Water Music

LAZARUS

Muttering darkly as he trudges through the drifts heaped up around the steps of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, Dr. D. W. Delp is in no mood for miracles. In fact, if a miracle sat up and slapped him in the face over his small beer and muffin he’d shout it down and chase it right back where it came from, and then possibly, if he felt insulted enough, dissertate in Latin on the experiential impossibility of its existence. He is in a funk this morning, a screaming blue funk, rankled to the quick by what he perceives as a failure of government — or rather, the impossibly inconsistent and unpredictable judicial system upon which it rests. The idea of hanging a man on Christmas Day! Shocking. Barbaric. Worse than that: inconsiderate. He swipes angrily at the iron handrail, misses, catches a pool of dead gray ice with his left foot, and goes down cursing on the hospital steps. “Where the bloody hell is that porter?” he shouts, slamming through the door and shocking the nurses out of their bonnets. “Do we pay him his five shillings a week to remove the frost around here or don’t we? Well, where is he? Malingering by the fire and warming his lazy arse no doubt, eh? Sucking at a pot of beer, eh?”

The porter peeks out from the broom closet, sheepish, while patients in nightcaps, splints and yellowed wrappings sink into themselves, momentarily hushed by the doctor’s outburst. Delp stands there a moment in his greatcoat, muffler and beaver hat, snorting through his mustache. And then an elderly patient, his leg withered and eyes clouded with cataracts, calls out in a feeble voice: “Doctor, it’s me lungs — me lungs is stopped up till I don’t know whether I’m dead or alive.”

That’s all it takes: the spell is broken, the pall lifts. Like supplicants before the oracle they crowd in on him with their arthritic hands and gouty legs, bleating Doctor, Doctor, Doctor.

But Delp has neither time nor inclination for them. He shoulders his way through the press, long legs kicking out impatiently, and makes his way up the corridor to his laboratory. No, it’s not sprains, rheumatism and goiters that have gotten him out of bed this morning. Suppurating sores and compound fractures are quotidian, unremarkable — hardly the sort of thing that would make a man forgo his holiday excursion to Bath on the day after Christmas, a trip planned long in advance to coincide with his son’s vacation from classes at Oxford and his daughter’s arrival, amidst trunks and boxes, from Miss Creamer’s boarding school. Oh, no. The only thing that could draw Delp to the hospital on such a day as this is scientific curiosity — the consuming desire for knowledge, the chance to extend the limits of anatomical understanding, the chance to perform a pedagogical dissection on a pair of cadavers obtained from the hangman the previous day.

The doctor pauses by the bust of Vesalius to blow out a long sigh of resignation, the columns and cornices of Bath and his children’s disappointed faces already receding into the far corners of his consciousness and the problem at hand emerging like a coach hurtling out of the mist. You’ve got to take them when you can get them, he knows that. Christmas, anniversaries, the first golden day of spring — if Quiddle comes round and says he’s got a corpse on ice, then it’s an operating day. No two ways about it. There’s been a real dearth of cadavers these past few years, and the competition has been fierce for the few clean and unmutilated specimens that do turn up. Everybody’s getting into the act. The Royal College of Physicians, Oxford University, St. Thomas’s Hospital, St. George’s, Guy’s, Westminster, Middlesex. The earth doesn’t even have time to settle over half the churchyards in London before someone’s dug up the late dear departed and sold off his moldering remains to the highest bidder. But what’s a man of science to do? Look at Philpott, over at the Royal College. He was so hard up for bodies he dissected his own three-year-old son, dead of the whooping cough, before a class of unsuspecting anatomy students.

“Decius!” Quiddle is waiting for him outside the door of the amphitheater. “How are you this morning? Have a good holiday?”

Delp fixes his assistant with a fishy stare. “What do they look like?”

“The one’s a beauty, laid out like a dead angel. The other—”

“Yes?”

“The other’s a dwarf.”

“A dwarf? Damnation. He came cheap I suppose?”

“Thirty-five quid for the sound one, twenty for the dwarf. Agent for Middlesex Hospital beat me to the first one — a pity too. He was a real corker, that one. A giant. Six-two or — three, at least.”

Delp, absorbed in the process of unbuttoning his greatcoat and ducking out of his muffler, looks up sharply. “You mean that son of a bitch Crump is selling them off to Middlesex now — after all the business we’ve given him?”

“ ‘They goes to the ‘ighest bidder,’ that’s what he told me.”

The doctor shrugs angrily out of his coat, tears off the muffler, fumbles for a match and then throws the whole box of them down in disgust. The corridor is haunted with shadows, early morning, underlit, a cold wind humming at the walls. “Well, let’s have a look at them then.”

♦ ♦ ♦

In his garret on Paternoster Row, Dirk Crump warms his hands over the grate and counts through the pile of coins on the table before him — nearly a hundred pounds. Not bad for a day’s work. The real stroke was to get that old hag in there to claim the murderer’s body. What hangman is going to deny the poor unfortunate’s dear old mom? The dwarf was up for grabs, of course — where would you find a hoary old midget to play the bereaved father anyway? But the big one, he was easy. Just hand over five shillings to Tall Bob, the apothecary’s assistant, and have him run over his lines twenty or thirty times: I’m Will’s brother, come over from Southwark. Da’ sent me to fetch ‘im ‘ome in the cart.

Bob blew his lines, but there was nobody there to care much about it, and the old lady — she was perfect. Absolutely deranged with grief. He’ll have to see if she wants to work for him on a regular basis. There were two or three friends or relatives or whatever pressing the hangman to give up the body to them, but the old lady shoved her way through the throng, screeching and blubbering like the mother of Christ come to haul him down from the cross. The only problem was she didn’t want to give up the body once she’d got it into her cart and hustled round the corner. Even now it makes him shudder to think of the look in her eyes as she sat perched atop the donkey cart in her black tatters like a ghoul or zombie or something. “Eeeeeeeeee!” she shrieked, “ ‘ee’s sleepin’ sound now I’ll warrant. Five pund and ‘ee’s yours.”

She had him over a barrel: he knew he could get thirty easy. He counted the coins out into her twisted claw, tossed the corpse in with the other two and trundled up Paternoster Row. Then settled down in a chair by the grate and waited for Quiddle and Babbo and the rest of them to come round and bid up the price. What am I bid? he asked Quiddle, leering across the table. Eh? What am I bid?

♦ ♦ ♦

The operating theater is close and warm. The two students from Leyden are there, bent over drawing pads and notebooks; behind them Delp recognizes Freischütz, the serious young German with the long nose and frazzled hair. Dr. Abernathy is there of course, seated in the front row, ever curious about the mysteries of the organism. In the back: four strangers, one of whom is a lady. Quiddle had arranged it. Society people with a scientific bent and a pocketful of guineas. They’ve come for the frisson.

Delp bows curtly to his audience before drawing on the calfskin gloves he customarily dons when delving into the body corporeal. He then clears his throat and fixes his gaze on Dr. Abernathy’s stockings; “Today we will begin with an examination of the principal sanguiferous conduits of the leg. . Quiddle?”

Quiddle, in white smock and cravat, strides briskly to the center of the room, where the two cadavers, large and small, lie side by side on a massive slate-topped table. With a flourish, he uncovers the smaller of the two. There is a murmur from the back row, tailed by a soft ladylike gasp. The doctor turns to the corpse, pointer in hand, and frowns. One of the dwarfs hands, rigid as a claw, is frozen at the neck, his body the size of a child’s, his face an accusation — twisted with rage and agony, eyes locked, lips drawn back from the teeth in a wild desperate grin — monstrous and absurd all at once. “No, no,” Delp whispers, “let’s begin with the other one.”

Obedient and efficient factotum that he is, Quiddle pulls the sheet up over the dwarfs ears and the audience breathes a sigh of relief. As he bends to expose the second cadaver, the apprehension is palpable — the lady’s fingers dart to her mouth, ready to stifle a cry, the students from Leyden are suddenly struck with the architecture of the ceiling, young Freischütz sucks at his pen until his lips turn black. But as it turns out, there’s no cause for alarm: the body is at rest, arms at its sides, face clear and untroubled, a white towel swaddling the groin. If it weren’t for the rope burns and broken blood vessels discoloring the throat, one would never guess that the fellow had died an agonizing and premature death — he could be sleeping, playacting, posing for a diorama of Adonis slain by the boar. A hush falls over the room, all eyes fixed on the limp and pallid form on the operating table.

The dry cutting voice of Dr. Delp is almost an intrusion. “As I was saying, today we will begin with an investigation into the blood vessels of the leg. . ah. . Quiddle, if you please?”

As Quiddle’s scalpel deftly lays open the dermis of the lower leg in order to expose the anterior tibial artery, a strange and wonderful thing happens: a rush of blood — forceful as a geyser — leaps up from the incision to spatter his chest, face and hands, coloring the smock as if it were a canvas.

“The anterior tibial artery,” Delp intones, his back to the table, “branches off at the patella from the posterior tibial artery, which in turn branches off to form the peroneal artery—” He cuts off in midsentence, wondering what has gone wrong. Abernathy is on his feet, speechless, the students from Leyden have dropped their notebooks with a clatter, the faces of the society people are ashen. . and then, as chilling as a summons from beyond the grave comes the groan at his back, subhuman, riveting, terrible.

“Doc-Doctor—” Quiddle stammers.

Delp swings around on a fountain of blood, the drained face of his assistant, and worst of all the trembling eyelids and fitfully clenching fists of the corpse on the table. His mouth falls open, the pointer drops to the floor. With the clear unreasoning instinct of a hunted animal he staggers back, turns, and bolts for the door.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” screams Abernathy, leaping the rail and springing to the floor like a geriatric acrobat. “He’s alive! The fellow’s alive! Stop that blood, man!”

Quiddle is the first to come out of it. Corpses don’t spring to life, he tells himself. Vampires, zombies, ghouls — a patient is bleeding to death. No time for thought, surprise, terror, his fingers are at the wound, pinching off the sheared vessels, and now Abernathy and Delp are at his side, trembling with the urgency of it, shouting for ligature and cautery.

In the gallery, the shock is not so easily overcome. Freischütz has fainted dead away, the students from Leyden are under the seats, the society gentlemen on their feet, as mad and uncertain as horses caught in a burning barn. Beside them, the lady sits rooted to her seat, eyes glazed with shock and incomprehension. But then a new look creeps into her face, a look of certainty and joy. Silently, reverently, she slips to her knees and clasps her hands in prayer. “Blessed be the Lord,” she murmurs. “It’s a miracle.”

Down on the floor, in the midst of the flurry round the slate-topped table — hands and instruments and terse panting commands — Ned Rise lifts his head and opens his eyes on Resurrection Day and the shifting lights and colors of life.

♦ THE LOTOS-EATER ♦

“We thought you were dead,”

“Yes, old boy, sorry to say it, we did.”

“Well, I mean, no word in two years’ time— and then that devastating news from Laidley about your Moorish captivity. . Tell me, confidentially now, do they really take their women from behind?”

Another reception, another round of drinks, another bank of faces. As best the explorer can ascertain, this is the twentieth bash thrown in his honor since he got back a month ago — or is it the twenty-first? The pace is killing. But exhilarating. He goes from one lecture to the next, one drawing room to another. One night he meets a duchess, the next an earl. Mungo Park, son of a crofter, rubbing elbows with the high and mighty — and not twenty-seven yet. Heady, is what it is.

No. 12, St. James’s Place

The Baroness von Kalibzo requests the

honor of your presence at a reception for

Mr. Mungo Park, geographical luminary and

discoverer of the River Niger.

9:00 P.M.

28 January, 1798

Sir Joseph, who isn’t much for these affairs, had warned him about the Baroness. Though she was cousin-german to the King, and of the highest rank and precedence in her own country, her reputation in London was somewhat unsavory. Sir Joseph would only say that she had been “guilty of excess,” and he advised the explorer to decline the invitation. But when it became apparent that Mungo was to be the guest of honor. Sir Joseph agreed that he should attend, if only for an hour or two.

So here he is, basking in the adulation of his social superiors, sipping at his fourth glass of wine, munching crackers smeared with Russian caviar and experiencing the distinct sensation that all is right with the world. Blackamoor servants in periwigs and Cluny lace scurry about, bare-bosomed statuary and portraits by Bonifacio, Titian and Fra Bartolommeo line the walls, a nine-piece orchestra softens the atmosphere. And what’s more, every time he opens his mouth, people in evening dress crowd round him. Is this paradise, or what?

At the moment, Sir Ralph Sotheby-Harp and two other wealthy subscribers to the African Association have worked him into a corner beside a potted fern. They are excited, their faces lambent with the ardor of pure and disinterested scientific inquiry as they press him for details pertaining to the sexual preferences of the various tribes, while the explorer, usually reticent in such situations, finds himself waxing glib under the influence of the wine. “The Foulahs, so I’m told, often have sex while mounted on their camels, and the Serawoolis—” here he lowers his voice while a blackamoor servant refills his glass and his auditors lean forward, “—the Serawoolis actually prefer prepubescent ewes to their women—“

“How unutterably dull.” The Baroness has appeared from nowhere, her head a mass of curls, neckline plunging to the point of no return. “To reduce so vital and transcendent an act as luff to mere lubricity, I mean. Don’t you tink, Mr. Park?”

“I–I—uh. .”

“Come,” she says, locking arms with him, “I haff some odder guests you maybe would like to meet. Gentlemen, you’ll excuse us pleese?”

♦ ♦ ♦

A few hours later the explorer is three sheets to the wind and leading the Baroness through a vigorous and semispastic reel while the other dancers clear the floor and the violin strains away at the upper end of the fingerboard. Chandeliers flash by overhead, plants, statues, paintings and astonished faces melding in a vertiginous blur, the Baroness looming and receding like a vision in a dream. She kicks up her heels, spins like a dervish, hair falling down her back in loops, bosoms jogging, petticoats aflutter. Inspired, the explorer attempts a sort of grand jeté, springing across the room like an antelope, leaping a writing desk and spinning toward his partner in a series of widening spirals. He feels so good he could shout for joy, roar like a lion, beat his chest and howl like some elemental force of nature. Unfortunately, he loses his balance at the last moment and pitches headlong into the Baroness, driving her back against a Pembroke table and blasting it to splinters. She lies there a moment, pinned beneath him, forty years old and feeling twenty. “You’re quite a dancer, Mr. Park,” she murmurs finally, her long-fingered hands spread across his back.

A moment later the two terpsichoreans are back on their feet, grinning, a knot of anxious guests crowding round to survey the damage. “More champagne!” calls the Baroness. “Strike up the orchestra!”

Dutifully, the musicians launch another tune, and a few couples edge timidly out onto the floor. Someone is telling a joke in the corner, the wave of chatter swells again, the incident already forgotten. The Baroness smooths her bodice, plumps her bosoms and adjusts the ruffles of her skirt, while the explorer brushes at his frock coat, momentarily at a loss for words. “Mein Gott, dat was fun,” she says finally. And then: “May I offer you anodder glass of champagne, Mr. Park?”

“Yes — yes, of course. And please: call me Mungo.”

While the servant refills their glasses, she looks up at him in a wide-eyed, cattish sort of way. “Iss dere anyting else at all you might want of me — Mungo?”

The explorer stands there, swaying back on his heels, grinning like an idiot, lost in contemplative admiration of the front of her dress.

“Maybe you would be interested to see the rest of the house — the sitting room, library. . my bedchambers?”

He watches her sip at her wine, the tip of her tongue like a bud, rich and pink and moist “And uh,” he stammers, fighting for nonchalance, “the Baron. . uh, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure yet—”

“Ach!” she says, taking his arm. “Didn’t I tell you? The poor man succumbed t’ree years ago.”

♦ DOWN AND UP AND DOWN AGAIN ♦

It’s been a shattering month. A month of trial and vindication, doubt giving way to certainty, crisis to resolution. And then this sudden deflation, the rush of joy and affirmation superseded by a new and malignant sense of incomprehension and hurt, lingering, persistent, dull. Like having a tooth pulled, the same tooth, twenty-four hours a day, thirty days running.

Mungo’s letter reached Selkirk on the twenty-ninth of December. Ailie was not there to receive it. She was in Kelso, in a brick house just outside of town, sitting before the fire and scrutinizing her emotions as closely as she’d ever scrutinized hydra or Paramecium beneath the ground and polished lens of her microscope. The brick house belonged to Dr. Dinwoodie. She could think of no one else to turn to. Her father, the relations, Katlin — even Zander was against her in this. Dinwoodie was bald, semi-invalid, sixty-three years old. His hobby was taxidermy. I dunna understand it, he said when he answered the door, ye’re a wild and wicked gull. But of course ye can stay with me. Of course ye can. Glad for the company.

On Christmas night she sent a message to her father via Dugald Struthers, who was riding into Selkirk to be with his mother for the holidays. Dear father, she wrote, don’t worry yourself. I’m at Dr. Dinwoodie’s, sorting things out. I just couldn’t go through with it, I hope you’ll understand. Won’t you?

The following morning, 6:00 a.m., the old man was beating at Dinwoodie’s door. With his shoe. A frozen rain was falling, gray as a dead lake, starlings stirred in the hedge, the world was sunk in glass. “Dinwoodie!” the old man thundered. “Open this door, be gad, open it this minute or I’ll put me shoulder to it!”

Ailie was upstairs in the guest room. She’d spent a sleepless night, racked with guilt and uncertainty. Staring up at the rafters, listening to the drum of the ice pellets on the roof as the snow turned to sleet, sick at heart over the absence of Mungo and the unforgivable thing she’d done to Georgie Gleg and her family. One minute she would think that she’d run back and marry him despite herself, the next she would know it was impossible. And at dawn, just before she dozed off, she knew, in a sudden flash of intuition, that waiting for Mungo was equally impossible. He was lost. She would never see him again.

The sound of her father’s voice startled her. She sat up in bed and listened to him storming around downstairs. “Where is she, the jezebel?” he shouted. “Be gad I’ll drag her back by the nape of her neck, spank her disrespectful bottom till it blisters, horsewhip her if need be!” And then the calm soothing tones of Dr. Dinwoodie, offering a cup of tea with a bit of brandy, going on about things psychological, the effect that Mungo’s loss has had on her, the need for time to heal the wounds. “Surely you don’t want to force the gull into marriage, Jamie.”

“Force her? She give her word. Give her word, Donald. It gars me greet to think on it. An Anderson, and she broke her solemn vow. Ye should hear the gossip—”

Then Dinwoodie, mumbling something about the new generation.

“New generation, my arse!” Her father’s voice shot back like a rally in a tennis match. “She’s twenty-three years of age. A growed woman. And she maun get married. Get her down here, the hussy — get her down here before I lose me self-control and thrash her out of bed before me oldest friend’s eyes.”

“Jamie, get a hold on yourself—“

“The devil with gettin’ a hold on — this is a time for action:”

There was the sound of a scuffle, crockery shattering, Dinwoodie’s voice, louder now, angrier, but with an edge of resignation to it: “All right, all right, keep your sark on — I’ll fetch her.” And then the scrape of the old doctor’s footsteps on the stairs.

Ten minutes later she was standing before the fire in the parlor, wincing down at the cup of tea Dinwoodie had brewed her, weathering her father’s tirade. Behind her on the mantel was one of the old doctor’s taxidermic triumphs: a badger and two stoats, erect, dressed in kilt and tarn o’shanter, playing at viol and fife. She transferred her gaze to the grinning badger as her father raged and spat round the room. The old man had a magnificent pair of lungs, but eventually he had to pause for breath.

“Are you done?” she asked, and before he could start up again she cut him off. “Because whether you are or not it’s time I had my say. Georgie Gleg is odious to me. He always has been. For all his good heart he’s a coof and a simp. There’s no magic between us, and I’ll not have him now nor ever.”

Her father’s mouth dropped. “Not have him—? But ye give your word, gull.”

“You’ll see me in the nunnery first.”

“All right!” the old man bellowed. “All right then — suit yourself,” slapping his hand down on the table. “I’ll bring the cart round and drag ye to the Abbey meself.” He fumbled angrily into his coat and slammed out the door, muttering “no daughter of mine,” over and over, as if he were rehearsing it.

That was on the twenty-sixth. Three days later he was back, vaulting the picket fence on his winded mare, plowing through evergreens and dormant flowerbeds, galloping right on up to the doorstep, and all the while sputtering through a bugle like some kind of madman. Ailie had heard the sound of the horn in the far distance and had come to the window, puzzled. Dinwoodie was in the midst of stuffing a pair of hedgehogs, which he’d dressed to resemble the parson and his wife, when he heard the commotion and thought for one wild moment that they were under attack. The confusion was short-lived. The next instant Ailie’s father was careening through the door, no time to knock, bellowing at the top of his lungs. “He’s alive, lassie,” the old man was shouting as he bounded up the stairs. It took a moment for his words to sink in — was it possible? — then she was up and out the door, rushing down the hallway to meet him. He swooped her up in his arms, whiskery and red-faced, rabid with the news, a letter flapping loose in his hand. “He’s done it lass. He’s back. Your mon’s come home!”

After that it was easy. The years of waiting, the trouble about the wedding, breaking her vow: it was all forgiven her. People began to talk about premonition, clairvoyance, a sign that had come to her at the last minute. How had she known? They came from miles around to congratulate her, to look at her, touch her, hear the sound of her voice. It’s a miracle, is what it is, they said. A love made in heaven. Ailie was vindicated. She felt as if she’d just won the lottery, restored Bonnie Prince Charlie to the throne, taken her seat at the right hand of God.

But now, back in Selkirk, the walls have come tumbling down again. A month passes, and no further word from Mungo. He’s alive, thank God, she’ll always have that — and yet where is he? The coach takes four days from London, five ownin’ for bad weather, her father says. Where is he then? Where is this boy that’s so hot to see his betrothed, eh? Where is he? Talk starts up again. He’s back, all right, but he’s deserted her — just as she had deserted Gleg. Serves her right. It goes on like this, worse each day, until finally, on the day after the anniversary of their engagement, the second letter comes.

The George & Blue Boar, Holborn

29 January, 1798

My Dearest Ailie:

I am unavoidably delayed in London over the issue of preparing a shortened account of my travels for dissemination to members and subscribers of the African Association. With the aid of Mr. Bryan Edwards, Secretary of the Association, I expect Ishould have it completed in a few months’ time — after which I shall fly to your arms. Think of it, my dearest friend and wife-to-be: once this minor impediment is out of the way, we shall be together always. At least while I’m at Fowlshiels working on the manuscript of my book, to be called “Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 1795-97.” Isn’t that exciting? Too, too much? I’m to be a literary man!

But of course, I languish till I feel your touch.

Yrs., Et Cetera,

Mungo

A few months’ time? She’s waited an eternity already. Badgered and beleaguered, fighting off the wide world for faith in him. And now he’s too busy to see her? Too involved with his book to come up to Selkirk for a week and tell her he’s missed her as she has so painfully and vitally missed him? She crumples the letter in disgust, suddenly filled with remorse for what she’s done to Georgie Gleg. It hits her like an epiphany: poor Georgie, he must feel as hurt and bewildered as I do now.

But that’s another story.

♦ GLEG’S STORY

(BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN) ♦

Georgie Gleg was born at Galashiels, second son of the local laird. As the moment of parturition approached, a golden eagle coasted down out of the haze, flapped its great dark wings a time or two, and settled lightly on the weathervane atop the Gleg house. The locals were astonished. People came running from shops and fields to stand in the courtyard and gawk at it.

“It’s a sign,” someone said.

“Aye,” said another, “but is it auspicious or no?”

A debate started up, right there beneath the windows of <“he laird’s house, Georgie’s mother crying out in pain, the eagle preening its wings as calmly as if it were perched high in its aerie.

“It’s the devil’s own hand laid on, I tell you,” insisted a man in an oversized hat.

“You’re a blatherin’ fool,” countered another. “It’s a benediction out of the heavens is what it is.”

Almost immediately a fistfight erupted. Women screamed, horses whinnied, someone broke out a bottle of whisky. Factions were already forming, and there were indications that the controversy could develop into a full-scale brawl, when suddenly Davie Linlithgow put an end to it. He raised his musket and took the bird’s head off in a blast of fire and smoke. Spastic, the big-feathered torso pitched forward and slathered the tiles with blood.

The crowd fell silent, the combatants held their punches. Upstairs, thin and harsh as a penny whistle, the voice of Georgie Gleg was heard for the first time on earth.

♦ ♦ ♦

If there were any doubts as to the meaning of the events surrounding Gleg’s birth, they were unequivocally dispelled as he grew into boyhood. Without question the appearance of the great bird had been ominous, its slaying a disaster: misfortune settled on the boy’s shoulders like a winged apparition. When he was six his father was killed in a hunting accident, and his sister Effie — the darling of the family — was kidnapped by gypsies and nailed to a tree in the wood beyond the north pasture. Anthrax decimated the flocks that year and three of five milch cows went dry. Inexplicably, the hens began laying yolkless eggs. There was a fire in the barn. Hailstones the size of goiters wiped out the wheat crop, and Georgie’s elder brother was struck by lightning. Poor Simon. They found him laid out in the heather as limp as some soft boneless thing washed up out of the sea.

Two years later Georgie’s mother remarried. Tyrone Quaggus, the new man of the house, was a gambling fool. Skeet shooting, tea drinking, a stroll in the garden — any human activity was occasion for a wager. I’ll bet you can’t put away twenty cups of tea in half an hour, vicar, he would say. Ten pund says I can make it around the garden in two minutes flat. See that jay out in the hedge? Five’ll get you ten he raps on this windowpane before noon. By the time Gleg was twelve, Quaggus had squandered the boy’s patrimony and three quarters of the estate as well. The family was in deep trouble.

But as if that weren’t enough, the blight touched Georgie in a far more subtle and insidious way: it made him a pariah. People shied away from him as if he were a leper, dogs snarled at him, his coevals kept him at a distance with sticks and stones. He was a toad, a worm, a freit — not fit for human company. And what made matters worse is that Gleg so clearly looked the part. He grew thin and ribby, with narrow shoulders and a breast like a plucked chicken. His feet were huge, his hands chapped. Talk had it that the high arched beak of his nose was the mark of the bird on him. His eyes too — they were tiny and close-set, flecked with yellow and red, pushed far back in his head and rimmed with flesh the color of liver. Bird’s eyes.

At school he was the object of taunts, epithets, practical jokes, inhuman pranks, outright mockery and patent disdain. He was ten years old, homely as a horse, and the best Latin scholar in the Selkirk grammar school. This last was the kiss of death as far as his classmates were concerned. If they could forgive him his strangeness, his flapping ears and lack of coordination, they could never forgive the way the declensions rolled off his tongue, effortlessly, while they sat agonizing over the ratlike scrawlings in their battered copybooks. The older boys were particularly incensed. They’d been at it, day and night, for four years — only to be shown up by a sniveling little wimp of a bejan. They decided to get even.

As school let out one evening, four of the older scholars — the Park brothers, Finn Macpherson and Colin Raeburn — took a detour on their way home and met at Ballindalloch Glen. The air was crisp and dry, the snow crepitated under their feet. Adam and Mungo had a fire going by the time the others arrived, uncertain shadows emerging from the black screen of the woods. They greeted each other silently, grimly; Finn slipped the jar of whisky from his pocket as if it were a dirk. No one mentioned Meg Munro. There was no talk of football or shinty, there were no jokes. This was serious business. This was a council of war.

Gleg had done the unthinkable — he’d won the Hogmanay prize for accomplishment in the scholarly tongue by outdoing his classmates in a sight translation from the Eclogues. The prize was half a crown, donated each year by Mrs. Monboddo, a widow with an enormous bosom and a taste for culture. Never before had a first-year boy won the prize.

“This is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Adam said. “We’ve got to teach the little bastard a lesson.”

Finn passed the jar to Mungo, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and assented. “I’m for layin’ his ears back.”

“No, no. We’ve got to be more subtle, trip him up with the old man. ” Adam, at fourteen, was the leader among them, though Mungo and Colin were a year older and set to graduate at the end of the term. Mungo, in fact, wasn’t much interested in the whole affair — he’d come along merely to show solidarity. It wasn’t so much that he liked or disliked Gleg — of course he disliked him — it was simply that he couldn’t be bothered with such petty concerns. At fifteen, Mungo was something of a golden boy: an average scholar, but the best athlete in school, despite a tendency toward clumsiness. He was already six feet tall, and he had the musculature of a grown man. “I’m with Finn,” he said.

Adam took his turn at the jar. “Hear me out,” he said, and leaned forward to outline his plan. It was fiendish in its simplicity, and what’s more it involved Gleg in a major transgression of school discipline: Since the raison d’être of the local grammar school was to inculcate an understanding of Latin, all students were interdicted from speaking Scots — at work or play — during the hours that school was in session. This rule was enforced through the use of spies or “private clandestine captors,” who would report violations to the schoolmaster. The first offense was punishable by a public upbraiding and a fine of two shillings, the second by a whipping before the class. The older boys, of course, knew who the spies were and bought their silence in one way or another. Of the six or seven finks operating in a class of thirtyseven, Robbie Monboddo was the most dependable. They’d simply have him give the schoolmaster a false report on his star pupil. Mr. Tullochgorm. I’ve a boy to report, Sir. Young Gleg. Profaning the Lord — and in broad Scots, Sir.

♦ ♦ ♦

Two days later Gleg was summoned to the front of the classroom. Peat glowed in the stone fireplace, a slow steady drip of meltwater puddled the earthen floor. The place had formerly housed dairy cattle, and the air was stung with the odor of urine and soured milk. Frost silvered the slats of the inner walls, the scholars’ candles flickered fitfully in the gloom, rodents rustled in the thatch overhead. “George Peter Gleg,” Tullochgorm intoned, “come forward.”

The thirtyseven scholars froze at their makeshift desks. All eyes were on Tullochgorm as Gleg apprehensively rose from his seat and started up the aisle. Since the schoolmaster’s face never varied in expression, it was difficult to assess his mood at this juncture — was he angry or merely dyspeptic? Was Gleg to be chastised or praised? It was anyone’s guess — though Adam and Mungo, among others, had a pretty good idea.

Tullochgorm’s totem was the cat-o’-nine-tails that cut an ominous slash in the wall behind him. He liked no one and no thing. Words like wonder, beauty and life were foreign to his lexicon. He was impoverished and embittered, a mere grind dependent upon the niggardly salary the township raised for him, and on the charity of his students. “Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus,” he snarled, lashing out at each syllable as if it were a dog to be kicked.

Gleg stood before the schoolmaster’s massive oak table, his head bowed. He answered in Latin: “I–I don’t understand. Sir.”

“What! Nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa, you young Turk.”

“But—”

“Silence!” Tullochgorm was on his feet now, delivering the customary lecture about disobedience, lack of discipline, those insidious few who circumvent the established rules of society and weaken the fiber of the Empire. When he was finished he seized Gleg by the scruff of the neck and shook him till the snot ran from his nose. “Two shillings!” shrieked the schoolmaster. “Two shillings! Quamprimum!”

A week later Gleg was called before the class for the second time. Adam smirked at Finn and Colin as the room fell silent and the wind moaned in the thatch. The younger boys blanched, clutching at the edges of their desks till their knuckles turned white. Tullochgorm was livid. Gleg frightened and confused. Mungo merely glanced up, absently fingercombed his hair, and then turned back to the dog-eared copy of Jobson’s African adventures he’d concealed beneath his Latin grammar. “Bonis nocet quisquis pepercerit malis!” roared Tullochgorm. And then: “Bend over the desk, reprobate.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Adam Park and his cohorts had achieved their end: Gleg was toppled. In the space of seven short days he’d gone from first scholar to thirty-seventh. But it didn’t end there. How could it, after all, when Gleg was so clearly marked, so conspicuously pathetic, so obvious a target he might as well have painted a black spot between his eyebrows? Adam and his friends had found the quintessential whipping boy. The more he suffered, the more they despised him — and the more determined they became to annihilate him, devastate him, squash him as they would have squashed a slug or spider. Adam took his brother aside. “Let’s have him expelled,” he whispered.

The following morning, at dawn, the scholars of Selkirk were gathered outside the schoolhouse awaiting the arrival of Tullochgorm. It was cold, and a number of them were huddled round the doorway, wringing their hands and stamping their feet. Adam and Finn were there, hands in pockets, copybooks tucked under their arms. They grinned at one another like Casca and Metellus Cimber on the front steps of the Senate House. Mungo and a few of the hardier types were out on the glazed-over duckpond, keeping warm with a round of curling. The big forty-pound stones hissed out over the ice like a long insuck of breath, the players panting along beside them with their whisks, the echo of the collisions bludgeoning the sharp morning air. From time to time a shout of triumph would ring out — in Latin, of course.

Gleg was late. He hurried along the path, bent over double, his copybook stuffed down the front of his jacket, a pot of ale cradled in his arms. Today was a tuition day, and each of the scholars was required to contribute a specified item to the schoolmaster’s larder, in lieu of pecuniary considerations. Colin had brought a boll of wheat, Mungo a basket of potatoes. Others had been asked for neeps or butter or a stewing chicken. Gleg’s assignment was to bring a pot of ale for the schoolmaster’s lunch each day for the next two weeks.

As Georgie beat his way around the pond, Mungo turned and called to him. “Hey Gleg — you want to sweep for me?” Georgie was stunned. He couldn’t have been more disoriented had he been hit in the back of the head with a shovel. Sweep for Mungo Park? He couldn’t believe it. Never before had anyone invited him to participate in anything. Though he wanted nothing more. Though he sat for hours and watched them at shinty, football, golf, dying for a chance at it, praying that the goaltender would break a leg and they’d turn to him, Georgie Gleg, slap his back, see him in a new light.

“Well: what do you say? You want to or not?”

He nodded, nodded emphatically, his heart beating agamst his ribs like a bird fighting to burst free. “I’ve just got — just got to drop off the ale —” he stammered, already loping across the lot to the schoolhouse, too caught up in it to be suspicious.

He rushed up to the door, out of breath, twin streams of mucus depending from his nostrils. It took no more than five seconds — he set the pot of ale down among the other offerings, slid his copybook into a chink in the wall, and shot back up the path.

His fate was sealed.

Adam grabbed up the tankard as soon as Gleg turned his back, flipped back the lid and took a long hard swallow. He wiped his mouth and took another swig. Then handed the jar to Finn. Finn drank deep, passed the jar to Robbie Monboddo, who took his turn and passed it on. A moment later Adam drained it. And then, with Colin looking out for Tullochgorm, he unbuttoned his trousers and pissed into the neck of the jar, fighting for every last drop, pushing, pushing, his face red with the strain. Finn was next. And then Robbie, Colin and the rest. At first Colin couldn’t make his water come and the others coached and cajoled him, talking it up as if they were out on the football field and this were a shot on goal. Tullochgorm had been sighted, the jar wasn’t full yet. Come on, come on: you can do it. Finally, with less than a minute to spare, Colin let loose, sweet music, and filled the jar to the rim. A cheer went up. Tullochgorm thought it was for him, and tipped his hat as he stepped past them to open the door.

In the winter, sessions began at dawn and ran through till sundown, with a half-hour break for refreshment at noon. During the break the boys sat at their desks, shivering, and nibbled at a bit of cold porridge, or took advantage of the free time to skate or curl on the pond. On this particular day, no one left the room. There was a low murmur of lunchtime chatter, Mungo chewed at a cold potato, Colin warmed a crust over the fire. Furtively, they all watched Tullochgorm.

The schoolmaster had turned his chair in order to face the side wall. He’d laid up his rod — for thirty minutes at least — and had already begun to shut out the scene around him, already begun to forget the slate board, the dreary room, the unwashed faces at his elbow. There was a book open on the desk before him — the Bellum Grammaticale—and he was alternately skimming through it, massaging his feet and dicing a raw turnip into a dish of groats. Fascinated, the scholars hung on his every move, as if they’d never before seen a man scratch his feet and spoon up porridge at the same time. When he reached for his pot of ale the room was electric with tension, a wave of quiet hysteria cresting and then as quickly subsiding. It was a false alarm. Abstracted, the schoolmaster put the tankard down again and took a spoonful of cereal instead, his eyes all the while fixed on the pages of his book. Finn Macpherson nearly leaped from his seat. Adam couldn’t resist a low nervous chuckle, Colin wiped his nose expectantly. Only Gleg was oblivious to it, scribbling away in his copybook as if he were immune to the nasty little surprises of life, poor dull unlucky Gleg, the sacrificial lamb blindly nosing round the pillars of the bloodstained altar itself.

Then, like the punchline of a bad joke, the moment passed into history. Tullochgorm lifted the tankard to his lips and took a long thirsty gulp. No reaction. He turned the pages of his book. There followed an instant during which he looked down at the pot of yellow liquid, took a puzzled experimental sip, and then spewed it all out like a whale coming up for air. Thirty-six heads dropped, suddenly absorbed in the intricacies of Latin grammar. Georgie Gleg looked up. The schoolmaster was having a fit of some sort, gasping and retching, pounding on the desk with the flat of his hand, blood vessels bursting in his face like a fireworks display. Georgie was awed, puzzled and frightened at the same time. But if he was surprised, the surprise was short-lived. For Tullochgorm was staring at him. Not staring exactly — glaring. Looking daggers. A froth of saliva and partially digested food on his chin, his eyes piglike with rage and hatred, Tullochgorm was glaring at him.

Georgie Gleg, ten years old, began to feel very small indeed.

♦ ♦ ♦

It was all downhill after that. There were peaks and valleys, of course, but essentially the plane of Gleg’s life inclined toward the nether pole. The immediate result of the incident with Tullochgorm was expulsion, followed by a tripartite thrashing at the hands of Georgie’s mother, Quaggus and the schoolmaster. For the next two weeks Gleg was forced to take a cup of his own urine with each meal, and to stand in the town pillory, erected ad hoc, for half an hour each afternoon. At the end of the two-week period he was unceremoniously booted from the house at the long end of Quaggus’ foot, and sent up to Edinburgh, where he was to live with his uncle Silas and attend the local school.

Surprisingly, Edinburgh wasn’t all that bad. For one thing, no one knew him in the big city. No one knew of the slain eagle and the tiles slathered with blood, no one accused him of harboring the evil eye or of curdling milk by his mere presence. To his schoolmates he was just another gangling, flap-eared object of ridicule — nothing special. Through the hail of abuse he even managed to nurture a friend or two — other misfits, of course — but it was a start. For another thing, Silas Gleg took an active interest in his nephew. He dressed him properly, hired a tutor, gave him an allowance — Georgie began to develop as a laird’s son should. He graduated with high honors.

At this point, Quaggus stepped in. Since there was really no estate left to manage nor any patrimony to speak of, he argued, the boy should set himself up in a professional way, earn a living, learn to maintain himself. Silas Gleg reluctantly agreed. Georgie was first apprenticed to an apothecary, and then later, when the druggist unexpectedly passed on, to Silas Gleg’s old friend, Dr. James Anderson of Selkirk. There he met Ailie, and his life developed into something worthwhile, something beautiful, something that for the first time approached the sublime. When she agreed to marry him he felt as if he’d conquered the world. Alexander, Caesar, Attila the Hun — they were pikers by comparison.

But then, just when life was opening up to him like an orchid in bloom, it snapped shut again, deadly, vituperative, rotten at the core. She left him. Crept off in the shadows as if he were some beast she couldn’t face in the light of day. The relatives and neighbors had gathered. Quaggus and his mother. Uncle Silas. It was to have been the crowning moment of his life.

He left Selkirk the day after Christmas. There were no explanations, no apologies, no farewells. Stoop-backed, valise in hand, he headed off in the direction of Edinburgh. It was cold. The wind swept down out of the north with a sound like the keening of birds, and the crusted branches rattled like chandeliers at a wake. If he’d bothered to lift his head he would have looked out on a ripple of cropped gray hills, sorry gashes of erosion, trees stark beyond any hope of renewal. He didn’t bother. Hunched against the wind. Gleg struggled on, weary and disconsolate, limping along the roadway like some half-dazed footsoldier beating a retreat from an enemy he could neither subdue nor comprehend.

♦ LIFE AFTER DEATH ♦

“It’s happened before, I tell you. An obstruction in the windpipe, shock and coma, the premature pronouncement of death. Good Lord, man, it was snowing to beat all hell — and Christmas morning on top of it. Who’s to blame the hangman for maybe rushing things just a bit?”

With the slow, steady persistence of grains accumulating in an inverted hourglass, the voice of reason is beginning to have its effect on Quiddle. Still, he resists. “He dangled twenty minutes, didn’t he?”

“Psssh,” Delp waves his hand contemptuously. “Need I remind you that the human animal is infinitely various, and that what will dispatch one quite neatly may not necessarily, inexorably and in all cases do the trick for another. A Fiji Islander might not last more than five minutes in the waters off Greenland, but what of an Eskimo? Or better yet — take your average greengrocer. He’d go up like a wad of paper if you sent him through a bed of hot coals, and yet the Indies are swarming with fakirs who do it three and four times a day — for a lark. Use your sense, man. Who’s to say that twenty or thirty or even sixty minutes’ hang time is sufficient to choke out a human life without first taking into consideration the vagaries of time and place, weather conditions, the type of knot and quality of rope, the endurance of the individual and any of a thousand other intangibles?”

“I don’t care how you explain it, I still think it’s a miracle that that man in there is alive. Whether it’s the hand of the Almighty or just a ripple of the law of averages, I’ll wager it’s the most extraordinary thing to happen round here since Queen Elizabeth’s handmaid got hit by lightning and sprouted a beard.”

Delp’s eyes have gone cold with exasperation. “Wager away,” he grunts, pulling the pipe from his mouth as if he were unplugging a drain, “but I’ll tell you this — I want that character out of here in a week’s time. Chafe his neck, let some blood, feed him broth — whatever it takes — but get him on his feet and out that door.” Here he pauses to strike a match and suck the yellow flame over the bowl of his pipe. “I have no objection to your parading him around a bit, incidentally. There’s been a lot of folderol about the miracle of modern science and all that, the patients looking on it with a certain degree of awe and so on. Walk him around. I don’t think it would hurt us a bit — if you know what I mean.”

♦ ♦ ♦

The door swings back and scatters light through the little room. In the doorway, Quiddle. A tray in his hands. Pewter mug, golden crust, steam rising from a bowl. “Well, you’re awake then,” he booms in a jaunty, whistling-in-the-churchyard sort of voice.

Ned Rise lies on a pallet in the corner, a dirty blanket pulled up to his neck. The room is dank and windowless: earthen walls, brick floor, deal planks overhead. A cellar of course, crude and unfinished, and yet not without its amenities: a washstand and tub of water, fireplace carved out of the wall, bucket of coal, framed mirror. Beside the door, a tottering rack of clothes and an upended grocer’s basket cluttered with books (medical texts and religious tracts) and the refuse of quotidian life: apple cores, cheese rinds, loose tobacco, the stumps of deceased candles. Someone has painted a window on the far wall and framed it with a fluff of soiled yellow curtain.

“So — how are you feeling?” Quiddle hollers, edging into the room and making motions toward the low table at the foot of the bed.

Ned says nothing. He lies there, unshaven, hair matted, the red rope burn a reproof round his neck. His eyes stick out like swords.

Quiddle sets the tray down with a quick athletic motion and springs back a step or two, keeping his distance, wary, light on his feet. He folds his hands behind his back. “Heh-heh,” he says. And then: “Listen, you do know where you are and all that, don’t you? I mean, this isn’t heaven or anything. You’ve been saved — you’ve lived through it. The hanging I mean.” Quiddle looks down at his shoes. “What I mean is you’re alive, man — alive as the King himself!” He ends with a burst of nervous laughter, as if he’s just told a joke in a tavern.

Ned says nothing. He knows perfectly well what’s happened. He’s had nearly a day and a half to sort it out, savor it, run the emotional gamut from initial bewilderment to religious ecstasy to pure animal joy. Besides, he’s been eavesdropping on the conversation in the hallway.

“Well, listen — if you don’t feel like talking just yet. .”

Ned’s eyes are fixed on Quiddle’s perspiring face. He has made an effort to keep from blinking since his benefactor stepped into the room. And it is an effort. Especially since he’s starving. The smell of the beef broth or oxtail soup or whatever it is has been setting off a whole battery of involuntary responses: a hollow thumping in the pit of the stomach, pursing of the lips, a clenching of the salivary glands. But he’s got to play this for all it’s worth.

“I can understand,” Quiddle says, backing toward the door. “It must be very hard for you. Just rest. You’re all right now. We’ll have you on your feet in a day or two and you can start life over, put it all behind you, make new associations, new—” His voice has become a whisper, soothing, motherly.

An instant later the door pulls shut and Ned falls on the tray like a pack of wolves.

♦ ♦ ♦

For the next several days Ned is led round the hospital in a white smock, nodding at the sick and dying, laying hands on crippled children, patiently exposing himself to the astonished probing fingers of surgeons, physicians and students. His leg hurts like a son of a bitch and his neck feels twisted out of joint, but Quiddle has found him a bottle of laudanum and the barber has been in to scrape his cheeks and powder his hair. Ned knows what’s expected of him. He limps round the corridors like a wounded seraph, the rope burn artfully concealed beneath a white cravat, a fervent messianic look in his eye. Whenever he’s addressed he turns round and raises a sorrowful finger to his throat.

Quiddle’s opinion is that the larynx has been crushed, while Delp insists that there is no evidence of physical damage whatever. After a painstaking examination of Ned’s vocal apparatus, Abernathy is forced to concur with Delp, but suggests that the crux of the problem may be mental rather than physical. In support of his diagnosis he adduces the case of Lucy Minor. Some years back she had been brought to the hospital after an accident in which she was run down by a drunken coachman. The horses bore down on her; she stumbled. When the coach had passed, bystanders rushed to her aid and were astonished to see that she had escaped injury — miraculously the flying hoofs and churning wheels had run wide of her. She was helped to her feet, someone dusted her dress, she was given a glass of brandy — but when she turned to thank the man who’d helped her up, she found that she couldn’t speak. Doctors were baffled. Abernathy himself tried every remedy he could think of, from leeches to hot poultices to binding the throat. He bled her until she blanched. Nothing. Now, twelve years later, Lucy Minor devotes most of her time to charity work with the deaf and dumb. No sound has passed her lips in all that time.

Dr. Maitland, who has been practicing at St. Bartholomew’s for nearly half a century, admits Abernathy’s point, but cites a glaring disparity between the two cases: the fact of constriction. “It’s a simple question of blockage,” he insists, “plain as the nose on your face. Purgatives is what the man needs. Give him a dose or two of croton oil, bleed him twice, and follow it up with an enema of antimony and foxglove.” Runder, a strict Brunonian, has his own theory. “Clearly it’s an asthenic disorder — treat the fellow with alcohol and he’ll be jabbering like a myna inside of a week.” Delp demurs. “He’s a fraud I tell you. I say we let the other patients have a look at him and then boot him out in the street. Or better yet, send him back to the hangman.” Finally, after a debate that consumes two dinner hours, three ribs of beef, eight capons, half a wheel of cheese and fifteen bottles of port, it is decided that Ned Rise’s initial week will be extended to two, and that Abernathy will contact Mrs. Minor in order to have her instruct the patient in the science of communicating by signs. At the end of the two-week period, the patient will be removed from the premises.

Ned’s reaction to all this is elemental. He sleeps in Quiddle’s bed, eats Quiddle’s food, drinks Quiddle’s laudanum. He pours Maitland’s croton oil down the hole in the outhouse, quaffs Runder’s alcohol, spends two hours a day waving his fingers at an earnest Mrs. Minor, and scrupulously avoids Delp. He continues to wander about the halls, his eyes stricken, hair tastefully arranged, lips sealed. Of all the theories put forward to account for his affliction, he privately concurs with only one: Dr. Delp’s.

Oh, he was hoarse for a day or two — who wouldn’t be? He lay there in the dark, grinning, the words dropping off his tongue like bits of solder as he rehearsed the miracle of his resurrection and the fevered ecstatic version he would deliver to Fanny. In person. He would stride up the steps at Brooks’ house, shove his way past the astonished butler and burst into the parlor, a ragged noose dangling from his neck. “I’ve come back from the grave to exact my vengeance, you pervert!” he’d shout, and bring Brooks to his knees with a single blow. Then he’d take Fanny in his arms, whisper that she shouldn’t be frightened and then reveal the whole story. Brooks would be moved, write them a check, call a carriage, and off they’d go. Or something like that.

But for now Ned is lying low. Licking his wounds, getting his strength back, trying to grapple with the horror he’s been through. Every time he closes his eyes it’s there, pitiless, unrelenting — the gallows looming over him like some gigantic carnivorous insect, the snow sifting down like ash, the dead cold gaze of the hangman and the inescapable sense that the black hood conceals some nameless inhuman terror. Awake or asleep, it haunts him. He shudders and writhes on Quiddle’s narrow pallet, the nightmare descending, noose poised, and then he starts up in a sweat thinking, What if they come for me again? What if Banks or Mendoza or Twit’s sister gets word of it? Sinking, he can feel the whole nasty cycle beginning again, the wheel creeping round on him, exquisite torture, slow and redundant. He wants to shout out, screech till the walls shatter — but he doesn’t. Silence is the key. Keep them guessing. Just a day or two more and the leg will be healed, a day or two more and—

The door cracks open. Quiddle. Sidling in with a tray: cold chicken, kidney pie, a mug of ale. But wait: this isn’t Quiddle. It’s someone taller, broader — who?

Decius William Delp stands over the bed, tray in hand. As he bends to set it down, Ned instinctively draws back. For a long moment the tray sits there between them, steam feebly rising from the meat pie. Delp’s eyes are locked on Ned’s. Ned looks away.

“Feeling better, I take it — huh, Sleeping Beauty?” Delp says finally. He is a big-boned man, very pale, with black hairs on the back of his hands. “Well — aren’t you going to sample the offering for the day. . Ned?”

Ned sits up as if he’s been slapped. “How—?”

Delp is smiling — a cold merciless sort of smile that digs deep into his face, flattens his ears and reveals his ravaged teeth. “Suddenly recovered the use of your tongue, have you?. . Well, speak up, I can’t hear you — Ned. Ned Rise, isn’t it?”

Suddenly Ned is up and breaking for the door, but Delp takes hold of his arm and flings him back down as if he were a disobedient child. “I’m not finished yet, friend.” The doctor pauses to light his pipe, the smoke squinting his eyes and riding up over his head like a hood. “I’ve been on to you from the beginning, you know. I’m no pushover like that ass Quiddle and the rest — I know you for what you are: a con man and a murderer. My first impulse was to toss you back to the hangman after the novelty wore off, but then another alternative occurred to me. It occurred to me that you’ve eat pretty well here, that you might even want to stick around, take a new name, lie low for awhile. Soft living and anonymity, eh?” Delp is pacing now — striding up and down in front of the door, head bent, pipe streaming. He looks like a bear in the pit just before they throw the dogs in. “I really see no reason why people like Sir Joseph Banks should need to know about your ah, recovery, do you?”

Ned is slouched against the wall, knees cocked under him. For the first time his eyes make contact with Delp’s. His voice is weary with resignation.

“All right,” he says. “What do you want me to do?”

♦ THINGS THAT GO BUMP

IN THE NIGHT ♦

The lights have winked out in the last cottage along the New Road, the sky is moonless and cold as a stone roofs are white with frost, doors latched, the healthy, sane and wise snoring in their beds or nodding before the fire. Out on the highway the stillness is broken by the slow plod of a mare’s hoofs and the barely perceptible snick-snick-snick of a rusted wheel. Ned Rise hunches in the bed of the creeping cart, huddled, muffled, gloved and hatted, while up front Quiddle keeps a numbed grip on the reins. Trails of vapor stream from their nostrils and their eyes water with the cold. The smell of the horse mingles with the faint acrid aroma of woodsmoke and the clean antiseptic bite of the air. Overhead, leafless trees claw at the sky.

Suddenly Quiddle pulls back on the reins and clucks softly to the horse, the wheels grab with a screech and the cart jerks to a halt beside the road. “This is it,” he whispers, securing the reins and springing down from the cart.

Ned looks round him glumly. He can’t make out much, objects drifting in and out of focus, murky, phantasmagoric, identifiable only as dense clots of darkness against an impenetrable backdrop. No more than a yard away is the black slash of a stone wall, the gray or white of individual stones aligned in a shifting ghostly grid. And there, beyond the wall, the silhouette of an enormous crippled yew snaking out into the night. The church steeple is invisible, black on black, a massive erasure in the corner of the sky. “I don’t like it,” Ned says.

“Shhhhhh, keep it down.” Quiddle lifts a pair of shovels from the back of the cart and hoists himself to the top of the wall. “Come on,” he whispers, “follow me.”

♦ ♦ ♦

After Delp left him that night, Ned lit a pipe and lay back on his pallet to sort things out. He’d kept his ears open around the hospital and knew that Delp needed cadavers badly — desperately even. The new term was starting, the other hospitals were in competition with him, his former source — Crump — had proved unreliable. And furthermore, society was against him — dissection was verboten, taboo, as unthinkable as cannibalism. If the afterlife was seen as corporeal as well as spiritual, how could a man enjoy his eternal bliss or suffer the torments of his damnation if he were in sixty-eight pieces? Accordingly, the public coffers provided for the interment of all those who expired in a given parish — vagrants, paupers and half-wits included. The only legal means of obtaining specimens was to visit the hangman and hope that one of his victims would go unclaimed by friends or relatives. All this, Ned realized, made Delp a very dangerous antagonist indeed. He was desperate. Manipulative, unscrupulous — and he held a knife to Ned’s throat. All he need do was drop a word — a single word — and Ned would find himself back in prison, dangling from a rope, dead meat on the dissector’s table.

When Delp came for his answer the following morning, Ned managed a smile and held out his hand. “I’ll do your bodysnatching for three shillings a week,” he said. Delp slapped the hand aside and pointed an admonitory finger at him. “You’ll do it for two. Another word out of you and you’ll do my bidding gratis, understand?” Ned understood. Of course, what he neglected to tell Delp was that he had no intention of doing anything whatever for him. He was merely buying time. As soon as his leg could take the strain he’d slip out and go to Fanny. She’d have something. And if she didn’t he’d force it out of Brooks — God knows she had earned it. Then they’d disappear and Delp be hanged.

Unfortunately, there was a hitch in the plan.

Ned was up before dawn one morning, past the slumbering porter and out the door. Quiddle had given him a suit of ragged clothes, and the suppurating slash in his leg had transformed itself into a long thin scar the color of calfs liver. He made his way to Great George Street, slowly, painfully, the cold stiffening his leg, the thought of Fanny spurring him on. He pictured the expression on her face when she saw him there at the door, remembered the careful white precision of her teeth, the cool slip of her arms, the way she laughed and made it sound like a symphony. But as he turned into Great George Street, he felt that something was wrong. There was Brooks’ house, imposing with its portico, Palladian windows and steep-pitched roof, but it looked closed up— as if — as if the occupants had gone out of town.

It couldn’t be. Ned bolted across the street, the pain an irrelevance, clumsily leaped the palings and found himself in the still, leaf-spattered yard. There was no sound from the house, no sign of life. No servants, delivery boys, gardeners. Surreptitious, a shadow among shadows, he peered through the shutters and saw the furniture draped in cloth coverings, the dark squares on the walls where the pictures had once hung, the cold soot-blackened hearth. Later, out on the street, he made some casual inquiries. After a rebuff or two he came across a loquacious housemaid walking a pair of Gordon setters. “Oh yes,” she said, “bless me if I can say wot’s moved ‘im to it, but Mr. Brooks ‘as gone off to It’ly and Greece for a spell. At least that’s ‘ow the gossip ‘as it.”

Ned’s stomach contracted. Hope was out of reach, he knew it, felt it slipping away like a leaf in a windstorm. The question was on his lips — Fanny, what of Fanny? — but he didn’t know how to phrase it.

The maid was picking thoughtfully at a mole on her chin. “They say ‘ee’s took ‘is trollop with ‘im too. . Oh don’t look so mortified, goldilocks — it was common knowledge up and down the block. A scandal it was, a reg’lar scandal. Keepin’ a woman and ‘im a bachelor. Ha! I could tell you a thing or two about these society people, believe you me.”

The dogs were pissing, sniffing, nosing one another in the rear. Ned became aware of a sudden chill in the air. He shuddered along the length of his body, as if the cold had stabbed him in the base of the spine, then turned and wandered off, the woman shouting something at his back. Up the block he found a sheltered spot to sit down and think it out. Fanny was gone. Indefinitely. Delp suddenly loomed in his mind. If Ned wasn’t back at the hospital when the doctor walked through those doors there would be hell to pay. Literally. He’d turn the hounds loose in a second, the bastard. Then what?

Ned sat there, chilled through, watching the pigeons scrabble in the gutter. After awhile he picked himself up wearily and started down the street. For St. Bartholomew’s.

♦ ♦ ♦

“Come on,” Quiddle hisses, “let’s get it over with.” And then he disappears behind the wall, the brief sharp clatter of the shovels like a hole poked through the night.

Reluctantly, Ned slides out of the cart, flapping his arms to keep warm. There is the scent of freshly turned earth on the air, and something else too — something like the smell of wet leaves or earthworms drowned in a rainstorm. The absolute blackness of the night is appalling. Ned shuffles around a minute, squinting into the gloom and fighting an impulse to whistle. The skin around his eyes and ears seems to have shrunk, tugging back at his hairline as if it were elastic. Good God, he thinks, and then he’s up and over the wall.

There had been a funeral in the Islington churchyard earlier that day. A family of four. Murder/suicide. In despair over a life of rags and potatoes, the Mrs. had seasoned her spouse’s porridge with arsenic trioxide and then smothered the children as they lay sleeping on their shuck mattresses. She kept a vigil over the bodies until dawn, and then forced the blade of a wood saw over her wrists, time and again, until she lay down beside them and bled to death. Delp had read about it in the morning paper.

If anything, it’s even darker on the far side of the wall. What now? Ned wonders, when Quiddle’s voice suddenly leaps out of the void at him—“Pssst: over here”—and he finds himself diving for the shrubbery, rattled to the bone, a stray branch whipping at his face, the crush of dead weed, and then that terrible stillness again. Lying there in the dark, feeling foolish, he begins to feel more strongly than ever that there are better ways of spending a cold winter’s night. His inner eye briefly flashes on white arms, sleeping dogs, mugs of ale and wild leaping extravagant fires. But to the business at hand: slowly, cautiously, as if a thousand eyes were on him, he rises to his feet and is startled half out of his wits by the shovel thrust into his hands. “Knock off your fooling and let’s get on with it,” Quiddle rasps, and then they’re moving, Ned concentrating on the vague glint of baldness at the back of Quiddle’s head as they make their way between pale headstones and looming dark monuments, crucified Christs and wingspread angels of death.

“Horace,” Ned whispers, “this is ridiculous. It’s ghoulish, unchristian, against all the laws of God and man. Couldn’t we tell Delp we got lost and never found the place?”

The bald spot moves on, dipping here, bobbing there. Quiddle’s only response is a sort of chuckle, so low and throaty it would frighten a hyena.

Then all at once they’re stopping, Quiddle down on one knee it seems, scratching about in the half-frozen earth. “This is it,” he says, his voice wrestling with nerves, susurrus and a tendency to crack into falsetto. “Try not to make too much noise with the shovel.”

Ned tries not to. He gingeriy slips the spade into the pool of blackness at his feet, feeling for soft earth. Quiddle is beside him, shoveling stealthily — Ned can hear the whisper and whine of his shovel and the accelerated chuff-chuff-chuff of his breathing. They work in silence for a long while, dipping deeper for their loads, Quiddle periodically kneeling to strike a match and check their progress. Finally, with a dull thud, Ned’s shovel makes contact with something solid. “That’ll be it,” Quiddle whispers, digging harder now, sweeping along the length of the coffin with the edge of his shovel.

Ned has stopped digging. At the first touch of metal and wood an involuntary shudder galvanized his body, as if the handle of the spade were a lightning rod and the rough planks charged with electricity. He stands there, looking into nothing, temples pounding, throat dry, listening to Quiddle’s knife as it pries at the lid of the coffin, thinking what next, what next, and waiting with a dumb stricken revulsion for his companion to light the next match. He can see them already, the poisoned husband, the smothered children, the mutilated wife sitting up in her bloody shroud and shrieking out with a wild desperate laugh.

But wait: is he hearing things? A rustling in the bushes at the base of the wall? Muffled footsteps? The walking dead? “Horace: what was that?”

Quiddle, breathing hard, forces back the lid of the coffin, wood splintering with a groan of protest: eeeeeeeee. “What was what?”

“That sound. Out there.”

Quiddle pauses, the bald spot motionless in the dark. A profound silence settles over the churchyard. Nothing moves. It is as still and dark and bleak as the back side of the moon. “Listen,” Quiddle says finally, “you keep it up and we’ll both be in a state. Now get on down here and give me a hand with this stiff.”

Ned drops the shovel with a clatter and eases down at the edge of the pit, feeling his way gingerly, catching his breath in case there’s an odor, his whole body revolting against the task at hand. Quiddle has propped the corpse up, stiff as a log, and is struggling to maneuver it toward Ned when suddenly a great crashing weight descends on Ned from the rear and impels him face forward into the coffin. Quiddle sprawls, the corpse totters, Ned cries out and the presence at his back — it is warm, possessed of arms and legs — grunts like a rooting pig. And then all at once a blinding light is shining in their faces and a voice snarling: “That’s royt: dig away, Quiddle. It’ll spare me the effort.”

Dirk Crump is standing over the pit, a lantern in one hand, pistol in the other. His accomplice is atop Ned, Ned is atop Quiddle, and Quiddle is wedged into the corner with the cadaver. As if in protest, the corpse’s hand is thrust straight out of its shroud, the raw ragged gashes slanting across the wrist, flesh gone gray, nails battered and black. “All royt Billy, ye’ve done well,” Crump says, “—come out of it now.”

It is then that Ned gets his first look at the accomplice and realizes with a start that he’s staring into the pale green unbelieving eyes of Billy Boyles. “Billy?” he says. But Boyles is backing away from him, his face working, eyes collapsed in on themselves with terror and disbelief. Then his mouth opens, a hole black as the night. “Run!” he shrieks, alternately clawing at the edge of the coffin and blessing himself, Ned reaching out to pacify him and Boyles screaming again, his voice pinched and raw with terror, the voice of spitted babes and animals skinned alive. Crump drops the lamp in shock and bewilderment, light dashing out on the ground in a spray of hot oil and the quick inevitable night rushing in to swallow it. There is the sound of scrambling, hands and feet tearing at the earth. Crump shouting out an obscenity and then Boyles’ traumatized shriek again: “Run for God’s sake, run — it’s a haunt!”

The snarl of the pistol is almost anticlimactic.

♦ WORDS ♦

Sir Joseph Banks, at fifty-five, is a hub of power and influence. President of the Royal Society for the past twenty years, Honorary Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Knight Commander of the Bath and member of the Privy Council, he is the doyen of the British scientific community, a distinguished botanist whose collection ranks among the best in Europe, founding member of the African Association, former explorer and eponym of a number of South Pacific landmarks, the man to whom the government turns for consultation on nearly every scientific matter, from the most effective way of preserving breadfruit on the H.M.S. Bounty to the disposition of explorers in the Tropics.

Though born to wealth and privilege, it was in the role of explorer that he first caught the public eye. In the late sixties and early seventies he circumnavigated the globe with Captain Cook, and was so successful in promoting his own role in the expedition that he was named President of the Royal Society shortly thereafter. He is self-righteous and proper, autocratic, insatiably curious, a manipulator, collector, seedsman, hobnobber, pacesetter, publicity hound — but above all else an explorer grown too old for exploring. And so, like the ex-athlete turned to coaching, he is mentor to his geographical missionaries. He is a man of taste, refinement and connection, a man of dedication and perseverance, a man who can make the entire country sit up and listen. At the moment, however, it is all he can do to keep from shouting.

“What’s this I hear from Edwards?” he says, each word cutting like a sword. He is sitting at the head of the big conference table in his study, shoulders hunched, chin jutting forward, looking for all the world like a bulldog straining at an invisible leash.

“Sir?” Mungo is flushed to the ears. He looks up quickly and then drops his gaze to the glass of claret in his hand.

“Don’t play games with me, boy — you know damned well what I’m talking about.”

“If you mean the Baroness—”

“The Baroness,” Sir Joseph mocks, hanging on each syllable as if it were smeared with excrement. “The woman’s a disgrace. She’s an immoralist, a vampire.”

Mungo looks up as if he’s been slapped. “You’re not being fair — she has her good points.”

“A pair of boobs, Mungo, a pair of boobs. That’s all.” He holds up a palm to forestall any further argument. “I’m not going to debate the subject. I want you to stay away from her. Period. You’re not just some hick from the Borderlands anymore, son — you’re a celebrity, you’ve got a position to maintain. And I’ll be damned if one of my geographical missionaries is going to run around town like some lower primate with an itch in his testicles.

“You’ve been at it for two weeks now — to the detriment of your work on the book, so Mr. Edwards tells me.” Banks’ expression softens a bit.

“We have subscribers to account to, Mungo. The good people who put up the money to buy you this glory that’s gone so quickly to your head. Isn’t it about time you sat down and repaid them?”

He pushes himself up from the table and shuffles over to the sideboard to refill his glass. Then adds, almost as an afterthought, “After all, it’s only words they want.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Words. They haunt him night and day, through his rewrite sessions with Edwards, through breakfast, tea and dinner, words masticated over plaice and fowl, lucubrated at the hour of the wolf, pried from the recesses of his memory like bits of hardened molding. . words that fight one another like instruments out of tune, arhythmic, cacophonic, words that snarl sentences and tangle thoughts until he flings the pen down in rage and despair. He never imagined the book would be such drudgery. After the stark physical challenge of Africa and the heady swirl of celebrity, the last thing he wants is to sit at a desk and push words around like a professional scrabble player.

Of course he does have Edwards. Bryan Edwards, Secretary of the African Association, has been looking out for him at Sir Joseph’s request. Precise, logical and thorough, he is constantly at the explorer’s side, coaching, cajoling, editing, sometimes sleeping the night on a cot in the spare room (Mungo has taken lodgings in London at the Association’s insistence and expense). And yet, no matter how eager and helpful his amanuensis is, Mungo still can’t seem to get himself out of bed in the morning. Every cell of his body resists it. He lies there, feeling hollowed out, a husk, drained and sucked dry. It’s an old but familiar feeling, the terrible devastating Weltschmerz of the boy who wakes with the knowledge that he hasn’t finished his Latin assignment.

One afternoon, the weak winter sun spilling into the room like milk, he turns to Edwards and bares his teeth. “I’ve had it,” he says, pushing back the chair and leaping up to pace round the room. “I don’t give a damn if they strip away my salary and boot me out into the street, I can’t write another word.”

Edwards is sitting at a table heaped with an accumulation of torn and yellowed scraps of paper that could only have come from an overturned wastebasket. He is wearing spectacles, and has the thin-lipped, wateryeyed look of the scrivener. At the moment he is sifting through this heap of crumpled paper — Mungo’s original hat-sequestered notes — looking for a reference to Tiggitty Sego’s cousin’s wife that Mungo insists is there.

“I tell you,” the explorer shouts, “I’d rather be tortured by the Moors again, flayed with whips and scourges and shackled face down in my own vomit, than have to spend the rest of the evening here like some damned copyboy.”

Edwards peers over the spectacles and fixes him with a wet, bloodshot eye. “May as well resign yourself, old man, you’re a celebrity now and you’ve got public responsibilities. You know as well as I do that great discoveries are as much a product of a good warm study as they are of deserts and jungles. Besides,” pulling a pocketwatch from his waistcoat, “we’ll knock off for tea in an hour or so.”

At that moment there is a rap at the door. The servant enters with a card on a tray. “The Baroness von Kalibzo.”

Edwards blanches at the name. The explorer, on the other hand, begins to breathe more rapidly, and his face undergoes a telling transformation — pupils receding, nostrils dilating, a muscle twitching at the base of his jaw — until he looks like a demented stallion sniffing out a mare in estrus.

Suddenly Edwards is at the door. He takes hold of the servant’s elbow for emphasis and announces in a clear authoritative tone that Mr. Park is not at home.

“Not at home? This is — this is too much, Bryan. The lady’s a friend of mine, and — and an aristocrat.” Mungo is standing beside his collaborator now, panting a bit, his face reddening. The servant stares at the floor. “Do you know what you’re asking?”

Edwards looks him in the eye, corporation man to the core. “I’m not asking.” Then he turns back to the servant. “You are to inform the lady that Mr. Park is not at home.”

The door closes with a soft click and the explorer stands there a moment, hands at his sides, studying the flat dull grain of the wood. He looks up at Edwards, who has moved a step closer to the door as if to block it, then strides across the room, flings himself down at the desk, and begins scratching away at the sheet before him with the desperate manic ferocity of the damned.

♦ ♦ ♦

And so it goes, week after week, month after month, invitations refused, lectures declined, friends and relatives snubbed. Mungo has become a prisoner to pen and ink, his fingers blotched like a leper’s, face pale, spine curved until it looks like an odd piece of punctuation. Day after day he stares at the page before him, eyes watering, progress testudineous, thinking he should never have left Selkirk, never challenged his place in life, never set foot in Africa. The man of action reduced to the man of recollection like some chatty doddering old veteran of foreign wars. It’s disgusting. Not at all what he’d thought it would be. A book. It’s a thing on a shelf, complete, ordered, rational — not an ongoing ache and deprivation. After walking nearly fifteen hundred miles he barely stretches his legs anymore. The only time he leaves his desk is to take his daily constitutional — with Edwards at his side, of course — or to make the occasional public appearance under Sir Joseph’s aegis. And when he bridles, Edwards is always there to remind him of his duty.

The target date is June. That’s when they’ll have the shortened version done and he’ll be free to visit Selkirk — and Ailie. Ailie. She looms in his mind like an island in the sea, an oasis in the desert. She is love and life and moral goodness, a buffer against the long African night and the seductive whirlpool of celebrity. How could he have forgotten her? The thought haunts him as he suffers through his London captivity, slave to the desk, the page, the word. Her letters have been increasingly cold and distant, his less frequent than they might be (after sifting through a jumble of words day and night, who has time for letters?). He knows he has hurt and offended her, duty before pleasure and all that, and he burns with a secret shame over his dalliance with the Baroness. He feels like a dog, some loping beast of dark desire and rutting instincts, some jism-addled hyena running with the pack. But then, insidious, the image of the Baroness cuts through his thoughts like a whiff of Eros, her breasts and bush, the hair under her arms, legs spread wide. The Baroness with Ailie’s face, Ailie with the Baroness’s face — can he even remember what Ailie looks like?

It’s an agony. But an agony that must end, will end — is ending, page by page. He looks up from his work, the fantasy playing before him, Ailie at the door of her father’s house, a stirring in his trousers, taking her now out into the garden, flowers and the scent of lilac. . but then it all dissolves and he’s gazing down at the sheet before him, letters coming into focus, dotted i’s and slithering s’s, words running across the page like troops, forming ranks, recalcitrant and hostile, boxing him in, staring him down, defeating him.

♦ THE HOMECOMING ♦

The London coach, on the last leg of its journey to Edinburgh, rattles into Selkirk at 4:00 p.m., in a vortex of swirling leaves, dust and hair. Flowers flash beside gates and walls, sheep step out of the way and gaze up with their stupid baffled sheep faces, moths and butterflies scatter like confetti, an ancient dog lifts his head and then slaps it back down in the dirt, volitionless. For a moment everything is still, as if held in suspension. The sun hangs overhead like a lantern, the essence of new grass and apple blossom narcotizes the air, the clack and whir of the wheels have a quelling, hypnotic effect on the passengers.

Mungo breathes deep, craning his neck to peer out the window over the accumulated bulk of an Edinburgh-bound matron and her antediluvian but robust mother. What he sees, in snatches, is endlessly fascinating. Three and a half years of change, both subtle and arresting — cracks in foundations, new walls and hayricks, hedges trimmed back from the road, a barn charred by fire. He leans farther, mesmerized, nostalgia sweeping him up as each landmark leaps out at him like a silent benediction — the old Hogg place set in a clump of birch, alderman’s gate, the Russells’ pea patch — his eyes gone soft with it all, leaning and looking until he’s literally hanging over matron and mother like some sort of molester. “I say there, what’s the matter with you? You, Sir — back off or I’ll holler out to the coachman.” Three and a half years.

The mood carries him into town, houses glancing by as if in a dream, trellises hung with ivy, the MacInnes girl bent over the well in a sunburst of daffodil and tulip, bees humming, cats napping, everything as orderly and serene as a page out of Oliver Goldsmith. But then a mongrel bitch with a strange stiff mane darts out of an open gate and throws herself at the wheels in a paroxysm of ferocity, yabbering at the coach as if it were packed with raw meat. The driver cracks his whip at the animal and she backs off, whimpering, but already the coach is going too fast, horses spooked, pedestrians shouting, disaster in the air. The accident is abrupt as a scissor cut: the coach veers close to a man on horseback, the horse shies, the rider is thrown. Two hundred feet up the street, nearly in the dead center of the village square, the coachman gets his team under control and brings the vehicle to a halt.

The first on the scene are smudge-faced boys, a horde of them, running with abandon, converging like flies on a shattered cider jug. Next the passersby, and shopkeepers, then just about everyone within earshot — crofters, wetnurses, sweeps and charwomen, cobblers, flaneurs, the Reverend MacNibbit. It seems that the rider — an old man in kilt and tarn o’shanter — has been flung into the middle of a cart full of trout and salmon wrapped in wet leaves. The fishmonger is beside himself with shock and grief, the old man in tartans is cursing like a professional, and the fishmonger’s wife has begun a high-pitched tirade against exorbitant taxes, the price of coal and the Presbyterian Church. There is a moment of confusion punctuated by angry shouts and catcalls, and then a bearded man catches the horse by the bridle and calms it, while another helps the old man from the fishcart. Someone laughs. Willie Baillie, drunk as usual, declaims a few snatches of a dirty limerick. And then, inevitably, someone spots Mungo.

It is old Cranstoun, his face raptured and keen, hurrying along the street with his cane, straining forward to get some sense of what all the commotion is about. He bobs past the stalled coach in a sort of three-legged canter, but then suddenly pulls up stock-still and turns to gawk at the vehicle as if he’s just seen an apparition. For a long moment he just stands there, the milky old eyes taking in the matron, her voluminous mother and the tall fair-haired hero peering out the window behind them. Slowly, degree by degree, the old man’s expression works itself round from surprise to elation, and then he’s hustling for the door of the coach, all the while bellowing like some sort of mental defective with his hair set afire: “Be gad if it isn’t the explorer! It’s Mungo! Mungo Park come home to his people!”

Mungo had hoped to slip into town as inconspicuously as possible. He hadn’t written Ailie for a month. No one knew he was coming. His plan, impulsively formulated, was to surprise her. The work on the abridged version of Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa had finally been completed — after a period of protracted torture that seemed Alighierian in its proportions — and he was free to spend the next several months in Scotland, relaxing, fishing, preparing the final version of the book, making love. He was particularly enthusiastic about this last prospect. Since he’d seen the error of his ways and given up the Baroness, his passion for Ailie had grown hotter and hotter. So hot in fact that he’d had trouble sleeping through the misty London nights. Spring came and went. Edwards badgered him. Sir Joseph ruled him with an iron hand. Then it was June. The abstract was finished on schedule and he was on his way to Scotland to lighten his fiancée’s heart.

But life isn’t always so simple.

For one thing, the crowd gathers round the coach so precipitously you’d think old Cranstoun had yelled: “Guineas! Fresh-minted guineas, free for the taking!” For another, the look in their eyes says that they’re not about to let Mungo off with anything less than a full-scale celebration and the good, rousing, whisky-washed, old-time hullabaloo the occasion demands. There is rapture on every face. Wondering hands reach out for the explorer, the matron and her mother look puzzled and offended, old Cranstoun stands at the open door like a footman. “Huzza!” shouts the crowd as a geyser of hats and wigs shoots high into the air, and now Jamie Hume is leading them in “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and Nat Cubbie is calling for a speech.

Mungo steps down from the coach to a roar of applause. He looks every inch the martyred hero, sallow, still a bit gaunt, the imprint of suffering and the indomitable will to conquer etched into his face. If anything, the past few months at his desk have taken more out of him than all the hopeless disease-ridden months of privation in Africa. But who’s to know that? All the crowd sees is their darling, grinning shyly, one of the greatest men Selkirkshire has ever produced, discoverer of the Niger, conqueror of Africa, why they watched him grow up! “Mungo!” they howl. And: “Speech!”

The explorer raises his hands on a roar and brings them down to a hush of expectation. There must be three hundred people in the street and more coming. Old friends, faces he grew up with. Finn Macpherson in a cobbler’s apron, grinning as if he’s just been named next in line for the Crown, Mistress Tullochgorm, Robbie Monboddo in a cleric’s collar, Georgie Scott. He doesn’t want to give a speech. He wants to burst in on Ailie, sweep her up in his arms. He wants to hike up to Fowlshiels and show his mother what her son has made of himself. But here are all these expectant faces looking up at him as if he could change water to wine or raise the dead or something. “All right,” he shouts, and then in a lower voice: “I’ll do my best.”

Immediately a call goes up from the rear of the press. “Speak up, lad: we canna hear ye.”

“I said that I’ll say a few words,” the explorer shouts, already at a loss for what to say next. A hush falls over the crowd. The explorer can hear the hurried footsteps of the latecomers, stifled shouts, doors slamming in the distance. “I–I’m glad to be back home at Selkirk”—a cheer goes up—”among my friends, and I—”

“Tell us about the black nigger cannibals!” someone shouts.

“Aye!” adds another. “Did they torture ye?”

“Cattul!” a powerful voice peals. “Wot sort o’ cattul has they got over there?”

“—I really hadn’t intended to make a speech,” Mungo stammers to a renewed roar, beginning to feel as if he were running for office, “. . you see I’d been meaning to come in quiet like so as to see my loved ones first. .”

“Hoooo! He’s a hot-blooded mon, all right!”

“It’s Ailie he’ll be wantin’ to see, no mistaking.”

The hoi polloi take up the refrain, joyous, mindless, pullulating with excitement—”Ailie! Ailie! Ailie!”—and the next moment the explorer is swept up on their shoulders and carted off in triumph. Through the square and down the street, the crowd swelling, dogs barking, someone strangling a set of pipes and another beating a snare drum. And all the while the crowd chanting “Ailie! Ailie! Ailie!”

Before he can resist or even fully comprehend what’s happening, he finds himself set down before the gate at Dr. Anderson’s house, his bags at his feet, fifty or sixty people cheering at his back. Suddenly the front door swings open and there she is, Ailie, in a bonnet and housedress, sleeves rolled up, staring out in bewilderment at the brouhaha in her front yard. The crowd lets loose at the sight of her, surging toward an emotional orgasm, some primitive hysterical sense of completion demanding that they join the two principals. Arms are raised, the cheers are deafening, the pipes turn to a strathspey and a whole section of the crowd launches into a mad jig.

The gate has been unlatched. There’s an arm on Mungo’s shoulder, someone gives him a gentle nudge and then he’s walking up the path toward her, the cheers like waves breaking on a beach, Ailie tiny, silken-haired, her lips and eyes beckoning like the promise of water at the far end of an expanse of desert. Three and a half years, all those nights of scorching need and seductive dream, his feet on the front steps, something else in her eyes now, some amalgam of recognition, hurt and surprise, something proud and belligerent in the face of the crowd. “Ailie,” he whispers, at the summit of the steps, his arms spread wide.

“Take her up in yer arms, lad!”

“Kiss her!”

The noise is tumultuous, apocalyptic.

He looks into her eyes. They say no. They say Fve waited too long. They say Penelope be damned.

She shuts the door in his face.

♦ THE LONG ARM ♦

He gels drunk that first night back. Stinking, puking drunk. Somebody has to send up to Fowlshiels for his brother Adam to come on down and take him home. The next morning he wakes in the back room of his boyhood home in a welter of younger brothers and sisters. He has a violent headache. His bones feel hollow. He thinks of Ailie and feels sick. Suddenly the door bursts open and his mother swoops into the room and buries herself in his arms, crying over him as if he were a corpse. His brother stands in the doorway, a short, dark-haired figure beside him. For one wild moment he thinks it’s Ailie — Ailie softened by a night’s reflection, Ailie come back to him. It is Zander.

After a breakfast of milk brose, bannocks, fried eggs and rashers, fresh-baked bread, finnan haddie, potatoes, onions, small beer and tea (his mother thought he was looking peaked), he trundles his way down to the river with Zander and settles himself in the long grass opposite Newark Castle. It is warm. The sun hits the river with a slap before it is filtered to softness in the trees. A grasshopper balances on every blade of grass, a butterfly on every flower. Mungo plucks a heather leaf and chews it. After awhile he turns to Zander. They’ve been talking village gossip — who’d married whom, who’d died, got rich, went off to fight the French. Neither has mentioned Africa, or Ailie. “So she thinks I’ve deserted her?”

Zander is sifting pebbles through his fingers. He answers without looking up. “She does. She went through an awful lot when you were lost in Africa and nobody’d heard from you — a hell of an awful lot. But then when you came back to London and never made it up to see her. . well, she felt you didn’t care.”

“But I had no choice in the matter — surely she can see that?”

“She’s not a man, Mungo. What does she know of duty and commitment?

But listen, give her time — she’ll come around. She loves you.”

The explorer looks up glumly at the ruined walls of the castle. He knows every chink and crevice. As boys, he and Adam refought the Border Wars there, capturing the battlements, putting the invisible enemy to flight, dreaming dreams of glory. “I went through alot too, Zander. Death and disease, starvation, imprisonment. I watched my guide die before my eyes and I was powerless to do a thing.”

“We know it, Mungo. And it’s only natural you should have a period of readjustment. But she told me if you want her you’ve got to start at the beginning.”

“Court her all over again?”

Zander nods. Then he turns to the explorer, his face suddenly animated. “But listen. Tell me what it was like over there.”

♦ ♦ ♦

That afternoon, head splitting, throat dry and stomach broiling with acid, the explorer again mounts the front steps of the Anderson house. He is wearing a freshly starched cravat and a new sergdusoy jacket, his boots are polished and he carries a clumsily wrapped package under his arm. A maid in apron and clogs answers his knock and shows him in. She must be new, he is thinking, when Douce Davie comes bounding up the hallway.

The explorer goes down on one knee and holds his hand out. “Here Davie,” he calls, clucking his tongue, “good boy.” The dog pulls up short, inhales a snarl or two and shows his teeth. Slam, the maid is gone. Mungo rises awkwardly. The dog begins to bark.

There is the sound of hurried footsteps, then a door opening at the far end of the hallway. It is Dr. Anderson, big, wide-nostriled, a new beard appended to his face like some lush species of aquatic growth. He wraps his arms around the explorer like a lover and presses him to his body. “Mungo!” he whispers, his voice quavering, “ye’ve come back to us then.”

The explorer is embarrassed. When the doctor loosens his grip, Mungo backs off a pace and nods his head. “Aye,” he mumbles. This sets off a renewed paroxysm of hugging, patting and hand pumping on the doctor’s part, while the terrier paws at the explorer’s legs, yipping in protest. Mungo feels as if he’s just taken the ball downfield and drilled the winning goal into the net. “Well, well,” the doctor booms, “step into the parior and let’s have a look at ye.”

Mungo follows him into the famihar room, a wave of warmth and nostalgia washing over him, and then stops short. What is this? The walls are cluttered with odd black-and-white drawings — squares and rectangles in a beehive arrangement, oblate spheroids, circles within circles — drawings that approach a crude geometry, as if the artist has intended something that falls midway between the aesthetically pleasing and the mathematically precise. Then he notices the cherrywood desk in the corner. A new Cuff microscope stands in its center, gleaming like an icon. Mungo is about to ask his old friend and mentor if he’s taken up microscopy when the doctor turns to hand him a glass of claret. “Bon santé!” he barks, “and me hearty congratulations. Ye’ve brung fame and glory to Selkirkshire and I’m damned proud of ye for it.”

And then the doctor is off, flitting round the room, refilling the glasses, offering cigars, oatcakes, kippered herring, jars of preserves, jerking books from the shelves and all the while jabbering about a case of impetigo he’s been treating in an Abbotsford lady. “Horseradish!” he shouts. “Five parts. Put that against two parts menstrual blood and three parts bezoar stone and the sores’ll disappear as if ye’d touched ‘em with a wand. Blast homeotherapy. I say stick with the tried and true.” The doctor pauses and turns round to look at the explorer as if he were seeing him for the first time. “But I guess ye’ve heard enough out of me. It’s me daughter ye’ve come about, isn’t it?”

Mungo takes the doctor’s hand. “I want to marry her.”

“Marry her?” Dr. Anderson shouts. “Of course ye want to marry her. Did ye not ask the gull to wait for ye while ye was off riskin’ life and limb amongst the niggers and Hottentots? And don’t ye call that an engagement — even if ye never give her no ring?”

“I–I’ve got a ring right—” the explorer stammers, fumbling through his pockets, “right—”

“And don’t an engagement mean a holy troth to be married before the eyes of the Laird and man?” Somehow the doctor has worked himself up into a sort of stentorian rage. His last words echo through the room like the voice of judgment, setting up sympathetic vibrations in the glassware on the shelves.

The explorer is no less puzzled at the excess of emotion than at the line of questioning. “Well, yes—”

“Ye’re deuced right, lad,” the doctors bawls, red to the eyes. “Marry her then,” he roars, then lowers his voice abruptly — is he winking or is there something caught in his eye? — ”but treat her right, lad, treat her right.” And then he’s gone, the door engaging the frame like distant thunder.

♦ ♦ ♦

Ten minutes later the door swings open with a whisper. The explorer has been sitting in the big armchair by the window trying to make sense of the esoteric drawings that paper the walls. Is it some new craze of Zander’s? he wonders, when the soft click of the latch strikes at his nervous system like a sudden ferment of churchbells. He leaps up from the chair as Ailie slips into the room and gently closes the door behind her. He doesn’t know what to say. Awkward, harried by his emotions, his confidence shattered by yesterday’s debacle, he can only gape at her.

She too is silent. But her lower lip is unsteady and her eyes are gorged with green, the pupils drawn in on themselves, pinpoints, hard and cold with resentment, determination, anger. Aside from those eyes and lips and the tumed-up nose, he hardly recognizes her. She’s been transformed. The country girl in a white cotton dress and clogs is standing before him looking like a London socialite, turned out à la mode in a free-flowing gown of English velvet with gold brocade scrawled across the bodice, the velvet a shade of green so rich and dark it could carpet a forest floor. Her clipped black hair is swept back beneath a matching green cap, her face is powdered, feet elegantly slippered. Perched on her forearm, as cool and gray as rainclouds, are the turtle doves.

“Well,” she says finally, “father says you wanted to see me.”

“I did. I do,” he answers, starting toward her and then hesitating, the package held out before him like an offering. “I want—” he begins, the words marshaling themselves at the tip of his tongue, words to express simple emotions and expectations, love, marriage, family — but something interferes, some sudden and stunning mindblock, a function of his debilitated condition, the night of drinking, nerves at a pitch, the quick rise from the chair. He’d had six or seven attacks while in London, the malarial curse reaching a long arm from the coast of Africa to muddle his thoughts and rock his knees. Once he’d lost his train of thought while addressing the Ladies’ Equestrian and Geopolitical Society of Chelsea, and Sir Joseph had had to step in and finish for him. Another time he blacked out at the Baroness’ after a single glass of champagne. Now he inexplicably finds himself on his knees, a good twenty feet from Ailie, wondering what he was about to say.

“Yes?” she prompts, her face softening in anticipation.

“I uh. . uh. . I. .”

“Yes?” She moves a step or two closer, alarmed at the expression on her lover’s face — has she been too hard on him? “Is it the package you want to give me?” she whispers, as if talking to a child. “Is the package for me?”

Mungo shakes his head to clear it, down on all fours now like a dog come in from the rain. He looks down at the package as if he’s never seen it before. “I want. . want. . uh. . I want to. . uh. .”

Good God, what have they done to him? Mortified, she drops her arm and the startled doves take wing, careening into the walls, flapping against the ceiling in a panic. . and then she’s on the floor beside him, cupping his face in her hands and trying desperately to make sense of his eyes.

“Mungo? Mungo: are you all right?”

He turns his head to kiss her hand and then stretches out prone on the floor, the package at his side. “Uh-uh-uh-uh,” he says, and suddenly she’s on her feet and out the door shouting for her father.

An instant later Dr. Anderson bursts into the room, white-faced, the new apprentice at his side. “Quick boy: salts! And bring me my bag — we’re going to have to bleed him!”

The salts bring the explorer around — enough so that doctor and assistant can prop him up in the chair and make an incision in his forearm. Ailie is there, equal to the occasion, gritting her teeth and holding the gleaming porcelain bowl while her fiance’s blood runs fresh and wet between her hands and leaps to spatter her dress. The apprentice, a boy of sixteen with a wandering eye, turns his head and then excuses himself to vomit in the fireplace while the old man thunders and the doves coo from the mantel.

♦ ♦ ♦

Later, much later, Ailie stands before the mirror in her room, unfastening her earrings, releasing the clasp of her necklace. It is past three in the morning. Mungo is sleeping soundly in the guest room, a bit pale from loss of blood and running a slight fever, but over the worst of it. She and Zander have been sitting up with him through the night. When she left for bed Zander was nodding in a straight-backed chair, a glass of brandy jammed between his legs.

She pulls the dress up over her head and lays it across the bed, smoothing back the creases. The blood has dried black against the green, hardly noticeable, and yet she runs her hand over the spatters thinking how stubborn they are and at the same time wondering what they’d look like under the microscope. She pictures herself by the window, pinning down a section of the dress and screwing it into focus, a patch of something organic freckling the material, fibers that clot and draw a wound together like fingers, fibers inextricably bound up in the calculated weave of the fabric. Dried blood. Frangible, no more than dust — and yet the stain will persist through half a dozen washings.

On the edge of the bed now, in her underthings, she waits a long tired moment before reaching to remove her shoes and stockings. She’s exhausted and exhilarated, empty and fulfilled. No more games, no more waiting. She’d been acting like a schoolgirl. Her man is back, and he needs her — that’s all that matters. The shoes drop to the floor, first the left, then the right, when suddenly the package on the dressing table catches her attention. Bulky, crudely wrapped. He’d been trying to give it to her when the attack came on. Something from London?

Moths bat round the oil lamp. A cricket rubs its legs together somewhere in the far corner of the room. Outside, beyond the lace curtains, a thousand others respond until the night crepitates with an airy whistling cacophony that sounds like an army of babies shaking their rattles. Ailie gets up from the bed, arms and legs bare, glides to the dressing table and hefts the package in one hand. Heavy. Solid. What an odd shape. She wants to tear it open, but no, she can’t do that — Mungo would want to see her surprise. Resolute, she sets it down again. And begins unlacing her stays. A moment later she slips out of the corset, drops her underthings to the floor, and is about to start for the wardrobe when the package again catches her eye. She hfts it a second time, puzzling, and then — before she can think — she’s shredding the paper with her nails.

Now she’s even more puzzled.

It seems to be some sort of carving — wood or stone. She turns it over in her hands. Smooth, black. So black it seems to drink in light and swallow it. At first she can make no sense of the thing, but then as she traces the thickly carved lines it comes to her: a woman. Ponderous, disproportionate, her head the size of an acorn, sagging dugs, abdomen and nates distended to cruelly absurd proportions. She looks closer. The woman’s feet are like trees, each toe a bole. And what’s this? Tortuous, secretive, black on black, a snake winds its way up her leg.

Ailie stares down at the figurine for a long while, lost in the pure rich glossy blackness of it, and then she begins to shiver. A night breeze lifts the curtains. Naked, she sets it down on the table and moves for the wardrobe and her nightgown. Outside the crickets stir.

♦ CHILD OF THE CENTURY ♦

In the summer of 1799, while Napoleon was slipping out of Egypt and Nelson was embroiled in Italian politics, Ailie Anderson changed her surname to Park. Less than a year later — in June of 1800—her first child was born. Dr. Dinwoodie performed the delivery, her father and Mungo sharing a nervous pint of whisky in the front room. It was a boy. So big he nearly split her in two. They named him Thomas.

Mungo held the infant in his arm, the eyes yellow with mucus, fingers creased and reddened as if they’d washed ten thousand dishes, the head a slick bulb of vein and tissue. Ailie’s father proposed a toast. “To the child of the century!”

Ailie couldn’t quite believe the whole thing. After all those years of fear and uncertainty, all the interminable days and weeks and months of waiting, he was back. Less than two years after he’d appeared on her front porch, all but a stranger, she was Mrs. Mungo Park, mother of his child. Each morning she woke beside him, each night sat down with him to supper. He was hers. She was absorbed with the thought of it, saturated to the very tips of her fingers with pride and satisfaction. The microscope gathered dust.

Of course, they had had their problems.

The first year after his return had been an admixture of hope and disillusionment, in equal parts. For six months Mungo lived at Fowlshiels, working on his book from morning till late in the afternoon. Then he would ride into Selkirk and spend the evening with her. They strolled along the river and watched the leaves spin down from the trees, rode out to visit Katlin Gibbie and danced a strathspey in her parlor, built a fire in the woods and roasted salmon on a spit. They grew to know one another again. It was like it once was.

But then the pull of Africa exerted its influence yet again. At Christmas Mungo took the coach to London and was gone five and a half months — while he and Edwards put the finishing touches to Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. The book came out in May. It was an immediate and resounding success. A second edition was ordered. And then a third. African clubs and associations sprang up all over the continent. He wrote her every day.

In August she married a famous man. Packed up her books and microscope and moved to Fowlshiels — temporarily. Mungo was up in the air. Offers were coming in so fast it took half his time and energy just to reject them. The government wanted him to survey Australia, Banks was holding out for a second expedition to West Africa, others wanted him to lecture, write articles, collect plants, head up expeditions to Greenland, Borneo, Belize. “I don’t want to settle down in our own place just yet,” he told her.

She asked him what he meant.

“I mean I don’t know where we’re going to be. We could just get moved in and then have to pack up and leave.”

She’d been afraid of something like this all along. “You don’t mean to say you’re going to leave a wife pregnant with your first child and go off and disappear for another three and a half years? Disappear and maybe never come back? Good God, man, we’re just married and already you want to leave me a widow?”

“Ailie. We, I said we. Sir Joseph has been talking about the government’s setting up a colony on the Niger — we’ve got to, if we’re going to beat the French to it. They’d want me — us — to run the place. Think of it.” His eyes had gone out of focus, distant and hazy. “Think of what we could do if we lived right there on the Niger — think of the territory I could cover, the discoveries I could make!”

“I do not want to live in Africa,” she said, but he wasn’t listening, didn’t hear a word, didn’t even see her. No, he was talking to someone else, talking to himself, selling Africa, a place of color and life and extravagant nature, where the rivers were choked with gold and the earth was so fertile you didn’t even need to cultivate it.

Nine months later, when Thomas was born, they were still at Fowlshiels.

♦ ♦ ♦

Now, the first child weaned and a second on the way, she sits on the porch at that same Fowlshiels, sipping at a cup of coffee, an open book in her lap. Summer, 1801. Nothing has changed. There’s a war on with France. Prices have gone crazy. People are emigrating in droves. Mungo is still waiting.

Since he finished the book he’s had alot of time on his hands. Two years’ worth. He fishes. He hunts. He takes long solitary hikes through the hills, sometimes spends an overnight in the woods with Zander. Since his father’s death and Adam’s move to India, he helps his brother Archie look after the farm. He is silent, morose. Once he didn’t show up for dinner and she found him down by the river, staring into the water. He was dropping pebbles in, one at a time, and counting to himself — one thousand, two thousand, three thousand. It’s how I used to figure the depth of streams in Africa, he said. Then he smiled for the first time in a week: Important to know when you’ve got to wade across them. He wakes in a sweat sometimes, shouting out in a strange language. His sexual appetite is astonishing. He says he’s happy.

Still, when the London mail comes in, he’s first in line. Looking for an envelope with the government seal — or Sir Joseph’s. Inevitably he is disappointed. The news has been bad. The government has diverted its attention to the war. Sir Joseph feels that the time is not right to go ahead with a second expedition, the French are making inroads in West Africa. .

Ailie is worried. What will happen if the war ends or Sir Joseph reconsiders or the French stop making inroads? She looks up at the steady green sweep of the hills and sees instead a seething jungle. The fetus moves inside her. Somewhere, from deep in the house, the child of the century begins to cry.

PEEBLES

Peebles.

There’s no other answer for it.

Yes, Peebles. She’ll speak to him when he gets back.

♦ ♦ ♦

It is late afternoon when she spots him emerging from a stand of larches at the far end of the field, Zander at his side. The sun is low in the sky, cold and milky, and shadows ravel out from the trees. Deep, menacing, blue-black shadows, stretching across the field like fingers, reaching out as if reluctant to give up the burden of her husband and brother. She loses them for a moment, but there — the flash of Mungo’s hair as he glances into the sun, the familiar loping stride, Zander struggling to keep up. A moment later they’re coming up the cart path.

“Hello,” she calls.

They wave in response.

“Thirsty?”

“Aye.”

By the time they reach the porch she has two tankards of ale set out for them. They fling themselves down on the wooden chairs with the easy animal grace of men who have just performed some prodigious feat. Zander’s collar is soaked through with sweat. His nose is sunburned.

“So where’ve you been today?”

“Out to Ancrum Moor,” Zander replies.

“Ancrum Moor? It must be fourteen miles there and back.”

“Seventeen.”

“And I suppose you talked of nothing but crocodiles and Mandingoes the whole way?”

Zander grins. The baby, who has been playing in the dirt, cries out in infantine rapture, and Mungo turns to look down at his son in an abstracted sort of way, as if he doesn’t recognize him. Thomas regards his father steadily, then sticks a bit of offal in his mouth. His chin is slick with a film of dirt and saliva.

There is a moment of silence, the men concentrating on their ale. Ailie picks up her knitting. “Father was out today,” she says.

No response.

“He told me of a place open at Peebles. A doctor’s place — and a fine old house with it. What do you think?”

Mungo looks up from his ale. “Peebles? But that’s a day’s ride from here.”

“It’d mean leaving our family and friends. But we can’t hang around here forever — waiting. Can we?”

Zander has been waiting all his life. He sets his tankard down. “I don’t see why not. Better to wait on the chance of going off on a new adventure than get mired down in the life of a country physician. Look what it’s done to the old man.”

Mungo gives her a doleful look. “I don’t know,” he says.

Suddenly Zander laughs out loud. “What is it they say about Peebles?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, that expression old man Ferguson used to come out with all the time—”

The explorer’s face lights with recognition. “Yes, yes — I remember. ‘It was an unco still night,’ he’d say, ‘quiet as the grave — or Peebles.’ “

♦ GRAVE BUSINESS ♦

The mourners lining the front steps are professionals, in black suits and scarves, their eyes fixed solemnly on the ground or gazing off into space with an expression of profound grief and bewilderment. Each stands rigidly at attention, holding a long ebony mourner’s pole at half-mast before him, the black-plumed tips crossed like swords. A fine doleful drizzle beads on their top hats and muttonchop whiskers. They are waiting patiently, professionally, for the funeral procession to begin, after which they look forward to falling on the remains of the funeral supper and drinking themselves into a stupor. The procession is scheduled for 9:00 p.m.

Throughout the afternoon, a succession of carriages has pulled up at the gate and discharged various groups of sober-faced men, stricken women and sniveling children. Relatives mostly, earning their inheritances. They are gathered in the house now, weeping and moaning. At quarter past eight a gleaming phaeton lurches up to the gate and a gentleman in black swings back the door and leaps into the street, too distraught to concern himself with ceremony. An instant later he is at the door, out of breath, his hair perfect, face radiant with tears.

The gentleman is Ned Rise. Dressed in a suit of black Genoan velvet, gloves and scarf dyed in printer’s ink, even the soles of his shoes blackened for the occasion. In his pocket, a black silk handkerchief soaked in vinegar. He presses it to his face as he enters the house.

A lugubrious old man with a pitted nose sits at the door passing out sprigs of rue and gold rings engraved with the deceased’s name and dates. Walls, windows and ceiling are draped in black crape and candles in sconces light the place like a chapel. From the room beyond, the sound of hushed voices and a steady sonorous undercurrent of mewling and nose blowing. Already in tears, Ned takes a fortifying whiff of his handkerchief and is about to plunge into the front room in a state of hyperaqueous hysteria, when he feels a hand on his arm. He turns round and finds himself staring at the trembling lower lip of a young woman — a girl, actually, no more than seventeen or eighteen. Her hair falls to her waist in two sheets, her eyes are like pools of oil, there is a mole on her left breast. “Claude?” she says.

Who in Christ’s name? Ned is thinking. The cousin? Yes, of course. Blinded by tears, he takes her hand and sniffs: “Cousin?”

She nods, her eyes filling.

May as well start here, he thinks, tucking the handkerchief away. “Oh cousin!” he cries, and buries his nose in her hair.

♦ ♦ ♦

Since that chaotic night in the Islington churchyard three and a half years ago, Ned’s life has followed as circumscribed a course as rainwater in a sluice — a sluice designed by Dr. Decius William Delp, man of science, husband, father, blackmailer, ghoul. . Delp, the eminently respectable professor-surgeon who takes a glass of Madeira with my lord or a hand at whist with my lady, and then sends his confederates round to rob their graves before the fluids have had a chance to settle.

Given the conditions, Ned had little choice. He was a survivor. He’d survived brutality, mutilation, drowning, the stink of fish, Newgate, the gallows. He looked back on it all as the pistol flashed in the utter desolation of the Islington churchyard and knew he could bloody well survive anything — the witches’ sabbath, an insurrection of the walking dead, the full onslaught of Delp, Banks, Mendoza and Napoleon himself. Besides, there was just a single shot fired and the ball missed him by a good two yards, striking Quiddle in the thigh and shattering the bone. The bullet hit with a dull slap, like the sound a good pig stunner makes when he brings his cudgel down in that clean, fluid, killing swipe that buckles the animal’s legs and pitches it limp to the ground — a sharp sound, almost immediately soaked up in the sponge of meat and gristle. There was a moment of surprised silence, as if no one had really meant to take things so far, and then the tattoo of Crump’s retreating footsteps and another outcry from Boyles. Quiddle said nothing.

Ned’s first impulse was to run. Shove the whole thing and run till his lungs burst — but then he remembered how Quiddle had stuck by him, nursing him, giving up his bed, defending him against Delp. “Horace,” he whispered. “You all right?” No answer. Blackness. Nothing. Ned began to feel his way round the open grave, fearing the worst. If Quiddle was dead, Delp would expect five bodies — and his former assistant would be cut up like the rest, so many feet of intestine, so many ounces of this organ or that, sausage, tripe, headcheese. The thought was so vivid and arresting that Ned nearly collapsed when Quiddle suddenly seized his hand.

Quiddle’s grip was a vise. His voice was hoarse. Between gasps he instructed Ned in the use of a tourniquet and emphasized the need for haste — both on his own account and because Crump’s indiscretion would bring the constables down on them. Ned understood perfectly. He bound the wound and dragged Quiddle to the base of the wall — but didn’t have the strength to get him over. “Hold on,” he whispered, and went off in search of Boyles.

Boyles was hunched behind a grave marker, gibbering and moaning to himself. He’d always had something of the Irish peasant’s fascination with elves and ogres and banshees — but this was the real thing. Not five minutes ago he’d come face to face with an impossibility. Call it specter, phantom, shade — it was real, a walking, talking dead man. He was shaken. Half-drunk, it’s true, but shaken nonetheless. Ned had to tackle him, pin him down, slap him forty or fifty times and twice run through the story of his escape from the hangman before he could convince Billy to get up and help him lift Quiddle over the wall.

Boyles sat up in the cart and sucked at Ned’s flask like a man in a dream. Quiddle bled and moaned. From time to time he would complain of the cold. Ned whipped the horse till his shoulder went numb in the socket, and back at St. Bartholomew’s Delp himself performed the operation, taking the leg off just below the hip and cauterizing the wound with the blade of a shovel held over the fire till it glowed.

With Quiddle out of commission, Delp came to rely heavily on Ned. And Ned, with few if any options left him, gradually overcame his resistance to the job and began to exercise his wits in competing with Crump and others for the short supply of cadavers in the precincts of London. For a gallon and a half of gin a week he was able to hire Boyles as his assistant, and the two soon became as familiar with catafalques and churchyards as they were with hogsheads and taverns. Within the year Ned was providing all the specimens Delp could handle, and doing a bit of free-lancing on the side. The following year he was able to move out of St. Bartholomew’s and take up lodgings in Limehouse. He began to dress with a degree of elegance. Dine out. Think about a trip to the Continent to track down his lost love.

He was alive. He was adapting. Despite the dangers and unsavory conditions of his new trade, he was infused with a guarded sense of optimism. Delp loomed on the one hand, demanding and unscrupulous, and Crump, rankled over the incursion into his sphere of influence, threatened on the other. But Ned was tiptoeing a fine line between them, and very gradually, with a steady, slow, incremental force, his star was rising.

♦ ♦ ♦

And so, like the mourners on the front steps and the old man distributing sprigs of rue, Ned is interested in the deceased on a purely professional basis only. The previous morning, while scanning the obituaries, he had come across the following notice:

The City will sorely feel the passing of Mr. Claude Messenger Osprey, manufacturer of fine porcelain and china, dead of the quinsy at the age of fifty-seven this eighth day of June, eighteen hundred and one. Mr. Osprey was perhaps best known for his determined and innovative work in the manufacture of porcelain chamberpots. He was the first to conceive of the personalized pot de chambre, and he employed a number of inspired artisans whose refreshing clover-leaf and willow designs are intimately known to us all. Mr. Osprey is survived by a brother, Drummond, of Cheapside, and a son, Claude junior, the Bristol china merchant. The deceased will lie in state at the residence of his brother this evening and throughout the day tomorrow. The funeral service is scheduled for nine o’clock tomorrow evening.

A few inquiries among the bereaved Osprey household staff turned up a rather intriguing bit of information: Claude junior, now en route from Bristol, was remembered only as a small boy. Due to a rift between the senior Osprey and his wife, the boy had been sent away to school at the age of nine, matriculated through the university, married, and had taken control of the Bristol branch of the family business without ever having returned to London. None of the London Ospreys had laid eyes on him in nearly twenty years.

That evening, Ned, Quiddle and Billy Boyles were waiting for the Bristol mail when it rolled up in front of the Gloucester Coffee House. Boyles, in livery, swung back the door of the coach before it had come to a stop and called out the young Osprey’s name in a voice thick with grief and anxiety.

He introduced himself as footman to the late Osprey senior, and led the young heir up the street to a waiting carriage. Inside the carriage, like house spiders anticipating a visitor, Ned and Quiddle toyed with lengths of rope and sturdy strips of cotton. Osprey didn’t have a chance.

♦ ♦ ♦

“You know,” the cousin sniffs, “I recognized you the instant you stepped through the door.”

Ned emits a mournful whimper or two, then blows his nose and looks up at her out of grief-stricken eyes. “Oh? How was that?”

“You. . you. .” here she falls into his arms again, blubbering like a drowning dog, “you look so much like him.”

The rest is easy. A few ponderous aunts, quaking uncles, sour in-laws, cousins thrice removed, a suspicious old nursemaid. No widow, thank god. (Ned can’t be sure, but thinks he recalls snatching a Mrs. Tillie Marsh Osprey from a churchyard in the West End nearly two years back.) Meanwhile, expressions of sympathy fall around him like brick buildings collapsing in an earthquake. Someone proposes a toast. And then another. More tears, back-patting, the reek of perfume and alcohol, a kiss and a squeeze, and then they’re out in the street, wrapped in black capes, torches held high, treading with stately tread behind the massive horse-drawn hearse. Over the cobbles and down the street, around a corner and into the churchyard. The glittering weasel eyes of the parson, dust to dust. And then Ned flinging himself on the coffin, biting at the ankles of the gravediggers, inconsolable, fighting off a host of soothers and sympathizers in the pure fierce outflowing of his grief. He grovels, he whines, out-Hamlets Hamlet. And finally, tearfully, begs them to leave him with his sorrow and his burning compulsion to bury this great and noble man, his father, with his own caring hands.

Ten minutes later the cemetery is deserted as the sleek phaeton draws up at the gate, Quiddle at the reins. A thin, flat-headed figure slips out and joins Ned beside the grave. There is a movement in the dark, a grunt or groan perhaps, some brief hint of nefarious activity. Then the carriage moves off and the final torch is snuffed in the cemetery.

♦ ALL THINGS THAT RISE

MUST CONTAIN YEAST ♦

As dawn stretches her rosy fingers over the rooftops of London, a harelipped match girl stumbles upon the writhing form of Claude M. Osprey, Jr. The heir to the Osprey fortune, bound hand and foot, is methodically inching his way up a soot-blackened alley, dragging a small ridge of detritus along with him. His face is a grid of scratches thin as cut hair, and a dirty cravat has been stuffed in his mouth. “Mmmff,” he says. “Mmmmmmmmff!” The girl cocks her head and looks at him alertly, like a setter responding to its master’s cluck, then bends to sift through his pockets. Half an hour later a butcher’s boy happens by, does a double take, and then slouches up to hang over the young heir as if the appearance of a bound and gagged man in a back alley presented a dilemma of Aristotelian proportions. Osprey’s eyes widen above the gag in rage and exasperation. The boy’s mouth drops open. He starts up the alley, ducks his head, turns and comes back again. Finally he squats down and cautiously removes the cravat from Osprey’s mouth.

The bound man works his jaw as if it were a newly created part of his anatomy. “Cut me loose,” he demands.

The boy tucks the cravat away in his pockets. He digs a sliver of wax from his ear and then examines it thoughtfully at the edge of a blackened fingernail. “Wot’s in it for me?”

“Half a crown.”

“Make it a crown and yer on.”

“A crown then. Cut the cords.”

“Ten shillings.”

“Help!” Osprey shouts. “Murder! Help!”

“All royt, all royt.” In a single practiced motion the knife appears from the boy’s ragged sleeve and the hemp cords fall to the ground.

Osprey sits up and frees his ankles, then reaches up a hand for support. The boy helps him to his feet. “Idiot!” the young heir hisses, and slaps the boy against the wall. Then he’s out of the alley and running for a hackney cab.

♦ ♦ ♦

They are stunned in Cheapside. Bowled over. “But, but — why would anyone want to do such a thing?” the uncle stammers.

“The grave!” shouts Osprey.

The authorities are called in. The parson. The cousin with her eyes of pitch. The aunts and uncles. The in-laws. When the earth is turned back from the grave and the casket revealed, they breathe a sigh of relief. “Open it!” shouts the heir. “Open it!” he insists, over a murmur of protest. The gravedigger pries open the lid. The casket is empty. Some gasp. Others faint. That afternoon the following handbill is distributed throughout the city:

Claude M. Osprey, Jr., offers a reward of £100 for information leading to the apprehension of three men, a one-legged man among them, who committed a heinous act of depravity against God and Nature in the St. Paul’s churchyard on the night of June the eighth. Information held strictly confidential. Great Wood St., Cheapside.

There are thirtyseven respondents. One after another they slouch into the study of the house on Great Wood Street. Bearded, one-eyed, pockmarked, drooling and stinking, each has a story for the young heir. He listens to semicoherent tales of murder, cannibalism, rape, robbery and mayhem. He hears of kidnapping and mutilation, fellatio, buggery, gypsies, blackamoors and Jews. The carpets are soiled and the spitoon full when a rangy man of about forty is led into the room, his biceps as lean as a side of bacon. A beard of three or four days’ growth darkens his chin, and he reaches up to stroke it from time to time with quick nervous fingers. His eyes are bright as bits of blue glass. “My name’s Crump,” he says, his voice flayed and harsh. “I knows the men ye want. Graverobbers.”

Osprey motions for him to sit.

“They’re a vicious lot, in league with the divil. It’s un’oly wot they done. Inyooman.”

Tight-lipped, seductive, Osprey rattles a bag of coins. His eyes hold the other man like pincers. “Where are they?”

“The gimpy one, ‘ee’s Quiddle. Ye’ll find ‘im at St. Bartholomew’s. The other one, the one with the flat ‘ead, they calls ‘im Boyles, Billy Boyles. ‘Ee’s a drunk. Sleeps in sheds and carts and such. But ‘oo you wants is the ringleader, the brains behind it all.” Crump pauses to wipe his mouth on his sleeve. “That’s a hunnert pund yer offerin’, init?”

Osprey rattles the bag, slow and sweet.

“ ‘Is name’s Ned. Ned is all I knows ‘im by. ‘Ee’s a subtle snake, ‘ee is. Slippery. But I’ve watched ‘im and I’ve followed ‘im like a terrier after a rat. I can tell ye where ‘is lodgins is at. In Lime’ouse. Upstairs from the Mermaid Tavern.” Crump pauses to lick his cracked lips. “Go now,” he whispers, “and catch ‘im while it’s light.”

♦ THE HOUND OF EARTH ♦

Experience has taught Ned Rise a good many things — nearly all of them unpleasant. One thing it has taught him is to keep his assets liquid. Another is to wear a life jacket if you’re expecting heavy seas. He has also come to understand that the prudent homme des affaires never removes his shoes, keeps one eye propped open in repose, and never under any circumstances allows himself to enter a room with only one door.

And so, when Osprey and a pair of armed lieutenants burst in upon him entirely unannounced and unexpected, Ned is only partially surprised. Though he is in bed asleep when they kick in the door of the front room, he has vanished by the time they reach the bedroom. As the front door splinters there is a moment of recognition during which the young heir, armed to the teeth, stares directly into the eyes of the bodysnatcher, startled awake in his bed. Not fifteen feet away. Through the doorframe, in the back room, under the bedclothes. Osprey has already begun to smile a wicked vengeful smile when Ned simply turns over in bed and disappears. One minute he is there, flesh and blood, and the next he has been drunk up by the air, trompe l’oeil, like a blacksnake vanishing into a stone wall.

Ned has planned for such contingencies. When he rented the modest apartment from the landlord of the Mermaid, he also took charge of a small room on the floor directly below it — a room no bigger than a closet actually — explaining to the landlord that he was an itinerant merchant and that he needed the extra space to store his wares. The landlord said he didn’t give a great blue damn who he was or what he did with his rooms, so long as there was no destruction done and he paid his rent on time. Ned smiled, and counted out the first week’s rent in advance. Then he appropriated Delp’s bone saw, waited until a fresh boatload of tars and salts began drinking, shouting, breaking glass and howling out sea chanties downstairs, and cut a neat round hole in the floor of his bedroom. The hole communicated directly with the closet on the floor below. It was the work of a minute to slide the bed across the room and conceal his handiwork. Add to this the fact that Ned always slept fully dressed, with his life savings tied up in a sock round his neck, and it is understandable that he was able to elude his would-be captors.

For the time being, at any rate.

For Osprey was not so easily discouraged. He seemed quite willing to let the chamberpot business languish in the hands of underlings while he pursued his present affair to its conclusion. The outrage to his father’s remains would have been reason enough to hunt the perpetrators to the far corners of the earth, but when coupled with the outrage to himself, the very existence of these thieves, kidnappers and crypt gougers was intolerable, rankling, a blot on society, and their extermination took on the nature of a sacred mission. Dogged, indefatigable, he was mad for vengeance, his mouth bitter with the taste of bile, his dreams puddled with blood.

The first to go was Quiddle. He was apprehended at St. Bartholomew’s, imprisoned, tried and eventually hanged. The only evidence against him was a deposition by the junior Osprey. It was enough. Delp, of course, denied everything. He did attend the execution though — seeing that Quiddle had no next of kin. Afterward, in a gesture that touched nearly everyone present, he stepped forward and announced that he himself would take charge of the body.

Boyles was another story altogether. He was none too bright, and dead drunk about three quarters of the time. But where he might be from moment to moment was hard to say. He had no lodgings. No friends. No job. No prospects. He slept in doorways, kitchens, ginshops. Osprey hired a dozen men to roam the alleys and taverns in the neighborhood of the hospital and to keep a watch in Limehouse. But to no avail: Ned Rise found him first. He was down on Hermitage Dock, taking in the sun and watching a swarm of skinny-legged boys dive into the Thames while seabirds dangled from the sky and three-masted schooners ran with the breeze like great white swans. He had a lemon, a potato and a bottle of gin with him, and he was sucking at them in slow succession — first the gin, then the lemon, and finally the potato. When Ned spotted the familiar flat head and tattered overcoat, he felt a rush of relief. Boyles turned his glittery green eyes and long nose to him as he sat down. “Neddy! Wot’s up? Another job?”

“We’re in trouble, Billy.”

Boyles didn’t want to hear it. He looked out over the gray sudsing waves like Napoleon surveying the Channel. “Lookit the way them gulls hangs in the air, like somebody was runnin’ a Punch and Judy show out o’ the sky,” he murmured. There was a fragment of lemon pulp stuffed up his nostril.

“They got Quiddle.”

“Who got ‘im?”

“Osprey.”

There was no change in Boyles’ expression. He looked at Ned blank as a baby.

“The one we dumped two nights back — the chamberpot king.”

Boyles’ face fell. He began to look queasy, as if his recollection of the fire-eyed young heir had suddenly cast him into stormy seas or swamped his potato in stomach acid.

“They’re going to hang him, Billy.”

Boyles absorbed this information with the same half-thoughtful, half-bilious look. His face gradually went white and he reached clumsily for his mouth. Then he vomited potato, lemon and gin all over the dock.

Ned took the bottle from him and flung it into the river. “Come on, Billy,” he said, “get up. We’ve got to go get ourselves lost.”

♦ ♦ ♦

That was in the summer, when days were long and nights as soft as a mother’s breast.

Now, with two months of winter and the New Year behind them, things are getting rough. For one thing, they are out of money. Boyles had all of six shillings on him when they decided to melt into the shadows, and Ned’s seventy-four pounds (an amount accruing in large part from the sale of the elder Osprey’s remains on the open market and the appropriation of the junior Osprey’s wallet and other effects) has been exhausted by the demands of lodging by the night in order to keep on the move. For another thing, the weather has turned against them. A cold wave is sweeping in off the North Sea with a frightening intensity, cracking foundations, smoothing over the Thames, spreading ague, pneumonia and influenza in its wake. While pigeons fall from the sky like stones and workhorses stiffen and die in their stalls, Rise and Boyles have had to make do with cold porridge and a bed in the straw. Still worse, Osprey has refused to give up the chase, sniffing them out of every hole they manage to crawl into, setting up a fierce bloodthirsty baying at their backs, ruining their digestion, assailing their peace of mind, hiding a bogey in every bush and making a gibbet of every streetlamp.

Currently they are huddled over a fire beneath the Blackfriars Bridge, muffled and miserable, noses plugged with mucus, feet numb, stomachs growling. They sit there for nearly half an hour, hugging their sides and staring into the flames, before Ned turns to his companion and whispers in his ear. Ten other vagrants are shivering round the fire. None even bothers to look up. Out on the river the shifting ice groans like a chorus of drowned men.

“There’s a woman buried tonight up at St. Paul’s,” Ned says.

“Wot, with the ground froze?”

Ned grins. “That makes it all the easier for us, don’t you see? She’ll be just lying there atop the grave for a few days till the gravedigger can open it up for her.”

Boyles’ nose is running. His eyes have sunk deep in their sockets, like two feverish little creatures retreating into their burrows. His voice is reproachful. “You got me into this, Neddy.”

“Crump did.”

Boyles turns back to the fire, carefully clears each nostril, and lets the idea drift through the gin-impaired circuits of his brain for a minute or two. “I could sure use a cup of negus and maybe some hot soup,” he sniffs. “And I wouldn’t mind passin’ the night on a bench in a inn someplace neither.” He pauses to cough up a clot of white serum. “But can we risk it?”

“Shit. We’ll freeze to death if we don’t.”

♦ ♦ ♦

It is past three in the morning when they slip into the cemetery. The night sky is a cauldron of clouds, white, black, a hundred shades of gray. There is wind, and that numbing, headaching cold that penetrates every cell and whispers death in your ears. Ned is in a hurry. Trembling with the cold, thinking only to snatch the corpse, stash it someplace and find a ginshop where they can sleep on the floor for a farthing, already envisioning Bluestone the surgeon counting the notes out in his hand and the bed and supper they’ll have by this time tomorrow. Osprey? He tries not to think of him, need rationalizing fear — how could anyone, even the devil himself, carry a grudge so far as to keep watch in a cemetery on a deathly cold night eight months after the fact? No, if he were Osprey he’d be in bed now, with a woman to keep him warm and a fire that lit the room like Guy Fawkes Day. .

There is a sudden sharp sound at his back and he spins around, tense as a cat, until he realizes it’s only Boyles stumbling over the gate. He waits for his accomplice to come loping up out of the shadows, then motions for him to stay put. Ned slips off, the brief scare snapping him out of his rapture, suffusing him with blood and adrenalin, his heart turning over like a machine. Five minutes later he locates the coffin — a plain deal box set between a pair of grave markers at the far end of the churchyard. He crouches low and watches for a full sixty seconds or more, the wind hanging in the vacant trees, the cold creeping up his legs, then starts forward.

But then there’s another sound — off to his left — a rippling or snapping like wash on a line. He hesitates, all his instincts shouting watch out, watch out, the cold prodding him on, whispering it’s all right, make the snatch, get warm, stay alive. He takes a tentative step forward. There it is again. Ripple, flap. Something is wrong. Dead wrong. Crouching, he slips off to his left, breath sucked back, heart churning, every muscle strung tight against the bone.

The sound becomes more insistent as he draws closer, its rhythm geared to the rise and fall of the wind. Spooked, he pictures a host of the dead standing silent atop their tombs, cerements rustling in the breeze, skeletal hands reaching out in mute appeal. But no, there must be a rational explanation. . He moves closer, ripple, flap. There: the sound seems to be emanating from the bank of shadow up ahead — a sepulcher, isn’t it? Yes, a sepulcher, oblong, massive, looming over the dark ranks of headstones like the passageway to the underworld. He moves closer still, and is startled to realize that the whole thing seems to be moving, undulating somehow with the slow soft wash of a gentle sea. Too dark to see, he reaches out a hand to touch it — and comes up with a handful of cloth. Strange. Someone has draped the entire thing in black muslin. In Memoriam? Another nob laid to rest?

He doesn’t have time to puzzle over it. The cold speaks to him again and he is about to turn back to his task, satisfied, when another sound, far more arresting, takes hold of him like a clenched fist and freezes every muscle in his body. Faint and muffled, a sound of voices — from inside the tomb! This is too much. For all his recent experience in darkened graveyards he wants to piss his pants, take to his heels, creep back to Blackfriars Bridge and lie down to die of the cold. But then a sudden gust lifts the sheets and a sliver of light cuts the darkness. A new fear comes over him, far more terrible than any thought of ghosts and goblins. His joints tremble with it. He is beginning to understand.

Carefully, carefully, he slips beneath the black sheet and huddles over the stone door that gives onto the tomb. It is ever so slightly ajar. He puts his eye to the opening.

Inside, by the dim glow of an oil lamp, three men in furs are sitting round a coffin, playing cards. Their feet are propped up on iron bed warmers; clouds of suspended breath dog their movements. Ned’s view is partially obstructed by the back of the man nearest him, but when the man sits up to look at his hand Ned realizes with a start that the cardplayer in the far corner is Osprey. Suddenly Osprey throws in his cards. “Hadn’t you better be making your rounds, Mr. Crump?” he says to the figure with his back turned.

“Aww, ‘ave a ‘eart, Claude. There ain’t nobody goin’ to be out on a night like this, not the divil nor ‘is dam.”

All the light from the lamp is puddled in Osprey’s eyes until they seem to glow with a preternatural light. He sighs, and casually draws a pistol from the lining of his coat. “I said: hadn’t you better be making your rounds, Mr. Crump?”

♦ ♦ ♦

Back at the gate Ned claps one hand over Boyles’ mouth, the other round his shoulder. He leads him from the cemetery and up a side street at a jog. Three blocks later a winded Boyles stops and spins his friend round by the arm. “Wot’s up, Neddy? Where we headed?”

Ned’s face is veiled in shadow. His voice is harsh, nagged at by the cold, muffled in the scarf drawn over his mouth and nose. “Hertford,” he whispers.

“Hertford?” Boyles’ chin drops. “But that’s outside Lunnon, init?”

A light goes on in a window up the street, throwing a pale flicker over Ned’s face. His look is so fierce and bitter Boyles steps back, but Ned grabs hold of his companion’s coat and draws him up close. His voice is clear, unmistakable. “That’s right,” he hisses.

♦ ILLUSORY CHEESES ♦

Ned turned his back on London without a second thought. It was the winter of 1802, and he was thirty-one years old. He was tired. He’d had thirty-one years of creeping through the shit and grime of the streets, thirty-one years of having his knuckles rapped and the ladder jerked out from under him every time he managed to step up a rung. Thirty-one years of torment and degradation, prejudice, abuse, and cruel and unusual punishment, mitigated only by the charity of Barrenboyne and the precious few months he’d had with Fanny. Now, at the end of all those blighted years, all those dark hollow years that had been drawn from him one by one like deeply embedded splinters, he was no better off than when Barrenboyne had first taken him in. He was broke. He had no lodgings, no possessions, no family. As far as friends were concerned, he was taking them all with him, in the flat-headed, pinch-shouldered person of Billy Boyles, drunkard and half-wit. Quiddle was dead, Fanny had vanished, Shem and Liam were up to their ears in fish and scales somewhere on the far side of the river — in any case, he hadn’t seen them in four and a half years. For the rest, they were faceless multitudes, hard as stones, ready to strip the clothes from your back as you lay dying or run you down in the streets with their phaetons and landaus. And if they weren’t strangers, they were sworn enemies. Banks, Mendoza, Brummell, Smirke, Delp — and the most venomous of all, Osprey. Orestes couldn’t have had it worse.

So he was off to Hertford. The country. Like Boyles, Ned had never been out of London, and had no idea what to expect. He had a vague image of great wheels of cheese, slabs of fresh-baked bread slathered with butter and honey, cattle at their cuds, the lazy sizzle of sun showers on a thatched roof. He and Billy could get jobs as fieldhands or shepherds or something. The air would be good for them.

Beyond ail this, another factor entered the equation: Fanny. She’d been born and raised in Hertfordshire, and had served her apprenticeship there as milkmaid to a certain Squire Trelawney. Ned would look up her family.

Perhaps they’d heard from her or knew where she could be found. After four and a half years of scouring the streets, he was at a loss. She wasn’t in London, as best he could determine, and with Osprey dogging him he had no chance of raising the money to go off to the Continent. Brooks’ house had long since been boarded up. Letters went unanswered. It was rumored that he was dead. If so, where was Fanny?

What Ned couldn’t know, as he trudged up the deserted turnpike in the cold vague light of dawn, was that the question no longer held any meaning.

♦ SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS ♦

Fanny Brunch left London early Christmas morning, 1797, in a state of shock. She wouldn’t be back for nearly four years.

It was snowing that morning, trembling little gouts of white spinning down out of the caliginous sky. She hardly noticed. When she finally emerged from the prison it was past five in the morning, and Brooks’ footman was waiting outside the gate. She looked right through him as he handed her into the coach, his touch the touch of a doomed man, flesh, blood, sinew, bone. All the way to Gravesend she watched the trees emerge from the darkness and turn to gibbets, the snow clinging to the naked branches like shreds of flesh, nests of dried leaves suddenly transforming themselves into kicking, writhing human forms. She felt lightheaded, disconnected from her body. There was a smell of meat in her nostrils, nagging and persistent. At one point the smell of it was so strong she had to ask the coachman to pull off to the side of the road so she could be sick in the weeds.

Brooks gave her a dose of laudanum for the trip to Bremerhaven, then a second, third and fourth dose to calm her nerves as they continued on from there to Cuxhaven and Hamburg. She lay dreaming on her narrow bunk as the ship lurched through a storm in the North Sea, her pupils reduced to slits, the wind soothing her with a chorus of voices. Her nostrils cleared, the fetor of decaying flesh giving way to a breath of the outdoors, azalea and hyacinth, spring in Hertfordshire. Above her, the darkened rafters began to shift and blend, faces clustered like grapes in the shadows, the candle guttering wildly as the ship pitched like a carriage with a thrown wheel. She saw her father, a spring they’d visited in the chalk hills, the clean-swept kitchen of their stone-and-thatch cottage. She was awake one moment, dreaming the next. She vomited and enjoyed it. There were roses in her nostrils. Toward the end she saw Ned, lying in some dark place — a cave — his throat chafed, a linen garment folded across his loins. She saw the gallows again, just as flash, and then Ned was on his feet, gliding toward the mouth of the cave. The light was blinding. There was singing. And then she found herself in Hamburg, at a hotel, sitting across the table from Brooks in a new white silk gown.

“Fanny,” he was saying. “Fanny. Will you look at me, please?”

She looked. He was standing now. There was a man at his side, tall and erect, his mustaches combed out from his face. His eyes were close-set, half the normal size. He was peering at her through a lorgnette.

“This is the gentleman I was telling you about — the one I met over cards last night?”

The man leaned forward and took her hand. “Karl Erasmus von Pölkler,” he said.

She smiled like all the fields of clover in Hertfordshire, she smiled like an idiot. She was thinking of something else.

♦ ♦ ♦

Two nights later she opened her eyes again and found that she was seated at a massive walnut dining table set in the center of a high-vaulted room. The walls were of stone and mortar, softened at intervals by a gloomy portrait or an oriental tapestry. A chandelier blazing with a hundred candles depended from the ceiling like a fragment of the sun. For a moment she was disoriented, the opium settling a deep fog over the backroads of her mind, but then she glanced up at the head of the table and saw von Pölkler raising a glass of wine in toast. Six other guests. Brooks among them, raised their glasses in unison while von Pölkler intoned something in German and seven pairs of eyes fastened on Fanny. Reddening, she stared down at the white tablecloth. A jeweled bracelet flashed on her wrist.

They ate Erbsensuppe, Beuschel and Gnagi, Bratkartoffeln, Fleischvögel and Hasenbraten. There were mounds of shredded cabbage and beets. A dozen bottles of Rüdesheimer. The conversation, in honor of the principal guests, was in a halting, consonant-choked English. “Ve haff. . wery great honor to place. . to place such charmed English mens and vomens here at Geesthacht,” von Pölkler sputtered, the ridge of his high forehead glistening under the chandelier. Fanny bowed her head and ate with a mechanical precision: two bites and a dab at the lips with her napkin. By the time the girl in pigtails and apron brought around the Schwarzwälder Kirsch, Fanny was floating. Brooks, drunk as a skunk, limp from laudanum and semi-articulate as a result of sharing two pipefuls of their host’s oriental tobacco, fell asleep in a puddle of gravy.

After dinner Fanny excused herself. The girl in the apron helped her up to her room. She lay on the bed for a long while, thinking of Ned, her family, the place she’d given up at Sir Joseph’s, the dismal prospect — like wriggling down through an interminable tunnel — of a life with Brooks. She reached for bottle and spoon. Tincture of opium. The stuff was magical, soothing, it was her friend and counselor. She took it like the medicine it was.

Fanny lay back and dreamed. The candle became the light of the sun, the room spun twice and suddenly she was in a deep lush canyon. Golden fish drifted through transparent pools, pleasure domes sprang up on precipices overlooking the sea, larks floated in the sky and the clouds pursed their lips and whispered nonsense rhymes in her ear. She dreamed. But the breath on her pillow was von Pölkler’s.

♦ ♦ ♦

On the surface. Brooks’ motive in getting Fanny out of London was purely compassionate— he meant to spare her the agony of her lover’s execution. The con artist’s death was a fait accompli. They’d done all they could. Now she must forget. But in point of fact, he hungered to stand at her side while the rope twitched and Ned Rise gagged his last. He burned for it; there was no scene in the world he’d rather witness. The whole thing was so deliciously morbid, so painfully exciting — the doomed lovers parted forever, torn from one another’s arms by the brooding implacable force of the hangman, the distraught heroine throwing herself on the corpse while the crowd casually remarked on the execution like drama critics strolling from the theater. “Aaaah, ‘ee was nothin’, this one. Remember Jack Tate? — kicked like a bleedin’ ‘orse for arf an hour and then made them ‘orrible noises in ‘is throat?” Brooks was titillated, no doubt about it. He desperately wanted to watch her watching the execution. But even more desperately, he was afraid of losing her. Once Ned Rise had passed beyond the pale she would no longer have any use for the Brooks fortune — or the Brooks proclivities. As soon as it hit her, she’d be gone. He knew it.

And so he dosed her with laudanum and hustled her off to Germany before she could have any real awareness of what was going on. Penniless, and unable to speak the language, she would be more than ever dependent upon him. And that was just what he wanted. Fanny Brunch was the most desirable woman he had ever laid eyes on — he was mad for her. She had the soft, pure, angelic sort of beauty that spoke to every fiber of his algolagniac’s heart. With her it wasn’t the mere momentary pleasure of sex, it was an ongoing process of erotic defilement, it was pissing in the pews, jerking off on the altar. She was made for him.

Germany was the obvious place to take her. With the war on, France was out. Ditto Italy. He thought of Greece, but the Mediterranean was nothing less than a floating battlefield — why risk it? No, Germany was the place. Fatherland of the few truly heroic men of the age — Goethe, Schelling, Tieck, Schiller, the Schlegels. And all of them gathered at Jena, the Athens of the modern age. It was too simple. They would travel up the Elbe, through Magdeburg, Halle and Weissenfels, and settle at Jena. He would write great poems that celebrated love, death and pain. He could have Goethe over to tea. Tell Schiller how wrong he was to have let Karl Moor give in — far better to be an outlaw, spitting in the face of bourgeois society. The thought of it — he, Adonais Brooks, an intimate of the great minds of his time, helping mold a canon of drama, poetry and philosophical speculation incandescent with scenes of pain and loss, windswept peaks and tortured youth, a canon of work that would once and for all lay to rest the precious claptrap they’d been heralding in England for the past fifty years. Brooks could feel himself teetering on the verge of a great and emotional future. Then he met von Pölkler.

“You must come out to the estate at Geesthacht,” the Margrave said. “Rest up for awhile.” The German tucked his lorgnette away and looked Brooks dead in the eye, as if he could see through to the inner man behind the flat blue eyes and hint of a smile. “I tink we haff alot in common.”

♦ ♦ ♦

As the weeks passed, each day more hopeless and humiliating than the last, Fanny lost the ability to care. About anything. Life, love, food, drink, sex, the functions of the body and mind. The only thing that pricked her interest was the blue bottle that stood on the shelf beside her bed. Laudanum helped her to dream, to forget what was happening to her, where she was, who these people were. Sex came like an avalanche, smothered in wine and opium. Sex with Brooks, von Pölkler, the girl in pigtails, beet-faced guests, a dog. Legs and arms flailed, smoke rose to the ceiling. Fanny reached for the blue bottle.

After three months at Geesthacht, she realized that she was pregnant. Strange things were happening to her body. She was sick before breakfast. Her liver was tender. Her blood no longer flowed in secret accord with the cycles of the moon. She reached for bottle and spoon, but before the glow came up she felt a stirring in some deep intuitive pocket of her mind, a burgeoning cellular knowledge that suddenly hit her with all the force of certainty: she was carrying Ned’s child. That final desperate night at Newgate came back to her in a flash of revelation, Ned driving at her with a frantic relentless fury as if he could somehow transcend his fate through the urgency of his lovemaking, while she lay there, sorrowing, cradling him in her arms as if he were a lost infant. She looked up at the stone walls of her apartment at Geesthacht. The drug was in her stomach, in her head. She leaned back on her pillow and smiled.

It was a boy, of course. Born on the twenty-fifth of September, 1798. At Geesthacht. Von Pölkler was delighted. He spoke of a system of education he had devised, a system that would inscribe the clean slate of the boy’s mind with precise, orderly strokes, a system that would allow him to achieve an intensely realized state of transcendent native freedom through the rigid application of drill and regimen. He would be instructed in the only two disciplines that mattered: philosophy and the martial arts. This was no ordinary boy, and he would have no ordinary education. No, he was destined to become a new man, a hero for the coming century, the Anglo-German Napoleon. Von Pölkler named the boy Karl. Privately, Fanny called him Ned.

Brooks viewed the whole thing with suspicion and distaste. While it was true that the child may have been his own, despite von Pölkler’s insistence to the contrary, the fact was that it deprived him of Fanny’s company much of the time. At first, of course, the prospect of Fanny’s motherhood excited him, and he did make an effort to explore the various erotic avenues that Madonna and child opened to him — balancing the baby’s cap on his erect member, suckling at the breast, strapping Fanny to the cradle and ravishing her from the rear, making love to a pair of village fräuleins dressed in diapers — but he soon grew bored with the whole thing. Gurgling, baby talk, rattles, the insufferable cuteness of it all. This wasn’t the way heroes lived. He became depressed. Stopped writing. Spent his time arranging cockfights or lying in bed with a bottle of laudanum and a fist-sized chunk of the Margrave’s oriental tobacco. He plumbed the depths of his host’s wine cellar, played billiards until he wore a hole in the felt. His eyes drooped, the beestung lips became so impossibly swollen he looked as if he were perpetually pouting over some imagined injustice, and he developed a habit of tugging at his missing ear. One night he and von Pölkler got stinking drunk and slit one another’s cheeks with a razor — strictly for cosmetic purposes. They wore their thin scars like chevrons.

♦ ♦ ♦

On the eve of the child’s third birthday, von Pölkler arranged a gala celebration: the boy would begin his formal education the following morning. The Mayor of Hamburg was invited, various local dignitaries and minor aristocrats, bankers and shopkeepers. Most declined the invitation, as a means of registering disapproval of the Margrave’s life-style. But those who did come were regaled with dancing, chamber music, a feast of roast suckling pig with plum sauce and Weinkraut, home-brewed black beer, flagons of wine and whatever else they had the imagination to desire. A select few were invited to join the Margrave in a lower chamber once used as a dungeon and still fitted out with all the accoutrements of bondage and torture. There they tasted French champagne, swallowed opium, stripped off their gowns and dinner jackets and let their impulses guide them.

Fanny did not attend the party. She lay in bed, the child at her side, counting out drops of laudanum. It was now nearly four years since she’d stepped through the gates at Geesthacht, four years that had accumulated all her loneliness, despair and self-contempt until the combined force of it lashed her like a whip day and night, four years that constituted her season in hell. She was a prisoner. Her future had been throttled on the gallows, her present was a blight.

At first, the child had revitalized her. She came out of her haze, made demands of Brooks and von Pölkler, tried to cut back her intake of medicine. Her keepers acceded to her demands — she was given a degree of autonomy and left alone much of the time — but the laudanum had a hold over her that struck far deeper than any influence either of them could assert. Without it, her dreams turned sour. She saw Ned in his grave, the cerements creeping with worms and insects; she saw her boy, son of a whore, grown into a beast under von Pölkler’s tutelage; she watched herself writhing in the cold dark muck of a riverbed, the current swirling over her like a stormy sky. She started up in bed, wet with perspiration, and was immediately racked with shivers. Her throat was dry, a thousand bright-eyed rodents dug at her insides with quick sharp movements of tooth and claw. She reached for the blue bottle.

Now it was a matter of course. She took seven thousand drops a day, and her dreams were easier. The child slept better for it too. When she first took him off the breast he couldn’t keep his food down and would toss in his cradle, colicky and restless. Frau Grunewald, the ancient midwife who had tended von Pölkler in his infancy, suggested a drop or two of medicine in the boy’s porridge. It worked. And now the medicine was as much a part of the child’s life as it was of Fanny’s own. She didn’t like it. She sensed that the child was starting out at a disadvantage, a cripple, saddled with a special need and a special craving to satisfy it. But then what did it matter? Von Pölkler would take her son away and indoctrinate him until he became a stranger to her. She was powerless to stop him.

As she lay there brooding over it, the laudanum stroking her abdomen with firm hot fingers, the door swung back, and Brooks staggered into the room. His clothes were torn, his face smeared, the eyes drilled into his head. He lurched for the bed, missed his mark and fell headlong into the corner. A moment later there was the sound of gagging — and then he was still.

Fanny cautiously lifted herself from the bed and bent over him. He did not seem to be breathing. She turned him over and listened for a heartbeat. There was none. She crawled back into bed and took a spoonful of medicine to clear her head. Very gradually, something began to bloom there, something compounded equally of fear and exhilaration. Two hours later, when Brooks had grown cold and a faint gray light had begun to peer in at the windows, Fanny lifted a fistful of currency from his waistcoat pocket, dressed the child and crept out into the hallway.

The place was silent. Stone corridors stretched off into darkness, arrases shadowed the walls. She tiptoed down the steps and into the main hall, afraid that von Pölkler might still be at it, red-eyed from debauch — he would stop her for certain, mother of his child. She’d have to reach Cuxhaven — no, be aboard a smack in the North Sea — before she’d be clear of him. But for the moment, all was well: there was no sign of him.

The main hall was a shambles. Littered with smashed furniture, overturned tables, scraps of food, the shards of bottles. There was a sound of snoring. Somewhere, someone was groaning. To her left, propped up against the wall, was Herr Meinfuss, the stablekeeper. Another man was asleep in his lap. Beyond them a dark shadow lay frozen against the floor. It was Bruno, von Pölkler’s Alsatian. The dog had been eviscerated, its intestines trailing from the rictus of the body cavity like rotten sausage. Fanny led her son around the carcass and out into the gray light of morning.

Her Hertfordshire upbringing served her in good stead when she reached the stables. It was nothing to saddle the Margrave’s finest horse — an Arabian gray — seat the boy across the pommel and head out over the fields for the Hamburg road. At a gallop. In Hamburg she was able to dispose of the horse to a suspicious but profit-loving dealer after she explained in her rudimentary German that her husband had been injured in Oldenburg, and that she needed to raise money so she could rush to his aid. The horse trader flashed a complicitous, full-toothed grin, gave her a fifth the animal’s worth and wished her husband well.

By nightfall she was at Cuxhaven. A boat was leaving for London, via The Hague, at six the following morning. She had just enough to cover her fare after purchasing two bottles of laudanum from the chemist and some milk and groats for her son. All night she sat huddled on the dock, jumping at every sound, expecting von Pölkler to swoop down on them at any moment. Finally, at dawn, the passengers were taken aboard, the captain weighed anchor and the schooner moved out into the bay. Fanny stood at the rail and watched the shore recede as a tall, mustachioed figure on horseback thundered out onto the dock, fist raised in anger. The commotion was sudden and violent. There was the sound of a gunshot, voices carrying across the water like the cries of the damned. But just then the wind came up and took hold of the sails like a great gloved hand, and the shore was lost in the gray wash of the waves.

♦ ♦ ♦

If there was triumph in that escape, a feeling that she had been able to react in a crisis and marshal her inner resources to outmaneuver a vastly superior force, the grimness of her homecoming all but annihilated it. There was no one to meet her, no one who cared whether she was alive or dead, returned safe to England or forever trapped in exile. Ned was gone, her parents would bolt the door and latch the windows against a fallen woman. Cook, Bount and the Bankses would sooner run naked through the streets than look at her. She was even cheated of the little patriotic jump of the heart that a first glimpse of the Tower or the spires of St. Paul’s might have given her — the German vessel put in at Gravesend, and she had no money even to hire a fisherman’s smack to take her up the river. As it was, she had to beg a ride with a man hauling a cartload of chickens to market. The cart jostled, a cold rain fell, the child cried, the chickens stank of scale and excrement, the man put a hand on her thigh.

They wound their way into London through the stinking slums of the East End. Soot hung in the air. Children were begging on the streetcorners, women lay drunk in the alleys. Two pigs gorged on the offal in the gutter, a madman was selling invisible Bibles, a woman with cancer of the throat offered to drink a gallon of water and vomit it up for a penny. After the carter let her down in Poultry Lane, Fanny wandered the streets for hours, aimless, the child tugging at her arm. She had nothing but a few worthless pfennigs in her pocket, no place to stay, nothing to eat, and what was worse, she was down to her last few drops of laudanum. She’d been pacing herself, trying to make it last, but already her stomach was beginning to crawl. The rain fell like fire and brimstone.

Sometime that night or the next, she found herself on Monmouth Street, grimly plodding through the rain, looking for medicine, food, shelter, warmth, medicine, medicine, medicine. The child had been crying steadily for hours, pulling back at her hand, tugging at her skirts, whining that he wanted to lie down and sleep. Her own legs felt like lead and her back ached as if she’d been hauling pails of milk all night or laboring over the butter churn. She had the dry heaves. Her throat burned with a raw desperate thirst that no amount of water could quell.

She finally stopped outside an old clothes shop to sift through a pile of refuse in the hope of coming up with something to quiet the child. There, in the midst of fouled rags and fragments of glass, lay a fish head, slick with wet and trailing a pale bubble of bladder and intestine. Her stomach turned, but the boy snatched for it. He crammed it in his mouth as if it were a crumpet or sugar bun and she began to scream, scream with disgust and despair and a mounting hysteria that fed on the thought that she had finally given way and would never be whole again, when the door behind her fell open and a pale stream of light trickled out over the cobblestones.

“ ‘Ere, ‘ere, wot’s the matter?” a rusty voice creaked at her back.

The massive wooden sign heaved on its hinges: Rose’s Old Clothes, it said, moving in the wind. Rose’s Old Clothes. An aged woman stood in the doorway. She was withered with years, her spine frozen at an angle, a bunch of skinless knuckles clutching at the head of a cane. Fanny’s screams caught in her throat. The child sat in a puddle and worked at the fish head with quick fingers and teeth. “ ‘Ere,” the old woman repeated. “Come in now and warm yerselfs by the fire. It ain’t much, but it’ll do ye better than the wet of the streets.”

Inside, Fanny and the boy hunched before the fire, dark mountains of clothes heaped up around them. The old woman shuffled out from the back room with a handful of coal and a bowl of crowdie for the boy. While the boy ate she settled herself beside Fanny and looked up at her with a knowing eye. Fanny was trembling, Saint Vitus’ dance and tic douloureux. She couldn’t hold the cup of broth the old woman forced into her hand. “Like a tumbler o’ Mother genever, dearie? Or is it somethin’ stronger ye’ll be wantin’?”

Fanny hung her head and asked for laudanum — if the old woman could spare it. “I’ve got a stomach problem,” she added, sotto voce.

The old woman clawed her way up from the floor and trundled off into a darkened corner where she rummaged through a mound of soiled garments for what seemed like hours. When she finally hobbled back to the fire, the breath whistling through her lungs, she clutched a blue bottle in her hand. “Tincture,” she read from the label, “of opium. That wot ye want, dearie?” The old woman was grinning. Suddenly a crazed primordial squeal flew from her lips: “Eeeee!” she cackled. “Eeeeeeeeee!”

Fanny grabbed the bottle from her and held it to her lips. Almost immediately the tightness in her throat was gone. The rodents stopped gnawing at her stomach, the blinding pain in her head began to soften, dissipate, finally losing itself in a pool of numbness. She took another drink, then another. After awhile she lay back and watched the ceiling revolve in an accelerating whirl of planets and satellites, fiery suns and the cold black reaches of space.

♦ ♦ ♦

She woke at dawn. A man and a woman were standing over her. The man sported a yellowish blood blister on the tip of his nose, the woman clutched a broom to her chest as if it were a shield. “Wot the bloody ‘ell you think you’re doing in my shop?” the man said.

Fanny sat up, dazed, and felt around her for the child. The child was gone.

“Well, speak up, you slattern,” the woman hissed.

Fanny felt as if she’d been thrown down a flight of stairs and hit with a mallet. Panic was beating at her ribs. “I–I. . the old woman—”

“Old woman?” the man said.

“She’s daft,” the woman spat, edging closer with the broom.

“No, no — you don’t understand. She’s got my boy. Right here, last night, she—”

“Out of it,” the man snapped. “Out before I calls the constable. ‘Ear? Get out.”

♦ ♦ ♦

She haunted the streets for a week, slept outside the shop on Monmouth Street every night. She ate nothing. The laudanum gave out. She lay in the alleyway back of the store, gasping for breath, her stomach punctured, heart torn out. She was a whore, an opium eater, a childless mother. All her beauty, all her stamina, all her resourcefulness had brought her to this. It was the nineteenth century. What else was a heroine to do but make her way to the river?

The month was October, the year 1801— but she hardly knew it. Napoleon was lulling the British with the Peace of Amiens, De Quincey was sixteen and bridling under the regimen at the Manchester Grammar School, Ned Rise was busy ducking Osprey and looking, with a sort of hopeless resignation for his lost love, for her, Fanny. Fanny, however, was looking for no one. Her son was gone, Ned was a memory. She made her way to Blackfriars Bridge one foggy night, pulled herself over the railing and toppled into the mist below. The flat dark water closed over her like a curtain drawn across a stage.

♦ NAIAD, YES INDEED ♦

The river is a murmur, a pulse, a dream of the body, schools of dace and shiners ebbing like blood, the tick-tick-tick of an arrested branch as persistent as a heartbeat. From down here, on a level with it, the surface seems to break into a thousand fingers, each one probing for direction, smoothing channels, skirting the worn black rocks that seem to dip and swell like shoulderblades as the current washes over them. Mungo leans back in the stiff high grass that overspills the bank, his face to the sun, the tip of his cane pole propped up against an overhanging branch. He is on holiday, at Fowlshiels, the playful cries of his children and the murmur of his wife’s chatter washing over him like balm. The earth breathes in and breathes out again. Beside him, Alexander Anderson lazily thumbs through an account of the West African slave trade and sips at a pint of porter.

After awhile the explorer props himself on an elbow and glances up the bank to where Ailie stands knee-deep in the cold swirling water while Thomas and Mungo junior play in the mud and grandmother Park rocks the baby in her cradle. Ailie catches his eye, a smile and a wave, and then she’s gone, slashing into the current like an arrow. The month is September, the year 1803. Two years have dragged by since the move to Peebles. Two years of on-again, off-again preparations for a second expedition to West Africa, two years of pacifying Ailie and trying to overrule a multitude of objections, two years of the most tedious and thankless work he’s ever done, tending the sick and cankered ingrates of Peebleshire. Two more years, two more children. Mungo junior came along in the fall of 1801, just after they got settled at Peebles; Elizabeth was born last spring.

All well and good. Healthy children, a loving wife. That’s what life is all about. But already the size of his family has begun to worry him. Four years of marriage, three children. He tries to imagine himself in twenty years, his hair gone white, fifteen children clamoring for meat and milk and sugar buns, new suits and dresses, schoolbooks, dowries, university fees, “Three’s enough,” he tells Ailie, but she just looks at him out of the corner of her eye, sly and suggestive, fertile as Niger mud. “I want bairns to remember you by when you go off and leave me,” she says, no trace of humor in her voice, each child a new link in the chain that binds him to her.

At night she lights candles before the carved black statue that squats in the center of her dressing table like an icon, and once he caught her rubbing its swollen belly before climbing into bed. Touch her and she’s pregnant again.

“I’m worried, Zander.”

Zander squints up from his book.

“The way the family’s grown and all. I feel responsible for them, I want to provide for them. . but I just can’t see going back to Peebles. This week down here at Fowlshiels has been heaven compared with the grind up there — heaven — and still I can’t enjoy it. I feel like I’m wasting my life away. Every time I get on that horse and tramp out to some godforsaken cottage in the hills to watch some old gaffer wheeze to death I can’t help thinking that’s the way I’ll wind up. Dying on my back. In bed. After forty years of boredom.”

“So what does Ailie think?”

“You know what she thinks.”

“No Africa.”

“No Africa.”

The explorer tugs indolently at his line for a moment, then shifts his gaze back to Ailie. He watches as she negotiates the current, cutting back against the flow, one arm suspended in a flash of foam, then the other, silver, luminous, clean and precise. She moves like a creature born to water. Moves with an easy fluid athletic grace, moves with a beauty that catches in his throat. He loses her momentarily in a shimmering crescent of reflected sun, only to watch her reemerge in an aureole of light, transfigured in that flashing instant to something beyond flesh and blood, something mythic and eternal. How could he ever leave her?

“Well,” Zander is saying, “maybe there are greater duties than family duty. Maybe you owe something to science and civilization too.”

Mungo turns to look him in the eye. “I got a letter this morning, Zandei. Brought down by special messenger from Peebles. Early. Before she was up.”

The news hits Alexander Anderson like an electric shock. Ten thousand volts. He kicks over the beer, drops the book and leaps to his feet. “From London?”

The explorer nods. “From the government. Lord Hobart. He wants to see me immediately about heading up an expedition to determine the course of the Niger.” The last few words are delivered in an almost reverential whisper.

Zander has been watching him, rapt, his eyes dilated, lips moving in silent accord with his every word. Suddenly he breaks into a grin and begins pumping the explorer’s hand. “This is what we’ve been waiting for — this is it!”

“Shhhhh.” Mungo looks like a weasel with an egg in its mouth. “I haven’t told your sister yet.”

“She won’t like it.”

“No.”

Zander squats down beside him, balancing on toes and fingertips. He is twenty-nine and looks eighteen. “But surely she can see it’s for a higher purpose — she’s got to. She’ll understand. I know she will.”

Mungo snorts. “I wish I could share your optimism.”

“Tell her. Go ahead — maybe you’ll be surprised.”

The explorer looks tentatively over his shoulder. Ailie and Thomas are wrapped in a blanket and roasting bits of meat over a fire. His mother is paring apples and rocking the baby, the two-year-old is screeching like a loon and running naked up and down the bank as if he’d been locked in the closet for a week. “You know, you may be right. Zander,” Mungo says finally, rising to his feet. “I might as well have it out now.” And then, less certain: “Though I hate to spoil the day.”

But before he can take two steps, the whole question of the letter, Africa, ambition and Ailie is suddenly shunted to the back burner — because at that instant the tip of the cane pole begins to twitch. Very gingerly at first, but convincingly enough to catch Zander’s eye. “Mungo!” he shouts, and the explorer, his reactions honed in the wilds of Africa, wheels round to appraise the situation in a flash, perceiving the pieces of the puzzle and its solution almost simultaneously (Zander’s face, the pointed finger, the cane pole trembling along its length from the shock of a solid hit and careering for the water like a pilotless bobsled). He reacts without hesitation. One moment he’s standing there looking down expectantly at his brother-in-law, the next he’s throwing himself at the fast-receding pole, barely managing to catch hold of its last knobby deformation. He fights to his knees, staggers to his feet, the pole bent double in his hands, an incredible slashing force communicating with him at the far end of the line, silver in the depths, beating and rushing with the pulse of the river itself. “He’s got one,” Zander is shouting, “he’s got a keltie!” And now Ailie and the boys are running toward him, excitement slapped across their faces like the first flush of winter.

Mungo strains against this fish with everything he’s got, all his being focused on this thing extending from his fingertips to scrape the rocks and hug its belly to the deepest recesses of the deepest pools. He can feel every pebble, he can read the whole history of the river there, igneous pillars thrust through the surface, the flat scouring hand of the glaciers, the relentless buffeting of the watercourse, stream without end, draining into the sea and rising again in the clouds. Implacable, determined, he pulls at the mystery with every nerve and fiber of his body, with every ounce of blood and pound of flesh, he pulls.

And it pulls him, it pulls him.

♦ SIDI AMBAK BUBI ♦

Mungo returns from London just before Christmas, the fringe of a tartan muffler peeping out from beneath his stovepipe hat, a small dark stranger at his side. If no one pays much attention to the explorer (familiarity breeds familiarity), the stranger is another story. No one in Peebleshire knows quite what to make of him. At first glance he seems ordinary enough — kneeboots, woollen trousers, greatcoat, cravat — but on closer inspection, the good people of Peebles find themselves confronted with a series of anomalies. For one thing, there is the question of the stranger’s complexion, the hue of which seems to fall midway between the dun of barnyard muck and the cheesy yellow of goat’s milk. For another, there is the question of his hat, which isn’t a hat at all but a strip of linen wound round his head. Not to mention his ritually scarred cheeks, waist-length beard and the gold hoop piercing his lip in the most shamelessly barbaric way. All in all, considering that nothing has changed in Peebles in eight hundred years, the stranger’s sudden appearance is every bit as extraordinary as the birth of a two-headed duck or the discovery of a new comet in the night sky.

They ride into Peebles at sunset, Mungo and his dark companion, the evidence of their dialogue hanging in the chill air like smoke. The denizens of Peebles — retiring types, quiet, half-asleep — are bent over their hearths as the horses clop past their windows, the puissant odors of neeps and potatoes, boiled beef and cockyleekie soup commanding their full attention. Even so, half of them are pressed to their windows or edging out into the street before the explorer has reached his front yard. They are in shirtsleeves, aprons, slippers, some are even barefooted. All look as if they’ve just seen some prodigy, some freak of nature, some walking, talking, insidious illusion they can neither accept nor dismiss. “Did ye see what I seen?” says Angus M’Corkle to his neighbor, Mrs. Crimpie.

“Aye,” she says, slowly shaking her head as if to unplug her ears, “and I’ll be blessed if it wasn’t one of the Magi himself come up for the Holy Day.”

“Nay, nay. It’s clear he’s just some itinerant Jew. . or maybe a Chinese Mongol.”

“Ali Baba,” says Festus Baillie, his jaw locked like a judge’s. “Ali Baba himself.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Sidi Ambak Bubi is neither Jew nor Mongol. Nor is he a freak of nature, a prodigy or an Arabian folkhero. He is, quite simply, a Moor: humble, unassuming, a trifle unctuous. A Moor from Mogador, well connected and educated, who originally came to London to serve as interpreter for Elphi Bey, Ambassador from Cairo. But when Elphi Bey expired suddenly after choking on a wedge of mutton and flushing a deep midnight blue, Sidi found himself out of a job. It would be months before Cairo could be informed of the Ambassador’s death and arrange for a replacement. He began to feel concerned. It was at this point that Sir Joseph Banks stepped in. Would Mr. Bubi be so kind as to come round to No. 32, Soho Square? Sir Joseph had a proposition to make him.

When Sidi was shown into the library at Sir Joseph’s townhouse, he found himself standing before two Englishmen: one elderly and squarish, with a cast of jaw that suggested a bulldog, the other young, fair-haired and muscular. The elderly man, as distinguished and formidable as a ship of the line, proved to be Sir Joseph Banks. He greeted Sidi with an outstretched hand, offered him a seat and a glass of claret (which Sidi, a devout Moslem, politely refused). And then turned to introduce him to his companion, Mungo Park.

Sidi flushed to his lip ring on hearing the explorer’s name, rose awkwardly and stretched himself on the floor at his feet. “Oh Mr. Park, sir, I greatly admire your writings,” he sang out in the high nasal whine of a muezzin at prayer, “and I applaud your efforts to open up our poor backward land to the civilizing influence of the Englishmans, I do, I do.” By this time both Mungo and Sir Joseph were on their feet expostulating with the Moor to get up and behave himself, but apparently he hadn’t yet finished what he intended to say. He lay there a full minute, nose buried in the carpet, before very hesitantly continuing. “But oh Mr. Park, Sir,” he mumbled, “how heartily I deplore the shameful treatment you had from my co-religionists in Ludamar. They are sorry dogs.” Apparently satisfied at having got this out, the Moor crept back to his seat on hands and knees, and perched at the edge of his chair, eyes averted, while Sir Joseph outlined his proposition.

Mr. Park, Sir Joseph explained, was in London for the second time in as many months for the purpose of organizing an expedition to the Niger Basin. The expedition was to have left within six weeks, but for an unforeseen reversal. The government of Mr. Addington had fallen, and the Colonial Secretary, Lord Hobart, had been replaced by Lord Camden. The new Secretary had informed Sir Joseph that the government could not possibly arrange for an expedition before September of the following year.

Mungo sipped moodily at his claret throughout this recitation. He was disappointed, disheartened, disgusted. In the fall, after that idyllic afternoon on the Yarrow, he’d spent two hellish days and nights trying to reassure Ailie that he had no intention of leaving her. She clung to him and screamed like a madwoman, threatened to drown herself, set the house afire, throttle the children in their sleep. He wasn’t going to desert her again — she wouldn’t allow it. She’d poison him first. He broke down under the pressure. “All right,” he told her, “I’ll run down to London and tell Hobart he’ll have to find another man.” She kissed his hands. They made love like newlyweds.

He was lying. Lying to buy time. In London he told Hobart: “I’m your man. Give me the supplies and manpower I need and I’ll map the Niger for you, beginning to end.” Hobart asked for two months to make the arrangements, and the explorer returned to Peebles, on edge, impatient, as guilt-racked as a sticky-fingered altar boy. “Did you tell him?” Ailie asked.

Mungo looked away. “Yes, but. . but he’s asked me to act as technical advisor for a new expedition to be headed up by some. . some young Welshman Sir Joseph has dug up.”

That was in October. In December there was another summons from Hobart and the explorer took the first coach for London. He stepped into the Colonial office, prepared to leave on the spot, already mentally drafting a letter to Ailie: Dear Ailie, I love and cherish you and adore the children, but duty to my country and my God must come before even my sacred duty to my family. Africa awaits, the greatest adventure mankind has ever known, and I am the only man alive who—Hobart’s face stopped him cold. “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news, Park,” the Secretary said.

“Sir?”

“We’re out.”

Mungo stared at the older man in bewilderment. “Out?”

“Addington has resigned.”

And so there he was, sitting in Sir Joseph’s study and looking gloomily out the window when he should have been sailing for Goree. Nine months more. It seemed as if he was doomed to fritter away his talents in Peebles forever, an overworked, underpaid, back-country sawbones. Lord Hobart, Lord Camden, Addington, Pitt — what difference did it make? All he got was excuses.

“Thus,” Sir Joseph was saying, “I am prepared to offer you thirty pounds sterling if you will accompany Mr. Park to Peebles and there tutor him in Arabic in preparation for his forthcoming expedition.”

The Moor looked around him as if he’d just been slapped. “T’irty pound sterling?” he echoed, incredulous. “You give me?” Sir Joseph nodded, and Sidi threw himself on the carpet. ‘‘Ya galbi galbi!” he sang, ‘‘An’ am Allah ‘alaik!”

♦ ♦ ♦

Ailie is in the kitchen, fussing over a partan pie and boiling down the snout, ears, cheeks, brains and feet of a freshly killed hog, when she is suddenly arrested by a sound from the backyard. It’s been going on for a minute or two now, a sort of dull thumping, but she’s been so absorbed in her work she hasn’t paid it any mind. There it is again. Viscous and muffled, the sound of someone splitting wood in the distance — or leading a horse around the corner of the house. Then it hits her: Mungo! In an instant she’s at the door, apron white with flour, the late sun spreading butter over the stable, her husband, the manes of the horses, the pinched dark stranger staring up at her out of his glittering, red-flecked eyes. Who—? she wonders, a vague unease settling in her stomach, but then she’s caught up in Mungo’s arms and nothing else really matters.

Inside, Mungo and his guest settle down at the edge of the hearth, warming their hands, while Ailie puts the kettle on and turns back to her pie. Mungo had perfunctorily introduced the little man outside the stable door. Seedy something-or-other, she didn’t quite catch his name. Meanwhile, the small talk sifts down like a blizzard. Mungo asks how the children have been, what the weather’s been like, has she got enough wood chopped, is that a cold she’s caught? He expatiates on Sir Joseph’s health, the rigors of the trip, the new government, Dickson, Effie and Edwards, but he hasn’t yet gotten round to explaining Seedy. She takes the little man to be an African, judging from the rag wrapped round his head and the slashes dug into his dark cheeks and brow. A Moor? A Mandingo? And what would Mungo be bringing him up here for?. . Unless—

“So,” she says, kneading her dough with a vengeance, “you’ve come to visit Peebles. . Mr. Seedy?”

The Moor looks up at her, as if surprised to hear his name spoken aloud by such a person in such a place. He is huddled so close to the fire she’s afraid he’ll burst into flame at any moment. “Oh my lady, yes, yes, I am visiting Peebles.” The look in his eye reminds her of Douce Davie when someone sets a ham out on the sideboard.

Mungo sighs, and gets up from the hearth. “God, that smells good,” he says. “What are you fixing — brawn?”

“For Christmas,” she says.

“No goose?”

She has the distinct sensation that he is trying to sidetrack her, that there is something about this Seedy he doesn’t want her to know. “Goose, yes,” she says, impatient, “goose too. But tell me,” turning to the Moor, “will you be with us for the holidays, Mr. Seedy?”

The Moor looks puzzled. “Hollandaise?”

In an undertone, quick as a burst of gunfire, Mungo says something to him in a foreign language. Arabic?

Sidi grins. “I am a Moor, precious lady.”

This is getting her nowhere. She turns to her husband, wiping her hands on her apron. “He’ll be staying?”

But before Mungo can answer, the Moor leaps to his feet, as if by prearrangement. “Oh yes, kind lady. Mistress Park,” he whines, rushing up to her and prostrating himself at her feet. “Wit’ your permission, I am to stay two or t’ree mont’.”

Ailie draws back as if she’s been scorched. “Two or three—?”

“Ailie,” Mungo is saying, his voice low and deprecatory.

“Good lady, good lady,” Sidi chants, pursuing her on all fours and making as if to kiss the hem of her dress. Suddenly he looks up at her and barks, “Tutor, tutor,” with all the exhilaration of a lexicographer who’s been searching out the word for a month.

“He’s come to tutor me in Arabic, sweet.”

“Arabic? Whatever for?” But she already knows the answer, her face draining, jaw gone rigid. “You’re not—?”

Mungo looks like a prisoner in the dock. “I uh — I’ve been meaning to tell you, uh, about what Sir Joseph—” he begins, only to be saved by the bell. At that instant Mungo junior pokes his head through the kitchen doorway, closely followed by Thomas. There is a moment of hesitation, and then they burst into the room, hugging at their father’s legs, their shrill infantile voices rattling the windows with an ingenuous, radiant and all-consuming joy.

♦ FATHERS AND SONS ♦

It’s a long road to Hertfordshire. A road that goes by way of Enfield, various hayricks, an old virago’s shack, the county jail and the hulks. But that’s getting ahead of the story. Step back a pace and remember the winter of ‘02, blustery and bitter, and the two ragged figures shivering their way up the Hertfordshire road, starved, penniless and fearful, hounded out of town by the fanatical persistence of Claude Messenger Osprey, Jr.

They are disconsolate, these two, no longer certain that they’ve made the right choice, numbly wondering if freezing to death is really all that much better than hanging. Ned can barely lift his feet, so soporific is the cold. He wants to lie down in a ditch, pull the greatcoat over his ears and dream of steaming cauldrons and mugs of hot broth. And Boyles, poor flat-headed sot, is even worse off. He’s long since fallen into a sort of trance, lurching up the road like a drunken automaton, pitching headlong into the bushes, flopping down in the road and embracing the rock-hard earth as if it were a featherbed. Each time he stumbles Ned turns back to exhort him him to get up and keep moving. “Come on, Billy, get up out of it now. You’ll be dead in an hour if you lie there like that.”

“Good.”

“Come on now,” tugging at the narrow shoulders as if at a harness, “we’ll beg shelter at the next place we come to.”

At that moment, the sound of hoof and wheel swells at them out of the penumbra of early morning. “Look out!” pipes a childish voice, closely followed by the screech of braking wheels and a man’s basso shouting, “Whoa there, whoa!” The shadowy light reveals a farm wagon, its wheels skidded to a halt about half an inch from Boyles’ angular head. The man at the reins is a rut-faced, graying farmer in his late thirties, his hands like blocks of granite and a soft salvationist’s glint in his eye. “Well, brother, what seems to be the trouble here?” he booms, squinting down at Boyles’ inert form.

Ned puts on his best lost-dog look and tells him that they’re on their way to Hertford, but down on their luck. Without shelter they’ll be dead of the cold before the day is out.

The farmer pauses to tamp the bowl of his pipe, the first long rays of the sun suddenly illuminating his face. “Can’t have that,” he grunts, smoke spewing from the corner of his mouth. “Climb aboard and make yourselfs comfortable under the rug with my boys here.”

Two sets of round black eyes peer from the shadows at the farmer’s back.

“Nahum and Joseph,” the farmer says, as the boys make way for Ned and Boyles in the back of the cart. Boyles is glassy-eyed from lack of sleep, warmth and drink. He stumbles twice, but manages to claw his way into the back of the wagon with an assist from Ned. “Under here,” whispers the older boy, who looks to be about six or seven, and a moment later Ned and Boyles are nestled under a skin rug that must weigh eighty pounds, sipping at a jug of still-hot cider and pressing their feet to an iron bed warmer.

“Goin’ as far as Enfield,” the farmer says over his shoulder as the wagon lurches forward. “You’re welcome to come along.”

♦ ♦ ♦

A lord in London — some distant, congenitally privileged, bewigged and besilked Member of the House, Knight of the Garter and hanger-on at White’s Gaming Club — is responsible for the meticulously arranged gardens, stands of naked black trees and cultivated fields that engulf Nahum Fribble’s one-room cottage. Nahum is merely a tenant. He owns two goats, a pig, a dozen hens and an ox. His wife is dead. She got into bed one night muttering something about a fat man sitting on her chest. In the morning there was blood on the pillow. Nahum buried her out back but the overseer made him dig her up and buy a plot for her in the parish cemetery. Ever since, Nahum has raised the boys on his own.

“Must be hard,” says Ned over a cup of mulled wine. The windows are black. Boyles is snoring in front of the fireplace, a dog on either side of him. The boys are in bed.

“Hard? That’s what Jesus must have thought when he was nailed to the cross and they stuck that spear in his side.” Nahum is standing over a tub of water, his big hands scraping at the wooden supper plates. The firelight washes his features clean, lines and furrows softened, his face as smooth and timeless as a portrait in a darkened gallery.

“I mean raising the kids with no woman around.”

The farmer turns to look Ned in the eye. “There’s a father in Heaven that looks after Nahum Pribble, and Nahum Pribble is humbly thankful that he’s been blessed to be a father on earth to look after them two boys there.”

Ned glances over at the frame bed, the two forms in the shadows, the slow pacific rise and fall of the coverlet.

“That’s the whole of my life,” the farmer says, his voice so soft Ned can barely hear it over the hiss of the flames.

♦ ♦ ♦

The next morning they’re back on the road, provisioned with bread and cheese, a handful of dried apples and a jug of beer. Despite lowering skies, a stiff wind and temperatures in the teens, Ned is feeling optimistic. The farmer’s hospitality has touched him, made him feel for the first time in years that the universe is not uniformly and actively malignant, that the milk of human kindness hasn’t necessarily soured, that hope is in the cards though the deck may be stacked against you. He actually finds himself whistling — an air for the clarinet Barrenboyne had taught him years ago — as he ambles up the rutted road like a landowner out for a stroll.

Though Hertford is less than ten miles off, Boyles is so worked up about the beer he convinces Ned to stop and have a nip before they’ve passed the first milestone. Ned manages to get a fire going in the lee of a stone wall, and they have a chilly picnic of it, toasting the bread and cheese, burning the apples and washing the whole thing down with thirsty gulps of beer. The remainder of the journey is comfortless, a grim silent plodding against the wind, the road deserted, neither cottage nor inn in sight. By late afternoon they reach the outskirts of Hertford, and are summarily turned away from the first three cottages they approach. So much for the milk of human kindness.

“What’ll we do now, Neddy?” Boyles stutters, hunched and trembling, blue in the face. The wind rattles the trees with a sound of bone on bone.

Ned is blowing into his fist, hugging himself, dancing. “Hit the next place,” he puffs, “beg them to let us stand by the fire a minute and then point us the way to the Brunches’.”

The next place is set back from the road in a grove of maple and yew.

Numbed, they fight their way through thorns and nettles, over fallen trees and through the slush of a fetid stream, the thin coil of chimney smoke guiding their way, the first glimmerings of desperation pricking at fingers and toes. But when they come upon the house itself, they’re stopped cold.

The place is nothing more than a hovel, linked by means of a crumbling umbilical passage to an even smaller hovel in back. It looks like a Druid burial mound, or a reconverted sheepcote dating from the reign of William the Conqueror. There are no windows, stones have dropped from the walls and left gaps like missing teeth, the thatch of the roof is overgrown with weed, moss, brambles, saplings four or five feet high. “No use in wastin’ your breath,” Boyles sighs. “Nobody’s lived here in a hunnert years.”

But there it is, incontrovertible, the thin steady stream of smoke spinning from the chimney.

Ned goes down on his knees in the frozen muck and taps at the door, a tale of want and woe and sore distress on his lips, the story of how he and Boyles, on their way to their father’s funeral in Cambridge — a wealthy man, their father, porcelain merchant, worth nearly two hundred thousand pounds at his death — were set upon by highwaymen, stripped of everything they owned and forced at gunpoint to change clothes with the heartless blackguards, and how they’d been wandering ever since, penniless, near dead with the cold and hunger, determinedly making their way to that distant seat of learning where a fat dazzling fortune awaits them. .

As it turns out, there’s no need for pretty speeches. The door wrenches back at the first tap, and before he can utter a word a wild shriek cauterizes the air and a wizened old crone is ushering them in the door. “Eeeeeeeeeee! Travelers, is it? Cold and ‘ungry? Robbed on the road, no doubt? Well come on in and warm yerselfs round Mother’s fire, come on now, don’t be shy.”

She is hunched low to the ground with some progressive deformity of the spine, this old woman, her squamate hands twisted into claws, the eyes keen as talons in a face as ravaged as the dimmest memories of the past. Boyles nearly knocks her flat in his rush to get at the fire, but Ned hangs back, alarmed, until she reaches out a withered claw and pulls him through the doorway.

Inside, it’s a cave. Stone walls, earthen floor, a darkness meliorated only by the primeval Light of the fire. Ned nearly trips over a shadow stretched across the floor, his heart racing like a quick little animal in a cage, something wrong, something dead wrong, all his senses strung to a pitch and that burned-once, twice-cautious voice gibbering in his head, look out, look out. He jerks back and the shadow snorts, rises from the dirt and materializes into a drooping, flap-eared sow.

“ ‘Ere!” shrieks the old woman, her voice as cracked and mad as a tortured violin, “come and warm yer bones. Eeeeeeeeeee!” Suddenly she wheels around on Boyles. “You, flattop—’ow ‘bout a snootful o’ nippitatum, eh? Eh?”

She doesn’t have to ask twice. Boyles has the jug to his mouth before she can lift it from the shelf, smacking his lips and gasping, running on with some nonsense about elixir of the gods, his lank legs thrust into the fire, his face red as an innkeeper’s.

“And you, peachfuzz?”

Ned is backed up against the hearth, tense as a cat, half expecting to blink twice and discover a string of murdered children hanging from the ceiling or some nasty stinging thing coiled in the shadows. The sow shakes its ears and gives him a long slow look of utter disdain before collapsing in the corner, the scent of it hot in his nostrils, a fetor of decay and excrement about the place, a stink of life lived at the root and mired in every odious little event of the body. “No,” he says, rubbing his hands. “No, we’ve really got to be going. . just stopped to ask the way to Squire Trelawney’s place—”

“Ah,” the old woman breathes, “friends o’ the Squire’s, are ye?”

Ned makes the mistake of nodding yes.

“Eeeeeeeeeee!” she caterwauls. “Well that’s a good one, the divil and ‘is dam it is. I took ye to be no-account, disreputable, vagabond, derelict bums, I did. . but friends o’ the Squire’s, now that’s a different story, yes,” she cackles, “another story altogether.” And then she cups her hands to her mouth and shouts down the passageway in a voice as raw and poisonous as a dish of toadstools: “Boy! Hallo, boy! Get yer lazy arse out ‘ere and meet the fine gennelmens wot’s come a-callin’.”

“Really, we just—” Ned stammers.

“Honored, I’m sure,” the old woman shrieks, scraping the ground in an obscene parody of a curtsy. “ ‘Ere, ‘ave a seat and give us peasants a minute o’ yer precious time,” thrusting a stool at him and calling out impatiently into the darkened passageway. “Boy!”

There is a movement on the far side of the room, furtive and shy, the form of a child emerging from the low rictus of the sheeprun. A boy, four or five, his face a dim white spot in the gloom. He stands there, uncertain, hanging his head.

“Well, ye young toad, stop yer loiterin’ in the shadders and come over ‘ere to yer old Mother — or don’t ye ken the King’s English no more?” The old woman, cocked and watchful, has stationed herself in the center of the room, at the pulse of things, playing to her audience like a demented actress in her most ominous role. What next? Ned is thinking, when suddenly she spins round on him, a leer on her face, the old gums working. “ ‘Ee’s a littul pissant, that one, ain’t ‘ee? A reg’lar changeling. Why ye’d think ‘ee was afraid of ‘is own dear Mother the way ‘ee acts.”

Ned’s face is locked like a vault. There is something familiar here, something sinister, something he doesn’t want to know. And yet he looks on as if hypnotized, compelled despite himself, this grim inscrutable drama unfolding with a logic and momentum of its own. He looks on as the harridan writhes across the room and snatches the child to her breast like a greedy crow, her shriek of triumph like a razor drawn across a pane of glass. Looks on as she insinuates a withered hand under the boy’s chin and twists his face to the Light with a glittering malicious grin.

As the firelight falls across the boy’s pinched features, illuminating the greasy wisps of hair and smudged face, the open sores on the chin and the steady patient gaze of a penned animal, Ned feels a panic rising in him. Compelled, he stares at the boy as he might have stared at a bleeding statue or his own epitaph etched in a gravestone, stares as he’s never stared before, Boyles turned from the fire to gawk at him, the only sound in the room the hag’s fierce rattling insuck of breath. And then he’s up off the stool, groping like a blind man, his mouth working in shock and incomprehension. He is looking at himself. Below the stark leering challenge of the hag’s eyes, he is looking into his own, the years stripped back, suffering in ascendancy, the ragged orphan set loose on the streets. He is dreaming, dying, going mad.

The harridan’s shriek breaks the spell. “ ‘Andsome lad, wot?” she cackles. “Though ‘ee needs a bit of a cuff now and again, don’t ye, boy? Eh?” And as if to prove it, she spins him round and rakes his ear in a single practiced movement. “Now get back to yer perch, ye dirty littul beast,” she spits, and the child vanishes into the passageway like a mirage.

It couldn’t be, no, it couldn’t. Look out, the voice shouts in his head. “I—” Ned begins, but the noose is round his throat again, the hangman’s eyes like rare jewels glittering in their slits, and suddenly he has Boyles by the arm. “Get up, Billy, get up.”

Boyles has by this time turned his attention back to the jug, periodically shaking it and holding it to his ear like a watchmaker inspecting a faulty timepiece. He puts it aside momentarily and pokes the fire, happy as the day he was born. “Wot?” he gasps, an edge of genuine shock to his voice.

“Eeeeeeeeeee!” the old woman keens.

Ned jerks Boyles to his feet. “Forget the jug, Billy — we got to go now. Go now,” he shouts, as if Boyles were brain-damaged or hard of hearing.

“Awwww,” croaks the hag, picking at her ear. “So soon? But ye just got ‘ere. Mother ‘asn’t ‘ad time to get out the linen nor polish the silver, eeeeee!”

Boyles’ face is pained and confused. “I likes it here, Neddy,” he whines, but his companion is already pulling him toward the door in a desperate trembling grip that pinches his arm — even through the coat — with all the implacable urgency of a steel trap.

Ned hesitates at the door, his voice floating on a wave of adrenalin: “The Brunch farm,” he stammers, “old woman, which way is it?”

The semblance of a smile twists her lips. “Farmer Brunch? I thought you boys was friends o’ the Squire’s?” The joke catches in her throat and she begins to hack and wheeze like an overworked horse, but Ned is already out the door, white-hot with terror and rage and confusion, fighting through the brambles and jerking at Boyles’ sleeve for all he’s worth.

“Arf a mile. . up the road, peach. . peachfuzz,” the old woman shrieks at his back. “At the fork. Just climb the fence and cut across the pasture. Stone cottage with a tumbledown barn. . out back. ‘Ear?”

Ned is running, panicked, every syllable an injection of fire and brimstone and the caustic salts of perdition, conscience rasping in his ear, Boyles forsaken, legs churning, arms parting the dead stalks and lowhanging branches as if they were waves and he a breaststroker making for shore, running for the cold hard road and the sanctuary of the Brunch farm like a filicide caught in the act.

♦ A TICKET TO GOREE ♦

Half a mile up the road they come to a fork. A milestone on the right indicates the way into Hertford proper. On the left, a neck-high wall of interlocking stones, an empyrean expanse of greening pasture maculated with stubborn patches of ice, and in the distance, as the hag had indicated, the stone cottage flanked by the tumbledown barn.

Boyles stops short, puzzles over the milestone and then, scratching his head, crosses the road to the stone wall, hikes himself up on his elbows and takes a good hard squint at the distant farmhouse. After a minute or two of intense concentration, rapid lip movement and the ticking off of various sums on his fingers, he turns back to Ned. “This’ll be it, Neddy, looks like.”

Ned is only half listening. The encounter with the hag and her strange timid ward has anesthetized him, deadened him to the cold and the uncertainty alike, shut his ears to hope, calculation and the insipid chattering voice of his traveling companion. He can still see the child’s eyes, hear the hag’s squawks of triumph, feel that empty strangling sensation in his gut, the insidious cramp of a truth so unimaginable it can only be digested in the dark essential atmosphere of the bowels. When he looks up at Boyles, he can only nod.

A heave, a ho, and a thump, and they’re in the pasture, looking half a dozen startled sheep in the eye. As they muck their way across the field, the farmhouse begins to look somewhat grander and more extensive than they’d been led to expect, the barn less tumbledown. Is this a tenant’s cottage? With three chimneys and a second story?

Boyles is rubbing his hands with glee and Ned is on the verge of making the deductive leap between the unwonted sprawl of the farmhouse and the hag’s ulterior motives, when the first shotgun blast knocks them flat. The second blast flings a fistful of mud in their faces and neatly threads the odd ball or two through their breeches and into the tender uncallused flesh along the nether plane of their thighs and buttocks. An instant later a pair of wooden-faced gamekeepers are standing over them, guns smoking and boots glistening. Then there’s a voice, deep as thunder along the spine of a mountain, righteous and indignant as the voice of God, barking out a terse command: “Off the ground, shitface.”

Ned rises slowly, his buttocks on fire, staring into the mouth of the gun. The man behind the gun is as impassive as a weasel with a rat in its mouth, sallow and dead-eyed.

“But — but you don’t—” Ned begins, but the man merely cuffs him with the stock of the gun in an automatic and exquisitely fluid snap of shoulder and elbow, and Ned finds himself face down in the mud again. Then there’s the cold pressure of steel against the back of his neck, the cords drawn tight around his wrists, the quick itch of the burlap sack jerked over his head. The whole thing, from the initial shock of the report to the blind stuttering march across the fields, takes no more than five minutes. Through the pain in his flank and the throbbing of his jaw, Ned can make out the sniffling inebriate whimper of Boyles at his side, and in the distance, faint as the multifarious hissing of adders in a pit, the mad liquid screech of the hag.

♦ ♦ ♦

The rest is as predictable as rain in Rangoon. Squire Trelawney, determined to put a stop to the alarming incidence of poaching on his estate, sourly forgoes his dinner to sentence the pair to six hours of strappado followed by peine fort et dure, and if at that point still viable, strangulation unto death. The Squire’s brother points out, as a matter of purely theoretical interest, that as the transgressors had neither fowling piece nor pelf about them, they should perhaps be sentenced for the less flagrant offense of trespassing. Not that he wishes to circumvent his brother’s authority, mind, nor to in any way suggest that the guilty parties should be lightly dealt with, it is just that he finds the thought of torn sockets and crushed ribcages most distressing before dinner. The Squire, framed by the mounted heads of stag and boar and surrounded by his collection of seamen’s knots, hesitates a moment, fiddling with his wig and staring off into space as if ruminating over his brother’s objection. After a minute or so, his stomach rumbles mightily. “Oh, all right, Lewis, have it your way,” he grunts finally. “Twenty years at hard labor.”

There follow two months of close confinement at the base of an abandoned well, long since gone dry, but damp as a sink nonetheless. The food is poor, the incarcerees step on one another’s toes, Boyles complains incessantly. “Wisht I’d never of been born,” he groans, face to face with Ned in their cylindrical prison, barely able to move his arms without tangling them in his companion’s. “And me feet — me feet’s so wet the shoes is rotted off ‘em. Besides which, I’m cold — spring, summer, winter — it’s like the Arctic down ‘ere.”

In the daylight, Trelawney’s overseer — a vicious psychopath with a spine so twisted his head lies flat against his left shoulder— lashes them to a plow beside an arthritic ox and drives them through the clods and mire of the fields from dawn till dusk. At night, they sleep in shifts. One of them climbs halfway up the well shaft and clings to the wet rocks, while the other hunches in the slime below, napping fitfully. As Ned clutches at a willow root one night, bracing himself against the far wall of the shaft with the cramped muscles of his legs, it begins to occur to him that he may have died after all, that his resurrection at St. Bartholomew’s was nothing more than a waking in hell, and that everything that has transpired since — every ache, shin splints, stitch and cramp, every crack in the jaw and kick in the ass, every turnabout, disappointment and gut-wrenching loss — is no more than the tiniest link in the eternal concatenation of torments he must live through, moment by moment, muttering his soft savage imprecations over each, as if they were the devil’s prayer beads.

It seems he’s not far wrong.

Two months later a constable rides out from London to haul the prisoners from the well, chain them to the back of a wagon and march them into town, where they are remanded to the hulks in order to serve out the remaining nineteen years and ten months of their sentences, shoveling mud. The hulks, if anything, are closer and damper than Squire Trelawney’s well, with the added liability of constant exposure to the reeking breath, runny bowels and festering phlegm of hundreds of hardened criminals, father rapers, generalized pederasts and blood drinkers alike. It’s pretty rough. Packed in at night, three to a berth, in the leaking, creaking holds of rotted tubs perennially mothballed in the Thames and stinking of their slow transubstantiation to sawdust and mulch. Slopped like hogs on cabbage soup and gruel. Forced down into walled enclosures, thirty or forty feet beneath the level of the river, to ply the shovel, wield the pick and haul buckets of rich, reeking muck. Dredging, they call it. Backbreaking, spirit-crushing work. Lay the shovel down to wipe your brow and they lay open your back.

But just when things seem blackest, they get blacker still.

Sometime in the winter of ‘04, one of the higher-ups in the Admiralty is struck with an inspiration while staring into his eggcup. An inspiration that will directly exacerbate the sufferings of Ned Rise, Billy Boyles and hundreds like them. What with the war on and the shortage of able-bodied conscripts to man the ships and flesh out the infantry, it occurs to this lord and official that it is a shameful waste of manpower to garrison out-of-the-way-yet-still-vital posts with regular troops. Why not, he thinks, spooning up a neat crescent of soft-boiled egg, why not man those forts with convicts? They’d been used in the past for such purposes, why not conscript them again? Get some use out of the lazy vagabonds? Swear them in and put them to work? After all, they can always go back to dredging once the little Corsican has been run up a flagpole. The idea pleases this lord and official immensely. He takes it to his superiors, and they in turn take it to their superiors.

And so, in the early fall of that year, Ned and Billy are transferred from the black stinking hold of the Cerberus to the black stinking hold of the H.M.S. Feckless, and deposited, soaked in their own vomit, at Goree — Fort Goree, on the island of the same name off the coast of West Africa. Fort Goree, gateway to the Niger and bastion of rot.

♦ NOLO CONTENDERE ♦

“You’ve been lying to me. You’re planning another adventure, aren’t you?

Well. Answer me.”

“Not really.”

“Not really? Then why bring this, this colored person into my house? Why jabber back and forth with him all day like some camel peddler at the bazaar, huh?. . I said why bring this Seedy into my house? Don’t you hear me?”

“I’m just brushing up.”

“For what?”

“Listen: say the word and I’ll stay.”

“Stay.”

♦ LOOSENING THE BINDS ♦

Sidi Ambak Bubi left Peebles after a stay of twenty-seven days, eighteen hours and six minutes. He was counting. Thirty pounds sterling or no, every minute under the slate roof in Peebleshire was like a week in Gehenna. It was Mistress Park. She was like a lioness with a cub, and he, Sidi, the slave sent out to bring back an infant lion for the Bashaw’s zoo.

His assessment wasn’t far off the mark. Ailie was fierce and defensive, strident, resentful, ungracious to the point of insult. She saw the Moor as an alien and divisive presence, a thief who’d come out of the dark fastness of Africa to steal her husband from her — and she responded in kind. Dogging his every movement, her bright suspicious eyes boring through his clothing, the door to his room, the very flesh and bone of his breast, always picking, insinuating, criticizing everything from the way he lit his chibouk to the condition of the turban wrapped round his head. She served him neeps and potatoes, bacon, ham, pig’s feet. She spilled tea in his lap, swept Saharas of dust round him as he sat studying the Koran, encouraged the dog to nip at his heels and chew up his sandals. She was distressed, upset, sick unto death, and she took it out on the Moor from Mogador.

When Sidi finally packed up his bags and rode into Selkirk to catch the London coach, an uneasy peace settled over the Park household. Ailie held her breath, and drew back. Mungo was contrite. He had given his promise, finally and irrevocably. Yes, he had lied to her — he admitted it. His ambition had gotten the better of him and he had lied to her. But he would lie no more. Could she forgive him? She could. She clung to him, mad to demonstrate her love, ease his burden, show him how much she valued his sacrifice and the vow he’d given her. The subject of Africa lay buried — even if the grave was a shallow one.

Things were quiet for the next several months, though it became increasingly apparent that Mungo was restive and dissatisfied. He was short of temper. Uninterested in the children or the workings of the household. Reclusive, silent, morose. The stomach disorder he’d contracted in Ludamar came back with a vengeance, and half the time he merely picked at his food or sipped a cup of broth and barley and called it a meal. When he was free of the grind of tending his ignorant, carping, accident-prone patients, he sat brooding over his books and maps or handling the artifacts he’d brought back from Africa, almost in a trance, his fingers tracing the outlines of a bone knife or wooden mask as if it were a fetish or the relic of a saint. Each morning, at dawn, he mounted his horse and rode thirty-five or forty miles across the moors to oversee births and deaths, treat sore throats and imaginary discomforts, look on helpless as a leg dissolved in gangrene or a cancer ate out an old woman’s intestines. This was his reward. This is what his daring and fame had got him. He was sick to death of it.

In May of 1804 he told Ailie he was selling everything — the house, the furniture, the practice. They would move in with his mother at Fowlshiels. He needed time to think.

“Think?” she echoed. “About what?”

He held her with his eyes. “About what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”

They were in the kitchen. Surrounded by potted herbs, crockery, wooden utensils, knives. A basket of freshly culled eggs, brown and white, sat on the table in a puddle of sunlight. Suddenly she pushed back her chair and swept the eggs onto the floor. “I know what you’re doing,” she said, her voice low, cracked with emotion. “You’re loosening the binds.”

“No, Ailie. Honey. I’m not. I’ve just got to have some time to think, that’s all.”

He was sincere. Or at least he felt he was. The confrontation over Sidi had left him feeling debased and low. He was a home-breaker, an irresponsible father, an egotist out to swell himself up at any expense — even if it meant lying to his wife like a common jack. This wasn’t Mungo Park, hero, conqueror of Africa and unveiler of the Niger, This wasn’t decent, clean and noble — it was despicable, and he despised himself for it.

There would be no more deceit. He was sure of it. The move to Fowlshiels was in no way connected with the expedition the government had promised him. It had nothing whatever to do with tying up his affairs, settling Ailie and the children comfortably and under the watchful eye of his mother, nothing whatever. No, it wasn’t the sort of thing that made him feel free and untrammeled, ready to hop a coach for London at the drop of a hat. No, no, no. He just needed time to think. That’s all.

♦ WATER MUSIC (SLIGHT RETURN) ♦

There was a premonitory chill in the air the day Mungo left for Edinburgh, a foretaste of the bitter nights to come. It was mid-September, just after his birthday. The leaves were changing and in the mornings a cold gray mist fastened on the river like the spread claws of a cat or bear. There had been a party of course — Ailie had insisted on it, though the explorer seemed embarrassed by the whole thing, as if it were foolish or undignified, as if when you got down to it there was really no cause for celebration at all. “But Mungo, it’s your thirty-third birthday,” she’d argued. “Doesn’t that strike you as auspicious?” He looked up from his dog-eared copy of Leo Africanus’ geography. “Auspicious?” She was grinning like a clown. “After all,” she said, “it was a big year for Christ, wasn’t it?”

Twenty-two guests turned out to drink the explorer’s health, Walter Scott, The Reverend MacNibbit and Thomas Cringletie among them. Scott had just settled in at Ashestiel on the Tweed, though he’d been sheriff of Ettrick Forest for the past five years and knew every farmer in the area — including Mungo’s brother Archibald. When Mungo moved down from Peebles, Archie brought the two together, and by the end of the summer Scott and the explorer had become fast friends. Mungo would mount his horse, cross the ridge that separates Yarrow and Tweed, and while away the long afternoons at Ashestiel, or Scott would show up unannounced to spend the evening out on the porch at Fowlshiels or down by the river, casting a fly and watching the midges hover over the shifting surface. They took long walks together, heads down, rapt in conversation; they fished, rode, drank and philosophized. Scott had published the three-volume edition of the Border Minstrelsy the previous year, and Mungo was drawn again and again to the old ballads, contrasting the poet’s versions and the ones he’d grown up with, pointing out inconsistencies, delighting in correspondences. He was even moved to give his friend the benefit of his own observations on the oral tradition among the Mandingoes and Moors. For his part, Scott never tired of hearing the details of Mungo’s travels — especially those the explorer had suppressed. He would pour out a cup of claret and prod Mungo to tell him about Dassoud’s excesses, for instance, or Fatima’s appetites and Aisha’s soothing, supple ways. About eating dog and groveling before Mansong, King of Bambarra. About the strange rites he’d witnessed, the unspeakable acts and unnatural practices.

Ailie was glad of the friendship. Scott was a man of culture and learning, Mungo’s coeval, and he seemed to have the ability to draw her husband out, to cheer and energize him, keep him from mooning about the house all day. But there were limits to everything. Mungo practically shut himself off from the other guests at the party, cloistering in the corner with Scott and Zander, their heads down, voices low. His mother and Archibald had to jerk him by the arms before he would get up, blow out the candles and start the dancing. And then it was right back to his corner, right back to Scott and Zander. Their voices were lost in the skirl of the pipes, and from time to time Ailie would glance across the room to see them mouthing phrases, gesturing, debating something, their faces as flat and serious as the faces of a clutch of ministers at tea.

That night, when they went to bed, Ailie gave him her present. It was a compass, set in cork. “So you can always find your way back to me,” she smiled. “From Edinburgh or Ashestiel — or even London.” She hesitated, her face lit with the glow of some burgeoning secret. “There’s something else,” she whispered, drawing close to him. He looked up at her, his face bland, the blond stubble of his cheeks transparent in the glare of the oil lamp. “We’re going to have another baby,” she said. “In the spring.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Mungo left for Edinburgh the following morning. On business. He’d been in and out of town all summer, consulting with Saltoun, the solicitor, on matters relating to investment and contingency funds for his family.

“Contingency funds?” Ailie had asked.

“One never knows,” he said, solemn as the patriarch of the lost tribes.

“But you’re a young man yet, Mungo — it’s foolishness to think of, of such things at your age.”

“I could be thrown from a horse tomorrow. Or tumble into the Yarrow and hit my head on a rock, or—”

She turned away. “I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “Do whatever you feel is right.”

He kissed her in front of the house before he left. And then pressed her to him and kissed her again, stroking her hair and tracing the line of her jaw with trembling fingers. She was surprised at his passion.

“Give my love to the Macleods and Leasks,” she said, “and to old Saltoun. . You’ll be back in four or five days?”

He was mounted now, looming high over the horse like a bronze statue frozen against the sky. She thought of the military, of the war with France, of Colin Raeburn and Oliphant Graham, dead at Copenhagen. And then suddenly, inexplicably, she thought of her mother. Mungo’s face was impassive. She managed to smile. “Four or five days?” she repeated.

The sun was at his back and she had to squint to get a look at his eyes. They were the color of ice. The horse whinnied and she felt something shift in her stomach. He never answered her. Just drew back on the reins, swung the animal’s head, and cantered off.

♦ ♦ ♦

The letter came two weeks later. From London. There was no return address:

19 September, 1804

My Dear Ailie:

Forgive me. I couldn’t face a scene. As you wil1 have guessed, or gathered from talking with your brother, I am off again for Africa. This time I will be at the head of an expedition financed by the government and consisting of some forty men. The opportunity is enormous. It is my patriotic duty to take it.

I will be in an agony until I return to you and the children, no doubt within the year. Our plan is to launch a boat at Segu and float it down to the sea. If the child is a boy, name him after Archie, could you?

Please try to understand me, Ailie, dearest Ailie. The Yarrow is tame, life is tame. There are wonders out there, wonders waiting for the right man to risk all to reveal them. I am that man, Ailie, I am that man.

Yours in love & Contrition,

Mungo

The letter pierced her like a bone spear flung by some black aborigine, some Seedy, straight from the stink and fear and incomprehensibility of Africa, straight from the black heart itself. She hadn’t spoken a word to Zander: he’d been avoiding her. After the first week had gone by she knew the letter would come, knew what it would say before she opened it. She knew, but prayed to all the saints and archangels and powers in their spheres that she was wrong, that Mungo had been detained in Edinburgh, that he’d had a minor accident or gone out to the country with Robbie Macleod.

But no. He’d deceived her again. The son of a bitch. The cowardly, irresponsible, lying son of a bitch. To desert her like this, to lie to her, make it up, and lie to her again. To tell his innermost secrets to a stranger like Scott, and conceal them from her. Well she was through with him. He was no good, he was a liar and a cheat. He’d taken her love and trust, her faith and confidence, and stolen off under cover of a lie — like a thief.

She read through the letter again, flung it down in disgust. And then, almost as an afterthought, she picked up the envelope, turned it over in her hand and noticed that there was something scribbled inside the leaf — a postscript? The writing was cramped and hurried, so contorted it could almost have come from a different hand. She took the envelope to the window and squinted at the flailing loops and tight squiggles until she could make sense of them: I can hear it in my dreams, hear it in the morning when I wake and the birds are in the trees — a rustling, a tinkling— a sound of music. You know what it is? The Niger. Rushing, falling, heaving toward its hidden mouth, toward the sea. That’s what I hear Ailie, day and night. Music.

The baby cried out. She dropped the envelope in the fireplace.