Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  ‘Sihirle, para bulmak!’ he cried. Between his fingers silver flashed. He flipped the coin in the air so it made, briefly, a glittering sphere, and presented it. ‘For you,’ he told her. ‘Precious metal out of thin air.’

  But Lovell seized Smith’s wrist, tilted it and squinted.

  ‘Out of my cashbox, if I’m not mistaken.’

  Elizabeth looked at her father.

  ‘You may take it, Lisje,’ he said. And to Smith: ‘What tongue was that?’

  Lovell released his grip.

  ‘Conjurer’s gibberish, surely,’ said Hendrick.

  ‘In fact, no,’ said Smith. ‘Turkish. It seemed fitting, since the coin is so too.’

  ‘You speak Turkish? A strange knack for an Englishman.’

  ‘Just a few words, sir, gained on my travels.’

  Tabitha, though, had been gazing intently not at Van Loon and her father, nor at Elizabeth, nor even at the piece of money, but at Smith’s hands. She tilted her head from one side to the other and back again, as if settling something into place. A flickering smile appeared on her lips, narrower than her sister’s, and roseleaf-brown in the shadows at the edge of the candle-light. It was the first Smith had seen there.

  ‘No, Mr Smith,’ she said softly, ‘that is not your interest.’

  *

  Scarves and coats in the hall; a squadron of departing Van Loons. It was only half past nine; Smith wondered what he was going to do with the rest of the evening. The women had not withdrawn when the meal was done, in the usual way, possibly he guessed because an effort was being made to keep Flora and Tabitha apart. Flora, in fact, was pulling a coat on too: the Van Loons had enfolded her, and were carrying her off to a game of cards in their house two streets away. Tabitha remained at the table while Zephyra cleared it, the men talking around her. ‘You will call again, won’t you, Mr Smith?’ she had said, looking up at him. ‘Oh, of course,’ said Lovell, without visible alacrity. ‘Why not.’

  ‘I’m sorry they were so rough with you,’ Flora said now, in the hall, her face flushed prettily, a tendril of fair hair hanging down. Joris tugged at her arm.

  ‘They comported themselves very reasonably,’ said Smith.

  ‘Well, then I’m sorry that Tabitha was so very … Tabitha.’

  ‘She has a temper,’ Smith agreed.

  ‘She has a demon,’ said Flora, seriously.

  Smith waited at the stairfoot for the buttoning to be complete. The framed thing was in front of him that had sparkled in the dark, the night before. It was not a picture, he saw now. It was a shallow box filled with whorls and loops of some brittle material encrusted with flecks of light. It drew the eye in: coils balanced countercoils in there, curls countercurled around other curls, in minuscule filigree. The colours were mineral. It was like looking into the bottom of a rock pool when the pebbles shine in sea-contrived patterns, or at the floor of a cavern cysted by patient droplets. It was a petrified forest, a hard little, subtle little garden.

  ‘What is this made of?’ he asked Hendrick, who was next to him.

  ‘Paper. You haven’t seen one before? It is called quill-work. Very frustrating, very difficult. A recreation for clever girls who don’t have enough to do. The shiny parts are ground glass, glued on. But you have to be careful. You can easily cut yourself, hey?’

  *

  ‘What do you make of him?’ Geertje Van Loon asked Piet that night, in their box bed with the damask curtains. ‘What do you make of him?’ the printer’s devil asked Hendrick, inking the pages of the new Post-Boy.

  By morning the news was all around the town, from the Bowling Green to the Out Ward, that the stranger was a Saracen conjurer, and quite possibly an agent of the French.

  2

  Pope Day

  November 5th

  20 Geo. II

  1746

  I

  Had a map been drawn, a week later, of Mr Smith’s movements through the streets of New-York, with a thickness for each path beaten by his feet in proportion to the number of times he trod it, a tangled hydra indeed would have been revealed, with its head at Mrs Lee’s house.

  One thick line led to the Merchants’ Coffee-House, where every morning he breakfasted, receiving cordial conversation from Hendrick and an ever-increasing number of the regulars, and cold nods from Septimus Oakeshott. Another, still a substantial spoor of ink but slightly thinner, led to Golden Hill Street and the Lovells; another again, to the low streets on the western or Hudson side of the Broad Way, up against the outer palisade of the town, where it then split into a purposeful splay of tendrils, for Smith was deliberately visiting every tavern or gin-cellar or drinking den he could find, and privily enquiring in each one whether such a man might be found as a fellow who specialised in the recovery of lost things. In London such people certainly existed, serving as recognised points of communication between the daylight and the criminal cities, between bon ton and flash mob; and to ask for one was to signal plainly that you wished to open negotiations with the thief who had robbed you. But whether it was that New-York lacked this sophisticated convenience, or that he was asking in the wrong words, all he found was sullen silence in the earth-floored rooms he entered, and unfriendly stares from those drinking there.

  Meanwhile, certain other threads broader than a single passage marked his route to places where he had begun, as discreetly as possible, to make the enquiries his errand required. Yet entangling these main and subordinate limbs of the hydra − almost losing them in a maze of the finest lines – was a spider’s scribble extending everywhere, as if Mr Smith had made it his systematic business to stroll, unhurried, at least once along every lane, street, dock and thoroughfare the city contained. This was not so far from the truth. Almost everywhere had seen Mr Smith wander by, whistling under his breath; but nowhere did he lay eyes on any who might have been the lanky, black-haired thief, of whom he had glimpsed only the back view. Perhaps the thief had cut or dressed his long hair, perhaps he was lying low, perhaps he inhabited one of the outer settlements – Greenwich or Haarlem, Breuckelen or Flushing – which Smith had not yet penetrated; perhaps he was long gone along the High Road to Boston, or over the water to New Jersey, with the windfall in the leather portfolio. Perhaps Smith was simply being unlucky, for even in a city of only seven thousand souls, it is possible for two of them never to meet, for them to draw paths of ink that cross, over and over, yet never arrive in the same place at the same time.

  His purse grew ever lighter. Day by day, it perceptibly clinked and rustled less. Soon it would not clink and rustle at all, vapour being silent. The most strict economy regulated Smith’s spending on necessaries. At least, such spending as no-one could observe, and might draw conclusions from; for nothing could be more disastrous to his credit, he realised, than to betray any suggestion that he needed to pinch pennies, or had access to anything less than inexhaustible funds. If he was to maintain his ability to run up bills he need not settle, until the bill on Lovell was paid at the Christmas quarter-day, it must always appear to be no more than a rich man’s whim that he preferred to handle any particular expense with credit rather than cash. So he laid out his slender store of coin and paper where it would make the most open-handed impression: producing it from a child’s ear, tipping Quentin at the Merchants, giving with careless liberality when the collection plate came to him on Sunday morning in church. He ate as large a breakfast as would not seem greedy every morning in the coffee-house, on credit, and he cleaned his plate at dinner every night with Mrs Lee’s other boarders, on credit; and in between he ate nothing, and drank only from the public pump, and his stomach griped as he walked and walked. After four days, he had only eighteen shillings left. He needed, he could see, to secure new supplies, and shortly. But how was a hard question. Rich men do not sell things, and nor do they ask for loans. In what way does one get money, while giving no sign that the getting of it is any more than the merest indifference?

  He hesitated, the first Sunday that he woke in
the city, before he betook him along the Broad Way to Trinity. Worship implied expenditure. And he had not always been a notably pious Londoner. He had lain abed of a Sunday morning, with or without company, far more often than he had roused himself. Yet possession of a secret that cannot be shared lends a particular promise to the company of the Almighty, from whom it is declared that no secrets are hid; whose temples we are told are antechambers each facing that light which burns without effort through every human disguise or imposture. Mr Smith, being burdened, desired to lay his burden down, at least momentarily, especially if this could be accomplished invisibly to those on his left and on his right. And then beyond these private and spiritual considerations there were others, public and prudential. A church might be a stage at which the Lord, as auditory, gazes undeceived; but the congregation also performed to each other. Smith shaved with a bowl and jug, splashed himself with rosewater, and set out.

  The bells were ringing, and a fashionable crowd was gathering at the doors of the grey-stone church opposite the western end of Wall Street, when he arrived. Already, thanks to his campaign of walking, he recognised many faces. Not everyone he knew was there, by any means – for if New-York resembled London in the wild variety of churches, chapels, meetings and conventicles it accommodated, hospitable to every sect and shade of sect except the Papists, it differed too, in that here the sectaries made up the majority, rather than being the animated foam beating at the edges of a great calm boulder of Establishment. The Lovells were Baptists, and were to be found at this hour in the meeting-house just around the corner from them on Cliff Street, and the Van Loons were Dutch Reformed. They were sitting in a row in the Nieuwe Kerk on Nassau, the younger ones restless at the prospect of an hour-long Dutch sermon of which they would not understand above one word in three. Trinity was only one church among New-York’s thirty-odd churches. Yet, dispute its sway though people might, and resent its sway, the Church of England remained all the same the established form of the entire Christian religion in the Province of New-York, sustained by law, and swaddled in privilege; and Trinity was its chief and central building. It was the King’s church, and so necessarily the Governor’s church; it was power’s church, and also the church of power’s intimate opposition; it was pride’s church, wealth’s church, fashion’s church, and also the place where pride and wealth and fashion went to be medicined.

  As a well-dressed newcomer, Smith was shown to a pew halfway up the left side of the aisle, a seat not firmly locked into the subtle hierarchies of placement, yet with a grand enough view of the height of the social firmament, at the front of the nave. Over the white wooden box-walls he could see impressive heads, cut off just below the shoulder at about the level where an antique bust would end. There, at the very front, with a peanut-shaped brow and an anxious expression letting down the blue and gold of his coat, must be Governor Clinton, and his lady in lilac silk, and two African footmen with wigs powdered to the colour of icing-sugar to get the maximum contrast of black and white. A row behind, a skinny, sinewy, querulous man with eyebrows like caterpillars and a pointed nose was tapping his teeth, rubbing his lip, scratching his concave cheek, with a yellowed finger; next to him, at his most glazed and impervious, was Septimus Oakeshott, and Achilles the slave alongside. Septimus raised an eyebrow when he saw Smith looking. And then behind them, with a whole lavishly-dressed household around him, stood a middle-aged man in plain black who justified the accidental classicism imposed by the line of the pew-top, for he had a massive and statuesque Roman head, finely modelled at ear and nose, like a slightly depraved but very intelligent emperor; and this man was turning, and nodding, and working the room as the Governor was not, directing smiles, and ironic compressions of the brow, and communicative glances, to many faces in the ranked congregation behind him, stirring as if with a spoon the coupled merchants and merchants’ wives, officers and officers’ wives, lawyers and lawyers’ wives. The men bowed, the women dipped and dimpled. His eye travelled over Smith too, and bestowed on him a look of lively curiosity, charm and danger. Seeing where he was looking, the people in the pews behind all looked too. Smith inclined his head.

  A band of fiddle, bass-viol, trumpet and hoboy tuned up in the west gallery, a choir of blue-coated orphan boys trooped in, followed by Trinity’s rector in surplice and cassock, and a wig whose weight was all in bunched clusters on each side, like ear muffs. On the sanctuary step he turned, and declared in the loud voice required by the prayerbook, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us … Wherefore I pray and beseech you, as many as are here present, to accompany me, with a pure heart and a humble voice, to the throne of the heavenly grace, saying after me—’

  The congregation dropped to its knees, and consequently out of sight of itself. Smith was all of a sudden alone, with nothing in view but the rectangular top of his separate box, and above it the church roof and vacant pulpit: a most effective architectural similitude of the individual soul’s necessarily separate and lonely address to the mercy seat. From all the separate souls, in all their separate boxes, lidless before the Lord, arose the grumbling, lisping, rumbling, droning, hoarse, melodious, piping, muttering, murmuring, whispering, bellowing voice of the congregation together, making its way through the utterly familiar words of the prayerbook’s General Confession, at once soothing and demanding, ignorable and liable from moment to moment to sink a hook into the soul where least expected. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, and there is no health in us … Whenever an individual lost their place in the flow of the words, lost their attention or paid too much attention, they heard the flow continue over their heads, a roof of sound beneath the roof of wood, made from the voices of the many separate souls combined, but apart from each, and asking no questions when the faltering voice was raised again to rejoin it. What, if anything, Mr Smith confessed, this history must not tell; and what answer he received, if any, it cannot. The operations of grace are beyond the recording powers of the novelist. Mrs Fielding cannot describe them; nor Mr Fielding, nor Mrs Lennox, nor Mr Richardson, nor Mr Smollett, nor even Mr Sterne, who can stretch his story further than most. Not much redemption is to be looked for, in a novel, when we lean so materially upon the visible and the audible, when the four walls of our domain are: what is seen, what is said, what is done, and what became of it. Certainly, all the heads reappeared again looking none the worse, when the Rector pronounced the absolution. And quite possibly none the better, either.

  Mr Smith, similarly, did not give any outward sign as (it being early in the month, and the church’s endless progress through the psalms having reached Psalm 15) the blue-coat little boys, assisted by fiddle and hoboy, asked:

  Lord, who’s the happy Man, who may

  to thy blest Courts repair;

  Not Stranger-like, to visit them,

  but to inhabit there?

  – and the tenors in the adult half of the choir, accompanied by sawing bass, replied:

  ’Tis he whose ev’ry Thought and Deed

  by Rules of Virtue moves;

  Whose generous Tongue disdains to Speak

  the Thing his Heart disproves.

  He prayed gravely for King George to be replenished with the Holy Spirit, and for the Royal Family to be prospered with all happiness. He attended with calm seriousness to the hour-long sermon, not participating in the fan-flutters and glance-exchanges that broke out behind him: although, two rows back, an older woman on the arm of a choleric lobster of an infantry officer had eyes of the deepest blue he had ever seen, almost lapis-coloured. Sober Mr Smith; reverent Mr Smith; chaste, pious, prudent Mr Smith.

  In the church porch afterward, he was not completely surprised to find the Roman emperor somehow materialising smoothly beside him, amid the swirl of people, and taking him by the elbow with imperious familiarity, and fixing him with twinkling, cold little eyes.

  ‘Let me introduce myself,’ he said, ‘for I mean to take no chance of missin
g your acquaintance, young man. James De Lancey.’

  ‘Chief Justice,’ said Smith, bowing; for he had worked out the structure of New-York’s governance since Lovell had accused him of arriving to meddle in it, and in any case, De Lancey spoke in a voice of legal milk and honey, exercised, expressive, not hard to match together with a courtroom in which he had the unquestionable right to be heard. ‘I’m—’

  ‘Oh, I know who you are. Up to a point, anyway. An intriguing point. George, I hope this boy is on the list for the King’s birthday.’ Now De Lancey was speaking, with an absolutely undiminished expectation of authority, to the Governor himself.

  Smith bowed. Clinton’s peanut forehead creased anxiously. He made an indeterminate noise, and bent his head toward Septimus, who was hovering at his shoulder. ‘Er—?’

  ‘I had not thought of it, sir,’ said Septimus, shortly.

  ‘Well, you should; you surely should,’ said De Lancey. Rivers of milk, floods of honey. ‘And I look forward to it. Gentlemen, Mrs Clinton; good day.’ And he swept on, with family, entourage, and (it seemed) much of the congregation following in his wake, bowing and curtseying to the Governor as they passed, but treating him and his party – the sinewy man scowling, Septimus porcelain-bland – as little more than an honorific outcrop in a riverbed.

  Smith, not sure of his ground, let himself be carried with the current; and he would have got away entire, if it had not been for a grubby child of nine or ten years, threading his way through the crowd, who that moment thrust a hat under his nose, and cried out, ‘Penny to build the fire, sir! Penny to burn the Pope, sir! Penny for the guy, sir!’ Smith, already five shillings (New Jersey) the lighter thanks to the church plate, cursed inwardly, and with a radiant outward smile stuffed sixpence (Maryland) into the ragged bonnet.