The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (Lawrence Miles) by The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street (by Miles Lawrence)

Author:The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street (by Miles, Lawrence)
Language: eng
Format: epub

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7

The World

The Blackest of Hearts and the Coldest of Feet

America. In just two short years, the word had come to mean so much.

As has already been mentioned, the Marquis de Sade was the first to describe America as some great amoral colossus, with its guns booming out to the world like thunder. But after 1780 the whole of the western hemisphere was beginning to feel uneasy. To the ritualists and the witch‐courtesans of England, America was a gigantic black stain on the world map, a no‐go area that might as well have had ‘here be tygers’ scrawled across its landmass. The very name made them think of the purges of Matthew Crane; of the witch‐hunts of Salem, still influencing the country after all these years; of Paul Revere riding his famous horse (metaphorically, of course) over the bodies of marked Englishwomen; of blackened and bloodied trees, hung with the corpses of those sacrificed to the new world of Washington, Jefferson and Adams.

Yet anyone visiting Virginia in 1782, as summer turned to autumn, would have found quite a different scene. By this point the War of the Revolution was over in all but name. The skies over Virginia were as blue as they had been in the days of Columbus, and the only thing disturbing the earth was the rhythm of the slaves in the tobacco fields. The houses had been repainted, in purest Protestant white, as if each one were a prototype of the big pale house which would one day stand in Washington. The wind would blow through the white oaks, and the gentlemen of the state, with their backs as upright as their reputations, were still old‐fashioned enough to greet every passer‐by as they strolled about their business. Yes, the word for Virginia was straightforward.

But when news of world events reached America, when sailors brought tales of the horrors in Saint‐Domingue and London, it was in Virginia that most notice was taken. Because it was in Virginia that Matthew Crane himself had set up his chambers, after the end of the struggle with the British there. General Washington himself had set Crane the task of ensuring that the Shaktyanda of America was defended, just as Washington himself intended to defend the country’s physical borders: as Jefferson once said, the Americans had no wish to see themselves ‘going to eat each other, as they do in Europe’, thus beginning an absolute rejection of foreign culture which would become the central policy of American society in the years to come. When the American lodges took notice of the rumours from abroad, they must have discussed things over scotch in their drawing rooms as if it were any other business matter. It was in such a drawing room that the red envelope from England would have eventually arrived.

It seems likely that the Americans began taking an interest in the Doctor after his visit to Hispaniola. After all, anyone connected with a negro revolt had to be considered a threat.

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