Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

a suit of excellent cloth, has clipped his hair and wears a wig, a new one, expensive and faintly scented.

Though it is possible that Fothergill has heard of the Munro affair, may even, in some way, have been prompted to write by

his knowledge of it, there is no dark hinting, no gesturing at his candidate's questionable moral credentials. James expounds his method of using a charged lancet for the inoculations. Fothergill nods, approves. They drink wine on a bench under a flowering cherry tree. They drink a toast to the Empress. Fothergill says: 'What an adventure, Mr Dyer.'

They have supper with the family, plain fare, the sun setting through the window. Fothergill's daughter blushes at the way James observes her, this beautiful man, as though she were laid on his slab.

After supper Fothergill leads James to a room in the upstairs of the house. It is full of stuffed birds startling from the walls, of bones and fossils, and dead butterflies with wings like cut silk.

'Come,' he says. There is a barrel next to the table. When Fothergill takes off its lid, a waft of tobacco, bitter-sweet, fills the room.

Says Fothergill: 'My agent in North America, Mr Samms, packs his prizes in tobacco dust. This arrived yesterday on a slaver out of Charleston. Pray, hold back my sleeves.'

Fothergill reaches into the dust, draws the creature into the twilight of the room.

James asks: 'What is it, sir?'

'Mephitis mephitis^' says Fothergill, holding it up like a darling. 'The Wood-pussy. The common skunk.'

The houses at Grand Parade are sold. An actor buys one, a retired captain of the East India Company the other. It is July. James's last week in Bath. A crowd is gathered by

the river where a rope slants steeply over the bow^ling green and the Orange Grove to the east tovv^er of the abbey. He walks over and stands at the back of the crowd. Everyone is gazing up at the tower. A small figure is manoeuvring on to the rope, lying down with his chest on some manner of breastplate that balances precariously on the rope. Someone shouts: 'He's coming! He's coming!', and the figure is suddenly in flight, hurtling down the rope, a stream of smoke trailing behind from the friction of the board. A pistol shot, the bray of a trumpet ringing over the hills. The figure plunges like a shooting star, a falling angel. Insane! Astounding!

The crowd cheers. James is pressed forward, until he finds himself looking over the shoulders of those nearest the point where the lower end of the rope is fixed to a scaffold. He sees a man, small and gristly, dressed in a patched coat, and beside him, the trumpet still in her hand, the wind tears still in her eyes, is a girl, fourteen or fifteen, conceivably his daughter. A woman next to James in the crowd says: 'It was her what done it. A short life, eh? Short and merry.'

He is studying the girl. She is laughing, as though her life at that moment could not be more lovely to her. She looks at the crowd, returns for a second James's stare. Such a face she has. Such fierce joy in her eyes.

James shoulders his way out of the crowd, gets free of it and walks, heavy as a corpse, towards the Orange Grove. He cannot think what has disturbed him so. It was a circus act, part of this rage for flying that has swept the country. A thrill for the rabble. He enters the quiet house, goes up to his room. It was always bare, green and bare. Now it is barer. He goes to the mirror, wipes it. Such a face. Is he alive? What is it to be alive? What does the girl feel that he does not?

He adjusts his cravat. Chill, dexterous fingers. He thinks of Russia, Russia, Russia . . .

FIFTH

Rev J Is Lestrade to Lady Hallam

Paris, 22 October 1767 Dear Lady Hallam^

Forgive me for not having written sooner. The truth is that I have been very loath to to do anything at all and find the smallest task wearying beyond description. This, I fear, makes me very poor company to your friend Monsieur About, who begs that I send his warmest regards and says with what fondness he recalls his stay at the Hall.

I do not believe you have ever been in his house which is on the Quai de Bourbon and but a minutes walk from the cathedral of Notre Dame. Do you admire the Gothic styled I was in there the other day and the air was so charged with incense it made my head spin. The windows are very fine things.

Alas! The city has too many palaces, too many churches, too many monuments. It would, I suppose, be the same for a foreigner coming to London, but I have no enthusiasm and I am glad to say Monsieur About does not bully me. As you know he is a man of business, though I am not certain what business, only that he seems to work for some Jews in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Often, I have been left in the care of his friend Mme Duperon, a very elegant and witty lady with whom I may practise my poor

French. Her English is eccentric to say the least, and her accent renders the most innocuous statements curiously improper.

Thisy however, is by the by. I have been stung into this tardy correspondence not only by the recollection of my promise to write to you, but by a very odd turn of events, such that it now seems we are to abandon Paris and set off - lest a nighfs sleep puts paid to the notion —for Russia! I do not myself quite understand how we came to this. I am not at all sure it is wise, but About is all for it, says he has been three or four times to St Petersburg and that he would rather