Golden Hill (16 page)

‘Well, then, I proceed with confidence,' said De Lancey. ‘Play on, play on! Now, sir: this power of chance must reign most strongly when the table is most evenly balanced, in politics, as well as in piquet. Small perturbations have biggest effect when all hangs finely between one thing and t'other. When the scores are almost level, and the single card you had not anticipated turns up where you had not expected it. As there, in that trick, for instance: ouch. And as here and now, Mr Smith, in this city and at this juncture. If the Assembly have enough votes (but only just enough) to deny the Governor his means to make war, and to deny him too, what is the usual resource of government, a supply of money to bribe and to treat and to persuade sufficient of the electors to shift a seat or two in his favour – why then, sir, if a stranger should appear, with a mass of cash that seemingly he may dispose as he wishes, then
he
may be the little chance that sways all. That swings the game. Ah, this one I see you must score out in detail. Do not forget the
capot
. And the winner is—? My condolences, William. In I come again.'

The judge rubbed his hands in an expression of enthusiasm so palpably insincere, so entirely disconnected from his look of forensic intent, that it seemed a wonder the hands were connected to him at all. This time, when the stakes were presented, he paused with a fourth golden disc held between thumb and forefinger, and turned it, so the candle-flame made the guinea blaze and dim, blaze and dim.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I had these of brother Lovell. Who understands plainly where his interests lie. Cut for deal. Jack? Let's see. Oh dear: King, and thus I am Elder again.'

Smith gripped his cardboard court tight. It was not impossible, as Younger hand, for him to impede Elder sufficiently to prevail, and gain the second win, and the pot. But it was very improbable. Had Mr Hoyle written of piquet as analytically as he had of whist, Smith would have been able to give an exact number to his scanty chance.

‘Five clubs,' said De Lancey, comfortably.

‘Good,' said Smith, wretchedly.

‘Tierce.'

‘Not good!'

But De Lancey was holding up the interdicting finger again – tilting it – pointing it – into the shadows at Smith's left.

‘A lady to speak to you, I think?'

He and the lawyer gazed with unhurried interest where Tabitha was standing at his elbow, clasping her hands together. The other politicos turned at their tables to survey her. There were smiles and muttered comments. She was very much the only woman at the smoking, gaming end of the hall. Smith felt a flash of resentment, that he should needs feel concern at such a thing. He found it hard to drag his attention from the printed red and blue and black in his hand, in which his immediate destiny seemed all encoded.

‘Yes?' he said, glancing up. ‘This is not a good moment.'

‘I'll be brief,' she said. ‘I have spoke to the Secretary, and he says my part in the play is gone, and why. I had not thought—' she said, and stopped, a struggle in her voice such as to penetrate, finally, all through the atmosphere of piquet. He looked up properly. Her mouth was clamped in a thin line. ‘I had not
thought,'
she
said again, winning back her control of herself, ‘that you would use what I said, about what the theatre means to me. I did not think you would. But it was a good move,' she said. ‘It was a very good move. I shall remember it.' And she grinned at him like a carpenter screwing a clamp wider open.

‘Tabitha, wait—' he said. But she walked away. He tried to push back his chair, to follow her, but the same unseen human obstacle behind was holding him in place.

‘I have not finished,' said De Lancey. ‘Look back this way. Look at me. Bring back your mind. The stranger I was talking of? If such a man should appear, would he not be the subject of the most intense concern? Would it not be a matter of the most pressing import, if he should seem to be becoming, on the swiftest terms, an intimate of the Governor's suite? Would it not be most urgent, that it should be made clear to the
boy
in question, that his own fate, in just the same way, is trembling between alternatives? Depending how he conducts himself, Mr Smith, he may with a few small steps in one direction or the other, put himself either in the way of making his fortune, or else just as easily ending it, in some unpleasant accident. Two destinies, sir, very nearly placed. One of gold, or at any rate of golden gratitude, for you know now how rare the veritable metal is. And one of lead. – Or of broken ice. Or of a long drop. – Have I spoke clearly enough? Am I understood?'

‘Yes, sir,' said Smith, transfixed. ‘I assure you, in all honour – I am nothing in that line. I am not a bag-carrier for the ministry. Or a piece of left-hand aid dispatched to the Governor.'

‘I'm delighted to hear it,' said the Chief Justice, regarding him ironically. ‘Of course, if you were, you would say the same. And if you were a Walpole-ite, seeking a safe home across the sea for
some of the spoils of the late ministry – the same. And if you were the Jesuit or Jacobite some take you for – the same. When you deny all possibilities, this denial can carry no more surety than the rest. But I thank you.' Watching still, considering still, De Lancey seemed content to continue indefinitely, watching and considering.

‘I was saying, not good?' Smith offered – the game having turned suddenly to the least of his anxieties.

‘Oh, as to that,' said De Lancey, with an imperial smile, laying down his hand, ‘I find my cards are so poor I must resign. The pool is yours. Go on,' he said, when Smith still sat, confused. ‘Take your winnings – and consider your position. Go on,' he repeated. ‘If you hurry, you may catch her yet.'

And Smith left the room, to the sound of male laughter. But though he hurried through the streets all the way to Golden Hill, none of the parties of revellers he passed was the Lovells or the Van Loons, and when he reached the house, the windows were dark. He did not knock.

‘What do you make of the boy?' De Lancey asked William Smith later, with the brandy bottle almost empty.

‘What do you think of him – Oakeshott's friend, I mean?' Terpie Tomlinson asked Major Tomlinson, propped up on three white pillows. But Major Tomlinson did not reply, except in the most liquid terms, his mouth being full at the time. (Why, what was he drinking? Nothing.)

By morning the news was all around the town from Trinity Church to the Bouwerij that the stranger with the money, however he had come by it and whatever he purposed to do with it, was himself assuredly an actor.

The lawyer's stakes at the table turned out to be not even colonial notes of the usual baffling variability, but certificates drawable upon a tobacco warehouse in Virginia, and Smith presented one without much hope, the first time he tried their use as payment. But it was accepted without demur, at fifty-five per centum of face, New-York's merchants seeming all to maintain within themselves a register of values for every conceivable money-substitute they might encounter. Wampum, tobacco bales, rum by the gallon: it was all money, in a world without money. Between the tobacco tickets and his own pointedly-returned guineas, Smith calculated he now possessed enough to reach Christmas in relative ease – if he could avoid being knocked on the head for spoiling De Lancey's game against the Governor, or offending in some other role pressed upon him, or falling victim to a misadventure entirely unsuspected.

Relieved therefore of the fear he would starve, yet supplied with new matter for alarm, Smith over the following days watched from his vantage point in the Merchants as the city rose to a frantic zenith of activity. One of the two peaks of the New-York year, said Hendrick, bawling explanations in the suddenly far more crowded coffee-house: the other being the moment in late spring when the fleet returned from the sugar isles with the harvest aboard, and every trying-house, refinery and distillery would belch sweet smoke, and the air would burn with caramel. For this, though, the first and outward pulsation of the city's commerce, every ship in the harbour, every keel belonging to a Mannahatta merchant house, must be crammed to the gunwales with the products of the
farms up-island and up-river. Land in the tropic Indies being too scarce to expend on any crop save the precious cane, the slaves who grew it, in the Barbadoes and Jamaica, Saint-Domingue and Demerara, were fed on flour and biscuit and dried peas from the provinces to the north. The slaves died in prodigious number, but there were always numbers still more prodigious from Africa to replace them in the great machine, and so the owners kept on buying, and eagerly, all that the Province of New-York could grow for their sustenance. Naturally they paid in their own crop. Wheat out, sugar back. So the traffic along the Broad Way, and in Broad Street and Maiden Lane and every other street that gave entrance to the docks, thickened to the point of deadlock. The laden carts and wains Smith had seen coming in through the fields beyond the stockade became a continual procession, a bumping, lurching, swaying, slow armada on wheels, advancing inch by congesting inch through every cobbled chink in the city's fabric that was wide enough (and some that proved not wide enough). Carters swore, horses jibbed and shat, loads slewed. While, on the water, river-schooners from up the Hudson and coasters from all along Long Island and Connecticut, and wherries plying across from Jersey, brought in cargoes of sacks that way, to be raised from one hold to another at the dockside on creaking cranes. A hundred wooden arms moving at once; a hundred sets of cries of Way and Ready and Ware Below; an orgy of transhipment. Carpenters in all the cross-trees, hammering; new spars of resin-smelling pine rising up to them in slings; sail-makers sewing; cordwainers paying out the perished pieces in old rigging and filling in with new manila; an aerial chorus of knocking and banging going on into the night, night after night by lamplight. And into the city, too, flowed all the sailors who would crew the voyage. Tars by trade who farmed at
home for the summer months, and younger sons from the Hudson settlements shipping out to earn the wherewithal to set up in new fields and houses of their own, and assorted hopefuls and wanderers and chancers of all descriptions – all these, thronging the taverns, and roaming the night streets in jovial gangs looking for entertainment, and filling out every lodging-house that had bedding or floor-space or attic-space to spare. Mrs Lee extended her breakfast table by three more wooden leaves, and was kept running with trays of porridge. Since all these new guests were swiftly informed in whispers of Smith's riches, he was fronted, as he left the house each morning, by frequent requests for loans, and offers of part-shares in schemes sure to make both him and the promoters a fortune by spring.

At Lions' Slip, just below Golden Hill Street, Captain Prettyman watched over the stowage of the Lovells' and Van Loons' three Indies vessels, giving orders in authoritative squeaks, as if a lean ship's rat had risen up into the stature of a man. But Smith heard nothing from Tabitha. Having failed to find her and explain the mischance within the first couple of days, he had resigned himself to receiving some piece of ingenious nastiness in return, by message or by letter or in person, but nothing of the sort arrived, and as the silence lengthened, his reluctance to breach it on his side, and get visited on him whatever she had prepared, grew the more solid, these motives of cowardice or self-protection holding the field unchallenged in the absence of the sight of her face, and of what he had seen in it. He began to tell himself that the careless slight he had given, had been in truth a stroke of luck, and that there was an accidental wisdom (which perhaps De Lancey's philosophy would approve) in being extricated from a difficult connection with an acknowledged shrew. Yet, a peculiar
compunction prevented him from asking Hendrick, any morning in the Merchants, how she did; for he had heard with what unaffection she was regarded in the family, and did not wish to salt the wound he had inflicted on her, by exposing the knowledge of it to Hendrick's likely laughter. ‘Fallen out with my dear sister-in-law?' said Hendrick, and Smith only shrugged.

After ten days had passed, rehearsals began for Septimus'
Cato
. Mijnheer Van Torn's old theatre on Nassau Street turned out to be a simple box of a space upstairs, made by knocking through three of the narrow row-houses there, and very dusty and dark and cumbered by lumber it was. Powdery flotillas of moths rose from the decayed velvet curtain when it was touched. Smith and Septimus and a gruff lieutenant from the Fort by the name of Lennox, who was playing the part of Cato, had to begin by clearing timber off the stage, and unblocking the nearest pair of windows, so that the actors might see one another. Smith had half expected that Tabitha would make this the occasion for some exquisitely- calculated piece of sabotage or subversion, and appear alongside Flora with a heckler's arsenal of weapons ready: but Flora came alone. Alone, that is, except for the glowering presence of Joris, who sat on a baulk of planks in the half-dark like a spindly monument to disapproval. Flora paid him no attention. She was cheerful with Smith, chatty to Septimus, and so ingenuously pleased to be there with Lennox that he unbent to the extent of several smiles. The one she was wary of was Terpie Tomlinson; and Smith watched, fascinated, as Terpie in turn made it her special study to win Flora's confidence. She had come dressed in a dark respectable gown, buttoned up to the neck, and she sat very still until you forgot she was anything but a face and a pair of moving hands, and she took as the limit upon
what she might do or say, Flora's own behaviour. She even copied, though Smith was sure Flora did not notice it, Flora's own gestures. Using only voice and hands she appeared to become another girl of seventeen, just as reassuringly confined by the proprieties, and just as forthrightly innocent – but perhaps a little shyer, requiring to be drawn out. She delivered her lines in the first read-through with a colourless clarity that had Septimus nodding with approval, but Smith thought he could guess what her final performance might be like. By the end of the rehearsal she and Flora were giggling together.