Lord Juniper sighed audibly and slumped in his chair.
‘So the alleged property, ye see, is not a purse, nor a timepiece, nor a kerchief, but a man. Can a man be stolen against his will? Aye, every day. The records of our own Royal African Company and their competitors will show ye that two hundred and fifty thousand…’
‘No matter, Mr Cameron, no matter.’
‘…men. Women. Children. A quarter of a million unwilling souls have been shipped from the coasts of Africa since 1640 to the English West Indies and sold as slaves.’
Good God, thought Cecily, I love him.
The judge was shouting: ‘No matter, no matter, no matter.’
But there it was. It had been knocking on the door all day, a persistent tap beneath the crashings of the riot. Now it was in and rampant: the guilt stirred into tea and cakes, sold in little white hills in the jury’s shops, the unacknowledged, unwritten, unfaced, unspoken, uneasy, unclean debit on the balance sheet. One ton of sugar: one slave dead. Every year England ingested fifty thousand tons of it. The taint was on every breath. It clung to the clothes of the West Indies grandees sitting in front of her, ran in beads down the back of their necks.
You’ve done it now. An industry supporting a quarter of all British shipping, half Lancashire, every port.
Walpole invested in it, George and Caroline wore jewels from it. It paid for the ermine on the blood-red robe of Lord Juniper. Too big a windmill, my love.
‘But England, gentlemen? What for did this man become restive when he arrived in England? I’ll tell ye. For the first time since he was fourteen years old his nostrils scented freedom. He’d been told so. Word had spread even to Africa of a people that had won a great charter, a Magna Carta, from a tyrant king…’
He’d told her once. After Dolly’s death. ‘Law has form, procedure; there’s nae point to it if it serves only the powerful. It must aye extend to others or it’s tyranny – and the powerful are fine aware of it. Sometimes it must work against them…’ He was out to make it work against them.
Did I love you then? I suppose I did. You didn’t save Dolly but you saved me. Time and again. Always. But I was looking down, not up. She was looking upward now – at one of the human race’s necessities: pedantic, stubborn, deciding what was right and refusing to let go; the irritant that stung fellow men into progress. He’d made good law, him and his kind, and bored those who’d use it for their own ends by reminding them that it applied to everybody, even a black cook. A pain in the world’s backside – and my lover.
She was entranced, not by romance, not with the cheap champagne she’d drunk for Guillaume of Edinburgh; here was a vintage wine for the sustenance of maturity. Even so, her toes wiggled like a little girl waking to a free day and a summer’s dawn. Let’s go to bed. If he lost this case, she’d run to him and tell him he was her pride. Snatch Quick and Eleanor and escape Walpole’s England to live happy ever after with her man.
Through the haze of her enchantment came the words: ‘Yorke-Talbot.’ Ah, good old Yorke-Talbot. Now she’d find out.
‘You are raising a point of law, Mr Cameron. Must I remind you of Yorke-Talbot?’ Lord Juniper turned to the jury. ‘Only four years ago, Attorney-General Philip Yorke and Solicitor-General Charles Talbot were asked for their opinion on this question and gave it that a slave coining from the West Indies to Great Britain does not become free and is his master’s property.’
‘Thank you, m’lud,’ Cameron said. He faced the jury in his turn. ‘But, as the learned judge has stated, Yorke-Talbot was an opinion asked for and given. It was not pronounced in court nor in response to a specific case.’
Lord Juniper: ‘Valid, nevertheless, Mr Cameron.’
Cameron: ‘Yes, m’lud. I’d argue that even more valid is the judgment in the case of Smith v. Gould in 1706, heard before Lord Chief Justice Holt, which said that common law takes no notice of Negroes being different from other men. By common law no man can have property in another… There is no such thing as a slave by the laws of England.’
He stood up straight. ‘Gentlemen, I’ll quote ye another case, from the days of Queen Elizabeth the First. In 1569 a slave was brought from Russia, much as Quick Bell was brought from Barbados. The court freed him. I’ll give ye the beautiful words of the ruling: “That England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.”’
The court was quiet, letting the sentence reverberate as if all subsequent and venal monarchs had never existed, as if the fabled old virgin still ruled and had spoken.
Then Cecily knew that Quick was free.
The judge lobbed a few more case laws at Cameron. Cameron lobbed back Holland and Scotland, despised nations, which refused slavery on their soul.
No need, my dear. You’ve won.
Lord Juniper attempted to limit the damage in his summing-up. He didn’t want to be the man who brought down the entire slave trade: he’d got money in it.
‘Gentlemen of the jury, I reiterate that this case is particular and not general. I fear financial disaster to proprietors, that untold business would be lost to them and this kingdom if the question be widened. Those whose passions are fired at the name of slavery have no cause here. Some right of compulsion there must always be by master over servant. All you are asked to decide is whether Mr Da Silva has right of property in this one Negro, Sambo Vickery. If he has, then Mr Cameron took the said Negro unlawfully. If he has not, and you decide that the laws of England give him no such right, then Mr Cameron did not purloin him and must be acquitted.’
Cecily watched the jury file back in. Not grocers now: twelve apostles of good news.
The clerk of the court stood below the jury box and held up a stick with pincers on the end of it. The foreman put a slip of paper into the pincers. The clerk took the stick and raised it to the judge who took the paper, read it without expression and laid it down.
‘Gentlemen of the jury, what is your verdict?’
‘We find the gentleman Mr Da Silva had no right of property to the man Vickery, my lord. We find Mr Cameron not guilty.’
The howl that went up from the public gallery’s rear bench was not for the nervous. Every black soul was on its feet, stamping, clapping. Cole was in the arms of Ebony Bet, Cecily in Solly’s. Judge, clerk, sergeants were calling for order.
Through the uproar a man on the bench in front of Cecily directed his voice at her: ‘Don’t fuck that Negro yet, lady. Nothing’s changed.’
She disengaged herself from Solly and restored her hat from over her eyes to see who’d spoken, but the three planters were already shouldering their way out.
In the well of the court, barristers’ clerks were chatting, Sir Peter Jennings was gathering up his papers with a win-some-lose-some insouciance. Her husband sat by himself, his head in his hands.
Cecily began struggling through the press to tell him she loved him. Downstairs, the door to the court was impassable with white-wigged lawyers trying to get out past jubilant blacks chanting Quick’s name and trying to get in. She’d have to wait.
In any case, there was another matter.
Blurt was on the edge of the crowd. ‘Mr Blurt, Mr Blurt.’
‘Congratulations, Lady Cecily. Your husband did well.’
‘Yes.’ She pulled him into a doorway. ‘Mr Blurt, would you do something for me?’
She watched him trot along the corridor to where the three planters were talking to Da Silva, saw his exchange with the largest: largest everything, hat, diamonds, jowl, heaviest belly.
Blurt trotted back. ‘Known as William, m’lady. But answers to Guillaume.’
‘Yes,’ she said, quietly. ‘Yes, I thought he might.’
‘Transportee, wasn’t he? I remember helping Master Archie try to find out what happened to him after the Fifteen.’
‘Yes.’
‘Should imagine he’s paid Sir Robert to be allowed back in the country. Purged his treachery, like. Surprising how many of ’em do well out in the colonies once they’ve serv
ed their seven years. And they don’t stay Jacobite long, not after they’ve made their pile. Looks like Master Archie and me needn’t have bothered.’
‘Nor any of us,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Mr Blurt.’
She was caught up in the crowd as it made for the entrance hall, allowing it to push her along; Cameron would find her. Here, too, among the columns, were noisy, capering people. Did the whole world rejoice at Quick’s freedom? Lawyers, barristers, ushers were throwing their wigs in the air, others slapping them on a colleague’s shoulder and causing a dust. A few, less pleased, were involved in elbow-raising argument that billowed their gowns. Cecily approached an usher who seemed soberer than most. ‘What is happening?’
He stared at her, trying to concentrate. ‘Excise, madam. Walpole’s withdrawn it.’ His gravity was a bedazzled disbelief. He looked up at the hall’s vaulted ceiling as if expecting it to crack open. ‘Old Brazen-face’s backed down. He’s lost. The old bugger’s backed down.’ He recollected himself, frowned, and hurried off to remonstrate with a group of young clerks minuetting to a chant of: ‘No Slavery, No Wooden Shoes.’
‘He’s lost.’ She kept repeating it until it made sense to her. Then: ‘We’ve won.’
In the crowd somebody said: ‘He’ll resign now. Have to.’
We’ve won. Oh, Dolly, he’s gone. She glimpsed her husband’s wigless red head swaying high above the crowd on the other side of the hall as he was carried in triumph on black shoulders towards the steps to the street. We’ve won. We’ve won, my dear love. We’ve won everything. He didn’t see her.
Cole shouldered through to her. ‘Can’t get Master Archie away from them singing Negroes. Quick’s with ’em.’
‘We’ll go back to Arundel Street and wait for them there.’
Sconces were lit in the street. It had been a long day’s trial. News of Walpole’s defeat had streamed from Westminster to the Law Courts on the last rays of the sun. All England would know it soon. Already, windows were being raised, the light from them blocked by leaning figures listening to the message shouted up from below. Wigs, chalk-white in the dusk, bobbed eerily among a morass of hats.
Arundel Street was quiet. Cole turned off to the mews to ready the coach for their return to the Belle the next morning. Tinker was waiting up for her. She told him the news and gave him the rest of the night off before she went upstairs to see Eleanor. The nurse met her on the landing, finger to lips: the child was asleep.
Cecily tiptoed in and stood at the bedside for a long time, watching her daughter. We won, Eleanor. You won.
Don’t fuck that Negro yet, lady. Nothing’s changed. It came like the hiss of a snake lying in wait somewhere in the room. Cecily found herself reaching out, as if she would snatch the sleeper away from a flickering, reptilian tongue.
Her euphoria ebbed. No, nothing had changed, not hatred, not the dominion of one race over another. Cameron’s triumph in court merely added one more case to the see-saw of law which, another time, for another black man, might be weighted the opposite way. He’d told her himself: ‘There’s only an Act by Parliament can abolish slavery.’ With so much of the country’s profit arising from the trade, small hope of that.
But we made it more difficult for them, Eleanor. Today the slavers had stumbled because a good man shamed a jury. One day possibly, perhaps when this black child was an old, old woman, enough people would have become ashamed. One day freedom might beat economic interest. Miracles happened. One had happened today.
Gently, Cecily went out and closed the door. In her bedroom she began to pack. Tomorrow the Belle, thank God. Her husband could go fishing again. He looked so tired. She’d go with him, back to the meadow and the Mimram. Cole said one of the kitchen flues needed relining. She’d have to see to it. Totty Stokes was raising opposition to the turnpike among the carters. I’ll reline you too, you bugger.
The noise of rejoicing crowds in the Strand reverberated gently against the window, emphasizing the quiet of her house.
Again Guillaume’s snake’s hiss. Nothing’s changed.
But it has, she thought. You beyond all recognition. And me too.
She could almost mourn for the Guillaume Fraser that had been – before he’d been brutalized into a brutalizer. Don’t fuck that Negro yet. There’d been an underlay in the venom, as of fresh grass relinquishing to sewage. Somewhere beneath the Barbadan accent had been the recognized timbre of the voice that had said: I’ll return for you, Lady Cecily, Lady Cecily.
She could accuse him on behalf of Quick and a quarter of a million slaves but not on her own account. God only knew what suffering and striving had wrought the young Jacobite in an Edinburgh prison cell into the caricature of self-made man she’d encountered in court today.
It was herself she had to condemn for wasting years of her own time and Archibald Cameron’s with a fallacy. She writhed in self-contempt at being such a nitwit.
It wasn’t Guillaume’s fault he’d enamoured her into contriving the escape from Edinburgh Castle that had destroyed Lady Cecily Fitzhenry. Clambering from the ruins had widened the world for her; she could not regret the process which had created Cecily Cameron.
It wasn’t Guillaume Fraser’s fault that she’d confused the image of love for its substance, not his fault she’d worshipped at the altar of an idol she herself had created.
How long did you tend my flame? I wonder. Not long probably; it would have become a pale thing in the hard glare of West Indian sun.
She could even forgive the man for growing physically and mentally gross.
What she couldn’t forgive him for – and at this point Cecily’s hands travelled in dubious exploration over her face and down to her waist – was that he hadn’t recognized her. You bastard.
With that, Guillaume Fraser was consigned to history.
There was a knock on the door. Cameron. Cecily ran downstairs to open the door ahead of the footman, ready to embrace her husband.
It was Sir Spender Dick.
Almost mute with disappointment and irritation, she began to say he couldn’t come in when he pushed past her and lurched into the parlour. He was alone and he’d been running. His dishevelment, his breathing, were reminders of wild things – her pastel parlour had a quarry in it.
Not now, she thought, I can’t do with this now. Then she thought: It was always going to end like this.
‘See if they’ve followed me,’ he said. He pulled her to the window and arranged the curtains behind her so that light shouldn’t shine into the street. She raised the sash, smelling London, bonfire, river. Arundel Street was empty, all activity concentrated at its top and the Strand where celebration at Walpole’s defeat was necessitating the same fires and noise as the rioting it had replaced.
Her one idea was to get rid of the man but from pity she poured him a brandy. He downed it and poured himself another without asking.
She began to make excuses. ‘I am pressed, Sir Spender. We’re bound for the Belle first thing tomorrow.’
He ignored her. ‘They found us. We… had to separate. The hounds were on us. Masky…’ He sat down and rubbed his forehead. ‘Poor Masky. Fought like a tiger. Killed one of them.’
‘Killed? Maskelyne killed somebody?’
Sir Spender interpreted it as concern for his friend. ‘He got away, madam, never fear. They can’t down our Masky, oh, no. With luck and a fair wind he’ll meet us at Hempens.’
‘Hempens? What do you talk about? I’m not going to Hempens.’
‘You are, dear lady. Nor must we be long about it.’ Shelter and brandy had calmed the man. He stood up and moved to the centre of the room to strike a deliberate pose. ‘The Lantern must be lit. Dies irae, dies ilia. Our day has dawned.’
Cecily sat down heavily on the chair Sir Spender had vacated. He looked down at her kindly. ‘Exactly. Tomorrow King James the Third sails for England. The armies of the godly gather for him in the corners of the country, awaiting his coming. You and I, dear lady – and Arthur Maskelyne, w
e hope – will light him in.’
She tried to gather her wits. Hadn’t it always been a game? She remembered another parlour in which a magical, uncrowned king had asked to make Hempens a postern to his country, much as he might have requested the use of a spare bedroom. Surely we’re not all still playing? It appeared they were. Horribly.
Reasonably, she said: ‘It’s too late, Sir Spender. He should have come before. The country has settled itself, it’ll not rise for him now. And anyway…’ she got up ‘…my husband will be home any minute…’
‘And is not friendly to the Cause,’ he said, nodding.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He isn’t. So…’
Sir Spender Dick smiled, ruefully. Only a few times in his and Cecily’s acquaintance had he shown himself more than a poseur; he showed it now. ‘But you see, dear lady, if you do not come with me as part of my disguise I shall be caught. If I am caught, who knows what hideous stratagems Walpole’s interrogators will use to find out the list of my helpmates. Naturally, I should be reluctant to give it yet we are but flesh and spirit and when those can stand no more…’
‘You’d give me away,’ Cecily said.
He let the sentence ride the air for a minute before he said: ‘And I do not think Sir Robert, old-fashioned as he is, would believe that Mr Cameron’s wife had been acting without Mr Cameron’s complicity. Do you?’
She swallowed. ‘No.’
‘And you would not wish that on your husband.’
‘No.’
He was in control now. He said skittishly: ‘And you did promise to aid His Majesty. I saw the letter.’
Sent to Anne. Long ago. After Dolly’s death. Before she’d come to know that Cameron mattered more to her than anything else.
‘Very well,’ she said briskly, and got up. The imperative now was to get out of the house before Cameron came back.
Sir Spender’s need of a disguise was met by dressing him in a coat and breeches of Cole’s – ‘Madam, how delightfully plebeian’ – the only clothes that would fit him.
For all that the man had recovered his poise, desperation oozed out of him like sweat. She saw him transfer a pistol to the pocket of Cole’s coat.
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