Salamander
Page 30
I tried. Much to the bookseller’s amusement. He told me not to waste my time.
Where is he now?
Not long after war was declared he went home to Paris. I sent a letter with him. He promised he would find someone to take it across the channel to London and deliver it.
Even at the best of times, the colonel says, letters miscarry. Perhaps when the siege ends …
Yes. Perhaps then the war will be over.
The stillness outside is broken by the crowing of a rooster. A sound, the colonel thinks, like a half-hearted challenge to the day, to bring something other than yet more bombs, more waiting. The young woman has sat down again and her gaze has come to rest on the broken remnants of the press.
So, the colonel says with a smile, the Commander of the Acheron predicted Quebec would be lost, did he?
He hears his own voice ring hollow. The mocking words echoing with the bleak certainty he cannot conceal. When she looks up he sees that she has heard it, too.
He wasn’t always right, she says. That I’m here at all is proof of that.
Yes. But even if Wolfe sails away this winter, someone else will come next spring at the head of another armada of ships crammed with men and guns. The Commander was really the most typical of Englishmen. When they have their minds set on something, even a handful of escaped slaves, they pursue it to the death, theirs or someone else’s makes little difference.
He rises stiffly from his chair, brushes plaster dust from the shoulders of his coat.
If the English hadn’t destroyed your press, he said, you would have gone on printing, I suppose. For the conquerors.
They would have asked me to print their proclamations, you mean. Their warnings and reward placards. And then, some day, their books.
Your father was obviously a rare craftsman, he says. We need such people in this part of the world.
She stands and looks out at the ruin of the shop, its vague shapes and shadows taking on harsh edges now in the morning light. She seems taller to him now, unburdened of the night and of her story.
Things can be taken away so quickly, she says. Lost almost before they are found. I thought if I could create something, out of what I’ve learned … But now I think this trade isn’t the way, for me.
So, he says quietly, what will you do?
She bends and sifts through the heaped remains of the press.
When the siege ends I will try to get to London, first of all. And then, I don’t know.
The colonel buckles on his swordbelt.
Indeed, mademoiselle. Perhaps, when the war is over, I will search for a different way as well. I would very much like to see some of the places you’ve visited. China. Terra Australis. Uncharted places.
I hope you will, Colonel.
And who knows, perhaps we will meet again somewhere. On the other side of the world.
I would like that.
When she hears the clop of his horse’s hooves fading away down the street, she returns to the wreckage of the press. She digs through the jumble of its shattered timbers, finding here and there a few broken shards of Ludwig. An ear. A bit of gold trim from his coat. She lifts the tympan and finds beneath it the head and trunk of the automaton. Miraculously, most of Ludwig is intact. Perhaps he can be repaired, in London, at the Cabinet of Wonders. She sets him aside and continues her search, finally unearthing a tray of type. The sorts, shifted in their compartments, have piled in corners like hillocks of leaden rubble.
She picks through the sorts, searching for accidental exiles in the wrong compartments, returning those that have strayed to their proper places. Her fingers are clumsy with cold, but as she works they warm, and soon she is moving almost at reading speed, barely noting each letter as it passes through her hands. When she is satisfied that all is in order she sweeps the brick dust from her unscathed work table and sets the typecase there.
Before she closes the battered lid, by habit she digs into the pocket of her leather work apron, in search of stray type. She fishes out a single sort. A blank slug, the last piece of the metallurgist’s type. She turns it over in her fingers, examining its absolute, unreadable surface. Gently she shuts the lid of the typecase and closes her fingers around the blank sort. Magpie, she whispers, and smiles. This one bit of metal, infinity in her pocket, she will keep when she leaves here, the beginning of a new collection.
For the star of the sea and the wise one
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This story is a work of fiction. The characters, including the historical figures, have been imagined.
Many books helped write this one. The art of printing was illuminated by Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style (Hartley & Marks, 1996); Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Kristina Johannsen’s Cabinets of Wonder: Nicholas Flood and the Magic of Technology (Porphyry Press, 1968). The China of this novel was inspired by Cao Xueqin’s The Dream of the Red Chamber and Wu Ching-Tzu’s The Scholars. Details of eighteenth-century Canton and the porcelain trade have been adapted from Chinese Export Porcelain, by Jean Mudge (Associated University Presses, 1981). Luciano Canfora’s The Vanished Library (University of California Press, 1989. Trans. Martin Ryle) and E.M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and Guide provided threads into that city’s labyrinths. The midwife’s fairytale on this page was adapted from a story in Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales. (Pantheon, 1980. Trans. George Martin). The excerpt on pages 128-29 is from The Adventures of Eovaii, by Eliza Haywood. The song on this page is by Thomas Arne.
The description of the alam owes much to “The Book of Sand,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. The novel that he never wrote was also a great inspiration.
An early version of “The Cage of Mirrors” was included in Threshold: An Anthology of Contemporary Writing from Alberta, edited by Srdja Pavlovic (University of Alberta Press, 1999). A version of the “Gardener’s Tale” appeared in Descant 105, Summer 1999.
Many thanks to Richard Harrison and Peter Oliva for their generous advice and encouragement, and to Aritha van Herk, the ideal reader. A special thank you to Ellen Seligman for her invaluable contributions to this book.
I am grateful to the crew of Pages Books in Calgary, for book talk and lore, and to the crew of NeWest Press for helpful suggestions. Thanks to George Bowering, Peter Ehlers, Jon Kertzer, Pamela McCallum, and Richard Wall; to Maria Batalla, Peter Buck, Anita Chong, Sharon Friedman, Carolyn Ives, Yukiko Kagami, Alberto Manguel, Ibrahim Sumrain, Ralph Vicinanza, and Thomas Wharton Sr.
Thank you, David Arthur, for the hour spent in your wondrous library, And finally, to Sharon Avery, descendant of pirates, boundless gratitude.
Thomas Wharton was born in northern Alberta. His acclaimed first novel, Icefields (1995), won the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Caribbean and Canada), the Writers Guild of Alberta Best First Book Award, and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize. Salamander (2001) was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. His work has been anthologized in Canada and the U.S.
Wharton lives in Edmonton with his wife, Sharon, and their three children. He is at work on his next novel.