He called for another pint and a bowl of shelled walnuts, devouring the nuts one after another, caught up in the marvel of their shape. Each intricately contrived walnut half was exactly like its neighbors. How cleverly they fit together, enclosed snugly in their shells, safe from the weather, just as he was enclosed in his own safe snug, laughing at the roaring night. There was nothing foolish about Diogenes’ barrels at all. Gilbert had seen that. They were a natural home, like the walnut shell or the shell of a snail. He contemplated on the bee in its hive and the tortoise in its domed chariot and the swallows and wasps in their mud nests. Nature was everywhere building barrels, to misquote the poet, and with great good sense.
He took out the brochure from the shop on Holland Road and scrutinized the various barrels and the countless contrivances that could be built into them. They were marvelous objects, these barrels—undeniable works of art and seaworthy into the bargain. His mind went back to the jolly, purple-hatted merrymakers outside the Magpie and Stump, and he was filled with a sense of longing that had no clear source or definition. “We know,” he muttered, nodding his head. He was flooded with a sagacious joy and determination. He wondered exactly what it was he so fundamentally knew—but he could not put it into words. It was simply too vast, like trying to make sense of the sky.
He was distracted by his pocket-watch, which was lying on the table next to his empty mug, although he didn’t remember having left it there. The perfectly round case of the watch attracted him—a barrel in its own right. It perfectly enclosed the workings—the intricately connected gears and springs that made up a living creature once they were put into motion. He saw in his mind’s eye this circular creature of gears and springs stepping out of its case like a hermit crab from out of its shell and going off on a journey to find a more expansive abode. It would make an elegant illustration if an artist could capture its essence, and he was awash with the notion that he was quite close to grasping what the entire thing meant.
He opened the watch case and looked straight into Alice’s face, a photograph of which was set into the inside of the cover.
He closed it hastily after noting that it was coming onto eleven o’clock; he had been running down mysteries for nearly three hours. He called for one more mug of porter, and when it came, he hurriedly opened another envelope of the powders, dusted the foam atop the porter, and then licked it away, savoring the flavor. If he could have five packets the first day, then he was still some way from overdoing it, and it had to be admitted that the effect of the powders brought about inarguable insight and clarity. His sciatic nerve had been silenced, and he meant to keep it that way.
He wondered at what time Diogenes set up his cart in the morning, for the urge was upon him to buy more of the envelopes of powder. He calculated the expense of a year’s supply: 1,460 envelopes divided by eight per crown piece, and four crowns to the pound—something in the neighborhood of forty-five pounds for the lot with a few shillings leftover. He knew for a fact that Gilbert had paid twice that sum for a case of French wine—good wine, no doubt, but “good” under the circumstances was an arguable quality, since the wine deadened the intellect and…
“Are you quite all right, sir?” the bar man asked him, and St. Ives realized that he had been talking aloud, perhaps for some time now.
The man’s temerity abruptly angered him, however, and he very nearly told him so. But on the instant the anger vanished, replaced by the benevolent thought that the poor brute was scarcely worth his ire. In fact the fellow was doing his best, no doubt. He considered offering him an envelope of the powders, but just as quickly decided against it. Until he had a safe supply of the envelopes, he would hold on tightly to the few he possessed.
“I’ve never been better,” he said, and handed the man his umbrella, saying, “Keep it for your trouble.” He took his coat from the peg, pocketed his pencil and note-book, and went out through the door into the courtyard, breathing in the delicious scent of the holy rain. He looked up at the sky and considered the clouds, none of them alike, and the fantastic shapes of the spaces between the clouds. Some sailed low in the sky and others higher, just as they damn well chose. What was a cloud, he asked himself as he walked along, but an ethereal barrel of rain afloat in the heavens?
It came to him that he should take out his note-book, find a sheltered place, and write this down, but now that he was moving, he was compelled to keep moving by an intense energy that raced through his veins and arteries. The bells of St. Magnus the Martyr were tolling the hour as he strode along Lower Thames Street past the bottom of Fish Street Hill, from which flowed a deep stream of water. He stood in the stream for a time, marveling at the water that filled his shoes.
Fish Street Hill!—the very name was laden with promise. “Hah!” he shouted, throwing up his arms and turning his face to the heavens. He angled up King William Street, the rain streaming down his face, past his open collar and into his shirt and off the tips of his fingers. Water rushed noisily through the rooftop gutters and poured from downspouts, contributing to the flood. He saw that the streets themselves were quite literally rivers—tributaries carrying the water that would fill the great London River and hence out to the sea, the Mother of all life on Earth….
He was immensely surprised to find himself looking up into the face of the massive toad that sat above the door of the Half Toad Inn. He had no recollection of time having passed or of having made any turnings since hearing the bells tolling midnight.
WATER DREAMS
HE AWAKENED SOME time later to find himself afloat on a broad river of great clarity. Far beneath the surface, waterweeds swayed in the current, and he could see transparent eels like ribbons of glass carried on the outward-moving tide toward the sea. The clear water was blood warm, the sky overhead blue as a robin’s egg, and the silver sea lay in the far distance. It was no river he had ever known, and even in sleep—for he was aware that he was dreaming—he wondered if this river might be all rivers in one, the ideal of a river, perhaps sleep itself. He had the sensation of floating on his back and looking at the sky, although without moving his head he saw beneath the surface of the river: silver eels swimming toward their destiny in the sea, the shifting, translucent green of the waterweeds, the rippling sunlight.
THE RIVER RETURNED to him carrying within it a blissful sense of ease and the awareness that he had been away for some indistinct length of time—asleep, he thought, asleep within the dream itself. He was borne out onto the vast, crystal sea, and soon was far from any visible shore, swept along on an ocean current—a river embedded in the sea—bound for a place of stillness in a world of profound calm. He was filled with a longing for the place toward which he was bound, a shimmering, green world of unfathomable peace and clarity, of waterweeds and small, swimming creatures, and he swimming among them in the green-tinted sunlight. Something within him recognized this place—a place from his childhood, he thought, or a place from childhood’s dream.
HE AWOKE SHIVERING, a vicious ache in his head. The dream was still vivid in his mind—more real than the dark room around him. It was not dissipating or fading from memory, something for which he was profoundly happy, although he was full of regret that it was a thing of the past. He shut his eyes and attempted to compose himself, but his frightfully alert mind refused to be composed. He sat up, staring stupidly at the window and a grey dawn. Very quietly he arose from the settee on which he had slept and made his way to the dresser against the wall. With a shaking hand he dumped the contents of two packages of powders into the tumbler, filled it with water from the pitcher, and drank it off, standing still for a long moment to allow the powders to compose his fibers.
LARKIN THE JUST
ALICE CAME AWAKE in a rush, noting that she was alone in the room, her book lying open on the bed beside her. There was a beam of sunlight showing between the gap in the window curtains and not a hint of last night’s storm. She sat for a moment, gathering her wits, recalling that she had intended to read u
ntil Langdon’s return. She must have fallen asleep. She had left the lamp burning, but it had no doubt consumed its oil and gone out. Langdon apparently hadn’t come in at all. He hadn’t slept in the bed, not even atop the bedclothes. And yet his pillow was missing.
He must have come in. She saw now that the lamp oil was diminished, but not gone. Evidently someone—Langdon—had quietly extinguished the lamp, very late.
She climbed out of bed, seeing now that he had spent the night on the thinly upholstered settee, for his pillow lay upon it, as did a mound of plush cushions that he must have carried up from the benches in the taproom downstairs. What an odd business, she thought, although surely there was an explanation for it. It came to her that he might have caught a cold while walking in the rain and so spent the night on the settee in order to keep his distance from her. He must have burrowed into a heap of cushions for warmth, no doubt awakening early and going downstairs.
She poured a tumbler of water from the pitcher and started to drink from it. She recoiled, however, at the fishy odor that arose from the glass. There was a powdery residue floating atop the water. It hadn’t been there last night. Suspicions came into her mind, but they were so farfetched that she dismissed them, and after making herself presentable as quickly as she could, she plucked up the cushions in order to carry them down with her.
They were quite damp, she discovered, as was the meager upholstery of the settee. Had he slept in his wet clothes? The corner of a well-worn book, bound in morocco leather, was just visible under the front edge of the bench—Langdon’s note-book, she discovered when she dropped the cushions and fetched it out. It was also wet. She looked for his coat on the peg near the door, but there was no coat. She set the note-book on the table next to the pitcher and basin, picked up the cushions again, and pushed out through the door, hurrying down the stairs, where she replaced the cushions and went into the breakfast room.
There was no sign of Langdon, only Tubby Frobisher sitting with a small girl, a child, with a shock of black hair pulled into pigtails. She was dressed like an orphan in a play, the rips in her dress sewn up with whip stitches using various colors of thread. The two of them were consuming the contents of a rack of toast, a dish of jam, and a pot of coffee with evident greed. The girl, whose cheeks were blue with blackcurrant jam, did not look up from her plate, but Tubby raised his knife, nodded to Alice, and gestured at an empty chair. Then, apparently seeing the look on her face, he asked, “What’s amiss?”
“Have you seen Langdon this morning?” she asked, keeping the worry out of her voice—an irrational worry, she assured herself. “He promised to breakfast with us so that we could fill him with regret for missing the opera.”
“Haven’t seen him or heard from him. Perhaps he’s gone out.”
“Possibly,” she said, and then went into the kitchen where both of the Billsons were hard at work, William cooking sausages at the stove and Henrietta emptying fruit and produce from baskets.
“Good morning to you,” she said. “Have you seen my husband this morning?”
“Aye,” William said. “He went out just at dawn in a hellfire hurry.”
“It was just when I was off to the market for produce,” Henrietta put in.
“Did he say where he was bound?”
“Not a word of it, ma’am,” Billson told her. “He didn’t look back. Seemed to be on a mission. He left a note, however, under the salt-cellar.” Billson found the message on a shelf and handed it to her—a damp piece of paper torn from the morocco note-book. The writing was childish, barely legible. His hand had clearly been shaking. In one place his pencil had torn a hole in the paper. “Out for a time,” it read.
“A time?” she muttered.
“Surely he had a good reason for going out,” Henrietta said. “There’s no one more sensible than the Professor. Sit down with Mr. Frobisher and Larkin and eat a bite. I’ll bet a shiny new farthing that your man will turn up in due course.”
Alice took a seat next to Tubby, who read the note and then reiterated what Henrietta had said about Langdon’s being a sensible man. “Coffee will see you right,” he said, filling her cup. “This is my great good friend Larkin the Just. We’ve just met this morning. William Billson introduced her to me as a rare plucked one, and I believe he told the truth. We’re eating pre-breakfast toast and jam to stimulate the digestive fluids in preparation for breakfast itself.”
“A sound idea,” Alice said, forcibly pushing the worry from her mind. “Hello, Larkin the Just.” She put out her hand and the girl shook it, perhaps a little skeptically. “How do you get along?”
“Prime, ma’am. Mayhem is my specialism, if that’s your meaning by how I get along. You’re quite beautiful. Are you royalty, then?”
“Royalty? No, but I met the Queen once. Surely you have nothing to do with mayhem?”
“Oh, yes, when we’re paid to do it, or when we takes a fancy to it. We start it spinning, like a top, and then we’re gone and leave it for others to put a stop to it.”
“William Billson has known Larkin for a great long time,” Tubby said. “He has the utmost faith in her loyalty, once she commits herself.”
“Then so do I,” Alice said, although it seemed to her that Larkin was more a wild animal than a civilized child. “How did you come to be called ‘the Just’?”
“On account of I didn’t gouge a man’s eye when I could’ve.” Her hand disappeared into the top of her shirt, and when it reappeared there was a hand’s-length, cylindrical white object in it—bone, apparently—with a claw-shaped hook carved into the end of it. It hung around her neck on a strip of leather. “It’s a gouger is what it is,” Larkin told her. “It goes in at the side up along the bugger’s nose, and then you give it a twist. It was give me by a sailor as knew my old dad, who carved it in Africa where he hunted it—the unicorn, I mean. It’s a bit of its horn. I’m handy with it.”
“Unicorn horn, is it?” Alice asked, staring at the girl for a moment, wondering whether she was being trifled with. Larkin couldn’t have been above ten years old. “And where is your old dad today?” she asked.
“Dead of the pipe. We lived in Limehouse mostly, and he had a bed at Tai Ling’s. I left when he copped it. They tried to take me to Mary Jeffries’ to make a whore of me, but I run off. Don’t remember my mum.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Alice said, and Larkin shrugged, as if she didn’t much share Alice’s sorrow. “Well, I’m glad you spared the…the man’s eye. King Solomon would have approved. Certainly you have a fitting name.”
The gouger had disappeared, and Larkin returned to her toast. Alice drank the strong coffee, thinking about Langdon again. At any moment he might walk in through the door, of course—this being a breakfast ‘worth coming into London for.’ It wouldn’t be the first time he had chased away in pursuit of a suddenly appearing…caterwaul, leaving her a vague explanation. But there were bothersome elements in this, certainly—his sleeping in wet clothes, for instance, and being careful not to awaken her. Perhaps it had been mere gallantry, she told herself.
“Larkin and I mean to pluck Uncle Gilbert from his barrel today, if you’re still willing to help, Alice,” Tubby said, making room on the table for the plates of sausage, eggs, beans, bacon, and black pudding that were just then coming out of the kitchen. “He has a vastly high regard for you, you know. You have a way with him.”
“Certainly I’ll do what I can. How will we find him?”
“I was up and about early, and consulted with William Billson, who consulted with Larkin. Larkin has a crew of pirates, do you see, whom we’ve managed to employ as a private army. We’ve got a strict rule against gouging of any sort, you’ll be happy to know. They scattered up and down as soon as we agreed upon a fee, and within half an hour two of them returned to report that there is to be a migration today at the base of London Bridge, near to where that quacksalver Diogenes does his business. The barrelers mean to launch at the turn of the tide. I’m assured that the
Primrose Hill faction is involved.”
“A migration?”
“Apparently they’re taking to the water, God help them.”
“It makes them into eels,” Larkin said, “and they must go to sea.”
“What makes them into eels?” Alice asked.
“The powders. Some goes quick, some slow. I know the Red Vests, and they told me. My mate Charley is one, and Jack Singer. It’s what’s in the powders, like I said. Glass eels dried out and ground up, along with what’s called ‘chemicals.’ Old Diogenes lays the eels in the sun out Brompton way, by the cemetery. If it’s hot out you can smell them to Putney. Charley told me, and he don’t lie and I don’t neither. They want to go home, the eels do. Their guts turn to mush afore they go, and they don’t eat.”
“And where is home?” Alice asked.
“Among the seaweeds,” Larkin told her.
“The great Sargasso, or so it’s reported,” Tubby said.
Alice stared at him for a moment. “This Diogenes is an enterprising man.”
“He’s rich is what,” Larkin said, “but Charley says his luck is out. Charley and Jack Singer mean to scarper before the rozzers take him.”
“That would be the police,” Tubby said to Alice, who nodded. “And that complicates our issue somewhat. If barrelling is outlawed, and the factions cut up rough, there’ll be trouble for one and all. The Here-and-Thereians won’t abandon their migration. We’re a long chalk better off taking Uncle out of his barrel than out of Newgate Prison.”
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 30