“Drunk?” he repeats, his basso scraping bottom. “Hell, yes. Drunk as a emir.”
At that moment an exceptionally virulent gust rattles the cane-and-earthen floor above them, and a quantity of sand explodes across their faces like buckshot.
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” bellows Johnson. “Rage! Blow!”
An idea had been forming in the explorer’s head — something to do with the fact that this was the first time in nearly six months that he’s been left unguarded. But the sudden gust and Johnson’s exclamation have driven it right out of his head. Besides, someone has just passed him the calabash.
♦ YOU CAN’T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN ♦
When they first spotted him they thought he’d been dead for days. His hands and chin were fast-frozen to a block of ice and the fluid in his eyes had turned to slush. He was bobbing there like a piece of driftwood, the black waters of the Thames lapping round his shoulders and ears.
“Wa’ is it, Liam?”
“Doan’t know, Shem: looks like a dead mon, and drownded.”
Shem Leggotty and Liam McClure were fishermen. Six days a week they set their gill nets for salmon and sturgeon coming upriver with the tide. The fish would blunder into these nets, catch their gills in the three-inch mesh, thrash about and drown. Sometimes they would thrash about and escape. It was all in the cards. This night, as the men tugged at the net, it felt somehow different, peculiar. It wasn’t the weight — a good sturgeon could go ten feet long and five hundred pounds — it was just the feel of the thing. A bitter wind stabbed at the back of their throats. Their hands were raw. Was it an ice floe? A log? When Shem lit a lantern to investigate, there he was, riding the swell like a man three days dead.
“So it’s a drownded mon, then. And froze.”
“That it is.”
“Well then. Let’s cut the poor beggar loose and be on with it. He’s no consarn of ours.”
They tugged at the net. As the drowned man came into contact with the bow of the boat, his head knocked against the planks with a crack, wood on wood. “Ik,” he said.
“Wa’ was that, Liam?”
“I didna say nothin’, Shem.”
The drowned man bobbed at their feet as they worked to disentangle him. His mouth was frozen open and the tongue welded to his teeth. “Ik,” he said.
“Sweet Jaysus, the mon’s aloive! Here, help me get him into the boat, Shem.” Liam’s breath hung in the air in clumps. He was a monument of sinew and brawn, case-hardened by years of hauling nets and brawling on the docks. He bent his back to the drowned man and heaved him up into the skiff, ice floe and all. The drowned man was naked from the waist down and wrapped in a sodden cape.
“Get some blankets round him, Shem. And hand me the usquebaugh.”
“The usquebaugh? That’s as like to kill him off as bring him round.”
It was a home brew, potent as fire. Liam poured it down the man’s throat while Shem pried his chin and fingers from the block of ice. The effect was almost instantaneous — the dead man lifted his head, vomited and fell unconscious. “Ik-ik,” he said.
♦ CHICHIKOV’S CHOICE ♦
Fishstink. For the past three months it’s been fishstink, day and night. The oily stink of eels taken from the green water among the pilings, the salt-stench of skate and mackerel, the cold mud reek of pouters and perch and carp. He’s snuffed them all — tench and bream and saury pike, bearded ling, gouty blowfish, alewives, hake and haddock — plucked out their entrails, whacked off their heads, set the air afire with their flashing translucent scales. It’s a grim, stinking, thankless job.
But safe. And safety is everything. That and invisibility. He’d made a lot of enemies that fateful night — Smirke, who was fined and sentenced to three hours in the pillory; Mendoza, Brummell and the others, whose names appeared in the paper the following afternoon; Nan and Sal, who wound up in Bridewell until they were bailed out by the Forlorn Female Fund of Mercy; and Lord Twit, who was publicly upbraided for consenting to the moral corruption of his black nigger servant. A lot of enemies — but none of them suspected he’d risen from the dead. And Ned Rise was not about to disabuse them.
So here he is, in the Leggotty Brothers’ fish shop, Southwark, breathing fishstink, hacking away at cold bloodless flesh in a welter of dumb-staring eyes. They pulled him from the river, Shem and McClure, three-quarters dead, and then nursed him for a week till he came round. He was penniless, having jettisoned pants, boots and bulge in a frantic effort to stay afloat. They offered him a job and a place to sleep. Fish chowder and black bread twice a day. Liam loaned him a pair of trousers. “All right,” said Ned.
It’s not that he’s ungrateful — he just isn’t cut out to be a fisherman. The nets slip through his hands, the oarlocks have a mind of their own, he’s afraid of the water, boats, oars, docks, the smell of fish turns his stomach. He can hardly swim. What’s more, he’s fed up with their dull talk and duller lives (“Aye,” says Liam, sucking at his pipe like a sage, “a storm’ll either take ‘em or bring ‘em”), and he longs for the gaming tables, the coffeehouses, the Pig & Pox and the Vole’s Head. Southwark is nothing but a festering slum, the hind end of the earth. How can you expect to rise in the world if you’re stuck in a fish shop in Southwark? He hacks at the heads and fins. He grows despondent.
Then one afternoon, as he’s stripping the scutes and hide from a shortnose sturgeon, an idea hits him. A modest idea, but one that combines invisibility and profit both. He looks round for someone to break the news to. Shem and Liam are out back in the alley, passing a jug and spitting in the dirt.
“You know wha’ they got over there in Africa, Liam?”
“Hamadryads?”
“Nope. They got river perch six hunnert pund.”
“Go on.”
“It’s true. Ned read it to me out of the Evenin’ Post.”‘
“Six hunnert pund?”
“In the River Nigel. There’s this young Scotsman disappeared up there tryin’ to bring one back.”
“Go on.”
Ned wipes the blood and fishslime from his hands and steps through the doorway. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.
Liam salutes him with the jug. “Well then lad, have yerself a snootful o’ mother’s finest and tell the old graybeards all about it.”
Ned takes a slug, pounds his breastbone and asks them if they’ve ever heard of caviar.
“That’s Latin, isn’t it?” says Liam.
“What I’m talking about is fish roe — sturgeon’s eggs. Here we are throwing away fistfuls of the stuff, when all the nobs over in the West End are paying the Russians three pounds a jar for it.”
“Three pund a jar? For offal?”
“It’s na offal, Liam — the Swedes eat it.”
“Bah, the iggorant squareheads. They gobble up pickled heering too, doan’t they?”
“Leave it to me,” says Ned. “I’ll strain it and salt it myself, undercut the Empress by half and peddle it door-to-door from Tottenham Court to Mayfair. You watch: we’ll be rich inside of a month.”
♦ ♦ ♦
A month later, Ned Rise strolls across Westminster Bridge in false nose and spectacles, white periwig, silk hose and brocaded waistcoat, a rich man. Or comparatively so. Chichikov’s Choice (named after a whaling companion of Shem’s brother Japheth) is selling like lemonade at a track meet. Gentlemen’s clubs, coffeehouses, taverns, inns and even private residences are buying up Ned’s caviar as fast as he can bottle it. “The finest Russian caviar,” he tells them, his voice lingering over the double s and the final rumbling r, “—at half the price.” It gets them every time. From parlormaids to head cooks to the white-capped chefs at Brooke’s or White’s. He pitches, they buy. Within the month, half the haut monde is spreading its crackers with Chichikov’s Choice.