Signals of Distress

16. Good Boots

CITY AIR makes free? Well, yes. It was a liberation to be home again amongst the soft civilities of city life, and free from the embarrassments of Wherrytown. But Aymer Smith affected not to like the taste of city air that much. He was a travelled man now, amphibious between the country and the town. His blood was spiced with salt. He wasn’t an innocent any longer. He took to wearing his tarpaulin coat and his heavy boots at every opportunity, to the factory, to debating rooms, to the subscription libraries, in the streets. ‘Your brother has begun to look just like the pudding man,’ Fidia Smith complained to her husband, when she had spotted Aymer, hatless and ‘dressed for the fields’, window-shopping like a vagrant in King’s Avenue. ‘He’ll have a basket on his shoulders next, and will be selling plum pudding by the quarter yard.’

Privately Matthias didn’t agree with Fidia’s opinion that his brother was ‘affected, but not improved’ by the trip to Wherrytown. ‘His stay amongst the hobnails and the corduroys has been no benefit,’ she said. ‘If an ass goes travelling, he’ll not come back a horse. More’s the pity.’ On the contrary, Aymer had matured, Matthias thought, in everything except his dress. Yet to have him safely back was not entirely a relief. There’d been so little tension in the works while Aymer was away. Orders could be given and not questioned. Changes which were ‘not in the interests of Fraternity and Justice’ could be made without a pious argument. And men could be sacked. Indeed, Matthias had dismissed three of the hands who had, at Aymer’s instigation, set up a Works Committee, and one other man who had poor eyesight. There would be a fine commotion, Matthias had expected, when Aymer got back from his mischief-making along the coast. But unexpectedly his brother didn’t mention their dismissal. Perhaps he didn’t notice it. He made more fuss when consignments of almost pure sodium carbonate, méthode Leblanc, were delivered to the factory yard in jogging-carts. Though even then the fuss he made seemed dilettante and not, Matthias judged, without the spice of irony. Aymer claimed he missed the cumbrous wagonfuls of kelp ash: six horses and six thousand flies a load. He missed the smell. This, surely, was a tease.

‘Where is the beauty in it?’ Aymer asked, on his first encounter with the new soda. He fetched the ancient folio of seaweed specimens from what had been their father’s roll-top desk, and thumbed through the heavy pages with their browning fans of kelp and their Latin names in browning ink. Matthias could see no beauty there, though Aymer was extravagant in his appreciation of the weeds. ‘If only you could see these living kelps in water, Matthias. You would imagine you were at a royal ball amongst the finest ladies …’

‘And why would I imagine that? I cannot understand how I must confuse fine ladies with seaweed.’

‘You would understand if you could see the living kelp. It is quite beautiful, I promise it. But you will not persuade me that this new material has beauty in it.’

‘Its beauty, Aymer, will not be seen until our ledgers are complete, and then you will be able to admire it in the profits column,’ said Matthias. He felt quite well disposed towards his brother for a change. Aymer had lost his argumentative edge. He seemed less preacherly, and more resigned. He complained less of minor illnesses. And, best of all, he displayed a less dutiful interest in the factory. Some days he left at lunchtime, and didn’t return. On Saturdays he didn’t come at all. He seemed too preoccupied with private matters — the very thought of which made Fidia laugh — to bully for the shorter working day or profit-sharing schemes.

‘What private life?’ said Fidia.

‘His books, perhaps?’

‘Ah, yes, his dusty volumes. Pity them, Matthias. They have to tolerate the tedium of sitting open on his lap for hours long with only him for company and his bad breath for ventilation.’ Fidia laughed politely into her glove. She was relieved that it was only books that kept her brother-in-law preoccupied. She didn’t want a ‘private life’ that might secure a wife for him — or offspring, God forbid. She and Matthias had a son who would inherit the soap factory in its entirety if Aymer could only remain steadfast in his bachelorhood. The sooner he grew too old for parenting, or — better — contracted some ailment that was fatal rather than imagined, the happier Fidia would be.

IT WAS an afternoon in mid-January 1837 when Fidia had spotted Aymer in his tarpaulin and his boots outside the shops in King’s Avenue. Her brother-in-law had been standing with his shoulders up against a wall watching the military band which exercised along the avenue on Fridays. They’d marched past him twice already — first playing a hornpipe and then a doleful coronach — and Aymer had been marching with them like some schoolboy when he saw Fidia, hurrying fatly across the street ahead of him. He took his refuge up against the wall until she disappeared into the haberdashery. Neither of them knew that they’d been seen.

When the band assembled round the King’s Hall steps for the tattoo, Aymer went up to look more closely at the drummer’s face. He was an African; that much was clear from fifty yards away. And he was large; though hardly large enough to topple the Cradle Rock. Even when he got close, however, Aymer was not certain that he’d found his man. The nose was right, small and depressed. But his face was pulled out of shape by its chin strap, and the hair was hidden by the regimental cap. His drumming was indifferent, Aymer thought, though he didn’t count himself as musical. He stood through two more pieces and endured the posturings of their final marching display, which was unaccompanied except for Otto — was it Otto? — beating time.

The soldiers put down their instruments and drank from water flasks. The drummer was talking to the buglers. He was ten inches taller at the very least. Aymer circled them. He didn’t want to call out, or even seem to stare. He wasn’t even certain what to do if he recognized the man. As he got closer he could hear the drummer talk. It was more complicated than Uwip, Uwip, and pitched too high. Aymer grew more certain that, if he called out Otto’s name, the man would not turn round. At last he pulled off his regimental cap. His head was bald above the temples, and what hair there was was slightly gingered. ‘Otto,’ Aymer said, at half-power. One of the buglers looked at him and yawned.

The drummer wasn’t the first — or the last — dark face that Aymer would pursue. Since his return from Wherrytown he had been struck by how many there were in the city. They haunted him. He let them. Otto’s life and his seemed pleached together, like the woven branches on a hedge. Of course, there were other concerns that might have bothered him. Should have bothered him, perhaps. The plight of Rosie Bowe, for one. Whenever he walked in the streets, Aymer couldn’t avoid encountering rough twins of Rosie: thin, tough women with no vanity, and with only the same unpinned black hair and pauper clothes to soften the knuckle and the sinew of their frames. But Aymer didn’t waste a glance on them. The women that he turned for were fleshy and sandy-haired, or black.

Aymer was unsettled by what he called ‘our Africans’, both the women and the men. Most — and that’s not more than forty, say, throughout the city — were the sons and daughters of liberated British slaves; laundry maids and cooks, footmen, valets and coachmen. There were a few who’d broken away. There was a freeman carpenter who called himself William King; because, he said, he would have been a Hausa king, if he’d not been born in London’s Battersea. And there was Susan Sack (or Sew-and-Suck as she was called), a mulatto seamstress working in the Mart-way tenements. She was a nursemaid, too, labouring both with the hems and with the infants of fashionable ladies. She had no nipples, it was said. She had brass thimbles on her breasts, and any child that she suckled had rusty lips. There was a black prostitute called Cleopatra, too, though no gentleman would admit to any acquaintance with her. Even when she greeted men by name in the street, her familiarity was passed off to their companions or their wives as sauce or lunacy. Who could she be? What could she want? Her nipples might be brass, for all they knew or cared. Their lips weren’t brown with rust.

Whenever Aymer saw black citizens, no matter what their station, he would catch their eye, press a sixpence on them, and enquire, ‘Are any of your brethren recently arrived?’ He would describe Otto, down to the glassy scars around his ankles, but no one yet had seen or heard of such a large black man. They were used to unsolicited donations, and odd requests. They were used to being stared at, too, and being shooed away like cats. Aymer’s sort was not a rarity — but even if they had seen Otto, huge and scarred, riding down King’s Avenue on a camel they wouldn’t have told a stranger.

Aymer though, through his persistence, had managed to befriend a local black coachman called Scipio Jones who worked for a wealthy estate-owner on the city fringes. Each Saturday morning, Scipio came with the family barouche to the city square, where he waited for his mistress below the salon rooms in the Royal Hotel while she played cards, drank tea and displayed her latest heavily flounced crinoline, decorated mantle or pagoda sleeves amongst the crapes, tarlatans and bombazines of her acquaintances. Scipio had to come down from the warmth and comfort of his hammer cloth and stand sentry by the horses, so that if any of her friends should leave the card tables and look out, they’d see him there in his show livery, his polished buttons and his braid, attending on her fine horses and her carriage. ‘Don’t fidget, Scipio,’ she’d said. ‘Horses fidget. Coachmen do not move.’

Aymer hadn’t mistaken Scipio for Otto. He was too small and plump. But he had offered him the sixpence and asked his usual questions when he’d first spotted him on New Year’s Eve outside the Royal. Scipio was cold, despite his jacket and his hat. He had to warm his hands at the horse’s nose and hope that no one had left the card tables and was watching him. He was glad to engage in conversation with Aymer. To talk politely to a stranger was not fidgeting, surely — but it was warming. Aymer blocked off some of the wind. No, Scipio hadn’t seen anyone as large as that, he said. Nor anyone with ankle scars. But he would keep his ears close to the wall and would be happy to oblige with information. Aymer could return each Saturday and Scipio would report what he had heard (and take another sixpence for his pains).

Scipio had nothing to report on the first Saturday of the new year, but on the second he had ‘double news’, of a large black drummer in the regimental band, and of an itinerant boxer — ‘an American, by all accounts’ — called Massa Hannibal. So it was thanks to Scipio that Aymer was outside the King’s Hall on the following Friday. And thanks to him as well that on the Friday night, Aymer Smith put on his boots and tarpaulin and went to see the boxing contest in a district of the city that he’d never seen before. As it turned out, Massa Hannibal was not an African, nor American. At most he was an octoroon. His accent was Italian. His hair was straight and greased to slide the blows. The blackest things about him were the bruises on his cheekbone and his arms from the previous night’s fight. He’d zinced his chest with horizontal stripes, he wore bead anklets and he babbled some invented African language when he came into the ring. His opponent — King Swing — was a bald man, bandy and unbruised. All the money went on him.

Aymer had only come to check on Massa Hannibal. He didn’t wait to see the fight. He gave his ticket to a wheedler waiting at the door. He was in a hurry to be home. It had been easy to find the warehouse where the fight was held. All he’d had to do was to follow those carriages with only gentlemen inside, and then stay with the crowd. But getting back into the quarter of the city where he had rooms was not as simple. He couldn’t find a chair to take him there. And none of the rattling four-wheelers, drays or raddle horses waiting outside seemed equipped for passengers. There were no drivers, anyway. They’d bought cheap seats at the fight and weren’t for hire.

The warehouse was on marshy ground below the river, amongst workshops and surrounded by ditches which weren’t successful in their main task of taking human dung away. The smell was stifling, but still the place was busy with people (and their pigs and dogs) who didn’t mind the smell of waste and poverty enough to build their slum courts somewhere else. Aymer followed alleyways that went uphill. That was his strategy. He was bound to find the upper town that way, but as he walked and left the marshes behind, his fears increased. The homes were scarcely lit. Each contained dark figures hunched around low light.

Laughter and loud voices went from house to house, through open doors and windows. Aymer didn’t feel concealed by the darkness, but disclosed. Low light throws long shadows, and Aymer’s shadow corrugated down the alleyways, dipping into homes, flattening on the walls of beer houses and tommy shops, running up front steps, and slatting across the faces of people watching from their windows. The dogs were large and importuning, bounding out and barking at him with their haunches in the air and their tails on springs. Slab-faced women — making baskets from the marshland reeds — whistled at him. Men didn’t step aside immediately when he asked for room to pass, but offered him their bottles or their pipes, or asked what he was looking for. Their friendliness was frightening. What might it lead him to? Where might it end? He was glad that he was dressed so democratically. They might mistake him for a wagoner and not consider him a man worth robbing or beating up.

He must have said good evening fifty times and forced a hundred smiles before he reached the first paved street and the reassuring sound of decent shoes on stone. Well, it had been an adventure, he decided within a few minutes — not one that had located Otto, perhaps, but one that was an education. One ought to know the city of one’s birth, including those parts that were not well furbished. He doubted that Matthias could boast of such a visit, not at night at least. And Perfidious Fidia? Well, Fidia hadn’t been anywhere. Aymer looked forward to telling them about the boxing contest and enlightening them about the common, marshy end of their city. ‘It would be wrong to regard as low and mean in character those people whose homes are low and mean in build,’ he might say, and (stealing one of Parlour George’s saner comments) he could add, ‘A man is not a horse because he happens to be born in a stable. The Romans did not crucify a horse, I think.’ He was smiling broadly now.

WILLIAM BAGNALL and his brother Bagsy had followed Aymer to the boxing match. Bagsy had, in fact, put a half-crown on King Swing to beat the ‘African’. He wasn’t pleased when Aymer occupied his seat for only five minutes and then — inexplicably — left the warehouse before a single blow had been thrown. There would be an opportunity outside to throw some blows themselves, but Bagsy would have liked to see how Massa Hannibal would cope with Swing’s right hand. Still, there were debts to clear and a sovereign to be made, from Walter Howells in Wherrytown. And all they had to do was give this man a beating, and send proof.

They’d thought, when Walter Howells’s letter had arrived before Christmas, that it would be a simple matter. They would intercept this Aymer Smith outside the Soap Works after dusk. It wouldn’t be hard to identify him. They merely had to ask one of the workers. And then there were a hundred alleyways and dark corners thereabouts where they might lay hold of him. They’d waited three evenings running at the works, but their quarry had already left, mid-afternoon. On the fourth day Bagsy Bagnall went alone early in the morning and, for a ha’penny, discovered from the works caretaker that Aymer Smith observed no timetable these days but could be recognized from his thin figure, his tarpaulin coat and his walking boots. He lived alone, Bagsy was informed, in rooms above the assay house in Whittock’s Court.

‘Don’t sink into a conversation with Mr Smith, unless you must,’ the caretaker warned. ‘He has such words, your head’ll spin.’ Bagsy Bagnall was amused by this. He knew whose head would spin. It wouldn’t be his.

Bagsy waited at the entrance to the court that afternoon. He was cold, but he was happy to be idle. He’d burned two pipes of best Virginia and helped himself to a purse from an unattended carriage before Aymer returned home, and no mistaking him. If ever there was a man deserved a beating, he was it. Look at the clothes he wore. Look at that bony, educated face, those soft and fussy hands, that self-esteem. Bagsy, hidden in the gateway, waited to see which door in Whittock’s Court led to Aymer’s rooms. When Aymer was about to step into the hallway, Bagsy shouted, ‘Mr Smith!’ Aymer turned around and peered into the empty court. No one. He had half expected to see Otto standing there.

The Bagnalls had left Aymer in peace over Christmas and the New Year. There was other work to do. Will Bagnall had obtained a list of which local gentlemen and wives would be attending the major balls and concerts of the season. ‘They’re out, we’re in,’ he told his brother, choosing to burgle the houses of the younger people who might be expected to stay late. They’d made a decent haul of jewellery, some silverware, some gold, a cavalry sword, and had only been discovered once, by a housekeeper who, at midnight, should have been asleep. Bagsy had to knock her down and gag her with a curtain sash. But by the middle of January Will Bagnall was keen to settle his accounts with Walter Howells. So on that Friday of the boxing bout, they’d followed Aymer from his rooms, and gone with him down to King’s Avenue. They’d endured the marching band, and waited while he inspected the musicians on the steps of King’s Hall. There’d been an opportunity, when Aymer was returning to his rooms, for Will and Bagsy to finish their business. Whittock’s Court was both dark and deserted. They could give him a good dextering, leave him and his bruises on the steps of his front door and be away within two minutes. What could be more pleasing and efficient? But they’d been too slow with their decision and Aymer had been too speedy with his key.

They’d followed him that Friday evening too, though there was little opportunity to confront him, with so many people walking in the same direction for the fight, and so many carriages and conveyances about. If the streets had been full of ladies or children, then no matter. But to give Aymer a beating in the presence of men distinguished only by their shared regard for pugilism wouldn’t be sensible. Nor was it sensible to set about him in the marshy alleyways around the warehouse. The people there would be quick to lend a hand to Aymer. Two men on one? They wouldn’t tolerate it in their slums. So the Bagnalls waited for the quieter streets of the upper town before they went to work. They were certain that Aymer hadn’t known that he was being followed. They’d walked quietly in the muddy lanes. But surely now, with their stolen leather shoes resounding on the paving stones, he would notice them a few yards to his rear and try to get away.

They didn’t give him the chance. They ran at him and swept him off his feet into a stable yard. They banged him up against a wooden door. The horse inside backed away and snorted in the darkness. ‘Your name? Your name?’ they said to him. If he had answered Robert Norris, say, or Ralph Parkiss, would they have hesitated and held their punches, fearful of making a mistake? Will Bagnall might. He only had his brother’s word that this tarpaulin was their man. His brother’s word wasn’t worth much. But nothing would stop Bagsy now. It didn’t matter whom they’d got inside the stable yard, or what his name was. Bagsy wanted to express himself. He’d missed the boxing for this. He’d squandered half a crown.

‘What do you want?’ said Aymer. He was winded and could hardly speak.

‘Shut up!’ said Bagsy. He took a short length of solid, six-ply rope out of his pocket, gripped both ends and pressed the middle tightly across Aymer’s throat. ‘Just say your name. Say it. Say it.’

Aymer gave his name as best he could, but couldn’t say it clearly.

‘Give us something with your name on it,’ said Will Bagnall.

‘Hurry up.’

‘Haven’t anything.’

‘Do what he says!’ Bagsy, who wasn’t the tallest of men, pressed his rope more firmly on Aymer’s throat. He brought his head down sharply on Aymer’s chest and at the same time brought a knee up into his groin. Aymer’s legs gave way. He was as tall as Bagsy Bagnall for a moment. Then shorter. Then on the ground.

Will searched the pockets of Aymer’s coat. All he found was a half-sovereign and some pennies. He knelt down on the cobbles and the straw, put his hand on Aymer’s head and said, almost gently, ‘Aymer Smith? Is that your name?’ Aymer nodded. ‘Have you been recently in Wherrytown?’ A groaning Yes. ‘It’s him,’ Will told his brother.

‘I know it’s him.’

‘Go on, then. Get it done.’

Bagsy kicked Aymer once, on the shoulder. His ankle twisted with the force of it.

‘We hear you’re a thief and not a gentleman,’ said Will Bagnall, while his brother shook his foot in pain. ‘We hear you don’t settle your accounts. So we’re settling them for you. Speak one word of this and we’ll visit you again. We know your rooms in Whittock’s Court … and we might call on you at any time. And you’ll get a whipping.’

Bagsy was more careful with his second set of kicks. He aimed for Aymer’s softer parts, his chest and stomach, then his buttocks, then his legs. He stopped and stepped back. ‘That’s it,’ he said. Aymer wasn’t badly hurt, just bruised and terrified. He groaned and stretched out on the ground.

‘Good boots,’ said Bagsy.

‘Get ’em then.’

Bagsy pulled up Aymer’s legs and tugged off his walking boots and his hose. He let the legs drop back onto the ground. Then, as a final flourish, he stamped on Aymer’s ankles and his feet. The tarsi cracked. Walter Howells had asked for broken bones. The Bagnalls had obliged. He’d asked for broken teeth as well. Bagsy found a cobblestone and brought it down on Aymer’s mouth. Aymer had never known pain so fierce and concentrated. His mouth was wet and red and stony. The Bagnalls collected two of his teeth as evidence for Walter Howells that they’d made a decent job of it. They covered Aymer in straw, then left the yard. If they hurried they might get back to the warehouse before the boxing finished. If King Swing had won, there’d be some winnings to pick up. Easy money, easy times.

Aymer Smith had wet himself. His bladder had been kicked and bruised. When he regained consciousness and found enough strength to limp, barefoot, for help, his trousers were soaked and icy cold. He didn’t look the least like a gentleman who’d encountered some misfortune. He looked more like a beggar in a dirty wagoner’s coat, lame and urinous, and with a black hole for a mouth. He leant against the outer wall of the stable yard. He couldn’t stand without the wall. He tried to call for help, but couldn’t make the words.

The first people to notice him crossed the road. The second — a group of high-collared bucks who’d been at the boxing match — pointed at him, stared for a few moments and stayed away, leaving Aymer in an empty street. At last a carriage stopped a few gates down but, even though Aymer waved his hands, the coachman wouldn’t look at him, and soon had driven off. What could Aymer do to save his life? A man who thinks he’s at death’s door when he’s only got a cold, or who wears a sling when all the bruising on his arm has healed, is not the sort to shrug off such a beating. He must, he thought, have lost several pints of blood already. His liver and his heart had been damaged, he was sure, punctured maybe. His face would be beyond repair. He’d have to hide behind a scarf. He’d be an invalid. Aymer had to save himself, and quickly, or (he imagined) he would bleed to death, or die of cold, or his organs would give out. There was a doctor who had rooms opposite his own in Whittock’s Court. But Whittock’s Court was far away, and uphill. Twenty minutes’ walking even for a healthy man. Two minutes, though, at his wounded pace, would bring Aymer to his brother’s city house. It was just a street away. He had no choice. He’d rather be with Fidia than die. He held on to the wall and, moving one limb at a time, as if he were scaling some treacherous rock face, he traversed along the pavings and the wall until he reached his brother’s wrought-iron gates and pulled the night bell with both hands.

FIDIA WAS horrified. Her nightman, Samuel, had come into the house, wearing his boots and carrying his lantern. Two rules broken. He’d not observed any of his ‘procedures’. If he had something urgent to communicate, he should — in the absence of Matthias and his valet — have summoned Emma, the housekeeper. She would have written a note for Fidia and called a maid to deliver it on a hand tray with a curtsey and a cough. Instead the nightman had knocked roughly on her drawing-room doors while she was entertaining friends and sharing the latest indiscretions over cards and Madeira, and had come into the room, even before she’d rung her bell. What must her friends, Mrs Bellamy and Mrs Whittaker, have made of it?

‘I hope this matters, Samuel,’ she said.

‘So begging you, ma’am, it’s Mr Aymer at the gate.’

‘And selling pudding by the quarter yard?’

‘No, ma’am. I’ve left him in the porter’s room, and he is in no condition to walk a step but wants me to help him come inside.’

What, drunk? she thought. This was embarrassing. Mrs Whittaker could take the gold rosette for gossiping. This would be common knowledge throughout the city, and much embroidered, by breakfast-time.

‘Then leave him there, if he will not come himself,’ she said. She turned towards her cards again as if her brother-in-law was not worth the worry. Whatever his business, it could wait.

‘I cannot leave him, ma’am.’

‘Good heavens, Samuel! You should not bother us. I am entertaining for the moment. Tell him that Matthias is away at the estate this evening and that I will join my husband there tomorrow. So Monday is the earliest that we can spare any time for him. He knows our timetables. Tell him, yes, that we can see him Monday.’

‘He might not last till Monday, ma’am, the state of him.’

Fidia raised her eyebrows for her guests — exasperated and embarrassed, but trying to appear amused. Aymer was a trial for her. She had no patience left. She laughed. She said, ‘The family cuckoo. Can’t leave me in peace for five minutes.’

‘Perhaps you ought to see he is quite well,’ said Mrs Bellamy. Mrs Whittaker nodded in agreement.

‘Oh, I suppose I must disturb myself if we are to enjoy our privacy at all. Excuse me, ladies, while I attend to this,’ said Fidia. She would attend to Samuel, too. He needed reprimanding and reminding that his place was out of doors. ‘Samuel is disposed to overcolouring the simplest things,’ she told her friends. ‘Where is my shawl? I should not want to take a chill …’

Samuel, for once, was not exaggerating. Aymer was a dreadful sight. He looked as if a horse had kicked him in the face. Fidia had to take him in, no question of avoiding it — he was related. What had her brother-in-law done to deserve such a bloody face? She was in little doubt that the beating was deserved. She would have liked to have rapped her little fists on Aymer’s jaw herself, on many occasions, if only to keep him quiet. He wasn’t talking now, though. His breathing was constricted, and he was moaning like a chimney pot. Was he sleeping, or unconscious?

‘Why didn’t you express his situation, Samuel?’ she demanded. ‘You have caused me to seem cruel. I don’t believe that he is drunk at all. What made you speak of it? There is no smell of drink. He is not a drinking man besides, despite his oddities. You had better hurry straight away to Fowlers and fetch the physician, if there is one on a Friday night. Do hurry up. Haste is only vulgar within the house. You may run. And do not thrust your hat back on your head. It is rowdyish.’

A boy was sent to call sedans to take both of her visitors home. Emma made a bed up on the second floor. (‘Not the good sheets, Emma. Mr Smith is bloody, and …’ She would not say what else.) The servants carried Aymer up two flights of stairs, his bare feet covered with a napkin. They put him on the bed, still in his coat, and Emma sat with him until the physician arrived, a little after eleven and a little the worse for drink. Fidia sat in her drawing room, and waited. She couldn’t concentrate to read. It would not do to practise her piano or go to bed. She played patience and finished the three half-glasses of Madeira while, two floors above, Emma and the doctor stripped her brother-in-law, washed him with warm water, applied poultices on his bruises, cauterized his wounds with candle wax and checked his ribs and limbs for breakages. They missed the fractured ankle bone, but that would mend without them anyway and provide him with an interesting limp.

Finally they turned Aymer on his side and laid his face on a surgical dish. The doctor swabbed his mouth out, cleaned the fragments from his tongue and lips, then left him to his dreams.

‘This will be a year of dentistry for him,’ he said to Fidia when he was ready to go. She shuddered at the thought. ‘I think you might sit with Mr Smith for tonight. He will be feverish and certainly will be in pain. I will leave some Greenoughs Tincture for his mouth. And some powdered laudanum. I’ll come again tomorrow. Don’t be too concerned for him, Mrs Smith. Your husband will be whole again in time, other than the teeth, of course …’

‘My husband, sir, is in the country,’ said Fidia, horrified for the second time that night. ‘That gentleman is a relation, that is all, and my concerns for him are only charitable.’ She looked down at her game of cards. She had a decent run of hearts. Her spades had let her down. ‘Will he be fit enough to go back to his rooms tomorrow?’

‘No, Mrs Smith. I beg you, let him rest. He should stay in bed until this time next week. He will be feverish.’ Fidia went across to her piano and struck a single note. A black one. Sharp. She must remember to warn her daughters and her son when they woke that Uncle Aymer was about. They should avoid his room.

When Aymer woke on Saturday the pain was hardly bearable. His chest and thighs felt as heavy and inert as iron. In this he didn’t differ much from King Swing who, contrary to all the bets, had been defeated in fourteen rounds the night before by Massa Hannibal. But King Swing’s face wasn’t much harmed. He was only bruised around one eye. The upper part of Aymer’s face was colourless. It hardly showed on the pillowcase. Both eyes were clear and moist. But everything below his nose was blue and swollen. His lips were a pair of overripe damsons, bloated, syrupy and sapped together by dry blood, with stripy wasps of scab feeding at the juice. His cheek and chin were stripped of skin. His jaw was bruised. He’d almost bitten through his tongue. It looked as if a three-inch worm was squashed across it. But his gums were worst of all. What teeth remained were shaken in his head, like gravestones in soft earth. The gravestones tilted and the earth was lifted up and split.

It was odd that he could think and see so clearly, yet hardly breathe or move, and that he should be so reassured and in such brutal pain at once. It was the bed that settled him and made him feel so like a child: its freshly laundered smell, its punched-up pillows, its quilted counterpane, its height and buoyancy. He looked around the room for clues to where he was. The windows were ten feet tall at least — an opulent house — and the room was full of calming winter light, yellow, penetrating, cool. Everything seemed sharp and mutely colourful. A silver candelabrum on a stand, which burned fine-smelling whale oil. A walnut dressing table and closet. Two brocaded chairs. A bedside table with a washing bowl and a pot pourri. A white marble fireplace. A watercolour of some ochre church in Italy or Spain. Hand-painted wallpaper, the latest fashion. This was no hospital. It smelled of furniture and cloth — and money.

At first he thought he was in Wherrytown. Inside some better inn. The footsteps in the corridor would belong to Mrs Yapp. Or George. How happy he would be to see the parlourman. But when Emma entered with fresh poultices and he saw his nephew and his nieces staring in and giggling, he knew exactly where he was.

Emma pressed cold flannels to his forehead and his face. She put him back onto the pillows. ‘You mustn’t move,’ she said. She pushed his eyelids up. She felt the temperature of his hands and the nape of his neck. ‘You’re doing fine.’

‘What day is it?’ He sounded drunk. It hurt.

‘It’s Saturday. Excuse me, sir, but you’re not allowed to talk, not until your mouth is on the mend. Mrs Smith says I am to keep you quiet at all costs. You mustn’t smile. You mustn’t talk or smile. You must just rest. Shall I draw back the curtains, sir? Don’t say.’ A wedge of light spread out across his bed. Emma took the flannels off his face. She spooned some water in his mouth, and gave some Greenoughs Tincture and a draught of laudanum. He couldn’t swallow it. It made a sticky pool between his lips and then seeped into the splintered cavern of his mouth. He had to fight a sneeze.

Then, while Emma changed the dressings on his wounds, he had sufficient time (before her draught of laudanum returned him to the night and to the sweetest dreams of all) to recall the details of the Friday evening, the endless crack and thud of it. And he remembered every word they said. Shut up. Your name? Your name? You’re a thief and not a gentleman. Good boots. I know it’s him. Say it, say it! Have you been recently in Wherrytown?

AYMER SMITH was at the end of tired. He was sleeping now, and truly dreaming: his landscape was a childish one. A beach, some dunes, some kelp, a granite headland, gulls, the numbing blanket of a sea-stunned sky, a dog. He put his shoulder up against the Cradle Rock. He had the strength. He rolled it back onto its pivot stone. He set the Rock in motion. He made amends. He put the world to rights again. Helped only by the muscle of the wind, and by the charity of dreams, the Cradle Rock ascended and declined.

A public announcement from

Oliver’s Register of Ships and Shipping

Toronto, February 1837