Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  A banging woke him. He startled awake and lay listening. His head ached and his mouth was dry. It was the pit of the night, some cold recess of the small hours. A faint smear of moon-light crept through the diamond panes of the casement, no brighter than the luminescence of a snail. His heart raced. All seemed still, but for the sound. He thought at first of fists hammering on the lodging’s outer door – of the mob reconstituted, and back in pursuit! – but it was not coming from outside, and it was a wooden sound, a hard regular knocking. Perhaps a shutter was loose and the wind had risen. Still mazed, still half-stupid, he uncoiled from the sopha, and padded to the inner-chamber door. The moon’s trail of reluctant phosphor followed him; not much of that dim, snailish light, but enough to see, when he opened the door, Septimus and Achilles in vigorous congress, the head of the bed striking the wall. They saw him seeing – their motion arrested, both pairs of eyes looking up at him.

  Smith groaned, pulled the door shut, and went and sat down by the ash-filled grate with his head in his hands. After an instant’s silence, there came through the door the sound of furious swearing, of clothes being frantically pulled on and feet stamped into shoes. Then Septimus burst into the room in a night-robe. He did not look collected, he did not look china-smooth. His skin was blotched with shadow, and his mouth was a writhing black square.

  ‘Good God!’ he cried. ‘Is there no end to your intrusions, you shameless wretch? Must I be punished immediately for helping you? You didn’t even have the decency to wait till morning, did you, you little coxcomb. Oh no, straight on with the damned squeeze. Maybe no-one else can tell you for the Drury Lane offal you are, but I can – oh, I can. So, out with it! What do you want? What are you after, you—’ But then he stopped, because Smith was not, in fact, sitting with his legs complacently crossed, and a sharp smirk of satisfaction on his face. His face was invisible behind his hands, and his fingers were digging into his temples, and he was making small sounds of despair.

  ‘What?’ demanded Septimus, still angry. ‘What?’

  ‘I thought I heard a shutter banging.’

  ‘A shutter. I have no shutters.’

  ‘I didn’t know that! I came in half-asleep. It was an accident. Believe me, I had no desire to walk in upon your – your—’

  ‘You know what it was.’

  Smith took away his hands. ‘Do I?’ he said. There was, for the first time, a note of defiance or even anger in his voice; but his eyes were wet, and gleaming in the moon-light.

  ‘You are confusing me,’ said Septimus. ‘You talked like a street-corner molly-boy in the coffee-house; and now you are all weeping innocence. Is this your method of work, to pretend to a shock, that a man may—’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Smith, ‘I am not trying to blackmail you. I am not trying to blackmail you! And as for innocence, I can name the act you were engaged in, in six tongues, including gutter Arabic and medical Latin, I thank you. I am quick with languages; voices too. I pick them up. They stick to me. Sometimes I use the wrong one, in haste. That was what I did in the Merchants – used the wrong tongue to you. And I am sorry for’t, as I am sorry now, for blundering in. It was a poor recompense for saving my life. I ask your pardon. There! And if I think the worse of you, it is not because you are a sodomite.’

  ‘You think the worse of me,’ said Septimus. He was puzzled, and cautious, now. He came around, and leant on the mantel, the other hand holding his robe together. ‘What, you think I am a low fellow, for consorting with a slave?’

  ‘I think you are a low fellow for taking your pleasure where there is no possibility of being refused.’

  Septimus stared. ‘Now that,’ he said slowly, ‘is a judgement I was not expecting.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Smith. ‘Is there not a little voice in here’ – he tapped his head – ‘that whispers it to you?’

  ‘Did it look like a rape, what you just saw? Did either seem reluctant? – I cannot believe I am justifying myself to you.’

  ‘I am sure you do not need force, to win obliging behaviour from one who is your property.’

  ‘Achilles is the Governor’s property, not mine. But, what is far more to the purpose, he is my friend.’

  ‘I am sure you tell him so.’

  ‘He tells it to me.’

  ‘Of course. Then, what is his name? His real name, I mean, for I do not think it is Achilles, any more than yours is Patroclus.’

  Septimus flushed, but it was another voice that answered.

  ‘Achilles is my real name,’ said the slave from the door-way between the rooms, where he was standing, wrapped in a sheet. ‘Once I had another one, yes, and he’ – nodding gravely toward Septimus – ‘has asked me for it again and again. But that life is over for me now. I must live where I am, or I will have no heart in my chest. If I called myself by the old name, even just inside, silently, behind the bones, I would be a ghost. And I do not want to be a ghost. I want to be alive. He understands that. You should not accuse him. He is a good man.’ Achilles’ voice was strongly accented with Africa. It was a country voice, steady, self-possessed; and Smith, hearing it, realised what the man’s thinness and shaved head had hidden, that he was the oldest of the three of them there, perhaps by twenty years.

  ‘My dear, there is no need—’ Septimus began.

  ‘Yes, there is, with this one,’ said Achilles. ‘Listen, boy,’ he said to Smith. ‘He did not make me do anything. He did not even ask me. I asked him. I put my hand on him. He was surprised.’

  ‘I was,’ said Septimus, quietly.

  Smith cleared his throat. ‘It was a free choice?’ he said.

  Achilles laughed.

  ‘Who is talking about choosing?’ he said. He came into the room, and sat on the other end of the sopha. The sluggish moon-light painted dull trails of pewter on him. ‘Your trouble is, you are afraid,’ he observed cheerfully to Smith. ‘You are waiting for the bad thing to happen. You are looking for a little safe place to hide in. But there are no safe places, and the bad thing happens all the time. Tonight they nearly killed you. You were lucky, that is all. Tomorrow, who knows. Every time you can be happy for one half an hour, it is enough.’ He fumbled a long dark arm out of the sheet, and proved to be holding the almost-empty bottle. He drained the dregs.

  Smith and Septimus looked at each other.

  ‘He will not let me plan,’ said Septimus. ‘Every time I try to fathom out a scheme for a future for us, he shuts me up. By shutting up himself. His silence is very persuasive. I would like to buy him out from the household and free him, if I could raise the money, but …’

  ‘Where would you go?’ said Smith.

  ‘London?’ A shrug.

  ‘Eccentric Mr Oakeshott and his butler?’

  ‘You have a madly exaggerated idea of my resources. It was the most the family could do, to place me in a position where I could rise with the Governor, and share in his lustre. But the Governor is not doing well, and there is no lustre to share. If I go home – especially if I quit his service and go home – I can look forward, at most, to a life as a schoolmaster, perhaps as a private tutor. Perhaps a scribbler. Do you remember you mentioned Lincoln’s Inn Fields? You must picture us sharing a garret there. – Even that would require me to scrape up a sum that seems entirely beyond me.’

  ‘How much— But of course, you cannot enquire,’ said Smith.

  ‘No, indeed. Not until I could be sure of meeting the price, whatever it proved to be, and to depart without lingering. But wait!’ said Septimus, clapping a hand to his forehead with a sarcastic flourish. ‘How foolish of me! Why, this very evening I have put Mysterious Master Money-Bags in debt to me for his life! He will surely be glad to lend me a modest twenty guineas!’

  ‘Alright,’ said Smith.

  ‘Al— What?’

  ‘When the bill is cleared at Christmas, I will lend the two of you Achilles’ price.’

  Septimus gazed at him, mouth slightly ajar.

  ‘You sound almost
as if you are in earnest.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ said Septimus slowly, ‘do you seriously mean to tell me – that the money is real?’

  Smith nodded.

  ‘I don’t suppose you would care to explain yourself,’ Septimus said.

  ‘I would if I could,’ said Smith, ‘but I cannot. It is not my confidence I am keeping. But for what it is worth, you have my word. And I will keep my mouth closed on your secret, too.’

  ‘Well,’ said Septimus. He was grinning. ‘Well! Let me see: if I trust you, and if it proves you are lying, I am a future fool, but if I trust you, and you are telling the truth, I am a past fool for having looked the gift horse in the mouth; and if I do not trust you, and you are not lying, I am a future fool again; only if I do not trust you, and you are lying, am I not a fool at all, but only a very disappointed man. Three ways to be a fool, and one sad way to avoid it. I think I must take the foolish step, and hope for the best. If that is agreeable to you, dear stoic,’ he said to Achilles.

  But Achilles was asleep.

  *

  ‘Are you sure this is safe?’ Smith asked in the morning, as they prepared to depart from the Fort in different directions, Achilles’ face restored to a mask, Septimus’ to a state of ceramic polish that made the night seem a dream.

  Achilles raised an eyebrow, but Septimus said, ‘Oh yes. Pope Day is in the nature of a purge, before the enforced proximity of the winter. Not only will you not be threatened: you will find no-one willing even to allude to last night.’

  ‘All the same, I think I will buy a sword of my own,’ said Smith. (On credit, he thought.)

  Septimus loped away across cobblestones rinsed by the morning rain, Achilles keeping pace a discreet step or two behind. At the corner, Septimus turned and, backing all the while, cried out, ‘Shall we see you later?’

  ‘Yes,’ called Smith, with a pleasant feeling of alliance, ‘and you can tell me what the story is, about Lovell’s crippled daughter.’

  Septimus’ receding visage crumpled with puzzlement. ‘What?’ Smith heard him say. ‘Neither of Lovell’s daughters is crippled …’ He shook his head and was gone.

  3

  His Majesty’s Birthday

  November 10th

  20 Geo. II

  1746

  I

  ‘I think I won’t ask you why you did that,’ said Smith to Tabitha.

  ‘Oh good,’ she said, striding cheerfully beside him across a damp pasture half a mile north of the city.

  Now she was no longer pretending to limp, her gait was a brisk, long-legged, functional matter, with no sway in it, and no particular grace either. It did not seem to occur to her that how she moved ordinarily might be an opportunity for artifice. Indeed, she struck Smith as being, in some ways, more oblivious to allure, and to how she might appear to another’s eye, than any other young woman he had ever met. All her consciousness, all her intent, was in her quick face. Nevertheless, she was in looks today. The wet November air had blown some colour into her cheeks to match the delicate ruddiness of her lips, which she was biting unselfconsciously as she darted upon Smith her sharp, smiling, studying glances. The loose strands of her brown hair were blowing about. Her teeth were very white. They were almost alone. Nothing was visible of New-York above the hedge-rows and half-bare trees but a couple of its steeples. The scene was not wholly pastoral to an English eye, however, for the labourers in the far corner of the field lifting potatoes were Africans, and along the rutted track that the Broad Way had become, rolled wagon upon wagon, far more than would conceivably be chance-met on a country road; and through drifting screens of drizzle there floated snatches of lamentation from the slaves’ burial ground, on the road’s farther side. Zephyra, pacing behind them, had turned aside to speak in low murmurs to a party carrying a child-sized bundle, wrapped in rags. Now she was stationed twenty feet away, in the shelter of the thorn hedge, with her fist propping her chin, and her averted face as unbetraying as ever.

  ‘Were you terribly angry?’ Tabitha asked.

  ‘No,’ said Smith, ‘for I never believed you for an instant.’

  ‘Liar!’ said Tabitha, grinning. ‘It was written all across your face, in characters an inch high, that you believed me. And pitied the poor cripple girl. The poor – lonely – imprisoned—’

  ‘If I were angry, I should never tell you,’ Smith said, ‘for I begin to know now how much pleasure it gives you to annoy people. So to tell you would be to oblige you; and you have not given me much reason to want to oblige.’

  ‘Yet here you are. In any case, I am sure you were not angry for long. I should think it was probably a relief to you, more than anything else.’

  This was perceptive. After the initial surprise and fury, Smith had felt in himself a kind of moral relaxation, at the removal from his path of the supposed innocent who might be injured by his scheme, and it was from gratitude at being so released that, a couple of days later, once his self-possession seemed returned, he had sent her a note asking ‘if Miss Lovell would join him for a Walk’ – thus assuring her that her trap had sprung. But now he only inclined his head non-committally. For it was also true that he found himself, generally, less inclined to do anything to oblige her. A savour of anger remained, like pepper, to flavour their relations. His guess was, that this might be the common experience of those who had the misfortune to like Tabitha Lovell. Flora and Mr Lovell seemed scorched, and wary.

  ‘I hear you had quite a time, on Pope Night,’ she said, seeing that her previous gambit would draw no more from him.

  ‘What do you hear?’

  ‘Why, that you and the Oakeshott boy broke into Mr Perkins’ party, with a mob at your heels, and scarified the servants, and broke out again – onto the roof? Can that be right? – and that Mr Perkins had an apology in the morning that was so cold and English and peculiar that it left him puzzled if he was being laughed at? All the guests told all their friends, and their friends told their friends, and so the story is broad-cast into every ear on the island. There are no secrets here. All is known as soon as done. Except,’ she said, turning to stare him smilingly in the face, ‘that it isn’t. What on earth were you doing?’

  ‘We-ell,’ said Smith, unwilling to forego the chance to recount an adventure to a pretty and eager hearer, yet tugged at more darkly by the memory of that night’s fears, ‘I ran into a little trouble at the bonfire. I had not understood what a serious, ah, saturnalia it was going to be, and I offended some gentlemen with my manner.’

  ‘Imagine that.’

  ‘It is a puzzle, isn’t it? But I did. And things grew a bit rough, and then I made a mistake and made them rougher by, you know, putting up my fists.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Pugilism, London-style!’ And, stopping to face him, she danced a few steps on the spot in the manner of a prize-fighter, which made her look about twelve years old, and sent a very gentle right hook gliding through the air to pause beneath his chin. This fist, unlike the butcher’s, was a slender hollow knot of tubes, like sections of bamboo, or the pieces of a flute. She had tucked her thumb inside: the infallible way to break it, if she actually hit anyone, Smith’s Limehouse advisor had told him. He could kiss the pale knuckles with the faint pink flush creasing each, if he lowered his head an inch.

  ‘London-style,’ he agreed, smiling at her instead, and she withdrew her arm. ‘But it did not answer. It inflamed them, and there were too many for my heroical efforts. But then—’

  ‘Were you frightened?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, surprised into candour. Her face was serious. ‘I thought I was done for.’ Speaking these words brought back to present memory the spike in the butcher’s hands, and he twitched at the cold ghosts of punctures. ‘I thought I would—’

  ‘You’d have talked your way out, I’m sure.’

  ‘No,’ he said, still addressing her serious eyes. ‘It had gone past talk.’

  ‘These things always grow in the tellin
g. A skirmish to a battle, a scratch to a severed head. What happened next?’

  Was she serious or only eager?

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Tell me the next part. – I am glad you are all right, of course.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said Smith, struggling to retrieve a light touch, like a man drawing a full bucket back up from a well, and finding the rope longer than it had seemed when it went rattling easily down. ‘Well – there I was, surrounded by ferocious New-Yorkers—’

  ‘—twenty men in buckram suits, yes—’

  ‘—yes, blood-boltered and savage, every one, with their teeth filed off to points—’

  ‘—for extra ferocity—’

  ‘You know,’ said Smith, ‘this is uncanny. It’s just as if you had been there. But who is telling this story, mistress, you or me?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes. You – you – you – you—’

  ‘Very well. So there I was, as I was saying, in a desperate condition, fending off half these assassins with my left hand and half with my right, throwing them by twos and threes over my shoulders, using such tricks of combat as would make your eyes water, all learned from subtle masters of the East; and yet making no headway against such a press of numbers, when out of nowhere appeared Mr Oakeshott, the Quixot of Secretaries, fortunately equipped with a hanger, and the enemy fell back. “Why, Mr Smith,” he said’ – he was giving Septimus, most unfairly, a voice of small-mouthed niminy-piminy exactness – ‘“I see you are labouring under some difficulties? Will you allow me to assist you?” “Why yes, you knight errant of the inkwell, you may!” I cried; and so—’

  ‘So you escaped,’ said Tabitha flatly, and deliberately yawned.