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A Novel of Old New York
by Francis Spufford
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"One turn deserves another," said Lovell. "This way."
He led him through a door in the panelling, and Smith found himself in what was plainly the hall-way of the merchant's private residence, for it ran perpendicular to another street-door, whence fell the faint remaining light of the day; and where the counting office had smelled of ink, smoke, charcoal and the sweat of men, this had the different savour of waxed wood, food, rosewater and tea-leaves, with a suggestion of (what is common to both sexes) the necessary-house. At the end of the hall a stair spiralled steeply up in the dark. At each turn it passed a window but, the outlook being to the east, little came in through the glass but roofs and spars in black outline, upon the ground of a slice of heaven but one degree brighter. Stray gleams of polish showed the placing of the banisters and newel posts; picture frames set faint rumours of gold around rectangles of darkness or curious glitters too shadowed to make out, as if Lovell had somehow collected, and drowned, a stairwell's-worth of distant constellations. This being Lovell's home, it might be expected that the merchant would put off the weight of business, and resume the legerity of domestic life, yet on the first step he paused for a moment, and Smith saw the level of his shoulders fall, as if they had taken on them some effort, perhaps the effortful thought of the thousand pounds, and Smith anticipated a slow, perhaps a wheezing, ascent. But instead, that moment past, Lovell set off up the narrow house at the pace of a climbing monkey, swarming aloft in the boughs of a familiar tree, and it was Smith, his hands too full to balance with, who followed the dark stair warily—and when Lovell crossed a landing and rushed on, he paused, arrested at a door-way.
The long room it opened on did have western windows, a pair of them letting in the day's last glow of light, rather the silver of rain than of the metal, streaked with a faint crimson admitting to the distant existence of the sun; brilliant light to Mr. Smith, and it burnished with borrowed brilliance the faces of the three young women in the room, plain-dressed among the plain furniture. One, fair-headed, was standing at the window with her hand to her mouth; one, darker, was sitting and reading something; and one, an African servant in a white kerchief, was holding a taper to a fresh white candle. When they saw him at the door, they all turned and looked at him. He looked back.
What a difference a frame makes! To Mr. Smith, gazing inward, the uprights of the painted door seemed to set out the three of them like some tableau representing the New World itself, of which his acquaintance to this point totalled forty-seven minutes, and which therefore he could not yet feel to be entirely solid, entirely terra firma as ordinarily founded on its bed of earth; but only to constitute a kind of scene, backed by drops and flats, where you must step forth at your cue to act your part, ready or not, ignorant as yet of the temper of the audience; ignorant of the temper of the other players, which will so much determine the drama you compose together, turn by turn, speech by speech, line by line. —The blonde one was extremely pretty, with a wide mouth of candid pink. The dark one not much less so, though she seemed just to have left off scowling, and her brows met in a knot. The African was turning eyes black as liquorice on him, in a gaze of perfect blankness. —What was more, what seemed to him a rarity fitting them to model the Three Graces, none of the three was in the slightest marked by the pox. He would learn that this exemption was, in the colony, almost too common to deserve notice, but it had for the moment the force of an original astonishment. Thus Smith, on the one side, gazing in. To the three gazing outward, however, into the dark of the stairwell, where a face had bloomed, and two pale hands clutching paper, he had only appeared in the ordinary aperture of an ordinary day. For them the blue-grey pediment of Connecticut pine faced the everyday world, as it always did, and they were their everyday selves, well launched (it seemed to them) into the middle of their histories, with loves, sorrows, resentments, hopes, all far advanced and long settled already into three familiar fortunes. He was the one unshackled, as yet unconfined; the one from whom diversion, or news, or any other of the new worlds a stranger may contain, were to be expected. And perhaps desired. For if your fortune at present is not such as pleases you, there is a prospect of mercy, as much as of doom, in the thought that Fortuna is fickle. The goddess's renown is all in her changeableness, and strangers are her acknowledged messengers. They bear with them a glimmering of new chances. When this stranger came forward to the threshold, he could be seen to be a youth of about four-and-twenty dressed in plain green, wearing his own hair in short rust-brown curls, smiling in a fashion that crinkled the freckles across his nose, and staring shamelessly.
Excerpted from Golden Hill by Francis Spufford. Copyright © 2017 by Francis Spufford. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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