Salamander (36 page)

– Do you know the Duchess of Beaufort?

– The Duchess, is it? the painted man said. My dear child, I can be a duchess for you, if you like. But yes, she and I have a passing acquaintance. In fact, I believe she is here today, holding court in the Temple of Chocolate. Do you see the Moorish-looking turrets, peeking up over the grove of orange trees?

Flood thanked him brusquely, and as he and Pica were turning away he called after them,

– It was delicious running into you again. If you need anyone else, I’ll be here.

The Duchess was tiny, a doll child disguised as a woman. The tips of her shoes swung just above the Persian carpet. Her stubby fingers struggled with the huge china serving boat.

– It was so delightful of you to call, she said, pouring Pica another saucerful of chocolate. And you’ve come from so far away, too. Goodness, the world is too large to bear thinking on. My father went to India ten years ago. I was a baby then. I don’t remember him. He caught a brain fever and died there. I like to think of him resting under a banyan tree. I don’t know what a banyan tree looks like, but it sounds like a restful sort of tree, don’t you think?

– It does, miss, Pica said.

– There’s just Mama and me now, and she stays in bed all day. She’s gotten quite fat now, the silly dear. She won’t see anyone.

She giggled, her pagoda of powdered hair wobbling.

– Well, almost no one. My brother’s gone, too. His name is George. Such a loving, thoughtful son and brother. How we wept when he went away to that island in the Caribbean – I can’t recall the name just now, St. Somebody-or-other.… He writes us six letters a year. Sometimes we get them all at once, though, if there was a hurricane. Or pirates. Sometimes we don’t get any letters for a long time. He’s getting on swimmingly in his business, he says, which has something to do with the blacks. He sent me one for my last birthday.

– One what, miss?

– A black. For a manservant. Mama gave the fellow our name. Because he’s so lovely, with his skin like chocolate, and so strong.
Beau. Fort
. You see?

She reached up a tiny hand and tugged at the bell pull above her sofa.

– He’s just outside. I’ll fetch him. You’ll see.

In the white mask of her face her watchful eyes danced.

– More chocolate?

The serving boat hovered ominously over Flood’s knees.

– No thank you, he said. Has your family always lived here? In England, I mean?

She giggled again.

– Of course, silly. Mama and I were both born just across the street. Did you think we were from Asiatic Tartary?

– No, miss. We’ve been searching for someone with the same name …

– Oh, yes. I know. When your family is as old as ours, people steal your name for all sorts of things. There’s a wigmaker …

– Yes, we’ve heard of him, Flood said.

– And a fortune teller and a boxer …

– A fortune teller, Pica said, leaning forward.

The Duchess pouted into her cup.

– I haven’t been to see her, of course, she said. Mama won’t let me. Although Mama does have her odd notions, too. She says when she dies she wants to be buried under a tree, like Father. A palm tree. Beaufort’s managed to grow one here, the clever fellow.

Back out in the gardens, the swampy heat was now as suffocating as anything they had endured on their ocean crossing. They were drawn into the dusky cool of the serpentine grove, a tree-lined path that turned back on itself in a figure eight. Statues of goddesses lined the pathway and drew Pica onward, until she came out opposite the Temple of Chocolate again, and found that Flood was no longer with her.

She retraced her steps and found him standing in the centre of the grove. He stared blankly at her, seemingly without recognition.

– Only if one, he muttered, stops moving …

Pica insisted that they return to the ship, where he went straight to the press room.

That night, when Snow came to take her on another nocturnal excursion, Pica pulled the blanket over her head and lay in her bunk, listening to the young woman’s footsteps die away. Then she realized that there was no sound from below. She got up and crept down the hatchway stairs. Her father was sitting at his work table, threading a needle. A pot of glue bubbled on the water-bath nearby. For a while she watched him, and when he spoke suddenly, she jumped.

– What’s the matter, Pica. Can’t sleep?

She climbed the rest of the way down and joined him at the work table.

– I didn’t hear the press, she said. I came to see …

– If I was finished?

She kept silent, not sure in what sense he meant it.

He set the threaded needle aside and turned to look at her.

– Almost.

He nodded towards the sewing frame on his work table, in which sat a small, coverless volume she had not noticed until now.

– The type is still liquid, he said, but it isn’t producing any more new formes. I thought it was time to bind what I had. Whatever that may be.

He took up the needle and thread and bent again to his work. Pica pulled up another chair, sat beside her father and watched him complete the sewing and then the rest of the binding. With the plough he cut the unruly fore-edge smooth. Tiny motes of paper shavings swirled into the candlelight and after a moment Flood raised his head, turned away and sneezed.

– That happens every time, he said.

He pasted the dyed, stiffened sealskin cover to the endpapers of Trincomalee parchment, rounded the back and worked the leather along the French groove, moulded the head and tail pieces. As always when he worked at these final stages of a book, he whispered soft words of encouragement to the inanimate materials he was urging into shape.

Pica watched and listened, and then asked,

– What was that you were talking about today, in the garden?

He looked up at her, frowning.

– Talking about …

–
Only if one stops moving
, you said.

– Oh. Yes. I was thinking about a book I once made. For your grandfather. It was about two young lovers, searching for one another. As long as both of them kept moving their story could never end. The Count was not impressed, so I gave it to your mother to keep. I suppose it’s lost now.

At last on the table sat a thick, compact volume, slightly narrower than ordinary pocket-size, bound in soft, dark green leather. The rhythm of the work had lulled her, and when her father spoke next she stretched as if waking.

– We’ll leave it under the pressing boards overnight, he said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes. Let the binding take.

He picked up the book to place it under the pressing boards, turned it over in his hands for a moment and then held it out to her.

– My father used to say,
Make a beautiful thing, but remember, it is not only the material object we strive for. The work is not finished until the book passes into the hands of a reader
.

Pica took the book from him. The cover seemed to breathe under her hand like the hide of a living thing.

– It’s so warm, she said.

– The paste, Flood nodded. It will cool.

She was about to open the book, then set it back down on the table.

– All the work you’ve done. Shouldn’t you keep … ?

– This one is unlike any other I’ve printed. It was made, somehow, out of all that has happened to us. What we have been, and will be. Even things hidden, and lost. That means it is your book, too. And maybe more yours than mine.

– How could it be? It belongs to you.

– I was thinking, he said, of the story you told me, not so long ago. About your life in Venice.

– I didn’t tell it right, she said with an embarrassed shrug. Not the way I wanted to. I couldn’t find the words to say it all.

– You were trying to tell everything. Everything that mattered to you, that was you. Do you remember what Samuel Kirshner said, about the books that come to be when someone dreams them?

– Yes.

– Perhaps this will become such a book, for you. When you enter its pages, I can’t say for certain what you’ll find. But no doubt it will enchant you, set you puzzles, even lead you astray. Wherever the book takes you, Pica, remember the way that led there, and you’ll know the way to go on.

He placed the book between the heavy wooden pressing boards and tied them together with twine. She was tired now, and cold, and so she rose to leave. On the steps she halted to watch him tidying up, methodically cleaning and putting away his scattered tools, as if this work day had been like any other. She felt she should say something more, let him know that this, too, mattered to her.

– Father …

– Yes?

Once again, she could not find the words.

– Good night.

The next morning, when Pica went down to the press room, he was not there. The book sat on the work table in the pale light from the hatch, a real book, ordinary and unknown.

Her father had gone up into the city, Turini told her at breakfast, to find his old shop.

She stepped out onto the quarterdeck, driven by a vague feeling of alarm. Up to now they had gone everywhere together. Standing at the taffrail she scanned the roofs and steeples, sharpening out of grey obscurity as the sky lightened.

He would be fine out there. He had lived here. This was his city.

She went back down to the press room, sat at the work table and stared for a long time at the book her father had made, before finally picking it up and opening it at random, somewhere near the middle. Fearing a desert of blank paper she was relieved to see rows of small, close-spaced print. She did not try to read at first, but flipped with her thumb through several pages, then shut the book again, held it in her hand, hefted it, felt the reassuring weight of a real book.

Everything that mattered, her father had said. Everything she was a part of. Things hidden and lost.

She opened the book again, this time at the beginning. Several pages, she could not tell how many, slipped between her thumb and the inside front cover. Try as she might, she could not reach the very first page, if there was one. The first few leaves, impossibly thin, evaded her blunt fingers.

She began to read at the first page she could reach, found a table of contents. A listing of numbered chapters, but in no apparent order.

She suddenly understood that she might search for these chapters but never find them. In such a book they could remain ever out of reach, tantalizing and perfect. She thought of how she approached other books. On the shelf or just opened, a book was all possibility, a wondrous box of paper that could contain anything.

Repeated to the bottom of the page, and onto the next. She turned another page, and then another and another.

She felt a surge of panic and shut the book. A dizzying fear had come over her that in the few moments she had been reading time had raced on past her in the real world: days, months, years … Footsteps clumping across the planks overhead told her that the others were still aboard, getting ready for the day.

She would join them, but not yet. Not yet.

She opened the book again and riffled through, stopping here and there at random.

A minute description of someone’s right ear, of the surprising contents of an iron chest buried in a sandbank beside the Orinoco River, of rain dripping from flower petals in a forest at night …