It should have been easy for Pyke to dismiss the whole spectacle as nonsense, as other white men before him had done. Generally he wasn’t a superstitious man, preferring to put his faith in the rigours of science and reason. But as he sat there taking it all in — the warm air, the strange sounds and smells, the fiery rum warming his stomach — Pyke found himself curiously affected by the spectacle. This hadn’t been a performance for him or even for those who’d participated in it but rather for family and friends who’d suffered and died during slavery, and especially for Mary Edgar, who had been buried alone and unloved in a faraway city. This was her farewell, and as the dance broke up and the revellers fell to the ground, exhausted, Pyke caught the old woman’s eye. She looked at him, puzzled at first, and then broke into a smile, as if to suggest her long-lost daughter had finally come home.
Later that night they came for him. Six or seven men crept up to his hut and pushed open the door. Pyke watched them from the trees on the other side of the clearing. Shortly afterwards they emerged from the hut, talking and gesticulating to one another. They looked around, not knowing what to do. Pyke withdrew behind the line of trees and stared up at the branches rustling overhead. Pyke didn’t doubt that, had he stayed in the hut, he would be dead by now; there was something he’d asked the old woman about, something he’d said, something he knew that made him a threat. Harper had been the same.
Earlier, before the celebration had started, he had hidden his horse a long way from the village and had already planned his escape route. He would wait for the men to disperse and then try to retrieve his mare. By that time the sun would be up and he would start the long two-day trek towards Kingston and the steamer.
Part of him wanted to have another talk with the old woman, hold a knife to her throat and force the whole truth from her. But some of the men had congregated outside her hut, and Pyke knew he wouldn’t get within fifty feet of her.
To go anywhere near her was to take a risk that he wasn’t prepared to take because, right at that moment, more than anything, Pyke wanted to take Felix in his arms and hold him. It was time to go home.
PART III
London
AUGUST 1840
TWENTY
Every seat in the cavernous room had been filled, which meant that Pyke had to stand at the back of the hall and could barely see, let alone hear, the figures on the stage. He moved down the aisle through the mass of bodies and eventually found a spot just to the left of the stage.
Exeter Hall was synonymous with a loosely connected group of anti-slavery, temperance and religious movements and was hosting the first Anti-Slavery Society World Convention. As Pyke surveyed the solemn faces in the crowd, listening earnestly to the sober pronouncements of the speaker, he thought about the unforgiving doctrine that many of them subscribed to — that God helped only those who helped themselves. He wanted to take each and every one of them a few streets to the north or south, to St Giles or Alsatia, and show them the conditions that many people had to endure through no fault of their own. It wasn’t their views he objected to as much as their holier-than-thou attitudes, as though God had personally selected them for his mission on earth while leaving the undeserving multitude to beg for their guidance or rot in the gutters. Emily had once tried to help other people, without a trace of the smugness and self-aggrandisement displayed by the Christian missionaries, and Pyke didn’t doubt she too would have despised most of the men in this room.
A new speaker had just taken to the stage and someone next to Pyke identified the man as Reverend William Knibb — ‘pastor of the Baptist mission in Falmouth, Jamaica’. Knibb was a small, unprepossessing man in his late thirties or early forties but he spoke in a loud, confident voice and soon had the rapt attention of his audience. He started his address by denouncing the popular views circulating in the colonial and metropolitan newspapers, put forward by the planters’ lobby, that emancipation had created a lazy and rebellious breed of negro. Knibb went on to suggest quite the opposite; that the free villages built on land purchased as a result of the generosity of congregations in Britain had fostered godliness, morality, domestic happiness and social order. ‘A place,’ he added, ‘of noble free peasantry where the man goes out to work and the woman, released from proper toil, tends to the home, and where there is a new Bible on every table.’
That got a thunderous ovation.
Given what Pyke had seen for himself in the mountains above Falmouth, it was hard to disagree with Knibb’s argument: that former slaves lived a better life freed from the shackles of slavery, and that owning their homes and tending their own plots fostered self-sufficiency and, in turn, contentment. But he also thought about John Harper’s damning indictment of the Baptists’ mission in Jamaica — that, in essence, it represented another form of colonialism since its goal was to turn former slaves into versions of themselves. To amuse himself, he wondered what Knibb and others would think if he took the floor and told them about what had really happened at Ginger Hill.
Still, Pyke held his tongue and waited patiently for the reason he’d come to the meeting in the first place. It came towards the end of Knibb’s address.
‘To show their respect for that esteemed man Joseph Sturge,’ Knibb said to a deafening cheer, ‘a town was set up that bore his honoured name. As we speak a new community named after my own birthplace, Kettering, is being settled and very soon a village called Malvern will be established.’ Knibb waited as Silas Malvern, perched on top of his high-chair, was carried onstage by two burly men. ‘It is my very great pleasure, and honour, to present to you Mr Silas Malvern. Mr Malvern is now a resident of London but until recently he owned one of the largest sugar plantations in the western part of Jamaica.’ A hushed silence fell over the room; this was the enemy right there in their midst. ‘My friends, please, I can perhaps guess what you’re thinking but before you rush to judgement, hear me out. Ill health prevents my brother, Mr Malvern, from addressing you in person but he wishes it to be known that he now regrets his role in the slave trade and by way of restitution he has committed to donating land to our mission for the purpose of establishing two new free villages in the parish of Trelawny, Jamaica.’
Knibb basked in the applause and Silas Malvern even managed a feeble smile from his high-chair. Knibb was preparing to bring his address to a climax. ‘In the name of three hundred thousand negroes in Jamaica, I return to you all the thanks which grateful hearts, happy wives and children can give.’
Many in the audience stood to applaud Knibb and Malvern and the applause continued as Malvern was carried from the stage.
Pyke found the old man sitting backstage on his high-chair, looking vaguely bemused. His porters had left him and Knibb was having what looked like an intense conversation with one of his supporters. Malvern seemed to have aged noticeably in the two and a half months since Pyke had last seen him. His shoulders were hunched, his arms like pieces of string and his eyes were sunken and rimmed by red circles.