Sanford nodded in support but had half an eye on the window. He felt something was in the mews. He did not like the shadows that wove across the rooftops, even knowing that they belonged to rooks.
Salmius Nalmius Nax adjusted his skullcap before responding. “You must voyage to Yount. Soon, weather to permit. With Mr. Sanford here, if that is your wish and his. There will be . . . challenges along the way and then again when you arrive. That is all I can say.”
Barnabas and Sanford stood still. They wanted to do this business but these were not standard terms and conditions. Barnabas asked, “You are devilish hard to discuss business with, Mr. Nax, sir! The giants on the Guildhall clock are more reasonable! Were we inclined to go on this journey, what assurances could you give us of our return? And how should we conduct the business of McDoon & Associates in the meantime?”
“No assurances whatsoever, Mr. Sanford,” said Salmius Nalmius Nax. “None can be forthcoming, this is not risk such as you might have underwritten at Lloyd’s. As for your firm’s business, we would run it on your behalf.”
“Ridiculous!” said Sanford.
“Nonsense!” said Barnabas. The idea that a total stranger would run McDoon & Associates was so infuriating that Barnabas, for once, was at a loss for words. The merchants of McDoon & Associates left the Piebald Swan.
The proprietor and the Purser watched Barnabas and Sanford stalk away. The skullcap slumped on Salmius Nalmius Nax’s head as he whispered something in another language to his companion. Both men looked pained. “We expected this,” Salmius Nalmius Nax said. “But it is hard all the same.”
Barnabas spat out, “Buttons and beeswax!” over and over again as he and Sanford stormed off. He so deeply believed in Yount that his anger was all the keener for the Purser’s laconic half-statements and ludicrous proposition. Sanford was even angrier about the possible truth of the Purser’s assertions about Wurm (“For their worm shall not die,” he quoted to himself. “Their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh”). So upset were the merchants of McDoon & Associates that they failed to notice two things. The first was that, as they moved down the mews towards the alley leading to Finch-House Longstreet, the Piebald Swan seemed to shift or elongate slightly, like fruit seen through a cut-glass bowl as one walks around it. The second was that, as they made their way down the Longstreet back to the City and their home on Mincing Lane, a figure detached itself from a doorway and followed them.
Chapter 3: Eyes in the Dark
Sally’s dreams were vertiginous and filled with a crying in the air. She read feverishly from the book, sharing what she could with Tom. She missed many meals (to the cook’s distress but no one else’s) and even missed her lessons once, which normally would have elicited comment, but neither her uncle nor Sanford noticed. She wondered if they had read the book too, and how it was that they had gotten the book in the first place. She tried to dismiss her fears but recalled similar dreams from childhood. Once, when she was twelve, Uncle Barnabas had called for the doctor. The doctor had patted her hand and said to her uncle, “A mild form of oneiric hysteria, related to an eidetic imagination — a common affliction of the gentle sex, particularly when they read and engage in other activities unsuited to their temperament.” But the nightmares had continued and now they were back.
She did not confide in Fraulein Reimer or in the cook, not wanting to cause them concern. Her only comforts were Isaak her cat, her commonplace book, and her visits to the partners’ office when no one was there. She had rescued Isaak from a group of boys on the street, who had bound the kitten and were about to smash it with stones. She’d given it the German version of “Isaac” because she felt there weren’t enough uses for the letter “k” in English. Then it turned out that Isaak wasn’t a boy-kitten after all but the name had already taken. As a sacrifice saved, Isaak loved Sally utterly. She had long golden fur, with a tail that stood up like a plume when she galloped, and pantaloons that flounced as she bounded onto Sally’s lap. She — Isaak, that is — stood guard at the top of the attic stairs, hissing and spitting at all comers. Everyone else in the house was terrified of Isaak, except Yikes, who ignored her, and the cook, who gave her the run of the kitchen and fed her milk from a chipped saucer. Isaak curled in Sally’s lap as she — Sally, that is — copied extracts into her commonplace book: snippets from Cowper, Gibbon and Pope, passages from Shakespeare, Thomson and Mrs. Barbauld, her own translations of Novalis and Tieck, and much else besides.
For as long as she could remember, Sally had visited the partners’ office once or twice a week, usually in the evening, whenever all the male members of McDoon & Associates were out. The mahogany furniture gleamed because, except on the warmest days of summer, a fire was always kept there. The clock ticked. Yikes slept by the fire, Chock sat in his cage, Isaak eyed them with contempt and stalked shadows.
On the walls were pictures she lived in. She imagined herself among the tiny figures in the paintings of the East India Company’s fort at Madras and the European and American trading factories at Canton. She could name each kind of ship in the mezzotint prints: chalks and galliots beating up the Trave at Luebeck, cats and pinks in the Danish Sound, schooners coasting off Dantzig. On the main table sat a bone-china punchbowl with a picture of the East Indiaman The Lady Burgess captioned “Launched September 1808 for the Honourable East India Company, God Speed and All Success!” Sanford had insisted that all visitors be reminded how necessary such wishes were: he had hung pictures of the shipwrecked East Indiamen Grosvenor and The Earl of Abergavenny, though Barnabas had re-hung them so that the opened door obscured them (“Damned unpleasant having to talk business with those poor souls staring at you.”) Sally had studied every feature of the distressed crew members, memorized the details of spars and half-submerged rigging.
The print next to the shipwrecks drew Sally even more: a white boy stunned in the water, attacked by a grey shark with jaws agape, his shipmates desperately trying to haul him in, a black sailor overseeing the rescue from the boat. She often lost herself in the trinity of white boy, grey shark and black man.
Even more than the pictures, Sally knew the smell of that room, could summon it at will, a deep aroma of pipe smoke, coal ash, leather and ink, shot through with the scent of sandalwood from a carved box that Barnabas had treasured home from Bombay. All the way home, thought Sally. Home.
Isaak, commonplace jottings, and the redolence of that room were some defence against her fears, but soon were tested. Her uncle and Mr. Sanford had been exceptionally distracted at breakfast on St. Fiona’s day, and then had gone out on some business errand. When they returned, both men were in foul humour, which added to Sally’s anxiety. The following days were ugly at McDoon & Associates. Barnabas and Sanford were curt with everyone, especially Tom, whose work the rest of that week never seemed to please the partners. An error in a remittance from a ship chandler in Wapping caused a huge row. A letter from the Landemanns in Hamburg was full of more bad news (salt shipments were being held up by the French army blockades). The cook even burned the kippers at breakfast one morning, adding to the general malaise.
“Burned the kippers,” muttered the cook, scraping the remnants into the sink. “Well, I never in all my time!”
“Scorched ’em quite wholly,” observed her niece.
“You’ll mind your mouth or you’ll be cleaning this pan yourself,” replied the cook. Her niece dared a smile, and moved up to lend a hand with the drying. Aunt and niece worked side by side in silence.
When the cleaning up was done, the cook leaned against the sink and sighed. She pointed to a potato-mallet hanging above a chopping block. “I’m like that old beetle,” she said, meaning the mallet. “Beetle-headed anyhow. Piece of wood through and through. I ought to have seen this coming.”
“What coming, aunt?” asked her niece.
“Whatever’s coming, niece,” said the cook, dusting off a soup tureen from the blue pheasant service, though the turee
n already sparkled. “I can feel something, like chickens in the coop when there’s a stoat slinking about outside. You see, you needs to get to know the ways of a house, know ’em right proper. Take Mr. McDoon, for instance, he is very particular about how his vests are pressed and laid out.”
The maid nodded. She had only recently come to the house on Mincing Lane.
“And Miss Sally,” said the cook, moving from the tureen to the mustard pot. “Upstairs in her room, dreaming and daffling and reading in all them books. She is looking for something, only she doesn’t know what.”
The cook’s cloth found invisible dust on the toast forks and rinding knives as she continued her tutorial, “Our Mr. Sanford now, Norfolk bred just like we are, he has his little ways too. Likes goat’s meat. How he loves goat’s meat. Ever since he and Mr. McDoon came back from their great trip to India, which was the cause of all the trouble with the Old McDoon. I will gladly fix it for him English-ways, but no, he must have it with pepper and spices from India, or it isn’t good enough for him! I have tried my best but, to speak wholly true, I just don’t hold with that foreign way of dealing with an honest meat.”
The cook looked up from her dusting, and said, “So my point, and maybe I got a smittick off the point, but now I will come back to it. The point, my niece, is that a house has its ways and, if you listen and watch, you can see when those ways have been disturbed, sometimes even before others know it themselves. So, something is a-coming, I says.”
The maid thought again of strangers in Dunster Court. The cook wagged a great runicled finger, and then shooed the maid away from the kitchen, saying, “Be watchful, my niece!”
Sally kept to herself, but no one except Fraulein Reimer and the cook sought her out anyway. All the men were exercised with their work and had no time. Her classmates seemed even more frivolous than usual. At every opportunity, she spirited the book to her room for reading by candlelight, poring over it as closely as the Sibyl of Cumae studied scrolls in the print above the chiffonier downstairs. Journies and Travells to Yount and the Realms Within was a compendium of disjointed details from many sources. Some passages were translations, such as those “from the records in Persian held by the customs-house at Bandar Abbas on the Straits of Hormuz” or those “being originally in Arabic from the port city of Muscat.” Memoires archived at St. John’s, the Jesuit college in Goa, were referenced, likewise manuscripts at the University of Leiden and at the presidency offices in Madras, surveys commissioned by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and by the Casa de Contracion, the trade college in Seville, and so on. Sally knew something of Alexander Dalrymple’s hypotheses on the existence of a great southern continent, which helped drive Cook on his famous voyages, and of Lord Macartney’s embassy to China in 1792. But she had not heard about Matthew Flinders’s voyage from New South Wales to Capetown in 1797, or the exploits of Jabez Haverstraw, a sailor shipwrecked south of the Nicobar Islands. Sally read about whales run ashore in Mozambique and albatrosses tangled in the rigging of Dutch East Indiamen, about “the Great Confluxion,” eddies in the cosmic ocean, the haunted roads leading to Yount.
Throughout the book ran notes of warning: references to mysterious forces, a grasping hand, suffering voices on the wind . . . Sally almost felt she understood the threat, but not quite. The name “Strix Tender Wurm” snaked its way through the text. Sally struggled to make sense of the hints and allusions, but the book itself seemed to thwart her. Although she refused to believe it, Sally felt that the text shifted from one reading to the next: sometimes a section she had read the day before seemed to have disappeared, no matter how carefully she looked for it, sometimes the entries seemed to change order or the wording to elide subtly.
Sally, when not engrossed in the book, gazed out her attic window. So she had always done, trying to know the world beyond the house but not able or allowed to join it. She cradled Isaak for hours, looking down to the street, observing the sarabande of traffic, tracing patterns of pedestrians in cat’s fur. She wondered what passersby were thinking, where they were going. Yet the greatest fascination of all was above the rooftops. Sally looked to the sky, especially at night, seeking the moon above London’s fume. Tom not infrequently asked Sally what phase the moon was in rather than look it up in the almanac. She was always right, no matter how much fog and smoke hid the moon. “Our own lunatic! Our captains could tell the tide by Sally,” said Tom.
She began to notice an odd man and an even odder bird in the street. Mincing Lane was heavily trafficked, so she could not be sure, but at dawn there seemed to be a man loitering near the corner of Dunster Court. Not loitering exactly, but busy in an aimless sort of way, she thought, someone affecting one task while actually on another errand altogether. She became aware of him on Thursday, January 16th, the feast day for St. Nigel-le-Blayne, which is how she remembered, because the church bells were muted on that day in honour of the saint’s deafness. Friday he was there, also Saturday . . . at least it seemed to be the same man, though the distance from her window down to the street, and the constant stir of the crowd, made it hard for her to be sure. She noticed him primarily because of his old-fashioned overcoat, like something from the engravings of a time before King George III. To match a coat that out of style, he really might have worn a bag-wig. The coat was remarkable not just for its cut and length. It was made of a reddish material that glistened as the man moved about the street. The coat almost seemed to writhe. Sally pulled back when she thought that, rubbed her eyes, and felt queasy. When she looked out again, the man and the coat were gone. She thought about telling Fraulein Reimer, but decided even Fraulein Reimer would find Sally’s suspicions absurd. In any case, the man in the coat was absent on Sunday and on Monday. “Silly,” she murmured to Isaak, who pressed up against her. “It’s just a man on his way to his employment. Must pass this way every day, only I have not noticed before.”
The bird she saw a day or two after she first saw the tall man. Sally observed many details from her bower: dray horses lumbering up to merchant warehouses, gentlemen in their cups late of an evening, the knife-grinder making his rounds, the baked potato vendor with his brazier, rooks disturbed from their perches by chimney-sweeps. Nothing escaped her gaze, certainly not the wren flitting from window to window across the street. A wren in the country is too common for mention, but a wren in the city is — as Mr. Sanford would put it — a thing out of its place. The wren seemed to be flying systematically from one house to the next, perching in crannies and cornices, almost as if it was searching for something. Sally laughed off the thought but there was the wren now positioned opposite the McDoon comptoir, its head rotating in a most un-wrenlike fashion.
She laughed again at her fears, looked out, the wren was gone. No, the wren was fluttering at her window. Sally started back. She caught its tiny eyes, black and dull as currants. Isaak leaped at the window, teeth bared and claws extended. The wren flew off, but for several days Sally saw it sitting on the eaves across the street. Isaak patrolled the attic window, growling at the wren. Convinced that the wren was spying on her, but too ashamed to admit such fears to anyone, Sally withdrew almost entirely to her room. Still no one paid much heed, so absorbed were the other members of the McDoon household in their own concerns.
Concerns drove every one but Sally out of the house Tuesday evening, January 21st. Tom went to Drury Lane. Barnabas and Sanford, seeking to slough off the oppression they still felt from their meeting at the Piebald Swan one week earlier, were at a coffeehouse off Cornhill. Fraulein Reimer was visiting a friend at Wellclose Square. The cook and the maid had their fortnightly evening two streets over with fellow Norfolk expatriates, the “bishy barnybees” as the women called themselves.
Sally normally enjoyed an evening on her own but tonight she wanted company. She sat for a while in the partners’ office, but the smell of sandalwood in an empty room only intensified her melancholy so she retreated to her garret. The evening was still and very cold, the atmosphere heavy with rive
r mists. Shadows thickened, her fears grew, and her shame of the fear mounted along with the fear itself.
As an antidote, she tried reading something by fussy, finger-wagging Hannah More (mostly to please Sanford, who extolled More’s virtues) but, wait, was that a creaking on the stair? Sally bent all her will to the book. A muffled voice in the hallway? Sally shut the book, closed her eyes, murmured, “Sankt Jakobi, Sankt Nikolai, Sankt Michaelis, Sankt Katharinen.” Since childhood, Sally had chanted the names of Hamburg’s churches as a charm against fear, picturing as she did Fraulein Reimer standing next to her, pointing at each church in the print of the Hamburg cityscape on the wall outside the library. “See the tall spire of the Michal?” Fraulein Reimer would say. “And Sankt Jakobi with the wunderschoen organ that Johann Sebastian Bach played?”
For a minute, Sally heard the Bach melody that Fraulein Reimer hummed, smelled the good mustiness of her black dress, and Sally felt the fear recede. But only briefly: wasn’t that a creaking near the door? It couldn’t be Yikes: that dog never left the hearthside. “Sankt Jakobi, Sankt Nikolai . . .” She could stand it no longer. Fear circled her. “Sankt Michaelis.” Sally got out of bed. “Sankt Katharinen.” She heard the clock strike eleven. Sally went to her door, summoned the kestrel within, and yanked the door open.
She saw nothing and laughed with relief. Then she did hear something: not a creak, but a rustling, like someone shuffling through papers. A rustling of paper in a counting house is too common for mention . . . except as midnight nears and one is alone in the house. Could Tom be back? No, she thought, especially if he stopped for claret or port on the way. Besides, Tom was noisy and, more to the point, would avoid the outer office whenever possible. She suppressed a giggle thinking of Tom working at his ledger books at midnight. Once more, the rustling came from below. Fear closed round again. She clutched the well of her throat but crept downstairs, Isaak padding beside her with tail flared. Sally passed the print of Hamburg on the wall outside the library, used the spires of the churches to anchor her resolve. The rustling was heard more clearly now, and also the treading of feet. “Chock,” sounded the parrot . . . and someone hissed in reply. She went down the back stairs. Oh, she thought, why doesn’t Yikes bark or attack? But she knew better than that: Yikes would sleep through the match between Gog and Magog. She meant to slip out through the kitchen and she should have done so, but something stopped her. Her fear choked her but she felt anger as well.
The Choir Boats Page 4