But Caroline observed that Agnes was able to command these slaves in their own strange tongue. She could bellow at those negroes with the same force that the negroes did bellow at each other. Agnes was heavy with child and although slight of frame, still she allowed no bulging protrusion at her waist to impede her when she was admonishing her slaves. Why, she jumped about as spiritedly as a mad hare—arms flailing, feet stamping, her thick red hair coming loose from its tie as she snapped, shouted, clapped and yelled to get her way.
After this exhausting work was done Agnes would lie upon her daybed with her arms dangling, too fatigued to lift them. She was then unable to answer even the simplest of Caroline’s enquiries without a weariness entering her tone or a gentle snoring commencing—sometimes when Caroline was still speaking.
In her first meeting with Agnes, in the cool drawing room of the great house, her sister-in-law had, in a blast of breath that left Caroline quite giddy, proclaimed that her family was from Scotland. Excepting Agnes’s flaming red hair, the profusion of freckles upon her face and neck (which she happily displayed instead of hiding with cosmetic preparations), and an abundance of tartan trimmings in and about the chairs in the room, Caroline detected nothing of the Scotch about this bouncy young woman.
‘You must show them who is master and who is slave. Leave them no room to fool you. Them is tricky, Caroline,’ Agnes said when instructing Caroline on the management of slaves. Using Molly as her example, Agnes called the slave girl to her and pointed her finger at the blackened eye. ‘She tie me shoe so tight me have to scream. She sitting at me feet so I give her one kick. You think she ever tie me shoe so tight again? No, no, no—for she learn.’ Pushing Molly forward so Caroline might better inspect the bruised wound for the imprint of Agnes’s shoe, she said, ‘Be firm. For these blacks be like children—all must be shown how is good and how is bad.’
And, every night since Caroline had arrived upon the island, she had been forced to listen to the panting, slapping, and giggling that crept over the walls from her brother’s room into her own. For this grand house, which had been lavished with so much vulgar finery—why, even the silver was gilded—nevertheless had bedroom walls that were not tall enough to reach all the way up into the wood of the eaves. The ridiculous din of the night creatures with their eternal screeching could not block the lusty sounds Agnes—oh yes, Agnes—made every night. Her brother, Caroline decided then, was quite prudent in never having brought Agnes to England, for his wife’s inelegant, beastly manners and ridiculous way of speaking would surely have seen her locked away.
After two weeks in Agnes’s company—where even a little light embroidery or the arranging of a vase of flowers seemed too much toil for her sister-in-law, who slept upon her daybed for so many hours of the day that Caroline began to believe that perhaps, like a bat, she was only aroused at night, Caroline was forced to admit to being bored. She even began to crave the company of Mary, her lady’s maid, who had never uttered more than three words of sense in the whole time she had been in her employ; she did, however, remain awake. But Mary was still quite sick; nursed in a darkened hut no bigger than a kennel by a large negro woman who guarded Mary’s feeble, sweating, panting body as fiercely as a dog with a bone. And as for the companionship of her brother John, he had begun to seem like a vision in the heat, for every time Caroline approached him he would simply vanish. Until one day, with the determination of a trapper, Caroline contrived to snare him upon the veranda of the house.
‘John, may we take a stroll around the grounds?’ she implored.
‘A stroll, Caroline! This is not England. In two steps the heat would claim you. No one strolls here,’ her brother replied.
‘A ride then, John—I still know how.’
‘The terrain is far too dangerous and, besides, I have no horse that could possibly take your . . .’ he said, prudently losing into a mumble the words which referred to Caroline’s robust dimensions.
‘Oh, John, please take me around, I wish to see my new home and