‘If we were at Bluecastle,’ James said, ‘we might have fucked them on the table. But we must respect our elder brother’s sense of decorum, Peter.’
George Kinloch roared with laughter. ‘I’m wi James on this matter, John, but of course I bow to your wishes. It’s not as if we canna restrain oorsels once in a while.’
Mr Hodge coughed and squirmed in his seat. He was looking pale and sweaty. ‘I keep only the ugliest female negers about the house,’ he said. ‘I’m not like you fellows, I can’t afford to yield to temptation. Mrs Hodge wouldn’t stand for it.’
‘Well, sir,’ said Kinloch, ‘you are in the happy state of not requiring to be tempted. For a fellow without matrimonial ties in this climate, it’s a necessity. It’s simply unreasonable to expect him to behave himsel when he’s surrounded by half-clothed sable bitches like thae.’
‘Brother John behaves,’ Alexander said quietly, as if he were not quite sure whether he wanted to be part of the discussion. John looked at him sharply. Sandy was performing in his usual manner, trailing along in the wake of others.
‘Oh, why’s that?’ Kinloch demanded.
‘B-because he has the dignity of the family name to uphold.’
‘Do you not indulge yourself at all, sir?’ Hodge asked. ‘I’m certain, if it were I –’
‘No, I do not,’ John interrupted him, giving Sandy a thin smile. He was well used to this from his brothers, but he had no wish to explain himself to Hodge. James and Peter in particular, and Sandy increasingly, could not understand his abstinence. All the planters did it – took the best-looking slave women for themselves: there was no shame and little discretion about it, as the clusters of mulatto bairns running around every plantation proved. You took them willing or not, gently or by force, and that was all there was to it. But John had no interest in coupling with slaves he might be whipping the next day. In fact, the thought revolted him. How, though, did you explain this to your three brothers, who were sometimes to be heard comparing notes on the performance of a girl they had each had at different times?
It was Davie Fyfe, the doctor, who came to his rescue: ‘Frankly, I am sick of treating half the population in this island for the clap. There’s nothing like drawing a discharge of pus from another man’s member to encourage you to keep to the straight and narrow.’ He looked round the table, but was careful that his gaze did not linger on any one face. A few seconds’ silence proved too much for Sandy, though.
‘Who else here has been syringed by Davie?’ he said. It came out almost as a shout. John shook his head in exasperation.
‘Oh, Sandy!’ James said. ‘That’s the last time I congress with any of your past bedfellows.’
‘It’s no secret, is it?’ Sandy said. ‘We all get the clap sooner or later.’
‘Not I,’ John said.
‘The later ye are, the mair chance,’ Kinloch said.
‘It depends on who’s been there before you,’ James said. ‘Eh, Sandy?’
‘That’s why I always like to get in first,’ Sandy said.
Again, John winced at his youngest brother’s forced bravado. He worried for him – that in his efforts to keep up with the pace set by James and Peter, he would burn himself out.
‘I hear Mr Collins flogged a girl almost to death for clapping him,’ said Peter. ‘But who’s to say she did not catch it from him, if Davie’s not pulling our legs. That would seem a trifle unfair.’
‘I never fash mysel wi the fairness or otherwise of another man’s use o the whip,’ Kinloch said. ‘Ye never ken all the circumstances. Ye see some neger greeting in the bilboes, or knocked senseless by her master, and ye feel it’s cruel. Then ye discover she was stealing, or feigning illness, or she wouldna do as she was tellt, in bed or oot o it. Mr Collins doubtless had another grievance forby the clap.’
‘There’s some men I would not have at my table, though,’ said John, ‘on account of the manner they treat their slaves.’
‘Such as?’ Kinloch sounded touchy.
‘Well, Tom Irvine.’
‘Auld Tom?’ said Kinloch. ‘What’s Tom done to upset ye, man?’
‘He’s a rough and ready kind of man,’ said Hodge, ‘fierce at times I’m sure, but he doesn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary.’ The merchant suddenly pulled off his wig and swiped at a mosquito, then laid the wig in his lap. His bald head gleamed with rivulets of sweat.
‘He degrades himself,’ said John. ‘He does not care if the blacks see him as a brute. In fact he revels in it.’
‘Then Mr Hodge’s observation is correct,’ said Davie Fyfe. ‘There’s plenty like him.’
‘Sometimes it’s necessary,’ said Kinloch.
‘No,’ said John, ‘it is necessary to be strict, to punish where punishment is due. Of course we can all agree on that. But Irvine – no, I’d not have him at my table.’ He made a rasping sound in his throat.
‘What on earth is it he’s done?’ Hodge asked.
‘We were down there three weeks ago,’ James explained. ‘His crop was all in – you know he hasn’t as much land, and what he has is poor, badly drained – and we thought we might hire some of his slaves to help finish ours. But they were in such a miserable, wasted condition we’d never have got the work out of them to make it worthwhile. We went to see him and he was wandering about in just his shirt. Said he’d lost his breeks and couldn’t be bothered to look for them. The place was stinking. One of his lassies had asked if she could go to tend her garden as there was nothing to be done in the house, so he shat in the hall and told her to clean that up.’
‘Maybe he is demented,’ said Kinloch. ‘The heat, Mr Hodge.’ But Mr Hodge had gone rather quiet, and did not seem to hear.
‘Is Mr Collins demented?’ asked Fyfe.
‘Collins? Of course not. Why?’
‘I heard if he catches a slave eating cane, he flogs him and has another slave shit in his mouth. Then he gags him for a few hours. Or he has one slave piss on the face of another. Is that the behaviour of a sane man?’
‘It may not be pleasant,’ said Kinloch, ‘but it’s no mad. If it was him doing the shitting and pissing, I grant that might suggest an unbalanced mind. But he instructs another neger to do it. He maintains his ain dignity.’
‘For God’s sake,’ John Wedderburn said. There was a round of more or less revolted laughter from the others, which he at last joined in. The story was neither new nor particularly shocking. They might not have stooped quite to good old Tom Irvine’s level, or Collins’s, or at least if they had they were not saying, but they had done other things – dripped hot wax into wounds opened by whipping, rubbed salt or hot peppers in them. Or, more to the point, they had not actually done these things: they had had others do them – white employees, other slaves – and watched. Or not watched. Like Collins, they had kept their distance, and thus their dignity.
‘In any case,’ Kinloch added, ‘eating shit is just a step frae eating dirt. I suppose some of them don’t mind it much.’
There was silence around the table as they all considered this. Dirt-eating was one of the great mysteries of the plantations. Some slaves had a craving for the ground, clay in particular. Nothing was more likely to send a white man into a fit of revulsion than the sight of an African grovelling in the field, stuffing his face with soil. Nothing brought down the lash so fiercely. It was like watching some wild beast sniffing and scraping at a midden. It seemed to mark the distinction between the races more clearly than anything.
‘We have a case of that