The Choir Boats (6 page)

The cook’s cloth found invisible dust on the toast forks and
rinding knives as she continued her tutorial, “Our Mr. Sanford now,
Norfolk bred just like we are, he has his little ways too. Likes goat’s
meat. How he loves goat’s meat. Ever since he and Mr. McDoon came
back from their great trip to India, which was the cause of all the
trouble with the Old McDoon. I will gladly fix it for him English-ways, but no, he must have it with pepper and spices from India,
or it isn’t good enough for him! I have tried my best but, to speak
wholly true, I just don’t hold with that foreign way of dealing with
an honest meat.”

The cook looked up from her dusting, and said, “So my point,
and maybe I got a smittick off the point, but now I will come back
to it. The point, my niece, is that a house has its ways and, if you
listen and watch, you can see when those ways have been disturbed,
sometimes even before others know it themselves. So, something is
a-coming, I says.”

The maid thought again of strangers in Dunster Court. The cook
wagged a great runicled finger, and then shooed the maid away from
the kitchen, saying, “Be watchful, my niece!”

Sally kept to herself, but no one except Fraulein Reimer and the
cook sought her out anyway. All the men were exercised with
their work and had no time. Her classmates seemed even more
frivolous than usual. At every opportunity, she spirited the book
to her room for reading by candlelight, poring over it as closely as
the Sibyl of Cumae studied scrolls in the print above the chiffonier
downstairs.
Journies and Travells to Yount and the Realms Within
was a compendium of disjointed details from many sources. Some
passages were translations, such as those “from the records in
Persian held by the customs-house at Bandar Abbas on the Straits
of Hormuz” or those “being originally in Arabic from the port city of
Muscat.” Memoires archived at St. John’s, the Jesuit college in Goa,
were referenced, likewise manuscripts at the University of Leiden
and at the presidency offices in Madras, surveys commissioned by
the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and by the
Casa de Contracion
,
the trade college in Seville, and so on. Sally knew something of
Alexander Dalrymple’s hypotheses on the existence of a great
southern continent, which helped drive Cook on his famous voyages,
and of Lord Macartney’s embassy to China in 1792. But she had not
heard about Matthew Flinders’s voyage from New South Wales to
Capetown in 1797, or the exploits of Jabez Haverstraw, a sailor
shipwrecked south of the Nicobar Islands. Sally read about whales
run ashore in Mozambique and albatrosses tangled in the rigging of
Dutch East Indiamen, about “the Great Confluxion,” eddies in the
cosmic ocean, the haunted roads leading to Yount.

Throughout the book ran notes of warning: references to
mysterious forces, a grasping hand, suffering voices on the wind . . .
Sally almost felt she understood the threat, but not quite. The name
“Strix Tender Wurm” snaked its way through the text. Sally struggled
to make sense of the hints and allusions, but the book itself seemed
to thwart her. Although she refused to believe it, Sally felt that the
text shifted from one reading to the next: sometimes a section she
had read the day before seemed to have disappeared, no matter how
carefully she looked for it, sometimes the entries seemed to change
order or the wording to elide subtly.

Sally, when not engrossed in the book, gazed out her attic window.
So she had always done, trying to know the world beyond the house
but not able or allowed to join it. She cradled Isaak for hours, looking
down to the street, observing the sarabande of traffic, tracing
patterns of pedestrians in cat’s fur. She wondered what passersby
were thinking, where they were going. Yet the greatest fascination
of all was above the rooftops. Sally looked to the sky, especially at
night, seeking the moon above London’s fume. Tom not infrequently
asked Sally what phase the moon was in rather than look it up in the
almanac. She was always right, no matter how much fog and smoke
hid the moon. “Our own lunatic! Our captains could tell the tide by
Sally,” said Tom.

She began to notice an odd man and an even odder bird in the
street. Mincing Lane was heavily trafficked, so she could not be
sure, but at dawn there seemed to be a man loitering near the corner
of Dunster Court. Not loitering exactly, but busy in an aimless sort
of way, she thought, someone affecting one task while actually on
another errand altogether. She became aware of him on Thursday,
January 16
^th
, the feast day for St. Nigel-le-Blayne, which is how she
remembered, because the church bells were muted on that day in
honour of the saint’s deafness. Friday he was there, also Saturday . . .
at least it seemed to be the same man, though the distance from
her window down to the street, and the constant stir of the crowd,
made it hard for her to be sure. She noticed him primarily because
of his old-fashioned overcoat, like something from the engravings
of a time before King George III. To match a coat that out of style,
he really might have worn a bag-wig. The coat was remarkable not
just for its cut and length. It was made of a reddish material that
glistened as the man moved about the street. The coat almost seemed
to writhe. Sally pulled back when she thought that, rubbed her eyes,
and felt queasy. When she looked out again, the man and the coat
were gone. She thought about telling Fraulein Reimer, but decided
even Fraulein Reimer would find Sally’s suspicions absurd. In any
case, the man in the coat was absent on Sunday and on Monday.
“Silly,” she murmured to Isaak, who pressed up against her. “It’s just
a man on his way to his employment. Must pass this way every day,
only I have not noticed before.”

The bird she saw a day or two after she first saw the tall man. Sally
observed many details from her bower: dray horses lumbering up to
merchant warehouses, gentlemen in their cups late of an evening,
the knife-grinder making his rounds, the baked potato vendor
with his brazier, rooks disturbed from their perches by chimney-sweeps. Nothing escaped her gaze, certainly not the wren flitting
from window to window across the street. A wren in the country is
too common for mention, but a wren in the city is — as Mr. Sanford
would put it — a thing out of its place. The wren seemed to be flying
systematically from one house to the next, perching in crannies and
cornices, almost as if it was searching for something. Sally laughed
off the thought but there was the wren now positioned opposite the
McDoon comptoir, its head rotating in a most un-wrenlike fashion.

She laughed again at her fears, looked out, the wren was gone.
No, the wren was fluttering at
her
window. Sally started back. She
caught its tiny eyes, black and dull as currants. Isaak leaped at the
window, teeth bared and claws extended. The wren flew off, but
for several days Sally saw it sitting on the eaves across the street.
Isaak patrolled the attic window, growling at the wren. Convinced
that the wren was spying on her, but too ashamed to admit such
fears to anyone, Sally withdrew almost entirely to her room. Still
no one paid much heed, so absorbed were the other members of the
McDoon household in their own concerns.

Concerns drove every one but Sally out of the house Tuesday
evening,
January
21
^st
. Tom went to Drury Lane. Barnabas and
Sanford, seeking to slough off the oppression they still felt from their
meeting at the Piebald Swan one week earlier, were at a coffeehouse
off Cornhill. Fraulein Reimer was visiting a friend at Wellclose Square.
The cook and the maid had their fortnightly evening two streets over
with fellow Norfolk expatriates, the “bishy barnybees” as the women
called themselves.

Sally normally enjoyed an evening on her own but tonight she
wanted company. She sat for a while in the partners’ office, but the
smell of sandalwood in an empty room only intensified her melancholy
so she retreated to her garret. The evening was still and very cold,
the atmosphere heavy with river mists. Shadows thickened, her fears
grew, and her shame of the fear mounted along with the fear itself.

As an antidote, she tried reading something by fussy, finger-wagging Hannah More (mostly to please Sanford, who extolled More’s
virtues) but, wait, was that a creaking on the stair? Sally bent all her
will to the book. A muffled voice in the hallway? Sally shut the book,
closed her eyes, murmured, “Sankt Jakobi, Sankt Nikolai, Sankt
Michaelis, Sankt Katharinen.” Since childhood, Sally had chanted the
names of Hamburg’s churches as a charm against fear, picturing as
she did Fraulein Reimer standing next to her, pointing at each church
in the print of the Hamburg cityscape on the wall outside the library.
“See the tall spire of the Michal?” Fraulein Reimer would say. “And
Sankt Jakobi with the
wunderschoen
organ that Johann Sebastian
Bach played?”

For a minute, Sally heard the Bach melody that Fraulein Reimer
hummed, smelled the good mustiness of her black dress, and Sally
felt the fear recede. But only briefly: wasn’t that a creaking near the
door? It couldn’t be Yikes: that dog never left the hearthside. “Sankt
Jakobi, Sankt Nikolai . . .” She could stand it no longer. Fear circled
her. “Sankt Michaelis.” Sally got out of bed. “Sankt Katharinen.” She
heard the clock strike eleven. Sally went to her door, summoned the
kestrel within, and yanked the door open.

She saw nothing and laughed with relief. Then she did hear
something: not a creak, but a rustling, like someone shuffling
through papers. A rustling of paper in a counting house is too
common for mention . . . except as midnight nears and one is alone
in the house. Could Tom be back? No, she thought, especially if he
stopped for claret or port on the way. Besides, Tom was noisy and,
more to the point, would avoid the outer office whenever possible.
She suppressed a giggle thinking of Tom working at his ledger books
at midnight. Once more, the rustling came from below. Fear closed
round again. She clutched the well of her throat but crept downstairs,
Isaak padding beside her with tail flared. Sally passed the print of
Hamburg on the wall outside the library, used the spires of the
churches to anchor her resolve. The rustling was heard more clearly
now, and also the treading of feet. “Chock,” sounded the parrot . . .
and someone
hissed
in reply. She went down the back stairs.
Oh
,
she thought,
why doesn’t Yikes bark or attack?
But she knew better
than that: Yikes would sleep through the match between Gog and
Magog. She meant to slip out through the kitchen and she should
have done so, but something stopped her. Her fear choked her but
she felt anger as well.

Before she knew what she was doing, Sally was at the door to
the outer office. The door opened, arresting her advance. Isaak
howled. Two men stepped forth. Vicious eyes. A yell, another (Sally’s
or theirs? She was not sure). Running. She grabbed a toby-jug from
the hallway stand, the jug commemorating Trafalgar, and swung it
with wild strength. The first man crashed to the floor, cursing and
clutching his nose.
Another victory for Nelson
, she thought. A shortlived victory as the second man caught her just before the door to
the yard behind the house. He hit her hard. Sally was more shocked
than hurt. The first man came up. “Here’s one from me,” he growled,
using his free hand. Sally almost fainted from the pain this time.
“Let’s go,” she heard, as they trampled over her and through the
door. Her head smashed onto the floor.

“Halt!” said a voice. In the yard, just beyond the door, was a short,
stout figure, hard to make out in the closing darkness. Easily seen,
however, was the pistol in its hand, held steady and chest-high, the
barrel glinting with light from the snowy half-moon. Sally passed out.

The clock in the coffeehouse tolled eleven. Discussion ebbed as
clients began to leave. Barnabas and Sanford had revived their
spirits, even if the news was depressing, about the ever-increasing
price of corn, Luddite riots in Lancashire, and the unsolved mass
murders the month before in Ratcliffe Highway (one of those
murdered had served on an East Indiaman whose captain was well
known to Barnabas and Sanford, so small the world could be, even
in the great metropolis). Above all, the talk was about the war with
Napoleon’s France: the victory last fall in Batavia, Wellington’s
opportunities in Spain, parliamentary debates over the Orders in
Council, rumours of Russian anger about the Continental System.
The French, Napoleon, well, at least they were real, not phantoms.
An honest Briton could do something about them. Barnabas and
Sanford had nearly put “that Yount business” out of their minds as
they put on their hats and left.

Few folk were on the streets. Drizzle mixed with snow covered
the cobblestones. About three streets from home, they crossed
one of the crooked alleys so typical of the City. A single streetlamp
sent out a weak light, the oil wick sputtering. Before they realized
what was happening, somebody ran up from behind and pushed
them. The merchants of McDoon & Associates staggered forward.
A second man slammed them into a wall of the alley. But Barnabas
and Sanford spun round together with backs to the wall, as they
had done together more than once in Bombay when Sanford was
supercargo for Barnabas’s uncle and Barnabas shipped out with
him. Both wielded heavy walking sticks.

“Come on, villains!” yelled Barnabas.

A bass growling stopped all four men in a weird tableau: Barnabas
and Sanford prepared to strike, their assailants nonplussed at the
failure of the attack, fists and canes raised in mid-air. The growling
echoed off the bricks. From around the corner of the alley it came.
And was followed by two red eyes in the dark. A dog’s head the size
of a wolf’s came into view around the corner, dusky red, with huge
teeth. All four men flinched. Into the weak, guttering light, hard
to see in the mist and shadow, stepped a man holding a leash to
the dog. His eyes glinted reddish, but probably that was a reflection
from the dog. Or from his long coat, a raddled confection from a
bygone era (even in this situation, Barnabas noticed that). He had a
peaked hat. His teeth shone white.