Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  – We’ll leave it under the pressing boards overnight, he said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes. Let the binding take.

  He picked up the book to place it under the pressing boards, turned it over in his hands for a moment and then held it out to her.

  – My father used to say, Make a beautiful thing, but remember, it is not only the material object we strive for. The work is not finished until the book passes into the hands of a reader.

  Pica took the book from him. The cover seemed to breathe under her hand like the hide of a living thing.

  – It’s so warm, she said.

  – The paste, Flood nodded. It will cool.

  She was about to open the book, then set it back down on the table.

  – All the work you’ve done. Shouldn’t you keep … ?

  – This one is unlike any other I’ve printed. It was made, somehow, out of all that has happened to us. What we have been, and will be. Even things hidden, and lost. That means it is your book, too. And maybe more yours than mine.

  – How could it be? It belongs to you.

  – I was thinking, he said, of the story you told me, not so long ago. About your life in Venice.

  – I didn’t tell it right, she said with an embarrassed shrug. Not the way I wanted to. I couldn’t find the words to say it all.

  – You were trying to tell everything. Everything that mattered to you, that was you. Do you remember what Samuel Kirshner said, about the books that come to be when someone dreams them?

  – Yes.

  – Perhaps this will become such a book, for you. When you enter its pages, I can’t say for certain what you’ll find. But no doubt it will enchant you, set you puzzles, even lead you astray. Wherever the book takes you, Pica, remember the way that led there, and you’ll know the way to go on.

  He placed the book between the heavy wooden pressing boards and tied them together with twine. She was tired now, and cold, and so she rose to leave. On the steps she halted to watch him tidying up, methodically cleaning and putting away his scattered tools, as if this work day had been like any other. She felt she should say something more, let him know that this, too, mattered to her.

  – Father …

  – Yes?

  Once again, she could not find the words.

  – Good night.

  The next morning, when Pica went down to the press room, he was not there. The book sat on the work table in the pale light from the hatch, a real book, ordinary and unknown.

  Her father had gone up into the city, Turini told her at breakfast, to find his old shop.

  She stepped out onto the quarterdeck, driven by a vague feeling of alarm. Up to now they had gone everywhere together. Standing at the taffrail she scanned the roofs and steeples, sharpening out of grey obscurity as the sky lightened.

  He would be fine out there. He had lived here. This was his city.

  She went back down to the press room, sat at the work table and stared for a long time at the book her father had made, before finally picking it up and opening it at random, somewhere near the middle. Fearing a desert of blank paper she was relieved to see rows of small, close-spaced print. She did not try to read at first, but flipped with her thumb through several pages, then shut the book again, held it in her hand, hefted it, felt the reassuring weight of a real book.

  Everything that mattered, her father had said. Everything she was a part of. Things hidden and lost.

  She opened the book again, this time at the beginning. Several pages, she could not tell how many, slipped between her thumb and the inside front cover. Try as she might, she could not reach the very first page, if there was one. The first few leaves, impossibly thin, evaded her blunt fingers.

  She began to read at the first page she could reach, found a table of contents. A listing of numbered chapters, but in no apparent order.

  XC. The briefest of chapters, nevertheless containing a very long kiss.

  VII. In which a choice of evils lies before the reader.

  LV. Storm, shipwreck, earthquake, and a preliminary note on what followed.

  XXXVII. Containing little or nothing.

  IX. How they were going to cut off the Princess’s head, and how they did not cut it off.

  DC. Containing a multitude of things the reader may not have expected to find in it.

  MCDLV. A chapter which would best follow the concluding chapter of the narrative, and which has thus been placed here to prevent its exclusion from the book.

  She suddenly understood that she might search for these chapters but never find them. In such a book they could remain ever out of reach, tantalizing and perfect. She thought of how she approached other books. On the shelf or just opened, a book was all possibility, a wondrous box of paper that could contain anything.

  CCLXV. A chapter within a chapter within a chapter within a chapter within a chapter …

  Repeated to the bottom of the page, and onto the next. She turned another page, and then another and another.

  … within a chapter within a chapter within a chapter …

  She felt a surge of panic and shut the book. A dizzying fear had come over her that in the few moments she had been reading time had raced on past her in the real world: days, months, years … Footsteps clumping across the planks overhead told her that the others were still aboard, getting ready for the day.

  She would join them, but not yet. Not yet.

  She opened the book again and riffled through, stopping here and there at random.

  A minute description of someone’s right ear, of the surprising contents of an iron chest buried in a sandbank beside the Orinoco River, of rain dripping from flower petals in a forest at night …

  She found the table of contents much further on, as if the thin leaves of paper were growing out of the covers, the book like a tree.

  Pages in other languages, pages of numbers and calculations, of zeros and ones. Paper dolls that could be scissored out and dressed in the clothes on adjacent pages. A tide and weather almanac for the year 2092.

  She skipped from place to place. Was there any order to all of this?

  Reams of baffling hieroglyphics. A description of the contents of another infinite book. A roster of forgotten lovers. A primer on how to read hieroglyphics …

  Her question was answered by a voice speaking out of her memory. You could ask the same thing of the universe.

  She looked up. The girl, Miza, was standing in the doorway watching her.

  – We’re going now, she said.

  Pica closed her eyes, distracted by the giddy thought that she was still reading. For some reason she thought of the Abbé, digging ancient manuscripts from holes in wet clay walls. She opened her eyes, tucked the book into her apron pocket.

  – Let’s go, then.

  Gently she closed the book on itself, almost certain she could hear, like the scratching of insects, its pages still turning.

  Flood was not sure why he had stayed away. He thought it might be the dreams that had begun to haunt the brief sleep he collapsed into in the small hours of the morning. Dreams in which he was living and working in the shop again. And in the dream someone would come to tell him that Pica was gone. The messenger was never someone he knew, and the reason was always different. Angry with him, she had gone back to Venice. She had found her mother but they could not wait for him to finish his work. In one dream she had married, and when he hurried outside he was just in time to see the wedding coach, absurdly huge, rolling away into the morning light.

  In his years in the cell he had learned to trust his dreams. They had rooted him, he understood later, in a ground of sanity far beneath his printing of an imaginary book. And now he sensed that something was in danger of being lost should he revisit the place of his youth. But if he did not go, he would never know what it was.

  He went along Cloth Fair, under the shadow of old St. Bartholomew’s, a ridge of grey stone in the luminous morning fog. The ancient Norman church had fallen int
o ruin long before he was born, its porches and side-chapels invaded by commerce, its cloisters become stables. A blacksmith had his forge in the north transept: the hours of his childhood were told not by bells or hymns but by the steady ring of the hammer on the anvil. He had wandered here as a boy, led by vague dreams of adventure, amid lace-makers and tailors whose shop doors were still flanked by grimacing devils and mournful, crumbling saints. Never stopping to consider what it meant that his forebears had chosen to settle here, up against a church named for the saint whose feast day had been stained with their blood.

  The entrance to Lady Chapel Court was narrower than he remembered, a gullet of wet stone. The square itself was deserted save for a ginger cat washing itself on a doorstep. The rusted old pump still stood crookedly over its weathered trough in the middle of the square.

  They used to play here, with the children of the other Huguenot merchants clustered around the church. Blind man’s buff. Fox and geese. He remembered a Christmas morning, Meg at the window, waking him with her breathless whisper, Nicholas, look. The snow that had fallen the night before was gone, leaving the dark cobbles bare except where someone had walked, pressing and hardening the snow underfoot so that it had not melted with the rest. A wandering track of white footprints crossed the square, circling the pump twice, turning back on itself so that the path, if there was one, was obscured by its own convolutions. Someone had passed through the court the night before, the veil of Christmas. Years later it occurred to him that the wayward tracks had probably been made by a drunken reveller weaving home. But that morning, the kind of white winter day when the world seems magical, unreal, he and Meg read another message in the unhurried meandering of those footprints. There were others like them.

  Past the pump, his feet remembered their way down the sloping cobbles to the doorway of what had once been Flood and Son, Printers. The old sign with its painted book no longer hung over the lintel. The windows were shuttered.

  As he was about to knock, the door opened suddenly and a thin, sallow woman appeared with a wash basin full of dirty water in her arms. She caught sight of him and stared with wide, frightened eyes.

  – May I speak to you a moment, ma’am?

  She continued to stare and said nothing. He took in her dry, cracked lips, the goiter under her chin.

  – I used to live here, Flood said. When it was a printing shop.

  The woman nodded her head slowly.

  – I’ve been away a long time, Flood said, and I just came to see if the house was vacant. For rent.

  The woman’s eyes went wider. She clutched the wash basin as if to protect it from him.

  – The landlord sent you?

  – No, I’m here on my own business. I just wanted to know …

  – He’s not here.

  – Who?

  – He won’t be back till after dark. You can come in and look for yourself. He’s not here.

  Flood was about to protest, but the thought of seeing the shop again drew him forward. He ducked in through the door and waited in the sudden dark for the woman to take the lead. She tossed the contents of the basin onto the cobbles, shut the door, and stood beside him, her wide eyes still fixed on him, her mouth gaping.

  The front room, which had been the print shop, looked much smaller and darker. Shirts and stockings hung from sagging lines along the walls. The air was close, and rank with the earthy smell of old potatoes. There was a small deal table near the window, heaped with unwashed crockery over which fat flies crawled.

  – I do keep things tidy, the woman said. I’ve been feeling poorly this fortnight, you see. You can tell him that.

  Flood nodded, glancing around for some evidence of the room he held in his memory. He found it at last in the hooks from which the laundry lines had been strung. His father had hung the damp, freshly printed sheets the same way, on wires tied to those hooks. His gaze travelled upward to the ceiling timbers and found the holes where the press had been bolted in place.

  – We didn’t make those, the woman said quickly. They were there before us.

  He nodded and climbed the steep, narrow staircase to the upper floor, stopping halfway to knead a sliver of pain out of his bad leg. Looking back, he saw the woman watching him from the bottom of the stairs.

  The doors to the two bedrooms were both slightly ajar. He stepped into the one that had been his and Meg’s. Something tattered, a curtain or blanket, had been hung over the window, and he crossed the dark room with his hands outstretched to brush it aside. The light struck him like a blow and when he could see again he looked through the warped glass down into the square and saw her.

  She was spinning, her red cloak bright against the snow. He scraped a nail against the frost to see her better, saw her fall into the drifted snow laughing, her arms outstretched.

  He tried the latch and found it had been painted shut. When he looked again she was sitting, looking up at the window and calling to him. He saw her lips move and knew what she was saying, although he could not hear it.

  Nicholas. Come outside.

  He touched his fingertips to the warped pane, felt the sun’s heat in the glass. She was gone. The court was dusty and bare.

  A whisper of a voice spoke behind him.

  – Is that you … ?

  He turned. In one corner of the room stood a narrow bed he had not noticed in the dark. On it, covered in a heap of rags, lay the skeleton of a man or woman, he could not tell. Long white hair growing out of a yellow skull. The eyes in their deep sockets clouded, unseeing.

  He backed slowly out of the room, left the house without speaking again to the woman downstairs.

  For the rest of the morning he wandered, letting his feet take him where they would while his thoughts chased round and round the blank at their centre. Finally he was brought up short by a wall and looked around to see that he was at the blind end of a lane he did not recognize. There was no one about to ask, and the houses were grand but cold and unwelcoming. Had he strayed north, or south?

  After an indeterminate number of turns and windings he came out unexpectedly into the clamour of Fleet Street. As he stopped to rest his throbbing leg and gain his bearings, the street began to waver before his eyes. He tried to work out how many hours it had been since he had eaten and remembered that at dawn, before Pica woke, he had wolfed down some bread. Perhaps he could eat at the coffee house the coachman had recommended, although he could not remember its name now. He held out his hands, alarmed at how badly they were shaking. A memory came to him that made him smile, Irena’s white hand at the breakfast table that last morning, the tips of her fingers touching his for an instant, a secret message among the porcelain and silver.

  Then his head seemed to swoop upward into the air, the street fell away from him and he found himself kneeling, gazing at drops of blood blossoming on the pavement.

  – Nasty spill, sir.

  Someone clutching his arm.

  – I’m fine.

  He climbed shakily to his feet and faced his helper, a pockmarked boy in a straw hat and grimy apron.

  – Bit of a scrape.

  Flood held up his hand, saw the gash below the thumb, the welling blood.

  – So you’ll be all right, then, sir?

  A tall wicker basket stood nearby, covered in a white cloth napkin under which Flood glimpsed golden-brown rolls, the dark sheen of ale bottles stippled with droplets of condensation.

  – Could I –

  He patted his pockets, forgetting where he had put his purse of coins.

  – Would you be able to sell me something?

  – Sorry, sir, the boy said, eyeing him now with distrust. These are already paid for by a gentleman up the street. I’m on the way now to deliver them.

  With a grunt he shouldered the basket, then seemed to hesitate. He plucked the napkin from the basket and handed it to Flood.

  – Here. For your hand. ‘Day, sir.

  Numbly, Flood took the napkin and watched the boy stagger away u
nder his load. He held the warm, starched cloth up to his face to inhale the steamy aroma of fresh-baked bread. He folded the napkin lengthwise twice, wrapped it around his hand and knotted it. A spasm of pain shot up his arm.

  He had to get back to the ship before something worse happened. But instead of moving on he stood in the street, letting the unending stream of passersby flow around him.

  Something Irena had once told him flitted moth-like through his thoughts. What was it? He stared about him in the street as if the answer lay there.

  Here the buildings move, she had said, and the people stand still. She was speaking of her father’s castle, of the system that, in changing ceaselessly, never changed anything that mattered.

  All at once he thought of something he had seen yesterday, a fleeting image noted in passing that had only now, in the dark corridors of his mind, encountered the memory of her words. He knew now where he might find her, but still he stood, waiting, tugging at the thread connecting image and words to see if it would hold, or break and leave him stranded.

  He was almost spent. It would be best to return to the ship while he was still able to make the journey. He could find Pica, bring her with him in case he lost his way again. But if the thread leading him out of the labyrinth was a lie, the answer to the wrong riddle …

  He had to find out for himself, without raising the girl’s hopes. If he was wrong it was better for her not to know.

  Pica stood in a great open square, a place without a name, surrounded by a milling crowd of strangers. She had bought an orange from a fruit vendor but had not yet peeled it. If she could just find the river, she was certain some familiar landmark along its banks would orient her. She had already asked three people how to get to Blackfriars Stairs and had received three different answers. That told her one thing for certain: she was a long way from the river.

  In the morning she had accompanied the Turinis to Covent Garden and then struck out on her own. She had a vague idea of where to look for her father’s print shop, but after losing herself among the winding lanes around St. Paul’s she simply wandered. When she rested, she would take the book out of her apron and turn it over in her hands, tempted but unwilling to brave two labyrinths at the same time.