Love, careless love. Had they known their stubbon residence would lead, however indirectly to the destruction of the Heart of Light perhaps they would have floated off, resignedly oxidizing their luciferin to play the great game of eat and be eaten in pastures new. Certainly a vague, half-articulated melancholy pervaded the colony as massive fish-kills went on dogging their progress up the western coast of France: the algae were not without compassion. But of the Heart of Light’s eventual fate, how could they have known? When the courted vessel reached Cherbourg, an irreducible ten hours behind the Megaera, her quarry, the algae still flung themselves out like a broad lover’s cape of blue and glittering green, billowing out over the ocean behind the vessel they had learnt to call home.
Love then, a hopeless trailing love. Looking off the stern, Wilberforce van Clam complained bitterly of the ship’s unwanted suitors. It was foolhardy enough to have ventured so far from their familiar hunting grounds. But that leap made, to lie at anchor off Cherbourg, flying the Jolly Roger and surrounded by a sea of light was madness. Luckily, the harbour appeared so clogged it was doubtful a squadron could get out to attack them; even so…. Amilcar Buscallopet devoted his evening prayers exclusively to the problem of the algae and ‘Mussel’ Wilkins aided by Lobs and Oiß de Vin made fruitless attempts to cut it away with long-handled scythes improvised from the dinghy’s oars. But their efforts came to nothing and all this time the Megaera was escaping towards the safety of the Thames estuary. Faced with the problems of the algae, the weed, the escaping Megaera and their own dwindling supplies of gunpowder, the pirates knew they were in a desperate strait. It was in these circumstances that Wilberforce van Clam, for only the fourth time in the vessel’s twenty-six year history, convened the Heart of Light’s highest legislative body, in which every member of the crew had his voice, the Pantisocratic Diet of Light, and in this forum he proposed a simple, but daring plan.
It was this: the Heart of Light should assume its original name and, disguised as the Alecto (as, in fact, herself), should pursue the Megaera up the Thames and there launch a full-blown no-nonsense pirate raid on the Port of London itself. Thus restocked with the desperately needed sulphur, they could then sail down river under their true colours, pillaging perhaps a small bankside settlement or two en route, and return to their former happy existence lurking about the fat Mediterranean trade-routes. Wilberforce stressed the element of surprise to his shipmates and, more subtly, the fame which so audacious an act would confer upon them all. As the protocol demanded, the Pantisocratic Diet of Light listened in silence to his proposal and, when it was ended, Hörst Craevisch struggled to his feet.
‘Idiocy!’ he exclaimed, waving an admonitory digit in the air. ‘Sheer lunacy!’
His stomach quivered with emotion as he went on to cite all kinds of precedents and possible pitfalls, each and every one mitigating against Wilberforce’s plan. But Wilberforce was ready. When he stood up, seemingly hours later, his tones were measured and calm, bespeaking compromise, which was the form of his second plan.
‘Algae,’ he said and stopped, allowing the word to sink in. Grey-headed pirates squatting painfully on their haunches (as the protocols also demanded) nodded sagely.
‘Algae,’ Wilberforce repeated, ‘and weed. The algae is attracted to the weed on the hull. Sometime, and somewhere, we will have to careen this Heart of Light of ours and scrape the weed.’
‘And the barnacles,’ came a voice.
‘And the barnacles,’ Wilberforce agreed. ‘Now, I share all your fears of the Port of London. We are all fugitives from that place. But all of us have suffered at the helm when the old lady swings about for no reason, or rolls in a calm sea, or snags her keel when the soundings clear a fathom.’ The less expert helmsmen, who suffered these mishaps even without the weed, nodded vigorously. ‘I propose a second plan. An appendix if you will: should we arrive and find the Megaera defended by His Majesty’s frigates, well then our story is simple. We are bound for the drydock at Blackwall and our only purpose is to scrape the hull. And it will be true. If we are to scrape the hull, why not there? And if we are to ever rid ourselves of our guests’ - he gestured in a wide circle to the enveloping algae which slopped greenly all about - ‘this ship must be docked, raised and scraped to the boards.’
The fourth Pantisocratic Diet of Light was to last a further three weeks, with plenary meetings and delegatory committees leading to amendments at the sub-committee stage, then there would be talks, and talks about talks, trade-offs, discreet lobbying below decks, several shameless displays of filibustering and even the odd case of vote-buying but, in the end, Wilberforce van Clam would see his dual resolution adopted by a majority of two and only then, still pursued by her amorous escort of phyto plankton, would the Heart of Light set sail for Deal bound either for the Megaera and glory or Blackwall Docks and a week’s scrubbing, but whichever (a further vote would decide the issue finally once they were in the Thames) Wilberforce was privately convinced that in all the politicking, it was the algae which swung the vote his way. Its constant encircling presence besieged the waverers, persuaded the doubters and exerted a unique pressure on men used to an open sea who would look out over the twinkling lights of their escort and intuit a vast and diffuse purpose behind their presence, an obscure commerce of some sort which, most unset-tlingly of all, seemed to have nothing to do with them, to exclude them somewhere as if they, the crew, were the escort and the algae were the true protagonists, which, from the point of view of the algae at least, was precisely the case. Thus, in his plan to take the Heart of Light home, Wilberforce found his most powerful allies in the algae. Without their mute intervention, the battle for the hearts and minds of the crew would have been lost, the Heart of Light would have sailed south on a slim majority and the catastrophe which was to befall her might well have been averted.
And Wilberforce? The Internuncio watched him wait out the bluffers, persuade the doubters, lose long exhausting arguments, win them back and pace the deck for hours with his eyes looking out miles over the water for England, the Port of London and beyond them to the secret nailed into the heart of the Heart of Light and, after the final vote had given him the fight, he watched as the man slung himself from a cradle off the bow’s rail and broke the heads of the nails with a chisel until the name-plate came away with a crack to tumble down into the algae, “Heart of Light”, where a film of tiny blue-green creatures swamped it before his eyes and it disappeared to become part of the colony which encircled and surrounded them all. In its place, Peter Rathkael-Herbert saw the darker wood of the original plate, protected alike from the weather and prying eyes by its substitute for all those years until its removal discovered the vessel’s first name, Alecto, now itself a masquerade, one amongst a rainbow of false colours which would take them deep into the heart of the Port of London, and thence a version of Rochelle.
The master of the Megaera thought he had lost his pursuers at Cherbourg. Having crossed the channel and hugged the coast as far as Deal, the mouth of the Thames was reached on the thirteenth of June. A barge guided her past the estuary shoals and sand bars as far as Gravesend where the pilot met the vessel and led her upriver between the squat settlements of Shadwell and Rotherhithe past the teeming suffrance wharves on the south bank until the Tower was reached and the river was crowded with small boats, lighters, wherries and barges which moved about the larger vessels standing at anchor in the Upper Pool, all waiting to berth and unload on account of the Dispute. A tight space was found off Queen’s Wharf, lashed up alongside the Tisiphone, who still awaited a gang to unload her cargo of charcoal.
‘Megaera,’ Captain Guardian noted the following morning. ‘From Caltanissetta.’
‘A guinea her cargo’s sulphur,’ challenged Roy.
‘Done,’ Guardian took him up, and later that day paid the same to his guest as they walked slowly in the baking heat along the quay and found that Roy’s guess was correct.
‘Had to be sulphur,’ said Roy as he
took his winnings. ‘Nothing else there.’
It was late afternoon and the air was close.
London boiled in the June heat. Summer glared off every street and rooftop. Alleys and courts trapped the heat and fed it to the citizens day and night alike until they tossed and turned and rose hollow-eyed to see the same sun waiting for them the next morning. And the next. Eben rose with the dawn and ran his errands early. After eight or nine in the morning the gutters stank, the light blazed in his eyes, he sweated, grew irritable and looked into a middle distance which was a shimmering haze of rising heat in which men and women appeared and disappeared like reflections off a moving sea. The quays were at a standstill, although this at least was due not to the heat, but the Dispute.
The Dispute had begun in the first week of June. No-one knew precisely what it was over, or even whom it was between, but already it figured as a catch-all excuse for any omission or failure of duty and as such had no lack of subscribers. If wool-bales were piled up on Butler’s Wharf, as they were, then it was because of the Dispute. If a collier stood three months in the Upper Pool with her load disappearing by the sackful every night as the mudlarks raided her unguarded decks - indeed, if she was unguarded in the first place - then this too was put to the account of the Dispute. There were meetings. Meetings between wharfingers and shipowners, between shipowners and warehousemen, warehousemen and stevedores, even stevedores and wharfingers. But the issues were vague and in the meantime the Dispute spread along the wharves and quays to north and south like an obscure paralysis. Men would arrive for work, but somehow never manage to start. Goods rotted in holds and clogged the quays, spreading up and back towards Thames Street until the approach roads were blocked and Eben’s and Roy’s afternoon promenade along the waterfront came to resemble an obstacle course of crates, sacks, hawsers, chains, planks, beams and discarded ballast. It seemed no-one could get this sluggardly creature by the tail, it had no name or cause unless, like everything else these days it seemed to Eben, the Dispute was something to do with Farina. His name had even been scrawled on the stonework of the Opera House, at which memory Eben stopped in his tracks.
‘What day is it?’ he asked Roy as they walked back together to the safety of the Crow’s Nest and, hearing that it was the thirteenth, he cursed mildly for two distinct reasons. Roy looked up at him in surprise.
‘The tortoises,’ said Eben.
‘Ah,’ said Roy.
They had gone to the opera. In return for Captain Roy’s excursion to the Stone Eater (still suffering, according to recent reports, from a mysterious malady of the bowel) Captain Guardian had taken his house guest to a performance of La Frascatana at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket. Despite several advertisements to the contrary outside rival establishments, Eben had been assured that the golden-throated Marchesi, of whom so much was being made in the gazettes, would sing the role of Cambio. The evening, as it turned out, had not proved a success.
Eben had last visited the opera house fifteen years before. He knew its proprietor slightly. Stark, Starkart. Something of the sort. He recalled a slow progress up broad flights of shallow stairs which swept left and right, an entrance into the auditorium, a greeting of half-known acquaintances, a general convivium. The performance, whose title he forgot, had been agreeable: mellifluous and Italianate with fussy strings and fat women in red velvet singing to men who sang back, then everyone together and tout va bien, the End and home by carriage to a glass of port by the fireside. It was all very undemanding and enjoyable. He should have returned long before. Stalkart, that was it.
Their late visit had turned out a rather different affair. Entering the foyer, Eben knew at once that it was not a night for the cognoscenti. It was crammed with people who hooted and jostled in a ruffian-like manner. Roy’s inevitably slow progress up the broad staircase drew impatient curses from this low crowd. They were barged and stampeded past until Roy began to curse and growl at the insubordinate horde. Reaching the safety of their seats, the two of them found themselves surrounded by apprentices and ladies maids who disported themselves immodestly, got up, moved, sat down, got up again as though every possible seating permutation had to be exhausted before the performance could begin. Then it was announced that Marchesi’s golden throat had a “dose of the nodules” and would not be gracing the production that night. In his place, a Signor Morigi would play Cambio.
The audience booed, and continued to boo when the curtains opened to disclose a Palladian interior of false perspectives and mirrored pilasters behind which a vast tortoise was painted with a vaguely Roman soldier astride its back. Someone threw something, the singers entered and a story of hopeless love unfolded, or would have unfolded if they could have seen through the bodies who stood up to shout abuse, swap seats, leave, return and engage in ribald conversation. Whole rows decamped he knew not where during Cambio’s final aria and only returned to shout insults at the curtain call, which was brief. Some Irish tunes followed and these were better received. There was a tightrope act and a dumb pantomime which drew scattered applause.
Captain Roy sat mute beside him through it all. Eben was humiliated by its awfulness and knew Roy knew it too. When they rose to leave midway through a reprise of the tightrope act, Roy said it was very different from how he had imagined it.
Leaving the theatre, they met Stalkart on the stairs. Tousled, unshaven, red-eyed, he grasped Eben by the elbow.
‘Did you see him?’ he asked, eyes staring ahead.
‘We gathered he was indisposed….’ Eben began stiffly.
‘Not him! The tortoise, you saw him?’
Eben recalled the fragments of the set he had glimpsed between the mass of bodies. ‘Ah, yes….’
‘Twenty-seven of them! Imagine it! Just wait, you’ll see, you’ll see. They all will. Tortoises, eh? Where, do you think? Where?’ Eben shook his head, edging sideways. ‘The roof! We’ll put them,’ Marmaduke pointed at the ceiling, ‘on the roof. A week today, you just wait. A ton apiece they are, the beauties, hoist ‘em up, stick ‘em down. Come and watch, everyone’s invited and’ - he looked about conspiratorially before lowering his voice -’when they’re up, no-one’ll ever see ‘em again. You see? They’re a mystery!’ and he began to laugh softly to himself. Eben watched him carefully. When he was calm again, he asked Eben if he had enjoyed the performance and, hearing to the contrary, dragged both men down to the foyer where he scribbled quickly on a scrap of paper.
‘There.’ He gave it to Eben. ‘That’ll get you both in. Not a word mind you …’ Eben looked down and read “The Secret Gala. Thirteenth day of July. Admit Two.” It was signed “M. Stalkart”.
‘Five weeks’ time. Only for the cognoscenti, mind you. Marchesi will sing in a performance of …’ He did a little dance of frustration. ‘I cannot tell you, it is a secret you see? Yes, a secret. But the tortoises.’ He was suddenly serious again. ‘They are the true spectacle. The elevation will begin at two. Come!’ he exhorted them. ‘Enjoy!’ He waved goodbye as Eben and Roy shuffled out of the foyer. ‘Come one, come all!’
He was still waving as they made their escape. Roy was silent for most of the journey home then, turning into Thames Street, he cleared his throat.
‘Quite fancy the sound of those tortoises,’ he said. Eben looked at him in surprise.
‘Then we’ll attend,’ he said, glad to salvage something from the evening’s wreck.
Now, eight days later, walking back along the quay and learning of the date, the elevation of Marmaduke’s tortoises was the first of two reasons for Eben’s curse. They had missed it.
‘Never mind,’ said Roy. They were passing the Vendragon in their quayside promenade.
‘It’s not only that,’ said Eben. He was distinctly irritated with himself. ‘I should have attended a funeral today.’
Across the city, through the heat and haze of a blazing afternoon, over the Fleet, down the Strand beyond the sweltering rookeries of Charing Cross, the tortoises were rising. Fat pink torpid tortoi
ses, baked twice already in the Manufactory kilns, once more in the heat of this June afternoon, swung left to right and seesawed in their slings like improbable pendulums as they rose inch by inch skywards, roofwards, up to the men who manned the ramshackle derrick on the summit of the Opera House, who sweated, cursed and pulled the beasts across the parapet - a yard or more across, half a ton each - while the men on the hawsers below sank twenty-six times to their knees as they heard the gross statuary dunt finally on the roof far above. Twenty-seven wagons had left Coade’s that morning to trundle in convoy along Narrow Wall, crossing the river at Westminster, straining through Whitehall, pulling hard up the short rise of Cockspur Street to their destination in Haymarket. Each wagon carried a crate packed tight with straw, and in the midst of each a tortoise lay cocooned with its bland herbivore’s smirk and stumpy legs and every other detail down to the individual plates of its shell perfectly realised in creamy-pink Coade stone.
Straw and splintered crates lay scattered all about the Opera House. Twenty-six carts lay empty. Marmaduke Stalkart ran hither and thither in excitement as the last tortoise emerged from its packing, was lashed about the midriff and slowly elevated to its prime position amongst them all, the parapet itself, for this was the leader of the battalion, the primus inter pares, the only one which would ever be seen by the hordes who would now surely flock to the theatre, the tortoise-rampant himself. Bolger pursued him with his ledger, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care that Marchesi was fleecing them, inventing maladies and contractual breaches to up his already considerable ante. He didn’t care that Casterleigh’s money was already spent, that there was no more and the cognoscenti stayed away in droves. He didn’t care that Bolger worried over the leasing of the theatre to the Viscount, thinking that on July the tenth any manner of disturbances might wreck the theatre once and for all leaving him, Marmaduke, ruined, meaning himself, Bolger, liable for the loss. He didn’t care about the slogans, or Farina, or the ruffians who were said to stalk the streets in organised gangs and beat passersby for nothing at all, or the heat, or the funeral he, like Eben and others, should have attended this morning (she would have understood), or the labours of Coade’s hired hands. No, all he cared about as he looked up to see the last beast clamped into place and rise rampant on one leg to grin down over the parapet, was his tortoises. Come one, come all, he thought triumphantly to himself. Come friend or foe alike, my tortoises will defeat you all!
Lemprière's Dictionary Page 55
