Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  Smith laughed, since he could picture this entirely.

  ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Who may I be? Portius? Marcus?’

  ‘You know the piece! Excellent. No, for you I had in mind Juba – the Numidian prince?’

  Smith hesitated, but Septimus, who was sawing at his own beef, did not remark it. I have not cultivated caution up until now, he thought. It is no part of the plan to be cautious, but rather the opposite, he reminded himself.

  ‘Very well,’ he said out loud. ‘But I am surprised at the choice of the play.’

  ‘Why?’ said Septimus. ‘It is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, here, as a matter of fact. No other piece comes close, for it tickles all the themes that New-York loves best. Liberty and virtue, virtue and liberty. Sometimes I think that if I could train a parrot to say those two words, we might run it for the Assembly, and get His Excellency one reliable vote at least, that way.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said the middle-aged man on Smith’s next right, roused by the naming of the Assembly. ‘Liberty an empty cry? No surprise, coming from you. Don’t listen to this popinjay. Precious trust. Sacred trust. Finest flower of the Constitution. Greatest glory of ’n Englishman. Smith!’ he said, sticking out a paw. His brow was a solid black bar, surprising beneath his wig.

  ‘Yes?’ said Smith, puzzled, taking the hand.

  ‘No – Smith!’ said the man, irritably pulling free and stabbing at his chest with a finger. ‘You?’

  Septimus sighed elaborately. ‘William Smith, meet Richard Smith,’ he said. ‘Richard Smith, meet Master William Smith, lawyer and historian – himself an ornament to our Senate of Lilliput.’

  ‘Lilliput, is it?’ said the Assemblyman. ‘If you patronised us less, you superior little court-worm, you might get more co-operation.’

  ‘I might patronise you less if we got any co-operation at all,’ snapped Septimus. ‘You might pay the Governor’s salary, for instance. Or mine.’

  ‘It is our ancient right to vote all spending,’ said the other Smith.

  ‘Ancient, is it?’ put in the cadaverous Scot beside the Governor. ‘Funny, then, that we never-rr heard of sich a thing, till last year-rr.’

  ‘Purse-strings to the people, or kings grow insolent. Ancient, yes. Old as the Saxon moot.’

  ‘Och, the Saxon moot,’ said the Scot deprecatingly, making of the word a derisive little hoot. ‘A wee bit misty a source for a legal doctrine, d’ye not think? When in braw black and white, it’s clear-rr that for the hale sixty year-rrs of its existence, the Assembly of the Province of New Yo-rr-k has rr-ecognised its duty to finance the basic, I say basic, fabric of gov-err-nment!’

  ‘The power is there. Acted on or not acted on: still a power. I’ve read the records, Colden; know ’em as well as you; probably better. Surprised you’d want to shine a light in there. Never mind rights ’n duties. Dirty hands! Dirt in the land grants, dirt in the customs. D’you want it dug out? Do you? Do you?’

  The Governor (who was staring appalled at this outbreak of brushfire) tinkled frantically with his spoon on his wine-glass. The table stilled; first at his end, then in a spreading imperfect wave, till almost all heads the table long were turned his way in expectation, and the slurp could distinctly be heard of a fat gentleman at the far end securing his last mouthful of gravy. The Governor rose to his feet, glass in hand.

  ‘Gentlemen!’ he said, ‘– and ladies, of course. My Lord Mayor. Learned gentlemen of the Bar. Honourable members of the Council and the Assembly. Our gallant defenders from the garrison. My fellow citizens of this fair city, and my fellow subjects together of the Sovereign on whose birthday we are glad to, ah, meet. It is my duty, yes, my very pleasant duty, to recall to our minds the blessings of the past year, and our many gracious deliverances from dangers domestic and foreign, and to propose that we give thanks, with loyal heart and voice, yes, with heart and voice together, for these our many blessings, and solemnise them indeed, as is only fit, on this special day of the year, by together raising our glasses, and saying: the King!’

  ‘The King!’ echoed the table, in one ringing near-shout. Smith, who was not used to these festivities being executed with such fervour, had his wine upraised, but his mouth open in surprise rather than loyalty, and added no sound to the toast.

  De Lancey rose smiling opposite the Governor, his own glass ready.

  ‘Here’s a health unto His Majesty,’ he said, ‘in whose person we see secured the majesty of our laws, the assurance of our rights, be we ne’er so high or so low, and the freedom of our Protestant religion. The King! Queen Caroline! And Prince Frederick!’

  ‘The King, Queen Caroline, and Prince Frederick!’ cried the company.

  ‘Indeed, yes indeed,’ said the Governor, once the wave had crashed past and subsided into foam. ‘How right it is, that having, ah, drunk to the person of His Majesty, we should conclude, yes, as we always do, by drinking to what he represents. Ladies, gentlemen: civil and religious liberty!’

  ‘Civil and religious liberty!’ intoned the table, solemn now, and with somewhat of the air of a congregation making a response in church; as in church, too, subsiding after this moment of high seriousness into a slightly uncertain contra-moment of awkward muttering, as if they scrupled to put against such a sentiment anything of too-great ordinariness, yet hoped, at the same time, to scramble down off the pinnacle as quick as may be. Smith, seeing the Governor still standing, wondered if he would launch the company into the new anthem that had concluded almost every play in Drury Lane, this past year and more. But it seemed that the fashion for ‘God Save Great George Our King’, to the music by Mr Arne, had not yet crossed the sea, for the Governor had a different purpose.

  ‘Now we have a treat in store,’ he said, clasping and unclasping his hands. ‘St James’s Palace is far away, and yet we are privileged this evening to hear one of the famous Birthday Odes with which His Majesty himself is, ahaha, regaled on this day. Performed for us by our very own Mrs Tomlinson!’

  Septimus’ wide eyes and startled brows declared transparently that this was not an element of the entertainment upon which he had been consulted. The porcelain of his forehead humped itself, indeed, into a pained white wave that stayed there, motionless, baked-in, glazed, as on ripples of applause and even catcalls, there walked past the table toward the orchestra the woman with the remarkable blue eyes whom Smith had seen in church, dressed in grey tights and a kind of tabard, wearing a cardboard helmet and carrying a trident not much larger than a toasting-fork. Her eyes were the rich colour of lapis lazuli, or of the warm sea of the tropics in that state where the turquoise of the shallows is just darkening to the purple of the deeps, and she had heightened it by painting the lids and the skin around with a blue kohl, giving the effect on wrinkling skin (she was not young) of a jewelled rope coiled around the greater jewels. But few of the men, at least, at table were confining their attention to the brilliance of her gaze, her Grecian nose, her red-gold hair, et cetera; for Mrs Tomlinson was one of those women blessed, or cursed, by the combination of prettiness of feature with voluptuousness of body. She was not fat, it must be clearly stated; she still possessed by some standards an excellence of figure; but she curved to the point of grossness, or perhaps just over it, in every respect in which a woman can curve, from calves upward. Her bosom strained the material of the tabard, and her thighs rolled in round magnificence as she paraded unhurriedly by. Except for those, like Septimus, disqualified by nature from the admiration of this species of abundance, the men the length of the room watched her hungrily, and their womenfolk, with a more narrowed gaze, watched them watching. Once, Mrs Tomlinson might have had a fresh, or ingenuous, charm. Now – said the judgement of the women’s gaze, at least, upon her six-and-forty years – she trembled, like a plum already fermenting, about to burst in a mess of juices.

  Arrived among the musicians, she spoke briefly to the cellist, who commenced a series of deep scrawling figures; and with this as audible backdrop, and the dark faces and shi
ning wigs of the band as a visual one, she turned into profile, and struck a pose, one leg extended behind her, the trident (or toasting-fork) extended in line with it in front.

  ‘Of fields!’ she declaimed ringingly.

  Of forts! and floods! unknown to fame!

  That now demand from Caesar’s arms a name,

  Sing, Britons! tho’ uncouth the sound …

  It was possibly the worst of Mr Colley Cibber’s notoriously awful odes, the one, three years old, hymning King George’s personal valour on a German battlefield. Yes, here came the rhymes of ‘Seligenstadt’ with ‘defeat’, and ‘Dettingen’ with ‘joyful strain’. Here came the martial blasts from the Poet Laureate’s personal wind machine. Septimus was all wince. ‘Oh God,’ he murmured, through unmoving lips and closed teeth. ‘Oh God. Oh God.’ James De Lancey was feeling the need to clear his throat, rumblingly, every few seconds. The stares of the Assemblymen seemed fixed, if not on the spectacle in general, then in particular on the way the pose bunched and elevated, beneath the rising hem of the tabard, the muscles of Mrs Tomlinson’s magnificent arse.

  But Smith shut his eyes to hear better. He could hear the layers in Euterpe Tomlinson’s voice. He could pick out the last traces of the Essex or perhaps Suffolk she had come to London speaking once, long ago, when, he’d bet, she’d been a Peggy or a Liza, determined to make her looks yield her a future. He could hear the careful lessons someone had given in breath and voice production, in instant grandeur and synthetic elegance, and how they had been taken to heart, and held close as recipes for destiny; and he could tease free, with his eyes closed and the absurdities blocked out, the gallant consciousness that that wished-for destiny was passing, or had passed, and stranded her here, on tour for ever. The poetry was awful. But she was doing it rather well. She was hitting the consonants finely, dealing neatly with the persistent hiss of Cibber’s s-fixation, and opening the verse out wide – all you could do with it, really – into a kind of warm, generous vacuity. She was, in short, a professional, and listening to her Mr Smith felt, for the first time in New-York City, a curdling homesickness.

  Ye Britons! blessed in such a race,

  Alike secure in arms or peace,

  What can your happiness annoy,

  Unless yourselves yourselves destroy?

  She managed to give the last words a sober thoughtfulness that conjured, for just an instant, the illusion that the Poet Laureate had actually been thinking when he wrote the line. There was a hush, rather than applause. Smith opened his eyes, to find that she had turned out of profile to fix her audience with a dark-blue gaze of warning, preposterous but oddly authoritative and compelling: the sternness of Pallas Athene, plus tremendous cleavage. She dropped her head, dowsing the blue lanterns. Then there was clapping: not tremendous, except at the mid-point of the table where one of the red-coated officers was whamming his hands together, suffused with pride and delight, and his fellow lobsters were pounding him on the back, as if Major Tomlinson were the one to be congratulated. But it was respectable applause, none the less, some of it even contributed by women. A creditable harvest, considering the unfruitful ground, thought Smith. He added some of his own.

  Septimus looked at him as if he were mad. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Another one La Tomlinson has taken by the cods? Say it isn’t so.’

  ‘Septimus,’ Smith said, ‘why do you insist on making yourself obnoxious?’

  ‘You are a fine one to talk on that score.’

  ‘But you have a place to stand, here. I don’t see—’

  ‘Do you not?’ said Septimus, signalling with his eyebrows, for William Smith was listening interestedly.

  ‘Alright. But there is, I assure you, a difference between us; though I may not be able to put my finger on it at this moment. You know,’ Smith continued impulsively, ‘you could do worse than to have her in your play.’

  ‘What!’ cried Septimus. ‘You said you’d read the piece! There are but the two women’s parts in it, Cato’s daughter and Lucius’ daughter; two chaste, innocent, virtuous, high-born maidens, of tender years and of good family. Spring flowers in their earliest bloom. Tell me, Smith, tell me: what is it in that description that reminds you of Terpie Tomlinson?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Smith. ‘She would speak the verse well.’

  ‘She has no taste!’ hissed Septimus, leaning forward. ‘She is a – a lustful joke, to the people here. Just look at her, Richard. She is the epitome of every low jest you ever heard about actresses. Don’t you think?’ he added, almost imploringly.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Smith again. ‘You are the director. You have taste. You tell her what you want, and she’ll do it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure she is very … pliant—’

  ‘Not what I mean. I mean she is trained, and she will take direction. If you can convey to her mind what you wish your Marcia or your Lucia to sound like, she can create it for you. Did you not hear that, in her voice? There is proper expertise there. Come on, Septimus: she made people clap for Colley Cibber …’

  ‘You’re serious.’

  ‘Of course I am. I don’t know who you have in mind for the other parts, but I am guessing that talent may be a bit thin on the ground – here in Lilliput – and she is a real actress. You can’t afford to neglect an obvious asset.’

  Septimus opened his mouth, reconsidered, and said instead: ‘What about the way she looks?’

  ‘Drapery. Wrap her up in something big and white and flowing that makes her look like a statue, and come up with a staging where she mostly stands still, so people notice face and voice.’

  ‘Drape her, eh?’ said William Smith, who proved to have been listening. ‘Oakeshott’s budget may not be big enough. You’d need a lot of cloth, to get round Terpie. Interesting, though; interesting. ’S that your professional judgement, Mr Smith?’

  ‘My … informed judgement,’ Smith said, suddenly careful.

  ‘Alright, I’ll think about it,’ said Septimus. ‘Since you urge it. But I am surprised you would be happy to push one of the Lovells out of her part, I must say.’

  Distracted by the lure of the familiar, invigorated (almost intoxicated) by the beef in his empty belly, awakened again only the moment before to a different anxiety, Smith had not in fact considered the matter from this point of view at all. Suddenly a likely and unwelcome consequence struck him.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘I—’

  A large, smooth hand took a proprietorial grip on his shoulder.

  ‘Mr Smith,’ said James De Lancey, standing beside him, ‘We are making up a party at cards. Won’t you join us.’ There was no question-mark in his sentence.

  All along the table the party was granulating into separate groups. Some of the younger guests were, once more, dancing, while others were making their way, farewell by farewell, towards the stairhead and the door; a sediment of older and for the most part public men, on the Assembly side of the question, were precipitating themselves out of the banquet’s temporary solution of irreconcilables, and pulling small tables out from beneath the unifying table-cloth, to create little islands where they might sit, and smoke, and politick. Towards one of these De Lancey led Smith, followed by Smith-the-lawyer. The Governor’s party seemed to be preparing to quit the field, while Septimus had darted off somewhere in the direction of the orchestra – only, Smith hoped, to make some arrangement concerning the music.

  He had expected to be introduced, when De Lancey descended on a parcel of grandees in silk and gilt at the nearest table – all drawing on long clay pipes, for a rustic note, rather than taking snuff in the London manner – but instead the Chief Justice made a circular, scattering motion in the air, giving one of his vulpine smiles, and the sitting tenants all obligingly rose and departed, with nods and significant looks, leaving him in vacant possession. It was apparently a tête-à-tête De Lancey had in mind, to what purpose Smith did not know: just himself, Smith, and the lawyer, who it was clear now must be that evening’s deput
ed crony, set to keep De Lancey’s eye and ear upon him at the dinner.

  ‘Well, now,’ said De Lancey, settling himself opposite Smith, and folding hand upon hand on the tabletop to make a white hill of knuckles. ‘What will you take, sir? A pipe, a glass of madeira, a little brandy? No? You must take your ease, you know, for the business part of the evening lies behind, and ahead is all pleasure-garden.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t have that the wrong way around, sir?’ said Smith.

  De Lancey laughed, a resonant chuckle that affected his eyes not one whit.

  ‘Fetch us some cognac and three glasses,’ he said over Smith’s shoulder to Quentin, who proved to have been floating there, silent and ready. ‘I mean to unburden myself, at any rate, young man. You see?’ he said, unbuttoning his collar. ‘Entirely off duty.’ He lifted his wig from his head and hung it on the back of the empty chair beside him. His scalp proved to be shingled in fine silver hairs. The sight of his naked head was no more reassuring than the sight of a tiger settling in comfort in its lair.

  ‘I have been wanting to talk to you,’ he said. ‘The whole city is debating the mystery of your intentions.’

  ‘I protest, sir,’ said Smith, trying for the same light dominance of tone. ‘There is nothing mysterious about privacy; and simple privacy—’

  De Lancey was holding up a finger.

  ‘Spare me,’ he said. ‘You have given many proofs already, from what I hear, that you mean to say nothing to the purpose, so let us omit the nonsense.’

  ‘’S friendly with Oakeshott,’ offered the lawyer.

  ‘So I observed,’ said De Lancey, tilting his gaze. ‘But is that policy, or taste? The sign of a side being chosen, or mere happenstance? I doubt you will enlighten us, Mr Smith. Will you?’