Suzerain: a ghost story by Adrian John Smith

Author:Adrian John Smith [Smith, Adrian John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Creephouse
Published: 2014-08-25T22:00:00+00:00

This house, both in history and in this story, was built by a man called Blackwood. Jeremiah Blackwood - a man not of landed gentry, not of noble birth, but a beneficiary of the recent social trend: the rise of the middle class; the rise of the mercantile class. An upstart if you will. Blackwood's was a Bristol family, grown wealthy on coffee, tobacco, cocoa and yes, at one time, slavery. But young Jeremiah Blackwood, not wishing to become a glorified (if wealthy) shipping clerk like his father, like his grandfather, decided to settle and to make his personal fortune here, to build boats down on the river, yes in the place where the newer boat yard stands today. This was a successful enterprise, and in time, Blackwood bought this land and he built this house and he married his Bristol sweetheart. So here they are, master and wife in this new and impressive house. The wife doesn't like it here however. Her nerves are fraught. It's the winter nights. The husband works long hours. There are servants but they seem coarse and unfitting company, rustic as they are to this semi-sophisticated, moderately-educated young woman - besides, they are village people who stay at the house only so long as they are required to do so. She is frigid, unaccommodating in the bedroom. The husband is patient. Understanding. There are women in the town he could go to, but he chooses not to. He chooses to work even harder, to bury his natural urges beneath papers and blue-prints, credit notes and banker's drafts, chits for timber, commission orders for the boats that he builds.

Until one day. Because one day, on a business errand, walking the quays on the other side of the river, Jeremiah Blackwood hears a girl singing. It's a sound which stops him in his tracks. Forgetting for the moment his business, he makes his way through the crowd, the audience, seeking out that voice. She's sitting on a keg, strumming a guitar. There's a man playing a pipe - a reed flute - and another with a fiddle. When the girl opens her mouth to sing, her eyes close, as if the sight of the world might cause some impediment to the music - or as if she has become merely a conduit through which the music flows. There is something in the attitude, the gesture, which seems to ring a corresponding something in Blackwood's soul. He surprises himself with the issue of a quiet gasp. Coins are tossed into an upturned hat at the end of the song. Blackwood is too transfixed to think clearly, or even to move. He listens to the next song - which turns out to be the last of this session. The song ends. The coins jangle into the hat. The audience turns and melts away. But the girl - the girl keeps her eyes closed meanwhile until the final possibility of resonance has faded from the body of the guitar. Blackwood lingers.

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