Theft of Life
Copyright © 2014 Imogen Robertson
The right of Imogen Robertson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2014
All characters in this publication – other than the obvious historical figures – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
Author photograph © Rebecca Key
eISBN: 978 0 7553 9018 2
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Table of Contents
London, 1785. When the body of a former West Indies planter is found staked out by St Paul’s Cathedral, suspicion falls at once on a runaway slave. But the answer is not that simple. The planter’s death brings tragedy for Francis Glass, a freed slave working as a bookseller, and a painful reminder of the past for William Geddings, senior footman in the household of unconventional widow Harriet Westerman.
Harriet is reluctant to confront the powerful world of the slave trade but she and her friend, anatomist Gabriel Crowther, must face its shameful truths – and the fact that much of Britain’s wealth is built on wilful destruction of human life. The secrets of London’s slave owners reveal a network of alliances across the capital. And while some people will risk everything to preserve their reputation, some acts can never be forgiven.
Imogen Robertson grew up in Darlington, studied Russian and German at Cambridge, and now lives in London. She directed for TV, film and radio before becoming a full-time author, and also writes and reviews poetry. Imogen won the
Telegraph’s
‘First thousand words of a novel competition’ in 2007 with the opening of
Instruments of Darkness
, her debut. Her subsequent thrillers featuring Harriet Westerman and Gabriel Crowther,
Anatomy of Murder, Island of Bones
and
Circle of Shadows
, were also richly praised. Imogen was shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award 2011 and for the CWA Dagger in the Library Award 2012.
Want to know more? Read Imogen’s blog at
www.imogenrobertson.com
or follow her on Twitter
@RobertsonImogen
.
Instruments of Darkness
Anatomy of Murder
Island of Bones
Circle of Shadows
Theft of Life
The Paris Winter
‘A true force in historical fiction’
Daily Mail
‘Deliciously chilling and dangerous. The plot and characters are absolutely mesmerising’ Karen Maitland
‘Stylish, enigmatic and wonderfully atmospheric… a story of secrecy and shame, reason and passion, that resonates long after you reach the final page’ Francis Wheen
‘Extremely impressive… a story, told by Robertson with great panache, of jealousy, greed and unkindness among the upper classes’
The Times
‘Westerman is one of the most appealing female characters to ever appear in historical fiction’
Oprah.com
‘[An] audacious mix of a cultural gloss and uncomplicated, straight-ahead storytelling… Robertson makes the various elements coalesce to striking effect’
Independent
‘Chillingly memorable. Imogen Robertson is an exquisite writer, and this is an extraordinary thriller’ Tess Gerritsen
‘A compelling story of secrecy, greed, deceit and revenge’
Historical Novels Review
‘Robertson’s foray into the world of historical detective fiction is a delight’
Sunday Express
‘Robertson’s language is spry and digestible, her scene-setting broad and detailed, her prose gracefully pressed into the service of a serpentine plot that still allows room for personal passions’ Christopher Fowler,
Financial Times
To Flora
As always, grateful thanks to my brilliant editor, Flora Rees, everyone at Headline and to my agent Annette Green. I really have no idea what I’d do without them. Well, I do – I’d starve in a gutter in a pile of my own spelling mistakes and throttled by dangling narrative threads.
My particular thanks to Kayo Chingonyi for his generous and thoughtful reading of the manuscript.
More than thanks to my husband, Ned Palmer, for dragging me out of every hole I fell into while writing this book.
I’d also like to thank Peter Fryer, a man I’ve never met but whose brilliant history of black people in Britain,
Staying Power
, introduced me to the works of Ignatius Sancho, 1729–80, Olaudah Equiano 1745–97 and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, 1757 –?. It is my sincere hope that their voices echo somewhere in these pages.
I own I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures and groans,
Is almost enough to drive pity from stones.
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
William Cowper ‘Pity for Poor Africans’
Northampton Mercury
, 9 August 1788
Look round upon the miserable fate of almost all of our unfortunate colour – superadded to ignorance, – see slavery, and the contempt of those very wretches who roll in affluence from our labours […] hear the ill-bred and heart-racking abuse of the foolish vulgar. – You, S[oubis]e, tread as cautiously as the strictest rectitude can guide ye – yet must you suffer from this –
Letter from Ignatius Sancho to Mr Soubise
Richmond, 11 October 1772
I.1
Saturday, 7 May 1785
T
HE BODY WAS STAKED
out in the north-east corner of the churchyard. The first light of a warm spring morning glanced off the pale stone of St Paul’s Cathedral, and shone in full blank surprise on the corpse. A driver taking barrels of coriander seed north first noticed the body face down in the dew. It was, or had been, a man, and the shift covering him, though yellow with age, still showed up strongly against the fresh-mown grass. The driver shouted down from his perch high on the wagon to a pair of men walking towards the docks, pointed over the railings with his whip, then urged his horses on. The men shrugged at each other and went to investigate, peering through the metal bars into the shadow of the Cathedral, then seeing what the driver had seen, they climbed over. The corpse had lengths of rope tied to his wrists and ankles, and the rope on his right ankle was attached to a stake half-driven into the ground. They approached cautiously. One knelt down by the corpse’s head and lifted it slightly from the shoulder. What they saw frightened them. They began to call out. The younger man swung himself back over the railings and, yelling as he went, ran to the door of the Chapter House and started beating on it with his fist.
William Geddings should have seen nothing of this. In the general way of things he would have woken in Berkeley Square, put on his footman’s livery in his attic bedroom then joined the rest of the upper servants for breakfast before beginning his duties in the house. The previous evening, however, he had gone to hear the music at the Elephant in Fenchurch Street, and by chance met an old shipmate. They had drunk too much in celebration of their deliverance, and he had slept in his friend’s room in Honey Lane Market.
By the time he left, the air was already warm. Only a month ago, back home in Sussex, there had been snow on the ground, but now the air was dry and heavy. William’s head throbbed and the morning light seemed tinged with orange and red. Whenever the family he served came to London he would ask permission to go, once or twice, to the places where other Africans gathered, and there listen to the music and songs of his childhood and those he had heard first as a slave in Jamaica. Rich, dancing, talking tunes they were, and some had already worked their way through the hands of curious English and German composers into the drawing rooms of the city. He would hear them from time to time as he passed trays of champagne glasses among the guests at Berkeley Square – strange, half-strangled translations of his own heritage. He did not completely understand his compulsion to seek out the originals; for the music brought back memories painful as well as sweet. His own language returned to his tongue, and remade him into the boy he had been. In the pulse of the music and talk around him he caught glimpses of his lost family, his father’s laugh and the feel of the black soil of the fields outside his village between his fingers. When his shipmate saw him and they embraced, under the joy of seeing him alive and safe in London, William’s body flickered with remembered pain: the weight of iron on his ankles, the sores on his side, the stench. No wonder they drank deeply. Now, his blood thickened by the memories, he prepared to return to the world of the English family he served, to the dramas and pleasures of the servants’ hall, to his responsibilities.