A dreamy, excited expression had settled on the dwarf’s face. He got up and mimicked the weariness of the conspirators, taking the part of each in turn, then the curious lurching gait of the sick woman. He let his eyelids fall half-closed and said in a kind of shrieking falsetto, “I can go no further.” He collapsed, and caught himself before he fell to the ground. He pulled forth an imaginary knife and looked warily about. This pantomime took him all round the room and up to a huge wardrobe of black pear wood, its mouldings disfigured where he had struck matches on them. As he reached this he turned towards Ashlyme the sexless, ageless glance of the obsessed, full of incomprehensible irony; and at the word fight, he opened it with a quick, powerful tug.
It was full of weapons of all kinds: clubs, truncheons, and loaded wooden coshes; misericordes and stilettos, with and without sheaths; knuckle-dusters studded and spiked, trick knives whose blades shot out on springs, and strangling cords made of silk or cheese wire, all hanging in rows from pegs. Most of this stuff seemed rusty and ill-kept, although at one time it had been in almost daily use. In a wooden rack were three bottles made of deep blue glass, which had once contained acids. Some rotten-smelling objects in the bottom of the cupboard turned out to be potatoes and cakes of scented soap into which had been embedded bits of broken glass; among them were other homemade devices of less obvious purpose. The dwarf took them out one by one and laid them on the floor, knives in one place, garrotes in another. He beckoned Ashlyme closer.
“Come on,” he said. “Have anything you want. We must go prepared.”
Ashlyme stared at him dry-mouthed. The dwarf made encouraging sounds. Eventually Ashlyme picked up the smallest knife he could find. It had a curious flaw halfway up the blade. The dwarf started a little when he saw Ashlyme had picked that particular one; but he soon recovered himself and told several stories about it. “I got that knife on Fenlen Island in the North,” he said. “There was blood on that knife from the moment I had it.” But this was said with such unconvincing bravado that Ashlyme was sure he had simply stolen it from the Barley brothers years ago, and was glad to get rid of it now in case they found out.
Ashlyme was to grow used to this weapon, sharpening his pencils with it, and sometimes fingering the flaw in its blade, which was quite unlike rust and had a satisfying texture to the ball of the thumb: but that night he took it home in horror, wondering what would become of him.
Emmet Buffo lived at the top of an old house at Alves, halfway up the famous hill (the summit of which had interfered with many of his most radical and innovatory observations). Alves was a curious place. It was a windy salient or polyp of the High City flung out into the Low, partaking of the character of both. While its streets were wider than those of the Artists’ Quarter, they were no less shabby. Strange old towers rose from a wooded slope clasped in a curved arm of the derelict Pleasure Canal. About their feet clustered the peeling villas of a vanished middle class, all plaster mouldings, split steps, tottering porticos, and drains smelling of cats. Ashlyme trudged up the hill. A bell clanged high up in a house; a face moved at a window. The wind whirled dust and dead leaves round him.
While he waited for the astronomer to open his door, he thought of Audsley King’s most popular watercolour, “On the bridge at New Man’s Staithe.”
In this view of Alves a honey-coloured light seems to rise from the glassy waters of the abandoned canal and enfold the hill behind, giving its eccentric architecture a mysterious familiarity, like buildings seen in a dream. The towers, their pastel colours thickened romantically, glow like stained glass.
Ashlyme smiled. A print of this picture hung in every salon in the High City. The question most frequently asked about it was: “This unmoving figure at the parapet of the bridge, is it male or female?” Audsley King would answer: “I did not intend you to know.” She had painted it during a love affair sixteen years before. She now disowned its dreamy lights and sentimentality. “It is untruthful,” she complained. “Yet they love it so!”
Emmet Buffo put his head round the door and blinked.
“Come in, come in!” he said.
He took Ashlyme’s hand as if he had never seen him before, and, under the impression that he had been sent from some committee to explore the funding of a new telescope, led him up the stairs. He had, he explained, almost given up hope of ever getting money for his experiments. He did not blame the High City for this. “Every six months I go to the patents office and sit for an hour, perhaps two, on the benches with all the others. I understand the needs of the bureaucracy. I understand its inertia. What can I do but maintain a philosophical attitude?”
Up the stairs went Ashlyme behind him, listening to this monologue float down, unable to find any opportunity to speak and in any case hardly knowing what to say. There were pockets of dust in the corners of the landings.
“Still,” said Buffo. “They’ve sent you. That’s something!”
He laughed.
He lived in a kind of penthouse, much of which he had built himself. It was cold there even in summer. In one room he cooked his food and slept; it was tidy, but a stale smell hung in the air about the low iron bed and the homemade washstand. He ground his lenses in another smaller room. Little pieces of coloured glass like the petals of anemones littered a table, some set in complex frames made of whitish metal. The astronomical charts had peeled that morning from the wall and lay in folds at its foot. (Mouldy patterns in the plaster suggested that another universe had been hidden behind them.) “It’s the damp,” apologised Buffo. He showed Ashlyme around like a tourist in the Margarethestrasse. “This is my ‘exterior brain,’ ” he said. “I call it that. I can refer to it at any time. It’s more than just a library.” He indicated an ordinary set of shelves on which were arranged reference books and instruments, models of telescopes and bits of paper with technical drawings on them.
The adjoining room, where he spent most of his time, was a flimsy structure like a greenhouse, with a complicated system of ratchets and rods that enabled him to lift its roof and poke out his telescopes. It was composed of odd panes of glass, some coloured, some milky; they were cracked, and of different sizes.
“This is the observatory itself. From here I can see twenty miles in any direction.”
Ashlyme looked out. A quarter of the sky was obscured by the bulk of Alves, with the cracked, threatening copper dome of the old palace askew on it like a crown. From the other side he could look down across the Pleasure Canal at the famous graves on Allman’s Heath. “It was built to my own design, ten years ago,” said Buffo. It was full of contraptions. As Ashlyme moved from one to the other, pretending not to have seen them before, Buffo sat on a stool. But he couldn’t sit still. He hopped to his feet to explain, “These are the plans for the new device,” and sat down again. He was like an exhibit himself in the odd light.
One of the contraptions was a maze of copper tubing into which Buffo had let two or three eyepieces, apparently at random. Ashlyme bent to look through one of them. All he saw was a sad reticulated greyness, and, suspended indistinctly against it in the distance, something like a chrysalis or cocoon, spinning at the end of its thread. Buffo smiled shyly. “Success is slow to come with that one,” he admitted. “You’ll agree it has vast potential, though?” He went on to explain his experimental method, but soon saw that Ashlyme didn’t understand. He left the observatory for a moment and came back with a tray. “Would you like some wine? Some of these pilchards?” Thankfully, Ashlyme sat down and took some. They ate in silence. When he had finished, Ashlyme rubbed his hand over his face.