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.