Black Ajax
Black Ajax
George MacDonald Fraser
Chapter 2 - Lucien de la Guise
Chapter 3 - Marguerite Rossignol
Chapter 11 - Henry Downes Miles
Chapter 12 - William Crockford
Chapter 13 - H.R.H. the Prince of Wales
Galway, Ireland, 1818
The black man is dying, but neither he nor any of the other men in the barn suspects it. After all, he is quite young, and if the heavy negroid face is unhealthily puffy and badly scarred by old wounds which show oddly pale against the coarse dark skin, these are hardly fatal signs, and not unusual in his profession. He
slumps
, overweight and flabby, on a bench against the rough timber wall, a grimy blanket draped across his naked shoulders, an old hat on his woolly bullet head, and the hand holding a bottle of cheap spirits shakes visibly when he raises it to his lips, one of which has been split so deeply that it has healed into a permanent cleft running halfway to his chin. His arms are long and muscular, and though there are creases of fat overlapping his waistband, his sheer bulk gives an impression of formidable strength not yet quite gone to seed. His eyes are closed, and he is plainly tired, but not with a weariness that can be cured by rest; there may be no outward sign of deadly illness, but the pain in his kidneys and the ringing in his head are now continuous, and seem to him to be draining the spirit out of his big, hard-used body. A few years ago he was as famous in England as Napoleon; now he hardly remembers that time.
Squatting in the straw, watching him anxiously and now and then addressing him in low voices to which he responds with a grunt or a nod, are two men in the crimson coats and yellow facings of the 77th Foot. They are not typical of the British Army, for they, too, are black. They have been drawn to the barn by fraternal sympathy with the dying man, a sentiment not shared by the only other person in view, a small, rat-like Cockney shabbily dressed in a worn tail-coat whose buttons are either tarnished or missing, stained pantaloons, and a beaver hat almost innocent of fur. He is the manager, for want of a better
word, of the man on the bench, and is reflecting glumly that his protege is the very picture of a beaten-up, broken-down, drunken pug who could (bar his sable skin) serve as a model for all those other prize-ring cast-offs from whom the manager, in his time, has scraped a meagre dishonest living, parading them from one country fair to the next, shouting himself hoarse with lies about their past prowess, thrusting them into combat with a bellyful of beer to batter or be battered by the local bully, and passing round the hat afterwards. It may be a far
cry
from the
Fives
Court or Wimbledon Common, from the hundred-guinea purses and the twenty thousand pound side-bets, but it usually pays enough to keep manager and man in food and drink as far as the next village or market-town.
Not that he expects much today, from the ragged, noisy crowd of yokels and urchins gathered about the makeshift roped square in the farmyard. Bleeding bumpkins, in the manager's estimate, never seen a shilling in their lives, living on pepper, potatoes and water, slaves to Popish superstition, and content to sleep in sties with their animals, if they have any. His one hope is the local squireen, easily recognisable because he wears boots and sits in a dog-cart above the throng, passing the flask with his cronies and flipping a farthing to the ancient fiddler scraping out a jig tune; with luck the bucolic potentate will be good, if not for cash, at least for a leg of mutton and a bag of spuds, provided the fight is a good and bloody one.
That depends, the manager is well aware, not so much on the local champion, a brawny, red-haired blacksmith who waits basking in the admiration of the gaping rustics, as on his own black fighter, whose behaviour this past month has been causing concern. Moody and withdrawn at the best of times, he has been going into long, trance-like silences, coming out of them only at the call of “Time!”, when he has instinctively come to scratch with his fists up, moving in a slow parody of that lightning dance-step which was once the wonder of the
Fancy
. Twice he has been so sluggish that the despairing Cockney has had to throw in the towel against opponents too unskilled or lacking the strength to knock him out; once, he has come unexpectedly alive and smashed an opponent into insensibility in a matter of seconds. His manager can only pray that today he will perform somewhere between those two extremes and give the spectators their money's worth.
Assuming, that is, that he can be got on his feet and led out to the yard, where the crowd is growing restive, the shrill Irish voices demanding a sight of the famous black, the legendary American hero whose feats once echoed even to this distant backwater, and who remains sprawled and apparently comatose on his bench in the dim interior of the barn. As the two soldiers and the cursing manager haul him upright he mutters a complaint of noises in his head; they demand, what noises?, but he cannot tell them. The manager becomes abusive, and to their astonishment and alarm the battered black face, its eyes still closed, smiles as though at some happy memory, for it is not the angry Cockney snarl that he hears, but another voice, eager and excited, from long ago, ringing down the years …
“You know how many people came to Copthorn? Ten thousand! Ten goddam thousand, boy! An' they came on foot, an' on horses, an' in carriages, to see Tom Molineaux, the Black Ajax – you! An' when you meet Cribb again, there'll be twenty, maybe thirty thousand, with the Dook o' Clarence, and Mistah Brummell, an' Lord Byron, an' every
bang-up
swell in London, yeah, an' maybe the Prince his own self! With half a million guineas a-ridin' on the fight – an' a million dollars' worth of it'll be on
you
!”
Through the fog that clouds his mind, he hears it, and then it fades to a whisper, and is gone. He opens his eyes and stands, swaying slightly, steadied by the two soldiers, while the Cockney at the barn door proclaims his fighter. As the raucous voice silences the spectators' chatter, the black man closes his eyes again, wincing at the stabbing pain in his lower body. Death is much closer now, but he is not aware of its approach, and if he was he would not care. The manager's speech has finished, the fiddler strikes up a lively march, the black soldiers urge him gently forward, and he takes a faltering step. The scraping of the fiddle is drowning out the noises in his head, then blending into another sound from far away, the thumping of brass and a kettle drum's rattle, growing louder amidst a tumult of distant voices, the murmur of a great multitude, and the music of Yankee Doodle, stirring him to action …
Soft grass under restless feet shod in black pumps and white silk stockings with floral patterns. He skips on the damp turf, and a smirr of rain is on his face and chest, shivering him with its chill, as he
moves forward into the winter sunlight, drawing the great caped coat closer about his shoulders. Out of the shadow, into the open, and the murmur of the throng swells to a great shout, Yankee Doodle rises to a crescendo, and now his feet are marching, the press of faces before him falling back to give him passage. White faces, all about him, smiling and grim, curious and jeering, hostile and laughing, fearful and admiring, marvelling and excited, and for a brief moment memory mingles with imagination in the mist of his mind, and he sees himself with their eyes …
The caped figure striding through the lane of people and carriages held back by the “
vinegars
”, brisk burly attendants in long coats and top hats carrying horsewhips, his stride becoming a swagger as he shrugs off the cape to reveal the magnificent body beneath, the black skin gleaming as though it has been oiled, the jaunty head with its tight curls, the white silk breeches with ribbons at the
knee
and coloured scarf encircling the slender waist. He breaks into the shuffle of a plantation dance, laughing and waving to either side, a fine lady smiles from beneath the broad brim of her Mousquetaire and tosses him a posy which he catches, putting a flower behind his ear and bowing low over her hand before dancing on, blowing kisses to the roaring crowd as the faces retreat into shadow and the sound dies …
He is floating high above them, looking down on a vast human amphitheatre, thousands upon cheering thousands ranged about a great roped circle, and beyond them the rolling wooded English countryside is bright in the December noontide, with scattered bands of running people and carts and carriages and horsemen, all hastening to join the huge expectant throng whose every eye is turned on that black and white figure, no bigger than a doll far beneath him, striding ahead, arms raised and hands clasped overhead in the age-old salute of the prize ring. Within the circle he can see the roped square, and the little knots of men standing and crouched about it, the umpires by the scales, the bottle-holders and timekeeper, the vinegars patrolling the space between square and outer circle to ensure order, the gamblers' runners scurrying to and fro, and at one corner of the square a slim slight man, a Negro like himself but lighter in colour …
… whose eyes are glittering with fierce excitement as they come face to face by the roped square. The mulatto is muttering to him and
towelling his shoulders vigorously against the biting cold, but the black fighter does not hear him. As he pulls off his waist-scarf and knots it to the ring-post all his attention is directed to the opposite corner where a man is standing clear of the rest, a tall white man with a rugged open face beneath crisp black curls, clad like himself in breeches and pumps, a man with the shoulders of an Atlas, massive arms crossed on his deep chest, heavy-hipped and long-legged, shifting slightly as he waits, rising on tip-toe and down again. He nods with a little smile, and as the black man raises a hand in reply his other self, back in the Irish barn, feels a strange peace settling upon him, a sense of contentment at the end of a long journey, and he realises with a growing wonder that the journey ended there, by that roped square long ago, when he looked across into the strong acknowledging face of the tall curly-headed man, nodding to him, and recognised, for the first and only time in his life, a companionship that was far beyond any bond of love or affection or loyalty that he had ever known, because it was of equals, apart and alone. He cannot explain it or even understand it, but he knows that the tall man feels it too, and he laughs in pure happiness as he snatches the hat from the top of the ring-post where his scarf is fluttering in the breeze, and sends it skimming over the ropes …
… to fall in the dust of the farmyard, startling a stray fowl which runs squawking wildly, and the red-haired blacksmith is rushing him, blue eyes glaring and arms flailing, and his feet shift and his body sways instinctively as he evades the attack. He knows he is too exhausted, in too much pain, to raise his hands or move his feet, yet somehow his hands are up, his feet are moving, and as the red-haired ruffian turns, the black left fist stabs into his face, and again, and yet again, and that is the last thing he remembers as the shadows close in, and then there is no more memory.