The New World (27 page)

I could not resist asking one more thing.

“Do you know where the two men went, Mr. Brydges, after you had given them that answer?”

My Brydges looked through the open door of his hotel into the street behind us. When I turned in the same direction I saw such dazzling sunlight it felt like blindness.

“No idea,” he said, still gazing off. “They went away. That is all I can tell you.”

Now it was my turn to stare, until my eyes got used to the brightness and I was able to see the dust blowing up from the street and the feet of the people who walked there—the moccasins and sandals, the riding boots and ladies' boots, and the bare toes as well, all pattering out their different rhythms.

“Jim?”

Natty was shaking my shoulder because I seemed to have fallen into a trance.

“Yes?” I blinked and looked round, first at Mr. Brydges, who had slumped back in his chair and closed his eyes, then at Natty. Her face had a sheen of sweat which might only have been heat, because Mr. Brydges had again stopped working his fan.

“We're still safe,” she said to me.

I kept still a moment longer, listening to the voices of the hotel around us, and the murmur outside as the town continued with its bustling. Yes, apparently we were safe, and could stay safe if we also kept to our plan. If we went to our room and lay low, then slipped away to our boat in the morning. We would be gone by noon. Sooner perhaps. Black Cloud would never find us now. We were almost invisible; we were almost free.

By the time this thought had taken hold of me, and we had left Mr. Brydges in his doze and returned to our room, we had pushed Black Cloud to the side of our minds and were cheerful again. We had not forgotten him, but we chose not to think about him. Instead, we preferred to lie on our bed and listen to the bed-springs remind us of other travelers who had rested here. To sleep a little. To talk about England and the changes we would find waiting for us. And to do all this so easily, with such a growing sense of our liberty, that when the afternoon began to darken, and the air cooled, and a smell of rotting vegetation drifted up from the river and in through our window, I could almost believe I was back at the Hispaniola, with the Thames a stone's throw away and the Mississippi a distant memory.

Then Joshua knocked on our door, an hour or so after darkness had fallen. We knew it was him; Anne Marie would not have dared. He was tired after his day, he told us, tired of exploring and asking for employment, and now also tired of resting and recuperating. Would we care to step outside with him and his beloved, and find something to distract us before we retired for the night?

Although he spoke courteously like a gentleman, I would like to say we demurred because we still felt nervous of the world, and conscious above everything of the need to protect ourselves. Instead we told him we were due to board the
Mungo
next morning, and would not see him again after that—which provoked him into an even greater fit of friendliness. He insisted we come with him immediately; he also insisted we make a proper good-bye, which he told us was the least we owed him for the cost of our rooms.

I stood at the door of our room while we talked, with the chatter of other guests bubbling up from the lobby below; when I turned to Natty to see if she agreed, I found her sitting on the edge of the bed and running her hands through her hair—as if she had already decided to accept, but heard the voice of reason telling her not to. Joshua, in contrast, looked more enthusiastic by the minute. He had thrown away the tight old clothes he had worn on the
Angel
and was wearing a smart black jacket and trews, which made me think he had already got the measure of the town. Likewise Anne Marie, who now appeared in the corridor behind him wearing a yellow dress that almost matched her hair.

“Well?” said Joshua.

“We've only got what you see,” I told him.

“No other clothes at all? Only those old Indian things?”

“That's right. No other clothes, and no money either; only a few coins.”

Joshua held up his finger, tapped the side of his nose, then swung away without a word, which left Anne Marie twisting her hands and muttering “Oh! Oh!” under her breath.

She did not have to suffer for long. Joshua's footsteps had hardly faded along the corridor before he was stamping toward us again with a crumpled white shirt and dark trousers, and an equally crumpled green dress, draped over his outstretched arms.

“Take these,” he ordered, thrusting them toward me. “They need a shake-out, but they're good enough, I think. We have plenty.”

“Plenty,” echoed Anne Marie though with such a blank look on her face, I thought she might not have known the meaning of the word.

“We can't repay you,” I told him.

“No matter!” Joshua said gaily. “We are beginning! We shall soon have clothes galore, won't we, my darling? Clothes galore.”

“Galore,” came the echo.

“Besides…” I went on, but changing direction. “We're happy with what we have.”

Joshua looked me up and down, then drew his fingers slowly across my tunic.

“You're happy…?” he said disdainfully. “With that?”

“It's mine,” I said, and looked over my shoulder at Natty on the bed; she was touching the grimy hem of her dress, avoiding my eye. “And hers is hers,” I added. I did not want to explain everything implied by this—how we had been given our clothes, and by whom, and what they had come to represent. I did not think Joshua would understand; not this new Joshua, and perhaps not the Joshua we had first met either.

“They don't look like yours,” he replied at length, which was polite compared to what I knew he was thinking. Then he went on more straightforwardly. “Anyway, do you plan to wear them forever? When you're back in England even? Are you going to be Indians in England?”

“Definitely not,” I told him a little stiffly. “We'll change at some point.”

“Well then.” He widened his eyes. “Why not change now? I told you—we are beginning. And tonight is the beginning of the beginning.”

This was all it took. I knew I should hesitate. I knew I should thank him and say no. But I had already begun to fall. So I merely nodded at him, and told him I understood what he meant, and received the clothes from his hands, and thanked him for his generosity.

Natty too. She stood up from the bed to claim her dress, and held it against herself and said she was sure it would fit, and yes, it was a pretty green—although yes again, very crumpled.

“Quite the belle,” said Joshua, smiling as though we had done something clever. “Now,” he went on, “you two get dressed, and we'll wait for you downstairs. Five minutes, all right? Five minutes.”

He grasped Anne Marie by the hand, turned smartly on his heel, shut the door behind him, and clumped away along the bare boards; by the time his footsteps melted into the laughter downstairs, we had already begun to change.

Our new clothes, which for a while seemed so unnatural to us—so tight, so bright, so peculiar in their ingenuity—made us feel interesting to everyone as soon as we left our lodging; I tucked my satchel inside my shirt and buttoned it up tight. In fact no one paid us the least attention, because everyone was too preoccupied by their own affairs. We were just four more faces among a multitude of strangers, and this soon restored my sense that we were invisible. By the time we had found our way through the backstreets and across the main square, then sat down together to make our celebrations as Joshua wanted, I felt certain that Black Cloud could not possibly harm me.

I should call the place we had chosen an inn, but it bore so little resemblance to the inn I knew best—the Hispaniola, which had been my home until I met Natty—that some other word would do better. It was a single high-ceilinged room, with a gallery (fed by stairways on all four sides) for additional seats such as you might find in a church, dozens of tables and chairs, candles gleaming, an endless bar, waitresses wearing black dresses and shirts like French maids, and an enormous, sweating, heaving crowd of people whose sole purpose was to consume a tremendous quantity of liquor while producing an equally tremendous din of shouts and whistles and comments and accusations and arguments and secrets and convictions. Not so much an inn, therefore, as a kind of den. Uproarious, outrageous and chaotic—as though everyone present was convinced the world would end tomorrow morning, and tonight was their last chance to enjoy themselves before the catastrophe.

Joshua, as I have said, was not at all interested in last things. In fact no sooner had he found us a table—beneath a long window overlooking the river—and hailed a waitress, and filled our glasses with whiskey, than he once again toasted the start of our lives, and how we would henceforth share them together. From this I understood him to have decided that our leaving tomorrow was an incredible idea, ridiculous in fact, and hoped to persuade us of this before the evening was done. Wishing us wealth and happiness, he waved his glass in the direction of my satchel—which he knew must be concealed inside my shirt—to show how well he understood its contents would help us achieve our joint ambitions. I glanced away at Natty and she gave me a little nod; in this way we agreed that tonight we would not protest any longer. We would play along with Joshua's ideas of our partnership, then disappear quietly in the morning.

For this reason I preferred not to encourage a conversation about our future together, and instead waited for Joshua to finish his cajoling, then spoke of nothing in particular—of the astonishing variety of people who thronged around us; of the great degree of drunkenness; of the tobacco smoke that swirled through everything like a fog; of the habit, apparently common to all Americans, of spitting on the floor whenever possible; of the myriad accents and languages and voices—and, when we were tired of these things, of the view through the long window beside us. This window opened directly onto a wharf that ran along the waterfront and so acted as a landing-stage for every vessel that tied up here, as well as being a temporary store for merchandise: bales of cotton, piles of logs, sacks of rice, and wicker crates in which (whenever the moon swam from behind the clouds that had blown in from the bay) I could see the claws of lobsters and crayfish waving slowly behind their bars.

I suppose we continued drinking for an hour or more. I also suppose that such a spell of shouting above the hubbub, of rubbing eyes and clearing throats, was long enough to make me pay less careful attention to things than I usually do. Less attention and yet more attention as well. I remember, at any rate, that after a while I became remarkably interested in those meaty claws waving at me in their traps. Very interested too in the men who sometimes strolled along the wharf and stared into our own faces as we stared out at them.

Especially in two men I saw too late, when they were walking away from me with their heads bowed and their shoulders touching. Or rather floating away from me, not walking. Drifting over the decking as if they were weightless.

“What is it, Jim?” Natty was sitting with her back to the window and had seen me staring off, but I could not answer her at once; I was not sure.

I stood up and bent forward, leaning my hands on the table so I could look further out through the window. The two silhouettes had vanished.

“No one there,” I told her after a minute. “I couldn't see.”

Natty leaped up at once, pushing past me so she was no longer blinded by the lights of the taproom. I imagined the difference she must feel, with the breeze whispering through the rigging of the ships, and the river slapping against the struts of the wharf.

Then Joshua was up as well, resting his hand on her shoulder, on the strip of green between her bare neck and her short sleeve. He knew what we were saying—he had seen Black Cloud off the stern of the
Angel
; but I thought he might still be full of bluster and say we had no reason to worry. Again he surprised me. Once he had turned Natty round to face the room, and made sure he had my attention as well as hers, he unbuttoned his black topcoat and held it open as carefully as he could manage, so no one else in the room saw what he was showing—a silver pistol tucked into his belt.

I sat him down as quickly as possible, saying once more that I was mistaken, certainly mistaken; there was no one. “Please,” I went on, looking at Natty now, and waiting for her to sit down as well.

This time she believed me. With a final glance outside, she sank into her chair, took a big gulp of her drink, smiled—and a moment later we were happy again, toasting our coming success in ships, or trade, or ferry-boats, or running a store, or any of the thousand other opportunities that awaited us in the grand new city. The two shadow-walkers might never have existed.

By midnight we had drunk enough to believe that all our triumphs would come to us immediately, perhaps even before daybreak. But when we stepped outside, amidst a barrage of goodnights and encouragements from others who dispersed at the same time, with the waitresses saying we were welcome to visit again tomorrow, we felt the collapse that every drinker knows when they are knocked on the head by a blow of cold air. The square before us was a desert of silvery light, with the shadows of balconies and chimneys lying on the stones like iron. Late walkers clattered homeward, their echoes quickly vanishing into the tall sky. A dog barked, and was answered by another far off. A moth thrummed in a lamp. Then the vegetation-smell and the mud-smell and the salt-smell poured over us.

I suppose it was the shock of this change—which in truth felt like another kind of intoxication—that persuaded me we should not go back to our hotel at once, but rather stroll to the river and watch it run past. Why the others agreed so readily I can only guess: perhaps Joshua and Anne Marie wanted to make a sentimental connection with their new home, just as Natty and I wanted to begin our farewell to it. In any event, when I led the way round the side of the inn and climbed down a few steps onto the wharf, the others followed me without question.

Although the surface of the wharf was only a few feet lower than the solid ground, I might as well have stepped into a different world. Here, with the shallows gleaming between cracks in the decking, and the suck and push of the water much louder, I had escaped the boundaries of the town—escaped the whole of America in fact, and everyone in it. If I stared upriver I saw the vast mirror-sweep of the current bending out of sight, and knew that beyond its margin of trees lay the wilderness I loved. If I turned to my right I saw the same universe of water vanishing between mud-islands toward the sea, which I imagined marking the horizon with a line of silver foam.

Two kinds of nothing, and myself at the center. Two kinds of emptiness, but also two kinds of fellowship. For a moment I had my wish. I felt planted deeply in the world, yet removed from it. I was safe. I was invincible.