Pillars of Creation

I know thee. I know thy name.

I know the name of him that guardeth thee.

The Book of the Dead, the spells of the gates of the House of Osiris

London, September 1893 The house of the late Sir Reginald Mortlock in Great Ormond Street looked to the north, and this was the one thing Auberley Brooks could set down to its credit. The northern light is even and tells no lies: it does not gild the look of a thing as the western sun gilds it toward evening, neither forgives a chip nor flatters an age — which is the very quality an honest inventory requires, that a thing should stand before you as it is, and not as it would wish to seem. By the same rule, and in the same light, Brooks examined people; and people, as a rule, came off the worse for it beside potsherds. It was near eleven in the morning when Brooks once again found herself standing upon the topmost step of the library ladder, labouring to wedge into its place a particularly refractory catalogue of antiquities, the Description de l'Égypte. The work of sorting and bringing up to date the catalogue-registers was precisely as suicidally dull as it sounded, and had gone forward since the earliest hour to the crescendo of the brass rail along which the rusted, oil-starved little wheels of the ladder dragged themselves with a grinding screech. The accompaniment was furnished by the creak of the loosened wooden hand-rail and of her own knees, which in the fifty-second year of Brooks's life were of an ill temper and held opinions of their own as to how their owner ought to be employing herself. In defiance of which, Auberley had all the morning flitted like a bumble-bee among the wooden shelves, amending the inventory and now and again dispatching another weighty tome to its appointed place, attending each ascent of the rungs with tap-room expressions of a peculiar sort, such as no respectable British lady could boast of knowing. Brooks, for that matter, had always held respectability a much over-valued quality, duller even than the filling-out of catalogues and inventories of archaeological finds. Auberley found dull a great deal of what everyone else held to be settled and self-evident, and discovered a charm in things that to the common run of folk seemed wholly insufferable. For this reason she had, in attaining the years tactfully termed advanced, never troubled to furnish herself with a family, recoiling — and with justice — from the prospect of wiping the dribble first from her own children, then from her grandchildren, and at the last from a husband sunk into his dotage. It might be said that Brooks for the most part neither understood nor accepted the company thrust upon her; and that this company, in its turn, paid her in kind, and endured Auberley's own with difficulty. Such convictions, to be sure, might have found their justification in a fervent faith; but faith Brooks had likewise failed to find, for all that she had rummaged thoroughly within herself while yet a girl. Nor was the matter helped by the precise manner of her first acquaintance with the spiritual side of life: at seven years of age, led by a child's curiosity, she made off with a copy of her father's Bible, and not only read it to the fraying of its lines but permitted herself to enter in the margins a number of observations at those passages where the plot, and the conduct of the principal characters, struck her as particularly preposterous. Her father — a meek and ungrudging man, lately widowed besides and constrained to bring up five children single-handed, Brooks among them — confronted that day with so flagrant a manifestation of Gnosticism, found himself obliged for the first and last time in his life to chastise her with the rod — but was so appalled at the deed by the second stroke that he broke off the execution and never again had recourse to such methods. The impression left by the teaching of Christ, however, had been spoilt past recovery. "That's done with," said Brooks, drawing a line beneath both her own meditations and the list of funerary furniture in the inventory, as she came down heavily from her perch onto the oak parquet, which creaked in indignation. "Now for the crates, seventeen through forty-three." Taking hold of one of them — they stood in multitudes upon the lower shelves of the cases, or simply as they were, upon the floor — Auberley threw back the wooden lid and fished up into the light a canopic jar powdered with sawdust, a label slovenly tied to it. "Duamutef," she announced aloud to the empty room. "The stomach." The artefact thus named was forthwith entered in the book — in ink, in a small, upright, unpretending hand — and then set back in its lawful place. Brooks smiled, well content, tasting that incomparable satisfaction of seeing a thing that a moment before had been nameless acquire a line; and the line, a number; and the number, a place; and the object which all of this betokened, a purpose and a meaning to its existence. The feeling was an agreeable one, and very nearly worth all the attendant bother. "Oh, but this is no work for a woman, my dear!" The voice came from behind Brooks — high, cloying, and so out of place in a house where for a second week together none but the dead, and now and then she herself, had been her interlocutors — that she shuddered, a thing she could not remember having done in a long while. Brooks at that very instant was lifting down from a lower shelf a crate of pottery, and in her surprise all but let it slip from her hands — caught it just short of the floor, whereupon a jug of the Late Period chinked plaintively within it (cat. no. 4765, rim chipped — and now, it must be supposed, chipped a trifle more than before). "Work belongs always to whoever takes it up," she said evenly, waiting for her heart to return to its catalogued place. "I had not thought you were cleaning the house to-day, Mrs Averin." Mrs Averin, who did the cleaning in Sir Reginald Mortlock's house, was a large woman, flabby and red all over. Her arms, schooled to the elbow in lye and washtub, looked weather-roughened and inflamed. Her broad face, from which a pair of small, keen little eyes regarded Auberley, set as deep as two currants, was distinguished by an abundant ruddiness that ran over from the cheeks straight onto the neck. Her cap she wore that had once been white, her apron that had once been clean, and her countenance was that of a general pursuing on his war-horse the retreating army of the foe. The floors of the living quarters she came to wash once a week, ever since the rest of the servants had been paid off, and washed them most vilely; but gossip she carried about with a diligence and a care she had never in her life brought to a cloth. To-day, however, was not her day, and the pail in her hand hung idle — a pretext, a letter of credence with which it is no shame to present oneself at another's house. "I thought I'd look in on you, being close by. For I do the washing besides for a most respectable gentleman a street or two off. He removed a few weeks since into a lodging-house in Lamb's Conduit Street," Mrs Averin imparted, without waiting to be asked, "and he, I may tell you, is not at all such a scoundrel as you hold all men to be." To all appearances another fit of match-making was in the offing. Auberley had been made to weather the like before, at the hands of her friends, her acquaintances, and at times of mere chance interlocutors; but with the passing of the years the ardour of these well-wishers had cooled. And not without cause. In sober truth, no tongue could ever have brought itself to call her beautiful with that substantial beauty which lays the foremost specimens of the male kind at a woman's feet, in the forlorn hope that she will grant one of them a crumb of her notice, or at the least let a scented handkerchief fall carelessly at his side. This was rather convenient. It was Brooks's firm conviction that a woman can get nowhere at all while men barely known to her — nay, even well known — are forever flinging themselves beneath her feet. Good handkerchiefs, moreover, were a thing to grudge when all was said: by her reckoning, their laundering and scent alone would run up a monthly sum that no honest budget could be made to hold — to say nothing of the certainty that each of the favoured suitors would not scruple to filch a handkerchief or two for his own dubious purposes, and so double her outlay. As for that other beauty, more hidden and exalted — that inner radiance so prized by writers, painters, and madmen of every other stripe — with this, so far as she could judge, Brooks was no more heavily burdened. Verse, and the penny trash adored by ladies of her years and station, woke in her only tedium and a yawn; while the ideal of fragility and exaltation sung therein, which her contemporaries strained to live up to, gave her heartburn and an insistent itch to fetch the latest inspired young miss a clout over the head with her own book. "I do not hold all men scoundrels." Brooks set the crate down upon the floor and straightened, a hand to the small of her back. "Only those you would make a match of for me. Which tells a deal more of your taste than of the male kind. Well — what of your gentleman?" "Oh, he is tactful, charming, modest! Never raises his voice; and as for bashful — you cannot conceive it." "It sounds perfectly delightful." Brooks wiped her hands upon a handkerchief and reached for the catalogue-book, giving to understand that her attention, unlike her hands, was occupied. "Oh yes! And I, you know, have great designs upon him — and have dropped him more than one hint. And lately — what do you suppose?" "Happily, no." Auberley suppressed a heavy sigh. "But you will, beyond doubt, enlighten me." "Yesterday I came upon a parcel in his post, from a linen-draper's in the Burlington Arcade!" Mrs Averin dropped her voice to the reverent. "You should have seen how he coloured! I, of course, made as though I had not made out that it was under-linen. And no cheap stuff, neither! He'll be presenting it as a gift any day now, mark my words!" "Inspiriting news." Brooks turned a page. "Is that all?" "Well, it's a sight merrier than sorting dusty old rubbish the day long!" "I'll not dispute it." She raised her eyes at last. "Only, when you make ready to go, be so good as to put back what you have stolen. Dusty old rubbish ought not to be scattered to the right hand and to the left." An uneasy silence settled upon the room. Even the smell of soap that Mrs Averin gave off on every side seemed to take confusion, ceasing for a moment to wander among the shelves. "And what might you mean by that?" the other found at last, assuming a look offended to the very depths of her soul, and of the under-linen not yet presented her. "You know very well." Brooks spoke without a shade of heat, in the same tone in which she had been dictating canopic jars to herself. "I can scarce believe, Mrs Averin, that you would in your right mind spend a morning seeking me out to repeat to me the freshest London gossip. I take it you did not reckon to find anyone here at all; and, having run up against me, you resolved to try your luck and put me out of temper — in the hope that I should prefer a fall from the ladder to your company. And, in view of your late successes in the field of the heart, I make bold to suppose that you have set about the assembling of a trousseau, and chose to begin with what you are at this moment hiding behind your back. Is it not so?" Mrs Averin, turning crimson, drew her hand from behind her back and set down with a thump upon the shelf a small bronze figure of Osiris (cat. no. 188). "The dead have no more need of any of it, Auberley!" "I am entirely of your mind. Though neither have you — the more so should there be found, say, a no less solitary neighbour to your admirer, lodging in the rooms across the way, to whom your gentleman makes a point of never bowing when they meet, notwithstanding that he removed into his own apartments but very lately." "Sir Guilford?…" broke from Mrs Averin before she could bite back her tongue. "But however do you—" "A lucky guess." Brooks waited out exactly as long as was wanted. "And here is another: do not look for the linen as a gift. It has been given already — and not to you." The door slammed behind the charwoman with a force that rendered all further explanation superfluous; somewhere in the bowels of the house a pail answered, aggrieved. Brooks took up the Osiris, blew from it the dust that strange hands had disturbed, and returned it to its appointed place, exactly. Over and above her weariness and a faint satisfaction, she felt also a belated prick of conscience toward Mrs Averin's failed betrothed. It remained to be hoped that the cruel disappointment of the credulous fool would not carry her and her long tongue to Bow Street, whence the bashful gentleman stood every chance of travelling by the straight road to the Old Bailey, and thence behind bars and to penal servitude.

***

The remainder of the day went forward in relative peace. The vexed charwoman clattered her mops a time or two more upon the ground floor, and later the front door, after which the house was wrapped in a viscid silence such as had not been in it these many years. Sad to say, it was owing to this alone that the catalogue-books seven through nine were brought to completion, stitched up, and made ready for delivery to Sir Reginald's executors. "At least it does someone good, this curse of the Pharaohs!" Brooks concluded grimly, addressing the silent figure of Osiris, and with a sigh took up the next volume and another set of dusty crates. "Could there really be found no better candidates for the wrath of God than that old rogue Reggie?" The Osiris upon the shelf held its peace, of course — whether it did not know, or did not think it needful to explain itself. To Brooks herself the idiotic capers of the late sovereign of Egypt, to which rumour bound the sudden decease of poor Mortlock, had thus far brought nothing but bother, and had at the least already deprived her of her place, and were on the very point of relieving her of all care for the roof above her head and the contents of her dinner-plate. For it is to no purpose to take thought for what one has not, or is on the point of having no longer. A title, for that matter, she had none either. Sir Reginald, a man who loved grand gestures and loud words in precisely the measure in which they cost him nothing, would in talk with his guests style her now "my Egyptologist," now "my keeper," according to whom he wished to impress with his latest invented dignity; while in the note of hand by which her wages came to her she figured as "assistant for the sorting of the collection" — a formula that left it an open question whether she was sorting the collection or were herself a thing to be sorted. Were the house a museum, Brooks would have been in it, belike, the lesser archivist — the least there is, the one to whom they will not give so much as a key to the front door, yet to whom they entrust all the dirty work, of which there was no want. A museum, however, the house was not, nor would become one: by Christmas, if not sooner, the inventory would be finished, the collection would go under the hammer or to the heirs — as the learned gentlemen of the law should determine — and the lesser archivist, no longer wanted by things or by people, would set off to seek herself another dead gentleman who had somewhat to be sorted. Of dead gentlemen with collections there are enough in London; the trouble was that of living ones, ready to pay a woman for work that a man would do — though worse, and for more money — there had been few even in Sir Reginald's lifetime, and now… The story of how she had come down to this page of her biography was, like the whole of her life, a sad one, but happily rather short, and Brooks permitted herself to tell it over to herself only in such grey hours as these, when the hands are busy and the head is free, and therefore given to useless self-torment. Her father had been a country parson in Norfolk, a man learned, poor, and unlucky in sons: the Lord had sent him five daughters entire and not a single heir to whom his Latin, his Greek, and three shelves of weighty tomes might be of use — among which, by an oversight of Providence, there had slipped in a grammar of the newest, Champollionian sort. For want of a son, the Latin, the Greek, and the grammar were parcelled out among his daughters by seniority; and to Auberley's portion — the middle one, and the plainest of feature, and therefore the most sedentary — there fell the hieroglyphs: a subject not to be reckoned to a respectable woman's credit, and for that reason wholly without prospect. By forty she knew the dead speech of the Pharaohs better than a good half of the professors who printed learned papers upon it, and got her bread by copying and transcribing inscriptions for those very men. Sir Reginald had picked her up in the course of one such piece of work: he had need of a person who read the ancient Egyptian, asked no questions as to the provenance of the goods, and would consent to a quantity of work, and a wage, that it would have been shameful to offer a man. Brooks answered to all three conditions, and as to her own worth she had not deceived herself a single day. "You do the work of two of my men single-handed, Miss Brooks," he had said to her once, supposing himself to flatter. "Of four, sir," she corrected. "Two is merely the number you pay for." The course of her thoughts was broken by an unlooked-for knock at the door. The knocking was timid and quick — not with the knocker but with the knuckles — and Brooks, with all possible haste, which is to say with none whatever, went down to the ground floor and opened the door, to discover upon the threshold a boy of some twelve years with a canvas bag and that characteristic look of brazen innocence upon his face by which one may unerringly know politicians, pickpockets, and street-sellers of newspapers. "The Illustrated, mum?" The lad was already unfolding the sheet without waiting for an answer. "It's all here about your one, about Sir Mortlock. 'The Pharaoh's Curse Strikes Again.' With a picture." The picture was a fine one. In it a person in a fez — the artist evidently held that in Egypt the fez is obligatory for all, the dead and the camels included — was raising a crooked knife above a sleeping gentleman, while from a corner a mummy looked benignly on, its eyes touched up, for the greater horror, so that they squinted markedly. Beneath the picture it was reported that, following Sir Reginald himself, deceased in July of a sudden and unaccountable inward wasting, there had in August departed this life Dr Sparrow likewise, the physician of the ill-starred expedition, and that the number of victims of the "sepulchral doom" was thereby risen to two, while persons of understanding looked for a third also, since, as everyone knows, Egyptian curses go by threes. "Dr Sparrow," said Brooks, "died of the typhoid fever, which he took, to all appearance, while yet in Egypt out of bad water, and carried home to England as others carry carpets. The typhoid, my boy, has no need of a curse to kill a man; a foul well will serve well enough. And as for the count — the water of the Thames below the bridge kills its hundred a year, and does not trouble to reckon them by threes; yet no one writes of a 'curse of the river,' nor draws mummies to go with it. Do you know why?" The boy did not. "Because for a 'curse of the river' they pay no penny, and for the Pharaoh's they do. There is your doom for you: it dwells not in the tomb but in the till." By the end of this monologue the boy was looking at her with an admiring horror, yet did not put the paper away, still counting upon his bit of profit. Brooks sighed, fished a penny from her apron pocket, and took the sheet — not from superstition nor from curiosity, but from that same feeling which bids a good steward know precisely what lie his competitors are putting about concerning him. Folly aimed against you ceases to be mere folly and becomes a circumstance; and circumstances Brooks preferred to keep numbered and at hand, like canopic jars. "Thank ye, mum," said the boy, and, already running down the steps, added with that serene cruelty proper to children: "Is it true you're all alone here with the lot of 'em? I wouldn't, not for nothing. Of a night it must be—" "Of a night," said Brooks after him, "it is quiet here. More and more so, of late." And she shut the door.

***

The newspaper she laid aside upon a corner of the desk, weighting it down with a bronze cat of Bubastis (cat. no. 211, Late Period, nose lost — in Brooks's conviction in antiquity, and not by the exertions of Sir Reginald, though one could not vouch for it), and returned to her work; but the order of her thoughts was already thrown out, and what had thrown it, to tell the truth, was not the picture with the squint-eyed mummy but the boy's foolish question. All alone… A simple childish folly found in her a far stronger echo than she herself was prepared to own. And what troubled her far more than the solitude was her own unsettled state. Brooks was not vain — that sin had been accounted by her father the first among the worst, and ruthlessly rooted out while she was still a child — yet it had always seemed to Auberley a needful thing to leave some trace in life, inasmuch as all the possible prospects beyond the grave remained for her wrapped in a fog of doubt. And the chances of success grew, with the passing years, ever the fewer. In the house she was indeed alone — if one did not count the things, and Brooks did count them, in the most literal sense of the word. The servants had been let go back in August: the executors saw no reason to heat and feed a house in which there lived but an inventory, and Brooks fully approved of this, for surplus persons in a repository promised nothing but shortages, gossip, and fuss. Once a week, when she was not attempting to steal anything, Mrs Averin came to wash the floors; the milkman left his can upon the porch; all the rest — the silence, the dust, the even northern light, and the three thousand dead laid out in their boxes — Brooks shared in this house with none but herself, and found such society quite tolerable, and on some days even to be preferred. By the sixth hour, when the first dusk had begun to gather over the city, she, after the established order, took up an oil lamp and went up to the late man's study — the one room where a fire was still kept, and where Brooks housed the finished catalogue-books and her own person — and spread out upon the window-sill the homely dinner she brought from home, which consisted of bread and cold mutton. This idyll lasted precisely until the second mouthful. From below, out of the bowels of the house where the cellar store-room lay, there came a crash — not the insinuating creak of settling to which Brooks had long grown used, but a full-bodied, deliberate one, giving notice of the arrival of uninvited guests. Brooks, to her own belated surprise, was up from the window-sill before she had managed to decide what she meant to undertake, and, still without letting the mutton go from her hand, made haste downward with all the rapidity at her command, which most nearly resembled the descent of a laden barge down a shelving bank. The store-room had formerly been, it must be, a coal-cellar, and under Sir Reginald had become the darkest and most frequented corner of the whole collection, because into it was carried that for which its owner truly cared. In the upper rooms stood for the most part things with a pedigree — a dubious one, granted; granted that half the "Thebes" in Brooks's books in fact meant a Cairo bazaar, and the other half could not tell so much as that little about itself — yet which at least did not lie so barefacedly about the lawfulness of their own origin. Here below, on the other hand, lay what Sir Reginald had carried out of Egypt past all partage, past the Antiquities Service, past conscience and the law, in crates marked "mineral specimens" and "personal effects" — lay brazenly, in heaps, without labels, and waited for Brooks to impart to it, by her own hand and in her own script, the decency it wanted. The lesser archivist's signature beneath an honest inventory of stolen goods — such was the price expected of her for her last wages. And it was no wonder at all that for goods once stolen there might be found takers ready to furnish them with a new owner a second time. Already bracing herself to meet the unknown housebreaker, and looking to see before her anyone at all, from a common thief to an Averin driven to robbery by her morning's want of success, Brooks appeared in the doorway, hoping that she might at the least, with her own person as with a gabion, hold up the malefactors until the police should come; and froze, straining in the desperately flickering lamplight to make out the disposition of the cellar. Contrary to all her expectations, upon an overturned crate, in a cloud of disturbed straw-dust, there sat a large, blue-black raven, as though it had but that moment flown hither straight from the Tower, where they are kept at the public charge and have their wings clipped. This specimen's wings, however, were quite entire. Not in the least abashed by the mistress's appearance, the bird was busily and intently worrying a canvas sack with its beak, having slit it along the seam with a mastery a pickpocket might have envied, and drawing forth stone beads, copper utensils, and the rest of the contents — possessed beyond doubt of a fabulous historical value, to say nothing of its expression in money. At that moment the raven was just methodically hauling from the sack some dull-green, shapeless vessel that stubbornly refused to quit its place of keeping. "And even you must needs make off with something from here? Good Lord above…" Brooks, puffing heavily, leaned against the door-post. "Have you never thought of a career as a museum keeper? You would answer every requirement. Here — have this instead!" And, for want of aught else, she flung the bird a piece of mutton — that very piece she had carried in her hand the whole way, like a material proof of an interrupted dinner. The raven appraised the offering instantly and without false modesty: it dropped at once its unyielding prize, caught the mutton on the wing with a deftness that betrayed in it a deal of practice, and with two beats of its wings soared up and out, with a querulous croak, through the barred little window beneath the ceiling. Brooks, for her part, was left standing once more alone above the slit sack, and had scarce followed the "guest" with her eyes before she fell to sneezing painfully from the clouds of dust raised into the air. Having mastered her sneezing, Auberley was able only after a good five minutes to unstick her streaming eyes, and made out at last in the half-dark the thing the late visitor had hunted so desperately. The prize proved to be a wholly unremarkable object, whether a measure or a lamp, covered all over in a brown-green patina — the sort they give you by the bunch for a piastre in a Cairo bazaar, and the sort Sir Reginald in his lifetime would not have honoured with a glance. The thing was unlovely, untidy, and plainly worth neither the sack, nor the seal, nor the raven's labours. "Well, what is one to do," Brooks resolved at last, pronouncing it to the empty store-room, to the dead in their boxes, and to the messmate flown off upon his raven's affairs. "I shall have to catalogue you too, dear."