* * *
Suddenly the day yields to darkness, as though it no longer has the will to continue. With a wet cloak upon his back and a carpetbag over his shoulder, he enters the seafaring town and begins to pass through the less public lanes and alleyways where the corpses of dogs and cats rot in the gutters. A shared journey in a post-chaise would have spared him the unpleasantness of proximity to people who are not overclean in either their habits or their persons, but his gruelling trudge is now reaching its conclusion, and there is no reason for him to confuse his mind by speculating on what might have been. Putrid vapours stupefy his senses, and as he proceeds deeper into this area of shameful squalor, his hand habitually hastens to his mouth to prevent his succumbing to a choking fit. All about him, in the very shadows of the port’s abundant wealth, it is impossible to ignore the evidence that the greater part of this town has a face that appears to have been exhaustively bruised by misfortune. He lowers his damp head and enters a court where the dwellings sag indifferently, one supporting the next, and where he can see offal-choked, verminous rooms — doors unlatched to all — that he knows to be peopled by men and women who nurse a lifelong commitment to quenching their thirst and who will fly into a murderous rage should they feel slighted.
A dirty-fleshed, drunken fool emerges suddenly from the shade and sneers at him, and then the man’s eyes flash and he laughs. (Her gentleman, if I’m not deceived. The stuck-up bitch is where she should be, but it is not this court.) The scruffy brute staggers in all directions, his head bobbing in the heavily fermented mist that he replenishes with each rasping statement. We must go next door, he insists. The dreary wretch then obliges him to drop a coin into his blackened palm in order that he might conduct his guest no more than ten faltering paces down the lane, where they both bend double and pass through the tunnel-like entrance to a closed-in court. There are six houses in the yard, each boasting two stories, all of which give out onto an unpaved central area that is littered with bodily refuse. A water pump has long ago given up service, but on the wall above it a dog has been hung for amusement, and it squeals and tumbles helplessly at the end of a piece of frayed rope. The half-witted man smiles toothlessly and points to an open door in the corner.
He carefully edges his way up the unstable staircase and enters the foul-smelling attic room, which boasts not a single stick of furniture. The air sits sluggishly in the abandoned quarters, and he steps carefully, for some seepage stains the floor and appears to be still leaking between the ill-matched boards, no doubt soiling the inhabitants below. He looks up, for he hears footsteps in the stairwell, and then a lamplit face appears and greets him with a cheerfulness so out of keeping with the environment that he wonders if this intruder is in full possession of his faculties. (Kind sir, the severity of the season has caused great distress to those already beset with ailment and pain. It is all part of this dreadful infestation that has reduced so many of my tenants to the severest condition imaginable with no prospect of relief.) The landlord advances boldly into the room, the light from his lamp pooling unsteadily on the floor, and he stands close by, which merely confirms his lack of fellowship with either soap or water. (Once she began to flounder, vitality rushed suddenly from her body and left behind an empty vessel. Thereafter the Lord ushered her out of the misery of the present world and delivered her into the everlasting glories of the world to come.)
They sit together in the quietest corner of the raucous Flying Horse Inn, and he listens to the landlord’s dull sermons as the man swills his beer with a hand that trembles on the glass. It is true, he thinks; some of these people have no more civility than the swine in their pens. (But she’d neither been baptized, nor was she of this parish, so I paid a man to swaddle her in a tight sheet, but as you have discovered, the detestable odour still triumphs. Soon after, the cart raced to the burial ground on the far side of the extension of the town, and I guarantee that once there she found some rest.) With comical impatience, the man signals for another flagon of beer, and then he lowers his voice. (You do understand that the woman was given to blatant falsehoods. The artful minx affected a superior attitude, but when her stomach was empty, she would walk through the streets seeking those like yourself, with elegant shirts and silken breeches, and murmur a wistful account of having fallen on hard times.) The landlord laughs, but then his expression grows grave. (Believe me, sir, there were many men conversant with her merits, for eventually she gave free admission to her bed, but I swear I was never one of those who sent the boy out while they took advantage.) A buxom woman well past her first bloom thumps the beer down onto the table, but the landlord ignores both the woman and the beer and produces a slip of paper from his waistcoat. (I would truly like to be in better favour with the goddess Fortune, but I have a final reckoning. I take it you’ll be settling her accounts.)
* * *
The handsome oak room is populated with men of commerce who customarily refuse the possibility of consensus, preferring instead to become heated with their own opinions, which they proclaim with a confident swagger calculated to override both logic and consideration. Their chief topic of interest is the fluctuating prices of sugar, rum, and slaves on the Exchange Flags, but on this blustery evening, the working day having been concluded, pipes and tobacco and newspapers and punch are much in vogue at the Kingston Coffee House, and no further industry is being conducted, as the men now sprawl with books bound in soft leather and stretch out before the fire. A jaded lodger, keen to impress upon onlookers the idea that no man need greet him cordially, sits at a table towards the rear of the room. Before him a knife is embedded in a slab of meat and candlelight plays on a silver goblet, and a rush of uncertain sensations courses through his body. Earlier in the evening, the landlord had set him down for an ass. After he had paid the man his money, the drunkard furrowed his brow in mock confusion and insisted there were no personal effects and claimed that he could offer no information with respect to the child.
His child. At the conclusion of their second dinner she slipped off her dress in the backroom of the Queen’s Head tavern, and his heart fell when he saw that she had been branded with the initials of another man. Suddenly he felt only tolerably well, and he became aware of tightness in his lips, and then his face began to colour and quiver uncontrollably. Once their enterprise was terminated, his conscience remained unsullied with regret, for although their union had not been sealed with missives sent by Cupid’s post, he had not stooped to using her brutally, and he understood that his wife would never inquire of him regarding time expended in Liverpool. Two days later he began the return journey across the moors, but long before he reached home, his mind had already turned back to Liverpool and thoughts of again entertaining this woman, who seemed willing to establish an arrangement by which she might call upon him at the Queen’s Head tavern whenever he had commerce to conduct in the town she now called home.
A year later their child was born. When she asked of him if he might arrange for her and the boy to return to the trafficking islands, he happily went in search of a captain he might trust. However, he soon divined them all to be testy, irritable creatures who tendered him no assurances that once at a distance from the laws of the land they would not use her and the boy heartlessly, and so he offered the woman money in exchange for the convenience of continuing their arrangement and sparing his soul the burden of worrying that he might have dispatched them both to a sad fate. But what hope now for the boy on the streets of this town? He knows full well that it will be only a matter of time before the child is propositioned with a tot of rum and overwhelmed and pressed to serve as a prize upon one of His Majesty’s ships, or else accused of thievery and snatched up and spirited away to a workhouse.