by S. I. Martin
William let himself be tugged off course, painfully aware that the young guardsman was taking pity on him.
Three black men were gathered around the pudding-seller’s cart. They scoffed handfuls of hot food and blew over saucers of black tea. William recognized the two other triplets who, like his guide, were in civilian dress. The third man, frock-coated, unwigged and unhatted, was also familiar to him.
‘Hail, Georgie!’
‘Hail, Willie-boy! What brings you here? You know these soldier boys?’
William shook hands with the other brothers, for once relieved to be amongst people he knew. ‘Course I know them. It’s a long story. Well, friends, what news?’
‘The regiment is shipping out to Martinique in a few months’ time. We won’t be with them tho’. We won’t be killing black men for white men! We’ve other plans, other ideas, eh, George?’
Georgie said hmmm, and stroked his cheek. ‘Good to know you’ve still got friends, Will. Tea? Pudding?’
They hovered for a while between food and drink stalls. The guardsmen paused to laugh at a pair of white buskers bashing tambourines. They tipped their hats at every young woman that crossed their path. Every half minute or so, passers-by, both high born and low, shouted greetings at Georgie. Georgie told the triplets tales of his and William’s close scrapes with the Charlies back in the old days and of their tall-story sessions at the Golden Cross. Being the object of the beggar king’s gentle joshing was not unpleasant, and William felt something akin to tenderness meshing beneath the man’s ribaldry. But he’d known Georgie too long and accepted that emotional intensity, not constancy, was the scoundrel’s stock in trade. So he wasn’t in any way surprised when Georgie clapped his hands and declared, ‘Well, Willie, you have yourself a nice evening now. Me and the boys have some business to discuss over at the Assembly House up Kentish Town way. Might tell you more about that some other time. Down the Charioteer one night, yes?’
‘Sure,’ said William. He watched the foursome leave the square, hot on the trail of two young dairymaids.
His urge to gamble had evaporated and his solitude soured to loneliness. He set off back to Rose Street; he had a letter to write.
Hog Lane was unusually empty for this time of night. Just a few horsemen and handcarts. All the pedestrians seemed to be streaming down the road towards St Martin’s. William followed them to the junction and saw that the road had been cordoned off. Charlies were policing the crowd, so he positioned himself against a wall at the rear of the congregation, hoping to make himself less conspicuous.
Fire trucks were clattering up St Martin’s Lane from the Hand-in-Hand fire insurance office in King’s Mews. As the cordon was lifted the crowd, now fifty strong and infected with the lure of disaster, chased behind the firedrakes, tailing them up the Lane and into Long Acre. Finding himself caught in the rush, William raced along with them. He sprinted to the front of the pack and made it onto Long Acre just before a new cordon was strung across the street.
Heavy, acrid smoke rose from the backstreets and mantled the rooftops of Covent Garden. Weeping women in blackened clothes were being comforted by those gloaters who had made it past the cordon. A bruised and coughing young girl staggered out from Conduit Court and instinctively hurled herself into the arms of the first male figure she saw. William Supple.
The gambler held the sobbing child and brushed dust and cinders from her hair. Her face and shift were burnt in places, and when she coughed he caught a dense whiff of smoke. She shivered.
‘There, there,’ he comforted, ‘you’re safe now. No need to cry.’
She rubbed a sleeve into her face, smearing soot everywhere.
The hiss and crack of flames eating old timber sounded dangerously close.
‘Where’s your mummy and daddy, littl’un?’ asked William, affecting London English.
‘I don’t know,’ she howled. ‘I don’t know! Our house was burnt down with all the others.’ She began to cry again.
‘Now, now,’ said William. ‘That won’t do, will it? What we’ll do is get you a nice, hot dish of liquorice tea with lots of lovely sugar, then we’ll go find your parents. So tell me, where do they live?’
She sobbed herself quiet and replied, ‘Rose Street.’
‘Wha’ the …!’ William flung the distraught child away from him as if she was a broken marionette. He ignored her screams as he dashed with all speed through Conduit Court and along Hart Street to the glowing mouth of Rose Street where the fire crews had assembled their hand-trucks. Firemen, wearing only leather gloves and casques for protection, levelled hoses at the blazing buildings and waited for their colleagues to re-commence work at the hand pumps. William edged round the firefighters and looked into the alley. One whole side of Rose Street – his whole side – was afire. Flames wrapped the walls of the Coopers’ Arms and lapped across the frames of neighbouring houses. Grappling hooks had been thrown up to catch on rafters and sills, and gangs of firedrakes strained at the ropes, trying to pull the structure to the ground. William heard the mournful, suffocated bellowing of some doomed souls still trapped in the cockpit, baking alive in a subterranean inferno.
A short, sweating fireman carrying a small keg jogged past William. The firefighter stopped in his tracks and turned back to ascertain that a black man was actually standing there, open-mouthed and scratching his head amidst the conflagration.
‘Oi, oi! You can’t stand there, you great, black ninny-hammer. There’s a fackin’ fire goin’ on ’ere.’
‘That’s my house!’ William squealed.
‘Your ’ouse?’ The fireman looked at him, disbelieving.
‘Well, it ’int your’n no more, I’ll tell you that. This’ll see to it.’ He tapped his little keg. ‘Don’t want the whole parish on fire, do we? You just stay out of our way ’n’ watch the fireworks. Heh-heh-heh!’ He ran towards his workmates shouting, ‘All away, lads, all away!’
Hoses were reeled in and grappling hooks stowed away. The last of the firemen came away from the red-hot ruins and stood, with the transports, far round the corner in Hart Street.
The keg-carrier unplugged his barrel and, walking backwards, proceeded to pour a trail of gunpowder back along to Rose Street. He zipped back round to join his mates and with great enthusiasm touched a lighted taper to the smutty, newly laid trail.
William watched aghast as the fizzing white light sped around the corner.
He had heard louder explosions on the battlefield, but he had never felt one like this, at close quarters, and in such a confined space. His ears popped as the explosion boomed into Rose Street’s double echo then reverberated through the adjoining labyrinth of courts and back-doubles. Walls, windows, the very ground, shook three or four streets away from the epicentre. The blast deafened him and he couldn’t hear the firemen crowing by his side. He tried to scream but found himself breathless. The explosion was drawing all the air from the surrounding streets into itself. Fairly soon, an almighty crump signalled the final collapse of the Coopers’ Arms.
William walked away rubbing perspiration from his face and neck. So, he had lost his home and his possessions. God knew how many wretches now lay entombed beneath the place where once he’d laid his head. He was homeless and penniless. He straightened his shoulders and shrugged five or six times in succession. It wasn’t the end of the world. He had bounced back from greater misfortune than this.
He stalked off down Long Acre, registering the stark facts of his condition – all the more stark for the absence of any corresponding emotions.
So, he was a sadblack again with nowhere to hide save the sleek clothes he stood in. Everything was gone again: his wardrobe, his furniture, his bed (Heaven help him!) and, most of all, his money, his books, the magazines and the letters. It was the sanctuary of paper that he’d miss most. Paper, he realized, was the one thing that kept him in touch with human life. Without it he was nothing, simply spinning idiotic fictions in voids of his own creation: like Buckram, illiterate,
insolvent, invalid.
As he tramped past the Wheatsheaf public house he noted, by its side, a door daubed with the number 43. He looked at the open windows two storeys above him and heard a strange, yet undeniably black female laugh, high and mocking: k-k-k-k-k-k. Buckram would be up there now, he knew. But this was altogether the wrong time to be knocking on strange doors and requesting favours.
His steps took him instead round the corner into James Street. He cut through the market-place, brushed aside the more insistent doxies and made his way along Russell Street, down Drury Lane and into Brydges Street. The Charioteer was always open.
For William Supple it would be open for quite some time to come.
London, 23 June 1786
It was a bigger house than Buckram had expected and when he knocked on the door a gaunt white man with a bloodless face answered.
‘Aye?’ He was a Lowland Scot.
Buckram knew he wasn’t mistaken, this was definitely number forty-three.
‘I’ve come to visit a Miss Charlotte Tell, the schoolmarm.’
‘Mr Buckram, I presume?’
Buckram said yes.
‘Above,’ said the Scotsman, ushering him in. ‘Follow me.’
Buckram walked behind him up a flight of stairs, feeling foolish with his bunch of wilting tulips.
Charlotte was laying out fancy cutlery at a table set for five. Behind her on a chaise longue, two earnest-looking black men were locked in animated argument. On seeing Buckram enter the room they rose to greet him as if he was a woman.
‘You’re just in time, Mr Buckram,’ said Charlotte. ‘Do come in and make yourself at home.’
Buckram wondered what was going on. A smell of stewing chicken filled the apartment.
‘Mr Thomas Hardy you’ve already met,’ she said.
The Lowlander said, ‘Aye,’ closed the door and brushed past Buckram to stand beside her other two guests.
‘Allow me to present Mr Olaudah Equiano, though you may know him better by his nom de plume, Gustavus Vassa of the Public Advertiser.’
Buckram didn’t know him. Mr Equiano had an extraordinarily serious face. His large round eyes brimmed with awesome, unwieldly sanity. It was the sort of face to which only outright victories could bring a smile.
The third man, Mr Ottobah Cugoano of the Gold Coast, resembled William Supple with his look of a well-flogged ex-slave, old before his time.
‘Tulips, how sweet!’ Charlotte took the flowers and carried them into the kitchen.
Two empty wine bottles stood on the varnished floorboards beside the chaise longue. Mr Cugoano opened a third and poured for himself, Buckram and Mr Hardy.
The men found seats and studied each other for a while longer than was comfortable.
‘Charlotte informs me that you are a man of letters,’ Ottobah ventured.
‘I live in the world of words, it is true,’ replied Buckram, surprising himself at the ease with which he spoke amongst them.
‘Perhaps then you can settle an argument we were enjoying prior to your arrival.’
‘Speak on, sir.’
‘My good friends, Tom and Ola here, maintain that the work of old man Sancho is superior to that of Gronniosaw. For my part I disagree, finding Sancho’s prose as stale and unappetizing as the almond custards his wife sells in that dreadful shop of hers. What do you think?’
‘Firstly,’ said Buckram, ‘like all of us, I know the Sancho establishment well and I do not wish to speak ill of the dead. In his defence, however, I must say that his widow is a purveyor of the most exceptional apple dumplings.’
There was a pause then everyone, except for Olaudah, exploded with laughter.
‘Capital, sir! Capital!’ guffawed Thomas. ‘But seriously, as a writer yourself, which do you find the more meritable document, Gronniosaw’s Narrative or Sancho’s Letters?’
Charlotte returned from the kitchen carrying the half-dead flowers in a china vase. She placed it at the centre of the table.
Buckram stalled, noticing Charlotte’s eyes on him and practically feeling Olaudah’s loud, steady breathing from the other side of the room.
‘I see no great difference between the two,’ he said. ‘I find them somewhat alike.’
‘As chalk and cheese?’ inquired the Lowlander.
‘Surely, Mr Hardy,’ Charlotte interjected, ‘surely you mean as charcoal and chocolate.’
‘Of course, ma’am. Of course. My mistake.’ He chuckled.
Buckram had never seen a white man behave like this in black company. He had never met a woman like Charlotte who felt free enough to invite four men to supper. And just how well did she know these three anyway?
They dined on ground rice and chicken cayenne.
‘This is the dish available to our people in the colonies on feast days,’ Charlotte lectured Thomas. ‘I prepare it every Sunday evening as a sort of … a sort of sacrament, I feel. Strange as it may seem, it is very much the practice amongst many of us who live in these islands.’
Some pains were being taken to overlook the Scot’s strangled coughing and the beads of perspiration speckling his forehead.
Buckram sucked at the juicy, over-peppered chicken, envying Charlotte for never having gnawed the tough, meagre sinews of plantation fowl and wondering at her perfect skin, as yet untraumatized by whips and branding irons.
He wondered what it would be like to eat two large spicy meals every Sunday, and how life would be if he could ever afford furnished accommodation.
Buckram emptied his plate long before anyone else. He settled back in his seat, to crunch chicken bones and marvel at the heady flow of intimate, cultured conversation.
‘… but it’s all happened before, I tell you,’ Equiano was saying. ‘Our brothers and sisters have survived such attacks and accusations many times in this country, most notably under Elizabeth, Good Queen Bess. She issued, again for reasons of political expediency, a proclamation ordering us to be discharged from her dominions, seeing how we supposedly relied over-much on “relief” at the “great annoyance of her own liege people”. This two hundred years ago, mark you, and yet, in spite of it and all of its kind, here we remain. More numerous than ever, better organized, an established community, I say.’
‘I’ truth, Ola,’ scoffed Ottobah, ‘I suspect you romanticize our plight. We have, as you say, always been here, and I fear we always will. But only as hewers of wood, drawers of water, cannon-fodder and sexual curios. More than that the English cannot abide.’
‘You do me wrong, Otto. I would not seek to undermine the gravity of our situation, I sought only to state that our numbers here increase and that we will become, if indeed we are not already, an ineradicable element of this nation’s character.’
‘So, they frequent our clubs, sing our songs, dance our dances and eat our foods. They do all that in the Caribbean and still flog us to death on a whim. Dammit, Ola, there are no ineradicable elements to these people, they’re a composite of those they’ve conquered, and nothing more. Mongrels all, is that not so, Thomas? Is it not the same story in your land?’
‘Aye, I regret to say that it is.’ The Scot whipped out a handkerchief and dabbed at his upper lip.
Olaudah Equiano stood up, glass of water in hand.
‘A toast, ma’am, sirs, to our most honoured guest and friend …’
Buckram stirred uneasily.
‘… Mr Ottobah Cugoano and, if he will permit, a toast in kind to his absent friend, Mr William Green, on the successful release from captivity of our brother, Henry Demane, now safely resident on British soil.’
Buckram imitated Charlotte and Thomas’s polite cheering at this news.
Charlotte passed him a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. Equiano and Ottobah noticed his awkwardness. He turned the items over in his hands until he divined their relationship and functions.
Charlotte made an excuse and left the room. The tenor of the mood plunged swiftly to the depths of acknowledged yet unspoken contempt.
&
nbsp; Buckram struggled with the bottle, making off-centred stabs at the cork, trying to recall how Ottobah had accomplished the feat.
From the other side of the wall they heard Charlotte using a chamber pot. Her piss rang tinny and splashed deep, betraying the height of its trajectory.
Thick wisps of smoke from a nearby source floated through the half-open windows. Raised voices, bells and frantic footfalls echoed from the thoroughfare below.
‘Miss Tell tells us that you are promoting the work of an associate, Mr Buckram,’ boomed Equiano. ‘What is his name?’
‘I fear I’d not be much of a friend if I revealed his identity.’
‘What! So you are sworn to secrecy? Name the fellow. Name his work.’
‘That I cannot do, sir. I am pledged.’
Buckram had succeeded in penetrating the cork and was on the point of extracting it when Charlotte returned from the bedroom (with unusual haste for a young black woman, he noted).
‘We were just inviting our brother Buckram to elucidate on his artistic endeavours. Are you by chance familiar with any of his writings, dear Charlotte?’
She shook her head and made too much fuss of clearing the table. She stuck her head out of the window and assessed the activity below. ‘There’s fire down the street!’ she declared. ‘The firedrakes are out there. The road’s blocked off. D’you think we’re in danger here?’
‘Heavens, no,’ said Equiano. ‘They’ll pull the building down, blow the damn thing up before the insurers will let the damage spread. Relax, woman. Besides you would, I am sure, be anxious, as are we all, to see something that friend Buckram here has produced, no?’
Thomas and Ottobah nodded with drunken, malicious vigour. Charlotte compressed her lips and flashed Buckram a bewildered, pitying look.
Equiano continued, ‘So, will you show us an example of your writing? What form does it take: essays, criticism, perambulations, personal recollections?’
‘Poetry mostly,’ muttered Buckram, taking care not to make eye contact. He wrestled the remainder of the cork from the bottle neck and raised the bottle to his lips, no longer caring what impression he made.