We find Mr Woods asleep, propped up in the corner of a high-sided settee. My tutor nudges his employer’s shoulder, warily at first, then more roughly, and speaks into his ear, ‘Wake up, man! The child is here.’
Mr Woods starts up and cries, ‘I think never to exceed the bounds of moderation more!’, his wig askew and his eyes wet with emotion. Mr Applebee helps him compose himself and then my benefactor looks upon me.
‘Why, it is Dawnay Price!’ He bids me sit opposite him upon a stool embroidered with an exotic boat. ‘So here we are, in my home. What do you make of it, Dawnay? Is it not a nice house?’
‘Very nice, sir. Full of ornament and colour. And you have the best cook in London, to be sure.’
‘Ah, you have eaten? Good, good. That old rogue Beelsby …’
‘Sir?’ questions my tutor and clears his throat as if needing drink.
‘Yes, yes, Stephen. Of course. Dawnay, your distinguished founder has your best interests at heart, I am sure – in keeping you half starved, the dog-hearted intermeddler – but never mind it, for you are to come each sennight here and eat a good luncheon with Susan. We shall have you fat in no time. Now, what have you been learning, child? What has this old friend of mine here been teaching you? Anything, anything at all?’
‘I know all my letters and grammar. And numbers, sir, with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of them.’
‘Excellent!’ says my benefactor. ‘With clever Stephen here as your guide, you will stick to your course and not be put out of your latitude by contrary winds. What else have you learned?’
‘A little geography where we study a map of the known world. And natural philosophy too, sir. Namely, some of the science of plants and how they grow. In fact, there is an experiment we wish to carry out, with your permission.’
‘And what is this, now?’ he asks my tutor, who is glaring at me.
Say I, ‘Where one tests an idea, to see if it be true. We think the children grow crooked at our asylum as they eat the wrong food. But if we could provide fruit and vegetable matter, some meat and sugar, from your kitchen, each week, we could try it, and see if the children improve. A worthy test, wouldn’t you say, sir?’
Mr Woods thinks on it, then says, ‘So I am to feed all the wretches now, is that it?’
‘In the interests of science?’ adds my tutor quietly, picking at his nails, and I watch my benefactor’s frown consider it and hold my breath. My mind wishes to test our hypothesis, but my forsaken heart desires to use this food to win friends.
‘We shall see, we shall see. I suppose if I spent less on port and more on foundlings’ suppers, I would find my way to heaven more surely. And after last night’s excesses, Stephen, I simply must refrain. I must change my ways. I will, old friend, I will.’
‘As you say, moderation is the key, Markham.’
‘Yes, yes,’ says Mr Woods, swabbing his brow with his kerchief and standing up. ‘Come, child. Speaking of science, I have something of much interest to show you. It is in the next room. A room, my dear, filled with wonderful things.’
I follow with inquisitiveness, my tutor behind me. Mr Woods opens a double door through to a capacious room with a bright white ceiling decorated with the plasterwork shapes of musical instruments, sheets of notation, books and quills. Yet the room itself is darkened by the collection of an inordinate number of objects displayed on shelves almost obscuring all four olive-green walls, with tables in the centre of the room also covered with artefacts in glass display cases and, beside them, two chests filled with tiny drawers, brass panels fronting each one with a card and neat handwriting upon it, naming its contents.
Says my benefactor in a grand voice, ‘This is my Cabinet of Curiosities! Or at least, it began as a cabinet. And now, as you can see, it has taken over what was the saloon. I have even sold the spinet to make room for it all! I collected many of these objects on my travels, Dawnay, and brought them back for fun. Yet Stephen here taught me the value of such curios and encouraged me to use my fortune to seek out more. Now I am older and too stout for adventures – other than the drinking kind – all right, Stephen! I know! But the child must be aware of such things as liquor? She is not, you say? Ah, well, protect the innocent, of course. Now, where was I? Yes, the age of adventure is over for me, but not my curiosity. So these days I pay young men to travel for me and bring back these odds and ends. And now, I can finally make use of them, as you are to come here with your tutor each week and study them all, make a list of them and – well, you know, catalogue them for posterity and the good of your own learning. You have nothing to say, my dear?’
But I have stopped listening. I am stepping about the room in shock, my eyes dry with astonishment at the jostling shapes before me – skeletons and horns, shells and dried beans, carvings and sculptures, brass instruments and engraved silver objects – all of them exotic and not at all English, not at all of my experience, but all of them outlandish and queer and remarkable. There are beautiful pebbles patterned and swirled in rainbow colours, and whorled shapes from a thumb’s breadth to a dinner-plate’s size, laid in long lines, beside strange stone-like plants in twisted forms, these by labels reading Minerals, Fossils, Corals; glass containers with tiny creatures or grey bodily parts suspended in liquid of yellow and orange; dozens of visitors’ cards have been turned up at each edge and filled with brown seeds in this one, red nuts in another; a frame criss-crossed with partitions, each neat triangle filled with piles of minute shells in purple, black, green and shiny white; here a small table topped with a glass jar turned upside down, labelled a Double-Barrel Air Pump and there a dried-out wedge shape labelled Shark’s Fin, beneath it a tray of sharp teeth-like objects named Tongue-Stones: the Petrified Tongues of Sea-Monsters; a jar with a cork stopper houses a miniature reptile, mouth open as if surprised at the winglike structures on its back, called Baby Dragon Preserved in Spirits; beside it, laid out on a desk, a spiralled tusk, as long as the desk itself, its label declaring it a Unicorn Horn; and a hefty book opened at a page headed A Table of Antiquities, with line drawings of hairy ape-like men with big pot bellies and women with long ears and fish tails; and more, more, a myriad of objects of peculiar spectacle.
The world has come here, to this room. And I will study it and know it. These objects that have been brought from so far, one day will lead me away beyond them, to the realms whence they came. For my mind is opened this day, to the richness of this globe, this life, to the spaces beyond the map. And nothing will contain my capacity for wonderment.
6
The year is 1740, I am presumed to be circa eight years of age and winter is here. It brings the most chilling cold anyone can recall, where we girls put on petticoats and stockings abed to prevent our shivering the whole night. One morning, we wake and find the chamber pots frozen. Once downstairs, my tutor and I come to our classroom to find the ink solid ice in the glass on the standish. He tells me, ‘The Thames River is frozen too and presently they hold a frost fair on the ice. Let us wrap ourselves up and go there. We shall tread in the footsteps of King Henry VIII and Queen Bess, who travelled and sported upon the frozen Thames in their own times.’
Outside, the cold seizes me like a footpad, while the fog that wraps up London almost entirely in these months hangs lowly, thick and white about us, and I almost step into a pile of fresh horse dung shoved up against our wall, keeping our lead pipes warm and free from cracks. We travel down to the river by coach, at a snail’s pace through the murk. We crawl through Covent Garden, where I see looming from the fog towards us the faces of many handsome women with much colour upon their cheeks and lips, joking and japing in the street in gaudy clothes. They are brighter and louder than the quality ladies I saw at the orphanage lottery, and I ponder at their being out on such a bitter day, and not in their houses beside a fire. Before long, the coach stops alongside the Thames, and where we alight, the usual rumpus of riverside life is strangely quiet this day. On the banks lie the land-bound wherries and in a few sit water
men with oars across their knees as if for warmth, their caps out for begging, as the river disabled by ice must have stopped their trade and their customary raucous shouting also.
Beyond them, the white-frosted river stretches easterly and my tutor guides me down to it. I have never stepped on frozen water and I ask, ‘Is it safe? Will it not crack and swallow us up?’
‘They say it is eighteen inches thick here, so there is nothing to fear.’ He takes my hand and we step towards two men who take a coin from Mr Applebee as we pass into the fair proper.
Before us, the river teems with life and pleasing amusements. Tents have been slung up from bank to bank, ramshackle affairs of canvas and poles at chaotic angles, housing all manner of stalls, shops and entertainments. There are fairground booths, puppet shows and roundabouts; two men are engaged in a boxing competition, beside a whole ox being roasted and food stalls selling nuts, puddings, spiced buns, sausages and – my favourite – hot pies. My tutor secures his place in my heart by buying me one, warm and meaty and delicious. We eat and wander, watching the fair folk and their antics. There are many rowdy types gulping from mugs of steaming liquid and slipping on the ice, spilling their drinks and protesting, while young boys skid past them at great speed, running and sliding on the ice for fun. We pass by a strolling woman and her daughter carrying warm apples on their heads in baskets, calling their wares in duet, the sweet scent drifting like blossom in the cold air, soon mingling with the warmer tones of hot tea, coffee and chocolate from further stalls. We see a group of acrobats tumbling and a rope strung up between two poles along which a man treads without shoes, surely a trick of the eye, but no, he truly can walk upon it. There are printers and their presses selling slips of paper adorned with verses and the customer’s name, as a memento of this extraordinary occasion of a frost fair, not seen on this river for twenty years or so. My tutor leads me in a leisurely manner, yet with a purpose, as he knows of one particular tent he wishes to show me.
‘Prepare yourself, Dawnay, for now we are to see an unfamiliar creature. One that has fascinated you from an early age, I think.’
We stop in front of a tent with its flap closed. Before it stands a sign upon which are painted these words: The Remarkable Beast of Africa. My tutor pays a man who pulls back the flap and says, ‘It is quite safe, girl. He is tethered.’ As we enter, it takes our eyes a short time to adjust to the low light, and in the dimness a shape moves and I jump in fear. The shape sits down. It is thickly furred almost all over, dark and crooked, an animal surely, yet has the look of a small person. He has a collar around his neck, from which a leather lead is attached to a heavy chain, which in turn is bound around a broad beam in the back of the tent, so that he cannot move far, or escape, rampage and cause havoc. Yet he seems calm and quiet. He makes no noise. Before him on the ground are things for him to play with: a ball, a bone and a cup of water. He drinks from this cup, his upper lip protruding as if to help the liquid in. His feet curl round objects like a second set of hands; most useful, I think. His arms are broad and stocky; he sits on his rear with knees bent. His body is covered in shaggy, dark and dusky hair, while his face is paler and free from hair, as are the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. He picks up the bone and bares his teeth to give a brief gnaw. The teeth are sizeable, and two are pointed and look exceedingly sharp. I take a step back. His mood is peaceful, yet those teeth remind me that he is a beast after all. He puts down the bone and sits very still, in repose.
‘What is it, Dawnay?’ asks my tutor in a low voice. ‘Can you surmise it?’
I answer in a reverential whisper, ‘It is a chimpanzee.’
His face is quite like a person’s, resembling an old man with large ears, a flat nose and deep wrinkles beneath the eyes, which are round, brown and expressive. When he glances from side to side, focuses on objects and people about him, I cannot help but wonder what he is thinking. And the moment when he looks at me, looks at my eyes for some time, I am thrilled by it and dare not move. I do believe there is a mind there that comprehends me, which is not idiotic or empty; which senses me as another animal, not simply an entertainment or potential tormentor. It is different from looking at a dog or a cat in the street, who are alien to us, as friendly as they may seem. They do not have human eyes, but canine or feline, and they think on meat and the tearing of it, or on running and catching, growling or purring. They are animals truly, as are the big cats and the birds I saw in the Menagerie. This creature seems to me utterly different from them, an intelligence in its movements and largely in its eyes which are undeniably kin to humans, to all of us, to me.
That day, my tutor and I lunch at my benefactor’s and afterwards repair to the curiosities room – where we spend the afternoon each time we visit his house – and Mr Applebee reads to me articles of science and novelty from such learned journals as the Gentleman’s Magazine; after which we study the artefacts, discuss their origins, make links between them, read of them, sketch them and write about them. This afternoon, I draw the chimpanzee I saw in all the detail I can remember. But I have trouble with its eyes and I cannot perfect it.
Seeing my trouble, Mr Applebee says to me, ‘Copy mine. They are quite similar,’ and he is correct. They are the same shape and even a similar colour, a kind of liquid brown. When I am done with my drawing of the animal I am pleased with it, I have captured something of it and we look at its likeness and are both quiet, both pondering.
Say I, ‘Is it a joke by God?’
‘What do you mean, child?’
‘The chimpanzee. A kind of jest that God has made, which makes the creature so closely resemble us.’
‘One or two learned thinkers have said that they are related to us in some way. A poet, Fenton, wrote not so many years ago these lines:
Foes to the tribe from which they trace their clan
As monkeys draw their pedigree from man.’
‘Do you believe this to be true? That monkeys are our cousins?’
I want to giggle at such a picture – myself with a tail, hanging from a branch, playing with my monkey family – but my tutor’s face is very serious and his hushed tones tell me this is not amusing. Then a question arises in my mind.
‘But it cannot be that way, sir. For the Bible does not tell us so. The story of Creation says the Lord made every beast of the earth first and then made man afterwards: in the image of God created He him.’
Mr Applebee picks up a round, shell-like stone. ‘As a boy, I had an aunt who lived by the sea in the west. Charmouth Bay it was, and its beach was full of these things. I would collect them and stow them in my pockets. I have told you before its name.’
‘Ammonite.’
‘Yes, and that it is a kind of sea creature. I told you it lived a long time ago. But that it does not live now.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘There are men, Dawnay, who spend all their time looking for these curiosities. You recall the magazine article I showed you last week, wherein the capacity of Noah’s Ark was minutely considered? There are many such puzzles and puzzlers seeking answers to them. Some of these men are of the Church, men of God if you will. They are looking for evidence on the earth of the Creation story. They look at ancient rocks and search underground for relics of those days. Some have found bones, giant bones, a hundred times bigger than the fossils we have in this room, a thousand times. Leg bones and beaks and spines, longer than rooms. Much larger than the elephant or even the whale. Where are they, these big-boned monsters? Are they hiding in dense jungles on islands we have not yet discovered, like that mysterious isle of The Tempest? Or, as some think, did they once live on the earth, yet from some unknown catastrophe they all died and did not procreate more, to die out completely and never again live?
‘Look at this little fossil; a likeable yet humble gift from our Lord. But what, in fact, is it? Some people say that they are a strange type of animal that once lived underground. Others believe there was a race of stone creatures who walked the earth, perhap
s the most peculiar theory. Men of God like to think that the evidence of bones in rocks points directly to the Deluge, the great flood that destroyed all corrupt creatures and people and only the righteous survived. Some of these men travel across the globe looking for these bones. But not everyone thinks they were once living creatures. Some say the rock itself makes them, that they are moulded by stone in the forms of creatures, by accident and luck. Just a whim of nature.’
‘That is silly.’
My tutor smiles.
I go on, ‘Good sense argues against it. These are clearly, most clearly, real creatures. That is, they once lived and now live no more. They were caught in the rock somehow, I do not pretend to understand how. But they were. I know it.’
‘How do you know it?’
‘Because my experience tells me so. When there are muddy puddles in the street and the sun shines on them, the water dries up and the mud goes hard. Perhaps that is what happened here. The rock is mud from the past, which was once wet. The sea flowed through it or over it perhaps, and then the sea dried up, or flowed another way.’
‘Why would it do that?’
I reason it. ‘The weather? Perhaps it was very hot. Or very cold. The sea froze, like the Thames. It froze and melted and moved itself in the process. Or it dried up in the heat.’
‘Listen. There was an extraordinary man called Leonardo da Vinci, who lived in Italy around three hundred years ago. He became an eminent artist and inventor. As a young man he was engaged in the construction of canals and often dug up fossils of sea life, shellfish and suchlike as you see here. He believed they must have been carried inland by the sea, that perhaps the earth itself rose. We see this today in earthquakes, the ground cracks and sometimes moves upwards hundreds of feet. If there were an earthquake under the sea, the earth would rise, the sea left below, and the sea creatures left in the mud would over time turn to stone.’
‘But dead things rot away to nothing, especially when wet. I have seen this in the kitchen and in the rubbish heaps.’
Song of the Sea Maid Page 5
