Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

‘Maketh glad the heart of man,’ said the old man. ‘For thy stomach’s sake.’

Mrs Brierley smiled B’s toad-smile and licked her lips, the way I always thought B was about to. She handed me a beautiful tall thin glass, slightly chipped and only about half full. She then chose a large cheap tumbler for herself, brim full, leaving B another old glass, larger and coarser and fuller than mine. I took an incautious sip, thinking it was going to be sangaree, a weak, cold, winy concoction I’d been drinking in bars. It turned out to be some kind of sweet-sour punch, with twice as much rum in it as I was ready for. B had been watching me, amused.

‘My mother drinks rum under doctor’s orders,’ he said. ‘I drink it because I like it. Thank you, Jeremy.’

‘Were you born on a plantation, Mrs Brierley?’ I asked.

‘Born and reared among fields that bore my name. Born in the old days, reared in the old ways, a Halper of Halper’s Corner.’

‘It sounds marvellous.’

‘It was hell on earth, Miss Millett. The Devil walked those fields in the shape of my father, a wicked, lustful, foul-mouthed, drunken atheist. My mother would stumble into my room at midnight to weep by my cot. When she died, many thought it was murder. The other planters would not speak with my father, or have me to their houses. I grew up alone, reared by the devil to be one of his kind.’

‘How ghastly,’ I said, though actually she made it sound perfectly thrilling, and meant to. ‘Do go on.’

‘When I was seventeen a man of God came to us, sent from England to do mission work among the Negroes. I saw him stand face to face with my father and wrestle there for his soul. My father laughed and swore and turned away, but my heart went out to that young man. I began to toil by his side in the work of the Lord among our poor Negroes, and before the time came when he was called back to England I betrothed myself to him in secret. I promised him I would follow him, but for eight years my father would not let me go: I had no money, no friends but our Negroes. Though I wore silk and lace and walked along the cuts between the cane fields with a servant to carry my parasol over me, I was no more free than an ape in a cage. For eight long years I continued the Lord’s work which that young man had begun, bringing the Word to our people where they laboured in the fields. One day the Lord moved me to speak to an old Negro of my sorrow, and thenceforth he and all our people put a portion of their small wages aside, little by little, to help me. In their poverty and in their wretchedness they sought to prove how nobly the seed we had sown among them brought forth its harvest of good works. At last we had gathered enough to pay for my passage to England. One day as I walked among the fields, with my father watching from the verandah, I went into one of the huts, as was my custom, to read the Word of the Lord, but instead I changed clothes with a child of that house and we put flour upon his face and he walked out under the parasol, going from hut to hut, while I was stolen away by the back and hidden in a cart they had ready with my cases, and taken to the harbour and put aboard the steamer for England. As we crossed the harbour bar I saw my father come raging down to the quay.’

‘What a romantic story! But what about the people who’d helped you?’

She held up her pudgy, crook-fingered hand, palm forward. I realised this was a party piece, which had to be told in its proper order with its proper words, like a church ritual. She talked with a slightly nasal drawl, which didn’t sound American or like anything else I’d heard, and sipped purse-lipped from her glass between sentences. I could imagine black faces, fire-lit, ringing her, as she sat in a space between shanty houses, and the stars overhead, and the punctuating cries of ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Praise the Lord’.

‘I sailed to England,’ she said, ‘and found my betrothed in Halifax, where I joined myself with him in the work of the Lord. Our son Amos was given to us. Ten years passed, and there was war and the breaking of nations, but we toiled on in the stony field the Lord had made our portion. For five and thirty years we toiled with small reward. Each year at the time of the Lord’s birth I wrote to my father and sent him tracts, begging and warning him to repent of his wicked ways, but he sent no answer. Then there was war again, and our son Amos was called to fight. Within a year there came a letter from a lawyer in Bridgetown saying that my father had died and Halper’s Corner was now mine, subject to heavy mortgages. I spoke with my husband and we made plans to return to the place where we had met and take up the work we had begun there, but because of the war we could not travel, and then within the year the Lord called him to His side and I was left desolate. My son Amos was in Italy. I had none to turn to. But at last the war ended and I gathered my possessions and sailed home to take up my inheritance. All was in ruin. Though the war had given fat years to sugar planters, there had been none to manage Halper’s Corner, and with peace the lean years came. Only one seed still prospered. The Word of the Lord that with my husband’s help I had sown among our people was now a strong green tree. Many remembered me and rejoiced at my return. They told me that my father had died as he had lived, ninety-five years old, raging in sin. They told me too that on my escape his fury had been terrible, so that he might have slain my helpers with his own hands, but foreseeing this they had persuaded the doctor from Holetown to come up, giving other reasons, and this man, though a feeble vessel, constrained my father by his presence. And the other landlords around were happy to thwart my father, so it was not difficult to hide my chief helpers, the boy who had carried my parasol, and the boy who had worn my dress. He stands before you now, my brother and servant Jeremy.’

‘The Lord shall deliver me from every evil work,’ said Jeremy.

I hadn’t realised he was still in the room, but he was, standing by the door and listening eagerly to the story. He smiled again when I caught his eye. There was something familiar about the smile which made me blink inwardly, and see him with different eyes. The likeness was nowhere near as strong as that between B and his mother, but it was there. When Mrs Brierley had called Jeremy her brother, she had meant it. Stepbrother, anyway.

‘How marvellous!’ I said. Did you manage to get the plantation going again? Was it very beautiful?’

She looked at me half-sideways over her glass. Knowing B as well as I did I thought she was pleased. I guessed he had brought me along because it would give her somebody new to tell her story to. Judging by the few words they’d said to each other so far, they didn’t find tête-à-têtes very easy.

‘If Amos had stayed we might have done it, with the Lord’s help,’ she said.

‘We’d have needed that,’ said B. ‘Sugar’s been in the doldrums for five years. The places which had built up a bit of fat during the war have managed to keep going, but Halper’s was run right down and mortgaged twice over.’

‘Now they are giving us the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement,’ said Jeremy. I expected him to add ‘Hallelujah,’ but he didn’t.

B shot him one of his looks. I thought he was about to snap at him to clear out, but perhaps he wasn’t quite prepared to take that line with his step-uncle. Instead he just growled, ‘Too late. Tell Miss Millett what it looked like, Mother.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It is an old house, built by my forebear Cleck Halper in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and twelve. Built and well built, but my father neglected it. I did not think it beautiful when I was a child, but when I returned and saw it in its ruin my heart went out in grief. The fields around are fields of cane, with cuts between, beautiful in the green and gold of their season. And beyond the road is a little bay with a beach, where my mother used to take me when I was a child and teach me my letters in the sand. That was surely beautiful, according to the beauty of this world.’