In its brightening light Smith began to see the extraordinary extent of the human ring that stretched around the fire. There must have been a thousand people there, a goodly fraction of the whole city gathered to gaze, with uptilted faces, at the flame-mountain. And on face after face, an expression of a kind of excited fear, as if there were something both horrifying and delightful being released in the increasing furnace roar. As the heat intensified, the damp November ground about the base of the fire began to steam; and the steam was sucked, at the speed of a river running, back across the silhouetted ridges of the grass and into the fire. Where it seemed to transmute, the vapour without any interval becoming the rising, rising lava-flows of orange-gold that ascended the hill of fuel, crinkling and incandescing, with a sound that resembled many distant glass windows shattering. A stippling of black stuff not yet burnt floated like slag on molten iron over the fire’s volcano heart. And at the peak the rising orange-gold transmuted again, into rushing gauzy tongues fifteen, twenty foot high, breaking in flickers at their ends into particulate tides of crimson sparks, that pulsed up high and slackened again, as the billows of heat assailed the night sky; pushed into its cold; lost way and sank again. That sky! The fiery glare blanked out the stars, but the very hugeness and extremity of the blaze made the far greater hugeness of the night more palpable, as the sparks recoiled defeated. New-York had gathered to ignite its biggest signal of assertion and wrath, and the intensity of the light and heat only seemed to reveal, for once at its true scale, the immense darkness of the continent at whose edge the little city perched – from this one pinpoint of defiant flame, the thousands upon thousands of miles of night unrolling westwards. For the first time Smith, dizzy with sparks and smoke, lost the comfortable understanding of size he had brought with him from home, and the awe and the fear of the New World broke in upon him. As if, till then, he had been inhabiting a little doll’s house, and misled by its neat veneers had mistaken it for the world, until with a splintering crunch its sides and front were broken off, and it proved to be standing all alone in the forests of the night; inches high, among silent, huge, glimmering trees.
The fire by this time was settling back from wild uprush into something more sullen, a hill all crimson-orange, morosely aglow. It made now a very creditable portrait of a landscape in hell, especially since from time to time across the infernal oven-glare capered, or reeled, or stumbled, the black outlines of the fire’s servitors. They were dragging forward the heads from off the cart. The Pope was first for the furnace. Two men on each side, they swung him crown and all like a battering-ram, as near as they dared get to the hellmouth, and flung him up onto the coals. He rolled a little way, and came to rest on his bulbous nose. For a second, his profile remained unchanged, a black exception to the fire; then on an instant it turned all to a flayed musculature of flame, a visage of wreathing scarlet fibres; then another instant, and hollow papier-mâché that it was, it was entirely gone, dissolved to a puff of sparks. A roar went up from the onlookers. For the Pretender, next, the crowd counted in its blundering voice-of-many-voices as the effigy swung. ‘OneONEoneone! TwoTWOtwotwo! ThreeTHREEthreethree!’ – And as Prince Charles Edward Stuart leapt into ash, an explosion of hoots, jeers, catcalls, whistles. Fawkes went more reverently, being a more ancient and more toothless enemy. Just a count as he swung in the air, and then a happy universal sigh of justice done. He rested on his nape, malicious tongue pointed skyward, and wick’d away to fiery nothing, up it. ‘God save the King!’ someone shouted, and a part of the circled crowd, away on the other side of the bonfire, attempted to chant it in chorus. But the voice-of-all-voices was separating to a babble of many; the linked arms of the circle unlocked; the strange grave hush disappeared; conversations began; flasks, bottles and jugs began to pass hand to hand.
Smith could have ventured forward now in search of his thief but, clue gone, he did not believe he would locate him at random in the dark of the Common any more than he had by quartering at random the streets of the city. Instead, shivery with more than simple cold, he accepted the earthenware jug coming from his right, and drank a mouthful of what turned out to be new rum, treacly and fiery. No sooner had he passed it on, than a stone bottle smelling of genever was thrust at him, and more, and yet more drink. He took sips, but looking left and right, he saw the rum, genever and moonshine going down in throat-pumping gulps: serious drinking, such as he had not seen since he left London, and which he had insensibly supposed he had left behind on the farther shore, the sozzled, desperate, waver-footed self-obliteration of the gin-cellars a part of all that was poxed and ulcered at home. Yet here it was regular, cleanly-dressed citizens – he would have said sober citizens – who were casting off their daylight selves upon the sulphurous apron of the fire, and drinking, not to be convivial, not to take off the cold edge of the night, but to dissolve as much of themselves as spirits would eat away.
Already the younger prentices had started to spew, and laugh, and try the liquor again; already gestures were growing bigger and rougher, and steps more lurching. The women were not drinking, except a few haggard-looking drabs over in the poorest part of the ring around the fire. The good wives, the respectable maids, the well-dressed ladies were melting away into the shadows, homeward bound, their part of the evening done. The circle rocked, and reeled. One man, receiving his mouthful of spirits, ran with his cheeks distended forward into the zone of intolerable heat close to the fire, and blew it at the coals, so that a line of dripping yellow-blue flame lit on the instant, and he seemed dragonish as he wove back grinning. Cries of laughter and applause; immediate imitation by three or four others dashing toward the blaze, till inevitably one too incapable to manage the trick cough’d at the critical moment and spilled blue flaming gin down his chin and clothes. Louder laughter, and a pause of admiration while he rolled on the ground screaming and beating at himself, before his friends stumbled to the rescue, dragged him back into the shades, and, lacking other resources, pissed him out.
Smith having sipped, not gulped, had the little glow in his belly, not the raging melting demon his neighbours had eagerly imbibed, and now the night was getting rowdy, he judged it best to fade away too. But he had missed his moment, it was past and of a sudden seemingly long past the stage of the carouse when a man might bow out and still be counted a good fellow, for instant offence bloomed on the face of the burly prentice to his right when he refused the next drink, and, backing, he only backed into the hot damp weight of the prentice’s friend, who gripped him.
‘Wassamatter? Where you creeping off to? ’S Pope Day. Have a drink.’
The one in front shoved the bottle at his mouth, like someone trying to push a spoon past the resistance of a baby. The glass banged his teeth, and he got his hands up to grip the neck, before it could knock any out. The prentice didn’t want to let go. He was only about seventeen, but he had the same milk-fed mass Smith had seen in Lovell’s Isaiah. Smith twisted, and the bottle came free. The boys were very close round him.
‘Thanks,’ said Smith, and took what he meant to be a hearty stage swig; but the base of the bottle was slapped at that moment, the hard rim struck his palate like a hammer, and he choked. The liquor sprayed. This they found very funny, the one behind creaking out a fit of mirth that broke down into hiccups.
‘Gotta have a drink on Pope Day,’ said the first.
‘Yuh!’ agreed the second. ‘Birth! righ’! ovva Eng! lish! man!’
‘Abfolutely,’ said Smith, tasting blood. He passed the bottle over his shoulder. ‘Here you go.’ As he’d hoped, the hiccupper let go to take it. Smith wriggled left, and stood back from them both. Another step and he’d be away.
‘Have a good evening, lads,’ he said. ‘This Englishman’s for his bed. Hey,’ he added, beginning to back, ‘do you know the fellows who drew the cart?’
They weren’t listening. The first one was staring at Smith’s shadow-dappled face, with the dark line running down from the corner of his mouth, and his neck-cl
oth loose, as if the backstep into the dark had revealed a strangeness there that hadn’t been apparent when they were nose to nose.
‘Fuck,’ said he. ‘’S him.’
‘Who?’ asked the hiccupper.
‘The heathen. The one as is rich as Creezus.’
‘That you?’ asked the hiccupper, muzzily interested, as you might be if introduced unexpectedly to a man with six fingers. But his friend was savouring the discovery more darkly.
‘Fuck,’ he said again. ‘It’s a fucken Papist. A Papist on Pope Day. You gotta lotta front, you evil fucker. Standing here! With us! You fucker!’ He was shaking his head with delight.
‘Oi! Lackwit!’ said Smith sharply. ‘Dim your gabber. I’m no more Popish ’n you.’
‘Jonesy!’ shouted the boy. ‘Simmo! Mr Higgins! Come over ’ere a minute! Look what we got here!’
Enough. Smith sidled into full shadow, and turned off briskly, yet at a walk, upon the usual city rule that a man who does not wish to be noticed, whether he has picked a pocket or pasted a play-bill where one is not allowed, should never pick himself out by running. Mistake. He had not made above twenty paces across the uneven grass, before the raised voices behind resolved into pounding feet, and a shoulder struck him behind the knees, and he was slammed to the turf beneath a mountain of rapidly augmenting male meat. Frieze against his cheek, his cheek against the cold dirt; the weight of at least two bodies on his back; excited, spiritous breathing. ‘Got him!’ someone cried. Smith was pinned. He tried to flex his spine, but there was no wriggling this time; the weight had him flat out. He waited, having no choice, bundled beneath so much brisket; yet calmer, to tell truth, than he had been a moment since. Smith, when his expedition was in nervous prospect – and when he was corked, contained, forced to bide his time aboard Henrietta – had imagined many dismal outcomes to his errand; disasters varied, disasters manifold; and tho’ none had quite figured him mobbed by angry prentices beside a bonfire, under mistake for a Jesuit, angry crowds had certainly been enumerated among disaster’s instruments, several ways; he had fingered over, in panicky imagination, those cards on which were printed futures where a multitude with screaming mouths dragged him gallows-ward, or pulped him to nothing in a ring of falling cudgels. Yet now, it seemed the maxim was true, that anticipation had been the worser part of the prospect, worse than actuality. As the heap of prentice disassembled, and he was yanked up roughly to his feet with many hands on him, he felt panic drain out of him, leaving a different fluid behind, steady and chill: winter salamander-blood in his veins.
‘What have we here?’ said a new voice, big but lazy, blustering but comfortable: a kind of plebeian cousin to the Chief Justice’s, with the same confidence of being made room for. Here in the deep black space between the bonfire’s red domain and the first pale-lit windows of the town, it was not possible to make out much more of the lads that held him than a shifting dark mass of shoulders and heads, and the man they’d turned him to face, as he strolled up, taking his time, was lit only in patches and gleams, with the fire-light behind the fat dome of his head, and distant scarlet picking out the delicate frizzle of his side-whiskers. But it was dimly clear he was wearing stripes for the holiday, broad avenues of lighter and darker silk stretched over his bulk, for if the boys were bullcalfs, he was the full ox. And he smelled of – the new, cooler Smith registered it as one more fact of the situation, plain as an angle in Euclid – animal blood. Steak, black pudding, offal in the mincer. Mr Higgins, I presume. The butcher come sauntering to see what the butcher’s boys had caught. But not to offer adult reproof, oh no; the butcher too was on holiday. And the rest of the dispersing crowd was spreading off in the darkness to its private pursuits; no help coming, there. The prentices had Smith held spread-eagled by his arms. The butcher drew back a fist as big as a pie, taking his time, taking his time. ‘O-o-o-o-o,’ went the prentices, on a rising note of pleasure—
But Mr Smith had learned a thing or two besides the art of patient starvation in the cellars of Limehouse. Left and right he stamped as hard and fast as he could on the toes of those holding him; and as they commenced to jump about swearing, and loosed their hold, he threw himself forward onto the blood-perfumed bulk of the butcher before the fist could pick up speed. It was an awkward, huddled embrace that checked the momentum of the blow at cost of leaving Smith merely draped on his adversary, but all he needed from the posture was leverage; a hand’s grip on each bulging shoulder of the butcher’s coat, quick, quick, while he still grunted with surprise, and then his own jack-knifing body all the weapon he required to pivot back from the waist and slam his forehead as hard as ever he could into the butcher’s nose. The cartilage cracked. A hot wetness splattered Smith’s brow. The butcher howled. The butcher fell. Smith’s head seemed split with pain itself, and flashes of white internal lightning obscured his sight, but he retained enough of himself to roll from atop the fallen pork monolith, and to try his best to crawl into the confused dark. Legs, shouts, the pain in his head − hands and knees over the tussocks – when he shut his eyes the lightning continued – he had seen the Limehouse Kiss performed but had had no idea it was so grievous for the doer – still he was moving, foot by foot, yard by yard – the stir and the groans falling behind – the inglorious escape of an injured beetle, but even so an escape— And then a hand seized his ankle, a firm and solid and unappealable hand, and he was caught.
It took a couple of panting minutes for him to be hoisted again to face the butcher, for the butcher himself rose only in slow staggering stages, the centre of his face a bubbling black mess, and all holiday humour gone.
‘You liddle bastard,’ he said thickly, spitting out dark gobbets as big as garden slugs. This time the fist was inevitable and, swung into Smith’s belly, drove the breath out of him as effectually and thoroughly as if he had got in the path of a hammer. Smith coughed and retched. The butcher’s shadow-smeared visage loomed close. He spat on Smith. He hit him again. But it did not seem to satisfy him.
‘We wuz only goig ter tiggle yer up a bid,’ he said fretfully. ‘No fugging longer.’ Rummaging in the dark; the rousting-out from the butcher’s pocket of something that gleamed as narrowly along its edge as the new moon. A clasp-knife, maybe; extended with professional delicacy in the butcher’s quivering, aggrieved hand. ‘I ab goig,’ he said, his voice a caress of treacle, ‘to fugging fillet you.’
Hesitancy in the group; a palpable in-drawing of breath all the way around the little circle, at a thought so cold and sharp it momentarily cut itself free from the soft fuzz of drunkenness, though it might in a moment more succumb to it, and dissolve back again.
‘Master—’ began the hiccupper anxiously.
‘Shud it,’ said the butcher. ‘Tide’s goig out. He’ll be floading past the Narrows by dawd. No-one’ll fide him. No-one’ll care. Now take his coad off.’ The butcher spat black slime; the butcher advanced. Oh well, thought Smith, surprised still to find his grieving all done.
‘Gentlemen!’ said a new voice: a bright voice, an amused voice, a drawing-room voice, a voice of tea-cups and couplets. ‘Are we all having fun?’ Smith dragged his gaze from the butcher, which seemed as hard as shifting a planet from its course. The gravity of his death had had him in its pull; he was tumbling down, all struggle done. He almost resented the interruption. There stood Septimus Oakeshott at the edge of the group, a sabre hanging negligently in one hand.
‘Who’s that?’ one of the prentices asked.
‘The Governor’s bumboy,’ said another.
‘This is privade business,’ said the butcher, ignoring them. He seemed to be finding it as difficult as Smith to change direction.
‘Is it?’ said Septimus. ‘I do sympathise, for I know myself how annoying our visitor here can be: but I’m afraid you will have to let him go. – Witnesses, you see.’
‘Nod if you both go oud with the tide,’ said the butcher.
‘Well, then, the other reason would be cold steel. Mine being bigger tha
n yours: that sort of thing.’ Septimus raised the sword, and the circle parted away from it, as suds do on a basin of water when soap is introduced into it. The hands holding Smith dropped.
Smith cleared his throat. His voice sounded rusty; he had not expected to use it again.
‘Mr Oakeshott, you are very welcome,’ he said.
‘Mr Smith, you are very stationary. Run!’
Smith pulled the green coat that had been half stripped off him back onto his shoulders, and hugged it round him, staring stupidly. The advice was excellent, he could tell, but he did not quite seem able to take it. The running, the grabbing: surely they had already done that.
‘Run!’
That did it. Smith turned obediently and lumbered away into the dark; and as his legs rose and fell, as slow it seemed as logs pounding the ground, the strange quietness of the last few minutes went dizzily away. Urgency, alarm, trembling were stirred back into him. A wave of pins-and-needles ran up his awakening calves, thighs, chest, neck. His head hurt, his heart fluttered, he felt the numb turf beneath him again with painful sharpness, and then he was running faster; sprinting indeed, as fast as his legs would carry him, with his arms pumping; bolting toward the welcoming mouth of the Broad Way. Nevertheless, Septimus overhauled him, coming up alongside after a brief interval as if propelled by the rising growl in the dark behind, running in a swift thin-legged scamper, breathing hard yet curiously upright, with a frown on his white face as if his body had carried him away of its own accord and he were, more than anything, puzzled to find himself hurtling disjointedly through the night. He was carrying the sabre pointed straight out in front of him, like a man ordering a cavalry charge in a painting.
Golden Hill Page 8
