Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  Relieved therefore of the fear he would starve, yet supplied with new matter for alarm, Smith over the following days watched from his vantage point in the Merchants as the city rose to a frantic zenith of activity. One of the two peaks of the New-York year, said Hendrick, bawling explanations in the suddenly far more crowded coffee-house: the other being the moment in late spring when the fleet returned from the sugar isles with the harvest aboard, and every trying-house, refinery and distillery would belch sweet smoke, and the air would burn with caramel. For this, though, the first and outward pulsation of the city’s commerce, every ship in the harbour, every keel belonging to a Mannahatta merchant house, must be crammed to the gunwales with the products of the farms up-island and up-river. Land in the tropic Indies being too scarce to expend on any crop save the precious cane, the slaves who grew it, in the Barbadoes and Jamaica, Saint-Domingue and Demerara, were fed on flour and biscuit and dried peas from the provinces to the north. The slaves died in prodigious number, but there were always numbers still more prodigious from Africa to replace them in the great machine, and so the owners kept on buying, and eagerly, all that the Province of New-York could grow for their sustenance. Naturally they paid in their own crop. Wheat out, sugar back. So the traffic along the Broad Way, and in Broad Street and Maiden Lane and every other street that gave entrance to the docks, thickened to the point of deadlock. The laden carts and wains Smith had seen coming in through the fields beyond the stockade became a continual procession, a bumping, lurching, swaying, slow armada on wheels, advancing inch by congesting inch through every cobbled chink in the city’s fabric that was wide enough (and some that proved not wide enough). Carters swore, horses jibbed and shat, loads slewed. While, on the water, river-schooners from up the Hudson and coasters from all along Long Island and Connecticut, and wherries plying across from Jersey, brought in cargoes of sacks that way, to be raised from one hold to another at the dockside on creaking cranes. A hundred wooden arms moving at once; a hundred sets of cries of Way and Ready and Ware Below; an orgy of transhipment. Carpenters in all the cross-trees, hammering; new spars of resin-smelling pine rising up to them in slings; sail-makers sewing; cordwainers paying out the perished pieces in old rigging and filling in with new manila; an aerial chorus of knocking and banging going on into the night, night after night by lamplight. And into the city, too, flowed all the sailors who would crew the voyage. Tars by trade who farmed at home for the summer months, and younger sons from the Hudson settlements shipping out to earn the wherewithal to set up in new fields and houses of their own, and assorted hopefuls and wanderers and chancers of all descriptions – all these, thronging the taverns, and roaming the night streets in jovial gangs looking for entertainment, and filling out every lodging-house that had bedding or floor-space or attic-space to spare. Mrs Lee extended her breakfast table by three more wooden leaves, and was kept running with trays of porridge. Since all these new guests were swiftly informed in whispers of Smith’s riches, he was fronted, as he left the house each morning, by frequent requests for loans, and offers of part-shares in schemes sure to make both him and the promoters a fortune by spring.

  At Lions’ Slip, just below Golden Hill Street, Captain Prettyman watched over the stowage of the Lovells’ and Van Loons’ three Indies vessels, giving orders in authoritative squeaks, as if a lean ship’s rat had risen up into the stature of a man. But Smith heard nothing from Tabitha. Having failed to find her and explain the mischance within the first couple of days, he had resigned himself to receiving some piece of ingenious nastiness in return, by message or by letter or in person, but nothing of the sort arrived, and as the silence lengthened, his reluctance to breach it on his side, and get visited on him whatever she had prepared, grew the more solid, these motives of cowardice or self-protection holding the field unchallenged in the absence of the sight of her face, and of what he had seen in it. He began to tell himself that the careless slight he had given, had been in truth a stroke of luck, and that there was an accidental wisdom (which perhaps De Lancey’s philosophy would approve) in being extricated from a difficult connection with an acknowledged shrew. Yet, a peculiar compunction prevented him from asking Hendrick, any morning in the Merchants, how she did; for he had heard with what unaffection she was regarded in the family, and did not wish to salt the wound he had inflicted on her, by exposing the knowledge of it to Hendrick’s likely laughter. ‘Fallen out with my dear sister-in-law?’ said Hendrick, and Smith only shrugged.

  After ten days had passed, rehearsals began for Septimus’ Cato. Mijnheer Van Torn’s old theatre on Nassau Street turned out to be a simple box of a space upstairs, made by knocking through three of the narrow row-houses there, and very dusty and dark and cumbered by lumber it was. Powdery flotillas of moths rose from the decayed velvet curtain when it was touched. Smith and Septimus and a gruff lieutenant from the Fort by the name of Lennox, who was playing the part of Cato, had to begin by clearing timber off the stage, and unblocking the nearest pair of windows, so that the actors might see one another. Smith had half expected that Tabitha would make this the occasion for some exquisitely- calculated piece of sabotage or subversion, and appear alongside Flora with a heckler’s arsenal of weapons ready: but Flora came alone. Alone, that is, except for the glowering presence of Joris, who sat on a baulk of planks in the half-dark like a spindly monument to disapproval. Flora paid him no attention. She was cheerful with Smith, chatty to Septimus, and so ingenuously pleased to be there with Lennox that he unbent to the extent of several smiles. The one she was wary of was Terpie Tomlinson; and Smith watched, fascinated, as Terpie in turn made it her special study to win Flora’s confidence. She had come dressed in a dark respectable gown, buttoned up to the neck, and she sat very still until you forgot she was anything but a face and a pair of moving hands, and she took as the limit upon what she might do or say, Flora’s own behaviour. She even copied, though Smith was sure Flora did not notice it, Flora’s own gestures. Using only voice and hands she appeared to become another girl of seventeen, just as reassuringly confined by the proprieties, and just as forthrightly innocent – but perhaps a little shyer, requiring to be drawn out. She delivered her lines in the first read-through with a colourless clarity that had Septimus nodding with approval, but Smith thought he could guess what her final performance might be like. By the end of the rehearsal she and Flora were giggling together.

  But no Tabitha. The month of November settled into chill mists, like an old sopha sinking down on its springs. Day upon day, the cold winds off the river stirred slow grey tributaries of fog between the houses, through which the crush of traffic loomed, and darkened as it loomed, as if becoming more solid with each approaching step. The fog contained and muffled the cries of draymen, squeak of wheelrims, hammering from aloft, et cetera, as a jewel-box with a cushioned lid presses all within into the smothering clasp of velvet. In the Merchants, at breakfast, Hendrick reported without any prompting or enquiry that Lovell and Van Loon senior were mired with business in the counting-house, and did not emerge from it now save to eat and sleep. Septimus, in the same place, attempted to gossip of the latest stratagems in the Assembly, and Smith, mindful of listening ears and the judge’s threat, closed down the conversation. In the fog on the Common, sword on his belt, he paced from tree to tree getting his lines by heart.

  A Roman soul is bent on higher views:

  To civilise the rude, unpolished world,

  And lay it under the restraint of laws;

  To make man mild, and sociable to man;

  To cultivate the wild, licentious savage

  With wisdom, discipline, and liberal arts …

  At the end of every line he stamped his foot. At the end of every speech he stamped and turned. The clamorous fog bore away his efforts and judged them not at all remarkable. It did pass the time. But no Tabitha. Ships were sailing, now, full-laden; dipping away into the hushing veils of white beyond the wharfs, as if bound for nowhere rather than the Indies. But others seem
ed to take their places without intermission, and at each next successive dawn – with the sun if glimpsed at all as a blue-green yolk, washed over by milk – the awkward frenzy went forward unabated. And no Tabitha.

  After the third rehearsal, Septimus took him to a bath-house he had not suspected the existence of, on William Street. The steam was welcome, for the perpetual fog was beginning to make him cough. Hot and wet and smelling of birch, it drove through all the passages of his nose and chest into which the mist had insinuated its clammy fingers, and purged it out in a wholesome sweat. When first invited, Smith had imagined the steam-bath might be a place of ill-repute, as the bagnios were in Covent Garden, at home, and (while taking the invitation as a compliment) had wondered in what scenes he might find himself. But this one, stuffed as it was with sailors baking themselves clean before they embarked, was wild and licentious in no wise; seemed in fact a place of almost aggressive virtue, where men in crowded ranks squeezed together upon the wooden shelves of the hot room, and talked busily the while of the harvest they had brought in that autumn, and their plans for the voyage to come. Septimus, bolt upright in a blue towel, was entirely his public self, rather than the impassioned figure of the bedroom, though the genial roar of the room allowed for a reasonable privacy of speech.

  ‘I was wondering,’ said Smith, passing the dipper, ‘whether at the performance, you mean me to put on black-face, for Juba?’ This was a point he had particularly considered.

  ‘God, no!’ said Septimus. ‘For these purposes, you are to consider yourself the fairest-skinned African who ever lived. North African. African like the Barbary States. African like St Augustine.’

  ‘Semper aliquid novum ex Africa.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. Nice, safe, classical Africa.’

  ‘He is played dark in London,’ observed Smith.

  ‘To be sure, but it would not answer here, even if you were painted up in the most obvious boot-polish, I promise. For Juba loves Marcia, and Marcia loves Juba. And decent society here is most clear about where Eros may not visit.’

  ‘Even if he does,’ murmured Smith.

  ‘Especially if he does,’ said Septimus, more sotto voce still. ‘In fact,’ he went on, regaining volume, ‘I’ve been thinking, à propos Marcia. – I might switch around her part and Lucia’s, and have Terpie play her, instead of Miss Flora. Should you mind? I know you and Flora go nicely together.’

  ‘No, no, that would be fine with me,’ Smith said. ‘But why? Are you displeased in some way with Terpie as Lucia?’

  ‘Never in life! She is as good as you said she’d be, and I owe you a debt for getting me to put down my prejudice and see it. But I must still guard against, um, accidents of perception.’

  ‘And you’ve found one?’

  ‘I think so, yes. When Lucia says, of Marcia’s brothers, that she longs “for neither and yet for both” – I think, if Terpie is playing her, that the average dirty-minded New-York gentleman in our audience – being, you know, still filled unlike me with the popular prejudice in re actresses – will not be able to forbear to, well, to—’

  ‘What?’ said Smith, grinning.

  ‘Well, to picture Terpie as the filling in a kind of Roman sandwich. I foresee snickering.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Smith.

  And hence at the next rehearsal he found himself opposite Terpie Tomlinson rather than Flora. Though constructed so generously in terms of proportion, she was not, on the absolute scale, very large at all: her head only came up to his chin. As she gazed sternly up at him, without breaking character either as a stoic virgin of ancient times or as a nice young girl playing one, she lowered the eyelid nobody else could see from their positions on the dusty boards, and winked at him. But still no Tabitha.

  By 26th November he had persuaded himself that his bruising encounters with the elder Miss Lovell had been merely an early interlude in his visit to the city, now thankfully concluded; a brush with a nasty (if uncommon) girl from which a misapprehension had fortunately delivered him, before it could interfere with his errand. Indeed he was so firmly persuaded of it that he revisited the question several times a day to persuade himself of it again, whenever the temptation grew too strong, to send a message by Flora, or by Hendrick, or to hammer on the street-door at Golden Hill until he was let in. Policy, self-preservation, self-respect, all argued for abiding by Tabitha’s silence – which, by now, he did not expect to see broken.

  So he was considerably surprised, that morning, when stepping out of Mrs Lee’s front door into more of the perpetual murk, he found himself greeted by the surly countenance of Isaiah, the Lovells’ prentice, pressing a note into his hand; and opening it, discovered himself invited, in Tabitha’s handwriting, to take a cruise with her up-river in the Lovells’ lugger, to fetch the last loads of the cargo. Invited to join her at Ellison’s Dock on the Hudson side, that day – that morning – now. There were no reproaches. ‘You may be glad to quit the Glue of Vapours for a Day,’ she wrote. ‘I am sick of it Myself.’ Smith thrust a random scrap of money-paper from his pocket at the startled prentice, and took to his heels.

  Ellison’s Dock was a wooden pier extending far out over the mud, from one of the tumbledown lanes west of the Broad Way, to give sufficient draught at low tide, and walking out on it now, into the coagulated grey curtains shifting above the river, seemed to remove one from the firm land without promising arrival anywhere else. It was silent out there, with the incoming salt-flow from the ocean swelling the sinews of the water but not breaking its glassy skin. Only the tiny purling of water against the piles could be heard. Smith wondered nervously if, at the end, he would find some street bully procured to push him in unobserved, but no, there in the fog was the lugger fat and broad and high-riding, creaking at its mooring-rope and bumping against the dock with the force of the moving tide, and its rigging ascending into unseen conjecture a few feet up; and when he called, and peered forward through the damp rope-work, there was Tabitha on deck, muffled up against the weather but bright-eyed, among Prettyman’s small crew, and Zephyra hanging behind her, blank as ever, for the sake of the proprieties.

  ‘I am so sorry—’ Smith began, as he scrambled aboard.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Tabitha, slapping his arm. ‘Watch this.’

  They slipped the mooring, and the water carried them immediately out and away, with the steersman on the rudder merely nudging them to an angle on the swollen face of the tide. The swirling fabrics of the fog parted and sealed around them, placelessly, in grey limbo for a minute or so, and then suddenly parted for good. Suddenly, they were out of it altogether, drawing clear of a cloudbank that lay long and curling to the right, stretching as far ahead and behind as the eye could see, with the whole city of New-York – in fact, the whole island of Manhattan – presumably buried inside it. Over on the left side, the Jersey shore too was lost behind another cloud-wall. The sky, though still cloud-covered, was higher and lighter and wider and more open than any he had glimpsed in more than a week. They were travelling up a lane of dull silver, wide enough to engulf the river Thames several times over, with all the solid geography round about apparently abolished on the instant; moving with a kind of effortless ease upon the moving bosom of the river, though not in solitude, for the silver was scattered with a gliding array of lighters, fishing smacks, long-boats and larger vessels, all catching the tide upstream. The sailors hoisted one triangle of canvas on the lugger, which scarcely even swelled in the damp still air but lent a kind of heft to the pull of the rudder, and lit their pipes.

  ‘Magic!’ said Tabitha. ‘I thought I owed you for the coin trick.’

  ‘That was free.’

  ‘So is this. Nearly, anyway. You can’t expect me to pull a whole ship from your ear, without a bit of preparation.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Not far. Only to Tarrytown, to load up Cortlandt flour, and then back on the ebb this afternoon.’ She leant far out over the side and hung there, looking ahead to the van
ishing-point where whites, greys and river silver met. Smith was content to gaze at the back of her head, where her hair was escaping again in tendrils from the silver pins securing it, and above her muffler, as she stretched, he could see the tendons moving in her narrow neck.

  ‘You must let me explain properly what happened, about the play,’ he said.

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘I would like to, please,’ Smith said, still addressing her hair. ‘For it was an accident, and not a manoeuvre in Queen Tabitha’s War, at all.’

  She blew dismissively through her lips but turned to face him, glancing as he spoke at his forehead, at his shoulders, at his chest – all around him, yet not quite at him.

  ‘I was distracted at the dinner,’ he said. ‘Plays and players and play-houses are something I … know about; and when a piece of my own world floated into view I grabbed it for the pure pleasure of not being at sea any more in an unknown place, among unknown people; and applied myself to the question of Septimus Oakeshott’s play as if it were just a question, a conundrum with no consequences; and I did not remember at all what it might mean to you, till it was too late; and I know it does not reflect well on me that I should manage to forget entirely the concerns of a friend, but at least I wasn’t aiming—’

  ‘You talk a lot,’ she said.

  ‘Especially when I’m nervous.’

  ‘Why should you be, if I’m your friend? – You’ll have to excuse me. I haven’t said much for a fortnight. Father is deep in the books, and Flora is gone. My mouth is rusting shut.’