Now I come to Olaudah Cambridge. And if anyone has questions to answer, it is him. Though there’ll be no way of getting answers, seeing as Olaudah Cambridge has not been seen since the night of her soirée.
This I know for certain. If Madame hadn’t seen him again, she’d still be alive. And she wouldn’t have seen him again if we hadn’t gone to the Cambridge lecture.
She wanted to go. It was her idea. The anti-slavery cause was all her excitement, then, and she’d read about the forthcoming speech in the Morning Chronicle, and then talked about nothing else for two whole days. Her little Laddie, all grown up. In the carriage, she twisted and turned and her eyes darted with excitement. She drew the window-shades, though I wanted to lift them and look out at the ash-dark streets, the domes and spires. Feel that I was a small part of it, at last. Maybe not the apple in the bowl, but one of the grapes.
The hall was near Bloomsbury Square, long and wide, panelled in dark, gleaming wood. They crowded the room, some of the women with arms linked, the men talking only with each other. All of them dressed in brown or grey. Anti-slavery people, mainly. Upholstered chairs lined an aisle as neat as a hair parting. It was dim in spite of the sconces flocking the papered walls.
Laddie walked in with the snap of a sail in high wind, and they took their seats. He wore a black jacket, shiny at the elbows, and, when he lifted his hands, he flashed crooked fingers and mashed knuckles.
He brought one hand down on the lectern, kept the other raised, cast his head slowly around. You couldn’t help but stare back. He had the body of a prime buck, but the face of a man who’d rather be dead than owned.
He worked his mouth into a grin. ‘Gentlemen,’ he began, voice hard as rope. ‘When Mr Macaulay asked me to speak here tonight, I wondered what I should speak about. Something that would make me more than your pet nigger, more than your entertainment. Just some black you managed to get up onto his hind legs to play tricks.’
Titters burst into pops of laughter, and they exchanged nervous looks. His words went inside to my weak spots. I sat up, jolted. Beside me, Madame shifted her hands in her lap.
‘Casting about for a topic,’ he said, ‘I remembered an Igbo tale my mother had told me. The only thing I remember about her. It was about the Asiki.’ He paused. ‘The Asiki were human children, stolen by witches and taken deep into dark forests, where the witches cut out their tongues, and changed every hair on their heads, from wool to silk. Changed their skin, too, from black to gold. Next morning the Asiki woke without speech or memory, their mothers and their fathers forgotten. Their homes as well. Full of questions they had no way to ask. If you ask one of them, “Who are you?” they cannot answer. They cannot speak at all! They make ugly barking noises, rolling the stubs they have in place of tongues.’
They sat quiet, tugged forward in their seats. ‘All speakers,’ he continued, ‘at the end of the day, speak about men. What men want. Or don’t.’ He shrugged. ‘But . . . the Asiki are not men. They are changelings. Men who have no memory. Men kidnapped into silence. Men whose value is measured in beads and brass pans and guns. What would they tell us if they did have tongues? What do they want? Would they tell us they love the back-breaking work of gathering in your cotton? And your cane?’ He shrugged again. ‘Would they tell us it is for their own good?
‘Isn’t that what the European himself has told us? That the European’s pleasure is the African’s pleasure? Aren’t we supposed to take the European’s word for it? Because who would ever dream of asking the African what he wants? It’s the European who marches across this little globe, measuring everything, writing it down. Adam. God of all creatures, great and small.’
He made his voice quieter. ‘Here’s the rub. You asking me to speak for them. How can I? Why have you asked me? Because you look at a single black man and see all black men. As if one black man is a representative of every other member of his race. Allowed neither personality nor passion. Not allowed to love anybody, or anything. It is for this reason there are so many dead men inhabiting the new world, drifting through cotton and cane. Zombis. Men who were left enslaved, even after the trade had been abolished. You abandoned them. Yes, you, with your good intentions. Even abolitionists succumbed to the idea that a man couldn’t be stripped of his own assets without compensation. By that equation, those men you left behind are property. Machines, not men.
‘We might as well give you the blade, too. Since you also cut out their tongues.’
When he came down among them, the men pumped his hands, and the women stared. I stood beside Madame, near the door. I had listened in silence. His words had split me, like a cord of wood, though I didn’t want to show it. They’d made me think of Phibbah. Madame’s eyes roved after him. Hep Elliot appeared at her side. ‘No sign whatsoever of the poor little wretch in your portrait, is there?’
‘No.’
‘A man now. A young black Moses, smashing his tablets of stone.’
‘If you say so.’ Madame laughed.
The crowd surged around us. ‘Thighs like thunder,’ I heard a woman saying, behind us. ‘And a face like thunder, too.’
He moved through the crowd but it was clear he was making his way towards her. He closed one hand around hers, bent to brush it with his lips. ‘Madame Bebbum,’ he said, and she threw back her head and laughed again.
‘That was his old name for me,’ she said to Hep Elliot. ‘No one has called me that in a very long time.’ She turned back to him. ‘Laddie. How very nice to see you. This is Miss Hephzibah Elliot. And my secretary, Frances Langton.’
He caught me looking at his hands and clenched them into a fist beside his jaw. ‘They ugly for true, aren’t they, little mulatta? I’m a prizefighter, you know. The next Bill Richmond!’
‘Is that right?’ Madame said.
I remember how irked I felt. The way he called me ‘little mulatta’, the way he danced around us, bobbing on his toes. His white teeth, his pomade-slick hair. A man who spends that much time on mirrors and tooth-powders isn’t to be trusted. And he was a different man from the one on stage. Rough, coarse. He used the old slave talk only when he spoke to me. With her he would oil up his smile and start to talk white again. Like so many blacks do when whites are around. The ladies looked from him to me. As if this was still part of the entertainment.
‘Your lecture left me wondering, Mr Cambridge,’ I said, feeling peevish. ‘How many years did you spend enslaved?’
She gave me a sharp look. In those days, she liked to have me with her, as her companion, but preferred me quiet, lest I give us away.
‘Not a one,’ Laddie replied smoothly, ‘having been spirited away to England at the age of four. Unless you think it’s enslavement serving as page boy to Madame Benham . . . As her secretary you would be best placed to say.’
They all sniggered, as if he’d made a good jape.
‘In other words,’ I said, cutting him off, ‘you are full of ideas, not experience. Precisely what I thought.’
‘An honest opinion! That’s rare. Where have you come from, Miss Langton?’
‘Jamaica.’
‘You were a slave?’
‘A house-girl.’
He laughed. ‘Precisely what I thought.’
Hep Elliot clapped his back. ‘Mr Cambridge! That was a triumph! Plenty to chew on. You are clever.’
His eyes were fierce above his white cravat. ‘Most whites will be impressed with anything that comes out of a black’s mouth, Miss Elliot, if it’s dressed up in plain English. One can never know if one is being praised for being good, or simply for being good enough.’ He sliced his eyes towards Madame. ‘What did you think?’
She grinned. ‘Oh, I thought you were magnificent. I really did. A young black Moses, smashing your tablets of stone!’
Hep Elliot coughed, and Laddie threw back his head and laughed. A bark of laughter that showed all his teeth.
It is impossible to be both black and a woman. Did you know that? No one was asking me to give any lectures. They allow some blacks to impress them. Men like Sancho, Equiano . . . Yet I fail to see what was so impressive about them. They wrote, yes. But thousands could, if someone would bother to teach them. And everything they wrote was written for whites. Petitions. Appeals. It’s another of this world’s laws. Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people, as if our purpose here is to change their minds.
All Olaudah Cambridge had done was get himself shipped over when he was too young to be a servant, young enough to be a toy.
Trays of cordial were passed by waiters bearing silver trays. The pair of them stood close together for a long time, in their own private conversation, and I stood in my place near the door, holding my glass, my eyes ticking, like hands on a clock. I was drowning so deeply in my own thoughts that I hardly noticed when Hep Elliot drifted near, looking from me to them. I took a sip of foul-tasting cordial. ‘Oh,’ she said, in her drumbeat voice. ‘Oh. I see. I see. I – Well . . .’ She needled her brows together. ‘Someone should give you a warning, poor girl. Meg’s been spoiled, you see. She’ll only return the affections of those who spoil her in return. And only for a time. See that look he’s giving her? Like a man in church? It’s the way everyone looks at her. That’s the trouble with Meg.’
The trouble wasn’t the way he looked at her. It was the way she looked at him.
On the way back, all she could talk about was how surprised she’d been, how Laddie had carved his own life, made himself his own man, and was to be admired for it. Benham’s old words jumped into my head as I listened to her, and I thought, Where is the sport in chasing something you’re bound to catch?
A hard seed lodged itself in my gut. When she leaned over me at the writing desk later that night, I pulled away.
‘As soon as we leave this room, I vanish. That is all your trick.’ I stood, put us face to face. For the first time I noticed how thin she was becoming. Her head was nothing but a curve of skin over skull, her jaw hard as the air between us. Her eyes had a hot-wax shine. Was it the drug? I’d watched her drink steadily all afternoon. Laudanum might have been one part of her nerves, that evening, but I was worried that the other part had been Laddie himself. I didn’t know which shamed me more – that I had the thought or that I couldn’t manage to voice it.
I had to clench my hand in my skirts to stop myself reaching for her. I shook my head. ‘I am a fool for wanting what you cannot give.’
‘What is it that you want?’
To live together in the cottage of stone. To sit hand in hand outside and feel the heat on our faces and to walk together at the seaside, arm in arm. To tend each other, sick or well.
But those words dried inside me, like pressed flowers. She reached for my hands, and I jerked away. ‘You’re a pot of water. Cold, hot, cold.’
‘If I am the water, dear Frances, you must be the stove.’ When I made no answer, she pressed her forehead to mine, took hold of my shoulders. ‘I am trying to coax up a laugh out of you.’
I didn’t reply.
After taking her tray down, I came back to find her waiting for me. There was a letter laid on my pallet. One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love. Forgive me. Ritte. I folded it over once, then again, and again, kept it small, folded until it was small and hard, and tucked it into my sleeve. And I carried it there until the night I was arrested and brought here, when the turnkeys took it from me, in the reception room.