Secrets and Billionaires

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

When he was six years old Tilly had a bit of luck. A French vessel landed, and with it an elderly travelling aristocrat who had found it politic to leave court circles at Versailles for some time; ennuyé with life on his estates, he decided to see the globe, and brought with him a great deal of money, two valets, and a brocade-hung bed. He was in fact extremely eccentric, and why Tilly's shopsoiled charms should have appealed to him when others were available was one of the mysteries which time never did unravel. She stayed on, in fact, as the Comte's mistress for two years, during which time Samson learnt to converse almost entirely in French. He forgot, as events turned out later, that he had ever known another tongue, and for the rest of his life adopted Gallic turns of phrase and its accent, which amused Gavallan later. Samson left the émigré establishment at very short notice.

He had been aware, as a much stupider little boy would have been, for some time that the old Comte had a marked fancy for his company, and would send for him, often while Tilly was still present, and take him on his knee and fondle him, and feed him comfits (this may have been the beginning of his history of bad teeth). In course of the improvements in his knowledge of the French language which Samson thus picked up, he learned the words for turban, tunic, silks, feathers, satins; the Comte would like to take him back to France with him, as his little page. "In England it is all the rage, the ladies, ah! They have a little page, a little black boy. He carries the train, so! He stands behind, while the great lady is at the opera. You have never heard of opera? They sing, so." And the Comte gave a short falsetto rendering of Rosina's air, which he had heard the Queen herself sing badly out of tune, once when they staged a performance in the theatre at Versailles. Samson digested this experience, with others. He could not later remember whether or not Tilly had been present to hear the Comte sing, but he was aware of some hauteur at being called a little black boy. He was brown, not black.

Tilly came in when he was at the privy afterwards; it was the only place where they could be alone. "For the dear Lord's sake, pull on your breeches and get out of here," she said. "I'll tell him you've run away."

He stared at her. "Do you know what they're going to do to you, you poor little varmint?" she said. "He's getting a barber to trim the balls off you, the way they do, that way, it's safe to hand you for a page, as they call it, to his lady friends when you're older. Ah, for the love of God, go!" And she shoved some money into his hand. He hadn't delayed more than instants, after hearing that one; he never knew if it was true, or found out what had happened in the end to his mother. He dived out of the house and away from the port, and lay up by himself in the bush for a while, living on yams; after that he fell in with a native tribe, and the women there were kind to him and fed him. Afterwards he stayed with the tribe for four years, finding out about natives, and learning their language; he dared say he knew more about them than any settler in the Bay. After that

"You're silent today," said Gavallan, chaffing him as he sometimes did. "What are you thinking about? This damned coach hasn't moved an inch; let's get out and walk."

They paid off the coachman, and made their way on foot to where the attorney had his office, flush with the arcaded street; Samson unobtrusively guided the blind man by walk ing behind him, but never took his arm. Doon, he knew his master had asked to be addressed as Doon-had an un canny instinct for knowing where he was going, for avoiding objects another sightless person might have knocked into; besides, he would remember this place from a boy, perhaps, before he was sent to Australia, Samson waited, patiently as a lion by a waterhole, to hear more of Gavallan's youth; he had never forced himself upon the attention of the white man, which was one of his attributes.

Now, they were to sign a paper about a house; this was all Samson knew of it, except that the house would be for them both to live in and was somewhere near the sea. Samson remembered the sea without sentiment; he had had four months of it on the voyage home, and had seldom been with out a sight of it all his boyhood. But to Doon, he knew, the sea meant something different. Of course, the thing they were to do about the brandy-running would all come from the sea. Tom Neilson, he knew, who had come home two months before them, had had instructions to see a man called Abel Judd. Samson knew no more than that. No one disobeyed Doon, or tried to evade his orders. He, Samson, would in any case see that they did not.

The attorney Fosse came bustling to meet them. "Mr. Doon? A great pleasure, sir; I had not expected you for a se'nnight yet, though they wrote of your coming from London."

"We made all speed from the south. There was no reason

for delay."

Mr. Fosse showed Gavallan to a chair, and by a kind of occult process involving no spoken orders to anyone, produced a tray of Madeira wine brought in by the scrivener, his wig a trifle awry. Gavallan could see none of that, but smiled, and sipped his Madeira. The obsequious reception by this crow in Devenham's employ amused him, coming as he did with credentials from the London lawyers, and with the name of Doon. A different kind of usage would have been his seven years back, when he, a convicted half-reprieved criminal, had been lodged nearby in the Tolbooth for a night or two, prior to his removal by Leith Roads to the prison-hulks in the south, and Botany Bay. Best not to remember that ... except that old Max's legacy, news of which had been received by Gavallan out there in the Governor's house at the port, had ensured his later prosperity, and this libation of wine today.