Gibbous House

by Ewan Lawrie

  ‘Well said, Moffat. But John Brown is a byword for scruple in Northumbria. Would you dine with me? The Olde Cross has a passable table, I believe.’

  Who was I to gainsay him? Besides, he had invited me and I presumed all would be to his account.

  The room was dark; candles in sconces and oil lamps few in number provided such illumination as there was. The dark, heavily varnished beams and woodwork sucked this light in rather than reflected it. Perhaps the patina of dirt was deliberately maintained to lend credibility to the preposterous legend of the dirty bottles. To me, it just seemed another grubby inn, but I never saw anyone touch the glassware, though many seemed drunk enough to brave more dangerous feats. The table too was darkly varnished, marked with the initials and sundry scratches of the idle drinker. Some may have been the tally marks of the less trusting; of the landlord or themselves, it mattered not. Robson apologised for the paucity of fare available: veal and ham pie, one leg of lamb, a hasty pudding and vegetables. He gave an excuse which I did not register beyond the word ‘late’. I cared not if it were the lateness of the hour or his mother, I confess. We spurned the hasty pudding, I because I had not eaten porridge for twenty-five years and never would again, and Maccabi, I presumed, because of the arcane dietary restrictions of his creed.

  Maccabi took his leave after pressing on me a final glass of port and extracting my promise that I would avail myself of his services as driver of the phaeton at ten the following morning. He assured me the ride to John Brown & Son in Seahouses would be no less comfortable than the stagecoach, and that he would then answer such questions as came within his remit. I should like to say I slept dreamless until the dawn, but the dream of Bedlam and its gory end visited me, as every night it lately had, though in all conscience I know not why.

  Chapter Six

  At five past the hour of ten, I presented myself in front of ‘The Dirty Bottles’. The phaeton and Maccabi were not waiting, but drew up the instant I appeared on the stoop. It rankled that Maccabi had not been inconvenienced; I consoled myself, however, that he had merely driven the horse once more around the triangle of Fenkle Street, Market Street and the Narrowgate to give the impression of an ill-mannered tardiness. He did not descend to offer a hand in boarding or loading my admittedly sparse luggage, just smiled his saintly smile. I cursed him silently.

  The Great North Road out of Alnwick offers a view of Alnwick Castle from the Lion Bridge, which, as Maccabi began to inform me, was designed by a Robert Adam. The most striking and ludicrous thing about the bridge was the rigid tail of the Percy Lion decorating it, pointing our way along the road. No one knew if the rigidity of the tail was some visual joke in dubious taste or an indication of the sculptor’s shortcomings in his art.

  Maccabi seemed remarkably well informed about the ancestral seat of the Percy family and began a tedious disquisition about their employment of a gardener whose given name of Lancelot was scarcely less ridiculous than his sobriquet of Ability or Capacity or some combination of the two.

  My escort seemed completely unperturbed by my disdain for him, continuing with his inconsequential chatter as though he were entertaining a small child or infirm relative. At one point he reined the horse into the side of the road, just beside a copse. He sat silent in contemplation, for which I was most grateful. It did not last; he began to list the avian riches of our serendipitous stop. Yaffles, screechers, boombirds, ragamuffins, thistlefinches and I knew not what. If I had had but one of my yellow scarves about my person, rather than in my baggage, I should have despatched him forthwith, no matter what riches awaited in Gibbous House.

  As Maccabi brought our carriage to a halt at Seahouses, I withdrew my recently acquired timepiece from my waistcoat and was quite surprised that it was merely the first hour of the afternoon. My travelling companion’s prattle had performed some alchemy that made the journey seem as long as Moses’ own to Canaan. King Street, though enjoying the benefit of several streets between itself and the sea front, was in the grip of a North Sea fret, which had soaked my outer garments instantaneously. Whenever I breathed in, I could taste the sea on the back of my tongue and felt as chilled as only the North Sea Spring can make one.

  Number 11 looked to have been built about the turn of the century. The window’s glass panes were small and dark with dirt, and the bow of the window of uncertain geometry. The door appeared far too ornate for the simplicity of the building: it was of two leaves, and the escutcheon around the lock was brass, in the shape of a lion’s head. There was something exotic in the lines, as though the brass had been fashioned in Persia or beyond. The wood was painted a vibrant green that was quite out of place in this Northumbrian seaside town, and the knocker on the door was a miniature, tarnished version of the benighted lion from Adam’s bridge. I presumed that this was a later addition to the door furniture.

  Maccabi grasped the rigid tail, lifted the knocker high and let it fall, making the solid sound of a beadle’s staff on a sack, or the back of a boy. Both leaves swung open to reveal a figure as wide as it was tall, or rather, short. Atop the rotund torso was a head fully as round. Cherubic features boasted the red cheeks of the happy or a devotee of fortified wines. Bold, greying whiskers seemed an extension of the fringe of hair circling his pate. The man’s waistcoat was stained and misbuttoned and one of his lapels hung by a thread. A ragged shirtsleeve emerged from the cuff of his frock coat. Maccabi chose to perform the obsequies on the threshold, whether intent on insult or no, I was unsure.

  ‘Mr Brown, sir, may I present Mr Alasdair Moffat, late of... ’ He eyed me for a moment.

  ‘London,’ I said.

  ‘Quite so. London.’

  John Brown’s voice seemed to come from a deep pit. Rough and harsh as the voice of a man half strangled, or hanged, it seemed no more likely to emerge from his cherub mouth as from that of a woman or a child. He gestured, bidding the two of us enter. Inside the hallway stood more furnishings than in an auction house. Eclectic pieces of variand purpose: tallboys, commodes, secretaries, dining chairs and one long table on its end, the legs offering us an embrace as we squeezed our way into Brown’s office.

  It was with some relief that I observed that a functional number of chairs, a solitary large bookcase and one desk comprised the furniture in that room. More disconcerting were the walls, if indeed any such lay behind the innumerable framed items. Portraits, landscapes, life paintings, sporting scenes, cartoons, sketches, incomplete works and several other canvases were nailed to whatever lay behind them. It was such a riot of images that I almost felt nauseous.

  I was put in mind of Greek symbols seen long ago on the flyleaves of books produced from a large and dusty trunk, by a man doomed by encountering me, so many years ago:

  Από τα βιβλία του μοφφατ

  (From the Library of Moffat)

  I fixed my attention on Brown. With conspiratorial elbows on his desk – an expensive piece but as marked and worn as a pawnbroker’s counter – he began to steeple his fingers in an attempt to strike a more prepossessing attitude. Sadly, his manual proportions echoed those of the rest of his person, and his chubby hands resembled more the dome of St Paul’s than any towering spire. However, the voice from the pit ensured no levity, much less mockery, at least from my part.

  His hanged-man’s voice, full of gravel and brimstone, put one in mind of the very deepest of pits; I myself countenanced no Gehenna beneath my feet, believing rather more in those hells I had seen above the ground. Still, I could imagine his voice as that of Malphas or Halphas escaped from Solomon’s urn.

  But no demon ever spoke words of such circumlocutory tedium, punctuated with harsh clearings of the throat, sniffs and snorts, with ahs and ums of uncountable number. I remember clearly how he began:

  ‘Ah... Mr... Moffat, is it? Um... Of course it is, yes.’

  At which point he broke into a round of percussive non-verbal noises. As the unmusical rasp went on, in so far as I was able to gather, the man was attempting
to establish my bona fides without asking me to prove it in any way. Maccabi retained an air of bored insouciance throughout. When satisfied – although I was unsure by what means – as to that good faith, Brown began to explain the legal points surrounding the inheritance. He elaborated on entail, detail and for all that I could make head or tail of any of it, the devil’s tail as well. Fortunately, the property had only lately emerged from chancery. The property, as he continued to refer to the estate throughout, had passed to Coble himself by a somewhat circuitous route, though he vouchsafed that Maccabi would describe it when he escorted me to inspect it.

  Brown’s acolyte stood by at some unseen signal. Taking possession of a most prodigious bundle of papers of varied antiquity, he proceeded to place them one folio at a time before me and bade me peruse each one with diligence. Some required marks or declarations, some did not. I confess I passed into numb oblivion, and the inky words ran before my eyes as if newly writ with no sand to hand. The last bore merely an anodyne form of words:

  As heretofore agreed, I pledge full payment

  Signed:

  Alasdair Moffat

  I was on the point of appending that much-practised sig-nature, when Brown asked for a final time, ‘Ah... you are quite sure... um... that you are, indeed... ’ Coughs and phlegmonous movements quite interrupted him, until he recovered himself enough to say: ‘Alasdair Moffat?’

  That I surely was. It had been the work of moments to become Alasdair Moffat, a decision taken as soon as the thought was formulated. The symbols flashed across my mind’s eye again. As to who I was before that, the name is gone and all who would own to it too. That party left a middling estate near Largs at scarce eleven years, following the unfortunate death of a younger sister. Her mother, being recently delivered of a further son, descended into peculiar hysteria in the presence of the elder. The older boy was despatched with a trunk to the care of a maternal great-aunt in Edinburgh, shortly after the girl’s funeral. How the father must have loved his wife to exile his beloved eldest son so! Senga Campbell, the great-aunt, lived and worked in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, and had done so since its opening in the previous decade. By the time she received the boy, she was indistinguishable in dress and deportment from some of the patients in Doctor Andrew Duncan’s Model Asylum – and as capable of his care.

  The boy received no further schooling, of course, but made himself useful in minor ways. Chamber pots were hardly a challenge, but he found the antics of the genuine lunatics a diversion. One fellow was exceedingly odd: for days at a time, on the opening of the judas hole, his handsome face would appear; cultured tones would explain reasonably that due to some unfortunate misunderstanding he, Doctor J____, was incarcerated in error.

  Less often, but with lunar regularity, his face would appear at the hatch contorted with rage and insanity and he would try to bite the boy through the bars, as he teased him with some beef on a stick. Several years passed in such amusement until the day his true education began, the day an Alasdair Moffat was consigned to Bedlam by his relatives.

  Από τα βιβλία του μοφφατ

  (From the Library of Moffat)

  Taking the pen proffered by Maccabi, who seemed to have produced both it and an inkwell from behind his coat-tails, I signed ‘Moffat’ with a flourish. It was a model of authenticity. Brown’s smile did not reach his eyes and he seized this last document with unseemly haste, I felt. The ink, unblotted by paper or sand, ran freely, creating unlikely shapes on the vellum. The notary began to take just such pains with the papers that he had encouraged fromme. In such degree was he absorbed that I could feel his very presence withdraw from the room, as it were. Maccabi caught my eye and raised a sardonic brow over his own. I lifted my regard and – to avoid any nausea – fixed my eye securely to a canvas nailed behind Brown’s right shoulder.

  The edges of the canvas were curling and appeared singed. The colours were dark and the draughtsmanship and use of colour were familiar in style, as was the content. However, I was sure the medium was not so. It was a painting in oils, depicting a room such as many I had visited. A moll, dressed in fashions over a century old, was being attended by her maid, an old and syphilitic jade. The bed was her only major piece of furniture, and a cat posed suggesting the moll’s own posture. A witch’s hat and birch rods on the wall suggested either black magic or that her profession required her to indulge some tastes out of the common. On the wall behind her I noted the artist had captured the very tawdry tints of portraits torn from ballad broadsheets; I fancied I could scry the appellation MacHeath under the one and Sacheverell under the other. The symbolism of the two philtres of quack salve on the shelf above the likenesses was admirable. It proved my diagnosis of the moll’s attendant.

  When Brown’s grating voice brought me once more to myself , I was on the point of remembering just whose hand I recognised in the painting.

  ‘Ah... Umm... Moffat. Did you want to repair at once to your... ah... property? Maccabi will be delighted to accompany you.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary, Brown. I’ll find my way easily enough.’

  ‘Oh, but it will,’ Maccabi interjected smugly. ‘You will recall signing my contract of employment, sir? I did not wish to leave the house after so long as its factotum, and am overjoyed that you are desirous of my continued employment as such.’

  I could have fed the insufferable prig his eyeballs with a Coburg-pattern spoon. The documents I had failed to read were clasped to Brown’s chest as like to put one in mind of corsets made of paper. The man himself remained mute and motionless, and, for the second time in less than a week, I found myself propelled from a place of business without courtesy or dismissal. Maccabi attempted a light touch on my elbow as we crossed the emerald portal, but the somewhat heavier touch of mine on his ribs thwarted his presumption. He did not gratify me with a grunt, but merely looked me in the eye as any equal might and said, ‘I thought... Perhaps... a tailor?’

  I was too surprised at his effrontery not to reply, ‘Here? I had supposed that Alnwick would house the very nearest!’

  ‘In that you are quite correct, Mr Moffat. However, I have taken the liberty of summoning one such to the Coble Inn to await our pleasure this very afternoon. He would not depart without seeking leave to do so, I think.’

  Had I not already taken against him so, I would have admired his foresight.

  ‘Coble?’

  He threw back his head and laughed his unmusical laugh. ‘A natural enough name for an inn in a fishing village! It is the local dialect for a fisherman’s boat.’

  ‘And my benefactor’s given name? How serendipitous!’

  Maccabi eyed me closely, and in a voice devoid of humour, declared, ‘There is little of chance in names, Mr Moffat.’

  Chapter Seven

  The Coble Inn was as mean a hovel as ever I had seen. On the weathered sign that hung acrook from rusted iron outside was a symbol, and not the fishing boat one might have expected. As arcane as it was, the symbol reproduced here did seem uncommon familiar. I was unable to place its provenance at the time, however.

  The inn’s sandstone walls had never felt the mason’s chisel, and it stood, or rather stooped, at the point where Main Street touched the shore. No afternoon sun had sweetened the salt spray from the rollers crashing in from the North Sea, and for that reason alone I welcomed the low accommodation as a haven from the elements.

  Inside the inn was a single, long room; all the carpentry was rough and unfinished, even the counter behind which the landlord stood. He continued to stand, mute, when I enquired after the tailor. Only the dart of his eyes to a darkened corner convinced me that he was not some tall Galatea into which the carpenter had poured all the dedication missing from the furnishings. Turning to Maccabi, I allowed that our host was a talkative cove. Maccabi grinned and said, ‘Hardly that. John Bill is a mute, hasn’t spoken a word since he washed up on the sand outside. His brother has never been found, nor even a plank from their boat. Coble
placed him here, an uncommon generous act, I should say.’

  ‘And so would I,’ I replied, resolving to ascertain if Coble had left me any interest in this property, and to knock it down if he had.

  A bent figure had risen as best it could from behind another rustic table. A dark and vigorous voice emerged, its beauty marked by an accent that was testament to the wanderings of its owner’s tribe.

  ‘Elijah Salomons, gentleman’s tailor, at your service, Mr Moffat.’

  I eyed Maccabi’s old-fashioned dress and remarked, ‘I am sincere in hoping, despite the evidence of my ears, that this is not your tailor.’

  His lips grew thin; I had at last punctured his poise.

  ‘No, sir, he is not. Mr Salomons is the best tailor north of Newcastle and south of Selkirk and numbers the Duke of Northumberland among his clients. I am most appreciative of his attending to you here in Seahouses.’

  I offered a smile to my servant before turning back to the tailor.

  ‘Now, tailor, take my measure, while you can.’

  Salomons busied himself about my person with chalk, pins and a bolt of dark material I found crude and rustic.

  ‘It is for the patterns, Mr Moffat. I assure you I shall choose the best of cloth to make your clothes, but I could not bring every bolt from Alnwick, I regret to say.’

  Glancing over at Maccabi, I saw the beginnings of a smirk, but he averted his gaze from me and engaged the mute in a monologue.

  ‘John, John. Join me in a porter, would you?’

  John Bill’s eyes rolled alarmingly as he gave a savage nod of affirmation. He poured two tankards and I noted none was offered to me.

  ‘A game, a game, John. To while away my employer’s fitting, wilt thou?’

  The same exploration of every nook of the eyesockets followed by a brutal head movement came as answer. The dumb figure moved slowly from behind the counter and both men repaired to the opposite corner of the room to a table with nine skittles atop it in three rows of three. The table gave the impression of an over-large fruiterer’s box set on four high legs. A stout wooden pole stood in the centre of the box. Attached to the pole by a link-chain was a heavy-looking wooden ball about the size of a plum. Maccabi, still addressing his mute companion in the same jovial tones, which, in truth, I could not credit nor countenance, ‘Ha, John, take you the first foray among the clothmakers.’