by S. I. Martin
‘Taper ready?’ asked Hercules apprehensively.
‘Ready!’
The dining-room window was being raised. Buckram dropped the slow-burning twist and rolled across the pavement. He jumped in through the open carriage doors and out the other side, grabbing one of the loaded pistols from the seat on his way.
He turned swiftly round the back of the coach to face the window, holding the pistol at arm’s length in a firing stance. Georgie and William were hefting a bulky iron box onto the window sill. They called for help in frenzied whispers.
‘Herkie!’ yelled Buckram, moving back to the little cannon. ‘I’m going to the window. Cover me.’
Hercules gave him the thumbs up from his position upon the top-box. His musket barrel swivelled from the door to the first-floor windows and back again.
‘Can I play, mister? Please.’
‘Why yes, son,’ said Buckram, suddenly inspired.
‘See this?’ he picked up the smouldering, smoky taper. ‘Our white friends will be coming through that door any second now. As soon as you see it open just a little-ittle, incy-wincy, eeny-teeny bit you’re going to put this hot part onto this bit and make everyone laugh. Alright, lad?’
‘Ah, wow!’
‘And mind you stand well back now. She jumps, sometimes.’
Buckram ran to the window. William and Georgie were only just managing to balance the strong-box over the sill. He noticed that William was carrying a spent pistol in his hand. There was a thud and a short scrape of wood on wood from deep inside the room.
‘Willie, hold your end down,’ said Buckram. ‘It’s too heavy a load to come over my side at once like this. Drop your gun. You’re covered.’
‘He can’t drop the gun. He’s in shock,’ said Georgie.
‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’
Buckram heard another thud, this time louder, and saw an enormous table jammed under the door handles bump a quarter inch into the room. Newton guarded the entrance with two pistols. Charles held a lighted taper in his teeth and juggled with two grenades.
‘Buckie, take the weight on your shoulders. I’m coming out to your side. Hurry!’
Buckram put his back to the wall and felt the massive container slide into his neck. ‘Wait …!’ he hollered, straightening his shoulders and redistributing the burden.
Georgie skipped through the window and landed gracefully beside him. They pulled together.
‘William, you can let go now. Here, let it fall. There’s nothing to break. We can drag it from here.’
They let it clunk to the ground.
Buckram looked back inside. An axe was being applied to the doors. Something shifted the light at the far side of the room. He looked again. Through the rear window, a shadow shimmered and vanished against the garden wall.
‘Charlie! In the garden! They’re in the garden! GRENADE! NOW!’
With the taper between his lips, Charles kissed the round, black, metal bomb. ‘EVERYBODY DOWN!’
He flung it with full force at the window. In the garden the black butler sprang up with a levelled musket. He was vaporized in the storm of shrapnel from the dull explosion.
‘Hmmm, who did he think he was,’ said Georgie, ‘Crispus Attucks?’
Dust clouds breezed in through the shattered window frame. The door resounded to renewed shoulder charges. Axe blows rained down on it in more frantic succession. The table had shifted out three inches.
‘Come, brethren, let us flee!’
Charles and Newton hopped through the front window and helped Buckram carry the gold to the coach. Once inside the vehicle they started shedding their false African kit and wriggled into everyday apparel.
‘Willie-boy, move, we’re going,’ called Georgie.
‘One second,’ said William absently, ‘I nearly forgot something.’ He pulled his second pistol from his robes and shot Mr Irving between the eyes.
‘Better now?’ asked George, incredulously.
‘Much.’
‘Good. Then we’re away.’
It was only as they boarded the coach that William noticed a child standing by the mini-cannon holding a lighted taper. Buckram was passing him two fresh twists and demonstrating how to light one with another. Buckram leaped up onto the driver’s perch and cracked the whip.
‘Thanks, sonny,’ he chirped. ‘It’s a good game. Don’t forget now, she jumps.’
‘And everyone will laugh, won’t they?’
‘Oooh yes! We all will. Lots. Later.’
‘Goodbye, Mr Chocolate-man!’
He whipped the horses to a gallop down Upper Grosvenor Street. A whoop went up from inside the carriage. They swept diagonally across a trafficless Tyburn Lane and cut into Hyde Park.
‘There’s Henry with the fresh horses!’ said Newton – or was it Charles or Hercules – next to him on the top-box. The now ex-Guardsman pointed up the dusty avenue towards a reservoir shrouded behind row upon row of trees. Henry Prince was standing akimbo atop a smart but austere mailcoach. He looked unrelaxed yet very pleased to see them coming.
All eight men unloaded the ‘royal carriage’. Their flashy clothes were bundled, weighted with cannon balls, and dumped into the reservoir. The horses were slapped away to canter free into the marshes of Hyde Park, dragging their coach behind them.
As the strong-box was being lowered into the mailcoach’s false compartment an unmistakable boom! carried over from the direction of Grosvenor Square.
‘Hmmm, now there’s a useful young fellow,’ jested Georgie. They were laughing so much that no one noticed Buckram unsheathing his old sword-pistol.
‘Well, brethren, let’s quit this land,’ Georgie turned to be hailed by the company. His eyes flashed once, almost imperceptibly as they caught Buckram’s stance. ‘To Plymouth,’ he continued, holding the door open for his cronies. ‘And Mr Supple, give us a tune. A new song. A victory march!’
William worked up a jaunty air into which strands of both ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ were woven.
‘Hop aboard, Buckie,’ said Georgie. He was staring at the sword-pistol with untroubled eyes, smirking in fact.
William’s music stopped as the realization of what was happening took hold of the coach.
Buckram had the weapon aimed at Georgie’s chest.
‘Time’s up, Georgie George,’ he said.
‘I thought my time was just beginning. What’s this now?’
‘This is a loaded pistol. George, I should have done this a long time ago.’
‘Buckie,’ reasoned the beggar king, ‘don’t pull that trigger.’
‘Why not? What have I to lose?’
‘Two thousand English pounds of solid gold. Don’t you care about that?’
‘You’ve no idea how much I don’t care,’ growled Buckram. ‘It was you all along, wasn’t it?’
‘Look,’ said Georgie. ‘The alarm has gone out and our lives are at stake should we tarry here. So, I beg you, please shoot or shut up.’
‘I’ll shoot, I’ll talk and I’ll take my time.’
Georgie raised a hand to quieten the crew in the coach.
‘It was you who had Neville murdered. We all know that,’ Buckram ranted.
‘Wouldn’t there be better times and places for this discussion?’
‘No.’
‘Very well, very well. So I’m a murdering madman, and I deserve to die. Shoot me.’ Georgie bared his breast.
Buckram squeezed the trigger. There was no explosion. A wisp of smoke snaked from the barrel of the firearm.
‘Hmmm,’ Georgie was stroking his chin. ‘I didn’t credit you with such strength of will. Well, now that’s over, shall we depart?’
‘No, no, no, it’s impossible.’ Every muscle in Buckram’s body seemed to tremble. He was squinting hard at Georgie and stepping backwards, away from the mailcoach. ‘So, it’s true – what Neville said. It’s true, then. You are the de …’
‘Will you shut up?’ screamed Georgie. Quit
e leisurely he reached into the coach and withdrew an enormous double-barrelled flintlock pistol. ‘Let me explain,’ he continued, cocking the hammer. ‘Knowing your weapon to be loaded, I greased the flint with goose fat. This gun is fully operational, you will find. So I beseech you, a third time, get in or go your own way.’
Buckram flung down his sword-pistol and threw up his arms. ‘Your game again, Georgie. It’s always your game.’
He saluted William and the triplets then turned his back on the coach and walked with slumped shoulders through the cover of trees into the marshland beyond.
‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ said William. ‘I’ll go after him. We can’t leave him here.’
‘Willie, save your strength. He’s gone, can’t you see?’ He tapped the side of his head twice. ‘Let’s get away while we still can. You’ve still a family to look out for, and don’t forget, you’re a rich man now. Rich men don’t die for nothing.’
‘No, wait, just one second.’
William tossed a dozen or so of the smaller ingots into a canvas bag and ran to catch up with Buckram.
‘If your heart’s set on misery, it’s better that it be monied.’
Buckram accepted the bag and slung it over his shoulder.
‘It’s a very small world we live in, Buckram.’ William held out his hand. ‘Until we meet again.’
‘God be with you, William Supple. Give my regards to Mary and the lads. Until we meet again.’
They shared a weak, confused handshake then Buckram stumbled off west to where the park grew wildest.
William watched from the coach as his friend tramped off towards the higher grass and rougher ground. Henry Prince cracked the whip and the heavy coach jerked them away.
Buckram became a speck on the horizon. He could have been anyone or nobody, heading through the strands of waving green, and maybe turning round to give a final salute.
Brazil, Recife, October 1786
A cool, steady breeze carried a flight of macaws over the palm fronds along the beach. William Supple took another deep breath and let his body sink beneath the water for the fifth time. The sea here was neither green nor brown: it was clearest blue as in topaz transparent.
He opened his eyes and saw diverse flotillas of multi-coloured fish swarm and switch about in rainbow abandon. He floated in the ocean, an inch or so below the surface, enjoying the salt water’s soothing sting against his mosquito-ravaged skin. William relaxed his stomach muscles for the first time in twenty hours and a dysenteric stream, almost unregistered by his rum-deadened mind, bled brown into the blue Atlantic.
His lungs were close to bursting, but he was being seduced by the ebb and flow of the greater currents into which he was being drawn. Then it came to him, almost as a sweet realization. I could die here. Not such a bad place to die. Suspended here off this perfect tropical coast. Just another naked brown corpse drifting away from this hot, humid beerless country. He pictured his future cadaver at the mercy of the tides, floating forever between the Old World and the New, never sinking, never rising, and never touching either shore.
It would be far better to die thus than to perish on Brazilian soil. Far better. In his short time in this place he had come to learn one thing, and one thing only: BRAZIL WAS THE WORST PLACE ON GOD’S EARTH!
He had been a fool. Georgie George had led him to a hell-hole beyond his wildest imaginings. Recife was a nightmare town; worse than London in mid-winter, worse than Carolina come harvest time. Every shop assistant owned slaves, every woman, black and white, was for sale. Priests outnumbered paupers. The whole port basked in great evil.
The enormity of the horror had struck William from the moment the little packet brig docked by the quayside. The presence of corruption was tangible. It was in the very air: in the stench of slave sweat laced with the high notes of the white men’s Kölnisch water; in the unending peal of church bells offsetting field hollers and work songs.
From his first view of the city, reason had abandoned William entirely.
Georgie laid a hand on his shoulder and steered him towards the gangplank.
‘Be unafraid, William,’ he said in the same tone he might have used to request salt at the dinner table. ‘This is but the start of our journey. It will soon be a memory. Be unafraid.’
William made to reply, but found his throat possessed by a fit of hiccoughs. He wondered how Georgie’s dreams of proud, free black cities (quilombos he called them), married up to the violent reality into which they were descending.
He let Georgie take his hand and lead him, as a father would a child, down the gangplank and onto dry land.
Black men were everywhere, legions of them. Half-naked and in chains, they trotted through the streets at the double in whip-driven columns. William saw them labouring like mules at all points in the port; waist-deep in the water, shoring up walls and sandbanks, hauling massive blocks of stone uphill towards some new bridge, town house or cathedral, lading and unlading ships’ cargoes of coffee, rum, cotton, sugar and gold. The stuff of empires: slave produce.
The two travellers had the greatest difficulty trying to move anonymously through the city. As far as William could see there were no free blacks in Recife. He and Georgie, apparently, were the only black people wearing clothes. Their outlandish styles and Georgie’s metropolitan swagger attracted much attention from the good freemen of the port. William soon realized that his wealth was of no value whatsoever in a city where the most cordial address they’d received was, ‘Negro, we will have you join us!’
Three soldiers had been trailing them from the harbour, walking five steps in their wake, hissing lazy Portuguese curses, at once menacing and musical. William saw them loosen the clasps on their scabbards just moments after they’d left the harbour.
‘I think we might just need a little help here,’ said Georgie as they crossed a canal bridge. The bridge led to an alley-way which gave onto a square packed with people.
‘Any ideas, Georgie?’ William croaked. These were the first words he had managed to utter since disembarking. ‘Any ideas? Anything? Do you know where we’re going?’
‘Trust me, William. This must be the place.’
What place?
A morning market was in full flow in the big square (Praça da Independência William read). Stall-keepers, hawkers and peddlers (almost all with a slave or two in tow), took up most of the space. An enormous church decorated with overwrought carvings occupied one whole side of the square.
‘We’re nearly there!’ Georgie shouted, pointing at the church. ‘If I’m not mistaken, that’s the Igreja de Santo Antonio.’
‘The what?’ William could almost feel the soldiers’ breath on his neck. Their mocking laughter was close to his ears. He heard them trailing their drawn blades against masonry and imagined the showers of sparks this excited.
‘Follow me. Quickly. This way,’ said Georgie. His eyes flicked across the crowd as if searching for a friend. ‘Come,’ he commanded. ‘It’s time to run.’
They tore off through the market, weaving through the stalled shoppers in a vain attempt to shake off the sword-wielding soldiers. William was tempted to drop his gold-heavy canvas bag on the cobbles to ease his flight, but he hadn’t come through three years of trials simply to die penniless. If he was to be murdered, he resolved, it would be with his bag of loot clutched to his chest.
They were approaching a tavern a few doors down from the church – its name, in English above the door, The Eagle’s Nest. William recognized several deckhands from the packet brig amongst the drinkers seated outside.
‘Ahoy, me buckos!’ yelled Georgie as he ran towards them.
‘Ahoy!’ came the massed, if hesitant, reply. The sailors, seeing the cause of their ex-passengers’ distress, rose as one. Their hands flew to their weapons and the soldiers stopped in their tracks. Georgie and William disappeared into their ranks and didn’t stop running until they had reached the back room of the tavern.
‘My God!
’ William fought to catch his breath. ‘Our lives have been saved by … English sailors!’
‘And don’t you forget it,’ Georgie advised. ‘They won’t. Like it or not, this is an English inn and we are English-speakers. Until we blacks use our original African language, our lives are linked with these people and theirs with ours, even against our proper interests, with the best will in the world.’ He lectured on, ‘We are in Brazil, as you may have noticed. To these drunken seafarers, it mattered less that we are black men than that we have a common tongue. Language fosters conspiracy. Whenever you find yourself outside the English-speaking world you will be reminded of this, William.’
‘D’you mean to say that the same thing would happen were these men Carolina rebels or slavers newly arrived from Africa?’ William spat the words.
‘Yes,’ Georgie replied, thoughtfully. ‘I believe it would. Indeed, some of these men are slavers, no doubt. Come. Let’s meet them and study their ways.’
William shook his head and shouldered his bag. Georgie was a deep one for sure. How he’d survived in this world was a mystery. For the longest time he’d reasoned that Georgie George had succeeded in wooing luck from sheer wilful naivety, or that his confidence (as awesome as it was congenial) was woven from multi-layered, ever-changing strategies. What was becoming clearer, under the brighter light and sharper shadows of this country, was that Georgie had gone mad a long time ago, maybe in London (where derangement visited every black man, as William knew), or maybe in the colonies where he’d been driven (so it was said) to murder another black man for the sake of adopting his crazy double-Christian name. But Georgie was no sadblack, his insanity seemed anchored and without anguish; it flourished and gave seed to all with whom it came into contact. He wasn’t lost in the everyday demon dance. He had embraced his folly and shared it with the world. William envied him.
There were a good twenty or so men drinking in the Eagle’s Nest. Most of them were now filing into the back room to welcome Georgie and William. They were a swarthy, rough-hewn crew, bejewelled and with pock-marked faces: Englishmen too long abroad, drowning their sorrows while waiting for another ship to take them from this friendless Latin city.