The Clay Dreaming (19 page)

A consort, yes – by English standards he was unmarried. And there was mention of a child, a daughter?

The relation of Bruce’s
Memoirs
had badly shaken her visitor. She wished to make doubly certain of the man’s identity. They had, at present, only half the story. Enough – she was overtired, bed calling.

Tattooed on the face. What must that look like?

The large framed map of London still lay on the occasional table. She took it up, carried it across the room, and restrung it to the nail on the far wall. Since taking the sleeve of her
blouson
to it, she barely recognised the old heirloom. The sickly and yellowish tinge erased, delicate lithographic hues refracted what little light reached them with a subtle brilliance she rather admired. Catching sight of her reflection in the glass, she noticed the heightened colour in her own cheeks.

‘Read in book like whitefellow’ – that had been his only instruction. She had little hope of understanding Brippoki, and yet she felt compelled to help. Unsure of his reasons, let alone hers, it was enough to know that he relied on her.

Sarah took the map down again. Keeping it hidden behind the opened door seemed too great a shame. She would seek out a new situation, somewhere more in the light.

Sarah could not sleep.

Sailor. And princess.

Fingertips rasping on dry fibres. Queer fabric. Indefinite shapes.

Something nagged from the shadows of sense memory, something long lost; an emotional recall more than any specific event or action, close enough to touch, yet remaining just out of reach. The suggestion alone was enough to make her heart ache.

The sailor and the princess, rough paper held in her hand. Bright colours.

George Bruce’s story provoked her on a level deeper than any she consciously understood. She had never before been acquainted with the text, she felt sure – and yet, somehow, she knew better. She had the feeling that she already knew the tale. How, then, and where?

Sarah churned in her bed, frustrated. Taking up her pillows, she turned them over, one, then the other, hoping for a cool side that might yet soothe her to sleep.

Eyes open, she stared into the blackness of night; eyes closed, into inner dark. Maybe if she went over it, one more time.

Brippoki. Brippoki had led her to a grave. According to records, the grave belonged to a sailor-Pensioner, one George Bruce. Brippoki appeared as mystified as she was, yet urged her to uncover his life story; the story of his
Life
.

The sailor. George Bruce.

According to the Naval clerk Dilkes Loveless, prior to his death George Bruce had presented the Hospital secretary with the book of his life story, a
book entitled
The Life of a Greenwich Pensioner
. So far, she had been unable to trace a copy. There was, however, his
Memoirs
, and Sarah felt sure…

But wait a moment. All along, she had assumed that she was looking for an item in print. What if…? Of course! If the book had never been published, it would only exist as a manuscript. There might only be one copy.

Her heart sank even as it leapt: unearthing a single artefact presented that much greater a challenge. If it survived, there was of course no guarantee it would have found its way into the library collection of the British Museum. It could lurk almost anywhere. Even so, even so, a manuscript! Fool! The likelihood was much too great to have been so simply overlooked – Bruce’s book, an unpublished manuscript!

Opening hour at the Museum could not come soon enough.

The princess.

Sarah imagined Aetockoe herself, floating directly overhead. Wearing a feathered headdress, she exactly resembled the Indian chieftainess from the Naval Hospital’s painted ceiling.

Disappointed at such a limit to her imagination, Sarah Larkin finally slipped into unconsciousness.

Dawn, barely perceptible, threatens to break.

Brippoki hasn’t slept in three days. Drawn as before towards the dread Well of Shadows, he resists the urge. Those parts of the city most familiar to his Dreaming are too filled with sadness. Instead, he lets the wind dictate direction.

He wanders beside London Docks. Next to the River Thames, the Great Serpent Himself, here alone he finds space for contemplation.

The huge, unnatural lakes stretch as far as the eye can see. From in amongst these trapped waters sprouts a forbidding forest, limitless, and petrified. A low wind whistles through the leafless black spars.

Stern brick formations rise to either side. Even so, the taller mastheads and yardarms overtop their roofs. This puzzle of angular rhythms mesmerises, yet makes Brippoki sad. The bolt uprightness of clay and wood betrays the hand of man, as do the squared sides of each deep lagoon. The curve and flow of natural forms is nowhere to be seen, nowhere a single natural growth, not plant, or living flower.

Played out in great long lines, the bowsprits stitch each ship to shore. Brippoki prefers them swamp and woods, as once they were.

In the empty early morning, amidst so much timber, the pungency of turpentine is almost overpowering. His keen nose is able to detect an underscore of subtler aromas: the welcome fragrance of coffee and spice, plus headier fumes of rum, tobacco, and rank, untanned hide.

Beneath Tobacco Warehouse, and the stacks of the South Quay, lurks a labyrinthine complex of stone cellars. From their unventilated depths, the fermentation of wine mingles with a fungal smell, the dry rot that coats their ceilings black.

Brippoki lingers over the threshold, at the lip. In the same instant that he is repulsed, he finds himself further attracted – just as it is with the city as a whole.

From east to west the wind switches direction, turning brisk. Brippoki puts his face into it. Progressing eastwards, he covers good ground, in that desolation before dawn. Only the occasional guard dog rouses itself as he pads past, to deliver a desultory bark. Rats and cats interrupt their pitched battles, startled by his silent approach. Everywhere is bare of human life.

He seems quite alone.

The Museum library’s manuscript collection was extensive, rare, and in nearly every subject could be declared exceptional. Confident of her claim on the
Memoirs
, Sarah spent the first part of the morning delving into the relevant catalogues. She stood, almost at the centre of the Reading-room, within the innermost circle of the three concentric stands, where ranged the Cotton, Harley, Sloane, and Lansdowne collections. Moderately familiar with their contents – most especially the writings on Scripture – she had, by the same token, never needed to search for anything so specific.

There were in excess of 25,000 manuscripts catalogued, to date. Without knowing the year in which a work might have been presented, Sarah would be obliged to go through them all. Assuming such presentation where Bruce’s manuscript was concerned, the posited event might conceivably have taken place at any time since its completion in 1819.

It rather looked as if she would be required to renew her contact with Lieutenant Dilkes Loveless.

Sarah continued to trawl through the various subject-headings that seemed the most appropriate – Navy; Travels; Voyages, &c. (Journals of Voyages and Travels) – but had to concede this was searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack exceeding large.

Never before had she wanted to lay her hands on a book so urgently.

Turning about, Sarah faced key members of library staff. They sat arranged at stations along both sides of the central dais. Business proceeded quietly beneath the watchful eye of George Bullen, superintendent of the room. Keeper of the Department of Manuscripts was Edward Augustus Bond, the Egerton Librarian; in spite of all her years in dealing with him, or perhaps because of them, Sarah was not overly fond of the man. She coughed
politely, before directing her enquiry towards the nearest of his senior assistants, Harry Ward.

Ward ceased to make notes, and squinted at her. He met her even gaze crookedly, with every air of a man not relishing the interruption. With his pen, he pointed towards the folio volumes she had just that minute abandoned.

‘On these two stands the catalogues must be referred to,’ he said, the advice perfunctory, delivered by rote, ‘and the tickets, of which there is a plentiful supply, made out for the works required.’

‘Yes…yes, I know,’ Sarah patiently explained. ‘I’ve tried the main catalogues, and those for the Additional
and
Hand – ’

She cut herself short. ‘Without success,’ she said. ‘I was wondering if you might…’

Ward’s one good eye swivelled in its socket. He threw a withering look at one of his juniors, eavesdropping further along the platform, and then back to her. His mouth was set. Sarah could appreciate his annoyance: every day she overheard other readers make the most outrageous and ignorant of demands. She changed tack, trying not to sound so vague.

Look confident. State the facts.

‘The title of the book – the manuscript,’ she did not say ‘perhaps’, ‘is
The Life of a Greenwich Pensioner
, and the author was Bruce, George Bruce. It would have arrived in the form of a bequest from the Royal Naval Hospital, at Greenwich…but I don’t know the year.’

The senior assistant had returned to his writing. She stared at his bald crown.

He spoke once more, with weary but firm finality. ‘Readers must conduct their own searches,’ he said, ‘for which the catalogues are provided. Staff are unable to undertake a search on behalf of a reader.’

He deigned to look up, briefly, thereby declaring a conclusion.

‘If we were to do that,’ he said, ‘nothing would ever get done.’

Eyes dull with disappointment, Sarah moved away.

Turning a corner in relative quiet, Brippoki faces, head on, a ship bearing down in full sail. Conjured as if from air, countless small craft busily crowd the riverfront. They weave back and forth, criss-crossing each other’s passage, a thousand collisions every minute only narrowly avoided.

Running along the riverside, Brippoki seeks the glimmer of dark waters, through tangles of chain, rope and crane, else covered over with spars and gangplanks. A heavy barrel swings at head-height, almost dashing out his brains. Only nimble reflexes save him. He stops to watch as it is winched aloft. High overhead, numerous bridges run warehouse to warehouse, spanning the narrow lane in which he stands. The air is filled with barrels, bales, and boxes, creaking and swaying all about – the larder of a giant jungle-spider.
Hungry black mouths piercing walls either side are served gobbets by wheezing windlasses.

London, it appears, is being fed.

‘You cannot,’ said the junior assistant. ‘It is in use.’

‘In use?’ said Sarah. ‘But it was reserved to me!’

The library staff seemed suddenly determined to frustrate her every effort. She brandished articles relating to the ‘Greenwich Pensioner’ from the previous day’s investigations. ‘I didn’t want these again,’ she whined. ‘Not these ones.
That
was the book I wanted.’

‘Madam, please…’

‘Is there a problem?’

A senior assistant took an interest. Sarah laid down the wrong books and hung her head while Dorset Eccles, the junior, explained. She had sounded more petulant than she had intended.

‘The book is in use, miss,’ the man confirmed.

‘Yes, I thank you, Mr Graves,’ Sarah snapped. ‘The book was in use to me. I had asked that it be reserved, but these were reserved in its stead.’

She touched the small pile on the desk before them. Uncertain whether she had dealt the day before with Dorset or his brother Gregory, she couldn’t accuse them of any wrongdoing, and it was anyway not in her nature.

‘There has been,’ Sarah stated, ‘a misunderstanding.’

‘I see,’ said the senior assistant.

It did not help that in any dispute one’s face was level with a man’s midriff: Sarah felt like a small child scolded, or a criminal brought before the judge. The volume of
Tracts
containing the
Memoirs
was doubtless wending its way back into the bowels of safekeeping. She would have to re-apply for it again, later.

The two men regarded her steadfastly, and without pity, until she backed away.

Sarah had no other choice but to return to her notes from the previous day, locating, without too much trouble, a bound copy of the periodical cited in Bruce’s narrative, the
Literary Panorama
for May 1810. ‘A review of books, register of events, magazine of varieties, etc.’, the octavo bound volume presented a comfy handful in neat brown binding.

In every number of the
Literary Panorama
, the frontispiece was the same. Sarah thought she recognised the epigraph as a quote from Milton –
Paradise Regained
, or perhaps
Paradise Lost
.

The article therein reproduced the very same text as in the
Memoirs
. Ironically, it stopped short at around the same point reached by her transcript. Half as
much again, again denied her; Sarah’s groan of frustration caused a couple of nearby readers to look up.

Written in the third person, the
Panorama
entry had been accredited partial source for the
Memoirs
, and so must have appeared first. Who else could have written it, if not Bruce?

A short preface to the article was suggestive from any number of angles. ‘Of the following narrative we have seen two accounts, differing in some trivial particulars. We have chosen the present, as being the most perspicuous and copious, with less of crimination than the other. We have added a few incidents, from equal authority.’

Taking up her transcript, Sarah made a closer comparison of the two texts. An additional fact immediately leapt off the page – the name of George Bruce’s father! ‘George Bruce, son of John Bruce, foreman and clerk to Mr Wood, distiller at Limehouse, was born in the parish of Ratcliff in 1779.’

Sarah double-checked her transcript: the detail was absent from the
Memoirs
.
‘John Bruce’
. She made a separate note of the father’s name and underscored it.

Interposed after a constellation of asterisks, the same article ended with a further editorial aside. ‘We have not seen Capt. Dalrymple’s statement of events; and therefore deem it justice to suggest the propriety of not determining on his conduct, which appears to have been both unwarrantable and cruel, till that officer has been heard in his justification.’

‘Miss Larkin?’

Benjamin J. Jeffery, another of the junior assistants, hovered beside her desk. She had noticed him before, his hair a vertical shock, and he boggle-eyed, or so she thought, at ungracious Mr Ward, who had no right to treat her as if she were a foolish novice.

Young Mr Jeffery held out a book.

‘I think…’ he began. ‘I couldn’t help hearing before. I think this may be the manuscript you were looking for?
The Life
…’ uncertain, he checked the item ‘
The Life of a Greenwich Pensioner
?’