Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  But now I am: oh, now I am. I hate this City. I hate these People. I should never have

  (Here the letter breaks off unfinished.)

  5

  Sinterklaasavond (St Nicholas’ Eve)

  December 5th

  20 Geo. II

  1746

  I

  ‘So they just let you out?’

  ‘They didn’t have much choice,’ said Smith indistinctly, with his mouth full of bread. Hendrick and Septimus had been breakfasting at the Merchants when he came in, wild-looking and unshaven and (to tell truth) not savoury of smell. But neither were uncivil enough to mention his state of disarray, being besides desperately curious and surprised at his reappearance. ‘It seems,’ he went on, swallowing, ‘that Sansom’s Venture came in this morning at first light with the other two copies of my bill in the mailsack together – there’d been some error in London, and the one meant for Antelope had missed the tide – and presto! on the instant I was converted from a fraud and a public enemy into a wronged man. Lovell came running to City Hall with the papers in his hand, and a gaggle of my creditors strung out behind him like the tail of a comet, and gave me, oh, you should have heard it, the angriest apology in the world, every word pushed from his lips with pain.’

  ‘You’re speaking very loud,’ put in Septimus, with a warning look, for Mr Smith was announcing his story as if speaking to the whole room; and indeed, most of the room was listening to him, with greater and lesser efforts at dissembling it, while he stuffed himself from the basket of rolls, and waved for more with scarecrow urgency.

  Smith smiled breadily and nodded, and dropped his voice, but it was clear that he was not much concerned; that he was content to let New-York know, starting with the roomful of gentlemen before him, that the roles were reversed, and that Lovell’s credit now lay in his hands, if he chose to complain of his treatment. ‘Well, then,’ he continued, ‘the keeper unlocked me, and all the others at whose suit I’d been held thronged around too, telling me how sorry they were, and pressed back on me all that had been sponged, against my debts. My supposed debts,’ he reminded the room. ‘My sword, my purse of money, my welcome in this fine establishment. Mrs Lee wanted me to know that she would change the sheets on her garret bed, in honour of me, and that there was beef-pie for supper tonight. At which, I confess, my mouth began to water, and I departed City Hall upon a velvet cushion of protestations, and so came here.’

  ‘Well, you are welcome back,’ said Hendrick, awkwardly.

  ‘Am I?’ said Smith. ‘That is good to know. For I am back, and I mean to stay back, and it is about time that your family repented of its cat-and-mouse games, and we fell to business, I think.’

  ‘I see that Mr Lovell is not the only angry one,’ said Septimus.

  ‘Me? Never in life!’ said Smith, giving them his familiar beam of amiability: only now with a ragged carelessness, a desultory approximation, like a man who briefly raises a mask on a stick to his face but cannot be bothered to line up the eye holes. Septimus and Hendrick glanced at each other involuntarily, to share the dismay that each for different reasons was feeling.

  ‘For my part, I am sure you have been ill-used, and I am heartily sorry for it,’ said Hendrick carefully. ‘But I ask you to remember that we worked, as we must, by the appearances of the thing; and that it was a chain of accident that set you in gaol, and not any … malignancy on our part. No-one in the family bears you ill-will.’

  ‘No-one?’

  ‘Not my father,’ said Hendrick, swallowing, ‘nor Gregory Lovell, nor me, nor any of us concerned in the business you have with us. I see that Tabitha has bitten you hard enough to draw blood, and the bite is presently festering, and again I am sorry for’t; but a bite from her is not policy from the houses of Lovell and Van Loon; it is in the nature of a curse, that lies in the first place on us, but which it seems we cannot help sharing. We did speak of this? But you seemed then to be enjoying the poison.’

  ‘Also,’ put in Septimus, ‘you did seem too to be enjoying the doubt you put them in, that you were here to rook them. Come on, Richard. You played at being a fraud, unmercifully. You flirted with it. It is not so strange if people believed you.’

  ‘Et tu, Brute?’ said Smith. He closed his eyes and scrubbed with his fingertips at the sockets, which Septimus and Hendrick, following the motion, saw were stained yellow with lack of sleep. The freckled skin over his nose was waxy and transparent. ‘True,’ he said, with his eyes still covered. ‘I think my stoicism has taken a dint, gentlemen. Excuse me.’

  ‘Then, will you not give us one more chance?’ said Hendrick, pressing his advantage. ‘Let us make amends. There is a Dutch festivity tonight, at the house, and I think you should come along.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ said Smith. ‘It is only an hour or two since, that you were all content to see me hanged: and now I am to be your guest?’

  ‘You should think of this as a restoration of the way things should have been, all along.’

  ‘I am not an actor in a farce, that I may spring back in through one door, the instant I have exited through another.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Hendrick. ‘This will be a feast day. We shall bombard you with marchpane and St Nicholas-rhymes, and sweeten you into forgiving us.’

  ‘You will all sit in a row and scowl at me, seriatim.’

  ‘We will not. I undertake it. There will be no scowling, no recriminating; no-one there who is not on their feast-day manners.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously. I swear to it: no unpleasantness, even if we have to gag Tabitha, and lock her in the cellar. Come, what do you say?’

  Smith covered his mouth with his hand and gazed at the tabletop, pitted with saw-marks from knives, and names gouged in the wood by idle hands. The moment lengthened. It was not clear if he was thinking, or refusing, or simply drifting off into reverie.

  ‘Mr Smith?’ said Hendrick. No answer.

  ‘Richard?’ said Septimus.

  No answer.

  ‘It will not be you that Uncle Lovell is most angry at,’ Hendrick said, cunningly.

  Smith transferred the hand from his mouth to the tallowy division-line at the centre of his forehead, and clawed at it. His gaze lifted.

  ‘When I came in the door,’ he said wearily, ‘I had the most straightforward resolution in the world, never to take anything from the pack of you again, except your money. But it seems I cannot abide by it. Oh very well, then; very well.’

  ‘Excellent!’ said Hendrick. He had plainly learned that cardinal rule of selling, that you should never linger after the bargain is struck, for he rose at once to his feet. ‘I shall come and fetch you from Mrs Lee’s at six this evening, after you have had a chance to sleep and bathe. And now I had better go to work. Quentin! Fetch Mr Smith a plate of chops, on my bill, will you?’ He left, grimacing a smile.

  ‘He is a good son,’ said Smith to Septimus. The coffee-house was emptying around them, at the call of the desk and the counting-house.

  ‘He tries to be, in what he can, to make up for the ways in which he is doomed to disappoint his father.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Smith. He yawned. ‘Tell me, am I grievously offensive to the nose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I had better go and wash off the stink, then, and get some clean clothes.’

  ‘Eat your fill first.’ Septimus hesitated. ‘Was it … very bad? I understood that the debtors’ portion of the prison, if not the dungeon below, was quite clean.’

  ‘It was fine. Lovely straw, pleasant views, informative company.’

  ‘Well, I am sure I have no desire to pry.’

  Smith groaned. ‘Sorry!’ he said. ‘The basket was a God-send, and I was more grateful for it than I can rightly say. I hope you have not been too embarrassed on my account. Achilles said you had been.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ said Septimus. ‘For having participated in your downfall, I now participate in your resurrection, and may wipe the smirk off several
faces. Look, here come your chops.’

  ‘I am almost dribbling at the sight of them. – You remember the warning you gave me, at first? About the – the – nature of the city? I … had it confirmed. In sickening abundance.’

  ‘I thought something must have happened.’

  ‘Bastards, all of them,’ said Smith, speaking in a fierce undertone to his plate. ‘I will punch the next one who mentions liberty.’

  ‘You know, London has gaols,’ said Septimus gently. ‘Newgate is a darker pit and a deeper by far, than the little cellar here. More die at Tyburn tree every season, than have hanged here in all the years of the city.’

  ‘And been scalped? Or burned? Or … broken?’

  ‘Oh. You have heard that story.’

  ‘At least at home, they do not pretend to clean hands and righteous hearts.’

  ‘I know I have been away a while,’ said Septimus, ‘but I am almost positive I remember there being liars in London; and hypocrites too, more than one; and girls who proved a disappointment to boys who loved them.’

  ‘It is not that! At least— It is not all that.’

  ‘I make sure of it,’ Septimus said. ‘Not that I am any expert.’ He made a ball of bread and pushed it in a circle before him with his forefinger, like the titan Atlas manipulating with ease a very small planet. ‘You know, if I find anything to praise here, when they go to such lengths to make my life miserable, you may perhaps believe it? I had a visitor, a year after landing; a grand connection of my father’s bishop, come to survey an inheritance he had come into, down in the Virginias. And it puzzled me, why I found I so disliked his manner of speaking to me, more than any here, more than any number of Van Loons or Van Rensselaers, or William Smith in his cups, or Judge De Lancey at his most self-satisfied: till it came to me, that he addressed me, as a matter of course, as a Secretary, with all my nature that it was needful to know comprised in that title. And I realised I had grown insensibly used to being treated, even by my enemies, as a man, with my nature all to be proved by what I did and said. He used no more toward me than the ordinary condescension of the great, and yet I found I resented it. I found I had gained the liberty to resent it. And that is a real liberty, Richard.’

  ‘Unless your skin is African.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘They would bludgeon your true love to jelly for speaking the wrong word.’

  ‘They would bludgeon him in London for sixpence in his pocket, or for stepping up the wrong alley. Look, dear man, I must go to work too. Sleep soon, won’t you? You are missing several of the usual layers of your skin, and I do not think you are quite safe for company yet.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Mr Smith. ‘Thank you, Septimus. Oh – how is the play?’

  ‘Suddenly improved now that you, and not I, are playing Juba again. We have only four more rehearsals, so restore yourself, do. Eat, bathe, sleep.’

  *

  As Mr Smith walked slowly towards the William Street bath-house, his stomach loaded to the point of a moderate nausea, his own thoughts taking the greatest share of his attention, he at first confused the quietness of the streets with his quietening mind. But it was not so. New-York was quiet because it was, suddenly, far emptier. A good half of the businesses had their shutters up, and where there had been busy mobs converging on the waterfront, his footsteps now rang out almost solitary on the cobblestones. While he had been imprisoned, the city had passed its great autumn climacteric. The sugar fleet had departed, and with it the whole frantic mood of the last weeks. The sailors, the country merchants and farmers seeing their stocks safe aboard, the buzzing projectors with their plans for instant profit, all had made their farewells; and the citizens who remained were locking down and bolting up for the winter. The city was shrinking in on itself, as Septimus had predicted. It was stoking up its stoves and sitting closer to ’em; it was drawing up its furs around itself. And not a moment too soon. The bare sky at the eastern street-ends, where the masts had thronged, had in it today a bitter green pallor, the unmistakeable colour of impending cold. On the shadowed sides of the streets the frost of the night was not melting, even at noon; and in the maze of little alleys up toward the Broad Way, where the low sun did not shine directly at all, ice already held the whole dim territory. The air there was as still and as chill as it had been in the ice-house upon Lord ——’s estate, when Mr Smith was dispatched into it one day to fetch a block for freezing a pudding, and found a buried winter reigning there underground, dark and silent, patient and permanent, lending iron rigour to each breath.

  And when he awoke in the dark that evening between Mrs Lee’s clean sheets, blinking and confused for a moment, he found that outside the cold panes of the dormer, the first snow was falling. Tiny flakes like feathered dust were floating out of the unlit night above into the unlit night below. He opened the casement and leaned out. On the skin he had steamed and scrubbed, pinpoints of cold prickled, as if winter were beginning without delay to tattoo its map upon him. All along the dark avenue, to left and to right, the powdery fall was already furring the cobbles with a thin grey nap like velvet, and rimming them white along all the crooked lines between. Everything seem slowed to the speed of the descending snow. A holy expectation reigned in the thickening air, and passers-by walked as if they did not want to disturb it. Only a small party, coming from the mouth of Crown Street opposite, made any noise. They were singing something, and carrying a small lantern on a pole which lit the flakes to swarming gold in a small globe around itself, and touched the edges of their faces – the line of a hat, the scroll of an ear, the filaments of a beard – with shadowy gilding, like statues in an ancient shrine. They crossed the road. Smith, lulled and fascinated, shivered in his shirt and watched them come closer; closer and closer, till they were arranged in a semicircle directly below him on Mrs Lee’s own doorstep, and were knocking at her door. A moment later her voice could be heard calling up the stairs for him.

  He came down slowly, and took his time wrapping himself in scarf and gloves and cocked hat, for he was in no hurry for the magic theatre he had glimpsed from above to dwindle into a parcel of Van Loons. But when he opened the door, and found himself indeed confronted in the flurrying glow of gold by Hendrick, Joris, Piet with little Lisje tucked beneath his arm, a face or two he didn’t know, and, nodding at the end, Jem the clerk at Lovell’s, all with expressions of effortful goodwill, they seemed to remain transformed by the advent of the snow; to be still their own grasping, dangerous, anxious selves standing there, that is, but brought by the weaving flicker of the flakes into a new, patient, unearthly solemnity. What Mr Smith’s face showed, or didn’t, emboldened Hendrick, who beat his finger in the air for time and said, ‘One, two.’

  Sinterklaas, goedheiligman!

  Trek uwe beste tabbard an,

  Reis daar mee naar Amsterdam,

  Van Amsterdam naar Spanje,

  Daar Appelen van Oranje,

  Daar Appelen van granaten,

  Die rollen door de straten.

  As soon as they had finished the lyric in Dutch, they went on without a pause and sang it in English, a little more heartily this time as the younger ones ceased to stumble.

  Saint Nicholas, good holy man,

  Put on thy tabard, best thou can,

  Ride clad in it to Amsterdam,

  From Amsterdam to Spanish lands,

  With oranges then fill thy hands

  And pomegranates bring to me

  That roll the streets at liberty.

  Lisje’s nose was as pink as a sugar pig’s, and she was blinking when the snow blew into her eyes. Despite the mention of liberty, Mr Smith did not punch anyone. He clapped his hands; or perhaps his hands clapped themselves, commanded by the strangeness of the night, and by his instinct to rally any uncertain performance.

  ‘Is there an answer I must give?’ he asked Hendrick. He meant to sound sardonic and self-possessed. Instead his voice came out almost reverential.

  ‘No, no, just come with us
, and help us sing it again at another door or two.’

  So Smith went along, in the moving sphere of gold, helping to smudge the grey velvet underfoot with a trail the sky commenced to fill as soon as their feet had moved on, crumb by crumb, feather by feather, and lent his tenor when the next door opened, and the next, and first a couple and then a whole Dutch family, ready-dressed for the night, stepped out to join them. There was no small-talk, only the muffled tread of feet and the hiss as snow fell on the hot tin of the lantern. New-York was not so big that Mr Smith could by any means lose himself, but the streets seemed altered in the fine, silent swirling, and he did not attend to the exact path of the Nicholas-night pilgrimage. They might even have passed City Hall. The Van Loons’ house, where he had never been, took him by surprise: a tall old fortress of the Amsterdammer type, with stepped gables, but tonight illuminated at every window by candles stuck in oranges, and wreathed around the sills and sashes with green branches of pine. It seemed a castle of lights, a magnet to draw their own lantern home through the snow. The children gazed up at it, bespelled.