T. Boyle - Water Music

“Hertford?” Boyles’ chin drops. “But that’s outside Lunnon, init?”

A light goes on in a window up the street, throwing a pale flicker over Ned’s face. His look is so fierce and bitter Boyles steps back, but Ned grabs hold of his companion’s coat and draws him up close. His voice is clear, unmistakable. “That’s right,” he hisses.

♦ ILLUSORY CHEESES ♦

Ned turned his back on London without a second thought. It was the winter of 1802, and he was thirty-one years old. He was tired. He’d had thirty-one years of creeping through the shit and grime of the streets, thirty-one years of having his knuckles rapped and the ladder jerked out from under him every time he managed to step up a rung. Thirty-one years of torment and degradation, prejudice, abuse, and cruel and unusual punishment, mitigated only by the charity of Barrenboyne and the precious few months he’d had with Fanny. Now, at the end of all those blighted years, all those dark hollow years that had been drawn from him one by one like deeply embedded splinters, he was no better off than when Barrenboyne had first taken him in. He was broke. He had no lodgings, no possessions, no family. As far as friends were concerned, he was taking them all with him, in the flat-headed, pinch-shouldered person of Billy Boyles, drunkard and half-wit. Quiddle was dead, Fanny had vanished, Shem and Liam were up to their ears in fish and scales somewhere on the far side of the river — in any case, he hadn’t seen them in four and a half years. For the rest, they were faceless multitudes, hard as stones, ready to strip the clothes from your back as you lay dying or run you down in the streets with their phaetons and landaus. And if they weren’t strangers, they were sworn enemies. Banks, Mendoza, Brummell, Smirke, Delp — and the most venomous of all, Osprey. Orestes couldn’t have had it worse.

So he was off to Hertford. The country. Like Boyles, Ned had never been out of London, and had no idea what to expect. He had a vague image of great wheels of cheese, slabs of fresh-baked bread slathered with butter and honey, cattle at their cuds, the lazy sizzle of sun showers on a thatched roof. He and Billy could get jobs as fieldhands or shepherds or something. The air would be good for them.

Beyond ail this, another factor entered the equation: Fanny. She’d been born and raised in Hertfordshire, and had served her apprenticeship there as milkmaid to a certain Squire Trelawney. Ned would look up her family.

Perhaps they’d heard from her or knew where she could be found. After four and a half years of scouring the streets, he was at a loss. She wasn’t in London, as best he could determine, and with Osprey dogging him he had no chance of raising the money to go off to the Continent. Brooks’ house had long since been boarded up. Letters went unanswered. It was rumored that he was dead. If so, where was Fanny?

What Ned couldn’t know, as he trudged up the deserted turnpike in the cold vague light of dawn, was that the question no longer held any meaning.

♦ SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS ♦

Fanny Brunch left London early Christmas morning, 1797, in a state of shock. She wouldn’t be back for nearly four years.

It was snowing that morning, trembling little gouts of white spinning down out of the caliginous sky. She hardly noticed. When she finally emerged from the prison it was past five in the morning, and Brooks’ footman was waiting outside the gate. She looked right through him as he handed her into the coach, his touch the touch of a doomed man, flesh, blood, sinew, bone. All the way to Gravesend she watched the trees emerge from the darkness and turn to gibbets, the snow clinging to the naked branches like shreds of flesh, nests of dried leaves suddenly transforming themselves into kicking, writhing human forms. She felt lightheaded, disconnected from her body. There was a smell of meat in her nostrils, nagging and persistent. At one point the smell of it was so strong she had to ask the coachman to pull off to the side of the road so she could be sick in the weeds.

Brooks gave her a dose of laudanum for the trip to Bremerhaven, then a second, third and fourth dose to calm her nerves as they continued on from there to Cuxhaven and Hamburg. She lay dreaming on her narrow bunk as the ship lurched through a storm in the North Sea, her pupils reduced to slits, the wind soothing her with a chorus of voices. Her nostrils cleared, the fetor of decaying flesh giving way to a breath of the outdoors, azalea and hyacinth, spring in Hertfordshire. Above her, the darkened rafters began to shift and blend, faces clustered like grapes in the shadows, the candle guttering wildly as the ship pitched like a carriage with a thrown wheel. She saw her father, a spring they’d visited in the chalk hills, the clean-swept kitchen of their stone-and-thatch cottage. She was awake one moment, dreaming the next. She vomited and enjoyed it. There were roses in her nostrils. Toward the end she saw Ned, lying in some dark place — a cave — his throat chafed, a linen garment folded across his loins. She saw the gallows again, just as flash, and then Ned was on his feet, gliding toward the mouth of the cave. The light was blinding. There was singing. And then she found herself in Hamburg, at a hotel, sitting across the table from Brooks in a new white silk gown.

“Fanny,” he was saying. “Fanny. Will you look at me, please?”

She looked. He was standing now. There was a man at his side, tall and erect, his mustaches combed out from his face. His eyes were close-set, half the normal size. He was peering at her through a lorgnette.

“This is the gentleman I was telling you about — the one I met over cards last night?”

The man leaned forward and took her hand. “Karl Erasmus von Pölkler,” he said.

She smiled like all the fields of clover in Hertfordshire, she smiled like an idiot. She was thinking of something else.

♦ ♦ ♦

Two nights later she opened her eyes again and found that she was seated at a massive walnut dining table set in the center of a high-vaulted room. The walls were of stone and mortar, softened at intervals by a gloomy portrait or an oriental tapestry. A chandelier blazing with a hundred candles depended from the ceiling like a fragment of the sun. For a moment she was disoriented, the opium settling a deep fog over the backroads of her mind, but then she glanced up at the head of the table and saw von Pölkler raising a glass of wine in toast. Six other guests. Brooks among them, raised their glasses in unison while von Pölkler intoned something in German and seven pairs of eyes fastened on Fanny. Reddening, she stared down at the white tablecloth. A jeweled bracelet flashed on her wrist.

They ate Erbsensuppe, Beuschel and Gnagi, Bratkartoffeln, Fleischvögel and Hasenbraten. There were mounds of shredded cabbage and beets. A dozen bottles of Rüdesheimer. The conversation, in honor of the principal guests, was in a halting, consonant-choked English. “Ve haff. . wery great honor to place. . to place such charmed English mens and vomens here at Geesthacht,” von Pölkler sputtered, the ridge of his high forehead glistening under the chandelier. Fanny bowed her head and ate with a mechanical precision: two bites and a dab at the lips with her napkin. By the time the girl in pigtails and apron brought around the Schwarzwälder Kirsch, Fanny was floating. Brooks, drunk as a skunk, limp from laudanum and semi-articulate as a result of sharing two pipefuls of their host’s oriental tobacco, fell asleep in a puddle of gravy.

After dinner Fanny excused herself. The girl in the apron helped her up to her room. She lay on the bed for a long while, thinking of Ned, her family, the place she’d given up at Sir Joseph’s, the dismal prospect — like wriggling down through an interminable tunnel — of a life with Brooks. She reached for bottle and spoon. Tincture of opium. The stuff was magical, soothing, it was her friend and counselor. She took it like the medicine it was.