The Long Song - By Andrea Levy Page 0,119

was so excited to have a negro foundling as his apprentice—a black boy who was born a slave in the West Indies and yet who could conjugate any Latin verb that Linus could bring to mind—that Thomas Kinsman became this man’s firm favourite from that day on.

However, when Linus Gray’s wife, Susan, first saw the new apprentice who was to lodge with them in their attic room, she screamed. Susan Gray begged her husband not to have a Hottentot board in their house; she thought it bad luck. But Linus ignored her concern and dismissed it with the word, ‘fiddlesticks’.

Thomas wrote to James Kinsman to tell that Susan Gray liked him so little and feared him so much that she carried a broom with her when he was about the house so that if Thomas ever approached her she might hold him the length of it from her. James Kinsman, in reply, promised to pray that Thomas would soon come to regard Susan Gray as his mother.

Alone at the top of the Grays’ tall narrow house that sat adjacent to the print office, in a room whose sloping roof rendered it no bigger than a cupboard, sitting by the dingy light and feeble heat of two coals that burned in the grate, wrapped in a blanket and wiping the black snot that ran from his nose upon his sleeve—Thomas wept.

And you might see a cloud come into Thomas Kinsman’s eye as he recounts those early days in London Town. He may recite for you the prayer he made—the one for the Kinsmans, all of them, to please, please, please, come find him. He may even admit to his listener that he did think to run away. But probably not. Instead, Thomas Kinsman will wave his hand to dismiss your concern. He may even use the word fiddlesticks. For he will not leave his listener to dwell upon sorrow when the print office beckons and he can show you what a good little devil he became.

The print office of Messrs Gray and Co.—a brick house that seemed to lean exhausted upon its neighbour in the middle of Water Lane—became Thomas Kinsman’s real home. For he chased up and down its dark winding stairs, ran in and out of the close, overheated rooms, scuttled about the dusty closets, searched the brimming cupboards, as ‘Black Tom’ was yelled at him from seven in the morning until seven in the evening. People, paper, metal, ink and presses all seemed to demand his devil’s care. Every inch of this engorged five-storey house was so hurly-burly that, when in full spurt, the lungs of men competed with the candles’ flames for air to breathe—and on long nights, neither burned the colour they should.

Parliament was where Gray and Co. found its work. Porters despatched from that magisterial institution arrived all day laden with colonial papers, reports of committees, election returns, statistics and accounts. Reams and reams of handwritten bluster that passed before Linus Gray’s glance, to collate and to folio, to decide upon its worth and to settle upon its price before the four journeymen compositors were commanded to mount their frames to prepare for copy.

Caslon or Garamond or Baskerville is shouted as the compositors search for as many cases of these types as can be found. But never is there enough of those metal letters. The apprentice is charged to clean the ones just used so he can distribute a constant supply, lest a compositor be forced into some fancy spelling for the want of Es. With his upper-case upper and his lower-case lower, the compositor, standing at his frame with his stick held in his hand, like an artist with his palette, looks first to the handwritten copy, before click, click, clicking metal letters into a line. Then, line by line, each page is built up upon a form and the metal words are banged home with a mallet, tightened and spaced with slugs of wood, then locked within this frame by the teeth of quoins. And when the page is set, ‘Proof’ is yelled at the door.

Up from the basement comes a pressman. Filthy with ink and sweating damp as the paper he carries. He puffs and grunts the form back down four flights of stairs. Here he locks it on to the press—the Albion or the Stanhope (never the Columbian for merely proofing). And the form is inked, the paper is applied, the bed is slid, and the platen is levered down and

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