Golden Hill (8 page)

Smith, not sure of his ground, let himself be carried with the current; and he would have got away entire, if it had not been for a grubby child of nine or ten years, threading his way through the crowd, who that moment thrust a hat under his nose, and cried out, ‘Penny to build the fire, sir! Penny to burn the Pope, sir! Penny for the guy, sir!’ Smith, already five shillings (New Jersey) the lighter thanks to the church plate, cursed inwardly, and with a radiant outward smile stuffed sixpence (Maryland) into the ragged bonnet.

Strings and gangs of boys, all promising to burn Guy Fawkes, were out in force in the streets that afternoon when Smith made his way back to Golden Hill to take tea with Tabitha Lovell. He was obliged, several times, to dodge as if accidentally up alleyways, as he heard the collectors’ chant.

Down King Street, back up Crown Street:

Past the mouth of Rutgers Hill, south on William Street, and suddenly north again by way of Bloat Lane:

Sidling and doubling back so incoherently that the poor hydra was all scribbled to indistinguishable blackness:

The exercise was certainly such, as to fix the street-plan good and deep in Mr Smith’s head; and when he arrived, panting slightly, on the Lovells’ doorstep, he still possessed undisturbed the twelve shillings and sixpence he had set off with. He hoped that there might be something to eat inside.

If the Lovells’ house, the first time he had seen it, had worn (at least for him) the dress of mystery, and the second time of hospitality, this visit showed it in a duller mood. Tabitha was sitting in the upstairs room where he had surprised the girls the day he landed, with some abandoned sewing beside her. Mr Lovell and Flora appeared to have gone a-visiting, leaving her alone in the house except for Zephyra; who, having fetched a tray with teapot and cups, settled herself by the door and mended stockings, so that the proprieties were minimally observed. A grey light without promise painted all the surfaces, including Tabitha’s face. It had seemed as pretty as her sister’s, and considerably more interesting, when she was misbehaving by candle-light; now it seemed tired, and tight-drawn around the mouth in a way that Smith did not understand, as if she were continually gritting her teeth. The jolt of animation that had seized it when he came in had settled back into a kind of eager ill-humour, a readiness (as he read it) to disoblige, once he had indicated in what way she might needle him most relevantly. Perhaps he was not in the best mood either. He was not quite sure what he was doing there, or what was expected of him, in this sulky tête-à-tête. There was no little plate of cake or macaroons on the tea-tray. She poured the tea, and the spout of the pot rattled irritably against porcelain.

‘Tell me something,’ said Smith.

‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘What?’

‘Why did you throw my book?’

‘You asked me to.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Oh? My mistake, then.’

‘You know I didn’t. Really, why?’

‘I suppose I assumed that when somebody hands you a nauseating lump, they want it disposed of.’

Smith looked at her. ‘I would like to know,’ he said – annoyed, as much as curious.

‘Why? Oh, you seem disappointingly earnest today. To amuse myself, obviously. I didn’t know there would be conjuring tricks later. About that—’

‘It seemed a little cruel.’

‘Did it.’

‘Yes.’

‘It made you laugh.’

‘It did. But still.’

‘I am not sure I invited you over to lecture me.’

‘I am not sure why you invited me over at all.’

‘Well, not to moralise, that’s for sure. Your character is slipping, Mr Smith. Scoundrel or moralist: pick one. I assure you, Flora has squadrons of defenders. Armies. Legions. I had not thought you would turn out to be another.’

At this she sounded so unexpectedly woebegone that Smith repented his bad temper; indeed, felt it vanish and promptly could not remember where it had come from. He smiled at her.

‘I—’ he began.

‘God’s teeth,’ she said, looking into her lap, ‘you remind me of my mother.’

‘I— What?’

‘Never a day she was alive that she wasn’t
at
me, prating of kindness.’ Her voice climbed to a high-pitched foolishness, with much wet mashing and flapping of the soft palate. ‘“Oh, Tabitha, how can you? Oh, guard your tongue. Oh, what a thing to say. Oh, Gregory, what have I done to deserve this?”’

‘You miss her,’ said Smith, attending to the downcast gaze and the misery of the shoulders, rather than the nasty vigour of the mimicry.

‘No!’ she said, so emphatically, and looking up at him with such a jerk that he recoiled from the sympathetic crouch he had leaned forward into. ‘Not I. The mind of a milch-cow, and the clinging suckers of a squid.’

‘Look,’ Smith said, holding out his palms.

‘More stage magic?’ she asked, after a moment.

‘No, just a demonstration. Look: fingers, fingernails, ten grasping digits. No suckers. Hands, not tentacles.’

‘I see them.’

‘The mind you will have to take on trust.’

‘Trust
you
, Mr Smith? Good heavens.’

‘But I dare say it is not so different from yours. A little impatient at dealing with fools, a little unwilling to wait to be amused.’

‘A little cruel, too?’

‘Maybe.’

‘But we are not the same; we cannot be. You don’t have to wait. You are a man, and may go where you please and see what you please and say what you please.’

‘And you cannot? I haven’t noticed you hold back much.’

‘Now you
are
being a fool. I amuse myself because I must. You because, what, it is your whimsy. Or because you are a scoundrel, purposing to rob us. I haven’t forgotten, you know.’

‘Granted that you are a girl and cannot run away and join the dragoons. Granted that this city is not of the biggest. Still it is not without variety. Or curiosity. Mystery, even. I know that after four days. After a lifetime of New-York, I don’t see how you can doubt it; or justly call yourself confined, because you live here.’

She stared at him. Then she smiled.

‘You booby!’ said Tabitha. ‘Have you really not noticed?’

‘Noticed what?’ said Smith, feeling the first burn of a blush, at he-knew-not-what idiocy, naively committed.

‘That every time you meet me I am sitting down? That, damn your stupidity, there is a stick leaning on the arm of my chair?’

There was, now it occurred to him to look. A walking cane with a round metal head, which might, he realised belatedly, be more than an ornament. Mr Smith opened his mouth. Uncharacteristically, nothing came out. At the corner of his eye, black moved on grey: Zephyra in her corner had turned around.

‘So you see,’ Tabitha said triumphantly, ‘
confined
is the word. Barring a few painful expeditions, I have fifty years of this room to look forward to. Will you count my blessings for me now? Will you tell me I am lucky in my family? Will you offer to pray for me? I sting and I bite, yes, so those who come close enough to be bitten will not count me altogether pitiable.’

‘Even your friends?’ said Smith, finding his voice.

‘I do not recognise the category you speak of,’ said Tabitha.

Smith considered her, interpreting anew the temper and the bitten lip, the grinding teeth, the contempt for stories of courtship or adventure: which, he could now see, might be pre-emptive, rejection before there was a chance of being rejected. He had been warned, with teeth, away from pity; but he could not afford it anyway. It could not be his concern what the effect on her might be, if payment of the bill should damage or ruin Lovell, if it should in some wise undermine the room in which she sat. This was – it was doubly plain now – not the place for him to play, beyond the necessary play to support the business that had brought him. Not the place for any expenditure of sentiment, beyond the general appetite for life it had
seemed fitting for a Mr Smith to show. Yet an unwelcome compunction was moving in him, sharp-pointed, stitching him through to the spot where he sat, attaching him by thin threads.

‘All your life?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Only since I was fifteen. A bad break, from the barrels in the warehouse.’

‘And, can you stand?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can stand
up
, and I can even stand your questions.’ She pushed herself to her feet, leaving the stick where it stood, and there was no visible struggle, except in the working muscles around her mouth. She was taller than Flora, and not deformed, except that one of her feet, below her skirts, turned in more than it should, and there was something more rigid in the shape of her leg on that side. Zephyra was standing, too, with her hand to her mouth, but Tabitha made a sharp forbidding motion with her hand.

‘It is only,’ she said, ‘that it hurts.’

She took one – two – three effortfully graceful steps across the Turkey-carpet towards him, and swayed. He leapt forward from the chair, and was in time to catch her by the hands before she fell. They were hot, almost feverish. He steered her back to her seat as best he could, their legs moving in time like awkward dancers; and all the while her face was alive with mockery.

‘Oh, Mr Smith!’ she whispered. ‘I believe you have
saved
me.’

‘I think I should go,’ he said.

‘Coward,’ she said. And then, as he was sidling towards the door, ‘I know why a magician claps his hands.’ Laughter followed him down the stairs, but it seemed to him that it was shame that kept a lazy, lolloping pace alongside. No need to pursue him: he was already caught.

Smith broke his economic vows and commanded a meal at the Merchants in despite of the hour, hoping that a solid something in his stomach would counter-act upon the agitation in his cranium. He ate his chop with a kind of defiance. One of the news-papers – not the
Post-Boy
– had reported him, under ‘Fresh Arrived’, as ‘a
Turkish
Illusionist, richer than
King Midas
, if the Rumor Itself be Gold not Counterfeit’. The coffee-room was far emptier than usual, and Quentin missing, replaced by a woman who might be his mother. Beyond the window-glass, the afternoon plummeted into darkness. The darkness was rent by cries, whizzes, and sudden surprising gouts of flame. The New-Yorkers, it seemed, kept the feast of Guy Fawkes grandly, on the large scale. He would have guessed that fervour for it would dwindle away, so far from the Parliament that poor Fawkes had failed to blow up with his gunpowder, but the opposite appeared true. He supposed he might go and see; there was little enough here in the way of diversion or conversation, to quell the memory of recent embarrassment.

The blood flared in his cheeks again, when he came out, but this time from cold. A bitter wind had come in, from off the East River, and licked at his skin as a salamander might, if that creature’s legend were reversed, and it lived in ice not fire, with a body of glassy blue. It gave him an appetite for whatever bonfire the collecting boys had scraped together. On the Common, presumably; that was the way the foot traffic seemed to be going, in narrow streets thicker thronged by shadows the farther he went. First a few, darting up as quiet as fishes towards the junction with Smith Street, then more, flitting in from both directions along
Nassau, school upon school of indistinguishable citizens, and all strangely hushed, it seemed to Smith, though a species of dull roar seemed to be sounding up ahead.

‘Cold night!’ he said cheerfully to the street of walkers in general, but earned nothing back but a few grunts and hums; there was even, he had the impression, a slight drawing-back from him, as if he had shown an unseemly levity. The streets of New-York were perplexingly altered in their spirit tonight, and not precisely in the direction of jubilation, or festival ease. The citizens slipped forward in their deft black myriad, unobtrusive, sombre; but the ruddy glare that now spilled back from the street’s opening ahead onto the Broad Way threw their shadows back behind ’em, and the shadows told a different story. Twenty foot, thirty foot tall, they flickered in antic motion across the walls of houses; capered, stretched and stilt-walked over red-dyed brick-and-plaster, with spindle-knees and heads elastic. Metamorphosis everywhere: how thorough, how complete the alteration the night effected, he did not perceive until he was carried by the current into the back of the crowd at Broad Way, and could see the sources of both light and noise.

The street was lined along both sides with people stamping their feet.
Thud – thud – thud
, not in time but in sluggish pounding waves.
Thud – thud – thud
, where usually the costers sold and the slaves swept, in civility and melancholy. And to this rhythm, a thing aflame was approaching, from which the shadows streamed. A kind of juggernaut, stuck with many torches, and bundles of hissing, sparking firecrackers; a moving, skirted mass as wide as the road, on which rose three monstrous heads, gleaming in lines of gleeful red where fresh paint had been applied to pates and noses and villainous grins, as if Mr Punchinello had been enlarged to
giant size three times over. And drawing along this mass of carnival wickedness were figures in robes with hoods rising to points seven feet, eight feet above the cobbles, and all seeming, beyond their own natural movement as they tugged on ropes in irregular heaves, to be wriggling and flowing and twisting as the red glare swayed that lit them. It was a spectacle of nocturnal frenzy, gravely – almost silently – executed. Here and there, yes, a child chattered, but the
thud – thud – thud
of many feet drove gravity into the scene like hammers driving nails. Those who had thronged with Mr Smith to the corner of King Street with the Broad Way were stamping too. The air seemed to be shaking, and their faces seemed to him to wear a common mask, of eager, reverent, anger.