I saw you. Your hand in fire, yes. But it was too far to reach your parents and too far for them to reach you, because your other hand stretched toward mine.
Isn’t that what hope looks like? he thought.
“Philip?”
Alamayou touched Philip’s packed bag with his right hand. His fire-scarred fingers opened it and took out the first of Philip’s possessions.
“Stay,” Alamayou said.
“I’m staying.”
He helped Alamayou unpack the bag first, then the other one they’d thrown together for Alamayou.
When they were done, Philip took Alamayou’s hand and turned it over. He touched the smooth scarring, his finger rising and falling along the fleshy rivulets permanently etched into his palm.
“Does it hurt?” Philip touched his own chest, making a tight fist over his heart. “Hurt.”
Alamayou smiled. “No. No more hurt.”
THREE
Chapter Thirteen
3 January 1869
Cold winds swept through Windsor’s grounds. The freezing rain slanted sideways, bending the trees.
In the gray light, a hot-air balloon hovered just above the steeps at Hyde Park. Despite the weather, an immense crowd gathered in the streets and on either side of the Long Walk, which had been opened by Her Majesty to celebrate the balloon’s maiden flight.
From beneath umbrellas, they watched it rise on drafts of fired air. Its skin was the sepia of ancient maps. The balloon’s passengers were reduced to black silhouettes by the falling rains. Small as mayflies, they waved to the city below.
The castle service came out to see, as did Philp, Alamayou, the prince, and the princess. They huddled together as the balloon drifted, casting its shadow over them as the wintry winds buffeted it about.
Some members of the castle staff broke ranks and walked to the gate, carrying mugs of tea and warm breads for the shivering soldiers waiting on the other side of the bars. In groups of two and three at a time, they’d come to Windsor’s gate every day to stand in silent protest of Alamayou’s continued presence. The Telegraph that morning had called for a trial to address Tewedros’ war crimes, and it took the royals to task for remaining so conspicuously quiet on Alamayou’s involvement. In closing, the editorial recommended that Alamayou be sent back to Abyssinia to meet whatever punishment his father should have received.
As the butlers, valets, kitchen staff, and maids returned to the castle, they passed Alamayou standing with the royals. Eyes down, they bowed to the prince and princess. Their side glances at each other, their smirks, and their turned backs made clear where their allegiances lay: with the men outside the gates, not the Negroes inside it.
“Come on, Alamayou.” Philip wanted to get Alamayou back inside and out of plain sight before the crowd, emboldened by the castle service and the soldiers among them, started catcalling, or worse. The royals had enough to think about as it was. Restlessness in their subjects could only tilt their thoughts in one direction.
As they returned to the castle, Philip filled with admiration for Alamayou. He’d been brave in front of the queen. Brave wasn’t even a large enough word to encompass what Alamayou had done. He’d been fearless, every bit the warrior his father wanted him to be, and not a drop of blood spilled. It was the sort of courage no one else would appreciate, and that was the part that posed the greatest risk. A man isn’t called brave if he admits to killing another man or defiling a woman. He’s called what he is, what he did, and he’s punished. It was no less true when the offense had no name.
The prince and princess returned to Windsor too, but at a distance. They slowed their pace even though the prince seemed healthy enough. No, Philip thought, this was purposeful. They didn’t want to be seen by the people, and probably their own service, as getting too close to Alamayou. Bastards. Cowards. Stand right next to him. Learn a little something about bravery, and in the face of banishment and death, no less. The sort of death that couldn’t be managed or put off by a medical bag and the best doctors on the continent.
He knew what they needed to do that day. He had to at least try to be that brave, for Alamayou.
“Follow me,” he whispered to Alamayou. Taking him by the arm, they veered away from the entrance to the ward and headed toward the livery.
“Where are we going?” Alamayou asked.
“We need to find our coachman.”
§
In the afternoon the rain tapered off and a bit of silvered light bloomed open across the tops of the Long Walk’s elms. The clouds thinned and the sky slowly shed its pale ash tone to become vivid, blue, and vast.
Alamayou, Philip, and Seely rode in Charles’s trap through London’s many neighborhoods. The city they saw from the coach held three million within a thirty-mile space. It teemed with filth and with life. Its people scratched out existences as best they could by collecting the bones of their dead and selling them to anatomy museums, or selling their animals to each other for food and fuel. They left their countryside homes each day for the fires of the distant city and the hope of work, only to die unknown on top of London’s cobblestones while city towers and country estates rose around them.
It would have been impossible for Alamayou, on arriving at the docks of the Royal Victoria, to imagine such a place as Charles drove through. Its history and sheer breadth defied his attempts to grasp the immensity of the city. As Philip took them farther into London’s soot-stained true heart, he felt that all the moments of his life since leaving the Feroze behind were like slats on a bridge, spanning his past and future, connecting one precariously to the other. He could look back and see how far he’d come, as if he’d left footprints on the hours that had passed. He could measure his life since the fire word by word.
Even his dreams spoke of how far he’d traveled from the man he was to the one he was becoming. His father and especially his mother still haunted him, but when he woke crying their names or their words, he was speaking English.
I’ve truly crossed over, he thought, into this new world.
At Windsor the air was clear and crisp after the rain, but as they reached the city’s outskirts, the light over London became almost tactile. A bile-yellow pall shuddered in the space between roof and sky, fed by the city’s many chimneys.
“You won’t find anyone born to the likes of Exeter here,” Philip said. “Or Windsor, for that matter, unless they’re looking for trouble.”
Charles brought them to the Lambeth neighborhood of Soho parish, where London’s next age crept in from the edges on black, coal-fed smoke. To the east, the marsh; to the west, the old archery ground the locals dubbed the Butts, on which a workhouse stood. They arrived at the corner of Paradise Row beneath the tap sign, Three Conies and Feathers. Around them the Parletons made their way along Three Coney Lane to waiting meals of pie and mash. Across the green fields and roughened lanes full of broken glass and discarded horseshoes, nurseries and untended farms stood abandoned in the shadows of the factories that drew the men away over the years, never to return.
Though the rain had stopped, the city still trembled with thunder that rolled between tenements to shake the loose cobblestones beneath their feet. Lambeth shrank into the storm’s lingering darkness even as candles flickered to life in the windows of flats and shops.
Down the lanes from the low house of the Feathers, with its sunken door two feet below the road, they came to a cluster of buildings five stories high and angled toward each other, making a star of the crisscrossing alleyways between.
“This is the flat where I grew up,” Philip said, patting the brick work. “This was all the life my father was able to give me.”
They entered one of the alleys. On either side, the tenements on Bailish rose, their rooftops overlooking the River Ouse.
“My father escaped to London as a runaway slave from the Caribbean,” Philip said. “I remember h
im telling me how he hopped a ship and had to steal a white woman’s purse to buy passage. The conductor demanded a high price from the Negroes he smuggled below deck. People like us lived mostly seaside in Canning, Liverpool, or Cardiff. We were rarities in the city, but still faces like ours could be seen here in Lambeth, so he settled us here. A marriage to an East End girl, birth, death, and me. In that order.”
Seely kept up a steady pace of translation. A quiver entered her voice at the mention of slaves, but she persevered.
They stood beneath a window on the Ouse side of the alleyway. “My mum died birthing my brother,” Philip said. “December eighteen fifty. He didn’t get a name. In her heart, maybe, but she never told anyone what it was. She took him with her. I was three, give or take. I don’t much remember what she looked like. All I have of her is a memory of her smiling at me while I lay in her arms, as if I fixed everything just by living. I don’t even know if it’s a real memory or something I made up over the years. She feared the blue death, my dad said. I guess God in his infinite wisdom killed her some other way, eh?”
He paused as the sensations of his childhood flooded back. He’d first heard the word “plague” at thirteen, the year Parliament decreed all smell to be signs of disease, and London’s future industries rose around his parish in response. New machines were created to beat back the plague. The air was collected by paddled wheels, pushed through pipes, purified with filters and water, and pumped back to the city’s poor as a test, to see if the rich could be saved.
“We can beat the bloody Hessians,” his father had been fond of saying, “so we won’t be brought low by bloody gasses.”
He’d look up at his father and think, It’ll all be right as rain before long. If my father says it, then it’s true. He knows. He’s found a way to live in a city that doesn’t want him.
Bloody idiot, Philip thought, there at his old tenement window.
Alamayou and Seely were staring at him.
“I remember there was a boy across this alley,” he said. “He lived on the same tenement floor as me, just across the way here. We would meet at our windows. We made signals of candles and our hands.
A sunrise game of chase around the streetlamps or a race to the corner and back. I think of him at times. I’m not sure why. One morning, I waited at my window but he didn’t come. After a few days, his window pane was fogged with dust, like it had been abandoned. It had. That was the first time.
“Each summer the Ouse overflowed and our flat flooded. All the sewers were good for was collecting the rains. I can’t describe to you what it was that floated through our flat. A soup of the lives around us. I saw blood slicks that made the water dark, and I knew that someone close by had died. Like the boy across the alley here.”
He smiled, a weak attempt. “I guess Lambeth was my first war, you could say.”
“Philip?”
“Yes, Alamayou. Sorry. These memories.”
“Your mother died. What happened to your father?”
“He mined coal at the Killingworth Colliery. The mine had him for seven years. His cough became like a lullaby to me. I heard it every night. All the men who worked the mines had it.”
“Not you.”
“No, not me. I never worked in the mines. He didn’t want that for me.”
A trolley went by the mouth of the alley, carrying revelers who hollered at them and held their flasks high. Their voices careened from the brick walls long after they passed.
“I told my father the boy across the alley wasn’t there anymore,” Philip said. “He asked me to take him to the window. I thought he wanted to wait with me until the boy came back, but really he just wanted to see a bit of the world before he died. He lasted another few days, maybe longer. He died there in a chair. That was autumn eighteen sixty-one. I was ten.
“The coroner came, and the sanitarium men. They fumigated the tenement while I sat at the window. They wetted our yellowed wallpaper with carbolic acid and let the paper curl, then stripped it all away to be burned. They brought these briquettes of brimstone and covered them in live coal. The stench made me gag but they didn’t care. They took our curtains, our hung clothes, all our loose ends. They lay my father down on an oilcloth. The coroner said they’d return in a week to limewash our flat. Then it would be ready to let again. I suppose they assumed I’d leave and die elsewhere. Or else they didn’t think at all of me. My skin, you know.
“But the coroner told me, ‘Look away. Don’t remember him this way.’ He wrote a number on my father’s arm with a stick of pitch, like you use to sketch, Alamayou. He wrote the same number into a journal. Then he whispered over my father’s body, a prayer. God, I remember it. ‘Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba…’”
“Old words,” Alamayou said.
“Yes. Old words.”
“My father knew old words.”
“Did he?”
“Yes. Before.”
“When you live in the middle of death, it’s all you remember. I had ten years with my dad and that’s how I remember him. How I see him. Tagged like a side of beef. I’d only met one man in all of London who’d spoken to me kindly, that coroner. So I wandered the city until I found him. When the lights of his flat dimmed I broke in and saw my father’s body on a table. I sat there until dawn, at a window watching the city just like the window I grew up at. Watching the world go on without me. I knew I’d die soon. I could feel it, easy as breathing. When the coroner came in from his night’s sleep, he wasn’t cross with me. He showed me why the number. On a wall behind a curtain there was a map. Pins by the thousands, and a number on each. Each, a life. My father was in there. The coroner was mapping the plague. He was trying to do good. Shows you how much a street urchin like me knew about people, eh?”
He shook his head. “That’s how it all began. My road to Abyssinia began when I became an orphan. By the time White found me in that jail cell, I was hard and mean. I didn’t care about anything or anyone. If I wanted for something, I stole it. If I wanted for someone, I took them. I figured the only way out of my lot in life was my father’s way. An oilcloth and a number. I didn’t expect anything more.”
“You didn’t expect me.”
“I’m sorry. You’ve come from so far and look at what sort of man you find yourself with. When I close my eyes it gathers round me.”
Alamayou put his arms around Philip and let him lean against his shoulder.
“There’s so much I’ve seen,” Philip said. “London during the plague, when disease no one could see floated past our rooftops with no fear of God. Parishes where the poor like us were herded. Smoking chimneys that rained ash onto the Thames. That drunken bastard White gave me a kind of life. He was what he was, but so was I. He didn’t give a damn about me nor I him, and when you have that in common, maybe that becomes a kind of caring after a time. I don’t know. He taught me. He’d seen so much, done so much. He told me of a time when he was at sea, before the war. There was a seaman whose life he saved after the man fell overboard. His fellows plucked him from the icy water and brought him to the ship’s infirmary. There was a Turkish water pipe, a trinket from a forgotten voyage. White filled its glass with collected rainwater and its bowl with tobacco. There was no warmth left in the seaman’s body, and White listened but only heard the tides in his chest. So he lit the bowl and surrounded the seaman’s bed with other sailors. They drew on the pipe tentacles and then blew smoke into the seaman’s nose through tubes. Soon, the smoke pushed out the lungs’ fluids. The seaman sat up and reached for a flask of whiskey.
“So many stories like that. He taught me how to be like him, and I wanted it. I didn’t want to just die and be nothing.”
He felt himself sink into Alamayou. His body shook with the violent unburdening of all that he carried.
“White passed himself off as a doctor, and maybe he really was one, I don’t know. But he knew en
ough to get by and he took matters in hand. Each day there was a bit to eat and a drop to drink. In the poor times, that was something. Then I was at sea and at war, and I saw things the likes of us never see. It’ll never be that sort of world for us, but I saw the body opened. The way breath looks when the ribs part ways with the muscle and the skin. And I wanted it. I wanted to know, even if putting my hands into the dead was no better way to live than sitting in my flat while those men washed my dad away.”
A dark sky covered Lambeth. They weren’t far from the pump at Broad Street. The heart of the blue death, the cholera outbreak of years before that emptied all the tenement windows of light.
“My dad died,” he said. “So did my mum. I’m an orphan just like you. When you lose people, it’s like taking a walk away from the world and me, I’ve always been the sort who doesn’t come back from walks, you know? The only thing I ever dreamt of was who’d shovel my corpse one day. I went to jail. I went to war. Nothing else to me, until you. You’re the first friend I’ve ever had, Alamayou.”
Down it came. The curtain over his heart. And Philip thought, I don’t want to let it close me in a shroud anymore. I don’t want to tell myself that loneliness is what I deserve.
“Every day I think, ‘Please, wake me in another body. Let me be anyone else.’ Someone who doesn’t look at the boy across the alley and wish for him, not to meet out and run wild in the streets, breaking windows and stealing potatoes from the carts, but for the feel of someone wanting me back. You give me something else to dream about,” he said.
The sun set behind the tenements. They watched their shadows advance and it felt like no time was passing at all. They said nothing, only listened to Lambeth around them. At the mouth of the alley, two merchants paused, their carts facing each other as they groused about the poor day’s sales. Somewhere beyond them, a squeaking cart rode atop the broken stone of the street, its owner calling out the price of medicinals.
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