by S. I. Martin
And every Wednesday at Fraunces’s Tavern, from 10 in the morning till 2 in the afternoon they would assemble to have their ‘General Birch Certificates’ examined by stony-faced army clerks. The rumour went that the man now known as Georgie George, a footman in the service of a wealthy Virginia planter, had escaped with a sackful of his master’s plate, jewels and quite a sum of money.
By the time he arrived in New York delegations of rebel masters were also gathering in the town to petition General Carleton, the commander-in-chief, for the return of their human property. In no time slave-catchers were abroad on the streets of the city. Old black campaigners were seized in the streets or dragged from their beds.
According to the story, the original Georgie George was an army storekeeper in the Black Pioneers who was murdered by the Virginia runaway who took his name and his certificate.
At the time Buckram and Neville were hiding with William Supple and his family in a shop cellar near Bowling Green. William had trekked from Carolina with his wife Mary and their children to seek passage on a ship, any ship, leaving for British territory. Like Buckram and Neville, William’s papers were in order; the three men spent their days and nights trying to figure how best to save his family from a return to bondage. But nothing could be done to save them. Every ship leaving the harbour was full. There were only places for officials, certified soldiers and horses. William insisted that he’d get them to London somehow, but Mary had begun to despair. She spoke of cutting their losses and fleeing overland to the free black towns of Nova Scotia before it was too late.
Buckram’s last memory of America was the sight of William Supple, his wife Mary and their two boys waving him and Neville goodbye from the quayside. He was not to meet up with William again for another year.
‘You’ll stay with me tonight,’ commanded Neville.
‘Thank you, Neville. You’ve saved my life. Another night in that Warren Street would have been my last.’
Outside the wind was picking up, causing chaos in the street. Slates and gutters were dislodged and everyone gathered at the window to watch the big signboard at the Denmark Coffee-house swing from side to side, higher and higher. They cheered when it fell.
Some of the more adventurous theatre-goers were now leaving Drury Lane and hurrying into Brydges Street for post-theatre drinks.
‘Well, Buckram. It does my heart good to have you back with us.’ It was Georgie, somehow he’d materialized behind him as they stood looking out of the window.
‘We’re off next door to the Three Hairs; buck up on some old buds.’
‘Whites?’
Georgie shrugged. ‘And what? A bud’s a bud. Anyway, you know them. It’s Roughjack and Pete Fortune. They still ask after you. Truth to tell, it’s crowbar bouncing we’re a-planning.’
‘Where, when, what’s the count?’
Buckram couldn’t believe he’d just asked that. So strong was the habit, it had slipped from him as unchecked as a parliamentarian’s voting slip.
‘It’s for Tuesday night. I hear the Earl of Dartmouth leaves London by the Dover Road. With his town house empty and him out through Fortune’s part of Kent, could be double gain to play the prospect both ends. You’re welcome to join us.’ He glanced at Neville. ‘Though I don’t suppose you will. Hmmm, remember my offer anyway, Aethiopian Secret Papers, your path to prosperity.’ He went once more around the tavern, chatting and joking, before returning to Buckram’s side. Pulling him away from Neville he spoke into his ear, ‘A question; tell me, what would you do if you had two thousand pounds? Where would you go with that sort of money? As a black man, I mean.’
Buckram didn’t have to think long. ‘Africa,’ he said. ‘I’d be there tomorrow had I the money today. Why?’
‘That’s an interesting answer, Buckie. I was just wondering if you had one. That’s all. A good night to you now.’
Georgie left the Charioteer accompanied by Henry and the barmaid.
A gust of wind, seemingly from nowhere, blew the front door open. Nobody moved. Neville stepped into the small gale and Buckram felt everybody’s eyes upon him. He looked over to see Neville signalling with a sad, lazy wave, like a farmer calling his hound.
London, 29 May 1786
There was a fight or fights going on in the square around the corner. William glanced at his cards and put down three at random. Across the table, the duke sighed contentedly, re-counting his cards in the golden coffee-house light.
‘Two kings and a knight!’ he declared. ‘I have you, sir, yet again.’
William watched the bright pink, bewhiskered man scoop the winnings to his heavy belly.
South London laughter echoed in the square and a howling wind chased women’s screams down narrow, almost empty streets. Somewhere doors were being splintered and bottles broken. Trouble was getting closer.
‘Another game, my gentoo friend?’ The duke was shuffling a fresh deck, his own. The four black people in the house – three women and William – stared into the pattern of sounds outside, triangulating the speed and direction of the violence.
‘Whist, swabbers? What d’ye say?’ The nobleman squared off the pack and whistled a bar of some triumphalist war tune.
‘I’m afraid I can’t join you for a final hand, my lord.’ William nodded to the noisy night life, ‘I have a heart condition I’d like to keep, therefore, at your leave …’
‘Sit down, you mad moorman, that’s nothing but the sound of the mob!’
‘The mob,’ William moaned. Danger walked the streets in shirtsleeves and tonight he was unarmed and far from home. The whole town had been abuzz with talk of unrest for days; of how the waterboys and lightermen would be out in force to sack the city in response to restrictions placed on their trade. William hadn’t expected them to attack so soon, and he didn’t understand how they could have moved through the city with such silent speed.
This was William’s second spring in London, and already he knew the routine. At the lilacs’ last blooming the suburban poor would take their demands to the city-centre streets. Draymen, cabbies, builders, clerks and tailors marched shirtless and cudgel-handed from Shoreditch, Ratcliffe, Dalston and Somers Town. William had witnessed riots before: food riots in Boston and Charlestown, but nothing could have prepared him for the spectacle of English urban disturbance. Colonial unrest resulted in attacks on symbols of the King’s authority: subsidized shops were looted, customs houses and ship chandlers were razed to the ground, the odd tax collector was murdered and food was stolen. In this country nothing was sacred. Anything and anyone was considered a legitimate target. The reasons for unrest – political or religious – were swiftly subsumed under the greater will of the mob as it swept across the metropolis, growing in size as it diminished in purpose. Any shop or pub en route to the city would be raided. Synagogues and Catholic churches were destroyed. Gaols were broken into and prisoners released to join the rioters. There were never enough infantrymen garrisoned in town to control the chaos, and those that were often refused to leave their barracks. It wasn’t unusual for a mob to leave a three-figure death-toll in its wake. Simply put, anyone who wasn’t with them was against them.
‘Bunch of cutpurses, fucksters and drunks, Mr Supple. They’ll not come here.’ The duke nodded briskly at the knots of aged beadles, delicate-looking artists and cavalry officers slumped around the room. ‘Should they, however – they’ll be sure of a very warm reception, believe you me.’
Violence didn’t scare William – he was a veteran of the American War and had killed at least forty-seven men that he knew of. What scared him was the prospect of totally random violence. He knew that being black would not necessarily make him an object of the mob’s wrath: more often than not the St Giles’s blacks would be active in the rampage. Indeed, three of them, Charlotte Gardener, Ben Bowsey and John Glover had been hanged at Tower Hill for their parts in the Gordon Riots six years before and they were still toasted from time to time in Dyott Street. In other circumstances Will
iam would have taken his chances and melted into the crowd, but here he was in his costliest clothes, playing cards with a duke in one of the most exclusive coffee-houses in the Court End. There was nowhere to hide – he’d have to make a run for it.
The duke, who had been drinking since ten o’clock that morning, steadily dealt two hands of centique. William half-feigned fatigue.
‘My, lord, I insist. I can no more. I fear drink has done for me this night. I must to bed.’
Suddenly at least six large bland faces surged at the window. More massed behind and William heard their hunting cry, ‘Oi, oi! Oi, oi! Oi, oi!’
‘In God’s name, don’t you thespians ever enjoy yourselves? Sit down, man. Play on. Be still and know that I am God!’
William was out of his chair, across the room, over the counter, through the back door and up the stairs before the first charge.
When a brick breaks glass humans shut their eyes and cradle their heads. Before a second brick can enter the room they’re on their knees, wobbling towards a door, all blind wolf-cubs piling in at the teat.
The boys from Bermondsey boiled into the house, stamping on would-be escapers and staring down the rest.
From his hiding-place somewhere above the ceiling, William Supple heard his gambling partner cry out, ‘Aux armes, mes braves, aux armes! On the Hussars! On the Hussars!’
Men with footfall like bouncing cannonballs entered the room. William recognized the sound of sturdy boots meeting soft flesh. People moaned in resentful, drunken pain. Someone shouted, ‘Aaayabasteh!’ and steel spanged once or twice. Coins spilled, men and women wailed hoarsely and bundling scuffles overturned furniture. Wet, sloppy wounds whistled keenly. Women were slapped about and dragged outdoors. The most intimate of abuses were occurring and above it all a young boy cackled wildly, goading it on. William heard the coffee-house being turned to tinder.
The badmen banged dagger hilts on tables and chanted, ‘Turn out! Turn it out! Turn out! Turn it out! Turn out! Turn it out!’
He was hiding in a cupboard when the bedroom door fragmented.
‘Coooeee! Sooty, we’re coming to get you!’ He heard the low chuckles of leisurely anticipation known only to genuine perpetrators of iniquity.
His flageolet was already at his lips when they started banging on the cupboard. He played the only tune he knew, ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’.
The room fell quiet and the door creaked slowly open. On the other side a grimy child stood swaying with a bloody hanger in his hand. He was quickly joined by nine or ten rough men who stood around him, studying the perfectly dressed black man and catching their beery breath.
‘Turn it aaaaaht!’ yelled the boy, jumping and shaking.
Claw-like hands pulled William from the cupboard knocking off his hat. He was dragged downstairs. Fists bunched in, boxing his face. Someone spat on him and the child jabbed weakly with his outsize sword, making a puncture near William’s liver. His mouth was dry and his testicles had retreated up into his abdomen.
And all the while, the hunting cry ‘Oi, oi! Oi, oi! Oi, oi! Oi, oi!’ reverberated around him.
Outside was pandemonium. From nowhere the poor were flooding into St James, looting houses and starting fires. Beadles were being beaten, horses were being chased. A harpischord crashed into the street. Foreigners’ homes were being sacked. Sardinians, Americans and Poles offered their money and wives to giggling machete-wielding maniacs from Deptford and Greenwich. People in nightgowns, people naked and disturbed, jumped from flaming bedrooms into the tumult below.
William was carried a short way through the riot before being dropped in mud. Someone approached him with a horse, another with a length of rope. This was starting to look just like New York at the evacuation: the same frenzy, the same perils. He found himself garbling a frantic prayer for his wife, Mary, and his sons, Nehemiah and Phillip. The family he’d left on the other side of the world, the family whose faces he could barely remember.
‘Grab his feet,’ someone said.
‘Get the neck,’ said another.
Cold, heavy rain fell on his reddening body while the hooligans debated whether to horse-haul or hang him. Rag-shod feet kicked and stumbled around his head. The arguments over his fate grew fiercer, poignards were drawn and voices raised.
In an instant William flopped over. The puncture in his side sang out in agony and the pain pumped sweat to his forehead with each beat of his heart. He rolled to a crouch and crawled to a hobble, then he was up, clutching his side, shambling crookedly through the rabble.
His body knew where he was going. He skidded down the slushy street and staggered against fresh swarms of looters. He felt that he stood out too much, dressed as he was and heading in the wrong direction entirely, so he wedged himself into a doorway and shed his coat and, with reluctance, his waistcoat. He ripped off his wig and smeared his shoes and stockings with mud. His shirt was torn and bloodied enough to pass inspection.
As he studied the mob anew, he noticed a small trickle of people beginning to move away from the destruction. It slowly dawned on him that they were shuffling over-cautiously towards Haymarket with children in tow; they were families in flight. Most of them were still dressed in their St James’s finery but others, like him, had attempted to dress down and were artlessly mangling their vowels in an effort to blend in with the crowd. The sole exit to Haymarket was quickly jamming up with the furious weight of incomers. William was trapped. He’d have to move fast.
He stepped back into the turmoil and took his chance. He flapped his arms and caught the attention of the leader of the next rush of roughs to bubble through the press.
‘Ahoy, Blackbird!’ said the big, blue-chinned man with tiny goose-shit-green eyes. He wore the blackened clothes of a coal-hauler. ‘What news, matey? Where’s the rumbling?’
‘Over there!’ William pointed out a party of escapers slinking by the wall of a gutted mansion. ‘Quality folk, Courtenders, shoals of ’em. Have at ’em, lads!’
The ‘people of quality’ were pounced on before they had time to soil their linen.
‘And there’s some more. Look!’ William drew their attention to a cowering band of burghers dressed only in their nightshirts. The men all carried backswords but they weren’t given the chance to use them. The mob brandished pistols and fired them at point-blank range.
High above the confusion, William heard a child scream frantically. It was a scream he’d heard before. This time it was clear and unmistakable, ‘Turn it aaaaaaaaaht! Turn it aaaaaaaaaht!’
The boy was sitting on the shoulders of the brute who’d proposed William’s hanging. The man–boy monster came lurching towards him with worrying speed as the remaining members of the original crew fell in behind.
Thugs were still bursting into the little street and William heard his pursuers growling behind him as they cuffed their way through the new arrivals. But his ruse was working. The crush was thinning out as the invading hooligans joined in the affray surrounding the well-to-do people. Moving sideways and holding his breath, William squeezed his way through the mass of smelly bodies till he eventually swerved into Haymarket.
Haymarket was blocked every way with overturned carriages and footloose livestock. Four or five brewers’ carts were being unloaded at the top of the thoroughfare. Casks and barrels rolled down the incline to the thirsty rioters below. Jugs of gin passed from hand to hand and the gutters ran red with raspberry wine.
Here and there couples still strolled arm in arm, gazing amusedly at the vandals at play, while late-night revellers sang insanely happy songs in praise of the mayhem exploding around them. Behind the sightseers lay the Morroccan Embassy. A black footman worked there with whom William was on nodding terms. But as he neared the building his heart sank. Another gang was already busy at the doors with a battering ram.
A second destination came to mind. Clutching his side, he fled down Haymarket. He spun right onto Pall Mall and raced against the wind to the corner of Albany Str
eet. It was almost quiet here. Only the sobs of women being violated in doorways and the trails of smoke drifting over from the Almack Rooms on Pall Mall showed that the rioters had been through. With any luck – with a lot of luck – he could make it to Mrs Sancho’s shop near Whitehall. He was not a friend of the Sancho family, but every black Londoner knew of them. They sold palm oil, hair pomade and dried fish. It was the only black-owned grocery in town; they were known to keep a collection of firearms. They had to help him.
He paused to take stock, checking that there was no one behind him. He gazed, fascinated, at his wound – it looked like an uncooked slice of veal cake. He was bent almost double as he peered around the corner. At the top of Albany Street groups of rioters had already broken through to Charles Street and were now looting their way down the road. He was too tired and frightened to move out of the way.
He watched as their numbers grew. One wave rushed off to attack Piccadilly, another swelled back up to St James’s Square. He hobbled along towards Old Paved Alley, one of his English gambling cronies lived there. It was worth a try.
For some reason a Turkish proverb came into his head. ‘A drowning man will clutch at a snake.’
At the bottom of the street William could see guardsmen at St James’s Palace fixing bayonets, priming muskets and closing the gates against the inevitable attack.
Another mass howl arose as the vandals suddenly appeared in Pall Mall, hard on the heels of three men they’d flushed out from St James’s Square. They were black men in Grenadier Guards’ uniforms, sprinting towards the barracks and towards William. He staggered out into their path, flailing his arms helplessly. Two of the guardsmen ran into him, grabbed an armpit apiece and dragged him backwards to the re-opening gates of St James’s Palace.