Now London stood at the edge of the century’s passing and the dawn of a new age. Those who crossed into the future would see many things, but none would see anything like the miasma, the pall, the red flags marking tenements as occupied by the dead and the soon-to-be.
In time the solicitors emerged, heads bowed in sober—and for a few, drunken—contemplation. One of them spoke to a colleague, lingered in the doorway examining a pocket watch, then motioned for him to follow.
On the other side of the building, the old solicitor turned to face him. “I am Lord Grant. And you, you are the author of this correspondence?” He held up a letter. “Philip Layard?”
“I am.”
“I instruct you to take care in addressing me, Mr. Layard.”
He knew the tone well. His skin brought the same reaction in all fine white gentlemen.
Only the rabbi, he thought guiltily, didn’t despise me on sight.
“Though I don’t recall you much beyond a vague notion that one such as you was there, Mr. Layard, I well remember the case of the Abyssinian, Alamayou. You were involved, you say?”
“Yes. I helped him understand.”
“Ah, I do remember you better now. Cheeky fellow, as I recall.”
“I see you remember me well, in fact.”
“And then, if my research since receiving your letter from Paris serves, you simply vanished.”
“I did.”
“Which makes you a fugitive, if you did something wrong.”
“Why would you think I did something wrong?”
“Why indeed. The secrecy of your reaching out to me, for one thing. This clandestine meeting, for another. Explain, sir, why I am not turning you over to the authorities. Or Parliament. Or the queen herself.”
“Because tomorrow, Lord Grant, I’ll do it for you.”
He handed Lord Grant the envelope. The solicitor opened it, running his fingers along the thick stack of pound notes inside.
“What is this? Some sort of bribe?”
“A retainer. You helped Her Majesty once, sir. You advised her, and your advice was, as I recall, to send the Abyssinian back.”
“Now look here. I don’t know what your purpose is, but I have a clear conscience.”
“She, however, does not. Nor do I. I need your help.”
“What do you want from me, Layard?”
“By this time tomorrow, I’ll have need of your services. The day’s events will make it plain. I will be facing charges. A friend, a rabbi in fact, will reach out to you. I beg you, come to me when he calls on you. This is all the money I have.”
He turned and left the solicitor staring at the envelope. “This is highly suspicious,” Lord Grant called after him. “Why should I help you? What charges?”
He kept walking. It wouldn’t have helped matters to respond. His journey would end before it began if he’d answered the solicitor’s question. Charges? My dear Lord Grant, why would a nobody like me ever need a high-born, influential barrister like you?
Murder, of course.
§
It was nearly three in the morning. The sky bled shades of crimson and mauve. The long day’s travels were done at last, and yet he wasn’t nearly ready to sleep.
He’d purchased a bottle of port and two glasses, some food for a late supper, and some trinkets for the rabbi. But he didn’t want to return to the flat on Frith yet.
To Cooke’s Menagerie.
A sarcastic billing. It was no Wombwell’s. There were no elephants, no gorillas, ocelots, or rhinos. No colorful signs for children to pass with adorable drawings of mythical creatures. He remembered seeing such a sign at Her Majesty’s zoo. It depicted a rhino, and next to it the proclamation the unicorn of faerie tale come to true life!
How to live a true life? he wondered. I never did figure that one out for myself.
He’d become intimately acquainted with Cooke’s when it passed through Paris ten years before. He’d found it on a chance visit, on a sunny afternoon with nothing to do. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d returned to it if he tried.
It was past closing. He walked quietly by tents that were home to the dwarf, the bearded lady, the legless, the armless, the torsos on pedestals like Grecian busts. He knew their names. The Fat Boy of Isfahan preferred to be called Raj, the better to recall his home in Ceylon. Li Jun was known popularly as Poor Yoo Hoo, a boy of Oriental ancestry who was unintelligible to anyone who heard him speak. No one came to listen to him. They went to stare at his loins, at the “infernal birth” dangling there, so it was billed. A bulbous mass, like the crown of a baby’s skull, hanging from his sex like a fleshy pendulum.
He learned. Freaks in public, in daylight, tried their best to please. They were no better than well-trained dogs that knew what was expected of them. Like those dogs, they went to great lengths to hide their suffering when eyes were upon them.
One night as he’d slipped through the menagerie outside Paris, he’d heard Yoo Hoo crying because he missed Nanking.
Everywhere at the menagerie, the borders of science and medicine crossed. The Python-Armed Girl was a mere child with unchecked elephantiasis. Yoo Hoo’s condition was really a tumor of the scrotum left to run riot. It had lain dormant for most of his life, but one day he’d surely awake to find that it too was awake, and taking him.
He was a doctor, no matter the contempt of others, and so he’d offered to help them. They all refused, every last one. To be better was to starve; they would never be whole and so would never live the way others did. To be the way they were gave them a way to earn money, to stay with the menagerie. To live.
He understood them more than the self-made men he saw around him. The Grants of the world. We’re all freaks, they and I. We’re not be prepared for the life we lead, but we’re certainly not prepared to hope for more and fail.
At least up until now, he thought.
There were only a few customers lingering around the grounds. He went to the last tent. It was separate from the others, built from saplings and fronds of painted paper to resemble the sort of hut Europeans thought were everywhere in Africa. Its occupant performed as Anchala, queen of a cannibal tribe. She’d done that for a long time.
It was dark, and he stayed far away so he wouldn’t be spotted. Over the years, the others had seen and even spoken to him, but they didn’t know him from Adam. Anchala was different.
He watched her remove her headdress. Time and labor had rounded her shoulders, and he couldn’t tell from the dim light of the tent opening if her wiry hair had gone gray or if her eyes were moated with puffy sacs and lines.
There was a drawing above her bed, of her. It had been done long ago. She’d said that she wanted to be beautiful, and that no one had made her feel that way before. So he painted her to be beautiful.
She stood in the doorway, regarding the night. She faced in his direction but he was too far and too dark to be seen.
A queer sensibility filled him, making light of his fingers. In Paris, the first time he’d seen her, he’d wanted to go to her. He didn’t know her well in their briefly shared time at Windsor, but she was there, and the fact of her being in the same city after so long felt important. He imagined what it would be like to approach her and say something. “It’s me, Seely. Do you remember? You helped us talk to each other. I painted that for you.”
What he imagined was her remembering him, then screaming his name as he ran.
He left the menagerie as pieces of his past peeled free to fall around him like burnt leaves. He knew he wouldn’t sleep soon. But for the old man waiting, and no doubt worrying, he felt as if he could walk alone all night long and not care. It would be dawn or nearly so and the light would find him still walking, still remembering.
§
When he opened the door, quiet as a common cat, he found the rabbi was awake.
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“I hope you weren’t worried, rebbe.” He closed the front door behind him.
The rabbi was in the cramped kitchenette, staring haplessly at the iron back stone and the logs below it that refused to kindle.
“I’d hoped to make you oat cakes.” The rabbi sighed in frustration. “I see I’m still the same old chef I always was, sadly for you.”
“I brought you food and the port you asked for.”
“I ate already. I found that pub you mentioned, on Aldersgate. Good chops and they seemed mightily entertained by me. Lively conversation these past few hours. The widow who keeps room and board there struck up a conversation with me at the flowerman’s. Charming lady, and she liked me.”
“Her patience must be the stuff of legend.”
Rabbi Ariel smiled, all angles and yellow, crooked incisors beneath the silver thorns of his beard. “A port, you say? Join me, Philip.”
He poured the rabbi a glass and one for himself. In the sitting room he fell into a chair, weary at last, and yet his heart still pulsed with anxiety.
Across from him, the rabbi struggled to thread a needle.
“And what are you doing now?”
“I have holes,” Rabbi Ariel explained with a shrug.
He slickened the thread with candle wax and stabbed at a needle in his thimble hand. On his ample lap was a black sock, rent open at the toe.
“Let me help. Here, I found this and thought of you.”
He gave the rabbi an églomisé souvenir tray, upon which a chromolithograph of the cathedral at St. Paul’s appeared. Taking the thread and needle from the rabbi’s trembling hands, he found the needle’s eye in the low light and slipped the thread through.
“It’s wondrous, Philip. Thank you. Where did you find such a thing?”
“There are vendors everywhere if you walk far enough.”
“Indeed there are. I found one on my own long walk.” He muttered over his port, then sipped it contentedly. “Join me in the prayer for this fine drink, will you?”
“I think not, rebbe.” He knew some of the Jews’ words, but it still felt wrong to say a language that wasn’t his.
He smiled at the irony.
They were quiet for a while. Around them, the flat filled with dusty colors of the dawning light seeping in.
“Was she a friend, Philip? The queen?”
“For a while.”
“I’m sorry she’s sick. A terrible thing, getting old. But tell me, how will you see her? I don’t imagine you can simply knock at her door.”
“There’s a procession at the castle tomorrow. The Order of the Garter, to honor her. I thought maybe I’d go, see if I could perhaps…I don’t know, just see her somehow, I guess.”
“Now that I’d like to see very much. A black and a Jew attending a procession. May I come with you?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, rebbe.”
“We’ll talk about it in the morning. It’s late, and you must be spent. But I have questions, Philip.”
“I know you do.”
“How did you meet her?”
“The first time? It was late at night. Quiet. Just her, alone.”
“Remarkable. And the war? How did you end up in Abyssinia? Of all the far-flung places, and a war. Terrible.”
“There were moments of beauty even in the middle of war. You’d be surprised. They came at the most unexpected times. Like a gorge I saw, between two mountains. One was called Meqdala, where the emperor’s fortress was. The other was called Amba Geshen, where there was nothing but a small cottage. Two people, living alone.”
He closed his eyes and let it all come back to him.
“I sat at the very edge of that gorge and from below me, white clouds rose as if they were boiling over the lip of a kettle. They were filled with gray and with light. They swelled higher and higher until they covered the space between Amba Geshen and Meqdala. Lightning flashed inside them. The air smelled like burning metal and the skin on my arms tingled. Then a raindrop struck my face, and another. But the rain wasn’t falling. It was flying up. The wind swept it up from far below, in the gorge. It swept everything upward. The rain, the lightning, all flew upward, past me and into the sky.”
He felt it. The rain, the uprushing winds.
“She called it the ‘white dream,’” he said. “That’s just what it was.”
“Who?” the rabbi asked.
“The queen, Tirroo. She loved it so much. She said, ‘Whatever happens to us, think of us here where we’ll always be happy. They’ll call but they won’t find us unless they look for us here. The clouds take everything away, even pain. May they take us soon, because we don’t belong anywhere in the world.’”
“Us, Philip?”
“She said those words to her son.”
“Alamayou.”
The room deepened with color. Mauves, pinks, warm and hazy with dust motes rising into the light. The rabbi was staring at him with that smile that he never felt deserving of.
Where have I been, he thought, that I didn’t feel the night moving all around us? I wish I commanded the ability to go there. The place where forgetting resides.
“Philip.”
“Yes. I’m still awake.”
“You’re crying.”
He touched his cheek. Dewy with wetness. “I am. Didn’t even realize.”
The rabbi began to whisper.
“What are you muttering?”
“A prayer for you. That you find peace and reason in whatever lies ahead for you.”
“Don’t pray for me tonight, rebbe. Pray for me tomorrow.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No good man could.”
“You’re tired,” the rabbi said. “A bit of sleep and in the morning, this won’t be so bad. Look, I told you I came across a souvenir seller. I bought something for you. Maybe it will bring back good memories.”
The rabbi held out a small case for cartes de visites. Silverleaf and raised impressions of Buckingham Palace decorated the front.
The rabbi opened it. There was a picture inside.
“Is it him?” the rabbi asked. “The Abyssinian?”
The shield. The necklace. Hints of the dangling linen, the falling evoked by that photographer and her Indian.
The eyes. How they looked left, away from the camera to the only one he knew after his world had ended.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s Alamayou.”
“So young to be taken from his home that way. To Windsor and the queen of England, no less.”
The rabbi led him to the couch and told him to lie down. He placed the carte de visite on the table beside, then completed his prayer. The rabbi’s eyes closed as his hands hovered over his heart.
“Amen,” he said at last. “Would you like to know what I said?”
“I know you’ll tell me.”
“‘Grant me light, so I do not sleep the sleep of death.’”
The rabbi arranged a thin blanket over him.
“Alamayou wasn’t alone,” the rabbi said. “He had you. Remember that.”
“I’ll try, rebbe. It’s late and you must be tired. Try to sleep. Here, take the couch. I prefer the chair.”
After a token bit of resistance, Rabbi Ariel took him up on his offer of the couch. Soon the old man fell into a weary, deep sleep. His chest rose and fell rhythmically. A light snore escaped his lips.
Philip brought the chair to the window so he could watch the gas lamps lift Frith up out of the shadows.
Grant me light, he thought, and don’t let me sleep the sleep of death anymore.
There’d be no sleep for him. Not until the next day was done with. He wondered where he’d be by that time, what sort of roof he’d be under.
Not alone. Remember that.
I
do remember, he thought. I remember everything.
Chapter Five
13 September 1868
Carts took the last of the mock fortress down a bridle path in pieces, out of Windsor and to the raging bonfires of London. After the splintered mountains and the plaster bodies were finally swept away, gardeners trimmed the lawns and clipped the old copse of trees in order to plant bays, corks, oaks, and evergreens that would stay green and defy the seasons. Life surged forward.
On that same bright morning, Princess Louise walked across the greens in the company of a man with a satchel on his back. In time they stopped. The man unpacked two easels and spread their legs while the princess stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the scene before her. Something in the light, or in the weave of the far, bare trees against the clear autumn sky, caught her painterly attention.
The man arranged some brushes and erected two large canvases of stretched white. He set them on the open easels, one beside the other.
Alamayou watched them from the open apartment window. The smells of fine, savory food perfumed the air—bacon, breads baked to mellowness, and something sweetened with warmed brown sugar—but he was captivated by the painter and the princess, too much so to take notice of his grumbling stomach. He recognized the painter from the day of his arrival, the one who found peace in the middle of all the activity that day. He envied that man, then and now. In the center of such a place, he had somehow earned the right to be left alone.
Soon, maids came to the apartment. They escorted Alamayou and Philip through the halls near St. George to a terrace overlooking the gardens. Their table soon filled with pastries, fruit, and strong tea with milk. The sun lengthened and warmed away the morning dew.
“Stranger,” Philip said. “Say it, please. Start with just the word. The rest will come and it’ll be done. The first step toward whatever life they’ve got planned for you. At least try. That’s what we do. We try.”
The Night Language Page 8