Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  ‘Would you rather,’ panted Septimus, ‘that it had. Been someone. Who was trying. To kill you?’

  ‘Do you mean you’re not?’ said Smith, forgetting to step back. Septimus’ steel, scarcely deflected, cut past his ear so close he felt the cold of it razoring by, like a concentration of winter itself, a wicked grey finger of the ice. He could imagine that if it touched him, he would crystallise around the wound.

  Septimus disengaged, took a half-step back, caught his breath.

  ‘I really am very angry with you, Richard,’ he said, not loudly. ‘I am severely tempted to cut off your ears just to make a point; so keep your guard up, for God’s sake. But no, I am not. The idea is to contrive some safe piece of humiliation.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Smith. ‘I see.’

  ‘You don’t approve? I am open to the alternative.’ The seconds were lumbering up.

  ‘No – no – please – proceed. Is there anything I must … do?’

  ‘It will all be done for you,’ said Septimus grimly, raising his sword again. But then, in a rapid mutter, in the last seconds left them: ‘You could work your way round to the left. No, idiot, my left. Watch out for the briar!’

  Cut and parry, cut and parry, slash and clash. Septimus drove Smith round in a loop, back to the flattened strip whereon they had begun; Smith, his movements a trifle hectic and approximate with relief, tried his best to play his part properly, and indeed the slashes at his guard still came with alarming verisimilitude. A few more onlookers had gathered, drawn by the prolonged music of metal against metal. ‘Skewer him, Juba!’ cried one of these, having apparently recognised the duel as some sort of reprise of the play’s battle; but Smith was very conscious that he was, by now, putting up little of a show. Sweat was trickling down his back, the sword seemed to be gaining in weight with each movement, and he hoped that whatever Septimus had in mind, he would do soon. He took it as a considerable mercy when Septimus, glancing left and right and clearly judging his audience to be adequate, interrupted the sequence of blows. As if suddenly forgetting what he had been about, in fighting with Smith, he withdrew his blade and absently inspected its tip, like a man who finds the cheese has unaccountably fallen off the end of his toasting-fork: the whole leisurely performance exuding a speaking disdain for any conceivable peril that might be afforded by his hot, heaving opponent. – An enemy so pitiful, said the gesture, that it was safe to ignore him at will. Unlike Smith, Septimus, though breathing hard, was still cool, unruffled, collected, precise. He flipped his point down again, and planted it in the snow at his arm’s length, so the weapon become dismissively pacific, a steel walking stick on which he happened to be leaning at an elegant angle, rather like one of the more balletic-looking woodcuts of the French king. The onlookers tittered uncertainly.

  ‘It seems our seducer here,’ he declared, ‘is more apt for the bedroom than the battlefield.’ The titter grew louder and more confident. ‘In which case, he is surely … overdressed.’

  The sabre flowed up again into his hand seemingly without effort, on the instant a tool of war once more, and he cut towards Smith’s side at waist height with a demonstrative rapidity that made it all too clear he had been only toying with him till now. Smith’s feeble, late parry he easily eluded, and Smith felt a bright line of pain scored across his hip, as Septimus sliced neatly through the band of his breeches, his drawers and (to the depth of a scratch) a curved arc of his skin. Deprived of buttons on that side, his breeches sagged down. This is going to end with me bare-arsed in the snow, Smith realised. A whoop came from the direction of the poor-house, the nature of the entertainment having revealed itself. Septimus acknowledged it with a bend of the head and a graceful rotation of the fingers on his spare hand. Then he prepared to do it again on the other side.

  Smith knew he might as well wait stock-still while Septimus concluded the comedy, but some point of pride, some residuum of stubbornness, made him lift his blade into guard, to at least attempt a lurching counter. But with his cloven clothes impeding him on the right, he threw his weight clumsily onto an advanced left foot, while Septimus was still poising himself like a matador, and discovered with his toes, under the snow just there, a patch of ice as slick as glass. His foot shot out from beneath him; he pitched suddenly forward, his sword still held out before him. Septimus, not expecting this stumbling lunge any more than Smith had, had no time to do more than to snatch his own blade out of the way, lest Smith impale himself on it as he fell.

  It seemed Smith’s point had passed harmlessly between Septimus’ legs, and as Smith scrambled to his knees, his face again snow-caked, his sword lost beyond his reach, he was already giving a grin of furious embarrassment and apology. But a spot of dark red appeared on the grey silk at the top of Septimus’ inner thigh, then expanded in the blink of an eye into a soaked red circle big as a saucer.

  ‘Ouch,’ said Septimus.

  Another blink, and the circle stretched into a waterfall-shaped stain down to his knee. Another, and blood ran out in a glossy cascade over his stocking.

  ‘Break!’ cried Lennox, and ran forward. The Lieutenant, knowing what he was seeing, in a trice had Septimus on his back on the snow, and was tugging off the crimsoned, already sticky breeches, to get at the gash right up in the white hollow of Septimus’ groin, between the tendons, where a jet of dark blood as fat around as a fence-nail was pulsing regularly. Smith stared stupidly. Lennox pulled off his own neck-cloth; studied it; discarded it as too short.

  ‘Something for a tourniquet,’ he roared. ‘Scarf? Shirt? Something! Now!’

  A muffler was passed. Lennox wrapped it round Septimus’ leg as high up as he could, and twisting the loose ends together at the outside of the hip endeavoured to tighten it. But the hurt to the artery was so high up that there was no room above it where the flow might be squeezed and arrested. Twist and grip as Lennox might, the blood still came oozing, trickling, very soon streaming through the folds. The muffler served only as a bandage, and a bandage was quite insufficient to the force with which the blood was leaving Septimus. Lennox’s hands were scarlet.

  ‘Ouch,’ said Septimus again. He did not cry it, he did not groan it, he did not wail it; he still uttered it, controlledly, as a word, but this time through gritted teeth, with great conscious effort, and a victory over a proximate panic in it.

  Achilles, coming up fast with a great double-armful of fresh snow, elbowed Smith out of the way, and throwing himself to his knees began, with Lennox’s help, to try to pack a mass of snow hard into the wound, as a species of frigid barrier where the blood might clot. They pressed and leant and heaved and struggled for leverage, but through each hopeful tight-moulded cold poultice they balled around his leg, the crimson came creeping, white crystals turning inexorably to burgundy along an advancing front, until there was only a white fur left sprinkled atop dark pink, and then the whole thing melted to wine-coloured slop. It looked like one of Lord ––—’s ice-house puddings, thought Smith, sick and dizzy: except for the smell, the hot salt smell, the butcher’s-shop smell. The flow began to slacken, but not for any reason to be rejoiced over.

  Smith found himself at Septimus’ head. His eyes were wide and rolling, like a frightened horse’s, and a very shocking change had come over his skin. It had turned to a dingy grey, with yellow in it, as if not redness but his accustomed whiteness were leaving him; as if what he was losing in gouts were his polish, his lustre.

  ‘Look what you’ve done to me,’ he said, in a voice without force.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ said Smith.

  ‘All I had to do was run you through and go home for breakfast. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. I look like a warning of the dangers of childbed.’

  And indeed, he lay now in a spectacular claret-stained circle on the white of the Common. A crow had flapped in from somewhere, interested, and was being kicked away by the sentry.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ said Smith again. ‘None of this was my intent.’

  ‘Who cares what you intended.
Come closer.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come down here. Come. Now.’

  Smith bent low and Septimus turned lips the grey of charcoal toward his ear.

  ‘You have to free Achilles,’ he whispered. ‘I need you to make sure of it.’

  ‘I don’t know if—’

  ‘On your honour. Swear.’

  ‘On my—?’

  ‘Swear. Swear. You owe me a debt. And him. Swear.’

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘On your honour.’

  ‘On my honour.’

  A slight grey nod.

  ‘You will find your pocket-book in my sea-chest. With your secret safe inside it. Good heavens, Richard. Aren’t you full of surprises.’ The ghost of a smile. ‘I think I am—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘—taking New-York too seriously …’

  Then Achilles, abandoning at last the fruitless labour, pushed Smith aside to take his place. Their conversation, Smith neither could nor wanted to overhear. There was not time for much of it. Lennox was saying the Nunc Dimittis. Achilles’ face was indescribable.

  The sentry gripped Smith so warmly and surely round the shoulders that he took it for a comfort, until the beadle arrived across the corrupted snow to arrest him for murder.

  III

  ‘You’re fortunate,’ said William Smith the lawyer.

  Smith opened his mouth to laugh at this, but nothing came from it but a kind of hoarse bark of air. They were talking in the cells beneath City Hall, Smith having been assigned this time to the criminal prison below, not the civil prison above. Between the fit of shivering in which he had been led off the Common, and the hours spent waiting in the dark, icy little hole below Wall Street, he seemed to be catching cold.

  ‘No; fortunate; ’tis true,’ said the lawyer, correctly interpreting his incredulity. ‘In many manners, I’d say; but at least in this, that tomorrow’s last day of Michaelmas Term. Court won’t sit again till January. But the judge’ll make room on the docket for ye tomorrow. So you’ve but the one night in here, before the trial.’

  ‘Before I hang, you mean,’ croaked Smith.

  ‘Half the town wants you swinging, true; half doesn’t. Half that doesn’t, sent me; you should like your odds the better.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Causes improve, with good counsel. – Or did ye mean, why’d they send me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Chaste stars, boy, isn’t it clear by now? Perhaps your wits have froze. Here,’ said the lawyer, ‘have a swig on this.’ He drew from his inner pocket a flask which, as he passed it, became the brightest thing in the dim blue glow from the snow-choked grating out onto the cobbles of Wall Street, up at the extreme top of the dungeon’s wall. The silver captured the little light in a frigid gleaming clot. The liquid inside, however, burned as it went down, cutting steaming tributaries through the dull ice of Mr Smith’s misery, and exposing rawer territories beneath, of guilt, and fear, and despair.

  ‘Better?’ asked the lawyer, looking at him head tip-tilted, with a kind of satisfaction. ‘Now: there are two causes here. What hurts one, speeds t’other. You have put horns on the Governor, near as dammit; you have pinked out his Secretary, who was also his spy-master. He loses, so we win. You have chose your side.’

  ‘I did not mean to.’

  ‘No? No matter, to us. As the judge said: if the boy won’t serve one way, he will serve another. ’Tis worth our while to point the moral, that opposition prospers. ’Tis worth the court’s ten minutes.’

  ‘Ten minutes?’

  ‘At eleven o’clock tomorrow. Between a larceny and a libel.’

  ‘Ten minutes?’

  ‘Oh. You’ve not seen many felony trials, I’m bound. That is the usual length, or a bit over.’

  ‘It does not seem much, to decide a man’s life,’ Smith said. ‘Or to give justice on another’s death.’

  The lawyer shrugged.

  ‘Well, time’s limited; docket’s full. Ten minutes in the eye of justice is more’n many a poor soul’d have, that lives in tyranny. Besides, jury’s been sitting a fortnight; fretful now; jaded. Best not to bore ’em with any long proceeding, hey? But I believe this may tickle their palate.’

  Smith did not seem receptive to this species of good cheer. He sat snuffling into his steepled fingers.

  ‘Come now,’ said the lawyer. ‘You do not want to hang, do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Smith.

  ‘Then, less doleful, if you please. Enough melancholy; to business.’

  ‘Should I not be melancholy? I have killed my best friend in the city. – My only friend.’

  The lawyer’s eyebrows beetled up, and he bestowed on Smith a very curious glance.

  ‘Surprising,’ he said. ‘Surprising; interesting. Won’t do, though. Don’t repeat it. Oakeshott’s death is admitted, you see; cannot be denied.’

  ‘I should think not,’ said Smith. In his mind the red circle spread again – had not ceased to spread.

  ‘Yes; but, the consequence is, penitence won’t serve. Might sway a sentence; won’t fend one off. You require to justify the death; not mitigate it.’

  ‘Duelling is illegal anyway, isn’t it? Am I not condemned already, for that?’

  ‘Ah, but who challenged, eh? In the nature of a challenge by authority, d’ye see? Therefore, to spare authority’s blushes, fact of the duel to be set aside. And there’s the opportunity, there it lies: fight’s conceded as an affray, and the jury may find you blameless in’t, if they like our story of its cause.’

  ‘Can we not tell the truth, that he died by accident?’

  ‘Accident? How, by accident? You were fighting with swords, boy; violent intent by definition, on both sides.’

  ‘But Septimus was not trying to kill me, only to chastise me.’

  The lawyer paused, and made a kind of chewing motion with his closed mouth. Again, the curious glance.

  ‘How do you know this?’ he asked.

  ‘He told me so.’

  ‘When? Before the fight?’

  ‘No, during it.’

  ‘Did anyone overhear it?’

  ‘No … No.’

  ‘Well, thank heaven: or you’d be dished, neat and sweet. To stick him after he said he meant no harm? Culpable homicide. Worse: dislikeable homicide. The law admits truth, sir, in one style only: witnessed. What was not witnessed did not happen. That is the greatness of the law. That is its guarantee, sir: against the whimsy of the tyrant, against mere regulation. The common law finds truth in cases. Is a breathing thing, sir. Is a free creature, sir. Forms law from men’s lives; doesn’t crush men’s lives, under forms of law. Takes authority, from the freedoms of England, not from the dictates of power. – And there, you see, for you, luck sews shut the jaws of disaster. Wasn’t witnessed? Didn’t happen. But “accident”? No; don’t want talk of that. Law’s a tussle, d’you see, to decide on a story; to settle an explanation. Was you to say, with all the goodwill of the court,’ – here the lawyer winked – ‘that, what, you made an unlucky cut at Oakeshott—’

  ‘My foot slipped.’

  ‘Did it, so? – But no-one can swear as much. – That all that blood was mere mishap: well: there’d be disbelief, boy. There’d be disappointment. A jury wants a tale proportioned to the occasion. Not a mess of accident.’

  ‘Life is a mess of accident, I find.’

  The lawyer smiled at him, and clucked his tongue.

  ‘No, no, not in the law, it ain’t. Not in the end, I mean. When a man is dead, sense must be made of it; and it might as well be sense as serves the living, for it won’t serve the dead, nohow.’

  ‘So I must tell some cock-and-bull story? Concoct some convenient lie?’ – Smith saying this with a bitter emphasis.

  ‘A lie, never,’ protested the lawyer, seeming truly shocked. ‘And if you did, ’twouldn’t serve you. For all the witnesses must say their piece, and who knows what they’ll say? Can’t predict it, can’t control ’em: can give a li
ttle turn to it, maybe, on cross, but that’s the limit. Your power’s only, to tell the story the jury likes best: will want to pick out from the mess of stories, and believe, and turn into the verdict. What then? You know what then. You’re an actor, ’tis no puzzle to you. The court’s your stage, tomorrow; to be believed, there, requires you to be believable. You need to tell a likely story; a probable story; a satisfying story. Even if we wander a little, to make it so.’

  ‘You want our second fight,’ said Smith with a dull helpfulness, like his theatrical advice to Septimus, only issued from the remote bottom of a well, ‘to please the audience as the first did. Only with real blood.’

  ‘Yes! You have it. That’s the mark to aim for; precisely. Now, why do young men fight? From anger, of course; there’s a motive likelihood don’t strain at. Hot blood. Impulse. Reckless impulse, even. Carried off by it. Same impulse you bedded Terpie by. Fire in the loins! Not creditable? But credible. Explains itself, don’t it. Just look at her. Most have. Teats like a prize heifer. So: Smith furioso, eh? Then to colour up fury—’

  ‘Wait,’ said Smith, putting up a chilled hand to arrest these points the lawyer was making, with accelerating taps of forefinger on palm. He wanted to say, that to boast in this wise of his offence, to blazon it in the jury’s eyes that he’d sinned the sin they all wanted to, was surely to compound it. He wanted to object, that there might still be fragments of worth adhering to his name, which it would be better not wantonly to blast and blacken, especially in the estimation of one person. But to observe the professional enthusiasm in the face of William Smith was to be reminded that to receive confidences is the office of a friend. And the only connection of that nature he had had in the city; – well. The red circle spoiled the snow once more. His eyes were sore. The viscous matter stuffing his nose oozed into the back of his mouth like an oyster that will not be swallowed. He took refuge in quibbling.