The Skull and the Nightingale (24 page)

T
hat evening Matt Cullen was shown up and sank gasping into a chair.

“God help me, Dick. I can’t recall another such summer. A man cannot breathe.”

We sat looking at one another, emptied of energy, and grinning stupidly at our common impotence. I sent out for a quantity of cold beer, which roused us sufficiently to get us talking, if at but half our customary velocity. Matt said that he had no news to communicate, the town having been so lowered by the heat during the period of my absence that nothing whatsoever had happened. Accordingly it fell to me to provide a detailed account of all that had passed at Fork Hill. As I told the story it sounded strange even to my own ears. Matt listened with his customary intentness, from time to time giving an incredulous shake of the head.

“You should be grateful to Mr. Gilbert,” he said. “It is an indulgent godfather who steers his young charge to the brink of an available notch.”

“An overripe one,” I demurred.

“That is ungraciously said. By your own account it was in eminently usable condition. The old fellow did you a favor.”

“Only in order to do himself a favor. Good God, Matt, he wanted Dame Hurlock plundered and her husband cuckolded, and commandeered my member to do the deed.”

“Which it did very willingly and to its own gratification,” cried Matt. “In any case your patron has been rewarding you handsomely for your labors. All was carried out according to contract.”

“And so I have reluctantly admitted to myself,” I conceded. “It was in the bond. But what say you to the old devil’s interference in my dealings with Sarah Ogden?”

“I deplore this whimpering from a wholehearted whoremonger.” Matt sat up to rally his thoughts. “Here you are, resolved to lie with Ogden’s wife—a reprehensible intention, but let us set that consideration aside. Your tolerant and kindly godfather, so far from objecting, urges you on, pays you, and offers you any assistance in his power. To resent that intervention is to be a strangely fastidious seducer. You are in the absurd position of pleading the exquisite purity of your impure motive. Consider, Mr. Fenwick, pray consider. When the dissolute Cullen turns preacher, the evil in question must be grave indeed.”

I tried to laugh but could not. What he had said was near the mark: I was in no position to argue. But somewhere, I still felt sure, there lurked a principle that I would have hoped to retrieve.

“The truth is,” I said half truthfully, “that at the moment I find myself too hot and too weary and too irritable to care very deeply about Gilbert or Sarah or life itself. I am in the soft toils of apathy.”

“I think I may be in the same plight,” said Matt. “Let us return to these grave topics when the weather has changed.”

For some minutes we sat in unaccustomed silence, drinking beer, each occupied with his own thoughts. When Matt spoke again it was with unexpected seriousness.

“We have drifted into a queer plight, you and I. There is Fenwick, enjoying a life of pleasure, but unhappily aware that he is his godfather’s plaything. Here is Cullen, paying court to a weary old nobleman who scarcely knows him. What has become of these promising young gentlemen? Have they no dignity? This cannot be the way to live.”

“I have had such a thought many times,” said I, “but I could do nothing with it. Have you anything to propose?”

“We could—” said Matt, and hesitated. “We
could
, if we had the will, leave this tainted island and travel to Virginia or the West Indies to seek our fortune. If we scraped together every guinea we possess . . .”

I replied in the same vein, taking him seriously:

“That would be possible. There are clothes and possessions that we might sell . . .”

“We are young and healthy,” said Matt. “We are educated.”

“More than that,” I added with sudden enthusiasm. “We might prove to have abilities which as yet we have never had a chance to exercise.”

“True,” said Matt. “It might be that one of us is a natural cattle breeder.”

It was at this point that we began to laugh.

“What could be more likely?” said I. “And one of us will surely show a talent for growing sugar or cotton—”

“Or timber,” suggested Matt.

“The timber is already grown. We would have only to chop down the trees, cut them into slices, and sell the planks.”

“Given all the building in the New World we would soon be rich men.”

In this way what had been, for a few moments, all but a serious suggestion subsided into fatuities. Cullen and I sniggered away over the last of our beer, offering suggestions increasingly facetious on such topics as gold mining, cattle, Indians, slave girls, bearskins, and buffalo. Yet the humor was forced and the laughter was flat. We could not so easily dismiss the qualms we had acknowledged.

A
day or two later, feeling that I had procrastinated as long as I reasonably could, I wrote to my godfather, recounting the discomforts of the city and using the lassitude induced by the heat as my excuse for having nothing of personal interest to report. The letter concluded:

I saw curious evidence, the other day, of the decline in energy that this weather has occasioned. Some poor rogue, in the stocks for I know not what offense, was being but perfunctorily pelted. There was enough in the way of filth and rotten eggs and trickling blood to make him wretched and disfigure his features, but in truth he got off lightly, his assailants showing little relish for the sport and wandering away after a throw or two.

I confess that I have found myself debilitated, physically and mentally. In the hot, noxious air I have experienced the sensation, as never before, of being one of a multitude huddled together, eating, drinking, sleeping, talking, fornicating, defecating . . . I feel myself to be an animal among half a million others in a teeming, stinking warren. Perhaps it is not surprising that the unnatural conditions of these past few weeks should have conduced to unnatural thoughts. I recall your reference to meteorology. In this continual heat the whole body feels dilated, distended. Even one’s hands are visibly a little swollen. Is it wholly fanciful, then, to conceive that there may be, correspondingly, some minute temporary deformation of the mind that makes us see things awry or think about them confusedly?

The weather must surely change soon. Look to receive a livelier letter from your godson when at last the city is cooled by a fall of rain.

I am, &c.

When the change did come it proved to be dramatic. One could smell it, or taste it, in advance. The air grew hotter yet and had a metallic tang to it. There were brief eddies of hot wind, accompanied by indeterminate creaks and shudderings. I was walking along the Strand when I first perceived these signs. They produced an almost instant reaction among pedestrians, street sellers, and even horses and dogs, as though all were moved to apprehension by a common animal instinct. When the first large drops of warm rain fell, the thoroughfares were already all but deserted. In moments the sky darkened dramatically. There came a sudden flicker of dazzling light, followed by a prolonged and rattling peal of thunder. Scurrying along, I reached the front door of my lodging just as the rain began to pelt down in earnest.

At the bedroom window I watched and listened to the great downpour. The rain fell vertically and with such force as to shut out the view across our narrow street. It drummed on the roof above me and sent water streaming down the panes so thickly that soon I could scarcely see out at all. Lightning flashed and flashed again, and peal upon peal of thunder broke out, with the crack of a cannon followed by a rumbling echo. I could fancy the whole house shook. In the space of a few minutes the air had become noticeably cooler, and there crept into the house through chinks or chimneys the delicious clean scent of this liquor from the skies.

Exhilarated beyond description, I suddenly stripped off coat and wig, clattered down two flights of stairs, and ran out into the street in my shirtsleeves. By now, indeed, it could hardly be called a street, for a dark stream filled the whole breadth of it from wall to wall and was swirling away down the slope. In seconds my garments were saturated, clinging to my body, and the water was over my ankles, filling my shoes. I cared not at all, and laughed at the next flash of lightning in a kind of crazed exaltation. I had an image in my mind of this great flood purging the whole filthy city, laying the dust, sluicing away the accumulations of dirt, decay, and stench. It was a joy to breathe the fresh, cooled air.

Half blinded by the rain, I waded my way to the end of the street, where it joined Tanner Hill, and clutched at a post to hold myself upright. What had become the Tanner Hill river—to which the Cathcart Street stream was but a tributary—was flowing away in a torrent destined, round a dozen corners and curves, to pour into the Thames.

I had thought myself the only human being abroad in the storm, but just beyond the corner I saw a ragged old man, perhaps a beggar, standing with closed eyes, folded arms, and a contented smile, delighting to be washed by the rain. As thunder pealed again I greeted my fellow idiot, shook his hand, and on the cheerful impulse of the moment forced two fingers into my soaking pocket to find a guinea for him. He cackled in wonder at the acquisition, as though it had been a gift from the heavens—which in a sense it was.

With some little difficulty I splashed my way back to the house against the stream, losing a shoe along the way. Only when I reached the front door did I realize that I had left my keys upstairs. Mrs. Deacon answered my knock, plainly astonished that anyone should call in the midst of such a storm, and still more astonished to see her tenant in such a plight. She looked at me doubtfully as I stepped into the hall, and seemed at a loss as to what to say. But as I smeared the water from my face with the back of a hand I began to laugh, and I heard her laugh, too, as she hurried away to fetch me a towel.

Chapter 14

T
he following morning the sky was clear, but gutters and kennels were still flowing fast, and great ponds of water lay in the streets. Donning stout boots, I walked down to the Strand, slithering on the wet stones. A few shop signs had come crashing down in the storm and were lying amid broken bricks, but those in place were legible once more, washed clean by the rain. Shops and stalls were doing a lively trade and the whole town seemed refreshed.

Outside the Pumpkin, in Tyler Street, I was hailed by Nick Horn, comically resplendent in scarlet coat and embroidered waistcoat, and brandishing a cane.

“To judge from your grimace,” he said, “you think me overdressed.”

“I do. Your shoes will be sodden and your clothes splashed with mud.”

“No matter,” said Nick. “I am bound for the park. At last a gentleman can wear a little finery without sweating like a bricklayer. So I play the popinjay for once, and preen a little.”

He postponed his parading, however, till we had taken coffee.

“We have not spoken since the masquerade,” said he. “Such an interval should spawn two hours of gossip, but the damnable heat so reduced us that nothing has happened: we have all gone to ground.”

“Have you seen Latimer?”

“Only once; but thereabouts lies a crumb of news. Miss Page has rejected him, which does not surprise me—but in favor of Mr. Crocker, which does. She must esteem the size of that gentleman’s fortune more than she dreads the weight of his body.”

“Perhaps she finds Mr. Crocker more interesting company.”

“That may be: Latimer has turned respectable, and respectability makes a man dull. I believe Miss Page’s friend Kitty is a lady in whom you take an interest?”

“I do—a lively interest.”

“Did you see her in
The Relapse
?”

“I did not.”

“A sad omission. Take my word, Dick, this was something out of the common run. If the damned heat had not kept people away, she would by now be the toast of London.”

A
day later I myself visited St. James’s Park. It had recovered its freshness and color with remarkable speed and was again a place of aristocratic resort. To stroll along its paths was to engage in a kind of dance, the elegant pedestrians moving at a measured pace, pausing to nod to an acquaintance or stopping to speak to a friend. There was always the chance, of course, of an unexpected social encounter. On this occasion I saw, with a sense of shock, that Mr. and Mrs. Ogden were approaching me, he heavy in black, she graceful in blue and white. Here was a chance that I had at all costs to seize. They had plainly seen me and were calculating whether it would be courtesy enough to pass by with no more than a formal acknowledgment. I stepped into their path, bowed, and greeted them. Wary courtesies were exchanged. Ogden was dour, but I flattered myself that there was a hint of amusement in Sarah’s response. For the moment my only recourse was courteous affability.

I asked Mr. Ogden about the progress of Crocker’s house.

“I was last there two days ago,” he said. “The renovation is all but complete.”

I asked Mrs. Ogden whether she had seen the house. She said that she had not, but that she hoped one day to do so.

I observed to Mr. Ogden that it seemed to me interesting and unusual that through dealing in diamonds he had found a second vocation.

“It
is
perhaps unusual,” said Ogden. “I know of no other such case. To me the transition seemed a natural one.”

I smilingly asked Mrs. Ogden whether her husband had applied his talents to their own home. She replied that he had, and to distinctive effect.

Turning once more to Mr. Ogden, I inquired whether his work had perhaps derived from, or led him to, a study of the science of optics.

“My knowledge of that subject is superficial. I deal in practicalities.”

“You will have surely visited Greenwich.”

“On several occasions.”

During these drab exchanges I was observing both husband and wife. My opinion of Ogden was confirmed: the man was impermeable. His eyes communicated nothing and his inexpressive face could have been made of clay. He spoke tonelessly, seeming to have no ear for conversation, no taste for pleasantry or humor: I could not imagine him smiling. His responses had a deadening effect, in that he disposed of ideas rather than developing them. It might be that he had little time for social exchanges in general or that he found me personally uninteresting—a possibility I resented. I stifled an impulse to strike him a blow to the guts that would double him over and compel him to take me seriously.