Yearn, p.4
Yearn, page 4
D’Arcy turned back to his desk, his heart still thumping. “I will get my hands on this secret diary. I will,” he reassured himself, but sensing that both tact and strategy were required, he busied himself with some trivial footnotes as he waited for the sweep to broach the subject again. It felt like the workman was taking an eternity to gather his equipment. Finally the sweep turned to leave. Before he walked out whistling he placed a business card on D’Arcy’s desk.
“Number ten, Golden Square. Ask for Harry. I’ll expect you at eight on the dot and I’ll have the desired object unpacked and waiting.” And then, to D’Arcy’s disconsolation, he winked.
• • •
Stepping over the rivulet of raw sewage that wound its way between the cobbled pavement and the front steps of the Georgian house with the number ten welded into its rickety iron gate, D’Arcy wondered whether he might have been a little rash—it might have been wiser to have asked the sweep to visit him again at his aunt’s mansion. But somehow it had felt safer and less conspicuous for him to visit the sweep. After all, he could not afford to be seen by any of his Mayfair or literary acquaintances, and he wanted to be entirely confident the existence of the diary would not be leaked to Tuttle.
And so it was, dressed suitably casually in a sack coat (which he now found to be unseasonably warm), checked trousers, and soft-crowned brown hat, D’Arcy came once more to find himself unintentionally in the vicinity of Prudence O’Malley, his moral weakness and object of great sensual distraction. Although her dwelling was situated on the other side of the square, the young biographer could even now feel the pull of her upon him. Forcing himself back to the task at hand, he approached a small female child of about six years or so, playing marbles on the step.
“Excuse me, young miss, I am after a Mr. Harry—the chimney sweep?”
The redheaded waif stared up at him, then thoughtfully picked her nose. “’Ow much is it worth to you?”
Reluctantly D’Arcy handed her a penny. She bit it, then, with practiced expertise, slipped it into a pocket hidden in her dirty petticoat. “He’s on the top floor, is Harry. No doubt he’d be expecting a gentleman like you,” she added with a lewd sort of sophistication that D’Arcy found momentarily repulsive.
Ignoring the waif’s comment, he stepped over her and entered the Georgian townhouse. Once a grand residence, it had, like all of its neighboring fellows, fallen into neglect and decay. The entrance hall was dark and dingy—a terrible stench rose up from the cellar below and somewhere beyond the darkened arch at the back of the house D’Arcy could hear the sound of a baby wailing.
Holding a handkerchief to his face, determined not to catch some dreadful disease through inhaling the foul and polluted miasma, D’Arcy began climbing the stairs and the air became less foul as he ascended each landing. The sweep’s residence was at the fourth landing, in what might have served originally as the servants” quarters. And Harry, out of uniform and dressed surprisingly in an elegant but obviously secondhand morning coat, was already waiting for him at the top.
“Prompt, sir, that is indeed the mark of good breeding, is it not?” There was a new shyness about the man, as if by removing the uniform he had removed some of the obvious social differences between them.
“Indeed, it is, Harry.” D’Arcy, winded by his climb, leaned for a moment against the railings.
“Please excuse my humble dwelling—isn’t a lot of money in soot,” the sweep explained as, holding up a smoldering oil lamp, he led the young biographer through a narrow corridor with a repressively low wooden ceiling toward a set of double doors. The smell of boiling cabbage became progressively stronger as they approached. “Not until I own me own set of brushes and then I can employ some lads below me. See, I have ambition, sir, and in my position ambition is both a blessing and a curse,” he concluded as they reached the door. Behind him D’Arcy had silently begun calculating how much money he could afford to pay the sweep for the diary since it was now apparent that obtaining the diary would require commerce.
Harry knocked three times and a tiny woman, her white hair hidden under a grimy bonnet, opened the door. She looked eighty but was probably not much more than fifty.
“Mother, this is the eminent biographer we was expecting,” Harry announced. After a demure curtsy, she silently let them pass. The large room contained two beds and a table placed in a low window alcove that looked as if it served as both kitchen and dining table. A copper cooking pot hung over the hearth and there was a small washstand in one corner. Despite being meager it was spotlessly clean, much to D’Arcy’s relief.
“I live here with my four sisters, but they are all out working. In the theater. They are handsome girls and they do handsomely, don’t they, Mother?” In response the old woman suddenly smiled, an expression that instantly transformed her face. To D’Arcy’s surprise, he could see where the son might have inherited some of his beauty. “Now to the diary, sir. Sit yourself down over there; Mother will bring you a mug of tea and I shall fetch it.” D’Arcy, his head lowered to avoid bumping it on the ceiling, made his way over to the table. Through the grubby diamond-shaped windowpanes he could just see the skyline of London, with a large, sickly yellow full moon rising up over the high roofs of Mayfair. It looked ominous and, again, D’Arcy wondered about the turn of circumstances that now found him in such a situation. The old woman poured tea out of a saucepan that had been sitting over the fire grate, then placed before him with a delicate grace a chipped china cup of the dark brew. On the other side of the room Harry reached under one of the beds and pulled out an old tea chest. At the rustle of paper, D’Arcy turned. Triumphantly the sweep held a small canvas bag aloft. “I knew I had it in here somewhere. I’ve not read it meself, out of respect for the great dead gentleman, but you, sir, are his official biographer so I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. . . .” Unable to contain himself, D’Arcy snatched it from the sweep’s hands and stepped into the only pool of light in the room, cast from a single oil lamp hanging from the ceiling. He pulled open the bag with his trembling fingers. The canvas smelt and felt old, at least sixty or seventy years of age. Carefully D’Arcy slipped out the collection of pages it contained. It was a slim notebook of ten pages or so, held together by string. On the thick oiled cover were written the words: The pages of my journal kept only for myself to avoid condemnation from God, my fellow scientists and perhaps, even my future wife . . . D’Arcy recognized the handwriting immediately.
• • •
The window was pushed as wide as it could go. Although it was past one in the morning, the temperature had not dropped and an oppressively humid heat rose from the pavement, seemingly mingling with the moon shadow that fell in broad blue-white bands, transforming the mundane into the mysterious. D’Arcy sat at his desk, the rest of the house hushed and sleeping. Before him lay the clandestine document. He held his hand an inch above the thick yellowed paper, fingers spread over the journal as if he were, through some feat of inverted gravity, absorbing the very soul of the great man up through the pages. It was an extraordinary intimacy, this communion, and the young biographer felt both the weight of responsibility and tremendous exhilaration. He was deeply conscious that the last person to have looked upon the manuscript was Banks and now he held it in his hands. It was undeniable; their lives were irretrievably woven together.
D’Arcy glanced back down, his mind reeling between disbelief, complete fascination, and, if he were frank with himself, a deluge of sexual fantasy that had made it hard to continue reading with the cold eye of the scientist, the bulge in his trousers an uncomfortable confirmation of this distraction. In front of him were several paragraphs he’d marked in pencil—these contained the description of the climax of the ritual Banks had reported in the journal, a secret religious ritual of the native Polynesians that, if executed, imbued the main participant with great powers. But this ritual differed from other ceremonies witnessed by Banks and documented in his published journals. This one involved sex magic and of such detailed intensity that the ritual was not only extraordinary but transgressive. Certainly perverse enough to outrage those esteemed guardians of high culture, the Church of England, but also the members of the Royal Institute. D’Arcy couldn’t have been more excited. The diary contained material guaranteed to compel all manner of reader to buy the biography. It was a writer’s gold mine, a treasure of controversy that would make him famous. For the hundredth time in the past two hours, D’Arcy began to read the marked paragraphs:
It came about that Otheothea, my native “wife,” had a quarrel with one of her friends over some breadfruit and coconut crops she was convinced the friend had been stealing. And she needed evidence to prove her case before accusing the friend and seeking local justice. She explained to me that there was a secret ritual that if executed gave the truth-seeker the power, for a limited time, to see through the eyes of anyone they named. “Truth magic” would be the nearest translation in our English tongue. She then asked me if I’d partake in the ritual, as it required two men, one of whom needed to be a Tupia (local priest), and two women, one of them a priestess. Eager to learn as much as I could about her culture and innocently thinking it would be a simple matter of the sacrifice of a few chickens and some chanting, I agreed. Never in the history of mankind has a man been so wrong. . . .
After insisting that I should bathe and groom my hair, Otheothea led me to a clearing in a small forest beyond which it was possible to hear the pounding of the ocean against the rocks. It was (judging by the position of the stars and the lights in the sky) about two hours before dawn, the time of which was significant to Otheothea as she kept indicating my fob watch. She herself had dressed in little more than a grass skirt with a garland of flowers about her neck and woven into her hair that she had loosened and wore down her back. Waiting in the clearing was a young girl (perhaps as young as sixteen), a girl Otheothea had noticed me watching—for the creature was as lovely and comely as the young Aphrodite herself. Instead of being consumed by jealousy (as would be the custom of the women of my country), Otheothea had smiled and asked if I desired the girl. At the time, fearing I might insult Otheothea, I had denied it. But now I could see that she’d read my emotions more faithfully than I had assumed. The other person waiting in the clearing was a native man, a Tupia, another magnificent specimen of humanity, standing over six foot tall. His oiled and muscular body gleamed in the light of the fire illuminating the grassy plateau. Both wore ceremonial dress—grass skirts, beads, and necklaces of scarlet feathers. There was a formal, almost religious atmosphere, as if both were there as participants in a solemn rite.
On the ground was laid a blanket, the pattern of
which I recognized from the cloak of a man I had been introduced to as a priest: a distinctive design of strips and crosses. Upon our approach the young man lit a low burner of incense and began chanting, rocking backward and forward. The girl knelt slowly on the edge of the blanket, her knees placed carefully on two points of the pattern.
Otheothea turned to me: “She is for you. She is part of the magic. The four of us will make a window of pleasure, and together our joy will join to wake the Earth Lizard and he will give me the eyes of my enemy for half a day.”
At the time I thought I had misinterpreted her intention, a meaning lost in translation. But when she placed my hands on the oiled breasts of the young girl, and she herself had straddled the lap of the priest, the nature of this magic ritual was apparent.
• • •
An ember suddenly crackled in the hearth, startling the young biographer, absorbed as he was by the detailed description of the ritual. It was almost as if Banks had written the account as a set of instructions left, if not for himself, for posterity. Even if he had hidden the journal it was evident to D’Arcy that some part of Banks must have assumed its discovery sooner or later, otherwise why had he not destroyed the pages, or even not written them at all? It was a moral argument the biographer allowed himself to be pursued by.
D’Arcy stared into the fire. It was as if the four figures themselves danced amid the flames, bronze skin gleaming as buttock pounded into buttock, breast against breast, Banks’s pale figure embraced by both man and woman—all abandoned to an instinctive animal force greater than the conventions of both D’Arcy’s era and that of the late eighteenth century. This transcended the rationality of modern man. Gripped by inspiration, D’Arcy could hardly breathe. It was a powerful and seductive vision. He returned to his reading. The next two pages provided a detailed account of the ritual itself, involving an elaborate orgy the movement of which appeared to be so highly choreographed that the four participants would reach orgasm simultaneously, the intent being (as far as D’Arcy could ascertain) that the energy of this sexual climax would then channel directly into the truth-seeker, who had hung about his or her body objects belonging to the person she/he wished to see through the eyes of. In the ritual described by Banks it was locks of hair, and some beads that belonged to the woman his native “wife” had accused.
Afterward Banks wrote of his skepticism, but also of his intense pleasure in witnessing such a ritual. Then came the last paragraph, the content of which fascinated the young biographer almost as much as the sexual acts so beautifully and lyrically portrayed.
I had dismissed the whole event as an excuse for the usual indulgence of the senses these people (as innocent as children) so delighted in, and had just decided to regard my involvement as a delightful memoir I might return to when age and infirmity had made such pleasures unobtainable when Otheothea who, up until that moment, had been lying quietly beside me, seemed to go into an apoplexy. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she began to shake wildly. I could not bring her to her senses. This went on for just under an hour until, as swiftly as it had begun, the paroxysms ceased. Sitting up and smiling peacefully, the native girl appeared to have returned to her normal self. “I have been with her, Joseph, I have seen through her eyes and she is guilty.”
After these words she insisted I accompany her to the hut of her enemy, gathering witnesses along the way. Upon arrival, despite violent protests from the accused, Otheothea went straight to a wooden chest in the corner and opened it. Hidden inside were the stolen fruits and crops. The location of the chest was not obvious, and neither were the crops hidden within. And I could not find a rational explanation except to acknowledge that the sex magic had worked and Otheothea had seen through her enemy’s eyes in order to locate the stolen crops.
Naturally the notion that such a ritual might indeed be empowering is deeply disturbing to me. I cannot afford such methods of promotion to become available to either my contemporaries or descendants. This kind of alchemy is not fit for either Christian or Englishman . . . and yet, it is mesmerizing.
• • •
By the time D’Arcy had finished reading dawn was already creeping in under the curtains and the fire in the hearth was reduced to smoldering embers. He closed the journal. Already he felt like an entirely different man from the one who had sat down to study the journal eight hours before. He had been transformed. He felt as if his notion of perception, the borders of reality, even his understanding of what religious worship might be had been blown apart. The discovery of the journal was more than just an extraordinary piece of luck that would doubtless propel his biography into a league of its own. It had also stirred D’Arcy to new heights of aspiration: to control the gaze of your enemy, to actually leave your body and enter another? These adventures promised to be as much a thaumaturgy of the senses as the orgy itself. And what if the ritual actually worked? He sat there staring across the familiar planes and shapes of his study and yet he was in Polynesia, lying naked and satiated in a jungle clearing by the smoldering remains of a log fire, his spirit having flown from his body and then returned, restored, renewed, the doors of perception yawning open. If only he had that power—to be able to see through the eyes of anyone he liked for an hour, to experience what they were seeing. What would he do with such a gift?
Just then his eye fell upon Tuttle’s white glove, which he had placed at the base of Sir Joseph Banks’s marble bust as a kind of trophy or offering. Inspired by the sight, a small trickle of an idea started glinting in his consciousness, an idea of revenge, of empowerment, an idea that might reverse forever the calamitous set of circumstances he now found himself in. If D’Arcy had such a gift, even for an hour, he would be able to find out at exactly what stage Tuttle was in his book. He would be able to read the actual pages, gauge whether Tuttle’s biography would be a real threat to his own. He would triumph no matter what.
Physically exhausted but with his mind racing with excitement, D’Arcy threw himself down on the daybed in a corner of the study. Strategies danced like dervishes about him. His plan would have to be extremely well executed. To conduct a ritual like that in London would not only be potentially ruinous (if it were ever discovered), it would also no doubt be illegal. And yet the advantage gained would be tenfold. Not only would he be able to thwart Tuttle’s publication (a concept that was as delicious to him as any fought duel), he would also have undergone the same experience as Joseph Banks himself, and the idea of being thus fused forever to his great idol was almost as irresistible.
He lay there imagining all the consequences—himself basking in the fame of scandalous celebrity, the book sales, the sheer pleasure of trumping Tuttle in the reviews, the covert pleasure of being in his skin for an hour, perusing his notes. . . . His mind was made up; he had no choice. It was as if the very discovery of the journal—the way it had organically arrived in his hands, the arbitrariness of Harry the sweep’s appearance, the coincidence of D’Arcy having stayed in that afternoon when the chimneys were being cleaned—was destined; he was compelled to commit body and soul to the journal. He had to perform the magic.
