Prologue: Two Streets in London

The young woman counted—“Otu, abua, ato, ano, ise, isii, asaa”— using what remained to her of the secret language her mother had learned from her father, the language they had used in the place across the ocean when they did not want the white men with whips to understand. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . we need seven to succeed, seven to open the way. Chi di, there is still daylight left, still time, but not much.”

She stood near dusk in a blind alley in Whitechapel on the verge of the City of London. Distant notes drifted down from the sliver of sky far above, bells tolling the Feast of the Epiphany on the first Sunday in 1812. The young woman (little more than a girl, perhaps sixteen years of age) pulled her worn-out sailor’s coat around her and knotted her red kerchief against the cold. She scratched numbers on the brick wall in front of her, deepening the grooves made hundreds of times before. Staring at the numbers until the bricks faded, until she could see deep into herself and beyond, the girl hummed.

Rooks flew over rooftops but she did not heed their calls. She was on the marches of ala mmuo, the realm of the spirits. There she met the ancestors, the ndichie, who spoke of pride burnished under the sun, the heart of courageous healing, the brown eye of wisdom. Today she went farther than she ever had before, led on by the humming of a thousand bees at a thousand bee-ships, until she neared the border to another land. The moon in that place illuminated a row of pillars on a ridge in the distance, pillars topped with watching creatures. One shape lifted itself off a pillar, a white owl as large as a house, an owl with a swallow’s tail streaming behind it as it flew towards her. The young woman fled the owl’s reshing beak, escaped from the borderland, turned back to see the owl circling at an invisible threshold. Its cry pierced the humming, followed her as she tumbled away.

Falling, she caught a glimpse of a young white woman reading by candlelight in an attic. A golden cat sat in the white woman’s lap. The walls of the attic leaned inward, the roof sagging like a thumb seeking an insect to squash. The white woman thrust the book up against the room’s slow throttle; the cat arched its back and spat. The candle flame shrank. The white woman threw back her head and opened her mouth, trying to sing but only gasping. The candle went out.

The woman in the alley ceased humming, fell back into herself. Before she awoke fully to her body, she heard the beating of a great drum and the booming of a great bell—a drum with eyes and a bell rimmed by living fire, out of which came a voice soothing and powerful, neither male nor female yet both at the same time.

“Uche chukwu ga-eme, God’s will shall be done,” intoned the voice in the secret language and in English. “Seven singers for turning to the people a pure language. ‘But who shall lead them? From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia and Cush, the daughter of the dispersed . . .’”

A figure emerged in the mist on Mincing Lane. He wore a coat from the previous century, a reddish coat that seemed to shift with the vagaries of the fog. Porters, carriage-men and servants passed him by but would be hard-pressed to describe him in that instant and had forgotten him entirely by the time they reached their destinations. Only the rooks wheeling overhead in the late-afternoon sky might have known what the man was, but no one understands their calls. Unheeded, the rooks returned to their towers as the church bells ceased tolling for the Feast of the Epiphany on the first Sunday of 1812.

The man in the crimson coat scanned Mincing Lane, a thoroughfare between Fenchurch Street and Great Tower Street not far from the Thames in the City of London. He found the three-story counting house of a merchant, unremarkable except for its dolphin-shaped door knocker and pale blue window trim. Without removing his gaze from the house, he took from one pocket a shrivelled apple. Fastidiously, he ate. His eyes took in the house, knowing as they already did every angle and every surface. Keeping pace with his eyes, his tongue and teeth delicately destroyed the fruit.

He was down to the core when the first light came on in the house. One window glowed in the mist, flickered as someone inside crossed the candle. He stopped eating, apple core held like a half-moon twixt finger and thumb. A candle was lighted in an attic room, illuminating a golden cat sitting on the window sill. The man’s coat undulated, restless and ruddy. Night came. The cold increased but the coat-man disregarded it; he had been much colder before.

Very faint, the man heard a hum in the back of his mind. Eyes still on the house, he sought inward and outward and round-ward, chasing the source of the sound. No good. The ghost whisper of a hum faded, eluding him as it had for a long age of this earth. Somewhere above the fog the moon rose. The house—moored and complacent—was unaware of him, or aware only as a sleeper is, in some deep recess of thought beyond waking.

The man in the coat swallowed the core in one bite. “Soon,” he said to the house. The next moment, he was gone.

Chapter 1: Drunk with Secret Joy

London merchant Barnabas Eusebius Playdermon McDoon received a box at his Mincing Lane house on the first Monday of 1812. Sanford, the firm’s other partner, a man of few hairs and fewer words, said the box had come in the morning post but no one knew its origin. Barnabas pushed aside the letter he had been writing to their Bombay factor about the Hamburg and Copenhagen markets for smilax root, pepper and mastic gum. The interruption pleased Barnabas: he had fretted all morning, his irritation mounting as he wrote about stratagems and manoeuvres in the North Sea that he would not be able to execute in person. He was tired of waging tabletop battles between his inkpot and his snuffbox. He longed for the cardamom whispers he thought he heard just around the corner of deserted streets, the minarets and elephants he thought he saw reflected in shop windows. He desired to exorcise the ghost of guilt and the memory of actions undone, a love abandoned.

“Well, beans and bacon, let’s have a look,” said Barnabas, who retained a Scottish accent even after years in London. He cut away the wrapper, revealing a wooden box. At that moment Barnabas and Sanford heard, or thought they heard, a low, distant hum, like a hundred bees moving together over a far-away meadow. They heard the ticking of the clock on the mantle, the voice of their apprentice (Barnabas’s nephew Tom) in the main office, the cry of rooks circling the rooftops, the clatter of horses and wagons on Mincing Lane, all the hubbub of London life. But under that was a humming. Barnabas opened the box. The humming, still unacknowledged by either man, grew louder in their ears, though it remained low and distant, as if the bees had only gotten larger, not closer.

The box held a key, a book, and a letter. Seeing three new mysteries in place of one, Barnabas nearly left his seat with excitement. Sanford’s face became three times as dour as before. Barnabas placed the three new things on the desk, thrusting aside his inkbottle, quill, blotting paper, quizzing glass, and now-forgotten letter to the Bombay factor. Gripping his vest with one hand, Barnabas held up the key and commented on its ordinary appearance. Sanford nodded but disagreed inwardly: keys need locks, and McDoon & Associates knew of no lock for this key, which was disorder of the worst kind.

Clutching at his vest so a button nearly came loose, Barnabas turned his attention to the book. On its age-mottled cover stood in abraded gold print: Journies and Travells to Yount and the Realms Within, Being Divers Recollections of Those Who Wished Themselves to Go. The book listed no author. The two partners considered the book. They knew every land, city, and fiefdom on all the trade routes, and had shipped out to India when employed by Barnabas’s uncle. They corresponded with merchants, bankers, naval agents, and consuls around the world. Their library held maps, portolans, atlases, travel accounts, histories, and descriptions of the known parts of the globe. Yet they had never heard of any place called Yount. Sanford’s face was beside itself with premonitions. A key out of place was a travesty, but a country out of place was beyond reckoning, a non-thing, a disorder, a debit without a credit.

Divining Sanford’s feelings, Barnabas grinned and held out the book. Sanford declined. Barnabas pressed the book forward. Sanford, with a mulish quiver, refused again to take it.

Barnabas put the book aside, took up his quizzing glass, opened the letter, and began to read. As he read, the humming grew louder— not closer but as if more and larger bees joined the first battalion. He breathed in time to the humming. Sanford’s face resembled a winnowing blade: first a misplaced key, then a no-placed land, now Barnabas about to go missing. “Not good at all,” Sanford thought. “Bears close minding, someone to put the accounts back to rights.”

Barnabas handed the letter and the quizzing glass to Sanford. As Sanford read the letter, Barnabas hummed and stroked his vest, unaware that he did either thing. Despite himself, Sanford too hummed. A thousand thoughts raced through Barnabas’s head, spinning and whirling as they did when he was striking deals on the exchange, only a hundred times more powerful. A thousand thoughts marched through Sanford’s head, wheeling and stamping as they did when he was closing the account books, only a hundred times more powerful. Humming in unison now, the two men looked at the letter and then at one another. They dimly heard the hurlyburly of Mincing Lane and apprentice Tom teasing his sister Sally as she returned from lessons. The humming overlaid all else in their minds. Barnabas hummed bees that coursed in mighty zigzags and raced in golden loops. Sanford hummed bees that serried together in purposed patterns.

“Yes,” they said together, “we will.”

The humming crescendoed and ceased. The ticking of the clock was the loudest thing in the room again. The two men leaned back, blinking. Barnabas continued to stroke his vest, fingers tracing the pattern out of India, with its curling red tendrils and little blue flowers on a cream background. His breathing slowed. Sanford handed back the quizzing glass. Barnabas reread the letter, aloud this time:

On the Day of Three Kings, To Mister McDoon, Merchant of Mincing Lane, by Dunster’s Court

Dear Sir,

You seek something new, a way to your future by reclaiming your past. We can show that to you, if you take the chance. Enclosed are a key and a book. The book explains itself: others have gone before you, and have left instructions for those who would follow. The key is another matter. We cannot tell you all you need to know about the key, only that you must learn about its peculiar abilities yourself. This is not a game. If you seize the chance, you will be engaged in a great mission upon which the fates of many depend. More we cannot reveal until your heart speaks for you and you pass certain tests.

Go Tuesday week to the Piebald Swan, in Finch-House Mews hard by the London Dock. Two o’clock. Ask for the Purser. He will explain what needs explaining in the first instance. Take a trusted companion, one who would share hazards with you on a long journey if you were to undertake such.

Tell no one of your plans. Others seek the key. Their intentions are not good. Above all, avoid the agents of N.C. Strix Tender Wurm.

This offer will not be repeated. If you do not meet the Purser on Tuesday (being January 14^th), you will never be given this opportunity again. Will you take it?

Postscript: We cannot promise heart’s desire. But we know what you seek and can help you regain what you have lost. Will you take the chance?

Barnabas rubbed his eyes. Sanford shook his head. Each man wondered if the ink might suddenly fade or the letter evaporate, so strange and unexpected was its message. Barnabas and Sanford thought of another letter, almost a quarter-century old, locked in a trunk, never revealed and never spoken of. The contents of that letter were stroked upon their hearts, Barnabas the recipient, Sanford the confidante.

Barnabas leaped back in memory to a place smelling of coriander, mangoes and sandalwood. Her voice was in his ear, the touch of her arms around his neck. He saw her singing in a garden. Kneading his vest, Barnabas stared at a print on the wall (one of his favourites, depicting Acteon and Diana) but he did not see it. Sanford remembered that place too, where the sun was as huge and red as a pomegranate. He recalled the aftermath: the letter hidden in the trunk, the arguments with Barnabas’s uncle (the McDoon in those days), threats of dismissal from the firm and of disinheritance. Barnabas had not had the strength to resist his uncle, and had stayed in the firm and kept his inheritance, paying a heavy price to do so.

Barnabas gazed at his calicosh vest. Without raising his face, Barnabas said, “We should go, old friend.” Sanford waited. “We must go, to discover whether the letter’s claims are true.”

Sanford said, “Heart’s desire. A most private affair, Barnabas. How could strangers know?”

“Precisely,” said Barnabas. “How could they?”

“Speculation,” said Sanford, “or just business. Everyone knows, for example, that McDoon & Associates lost on our ventures in clove and nutmeg last year.”

“In which case, we should meet the letter writers if only to recoup that loss,” said Barnabas, “But, nay, spices as heart’s desire? Surely you, of all people, would argue that poetics ought best be left out of the counting house.”

“The loss you would have the letter refer to cannot be recovered,” said Sanford. His voice now bore traces of his Norfolk upbringing

(Sanford had come to London years ago from Norwich).

“No,” Barnabas said, gripping his vest. “But, oh Sanford, who can say? I should have . . . What if she . . . ? Not one day in all these years . . .” Barnabas sighed, then realized that Sanford alluded to more than Barnabas’s own loss. Suddenly he saw in memory his uncle, slamming a door, upsetting a shelf of ledger books. Old McDoon had exiled Sanford when Sanford defended Barnabas, ended Sanford’s employment. Damned as he was, Sanford could only find employment as a wharfinger’s “boy,” a mercantile odd-jobs man making barely enough to stay alive. Mrs. Sanford did not survive the blow—she died of pleurisy that winter, a death Sanford laid at the feet of the Old McDoon. Barnabas supported Sanford as best he could in secret, and had been the only mourner at Mrs. Sanford’s funeral besides Sanford and the McDoon’s cook.

In the end, thought Barnabas, looking at his stockings, which were quince-coloured because it was Monday, what did he gain from it, my implacable uncle? He died not long after he denied me my desire and ruined Sanford. All his talk of our Edinburgh upbringing and our reputation in London, our standing: those things did not warm him in his waning hours. He was as good as his word, though, no matter how hard that word was. He did not disinherit me. The first thing Barnabas had done as the proprietor of McDoon & Associates was to install Sanford as his partner in the firm.

The ticking clock brought Barnabas back to the present. He said, “You are right, dear Sanford, some things cannot be gotten again.”

“But some things might be,” said Sanford, the Norfolk thick in his voice, holding his fist in the palm of his other hand. “One loss shall not compound another.” He leaned across the desk, prodded the letter. “If even one loss could be mended, then we would be nearly as good as restored.”

For a second Barnabas and Sanford shared a montage of memories: a chaffinch on the churchyard gate, a minaret against a great red sun, the roar of surf under a ship the size of a castle. And crabbed handwriting on a letter locked in a trunk upstairs. Barnabas pushed his chair back, and strode forward to clasp his partner’s hand. “Thank you,” he said, in a voice low and taut. “We shall double this cape together, old friend. Together.”

The partners turned to practical matters, neither of them having heard of the Piebald Swan. Sanford said, “Finch-House Mews is above Hermitage Stairs near Brown’s Key and the Oil Wharf. George & Sons, the chandlers, have their office at Finch-House Longstreet and the New Deanery. You’ll recall they owe us for jute-sacking from the Gazelle’s last voyage.”

“Well, buttons and beeswax,” said Barnabas, “We should ask ’em, the Georges, about this Piebald Swan.”

Sanford shook his head. “The letter is clear about not telling anyone.”

Barnabas would not be swayed. “Not to tell anyone of our plans,” he pointed to the letter, adopting the tone he used with East India Company officials and their lawyers when interpreting a clause in a contract. The lips on Sanford’s face stretched briefly upward, the nearest thing to a smile he afforded himself or others. Barnabas was, he knew, “clarifying,” as Barnabas called it. He’d seen Barnabas “clarify” contractual points to a profitable nicety many times before. Sanford was an able practitioner of “clarification” himself.

“In formal terms, yes,” said Sanford. “But think what might occur should we noise about our enquiries for an inn or coffeehouse named the Piebald Swan. Quick ears will pick up our tale, pass our scent for money in all the rookeries and dens from Cripplegate to Whitechapel.”

“Fairly spoken,” said Barnabas. “Point to you, round still undecided.” Sanford bowed his head. “No good to have every rascal, wretch, and cutpurse from here to Limehouse swarmin’ ’round us. Not that we couldn’t handle ’em, of course, just that the letter states it pretty plain . . .” Barnabas lost his sentence as he thrust out his arm, waving the quizzing glass in lieu of a cutlass to “handle ’em.”

Sanford ducked the sweep ofthe quizzingglass.“Quite,”hesaid. “And then there’s the N.C. Strix Tender Wurm the letter warns us against.”

Barnabas paused in mid-stroke, looking like Playdermon, the hero of the hills whose exploits were put on stage by Buskirk in the year Barnabas was born. “Ah,” he exclaimed. “Surely a monstrous brute, this Wurm fellow, a great villain . . . but we . . . aren’t . . . scared . . . of . . . him!” Between each word, Barnabas took huge swipes with his phantom blade, ending with an explosive chop to a globe that he deemed suitable as a substitute for the Wurm’s head.

Once again, the merest rictus crossed Sanford’s face, the grimace that was his mule’s smile. Not scared, no, he thought. But best be wary, all the same.

Satisfied that he had dispatched the Wurm, Barnabas thumbed through the book from the box. As Sanford’s eyes narrowed, Barnabas read aloud from a page at random: “‘On March 10, 1788 the two ships in the French naval expedition led by de la Perouse left Port Jackson in Australia, witnessed by the British onshore, and vanished. France has been searching ever since for the lost expedition.’ Well, there’s some proof for you! Everyone has heard about the lost Perouse expedition. There was even that play about it, here in London. Not that I care for the French, mind you, but all the same, poor devils. . . . Ah listen, here’s more: ‘Some believe that the Perouse ships have wandered off our world onto the mist-wracked roads that lead to Yount . . .’”

Words like “mist-wracked”nearly caused the tendrils on Barnabas’s vest to uncurl with delight. Eyes shining, Barnabas was about to steer the McDoon’s Mincing Lane counting house onto the salt-roads in search of the Perouse expedition and Yount itself, when Sanford pointed to the clock and reminded Barnabas that they were due at the Exchange right after lunch. The India tendrils strained, and the counting house bucked to leave the quay, but Barnabas with a great sigh warped himself back to the clock and its demands. Barnabas sighed, “Yes, yes, right you are, tempus fugit, as the old Tully would put it. But tonight then, we can read the book this evening.”

“No,” said Sanford. “Tonight we meet at the Jerusalem coffeehouse to discuss the business in camphor wood with Matchett & Frew and their syndicate. Remember?”

Barnabas sighed again and searched the key for clues about its provenance. Finding none, he put the key in a vest-pocket. He took it out, checked the key again, returned it to his pocket. One hand soon found itself stroking the vest-pocket, sometimes fondling the key within. He locked the letter in the lockbox.

“We need to keep the book about so that we can read it, clear up this mystery,” said Barnabas. “I know. We’ll hide it in plain sight . . . in the library.”

Neat and orderly, thought Sanford, who followed Barnabas out of the inner office, up the back stairs, and into the library on the second floor. Barnabas slipped Journies and Travells to Yount and the Realms Within onto a lower shelf between The Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson and The Female Quixote. Waving a hand above his head, Barnabas declared that no one would ever think to find the strange book there. But he was wrong.

Tom could not believe his luck. For an hour, his masters had been in the partners’ office, leaving him unsupervised in the clerk’s room. Perched high on a stool at his scrivener’s desk, surrounded by ledgers and inventory books, he at first diligently reconciled the accounts for the Gazelle’s latest voyage. Gradually, however, as the partners’ office door remained shut, Tom dwelled instead on the escapades of various friends. His pen moved with languor as he thought of the theatres in Drury Lane, Covent Garden and Vauxhall. The door to the street opened, startling him into activity, but it was only his sister Sally, back from her morning lessons.

Tom was grateful for his situation but he longed for life beyond the ledger books, especially at a time when England was fighting for its life against the tyrant Bonaparte. The house of McDoon dealt in goods from India and China, selling mostly to merchants in Hamburg and Copenhagen and other ports in the North of Europe, with an occasional foray into cochineal or campeche wood from the southern Americas or figs from Turkey. While the trade sounded exciting, Tom never ventured farther than the Thameside quays and spent most of his days at his daventry-desk within the four walls of the house on Mincing House Lane. Tom had never even been back to Edinburgh, let alone seen Bombay or Madras: Bit unfair, Tom thought, his pen blotting. Uncle Barnabas was sent out to Bombay by his uncle when he was my age!

Thomas Tobias MacLeish and Sarah Margaret MacLeish had come to their uncle as children. Their mother was sister to Barnabas, a younger sister whose naval husband had died at the Battle of Camperdown in 1797. Having nowhere to turn as a pregnant widow, with a son aged six and a daughter aged three, she had left Edinburgh to plead for haven with Barnabas. Haven he had gladly given her, his only surviving sibling, but she died just months later delivering a stillborn son. In the fifteen years since their mother’s death, Tom and Sally had become as son and daughter to Barnabas and he was both father and mother to them, with Sanford as much a parent to them as Barnabas.

Sally loved Tom with the comprehensive fierceness of an orphan. Sally resembled Tom in more than just looks (both had dark unruly hair, darting hazel eyes over high cheekbones, and chins a trifle too small for their faces): she too longed to find a dazzling field upon which to meet the cavalry charge of fate. More, she yearned for high houses of thought that girls were not allowed to enter and she dreamed of hills that could not be found on any map in the City of London.

The interlude ended as Tom knew it must, with Barnabas and Sanford returning to the outer office. (Sanford’s full name was Nehemiah Severin Sanford, but he never answered to anything other than his last name, finding it uneconomical to use three words when one would suffice.) Tom picked up his pen, sighed, did sums in the margins of wastepaper fetched out of the cartonnier. Sally had already gone upstairs. Magpies cried above the gables, horses whinnied outside, an oyster-man hawked his wares in the street.

The clock seemed to tick even more slowly than usual.

On her way to her room, Sally made a detour. She heard footsteps on the back stairs, which was odd because she heard the maid—for whose use the back stairs were primarily intended—gossiping in the kitchen (“mardling,” the maid called it) with her aunt, the cook. The footsteps must, therefore, belong to Barnabas and Sanford, which was doubly odd because neither man regularly left the ground floor during business hours. Sally dashed across the landing before the two merchants reached the second floor from the opposite direction. She dove into the library, and then scrambled under the writing desk in the far corner. Sanford and her uncle walked into the library. Hardly daring to breathe, Sally knelt under the desk and listened (dismissing thoughts that it was not very ladylike to hide under desks and eavesdrop).

When the men were gone, she came out from under the desk and searched the shelves for whatever book her uncle had deemed so important or dangerous that he had hidden it. Sally knew the library better than anyone else. For Barnabas and Sanford the library was a tool of the trade, for Tom a duty, but for Sally it was a field of pleasure, a storehouse, the contents of which she purloined on nocturnal raids. Her schoolmates, the daughters of other men of good standing, fancied romances and tales of gothic horror, but Sally hungered for knowledge about political economy, history, natural philosophy, just about any topic that a man (but, alas, not a woman) might debate in Parliament or in the coffeehouses. Her uncle worried about how she was to marry, since few men were interested in an educated woman, but he indulged her. Sally located the book in five minutes.

Her room was a cubby right under the eaves, smelling of tea and pepper because the rest of the attic was used to store trade goods. By the gable-window, alone with her cat Isaak, Sally began to read Journies and Travells to Yount and the Realms Within. The yearning in her heart responded, quickened as she turned the pages, began to take shape and name. The book’s anonymous author, or authors, seemed to be present, whispering in her ear. She missed lunch, then almost missed dinner and barely ate when she did come to the table. The cook was not the only one to notice Sally’s agitation. “Roasted rabbit, Miss Sally,” urged the cook. “With mustard gravy just the way you like it.” But Sally paid little heed to either coney or mustard.

“Something is afoot in this house,” said the cook to her niece, the maid. “Or I am a stag-turkey.” The cook and the maid were in the kitchen as noon neared. They had just heard Sally enter the library, followed closely by Barnabas and Sanford.

The cook picked up her flairing knife in one hand and the rabbit to be skinned in the other. Her words followed the rhythm of her knife.

“I have been in this house a long time,” the cook said. “And I feel something’s come unstilted.” She had been a long time at McDoon & Associates. Originally from a village by the Norfolk Broads, near the fishing port of Great Yarmouth, she had been called to London by Sanford many years ago. Her mother had been a maid to Sanford’s family in Norwich, and now the cook had called her niece from the same village. Unlike Sanford, the cook’s Norfolk accent was plain to hear at all times. She ran the kitchen the way Sanford ran the office: no pan was ever misplaced, no tureen lacked its top.

Her niece, the maid, nodded. The cook put down the flairing knife, wiped her hands, picked up the leaching knife to slice the skinned coney.

“Yestereve,” the cook said, leaching the meat. “I felt uneasy. Mark my words, niece, this home is being watched . . . spied on like.”

“Aunt,” said the maid. “As I lighted the candles yesterday, I had a sort of quaver, like Old Shuck had walked on my shadow. There was something outside in the dark. I thought maybe I saw a man near Dunster Court.”

Both women crossed themselves.

“Mister McDoon and Mister Sanford, now, they are up to something, those two; they’ll keep this home safe, so don’t you worry about no boggarts in the alley,” said the cook. “But could be there’s our Miss Sally to worry about, regardless.”

The cook put the coney in the roasting-pan, and said, “Miss Sally is a funny little smee.”

Aunt and niece thought of ducks trapped by nets in the Norfolk Broads, how the “smees” struggled in the brashy reeds until exhaustion and the hunter’s hand overcame them. The cook wiped her hands again, touched the medallion of St. Morgaine (the baker-abbess of Chiswick-near-Shea, the matron saint of cooks) around her neck , returned to grinding the mustard seeds for the dinner’s sauce.

“I think she sees things you and I don’t, niece, nor other folks neither, though what things I don’t rightly know,” said the cook, shaking her head. “Always up in her room with her books.”

The cook finished grinding the mustard seeds.

“Which ain’t normal itself, her all alone up in the attic, in the maid’s room, mind you,” said the cook.

“Grateful I am for that, aunt,” said her niece. “Especially as means sharing a room instead with you in the back-house, with its lovely big fireplace.”

“Make yourself useful then,” said the aunt. “Fetch out the china with the pheasant on it, the blue pheasant, that’s the one, it’s Sally’s favourite, we’ll serve on it today. So long as Sally eats proper, won’t matter so much what she sees . . . funny little smee.”

Sally disappointed the cook that afternoon, hardly touching the coney in mustard gravy. She did not voice her excitement but Tom sensed something, just as he sensed an electric air about Sanford and Uncle Barnabas. Tom sensed equally that Covent Garden might be less exciting than whatever agitated the other three. Rather than visit the theatre after dinner, Tom intercepted Sally as she hurried upstairs.

“You are quiet today, sister,” said Tom. He did not need to say more. Sally beckoned him into the partners’ room, empty since Barnabas and Sanford were at a coffeehouse. The coals in the fireplace and a lone candle on the table created shadows on the walls. Sally told Tom what she had read.

“A book about a lost continent in the southern seas?” Tom laughed. “Well, I’ll sooner believe that the giants will walk off the Guildhall clock! It’s an old and discredited story, dear sister! Cook and Bougainville have been there, to the far South Seas, you know that. They charted Australia, New Zealand and Van Diemen’s Land. But that’s all, there’s nothing more to be discovered except perhaps some tiny islands not worth the mention. At most, we’d find some strange animals, with luck some gold or cotton or other useful stuffs worth trading, and a king we’d either have to conquer or make a treaty with.”

He stopped when he saw the anger on Sally’s face.

“The book,” she said, “The book . . . it’s real, what it says, I can tell. You must believe me. Let me show you.” Something in her voice made him follow her to the library. Lighting one candle and shutting the door, in case Barnabas and Sanford returned early from the coffeehouse, Sally produced the book for Tom. Seeing the dog-eared, weathered tome, the apprentice became a little less jocular. The mere sight of it made Sally’s claims more plausible.

Sally read, “‘Ptolemy and Pomponius Mela assumed the existence of a great southern continent, necessary to balance the boreal continents, for how otherwise would the Earth remain equilibrated and avoid wandering lost in the void?’”

She paused. The lacquered globe in the room caught the candlelight.

“‘Plato wrote of the fall of Atlantis, a mangled legend in his time but one preserving a measure of truth. A cataclysm in ancient times wrenched the continents and sent the ocean out of its bed. Does not the Bible itself tell us of the great Flood?’”

Sally paused again. She and Tom thought about forty days and forty nights of rain. The dancing shadows from the candle seemed to rise up and overwhelm the ship’s model on the top shelf.

She read out another passage: “‘Far south of India and Sumatra lies land, exceeding difficult to reach, of no fixed latitude, fenced by perils. Some say this is the land of Prester John, in the wilderness of sunrise seas beyond Araby. Others say it is a floating island, peopled with the races described by Herodotus. The Chinese admiral Cheng Ho, on his expeditions through the Indian Ocean to eastern Africa, is said to have lost ships on a coast that no one has since seen. Dutch whalers speak of mountains on the anti-septentrional horizon and say that boats seeking those mountains never return, only that sometimes one hears voices over the near-frozen waters of the deepest south.’”

Tom stirred. “That sounds like what the survivors claimed happened to the boats of the Glen Carrig.”

Sally and Tom thought about the story published by the survivors of that ill-fated ship. The Glen Carrig had wrecked in 1757 in the southern ocean, blown far off the shipping lanes. The ship’s boats had landed on vast mud-flats where they were attacked by creatures unknown to natural philosophers. Plangent cries had filled the air, and other ships, empty, were stranded in the estuaries of that land. The authors swore that their adventures were true, but they were derided or pitied as madmen whose thirst and hunger as they drifted on the open sea had forced nightmares into their minds.

The candle burned low. Sally thumbed ahead to a page very near the end of the book. Her voice lowered as she read again: “‘We live in the Age of Reason. We employ the tools of enquiry that Locke and Leibniz, Hume and Condorcet have uncovered so that we may correct the omission of Yount from mankind’s histories and systems of thought. Yount is a third hemisphere, a terra abscondita, a hidden world within a lost sea, or mare perdita.’”

Tom shrugged and said, “All those claims hardly make it as correct as Cocker.”

Sally implored, “Damn it, brother: sapere aude.”

Tom looked shocked at the first expression and then blank at the second. Sally translated: “‘Dare to know.’ It’s Latin, the rallying cry of our modern age, the motto of Kant.”

Tom laughed. “I yield, sister. You are harder than Coade-stone.” He and Sally had been schooled in German, Tom because he needed it for McDoon & Associates’ business in Germany and Scandinavia, Sally because her uncle had indulged her desire to learn as much as (no, more than) Tom. One of McDoon’s corresponding merchants, the Landemanns of Hamburg, had recommended a German governess, Fraulein Reimer, a member of the German expatriate community around Wellclose Square. Fraulein Reimer had become part of the family over the years and now lived in a small apartment in the back-house behind the main house. She had not, however, had uniform success with each of her charges. Tom had a lazy facility with German but annoyed Fraulein Reimer with his indifference to the dative and genitive cases. Sally was Fraulein Reimer’s star pupil, speaking with the precision of a Heidelberg professor. Unfortunately, Sally acted like a Heidelberg professor in other ways too. “Quatsch,” was all Tom could muster in reply, the German word for “nonsense,” which he heard all too often from Fraulein Reimer.

Sally was about to continue her lecture when they heard the clackering of the brass dolphin on the door as Barnabas and Sanford returned from the coffeehouse. By the time Barnabas and Sanford had reached the top of the front stairs, Tom was in his bedroom, and Sally was tiptoeing into her room in the attic. Tom would not admit it to Sally, but he thought about Yount late into the night. Sally was beyond debate. She wished herself to go. Somewhere far off there was a humming, threaded now with an intermittent, thin wailing, an eerie contrapunto that made Sally cry out in her sleep.

Chapter 2: A Visit to the Piebald Swan

For the next week Barnabas thought about little else except the meeting with the Purser, whoever he might be. Bursting with gambits, queries, and recipes for swift success, but not able to tell Tom or Sally about them, Barnabas shared his thoughts instead with Yikes, the ancient border collie curled at his feet by the fire, and Chock, the parrot given as a gift by an East Indian connection. “What’s lost will be recovered, well, what do you think of that?”

Yikes—whom no one had ever heard bark or ever seen move more than three feet at any speed resembling haste—regarded Barnabas with equanimity and snuggled closer to the hearth. Uncharitable souls noted that Yikes, whom Barnabas characterized as a “Scotsman in London, just like me,” was no more a border collie than King George III was sane; in truth, Yikes had come into the world behind a knacker’s yard near Bishopsgate, so the only border known to him was that between the City and Spitalfields, and the only sheep Yikes was likely ever to herd were those in his sleep. Chock made the sound for which he was named, and shifted from one foot to another on his perch. Pleased with these responses, Barnabas forged ahead with his drawing-room plans.

Sanford was another matter. Learning about Yount was important, and seeking to restore a past that Barnabas had thrown away most important of all, but McDoon & Associates had to be in order before they embarked on a new venture. One locked one’s door and arranged for alternative postal delivery before a journey.

“Beans and bacon,” Barnabas muttered when Sanford urged their attention to the disposition of the northern trades.

“Barnabas, be reasonable,” said Sanford. “Our regular trade is blocked but the Landemanns in Hamburg and the Buddenbrooks in Luebeck write of loopholes in the French embargo. Helgoland in the North Sea, Toenning on Jutland: the Royal Navy protects merchants at those places.”

Barnabas, with a “Quatsch,” consented to be led through the opportunities to break the French blockade. Would Tuesday the 14^th never come?

Tuesday came, January 14^th, the feast day of St. Fiona, so all the shops had a dried nettle hung above the door in memory of her martyrdom. Barnabas and Sanford stepped out into a raw, sunless day. Barnabas admired the dolphin door knocker as he closed the door behind him, and wondered if the pale blue window trim wouldn’t want refreshing come spring. From the McDoon comptoir in Mincing Lane, they walked towards the Piebald Swan in Wapping. All the life of the City of London thronged about them, a raucous river of buying and selling in the world’s greatest port. Their house was nestled in the heart of the City, surrounded by the counting houses of friends and rivals such as Chicksey, Veneering & Stobbles just round the corner, Matchett & Frew in Crosby Square and others in Austin Friars and Pope’s Head Alley. The pales of their immediate world were the Bank of England and Royal Exchange on Threadneedle Street, the East India House on Leadenhall Street, the Baltic Coffeehouse near St. Mary-Axe, the Victualling Office on Tower Hill. On a stroll, Barnabas was apt to swell with pride at these edifices to trade, and expatiate on Great Britain’s imperia pelagi, its oceanic empire, but the intensity of today’s mission left him no time for such amplitude. The Purser awaited, and Yount beyond him. The key in his vest-pocket bounced with every stride.

Farther east they headed, near the Danish Church and Wellclose Square, where many of their captains lived, in a neighbourhood known for German merchants and sugar refiners. Skirting the London Dock, they entered a run of streets in the district of Wapping. Past a great brewery, near an even larger staveyard, they found the New Deanery, which intersected Finch-House Longstreet where George & Sons, Ship Chandlers, had their place of business. But Barnabas and Sanford did not halt at George & Sons (payment owed us, thought Sanford), hunting instead for the Finch-House Mews that must be nearby. The houses on Finch-House Longstreet were narrow and nondescript, built a century earlier in the plain fashion favoured after the Great Fire of 1666. Few people were about: a butcher’s apprentice in an apron hurrying westwards to the Smithfield market, a woman with a load of old clothes for sale on her back, a peddler going house to house selling candle stubs and used suet, one or two men idling at a corner who might be sailors on shore leave. Barnabas paid little heed, but Sanford did not like the looks of the idlers. Wapping was no place for the fainthearted.

As Finch-House Longstreet turned towards the Thames, inns and taverns catering to a seafaring clientele appeared. Sanford made a slight show of thrusting his walking stick forward with every other step, a parsimonious yet eloquent gesture not lost on several men slouched in front of an alehouse. Interspersed with the taverns were a few coffeehouses, more refined establishments, though hardly as exalted as coffeehouses in the City. Shopkeepers, broker’s clerks, coopers, chandlers, minor excise officials, shipwrights, and owners of ropewalks and tar-sheds frequented the Wapping coffeehouses, not great merchants such as Barnabas and Sanford. The proximity of the docks made sailor’s tales and other fables as much the subject of conversation as ship arrival and departure dates, the price of corn or alum, and the state of the war against the tyrant Napoleon. Barnabas slowed as he passed an inn called The White Hart—notorious for the imaginative mendacity of its drinkers—and stopped. A narrow alleyway led off Finch-House Longstreet. Stepping over dung, Barnabas and Sanford walked down a slight incline into the mews. The mews were empty, but at one end was a little sign painted with the likeness of a piebald swan. Barnabas fingered the key in his pocket and walked up the steps of the coffeehouse. Sanford, with a glance over his shoulder, followed.

The Piebald Swan was tiny and seemed to have survived the Great Fire, with its exposed roof beams and crooked stairs. A coffee urn sat on a counter at one end, tended by a man in a skull-cap. He had a short black beard, dark eyes and coppery skin. The man said nothing but looked intently at his only visitors. On a credenza next to the urn was a coffee-service in gold-rimmed white porcelain with harbour scenes painted expertly on each cup. The walls were bare except for an engraving of a man swimming with a dolphin, and a painting of a schooner taking wind into its sails under moonlight.

“I received a letter. I have come to see the Purser,” said Barnabas, warming to the puzzle as he did when entering a business negotiation. He felt the key in his pocket. He thought he might have heard a humming as he touched it.

The man in the skullcap pointed to Barnabas’s pocket. In an accent that neither Barnabas nor Sanford could place, he asked, “What do you have in your pocket?”

At the very edge of memory, Barnabas vaguely recalled that question coming into an old story of another riddling contest. But didn’t the question in that story have to do with a ring?

“A key,” said Barnabas.

“To what?”

“I do not know. That’s why I seek the Purser.”

“Who is your companion?”

“He is . . .” Barnabas checked himself again. “He is the companion I was directed to bring with me. We are partners.”

The man in the skullcap looked from Barnabas to Sanford and back again. Sanford was impressed with how much their host said without speaking. The man in the skullcap pointed upstairs, and stepped aside with his finger still outstretched. Under the proprietor’s gaze, Barnabas and Sanford mounted the stairs.

The second floor was all one room, with gable windows letting in wan light from the mews, and a table at one end. At the table sat another man in a skullcap. He might have been a twin to the proprietor except that he was a little taller and had a larger nose. Like his compatriot, he dressed in a way that drew no attention to himself but was, upon close inspection, a model of simple elegance. His skullcap was black, with magenta embroidery.

Barnabas said, “Your cap, sir, I have never seen such a colour.”

The man at the desk said, “My people have recently devised the art of extracting dyes from coal-tar. This colour is one we have discovered using the new process.”

Self-professed abolitionists, Barnabas and Sanford were ashamed at themselves for wondering that such a dark-skinned people could possess a technology superior to that of any true-born Englishman (or any other European, for that matter): dye from coal-tar was a thing unknown. The merchants were willing to quash their prejudice in pursuit of profit, however, and wondered if the gentleman might consider a joint venture with McDoon & Associates to introduce the new dye process to Great Britain. Let Napoleon try to stop that!

The man at the desk offered compliments on Barnabas’s vest. Barnabas beamed: he was wearing his best today, a sherbasse silk with cerulean twiggery and scarlet buds traced on an ivory background. The man in the magenta-limned skullcap said, “I am the Purser. We have much to discuss and very little time to do so. We have summoned you because we need you. More than that I cannot say. The Learned Doctors in Yount will answer your questions. Assuming, of course, that you want to go.”

Barnabas tugged at his vest and clenched the key in his pocket.

Bees coursed in his mind through the scent of cardamom under a ripe red sun as he said, “One moment, hold on, figs and feathers . . . of course I do, want to go that is, but this whole thing is like a pig in a poke, you know.”

The Purser frowned. “Pig in a poke? I do not know this expression.” His accent, like the proprietor’s, was hard to describe, soft and yet direct, with rolled Rs and muted vowels.

Barnabas explained. “Ah,” said the Purser. “I see. You want to know more before you commit. Wise practice, in trade and in . . . ventures such as these. There is no time to tell you everything, even if I could. Like you, I am a man of business, responsible for logistics not policy. The Learned Doctors can answer the deep questions but you must win through to Yount to speak with them.”

Sanford looked through the nearest window over a tiled roof across the mews, above which he could make out the tops of masts in the distance. A rook’s shadow glided across the roof.

The Purser continued. “Long ago there was a great change in our worlds. We do not fully understand it but in strange ways your world and ours became linked. We call it the Great Confluxion. It is not natural, has potentially disastrous consequences for both our worlds.”

Barnabas and Sanford listened closely. After years of negotiating business deals, however, they knew better than to swallow whatever they were told without chewing more than once. Sanford remained suspicious that the book, the key, and this visit might be a swindle. Both men were poised to “clarify,” as if they were assessing the quality of tea auctioned at the East India Company House in Leadenhall Street or were querying the Khodja merchants in Bombay about the quality of pepper and cassia-bark for sale. Yet something had overcome their usual scepticism the morning the box arrived, and something had propelled them to the coffeehouse. They had read throughout the week from the book secreted in the McDoon library, belief alternating with disbelief. The book contained references to the “Great Confluxion,” but neither man could make sense of it.

Barnabas wondered if it had something to do with Freemasonry or with stories he had heard in the Orient about multi-armed goddesses and dragons with beards. Sanford thought perhaps it had to do with the lost tribes of Israel or with the ships of Tarshish mentioned by Isaiah and other prophets: “Cross over to your own land, O Ships of Tarshish, this is a harbour no more. He has stretched out his hand over the sea, he has shaken the kingdoms . . .”

The Purser said, “All our science has not availed to separate our worlds. There is something deeper at work than science, something you and I might call ‘magic,’ a primitive term but all we have. We have discovered that someone from your world must help us. I do not know how, except that the key is involved. The history of the key is too long to recount now. Have you heard of Tlon, Uqbar, and Tertius Orbis? Of Xiccarph? Of Carcosa and Hastur? No? Well, if you make it through to Yount, you will learn more, you will understand what the key can do if used by the proper hand.”

A shadow slid across the rooftop again, catching Sanford’s eye. The Purser leaned even closer, lowered his voice. “The key can do other things if it is used by . . . other hands. It has great power.”

Sanford looked out the window again, thinking he heard a sound from the mews below. Barnabas stroked his vest and said, “The Wurm fellow the letter spoke of!”

“Yes,” said the Purser. “‘The Wurm fellow,’ as you call him, is— how shall I say?—more than dangerous. He is . . . He wants power. More power than your Napoleon—yes, imagine that!—and he will never stop hunting for the key. Strix Tender Wurm changes guise, so it is hard to say who and where he is. We’ve heard him called The Yellow King, the one who wears the Pallid Mask. He may be the one called Professor Moriarty—have you heard that name?—rumoured to head London’s network of thieves and villains. Others say he is Doctor Silvano, the art connoisseur, who you may remember tried to poison the Duke of Umbershire and then disappeared. That is how Wurm is here in your world. He is even worse in ours. He is in our oldest legends, an owl larger than a man, with eyes of fire and a beak like a sabre. He haunts our earliest memories after the Great Confluxion.”

The merchants of McDoon & Associates were most struck by the Purser’s matter-of-fact delivery of this information. Sanford contemplated the possibility of a man, if man it was, alive since the Flood. He reached in his mind for Michael’s sword and Gabriel’s trumpet. Barnabas was torn. All thoughts of pepper, smilax root and mastic gum had swirled out of his head. Yount was in trouble. He did not know why, but the key had come to him, so he must help Yount. More: he sought the love he had surrendered. The letter said someone in Yount might be able to help him. So, he wished himself to go. But the story the Purser told was preposterous.

Barnabas said, “Sir, what proof have you of what you say? Why, who are you anyway? You have our names, but we do not have yours. For all we know, you might be a scheming Turk or Parthian!”

The Purser did not look affronted. “I am Salmius Nalmius Nax. Purser First Class, Commissionary for the Royal Fleet of Yount Major, and Deputy Attendant for the Fencibles Squadron.” He pronounced his name “Salms Nalms” but wrote it, Barnabas and Sanford were to learn later, “Salmius Nalmius.” Something, he told them when they first saw it written, to do with old family custom and Yountish protocol. Like the “k” in “knife,” thought Barnabas and left it at that. Salmius Nalmius Nax continued. “I know my story is strange to you, and you have every right to doubt me. Indeed, you would not have been called if you did not doubt. I can only assure you that what I say is true.”

“Beans and bacon!” said Barnabas. “We are no pouts fresh taken from the nest! Come, you offer no proof, only pure assertion.”

Salmius Nalmius Nax remained impassive, except for a flicker right around his eyes. “I think,” he said, “it must be—how do you put it?—that the proof of the pudding must be in the eating.”

“Which means no proof at all right now!” said Barnabas. “With pardon, sir, but you seem no more trustworthy than a bishop in Barchester. What exactly do you propose?”

Sanford nodded in support but had half an eye on the window. He felt something was in the mews. He did not like the shadows that wove across the rooftops, even knowing that they belonged to rooks.

Salmius Nalmius Nax adjusted his skullcap before responding. “You must voyage to Yount. Soon, weather to permit. With Mr. Sanford here, if that is your wish and his. There will be . . . challenges along the way and then again when you arrive. That is all I can say.”

Barnabas and Sanford stood still. They wanted to do this business but these were not standard terms and conditions. Barnabas asked, “You are devilish hard to discuss business with, Mr. Nax, sir! The giants on the Guildhall clock are more reasonable! Were we inclined to go on this journey, what assurances could you give us of our return? And how should we conduct the business of McDoon & Associates in the meantime?”

“No assurances whatsoever, Mr. Sanford,” said Salmius Nalmius Nax. “None can be forthcoming, this is not risk such as you might have underwritten at Lloyd’s. As for your firm’s business, we would run it on your behalf.”

“Ridiculous!” said Sanford.

“Nonsense!” said Barnabas. The idea that a total stranger would run McDoon & Associates was so infuriating that Barnabas, for once, was at a loss for words. The merchants of McDoon & Associates left the Piebald Swan.

The proprietor and the Purser watched Barnabas and Sanford stalk away. The skullcap slumped on Salmius Nalmius Nax’s head as he whispered something in another language to his companion. Both men looked pained. “We expected this,” Salmius Nalmius Nax said. “But it is hard all the same.”

Barnabas spat out, “Buttons and beeswax!” over and over again as he and Sanford stormed off. He so deeply believed in Yount that his anger was all the keener for the Purser’s laconic half-statements and ludicrous proposition. Sanford was even angrier about the possible truth of the Purser’s assertions about Wurm (“For their worm shall not die,” he quoted to himself. “Their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh”). So upset were the merchants of McDoon & Associates that they failed to notice two things. The first was that, as they moved down the mews towards the alley leading to Finch-House Longstreet, the Piebald Swan seemed to shift or elongate slightly, like fruit seen through a cut-glass bowl as one walks around it. The second was that, as they made their way down the Longstreet back to the City and their home on Mincing Lane, a figure detached itself from a doorway and followed them.

Chapter 3: Eyes in the Dark

Sally’s dreams were vertiginous and filled with a crying in the air. She read feverishly from the book, sharing what she could with Tom. She missed many meals (to the cook’s distress but no one else’s) and even missed her lessons once, which normally would have elicited comment, but neither her uncle nor Sanford noticed. She wondered if they had read the book too, and how it was that they had gotten the book in the first place. She tried to dismiss her fears but recalled similar dreams from childhood. Once, when she was twelve, Uncle Barnabas had called for the doctor. The doctor had patted her hand and said to her uncle, “A mild form of oneiric hysteria, related to an eidetic imagination—a common affliction of the gentle sex, particularly when they read and engage in other activities unsuited to their temperament.” But the nightmares had continued and now they were back.

She did not confide in Fraulein Reimer or in the cook, not wanting to cause them concern. Her only comforts were Isaak her cat, her commonplace book, and her visits to the partners’ office when no one was there. She had rescued Isaak from a group of boys on the street, who had bound the kitten and were about to smash it with stones. She’d given it the German version of “Isaac” because she felt there weren’t enough uses for the letter “k” in English. Then it turned out that Isaak wasn’t a boy-kitten after all but the name had already taken. As a sacrifice saved, Isaak loved Sally utterly. She had long golden fur, with a tail that stood up like a plume when she galloped, and pantaloons that flounced as she bounded onto Sally’s lap. She—Isaak, that is—stood guard at the top of the attic stairs, hissing and spitting at all comers. Everyone else in the house was terrified of Isaak, except Yikes, who ignored her, and the cook, who gave her the run of the kitchen and fed her milk from a chipped saucer. Isaak curled in Sally’s lap as she—Sally, that is—copied extracts into her commonplace book: snippets from Cowper, Gibbon and Pope, passages from Shakespeare, Thomson and Mrs. Barbauld, her own translations of Novalis and Tieck, and much else besides.

For as long as she could remember, Sally had visited the partners’ office once or twice a week, usually in the evening, whenever all the male members of McDoon & Associates were out. The mahogany furniture gleamed because, except on the warmest days of summer, a fire was always kept there. The clock ticked. Yikes slept by the fire, Chock sat in his cage, Isaak eyed them with contempt and stalked shadows.

On the walls were pictures she lived in. She imagined herself among the tiny figures in the paintings of the East India Company’s fort at Madras and the European and American trading factories at Canton. She could name each kind of ship in the mezzotint prints: chalks and galliots beating up the Trave at Luebeck, cats and pinks in the Danish Sound, schooners coasting off Dantzig. On the main table sat a bone-china punchbowl with a picture of the East Indiaman The Lady Burgess captioned “Launched September 1808 for the Honourable East India Company, God Speed and All Success!” Sanford had insisted that all visitors be reminded how necessary such wishes were: he had hung pictures of the shipwrecked East Indiamen Grosvenor and The Earl of Abergavenny, though Barnabas had re-hung them so that the opened door obscured them (“Damned unpleasant having to talk business with those poor souls staring at you.”) Sally had studied every feature of the distressed crew members, memorized the details of spars and half-submerged rigging.

The print next to the shipwrecks drew Sally even more: a white boy stunned in the water, attacked by a grey shark with jaws agape, his shipmates desperately trying to haul him in, a black sailor overseeing the rescue from the boat. She often lost herself in the trinity of white boy, grey shark and black man.

Even more than the pictures, Sally knew the smell of that room, could summon it at will, a deep aroma of pipe smoke, coal ash, leather and ink, shot through with the scent of sandalwood from a carved box that Barnabas had treasured home from Bombay. All the way home, thought Sally. Home.

Isaak, commonplace jottings, and the redolence of that room were some defence against her fears, but soon were tested. Her uncle and Mr. Sanford had been exceptionally distracted at breakfast on St. Fiona’s day, and then had gone out on some business errand. When they returned, both men were in foul humour, which added to Sally’s anxiety. The following days were ugly at McDoon & Associates. Barnabas and Sanford were curt with everyone, especially Tom, whose work the rest of that week never seemed to please the partners. An error in a remittance from a ship chandler in Wapping caused a huge row. A letter from the Landemanns in Hamburg was full of more bad news (salt shipments were being held up by the French army blockades). The cook even burned the kippers at breakfast one morning, adding to the general malaise.

“Burned the kippers,” muttered the cook, scraping the remnants

into the sink. “Well, I never in all my time!”

“Scorched ’em quite wholly,” observed her niece.

“You’ll mind your mouth or you’ll be cleaning this pan yourself,” replied the cook. Her niece dared a smile, and moved up to lend a hand with the drying. Aunt and niece worked side by side in silence.

When the cleaning up was done, the cook leaned against the sink and sighed. She pointed to a potato-mallet hanging above a chopping block. “I’m like that old beetle,” she said, meaning the mallet. “Beetle-headed anyhow. Piece of wood through and through. I ought to have seen this coming.”

“What coming, aunt?” asked her niece.

“Whatever’s coming, niece,” said the cook, dusting off a soup tureen from the blue pheasant service, though the tureen already sparkled. “I can feel something, like chickens in the coop when there’s a stoat slinking about outside. You see, you needs to get to know the ways of a house, know ’em right proper. Take Mr. McDoon, for instance, he is very particular about how his vests are pressed and laid out.”

The maid nodded. She had only recently come to the house on Mincing Lane.

“And Miss Sally,” said the cook, moving from the tureen to the mustard pot. “Upstairs in her room, dreaming and daffling and reading in all them books. She is looking for something, only she doesn’t know what.”

The cook’s cloth found invisible dust on the toast forks and rinding knives as she continued her tutorial, “Our Mr. Sanford now, Norfolk bred just like we are, he has his little ways too. Likes goat’s meat. How he loves goat’s meat. Ever since he and Mr. McDoon came back from their great trip to India, which was the cause of all the trouble with the Old McDoon. I will gladly fix it for him English-ways, but no, he must have it with pepper and spices from India, or it isn’t good enough for him! I have tried my best but, to speak wholly true, I just don’t hold with that foreign way of dealing with an honest meat.”

The cook looked up from her dusting, and said, “So my point, and maybe I got a smittick off the point, but now I will come back to it. The point, my niece, is that a house has its ways and, if you listen and watch, you can see when those ways have been disturbed, sometimes even before others know it themselves. So, something is a-coming, I says.”

The maid thought again of strangers in Dunster Court. The cook wagged a great runicled finger, and then shooed the maid away from the kitchen, saying, “Be watchful, my niece!”

Sally kept to herself, but no one except Fraulein Reimer and the cook sought her out anyway. All the men were exercised with their work and had no time. Her classmates seemed even more frivolous than usual. At every opportunity, she spirited the book to her room for reading by candlelight, poring over it as closely as the Sibyl of Cumae studied scrolls in the print above the chiffonier downstairs. Journies and Travells to Yount and the Realms Within was a compendium of disjointed details from many sources. Some passages were translations, such as those “from the records in Persian held by the customs-house at Bandar Abbas on the Straits of Hormuz” or those “being originally in Arabic from the port city of Muscat.” Memoires archived at St. John’s, the Jesuit college in Goa, were referenced, likewise manuscripts at the University of Leiden and at the presidency offices in Madras, surveys commissioned by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and by the Casa de Contracion, the trade college in Seville, and so on. Sally knew something of Alexander Dalrymple’s hypotheses on the existence of a great southern continent, which helped drive Cook on his famous voyages, and of Lord Macartney’s embassy to China in 1792. But she had not heard about Matthew Flinders’s voyage from New South Wales to Capetown in 1797, or the exploits of Jabez Haverstraw, a sailor shipwrecked south of the Nicobar Islands. Sally read about whales run ashore in Mozambique and albatrosses tangled in the rigging of Dutch East Indiamen, about “the Great Confluxion,” eddies in the cosmic ocean, the haunted roads leading to Yount.

Throughout the book ran notes of warning: references to mysterious forces, a grasping hand, suffering voices on the wind . . .

Sally almost felt she understood the threat, but not quite. The name “Strix Tender Wurm” snaked its way through the text. Sally struggled to make sense of the hints and allusions, but the book itself seemed to thwart her. Although she refused to believe it, Sally felt that the text shifted from one reading to the next: sometimes a section she had read the day before seemed to have disappeared, no matter how carefully she looked for it, sometimes the entries seemed to change order or the wording to elide subtly.

Sally, when not engrossed in the book, gazed out her attic window. So she had always done, trying to know the world beyond the house but not able or allowed to join it. She cradled Isaak for hours, looking down to the street, observing the sarabande of traffic, tracing patterns of pedestrians in cat’s fur. She wondered what passersby were thinking, where they were going. Yet the greatest fascination of all was above the rooftops. Sally looked to the sky, especially at night, seeking the moon above London’s fume. Tom not infrequently asked Sally what phase the moon was in rather than look it up in the almanac. She was always right, no matter how much fog and smoke hid the moon. “Our own lunatic! Our captains could tell the tide by Sally,” said Tom.

She began to notice an odd man and an even odder bird in the street. Mincing Lane was heavily trafficked, so she could not be sure, but at dawn there seemed to be a man loitering near the corner of Dunster Court. Not loitering exactly, but busy in an aimless sort of way, she thought, someone affecting one task while actually on another errand altogether. She became aware of him on Thursday, January 16^th, the feast day for St. Nigel-le-Blayne, which is how she remembered, because the church bells were muted on that day in honour of the saint’s deafness. Friday he was there, also Saturday . . . at least it seemed to be the same man, though the distance from her window down to the street, and the constant stir of the crowd, made it hard for her to be sure. She noticed him primarily because of his old-fashioned overcoat, like something from the engravings of a time before King George III. To match a coat that out of style, he really might have worn a bag-wig. The coat was remarkable not just for its cut and length. It was made of a reddish material that glistened as the man moved about the street. The coat almost seemed to writhe. Sally pulled back when she thought that, rubbed her eyes, and felt queasy. When she looked out again, the man and the coat were gone. She thought about telling Fraulein Reimer, but decided even Fraulein Reimer would find Sally’s suspicions absurd. In any case, the man in the coat was absent on Sunday and on Monday. “Silly,” she murmured to Isaak, who pressed up against her. “It’s just a man on his way to his employment. Must pass this way every day, only I have not noticed before.”

The bird she saw a day or two after she first saw the tall man. Sally observed many details from her bower: dray horses lumbering up to merchant warehouses, gentlemen in their cups late of an evening, the knife-grinder making his rounds, the baked potato vendor with his brazier, rooks disturbed from their perches by chimney-sweeps. Nothing escaped her gaze, certainly not the wren flitting from window to window across the street. A wren in the country is too common for mention, but a wren in the city is—as Mr. Sanford would put it—a thing out of its place. The wren seemed to be flying systematically from one house to the next, perching in crannies and cornices, almost as if it was searching for something. Sally laughed off the thought but there was the wren now positioned opposite the McDoon comptoir, its head rotating in a most un-wrenlike fashion.

She laughed again at her fears, looked out, the wren was gone. No, the wren was fluttering at her window. Sally started back. She caught its tiny eyes, black and dull as currants. Isaak leaped at the window, teeth bared and claws extended. The wren flew off, but for several days Sally saw it sitting on the eaves across the street. Isaak patrolled the attic window, growling at the wren. Convinced that the wren was spying on her, but too ashamed to admit such fears to anyone, Sally withdrew almost entirely to her room. Still no one paid much heed, so absorbed were the other members of the McDoon household in their own concerns.

Concerns drove every one but Sally out of the house Tuesday evening, January 21^st. Tom went to Drury Lane. Barnabas and Sanford, seeking to slough off the oppression they still felt from their meeting at the Piebald Swan one week earlier, were at a coffeehouse off Cornhill. Fraulein Reimer was visiting a friend at Wellclose Square. The cook and the maid had their fortnightly evening two streets over with fellow Norfolk expatriates, the “bishy barnybees” as the women called themselves.

Sally normally enjoyed an evening on her own but tonight she wanted company. She sat for a while in the partners’ office, but the smell of sandalwood in an empty room only intensified her melancholy so she retreated to her garret. The evening was still and very cold, the atmosphere heavy with river mists. Shadows thickened, her fears grew, and her shame of the fear mounted along with the fear itself.

As an antidote, she tried reading something by fussy, finger-wagging Hannah More (mostly to please Sanford, who extolled More’s virtues) but, wait, was that a creaking on the stair? Sally bent all her will to the book. A muffled voice in the hallway? Sally shut the book, closed her eyes, murmured, “Sankt Jakobi, Sankt Nikolai, Sankt Michaelis, Sankt Katharinen.” Since childhood, Sally had chanted the names of Hamburg’s churches as a charm against fear, picturing as she did Fraulein Reimer standing next to her, pointing at each church in the print of the Hamburg cityscape on the wall outside the library. “See the tall spire of the Michal?” Fraulein Reimer would say. “And Sankt Jakobi with the wunderschoen organ that Johann Sebastian Bach played?”

For a minute, Sally heard the Bach melody that Fraulein Reimer hummed, smelled the good mustiness of her black dress, and Sally felt the fear recede. But only briefly: wasn’t that a creaking near the door? It couldn’t be Yikes: that dog never left the hearthside. “Sankt Jakobi, Sankt Nikolai . . .” She could stand it no longer. Fear circled her. “Sankt Michaelis.” Sally got out of bed. “Sankt Katharinen.” She heard the clock strike eleven. Sally went to her door, summoned the kestrel within, and yanked the door open.

She saw nothing and laughed with relief. Then she did hear something: not a creak, but a rustling, like someone shuffling through papers. A rustling of paper in a counting house is too common for mention . . . except as midnight nears and one is alone in the house. Could Tom be back? No, she thought, especially if he stopped for claret or port on the way. Besides, Tom was noisy and, more to the point, would avoid the outer office whenever possible. She suppressed a giggle thinking of Tom working at his ledger books at midnight. Once more, the rustling came from below. Fear closed round again. She clutched the well of her throat but crept downstairs, Isaak padding beside her with tail flared. Sally passed the print of Hamburg on the wall outside the library, used the spires of the churches to anchor her resolve. The rustling was heard more clearly now, and also the treading of feet. “Chock,” sounded the parrot . . . and someone hissed in reply. She went down the back stairs. Oh, she thought, why doesn’t Yikes bark or attack? But she knew better than that: Yikes would sleep through the match between Gog and Magog. She meant to slip out through the kitchen and she should have done so, but something stopped her. Her fear choked her but she felt anger as well.

Before she knew what she was doing, Sally was at the door to the outer office. The door opened, arresting her advance. Isaak howled. Two men stepped forth. Vicious eyes. A yell, another (Sally’s or theirs? She was not sure). Running. She grabbed a toby-jug from the hallway stand, the jug commemorating Trafalgar, and swung it with wild strength. The first man crashed to the floor, cursing and clutching his nose. Another victory for Nelson, she thought. A short-lived victory as the second man caught her just before the door to the yard behind the house. He hit her hard. Sally was more shocked than hurt. The first man came up. “Here’s one from me,” he growled, using his free hand. Sally almost fainted from the pain this time. “Let’s go,” she heard, as they trampled over her and through the door. Her head smashed onto the floor.

“Halt!” said a voice. In the yard, just beyond the door, was a short, stout figure, hard to make out in the closing darkness. Easily seen, however, was the pistol in its hand, held steady and chest-high, the barrel glinting with light from the snowy half-moon. Sally passed out.

The clock in the coffeehouse tolled eleven. Discussion ebbed as clients began to leave. Barnabas and Sanford had revived their spirits, even if the news was depressing, about the ever-increasing price of corn, Luddite riots in Lancashire, and the unsolved mass murders the month before in Ratcliffe Highway (one of those murdered had served on an East Indiaman whose captain was well known to Barnabas and Sanford, so small the world could be, even in the great metropolis). Above all, the talk was about the war with Napoleon’s France: the victory last fall in Batavia, Wellington’s opportunities in Spain, parliamentary debates over the Orders in Council, rumours of Russian anger about the Continental System. The French, Napoleon, well, at least they were real, not phantoms. An honest Briton could do something about them. Barnabas and Sanford had nearly put “that Yount business” out of their minds as they put on their hats and left.

Few folk were on the streets. Drizzle mixed with snow covered the cobblestones. About three streets from home, they crossed one of the crooked alleys so typical of the City. A single streetlamp sent out a weak light, the oil wick sputtering. Before they realized what was happening, somebody ran up from behind and pushed them. The merchants of McDoon & Associates staggered forward. A second man slammed them into a wall of the alley. But Barnabas and Sanford spun round together with backs to the wall, as they had done together more than once in Bombay when Sanford was supercargo for Barnabas’s uncle and Barnabas shipped out with him. Both wielded heavy walking sticks.

“Come on, villains!” yelled Barnabas.

A bass growling stopped all four men in a weird tableau: Barnabas and Sanford prepared to strike, their assailants nonplussed at the failure of the attack, fists and canes raised in mid-air. The growling echoed off the bricks. From around the corner of the alley it came. And was followed by two red eyes in the dark. A dog’s head the size of a wolf’s came into view around the corner, dusky red, with huge teeth. All four men flinched. Into the weak, guttering light, hard to see in the mist and shadow, stepped a man holding a leash to the dog. His eyes glinted reddish, but probably that was a reflection from the dog. Or from his long coat, a raddled confection from a bygone era (even in this situation, Barnabas noticed that). He had a peaked hat. His teeth shone white.

The first of the two attackers cursed and bolted, then the other. Barnabas and Sanford were prepared to accept the newcomer as their rescuer . . . until they saw the dog and realized why the two footpads had fled. As the man in the glistening coat moved around the corner, so did the dog on the leash. Rather, the dog flowed around the corner, an impossibly long body that bent and formed itself around the corner as if hinged. Its forelegs were at a right angle now to its back legs and still it oozed around the corner. The growl intensified. The man in the antique coat was about to slip the leash. Sanford saw that the dog had ape-like hands.

Sanford gripped his cane for a blow before going down. Shouts erupted from the other end of the alley. Two figures raced by Barnabas and Sanford, shouting in a foreign language, and brandishing very large pistols. The dog, or whatever it was, barked loudly once—a hoarse, wet sound as if its tongue was too large for its mouth. Darkness swallowed man and dog. A few seconds later, the two newest newcomers returned out of the darkness. In the gloom, Barnabas could just make out a magenta flash on each of their skullcaps.

“Salmius Nalmius Nax!” he shouted.

“At your service.”

Half an hour later, seven people crowded into the partners’ office at the McDoon comptoir: Fraulein Reimer, Sally, Barnabas, Sanford, the Purser, the proprietor of the Piebald Swan, and Tom. The cook and the maid had returned just before Barnabas and Sanford and, after determining that Sally was well enough to talk, and that the kitchen was un-invaded, they made for their room in the back-house. “Poor brave little smee,” said the cook. “The German miss with a pistol! Housebreakers! Niece, you bar that window!”

While the cook and niece barred the windows of their room, the seven in the partners’ office were in an uproar. Only Yikes seemed unflapped, looking on from his position by the fire. Sally lay on a chair, Isaak licking her face. Sally was bruised and her right arm in a sling, but she smiled grimly at her brother. “. . . and then,” she continued, “right outside our back door, up pops Fraulein Reimer.”

“Fraulein Reimer!?” exclaimed Tom.

“Yes,” said Sally. “Cool as can be, with this huge great pistol, yelling ‘Halten Sie jetzt!’ or ‘halt now,’ I don’t know exactly because I was in shock on the ground.” Everyone looked at Fraulein Reimer, a plump woman whose hands now held needlepoint, and who steadfastly refused to look at the others, though she was blushing. Shaking his head, Barnabas asked the fraulein what had happened.

The fraulein stopped working the needlepoint, looked up shyly, and said, “Those, those . . . boese Leute . . . bad men, they stopped only for an Augenblick, a moment, and then they ran around me, jumped over the wall, were gone.” She paused, looked down again at her needlework. “It is the most shockingest thing, the most shockingest thing.” Her undertone suggested, however, that she would have shot the burglars if necessary.

Barnabas and Sanford added this news to the evening’s growing list of wonders. Fraulein Reimer chasing off burglars was as remarkable as their rescue by the Purser and the proprietor of the Piebald Swan. “Oh,” grinned Barnabas. “Isaak tried to bite one of the attackers, isn’t that right, Fraulein?” The fraulein said “Ah, ja, stimmt,” and all members of McDoon & Associates. agreed that Isaak probably would have slashed the man to death had she only been a little bigger or the man a little smaller. Barnabas turned to Salmius Nalmius Nax and asked once again for an explanation of the evening’s events.

Salmius Nalmius Nax cleared his throat. “It has to do with Yount, and with the key, and the danger that surrounds the key.” Though her head and arm throbbed, Sally strained to hear every word. Tom hardly breathed. “We have watched McDoon & Associates for a long time. I have been in London since just before your sister died, Barnabas.” (Salmius Nalmius made a gesture with his left hand that the McDoon household understood to be a sign of respect and mourning.) “I am also known here by another name, as the merchant Oliveire de Sousa, a trader who left Amsterdam during the revolution in 1795, a trader with connections from Smyrna to Lisbon, from Antwerp to . . . Hamburg. I have not been alone. This is my brother, not merely the proprietor of a coffeehouse but one of Yount’s greatest military leaders, Captain of the Fencibles: Nexius Dexius Nax.” He pronounced it “Nex Dex Nax.” He spoke of the Piebald Swan as their hidden base of operations, a haven from those who wished them harm. He said that those same foes had taken an interest in the McDoons, which is why the Naxes had sent for the McDoons earlier than expected.

“It’s Fraulein Reimer!” Sally blurted out, looking away from the drowning men in the prints of the foundering East Indiamen. “Fraulein Reimer has been our guardian all this time . . . isn’t that right?” The others turned towards her. Fraulein Reimer blushed and quickened the pace of her needlepoint.

“Yes,” said Salmius Nalmius. “The fraulein is a long-time ally of ours. She has a more varied experience than you can guess. She has been our chief source of news about you, and your chief guardian all these years. You recall who recommended her to you at the start of her employ?”

“Why, the Landemanns,” said Barnabas. “Of Hamburg.”

“Yes,” said Salmius Nalmius. “The Landemanns. We have worked with them for two generations now, father and son. Both on the matter of Yount, and incidentally on purely mercantile matters. Oliveire de Sousa has done some profitable business with the firm of Landemanns, if I may say so, especially in the matter of salt from Cagliari and Setubal.”

“We know something of that business, sir, indeed we do,” said Barnabas. “So you were the mysterious investor, the undisclosed capital, that Lindemanns spoke of. Don’t I feel a capital chub-gudgeon for not knowing anything about any of this! Buttons and beeswax!”

Sanford felt order returning, patterns reasserting themselves. Sally, from another point of departure, felt the same. She stared at the white boy threatened by the grey shark in the mezzotint, while she said: “So what were they looking for here tonight?”

Salmius Nalmius spread his hands, his skullcap bobbed, its magenta embroidery catching the candlelight. “The key,” he said. The room fell silent, except for the “chock, chock” of the parrot. Sally and Tom looked at Barnabas and Sanford. Barnabas quickly told them about the entire package, was surprised (but not much) to hear that the book was known to them.

Sanford stirred. “The dog, the man?” he asked.

Salmius Nalmius moved to reply but his brother the soldier put a hand on his arm. Speaking in a low voice, Nexius Dexius said, “We call him the Cretched Man, on account of the coat he wears.”

Barnabas interrupted, “The Wurm fellow? Is that him?”

“No,” said Nexius Dexius. “But the Wurm’s chief lieutenant. Very dangerous. The thugs he used tonight, both here and in the street, were just common London criminals. We were lucky.”

“I saw him!” Sally cried, relieved that her “eidetic imagination” had not been so fanciful after all. “In Mincing Lane last week. Ugh, his coat seemed to move on him, gleamed almost.” The Nax brothers nodded. The tall man’s rusty virgated coat was his trademark. The fraulein said something that sounded like a prayer, of which Sally caught in German the words “a cloth of wonder with strange figures in-woven.”

Nexius Dexius went on: “Very dangerous, the Cretched Man. Also, his creature . . . very dangerous. Almost never brought here, to your world. The Wurm’s need is great. We call the beast ‘shaharshharsh.’ In your language, that is ‘knuckle-dog.’ Scholars say they are the Hounds of Tindalos. As may be . . . knuckle-dogs.”

Barnabas and Sanford thought of the wolf-thing sliding bonelessly around the corner, gripping the paving stones with simian hands.

“‘Outside are the dogs and sorcerers . . . and murderers and idolaters’,” recited Sanford under his breath.

“A bird,” Sally yawned and winced but wanted one more question answered before sleep took them all. “I saw a wren last week keeping watch on us.”

Salmius Nalmius replied, “Ah, a wick-wren, a hyter-spirit. Another one of their creatures. Not really a bird. A phantom made flesh. A spy.”

As if she understood, Isaak arched her back at the description of the wick-wren. Salmius Nalmius nodded in her direction: in Yount, cats were given special honour. Turning back to McDoon & Associates, he said: “It is late. My brother and I withdraw for the night. But please, let us talk again tomorrow.” Barnabas and Sanford agreed, convinced now of a threat but still uncertain of its origin, and how best to meet it.

At the door, Salmius Nalmius said, “They will try again, and soon. Please, I beg you: the key must leave London. The key must go to Yount.”

“Chock,” said the parrot, and then the house fell silent.

Chapter 4: Hearth and Home

No one slept well that night except for Yikes. The cook and the maid had the first word of the day, to one another as they lit the fires.

“Beetle-headed I said I was, and so I am!” said the cook. “We never should have gone last night to the bishy-barnybees. ’Stead of mardling there, we should have been here fighting off those reasty devils.”

The maid looked none too certain of that, but the cook pulled out her sharpest hulking knife and declared, “I would have gutted any man as came into this kitchen, same’s I hulk a chicken.”

The maid admired her aunt, and had no doubt of the cook’s abilities with any kitchen utensil, but thought she’d rather have Fraulein Reimer’s pistol to hand. She was on good terms with the fraulein, even though they did not always understand one another’s accents. She wondered if all German women were as brave. Altogether it had been an unnerving evening, what with the talk among the Norfolk women about the dreadful Ratcliffe Highway murders in December (someone knew a man who knew a brother of one of those murdered, so small the world could be!), and now this.

The cook bent over to give Isaak some milk. “Well,” she said. “From what I hear, you did your best, didn’t you, little lion?”

Straightening up, she said, “Now, my dear, there’ll be no falling apart here, then. Pass me the eggs, let’s make the best duff-pudding we can.”

Bolstered by pudding (the cook insisted everyone have seconds, and she gave Isaak another saucer of milk), McDoon & Associates spent the day in caucus. Correspondence was suspended, a first in the history of the firm. Three times someone used the dolphin door knocker to announce themselves, and each time Sanford asked the visitor to come again the next day.

Barnabas was for counter-attacking immediately. “Like Lord Rodney against the French!” he said, waving in the direction of the picture in the hallway of Rodney in the Formidable leading the British fleet through the French line off the Dominican coast.

Sanford liked the precision with which the engraving was subtitled (“at fourteen minutes past nine a.m., April 12, 1782”), but nevertheless shook his head.

“Why not, old friend?” asked Barnabas, mentally arranging cannons on the foredeck.

“For three reasons, my dear Barnabas,” said Sanford. “First, Lord Rodney knew his enemy, and we do not.”

Barnabas considered the point, as he beat his gun-crews to quarters. He thought he looked rather fine in his tall admiral’s hat, and that his vest went well with the scarlet coat. But Sanford was right. Quatsch. Coat, hat, and cannons faded. For now.

“Second, we cannot be sure what game the Nax brothers might be playing at,” Sanford continued. “Are they truly our friends?”

“A fair pigeon, that one,” said Barnabas, looking at the print of Diana and Acteon, and then at the sandalwood box.

“Due diligence,” Sanford said. “We need to learn more about the Naxes before we act. Just possibly last night’s events were arranged by the Naxes.”

“To what end?”

“A scheme to defraud the firm perhaps, or simply a hoax, a monstrous great prank, who knows?”

“Aye, reason is all on your side, Sanford,” said Barnabas. “And we all know it, but still . . .”

“No,” said Sally. Like a burst of wind that topples a tree, her word overwhelmed the edifice of Sanford’s logic, to the relief of all.

“No,” agreed Sanford. “No indeed, Miss Sally. Something ill is at work here, but the Naxes are not working it. I cannot say how I know that, but I do.”

Barnabas said, “Because your heart tells you. So does mine. All of us.”

“The fraulein,” said Tom. “She is with the Naxes, and we know her. She is part of this house.”

“Settled then,” said Sanford. “The Naxes are not enemies, though what sort of friends they might be is yet to be determined.”

The fourth visitor of the day used the dolphin knocker. At the door was a tall man with big brown boots like farmers wear, pressing to his head a floppy hat against the wind and the increasing snow.

“Today we admit no visitors,” said Sanford.

“No visit, sir,” said the man, with a noticeable Devonshire accent (his “sir” sounded like “zahr”). “Message only. From Mr. de Sousa, sir, by special delivery, as I am his confidential clerk.”

Sanford thought he had never seen a man less likely to be a City merchant’s confidential clerk. He looked at the messenger’s huge hands, thick and red like collops of meat, and could not imagine those hands holding a pen. Though, he thought, they would be well-suited to other purposes. The man in the country boots handed Sanford a letter.

“What’s your name?” asked Sanford.

“Harris, sir,” said the man, smiling easily so that his side-whiskers rippled. “Good day to you, sir.” Harris’s brown boots ploughed through the muck on the cobblestones, and disappeared past Dunster Court.

Sanford read the letter aloud:

January 22, 1812

Dear Mr. McDoon, with greetings to McDoon & Associates,

Last night’s unfortunate but inevitable events underscore the urgency of this business. Those who struck last night will strike again. We beg you, in all sincerity, to consider again what we discussed last week. Will you come tomorrow at noon to the Piebald Swan? Do not come on foot. Go to the hackney coach stand at the Minories near Tower Hill. Seek there Mr. Harris, who delivered this letter. He will escort you in a hackney coach that we have arranged for you. We will await you as before.

Your humble servant, Oliveira de Sousa

P.S.: Be sure it is really Mr. Harris. You can best know him by his Devonshire accent and his country boots.

Tom broke in before Barnabas could speak. “Oh, may I go too?”

Sanford and Barnabas were swift and united in their “no.”

“Think on it, Tom,” said Barnabas. “There’s a home here that’ll need defendin’ while we’re away.”

Church bells tolled the hour across the City, hard to hear above the increasing storm. By some trick of the wind, the bells of St. Margaret Pattens were heard over all the others. Barnabas sang to himself the old rhyme:

“Bull’s eyes and targets, Say the bells of Saint Mar’grets.”

By the time the bells had spoken of bull’s eyes and targets three times, he was back commanding a ship of the line, ordering grapeshot loaded into the cannons. Then the bells stopped, and nothing but the wind was heard, shaking the panes and going “flonk, flonk, flonk” across the chimney-top.

Holding Isaak in her lap, Sally spoke into the sound of the wind. “You gave Uncle Barnabas three reasons, Mr. Sanford, but you have only told us two.”

Sanford smiled, an alarming sight. “Ah, Miss Sally, ever attentive, as some apprentices I know might be more often. Third reason: Yount itself. Ridiculous concept. Unproven, probably unprovable, attack or no attack.”

“Yet there it is,” said Barnabas. “We all long to go . . . to a place we’ve never heard of, let alone seen!”

“Except it feels as if we have been there,” said Sally, her eyes focussed beyond the wind outside, her voice getting softer yet more determined. “A place we knew before we had words, someplace we have lost and must get back to. The corner of a garden, with a little fountain spilling its water and leaves falling from trees overhanging the wall . . .”

Everyone pondered Sally’s words.

“Bittersweet,” thought Sanford. “Imperfect memory.”

“A garden, Sally?” said Barnabas. “I like that. Oh, very much I do. How I feel every spring when we first turn the earth out back. Or rather more how I feel now, in winter, as I imagine what is to come. Say, maybe we should try planting smilax this year, what?” Barnabas thought also of a garden long ago in Bombay, but did not speak of it now.

“Makes me feel sad and joyful all at once somehow,” said Tom. “How is that possible?”

“Sehnsucht,” said Sally. “Sehnsucht, German for this longing after a place we aren’t even sure exists. Cannot be translated into English, not fully anyway. Fraulein Reimer uses it. When we talk about Hamburg.”

“Ah, smilax in a garden,” said Barnabas. “Ah, well . . . I suppose . . . Sanford, we’ll go tomorrow to the Naxes, but just to hear them out . . .

no commitments. We cannot abandon everything, the business, the house, our home, to travel to a place no one has ever heard of, not without a great deal more explanation.”

“Uncle,” said Sally. “You know you wish to go. We all do. Even you, Mr. Sanford.”

Barnabas gripped the key in his pocket. “I know, my dear Sally, but nothing is that simple. None of this is according to Cocker! What becomes of McDoon & Associates if we leave?”

“The Naxes will have a plan for that, surely.”

“Yes, perhaps, but their first plan, well, less said about that, the better. Besides, the danger is here, Sally, against this house, our house. Why fly headlong into danger when it has found us right here? The brutes, hurting you like that, why, to think of it makes me . . . makes me . . .”

Sally squeezed his hand. No Sankt Jakobi when Uncle Barnabas was here getting ready to “handle ’em.”

Barnabas smiled at his niece. He thought of the one thing he and Sanford had not talked about with Tom and Sally: the claim the Naxes made that going to Yount would yield Barnabas’s heart’s desire. The thought that they might be able to bring her back to him . . . no, it simply could not be possible and, even if it were, surely there would be a price to pay, some favour or service or even money. No, it did not bear thinking about.

“Deadly cold this morning, sirs,” said Harris, the tall Devonshire man, when Barnabas and Sanford appeared the next morning at the hackney coach stand. “Beggars found frozen in Islington doorways, crows burrowing into dungheaps to stay warm, a bitter night but we hopes a warmer day, right, sirs?”

“You are . . . ?” said Barnabas.

“Harris, sir,” said the tall man.

“Not your real name, I’ll be bound,” said Barnabas.

“No, sir, now that you ask, not rightly,” said the man in the big brown boots. “But I come by it honest, as it was my mother’s name

before she married my father.”

“It will answer then,” said Barnabas. “You are from Devonshire, or else you are a damned fine play-actor.”

“Oh, yes, indeed,” said Harris. “True Devonshire, through and through.”

Sanford asked, “Who is the coachman?”

Harris stepped to the front of the coach, rapped on the coachman’s boot.

A small man in a great cape leaned down, touched his hat, and said, “Morning, my gentlemen. I rejoice in the name of Fletcher.” The accent was all London East End.

Barnabas put two hands on the ferrule of his walking stick, planted firmly in front of him, and put the clarifying tone in his voice.

“Fletcher, is it?”

“Well, chip chap chunter, I’m no arrowsmith if that is what you are driving at, sir,” replied the coachman before Barnabas had finished his question. “But where’s the fun, much less the profit, in using the name that’s scribbled in the parish book on the date when this body was baptized?”

Under his hat, Fletcher winked. Barnabas and Sanford could not decide whether to be amused or affronted. Fletcher caught their look, and grew serious in an instant.

“Solemn like,” he said, pulling back his cape to reveal two pistols and a knife strapped to his body. “Fletcher is as comfortable a cloak as this here one I am wearing, and just as serviceable against windy fingers and sniffing dogs. I am here to protect the quality against footpads, chowsers, varlets, and squoriers. Why, if Dick Turpin himself rode up against us, he’d not ride off again.”

“God’s truth,” agreed Harris.

“Well met then,” said Barnabas, and they set off in the coach for the Piebald Swan.

“Welcome,” said Salmius Nalmius. “Today is no day for a visit but there you are, cannot be helped!”

Nexius Dexius appeared with a pot of hot chocolate, saying, “I meet you in a minute upstairs. First, chocolate to Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Harris, who will wait outside in the mews.”

Upstairs, Barnabas admired the prints on the wall. “Beans and bacon,” he said. “This is a fine one. But what is the tale here?”

Salmius Nalmius said, “Ah, a favourite, a story from your world . . . do you not know it? The man riding the dolphin is Arion, a musician threatened by pirates. They were going to kill him, so he jumped overboard. The dolphin saved him, carried him to land, where later Arion got justice from the pirates. A good story.”

“What about these?” asked Barnabas, pointing to a row of old-fashioned prints depicting beached whales.

“Old Dutch pictures,” said Salmius Nalmius. “With meaning for us from Yount. Whales and dolphins are special friends of ours. You will learn this when you come. To see them run ashore like this is a terrible thing, a tragedy. We honour them.”

Barnabas looked at the great creatures on the shore, flukes in the air, mighty mouths agape, with people swarming about. In one picture a man stood on the head of the whale. In another, a small dog played with its owners by the side of the dying sea-mammoth. The engraver had done a particularly good job on one picture: the eye of the whale seemed to plead with the viewer for time, love, and caution.

Sanford had been looking out the window while the connoisseurs admired the prints. He watched Nexius Dexius talking with Harris and Fletcher. He looked at the sky. Not even a rook was up, with the wind starting again. Yet Sanford thought he saw shadows sliding over the roofs, angle around chimney-pots and corbels. He turned back to the room as Nexius Dexius came up the stairs.

The captain from Yount carried a rifle of strange design, which he placed by the door. “I will . . .” said Nexius Dexius. “I shall have . . .” Stumbling over the conditional, he looked at his brother.

“Would have?” said Salmius Nalmius.

“Would have asked Mr. Harris and Mr. Fletcher to come inside,” said Nexius Dexius. “It is hard cold outside. But our men must guard out there. You were followed part way.”

“What do they know of Yount?” asked Barnabas.

“Enough to know how important their services are,” said Salmius Nalmius. “Harris and Fletcher are estimable men. They work for more than their pay. They have each their own reasons for joining our fight. Trust them.”

The word “trust” hung in the air. Each man sipped at his chocolate, indulged in the warmth of the fire for a moment. Barnabas stroked his vest (a pale yellow nankeen), cleared his throat.

“Buttons and beeswax,” he said. “First, Mr. Sanford and I owe you an apology, if we offended on our last visit. Events and your rhetoric moved in unlikely avenues, caught us off balance. Second, we also owe you our gratitude for your appearance in the alley the night before last. A tight spot that was, not clear how we might have fared without your help. Thank you.”

The Naxes inclined their heads, touched their caps.

“So now, here we are,” finished Barnabas.

The fire crackled. Outside the wind murmured.

“You still have questions,” said Salmius Nalmius.

“Yes,” said Barnabas. “There’s a Cretched Man and a Wurm who want the key in my pocket. There’s a place called Yount and you’re from there. Sanford and I are ready to concede all that, even though saying so much in public would have us locked up in Bedlam.”

He paused.

“Beans and . . .” he began. “We wish to go, make no mistake. It’s just that this is our home, don’t you see? McDoon & Associates, Mincing Lane, the City . . . we cannot just leave our home. Especially with it being attacked. Running off seems like running away. No. We won’t let them drive us away.”

Another pause.

“Besides,” said Barnabas. “Why can’t we send the key with you to Yount? It’s the key they want, right?”

Salmius Nalmius shook his head. “No, it is not just the key they need. Or that we need. It’s the holder of the key as well. The key and the holder, together. One without the other is useless. The lock won’t open without both. My dear Barnabas, you must come to Yount or all our hopes are naught.”

“Look,” said Sanford, his Norfolk accent more pronounced than usual. “I’m just an old moke from Mousehold Heath, but there is more here than you reveal.”

Salmius Nalmius sighed. “Yes, but what we hold back is for your own good. And in truth there is much that neither I nor my brother understand of these events. We are, like you, just small threads in the grand weaving.”

Nexius Dexius poured more chocolate, then paced to the window. He stood there for some time.

Barnabas spoke again. “The letter spoke of my heart’s desire. What about that? How could you even know . . . ?”

The merchant from Yount held out his palms, touched his thumbs to the forefingers then the little fingers. His dark eyes were bright in the firelight. “This is beyond me too,” he said. “But I know it to be true. The Learned Doctors in Yount understand. They will make it happen. All I know, all I have been told, is that you once long ago had . . . a liaison . . . a connection with a merchant’s daughter in India, a connection that was severed before it properly had a chance to grow. Am I not right?”

Barnabas nodded. Sanford, the “old moke,” stared straight at Salmius Nalmius.

“How your love—may I use that word?—for this woman is involved in our business, that I do not know,” said Salmius Nalmius. “Nor do I know how you are to be reunited with her. All I know is that this is what is supposed to occur, all linked to the key and your carriage of it to Yount.”

“Sir,” said Sanford, with a ferrous tone. “If you jest or make false promise or in any fashion play with us . . .”

Again, Salmius Nalmius sat forward, palms outstretched, fingers touching. He shook his head, restraint in his voice. “No,” he said. “My world depends on what I say to you. I do not jest or speak idly.”

Nexius Dexius paced back from the window. “Not much time today,” he said. “They are coming soon.”

Sanford turned slowly from Salmius Nalmius to Nexius Dexius. He thought he sensed the sound of far-off footsteps on a hollow staircase. Outside he heard the coach horse stamp its feet, and a brisk word from Mr. Fletcher.

Barnabas spoke: “Here it is then: we cannot depart, not yet at any rate, much as we recognize the need. We must defend our home. Your proposal to take over McDoon & Associates is no more credible today than it was on first utterance. Not so much for our sake but for that of the market. Who would believe such a change? No, it would not answer. McDoon & Associates would be reduced, ruined.”

The Naxes began to protest but Barnabas continued with a wave of his arm. “I am sorry, but that is how it must be. For now. Let us part today as friends and continue the conversation as wit and weather permit.”

Nexius Dexius scowled, but Salmius Nalmius said, “So be it. As friends.”

A knock sounded on the outer door, and then Harris drawled up the stairs, “Time to be afoot, gentlemen.”

Nexius Dexius went down the stairs, taking the strange rifle with him. Salmius Nalmius reached out to Sanford and Barnabas. “Stay but one second longer,” he said. “I understand your choice, though I regret it. No one knows about home more than I do, or Nexius Dexius. Defending one’s home. Yes, we know about that. So let us continue to help you, if we may. Take Harris and Fletcher, let them live with you as guardians.”

They moved down the stairs. “The Cretched Man will never desist,” said Nexius Dexius. “You know that, don’t you?”

At the door, Barnabas and Sanford halted. “Thank you,” said Barnabas. “We accept your aid. Think us not ingrates. We may yet go to Yount. Our reluctance is not because we don’t want to help you, but because we must look first to ourselves. Send us Harris and Fletcher, and we shall beat the Wurm on our own ground.”

Nexius Dexius called from the mews. Sanford felt the hollow footfalls quickening in his mind.

“Thank you,” said Salmius Nalmius. “For this much, I thank you. We shall speak again soon. Now, make haste, and Godspeed.”

A minute later, the coach rattled out of the mews. A bolt of midnight-blue seemed to course after it, but flickered and was gone.

The Naxes shut the door against the cold. “Another step has been taken,” said Salmius Nalmius in his own language.

“The wolf takes six steps while the beaver gnaws the wood,” replied his brother.

“This beaver has sharp teeth, you shall see, brother.”

“Let us hope so. We will need every tooth in our heads, and all the claws on our feet.”

So Fletcher and Harris came to live in the house on Mincing Lane, with its dolphin door knocker and its blue-trimmed windows. Almost overnight the two men became part of McDoon & Associates, strange as that seemed to Sally. Strange but welcome, she thought, as she sat in the kitchen one evening a month later. Candlemas had passed, and the feast of St. Polycarp, and the feast of St. Eudelme with its procession of beribboned goats through the City. The most terrible cold had passed, but still it was good to gather around the kitchen stove for warmth and company. Mr. Fletcher was holding forth.

“They found a bag of bones in the foundation stones of a building what was took down in Lambeth to make way for the new bridge to be built over to Westminster,” he said, pausing for effect. “Small bones, like maybe a baby’s.”

“Come now, Mr. Fletcher, if you please,” said the cook. “There’s trouble enough without you going on about . . . baby’s bones.” She imitated Mr. Fletcher’s London accent as near as her Norfolk village tongue could manage. Her niece the maid smiled, her eyes round and bright.

“No, missus, I know it to be true,” said Fletcher, with his hand moving to his heart. “Because I have it on good account from my cousin, who knows a man who works on the site.”

“Hmmph,” said the cook. “I’m wondering if your cousin would know a hink from a twibill, that’s all, coming with stories about baby bones in the groundstone.”

The reference to hinks and twibills swept right over Mr. Fletcher, who would have ignored it anyway. But Mr. Harris approved.

“That’s a good one, missus,” said the man from Devonshire. The cook stopped scrubbing a pot for a moment to acknowledge the compliment.

Her niece used the moment to venture a query. “What else might your cousin have to say, Mr. Fletcher?” The cook banged the pot more than she needed to, but did not interrupt.

“Well,” said Mr. Fletcher, his face red in the glow of the stove fire, “There’s talk of a sighting in the Garlickhythe of a ghostly old nun walking back and forth wringing her hands.” He walked the length of the kitchen and back, wringing his hands as he did so.

“Fallabarty and fol-dee-rol,” said the cook, but she was not the least bit convincing. She had stopped scrubbing the pot, and was hanging on Mr. Fletcher’s words.

Sally laughed good-naturedly. “Mr. Fletcher, really, that’s such an old story, like the one about the haunting of Velvet Lane. Surely you don’t believe—”

Mr. Fletcher cut her off, while bowing to her at the same time. “Oh, yes, Miss Sally, by Wee Willie Hawken, I do, as I have it well affirmed, from another cousin, this one on my mother’s side, who knows a woman who is married to the deacon in the church there. Was him that saw the ghostly nun.” An artist wanting an image of sincerity could not have found a better model than Mr. Fletcher at that instant.

Mr. Harris laughed again, his big brown boots crossed in front of him as he leaned back in his chair. “Hmmm, Mr. Fletcher, how many cousins do you have?”

“No small number, Mr. Harris, a veritable tribe of us, all true cock’s eggs, born within the sound of Bow bells.”

“Hah! Soused gournards then!” said the cook. “That proves we ought all to stop our ears then whenever ‘your cousin’ holds forth.”

More laughter all around. Fraulein Reimer, who understood the gist even when she missed some of the details in a language not her own, put down her needlepoint. “Perhaps we shall sing together now a song, yes?” she said. “I do not like this talk of ghosts and bones.”

So the company sang “The Merry Christ Church Bells,” the cook beating time on the pot and Mr. Harris stamping his boots. Sally, holding Isaak in her lap, joined the refrain:

Let none despise the merry, merry wives

Of famous London town.

Upstairs in the library Sanford put down a book to listen. Barnabas was tapping time, and murmuring the refrain. Sanford did not entirely approve of chat and singing in the kitchen, but allowed that Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Harris had accommodated themselves well to the household. Everyone’s morale was improved since their arrival. Most of all, there had been no further attacks. No one had seen any evidence of the Cretched Man or any other minatory being. Sally said that her dreams were quiet. Sanford did not imagine the enemy had retreated far but for now all seemed well.

Interlude: Frozen Algebra on Fire

Maggie thought her mother might die from the cold. The winter had been the coldest anyone could remember and this night—January 22, 1812—was the coldest yet. Maggie was wearing all the clothes she owned, swaddled within the worn-out sailor’s jacket that reached to her knees, and still she shivered. Her ears were cold under her red kerchief: she wished she had kept the crownless hat she had found two weeks ago instead of selling it to the rag-and-bone man. She lay on the pallet on the floor, holding her coughing mother.

They lived in a cellar, like thousands of others throughout London. Actually, they shared a cellar, with an Irish family, separated by a thin, hastily erected wall. (The man who collected the weekly rent smirked every time he came, calling the basement flats his “salt-and-pepper cellar.”) Maggie heard muffled crying through the wall, the ache of one of the little Irish children overcome by cold and hunger. Sometimes on a Sunday in the summer, Maggie would join in their games in the alley: hopscotch, unkitty-dunkitty-donkey, tumble-sticks. They seemed to view her as a good luck charm, a strange “blue” older sister. They never disturbed her when she carved numbers on the walls of the alley with an old nail or drew circles and lines with a pencil stub she’d found in the street. The children’s mother seemed a bit scared of Maggie but since the Irish woman did not speak much English, she limited her exchanges with Maggie to “good morning” and “good night.” As the little girl cried, Maggie felt sorry for her Irish neighbours, as sorry as she felt for herself and her mother. And she was angry that you could not warm two blocks of ice by rubbing them together.

The cold had stunned the wall-lice and bedbugs into temporary submission, but the rat which lived behind the far wall was active. He was drawn to the meagre heat of the fire Maggie kept alive in the fireplace. As long as the rat stayed hidden, Maggie kept it out of mind. Feeding the fire might bring the rat out, but Maggie had no choice. She put another slip of scavenged newspaper on the fire, revelled in the small gust of heat, held her mother close. They had spent their last shillings on coal two days ago. Maggie calculated that the pile of scrap paper, dried horse dung, and wood slivers would not last the night. At least she’d have the pleasure of knowing the rat would freeze as well once the remaining fuel was exhausted. What really pained Maggie, besides knowing that the cold was eating her mother’s lungs, was that every scrap of newspaper burned was a story she could no longer read. She made sure to read every fragment before consigning it to the flames, reading them out loud to entertain her mother.

“For young Gentlewomen,” Maggie read. “Lessons given in waxwork, filigree, japanning, quill-work, painting upon glass, embroidery with gold and silver threads, and other diversions not here enumerated. Enquire at Mrs. Neeseden’s in Derby Close by St. Blandina Priory.” Maggie and her mother had never heard of Derby Close or St. Blandina Priory: wherever these places were, they weren’t anywhere near by. The advertisement might just as easily have referred to a location on the moon.

The fire dwindled again.

“Reward offered by the Constabulary,” she read. “For any knowledge leading to the capture of the person or persons responsible for the murders December last in Ratcliffe Highway.” Maggie and her mother shuddered even as they shivered. Everyone knew about the murders in the Ratcliffe Highway, everyone had a theory about their cause, and everyone claimed to know someone who knew or was related to one of the victims.

The flames died down. Viscous smoke hung in the air.

“For sale,” she read. “At Mr. Brewster’s shop in Carnaby Street, fine laced whisky-yellow gloves, white bird’s eye bone lace, gimp lace, and other fine possaments for Ladies of refined taste.” Maggie and her mother sighed, picturing these glories. They’d seen once or twice from afar the Ladies for whom such articles were made.

The fire smoked and sputtered.

“Newly arrived on the Gazelle,” Maggie read. “Best Chinese smilax root, also mastic gum, Gujaratee sandalwood, tragacanth, mace from Amboina, pepper from Ternate, divers other spices and apothecary wares.” Besides the pepper, Maggie had no idea what these things were or what their use might be, but her mind soared in the imagining.

In between readings from the doomed shreds of newspaper, Maggie told her mother stories to keep the cold at bay. The stories were the ones that her mother had told her over and over as a child, stories from far away, some of them stories from places where everyone looked like Maggie and her mother. “Well,” the story always started, “once upon a time in the summer time, turtle chew tobacco and spit white lime,” and then Maggie would tell how Woodpecker got the red patch on his head from pecking on the hull of the Ark, and how greedy Tortoise got his patchwork shell.

Her mother shut her eyes and sighed, her breath wisping from her mouth. She coughed, overrode her daughter’s request that she not overexert herself and said, “Maggie, agamega, leopard-woman, I tell you now about Ala the Mother and Ezebelamiri, the Queen who lives in the Water, and Ikoro the Drum-Spirit. Listen.” Maggie knew the stories by heart but listened intently, blocking from her mind the wind and snow outside and the cold inside. Her mother told stories that had been passed down in secrecy about Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica and Kongo-Jemmy’s Revolt in Carolina, about the King of the Eboes flying across the ocean with an army to free his people. Her mother barely had strength to speak but insisted on continuing.

“Maggie, baby eagle, nwugo,” she whispered. “Remember your story. You were born to me in a place called Maryland, near the Choptank River, on the Baird plantation. . . .”

“I know, Mama,” said Maggie, smiling. “I know. My father was as strong and handsome as Quaco Sam. . . .”

“Yes, yes, nwugo,” said her mother, smiling back. “Oh yes, and as smart as John who beat the Devil at the crossroads.”

“What happened to my father, Mama?” Always the question, down through the years, always the same answer.

“He was from Africa, he had been a prince there, and he was smarter than the buckra,” said her mother, smile fading. “When first quail calls, he took you and me, and we slipped away, following the drinking gourd in the sky. Oh, the buckra masters, they set dogs after us and men with guns on horses, but your father was too smart and we got away clean. From Bee-luther-hatchee we got.”

“But not to Ginny-gal, Mama? Not like we hoped?”

“No, we came to New York, a big city like London. You were so small, so small, you could only walk a few steps, you were so young. But New York is not safe either. The Baird masters have spies in New York, obala obala, blood of blood, wicked men.”

Maggie’s mother stopped there. The wind howled. The Irish children moaned in their half-sleep on the other side of the wall. Maggie saw sweat on her mother’s brow.

“Mama, no more now.”

“No, we go on, ndem mbu enyi, women are as strong as elephants,” said Maggie’s mother. She coughed for almost a minute after that but continued. “After some by and by, we lived with another family of colour, only they were always free. The Weatherbys took us in,

like Abraham and Sarah they took us in as strangers. Remember that, Maggie, like Abraham and Sarah.” Maggie held her mother tight, the old sailor’s jacket scrunched up between them.

“One night some buckra beat on the Weatherby door,” whispered Maggie’s mother. “‘Who there?’ says Mr. Weatherby. ‘Got a law paper says we can take the Baird family. Are they there?’ comes back a voice on the other side of the door. We changed our name when we came to New York, but still they find us! He was easy to find, I guess, your father, ’cause of his country marks. On his face. I told you he was a prince in Africa. So the takers are at the Weatherby door. ‘Quick,’ says your father. ‘Hide in the attic.’ You and me, little eagle, we run upstairs and hide in the attic. ‘You too,’ I say, but your father shakes his head. He going to deal with this so they cannot take his family. Last time I see your father, he is looking up at me from the foot of the stairs. ‘Hide,’ he says. So we do. I tell you not to make a sound or the buckra will take us. You are so scared you bite your hand until you bleed.”

Maggie looks at the scar between thumb and forefinger on her left hand.

“Mr. Weatherby tried to keep those men out, but they smashed a window. They came in. From the attic I heard fighting and yelling. Almost I ran back down.”

The cold is so intense in the cellar that even the rat in the far wall is quiet.

“Well, you know what happens. They took your father. He kept you and me safe. But he never came back from Maryland; now he’s in Bee-luther-hatchee.”

Maggie rocked her mother in her arms, hummed an old song about Elisha feeding the Shunammite widow and bringing back the dead. Maggie knew the rest of the story: how Maggie’s mother had determined to leave the United States of America altogether, how the Weatherbys and others in the free black community had collected funds for Maggie and her mother to sail to London, where Maggie’s mother had found work as a seamstress making simple waistcoats and ticken breeches. When they’d registered at the local parish in Wapping, they’d called themselves Collins, the name of the captain of the ship that had landed them in London. For a while they more than made ends meet. Maggie was able to attend the parish charity school, where she learned to read and do her first sums. People talked about that, a poor black girl who could read and add, but Maggie did not care, though she learned to play dumb when she needed to (which was often). For a year or two they lived above ground and shared a real bed, not just a pallet on the floor, and had meat three times a week. One Easter, Maggie’s mother had bought them both bonnets and they had walked all the way to St. Pammachius Underhill for the noon service, and had tea after at a public garden. But then the war with Napoleon and the French got worse, and harsh winters followed poor harvests, so working folks got squeezed between unemployment and high prices. Maggie had joined her mother at the seamstress’s establishment but still they found themselves back in the cellar without enough money for a full week’s coal.

Maggie’s mother was slipping into fever. “Ol’ Heeg from under cottonwood roots is snatchin’ my breath,” she wheezed. “Ol’ Heeg the witch-owl has a-got hold of my breath, Maggie.” Maggie thought of the owl atop the pillar on the border of the spirit-land, the owl that was looking for her.

“Hush, Mama, no owl has you.”

“Squinch owl, white as buckra men,” husked her mother. “No Ginny-gal for us, just a dry-bone valley. But the King will fly back. Take force by force, he sings, with his fiery army. Uche chukwu gaeme, God’s will be done.”

Maggie nodded. The fire had almost gone out. The pile of newspaper scraps and other rubbish was gone. Morning was still far off. The wind roared as loudly as ever. Maggie looked at her delirious mother, and knew what she had to do. Easing her mother full-length onto the pallet, Maggie went to the wall nearest the bed (and farthest from the rat-infested wall). She pried away several bricks and felt for her most precious treasures: three books purchased for pennies from the peddlers who went street to street, in the years when she and her mother could afford bonnets at Easter. The books were old, ragged, missing pages; they were the sort sold by the pound at estate auctions, books that often ended up as filler for walls in the terrace houses being built in London’s growing suburbs. To Maggie they were more valuable than diamonds.

Even in the dark she knew each book by its shape and state of disrepair. She had memorized each one. The first one she retrieved was The Elements of Algebra by Nathaniel Hammond. “‘In a New and Easy Method,’” Maggie chanted to herself. “‘With their Use and Application, in the Solution of a great Variety of Arithmetical and Geometrical Questions, by General and Universal Rules. Published in 1752.’” Page by page she fed the book into the fire, which blazed for a while, reflected in her mother’s half-shut eyes. When the fire had died down, and her mother began coughing again, Maggie took out the second book: The Compleat Compting-house by John Vernon, published in 1719. Slowly she stripped out the pages, crumpling them before placing them carefully onto the embers. She watched as the flames jumped up to devour “the young Lad’s first Understanding of plain Arithmetick” and “Tables for Calculation of Interest.”

Her mother would need medicine, though Maggie had no idea how they would afford that. She would ask for extra piecework to take home, and perhaps the parish would provide some relief. Until the fever broke, Maggie would have to tend to her mother. She prayed for the cold to diminish. She saw two eyes flash in the far corner, a naked tail whisk into the shadows cast by the fire. The heat had also revived the bedbugs, several of which crawled over the blankets covering Maggie’s mother.

“Women are as strong as elephants,” said Maggie into the dawning light. The wind was dying down a little but so was the fire. Her mother coughed up thin greenish spittle, which Maggie wiped off with a bit of rag from the pallet. Summoning her strength, Maggie pulled out the third book. She could just read it in the half-darkness, but she did not need to, knowing it by heart.

“Cocker’s Arithmetick,” she breathed as an incantation. “‘Being a plain and familiar Method for the full Understanding of that incomparable Art. Being the fifty-first edition, printed in 1745 by R. Ware, at the Bible and Sun, Amen Corner.’”

Rip, rip, went the pages. Maggie half-sang Cocker’s preface: “‘. . . by studiously conferring with the Notes, Names, Orders, Progress, Species, Properties, Proportions, Powers, Affections, and Applications of Numbers delivered herein, become such Artists indeed . . .’”

Maggie kept the fire going until mid-morning when the cold weakened its grip, and her mother’s fever abated slightly. The rat retreated into his wall. Just before she collapsed into sleep next to her mother, Maggie looked at the ashes of her books and cried. She had their knowledge in her head but they had been her only real friends, and now they were gone. Just before she fell asleep, Maggie thought of the white woman, the one about her own age with the nice clothes in the big house, whom she had seen in her far-dreaming.

“That fancy white girl, whoever she is,” thought Maggie. “She did not have to burn books this night just to stay warm.”

Chapter 5: Theft from the Garden

The McDoon household resumed its usual rhythm as the winter of 1812 ebbed. Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Harris became fixtures at the house on Mincing Lane. Lady Day and then Easter week came in late March, followed by the feast of St. Alphege in April, and of course May Day. The events of the winter seemed a dream, or a vision seen through grimed, frosty windows. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had happened since the night of the break-in. Sanford brought this up to Barnabas one day in early May as they prepared to go to the coffeehouse.

“That man in the coat and his dog,” said Sanford. “They’ve only gone into hiding, lurking concealed while we lower our guard.”

Barnabas whirled about. “Lower our guard?! Not on your life!” He brought his walking stick up in a posture of attack, catching the edge of the Rodney picture and almost knocking it from the wall.

“Nevertheless,” said Sanford, righting the picture so Rodney could beat the French on the level, “that’s what our enemy hopes for.

To lull us while they lie close and wait to strike like a viper.”

They discussed their defences on the way, with Harris strolling a few feet behind them as if he had nothing whatsoever to do with them. Still, other matters pressed in on them again, matters of business and politics that swirled through the coffeehouse. Barnabas and Sanford felt the urgency of Yount slipping from their minds.

Sally too struggled to keep Yount in her mind. She read and reread passages from Journies and Travells to Yount and the Realms Within, cross-examined her dreams for signs and symptoms of Yount. Yet there seemed to be a narcotic force at work in her mind, smothering the urgency, stilling her wish to go. She often found herself in the partners’ office, gazing listlessly at the sandalwood box, the book of Yount open but unread on her lap. From Mincing Lane came the cries of London:

“Buy my brooms!”

“Holloway Cheese Cakes!”

“Coal man, coal man here!”

“Ripe sparagas!”

“Pens and ink, who will buy my pens?”

With these cries as a lullaby, Sally would nod off, Yount a muddle in her mind.

Until one afternoon in early May, when Sally dreamed of—or was visited by, she could not tell which—the Cretched Man while she dozed in the partners’ office. She awoke suddenly, but may have dreamed she was waking. Either way, she turned around in her chair, like a recalcitrant cork being pulled from a bottle.

He stood there in his raddled coat and outdated hat, not four paces away. So close. She saw every detail of that coat, all its patterns and striations. She sensed a message in the patterns, began to discern a calligraphy in the threads. The longer she looked, the more she thought she understood the message, considered it a beacon luring the unwary to a deadly shore. The buttons of that coat were silver, embossed with a half moon. His hands were pale, finely groomed, with fingernails cut to match the buttons. Against her will, Sally’s gaze moved up to the Cretched Man’s face. She gasped.

He was beautiful. His eyes were a galvanic blue that shifted to green. Nose, cheeks, lips, chin, forehead, all were perfectly proportioned, like the statue of an ancient Roman. She hated herself for thinking so, but, dear Lord, he was beautiful. He held out his hands to her. They held gifts, two books. His expression was that of one long-pained, one who seeks to spare another the grief he himself has suffered. Involuntarily, she reached out to take the books. The distance between them closed. Two paces away. She smelled almonds. His eyes were enormous, trapping her. He beckoned with the books. Sally took a halting step forward, towards an infinite library behind The Cretched Man, miles of shelved books reaching to the heavens. From the celestial archive came the whispers of a thousand scholars, welcoming her if she just accepted The Cretched Man’s gifts.

Sally wrenched her gaze away. The Cretched Man shook his head, smiled. She detected a hundred emotions in that smile. His face was too white. His teeth were too white. The smell of almonds overwhelmed her. Her eyes teared. When her vision cleared, The Cretched Man was gone. Or she woke up. Or both.

The Cretched Man struck the next day, Monday the 11^th of May.

Barnabas, Sanford and Fletcher went to the Piebald Swan. Tom wanted to be part of the discussions at the mysterious Yountish inn, having read too many histories of Nelson and Rodney, and heard too many stories of Hornblower and of Lucky Jack Aubrey. Tom slipped out of the house on Mincing Lane to follow his uncle, but had not counted on two things: that those he followed would take a hackney coach, and that he would get lost.

The coach was soon away from Tom. If he ran, he might keep it in sight, but then he might also be noticed by the lynx-eyed Fletcher. He tried to estimate where they were heading, but knew only that their general destination was Wapping, and was soon lost in a maze of lanes and alleys near the river.

That’s three men behind me, sauntering with purpose, I’d call it, Tom thought. Those two in the conduit, they’re all together, that’s five following me.

Tom trotted.

I think this must be Blanchflower Street, not far from George & Son. If I can just make it to George & Son, I’ll be quit of these rascals.

No one was about except the five men tracking him. Tom ducked into an alley.

Smallbone’s Cutting, I think this is, Should leave me on Finch-House Longstreet.

But he was mistaken. The cutting ended in a small yard with no other entrance.

Tom turned to face his pursuers.

“What do you want?” he yelled at the five.

“You,” said the leader of the band, with a sad, knowing look in his eye.

“Come on then, you chowsers!” said Tom.

The fight did not last long: five on one were impossible odds, though Tom put up a game struggle.

Just before they bound his arms and put a sack over his head, Tom thought, Quatsch! I wish I had one of the fraulein’s pistols. Uncle Barnabas, come quick!

“Where’s Tom?” asked Barnabas when he, Sanford, and Fletcher had returned from their meeting. Everyone at Mincing Lane thought Tom was with another member of the household. They turned the house out looking for him, and then scoured the nearby streets. They called on neighbours. No one had any word of Tom, nor would they since Tom by then was a captive in a warehouse down the river in Shadwell.

Late that evening, someone thumped on the door with the dolphin knocker. Barnabas almost yanked the door off its hinges, but no one was there. A letter sat on the doorstep. No one could have delivered the letter and then disappeared so quickly. The hairs on Barnabas’s neck went up.

With trembling hands, Barnabas opened the letter. On creamcoloured stationery, and in a fine hand, it read:

Dear Mr. McDoon,

We are pleased to inform you that we have found the lost member of your household and are caring for him in preparation for returning him to you. We look sincerely forward to relieving ourselves of his care, in return for which we only (and humbly) ask for your cooperation in joining us on a certain journey, a journey you will undertake together with a certain article, viz. a key, that you possess.

To effect the transaction, we ask (amicably) that you meet us Tuesday, May 12 at Saint Clare Minoresses without Aldgate at nine o’clock in the evening. Come alone. Your failure to heed this latter request will be taken as a grave trespass on our hospitality and good will, which might in turn have other consequences.

In anticipation of a satisfactory resolution to the immediate concern, and to furthering our heretofore only slight acquaintance, I am your most obedient servant,

Pausanias

Barnabas said, “So our enemy has a name after all. Is he Greek?”

Sally said, “He . . . he taunts us, Uncle. Pausanias was one of the ancients—a traveller and teller of tales.” She turned away in tears. What good was all her learning if she could not save Tom?

Barnabas hugged Sally. What good were all his wealth and all his connections, if he could not save Tom?

Sanford felt pain in his deepest being: a part of the very household had been taken, creating not just disorder but an assault on order itself. What good were discipline and detail if he could not save Tom?

“Send word tonight to the Piebald Swan,” said Barnabas. “We make plans for our counterstroke. But above all we must get Tom back unhurt. Nothing else matters.”

In the kitchen, the cook held her niece. “There, there,” the cook said. “Don’t you worry. The house is roused, at last! You’ll see. And your Fletcher will come through unharmed. I’ll wager that.”

The cook looked about her, counted her knives. “Come on, lively now, girl,” she said. “We may have to defend ourselves, against this eel-rawney and his dis-holy brood.”

As she collected the knives, she chanted:

Willows walk and elders bleed,

Witches take what witches need.

“Witches got Master Tom,” she said. “Witches got Master Tom.” She touched her St. Morgaine medal, then sharpened the blades.

In the attic, Sally cried with her arms around Isaak. “On our mother’s grave,” she said. “That’s what Tom always swears by. Oh, Tom.” She took out the locket from around her neck, opened it to display the only picture anyone had of her mother.

In the back-house Fraulein Reimer sat alone with her needlework, remembering how she used to tell Tom and Sally the story of the wren and the bear.

“How is it called in English? Zaunkoenig?” she would ask.

“Wren,” Sally would reply.

“Ja, the wren. The wren was the king of all birds, but one day the bear insulted him, so there was a war between the small creatures that fly and all the animals. The animals were confident they would win because they were so much bigger and stronger. But the wren was too scharfsinnig, smart, for them. He sent hornets and wasps to sting them and birds to peck out their eyes. In the end, the animals gave up, and the birds and insects won.”

The fraulein put down her needlepoint, picked up the pistol beside her, and polished and checked its workings.

Barnabas checked his pocket-watch again. Ten minutes to nine in the evening. The night would be dark, only two days past the total lack of the moon. He stood alone just outside St. Clare Minoresses without Aldgate, staring into the gloom. The church was a ruin, burned in a fire fifteen years earlier, roofless, with empty windows. Vines and creepers suckered to the walls, and a small elm tree had taken root in the vestry. Rooks and crows were the only visible guardians of the place. Barnabas would have laughed if he could: this was a scene out of a romance. He half expected a mad monk to shamble out of the ruins, seeking to carry him into the catacombs.

“Only this ain’t a novel,” he said.

Five minutes to nine, darker, darker. Barnabas strode over rubble and trash through the doorway. A paving stone was tipped up to his left, leaning against a charred buttress. To his right, beyond the young elm, was a pool of water and more heaps of broken stone.

Nine o’clock by the church bells from the City and Whitechapel.

“Well, come on then,” Barnabas shouted into the darkness. “I’m here.”

Barnabas thought he saw something move at what would be the far end of the nave.

“You’re good at hiding, and spying, and now kidnapping,” he said. “What I want to know is, are you good at keeping your word?”

Out of the darkness in front of him came a voice sinuous and clear: “A word is a breath of air, a rush of wind over the tongue and between the teeth, leaping to be free, rejecting restraints, slipping strictures and straits. My dear sir, you cannot keep a word, unless it is unspoken, in which case it is unborn and not yet a word at all.”

Barnabas saw a figure in a dull red coat, flickering like embers.

“Where’s my nephew?” said Barnabas.

“My guest,” replied the voice. “Is right here.”

The dark did not lessen so much as Barnabas could suddenly see in the dark. Or so it seemed. The man in the coat stood on a mound of debris, with Tom beside him.

“Tom!” yelled Barnabas, lunging forward.

“Terms, Mr. McDoon, terms,” said the smouldering man. “I offer to return your lost one, but first you must agree to my terms. You know what they are.”

Barnabas pulled up short, breathing hard. The pistol under his coat banged against his ribs.

“I will come with you to Yount,” he said.

“The key?” said the Cretched Man with the slightest sub-slide of yearning.

“Here it is,” said Barnabas, pulling it from his pocket.

“You and the key together must come to Yount.”

“Yes,” said Barnabas. “First you release Tom, and guarantee his safe passage from this place.”

“Of course. Walk forward. We will complete the exchange . . . together . . . now.”

Barnabas shifted his gaze to the Cretched Man, saw his face for the first time. (Marvellous, thought Barnabas. Like alabaster, like a living . . .) All three were within six paces, five paces, four paces. For an instant Barnabas looked into blue eyes that shimmered green in the grisaille wash of witch-vision.

What happened next no one could ever reconstruct. Shots were fired. Someone shouted to Barnabas’s left, someone else to his right. More shots. A chorus of yells. Barnabas leaped forward, forgetting his pistol. His only goal was to free Tom. But Tom was gone, all was dark. Barnabas slipped, fell heavily to one knee. Something whizzed by his ear. He pulled out his pistol.

“Barnabas?” Sanford was nearby. The two merchants made their way to the far end of the ruins. After the shots and the cries, St. Clare Minoresses was quiet.

“Mr. Harris?” said Sanford, holding his pistol before him.

“The same, sir,” came the reply. Others had gathered to Mr. Harris. Even in the dark, Barnabas caught a glimpse of magenta on a skullcap.

“Salmius Nalmius,” said Barnabas. “Did we bag ’em?”

“No.”

“Come, sir,” said Harris. “It’s no good here. Best we return home before the watch arrives.”

Back at Mincing Lane, Barnabas sat staring into the small fire in the partners’ office, a hand on Yikes. With his other hand he held the key in his pocket.

“The Cretched Man had at least five men with him,” said Harris. “We had more. How did his men get away? We had them surrounded, men posted in Goodman’s Fields and Heydon Square, as far up as the Whitechapel High Street. No one passed.”

“The Cretched Man can find doorways that others overlook,” said Salmius Nalmius.

Sanford thought of weapons against those who walked through oblique doorways. Jawbone of an ass? Jericho trumpets?

“No one hurt?” said Nexius Dexius.

“No,” said Harris. “Except Mr. Fletcher, who has a big gash across his forehead. Nothing serious. He is being tended to in the kitchen as we speak.”

Barnabas spoke, still staring at the small coals. “We failed. I failed. They’ve taken Tom.”

Sanford put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll find him,” he said. But, in truth, no one could think of how. The next step, if there was one, would come from the Cretched Man, or it would not come at all. Barnabas stared into the flames as the others departed.

In the kitchen, the maid and the cook finished winding Fletcher’s forehead with an old piece of linen. The maid had nearly fainted when he came in, his face covered in blood.

“How did I get this?” said Fletcher. “Well, I’d like to say I duelled that scarlet devil myself to win this . . . but, to speak less dramatic-ably, that is, fully accurately in all respects, well, I tripped and fell on a stone.”

The cook smiled in relief. Mr. Fletcher, she thought, is just fine— no one hurt bad would ever talk like he did now. The maid, shaken by all the blood, was not so sure. Roaming the streets after dark in pursuit of kidnappers could be left to others, it seemed to her, now that Mr. Fletcher had been injured in the cause.

Harris walked in as Fletcher was finishing. “Humbleness,” he said, “is a great virtue but it can be overdone. Our Mr. Fletcher led the charge against the enemy, braving the bullets. The ground was rough uneven: falling over a rock was all too likely.”

The maid looked with redoubled admiration at Fletcher, who shot Harris a look of gratitude. The cook shooed everyone out of the kitchen. As she banked the fire, she murmured a prayer to St. Pancras, since his feast-day was just ending. “We’re in trouble, that no one can deny,” she said. “Sweet saint, whose feast was ruined by that eel-rawney, that witch-man, please help us save Master Tom. And help preserve that Mister Fletcher from harm, for my niece’s sake.”

In her room, Sally held a mirror to her face with one hand, and covered the bottom half of her face with the other hand. She nearly saw Tom: the flashing hazel eyes, the high cheekbones, the dark hair that never sat where it was supposed to. She began to cry. “Tom’s taken. We cannot get him back in London. What will we do?”

Isaak licked her face, jumped down to lunge at a dust mote. Watching Isaak attack invisible foes, Sally laughed in her tears. “We’ll go to Yount,” she said out loud, hugging herself. Isaak paused, stretched a golden leg, then returned to the fray.

No word came of Tom’s whereabouts the following day. Salmius Nalmius returned to Mincing Lane, Harris and Fletcher came and went on unspecified errands. Strange men used the dolphin knocker, entered with messages. Sanford was furious, on Peniel wrestling with a spirit as Jacob did.

Barnabas barely spoke except to say to Sally. “I swore to my sister long ago to protect you and Tom.”

Sally said, “It’s not your fault, Uncle.” She took out her locket, handed it to her uncle, who opened it. He looked down at his sister’s picture, head bowed like the pelican who would pierce its own heart to guard its young.

“She loved you then, she loves you now,” said Sally. “And so do I.”

Barnabas, vest rumpled, one stocking nearly to his ankle, hung his head. “I hate that . . . man,” the merchant said with such a savage expression that his niece stepped back. “This is . . . I hate his wicked vermissage . . . is that a word?”

“I don’t think so, Uncle, but we all know what you mean.”

Barnabas snapped the locket shut, handed it back to Sally, and said, “We’ll go to the ends of the earth if need be, beans and bacon, we will.”

“Yes, Uncle, we will.”

“Chock,” said the parrot.

A knock followed on the door, so loudly that Sally jumped. Sanford threw the door open, to find . . . no one—only a box on the doorstep. Sanford rushed out the door, looking up and down Mincing Lane. All manner of traffic passed, but nothing out of the ordinary. He walked back, picked up the box. He turned around and scanned the street one more time. There! High up on the house across the way was a small bird-shape, like a wren only not so, with a dull blank face. It disappeared behind a chimney. Sanford spat and went into the McDoon house.

Barnabas looked at the box on the table. “Our troubles began with a mysterious box . . .” he said, casting a glance at Salmius Nalmius. This box held a letter and a glass pendant on a fine chain. The pendant was claret red. Barnabas read the letter, nodded grimly, handed it to Sanford, who read it aloud.

Dear Mr. McDoon,

You disappoint us. You violated the terms of our exchange. Therefore, and alas, we are obligated to begin the journey without you. We will, of course, take our guest with us, for his safekeeping. You know where we shall journey. Our offer still stands, on the same terms, to be consummated at our journey’s destination. Come as expeditiously as you can. Meet us at the Sign of the Ear as soon as you are able. (Your new friends can tell you where that is.) We will await you, though our patience is not unlimited. More there is not to say. By the time you receive this, we will have departed. Make haste!

With regrets, but with hope for a successful resolution,

I remain yours, sir,

Phlegyas

Postscript: As an affidavit of our good faith, enclosed is a token that will assure you of our guest’s continued well-being. Carry it with you if you desire to know how he fares. Your new friends can enlighten you further.

“Now he’s ‘Phlegyas,’” said Barnabas. “More mockery, I guess. What does he mean—do you recognize it, Sally?”

“I don’t know—Virgil, maybe . . . oh, what does it matter?” said Sally.

“Where’s the Sign of the Ear?” asked Sanford.

“In Yount,” said the Purser. “I can show you the way.”

“What’s this for?” asked Barnabas, holding up the pendant.

“It is connected to Tom,” said Salmius Nalmius. “It is a kind of ansible, a device for communicating across long, strange distances.”

Barnabas jumped out of his chair. “We can talk to Tom with this?”

Salmius Nalmius shook his head. “No, I am afraid not. It only communicates . . . it lets you know that he is still alive. As long as it holds its colour—see how red it is?—you know that Tom is alive. If it goes dark . . .”

Everyone stared at the pendant. The red was rich, deep. Sally saw colour swirl in the depths of the glass. A heart, Tom’s heart, on a string.

Barnabas cleared his throat, did a defiant arabesque. “Well, beans and bacon,” he said. “Let’s go to Yount.”

——————————————————————–
_{Daniel Rabuzzi’s The Choir Boats will be available on Sept. 2009 from Chizine Publications and is now available for pre-order. You can visit him at www.DanielARabuzzi.com and at his blog Lobster and Canary.}

    

The Choir Boats explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includese a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root, goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

    

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Tags: Chizine Press, Daniel A. Rabuzzi, Exclusive, Fantasy, The Choir Boats

About Jay Tomio

...Jay Tomio is the co-owner of BSCreview and BSCkids. You should probably become his disciple through twitter @JayTomio. More fun awaits at Vogue Immunity, Gestalt Mash and The Malazan Ascendancy.

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