They finished their drinks, then parted on the street with vague promises to meet again, although both men understood that they would not. Burke walked in the direction of Hyde Park, while Stokes stopped at a flower stall to buy some carnations for his wife. Neither saw the small, dark-haired woman who stood in the shadows of a lane, watching them closely. The air shimmered around her, as though distorted by the summer heat, and a faint smell of roasting meat could be scented by passersby.
Mrs. Paxton made her choice, and slowly began to follow Burke toward the park.
The Inkpot Monkey
Mr. Edgerton was suffering from writer’s block. It was, he quickly grew to realize, a most distressing complaint. A touch of influenza might lay up a man for a day or two, yet his mind could continue its ruminations. Gout might leave him racked with suffering, yet his fingers could still grasp a pen and turn pain to pennies. But this blockage, this barrier to all progress, had left Mr. Edgerton a virtual cripple. His mind would not function, his hands would not write, and his bills would not be paid.
In a career spanning the best part of two decades he had never before encountered such an obstacle to his profession. He had, in that time, produced five moderately successful, if rather indifferent, novels; a book of memoirs that, in truth, owed more to invention than experience; and a collection of poetry that could most charitably be described as having stretched the capacities of free verse to the limits of their acceptability.
Mr. Edgerton made his modest living from writing by the yard, based on the firm but unstated belief that if he produced a sufficient quantity of material, then something of quality was bound to creep in, if only in accordance with the law of averages. Journalism, ghostwriting, versifying, editorializing; nothing was beneath his limited capabilities. Yet, for the past six months, the closest he had come to a writing project was the construction of his weekly grocery list. A veritable tundra of empty white pages stretched before him, the gleaming nib of his pen poised above them like a reluctant explorer. His mind was a blank, the creative juices sapped from it to leave behind only a dried husk of frustration and bewilderment. He began to fear his desk, once his beloved companion but now reduced to the status of a faithless lover, and it pained him to look upon it. Paper, ink, imagination: all had betrayed him, leaving him lost and alone.
At first, Mr. Edgerton had almost welcomed the opportunity to rest his creative muscles. He took coffee with those less successful than himself, safe in the knowledge that a brief hiatus in production was unlikely to damage his reputation among them as a prolific producer of adequate material. He attended the best shows, making sure that his presence was noted by taking his seat at the last possible moment. When questioned about his latest endeavors, he would merely smile mysteriously and tap the side of his nose with his index finger, a gesture employed by Mr. Edgerton to suggest that he was in the midst of some great literary endeavor, but which instead gave the unfortunate impression that a particularly irritating fragment of snuff had stubbornly lodged itself in his nostril.
But after a time, Mr. Edgerton stopped attending musical performances, and his peers were forced to find other sources of amusement at the city’s coffeehouses. Conversations about writing began to pain him, and the sight of those whose creative juices flowed more freely than his own compounded his agony. He found himself unable to keep the bitterness from his voice as he spoke of such blessed souls, arousing immediately the suspicions of his fellow, less prolific, scribblers, for although they were more than willing to skewer another’s reputation with a barbed witticism or unflattering anecdote, they avoided the use of brute insults or, indeed, any form of behavior that might lead a casual listener to suspect that they were not their rivals’ superiors in talent, success, and critical acclaim. Mr. Edgerton came to fear that even his silences now gave him away, clouded over as they were with brooding and frustration, and so his social appearances grew fewer and fewer until at last they ceased altogether. In truth, his colleagues were not unduly troubled by his absence. They had reluctantly tolerated his modest success. Now, with the taint of failure upon him, they relished his discomfort.
To further complicate matters, Mr. Edgerton’s wallet had begun to feel decidedly lightweight of late, and nothing will dampen a man’s ardor for life more than an empty pocket. Like a rodent gripped in the coils of a great constricting snake, he found that the more he struggled against his situation, the tighter the pressure upon him grew. Necessity, wrote Ovid, is the mother of invention. For Mr. Edgerton, desperation was proving to be the father of despair.
And so, once again, he found himself wandering the streets, trawling the city’s great rivers of people in the hope of netting a single idea. In time, he came to Charing Cross Road, but the miles of shelved books only depressed him further, especially since he could find none of his own among their number. Head down, he cut through Cecil Court and made his way into Covent Garden in the faint hope that the vibrancy of the market might spur his sluggish subconscious into action. He was almost at the Magistrates Court when something caught his eye in the window of a small antiques shop. There, partially hidden behind a framed portrait of Admiral Nelson and a stuffed magpie, was a most remarkable inkpot.
The inkpot was silver, and about four inches tall, with a lacquered base adorned by Chinese characters. But what was most striking about it was the small, mummified monkey that perched upon its lid, its clawed toes clasped upon the rim and its dark eyes gleaming in the summer sunlight. It was obviously an infant of its species, perhaps even a fetus of some kind, for it was no more than three inches in height and predominantly gray in color, except for its face, which was blackened around the mouth as if the monkey had been sipping from its own ink. It really was a most ghastly creature, but Mr. Edgerton had acquired the civilized man’s taste for the grotesque and he quickly made his way into the darkened shop to inquire about the nature of the item in question.
The owner of the business proved to be almost as distasteful in appearance as the creature that had attracted Mr. Edgerton’s attention, as though the man were somehow father to the monkey. His teeth were too numerous for his mouth, his mouth too large for his face, and his head too great for his body. Combined with a pronounced stoop to his back, his aspect was that of one constantly on the verge of toppling over. He also smelled decidedly odd, and Mr. Edgerton quickly concluded that he was probably in the habit of sleeping in his clothes, a deduction that briefly led the afflicted writer to an unwelcome speculation upon the nature of the body that lay concealed beneath the layers of unwashed clothing.
Nevertheless, the proprietor proved to be a veritable font of knowledge about the items in his possession, including the article that had brought Mr. Edgerton into his presence. The mummified primate was, he informed the writer, an inkpot monkey, a creature of Chinese mythology. According to the myth, the monkey provided artistic inspiration in return for the residues of ink left in the bottom of the inkpot. As he spoke, the dealer placed the inkpot on the counter before him, like an angler skillfully spinning a lure before a hungry fish in the hope of drawing it onto his hook.