The English Monster

by Lloyd Shepherd

  “Yes. To Coldbath Fields. But tonight he is at Shadwell, being interrogated again. They have been busy rounding up people who know him, according to Horton.”

  “You did not wish to go?”

  “Horton is there.”

  “Is he now?”

  “I’m not at all sure I like your tone, Graham.”

  “My tone is as it ever is. I am perhaps surprised at your lack of interest in the proceedings against this man Williams, given how very involved you have been in the investigation to date, old friend.”

  Graham is aware of the sharpness in his voice, and thinks with wonder: My Lord, am I chastising this man for a lack of application? How the world has turned these past weeks!

  Harriott’s face has flushed red at his friend’s aspersion, but the flush is fleeting. He breathes out suddenly and his head drops, so Graham can no longer see his eyes.

  “Do not let me detain you,” says Harriott, softly. “If you wish to witness the humiliation of this accused man, it is barely a half-mile from here.”

  Graham does not rise. He does lean across the table and put his hand on the older man’s arm.

  “My dear Harriott. You are spent. Your years have caught up with you. One day they will do so with me too. You are an old man, Harriott, and your internal fires have burned hard and strong. But they are spent.”

  Harriott looks up, and Graham’s world spins again at the sight of tears in the old man’s eyes.

  “Graham, I should strike you down for saying such a thing.”

  He leans back into his chair, as if surrendering to something.

  “But you are right, by God. It is Christmas tomorrow. In January, I believe I shall retire. My work is finished.”

  A gull squawks outside the window, as if in agreement.

  AUGUST 1688

  The old buccaneer Morgan was dead. Preparations were being made in Port Royal for his funeral. The doctor from London, Sloane, had not succeeded in curing him. He didn’t even succeed in stopping the stubborn old fool from resorting to local remedies and to black magic. Nothing worked. I thought at the end he must have died of boredom and disappointment. The lack of adventure and the lack of advancement swelled up in his Welsh belly until it exceeded his corporeal bounds. He had to die.

  His death affected me, I confess. I had known Morgan for as long as I had known anyone apart from Kate. Since I had made my final visit to Stanton St. John, so many people around me had died; shipmates and slaves alike. But Morgan had seemed to endure even while he raged at my inability to age. He had seemed to be made of different stuff. And his presence had made me feel really alive. Not this gray shadowy presence which I seemed to occupy most of the days. Truly warm and truly alive.

  He had angered me on that Christmas visit, with his talk of atrocities in Portobelo, as if I had been the only perpetrator and he (like all his crew) had not benefited from the transactions there undertaken. I am at peace with myself. If I find it within myself to commit those melancholy extremities which Morgan claimed had affected him so, why it is just a result of my lingering time on this earth. I see the truth of things. I see how the world is. I know that there is evil all around, because I see it, taste it, and, most of all, I hear it. And I know that others hear it too. The old Roundhead did. I saw it in the naive fool’s eyes.

  Morgan’s death had left the island effectively headless. The doctor Sloane had turned all his medical attention to that mad fool the Duke of Albemarle, who was supposedly running Jamaica as its governor. Look to the doctor on these occasions. Sloane spent more time with Albemarle than anyone did, and was also closest to Morgan in the weeks before he died. I would not have been surprised to see him take over the post of governor, if it came to that. And he was a very, very young man.

  Woodperry, meanwhile, was going through one of those intermittent phases when the introduction of new blacks disturbed the natural order of the place. Productivity had declined; the field gangs in particular had become uncooperative and even on occasion downright disobedient. I’d branded the new batch of blacks myself on the quayside in Port Royal, marking them with the same PTSI which Henry Morgan had once carved into the wood of the Drake. My own private joke. These new blacks had proven harder to tame than their predecessors, and their behavior had infected all but the oldest slaves on the plantation. In recent days we had even lost some of the slaves, following others from other plantations into the hills of Cockpit County to join the Maroons. Some—the ones with children—had even returned to Woodperry by night to steal their offspring.

  Today, I was to travel to Port Royal, a journey of twenty miles or so, to attend Morgan’s funeral, which would take place any day now. I was waiting on the veranda of Woodperry. The great house was on the highest point of the plantation, so I could see the hundreds of acres of waving green cane and could also, if needed, defend the house from any attack by the field slaves. A dirt track led out from the house to the edge of the plantation, but in front of the house it was bordered by white stones and, behind them, patches of green lawn which were watered regularly by the household slaves. Beyond the garden the sugar cane began, and I spent some time watching the backs of a field gang cutting away at it, dressed in various shades of cotton, their hats drooping in the sun, the cane towering above them like a wall. Some of them were even singing.

  I had long ago left the house’s garden to one of the slaves, a giant of a man called only Newton after the great scientist (it amused me more than I can say to name the slaves after the Fellows of the Royal Society, for whom my presence on earth would have been as unwelcome as the discovery that apples fell upward and not down). Newton spoke no English. He had been brought from Guinea five years before, and I had bought him two years ago from a neighboring plantation that was going bankrupt.

  I watched Newton now as the shining black giant gently planted something green and sharp-looking into a patch of earth behind the lawn. The slave stood back from it, and for a moment stood still before dropping his head and wiping something—perhaps tears—out of his eyes. I had seen this kind of thing often. A slave would see something everyday and ordinary and would suddenly, unaccountably, become upset by the memory of whatever. I found it both charming and amusing.

  Isak Naar stepped out onto the veranda and watched Newton for a moment alongside me. The slave had not noticed us.

  “He is a fool, this one,” said Isak. His voice had kept much of its Portuguese harshness, despite his years in Brazil and then Jamaica. To my ears it sounded almost Russian. “He stands and he weeps like some old woman, all the time.”

  “They have some sensibility,” said I. “Sometimes they remind me of intelligent dogs with their sad eyes and hung heads. Now, Isak. I will be gone several days for this funeral.”

  “Yes, Mr. William.”

  “You have taken the measures I suggested against the interlopers onto the plantation?”

  “I have, Mr. William. There is a new fence on the northwest side. And I have undertaken a careful audit of the slaves. All names have been verified. We shall not be surprised by anything.”

  “Surprised?”

  “I have attempted to calculate the probability of the remaining slaves escaping, Mr. William.”

  Isak always spoke with this slow, elaborate formality. To start with it had irritated me, and there had been occasions when I’d snapped at the man and told him to speak more directly. But now I found it comforting. History seemed to inform the way Isak spoke, and history was a quality of which I was minutely aware.

  “So who is likely to try to escape first?”

  “By my calculation, Robert Boyle is the most likely.”

  I racked my brain, trying to picture the slave mentioned. I was unsuccessful.

  “I have taken the precaution of having Boyle locked up as a warning. We have interrogated him forcefully.”

  Isak’s face was blank as he said this. But I knew what spectrum could be covered by the word “forcefully.” I also knew about the little solitary
jail Isak had had constructed down at the southern end of the plantation, for the imprisonment of Negroes who might be causing a disturbance. Some nights I wandered down there myself and looked in at the porthole in the door, and wide white eyes would stare back at me, sometimes shouting in terror (I was always recognized), sometimes weeping, sometimes defiant.

  “Well, you have things under control as always, Isak. I can leave Woodperry with no anxiety.”

  “There is one other thing I would discuss, Mr. William.”

  “Hurry, Isak. I can hear the carriage approaching.”

  “It is a matter I have been meaning to raise with you for some time. But”—and with this Isak’s face stiffened, and his eyes filled with tears, and his hands started to shake—“but I fear I must leave you.”

  “Leave me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “For how long?”

  “For ever, Mr. William.”

  “Why on earth would you do that?”

  “My wife, Mr. William. She is . . . with child.” His hands were still shaking, and now there were real tears rolling down his cheek.

  “And what of it?”

  “She does not wish . . . sir, she does not wish her child to be born in Jamaica. She believes it to be a place of evil, Mr. William. She wants to go to London.” The words tumbled out as if vomited. Isak raised one shaking hand to his face.

  He is afraid, I thought, with some wonder. He is so afraid of me that he shakes and he cries. I believe he thinks I will reach out and snap his neck. I believe I might.

  A carriage appeared in front of the house, with two men up front, obviously assuming a long bumpy ride that would require a change of driver. Old Newton was looking up at the sky, his massive hands pressed to a pain in the small of his back. From beside me, Isak snorted a string of snot back into his nose. Really, the man was in suppressed hysterics. For a moment, I imagined myself suspended in the air above Woodperry, looking out on the fields of cane and the Negroes bent over before them in supplication, men and women both, small children running around their feet, and I believed that I would be looking at paradise. The only paradise available to me. Why would anyone want to leave paradise?

  I turned to Isak, and placed a hand on his shoulder. The man’s shoulder was a mess of tense knots and shaking muscle. He felt like a slave did when I put my hand on them: terrified yet frozen in place.

  “Isak, you have been a loyal friend and fellow traveler these last few years. Woodperry would be no place at all without you. Go to London, my friend, and raise your family. And who knows? Perhaps we will meet again.”

  And with that, I walked down the steps of the plantation house and climbed into the carriage. It was an open-top affair, as were most of the carriages in Jamaica, and the engineering was not of the highest quality. The two men in the carriage said nothing as we set off down the driveway of the plantation house and out onto the road, if a road it could truthfully be called. The carriage groaned on the ruts and rocks beneath and I found myself being shaken violently from side to side as I pondered Isak’s news and began planning a future without him. We continued in this way for an hour, and Woodperry vanished over a hillside. Soon after, the man holding the reins swore and pulled the carriage to a halt.

  “Bloody wheel,” he muttered, and they both climbed out to look at whatever had caused the delay. I gazed over the land beside the road, struck (as I often was) by the immensity of the fact that this entire vista belonged to me, Billy Ablass, son of a Polish sailor, Oxfordshire pig-farmer, river pirate, and buccaneer. What a very strange world it was in which to endure. Then there was a noise from behind the carriage, and a man shouted, and perhaps a half dozen pairs of hands grabbed my shoulders and arms and pinned me from behind to the back of the carriage. I heard someone speak.

  “Compliments of the doctor.”

  I could not move, there were too many of them, and as I saw them for the first time—three white men in addition to the two who’d met me, and perhaps a dozen slaves, a real gang of lionhearts—one of them placed a sack over my head, and the world disappeared behind a cotton screen. Seconds later, I felt a cosh thumping into the side of my head, over and over again, as they tried to knock the senses from me. Thick rope was tied around my hands and feet, to the fierce rhythm of the cosh and the frightened shouts of my captors. I never saw my Woodperry again.

  CHRISTMAS DAY 1811

  The small dinghy drifts away from the jetty in front of the River Police Office. The early morning water is gray-black and near freezing. Further up the river, past the old bridge where the big ships cannot go, the water is already beginning to settle and freeze. People are starting to talk about another Ice Fair on the river in the New Year.

  Here, downstream and in front of the Wapping wharves, there is no ice, but the water is still a thick, blood-like liquid, like cold Russian vodka. The chill air and ever present fog dampen the working noise of the river—the men’s voices, the wooden-and-metal clanking of board on stone and chain, the occasional splash as something heavy falls into the water, and the ever present creaking scream of rope pulling away on timber and iron. Warm breath rises in clouds from the ships anchored, side to side, across the river. On some days, it is said, a man can walk back and forth across the river stepping on the anchored ships. Not so this morning. There is still trade on the river, but it is cold and resentful, as befits a freezing Nativity.

  Charles Horton rows the little single-masted Police Office boat into the middle of the river, picking his way between the ships and the lighters, and then over toward the opposite Surrey shore. When there is some room (not much, barely enough to turn the dinghy in and out of the wind, but for a skilled sailor like Horton it’s sufficient) he raises the dinghy’s sail, which catches the sharp wind immediately. The wind is blowing downstream, and the little boat picks up some speed ahead of the breeze. He stows the oars down the sides of the vessel, and sits back with his hand on the tiller.

  The dinghy moves more confidently downstream, away from the clamor of vessels along the Pool and in front of Wapping. Ships are moving steadily in and out of the dock, and the Wapping wharves bending away around the curve of the river are a hive of activity. Watermen ferry goods from the ships which have been anchored on chains in the middle of the stream, transporting barrels and crates and sacks to the riverside wharves.

  The wharves present a uniform front on the north side of the river, broken occasionally by steps. In contrast, the Surrey side is more open; many of the old wharves have been pulled down to allow ingress to the emerging Rotherhithe dock complex, built around the Greenland Dock, where for decades enormous whales were cut to pieces and rendered down into their constituent parts. Houses and warehouses have begun to spring up around the new docks, like flies on a gigantic piece of whale meat.

  The river curves to the north, and the wharves of Wapping give way to the ramshackle houses and factories of Limehouse and then, as the river bends south again, Horton sees the western edge of the Isle of Dogs, the peninsula which has been hollowed out to create the East and West India Docks, behind the old windmills which give the Millwall its name.

  Wapping, Rotherhithe, the Isle of Dogs—the scale of the dock-building in the last decade has been breathtaking, and all while the country has been at war with Bonaparte. Goods are pouring in from the markets of the empire and are being magically transmogrified, by the alchemy of trade, first into gold, then into currency, and then into the mercenary armies who are even now crossing swords with wild-eyed French revolutionaries in distant central European fields. English money flows through the veins of Austrian and Russian armies, and is spilled into fields at Ulm and Austerlitz, but no matter—new money is being created, at an ever-increasing rate, out here on the river.

  Around the river there is little time for culture or religion or politics: there is only trade. Every man, be they the richest financier or the meanest dock worker, is seeking to turn something—be it the labor of their hands or the finest Indian textiles�
��into cash. The recent cessation of the slave trade, which together with the massive sugar industry had been the prime mover in generating this great economic machine, seems to have done little to dent the headlong rush to the banks. This two-mile stretch of river is an engine of wealth—the wealth of the rich men, but also the thinner, less nourishing wealth of the scurrying humanity which swarms around it: the sailors; the dock workers; the shipbuilders; and their attendant armies of wives, children, whores, publicans, pawnbrokers, spies, funeral merchants, and shopkeepers. Even on this dark, dank Christmas morning, the noises of this place are evidence of the buzzing energy behind the wharf walls. This is the economic point on which the wide world turns.

  Horton sails on for another half hour before crossing the physical turning point of the globe, the boundary of zero longitude at Greenwich, where he passes dozens more ships, each making their way upstream to the docks. He is in definitively military waters now. Wren’s hospital glides into view, as if floating on the river itself, and Horton feels a twinge of nostalgia and anxiety. He has seen this building so very many times before, but now it seems almost unbearable to find himself approaching it, exiled and outcast as he is both from the navy he mutinied against at the Nore and the mutineers he betrayed. He has not been this far downstream in years, and the emotions are as sudden as if he had run into a reef under the river’s surface. The hospital (the fingerprints of its codesigner Hawksmoor all over it, echoes of his pale creation St. George in the East, whose heart beats along the bloodied Ratcliffe Highway) glowers at him elegantly, as if hidden old admirals were scurrying to its windows to watch the traitor float past, muttering dark naval curses under their breaths.

  He passes the hospital and approaches the great shipyard at Woolwich, where gigantic engines of war are being constructed. An enormous man-o’-war is rising from the dry dock, only its masts left to be attached. Outside the docks sit two more enormous ships, and Horton realizes he recognizes one of them: the Inflexible, one of the mutinous vessels from the Nore, although it appears its name has been changed to Obedience, one of many little jokes the authorities have had at the mutineers’ expense in the last fourteen years. Horton cringes back into his boat as he passes between the two ships, his head kept down. It is not impossible that a face might lean over and recognize him.