Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  – I’ve been speaking with the doctors, the Abbé de Saint-Foix said, nodding to Snow as he stepped past her into the cell. He bowed curtly towards Pica. They are unanimous, he said, that it would be best for your father to be surrendered to my care.

  – I think it’s a good idea, the man with the palsy said.

  Pica backed away from the Abbé and crouched beside Flood. Snow drew one of the pistols halfway out of her apron pocket.

  – I would keep that hidden, Captain Amphitrite Snow, the Abbé said, frowning. Unless you truly do wish to be taken and hanged.

  – How did you find us? Snow growled.

  – After we parted in Alexandria, I tried to imagine what Pica and her father would do next. Where they might go to find the Countess. Evidently we had the same thought, that she might come to London, her longed-for City of the New.

  – My mother is not here, Pica said.

  – I did not come looking for her, the Abbé said. The time we spent together in the pasha’s employ was far too brief, and there is yet some unfinished business between us. I believe, mademoiselle, it should be clear what I want.

  – Us, Pica said.

  The Abbé smiled.

  – I am not your grandfather, the Abbé said. Nor is this the pasha’s domain. I will settle for the press, the ink, the paper. And whatever you were given by the metallurgist. Very little, really, wouldn’t you agree, in exchange for your father’s freedom. And your own.

  – Nothing, Flood said. They turned to him in surprise. His eyes were open and fixed on the Abbé. Isn’t that it, Abbé Ezequiel? You once told me every book has a book of nothing concealed in it. Isn’t that what you’re really looking for?

  He made an effort to rise and fell back against the wall. Pica took his arm, helped him to his feet.

  – A book, he went on, that will return you to the paradise of your father’s library.

  – You’re not as far gone as I had thought, the Abbé said, his voice setting each word down like a cold jewel on velvet. That is good. I am sure you would rather not spend the rest of your life in a place like this.

  – Of course he wouldn’t, said the palsied man.

  – Let us say you are right, the Abbé shrugged, about what I’m looking for. I would have thought, then, that you would be eager to show me what you’ve accomplished since we last met. After all, are we not really after the same thing, you and I? If one could print an infinite number of pages there would have to be, amid all those words, an infinite amount of nothing. Is that not so?

  – I haven’t any answers for you, Flood said. Take what you will and make of it what you can.

  The Abbé sighed.

  – You have come to your senses. And thus we need not tarry much longer in this terrible place. If I may, though, let me suggest what you should do in order to guarantee your newfound liberty. When you leave here, return to your ship and, as soon as the tide permits, head downriver. My associates will meet you past Southend-on-Sea, and transfer the printing equipment to their vessel.

  – And you? Snow asked with a dangerous grin. I hope you’ll be there with your associates.

  – Be assured you will see me again, the Abbé said, moving towards the door, and I will hold you to the bargain we have made.

  – We will hold you to it as well, Snow said. You have my word.

  The Abbé stepped up to her and raised his hand. She stiffened but made no other movement as he tucked a loose curl of hair back under her straw bonnet.

  – Your word, Captain Snow, is of little consequence to me.

  – Well then, the palsied man said brightly. You’ll be going now.

  Outside, the air had turned green and electric. The coachman’s horses snorted and tossed their heads.

  – Pleasure to see you again, sir, the coachman said, doffing his hat to Flood and glancing back at the gates. I take it we need to use haste.

  At Covent Garden, Snow left them in the coach and waded into the crowd to find the Turinis. By this time the sky had closed over and the first fat drops of rain were pattering on the awnings of the market stalls. People began running for shelter, and those who couldn’t find any were lifting baskets and newspapers over their heads. Pica turned from the window to look at her father, who had been drifting in and out of awareness since they left Bedlam. He lay back against the seat, his eyes closed.

  Snow returned with Turini, Darka, and Miza. Lolo had just gone off with his hard-earned money to buy himself the toy he had seen in a shop window the day they arrived.

  The rain was falling in earnest now, sweeping across the square in slashing gusts. Turini stowed his collapsible scaffold on the back of the coach and was about to set off in search of Lolo when the boy appeared, dashing through the rain with his hand tucked under his coat. When he reached them they all climbed into the hackney coach, dripping. Pica shouted to the coachman to take them to the nearest landing place.

  – Savoy Stairs it is, miss.

  The coach started off and she settled back, glancing across at her father to see that he was still sleeping quietly, despite the noise Lolo and his sister were making as they quarrelled over his prize. Turini growled at them. They left off arguing and took turns blowing on the whirligig so that the loop of cardpaper spun on the end of its curiously contrived wheel. Pica saw now that there were tiny paper figures affixed to either side of the loop.

  The rain roared on the coach roof. She leaned closer.

  On one side a rider on horseback. On the other side another rider, galloping upside down and in the opposite direction from the first. When Lolo spun the wheel, she could see that the riders were in fact both travelling in the same direction. Pursuing one another.

  – May I see that?

  Reluctantly, Lolo surrendered the toy to Pica. She set it spinning and saw that she had been right. Tracing the twisting path of the riders she saw that they galloped on the same side of the paper ribbon. Or was it that the ribbon really only had one side?

  Pica slid the window open, stuck her head out into the rain and shouted to the coachman. The coach slithered to a halt on the muddy pavement. She leaned towards Lolo and held up the whirligig.

  – Can you show me where you got this?

  The boy looked up at his father, who nodded.

  – Cabinet of Wonders, Lolo said.

  Pica glanced at Flood, who was stirring restlessly in his sleep.

  – We’ll get him to the ship, Snow said, swinging open the door.

  Tucking the whirligig into her breast pocket, Pica climbed out of the coach after Lolo. She let him take the lead back along the street to Covent Garden. Pelted by the driving rain they dashed across its flooded, empty expanse and down the slope of a narrow, winding alley. Lolo soon outpaced her and she called to him to wait, but the water pouring from the spouts of the eaves drowned out her voice.

  She ran, slashing through puddles and slipping in her thin shoes, under an arcade and around the curve of a lane of shops, where at last she saw the sign she had barely noticed that first day, the name painted in green and black above a deep-set narrow door.

  Lolo stood tugging at the brass door handle.

  – They must be closed now, Pica said. We’ll have to come back another time.

  She took hold of the handle and gave it a last tug to make her point. The door cracked open.

  It seemed to her at first as if they had stepped inside a giant pocketwatch. Wherever she looked something was in motion, bobbing, spinning, whirring away with a life of its own. In an alcove to one side a tin mouse crawled through a maze of whirring gears and ticking hammers. In another niche an Arabian xebec rode a sea monster’s back over waves fashioned of revolving tin cylinders. A hooded spectre rose from a trapdoor in the floor, and sank again. Mechanical birds sang and twittered from perches overhead.

  Down the long narrow room life-sized automata swivelled and bowed and danced. A Cossack gnashing his wooden teeth and brandishing a sabre. A woodcutter and a milkmaid leaning towards each other an
d then away again, with each approach almost but not quite embracing. An Indian woman and child in buckskin stepping out of a dark pine forest, startling her, their painted eyes seeming to watch her as she passed.

  In the centre of the room, in a great glass-sided case, stood a palace of ivory spires. Minuscule guardsmen paced the jewelled battlements. Around the walls fountains sprayed tiny jets of water over revolving statues of nymphs and nereids. A hedge maze spread in green whorls on either side of a broad marble thoroughfare. As Pica watched, her hands pressed against the glass, a gold carriage pulled by a team of six miniature white horses appeared, whirring out through the seashell gates, circled around and disappeared inside again. Pica’s wandering gaze finally came to rest on a wooden scaffolding on the palace lawn, a mounting for a toy-sized telescope into which little bending tin figures of a man, a woman, and a child were taking turns peering.

  Through the double panes of distorting glass she caught sight of Lolo, blowing on his coveted whirligig, about to disappear behind a clock case. She called his name in a furtive whisper and went after him, following the puddles left by his shoes.

  Further on, the shop broke up into smaller rooms and compartments on different levels, so that she found herself going up and down short flights of stairs and having to turn back and retrace her steps as she pursued the boy. She shivered in her wet clothes and kept on, aware that she was heading generally away from the front entrance.

  At last she caught up with Lolo, in a dark nook cluttered with wooden limbs hanging from the ceiling, empty metal housings stacked like discarded armour, bits and pieces of oily machinery piled on shelves. Unlike the rest of the shop, nothing here moved or made a sound.

  Among these unfinished and set-aside wonders she found Lolo and saw that he had found Madame Beaufort.

  The automaton sat in a velvet-curtained booth that resembled a travelling puppeteer’s stage, her name painted in spidery gold letters across the front panel. A pane of dusty glass with a window cut in it for coins separated her from prying hands, so that Pica could look both at the fortune teller’s porcelain features and her own reflection. The drunken Englishman in Canton had been right: despite Madame Beaufort’s Persian costume, there was a resemblance. The wavy auburn hair. The pale green eyes. She wondered if, when she reached the age the automaton was meant to portray, she would look out at the world with this glassy stare, the same for everyone, seeing nothing.

  With a waxen hand Madame Beaufort drew Lolo’s penny across the rough wooden counter towards her, until it disappeared in the folds of her dark green satin cloak. The automaton’s eyelids slid shut, its jaw rose and fell soundlessly. A bell chimed somewhere inside, the eyes clicked open, and the hand reappeared, holding a tiny paper scroll bound with red ribbon.

  – There you are, Pica said.

  The boy unrolled the stiff paper. Slowly he read the inscription to himself, then solemnly tucked the scroll into his vest pocket.

  – We have to go now, Pica said. Before someone catches us here.

  Lolo dug in a pocket, took out a second penny and thrust it at Pica.

  – My fortune? No, Lolo, Madame Beaufort has nothing to tell me.

  In the glass pane of the booth she caught a reflected movement behind her, turned and glimpsed, through a hanging garden of limbs, the most life-like creation yet. Another Madame Beaufort, but an older and more convincing one. She was seated at a table under a narrow glazed window, bent over a watchmaker’s vise that held a sphere of dull metal the size of a child’s fist. Unlike the other Madame Beaufort, this automaton was clothed not in a gaudy costume but in a pale blue dress and apron. Strands of faded russet hair had slipped from under the lace cap, and as Pica watched, a hand rose to brush them back behind an ear. This was accomplished, but still a finger strayed among the strands of hair, twining them slowly round itself. It was then that Pica realized her mistake. Machines did not forget themselves like that.

  With a pair of tweezers the woman plucked a small flat disk out of the top of the metal sphere and set it on the stage of a microscope. Peering through the aperture she scraped at the edge of the disk with a tiny hooked tool, the tendons in her thin hand pulsing. When she had finished she picked up the disk again with the tweezers, blew on it and inserted it gently back into the top of the sphere. She freed the sphere from the vise, twisted it in her hands and set it on the table. The sphere buzzed for a moment, gave three unevenly spaced clicks, and went silent.

  The woman sighed, lifted her spectacles and rubbed her eyes.

  – The shop is closed, she said. But you must be soaked. You can stay a while and dry off.

  Pica shrank back, then took Lolo’s hand and stepped forward.

  – The door was open, she said.

  The woman turned slowly and searched her out through the intervening watch works.

  – You found your brother, she finally said, taking off her spectacles and rising stiffly from her chair. Good. I heard you calling him.

  – He’s not my brother, ma’am.

  – Be that as it may, he shouldn’t be unattended. Things in this shop move unexpectedly. Some are dangerous. He was here alone just now …

  Pica held up the paper whirligig.

  – Yes, and bought this, the woman said, moving closer to take the toy from her. Is there something wrong with it?

  She spun the wheel.

  – No, ma’am, Pica said. It’s very clever. But I don’t really understand. How a piece of paper can have only one side.

  – I know, the woman said with the trace of a smile. I never understood it either.

  As she handed Lolo the whirligig, it slipped from her fingers and spun to the floor.

  – We heard about you, Pica said as Lolo dived after his prize. In Canton.

  – Canton? You’ve travelled a long way to get here.

  – We have a ship. My father used to live in London.

  Her throat tightened and she turned away. The Cabinet of Wonders seemed to have shrunk, closed in around her, so that she had to struggle to breathe. She put her hand to her chest and felt, under her bodice, the quoin key jab against her breastbone. She turned back and saw that the woman was sitting again at the table, her hands twined together in her lap.

  – What did you hear about me in Canton?

  – That you answer questions.

  Pica nodded towards the fortune teller.

  – That she does, I mean.

  The living Madame Beaufort was gazing at her with such motionless intensity that for a moment Pica thought the world had stopped. The look in the woman’s eyes was the same she had glimpsed in her father’s when she found him, frozen in time, at the top of the hatchway stairs.

  – Everything in this room is a question, the woman said, not taking her eyes off Pica.

  Lolo had left Pica’s side and stood nearby on tiptoe, batting at a painted wooden torso hanging from the ceiling.

  Not trusting herself to speak, Pica looked at the fortune teller in her glass cage, at the limbs hanging from chains, swinging where Lolo had passed and disturbed them. She glimpsed, through a thicket of gears and levers and pendulums, the far-off ivory palace. At last her gaze came to rest on the metal sphere in the vise.

  – That is a special kind of clock, the woman said. I’ve never gotten it working properly. It’s supposed to tell time by turning, like the earth.

  Lolo had strayed farther away, this time in the direction of the front of the shop.

  – I have to go, Pica said. My father …

  She stopped, tugged the quoin out by its frayed ribbon, slipped it over her head and hung it from the curled forefinger of one of the hanging arms.

  She went after Lolo and found him near the door, where she stopped for a moment and looked back the way she had come. The woman could not be seen.

  At Savoy Stairs, Pica found a wherry to take her and the boy back to the Bee, although they had to share it with another passenger, a young woman in a mud-spattered grey cloak, marked with a livid scar d
own one side of her face. After a moment, Pica realized it was the woman they had passed the other day, in the tunnel on the way to Covent Garden. She leaped nimbly aboard as the boatman was already casting off. When Pica asked to be taken to the custom-house dock, the young woman said that would be fine for her as well.

  Pica stood near the stern of the boat and gazed back the way they had come, even after the jutting wall of Blackfriars Stairs was obscured by the swarming river traffic. The world had grown larger, emptier. The rain had drawn off and the clouds were scudding away, their edges reddening in the sunset. From the river, the city was an exquisite crystal, washed clean of its grime and its memory, pitiless and perfect.

  When they pulled up at the custom house, Pica paid the boatman, helped Lolo out and hurried with him along the quay to the ship, glancing back to see the young woman with the scar following them at a steady, determined pace. She walked faster, whispering to Lolo to do the same. By the time they reached the gangplank they were running.

  Snow met them on the quarterdeck and told Pica that Flood was in the great cabin and the Turinis were tending to him.

  – Someone’s behind me, Pica said breathlessly, as the scarred woman stepped onto the gangplank.

  Snow raised a hand in salute.

  – Lucy Teach, she said. In ahead of the pack.

  Pica followed the direction of Snow’s nod and saw two more women in dark ankle-length cloaks, hurrying along the quay from the opposite direction.

  – Cat Nutley. Abena Khedjou.

  – You knew all the time, Pica said. You were waiting …

  – For you to finish here.

  There was a thump of boots on the port ladder, and the close-cropped head of another young woman appeared over the side.

  – Crook-Fingered Jane, Snow said, nodding, then turned to Pica. That’s the lot then.

  All four women were aboard the ship now, huddled together near the mainmast and gazing around inquisitively at the timbers and ropework. Two of them knelt on either side of the gangplank and looked up at Snow as if awaiting her order to draw it in. Lolo had already gone into the great cabin, and Pica was turning away to follow when Snow spoke again.