The Lambs of London Page 7

  PHILIP DAWSON WAS SITTING at a desk at the far end of a long, low room; it was above the gate-house itself, and its ceiling was supported by great timber beams of the fifteenth century. As soon as he saw Samuel Ireland he rose to his feet and walked towards him; he noticed at once the fashionable cut of the man’s jacket, the florid complexion, the full mouth and the sharp, restless eyes. “You have produced a wonder, Mr. Ireland,” he said after their formal greeting. He was still gazing at him frankly.

  “It is a wonder, Mr. Dawson. May I have some water before we begin to speak?” His throat was very dry.

  “Soda?”

  “Perfectly acceptable.” He swallowed it down in large draughts, and could not disguise a burp when he put down his glass. “Apologies.”

  “Many of my guests do that. The soda shakes them up.”

  “I am sure. I presume that you have read my letter?”

  “All I require now is the evidence, Mr. Ireland. The document itself.”

  “By curious coincidence—” He reached down to his carrying-case and took out the testament of William Shakespeare which, for the sake of safety, he had wrapped in a linen handkerchief and placed in an envelope.

  Dawson took it out and examined it carefully. “It is a remarkable thing.”

  “Very.”

  “The sentiments are orthodox, of course.”

  “It is a comfort, Mr. Dawson. If our bard had been proved a puritan or a papist…”

  “It would have thrown a strange light upon his dramas.”

  “It would have been disquieting.”

  “But will it be deemed authentic? That is the question.”

  Samuel Ireland was surprised. He had taken for granted the genuineness of the documents. For what possible reason would William’s patron falsify them? “I can assure you, sir, that they have an unsullied provenance. You may depend upon it.”

  “I am glad to hear it. But we will need a palaeographer.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Samuel Ireland had never heard the term.

  “A palaeographer. A reader of ancient hands.”

  “Mr. Edmond Malone has already verified the signature.”

  “Malone is a scholar. But he is not a palaeographer. Would you excuse me for a moment?” Dawson sat down at his desk and rapidly scrawled upon a card. “Jane!” A young woman appeared in the doorway, clutching a wooden tray of metal type. “Could you take this to Mr. Baker? You know the address.” Jane interested Samuel Ireland. Her dark hair was neatly cut around her oval face, in the style known as “Morocco,” and she reminded him of the painting of Lady Keppel in Somerset House. “Mr. Baker is an authority on the sixteenth-century hand. I have asked him to call upon us. More soda?” Ireland accepted the glass of soda water, and drank it down quickly.

  YOU ARE QUICK , Mr. Baker.”

  Jonathan Baker was a short and stocky man with a countenance that expressed complete weariness. His mouth was turned down, and his eyes heavy. To Samuel Ireland he seemed like some Pantaloon out of the comic operas. He had arrived in the office wearing a “morning glory,” the name for a peaked hat of uncertain date.

  “When I am summonsed by you, Mr. Dawson, I fly.” His voice was light, almost playful. “May I see this document?” He had not looked at Samuel Ireland, as if any greeting might prejudice his examination. He took the testament and held it up to the light from the window. “The paper is good. The watermark is of the period. And the ink is very fine. Do you see how it has faded into the weave?” He had forgotten that he was still wearing his hat, and with an apology removed it. “It is a good sixteenth-century hand. I have studied Shakespeare’s signature in the past—”

  “From where, sir?”

  “His will is in the Rolls Chapel. It is beneath glass, Mr. Dawson. But I studied it well.” He took from his pocket a strip of paper. “I plotted it with a micromemnonigraph of my own invention.” On this paper were a series of lines and numbers. “I have my own method of calligraphy, you see, which is based upon exact principles.”

  His voice was so lively, and so graceful, that for a moment Samuel Ireland did not follow his meaning. But, as Baker studied the signature on the testament, he began to feel uneasy. What if this man should suspect some falsehood? Baker pored over it, his nose almost touching the vellum, with an occasional “Oh!” and “Aha!” “There are some abnormalities,” he said eventually. “But they are produced in certain circumstances. On the whole, I am inclined to believe it is the thing. The genuine article. Congratulations, sir.” He looked at Ireland for the first time. “I presume you have brought this here?”

  “I have that honour.”

  “Then you have performed a great service.”

  WHEN SAMUEL IRELAND eventually recounted this scene to his son, he imitated all the actions of Dawson and of Baker—how Baker had bowed to him, how Dawson had waved a soda-bottle in the air, and how Jane had cried “Huzzah!” from the doorway. William at first seemed horrified when his father told him of the arrival of the palaeographer. By what right had this Dawson called in a stranger? But he had laughed out loud when his father had told him of the vindication.

  “What else did you expect, Father?” he asked him. “Who could possibly have doubted you?”

  William left the room for a moment. He was wrapped in an elation so great that he did not wish to be seen.

  chapter six

  WHAT IS ‘THE MOTHER ’?” It was the first day of spring. Charles Lamb was sitting with Tom Coates and Benjamin Milton in the Billiter Inn. “I read somewhere that Julius Caesar had ‘the mother.’ But I have no idea what it means.”

  “Have you had your mother, Ben? Whoosh.” Tom was drinking “Stingo” and could not resist sneezing on to his sleeve.

  Benjamin patted him on the back. “God bless you, dearest. I am surprised at you, Charles. Surely you recall that “the mother” is in King Lear. It is hysterica passio. The womb mounts higher and higher, in your frenzy, and suffocates the heart. And the womb is the mother.”

  “But men have no wombs.”

  “They have entrails, have they not? They can bleed.”

  “My mother is always hysterical.” Tom finished the rest of his drink, and put his arm in the air to signal that he wanted another. “She cries at the drop of a stitch.”

  “The passions create bodily humours.” Benjamin was intent upon following his thought through the mist of drink. “And the lower vapours rise into the brain. That is hysteria.”

  Charles was thinking of his sister.

  A WEEK BEFORE , Mary had been in the kitchen, preparing kidneys for that evening’s supper, with her mother sitting beside her. “I will never know,” Mrs. Lamb was saying, “why some people insist on devilling their kidneys. What is wrong with frying?” Mary cried out in pain. She had sliced the inside of her thumb, and the blood was seeping on to the wooden chopping board. Charles had been watching her cut the meat—watching her idly, incuriously—but he could have sworn that she had deliberately injured herself. She had gone from the kidney to the thumb with a calm movement of the knife. Mrs. Lamb shrieked at the sight of the blood, and jumped up from the chair. She was about to take her daughter’s hand but Mary turned away from her and found a piece of linen cloth in a drawer; she wound it around her thumb quickly, and looked at Charles. It seemed to him that she was triumphant.

  Later that evening she had gone into his room, with the excuse that she wished him to translate a difficult phrase from Lucretius. She sat at the bottom of his bed. “You know, Charles, I must get out of this house.”

  “Why, dear?”

  “Can’t you see? It is killing me.” He was astonished. She noticed his astonishment, and burst into tears. He leaned towards her, but he did not touch her. She stopped crying as quickly as she had begun. She wiped her face with the cloth bandage around her thumb. “I am deadly serious, Charles. I must leave or I will go insane.”

  “What would you do? Wherever would you go?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

/>   Mary had never revealed these feelings to him before; they shocked, and unnerved, him. He could think of no reply. There was of course the implication that she was willing to leave him—to abandon him—but he dismissed this at once. There was no possibility of it. But the source of her anger and frustration was hidden from him. He had believed her to be contented, placid almost, in the company of her parents and in the comfort of familiar surroundings. She had time for her reading and for her sewing. Had she not said that she always looked forward to their conversations at the end of the day? He could not take her threat seriously. “And what would become of Pa?” was all he said.

  She looked at him wildly, and left the room. He could hear her steps upon the stairs, then the opening and closing of the front door. She had gone out without a shawl or bonnet.

  THE NIGHT WAS MILD , but there was a strong wind blowing through the streets. Mary Lamb had no direction or purpose: she had to escape into the air. She was walking quickly across the cobbles. She saw a rat entering a water-pipe, but she felt no unease. It was the world. In the force of the wind pieces of orange-peel and scraps of newspaper were rustling over the stones; her hair was not pinned, and it blew about her neck and forehead. I am a witch, she thought, a midnight hag. I have become accursed. She started to run, and turned a dark corner. In her haste she fell against someone.

  “Miss Lamb?”

  For a moment she did not recognise him. “Oh, Mr. Ireland. I’m sorry. I have alarmed you.”

  “Not in the least. No harm done whatsoever.” They looked at each other in silence for a moment. “Is there anything the matter?”

  “Matter? There is no matter.” In her anxiety, and embarrassment, she did not know what she was saying. “Will you walk with me a little way?”

  “Gladly.”

  They walked down the street together, Ireland slightly ahead as if he were leading her forward. Then she laughed aloud. “I must seem to be a dissolute woman, without a shawl. And my hair is undone.”

  “Oh no. Nothing of the kind.”

  They walked in silence, as she slowly recovered her composure. “I like to watch the form and pressure of the wind,” she said at last. “Do you see how it ripples across the windows there?” She felt protected by the close cover of the darkness in the city; she was comforted by the ashcoloured air. “You are a lover of London, too, Mr. Ireland.”

  “How do you guess that?”

  “Well, you have survived it.”

  “I have survived.”

  “And you walk in the night.”

  “I cannot sleep. I am too excited.”

  “May I ask the reason?”

  “I was intending to call on you tomorrow with my discovery. This is not the time—”

  “It is always time.”

  “I can put the matter simply enough.” He put his face up to savour the wind. “I have found a poem by Shakespeare. A new poem. Unseen. Unread.”

  “Can this be true?”

  “All is true, Miss Lamb. I discovered it only last night, among the papers.”

  “I would like to see it. At once.”

  “Would you?”

  “Oh yes.” It was a refuge from her misery. To dwell in another time—if only for a moment—offered her proof that she need not be confined or constricted. That was perhaps why she had run into the night.

  “I have not carried it with me.” He was almost apologetic. “I have it in the house.”

  “May we go there please?”

  “It is late. But if you take no offence—”

  “Not the least in the world.”

  So they walked the short distance to Holborn Passage. “I did not know what it was until I examined it carefully. It was on a piece of manuscript that had been torn from a larger sheet.” William was talking quickly. “The writing is very small, and at first I did not recognise it for what it was. It was not written in poetic form, you see, but in long lines. To conserve space. Then I noticed the peculiar style of the ‘s,’ and I remembered where I had seen it before. It was his hand, of course. Without any doubt.”

  “And the poem concerns what?”

  “It is a short complaint, as one lover might make to another. Please wait a moment, Miss Lamb.” They had arrived at the bookshop, which was in darkness. He unlocked the door, and a few moments later came back with a lamp.

  “Well met by oil-light,” she whispered.

  “Indeed. This is an adventure.” Yet, in the pale circle of the flame, he looked anxious and confused. “My room is on the second floor. Please to be quiet. My father sleeps above me.” He led her up the panelled deal staircase, through the dining-room, and then upwards to a further storey. It was an old house, a sounding box of wood with uneven floors and curved timbers. He unlocked the door of his room, with two separate keys. When he put down the lamp she noticed that the walls were covered with sheets of engravings. Here were the heads of Shakespeare and of Milton, of Spenser and of Tasso, of Virgil and of Dante.

  “Who is that?”

  “That is John Dryden. The father of English prose.”

  “A mighty position.”

  “Or so my father says. Please do sit down, Miss Lamb. I am afraid there is little space.” With great care he took from a drawer a piece of manuscript paper. She observed now that there were several boxes and chests in this little room, taking up most of the available floor. She sat down upon one of them as in a hushed voice he began to read from the manuscript, the lamp illuminating the paper. She was aware of Mr. Ireland sleeping in the chamber above their heads.

  “Not a maid who in his purview came

  Could miss the force of his unerring aim

  What was once wild did soon become all tame

  And he did seize what once he wished to maim.

  And thus at once their virtue he forecloses

  Like hue and tincture taken from fair roses.”

  He put down the lamp. “That has the Shakespearian ring, does it not?”

  “Who is there?” It was his father, calling from the floor above.

  “Only me, Father. I am reading.”

  “Be sure to extinguish the lamp.”

  “Of course, Father.” He waited for a few moments, his eyes closed; it was as if he did not wish Mary to see them blazing. “Does it strike you, then, as genuine Shakespeare?”

  “Oh yes. It could be no one else.” She wanted to reinforce his excitement, to be caught up in his elation so that she might leave her own life behind.

  “I have not told him anything as yet.” The motion of his head upwards signified whom he meant. “He would take all the glory. If I wrote something on this discovery, and gave it to your brother, do you think he could have it published?”

  “Of course he could. Charles would be delighted to do so. It would be his privilege.”

  “Will you tell him from me, then, that I have begun to write it? I will present the essay in a week’s time.” He seemed suddenly to become aware of the difficulty of their situation, sitting together in his bed-chamber. “I think, Miss Lamb, that I should accompany you home.” His voice was very low and steady. “I hope I have not offended you in any way.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Ireland. I have intruded on your hospitality, I am afraid.”

  “The night and the wind entered our heads. We will leave as quietly as possible.”

  So he took her out into Holborn Passage and then walked with her to Laystall Street. He stayed by her side until they reached her door, where she turned and smiled. “It has been a remarkable evening.”

  “And for me.”

  CHARLES WAS STANDING in the hallway, his hair dishevelled, when she came in. “Wherever have you been, Mary? I have been searching the streets.”

  “I have been listening to Shakespeare.”

  “I do not understand you.”

  “William Ireland has found a poem. I have just heard it.”

  “He read it to you in the street?”

  “No. I returned with him to the bookshop.”


  “In the middle of the night? Have you lost your senses?”

  She looked at him for a moment as if he were a stranger, as if he were someone with whom she had no connection. “What are you suggesting? What possible harm could come to me?”

  “It is not a question of harm, Mary.”

  “Of what then? Propriety? Custom? Do you think so little of me that you would impose conditions upon me?”

  “I know Ireland is honourable—”

  “But you do not know your sister. When you see me in this house I am sleep-walking. I have no real—no genuine—life here at all. Why do you think I long for you to come home each evening? When you are not wretchedly drunk, of course.” Charles said nothing. “Whom do I see? Whom do I talk to? Whose propriety is it that I should be pressed to death? Whose convention is it that I am already lying in the family grave?”

  “Hush, Mary. You will wake them.”

  She raised her voice even higher. “They will never be woken! I am dying here.”

  He took her arm and hurried her upstairs into his room. “Do you want the world to hear you, Mary?”

  She sat upon his bed, exhausted. “Mr. Ireland read to me his latest discovery. I listened. That is all. Then he escorted me back. We parted at the door. As you say, he is an honourable man. I promised him one thing.”

  “And what was that?”