room on all fours. He landed his boot upon our little Byron’s backside with so hard a kick that the boy was lifted from the floor by it and cried for several hours after. He showed his fist to Florence and Lucy, for they stood too far for him to reach with a blow. With the room now purged of negroes, he shut the door behind them with an almighty slam.
July, firmly pinned by the droop of her missus’s backside as it squashed the bed down finally had to allow her piss to soak her. While Nimrod, with no sound, nor movement, without taking breath nor making gesture, resolutely commanded July not to reveal herself but to stay . . . stay still . . . stay-oh-so-still.
‘He is dead, Mrs Mortimer.’ Even as the overseer lifted his two thick palms to Caroline, which were marbled with her brother’s blood, she still asked feebly, ‘Are you sure?’
‘Aye. He has shot himself.’
‘He has what?’
‘He has taken his own life, Mrs Mortimer.’
‘His own life, you say?’
‘Aye.’
‘Are you saying he inflicted this upon himself?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Nonsense. My brother would never do such an unchristian thing, Mr Dewar,’ Caroline informed him. The room reeked like a butcher’s shop—there was just not enough air within it. Was it the overseer that stank so? Caroline got up to move toward the window. She had to, or she would faint, she knew it. But his noxiousness trailed her.
‘Look, look, see for yourself,’ the overseer said. It was with his boot that he flipped over the head of her brother so she might have a clearer view of that dreadful wound. ‘The shot went in here,’ he carried on, as if her brother were some freshly slaughtered cattle, ‘and came out here.’
‘Don’t touch him. How dare you touch him? Leave him alone.’ Caroline rushed to stand guard over her brother’s body.
‘He put the pistol to his mouth,’ the overseer said.
‘He would never do such a thing, he would never. It is against God.’
‘It’s the best way to do it, and he’d know it,’ the overseer told her.
Caroline was determined to think carefully upon this situation. Her brother was dead. Shot. Perhaps by his own hand. By his own hand! Oh God! She needed to deliver to that ghastly overseer the action that she required him to take. For it was he that was in her brother’s employ and not the other way about. But first, as his tender, loving, bereaved sister, she would clasp her brother tightly to her sorrowful breast, wipe his pitiful brow, and deliver a kiss of sweet parting upon his cheek. She would prepare his melancholy soul for that everlasting hereafter by washing his face with her grieving tears. But, oh Lord, he was a bloody sight. Caroline Mortimer could not bring herself to gaze upon his gruesome corpse, let alone embrace it.
‘He’s left you with a pretty mess,’ the overseer said. And the bald truth of that assertion buckled her knees until Caroline fell back upon the bed sobbing.
Perhaps if Tam Dewar had been a gentleman—her and her brother’s equal, and not just the son of some lowborn Scots fisherman who, in England, she would not even deign to look upon, let alone solicit an opinion from—Caroline Mortimer may have wished to ask of the overseer why he believed her brother was driven to perform such a profane act as taking his own life. And, perhaps, if Tam Dewar were a person for whom despair and the sorrow of death were still disquieting intruders upon his soul, and not the stuff of his daily bread, then he may have thought it an act of Christian solace to disclose to Caroline Mortimer what he and her brother had witnessed after they had left her table to join their militia.
He may have started by recalling for her the uneasy ride through town that he and John Howarth took as they rode to join their regiment, that was barracked up near Hope Hill. There were no higglers upon the road. No black faces calling boisterous for these white massas to buy their Guinea and Indian corn, their nuts, their sweet cakes, their bundles of firewood, piles of cane, their colourful ribbons or coarse pots, their jack fruits, sweet potatoes, their yams, berries and beans. Not even that curious old woman, who sat with a turkey atop her head upon the corner of Main Street, was to be seen that day, and she was always found wilting beneath her prize