The Choir Boats

by Rabuzzi, Daniel

  Tom stirred. “That sounds like what the survivors claimed happened to the boats of the Glen Carrig.”

  Sally and Tom thought about the story published by the survivors of that ill-fated ship. The Glen Carrig had wrecked in 1757 in the southern ocean, blown far off the shipping lanes. The ship’s boats had landed on vast mud-flats where they were attacked by creatures unknown to natural philosophers. Plangent cries had filled the air, and other ships, empty, were stranded in the estuaries of that land. The authors swore that their adventures were true, but they were derided or pitied as madmen whose thirst and hunger as they drifted on the open sea had forced nightmares into their minds.

  The candle burned low. Sally thumbed ahead to a page very near the end of the book. Her voice lowered as she read again: “‘We live in the Age of Reason. We employ the tools of enquiry that Locke and Leibniz, Hume and Condorcet have uncovered so that we may correct the omission of Yount from mankind’s histories and systems of thought. Yount is a third hemisphere, a terra abscondita, a hidden world within a lost sea, or mare perdita.’”

  Tom shrugged and said, “All those claims hardly make it as correct as Cocker.”

  Sally implored, “Damn it, brother: sapere aude.”

  Tom looked shocked at the first expression and then blank at the second. Sally translated: “‘Dare to know.’ It’s Latin, the rallying cry of our modern age, the motto of Kant.”

  Tom laughed. “I yield, sister. You are harder than Coade-stone.” He and Sally had been schooled in German, Tom because he needed it for McDoon & Associates’ business in Germany and Scandinavia, Sally because her uncle had indulged her desire to learn as much as (no, more than) Tom. One of McDoon’s corresponding merchants, the Landemanns of Hamburg, had recommended a German governess, Fraulein Reimer, a member of the German expatriate community around Wellclose Square. Fraulein Reimer had become part of the family over the years and now lived in a small apartment in the back-house behind the main house. She had not, however, had uniform success with each of her charges. Tom had a lazy facility with German but annoyed Fraulein Reimer with his indifference to the dative and genitive cases. Sally was Fraulein Reimer’s star pupil, speaking with the precision of a Heidelberg professor. Unfortunately, Sally acted like a Heidelberg professor in other ways too. “Quatsch,” was all Tom could muster in reply, the German word for “nonsense,” which he heard all too often from Fraulein Reimer.

  Sally was about to continue her lecture when they heard the clackering of the brass dolphin on the door as Barnabas and Sanford returned from the coffeehouse. By the time Barnabas and Sanford had reached the top of the front stairs, Tom was in his bedroom, and Sally was tiptoeing into her room in the attic. Tom would not admit it to Sally, but he thought about Yount late into the night. Sally was beyond debate. She wished herself to go. Somewhere far off there was a humming, threaded now with an intermittent, thin wailing, an eerie contrapunto that made Sally cry out in her sleep.

  Chapter 2: A Visit to the Piebald Swan

  For the next week Barnabas thought about little else except the meeting with the Purser, whoever he might be. Bursting with gambits, queries, and recipes for swift success, but not able to tell Tom or Sally about them, Barnabas shared his thoughts instead with Yikes, the ancient border collie curled at his feet by the fire, and Chock, the parrot given as a gift by an East Indian connection.

  “What’s lost will be recovered, well, what do you think of that?” Yikes — whom no one had ever heard bark or ever seen move more than three feet at any speed resembling haste — regarded Barnabas with equanimity and snuggled closer to the hearth. Uncharitable souls noted that Yikes, whom Barnabas characterized as a “Scotsman in London, just like me,” was no more a border collie than King George III was sane; in truth, Yikes had come into the world behind a knacker’s yard near Bishopsgate, so the only border known to him was that between the City and Spitalfields, and the only sheep Yikes was likely ever to herd were those in his sleep. Chock made the sound for which he was named, and shifted from one foot to another on his perch. Pleased with these responses, Barnabas forged ahead with his drawing-room plans.

  Sanford was another matter. Learning about Yount was important, and seeking to restore a past that Barnabas had thrown away most important of all, but McDoon & Associates had to be in order before they embarked on a new venture. One locked one’s door and arranged for alternative postal delivery before a journey.

  “Beans and bacon,” Barnabas muttered when Sanford urged their attention to the disposition of the northern trades.

  “Barnabas, be reasonable,” said Sanford. “Our regular trade is blocked but the Landemanns in Hamburg and the Buddenbrooks in Luebeck write of loopholes in the French embargo. Helgoland in the North Sea, Toenning on Jutland: the Royal Navy protects merchants at those places.”

  Barnabas, with a “Quatsch,” consented to be led through the opportunities to break the French blockade. Would Tuesday the 14th never come?

  Tuesday came, January 14th, the feast day of St. Fiona, so all the shops had a dried nettle hung above the door in memory of her martyrdom. Barnabas and Sanford stepped out into a raw, sunless day. Barnabas admired the dolphin door knocker as he closed the door behind him, and wondered if the pale blue window trim wouldn’t want refreshing come spring. From the McDoon comptoir in Mincing Lane, they walked towards the Piebald Swan in Wapping. All the life of the City of London thronged about them, a raucous river of buying and selling in the world’s greatest port. Their house was nestled in the heart of the City, surrounded by the counting houses of friends and rivals such as Chicksey, Veneering & Stobbles just round the corner, Matchett & Frew in Crosby Square and others in Austin Friars and Pope’s Head Alley. The pales of their immediate world were the Bank of England and Royal Exchange on Threadneedle Street, the East India House on Leadenhall Street, the Baltic Coffeehouse near St. Mary-Axe, the Victualling Office on Tower Hill. On a stroll, Barnabas was apt to swell with pride at these edifices to trade, and expatiate on Great Britain’s imperia pelagi, its oceanic empire, but the intensity of today’s mission left him no time for such amplitude. The Purser awaited, and Yount beyond him. The key in his vest-pocket bounced with every stride.

  Farther east they headed, near the Danish Church and Wellclose Square, where many of their captains lived, in a neighbourhood known for German merchants and sugar refiners. Skirting the London Dock, they entered a run of streets in the district of Wapping. Past a great brewery, near an even larger staveyard, they found the New Deanery, which intersected Finch-House Longstreet where George & Sons, Ship Chandlers, had their place of business. But Barnabas and Sanford did not halt at George & Sons (payment owed us, thought Sanford), hunting instead for the Finch-House Mews that must be nearby. The houses on Finch-House Longstreet were narrow and nondescript, built a century earlier in the plain fashion favoured after the Great Fire of 1666. Few people were about: a butcher’s apprentice in an apron hurrying westwards to the Smithfield market, a woman with a load of old clothes for sale on her back, a peddler going house to house selling candle stubs and used suet, one or two men idling at a corner who might be sailors on shore leave. Barnabas paid little heed, but Sanford did not like the looks of the idlers. Wapping was no place for the fainthearted.

  As Finch-House Longstreet turned towards the Thames, inns and taverns catering to a seafaring clientele appeared. Sanford made a slight show of thrusting his walking stick forward with every other step, a parsimonious yet eloquent gesture not lost on several men slouched in front of an alehouse. Interspersed with the taverns were a few coffeehouses, more refined establishments, though hardly as exalted as coffeehouses in the City. Shopkeepers, broker’s clerks, coopers, chandlers, minor excise officials, shipwrights, and owners of ropewalks and tar-sheds frequented the Wapping coffeehouses, not great merchants such as Barnabas and Sanford. The proximity of the docks made sailor’s tales and other fables as much the subject of conversation as ship arrival and departure dates, the price of corn or alum
, and the state of the war against the tyrant Napoleon. Barnabas slowed as he passed an inn called The White Hart — notorious for the imaginative mendacity of its drinkers — and stopped. A narrow alleyway led off Finch-House Longstreet. Stepping over dung, Barnabas and Sanford walked down a slight incline into the mews. The mews were empty, but at one end was a little sign painted with the likeness of a piebald swan. Barnabas fingered the key in his pocket and walked up the steps of the coffeehouse. Sanford, with a glance over his shoulder, followed.

  The Piebald Swan was tiny and seemed to have survived the Great Fire, with its exposed roof beams and crooked stairs. A coffee urn sat on a counter at one end, tended by a man in a skull-cap. He had a short black beard, dark eyes and coppery skin. The man said nothing but looked intently at his only visitors. On a credenza next to the urn was a coffee-service in gold-rimmed white porcelain with harbour scenes painted expertly on each cup. The walls were bare except for an engraving of a man swimming with a dolphin, and a painting of a schooner taking wind into its sails under moonlight.

  “I received a letter. I have come to see the Purser,” said Barnabas, warming to the puzzle as he did when entering a business negotiation. He felt the key in his pocket. He thought he might have heard a humming as he touched it.

  The man in the skullcap pointed to Barnabas’s pocket. In an accent that neither Barnabas nor Sanford could place, he asked, “What do you have in your pocket?”

  At the very edge of memory, Barnabas vaguely recalled that question coming into an old story of another riddling contest. But didn’t the question in that story have to do with a ring?

  “A key,” said Barnabas.

  “To what?”

  “I do not know. That’s why I seek the Purser.”

  “Who is your companion?”

  “He is . . .” Barnabas checked himself again. “He is the companion I was directed to bring with me. We are partners.”

  The man in the skullcap looked from Barnabas to Sanford and back again. Sanford was impressed with how much their host said without speaking. The man in the skullcap pointed upstairs, and stepped aside with his finger still outstretched. Under the proprietor’s gaze, Barnabas and Sanford mounted the stairs.

  The second floor was all one room, with gable windows letting in wan light from the mews, and a table at one end. At the table sat another man in a skullcap. He might have been a twin to the proprietor except that he was a little taller and had a larger nose. Like his compatriot, he dressed in a way that drew no attention to himself but was, upon close inspection, a model of simple elegance. His skullcap was black, with magenta embroidery.

  Barnabas said, “Your cap, sir, I have never seen such a colour.” The man at the desk said, “My people have recently devised the art of extracting dyes from coal-tar. This colour is one we have discovered using the new process.”

  Self-professed abolitionists, Barnabas and Sanford were ashamed at themselves for wondering that such a dark-skinned people could possess a technology superior to that of any true-born Englishman (or any other European, for that matter): dye from coal-tar was a thing unknown. The merchants were willing to quash their prejudice in pursuit of profit, however, and wondered if the gentleman might consider a joint venture with McDoon & Associates to introduce the new dye process to Great Britain. Let Napoleon try to stop that!

  The man at the desk offered compliments on Barnabas’s vest. Barnabas beamed: he was wearing his best today, a sherbasse silk with cerulean twiggery and scarlet buds traced on an ivory background. The man in the magenta-limned skullcap said, “I am the Purser. We have much to discuss and very little time to do so. We have summoned you because we need you. More than that I cannot say. The Learned Doctors in Yount will answer your questions. Assuming, of course, that you want to go.”

  Barnabas tugged at his vest and clenched the key in his pocket. Bees coursed in his mind through the scent of cardamom under a ripe red sun as he said, “One moment, hold on, figs and feathers . . . of course I do, want to go that is, but this whole thing is like a pig in a poke, you know.”

  The Purser frowned. “Pig in a poke? I do not know this expression.” His accent, like the proprietor’s, was hard to describe, soft and yet direct, with rolled Rs and muted vowels.

  Barnabas explained. “Ah,” said the Purser. “I see. You want to know more before you commit. Wise practice, in trade and in . . . ventures such as these. There is no time to tell you everything, even if I could. Like you, I am a man of business, responsible for logistics not policy. The Learned Doctors can answer the deep questions but you must win through to Yount to speak with them.”

  Sanford looked through the nearest window over a tiled roof across the mews, above which he could make out the tops of masts in the distance. A rook’s shadow glided across the roof.

  The Purser continued. “Long ago there was a great change in our worlds. We do not fully understand it but in strange ways your world and ours became linked. We call it the Great Confluxion. It is not natural, has potentially disastrous consequences for both our worlds.”

  Barnabas and Sanford listened closely. After years of negotiating business deals, however, they knew better than to swallow whatever they were told without chewing more than once. Sanford remained suspicious that the book, the key, and this visit might be a swindle. Both men were poised to “clarify,” as if they were assessing the quality of tea auctioned at the East India Company House in Leadenhall Street or were querying the Khodja merchants in Bombay about the quality of pepper and cassia-bark for sale. Yet something had overcome their usual scepticism the morning the box arrived, and something had propelled them to the coffeehouse. They had read throughout the week from the book secreted in the McDoon library, belief alternating with disbelief. The book contained references to the “Great Confluxion,” but neither man could make sense of it. Barnabas wondered if it had something to do with Freemasonry or with stories he had heard in the Orient about multi-armed goddesses and dragons with beards. Sanford thought perhaps it had to do with the lost tribes of Israel or with the ships of Tarshish mentioned by Isaiah and other prophets: “Cross over to your own land, O Ships of Tarshish, this is a harbour no more. He has stretched out his hand over the sea, he has shaken the kingdoms . . .”

  The Purser said, “All our science has not availed to separate our worlds. There is something deeper at work than science, something you and I might call ‘magic,’ a primitive term but all we have. We have discovered that someone from your world must help us. I do not know how, except that the key is involved. The history of the key is too long to recount now. Have you heard of Tlon, Uqbar, and Tertius Orbis? Of Xiccarph? Of Carcosa and Hastur? No? Well, if you make it through to Yount, you will learn more, you will understand what the key can do if used by the proper hand.”

  A shadow slid across the rooftop again, catching Sanford’s eye. The Purser leaned even closer, lowered his voice. “The key can do other things if it is used by . . . other hands. It has great power.”

  Sanford looked out the window again, thinking he heard a sound from the mews below. Barnabas stroked his vest and said, “The Wurm fellow the letter spoke of!”

  “Yes,” said the Purser. “‘The Wurm fellow,’ as you call him, is — how shall I say? — more than dangerous. He is . . . He wants power. More power than your Napoleon — yes, imagine that! — and he will never stop hunting for the key. Strix Tender Wurm changes guise, so it is hard to say who and where he is. We’ve heard him called The Yellow King, the one who wears the Pallid Mask. He may be the one called Professor Moriarty — have you heard that name? — rumoured to head London’s network of thieves and villains. Others say he is Doctor Silvano, the art connoisseur, who you may remember tried to poison the Duke of Umbershire and then disappeared. That is how Wurm is here in your world. He is even worse in ours. He is in our oldest legends, an owl larger than a man, with eyes of fire and a beak like a sabre. He haunts our earliest memories after the Great Confluxion.”

  The merchant
s of McDoon & Associates were most struck by the Purser’s matter-of-fact delivery of this information. Sanford contemplated the possibility of a man, if man it was, alive since the Flood. He reached in his mind for Michael’s sword and Gabriel’s trumpet. Barnabas was torn. All thoughts of pepper, smilax root and mastic gum had swirled out of his head. Yount was in trouble. He did not know why, but the key had come to him, so he must help Yount. More: he sought the love he had surrendered. The letter said someone in Yount might be able to help him. So, he wished himself to go. But the story the Purser told was preposterous.

  Barnabas said, “Sir, what proof have you of what you say? Why, who are you anyway? You have our names, but we do not have yours. For all we know, you might be a scheming Turk or Parthian!”

  The Purser did not look affronted. “I am Salmius Nalmius Nax. Purser First Class, Commissionary for the Royal Fleet of Yount Major, and Deputy Attendant for the Fencibles Squadron.” He pronounced his name “Salms Nalms” but wrote it, Barnabas and Sanford were to learn later, “Salmius Nalmius.” Something, he told them when they first saw it written, to do with old family custom and Yountish protocol. Like the “k” in “knife,” thought Barnabas and left it at that. Salmius Nalmius Nax continued. “I know my story is strange to you, and you have every right to doubt me. Indeed, you would not have been called if you did not doubt. I can only assure you that what I say is true.”

  “Beans and bacon!” said Barnabas. “We are no pouts fresh taken from the nest! Come, you offer no proof, only pure assertion.”

  Salmius Nalmius Nax remained impassive, except for a flicker right around his eyes. “I think,” he said, “it must be — how do you put it? — that the proof of the pudding must be in the eating.”

  “Which means no proof at all right now!” said Barnabas. “With pardon, sir, but you seem no more trustworthy than a bishop in Barchester. What exactly do you propose?”