A Beggar's Kingdom Page 26

  “Julian.”

  “Yes, Miri?”

  “Will you walk in, my lord,” Miri says, quoting Cressida.

  He walks in. She shimmers in the candlelight, covered up to the neck with water and soap bubbles.

  “Can you wash my hair?” she asks, her voice foaming wet. “But I don’t want to be touched.”

  “I have to touch you to wash your hair.”

  “You know what I mean.” Her face is flushed pink.

  “Okay, Miri. Just your hair.”

  Julian takes off his waistcoat, his white shirt with the big puffy sleeves, his shoes, his hose, his crystal necklace. Shirtless he sits on a low stool behind her, wearing only his breeches. He is bubbling and foaming, too, and he’s not even in the water.

  “The water’s hot,” she says.

  “Is it too hot?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Her voice is barely above a whisper, her head tilted against the porcelain.

  “Sit up, Miri.”

  She sits up, her wet bare back to him. He lathers her head. His two gnarly, fighting, yearning, rough hands knead and caress her scalp with rhythmic fingers, with slow open circles of love and desire.

  She grips the edges of the tub.

  “It is nice?” Julian’s voice is low.

  “It’s nice,” she says. “My hair must be clean by now.”

  “It’s important to be thorough. Okay, now dunk and rinse.”

  He waits, watching the outlines of her bare body gleam under the opaque surface.

  “Now what?” she says, rinsed off, her hair slicked back, settling against the porcelain.

  “If you lean forward, I can scrub your back.”

  “How dirty is my back,” she murmurs. But she leans forward. “I still don’t want to be touched.” She barely whispers it.

  “Okay,” Julian says, lathering his hands. “I’ll wash your back without touching you.” In measured rings, his soapy palms and thumbs caress her from her neck to the small of her back. Rhythm is the basis of speech, of rhetoric, of logic. Rhythm is the underpinning of melody, and melody is infused with harmony, and harmony is love. That’s where music comes from. Two voices, two souls, two hearts in synchrony, in union, as one.

  And something else, too.

  Rhythm is the footing of the act of love.

  Julian wants to tell her this.

  Julian wants to show her this.

  Miri speaks first. “I like this bath thing.” The exhale that leaves her throat sounds almost like a moan. He leaves his palms flat against her bare back, his thumbs circling her. “It’s soothing.”

  Julian moves the bench to the side of the tub.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “Let me wash your arms and hands.”

  Leaning back, she lifts her right arm out of the water. This time she doesn’t say she doesn’t want to be touched. She doesn’t say anything.

  He soaps her, caressing her from the shoulder to the fingertips and back again. His slippery hand intertwines with hers in the warm suds.

  “You might want to turn to me,” he says. “So I could wash your other arm.”

  His bare chest is above the porcelain rim. She turns her face and gazes at him, her brown eyes replaced by dilated black pupils. “Do you like the fighting?” she asks, reaching out and stroking his bicep.

  “I do,” he confesses. “Rather, I used to quite like it. Once upon a time, it’s all there was.”

  “So tell me something…” she whispers. “How can your fighting hands be so rough and do what you did to that man, yet touch me so tender?”

  “You know how, Miri,” Julian replies. “Because love turns men into weaklings.”

  “I understand nothing,” she says, arching her back, lifting her breasts out of the water.

  “Yes,” he says, “because mystery is incomplete knowledge. He cups her wet breasts, fondles them with his unsteady hands.

  “I have a feeling,” she says, moaning, holding on to the bathtub, “that even if I had knowledge, some things would remain a mystery.”

  He leans in. She is wet, her lips are wet.

  “Will you walk in, my lord?”

  Groaning, he kisses her. His soapy palms rub rings against her dark nipples until she can’t take it and he can’t take it.

  “Can you touch me,” Miri whispers, her head tipping back, grabbing the edge of the tub. She opens her legs slightly. “Touch me with your fighting hands…but soft, Julian, okay, be gentle, please…be kind.”

  He slips his hand between her legs. “Like this?” he whispers, caressing her.

  Miri doesn’t speak at first. Yes, like that.

  His left arm goes around her to keep her from sinking under.

  “Like this, Miri?”

  Yes. She is shuddering.

  “Do you like that?” Julian whispers.

  She cannot speak. Leaning over her, he kisses her open moaning mouth like it’s the last hour before Revelation. His fingers continue to bring paradise to her body.

  A sleepless night of rapture follows for Miri and Julian, the windows open, the curtains blowing, full of sounds of sleeping London and awake lovers.

  Finally, oh God, finally, Julian drinks from the rivers of Babylon and the delta of the gods. Finally her small hips are in his grasping hands and she bears his weight above her. Finally they beat to the rhythm of common time. No patch of damp, starved for affection Miri remains unravished by Julian’s burning lips.

  My love, I found you again, he whispers. And this time I have truly earned you.

  Come, Julian, come closer, my gentle fighting knight, don’t be afraid, I won’t break, do unto me as you wish, O God, walk in, walk in. She was a lump of ice but the sun had heard her prayer and began to shine. Now she has melted away. The woman she is for the outside world is not the woman in bed with him. There is no protective shell around her anymore. Only Julian is around her.

  My desire is boundless, he whispers into her overcome mouth, overcome himself, my act is limitless, my will infinite, my love unconfined.

  You were right, my lord, she whispers, stretched out on the rack of his bed. Your desire for me was not all innocent. But it was holy.

  And he has his own whispers as he cocoons her in his arms. Do you remember me, Miri?

  She’s been devoured, emptied, filled, comforted. Am I supposed to? And what do you mean, you found me again?

  Is there a trace of anything old you feel for me?

  No, my angel. You are altogether marvelous and new. Her sleepy hands caress him. What are these tattooed names, these dots on your arm? In the moonlight, she lifts his left arm, studies the inside of it. They’re not birthmarks. Are they deliberate? Who is Mary, who is Mallory, who is Mia? Why is her name the smallest of the three? Did you like her the least?

  I knew her the least, he says, pulling his arm away, hiding it behind his back like sin. Could you have opened your mouth and said my name, Julian asks, when you first met me?

  When I first met you, Miri says, you were odd and worrying. You wore a stretched suit and said things that made no sense. You still do that. You looked at me strangely, too deeply. You stared at me with pain in your eyes. You do see how that can unsettle any girl, not just me, how that can make any girl uneasy? You looked at me like I broke your heart, yet I didn’t know you at all.

  In bed she gazes at him, waiting for him to say she is wrong, and he offers her nothing except his overflowing face.

  See, you’re still looking at me that way.

  He blinks her ghost away from his eyes. Why did you ask Monk to send in the clowns to foist me?

  Because I was afraid of you.

  Why?

  Because this is what I feared, Miri says. I was afraid of my dishonor. I didn’t need more trouble in my life. I’m already tangled up to my throat.

  Julian lies holding her soft small body in his hands.

  Do you think I have flagrantly flung myself at you?

  Um, no, Miri, I would no
t say that is what you did.

  I tried to be circumspect.

  You succeeded admirably.

  I suppose there’s no harm in telling you the truth now, Miri whispers. Don’t judge me, promise? The first day we met, I sneaked away to change because I didn’t want you to see me the way I was, so grubby. I wanted you to see me with a clean face, in a skirt and blouse. Even though I was wary and full of misgivings, I still wanted to look my best for you. I suppose what I mean to say is that I wanted to look worthy of the way you looked at me.

  My eyes look on you, Miri, Julian says, but it’s my heart that sees you.

  They kiss, pressed breast to breast.

  I couldn’t stay away, Miri says. Do you know when I knew it was hopeless to resist? At the Lamb and Flag.

  Julian allows himself a small smile. Sometimes when we seek to conquer love, we must use all our weapons.

  When you let yourself be provoked by Monk into an illegal brawl to get back at me, she continues. You stood there mad because I tried to rob you, challenging me, shirtless in your velvet breeches, perspiring, panting, all brawn and grit, your blood and the other bloke’s blood spilled over your face and chest, and I knew then that you were…what’s the word I’m looking for?

  Irresistible?

  Mine, Miri whispers, her hands enfolding him in the blue dark. Did you love me the first moment you saw me?

  I loved you way before then, says Julian.

  In a box of bliss with her, he almost forgets the scourge outside.

  He decorates the room where they lie together with bouquets of asphodels he buys in Covent Garden.

  Asphodels, the immortal flowers grown in Elysian Fields, in the Isles of the Blessed.

  Branched asphodels.

  Summer asphodels.

  White or rimmed lichen asphodels.

  Wild onion, too.

  Poison to sheep.

  Fatal to mice.

  Heal sickness in pigs.

  Asphodels bloom after winter rains, on dry grasslands and rocky sands.

  Bog asphodel, the wedding flower he left planted in the earth in distant Clerkenwell.

  Asphodel, the forever flower.

  Like onionweed they grow.

  Will you walk in, my lord, walk in.

  ∞

  Dot 29, 31, 39…

  Day for night returns to Julian’s life.

  Because almost every night, no matter how inflamed the love in their white bed, no matter how many times Miri pleads for Prospero to wield his magical staff, in the end, she changes into her old clothes and says dejectedly, “I must go back.” She doesn’t want Mortimer or Monk to grow suspicious and wicked in the brief weeks left before Fulko sails for the new world and Miri and Julian can live as they wish.

  They walk arm in arm through nighttime London, disengaging only when they reach the end of Piccadilly. Sometimes when it rains they flag down a carriage and let the horses pull them down the cobblestones, while inside the cab Julian kisses her hands and begs her not to leave him.

  Dot 40.

  Every night when they return to the rookery, they’re welcomed like Odysseus and Penelope, with drums and meat. There’s always a resplendent feast on the rotted table, plenty of ale and gin in the mugs, and dancing revelry until dawn.

  The charade in front of Miri’s three “children”—Jasper, Mortimer, and Monk—entails elaborate schemes and lies and sleights of dress and separate entries into St. Giles. She quits her job as a pure finder, stops selling the Chronicle and the Gazette, so she and Julian can spend their days together, pretending day is night. If her boys looked closer, they’d be able to tell their Miri is not the same girl. A hum doesn’t leave her throat. She skips when she walks through St. Giles.

  Miri skips when she walks through St. Giles.

  Perhaps Mortimer can tell the difference. The more cheerful she becomes, the grimmer he grows. A silent giant with a titanic envy, Mortimer sits in the corner of the dining hall in the cellar and like a black crow watches her dancing on the tables and telling jokes in her clean lace dresses.

  Julian and Miri are careful not to touch while they’re in St. Giles, but they don’t glance behind them as they embrace on the steps of the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, ambling to Charing Cross on their way to their rooms, twirling their umbrellas, chatting about Brighton and Torquay, where they might go, where they might live.

  She wants to learn to waltz like a lady, she wants to take piano lessons. She wants to learn how to act.

  She crawls to him in their bed—when morning is sunset and afternoon is dusk—to sleep as one. She’s so hot when she sleeps, like she’s burning, and this torments Julian and makes him sleepless. He tries to unravel himself from her, to creep away, but in her dreams she finds him and cocoons him inside her hot limbs. Julian lies awake as if he’s in a never-ending great fire.

  He lavishes her with gifts: candy from confectioners’ shops, drinking chocolate, his own body. He takes her for strolls near Westminster, where the river is not overrun with criminal gangs, he buys her a folio of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so they can run lines together, and she can pretend to be a star. O, I am out of breath in this fond chase! The more my prayer, the lesser is my grace. She jumps up on the table in the drawing room to recite her monologues. Laughing, Miri stands naked in the candlelight to illumine herself, a beacon to the meridian line between what is and what might never be.

  Sometimes in bed Miri weeps into his chest.

  Tangled, they lie in abandon. Where did you come from? she murmurs.

  I crawled down a canyon wall for you, swam miles under the earth for you.

  You make it sound almost romantic. Where are you really from, my lord?

  The caves. The tunnels.

  Like where Cleon goes?

  Something like that.

  Like where Cleon goes.

  Julian sits upright. Cleon!

  Miri has given him an idea.

  Hurry, he says to her, get dressed, let’s go talk to Cleon.

  Dot 43.

  In the maze of St. Giles, in his room, Cleon eyes them both with hostility.

  “What are you asking me? Have I seen what in the tunnels? A way out? You go out the way you come in, mate. But in reverse. Is that what yer asking?”

  Julian wishes he had another headlamp to trade. He wants something else from the surly man. Something mystical. “Have you ever seen anything, anything at all,” Julian asks, “in the miles of underground you’ve scoured for seventy years, that made you doubt your reality? Have you ever seen something you could point to and say, this is not the usual thing I find?”

  “Like me?” pipes in the newly sunny Miri. Julian kisses her hand, his focus trained on the sewer hunter.

  Cleon won’t bite. But his eyes deepen. He steps away from Julian. “What are you looking for?”

  Julian mines the man’s leathery face. “The mystery of the seven stars?” he says. “A lake where Satan and martyrs swim? Maybe a golden seal that opens at dawn, where blessed and cursed creatures dwell under the earth? Mountains? A mighty wind? A meandering river? A spot where men die in the black waters of a wormwood pool? Or perhaps, just the opposite. A place where men—and women—leap over the bitter waters and live.”

  Both Miri and Cleon gape at Julian, troubled and darkened.

  Undeterred, Julian waits.

  “There’s a foot tunnel under the Thames,” Cleon says at last, “that connects Greenwich with the Isle of Dogs. It was started to be built and then abandoned. It’s nearly impossible to find. It appears only at certain times of the year, during the newest moon and the lowest tide. Blink and you will miss it.”

  Julian can barely breathe. He knows there’s something there in the shape of things Cleon is telling him. He feels it. The Isle of Dogs is directly across the river from Greenwich. The Isle of Dogs lies on the Prime Meridian. A coincidence? No such thing.

  “You go every night under the city of souls for seventy years, you see some things,” C
leon says. “You see some things you don’t want to see.”

  Standing close to Julian, Miri nudges him. I told you, she whispers.

  Julian holds her hand. “What did you see, Cleon? What happened in that foot tunnel?”

  “A man got swallowed up into the blackness,” Cleon says. “He went looking for trouble. Like you want to. And he found it. One minute he was there. The next he wasn’t.”

  “Did he ever come back?”

  “I never seen him again.”

  “When was that?”

  “In 1710.”

  Julian tries to stay calm. “What time of year was it?”

  “I don’t know! There are no seasons in the tunnels.”

  “Come on, Cleon.”

  “September.” Cleon speaks with reluctance.

  “Like the September equinox maybe?”

  “I don’t know what that is. What difference does it make?”

  “Who was the man?”

  Cleon doesn’t want to tell him. “It was me dad, if you really must know.”

  Julian stares at the motionless sewer hunter. “Where’s your mother?”

  “Died in 1700.”

  Julian exhales. “Your father searched for your mother for ten years, and then vanished?” Julian lets Miri yank on him. She doesn’t like this. She wants to go.

  “He was deranged,” Cleon said. “He was made mad by grief. People like that do all sorts of things normal people don’t do.”

  “Oh my God, Cleon,” Julian says, “is that why you’ve been underground for seven decades? Have you been trying to find your father?”

  “I’m a sewer hunter.” Cleon is grim. “It’s me job. It’s what me father did before me. It’s what I do.”

  “Can you show us the foot tunnel?”

  “Who is us?” Miri cries. “Not me.”

  “Never!” Cleon says. He shoves Julian toward the door. “Get out. You want to go there, you go on yer own. I won’t take you.”

  “We can’t find it on our own, Cleon. Show us where it is—please.”

  “Who’s this we, Julian? I don’t go down there,” Miri says. “I won’t go down there. I heard a story that in the sewers, a pregnant sow gave birth to a litter of pups who multiplied like roaches and now feed on offal and whatever still walks below.”