Golden Hill (17 page)

But no Tabitha. The month of November settled into chill mists, like an old sopha sinking down on its springs. Day upon day, the cold winds off the river stirred slow grey tributaries of fog between the houses, through which the crush of traffic loomed, and darkened as it loomed, as if becoming more solid with each approaching step. The fog contained and muffled the cries of draymen, squeak of wheelrims, hammering from aloft, et cetera, as a jewel-box with a cushioned lid presses all within into the smothering clasp of velvet. In the Merchants, at breakfast, Hendrick reported without any prompting or enquiry that Lovell and Van Loon senior were mired with business in the counting-house, and did not emerge from it now save to eat and sleep. Septimus, in the same place, attempted to gossip of the latest stratagems in the Assembly, and Smith, mindful of listening ears and the judge's threat, closed down the conversation. In the fog on the Common, sword on his belt, he paced from tree to tree getting his lines by heart.

At the end of every line he stamped his foot. At the end of every speech he stamped and turned. The clamorous fog bore away his efforts and judged them not at all remarkable. It did pass the time. But no Tabitha. Ships were sailing, now, full-laden; dipping away into the hushing veils of white beyond the wharfs, as if bound for nowhere rather than the Indies. But others seemed to take their places without intermission, and at each next successive dawn – with the sun if glimpsed at all as a blue-green yolk, washed over by milk – the awkward frenzy went forward unabated. And no Tabitha.

After the third rehearsal, Septimus took him to a bath-house he had not suspected the existence of, on William Street. The steam was welcome, for the perpetual fog was beginning to make him cough. Hot and wet and smelling of birch, it drove through all the passages of his nose and chest into which the mist had insinuated its clammy fingers, and purged it out in a wholesome sweat. When first invited, Smith had imagined the steam-bath might be a place of ill-repute, as the bagnios were in Covent Garden, at home, and (while taking the invitation as a compliment) had wondered in what scenes he might find himself. But this one, stuffed as it was with sailors baking themselves clean before they embarked, was wild and licentious in no wise; seemed in fact a place of almost aggressive virtue, where men in crowded ranks squeezed together upon the wooden shelves of the hot room, and talked busily the while of the harvest they had brought in that autumn, and their plans for the voyage to come. Septimus, bolt
upright in a blue towel, was entirely his public self, rather than the impassioned figure of the bedroom, though the genial roar of the room allowed for a reasonable privacy of speech.

‘I was wondering,' said Smith, passing the dipper, ‘whether at the performance, you mean me to put on black-face, for Juba?' This was a point he had particularly considered.

‘God, no!' said Septimus. ‘For these purposes, you are to consider yourself the fairest-skinned African who ever lived.
North
African. African like the Barbary States. African like St Augustine.'

‘Semper aliquid novum ex Africa.'

‘Yes, exactly. Nice, safe, classical Africa.'

‘He is played dark in London,' observed Smith.

‘To be sure, but it would not answer here, even if you were painted up in the most obvious boot-polish, I promise. For Juba loves Marcia, and Marcia loves Juba. And decent society here is
most
clear about where Eros may not visit.'

‘Even if he does,' murmured Smith.

‘Especially if he does,' said Septimus, more
sotto voce
still. ‘In fact,' he went on, regaining volume, ‘I've been thinking,
à propos
Marcia. – I might switch around her part and Lucia's, and have Terpie play her, instead of Miss Flora. Should you mind? I know you and Flora go nicely together.'

‘No, no, that would be fine with me,' Smith said. ‘But why? Are you displeased in some way with Terpie as Lucia?'

‘Never in life! She is as good as you said she'd be, and I owe you a debt for getting me to put down my prejudice and see it. But I must still guard against, um, accidents of perception.'

‘And you've found one?'

‘I think so, yes. When Lucia says, of Marcia's brothers, that she longs “for neither and yet for both” – I think, if Terpie is playing
her, that the average dirty-minded New-York gentleman in our audience – being, you know, still filled unlike me with the popular prejudice
in re
actresses – will not be able to forbear to, well, to—'

‘What?' said Smith, grinning.

‘Well, to picture Terpie as the filling in a kind of Roman sandwich. I foresee snickering.'

‘Fair enough,' said Smith.

And hence at the next rehearsal he found himself opposite Terpie Tomlinson rather than Flora. Though constructed so generously in terms of proportion, she was not, on the absolute scale, very large at all: her head only came up to his chin. As she gazed sternly up at him, without breaking character either as a stoic virgin of ancient times or as a nice young girl playing one, she lowered the eyelid nobody else could see from their positions on the dusty boards, and winked at him. But still no Tabitha.

By 26th November he had persuaded himself that his bruising encounters with the elder Miss Lovell had been merely an early interlude in his visit to the city, now thankfully concluded; a brush with a nasty (if uncommon) girl from which a misapprehension had fortunately delivered him, before it could interfere with his errand. Indeed he was so firmly persuaded of it that he revisited the question several times a day to persuade himself of it again, whenever the temptation grew too strong, to send a message by Flora, or by Hendrick, or to hammer on the street-door at Golden Hill until he was let in. Policy, self-preservation, self-respect, all argued for abiding by Tabitha's silence – which, by now, he did not expect to see broken.

So he was considerably surprised, that morning, when stepping out of Mrs Lee's front door into more of the perpetual murk, he found himself greeted by the surly countenance of Isaiah, the
Lovells' prentice, pressing a note into his hand; and opening it, discovered himself invited, in Tabitha's handwriting, to take a cruise with her up-river in the Lovells' lugger, to fetch the last loads of the cargo. Invited to join her at Ellison's Dock on the Hudson side, that day – that morning – now. There were no reproaches. ‘You may be glad to quit the Glue of Vapours for a Day,' she wrote. ‘I am sick of it Myself.' Smith thrust a random scrap of money-paper from his pocket at the startled prentice, and took to his heels.

Ellison's Dock was a wooden pier extending far out over the mud, from one of the tumbledown lanes west of the Broad Way, to give sufficient draught at low tide, and walking out on it now, into the coagulated grey curtains shifting above the river, seemed to remove one from the firm land without promising arrival anywhere else. It was silent out there, with the incoming salt-flow from the ocean swelling the sinews of the water but not breaking its glassy skin. Only the tiny purling of water against the piles could be heard. Smith wondered nervously if, at the end, he would find some street bully procured to push him in unobserved, but no, there in the fog was the lugger fat and broad and high-riding, creaking at its mooring-rope and bumping against the dock with the force of the moving tide, and its rigging ascending into unseen conjecture a few feet up; and when he called, and peered forward through the damp rope-work, there was Tabitha on deck, muffled up against the weather but bright-eyed, among Prettyman's small crew, and Zephyra hanging behind her, blank as ever, for the sake of the proprieties.

‘I am so sorry—' Smith began, as he scrambled aboard.

‘Oh, shut up,' said Tabitha, slapping his arm. ‘Watch this.'

They slipped the mooring, and the water carried them immediately out and away, with the steersman on the rudder merely
nudging them to an angle on the swollen face of the tide. The swirling fabrics of the fog parted and sealed around them, placelessly, in grey limbo for a minute or so, and then suddenly parted for good. Suddenly, they were out of it altogether, drawing clear of a cloudbank that lay long and curling to the right, stretching as far ahead and behind as the eye could see, with the whole city of New-York – in fact, the whole island of Manhattan – presumably buried inside it. Over on the left side, the Jersey shore too was lost behind another cloud-wall. The sky, though still cloud-covered, was higher and lighter and wider and more open than any he had glimpsed in more than a week. They were travelling up a lane of dull silver, wide enough to engulf the river Thames several times over, with all the solid geography round about apparently abolished on the instant; moving with a kind of effortless ease upon the moving bosom of the river, though not in solitude, for the silver was scattered with a gliding array of lighters, fishing smacks, long-boats and larger vessels, all catching the tide upstream. The sailors hoisted one triangle of canvas on the lugger, which scarcely even swelled in the damp still air but lent a kind of heft to the pull of the rudder, and lit their pipes.

‘Magic!' said Tabitha. ‘I thought I owed you for the coin trick.'

‘That was free.'

‘So is this. Nearly, anyway. You can't expect me to pull a whole ship from your ear, without a bit of preparation.'

‘Where are we going?'

‘Not far. Only to Tarrytown, to load up Cortlandt flour, and then back on the ebb this afternoon.' She leant far out over the side and hung there, looking ahead to the vanishing-point where whites, greys and river silver met. Smith was content to gaze at the back of her head, where her hair was escaping again in tendrils
from the silver pins securing it, and above her muffler, as she stretched, he could see the tendons moving in her narrow neck.

‘You must let me explain properly what happened, about the play,' he said.

‘Must I?'

‘I would like to, please,' Smith said, still addressing her hair. ‘For it was an accident, and not a manoeuvre in Queen Tabitha's War, at all.'

She blew dismissively through her lips but turned to face him, glancing as he spoke at his forehead, at his shoulders, at his chest – all around him, yet not quite at him.

‘I was distracted at the dinner,' he said. ‘Plays and players and play-houses are something I … know about; and when a piece of my own world floated into view I grabbed it for the pure pleasure of not being at sea any more in an unknown place, among unknown people; and applied myself to the question of Septimus Oakeshott's play as if it were just a question, a conundrum with no consequences; and I did not remember at all what it might mean to you, till it was too late; and I know it does not reflect well on me that I should manage to forget entirely the concerns of a friend, but at least I wasn't aiming—'

‘You talk a
lot
,' she said.

‘Especially when I'm nervous.'

‘Why should you be, if I'm your
friend
? – You'll have to excuse me. I haven't said much for a fortnight. Father is deep in the books, and Flora is gone. My mouth is rusting shut.'

Smith glanced at Zephyra. Evidently Tabitha did not categorise her as company, or as a source of conversation. It was true that he himself had not yet heard her speak.

‘You could come to the rehearsals,' he said.

‘No.'

She still had not looked at him straight on. Her eyes kept up a flickering dance of avoidance, around and about his visage. He could almost feel it: a tickling, wary, dry, velvet-light attention, as if he were being visited by the scouts of a bee-swarm.

‘Tabitha, why are
you
so nervous?'

That stopped her. The brown gaze locked to his. The bees stung.

‘Why do you think?' she said, fiercely.

This was a statement capable of several meanings. Mr Smith tried not to assume the one that was most flattering to a young man's sensibility, but he did not altogether succeed. In fact he felt a little swelling of heat and satisfaction behind his breastbone.
There is no need
— he began to say, in his head, but stopped himself before the words reached his lips. Slow down, he told himself. Remember all the impossibilities. Remember what you must do. Remember what you are. Remember everything. Patience.

He smiled at her instead. She scowled, and shook her head like somebody trying to clear a blockage from their ear.

‘Tell me where we've got to,' he said.

‘Spouting Devil Creek,' she said, pointing to the right, to where the cloudbank was breaking up along what seemed to be a side branch of the river. ‘The top end of Mannahatta.'

The Hudson was narrowing, and through the cloud on both sides, glimpses of much higher bluffs were appearing, steep and wooded and dark, and tinted also with a mysterious dim red. The tide was carrying them up into a valley as deep as a canyon; the current within the tide was drawing them rapidly in toward the right-hand shore, until a wall of hillside was scudding by close enough to reduce the mist to mere streamers and tatters, and Smith could soon see, tilting above him, a continual blanketing
thicket of bare trees in spidery grey filigree, all strung with tresses of dead creeper, the strange colour explaining itself as a kind of autumn tinge in the bark that (repeated a millionfold) made the whole wood glimmer faintly maroon. The rocks at the Hudson's edge were drawing a little too close for comfort. Two more of the sailors joined the steersman to lean hard on the tiller. Smith and Tabitha moved out of the way, and fetched up together against the right-side rail. Creaking, groaning, the lugger's prow came round, and they eased back more comfortably offshore, into the deeper channel; but Tabitha and Smith stayed, side by side, at the rail, looking out. The strange noiseless flight, the unexpected height and grandeur of the scene, the colour unknown in all his previous experience of country views, lulled Mr Smith into an awed, almost an enchanted state, and perhaps something of the same quieting effect operated on Tabitha, despite the familiarity of her home river, for her agitation seemed to be soothing away. She too seemed content to gaze at each new sight the thinning mist disclosed.