The English Monster

by Lloyd Shepherd

  And suddenly, the reason for Graham’s visit becomes clear to Charles Horton.

  “You want me to deal with Ablass.”

  There it is. A loose end to be tied fast before it grasps the ankle of a shipmate and throws him overboard.

  Graham coughs discreetly.

  “The . . . gentlemen who I have been speaking to have suggested an unofficial course of action. This much is true.”

  “I will not do it.”

  Graham looks down at his hat, which is now whirring through his hands like some portable engine. He does not look at Horton again.

  “I suspected you would say as much. You are a man of honor and integrity, Charles Horton, and in that you do credit to yourself, to your wife, and to your superior. Harriott thinks this of you, and will continue to think this of you, despite what I am about to say about your past.”

  Oh my God. Surely not this.

  “Harriott agrees that Ablass must be destroyed. He also agrees with me that this will be impossible through the official channels. He is not here because I will not let him be any part of the mechanism by which the destruction will be effected.

  “This is too important to let individual punctiliousness drive us. You will do it, Horton, because if you do not I will ensure that your maritime history is revealed to the world. Those former shipmates with whom you still meet—like that neat little family currently residing on one of the Sheerness hulks—will be made aware of your betrayal, you will be forced to leave Harriott’s service, and you and your wife will be subject to two disgraces: the disgrace of the mutineer, and the disgrace of the stool pigeon.

  “Arrangements have already been made. You will find what you need to complete the undertaking waiting for you in a private coach which will take you directly to Sheerness. You will leave tonight, and we have no time to wait for tides and boats. The means for the destruction of Ablass have been provided and will be waiting for you in the coach. I have an agent in Sheerness who will report on the success or otherwise of your mission. If I do not hear from him within three days, the information I hold about you will become widely known.

  “Good night, my dear Horton. And good luck.”

  Graham makes his own way out, his eyes still averted. When she hears his feet on the stairs, Abigail rushes into the room and buries her head in her husband’s neck, arms tight round his shoulders, and weeps with rage and frustration. Horton says nothing.

  5 FEBRUARY 1812

  My, the night is quiet. Cold, certainly, and somewhat bleak with those ugly hulks lurking on the water, but the sky is clear for the first time in days and the stars are as bright as they can hope to be at this latitude. Amazing, how the night transforms a scene. What in the day is pockmarked and ugly can in the dark seem wondrous. After the noise and smells of London, after that dirty little cell somewhere beneath Covent Garden, I begin to feel something like peace. Hart and Pugh are leaving. The two of them are very drunk. We have been busy celebrating the recommencement of our project.

  Isak Naar and I had stood much like this out on the veranda at Woodperry, the night before I was taken by Sloane’s men. We often met together to swap stories and plans for the future. He sometimes called me his golem, when the wine flask was nearly empty and the liquor had worked its way into his blood.

  But that night had been different. Isak seemed sad and perhaps even scared; even then he was working up the courage to tell me he was leaving. The knowledge of that future conversation, and I assume his real regret at having to leave, meant he was in an elegiac mood that evening, with the wind whipping off the Caribbean and the sound of a slave singing from over by the barrack-house. He spoke to me about his own future and past: how his father had sailed out from Portugal with his own dreams of wealth and had established the family on a plantation in Surinam. He spoke of his own dream: the establishment of a successful trading company in London.

  “I left home with similar dreams,” I said to him.

  “Ah, yes?”

  “Wealth and property, Isak. The Jews don’t have a monopoly on those dreams.”

  He laughed at that, but it wasn’t his usual belly laugh, more an Old World chuckle, full of knowledge and more than a little bitter.

  Terrible winds and rains came upon us that night. Jamaica could be wicked when she wanted to be. The Negroes ran wild around the house, screaming and wailing that God was angry with them. Isak and I mocked their silliness. Funny little Christians, with their redemption and salvation and superstitious optimism. The two of us knew that all that mattered in the cosmos was comfort and hard work and money. These were what God consisted in.

  The next day Isak gave me the news he had been swallowing for days, but then Sloane’s men took me and I never saw old Naar again. He did very well out of my disappearance. He must have changed his plans quickly, and with his complete power of attorney over the assets and chattels I held at Woodperry he sold everything and transplanted his family, the business, everything to Surinam, where his father had first made his riches. Isak never did open his London trading company, but one of his great-great-great-grandsons did.

  Two years ago I swam ashore in Surinam and encountered a younger Isak, who told me of his cousin Benjamin and the counting house in Limehouse. Benjamin was now the curator of my little store of treasure, the investment against the future that old Isak had put aside, in Potosí silver. The older Isak had known his golem would be back to ask hard questions of his descendants; the silver was Isak’s insurance policy, transplanted from its hiding place in Cockpit County (Isak knew of my secret treasury, as he knew of everything) to the counting rooms of a lonely Jew in London’s East End. Somehow old Isak’s message had been passed down the generations: fear the golem, but help him, too.

  So, you see trust is something which even monsters must have faith in. Without my trust in Isak, everything I owned would have been lost on that road to Port Royal when I was seized by unknown hands. Under Isak’s care, my estate survived and even thrived, and my wealth remained available to me, though the years had lessened its worth. I possessed the capital I needed to invest in my own centuries-long undertaking.

  Horton approaches Sheerness across the estuary. The lights in the hulks outside the new dock float in the air above the silent water, full of their own melancholy humanity. Inside those dark arks families are settling down for the night, sharing a flavor of domesticity despite their eerie dwellings. He imagines sharing such a watery palace with his own Abigail. She would carve out a comfortable accommodation, comfortably decorated with cheap oddities from who knows where. There would be candles and cushions and rugs. Collected together, it would feel like home.

  He sits on the small wooden barrel, smoking a pipe. His heavy old naval coat is wrapped around him; his head is covered by a floppy, wide-brimmed hat in the French Revolutionary style; a leather bag is across his shoulder and chest. In Europe, Napoleon is marching toward Moscow. In Sheerness, a guilty old mutineer is sailing toward something that feels a bit like destiny and a bit like redemption.

  He had told the London coach to head for the small hamlet in the Grain Marshes, confident this was a more direct route than the great loop round to the Swale. He knew he would find the old waterman again, and he knew how to get from that side of the Medway into the Sheerness harbor without being seen by anyone or anything. The London driver had muttered and complained at the unfinished roads that this route took them down, but Horton ignored him, deep in his own contemplation of the task ahead.

  The waterman glances occasionally at the barrel Horton is sitting upon. He had tried to help Horton carry it into the boat but had been firmly rebuffed. Consequently he is now working over in his mind what might be there in that barrel. Not anything liquid, like wine or gin. No sounds of sloshing. Something solid and heavy. Not tobacco. Perhaps smuggled spices to be traded. The ferryman looks toward Sheerness, guiding the little boat between the silent hulks.

  From aboard one of them comes the sound of singing, male voices joined tog
ether in something foreign-sounding. Portuguese or Gaelic, perhaps, though Horton believes that most of the dwellers in the hulks are English, old families pushed out from London like generations before by harder-working, more-desperate incomers, forced to find a new living out here on the margins. Running away from something and toward something else, unable to articulate either.

  These people will soon be edged away even from here. Rennie’s dock is rapidly taking shape and the laborers dwelling on the hulks are only a short-term necessity. Soon enough the wharves and warehouses will be completed, and men in uniform will patrol the locked gates and shuttered buildings. Within perhaps a year or two it will be like Wapping out here, the dock sitting in the middle of a community, the only engine of moneymaking, essential yet also somehow alien, tolerated, worshipped, and resented.

  Into the harbor goes the little boat, in among some hulks and other working vessels now at rest. The growing warehouses around the dock stick up against the moonlit sky like geometrical megaliths, monuments to new gods. And there, up against the half-built facade of a mighty new warehouse, is the Zong.

  In the dark you cannot see her neglect, so you could if you chose marvel at the lines of her hull and the forthright way she sits in the water. In the dark she has the romantic outline of a mighty vessel of commerce, an engine of British influence and power. You cannot see the name torn away from her bows, the figurehead which has been ripped off. In the dark she is all that makes Britain great. You cannot see what makes Britain terrible.

  Apart from one thing. There, toward the stern, a light is flickering and a tall, dark shape is moving on the quarterdeck. Here, on the water, it is impossible to hear if it is making a noise. But the shape is moving back and forth, back and forth, pacing out some urgent question. From somewhere behind the ship a man is laughing. Horton pulls the sleeve of the waterman and places a finger on his lips, then indicates that he should head to the bow of the ship, where he remembers steps which reached down to the water from the quay.

  I find myself considering something Hart said this evening. We were talking of the new plans we must put in place, of the need to find new suppliers, of how Benjamin Naar can help us once again. And Hart had upended a bottle of wine down his throat, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and said: “Jews and niggers. I can’t figure out which of ’em I hate the worst. But they’re the only ones what’ll do what’s needed.”

  So English, that mixture of contempt and resourcefulness, that proud and unthinking hypocrisy. Money is what it’s about, says Hart, says England itself, and his greed is why I can trust him. Ever since I left Kate behind and traveled to Plymouth to seek out Hawkyns, I have never deviated from my desire to pursue wealth. At first, my goals were not lofty—enough money to buy some pigs and build a farm. A little rural paradise for me and my pretty wife. But then my pretty wife became less pretty and the years opened out into infinity, and how is a man to fill those years? Motion is essential, but motion toward what? In my case, the answer to that question was simple: the getting and the keeping of money.

  Still I burn with frustration at what I missed while I sat, for yawning decades, in Sloane’s benighted chamber, chained down and with only books to console me, books through which I gathered a picture of the world that had emerged during my captivity.

  I read of a globe becoming encircled by English ships (or I should rather say British ships, a shining word which was minted and then traded even while I remained in captivity). New manufactories in English and Scottish cities churned out cotton and guns and machines to be carried from British shores to the edges of the world. I read of the birth of a great Triangular Trade: goods carried to Africa, exchanged for slaves, which were in turn exchanged for sugar, which was in turn exchanged for British goods, and on and on went the great machine. And at the heart of the trade those great West Indian plantations, like my own dear Woodperry, engines running on black muscle and spewing out money and sugar and rum.

  How right Hawkyns was in his early imaginings. He knew that the fuel for this mighty endeavor would be the blacks. They were the precious commodity on which England would build an empire. The few hundred we took onto the Jesus were merely signals of what was to come. Elizabeth had provided that ship—why, she was the most far-sighted of all! A hundred and fifty years after Hawkyns another queen, Anne this time, was setting up her own South Sea Company to trade in slaves, and that company had made Britain rich. Slave-trading primed the pump which even today drives British factories. Thinkers and poets invested in the enterprise: Swift, Pope, Newton, Defoe, Locke. I think of Newton, the great old alchemist, coming to the realization that there was one base element that could indeed be converted to gold: the Negro. When I think of those great thinkers, I think also of Hart’s hypocrisy, for are they not guilty of the same thing?

  And, to borrow from Newton, the effect of the Negro was seen at a distance. Those selling slaves in Guinea needed guns and cotton, and British factories were built to supply them. When I think of those black bodies bent down before a wall of cane on Woodperry, I see the labor of their hands working the great machine of Britain itself.

  But I missed this magnificent moment. When I finally escaped this great new trade was coming to an end, in Britain at least. The intellectuals and lawyers in Britain had grown fat, literally and figuratively, on the benefits of commerce but had now become squeamish about the activities which primed the great economic pump. They argued for an end of the trade. Other countries were less weak-willed. It took me some years to discover the new Woodperry in Surinam, where I met Isak’s descendants and was turned away from my intention of destroying them as thieves by the revelation that my hidden wealth remained intact, in London, and could be transmuted into gold again. That there was a chance for a final trade, even while the slaving acts were being implemented around the great empire which slaving had built.

  The boat comes to against the newly minted steps. Horton hefts up the solid, heavy little barrel. He indicates that the waterman should move a little way from the Zong once he is out of the boat. He cannot see the light in the stern from here, and has no idea if he can be heard or seen by whoever is on the ship. Step by step, as quietly and slowly as he can manage it, he climbs up toward the quay.

  Two men appear on the gangplank between the Zong and the quayside, perhaps fifty feet away from where Horton stands, frozen, clutching his heavy barrel. He glances fearfully at the waterman, but the old man has taken his lead from Horton and is likewise still and silent in his old boat.

  The two men are laughing and unsteady on their feet as they walk across the plank. Even while fear of discovery locks him in place, Horton strains to hear what they are saying.

  “Steady, you bastard!”

  “Don’t ‘bastard’ me!”

  “You can’t hold your bloody wine, Hart!”

  The first man reaches the quayside and turns belligerently toward the one following him. He swings a halfhearted fist but misses and is shoved to the ground for his pains, out of Horton’s sight. Both men can be heard struggling, shouting and laughing.

  “Long Billy’ll get yer, fucking white-livered turd.”

  “Shut it, shut it.”

  “’Ere, that girl you fucked in Spitalfields, I ’eard she was a bloke, big fat weaver with a beard!”

  “Go on, ’ave some of this.”

  This goes on for some time, and eventually they quieten and stand. Horton sees their heads appearing over the line of the quayside above him. Cornelius Hart and Thomas Pugh, the carpenters who worked on Timothy Marr’s shop. The men now have their arms around each other’s shoulders and are swaying gently in inebriated comradeship.

  “Lovely, ain’t she?” says Hart.

  “Thing of beauty,” says Pugh.

  They are talking of the Zong.

  “Reckon Billy’s right, do yer?” says Hart. “Reckon we’ll be off by spring?”

  “P’raps. P’raps.”

  “You know what, though?”

  “What?”<
br />
  “I never did get my fucking chisel back.”

  At that a great roar of laughter, and the two of them turn away from the ship, singing some old chanty on their way, the words unrecognizable in their drunkenness.

  I watch my two accomplices fighting on the quayside. These are in some strange way my friends now, I suppose. Like John Williams thought he was. Yet I feel nothing toward them, only that yawning emptiness which has characterized all my transactions with the everyday since—well, since when? Sometime after that encounter in Florida, but not immediately after. I came back in most ways the same man I had been when I left. But one by one the ingredients of a man’s inner life—love, ambition, excitement, lust—were emptied from me. Love I left in Stanton St. John, with a pearl beneath a pillow. Ambition died with contentment’s rise in Jamaica. Excitement, lust—all washed away in the blood and heat of Tortuga and Portobelo. All that remains is a wish for peace, the kind of peace that only money, and a good deal of it, can buy. I wish to sit once again on the veranda at Woodperry, with the blacks singing in the fields and the house slaves preparing dinner. This shoddy dock at the edge of this half-forgotten town is no place to spend eternity.

  So for now I must consort with these shallow men, with their limited view of the riches in store for them. They have been useful. It had been Hart’s idea to leave his chisel in Marr’s shop as an excuse to be let in later. Marr did not then know me. It was Benjamin who’d made arrangements, and Benjamin who’d told me of Marr’s decision to end the undertaking, and his threat to reveal what he had discovered of my plans. The old fury had risen within me; I was reminded of the Ironside, Sharp, and his sanctimonious belief in a preposterous Right and Wrong mediated by some supernatural being. Now this new prig, this self-important shopkeeper, threatened all my plans.

  When I saw him at the door of his shop, I heard it again: that relentless, insidious hum. It pursued me into the house, maddening and enraging me. Pugh and Hart waited at the back of the house while I pursued my melancholy transactions within. It was the work of a minute, no more. That blissful music thrummed in time with my heart and filled my head with light as I dispatched the merchant and his family, my hands a blur of doing and undoing. I took the maul, the instrument of destruction, upstairs and left a candle as the signal of it. The maul would ultimately lead those seeking the killers to John Williams. I felt a glorious kind of peace coming back down those stairs, as if I was in some way sanctified—for did I not carry my own stigmata, in my side, my stomach, my ankle? And was not that hum the sound of angels singing me to my destiny?