Golden Hill (4 page)

‘Migh’er done,’ he said.

Smith studied the expectant face, and considered the state of his pockets.

‘You didn’t, though, did you,’ he said.

‘No,’ agreed the soldier, amiably, and stuck his clay pipe back between his teeth.

With what sadder steps, and slower, Smith retraced his way, the reader may imagine; how the faces of passers-by, which had formerly expressed a cheerful involvement in their own concerns, now seemed locked tight, so many declarations of secretiveness and guile, not to be trusted; how the city itself, a few minutes before remarkable and new, now appeared provincial and small, rustic and contemptible, absurd in comparison to any metropolis of Europe,
et cetera
, with a mere delusive shine laid upon it by the morning. Even the savour of fresh bread, once he had returned to the coffee-house, stirred his appetite with less relish. He hesitated
at the threshold. He had been out of sight of the window when he was robbed, he calculated. Yet he had run past, and might have been seen. Some customer might have been going in, or coming out, at the critical instant. His catastrophe might have been deduced. Well, well: nothing for it but to spin the wheel, and play.

‘Service!’ he cried, entering a long low room canopied in smoke, diversified with steam, where men (all men) conversed in a gruff murmur that rose and fell like a masculine sea. At an unoccupied table he bounced into a chair and settled with a wide spread of knees, a confident sprawl of legs, a benignant beaming in all directions.

‘Service!’

Heads turned, but mildly, slowly; not – he judged – with that quickness that betokens an interest in a drama resumed at its exciting mid-point. Not as if they were expecting Act Two of
The Wrong’d Traveller
, in which Simon Simple (an
ingénu
from the country) loses his all to a sharper, and must throw himself upon the dubious mercy of Sir Bartholomew Quorum (a lawyer) and Mrs Spurt (a bawd). It seemed only the slow stir with which any coffee-house registers an unknown come among regulars; fresh supply of another talking head, loud or wise or foolish as the case may be, to be recruited into the great plural organism of the room, which now and again loses a body or gains a body, as people arrive and depart, but talks on, talks on.

‘Yessir?’ A boy had bustled up in a white apron. ‘Tea, coffee or chocolate, sir?’

‘A pot of the dark Mahometan, no cow juice.’

‘Yessir. Victuals?’

‘Basket o’ white tommy.’

‘Yessir. News-paper, sir?’

‘What do you have?’

‘
Post-Boy, Intelligencer
or
Monitor
, sir.’

‘All three, then.’

‘Yessir. In a moment, sir. May have to wait for the
Post-Boy
, sir. Only one copy in this morning, and it’s with those gentlemen over there.’ – A youngish pair, one bearded and one in horn-rimmed spectacles, laughing over by the window.

‘Just the others, then,’ said Smith. ‘No need to bother ’em.’

The rolls came, smelling of the oven, and the coffee in a pewter pot that London would have called ten years behind the fashion, its sides were so straight and its handle so lacking in decorative folderol. The boy whirled the breakfast in on one tray while he kept two more balanced up his arm; shifted, uncrooked his neck to release the folded pages he’d clamped against his shoulder with his chin; laid them before Smith; spun onward into the next figure of his coffee-house dance. Smith found his appetite returning. He inhaled the rising savours of basket and pot as if they were friends whose shoulders he could throw his arms around, and fell to his meal, munching and buttering, licking crumbs from his fingers while he propped the papers against the pot, and the clatter of plates and speech and the guggling liquid made their familiar music, played
continuo
.

When he had ate his fill, and proceeded from the urgent first cup and necessary second to the voluntary third which might be toyed with at leisure, without any particular outcry seeming to suggest he should be on his guard, he leant back, spread the city’s news before him, and, by glances between the items, took a longer survey of the room. Session of the Common Council. Vinegars, Malts, and Spirituous Liquors, Available on Best Terms. Had he
been on familiar ground, he would have been able to tell at a glance what particular group of citizens in the great empire of coffee this house aspired to serve: whether it was the place for poetry or gluttony, philosophy or marine insurance, the Indies trade or the meat-porters’ burial club. Ships Landing. Ships Departed. Long Island Estate of Mr De Kyper, with Standing Timber, to be Sold at Auction. But the prints on the yellowed walls were a mixture. Some maps, some satires, some ballads, some bawdy, alongside the inevitable picture of the King: pop-eyed George reigning over a lukewarm graphical gruel, neither one thing nor t’other. Albany Letter, Relating to the Behaviour of the Mohawks. Sermon, Upon the Dedication of the Monument to the Late Revd. Vesey. Leases to be Let: Bouwerij, Out Ward, Environs of Rutgers’ Farm. And the company? River Cargos Landed. Escaped Negro Wench: Reward Offered. – All he could glean was an impression generally businesslike, perhaps intersown with law. Dramatic Rendition of the Classics, to be Performed by the Celebrated Mrs Tomlinson. Poem, ‘Hail Liberty, Sweet Succor of a Briton’s Breast’, Offered by ‘Urbanus’ on the Occasion of His Majesty’s Birthday. Over there there were maps on the table, and a contract a-signing; and a ring of men in merchants’ buff-and-grey quizzing one in advocate’s black-and-bands. But some of the clients had the wind-scoured countenance of mariners, and some were boys joshing one another. Proceedings of the Court of Judicature of the Province of New-York. Poor Law Assessment. Carriage Rates. Principal Goods at Mart, Prices Current. Here he pulled out a printed paper of his own from an inner pocket, and made comparison of certain figures, running his left and right forefingers down the columns together. Telescopes and Spy-Glasses Ground. Regimental Orders. Dinner of the Hungarian
Club. Perhaps there were simply too few temples here to coffee, for them to specialise as he was used.

The pair by the window were coming over, still laughing, the one in the spectacles bearing the missing
Post-Boy
. He had a remarkably smooth, white, oval countenance, on which the dark circles of the horn frames made, somehow, a most neatly comic appearance. His hair was the stubble of one who usually wears a wig but is off duty.

‘Here you are,’ said the stranger, tilting a curious look at Smith. ‘No trouble, we’ve finished with it. You are welcome, sir, to all the slender pleasure it may give you.’ His voice was fastidiously educated and amused. ‘May I ask – did I just hear you say, “No cow juice”?’

‘It was in the nature of an experiment,’ said Smith. ‘I am new-come, and last night I drew a blank with a London word I thought was plain to all the world. So I made the venture of a little coffee cant today, just to see—’

‘Oh, you’ll have no luck with Quentin there, for he’s fluent in every English in which a cupful can be ordered, let alone Dutch, and most other tongues a sailor may bring through the door. French, Spanish, Danish, Portuguese. Latin, if all else fails.
Nonne, Quentinianus?’
he said, as the boy passed by, deep in trays.

‘Sic, magister,
’ said Quentin, gliding on.

‘Will you join me?’ Smith asked.

‘If you’re sure we don’t intrude—’ But they were already pulling chairs around, and waving two fingers at Quentin.

‘Septimus Oakeshott,’ said the smooth, pale one.

‘Hendrick Van Loon,’ said the other, pronouncing it with so little Dutch guttural, that Mr Smith took a moment to find the surname in it. Front of an army; name of a wading bird.

‘Richard—’ he began.

‘Oh, we know,’ said Septimus Oakeshott. ‘I’m afraid that everyone knows, Mr Smith. You are celebrated before you open your mouth. You are the very rich boy who won’t answer questions.’

‘Well …’

‘Unless, by chance,’ put in Van Loon, ‘you
do
answer them?’

‘Hendrick’s interest is professional,’ said Septimus, his comical eyebrows raised high on the blank egg of his forehead. ‘He actually writes for the
Post-Boy.’

‘Not wholly professional,’ said Van Loon. ‘My family has dealings with Gregory Lovell, so we are … intrigued … that you’ve come, Mr Smith. But it’s true that you’re news. And our friend Septimus here is plying his trade as well, in case you were wondering’ – paying Oakeshott smartly back – ‘for he is Secretary to the Governor, and we suspect him of keeping his ears wide open while he sits here in the Merchants.’

‘The Merchants?’

‘As opposed to the Exchange Coffee-House, back that way on Broad Street,’ said Septimus, pointing a white finger at the wall. ‘The coffee is better here, and the conversation.’

They both gazed hopefully at Smith. He, understanding that he was in the presence of the two powers of Press and Government, albeit their junior versions, gave his most guileless smile.

‘I’m afraid I am exactly as advertised,’ he said.

‘How unusual,’ said Septimus. ‘
Exactly
as advertised?’

‘Yes.’

‘What, in every detail?’

‘Yes.’

‘A perfect fit with legend?’

‘Mm-hm.’

Septimus waited, his face exhibiting the glazed patience of a porcelain owl, to see if there was more; but there was not, for Mr Smith was as patient as he. More coffee arrived, and the silence lengthened between the two ingenuous faces, with Van Loon glancing amused from one to the other, as if spectating at chess; and it was Septimus who spoke first, resuming the vein of his chatter as if no time had passed at all.

‘Then you must be a marvel of nature,’ he said, ‘quite remote from the usual run of mortals. For I am not as advertised, and he is not’ – indicating Van Loon. ‘You could make a little grammar of it. I am not, you are not, he or she or it is not as advertised. Speaking for myself, I rise in the morning, and it takes all the effort of which I am capable – the thought of my pious father the rector, and my six virtuous sisters – to stuff the billowing sackful of whim-whams, impulses and contradictions back behind my face, and turn myself out for the day as a plausible secretary again.’

He laid his white right hand tidily atop his white left hand, on the tabletop. Smith smiled appreciatively, but still declined to come out to play. Septimus tapped the toe of his shoe on the floor. Tap-tap-tap: a foot tutting.

‘How disappointing you are, Mr Smith. I understood you talked. “Talked the hind-leg off a donkey” was the phrase I heard.’

‘I prefer to talk myself out of trouble, Mr Oakeshott. Not into it.’

‘Do you anticipate trouble?’

‘Do you, sir?’

‘Never in life,’ said Septimus. They drank.

‘This is really very good coffee,’ said Smith.

‘Yes,’ said Van Loon. ‘It comes from the Leeward plantations, and the voyage is probably shorter than you are used to.’

‘I am not speaking officially,’ said Septimus. ‘But if I
were
– if I had my wig on – then there are several categories of thing we would rather you were not. We would rather you were not a spy. We would rather you were not a hireling of the ministry. We would rather you were not a scoundrel, come to spoil the credit of London paper in the city.’

‘I am not a spy or a hireling,’ Smith said promptly.

Septimus laughed. You would have thought it would crack the eggshell of his countenance, but his teeth proved as neat and white as the rest.

‘For myself,’ put in Van Loon cheerfully, ‘well – speaking for myself as a member of the family, not for the
Post-Boy
– we would not mind at all if you proved a scoundrel. Pray, be one. For if you’re a fraud, then there’s no drain in prospect on old Gregory’s funds, and our projects with him are not in danger; but he is treating you at present as the genuine article, and so we shall too, and be glad to dine with ye, and shake your hand.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Smith.

‘Now, I had better be getting back to the printing-house,’ said Van Loon, rising.

‘Would this be of any use to you?’ asked Smith, shaking out the page he had drawn from his pocket, and reaching it up.
London Prices Current
, it said across the masthead, and a date six weeks old.

‘Yes indeed,’ said Van Loon. ‘Indeed it would. The
Post-Boy
would be delighted. These are fresher by a fortnight than any I’ve seen.’

‘Take it, then.’

‘I thankee. So long, Septimus. See you later, Mr Smith.’

‘You will?’

‘Oh yes.’

He departed.

‘Why will he see me later?’ Smith asked.

‘Because you are dining at the Lovells’.’

‘And everyone knows this.’

‘They do. It’s a small town.’

‘Is it? I see streams of people, all in motion, and ships enough to turn Quentin there polyglot.’

‘True. But the ships come and go again, and the most part of the traffic of souls passes straight through. They walk up from the slips to the streets and are gone; the continent devours them. New-York is but a gullet. Few stay. Will you be staying?’

‘For a while.’

‘Well, if you stay till the snows come, you will discover just how tiny it can be. When the winter takes hold we all huddle in each other’s pockets. Colonial snow is a different article from the domestic: altogether fiercer.’

Septimus was playing with a tea-spoon.

‘Do you really have six sisters?’ asked Smith.

‘Yes. In Hampshire.’

‘Hence the name.’

‘Hence my name.’

‘May I ask you a question?’

‘What, another one? Luckily I am in more of an answering mood than you are. Go on.’

‘There is a board by the fort, with—’

‘Scalps nailed to it. Yes.’

‘What are they doing there?’

‘They are showing how much we love the French. In order to keep the river valley north of here empty of all but those who speak good English – or Dutch – the Government has a bounty
on the scalps of settlers
avec un mauvais façon de parler
, and once a year the friendly Mohawks bring down their crop to New-York, and we count out the cash. It’s a celebrated local occasion. They march along the Broad Way with their trophies on a pole, and the Governor receives them. I stand on his right. Everybody cheers. You have to remember that here, too, last year was rather tense.’