Authors: Francis Spufford
‘So sorry,’ said Septimus to the world in general. ‘Up!’ he added to Smith. ‘Good evening, sir!’ to an astonished, red-faced householder, his mouth an O. ‘Shut the door!’ – over his shoulder to the maid, as they plunged up the treads of a grand oval staircase, elegantly carpeted, radiantly lit, where guests clearly stuffed and basted with dinner were craning out of door-ways. Round and up, round and up; flashes of dining-room, where the walnut gleamed, and of a drawing-room with card party where a flutter of ladies, having withdrawn from the gentlemen, was being teased from the door-way by a moustached officer. ‘I say—’ said the officer, wondering whether he was supposed to perform some gallant intervention.
‘Sorry – terrible hurry—’ said Septimus, brushing past.
‘Excuse us,’ Smith threw in.
‘Your servant, sir – your pardon, madam – coming through—’
‘Thank you – obliged, obliged – marvellous party – very kind,’ said Smith, trying to smooth somewhat the impression they were making, yet helplessly on the verge of laughter at this sudden transition from naked Fear to clothed Society, this dash as quick as a scene-shift from wild black street to domain of piquet and face-powder. The trick was to stay close behind. Septimus
progressed upward like an extremely well-mannered fox going through a hen-house. In his wake, feathers, clucking, dismay, uproar − yet he behaved as if he had such a perfect right to push his way through someone else’s house from bottom to top, that no-one gathered the confidence to protest effectually until he was well past.
The twist of the stairs tightened; the carpet beneath their galloping feet gave way to boards; a door presented itself with a simpler, barer flight of staircase beyond. Glancing back down the well, Smith saw beneath the spiral of astonished faces tilted up at him that there was a commotion in the hall now, with shouts and banging, but that, judging by the banging, the door to the street had not been opened. Not yet, anyway. Up the next flight. Oilcloth, plain wood, a child’s wooden horse: a nursery. Past a nurse with a babe in arms that began, reliably, to bawl. Last flight: up among the eaves, servants’ bedrooms, grey plaster, cold air, truckle beds. Along a mean corridor, Septimus counting along the rooms on their right. Last room. Door of plain pine. Door locked from inside. Septimus rapped on it. No answer but a faint, sickly groan.
Smith looked back. The temper of the house-noise was altering behind them, now that the hypnotic effect of Septimus’ passing was worn off.
‘Bother,’ said Septimus, ‘I shall have to send them a note in the morning’, and kicked the door open with his pointed black shoe.
The woman who had been lying in the bed in the corner with the toothache screamed, or tried to. Her jaw was bound up with a grey clout of rags, and she could only open her mouth enough to emit a high-pitched moan. She clutched the sheet up to her chin.
‘Come now, mistress, your virtue is perfectly safe,’ said Septimus reprovingly. ‘We are only interested – in – your—’ The last words were said in grunts, he having bounded across the room and addressed himself to the casement.
The top half of the wooden sash could be forced down to the mid-point of the window, creating a slot two feet high at about chest height. There, in the darkness outside, the loose end of the rope was swinging down over the guttering at the edge of the roof, just above. Alas, the eaves of the house projected outward, from window-top to gutter, so the rope hung a good yard away, and there was not much length to it, perhaps a scant man’s height, and no knot at the end neither, to arrest a pair of slipping feet or (worse) slipping hands. Four storeys down, their pale faces gleaming like bubbles around the edge of a glass of dark wine, the mob ringed the front door, shouting – shouting
through
it, for it had still not been opened, the house having learned caution from Smith and Septimus’ first invasion. None of the besiegers were looking up. To them, the eaves of the house were deep-shadowed.
Septimus cast round for a chair. There was none.
‘Better give me a leg,’ he said. Standing on Smith’s bent knee, he leaned forward over the sash and wriggled forward, with his stomach as a fulcrum, and his head, chest and out-stretched arms projecting free and unsupported into the night air. Smith gripped his coat as he inched forward. The sabre in its scabbard projected awkwardly, clipping Smith’s chin. Septimus’ hands found the rope.
‘You will forgive the ludicrous posture,’ said he – and, gripping the rope in both fists as tightly as he could, he wriggled the rest of the way over the sill, a black secretarial seal entering the ocean, pushed off from the window above fifty or so feet of empty air,
and swung out to dangle over the street, making a
huff
of effort. His thin legs kicked, his hands slid: but then they caught, and he wrapped himself tight round the fibres. As soon as his weight was full on the rope, he began to rise, and the twisted clove-hitch he had made of himself disappeared upwards, with further quiet
huffs
and
mmphs
where he was scraped on the gutter. What seemed only a couple of seconds later, the rope reappeared, empty. An urgent hiss from above: ‘Come on!’
At this point Mr Smith made the mistake of pausing for an instant, and looked down, considering how he would have to scramble up and out above the fifty-foot void without a helper behind to steady him; how he would need to throw himself beyond all chance of appeal upon the mercy of a narrow, slippery cord; how much more likely it was than any other outcome that he should tumble screaming through the air, and strike the stones below with a croquillant squelch, in a posture of annihilation. He paused on the brink; and, hesitating, looked back into the room.
But it was no longer empty. Coming through the door-way, three steps away, was the householder, his periwig off and a fowling piece in his hands, with other male guests crowding at his shoulders.
‘What the devil do you think you are—?’ began his host.
Propelled by embarrassment, and by a prospect of explanations that made the atrocious fall before him seem at least the simpler alternative, Smith scrambled up onto the sash in a kneeling crouch, and before consideration could weaken resolve any further, leapt.
One hand caught on the rope, but the other’s knuckles bumped off it, and he swung for a moment over the gulf by the grip of one burning, slithering palm. The mob-filled deep spun beneath
his feet, and the indifferent darkness of the continent leaned in, prompt to claim him. – Then his other flailing hand got purchase and up he rose out of the pit, away from the window filled with open-mouthed faces, over the hard sharpness of the gutter, and up to a tiled slope where Septimus and Achilles were pulling, braced against the drop, with teeth bared in effort. They landed him like a fish and dragged him up over the roof-crest and into a leaded valley beyond.
‘Better move on a house or two,’ panted Septimus, and the three of them scrambled up and down and up and down the steep tiled slopes till the noise of the street diminished behind them. Septimus held up a finger, and they listened: a hubbub, still, but not a hubbub rising. A hubbub on the contrary spreading its skirts and settling into a mutter. No figures rising through trapdoors. No battering-ram blows upon the Princes Street door. Perhaps the members of the mob would countenance slaughter on a midnight impulse, but found they could not contemplate house-breaking, without a calculation of daylight consequences. Or perhaps the hot blood was simply cooling. Soon, the sounds from below were those of departure. King Mob melted into his separate parts, and slunk away, restored to the mode of individual existence.
The three on the roof looked at each other. Septimus’ face was calm but his eyes were wide, as if the wind had changed and frozen him in a moment of disbelief. Achilles was smiling slightly. After a while they moved again, to an east-facing slope of slates commanding a view of Broad Street’s lower end, descending to the docks, and there in a crevice they settled until the streets should become quiet. Achilles had acquired one of the bottles of rum that had been circulating by the fire, and this they drank
the greater part of while they waited to descend – it having been agreed that Smith had better come with them tonight into the safety of Fort George – passing it from hand to hand convivially, and without urgency, each one succumbing at times to a quiet spasmodic laughter for which the others required no explanation. At the northern limit of the dark city, the dull red glow of the fire smouldered on, while the shrieks and the pyrotechnical whip-cracks faded away. A man with a ladder came and extinguished the pale lanterns along Broad Street. Over the water, the scattered twinkles of Breuckelen went out one by one, and the cold wind brought faint creaks from the rigging of the ships riding at anchor, borne up to them in chill gusts and eddies, there where they perched, high above Manhattan.
The Fort, behind its ramparts and its outer rind of scorched and roofless barracks, turned out far less military in feeling than Smith had imagined, with a refurbished old Dutch house for the Governor extended out into a higgledy-piggledy quadrangle, which by night seemed to possess the peace of a cloister. Or would have done so, had there not been three musty bell-tents pitched on the grass for the sentries displaced by the fire. Septimus’ dwelling was a pair of rooms up a staircase in the corner: a sleeping chamber, with bed and palliasse, and a small day-room or parlour-room with a casement window overlooking the lawn, and a sopha losing its stuffing, beside a little fireplace. Here Septimus placed Smith, and left him with a blanket, tho’ without conversation. The awkwardness between them that danger and
hilarity had dissolved was drifting back into place, like a sediment in a briskly-shaken bottle that, when the shaking ceases, begins at once to float down again. Smith was embarrassed, and alarmed at the dependence he had demonstrated; Septimus was angry at what he had been compelled to do, and anxious about what damage he might (on the morrow) prove to have done, by the escapade, to his standing in the colony; and all for the sake of one who might very well turn out no more than a travelling rogue.
The sopha was too short for Smith, and the mutinous springs beneath its torn velvet pressed lumpishly into his back. But the rum had soaked his consciousness through, and he tumbled off into a confused depth of sleep, accompanied by the pattern of the lumps, which incorporated itself into his dreams, so that at times he appeared to himself to have become a chess board, to be stiffly locked and strenuously divided into squares which (as well as being different colours) stood at different heights. Here there was something which must be put into order; yet though he revisited it again and again, the puzzle remained always still to be done. The different heights were of immense significance. The different roughnesses too. Yet a leftward twist – a kind of siphoning mutual substitution – no – back at the beginning again. Or sometimes, he was a giant slumbering upon the points of a mountain range, poised on nothing but the lumps, and must compose himself to perfect stillness, or he would fall off. Roll from spiky safety into an abyss on all sides. Yet no sooner had the fall begun than he was restored to the uncomfortable heights, with something to do, something to do—
A banging woke him. He startled awake and lay listening. His head ached and his mouth was dry. It was the pit of the night, some cold recess of the small hours. A faint smear of moon-light
crept through the diamond panes of the casement, no brighter than the luminescence of a snail. His heart raced. All seemed still, but for the sound. He thought at first of fists hammering on the lodging’s outer door – of the mob reconstituted, and back in pursuit! – but it was not coming from outside, and it was a wooden sound, a hard regular knocking. Perhaps a shutter was loose and the wind had risen. Still mazed, still half-stupid, he uncoiled from the sopha, and padded to the inner-chamber door. The moon’s trail of reluctant phosphor followed him; not much of that dim, snailish light, but enough to see, when he opened the door, Septimus and Achilles in vigorous congress, the head of the bed striking the wall. They saw him seeing – their motion arrested, both pairs of eyes looking up at him.
Smith groaned, pulled the door shut, and went and sat down by the ash-filled grate with his head in his hands. After an instant’s silence, there came through the door the sound of furious swearing, of clothes being frantically pulled on and feet stamped into shoes. Then Septimus burst into the room in a night-robe. He did not look collected, he did not look china-smooth. His skin was blotched with shadow, and his mouth was a writhing black square.
‘Good God!’ he cried. ‘Is there no end to your intrusions, you shameless wretch? Must I be punished immediately for helping you? You didn’t even have the decency to wait till morning, did you, you little coxcomb. Oh no, straight on with the damned squeeze. Maybe no-one else can tell you for the Drury Lane offal you are, but I can – oh, I can. So, out with it! What do you want? What are you after, you—’ But then he stopped, because Smith was not, in fact, sitting with his legs complacently crossed, and a sharp smirk of satisfaction on his face. His face was invisible behind his hands, and his fingers were digging into his temples,
and he was making small sounds of despair.
‘What?’ demanded Septimus, still angry.
‘What?’
‘I thought I heard a shutter banging.’
‘A shutter. I have no shutters.’
‘I didn’t know that! I came in half-asleep. It was an accident. Believe me, I had no desire to walk in upon your – your—’
‘You know what it was.’
Smith took away his hands. ‘Do I?’ he said. There was, for the first time, a note of defiance or even anger in
his
voice; but his eyes were wet, and gleaming in the moon-light.
‘You are confusing me,’ said Septimus. ‘You talked like a street-corner molly-boy in the coffee-house; and now you are all weeping innocence. Is this your method of work, to pretend to a shock, that a man may—’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Smith, ‘I am not trying to blackmail you. I am not trying to blackmail you! And as for innocence, I can name the act you were engaged in, in six tongues, including gutter Arabic and medical Latin, I thank you. I am quick with languages; voices too. I pick them up. They stick to me. Sometimes I use the wrong one, in haste. That was what I did in the Merchants – used the wrong tongue to you. And I am sorry for’t, as I am sorry now, for blundering in. It was a poor recompense for saving my life. I ask your pardon. There! And if I think the worse of you, it is not because you are a sodomite.’