The New World

by Andrew Motion

  At this point Joshua surprised us again. Having seemed so meek when we first met him on the Angel, and then so mysterious and moralizing, he now became very efficient.

  “Here are five dollars,” he said, pulling the sum from his pocket and slapping it down on the desk. “Is that your tariff?”

  Mr. Brydges gathered himself with more trembling and shaking. “For one room, yes,” he said truculently. “For two, no. Five dollars will pay for one room for a week.”

  I thought that Joshua would now explain to me, politely or otherwise, that he would accept this offer and in the same breath say goodbye to us. But with a glance at the satchel hanging around my neck, and no doubt a thought about the value of what lay inside it, he said, “Very well, two rooms for three days, and change of fifty cents due to me. Three days are all we shall need. Because in three days we shall find employment and a home elsewhere.” He bent forward over the desk so the jacket of his suit stretched tight across his shoulders, then continued in a confiding way, “You see, we have come here to make our fortune.”

  Mr. Brydges, who must have heard this sentiment a thousand times before, was nevertheless impressed by Joshua’s determination. Sufficiently impressed, at any rate, to forget he must keep tramping on the pedal connected to his fan, so the slicing sound ceased above our heads and warm air fell down on us like a cloth.

  When he began pumping again, the effect pleased him enough to accept our offer. Joshua did not seem surprised. “Thank you, Mr. Brydges,” he said quite calmly, and with that he straightened his back, extended his hand palm upward, received his change, pocketed it, and so began his career as a businessman. A moment later we had climbed to the floor above, taken rooms next to one another, arranged to meet a few hours later in the evening, and shut our doors.

  Natty and I crossed to the bed and lay down together with as little fuss as we had lain down side by side in the wilderness. Although less than two months had passed since we last slept under a roof—in Mr. Vale’s hotel—I thought it might as well have been a year, because our feelings for one another had changed so much. Or rather, our feelings had not changed, but the way we showed them had changed. My jealousy had burned away and our good companionship had returned; beneath these things, and as the source of both, everything was the same as ever. Unsayable and unsaid. Waiting until we reached England to find an expression, as Natty had stipulated.

  For this reason all we did next, when our heads had cleared and our land-balance was restored, was to look about us. To find our windows showed the blank brick wall of a house across the way; to hear our peace broken every so often by the shouts, cries, sobs, moans and laughter of others in the street below; to be grateful we had privacy enough, and comfort enough, and clean water in a pitcher, and a shiny white wash-bowl; to feel the strangeness of all these things, and to know we were perfectly content.

  This is all the description I shall give of our time in that room, except to say that after we had slept for an hour or so we woke refreshed, and cleaned our faces, and ran our fingers through our hair, then knocked on Joshua’s door and told him we were about to return to the docks, where we would ask how best to make our way to London.

  To London? Wherever we went and however we put the question, the response was always to laugh us nearly back to our hotel. To London? No boats ever sailed to London. To London? Did we think London was just over the horizon and could be reached in a single stride? When we replied that we did indeed know the answers to these questions, having lived in that city some time before, having come from there in fact, we were laughed at even more loudly. As far as these sailors were concerned, we were two Indians who had been driven mad by losing our homes, or by the sun, or by drinking.

  All this—until we approached our umpteenth whiskery old captain, and this time found our replies were taken as proof of spirit not lunacy, and so waited on the quayside until he had climbed down from his wheelhouse to examine us more closely.

  “New York is the way to go,” he told us. Initially, while he had been regarding us from his ship, which was a twin-masted clipper a little smaller than the Nightingale, I had thought his beard was wild as a hedge. Now I could see it was carefully trimmed, but so profuse it had almost crawled across his eyes, which perhaps for this reason had become very fierce. Despite that eagle stare, or perhaps because of it, he did not seem to mind us being dressed for the wilderness, and if he noticed Natty was an unusual sort of sailor—which he could hardly fail to do—he never mentioned it.

  “You look lively,” he said, when he had studied us both from head to toe. “Do you know anything about ships? And about sailing?”

  We told him we did, without saying that all our expertise had ended in a wreck.

  “And do you know about hard work?” he went on.

  “More than we care to know,” I told him, which was facetious but true enough.

  The captain folded his arms and made his decision. “I’ll take you to New York,” he told us. “If you’ll work for me.”

  I promised him we would, and then wondered how soon we might set sail.

  When he told us next day I almost said we could not join him after all, because it surprised me so much: I had expected a longer delay. But once I had gulped once or twice and felt Natty tap me on the shoulder, I informed him that this would do very nicely, and we would return the next morning if he liked, and acquaint ourselves with the ship. As soon as he agreed we bade him farewell and went on our way rejoicing.

  We made these arrangements very swiftly and simply in contrast to our previous travels. So much so, I felt we were at last keeping step with destiny, and fulfilling whatever purpose Fate had in store for us, rather than pushing against the grain of things. Yet I must also admit that in passing over certain details (such as the names of our ship and her captain, which were Mungo and Yalland respectively; and the color of her sails, which were a dark liverish brown; and the number of her crew, which I estimated to be a dozen or so; and her business, which was to carry cotton) I also intend to suggest a less comfortable aspect to all this speed.

  I felt driven forward by a force I could not control. In the wilderness, where a particular day had often seemed identical to the one before and the one after, I had generally thought of time as a slow current. On the river it had been the same, and literally. Now everything was hasty, with appointments to keep and meals to eat, and every one of them tied to a particular moment, so we were continually in danger of being too early or too late. I could not help thinking again how much peacefulness I had left behind me, amidst the danger.

  Having said that, I also believed our first task was to return to our hotel. But as soon as we got there and found Mr. Brydges inflating himself under his fan, I discovered that haste was the least of our difficulties.

  “Ah-ha!” he sighed, as we tried to slip past him and reach our room without starting a conversation.

  “Yes, Mr. Brydges?” said Natty, pretending to be taken aback.

  Our host kept twitching his foot to operate the fan, making our hair fly around our ears.

  “What is it, Mr. Brydges?” I asked again.

  “Pleasant afternoon?”

  “Very pleasant, thank you.”

  “Sunshine?”

  “Always sunshine.”

  “Ah-ha.” Mr. Brydges worked faster at his pedal, which began to squeak like a bat.

  After a moment I asked, “Was there anything, Mr. Brydges? You wanted something, I think?”

  At last he looked at me directly. “A man called for you,” he said, in his finicky little voice.

  Natty and I knew at once. Knew as we had known at a similar moment in Mr. Vale’s hotel in Santa Caterina. Knew so well we wanted to run—but at the same time not. We must hear all there was to hear; we must not seem alarmed.

  Natty found a way. “What sort of man?” she asked.

  “A strange one,” said Mr. Brydges, relaxing his footwork and smiling because he knew he had something we needed, which gave him
power over us as long as he kept it to himself.

  “One man?” I asked.

  “I can see you know him then,” Mr. Brydges replied. “And you are quite right. Not one man. Two men.”

  “Indians?” I continued.

  Mr. Brydges now abandoned his fan entirely and tilted against one side of his chair to spit a bullet of tobacco juice into a bowl placed beside him on the floor.

  “You could say that,” he said when he was working his fan again, more gently than before.

  “We know them, Mr. Brydges,” Natty and I said together. My intention, which I am sure must have been hers as well, was to show we were still in command of the situation; that we were not in the least alarmed.

  Mr. Brydges was unimpressed. “Friends of yours, are they?” he asked.

  We were less unified in our response this time, and replied in a jumble, “Not quite”; “Not exactly.”

  “I thought so,” Mr. Brydges murmured, nodding his head.

  I waited for him to continue, and when he did not I asked, “You thought what?”

  “I thought they were not your friends,” he said, and raised himself a little in his chair to bring the current of air away from his head and onto his chest, where his shirt-front began to panic and open, revealing skin as white as chicken meat.

  “I thought they could not be friends,” he said again. “Although they said they had traveled a long way to meet you. A long way and a long while.”

  “They spoke to you in English?”

  “What passes for English round here. I understood them well enough.”

  “Did they say they would come back?” Natty had recovered from our confusion a moment before and now spoke very intently. I thought this might annoy Mr. Brydges, and provoke him into behaving even more like a cat with a mouse; in fact, and to my great relief, it had the opposite effect.

  “They did not say anything about that,” he said, then paused and gave another tremulous roll of his shoulders. “They did not say,” he went on, with a little smile of self-congratulation, “because I did not say you would be here to meet them. In fact I did not say you would be here at all. Would be or ever had been.”

  “Oh, thank you, Mr. Brydges,” I burst out, with so much relief I embarrassed myself somewhat.

  “Yes, thank you,” Natty added, with more dignity.

  “Things that happen in my hotel!” Mr. Brydges said, swelling even more enormously in his chair. “Things that happen!” This phrase, which he clearly felt to be very rich in meanings, gave him so much food for thought he let it hang in the air between us for a while, before narrowing his eyes and staring at us more closely, to make sure we were as grateful as we should be. Once he had satisfied himself on this score, he drew a plug and a knife from the pocket of his trousers, cut off a piece of the tobacco, popped it into his mouth, and began to chew.

  After he had continued in this way for another minute, he felt able to repeat his judgment a third time—“Things that happen in my hotel!”—and then to elaborate it. “They happen,” he said, “when I let them happen. The folk I allow in, I allow in. Them I don’t, I don’t. Them two, I don’t.”

  He stopped chewing for a moment, which allowed his chins to settle onto his neck, and I thought this might be a signal for us to speak again, and say once more how indebted we were to him. But I let the moment stretch until it became a silence, at which point he waved one hand loosely like a flipper to show he thought our conversation was over and done with. We were free to go.

  I could not resist asking one more thing.

  “Do you know where the two men went, Mr. Brydges, after you had given them that answer?”

  My Brydges looked through the open door of his hotel into the street behind us. When I turned in the same direction I saw such dazzling sunlight it felt like blindness.

  “No idea,” he said, still gazing off. “They went away. That is all I can tell you.”

  Now it was my turn to stare, until my eyes got used to the brightness and I was able to see the dust blowing up from the street and the feet of the people who walked there—the moccasins and sandals, the riding boots and ladies’ boots, and the bare toes as well, all pattering out their different rhythms.

  “Jim?”

  Natty was shaking my shoulder because I seemed to have fallen into a trance.

  “Yes?” I blinked and looked round, first at Mr. Brydges, who had slumped back in his chair and closed his eyes, then at Natty. Her face had a sheen of sweat which might only have been heat, because Mr. Brydges had again stopped working his fan.

  “We’re still safe,” she said to me.

  I kept still a moment longer, listening to the voices of the hotel around us, and the murmur outside as the town continued with its bustling. Yes, apparently we were safe, and could stay safe if we also kept to our plan. If we went to our room and lay low, then slipped away to our boat in the morning. We would be gone by noon. Sooner perhaps. Black Cloud would never find us now. We were almost invisible; we were almost free.

  By the time this thought had taken hold of me, and we had left Mr. Brydges in his doze and returned to our room, we had pushed Black Cloud to the side of our minds and were cheerful again. We had not forgotten him, but we chose not to think about him. Instead, we preferred to lie on our bed and listen to the bed-springs remind us of other travelers who had rested here. To sleep a little. To talk about England and the changes we would find waiting for us. And to do all this so easily, with such a growing sense of our liberty, that when the afternoon began to darken, and the air cooled, and a smell of rotting vegetation drifted up from the river and in through our window, I could almost believe I was back at the Hispaniola, with the Thames a stone’s throw away and the Mississippi a distant memory.

  Then Joshua knocked on our door, an hour or so after darkness had fallen. We knew it was him; Anne Marie would not have dared. He was tired after his day, he told us, tired of exploring and asking for employment, and now also tired of resting and recuperating. Would we care to step outside with him and his beloved, and find something to distract us before we retired for the night?

  Although he spoke courteously like a gentleman, I would like to say we demurred because we still felt nervous of the world, and conscious above everything of the need to protect ourselves. Instead we told him we were due to board the Mungo next morning, and would not see him again after that—which provoked him into an even greater fit of friendliness. He insisted we come with him immediately; he also insisted we make a proper good-bye, which he told us was the least we owed him for the cost of our rooms.

  I stood at the door of our room while we talked, with the chatter of other guests bubbling up from the lobby below; when I turned to Natty to see if she agreed, I found her sitting on the edge of the bed and running her hands through her hair—as if she had already decided to accept, but heard the voice of reason telling her not to. Joshua, in contrast, looked more enthusiastic by the minute. He had thrown away the tight old clothes he had worn on the Angel and was wearing a smart black jacket and trews, which made me think he had already got the measure of the town. Likewise Anne Marie, who now appeared in the corridor behind him wearing a yellow dress that almost matched her hair.

  “Well?” said Joshua.

  “We’ve only got what you see,” I told him.

  “No other clothes at all? Only those old Indian things?”

  “That’s right. No other clothes, and no money either; only a few coins.”

  Joshua held up his finger, tapped the side of his nose, then swung away without a word, which left Anne Marie twisting her hands and muttering “Oh! Oh!” under her breath.

  She did not have to suffer for long. Joshua’s footsteps had hardly faded along the corridor before he was stamping toward us again with a crumpled white shirt and dark trousers, and an equally crumpled green dress, draped over his outstretched arms.

  “Take these,” he ordered, thrusting them toward me. “They need a shake-out, but they’re good enoug
h, I think. We have plenty.”

  “Plenty,” echoed Anne Marie though with such a blank look on her face, I thought she might not have known the meaning of the word.

  “We can’t repay you,” I told him.

  “No matter!” Joshua said gaily. “We are beginning! We shall soon have clothes galore, won’t we, my darling? Clothes galore.”

  “Galore,” came the echo.

  “Besides…” I went on, but changing direction. “We’re happy with what we have.”

  Joshua looked me up and down, then drew his fingers slowly across my tunic.

  “You’re happy…?” he said disdainfully. “With that?”

  “It’s mine,” I said, and looked over my shoulder at Natty on the bed; she was touching the grimy hem of her dress, avoiding my eye. “And hers is hers,” I added. I did not want to explain everything implied by this—how we had been given our clothes, and by whom, and what they had come to represent. I did not think Joshua would understand; not this new Joshua, and perhaps not the Joshua we had first met either.

  “They don’t look like yours,” he replied at length, which was polite compared to what I knew he was thinking. Then he went on more straightforwardly. “Anyway, do you plan to wear them forever? When you’re back in England even? Are you going to be Indians in England?”

  “Definitely not,” I told him a little stiffly. “We’ll change at some point.”

  “Well then.” He widened his eyes. “Why not change now? I told you—we are beginning. And tonight is the beginning of the beginning.”

  This was all it took. I knew I should hesitate. I knew I should thank him and say no. But I had already begun to fall. So I merely nodded at him, and told him I understood what he meant, and received the clothes from his hands, and thanked him for his generosity.

  Natty too. She stood up from the bed to claim her dress, and held it against herself and said she was sure it would fit, and yes, it was a pretty green—although yes again, very crumpled.

  “Quite the belle,” said Joshua, smiling as though we had done something clever. “Now,” he went on, “you two get dressed, and we’ll wait for you downstairs. Five minutes, all right? Five minutes.”