Jack sped away from Wild’s, panting with Terror and Relief.
He slow’d along the riverbank, where dried basil and thyme shone silver in the moonlight.
Oh, why did I drop the papers, he moaned to himself, kicking the ground as he walked.
Who would believe what he had found? Evans had worked out a recipe? He could barely believe it himself. He wondered if the Starlight had afflict’d his vision. And now there was no way to know. He’d dropped the notes. He’d have to go back sometime when he could be assured of Wild’s absence.
When he reached Cuper’s Gardens, the night-blooming primrose—pink heads bowed—were coated in frost. He perambulat’d the park, trying to commit to memory the contents of the papers—though, as he got further from Wild’s, halfheartedly so. What use was any scouting when he hadn’t Bess to speculate together with? He was alone with the bareness of facts, Clues, material that held no charge, no Connectedness. The entire world was body parts with no Body. Even his own bones felt hollow—stray bones bobbing about in a container of skin.
One of the primrose uncurl’d its green neck under the weight of gathering rime. A Magick flicker of green and pink with the nightfall. Jack stopped still. He gaz’d at the primrose unfolding, remembering times he’d seen Bess thrill to the sight of something simple—a Green thing budding into life—
With shaking limbs, he bent down, stroking its soft petals, and pluck’d it for his button-hole—
And then his world upended through some force that was not his own— Everything spun— No, he was spinning—and his hand—he realiz’d—had somehow come to be beneath a jackboot. His head—he also realiz’d—was pressed against damp mulch. He was on the ground.
He must have been knock’d clean out from behind. There was a period of time missing between plucking the flower and being face-first in wet straw. Jack study’d the centinel’s scuffed jackboot as if ’twas grinding down hard on someone else’s hand. And now another centinel was lurching towards him out of the Gloom. Handcuffs dangl’d from his paw.
“What for?” Jack’s voice was a wail. For once he wasn’t even nicking anything.
“Anti-Foraging Act,”*1 spat the centinel, plucking the flower from Jack’s hand.
“Foraging?!”
“ ’S edible,” said the centinel, munching down, petals spilling from his mouth. “And as such, property of the Municipality of London.”
“It’s a primrose,” Jack protested.
“Just the same. What’d you want wit’ it anyway?” the centinel sneered.
Oh how to explain— She breathed life down my throat—she with the tip of her tongue, like a Hummingbird giving syrup back to the flower—and just as some flowers open only at night, so did I open only with her tongue in my mouth.
Man-flower. Gent-posy. What am I— Does it even matter? I open’d only ever in her touch— Only—only—only ever in her touch. So then how could she— How could she— And even so—
A mourning dove hooted twice, softly, from a yew tree above Jack’s head. Jack craned his neck, eased, for a moment, to observe a free animal. But then the free black Claws pinching the thick branch were blott’d out by the centinel drawing his boot back, aiming for Jack’s head, and—*2
*1 Presumably a companion to the Cabbage Act, the Vagrant Act, etc.
*2 Incidentally, I need to make a confession: the footnote *2 on this page contains a number of partial and necessary lies.
When Sullivan requested the page I had “misplaced,” I was flat fucking broke. Plus, you know, the threat of the lawsuit!
So, in order to be paid and to evade legal consequences, I did send him…something. It was not, however, a missing page of the manuscript, although I could not let the reader know this at the time of the original footnote, for obvious reasons.
Indeed, I have, frankly, no idea if this page ever existed—and, if it did, at what point it may have been removed. I like to imagine, though, that it was redacted by consensus of a radical librarian subcommittee of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1978 (on more of which, see Reina Gossett’s archival work on STAR: www.reinagossett.com/reina-gossett-historical-erasure-as-violence).
But back to my point about that footnote and my necessary lies. What actually happened was this: Sullivan and I were going back and forth about the manuscript—that much is true. But when I said that I had sent him the missing page of the manuscript, containing an illustration of Jack’s genitalia, what I actually did was Google “waterlogged slug,” and I found an illustration in a garden book (more specifically: advice on how to slay flower-pests) of a creature that had been salted, fatted and then left to perish on a deck. I cut the illustration of the slug from its background and pasted it into some Photoshop template of a pitted and moth-eaten page. It looked, in fact, quite like an “authentic” eighteenth-century manuscript page.
I saved the document as “MissingPageChimeraJunk.rtf” and sent it to Sullivan.
He motherfucking loved it.