The Choir Boats (4 page)

Tom shrugged and said, “All those claims hardly make it as
correct as Cocker.”

Sally implored, “Damn it, brother:
sapere aude
.”

Tom looked shocked at the first expression and then blank at the
second. Sally translated: “‘Dare to know.’ It’s Latin, the rallying cry
of our modern age, the motto of Kant.”

Tom laughed. “I yield, sister. You are harder than Coade-stone.”
He and Sally had been schooled in German, Tom because he needed
it for McDoon & Associates’ business in Germany and Scandinavia,
Sally because her uncle had indulged her desire to learn as much as
(no, more than) Tom. One of McDoon’s corresponding merchants,
the Landemanns of Hamburg, had recommended a German
governess, Fraulein Reimer, a member of the German expatriate
community around Wellclose Square. Fraulein Reimer had become
part of the family over the years and now lived in a small apartment
in the back-house behind the main house. She had not, however, had
uniform success with each of her charges. Tom had a lazy facility
with German but annoyed Fraulein Reimer with his indifference to
the dative and genitive cases. Sally was Fraulein Reimer’s star pupil,
speaking with the precision of a Heidelberg professor. Unfortunately,
Sally acted like a Heidelberg professor in other ways too. “
Quatsch
,”
was all Tom could muster in reply, the German word for “nonsense,”
which he heard all too often from Fraulein Reimer.

Sally was about to continue her lecture when they heard the
clackering of the brass dolphin on the door as Barnabas and Sanford
returned from the coffeehouse. By the time Barnabas and Sanford
had reached the top of the front stairs, Tom was in his bedroom, and
Sally was tiptoeing into her room in the attic. Tom would not admit
it to Sally, but he thought about Yount late into the night. Sally was
beyond debate. She wished herself to go. Somewhere far off there
was a humming, threaded now with an intermittent, thin wailing,
an eerie contrapunto that made Sally cry out in her sleep.

For the next week Barnabas thought about little else except the
meeting with the Purser, whoever he might be. Bursting with
gambits, queries, and recipes for swift success, but not able to tell
Tom or Sally about them, Barnabas shared his thoughts instead
with Yikes, the ancient border collie curled at his feet by the fire,
and Chock, the parrot given as a gift by an East Indian connection.

“What’s lost will be recovered, well, what do you think of that?”
Yikes — whom no one had ever heard bark or ever seen move
more than three feet at any speed resembling haste — regarded
Barnabas with equanimity and snuggled closer to the hearth.
Uncharitable souls noted that Yikes, whom Barnabas characterized
as a “Scotsman in London, just like me,” was no more a border collie
than King George III was sane; in truth, Yikes had come into the
world behind a knacker’s yard near Bishopsgate, so the only border
known to him was that between the City and Spitalfields, and the
only sheep Yikes was likely ever to herd were those in his sleep.
Chock made the sound for which he was named, and shifted from
one foot to another on his perch. Pleased with these responses,
Barnabas forged ahead with his drawing-room plans.

Sanford was another matter. Learning about Yount was
important, and seeking to restore a past that Barnabas had thrown
away most important of all, but McDoon & Associates had to be in
order before they embarked on a new venture. One locked one’s door
and arranged for alternative postal delivery before a journey.

“Beans and bacon,” Barnabas muttered when Sanford urged their
attention to the disposition of the northern trades.

“Barnabas, be reasonable,” said Sanford. “Our regular trade is
blocked but the Landemanns in Hamburg and the Buddenbrooks in
Luebeck write of loopholes in the French embargo. Helgoland in the
North Sea, Toenning on Jutland: the Royal Navy protects merchants
at those places.”

Barnabas, with a “
Quatsch
,” consented to be led through the
opportunities to break the French blockade. Would Tuesday the 14
^th
never come?

Tuesday came, January 14
^th
, the feast day of St. Fiona, so all the
shops had a dried nettle hung above the door in memory of her
martyrdom. Barnabas and Sanford stepped out into a raw, sunless
day. Barnabas admired the dolphin door knocker as he closed
the door behind him, and wondered if the pale blue window trim
wouldn’t want refreshing come spring. From the McDoon comptoir
in Mincing Lane, they walked towards the Piebald Swan in Wapping.
All the life of the City of London thronged about them, a raucous
river of buying and selling in the world’s greatest port. Their house
was nestled in the heart of the City, surrounded by the counting
houses of friends and rivals such as Chicksey, Veneering & Stobbles
just round the corner, Matchett & Frew in Crosby Square and
others in Austin Friars and Pope’s Head Alley. The pales of their
immediate world were the Bank of England and Royal Exchange on
Threadneedle Street, the East India House on Leadenhall Street,
the Baltic Coffeehouse near St. Mary-Axe, the Victualling Office on
Tower Hill. On a stroll, Barnabas was apt to swell with pride at these
edifices to trade, and expatiate on Great Britain’s
imperia pelagi
, its
oceanic empire, but the intensity of today’s mission left him no time
for such amplitude. The Purser awaited, and Yount beyond him. The
key in his vest-pocket bounced with every stride.

Farther east they headed, near the Danish Church and Wellclose
Square, where many of their captains lived, in a neighbourhood
known for German merchants and sugar refiners. Skirting the
London Dock, they entered a run of streets in the district of
Wapping. Past a great brewery, near an even larger staveyard, they
found the New Deanery, which intersected Finch-House Longstreet
where George & Sons, Ship Chandlers, had their place of business.
But Barnabas and Sanford did not halt at George & Sons (
payment
owed us
, thought Sanford), hunting instead for the Finch-House
Mews that must be nearby. The houses on Finch-House Longstreet
were narrow and nondescript, built a century earlier in the plain
fashion favoured after the Great Fire of 1666. Few people were
about: a butcher’s apprentice in an apron hurrying westwards to the
Smithfield market, a woman with a load of old clothes for sale on her
back, a peddler going house to house selling candle stubs and used
suet, one or two men idling at a corner who might be sailors on shore
leave. Barnabas paid little heed, but Sanford did not like the looks of
the idlers. Wapping was no place for the fainthearted.

As Finch-House Longstreet turned towards the Thames, inns and
taverns catering to a seafaring clientele appeared. Sanford made a
slight show of thrusting his walking stick forward with every other
step, a parsimonious yet eloquent gesture not lost on several men
slouched in front of an alehouse. Interspersed with the taverns were
a few coffeehouses, more refined establishments, though hardly as
exalted as coffeehouses in the City. Shopkeepers, broker’s clerks,
coopers, chandlers, minor excise officials, shipwrights, and owners
of ropewalks and tar-sheds frequented the Wapping coffeehouses,
not great merchants such as Barnabas and Sanford. The proximity of
the docks made sailor’s tales and other fables as much the subject of
conversation as ship arrival and departure dates, the price of corn or
alum, and the state of the war against the tyrant Napoleon. Barnabas
slowed as he passed an inn called The White Hart — notorious for
the imaginative mendacity of its drinkers — and stopped. A narrow
alleyway led off Finch-House Longstreet. Stepping over dung,
Barnabas and Sanford walked down a slight incline into the mews.
The mews were empty, but at one end was a little sign painted with
the likeness of a piebald swan. Barnabas fingered the key in his
pocket and walked up the steps of the coffeehouse. Sanford, with a
glance over his shoulder, followed.

The
Piebald Swan was tiny and seemed to have survived the
Great Fire, with its exposed roof beams and crooked stairs. A coffee
urn sat on a counter at one end, tended by a man in a skull-cap. He
had a short black beard, dark eyes and coppery skin. The man said
nothing but looked intently at his only visitors. On a credenza next
to the urn was a coffee-service in gold-rimmed white porcelain with
harbour scenes painted expertly on each cup. The walls were bare
except for an engraving of a man swimming with a dolphin, and
a painting of a schooner taking wind into its sails under moonlight.

“I received a letter. I have come to see the Purser,” said Barnabas,
warming to the puzzle as he did when entering a business
negotiation. He felt the key in his pocket. He thought he might have
heard a humming as he touched it.

The man in the skullcap pointed to Barnabas’s pocket. In an
accent that neither Barnabas nor Sanford could place, he asked,
“What do you have in your pocket?”

At the very edge of memory, Barnabas vaguely recalled that
question coming into an old story of another riddling contest. But
didn’t the question in that story have to do with a ring?

“A key,” said Barnabas.

“To what?”

“I do not know. That’s why I seek the Purser.”

“Who is your companion?”

“He is . . .” Barnabas checked himself again. “He is the companion
I was directed to bring with me. We are partners.”

The man in the skullcap looked from Barnabas to Sanford
and back again. Sanford was impressed with how much their host
said without speaking. The man in the skullcap pointed upstairs,
and stepped aside with his finger still outstretched. Under the
proprietor’s gaze, Barnabas and Sanford mounted the stairs.

The second floor was all one room, with gable windows letting
in wan light from the mews, and a table at one end. At the table
sat another man in a skullcap. He might have been a twin to the
proprietor except that he was a little taller and had a larger nose.
Like his compatriot, he dressed in a way that drew no attention to
himself but was, upon close inspection, a model of simple elegance.
His skullcap was black, with magenta embroidery.

Barnabas said, “Your cap, sir, I have never seen such a colour.”
The man at the desk said, “My people have recently devised
the art of extracting dyes from coal-tar. This colour is one we have
discovered using the new process.”

Self-professed abolitionists, Barnabas and Sanford were ashamed
at themselves for wondering that such a dark-skinned people could
possess a technology superior to that of any true-born Englishman
(or any other European, for that matter): dye from coal-tar was a
thing unknown. The merchants were willing to quash their prejudice
in pursuit of profit, however, and wondered if the gentleman might
consider a joint venture with McDoon & Associates to introduce the
new dye process to Great Britain. Let Napoleon try to stop that!

The man at the desk offered compliments on Barnabas’s vest.
Barnabas beamed: he was wearing his best today, a sherbasse
silk with cerulean twiggery and scarlet buds traced on an ivory
background. The man in the magenta-limned skullcap said, “I am
the Purser. We have much to discuss and very little time to do so. We
have summoned you because we need you. More than that I cannot
say. The Learned Doctors in Yount will answer your questions.
Assuming, of course, that you want to go.”

Barnabas tugged at his vest and clenched the key in his pocket.
Bees coursed in his mind through the scent of cardamom under a
ripe red sun as he said, “One moment, hold on, figs and feathers . . .
of course I do, want to go that is, but this whole thing is like a pig in
a poke, you know.”

The Purser frowned. “Pig in a poke? I do not know this expression.”
His accent, like the proprietor’s, was hard to describe, soft and yet
direct, with rolled
R
s and muted vowels.

Barnabas explained. “Ah,” said the Purser. “I see. You want to
know more before you commit. Wise practice, in trade and in . . .
ventures such as these. There is no time to tell you everything, even
if I could. Like you, I am a man of business, responsible for logistics
not policy. The Learned Doctors can answer the deep questions but
you must win through to Yount to speak with them.”

Sanford looked through the nearest window over a tiled roof
across the mews, above which he could make out the tops of masts
in the distance. A rook’s shadow glided across the roof.

The Purser continued. “Long ago there was a great change in
our worlds. We do not fully understand it but in strange ways your
world and ours became linked. We call it the Great Confluxion. It is
not natural, has potentially disastrous consequences for both our
worlds.”

Barnabas and Sanford listened closely. After years of negotiating
business deals, however, they knew better than to swallow whatever
they were told without chewing more than once. Sanford remained
suspicious that the book, the key, and this visit might be a swindle.
Both men were poised to “clarify,” as if they were assessing the quality
of tea auctioned at the East India Company House in Leadenhall
Street or were querying the Khodja merchants in Bombay about
the quality of pepper and cassia-bark for sale. Yet something had
overcome their usual scepticism the morning the box arrived, and
something had propelled them to the coffeehouse. They had read
throughout the week from the book secreted in the McDoon library,
belief alternating with disbelief. The book contained references to
the “Great Confluxion,” but neither man could make sense of it.
Barnabas wondered if it had something to do with Freemasonry or
with stories he had heard in the Orient about multi-armed goddesses
and dragons with beards. Sanford thought perhaps it had to do with
the lost tribes of Israel or with the ships of Tarshish mentioned by
Isaiah and other prophets: “Cross over to your own land, O Ships of
Tarshish, this is a harbour no more. He has stretched out his hand
over the sea, he has shaken the kingdoms . . .”