Golden Hill (32 page)

‘It – was – an accident,’ he managed.

Achilles banged his head smartly on the boards.

‘Of
course
it was accident!’ he cried, if it is possible to cry in a whisper. ‘You think you can hurt him on purpose? You? Never! You … you …’

He hammered the floor with Smith’s forehead again, but he did not tighten the neck-hold. He seemed to need to converse. It occurred to Smith, amid thuds and coloured stars, that Achilles could with far more swift and straightforward effect have just stuck a blade between his ribs, if he had desired only a sure revenge. But a cooling corpse cannot hear what you tell it.

‘No – one – to – mourn – with,’ he guessed.

‘You!’ repeated Achilles, in a voice so congested with fury and sorrow, and by the need to hush them, that he sounded almost as choked as Smith. ‘You take him from me, and look at you! Nothing in you is strong. You kill him through his kindness. He
pity
you. You are a bag of wind. You say what they tell you. You understand nothing. You don’t know what you are. But look what you take from me! Look what you
take
!’

The last word was a wail, a roar, that lost itself in desperate constriction. Wet drops were falling on the back of Smith’s head. Achilles stopped heaving Smith up in order to pound him down, and for a moment was all slack weight upon him. Smith thrashed his legs sideways – heaved – rolled left as hard as he could, and contrived to get an elbow underneath him, and a hand spread on the floor to push. It was the branded hand, which was no more than he deserved, and it hurt like fire when he shoved with all his might upon the out-stretched thumb and fingers, but it got his face off the floor, and sent them both rolling right over clumsily leftward till they hit the wall, Achilles’ back taking the force of the collision. Both gasped. Smith was able to surge up onto hands and knees; Achilles regained his grasp, but only of Smith’s shoulders, and tried with twists and throwings of his weight to drive Smith back down, but now he lacked the impetus that had first bowled his opponent over. Now, as they struggled, the advantage of Smith’s greater bulk was felt. Now, it was bullcalf against spider, though the spider be never so much more subtle, and Smith was able heavingly to turn, and to drag both their weights across the room on all fours, back towards the window-ledge, and the glimmer of Septimus’ sword-hilt in the dark, with Achilles trying to brace his legs to arrest them, and to kick out Smith’s knees from beneath him. Step by heaving step, and as they gaspingly traversed the dark room, Achilles started talking in his ear again: this time, as he were talking to himself.

‘What I am now?’ he said. ‘What I have left? I was Fulani. I was guard of the Emir. I was
hafiz
. I was husband. I was son. I was
father. All gone; start again. I was lover. I was friend. I was older brother. I was soldier. I fight again, I think again, I breathe again. I ride in green forests. I sit with the chiefs of the Hodenosaunee people. I walk on mountains white men never see. All gone. All
gone
. All gone
again
.’

He was fighting less hard with every word. Smith, reaching the window-ledge, was able to claw up it, to rear up till he was half-standing, and without too much difficulty to throw off Achilles’ spindly, long-limbed weight. And to grab and draw, in the dark of the room, Septimus’ sword.

Achilles picked himself up, and stepped with dignity towards the blade. Smith could tell by the dim liquid shine of his eyes that he was weeping, and the crumpled line of his shoulders showed his age.

‘And now,’ he said quietly, ‘I know too much business. Too many secrets. They won’t keep me here. Soon they sell me south, to tobacco field, to iron mine. But I can’t begin again. I don’t have it in me. It is too much. Two lives is enough. So.’ He turned his gaze up to the ceiling and held it there.

‘I don’t—’ said Mr Smith – and had to stop, and rasp and cough to clear his throat – ‘I don’t desire to kill you. I don’t desire even to hold this. I mean if I can never to hold one of these again.’

Achilles looked down. Smith was offering him, not the point, but the hilt of the sword.

Whether Christmas Day were an occasion for work or for play was, at that time in New-York, a matter of denomination. The followers of the established church kept the feast, with green branches in their houses and logs upon the fire, and bunches of sweet-smelling rosemary, and so did Lutherans and Moravians. But the Quakers, the French Calvinists, the Dutch Reformed, the English-speaking Baptists and Presbyterians, all signified their dissent, and their scornful judgement of the feast as a Popish mummery, by treating the day as one for ordinary business. That year, it fell on a Thursday, and you might have made a reliable chart of the affiliations of the whole city, by marking which shop-fronts were barred and shuttered, and which were defiantly opened, with lanterns lit, clerks at desks, merchants ready to sell, and tailors ready with their needles, despite the cold, and the grumbling of prentices, and the mere trickle of customers. It was cold indeed, with a renewed boreal bite in the air, and a hard slippery crust on the snow very grateful to sledge-runners. Ordinary walkers slid and cursed, and noting the cast of colour in the north-eastern sky, resolved to be back in shelter as soon as may be. The counting-house on Golden Hill was open, the Lovells being Baptists. Isaiah hung miserably over the fire, having been given nothing to do but brew up hot pearl for the occasional
callers who came by to make or receive a quarter-day payment; Jem, in gloves, scratched away at the reconciling of the account books, the movement of whose figures from column to column embodied the real flow of money in the city, since there was no solider form for money to take; and Gregory Lovell, dipping his quill in the same well of black slush, sighed as he tried to figure on scraps of waste paper, not for the first time, how the plans of the firm for the year to come might be as little crimped and savaged as possible by the sudden vast hole in its capital; how Lovell & Co might best survive the depredations of Smith.

Smith, however, went to Trinity to welcome the Christ Child. There were iron stoves in there glowing red with generous heat, and banks of the best yellow beeswax candles in blazing radiance, and the smell of wine mulling to fete the congregation after the service: but the verger, scowling, packed Smith into the obscurest pew behind a pillar at the back, where the indigent, the muttering and the strange were housed. It had been a question to struggle with, whether to admit such a notoriety at all, but this particular flagrant sinner, far from flaunting himself, was pale and subdued, with purple bruises fading on his forehead. You surely cannot turn away a sinner who may be repenting. Not at Christmas. Not while proclaiming goodwill toward men. You may only hide him. Smith, behind his pillar, was relieved not to be seen, and not to see the great in their array up at the front, where the choir were carolling ‘Adeste Fideles’, and the Governor’s mouth opened and closed like a fish, and the Tomlinsons sat like two statues of wretchedness, and De Lancey was manifesting gravity enough to perturb the orbits of the planets. He did not go up to receive the communion, perhaps because he did not dare to walk through the company, or perhaps from compunction. The tablets of the
law were displayed on the church wall where he
could
see them: and of the Ten Commandments, he had by his count recently broken at least three. He closed his eyes and pressed his fists to his forehead and prayed. For what, I know not. And when the service was done, he slipped out unnoticed, wearing a new fur over his green coat, for he had much to do; and meant to have it all squared away before his last conversation in New-York, so that he might be able to depart immediately, no matter how it turned out.

It was two o’clock before he was ready to knock, as quietly as may be, upon the street-door of the house at Golden Hill. He had glanced around the corner: the counting-house was still stubbornly open for business, and the occupants engaged. When Zephyra opened the door, he pressed his finger to his lips, and darted straight past her, running on silent feet along the hall and up the staircase, past the windows where again ships’ masts were swaying, past the cruel little gardens of quill-work, trapped in their boxes, to the landing from whose shadows he had first seen the Lovell girls.

Tabitha was sitting alone, grimly sewing, a hardly-touched plate of food beside her.

‘Oh look,’ she said. ‘It’s the killer. What do you want?’

Smith, returning instantly to the state of irritation which was so easy to forget when out of her company – the sensation of a few grains of grit always between the teeth, something niggling or scratching at the skin – saw that she was in better looks; not as supple and rose-brown as when they had walked together in the rain, or as bold and illuminated as on the way to Tarrytown, but not shrunken and dried-up in malice either. She no longer
reminded him of a winter wasp. She must have been eating, at least a few meals. Her skin was restored, her wrists were not such sticks. But she seemed, for her, unusually cautious, rather than combative. She had stood up, when she saw him, and edged back, behind a low table, toward the mantel-shelf.

‘I came to beg your pardon.’

‘Really? What for? There are so many things to choose from, now.’

‘I thought we’d agreed to treat the older offences as squared, and to sink them into oblivion.’

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘That was before you took up with your gross doxy, in the public square, where all could see; before you declared to the world that you would rather be rolling in blubber. Since then, all your sins are fresh again.’

‘That is certainly how they seem to me.’

‘Is that so?’ she said, politely. Her voice was effortfully calm. She did not fly out, she did not catch fire, she did not frown or grin. She compressed the muscles around the mouth and raised her eyebrows as if that was needful to keep her eyes steady. ‘Go on, then: say what you must.’

‘I am … sorry I hurt you. I am sorry I betrayed your trust.’

‘There is no trust to betray. Your amours are your own business.’

‘You were just beginning—’

‘Not any more. That is all gone.’

‘If I could explain to you, how very much what happened – no, what I
did
, with Mrs Tomlinson – was a piece of cowardice – or, of impatience – or – of succumbing to the greed of the moment, a
shallow
greed, and stupidly sacrificing for it – something – something more—’

‘I don’t want you to explain. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you. You have said what you came to; now, please go away.’

It seemed as cold in the room as on the street outside. Smith, looking at her white hands twisting together, understood that she was frightened. That he could not appeal to some resigned, if outraged, sense in her of the stupid things humanity was wont to do, in the grip of desire, and men proverbially; that what had happened had fallen, for her, quite outside the scope of the game, and perhaps outside of her experience altogether. If only she would fight, he thought. It seemed dreadful that such a fierce soul would not.

‘I am also sorry,’ he said, as gently as he could, ‘that you found out in the way you did, through Flora. I am sure she did not tell it you very kindly.’

‘If you had heard the things she said!’ cried Tabitha suddenly, her voice going high and wobbly. ‘She was so
pleased
. She said – such things to me—’

Smith thought for a moment that she was kindling, that the familiar fire was returning, on this more familiar ground; but Tabitha bit off what she had been going to say, and clamped shut her mouth. Smith hesitated.

‘Well,’ he said, like a man spitting gin onto hot coals, to try to rouse a flame, ‘she had a lifetime of mockery to pay back, didn’t she?’

Her eyes rounded indignantly, but she did not ignite. Animation stirred in her face; and faded back into fear.

‘No doubt,’ she said. ‘No doubt’ – wavering upon her way at first, but steadying as she went, into a voice to close accounts, formal and decided. ‘Now please go away.’

‘I am going away. I am leaving New-York.’

‘Good.’

‘I mean, now. I am leaving New-York now.’

‘Good. Goodbye, Mr Smith.’

Smith gazed at her, and she returned the gaze, whitely level. He looked an appeal at her; a question at her; a beseeching incredulity at her.
That cannot possibly be all?
But her miserable, resolute, still gaze repelled them all unmoving, like a pane of glass against which snow-balls thump. There seemed no way, from here, to reach the things he had thought his soul required of him to say before he left, no matter how ridiculous he made himself thereby, or how much she might scorn them.

In desperation, he smiled at her, foolish and huge and heartfelt, and made his best bow, and walked from the room.

He was through the green-painted pine door-way and descending the first stair before she spoke.

‘I know why magicians clap their hands,’ she said, as if she couldn’t help it.

Mr Smith froze in place upon the staircase.

‘Do you?’ he said.

His eyes prickled. He turned, with infinite slowness and precaution, and came back to her where she stood in the long room in the same manner, as if approaching a bird on a bough that would take wing at the slightest startling movement. He made sure he stopped at a good distance.

‘And why is that?’ he said.

‘To keep our eyes busy. So that we should not see something else.’

‘You are right. And do you know what it is I did not want people to see?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t.’ There was the faintest flush of frustration in her voice.

‘Would you like me to tell you?’

‘Yes,’ she said: the same emotion, stronger, almost amounting to an edge.
Yes, obviously. Yes, you idiot
.

It seemed to Smith that he had her on the frailest, slenderest hook imaginable, made only of curiosity; like a fish-hook of ice, ready to shatter at too much force, or to melt at too much warmth; but that he might play her back all the way to safety on this hook, to the safe shore of her happiness and his own, if only he were subtle enough, if only he were wise enough, if only he had limitless time. But he did not have limitless time.

‘I will tell you in five minutes,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I will tell you five minutes after you leave the house with me.’

‘You want to be out in the street, for this great secret?’ she said, not understanding.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, I will tell you if you come away with me. If you put on a coat, and pack up a bag, and leave the city with me; for good; now.’

‘Did you – did you not understand what I said to you, a moment gone?’

‘I did. I just didn’t believe it.’

She stared. The fear was plainer again, yet not quite dominant in her face; exasperation vied with it, and something else, startled and very tentative.

‘I know you,’ he said. ‘At least, I believe I do. You have instructed me of your nature. The lessons were painful, and the pupil was stupid, but I learned in the end.’

‘And what am I?’ she said, trying for scorn, yet arriving closer to entreaty.

‘A bird and a cage. Not a bird in a cage, as you like to imagine:
that is sentiment, that is you indulging yourself in the pleasure of conceiving yourself a victim, and being warranted by it for any amount of clever poison. No, you are yourself the cage. It is not made of your circumstances. It is made of your passions; which, by the way, are very nasty ones. If you were happier, you would be ashamed of yourself. But the cage is small, and getting smaller as time goes by. It is too small for you already, and there is a bird inside, who requires to be let out.’

‘If this is your idea of a love-note, Signor Smooth, I am not surprised that you end up taking your pleasures in the sty, with the sows.’

‘It is my idea of the truth.’

‘How do you even
dare
to offer me this stuff? You! When you have blundered and battered your way around, from the moment you have arrived. And now you are going to set up for a truthteller? Do you not know how ridiculous you are?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do know how ridiculous I am. It has been brought home to me, I assure you. And you are right about the sty: I have rolled in shit in this city. I have had my soul stripped naked, in this city. What further can I lose, by telling you what I think of you? Besides, you like it.’

‘“I wonder that you will still be talking—”’

‘“—when nobody marks you”,’ finished Smith. ‘But you are not Beatrice and I am not Benedick, as we have already established. And you do like it. Listen to yourself. Your voice has got its strength back. Look in the mirror. Your eyes are bright again. I accuse you of enjoying yourself, right now.’

‘I am not.’

‘You are smiling.’

‘I deny it.’

‘Of course you do, Mistress No. You are the queen of denials, rebuffs and contradictions. But you like it, alright—’

‘No—’

‘You do; you like being matched. You like playing with someone who is as quick as you, as clever as you, as rude as you. Don’t you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Aha!’ cried Smith, and crowed comically like a cockerel: but quietly, so as not be overheard from downstairs.

‘You fool,’ said Tabitha, with a kind of undeniable fondness.

‘Yes. – The trouble is, you think I’m insulting you. You think we have begun the game again; and we have not, I don’t have time. What I am telling you is, you like being known, for it makes you feel less lonely – and I think you are the loneliest person I have ever met. And I am trying to tell you that
I
like
you
.’

‘Despite all the flaws I have, according to you?’

‘Despite them; because of them; who knows? I like all of you. I like the bird and I like the cage. I like the polished mind and the rough tongue. I like the tearing claws and the warm hands. I like the monster and I like the girl.’

‘I do not like myself very much,’ said Tabitha painfully.

‘I know.’

‘Since you came I have been very … confused. – You make me angrier, you know, because I cannot win very easily with you, so I have behaved worse with you than I think with anyone, even my mother; and then I feel worse about it than with anyone. Is that good? Can that be a good thing? It is a relief when I can just hate you.’