Free Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

impression: producing it from a child’s ear, tipping Quentin at the Merchants, giving with careless liberality when the collection plate came to him on Sunday morning in church. He ate as large a breakfast as would not seem greedy every morning in the coffee-house, on credit, and he cleaned his plate at dinner every night with Mrs Lee’s other boarders, on credit; and in between he ate nothing, and drank only from the public pump, and his stomach griped as he walked and walked. After four days, he had only eighteen shillings left. He needed, he could see, to secure new supplies, and shortly. But how was a hard question. Rich men do not sell things, and nor do they ask for loans. In what way does one get money, while giving no sign that the getting of it is any more than the merest indifference?
    He hesitated, the first Sunday that he woke in the city, before he betook him along the Broad Way to Trinity. Worship implied expenditure. And he had not always been a notably pious Londoner. He had lain abed of a Sunday morning, with or without company, far more often than he had roused himself. Yet possession of a secret that cannot be shared lends a particular promise to the company of the Almighty, from whom it is declared that no secrets are hid; whose temples we are told are antechambers eachfacing that light which burns without effort through every human disguise or imposture. Mr Smith, being burdened, desired to lay his burden down, at least momentarily, especially if this could be accomplished invisibly to those on his left and on his right. And then beyond these private and spiritual considerations there were others, public and prudential. A church might be a stage at which the Lord, as auditory, gazes undeceived; but the congregation also performed to each other. Smith shaved with a bowl and jug, splashed himself with rosewater, and set out.
    The bells were ringing, and a fashionable crowd was gathering at the doors of the grey-stone church opposite the western end of Wall Street, when he arrived. Already, thanks to his campaign of walking, he recognised many faces. Not everyone he knew was there, by any means – for if New-York resembled London in the wild variety of churches, chapels, meetings and conventicles it accommodated, hospitable to every sect and shade of sect except the Papists, it differed too, in that here the sectaries made up the majority, rather than being the animated foam beating at the edges of a great calm boulder of Establishment. The Lovells were Baptists, and were to be found at this hour in the meeting-house just around the corner from them on Cliff Street, and the Van Loons were Dutch Reformed. They were sitting in a row in the Nieuwe Kerk on Nassau, the younger ones restless at the prospect of an hour-long Dutch sermon of which they would not understand above one word in three. Trinity was only one church among New-York’s thirty-odd churches. Yet, dispute its sway though people might, and resent its sway, the Church of England remained all the same the established form of the entire Christian religion in the Province of New-York, sustained by law, and swaddled in privilege; and Trinity was its chief andcentral building. It was the King’s church, and so necessarily the Governor’s church; it was power’s church, and also the church of power’s intimate opposition; it was pride’s church, wealth’s church, fashion’s church, and also the place where pride and wealth and fashion went to be medicined.
    As a well-dressed newcomer, Smith was shown to a pew halfway up the left side of the aisle, a seat not firmly locked into the subtle hierarchies of placement, yet with a grand enough view of the height of the social firmament, at the front of the nave. Over the white wooden box-walls he could see impressive heads, cut off just below the shoulder at about the level where an antique bust would end. There, at the very front, with a peanut-shaped brow and an anxious expression letting down the