Golden Hill by Francis Spufford Read Free Book Online

you; to one who is really a dear little Moorfield toad, and one who only counterfeits being so. – And now I had better go and wait upon the Governor. You may keep the opera-house you offer, sir; but by all means pay for breakfast.’
    ‘Of course,’ said Smith, with as little of a detectable pause as he could contrive. ‘Quentin? Put Mr Oakeshott’s and Mr Van Loon’s victuals to my account, would you? I believe I shall be here most mornings.’
    ‘Yessir,’ said the boy. ‘Three shillings and fourpence New-York, then, on the slate, sir.’
    Oakeshott had already left, jangling the bell on the door as he pulled it sharply to, behind him; and Smith, who had coloured, did not hurry as he followed; so he was surprised to find Septimus in fact still waiting, outside, beneath the overhang of the coffee-house’s old-fashioned upper storey; hesitantly rubbing or perhaps hesitantly tapping his pointed white chin with one well-cared-for fingertip, his gaze seemingly fixed in fascination on the mastheads of the ships opposite.
    ‘This may be needless advice,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what game you purpose to play here. I think I don’t care to know, unless you force me to take notice. But let me give you a warning. This is a place where things can get out of hand very quick: and often do. You would think, talking to the habitants, that all the vices and crimes of humanity had been left behind on the other shore. Take ’em as they take themselves, and they are the innocentest shopkeepers, placid and earnest, plucked by a lucky fortune out from corruption. But the truth is that they are wild, suspicious, combustible – and the devil to govern. They flare up at the least thing, especially at the least touch of restraint, real or imaginary, which they resent as the most bitter imposition, having known so little of it. In all their relations they are prompt to peer and gaze for the hidden motive, the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden they insist their New World to be. And thus there are few quicker to get a scent of anything … odd … about a fellow. Anyone with a particular reason to prize their privacy must work at it assiduously; for London is really a very long way away, and if a person were to get into trouble, there would be very little help that could be expected. Only what is here matters, and who is here. The courts are, if anything, more savage than those at home, and even more ruthlessly commanded by party interest. You have walked into a mesh of favours owing, where everybody knows everybody – even if none of them, as yet, know you . Do you know that there is a graveyard here, quite as if it were a real town? I think it would be taking your visit altogether too seriously for you to end up in it, don’t you?’
    A sailor had ascended the foremast of the country schooner nearest in to the dock and was painting it with something out of a pail.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Smith. ‘I think.’
    ‘Well, I am not sure I am saying it for your good, exactly. But my sisters would like me to have said it. My father the rector certainly would.’
    In Smith’s mind these vicarage figures, who had seemed entirely substanceless, thickened slightly, and for an instant he imagined Septimus as a painfully well-behaved child, playing tidily on the floor while seven high-minded adults stared at him.
    ‘I perceive you are a man of virtue, Mr Oakeshott,’ he said, trying for the lightness of their conversation’s opening.
    ‘Go away, Mr Smith. – Achilles!’ he called, and a tall African of about Smith’s age, wearing livery, with long limbs and a tight knob of a head like the bole of a dark tree, wordlessly unfolded himself from where he had been crouching against the dockside wall, chewing a mouthful of tobacco. He spat into the gutter.
    ‘And shall I see you later, too?’ Smith asked Septimus.
    ‘Not tonight. But soon, assuredly, if you stay. Just wait for the dark and the cold to set in; for then, as I