The Harlequin Tartan: Quest of the Five Clans

by Raymond St. Elmo

  Puppets and dolls… A mind seeking wonders would whisper: the boy in the mist was an escaped toy from Zeit-Teufel. Bah. Never take whispers for wisdom. Not from within your head or without. The fog mutters so, and there is no wisdom in fog, only faces.

  And yet… had I not spoken today in praise of wonders, of the hunger for magic? Well, yes, but for others. The last thing I needed was anodyne to reality. Spend a month chained in a cell after seeing your world burn. Then endure months more wandering half mad in sewers and alleys, and should you survive you shall crave order to existence, not miracles.

  To the devil with adventure. I reached again into my coat pocket. Grasped the toy child’s hand, prepared to toss it away. The barker ceased his patter, observing. Puzzled with what debate I conducted in my inner puppet-show. If the man would take off his tinted spectacles, I would see whether he thought I was mad, or comic, or merely a fellow creature in doubt. Tangled in my strings, so to speak. Alas, the barker wore tinted spectacles. Disguise for the soul were the fashion this week. Excellent style. Souls are ugly things, as the world is an ugly place. As above, so below; as within, so without. Best just admit it. Were our hearts clean, we’d no more need magic than fish crave drink. So hide eyes, and all after.

  I grasped the child’s hand in my pocket, determined to toss it. It slipped comfortably into mine, a child’s hand trusting my rough scarred grasp. I shivered to imagine it clasped tight. Encouraging me to continue our journey, to find our way through fog. I felt that grasp as eerie challenge; perhaps even plea.

  “Fine,” I surrendered. Better than going to the reading of the last words of a dead friend. I tendered a shilling. “One ticket to the Hall of Wonders.”

  Chapter 6

  Sand, Bell, Sand, Bell, Thimble

  The first wonder I ever beheld: the High Street at midday. Second: my aunts’ kitchen-maid washing at a rain barrel. That first glimpse of bustling city street dazzled brain and heart. These organs understood exactly what eyes beheld. Whereas the vision of the maid bathing shot between my legs as revelation only for the organ therein. Mind and heart gaped puzzled. They didn’t know what to think.

  I understood city streets my first step upon cobble stone. I darted between carts, dodged farmers and bakers, leaped fences, watched a hanging, bought a muffin, laughed at a drunk trying to mount a horse. I was born for the glory and riot of the High Street. The life it declared, the sounds it shouted and stamped and screamed and bellowed, the smells and tastes and feel of crowd and market and barrows and quarreling cats, crows, chickens, children and stamping horses… it all rushed and flowed between the grand buildings as one great river of life. I the happy fish, darted immediately within, uncatchable. King of the cobbles, confidant to alley shadows, advisor to stray dogs, prince of the roof tiles.

  But Mirabilis Secundus: the kitchen maid naked? Not a thing for comprehending. Called Swan for her bodily grace, her fierce temper and the fact she possessed a head full of feathers. Mindless; but gracefully mindless. She splashed barrel water onto her glorious undressed person, shivering not for cold but for joy; delighting in each diamond drop shaking upon breasts and tummy and thigh.

  She eyed me, a boy of ten, gawkish thin with feet and hands man-size. A comic creature of incompatible parts. She tossed head back to say come closer an’ I thump you. Then went on with her splashing, indifferent to my mere gaze.

  I do not think the thrill I felt was only a virgin’s first clear vision of where girls’ legs joined, how breasts waggled when free of binding, how nipples poked if caressed by cold. My shiver lay closer to what shook Dealer as he described some painting that astonished his soul. Swan possessed naked beauty; that is to say: grace of form unspoiled by clothes, propriety, fear or lust. I observed her weekly baths as my only true religious service. Whenever my aunts caught me at it they beat at my devotion with the scullery broom.

  Swan paid no mind to my worshiping stares nor howls of martyrdom. I do not think she had coin of mind to pay. She could speak, but incoherently. When she felt the social need she breathed out a jabber of random words in imitation of conversation. Perhaps she supposed everyone did the same. Perhaps they do.

  I dared touch her once only, at thirteen and feeling a hollowing madness within whenever I considered girls’ lips, tongues, cheeks, crotches, asses, ribs, calves, tummies, shoulders, knees, elbows, toes, napes, ankles, breasts, thighs, buttocks. Arms. Mere sight of a girl’s bare arm grabbed and twisted my head at a hundred yards. The treasure need not be revealed. The shadow of a curve of a breast beneath five layers of shawl, would bugle-call: soldier arise! While heartbeat drummed double time.

  The Dared Touch: Swan splashed, I watched. Found my foot rising, moving forwards. She eyed me, splashing again, shaking her torso to send drops flying. I stepped again, hand held out as one would approach a growling dog. She straightened, frowning, jutting breasts forwards, setting legs apart to show the glorious, furred, cleft center of my fascination. I edged yet closer, hand trembling… at last my forefinger reached her pale wet shoulder. I trembled. She tilted head, eyes narrowed, allowing for one eternal breath that fingertip communion. Then struck me side-of-the-head, sending me toppling down.

  “Cats dogs hats plates on the table now!” she chattered angrily. “Hair combs singing in the sea great waves your best stones bells ringing sand, sand, thimble, bell, sand, thimble. Powder on coats? Cats, thimble the sand bell sand, bell boyo bell!” I lay stunned, head ringing like a sand-bell. Yet appreciating the view of her body from this new angle. She grabbed the Scullery Broom of Inquisition. I wriggled up and ran for my life. Proud, despite sounding retreat.

  The High Street had its adventures, of course. Its moments of edging into danger, daring a finger poke to some object of fascination. A tar-black corpse dangling from his gibbet, or a cavalry major’s warhorse on parade. The front door of the City Gaol, the window bars back of the Bedlam. The door-knocker of a house said to be haunted. These acts always ended with turning and running. Not out of fear, but in a sense of completion.

  In theory I lived with my father’s aunts, who owned a respectable brick house south of the city. They assigned me a tutor by day, and tavern work by night. My aunts held strange views on the natures of boys. They considered it frivolous for us to sleep. My twenty-four hours were best spent in work or study. The Aunts gave me all the attic of the house, ignoring me entirely so long as teacher and tavern keeper pronounced themselves satisfied.

  By the tradition of neglected children I should have been abused and bruised, grown wan and thin from cold, work and lack of love. No, I prospered fine. My parents dwelled across the sea while war and revolution took their course. Their house was set aflame, my aunts announced. At first I did not take this as word of their deaths. No, I pictured my parents now getting by in a grand country house comfortably ablaze. One would learn where to step, how to best breathe smoke and ash. Continuous rebuilding would be required. Warm in winter. I envied them, but preferred the city.

  My tutor was a student wavering between a practical clerical future and poetic ambitions leading towards laudanum and damnation. Poor tortured soul, but he solaced himself in books. He was a walking fire of print-love and ink-debauchery, a lecher of literature, a book ravisher to make librarians gasp in lewd appreciation. Master Clive I called him, for he was tall and solemn as a church warden so long as the aunts were about. On their absence he’d leap onto a chair reciting Milton. At Satan’s fall he’d tumble down, crying out to Seraphim and Cherubim, Angels, Archangels, Powers, Thrones and Principalities... Ah, but he was a wonder to match any puff cloud angel nobility. For the languages he knew, for his love of each word. For the pieces of poem and play, line and declamation he breathed out, happy you should then breathe in. Afire; and the sparks of his love of words and the learning of words and the caress of words caught in the listener’s hair, ember-winding their path to the brain.

  While Keeper, my master in tavern-work was sober and dull, large and leather-smocked. Capable of cu
dgeling quiet a riot of rowdies; yet kind to those he considered his own. When he understood I dropped plates for reason of being raised by aunts who considered sleep luxurious nonsense, he gave me a cot in the cellar. Halving my wages, but that was fair. I considered myself paid in coin of rest, and felt rich.

  Keeper’s tavern by day: an orderly place of coin, drink, chat, coin, drink, chat, coin, drink, chat. All attempts to incite drama or comedy were quick stamped upon by Keeper’s cudgel or the frowns of workers who desired only that life’s playwright script for them ‘they rested quiet all that day’. If their souls hungered for wonder, their minds and bodies thirsted more for beer and peace.

  But at night a different clientele entered; or else a different mood entered clients. Then came men and women laughing, growling, stamping feet and arguing loud to announce their presence onstage, openly seeking audience and theatre, quarrel and love.

  No time for sleep then; nor would I have laid me down upon a feather bed. The tavern at night served for stage to a dozen plays enacted at once. Seductions, revenges, screamed boasts, whispered admission, sly thefts and sudden downfalls. In the back and forth from kitchen to tables I beheld all the separate parts of human copulation, challenge, betrayal, murder, confession, contrition, and redemption. Shuffled like cards so that my boy’s mind must puzzle what connection lay between a man crying to the fire and a girl’s bodice torn, a knife drawn and a beer downed; a sweet song sung followed by a curse; two old friends sitting separate, eyes to the floor.

  At thirteen I killed a bully-bravo who’d terrorized the tavern all the night. Knife work, easier than peeling potatoes. They say one feels sad upon completion of desire. I never felt so, for all I desired to see him bleed his life upon the floor. I mopped the pools afterwards feeling alive, as though at last I’d jumped onstage. A man now, no tavern boy scripted for brief entry and exit.

  That fight brought me arrest, whipping, disownment from my aunts. I was shipped as bootblack for the army across the channel. I found war quite like tavern keeping, much like poetry. Drink, blood, vomit, shouts, shit, orders, songs, boredom, all enacting exactly what Master Clive recited in the words of Dante and Milton, Homer and Virgil. War and idiocy, courage and confusion. At war I slept more, ate better and grew like fire. By fifteen I towered over officers.

  What do we even mean by ‘wonders’? Some experience that awakens us to life. A vision, a song, a wind that opens eyes we only dreamed were open. We are poor sleepers, leaning against the wall, drowsing. Till a proper wonder shakes us, cold revelation-water splashes the face. But the deepest wonders are the most plain. I have recounted two, and you missed them for the naked girl, the busy street. Hear then the two real first wonders of my life: The kindness of my master Keeper, and the honest love of words of my first teacher, Master Clive. Greater wonders than any knife or tit revealed by tavern candle, nor sun upon the High Street.

  * * *

  And so I, veteran of wonders, entered Zeit-Teufel’s Hall of Wonders, and yawned. Here would be fast words and mystic airs hinting at a dream never revealed. The longing for magic producing the illusion of magic. I had no such longing. I’d left miraculous with boyhood. Not in cynical disappointment, but adult completion. I had grown into citizenship of a man’s reality: laws and war, coin and crown, cocks and coquettes. A damned interesting place, the real world. Why any lack of wonder should lately drive me to stare out windows fretting at the over-gray air, was a wonder itself. Inclement brain fever, like enough.

  The hall waited darker than I wished. A great open gallery of booths and tents that echoed with clacks and clicks, mutters of conversation. More crowded than I’d supposed. I peered about till lightning flashed. For one second I stood in a crowd of tinted spectacles, black lenses turned to circles of white fire. Eyes of seraphim, contemplating me.

  I narrowed my own eyes, grasped knife. But no, the crowd gazed not at me but upon the light’s source. Neither God’s throne nor my soul. A lightning bolt, perched like a parrot upon two high iron rods in the gallery center. A writhing white dragon-worm that made my unprotected eyes bleed tears. A man cranked a great wheel, and as he did the light-worm grew and diminished. Sharp shadows rushed in, drew out again, tide for a sea of angelic fire.

  An arc lamp of some kind. I’d only heard of them. I have seen gas lamps. One can read by burning gas with only slight fear of suffocation or sudden combustion. But read by this hell shine? Never, not even Milton or Dante. The white shine turned our faces sharp and pale as paper cutouts, knife-edged shadows slashing floor and walls.

  “Lenses, sir?” asked a voice. A man in suspenders and devil-eyes hurried up, proffering a tray of spectacles, silverware for the feast of light. He wore a top hat. I distrust men in top hats. Far more sinister than tinted lenses. A top hat says ‘the brain beneath me works to man’s mischief’. It’s a dark tower on a sinister hill, posed before storm-lightning.

  He studied me as I him. I offered my ticket; he peered at the strip of paper, to me, to it, at last frowned. No telling why. The black-circles for eyes reflecting the arc-lamp’s hell-shine revealed no emotion known this side of the Acheron.

  “Lenses not included with the ticket, sir,” he regretted to inform, and gave his tray a shake to jangle the wires and lenses. “Three shillings and a bargain. That white electricality will burn your eyes out else.”

  “Then why have it?” I demanded to know. For I always expect sense of my fellow man, unless I lie.

  “Why, because it is a wonder, sir,” he informed me, voice solemn as undertaker opening front door. “’Behold the future. At last is come something new under the sun. It may yet replace the sun. Why, it strikes a man dead should he touch it! ‘Tis the Ark of the Covenant of Man, sir. No more shall men live in fear of shadows and the beings of shadow. No more for humanity, the moth-souls of dark corners fluttering about the candles of monk’s illumination.”

  In time to this prophecy the wheel cranker spun the dynamo till the dragon-worm brightened past bearing. The rays shot through the lids of my half-closed eyes, needles piercing brain. In agony I pawed through the tray, plucked out tinted lenses round as coins to place upon my eyes. Preparation for a journey through perilous fire. I paid, received in thanks a tilt of the top hat. A kindly smile, turned ghastly in the arc-lamp glare. As though the rays shown through skin, revealing the death that lurks beneath all faces. Dark glass holes for eyes helped not.

  I weighed my own new lenses. Recalling the message through the window. You have been enspelled by the folks in smoky glasses. Well, now I would join them, and so see past the curtain of conspiracy. I laughed at the fog we blow out our mouths with childish complaints of the world’s vapidity, and put them on.

  Angelic spears ceased to stab the brain. Now the gallery appeared of normal shading. Till the moments when the wheel slowed. Then shadows leapt forth like black lightning, the gallery plunging into night. At these black flashes the crowd would stop all motion, pausing till the wheel should spin fast again, light return again. An eerie, mechanical rhythm that guided us all, as though the cranking dynamo had become our common heart.

  I wandered towards an open alley, rope barring access so we only peered within. A woman danced to faint music. Or else a puppet? Joints of neck and chin and knee and wrist seemed articulated hinges. Yet life sized, with shapely breasts and hips, a slight cotton dress that implied womanhood with curves and shadow. But her motion came and went in bits and pieces. The face white as porcelain, eyes closed in dream of mechanical dance.

  I studied that face; familiar seeming. Not a face I knew, but a mix of parts I felt I knew. As we see in dreams of houses, where a room from childhood leads to that parlor of adulthood. I knew those lips, the nose and eyes, chin and delicate wrists…. Yet I could not give a name to the persons these features evoked. Nor to the person they summed. I sighed and moved on.

  I was followed, and not by a ghost’s tumbling head. I knew so not by magical senses gained in the forests of France. No, simply the warning of
matching steps, a turning away whenever I glanced back. A man, dark cloak, high hat. The day grew brighter for me, with naught to do with dynamo wheels.

  Yet why should I joy at threat of violence? Hypocrisy. I just spent hours beseeching guildsmen to forsake violence. ‘Seek wonder’, I’d scolded. Now here I stood in a hall of wonders, grinning at the promise of spilled blood.

  At the far end of the hall waited a lonely exhibit. A bored attendant slouched before a curtain, tinted lenses hiding eyes surely closed in boredom. Naturally. Station a man in a hall of wonders, he shall yawn, longing for the real miracles waiting outside, beyond walls and work. I turned and faced my stalker.

  The newcomer was a tall man in a tall hat, tall boots. Set within the hat, above the brim, a clock face. I near laughed. A church tower of a hat. The man pulled the edifice away with low flourish, low bow.

  “Mr. Gray, I believe,” he said. Perhaps his eyes smiled gently, else mocked with open sneer or narrowed in hate or turned ice in murderous intent. No telling. I couldn’t see his eyes nor he mine. We existed each to each beyond dark glass fog. Still I caught humor in his voice, inviting me to share the jest of name and identity.

  I considered denying any identity. I didn’t feel myself of late. Perhaps I was the French madman who’d pretended to be me. Sacre mil diables, a depressing thought. He’d been a twisted ass.

  And another reason for denying Rayne Gray thrice: so very many people wished him dead. Not so many as once. I had thinned the herd, so to speak. The survivors had retreated to write furious letters or abject apologies. No doubt sounding out assassination rates. Fine, I was the Seraph, master spadassin. Any killer they hired would be hobbled by professional awe. Before that fatal stab of dagger, they’d want to shake hands, explain how much my early work influenced them.