Theft of Life (44 page)

‘Never again, boy,’ he said while the man struggled, then dropped him, dusted his hands and left the shop. The clerk waited till he was gone and then spat out the damp paper and whined a complaint to his employer, who had been calmly watching the whole episode from the door to the back office.

Mrs Humphrey sniffed and rubbed at an ink-stain on her fingers until the clerk had worked himself to a pitch of indignation that made him sound like a kettle boiling. ‘Oh, shut your bone box,’ she said at last. ‘Glass should have done that years ago.’ Then she turned her back on him.

The Reverend Dr Fischer’s prosecution for assault was almost missed. He was fined five pounds. After consulting with the Bishop of London he found he no longer wished for the responsibilities of a large parish in the city and retired to the country. A month later he wrote to Eustache, apologising with apparent sincerity for his moment of madness and fear. He declared his intention of making a full confession of his own role in the slave trade and closed with a request that he might live in hopes of Eustache’s forgiveness. Gritting his teeth, Eustache said he would wait until he had read the damned book. Graves did not scold him for swearing and sent Fischer a tightly worded note saying approximately the same thing.

Bounder and Creech were both found guilty of the manslaughter of Mr Trimnell, fined a pound each and discharged. The trial of Mrs Trimnell for murder was reported in the newspapers, but the references to it were brief and factual. She confessed to the crime of killing Mrs Smith and stated that she had at once gone to the Jamaica Coffee House and told her father what she had done. He had returned to Mrs Smith’s premises, set the fire and carried off the maid. Penny gave her evidence clearly and calmly and left the court between Mr and Mrs Scudder. Mrs Trimnell’s claims that Sir Charles Jennings had murdered her father by cutting his throat and made an attempt on her own life were not reported by the gentlemen of the press, nor did they appear in any of the official records. Her hanging was the usual London carnival.

Neither Mrs Westerman nor Crowther attended, but at about the hour it was due to take place they found themselves together with Mr Palmer in Christopher’s Academy in Soho Square. They drank tea with Mrs Christopher and the children. Harriet discussed female education with Sally and Mrs Christopher, and took a note of the school Miss Christopher was attending, thinking of Anne’s future. The gentlemen discussed different philosophies of fighting with a short sword, and Trimnell’s name was not spoken. Mr Palmer did say, however, that he had heard from a reliable source that Sir Charles was living under an assumed name in Rome, and Drax had taken a position as Court Physician to the Margrave of Baden. He had also heard from the same source that a young mulatto singer and harpsichord player had made an impressive debut in Paris.

On the same day that Mrs Trimnell was hanged, Thomas Clarkson read his prize-winning essay to an audience of dignitaries in the Senate House of Cambridge University. His future in the Church assured, he rode back to London, but on the way his mind could not cease turning over the essay in his mind – what he had read, heard and written. He got off his horse and began to walk, trying to persuade himself that it could not really be true, or even if it was, it was not really his concern. Coming in sight of Wades Mill in Hertfordshire, he sat disconsolate on the turf by the roadside, holding his horse’s reins. The thought came into his mind that, if the contents of the essay
were
true, it was time some person put an end to these horrors. There by the roadside, and with only his horse for witness, he decided it might as well be him.

Francis also found he had no wish to see the hanging. Instead, he spent the morning finishing a project he had begun the day he had forced the clerk at Humphrey’s to eat the print. He wrote
finis
with a feeling of relief more than happiness, then carried the pages upstairs to where Mr Ferguson was waiting. The older man examined the first few sheets and nodded. ‘All that singing black folks do – means something then, does it?’

‘It’s how we record our history, Mr Ferguson.’

‘Is it now?
Is
it now? Well, how many are you thinking?’ he said.

‘Two hundred?’ Francis replied.

Ferguson shook his heavy head. ‘No, lad. Five hundred for something new like this, and if we don’t sell them all in two months, you can dock the paper costs from my wages.’

‘Perhaps I will.’

Ferguson held the page up. ‘
The Life of Adisa Enitan, the African, also known as Francis Glass, by himself. Including the story of his kidnapping from his native land, his sufferings as a slave and trial as a child at the Old Bailey, with an account of the many cruelties and kindnesses he met with in Christian lands leading to his freedom, with his thoughts on slavery and an appeal to all good English men and women for its immediate abolition
. Oh, those are good words. Five hundred, no doubt.’ He turned away from the page. ‘Joshua! Up here, my lad! There’s work to be done.’

‘Thank you, Mr Ferguson.’

‘My pleasure, Mr Glass.’

As he walked away, Francis could already hear the type rattling into place.

The history of British involvement in slavery and the slave trade is complex, contradictory, evolving and unsettling. Much of the prosperity this country has enjoyed over the last two hundred years was built on human misery and suffering on an almost unimaginable scale. Our institutions, our monuments and our culture are all stained and coloured by slavery, and it’s not talked about enough.

The transatlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1807 after massive public pressure, and slavery was finally abolished in 1833. At that point, £20 million in compensation was paid out by the British Government – not to the slaves but to the slave-owners. You can see where this money went and find a great deal more information at the Legacies of British Slave-ownership site at
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
which was launched during the writing of this book.

For a general history of the Abolition movement in Britain I’d recommend
Bury the Chains: the British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
by Adam Hochschild, and for an account of the British in the West Indies
The Sugar Barons
by Matthew Parker. For more about the lives of black people in Britain, as well as Peter Fryer’s book
Staying Power
, I’d recommend Florian Shyllon’s
Black People in Britain 1555–1833
. The book I would most like everyone to read though is
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
, also known as Gustavus Vassa. It was published in 1789. The Penguin Classics edition has an excellent introduction and notes from Vincent Carretta.

Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) did indeed write an essay against slavery for the Cambridge Latin Prize in 1785 and included in it testimony from unpublished manuscripts and extracts of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley. After winning the prize, he dedicated the rest of his life to fighting slavery, and records the moment of his revelation on the road in Hertfordshire in his memoirs. I’ve drawn very heavily on his account of that moment in my description of it. His essay was published in English in 1786 and was instrumental in turning the public mood against slavery. You can read it online. The story of a slave beaten to death on the quayside and thrown to the sharks comes from the English version of his essay, quoting from unpublished papers. In 1787 he formed the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade with the lawyer Granville Sharp, who is also mentioned in the novel, and a number of prominent Quakers. He met William Wilberforce in the same year.

Stephen Paxton and Dieudonné-Pascal Pieltain were both real composers and performers working in London in May 1785. Paxton has a cameo in
Instruments of Darkness
, the first novel in this series.

All of the other characters who appear in the book are fictional, but some are more fictional than others. Students of the period might notice some similarities between the careers of Dr Fischer and that of John Newton (1725–1807), who wrote ‘Amazing Grace’, among other famous hymns. Newton was a slave trader for some years then, after taking Holy Orders and preaching very successfully in Olney, he was invited to become Rector of St Mary Woolnoth in 1779. He was an evangelical, obviously a charismatic preacher, and attracted a large congregation. He did not speak out against slavery until 1788, but when he did, it was with considerable effect. I do not think he ever attacked small children to cover up his past, nor is there any evidence I have seen of active sadism on his part during his time as a trader.

The manuscript is also, like Trimnell himself, a fiction, but deeply influenced by the diary left by Thomas Thistlewood of his time in Jamaica. The names Eustache yells at Fischer come from this document, and the stories Eustache quotes are loosely adapted from the same source. I left out the worst of it. Professor James Walvin’s
The Trader, The Owner, The Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery
is a gripping account of the lives of Newton, Thistlewood and Equiano.

Tobias Christopher owes much of his rhetoric to Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and his
Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery
published in 1787.

Francis Glass as he appears in this book is my own creation, though much of his story is deeply influenced by, and draws on, that of Olaudah Equiano and his
Interesting Narrative
. There is an historical Francis Glass behind the fictional one, however. Below is the complete text of a record I found on
www.oldbaileyonline.org
(
Old Bailey Online: The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913
) during my research for this novel:

Francis Glass, Theft > burglary, 7th September 1768

573. (M.) Francis Glass was indicted for that he, on the 5th of September, about the hour of two in the night, the dwelling-house of James Smith did break and enter, and stealing a silk handkerchief, value 10 d. the property of the said James.
^*

James Smith
. I live in Norfolk-street in the Strand; the boy at the bar was servant to a gentleman named Allear, who lodged at my house. (Note, the prisoner was a Black.) It is about 12 months since the prisoner was sent to Jamaica, and he has been returned about six weeks; my servant came up to me this day se’nnight in the morning, about eight o’clock, and told me my house was broke open; I came down and found the kitchen window broke open; there was a little place where I kept some brandy and wine, that had been pulled all about the parlour, and particularly an apple-pie which the young man at the bar was very fond of; I believe he had filled his belly, but the silver spoon in the pie was there safe; I immediately called my servants, and asked them if they had seen any thing of the prisoner he having served me so some time before; I said, I fancy it is my friend Glass come again; I being about going out of town, desired them to see if they could see him; accordingly one of them found him; he was brought to me; I said to him, how came you here again; he told me a gentleman had bought him in Jamaica, and that he lived with one Dr Fisher in Cecil-street; I could not find such a gentleman; at last he confessed he lived with Dr Fisher; I wrote the doctor a letter, he came to me; the prisoner told me the doctor had threatened to whip him for pissing his bed, and that was the occasion of his running away from him; he left the silver spoon and several things of value, he only took a handkerchief which our people found upon him; I cannot tell where it was taken from.

Acquitted.

Old Bailey Proceedings Online (version 7.0, 20 September 2013), September 1768, trial of Francis Glass (
t17680907–69
)

I’ve not been able to find any further record of the real Francis Glass and I wish very much there was a way to find out what happened to him. However, in fiction – possibly in crime fiction in particular – we are allowed to make occasional attempts to save some of the innocent, and punish at least some of the guilty.