The Solitary House (7 page)

“My journeys into Africa were exclusively devoted to science, and to the study of nature, but I could not help bestowing some attention to the advantages that might be derived from the civilisation of that most fertile portion of the globe. I shall therefore touch here and there upon the practical, as well as upon the scientific, results of my expedition. I may premise, that I had prepared myself for the task I have undertaken by studying natural science under some of the most distinguished professors in several universities, and that from my earliest youth the observation of the phenomena of nature had excited in me the liveliest interest.”

T
HE ROOM IS FULL
tonight, and the number of portly and be-bearded gentlemen crowding the rows of seats is making up for the rather inadequate fire at the far end. Cigar-smoke is hanging heavily overhead, and it’s obvious that the portly gentlemen are sweating gently under their starch and barber’s cologne. The speaker on the dais at the front is small and lean, with heavy whiskers, thinning hair, and a little beard sharpened to a perfect point. He looks rather like the
Prince Consort, and speaks with a very similar accent, though someone better versed in these things than I am would tell you that he is, in fact, Austrian. A former Consul-General, no less, and his presence here, therefore, is something of a coup for this as yet rather minor geographical society, which has only fairly recently acquired another adjective before its name, and has yet to take possession of the large and distinctive redbrick premises it will later occupy on Kensington Gore. Baron von Müller has a map pinned to an easel and a small table to his left, which holds a number of interesting items, some instantly identifiable, others rather less so. We have just been listening to his opening preamble, and it’s a fair sample of his rather self-important, amplifying style. No doubt it comes with the territory, in every sense of the word.

His subject tonight is ‘A Scientific Journey through Africa’, and he is clearly going to take his time about it. Some twenty minutes later he is still “proceeding slowly across the immense steppes,” though there is no hint of impatience from most of his audience. But if the august members are increasingly intrigued by the identity and purpose of the tray of props, they are about to be enlightened. One by one, the Baron proceeds to hold up these prize samples of what the African continent offers to “the commercial, industrial, and intellectual people of Europe.” They are, to wit, and in order: a piece of gum Arabic (smooth, slightly clouded, amber-coloured, the size and texture of a bar of soap), a large ivory tooth (known—the Baron tells us—as a
masheket
, due to the fissure running through it, which he carefully points out), a jar of tamarind (small brown peanut-shaped pods), a sliver of ebony (cut thinly from unpolished trunk, with a light outer skin and a dark inner core), a handful of pressed senna leaves (dried now and faded), and—finally—two large ostrich feathers. The latter, at least, need no accompanying explanation; there is not a gentleman in the audience whose wife does not possess a fan or head-dress embellished with plumes just like these. But the table has not yielded up all its treasures yet, though it is some minutes more before we find out what the final item is doing there.

The Baron resumes: “At Melpess, in the vicinity of Lobehd, where I had spent some time for the purpose of collecting objects of natural history, I made in April 1848, the acquaintance of a man, from whom I wanted to buy several animals, who for the first time put me on the trace of the unicorn, or
anasa
, hitherto considered a fabulous animal. The man had often seen the animal living in the Chala and dead among the tribes. It is the size of a small donkey, has a thick body and thin bones, coarse hair, and tail like a boar. It has a long horn on its forehead, and lets it hang when alone, but erects it immediately on seeing an enemy, when it becomes stiff and hard.”

The Baron smoothes his moustache and looks up and down the rows of faces turned towards him. “Moreover,” he continues, and then pauses, prolonging his moment. “Moreover, I was able, at no inconsiderable expense, to obtain an example, and return with it from the darkest heart of Africa. Gentlemen, I present to you now the only authenticated example of a unicorn horn ever to be brought to these shores!”

He lifts the final item in his hands with a theatrical flourish, and stands there, awaiting the wonderment. He’s given this performance before, and this is always by far the most rewarding moment.

The horn in question is perhaps three feet long, not entirely straight, but almost so. Dark, highly burnished, and twisted in a thick spiral towards the base. There is no question that it does indeed look uncannily like the representations of unicorn horns that everyone present has known since boyhood, not least on the royal coat of arms. The room is silent for a moment, and then the murmuring starts. Quiet at first, but then louder, with here and there a word discernible.

“Good Lord.”

“Quite extraordinary.”

“Never seen the like.”

The noise continues for some moments more. And then—improbably—there is the sound of laughter. Loud, incredulous, and outrageous laughter. As you would expect, this is rather a rare occurrence for such a learned institution, and the members start moving cumbrously in their chairs to see what’s going on. It’s coming, they find, from a seat at the back; it’s coming, as we can now see, from none other than Charles Maddox. The officer of the Society who has been chairing the proceedings rises to his feet.

“Order, please! His Excellency deserves the courtesy of a considered hearing.”

It makes no difference; the noise is rising to a din. He picks up his gavel—normally an object of far more ornament than use—and strikes it against the wooden block.

“Would the gentleman in the back row care to explain himself?”

Charles smiles. “Gladly,” he says, and gets to his feet. “I have read a number of papers on the subject,” he begins, “and they have only served to confirm my belief that there is not, and never has been, any such species as the unicorn. The very idea of such a creature is, quite frankly, an insult to the intelligence of this Society—”

The Baron had returned to his seat, but he is on his feet again in an instant, his face red. “
You
, sir, I take it, have never even set foot on the African continent—”

“I have not. And therefore I can offer no actual
proof
—scientific or otherwise—that this creature does not, in fact, exist.”

“There you are—what did I say! The man is an ignorant fool—”

“But what I
can
do is prove beyond all doubt that the horn you are holding is
not
what you claim it to be. That it is, in short, a fake, and that if there is indeed a fool among us, it is far more likely to be
you
, than
me
. Though in your defence, you are not the first to be taken in by cunning and opportunistic natives, and I dare say you won’t be the last.”

Uproar now. The room is in chaos. The chairman raps his gavel again, and motions Charles to the front.

“You had better be able to make good your claims, sir, or be prepared to make a full and unreserved apology to our esteemed guest!”

Charles looks unperturbed by either the words, or the portentous tones in which they have been uttered. He makes his way briskly up the centre aisle to the mutterings and—in some cases—the downright disapproval of several of the audience. He does not, after all, look the part of a serious scientific mind, being every bit as untidy as when we saw him last and a good twenty years too young to have any sort of legitimate opinion. He leaps the steps to the dais two at a time and takes the horn from the Baron’s hands. He turns it, weighing it lightly, and running his fingers from tip to root. Silence descends. You could, in fact, hear a pin drop.

A moment later he looks up at the chairman and grins (something else these walls rarely get to see). “As I thought. This horn was taken from an adult bull of the
Taurotragus oryx
, or Common Eland. An antelope common in precisely those parts of Africa that the Baron has been describing to us in such exhaustive detail.”

He tosses the horn back to the Baron. “It is, I grant you, a fine and unusually large example, and will make an admirable addition to the wall of your ancestral
Schloss
. Appropriately labelled, of course. I am sure that a man who has ‘studied natural science under some of the most distinguished professors in several universities’ would not wish to leave his visitors in any doubt as to what this
actually
is.”

The Baron is only half-way through his prepared paper but Charles does not stay to hear it—he has better things to do with his time. How long it takes for the rest of the room to return to anything like its previous attentiveness, he neither knows nor cares.

Outside on Regent Street the night is clear but frosty, and though he is not far from home the sight of a green Bayswater heading
his way tempts him, for once, to take the omnibus. It’s very full—no surprise at this time of night—and Charles struggles to find a seat between a little testy man with a powdered head, and a sturdy brown-faced woman in a grey cloth cloak who’s gripping an umbrella with a wooden crook and has a market-basket full of greens wedged between her knees. The ’bus grinds its slow way past brilliantly lit shops and strolling crowds, and Charles eventually swings down the step at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road.

It is, perhaps, some five minutes later that he first gets the sense that someone is following him. It’s happened many times before, especially on fast-darkening evenings like this, but it’s no less alarming for that. He stops, and turns as if nonchalantly, but sees no-one. A minute later he steps quickly down his own small side street and slips into the shadow of a doorway. And now he knows he’s not imagining it: He can hear heavy boots, and even heavier breathing. One man only; that at least is something. He waits, his heart pounding, but when he springs out, grasps his pursuer by the throat, and throws him against the wall, he starts back in disbelief.

“Abel Stornaway—what in God’s name do you think you’re doing?—I could have killed you!”

The old man is leaning against the wall, spluttering. “Mr Charles, sir,” he gasps, his Scotch tongue tempered by the best part of fifty London years. “I never meant to startle ye. Yer landlady wouldna let me wait in yer room, so I was keepin’ an eye out—”

“—let me guess—from the snug of the White Horse?”

Stornaway smiles weakly. “A wee nip ne’er goes amiss on a night like this. And then when I saw ye go past I couldna keep up with ye. The legs bain’t what they once were, and that’s a fact.”

Charles looks at him. He is—what—seventy-five now? Even eighty? He has a pitiable old scarf round his neck and a much-worn and often-mended pair of gloves, but neither will be much good in these
freezing temperatures. Whatever it is that’s dragged him from his comfortable fireside, it must be important.

“Look,” he says, “let me make amends for Mrs Stacey’s lack of hospitality. She is a kind woman at heart, but her infatuation with Gothic novels has her seeing ghosts and vampyres under every bed, especially after dark. Come back to my room and I’ll have her get us some hot coffee. And then you can tell me what this is all about.”

Stornaway is soon installed in front of Charles’s small fire, with a mug gripped in both hands and the powerful aroma of coffee filling the room. The cat wakes, stretches languorously on the bed, then turns himself slowly upside-down, inviting adulation. His companion takes his time to get to the point, but Charles is in no hurry and sips his own coffee patiently, stroking the cat and contemplating Stornaway. He bears all the marks of his brutal career: twisted fingers gnarled with scar tissue, a nose that’s been broken more than once, and the thin white mark of a knife wound running from his brow to the corner of his mouth. He was lucky not to lose the eye; Charles’s father even let drop, some years before, that another such encounter left him with a fractured skull and a metal plate holding his head together.

“It’s the Guv’nor, Mr Charles,” he says eventually, his face troubled.

Stornaway is not a man given to delicacy of feeling, or finding problems where none exist, and Charles is troubled in his turn, not least because it’s been rather longer than he cares to admit since he last saw his great-uncle. Maddox spent the summer on a long-postponed tour of northern Italy, but he must have returned to his house near the river at least six weeks ago, and Charles has still not found the time to visit. Given the relationship they have—or had; given what Charles said of him only yesterday (and every word of that was true), this lapse might strike you as rather odd. It might
strike you, too, that there must be a reason for it that Charles seems rather reluctant to admit. What this might be we may yet discover, but it is, in itself, instructive: He may be a meticulous observer of the habits and behavioural patterns of other creatures, human or otherwise, but he is singularly blind to his own. Abel, meanwhile, has said nothing, but Charles is in no hurry. Best the man come to it in his own way.

“He’s not his’sen, Mr Charles. Not at all. Not since we got back.”

“Is he unwell?”

Stornaway looks perplexed. “That’s just it. I dinna rightly know. One day he’s as right as rain, the next he dinna seem to know who I am. One day he just sits there in his chair, starin’ into space mumblin’ to his’sen; the next he’s as sharp as a razor, settin’ everything to rights from the state o’ my collar, to the state o’ the nation.”

Charles puts down his mug. “I suppose he is very old now.” He’s trying to be reassuring, but he’s not as confident as he sounds. Maddox has an incisive mind, yes; but he was never a belligerent man.

Stornaway, meanwhile, is nodding. “Aye, that’s what’s I thought me’sen. Mrs McLeod, who comes in twice a week to do for us, her husband is in the same declinin’ way. More a little chiel than an old man she says. If that’s all it were, I could manage. But these last few days, things have changed.”