‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ It was a lie. I knew it was.
Nathaniel rose from the bed and came towards me. Conscious of his nakedness, I averted my eyes. He held out a hand. ‘Come, sir, let’s get you back to bed.’
I knocked his hand away, as a new realization hit me. ‘Did you come here with him? With Archer? Were you looking for him that night you found his body?’
‘Aye, he came here several times. Archer had a lot of scruples, sir, not like you. I wanted him, but he said I was too young. But he talked to me – gave me counsel. It’s a lonely path we tread, dangerous too.’
‘This has nothing to do with me. Do you hear?’
Fumbling, going too fast, I buttoned my shirt. Nathaniel walked to the table, still naked, and lit the lamp. ‘You’re leaving? That’s a shame. Just one thing before you go. Last night you promised me money. I wouldn’t ask, but times are hard.’
I didn’t believe him, but I reached for my purse, scattering some coins on the table to be rid of him.
He examined them doubtfully. ‘That’s not quite what I meant, sir. I don’t want to go slaving, see. Nobody does, not really, but don’t underestimate the measure of my distaste for it. I need two hundred pounds to get the inn out from under, and then another hundred to get my apprenticeship back.’
Blackmail. Tad had told me about it long ago. The predators who enticed their fellow mollies into acts of depravation, then threatened to go to the authorities unless they paid up. Nathaniel had made no threats yet, but I knew they’d follow if I refused. I remembered the merchant in the churchyard. Nathaniel hadn’t been the victim of that piece, as I’d presumed.
‘Think on it as a scholarship,’ Nathaniel said. ‘The Corsham Endowment.’
‘You’re lying. Nothing happened between us.’
Yet I couldn’t prove it – and if Nathaniel made a complaint, I didn’t imagine Deptford justice would be kind to me. Nor would Cavill-Lawrence lift another finger to protect me.
Nathaniel’s smile vanished. ‘I remember it differently, sir. I think I know who the mayor and the magistrate will believe.’
I gazed at him helplessly. ‘I don’t have three hundred pounds.’
‘I know you don’t, sir. Not here anyway.’
I remembered that half-dream, him going through my bags. He had planned this.
‘I’ve asked around, sir. You’re a wealthy man, I hear. Your wife’s father owned a bank. How would she take the news of our little night here?’
Tell him anything. Just get out of here. ‘I’ll get your money, but I need to return to London first.’ I pulled on my coat and boots, buckled my sword.
Nathaniel nodded. ‘I know you will, sir. I’ll be waiting. Not too long, mind, else I’ll have to come and find you.’
I opened the office door, and that foul, carrion smell hit me once again. I turned back. ‘Did you extort money from him too? From Archer?’
His face was watchful, a new hardness to his soft green eyes. ‘Archer gave me a little blunt because he pitied me going slaving, but his pockets weren’t deep like yours. Not worth the trouble. It was him who put this idea into my head, as it happens. He warned me to be careful of –’ he paused, and smiled – ‘I suppose he warned me to be careful of men like me.’
*
My heart raced, and my skin crawled. As I walked up to Deptford Broadway, I thought of the boy undressing me, touching me. Pausing by the roadside, I retched up the little I’d eaten. I needed a clear head to think, and I threw Brabazon’s tincture into the fields.
Even in my panicked state, the questions still gnawed at me. Not Frank Drake. Not Peregrine Child. Then who? By the time I reached the Broadway, I was no nearer any answers.
A few dedicated patrons were still drinking in the taproom of the coaching inn. One of them rose to meet me. Scipio. His eyes travelled over my bruises, and his hands twisted the brim of his hat.
‘Mr Stokes is sending Cinnamon to his plantations in Bermuda. She needs your help.’
I sat down before I fell down, regarding him coldly. As far as I was concerned, this was on him.
‘He got the truth out of Cinnamon last night,’ Scipio said. ‘I couldn’t prevent it, though I tried. He says he can no longer trust her. She will die there. I know she will. I cannot have that on my conscience too.’
‘Had you let her go when you had the chance, she would be free and in London.’
‘I know.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Please help her, Captain Corsham. I would go myself, only I don’t believe the magistrate will give me an injunction.’
‘I doubt Child will give me one either.’
‘She’s in Woolwich, not Deptford. That’s under the jurisdiction of the Greenwich magistrate. No Guineamen were sailing to Bermuda from Deptford until next week, and Stokes wanted her gone. He’s like that when he makes a decision. The ship is called The Princess Charlotte. She weighs anchor at six this morning. That’s less than two hours.’
If I did this, there would be no hiding my involvement. It would be done in the public gaze, with all the attendant scandal. Alternatively, it could be a trap. ‘I saw you in Greenwich,’ I said. ‘You were talking to Nicholas Cavill-Lawrence.’
His voice rose with urgency. ‘What has that to do with anything?’
‘I’d like to know what you discussed.’
‘Just business. Stokes’s plans for the new West India dock.’
‘You expect me to believe that Stokes would send his secretary to such a meeting?’
Scipio pressed his fingers to his temples. ‘It was not a meeting Stokes wished to attend himself. Little discussion took place, certain assurances were given. Mr Cavill-Lawrence went away a happy man.’
He meant a bribe. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. As Under-Secretary of State for War, charged with protection of the Caribbean colonies, Cavill-Lawrence would doubtless be involved in the key discussions over the siting of the new dock. Corruption was rife across Whitehall, even within the Cabinet. It didn’t come as any great surprise that Cavill-Lawrence was lining his pockets.
‘So Stokes will get his dock?’
‘Perhaps. I imagine the Wapping men have also been busy.’
I closed my eyes to stop the room from spinning. Scipio gave a grunt of impatience. ‘You haven’t much time.’
I could sense his desperation. In how many directions he’d been pulled. His desire to build a normal life for himself here in Deptford. Forced to act as gaoler to Cinnamon, Abraham, and Stokes’s other slaves. His affinity to his brother Africans that he’d tried so hard to suppress. Now something in him seemed to have broken. Part of me pitied him. Part of me was determined to use his torment to my advantage.
‘Why did you and Peregrine Child search Archer’s room the morning his body was found? Were you looking for the syndicate’s contracts that were stolen from John Monday?’
He made a sweeping gesture. ‘We can talk about this later.’
‘I’m not going anywhere until you’ve answered my questions, so you’d better be quick.’
‘Yes, Mr Stokes ordered us to go there.’
‘It needed two of you?’
‘One to watch the other. Those contracts were important to Stokes. I don’t know why.’
‘Did you find them?’
He hesitated. ‘Yes. Archer had concealed them behind the washstand. It was Child who found them. He gave them to Mr Stokes.’
So the mayor had had the contracts all along. Yet he hadn’t returned them to John Monday, nor given them to Napier Smith and the West India lobby. A lot of things were falling into place. I remembered my assailants last night, my bafflement that they hadn’t killed me. Only one explanation made sense.
‘The help you gave me – with Jamaica Mary, asking around about Drake, talking things through. You were doing it on Stokes’s orders, weren’t you?’
His hands bunched into fists, and he stared at them. I didn’t care about his shame, I wanted to know.
‘
Well?’
‘Stokes thought the murders were a threat to his dock, to Deptford’s reputation. He wanted the killer caught, but he needed to do so covertly, without the West India lobby finding out. That’s why he told me to help you. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you.’
That might have been what Stokes had told Scipio, but I believed his motives to be somewhat more complicated. ‘As it happens, I don’t think that’s true, but let’s not worry about that now. Why did Stokes go to John Monday’s house the night Archer was killed?’
‘I don’t know. I swear it. I didn’t go with him. Please, Captain Corsham, I have answered your questions. Will you help her?’
Of course I was going to help her. It would probably be the last nail in the coffin of my political ambitions. Caro would think I’d lost my mind. Yet I was going to get Cinnamon off that boat, or die trying. There was one other thing I wanted to ask Scipio, but it could wait. As he said, I didn’t have much time.
PART FIVE
3–7 JULY 1781
The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed along with the body, but something of it remains, which is eternal.
V. Of Man’s Freedom or The Power of the Understanding, Ethics, Baruch Spinoza
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The ride to Greenwich felt as though I was taking a beating all over again. The pain acted as a spur to drive me on. I couldn’t save Tad or Proudlock or the drowned slaves or Amelia, but I could save Cinnamon. In that moment, everything else had ceased to matter.
Greenwich turned from grey to pink to gold as the sun rose higher in the sky. It slid over me, then onwards towards London. We rode at a gallop. Zephyrus’s flanks were already soaked in sweat. I urged him on.
I tied Zephyrus up at the Navy Hospital, where I’d walked with Jeremiah Robertson only two days ago. Few people were about at that hour, but eventually I found someone who could give me directions to the magistrate’s house. He lived in a street of new townhouses bordering the park. I hammered on his door for several minutes before a manservant appeared. He took one look at my face. ‘If you’re here to report an assault, sir, come to the courthouse after ten.’
He made to close the door, but I jammed my foot in the gap. Speaking in a tone that brooked no refusal, I told him to send for his master.
It took half an hour for the magistrate to receive me.
His face and hands were covered in liver spots, and his ginger eyebrows drew together, as I related my request. ‘You got me out of bed for a Negress slave?’
‘The ship sails in an hour.’ My watch was in my hand. ‘Less.’
‘And you’re quite sure the girl doesn’t want to go?’
‘She told me so herself several times.’
Sighing deeply, he took a sheet of parchment from his desk and drew up his inkwell. He sat scribbling, while I paced the room. He asked me a few particulars, and then I had to endure another wait while he sent for his clerk to witness the document. By the time I left, clutching the injunction, I had less than twenty minutes before the ship sailed.
We took the road east at a gallop, each stride sending a stabbing spasm through my innards. It was high tide and the river broadened as we rode. By the time we clattered into Woolwich, ten minutes later, the north bank was nearly a mile distant.
Woolwich was a similar river port to Deptford, though its royal connections lent it an air of respectability the latter lacked. I asked a passing collier for the harbour master’s residence, and was directed to a row of little houses near the clockhouse. The harbour bristled with masts, the river reflecting the sky and the gathering clouds. Seagulls soared above, and I tasted salt. The harbour master was awake, though no more pleased to see me than the magistrate. A small plump man with round owlish eyes, he read my injunction impatiently on his doorstep.
‘You’re too late,’ he said, handing it back. ‘The Princess Charlotte has already sailed. You missed her by nearly an hour.’
Despair and confusion assailed me. ‘But I still have five minutes.’
‘The ship due to sail at five wasn’t ready. The Charlotte took her place in the queue.’
I knew how congested the river could get – how ships queued and captains bribed their way to better sailing times. ‘How far will she have got by now?’
The harbour master held a finger to the breeze. ‘Halfway to Thurrock, I would think. If you’re lucky she’ll be held up at Erith Reach.’ He peered at me. ‘You know that’s one of Napier Smith’s ships? I wouldn’t cross the Chairman of the West India lobby for all the sugar in Jamaica.’
Scipio had neglected to tell me that. Perhaps he’d thought I wouldn’t go after her if I knew. Yet it caused me only a moment’s hesitation. A woman’s freedom, perhaps her very life, hung in the balance.
The river road grew rougher the further I rode from London. Through Charlton and Plumstead, across the Plumstead Marshes. Zephyrus was starting to tire, and I knew if I didn’t catch The Princess Charlotte at Erith, he could never maintain this pace all the way to Tilbury. Beyond there the estuary widened dramatically, and I’d never catch her.
The river swept south again, cutting through the marshes. I felt a surge of exhilaration, as I glimpsed a queue of ships lying at anchor in Erith Reach. A merchantman was navigating the bend in the river, her sails plump as pillows, pennants fluttering.
Erith was a two-street town, perched between water and marsh. Fat river flies and mosquitos swarmed around us. The harbour was barely worthy of the name: a few boatyards scattered over a gravelly patch of shore. A man was scrubbing down a painted sailing boat, and as I dismounted, I called out to him. ‘Have you seen The Princess Charlotte go past?’
He didn’t look up. ‘Can’t say I have.’
I scanned the ships on the river: Guineamen and Indiamen, a few brigs and pinnaces, looking like toys in the wake of the larger vessels. I couldn’t read their names at this distance, and I thrust a handful of coin in the man’s face. ‘Can you take me out to them? I need to intercept one of the Guineamen.’
He raised his head to study me, then examined my money with a scholar’s solemnity. ‘I can do that.’
We sailed against the wind, tacking north, then south. It took us about fifteen minutes to draw alongside the nearest merchantman. Nassau was her name. In size she outstripped even the Guineamen I’d seen in Deptford dock. Crew swarmed over her rigging, and I called up to them.
‘The Princess Charlotte.’ The wind snatched my words away, and I repeated them several times. Eventually one of the men understood. ‘She’s four ships down, I think.’
Relief overwhelmed me. A cry went up on deck: ‘Raise anchor.’
‘Better get out of the way,’ the sailor shouted down. ‘Or you’ll be swamped.’
The swell rocked us violently. My boatman swore, but he kept us righted. As we tacked north again, I shaded my eyes. I could see her now. A Guineaman with a figurehead of a fair-haired woman wearing a crown. A more pleasing omen than The Dark Angel, yet her purpose was the same, and as we pulled nearer, I caught the familiar stench of corruption.
We drew alongside her, and again I called up to the sailors climbing the rigging. ‘I have a document for your captain, an order from a magistrate. Fetch him, please!’
A man, an officer from the look of his attire, appeared at the side, frowning down at me. ‘Who the devil are you?’
‘My name is Captain Henry Corsham. This ship carries disputed property. Fetch your captain now, sir. I need to board you.’
The face disappeared, only to return a minute later together with a man wearing a black naval coat and a gold-trimmed bicorne. ‘I am Captain Blake. What do you want?’
Our craft lurched up on an eddy, turning my stomach to soup. I shouted over the wind and the waves. ‘The slave girl you have on board. You are to surrender her to my care. I have an injunction to that effect signed by the Greenwich magistrate.’
‘You are mistaken, sir. I spoke to the girl’s owner myself.’
‘When the c
ourts uphold her claim to freedom, she’ll have no owner. While her status is under dispute, she is not to be removed from English soil. If you refuse to let me have her, you’ll be in contempt of court. This man here is my witness.’
My riverman, pleased to be the centre of attention, grinned gummily.
I could see the captain calculating. His pride versus a world of trouble for himself. In the end, convenience got the better part of valour. He made a signal with his hand, and a rope ladder dropped down. I instructed the boatman to wait, and steadying myself against the swell, began to climb it. When I reached the top, I ignored the hostile faces I found there.
‘Where is she?’
The captain studied my injunction, and then nodded to one of his men. ‘Take us down.’
The hatch in the deck was much like the one on board The Dark Angel. We descended the ladder, and the crewman paused to light a lantern. The hold was packed with shipping crates, a long aisle running between them. Guns, beads and liquor, I presumed, remembering Monday’s lecture in the warehouse.
‘When we reach Tilbury, I intend to send a message to Napier Smith,’ the captain informed me. ‘He’ll know of this by tonight, I assure you.’
‘Just take me to her.’
We were nearing the end of the hold. The sailor turned to shine his light upon a gap in the stacks of crates. Cinnamon lay there, naked, chained like an animal. She put up her hands to shield her face, and I saw bruises on her wrists, breasts and thighs.
I knelt on the boards beside her. ‘It is I, Captain Corsham. You’ll soon be free. I’m taking you to London.’
I had to repeat this twice before she seemed to understand. She put out a hand to touch my face, staring at me as if I was an apparition.
The captain ordered her chains unlocked, and I took off my coat to cover her. I lifted her and carried her bodily from that place. She didn’t say a word, even when we were safely ensconced in the sailing boat. She only clung to me like flotsam in a storm.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Blood & Sugar Page 28
