And he did make the place sing with profit. He took no nonsense from the blacks and their overseers, and I was told the sugar which was produced from our cane was as fine and as pure as any in the Caribbean, even that of the most famed plantations of Barbados. Isak had proven his worth time and time again. His knowledge of the techniques used in plantations in Brazil meant we were more productive, with cane of a higher quality, than any other plantation on the island.
Jamaica itself was a wonder of energy and invention. Barbados remained the richest of England’s Caribbean islands, but all of the planters on Jamaica were seeing their income grow relentlessly. It seemed that every week a new sugar plantation opened somewhere on the island. Good-quality slaves poured into Port Royal, most of them from the dead King’s Company of Adventurers, but a good few of them from independent traders as well. If old Hawkyns could see how well-oiled the transactions between ship captain and plantation owner now were, with the slaves washed and greased and gleaming on the quayside, his old Plymouth heart would have swelled beyond the confines of its chest.
The blacks in Woodperry knew their place and mostly behaved. In recent months there had been many escapes from other plantations. Most of the escaping slaves, it seemed, were joining with the Maroons up in the hills and in Cockpit County, and there were constant rumors that they may have been planning to take some kind of stand. Isak told me that this was much in the minds of the local Jews, and the limited contact I had with other plantation owners showed me that they, too, were worried lest the Maroons grew in sufficient numbers to threaten the emerging sugar economy.
No one, including Isak, knew of my own dealings with the Maroons, who for years watched over my own particular treasure trove in Cockpit County, the trove which had allowed me to build Woodperry and buy so many of the highest-quality slaves in the first place. Potosí silver had been transmuted, first into black labor, then into sugar, which attracted ever-growing prices back in England, where chins were multiplying beneath aristocratic faces as the rich and powerful shoved the sweet stuff down their pampered throats. While England grew fat, Jamaica grew rich. Sometimes I even thought there might come a time when England’s government was moved to Jamaica, where the landscape was pleasant, the sea was blue, and the air smelled of an exotic Sussex.
Morgan’s manservant answered the door when I arrived at the house. I recognized him immediately from the Portobelo campaign, an ugly serpent of a man, as ruthless and cunning as any among the Brethren. The man’s customary scowl fell away when he saw who was at the door, and he bent his head to the floor, muttering that Sir Henry could be found in the garden room. I followed the man through the house. Everywhere I looked there was careless and neglected opulence: elegant paintings sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall; vases still in wooden crates; expensive furniture left in strange alcoves and nooks. The house felt like something half-occupied and half-neglected. There were house niggers everywhere, dressed in rough Osnaburg cotton and bumping into each other as they moved things from room to room, under the influence of some unseen motion which I could not fathom. The house niggers in Woodperry were never this chaotic.
I went into the garden room, and saw Morgan. The rumors had led me to expect to find him in a hammock, surrounded by food and drink, but today the old admiral was in a massive throne-like chair, apparently plated in gold and upholstered in purple silk and cotton. His bottom half was covered by a blanket. His stomach was enormous, as big as a folded-up sail, and his old red beard was still finely groomed in the best Francis Drake fashion, but was now pushed out by his inflated chins and cheeks. His eyes seemed to have climbed back into his swollen face, like little crabs disappearing beneath a rock.
He did not stand to greet me. Two other diners were already there. One was a fellow captain of Morgan’s, who had also been involved in the Portobelo campaign but who made no move to greet me, and seemed to have become suddenly intensely interested in the grain of the floor. The other I did not recognize, but this second guest did stand up and take my hand, looking at me closely as he did so.
“Sloane,” said the other guest. “Hans Sloane.”
“Of course,” said I. “The doctor from London.”
The man made a slight bow of the head in acknowledgment before returning his gaze to mine. His eyes held no welcome in them, but were fiercely penetrative. They seemed to be absorbing information from my face. He did not look straight into my own eyes but rather roamed all about my head, face and shoulders, as if looking for a particular sign or badge. I broke the chain after a few seconds by walking over to Morgan, my hand outstretched. I found this young London doctor disconcerting. I felt as if he had been waiting for my arrival—as if I was a specimen and he’d requested a special viewing.
Sir Henry refused to take my outstretched hand, and seemed to shrink back into his seat, if such a massive creature could ever have been said to shrink into anything.
“God’s teeth,” he said, and his voice was a cracked vessel, his Welsh accent barely discernible, his breath odious. “God’s fucking teeth. William Ablass. Your mother must be fucking proud she spawned an evil fucking monster like you.”
I smiled at him, my professional smile. My profitable smile. It was a mechanical thing, like an anchor dropped into the water or a pulley guiding a sheet. The smile appeared from nowhere, and went back the same way.
“We are both monstrous, admiral and deputy governor,” I said. “Indeed, your monstrosity is somewhat more immediately apparent than my own.”
Morgan did not return my smile. His eyes were fixed and had something in them I had never seen before, even when the French had deserted him in Tortuga, even years later when the news had come from England that he was to be arrested and shipped home for trial. It looked very like fear. Morgan’s breath came in short, ragged bursts, and with each of them his belly quivered.
“I had to see it,” said Morgan. “Had to see it. I suspected it. But now I have seen it.”
“Yes, admiral,” said I. “You have. You have seen me. The weapon you used so effectively for so long. And the weapon has kept its shine and its edge. But now it is used for other purposes.”
“No. The same purpose.”
“The same?”
“The getting of money. It’s the only purpose there is, William. The getting of money is what keeps us human. The spending of it is what makes us monsters.”
“Ah, but then there’s the question of how we spend it, admiral. You once described an associate of mine as an animal driven by its desires. And you also told me you’d die fat on the veranda of a Jamaica plantation. I heeded your advice. So, it would seem, did you.”
We ate, not at table, but on small wooden planks which we perched on our laps, so that Morgan did not have to rise from his chair. I had known for years that I did not need to eat or drink, even though I could and did feel hunger and thirst, so Morgan’s food was as welcome to me as to his other guests. At one point, the old manservant crept in and went behind Morgan’s chair, and kneeled down behind him, manipulating something mechanical. Morgan’s face reddened slightly and there was a soft, moist sound, as of wet mud hitting rock. Morgan’s face resumed its normal state, and the manservant pulled a chamber pot out from beneath the chair and removed it from the room.
Nothing was said of it, and Morgan barely interrupted his reminiscences. He was speaking of his interview with King Charles years before, at which Morgan had laid out a new Western Design for the Stuart King, grander and richer than old Cromwell’s original. Charles had been delighted and had forgiven him all his transgressions and knighted him and made him Deputy Governor of the island of Jamaica.
Morgan always had been a ridiculously loyal old royalist. It had been his good fortune not to have been born a decade or two earlier, as he would have been a dangerous anachronism to Cromwell. The author of Cromwell’s original Design, Thomas Gage, had emphasized money and slaves and God’s work when laying out his plan for England’s western expansion, and Cromw
ell had lapped it up. But for Morgan, the New World was about the clothes, the adventure, and the drink, much more in keeping with the sensibilities of the Stuart who was now two years in his grave. No mention was made of the idiot brother who now sat on the throne in his place, who had fought on the same side as the Spanish and who was thus an unmentionable on Jamaica.
The guests ate four or five courses, and Morgan drank three or four bottles of wine and became disgustingly drunk. His fellow captain left in a huff after Morgan made a revolting allusion to his wife’s activities down in Port Royal a couple of decades before, and the doctor fell asleep in his chair soon after. Morgan and I were to all intents and purposes left alone, though the manservant could be heard banging around in the kitchen and in the hallway, and blacks continued to stream in and out of the room, unnoticed and unheeded.
Sloane was snoring softly. It occurred to me that the snores were a little theatrical, as if this strangely observant young doctor was pretending to sleep while the old admiral and his quartermaster reflected on their past. Morgan was gazing at a bottle of wine with the maudlin aspect of a drunk who has reached the limits of his capacity and is mournful of it. I stood at a bookshelf, marveling at how a man who had never read a book in his life (as Morgan had repeatedly asserted with a defiant pride) still seemed determined to surround himself with dusty volumes.
“What is it like?” asked Morgan suddenly, his bleary eyes now resting on the ceiling, gravy and cream and wine drifting down the steep sides of his belly.
“What is what like?” I asked, already knowing what he meant.
“What is it like to never grow old?”
“I have grown old.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, man. You know what I mean. You still look like a man of barely twenty years.”
“But I grow old, Morgan.”
“Old how, Billy? Old how?”
I tapped the side of my head. Morgan didn’t look at me, but seemed to understand the movement nevertheless. He nodded into his chins and spoke with some sorrow.
“’Tis true. Our innocence is a fragile and short-lived thing.”
Now he did look out at me.
“Know when I lost my innocence, Billy Ablass? Know when my mind decided it was no longer young and sprightly? Do you know when I puked up onto the ground and out came all my joy?”
I knew what he was going to say even then, in the silence that hung in the air after his question. I grew angry as the doctor snored.
“Portobelo. That child awaits us both at the gates of Hell, quartermaster.”
CHRISTMAS EVE 1811
For the second time this grim and gruesome December, John Harriott is dining with his friend Aaron Graham. This evening Graham is the visitor, traveling east to Wapping to attend his old friend in the fresh-faced apartments at Pier Head. Harriott’s wife, Elizabeth, prepares the evening, planning it carefully with the servants and ordering them about mercilessly, but then retires to her own rooms for the duration, leaving the two magistrates to enjoy their meal and drink their port in glorious masculine isolation.
Harriott’s dining room looks out onto the river from the second floor of the new building, and their meal is accompanied by the distant shouts of men, the rumble of barrels, the splashing of water, and the vertical splendor of masts moving in and out of the dock, plainly visible through the window.
Graham sees immediately upon arriving that all is not well with his old friend. Harriott is as smartly dressed as ever, his belly carefully sequestered inside white breeches, white waistcoat, and a dark coat. His clothes are about a decade out of fashion, but such is always the way with Harriott. Graham (whose clothes are hours, not even days, old, and whose tailor is one of the busiest tradesmen in Jermyn Street) normally finds this consistently smart but out-of-date sartorial approach charming, but he barely notices it this evening. He is more preoccupied with how very, very old his friend suddenly appears.
Such has been the change in him, in fact, that Graham audibly gasps when he is shown into Harriott’s drawing room to see the old man sat by the fire with a glass of malt whisky. Harriott gets up slowly to greet his guest, and for the first time in his life Graham finds himself urging the older man not to stand, to take things slowly. As the words leave his lips he regrets them. Harriott continues to rise, now with a look of dismay on his face, combined with a flush of embarrassment and, possibly, anger at his friend’s well-meant impertinence. John Harriott, the Engine of Empire, too tired to stand up? No, sir, no!
But there is no disguising the man’s exhaustion. As they move to the dining room and start to work their way through the evening’s seven courses, Graham finds himself having to work hard to maintain any kind of intelligent conversation. Fortunately he is used to this, and can pepper any company with a variety of suitable anecdotes and observations that would keep a party of the dead amused. But even in the face of Graham’s charm Harriott’s answers are this evening monosyllabic, and occasionally he appears not to have even heard what Graham has said. During one lengthy between-course anecdote relating to the daughter of a senior official at the Admiralty, Harriott’s eyes are so absent, his face so nonregarding, that Graham finds himself wondering if the man has not perhaps had some kind of a disturbance of the brain.
Only when the talk turns to the Shadwell investigations does Harriott gain any kind of enthusiasm, but even then he seems more to mourn the details than discuss them.
“So, my dear Harriott, your investigations. How do they develop?”
“My investigations, Graham? Would that they were!”
“Ah, of course. Shadwell continues to take the lead, I take it?”
“They do.”
“So. How go their investigations?”
Harriott lets out one enormous sigh, sips his port, and answers.
“As of this evening, I believe my colleagues in Shadwell would answer that their investigations go exceedingly well. They have a new suspect.”
“Indeed? There have been so many! Does this one possess any unique qualities to make him stand out from the army of those arrested?”
“It would appear so. To Shadwell’s eyes at least. The man is called John Williams.”
“Ah, yes, Williams. I read about him in The Times. Arrested only yesterday.”
“Indeed. Arrested for the astonishing crime of being an Irish seaman with an eye for the ladies and a fondness for a drink.”
“A not entirely singular individual.”
“Indeed not, Graham. When I heard of his arrest, I confess that I rolled my eyes. In recent weeks we have arrested enough Irishmen to form a new regiment. And enough Portuguese to crew an East Indiaman. I had little confidence that this new suspect would amount to anything. And yet, today, events have moved rather quickly.”
“So this Williams is more promising as a suspect than you imagined him to be?”
“Certain discoveries have implicated him more than I would have forecast.”
“Discoveries?”
“Yes. You remember the maul?”
“Of course. That awful instrument has stayed in my brain like an echo of hell, my dear Harriott.”
“Did you see it?”
“Not at all. Merely your description. It was enough.”
“My words cannot have done the vicious thing justice, Graham. My God, it was an instrument of pure evil. I have seen similar tools in the succeeding days, and all of them have made me shudder.”
“It had letters imprinted on the face, did it not?”
“Yes. ‘JP’ were the letters. Much time has been spent searching for the owner of those initials, and thus the owner of the maul. Our searches, both here and in Shadwell, had proven fruitless until recently.”
“You have found this ‘JP’?”
“Capper from Shadwell believes he has, yes. A John Petersen. German sailor.”
“Capper identified the man?”
“He claims so. He took the maul to a prisoner in Newgate, who claimed to know it. A Mr. Vermilloe,
landlord of the Pear Tree boardinghouse in Wapping. Vermilloe identified it as belonging to one of his lodgers, this Petersen.”
Graham sips his own port, and ponders before speaking again.
“Why on earth did Capper take the maul to Newgate?”
“To show it to Vermilloe.”
“But why the connection, Harriott? Why the connection with the Pear Tree?”
“The connection is Williams himself. The Pear Tree is where he lodges.”
The fire spits suddenly, causing Graham to jump slightly before recovering himself. Harriott is facing the fire, but he is not looking at it.
“Does this Petersen know Williams?” asks Graham.
“Petersen is currently at sea. He left his tools with Vermilloe and his wife for safekeeping.”
“And Vermilloe was in prison when both sets of murders were committed?”
“Meaning is he a suspect? Yes, he was in Newgate.”
“And yet his is the evidence on which the case against Williams turns.”
“There is one other thing. Williams was a shipmate of Timothy Marr.”
“A shipmate? On what ship?”
“An East Indiaman, called the Dover Castle.”
“And does anything link him to Williamson?”
“He was drinking in the King’s Arms on the night of the murders. And he is somewhat lame. Some people reported seeing a lame man escaping from the crime, although most seem to think it was a tall lame man. Williams is, by all accounts, rather short.”
“You have not seen this Williams?”
“No indeed. I left the investigating of all this to my constable, Horton. It is his information I am relaying to you.”
“And Williams has been remanded?”
The English Monster Page 23
