by S. I. Martin
‘Buckram …?’ He touched the tired man’s shirt – it felt like iron, so stiffened was it with dried blood – he touched the wild grey hair, then he looked into those steady, demented eyes and knew for sure. ‘The Bridewell?’
Buckram nodded. ‘Where else?’ He heard his whispered name echo round the room. More faces, some strange, pressed in on him. People stroked him, held him gently by his elbows and cooed, while he just stood there stinking the place out and mumbling graceful insincerities to his old mates.
A pint of Bene Carlo wine appeared in his hands.
‘We thought you dead. Some said you were fitted out for sea.’ Georgie looked him up and down. ‘What happened to you?’
The ex-convict fixed the alehouse with a stare as vicious and impartial as birdshot. ‘Don’t you know?’
For all of one second Georgie George smiled his weakest smile, with hatred. Then suddenly turning aside and raising his drink, the beggar king cried, ‘To our old friend, Buckram, back from Bridewell. Three cheers, hip, hip …!’ For some reason black people usually found it hard to respond appropriately to this call but tonight duty diluted their reservations. They hoisted Buckram on their shoulders and carried him across the pub to his old chair in the corner.
He drank long and deep of his wine, finishing the measure in one unbroken swallow. He smacked his lips. ‘I needed that. Feels good, so good to be free again.’
‘Free?’ said Georgie. ‘Free? We’re all in prison here, Buckie. You’re just out of gaol.’ Georgie raised his beaker. ‘But don’t forget – you’re still in the exercise yard. Welcome home, boy. Welcome home.’
Against his better judgement, Buckram accepted the sentiments. He desperately wanted to relax, was trying his best to, but the only comforts he could glean from his situation were the facts that he was as safe as he ever could be from physical injury and that he was once more in the company of a black person who spoke his kind of English: American English. Shame that person was Georgie George though.
Georgie was beckoning someone to join them. Henry Prince, trying to hide his irritation at having been summoned over with so little subtlety, glided over and slapped Buckram on the back, making him wince. The near giant carried a velvet folder under his arm.
‘Well, hello again, soldier. What brings you back to the Charioteer?’ he groaned.
‘Buckie’s been away on His Majesty’s Service,’ Georgie chirped. ‘But he’s back to his old ground now. Back to stay.’ Buckram sat motionless, staring into his empty jar, daring himself to out-dream yet another living nightmare.
‘It’s funny,’ Georgie continued, ‘we were talking about you not so long ago, me and Henry.’
The once-famous boxer just scratched his head and looked away across the room.
‘Henry’s become a man about town, he’s famous now. His money-making’s moved from his knuckles to his fingertips. Our Henry is an author. Toast of London. In great demand. He’s outsold Sancho. Having some funny distribution problems though over the Court End. Ain’t that right, Hen?’
Henry Prince, Buckram now saw, was exhausted from some private sadness. Forcing himself to smile, Henry replied, ‘Whatever you say, George. Whatever you say.’
‘Hmmm. Anyway it’s good to see a black man get his bread any way he can. And a brother like Henry, you know …’ Georgie jerked his stool round to address Buckram and speak away from the subject, ‘… he’s the kind of man who’d rather need somebody in help, if you follow. Give him two friends and he’ll make his own crowd. He’s always had a lot to give. He just lacks the right people to give to. True or not, Mr Prince?’
From behind the beggar king’s back Henry produced a sensational sarcastic grunt of assent.
‘Hear him?’ Georgie nodded swiftly to where Henry sat. ‘All that work’s getting to him.’
Buckram grabbed Georgie’s sleeve and tugged him closer, out of Henry’s earshot.
‘George,’ he asked, ‘what’s really going on here?’
‘Our friend here has had family worries. Lost his wife, y’know. You remember her, don’t you?’
Buckram summoned up a vague image of Deirdre: serious, frantic and blonde. Too afraid to walk the streets with her husband, she spent most of her time pacing their room in Drury Lane.
‘Left this life by her own fair hand,’ Georgie added. ‘Took the child with her as well. Vitriol. Straight down the throat.’ He went on, ‘Friend Henry here needs a rest, so that’s why I mentioned that a sharp mover, an old street hand, someone like you, say, could help him out with the selling and things, y’know? Easy work. Clean money.’
Henry Prince scratched his head and looked sheepishly at Georgie.
‘Hen,’ Georgie tapped him on the cuff, ‘show him what you do.’
Henry opened the folder and produced a slim package wrapped in brown paper and sealed with red wax. He broke the seal and handed Buckram a thin, rough-papered, grey pamphlet. Georgie spelled out the florid lettering on the cover for him: Aethiopian Secret Papers.
Buckram turned the page and saw an impressively rendered drawing of a white man enjoying sexual congress with a black woman who looked suspiciously like Angola Molly. He flicked through ten more pages of similar material, featuring the same model with different men, combinations of men and inanimate objects. Buckram nodded approvingly at a picture of her wielding a bamboo cane over the head of an old white man chained to a post in a gloomy cellar.
Georgie explained the tiny print crammed into the last five pages, ‘These are all the girls, see? Their names and addresses here, their skills just underneath, and over on this side their fees.’
‘So what’s the problem, Georgie?’ said Buckram. ‘Don’t tell me you can’t sell enough of these?’
‘Well, in the past we’ve managed to outsell Harris’s List and all the others … but now you’ve got all kinds coming over here, setting up in business: Libyan women, Moluccan women, Lascars and Chinese, to say nothing of the French and Swedes. It’s not so easy.
‘And on top of that there’s the problem of the law, Buckie. It’s not like the old days when a black man could just slip a Charlie a pound or two and they’d leave you alone to mind your business. No, nowadays they’ll take you down Bow Street for a drubbing right after they’ve robbed you. So you can see, we have a situation.’ He held his hands open in front of Buckram. ‘You can help us.’
‘NO!’ Buckram flung the papers to the table and rose up before Georgie, trembling with rage. ‘I’ve had enough of your lies and schemes. All I want from you is what you owe me for two years in that … that …’
Georgie simply raised his eyebrows in the direction of Henry. The boxer-turned-illustrator took Buckram by the shoulders and settled him back in his chair.
‘I just want what’s mine, Georgie, with interest. I’m a master horseman, a groom, an ostler. If you hadn’t asked me to join you in …’
‘Asked? Buckie, when did I ever ask you or anyone for anything? I didn’t ask you to join me. That, like this,’ he pointed at the papers in the folder, ‘was an invitation. And in any case, d’you think there’s a single white man out there who’ll take on a black horseman? What can I say? I’m always here if you need to discuss any money matters.’
Georgie folded his arms and shot a smirking glance at the company. Henry Prince eased a charcoal stick from his waistcoat and started to sketch the beggar king in his new position.
A barrage of dry cackles erupted from the bar. Through the dim, exhausted air, Buckram saw Old Morris, another soldier from the American War, staggering drunkenly from drinker to drinker. He was crossing himself profusely and pointing at Buckram and Georgie sitting together. He reeled his fleshy bulk to their table, drew up his shoulders and gave a wobbly salute.
‘All present and correct, I see.’ He grinned wildly.
‘Greetings, Morris,’ said Buckram. ‘Long time.’
‘I see prison taught you nothing about friendship, Buckie.’ Morris glared openly at George. ‘He’s got
you again, eh?’ He drew a fat forefinger across one of his chins and made a croaking sound.
‘Look to yourself, Buckram, look to yourself, brother.’ Old Morris crossed himself one more time then his eyes glazed over and he toppled backwards onto the floor and lay there, breathing long and shallow.
‘Don’t mind him,’ said Georgie, struggling to suppress his contempt. ‘God alone knows what drags him here night after night. We all hate him. He’s just a slave.’
‘He’s still one of us.’ Closer to a question than a statement.
‘Look at us!’ Georgie flung a hand towards the crowd. ‘Most of us were slaves at one time or another. But him …’ he snorted. ‘He’s a slave reborn. A slave of his own making.’
Lost for words, Buckram conceded the point. That well-fed drunkard, whom people were now stepping over as if he was a misplaced sack of gravel, had once been one of them. Like Buckram, Henry, William and Neville, like hundreds of others. Old Morris had been born and raised in America as some white man’s property, in his case a Pennsylvania armourer’s. At the outbreak of war in the colonies, he like they had escaped bondage to enlist in the British Army and take up arms against his rebel masters. Morris had been a war hero – a spy behind enemy lines and a first-class man-at-arms. But the British lost and whole platoons of Black Loyalists fled with them. They had all been promised their freedom as a condition of their service and they had been promised pensions. But as they boarded the troop-ships that would take them to exile in London none of the black fighters could have imagined the so-called freedom to which they would be doomed.
In no time at all, the streets of London were flooded with an army of fresh black beggars, with bizarre accents and rotting uniforms. Instead of begging down the Court End or along the Strand, Morris chose to rattle his cup in Lincoln’s Inn Fields at the door of the Committee for the Settlement of American Claims. He had done this for eight months, day and night, and as a result, he became the only American black Buckram knew of who’d received any part of his pension. Money, however, was not the cure for Morris’s ailment. He couldn’t rest until he had found work in his profession as a gunsmith. It was a fool’s dream. For decades blacks had been barred from both apprenticeships and any paid work within a London guild. Morris, though, had managed to keep in contact with his old commanding officer, and on his commendation finally secured a position in the cannon-boring shed of Grice and Co., in Lower Marsh. In time it transpired that not only was he an unpaid worker but that he had willingly sold himself to the proprietor in perpetuity for fifty guineas in exchange for a roof over his head, three meals a day and the opportunity to design newer, deadlier firearms.
At the end of the day, Buckram decided, he wasn’t in a position to judge. At least Old Morris didn’t have to fear for his life, day in day out. The same couldn’t be said of Quintus Greene, the legless veteran now wheeling himself across the floor on a trolley propelled by wooden blocks, and it couldn’t be said of Georgie or of Buckram himself. He paused a while to reflect on how much he could get for himself on the open market.
Georgie nudged him. ‘Ah, look,’ he said. ‘Here comes your dinner. It’s on the house.’
A barmaid slid a plate of boiled mutton and barley across his table. Buckram didn’t know her but he tried to feel something for her as she sashayed back to the bar.
The food was hot and tasty and he chewed softly with broken teeth.
‘Where’s William tonight?’
‘We don’t see so much of him these days. Not in Brydges Street. Most nights he’ll be at that alehouse in Rose Street. I forget the name. He has a place in one of the upstairs rooms there. But he’s still the same old William; throwing his money around, trying to dice his way to a fortune.’
‘And Neville?’
Georgie grimaced and spat on the floor. ‘Pastor Neville! He’s still around. Sweeps out the churchyard at St Giles. Best place for him. Lives in his own little world. So, tell me, when did you get out?’
‘Yesterday afternoon. Stayed at the Sickhouse last night. Never again.’
‘Too true. They’re killing black people in that place, y’know. If you get better in there, they’ll sell you off to some sea captain bound for America. You’ll end up back in chains. You still have your army papers on you?’
‘Somewhere. With Neville, I hope.’
‘Good, well get yourself off to Lisson Grove tomorrow morning. If you don’t want to work with us, they’re giving out money to black beggars and all kinds now at the sign of the Yorkshire Stingo.’
Buckram tried to imagine what a Yorkshire Stingo looked like.
‘Sixpence, every day. But get there early, before the rush. Or, if you’re fast you can call over at the White Raven, Mile End in the morning; they’re doing the same thing there too, then you can make it to the Stingo by the afternoon.’
‘Sixpence, eh?’ Buckram stroked his chin, wary as he always was when he could see no reason for white men’s generosity.
A Jamaican barber, whose name Buckram had forgotten, brought over another measure of wine and a clay pipe packed with hemp leaves. With some ceremony Buckram tipped a burning candle to the bowl and sucked hard. He blew a column of pungent fumes over the dark, adze-chipped beams in the ceiling. He puffed slowly, letting the sharp, rich smoke fill his lungs, waiting for it to fine-tune his settling thoughts. Georgie almost didn’t snatch the pipe from him and say, ‘You’re not ready for this yet. Give it some time. A few days.’ The beggar king tapped Buckram’s tankard with the stem and said, ‘Drink now.’
Suddenly there was a firm hand at his shoulder and a firmer one on his forearm preventing him from lifting the wine. After two years in gaol Buckram knew better than to turn too quickly. He knew how to be still. He glanced at Georgie who was pulling on the pipe and scowling up at the newcomer.
‘Wine is a mocker,’ said the stranger. ‘Strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.’
‘Pastor Neville!’ shouted Buckram and jumped up to embrace his old comrade-in-arms from Carolina.
‘How did you know where to find me? I’ve just come from Ivy Street. Who told you I was out?’
‘Out?’ He looked at the mess his mate had become. ‘So it’s true, then. It was the House of Correction. Cold Bath Fields?’ Neville shivered, savouring that perfect name for gaol.
‘No, Bridewell,’ Buckram corrected him.
Neville made a sound between a grunt and a groan. ‘I followed you from Broad Street. I thought it was you, but I couldn’t believe my eyes. So I had to enter this … this … sink of iniquity, in my quest for the truth.’
Of all the old campaigners now living in London, Neville Franklin was the only one who had retained his dignity. But he was mad. He still wore his Royal Ethiopian Regiment uniform with the motto ‘Liberty to Slaves’ stitched across the shoulders. He still spoke as if he’d swallowed the Bible. Word for word.
He was a tall gloomy man in his late thirties. When not speaking the Bible, Neville muttered in tongues and focused on infinity. He glowered at the debauchees in the tavern one by one: whore, catamite, footpad.
The two men in women’s clothing pulled scented handkerchiefs from their bosoms and waved them at him.
‘Buckram,’ he muttered, his voice growing to a bellow, ‘what place is this! Behold these sons of Sodom, flaunting themselves in Satan’s raiments.’ Neville turned to address the crowd while pointing at the transvestites. ‘I have espied such as these taking the walk from Clare Market to the Piazza, and seeking to entice unwary youth unto the like corruption. Verily, the Lord shall smite thee in thy gin-soaked citadels as he did smite the Cities of the Plain. Thrice accursed art thou, Seed of Bab …’
‘Oi,’ hollered Offaly Michael from the other side of the room. ‘None of your sermons in here. I remember you now. We’ve had trouble with you before. Either drink or get out. He with you, George?’
Reluctantly, Georgie spread his arms to include Buckram and Henry. ‘He’s with us.’
‘Neville,’ Buckram implored. ‘Please be seated.’
The good Christian remained standing.
‘Oooh! This is what I call a real welcome home, Buckie boy,’ sneered Georgie. ‘Us old soldiers have to stick together.’
‘You, an old soldier?’ Pastor Neville sucked his teeth. ‘You fight only for yourself, Georgie George. We all know how you came to be here.’
‘What is this now, preacher? Are you calling me a liar?’
Unable to make up with abuse what he lacked in wit, Neville floundered in the refuge of scripture, ‘The guilty fleeth where none pursueth. Indeed, I am calling you a liar. You have borne false witness. And more.’
From nowhere, a service bayonet appeared in Georgie’s right hand. It weaved and bobbed in front of Neville’s expressionless face. The crowd parted, giving Georgie more room in which to commit murder.
In a calm, loud voice Neville said, ‘You will put down that weapon, Mr George. Violence covereth the mouth of the wicked. My friend Buckram and I will now hold counsel together. Alone.’
Slowly, deliberately, Georgie reached out with the bayonet and let its heavy point rest on Neville’s cheek, just beneath his eye.
‘Fool,’ he said, and slid the blade harmlessly, skilfully, down the preacher’s stubble. He passed the unfinished pipe back to Buckram and withdrew with Henry to the bar.
‘Of all places,’ said Neville as he took Georgie’s vacated seat, ‘you had to come here. To sit with him after what he did to you.’ Neville twitched and fidgeted on the stool, as uncomfortable as a genie trapped in a whisky jar.
‘Neville, Georgie is … Georgie. What he did was wrong. You are a Christian. You should find it in yourself to forgive him.’ Buckram re-lit the pipe.
‘No, never. Georgie George doesn’t make mistakes.’
Neville was right, of course. Georgie never made mistakes. And everyone did know how he came to be in London.
Three years before they’d all been stuck in the port of New York, all desperate men, looking for a way out of the American States. His Majesty’s Government had promised safe passage to Jamaica, Nova Scotia or Britain to any black man who could prove he’d served with the Loyalist forces, and it soon became apparent that not everyone who wanted to leave would be able to do so. New York, the last British stronghold, was teeming with thousands of Black Pioneers, Royal Ethiopians and other black militiamen, all searching for their old commanding officers, or any British official, to vouch for their service records.