Incomparable World

by S. I. Martin

  Her face lit up, markedly erotic in its incandescence.

  ‘Oh, how wonderful.’ She looked swiftly at the schoolyard then back to Buckram. ‘May I see a copy?’

  ‘A copy of this?’ Buckram scratched his head and sensed himself staring intently at her Oriental-style slipper shoes. ‘These books are for sale only.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Then perhaps you’d be so good as to deliver some examples of your friend’s work to my home address.’

  Like most illiterates, Buckram had a terror of addresses but an excellent memory.

  ‘I keep rooms at number 43 Long Acre, next door to the alehouse for sodomites, the Wheatsheaf. You must know it?’

  Buckram pursed his lips. Everyone knew it.

  ‘I can be found at home most evenings after five o’clock. Do send a copy round. Please. I’ll be waiting. Good day.’

  She vanished into the schoolhouse before he could phrase a reply. Buckram stared dumbly at the spot where she’d stood, feeling goosebumps swarming up his flesh.

  He walked back towards James Street, taking longer, languid steps. He repeated the name Charlotte Tell; it danced on his tongue like ripe gooseberries steeped in perry. He felt the heavy swell of the afternoon sun as he turned the corner. And his only thought for the next hour and a half was: 43.

  What did that look like?

  London, 20 June 1786

  The makeshift gambling board tilted precariously under a weight of drinks and coins. William Supple rolled a tiny whisky glass between his palms while waiting for the last of his five companions to show their hand. Ten or so other men, their games long finished, stood in sepulchral silence around them, breathing down their necks and signalling wordless bets on the outcome.

  They were playing in a small, brightly lit cellar under the Strand. The temperature in the gambling den was several degrees warmer than that on the surface, and the men played in shirtsleeves – their coats, turned inside out, hung on the backs of their chairs for luck. The air was filled with tobacco smoke and the smell of soil and old bricks.

  William watched as Gerhard the Hessian studied his cards and stroked his great red beard. The German was also a veteran of the colonial wars, his regiment had served with William’s at a number of battles in the Carolina campaign, and like some of the black servicemen, he had chosen to make London his home.

  They exchanged a brief non-specific look and – William thought – a conspiratorial smile. Gerhard drew a few coins from his purse and stacked them on the board. The company exhaled loudly.

  ‘Ten shillings further, William,’ he whispered. ‘Will you meet me? I dare you.’

  William stared him full in the face and nodded. ‘Do your worst, Hessian.’

  The German spread his cards on the table, almost failing to mask his anxiety.

  A king, a pair of nines and the Jack of Hearts.

  William willed himself expressionless as pockets of malevolent cheer erupted around him – that delight in annihilation, paranoia redeemed: the gambler’s laugh.

  And once more, here he was, on the threshold of games; how to win without losing.

  How to show face.

  He fanned out his cards with quiet dignity: his Ace, his Queen of Hearts, his Jack of Diamonds, his Ten of Spades.

  His victory.

  He took some comfort in the over-hearty applause from the fickle, fortune-hunting crowd. They’d come to cheer a winner.

  And here he was, ever the actor.

  ‘Outplayed again,’ admitted the Hessian. ‘Outplayed again.’

  A club-footed pot-boy came over to clear away the glasses and take a cut for the house.

  ‘You’ve a visitor, Mr Supple. At the door. Wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Tell him I’m busy, Giles,’ said William, ‘and fetch us another round of usquebaugh.’ William gathered up the pack to shuffle a game of faro.

  ‘It’s a black man, sir,’ Giles raised his eyebrows and nodded significantly. ‘Goes by the name of Buckram. Says it’s an urgency.’

  William sucked his teeth. ‘Tell him I’ll be up in a minute.’

  He passed the pack to Gerhard and strutted to the door.

  Three bolts were removed and two locks were turned before William could mount the steps to the street.

  Buckram stood filling the doorframe with hat – his hat – in hand. Warm, fresh air steamed in from the Strand and Buckram kicked his heels in the dark, dusty street.

  ‘Hello, Buckie, how is it?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not too bad. Sought you all over tonight, William. I need to talk to you about something. Whaddy’ say we go sink a few jars down the Charioteer?’

  With as much exasperation as he reckoned their friendship could hold, William started explaining how busy he was, making an illegal living down in the cellar, and that he was available to friends during daylight hours only.

  It hurt him to say that. He’d taken such care to avoid Buckram these past weeks. Best to keep things superficial. Just thinking about the Charioteer was depressing.

  A door opened down behind him, and the pot-boy shouted, ‘Table’s ready and calling for you, Mr Supple.’

  ‘Bid them wait!’

  ‘Are you winning?’ Buckram asked.

  He was looking better, William noticed; the gaol-house edges blurred back towards normality, the haunted eyes were still haunted, but at home. He was a man at leisure, wanting to celebrate his liberty. The old Buckram. Maybe.

  ‘Winning? Yes,’ William slowly replied. ‘I’ll join you in a while.’

  He returned to the cellar to close his affairs with the house then bounded back up the stairs, pulling on his coat.

  ‘Let’s walk around for a bit. I need some air.’

  They strolled down to Charing Cross past small crowds of night people enjoying the antics of sword swallowers and a man lifting a four-hundred-pound weight with the hair of his head. William paused by a gipsy girl who was goading a small dancing dog to gavotte. He noted Buckram frowning at the spectacle and reconsidered throwing her the coin he had palmed in his pocket.

  With the exception of coal-carts coming up from the river-front alleys and the odd horseman or sedan chair, the street was relatively free of traffic, and, like everyone else, William and Buckram walked along in the middle of it.

  ‘How’s your side?’ inquired Buckram.

  ‘No complaints. Hardly a war wound. Getting better. I’m alright as long as Georgie keeps me supplied with this.’ He pulled a fat, brown glass bottle from his pocket: opium cordial.

  ‘He tells me,’ said William, ‘that you’re working for him and Henry.’

  ‘Sort of. I sell prints and guides around the Piazza.’

  ‘Oh, I can imagine.’

  ‘No you can’t. I was stopped by the Charlies in Southampton Row today. They asked me my business. Threatened to deliver me to the Navy Office if I didn’t give them some money. I caught one of them on the jaw and had to run. I lost them in Clare Market, but I think they’ll come looking for me, y’know. They’ll remember my face.’

  William laughed openly. ‘No, Buckie, you’re safe from the watch. Don’t you know they can’t tell one black man from another? You just have to lay low for a day or so, then resume your work. Stick to St Giles and Seven Dials. They can’t touch you there.’

  ‘I’m tired of the place. Tired of this town, William.’

  ‘But where else is there?’

  ‘Sierra Leone.’

  ‘Whaaat?’

  ‘Sierra Leone. Africa. You must have heard the news, seen the handbills, the posters. Everyone’s talking about it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t talk to everyone. Don’t read too much nowadays either.’

  ‘So, you really don’t know, do you? They’re planning to clear us off the streets. They want us out of this country.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘Any black, or Lascar, found not working will be held at Newgate for transportation. They’re making the Yorkshire Stingo beggars agree to sign for passage on th
eir boats before they receive their sixpence.’

  ‘Transportation to Africa? What the devil d’you mean? Every year they find something new to scare us with. It never works. We’re still here. There’s too many of us, slaves, ex-slaves, freeborn and all, just too many. I read in Gentleman’s Magazine …’

  ‘Gentleman’s Magazine?’

  ‘… there are fifteen thousand of us in London alone. They’ll have to call out the soldiers to fight us. It’s impossible. It’ll never happen.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to go?’

  ‘To Sierra Leone? No. I heard some old settlers from Nova Scotia talk about it. But that’s a freeman’s country, they can choose how and when they go. Over here it’s different. Imagine the Englishman inviting us to return to Africa. We’d end up in chains, for sure.’

  He’d heard about the west coast of Africa, and all he knew was that it attracted slavers like bees to a sugar plantation.

  ‘You are happy here, aren’t you?’ asked Buckram.

  William didn’t answer.

  They bought two portions of cold chicken pie with catsup from a street vendor in Villiers Street, and sat down beside the Charing Cross pillory block to eat. In front of them, behind some railings, loomed a statue of King Charles I on horseback. The starless sky was as clear as a London night could be.

  ‘That’s where I should look for work,’ said Buckram. He pointed to a filthy warren of long, low sheds over the crossing. It looked like a penal colony for dwarves. The stench of horse manure was overwhelming. Distant whinnying and the clang of blacksmiths’ hammers carried over to them.

  ‘You’d never get a start in there,’ said William. ‘That’s the King’s Mews. They can’t take black people.’

  ‘But that’s my trade. Horseman. I won’t live like a tramp again.’

  ‘You seem to be doing alright. My clothes look better on you than they do on me. You look to go a-courting.’

  ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about.’

  ‘You’ve found a lady friend?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I think so. Maybe.’

  William had never seen Buckram like this before, rendered speechless by a woman. He wanted to know more.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘I thought you might tell me. I don’t know her. Just met her this afternoon. Young black woman, a teacher by the name of Charlotte Tell.’

  ‘The schoolmarm at the Adelphi School, Hart Street?’

  ‘The same. D’you know her?’

  William finished the last of his pie and slowly wiped crumbs and sauce from his lips.

  ‘Oh, yes. Miss Tell. Everyone knows of her. She’s a woman of some quality, y’know. Some quality.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘I mean that she’s very well connected, has independent means and a mind of her own. She’s a strange one.’

  ‘She’s beautiful.’

  ‘Yes, she’s very beautiful, but she’s from another world.’

  ‘She was born here.’

  ‘Exactly. Her manners and graces aren’t ours. She’s more like the Sanchos or one of those Mayfair blacks you see from time to time.’

  ‘What can you tell me about her?’

  ‘Well, her mother and father were brought over here as servants of the Earl of Stanford. He has a Jamaican estate, y’know: sugar, rum. She was raised in his Staffordshire household as one of his own. She grew up with the Earl’s children and was schooled into a young woman by private tutors. When the Earl died a year or so back, she came into a tidy bit of legacy and annuity. She moved down to London to be closer to her own kind, as most of them do in the end, y’know. She mixes with some political types, abolitionists, radicals and God knows who. What I’m trying to say is that she’s not of our caste in any way, shape or form. She’s practically a gentlewoman. You’ve taken to her, then?’

  ‘I think so.’ Buckram nodded and – William thought – shivered.

  William whistled high and long. ‘Let’s go for that drink.’

  They set off towards St Martin’s Lane.

  ‘You should relax more, Buckram. With the women, I mean. Remember how you used to be?’

  ‘Too well. But we were fresh out of the army. First time in London. Never been around white women before. Things have changed.’

  ‘What’s changed?’

  ‘I have. There’s something I haven’t told anybody. Things I did, things I was made to do in gaol.’ He paused on the steps of the church and faced William.

  ‘When I landed up in the Bridewell I was penniless. I couldn’t afford to buy good food and drink from the turnkeys. They put me in a cell with nine other men. All white. All crazy. House thieves, coiners, old rapemasters and cutthroats. Some of them had been in there twelve years. We had a ration of thin gruel and hard bread and we had to fight over it like wild dogs.

  ‘Once or twice a week the turnkeys would throw a young girl in with us just to see what they did to her. Some of those girls died, William. It was hell.

  ‘Then one night they came for me and dragged me into a private room. This table they had, it was laden with roast goose and cheese, dry devils, French bread and Hereford cider. There was a great, soft bed with a naked strumpet on it. Around that bed were six chairs …’

  ‘Mmm, yesss??’

  ‘William, they bade me fornicate with the whore or forfeit that dinner, that room, that bed and suffer a flogging into the bargain.’

  ‘You call that punishment? Whaaat?’

  ‘This is no joke, my friend. Almost every night for a year, I dreaded the sound of the key turning in that lock. Sometimes the room would fill with strangers who had bought tickets at the gate.’ William listened to how his friend had performed for them like a posture moll, nights beyond number. How he worked his cold arts of love with every kind of drab this earth has mourned; maidens, hags, fatties and greyhound-girls. Buckram had swived a world under those evil eyes.

  ‘After a year of such abuse, I rebelled.’

  ‘Rebelled! Rebelled!! Against what? Fresh sheets, warm blankets, good food and more woman-flesh than any one man deserves. Pah! To think that Neville was arranging weekly prayer meetings on your behalf – and that I attended! Great are thy works, O Jehovah!’ He shook clasped hands at St Martin’s steeple.

  ‘William, you are my friend, and I know your jests to be insincere.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure!’

  ‘It’s one thing to think these things and quite another to do them. It wasn’t what you imagine. There was a girl, a woman … her name was Jill …’

  ‘And she won your heart, this Jill?’

  ‘Who can say?’

  ‘So she was special, then?’ William gurned.

  ‘Please stop, William. All I can say is that from our first forced time together we knew that what we had was not for the eyes of others. So I rebelled.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘I was thrown back to that first dungeon, back amongst the madmen. I was awarded one thousand and five hundred lashes to be administrated over the rest of my sentence. I should have died from the clap a hundred times, I swear, but God – Neville’s God – must have spared me and I left the Bridewell without a sore.’

  ‘And Jill. What of her?’

  Buckram shrugged and shook his head.

  ‘And now you’re a struggling tract-seller, in love with a woman of virtue, above your station.’

  ‘As you see me.’

  The Charioteer was as packed as ever. One o’clock was a busy time in Brydges Street. There was room to move, but only just.

  Stepping back into his old haunt, William was consumed by a sudden sense of despair; this was the world he’d left behind. This was somewhere he knew too well: the intense, shallow, circular talk, full of lies, excuses and accusations, all the forced, dead-eyed bonhomie fuelled by gin and the flower of the hemp seed, the over-embroidered coats, the sad, pompous lamb’s-tail wigs, the shoeless, shuttling messenger-boys – some old enough to be his father – waiting for
an errand or some sinister, new friend to buy them a drink.

  Bambara, Mandinka, Wolof, Fulani, Ibo, Whydah, Ashanti, Coromantee, Fanti, Ga, Hausa, Yoruba, Angola, William knew them all, even if they didn’t know themselves. William was a Wolof. That’s what Gullah had told him. Gullah was the only octogenarian slave William had met. He had been brought to the Americas as a twenty-year-old and had toiled on Blackstock’s Plantation ever since anyone could remember. The old African used to wait for the young William when he had finished his chores. Together they would walk through the fields and along by the cabins. Gullah talked of a world so unlikely William took it to be imaginary. It was a black world of black kingdoms where black people did black things.

  William was glad Gullah wasn’t here with him in the Charioteer to see just how much cheap London gin could tame an Ashanti like Old Morris, or how extreme poverty and isolation had compelled an Angola woman like Molly to market her maidenhood.

  The Charioteer was the safest place he knew for blacks in London, and William hated it.

  On seeing him enter, a number of St Giles’s Blackbirds saluted cautiously. He returned the gesture and let Buckram manoeuvre him through the press; he had nothing to say to them. Nothing at all. They could have been anyone or nobody.

  The two friends found elbow room at the bar.

  ‘Michael, scurvy-grass ale!’ hollered Buckram.

  They watched the deceptively quiet-looking barman fill two tankards with ale from a cask. He set the drink before them and gave William a knowing wink. ‘You’re a stranger to Brydges Street, aren’t you?’ he clucked.

  William just laughed and mumbled something inaudible.

  ‘You see how it is,’ said Buckram motioning to the room. William suppressed a mild wave of nausea and turned to examine the boisterous clientele.

  Old Morris was still doing the rounds with his glass of towrow, getting mocked and rebuffed from table after table. Quintus Greene, alone and smiling drunkenly by the empty hearth, sucked at a bottle. He used his waist to rock his wheeled trolley back and forth to music only he could hear. Henry Prince was standing on a table teaching a group of white men with bandaged heads and split noses a new dance.