by Sara Collins
‘Good,’ he said, staring out. His own hands danced across his lap, shivering the loose fabric of his breeches. I bit down the urge to reach out, press them still. ‘Good.’
The sky was thickening, empty save for a peppering of birds. ‘Could it really still be daytime?’ I said. ‘And yet so dark?’
By way of answer, he kissed his tongue against his teeth. In his bad spells, the words fumbled out of him, so he refused to speak, but I knew what he wanted before he wanted it. Now that we were off the ship, he wanted me cowed, quiet. I folded my arms, like clean towels, felt my spit rise, clogging and sharp. I looked down at them, twisted and twisted at the grey cloth I held in my hand. I’d told myself I would forget Paradise, and everything that had happened there. Scrape it off and cast it aside, gone ‒ like slave speech, like slave manners. Make myself new.
I couldn’t keep still. My hands smoothed my dress, serge slick as cat fur, and I sat forward, looked up at Langton, looked out. Daring him to tell me not to. My new skirts sighed against the leather. The distance between poor cloth and fancy is all in how it speaks, and it’s the same for people, Miss-bella used to say. But rich people’s noises are as rough as anyone’s, except that they can buy thicker walls.
I pulled aside the small drape at the window. When Langton said nothing, I pulled it back the rest of the way. It was raining, the streets thick with water and filth. Muddy drops speckled the glass.
I hadn’t expected London to be crumbling like a stale loaf. Or the streets to be crowded with people in their hundreds! Faces pale enough to vanish into fog, then float up like curds in milk. Langton was brown here, his skin cracked, like ageing leather. And so many of them were poor. Whites toothless and dirty; whites fluttering, like sorrowful little flags, as they pissed into the street. Whites with skin grated raw, and pocked as orange peel. Hard, hungry faces. The children were the worst. Hands quick, eyes slow. The first tingles of fear drained through me when I saw those children. I knew only too well that eyes have only two choices. Open or shut. When they go too wide, too black, it’s because they can’t make space for all they’ve seen. The sight of those children sparked a memory, the one other thing I carried that I couldn’t set down, though it wasn’t in my portmanteau. It slammed into me then, whether I liked it or not, made my stomach jump.
In a world of his own making, any man can be God. Langton had made his own world, and then he’d brought me with him when he fled it. I thought it was because he was a member of that race of men who cannot be men without their slaves.
A copy of his letter to George Benham lay across my lap. I’d been the one to copy it twice onto vellum, one copy to send and one to keep, but then I’d been the one to write every word Langton had put in ink for years.
My dear G,
I enclose the amended manuscript. Crania. It saddens me that the work became the wedge between us. But I’ll admit that you were right, about one thing at least. A good scientist merely searches for the answer to the question posed, but the one whose name history will record reaches for the question no one has even thought to ask. There couldn’t be a better moment for proof that the differences between the varieties of men are not mere flukes of nature but purposeful design. It is even more important than ever, now that England seems hell-bent on destroying the colonies with the prospect of emancipation, so soon after abolishing the trade.
Her politicians need reminding. A mother doesn’t eat her young. Not a tender mother at any rate.
I thought that was where we started. How did our paths diverge? Be that as it may, I still believe a careful reading of the final corrected version will lead you to reconsider your stance. With your name attached again, the work would grow wings. There must be publishers in England (though I know they can seldom be counted on to see beyond their own noses) who will recognize the commercial and scientific merit in this.
Pressing matters will keep me here for some time, and it seems that it will take me longer to reach you than even the infernal post. Therefore, this must be entrusted for now to the impersonal medium of paper and ink.
I will follow it as soon as I can.
Yours &c.,
John
George Benham. The important man. The one who’d started the work on Crania, then written to say he’d changed his mind. The thought that my path was likely to cross his sent a shudder through me. Crania itself nudged my leg, lying beside me on the bench. Langton’s magnum opus. I’d written that too, in my best curling copperplate. Yet I had to fight the urge to haul it out into the muck.
‘You’re as eager to try your new London manners as you were to put on that dress.’ Langton’s lips peeled into a grimace, his words choked to a halt. His illness sometimes stopped them entirely.
I sprang out of my seat, pressed his hand in mine. ‘Cramp?’
‘I need rum.’
‘No. You don’t.’
‘What the devil do you know about anything?’ He jerked his hand away, knuckled it to my breastbone, pushed me back. But then the trembling came over him again, fingers, wrists, shoulders. ‘This isn’t Paradise, girl. You can’t just . . . clatter out things that have been . . . private between us . . .’
‘There are so many things private between us. I won’t be able to say a word.’
He looked away, mouth narrowed. His hands, curled in his lap, twitched like sleeping dogs and his shoulders curled too.
Dying men don’t just dwell on the past: they invent it.
‘I never touched you,’ he said.
I moved back to my own seat, rested my head against the cushion, held myself stiff as the leather, taking care not to look at him. When he told me not to get too snug, I paid him no mind.
‘This blasted traffic,’ he said, peering out. ‘That’s London for you. Everything moves fast, until you see it’s moving in circles. Not a single thing has taken a forward step in two hundred years.’
He decided we’d get out near London Bridge, find a waterman, elbowing through the crowd. I had to trot so I didn’t get swallowed in it, nerves stirred raw, thinking of all the things that could go wrong. He might fall, lose his footing, suffer an attack, or simply turn a corner without me, and vanish. There were a hundred ways I could lose sight of him. And then what would become of me?
The cold seemed to carry its own smell, like raw meat, and came on me sudden as a cutpurse. London air, wet as a kiss. I shivered and reached up to tug on my shawl. ‘Only way to get used to it is to be out in it,’ Langton shouted back. Heads turned. They stared here, same way the sailors had stared on the Pride, when there was no risk of being caught. I felt watched as a clock. To be black in a sea of whites is to wish to be invisible.
I kept my eyes fastened to Langton’s back, his new black coat stretched tight as a cheek, lifted my feet between mounds of dung, and fat, slithering puddles. Each time I came too close, forgetting to slow my pace to his, he snapped his teeth. ‘Keep some space between us, girl.’ As if there was any distance that could magic the two of us into gentleman and maid, instead of what they thought they saw: a slow Creole, his mulatta whore.
I didn’t have my land legs back, stopped to lean against a wall and let the wave in my head build up and die down. Then I had to run to catch up with Langton again. Three times I chased, not once did he look back. A heavy feeling poured into me.
But it lifted when we reached the river, and my heart took flight. I felt a wind inside me gathering speed.
The Pride’s captain had had a map tacked up in the galley; many a morning I’d traced the crooked seam of the Thames along to its bucket-shaped dip, reading the names aloud. Southwark, Bermondsey, Wapping. On paper, it looked like a meandering curve stitched through the city’s chest. But maps never tell the whole truth. For London is a river with a city around it. People milled along the bank, leaning over the railing to watch the ships and the building works, which Langton said were for the new bridge. I forgot about the awful smell, found myself wishing I could linger. Across the water, I could see the arches of th
e old bridge, the clawing spires and rooflines. The wooden hulls clacked against each other like oyster shells in a bucket. The watermen reminded me of nigger-drivers, the way they rode high on their rowboats, spat out from under their hats. Langton said he’d go down to haggle a ride, told me I’d better stay right where he left me. Fragments flew back to me: ‘. . . to the Strand . . . me and my . . . my wife’s serving girl.’
I was black as a fly in butter, and had no choice but to stand out ‒ and stand there too, pinned to the street, as if my own legs were stuck. Spittle flew at the back of my neck. When I turned I saw one of the barrow-women duck her head and fidget a potato back onto the pile, counting on her fingers, like they were an abacus. I lifted a gloved hand to wipe my neck. Told myself my dress was serge. She was the one who looked slovenly, and low, dressed in linsey with a dirty kerchief. I told myself I looked like a lady. At the very least a higher class of maid. Even if Langton only let me dress as such so no one would see what I was, while I travelled with him.
I told myself it was my head that was filled with learning. I’d read Mr Defoe’s Essay on Literature the week before, settled under the skylight with water tapping at the hull and night creeping above, thinking how confident a man must be to write down his own musings, expecting anybody else to be interested in reading them.
Sometimes I picture all that reading and writing as something packed inside me. Dangerous as gunpowder. Where has it got me, in the end?
I brushed my skirts down again, set my shoulders back, glanced towards Langton. A pair of girls climbed off the back of a cart, slowed to a stop when they saw me, gawping, looking as if they’d reach out and tug at me. The river shook itself out like a sheet. Dark as pewter. Everything in the whole world seemed to be on its way in or on its way out of London, the water waltzing cargo. For a moment, I wondered what it would be like to plunge, skirts flying, heart in full sail, flow myself through all that silvered water. Let it take me somewhere.
A thread of wind shivered through the ships’ flags.
One small step. Another. Forward, forward. I stared down at my feet. How much time passed, while I stood there? Then noise came flooding back. Birds’ cries. Scuffling breaths of carriage horses. Slowly, the world fell back into place. You can knock the world down, smash its teeth, kick it to pieces, and still it will click back into its remembered habits, like any seasoned slave.
When I looked up, the girls were clambering away, down a street that twisted into darkness. I wanted to follow. A picture came into my head. Me, flying down the blind street, finding a stone cottage, like a coin tucked up a sleeve. Shelves of books, a crackling fire. Nothing else inside it but time. And a woman, though I couldn’t see her face. I’d live there. And I’d write. There’d be no law against it. I’d write a novel. The house would be sturdy around us. Plain and clean and warm.
But no one like me has ever written a novel in the history of the world.
‘Get!’ Langton said suddenly, crept up against my ear. ‘Girl, get!’ I felt a squeeze at my temples, cold as Langton’s calipers, and looked up and saw that a boat was waiting. I leaned forward, sucked in the breath that hammered back into me, and followed him into it.
Chapter Nine
The anti-slavers are always asking me, what was done to you, Frances? How did you suffer? They don’t believe any of it could have been done to you unless you were forced. I remember a thing Phibbah used to say: Only two types of white people in this world, chile, the ones doing shit to you and the ones wanting you to tell them ’bout the shit them other ones did.
What would they say if I told them I pinned my own self to Langton, even after we came here? That I was the one who followed him? Oh, how they’d leap away! Uncommon, unlikely. But true. They only concern themselves with flesh and bone, as if those are the only things that suffer. As if minds don’t.
I glowered at Langton’s back from the bench behind. The river lumbered beneath us, the boat’s slow rocking reminding me of a mule-cart. I felt each pull of the oars tugging me backwards, felt the anger pour into me hot as gin. London sped past me as if I was losing it.
We got off near the Strand, walked the rest of the way to Covent Garden, where Langton was meeting the man called Pomfrey at a public house. We found him leaning back in his chair, cheeks bristling with pale whiskers, hands locked together above his gut. Ale foamed like fresh cow’s milk above his lip. The room was dim and crowded, each table lit by a greasy candle. Crowded with tobacco and the smells of men. Exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find a creature like Pomfrey. When he saw Langton, he looked up, face leathery as a lung. ‘My God, man, what happened to you?’
‘Twenty years.’ Langton braced his wrists, eased himself into a seat.
‘That long, eh?’ A slow whistle. ‘And who’s this?’
‘My house-girl.’
‘Oho. I heard about this one!’ Pomfrey gave a wet chuckle. ‘Heard you’ve been squeezing more out of her than the usual tricks. Can’t leave home without her, eh? You colonials! You do things the way a man should.’
I’d heard about Pomfrey, too. He was a skull-chaser. The abolition law had spawned men like him. Whatever he’d made as a slaver he’d doubled, dodging the English navy across the Atlantic, slippery as butter on hot bread, still using the same fleet of old Guineamen. ‘Bastards only managed to scupper me once, but they found us clean as a whistle, didn’t they? A very well-scrubbed brig they said to me, at pains to point it out. “Aye, well, I run a tight one, and surely one navy man won’t fault another for that,” I told them.’
The skulls he’d shipped to Paradise had arrived in wooden crates, packed in straw, labels tied through the eyeholes with pink ribbons. There’d been a man from Madagascar, bullet hole through the jaw. A female Hottentot with a perfect set of teeth strung like pearls. I can still see them, set out in their rows. In death, as in life, each man cohabited only with the same type. Caucasian with Caucasian, Mongolians side by side, Malays, Americans. Negroes on the bottom. One of my jobs was to measure volume, fill them with white mustard seed, which I then poured back into marked cylinders.
Six hundred and twenty-seven skulls. I’d counted them, written down each new crate in Langton’s ledger. Six hundred and twenty-seven. A sum so simple, yet so terrible. One plus one plus one, until there were multitudes, all of them now ash, grated fine as sand.
Pomfrey was still eyeing me. ‘Man’s got the right idea, I’d say, when he settles someplace that allows him to warehouse his bobtail right under his own roof.’ He gave me a feeling like the hair being pulled tight on my scalp. I looked around. Broad backs, yellowy faces, waving arms. No other women, just the two serving-girls. I’d never sat at a table in a public house before. If any of the slaves had thought to gather in such numbers, Langton would have stamped on it at once, scattered them like cockroaches.
I was expected to be quiet, when it wasn’t just the two of us, mind my own business and stay out of Langton’s way. But I was in a new place: I wanted something new from myself. I sat up, pricked up my ears.
‘What’s the latest out of Parliament?’ Langton asked.
‘Nothing new. Coven of wastrels and do-nothings and castrati.’
‘Just what you said in ’06 –’
‘Well –’
‘‒ and then they cut the trade with France, which was the first sally before they choked us off altogether.’
Pomfrey waved a hand. ‘The emancipationists want to feel they’ve had their say. Et cetera. A lot of hot air. One thing to stop the blasted trade, quite another to cut a man off at his knees. They can’t just take a man’s property.’
‘We need to make scientific arguments uppermost in the debate, Pom, and we need to be quick about it. Any luck finding another specimen?’
‘Oh, there are always specimens, boyo. This fair world of ours is stocked to its rafters with specimens. But you want a white nigger, you want one of them albinos, that is going to take time. And it is surely going to take money.’
That name thudded into me. I looked away, down at the copy letter, resting in the bag at my feet. Pomfrey tipped his chair onto its hind legs. ‘Oho. George Benham.’
‘Old friend.’
‘Ha. I know all about your old friendship. Know he cut you loose. Cut you off.’
‘I’ve rewritten the manuscript. To every single one of his specifications.’ Langton clenched his jaw, looked at me. ‘Not to mention I come bearing gifts.’
Pomfrey laughed. ‘Mahomet going to the mountain, eh?’
Langton tilted forward. ‘The albino is the part of all this that doesn’t have to concern him. I want to try for another study – I heard there was one on display in Paris.’
‘And?’
‘Maybe start there.’
‘Paree? Paree? Start in Paree? Start again, you mean. I still haven’t been paid for your last white-nigger chase.’
‘Truth be told, Pom, my pockets are let. I was hoping you’d see your way to –’
He scoffed. ‘Credit? It’s credit you’re after? Ha! You know credit’s the one thing I don’t do. Not unless you’re putting her on the table?’
Langton blinked. ‘Her?’ He turned to me. ‘Go get some rum,’ he said, shaking me off. Four words from him and I was a serving-girl again. But I was glad for the reason to flee the table, had been looking for one as soon as their talk turned to albinos. And to George Benham. I fumbled a handful of coins from his waistcoat, hoping it was enough. I’d done many things for Langton, but counting money hadn’t been one of them.
‘A guinea for a Guinea,’ Pomfrey said, chuckling, watching me go.
When I returned, his words were tumbling downhill, oiled by drink. ‘Course getting yourself on a nigger doesn’t mean a thing, they do anything and let you do anything . . . it means as much to them as sneezing, doesn’t it? But don’t it make us animals?’ He looked up, sorrowful.
‘No more than administering a whipping to a dog makes you a dog,’ said Langton.
