For Adrian
Cast of Characters
London in 1781 is a ravenous behemoth, swallowing forest and field, outlying villages, entire towns. The city is the centre of a fledgling empire, the capital of a country at war. Political and commercial deals are struck in her elegant drawing rooms, washed down by bowls of sweetened tea: the product of Britain’s mercantile power.
Five miles to the east, on the banks of the River Thames, lies Deptford: gateway port to distant oceans and untold riches. A town where fortunes in sugar and slaves are made and lost, thieves and prostitutes roam the streets by night, and sailors lose themselves in drink, trying to forget the things they did and saw upon the Middle Passage.
Here are some of the people to be found there …
IN LONDON
Captain Henry Corsham (Harry) – a war hero with political ambitions.
Caroline Corsham (Caro) – Harry’s wife, a society beauty.
Gabriel Corsham – Harry and Caro’s infant son.
Thaddeus Archer (Tad) – a barrister and campaigner for the abolition of slavery. Harry’s oldest friend.
Amelia Bradstreet – Tad’s sister, a widow with a scandalous past.
Moses Graham – a former slave. A gentleman painter of watercolours. Also an author and campaigner against the slave trade. Friend to Thaddeus Archer.
Ephraim Proudlock – a former slave. Assistant to Moses Graham in matters of art and abolition. Also a friend to Thaddeus Archer.
Caesar John – a former slave turned villain.
Jupiter – a former slave. A member of Caesar John’s gang.
Nicholas Cavill-Lawrence – Under-Secretary of State for War. Harry’s patron.
Napier Smith – owner of sugar plantations. Chairman of the West India lobby. Probably the richest man in the kingdom. Not yet twenty-five.
Pomfret – Harry’s butler, a former navy man.
Sam – Harry’s coachman.
Bronze – a former slave. Tapwoman at the Yorkshire Stingo tavern.
IN DEPTFORD
Lucius Stokes – a slave merchant. Mayor of Deptford.
Scipio – a former slave. Secretary to Lucius Stokes.
Cinnamon – a beautiful mulatto slave girl owned by Lucius Stokes.
Peregrine Child – the Deptford magistrate.
John Monday – a slave merchant with a religious calling.
Eleanor Monday – his wife, mother of two children.
Evan Vaughan – a slave ship captain.
James Brabazon – a slave ship surgeon.
Frank Drake – a slave ship officer.
Daniel Waterman – a slave ship cabin boy.
Nathaniel Grimshaw – a young nightwatchman, soon to take his late father’s place as a slave ship officer.
Marilyn Grimshaw – Nathaniel’s mother, a grieving widow. Landlady of the Noah’s Ark tavern.
Jamaica Mary – a former slave turned prostitute.
Alice – a prostitute.
Abraham – footman to Lucius Stokes. A slave.
Isaac Fairweather – a sailor. Friend of Frank Drake.
Rosy and her husband – owners of the coaching inn at Deptford Broadway.
Contents
Cast of Characters
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: 21–24 JUNE 1781 CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
PART TWO: 24–26 JUNE 1781 CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
PART THREE: 26–29 JUNE 1781 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
PART FOUR: 29 JUNE TO 3 JULY 1781 CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
PART FIVE: 3–7 JULY 1781 CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Historical Note
Acknowledgements
Book Group Questions
PROLOGUE
Deptford Dock, June 1781
The fog hung thick and low over the Thames. It rolled in off the water and along the quays, filling the squalid courts and dockside alleys of lower Deptford. The local name for a fog like this was the Devil’s Breath. It stank of the river’s foul miasma.
Now and then the fog lifted, and Nathaniel Grimshaw caught a glimpse of the Guineamen anchored out on Deptford Reach: spectral lines of mast and rigging against the dawn sky. His greatcoat was heavy with damp and his horsehair wig smelled of wet animal. He had been pacing in that spot for nearly half an hour. Each time he pivoted, Jago growled. The dog’s black fur stood up in spikes and his eyes shone like tiny yellow fog-lamps in the gloom.
Nathaniel could hear the fishermen talking, and he could taste their tobacco on the wind. He wanted a pipe himself, but he wasn’t sure he could hold it down. He didn’t know how they could stand there, in such close proximity. A figure loomed out of the mist, and Jago growled again, though he quietened when he recognized the stocky, square frame of the Deptford magistrate, Peregrine Child. A pair of bleary eyes peered at Nathaniel between the wet folds of the magistrate’s long wig of office. ‘Where is it, lad?’
Nathaniel led him through the fog to the wall that divided the Public Dock from the Navy Yard. The fishermen parted to let them through, each man turning to observe Child’s reaction.
On the quayside stood a ten-foot pole topped by a riveted iron hook, where the fishermen liked to hang their largest catches. Lately it had displayed a shark that had washed up here last month. Now the shark was gone and in its place hung a man. He was naked, turning on a rope in the wind, secured under the arms, with his hands tied behind him. Nathaniel didn’t like blood and there was a lot of it – dried on the dead man’s chest and back, smeared across his thighs, in his ears, in his nose, in his mouth. He had seen murdered men before – washed up on the mudflats, or dumped in the dockside alleys where he worked as a nightwatchman. None of them had prepared him for this. This one was more than a corpse. He was a spectacle, like the boneless man at the Greenwich Fair.
Steeling himself,
he studied the man again. He was about thirty years of age, very thin, with long black hair. His eyes wide open, staring accusingly. His lips were pulled back in a frozen rictus, white skin stretched taut over angled cheekbones. Beneath the first mouth was a second: a gaping, scarlet maw where the throat had been slashed.
Child stepped forward, his face inches from the body. ‘Jesu.’
He was staring at a spot just above the dead man’s left nipple. The lines seared into the pale, hairless skin were smooth and deep. The flesh around them was puckered and blistered. From where he stood, Nathaniel could just make out the design: a crescent moon on its side surmounted by a crown.
‘It’s a slave brand,’ he said. ‘Someone’s marked him like a Negro.’
‘I know what it is.’ Child stepped back, still staring at the body.
Jago’s growling rose in pitch, and Nathaniel made soothing noises, though his heart was in full sympathy with his dog.
‘You recognize him, don’t you, sir? It’s that gentleman, Thomas Valentine. You met him, didn’t you, sir, before?’
‘I met him.’ Child’s abrupt tone discouraged further discussion upon this point.
Nathaniel studied the magistrate surreptitiously, trying to understand his mood, trying to work out if he himself was under suspicion. But Child seemed to have forgotten that he was even there. He mouthed something beneath his breath that Nathaniel didn’t catch, only a waft of sour brandy fumes on the chill dawn air.
‘Cut him down,’ Child said at last. ‘Not a word to anyone. Understand?’
Nathaniel dragged an old shipping crate over to the hook, and clambered onto it. The dead man’s eyes gazed unseeing at the still, brown river. Out on the Reach, the Guineamen creaked, and the fishermen muttered sullen, riverine prayers. On every side of them, the Devil’s Breath coiled and smoked.
PART ONE
21–24 JUNE 1781
That thing is said to be free (liber) which exists solely from the necessity of its own nature, and is determined to action by itself alone. A thing is said to be necessary (necessarius) or rather, constrained (coactus), if it is determined by another thing to act in a definite and determinate way.
I. Of God, Ethics, Baruch Spinoza
CHAPTER ONE
The worst surprises are those we think we see coming.
Amelia Bradstreet called at my London townhouse at a little after nine in the evening on the 21st day of June 1781. I was playing with Gabriel at the time, lining up rows of lead soldiers on the Turkey rug in my bookroom, so that he could knock them down with a stick. My infant son’s delight in this simple activity was matched only by my own, yet the rap at the front door extinguished all such pleasure in a moment. A week ago, at around this hour of the evening, a young gentleman had called at the house without invitation, and I feared that this same troublesome individual had now returned. Yet when my butler knocked and entered, he swiftly disabused me of that notion.
‘There is a lady to see you, Captain Corsham.’ Pomfret handed me the card on his tray.
‘Mrs Bradstreet,’ I read.
‘She says that you knew her once as Amelia Archer.’
I stared at him in surprise. Tad’s sister. It must have been over ten years since I’d seen her last. Dimly I recalled a thin, bookish, birdlike girl, with her brother’s large grey eyes and pale skin. I’d been in America when she’d left England and had consequently missed much of the scandal that had attended her departure. She had returned last year after the death of her husband, and Caro had been adamant that we should not receive her. As far as I was aware, nobody did.
I hesitated, pondering her motives. Had Tad sent her here? What could she want?
‘She came in a hired carriage, sir. No servant to speak of. Shall I tell her that you are indisposed?’
Pomfret, like my wife, was a stickler for the proprieties. Not the fact of the thing, but the look of the thing. Some call it hypocrisy, others society. For my part, I had seen men entangled in their own entrails upon the battlefields of the American rebellion, and the crimes of the drawing room seemed small by comparison. Nor was I minded, at that moment, to please my wife. Call it my own act of rebellion, if you will.
‘Show her into the drawing room, would you, Pomfret, please?’
I dispatched Gabriel into the care of his nursemaid, and went to the console mirror in the hall to retie my cravat and straighten my periwig. Then I walked into the drawing room, where Amelia Bradstreet was waiting.
She did not look like a widow, was my first thought. She was standing in the centre of the room, gazing about – at the furniture and the silver and the portrait of Caro by Thomas Gainsborough over the fire. My eyes were drawn at once to her gown, which was close-fitting with bared shoulders, the silk a rich and vibrant shade of indigo. She had matched it with a Kashmir shawl embroidered with golden flowers, and an amethyst necklace.
She turned, and we appraised one another. I recalled that Amelia was three years younger than Tad and I, which would make her twenty-seven years old.
‘Captain Corsham,’ she said faintly, holding out her hand for me to kiss. ‘How long it has been since those happy days down in Devon. I hope you can forgive my intrusion at this late hour.’
Her eyes were silver in the candlelight, her hair a dark, lustrous brown. She had curled and pinned it high, and I admired the curve of her throat and the rich glow of the amethysts against her skin. Her features were all angles: high cheekbones, a pointed chin, a sharp little nose. When she spoke, I caught a glimpse of tiny white teeth.
I caught other things too. Agitation, in her movements and the way she spoke. Poverty, in her cheap perfume – a sickly wash of jasmine – and the shabby slippers I spied beneath the hoops of her skirts. Finally, I sensed resilience in her gaze and in her bearing.
‘It is no intrusion,’ I said. ‘Won’t you sit down, Mrs Bradstreet? Some Madeira perhaps?’
While we waited for the wine, she examined Gainsborough’s portrait. ‘Caroline is not at home?’
‘At Carlisle House.’ I smiled to reassure her. ‘Taking on all comers at the faro table.’
Her relief was palpable and she sank onto the sofa, her fingers tugging at the sleeves of her dress. The footman knocked and entered, bearing the Madeira, and I noticed his eyes slide over Mrs Bradstreet as he served her, alive with carnal interest and contempt.
‘You carry off the redcoat,’ she said, as the door closed behind him. ‘Not all men do.’
‘It isn’t vanity.’ I felt an unaccountable need to explain myself. ‘The War Office likes us to wear it.’
‘You have earned the right to wear it, have you not?’ She regarded me solemnly. ‘I read about you in the newspapers. Captain Henry Corsham, scourge of the American rebels. They say even the King knows your name.’
‘They exaggerate,’ I said, and there was an awkward pause, while I tried again to divine why she had come. To borrow money, perhaps? To lay claim to a connection on the grounds of our long acquaintance? Or did Tad hope to mend the rupture in our friendship? The thought made my scalp crawl as if with lice, and in my mind I juggled words of polite refusal.
Amelia leaned forward, her eyebrows knotted. ‘I hope I do not embarrass you and Caroline by coming here tonight, but I’m afraid my business was far too pressing for a letter.’
I frowned. ‘Mrs Bradstreet, forgive me for asking, but are you in some kind of trouble?’
‘Not I, but I fear that Tad might be.’
‘I see.’ I tried to mask my anxiety with irritation. ‘Is he in a debtors’ prison? Is it money that you need?’
She blanched a little at my tone. ‘He is missing. He called at my cottage nearly a week ago now, on his way out of the city on business. He said that he would call again on his return to London, but he never came. I have tried at his rooms, but he’s not there. The porter hasn’t seen him since he left town. Neither has anyone else.’
‘When were you expecting him?’
‘This Thursday past.�
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‘That’s only four days,’ I pointed out. ‘Tad never was the most reliable fellow.’
She touched her necklace and the stones flashed in the candlelight. ‘Tad told me he was on his way to Deptford,’ she said quietly. ‘Deptford is a slaving town, is it not?’
Tad and slavery. I remembered our pamphlets and our essays and our speeches. The unfashionable cause of abolition had once fired our youthful souls. We had nearly been sent down from Oxford because of it. Since my return from the war, I had turned my mind to more orthodox political matters, but Tad had only grown angrier and more determined over the years.
I spoke gently to assuage her fears – and my own. ‘I am sure there is no cause for undue concern. They might not like abolitionists in Deptford, but the worst they’d do is run him out of town.’
She was silent a moment. ‘I am worried for him. It isn’t just Deptford. Tad was mixed up in something dangerous. He told me that he had made some powerful enemies.’
‘He was always prone to grandiose language. And he used to see enemies everywhere.’
‘That doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. He was afraid. I could see it.’ Her voice caught. ‘He said that people had been following him and that someone in Deptford had tried to kill him. I told him to go to the authorities, but he said the authorities were in league with the slavers.’
You know what he’s like, I told myself. He’s probably locked in some Deptford sponging house after running up debts, or hiding from his creditors in London. Yet a little knot of fear flagellated these more cynical thoughts. What if someone really had tried to kill him? What if that person had tried again, and this time succeeded?
‘Did he say anything else about these powerful enemies?’
‘He said he’d lit a fire under the slave traders. He said he was going to burn their house to the ground.’
‘I presume he meant it metaphorically?’ With Tad you could never quite tell.