Two long days later, Lenox stood in Carlisle’s Bookshop amidst an excited crowd of people.
Carlisle was a bookseller, small publisher, and advocate for various causes. He ran an excellent bookshop and a still better salon. On this evening, at a quarter past seven, the fifty or sixty people in the room—Lenox, for his part, was alone—quieted, because Josiah Hollis was striding into the room, tall and grave, though nodding politely to the people he passed who greeted him. He held his hands behind his back.
He stood by as Carlisle gave him an introduction. After thanking the crowd and making a small joke about the weather, Carlisle said, “We are thrilled to be publishing Mr. Hollis’s true account of his early years, and hope many of you will order from the private first edition of five hundred to be published later this month, before it goes into general circulation in March. We are equally thrilled that Mr. Hollis has extended his stay in London to help complete and edit the book so that it will be available sooner than transatlantic mail would allow.”
Ah! That was the explanation for Hollis’s ongoing presence in London.
Carlisle went on then, talking about the book and its author in equally admiring terms. After a few minutes, Lenox’s mind drifted. He was tired. Somewhere in London at this very hour, if all went according to plan, Wilt Sheridan and Samuel Jonas were being placed under arrest.
His fatigue was not purely physical. He had been involved in the grueling hours it had taken to interview Forsythe Witt and then verify his story. Yet it was more an emotional than physical drain he felt on his spirits.
He knew more about slavery than he ever had before. This was no imposition on him—only it had involved a kind of permanent disillusionment, for while he had been staunch in his position as an abolitionist, like the overwhelming majority of Britons, it had been a position largely formed in theory theretofore. After their conversations at the Yard with Witt—after hearing about the life of a plantation—it all seemed too terribly real.
His guesses about the crime had been right in some respects, it emerged, wrong in others.
The first part he had missed was that Witt had been much more than just a man with a few boats. He was an active slave trader in America. This was part of the service he had provided to merit inclusion in the triumvirate with Sheridan, who had slaves to offload, and Jonas, who had capital. Witt was the muscle and the talent. His birth was obscure, his fortune minimal, but he had been able to do what the indolent Sheridan and Jonas could only conceive. It also explained why it was he who had been chosen to play the role of Bert Smith. Of the three men, he was the only active one.
“Take us back to the start,” Sir Richard Mayne had said at the outset of their interrogation. “Twenty years ago.”
Though Lenox, Hemstock, Dunn, and Cobb were all present, Mayne was conducting the interview himself. Whatever he had done, Witt was still a Member of Parliament.
He smoked continually throughout the questions, creating a fug in the small room where they all sat around a plain table. “Sheridan was young then. So was I. Even Jonas.” Puff. “Sheridan had about five hundred and forty hands on his plantation in Saint Elizabeth.”
“Slaves, you mean.”
Witt nodded. “Sure, if you like. Anyhow. Wasn’t hard to see which way the cat was going to jump. They were going to be freed. They were Sheridan’s inheritance. His elder brother would get the English property; the plantation was entailed upon the second male. Soon enough he knew it would be worth whatever you could get for the acreage. Not much at all.
“It was Jonas and I who approached him. Jonas had a cousin in South Carolina who owned a property with about thirty slaves. That’s quite a lot in America. A prosperous family might have two or three. More than five hundred—well, that’s a large, large number.”
“How much does a slave cost?” Hemstock asked.
It was Cobb who replied. “Something like fifteen hundred dollars,” he said.
Hemstock whistled. It was a small fortune in itself. “Multiplied by five hundred and forty,” said Lenox, squinting up at the ceiling as he calculated. “Eight hundred and ten thousand dollars? Is that right, Mr. Witt?”
This was a vast fortune—enough, even split three ways, to make them some of the richest men in the world.
Witt shrugged. “As for your math, I daresay it’s roughly right. But we worked very hard, you know.
“I started taking them over thirty or forty at a time. Of course, you have to keep them alive. That’s not free. Then you have to find the right market. Sometimes for a large male you might get more than two thousand dollars. But a female is worth less, and a child less still. As time went on we figured out that the skilled ones sold for much more. A good blacksmith under thirty could fetch twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“A child less still,” repeated Dunn. “But they stayed with their parents.”
Witt looked at him scornfully. “They’re not like us; they don’t care. They put on a show, but they don’t care.” Puff. “We were able to buy Jonas’s cousin’s farm and slaves off him, overpaid for it—since it can be difficult for the British to own land in America.
“Soon enough, his American slaves and our Jamaican ones were assimilated, without anyone noticing. We bought some of the surrounding land. We didn’t farm it very hard, which some thought peculiar. Instead we had the cook train cooks, the blacksmith train blacksmiths, the cooper train coopers. And so on.”
Sir Richard looked up. “To increase their value on the auction block.”
“Yes.”
“And Sheridan and Jonas were conscious of all this?”
“Jonas was. He was there, for heaven’s sake—there more often than I was, for I traveled constantly. But Jonas loved the place. He took one of the slaves as a mistress. Filthy. Moved her into the house, wouldn’t let anyone touch her, though he whipped her himself when she tried to escape. As for Sheridan, he only ever asked about the money. Obsessed by it, he was. Finally by 1836 we’d gotten all of his men out. But he never lost the fear that we were shorting him.”
“Were you?”
“Here and there. About as fair a partnership as you’re like to find in that trade. He held out a carrot for us, you know: seats in Parliament. To his credit he made good on them. Found us the races, at least. We had to win them on our own. Jonas is about to lose. If he did, I told him, I thought he should go back to America. But there was never such a one for London, now that he’s back.”
“Did no one in Jamaica notice?”
“People in Jamaica become less observant if you gave them a few dollars,” said Witt. “More outlay, you see? Before you think we’re so rich as all that.”
So it went on. He was a brutally unsympathetic man. He recounted the death of slaves and friends without compunction or remorse. When they came to Winfield Bell, he was outright derisive.
“A fool.” That was his verdict. “A few pounds he cost me. Not more.”
“What was the plan, then?” Cobb asked. “Why did you kill Gilman?”
But here Witt stopped. It was the first detail that Cobb and Lenox hadn’t told him before he’d told it back to them.
“Thus far I haven’t seen a paper guaranteeing my safe passage off this island,” he said. “When I do, I’ll tell you whatever else you like.”
Lenox, reflecting on this exchange as it had passed late two nights before, stirred only when there was a loud round of applause. Carlisle was coming offstage; Hollis inclined his head and approached the dais.
He thanked his friends the Thompsons first. He then gave a eulogy for Gilman and Tiptree, one that was moving to all present, or so it seemed at least to Lenox; tears stood in the eyes of the woman next to him as Hollis described the friendship the three had made on their crossing of the Atlantic, three men from very different backgrounds, Tiptree urbane and bright, Gilman fiery and brilliant, Hollis himself seasoned and wary, distant at first.
This formed a natural transition to his own history.
What had Lenox been expecting? Well, what he heard was a litany of horrors. Lives lived in intense heat, hunger, and pain. Flayings at the post—or in the case of pregnant women, Hollis said, facedown, their bellies in holes they had dug themselves, so as not to endanger the master’s property—illness untreated, near starvation. Bodies that gave up life in the rows of sugarcane and were merely pushed to one side of the furrow.
“Were none of the slave owners kind?” one man interjected from the second row at one point.
The American took the question in good faith. “Some are, to be sure, sir,” he said. “These I consider the most evil and least Christian of all—for they make the practice easier to justify, with their slight humanities.”
Lenox admired the undramatic, unadorned, straightforward way that Hollis told his story. It made him wonder if the book was just as plain—or if Carlisle would help to make it less political, more personal. The single moment when the whole crowded bookshop held its breath was when Hollis described his mother being caught out by the local patrollers one night while she was collecting herbs, and sold off as punishment.
He had still never found to whom, despite years of trying.
After the speech, there was a long line of people who wanted to meet Hollis. Lenox was content to wait. He sat, reflecting on the case. Not with satisfaction. As he had told Cobb, only the American’s arrival had saved his life. And it had been Cobb, too, who isolated the three men involved in the plot from Gilman’s calendar. That was the crucial thing to have missed, and Lenox a well-connected Londoner, too, with a brother and several other relatives and a dozen friends in Parliament, Lenox, who could tell Disraeli from a backbencher far more easily than Cobb might ever hope to.
“Mr. Lenox!” said Hollis, when at last the store had mostly emptied.
Lenox stood and smiled. “Good evening, Mr. Hollis. I was hoping to buy you supper, but now I see that you are grown very famous.”
“Yes, I am pleased to have found a British publisher for my memoir. And after it appears here I will go to France, where it is being translated even now.”
“My dear sir, congratulations!”
“But I would be happy to dine with you, if you have half an hour to wait.”
“Please take whatever time you need,” said Lenox. “As it happens, there is some further news about your attack.”
“I hope nothing alarming?”
“Not at all.”
“Then I shall be with you shortly.”
Lenox went and ordered Hollis’s book from Carlisle. He’d had a good night and happily took the order, thanking Lenox, who then waited among the tables full of gleaming red leather books, their pages still uncut—each still unread, with the chance it might contain any story at all. Thinking of Kitty Ashbrook, he bought a copy of Ivanhoe to be sent back to Hampden Lane.