Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  ‘Keep going!’ he said. ‘They’re coming!’

  They reached the gravelly dirt of the street. Lighted windows were just ahead, but there was no cover to hide in along the ropewalk, nor time to bide the uncertain outcome of hammering on one of the doors, judging by the swell of the noise behind.

  ‘Achilles!’ yelled Septimus, and waved with the sword: a blacker streak of shadow slipped out of the dark to their left and disappeared towards the far end of the ropewalk, and the ingress of Nassau beyond. They ran on, panting, along Broad Way.

  ‘Two – corners,’ gasped Septimus; ‘two – corners – between us – and them – to lose them—’

  They skidded left onto Maiden Lane, running downhill over cobbles now from the whaleback of the island. Quick glimpses of candle-lit chambers, families at table, ordinary life continuing; the sound behind getting louder, becoming diversified with glad hunting whoops, echoing between walls as the followers came off the Common and into the streets; clearly more, many more of them than had stood in the little circle with Smith and the butcher. Neither looked back.

  ‘Small streets – oldest – best – more cover—’

  Right at full pelt onto Nassau. Past the Dutch church, where a knot of greybeards were smoking long pipes on the steps, self-exempted from the English madness. Jinking left, right, left in the deserted dogleg alley around the red-brick back of City Hall. Left down the cracked paving of Wall Street, masthead lanterns swaying ahead; Septimus tripping, slipping, his blade grating out a shower of sparks from the rough slabs; recovering himself, gesturing right; them both flinging themselves into an alley that threaded away between the dark bulk of house-fronts. Septimus pressed his finger to his lips. They flattened themselves against the near wall and listened. Smith’s blood popped and bounded in his ears. The riverine roar of the pursuit surged, as the city’s stone brinks channelled it round some bend, back behind. Then seemed to settle, as if the flood were tossing irresolute, not sure which way to proceed, and might ebb, given a little longer.

  ‘If they just get bored …’ whispered Septimus. He sheathed the sabre carefully and tiptoed back to the alley’s end, and with a hand to shield the lightness of his face, leaned one eye out. One of the Hervormde Kerk greybeards was helpfully pointing their way, clapped on the back as they passed by a mob thirty or forty strong. His pipe ember brightened and dimmed contentedly. The hunters threw back their heads and bayed.

  ‘Oh drat,’ said Septimus.

  ‘Could you not order them to disperse?’ cried Smith as the two of them laboured on again up the twisting gullet of the alley.

  Septimus laughed. ‘How?’ he said.

  The view over the tops of the alley walls as they pelted by was a chaos of lean-to roofs, blind back-sides of warehouses, yards heavy with the smells of trade both sweet and disgusting; even a tree growing a courtyard or two over, where someone was cultivating a garden in a tight embrace of masonry; but no yard, gate-way or recess that offered anything other than a small confined space without egress; any prospect better than continuing to run. So they ran on. The alley debouched into the bend of Bloat Lane, which in turn gave onto William Street. Smith, pounding along next to Septimus’ spring-loaded lope, wished most passionately that he were again trying only to avoid requests for sixpence, yet his second wind had come in, and there was a sort of mad exhilaration in this helter-skelter dashing along; a sort of antidote of movement, to having been held, pinned, secured.

  At William Street they were, all of a sudden, in one of the city’s little domains of wealth and luxury. Tall, handsome houses of the newest proportions; white shutters at windows; candelabra lighting moulded ceilings visible at windows; patient horses and even a sedan chair at the mounting blocks beside the doors, where guests had spent Pope Day far from the bonfire’s barbarity. Septimus skidded left, no doubt intending by that means to get onto Duke Street and the shortest way to Fort George, but he halted after two steps and held his hand up. The pursuit was ahead of them, coming round the east end of William Street. Back they went – but the happy baying and hooting was coming from that way too. Intelligently the pursuers had divided, and were coming round from both sides at once, as well as boiling along the alley itself, judging by the way Bloat Lane had begun to pulse and echo. They were not growing bored. They had found their entertainment for the latter part of the evening, and they meant to make the most of it. The only way left open was ahead, up Princes Street, too wide for the preference of anyone seeking concealment, and with the even greater breadth and openness of Broad Street beyond, where public oil-lanterns burned on posts and passers-by on foot and horseback could be seen, of sympathies most doubtful. But needs must, and on the pair of them flew.

  However, they had not quite crossed the junction when Septimus’ attention was arrested by a whistle from above. It was hard to pick out in the gloom up there, against a night sky of hurrying cloud intermittently rent with stars, but a figure was running in a precarious crouch along the roofline of the townhouse on the corner opposite, waving something in one hand. Smith, groaning inwardly, assumed at first that the pursuers had somehow got an agile spotter up there, to guide them on to their prey from above; but Septimus was waving back, whistling back, and as the roof-runner scrambled over the sloping slates of the first roofs on Princes Street, Septimus was hopping along beneath, sideways from foot to foot, staring at door-ways, gazing up at the sash windows of the floor just below the eaves – the fourth – with an expression of rapid calculation.

  ‘There!’ he called, pointing, and the figure stopped against a chimney, and threw down what appeared to be a rope: a rope so short, however, that Smith could not see how it could be of any earthly use. It only hung down far enough to dangle just outside the fourth-floor window Septimus had indicated. With the figure motionless in the dark beside the chimney-stack, and nothing therefore to call attention to it, the rope was virtually invisible, a dark thread amidst the dark.

  Septimus seized Smith by the elbow. ‘Right, in we go,’ he said – and bounded with him up the marble steps leading to the grand door-way of the house before them, where he hammered furiously on the door-knocker. It seemed hideously exposed to remain there unmoving, in plain sight, while the three hubbubs of the pursuit converged, for the stretching seconds it took for the door to be answered. At any moment the first emissaries of the mob would come view-hallooing over the cobbles. Feet were audible on the stairs inside, though. Septimus sheathed the sabre, drummed his quivering hands on his temples; absurdly adjusted his neck-cloth. Keys turned inside. But as soon as the first crack of light appeared along the door-edge, Septimus shoved with an un-Septimus-like lack of civility, and they burst through into a tiled hall sending a housemaid reeling.

  ‘So sorry,’ said Septimus to the world in general. ‘Up!’ he added to Smith. ‘Good evening, sir!’ to an astonished, red-faced householder, his mouth an O. ‘Shut the door!’ – over his shoulder to the maid, as they plunged up the treads of a grand oval staircase, elegantly carpeted, radiantly lit, where guests clearly stuffed and basted with dinner were craning out of door-ways. Round and up, round and up; flashes of dining-room, where the walnut gleamed, and of a drawing-room with card party where a flutter of ladies, having withdrawn from the gentlemen, was being teased from the door-way by a moustached officer. ‘I say—’ said the officer, wondering whether he was supposed to perform some gallant intervention.

  ‘Sorry – terrible hurry—’ said Septimus, brushing past.

  ‘Excuse us,’ Smith threw in.

  ‘Your servant, sir – your pardon, madam – coming through—’

  ‘Thank you – obliged, obliged – marvellous party – very kind,’ said Smith, trying to smooth somewhat the impression they were making, yet helplessly on the verge of laughter at this sudden transition from naked Fear to clothed Society, this dash as quick as a scene-shift from wild black street to domain of piquet and face-powder. The trick was to stay close behind. Septimus progressed upward like an extremely
well-mannered fox going through a hen-house. In his wake, feathers, clucking, dismay, uproar − yet he behaved as if he had such a perfect right to push his way through someone else’s house from bottom to top, that no-one gathered the confidence to protest effectually until he was well past.

  The twist of the stairs tightened; the carpet beneath their galloping feet gave way to boards; a door presented itself with a simpler, barer flight of staircase beyond. Glancing back down the well, Smith saw beneath the spiral of astonished faces tilted up at him that there was a commotion in the hall now, with shouts and banging, but that, judging by the banging, the door to the street had not been opened. Not yet, anyway. Up the next flight. Oilcloth, plain wood, a child’s wooden horse: a nursery. Past a nurse with a babe in arms that began, reliably, to bawl. Last flight: up among the eaves, servants’ bedrooms, grey plaster, cold air, truckle beds. Along a mean corridor, Septimus counting along the rooms on their right. Last room. Door of plain pine. Door locked from inside. Septimus rapped on it. No answer but a faint, sickly groan.

  Smith looked back. The temper of the house-noise was altering behind them, now that the hypnotic effect of Septimus’ passing was worn off.

  ‘Bother,’ said Septimus, ‘I shall have to send them a note in the morning’, and kicked the door open with his pointed black shoe.

  The woman who had been lying in the bed in the corner with the toothache screamed, or tried to. Her jaw was bound up with a grey clout of rags, and she could only open her mouth enough to emit a high-pitched moan. She clutched the sheet up to her chin.

  ‘Come now, mistress, your virtue is perfectly safe,’ said Septimus reprovingly. ‘We are only interested – in – your—’ The last words were said in grunts, he having bounded across the room and addressed himself to the casement.

  The top half of the wooden sash could be forced down to the mid-point of the window, creating a slot two feet high at about chest height. There, in the darkness outside, the loose end of the rope was swinging down over the guttering at the edge of the roof, just above. Alas, the eaves of the house projected outward, from window-top to gutter, so the rope hung a good yard away, and there was not much length to it, perhaps a scant man’s height, and no knot at the end neither, to arrest a pair of slipping feet or (worse) slipping hands. Four storeys down, their pale faces gleaming like bubbles around the edge of a glass of dark wine, the mob ringed the front door, shouting – shouting through it, for it had still not been opened, the house having learned caution from Smith and Septimus’ first invasion. None of the besiegers were looking up. To them, the eaves of the house were deep-shadowed.

  Septimus cast round for a chair. There was none.

  ‘Better give me a leg,’ he said. Standing on Smith’s bent knee, he leaned forward over the sash and wriggled forward, with his stomach as a fulcrum, and his head, chest and out-stretched arms projecting free and unsupported into the night air. Smith gripped his coat as he inched forward. The sabre in its scabbard projected awkwardly, clipping Smith’s chin. Septimus’ hands found the rope.

  ‘You will forgive the ludicrous posture,’ said he – and, gripping the rope in both fists as tightly as he could, he wriggled the rest of the way over the sill, a black secretarial seal entering the ocean, pushed off from the window above fifty or so feet of empty air, and swung out to dangle over the street, making a huff of effort. His thin legs kicked, his hands slid: but then they caught, and he wrapped himself tight round the fibres. As soon as his weight was full on the rope, he began to rise, and the twisted clove-hitch he had made of himself disappeared upwards, with further quiet huffs and mmphs where he was scraped on the gutter. What seemed only a couple of seconds later, the rope reappeared, empty. An urgent hiss from above: ‘Come on!’

  At this point Mr Smith made the mistake of pausing for an instant, and looked down, considering how he would have to scramble up and out above the fifty-foot void without a helper behind to steady him; how he would need to throw himself beyond all chance of appeal upon the mercy of a narrow, slippery cord; how much more likely it was than any other outcome that he should tumble screaming through the air, and strike the stones below with a croquillant squelch, in a posture of annihilation. He paused on the brink; and, hesitating, looked back into the room.

  But it was no longer empty. Coming through the door-way, three steps away, was the householder, his periwig off and a fowling piece in his hands, with other male guests crowding at his shoulders.

  ‘What the devil do you think you are—?’ began his host.

  Propelled by embarrassment, and by a prospect of explanations that made the atrocious fall before him seem at least the simpler alternative, Smith scrambled up onto the sash in a kneeling crouch, and before consideration could weaken resolve any further, leapt.

  One hand caught on the rope, but the other’s knuckles bumped off it, and he swung for a moment over the gulf by the grip of one burning, slithering palm. The mob-filled deep spun beneath his feet, and the indifferent darkness of the continent leaned in, prompt to claim him. – Then his other flailing hand got purchase and up he rose out of the pit, away from the window filled with open-mouthed faces, over the hard sharpness of the gutter, and up to a tiled slope where Septimus and Achilles were pulling, braced against the drop, with teeth bared in effort. They landed him like a fish and dragged him up over the roof-crest and into a leaded valley beyond.

  ‘Better move on a house or two,’ panted Septimus, and the three of them scrambled up and down and up and down the steep tiled slopes till the noise of the street diminished behind them. Septimus held up a finger, and they listened: a hubbub, still, but not a hubbub rising. A hubbub on the contrary spreading its skirts and settling into a mutter. No figures rising through trapdoors. No battering-ram blows upon the Princes Street door. Perhaps the members of the mob would countenance slaughter on a midnight impulse, but found they could not contemplate house-breaking, without a calculation of daylight consequences. Or perhaps the hot blood was simply cooling. Soon, the sounds from below were those of departure. King Mob melted into his separate parts, and slunk away, restored to the mode of individual existence.

  The three on the roof looked at each other. Septimus’ face was calm but his eyes were wide, as if the wind had changed and frozen him in a moment of disbelief. Achilles was smiling slightly. After a while they moved again, to an east-facing slope of slates commanding a view of Broad Street’s lower end, descending to the docks, and there in a crevice they settled until the streets should become quiet. Achilles had acquired one of the bottles of rum that had been circulating by the fire, and this they drank the greater part of while they waited to descend – it having been agreed that Smith had better come with them tonight into the safety of Fort George – passing it from hand to hand convivially, and without urgency, each one succumbing at times to a quiet spasmodic laughter for which the others required no explanation. At the northern limit of the dark city, the dull red glow of the fire smouldered on, while the shrieks and the pyrotechnical whip-cracks faded away. A man with a ladder came and extinguished the pale lanterns along Broad Street. Over the water, the scattered twinkles of Breuckelen went out one by one, and the cold wind brought faint creaks from the rigging of the ships riding at anchor, borne up to them in chill gusts and eddies, there where they perched, high above Manhattan.

  III

  The Fort, behind its ramparts and its outer rind of scorched and roofless barracks, turned out far less military in feeling than Smith had imagined, with a refurbished old Dutch house for the Governor extended out into a higgledy-piggledy quadrangle, which by night seemed to possess the peace of a cloister. Or would have done so, had there not been three musty bell-tents pitched on the grass for the sentries displaced by the fire. Septimus’ dwelling was a pair of rooms up a staircase in the corner: a sleeping chamber, with bed and palliasse, and a small day-room or parlour-room with a casement window overlooking the lawn, and a sopha losing its stuffing, beside a little fireplace. Here Septimus placed Sm
ith, and left him with a blanket, tho’ without conversation. The awkwardness between them that danger and hilarity had dissolved was drifting back into place, like a sediment in a briskly-shaken bottle that, when the shaking ceases, begins at once to float down again. Smith was embarrassed, and alarmed at the dependence he had demonstrated; Septimus was angry at what he had been compelled to do, and anxious about what damage he might (on the morrow) prove to have done, by the escapade, to his standing in the colony; and all for the sake of one who might very well turn out no more than a travelling rogue.

  The sopha was too short for Smith, and the mutinous springs beneath its torn velvet pressed lumpishly into his back. But the rum had soaked his consciousness through, and he tumbled off into a confused depth of sleep, accompanied by the pattern of the lumps, which incorporated itself into his dreams, so that at times he appeared to himself to have become a chess board, to be stiffly locked and strenuously divided into squares which (as well as being different colours) stood at different heights. Here there was something which must be put into order; yet though he revisited it again and again, the puzzle remained always still to be done. The different heights were of immense significance. The different roughnesses too. Yet a leftward twist – a kind of siphoning mutual substitution – no – back at the beginning again. Or sometimes, he was a giant slumbering upon the points of a mountain range, poised on nothing but the lumps, and must compose himself to perfect stillness, or he would fall off. Roll from spiky safety into an abyss on all sides. Yet no sooner had the fall begun than he was restored to the uncomfortable heights, with something to do, something to do—