Authors: Francis Spufford
‘Why do you suppose,’ he said slowly, ‘that a young fellow who has money might pretend he does not – or, at any rate, keep it doubtful?’
‘
Does
he have money?’ Tabitha asked.
‘I think so, yes. I
think
the rest is all palaver, confusion a-purpose. Sand thrown in our eyes. Why, though, is what I cannot tell. What do you make of him?’
The same question was asked that night by Isaiah of Jem, at the kitchen fire; and again, by the master of the
Henrietta
of its mate, as the ship rode at anchor, on the swelling black rain-pored skin of the East River.
By morning, the news was all around the town that a stranger had arrived with a fortune in his pocket.
As a mason must build a wall one brick at a time, though the finished wall be smooth and sheer, so in individual pieces did Mr Smith’s consciousness return to him, the next day, as he lay in the truckle bed of Mrs Lee’s gable-end bedroom, and assembled the world again.
First, the white ceiling. Then the slow realisation that this was not the dark, damp timber six inches above his nose to which he had woken for six weeks in his bunk aboard
Henrietta
. Then the memory of his purpose; and the whole variorum mosaic of the evening before; and a burning curiosity. The light through the gable window was full sunshine. He jumped out of the bed in his shirt and threw the casement wide – rooftops and bell towers greeted him; a jumble, not much elevated, of stepped Dutchwork
eaves and ordinary English tile, with the greater eminences of churches poking through, steepled and cupola’d, and behind a slow-swaying fretwork of masts; the whole prospect washed with, bright with, aglitter with, the water last night’s clouds had shed, and one – two – three – he counted ’em – six crumbs of dazzling light hoisted high that must be the weathercocks of the city of New-York, riding golden in the hurrying levels of the sky where blue followed white followed blue. The Broad Way, it turned out as he leaned and craned from the window, was a species of cobbled avenue, only middling broad, lined on Mrs Lee’s side with small trees. Wagon-drivers, hawkers with handcarts and quick-paced pedestrians were passing in both directions. Somewhere below too, hidden mostly by the branches, someone was sweeping the last leaves, and singing slow in an African tongue as if their heart had long ago broken, and they were now rattling the pieces together desultorily in a bag.
But Mr Smith took his time from the hurrying clouds and the hurrying walkers. He splashed his face with water from the ewer, changed his shirt, and threw on his breeches and his coat; descended the stairs in clattering leaps that startled the widow Lee, who was serving porridge and a dish of kidneys to her boarders in the ground-floor parlour.
‘Shall you be wanting breakfast, sir?’ she asked, with more deference than she was used to show to guests, for the word had reached her too, with the morning’s delivery of the milk, that she was entertaining a nabob unawares: a being so overstuffed with guineas that he might scatter them at the slightest nudge.
‘I thank you, no,’ said Smith, scarce pausing; ‘I shall furnish myself as I go. Good day!’ And the hall door slammed behind him as he went.
The singer had departed; the street was all business. Which direction to follow? To the left, Broad Way seemed to debouch onto a green common, with a complication of barriers or fences beyond it, but the flow of the traffic favoured, by a majority, the rightward direction, where the houses thickened, and the heart of the town plainly lay; that was the way the barrows of bread and the milk churns were going, and Smith strode with them, almost skipping. The cobbled roadbed seemed to lie along the top of the gentle hummock the island made, between the two rivers, as if it were following out the course of some mostly submerged creature’s spine, with the cobbles as lumpish vertebrae. On both sides the side-streets sloped down, but beyond Broad Way on the side where Mrs Lee’s door stood – the west side, he calculated – there was only one layer of building, backed by a few scraggy shacks: the lanes descended there to an uncertain shore, where rowing boats were drawn up in clumps of yellow grass, and wading birds stalked on mudflats exposed by the tide. The weight of the town seemed all to be to the east. It was there that the openings revealed descents tight-packed with tall houses in the mode of Amsterdam, where pyramids of doorsteps supported mid-air door-ways. Or rather – looking closer – in the modes of Amsterdam and of London intermingled, for the spindle-thin facades of the one style jostled now against the broader haunches of the other. It was from these windings that Smith had emerged in the rain, last night, and it was into these that the barrow-pushers and the costermongers, the merchants in a hurry and the prentices on errands, steadily streamed away from the main flow of the avenue.
But Smith, in holiday mood, followed Broad Way instead, strolling past a square-towered stone church that might’ve been
transplanted (like a rose root in moistened sacking) from any county town of the English shires, and a bowling lawn preserv’d from foot traffic behind railings, a teardrop of perfect green, until the avenue dissolved into a parade ground before a fort, with a blowy esplanade behind, where left and right and all around the bright air showed yesterday’s grey expanse of water turned tossing blue in all directions, crowned with white caps. It was the point, the last, the
ne plus ultra
of the island; and the burly wind pumped Smith’s chest with tipsy breaths. The silk of the Union flag on the pole within the fort snapped and ruffled, but the fort itself, on inspection, was if not quite derelict then at least distinctly singed, with blackened walls and here and there rooflines broken to bare, scorched rafters. The sentry in the box beside the gate sat head-down, a huddle of red. Only the wooden structure alongside seemed fresh, a contrivance of pale timbers whose function Smith at first could not fathom. A gibbet without nooses? A giant’s enlargement of the vermin board where a zealous keeper nails carcasses of owls, weasels, all rivals who presume to hunt the master’s game? This board was strung with dark blotches and streamers; rustling congealments Smith puzzled at till, leaning close enough, he saw the fibres the wind stirred were human hairs, still rooted in the parchment-yellow of scalps. There must have been forty, fifty, sixty of them nailed there, and close up, they reeked like bad meat. He stepped abruptly back.
Round to the left, the swaying mast-forest beckoned from behind the houses, and now Smith took the invitation of a street’s mouth, and followed into the gullet of the town. Prosperous dwellings, here, with window-glass glinting, and maids swilling doorsteps and stairways clean; counting-houses too, and stalls, and shops; streets a-bustle, heterogeneously, for though the houses were plain as day
the domicile of wealth, New-York’s answer to the new-pattern’d squares of the West End, the business of the port was running through them, in mixtures London did not see. Wagoners moving boxes, cases, crates, barrels; fresh-landed emigrant families carrying off their all, looking as dazed (no doubt) as he did himself; a coffle of shuffling black men in irons underscoring the street music with a dismal clank. In London the costers would not have cried their apples at the Lord Mayor’s door, a goldsmith would not have been in business next to a meagre dealership in marine supplies. There were omissions too, as well as unexpected presences. Smith had instructed his brain to ignore the information of his nose – schooled reflex of the city-dweller, in the face of stinks – and it took a little time for his brain to take the news that there were few stinks to ignore. The vapour from the scalps remained the worst of New-York’s bouquet. A little fish, a little excrement; guts here, shit there; but no deep patination of filth, no cloacal rainbow for the nose in shades of brown, no staining of the air in sewer dyes. A Scene of City-Life, his eyes reported. A Country-Walk, in a Seaside District, his nostrils counter-argued. No smells; also, he realised, no beggars. He had been strolling the city’s densest quarter for minutes, and yet no street-Arab children pepper-pointed with sores had circled him round, no gummy crones exhaling gin had plucked his sleeve, no mutilated men in the rags of uniform had groaned at him from the ground. He wandered at his ease among strangers who seemed universally blessed with health and strength and moderate good luck, at least, in life’s lottery. Not to mention height. He was used, in the piazza of Covent Garden, to standing taller by a head than the general crowd; but here, in the busy bobbing mass of heads, he was no taller than the average.
It was perhaps because of this relaxation of the usual irritations
of the street that Smith, without taking notice of it, relaxed in turn the town-dweller’s habitual guard, and failed to perceive, as he reflected and considered, that others were meanwhile reflecting and considering upon him. He paused to admire the unloading boats, where an arm of the harbour pushed up among the houses. He passed into a narrow square where printer’s devils ran from door to door with bundles of paper, and smiled on enquiring its name and being told it was Hanover Square, for its London counterpart ran less to ink, and more to ballrooms lit by half a thousand candles. He spied a coffee-house ahead, from which came perfumes of hot bread and well-ground beans, and stopping short of it, did what he would not have done at home, or anywhere he had full conviction he trod the humdrum earth. To try to sift from the unruly cram of Mr Lovell’s paper a suitable scrap to command his breakfast, he pulled out in the street his whole pocket-book. Quick as a wink, one of his followers dashed forward, snatched it, and took to his heels up the road ahead.
Smith had had his riches in his hand. Suddenly he did not. Smith gawped. Smith stared stupidly at the empty hand where money had been. And a document besides, which— But there was no time for that. Smith hesitated – considered shouting ‘Stop thief!’ – perceived a train of likely consequences – shook his head like a man assailed by flies – and set off in pursuit himself, silently, instead. His moment’s stillness had given the snatcher a lead of twenty yards or so already, and though Smith’s legs pumped and his green coat’s tails flew out behind him, the goal of his chase was slipping deftly between backs, round corners, up alleyways. Now the streets of New-York reeled by, not at a stroll but at a sprint; the same scenes, the same mixture of familiar and unfamiliar chequered close together as black and white squares of a chess board,
but accelerated, passing at a blur; in fact, some of the very same route he had trodden the night before, but now had no time to recognise, as he gasped, and pounded, and felt the enforced enfeeblement of his shipboard weeks dragging at his limbs, while the figure ahead, jinking and turning, weaving and bounding, drew no closer, in fact pulled ahead. The thief was thin, with long, straight, black hair, and seemingly tireless legs in grey breeches, and bare dirty feet that twinkled as they rose and fell: that was all Smith could tell as the distance widened.
Now they were running uphill. Smith, seeing the grass of an open space ahead, and deducing that every street here must run upward in parallel to the open ground, whatever it was, resolved on a desperate expedient, and flung himself right at the next cross street, then left uphill again on the next street over, meaning if he could to cut the fugitive off at the top. The street was far emptier here, and Smith made himself squeeze out the greatest pace he could as he bolted upward (as he hoped) in parallel to his wallet. There were no more cross streets: no chances to see if his stratagem was working. Bare walls, poorer doors, empty lots. A hammering heart. Lungs on fire. The top of the street coming up. Smith threw himself left once more and gasped his way across to the top end of the original street, expecting at any moment to catch sight again of his quarry. He turned the corner.
Nothing; nobody. Nobody in sight at all at this end. The currents and eddies of the town’s traffic all flowed other ways, leaving this street, at this moment, as an empty backwater. Just a hundred closed door-ways in the bright morning light, into any of which, Smith saw, realising the magnitude of his error, the thief might have vanished. He could not knock on all of them. He wheeled around. The green space was a ragged common. A cow was gazing
at him, chewing the cud in comfortable incuriosity. Any of the bushes might conceal a thief. Then again, they might not.
Mr Smith put his hands on his knees and breathed; labouring, just as much, to bring his emotions under his control, to stop the indignant working of his mouth, which wanted to form – which wanted to shout – words he would not permit it. When his chest no longer heaved, he smiled, experimentally, at the cow, and if the expression resembled a rictus somewhat, a drawing of the lips from the teeth such as a corpse may perform when the strings of the flesh tighten in death, it was, nevertheless, voluntary, which was the only quality he just then required of it. The cow was indifferent.
Then Mr Smith walked onto the common, past a cricket-pitch worn to bare dirt at the wickets, past a pot kiln and a charcoal-burner’s fire and a flock of sheep, and found himself a spot between trees where he could feel as sure as may be that he was not observed; and there, in the security he had not bothered to assure himself of earlier, he turned out the coat pocket where he had kept the pocket-book, and investigated his resources. As he had hoped, some of the paper bills had escaped in his carelessness, and were loose in there. But not many. He smoothed them out one by one, and counted. Five – six – six shillings and six – and eightpence – and this dirty spill was a sixpence too – and another shilling. Eight shillings and eightpence, in the money of – he squinted – New-York and New Jersey. The flimsiness of the paper seemed altogether less entertaining now. Plus, he remembered with a burst of relief, the small pile of veritable coin, which he had left in a heap at his bedside. Twenty-nine shillings odd, where he had reckoned on six times as much. He calculated. Could he live as he had planned? No. He would live as he must.
When he rose from his hiding place, his smile convincing once more, the road running along the far side of the common struck him as somehow familiar-looking, and a minute’s walk in that direction confirmed it. It was the Broad Way continuing in the other direction to the one he had set out in. He had circled the whole town; that was New-York, all of it. The far end of the common was blocked with a palisade, and the Broad Way, cobbles diminished into a cart-track, went out through the barrier at another sentry post. At a venture, he asked if the soldier decorating the ground there with spit had seen anyone; anyone running.