Authors: Francis Spufford
‘What have we here?’ said a new voice, big but lazy, blustering but comfortable: a kind of plebeian cousin to the Chief Justice’s, with the same confidence of being made room for. Here in the deep black space between the bonfire’s red domain and the first pale-lit windows of the town, it was not possible to make out much more of the lads that held him than a shifting dark mass of shoulders and heads, and the man they’d turned him to face, as he strolled up, taking his time, was lit only in patches and gleams, with the fire-light behind the fat dome of his head, and distant scarlet picking out the delicate frizzle of his side-whiskers. But it was dimly clear he was wearing stripes for the holiday, broad avenues of lighter and darker silk stretched over his bulk, for if the boys were bullcalfs, he was the full ox. And he smelled of – the new, cooler Smith registered it as one more fact of the situation, plain as an angle in Euclid – animal blood. Steak, black pudding, offal in the mincer. Mr Higgins, I presume. The butcher come sauntering to see what the butcher’s boys had caught. But not to offer adult reproof, oh no; the butcher too was on holiday. And the rest of the dispersing crowd was spreading off in the darkness to its private pursuits; no help coming, there. The prentices had Smith held spread-eagled by his arms. The butcher drew back a fist as big as a pie, taking his time, taking his time. ‘O-o-o-o-o,’ went the prentices, on a rising note of pleasure—
But Mr Smith had learned a thing or two besides the art of patient starvation in the cellars of Limehouse. Left and right he stamped as hard and fast as he could on the toes of those holding
him; and as they commenced to jump about swearing, and loosed their hold, he threw himself forward onto the blood-perfumed bulk of the butcher before the fist could pick up speed. It was an awkward, huddled embrace that checked the momentum of the blow at cost of leaving Smith merely draped on his adversary, but all he needed from the posture was leverage; a hand’s grip on each bulging shoulder of the butcher’s coat, quick, quick, while he still grunted with surprise, and then his own jack-knifing body all the weapon he required to pivot back from the waist and slam his forehead as hard as ever he could into the butcher’s nose. The cartilage cracked. A hot wetness splattered Smith’s brow. The butcher howled. The butcher fell. Smith’s head seemed split with pain itself, and flashes of white internal lightning obscured his sight, but he retained enough of himself to roll from atop the fallen pork monolith, and to try his best to crawl into the confused dark. Legs, shouts, the pain in his head − hands and knees over the tussocks – when he shut his eyes the lightning continued – he had seen the Limehouse Kiss performed but had had no idea it was so grievous for the doer – still he was moving, foot by foot, yard by yard – the stir and the groans falling behind – the inglorious escape of an injured beetle, but even so an escape— And then a hand seized his ankle, a firm and solid and unappealable hand, and he was caught.
It took a couple of panting minutes for him to be hoisted again to face the butcher, for the butcher himself rose only in slow staggering stages, the centre of his face a bubbling black mess, and all holiday humour gone.
‘You liddle
bastard
,’ he said thickly, spitting out dark gobbets as big as garden slugs. This time the fist was inevitable and, swung into Smith’s belly, drove the breath out of him as effectually and
thoroughly as if he had got in the path of a hammer. Smith coughed and retched. The butcher’s shadow-smeared visage loomed close. He spat on Smith. He hit him again. But it did not seem to satisfy him.
‘We wuz only goig ter tiggle yer up a bid,’ he said fretfully. ‘No fugging longer.’ Rummaging in the dark; the rousting-out from the butcher’s pocket of something that gleamed as narrowly along its edge as the new moon. A clasp-knife, maybe; extended with professional delicacy in the butcher’s quivering, aggrieved hand. ‘I ab goig,’ he said, his voice a caress of treacle, ‘to fugging
fillet
you.’
Hesitancy in the group; a palpable in-drawing of breath all the way around the little circle, at a thought so cold and sharp it momentarily cut itself free from the soft fuzz of drunkenness, though it might in a moment more succumb to it, and dissolve back again.
‘Master—’ began the hiccupper anxiously.
‘Shud it,’ said the butcher. ‘Tide’s goig out. He’ll be floading past the Narrows by dawd. No-one’ll fide him. No-one’ll care. Now take his coad off.’ The butcher spat black slime; the butcher advanced. Oh well, thought Smith, surprised still to find his grieving all done.
‘Gentlemen!’ said a new voice: a bright voice, an amused voice, a drawing-room voice, a voice of tea-cups and couplets. ‘Are we all having fun?’ Smith dragged his gaze from the butcher, which seemed as hard as shifting a planet from its course. The gravity of his death had had him in its pull; he was tumbling down, all struggle done. He almost resented the interruption. There stood Septimus Oakeshott at the edge of the group, a sabre hanging negligently in one hand.
‘Who’s that?’ one of the prentices asked.
‘The Governor’s bumboy,’ said another.
‘This is privade business,’ said the butcher, ignoring them. He seemed to be finding it as difficult as Smith to change direction.
‘Is it?’ said Septimus. ‘I do sympathise, for I know myself how annoying our visitor here can be: but I’m afraid you will have to let him go. – Witnesses, you see.’
‘Nod if you both go oud with the tide,’ said the butcher.
‘Well, then, the other reason would be cold steel. Mine being bigger than yours: that sort of thing.’ Septimus raised the sword, and the circle parted away from it, as suds do on a basin of water when soap is introduced into it. The hands holding Smith dropped.
Smith cleared his throat. His voice sounded rusty; he had not expected to use it again.
‘Mr Oakeshott, you are very welcome,’ he said.
‘Mr Smith, you are very
stationary
. Run!’
Smith pulled the green coat that had been half stripped off him back onto his shoulders, and hugged it round him, staring stupidly. The advice was excellent, he could tell, but he did not quite seem able to take it. The running, the grabbing: surely they had already done that.
‘Run!’
That did it. Smith turned obediently and lumbered away into the dark; and as his legs rose and fell, as slow it seemed as logs pounding the ground, the strange quietness of the last few minutes went dizzily away. Urgency, alarm, trembling were stirred back into him. A wave of pins-and-needles ran up his awakening calves, thighs, chest, neck. His head hurt, his heart fluttered, he felt the numb turf beneath him again with painful sharpness,
and then he was running faster; sprinting indeed, as fast as his legs would carry him, with his arms pumping; bolting toward the welcoming mouth of the Broad Way. Nevertheless, Septimus overhauled him, coming up alongside after a brief interval as if propelled by the rising growl in the dark behind, running in a swift thin-legged scamper, breathing hard yet curiously upright, with a frown on his white face as if his body had carried him away of its own accord and he were, more than anything, puzzled to find himself hurtling disjointedly through the night. He was carrying the sabre pointed straight out in front of him, like a man ordering a cavalry charge in a painting.
‘Keep going!’ he said. ‘They’re coming!’
They reached the gravelly dirt of the street. Lighted windows were just ahead, but there was no cover to hide in along the ropewalk, nor time to bide the uncertain outcome of hammering on one of the doors, judging by the swell of the noise behind.
‘Achilles!’ yelled Septimus, and waved with the sword: a blacker streak of shadow slipped out of the dark to their left and disappeared towards the far end of the ropewalk, and the ingress of Nassau beyond. They ran on, panting, along Broad Way.
‘Two – corners,’ gasped Septimus; ‘two – corners – between us – and them – to lose them—’
They skidded left onto Maiden Lane, running downhill over cobbles now from the whaleback of the island. Quick glimpses of candle-lit chambers, families at table, ordinary life continuing; the sound behind getting louder, becoming diversified with glad hunting whoops, echoing between walls as the followers came off the Common and into the streets; clearly more, many more of them than had stood in the little circle with Smith and the butcher. Neither looked back.
‘Small streets – oldest – best – more cover—’
Right at full pelt onto Nassau. Past the Dutch church, where a knot of greybeards were smoking long pipes on the steps, self-exempted from the English madness. Jinking left, right, left in the deserted dogleg alley around the red-brick back of City Hall. Left down the cracked paving of Wall Street, masthead lanterns swaying ahead; Septimus tripping, slipping, his blade grating out a shower of sparks from the rough slabs; recovering himself, gesturing right; them both flinging themselves into an alley that threaded away between the dark bulk of house-fronts. Septimus pressed his finger to his lips. They flattened themselves against the near wall and listened. Smith’s blood popped and bounded in his ears. The riverine roar of the pursuit surged, as the city’s stone brinks channelled it round some bend, back behind. Then seemed to settle, as if the flood were tossing irresolute, not sure which way to proceed, and might ebb, given a little longer.
‘If they just get bored …’ whispered Septimus. He sheathed the sabre carefully and tiptoed back to the alley’s end, and with a hand to shield the lightness of his face, leaned one eye out. One of the Hervormde Kerk greybeards was helpfully pointing their way, clapped on the back as they passed by a mob thirty or forty strong. His pipe ember brightened and dimmed contentedly. The hunters threw back their heads and bayed.
‘Oh
drat,’
said Septimus.
‘Could you not order them to disperse?’ cried Smith as the two of them laboured on again up the twisting gullet of the alley.
Septimus laughed. ‘How?’ he said.
The view over the tops of the alley walls as they pelted by was a chaos of lean-to roofs, blind back-sides of warehouses, yards heavy with the smells of trade both sweet and disgusting; even
a tree growing a courtyard or two over, where someone was cultivating a garden in a tight embrace of masonry; but no yard, gate-way or recess that offered anything other than a small confined space without egress; any prospect better than continuing to run. So they ran on. The alley debouched into the bend of Bloat Lane, which in turn gave onto William Street. Smith, pounding along next to Septimus’ spring-loaded lope, wished most passionately that he were again trying only to avoid requests for sixpence, yet his second wind had come in, and there was a sort of mad exhilaration in this helter-skelter dashing along; a sort of antidote of movement, to having been held, pinned, secured.
At William Street they were, all of a sudden, in one of the city’s little domains of wealth and luxury. Tall, handsome houses of the newest proportions; white shutters at windows; candelabra lighting moulded ceilings visible at windows; patient horses and even a sedan chair at the mounting blocks beside the doors, where guests had spent Pope Day far from the bonfire’s barbarity. Septimus skidded left, no doubt intending by that means to get onto Duke Street and the shortest way to Fort George, but he halted after two steps and held his hand up. The pursuit was ahead of them, coming round the east end of William Street. Back they went – but the happy baying and hooting was coming from that way too. Intelligently the pursuers had divided, and were coming round from both sides at once, as well as boiling along the alley itself, judging by the way Bloat Lane had begun to pulse and echo. They were not growing bored. They had found their entertainment for the latter part of the evening, and they meant to make the most of it. The only way left open was ahead, up Princes Street, too wide for the preference of anyone seeking concealment, and with the even greater breadth and openness of Broad Street beyond,
where public oil-lanterns burned on posts and passers-by on foot and horseback could be seen, of sympathies most doubtful. But needs must, and on the pair of them flew.
However, they had not quite crossed the junction when Septimus’ attention was arrested by a whistle from above. It was hard to pick out in the gloom up there, against a night sky of hurrying cloud intermittently rent with stars, but a figure was running in a precarious crouch along the roofline of the townhouse on the corner opposite, waving something in one hand. Smith, groaning inwardly, assumed at first that the pursuers had somehow got an agile spotter up there, to guide them on to their prey from above; but Septimus was waving back, whistling back, and as the roof-runner scrambled over the sloping slates of the first roofs on Princes Street, Septimus was hopping along beneath, sideways from foot to foot, staring at door-ways, gazing up at the sash windows of the floor just below the eaves – the fourth – with an expression of rapid calculation.
‘There!’ he called, pointing, and the figure stopped against a chimney, and threw down what appeared to be a rope: a rope so short, however, that Smith could not see how it could be of any earthly use. It only hung down far enough to dangle just outside the fourth-floor window Septimus had indicated. With the figure motionless in the dark beside the chimney-stack, and nothing therefore to call attention to it, the rope was virtually invisible, a dark thread amidst the dark.
Septimus seized Smith by the elbow. ‘Right, in we go,’ he said – and bounded with him up the marble steps leading to the grand door-way of the house before them, where he hammered furiously on the door-knocker. It seemed hideously exposed to remain there unmoving, in plain sight, while the three hubbubs
of the pursuit converged, for the stretching seconds it took for the door to be answered. At any moment the first emissaries of the mob would come view-hallooing over the cobbles. Feet were audible on the stairs inside, though. Septimus sheathed the sabre, drummed his quivering hands on his temples; absurdly adjusted his neck-cloth. Keys turned inside. But as soon as the first crack of light appeared along the door-edge, Septimus shoved with an un-Septimus-like lack of civility, and they burst through into a tiled hall sending a housemaid reeling.