Salamander (43 page)

– The Commander, he said, is not a patient man. It would seem he has forgotten about me.

She saw that the book had slipped from his grasp and slid across the table, closer to her. Before she could move, his shaking hands found it again.

– I’ve waited too long.

He rose, seemingly possessed again of strength and will, pulled the chair out from the work table, and set one foot on the seat.

Pica took a step towards him.

– The book wasn’t part of our bargain, she said, her voice trembling.

He seemed to hesitate a moment and then turned to her and slipped the book into the pocket of his cassock. In his eyes for an instant flashed the familiar knife-gleam of cold wit.

– I pray you will forgive a last
bon mot
, he said, but either way, it would seem that I am out of time.

Laboriously he hauled himself up onto the chair, oblivious to Pica now as she backed towards the hatchway, then lunged up the stairs. Halfway she stopped and stood still, listening. In a brief flaw of stillness she heard the tick of the ship’s timbers, the slap of the waves. From the press room, a sound she had never heard before. Like water furiously boiling.

She turned and hurried back down the stairs. The Abbé was gone. A column of raised letters was sinking into the seething matrix in the chase, glowing white-hot so that the heated air in the press room rippled like water.

She leaned over the chase and read the words vanishing into the metal.

As she read, the type disappeared completely and then suddenly rose again, even more agitated, with some sorts almost leaping from the matrix. She wondered if it had been a message
meant for her. How long had he been in the well? A moment of her time could be countless centuries for him.

The words she had just read were broken now into a seethe of letters that she tried to make sense of, until she realized that the type was being pushed outward by something within, forming an image in relief. A face, distorted by the torment of the metal, rising and then sinking away again so quickly that she wondered if she had really seen it.

She lifted the chase gently from the table, not knowing for certain what she intended. Perhaps he had been trying to get out, and the metal was too hot, or he had gotten lost on the way, as she had, in the place where there was only darkness.

The metal was darkening now, waves of heat rising into her face as she carried the chase towards the stairs. She was about to set foot on the first step when the
Acheron
fired again. The ship reeled from the blow and she was thrown backward, the iron frame wrenched from her hands. As she fell she saw the chase wheel end over end through space and strike a crossbeam. The pieces of type burst forth, showering onto the planks with a crash like falling water. Even as the scattered sorts came to rest, lifeless and inert, the sound of their fall seemed to carry on, diminishing slowly, blending in with the slap of waves against the hull. As if whatever living force was bound within the metal had trickled away through the seams of the ship to mingle with the ocean.

She climbed to her feet and stood for a moment, dazed. The sound of cannonfire, of the wounded ship’s groans, receded into distant murmurs and she seemed to be alone in the world, utterly alone, as if it was not the Abbé but she who had descended again into the well. What was he now? A shoal of broken-up type. Hastily, she crouched amid the spill of
letters, plucked a single sort from the planks and raced up the hatchway.

On deck, a few of the wooden casks had been broached so that the gangways were now awash in black ink. Off their port quarter, the
Acheron
was ranging up again out of the mist.

– At last, Amphitrite Snow said, hauling Pica by the arm across the deck, and then suddenly stopping to look at her. What happened to you?

– I … I couldn’t get the book.

– Never mind. Your father wouldn’t have wanted you to lose your life over it.

The
Acheron
had still a wide seaway to cross, but from her forward guns another impatient volley boomed out and exploded into spray just off the Bee’s stern. Snow helped Pica climb down into the longboat, then clambered back up over the heaving side, disappeared for a moment and then handed down Djinn’s kite, folded up and bound with its string.

– If you don’t reach land on your own, send this up on fire and pray someone sees it.

Pica caught the kite, set it beside her, and stared up at Snow.

– You’re not coming.

– You’ve read all the books, Snow called down to her. Don’t you know how stories like mine have to end?

The longboat dropped with a drumroll of sliding chains, struck the waves and rode the surge of the Bee’s wash. Then the chains were released, a swell caught the longboat, and the ship’s hull slid away from her like an opening door.

T
he candles have long since guttered out. Beyond the shattered walls a fine rain is just drawing off. It will be sweeping away eastward now, the colonel thinks, hurrying across the sodden, abandoned fields. As he should have been, hours ago. A sullen lassitude comes over him at the thought of climbing back on his horse and riding to another day of pointless bombardment, of the same haggard faces around the map table, of endless inconclusive debate over what to do about the English
.

He takes another sip of the tea she brewed to warm them. It has gone cold
.

And then? he asks, unable to resist, his voice hoarse from long silence. Despite what Captain Snow said, I doubt that was the end
.

The young woman had risen now and then during the telling, to light a candle or simply to stretch limbs chilled with long sitting. Now, with a charred stick of wood she is stirring the coals in the brazier that has kept off the sharp edge of the night wind
.

It isn’t the end, she says. But it is a good place to stop, for now
.

Bougainville eases back in his chair. His horse, which he had tied up for the night just inside the entrance, whinnies impatiently and knocks a hoof against a fallen board. A suggestion he chooses to ignore
.

May I attempt an ending, then? After all, this is a book I would very much like to read, too. The longboat, I imagine, drifted away The girl saw the smoke of the first unseen flames darkening the
Bee
‘s sails as she came at the
Acheron.
Then all at once the little ship was blazing, flames hurtling to the skies. She watched helplessly, straining for any sight of figures leaping over the side
.

The young woman leaves off tending the fire and sits down across from the colonel
.

The smoke blinded her, she says, nodding and closing her eyes. The girl shouted for Snow but got no answer. Then there was a great roar, and suddenly through the fog and smoke she saw the
Acheron
‘s hull burning Bursting apart. Shards of her aft timbers spinning in slow, winking arcs, falling into the sea
.

She huddled in the boat with the automaton for a day, drifting on the waves. When evening came she was still alone on the water, so she sent the kite up on fire. That night she was found and rescued by La Constance, a naval transport out of Calais. Bound for Quebec with men and supplies
.

The young woman opens her eyes
.

The girl arrived here four years ago, just before the war began. With nothing. Knowing no one. She was taken to the convent first, to be looked after by the nuns, but that did not go well
.

She disliked their cloistered life, no doubt
.

On the contrary. She wanted to stay with them, at least for a while. She liked them. Their life. They were more worried about an early frost ruining their beans and cabbages than about the threat of invasion. But they did not know what to make of her
.

I
am not surprised
.

For a time she lived in the streets, but then the snow started to fall. Finally she found the Abbé’s house, deserted, and camped there like a gypsy for the winter
.

I don’t know the place, the colonel says. Is it near the town?

Not far. When the war began, soldiers came to live there. She had to leave, again. When she first appeared on the bookseller’s doorstep he didn’t want to hire a girl, but she convinced him she could keep track of things better than he had. She fixed up the broken old press he kept under a sheet in the back room
.

She looks down at the heap of wooden fragments on the floor, and the colonel realizes what she was doing when he first entered the shop. Trying to assemble the pieces of a puzzle
.

You became a printer, he says
.

I tried. Much to the bookseller’s amusement. He told me not to waste my time
.

Where is he now?

Not long after war was declared he went home to Paris. I sent a letter with him. He promised he would find someone to take it across the channel to London and deliver it
.

Even at the best of times, the colonel says, letters miscarry. Perhaps when the siege ends …

Yes. Perhaps then the war will be over
.

The stillness outside is broken by the crowing of a rooster. A sound, the colonel thinks, like a half-hearted challenge to the day, to bring something other than yet more bombs, more waiting. The young woman has sat down again and her gaze has come to rest on the broken remnants of the press
.

So, the colonel says with a smile, the Commander of the
Acheron
predicted Quebec would be lost, did he?

He hears his own voice ring hollow. The mocking words echoing with the bleak certainty he cannot conceal. When she looks up he sees that she has heard it, too
.

He wasn’t always right, she says. That I’m here at all is proof of that
.

Yes. But even if Wolfe sails away this winter, someone else will come next spring at the head of another armada of ships crammed with men and guns. The Commander was really the most typical of Englishmen. When they have their minds set on something, even a handful of escaped slaves, they pursue it to the death, theirs or someone else’s makes little difference
.

He rises stiffly from his chair, brushes plaster dust from the shoulders of his coat
.

If the English hadn’t destroyed your press, he said, you would have gone on printing, I suppose. For the conquerors
.

They would have asked me to print their proclamations, you mean. Their warnings and reward placards. And then, some day, their books
.

Your father was obviously a rare craftsman, he says. We need such people in this part of the world
.

She stands and looks out at the ruin of the shop, its vague shapes and shadows taking on harsh edges now in the morning light. She seems taller to him now, unburdened of the night and of her story
.

Things can be taken away so quickly, she says. Lost almost before they are found. I thought if I could create something, out of what I’ve learned … But now I think this trade isn’t the way, for me
.

So, he says quietly, what will you do?

She bends and sifts through the heaped remains of the press
.

When the siege ends I will try to get to London, first of all. And then, I don’t know
.

The colonel buckles on his swordbelt
.

Indeed, mademoiselle. Perhaps, when the war is over, I will search for a different way as well. I would very much like to see some of the places you’ve visited. China. Terra Australis. Uncharted places
.

I hope you will, Colonel
.

And who knows, perhaps we will meet again somewhere. On the other side of the world
.

I would like that
.

When she hears the clop of his horse’s hooves fading away down the street, she returns to the wreckage of the press. She digs through the jumble of its shattered timbers, finding here and there a few broken shards of Ludwig. An ear. A bit of gold trim from his coat. She lifts the tympan and finds beneath it the head and trunk of the automaton. Miraculously, most of Ludwig is intact. Perhaps he can be repaired, in London, at the Cabinet of Wonders. She sets him aside and continues her search, finally unearthing a tray of type. The sorts, shifted in their compartments, have piled in corners like hillocks of leaden rubble
.

She picks through the sorts, searching for accidental exiles in the wrong compartments, returning those that have strayed to their proper places. Her fingers are clumsy with cold, but as she works they warm, and soon she is moving almost at reading speed, barely noting each letter as it passes through her hands. When she is satisfied that all is in order she sweeps the brick dust from her unscathed work table and sets the typecase there
.

Before she closes the battered lid, by habit she digs into the pocket of her leather work apron, in search of stray type. She fishes out a
single sort. A blank slug, the last piece of the metallurgist’s type. She turns it over in her fingers, examining its absolute, unreadable surface. Gently she shuts the lid of the typecase and closes her fingers around the blank sort. Magpie, she whispers, and smiles. This one bit of metal, infinity in her pocket, she will keep when she leaves here, the beginning of a new collection
.