The Choir Boats

by Rabuzzi, Daniel

  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 shortlived 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 toward
s 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 ‘shaharsh-harsh.’ 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, pressin
g 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.