Golden Hill (34 page)

Well, I still hate novels. They still seem to me to be tissues of exaggeration, simplification, a sweetness that falsifies; and now I know this truth from, as it were, the inside, having written one myself, and marked all the sleights and tricks required to tease out a very partial understanding, a perished cloth more holes than thread, into what seems a smooth continuous fabric. I, who did not know what Mr Smith was thinking, lend my own spirit to set in motion a puppet of him who does not know what I was thinking. Nonsense, absurdity upon absurdity! I, who have never fought a duel, or played piquet, or shared in various other of Mr Smith’s experiences, find I can concoct the necessary passages by a winking charm, by talking faster, by a conjurer’s distracting busywork. How can such farragos be trusted? And yet what else is there, to catch in any shape at all the fragile pattern of particular acts and hours long ago, before oblivion blows them to the winds? They are the best, worst chance to coax into anything like a durable existence the
feeling
of those weeks when Smith was with us, sixty-seven years ago: even if the cost is lies at every turn. Lies are better than nothing.

Besides, they never bothered me very much when I was doing the lying. In fact, there has been a strange kind of satisfaction, like a ghost of my old pleasures, in withholding or denying in these
pages most direct views into my past self, as if I was contriving all over again thereby to withhold myself from
him
.

And now I do not want to stop. I sit at my window in the farm-house here, and listen to the hoot-owls drifting across the Fishkill like ghosts in the last of the short summer night, with the lamp lit that I may burn till all hours if I wish to, for we are rich and lamp-oil is a cheap indulgence to keep a nasty old lady happy: and I wish the story not to be over, though it is, and has been these many years. Once again, I have made Smith depart in the snow, with stolen Zephyra and Achilles, and since we never heard any more of those in the sledges ever again, that is that. I have no more to tell. No more I want to, anyway.

The reader must imagine, if they desire it, the scene of chaos and confusion Smith left behind him. The outbreak at first of derisive laughter directed at my father, when the news spread that he had entertained a n––— unawares, and let him carry off a good share of his fortune, and pressed upon him the society of his daughters; and then the rapid smothering of that laughter in embarrassment, and effortful silence, when it was realised, all across the snowy city, what else had been done unawares, and by how many, in relation to Smith. That judge, lawyer and jury together had excused a black man for the death of a white one. That the whole audience of
Cato
had adored him. That the Assembly had thought him worth wooing, and threatening. That for sixty whole days he had been treated as a person of consequence. That Terpie had— Well; enough of that. The Tomlinsons obtained a posting shortly afterward to the Philadelphia garrison, and soon, without any discussion, the city’s embarrassment over Smith thickened into the pretence that there had never been a Smith at all. He became unmentionable. No-one would talk about him;
no-one but me. I have written this to conjure him. To
insist
upon him. My tale begins suddenly, as he arrives, and ends, just as suddenly, as he departs.

But if my pen stops moving, if there are no more fresh words in glistening black flowing out of it, to somehow keep all the preceding ones irrigated and live, if my ink all dries to autumnal brown – then the past too crackles and fades. The people go away, and so does the city.

It is a striking thought that the New-York of my story
only
exists in my story, now. I remember it, unchanged, because I left it in 1750, after writing some letters at which the neighbours took offence, and have not been back. (Indeed, I have not been anywhere but here my whole life since, except once in the year ’60 to Princeton, to see the scholars play
The Tempest
, and that did not work out happily, confirming the family in their sense that had I best be stowed safe away.) In my pages, and in my head, the Dutch houses stand, and the mansions of Broad Street, and the spire of Trinity, and the cows grazing on the Common, and our house on Golden Hill: but in Manhattan, apparently, all this is gone without a trace, ruined in the Revolution and burned in the great fires. Scarcely a brick stands. Septimus’ grave must still be there, unchanged until the trumpet sound and all sleepers wake, but with a new New-York billowed up around it. Trinity is a different Trinity, City Hall is demolished, and the streets march north up the island carrying the homes of the wealthy with them, and leaving a scurf of slums behind. There is a De Lancey Street now, they say: but no De Lanceys, for they came out for the King at the Revolution, and so are all scattered to Nova Scotia and beyond. The judge himself was long dead by then, but very probably he would have concurred: for after all, he was Governor himself,
after poor hopeless Clinton, and in that role a great supporter of the Crown prerogative.

I do not think I could explain to the younger ones I see, when the family comes up-valley to join me here for the summer months, how such a man as the judge could have been a royalist: how we all were. For they recite the litany of the King’s evil deeds every July Fourth as if they were sacred history, and I perceive that for them all kings called George are hobgoblins, who prowl at night through the cities of
their
imagination kicking puppies and eating kittens. ‘The British’ are a species of especially venomous foreigners, tyrannical by nature, enemies to all liberty, and of course the White House-burning villains of the recent war. I perceive I have lived out of one epoch into another one, quite mutually unintelligible, so that if I cried, like the solitary servant surviving the wreck of Job’s house, “I only am alone escaped to tell thee”, I would be looked at as if I were making animal noises. I am looked at like that quite often anyway.

My father died in the year ’64. Flora is dead too. She had four children, of whom one did not survive, perhaps luckily, for he looked much more like her estate manager than boring old Joris. I grew no nicer with age. However, around about the point I passed from aunt-hood to great-aunt-hood, the passion of my contrariness (as they all decided to call it) seemed to leave me, or at least to diminish into a more easily domesticated form. So that now, when I regard those earlier times, and especially the days on Golden Hill, I find I possess two incompatible reactions to them, two feelings that run along beside one another but without mixing, like the snaking currents of dye you now see running along under the transparent skin of the Hudson. I both wish that I felt again that burning pleasure of opposition: and at the very same
time I regret with all my heart that I sacrificed so much else to it. With all my heart? No, with only half of it; and half a heart, I suppose, is not enough to make you bold for the business of loving. It is a vote cancelled by the suffrage of the other half.

My great-great-niece says I am the oldest thirteen-year-old girl in the United States. She is thirteen herself, and so, she says, she should know. Heloise Van Loon, born with the century: as sharp as me, but I hope better fitted for happiness. Being clever never did me much good, for you can know perfectly well why you do something, and still not be able to desist from it.

I do not know what became of Smith. I do not think he can have perished directly in the snows of ’46: he was hopelessly incompetent to travel through a continental winter, but Achilles will not have been, and I imagine they will have arrived wherever they were going. But after that, all is conjecture, and I can only wonder. Whether he found the learning at Harvard, for example, that he had refused at Oxford; or whether he was reconciled to his father and returned to England; whether he adopted the destiny of his un-apparent colour, or whether, going back to London, he went where it became again a mere personal peculiarity. Whether he yet lives. Can he, possibly? He would have to be even older than me, and women live longer than men, and I suspect I have been pickled into durability somehow by wickedness, like a preserve in vinegar. But I can imagine him, several ways, somewhere sharing this ember of a world with me. An ancient roué of a Smith, who totters at ninety to the gaming-tables, rouged; a Smith who lives in retired pomp in the English countryside after a long success on the stage; a Smith simply enthroned in honour beside a hearth, surrounded by children of whatever colour; or a Smith snoozing venerable in the study of a manse with a thousand brown books
of divinity about him, for he had that possibility in him too, from his father.

Does he think of me, if he lives? I think of him, often. Heloise brings me my hot milk, and while the house sleeps and I do not, I return again and again to the moment when Mr Smith asked me to go with him, and I did not. I wish that I could hover at the shoulder of that stubborn girl (that frightened girl) and nudge her, push her, shove her out of her solitary fear, and into the sleigh, like Zephyra; into a wider life. But I also wish that I could feel again the rejecting fire that was in me then. And I remember how good it was to scream.

After five books of non-fiction, or fiction blended with non-fiction, it feels very strange to me not to say anything about the way this book uses history, but with a mighty effort I will only point out that Mr Smith is not being unfair about the relative sizes of London and New York as he knows them. New York in 1746 had a population of about 7,000, while London, then the largest city in Europe, had one of 700,000: genuinely a hundred-fold difference.

I owe thanks to a lot of people. My brother-in-law Jonathan Martin made a vital suggestion about the mechanism of the plot. My father, Peter Spufford, inducted me into early-modern finance. My younger daughter, Theodora, helped with the conversation at the Lovells' dinner party. My wife, Jessica Martin, put up with Mr Smith and Tabitha as perpetual guests at
our
dinner table. The gentleman who led me round Iran in 2000 always punctiliously referred to those who ruled his country as ‘
Mister
Khatami' and ‘
Mister
Khamenei', alerting me for the first time, member that I am of an anti-formal generation, to the comedies of formal naming. Long-ago conversations with Jenny Uglow about Fielding and Hogarth turned out to have been secretly at work in my imagination. Regine Dugardyn briefed me on Sinterklaasavond. Marina Benjamin saved the middle of the story from sagging. Zoe Adjonyoh, Professor Graham Furniss and Dr
Kwadwo Osei-Nyame guided me to two accurate sentences in Ashanti Twi, which I then had to alter to fit pre-twentieth century typography. Jacob and Melina Smith lent me and my family their Episcopalian rectory to stay in for a week, up in the open fields and wild pasturelands of 23rd Street, but with easy access to the eighteenth-century city on the 6 train. Shawn Maurer showed me eighteenth-century Boston, and behaved at an early stage of the book's gestation as if a colonial counterpart to
Joseph Andrews
or
David Simple
was not too crazy an idea. At the other end of its composition, my agent, Clare Alexander, and my editor, Julian Loose, backed me uncomplainingly in various acts of stubbornness. In between I wrote most of Mr Smith's story in CB1, the oldest cybercafé in the English Cambridge. Gabi gave me my billionth cup of Americano free.

The book was kindly read and commented on in draft by Felix Gilman, Claerwen James, Sarah Leipciger, Henry Farrell, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, Elizabeth Knox, Tim Parnell, Oliver Morton and Anne Malcolm.

Thank you all.

Feast of St Michael & All Angels

64 Eliz. II

Francis Spufford was born in 1964. He is the author of five highly-praised books of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either ‘bizarre’ or ‘brilliant’, and usually as both. The most recent,
Unapologetic
, has been translated into three languages; the one before,
Red Plenty
, into nine. He has been longlisted or shortlisted for prizes in science writing, historical writing, political writing, theological writing, and writing ‘evoking the spirit of place’. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lives near Cambridge. This is his first novel.

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