The Choir Boats Read online

  In the end, thought Barnabas, looking at his stockings, which were quince-coloured because it was Monday, what did he gain from it, my implacable uncle? He died not long after he denied me my desire and ruined Sanford. All his talk of our Edinburgh upbringing and our reputation in London, our standing: those things did not warm him in his waning hours. He was as good as his word, though, no matter how hard that word was. He did not disinherit me. The first thing Barnabas had done as the proprietor of McDoon & Associates was to install Sanford as his partner in the firm.

  The ticking clock brought Barnabas back to the present. He said, “You are right, dear Sanford, some things cannot be gotten again.”

  “But some things might be,” said Sanford, the Norfolk thick in his voice, holding his fist in the palm of his other hand. “One loss shall not compound another.” He leaned across the desk, prodded the letter. “If even one loss could be mended, then we would be nearly as good as restored.”

  For a second Barnabas and Sanford shared a montage of memories: a chaffinch on the churchyard gate, a minaret against a great red sun, the roar of surf under a ship the size of a castle. And crabbed handwriting on a letter locked in a trunk upstairs. Barnabas pushed his chair back, and strode forward to clasp his partner’s hand. “Thank you,” he said, in a voice low and taut. “We shall double this cape together, old friend. Together.”

  The partners turned to practical matters, neither of them having heard of the Piebald Swan. Sanford said, “Finch-House Mews is above Hermitage Stairs near Brown’s Key and the Oil Wharf. George & Sons, the chandlers, have their office at Finch-House Longstreet and the New Deanery. You’ll recall they owe us for jute-sacking from the Gazelle’s last voyage.”

  “Well, buttons and beeswax,” said Barnabas, “We should ask ’em, the Georges, about this Piebald Swan.”

  Sanford shook his head. “The letter is clear about not telling anyone.”

  Barnabas would not be swayed. “Not to tell anyone of our plans,” he pointed to the letter, adopting the tone he used with East India Company officials and their lawyers when interpreting a clause in a contract. The lips on Sanford’s face stretched briefly upward, the nearest thing to a smile he afforded himself or others. Barnabas was, he knew, “clarifying,” as Barnabas called it. He’d seen Barnabas “clarify” contractual points to a profitable nicety many times before. Sanford was an able practitioner of “clarification” himself.

  “In formal terms, yes,” said Sanford. “But think what might occur should we noise about our enquiries for an inn or coffeehouse named the Piebald Swan. Quick ears will pick up our tale, pass our scent for money in all the rookeries and dens from Cripplegate to Whitechapel.”

  “Fairly spoken,” said Barnabas. “Point to you, round still undecided.” Sanford bowed his head. “No good to have every rascal, wretch, and cutpurse from here to Limehouse swarmin’ ’round us. Not that we couldn’t handle ’em, of course, just that the letter states it pretty plain . . .” Barnabas lost his sentence as he thrust out his arm, waving the quizzing glass in lieu of a cutlass to “handle ’em.”

  Sanford ducked the sweep of the quizzing glass. “Quite,” he said. “And then there’s the N.C. Strix Tender Wurm the letter warns us against.”

  Barnabas paused in mid-stroke, looking like Playdermon, the hero of the hills whose exploits were put on stage by Buskirk in the year Barnabas was born. “Ah,” he exclaimed. “Surely a monstrous brute, this Wurm fellow, a great villain . . . but we . . . aren’t . . . scared . . . of . . . him!” Between each word, Barnabas took huge swipes with his phantom blade, ending with an explosive chop to a globe that he deemed suitable as a substitute for the Wurm’s head.

  Once again, the merest rictus crossed Sanford’s face, the grimace that was his mule’s smile. Not scared, no, he thought. But best be wary, all the same.

  Satisfied that he had dispatched the Wurm, Barnabas thumbed through the book from the box. As Sanford’s eyes narrowed, Barnabas read aloud from a page at random: “‘On March 10, 1788 the two ships in the French naval expedition led by de la Perouse left Port Jackson in Australia, witnessed by the British onshore, and vanished. France has been searching ever since for the lost expedition.’ Well, there’s some proof for you! Everyone has heard about the lost Perouse expedition. There was even that play about it, here in London. Not that I care for the French, mind you, but all the same, poor devils. . . . Ah listen, here’s more: ‘Some believe that the Perouse ships have wandered off our world onto the mist-wracked roads that lead to Yount . . .’”

  Words like “mist-wracked” nearly caused the tendrils on Barnabas’s vest to uncurl with delight. Eyes shining, Barnabas was about to steer the McDoon’s Mincing Lane counting house onto the salt-roads in search of the Perouse expedition and Yount itself, when Sanford pointed to the clock and reminded Barnabas that they were due at the Exchange right after lunch. The India tendrils strained, and the counting house bucked to leave the quay, but Barnabas with a great sigh warped himself back to the clock and its demands. Barnabas sighed, “Yes, yes, right you are, tempus fugit, as the old Tully would put it. But tonight then, we can read the book this evening.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Both women crossed themselves.

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

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

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

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

  The cook finished grinding the mustard seeds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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