by Ewan Lawrie
The dwarfish fellow stiffened his back, puffed out his not inconsiderable chest and said, ‘Well that I am not one such, Mr Moffat. I am Professor Enoch Jedermann, once of Vienna, Leyden and Siena Universities, late of Berlin. I am... curator of the Collection.’
He hesitated for the briefest time, and then added, ‘At your service.’
‘Collection?’ My eyebrows would have become entangled with my hair had I raised them any further.
Miss Pardoner caught my eye, and I saw the familiar upturn at the very corner of her mouth. Maccabi looked uncomfortable. The professor displayed the most self-possession I have ever seen in such a minuscule container.
‘My great friend, the late Septimus, was an avid collector of certain... artefacts,’ the professor said. Then he nodded and repeated, ‘Artefacts.’
Looking around, I realised that the eccentric furnishing of Brown’s offices reflected the entrance hallway of Gibbous House. Passages narrowed by piles of heaped furnishings led off the hallway and to a staircase that swept up into a gallery under the dome. I felt that the lunacy of the interior might possibly prove to be the equal of that of the exterior.
I enjoined Maccabi to show me the house, and bade Miss Pardoner make herself comfortable. The professor I invited to dine with us at the hour of eight. It pained me somewhat when he replied, ‘Forgive me, Mr Moffat. But as it is Shabbat, I took the liberty of bidding Mrs Gonderthwaite prepare the Shabbat meal. It is ׁ – kasher – I hope you do not think me too presumptuous. I feel we should respect others’ customs, Mr Moffat, don’t you?’
ֵׁרֵֵׁשֵֵׁכָָּׁ
Of course I did think him so, but I would not give him the satisfaction of knowing it. I gave him no more than a cursory nod in response before Maccabi began to show me the seat of my fiefdom.
The staircase led up to a gallery off which led several doors to other parts of the house, including both east and west wings. Contrary to the impression created by the elevation of the forefront, the house extended far, if haphazardly, to the rear. Like the hallways, the atrium was crammed with furniture of madcap selection and sundry bric-a-brac. On the gallery, sconced candles threw a faint illumination on the discoloured wallpaper. This paper was in the French style of half a century before, and, though not so bright as it once had been, was a trompe l’oeil after those of Zuber et Cie, a de-piction of a vast hall of mirrors.
Maccabi pushed the surface of one of the faux mirrors and it swung ajar. He directed me through into a long corridor with some twenty doors to other rooms. He turned to me. ‘These are all the usable bedrooms, sir. The west wing is uninhabitable on account of the cats, whilst the east houses the Collection.’
‘And where are the servants’ quarters?’ I asked him.
He replied with a little heat, ‘Miss Pardoner and the professor are the only other users of these accommodations, sir.’
I guessed he had but recently vacated them, or I had mistaken myself in the man.
Each door had at one time been painted in a different shade of blue, with the nearest to the looking-glass entrance being the lightest and the last in the corridor being almost black. Maccabi cleared his throat. ‘Miss Pardoner has the teal, third on the left. The professor has the midnight-blue at the very end, Mr Moffat. I suggest you inspect the others to see which is the most suitable to your purpose. I shall wait below to show you the rest of the house; I regret that I may not be able to accompany you around the grounds after darkness falls.’
It was no surprise that he wished to be shot of me as much as I of him. He was a fool if he thought I would not take the opportunity to investigate what lay behind both the teal and midnight-blue doors.
The brass knob was tarnished to the colour of mud, and contrasted sharply with the still-vibrant teal of Miss Pardoner’s bedroom door. It seemed politic to peruse her chamber now, as no doubt she would be performing her toilette before dinner. There were few women of my acquaintance who could do such in less than an hour. The hinges appeared to be as ill cared for as the knob, since they groaned and creaked as though they were about to reveal Ambrosio the Monk in the hands of his inquisitors.
The room was plain enough, neither over furnished nor sparsely so. Its papered walls were no doubt pleasing to the feminine eye, although perhaps more attuned to the tastes of a half-century earlier. The porcelain stood neatly and clean on the toilette to the left of a window. What this window overlooked I could not say, for the filth of it was as impenetrable as night. Nor could I imagine what lay beyond: something about my home disturbed me whenever I attempted to conjure its composition in my mind’s eye.
The bed was four-posted, and there were holes in its tester. The curtains seemed in better repair, although a tawdry scene was depicted on them: a very poorly executed copy of ‘The Marriage of Venus’. I wondered if this had had any bearing on Miss Pardoner’s choice of bedchamber, or if she had merely chosen a door close to the ingress for its convenience. The room itself was spacious enough to encompass several large pieces of furniture and a faded Persian carpet of some beauty.
A large double-fronted armoire was on the wall adjacent to the sash window. Beside it stood a tallboy in the same richly dark wood; it might have been mahogany. The drawers opened smoothly and I chose an item of intimate apparel from one of them; it fit snugly in the long pocket of my frock coat. Opposite was a bookcase that contained only three books. Novels, rather. They were the work of the so-called Bell brothers. I opened one at random; Miss Pardoner, or someone, had underlined the following: ‘Conventionality is not morality.’
It was a mere fragment of a somewhat longer statement. But the four words seemed sufficient to me to found a philosophy upon. I confess I hoped that my ward’s hand had drawn the line under this motto.
At this point the mooted defiler of the tome entered the room. A low and extravagant bow seemed an appropriate greeting. She gave the merest nod and struggled against a smirk: ‘I trust you have satisfied your... curiosity, Mr Moffat.’
‘There is time enough for that, Miss Pardoner, I promise you.’ I gave a somewhat more perfunctory bow and left her to her toilette. It was not until I left the room that I realised it was deficient in one particular. There had been no sign of a looking-glass.
Someone, I supposed it to be Maccabi, had lit candles in the corridor. There was a window of relative transparency at the very end, but it was admitting little light as dusk was falling. The improvement offered by the candlelight was but little and the dark wallpaper above the wainscoting scarcely helped.
The corridor would indeed have been a dismal place had it not been for the inexplicably unfaded shades of the blue doors. Chance and serendipity had long fascinated me, who had charted no course through life but merely profited – or not – from coincidence at every turn. Therefore, I chose a door midway down the sinister side, for no other reason than that it was the same shade as my frock coat.
The brass knob and plate were alike in design to Miss Pardoner’s, save for the fact that they were highly polished. As I opened the door, it became clear that unlike the other bedchamber, this would easily welcome a clandestine nocturnal visitor. I took a candle from the sconce to the left of the door before entering. Inside was a window, although it was not quite so filthy: the glass was so clear as to allow enough crepuscular light to illuminate the room, but perhaps not to permit the reading of any papers.
The bed was little different from that of the previous room, though the tester was in good repair, if a little faded, and there were no classical scenes of dubious taste on the drapery. These drapes were a subtle and warm sienna colour, and decorated with a monogram that included a six-pointed star and the letters A and C. Again, I was struck by the lack of a looking-glass.
The furnishings were lighter in colour, there was no hulking wardrobe of mahogany, rather a clothes press. I slid out a tray or two but found them empty. In common with the other furnishings, the wood was highly polished walnut. There was a dresser with porcelain stood atop it, a
little high for practical use. Several hair pins were strewn beside the sanitary ware. A silver-backed hairbrush lay next to them, and it looked as though it should have had as companion a hand-held looking-glass, but it did not. In one corner, to my surprise, was a love seat. With my candle, I walked over to inspect it more closely. The upholstery was stained in a manner that I recognised from years of removing linen from lunatics’ beds. Neither stain should have been found in the room of a lady of quality.
There was also a handsome leather-bound book with a locked hasp on the seat, also bearing the monogram with the six-pointed star. It was a simple matter to break the lock with the spear-blade penknife I carried in my pocket.
The book was a journal, and inside was the name Arabella Coble.
Chapter Eleven
I was pricked by no sentimentality in finding the adolescent journal of my late wife. I was merely puzzled that such a thing would still lie in her bedchamber so long after her departure from Gibbous House. But my recent apprehension of my wife’s earlier incarnation as the wife of one Cadwallader had provoked in me some curiosity about her, such as I had heretofore not owned, and I took up the book. Equally baffling was the immaculate repair of the room itself.
Book under my arm, I advanced to the door opposite the professor’s midnight-blue. The shade applied liberally to this door was navy. There was a lever arrangement where the handle should have been. Brass – as the other door furniture had been – neither carelessly filthy nor diligently polished.
I glanced over my shoulder at the portal to the professor’s lair. I swung the door wide. The walls were void of paper or hangings of any kind, and painted with limewash. There was a mean cot cramped against one wall, and the room was not large. There was a window of sorts: a tiny square of glass and wood with no apparent aperture. A rough wooden garderobe stood in one corner and in the centre of the rough carpentry of the floorboards stood a chamberpot, or – more correctly – a bourdaloue. The room reminded me of nothing so much as the asylum in Edinburgh. I tossed my late wife’s diary on the cot, pleased with my choice of bedchamber.
It was time to inspect the professor’s inner sanctum. There were several unusual aspects to his retreat. For one, an entire wall consisted of the most magnificent mahogany shelves filled with leather-spined books and sundry papers, many of which the professor – unless he possessed the agility and balance of a colobus – could have no earthly hope of perusing.
The remainder of the room was almost filled by the largest bed I had ever seen; bare of tester or other drapery, the posts rose like vacant flagpoles toward the ceiling. At last I had found a room in possession of a looking-glass, although it would have been of little use in adjusting one’s dress: the entire ceiling was of mirrored glass, though cracked and crazed as if someone had thrown stones at it by the handful. It showed distorted reflections of murals as outrageous as those rumoured to have been discovered in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Indeed, I would not have been surprised if Francis I of Naples had fainted dead away in the presence of such lubriciousness. I wondered how the professor slept at night, or, indeed, if he preferred not to do so.
The professor’s library drew my eye: the entire wall of shelves appeared to have the tomes and papers arranged in no discernible order. Plutarch sat cosily beside Pythagoras and both were Pope’s Dunciad away from the sentimentalist scribbler Dickens. More venerable volumes had titles familiar to me from Moffat’s trunk; several of these were beside vellum and parchment documents. I took only a bundle inscribed with a script identical – it appeared – to the magically appearing hieroglyphs on the blank vellum sheets I had received from the unfortunate Mr Cartwright. A volume lay open on the bed, a wavering black line under the words,
But it must be thought that the electric principle, that it may be easily understood from those things which we shall soon submit, was not added by accidental causes, but was intentionally implanted by nature:
It was a book on something called ‘Animal Electricity’ by one Luigi Galvani, and it seemed to contain more such arrant nonsense, light on which page I might.
There appeared little of a personal nature in the room, at least nothing that I could find among the professor’s clothing. Nor was there any trace of an escritoire or writing slope. Evidently none of the professor’s duties of curatorship was performed in the privacy of his bedchamber.
That fellow gave a mighty roar of pain as I tripped over him on the way out of his room. I considered I might issue him with a bell so that one might be warned of his approach. No one should be forced to perambulate their home, eyes fixed downward, on account of a midget. He recovered his equilibrium and his patriarchal voice was calm as he said, ‘Feel free to borrow anything from my library, Mr Moffat. Although I fear there is little that is not in your own, or rather in that which comprises part of the Collection.’
My hackles quite rose. ‘And how would that not be mine?’
‘All writing is posterity’s, Mr Moffat, we merely safeguard it for others.’
I eyed him, astounded at the patronising tone emerging from three feet below my own mouth.
‘D___ posterity, Professor, and d___ you!’
And I resolved to be rid of the Collection – whatever it might be – and its eminently d___able curator, as soon as I possibly might.
The tiny man stiffened, made a parody of a bow and informed me that, as it soon would be the hour of eight, he would be delighted if I would join him in the library for a libation of my own choosing. It was insufferable; the man was treating me as a guest in my own house. It would soon be time for me to go abroad, in search of relief from dangerous passions. I feared there would be little opportunity in rural Northumberland. Nevertheless, I remained outwardly cordial to the man and bade him lead me to the library.
We passed back through the trompe l’oeil looking-glass and descended the stairs in silence. Choosing our path carefully through the piled furniture, we made for a fine walnut door leading to the east wing. The professor passed through it and quickened his pace, his gait becoming the scuttle of a roach, the nails in his tiny boots recalling associated sounds. Surprisingly, I had to make an effort to stay close on his heels; as a consequence, I could take less note of the rooms we passed through than I might have wished.
It was clear, however, that the first – as well as housing objets de mystère in every material, of every shape and size – appeared to be serving as the dining room, at least for this evening. The next room was crammed with products of the taxidermist’s art; from the largest savage feline to the tiniest wren, it seemed as though all creation, or at least an example of every species of fauna, had gathered in the room. It was as though one of each of Noah’s pairs had made the huge journey from Ararat to be rendered glassy eyed and sinister in Northumbria.
The next room was reminiscent of the notary’s office, and for that reason I was glad that the dwarf’s scurrying pace had not abated, as we passed through the madman’s gallery of images rapidly. Then came a room of geological specimens: agates, beryl, topaz, simpler quartzes, fossils, amber. I would have preferred to tarry in it, but the professor’s hobnails tip-tapped ever on. We passed through a vivarium worthy of the Zoological Society’s garden in Regent’s Park, and I shuddered at the slithering behind the foliage-darkened vitrines.
At last we came to the library. A vast room: it was a repository of books such as the fabled Alexandrian library must have been. The dimensions of the room itself were most impressive. In length it comprised two chains. One wall was punctuated by high, arching windows between which shelves were bursting with books of every size and shape. One of the shorter walls enjoyed French windows leading out onto the grounds, but they were of course flanked by more books. The remaining longer wall contained thousands upon thousands of volumes. The ceiling was high and vaulted, six chandeliers filled with an unconscionable quantity of candles lit the room. Other candlebrae stood on every available surface, and there were many. Low bookcases and tables housed further books
, and some manner of seating stood by every place where a hand might be laid on a book.
One low table by a chaise and an upholstered seat had but one book; the remainder of its surface, thanks be, was taken up by crystal glasses and tantali. The professor, as yet not putting aside his irritating presumption, poured us both a generous glass of jerez and proposed a toast:
‘To posterity, Mr Moffat.’
‘To purgatory, Professor,’ I replied.
It was not a jerez of the very highest quality, but it was more than palatable. In fact, it was a better libation than had passed my lips in some time. We were still standing, the professor and I, and though it might be expected that the advantage in height that I held would have made him uncomfortable, indeed it did not. Perhaps it was the darkest brown tones of his voice, the biblical quality of his speech or the perfection of his English in contrast with his accent, but he seemed as prepossessed as any man I had ever met. I despised him for it; hated him for making so little of his disadvantage, and so much of his tiny self. His eyes were full of intelligence as befitted a man of his learning, and I searched in vain for something of the sly in them. He kept them on me, scarce blinking, as though quite content to look at me until I began a conversation or died of boredom.
‘Professor,’ I began, ‘you will forgive me if in future my household does not comply with the servants’ rituals. As a man unconvinced of the existence of any divine being, I should prefer that any religious observance of whatever marque not take place under my roof. You may do as you please within your own chamber. At least until I have considered the disposition of this household and your place within it.’
He lifted an eyebrow and, although I felt it had a somewhat comical effect, I was unable to laugh.
‘Mr Moffat, Jedediah has told me you have been foolish enough to sign unread papers. I see now that I should have believed him. Gibbous House and all its contents form part of a discretionary trust.’