Spurred to life, I ran to the window, expecting to see him lying broken on the cobbles below. But he had landed eight feet down, upon a cast-iron porch over the Carey Street entrance to Tad’s building. He threw his bags onto the street, and jumped down after them. I shouted and he glanced up at me. I glimpsed a blurred white face. Then he snatched up his bags, and ran off in the direction of Chancery Lane.
I wanted to go after him, and in another lifetime I would have done. Yet the drop to the porch and then to the street, was precisely the manner of activity the surgeons had warned me against. I couldn’t risk another fracture, and so I stood there helplessly, watching him disappear into the night.
Struggling to make sense of what I’d just seen, I stumbled to the mantelpiece, groping around until I found a lamp. I lit it with a tinder from my pocket, and it cast a sallow glow around the room. The sitting room appeared much as it had the last time I’d been here. Everything a little shabby, few items of value that hadn’t been pawned, books of philosophy and law, and not much else. Had I disturbed a burglar? If so, then he must have been disappointed. Tad had lived frugally, one of the poorest gentlemen I knew.
Yet as I inspected the room more closely, a new theory formed. The last time I’d been here, the cabinet by the door had bulged with legal documents and correspondence. Now every pigeonhole was empty. Similarly, the wall above Tad’s desk was bare, when before it had been covered with paper. Charts and tables. Maps of Africa and the Caribbean. A diagram of a slave ship, black bodies packed in like herrings in a barrel.
Everything was gone. I stared at the pinpricks in the plaster, the pins scattered over the desk. The place had been searched. All Tad’s documents had been taken.
I thought about the man who’d jumped from the window. He hadn’t been panicked by my appearance. Quite the reverse. His self-possession suggested someone used to breaking and entering. Could it have been Tad’s killer? Or someone else who had an interest in his papers? I thought of my conversation with Amelia, Tad’s fears about the West India lobby. Then I chastised myself for my own foolishness. I was starting to think like Tad. The lobby didn’t go around stealing lawyers’ papers.
And yet someone had.
Why now, tonight, when Tad had already been dead several days? I wondered if that man, or whoever had sent him, hadn’t known Tad’s real name until now? Which meant they must have learned it today, after my visit to Deptford. Which meant either the mayor, Lucius Stokes, or the magistrate, Peregrine Child, must have told them.
I walked into the bedroom. Tad’s bed was unmade, but that was normal enough. His clothes were folded in his armoire, and the drawers of his bedside table were closed. It was hard to tell if the room had been searched or not, and yet if I had disturbed the intruder before he’d got this far, then it was possible that something might remain here that could help explain Tad’s murder.
I looked in the drawers of the bedside table first, but found nothing of any note. I searched the pockets of his clothes, and discovered only coins and dog-eared pamphlets. I even felt beneath his mattress. Nothing.
Everywhere I looked conjured visions of Tad. A cravat tossed on the floor, a claret-encrusted wineglass by the bed, a jar of dead violets on the windowsill. My eye came to rest on the painting of Tad’s mother that had once hung in the set of rooms we’d shared at Wadham College. Carried on the surge of emotion it elicited came a memory of Oxford. I could hear Tad’s voice as though it was earlier that day.
‘Mama keeps all my secrets. She never breathes a word, though she knows I’ll burn in hell.’
My breathing quickened. Harry Corsham will know what to do.
I took the portrait down from the wall. Examining the back of it, I realized I needed a knife, and returned next door.
Tad’s desk drawers contained a jumble of sealing wax, pawnbroker’s tickets, packets of ink powder and broken pens. Something metallic caught my eye amidst the clutter, and I rooted around for the source. Not a knife but a flattened rectangle of beaten silver. It was about the size of a large snuff box and I guessed it was a ticket to provide admittance to some place of fashionable resort. It held my attention because it was plainly worth something and Tad hadn’t pawned it. The number fifty-one was stamped on one side in Roman numerals, surrounded by engraved flowers that might have been lilies. I put it in my pocket, thinking that Amelia could sell it.
Triumphantly, I retrieved an old quill knife from the back of a drawer, and returned to the bedroom with it in hand. I levered the blade into the gap between the frame and the back of the picture, and it didn’t take me long to work it free. In the old days, Tad had kept his radical pamphlets and private papers here. Now the cavity contained only a few scraps of paper. I held them up to the light, and a chill broke over me.
STOP ASKIN QUESTSHUNS. STOP POKIN YUR NOSE INTO OTHER MENS BIZNESS. SHOW YUR SHITTEN FACE AGIN IN DEPTFORD AND YUR DED
I AM WOTCHIN YOU. LEEV TOWN BEFOR I GUT YOU SHITTEN FUCKSTER
The third was the most succinct of all.
GET OWT OF DEPTFORD OR ILE KILL YOU NEGRO LUVVER
Outside on the street some men were arguing. Something about an idiot and a horse. My ears were buzzing again and I struggled to think. Why didn’t you come to me, Tad? If you were in trouble, being threatened – why didn’t you come to me?
At the back of the cavity was a folded wad of old paper, which I had at first taken to be packing to hold the letters in position. Carefully, I unfolded the brittle, stained pages on the bed. They appeared to have been torn from a book, each sheet inscribed with columns of numbers. Next to each number was inked a human skull. Dozens of them. Hundreds. A trickle of icy sweat ran along my ribs. The skulls seemed to march across the page like fat black beetles.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When I arrived home, I went upstairs to the nursery, where I watched Gabriel sleeping. Studying the curve of his lashes against his cheek, Caro’s dark hair and my olive skin, I was gripped by a terrible fear that something would happen to him whilst I was in Deptford. It was irrational, but when I went downstairs, I told Gabriel’s nursemaid that one of the footmen must always accompany them on their excursions to the park. Consoled by this precaution, I asked Pomfret to have Gaston grill me a bone for my supper. Despite everything else that had happened that day, when I went into the drawing room, I found myself thinking about my conversation with Caro.
The Caro in Gainsborough’s portrait had the same oval face as my wife, the same dark blue eyes, and her expression held an exhilaration that enhanced her beauty. Once she had looked at me like that. Yet somehow, very swiftly, everything had gone wrong. I had spent many hours trying to understand it.
If ever I broached the subject, I received unsatisfactory answers. If I persisted, I ended up wishing I had not. The last time we had talked, she had looked at me calmly. ‘Please explain in what duties as a wife I am remiss.’
I had said something about love, and as she turned away, I thought I glimpsed a flash of pain upon her face.
Yet when she turned back, her eyes were clear. ‘We are not lovers in a novel, Harry. I have given you an heir and a fortune. Your interests are my interests. Is that not enough?’
The young viscount who’d come to the house last week was neither the first, nor would be the last. I resented it, but I would not lock her up. To become a tyrant like my father, despised by his wife and son, was the one thing I could imagine that would be worse.
Thus our discontent festered, her unhappiness midwife to mine. Sometimes I caught her looking at me oddly, and I feared she could read my private thoughts. Sometimes I wondered if she hoped that I would die.
I didn’t know how to mend it. I didn’t know if I wanted to try. All I knew was that for me, there could only be Caro.
*
A little later, I went to my bookroom, where I took up inkpot and quill. From memory, I made a drawing of the slave brand. A crescent moon turned on its side, so that the horns pointed south, surmounted by a band with points,
like a crown.
‘Is it not grotesque?’ Tad had said to me once. ‘A human being stamped with his owner’s mark, like a label sewn into a coat?’
Whose mark is this? I stared down at the picture I had made.
On the desk I laid out the things I’d found that day: the abolitionist pamphlet, the opium, the threatening letters, the wad of old paper with the skulls, the silver ticket. Then I thought about the man I’d seen in Tad’s rooms: his blurred white face. Try as I might, I could recall nothing else about him.
STOP ASKIN QUESTSHUNS. STOP POKIN YUR NOSE INTO OTHER MENS BIZNESS. SHOW YUR SHITTEN FACE AGIN IN DEPTFORD AND YUR DED
The script was crude, an uneducated hand. Or an educated hand pretending to be uneducated. The author clearly came from Deptford, and the letters suggested Tad had been conducting some sort of inquiry there. Maybe the wad of old paper was also connected to that inquiry? I took a magnifying glass from my desk to make a closer study.
The list of numbers next to the skulls ranged from one to three hundred and sixteen. It made no more sense to me now than it had done in Tad’s chambers. Some of the numbers had Christian crosses drawn next to them instead of skulls. I counted ten in total. It perplexed me.
On one page I made out a date: 12 Dec 1778 – just over two and a half years earlier. I pored over the rest of the pages, making out more dates in the margins, interspersed between the skulls: 14, 16, 17, 19 December. Five dates, seven days apart. There were other numbers too, which made no sense to me at first. Finally, I made out a single, faded sentence: Latter part of the day very hot weather and calm … The rest of the sentence was rendered illegible by water damage.
Pomfret had been a navy quartermaster during the Austrian wars, and when he brought me my grilled bone, I asked him to take a look. ‘Could these numbers be geographical bearings, do you think?’
Pomfret examined them, one hand clasped to his long chin, so that he resembled a thoughtful puppet. ‘They could be, sir. It looks to me like the journal of a ship’s master.’
‘Do you know what these crosses and skulls mean?’
‘The master draws a cross when a crew member dies at sea. I’ve never seen skulls before. And why so many? Were they transporting animals, perhaps?’
I gazed at the long lines of skulls, my flesh prickling. ‘I rather think that it was slaves.’
‘Poor devils.’ Pomfret shook his head. ‘Not a profitable voyage. What the deuce happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Something bad.’
CHAPTER NINE
We buried Thaddeus Archer two days later.
The church at Bethnal Green smelled of wax and dying flowers and mouldering leather. The vicar’s prayers were long and my bad leg cramped in the pew. I sat next to Amelia. Against her black cambric gown, her complexion held a marble pallor. Her grey eyes glistened, though neither of us wept. I recognized some of our fellow mourners: Lincoln’s Inn lawyers; Oxford men and their wives. They must have read the notice Amelia had placed in yesterday’s newspapers. A number of old women were sitting together, and I guessed they were part of the local congregation.
Only one mourner stood out: a lady, sitting alone, without even a servant. She wore a black lace veil pulled forward, obscuring her face. Her hair was also black, twisted into a simple knot secured with ivory pins. As the vicar said the final prayers, she rose from her pew and I saw that she was unusually small in stature. From the hands that clutched her Bible, I guessed that she was young. Afterwards I looked for her outside, but I couldn’t see her.
I escorted Amelia to the graveside. A featherman with his staff led the way, followed by the pallbearers with the coffin, and half a dozen professional mourners. As we rounded the corner of the church, Amelia gripped my arm a little tighter.
‘Captain Corsham, do look.’
Gathered around the hole that had been dug to receive Tad’s earthly remains were about two dozen Africans. The colour of their skin ran from tawny beige to darkest ebon; their clothes vivid shades of yellow, scarlet and turquoise. The women wore caraco jackets and the men had feathers in their hats. Some carried trumpets or clarinets. A very fat African dressed as a gentleman made a gesture in the air, and the musicians struck up Pope’s funeral hymn. The remaining Africans broke into song.
‘Hark! they whisper; angels say,
Sister spirit, come away!
What is this absorbs me quite –
Steals my senses, shuts my sight,
Drowns my spirit, draws my breath?
Tell me, my soul, can this be death?’
The vicar was speaking rather heatedly to the featherman, and the pair of them approached Amelia. ‘I am so sorry, Mrs Bradstreet,’ the vicar said. ‘I will have the verger disperse them in just a moment.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I believe they must have known my brother. Pray let them finish.’
We stood watching while the Oxford men and the other mourners shifted around us. Tears rolled down the Africans’ faces as they sang. After a time, I realized that the fat gentleman had stopped singing. He was staring at another black man standing some way off from the rest, behind the low wall that bordered the churchyard. This second man was also watching the funeral, a red hat held against his breast. This time I made out the scars on his face very clearly. It was the same African I’d bumped into two nights ago at Lincoln’s Inn.
He and Tad must have known one another, and I wondered if he was connected to the Children of Liberty. I kept glancing at him as the coffin was lowered, and the vicar read more prayers. A pair of gravediggers stepped forward to shovel earth onto the coffin. The first clods struck the lid, and the Africans broke into song once more. I stood watching as Tad was claimed by the hard, baked ground. Amelia swayed on my arm, and when it was over she let out a little sigh.
Afterwards I thanked the vicar and the featherman. They were stony-faced because of the Africans, and quickly left. One of the mourners came to speak to Amelia and I excused myself. I wanted to talk to the young black man with the scars. As I crossed the graveyard towards him, he saw me coming and walked away. By the time I reached the churchyard wall, he was halfway along the street, heading in the direction of the green. I climbed over the wall and hastened after him. He glanced over his shoulder, and quickened his pace. I increased my own, though my infirmity held me back. He turned onto the green, and by the time I reached the spot, he’d vanished into the swirl of shoppers and farmers going about their business. I scanned the crowd, but I had no further sight of him. Disappointed, I walked back towards the church.
When I returned, Amelia was talking to the fat African gentleman. ‘Allow me to name Mr Moses Graham,’ she said. ‘Captain Corsham was one of my brother’s oldest friends. Mr Graham is a painter of watercolours – and when his work permits, he campaigns for the abolition of slavery. That’s how he knew Tad.’
We bowed. Moses Graham’s round, meaty face was elongated at the mouth, with a flat nose, and bushy white eyebrows. His coat and waistcoat were scarlet velvet, trimmed with gold braid; his wig large, heavy and old-fashioned.
Next to him stood a tall, skinny African in a blue martial jacket. ‘Ephraim Proudlock,’ Graham introduced him. ‘My assistant in matters of art and abolition.’ His voice was rich, the English inflected only by a slight lisp.
Proudlock bowed. His hair was plaited into many tiny braids, tied back in a queue with a yellow ribbon.
‘Mr Graham was just telling me that he has written a book about his experiences,’ Amelia said. ‘He hopes his account will change people’s minds about slavery.’
‘I should be glad to read it,’ I said. ‘Were you a slave yourself, sir?’
‘Indeed, I was.’ Graham indicated the other Africans with a sweep of his pale palm. ‘Many of the men and women here owe their freedom to Mr Archer. They have come to give thanks to the Lord in his memory.’
I knew Tad had often represented black clients. Nine years ago, a slave named James Somerset had sued his owner in the Lo
ndon courts, and the Lord Chief Justice had reluctantly ruled slavery to be incompatible with Magna Carta. The case had set a precedent, and some claimed slavery was now illegal on English soil. In truth it wasn’t as simple as that – the law was a muddle – but slaves could resort to the courts to prevent their removal by force to the Caribbean. As a consequence, most blacks in England were now paid servants. Only in the slave-trading ports – Bristol, Liverpool, Deptford – did Englishmen still own slaves in significant numbers. People said the Africans in such places often didn’t understand that the law could help them, nor that lawyers like Tad would represent them pro bono. Little wonder they were confused. English liberties might have prevailed upon English shores, but Magna Carta made no prescription against hypocrisy. The judge’s ruling did not apply to our Caribbean colonies, where the plantations were dependent upon slave labour.
‘Mr Graham, do you know of an abolitionist society named the Children of Liberty?’ I asked.
‘I have heard of them, though I wish that I had not. They do more harm than good to the cause of abolition.’
His reply confused me. ‘Don’t they help runaway slaves?’
‘They do, but their methods are often confrontational, sometimes violent. Last year they helped a slave escape from a house in Blackheath, and a footman who tried to stop them was beaten badly. Mr Archer was one of the lawyers they used to represent the slaves they assisted.’
‘Do you know where I might find them?’
‘I regret that I cannot help you. They operate in secrecy, you see. Their activities have made them many enemies amongst the slavers, and they fear reprisals. For these reasons, I would advise against seeking them out.’
Despite Moses Graham’s warning, I decided that when I returned to London I would try to find them. ‘That man in the red hat with the scars. I saw you looking at him just now. Who is he?’
Blood & Sugar Page 5
