A Different Flesh (21 page)

Then Douglas went on, “You cook, you say?” At Jeremiah's nod, he broke into a grin that turned his heavy features boyish for a moment. “Then board with me, why don't you? I've rattled round my house since the swamp fever took my Margaret two years ago.” The memory made him somber again. “Help me keep the place neat, and I'll buy supplies for both of us. You deal with them then: if I'm not the worst cook in the commonwealth, he's not been born yet. Do we have a contract?”

“A deal, you mean? Yes, sir!” Jeremiah clasped Douglas's outstretched hand. The lawyer's grip was soft but strong. Jeremiah felt like turning handsprings. With room and board taken care of, three denaires wasn't bad money at all.

Jeremiah spent the rest of the day getting things off the floor so he could sweep it clean of crumpled papers, dust, apple cores, nutshells, and other garbage. Douglas's indifference to filth left his fastidious soul cringing.

He found another denaire and a half in loose change. The lawyer let him keep that too, though he warned, “Bear in mind my generosity doesn't extend to gold, if there is any down there.” The thought of coming across a goldpiece made Jeremiah work harder than ever; only later did he think to wonder whether that was what Douglas had had in mind.

He had gotten down to bare wood in a few places when Douglas had a visitor, a tall, lean, middle-aged man who wore a stovepipe hat to make himself seem even taller. “Ah, Mr. Hayes,” Douglas said, setting aside the document he had been studying. “What can I do for you, this fine afternoon?”

Hayes glanced at Jeremiah. “Buy yourself a nigger? Doesn't seem like you, Alfred.”

“He's free; I hired him,” Douglas said, his color rising. “Mr. Hayes, Jeremiah Gillen. Jeremiah, this is Zachary Hayes.” Hayes nodded with the minimum courtesy possible and did not offer to shake hands. Jeremiah went back to work. He was not used to respect from whites, and so did not miss it.

“I came on a gamble,” Hayes said, turning away from Jeremiah with obvious relief. “I daresay you own the most law books in the city, and keep them in the worst order. Have you a copy of William Watson's
Ten Quodlibetical Questions Concerning Religion and State
and, if so, can you lay your hands on it?”

“The title rings a bell—having heard it, how could one forget it?” Douglas said. “As for where it might be, though, I confess I have no idea. Jeremiah, paw through things and see what you come up with, will you?”

Hayes made a sour face and folded his arms to wait, plainly not expecting Jeremiah to find the book. That scorn spurred him more even than Douglas's earlier mention of gold. He dove under tables, climbed on a shaky chair to reach top bookcase shelves. On one of those, its calfskin spine to the wall, he found Watson's tome. He wordlessly handed it to Hayes.

“My thanks,” Hayes said—not to him, but to Douglas. “I'll have it back to you within a fortnight.” He spun on his heel and strode out.

Douglas and Jeremiah looked at each other. They started to laugh at the same time. “Don't mind him,” the lawyer said, clapping Jeremiah on the back. “He thinks niggers are stupid as sims. Come on; let's go home.”

The house almost made Jeremiah regret his new employment. Douglas had spoken of needing help to keep the place neat; only someone with his studied disdain for order would have imagined there was any neatness to maintain. The house bore a chilling resemblance to his office, except that dirty clothes and dirtier pots were added to the mix.

The only thing that seemed to stand aloof from the clutter was a fine oil painting of a slim, pale, dark-eyed woman. Douglas saw Jeremiah's eyes go to it. “Yes, that's my Margaret,” he said sadly; as Jeremiah would learn, he never spoke of her without putting the possessive in front of her name.

The kitchen was worse than the rest of the house: stale bread, moldy flour, greens limp at best, and salt pork like the stuff Charles Gillen's sims ate. Jeremiah shook his head; he had looked for nothing better. He pumped some water, set a chunk of pork in it to soak out some of the salt. Meanwhile, he got a fire going in the hearth. The stew he ended up producing would have earned harsh words from his former owner, but Douglas demanded seconds and showered praise on him.

“Let me start with good food, sir, and I'll really give you something worth eating,” Jeremiah said.

“I don't know whether I should, or in six months I'll be too wide to go through my own front door,” Douglas said, ruefully surveying his rotund form.

Jeremiah had to sweep off what he was coming to think of as the usual layer of junk to get at his cot. It was saggy and lumpy, nowhere near as comfortable as the one he'd had on the Gillen estate. He didn't care. It was his because he wanted it to be, not because it had to be.

He slept wonderfully.

As the months went by, he tried more than once to find a name for his relationship with Alfred Douglas. It was something more than servant, something less than friend. Part of the trouble was that Douglas treated him unlike anyone ever had before. For a long while, because he had never encountered it before, he had trouble recognizing the difference. The lawyer used him as a man, not as a slave.

That did not mean he did not tell Jeremiah what to do. He did, which further obscured the change to the black man. But he did not speak as to a half-witted, surly child, and he did not stand over Jeremiah to make sure he got things done. He assumed Jeremiah would, and went about his own business.

Not used to such liberty, at first Jeremiah took advantage of it to do as little as he could. “Work or get out,” Douglas had told him bluntly. “Do you think I hired you to sit on your arse and sleep?”

But he never complained when he caught Jeremiah reading, which he did more and more often. In the beginning that had been purely practical on Jeremiah's part, so as to keep fresh what Caleb Gillen had taught him. Then the printed page proved to have a seductive power of its own.

Which is not to say reading came easily. It painfully taught Jeremiah how small his vocabulary was. Sometimes he could figure out what a new word meant from its context. Most of the time, he would have to ask Douglas.

“‘Eleemosynary?'” The lawyer raised his eyebrows. “It's a fancy word for ‘charitable.'” He saw that meant nothing to Jeremiah either, simplified again: “‘Giving to those who lack.' What are you looking at, anyhow?”

Jeremiah held up a law book, wondering if he was in trouble. Douglas only said, “Oh,” and returned to the brief he was drafting. When he was done, he sanded the ink dry, set the paper aside, and pulled a slim volume from the shelf (by this time, things were easy to find).

He offered the book to Jeremiah. “Here, try this. You have to walk before you can run.”

“
The Articles of Independence of the Federated Commonwealths and the Terms of Their Federation
,” Jeremiah read aloud.

“All else springs from those,” Douglas said. “Without them, we'd have only chaos, or a tyrant as they do these days in England. But go through them and understand them point by point, and you've made a fair beginning toward becoming a lawyer.”

Jeremiah stared at him. “There's no nigger lawyers in Portsmouth.” He spoke with assurance; he had gotten to know the black part of town well. It boasted scores of preachers, a few doctors, even a printer, but no lawyers.

“I know there aren't,” Douglas said. “Perhaps there should be.” When Jeremiah asked him what he meant, he changed the subject, as if afraid he had said too much.

The book Douglas gave Jeremiah perplexed and astonished him at the same time. “This is how the government is put together?” he asked the lawyer after he had struggled through the first third.

“So it is.” Douglas looked at him keenly, as if his next question was to be some kind of test. “What do you think of it?”

“I think it's purely crazy, begging your pardon,” Jeremiah blurted. Douglas said nothing, waiting for him to go on. He fumbled ahead, trying to clarify his feelings: “The censors each with a veto on the other one, the Popular Assembly chose by all the free people and the senators by—I forgot how the senators happen.”

“Censors and commonwealth governors become senators for life after their terms end,” Douglas supplied.

Jeremiah smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “That's right. And the censors enforce the laws and lead the armies, but only if the Senate decides to spend the money the armies need. And it's the Popular Assembly that makes the laws (if the Senate agrees) and decides if it's peace or war in the first place. If you ask me, Mr. Douglas, I don't think any one of 'em knows for certain he can fart without checking the
Terms of Federation
first.”

“That's also why we have courts,” Douglas smiled. “Why do you suppose the Conscript Fathers arranged things this way? Remember, after we won our freedom from England, we could have done anything we wanted.”

Having had scant occasion to think about politics before, Jeremiah took a long time to answer. When he did, all he could remember was the discussion Charles Gillen and Harry Stowe had had the spring before. “For the sake of argufying?” he guessed.

To his surprise, Douglas said, “You know, you're not far wrong. They tried to strike a balance, so everyone would have some power and no one group could get enough to take anybody else's freedom away. The Conscript Fathers modeled our government on the mixed constitution the Roman Republic had. You know who the Romans were, don't you, Jeremiah?”

“They crucified Jesus, a long time ago,” Jeremiah said, exhausting his knowledge of the subject.

“So they did, but they were also fine lawyers and good, practical men of affairs—not showy like the Greeks, but effective, and able to rule a large state for a long time. If we do half so well, we'll have something to be proud of.”

The discussion broke off there, because Zachary Hayes came in to borrow a book. Now that Jeremiah had Douglas's library in order, Hayes stopped by every couple of weeks. He never showed any sign of recognizing why he had more luck these days, and spoke directly to Jeremiah only when he could not help it.

This time, he managed to avoid even looking at the black man. Instead, he said to Douglas, “If you don't mind, you'll see me more often, Alfred. I've a new young man studying under me, and long since gave away my most basic texts.”

“No trouble at all, Zachary,” Douglas assured him. Once Hayes was gone, Douglas rolled his eyes. “That buzzard never gave away anything, except maybe the clap. I guarantee you he sold his old books—probably for more than he paid for them too; no denying he's able.”

Jeremiah did not answer. He was deep in the
Terms of Federation
again. Once the Conscript Fathers had outlined the Federated Commonwealths's self-regulating government, they went on to set further limits on what it could do.

Reading those limits, Jeremiah began to have a sense of what Douglas had meant by practical ruling. Each restriction was prefaced by a brief explanation of why it was needed: “Establishing dogmas having proven in history to engender civic strife, followers of all faiths shall be forever free to follow their own beliefs without let or hindrance.” “So that free men shall not live in fear of the state and its agents and form conspiracies against them, no indiscriminate searches of persons or property shall be permitted.” “To keep the state from the risk of tyranny worse than external subjugation, no foreign mercenaries shall be hired, but liberty shall depend on the vigilance of the free men of the nation.”

On and on the book went, checking the government for the benefit of the free man. Jeremiah finished it with a strange mixture of admiration and anger. So much talk of freedom, and not a word against slavery! It was as though the Conscript Fathers had not noticed it existed.

Conscious of his own daring, Jeremiah remarked on that to Douglas. The lawyer nodded. “Slavery has been with us since Greek and Roman times, and you can search the Bible from one end to the other without finding a word against it. And, of course, when Englishmen came to America, they found the sims. No one would say the sims should not serve us.”

Jeremiah almost blurted, “But I'm no sim!” Then he remembered Douglas thought him free. He did say, “Sims is different than men.”

“There you are right,” Douglas said, sounding uncommonly serious. “The difference makes me wonder about our laws at times, it truly does.” Jeremiah hoped he would go on, but when he did, it was not in the vein the black had expected: “Of course, one could argue as well that the sims' manifest inequality only points up subtler differences among various groups of men.”

Disgusted, Jeremiah found an excuse to knock off early. One thing he had learned about lawyers was that they delighted in argument for its own sake, without much caring about right and wrong. He had thought Douglas different, but right now he seemed the same as the rest.

A gang of sims came by, moving slowly under the weight of the heavy timbers on their shoulders. He glowered at their hairy backs. Too many white men were like Zachary Hayes, lumping sims and blacks together because most blacks were slaves.

As it had back on Charles Gillen's estate, that rankled. He was no subhuman … and if Hayes doubted what blacks really were, let him get a sim instead of the fancy cook he owned! Soon enough he'd be skeletal, not just lean. Jeremiah grinned, liking the notion.

Another party of sims emerged from a side street. This group was carrying sacks of beans. Neither gang made any effort to get out of the other's way. In an instant, they were hopelessly tangled. Traffic snarled.

Because all the sims had their hands full, they could not use their signs to straighten out the mess. Their native hoots and calls were not adequate for the job. Indeed, they made matters worse. The sims glared at each other, peeling back their lips to bare their big yellow teeth and grimacing horribly.