“The chest is stowed in your cabin. There is a chemist’s shop on Clifford Street besides the Freemason’s Hall. Get whatever you need and tell them to send the bill to Mr. Baxter.”
Both men rise from the table. Sumner extends his hand and Brownlee briefly shakes it. Each man for a moment peers at the other one as if hoping for an answer to some secret question they are too alarmed or wary to ask out loud.
“Baxter won’t like that much, I imagine,” Sumner says at last.
“Bugger Baxter,” Brownlee says.
* * *
Half an hour later, Sumner sits hunched over on his bunk and tongues his pencil stub. His cabin has the dimensions of an infant’s mausoleum, and smells, already, before the voyage has even begun, sour and faintly fecal. He peers skeptically into the medicine chest and begins to make his shopping list: hartshorn, he writes, Glauber’s salt, Spirit of Squills. Every now and then he unstoppers one of the bottles and sniffs the dried-up innards. Half the things in there he has never heard of: Tragacanth? Guaiacum? London Spirit? It’s no wonder Brownlee thinks the “potions” don’t work: most of this stuff is fucking Shakespearean. Was the previous surgeon some kind of Druid? Laudanum, he writes by the eggish light of a blubber lamp, absinthe, opium pills, mercury. Will there be much gonorrhea amongst a whaling crew? he wonders. Possibly not, since whores in the Arctic Circle are likely to be thin on the ground. Judging by the amount of Epsom salts and castor oil already in the chest, however, constipation will be a sizable problem. The lancets, he notices, are uniformly ancient, rusty, and blunt. He will have to have them sharpened before he begins any bleeding. It is probably a good thing he has brought his own scalpels and a newish bone saw.
After a while, he closes the medicine chest and pushes it back beneath the bunk, where it rests beside the battered tin trunk that he has carried with him all the way from India. Out of habit, automatically, and without looking down, Sumner rattles the trunk’s padlock and pats his waistcoat pocket to check he still has the key. Reassured, he stands, leaves the cabin, and makes his way along the narrow companionway and up onto the ship’s deck. There is a smell of varnish and wood shavings and pipe smoke. Barrels of beef and bundles of staves are being loaded into the forehold on ropes, someone is hammering nails into the galley roof, there are several men up in the rigging swinging pots of tar. A lurcher scuffles by, then stops abruptly to lick itself. Sumner pauses beside the mizzenmast and scans the quayside. There is no one there he recognizes. The world is enormous, he tells himself, and he is a tiny, unmemorable speck within it, easily lost and forgotten. This thought, which would not normally be pleasing to anyone, pleases him now. His plan is to dissolve, to dissipate, and only afterwards, some time later, to re-form. He walks down the gangplank and finds his way to the chemist’s shop on Clifford Street, where he hands over his list. The chemist, who is bald and sallow and missing several teeth, examines the list, then looks up at him.
“That’s not right,” he says. “Not for a whaling voyage. It’s too much.”
“Baxter’s paying for everything. You can send him the bill directly.”
“Has Baxter seen this list?”
Inside the shop, it is gloomy and the brownish air is sulfurous and thick with liniment. The bald man’s finger ends are stained a glaring chemical orange and his nails are curved and horny; below his rolled-up shirtsleeves Sumner sees the blue fringes of an old tattoo.
“You think I’d trouble Baxter with shit like that?” Sumner says.
“He’ll be troubled when he sees this fucking bill. I know Baxter and he’s a tight-fisted cunt.”
“Just fill the order,” Sumner says.
The man shakes his head and rubs his hands across his mottled apron.
“I can’t give you all that,” he says, pointing down at the paper on the countertop. “Or that either. If I do, I won’t get paid for it. I’ll give you the regular allowances of both and that’s all.”
Sumner leans forwards. His belly presses up against the burnished countertop.
“I’m just back from the colonies,” he explains, “from Delhi.”
The bald man shrugs at this intelligence, then sticks his forefinger in his right ear and twists it noisily.
“You know I can sell you a nice piece of birch wood for that limp,” he says. “Ivory handle, whale tooth, whichever you prefer.”
Without answering him, Sumner steps away from the counter and commences gazing around the shop as though he suddenly has a good deal of time on his hands and nothing much to fill it with. The sidewalls are crammed with all manner of flasks, bottles, and tantali filled with liquids, unguents, and powders. Behind the counter is a large yellowing mirror reflecting the hairless verso of the bald man’s pate. To one side of the mirror is an array of square wooden drawers, each with a nameplate and a single brass knob in its center, and to the other is a row of shelves supporting a tableau of stuffed animals arranged in a series of melodramatic and martial poses. There is a barn owl poised in the act of devouring a field mouse, a badger at perpetual war with a ferret, a Laocoonian gibbon being strangled by a garter snake.
“Did you do all those yourself?” Sumner asks him.
The man waits a moment, then nods.
“I’m the best taxidermist in town,” he says. “You can ask anyone.”
“And what’s the biggest beast you’ve ever stuffed? The very biggest, I mean. Tell me the truth now.”
“I’ve done a walrus,” the bald man says casually. “I’ve done a polar bear. They bring them in off the Greenland ships.”
“You’ve stuffed a polar bear?” Sumner says.
“I have.”
“A fucking bear,” Sumner says again, smiling now. “Now that’s something I would like to see.”
“I had him standing up on his hindmost legs,” the bald man says, “with his vicious claws raking the frigid air like this.” He reaches his orangey hands up into the air and arranges his face into a frozen growl. “I did it for Firbank, the rich bugger who lives in that big house on Charlotte Street. I believe he still has it in his grand entrance hall, next to his whale tooth hat stand.”
“And would you ever stuff an actual whale?” Sumner asks.
The bald man shakes his head and laughs at the idea.
“The whale can’t be stuffed,” he says. “Apart from the size, which makes it impossible, they putrefy too quick. And besides, what would any sane man want with a stuffed bloody whale anyway?”
Sumner nods and smiles again. The bald man chuckles at the thought.
“I’ve done lots of pike,” he continues vainly. “I’ve done otters aplenty. Someone brought me a platy-puss once.”
“What do you say we change the names?” Sumner says. “On the bill? Call it absinthe. Call it calomel if you want to.”
“We already have calomel on the list.”
“Absinthe then, let’s call it absinthe.”
“We could call it blue vitriol,” the man suggests. “Some surgeons take a good amount of that stuff.”
“Call it blue vitriol then, and call the other absinthe.”
The man nods once and does a rapid calculation in his head.
“A bottle of absinthe,” he says, “and three ounces of vitriol will about cover it.” He turns around and starts opening up drawers and picking flasks off the shelves. Sumner leans against the countertop and watches him at his work — weighing, sifting, grinding, stoppering.
“Have you ever shipped out yourself?” Sumner asks him. “For the whaling?”
The chemist shakes his head without looking up from his work.