The Choir Boats Read online

  Daniel A. Rabuzzi

  The Choir Boats

  Volume One of Longing For Yount

  ChiZine Publications

  FIRST EDITION

  The Choir Boats © 2009 by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

  Cover wood carving and chapter illustrations © 2009 by Deborah A. Mills

  Wood carving photograph © 2009 by Shira Weinberger

  Jacket design © 2009 by Erik Mohr

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Rabuzzi, Daniel A. (Daniel Allen), 1959-

  The choir boats / Daniel A. Rabuzzi ; editors: Alexander Savory & Sandra Kasturi ; illustrators: Erik Mohr & Deborah Mills.

  (Longing for Yount ; v. 1)

  ISBN 978-0-9809410-6-7 (bound).--ISBN 978-0-9809410-7-4 (pbk.)

  I. Savory, Brett Alexander, 1973- II. Kasturi, Sandra, 1966- III. Title. IV. Series: Rabuzzi, Daniel A. (Daniel Allen), 1959- . Longing for Yount ; v. 1.

  PS3618.A328C47 2009; 813’.6; C2009-903617-7

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Edited by Brett Alexander Savory

  Copyedited and proofread by Sandra Kasturi

  Converted to mobi and epub by Christine http://finding-free-ebooks.blogspot.com/

  A Grove extends, in tangled mazes wrought,

  And fill’d with strange enchantment: — dubious shapes

  Flit thro’ dim glades. . . .

  Dreams hang on every leaf, unearthly forms

  Glide thro’ the gloom, and mystic visions swim

  Before the cheated sense. Athwart the mists,

  Far into vacant space, huge shadows stretch

  And seem realities; while things of life,

  Obvious to sight and touch, all glowing round

  Fade to the hue of shadows.

  — Anna Lætitia Barbauld,

  “To Mr. C — ge” [i.e., Samuel Taylor Coleridge] (1799),

  lines 3-5, 7-13.

  . . . a fracture in the vapour,

  A deep and gloomy breathing-place, through which

  Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams

  Innumerable, roaring with one voice . . . in that breach

  Through which the homeless voice of waters rose,

  That dark deep thoroughfare had Nature lodged

  The Soul, the Imagination of the whole.

  — William Wordsworth,

  The Prelude,

  Book XIII (1805),

  lines 110-113, 116-119.

  For notes to the text, and other background information on the McDoons and Yount, see: www.danielarabuzzi.com

  Dedicated to my two brothers, Matt and Doug, and my five nephews, Nick, Patrick, Than, Terence, and James.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Prologue: Two Streets in London

  Chapter 1: Drunk with Secret Joy

  Chapter 2: A Visit to the Piebald Swan

  Chapter 3: Eyes in the Dark

  Chapter 4: Hearth and Home

  Interlude: Frozen Algebra on Fire

  Chapter 5: Theft from the Garden

  Chapter 6: Surprises Onboard

  Interlude: Starved Mercies

  Chapter 7: The Moon Waits on the May-Star

  Interlude: Entertaining Angels Unawares

  Chapter 8: Pious Drops for the Closing Eye

  Chapter 9: Pilgrims’ Progress

  Chapter 10: A Song Out of Silence

  Interlude: Binomials, Quoth the Char-Girl

  Chapter 11: Dreams Are the Daughters of Earth

  Chapter 12: At the Sign of the Ear

  Chapter 13: Breathing Honied Ashes

  Interlude: Regina Coeli

  Chapter 14: Endued with Particles of Heavenly Fires

  Chapter 15: No More Pint o’ Salt

  Chapter 16: Stone-Corbies on the Quay

  Coda: Introit for the Days of Lead

  About The Author

  Prologue: Two Streets in London

  The young woman counted — “Otu, abua, ato, ano, ise, isii, asaa” — using what remained to her of the secret language her mother had learned from her father, the language they had used in the place across the ocean when they did not want the white men with whips to understand. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . we need seven to succeed, seven to open the way. Chi di, there is still daylight left, still time, but not much.”

  She stood near dusk in a blind alley in Whitechapel on the verge of the City of London. Distant notes drifted down from the sliver of sky far above, bells tolling the Feast of the Epiphany on the first Sunday in 1812. The young woman (little more than a girl, perhaps sixteen years of age) pulled her worn-out sailor’s coat around her and knotted her red kerchief against the cold. She scratched numbers on the brick wall in front of her, deepening the grooves made hundreds of times before. Staring at the numbers until the bricks faded, until she could see deep into herself and beyond, the girl hummed.

  Rooks flew over rooftops but she did not heed their calls. She was on the marches of ala mmuo, the realm of the spirits. There she met the ancestors, the ndichie, who spoke of pride burnished under the sun, the heart of courageous healing, the brown eye of wisdom. Today she went farther than she ever had before, led on by the humming of a thousand bees at a thousand bee-ships, until she neared the border to another land. The moon in that place illuminated a row of pillars on a ridge in the distance, pillars topped with watching creatures. One shape lifted itself off a pillar, a white owl as large as a house, an owl with a swallow’s tail streaming behind it as it flew towards her. The young woman fled the owl’s reshing beak, escaped from the borderland, turned back to see the owl circling at an invisible threshold. Its cry pierced the humming, followed her as she tumbled away.

  Falling, she caught a glimpse of a young white woman reading by candlelight in an attic. A golden cat sat in the white woman’s lap. The walls of the attic leaned inward, the roof sagging like a thumb seeking an insect to squash. The white woman thrust the book up against the room’s slow throttle; the cat arched its back and spat. The candle flame shrank. The white woman threw back her head and opened her mouth, trying to sing but only gasping. The candle went out.

  The woman in the alley ceased humming, fell back into herself. Before she awoke fully to her body, she heard the beating of a great drum and the booming of a great bell — a drum with eyes and a bell rimmed by living fire, out of which came a voice soothing and powerful, neither male nor female yet both at the same time.

  “Uche chukwu ga-eme, God’s will shall be done,” intoned the voice in the secret language and in English. “Seven singers for turning to the people a pure language. ‘But who shall lead them? From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia and Cush, the daughter of the dispersed . . .’”

  A figure emerged in the mist on Mincing Lane. He wore a coat from the previous century, a reddish coat that seemed to shift with the vagaries of the fog. Porters, carriage-men and servants passed him by but would be hard-pressed to describe him in that instant and had forgotten him entirely by the time they reached their destinations. Only the rooks wheeling overhead in the late-afternoon sky might have known what the man was, but no one understands their calls. Unheeded, the rooks returned to their towers as the church bells ceased tolling for the Feast of the Epiphany on the first Sunday of 1812.

  The man in the crimson coat scanned Minci
ng Lane, a thoroughfare between Fenchurch Street and Great Tower Street not far from the Thames in the City of London. He found the three-story counting house of a merchant, unremarkable except for its dolphin-shaped door knocker and pale blue window trim. Without removing his gaze from the house, he took from one pocket a shrivelled apple. Fastidiously, he ate. His eyes took in the house, knowing as they already did every angle and every surface. Keeping pace with his eyes, his tongue and teeth delicately destroyed the fruit.

  He was down to the core when the first light came on in the house. One window glowed in the mist, flickered as someone inside crossed the candle. He stopped eating, apple core held like a half-moon twixt finger and thumb. A candle was lighted in an attic room, illuminating a golden cat sitting on the window sill. The man’s coat undulated, restless and ruddy. Night came. The cold increased but the coat-man disregarded it; he had been much colder before.

  Very faint, the man heard a hum in the back of his mind. Eyes still on the house, he sought inward and outward and round-ward, chasing the source of the sound. No good. The ghost whisper of a hum faded, eluding him as it had for a long age of this earth. Somewhere above the fog the moon rose. The house — moored and complacent — was unaware of him, or aware only as a sleeper is, in some deep recess of thought beyond waking.

  The man in the coat swallowed the core in one bite. “Soon,” he said to the house. The next moment, he was gone.

  Chapter 1: Drunk with Secret Joy

  London merchant Barnabas Eusebius Playdermon McDoon received a box at his Mincing Lane house on the first Monday of 1812. Sanford, the firm’s other partner, a man of few hairs and fewer words, said the box had come in the morning post but no one knew its origin. Barnabas pushed aside the letter he had been writing to their Bombay factor about the Hamburg and Copenhagen markets for smilax root, pepper and mastic gum. The interruption pleased Barnabas: he had fretted all morning, his irritation mounting as he wrote about stratagems and manoeuvres in the North Sea that he would not be able to execute in person. He was tired of waging tabletop battles between his inkpot and his snuffbox. He longed for the cardamom whispers he thought he heard just around the corner of deserted streets, the minarets and elephants he thought he saw reflected in shop windows. He desired to exorcise the ghost of guilt and the memory of actions undone, a love abandoned.

  “Well, beans and bacon, let’s have a look,” said Barnabas, who retained a Scottish accent even after years in London. He cut away the wrapper, revealing a wooden box. At that moment Barnabas and Sanford heard, or thought they heard, a low, distant hum, like a hundred bees moving together over a far-away meadow. They heard the ticking of the clock on the mantle, the voice of their apprentice (Barnabas’s nephew Tom) in the main office, the cry of rooks circling the rooftops, the clatter of horses and wagons on Mincing Lane, all the hubbub of London life. But under that was a humming. Barnabas opened the box. The humming, still unacknowledged by either man, grew louder in their ears, though it remained low and distant, as if the bees had only gotten larger, not closer.

  The box held a key, a book, and a letter. Seeing three new mysteries in place of one, Barnabas nearly left his seat with excitement. Sanford’s face became three times as dour as before. Barnabas placed the three new things on the desk, thrusting aside his inkbottle, quill, blotting paper, quizzing glass, and now-forgotten letter to the Bombay factor. Gripping his vest with one hand, Barnabas held up the key and commented on its ordinary appearance. Sanford nodded but disagreed inwardly: keys need locks, and McDoon & Associates knew of no lock for this key, which was disorder of the worst kind.

  Clutching at his vest so a button nearly came loose, Barnabas turned his attention to the book. On its age-mottled cover stood in abraded gold print: Journies and Travells to Yount and the Realms Within, Being Divers Recollections of Those Who Wished Themselves to Go. The book listed no author. The two partners considered the book. They knew every land, city, and fiefdom on all the trade routes, and had shipped out to India when employed by Barnabas’s uncle. They corresponded with merchants, bankers, naval agents, and consuls around the world. Their library held maps, portolans, atlases, travel accounts, histories, and descriptions of the known parts of the globe. Yet they had never heard of any place called Yount. Sanford’s face was beside itself with premonitions. A key out of place was a travesty, but a country out of place was beyond reckoning, a non-thing, a disorder, a debit without a credit. Divining Sanford’s feelings, Barnabas grinned and held out the book. Sanford declined. Barnabas pressed the book forward. Sanford, with a mulish quiver, refused again to take it.

  Barnabas put the book aside, took up his quizzing glass, opened the letter, and began to read. As he read, the humming grew louder — not closer but as if more and larger bees joined the first battalion. He breathed in time to the humming. Sanford’s face resembled a winnowing blade: first a misplaced key, then a no-placed land, now Barnabas about to go missing. “Not good at all,” Sanford thought. “Bears close minding, someone to put the accounts back to rights.”

  Barnabas handed the letter and the quizzing glass to Sanford. As Sanford read the letter, Barnabas hummed and stroked his vest, unaware that he did either thing. Despite himself, Sanford too hummed. A thousand thoughts raced through Barnabas’s head, spinning and whirling as they did when he was striking deals on the exchange, only a hundred times more powerful. A thousand thoughts marched through Sanford’s head, wheeling and stamping as they did when he was closing the account books, only a hundred times more powerful. Humming in unison now, the two men looked at the letter and then at one another. They dimly heard the hurlyburly of Mincing Lane and apprentice Tom teasing his sister Sally as she returned from lessons. The humming overlaid all else in their minds. Barnabas hummed bees that coursed in mighty zigzags and raced in golden loops. Sanford hummed bees that serried together in purposed patterns.

  “Yes,” they said together, “we will.”

  The humming crescendoed and ceased. The ticking of the clock was the loudest thing in the room again. The two men leaned back, blinking. Barnabas continued to stroke his vest, fingers tracing the pattern out of India, with its curling red tendrils and little blue flowers on a cream background. His breathing slowed. Sanford handed back the quizzing glass. Barnabas reread the letter, aloud this time:

  On the Day of Three Kings,

  To Mister McDoon,

  Merchant of Mincing Lane,

  by Dunster’s Court

  Dear Sir,

  You seek something new, a way to your future by reclaiming your past. We can show that to you, if you take the chance. Enclosed are a key and a book. The book explains itself: others have gone before you, and have left instructions for those who would follow. The key is another matter. We cannot tell you all you need to know about the key, only that you must learn about its peculiar abilities yourself. This is not a game. If you seize the chance, you will be engaged in a great mission upon which the fates of many depend. More we cannot reveal until your heart speaks for you and you pass certain tests.

  Go Tuesday week to the Piebald Swan, in Finch-House Mews hard by the London Dock. Two o’clock. Ask for the Purser. He will explain what needs explaining in the first instance. Take a trusted companion, one who would share hazards with you on a long journey if you were to undertake such. Tell no one of your plans. Others seek the key. Their intentions are not good. Above all, avoid the agents of N.C. Strix Tender Wurm. This offer will not be repeated. If you do not meet the Purser on Tuesday (being January 14th), you will never be given this opportunity again. Will you take it?

  Postscript: We cannot promise heart’s desire. But we know what you seek and can help you regain what you have lost. Will you take the chance?

  Barnabas rubbed his eyes. Sanford shook his head. Each man wondered if the ink might suddenly fade or the letter evaporate, so strange and unexpected was its message. Barnabas and Sanford thought of another letter, almost a quarter-century old, locked in a trunk, never revealed and never spoken
of. The contents of that letter were stroked upon their hearts, Barnabas the recipient, Sanford the confidante.

  Barnabas leaped back in memory to a place smelling of coriander, mangoes and sandalwood. Her voice was in his ear, the touch of her arms around his neck. He saw her singing in a garden. Kneading his vest, Barnabas stared at a print on the wall (one of his favourites, depicting Acteon and Diana) but he did not see it. Sanford remembered that place too, where the sun was as huge and red as a pomegranate. He recalled the aftermath: the letter hidden in the trunk, the arguments with Barnabas’s uncle (the McDoon in those days), threats of dismissal from the firm and of disinheritance. Barnabas had not had the strength to resist his uncle, and had stayed in the firm and kept his inheritance, paying a heavy price to do so.

  Barnabas gazed at his calicosh vest. Without raising his face, Barnabas said, “We should go, old friend.” Sanford waited. “We must go, to discover whether the letter’s claims are true.”

  Sanford said, “Heart’s desire. A most private affair, Barnabas. How could strangers know?”

  “Precisely,” said Barnabas. “How could they?”

  “Speculation,” said Sanford, “or just business. Everyone knows, for example, that McDoon & Associates lost on our ventures in clove and nutmeg last year.”

  “In which case, we should meet the letter writers if only to recoup that loss,” said Barnabas, “But, nay, spices as heart’s desire? Surely you, of all people, would argue that poetics ought best be left out of the counting house.”

  “The loss you would have the letter refer to cannot be recovered,” said Sanford. His voice now bore traces of his Norfolk upbringing (Sanford had come to London years ago from Norwich).

  “No,” Barnabas said, gripping his vest. “But, oh Sanford, who can say? I should have . . . What if she . . . ? Not one day in all these years . . .” Barnabas sighed, then realized that Sanford alluded to more than Barnabas’s own loss. Suddenly he saw in memory his uncle, slamming a door, upsetting a shelf of ledger books. Old McDoon had exiled Sanford when Sanford defended Barnabas, ended Sanford’s employment. Damned as he was, Sanford could only find employment as a wharfinger’s “boy,” a mercantile odd-jobs man making barely enough to stay alive. Mrs. Sanford did not survive the blow — she died of pleurisy that winter, a death Sanford laid at the feet of the Old McDoon. Barnabas supported Sanford as best he could in secret, and had been the only mourner at Mrs. Sanford’s funeral besides Sanford and the McDoon’s cook.