Carver's Quest

by Rennison, Nick

  By the time he was free and able to sail home, Mr Moorhouse had been cured permanently of any further desire to leave his native land. Now, more than fifty years after his Levantine adventure, he rarely set foot outside London. He sat for hours in the smoking room of the Marco Polo, puffing contentedly on a succession of foul-smelling cigars and indulging in amiably inconsequential conversation with anyone prepared to join him at his table. Adam found him a curiously relaxing companion.

  ‘Clever fellow, that Boucicault,’ Mr Moorhouse remarked out of the blue, after several minutes of silence. ‘Saw that play of his, After Dark, at the Princess’s a couple of seasons ago. Did you see it?’

  Adam said he had not had the pleasure.

  ‘Damned great train comes thundering across the stage halfway through it.’ Mr Moorhouse made vague, waving motions with his hands to indicate the size of the train. ‘Man lying bound to the tracks. Engine getting closer and closer. Train whistle going like billy-o. Terribly exciting. Thought I was going to have conniptions.’

  Adam said he was sorry he had missed it.

  ‘Train didn’t hit him, though. God knows how. Think I must

  have looked away for a second and next thing you know, the man’s up and free. Never did work out how the blazes they did it.’

  Mr Moorhouse fell silent again, as if he was still struggling to understand the logistical details of the sensational scenes he had seen two years earlier. Adam returned to his own thoughts, many of which circled around the attractive figure of the young woman who had called at Doughty Street the previous day. Who had she really been? Was her name really Emily Maitland? And what had been her purpose in flouting convention so flagrantly by visiting him in his rooms? Although his vanity had been tickled by her claim to be an admirer of his book, he was not sure he believed her. Nor was he sure he believed her interrupted tale of watching the Fields expedition arrive at Salonika’s waterfront. The professor, he remembered, had gone out of his way to ensure that they had arrived without fanfare. It was unlikely that she and her mother could have learned their names or that they were English. And why would she knock on his door three years later in order to inform him of the fact that she had seen him in Salonika? It made no sense. He was at a loss to imagine any reason for her visit. And, once she was there, why had she left so suddenly and without a word of explanation? Quint’s noisy destruction of the plates in the dark room had been a shock, but surely not sufficient to scare a young woman into flight. Certainly not one who seemed so self-possessed as Miss Maitland. Adam was faced with plenty of questions but few answers. After a minute, his companion broke in upon his thoughts.

  ‘By the way, Carver. Almost forgot to tell you. Fellow was in here asking after you last night. Asking if you’d be at the memorial dinner for Speke on Thursday. Told him I thought you would be. Hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Fellow, Mr Moorhouse? What sort of fellow?’

  Mr Moorhouse seemed taken aback by the question. ‘Tall-ish chap. Balding.’ The old man quickly exhausted his powers of description. ‘Don’t recall much more about him, to be honest… except, now I come to think of it, he did have a scar you couldn’t help noticing. Above his eye. Like a crescent moon. Here.’

  Moorhouse pointed to his own brow. ‘Sorry, old chap. Hope I haven’t committed a faux pas of any kind.’

  * * * * *

  With Adam at the Marco Polo, Quint Devlin was alone in the rooms in Doughty Street. He had seated himself in the best chair in the sitting room and was busily engaged in packing his favourite pipe with the villainously smelling tobacco he favoured. His intention was to spend the next hour doing nothing more strenuous than inhaling and exhaling it.

  Quint had gained his present name one day in 1828, when he was but a month old. Perhaps he had had some other name bestowed upon him before he was discovered, wrapped in a blanket and lying on the steps of the St Nicholas Hospital for Young Foundlings in Ely Place, but if he had, it had been lost. The Reverend Malachi Merridew, spiritual director of St Nicholas, who had been presented with four other orphaned infants that week decided that, as the fifth, this one should be named ‘Quintus’. The ‘Devlin’, more prosaically, had come from the blanket in which the baby had been found. On the blanket was a label which read: ‘The property of Devlin’s Boarding House, Ardee Street, Dublin’. So it was as Quintus Devlin that the Reverend Merridew presented this particular foundling to the world. The foundling no sooner reached an age when he could speak than he decided that a two-syllable Christian name was simply too cumbersome. Quintus became Quint and had remained so for forty years.

  During those forty years, Quint’s life had had both its ups and its downs. Downs had included a short spell working the treadmill at the Coldbath Fields House of Correction, after a misunderstanding with another man involving the ownership of a horse; and an even shorter spell spent soldiering in one of the least illustrious regiments of the British Army. Quint had found being a soldier a tiresome business and had deserted after only a month. Luckily, he had taken the precaution of enlisting under a false name. Even more luckily, the name he had chosen had been ‘John Smith’ and he had decided, quite rightly, that the chances of the army catching up with a deserting John Smith were so negligible that they could be dismissed from his mind. Two days after leaving his barracks in Aldershot without the necessary permission, Quint had been back in familiar haunts in the Borough, renewing his acquaintance with London street life.

  If anyone had questioned him, as he sat blowing plumes of smoke in the direction of the bookshelves, he would have acknowledged that his association with Adam Carver represented a very definite up. He might also have acknowledged that the association was an unlikely one. However, Quint was a firm believer in fate. Fate, he thought, had to be behind the events which had brought master and man together. It had surely been fate that had led Quint to join the Fields expedition to European Turkey in the first place. What else would have led him to pick up the discarded copy of a morning newspaper in a Southwark pub? He was not usually a great reader. What else but fate would have drawn his eyes to the advertisement that invited men of stout heart and strong body, interested in shaking the dust of England from their feet, to present themselves at an office in the Marylebone Road at nine on the following morning, where they would learn of certain plans that might prove to their advantage? Money, it was clearly suggested, might be offered to those who possessed the qualities the advertisers sought. Quint had been intrigued. He was unsure whether or not he had a stout heart but he did have a strong body. He was also enduring one of his periodic spells of pennilessness. His creditors, of whom there were several, had begun to insist on payment. One of them, familiarly known as Black Ben, had let it be known that broken bones might well follow failure to cough up. Cash, or the opportunity to leave London – or both – seemed an appealing prospect to Quint. On the principle of ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’, he had decided to turn up at the Marylebone office at the appointed time and see what game the advertisers were playing.

  A queue of men who had read the advertisement had already formed outside the office of Mr William Perry, the agent Professor Fields had appointed to recruit half a dozen dogsbodies for his expedition. Quint was there to join it. While every other man waiting in the line looked like a disgruntled clerk or unemployed shop assistant, he was the only one who could be vaguely described as belonging to the labouring classes. The distinction was a decisive one.

  ‘The gentleman I represent is looking for men of stout heart,’ Mr Perry had said, ‘men who are unafraid of hard physical labour in the blazing summer sun of distant lands. Not pasty-faced hobbledehoys who spend their days behind a draper’s counter in Holborn.’

  In Quint, Mr Perry thought he had found the ideal candidate. He was taken on. The rest of the supplicants were sent packing. The agent was not the first to make the mistaken assumption that Quint’s air of surly obstreperousness was only a mask hiding sterling qualities beneath it. And so fate decreed tha
t, within a few weeks, together with Professor Fields and Adam Carver, Quint was one of those who shook the dust of England from their feet. Black Ben and the other irritations of London life were left behind as they sailed for Salonika.

  Equally surely, Quint had thought, it was fate that dictated that he was on hand to rescue Adam in an alleyway in Salonika when the young man was confronted by four unfriendly Turks demanding any piastres he had about his person. Adam, who had boxed for his college only a few months earlier, succeeded in knocking two of his assailants to the ground, but weight of numbers began to tell. He was facing a beating from the other two when Quint providentially turned the corner into the muddy backstreet. The Turks were significantly heavier than the Englishmen, but Quint had earlier decided, soon after the party had reached Salonika, never to walk anywhere in the city without a billy stick to hand. The billy stick, especially when wielded with enthusiasm, changed the odds in the fight in favour of the visitors. The Turks were swiftly rendered unconscious. Adam’s piastres remained in his pocket. He and Quint, who had hitherto taken little notice of one another, now formed an alliance. Months later, in the mountains south of the city, Adam had been able to return the compliment. Quint had tumbled from his mule and into a fast-flowing river. He would have been swept halfway to the Thermaic Gulf had Adam not hauled him from the waters. The unlikely partnership between the two men was strengthened. Quint came to be seen by others in the party as Adam’s man.

  When the expedition returned to London, Adam had suggested that he had a vacancy for a manservant and that Quint might be just the person to fill it. Quint, behaving as if he would be bestowing a favour on Adam if he accepted the post, had agreed. Adam duly availed himself of the money that John Murray had advanced for the privilege of publishing Travels in Ancient Macedon, and man and master had moved into the rooms in Doughty Street. They had been there for nearly two years and the arrangement seemed to suit them both.

  None of this past history crossed Quint’s mind as he smoked his pipefuls of noxious tobacco. At such times as this, he had a capacity for tranquil existence in the present moment that would have been the envy of an oriental sage. For nearly an hour, he was troubled by nothing more than the need to tamp down or refill his pipe at regular intervals. As midday arrived, however, and he listened to the sound of the mantle clock striking the hours, he became aware that something was wanting to complete his happiness. A smoke, he thought, was nothing without a drink. It was time to make his way towards the Lion and Lamb. Quint walked from the sitting room to the small side room which was exclusively his domain. He picked up the blue serge jacket that was lying on the bed and put it on. Thrusting his dowsed pipe into one of the pockets, he left the room and headed for the stairs that led from the first-floor flat to the ground floor.

  As he began to descend those stairs to the hallway, he saw that someone was standing in the ill-lit passage. To his dismay, he realised that it was Mrs Gaffery. Mrs Gaffery, courtesy of her late husband’s will, was the owner of 65 Doughty Street. Unfortunately, ownership of the property was all that Mr Gaffery, a solicitor with a small practice in Chancery Lane, had been able to leave his wife. Unwise investment in an Australian gold mine which, on closer inspection, had proved to contain very little gold, had eaten up all his other worldly goods. After his death, his relict had no means of support at all. She had been obliged to let the upstairs rooms of her property to paying tenants while she continued to live on the ground floor. She had been forced to become a landlady. It was not a situation that either Mrs Gaffery or many of her tenants enjoyed.

  Mrs Gaffery’s loss had occurred many years earlier yet her already formidable appearance continued to be made even more tremendous by the mourning clothes of black crape and bombazine which she still wore. Unkind rumours suggested that, during his lifetime, Mr Gaffery had been a severe disappointment to his wife. His last will and testament had certainly been so. However, now that he had long been a member of the great majority, his faults had been forgotten. It seemed that Mrs Gaffery, like the queen, was determined to advertise her status as a widow until she followed him to the grave herself. Now, black and unmistakeably threatening, she stood in Quint’s path.

  ‘Women,’ she said. ‘I won’t have them.’

  Quint’s method of dealing with Mrs Gaffery was the same one he employed to deal with any social superior likely to trouble him. He feigned idiocy. If he had been able to feign cheery idiocy, he would have done so on the grounds that it was more likely to produce the results he wanted. However, Quint being Quint, he was obliged to feign surly idiocy. Over the years he had found that even surly idiocy was remarkably effective in persuading people in any kind of authority that he wasn’t worth questioning or bothering any further. Faced with an apparently furious landlady, wagging her forefinger in his direction, he simply grunted and stared fixedly at the wainscoting. The storm, he knew, would eventually pass over his head.

  ‘Not in my house. Not under my roof. Flibbertigibbets flaunting their shamelessness. They have fewer morals than a pack of Pawnee Indians, the lot of them.’

  Quint continued to gaze floorwards. He had been puzzled by Mrs Gaffery’s opening remark but he had now worked out that it was the visit of the mysterious young lady that had disturbed her sense of propriety. He could think of nothing useful to say so he remained silent. Mrs Gaffery’s outrage continued to erupt around his ears. Quint waited for it to pass and eventually sensed that it was reaching its conclusion.

  ‘… and you can tell your master that from me. Tell him there shall be no more women coming calling upon him at all hours of the day. Or he shall hear more from me. Much more. You tell him that, Quint. Do you understand me, man?’

  Quint grunted again. Taking the grunt as an indication that her words had hit home, Mrs Gaffery turned and retired to her lair. Quint, grateful that his ordeal had been a short one, continued on his interrupted journey towards a pint of India Pale Ale.

  * * * * *

  Standing under the portico of the British Museum, Adam looked towards Great Russell Street and the traffic passing down it. It was a few minutes after ten on a Wednesday morning and, behind him, the doors of the museum, which welcomed members of the public only on alternate weekdays, had just opened. He was waiting for Professor Fields, who had despatched a letter to say that he was coming up to town from Cambridge that morning. ‘There is an Attic vase from the bequest of Sir Charles Tankerville that has been newly put on display,’ the professor had written, ‘and I am particularly eager to see it. You would also find it of interest and I propose that you should meet me at the entrance to the museum prompt at ten.’

  The letter was, Adam thought, typical of Fields’s somewhat peremptory style of correspondence. There was no suggestion that the young man might have other plans which might conflict with the professor’s. He had been summoned to appear and appear he must. The fact that Fields himself was not in evidence prompt at ten was not unexpected. The professor was also given to issuing strict instructions for behaviour and comportment which he then failed to follow himself.

  Adam pulled out his watch on its silver Albert chain from his waistcoat pocket. It was nearly ten past ten. He glanced idly at the small stream of visitors climbing the steps to the entrance of the museum and then looked towards Great Russell Street once more. He felt a small surge of affection as he picked out the sturdy figure of the professor turning into the grounds of the museum and heading in his direction. Fields could be difficult and argumentative and irritating, it was true, but he had become an important person in Adam’s life. Thomas Burton Fields had been a senior master at Shrewsbury School, and was already a legendary figure when Adam had arrived as a timid thirteen-year-old boy from his prep school. Fields had seen something in him, had encouraged his burgeoning love for Greek and Latin and for the long-vanished civilisations of the Mediterranean. When Fields had left Shrewsbury to accept a professorship at Cambridge, Adam had been lost but he had followed his mentor to the university only a y
ear later. The death of his father and the consequent change in his financial fortunes had ruined his hopes of a life in academe, but Fields had been on hand to rescue him. Although Adam had found it necessary to go down from Cambridge without taking his degree, the professor had arranged for him to join him on his expedition to European Turkey. In many ways, Thomas Burton Fields had been a second father to him.

  ‘We must make our way to the Tankerville Vase immediately,’ the professor said, as he strode up the steps. He made no attempt at a formal greeting and spoke as if it was Adam’s fault that they had not been able to enter the museum the moment it opened. ‘Doubtless there will be hordes of gawking visitors in front of it already.’

  Adam thought it unlikely that an Attic vase would draw the crowds Fields was anticipating.

  ‘Should we not first take a side turning into the Elgin Gallery?’ he asked teasingly, knowing what the answer would be.

  ‘Those marble statues are much overrated,’ the professor said dismissively. ‘I would exchange all of them for the finest examples of Athenian red-figure wares.’

  ‘Or the Phigalian Saloon? The bas-reliefs from the Temple of Apollo are much admired.’

  ‘They are even worse than the works Elgin prised off the Parthenon. No – we are here to see the Tankerville Vase.’

  As Adam had anticipated, there was nobody in front of the case that held the vase. Both men bent double to peer more closely at the decoration.

  ‘It is unmistakeably a depiction of the Centauromachy,’ the professor said. ‘The same subject that appears on some of the sculptures you mentioned earlier but a purer, more authentic rendition of it. I had read that this was so but I wished to see for myself.’

  They continued to examine the tiny figures on the pottery.