A Place Called Freedom (1995)

Robert was the first to realize. “Good God, it’s Miss Hallim in disguise!” he said.

There was a moment of startled silence. Then Sir George began to laugh. The other men, seeing that he was going to take it as a joke, laughed too.

Lizzie took a drink of water and coughed some more. As she recovered, Jay admired her costume. The spectacles had hidden her flashing dark eyes, and the side-curls of the wig had partly obscured her pretty profile. A white linen stock thickened her neck and covered the smooth feminine skin of her throat. She had used charcoal or something to give her cheeks the pockmarked look, and she had drawn a few wispy hairs on her chin like the beard of a young man who did not yet shave every day. In the gloomy rooms of the castle, on a dull winter’s afternoon in Scotland, no one had seen through her disguise.

“Well, you’ve proved you can pass for a man,” said Sir George when she had stopped coughing. “But you still can’t go down the pit. Go and fetch the other ladies, and we’ll give Jay his birthday present.”

For a few minutes Jay had forgotten his anxiety, but now it came back with a thump.

They met up with the women in the hall. Jay’s mother and Lizzie were laughing fit to bust: Alicia had obviously been in on the plot, which accounted for her secretive grin before dinner. Lizzie’s mother had not known about it, and she was looking frosty.

Sir George led the way out through the main doors. It was dusk. The snow had stopped. “Here,” said Sir George. “This is your birthday present.”

In front of the house a groom held the most beautiful horse Jay had ever seen. It was a white stallion about two years old, with the lean lines of an Arab. The crowd made it nervous, and it skipped sideways, forcing the groom to tug on its bridle to keep it still. There was a wild look in its eyes, and Jay knew instantly it would go like the wind.

He was lost in admiration, but his mother’s voice cut through his thoughts like a knife. “Is that all?” she said.

Father said: “Now, Alicia, I hope you aren’t going to be ungracious—”

“Is that all?” she repeated, and Jay saw that her face was twisted into a mask of rage.

“Yes,” he admitted.

It had not occurred to Jay that this present was being given to him instead of the Barbados property. He stared at his parents as the news sank in. He felt so bitter that he could not speak.

His mother spoke for him. He had never seen her so angry. “This is your son!” she said, her voice shrill with fury. “He is twenty-one years old—he’s entitled to his portion in life … and you give him a horse?”

The guests looked on, fascinated but horrified.

Sir George reddened. “Nobody gave me anything when I was twenty-one!” he said angrily. “I never inherited so much as a pair of shoes—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said contemptuously. “We’ve all heard how your father died when you were fourteen and you worked in a mill to keep your sisters—that’s no reason to inflict poverty on your own son, is it?”

“Poverty?” He spread his hands to indicate the castle, the estate, and the life that went with it. “What poverty?”

“He needs his independence—for God’s sake give him the Barbados property.”

Robert protested: “That’s mine!”

Jay’s jaw became unlocked, and at last he found his voice. “The plantation has never been properly administered,” he said. “I thought I would run it more like a regiment, get the niggers working harder and so on, and make it more remunerative.”

“Do you really think you could do that?” said his father.

Jay’s heart leaped: perhaps Father would change his mind. “I do!” he said eagerly.

“Well, I don’t,” Father said harshly.

Jay felt as if he had been punched in the stomach.

“I don’t believe you have an inkling how to run a plantation or any other enterprise,” Sir George grated. “I think you’re better off in the army where you’re told what to do.”

Jay was stunned. He looked at the beautiful white stallion. “I’ll never ride that horse,” he said. “Take it away.”

Alicia spoke to Sir George. “Robert’s getting the castle and the coal mines and the ships and everything else—does he have to have the plantation too?”

“He’s the elder son.”

“Jay is younger, but he’s not nothing. Why does Robert have to get everything?”

“For the sake of his mother,” Sir George said.

Alicia stared at Sir George, and Jay realized that she hated him. And I do too, he thought. I hate my father.

“Damn you, then,” she said, to shocked gasps from the guests. “Damn you to hell.” And she turned around and went back into the house.

5

THE MCASH TWINS LIVED IN A ONE-ROOM HOUSE FIFTEEN feet square, with a fireplace on one side and two curtained alcoves for beds on the other. The front door opened onto a muddy track that ran downhill from the pit to the bottom of the glen where it met the road that led to the church, the castle and the outside world. The water supply was a mountain stream at the back of the row of houses.