Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  This last repetition, he had not pre-meditated. But as the only part of Smith’s testimony he actually meant, and (as it were) the last projecting piece of the drowned continent of conscience, the words jumped from his mouth despite him, with a ragged intensity quite unlike the rest of his speech. I have broke character, he thought with a hazy professional compunction. The cheerfully murmuring courtroom was struck almost resentfully to silence. De Lancey, who had been solicitously turning his gaze from side to side the while Smith was speaking, to keep watch like a good shepherd on all the moods of his flock, the golden twists of the carved lion and unicorn behind him gleaming out alternately upon each flank of his wig – stilled; and rested upon the prisoner instead a narrow, considering, wholly serious gaze. Colden, perceiving the change of atmosphere, seized upon it instantly.

  ‘It was a very gr-r-rotesque end you visited upon Mr Oakeshott, was it not? A slaughter-house scene, more fit for the death of a beast, than for a Christian man?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Smith, swallowing. ‘But not one I intended.’

  ‘Was it not? Was not this whole spectacle of spilled blood the fruit of your concupiscence? Are you not responsible for it?’

  ‘I did not ask to fight. I did not begin the quarrel.’

  ‘Is not the weight of this honest man’s death upon your soul?’

  ‘No,’ said Smith.

  ‘Is it not?’

  ‘He has answered the question, Mr Colden,’ said De Lancey. ‘Do you have anything else to ask?’

  ‘One thing, my lord. Prisoner, you said you had never been in trouble with the law – were you not imprisoned for debt in this very building, not a month ago?’

  ‘Upon a misunderstanding,’ said Smith.

  ‘Amicably resolved?’ asked De Lancey.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Smith.

  ‘Good,’ said the judge. ‘Counsel for the prisoner?’

  ‘Shook you, hey – Oakeshott’s death?’ said William Smith. ‘All that blood?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Smith.

  ‘Very natural. Not a soldier; not a swordsman; not accustomed. Shock. But, scene not of your choosing, hey?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And sometimes, spilt blood, justified. Sometimes, spilt in a noble cause. “Remember, O my friends, the laws, the rights, the generous plan of power delivered down from age to age, by your renowned forefathers so dearly bought, the price of so much blood …”’ As the lawyer growled Cato’s lines from the play, his usual staccato periods serviceably lengthening out, the room’s murmuring undertone of pleasure was restored. He had safely converted the crimson puddle back to rhetoric. ‘So much blood,’ he repeated, more musingly. ‘Honest man’s blood? Remains to be seen. Did you,’ he shot at Smith, ‘see Oakeshott again, between slap in the face, Merchants, and fight, Common?’

  This was the last of the downward steps required of him. Smith wrestled, writhed, struggled, but found himself still floating above the needful tread on his internal staircase: he produced nothing audible.

  ‘Mr Smith?’ prompted the lawyer.

  ‘I must say,’ interpolated Judge De Lancey smoothly, ‘that it confirms my doubts about this novelty of bringing in counsel, when a man refuses to answer his own advocate’s question. You would not see a man refusing to answer himself, now, would you?’ Laughter. ‘Yet we are told, that this new situation is the equivalent, in law. Prisoner – the question once posed, we must hear a reply from you. Prisoner?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Smith, dismally. ‘Yes, I saw Septimus again. That evening, at the William Street baths.’

  ‘And what happened then?’ pursued the lawyer.

  But this time Smith’s mouth would not open at all.

  ‘Ask the court’s indulgence, m’lud,’ said William Smith. ‘Testimony not essential for defence’s case; covered by another witness. Understandable delicacy on prisoner’s part. Will be made clear.’

  ‘Very well—’ began De Lancey in his voice like unrolling brocade; but Colden, sharp, incredulous, Caledonian, spoke at the same time.

  ‘What? Ye’ll tolerate such … such palpable nonsense?’

  ‘“My lord”,’ said De Lancey. ‘Pray remember, Mr Colden, the courtesies due to the bench. And remember too, that what we tolerate here is at the discretion of the good people of New-York, at whose command we sit; and is not to be abridged or usurped, sir, by any other power whatever, be it never so mighty.’

  Applause.

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ grated Colden.

  ‘Now, finish your case, please, if you’ve no-one else to call. Time marches.’

  ‘The case for the Crown is simple,’ said Colden. ‘It needs no rr-r-efinement. This travelling mountebank here’ – indicating Smith – ‘of whom we know nothing, except that he sings and nae doubt dances, and shows himself to fine advantage in white-face, and likes to help himself to other men’s wives, has by his own simple admission caused the death of the Governor’s Secretary; a valuable young man, a serious young man, a skilful young man, known to you all, and I remind you, a servant of the very same lawful power as is manifested here, in this very courr-rt. And all for no reason that has been adduced, save a pettish and careless wrath. The servants neither of His Majesty, nor of His Majesty’s honest subjects, are to be cut down at whim and left weltering in their blood. That’s all.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Colden,’ said De Lancey. ‘William, call your witness, and let’s be done.’

  Smith’s counsel called, of course, his late cellmate, the monster who had tormented his ears with horrors. He seemed equally familiar to the crowd in the court. As the Capting grinned his way to the bar, exhibiting a gape variously cracked, gapped and stumped, and billowing before him like the vanguard of an army his cloud of stench, the bystanders stirred and made room for very self-protection: yet, except for the slaves, did so with nudges, nods and a kind of anticipatory relish, as of people promised some repulsive yet assuredly diverting spectacle. The Capting acknowledged their recognition with little becks and turnings of the hand to left and right.

  ‘Well!’ he said, established before the bench. ‘It is a pleasure, to rid myself of a matter, what has been wery heavy on me since I chanst on it two night since. I was in the William Street stews, when I hear the sound of argyment, and putting my head round the corner, what do I see but this feller here’ – rubbing at Smith’s sleeve between finger and thumb – ‘holding off that long, pale, sickly molly-man, Oakeshott, who is after him, to kiss him, or dandle him, or wuss. And he says, “No, no, hands off, I’ll have none of your japes.” And Oakeshott says, “Let me have my will, you pretty fellow, or it will be the worse for you, tomorrow.” And he says, “What do you mean?” And Oakeshott is laughing, and he says, “I’ll be bound you knows how to play the lady’s part well enough, don’t you be coy. You are an actor, it is all the same to you. I’ll have you at both ends, or I’ll slit your gizzard tomorrow and nobody the wiser, for I am well in dibs with the Governor, and you are gutter leavings compared to the likes of me.” But this one says, “It is against nature, and I’ll have none of it. You may do your worst.” Then Oakeshott is wery angry, and he throws on his clothes, and out he goes, cursing most ugly. You would not think such a milk-and-water looker knew such terms. He says—’

  ‘Enough,’ said De Lancey, who seemed not to be enjoying this as much as some. ‘We have the gist. Mr Colden?’

  Colden’s long face had by this time passed from astonishment, to outrage, to a kind of bleak amusement.

  ‘Do you agree that it is contemptible to slander the dead?’ he asked.

  ‘’S not a slander if it’s true,’ said the Capting, grinning.

  ‘Very well, remind me: where did this alleged conversation take place?’

  ‘In ve William Street bath-house, like I said.’

  ‘Two nights ago?’

  ‘Like I said.’

  ‘You took a bath, two nights ago?’ Colden, with his long fingers, scribed in the air between him and the Capting an
oval, a cameo setting, to frame for the jurors the ingrained ooze of the Capting’s countenance. ‘And yet the experience has left you mir-r-aculously untouched.’

  Laughter in the court, which De Lancey joined in with.

  ‘I saw them from ve door-way,’ protested the Capting sulkily. He did not like the laughing; his mouth twisted, and he looked nine parts in ten malignant.

  ‘I see,’ said Colden with heavy sarcasm.

  ‘He has answered,’ said De Lancey. ‘Any questions from the prisoner’s side?’

  ‘Yes!’ burst out Smith. ‘I have a question! How—’

  ‘Prisoner at the bar,’ said De Lancey. ‘You can be represented by counsel, or not. But you cannot be half-represented. (A maxim with some political application, by the by.) You have elected to be spoken for; so you may not speak. William, final remarks.’

  ‘M’lud,’ said the lawyer. ‘Jurors: we have here, ordinary young man. No better’n most. Maybe a little worse’n some. Likes to whore and misbehave himself. No choice for a son-in-law. But any man can be liberty’s friend; for liberty is every man’s. And when power holds out a bargain to him – vile bargain; vilest of bargains – does he take it? No. He fights. And by a lucky chance, he conquers. Juba slays Sempronius. That’s all.’

  ‘Seventeen minutes,’ announced De Lancey, looking at his golden pocket-watch. ‘Disgraceful. Not a precedent that must be allowed to stand. Mr Foreman, can we at least proceed immediately to a verdict?’

  The jurors’ heads craned, strained and pulled toward one another, muttering and murmuring, like a stook of wheat being gathered by a string. Then they fell away from each other again.

  ‘Not guilty, my lord,’ said the foreman.

  ‘Hmm,’ said De Lancey. ‘No; I don’t think so. Not if you take proper account of the prisoner’s acknowledged hot temper, or hastiness. Mr Colden is right. Whatever the circumstances, whatever the provocation, we cannot have our disputes settled with blood in the streets. There must be some mark of guilt, in proportion to the seriousness of the event. Pray, reconsider. Quickly.’

  The jury muttered once more.

  ‘Guilty of manslaughter, my lord,’ reported the foreman.

  ‘Excellent. Clerk, write it so,’ said De Lancey. He cleared his throat: a premonitory noise, a ritual noise, a musical noise. He fixed Smith with his expressive eyes. ‘Prisoner at the bar,’ he said, ‘you are to be branded on the thumb, in token that you have taken life, and to advertise to others your culpability, your life long. Sentence to be discharged immediately by the sheriff’s officers.’ There, said his eyes. Is that not as you desire it? And he gave Smith a bestowing nod. ‘Next?’

  Smith was indeed so strangely relieved that he had been allowed to be guilty of something, that he suffered himself to be led away through the crowd in a meek daze, back to the sheriff’s room from which he had issued forth; and it was not until an iron was heating in the brazier there, that the physical aspect of the punishment became real enough to give him uneasiness; but with a cheerful force, the sheriff’s two bullies had already taken an immovable hold on his arm, and were stretching it out across the tabletop.

  ‘Ready? – I would look away, sir, if I were you. ’Twill only take a moment.’

  Which it did: though that moment was far easier to look back upon or even to look forward to than it was actually to pass through, when the glowing M was pressed in, with a hiss and a smell like roasted pork, and the skin shrivelling back like wax and the meat of his thumb scorching, and the heat seeming to lance right to the bone. Then they clapped his hand into the very basin of snow they’d given him to wash with, still only half gone to water, and wrapped his used handkerchief considerately around the burned and melted flesh, where it throbbed and blazed, a red star of pain attempting to constrain his whole attention to the news of itself.

  ‘Sir? Free to go now, sir.’

  He tottered out onto the landing, where he found that the stairwell, and the open hall below where the snow had drifted in between the arches, was full of men applauding him.

  ‘You see?’ said William Smith, taking his unhurt arm. ‘No reason for melancholy at all.’

  *

  A kind of impromptu party had been convened, in the upstairs room of the Black Horse: a gathering of the senior men, and supporters, and admiring hangers-on of the judge’s faction, not to scheme anything of substance, or to decide anything, but just to lay eyes on each other and celebrate a victory before the moiety of them who had had court business scattered out of the city. They floated in and out as the short winter’s day (almost the shortest of the whole year) closed in icy darkness, the snow in the street outside dimming in the window-glass to the merest glimmer, while the pane thronged with reflected flames, and with faces jovial, chuckling, roaring. De Lancey himself came in when the last cases of the Michaelmas Term had been settled, and the room re-oriented around his black bulk and his fine face, where he stood in high good humour, listening far more than he spoke. Smith had been anchored by the lawyer to a chair beside him, up against the panelling. Not much was required of him, this being a triumph about him, rather than for him. He was its visible pretext, that was all, and he felt himself good for little else. Between the flushes of his mounting fever, and the dull thought-suck of the pain in his hand, and the certainty that there was nothing better to be thought or remembered if he were rid of these bodily distractions, he was content to be fully occupied sitting hunched in the heat from the fireplace, clumsily drinking from a glass of brandy in his left hand that was never permitted to run dry, and holding up the bandaged other one at command, to have it saluted or commiserated over. He thought blearily that those in the room, exchanging their strenuous tokens of goodwill, were like a troop of baboons he had seen in the menagerie in Stamboul. Or rather he did not think it – nothing so deliberate. The remembered hooting and patting and petting of the apes rose in his mind and merged with the present laughter and the clinking of canary glasses and the display of teeth, and all swayed together like the flames of the fire. And what am I?

  But when Gregory Lovell came in to pay his respects, and saw Smith fixed in his place, he came directly across to beard him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you’d hanged, that’d have been a thousand pound saved, and my life a deal simpler. Still, good luck to you, I suppose. But now we’ll have no more prevaricating. I have you; I’ll hold you till I hear an answer. Six per cent for goods – and how’ll you take the money?’

  So Smith told him.

  Lovell stared, and then cackled.

  ‘Not so particular after all! I thought we’d see the back of your damned fastidiousness in the end, but this! All the blether, all the mystery, all the smart looks down your nose at us, and you were – well; wait till I tell Piet. He’ll laugh till his guts ache. Alright, then. Seventeen hundred and thirty-eight, fifteen and fourpence New-York, plus six per cent consideration for foregoing cash, is eighteen hundred and forty-three pound one shilling, New-York, or near enough. I’ll send you over a note of hand tomorrow which you may carry with you to spend, as soon as you get it, and your other little sums owing, you may tell them to direct to me. And we’re done. That’s it, Mr Smith. That’s our business concluded. No need, if you please, to present yourself on quarter-day. We’ll consider that ceremony discharged, for I’ve a powerful desire never to set eyes on you again.’

  ‘Would you tell Tabitha—’ began Smith, his tongue thick.

  Lovell held up a finger.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, no. No messages from you to any of mine. You will stay away from my daughters, and my house, and my business, and my friends, and everything of mine. You may do well enough in this company, but you are spoiled meat for daylight society, I can tell you. Not a door on the island will open to you. We let you in, and look what happened, you pox on legs. William,’ he added civilly, nodding to the lawyer, and went.

  As Lovell passed De Lancey, he drew him into speech for a moment or two, and he must have conveyed what
he had just learned, for as the merchant left the room, De Lancey turned to Smith, and directed on him a look of paternal disappointment, with a rumpling of the eyebrows, as if to express surprise that Smith had led the town a dance for such a very dull reason. He rang on his glass with a spoon.

  ‘Let’s have a toast, lads, before the season parts us and we all go our ways,’ he declared. ‘What shall it be?’

  ‘Confusion to the Governor!’

  ‘Nay, to all tyrants!’

  ‘To our ancient rights!

  ‘To the wisdom of the law!’

  ‘To the free men of the jury!’

  ‘To the charms of Mrs Tomlinson!’ said a coarser wag, and there was a laughing masculine groan, generally sustained.

  Smith, in the lull of sound following, said something indistinct; and both the connection of ideas from the mention of Terpie, and the recollection that he was for today the mascot of their cause, made an appetite to hear what the dissolute little rascal had to say, especially among those who had had no direct acquaintance with him.

  ‘Stand up, boy,’ urged a hubbub of voices. ‘Out with it, out with it, we’ll hear ye.’

  Smith wobbled upright, by the wall, and held his glass out, stiff-armed.

  ‘To Septimus Oakeshott!’ he cried, in a loud, miserable, belligerent voice.

  This was found tasteless and incomprehensible, once it was clear he was not going to add anything of a lighter nature, anything by way of a pleasantry. There was a tutting and a growling of disapprobation, and when he blared it out drunkenly again – and again – and went on doing it, there was a turning away, a detaching and departing, with curses and shaken heads and backward looks at him where he stood staring at the fire and waving his bandaged hand. It continued until the party was dwindled down to nothing, and Mr Smith was left completely and entirely alone.