Free Cupids by Paul Butler

persistence. I wonder if fear, as well as guilt, is distorting my vision. Perhaps there will merely be more of the same: creaking silence while the foundation of the house continues to settle to a new reality. There has been no commotion at all since Mr. Whip’s visit. I heard none but the most routine of conversations between Mr. Egret and his sister-in-law. Today there was the silent roast lamb at one o’clock, Mr. Egret’s afternoon retreat to his study at two, his gruel and bread at five, his bed at eight, and now the same untroubled snoring from Bertha. Surely if things are terribly wrong under this roof, it would seem so. But nothing has changed. Does Mr. Egret know about the visits and simply not care? Or will he remain in the dark until the next visit from his banker, which could come on any day? Will the house suddenly explode into uproar?
    I simply do not know enough about the dealings of the world to make a decent guess, although I do know that nothing is more important than property and that no purse can ever be threatened without exciting the most extreme of passions. It is difficult then to imagine how a catastrophe of some sort can be avoided.
    I have never entered the circle of women and men who look upon money as more than bread, milk, and oats for today and tomorrow. Food and shelter are the only currency I know. But I can see the feverish activity behind Bartholomew’s upward climb to riches and I understand the significance well enough. He is thinking not of today or tomorrow, but next month, next year; an old age in safety and opulence; a life without labour. Perhaps there are nobler yearnings too: a wife and family, a growing tribe. Of course a colonial boy would have to think that way; he is forging a new limb of history.
    I am breathless at the thought and my face stings with heat. In the vision of his family that skipped through my mind, I realize, the hair that curled under the bonnet of Bartholomew’s pretty wife was black, like mine; her eyes, though indistinct, were brown, also like my own. The vision is not only noble in its way, but exciting.
    Still, something in me recoils from the baseness of money. The sovereign he dropped into my hand was a shock greater even than his theft of the pendant. That trinket merely had to be replaced. Bartholomew’s sovereign, however, was a different matter. The boy clearly believed he had purchased a piece of information from me, a slice of intelligence that I had no right either to possess or to give. The moment I felt the gold upon my skin, I heard the turning of a heavy lock. I had taken and passed to another someone else’s secret. I could give back the payment it had earned, but I could not undo the crime.
    Yet even as I imagined the hammering of prison shackles upon my wrists, something other than fear was sparked. It was another kind of token I had wanted from Bartholomew, not the golden kind. Even in disappointment I carried on searching my palm for some message beyond the crude metal, and then I lifted my gaze to scan his face. Was I searching for a softness there that might belie the ugliness of the transaction?
    I did find something, a word not said but thought, perhaps even passed between us; I was his accomplice . Was there not a strange intimacy in the word? Better than “partners,” the term he had employed by the dockside fire. Accomplice is soft and clandestine, the sound of lovers collapsing into a hollow, the hushed folding of limbs, the whisper of infinite trust. Each crossing of our paths — the slipping of notes at dinner, the dropping of a coin in my palm — had the silken texture of true understanding. We were in it together, even though I hadn’t any sense of where the journey was taking me.
    The bird knocks upon the pane so hard, I turn upon the bed and raise my head. There’s another thump as I steady myself on an elbow and try to peer through the misted glass. Something is pressed up