The Elephant Keeper
Page 27
And suddenly I am frightened. As I stand among these gaunt relics, the dream has thrown up a terrible possibility: that Tom and Jenny’s love may have failed, that Tom has married Mr. and Mrs. Sanders’s widowed daughter, Jane, and that they have gone to live in a quaint, weatherboarded cottage in Kent. They have three little children, on whom Tom dotes. He works as a groom to the Reverend Andrew Gould, a fox-hunting parson. While Jenny, alone and abandoned, dies of pneumonia in the chill of some London winter.
Is it possible? It is possible.
Is it true?
LET US REFUSE TO BELIEVE this dream. Let us calmly reject this possibility and try another approach. We know—it was reported in the Times—that Gilbert Cross, the proprietor of Cross’s Famous Menagerie, died on the tenth of February, 1794. We know that he died childless and deep in debt, and that the menagerie closed shortly afterward. A register of the animals was compiled for the purposes of the sale: it includes a bear, a monkey, a snake and a lion, but it does not include an elephant. The elephant has disappeared. How can an elephant disappear? Hard to say. But it may be worth noting that from the fourteenth to the seventeenth of February, according to the meteorological journal kept by William Bent, of Paternoster Row, much of London lay in the grip of a dense, clammy fog, during which it was apparently hard to see from one side of the street to another.
Come with me into this lost, fog-bound city. Come through the muffled streets and forgotten alleys. It is midnight on the sixteenth of February, and we are standing in the Strand, outside the menagerie. The streetlamps have been lit, but the fog traps and contains their swirling light. As we wait for something to happen, a pair of doors suddenly opens, and out come Sam Scott and Tom Page, and behind them Jenny. In the fog she seems huge. The two men say some brief words and shake hands. Then, reaching down with her trunk, she swings Tom into the damp air, lowers him onto her neck and strides in the direction of Charing Cross.
Few people witness her progress. A pair of tired watchmen, a drunkard swaying over the cobbles, two elderly prostitutes coughing in the entrance to a jeweler’s shop. A horse, pulling a chaise in which a young blade caresses his new mistress after an evening at the playhouse, almost collides with the elephant; it gives a wild, frightened swerve at this ghostly juggernaut and careers away. The elephant continues, her stride quickening: past Charing Cross, down Whitehall, into Parliament Street, along Abingdon Street. Then more streets, and more, and at last she and her passenger reach the river, sliding through the fog like a dark snake.
There is a bridge over the river, and at the entrance to the bridge is a toll gate, and even in this nighttime fog there stands a solitary man, the ancient gatekeeper, the keeper to the gates of heaven. He is carrying a lantern, a globe of foggy light. As the elephant looms out of the murk he reels, raising the lantern, but by now she is moving at such a pace that she barely seems to touch the ground. With Tom crouched low on her neck, she hurtles over the bridge, forcing a way through the fog, which closes behind.
What then? Who knows? It would seem that the fog hides Tom and Jenny forever. Yet there are some old stories, which may be true, or may contain some shadows of truth, at least.
These stories relate how, one spring and early summer in the mid 1790s, a man and an elephant traveled through the green countryside of southern England and at each town and village were greeted with admiration and delight. The elephant was a female, and though her prodigious appetite and great strength were noted, what appear to have impressed people the most were her gentleness and good nature. One story describes how at dusk, near a small village, the man and elephant trundled down a track which led to a pond. At the man’s command, the elephant rolled over, and lay on her side to be washed and scrubbed. This accomplished, the man sat on the bank, while the elephant splashed and bathed to her heart’s content. A large moon had swum into view, and to the watching villagers it seemed as though the gleaming elephant was herself part of the moonlight.
Nowhere is the name of the man given, but according to the stories he was a native of Somersetshire, and he possessed an extraordinary ability to communicate with the elephant. It is this last detail, above all, which surely confirms that the man and the elephant were Tom and Jenny. What joy they must have taken in their escape from the city. What joy they must have felt as they walked down the quiet woodland lanes, as they crossed meadows white with lady’s smock, as they trailed through fields of long, silvery grass skimmed by swallows. While the stories give no hint as to how their journey ended, the general direction of their travel would seem to have been westward, and it is at least possible that their immediate destination was the port of Bristol. Perhaps, therefore, just perhaps, some time in late May or early June 1794, Tom and Jenny took ship for the Indies.
If so, this ship must be none other than the Fortune, a vessel of two hundred tons, under the command of Captain James Page, Tom’s brother. On its voyage it appears to us in a series of pictures: moving down the narrow muddy river and swinging toward the choppy waters of the open sea; wallowing and pitching through a thunderstorm in the Bay of Biscay; heeling and creaking and groaning along the coast of Africa. It rounds the Cape of Good Hope and enters the Straits of Madagascar, and gales buffet and toss it like a little toy. Yet, as its name suggests, this is a lucky ship; it survives all; and before it vanishes we have a last glimpse of it in its crossing of the Arabian Sea. The day is fine, the air soft as milk, the sea a pearly luminescence, and Tom and Jenny are standing on deck, side by side, by the forward rail, with Jenny’s spread ears echoing the wide, rippling sails. We too are on deck; and suddenly Tom seems to catch sight of us, and murmurs something to Jenny, and both look, curious, puzzled, in our direction. Much as we would like to make some gesture, to establish communication, there is nothing that we can do. For now a sailor high in the rigging gives a loud shout, and Tom and Jenny turn away from us, and gaze over that shining sea toward the crinkled line of writing on the distant horizon.
About the Author
A prizewinning radio documentary producer who has worked for the BBC World Service, CHRISTOPHER NICHOLSON rode an elephant for the first time at Chitwan National Park in Nepal. He has been interested in natural history his entire life, and many of the programs he produced for the BBC revolved around the connection between animals and humans. Because of a love for the novels of Thomas Hardy, Nicholson and his wife settled in Dorset, England, with their two children.
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ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER NICHOLSON
The Fattest Man in America
Credits
Jacket design by Mary Schuck
Jacket art montage: elephant © by Underwood & Underwood/Corbis; landscape © by Panoramic Images/Getty Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE ELEPHANT KEEPER. Copyright © 2009 by Christopher Nicholson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition June 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-189867-9
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