Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  He reeled back with his hands clapped to his head, and without ceasing to scream she whirled about and began to sweep objects off the mantel, seizing them in spasms and twitches and flinging them down to shatter on the boards. A china shepherdess – smash – the matching shepherd boy – smash – the clock and the Meissen candle-sticks – smash, smash, smash.

  Smith tried to reach into the whirlwind, and she snapped at him with her teeth. Feet came pounding up the stair; Zephyra burst into the room, still holding the cloth with which she had been polishing silver.

  ‘What you said to her? She not like this for months!’

  ‘I—’ said Smith, ‘I – just—’

  ‘Step back from her. Mistress,’ said Zephyra, who rather than entering the zone of Tabitha’s fury was carefully drawing pieces of furniture away from her, ‘you settle down, now; it be all alright; you be a good girl, and take some breath; you hush yourself, now. You,’ she said to Smith, with a furious jerk of the chin, ‘go!’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Don’t you see you make it worse?’

  ‘But – I am responsible—’

  ‘Go!’

  Seeing that Smith still gaped, and that Tabitha seemed now to be locking into place, a stationary banshee with fists rigid at her side, eyes closed, lost in an ecstasy of protest, Zephyra, sighing, grabbed his sleeve and towed him from the room, and down the stairs.

  ‘You go before the Mister comes,’ she hissed.

  It was too late for that, however. Lovell, issuing falteringly out of the passage-way from the counting-house, moving as if against a hurricanoe-headwind of his own reluctance, met them at the foot of the stair with his hands clutching at his wig.

  ‘You!’ he cried. ‘What has – what have you—?’ He made a grab at Smith’s lapel, but the shrieks from above, the rising howls, distracted him, and instead he pushed past. ‘Oh God, not again,’ he could be heard to mumble.

  ‘Now, out!’ said Zephyra, and she thrust Smith ahead of her along the passage; to the street-door, and out into the cold.

  And stopped dead, on the threshold, seeing what was waiting for Smith there in the snow: what he had accomplished at last, in New-York, with his thousand pounds.

  Mr Smith had been shopping in the slave-market. There, in two of the largest possible sizes of sledge, hitched up to driving horses, twenty or so silent Africans were packed. He had dressed them all in winter furs, but he must have selected his purchases according to some peculiar principle, for they were an unlikely crowd to choose for labour: old women, children, sullen-looking wenches, a girl with a wall-eye, another whose visage had the far-off serenity of deafness, and a crew of men most owners would have found intolerably villainous, for they were blue-black of skin, with the nakedly belligerent expressions of those not yet resigned to the country. Two had tribal scars.

  Smith bolted across the snow-crust of the street in two bounds, like a cat escaped from a scalding. But then surprised her by turning back, when he had reached his strange cavalcade. He was weeping, but he smiled, and held out his hand to Zephyra.

  ‘Aane, me ara ni nnipa a wo twen no,’ he said.

  What a difference a frame makes. The aching winter light that glared up into the glassy humour of her eye from the street, where the blue shadows were beginning to lengthen, was just the same; the sight before her was unaltered; but in her unmoving dark face, armoured to stillness by long sorrow, the pupil through which the light flowed in flared wide of its own accord, in miniscule astonishment, for the meaning of the scene was suddenly reversed. There was Smith, still shaking with the early shock of what he had just lost, and with much more to feel of it ahead of him, and yet with a tension falling from his face – no, more than that, with a whole role falling from it, in flakes and pieces and cascading blocks, like a collapsing wall – that had been maintained in place without a pause since he landed. And there was Achilles from the Fort, who, the word had been, was sold now down to a tobacco farm in the Carolinas, here instead in gloves and furs, holding the reins of the front sleigh to drive it; and there was Smith, jumping up beside him, and the others around him all budging up, shuffling up, to give him his place among them. Smith looked at her again; again held out his hand. The messenger of her new fortune had indeed arrived; if she was willing to hear him.

  Which she was. Zephyra dropped the rag she was still holding, and without looking back, without even closing the door, clasped her hand across her belly and walked out of the house on Golden Hill for ever: a step, and another step, and one more step through the crunching snow, to the dark hands reaching to lift her up. Ten seconds later, the street was empty.

  9

  A LETTER

  to Gregory Lovell, Esqr., Golden Hill Street,

  City of New-York: by the ship

  Crown of Heligoland

  Banyard & Hythe, Partners: Mincing Lane, London, 10th December 1746

  My dear Sir,

  I received yours of the 2nd November, and confess Myself surprised at its indignant Tone. For though it is true, that the Balances owing between your Office and ours, are usually settled by means of the Jamaica Trade, yet, a Debt is a Debt, and while it rests upon our Books, it is our Right to issue any Bills whatever upon it that We see fit. The mulatto Smith having presented Himself here with a thousand Pound (Sterling) in right Currency, it was a Matter of straightforward Advantage to Us, to sell Him immediately what He desired to buy immediately.

  The Bill is a true Bill and may therefore be paid with Confidence. Nevertheless, it is understandable that You may have been taken aback by his sudden Appearance with it, and for your greater Surety of Mind, We have made the Enquiries concerning Him that You have requested.

  The Tale is certainly a striking One. Richard Smith is, it seems, the Descendant of a Slave of the late Lord ––— (the present Lord ––—’s Father) by Way of two Generations of Marriage to Englishwomen. His Grandfather Hannibal was a favourite Page of this elder Lord’s Wife, who being brought to England in the Seventies of the last Century, was enfranchised at his Majority and became a Servant, taking the Sur-Name of Smith. Or, truer to say, became as it were a favoured Ward of the Family, to the Extent that his Son (your Smith’s Father) was upon showing Proof of promising Parts, actually sent to Oxford as a Servitor or Scholar-Servant to Lord ––—’s Son, and later rewarded by the Living of one of the Churches in Lord ––—’s Gift, and consequently settled there in Dorset as a country Parson, where He presently remains. The same Strategy of Benevolence was purposed to be followed for the Parson’s Son, but the Boy ran off, pertly objecting to the Fate planned for Him. Rather, He endeavoured to make his own Way, here in the City of London, tricking Himself out first as a Dancing-Master, where He had but little Success, and then as an Actor in small Parts: where He shone more, being as You will have observed handsome of Face and pleasing of Manner, yet not so much as to secure Himself a Competency. This He found instead as Secretary or Factotum to the Mimick Club of Drury Lane, a dining Society not unlike the Beefsteak, where He has mingled for the last two Years with a Scattering of Persons prominent in Drama, the News-Sheets, and the Exchange.

  But the Errand on which He came to You proceeds, it seems, from his Sunday Affiliation rather than his Week-day one. He is a Worshipper, in a small Congregation where the Fringes of Aristocratic Zeal meet London’s Population of emancipated Africans: the Countess of Malmesbury’s Abyssinian Connection. This Group receiving a Bequest of a thousand Pounds from one of its Patrons, it was decided that it should be laid out for the Purchase, the Freeing, and the Establishing in Independency of their Country-Men and -Women. New-York was chosen as a Market far enough from the West Indies Hub of the Trade for the Transaction to be unobtrusive, and Richard Smith volunteered to accomplish It, as the Person among Them most fitted to pass without Difficulty in different Companies. He had a written Commission for the Business in his Pocket-Book, which He shewed Me.

  The Bill, then, to repeat the essential Point, is good, and You ma
y pay It without Demur. Indeed, if the Seas be as usual, You will have paid It long before this Assurance can reach You. But I trust this Information will set your Mind at Rest, and that, after the initial Surprise, the Transaction proceeded on your Side without any further Difficulty or Perturbation.

  With a warm Protestation of the Value we place upon our long Association with the House of Lovell, and my best Regards to Mr Van Loon, I have the Honour to remain,

  Your Servant,

  Barnaby Banyard

  10

  August 1813

  Well, I still hate novels. They still seem to me to be tissues of exaggeration, simplification, a sweetness that falsifies; and now I know this truth from, as it were, the inside, having written one myself, and marked all the sleights and tricks required to tease out a very partial understanding, a perished cloth more holes than thread, into what seems a smooth continuous fabric. I, who did not know what Mr Smith was thinking, lend my own spirit to set in motion a puppet of him who does not know what I was thinking. Nonsense, absurdity upon absurdity! I, who have never fought a duel, or played piquet, or shared in various other of Mr Smith’s experiences, find I can concoct the necessary passages by a winking charm, by talking faster, by a conjurer’s distracting busywork. How can such farragos be trusted? And yet what else is there, to catch in any shape at all the fragile pattern of particular acts and hours long ago, before oblivion blows them to the winds? They are the best, worst chance to coax into anything like a durable existence the feeling of those weeks when Smith was with us, sixty-seven years ago: even if the cost is lies at every turn. Lies are better than nothing.

  Besides, they never bothered me very much when I was doing the lying. In fact, there has been a strange kind of satisfaction, like a ghost of my old pleasures, in withholding or denying in these pages most direct views into my past self, as if I was contriving all over again thereby to withhold myself from him.

  And now I do not want to stop. I sit at my window in the farm-house here, and listen to the hoot-owls drifting across the Fishkill like ghosts in the last of the short summer night, with the lamp lit that I may burn till all hours if I wish to, for we are rich and lamp-oil is a cheap indulgence to keep a nasty old lady happy: and I wish the story not to be over, though it is, and has been these many years. Once again, I have made Smith depart in the snow, with stolen Zephyra and Achilles, and since we never heard any more of those in the sledges ever again, that is that. I have no more to tell. No more I want to, anyway.

  The reader must imagine, if they desire it, the scene of chaos and confusion Smith left behind him. The outbreak at first of derisive laughter directed at my father, when the news spread that he had entertained a n––— unawares, and let him carry off a good share of his fortune, and pressed upon him the society of his daughters; and then the rapid smothering of that laughter in embarrassment, and effortful silence, when it was realised, all across the snowy city, what else had been done unawares, and by how many, in relation to Smith. That judge, lawyer and jury together had excused a black man for the death of a white one. That the whole audience of Cato had adored him. That the Assembly had thought him worth wooing, and threatening. That for sixty whole days he had been treated as a person of consequence. That Terpie had— Well; enough of that. The Tomlinsons obtained a posting shortly afterward to the Philadelphia garrison, and soon, without any discussion, the city’s embarrassment over Smith thickened into the pretence that there had never been a Smith at all. He became unmentionable. No-one would talk about him; no-one but me. I have written this to conjure him. To insist upon him. My tale begins suddenly, as he arrives, and ends, just as suddenly, as he departs.

  But if my pen stops moving, if there are no more fresh words in glistening black flowing out of it, to somehow keep all the preceding ones irrigated and live, if my ink all dries to autumnal brown – then the past too crackles and fades. The people go away, and so does the city.

  It is a striking thought that the New-York of my story only exists in my story, now. I remember it, unchanged, because I left it in 1750, after writing some letters at which the neighbours took offence, and have not been back. (Indeed, I have not been anywhere but here my whole life since, except once in the year ’60 to Princeton, to see the scholars play The Tempest, and that did not work out happily, confirming the family in their sense that had I best be stowed safe away.) In my pages, and in my head, the Dutch houses stand, and the mansions of Broad Street, and the spire of Trinity, and the cows grazing on the Common, and our house on Golden Hill: but in Manhattan, apparently, all this is gone without a trace, ruined in the Revolution and burned in the great fires. Scarcely a brick stands. Septimus’ grave must still be there, unchanged until the trumpet sound and all sleepers wake, but with a new New-York billowed up around it. Trinity is a different Trinity, City Hall is demolished, and the streets march north up the island carrying the homes of the wealthy with them, and leaving a scurf of slums behind. There is a De Lancey Street now, they say: but no De Lanceys, for they came out for the King at the Revolution, and so are all scattered to Nova Scotia and beyond. The judge himself was long dead by then, but very probably he would have concurred: for after all, he was Governor himself, after poor hopeless Clinton, and in that role a great supporter of the Crown prerogative.

  I do not think I could explain to the younger ones I see, when the family comes up-valley to join me here for the summer months, how such a man as the judge could have been a royalist: how we all were. For they recite the litany of the King’s evil deeds every July Fourth as if they were sacred history, and I perceive that for them all kings called George are hobgoblins, who prowl at night through the cities of their imagination kicking puppies and eating kittens. ‘The British’ are a species of especially venomous foreigners, tyrannical by nature, enemies to all liberty, and of course the White House-burning villains of the recent war. I perceive I have lived out of one epoch into another one, quite mutually unintelligible, so that if I cried, like the solitary servant surviving the wreck of Job’s house, “I only am alone escaped to tell thee”, I would be looked at as if I were making animal noises. I am looked at like that quite often anyway.

  My father died in the year ’64. Flora is dead too. She had four children, of whom one did not survive, perhaps luckily, for he looked much more like her estate manager than boring old Joris. I grew no nicer with age. However, around about the point I passed from aunt-hood to great-aunt-hood, the passion of my contrariness (as they all decided to call it) seemed to leave me, or at least to diminish into a more easily domesticated form. So that now, when I regard those earlier times, and especially the days on Golden Hill, I find I possess two incompatible reactions to them, two feelings that run along beside one another but without mixing, like the snaking currents of dye you now see running along under the transparent skin of the Hudson. I both wish that I felt again that burning pleasure of opposition: and at the very same time I regret with all my heart that I sacrificed so much else to it. With all my heart? No, with only half of it; and half a heart, I suppose, is not enough to make you bold for the business of loving. It is a vote cancelled by the suffrage of the other half.

  My great-great-niece says I am the oldest thirteen-year-old girl in the United States. She is thirteen herself, and so, she says, she should know. Heloise Van Loon, born with the century: as sharp as me, but I hope better fitted for happiness. Being clever never did me much good, for you can know perfectly well why you do something, and still not be able to desist from it.

  I do not know what became of Smith. I do not think he can have perished directly in the snows of ’46: he was hopelessly incompetent to travel through a continental winter, but Achilles will not have been, and I imagine they will have arrived wherever they were going. But after that, all is conjecture, and I can only wonder. Whether he found the learning at Harvard, for example, that he had refused at Oxford; or whether he was reconciled to his father and returned to England; whether he adopted the destiny of his un-apparent
colour, or whether, going back to London, he went where it became again a mere personal peculiarity. Whether he yet lives. Can he, possibly? He would have to be even older than me, and women live longer than men, and I suspect I have been pickled into durability somehow by wickedness, like a preserve in vinegar. But I can imagine him, several ways, somewhere sharing this ember of a world with me. An ancient roué of a Smith, who totters at ninety to the gaming-tables, rouged; a Smith who lives in retired pomp in the English countryside after a long success on the stage; a Smith simply enthroned in honour beside a hearth, surrounded by children of whatever colour; or a Smith snoozing venerable in the study of a manse with a thousand brown books of divinity about him, for he had that possibility in him too, from his father.

  Does he think of me, if he lives? I think of him, often. Heloise brings me my hot milk, and while the house sleeps and I do not, I return again and again to the moment when Mr Smith asked me to go with him, and I did not. I wish that I could hover at the shoulder of that stubborn girl (that frightened girl) and nudge her, push her, shove her out of her solitary fear, and into the sleigh, like Zephyra; into a wider life. But I also wish that I could feel again the rejecting fire that was in me then. And I remember how good it was to scream.

  Author’s Note

  After five books of non-fiction, or fiction blended with non-fiction, it feels very strange to me not to say anything about the way this book uses history, but with a mighty effort I will only point out that Mr Smith is not being unfair about the relative sizes of London and New York as he knows them. New York in 1746 had a population of about 7,000, while London, then the largest city in Europe, had one of 700,000: genuinely a hundred-fold difference.