Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

‘Yes. I did,’ said Smith, equally flatly, after a moment, and fell silent.

  ‘And all of this unlikeliness happened beside the fire, on the Common. And then you ran to Mr Perkins’, on Princes Street.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Smith, with a sigh.

  ‘Why did you not run to Golden Hill? We were much closer.’

  The truth was that in the rush of the flight, Smith had not even thought of it. The Lovells’ house – thinking of it now – stood in his mind as a place of effort and exertion, not of refuge. It had not the character, for him, of somewhere that one might seek safety.

  ‘It would not be a friendly act,’ he said, ‘to bring a mob to your door, would it?’

  ‘We would have managed, I dare say. But that was not your reason.’

  ‘No?’ said Smith.

  ‘You were not sure that we would open the door to you.’

  ‘I am sure you would,’ Smith said half-heartedly.

  ‘Are you? Would you bet on it? How much? Would you bet a thousand pounds? For that is how much we would profit, were you assassinated on our doorstep. We might leave you to be mangled there, and it would be all to the credit side of the ledger.’

  Definitely eager; avid, in fact. She had her eyebrows up, as if she were awaiting something. Indeed, she was waiting, he realised. She was waiting, excitedly, for him to strike back. It was his turn.

  ‘Must we play at this?’ he said suddenly. ‘Must it be Queen Tabitha’s War every time we meet?’

  She drew back sulkily, and kicked at a piece of rotten wood on the ground.

  ‘You are mocking me,’ she said. ‘I do not care to be mocked.’

  ‘You care to mock, though; and you invite mockery, so you can mock some more.’

  ‘What about you? You only want me to admire you, and to listen to your boy’s tales with a girl’s wide eyes, because you prefer to be liked. You want us to like you right up to the moment when you take our money and suddenly depart. My way is more honest.’

  ‘Assuming I am a villain.’

  ‘Till you explain yourself, you are a villain.’

  ‘You have a nasty sharp eye for other people’s weaknesses, Tabitha Lovell. Do you ever turn it on yourself? Do you—’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘When there is no-one else to fight with.’

  Smith stopped walking. Tabitha took a further step, and stopped too, her head down, her gaze fixed on her feet.

  ‘I do not have much company,’ she said. ‘People do not seek me out, very much.’

  ‘Imagine that,’ said Smith, but gently, surprised into sympathy. ‘But why fight at all? Why always have rapier in hand?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It just seems to come out like that. When I talk – when I get excited. When I am enjoying myself, it flashes out of me. I want people to fight back, you know. I like it when I cannot knock them over; when they do not give up and melt into tears. But mostly they do not. My father avoids me, and Flora is as aggressive as a puddle.’

  Now she was looking up at him. Now she was in earnest, or seemed to be: brow furrowed in a scowl of puzzlement, brown eyes fixed on his as if he might possess the answer to a question she had not put.

  ‘Well, at least, then,’ he said with deliberate lightness, ‘I may know it is not a mark of special disfavour, when you stab at me. If you run me through, it will be just on general policy. You do not hate me in particular.’

  She blinked, and rallied.

  ‘Why no,’ she said, ‘– no more than measure.’

  They smiled at each other. The drizzle of the day was becoming determined, and soon might be rain. The bloom of moisture on her forehead was gathering into tiny clear beads.

  ‘Perhaps we had better go back,’ Smith said. ‘You do know your Shakespeare,’ he added, when they were wandering again back toward the traffic on the road. ‘Why don’t you scorn him, like the novel-writers?’

  ‘I suppose, because he does not tell me lies about things close to hand. I can read about thrones, and kings, and Romans, and yellow cross-gartering, and madmen on the heath, and I have free air to breathe. Theatre is my open window. I don’t see what I do know, business and money and manners and ordering of beef and sallots, turned all to smirking sentiment and unlikelihood.’

  ‘What if Shakespeare is lying to you just as much, and it is only that you don’t spend your days with kings and Romans?’

  She shrugged. ‘If so it is a style of lie I don’t care about. I don’t read Hamlet for the Danish news.’

  ‘I think you like him because the comedies are full of quick-tempered women with razor tongues. I think you like to hear Beatrice and Benedick insulting upon each other.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, laughing. ‘But you, sir, are not Benedick.’

  ‘And you, madam, are not Beatrice.’

  ‘True.’

  *

  ‘Hammer and tongs,’ said Hendrick, breaking his fast the day after in the Merchants. ‘All day, every day. Like a choir of harpies, so that you doubted the report of your eyes that there were only the two of ’em, they made such a room-filling racket. Mrs Lovell complaining always of Tabitha’s unkindness, coldness of heart, lack of tender and daughterly feeling, and what-have-you, but always giving shrewdly fierce blows of her own; and Tabitha proclaiming every minute how she was traduced, confined, misunderstood, and all the while lighting up the curtains with the epithets she threw back. Flora crouching in the corner of the sopha like a rabbit, Mr Lovell hiding in the counting-house. They were a famous pair of shrews, and the best that could be said of ’em was, that they soaked up the worst of it themselves. Passers-by were not hit except at random, or when one or t’other was alone and didn’t have the usual place to sink their teeth. Now that dear Tabby is without her partner in shrewdom – well, you’ve seen.’

  ‘And when did her mother die?’ Smith asked, eyeing the bread Hendrick had left on his plate.

  ‘When she was fifteen.’

  A bad break, thought Smith; an injury that did not heal aright. It is only that it hurts.

  ‘I must say,’ said Hendrick, getting up, ‘the family is grateful you’ve volunteered to put yourself in the way of it. While she is kicking you, we have a quieter life altogether.’

  ‘And Flora’s engagement to George can go ahead without the half-bricks flying.’

  ‘Or with not so many, at any rate. So: thank you. It is a noble duty you do, and a better service than one would look to receive from an impostor bent on fraud. If that is what you are. Try to take her away, if you are intending to ruin her. You won’t mind getting this, I’m sure’ – indicating, as he departed, the array of dishes between them where bacon had been reduced to grease, and rolls (mostly) to crumbs.

  II

  The next day was the King’s birthday. Smith had had a pasteboard invitation, in Septimus’ handwriting, bearing the Governor’s arms and bidding him to dinner, and he was looking forward to it, because he was curious but also because he had, the day before, expended the very last of his store of money. His pockets rustled no more. All he had in them was air.

  All over the town lesser celebrations at home were raising a glass to King George, and making the traditional toasts, in a kind of decorous indoor reprise of the patriotic orgy at the bonfire. But the Governor’s dinner, having been burned out of his residence by the fire at the Fort, needs must occupy the panelled long room upstairs in City Hall, where the Assembly usually sat. This superposition of two powers, and their two proper territories, made for wariness on all sides. Septimus – still up a ladder when Smith arrived, and trying to organise a mass of red, white and blue ribbons around a decorative lozenge of the royal countenance – was as uneasy as a cat carried into a stranger’s house. And the others of the Governor’s party, His Excellency included, were little less inclined to twitch and fidget; while the Assemblymen and their wives and daughters, the prominent citizens and their wives and daughters, hung back in a murmuring mass.

  ‘I don’t think I c
an get it any better than this,’ called Septimus.

  ‘Your problem is, you are looking for his good side,’ said James De Lancey, massive and genial in his judge’s black; he alone, it seemed, strolling about indifferent to the fissure in the room. ‘But King George’s good side is the Constitution.’

  Septimus at the ladder-top nodded stiffly. It was the querulous, hollow-faced man Smith had seen at church who answered, in saw-edged Scots.

  ‘Is that a gene-rr-ous, a co-orr-dial, beginning to the evening? To insult His Majesty’s face?’

  ‘Come on now, Cadwallader,’ said De Lancey easily. ‘No offence was meant, and I’m sure none would have been taken, even if I had said it to his face. By all accounts he is the most moderate and undespotic of princes – that is what my cousin Pelham tells me, from his interviews with him.’

  His smile was warm yet the group around the Governor contracted as if poked. De Lancey made a bow, and moved on among his constituents.

  ‘Did he mean Lord Pelham?’ Smith asked, holding the ladder while Septimus descended. ‘Is he really cousins with the prime minister?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Septimus bitterly. ‘That is one of our problems. Usually, a governor can at least call on his interest in London as a counterweight, when things get sticky here. It is slow but it works in the end. But De Lancey’s connections are better than ours. His cousin is prime minister and, just to set the cherry on the damned cake, his old tutor at Cambridge is this year made Archbishop of Canterbury. Church and State, he has us out-flanked, and as you see, he likes to remind us of it from time to time, to torment us. Right; wine and music.’

  He wove away between the sidling dignitaries, towards the small slave orchestra tuning up at the end of the room, and the squadron of waiters with trays who had been drafted in from the taverns and the coffee-houses. The banquet had been laid along a single great table down one half of the room, leaving the other clear as a dance-floor; and as the band struck up a minuet, the guests sorted themselves into standers and dancers, the standers receiving a glass of canary and the dancers beginning (amid chatter and calls of recognition) to tread out the measure on the polished boards. They did at the least overlay the division in the company with some animation, and as the couples turned, at first a few and then more, their circular motion gently scoured the partisans out of the corners, and blended them together. The Governor and Mrs Clinton took to the floor, and so did the De Lanceys, so did the Livingstons, so did the Philipses, so did the Rutgers, so did the Van Loons, with the younger members of their clans following as soon as, in a flurry of bows and curtseys and laughter, they had found themselves partners.

  Smith, looking around to see whose eye he might catch, was pleased to spy a mixed phalanx of young Lovells and Van Loons readying themselves, and slipped over to join them. Flora smiled, Joris snarled, Hendrick raised an eyebrow, and Tabitha turned on him a gaze of such amused welcome that his heart startled within him; she was dressed in a dark red silk which became her, and had garnets in her ears, but rather than taking a pleasure in the gown as a new and formal skin, as Flora was with her pink, shifting in it and stroking at the fabric with a fingertip, she stood there inside it as if it were no part of her, like a tall pole which in the wind happens to have become entangled in a cloth.

  Smith made a leg to the group in general.

  ‘Does anyone require a partner?’ he said.

  ‘You must dance with Flora,’ said Tabitha promptly.

  ‘No, I shall dance with Flora,’ said Joris.

  ‘But you promised me,’ whined Anneke, whose grey made her look like a little pouter pigeon.

  ‘I was thinking I might dance with you,’ said Smith to Tabitha.

  ‘Were you? I am afraid Hendrick has claimed this one.’

  ‘I have?’ said Hendrick. ‘Of course. I have. How forgetful of me.’

  He held out his hand, palm upward, and Tabitha took it. The two of them stepped away into the minuet, turning smoothly and correctly, and no more involved with each other than a couple of clockwork figures.

  ‘You promised,’ said Anneke to her brother. ‘You know that it is my first time, and that no-one else may ask me if you don’t, and you promised.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Joris, his teeth clamped. ‘Just … just …’ His finger was pointed warningly at Smith, but he could find no way to disburden himself that would not make matters worse.

  ‘Don’t be so silly,’ said Flora, with unexpected firmness. ‘I shall be quite safe with Mr Smith. You know that Tabitha is only trying to annoy you. You and I can dance the next one. Go on!’

  ‘You are determined to enjoy yourself,’ Smith observed, as Anneke was rotated, beaming, away.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said Flora cheerfully, accepting his fingertips and sliding into place next to him, pink and white and fair, and smelling of soap and healthy young skin. When they were facing each other, she did the dips and turns with zest rather than delicacy, feet almost stamping, and when they were in the close turns, she made a very pleasant armful. As her breath quickened, her bodice rose and fell, and the tops of her breasts grew flushed.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ she said again. ‘Tabitha wants to dance with you, and you really want to be dancing with her, and neither of you are getting to do what you want, because she would rather be spiteful instead; and I just think that is stupid, so I am going to have fun no matter what. I am going to dance with you, and I am going to dance with Joris, and I am going to dance with anyone else who asks me. – You’re good at this, aren’t you?’

  ‘Two years with a fashionable dancing-master,’ said Smith, seeing again the waxed floor of the salle in Covent Garden. And another year trying to wring shillings from the skill by teaching it, he did not add. If Flora had been in respectable society in London, she would have seen that his movements had become more flashy than was strictly gentlemanly: the noble art corrupted into a show that would please at a distance. Joris and Anneke passed, Anneke stepping on her wincing brother’s toes; De Lancey went smiling by, a victory column in deft motion, and nodded to Smith.

  ‘I don’t think it’s very flattering to be called safe,’ he complained to Flora, essaying his best glance of flirtatious menace. She laughed.

  ‘But I am safe with you,’ she said. ‘I may not be clever like Tabitha, but I am not an idiot, you know. You think I’m pretty, but she is the one you’re interested in, Mr Smith.’

  ‘In that case, you could call me Richard, surely,’ he said.

  ‘When the bill clears,’ she said, comfortably her father’s daughter.

  *

  At dinner he was placed three-quarters of the way towards the top of the long table, in what was evidently the tail of the Governor’s invitation list, with Septimus opposite him, and the great men of the colony clustered together to his right, where he might have the pleasure of overhearing their collisions, yet was plainly not bidden to participate. The Van Loons and Lovells were far down the lane of white linen. Half a dozen different conversations were rattling on between: leaning to look, he received the performance only in dumbshow, quite soundlessly, of Flora laughing, and settling herself in state with the folds of the pink silk around her, and both Joris and Hendrick leaning solicitously in, to confirm her rights in acting the princess on this royal evening; and Tabitha, finding no purchase for mischief in this impervious happiness, sitting bolt upright on the other side of the table, looking isolated and even a little lost. He raised his canary glass to her, but her gaze was fixed on some inner horizon, and she did not see.

  The dinner, as it must be on this night, was roast-beef. And of course, as the sides of the beef were carried in on trenchers, to cheers, sizzling and brown and scarlet, each a goodly fraction of a cow, the orchestra struck up, as it must, ‘The Roast-Beef of Old England’, and the company roared out loyally:

  When mighty roast-beef was an Englishman’s food

  It ennobled our veins, and enriched our blood;

  Our soldiers were brave, and our courtier
s were good …

  – the Assemblymen vying in volume with the Governor’s party, to prove they were of no less devotion, until the table’s head was all wigs and wide mouths and glittering eyes in the candle-light, the rough music dissolving at the last chorus into a general laughter.

  ‘James, may I carve you a slice?’ asked the Governor reedily, a spot of colour in each powdered cheek.

  ‘Why, George, I don’t mind if I do,’ rumbled De Lancey, passing his plate; and the treaty was sealed in dripping and gravy.

  Septimus, who had been watching with the stem of his glass pinched between a whitened finger and thumb, exhaled; and directed his attention across at Smith instead, with the air of one allowed for a minute to go off duty. Smith was cocking an ear to the conversation on his right, and glancing as if compelled down to his left; but most of all he was chewing the largest mouthful of beef that he could decently take in, and trying not to salivate on the table-cloth. Septimus, intercepting the direction of the glances, smiled at him.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I have them both – both the Misses Lovell – down for roles in my play; I mean the drama we put on to beguile the first part of the winter. It is Cato this year. Should you like to take a part?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Smith, swallowing. ‘Is this in the nature of private theatricals, then?’

  ‘We-ell, not strictly; we do not take money, for that would waken the city’s puritan doubts, and make ’em think acting not a fit recreation for their sons and daughters, but we do show it before such a public as wants to see it. It was formerly in the Fort, with an audience chiefly from the families of the garrison, but this year I have procured for a night the use of the old theatre on Nassau Street, which is usually a lumber store, there being no players to turn it to its proper purpose. Come; it will pass the time; let me tempt you to be a Roman.’

  ‘Are they any good?’ asked Smith, with a motion of his chin to the left.

  ‘Well; Miss Flora more than Miss Tabitha, strangely enough, for she has it thoroughly in mind to be a heroine, if she can, and she cries out the lines with relish, if not with subtlety. While Miss T understands the piece, but carries herself like a reader of it, who has been deposited on stage by chance, with eyebrows raised at the absurdity of it all.’