by Ross King
No, I thought, shuffling through his doorway a few minutes later and back into the heat, thinking of the water-damaged volume in the queer little laboratory: not quite all of the copies had vanished. But as I wandered aimlessly back towards Charing Cross I wondered if I had not wasted my time after all. For what connections could exist between Ortelius's Theatrum and the Hermetic text I had been hired to locate? Between a new map of the world and a manuscript of ancient wisdom? But then I recalled what Mr. Barnacle had said about the age of discovery and wondered if I had stumbled upon a connection, however remote, with Sir Ambrose's expedition to Guiana, if in fact the voyage ever took place.
I thrust the thought from my head. I decided that my imagination, like my feet, had taken me too far afield. It was time to return home.
***
It must have been after six o'clock when I hailed a hackney coach outside the Postman's Horn (in whose tiny garden I had consoled myself with another pint of ale under a mulberry tree) and began making my way back towards London Bridge through the knots and streams of evening traffic. I fell asleep after a few minutes but was roused, somewhere along Fleet Street, by the sound of shouting. The traffic must have been even thicker now, because for minutes on end the hack barely moved. I dozed again but found myself awakened once more, this time by the abrupt, two-toned bleat of a horn. I sat upright and drew back the curtain, expecting to see the Fleet Bridge with Ludgate beyond it. Only we were no longer in Fleet Street.
I thrust my head outside the window and peered up and down the street. We must have taken a wrong turn. I didn't recognise any of the taverns and alehouses overhanging the street, or even the street itself, a narrow, deserted channel darkened by billows of black smoke.
'Driver!' I rapped on the roof of the coach. Had the idiot lost his bearings?
'Sir?'
'Where the devil are you taking us, man?'
He had swivelled round in his seat, a big bear of a fellow with a thick neck and sun-peeled nose. He was grinning uneasily through a set of wooden dentures.
'An accident in Fleet Street. Cart-horse dropped down dead, sir. So I thought that if you pleased-'
I interrupted him. 'Where are we?'
'Whitefriars, sir,' he replied, teeth clicking. 'Alsatia. I thought I'd come back up to the Fleet Bridge from Water Lane, sir, and then-'
'Alsatia-?'
The narrow passage had now assumed a more sinister aspect. I knew of Alsatia's unsavoury reputation. It was a dangerous hinterland beside the noxious sludge of the Fleet River: a dozen-odd streets and God only knew how many back courts and alleyways, all claiming exemption from the jurisdiction of the City's magistrates and justices by right of a charter granted earlier in the century by King James. The result of these privileges was that the quarter now gave sanctuary to criminals and villains of every description. Bailiffs and catchpoles entered at their peril, as did anyone else foolish enough to wander south of Fleet Street. The horn that awakened me must have been, I supposed, a signal from one of their look-outs, a warning to the others that strangers had arrived in their midst. Although the quarter now seemed innocent enough in its faint gilding of antique-gold sunlight, I was taking no chances.
'Take us out of here immediately,' I commanded the driver.
'Yes, sir.'
The hack shunted forward, negotiated a dog's-leg, rounded a bend, then crept through a tight street bordered on either side by decrepit buildings whose window-panes were filmed with grease and soot. The road was cratered with pot-holes, a few of which had been imperfectly repaired with brushwood. No one seemed to be about. The Thames lay to our right, parallaxing into view every now and then across vacant, rubble-littered lots, its front lined by a number of precarious-looking wharves. Black ghosts of coal dust hurried across our path. We kept a course parallel to the river, the hack swaying from side to side as the wooden-toothed Jehu on the box-seat picked our way recklessly round an obstacle course of desquamated roof-tiles, shattered bits of quern-stone and the iron hoops and broken staves of long-emptied kegs of ale. Soon I could smell the mud of the Fleet; then a minute later its bank cut us off, and we turned on to a path that did not, to my eyes, look like leading back up to Fleet Street.
'For God's sake, man!'
'Another minute, sir…'
But after another minute we were still bumping and swaying on the path, downwind of the constipated river, our wheels squelching in the mud. The Fleet's surface was scummed over and clouds of insects hung in the air. I covered my nose with a handkerchief and held my breath.
All at once, however, I caught sight through the window of something that looked familiar, a bit of graffito-the work of a child?-scrawled in chalk across a dead wall, thus:
I craned my neck as we lumbered slowly past. What did this peculiar hieroglyph mean? Was it the caricature of a man? A horned man? Perhaps the devil? I was certain I had seen the figure somewhere before. But where? In a book?
'Damn!'
I swung round and peered up at the box-seat. 'What is it?'
'Apologies, sir.' The hack had stopped moving. 'We seem to have reached a dead end.'
'A dead end-?'
The graffito was forgotten. I flung open the door, stepped outside and immediately sank halfway to my ankles in some sort of ooze. The horses, too, stood fetlock-deep in sludge and the wheels of the hack were buried to their rims. I raised my eyes. I could see ahead of us the bell-tower of Bridewell Prison and the steeple of St. Bride's, but little else other than a cluster of sheds in the gathering shadows. It was later than I had realised, for the sun was dipping behind the irregular serrulations of Whitehall Palace, and here and there among the buildings a few rush-lights had begun to flicker. Alsatia was coming awake.
'Allow me, sir.'
The driver tossed his whip aside and hopped down from his box, giving me an ingratiating smile. He had almost guided me back inside, when I looked up from the mire to see that a light had appeared in the window of the building nearest us: a tavern, from the look of it. Its signboard creaked faintly in the breeze. I squinted at its inscription. I could make out the head of some sort of animal and a wink of gold paint.
'Come along, sir.' The driver's hands pressed my shoulders. 'Sir? Is everything all right?'
'Yes…' I barely heard him. I was pressing a shilling into his palm, not looking at him. 'Here-your money. Take it.' I was already walking towards the tavern. 'Now go.'
I heard his incredulous voice behind me: 'Sir?'
'Go!'
The mud sucked at my boots and I had to wrench them free at each step. But a few seconds later I was on solid ground, a bricked footpath, and the tavern rose before me. The door opened, throwing a triangle of light across the bricks. I was moving forward, squinting at the signboard. And, once again I saw the peeling portrait, clearer now: the head of a buck whose antlers had been painted gold. Above the antlers, three words: THE GOLDEN HORN.
Chapter Four
It was the smell that struck me first, stale pipe and coal smoke mingled with sawdust and vermiculated wood daubed with pitch: the smell of a chamber that had seen neither broom nor beeswax, neither light nor air. Then, as I stepped inside and my pupils adapted to the dim light, I caught what became the most pervasive scent of all: coffee. For the Golden Horn wasn't a tavern after all, but a coffee-house.
The door swung shut behind me and I took a few more steps through the hearth smoke, casting about for a chair. A coffee-house was the last thing I expected to find in the heart of Alsatia, though I shouldn't really have been surprised, because even then, as far back as 1660, it seemed that a coffee-house stood in every street. I had only ever been inside one of them, the Greek's Head, an airy place filled with would-be actors and poets, and its congenial atmosphere could not possibly have prepared me for the smoke and gloom of the Golden Horn.
I found a seat, a three-legged stool, and sat down well away from the fire, which was drawing poorly.
'Your pleasure, sir?'
A short and
pot-bellied waiter had appeared beside me, wiping his hands on a grubby apron. Behind him, two unsavoury-looking men sat in grave discussion, while behind them a lone man, the one who had entered a moment earlier, sat with his back to us, paring the calluses on his palms with a knife. As I looked around me at the crude furniture, the tiny hearth, the curled handbills yellowing on the walls, I wondered what tangled thread could possibly connect the Golden Horn to Pontifex Hall. All at once I doubted whether the patterns I was seeing-the cipher, the keyword, the strange verse, Strabo, now the Golden Horn coffee-house-had any significance beyond my own imagination. Was there a meaning behind this series of clues, or only chance and coincidence?
There was only one way to find out. I reached into my pocket and withdrew a penny. 'A dish of coffee, please.'
But no clues or mysterious powers revealed themselves; at least, not yet. By the time I finished the drink-a bitter, sludgy brew-the room had filled with more customers. A dozen-odd men had arrived, singly or in twos, each of them shabbily dressed, with scuffed boots and patched coats. Conversation was sporadic and quiet, punctuated by guttural laughter. The waiter moved back and forth from the counter to the tables, dishes clattering on his tray. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. I had been wrong about the significance of the name; it must have been a coincidence, nothing more. There were probably half a dozen taverns or coffee-houses called The Golden Horn, none of which had any connection with Pontifex Hall, least of all this one.
It was only after a few more minutes that I noticed the cabinet. It stood in the corner of the room, a small cabinet of rarities of the sort used by proprietors to attract custom. But from my seat I could see how this particular case was a sorrier collection than most, a witch's cupboard unlikely to convince even the most gullible patron. But I was curious, if not gullible, so I rose from my chair and crossed the floor.
The corner was darker than elsewhere, and no one else was paying the least bit of attention to the half-hearted display. Misspelled cards inscribed in a shaky hand identified a half-dozen uninspiring objects that seemed to cringe behind the glass. I leaned forward, squinting through my spectacles. A worm-eaten piece of cloth was identified as part of Edward the Confessor's shroud, while, beside it, an unremarkable wooden branch, half rotted, was reported as coming from a tree against which glanced the arrow that killed King William Rufus. According to its label, another even more undistinguished fragment had been chipped from the tomb of Sebert, King of the Saxons.
I almost burst out laughing at the sight of these bogus fragments of history, but then another of the cards caught my eye. Yellowed and curling, propped at the back of the cabinet, it identified a few square inches of frayed canvas as part of the main topsail of the Britomart, one of the ships in Sir Walter Raleigh's Orinoco expedition of 1617. I frowned and leaned forward again. I doubted the scrap was any more authentic than the others, but it reminded me of the patent in the coffin at Pontifex Hall, the one for the construction of the Philip Sidney.
And then I saw the last exhibit in the cabinet, by far the most gruesome. It, too, was at the back of the cabinet and looked like the severed head of a man. I started, then leaned forward again, goggling at this gruesome curio from what must have been some barbaric and heathen cult. It made a horrific sight. Matted brown hair hung over a tallow-coloured brow, beneath which two eyeballs goggled back, one pointed at the ceiling, the other at the floor. The left eyelid drooped, suggesting a wink, while the lips-grotesquely thick and painted red like a harlot's-were twisted into a cynical and knowing grin. But no sooner did I realise that the head was a fake, made of wax and velvet, than I was startled again, this time by the placard propped beneath the protuberant chin and inscribed in the same childish hand as the others:
The Head of an Automaton from
the Kingdom of Bohemia, once Belonging to
His Imperial Majesty, Rudolf II
By the time I crept back to my table, the windows had darkened and hearth smoke was wreathing about the joists. My hand shook as I held the dish to my lips. I wondered whether the grisly head was more authentic than the other objects. Had it somehow found its way here from Pontifex Hall? Via Cromwell's soldiers, perhaps, or some other band of looters?
I sat in the chair for another thirty minutes, feeling ever more exhausted and anxious, throwing the occasional glance at the waxwork skull that seemed to wink back at me, smug and knowing, from behind its pane of glass. The dish of coffee, far from soothing me, as I had hoped, seemed to have set my nerves on edge. When my waiter shuffled past, however, I managed to point at the cabinet and ask how the item had been acquired. But he claimed to know neither how nor when it might have arrived in the Golden Horn. Indeed, it almost seemed from his surprised and then puzzled expression that he had never so much as noticed the cabinet before, let alone its most horrific inhabitant.
I decided to return home, now regretting that I had dismissed my driver so quickly. The journey back to Fleet Street was bound to be dangerous. I would have to travel on foot, I knew, because it was unlikely that a hackney-coach would stray into this street, especially after dark. My mind filled with all sorts of unpleasant encounters, which I tried to thrust aside as I threaded my way to the door.
It was then that I made my last discovery of the evening. As I reached the door I noticed a handbill pasted on the wall beside the jamb. There was nothing unusual about it, because the walls of the coffee-house were papered with all sorts of these notices. From where I sat I had been able to read a score or two of flyblown playbills, tradesmen's cards, obscene ballads printed on fox-marked broadsheets, together with bits of graffiti, also obscene, either carved into the benches and tables or else daubed on to the beams. So I almost passed the handbill without a thought, but as I stood aside to allow others to enter through the doorway, the inscription, a murky copperplate engraving, attracted my eye:
NOTICE OF AN AUCTION
to be held at the GOLDEN HORN, Whitefriars,
on the 19th Day of July, at Nine o'clock in the Morning,
at which time many diverse and uncommon Books
shall be exposed to View and auctioned
in 300 Lots
by Doctor Samuel Pickvance
I stood staring at the handbill as several customers pushed inside and then several more pushed past me into the night. A book auction? It was as if I had stumbled across an edition of Homer or Virgil in the forests of Guiana. I thought I knew everyone in the London book trade, including all of the auctioneers, but I had never heard of anyone named Pickvance, if that was in fact his real name. I wondered what 'diverse and uncommon' books he would be selling and what sort of collectors might turn up to bid for them. But most of all I wondered why he had chosen to auction them in the Golden Horn. It would be easy enough to find out, though, because the nineteenth, the day of the auction, was only two days hence.
Alsatia seemed almost peaceful as I stepped on to the tessellated path, the evening air cool and pleasant compared with the hellish climate of the Golden Horn. The illusion did not last long. A moment later I smelled the Fleet and was bumped roughly aside as four or five men, all wearing falchions or daggers on their hips, swaggered towards the door of the coffee-house. Other figures were moving about in the shadows. Alsatia had come brutishly to life. I shuddered at the prospect of the journey that now awaited me.
But I would make a return trip in two days. I knew this already as I turned round for a last look at the gold antler and the inscription above, neither more than a shadow in the failed light, but each one now a glinting hieroglyph. For there must be a connection, I was suddenly certain, between the parchment I was seeking and the 'strange and uncommon' books of Dr. Pickvance.
***
The journey back to Nonsuch House was, in the event, without incident. I followed the wheel tracks down towards the river and found a waterman dozing at his oars alongside one of the coal wharves. For two shillings he agreed to row me downstream on the tide, which w
as ebbing once more. When he had fitted the oars into the rowlocks and shoved off with a grunt, I lay back in the sculler and watched the thinning spray of lights ashore. Buildings and spires slipped slowly past; a boat overtook us. Our oars dipped and lifted, dipped and lifted, mud from the shallows catching on the blades and dolloping back into the water. The pitched roof of the Golden Horn shrank, dwindled, disappeared. A few minutes later I could see the moon rising above the chimney-pots on London Bridge. I closed my eyes and felt the sculler slip between the stone piers and plunge, weightless, into five feet of roaring darkness and a sudden rush of spray and air.
Emerging on the other side, legs trembling, I disembarked to find a light burning in my corner of Nonsuch House. Monk had retired to bed, but Margaret was in the kitchen, pickling oysters. She scolded me for missing my supper, boiled brawn, which I ate cold, sitting alone in my study, exhausted. Thirty minutes later I, too, had crawled into bed. I lay still for a long while, listening to the tide gurgling through the piers and trying to steady my breathing. I felt for a moment as if I was still falling between the giant legs of the bridge; as if everything beneath me had, like the sculler, given way to empty air and exhilarated suspension. Because as I drifted asleep I was thinking not only of the handbill pasted to the wall of the Golden Horn but also of the letter, imprinted with a familiar seal, that had been propped on my desk, awaiting my return.