Authors: Francis Spufford
‘Would you tell Tabitha—’ began Smith, his tongue thick.
Lovell held up a finger.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, no. No messages from you to any of mine. You will stay away from my daughters, and my house, and my business, and my friends, and everything of mine. You may do well enough in this company, but you are spoiled meat for daylight society, I can tell you. Not a door on the island will open to you. We let you in, and look what happened, you pox on legs. William,’ he added civilly, nodding to the lawyer, and went.
As Lovell passed De Lancey, he drew him into speech for a moment or two, and he must have conveyed what he had just learned, for as the merchant left the room, De Lancey turned to Smith, and directed on him a look of paternal disappointment, with a rumpling of the eyebrows, as if to express surprise that Smith had led the town a dance for such a very dull reason. He rang on his glass with a spoon.
‘Let’s have a toast, lads, before the season parts us and we all go our ways,’ he declared. ‘What shall it be?’
‘Confusion to the Governor!’
‘Nay, to all tyrants!’
‘To our ancient rights!
‘To the wisdom of the law!’
‘To the free men of the jury!’
‘To the charms of Mrs Tomlinson!’ said a coarser wag, and there was a laughing masculine groan, generally sustained.
Smith, in the lull of sound following, said something indistinct; and both the connection of ideas from the mention of Terpie, and
the recollection that he was for today the mascot of their cause, made an appetite to hear what the dissolute little rascal had to say, especially among those who had had no direct acquaintance with him.
‘Stand up, boy,’ urged a hubbub of voices. ‘Out with it, out with it, we’ll hear ye.’
Smith wobbled upright, by the wall, and held his glass out, stiff-armed.
‘To Septimus Oakeshott!’ he cried, in a loud, miserable, belligerent voice.
This was found tasteless and incomprehensible, once it was clear he was not going to add anything of a lighter nature, anything by way of a pleasantry. There was a tutting and a growling of disapprobation, and when he blared it out drunkenly again – and again – and went on doing it, there was a turning away, a detaching and departing, with curses and shaken heads and backward looks at him where he stood staring at the fire and waving his bandaged hand. It continued until the party was dwindled down to nothing, and Mr Smith was left completely and entirely alone.
Smith took to his bed. The domestics of the Black Horse kept their distance; there were no knocks upon the door, no offers of a doctor or solicitations to shave him or feed him. The side of the bed seemed the height of an Alp. He levered himself up on his left arm and fell forward upon the covers, shaking and shivering. The project of getting his coat or his shirt off over the burned hand
defeated him, and he only kicked his shoes free before rolling himself as best he could in the blankets, in a kind of sausage with the hurt arm sticking out beside his head. Drawing the bed’s curtains was beyond him, so the winter dark and the patter of snow flowed in unimpeded from the icy window-glass of the room, and the pale winter day leaked in in the same way, and the dark again, while he lay helpless. He plummeted into sleep as into a deep abyss, and the mattress seemed to lurch under him as unsteadily as the deck of a ship, and sometimes the tube of blankets was as hot as a furnace, and sometimes he was so cold that his teeth ached and chattered. Abyss, ship, furnace, ice-house. Ice-house, furnace, ship, abyss. There was no comfortable way to stow the thumb upon the pillow, or beneath, or beside it, and as he rolled, it would be rubbed or caught, and send slivers of pain spiking into the hot or cold turmoil of his dreams: for fever had him, and made him work, and all his rest was netted with branching pathways along which he must labour, effortfully trying to count spilling masses of powdery things, or remember momentous catalogues whose heads obliviously ate their tails, or to persuade animals into boxes without sides or bottoms. Ship, ice-house, abyss, furnace. Lord ——, his father, Cadwallader Colden, Mr Lovell, all berated him. De Lancey laughed, rich and slow, and his laughter wound richly and slowly in twists onto a bobbin. Tabitha presented her back to him, and when he turned her by her shoulder, why, the front of her was her back too. Septimus bled again. ‘Save the snow!’ roared Lennox. ‘Not a minim of it must be lost, for we can bundle it back inside him!’ With Lennox and Achilles, he pushed the crimson slush through an aperture in Septimus’ leg the size of a rabbit-hole, and Septimus swelled out till his buttons burst, into a wine-coloured snow-man, only still with Septimus’
natural head atop it, speaking wittily from grey lips. Furnace, ice-house, ship, abyss. Around and around: none of the dreams once, it seemed, but all repeating on a loop of variations, as if some kapellmeister of fever were driving them through an endless fugue. He baked and he froze, interminably. He opened his eyes on the room bright or dark, and it seemed only one chamber of an uncountable spawning of chambers, jelly-walled. He slept on, shaking.
As he slept, Achilles chipped out a grave in Trinity churchyard, softening the iron earth with burning lamp-oil. To passers-by on Broad Way, the little blue flames crept and glowed as if a will-o’-the-wisp were loose in the night among the tombs. As Smith slept, Septimus was buried, and the Rector of Trinity read the service from the Prayer Book over the black rectangle in the white snow. The 20th December slid through walls of jelly into the 21st; the 21st December through tropics of heat and cold into the 22nd.
But there came a lucid waking eventually, unlike the others. Smith opened his eyes upon a renewed winter night, and discovered the bed level and steady beneath him. He could not see anything, and he had no idea what hour or even what day it was, but he felt himself for the first time prosaically present, and the night (though cold) prosaically separate from him. His thumb hurt. He was rackingly thirsty. He unwound himself with difficulty from the bedding, got his feet upon the floor, and felt about in the black room, bumping against furniture and dislodging small objects. He found a jug and ewer on a sideboard of some kind, and drank most of the flat dusty water in the jug. He could feel it going down him in a grateful wet tide, triggering his body’s next need, which he relieved by pissing into the ewer; or, mostly into it. Then he felt his way back to the bed, and was able to dig down and climb
between the smooth sheets. Sorrow and shame reminded him, undeliriously, of their presence, but they would wait; he banished them on a promise of attention later, and dropped back into an unconsciousness that was, in comparison to what had gone before, all delicious, all cool.
Then it was daylight, and he lay upon a pillow the light revealed to be smeared with dried blood. He was filthy too. He could feel that his limbs all over were sticky with the exudate of the fever. He stirred his legs beneath the linen and they seemed thin and fragile. He was as weak as water: but his mind was as clear as water. He looked up at the canopy of velvet, and listened to street noises: muffled speech, the trudge of feet in snow, sledge runners hissing, the snorting breath of a horse. It was another morning when Septimus was not in the number of those awakening. It was another day when Septimus was dead, and it would be followed by further days when Septimus was dead until the end of the world.
I am not near as clever as I believed, he thought. I imagined that I was playing a deep game, by rules all of my own making, and so I wandered without attending into other games already begun whose rules I did not wait to fathom. I have blundered again and again. I brought Terpie into the play, and roused up her desire to be what she used to be. I let Septimus try to protect me from the consequences, and instead made sure they were visited all on him. I made his memory an object of contempt. I gave one party a weapon against the other, when I did not mean to take sides. And Tabitha! I meant to woo Tabitha, and she tried to trap me. I meant to leave her alone, and it called out of her an experiment in trusting me, which I crushed. Blunder upon blunder; nothing but blunders; half a hundred blunders. – It will be
observed that these realisations were coming rather late, and that Mr Smith was annexing for himself all the blame in the neighbourhood; but perhaps wisdom is always wont to arrive late, and to be a little approximate on first possession. – All this while, he thought, ever since I left Lord ––—’s house, I have exalted in my mind my precious sovereign will. I have told myself, that the greatest thing in the world is to preserve my power of choosing for myself. I have made sacrifices for it. Indeed I might say I have made sacrifices to it. I made an idol, I built an altar, and I have poured out on it— He stopped himself, but the snow still crimsoned on his mind’s Common. – I came here with a secret, and I have used it to persuade myself that I may be careless here, as careless as I like, on the argument that, if they knew what they do not, they would have no care for me. But it seems I have mistook.
He gritted his teeth and unwrapped his thumb, to look upon the mark of his mistake. The crusted fabric of the handkerchief had glued itself to the leaking wound, and he must tease the cloth free, but what was beneath was less disgusting than its covering. The ball of his thumb was swollen and clubbed, but the shallow M burned in it was beginning to scab, and there was no sign of infection creeping down into the hand. The wound had been cauterised as it was made.
He could not go back and make amends. He could not vindicate Septimus with a raised glass, or bring him back to life with a drunken gesture. He could only – what? What could he do? Go on; and try to be wiser; and keep future promises better; and avoid future mistakes. He must keep faith with the purposes for which he had come, and endeavour to discharge in something more like honour all he now found himself pledged to. And beyond that, just try to see what might be restored if— No, he told himself,
this must be undertaken without indulgent hopes, or sweetening thoughts of lucky chances, unearned rewards, happy ends. There was enough to be doing. More than enough, if he was to be ready by Christmas Day. He closed his eyes, and set himself to compose a list of everything he must arrange; and when the tasks were all in order, he got up, wobbled to the door, stuck his head out into the hall-way, and bawled with a reasonable imitation of insouciance for a bath, and hot water, and bacon and eggs.
*
The first item on the list, though, proved the hardest to accomplish, and he was still struggling to begin it when he had much of the rest done and stowed away. The Governor’s household declined to oblige him in any way whatever, on any subject. His request to collect a possession of his, that he had left in Septimus Oakeshott’s room, was rejected with contempt, and his suggestion that he might offer to buy the late Secretary’s slave was treated as both grotesque and suspicious. When Smith presented himself in person at the gate of the Fort, to see if he might make more headway in speech than in correspondence, the sentries, who had clearly had instructions, absolutely refused to admit him; and when he persisted, they glanced up and down the street to check if anyone was looking, and then when no-one was, they punched him in the stomach and threw him across the cobbles.
‘Bugger off, mate,’ said the sergeant. ‘You ain’t wanted.’
The ruination of Fort St George by the fire, however, had left its wall more a notional or administrative barrier than a physical one, and Smith, judging that he had no alternative, found it quite easy, deep in the dark night of the 23rd, to approach from an angle not overlooked by the gate, and to slip in quietly over a collapsed baulk.
The snows had smoothed the rutted confusion of the courtyard, and drifted around the three bell-tents pitched there, no doubt warming the soldiers sleeping inside. There were no lights in the tents, just one window lit yellow upstairs in the Governor’s house, where maybe a night-sentry sat outside his door. Smith picked his way, with the smallest crunches he could, along the shadowed side of the court to Septimus’ stair. He was not sure what he would do if he found the door locked, except to try to force it with the least noise he could contrive, but in the event the latch lifted easily, and the thick mass of iron-bound wood swung open onto a space as dark as Smith had expected, if not quite as cold and abandoned-feeling. He pulled the door to behind him, and waited for his eyes to make a little more sense of the faint gleam through the little leaded window, it being most impractical to strike a light. Gradually, the single undifferentiated black modulated to shadings of black, and he could see under the window a pile of Septimus’ clothes and gear, with a metallic something on top reflecting in spots that might be his scabbarded sword. On the opposite wall, by the door into the little sleeping chamber, a scant difference between dark and dark resolved into a square shape that perhaps was the sea-chest Septimus had mentioned. Smith took one step towards it, and Achilles, who had been waiting motionless in the blackest black behind the door, leapt onto his back and bore him to the floor with his hands gripped round Smith’s windpipe in a strangler’s hold.
Smith choked and scrabbled at the boards for purchase, but though Achilles was not very heavy, he had his weight high up, pinning Smith’s shoulders, and the long thin fingers round his throat had a practised force.
‘It is kind of you to come,’ he hissed in Smith’s ear. ‘Because, if
I go out to find you, they say: he has hurt a white man. Tear him to pieces. But now you come sneaking in here in the dark, I can kill you, and they say: well done, faithful Achilles. Good servant. You protect your master’s house.’
Smith produced a guttural rattle.
‘What you say? Can’t hear you, boy.’
Kkhglggkh
.
‘What do you say to me, eh? What you want to say? What is your new idea now? What do you try now?’
He seemed only angrier, but to Smith’s surprise the questions proved not purely rhetorical. Achilles loosened his grip: not much, but enough to open a straw’s-width passage for air, and to part again by a trifle the walls of singing night that had been closing on Smith’s consciousness, and to permit a croaking answer.