“Buffo,” he said. “You know it’s me, not some clerk from the patents office. It’s Ashlyme. I’ve seen all this a hundred times before.”
“Pardon?” Buffo stared at him, his expression changing slowly. “I suppose you have,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose you have.” He sighed. “I expect I knew all along really. I’m sorry, old chap.”
Ashlyme explained how he had become entangled with the Grand Cairo.
“Now this dwarf wants to come with us to the Rue Serpolet,” he told Buffo. “He won’t take no for an answer. What are we going to do?”
Buffo looked bleakly round the observatory.
“You wake from one nightmare into the next,” he said in a quiet voice. He inspected the palm of his hand as if it was his whole life. “I’m sorry, this fish is awful. Leave it if you like.” Suddenly he laughed and pushed his plate on the floor with a clatter. “We must lay new plans then!” he exclaimed. He touched Ashlyme’s arm. “Come on, Ashlyme, it cheers me up just to see you!”
He had an idea already, he continued. “Let him push the handcart if he is so keen to come! We need someone to do that, after all; and it’s our plan, not his.”
Ashlyme wiped the condensation off a pane of glass and looked out. The Artists’ Quarter was barely three hundred yards away across the Pleasure Canal and Allman’s Heath. He stared at the dark loop of water, the jumble of roofs to the west, the leaning gravestones that filled the heath between. (Had Audsley King set her easel up among them to paint “On the bridge at New Man’s Staithe,” anemones and sol d’or burning at her feet? Now the graveyard was full of briars and plaster dust blown in from the senseless renovations on Endingall Street and de Monfreid Square.) The canal was quite shallow. You could see the bottom on a sunny day. They had intended to wade it after the rescue, and bring Audsley King directly to Alves. His long experience of conspiracies had enabled the dwarf to guess this immediately.
“I don’t think he would be content with that, Buffo. Even if we could persuade him, he is untrustworthy. He is subject to moods, fits of enthusiasm, distempers, sudden hatreds. He is in love with plots. Even his masters, the Barley brothers, he believes, are plotting against him.”
“Never mind,” said Buffo. “We’ll think of something.”
He went out for a minute and came back with what looked like a bundle of rags, wrapped around something more solid.
“Don’t look for a moment,” he said.
Ashlyme was forced to smile. He closed his eyes; ran his tongue round the inside of his mouth to dislodge a piece of pilchard. When he opened his eyes again he saw Buffo standing there wearing a kind of varnished rubber mask. It covered his head completely, and resembled the stripped and polished skull of a horse, two pomegranates set in the empty sockets to simulate eyes. It was ludicrous. Buffo had taken off his clothes and wound strips of green swaddling round his body. His arms were like sticks, his rib cage huge. Two great branched feathery horns came up out of the forehead of the mask. He did not look human.
“They’re rather well done, aren’t they?” he said, his voice muffled by the rubber which was forced down over his nose. “Don’t you want to look at yours?” He had another mask in his outstretched hand.
Ashlyme backed away. “No,” he said. “I don’t want to see it. Why must we dress like that?”
“I thought the old man had done rather well. We will look just like beggars. No one will recognise us!” He pounced on Ashlyme and took him by the shoulders. He whirled him round and round in a clumsy dance. “What an idea!” he crowed. “What a success!”
Ashlyme was helpless. The skull of the horse was thrust into his face. It was hard to believe that Buffo’s familiar features were somewhere beneath it. He was as frightened by the strength of the astronomer’s thin arms as he was by the sound of breath sobbing in and out of the mask. Then he began to laugh despite himself.
“Well done, Buffo!”
Buffo, encouraged, sang a lively but mawkish popular song. They finished the bottle of wine and even the pilchards. The sun set. Crowing and singing, they pranced about the observatory, bumping into things and falling down, until they were exhausted.
Later, with the proper fall of night, the observatory became cold and uninhabitable; but the two men sat on, talking at first, then contemplating their plan in a companionable silence. They discussed the future. Buffo would move out of Alves and into the High City, where he believed his work would be better appreciated; Ashlyme would share his studio with Audsley King and they would do great work together. The flimsy structure of the greenhouse creaked around them as the wind rose. Damp air blew through the cracked panes, giving Ashlyme the impression of motion, of racing travel through some ramshackle but benign dimension. Where would they end up? He smiled over at Buffo. The astronomer’s head had sunk on to his chest; he had fallen asleep with his mouth open and begun to snore. Turned down, the lamps emitted a queer crepuscular light. Ashlyme got his cloak and folded it about him. It was too late to go home. Besides, he felt somehow responsible for the astronomer, who looked even more honest asleep than he did awake. He wandered about for a while, squinting into the eyepieces of the telescopes. Then he sat down and dozed. Once or twice he woke up suddenly, thinking about the pile of clothes and masks on the floor.
For a week he felt debauched and bilious, uninclined to commit himself. Was the dwarf still having him watched? Was Emmet Buffo a broken reed? The plague, he wrote in his diary, permeates all our decisions, like a fog. He put the rescue attempt off again and again, and for the most part stayed in his studio, watching morosely as the unseasonable rain swept across the Low City and lashed the fronts of the houses at Mynned. This summer is a travesty, he wrote, as if the trivial might allow him to forget his situation. And, on finding water among his belongings in the attic, I am appalled, but it is my own fault. I have not repaired the roof. Neither had he repaired his opinion of the High City art cliques. Is anything worthwhile being done? In short, no: up here it is all dinner arrangements and affaires. Rack has had the set designs for The Dreaming Boys for two months now, yet there have been no auditions, no readings. He wishes (he says) “to consult the artist”; but he never goes to the Low City.
He could not work on the portrait of Audsley King. Instead he began framing the pictures she had given him. He discovered with delight the early landscape “A fire this Wednesday at Lowth,” and what appeared to be an incomplete gouache of the notorious “Self-portrait half clothed,” in which the artist is seen peering slyly into a mirror, her long hands touching her own private parts. He hung the paintings in different places to find the best light and stood in front of them for long periods, thrilled by the stacked planes of the landscapes, the disquieting eros of her inner world.
At last an oblique sunshine broke through the clouds above the city and filled it with a shifting, fitful brightness. There was a rush to the banks of the Pleasure Canal. The High City emptied itself onto Lime Walk and the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves, and there, in audacious proximity to the plague zone, took the sun.
Little iron tables were set up and the women drank tea out of porcelain “lucid as a baby’s ear”; while those poets who had escaped exile in the Californium and the Luitpold Cafe recited in musical voices. Everyone had a theory about the plague. Everyone had it from a reliable source. Most agreed it would never reach the High City. Imagine the scene! The women had on their muslin dresses. The men wore swords and meal-coloured cloaks copied carefully from those fashionable among the Low City mohocks two or three centuries before. A wet silvery light fell delicately on the white bridges, limning the afternoon curve of the canal and perfectly disguising its shabbiness. Everyone enjoyed themselves thoroughly; while down below, among the ragwort on the towpath, writhed the thousand-and-one black and yellow caterpillars of the cinnabar moth, some fat and industrious, rearing up their blunt, ugly heads, others thin and scruffy and torpid. The Barley brothers ate them and were sick.