Golden Hill (9 page)

As the hooded servants hauling the juggernaut came alongside, the pointed caps on their heads were revealed to be cones of butcher’s paper, and their robes to be bedsheets tied with string. But the tawdry means to the transformation only rendered it stranger, not ridiculous. Smith recognised faces among the acolytes – Isaiah, the Lovells’ prentice, Quentin from the coffee-house, a bass and a tenor from the Trinity choir, some of the sullen onlookers from the west-side taverns – and each alike was changed, to a swollen straining gargoyle seriousness. Then he saw, on the far side and with the face obscured, a paper cone beneath which writhed out long, straight, black hair, and a body so thin and long that even in the robe it seemed but a coagulate line in motion—

‘Hey!’ shouted Smith, and tried to push forward. But the thudding and the crackle of the gunpowder robbed his voice of force, and whether by accident or design, the rank of citizens in front of him formed a most effectual fence. As he tried to penetrate it, the stamping feet fell without malice on his shoes, and he would have reeled back had the rank behind not repelled him just as
effectually, so he must stay bruised and upright, as tight-packed as a lucifer match amidst a bundle. The straining acolytes and their ropes passed by, and then the slow-shifting body of the fiery mass itself, many cart wheels turning beneath its tacked-on skirt of canvas, and above, in clouds of pitch-smoke and powder-smoke glaring like a furnace, the splotched gilt writing that identified the giant puppets.
The Pope
on the crowned one with the leer of pride.
The Pretender
on the simpering face, with the beauty-spot as big as a plate and the blubbery lips. And last, on the visage of pantomime evil with the protruding tongue,
Fawkes
. Only after the back of the juggernaut passed could the bystanders begin to move into the road and follow; and there was an order of precedence here, rows of citizens already stamping along behind, with two drummers from the garrison in their midst beating a more orthodox time, and ruining it again, boys with saucepans they were banging, and men with old trumpets and bugles that they blew for noise not tune, in bellowing discordant squawks and blasts; and only after fifty feet or more of procession had passed, did the crush slacken enough for Smith to sidle into the road and follow on, seeing the puppets’ chariot up ahead now as a slow-travelling blockade, a tight plug of fire and dancing demon shadows creeping between dark walls, with no possibility of overtaking.

But the procession was bound for the Common. When they had inched past Fair Street and the Spring Garden on the east side, and Van Pelt’s ropewalk on the west, the pressure was abruptly released, and the narrow parade spilled out into a fan of walkers, all pursuing the bobbing light ahead into the wide darkness. Through these at last Smith could weave his way, and run on, tripping from time to time on tussocks, and casting to left and right trying to get the acolytes back in view. But when he came up
to the float, he found the corps of the acolytes dissipated – caps removed – ropes fallen – the men all indistinguishably faded into the general assembly – and
that
not open to his easy inspection, for that it had formed, as he found when he tried to cross it, into a thickening ring of bodies, extending left and right as far as he could see around some central eminence buried in the darkness; and this elastic human obstacle proved as unpierceable as before, if slightly more talkative. ‘Steady now, steady now, keep back, no pushing, sirrah, room enough for all,’ said the dark around him. All were craning forward, towards what stygian vanishing-point Smith could not perceive. A single figure still capped (but without black hair) walked forward from the stranded car of the heads, a torch detached from it burning upright in both out-stretched arms. A faint contour formed in the air ahead of it, black on black; then, bigger than Smith could have imagined, a mountain where no mountain had been on the grass of the Common, all formed of wood and flammable rubbish, with flanks of discarded wardrobes and smashed cabinets, and ravines in which broken bedsteads gaped, an alp composed seemingly of every old thing, every burnable thing, every imperfect cumbrance of past time the city of New-York could scour from its attics, its middens, its cellars. The acolyte thrust the torches into the base of the mountain. A pause. Then –
crackle, crack
, with a quick dry popping flare of tormented wood – lines of flame began to work their way, zig-zag, through the inward jigsaw of the alp, with pauses for consumption, for gnawing at dense nuggets of mahogany, and rapid advances through fillets of wadded paper, but always up, up, up to the summit: which glowed, improbable high, then seemed to sit on red fire like black trellis-work, then burst at last into a crown of yellow flame. The bonfire was ablaze.

In its brightening light Smith began to see the extraordinary extent of the human ring that stretched around the fire. There must have been a thousand people there, a goodly fraction of the whole city gathered to gaze, with uptilted faces, at the flame-mountain. And on face after face, an expression of a kind of excited fear, as if there were something both horrifying and delightful being released in the increasing furnace roar. As the heat intensified, the damp November ground about the base of the fire began to steam; and the steam was sucked, at the speed of a river running, back across the silhouetted ridges of the grass and into the fire. Where it seemed to transmute, the vapour without any interval becoming the rising, rising lava-flows of orange-gold that ascended the hill of fuel, crinkling and incandescing, with a sound that resembled many distant glass windows shattering. A stippling of black stuff not yet burnt floated like slag on molten iron over the fire’s volcano heart. And at the peak the rising orange-gold transmuted again, into rushing gauzy tongues fifteen, twenty foot high, breaking in flickers at their ends into particulate tides of crimson sparks, that pulsed up high and slackened again, as the billows of heat assailed the night sky; pushed into its cold; lost way and sank again. That sky! The fiery glare blanked out the stars, but the very hugeness and extremity of the blaze made the far greater hugeness of the night more palpable, as the sparks recoiled defeated. New-York had gathered to ignite its biggest signal of assertion and wrath, and the intensity of the light and heat only seemed to reveal, for once at its true scale, the immense darkness of the continent at whose edge the little city perched – from this one pinpoint of defiant flame, the thousands upon thousands of miles of night unrolling westwards. For the first time Smith, dizzy with sparks and smoke, lost the comfortable
understanding of size he had brought with him from home, and the awe and the fear of the New World broke in upon him. As if, till then, he had been inhabiting a little doll’s house, and misled by its neat veneers had mistaken it for the world, until with a splintering crunch its sides and front were broken off, and it proved to be standing all alone in the forests of the night; inches high, among silent, huge, glimmering trees.

The fire by this time was settling back from wild uprush into something more sullen, a hill all crimson-orange, morosely aglow. It made now a very creditable portrait of a landscape in hell, especially since from time to time across the infernal oven-glare capered, or reeled, or stumbled, the black outlines of the fire’s servitors. They were dragging forward the heads from off the cart. The Pope was first for the furnace. Two men on each side, they swung him crown and all like a battering-ram, as near as they dared get to the hellmouth, and flung him up onto the coals. He rolled a little way, and came to rest on his bulbous nose. For a second, his profile remained unchanged, a black exception to the fire; then on an instant it turned all to a flayed musculature of flame, a visage of wreathing scarlet fibres; then another instant, and hollow papier-mâché that it was, it was entirely gone, dissolved to a puff of sparks. A roar went up from the onlookers. For the Pretender, next, the crowd counted in its blundering voice-of-many-voices as the effigy swung. ‘OneONE
one
one! TwoTWO
two
two! ThreeTHREE
three
three!’ – And as Prince Charles Edward Stuart leapt into ash, an explosion of hoots, jeers, catcalls, whistles. Fawkes went more reverently, being a more ancient and more toothless enemy. Just a count as he swung in the air, and then a happy universal sigh of justice done. He rested on his nape, malicious tongue pointed skyward, and wick’d
away to fiery nothing, up it. ‘God save the King!’ someone shouted, and a part of the circled crowd, away on the other side of the bonfire, attempted to chant it in chorus. But the voice-of-all-voices was separating to a babble of many; the linked arms of the circle unlocked; the strange grave hush disappeared; conversations began; flasks, bottles and jugs began to pass hand to hand.

Smith could have ventured forward now in search of his thief but, clue gone, he did not believe he would locate him at random in the dark of the Common any more than he had by quartering at random the streets of the city. Instead, shivery with more than simple cold, he accepted the earthenware jug coming from his right, and drank a mouthful of what turned out to be new rum, treacly and fiery. No sooner had he passed it on, than a stone bottle smelling of genever was thrust at him, and more, and yet more drink. He took sips, but looking left and right, he saw the rum, genever and moonshine going down in throat-pumping gulps: serious drinking, such as he had not seen since he left London, and which he had insensibly supposed he had left behind on the farther shore, the sozzled, desperate, waver-footed self-obliteration of the gin-cellars a part of all that was poxed and ulcered at home. Yet here it was regular, cleanly-dressed citizens – he would have said sober citizens – who were casting off their daylight selves upon the sulphurous apron of the fire, and drinking, not to be convivial, not to take off the cold edge of the night, but to dissolve as much of themselves as spirits would eat away.

Already the younger prentices had started to spew, and laugh, and try the liquor again; already gestures were growing bigger and rougher, and steps more lurching. The women were not drinking, except a few haggard-looking drabs over in the poorest part of the ring around the fire. The good wives, the respectable
maids, the well-dressed ladies were melting away into the shadows, homeward bound, their part of the evening done. The circle rocked, and reeled. One man, receiving his mouthful of spirits, ran with his cheeks distended forward into the zone of intolerable heat close to the fire, and blew it at the coals, so that a line of dripping yellow-blue flame lit on the instant, and he seemed dragonish as he wove back grinning. Cries of laughter and applause; immediate imitation by three or four others dashing toward the blaze, till inevitably one too incapable to manage the trick cough’d at the critical moment and spilled blue flaming gin down his chin and clothes. Louder laughter, and a pause of admiration while he rolled on the ground screaming and beating at himself, before his friends stumbled to the rescue, dragged him back into the shades, and, lacking other resources, pissed him out.

Smith having sipped, not gulped, had the little glow in his belly, not the raging melting demon his neighbours had eagerly imbibed, and now the night was getting rowdy, he judged it best to fade away too. But he had missed his moment, it was past and of a sudden seemingly long past the stage of the carouse when a man might bow out and still be counted a good fellow, for instant offence bloomed on the face of the burly prentice to his right when he refused the next drink, and, backing, he only backed into the hot damp weight of the prentice’s friend, who gripped him.

‘Wassamatter? Where you creeping off to? ’S Pope Day. Have a drink.’

The one in front shoved the bottle at his mouth, like someone trying to push a spoon past the resistance of a baby. The glass banged his teeth, and he got his hands up to grip the neck, before it could knock any out. The prentice didn’t want to let go. He was only about seventeen, but he had the same milk-fed mass Smith
had seen in Lovell’s Isaiah. Smith twisted, and the bottle came free. The boys were very close round him.

‘Thanks,’ said Smith, and took what he meant to be a hearty stage swig; but the base of the bottle was slapped at that moment, the hard rim struck his palate like a hammer, and he choked. The liquor sprayed. This they found very funny, the one behind creaking out a fit of mirth that broke down into hiccups.

‘Gotta have a drink on Pope Day,’ said the first.

‘Yuh!’ agreed the second. ‘Birth! righ’! ovva Eng! lish! man!’

‘Abfolutely,’ said Smith, tasting blood. He passed the bottle over his shoulder. ‘Here you go.’ As he’d hoped, the hiccupper let go to take it. Smith wriggled left, and stood back from them both. Another step and he’d be away.

‘Have a good evening, lads,’ he said. ‘This Englishman’s for his bed. Hey,’ he added, beginning to back, ‘do you know the fellows who drew the cart?’

They weren’t listening. The first one was staring at Smith’s shadow-dappled face, with the dark line running down from the corner of his mouth, and his neck-cloth loose, as if the backstep into the dark had revealed a strangeness there that hadn’t been apparent when they were nose to nose.

‘Fuck,’ said he. ‘’S him.’

‘Who?’ asked the hiccupper.

‘The heathen. The one as is rich as Creezus.’

‘That you?’ asked the hiccupper, muzzily interested, as you might be if introduced unexpectedly to a man with six fingers. But his friend was savouring the discovery more darkly.

‘Fuck,’ he said again. ‘It’s a fucken Papist. A Papist on Pope Day. You gotta lotta front, you evil
fucker
. Standing here! With
us
! You fucker!’ He was shaking his head with delight.

‘Oi! Lackwit!’ said Smith sharply. ‘Dim your gabber. I’m no more Popish ’n you.’

‘Jonesy!’ shouted the boy. ‘Simmo! Mr Higgins! Come over ’ere a minute! Look what we got here!’

Enough. Smith sidled into full shadow, and turned off briskly, yet at a walk, upon the usual city rule that a man who does not wish to be noticed, whether he has picked a pocket or pasted a play-bill where one is not allowed, should never pick himself out by running. Mistake. He had not made above twenty paces across the uneven grass, before the raised voices behind resolved into pounding feet, and a shoulder struck him behind the knees, and he was slammed to the turf beneath a mountain of rapidly augmenting male meat. Frieze against his cheek, his cheek against the cold dirt; the weight of at least two bodies on his back; excited, spiritous breathing. ‘Got him!’ someone cried. Smith was pinned. He tried to flex his spine, but there was no wriggling this time; the weight had him flat out. He waited, having no choice, bundled beneath so much brisket; yet calmer, to tell truth, than he had been a moment since. Smith, when his expedition was in nervous prospect – and when he was corked, contained, forced to bide his time aboard
Henrietta
– had imagined many dismal outcomes to his errand; disasters varied, disasters manifold; and tho’ none had quite figured him mobbed by angry prentices beside a bonfire, under mistake for a Jesuit, angry crowds had certainly been enumerated among disaster’s instruments, several ways; he had fingered over, in panicky imagination, those cards on which were printed futures where a multitude with screaming mouths dragged him gallows-ward, or pulped him to nothing in a ring of falling cudgels. Yet now, it seemed the maxim was true, that anticipation had been the worser part of the prospect, worse
than actuality. As the heap of prentice disassembled, and he was yanked up roughly to his feet with many hands on him, he felt panic drain out of him, leaving a different fluid behind, steady and chill: winter salamander-blood in his veins.