Nonetheless this is Aaron Graham’s milieu, and Graham is a good friend and an excellent companion, honest and diligent but otherwise totally unlike John Harriott. Indeed, rather more like Ryder than Harriott cares to admit. Graham dresses carefully in the latest fashions, affects a stylish air of insouciance, and has a lightness of touch when it comes to conversation that makes him a favorite among the dining societies and parlors of the West End. His political nous may not be to Harriott’s tastes, but it is always framed with such charm that the older man’s hackles are rarely raised for long. Graham, for himself, admires Harriott more than any man he has ever met, and fervently wishes his old friend were more discreet and measured in his undertakings—he had raised a despairing eyebrow when he first heard of Harriott’s handbill. The two of them dine regularly, and Graham’s hand has been responsible for guiding the old farmer-sailor-soldier to a more effective sense of purpose and, did Harriott but know it, for shielding him from several attempts to unseat the River Thames magistrate and replace him with someone cut from a more amenable cloth.
Graham’s lodgings on Great Queen Street throw light and heat out into the dark street as Harriott arrives, and the welcome inside is just as warm and bright. Harriott and Graham share an excellent meal that evening, discussing random administrative and political matters (when the name of Ryder is mentioned Harriott embarks on a screed of such maritime saltiness that Graham is forced to ask his servants to retire until it blows itself out). And, eventually, as the port reaches the table, the cigars are rolled out, and the servants clear away the dinner things, the conversation turns to the Ratcliffe Highway murders. Harriott wastes little time in bemoaning the lack of action at the Home Office and in Shadwell.
“And yet the reward, Harriott. It is unprecedented,” says Graham. The Home Office has just raised its price for information about the murders from £100 to £500. “Ryder has made a bold move, particularly for one such as him. You surely cannot complain about his effort.”
Harriott grunts.
“It’s ironic, is it not, Graham?” he says. “Barely a week after I was forced to apologize for offering an amount which was a fraction of that sum. Had it come earlier, perhaps the reward would have been effective. As it is, there has been more than a week since the murders. Whatever information may be unearthed by this new sum is likely to be worse than useless.”
“Worse than useless, Harriott? How so?”
“The unprecedented amount serves no purpose other than to make it even more worthwhile for miscreants to invent information. It will create noise and bluster. We have more than enough of that. Have you not noted how many suspects the various offices have taken into custody? Not one of them has led to a firm avenue of inquiry. This setting of eye-catching rewards is no substitute for good police work.”
“Police work? What an extraordinary phrase. I take it that you mean the business of discovering who committed these atrocious crimes.”
“I mean that exactly, Graham. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of the methodologies of detection and evidence. There is much to be discovered in this area. The men at Shadwell have little idea of it. They expect the murderer will walk in with his hands in the air and an apology on his lips. Or, alternatively, they imagine that by arresting all and sundry they will somehow scoop up the killer, as a fisherman scoops up his catch in a net. Multiply that by seven other offices, all of whom are scooping up in the same fashion, and you have a very large catch indeed. ’Tis a shame there aren’t any decent fish to eat in it.”
“So, you include my office in that, Harriott?”
“I do, sir. I do not include you in it, however. Despite your ironic grin and mischievous countenance, I know full well you understand what I am talking about.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Your investigation of Mr. Patch, and your discovery of him as the murderer of Mr. Blight.”
“Ah, once again your attention to the niceties of my career flatters me, Harriott.”
“Not at all. It is my Waterman-Constable Horton who told me of the case. He is very much a student of your work.”
“Really? How very odd he must be.”
“He is exceptionally committed to the cause of reducing the miseries which plague honest men and women.”
“I am sure he is, although you make him sound like a politician. And I do know him rather well, as it happens. I have observed his work on several occasions. And I rather think he, like us, is genuinely motivated by other things than the simple doing of good.”
“I do not understand your meaning, sir.”
“Let me explain. You are first and foremost a seagoing man, Harriott. You started your career at sea. You are a man of action. Wherever you spy inaction, such as your perception of the inactivity at the Home Office in recent days, you become irritated and frustrated. You clench your fists and you slam them down on tables. I can see your fists now, and they look as tight and as white as a pair of fresh cauliflowers. You resent the inactivity of the Police Offices. The Shadwell magistrates enrage you because they are, essentially, passive men, Harriott, and you are the most active man I know. I believe if you go to bed not having completed a dozen tasks in any day you go to bed a deeply unhappy man. You stamp your mark on the world in a frenzy of doing.”
“I will accept your description even while I ignore your mocking tone, Graham.”
“My respectful thanks, old friend, and I meant no mocking by it. It is an extraordinary quality. I only raise the point to make another point. Constable Horton is not like you, Harriott. Horton sees the world as an intellectual puzzle. It is something to be worked out, like an interesting watch mechanism. Horton looks at the facts surrounding these murders rather as Plato looked at the shadows flickering on the walls of his cave—as indications of a reality which cannot be directly seen. Horton is not motivated by the wish to do good, he is motivated by the wish to receive gratification for working things out. Like all of us, including you, Harriott, he wishes to find ways of gratifying himself.”
“I rather suspect that you just described yourself, rather than my policeman.”
“That is perhaps the case. You are more deductive than I gave you credit for, my dear Harriott.”
“Your point is well taken, Graham. Horton and I are indeed trying to force the issue on this case, in our different ways. Horton spent yesterday at Shadwell observing their efforts to make something stick with this Pugh character.”
“Pugh?”
“He is a contractor, responsible for the cosmetic work on the Marr shop. The ripping chisel found on the shop counter was his. Pugh claims he hired a man named Cornelius Hart to work on the shop three weeks ago, and this man requested a chisel of the type found in the shop. Hart was also brought in to Shadwell, but was identified by a bricklayer who worked in the shop, and by the girl servant Margaret Jewell.”
“Why was the chisel on the counter?”
“Why? I suppose it was left there.”
“Left there? By whom?”
“By the carpenter, Hart.”
“But you said he did the work three weeks ago. Are we to believe that the fastidious Mr. Marr would have left a tool on his shop counter for three weeks? Surely it would have been put away. And why was it not missed?”
“You sound like Horton.”
“I shall take that as the greatest compliment, given what you have told me this evening.”
“Perhaps Marr took the chisel out to return it?”
“At midnight? Surely he wasn’t planning to take it to Hart at that time of night?”
“Well, perhaps using your powers of deduction you might give me an idea of what did actually happen.”
“Well, I think it most likely that either the killer, or killers, brought it into the house as a tool for their crime, or Marr got it out for some other reason, perhaps to defend himself.”
“But no one heard any voices, raised or otherwise. And unlike the maul the chisel had no blood on it, so was n
ot used in the crime.”
“Indeed. But it is there. That is the one single fact we’re sure of—the chisel was on the counter.”
“Yes.”
“Then I do think it rather important, Harriott, that we find out what it was doing there.”
“We?”
“We, indeed. Since neither of us is formally permitted to work on this case, I think we may both be said to have an equal share in its investigation, if I may use such a word. Now, some port?”
“If you insist, my friend. Though I wouldn’t want your crystal clear investigating faculties clouded by the rancid effects of alcohol.”
“Yes. Like all seamen, you are of course a model of temperance.”
APRIL 1565
Billy and Drake were looking for pearls.
The place in which they were looking, Rio de la Hacha, was a scrappy colonial town on the coast of Venezuela where the pearls grew to the size of hazelnuts, or so Drake had heard, and he’d found a local man who owned a boat and a team of slaves who dived for them. This wiry middle-aged Spaniard had just added to his little team by buying some more slaves from the Hawkyns fleet, squeezing their thighs to test for muscle and holding his hand over their mouths and noses to see which of them had the biggest lungs.
Billy had never seen a pearl, but even the sound of the word was thrilling and opulent. Drake was just excited by the prospect of more surreptitious wealth, although it had seemed clear to Billy for quite some time that Hawkyns’s second cousin Francis Drake was set fair to make more money from this voyage than Billy could dream of making in an entire lifetime. Drake had the knack of being in the right place at the right time, and of being as far away from the wrong place when he needed to be. It had struck Billy that Drake’s position on the voyage was rather more influential than the one he affected, that of the sophisticated but callow young distant cousin learning his trade. Billy was beginning to think Drake was there to keep an eye on the crew, an eye on the cargo, and both eyes on the interactions between the two. Hence their careful stocktaking, and Drake’s long evenings spent watching the Negroes in their cots. He had even been learning their language.
They had met with the bad-tempered little pearl fisherman early that morning. Eight slaves were already sitting in the boat. One of them looked at Billy and pointed, opening his mouth to shout something, and Billy saw sharpened teeth and thought perhaps that he recognized the man. A slave from the Jesus, obviously, one of the two hundred or so they’d been selling in Rio de la Hacha since their arrival. The boat-owner smacked the African round the back of the head when he heard him speak, and the Negro’s head fell forward. He made no further sound. Billy looked down to the man’s feet and there, sure enough, was the questing head of the worm, now four or five inches longer and beginning to work its way down the African’s foot. It made him feel sick, and he looked away.
Throughout their negotiations the boat-owner was surly and unhelpful, and Drake smirked at him. “This Spanish coward is worried we’re going to kill his family,” he told Billy, not bothering to lower his voice in front of the Spaniard. “Isn’t it marvelous how afraid they are of us?”
The boat-owner, and his fellow townsfolk, had learned pretty well to be afraid of English sailors. The John Hawkyns style of mercantile negotiation brooked little debate and was conducted under the shadow of cannon. Since arriving from Africa weeks before, Hawkyns and his fleet had bullied their way around much of the Caribbean and the coast of the Spanish Main in an attempt to sell their slaves. They had taken on as many riches from the locals as they could get away with.
In the third week of March the fleet had arrived in the Caribbean. Before leaving Africa, thanks to the capture of several Portuguese caravels sixty miles up the Callowsa river, the number of ships had swollen to seven. The holds of these caravels had been filled with Africans, and their crews had been tortured for information by Hawkyns and the gentlemen officers who sailed with him. Billy had heard the screams of the Portuguese from the caravels, and each scream had been accompanied by a cheer from the crew of the Jesus. When Hawkyns had finished with them, the Portuguese were thrown into the river waters.
They had spent many days raiding the island of Sambula for slaves after the initial successful attack. Every day for two weeks they went ashore, and perhaps two hundred Africans had been seized. But Hawkyns had been determined to seize more Africans with less effort, and the caravels provided both information and, crucially, more cargo space. The holds of the Jesus and the Minion were almost full, indeed were becoming dangerously overcrowded.
The Portuguese information led to an attack on a town further upriver, in which more Africans were seized. Before long the caravels were also filled up, and Hawkyns came down to view the cargo in the hold of the Jesus, ignoring Drake and Billy as he counted heads and muttered to himself. Billy thought he understood the equation Hawkyns was trying to calculate. He and Drake had already done it themselves. Pack the Africans in too tightly, and the contagions which were already leaping from slave to slave would jump ever more quickly. Pack them in too loosely, and there wouldn’t be enough Negroes left to draw a profit (or at least as heavy a profit as they all would like) on the other side of the ocean. What was the optimum ratio of Africans to cargo space?
Billy did not know how many slaves were in the holds of the other ships, but he reckoned on more than a hundred down in the hold of the Jesus. Whatever the calculation was, Hawkyns decided this was the ideal amount, and they immediately set sail for the Spanish colonies of South America and the Caribbean.
Crossing the Atlantic took several weeks, and many Africans died during the voyage. Billy and Drake carefully totted up the totals each morning, removing the Africans who had died during the night or looked close to death and having them thrown overboard. But the losses seemed to be acceptable, and Hawkyns’s equation had held—the number of surviving Africans was still thought to be high enough to bring healthy profits when they reached the Spanish colonies.
No one had been able to answer Billy’s oft-repeated question, though: what were these slaves actually worth?
Their first stop was Dominica, where they took on fresh water, mainly for the Africans in the holds. At their next stop, the island of Margarita, the townspeople vanished when the Hawkyns fleet arrived, fearful of what he might do. They remembered previous English voyages to the region, and had been told stories of guns trained on towns, and secretaries and treasurers and governors run through for refusing to cooperate with those wanting to trade.
The fleet kept moving, hitting the Venezuelan coast at Cumaná, but finding the settlement there almost deserted they moved on to Santa Fe, where they took on supplies for the crew and for the slaves, although prospects for trade were still not promising enough for Hawkyns to set out his stall (quite literally, as Billy would discover). At Santa Fe they were approached by Arawak Indians, with whom the English traded trinkets such as beads and pewter for food—bread and corn and chickens and, most exotically of all, pineapples. Only a few crewmen went ashore for the transactions, and from the ship Billy watched the Indians emerge from the forest behind the shore, their dark hair gleaming in the sun and the light flashing on their painted skin. Some of the crew came back with stories of the Arawaks’ poisoned arrows, which the Indians had been happy to show off and which were tipped with the venom of the local serpents.
Finally, at the significant colony of Burburata on the mainland coast, Hawkyns decided to set up shop, finding a settlement big enough to need slaves and rich enough to promise profit. Soon after the fleet anchored, he was rowed ashore to meet with the town officials. Drake went with him, and returned with details of the formal negotiations. The admiral had claimed to have been blown off course by storms, and had asked to be allowed to trade with the locals in order to replenish his much-needed supplies. His tale was delivered with part desperation, part charm and part threat—as he spoke to the local dignitaries, Hawkyns made sure his ships’ guns were visible from the quayside, orderi
ng them made ready and polished up so the Caribbean sun flamed along their sides. It was a combination well tailored to unlock the incipient greed and fear of the locals.
Like all Spanish subjects on the Main the Burburata officials had been told many, many times by representatives of the crown that they were not to trade with Englishmen, and in particular this Englishman. Hawkyns was already well-known among the bureaucrats and counselors of Madrid, and Spain’s ambassador to England had long ago sent word that a visit from this Plymouth adventurer should be expected. Madrid was clear: local trading monopolies were to be preserved. The economic wall which the Spanish court had erected around its empire would not be breached.
But then, Madrid was a very long way from Burburata.
Hawkyns persisted in his cajoling. He promised bribes for the governor of Venezuela (who just so happened to be the nephew of another official with whom Hawkyns had traded on a previous voyage, which was the kind of relationship which drove those same Madrid bureaucrats into elegant tantrums), but he also hinted that a ship the size of the Jesus with a big crew of lusty determined Englishmen was likely to turn nasty if his wishes weren’t met. The threat became more defined, the charm sharper at the edges.
And while all this was happening, Africans were dying in the ship’s hold. Sickness leaped from slave to slave, and the English sailors muttered angrily that if the Spaniards didn’t give them a license to trade soon, the merchandise would all be dead. Billy worried as much as anyone. If Hawkyns didn’t get a move on, and get the slaves sold, he’d be returning to Kate with nothing.
Eventually, with one eye on Madrid but with a more immediate, and significantly greedier, eye on the treasure in the hold of the Jesus, the Burburata authorities agreed to issue a trading license, with the authority of the governor of Venezuela. But in their determination to drive a bargain, they went too far, demanding that Hawkyns pay customs duty in advance and a sales tax on every African the English sold in the town.
The English Monster Page 10