Golden Hill (22 page)

‘But anything you want to buy, we can get,' said Lovell. ‘Where's the difference?'

‘Privacy,' Smith said.

‘And why do you need to be private?'

‘Well,' said Smith, steepling his fingers, and making of his voice a confidential murmur, ‘Let's say … that perhaps I have been commissioned by a certain gentleman – a certain
very distinguished
young gentleman, of, shall we say, German family – who desires, on terms of strict anonymity, to visit his …
estates
in the New World; and requires the way to be made ready for him, with a household befitting his station, yet with great discretion. A house, a carriage, an equipment of staff; yet all to be muffled in deep
secrecy. Deep, deeper, deepest secrecy. The most regal of discretions.' At each syllable of this farrago of nonsense, he expected a snort of derision from the corner, yet none came.

‘Do you mean,' said Lovell, hushed, ‘that you are acting for Pr—'

‘No,' said Hendrick flatly. ‘Listen to him. He is just amusing himself.'

‘True,' said Smith. ‘Prison must have put me in the mood for it.'

‘You little blackguard—'

‘Don't let him bait you so easy,' Piet said to Lovell. ‘We must still settle this. And it
is
his right in law to ask payment how he likes.'

‘How am I supposed to find seventeen hundred pound in cash?'

‘Oh, I don't expect it in gold,' Smith said. ‘I have learned better than that. Any pile of paper will do, as strange as you like, so as it is negotiable; – and does not come from Rhode Island. Pay me in dead leaves, I care not, if they will pass in trade. But
how
is your problem.'

‘Banyard's will not pay for my sugar till spring.'

‘But then, if I have it right, in cash themselves, you having settled your balance with them by paying me?'

‘I suppose so; theoretically.'

‘Then borrow until then,' said Smith. ‘Or sell something. Or beg. Or steal. But in nineteen days, I want cash.'

‘There is none.'

‘What, in no drawer, closet, chest or cubbyhole of the entire colony? You disappoint me. And I believe you would disappoint Judge De Lancey as well, who promised you'd oblige me lavishly, if I forebore to meddle.'

‘I see you do not purpose to mend a friendship at all,' said Hendrick.

‘I have not yet heard the words to make me want to!' said Smith.

Silence.

‘We might perhaps be able to offer a per centum over value, if you would settle for payment in kind,' said Piet.

‘Really?' said Smith. ‘How much?'

‘Six per cent?'

‘Nonsense. Twenty.'

‘Ridiculous!' said Piet, but there was beginning to be a general relaxation in the room, when a noise that had been swelling on the stairs outside for some time rose to a bursting point, and the door flew open in what seemed to Smith to be a blaze of light, admitting a confused throng of persons, with, at its head, a mighty bulk of red and white and palpably false beard, brandishing a candelabrum.

‘St Nick am I, with bulging sack,' roared this apparition.

Smith, who had half-risen, dazzled, made out appraising little eyes he recognised between the white flax moustaches and the red hood. His silky politic voice expanded to a booming bellow, it was plain who was in the robe: the saint was the judge, Sinterklaas was De Lancey. Smith wondered if, on St George's Day, he turned out to delight his constituents as the Red Cross Knight. Or possibly
as the dragon. The soot-smeared sprite holding out the sack at his elbow was William Smith. Around them crowded curious faces. Whatever the saint had done downstairs, the onlookers were looking forward to seeing it happen again up here.

‘Welcome, good holy man,' said Piet from his chair.

‘You find us not in the harmony we'd hoped, Sint Klaas,' added Hendrick.

‘Is that a fact?' said Sinterklaas, peering sharply into the shadows. ‘Then, well come or ill come remains to be seen, for my sack bears punishments as well as sweetness, and words to sting as well as words to bless, for such as cannot agree. Ho. Ho. Tell me, Black Peter, my faithful helper, whom have we news for first?'

‘For Hendrick, son of the house,' said the lawyer, reaching out a folded slip of paper and a little packet wrapped and ribboned. The saint cleared his throat, raised his candles to light the paper, and declaimed:

General laughter. In the flickering candle-light, Hendrick smiling gamely.

‘Do we give him his cake?' the saint asked the jury at his shoulders.

‘Yes! Yes!' – and the little package was passed across.

‘Next, Gregory Lovell,' announced the sack keeper.

The saint took the slip, and beetled his stuck-on flax eyebrows as he read it over. ‘Brace yourself, friend Lovell. Ahem –'

Groans of outrage, cries of approval. Lovell, dim in the yellow-stippled blackness, arranging his features in a grin of vinegary goodwill, but unconsciously touching his offended head. No snicker, no sound at all, though, from Tabitha's corner.

‘The verdict goes against your wig, sir. But boys, girls, ladies, gentlemen: does the man beneath it deserve his Sinterklaas cake?'

‘Yes!'

‘Very well. Black Peter? – And surely we must now have greetings of the feast for the master of the feast? Yes, yes, here we are.
Een Sinterklaasgedicht voor Mijnheer Piet Van Loon
, with our grateful respects, and the pious hope he will forgive us.'

The watchers whooped, but the saint spoke over them. ‘Nonsense!' he boomed. ‘Who writes this stuff? Mijnheer, as one well-sized man to another, I advise you to glory in your stature. Roll through the world with pride! And yet' – undoing the ribbons on Piet's sweetmeat with nimble fingers – ‘I think I had better eat this one myself. Hmph. Mmm.' Laughter; Piet's belly shaking at the joke, in (as it were) comfortable discomfort. ‘So much for the easy part of my task,' Sint Klaas boomed on, wiping his mouth, ‘when Sinterklaas has old friends to commend, familiar faces … and familiar
vices
, to smile at as the winter comes and we draw our circle close. But what will my sack have in it for a guest unknown? Black Peter?'

Smith, knowing himself not part of that circle, rose to his feet warily. He did not want to receive the saint's judgement, whatever it was, at De Lancey's feet. He could see that this ceremonious clowning had been supposed to furnish a cement for the agreement they had expected to reach with him, but what present they were trying to give him, what balm they thought they could offer – he did not know. The judge stepped forward, the candelabrum a crusty anchor for streaming ribbons of light, and held it so that the two of them were looking at each other through the flames, with all the world dark beyond. The judge's real eyelashes were a sandy pink, like bristles in pigskin.

‘Had us disappointed for a while there, son,' he said quietly; ‘thought we'd wasted all that consideration on a nobody. Steady there, hey? Play your part, hey? You mean to dance on the rope, I conceive, not dangle from it.'

He raised his voice back to the jocular blast required of the saint.

This verse could not give the satisfaction of confirming a known character in Smith, Smith having none to confirm: but it drew a very pleasing and pathetic picture, with the different satisfaction of surprise about it, and so when the saint then clapped his hands together, to show what the reaction should be, the jury at his back and in the door-way obligingly joined in a ripple of applause. Sinterklaas indicated by a lift of his beard, and an opening of his hands, that Smith might reply if he wanted to; but Smith only smiled, tightly, and the saint turned away with a swirl of his robe, candle-stick held high.

‘Black Peter,' he said, ‘there remains one more in the room, does there not?'

‘There does.'

‘Has she deserved a gift from Sinterklaas?'

‘She has not. For she is a very froward, meddlesome, mischievous soul; a bad daughter, and a curse to her acquaintance; a notorious shrew and scold.'

‘What have we for her in the sack, then? A switch, a whip, a lump of coal?'

‘Harsh words, good holy man. Words to sting her for her offences, and to offer recompense where she has offended.'

A paper was passed, and the saint began to inflate himself within his robe for the oration, the bolster at his waist moving upward in a lump as he took breath; yet Smith was suddenly paying him little heed, for as Sinterklaas had turned towards Tabitha's chair, the candles had at last illuminated her, and shown him what the chair contained, and it was not at all the mocking, self-possessed creature that he had all this time imagined. Curled up on the seat, with her knees drawn up to her chin, she was indeed twisted as far away from the company as she might turn: but not laughingly, not in a posture of proud refusal. She seemed clutched in on herself as an animal is who curls tight against pursuers, who presents brittle spines or creaking plates of horn because it cannot contend with the world by any more active means. The flames made her look yellow, but she might have been so anyway, without them, for her skin seemed wizened into a mummified dryness on her bones, with dark shadows practically amounting to bruises under her eyes; and she appeared to have shrunk, to have thinned past slenderness to a dry, jointed angularity. She did not look well, or young. In the sudden glare of light from the candles she only stirred and winced sluggishly, like a wasp left over from summer. The same momentary glare seemed to accomplish an entire revolution in Mr Smith. It has often been observed, how our desires take strength or force from having a minute dash of repulsion curdled into 'em, the fruit no doubt of our fallen state. Now desire ceded to repulsion altogether. The soft expansive wish to reach for her, with mouth, with tongue, with hands – the bare-skinned greedy gentle unprotected urge to hold, stroke, suck, coddle, transfix – recoiled in alarm, as if
he had been wishing to kiss (indeed) a creeping wasp in winter, or a crab, or a furr'd and feeler'd moth. He had believed till that instant that he hated her, but to hate a strong enemy, full of resource and will, is to continue to admire, after a fashion, especially if what you hate you also find beautiful. Now, rather than a girl who made mischief from an excess of spirit, a wicked lively freedom, it seemed he saw a being miserably compelled, venomous and yet helpless; self-stung, self-poisoned; unequal to the catastrophes she caused.

Smith felt his anger shrivelling away to ash inside him. What was there in the chair was too small for the great feelings it had stirred: too ugly for love, too ingrowing for passion, too negligible for hate. But not too small for pity. If it was wretched to care for her, it must be still worse to be her.

‘Please, stop,' he said.

‘What's this?' said the saint, baffled.

‘Please, enough.'

‘Don't you want your cake from Sinterklaas?'

The saint peered from face to face for guidance, the verse still poised.

‘Stupid,' muttered Tabitha into the upholstery.

‘Can you not stop this?' Smith said to Hendrick.

‘Mr Smith is very tender-hearted,' said Hendrick, discovery in
his voice, and something like glee. ‘I think Mr Smith wishes to renegotiate. Six per cent,' he said.