61
" It was possibly the worst of Mr Colley Cibber’s notoriously awful odes, the one, three years old, hymning King George’s personal valour on a German battlefield. Yes, here came the rhymes of ‘Seligenstadt’ with ‘defeat’, and ‘Dettingen’ with ‘joyful strain’. Here came the martial blasts from the Poet Laureate’s personal wind machine. Septimus was all wince. ‘Oh God,’ he murmured, through unmoving lips and closed teeth. ‘Oh God. Oh God.’ James De Lancey was feeling the need to clear his throat, rumblingly, every few seconds. The stares of the Assemblymen seemed fixed, if not on the spectacle in general, then in particular on the way the pose bunched and elevated, beneath the rising hem of the tabard, the muscles of Mrs Tomlinson’s magnificent arse. "
― Francis Spufford , Golden Hill
63
" The violinist launched into the figures of a minuet, and Zephyra came and went with a tray until the table was loaded with the soups and meats of the first course, in silver dishes stowed among the candelabras. Mr Lovell carved from a grand ham blackened with molasses. While he passed along plates, and exchanged pleasantries, Smith was able to consider upon the informative and (as it were) strategic design of the plan according to which the diners had been bestowed at table: his own placement amidst the knot of the adult men, where Captain Prettyman and Van Loon senior could rake him from opposite, and Mr Lovell could contribute enfilading fire from his left, while Hendrick remained just in range should reinforcements be required, and the careful removal meantime from out his conversational reach of all the women except Tabitha, who was presumably considered an armament in herself. Little "
― Francis Spufford , Golden Hill
64
" The brig Henrietta having made Sandy Hook a little before the dinner hour – and having passed the Narrows about three o’clock – and then crawling to and fro, in a series of tacks infinitesimal enough to rival the calculus, across the grey sheet of the harbour of New-York – until it seemed to Mr Smith, dancing from foot to foot upon deck, that the small mound of the city waiting there would hover ahead in the November gloom in perpetuity, never growing closer, to the smirk of Greek Zeno – and the day being advanced to dusk by the time Henrietta at last lay anchored off Tietjes Slip, with the veritable gables of the city’s veritable houses divided from him only by one hundred foot of water – and the dusk moreover being as cold and damp and dim as November can afford, as if all the world were a quarto of grey paper dampened by drizzle until in danger of crumbling imminently to pap: – all this being true, the master of the brig pressed upon him the virtue of sleeping this one further night aboard, and pursuing his shore business in the morning. (He meaning by the offer to signal his esteem, having found Mr Smith a pleasant companion during the slow weeks of the crossing.) But Smith would not have it. Smith, "
― Francis Spufford , Golden Hill
65
" The lawyer’s stakes at the table turned out to be not even colonial notes of the usual baffling variability, but certificates drawable upon a tobacco warehouse in Virginia, and Smith presented one without much hope, the first time he tried their use as payment. But it was accepted without demur, at fifty-five per centum of face, New-York’s merchants seeming all to maintain within themselves a register of values for every conceivable money-substitute they might encounter. Wampum, tobacco bales, rum by the gallon: it was all money, in a world without money. Between the tobacco tickets and his own pointedly-returned guineas, Smith calculated he now possessed enough to reach Christmas in relative ease – if he could avoid being knocked on the head for spoiling De Lancey’s game against the Governor, or offending in some other role pressed upon him, or falling victim to a misadventure entirely unsuspected. "
― Francis Spufford , Golden Hill
69
" Mr Lovell, to whom few things retained the force of novelty, and who misliked extremely the sensation when they did, as if firm ground underfoot had been replaced on the instant by a scrabbling fall in vacuo – was, at the moment the door opened on Broad Way, hesitating in his parlour. Flora was downstairs, commanding from Zephyra the supper that would have arrived whether she commanded it or not. Only Tabitha still sat on the sopha, her hands quite still in her lap. It had been his custom, since his wife died these three years past, to call from time to time on his elder daughter’s intelligence, in the same office her mother’s had served; but now, for particular reasons, the issue might touch on her own self in terms that made advice unwise to solicit. "
― Francis Spufford , Golden Hill
70
" Done,’ echoed Lovell. ‘Jem, note and date the document, will you? And add a memorandum of this agreement; and make another note that we’re to write to Banyard’s on our own account, by the first vessel, asking explanations. And then let’s have it in the strongbox, to show in evidence, as I suspect, for the assizes. Now, sir, I believe I’ll bid you—’ Lovell checked himself, for Smith was feeling through the pockets of his coat. ‘Was there something else?’ he asked heavily. "
― Francis Spufford , Golden Hill
71
" Smith considered her, interpreting anew the temper and the bitten lip, the grinding teeth, the contempt for stories of courtship or adventure: which, he could now see, might be pre-emptive, rejection before there was a chance of being rejected. He had been warned, with teeth, away from pity; but he could not afford it anyway. It could not be his concern what the effect on her might be, if payment of the bill should damage or ruin Lovell, if it should in some wise undermine the room in which she sat. This was – it was doubly plain now – not the place for him to play, beyond the necessary play to support the business that had brought him. Not the place for any expenditure of sentiment, beyond the general appetite for life it had seemed fitting for a Mr Smith to show. Yet an unwelcome compunction was moving in him, sharp-pointed, stitching him through to the spot where he sat, attaching him by thin threads. "
― Francis Spufford , Golden Hill
72
" Smith had imagined that there would be time again for serious speech between the two of them, on the return leg to New-York; but as well as a hold full of sacks and a deck laden with casks, the lugger had also taken on a moderate clutch of New-York-bound passengers, from Dutch farm-wives carrying baskets of eggs to several more would-be sailors for the Indies voyage, and a talkative attorney, up, he said, from Baltimore to view the northern colonies. Smith and Tabitha were parted by the casks and the crowd, and he spent the journey back into fog and darkness on the ebb tide, obliged to lob back the attorney’s conversational sallies; and thinking wonderingly, where he could betwixt the distractions, as young men are likely to do in these circumstances, how very ordinary and general and unremarkable a destiny it must be, how predictable a part of the universal portion of mankind it is, to love and to feel oneself beloved; and yet how astonishing it seems when it happens to you, yourself; what a stroke of glorious, undeserved, unprecedented, unsuspected luck it turns out to be, that you should be permitted, in your own person, to share in the general fate. It was not until the end of the voyage that she squeezed her way back to his side. They "
― Francis Spufford , Golden Hill
73
" The twist of the stairs tightened; the carpet beneath their galloping feet gave way to boards; a door presented itself with a simpler, barer flight of staircase beyond. Glancing back down the well, Smith saw beneath the spiral of astonished faces tilted up at him that there was a commotion in the hall now, with shouts and banging, but that, judging by the banging, the door to the street had not been opened. Not yet, anyway. Up the next flight. Oilcloth, plain wood, a child’s wooden horse: a nursery. Past a nurse with a babe in arms that began, reliably, to bawl. Last flight: up among the eaves, servants’ bedrooms, grey plaster, cold air, truckle beds. Along a mean corridor, Septimus counting along the rooms on their right. Last room. Door of plain pine. Door locked from inside. Septimus rapped on it. No answer but a faint, sickly groan. "
― Francis Spufford , Golden Hill
74
" At dinner he was placed three-quarters of the way towards the top of the long table, in what was evidently the tail of the Governor’s invitation list, with Septimus opposite him, and the great men of the colony clustered together to his right, where he might have the pleasure of overhearing their collisions, yet was plainly not bidden to participate. The Van Loons and Lovells were far down the lane of white linen. Half a dozen different conversations were rattling on between: leaning to look, he received the performance only in dumbshow, quite soundlessly, of Flora laughing, and settling herself in state with the folds of the pink silk around her, and both Joris and Hendrick leaning solicitously in, to confirm her rights in acting the princess on this royal evening; and Tabitha, finding no purchase for mischief in this impervious happiness, sitting bolt upright on the other side of the table, looking isolated and even a little lost. He "
― Francis Spufford , Golden Hill
76
" That’s right,’ said Morin smoothly. ‘We had better just let Marfa Timofeyevna finish keeping us on the straight and narrow.’ Somehow his tone as he said this managed to suggest both that censorship was silly, and that it was silly to mind it. Galich conceded Morin a small internal round of (Applause), his headache whispering in his temples. He was highly accomplished himself at finding pleasure-giving, urbane descriptions of what couldn’t be helped, but Morin, moreover, had hit the precise note of the moment, liberally-minded yet unchallenging, ironic yet inoffensive. The "
― Francis Spufford , Red Plenty
