Curiosity Read online

  “Club night,” says his uncle at the door of his rooms.

  “I thought so,” says Henry. “I passed by.”

  The doorman has given Clement a lamp and now he lights another one. In the blue-papered drawing room, he busies himself with tumblers and a dusty bottle of port from the sideboard, moving through the answers to questions he hasn’t asked. “Half-holiday, eh. A rum business, officer training. Lucky with this war, bound to be commissioned. Regardless, eh?” He hands Henry a drink. “At the Beach family seat in Bristol, then, your mother?” He’s the uncle on the other side – it’s his way to affect distaste for the De la Beche family, as though Henry’s connection to his father is a youthful folly he’ll outgrow.

  “No,” says Henry. He settles himself on the divan with his legs foppishly scissored to take the pain off his right hip. Clement doesn’t ask. “You wouldn’t have a bit of bread or cheese about, would you?”

  “Never keep victuals in the house,” says Clement. “Can’t tolerate the vermin. You should have come into the club if you wanted to eat.” Two carved chairs flank the bookcase and he settles on one. Columns of squashed laurel wreaths climb the paper behind him. He raises his glass. Victory floats in a halo around his limp fair curls. He’s joined the Headstrong Society at Boodle’s, he debated that night – what a pity Henry did not stop in! – he built an unassailable case for the affirmative. It was a debate on the poor tax, on parish relief and its folly. “Be it resolved!” he cries. “Be it resolved that the poor tax promotes growth in the underclasses!” He was proud to cite Malthus, starvation being one of nature’s checks on rampant breeding. He could see them sitting up straight at the name of Malthus – it was science that won the debate. He lifts his glass again, tips it to the light. “To science,” he calls. Then, seeming to see something in Henry’s silence, he suddenly abandons the debate, agrees to offer it up for ridicule. The comic mask falls over his face. “A riddle for you,” he says. “How is a Headstrong debate like a pint of Boodle’s ale?”

  Henry has heard this before. “Foamy and frothy on top?” he asks heavily, feeling the port rise at that very moment to his head.

  “Heavy and muddy within, haha.”

  On the wall above, Beau Brummel stands in aquatint, a graceful hand on a graceful hip. “I was stood drinks all night by Forester,” Clement crows. “Simon Forester?” He lifts his eyebrows theatrically. London agent for Napoleon Bonaparte? Why, just last week Forester was commissioned by Bony to buy a thousand tickets from London bookmakers. Or so Clement had heard. “It’s not right,” he cries, finding a segue to the evening’s hilarity. “Where does it leave the rest of us? There must be an exclusion for men of destiny.”

  “Perhaps Bonaparte’s betting on his own defeat?” says Henry, feeling a violent longing for the towpath by the Thames.

  “Haha,” says Clement absently. No contributions accepted, apparently: the hilarity was for members only. He crosses his legs, batting at one of the wandering calves, and then he reaches over to the table for his snuff box, passing it to Henry with a look of suppressed provocation. He knows Henry won’t take snuff. He wants to show the box, an enamel of an imploring Negro in chains. And the legend: Am I not a man and a brother?

  “Thank you, no,” says Henry, passing the snuff box back. His head is pulled irresistibly to the arm of the divan. The wall of the drawing room sags towards him, the lamplight swoons. “Where is she?” Henry mumbles. “My mother. Do you know where she is?”

  The next morning, Clement takes Henry on a promenade through Soho. Rain overnight left pools of water lying on the streets, and women wearing pattens click along the pavement. Most of the grand houses are apartments let out to members of Parliament come in from the country, or to gentlemen about town and the ladies they consort with. Clement likes to tell about Mrs. Hamilton living on this street when Lord Nelson died, he shows Henry the very house (a different house, Henry notes, than the last time he was taken on this tour). And there’s the house where the celebrated actress Mrs. Pope died and from which she was taken to be buried. “In the cloister,” says Clement reverently. “In the Abbey.” Clement’s friend William Bullock, the famous collector, is building a new exhibition hall on Piccadilly. It’s a grand edifice, fronted in a fine granite. An immense statue, extravagantly roped as though caught in a poacher’s net, is being hoisted into place on the first floor. William Bullock himself stands on the pavement in a horsehair wig in lieu of a hat, supervising the installation. This is the sort of marvel I can offer up daily, Clement says by his sparkling manner, pulling Henry along. Now that he’s had a proper breakfast of kippers and eggs at the Halfmoon Inn, Henry is sullen at having squandered his freedom. Mr. Bullock greets them with professional friendliness, but introductions are interrupted by shouts from the men on the pulleys. The statue rises serenely above them and settles heavily on its marble platform over their heads. Something about the statue’s hair is in keeping with the hieroglyphics carved on the granite facing stone. “Is your hall to house Egyptian artifacts?” Henry asks.

  “No, no,” laughs his uncle, trying to draw Mr. Bullock into amusement at Henry’s ignorance.

  “There will be a mummy in permanent exhibit, lad,” says Mr. Bullock kindly. “But the Egyptian is just a style the public’s enamoured of at the moment. This hall will house all manner of objects from around the world.” The inaugural exhibition, just two weeks away, is to be souvenirs from Captain Cook’s voyages, every sort of natural curiosity and artifact of native manufacturing. Spices, shrunken heads, feather cloaks, masks, rattles, helmets, spears, shells – this spiel is word for word from the posters pasted to the hoarding in front of them. “Taking the lad to see the Hottentot, eh?” Bullock asks when he’s come to the end of it. “Go ahead, spend your brass at Schmitt’s. I’ll get it out of you another day.”

  “Hottentot?” says Clement. “Schmitt?”

  “Up at 225. Had a chance to bring her in myself.” He’s shouting over the din, the story coming rapid-fire from the puckered pouch of his mouth. “I was dealing with Dunlop on a came lopard skin and he offered her to me for thirty pound. The Hottentot Venus, he’s calling her. From Cape Town. Says she’s a corking example of the type. Grab a chance to lift her loincloth and you’ll see the whole business. I was keen. I could have shown her at Bartholomew Fair. But by the time I counter-offered, that dirty Schmitt was in. Oh, well, he can take the fall. The Attorney General’s got his nose in, he’s taking it to the Chancery. He’ll shut it down. You’d best go today.”

  “He bought this woman?” says Henry, trying to understand. “From South Africa? He will be charged under the Wilberforce Bill!”

  “Oh, he’s the one for niceness,” cries Clement, making a little hop. “Allow me to present my nephew, young Henry De la Beche. Officer cadet at Great Marlow. Son of Halse Hall plantation, Clarendon, Jamaica. Commission to be paid in bananas and cotton.”

  “Cane sugar, actually,” Henry says. Clement looks at him sharply. Perhaps only now is he registering Henry’s diminished uniform, the crossed white sash from his tunic missing and the plume from his shako gone. His hose filthy, perforated by sharp branches along the towpath, his shoes muddy.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” says Bullock. “But that’s just the thing. Apparently she wasn’t bought. She’s a full partner. She’s on shares of the gate. There’s moaning about it all down the street. But think about it. She’s got as much right to display herself as your common dwarf, don’t she, eh?” He brings his wrinkled lips down to Henry’s ear. “But what part is she displaying? That’s the question, eh. It’ll be a public decency charge they get them on.”

  The exhibition hall of Mr. Bullock’s rival is close to Piccadilly Circus. Henry thought he understood Mr. Bullock’s meaning, but still they go. Maybe he got it wrong – there is Clement, strolling blithely along. “I’m not going in,” he says, and he sees Clement’s eyes light up: here’s a story he can trot out for the amusement of his friends. The crowd thickens.
They’re beset by vendors hawking matches, eels, rat poison, eggs, wooden dolls. Henry tries to put his mind to a pretext for borrowing a couple of quid so he can leave. Clusters of girls in striped gingham stroll the pavement. Clement has clamped an arm around Henry’s shoulder. He digs his fingers in as a confiding signal each time they pass a comely one. And then they’re at 225 Piccadilly and there’s the sign tacked by the door: Outlandish Beast in a Raree Show. A permanent all-purpose sign, judging by its patina of grime and tobacco spit. Clement’s arm is still around his shoulders, he tries to wheel Henry towards the entrance. Henry stiffens his legs, resisting, and an old affection rises, a habit of play that makes him lean suddenly into the turn. He’s as tall as Clement now, he’s heavier, and his reversal almost topples them. Then they’re at the wicket after all, where Clement parts with four shillings, squeezing them one by one out of the purse at his waist. They’re directed to wait in the crowd of chattering sightseers on the stairs. Spectators exiting the exhibition hall have to use the same stairway, and Clement and Henry are pressed into a conglomerate of bodies at desperate cross-purposes. Finally the deadlock is broken and they’re carried bodily up by the crowd and deposited in a lofty hall lit by windows in the ceiling.

  Beside a placard reading THE HOTTENTOT VENUS, a boy is hawking two-foot lengths of willow for three pence. “What are the sticks for?” Henry says, but Clement is out of hearing. A keeper, curiously costumed in a beefeater hat and a kilt too short for him, directs the crowd. Here decorum prevails, he says by his expression, ushering Henry into a stream of curious Londoners milling around a platform, and through a trick of centripetal action Henry finds himself on the inside of the stream, just a few feet away from the subject of the exhibition, who stands still and erect and bare-breasted.

  Two shillings each they paid, he thinks afterwards, as he stands on Piccadilly watching well-dressed Londoners wander out of the hall. The cost of a roast beef dinner in an inn, to ogle an ordinary Negro woman with her breasts bared. Across the Circus, an itinerant clarinet plays. A hawker with a pack on his back calls, “Ole clo,” and he perks up – in his blue and scarlet uniform, he’s an illicit Union Jack. But he doesn’t have a pence about him. Rain begins to mist down. His mother will know of his disgrace by now; they lay three days in the guardhouse waiting for the king’s envoy to arrive to sign the writ. He presses against the building, trying to avoid the rain, wondering where he can go. To Mrs. Butterworth, maybe, their old housekeeper in Ottery St. Mary. Or to Uncle Alger in Bristol, his uncle on the other side. Alger will know where Mother is – she keeps in touch with him because of Halse Hall business. But I’ve got to get out of this uniform, he thinks, before they arrest me. The previous morning, he had lain for a while on the bench listening to the chain of small metallic noises coming from the hen on the window ledge above him. In that moment, he understood that what you do does not necessarily define you. You can choose to say, Yes, I do this. But I am separate from it. You can give them the callow gesture, because that’s what they’re worth, and you can be as you were. As you were – it’s a military expression.

  Clement emerges from the entrance, wiping his brow. “You left too soon,” he says. “I swear I caught sight of a tail.” He does a little dance of excitement and revulsion on the pavement, flapping his handkerchief. When Henry doesn’t respond, he sobers. “That will be nothing new to you,” he says. “It’s the heat that does it, as you know. You’re familiar with pawpaw and breadfruit. Grows in three days, breadfruit does, as big as an archbishop’s hat.”

  They set off for home. Henry is thinking of Marlow, the sunlit study hall. His folio, and the narrow shelves under the windows where they kept their pens, the solid oak tables where they sat copying Muller’s Artillery. Afternoons hiding in the mouldy barracks attic with Chorley and Wyndham, an earl’s son, all of them working on copies of his drawings (tuppence a copy, he paid them), their admiration for his skill and wit and daring evident in their assiduous journeyman efforts. Crossing the Circus with Clement chattering at his side, he thinks of the truest moment there was, in the guardhouse at Marlow after the flogging, when they lay on the packed earth floor without a blanket (Chorley a little apart and silent), he and Wyndham lying side by side in their pain and exaltation, and the torch outside the barred window shone on his friend’s head and he saw tiny movements in Wyndham’s hair; lice, delicately illuminated.

  But he’s fallen into a new drama. As they walk up Halfmoon Street, he sees a carriage with his own arms stencilled on the door, and Algernon De la Beche descends in his queued and powdered wig, looking like an advance agent from the Captain Cook exhibit in Bullock’s Egyptian Hall, and evidently astonished to encounter Henry here.

  Properly indoors, Alger declines a drink. He likewise declines the divan and lowers himself onto a chair, the carved back of which he declines to use for support. His indignation of manner is theatrical, his real indignation having been exhausted, Henry can guess, over the temperature of his tea at breakfast. Ignoring Henry, who stands by the mantel, he addresses himself to Clement. “I was in London town, as it happens, yesterday. Having made my way here to tend to the business affairs of my sister-in-law, as prearranged. My meeting was with a solicitor at Lincoln’s Inn.”

  Henry offers his uncle a sober, attentive countenance. “We had just settled nicely into our affairs,” Alger goes on, “when a letter arrived informing us that this young chap’s mother had been summoned to Great Marlow on a matter of great consequence and urgency, and asking if I would present myself there on her behalf. Your sister is prostrated, Mr. Mollot, as you can imagine. She is entirely unable to travel. And so I took myself to Great Marlow, anticipating bad news and, upon my arrival, hearing worse. And now, after a day of to-ing and fro-ing and exhausting the horses to no avail on the Great West Road, I find the lad on your premises. Well, Mr. Mollot, whatever your intentions in sheltering him, I must inform you that my sister-in-law has conferred on me the responsibility of paterfamilias. No slight towards you, I’m sure, Mr. Mollot, no slight at all intended.” His next observations are broken by throat clearing. Henry hears my brother, safe from this, God’s grace.

  “Sheltering him?” asks Clement. “Safe from this?” “Ah?” says Alger, sitting back then with satisfaction, casting his eyes about Clement’s drawing room, every surface of which, Henry sees now, is felted with dust. What he took for laurel wreaths stencilled on the wallpaper are circles of mould. “He’s not told you,” says Alger. “He’s not had the courtesy to enlighten you as to the true circumstances of his visit.” He takes up the vial hanging from a chain on his bosom and painstakingly extracts two peppercorns to chew as a tonic. “Our mutual nephew,” he says, looking directly at Clement, his eyes glittering, “has been sent down. From Great Marlow. By royal edict.” “Sent down?” cries Clement. “Royal edict?” Henry is still standing by the fireplace. “My mother. My mother, where is she?” he asks, chagrined to hear his voice revert to the treble notes of boyhood.

  THREE

  here was a war on that year, and a naval blockade that left the English with only their own corn to eat, and then the crops failed. But Lyme Regis did a respectable domestic trade. That it was a port town at all and not a squalid fishing village was down to its sturdy, black-haired citizenry, who, hundreds of years in the past, had hauled stones from the beach to build a massive breakwater the shape of an elbow, turning an inhospitable stretch of Lyme Bay into a harbour. For centuries, the weight of those stones and their affinity for each other was all that held that breakwater together. The Cobb, they called it, and by the time Mary was a girl, it was a wide, tilting road capped with massive blocks of dark limestone from the Isle of Portland, with the revenue office and the isolation hut built right onto it.

  Mary often followed Marine Parade west along the shore to the Cobb, to buy fish. And often she walked out past it with her father, to collect on Monmouth Beach. There the walking was perilous, the stones a queer shape and neither small enough to be called shingle
nor large enough to bear the flat of a boot. It was a common boast of smugglers washed up there in fog that they knew their bearings by the shape of the stones, but that was not such a feat; Mary would have been able to do the same.

  The Devil had made Monmouth Beach on a wager, people always said. Mary held such comments loosely in her mind now, thinking of the man with the blue bag. But the curiosities they collected on that beach, they were still a puzzle. They were given to the poor like manna to the Children of Israel, Richard said, although not as regular. And so it would seem God had made the curiosities, although James Wheaton, the pastor at the Independent Chapel, feared and hated them. It was true that some of the curiosities had an unwholesome look to them, especially the curved grey stones the townspeople identified as the Devil’s discarded toenails. Even the beautiful ammonites were a mystery. They had the weight of stones, but they were unlike any stone God had made. So intricate and patterned, they had almost the hand of an artisan upon them.

  One Sabbath morning, walking out early, Mary and her father met the hedge carpenter Walter Jones and his son, on their way to the Independent Chapel to get the fire started. Walter Jones lifted the cap from his tufted hair and said, “We’ll see ye in chapel anon, then,” offering them a view of the narrow brown teeth spaced like fence posts in his gums. “Not today, friend,” Mary’s father said agreeably, and turned to walk on, and Mr. Jones said to his back, “Ye’re niver taking that child to the shore on the Sabbath morning.” They kept going and then they heard a bellowed, “Oy!” and they stopped and turned. “Or up on the boogerin’ cliffs!” Mr. Jones shouted.

  When had her father stopped going to chapel? Mary couldn’t say exactly. He’d always complained about James Wheaton at the pulpit, for his twitching and his eye fluttering and his knuckle cracking. When money was tight and the foreshore gleamed in the morning sun just at chapel time, Richard would declare a holiday from sermonizing and spend the morning collecting, eager to have first chance at the treasures the waves had brought in overnight and would batter and smash by noon. Eventually, he began to avoid chapel even when the tide was high.