“Potosí pieces of eight were found at the scenes of both murders in Shadwell, Graham,” says John Harriott, after a significant moment of silence. Until now, Horton has shared this information with Harriott alone. He did not trust Graham sufficiently to divulge it. Harriott has had to step in before the silence becomes too rude and yawning.
“I dare say,” says Graham. “But pieces of eight are not unusual in London, Harriott. There are more species of coin swilling round the inns of Wapping than there are unmarried young women in Bath.”
“Potosí pieces of eight, mind.”
“Well, that narrows it down somewhat. But not enormously.”
Their voices echo slightly out on the cavernous deck beyond the captain’s cabin. The ship creaks, but it is a dead sound, as if she were scared to draw attention to herself. And with good reason, thinks Harriott.
“Is there nothing else, Horton?” says Graham. Horton looks at Harriott, and the old man waves his hand resignedly. Let the blighter speak for himself, for a change.
“The ship was sailed into Sheerness by a skeleton crew a few weeks ago,” says Horton. “The captain is described as a tall man, young, with a limp, by several witnesses and by the harbormaster. He told the harbormaster that the ship was going to be refitted somewhere on the south coast, but needed to remain here while he organized for supplies and sundries in London. He said he would return here in the New Year with new sails, rigging, and victuals.”
“And no one thought to ask this man his name?”
“They did. He signed the documentation as Henry Morgan.”
“So, presumably we look for this Morgan.”
“Well, sir, I rather suspect that’s an invented name.”
“Invented? Why should it be invented?”
“Because I’d think it unlikely that anyone would use their real name in so public a fashion if they were going to do what I think they intended to do.”
“Which is what, man?”
“Trade slaves, sir.”
Graham stops at that and glares at Constable Horton, as if the man was guilty of some terrible social faux pas.
“A somewhat inelegant theory, my dear constable,” he says, the words polite, the tone anything but. “You cannot extrapolate from the Zong’s previous history to that theory without some more thought.”
“There’s been no work to readapt the ship, Mr. Graham.” Horton’s voice is polite, but a slight change in emphasis bespeaks growing insubordination. “This boat is useless for the carrying of anything other than slaves.”
“But trading slaves has been outlawed, constable.”
“Indeed so, Mr. Graham. But only these past five years. And new laws take time to make their way around the world. There are still plenty of buyers for slaves in Cuba and Brazil. You can find many buyers in America. It will be a lucrative trade for some years to come, perhaps even decades. Made all the more lucrative by the fact that most British traders have abandoned it. It’s perhaps a highly auspicious time to launch a slaving enterprise.”
Graham considers this. He looks at Constable Horton in a new way.
“By God, man, you’ve thought this through,” he says.
“Aye, Mr. Graham. That I have. I spent last night on this ship. It has a powerful way of stirring one’s considerations.”
Graham pauses, unaccountably annoyed. He glares around the inside of the captain’s cabin, defying it to give up some of its secrets.
“I still don’t understand why you assume that Morgan is an invented name. It seems perfectly normal to me.”
“I have found evidence of a connection between this tall man and Jamaica, Mr. Graham.”
“What evidence?”
“An entry in Mr. Williamson’s order book. An order had been placed for victuals sufficient for a journey to Africa and then Jamaica, with sufficient for trading in Africa. The order also included sacks of peas and beans, which I understand was for long years the common sustenance for feeding Africans during the Atlantic crossing.”
“Jamaica was specifically mentioned?”
“It was, sir.”
“And it’s Williamson’s order book that ties this ship’s captain to the murders?”
“Not just Williamson. Marr also. A Henry Morgan appears as a buyer of Osnaburg cotton in pages I removed from Marr’s order book. Again, the order includes hundreds of cotton shirts and trousers, which I also understand is common for a slaver; they need the slaves to look the part when they sell them. Again, Jamaica is mentioned. Indeed, it’s given as his address.”
“The man is from Jamaica?”
“It would seem so.”
“So how hard can it be to find a Morgan from Jamaica?”
John Harriott speaks up, irritated by Graham’s dullness.
“My dear Graham, I think you need to stop and think for a moment. Henry Morgan? Jamaica?”
Graham’s bad mood evaporates instantly. He smiles, almost with delight.
“Our man has a sense of humor, it appears.”
Neither Horton nor Harriott respond to this. It is perhaps too genteel a remark for the circumstance, and Graham speaks again quickly to mask any embarrassment.
“So, why didn’t this ‘Morgan’ buy his supplies in Sheerness?”
Constable Horton answers again.
“I think that’s what he intended, sir. But the chandler’s here in Sheerness has been closed for some time. It burned down in a fire.”
“So why not sail the ship into London?”
“The cost. It’s far cheaper to have the ship ported here; while the new dock’s being built, rates are low, and there’s plenty of labor on the ships. I spoke to an old shipmate of mine who told me this ‘Morgan’ had been recruiting people to work on the ship, and they have been waiting for supplies and money to get started. Also, he probably did not want to draw attention to himself. Sheerness is ideal for him, in some ways. It’s still a bit of a backwater.”
“Linen and victuals,” says Graham. He runs his hands along a small wooden shelf, a kind of decorative counterpoint to the dread compartments and chains in the deck beyond. He scuffs the graying decking gently with one elegant shoe. “So the question becomes: what went wrong? And why did it end in murder?”
JUNE 1780
I heard them crash into the door three times. The chain was tight around my neck, and no air entered my body, and once again I felt that strange, almost unbearable lightness of being come over me as the old curse took grip and forced encroaching death out. The chain bit into the skin, and there was a great deal of pain, of course. But there would soon be air breathing into me again. I would be able to make my way through the living world.
I had tried this trick a dozen or more times before, but Sloane had been careful in his arrangements, passing down instructions about the Monster in the Crane Court attic only to a trusted circle of young Fellows who had been charged with the responsibility of both observing me and keeping me secret.
This little circle of Fellows had aged as Sloane had done, and as they did so all of them took the opportunity to come up to the little attic room and beg of the Monster the secrets he held, the secret of Eternal Life, and one by one they threatened to eviscerate me to unlock my mysteries before falling into a final despairing acknowledgment of the horrors of Mortality. They never seemed to extend the circle of those who knew about the Monster. The same familiar faces appeared again and again, the skin around their faces sagging and their backs thinning out and bending, until finally only one of them remained, an unimpressive gentleman called Lambert who had made an accidental alchemical discovery decades before which had earned him a Fellowship but who had failed to improve on this early success in subsequent years (this was his personal biography, as he related to me on one of the endless evenings when he wept for his own approaching doom). Lambert, of all the Fellows, took Sloane’s pronouncements on secrecy the most seriously, and often said that the secret of the Monster should die with him, that he should arrange for the Monster
to be taken out of the country and left on some island somewhere to rot in a foreign sun. He said this to me without embarrassment. He made a great show of hiding the papers describing the various investigations into my Existence and Enduring in a cupboard in my room, so they would remain hidden with me. I sometimes took them out, those papers, and cheered myself up with their fruitless attempts to explain, in their new language of Natural Philosophy, a Monster who did not die.
But then Lambert appeared no more. Perhaps he had succumbed to a sudden poisoning, the result of a final experimental effort to unlock an arcane corner of natural philosophy and silence those Society whisperers who said he had singularly failed to achieve any discoveries of note since his first accidental breakthrough. He seemingly left no arrangement for me, and I waited out my chance for seven more months, hunger and thirst raging through me but still, even now, a long way from death. Then the workmen arrived.
I had heard them clambering around Crane Court for almost two weeks, working their way up the house, chests crashing onto wooden floors and glass chandeliers tinkling into storage. A move was underway, apparently.
Slowly, the workmen made their way toward me, room by room and floor by floor. Last week, they were in the room below my chamber, and were so close that I could even hear them speak, their conversation a rough one of beer and women and poverty and work. Three days ago, I heard footsteps on the stairs outside, and the door into the chamber had moved as someone had tried to force it open. It was then I’d begun to prepare my little tableau, placing the chair in the middle of the floor, looping the chain which was attached to my ankle over a beam above, such that it hung down in a great U, while still remaining attached to the thicker chain which ran around the reinforced walls.
There were no further footsteps on the stairs for some time, and then today I heard them again, three or four men climbing the stairs and talking to themselves, of what I could not hear. So I climbed onto the chair, put a small loop in the great U of the chain, placed my head and neck within it, and kicked the chair away, and allowed myself to hang, the air departing my body (soon to return) and the chain biting into my undying flesh while pulling on my lame ankle.
One, two, three crashes came from outside as the men tried to force their way in, and on the fourth the door flew open and I closed my eyes, listening to the men below me as I hung there (just as I had once listened to a Dutchman on the banks of the river two hundred years before).
“Oh, my Lord Jesus Christ! Fuck!”
The voice was deep and London and heavy, and I could picture the heavy man who spoke it, the one who’d successfully crashed through the door.
“Get the bloody chair! There! Get the bloody chair!”
Scuffling sounds as unseen hands moved the chair back beneath my feet, then the feel of arms on my legs as they lifted me out of the metal noose.
“’Anged by a chain!”
“How long ’as ’e been ’ere?”
“Fuck!”
“If you stopped fuckin’ cursin’ and helped, we’d get this done quicker.”
“Watch your fuckin’ mouth, you floggin’ cully.”
“Well just get on wiv it!”
The hands brought me down with great care and laid me down on the floor, on my back, and I heard some discussion. My chest did not move. It was simple to feign death.
“Leave ’im ’ere. I’ll go and ask what they want doing wiv ’im.”
“I ain’t stayin’ in ’ere wiv ’im.”
“Well come wiv me then, he ain’t goin’ anywhere.”
They went out through the door, and clumped down the stairs. I waited, my eyes remaining closed, my lungs not moving. I waited and waited. Finally, more men entered the room. Their voices were refined and educated.
“Must be one of these . . . I wondered what these keys were for . . . Never been up into this attic before, always assumed it was just storage . . . So, try the keys . . . No, not this one . . . Nor this one . . . Nor . . . Ah!”
And the hated lock around my ankle sprang open for the first time in a hundred years.
Later, after much discussion and chatter, these new men left the room, resolving to return to bring the body down. And then I did open my eyes, and sat up, only to find that a young, thin, dark-haired boy of no more than sixteen had remained in the room and was watching, wide-eyed, as the hanged man came back to life.
I stood up and limped over to where the boy was standing, looking him in the eye all the while. The memory of the iron pain around my neck was already starting to disappear, but the older pains—the wounds in my chest and in my stomach—were as present as ever, hovering like bats, and it appeared the damage done to my ankle by that obscene chain would be permanent also. All I saw was a boy, a witness, and behind him the emergence of a plan for the future.
“Jus’ . . . jus’ . . . look, jus’ . . .” whimpered the boy and I smelled something then, a urine odor, fresh and sharp. I heard something too, that old familiar hum, as once again the curse enfolded me. I did not look away from the boy’s eye. The old calmness settled on me as I approached the boy, and my mind was already on the next few minutes—the walk down the stairs, the escape through the courtyard, and then, perhaps, a ship, flight to Jamaica, the chance to find my treasure—as I took the boy’s head between my hands and with a simple crack! smashed it against the brick wall of the room. The boy sank to the floor, a vertical thick line of blood and brains smeared on the wall behind him, and I turned to leave. I cast one more glance around the room that had contained me for almost a century, and then I went down the stairs and out into London, and beyond.
27 DECEMBER 1811
The three of them stay in Sheerness the night after visiting the ship, planning to sail back on the rising tide the following morning. But the next day dawns to appalling weather, a harsh, cutting wind rushing across from Holland and squalls following one on the other, as if the elements have sensed the obscenity within the harbor and are determined to send the black old thing down to the depths.
In any case Graham now seems determined to speak to every resident of the Sheerness hulks, to “add some color to the painting” as he puts it over breakfast with Constable Horton in the snug little inn in which they had spent the night. John Harriott has not appeared to eat with the two men. His constable asks after the old man with the inn’s staff, and is reassured that his breakfast has been served in his room. Horton goes out into the howling wind to pursue his own unheralded inquiries.
Harriott lies in his bed for some time. The breakfast which is brought in to him by a pinch-faced little Kentish lad is allowed to go cold on the side table, as the old man wrestles with a growing sense of despair. The wrench of being aboard the Zong has stung him profoundly and he had woken to a black mood. He finally rises from bed two hours after Horton and Graham have departed on their own errands, and wanders aimlessly about his room for quite some time before deciding to take a walk along the straight stretch of flat, dreary beach that drifts eastward back from the new dock, facing north across the estuary and out to the Nore.
It is not pleasant walking. The wind continues to whip up alarmingly, and squally winds pour themselves back into his face. The conditions bring back memories of that terrible night in Essex when the river had flooded out his little farm, on the island he’d reclaimed by sheer force of will from the waters around it.
He walks for perhaps an hour along the empty shore, until the masts of ships in and around the dock are barely pencil-thin scratches on the gray air. He comes to a stop, and stares out at the flat, gray sea.
He’d stepped out there on that flatness, decades before, as a boy. Thirteen years old, with a head full of Robinson Crusoe, sailing off from Spithead as part of a fleet bound for New York. He’d felt like a king, that first morning, dashing around on the deck and in the rigging. And then the gale had struck, slashing into the side of the ships as the sailors desperately furled the sails and close-reefed the few that were left. The wind had blown for hours, an
d the horror of that night was still with him: the signal-guns blaring in the dark; the shouts between ships (the terror was not of sinking but of crashing into one of the other vessels, so close were they to each other); the breathless, dashing madness of it all.
And in the morning, the ruination of the fleet. His ship had escaped unscathed. Others were de-masted or had run afoul of each other and two had sunk beneath the waves. Dozens of lives lost. His first taste of death.
He’d seen other things. So many things. But that blood-rushing mixture of death and crashing violence and crazed activity was what had brought him to the sea, and what kept him there for years. And by God he’d tasted life! Plagues and girls and islands in the Mediterranean, Indians in America, tigers and Gentoos and rajahs in India, sultans in Sumatra and duchesses in England. His crippled leg, destroyed in action in India, followed him around as a keepsake of those dazzling, startling years. Even back in England he’d maintained a flair for the dramatic, his single-handed attempt to roll back the waves, Canute-like, from his little Essex island only the most flamboyant of a procession of adventures within polite middle-class society. But then there were those two other women, dead young wives in the ground, a melancholy rhythm within the bluster of his life.
Four years ago, he’d published his memoirs at the urging of friends, and had found the whole undertaking a desperate, ridiculous process. The publishing, mind, not the writing. The writing of the memoirs had been almost a cleansing thing, a taking account, a starting anew. And when he’d finished, he’d asked himself: Is my life now over? And the gruff, energetic old Harriott had told himself not to be ridiculous, to get on with it, to finish the job, whatever the job might be.
So he’d worked even harder, pushing onward and forward with the River Police Office, determined to be a pioneer in the new practice of policing following his early years as a magistrate in Essex. The office had been his idea, developed with his associate Patrick Colquhoun, and the two of them had been its first magistrates, Colquhoun the senior of them thanks to his political connections. Colquhoun had retired as the new century began, leaving Harriott as the senior magistrate.
The English Monster Page 28