Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  ‘Right,’ said Hendrick, and handing the pole to his father to hold, trotted up the steps to the front door, crunch-crunch-crunch, and hammered at it. When it opened, and Geertje Van Loon wide in bright silks stood there, with Flora and Anne crowding behind her to see, a myriad of little flames spangling the dark hall, it looked as if a treasure-house had opened, a winter cavern set with jewels, and an air laden with spices flowed out. One last time at the foot of the steps they sang Sinterklaas, goedheiligman, and the three hostesses listened with hands clasped. But that was it. At the last note the snowy silence collapsed into a genial roar, and all the singers surged up to the door chattering and laughing nineteen to the dozen, to kiss and be received.

  Smith, feeling the spell broken, felt too the sullen grasp of his resentment closing again, and hung back, wondering if he might sidle off, but Piet Van Loon put a hand in the small of his back and propelled him firmly upward to the threshold, before slipping past and in. Mrs Van Loon put out a hand. He meant to bow over it; instead, she drew him against the powdered slopes of her bosom, and bussed him explosively on each cheek. ‘Prettige Sinterklaas,’ she said firmly, as if prescribing a medicine, and passed him on for the laughing imprint of Flora’s lips and the anxious nibble of Anne’s. ‘Happy St Nicholas,’ they said. ‘Go in, go in.’ Flora was in looks, and in her element as well, apparently: suffused with busy excitement, a fair tendril of her hair come loose from its net of pearls and bouncing by her mouth as she spoke. Stationed authoritatively at Geertje’s shoulder she seemed settled into place as the house’s elder daughter already. The contrast with the put-upon girl he had seen through the upstairs door a month before was marked. It occurred to Smith that the short time he had passed in the city stood for a whole epoch to Flora. Some of what she had wanted, she had gained, while he did her the unwitting service of distracting her sister. She was well launched out into her career of change, and if Joris was not quite the cavalier of romance, he was the means of replacing the sharp words of the Lovells’ long room for her, with this shrewd domestic enchantment, this easier household where the conversation did not bristle with traps.

  ‘Richard, you’re staring,’ she said, sounding perfectly happy about it: as if, in fact, receiving his stare was helping to make her cheeks glow. ‘Go in! The saint is coming in a half an hour, and there is food and drink everywhere, but the men you’ll find upstairs, smoking.’

  The Van Loons had cleared their main rooms to accommodate the party. Only the blue-and-white-tiled stoves in the corner of each could not be removed, being built into the walls, and these seemed too to be the last traces of Dutch taste in the furnishing. Paint, wallpapers, pictures – all were smartly in the latest English fashion, or at least the latest version of it that had reached New-York. By the light of many candles a crush of prosperous people were exchanging the news, here and there in Dutch but largely in English, and trying to moderate the appetites of their children, who were reaching their hands over and over into baskets of flat little biscuits offered by the Van Loons’ servants. ‘Wim, Davey, leave some room in your stomach for when Sinterklaas comes. You’ll be sorry if you’re sick.’ Smith took one for himself. It tasted of cinnamon and orange peel and, surprisingly, black pepper. He was wished the joy of the feast many times as he worked his way up the stairs, either absently, as the mere compulsory custom of the night, or with a nodding, beaming significance that suggested a closer connection of the family, primed by Hendrick to please. After a while he started saying it back, and by the time he reached the first-floor landing he had the pronunciation of prettige Sinterklaas about perfect, thanks to his quick gift with tongues, though he still had no clear idea of what was being celebrated, or of what the saint’s arrival might entail, not having happened to pass through the Low Countries in December on his Grand Tour.

  On the landing a room to the right was filled with all the exiled chairs, and on them smiling ancients discoursing gummily together, but on the left a closed door declared that a domain of private business lay beyond. The African footman stationed there was expecting him, and ladled him a steaming silver beaker of orange punch from a grand silver tureen on a side table, before turning the door-handle and bowing him into a seam of blackness. Smith passed from treasure-house into cavern. He could feel the dense softness of a Turkey-carpet underfoot, and smell tobacco smoke thickly compounding with the spices, but in here the only lights were the four little stumps of candle piercing oranges at the windows, and the dull red-gold coals of a fire. It was so dark, it took him a moment to sort and establish the shadowed forms of what must be Piet Van Loon’s study, with its desk and globe and tall armchairs by the overmantel. If the room had been a print, it would have been one those cross-hatched unto Hades by the burin, line upon line, ink upon ink, till the figures are lost in a frenzy of gloom. If it had been a painting, it would have been one of those ancient daubs smoke-blackened till the viewer must guess at subject and setting from the few ambiguous streaks remaining, and decide according to taste whether it depicts a battle or a serenade, a tragedy or a cucumber-lodge. His hosts were waiting in the chairs. Piet, Hendrick, Lovell, the embers of three pipes coming and going in the black with their breaths. No: Piet, Hendrick, Lovell, and Tabitha, beyond the others in the far corner, twisted in her seat to avert her face as far as might be from the closing door. He knew her by the faint gleam along the narrow shoulder hitched up against him. The twisting line there, it was impossible he should fail to recognise. He would have recognised it on the moon; where there would certainly have been more light.

  ‘Sit down, jongeheer,’ said Piet. They had left him a place facing outward from the fire, towards the flames along the sills and their quivering doubles in the glass, and the thin snow falling beyond the glass. Tabitha was almost behind him, and quite out of view. His nerves quickened at the thought of the elaborate malice she would be nourishing in the darkness. The sounds of the party throbbed remotely.

  ‘I didn’t think you Calvinists had saints’ days,’ he remarked.

  ‘Only this one,’ said Piet.

  ‘A bit gaudy for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’re a long way from the synod of the Hervormde Kerk,’ said Hendrick. ‘We can afford to be lax. Sinterklaas has grown much bigger since the Governor started holding his St George’s dinners, and the Irish and the Scots societies got going with St Patrick and St Andrew. But,’ he went on patiently, a man obliging his family in what he could, ‘you didn’t come to talk about that. You wanted to get down to business. Here we are.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lovell around his pipe stem. ‘And I’ll bite my tongue and not say a word whose fault I think it is we’ve danced about the matter so damn long to no purpose: but, yes, here we are. Your bill is good. We’ll call that established fact. Now, how will you take it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We mean, that quarter-day is but nineteen days off, and that we must agree what properties you’ll take your seventeen hundred and forty pound New-York in, for doubtless a deal of haggling—’

  ‘I think I am owed an apology first, am I not?’

  ‘You’ve had it,’ said Lovell. ‘You’ve had it from me, and as I understand it, you’ve had it from Hendrick here too, and that’s both houses covered.’

  ‘It isn’t your houses I’m owed it by,’ Smith said; his attention, his rancour, the quiver of his sinews, all concentrated with galvanic sensitivity upon the dark chair behind his left shoulder.

  ‘Oh, God save us from pride-offended youth. Well, we reckoned on that too. Tabitha, apologise to the boy.’

  Silence.

  ‘Tabitha, you know the necessity of this.’

  Silence. Lovell huffed a sigh. He stood, and the thud that followed suggested that he had kicked the chair in the corner.

  ‘Tabitha!’

  A thread of a whisper: ‘I apologise.’

  ‘There,’ said Lovell, breathing hard. ‘Piet, excuse the insult to your furniture.’

  ‘Granted,’ said Pi
et.

  ‘Now. If we may, please God, dispense with any more of this spoony mumchancing: what will you take the bill in? Speak plain at last. We can offer you a three-fourths share in one of the spring sugar cargoes; or a stake in our privateer a-building at Mystic; or a choice of city properties and building land; or rum to a quantity to be decided. Or one of the farms. Or some piece of another of our enterprises. What d’ye favour?’

  ‘None of those,’ said Smith.

  ‘Very well,’ said Lovell, after a fractional pause. ‘What, then? Name it and we’ll find it.’

  ‘Tobacco, for instance, we can get you at better than the spot price,’ said Piet. Der schpot prysch. ‘Better than wholesale, even, if you deal through our friends in Baltimore.’

  ‘Slaves?’ said Smith. ‘Can you make me a bargain there?’

  ‘Surely. But quick or slow depends on what kind of hands you have in mind. The city markets are run low for stock in winter, and they mainly provide for household work, that being the demand hereabouts, and all seasoned and broken for the country, able to speak the lingo, and so on. If you wanted labour to set up as a planter, you’d need to look south. But that’d be no hardship. We have a friend in Savannah would look you out whatever you needed in that line, at a keen enough price—’

  ‘What about a wench for the cold nights?’

  A longer pause, and ice in Lovell’s voice. ‘Smith, my daughter is present.’

  ‘I had not forgot it,’ Smith said, and waited, but there came no interjection from the corner. ‘Anyway, you mistake me. I was merely curious. Gentlemen, you are too elaborate. I don’t want to take my bill in human flesh, or as a thousand gross of pincushions, or in barrels of lard neither. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer money. I want cash.’

  Lovell and Piet both began speaking at once, in raised voices. Piet’s basso calm prevailed over Lovell’s tenor indignation.

  ‘We have explained’ – eckschplayned – ‘that there is not cash money in the city of such an amount. Here the money is figures in the ledger only. When it is time to settle, we do it with assets. When in Rome, jongeheer, when in Rome? You do business here, you must do it our way.’

  ‘Must I?’ said Smith. ‘The law is of another opinion, I think. I paid in cash, and if I want cash back again, it is my right to have it.’

  ‘But anything you want to buy, we can get,’ said Lovell. ‘Where’s the difference?’

  ‘Privacy,’ Smith said.

  ‘And why do you need to be private?’

  ‘Well,’ said Smith, steepling his fingers, and making of his voice a confidential murmur, ‘Let’s say … that perhaps I have been commissioned by a certain gentleman – a certain very distinguished young gentleman, of, shall we say, German family – who desires, on terms of strict anonymity, to visit his … estates in the New World; and requires the way to be made ready for him, with a household befitting his station, yet with great discretion. A house, a carriage, an equipment of staff; yet all to be muffled in deep secrecy. Deep, deeper, deepest secrecy. The most regal of discretions.’ At each syllable of this farrago of nonsense, he expected a snort of derision from the corner, yet none came.

  ‘Do you mean,’ said Lovell, hushed, ‘that you are acting for Pr—’

  ‘No,’ said Hendrick flatly. ‘Listen to him. He is just amusing himself.’

  ‘True,’ said Smith. ‘Prison must have put me in the mood for it.’

  ‘You little blackguard—’

  ‘Don’t let him bait you so easy,’ Piet said to Lovell. ‘We must still settle this. And it is his right in law to ask payment how he likes.’

  ‘How am I supposed to find seventeen hundred pound in cash?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t expect it in gold,’ Smith said. ‘I have learned better than that. Any pile of paper will do, as strange as you like, so as it is negotiable; – and does not come from Rhode Island. Pay me in dead leaves, I care not, if they will pass in trade. But how is your problem.’

  ‘Banyard’s will not pay for my sugar till spring.’

  ‘But then, if I have it right, in cash themselves, you having settled your balance with them by paying me?’

  ‘I suppose so; theoretically.’

  ‘Then borrow until then,’ said Smith. ‘Or sell something. Or beg. Or steal. But in nineteen days, I want cash.’

  ‘There is none.’

  ‘What, in no drawer, closet, chest or cubbyhole of the entire colony? You disappoint me. And I believe you would disappoint Judge De Lancey as well, who promised you’d oblige me lavishly, if I forebore to meddle.’

  ‘I see you do not purpose to mend a friendship at all,’ said Hendrick.

  ‘I have not yet heard the words to make me want to!’ said Smith.

  Silence.

  ‘We might perhaps be able to offer a per centum over value, if you would settle for payment in kind,’ said Piet.

  ‘Really?’ said Smith. ‘How much?’

  ‘Six per cent?’

  ‘Nonsense. Twenty.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’ said Piet, but there was beginning to be a general relaxation in the room, when a noise that had been swelling on the stairs outside for some time rose to a bursting point, and the door flew open in what seemed to Smith to be a blaze of light, admitting a confused throng of persons, with, at its head, a mighty bulk of red and white and palpably false beard, brandishing a candelabrum.

  ‘St Nick am I, with bulging sack,’ roared this apparition.

  Come to judge twixt white and black:

  Twixt vice and virtue make I choice

  And give to goodness its reward.

  I praise the virtuous, at this time,

  And pay back wickedness, in rhyme!

  Smith, who had half-risen, dazzled, made out appraising little eyes he recognised between the white flax moustaches and the red hood. His silky politic voice expanded to a booming bellow, it was plain who was in the robe: the saint was the judge, Sinterklaas was De Lancey. Smith wondered if, on St George’s Day, he turned out to delight his constituents as the Red Cross Knight. Or possibly as the dragon. The soot-smeared sprite holding out the sack at his elbow was William Smith. Around them crowded curious faces. Whatever the saint had done downstairs, the onlookers were looking forward to seeing it happen again up here.

  ‘Welcome, good holy man,’ said Piet from his chair.

  ‘You find us not in the harmony we’d hoped, Sint Klaas,’ added Hendrick.

  ‘Is that a fact?’ said Sinterklaas, peering sharply into the shadows. ‘Then, well come or ill come remains to be seen, for my sack bears punishments as well as sweetness, and words to sting as well as words to bless, for such as cannot agree. Ho. Ho. Tell me, Black Peter, my faithful helper, whom have we news for first?’

  ‘For Hendrick, son of the house,’ said the lawyer, reaching out a folded slip of paper and a little packet wrapped and ribboned. The saint cleared his throat, raised his candles to light the paper, and declaimed:

  Hendrick, thou good and duteous boy!

  To both thy sire and dam giv’st joy!

  Yet on thy clean sheet spills one blot –

  One virtue’s missing from the lot!

  In bachelor joys too long you’ve tarried!

  It’s getting late! You should be married!

  General laughter. In the flickering candle-light, Hendrick smiling gamely.

  ‘Do we give him his cake?’ the saint asked the jury at his shoulders.

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ – and the little package was passed across.

  ‘Next, Gregory Lovell,’ announced the sack keeper.

  The saint took the slip, and beetled his stuck-on flax eyebrows as he read it over. ‘Brace yourself, friend Lovell. Ahem –’

  Across the sounding seven seas

  The waves sustain thy argosies;

  Treasure’s heaped up by the shovel

  By sage and prosp’rous Greg’ry Lovell.

  Why then, upon your golden head,

  Wear you that thing like mice long dead?<
br />
  Is it your plan to make us puke,

  Too mean to buy a new peruke?

  Groans of outrage, cries of approval. Lovell, dim in the yellow-stippled blackness, arranging his features in a grin of vinegary goodwill, but unconsciously touching his offended head. No snicker, no sound at all, though, from Tabitha’s corner.

  ‘The verdict goes against your wig, sir. But boys, girls, ladies, gentlemen: does the man beneath it deserve his Sinterklaas cake?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Very well. Black Peter? – And surely we must now have greetings of the feast for the master of the feast? Yes, yes, here we are. Een Sinterklaasgedicht voor Mijnheer Piet Van Loon, with our grateful respects, and the pious hope he will forgive us.’

  Dear Piet is famous for his board.

  With generous hand he spreads abroad

  Meats, sauces, dainties, sweets: the most

  We see from any New-York host.

  But should he maybe for his health

  Eat slightly less of it himself?

  The watchers whooped, but the saint spoke over them. ‘Nonsense!’ he boomed. ‘Who writes this stuff? Mijnheer, as one well-sized man to another, I advise you to glory in your stature. Roll through the world with pride! And yet’ – undoing the ribbons on Piet’s sweetmeat with nimble fingers – ‘I think I had better eat this one myself. Hmph. Mmm.’ Laughter; Piet’s belly shaking at the joke, in (as it were) comfortable discomfort. ‘So much for the easy part of my task,’ Sint Klaas boomed on, wiping his mouth, ‘when Sinterklaas has old friends to commend, familiar faces … and familiar vices, to smile at as the winter comes and we draw our circle close. But what will my sack have in it for a guest unknown? Black Peter?’