Peter Carey - The Chemistry of Tears

But at that very moment the Jesus began to roll back and forth laughing, and it was for this exact reason, Sumper told me, he had made the Son of Man. When the arms opened wide, the body was lifted, and then the body rolled, and revealed the sacred heart, and then, from his chest came a laugh the old man could not resist.

Herr Sumper was satanic, wrote Henry. I was afraid of his influence. Yet when he turned his wet eyes and slightly wobbly smile upon me, I was reminded, not of the devil, but of my wife’s face when first she held our Alice in her arms.

That, Sumper told Henry, was how he brought the Genius back to life. He had concocted a medicine that, if administered frequently enough, would effect a cure.

Cure, Henry underlined.

Endorphins, thought Catherine.

While Sumper had been busy with his Jesus Christ he had conceived a plan to present his employer’s “Ledger of Drowned Subjects” to Queen Victoria. This was stage two. It began immediately.

“You thought I lied about Prince Albert but my master saw my character. When the old man heard my plan he did not doubt that I was determined that the Queen would know the great purpose of the Engine and see how many of her subjects might be saved.”

The Genius correctly feared for Sumper. He was not reassured to learn that “my German” had been a visitor to Buckingham Palace on three previous occasions; two of them were moonlit nights. Sumper now revealed to him the vaulting pole he had constructed, ten parts to it, with metal sleeves. He drew him a rough plan of those portions of the palace where he would interview Her Majesty.

“The Genius said, They will deport you from England, at the very least.”

For Sumper, nothing could be worse than to be separated from Cruickshank, but he would not be ruled by fear. He had been “called.” He hoped his service might be long. But sitting inside 16 Soho Square he accepted that it might also be as brief as a butterfly’s existence.

“At that moment,” he said, “I beheld the reason for my life.”

In my room above the pub I, Catherine Gehrig, surfaced. It was about midnight and there was an argument in the street downstairs.

I could have paid attention to the place I lived in, but I had allowed myself to become a citizen of an imaginary world.

Henry wrote. Sumper spoke. He said, “I had met great men in England. They were of a sufficient size to comprehend their human smallness, and therefore to serve, in their turn, beings of impossible knowledge and magnitude. They were my examples.”

The German had already mocked my God, Henry wrote, so I asked him coldly who these Superior Beings might be. Instead of answering he described how he wrapped the ledger of drowned souls in oilskin and strapped it to his back before departing Soho Square. Of his farewell that night, he reported no single word. He set off to the palace oblivious of the personal disaster which lay ahead.

About the alleged pole-vault, no more was said. Thank the Lord, wrote Henry who was clearly anxious about what he could believe.

Twenty lines later some evidence had caused the writer to change his mind. It was, in all likelihood, the star-shaped scar on Sumper’s abdomen which had earlier repulsed him. Now it appeared to him an honest injury suffered in a hare-brained vault across the palace wall.

If the clockmaker described his pain or injury, Henry made no note of it. But he no longer doubted that “the liar” had not only gained entry to the palace but had captured Prince Albert, not in a reception room or even a study, but reading in his bed. Impertinent, wrote Henry, adding that the greatest barrier between the populace and the Prince and Queen was the belief of the common people that it was completely and utterly impossible for anyone to gain access to their monarch.

The Prince Consort, having looked up from his book and stared directly at the place where Sumper stood, seems to have seen only what he expected. In this case it would appear to be an over-stuffed red chair.

It actually took “the most forceful tactic,” Henry reported, to get the attention of the Prince. Who could have imagined what it must have felt like to be in Herr Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’s shoes? Did he think that a poltergeist had seized his book and wrenched it from his hand? What did he expect might be contained in the oilskin parcel the bleeding phantom presently unwrapped upon his bed?

The ledger of deaths by drowning was apparently such a size that it must be shared between two readers, and what fear did the Prince feel to have the injured stranger lie beside him and demand HRH read aloud the notices pasted on every page?

“He was very cold and formal,” Sumper said, “until we reached a certain shipwreck where he recognized the name of a drowned passenger. He said it was his little niece. So when he began to weep, I naturally assumed this drowning was the source of his grief. To be frank, I was delighted. It made me hope I would enlist his support for the Engine. However, taking into account what happened next, it seems more likely that the coward was crying because he was afraid.”

This view was based on a brief conversation between the Prince and Queen Victoria who now appeared at the door in her nightgown. Speaking in German she asked Prince Albert to explain his bedfellow, although she used a rougher word.

“As we had been speaking that language,” Sumper told Henry, “the Prince surely realized I could understand his wife. He answered in French telling her that I was about to murder him, at which news the Queen closed the door and went away.”

An “astonishingly long time” passed before Sumper heard the palace guard running in lock step. It was a great slamming performance they gave upon the marble floors. It was only then, when he was so roughly handled, that he seems to have accepted that his plan had failed.

Even there, apparently, he found reason for hope. That is, they called the Prince’s personal physician for him and when he was sewn together they accommodated him in a room in the palace, where “apart from the barred windows, the view was good.”

At that time Sumper had no idea of how his adventure might be read by the nation. Only later did he learn that the Royal Family thought it unwise to reveal that one more German had arrived at Buckingham Palace. There had been two previous assaults on Her Majesty, the first by the disgruntled Irishman who had fired a powder-filled pistol as the Queen’s carriage passed along Constitution Hill, and then an insane ex-Army officer who struck her with his cane, crushed her bonnet and (as Henry knew from his mother) bruised her arms and shoulders.

Both of these men were sent to New South Wales, but Sumper was not destined to be transported to a gold mine. At first he was well fed, and the English puddings increased his optimism, but early one morning two soldiers escorted him to a blind carriage and rode with him to a wharf somewhere west of London Bridge. Here he was locked in a brig aboard a German trawler and it was only then, at the moment of his banishment, when he was given back the ledger, that he accepted everything was lost.

IN THE MORNING I returned all Henry’s surviving notebooks to Lowndes Square and Crofty, in taking delivery, bestowed on me the most lovely smile. “Thank you,” he said. “Would you like some tea?”

I was so relieved to be forgiven.

“Yes please,” I said. Surely he would permit me to keep the final volume one more day.

I waited, swivelling on my chair, looking out the window at the trees.

“No milk,” he said. “Do you mind?”

“Perfect,” I said, as he placed a very lovely (uncharacteristically restrained) Clarice Cliff cup and saucer on the desk beside me. “I had the most awful dusty tea for breakfast.”