by Sara Collins
Titters burst into pops of laughter, and they exchanged nervous looks. His words went inside to my weak spots. I sat up, jolted. Beside me, Madame shifted her hands in her lap.
‘Casting about for a topic,’ he said, ‘I remembered an Igbo tale my mother had told me. The only thing I remember about her. It was about the Asiki.’ He paused. ‘The Asiki were human children, stolen by witches and taken deep into dark forests, where the witches cut out their tongues, and changed every hair on their heads, from wool to silk. Changed their skin, too, from black to gold. Next morning the Asiki woke without speech or memory, their mothers and their fathers forgotten. Their homes as well. Full of questions they had no way to ask. If you ask one of them, “Who are you?” they cannot answer. They cannot speak at all! They make ugly barking noises, rolling the stubs they have in place of tongues.’
They sat quiet, tugged forward in their seats. ‘All speakers,’ he continued, ‘at the end of the day, speak about men. What men want. Or don’t.’ He shrugged. ‘But . . . the Asiki are not men. They are changelings. Men who have no memory. Men kidnapped into silence. Men whose value is measured in beads and brass pans and guns. What would they tell us if they did have tongues? What do they want? Would they tell us they love the back-breaking work of gathering in your cotton? And your cane?’ He shrugged again. ‘Would they tell us it is for their own good?
‘Isn’t that what the European himself has told us? That the European’s pleasure is the African’s pleasure? Aren’t we supposed to take the European’s word for it? Because who would ever dream of asking the African what he wants? It’s the European who marches across this little globe, measuring everything, writing it down. Adam. God of all creatures, great and small.’
He made his voice quieter. ‘Here’s the rub. You asking me to speak for them. How can I? Why have you asked me? Because you look at a single black man and see all black men. As if one black man is a representative of every other member of his race. Allowed neither personality nor passion. Not allowed to love anybody, or anything. It is for this reason there are so many dead men inhabiting the new world, drifting through cotton and cane. Zombis. Men who were left enslaved, even after the trade had been abolished. You abandoned them. Yes, you, with your good intentions. Even abolitionists succumbed to the idea that a man couldn’t be stripped of his own assets without compensation. By that equation, those men you left behind are property. Machines, not men.
‘We might as well give you the blade, too. Since you also cut out their tongues.’
When he came down among them, the men pumped his hands, and the women stared. I stood beside Madame, near the door. I had listened in silence. His words had split me, like a cord of wood, though I didn’t want to show it. They’d made me think of Phibbah. Madame’s eyes roved after him. Hep Elliot appeared at her side. ‘No sign whatsoever of the poor little wretch in your portrait, is there?’
‘No.’
‘A man now. A young black Moses, smashing his tablets of stone.’
‘If you say so.’ Madame laughed.
The crowd surged around us. ‘Thighs like thunder,’ I heard a woman saying, behind us. ‘And a face like thunder, too.’
He moved through the crowd but it was clear he was making his way towards her. He closed one hand around hers, bent to brush it with his lips. ‘Madame Bebbum,’ he said, and she threw back her head and laughed again.
‘That was his old name for me,’ she said to Hep Elliot. ‘No one has called me that in a very long time.’ She turned back to him. ‘Laddie. How very nice to see you. This is Miss Hephzibah Elliot. And my secretary, Frances Langton.’
He caught me looking at his hands and clenched them into a fist beside his jaw. ‘They ugly for true, aren’t they, little mulatta? I’m a prizefighter, you know. The next Bill Richmond!’
‘Is that right?’ Madame said.
I remember how irked I felt. The way he called me ‘little mulatta’, the way he danced around us, bobbing on his toes. His white teeth, his pomade-slick hair. A man who spends that much time on mirrors and tooth-powders isn’t to be trusted. And he was a different man from the one on stage. Rough, coarse. He used the old slave talk only when he spoke to me. With her he would oil up his smile and start to talk white again. Like so many blacks do when whites are around. The ladies looked from him to me. As if this was still part of the entertainment.
‘Your lecture left me wondering, Mr Cambridge,’ I said, feeling peevish. ‘How many years did you spend enslaved?’
She gave me a sharp look. In those days, she liked to have me with her, as her companion, but preferred me quiet, lest I give us away.
‘Not a one,’ Laddie replied smoothly, ‘having been spirited away to England at the age of four. Unless you think it’s enslavement serving as page boy to Madame Benham . . . As her secretary you would be best placed to say.’
They all sniggered, as if he’d made a good jape.
‘In other words,’ I said, cutting him off, ‘you are full of ideas, not experience. Precisely what I thought.’
‘An honest opinion! That’s rare. Where have you come from, Miss Langton?’
‘Jamaica.’
‘You were a slave?’
‘A house-girl.’
He laughed. ‘Precisely what I thought.’
Hep Elliot clapped his back. ‘Mr Cambridge! That was a triumph! Plenty to chew on. You are clever.’
His eyes were fierce above his white cravat. ‘Most whites will be impressed with anything that comes out of a black’s mouth, Miss Elliot, if it’s dressed up in plain English. One can never know if one is being praised for being good, or simply for being good enough.’ He sliced his eyes towards Madame. ‘What did you think?’
She grinned. ‘Oh, I thought you were magnificent. I really did. A young black Moses, smashing your tablets of stone!’
Hep Elliot coughed, and Laddie threw back his head and laughed. A bark of laughter that showed all his teeth.
It is impossible to be both black and a woman. Did you know that? No one was asking me to give any lectures. They allow some blacks to impress them. Men like Sancho, Equiano . . . Yet I fail to see what was so impressive about them. They wrote, yes. But thousands could, if someone would bother to teach them. And everything they wrote was written for whites. Petitions. Appeals. It’s another of this world’s laws. Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people, as if our purpose here is to change their minds.
All Olaudah Cambridge had done was get himself shipped over when he was too young to be a servant, young enough to be a toy.
Trays of cordial were passed by waiters bearing silver trays. The pair of them stood close together for a long time, in their own private conversation, and I stood in my place near the door, holding my glass, my eyes ticking, like hands on a clock. I was drowning so deeply in my own thoughts that I hardly noticed when Hep Elliot drifted near, looking from me to them. I took a sip of foul-tasting cordial. ‘Oh,’ she said, in her drumbeat voice. ‘Oh. I see. I see. I – Well . . .’ She needled her brows together. ‘Someone should give you a warning, poor girl. Meg’s been spoiled, you see. She’ll only return the affections of those who spoil her in return. And only for a time. See that look he’s giving her? Like a man in church? It’s the way everyone looks at her. That’s the trouble with Meg.’
The trouble wasn’t the way he looked at her. It was the way she looked at him.
On the way back, all she could talk about was how surprised she’d been, how Laddie had carved his own life, made himself his own man, and was to be admired for it. Benham’s old words jumped into my head as I listened to her, and I thought, Where is the sport in chasing something you’re bound to catch?
A hard seed lodged itself in my gut. When she leaned over me at the writing desk later that night, I pulled away.
‘As soon as we leave this room, I vanish. That is all your trick.’ I stood, put us face to face. For the first time I noticed how thin she was becoming. Her head was nothing
but a curve of skin over skull, her jaw hard as the air between us. Her eyes had a hot-wax shine. Was it the drug? I’d watched her drink steadily all afternoon. Laudanum might have been one part of her nerves, that evening, but I was worried that the other part had been Laddie himself. I didn’t know which shamed me more – that I had the thought or that I couldn’t manage to voice it.
I had to clench my hand in my skirts to stop myself reaching for her. I shook my head. ‘I am a fool for wanting what you cannot give.’
‘What is it that you want?’
To live together in the cottage of stone. To sit hand in hand outside and feel the heat on our faces and to walk together at the seaside, arm in arm. To tend each other, sick or well.
But those words dried inside me, like pressed flowers. She reached for my hands, and I jerked away. ‘You’re a pot of water. Cold, hot, cold.’
‘If I am the water, dear Frances, you must be the stove.’ When I made no answer, she pressed her forehead to mine, took hold of my shoulders. ‘I am trying to coax up a laugh out of you.’
I didn’t reply.
After taking her tray down, I came back to find her waiting for me. There was a letter laid on my pallet. One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love. Forgive me. Ritte. I folded it over once, then again, and again, kept it small, folded until it was small and hard, and tucked it into my sleeve. And I carried it there until the night I was arrested and brought here, when the turnkeys took it from me, in the reception room.
MORNING POST, 18 APRIL 1824
The Battle between Lightning and Sullivan
On Saturday last, Laddie Lightning fought Tom Sullivan at Fives Court near Leicester Square. Men of all shapes and sizes crowded the ring, some holding bullish-looking dogs on leashes, while hundreds of others had been forced to climb onto the surrounding roofs, or hang out of the windows overlooking the yard.
The name on everyone’s lips was that of Laddie Lightning, whom the King himself called ‘the best damn pair of blacky fists’ since Bill Richmond. The ring rose out of the centre of the courtyard like a roped-off temple. The Negro pugilist’s many nicknames followed him as he made his way through the crowd: Mungo, Black Devil, Devil’s Fist, Chimney Sweep, and the men, the dogs – even the ropes! – rippled with the excitement stirred up by the greatly anticipated bout.
Set beside the hulking Negro, Sullivan had a prepossessing appearance, his form compact and muscular. But Lightning’s first punch, a left-hander, made a noise like the slap of meat under a butcher’s fist, and he swiftly blocked the counter-punch. Although his second merely glanced off Sullivan’s cheek, it knocked him back onto his heels, and sprayed blood over those who had thought themselves lucky enough to jockey for their ringside perches. Any advantage Sullivan possessed in superior training was dashed to smithereens by Lightning’s sheer brutality. In their third set-to, the two men locked arms and foreheads and snorted at each other like bulls, white wrapped in black – Sullivan clenched tight in the Devil’s Fist! Lightning’s sixth and final punch left Sullivan reeling, penned to the corner, bleeding from his lip and one shut eye, and unable to come up to scratch, whereupon Lightning, on being declared the victor, mounted the ropes with all the energy he had brought into the ring, and entertained the large assembly by roaring out to them, ‘Black I may be, but lily-white in victory!’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Two weeks later, I went to Cheapside on my mistress’s command.
Laddie opened the door himself. His flat was three flights above a bakery on Gant Street. The smell of muscovado and burning sugar seeped out as I drew near to it, reminding me of hot cane juice, of Sukey and her stumps. It was a smell that brought the spittle up, let me tell you ‒ most of you wouldn’t be as mad as you are on sweets if you’d ever caught the smell of a boiling house.
A woman passed me on the stairs, scratched her thigh through her skirts and gave me a hard stare. ‘You looking for Laddie.’ It wasn’t a question.
His room was bare as a stripped bed. The furniture ragged, but scrubbed clean. A soapy smell rose above the ovens’ hot, syrupy breath. A sheet had been pinned over the single window and a thin white candle guttered on top of the table. I saw his black suit slumped off a hook on the door. He narrowed his eyes. ‘What do you want?’
When I said nothing, he went back to studying himself in a sliver of glass, poking his swollen eye, his purple jaw. It seemed I’d caught him in the act of cleaning off a fight. Blood gleamed on the floor. One of his cheeks was pasted with it. He wore nothing but a pair of breeches, wiped his face with his shirt, and spat into the washbasin.
‘I’m bone-tired, little mulatta. I’ll be bedding down in ten minutes, asleep in fifteen. You have five to tell me what you want.’
I made a show of looking around me. ‘Mr African Genius. What would they say if they could see this?’
He raised a brow. ‘Whatever them have to say about it, their concern, not mine.’
I thrust out the letter. ‘I was sent to deliver this. From my mistress.’
‘Which mistress is yours?’ He settled himself on his pallet.
‘You know perfectly well which one,’ I said, and he laughed. I crossed the room, no more than two steps, and set the letter down on his chest. ‘I’m to await your response.’
‘Madame Benham got no footman to deliver her letters?’ He broke the seal, squinted down at the letter and read it aloud.
‘Mr Cambridge,
I have been thinking a great deal about your lecture. Antagonism disguised to amuse. It is a rare talent, to hit dead on the mark, killing off your target before they see the arrow coming. You do for your pleasure what they think you do for theirs.
I am chair of a committee that is organizing a debate sponsored by the Society. The motion is as follows: “What is the purpose of variety of the species of humankind?” Might I interest you in taking part?
Please believe I would be delighted to know you again. Indeed, the entire Benham family would be most gratified, I am sure, to hear how well you have fared since you left us.
In the meantime, I remain, yours faithfully,
Mme Marguerite Benham.’
‘Not a love letter, then. Pity.’ He folded the paper into a kite, sent it tripping across the room. ‘That family. They ever gratified? By anything?’ He laughed again, leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. ‘That woman as crazy as the rest. And somehow I doubt it was my lecture she found fascinating.’
Voices floated in, a woman’s, then a man’s, and bobbed away downstairs, like ash in the wind. I wanted nothing more than to leave that room, but I found myself stuck fast. It could have been the drug, which often weighted my limbs in those days, and made everything thick and slow, including my thoughts. She had been giving me little sips, from her own vial. Laudanum softens everything to the same grey shapes as an English fog. Any feeling – whether hope, anger, or happiness – becomes just a flicker in the dark. It was why I loved it. It leaves nothing sharp except eyes. His peered at me through the haze. ‘No,’ he said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘To the Devil with her. Tell your mistress some niggers happy to make themselves into a bit of sport for bored bluestockings. But not this one.’
I bristled. It wasn’t laudanum that made my feet stick to the floorboards, I thought, but him. Something about him. Watching him was like pricking pins into my own thumb. ‘Is that right?’ I said. ‘There is talk that you were sport for her once upon a time.’
‘Is there? Oh, she won’t like that.’ He licked at his lip, brought his hand up to wipe at the blood. ‘What do you think happens to page boys when they grow up?’
‘You went to Cambridge, that’s what I heard.’
‘They toss you out! With the night-soil. Into the shit bucket. Not even the mercy of a bullet to the head.’
I had a mind to slap him, nick his gut with his little sliver of mirror. ‘Very well. Your answer is no.’
‘
You run around like this for her all the time?’
Blood, like a taper touched to my face. ‘I didn’t come here to quarrel with you.’
‘No. You did what you came for, yet you still here.’
Before I left, I found myself turning, blurting out, ‘You not better than anybody else. White men pay you a sovereign a time to hammer your nose in. You monkey up speeches. White ladies paw at you like some cat.’
He shrugged. ‘Every black in London either a maid or a whore or a prizefighter. If you get the chance to do another thing, any different thing, you take it.’
‘Any different thing?’ I tossed back. The words scraped through my throat. ‘Like that doxy who was leaving here when I was coming up? I can sniff out a man who sells women, you know.’
He laughed, loud and long. He sprang to his feet, and gripped my elbows. It was like being banded by a snake. He brought his face close to mine. His skin was still damp, blood-warm. He smelt like meat. His voice came swift and hard.
‘I have the same nose, little mulatta . . . but mine sniffs out a woman who’s sold herself.’
From the journals of George Benham
(Marked by George Benham as: NOT INTENDED FOR PUBLICATION)
It always suits Meg to have a companion, and what suits Meg always suits everyone else. Her newest one is always at her side. Sitting in my library, attending my wife. For all the acres of difference between them, they are as like as two peas. Stubborn, changeable, quick. Even the girl’s challenging, questioning manner is so very like Marguerite’s when I first met her. They almost begin to look alike. Perhaps a trick of the light. I surprise them in the hallways, heads bent together, and then they fly apart and both stare. She is a distraction for my wife, at least. One can only hope this will temper Meg’s constant need to be a distraction to herself. She blames me for the last one, as she blames me for everything. But what did I do, other than pluck the lad out of his circumstances, give him a life that exceeded them? There’s no crime in that. Nor can a man be expected to continue to employ a footman who once cuddled his own wife on his lap.
