by S. I. Martin
‘Happy though, aren’t they?’ Buckram added.
‘Yes, desperately.’
Two groups of drinkers exploded into a knife fight in the corner. William and Buckram turned their backs on the scene and looked into their foaming cups.
‘What would you do?’ asked William. ‘What would you do if all of a sudden you came into a couple of thousand pounds? Just like that. How would you spend it? Two thousand pounds.’
Buckram stared at him like a condemned man. He took a sip of ale, dodged a flying bottle, and said, ‘Do you know, that’s the second time someone’s asked me that. Georgie put the same question to me not so long ago.’
‘Did he now? That makes two of us.’
They laughed nervously and shook their heads.
The fight was rolling over to their part of the tavern, so they shouldered through the crush – ale held high above their hats – to stand by the door.
‘He’s up to something,’ said William.
‘For sure.’
‘Something big. I can feel it. Has he spoken to you recently?’
An unwilling fighter had wriggled out of the scrum and was making for the exit. His enemies, or maybe his friends, grabbed him and threw him back into the fray.
‘I haven’t seen him in over a week. I’m avoiding him, truth to tell. I owe him money.’
‘Over a week. That’s a long time for the George. He must be hiding out. Planning.’
‘Hmmm. Big plan. You interested?’
‘Forget it. He’s poison. You forget it too.’
They heard the petulant, unmistakable cry of someone who has just been stabbed. The injured man swivelled frantically and a jet of red-hot blood arced from a throat wound to splash freely into the onlookers’ cups.
William watched, fascinated, as alcohol attacked blood in his tankard, making it dissolve, turning the whole mess purple. Blood was on his clean clothes and blood was on Buckram.
When Offaly Michael ordered the dying man’s cronies to carry him out to the street both gangs turned on him, his staff and everyone in sight.
Buckham half-drew his sword-pistol.
‘Why bother,’ said William. ‘Let them kill themselves. Who cares. Let’s go to the Denmark. Have a coffee. Something civilized.’
And as they crossed the street, from the noisy house to the quieter one, Buckram passed him a blank scrap of paper and said, ‘Write out forty-three for me, William. Numbers and letters.’
London, 23 June 1786
As always, the American War returned to Buckram in his sleep. This time he was back at Biggins Bridge, running away from the battlefield through the April drizzle.
Boys with melted faces screamed at him for help (in German) and he fled past them into the woods where the trees were hung with the mutilated bodies of Jäger Korps soldiers – some of them still alive and likewise calling on him for salvation.
He was not running alone. Charlotte was with him somehow, skirts flashing across the forest floor, keeping pace. Her hand in his. He knew they were running back towards the bridge where an ambush lay waiting, but they couldn’t stop their flight. Their feet propelled them against their will to certain doom. Breaking cover of the trees they met volley after volley of rebel gunfire. The air around them soon turned to swirling clouds of sulphurous smoke. They stopped, but the firing continued, even increased. They were standing unhurt in the misty middle of nowhere with musket balls chopping up the air around them. Field guns fired hollowly from the hillsides and he held Charlotte’s hand more tightly.
‘You’re safe now,’ he told himself. ‘Safe now.’
The cannons boomed, one after another, till their noise sharpened, became a pattern, became a tune.
Bells were ringing and Neville was saying, ‘Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.’
And Buckram was awake, with perfect knowledge of his situation.
It was like this every Sunday morning.
Neville would be standing over him with a cracked pitcher of cold water and a sliver of fatty soap, waiting for him to rise and accompany him to church. And every Sunday he would comply ungrudgingly.
He didn’t like church as a rule, especially a church like St Giles where black people formed a sizeable part of the congregation. It reminded him too much of his plantation life, when an overseer would ride down to the shacks on the Lord’s day to read to kneeling slaves from the chapter in Ephesians where it beseeched obedience to ‘them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling’. Buckram hated hymns too. White people’s hymns were so joyless, as if they were all waiting for their turn on the cross with no coup de grâce and an extra sponge of vinegar; black people’s hymns were just too inane, about walking streets of gold and being so happy when they were all dead.
Still, he’d had a bad week working for Henry Prince and Georgie. With only three copies sold in the last few days, he wasn’t too proud to hope for divine intervention. Besides, the church was normally packed with all sorts of folk.
He folded up a copy of the Secret Papers and slipped it into his waistcoat.
One never knew.
Buckram was the last worshipper to arrive. He took a place in the back pew beside a beaming usurer and his family.
Neville was busy, in his element, padding down the aisle, handing out cushions and hymnals with flamboyant grace.
The church was a beautiful building, supported on the inside by Ionic columns of Bath stone. Stained glass in the east window depicted Abraham offering Isaac as a sacrifice and the angel restraining him. Light poured through this delicately wrought scene onto a massive organ in the west gallery. The altar piece had a scrolled pediment supporting a golden eagle in the middle, and above it the head of John Smyth, the vicar, could just be discerned. The preacher’s voice called out, high and reedy, above the congregation.
Buckram tried to follow the dirgeful sermon: … according to Habakkuk, chapter 2, verse 2, ‘For the vision is yet for an appointed time …’
Zealots scuffled pages in their bibles, racing each other to the quote.
‘… but at the end it shall speak and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.’
Nursemaids in the middle seats silenced babies and scolded toddlers.
He moved drowsily through the motions; picking up a prayer-book, opening it at random and rising to mouth hymns.
Six rows in front of him, across the aisle, he noticed a young, pert, weasel-faced black woman. She had an uninteresting bosom and she was sharing a prayer-book with Charlotte Tell.
Immediately he was aware of his clothing: his shirt was clean (he washed it daily), but the waistcoat, breeches and stockings were exactly the same as she had seen him in three days before, and they smelled of Neville’s sleeping quarters.
He left the church before the collection plate reached him and walked about the churchyard, nervously rehearsing his introduction, till the service was over.
Beyond the low stone wall St Giles’s High Street was unusually quiet. Sundays were the only time when birdsong could be heard in this neighbourhood and he listened, contrasting the sweet, atonal chirpings in the trees to the sad music droning from the House of God.
As the congregation exited he positioned himself by the grave-stones, pretending to be lost in their strange inscriptions.
A tap at his shoulder. ‘Well, we meet again, Mr Buckram.’ He swivelled round stiffly, smiled and tipped his hat to Charlotte.
‘So, you’re a church-goer, I see.’ She cocked her hatted head. ‘Have you met Mrs Brookes?’
Her flat-chested companion looked up at him, shielding her eyes with a fan. She curtsied and said, ‘You’re a writer, I understand?’
She had spoken about him.
‘You may know my husband, Mr Aaron Brookes, the navy cook. He’s a countryman of yours. We have lodgings in Bainbridge Street, round the corner from here.’
Buckram kne
w the street but not the family. So many blacks and ex-slaves from the Americas lived in St Giles, how could he be expected to know them all?
‘I thought your church would be St Paul’s in the Piazza?’ he said to Charlotte, at a loss for anything more substantial to mention.
‘By rights it is, but I do find the ambience there so … so … white.’
He rubbed his right ear, wondering exactly what she meant by that. Black people don’t always make a black church.
‘It is my habit, after Sunday prayer, to take an Indian luncheon at the Lascar House in Newport Market. Would you do us the honour of accompanying us, Mr Buckram?’
Buckram smoothed his empty pockets and noticed Neville lurking behind the church doors, watching them earnestly over an armful of prayer-books.
‘Alas, I must disappoint you, ma’am. I have an appointment with the verger of this parish, a Mr Neville Franklin of Virginia.’ This was the saddest lie he’d ever told; all the sadder for the mounting pride felt in the telling.
‘Oh, pity,’ said Charlotte, scrutinizing his clothes. ‘Never mind, perhaps you will be able to visit me in person this evening at my home, seeing as you’ve been unable to send over your friend’s work.’
‘I’ve been busy,’ mumbled Buckram.
‘Too busy even to send someone?’ Charlotte pointed to a dishevelled, glassy-eyed man crouched by the church gates with a sign round his neck reading ‘Messages delivered and errands run’.
‘You live at number forty-three, Long Acre, beside the sodomitical tavern?’
She laughed, k-k-k. ‘You have a good memory. You won’t forget to call, will you? Tonight will be a very important night.’ She grabbed his wrist. ‘There’s such great news. So much to celebrate.’
He felt her hand grip, release and grip again.
‘And at what time will you be expecting me, Miss Tell?’ he asked, carefully modulating the rising pitch in his voice.
‘Oh, anytime around seven o’clock. I’ll be waiting.’
She laughed again and sauntered off arm in arm with Mrs Brookes.
Buckram watched them till they vanished into Denmark Street. Neville and the Reverend Smyth were heading off tonight for a week-long tour of the shires to lecture on the evils of slavery. He rubbed his hands and clicked his heels before turning back to the gravestones to search for fresh flowers.
London, 23 June 1786
William counted his money … one hundred and forty … one hundred and fifty … one hundred and sixty … till he’d fanned out two hundred and seventy-five pounds on the bedspread before him. It was enough to pay the passage of his wife and sons over to London, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near sufficient to keep them in the style to which he’d become accustomed. Looked at squarely, it wasn’t so much to show for two years’ living in the Imperial capital. How could he explain the sources of his income to Mary? Mary, who wouldn’t even dance on the Lord’s Day – Mary who wouldn’t even dance.
He tried to imagine everyone (himself, Mary, Phillip and Nehemiah) living together in this room here on Rose Street. The picture was all too clear, and he winced at it: Mary sniffing at the activities in the cockpit and sneering at the unwashed Covent Garden drabs with whom she’d have to share a communal kitchen; Nehemiah rifling willy-nilly through his collection of first editions and fighting with Phillip over who would sleep in which corner; who would fetch water from the pump and who would wash first. The children with their dark faces and plantation manners would have to be weaned away from the market scallywags seeking to befriend them. He saw his new weekends; stagnant Saturday evenings spent reading edifying texts in the huddled bosom of his family, the interminable afternoons passed in the Pleasure Gardens of Ranelagh or Vauxhall. On Sundays, he knew, Mary would troop them off to worship at the Piazza church – a family treat. And schools, new clothes, new shoes, the sheer daily bread … where’d he find the money?
He asked himself again, as he asked himself time after time, What am I doing here? The answer came as it had come time after time: he was a free man. In London he was free to rise and sleep when he chose, free to read whatever he chose and free to correspond with any like and literate mind. William fingered the leathery spines on his bookshelf and reflected glumly on his copies of Gentleman’s Magazine (to which he’d stopped subscribing a month ago after a virulent series of editorials attacking the Black Poor). Over the years his letters from Mary had grown fewer and further between. The family were back in Carolina, he believed, but where he no longer knew. He hadn’t received a letter in over four months. He was worried.
He shuffled his wad of money together and replaced it under a loose floorboard. He picked up George’s sparkly gift from the bedside table and opened the lid. He let the nursery rhyme play, softly, hauntingly, as he considered the possibility of Mary ever hearing it.
It was late in the evening and his muddled thoughts and the gloom in the room were getting to him. With a decisive grunt, he snatched a single-breasted blue frock coat from the wardrobe and marched out of the door.
Thinking of Mary always drove him to spend. He knew what he was doing and he didn’t like it. He was buying time: buying peace of mind.
He traipsed towards Leicester Fields with a heavy heart, feeling the rough-grit roads under his new shoes and sensing the wear on his two-day-old heels. If he won enough tonight he could buy another pair of boots and leave his second set in Buckram’s keeping. Old Uncle Buckram, pimp and love-struck fool and Mad Old Uncle Neville, still doing the Lord’s work in his threadbare uniform. Phillip and Nehemiah deserved better than this and he, William Supple, would make sure they got it.
He stepped up his pace as he approached Hog Lane. Some Conduit Court cutthroats had established a new outpost at the corner with St Martin’s Lane where anyone who looked as if they didn’t belong to the locale could bank on being shillied. Their presence didn’t bother William. He passed that way daily, and besides, he knew how white people thought; they’d see a dignified black man wearing new boots, new stockings and a clean blue coat of the kind they could never afford. They would take him for a boxer or a Blackbird – a violent, well-connected man. Not to be messed with. He knew they would think twice. He trotted past the scowling loiterers with firm deliberation. He heard nary a grumble but he felt the ruffians’ eyes on him, tracking his course into the side streets leading to Leicester Fields.
The square had been redecorated since his last visit. Chinese lanterns were strung out along the handsome façades of the freshly painted buildings. Crowds of prospective gamblers, strumpets and their culls promenaded through the over-ordered gardens in the cool evening air. As usual, the place was full of twittering couples. William found himself walking behind a well-dressed pair heading towards the Piccadilly end: a black man and a black woman walking hand in hand. He was stunned to realize that he’d been following them from Hog Lane, transfixed by this most unusual sight in a city full of wonders.
Hoping to overhear a familiar accent, he moved closer to them. But they were clearly lovers, or a bored, over-familiar couple whispering one to the other the strangled language of their desire.
He wondered where they’d come from, where they dwelt. What wayward impulse to happiness had driven them to stroll with such calm confidence here in the heart of the white man’s world? It could be Mary and himself, he envisioned, three months or so hence. Or maybe not. He remembered. This was a Sunday. This would never be. Mary, the real Mary, came back to him anew: her hesitant speech, her stalled laughter, her terse, critical asides, her haughty Baptist demeanour, her astringent body odour and the touch of her skin, so different, yet so similar to that of the women he’d known in this town. He cursed his inability to remember her face clearly. And looking back at the black couple (now turning around and retracing their steps back to Hog Lane), he knew he’d never be that man, Mary’d never be that woman. Mary’s heart, he felt, was still set on their original goal of Nova Scotia. She’d quickly wither and perish in this rough and tumble worl
d he’d come to love. Maybe she was right. The Canadian blacks seemed to have more going for them. They had their own towns, their own churches, they farmed their own land and knew white people only as distant neighbours or yearly tax collectors. He ambled through the hawkers and fortune-tellers in the square and tried to compose a new missive to his beloved.
‘William!’
He almost jumped, but he didn’t break his stride. He’d been speaking to himself a lot these days. Self-address was normal. ‘William Supple!’ The voice was accented, insistent, not his own. A figure drew up alongside him. It was one of the triplets in civilian clothes. His young face glowed with excitement.
‘William, look at you! On your own on a weekend, dressed in your finest. Let me guess. You’re going to gamble?’
William nodded and laughed.
‘Then you must be desperate.’ The triplet patted him on the back and looked him up and down. ‘Which club are you headed for?’
William scanned the public houses and gaming rooms encircling them. Everywhere was full tonight. He had money to make. He wasn’t sure if he wanted company.
When was the last time he wanted company?
‘I’m uncertain what the night will hold,’ said William. His side tweaked as if in anticipation of further disruption. ‘I didn’t get the chance to properly thank you and your brothers for saving my life that time.’
‘Ohhh, that was nothing.’ The young man bowed his head bashfully. ‘You’d do the same if it was the other way round. Wouldn’t you?’
Knitting his brow, William said yes.
‘We didn’t see you at the rout. Thought you’d have pitched up with your buckos. Anyway next time, yes?’
William was about to reply when the triplet grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him gently to the west side of the square.
‘Where are we going?’ William inquired lazily. Black men behaving bizarrely no longer disconcerted him.
‘I’m meeting a friend at the plum-pudding stall. A great fellow. Knows all the kens. He’s from the colonies, like yourself. You should meet him.’