The Clay Dreaming

by Ed Hillyer

  Thara.

  She seems curious about him, in her way. None of this helps to solve his predicament.

  Her body is of little interest. Inside her cocoon of dark cloth, the precise outline stays uncertain, except to say that she is long, and thin. It is the fire in her spirit he most admires, her obvious intelligence. What he needs is her advice.

  Still, the Guardian is a woman. This involves compromise. The value of silence must be duly considered. Not all knowledge is permitted; in religious matters, in particular, women are stupid.

  He may tell her nothing of his recent experience, reveal none of his past. The Way of the Law strictly forbids it, an offence punishable by death – that of the hapless female.

  Eventually, he accepts there is no other choice. He must take the risk.

  ‘You help me,’ he says.

  ‘How?’ she asks.

  The cave painting! Cole leads Thara to the map behind the door. He tries to explain. She surprises him by taking down the frame, and carrying it over into the light.

  The long blue animal described there is surely Mindeye, the Great Serpent. He examines the surface of the drawing, looking for some way to recognise the Well of Shadows, or Moon Palace, anything that might indicate his trail. The mark-making is too obscure.

  He lets out a weary growl of frustration.

  And then he sees the red ball, knows the image for what it is meant to be: the false sun he first saw, early that same morning. Yes, it is that thing, he is certain. It has significance!

  ‘Eora! Eora! Deen!’

  Thara’s eyes look skyward, filled with fear. Is her god angered?

  Quieter now, he points at a corner of the painting. He searches her expression, patiently, earnestly, longing for a spark of recognition.

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  She says yes.

  The matter is settled. Thara will return with him, to the place she calls ‘Grennidge’. What else can they do? He is desperate. In the city whose shape he has known all his life, still, he is a stranger.

  She is the only one qualified. He knows no one else.

  Her colour overcomes his grave doubts. This alone lends distance, and hopefully pardons the offence – as far as he is willing to commit. It is only by persuading himself that her womanhood is irrelevant, that Cole has finally been able to speak.

  Her sex is of no account.

  As long as he remembers that, the danger of their damnation is not so great.

  ‘Yes,’ Sarah said.

  But then she asked, ‘Why me?’

  King Cole looked very serious.

  ‘Guardian,’ he said, simply.

  Ah.

  Rebecca Viner had described her as ‘a guardian of the wisdom of dead men’. Or was it ‘words’? A pretty fanciful attempt to explain her away; Sarah had dismissed the overblown suggestion, even as she thrilled to it.

  Hearing the title again, and in such admiring tones, she found herself quite taken with it – such a glorified elevation of her self.

  She took a moment to savour this newfound sensation, this very female vanity.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Whit Monday, the 1st of June, 1868

  THE REJOICING CITY

  ‘Wherever he turned his wandering eyes

  Great wealth he did behold–

  And peace and plenty hand in hand,

  By the magic power of gold.’

  ~ Charles ‘The Inimitable’ Thatcher, ‘Look Out Below’

  When Sarah Larkin reappeared in the doorway to her father’s bedchamber she found him bright and busy. He sat at his desk, in nightshirt and dressing gown, surrounded by books and papers. She felt immediately concerned. Had he been disturbed? Was he aware they had a visitor – that she had a visitor?

  ‘How are you, father?’ she asked.

  He expelled only a short grunt by way of acknowledgement.

  Men were impossible to talk to. Sarah entered the room and hesitated, before advancing to the foot of his bed to declare her intentions.

  ‘I am going out for a few hours,’ she said.

  Only then did Lambert Larkin look at his daughter. Seeing that she was already dressed for departure – not realising that she had already been out that morning, and without opportunity to change – he took it as sure sign of her determination. His eye returned to the matter in hand.

  ‘What was all that infernal noise, a few minutes ago?’ he said.

  Lambert meant only to express disapproval: he had woken from an unbearably poignant dream, one that pained him still.

  Sarah saw that his breakfast tray lay untouched. Her father wasn’t in the habit of taking lunch; but neither was he likely to go hungry, at least not through any neglect of hers.

  ‘Oh, you heard that?’ she said. ‘A picture frame. Downstairs. It fell off the wall.’

  ‘By itself?’

  ‘Mary. Mary was dusting it.’

  Sarah looked away, down at the skirting boards. She was hopeless at lying. Some days before, upon her return from Kent, she had been obliged to dismiss Mary, the last remaining one of their servants. At seven shillings and tenpence a week, the simple truth was that they could no longer afford her. She had not yet dared to tell her father.

  ‘Is there anything else you might need?’ she asked.

  ‘“Else”?’ repeated Lambert. ‘If there is, I shall get Mary to bring it to me.’

  Sarah swallowed. ‘Oh, but Mary has gone,’ she said. ‘For the day. She had to go to Islington, for…’

  Panicked, she could not think of a good reason to go to Islington.

  ‘Do not say “oh”, child. It gives you a fish’s mouth,’ chided Lambert.

  Sarah already wrestled second thoughts. If Dr Epps was absent and the surgery closed, with neither herself nor Mary on hand her invalid father would be alone in the house, for who could say how long? Greenwich was not a short trip. ‘You will be all right, won’t you?’ she said.

  ‘I am busy,’ said Lambert, simply. ‘You will not be needed this afternoon. You may go.’

  She had only sought to be excused. He neither acknowledged her latest delivery of transcripts, nor thanked her for them.

  Sarah swept out of his throne-room, entirely glad not to have mentioned the mysterious gentleman waiting downstairs.

  Brighter skies had brought the crowds out in force. Taking to the streets, Sarah Larkin and her shadow were obliged to push their way through heavy pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic. Each absorbed in private thought, they hardly spoke at all.

  What on earth should make him want to visit the Royal Observatory? wondered Sarah. Perhaps the reason would become apparent once they were there.

  The worn pair of her father’s old shoes on his sleek feet suited the Aborigine rather well; the parson’s black coat, less so. It was not long enough in the sleeve, and fell noticeably slack around his shoulders. King Cole’s slender frame and narrow chest failed to fill the jacket out as her father once had; or did, rather.

  She did not like falling into that trap – admitting Lambert’s active life might be over.

  As they walked, Sarah took pains to observe the reactions of her associate to his surroundings. Were she to drop back a step, she found that he would stop and wait patiently for her to catch up. If she walked on ahead, they remained in tandem: she could not see him at all without turning around. It all became rather obvious, and anyway impolite. They proceeded side by side.

  Via surreptitious glances, she approved Cole’s splendid skin tone. Beneath the black surface glowed depths of burnished bronze – as if, like some Regency holdover, he was fashioned from ebonised wood. Sarah caught sight of their reflection in a shop’s window-glass; how her own grey flesh suffered by comparison. Hardly the tall, dark stranger of fairground fortune, he stood slightly shorter than the average height appropriate to his sex; she, somewhat taller than hers.

  He wore a grimace.

  ‘How do they fit, the shoes?’ Sarah asked. ‘I hope you do not find them too uncomf
ortable.’

  Cole merely smiled.

  With a waft of her hand she gestured that they should cross the road.

  How shabby Bloomsbury looked: the busy street congested with smoke and dirt, every exterior was of the same filthy grey. What must he make of it? She noticed how infrequent carvings in the surrounds to doors and windows would arrest his attention, the soot-caked structures otherwise showing very little ornamentation.

  They stood within the shadow of the Parish Church of St George. Its dark tower had terrified her ever since she was a little girl. Sarah disliked it still – a reproduction of the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, one of Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: by what right did a pagan monument squat there?

  Blackened by coal-smoke, the entire building was benighted, a match to the naked brick fronts of the surrounding tenements.

  ‘Bin big bushfire here,’ said Cole.

  He was right. The church itself looked burnt, more Satanic than Christian. Her entire neighbourhood was on the slide, a decline all too familiar. The horrors of Gin Lane crept nearer every day. What sort of a household was without at least one servant in its employ?

  Sarah shuddered and turned. She beckoned to Cole and with a sudden leap they were in the road, in the path of oncoming traffic. Luckily, a recent ruling obliged London General Omnibuses to pull in to the side to pick up their passengers.

  Sarah hoisted herself up, ducking through the still moving doorway. King Cole followed on. He had to bend almost double to enter. Bodies were packed close within the interior – a damp little lodge, air wet with breath. The smell of oranges did not entirely disguise sour odours. The gentlemen within sat bolt upright, their top hats scraping the low ceiling; ladies tilted heads in a more decorous incline.

  Sarah and Cole hazarded a path through a dozen or so feet, avoiding the poke of umbrellas, folded like broken-winged birds. Gaining their seats at last, they ended up near to the front. None of the passengers would meet anyone else’s eye; gathered too close for comfort, their bodies jerking helplessly in time.

  Sarah worried briefly that Cole might be taken for her Pompey, or a Caesar: in truth, the fashion for black manservants had long passed. She felt slightly surprised, but nonetheless relieved, that no especial notice was taken of them. Not for the first time, she followed his eye-line. Painted daubs above their heads celebrated the white man’s hunting – advertisements for scent and trouser, Stearine Sperm Candles and Ivory Soap (‘It Floats’).

  The conductor appeared next to them.

  ‘Where to?’ he asked.

  He shouted too loud. Sarah was measured in reply. ‘Where do you go?’

  ‘Ludgate!’

  Sarah had had in mind the St Paul’s Pier for their first port of call, so that was perfect. Purse in hand, she paid the minimum fare, sixpence each. She thought to check for at least two more coins with which to pay the ferryman, and enough again to get home.

  It took them over half an hour to make even partial headway down High Holborn. When they turned into Chancery-lane, the road stood completely snarled. King Cole evinced mild bemusement, but Sarah’s cheeks were burning.

  ‘It’s the Holborn Valley works, m’am.’ The conductor, stooped at their side, peered ahead. ‘They have just now finished a circus at the far end,’ he said, ‘at least as wide as that at Regent Street.’

  The conductor surveyed the immobile chaos without emotion, resigned to his lot.

  ‘Is there no way through?’ said Sarah.

  ‘We go down Chancery Lane, that’s our normal route,’ the conductor stated, still shouting. ‘But with all o’ that goin’ on, so it is for every’un else!’

  Red-faced, Sarah declared that they should quit the omnibus. King Cole, mute, complied.

  They walked the boundaries of Lincoln’s Inn, and then cut across the Inns and Chambers of St Dunstan’s. A maze of walkways and passages, this part of the city, with its gabled shops and galleried courtyards, was still almost medieval in character.

  ‘Dear me,’ exclaimed Sarah, ‘now I think we are completely lost.’

  A tug on the sleeve, and she found herself following the Aborigine through the antiquated district. He strode forthright and imperious, an impish hand resting on the lapel of her father’s black coat.

  The narrow alleyways out of the law courts soon gave way to a much wider thoroughfare, lined with a curious admixture of the old and new. They emerged a little west of the wedding-cake steeple of St Bride’s, ‘the Phoenix of Fleet-street’: Fleet-street named for the Fleet river, whose former valley it bisected, a sluggish ditch entirely submerged. A seething quagmire of mud and horse-dung, the road had even less chance of living up to its name. Omnibuses, four-wheeled broughams, hackney and hansom cabs, as well as merchant carts of every size and description – a thousand vehicles were held in furious stasis whilst their drivers bickered and swore, whips ineffectually cracking the miasmic air. All attempted to squeeze through the stone archway of Temple Bar, boundary marker between the Cities of London and Westminster.

  To the north and west of that giant frog-mouth lay the signs of a vast demolition.

  A massive Imperial programme of improvements, being conducted throughout the nation’s capital, required the equally radical destruction of its past – London’s oldest surviving parts. The city simultaneously ruined and restored, all remnants of earlier lives were being transubstantiated, into limestone, into brick and terracotta. The latest and greatest public buildings towered high overhead, ornate with frescoes, statuary, and stone carvings. From all sides figurines gesticulated and faces leered, as if extruded from the rock itself.

  Seeming overwhelmed, King Cole – formerly so confident – baulked and trembled in the balance; no longer sure which way to turn, after all.

  ‘You do not know this part of town?’ asked Sarah.

  His wide eyes turned her way, a reply so long in coming she thought he had not heard the question.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  Sarah Larkin recovered the lead, and they stumbled on towards St Paul’s Cathedral. A new bridge at Ludgate Hill cut straight across the cathedral’s western approach, obscuring even this mammoth landmark from view – just one of many rail networks scratching fresh scars across the face of London. Dust and fumes clogged the atmosphere, the smog of a million chimney fires in addition to the filth disgorged from hell-mouth excavations north and south. As the result, the uppermost swell of the dome could not be seen, even from as close as Ludgate Circus.

  Only when an immense shadow fell across them did King Cole look up towards where the sun struggled to pierce the murk. Sheer, perpendicular shock – hundreds of feet above their heads, filling the slender strip of sky, frowned a massive giant.

  Sarah heard the loose scuff of borrowed shoes – her father’s shoes – abruptly cease. Cole’s fingers brushed lightly against her sleeve.

  Turning, she followed the flex of his outstretched arm, pointing beyond them in solemn wonder.

  She had to raise a hand to shield her eyes against the light.

  She thought of snow, snow on coal. Portions of the cathedral walls had been blackened by soot, others washed clean by rain – a permanent etching in sunshine and shadow. This chequered appearance was common to Portland Stone, out of which so many of London’s grandest buildings were crafted.

  ‘Piebald,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Uah,’ King Cole agreed, ‘like Him g’nort!’

  She looked to him, uncertain.

  ‘Neighit!’ he declared. He imitated the sound, and then raised and stamped his foot.

  ‘Oh, horse!’ Sarah laughed.

  His teeth shone brilliant white in his black face.

  Moving south of the cathedral, they soon found themselves fenced in by hoardings and deafened by the roar of heavy machinery. Workers wielding picks and shovels tunnelled deep underground, laying railway lines, water and gas pipes. Vast subterranean tracts had been exposed, timber sleepers shoring up their excavations. Unremitting roadworks force
d the unhappy pair to forsake and re-mount the pavement countless times; a potent mix of ordure squelched underfoot, their route necessarily roundabout.

  ‘Half of London is being torn down,’ lamented Sarah, ‘the other half, torn up!’

  Coming finally to the end of the twisted narrows of Paul’s-wharf, the trekkers met with a heartening sight – a glittering expanse of bright water. The river at high tide, although fouled and stinking, seemed to them the very breath of life.

  ‘Old Father Thames!’ said Sarah, cheering.

  ‘Uah,’ nodded King Cole. ‘Serpent.’

  They stood alone on the St Paul’s Pier, and for a time Sarah worried that she might be mistaken. Then from among the crowding wherries and river-barges appeared a dingy little steamboat, the Nymph.

  A rush of suits, materialised from nowhere, filed past them from the dock, clerks and bookkeepers, frock coats and stovepipe hats a uniform black.

  Sarah paid the ferryman, and she and Cole took seats near to the prow. The Nymph swiftly gained the centre of the channel. As the engines changed gear, the funnel coughed up a small black cloud. Suspended overhead, it stayed with them, and proceeded to shower them liberally with smuts.

  They passed beneath the granite mass of Rennie’s London Bridge. From the Tower onwards, London best resembled a seaport. Wharves and warehouses in a continuous line concealed the enormous dockyards beyond. The shipping lanes either side were thoroughly overcrowded; with coasters, dredgers, galleys and lightermen; freighters, tramps, clippers and brigs. River traffic had tripled inside of a century.

  Lulling vapours curled from off the surface of the Thames. Beneath a roiling oilskin, scorning all light, the polluted river ran deep and dark. Making repeated attempts to break through, a sickly orange sun performed feats of alchemy, suffusing impure airborne particles with gilt.

  Into this daze the Nymph went gliding, everyone on board in a shallow trance.