Free The Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd Page A

sir.”
    William was astonished at the purity of his diction. The boy might have been an Englishman. William’s only previous contact with a Negro had been the crossing-sweeper by London Stone, who scarcely seemed able to speak at all. “How long have you worked here?”
    “Since I was a very small child, sir. I was brought across the ocean and redeemed here.” William did not quite know what the boy meant by “redeemed” but it had some connotation of debt or purchase. And yet it might have meant that he had been baptised.
             
    J OSEPH ’ S MOTHER , ALICE , had taken him aboard a ship sailing from the Barbadoes with a cargo of sugar cane; Alice had recently become the captain’s mistress, and had pleaded for her small son to join them on the journey to England. Joseph was then six years old. On their arrival at the Port of London the captain took mother and son to the Evangelical Mission for Seamen, on Wapping High Street, and ordered them to wait there for his return. They sat upon the steps all night. The following morning Alice told Joseph to wait there for the captain while she went in search of food. She never returned. Or, rather, she had not returned seven hours later when Hannah Carlyle had found the young black boy curled up against the door of the Mission. “Goodness me,” she asked no one in particular, “what is it?” He knew only the Bajan patois of his country, and she did not understand what he answered. “Bless you for your heathen tongue,” she said. “Your skin is black, but your soul is white. You have been sent here for a purpose.”
    The boy’s colour caused little remark among the illegitimate white children of this neighbourhood, sailors’ children who ran wild through the riverside alleys and warehouses of the docks. This was a strange world where it seemed to Joseph that the sea entered London. The wind was like a sea-wind, and the birds were sea-birds. The ropes, and masts, and barrels, and planks, gave him the impression of a ship upon land.
    Yet Joseph was eventually taken out of Wapping by Hannah Carlyle, who gave him to her cousin who was the housekeeper of Church House in Fetter Lane. So he was brought up in the company of Doctor Parr and Doctor Warburton; they taught him English, and he acquired from them the slightly old-fashioned diction that had surprised William Ireland. The divines also took turns in entering his bed. Doctor Parr would suck his member and masturbate himself, whereas Doctor Warburton would simply fondle him before returning with a sigh to his own room.
             
    I T MAY INTEREST YOU to know, sir, that my name is Shakespeare. Joseph Shakespeare.”
    William could not help smiling. “How is that possible?”
    “It was a name given to the unfortunate slaves, sir. It was a jest.”
    Doctor Parr was reading aloud another part of the testament. “‘Our poor weak thoughts are elevated to their summit and then, as snow from the leafless trees, drop and distil themselves till they are no more.’” He wiped his lips with a white handkerchief tucked beneath his wristband. “This should be read out from every pulpit in England.”
    William walked over to them and, on the pretence of asking for the time, whispered in his father’s ear. “This will not be considered a bastard issue.”
    “We have very fine passages in our church service,” Warburton was saying. “And our litany abounds with beauties. But here is a man who has distanced us all. Genuine feeling breathes through the whole composition.”
    “Is it in the style of Shakespeare?” William asked him.
    “There can be no doubt about it. This must become known to the world.”
    “I am intending to write an essay for the
Gentleman’s Magazine,
” Samuel replied.
    His son looked at him in astonishment.
    There was time for more sherry, and a further toast to “the bard” before Doctor Parr and Doctor Warburton took their visitors to the front door of Church House. “It