The White Witch of Rosehall
Chapter 1: The New Book-Keeper
Robert Rutherford reined in his horse at the stone and iron gates that opened on the estate; half a mile away, on an eminence that commanded a wide, sweeping view of canelands, hills and sea, stood a building, the fame of whose magnificence he had heard when in the town of Montego Bay, some ten miles to westward.
White in the golden light of the sun it stood, the Great House of Rosehall. It dominated the landscape; it imposed itself upon the gaze of all who might pass along the road that ran in front of the property; it indicated opulence. Young Rutherford knew that it represented the pride and arrogance of the planter caste which still ruled in Jamaica, and whose word, on its own plantations, carried all the authority and sanction of an arbitrary will scarcely curbed by laws passed in recent years for the protection of the bondsmen. Behind him, a few paces from the outer edge of the road, rolled and glittered a vast expanse of sea, all blue and purple, with snowy breakers rolling lazily to the shore. Above him stretched a vault of azure flecked with clouds. It was eight o’clock in the morning. The month was December; the year, 1831.
The cane, full-grown, flowed up to within a short distance of the Great House, a spreading carpet of vivid green. In the midst of it, to his right, he saw the sugar works, from the chimneys of which floated and wavered in the breeze long columns of grey smoke. To the left he spied a building on rising ground which he guessed to be the overseer’s house; and on this side also, well within sight of the building, he saw a village of huts embowered in greenery. He had been long enough in Jamaica to recognise in this the slaves’ quarters.
He twitched his reins and the horse moved forward.
As he slowly trotted up the long path leading southwards he noted the slaves, clothed in coarse blue osnaburg, busy cutting canes in the fields, women as well as men armed with scythes and machetes, and hacking at the roots of the slender green-topped plants. Wagons drawn by oxen and by mules stood in the paths, several feet wide, which divided field from field; into these wagons the workers heaped the canes they cut, and as he passed he saw some of these vehicles moving on their journey towards the sugar mills, with a creaking and groaning of axles and amidst shouts from sable drivers who ran alongside of them cracking ox-thonged whips four yards long and calling to the cattle by name. He saw other men armed with whips also which they brandished menacingly, though not at the oxen and the mules. These were the slave-drivers, sturdy fellows whose duty it was to see that the slaves did not loiter or slacken at their work; yet in spite of them some of the labourers lifted curious eyes to gaze for a moment at the strange white man who seemed to be going up to the Great House where lived the lady owner of these domains. The drivers glanced at him also, but asked no questions, for he wa