The Clay Dreaming (28 page)

Brippoki's eyelids flicker open. A ladybird walks the length of a stem of grass. That same green grass covers over half a world, turned on its side. He can hear the scratch of ants, busy below. With an effort he sits up.

Bone scrapes along bone.

The shadows have lengthened considerably, and the day is almost done. He can feel the tautness of congealed blood around his nostrils, dried along his top lip. From a nearby bush, he carefully selects a couple of broad leaves. He wipes his face clean, cracking and applying the moisture from another plant as a salve.

Backlit by the setting sun, the black tower of Christ Church darkens the rectory garden. Brippoki quails beneath the sharp shadow thrown down. He crosses into quiet Church-street, a dark vale, also largely consumed, and makes for the far corner. At the tip, he has to stop and hold his aching sides.

Best to take things slow at first.

He looks up. A flare of orange light illuminates the front of another church building. The dramatic sideways slant of a dying sun's rays illuminates each pit or protruding part of the brick and plasterwork. Brippoki feels glad to have survived, to be alive. He senses himself suspended, between the states of life and death, on the verge of some grand discovery.

Brow creased, he studies the stone relief of a sundial within the chapel's elongated pediment, set high overhead. The hours are clearly marked with roman numerals. He knows enough to understand the
walypela
look to these
letterforms as a means to quantify time. A pair of sticks, somewhat like a
water-diviner
, protrudes from the upper centre. The shadow it casts points off the dial, directing his attention towards more characters that cap the design: four digits, like those on the grave marker, only different.

Carved beneath is a brief inscription, ‘
Umbra sumus
': mysterious words that he cannot understand.

Turning to greet his tenant, John Epps raised his hat, a faint medicinal whiff for his cologne.

‘Miss Larkin!’ he said.

‘Dr Epps,’ said Sarah. ‘I was about to leave this for you.’

She presented him with a plain brown envelope.

Amid the morning bustle of Great Russell-street, they met outside the front door to No.89. The landlord was diminutive, a well-groomed man of middle age. They stood almost eye-to-eye, he on the front step and she the pavement. In taking up the envelope he glanced across her right shoulder. She had approached from the direction of Mills and Wellman, Ironmongers, Post Office and Savings Bank.

Rent money in hand, he squinted up at the low sky. ‘It seems almost unfair,’ he said, ‘given the preternatural warmth of recent weeks, that today should start out so uncommonly cold.’ He gave a genial little shiver, before addressing her more directly. ‘Uncommonly cold… I trust you are wrapped up warm against the elements?’

Sarah smiled weakly. He saw lines of anxiety on her face, and that she clutched a second, much larger envelope. ‘If you’ll excuse me…’ she said.

‘Certainly.’ He stood aside and she rushed in through the open door. ‘And, thank you!’ he called after.

Sarah Larkin’s slender, retreating figure had already disappeared around the stairwell. Dr Epps retrieved his key, still dangling from the lock. He turned to face the queue of patients for morning surgery.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Who’s first?’

Without pausing to remove her bonnet or outside garments, Sarah tore at the seal of the large envelope. The correspondence came direct from the Admiralty, from the office of the clerk Dilkes Loveless.

‘Dear Miss Larkin,’ it read. ‘Thank you kindly for your recent letter. I count myself delighted to have this further opportunity to assist you in your endeavours. To whit, please find enclosed a Navy-Office list of those ships on which George Bruce is recorded as having served.’

Sifting through the appended papers, she found a table of sorts, copied out in the clerk’s elegant hand. This she gave a cursory examination before returning to his cover letter.

‘Further references to this same individual,’ he went on, ‘are found among articles of gubernatorial correspondence held at the Admiralty. He writes to the Secretary of State for the Colonial Department, presenting his Memorial.

‘Records returned by Lachlan Macquarie, governor of the colony at New South Wales at that time, detail his response concerning George Bruce, “who went by the name of Dreuse in this Country”.’

George Bruce had once gone by an entirely different name. Only now was she in possession of both halves – ‘Joseph’, according to a slip in the relation of his own
Life
, and ‘Dreuse’. Joseph Dreuse.

Sarah penned an immediate and hasty reply. Making sure to thank the clerk profusely for going out of his way to assist her, she then requested – if he would be so kind – the full text of the correspondence. Bruce’s ‘Memorial’ must, she felt, bear relation to Bruce’s
Memoirs
.

Sarah valued complete information in a way that only a clerk might appreciate, and said as much. And then, since it nominated vessels additional to the Admiralty List, she traded in her own tally of those ships on which Bruce said he had served, as recorded from the manuscript thus far.

She referred herself to the additional comments Dilkes’s transcript had included: written against the first ship listed, the
Lady Nelson
: ‘No books’; and later: ‘Vol. Sydney, deserter from
Lady Nelson
’.

‘Deserter’…this one word went so entirely against what she understood from Bruce’s earlier
Memoirs
that she very much wished to know more. She would have to see what accounting was yet to be given in the more
honest-seeming
Life
.

Finally, thinking that it could do no harm, but might indeed be arousing of the clerk’s curiosity, she made declaration of her suspicions: that ‘George Bruce’ was a false identity, latterly adopted by man whose real name was almost certainly Joseph Dreuse, or else something very similar.

Sarah quit the house again. She posted the new letter, and then, making her way down Duke-street, continued south. No time to retrieve the manuscript from where she had last left it – she would not be reading it today. The author’s
very identity being in question, she meant to trace Bruce back to his literal source, his birthplace. Her intent was to proceed directly to St Paul’s, the parish church of Shadwell.

Catching an omnibus from New Oxford-street, Sarah sensibly sought travel advice from the conductor. She remained on board accordingly, until the start of Whitechapel.

Alighting there, she cut down Leman-street on foot. Once before, while her mother was still alive, they had ventured here as far as the Garrick Theatre.

Hard alongside, at times overhead, the steam trains rattled past constantly; London and Blackwall Railway passenger locomotives serving Fenchurch-street station; goods transports to and from Wapping’s wool and wine warehouses.

The air grew thick with fumes. Sugar refineries, prevalent hereabouts,
generated
an atmosphere most unnerving. Gratings, set in the pavement, revealed lurid aspects of a hell, sufficient almost to make Sarah turn tail and run. Handkerchief pressed across her nose and mouth, she maintained her course.

The Ratcliff-highway – a coagulate of older, lesser roads – ran across the top of Wapping Island, from Little Tower-hill in the west almost to the Regent’s Canal in the east. Running parallel with the river and hard by the docks, it was of a piece with London’s port and its commerce – so utterly notorious, following a series of murders early in the century, that it had since been renamed. St George-street only existed on maps, however; everyone still referred to it as of old.

Sarah’s ideas concerning ‘the Highway’ persisted from her childhood picture-books, as a broad avenue of elms: the area had not been built as a slum, as could be said of Shoreditch, or Bermondsey in the south, but a slum had been made of it. The houses collapsed together in a cheery yet filthy disorder, each drunkenly supporting its neighbour. The populace, clinging to their porches, eyed her suspiciously as she passed.

As she approached the corner of one tumbledown street, a group of sturdy women-folk all but filled the pavement. Dark shawls gathered up over their heads, they resembled mourners, and stood with their faces pressed to the dark surface of a window-glass. The white lettering above their heads read ‘CREAM GIN’. One turned aside to sit on the kerb dejected. She cradled a tiny infant.

Chancing the gutter, Sarah passed by.

The streets being unpaved and with no guttering to speak of, heavy raindrops fell splashing in filth and puddle alike. Sarah regarded a strand of grimy rabbit-skins. Her boot heels skidded in the nightmare sludge. Even in decline, Bloomsbury was a paradise by comparison. She had often overheard other Londoners speak of going ‘up West’ and ‘down East’, without ever really understanding why, not having seen the imbalance for herself.

Thinking on her mission, Sarah redoubled her courage. She marked the multiplicity of churches by their visible signs. A spire here, a bell-tower there, they sprang up in swift succession – Mission, Episcopal, Swedish Protestant – the notoriety of the former Ratcliff-highway was such that it required the services of every single denomination. Any one of these eruptions might be the St Paul’s Church: she really should have referred to a Kelly’s Directory before venturing forth, only she had not expected the road to be so very long…

Adjacent to the bustle of a cab stand was a turning into Ratcliff-street. Sarah stood at the gate to a graveyard. The grind of wheels at her back reduced to a dull murmur, a spooky hush settled over the place. Mighty St George in the East reared to her left. Pale sunlight, playing on the stained glass of its rear window, threw patterns across the acreage of cold stone. Abutting to the northeast, through the shade of a grove of trees, she glimpsed a second church, a Wesleyan or Methodist chapel. Other potential candidates clustered close by. Tucked away down side streets, they were perhaps more immediately accessible, but only by cutting across this burial ground.

Sarah shivered, turned, and made her way back to the main road.

The next turning, about a hundred yards on, was nothing more than a dark alleyway, enclosed on all sides by high brick wall. She could see that it opened out after a short interval by the way that it grew lighter ahead. Not entirely insensible of the dangers, but inclined to recklessness, Sarah gathered her skirts from where they trailed in the muck and ducked in.

A gutter ran down the centre, where a lean young pig stood sniffing at a mouldering stump of turnip. Someone from an upper window gathered spit. Thuggish-looking women, mottled arms as thick as hams, crouched beneath the windowsills, knees up to their flabby chins. Naked babies wallowed at their feet, pink, puny and underfed, like worms.

In this jungle of the senses the stink of humanity was almost metallic.

Sarah hesitated at a junction within the network of small passageways. By the stark blackletter of signs screwed to the walls she at least knew their names: Palmers-folly lay behind, Perseverance-place ahead.

First bypassing a Rehoboth chapel, Sarah briefly contemplated sanctuary inside tiny Ebenezer Church.

She crossed into Angel-gardens, a squalid slum terrace of back-to-backs accessed by a blind alley. This led to and from an inner courtyard, enclosed on all sides by high brick wall: the Chancery. A suffocating pocket universe that had surely never known light, or air, its brickwork was black, as if shadows of night clung there. The walls pressed in so close that the sun, when it shone, might only blanch their very tops.

Sarah was instantly struck by the absolute silence: to not hear the sound of anything in London was exceptional. At first she assumed her ears had popped,
as with altitude gained, instead of her having sunken to these great depths. Among such ghostly haunts, she could not be certain she was not herself the ghost. The stench was truly overpowering. Enervated, becoming faint, she felt she might fade entirely away.

This must be Shadwell – Dreuse’s London, barely altered since the day he was born.

The enclosed courts slid invisibly one inside another like a succession of trick Chinese boxes. Figures filled the doorways, faces leering; it was enough to see their lips working to know that they traded in slander and gossip. The risk was great in pressing on; greater still in staying put. Sarah’s pulse, already racing, set to a mad gallop. Gathering all her strength, she advanced into an even darker passageway, no bigger than her coal-cellar, to emerge within a bare yard, long, and thin, and ruined.

Altogether down and out, the poorest of the poor, the residents swarmed like lice in crumbling wood. The staggered outlines of an agglomeration of hovels, close-packed, begged for a conflagration to wipe them out. No gardens here, and no angels; these were the precincts of the damned: bodies that suffered, spirits that fell, souls that were lost. Sarah could scarcely believe whole families made their homes in this way – not living, mere existence.

She looked out at scenes as if steering a tiny craft that merely sailed through them. Danger, perhaps even tragedy, hovered in the wings. One or two of the stunted creatures were stirring. Listless blanks before, the masks of their faces began to twist and take on new shapes. Broken-veined and empurpled, they exhibited blunt interest, even the stirrings of anger. From out of the generalised grumbles sprang an occasional loud oath.

Sarah wanted to bring out her purse, slip the few coins into an open hand, if only for the sake of a child – but feared such an action might bring the rest down on her head like a pack of hungry wolves. She was no ghost, but flesh and blood: if she did not pull herself together, she risked being torn apart.

She turned and fled.

A dark figure pulled away from the shadows in her wake, moving almost as swiftly in pursuit.

Popped like a thorn squeezed from a wound, Sarah rejoined the main Highway. Crossing the busy road to the south side, she passed by entrances to the docks. Over the tops of shorter buildings the tall spars of a great many ships were visible at anchor, and she could almost smell the salt sea on the air.

Van horses toiled the length of New Gravel-lane. A roughneck crew of sailors swaggered past, doing the rope-walk. Dark-skinned, they wore red shirts with broad sashes tied around their waists. They seemed hopelessly exotic, like foreign pirates, the air boiling in their wake redolent of rum.

Sarah examined the shops, marine-store dealers. They were bright with brass fittings: quadrants and sextants, chronometers, all sorts of other navigational
paraphernalia. A mariner’s compasses nestled among ocean-going charts. A sudden gleam in the window-glass caused her to spin about. The light reflected off the polished buttons on the jacket of a custom-house officer. Standing tall by her side, he nodded politely. Sarah hurried on.

Crude hand-written notices read, ‘LODGINGS FOR SAILORS – OWN BUNKS’, ‘LETTERS WRITTEN AND SENT’, or, ‘MONEY AND BILLS EXCHANGED’. Sitting at the threshold to a ship’s chandler, one fellow in particular caught her eye. Hands dyed a deep orange colour from the handling of rope and tar-bucket, he wore a bright satin waistcoat, and pulled at the most enormous pair of boots. His face glowed red, but not, thought Sarah, through strain: his tanned muscles worked comfortably. Twisted around his head, worn as a sort of turban, was a cotton kerchief. Dark hair, extruding beneath, was artfully curled into ringlets, and flattened with grease. He was, every inch, a model sailor: Bruce, as first pictured in her imagination.