The Choir Boats (3 page)

“No,” said Sanford. “Tonight we meet at the Jerusalem coffeehouse to discuss the business in camphor wood with Matchett &
Frew and their syndicate. Remember?”

Barnabas sighed again and searched the key for clues about its
provenance. Finding none, he put the key in a vest-pocket. He took
it out, checked the key again, returned it to his pocket. One hand
soon found itself stroking the vest-pocket, sometimes fondling the
key within. He locked the letter in the lockbox.

“We need to keep the book about so that we can read it, clear up
this mystery,” said Barnabas. “I know. We’ll hide it in plain sight . . .
in the library.”

Neat and orderly
, thought Sanford, who followed Barnabas out
of the inner office, up the back stairs, and into the library on the
second floor. Barnabas slipped
Journies and Travells to Yount and the
Realms Within
onto a lower shelf between
The Life and Adventures
of Joe Thompson
and
The Female Quixote
. Waving a hand above his
head, Barnabas declared that no one would ever think to find the
strange book there. But he was wrong.

Tom could not believe his luck. For an hour, his masters had been in
the partners’ office, leaving him unsupervised in the clerk’s room.
Perched high on a stool at his scrivener’s desk, surrounded by ledgers
and inventory books, he at first diligently reconciled the accounts
for the
Gazelle
’s latest voyage. Gradually, however, as the partners’
office door remained shut, Tom dwelled instead on the escapades of
various friends. His pen moved with languor as he thought of the
theatres in Drury Lane, Covent Garden and Vauxhall. The door to
the street opened, startling him into activity, but it was only his
sister Sally, back from her morning lessons.

Tom was grateful for his situation but he longed for life beyond
the ledger books, especially at a time when England was fighting
for its life against the tyrant Bonaparte. The house of McDoon
dealt in goods from India and China, selling mostly to merchants
in Hamburg and Copenhagen and other ports in the North of
Europe, with an occasional foray into cochineal or campeche wood
from the southern Americas or figs from Turkey. While the trade
sounded exciting, Tom never ventured farther than the Thameside
quays and spent most of his days at his daventry-desk within the
four walls of the house on Mincing House Lane. Tom had never even
been back to Edinburgh, let alone seen Bombay or Madras:
Bit unfair
,
Tom thought, his pen blotting.
Uncle Barnabas was sent out to Bombay
by his uncle when he was my age!

Thomas Tobias MacLeish and Sarah Margaret MacLeish had
come to their uncle as children. Their mother was sister to Barnabas,
a younger sister whose naval husband had died at the Battle of
Camperdown in 1797. Having nowhere to turn as a pregnant widow,
with a son aged six and a daughter aged three, she had left Edinburgh
to plead for haven with Barnabas. Haven he had gladly given her, his
only surviving sibling, but she died just months later delivering a
stillborn son. In the fifteen years since their mother’s death, Tom
and Sally had become as son and daughter to Barnabas and he was
both father and mother to them, with Sanford as much a parent to
them as Barnabas.

Sally loved Tom with the comprehensive fierceness of an orphan.
Sally resembled Tom in more than just looks (both had dark unruly
hair, darting hazel eyes over high cheekbones, and chins a trifle too
small for their faces): she too longed to find a dazzling field upon
which to meet the cavalry charge of fate. More, she yearned for
high houses of thought that girls were not allowed to enter and she
dreamed of hills that could not be found on any map in the City of
London.

The interlude ended as Tom knew it must, with Barnabas and
Sanford returning to the outer office. (Sanford’s full name was
Nehemiah Severin Sanford, but he never answered to anything
other than his last name, finding it uneconomical to use three words
when one would suffice.) Tom picked up his pen, sighed, did sums
in the margins of wastepaper fetched out of the cartonnier. Sally
had already gone upstairs. Magpies cried above the gables, horses
whinnied outside, an oyster-man hawked his wares in the street.
The clock seemed to tick even more slowly than usual.

On her way to her room, Sally made a detour. She heard footsteps
on the back stairs, which was odd because she heard the maid — for
whose use the back stairs were primarily intended — gossiping in
the kitchen (“mardling,” the maid called it) with her aunt, the cook.
The footsteps must, therefore, belong to Barnabas and Sanford,
which was doubly odd because neither man regularly left the ground
floor during business hours. Sally dashed across the landing before
the two merchants reached the second floor from the opposite
direction. She dove into the library, and then scrambled under the
writing desk in the far corner. Sanford and her uncle walked into
the library. Hardly daring to breathe, Sally knelt under the desk and
listened (dismissing thoughts that it was not very ladylike to hide
under desks and eavesdrop).

When the men were gone, she came out from under the desk
and searched the shelves for whatever book her uncle had deemed
so important or dangerous that he had hidden it. Sally knew the
library better than anyone else. For Barnabas and Sanford the
library was a tool of the trade, for Tom a duty, but for Sally it was a
field of pleasure, a storehouse, the contents of which she purloined
on nocturnal raids. Her schoolmates, the daughters of other men
of good standing, fancied romances and tales of gothic horror, but
Sally hungered for knowledge about political economy, history,
natural philosophy, just about any topic that a man (but, alas, not
a woman) might debate in Parliament or in the coffeehouses. Her
uncle worried about how she was to marry, since few men were
interested in an educated woman, but he indulged her. Sally located
the book in five minutes.

Her room was a cubby right under the eaves, smelling of tea and
pepper because the rest of the attic was used to store trade goods.
By the gable-window, alone with her cat Isaak, Sally began to read
Journies and Travells to Yount and the Realms Within
. The yearning
in her heart responded, quickened as she turned the pages, began
to take shape and name. The book’s anonymous author, or authors,
seemed to be present, whispering in her ear. She missed lunch, then
almost missed dinner and barely ate when she did come to the table.
The cook was not the only one to notice Sally’s agitation. “Roasted
rabbit, Miss Sally,” urged the cook. “With mustard gravy just the way
you like it.” But Sally paid little heed to either coney or mustard.

“Something is afoot in this house,” said the cook to her niece, the
maid. “Or I am a stag-turkey.” The cook and the maid were in the
kitchen as noon neared. They had just heard Sally enter the library,
followed closely by Barnabas and Sanford.

The cook picked up her flairing knife in one hand and the rabbit to
be skinned in the other. Her words followed the rhythm of her knife.

“I have been in this house a long time,” the cook said. “And I feel
something’s come unstilted.” She
had
been a long time at McDoon &
Associates. Originally from a village by the Norfolk Broads, near the
fishing port of Great Yarmouth, she had been called to London by
Sanford many years ago. Her mother had been a maid to Sanford’s
family in Norwich, and now the cook had called her niece from the
same village. Unlike Sanford, the cook’s Norfolk accent was plain to
hear at all times. She ran the kitchen the way Sanford ran the office:
no pan was ever misplaced, no tureen lacked its top.

Her niece, the maid, nodded. The cook put down the flairing
knife, wiped her hands, picked up the leaching knife to slice the
skinned coney.

“Yestereve,” the cook said, leaching the meat. “I felt uneasy. Mark
my words, niece, this home is being watched . . . spied on like.”

“Aunt,” said the maid. “As I lighted the candles yesterday, I had a
sort of quaver, like Old Shuck had walked on my shadow. There was
something outside in the dark. I thought maybe I saw a man near
Dunster Court.”

Both women crossed themselves.

“Mister McDoon and Mister Sanford, now, they are up to
something, those two; they’ll keep this home safe, so don’t you
worry about no boggarts in the alley,” said the cook. “But could be
there’s our Miss Sally to worry about, regardless.”

The cook put the coney in the roasting-pan, and said, “Miss Sally
is a funny little smee.”

Aunt and niece thought of ducks trapped by nets in the Norfolk Broads, how the “smees” struggled in the brashy reeds until exhaustion and the hunter’s hand overcame them. The cook wiped
her hands again, touched the medallion of St. Morgaine (the bakerabbess of Chiswick-near-Shea, the matron saint of cooks) around her neck , returned to grinding the mustard seeds for the dinner’s sauce.

“I think she sees things you and I don’t, niece, nor other folks
neither, though what things I don’t rightly know,” said the cook,
shaking her head. “Always up in her room with her books.”

The cook finished grinding the mustard seeds.

“Which ain’t normal itself, her all alone up in the attic, in the
maid’s
room, mind you,” said the cook.

“Grateful I am for that, aunt,” said her niece. “Especially as means
sharing a room instead with you in the back-house, with its lovely
big fireplace.”

“Make yourself useful then,” said the aunt. “Fetch out the china
with the pheasant on it, the blue pheasant, that’s the one, it’s Sally’s
favourite, we’ll serve on it today. So long as Sally eats proper, won’t
matter so much what she sees . . . funny little smee.”

Sally disappointed the cook that afternoon, hardly touching the
coney in mustard gravy. She did not voice her excitement but Tom
sensed something, just as he sensed an electric air about Sanford and
Uncle Barnabas. Tom sensed equally that Covent Garden might be less
exciting than whatever agitated the other three. Rather than visit the
theatre after dinner, Tom intercepted Sally as she hurried upstairs.

“You are quiet today, sister,” said Tom. He did not need to say more.
Sally beckoned him into the partners’ room, empty since Barnabas
and Sanford were at a coffeehouse. The coals in the fireplace and
a lone candle on the table created shadows on the walls. Sally told
Tom what she had read.

“A book about a lost continent in the southern seas?” Tom
laughed. “Well, I’ll sooner believe that the giants will walk off the
Guildhall clock! It’s an old and discredited story, dear sister! Cook
and Bougainville have been there, to the far South Seas, you know
that. They charted Australia, New Zealand and Van Diemen’s Land.
But that’s all, there’s nothing more to be discovered except perhaps
some tiny islands not worth the mention. At most, we’d find some
strange animals, with luck some gold or cotton or other useful stuffs
worth trading, and a king we’d either have to conquer or make a
treaty with.”

He stopped when he saw the anger on Sally’s face.

“The book,” she said, “The book . . . it’s real, what it says, I can
tell. You must believe me. Let me show you.” Something in her
voice made him follow her to the library. Lighting one candle and
shutting the door, in case Barnabas and Sanford returned early from
the coffeehouse, Sally produced the book for Tom. Seeing the dogeared, weathered tome, the apprentice became a little less jocular.
The mere sight of it made Sally’s claims more plausible.

Sally read, “‘Ptolemy and Pomponius Mela assumed the existence
of a great southern continent, necessary to balance the boreal
continents, for how otherwise would the Earth remain equilibrated
and avoid wandering lost in the void?’”

She paused. The lacquered globe in the room caught the
candlelight.

“‘Plato wrote of the fall of Atlantis, a mangled legend in his time
but one preserving a measure of truth. A cataclysm in ancient times
wrenched the continents and sent the ocean out of its bed. Does not
the Bible itself tell us of the great Flood?’”

Sally paused again. She and Tom thought about forty days and
forty nights of rain. The dancing shadows from the candle seemed
to rise up and overwhelm the ship’s model on the top shelf.

She read out another passage: “‘Far south of India and Sumatra
lies land, exceeding difficult to reach, of no fixed latitude, fenced by
perils. Some say this is the land of Prester John, in the wilderness of
sunrise seas beyond Araby. Others say it is a floating island, peopled
with the races described by Herodotus. The Chinese admiral Cheng
Ho, on his expeditions through the Indian Ocean to eastern Africa,
is said to have lost ships on a coast that no one has since seen. Dutch
whalers speak of mountains on the anti-septentrional horizon and
say that boats seeking those mountains never return, only that
sometimes one hears voices over the near-frozen waters of the
deepest south.’”

Tom stirred. “That sounds like what the survivors claimed
happened to the boats of the
Glen Carrig
.”

Sally and Tom thought about the story published by the survivors
of that ill-fated ship. The
Glen Carrig
had wrecked in 1757 in the
southern ocean, blown far off the shipping lanes. The ship’s boats
had landed on vast mud-flats where they were attacked by creatures
unknown to natural philosophers. Plangent cries had filled the
air, and other ships, empty, were stranded in the estuaries of that
land. The authors swore that their adventures were true, but they
were derided or pitied as madmen whose thirst and hunger as they
drifted on the open sea had forced nightmares into their minds.

The candle burned low. Sally thumbed ahead to a page very near
the end of the book. Her voice lowered as she read again: “‘We live
in the Age of Reason. We employ the tools of enquiry that Locke
and Leibniz, Hume and Condorcet have uncovered so that we may
correct the omission of Yount from mankind’s histories and systems
of thought. Yount is a third hemisphere, a
terra abscondita
, a hidden
world within a lost sea, or
mare perdita
.’”