Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  Smith glanced at Zephyra. Evidently Tabitha did not categorise her as company, or as a source of conversation. It was true that he himself had not yet heard her speak.

  ‘You could come to the rehearsals,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  She still had not looked at him straight on. Her eyes kept up a flickering dance of avoidance, around and about his visage. He could almost feel it: a tickling, wary, dry, velvet-light attention, as if he were being visited by the scouts of a bee-swarm.

  ‘Tabitha, why are you so nervous?’

  That stopped her. The brown gaze locked to his. The bees stung.

  ‘Why do you think?’ she said, fiercely.

  This was a statement capable of several meanings. Mr Smith tried not to assume the one that was most flattering to a young man’s sensibility, but he did not altogether succeed. In fact he felt a little swelling of heat and satisfaction behind his breastbone. There is no need— he began to say, in his head, but stopped himself before the words reached his lips. Slow down, he told himself. Remember all the impossibilities. Remember what you must do. Remember what you are. Remember everything. Patience.

  He smiled at her instead. She scowled, and shook her head like somebody trying to clear a blockage from their ear.

  ‘Tell me where we’ve got to,’ he said.

  ‘Spouting Devil Creek,’ she said, pointing to the right, to where the cloudbank was breaking up along what seemed to be a side branch of the river. ‘The top end of Mannahatta.’

  The Hudson was narrowing, and through the cloud on both sides, glimpses of much higher bluffs were appearing, steep and wooded and dark, and tinted also with a mysterious dim red. The tide was carrying them up into a valley as deep as a canyon; the current within the tide was drawing them rapidly in toward the right-hand shore, until a wall of hillside was scudding by close enough to reduce the mist to mere streamers and tatters, and Smith could soon see, tilting above him, a continual blanketing thicket of bare trees in spidery grey filigree, all strung with tresses of dead creeper, the strange colour explaining itself as a kind of autumn tinge in the bark that (repeated a millionfold) made the whole wood glimmer faintly maroon. The rocks at the Hudson’s edge were drawing a little too close for comfort. Two more of the sailors joined the steersman to lean hard on the tiller. Smith and Tabitha moved out of the way, and fetched up together against the right-side rail. Creaking, groaning, the lugger’s prow came round, and they eased back more comfortably offshore, into the deeper channel; but Tabitha and Smith stayed, side by side, at the rail, looking out. The strange noiseless flight, the unexpected height and grandeur of the scene, the colour unknown in all his previous experience of country views, lulled Mr Smith into an awed, almost an enchanted state, and perhaps something of the same quieting effect operated on Tabitha, despite the familiarity of her home river, for her agitation seemed to be soothing away. She too seemed content to gaze at each new sight the thinning mist disclosed.

  ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to be out of the town,’ said Smith, after a time.

  ‘I thought you were a city animal, through and through,’ said Tabitha.

  ‘True, I am,’ said Smith. ‘But – not meaning any offence by it? – New-York scarce qualifies.’

  ‘And London does, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh yes. London is a world. – No, a world of worlds. Many spheres all mashed together, to baffle the astronomers. A fresh planet to discover, at every corner. Smelly and dirty and dangerous and prodigious. I wish I could show it you.’

  ‘You love it.’

  ‘Yes – or I love what it has been to me. New-York, compared, is small and tidy and amazingly much all the one thing, when you get used to it, and you see the same faces over and over.’

  ‘Yet here you are instead.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because you love running away, too. Even more,’ said Tabitha with satisfaction, like one who completes a theorem, and now has the whole knowledge of something tidily tabulated.

  ‘How do you know that?’ said Smith, startled.

  ‘It’s obvious.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Well, I hope it’s only obvious to you.’

  ‘My dear man,’ said Tabitha – a phrase which in her mouth sounded like part of the borrowed equipment of a little girl playing house, as much as it did an endearment – ‘there is a whole school of thought about you, that holds you to be a banker’s clerk, or a scrivener’s prentice, who has run off with a bill from the master’s desk.’

  ‘But I’m – I’m not—’

  Mr Smith had had so little practice, lately, in explaining himself, that now, when he wanted to, he stumbled.

  ‘It was in London I did my running away,’ he said, trying to collect himself. ‘If I was to run away here, I would go back.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Tabitha, who looked as if she did not want to.

  ‘This is my dutiful self you are seeing,’ said Mr Smith. ‘My attempt at duty, anyhow.’

  ‘Smith the hero,’ said Tabitha scornfully. ‘Smith the valiant.’

  ‘Must you always interpret me in the most unfriendly way?’ he cried. ‘I do my best to think the best of you!’

  Hearing their voices raised, Captain Prettyman was staring Smith’s way, with no friendly expression on his face. Tabitha raised a quelling palm in the Captain’s direction, and he subsided. Smith felt an abrupt and uncomfortable consciousness that he was with Lovell’s daughter, aboard Lovell’s ship, among Lovell’s men.

  ‘I mean it,’ Smith said. ‘Here I must wake every morning, and stay in the same place all day long, waiting. My feet itch to be moving, and I ignore them. I hate confinement; hate it.’

  ‘You would not be very happy as a girl, then,’ said Tabitha, ‘if you regard a few weeks of idleness and play-acting as an intolerable burden.’ But she put her hand on his shoulder, and kept it there. ‘Hush,’ she said. He could feel the moment of hovering and hesitation, as it arrived; and the way she pushed through it; and the way it seemed to call on resolution, in her, to do so. Which made it seem the more valuable, to him. Even through his coat and his shirt he could feel what he had noticed when she had caught at his hands, before – that Tabitha’s blood ran hot, a little hotter than the ordinary, as if she were all the time in a dry, hectic fever. He imagined what it might be, to feel the furnace burn of the whole red-pale-brown length of her against his skin. – Yet the touch on his shoulder was steadying. The heat of it, coming steadily through his clothes, smoothed him like a flat-iron. ‘Hush,’ she repeated.

  ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘I do not wish to give scandal.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘They say this part of the river is like the Rhine.’

  Indeed, they had passed the narrow point, and the river was broadening, and broadening still, to an immensity that astonished him, and all of it visible now, for the mists were fading or withdrawing, into distant cloud, hanging above far shores of grey and russet and brown forest, and lines of crags. The impetus of the tide was lost in the width of the water, and they drifted onward, only, across a surface as steady as metal, as well as having its colour, while the crew hoisted more sail, to catch the little cats’-paws of breeze that came wrinkling and dabbing the water, scuffing the water as they touched it, from silver into pewter. The reflection of cliff and forest came and went in bands, where the breeze blew or did not. They watched together. It was a sight to make all human scurrying seem miniscule, and still it was a grateful sight, in its contagious peace: a sight, it seemed, to lay the phantoms of mistakes not yet made. Slowly, the lugger got enough way on her to begin a long curve, aimed at a point as yet invisible on the right-hand shore, ahead.

  ‘Bigger than the Rhine,’ said Smith. ‘Bigger and grander.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Homer compared to a sonnet, I swear. A canto laid up against a couplet.’

  ‘You’ve seen the Rhine?’

  ‘Yes. – Yes!’ he insisted, when she squinted scepticall
y. ‘I have done the whole Tour. I have received the education of a gentleman. Why else do you think I needed to run away?’

  She clicked her tongue at him.

  ‘It’s not a temptation you feel, then?’ he asked. ‘You don’t ever want to rise up from your chair, and walk down the stairs, and put on your coat, and step out of the door onto Golden Hill, and just go?’

  ‘Where would I go to?’ she said.

  ‘Anywhere,’ he said. ‘You have a whole continent to choose from. Look at it. You could land anywhere on that shore, and just walk away, under the trees.’

  ‘Do you know what is under those trees?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing, Smith. More nothing than you can possibly imagine. You come from England: you think there will be villages, and roads, and inns to stay in, and there are not, hardly. Just hundreds of miles of bare branches, and dead leaves, and valleys without names. You would lie down and die in it, if you went in without knowing what you were doing – which you do not. You would freeze, or starve, or be scalped; all alone.’

  ‘I was not suggesting doing it alone.’

  ‘People are different,’ she said. ‘They differ even in their mad ideas, Smith.’ She took the hand off him, and he felt the patch of himself where the contact had been cooling, painfully, towards solitude. Tabitha hugged both her arms around herself, and lowered her chin into her scarf. ‘I find the idea of stepping off the edge of the world … terrifying,’ she said. ‘Going flailing down into empty space.’

  ‘It is worst the first time you do it,’ he said. ‘Then you find that you can find your way. You find that there is enough in you, to manage.’

  She only shook her head in the scarf.

  ‘Besides,’ he said daringly, ‘I think it might be good for you. What else is there here for you?’

  ‘The family. The business.’

  ‘Apart from that?’

  No reply.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you may be the kind of dog who bites because she is chained up.’

  He expected her to laugh, or to flash out at him, or to do both. She did look up, but with a melancholy kind of trouble in her eyes.

  ‘A lovely analogy: I thank you,’ she said. ‘But what if I am the kind of dog who bites because it pleases her?’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Smith.

  *

  Tarrytown was another wooden pier with a couple of muddy streets behind it, and beyond them a shelf of land a couple of miles wide, given over to fields, before the steep bluffs rose, at the valley’s rim. Sacks and crates were waiting, piled on the pier, and loading began at once. Tabitha had some call she must make, as the daughter of the house of Lovell, and he wandered a little way inland while she was busy, along a deserted lane. She was not quite right about there being nobody in the woods, he saw: up on the top of the ridge the faint smudge of smoke from a fire was rising into the grey sky.

  When he strolled back, he found her in urgent talk, at the pier’s end, with Prettyman and another man – an agent, or factor, perhaps, who was stuffing papers back into a case. She broke off, seeing him, and strode quickly over, bidding the men to stay behind with another of those quick hand-chops of command. Smith was so happy to see her face – found her face so important a luminary, in the dimming grey expanse of the day; so unlike the rest of the lumpish indifferent matter of creation – that he did not pause over the look of stricken resolution upon it. He merely added to his elation an impulse of comfort, and a buoyant surety that, with a little perseverance, he would be able to ease her anxiety, whatever it might be.

  ‘I think you should stay here,’ she said.

  ‘What? Why? – You’ve changed your tune,’ he said, half-laughing in a suspicion of an imminent joke.

  ‘There is an inn,’ she went on, still apparently in earnest. ‘You could stay a few days – try the lie of the land – breathe deep – give the city a rest. You said you wanted to.’

  ‘Just now? Tabitha, I was romancing,’ he said, grinning for two. ‘Not that I did not mean the invitation, most earnestly’ – in case he was accidentally banishing a future happiness – ‘but … but … it would not answer. I am, truly, bound by duty, till my business is done. Then I am yours for any escape; for anything.’

  ‘Shut up!’ she said. ‘I didn’t ask for that. – You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Very well, then: come along, we’re sailing.’ And she turned on her heel with a snap, and led the way back aboard the boat.

  Smith had imagined that there would be time again for serious speech between the two of them, on the return leg to New-York; but as well as a hold full of sacks and a deck laden with casks, the lugger had also taken on a moderate clutch of New-York-bound passengers, from Dutch farm-wives carrying baskets of eggs to several more would-be sailors for the Indies voyage, and a talkative attorney, up, he said, from Baltimore to view the northern colonies. Smith and Tabitha were parted by the casks and the crowd, and he spent the journey back into fog and darkness on the ebb tide, obliged to lob back the attorney’s conversational sallies; and thinking wonderingly, where he could betwixt the distractions, as young men are likely to do in these circumstances, how very ordinary and general and unremarkable a destiny it must be, how predictable a part of the universal portion of mankind it is, to love and to feel oneself beloved; and yet how astonishing it seems when it happens to you, yourself; what a stroke of glorious, undeserved, unprecedented, unsuspected luck it turns out to be, that you should be permitted, in your own person, to share in the general fate. It was not until the end of the voyage that she squeezed her way back to his side. They had entered the Manhattan cloudbank again, and were sounding their way in to the dock with halloos, amid a gloom still darker than before.

  ‘Smith—’ she began.

  ‘Richard,’ he said. ‘I think you could call me Richard.’

  ‘If you insist,’ she said. The curiously stricken look had gone, and she was animated again. More than animated; almost frantic, as if she was bursting with some news. ‘Richard, the Antelope docked last night—’

  ‘Who are these people?’ he interrupted, for Ellison’s Dock had swum up out of the murk, and the shadowy group standing at the end of it had the unmistakeable look of officialdom, of worldly powers about their duties.

  ‘The beadle and constables of the Out Ward,’ she said. ‘Antelope came in last night without any copy of your bill. You are a fraud; you are detected. If you had been abroad in Manhattan today, you might have heard the news and slipped away, but I have made sure you did not. We have got you, Mr Smith. You are caught. I have caught you!’

  On her face there was a writhing mixture of triumph and shame, horrible to see.

  4

  A LETTER

  to the Reverend Pompilius Smith

  New-York, 1st December 1746

  Sir:

  You have warned me so many Times, of the Dangers of the World, for such as Us, should We but stray one Step beyond the Bounds of our Safety, that You will not be surprised to discover (after so long a Silence) that my present Accommodation is a Gaol. Not, however, one of the common Bridewells of London, where You may expect Me to have tumbled, after the Misadventures You predicted, when I quit the Patronage of Lord ——, and declined to submit Myself tamely to the Connection He had devis’d for Me at Oxford, in the perpetual Role of Hanger-On to his Son. Instead an Ocean lies between: my Confinement is American. I find Myself lodged in the Debtors’ Prison of the City of New-York. Which is, to particularise less grandly, an Attic of the Town-Hall here. The Apparatus of the Courts, as of the Government, is all conducted upon the Floor beneath. At present I am detain’d upon the civil Suit of my Land-lady and some Merchants and Victuallers with Whom I had run up Bills; but a Date is set for my Trial upon a criminal Charge of Fraud, in the Courtroom below, and if all continues to go ill with Me, as Events seem presently determin’d to do, I shall within some Days pass irresistibly downward through the whole Building,
for the criminal Prison is in the Cellar. And though my Fate after that would comprise a brief Excursion to the Common, it would in a manner of speaking be downward still. Fraud, as I have been informed with vengeful Grinning on all Sides, is a Hanging Offence. So if found guilty, my Destination would be swiftly Subterranean.

  I confess, Father, that were it not for this Consideration, I should probably preserve the Silence between Us that has lasted since I declin’d Oxford, and the petted and protected Future that would have followed it, by departing His Lordship’s House in Grosvenor Square, through the Scullery Window. It gives me no Satisfaction to confirm the Judgement which You long ago made, of my Recklessness. Yet I would not desire to quit this dangerous World, without ensuring You receive some Account of your Son, and to tell Truth, there is some Comfort in addressing You thus, for I am Nineteen Parts in Twenty wretched, many Things upon which I had counted or hoped, having misfir’d, or proved flat contrary to my Hopes and Understandings of Them. And as my Pen scratches on, between the bare Walls of Lath and Board, and the Noise of the World’s Business floats up on ever colder Air, to the two unglaz’d Dormers with which my Apartment is provided, I discover in Myself too a meagre Satisfaction, in being able to talk to you at whatever Length I chuse, without You interrupting Me – without it being in your Power, to raise your Voice, or clap a Hand to your Temple, or to declare in your Pulpit Manner, the Strictures of God’s Word upon ungrateful Children. I am not in your Study now, but You in Mine. I may say what I like, while Paper and Ink hold out.

  For These I am indebted, to my remaining Friend in this Place, Mr Oakeshott. He is much puzzled, having but recently decided upon my Honesty, by this Sign that (perhaps) I am now after all not to be relied upon. He does not know, whether He was fooling Himself before, or whether He would be a Fool now, to continue even in so generous a State concerning Me, as Doubt. I exasperate Him: which as You see, is the Mode of my Relations with much of the World, and not just with You. But such is Mr Oakeshott’s Make, that He cannot forebear the Attentions of Charity, having once suffered Himself to feel a Connection. You would recognise and approve Him, Father, in some Things at least. He too is a Child of the Parsonage, inculcated with Principles of Benevolence and Magnanimity that work in Him most comically, whether He will or no, despite a sharp Tongue and a mordant Temper. He saved my Life three Weeks ago, in a Fit of Annoyance. I wish I could give Him better Recompense. – All these are Deductions made in His Absence, for He has not visited Me Himself, but sent his Man Achilles, with a Basket containing some Provisions, and the Means to write this Letter.