CENTURIES BEFORE PENSIONERS limped the grounds of the Seamen’s Hospital, Plantagenets and Tudors lived very well here in the old Royal Palace, Placentia, nestled within their armories and tilting yards and banqueting halls, and a warren of residences for their staffs and hangers-on. Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth were born and pampered here. But Charles II wanted something both a little newer and a little grander when he returned from exile in France, as monarchs whose fathers have been decapitated tend to do when they eventually reassume the Throne.
And so he did to the old Royal Palace complex what perhaps only a brand-new king could do: he had it demolished, in its entirety, and tipped into the Thames. Not a banqueting hall remains above ground from the days before the Stuarts. Not one timbered ceiling. Not a wall. When he began work on the Royal Hospital, Christopher Wren had the luxury of a well-scrubbed canvas.
But beneath Wren’s Queen Anne block, on the eastern side of the Hospital, something survives well below ground, and that is the second spot I must run my eye over while James is feasting and nodding. Just within the entrance arches to the Queen Anne courtyard lies an ancient horse-mounting block. Without this marker, the door to the undercroft might pass unnoticed; the workmen who built the new Hospital structure above ground managed to work the existing stone entrance cleverly into the ripple and flow of their masonry. And in that tiny stone archway they fitted a newish door, of stout oak, with a newish lock.
Fortunately for me, my old man found a way to come at a newish key.
Filching this key was the only part of today’s itinerary that shook his courage. He is already under a heavy sentence, as the Hospital’s rules go, and he genuinely fears losing his pension altogether. I had to press him hard, and promise to pay him very well, to manage it. I have promised to return the thing to him when I have done with it, and I will do so.
When the outer door is opened, daylight falls upon three lanterns racked on the thick stone retaining wall at the top of the staircase. My canary has made sure that one of these lanterns is lit, and I lift it down. Few visitors know of the undercroft, and traffic to it is very light, but still there are enough curiosity seekers each year to warrant more than a single lantern. Johnson happens to know of this under-cellar from the days he spent living and writing in Greenwich, the years he composed in the Park and drank coffee and nosed out all the riddles of the little city. But Johnson is not the only lover of secret history, and neither is he the only one with the intention of scaring the stuffings out of a companion.
The lamplight moves with me as I drop down the first of two narrow staircases, filling the small space and illuminating the damp brick. With the Thames only a stone’s throw away, James I found upon taking the Throne that the timbers of his Great Banqueting Hall were slowly moldering, and so early in his reign he caused a huge vaulted cellar to be built beneath it, stretching from his garden ponds to the Thames itself. The floor was meticulously tiled in clay. In this way the upper structures were kept dry; the ever-present smell of damp in the Banqueting Hall vanished.
And when all other evidence of James and his ancestors had been scraped into the river like so much rubbish, this undercroft remained. That is all: an under-cellar to keep the wet at bay. One last ignoble remnant of the seat that gave Eliza birth, and, for that reason among others, Johnson has a sentimental attachment to it.
At the base of the stairs, I move out into a vestibule the size of a small wine cellar. But this is clearly meant as entrée to the undercroft-proper, which opens out through an archway to my right. I move through the arch, listening, but there is no sound.
Outside the halo of lamplight, I can sense the vastness of the larger chamber, the space broken only by thin ribs of brick vaulting that flow down into shaped stone pillars at intervals across the tile. The temperature has fallen considerably, so that the sweat at my temples and the back of my neck quickly cools. A perceptible draft moves aimlessly over the tile, as though searching for the water that gave it birth.
A trick of the lamplight renders the march of arches into the gloom infinite, but it can be no more than a few hundred feet long and a hundred feet across.
Still, it is as lightless and silent and cool as the grave, and I know that James will only barely be able to force himself to descend the steps and move out into the center of this space, even beside his imposing hero. His fear of ghosts and death and the dark is profound, and has been since he was a child.
Although Johnson has known my brother for only two months now, he knows this about him well enough, and the insistence that they visit the undercroft together this afternoon carries with it just a hint of exploratory cruelty. But this is all part of what they offer one another. For all his trepidation, James will come here, and he will indeed be afraid; he will marvel openly at Johnson’s lack of fear; Johnson will comfort James; James will add that show of compassion to his accumulating mental notes of the day; and in this way they will test and strengthen their odd new complementarity. They will confirm one another in being what they each cannot help but be.
* * *
THERE IS ONE other significant advantage to employing a canary: it is possible to sit atop One Tree Hill, overlooking the town and the river, and follow the pair’s progress—from the Old Ship, up through the Park’s long scenic tunnel of elm and Spanish chestnut, up to the Royal Observatory—simply by tracking the mote of yellow trailing brilliantly behind. Occasionally, my old man doffs his hat and fans himself briefly, as though he finds the heat oppressive; this bit of semaphore prevents me from confusing him, at a distance, with the handful of other Hospital reprobates in mustard. I am truly impressed with him this day. He is performing flawlessly in his various roles.
At the foot of the Giant’s Steps, the canary wheels slowly off and begins the labored process of climbing One Tree Hill, on one good leg, to deliver me his report.
By the time my amanuensis struggles up to me, I am seated on the wooden bench encircling the gnarled trunk that gives the Hill its name. Other than myself, the crown of the hill is deserted, though voices and laughter sift though the trees of the Park below. A small knot of deer are cropping at the edge of the woods behind me, paying me no mind. Town deer, they have been raised to fear no man.
I have my eyes closed, letting the sun bathe my face.
And so I hear the old man clear his throat without seeing him. A smile touches up the corners of my mouth, but this without opening my eyes. It is pleasant to refuse the headlong movement of the day, at least for a few moments, more pleasant than I care to think about. After all, our two quarries will be occupied for a good while with the sextants and quadrants and clocks and the Domus Obscurata in the Observatory’s garden pavilion. I could almost doze here, almost dream.
I feel the same lethargy I felt on the sculler, the slow fingers of fugue. Finally, the old man scratches carefully at my shoulder, and then again. He has gone too far with things to have me suddenly turn whimsical on him.
“They are a strange pair, are they not,” I ask him, eyes still shut. But even as I speak the words, I find myself thinking: Devonshire junket. The cinnamon smell in the Greenwich air today puts me in mind of Devonshire junket, covered in a whipped cream touched with rosewater. James and I ate it once, as boys, at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. Only once, yet it remains today our common touchstone for both an elegant and a greedy dessert.
“They are that, sir,” says the canary. “The big one has his ideas, true enough.”
I open my eyes, and he hands me a series of half-sheets, neatly ordered together.
“And this is the stuff of their conversation?”
“The meat of it. With as much of the words themselves as I could put down as they came running. Been a while since I was called to scratch down so much so quick. But I believe I done a neat enough job of it.”
“It is the best way to come to know a man, Grandfather. To sample his conversation when he is unaware that it is being sampled. You do not hear truth, but you hear the particular range of fictions he tells his particular listener. And from this you may take your measure of them both.”
He is searching my coat with his glance now, for the bulge of the second flask, no doubt. But he realizes that something is expected of him by way of response. And he rises to the occasion.
“So, belike, I have heard say,” he puts in sagely, after a moment.
The Old Ship
Saturday 30 July
Just after 1 in the afternoon
Below lie the subjects they covered. The hooks are saved for their very words, as spoke.
First thing, they called for their lunch, fish and potatoes, bread. Sat at the table furthest to the back. And the littler one said shall we drink wine, and the bigger one said <nay, we shall drink tea now and save our two bottles for the Turk’s Head this night.>
Missed something here as I was obliged to call for my own meal. It was but a minute.
The big one remarked as to how he don’t like the buildings of the hospital. Not to his taste, because <too detached to make up one great whole.> And he said he thinks the whole lot too grand for a charity hospital. <What have such men to do with palaces and hunting parks and Painted Halls? They have lived aboard ship their entire lives, comfortable in their tiny bunks. One might as well transport a badger to a ballroom. Neither the badger nor the other dancers will long abide the arrangement. Here the pensioners are confronted each hour with the contrast between their battered selves and their brilliant surroundings.> Smaller lodgings in the City better.
The littler one asked, <Should not they be allotted their portion of grandeur, as they have served their King very well?>
Bigger: <A street sweeper serves his King very well also, Sir, but he lies in no palace at night. Believe me, these pensioners would find a boiled chicken and a clean suit of clothes full grand enough, no matter where they were offered.>And, said he, it makes for dependency as well. Turns pensioners almost into children. <Enfeebles those who have been rendered feeble enough by Chance.>
Littler: <True, but Sir, the Bible exhorts us to Charity. We are not to consider the effects, but to obey the exhortation.>
Bigger: Grew peevish at that, loud in his talk, and swung about in chair. <Indeed, Sir, and in Matthew it says Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. It matters not if a man go early or late to the vineyard, he will be rewarded, but he must go to the vineyard, Sir, for all that. Idling outside the vineyard serves no man. If a sailor has yet one good arm, then let him use it.>
Littler: <But surely if a man is rendered unable by wounds—>Bigger: Waved hand in the air. <Now do you begin to talk nonsense, Sir.>
Here they fell to their meal, and said nothing for a good while.
Bigger one ate as if starved. Didn’t take pause to chew, but forked in a new bite while the old was still underway. Veins stood on his forehead as he did so.
Bigger one: <Fish is exceedingly badly dressed>Littler: <I am just of your mind. Badly dressed, indeed.>
The undercroft is farther across than I had imagined, closer to one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet. I have a sharp moment of uncertainty, as a man might have swimming in the sea at night, when he expects to feel sand grind beneath his toes, yet does not—and then, a moment later, still does not. But it is not much farther, for all of that.
When I reach the far wall, I inspect the moist stone and find precisely what the canary has told me to expect: two short alcoves built into the wall, for wine or coal but empty today, and broom-clean. They are each deep enough for a man to take three paces into them, and I do so, leaving my lantern sitting on the clay tiles of the one farthest from the door.
Then I turn back to the darkness and retrace my steps. Once outside the alcove, and nearer the center of the floor, I turn back:
the alcove looks miraculous, glowing from some indirect source, as though it contained a particle of the Divine.
From One Tree Hill, I watched James and Johnson leave the Observatory and begin their slow saunter back down through the Park. According to James’s notes, they plan to tour the undercroft next. Johnson seems to have deliberately designed this part of the tour for later in the afternoon, with evening coming on.
I have perhaps fifteen minutes, then, before the two come clamoring down the stairs behind me, and I use this time to familiarize myself with the vast space of the chamber.
There was a time when, like James, I was deathly afraid of the dark. Growing up together, we were both petrified if a sudden wind snuffed the candles in our flat. It seemed then the breath of something monstrous, something biding its time just outside the corona of light and family. And it was not uncommon for the winds curling up the Edinburgh High Street to wreak their little bit of havoc.
But somehow, in the Plymouth Hospital last year, I shed that fear completely. Now I could spend the day in this lightless chamber and fear nothing. When a man has been disturbed—so that his very sense of himself is laid jaggedly open—and then that man returns abruptly to his senses, he knows forever after that there are worse things than a room without a candle.
The undercroft’s five great stone pillars, each the terminus for eight brick ribs spilling elaborately down from the ceiling, are precisely placed. The pattern is the four points of a square, with a fifth pier dropped right into the center of the figure. Otherwise the space is empty. It is so very silent that I can hear my blood course in my ears, and I rehearse the mathematics of the pillars, first walking deliberately with my arms stretched in front of me, and then, when I have my bearings, striding faster and more surely.
If I slip back all the way to the south wall, and rest there with my back against it, the glow of the distant alcove silhouettes the pillars just enough to allow me to run nearly as fast as I am able. The south wall, like the north, has its storage alcove. I remove my shoes and place them snug against the rear wall of it.
This is where I will stand, when the moment comes. As James and Johnson enter the undercroft proper, their lamplight will not reach me here. After an instant, they will mark the glow from the far wall, and they will do what insects and humans in dark places cannot help but do: they will gravitate toward it, across the long tiled floor. Another tourist party, they will imagine, or a guide of some sort. Someone, anyone, with whom they may talk, talk, talk.
When they are far enough across the floor, I will circle behind them, back up the steps, to lock the door from the inside. In my stockings alone I can move very quietly. And then, when they reach the far alcove, they will find the orphaned lantern; they will stand before it, thinking, pondering. And in that instant, I will pad forward into the light and the two parallel branches of the riverine excursion will converge and become one.
I transfer the dags from their fitted pockets beneath my arms to the long outer pockets of my coat. There, if need be, I can keep them in my hands without announcing them. Giving the pillars and brickwork now little more than a cursory thought, I walk back toward the alcove, glowing faintly in the distance. Perhaps ten minutes remain, more than enough time to advance in my reading.
They talked of the possibility of rain in the evening, even during their trip back up the Thames. The littler one seemed put out at the idea, but the bigger one bade him never mind rain should it come. Littler one: <Of course it is good for the vegetable part of the creation.> Bigger one: <Ay sir, and for the animals who eat those vegetables, and for the animals who eat those animals.>
Here they had finished their meal, and sat back with tea cups. Big one put his legs up on the counterpane of the window, as at his ease.
Then the littler began to speak of his own father. Comparing the father to his friend, after a fashion. <You and I, Sir, are very good companions, but my father and I are not so. Now what can occasion this? For you are as old a man as my father, and you are certainly as learned and as knowing.>
Bigger one seemed pleased at that, nodded head, tapped foot. <Sir, I am a man of the world. I live in the world, and I take in some measure of the colour of the world as it moves along. But your father is a judge in a remote part of the country, and all his notions are taken from the old world.>
Littler: <I cannot believe, had you been raised in Scotland, that you would have a narrow manner of thought, Sir. I will not believe that.>
Bigger: <And too, there must be a struggle between father and son, while the one aims at power and the other at independency.>
Littler said that he was afraid his father might force him to pursue a career in the Law. Did not take the exact words, but somehow he feared trickery of some kind on the father’s part.
Bigger: <Do not fear. He cannot force you to be a laborious practising lawyer. That is not in his power, even a Judge of the Scottish High Court. One man may lead a horse to water, but twenty cannot make him drink.>
Littler: <I wish you was there with me, when I go down to Scotland. You keep me in mind of my own abilities, where I am too often apt to think myself powerless in contesting against him concerning my future. It is good of you, to take such charge of my education, Sir, to establish my principles. I value the chance to be in your company, truly. It has been a dream of mine since I was a child, marveling over your Dictionary.>
Bigger: <My dear Boswell! I do love you very much.>
Here they discharged their reckoning. Bigger one cleared a path for them through the traffic in the Old Ship, swinging his stick just a bit to left and right, nudging people out of the way, like a goose girl touching up her flock. No particular mention throughout the meal of the suit at law you spoke of, unless it may possibly be with the gentleman’s own father.