Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  IV

  Smith took to his bed. The domestics of the Black Horse kept their distance; there were no knocks upon the door, no offers of a doctor or solicitations to shave him or feed him. The side of the bed seemed the height of an Alp. He levered himself up on his left arm and fell forward upon the covers, shaking and shivering. The project of getting his coat or his shirt off over the burned hand defeated him, and he only kicked his shoes free before rolling himself as best he could in the blankets, in a kind of sausage with the hurt arm sticking out beside his head. Drawing the bed’s curtains was beyond him, so the winter dark and the patter of snow flowed in unimpeded from the icy window-glass of the room, and the pale winter day leaked in in the same way, and the dark again, while he lay helpless. He plummeted into sleep as into a deep abyss, and the mattress seemed to lurch under him as unsteadily as the deck of a ship, and sometimes the tube of blankets was as hot as a furnace, and sometimes he was so cold that his teeth ached and chattered. Abyss, ship, furnace, ice-house. Ice-house, furnace, ship, abyss. There was no comfortable way to stow the thumb upon the pillow, or beneath, or beside it, and as he rolled, it would be rubbed or caught, and send slivers of pain spiking into the hot or cold turmoil of his dreams: for fever had him, and made him work, and all his rest was netted with branching pathways along which he must labour, effortfully trying to count spilling masses of powdery things, or remember momentous catalogues whose heads obliviously ate their tails, or to persuade animals into boxes without sides or bottoms. Ship, ice-house, abyss, furnace. Lord ——, his father, Cadwallader Colden, Mr Lovell, all berated him. De Lancey laughed, rich and slow, and his laughter wound richly and slowly in twists onto a bobbin. Tabitha presented her back to him, and when he turned her by her shoulder, why, the front of her was her back too. Septimus bled again. ‘Save the snow!’ roared Lennox. ‘Not a minim of it must be lost, for we can bundle it back inside him!’ With Lennox and Achilles, he pushed the crimson slush through an aperture in Septimus’ leg the size of a rabbit-hole, and Septimus swelled out till his buttons burst, into a wine-coloured snow-man, only still with Septimus’ natural head atop it, speaking wittily from grey lips. Furnace, ice-house, ship, abyss. Around and around: none of the dreams once, it seemed, but all repeating on a loop of variations, as if some kapellmeister of fever were driving them through an endless fugue. He baked and he froze, interminably. He opened his eyes on the room bright or dark, and it seemed only one chamber of an uncountable spawning of chambers, jelly-walled. He slept on, shaking.

  As he slept, Achilles chipped out a grave in Trinity churchyard, softening the iron earth with burning lamp-oil. To passers-by on Broad Way, the little blue flames crept and glowed as if a will-o’-the-wisp were loose in the night among the tombs. As Smith slept, Septimus was buried, and the Rector of Trinity read the service from the Prayer Book over the black rectangle in the white snow. The 20th December slid through walls of jelly into the 21st; the 21st December through tropics of heat and cold into the 22nd.

  But there came a lucid waking eventually, unlike the others. Smith opened his eyes upon a renewed winter night, and discovered the bed level and steady beneath him. He could not see anything, and he had no idea what hour or even what day it was, but he felt himself for the first time prosaically present, and the night (though cold) prosaically separate from him. His thumb hurt. He was rackingly thirsty. He unwound himself with difficulty from the bedding, got his feet upon the floor, and felt about in the black room, bumping against furniture and dislodging small objects. He found a jug and ewer on a sideboard of some kind, and drank most of the flat dusty water in the jug. He could feel it going down him in a grateful wet tide, triggering his body’s next need, which he relieved by pissing into the ewer; or, mostly into it. Then he felt his way back to the bed, and was able to dig down and climb between the smooth sheets. Sorrow and shame reminded him, undeliriously, of their presence, but they would wait; he banished them on a promise of attention later, and dropped back into an unconsciousness that was, in comparison to what had gone before, all delicious, all cool.

  Then it was daylight, and he lay upon a pillow the light revealed to be smeared with dried blood. He was filthy too. He could feel that his limbs all over were sticky with the exudate of the fever. He stirred his legs beneath the linen and they seemed thin and fragile. He was as weak as water: but his mind was as clear as water. He looked up at the canopy of velvet, and listened to street noises: muffled speech, the trudge of feet in snow, sledge runners hissing, the snorting breath of a horse. It was another morning when Septimus was not in the number of those awakening. It was another day when Septimus was dead, and it would be followed by further days when Septimus was dead until the end of the world.

  I am not near as clever as I believed, he thought. I imagined that I was playing a deep game, by rules all of my own making, and so I wandered without attending into other games already begun whose rules I did not wait to fathom. I have blundered again and again. I brought Terpie into the play, and roused up her desire to be what she used to be. I let Septimus try to protect me from the consequences, and instead made sure they were visited all on him. I made his memory an object of contempt. I gave one party a weapon against the other, when I did not mean to take sides. And Tabitha! I meant to woo Tabitha, and she tried to trap me. I meant to leave her alone, and it called out of her an experiment in trusting me, which I crushed. Blunder upon blunder; nothing but blunders; half a hundred blunders. – It will be observed that these realisations were coming rather late, and that Mr Smith was annexing for himself all the blame in the neighbourhood; but perhaps wisdom is always wont to arrive late, and to be a little approximate on first possession. – All this while, he thought, ever since I left Lord ––—’s house, I have exalted in my mind my precious sovereign will. I have told myself, that the greatest thing in the world is to preserve my power of choosing for myself. I have made sacrifices for it. Indeed I might say I have made sacrifices to it. I made an idol, I built an altar, and I have poured out on it— He stopped himself, but the snow still crimsoned on his mind’s Common. – I came here with a secret, and I have used it to persuade myself that I may be careless here, as careless as I like, on the argument that, if they knew what they do not, they would have no care for me. But it seems I have mistook.

  He gritted his teeth and unwrapped his thumb, to look upon the mark of his mistake. The crusted fabric of the handkerchief had glued itself to the leaking wound, and he must tease the cloth free, but what was beneath was less disgusting than its covering. The ball of his thumb was swollen and clubbed, but the shallow M burned in it was beginning to scab, and there was no sign of infection creeping down into the hand. The wound had been cauterised as it was made.

  He could not go back and make amends. He could not vindicate Septimus with a raised glass, or bring him back to life with a drunken gesture. He could only – what? What could he do? Go on; and try to be wiser; and keep future promises better; and avoid future mistakes. He must keep faith with the purposes for which he had come, and endeavour to discharge in something more like honour all he now found himself pledged to. And beyond that, just try to see what might be restored if— No, he told himself, this must be undertaken without indulgent hopes, or sweetening thoughts of lucky chances, unearned rewards, happy ends. There was enough to be doing. More than enough, if he was to be ready by Christmas Day. He closed his eyes, and set himself to compose a list of everything he must arrange; and when the tasks were all in order, he got up, wobbled to the door, stuck his head out into the hall-way, and bawled with a reasonable imitation of insouciance for a bath, and hot water, and bacon and eggs.

  *

  The first item on the list, though, proved the hardest to accomplish, and he was still struggling to begin it when he had much of the rest done and stowed away. The Governor’s household declined to oblige him in any way whatever, on any subject. His request to collect a possession of his, that he had left in Septimus Oakeshott’s room, was rejected with con
tempt, and his suggestion that he might offer to buy the late Secretary’s slave was treated as both grotesque and suspicious. When Smith presented himself in person at the gate of the Fort, to see if he might make more headway in speech than in correspondence, the sentries, who had clearly had instructions, absolutely refused to admit him; and when he persisted, they glanced up and down the street to check if anyone was looking, and then when no-one was, they punched him in the stomach and threw him across the cobbles.

  ‘Bugger off, mate,’ said the sergeant. ‘You ain’t wanted.’

  The ruination of Fort St George by the fire, however, had left its wall more a notional or administrative barrier than a physical one, and Smith, judging that he had no alternative, found it quite easy, deep in the dark night of the 23rd, to approach from an angle not overlooked by the gate, and to slip in quietly over a collapsed baulk.

  The snows had smoothed the rutted confusion of the courtyard, and drifted around the three bell-tents pitched there, no doubt warming the soldiers sleeping inside. There were no lights in the tents, just one window lit yellow upstairs in the Governor’s house, where maybe a night-sentry sat outside his door. Smith picked his way, with the smallest crunches he could, along the shadowed side of the court to Septimus’ stair. He was not sure what he would do if he found the door locked, except to try to force it with the least noise he could contrive, but in the event the latch lifted easily, and the thick mass of iron-bound wood swung open onto a space as dark as Smith had expected, if not quite as cold and abandoned-feeling. He pulled the door to behind him, and waited for his eyes to make a little more sense of the faint gleam through the little leaded window, it being most impractical to strike a light. Gradually, the single undifferentiated black modulated to shadings of black, and he could see under the window a pile of Septimus’ clothes and gear, with a metallic something on top reflecting in spots that might be his scabbarded sword. On the opposite wall, by the door into the little sleeping chamber, a scant difference between dark and dark resolved into a square shape that perhaps was the sea-chest Septimus had mentioned. Smith took one step towards it, and Achilles, who had been waiting motionless in the blackest black behind the door, leapt onto his back and bore him to the floor with his hands gripped round Smith’s windpipe in a strangler’s hold.

  Smith choked and scrabbled at the boards for purchase, but though Achilles was not very heavy, he had his weight high up, pinning Smith’s shoulders, and the long thin fingers round his throat had a practised force.

  ‘It is kind of you to come,’ he hissed in Smith’s ear. ‘Because, if I go out to find you, they say: he has hurt a white man. Tear him to pieces. But now you come sneaking in here in the dark, I can kill you, and they say: well done, faithful Achilles. Good servant. You protect your master’s house.’

  Smith produced a guttural rattle.

  ‘What you say? Can’t hear you, boy.’

  Kkhglggkh.

  ‘What do you say to me, eh? What you want to say? What is your new idea now? What do you try now?’

  He seemed only angrier, but to Smith’s surprise the questions proved not purely rhetorical. Achilles loosened his grip: not much, but enough to open a straw’s-width passage for air, and to part again by a trifle the walls of singing night that had been closing on Smith’s consciousness, and to permit a croaking answer.

  ‘It – was – an accident,’ he managed.

  Achilles banged his head smartly on the boards.

  ‘Of course it was accident!’ he cried, if it is possible to cry in a whisper. ‘You think you can hurt him on purpose? You? Never! You … you …’

  He hammered the floor with Smith’s forehead again, but he did not tighten the neck-hold. He seemed to need to converse. It occurred to Smith, amid thuds and coloured stars, that Achilles could with far more swift and straightforward effect have just stuck a blade between his ribs, if he had desired only a sure revenge. But a cooling corpse cannot hear what you tell it.

  ‘No – one – to – mourn – with,’ he guessed.

  ‘You!’ repeated Achilles, in a voice so congested with fury and sorrow, and by the need to hush them, that he sounded almost as choked as Smith. ‘You take him from me, and look at you! Nothing in you is strong. You kill him through his kindness. He pity you. You are a bag of wind. You say what they tell you. You understand nothing. You don’t know what you are. But look what you take from me! Look what you take!’

  The last word was a wail, a roar, that lost itself in desperate constriction. Wet drops were falling on the back of Smith’s head. Achilles stopped heaving Smith up in order to pound him down, and for a moment was all slack weight upon him. Smith thrashed his legs sideways – heaved – rolled left as hard as he could, and contrived to get an elbow underneath him, and a hand spread on the floor to push. It was the branded hand, which was no more than he deserved, and it hurt like fire when he shoved with all his might upon the out-stretched thumb and fingers, but it got his face off the floor, and sent them both rolling right over clumsily leftward till they hit the wall, Achilles’ back taking the force of the collision. Both gasped. Smith was able to surge up onto hands and knees; Achilles regained his grasp, but only of Smith’s shoulders, and tried with twists and throwings of his weight to drive Smith back down, but now he lacked the impetus that had first bowled his opponent over. Now, as they struggled, the advantage of Smith’s greater bulk was felt. Now, it was bullcalf against spider, though the spider be never so much more subtle, and Smith was able heavingly to turn, and to drag both their weights across the room on all fours, back towards the window-ledge, and the glimmer of Septimus’ sword-hilt in the dark, with Achilles trying to brace his legs to arrest them, and to kick out Smith’s knees from beneath him. Step by heaving step, and as they gaspingly traversed the dark room, Achilles started talking in his ear again: this time, as he were talking to himself.

  ‘What I am now?’ he said. ‘What I have left? I was Fulani. I was guard of the Emir. I was hafiz. I was husband. I was son. I was father. All gone; start again. I was lover. I was friend. I was older brother. I was soldier. I fight again, I think again, I breathe again. I ride in green forests. I sit with the chiefs of the Hodenosaunee people. I walk on mountains white men never see. All gone. All gone. All gone again.’

  He was fighting less hard with every word. Smith, reaching the window-ledge, was able to claw up it, to rear up till he was half-standing, and without too much difficulty to throw off Achilles’ spindly, long-limbed weight. And to grab and draw, in the dark of the room, Septimus’ sword.

  Achilles picked himself up, and stepped with dignity towards the blade. Smith could tell by the dim liquid shine of his eyes that he was weeping, and the crumpled line of his shoulders showed his age.

  ‘And now,’ he said quietly, ‘I know too much business. Too many secrets. They won’t keep me here. Soon they sell me south, to tobacco field, to iron mine. But I can’t begin again. I don’t have it in me. It is too much. Two lives is enough. So.’ He turned his gaze up to the ceiling and held it there.

  ‘I don’t—’ said Mr Smith – and had to stop, and rasp and cough to clear his throat – ‘I don’t desire to kill you. I don’t desire even to hold this. I mean if I can never to hold one of these again.’

  Achilles looked down. Smith was offering him, not the point, but the hilt of the sword.

  8

  Quarter-Day

  December 25th

  20 Geo. II

  1746

  Whether Christmas Day were an occasion for work or for play was, at that time in New-York, a matter of denomination. The followers of the established church kept the feast, with green branches in their houses and logs upon the fire, and bunches of sweet-smelling rosemary, and so did Lutherans and Moravians. But the Quakers, the French Calvinists, the Dutch Reformed, the English-speaking Baptists and Presbyterians, all signified their dissent, and their scornful judgement of the feast as a Popish mummery, by treating the day as one for ordinary business. That year, it f
ell on a Thursday, and you might have made a reliable chart of the affiliations of the whole city, by marking which shop-fronts were barred and shuttered, and which were defiantly opened, with lanterns lit, clerks at desks, merchants ready to sell, and tailors ready with their needles, despite the cold, and the grumbling of prentices, and the mere trickle of customers. It was cold indeed, with a renewed boreal bite in the air, and a hard slippery crust on the snow very grateful to sledge-runners. Ordinary walkers slid and cursed, and noting the cast of colour in the north-eastern sky, resolved to be back in shelter as soon as may be. The counting-house on Golden Hill was open, the Lovells being Baptists. Isaiah hung miserably over the fire, having been given nothing to do but brew up hot pearl for the occasional callers who came by to make or receive a quarter-day payment; Jem, in gloves, scratched away at the reconciling of the account books, the movement of whose figures from column to column embodied the real flow of money in the city, since there was no solider form for money to take; and Gregory Lovell, dipping his quill in the same well of black slush, sighed as he tried to figure on scraps of waste paper, not for the first time, how the plans of the firm for the year to come might be as little crimped and savaged as possible by the sudden vast hole in its capital; how Lovell & Co might best survive the depredations of Smith.

  Smith, however, went to Trinity to welcome the Christ Child. There were iron stoves in there glowing red with generous heat, and banks of the best yellow beeswax candles in blazing radiance, and the smell of wine mulling to fete the congregation after the service: but the verger, scowling, packed Smith into the obscurest pew behind a pillar at the back, where the indigent, the muttering and the strange were housed. It had been a question to struggle with, whether to admit such a notoriety at all, but this particular flagrant sinner, far from flaunting himself, was pale and subdued, with purple bruises fading on his forehead. You surely cannot turn away a sinner who may be repenting. Not at Christmas. Not while proclaiming goodwill toward men. You may only hide him. Smith, behind his pillar, was relieved not to be seen, and not to see the great in their array up at the front, where the choir were carolling ‘Adeste Fideles’, and the Governor’s mouth opened and closed like a fish, and the Tomlinsons sat like two statues of wretchedness, and De Lancey was manifesting gravity enough to perturb the orbits of the planets. He did not go up to receive the communion, perhaps because he did not dare to walk through the company, or perhaps from compunction. The tablets of the law were displayed on the church wall where he could see them: and of the Ten Commandments, he had by his count recently broken at least three. He closed his eyes and pressed his fists to his forehead and prayed. For what, I know not. And when the service was done, he slipped out unnoticed, wearing a new fur over his green coat, for he had much to do; and meant to have it all squared away before his last conversation in New-York, so that he might be able to depart immediately, no matter how it turned out.