Blood Royal

by Blood Royal (retail) (epub)

  She told him.

  He seemed relieved. ‘One thing, we got time. The Pretender ain’t going to be ready to sail for a month or more, so the fatty said, and if I’m a judge he never will. Most Jacks couldn’t find their arse with both hands, let alone plan an invasion. As for them two, if they’re on the run already, it’s next stop Tyburn for them, sure as the Devil’s in Ireland. They’ll be in Newgate before they get round to lighting anything more than a bloody pipe. We got time. First thing we do is find young Nellie.’

  * * *

  The next morning Mrs Tothill forced breakfast down her. Tyler said: ‘You going to be help or jelly?’

  ‘Help.’

  He nodded. ‘We need it. Never knew the country’d got this many Negroes. Where’d they all come from?’

  From Sierra Leone, from the Niger Delta, from Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, with tribal markings and without, tall, short, speaking jargon English, good English, no English at all, albino black, milky black, coffee black, blue-black, coal-black, black-black, the fashion accessories of masters who’d abandoned them, or died, or whom they had abandoned; a process going on so long that Good Queen Bess’s edict in 1596, to protect English jobs, that all blackamoors in the country should be shipped out of it, was ignored; they were too entrenched. Anyway, Elizabeth herself had imported a few into her court and set a tradition followed by every monarch after, so that there were black families who could lay over a century’s longer claim to English citizenship than their German king.

  Into this nucleus came the runaways and cast-offs of the prospering slave trade, finding precarious asylum in communities that were homogeneous only in colour and poverty: Mile End, Limehouse, Wapping, copses of deeper darkness in the forest of London’s poor.

  Fifteen thousand people, perhaps more. It was like looking for two particular fir cones in a pinewood.

  Cecily hated them. She didn’t want Eleanor a bridge between herself and these cellars and attics that stank of excrement from the vault under the staircase, where families of eight slept in shifts on the only bed, where there was no room to wield a whitewash brush or dustpan among the articles of trade that took up the rest of the space. She didn’t want Eleanor the connection between herself and people who slumped like sacks at the sight of her white face and were too stupid to answer her questions.

  ‘They’re frightened,’ Cameron said. ‘What happened to Quick could happen to them.’

  Did it matter? Quick was worthy; these were human dross.

  As word spread that it was Master Archie who was inquiring for a nine-year-old girl and an old man, the same Master Archie who’d saved Harry Stockings from the slavers and given Chocolate Smith money to get her man out of the Fleet, who’d won the case for Sunday Pratt when he’d been left a portion by his master that the son said he wasn’t entitled to, then intelligence came back. No, they didn’t know a Da Silva but they was mighty sorry Master Archie was troubled and they’d do what they could.

  With the thaw in attitude came distress. Hands clutched Cecily’s sleeve. ‘Missy, missy, you find your li’l girl back you ask for mine. Slavers dragged her t’rough dat window, dat one, and I ain’t seen her since.’

  Meeting Cameron at the end of the lane – they’d taken a side each – Cecily said: ‘That woman says she was manumitted but they took her daughter just the same. This is England. Can they do that?’

  Cameron shrugged. ‘They do it. They’ll have got a good price for her and others in the West Indies.’ He saw her face. ‘No, no. Blurt says there’s no ship come in from the West Indies nor gone out this week past. She’s still here. We’ll find her. We’ll find them both.’

  Two men were waiting at the chambers when the hunters returned that night. Both had come to offer their service. One of them was an evil-looking little black man with a Cockney accent to whom Cameron said: ‘How was Newgate, Solly? I’m pleased to see ye out.’

  The other was Tinker Packer.

  The chambers were becoming overcrowded; Cecily, with Tyler, was to move back to Arundel Street to sleep while Cameron kept the hunt’s headquarters in the Middle Temple. Before she left, Cameron pleaded with her: ‘Will ye no speak to Tinker? He’s been keeping to the forest and Cole told him we needed his aid. He’ll no admit it but he’s gey sorry about Dolly.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Cameron didn’t speak Packer-ese. Sullen, slouching, Tinker hadn’t said a word to her, nor she to him; it hadn’t been necessary. They both knew that forgiveness for the desertion of Dolly that had led to her hanging had been asked for and granted in the fact that Tinker had come and Cecily hadn’t sent him away.

  The third day of the hunt began at dawn, sidestepping the surge of blacks heading into the City. Negro bandsmen in fierce cocked hats on their way to work were already playing their trumpets and clash-pans. Ruffled, satined, epauletted footmen, who’d had the night off, their powdered wigs and silver, padlocked collars whitened by the frost, strutted to it; mulatto prostitutes swayed in thin dresses and high heels, ready for morning trade in the churchyards; cheap clerks wound their pocket watches to the music’s time; acrobats on their way to Smithfield Fair teetered to it, juggling, crossing-sweepers, night-soil cleaners, men pushing barrows of stockings, nightcaps and garden netting that had been knitted the night before swayed them from side to side through the dodging cut-purses, sneak-thieves and tricksters who went with them to begin the business of the day.

  Then Cecily knew that Eleanor had inherited more than blackness from a people who, despite an infliction more usually put upon animals, refused to surrender humanity.

  She bridled, nearly smiling, at Cameron’s look. ‘She hasn’t got their musical sense, anyway.’ Eleanor had been begged to leave the church choir.

  Today it was Limehouse, where the broken roofs of the houses gave little more protection from the cold than the spars of the docked ships that showed above them. Scarred, tarry men just out of bed came yawning to the door at Cecily’s knock or puffed their answers to her questions in pipesmoke as they sat on the Basin’s bollards, waiting for ships. Somehow she’d never associated Negroes with the navy; now she saw how a high proportion of its sailors was black.

  ‘But where are the women?’ There’d been few enough in Mile End, she realized; here there were virtually none.

  Tyler was keeping her company in this section, with a pistol inside his coat. He said: ‘Reckon the market’s always demanded more black boys than girls. Imbalance of the sexes, as the saying is.’

  The same indelicate question occurred to them both. It was answered by a gaunt white woman who came to the door of a shack with three mulatto toddlers clinging to her skirts. Further down, behind another door, white girls peered over the shoulder of a massive black woman: ‘Da Silva? He a whitey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He don’ patronize Ebony Bet’s, then.’ She winked. ‘But I always got work for a fine set-up gal like yo’self.’

  Cecily told Cameron: ‘White women. How can they?’

  He said: ‘Aren’t we planning for Eleanor to marry a white man?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He was irritable with fatigue. ‘Then why so terrible the other way round?’

  He’s consorted with these people too long. He’s lost touch with decency. And to what end? For all his liberality, we’re not finding Eleanor.

  The encounter at Ebony Bet’s induced dreams that night in which Eleanor, taken for her body not her slave price, screamed for her in the padded room of a brothel.

  Cecily woke sobbing. ‘I can’t find you, darling. I’m trying.’

  She thought that the faint glow through her bedroom window was the dawn and welcomed it for the day’s activity that would subsume some of her dread. But it came from bonfires still burning in the Strand. She spent the rest of the night half awake to shouts of ‘No Slavery, No Wooden Shoes’ mingling with the cries of her child.

  Cameron was at the door with early news. ‘Solly says there’s a Mr Da Silva has lodging
in Holborn.’

  It wasn’t far. They all went, Tyler, Tinker, Solly, sometimes breaking into a run, dodging through riot detritus. The house was on a busy corner but pumiced steps led to a door with a gleaming fanlight – white and respectable, like the landlady, though she was built on a scale reminiscent of Ebony Bet’s. But Ebony Bet never pursed her lips this tight.

  Yes, Mr Christopher Da Silva was a regular tenant: always stayed here when he was in England. She was sure she gave satisfaction. No, he’d gone away. No, she didn’t know where. ‘I don’t inquire into other people’s business.’ Like some, said the closing door.

  Cecily held it open. ‘Did he bring a little girl and an old man here? They were black.’

  ‘Certainly not. This is a decent house.’ Slam.

  The hunters went into a huddle at the bottom of the steps while the decent curtains twitched above them.

  ‘We don’t know if he’s coming back, what he looks like, anything.’

  ‘We will.’ The assurance was Solly’s, nodding his cunning head at the crossing sweeper at that moment brushing a path through horse-droppings so that a gentleman could traverse the road. The sweeper was black. ‘That old bat got Mingo on her doorstep, she got a maid I can see in the basement windy this minute and she got tradesmen. Know ’im? We’ll know the colour of his bloody stockings. Leave it to Solly.’

  So they did.

  ‘What does Solly do?’

  ‘He’s a pickpocket.’

  Limehouse again, then on to Wapping, as if they were rats burrowing deeper into the riverside’s grey silt. The feeling of being underwater encroached on Cecily with growing fatigue and desperation. Sometimes she couldn’t hear what people said; things became vivid, others swam out of focus; she couldn’t remember how she came to places that had no connection other than the smell of tar and sewage and river. Inn-signs: ‘Ship and Whale’, ‘Hope and Anchor’, ‘Queen’s Landing’, ‘Prospect of Whitby’. Iced corpses in chains at Execution Dock. A chandler’s-cum-ironmonger’s stacked with nets, blocks, oars, tins of biscuits – and boxes of iron half-circles set with a flat, inwardpointing plate. Tinker, picking one up: ‘What’s this bugger for?’

  It was a muzzle, the chandler said. Big export of ’em to the sugar plantations. ‘Called “sulkies” they are. Use ’em on sulky Negroes, see, to stop ’em gnawing the sugar cane or eating dirt.’

  A christening at a church where baby, parents, godparents were black. Somebody, Cameron, saying: ‘Poor things, they think being Christian will guarantee them the status of freedom.’

  Another voice: ‘Don’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  A muscled barber on a quayside pulling out a young Negress’s teeth to make dentures for the toothless of St James’s.

  A black face sneering: ‘Why for you want this one back, missy? Plenty more slaves in the sea.’

  The final admission: ‘I love her.’

  If the hunters accreted help, they gained a hinderer, a tall white man with the tippets of a parson on his black surcoat, trumpeting Enthusiasm: ‘Why do you search among the people of Ham, you English? They are as mischievous as monkeys, a stain and contamination on the beauty of our Christian land. Seek for your servants among the white race, good people, for these of the Morisco tint will but grow refractory and expect wages according to their own opinion of their slender merits.’

  He attracted a black and grumbling crowd to which he seemed oblivious. A deep voice came out of it, articulating like an actor. ‘Remember Aesop’s fable, preacher. There are many statues of men slaying lions, but if lions were sculptors there would be a difference in the statues.’

  The Enthusiast was delighted: ‘Ha, a learned Negro. Admired for being like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.’

  A dispute. The crowd was hemming them in. We don’t have time for this. Before Cameron could stop her, Cecily had walked up to the preacher and kicked him on the shin. ‘Piss off,’ she said.

  That night Solly knocked on her door, a new light in his narrow eyes. She’d won respect. ‘Thought I’d tell you first, miss. Da Silva’s tall, dark and skin yellow as a guinea, wiv a smacking great turquoise on his finger. An’, miss, his luggage’s still in his room.’

  She took Solly’s horrible head between her hands and kissed it. Then she wished she hadn’t; not because it was filthy – though it was – but because assurance that Da Silva hadn’t left the country didn’t mean that Quick and Eleanor had not.

  She had three hours’ rest before Cameron ran into the room and told her to get dressed. ‘Gravesend,’ he said.

  It was dark in the coach, and crowded with all tire searchers except Tinker, who was on the driver’s seat. She could smell Solly and hear a chastened Mr Blurt: ‘I should have thought of Gravesend, Mr Archie, indeed I should. We’ve been looking in the wrong place.’

  ‘Ye’ve done well, Mr Blurt.’ She felt her husband’s hand take hers. ‘The Swan. Out of Barbados carrying sugar. Came into Gravesend thirty-six hours ago.’

  ‘Thirty-six. She could have gone again.’

  ‘Now, now, Lady Cecily.’ Blurt’s voice. ‘None of that. You trust me. She’s got to unload, recommission and let her sailors get drunk.’ She saw the little man’s shoulders outlined against the coach window as he leaned out to peer at his timepiece by the light of a street flambeau. ‘The tide’s against her, too, won’t turn for another six hours. Still, she’ll not be idle. Time’s money in the Triangle.’

  And Gravesend was twenty-four miles downriver, at least five hours away in this weather. And they’d have to change horses.

  ‘Triangle?’ asked Tyler.

  ‘Goods from England to the Guinea Coast. Slaves from the Guinea Coast to Barbados. Sugar from Barbados to England. Triangle. Always a cargo. They’ll not put your man or the young lady in the slave hold, Master Archie. They’ll be wanting to keep ’em healthy. They’ll fetch more in Barbados than the Negroes fresh from the barracoons who can’t speak the king’s English…’ She was defenceless against the flow of information.

  Cameron’s voice rose above it: ‘They’ll be in Gravesend, Cecily, be sure of it. He’d lodged them there, that’s why he left Holborn – to put them aboard. We’ll find them there. Be sure of it. Be sure.’

  The repetition told her he was as frightened as she was, and possibly tireder.

  Once across the river, Tinker drove like Jehu, rattling them through the sleeping streets, mercifully stamped free of ice by the rioters who had retired only an hour or two before. The same moon that had seen her into London that terrible night – how long ago? A week? A year? – saw Cecily and her allies out of it.

  At Dartford they had trouble rousing the landlord of the Golden Fleece and getting fresh horses. By then they were driving against the dawn and wagons carrying coal and logs for London’s fires. At Northfleet they were stopped by pickets who suspected their coach of coming from St James’s – Cecily’s arms were gilded on the door – and its passengers, therefore, of being for the excise. It took Tyler’s pistol to convince them that they weren’t.

  It started to snow.

  Out in the river, yachts and skiffs slowly swung their prows eastward and it was possible to see a swirl of water around the buoys. The tide was beginning to turn.

  It was no longer ‘when’ we board Swan, it was ‘if’ we board her, then it was ‘if’ we miss her we can catch up with her in the estuary, and Cecily knew her child was sailing further and further away from her.

  Suddenly, Cameron shouted: ‘By Christ, I’ll have my wean off that ship if I have to pursue her a thousand mile.’

  Cecily buried her head in his shoulder. We’ve lost her.

  All roads in Gravesend led to the river; Tinker took them down the hill at a gallop to a wharf. Pedestrians jumped out of the coach’s path and Tyler had his head out of the coach window, screaming at them: ‘The Swan. Which one’s the fucking Swan?’

  They trampled on each other to get out. Oh, my God. The river was full of ships, big, litt
le, squat, graceful; you could nearly reach the opposite bank jumping from one deck to another.

  An old man was fishing with rod and line from a jetty. Blurt had him by his coat, shaking him. He came running back, still towing his informant. ‘That one. That one. The schooner. See her?’

  Cecily couldn’t. He was pointing through the ships at the quay to the middle of the river where there were three, each with two masts. Which one was a schooner?

  ‘Thanks be to God, she’s not set sail yet.’

  ‘In’t goin’ to,’ said Blurt’s prisoner, amiably. ‘Not till her’s past Tilbury. She’s goin’ down under sweeps. Look.’

  They were seeing something through the snow and confusion of hulls and rigging that Cecily couldn’t. They milled around. Cameron shouted from a slipway and they ran towards him, Cecily following; he was trying to right an upturned skiff. Tyler helped him while the others cast about for oars. Blurt, Cameron, Tyler and Solly were in the boat, Tinker up to his thighs in water, launching it with a shove that carried it clear of the causeway. Cecily began wading after it. Tinker pulled her back. ‘Ain’t room for us. We’d just weigh her down.’

  The two of them stood, their feet in water, watching the skiff veer while the men in it tried to synchronize their stroke.

  ‘They’ll not catch her,’ said the old angler behind them. It seemed to give him satisfaction. ‘She’s got the sweeps on. She’ll be off in a minute.’

  The skiff was lost to sight among hulls and hawsers. Cecily and Tinker ran along the wharf to a jetty for a clearer view. A small group of men stood at the jetty’s end, watching the traffic of the river. No need to ask which was The Swan: from behind the hull of another ship at anchor it was just possible to see the prow of a ship with lines leading to rowing boats, crabs harnessed to a giant turtle.

  A captious wind flurried snow into the watchers’ eyes as if curtains were being closed and drawn back but each time Cecily blinked the flakes from her eyes more of The Swan’s prow was visible. She was moving. There was a cheer from the men on the jetty. ‘She’s off.’