The Potter's Hand Read online

  Unable to think, for the moment, of anything further he had to say to his Creator, Voltaire said to the secretary,

  —Let us write to the Empress of Russia.

  Madame, vous avez posé une question à l’ancien malade de Ferney au sujet des Anglais, toujours un sujet—

  Madam, you have put a question about the English to the old sick man of Ferney—

  —Let me see her last letter, said Voltaire to the secretary. Fumbling in the bureau, the secretary found the last effusion of the Empress, written in French, in her large-bottomed German hand.

  The Empress kept up a regular correspondence with the old gentleman and each of her letters made clear her fervent admiration. His Lettres Philosophiques, of which she was especially fond, described his visit to England in 1726 and his belief that, with all its faults and foibles, England was freer and more enlightened than his own benighted France. He was always too ironically subtle and yet too sycophantic to spell out the fact that England was, and always would be, a good deal more enlightened than Catherine’s benighted Russia!

  The old sage, who had visited London nearly fifty years before, had in fact, as a young man, been dazzled by the extent of toleration, political enlightenment, freedom of expression and thought. It puzzled him all the more, this quarrel with America. Was George III trying to behave like a Russian tyrant? He could hardly ask the question in a letter to Catherine. For a while, having cleared his throat, he dictated generalities. By the time a prolific and opinionated man has reached Voltaire’s age, he can scarcely hold back the flow of self-parodying generalization.

  —and taken all in all, Madame, the English are a reasonable Nation. But it would be a mistake ever to take this Reasonableness for granted. In the matter of Shakespeare, for example, there is an incomprehensible national madness. I told their most celebrated actor, M. Garrick, that I could see no merit whatsoever in Romeo and Juliet. A young man meets a thirteen-year-old girl and decides that his whole happiness depends upon marrying her sur le coup. With no canonical precedent or justification, a member of the Franciscan order not only consents to this, but administers narcotics to the young woman which will render her totally insensible – giving her the appearance of death itself. And this is the stuff of realism! This is their great love drama! Garrick is a reasonable man, and by his acting he tries to make natural, and reasonable, passions which Shakespeare has only disfigured and exaggerated in the most ridiculous manner! Garrick merely chided me for being ‘an amiable barbarian’!

  But, Madame, you ask of M. Wedgwood. Naturally, I have heard of his prodigious invention of an English pottery to rival even the finest productions of Sèvres. Indeed, he has flattered me by producing a portrait bust of this ancient invalid of Ferney, which the old man is vain enough to have in his library alongside Houdon’s portrait-bust and another of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. I also possess a portrait medallion of myself in M. Wedgwood’s exquisite white biscuit ware. (Where does he find such white clay outside China?)

  He has arisen to prominence in England long since my own departure from that mysterious land. As well as being a distinguished ceramicist he is also a Natural Philosopher, who has made many experiments into geology. He belongs to a philosophical circle who discuss such developments of human knowledge as Electricity, and the properties of Matter. His friends are M. Priestley, Dr Darwin, M. Watt, a pioneer of industrial engineering and whose invention of a steam-powered engine I should love to import into my small manufactory at Ferney. So, all in all, a group of philosophes likeminded with Your Imperial Majesty and myself. It was a happy chance that Lord Cathcart had been the British Minister at St Petersburg. Lady C., as Your Imperial Highness knows, is the sister of Sir William Hamilton, whose discoveries of Italian and Etruscan antiquities have done so much to inspire M. Wedgwood, and it was a happy fortune that M. Baxter in London was able to facilitate your order and to put you in touch with M. Wedgwood.

  The dinner service which M. Wedgwood has already made for Your Imperial Highness sounds exquisite. Twenty-four pieces of the most formidable ceramic work – not china, I note, but M. Wedgwood’s own invention of ‘Creamware’ – a new word to add to my English vocabulary! I myself possess a tea set and a dinner service made by M. Wedgwood and I can only echo Your Majesty’s delight, not only in their beauty, but in their practicality: the jugs truly pour, the lids of the bowls and tureens actually fit. When piled up, the plates fit together as neatly as if they are made of paper.

  And now, Your Imperial Majesty has decided on a truly Imperial commission for M. Wedgwood – nearly a thousand pieces for your palace of the Finnish Frogs, the Kekerekeksinen. Our English friends would find a drollerie, perhaps, in Your Majesty asking the advice of a famous ‘Frog’ Philosopher for your ‘Frog’ Palace.

  But, I pray you, do not listen to Sir William when he requests a dinner service of a design which he deems to be ‘classical’. True, M. Wedgwood makes exquisite copies of Etruscan and Roman originals. And if Your Imperial Majesty wanted to eat soup from a dish of gambolling Dryads, and sturgeon from a plate depicting Poseidon or Aphrodite, M. Wedgwood would be the best man in Europe to gratify your Imperial desire. But would it not be in every way more original, more amusing and more comme il faut to ask that honest son of English clay to celebrate his own country – to decorate Your Imperial Highness’s service with Topographick and Architectural Scenes of the Island of Britain? Here you could view a great Duke’s house, as it were Chatsworth or Blenheim. Here you could see the poor huts of Hebridean fisher-folk. Here a park, and there a mountain. And so through the hundreds of views which M. Wedgwood could supply Your Majesty you would begin to build up a picture of this strange kingdom. We watch – we enlightened ones of the world! – with wonder as the Ministry in London quarrels with the coarse but honest colonists of America! Come what may, England, that land of paradox, will always hold a special place in the heart of the sickening, and ageing, Methuselah of Lake Geneva.

  3

  —THEY DON’T SEEM TO COMPREHEND, THOSE MERCENARY fools they sent over here – we’re all trained fighters! Trained to shoot. Trained to use a gun. More than any Englishman is likely to be.

  —Yes, sir, but we are trained to shoot the wolf and the bear. To defend our homes against the Indian savage. Not to fight fellow Englishmen.

  —It won’t come to that.

  —Didn’t you just hear what Bowood said? The fighting has started.

  —It was a skirmish that got out of hand. A skirmish is not a battle. Still less a war.

  —I tell you, my boy came down from Concord last night. That was no fuckin’ skirmish. If Paul Revere hadn’t ridden out and warned ’em to reach for their muskets, those boys in Lexington would have been slaughtered. As it is, there were boys killed up there.

  —Hal, no one doubts there’s been some shooting. But a shooting don’t make no war. Don’t you remember what John Adams keeps a-sayin’ – we’re part of the British Dominions!

  —And what do we get for it? Sausage-eating mercenary soldiers shootin’ our little boys. By Christ, Bowood, one of them lads up at Lexington was sixteen, fuck it.

  While this conversation took place in Strong’s, the good new coffee-house lately opened in Pell Street, New York City, a young man of twenty-four sat in a neighbouring booth reading his correspondence from England. Tom Byerley was well made, and well dressed. His angular, bony face was divided by a pronounced Roman nose. His chin was sharp. His eyes, which were of so dark a blue that many, when they remembered him, thought of them as brown, were deep set, and shone with an intelligent knowledge of the effect which he produced upon his company. He knew himself to be highly attractive to women, and it was a knowledge which had led to his present predicament – love affairs with two women at once, and the near certainty that he was about to conquer a third.

  Time was when Tom Byerley would have been highly contented with this state of things. But the affair with Mrs Aylmer, the wife of the theatre proprietor, was quite out of control. Mrs
Aylmer, a handsome woman some fifteen years Tom’s senior, had professed herself so inflamed with love that she was going to inform her husband. This course of action would not only have cost Tom his employment in the theatre company, but it would also have thrown him back, penniless, on the sole company of the lady herself. And the truth of the matter was that, however happy he was when they were alone together in the lady’s bedchamber, her conversation was so tedious that he could scarcely endure the hours of dinner with her after their lovemaking. The prospect which she held out to him – of their eloping with her small savings and fleeing to some other city, perhaps to the capital, Philadelphia – was the stuff of which nightmares are made.

  There was also the disagreeable fact that, were his intrigue with Mrs Aylmer to become public, he would be constrained to own the affair to Polly Dwyer, an actress of his own age with whom he sometimes supposed himself in love. Whenever the occasion permitted, and when Mrs Aylmer was required by her husband to attend to costumes or props or other aspects of theatre management, Tom and Polly would repair to her dressing-room. Polly Dwyer’s white skin was paler even than Cherokee kaolin clay, baked into the snowiest jasperware. Her hair was raven black and her Irish eyes were sea-green. Tom had enjoyed love affairs with numerous women, but there had never been anyone to match Polly for sheer insatiability, for the gusto with which she went to it, for the almost literal hunger with which her rosy lips curled on the object of their passion. Nor, when Polly was naked, had any painter or sculptor, not Rubens himself, envisaged so great a wonder.

  But, in the works of Shakespeare, there was indeed a phrase for every situation, and ‘appetite increased by what it fed on’. The more Mrs Aylmer offered Tom her all but unwanted devotion, and the more Polly accepted his amorous attentions, the more Tom found himself in a haze of lust which felt as if it could never be satisfied. And he had of late become preoccupied by a young married woman who was staying in the inn off King Street which served as Tom’s temporary lodgings.

  She was a redhead, tall and unscrupulous-looking, as, with one gloved hand on her husband’s arm, she shot shy glances at Tom across the breakfast-room. Her name was Mrs Sternfeld, her husband being German. Her nationality was hard to guess. He fancied she might have been German also, but perhaps she came from the Low Countries. They had not advanced their affair very far on an emotional level. A week since, however, as they passed one another in the lobby of the inn, she had asked his help with a portmanteau which needed to be taken to her room. The inn was well supplied with slaves, and there was absolutely no need for one of the guests to lift luggage on his own account. Indeed, it was a place of sufficient gentility that for one of the guests to lift so much as a pocket handkerchief would excite notice, for the slaves were there to attend your every bidding. But Tom did not need Mrs Sternfeld’s intentions spelling out, and he had carried the case – light as it turned out – to her chamber on the first floor. Once they were alone together in the room, her hand had reached, not for his hand, but for his breeches.

  Seated as he now was in the Coffee-Room of Strong’s, one of the more fashionable establishments in this new part of town, Tom Byerley surveyed the same nankeen breeches with a mixture of self-congratulation, amusement and wistfulness. The escapades into which he was constantly being led by the most overpowering of passions were, after all, not merely exciting. They were also a little sad.

  Over the nankeen breeches, Tom wore an elegant, pale green top coat and a yellow vest, double-breasted and much adorned with brass buttons. His ruffle of white cravat beneath his chin could have been a spoonful of the purest whipped cream. His chin was freshly shaven. His brow was framed by a brown tie-wig. This alone marked him out to any intelligent observer to be an Englishman, since, even in fashion-conscious New York, the defiant mood of the political moment somehow decreed with an urgency that could not logically be explained that the colonists should cast off not merely the political shackles and ecclesiastical restraints of the Old World, but also its wigs.

  Dear Tom,

  he read as he sipped his coffee – and damned good coffee it was. The proximity of Jamaica meant that you could drink coffee in America which was fresher and stronger than anything you ever tasted in London. As for Burslem! Tom smiled as he recollected his mother sniffing the beans which his Uncle Jos gave her.

  —Sister, I’ve made you these elegant coffee-cans. Surely you will at least try the drink?

  —I don’t think coffee-housing would be quite my line, Mother had said with one of her satirical snorts of laughter. And the little coffee-mill which Uncle John had once brought from London and the costly bag of beans imported from Ceylon were left unused, unground and untasted.

  —I should conjecture it were very rich, had been her final dismissive judgement of the matter.

  When it came to people, Mrs Byerley did not mind how rich they were: the richer the better. When it came to comestibles, ‘rich’ was a term of disapprobation.

  Tom sipped eagerly from the crude Delftware coffee-can in front of him – where did the Americans find these things? – and read on.

  It is now nearly a year since we heard from you directly, though your good mother keeps us informed of your welfare. She keeps up the shop and is, I believe, doing pretty brisk business. Believe me, my Boy, I love you as a son and would never have wished to stand in your way of success either in the literary line or on the stage. A part of me hopes that you will be the American Garrick!

  But another part of me wishes you home. Your brave mother has never indicated that she resents your going, but I know how much she misses you – as we all do. And now, Tom, I renew a request for you. When I asked you last year you said that my request was impossible, and that it came at an inopportune moment. If once again, you refuse me, well and good, but please, my dear Boy, I should be in your debt were you to reply instanter, either direct or via Mr Griffiths the agent.

  May I repeat what I wrote last year. As you will recollect, ’tis eight years since – when you, dear Nephew, were still working as my boy clerk – that we persuaded an unwilling Mr Griffiths to sail the Atlantick Ocean and, having dock’t at Boston, to make the laborious journey southwards to the country of the Cherokee. There, by supreme good fortune, good sense and industry, he managed to acquire five tons of this exquisite white kaolin. As you know, Tom, there are spies abroad, and I dare not communicate to you my reasons, my desperate reasons, for requiring more of this precious commodity! If it were injudicious, in the Extreme, to communicate the exact Formulae of my experimental Ventures, however, it is equally no secret that I need white china clay for two of my most distinctive Inventions: the Creamware which has made my name, not only in England but in Europe, not only in Europe, but in the world; and the Jasperware which has become my hallmark.

  Tom, an opportunity has arisen which is without parallel not only in my life, but in the history of European pottery manufacture. I cannot tell you what it is, but I need white china clay in enormous quantities. If I were able to acquire it from Cornwall, I should do so, without putting myself to the expense, and you, dear Boy, to the danger and worry, of travelling into the country of a strange people. But, dear Tom, the dispute over the rights of ownership and purchase of Cornish china clay goes on and on. My old enemy Cookworthy (worthy to be roasted alive more than to be cooked, in your old uncle’s opinion!) continues to hold on to the patent for china clay and the exclusive right to purchase Cornish clay.

  I need white clay and I need it in great quantities. If you were able, my dear Tom, to journey to the Cherokee country, you would place yourself everlastingly in the debt of your loving old Uncle. Ever since your father died, I have looked upon you as a son. Your dear mother, my sister, depends upon me as a protector, but she depends upon you for her emotional sustenance. I need not labour these points to you, since you know them.

  The Cherokee are not a race of Savages, despite what some of the Americans will tell you. You will perhaps recollect that when thou wast a lad, three no
ble Cherokee tribesmen visited London and had the honour to be presented to His Majesty the King. I had been going to write that the Chief of them, Ostenaco, was their equivalent of my Lord North or His Grace the Duke of Grafton. But this would be to mislead you, since, in so far as I have been able to establish the truth of the matter, the Cherokee would appear to have no kings, dukes or princes. Ostenaco, if he has an English counterpart, would appear to be a theocratic personage, perhaps the equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury. (I am no more a judge of Church matters than you are and rejoice in my ignorance!) These people do not have politicks, but they have warriors, and their craftsmanship is not to be despised. The pots they make are not unlike – in shape – the old Greek vases lately excavated by Sir William Hamilton in Italy. But they are not of your Italian terracotta. Rather, they are of the most exquisitely delicate white clay. Tom, this clay of the Cherokees is whiter than anything in Europe – it is as white as the Chinese kaolin itself!

  They were assured by His Majesty that the British Crown would protect Cherokee lands from the colonial settlers and that there would be an everlasting alliance between the English and the Cherokee peoples. So if you penetrate Indian country, Tom, you will be among friends – so long as you are able to persuade them that you are not an American!

  The American colonists have Justice on their side in their quarrel with the Crown. All decent men and women at home support the American cause, certainly all my friends the Lunar men do so, but in Parliament even Mr Pitt and Mr Burke take the colonists’ side against the intemperate Toryism of Lord North. In their quarrel with the Cherokee, we can be less certain of the righteousness of the American cause. But I am sure that you are as able as I am to keep the two matters separate in your mind. Whatever the rights and wrongs of individual colonists’ disputes with the Indians, it is impossible to doubt the overall rightness of the American position. They have no representation in our Parliament. All decent folks must sympathize with the Americans in their grievance against the various taxes and Stamp Duties &c. imposed upon ’em by the Ministry. As for the punishments and embargoes meted out to the good people of Massachusetts since that unfortunate incident in Boston Harbour with the consignment of Indian tea, we can only hang our heads in shame, as Englishmen, that such pettiness and lack of generosity could be exercised by a sovereign Government against the courageous and independent-minded colonists. None of us here supposes for one moment that the hostility at present erupting between the Americans and the Ministry could possibly result in violence.