Chapter Twenty-Four: That Bothersome Little Colony

Chapter Twenty-Four: That Bothersome Little Colony

“By the laws, William, I have had a bellyful of your sulking! The fellow wasn’t a saint, he was a mercenary! And a mercenary paid handsomely for a job he failed to do!”

“Yes, My Lord.”

“For all his swaggering, Sergeant Thomas did not even have the bottom of that hideous hound from hell…”

“As you say, Sir.”

Lord Luxon snorted angrily and threw down his napkin. “Pray command me a carriage, William. I am eager to return to Manhattan to see the fruits of my labours.”

“A carriage, Sir?”

“A cab, you impudent fellow! And, as there is no one else, I must charge you to stay in New Jersey and stand guard over the device until my return.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

William reached into his pocket and held out an envelope to his master.

“What is this?” asked Lord Luxon.

“I have sold your gold timepiece as you requested …”

“Ah. Capital. I trust you got a good price - I was fond of it. No matter – I shall buy myself another watch …or a hundred if I feel so inclined when I return to New York!”

Lord Luxon tore open the envelope and emptied a pile of bank notes and coins onto the palm of his hand. A smile slowly lit up his face. Instead of slim, green dollar bills he held up, one by one, larger paper notes, some blue, some green, some brown… and all with the British sovereign on the back.

“Five pounds! Ten pounds! A half crown!” He picked out the largest note. It was tinted gold and bronze and had a fine silver stripe running through it. “I promise to pay the bearer fifty pounds!” Forgetting decorum for once, Lord Luxon danced up and down on the spot, brought the notes to his lips and kissed them. “America has come home!” he shouted. “I have achieved what vast armies could not have done! Why, even my own father might have dropped his disapproving air for once and admired the genius of the plan, eh, William?”

“Indeed, my Lord,” said William flatly. Lord Luxon’s father was dead by the time he came to work at Tempest House, but he was aware of his reputation and his ill-disguised contempt for his son. “I am certain your achievement would have astonished him.”

William watched Lord Luxon’s cab disappear out of sight and then stood looking at the sky for a long while. He thought of Sergeant Thomas and Sally. And then he wondered if this new America would have room for Michael in his bar off Sixth Avenue. Finally he returned to his room, put on his jacket and, with only the clothes that he stood up in, walked out of his employment towards a new life where, if nothing else, he could call himself his own master.
The cab was uncomfortable and hot, and the roads leading to New York were bumpy. Despite objections from the driver, Lord Luxon insisted that they approach the city via the Brooklyn Bridge, which the thick-set man had insisted on calling the Brookland Bridge. Lord Luxon leaned out of the open window to feel the wind on his face and his blond hair escaped from its pigtail and blew into his eyes. It was a sultry, stifling day, and a thick carpet of lead-grey cloud was trapping the heat. A pity, he thought, that he would not be able to see the glorious island of Manhattan rising up out of the sea in brilliant sunshine that suited it so well. A pity, too, that he was not able to enter the city a conquering hero, carried on the shoulders of British red coats, instead of arriving alone and in this shabby taxi.

It was early afternoon when the cab crossed a bridge which spanned a stretch of water which was unfamiliar to Lord Luxon. He saw an island, or a peninsula – he was not sure which – and on the opposite shore were rows of municipal buildings of grand, if insipid, architectural design, that failed to compensate for the forest of factory chimneys that sent up plumes of smoke to the west. Also to the west of the bridge was a small harbour or shipyard. Lord Luxon watched cranes swing giant crates out of rusting ships onto an empty quayside. The cab stopped behind a line of queuing traffic. Fumes filled the car from the ancient lorry in front of them. The line of cars did not move and soon all the drivers were sounding their horns, those of the big lorries booming over the water. Lord Luxon dabbed at his forehead with a violet silk handkerchief. The heat and humidity were becoming irksome.

“What is this city? Must we drive through it?” asked Lord Luxon ill-temperedly.

The driver turned around and looked at Lord Luxon as if he were a fool.

“But we’ve reached your destination, Sir - this is the Brookland Bridge. This is New York.”

Lord Luxon bid the cabbie drive around the city until he told him to stop. He was shocked to the core of his being. What had happened to his city of dreams? Where were the skyscrapers? Where was the vibrant energy? Where was the crisp grid of streets? Where was his beloved Central Park and the great museums and art galleries! Where were the shops? Where were Saks and those irresistible boutiques in Greenwich Village and SoHo Where were the bars, the luxury hotels, the restaurants serving cuisine from every nation that spilled out onto the sidewalks? And why were all the faces a tediously uniform white? Why did everyone dress with so little panache? This town was… dull.

Lord Luxon’s face was the colour of putty as they drove through a succession of narrow, winding streets. His expression had set into one of deep despair. He mopped his clammy forehead repeatedly, closing his eyes each time and hoping that when he opened them some wonder would confront them. None did. True, there were some attractive little crescents, and churches, and there was an equestrian statue of George III in a toga that caught his eye in Bowling Green Park. There was also a tolerable statue of an English monarch called Queen Victoria set above a granite fountain on Wall Street. Most things he saw through the open window of the grimy taxi cab were distasteful to his eyes. He had not seen a single building above twelve storeys high. Where was the civic spirit whose pride and self-belief had built the man-made mountains of Manhattan? This New York was not the city which had made his imagination soar. This New York was a carbuncle on the face of America… What could have happened? Lord Luxon’s heart sank. It then occurred to him that all the priceless treasures which he had amassed were housed in a street which did not exist and were guarded by men whose whereabouts in time and space he could not even guess at.

The overheated cabbie was becoming frustrated driving around and around with no definite destination. Every few minutes he would turn around and look at Lord Luxon questioningly, but his passenger would just indicate, with a sweep of his hand, that he should drive on. Eventually they entered a square where once elegant red-brick terraces had been converted into shops with rented apartments above them. Lines of washing hung from many of the wrought iron balconies. A cluster of enormous plane trees grew in a patch of sun-bleached lawn at the centre of the square. Beneath the trees, a life-size sculpture of a lady in Grecian costume stood on a plinth. A seagull stood on her head and one of her hands had dropped off. A vague memory of such a statue stirred in Lord Luxon’s head but vanished again almost as quickly.

“You may stop here,” he said to the cabbie, finally accepting that he could not deny the evidence of his own eyes. This, whether he liked it or not, was what two and half centuries of British rule had done to New York.

When Lord Luxon asked if the café was air-conditioned, the waitress stared at him with such a blank look on her face that he did not bother to repeat the question, but went instead outside, and sat at one of the rough wooden benches overlooking the square. It was by now three o’ clock in the afternoon, and the sun had burned away the cloud cover. The city was suffocating. The drains and the gutters stank. Hoping for a breeze which did not come, Lord Luxon stirred his cup of coffee. A large plane tree cast dappled shade but he did not feel any cooler. Opposite him sat a florid-faced man with neat white hair. He wore an immaculate white shirt with engraved cufflinks and he was reading through some documents, making occasional corrections with a gold-nibbed fountain pen. A pot of tea and a plate of scones stood in front of him on the bare wooden bench. When he asked Lord Luxon to pass him the sugar, he obliged, sliding over a half empty bowl crawling with flies. Lord Luxon sighed deeply. He was already beginning to turn any remorse about what he had done into anger and disappointment at his fellow countrymen. What a lamentable lack of vision, he thought bitterly. What a terrible admission of mediocrity. Lord Luxon was all at once so angry he found himself about to thump the table. To stop himself, he clasped his hands together, very tightly, and put them on his lap. Absentmindedly, he observed his whitened knuckles and the half moons of his thumbnails. Something made him lift up his hands to examine them more closely. He looked at the fine gold hairs on the back of his hand and at the pattern of lines on the palms. He had the absurd, if fleeting, notion that his flesh did not look as solid as it normally did.

Lord Luxon took a sip of his coffee. “Phouah!” he exclaimed, spitting out the muddy liquid over the scrubby grass. “Oh! Oh!” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and smacked his lips together trying to get rid of the taste.

The man opposite laughed heartily. “You must be new in town to order coffee!”

“I shall not make the same mistake again,” replied Lord Luxon.

“Jack Grafton,” said the man extending his hand.

Lord Luxon hesitated for a moment and shook it. “Mr Luxon,” he said.

“Luxon!” laughed the man. “How very appropriate.”

Lord Luxon wanted to ask why it should be so, but decided against it. “Indeed.”

“I detect another Englishman by the sound of your accent.”

Lord Luxon nodded. “You are correct in your assumption, Sir.”

“Well I, for one, am counting the days until I can get back to London. I loathe New York, especially in the summer. Alas, I have an important client who insists on expanding his business into the American market. Be satisfied with Canada, I tell him. What’s the point of battling with all that transatlantic red tape for a country with a population the size of Scotland.”

Lord Luxon gulped. “Quite so.”

“And what about you? I presume you’re here on business?”

“Yes…”

“What line are you in - if you don’t mind me asking”

“A holiday home, you mean?”

Lord Luxon smiled. “In a sense.”

“Any luck?”

“No. You could say it has been a disaster.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. But perhaps it’s a good thing – New York is a backwater. Property is cheap - but you can never be sure that it will retain its value. Personally, I don’t think you can beat South-western Canada, particularly San Francisco. The climate is good and it’s got a very European feel to it – King Louis XXIV of France has a holiday home there, I believe…”

“Really?” Lord Luxon raised his eyebrows and watched the gentleman spread jam and clotted cream on his scone.

“Forgive me, but what precisely did you mean when you said that it was appropriate that I found myself here?”

The gentleman smiled. “Look up, Mr Luxon!”

He pointed to a street sign above their heads.

“Upon my word! Luxon Square! Do you, perchance, know the reason? Are there any famous Luxons?”

The gentleman looked at him, clearly surprised that he should be so ill-informed. “With your name, how odd that you don’t know all about them! The Luxon family is fabulously wealthy. They own half of London and great tracts of Canada and America besides.” He pointed up at the sign again. “The most famous of them all, at least on this side of the pond, was this one, Lord Edward Luxon.”

Lord Luxon could barely disguise his delight. “And why did they name a square after him?”

“The story is that he came to America incognito and assassinated some General, whose name I’ve forgotten, when the early colonists were causing trouble. He was certainly made first Duke of New York for his pains. Still doesn’t ring any bells?”

Lord Luxon shook his head, biting his lower lip to stop himself laughing out loud in delight.

“And you see that?”

The gentleman indicated the statue of the lady in Grecian costume in the centre of the square. “That is a reproduction of a statue you can see in the Luxons’ family seat, Tempest House, in London.”

Lord Luxon swung his head around and scrutinised the statue. His eyes suddenly sparkled with recognition. Of course! It was the statue of Aphrodite that his father had commissioned for the fountain!

“Tempest House is in London?”

“Yes, close to the Surrey borders. It is sublime. If you’ve never been, you must go. The gardens are spectacular – there are water gardens that cascade the full length of the valley. And as for the house itself…Are you positive you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

“I do not, I assure you. Go on”

“Well, the house easily rivals Versailles. It’s enormous – but beautiful, too. An architectural masterpiece. And stuffed full of the most amazing artefacts. There’s one wing of the house entirely devoted to timepieces. Thousands of the things. The children love it, of course. When the hour strikes, it’s deafening. ”

“Timepieces. Extraordinary!”

“I promise you that even if that sort of thing normally leaves you cold, go around Tempest House open-mouthed. They say that Lord Edward Luxon bled America dry to pay for it…”

Lord Luxon stood up. “Thank you for your company, Mr Grafton. Talking with you has brought on a sudden pang of homesickness. Upon my word, why tarry in America when Tempest House awaits?”