Copyright © 2014 Imogen Robertson
The right of Imogen Robertson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2014
All characters in this publication – other than the obvious historical figures – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
Author photograph © Rebecca Key
eISBN: 978 0 7553 9018 2
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Book
About Imogen Robertson
Also By
Praise for Imogen Robertson
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Part I
I.1
I.2
I.3
I.4
I.5
I.6
I.7
I.8
I.9
I.10
I.11
Part II
II.1
II.2
II.3
II.4
II.5
Part III
III.1
III.2
III.3
III.4
III.5
III.6
III.7
III.8
III.9
III.10
III.11
III.12
Part IV
IV.1
IV.2
IV.3
IV.4
IV.5
Part V
V.1
V.2
V.3
V.4
V.5
Part VI
VI.1
VI.2
VI.3
VI.4
VI.5
VI.6
VI.7
Part VII
VII.1
VII.2
VII.3
VII.4
VII.5
VII.6
VII.7
VII.8
VII.9
Epilogue
Historical Note
About the Book
London, 1785. When the body of a former West Indies planter is found staked out by St Paul’s Cathedral, suspicion falls at once on a runaway slave. But the answer is not that simple. The planter’s death brings tragedy for Francis Glass, a freed slave working as a bookseller, and a painful reminder of the past for William Geddings, senior footman in the household of unconventional widow Harriet Westerman.
Harriet is reluctant to confront the powerful world of the slave trade but she and her friend, anatomist Gabriel Crowther, must face its shameful truths – and the fact that much of Britain’s wealth is built on wilful destruction of human life. The secrets of London’s slave owners reveal a network of alliances across the capital. And while some people will risk everything to preserve their reputation, some acts can never be forgiven.
About Imogen Robertson
Imogen Robertson grew up in Darlington, studied Russian and German at Cambridge, and now lives in London. She directed for TV, film and radio before becoming a full-time author, and also writes and reviews poetry. Imogen won the Telegraph’s ‘First thousand words of a novel competition’ in 2007 with the opening of Instruments of Darkness, her debut. Her subsequent thrillers featuring Harriet Westerman and Gabriel Crowther, Anatomy of Murder, Island of Bones and Circle of Shadows, were also richly praised. Imogen was shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award 2011 and for the CWA Dagger in the Library Award 2012.
Want to know more? Read Imogen’s blog at
www.imogenrobertson.com or follow her on Twitter
@RobertsonImogen.
By Imogen Robertson
Instruments of Darkness
Anatomy of Murder
Island of Bones
Circle of Shadows
Theft of Life
The Paris Winter
Praise for Imogen Robertson
‘A true force in historical fiction’ Daily Mail
‘Deliciously chilling and dangerous. The plot and characters are absolutely mesmerising’ Karen Maitland
‘Stylish, enigmatic and wonderfully atmospheric… a story of secrecy and shame, reason and passion, that resonates long after you reach the final page’ Francis Wheen
‘Extremely impressive… a story, told by Robertson with great panache, of jealousy, greed and unkindness among the upper classes’ The Times
‘Westerman is one of the most appealing female characters to ever appear in historical fiction’ Oprah.com
‘[An] audacious mix of a cultural gloss and uncomplicated, straight-ahead storytelling… Robertson makes the various elements coalesce to striking effect’ Independent
‘Chillingly memorable. Imogen Robertson is an exquisite writer, and this is an extraordinary thriller’ Tess Gerritsen
‘A compelling story of secrecy, greed, deceit and revenge’ Historical Novels Review
‘Robertson’s foray into the world of historical detective fiction is a delight’ Sunday Express
‘Robertson’s language is spry and digestible, her scene-setting broad and detailed, her prose gracefully pressed into the service of a serpentine plot that still allows room for personal passions’ Christopher Fowler, Financial Times
To Flora
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As always, grateful thanks to my brilliant editor, Flora Rees, everyone at Headline and to my agent Annette Green. I really have no idea what I’d do without them. Well, I do – I’d starve in a gutter in a pile of my own spelling mistakes and throttled by dangling narrative threads.
My particular thanks to Kayo Chingonyi for his generous and thoughtful reading of the manuscript.
More than thanks to my husband, Ned Palmer, for dragging me out of every hole I fell into while writing this book.
I’d also like to thank Peter Fryer, a man I’ve never met but whose brilliant history of black people in Britain, Staying Power, introduced me to the works of Ignatius Sancho, 1729–80, Olaudah Equiano 1745–97 and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, 1757 –?. It is my sincere hope that their voices echo somewhere in these pages.
I own I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures and groans,
Is almost enough to drive pity from stones.
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
William Cowper ‘Pity for Poor Africans’
Northampton Mercury, 9 August 1788
Look round upon the miserable fate of almost all of our unfortunate colour – superadded to ignorance, – see slavery, and the contempt of those very wretches who roll in affluence from our labours […] hear the ill-bred and heart-racking abuse of the foolish vulgar. – You, S[oubis]e, tread as cautiously as the strictest rectitude can guide ye – yet must you suffer from this –
Letter from Ignatius Sancho to
Mr Soubise
Richmond, 11 October 1772
PART I
I.1
Saturday, 7 May 1785
THE BODY WAS STAKED out in the north-east corner of the churchyard. The first light of a warm spring morning glanced off the pale stone of St Paul’s Cathedral, and shone in full blank surprise on the corpse. A driver taking barrels of coriander seed north first noticed the body face down in the dew. It was, or had been, a man, and the shift covering him, though yellow with age, still showed up strongly against the fresh-mown grass. The driver shouted down from his perch high on the wagon to a pair of men walking towards the docks, pointed over the railings with his whip, then urged his horses on. The men shrugged at each other and went to investigate, peering through the metal bars into the shadow of the Cathedral, then seeing what the driver had seen, they climbed over. The corpse had lengths of rope tied to his wrists and ankles, and the rope on his right ankle was attached to a stake half-driven into the ground. They approached cautiously. One knelt down by the corpse’s head and lifted it slightly from the shoulder. What they saw frightened them. They began to call out. The younger man swung himself back over the railings and, yelling as he went, ran to the door of the Chapter House and started beating on it with his fist.
William Geddings should have seen nothing of this. In the general way of things he would have woken in Berkeley Square, put on his footman’s livery in his attic bedroom then joined the rest of the upper servants for breakfast before beginning his duties in the house. The previous evening, however, he had gone to hear the music at the Elephant in Fenchurch Street, and by chance met an old shipmate. They had drunk too much in celebration of their deliverance, and he had slept in his friend’s room in Honey Lane Market.
By the time he left, the air was already warm. Only a month ago, back home in Sussex, there had been snow on the ground, but now the air was dry and heavy. William’s head throbbed and the morning light seemed tinged with orange and red. Whenever the family he served came to London he would ask permission to go, once or twice, to the places where other Africans gathered, and there listen to the music and songs of his childhood and those he had heard first as a slave in Jamaica. Rich, dancing, talking tunes they were, and some had already worked their way through the hands of curious English and German composers into the drawing rooms of the city. He would hear them from time to time as he passed trays of champagne glasses among the guests at Berkeley Square – strange, half-strangled translations of his own heritage. He did not completely understand his compulsion to seek out the originals; for the music brought back memories painful as well as sweet. His own language returned to his tongue, and remade him into the boy he had been. In the pulse of the music and talk around him he caught glimpses of his lost family, his father’s laugh and the feel of the black soil of the fields outside his village between his fingers. When his shipmate saw him and they embraced, under the joy of seeing him alive and safe in London, William’s body flickered with remembered pain: the weight of iron on his ankles, the sores on his side, the stench. No wonder they drank deeply. Now, his blood thickened by the memories, he prepared to return to the world of the English family he served, to the dramas and pleasures of the servants’ hall, to his responsibilities.
He had set out at a good pace, happy he would be back in Berkeley Square before the house was fully awake. Then he saw the crowd gathering close to St Paul’s Cathedral’s northern flank, inside the railings. He hesitated, but curiosity drove off the pain in his head; he crossed the roadway and clambered up on the stone wall, clinging onto the railings to look down at whatever the crowd was circling.
A constable was trying to shoo the people back, but what they saw excited them too much and they continued to move past and about him like water round a rock. It was an early-morning crowd all dressed in labouring clothes; the ragged who had been turfed out of their tuppenny beds at first light; the porters on their way to the riverside and markets; servants and housewives ready to lose sleep for the best bargains. London’s broad base in all its colours and conditions. Then, as the constable harried and begged them to move away, William caught his first sight of the body. A man, dressed only in his undershirt, face down in the dirt. A drunk? A lunatic? But the people seemed disturbed – shocked, not amused. William lifted himself a little higher and craned his neck. He saw the loops of rope. The skin on the body’s thin and naked calves looked a greyish-blue. William began to sweat under his linen shirt. A clergyman was kneeling by the man’s head, hiding it from William’s view. As he lifted his eyes and looked around the crowd, William saw desperate tears running down his pink, round face.
‘I cannot get it off!’ he cried out. ‘There’s a padlock! Is there a key?’
William saw the iron and leather bands around the body’s skull, and his heart began to thud, leap and pitch but he could not look away. A man in a soft-brimmed hat pushed to the front of the crowd and knelt by the priest. He swung his satchel off his shoulder and pulled out a chisel and hammer. William’s mouth was dry. The hammer came down and the echo of it was lost in the sudden clang of the bell of St Paul’s striking the half-hour. The priest pulled away the broken padlock and threw it aside, then, as the man with the tools stood back, he turned the body over gently, onto his knee.
The heavy metal mask which still hid the corpse’s face was a rough bit of work. It was a rude clamp, with a plate welded under the chin to hold the jaw closed. Almond-shaped eyeholes, a riveted pyramid open at the base for the nose, and a blank where a mouth should be so that whoever wore it could breathe and go about their work, but could neither eat, drink nor speak. William had never seen such a thing on the head of a white man. The priest lifted it carefully away and William saw the face underneath, the high cheekbones, long nose and sharp chin, a heavy white stubble. The skin was slightly purplish, bruised. So many years older, but it was him. Unmistakably him. It seemed to William as if he had come crashing and floundering down to the dust, though he still could not move. Suddenly he smelled the heat of the docks, tar and rope; the sweet scent of white orange blossom …
The priest looked around the crowd. ‘Does anyone know this man? His name?’
William managed to release his grip on the railings and, slowly and painfully, slid down to the roadway, then began to walk away while the priest was still calling for a name. He reached the relative privacy of Swan Yard before his stomach gave a final heave and he threw up, resting his forearm against the crumbling Tudor bricks among the chemical stink coming from the workshops and the sharp rot of old piss. He rested there a minute till the colours of London, the rattle of carriages and the fading clap of the bells returned him the five thousand miles and fifteen years from the harbour of Kingston, Jamaica. Then he began, a little more unsteadily now, his walk home to the London residence of the Earl of Sussex and his family in Berkeley Square where his employer, Mrs Harriet Westerman, was staying for some weeks; and where, even now, she would be stirring in her bed and ringing her bell for her maid and her coffee.
Cutter, the clerk of Hinckley’s Bookseller, Stationer & Printer in Ivy Lane, brought word of the body in on his first breath. He was delighted to have the chance to tell the news. Ivy Lane was close by St Paul’s, off Paternoster Row, so in the heart of the book-printing and bookselling district of the capital. He thought the others would all have heard about it by now, but it seemed they had stumbled from their lodgings to their place of employment at first light, before the body was found. The presses were already at work upstairs; the more hours of light in the day there were, the more pages could be printed. Cutter, however, who served, bowed and totted up the accounts in the shop, did not come in until the later hour of eight. The respectable clientele who bought their stock of novels, histories, prints, music and more novels never thought to attend before nine. He rattled through a description of the body and its discovery with great excitement.
The shop’s senior salesman and de facto manager, Mr Francis Glass, looked up sharply at the mention
of the mask but made no comment.
‘Perhaps they’ll never know who he is,’ Cutter said cheerfully, looking about the shop for something to neaten or straighten or dust with the edge of his coat-sleeve. ‘I dare say they’ll have to keep his head in a jar of spirits. All the abandoned ladies of London can go and see if it’s their husband come back.’
Mr Francis Glass began writing in the account book again and spoke without looking up. ‘Was he white, this man in the churchyard?’
Cutter had found a mark visible only to himself on the edge of a bookshelf, seldom disturbed, holding a run of Histories of the Anglican Church. He scrubbed at it furiously. ‘What? Oh yes. He was white. Why do you ask?’
Mr Glass returned his pen to its stand and carefully blotted the page. ‘Because in that case it will not be long before he is identified, I am sure. All the West Indian slavers and traders know each other.’ Puzzled, Cutter frowned and opened his mouth. Francis closed the book. ‘What you describe is a punishment mask for slaves, Cutter. The dead man must have connections with the West Indian community in London, don’t you think?’ His voice was as calm as ever.
Cutter suddenly became aware that the conversation was moving into a dangerous area, but was not quite sure why. He was about to ask something further, but at that moment Francis looked up at him. Mr Glass had large eyes, very dark, and the smooth ebony glow of his skin made Cutter very conscious of the red veins becoming visible in his own cheeks as he reached middle age. ‘Oh, was it? Do they? No head in a jar then. Understood.’ He returned to his invisible mark with renewed concentration.
I.2
MRS MARTIN WAS HOUSEKEEPER to the family of the Earl of Sussex, a role which gave her both standing and satisfaction. She had grown used to the great ancestral hall in Hartswood, but since she was by birth, habit and choice a Londoner, she had an especial love of the family’s Town residence at 24, Berkeley Square and took pride in its smooth running. The senior servants of the other great families of England thought Mrs Martin very young for her responsibilities but, they admitted grudgingly, she acquitted herself well – particularly given the circumstances.
Theft of Life Page 1
