Salamander (34 page)

Pica was relieved when Flood turned down the widow’s invitation, although he did accept a skein of
kamma
thread as a token of remembrance.

When at last the
Bee
stood off from the Cape, a line of ships with tattered sails ranged up on her stern. It was the merchant fleet. The captain of the flagship came across in a cutter to find out how they had accomplished their record passage into homeward waters.

They headed northwest into the Atlantic and once more, after a few days of scurrying along in the midst of lumbering giants, they left the fleet behind.

On the island of St. Helena, where they watered, Snow prowled the harbour lanes with Pica in tow, and learned that the
Acheron
had been sighted three days earlier, headed south.

As they neared the English coast, Flood began to tell stories of London, delivering them unbidden and without warning, like prophecies.

He spoke of the navy press gangs with their cudgels, filling the rosters of warships with the bruised. The pimps and bawds prowling like sharks for hungry, credulous girls. And boys. The Mohocks, aristocrats who daubed their faces with paint and stalked the streets at night, slitting off the noses of their victims, gouging out eyes.

London was smoke.

At dawn they passed Execution Dock, where the tarred bodies of pirates hung in gibbets, and passed into a world of ghosts. Pale ash whitened the rails and rigging. Fog drifted upon the waves like wraiths. Near the custom house the
Bee
slid unnoticed between two towering coal hulks riding at anchor, their masts vanishing into a yellow haze. On the dock great vats of caulking tar bubbled and steamed, stirred by boys with blackened faces.

They could not see the city, but all their other senses told them it was there. They could smell its filthy gutters and burning rubbish heaps, hear its human clamour, feel the tremor of innumerable feet and hooves and carriage wheels. And then there were Flood’s stories, to fill the streets they could not see with menace.

Pica disappeared into the great cabin with Darka, and when they emerged an hour later everyone was startled by the unexpected appearance of a girl decked out in a hooped gown of yellow tabby silk, lavender petticoats, and shoes of silk damask.
Pica’s unkempt hair, which had grown long during the voyage, had been upswept into a powdered coiffure and topped with a pinner of lace. Darka, it turned out, had kept a secret in the days before they reached London, altering one of her old costumes to Pica’s size. To find Madame Beaufort, she reasoned, Pica might need to get in through any number of doors, most of which would be closed to an unbrushed tomboy in patched breeches.

The contortionist had watched the others listen in dread to his stories, Flood realized, and had grasped his underlying lesson. This was a city extending not so much in the familiar directions of the compass as in sundered zones of fortune and desolation, with hidden passageways that could transport you from one to the other in an eyeblink.

Snow turned Pica around, inspected her, and gave an unexpected nod of approval.

– You could hide a brace of pistols under all that stuff.

Flood ventured out and hired a wherry to take them upriver. As they climbed into the boat, Snow took her leave of them and went off alone. She had reached an agreement with Flood: once the printer had found a place to set up shop, the
Bee
was hers to take where she wished, provided she could gather a crew.

The wherry slid through the oily smoke standing on the river, skirting the sudden phantom shapes of barges, skiffs, and other passenger boats plying the sullen waves. In reply to Flood’s question about the smoke, the boatman told them that it had been an unusually hot and dry spring, which was always good for a rash of fires around town. Most of the murk, though, came from the bonfires and the rockets sent up last night, a burst of patriotic fervour following the latest news from the American colonies.

As if unable to contain himself, he launched into a tune.

While the boatman piled verse upon verse, the wherry ran the foaming cataract between the derelict piers of London Bridge, and slid at last into the crush of boats at Blackfriars Stairs.

In an ashen twilight they climbed to Ludgate Hill, following Flood’s memory of the streets. Every now and then they skirted dark alleys lit by fires around which ragged figures huddled, staring sullenly out at the traffic in the street. They passed a man dressed as a dervish, ringed by a pack of gaping children, about to swallow a sputtering rag torch. On their left hand, below the crumbling embankment, the filth-choked, reeking Fleet Ditch steamed in the morning chill like a river of the underworld.

At the top of the hill they stood at the edge of a great thoroughfare, uncertain what direction to take. Pica was shoved from behind and stumbled forward into the street, so that only Snow’s quick clutching of her cloak saved her from a collision with a passing coach horse. They looked around to see who had caused the mishap, but the crowd was too thick for any one culprit to be singled out.

They stopped the next hackney coach that came along, driven by a man with a hand of dirty, frayed playing-cards pinned to his hat. When he asked them where they would like to go, no one spoke. Overwhelmed by the city itself, they had not thought that far ahead.

– We’re looking for someone, Pica finally said. We don’t know where to begin.

The coachman replied that if it was someone who might prove difficult to find, they should visit the booksellers around St. Paul’s.

– A book is a confession, after all. Those fellows know all the secrets.

– They used to say you could get anything here, Flood observed.

– Still true, sir, the coachman said, nodding solemnly. Even the Spanish pox.

Flood asked about the news from the colonies.

– A young major, name of Washington, the coachman said, surprised a troop of Frenchies in hiding and peppered them good. Supposedly shot their commander just as he was waving some sort of official paper he’d been sent to deliver. If that’s the case, I ask, why was he hiding in the woods? But now Paris is howling bloody murder. There’ll be out-and-out war at this rate, mark my words. They’re rioting for it on both sides of the channel.

At the bottom of the hill they passed an inn gutted by fire. A man in a soot-blackened apron sat on the pavement with his head in his hands.

– Tragedy at the Belle Savage, the coachman shouted down to them like a tour guide. Handsome officer and young gentlewoman, pretty little biscuit. Take a room as man and wife, up from the country for the celebration. Round midnight the husband arrives, forces his way upstairs, and catches the lovers in a state of dishabby, which is French for your clothes mostly off. Furious oaths. Blood-curdling shrieks. Flash of rapiers in the candlelight.
Ting, tang, skiing, sklang
. And finally
sshhtuck
. Husband mortally wounded, expiring on the floor. Night watch
rushes in, apprehends the captain fleeing out the window in his nightshirt. In the confusion, candle knocked over, curtains catch fire. Conflagration.

The coachman tapped the cards on his hat as he dealt out the remainder.

– Pretty gentlewoman brought home insensible. Yesterday learns of her gallant officer: Newgate’s newest tenant. Public rendezvous with a rope expected shortly. Despair of the gentlewoman knows no bounds. Takes poison with her afternoon tea. Dying whisper to nursie:
Bring me my little girl
. Last kiss. Poor lame poppet left an orphan.

The coach drew up suddenly as a fancy carriage crossed their path, its gilt facings in the shapes of unicorns and gryphons flashing at them through the murk. Like spectators in the dark of a theatre pit they gaped as a mythological tableau traversed the stage.

– Where will she go? Pica asked. The little girl.

– If she’s lucky there’re rich relations to take her in. Though with a start like she’s had I wouldn’t wager her a happy life.

Their progress was halted next by a crowd of people milling in the street. The cries of hawkers selling oranges, chestnuts, and ballad sheets competed with the shouting and banter of the crowd, the wails of children lost in the crush, the barking of dogs. The Turinis shrank together in their seat, staring out the window in frightened wonder at the roaring tide of humanity as it seethed around the coach.

– Newgate just up the street, the coachman shouted over the din. A load of condemned men being carted off to Tyburn this morning. And there’s the summoning bell. Won’t be long now.

They spent the rest of the morning in the narrow, winding
lanes around St. Paul’s, going from bookshop to bookshop, asking everyone they met if they knew of a Madame Beaufort. Once in a while the proprietor recognized Flood and grumbled that it was a long time since he had seen fit to grace them with his merchandise. At Pica’s insistence they stopped in at all the other shops as well, print sellers and sheet-music sellers, jewellers and clockmakers, engravers and silversmiths, gathering a few unpromising scraps of rumour and hearsay. A certain duke owned a prize racehorse named Beaufort, and Beaufort was also the name of a lady’s wigmaker in St. Martin’s Lane, famous for the scandalous shapes of his creations. By noon the smoke had thinned enough that the dome of the cathedral appeared, its golden cross flickering in the haphazard sunlight like a cold, distant flame.

With the clearing of the sky, a damp, sweltering heat descended. The jostling crowd around them reeked and steamed like cattle, and with the exception of Pica, who seemed to thrive on the noise and confusion, they all began to droop. Turini and his wife, their faces pale with shock and exhaustion, clung to the young twins, who by now had overcome their earlier fear and strained to be let loose.

Flood found himself in a borderland between this city and the one he remembered, only now and then recognizing streets, shop signs, monuments, like beckoning islands in an unfamiliar sea.

They were rolling past the dust and flying straw of Smithfield Market when Flood suddenly spoke.

– It was near here, he said. My old shop.

Pica wanted to stop, but Flood pictured her disappointment when she saw the sort of place he was asking to live. He insisted they go on.

– There’s nothing there.

It was clear to him that she had not yet grasped the futility of this random pursuit of a vague clue, a name, in the biggest city on earth. There were other ways, more likely places to search, but he held off mentioning them for now, unwilling to snatch hope away from her too soon.

The shops around the cathedral had turned up very little, and so the coachman again became their guide.

– Covent Garden, he suggested. Rumour mill of the city.

From Fleet Street to the Strand the coach was swept along in a rushing river of foot, horse, and vehicle traffic, besieged by a thousand contending sights, clashing sounds, and odours borne to them on the broiling air. London was every place they had been: the crowds and the murkiness of Venice. The heat of Alexandria. The many-tongued babble of Canton.

When they struck a shoal of oyster stalls on the edge of the Haymarket, they abandoned the coach and set out on foot, but not before engaging the coachman’s services for an indefinite period. It was agreed that he would meet them at Blackfriars Stairs every morning at eight.

They passed through a maze of winding alleys lined with shops selling oddities and marvels. At each grimy window the twins would stop and press their faces against the glass, gaping at comical masks and animal disguises, ingenious toys, marvellously iced pastries and chocolate-dipped sweetmeats, until their mother or father tugged them away by the hand.

Their way led them through a sort of roofed tunnel with shops on either hand. A sallow-faced young woman stood leaning in a doorway, watching them pass with cold, unswerving
eyes. A long, livid scar ran down one side of her face. At the tunnel’s end Pica glanced back and saw that she had vanished.

In Covent Garden the carpenter and his wife at last discovered a London they could understand: the realm of amazement. Under the colonnades of the Piazza inventors, clowns, conjurers, and snake charmers jostled for elbow room. Everywhere they turned another spectacle greeted them. On a raised stage near the centre of the square two Amazons in tinsel armour trading meaty smacks. Gaudy puppet theatres staging Noah’s Flood and the Siege of Troy. Waxwork booths promising gory tableaux of famous executions. Barkers thundering from curtained platforms where giantesses, two-headed men, and other human monstrosities would display themselves to the public for sixpence, with Turkey-chairs at the ready for fainting women.

As a trial, the Turinis appropriated a tiny patch of open ground, strategically close to a seller of sugared ices, where Darka and the twins prepared a hastily improvised tumbling act. Lolo sulked at first, lamenting a brightly coloured paper whirligig he had seen spinning in a toy-shop window. When Turini suggested the toy could be his if he earned it, he threw off his moodiness and joined his mother and sister. Thanks in part to the ice seller, they swiftly attracted a crowd, and Turini’s overturned hat soon began clinking out the music of tossed pennies.