Philip called upon the limited language of their hands, sweeping them through the air in hopes of getting at least that through Alamayou’s head. “Away. As in, nowhere to go. I got not a bloody farthing to my name nor a roof to crawl under. Away!”
“Philip.” Alamayou’s hands tried and failed to convey. You’re all that I know. What’s happening?
Atop the bed was a box. He held it up for Philip to see.
“Gift,” Philip said wearily. “I guess they wanted to give you something to make you feel welcome. It’s yours.”
He took it from Alamayou and unwrapped it, then handed it back. “Yours.”
Alamayou took out a stuffed cat and handed it to Philip with a quizzical expression. Philip turned the key in its side, creating a metallic sound that startled them both.
In motion the cat was a rickety, quivering thing, as spindly and ancient-seeming as any Vaucanson pipe and tabor player. Its eyes batted and its paws moved as if wading through water. Its purr carried the atonal whir of mechanics.
Alamayou seized the cat, turned it over and tore open its woolen coat, revealing screws and secret interlockings under its poorly stitched hide where the heart should be.
Breaking it open, he scattered its insides across the floor. Its tin heart lay on the cold wood, a slowly spinning saw wheel in its woodblock chest.
“Well,” Philip said, “that ought to go over well. What’ll they say when they see what you did to their welcoming gift, eh? You need to be smarter than this.”
Alamayou turned away while Philip picked up the cat pieces and hid them under the long folds of the bed’s covers. Opening the window to the warm, heavy air of summer, Alamayou took in the perfume of the night garden. The wilting bloom of the landscape lay beneath dustings of light rain and spent gunpowder that still tainted the breeze.
Philip came and together they took in the bleary remains of the fortress at Meqdala, now in ruins from the cannons. “Home.” Philip pointed at the shattered structure outside. “Do you see, Alamayou? Your home’s gone.”
Alamayou didn’t respond.
“I was a stranger. Say it. Can we at least start with that much? ‘I was a stranger and yet you took me in.’ Just give them what they want.”
“Not alone.”
“You won’t say it? All right, then. What about your mother?” Frustration set in. “Damn it all! What happened to her? You must, for both our sakes. You must speak!”
Alamayou pushed him away. He screamed in Amharic; he thought of the Feroze and the lights and voices of war. It all came too near.
Retreating to the bed, he rested his head against the wall while Philip stared out the window, helpless. “Abat,” he said. “Abat.”
He called the old Amharic out, again and again, and in his heart he held a lost child’s hope of being found.
“Ya T’afa,” he told Philip, though Philip couldn’t understand. He could repeat the word all night and it wouldn’t matter. Ya T’afa. Everything is gone.
§
Late in the night, Philip snapped awake. He’d fallen asleep in a chair and dreamt of being back aboard the Feroze. In the dream he’d been terrified as a storm tore the ship apart plank by plank. Soon the cabin floor split open. He could see the ocean churning beneath his feet, rising up to swallow him.
He rubbed his eyes and stretched the kinks out of his back, letting the fear dissipate into the warm air of the apartment.
Alamayou was back at the window.
“Can’t sleep either? Strange places, they take getting used to.”
Alamayou said nothing. He didn’t turn.
Watching him, Philip thought of how he’d looked the first time they’d locked eyes. Was it already four months ago? Longer? The notion seemed impossible, that so much time had passed so swiftly since Amba Geshen and the fire.
At first he hadn’t been able to see Alamayou clearly against the cottage and the flames. Just his dark silhouette. The fire’s intensity stole the details of him. It was absolute chaos. Soldiers ran around searching for water, the terrible roar of the fire as it consumed the cottage, the cottage walls buckling and cracking like bones beneath a butcher’s cleaver. In the middle of all that, there’d been a stillness to Alamayou that caught Philip’s breath. It was as if the violence of the fire stopped at the outline of Alamayou. It made room for him.
Philip shook the image away. He needed sleep, a meal, and an answer to the question nagging at him for a second full day. What now?
“If you’re awake, you can at least try to say something. ‘I was a stranger.’ Just say that much, would you?”
He joined Alamayou at the apartment window and saw what he’d been so intent on. There was someone on the lawn, sitting in a chair. In the bright moonlight Philip could make out that it was a woman wearing a vivid white gown and matching wrap. She sat before a blank square of paper propped on an easel.
“You can’t be spying on her, here of all places.”
The woman turned to face their ward. She was too far away, and Philip couldn’t tell where she was looking, or whether she returned their gaze.
“Christ on the cross, that’s Princess Louise. I told you not to stare. Come away from the window.”
Philip wanted him to step back, but Alamayou didn’t leave the window. He could tell the woman on the grass was one of the important people they’d met earlier. Not the dour ones at the entrance to the room, but the pretty one who had many flitting around her but still seemed alone in the crowd.
That was why he didn’t want to stop looking at her. Her aloneness drew him. He wondered if she was as alone as she seemed, and if so, was it because she was hated?
Solitude never bothered him. The cottage on Amba Geshen where his father had sent him to live with his mother was isolated from everything except her and a guard. The thought that he was no bigger than an ant to anyone glimpsing the cottage from his father’s fortress meant nothing to him. That he was sent there because the sight of him made his father sick, that cut so deeply it turned his solitude into sharp, shearing loneliness. A radiant thing in his chest that left him feeling like an orphan.
He sensed that if he could say those words, Philip would understand. Maybe this woman, as well. The world was far larger than he’d ever imagined, and full of people like him.
Like them.
He and Philip watched the woman cross the grounds until she disappeared into their ward.
In a few moments there was a soft knock at their apartment door. “I saw your lights on,” Princess Louise said quietly. “May I come in?”
Philip opened the door tentatively. Up close, the princess was as the news of London made her out to be. Tall and beautiful, with a perfectly oval face and cascading tresses of chestnut hair. She didn’t wear the mourning weaves the queen had imposed upon her family, staff, and even visitors. She dressed simply in pale lace.
“He seems much calmer than before,” she said. “It’s necessary, since he’ll be here until it’s decided what to do with him. You as well, Mr. Layard.”
“Highness, I know I’m not fit to be here. I should probably go before I cause more strife for you all.”
She joined Alamayou at the window and pointed to the grounds, then to herself. “Me. I’m the one you watched. Louise.”
“Alamayou.”
She had a kind face, Alamayou thought. An ease. Maybe she wasn’t as alone as he imagined her to be. Maybe it was only him after all.
“On the grounds,” the princess said to Philip, “you spoke to my brother quite aggressively.”
“I didn’t know he was a royal, Your Highness. I’ve grown up never seeing any of you. I’m a bloody fool.”
“Royal or commoner, he and the entire audience were white. Never do that again for your own sake. It’s not your place.”
“I understand.”
“He probab
ly deserved it. He can be quite good at the cutting word. Just not from you. There will be consequences for you, for as long as you’re here.”
“Your Highness, how long will that be?”
“Alamayou may become a ward of the court, so it may be different for him. He’s an orphan of war. As long as he’s found fit, this may be his life. As for you, that’s not for me to say. He’s a guest of the queen, but you? I suppose you’re a guest of Alamayou. So my advice to you both is to watch yourselves, learn, and don’t get too attached to anything.”
Her reflection hovered in the windowpane. “One never knows when one’s last moment in a place is until it comes. Then nothing of it belongs to you anymore. Only the memories. So watch, listen, and remember. This is a most unusual place, Philip. One we aren’t meant to have forever. That’s reserved for the queen only.”
She traced shapes on the window glass with her finger. “I walked these halls as a child. Restless as a girl. I still am. At night, I see all that I used to see. Now tell me, what do you hear out there?”
“Voices. Footfalls. Horses out somewhere. The night birds.”
“I hear the stories in this castle. I hear the Master of the Horse outside, preparing the coach to take me to see the prince at first light, as his health suffers. Do you hear the chiming? Brass buckles along the reins, with circles of some stamped metal that jingle when they grow loose. He’s never changed out those reins and he’ll tell you it’s because as a girl I said how much I loved the chiming. The low whine of aged wheels. Do you hear it beneath these floorboards? The chambermaids bringing fresh linen to the ward, to the Grace and Favour apartments. Beneath the wheels, the kitchen’s clamor. I can smell orange zest and clove because I know it’s there. There will be a young girl, new to the kitchen. There always is. She’ll take bread or a bit of gristle and she’ll bring it home to someone. She’ll make a secret of taking it. The sound of her walking will be different. Remember that, Philip. The sound of secrets is always different.”
She was so lost, Philip thought.
“Of all the music you’d hear,” she said, “I assure you, none is as loud as the sound of the queen’s absence. It’s almost as deafening as her words.”
She stepped away from the window. Outside it was a perfect world at near dawn.
“Thank you,” Philip said.
“For what? Saying too much, perhaps.”
“For a look at your home that I’d never seen. I’ll never forget it. I hope one day he and I’ll understand each other. I’ll tell it all, I swear.”
“We shall see.”
“Your Highness, why’s it matter what happens to us?”
She smiled. It was a kind thing, Alamayou thought. He hoped she had children who saw it.
“The life that’s taken hold of you now,” she said. “Not what you thought it would be. And the war. All of it. You’re not free. Either of you.”
“Likes of us,” Philip said, “we’re not allowed thoughts of what life should be. Speaking for myself, I’ve come to a place where I just don’t think about it. Does no good to dwell on what can’t be for me.”
“We differ then only in this one way. You may speak of it.”
Louise opened the door. “You’re both at the end of your endurance. A brief warning and I’ll leave you. It’s a different language, the words that come quietly at night. Don’t mistake what we’ve talked about for something we can speak about in daylight. Only night truly belongs to you, him, or me. Especially here.”
After she left, and in response to Alamayou’s questioning eyes, Philip extinguished the lamp and settled into his chair. The events of the day spun and he craved quiet.
Soon Alamayou’s restlessness stopped. He slept atop the bed. He kicked, sweeping the covers as a swimmer would. Shifting, he spread his fingers as if clasping hands.
The morning would bring round another day full of things Philip couldn’t possibly predict. He hoped there’d be food, but didn’t know if it would be brought to them or if they’d have go in search of it. And where would they wander? In what clothes? How many fine silks would it take to make two wayward Negroes look like they rightfully belonged at Windsor?
He decided that, at the least, he could keep trying to get Alamayou to say the words. For whatever reason, it mattered. They would give the royals what they wanted. In return, perhaps the royals would give them something. A chance to wipe the past clean.
Settling back into his chair as the war and the voyage finally overtook him, his last waking moment was the sight of a figure in one of the palace’s upper windows across from their apartment. Another wing, another ward. He could see the outline of a person as the wind blew the curtains in around them.
Gone. The wind died, the curtains fell, and they were gone.
It was as if they never were.
It was 5:20 a.m. Princess Louise had left them. Left him to consider Alamayou’s turnings, and his own.
Chapter Four
21 December 1900
Little Britain was a cluster of streets and broken old homes that once mattered. Christchurch and St. Bartholomew’s to the west, Smithfield and Long Lane, Aldersgate, Butcher Lane, Paternoster Row, Amen Corner, Ave Maria. Above it all, the blight on the sky that was the dome of St. Paul’s.
He stood with the rabbi before a derelict flat. Its original occupant, Marcus Baker White, was dead and gone, beginning a succession of low-rent occupants that ended a year or so ago. The place had been vacant since. Number Twenty-Nine Frith Street was available.
He opened the door, then lingered in the entryway, taking in the hymnal breathing of the flat. It was in a considerable state of disrepair, so much so that he worried it might crumble around them both the moment they stepped inside. Still, it presented just what he needed.
Rabbi Ariel went in and put his valise down in the sitting room. Near the sooted windows there was a chaise, neatly brocaded and covered in withered lace. The rabbi sat there, breathing laboredly.
“I’ll fetch you something to drink, rebbe. There’s a pub not far.”
“A good port would be lovely.”
He didn’t like the old man’s color. “Let me just take the measure of this place and I’ll go quickly. In the meantime, lie down.”
“I’ll be fine. Do what’s needed, Philip. No need to keep a deathwatch on me just yet. There’s still so much for me to hear about.”
“There’s one errand I need to do. I’ll be quick.”
“Stop fussing.”
He left the rabbi for the adjacent room. Atop the end table in there, he found dusty old books on manners and domesticity. The first portrayed in loving detail the ideal expectant wife. That she should avoid crowded rooms. Her mind must remain an oasis of calm. Nothing disorders the milk such as the passions, the violent actions of the female humors. Fitful temperaments are injurious. Calm, placid dispositions raise the woman’s worth.
If it turned out that his stay lasted beyond the next day—a difficult thing for him to imagine—he’d consider keeping the flat decorated in the reassuring manner proper European ladies expected. Flowers of silk and wire, ornamental ceramics, Oriental lamps, curtains patterned in wedding weave and then covered again in heavy chintz to close out the world. There was a cozy fireplace with a torn fabric over the mantel that he could mend, and on top of it some hideous knickknacks.
The lone ode to Dr. White’s life in the bottom rungs of medicine was a painting on the wall, “Old Schoolfellows.” It was as if the doctor only just departed for a walk, one lasting thirty years.
He returned to the sitting room and found Rabbi Ariel uncomfortably curled up on a settee, asleep. His breathing was even and soft as a child’s. He removed the rabbi’s black hat and set it alongside him. Before departing, he unbuttoned the rabbi’s heavy coat and lifted the tzitzit dangling from his side, so that the strands wouldn’t sweep the dusty floor.
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Opening the front door, he found that he couldn’t simply leave. Everything was more complicated than he imagined.
He conjured the flat as it would have been decades before, with the women coming to its door in secret to see Dr. White.
He closed the door and set off. Briefly, he considered going back to write a note for the rabbi, so the old man wouldn’t think he’d awakened to yet another disappearance by his friend Philip. But he couldn’t go back, now that his feet were making their solitary sounds on London’s walkways. He needed air and movement more than anything.
§
At the late hour, Frith Street was empty. Tilting tenements still showed signs of craftsmen’s work across their facades. The maple carvings of mythic creatures he saw along the streets would have been right at home on a church roof. An omnibus passed him, its upper level seats filled with silent men in grimy dusted coats, smoking and reading while around them London’s spires loomed in the bright fog. Below, the women and their restless children clung to the frames of the compartment’s closed windows.
He crossed the lane as two-seat hansom cabs filled the avenues, weaving between carriages. Men and women stepped down from curbs onto the street, umbrellas raised to hail cabs in hopes of escaping the bitter cold. Intersections were crowded and tight, even at the late hour. Baked potato men, oyster sellers, sheep’s trotters stalls on wheels, stewing eels and roasting apples, milkmaids with enormous silver canisters from their shoulders, all fought for a breath’s worth of room on London’s many paths.
The city thrilled and terrified him all at once. He found it nearly impossible to believe that he was really back.
He went round to the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, to the south of Fleet Street. The Society sat atop three identical two-story sarcophagi of sepia-toned brick crowned with a conical of hammered iron sheets, opal inlays, and a dome of limestone. The dome was crowned with thorny scaffolding encircling a statue in mid-erection to its pinnacle. A man, a torch, the search for knowledge. Or some such.
Envelope in hand, he waited beneath the scaffold’s webbing. It was nearly midnight and the evening’s festivities were concluding. Drinks and cigars following a presentation on the emergence and spread of typhus in London’s poorest pockets some fifty years before. Its origins, its toll, its eventual decomposition, and the legalities of forced segregation of the sick.
The Night Language Page 7