After my absence, I had hoped to return to a different Bertha, perhaps even a chastened one. But the moment I put foot to the veranda steps, she ran out of the house, dressed like a harridan, her black curls flying, her mouth spewing the most vile language I had ever heard. She rushed toward me, her face contorted in anger, and when I was within her reach she slapped my face. And then, before I could even react, she accused me, in full earshot of the whole household, of every indecency she could think of: desertion, drunkenness, unfaithfulness, even violence.
Astonished, I tried to place my hands on her shoulders to calm her, but she screamed and backed away as if I had assaulted her. To my relief, Molly materialized at Bertha’s side, gently touching her arm and speaking in a language I did not know. Bertha soon turned from me and followed Molly as docilely as a child.
From that day forth I gave up all pretense of a respectful partnership with her. I learned to ignore her demands and her foul words, using only calm language in her presence, and I never had intercourse with her again. She screamed at me and swore and attacked me more than once. But just as she had lost all sense of decency, I had lost all desire for her.
Jonas caught me by the arm one day shortly after that first public outrage and pulled me into his study. “You are not to be blamed for this,” he said, and his voice was shaking with emotion.
Still, she was my wife; I had taken her for better or for worse, though none of us imagines beforehand how bad the worse might be. In my despair, I wondered what I might do to free myself of her. But a divorce would have taken an act of Parliament, and how could I drag us both—all of us—through that? No, I could not. When one is young, one imagines all sorts of miracles that might come to pass if one is patient. So I let time pass, still harboring a slim hope that that lovely, vivacious girl I had fallen in love with remained in there, hidden, but alive.
Now, in retrospect, I know that I should have done at once anything necessary to free each of us from our bonds to the other. But at the time, I thought that would have been an unconscionable act of cruelty. I had no idea of what was yet to come.
Chapter 9
I cannot say that my decision was brave or generous or kindhearted, or even humane. It was just that I had nothing behind me in England and nothing ahead of me in Jamaica that I could see except the life I had slipped into in Valley View. I had been linked to Jonas by my father, not only in marriage to his daughter but also in my very way of life: the plantation and the import and export business that we shared. As well, the Sea Nymph was doing so well that Jonas and I had together purchased another ship, the Dragon, which we had outfitted as another passenger ship in the lucrative immigrant trade from Europe to America.
And, indeed, Jonas had had to deal with a mad wife. I did not ask—nor did I want to know—the circumstances of his marriage, but we shared that situation as well, and, in particular, our concern for Bertha. It might have been easy to blame Jonas for his part in entangling me with Bertha, but his very concern for her taught me that he was simply doing what he thought best for a child he loved. I could not blame him for that. So I simply tried to make the best of my situation.
But my father was a different case. I could not understand how he could have encouraged a relationship between Bertha and me. If anything, it seemed, he should have warned me against it. His actions went against all I understood about a parent’s duty to his child. I could not forgive him, and therefore I ceased what little communication had occurred between us.
There would never be anything like a normal marriage between Bertha and me, but, as with many marriages in the world, a person could manage, more or less, with a sham. Sometimes, in Bertha’s calmer moments, I tried to make something of what we had left. I would sit down beside her in the evening and try to have a conversation with her, but she knew little of the wider world and cared less. The only things she seemed to care about were the worthless incantations and precepts of her current Obeah man or woman, and the strange games that she played with Molly. Now and then she tried to seduce me, but more often she attacked me. Twice she came at me with the sharp edge of a broken china plate, once managing to draw blood before I was able to wrest the weapon from her.
Sometimes she even turned on her own flesh. Twice she tried stabbing herself with the pin of a brooch I had given her as a wedding gift, and once she shoved a fist through a window in order to cut herself with the glass shards. Molly kept a close watch on her day and night, and for the most part she was successful in keeping Bertha safe.
But one dark night Bertha managed to escape, making her way out of the house with a lighted candle, and before anyone knew it, she had set the nearest cane field ablaze. When the fire was discovered, ten acres were already burning and Bertha was still nearby, her eyes on the flames as if transfixed. It was too late to save that field, and only with the valiant efforts of everyone on hand were we able to save the other nearby fields. By afternoon the next day we claimed victory, though there were still smoldering pockets. As I stood in the midst of the ashes, covered in dirt and soot and smelling like burned sugar, it occurred to me that in nearly all of Jamaica the whites feared an uprising of the negroes that would burn down the fields, but at Valley View it was a white woman who did it and negroes who put the fire out.
The morning after the fire Jonas asked me into his study, closing the door behind me. I sat—uncomfortably, for we had difficult things to discuss—in a chair facing his desk. “My daughter is a danger to herself, to us, and now to the plantation itself,” were his first words. “But I refuse to put her into an asylum. It would break her heart. It would kill her.”
I felt a sudden surge of rage. “I cannot understand why I was not told!” I charged. “I should have been told! You deliberately—”
“I suppose I did,” he interrupted.
“You suppose?”
“I hoped…,” he said. “I thought marriage would keep her from growing worse. I thought perhaps a baby—”
“A baby! She is the last person who should have a baby! Her mother is like this?”