God's Fool (22 page)

We had not been the first to make a study of the artwork these rooms contained; above each painting—a record of desperation as touching in its way as the prisoner’s cross-hatched picket fences tallying the years—an arc of candle smoke marked the wall like a dirty rainbow. But soon it grew too cold for art. The fire hissed and spat. Chilled to the marrow, we would retire to our straw mattress. Snuffing out the endlessly guttering candle with wetted fingers (there seemed to be no snuffers between Paris and London) we would plunge into bed and be burrowed down beneath the moth-eaten quilt, breathing it warm, while the ribbon of candle smoke still twisted in the air.

How quickly fate, like a wrestler, can throw us to the ground. A room with a wooden floor, a quilt, a hearth … how soon these would take on value in our eyes. How soon those walls, that hearth, would begin to glow in our memory. Shivering in the darkness beneath our quilt, making small jokes to keep up our courage, we had no way of knowing that the day would come, and soon enough, when the jokes would end; when we would, without too much hesitation, have willingly offered a finger for another night like this one—laid our hands on the block and turned
our heads, and another for one more—had there only been someone to take our offer.

For a time—a brief time, true—it appeared we might be able to revive our fortunes. For a few precious weeks in May the performance halls—though a fifth the size we had commanded a year earlier—were once again full. Once again our names and likenesses appeared in the pages of
John Bull
and the
Universal Pamphleteer
—a far cry, admittedly, from the days when we had appeared at the Egyptian Hall before Queen Adelaide and the Duke of Wellington but, given our situation, encouraging nonetheless.

Emboldened by our success, we began to talk again between ourselves of how best to confront our guardians. For over six months now, Eng had carefully recorded the totals he believed were owed us; returning to England, he had set about reconstructing, as accurately as possible, the performances we had given the first months after our arrival. He estimated the size of the crowds and the probable ticket sales; he noted, whenever the opportunity presented itself, the cost of the halls in which we had appeared, then deducted the probable expenses for our meals and lodging. I helped him as much as I could—recalling dates and places, writing letters of inquiry—but the lion’s share of the task fell to him. Night after night he labored. Fearful of losing the evidence, or having it stolen, he took to carrying the notebook in which he made his calculations with him wherever we went. For months, I realized, his outrage over the injustice that had been done to us had been quietly boiling inside of him.

I knew my brother. This was the same man who had saved us after our father’s death, who, on emerging from the king’s harem, had pulled up his pants and doggedly insisted on selling duck eggs to the citizens of Bangkok; the man who had plotted and planned our survival, engineered our triumph, until the day God, in the shape of a typhoon, had laid his plans to waste. What Hunter and Coffin had done was wrong. He would hang on to their heels like a terrier, jaws clenched and eyes closed, until justice was done or he was beaten to death, one or the other.

I had rarely seen him this happy. “Prepare yourself, brother,” he announced one warm evening as we sat in our rented room off Rosemary-lane. He shut the notebook he had been scribbling in. From below came the shoving, jostling clamor of the streets: hooves and shouts and startled whinnies, the cry of a peddler hawking her wares, the clang of steel against steel …

His eyes were shining. “I’ve checked the figures, then checked them again.”

“Fish, ha’penny fried fish!” came the cry from below.

“And?”

He cleared his throat, trying hard to sound like a solicitor. “Assuming, as I think we can, that any expenses we’ve overlooked are more than balanced by the performances we’ve forgotten—”

“Fish, ha’penny fish.” Again the cry rose from below and was buried beneath the knuckled clatter of hooves on stone. A particular London smell—part stable and wetted stone—moved in on the warm air.

“—and subtracting an extra ten pounds so there is no excuse for complaint or argument, Messrs. Slumber and Muffin”—for that is how we, in our childishness, had come to refer to Hunter and Coffin—“owe us not one ha’penny less than 4,653 pounds!”

I stared as though informed that I had inherited the throne of England. The sum he mentioned was enormous, enough to live on—and live well—for years. It could get us home. It could care for our mother to the end of her days. It could buy us that house in Bangkok we had dreamed of. Or two. Properly invested, it could support any venture, cushion any fall.

“My God,” I whispered. The noise of the street at that moment seemed lessened, as if Rosemary-lane with its smells and cries, its costermongers and bird sellers, had suddenly, quite literally, dropped away from us.

My brother nodded. “I know,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “Quite sure.” I could feel something, a high, wild laughter, building inside me. My brother’s features, however, had shifted
from controlled giddineass to sober determination. On the street far below us, a loud argument had begun. “We’ll not get a penny from the bastards unless we’re careful,” he said quietly. He shook his head. “We don’t know the rules here. It’s like fighting someone in the dark.”

“But we have this,” I said, tapping the notebook. “We know the truth.”

“The truth?” My brother smiled. “I’ll tell you the truth. The truth is that they’ve made at least
eighteen thousand
pounds on us while for six months we stuck out our tongues and turned somersaults like a pair of organ grinder’s monkeys.”

Somebody was pounding on a door. “Open the door, y’ bitch, or oil beat ye ’ead in,” came a man’s voice from below. Voices rose around him.

My brother glanced toward the window, then back. “I can feel them moving … planning something … but I don’t know what.”

From below, as though the air had grown animate, came the sound of barking, then a quick, lunging snarl.

It was not a big event as events go. That year there would be riots in Bristol and Nottingham; in America, bushy-browed Nat Turner would kill fifty-five in the name of truth and be hanged from a yellow oak; Charles Darwin would step aboard the
Beagle
. And yet, to us—though history would rumble along like a carriage wheel, recording the words of princes and parliaments, mindless of the pebbles pressed into its steel or flung into the ditch—an empty room on Aldgate High-street was of greater import than any invasion of Syria.

The date was May 23, 1831. We had just returned from Temple Bar, where (ignoring the stares of the clerks who scurried this way and that like large, frantic mice) we had spoken briefly to a tall, impatient cadaver named George Francis Rump, a solicitor. It had not gone well. Continually glancing off to the side or over our shoulders, glances accompanied, eerily, by a nod, a raised eyebrow, a small, tight smile, he had seemed mildly interested in our case until we explained our financial straits, at which point the enthusiasm seemed to drain out of him like air from a punctured bladder. Tilting his head, he began exploring his right
ear with a finger. My brother, undeterred, continued to explain our predicament:

“And so you see, even though there is this matter of the paper we supposedly signed, we feel that …”

Turning his hands palm-up, Rump now began inspecting his nails, a worried look on his face. He reminded me of some pale, ground-dwelling creature studying its paws. I half expected him to lick them.

“… we feel that since neither of us saw this paper—” my brother was saying.

“Mmmm.”

“—much less signed it—”

“I see.”

“—it must be a forgery.”

Noticing that my brother had stopped, he sat up abruptly, then glanced around the room, as though unsure of quite how to proceed. “Yes, well …” he said, moving some papers a short distance to the left, “but you say you and your brother performed before the public these past months?”

“Of course.”

“And that these gentlemen acted as your agents in this?”

“Yes, of course. This is what we have been saying all along.”

He nodded, clearly irritated now. “I see. Well, this is all most interesting”—here his thin lips stretched slightly in an attempt at a smile—“but as you can see”—patting a large pile of books by his side—“I have a great many cases before me already and not nearly enough hours in the day to attend to them properly.” He stood. “I shall be in touch, gentlemen,” he announced, not explaining how he intended to do this without knowing our address. “And now, if you will excuse me, I must bid you good day.”

A warm brown dust was blowing in the streets. Hoping to save the money on the cab, we returned to Rosemary-lane on foot, breathing through our hands. George Francis Rump had been the third man we had tried to convince to take our case. It had been days since we had
heard a word from Hunter or Coffin. And suddenly—as precipitously, as automatically as we had turned toward Sophia’s house after emerging from the Musée de L’homme et la Nature—we turned toward Hunter and Coffin’s spacious lodgings on Aldgate High-street. It was time.

They were gone. For the second time in as many months we found ourselves standing outside an open door letting in on a darkened, half-empty room. Messrs. Hunter and Coffin had given their notice two weeks earlier, we were told. Their ship had sailed for Singapore on the twentieth.

My first reaction, albeit a fleeting one, was a pang of loneliness. I knew it was absurd. We had dreamed of being free of them, talked of it endlessly. And yet, though the apparent effect of being left and leaving is the same, in the heart they are January and June. We had known Hunter for years, after all, and though we had come to despise him, and Coffin as well, even hating can make a history. At certain times in our lives, given the right combination of vanity and weakness, it can be as difficult to abandon as love.

My brother, on the other hand, was beside himself. I had never seen him so furious. He roared with frustration, splintered his walking stick over the railing, then swung his fists at the empty air, wrenching me about. I tried, uncharacteristically, to console him. A crowd had begun to gather. A small boy ran off, presumably in search of a constable. “It’s all right,” I said stupidly, unable to think of anything else to say.

He turned on me with such fury that we nearly fell. “Do you know what this means?” he screamed, his right hand closed around my shirt front, shaking me. “Do you have any idea what this means?” He let loose a string of profanities such as I had never heard him use before. If either Hunter or Coffin had appeared at that moment, I truly believe he would have crushed the life out of them with his bare hands.

“We’ll be all right, brother,” I said, letting the fury work itself out. “Calm yourself.”

He laughed. “Calm yourself? Calm yourself?” Letting go of my shirt, he snatched my stick, a fine carved piece I had bought the week after we
stepped off the
Sachem
, and smashed it across the rail. “I’m calm. I’m as calm as a babe. I’m as calm as a calf in summer clover. I’m—so—calm”—the stick snapped, sending the handle flying off across the street—“I could rip—this—railing out with my hands and calmly bend it with my teeth.”

Turning back to me, he jerked me as close as our bond would allow. “Do you know what this means?” he said again. “No? I’ll tell you what it means. It means we have nothing. Nothing. Do you understand that?” The fury was ebbing now, the tears rising closer to the surface. He shook me again, a last departing gust of rage. “They’ll eat us alive, brother. Can’t you see that? They’ll eat us alive.”

But I couldn’t see it. I was younger than he was, young in a way he would never be. Though I knew what he said was true, though I understood—or thought I did—the direness of our predicament, I didn’t feel it. My own moment of weakness, cleansed by his fury, had passed. Not only did I feel no panic now, but down in my heart some small part of me thrilled to the drama of our situation, the adventure of it. We were strong, resourceful. Somehow we would make our way. Perversely enough, I felt a kind of elation rising in me, a feeling of rude health. I glimpsed our freedom. It was deep, beautiful, a wedge of summer sky between buildings at dusk. We were shut of the bastards.

My brother, no weaker than I, just older and wiser, knew the price we would pay for that liberation.

X.

In another lifetime, well fed and warm, we would put another log on the fire, shove our feet under the nippled bellies of the hounds, and tell the tale of how it was. It would make a fine story too, full of color, harrowing yet ultimately redemptive … Ten thousand logs would burn to ashes before we told it all.

There were some things we left out, of course; every labor has its leavings. And these, like all omissions, forced adjustments, substitutions. Things grew complicated. When the children (who had committed our tales to memory, and who would cry out the slightest change in the retelling), called our attention to the fact that the dress had been green, not blue, or that the lodging house had been on Sandy’s-row, not Boar’s-head-yard, my brother and I would thank them for their help and, tapping our foreheads with our fingers, explain that the memory, like the middle, grows soft with age. But we had not forgotten. We had merely lost control of our lies, allowed reality, like a carpenter’s ghost, to open a crack and momentarily skew the joints of our tale.

We improved. We learned from our mistakes. Our stories, beveled and smoothed in the retelling, grew so tight no uninvited truth could slip through. Our children rarely interrupted us now; our wives, who had heard it all before, nodded over their knitting.

Perhaps it was necessary. But it was not the life we had lived. To tell
that
—really tell it—I would have to get on my knees and sweep up the bits and pieces that wouldn’t make a story, the fragments we’d left aside. To tell it right I would have to force them into the shaped and polished thing we had made, crack its joints, pull the tongue from out its groove.