The Revolutions (10 page)

What End?

—April 17

“I will be frank,” Vaz whispered to me. “At first I thought this was a bank or a counting-house. But not for long. Soon I thought perhaps it was something—Mr Shaw, may I say this to you? Something criminal.”

“Well,” I whispered, counting off facts on my fingers. “We have a motley assemblage of young men—women, too—and we have an unmarked building by the river. Money without apparent legitimate purpose. Secrecy, codes, conspiratorial oaths. Dimmick, a thug if ever I heard of one. It doesn’t take a master detective to smell a rat, does it, Mr Vaz?”

“I have said the same things to myself, Mr Shaw. Many times.”

“And Atwood, of course; sinister in his own way, I’ve started to think.”

“Atwood?”

I described Atwood, and Vaz agreed with me that he sounds a bad sort.

“You cannot trust a man who smiles too much,” he said.

“But what sort of crime? It must involve numbers. Falsifying bank accounts? Inflating a bubble? I don’t see how. What would one say to the police? We’ve uncovered a conspiracy to perform unusual mathematics?”

“Ah,” Vaz said; but then Mr Irving clapped to indicate that we should resume the Work.

—Friday

A half-day. Told Josephine: a place at the seaside. Good-bye to London. Clean air, sunshine, the blue sea. Quarrelled—don’t know why. Can hardly think of anything these days but the Work.

—April 22

Simon, the medical student, has coughing fits, a burden to those of us who sit next to him, causing us to lose our train of thought. Mr Irving makes no allowance for distractions. He mutters:
discipline yourselves
. Simon follows these fits with a nervous and ingratiating smile, as if he expects sympathy; but there’s none to spare. He says he intends to work for Gracewell only long enough to clear up some debts, and that he is not, appearances to the contrary, sickly or dying.

We all have coughing fits, or headaches, or bloody noses. Or shivering, or bouts of lassitude, or moments of creeping unease. Our dreams are troubled.

“Worse things happen at sea,” Vaz says. And certainly, the battle for life may be fought more fiercely elsewhere; yet there is something peculiarly uncomfortable about the Work. Something unnatural about the numbers themselves. I do not know how to describe it.

Mr Vaz himself suffers headaches, and fainting fits, from which he once woke up quite convinced that, through a window that had opened in the ceiling, an unfriendly eye was staring at him.

He does not have a family, and says cheerfully that he never intends to be burdened with one. His ambition is to one day own his own little ship, and have a crew to call him sir, and to trade back and forth across the ocean; in pursuit of this ambition he is willing to endure Gracewell’s Work with less complaint than most. He had already been there for nearly two months when I arrived, and that makes him something of an old hand. Few last that long.

“Before this place,” Vaz once told me, “there was another place. It was lost in the storm. That’s what the
real
long-service men—longer even than mine—say, but they won’t tell you anything more. They’re not supposed to talk about it.”

I shall record the story of how he came to be working for Gracewell.

“I told this same story,” he said, “to the fellow who used to sit where you sit now.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know. One morning he didn’t come in. The nightmares, I suppose. But please, you asked to hear my story. I’ll tell you. I’m a sailor. That has always been my profession. I could climb a rope before I could walk. It’ll be my profession again when Mr Gracewell’s lunatic enterprise here collapses. Perhaps they’ll come for him and put him in a hospital for madmen. Perhaps they’ll ship him out to India to govern something. In the meantime I am making more money than I have ever heard tell of in my life.”

The room idled. Mr Irving chalked up new instructions. Simon, the medical student, sat with his head in his hands and moaned.

“I was between services. This was shortly after the storm, which I am sure you know was a bad night for ships. The
Viceroy
lost her top mast to lightning! Well, that was not such bad luck for me. I was bound in service for another two years to the
Viceroy
. If the storm had come a few days later I would already have been at sea, far from here; and I suppose I would never have heard of Mr Gracewell.”

“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,” I said.

“I was enjoying my freedom in a lodging-house over a shop in Shadwell, where I shared a room with three or four very good friends. And one morning, as we were playing skittles in the garden, and arguing about money, Mr Dimmick interrupted us. I suppose he climbed the fence; one moment we were alone, the next he was there, leaning on the fence and tapping his stick for our attention.”

He shook his head sadly. “No Englishman had set foot in that garden in years. You can’t be too careful in London these days, Mr Shaw.
Get out
, I said,
whoever you are. Get out. We did not kill your bloody Duke and we do not know who killed him.
I mean no offense to the Duke, but there has been trouble of that sort lately. He said,
shut up.
Tapping his stick on the cobbles—
shut
—
up
—like so. Anyway—he said that he was looking for me. He knew my name, Mr Shaw. I said,
What do you want
, and he said that he had heard it said in the pubs that I could tell fortunes.”

Vaz shook his head. “I said certainly not, because I thought perhaps he was a policeman. But it’s true, I have made a little money here and there telling fortunes. Sailors appreciate a glimpse of the future. I have picked up a trick or two in this port or that, and when I was a boy I could roll my eyes back in my head and speak in strange tongues. I consider it an honest profession, though the law of London disagrees.”

I explained that recent events had caused me to have an open mind on the subject of clairvoyance.

“I said that he should leave, because I was not in the business of telling fortunes. He said that he was a sure hand at fortune-telling himself and so he could tell that soon I would be working for him. I said that I wished him good fortune in his endeavours, and he said what did I mean by that, was that a sort of curse? He said that he supposed that, as a heathen, I probably had all kinds of charms and amulets lying around, and I probably thought I could put the evil eye on a man and was probably accustomed to communicating with devils.”

Vaz shook his head.

“Now, my friends are not the kind of men who take such insults lightly. I thought it was very bad manners myself. So they said some harsh words of their own to Mr Dimmick, and they approached him roughly. Mr Shaw, Dimmick’s stick struck like a snake—I hardly saw it move.”

“A nasty-looking implement, that stick.”

“My friend did not like it either. Dimmick had knocked him to the floor.
Peace
, I said
, peace, we are all reasonable men here.
I said that I was only a sailor, and that if he wanted to hire a sailor I might work for him, but if he wanted to hire a mystic he should go somewhere else, and quickly. Plenty of frauds in London would take his money! He said that he did not want sailors, and was I deaf, had he not been clear? He wanted clerks. I said that perhaps he was deaf, because hadn’t I said I was a sailor.
Shut up
, he said,
and I’ll give you two pounds to come with me and let the boss explain
. Well—I was afraid of him, but I have done more dangerous things than follow a madman to Deptford, and for less money.”

Others tell much the same story as Mr Vaz—the unexpected visit from Dimmick, that is. One or two were recruited from jail, I regret to say.

Mr Vaz has shared his cure for the headaches.

“When it gets too painful,” Vaz advises me, “I close my eyes and think of God; and when that does not work, I think of women.”

“I think of Josephine,” I say. I have told him about Josephine.

“Aha!” he says.

“Sometimes I think about food.”

“Ha! Food!”

“Ham,” I say. “Bacon. Oxtail soup, curried fowl, meat puddings, pea soup, roast—”

We have these conversations two or three times a day. Talk of food makes poor Simon moan.

—April 24

Graves was gone today. Coe left us on the nineteenth of the month. Parrington and Singh on the fifteenth—Singh had been suffering from something that resembled consumption. I forget other names.

A letter from Josephine. Could hardly make sense of it.

Awful confession—her letters pile up beside my bed, unread—unopened. Can hardly think about a thing but the Work.

—April 26

Dimmick gave me a long hard look this evening, as if he suspects that I have been keeping notes. But then that’s Dimmick’s way—the scowl, the menacing
tap-tap-tap
.

Yesterday, Dimmick caught me trying to sneak into a room not my own. I was confused, I said, bloody place is a maze, isn’t it? The scowl, the
tap-tap-tap
.

—April 27

Starry night as I walked home. Struck by a quite unreasoning sensation of utter terror, I clutched to a lamp-post as if to a mast in a storm, and was mistaken for a drunk. A light in Josephine’s window, but I did not know what to say to her. All this is for her; and yet I cannot tell her. Not a

Had to put this away. Could hardly read the page before me. Troubled all day by visions and now the symbols of the Work dance before my eyes.

—May 10

Quite forgot this thing. Not a great success. The Work leaves little time to reflect; and for a while there I was unwell. Let me try again.

Every morning the ledgers contain numbers, written in the left-hand column of the leftmost page.
Numbers
is something of a simplification. They are dots and dashes, somewhat like Morse code, though so far as I know, it is not. We think of them as representing numbers. It is rather like learning a new language. In amongst the dots and dashes are a few other symbols. Today I encountered
α
,
φ
,
ψ
,
and
Ω
. My classical education was poor, but I know those to be Greek. There are a few other symbols—not many—that my education had not equipped me to recognise at all, such as
, or
≈
, or
. Over the course of the day, the job is to perform certain operations on those dots and dashes
et cetera
, transforming them as they march across the columns from one side of the ledger to another.

Vaz believes that the ledgers circulate among the rooms, so that operations that began in Room 1 might be continued in Room 6 and concluded in Room 12 and revolve back to begin again in Room 2.

The instructions Mr Irving chalks on the board set the rules of the game.

Mr Harriot, who works at the back of the room, advised me to think of it as a game. He says it’s trying too hard to understand what it’s all for that causes headaches and worry and sickness, and the thing is to play the game the best you can. He is a rugby man.

The operations that we perform are generally not very difficult, but there are a great many to be performed in a day. Mr Irving never makes threats or speeches, and Gracewell never shows himself in Room 13, but no one doubts that errors will not be tolerated, and speed is of the essence. There is a spirit of competition in the room.

The instructions are sometimes very simple: