Stories

OK, I’ve got this, well not quite a mountain, but at least a fair-sized mound of short stories. They’ve got no commercial value, because that’s just how things are in the year 2025. I’m not even sure it’s worth self-publishing them on Amazon given the amount of AI slop out there. So I’m just going to sling them up here for anybody who likes to take a look at them.

This first one is my best shot at Sherlock Holmes fan fiction. Sort of…

The Curious Case of the Skull in a Hat-Box

Holmes later related to me the circumstances of his unexpected encounter with his maker. In his own words:

It was a dark cold day in mid-November 1913 - one of those dank dreary days when the rain has set in and falls straight down like prison bars. I was lying athwart the divan in our rooms on Baker Street, suffering from one of my periodic bouts of abject lethargy, when the doorbell rang downstairs. It being a Saturday afternoon, and thus outside my usual hours as a consulting detective, Mrs. Hudson brought up a card. It announced my supplicant as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As I did not know the gentleman I thought to send him away. But on the back of the card was scrawled “On a matter of singular archaeological import.”

This stirred my curiosity. And I was in need of mental exercise, for I find that my mind, if it is not otherwise occupied, reflects in upon itself, as if trapped in a fairground hall of mirrors, until the endless repetitions of its own image diminish and vanish away, and all that is left is a bewildering paralysing void. Thus, hoping that the gentleman would provide me with sufficient stimulation to jolt me out of my despond, I asked Mrs. Hudson to send him up.

A few moments later Mrs. Hudson showed in my visitor. He was a prosperous and energetic gentleman of about fifty-five years of age, of Celtic extraction, florid of face, and sporting a bushy moustache. His body had run to fat, but I discerned that he had been a fine athlete in his day. His eyes were intelligent, observant, and full of humour, fantasy, and an easy credulity - here was a man whose company was to be savoured, even if it were unwise to entrust him with your life-savings. Under his arm he was carrying a cylindrical hat-box, of the sort that are used to keep top-hats.

Once we had exchanged the ritual greetings observed between two gentlemen on first acquaintance I played my usual parlour trick on him. I ventured, “I perceive, Sir Arthur, that you are a medical gentleman and that you write a good deal. I also discern that your considerable imaginative powers at times overpower your scientific education, and that you believe in spirits and what-not. Am I right or am I right?”

“By jeepers, Holmes,” Sir Arthur replied with an over-familiarity that bordered on rudeness, “How the blazes did you work that out? Is there a telltale scratch mark upon my shoe, or a smudge of fairy-dust on my nose?”

“Nothing so extraordinary,” I said. “As to you being a writer, I observed the deformity of the first two fingers of your right hand, caused by the constant pressure of holding a pen above a page whilst in deep thought. Also, despite your best attempts at scrubbing your hands, I noted the blueish ink-tinge on your fingertips. I can only regret I have not had the pleasure of reading your works. As regards your belief in the supernatural, there is a Rosicrucian Cross engraved on the case of your gold watch, which is the mark of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a society dedicated to the occult. Finally, as to you being a medical man, I note the winged ox charm on your watch chain, which is the symbol of St. Luke, the patron saint of doctors.” I glanced at his card in my hand and added, “And also, Sir Arthur, your handwriting is such an illegible scrawl that I believe only an experienced pharmacist could decipher it. I was only able to make out your message due to my familiarity with the equally abominable hand of Dr. Watson. Indeed your hand and his are much alike. If I did not know better, I would say they were one and the same.”

To my great surprise Sir Arthur returned that I should indeed know his writings, for Dr. Watson was, so to speak, his amanuensis or scribe, and that I was the leading character in many of his stories. Indeed, it was chiefly owing to my fame that he had been dubbed a knight of the realm.

This was a rum turn of events. The man standing before me was claiming to be my author!

I must say this displeased me. I confess if I must have an author, I would hope for more than this rather ordinary middle-aged gentleman. I can not pretend I felt in awe of his power, as if I was in the presence of my God. Also, I had many indelicate questions for the gentleman, such as why he had attempted to murder me by sending me over the Reisenbach Falls whilst struggling with Professor Moriarty. It was only due to pure serendipity that I had survived and, after a brief hiatus, I had resumed my detective career.

I inquired the reason of his visit with a certain froideur. Sir Arthur gestured to the hatbox he had placed on a side table. I perceived it contained an object of great mystery. However, before Sir Arthur would open the box he explained that the matter touched upon the honour of his friends and he swore me to secrecy. I gave him my word and, forgive me for my presumption, my dear Watson, but I also vouchsafed your discretion.

It was at this point that I, Dr. John H. Watson, returned to Baker Street from watching my old club, Blackheath, so I shall now take up the narration:

It had been a most entertaining game of rugger, though played in the pouring rain and of a decidedly violent nature. Indeed, it was only a little less restrained than the skirmish with the Pashtuns in which I received my wound. I had been pressed into service as a medical professional with alarming frequency, and the final score was a broken tibia and a gashed thigh against two concussions, a dislocated shoulder, and a raked cheek that required eleven stitches. It had been a bloodbath in a mudbath indeed! If England continues to produce such splendid young men, so careless of life and limb, her Empire can only prosper!

After I had been introduced to our visitor, Sir Arthur opened his hat-box and took out a human skull and jawbone, both clean of flesh. The skull had been assembled from many broken bits of bone and carefully glued and wired into an almost complete whole. It was evidently of great age, and the capacity of its cranium was markedly smaller than that of modern man, though still larger than that of the chimpanzee. As for the jawbone, it jutted forward from the face in a peculiar ape-like manner.

Holmes took the skull from Sir Arthur. He gazed deeply into its vacant eye sockets, after the manner of an actor playing Hamlet. “Is it not sobering to think the wonders of the human mind are enclosed in such a puny vessel as this?” he reflected. “As a species we have conquered the continents, traversed the oceans and lately taken to the skies. And yet all the marvels and miracles of Mankind, and all its rapacity and savagery, is encased in this fragile bubble of bone, and consists only of a quart or so of thinking chemicals.”

I perceived Holmes to be falling back into dejection. To distract him from his melancholy I exclaimed, “Surely, Holmes, do you not recognise the object in your hands?” - for I had recognised the skull instantly.

“Yes, my dear Watson?” Holmes invited me to explain.

“Why, this is the skull of Dawson’s Early Man, or Eoanthropus dawsoni, which was excavated from a flint quarry in Sussex, and whose discovery was in the newspapers so much a year ago.”

Holmes glanced at his guest for confirmation.

“Dr. Watson is correct,” Sir Arthur corroborated. “This is the skull of the so-called Piltdown Man. Mr. Smith Woodward, the keeper of the Natural History Museum, is an old friend of mine, and he has permitted me to borrow it. Please handle it with care, for it is a national treasure.”

In my enthusiasm I added, “It is supposed to be five hundred thousand years old, and to show an intermediate stage in the development of man from primitive ape to our current civilised state. Observe the ape-like jut of its jaw and yet the human-like cranium. The skull is said to prove that the origins of humanity are to be found where Mankind has since reached its apogee; that is, here, in England.”

“I take it that the purpose of your visit is to obtain my professional opinion of this object?” Holmes asked his visitor drily.

“Just so,” Sir Arthur replied. “Only I must beg the skull back of you at the same time tomorrow, for it must be returned to the Museum in time for its opening on Monday. It has pride of place in the main gallery and its absence would be remarked on.”

Holmes nodded his agreement and after a few more pleasantries, Sir Arthur took his leave. I heard the street door close downstairs, went to the bay window, and looked out.

“Well, there is one thing we should be glad of,” I remarked as I watched our author hail a hansom cab in the drenching rain.

“Yes? And what is that?” Holmes inquired.

“We have met our Maker and yet we are still alive,” I replied. “There are not so many men who can boast of that!”

Holmes smiled wanly at my feeble jest. Then he shook his head thoughtfully and went on, “Is it not passing strange that a man like Sir Arthur, so credulous that he trusts in ouija boards, seances, and such like hokum, could be the creator of such a dispassionate, rational and analytical mind as my own?”

“It is at once incredible and yet entirely human,” I ventured.

Holmes looked at me askance. I felt the lack of the human touch in my friend again. It was not so much that he did not forgive us mortals our inadequacies, our preposterous vanities, our contradictions, and our secret hurts in our broken places; rather that he - the great reasoning mind, the Babbage Engine of logical deduction - was oblivious of them.

“Do you not see, Holmes, you are Sir Arthur’s polar opposite,” I explained. “You are everything he is not but perhaps he wishes that he were. He believes instinctively and unconditionally; you require empirical proof.”

Holmes nodded pensively and fell silent, as if pondering my words. Though I knew that my friend had made an exhaustive study of the mineralisation of bones in order to determine the length of time a cadaver had been buried, I had not known before that he was interested in palaeontology, and I remarked on this.

Holmes idly stabbed a glowing coal in the hearth with the poker. It popped loudly and a shower of sparks rose up the chimney. “Indeed I am, for I consider the study of fossils to be a species of the detective genus,” he replied. “In uncovering the distant past, as in the detection of crime, one must be scrupulously attentive to seemingly insignificant details. Then, on the basis of these minute details and small evidences, a whole castle of supposition must be erected until you arrive at your reconstruction of the past - that is, the truth. It is a perilous intellectual endeavour, for you must build upon such uncertain foundations that your castle is always, so to speak, teetering over the abyss of error and at risk of collapse.”

Holmes glanced at the skull of Piltdown Man and went on: “And if that were not difficult enough in itself, the field of fossil-hunting is not without its mountebanks and charlatans. Do you not recall the case of Flint Jack, or Fossil Willie, who faked flint tools of supposedly great age and peddled them to credulous antiquarians? Or, indeed, the forgery of the brontosaurus?”

“The brontosaurus!” I exclaimed. “But that’s the most famous of all the dinosaurs. What on earth is wrong with it?”

“Its first discoverer, a Mr. Marsh, lacked a head for the sauropod skeleton that he had excavated, so he attached the skull of a brachiosaurus, an entirely different species of sauropod, to its other bones, thus creating a chimera which never existed in nature. I warn you, Watson, the investigation of prehistory is a treacherous endeavour, and before coming to any conclusions we must examine our subject meticulously, proceeding carefully from evidence to inference, following the example of Mr. Darwin’s masterwork.”

I had not heard Holmes before on Evolution. So I asked the Great Calculating Mind his opinion of Mr. Darwin’s theory.

“When a theory is backed by such preponderance of evidence as is Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace’s and Mr. Charles Darwin’s (to give both its authors their due credit) then, in my opinion, it ceases to be a supposition and it becomes a proven truth,” Holmes commented.

I glanced at Holmes’s thin angular face with its high domed cranium, so different from the skull lying on the table before him. “So you admit that you are descended from an ape in the zoo?” I teased him.

“No, not from an ape in the zoological gardens,” Holmes replied. “But from an ape dead long ago, yes. And on both sides of my family. As are you, my friend. As are all men. And women. For all our intellectual vanity, the ape is inside us, and we are all equally cousins to the chimpanzee.”

“So you do not admit of a distinction between the races of man that elevates the white man over others, as mankind itself is elevated over the chimpanzee?” I asked him.

“No, I do not. Though I am of an unusually cerebral nature, I am a man like any other. No more, no less. And that ‘elevation’, that distinction between the races of which you speak, and which is so fashionable nowadays, has no basis in sound science.”

“So your opinion is that the negro race is as advanced as our own?” I blurted, incredulous that my friend was attacking the very foundation of our Empire - for by what right do we hold our colonies if our task is not to bring civilisation to the barbarous and the savage?

“The negro race is no less advanced than our own, certainly, Watson,” Holmes replied. “I could even argue more advanced.”

“How so?” I asked, astounded.

A mischievous smile lit up Holmes’ gaunt face, and he expounded: “Visit the zoological gardens in Regent’s Park and observe the chimpanzee in its cage without prejudice. You will notice its skin, though covered in a sparse, wiry fur, is pinkish-grey in colour, like our own. So you see the black skin of the African negro is an advancement from the original white; I suspect obtained because the chimpanzee is an animal of the rainforest, and it is naturally shaded by the jungle’s canopy, whilst our distant ancestors were creatures of the open savannah, and the darkness of their skins was necessary to protect them from the harsh African sun. So you see our pallid Northern complexion is simply a regression to the initial, more primitive, ape-like state.”

Though provoked by Holmes’ canard, I held my tongue, for minds as brilliant as my friend’s will sometimes fall into gross fallacy, for (in my humble opinion) occasional error is the inevitable consequence of great originality.

Holmes set to work. I can scarcely recount the intellectual frenzy of the next twenty-fours hours, during which time Holmes slept not a wink. Tables were hurriedly cleared of stacks of old journals and newspapers to make space for his labours. Then came the looking glass and the optical microscope, and a painstaking inspection of the skull, the jawbone, and the loose teeth of Eoanthropus dawsoni.

An hour later I was dispatched to St. Barts and the London Zoological Society to ransack their libraries for treatises on the anatomy of both humans and apes, which I obtained only by using Holmes’s name and pleading the urgency of the case. I also retrieved from St. Barts a human skull and jawbone, for the purpose of comparison with the skull of Piltdown Man, which the surgeon-on-duty informed me were the mortal remains of Frederick Manning, the infamous perpetrator of the Bermondsey Massacre in 1849. I admit I felt a certain frisson of emotion in riding in a hansom cab through London in the dark and the pouring rain with the bones of a hanged man at my side.

When I returned to Baker Street the books I had brought were hurriedly consulted, and at one point a frown of displeasure crossed Holmes’ features, like a storm cloud across a sunlit landscape. However, Holmes spoke no words aloud, uttering only a series of quiet “humphs” and “ahas” under his breath.

Holmes advanced to testing the skull and jawbone with sundry vials of chemicals. Soon strange smells were wafting through our rooms, mixing with the smells of Mrs. Hudson’s cooking rising up from downstairs. Drops of chemicals were applied by swab and pipette to tiny areas of the bones, and their reactions minutely observed with stopwatch and microscope. This was followed by more “humphs” and “ahas”. Meanwhile, raindrops spattered on the window and stray droplets of chemicals burnt holes in the bearskin rug spread out before the fire.

Dinner was sent up but remained uneaten - at least, by Holmes. However a cup of tea was drunk and Turkish tobacco was fished from the toe-end of a Persian slipper and smoked in a pipe retrieved from the coal scuttle. Soon a thick haze of purplish fumes wavered beneath the chandelier.

Next Holmes prepared a complex test of his own devising which involved measuring the fluorine uptake of the separate bones to determine their relative ages. As he worked he hummed Wagner’s “Lohengrin” under his breath. I can not say he hummed the opera in its entirety, for the hour grew late, the fire was heaped up to a blaze, and I fell sound asleep in my armchair.

I awoke at five in the morning. Holmes was sitting bolt upright in his armchair opposite mine, staring fixedly and unblinkingly at a point somewhere over my left shoulder. I feared my friend had had an apoplectic fit due to his exertions, and that he had passed “beyond the veil.” I held my breath and watched him for all of three minutes, not daring to disturb him. Just as I had resolved to intrude upon his trance, come what may, he suddenly started up energetically, determined on a new course of investigation.

Holmes’s detective endeavours were now more social than scientific. He hunted through the piles of old newspapers and magazines which he had removed from our tables earlier, searching for articles on the discovery of Piltdown Man. Then, when the first grey light of dawn seeped into the leaden sky, he sent me out into the never-ending rain to collect clippings from the newspaper offices in Fleet Street, and to summon Langdale Pike, a failed actor turned gossip-monger for the gutter press.

When I returned to Baker Street breakfast had been left untouched but another cup of tea had been drunk. Whilst I had been about my errands I noticed that Sir Arthur’s card had been transfixed above the fireplace with Holmes’ jackknife. I approved of this knife-throwing praxis as being an considerable improvement over Holmes’ regrettable habit of practising his pistol shooting indoors when impatient, as now.

Langdale Pike arrived shortly after, reeking of strong spirits and as dishevelled and rat-like as always. For three hours he and Holmes engaged in a vulgar and scurrilous tittle-tattle concerning the characters of London’s scientific and literary communities; concerns that I had thought was beneath the Great Mind. I must confess I felt a pang of jealousy as Holmes conversed so freely with such a low sort of fellow, for I flatter myself to be his especial friend.

Finally, just after two in the afternoon, Holmes announced that he had reached his conclusion. He sent Langdale Pike away without ado and napped in his armchair for precisely forty minutes before the doorbell rang.

It was Sir Arthur again. Mrs. Hudson showed our visitor up. He was carrying a sizeable object wrapped in brown paper, which he placed carefully on a side table.

Once we had exchanged greetings, Holmes gestured to the skull and told his author bluntly, “Your Piltdown Man is a hoax, I tell you. A fraud.”

“Surely it is not a fraud,” I remonstrated with my friend, shocked by his abrupt speech. “At worst, it is merely a mistake.”

“No, Watson,” Holmes replied assuredly. “A mistake is when a palaeontologist erroneously attaches a dinosaur’s skull to the tip of its tail instead of to its neck and produces a most peculiar monstrosity. Yes, that mistake happened: look it up, the unhappy beast was named Elasmosaurus. But a fraud is a conscious attempt to deceive and to mislead others, and that is what this skull is.”

“Dammit, Holmes, are you certain?” Sir Arthur replied testily. “Our best experts at the Natural History Museum have certified Piltdown Man to be genuine. If this gets out, it’ll turn the accepted truths of archaeology upside down.”

“Nonetheless, it is a hoax,” Holmes pronounced without a scintilla of doubt. “As regards the skull it is indeed old, in the usual meaning of that word. But I estimate it to be around five hundred years old, give or take a century, and not five hundred thousand years of age. Whoever this skull belonged to lived in Medieval Britain, and not in prehistoric times. Furthermore, I am not convinced that their brain pan was any smaller than our own. It has been reported that the workers in the flint quarry who made the discovery at first thought the skull was a fossilised coconut and smashed it deliberately. I do not know if this tale be true, but I believe the skull’s surviving fragments could be assembled into a modern cranium equally as easily as it has been assembled into this smaller, supposedly ancient one. Finally, and to my mind conclusively, the skull’s fragments have been artificially aged with iron solution and chromic acid.”

Holmes then turned to the jawbone and its loose teeth. “As regards the jaw of this so-called Piltdown Man, it would indeed be extraordinary if it had ever belonged to any human, ancient or modern. It is the jawbone of an orang-u-tan, the so-called Man of the Forest of the East Indies. See here where it has been altered with a file to make a fit with the human skull. As for these teeth, which were found separately, they are from an adult chimpanzee. They have also been filed down to create a more human appearance. In conclusion, Eoanthropus dawsoni is an elaborate deception practised upon the scientific community by a person or persons unknown. Such pranks appeal to a certain type of frivolous, fanciful mind, which takes pleasure in outwitting and misleading the forces of science.”

I glanced at Sir Arthur. He did not flinch.

“Oh, do not look at our visitor for surprise, my dear Watson,” Holmes exclaimed. “He knew full well that the skull was a hoax before he climbed our stairs.”

“Then who perpetrated this deception?” I wondered.

“That is indeed an apposite question,” Holmes said. “To my mind there are three suspects who had the means, motive, and opportunity to wreak this mischief - for we can safely exclude the workers at the flint quarry where the finds were made as they would hardly know a fossil from a dog bone. The first suspect is Mr. Charles Dawson, the discoverer of the skull and jawbone. This Dawson is a small-time dealer in antiquities of questionable provenance and an ambitious and unscrupulous social climber. I believe him to be a part of the conspiracy, for his presence at the quarry during each of the finds is damning evidence against him. However, I believe he lacks the audacity of mind to conceive of this business. In my judgment he was only a tool in the hands of a greater intellect.”

“So who else do you suspect?” Sir Arthur asked uneasily.

“My next suspect,” Holmes replied, “is Father Teilhard du Chardin, a young Jesuit priest who assisted Dawson on the dig. This Jesuit, of undoubted brilliance of mind, has the most peculiar notions. For instance, he seeks to reconcile science and religion, and to make evolution an argument for Christianity.”

“But did not Charles Darwin fear that he had murdered God?” I recalled hazily.

“Indeed Mr. Darwin did lose his faith,” Holmes said. “But this Catholic Father affirms that God works through evolution to create beings capable of consciousness who in turn will fill the universe with divine energy. To my mind it is a clever argument but a specious one. For one thing, it fails to account for nature being red in tooth and claw, and for our own cruelty and indifference to the suffering of others. To be frank, I fear for the young man. Though he may not be burnt at the stake for heresy, like Giordano Bruno, I do not think the Roman Church will make his life an easy one. Nonetheless, I acquit Father du Chardin of this hoax. He abandoned the dig immediately after he had discovered a supposed canine tooth of this supposed Piltdown Man, in fact a chimpanzee’s tooth, and he has not spoken of it since. To my mind he suspects the fraud but he cannot prove it, and so he remains silent.”

I could not hold back a moment longer. “So you suppose Mr. Smith Woodward of the Museum to be the architect of this fraud?” I preempted Holmes. “For did he not verify the skull of Piltdown Man as genuine and introduce it to the world?”

“Indeed he did,” Holmes replied. “But I accuse him of nothing. He is merely a hapless dupe; a careless scientist who saw what he wanted to see because it fitted in with his foolish preconceived ideas about the racial superiority of the English.”

Holmes then turned and glared at Sir Arthur. I knew that look well from past investigations.

“Surely, Holmes, you can not be accusing your own author?” I exclaimed.

“Indeed I am. You are a freemason I think, Sir Arthur?

Sir Arthur remained silent.

“Exactly. A man may not say so outside the brotherhood. But your handshake gives it away.”

Sir Arthur nodded imperceptibly, as if conceding the point.

“And this Mr. Dawson is a freemason as well?”

Sir Arthur did not reply.

“Come, come, Sir. You hail from the same part of Sussex. You are friends. You are known to have driven him to the dig site in your motor car. Where did you make his acquaintance if not at your Lodge? And what is the Lodge for if it is not for men like you to become friends?”

Sir Arthur nodded imperceptibly again. Holmes was warming to the chase now.

“To speak freely, as a man may with his author, you are a man of strong and ungoverned imaginative powers. Such is their force that you believe in communication with the spirits of the dead, and in the existence of fairies, and in such like superstitious claptrap. You have even quarrelled with Mr. Houdini, asserting that he has supernatural powers and refusing to believe that he has not, even when he has explained to you how he performs his escapes. As Mark Twain once observed, it is often far easier to fool a man than to convince him that he has been fooled!”

Rarely had I seen my friend speak with such ill-concealed contempt for any man. And the man he was addressing was his own Maker!

“I believe you proposed this hoax to Mr. Dawson after a dinner at your Lodge, when full of wine and in high spirits,” Holmes accused Sir Arthur. “The planning of it was an intellectual game for you, an exercise of your over-active imagination. But Dawson, eager for any kind of fame, took it upon himself to realise your conceit. Then, with or without your knowledge, Dawson took this skull and jawbone to Smith Woodward and convinced him that it was genuine. And you have watched in alarm as your prank has gotten out of hand, and now has the makings of a full-blown scandal. And you are embarrassed and caught, so to speak, not between two stools but between two fools, this Dawson and this Smith Woodward. Am I right or am I right?”

“Of course you are right,” Sir Arthur begrudged Holmes sourly. “You are always right. Do you not find it tedious? Do you not wish to be wrong once in a while?”

“What boneheaded idiocy this whole farce has been!” Holmes exclaimed suddenly, slamming his hand down upon a table. I confess I was amazed by his passion. He looked his creator levelly in the eye, and went on, “Now tell me why you are really here. Because, if my suspicion is correct, there is more to this affair than just this skull. And no more deceptions, Sir Arthur,” he warned him sternly, “or else I will wash my hands of you.”

Breathing heavily, Sir Arthur unwrapped the object he had brought with him from its brown paper. It consisted of two large pieces of bone, evidently once joined together.

“Dr. Watson, you were in India, perhaps you would care to examine this gimcrack,” Holmes invited me.

I needed no second invitation. The two pieces were made of elephant bone, or perhaps mammoth bone, and had the appearance of great age. Their surface had been crudely scored over with a flint tool. In size and shape the two pieces, when joined together, strongly resembled a cricket bat. I could not help but exclaim that, if I did not know better, it was evidence that the first Englishman played that most English of games half a million years ago.

“Exactly, Dr. Watson. But we do know better, do we not? As the skull is a fake we may conclude it that this object is likely a fake as well.” Holmes turned to Sir Arthur. “I surmise, Sir Arthur, that this object was discovered lately in the same flint quarry as Piltdown Man’s skull?”

Sir Arthur nodded.

“And that it was discovered not by you, or Mr. Dawson, or Father Teilhard du Chardin, but by somebody outside your narrow circle?”

Sir Arthur nodded again. I noted how he shuffled awkwardly on his feet, and his brick-red face had acquired an even redder shade than usual. The man was embarrassed!

Holmes exclaimed almost joyfully, “Then this is quite the most elegant blackmail note I have ever beheld!”

“Blackmail?” I echoed.

“Perhaps that is too strong a word, Watson. But the hoax has been discovered and this absurdity, this cricket bat of antiquity, is the discoverer’s way of informing its perpetrator that the game is up.”

“But why a cricket bat?” I asked.

“That is the elegant part of it. Sir Arthur, you were a proficient sportsman in your day, were you not?” Holmes asked, revealing the fruits of his gossiping with Langdale Pike. Then the Great Mind turned to me and remarked, “Our author here played rugger for Blackheath, your club, Watson. And he was an excellent cricketer. He even once dismissed the great W.G. Grace and wrote a poem about it. I believe this cricket bat is the blackmailer’s artful way of alluding to that feat.” Holmes turned back to Sir Arthur and concluded, “Naturally, the questions you seek the answers to are, who has discovered your hoax, and how they are to be silenced. Is that not so?”

“Silenced!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, silenced. I’m afraid the mischief that Sir Arthur and this Dawson have perpetrated has spun out of control. Piltdown Man’s skull has been accepted by the keeper of the National History Museum as authentic. A dozen scientific papers have been written on it. Were it to be exposed now, Mr. Smith Woodward’s reputation would be ruined. He would have to resign. The reputations of many other scientific gentlemen would also suffer grievous harm. As for our author, the scandal would destroy his career. Even his knighthood would be in question. And Mr. Dawson would be ostracised. And do not forget, Watson, that these men have wives and children who would suffer with them. The devastation would ripple outwards like a stone dropped in still water and take in many innocent lives.”

“See here, Sherlock! It is your reputation as well as mine in peril,” Sir Arthur retorted brusquely, blustering in the way that men do when they are both anxious and ashamed. Then he continued, “I may call you Sherlock, mayn’t I, considering how we’re family, so to speak? If I am disgraced in public, doubt will be cast upon your achievements as a detective as well. It’s never clever for family to wash their dirty linen in public, you know.”

“But surely we must reveal the skull is a hoax. Science demands it!” I urged. “Is not the truth sacred?”

“No, unfortunately that discovery must be left to others, Watson,” Holmes reluctantly decided. “I have sworn us to secrecy and we must keep our word.” Holmes turned to his author and bargained: “If I hush up this scandal for you, will you set me free? I have grown tired of London. And of people. And I have reached that age when a man must think of his death as something natural and inevitable. Whilst I still have time I wish to retire, I think to a cottage in the country, maybe in Sussex. I fancy keeping bees as a hobby; they will not trouble me with their petty affairs. Well, Sir Arthur, do I have my liberty? Do you swear to henceforth keep my name out of print?”

“Dammit, Sherlock, you are my best source of inco…” Sir Arthur protested. But then he thought better of his objection, and he conceded reluctantly, “Yes, I will leave you in peace. You have my word.” He paused, and then added sourly, “Whatever you think that is worth.”

Holmes nodded gravely, accepting his author’s pledge.

“So what do we do now? Should I look up the train times for Piltdown in Sussex?” I asked, eager for one final adventure with my friend.

“Perhaps that will not be necessary,” Holmes replied. “May I examine the cricket bat?”

I handed it to him. Holmes examined it cursorily,  pointing out some faint marks where the bone had been worked with an iron chisel. Then he drew the curtains, inserted a special bulb in a table-lamp (for electricity had recently been installed in Baker Street), and asked for the room light to be extinguished.

I did so. The room went dark except for a faint violet light emitted by the table-lamp. The “cricket bat” phosphoresced in the eerie light, and Holmes commented that we were looking at that part of the optical spectrum that bees can see and we can not. Each mark that had been made on the face of the “cricket bat” now appeared as a dark scar, and amongst them I made out the scratched initials “S.W.”

The cricket bat’s maker had had the impudence to sign his handiwork!

Holmes “harrumphed” loudly and remarked it was time to take the skull and bat back to the Museum.

Outside the rain had finally stopped and a gas lighter was lighting the lamps. We travelled across London in two hansom cabs, Holmes choosing to ride on his own with the skull in its hat-box. It was a dark chilly evening and the streets were deserted. A clammy greenish-tinted fog, what the cockneys call “a pea-souper”, was rolling in from the Thames, muffling the clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves.

My ride with Sir Arthur was an awkward one. He was a man of considerable pride, and he was embarrassed to have been found out by his own creation, much as a man might feel awkward to be accused of some inadequacy by his own son. I did my best to alleviate his discomfort, for I was grateful to him for my existence, and to ease his discomfort I talked  rugby with him.

When we arrived at Kensington it seemed as if the doorman had been expecting us, for despite the Museum being unlit and closed up, he readily granted us admission to the main hall. I gazed up at the gigantic skeleton of the diplodocus mounted there, amazed that a creature so huge could have once walked the earth.

Mr. Smith Woodward appeared at the top of the hall’s stairs. Holmes gestured to Sir Arthur and I to stay back. Mr. Smith Woodward descended the stairs. Holmes met him at their foot and handed him back the skull in its hat-box and the “cricket-bat” in its brown wrapping-paper.

The two men talked awhile in a low voice whilst Sir Arthur and I gazed nervously at two pterodactyl skeletons suspended from the rafters of the great hall. The museum was silent except for our footsteps and it was easy to imagine these terrible monsters coming back to life and filling the shadowy hall with their shrieking cries and their deafening wing-beats. I glanced at Sir Arthur. He had already forgotten his embarrassment, and there was a strange gleam in his eye. I fancy he was imagining a Lost World where dinosaurs still roam.

At last Holmes and Smith Woodward came to some agreement. They shook hands, and Smith Woodward took his treasures and went back up the stairs without acknowledging our presence.

Holmes returned to us.

“We have botched up this matter as best we can,” Holmes explained. “Though, of course, it would have been better had it never happened. Science is hard enough without deliberate fakes and hoaxes. And I am afraid you have lost a friend in Smith Woodward, Sir Arthur. You introduced Dawson to him and vouched for him; he trusted you.”

Sir Arthur bit his lip in mortification, realising his error.

“This is what we have agreed upon,” Holmes continued. “The skull of Piltdown Man will remain on public display. It must wait to take its place in history’s dustbin. To expose it as a forgery now would ruin too many reputations and destroy too many livelihoods. You, Dr. Watson, may write this story with your usual Boswellian flourishes, but its publication will be forbidden until ninety-nine years after its players’ deaths. And you, Sir Arthur, must speak privately with Mr. Dawson and forbid him from making any more “finds”. He is to retire from the field, do you hear? You have been rumbled and paid back in kind. Any more such forgeries and deceptions and you will be exposed and your reputation ruined. Stick to fairies, Sir Arthur, and leave science well alone. You have had your warning.”

Holmes spoke sharply, and I could hear Smith Woodward’s anger at being made a fool of in his voice. Sir Arthur stood with head bowed down and nodded his agreement. At length he breathed out heavily, and I sensed his relief at escaping from this scare with his knighthood and reputation intact.

We parted without ceremony outside the Museum, and Holmes and I rode back to Baker Street together.

I was concerned for my friend’s health after his exertions, for we are no longer young men. I persuaded him to take a sleeping draught containing chloral hydrate and St. John’s Wort. While he waited for it to take effect he improvised contemplatively upon the violin. Music seemed to flow through him. There were snatches of melody that a lesser man would have hurried to scribble down, but Holmes played on with his eyes closed.

Suddenly, he broke off and remarked out of the blue, “Is it not strange that a story can be more powerful than the truth? Who now remembers the Mary Celeste?”

“Surely you mean the Marie Celeste?” I corrected him. “And who does not know the story of the ghost-ship found afloat and in full sail with all her boats on deck but without her crew?”

“No, I meant the Mary Celeste,” Holmes insisted, placing his violin back in its case and settling his angular frame into his armchair. “That was the correct name of the vessel. She was found foundering and her longboat was missing along with her crew. You see, the cold hard facts of the matter are forgotten, whilst her imagined story, as first recounted by our own author, is remembered. Such is the power of myth! - I know that you disapprove of my use of cocaine. Do not deny it, my dear fellow. But I tell you that imagination is a far more dangerous drug than that stimulant. A man imagines discovering an apeman in darkest Sussex as an after dinner jest, but then he finds his fancy turning into reality, and he ends up in a scrape like this.”

Holmes shook his head, almost like a father disheartened by the misbehaviour of his offspring. Then he went on, “Our author has a remarkable capacity for belief. Both for believing things himself and for making others believe what he believes, even if it is arrant nonsense.” The great detective yawned, and continued sleepily, “But perhaps we should be grateful it is so, Watson, for he believed us into being, and he made others believe in us so entirely that now we, who were never mortal, are immortal. I wish him well.”

I was surprised to hear my friend talk in this most un-Holmes like manner, and I told him so. But no answer came back. And when I glanced at him, he was sound asleep in his armchair.

I built the fire up to a blaze for him. A faint smile played upon his thin lips as he slept. I fancy he was dreaming of the warm summer sun, and of lilac bushes in bloom, and of dripping combs of golden honey, and of the endless hum of bees.

Concerning The English

“Oh would some power the gift give us,
to see ourselves as others see us!”

                                                                    - Robert Burns

It is to my undying regret that I made the acquaintance of my great-uncle Sir Hamish Gordon Innes Crombie only after his death. In fact, until “he shuffled off this mortal coil”, or to put it more colloquially, “he kicked the bucket”, I had not known I had a great-uncle (or indeed any living relatives) at all. And yet is is thanks to this true son of Scotland that I can state, with scientific precision, that the auld enemy of Alba, the Sassenachs, are quite remarkably full of shit. In fact, a rough and ready calculation would place the yield of ordure extracted from each Sassenach in our experiment at approximately four kilograms, a figure equating to double the weight of their supposed brains.

But I am “harnessing th’cart afore th’horse”, as we Scots gab. And I must begin this story in the time-honoured manner; not at its end, but at its beginning, “nigh on a thousand years sin’.”

My minor lowland Scots clan, the Crombies of Old Crombie, hail from the pasturelands between the granite city of Aberdeen and the market town of Banff. There a small river, or burn, and a stone tower-house, grandly titled a castle, both bear our name. The name itself is derived from the Gaelic descriptive “crom”, signifying “crooked”. Whether the twists and turns of the burn lent my clan its name, or whether the twisted deeds of my ancestors were how the river received its appellation, is lost forever in the mists of time. But we Crombies have only too often trodden the primrose path that leads the wicked down to Lucifer’s fiery abode.

It is an unfortunate truth that “crom” is also used colloquially in Gaelic to describe a singularly intimate part of a lady’s anatomy, and our clan name could thus be rendered into English as “the Cunts of Old Cuntsby”. The mockery provoked by this unhappy linguistic quirk likely explains a number of the innumerable duels we Crombies have fought through the ages with dirk and broadsword, with epees and pistols, and with our bare fists and broken bottles.

Our clan’s “annals” - a haphazard bundle of parchments and papers handed down from father to son - date back to the reign of King Macbeth in the 11th Century, under whose benign rule our chieftainship was established. (Shakespeare’s so-called “Scottish play” is vicious Sassenach propaganda. Yes, Macbeth murdered his predecessor, King Duncan. But everybody did that in those days. Other than that trifling indiscretion Macbeth was a braw Scotch monarch.)

The annals themselves chronicle a blood-curdling history of family strife. Crombie brother has slain Crombie brother; Crombie father has left his Crombie son to freeze to death on the cold porch of his manse; Crombie uncle has kidnapped his Crombie nephew’s bride; and Crombie cousin has betrayed his Crombie cousin to the hangman. Estates have been staked and lost at cards just so that they couldn’t be inherited by prodigal offspring; and Catholics have converted into fire-breathing Calvinists, and pious Protestants have turned into militant atheists solely to incense their scandalised relations.

Indeed, we Crombies have so so diligently nursed our internecine grudges and fed our family feuds that we have, so to speak, always culled our herd from within. Our family motto is “Tace”, which is commonly translated as “Keep Thy Peace.” However, having perused our clan’s annals, I believe it would be better translated as “Never Breathe a Word to a Living Soul About What You’ve Done, or If You Do Kill Them Straight After.” Our clan’s heraldic crest is a Scottish wildcat, a small feline deceptively similar to a domestic cat, but which will scratch your eyeballs out should you attempt to stroke it.

We Crombies of Old Crombie have played our part in many of the great events of Scottish history. Dispossessed of our lands in the days of “the empty cloak”, John Balliol, we regained them by participating in the joyous slaughter of the Sassenachs at Bannockburn under the banner of Robert the Bruce. In 1487 a barony was granted by King James III to our thirteenth Chief, Alexander Innes Crombie.

In the early seventeenth century several Crombies ventured south in the train of King James VIth of Scotland, later King James 1st of England, and established themselves as merchants in London. The deaths of several Crumbys, or even Crummys, as they took to spelling their name, are recorded in the Great Plague of London in 1665.

Nearly a century later Crombies of Old Crombie rallied to the standard of the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and faithful to the last, they were butchered at Culloden Moor by their distant Crummy English kin. Then in the dark years after the ’45, when the highlands were cleared and even to speak the name of “Scotland” was forbidden, impoverished Crombies emigrated to Ulster, to the United States, and to the Argentine in search of their fortunes, and they were transported (in surprisingly large numbers) to the penal colonies of Terra Australis.

However, although we Crombies of Old Crombie have ventured to all four corners of the globe, we have always taken our unfortunate propensity for quarrels and blood feuds with us. And this, together with the steady toll exacted by wars, shipwrecks, accidents, misadventure, tropical diseases, suicides and alcoholism had so thinned out our ancient line that, until a solicitor’s letter simultaneously informed me of my great-uncle Hamish’s existence and extinction, I had believed our family tree was an ancient oak so blasted and riven by bolts of lightning that I was the last green leaf fluttering from its otherwise barren and charred boughs.

I leave it you to imagine the sorrow that I felt when I - an only child and an orphan since early childhood - found out that I had family, only to lose it again a paragraph later.

Though Sir Hamish was a stranger to me, and though I am merely a deracinated and semi-anglicised (that is to say half-emasculated) Scot, I could not subscribe to consigning my great-uncle’s mortal remains to an unceremonious anonymous cremation. Sir Hamish (whoever he may have been) was a Crombie of Old Crombie, and “blood is thicker than council juice”, that is tap-water, as we say. No, traditions had to be maintained; customs had to be upheld; rites had to be performed. So I took it upon myself to ring the death bell for him and to tell the world of its loss. That is, I placed a small paid advertisement in the obituary pages of the august Times of London, as follows:

Crombie of Old Crombie, Sir Hamish Gordon Innes, gentleman adventurer and proud son of Alba, after a long becalming with dementia, has set sail to the bourne from which no traveler returns at the ripe old age of 98. His passing is mourned by his sole surviving kin, his great nephew Robert (who alas never knew him in life). His friends are cordially invited to his funeral and traditional Scottish wake. Please reply to: etc. etc.

The morning of the death notice’s publication the first e-mails dropped into my inbox. A few of my older correspondents had known Sir Hamish at school. (Eton, Harrow, Fettes and Gordonstoun were all mentioned. From the tone of the letters I surmised that my great-uncle had been expelled from each in turn). One writer hinted that Hamish had “done something very hush-hush” for the Special Operations Executive during the war, and that he had been the model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Other correspondents had encountered him on his extensive post-war foreign travels. It appeared that Hamish had excavated royal tombs in Egypt, hunted big game in Kenya, fished for marlin off the Florida Keys, rafted down the Amazon, and sailed single-handedly across the Pacific Ocean.

My great-uncle had evidently been a remarkable man: an elusive rugby wing, an excellent shot, a skilled horseman, a reckless race-car driver with an irrepressible lust for speed, a talented linguist, an avid collector of Chinese ceramics, a knowledgeable connoisseur of fine wine, a convivial companion, and a compulsive gambler.

My correspondents spoke of him as flamboyant, handsome, extravagant, tall, slim, and handsome. One lady wrote that, like his distant Gordon relative, the poet Lord Byron, Sir Hamish had been “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Certainly, he had been a prolific womaniser: his romantic conquests apparently included society debutantes, heiresses, duchesses, chambermaids, chorus girls, air hostesses, Tahitian peasant women and Hollywood starlets. There were even three missives on heavily perfumed notepaper enquiring about possible provisions in his will for unacknowledged natural children, accompanied by heavy-handed hints that “the stubborn old sod might have finally wished to do the right thing at the last.”

Reading over the e-mails I had the impression that, until the unfortunate onset of his dementia, Sir Hamish had lived enough for five ordinary men. My own life seemed puny and unadventurous and impossibly dull in comparison. To be frank, I felt jealous of my great-uncle, even though he had cashed in his chips. Truly, he had lived the world as it was in his time!

I wrote back to my correspondents thanking them for their remembrances and inviting them to Sir Hamish’s funeral and wake, as they had surely intended. Given their surprising number, I also doubled the catering and drinks budgets and invited a videographer to record the occasion for posterity. I was confident the occasion would be a splendid send off for a gentleman who had brought such lustre and distinction to the ancient name of Crombie of Old Crombie.

***

We “planted” Sir Hamish in the ground on a fine autumn day. It was a good turn-out; evidently word of my great-uncle’s demise had spread swiftly amongst his friends and acquaintance. The lanes of my tranquil Sussex village were clogged with automobiles of all ages, marques, and conditions, and there were so many mourners packed into our tiny 13th Century church that it was standing room only.

Let me confess it is no easy thing to organise the last hurrah of a man that you have never met. Everything tends towards the impersonal, as though the dead man were a nameless tramp. To lend dignity and gravitas to the proceedings, I took refuge in our time-honoured Scotch traditions: Hamish’s coffin was draped in our clan tartan, a piper in full regalia piped “Flower of Scotland” as the mourners took their seats, and a church window was left open during the service so that my great-uncle’s soul could escape its mortal bonds and soar up to heaven. That is, if it were not bound otherwards.

After a couple of hymns, sung as badly as hymns are usually sung in church, the vicar, a long-haired chap evidently fresh out of seminary, climbed into the pulpit. He took as his text a verse from the First Epistle of St. Peter: “For all flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.”

Of necessity, the reverend’s sermon was a generic affair about the ephemeral nature of human existence, for “nae man can tether time nor tide”. In truth, it would have suited a truck driver or a housewife as much as it befitted my rakish great-uncle. But the vicar swished his surplice with great theatricality as he swayed from side to side in his pulpit. And, as he launched into one particularly florid rhetorical trope, I did wonder if the “flower of grass” the reverend kept referring to was in fact the substance colloquially known as weed, or “wacky backy”, and if pot as well as incense were burning in the church’s censers. And there were moments in his sermon when I questioned if the young fellow believed in God at all. But that’s the modern-day Church of England for you: faith in the Lord is optional as long as the proprieties are nicely observed.

After the vicar had done sermonising I stepped up to the lectern. I read a few appropriately gloomy verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes. Then I explained to the congregation that, although I was my great-uncle’s only surviving blood relative, owing to an ancient family quarrel I had not known Sir Hamish from Adam, and therefore I could not offer up a fitting eulogy. In its place, I asked the mourners to share their reminisces of my great-uncle with me at the wake, so that I could know him in death, if not in life. After that I would attempt to eulogise Sir Hamish appropriately.

We duly laid Sir Hamish to rest in the churchyard and sprinkled earth and salt on his coffin. Then I invited the congregation to repair to my humble abode - a Georgian mansion which had once been the parish’s vicarage.

The wake was an authentically Scottish affair; what we sons of Alba term a “dredgy”. I had ensured that all the mirrors in the house had been turned to face the wall and the clocks had been stopped. But, above all else, I had not stinted on the food and drink, especially the traditional oatmeal biscuits and that liquor of life that Americans insultingly call “Scotch” - as though any other country could produce a whisky to rival our own. I was particularly pleased to serve - in unlabelled bottles - a single malt from a small distillery in our native Banffshire which does not seek the harsh glare of publicity, but which rather wishes to avoid the unwanted attention of the tax and excise authorities.

Almost all of Sir Hamish’s mourners were younger than him - when you live to the grand old age of ninety-eight you must not expect to be grieved by your contemporaries. Ethnologically, they were entirely white, wholly English with nary a true-born Scot amongst their number, preponderantly male, and predominantly in their sixties and seventies. In short, they were typical representatives of that subset of the Sassenachs that the more progressive youth of today scurrilously label “gammons”. Although the mourners did their best to talk like they had a plum in their mouths, many of them were obviously only middle class, if that. One or two of them even pronounced far too many consonants and far too few vowels (a sure indicator of working class roots), and they left the impression that they had been second-hand car salesmen or “independent financial advisers” or similar such spivs in their day. Judging by their braying nasal tones and their mien of entitled self-assumed superiority, I deduced that they had overwhelmingly voted for the act of national self-harm commonly known as Brexit, and that the majority of them had already outlived their IQs.

Overall, the tribe of mourners was best defined by their hatred of the “other” - the “other” being, collectively, benefits scroungers, immigrants, foreigners in general, the young, especially young black males, experts and intellectuals, and anybody not living a traditional and highly-repressed lifestyle. Several of them even sported the fake tan and enamelled teeth of that mahogany-skinned PoundShop gobshite Nigel Farage. As for the women amongst them, they were “all fur-coat and nae knickers” - all perfume and pretence and no sincerity.

Hamish’s mourners seemed awkward and ill-at-ease, even surly, as they assembled in my living room. A few of them exchanged hostile glances, as if they knew one another but were ashamed to admit the acquaintance. I circulated amongst them, offering them oatmeal biscuits from a silver platter and inquiring politely how they had known my great-uncle.

At first the mourners were wary, as if unsure that I could be trusted with their secrets, and many of them were unnerved by the videographer hovering over my shoulder. Besides, most of their attention was taken up by the buffet. So my questions elicited little more revealing than that my great-uncle had been “a splendid chap”, “the best of men”, and “a jolly good sort.” Occasionally, the mourners would intersperse their remarks with phrases like, “I say, this is top notch smoked salmon, you couldn’t get better at Fortnum’s.” And, “Ooh, is that haggis? Filthy stuff. Lord knows what nasty muck the jocks’ve stuffed in it.” And, “This is how the old fellow would have liked to go; no crocodile tears, only jolly good people having a jolly good feed.”

However, the free-flowing whisky gradually loosened the mourners’ tongues, and their stories took flight, like white swans rising up from the placid waters of a tranquil lake. At first, their anecdotes were no more than vague hagiographical platitudes, but after a couple more drinks they began, “Of course, one should always speak well of the dead, but your uncle…”

I began to notice odd discrepancies in the mourners’ tales: one venerable old dodder told me that he had saved my great-uncle’s life when his tank had been hit by a German 88 near Tobruk. Another veteran had flown Spitfires with him. An old naval type had pulled him out of the freezing waters of the North Atlantic when HMS Hood had been sunk by the Bismarck. In 1955 it appeared that Sir Hamish had led a most confusing existence: an old dear reeking with cheap scent suggested that he had been her lover in Monte Carlo; one of the “used car salesmen” claimed that he had shared a cell with him in “the Scrubs” (my great-uncle was apparently doing “a fiver” for insurance fraud); whilst an olive-skinned gentleman swore that they had been prospecting for gold together in Peru. I did not know what to make of it.

I started to believe that my great-uncle must have been a master of disguise. I was told he was clean-shaven, he had whiskers, he had a moustache; and that he was blond, raven-haired, and as bald as a coot. He was handsome (the ladies averred); he was not (the men demurred). The mourners could not even agree how plain Hamish had become Sir Hamish. One said he had been born a baronet. Another declared he had been knighted for selflessly renouncing Princess Margaret’s love. And a third claimed he was a cad and a bounder who had no proper right to call himself a “Sir” at all.

When I had first read the mourners’ letters I had glimpsed my great-uncle striding boldly towards me out of the mists of oblivion. In my mind’s eye I had pictured him as a cross between those great Scots Lord Byron and James Bond (as played by that other great Scot Sean Connery, of course). But I could not reconcile that debonair image with the coarse vulgarity of his mourners. I began to wonder what kind of man my great-uncle had been if these people had been his social circle. In my mind’s eye I pictured Hamish’s disembodied hand waving to me in farewell as he was swallowed up again by the swirling fog of time.

Then one of the grey-haired retired “independent financial advisors” cornered me.

“I’ll have you know that bastard your great-uncle owed me money,” he growled, placing his hand on my chest to detain me.

“Oh, dear! I’m sorry to hear that,” I parried, as my videographer dutifully recorded our encounter.

“It’s a terrible thing, when a man dies forgetting a debt of honour,” the “financial advisor” persisted. “I’m sure the old boy would have been quite cut up about it.”

“Well, Hamish did suffer from dementia at the end,” I pleaded in mitigation. “You should get in touch with his executors and show them your documentation. I’m sure the solicitors will do the right thing.”

The financial adviser’s face turned a bright crimson, like an ovulating female baboon’s buttocks, and he spluttered angrily, “It wasn’t that kind of debt, fool that I am. I took it that a gentleman’s word was his bond, and that paperwork was only for jews and lawyers. Ten thousand pounds I lent him, in 1973 money, too. That’s like half a million nicker today. And now the old bastard’s popped his clogs without coughing up.”

“Well, all I can say is that I’m truly sorry for your loss,” I murmured soothingly.

“Are you doubting my word?” the financial advisor accused me.

I didn’t reply.

“Well, that is just too much,” he exploded, showering me in his spit. “First, I was diddled by the double-dealing old swindler, damn his rotten bones. And now I’m being scammed by his brother’s thieving spawn.”

I removed my interlocutor’s hand from my chest and excused myself. The house had grown warm and stuffy and the dredgy was in full swing. The young vicar was gallivanting around the room in his surplice like he was dancing the conga and in one corner I could hear angry voices raised in argument. Meanwhile, a long queue had built up outside the downstairs lavatory, and a silver-haired gentleman was banging on its locked door with his fist and demanding urgent admission.

As I studied the scene the “used-car salesman” buttonholed me. “I bet the old codger was loaded, eh?” he slurred, his face flushed with drink. “He must have tucked away a fair few bales of hay in his barn.”

“Yes, I believe Sir Hamish left a substantial sum,” I remarked neutrally.

“Hey, you’re single, aren’t you? And you bat for our side, don’t you?” the used-car salesman went on. “It would be a crying shame if a respectable old family name like yours were to die out. Whaddayasay I fix you up with my grand-niece? She’s a pretty heifer and egg-sellent breeding stock. And she won’t mind if you play away a bit; just don’t rub her face in’t.”

“Oh, but I’m not inheriting any money,” I said. “It’s all going to the homeless.”

“What did the old fool go and do that for?” the salesman blurted, so outraged his face turned as pink as a boiled lobster. At that moment a waiter came by with a tray. The salesman swiped a fresh glass of whisky from it before going on, “if you ask me, the homeless are a bunch of scroungers. Shameless skivers, the lot of them. They’ll just waste his dosh on booze and drugs. Why on earth didn’t he leave his fortune to people like us, eh? People who’d have treated his money with the respect it deserves.”

I nodded sympathetically. It was indeed too bad.

Sensing my regret, the salesman drew me aside and hinted, “You must be pretty cut up about it, eh? All that money leaving the family. Maybe the old codger went a bit a gaga at the end? You know what they say; where’s there’s a will there’s a way…”

“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me,” I replied innocently.

The salesman arched an eyebrow and proposed confidentially, “What do you say we find a will with a later date on it? I’ve got a pet solicitor. Muslim, but drinks. You know the type. No scruples at all; dodgy as ‘f’ but a damn useful fellow. I’m sure he could fix you up with a spanking new will for a modest cut of the proceeds. Whaddayasay? God helps those who help themselves, eh? And people like us should stick together.”

“People like who?” I wondered idly.

“You know, the English; I mean the British,” the salesman replied. “Cripes, you Scots are meant to be even more tight-fisted about moolah than us.”

I was about to thank the salesman for his kind offer but to decline it when an old lady with blue-rinsed hair butted in. “Listen, I want a word with you, young man,” she declaimed aggressively. “There has been some mistake here. You see, I was dear old Hammy’s lawfully wedded wife. I believe that you have forged his will. This house rightfully belongs to me.”

“Oh, really?” I said calmly. “Would you care for an oatmeal biscuit?”

“Don’t think you can buy me off with a biscuit, young man!” she announced so sonorously that several bystanders swivelled round and gawped at us open-mouthed. “I demand that you hand over the keys to this house or else I will be forced to call the po-lice!”

I think the old biddy wanted to say more, but just then her guts betrayed her. She blushed and hurriedly waddled off to the join the queue for the downstairs lavatory, clenching her thighs together. Meanwhile a shriek came from upstairs as the lavatory there backed up and overflowed, and a puddle of urine leaked out from under its locked door. Downstairs, the olive-skinned gold prospector and his friends were banging on the loo door ever more urgently as their aged colons and bladders demanded immediate relief. Then, when its door finally swung open, they pushed and shoved one another in a frantic battle to gain admittance. At the same time great-uncle Hamish’s “lawfully wedded wife” had a most embarrassing public accident in the hallway.

Once the dam had been breached, so to speak, all pretence of decorum and gentility was swept away. The desperate mourners started pissing and crapping in the garden, and one even hitched himself up to evacuate his bowels in the kitchen sink.

It was time for my long-delayed eulogy for Sir Hamish. As my videographer faithfully recorded the scene, I stood on a chair in the drawing room and clinked an empty glass with a teaspoon. Once I had the attention of the remaining unafflicted mourners, I proposed a toast to my great-uncle, Sir Hamish Gordon Innes Crombie of Old Crombie.

A ragged chorus of “Hear, hear,” and “To Hamish” echoed round the room dutifully, and glasses were raised in toast. Under the circumstances, it was the least the mourners could offer up to the dear departed.

I surveyed Hamish’s so-called friends and acquaintance and continued, “I want to thank you all for sharing your memories of my great-uncle with me so generously. But did I say ‘memories’? No, I should have said ‘fantasies’. You see, there is no Sir Hamish.”

“I should damn well hope not,” spouted an old Air Force type with a handlebar moustache. “We’ve just buried the old dodder. I’d hate to think of him waking up in that damn coffin, buried under six foot of good English earth.”

“There’s not much chance of that,” I replied drily. “His coffin was empty. Except for a few bricks.”

“But I don’t understand. Is the old boy alive or dead?” asked a confused old lady.

“Neither. He never existed,” I replied drily.

“But his death was mentioned in The Times. Are you saying the Times got it wrong, young man?” the old lady questioned me disbelievingly.

“That was my bait,” I rejoined. “And you lot swallowed it hook, line and sinker.”

There was a sharp intake of breath and the room went as silent as the grave. The only sounds audible was a heart-rending groan coming from the downstairs lavatory, as if its unfortunate occupant’s bowels were being torn out of his body.

“What a damn peculiar carry on!” muttered “Hamish was James Bond” under his breath. “What about that priest? And the church service? They looked real enough to me.”

“Staged, I’m afraid,” I replied. “The village church is only used once a month and I have the key. As for the priest, he’s an actor friend. You may have seen him in EastEnders.”

“What the devil! I knew it!” shrieked “blue rinse” triumphantly. “This young man’s an imposter. He’s stolen old Hammy’s body and forged his will! Will somebody p-lease call the po-lice!”

“How could I possibly steal Uncle Hamish’s body when he never existed,” I retorted. “I invented him, and you lot added flesh to his imagined bones with your lies.”

“Well, I say, to invent a man’s death, that’s quite out of order,” growled the “financial adviser” threateningly.

“Is it? Is it?” I retorted. “You invented his life. And even an imaginary debt of honour which you tried to foist on me.”

“But what’s your game?” asked the used car salesman. “It must have cost you a pretty penny to stage this farrago. And why us?”

“Ah! Now we’re getting to the crux of it,” I replied. “I wish to thank you all for kindly participating in my little anthropological experiment.”

“What do you mean - austro-polotical experiment?” spluttered “Hamish was a desert rat” angrily. “We’re not lab rats. Or jungle bunnies or chocos. We’re English, dammit. We built the greatest Empire the world has ever seen.”

Before I could reply I heard a shriek from the garden. A man in plain view was squatting down with his trousers around his ankles and fertilising the roses as a horrified woman looked on.

“What’s going on?” demanded “handlebar moustache”. “What have you done to us?”

I surveyed the mourners and answered, “I’d heard rumours about a tribe of people like you. And I wanted to see for myself if you freeloaders existed for real.”

“How dare you call me a freeloader! I’m a freemason, and a respected member of the Conservative Party,” rejoined the “financial advisor”. “Every one of us here is a respectable member of society.”

A murmur of agreement ran round the room.

“Of course you all are,” I retorted acidly. “You vultures are so respectable that you scour the obituary columns of the posher sort of newspapers, pretend an acquaintance with the deceased, and then descend on their funerals to scoff and swill to your hearts’ content. Well, since you’re so full of it, I thought it was time for you scroungers to give back some of what you’ve obtained by false pretences.”

“What do you mean by ‘full of it’?” muttered “Hamish was James Bond”.

“I mean that you’re so full of shit that I laced the oatmeal biscuits with laxatives,” I replied. “I thought you could do with good purge. Now, smile, please; you’re on camera. You’ve all been participating in a documentary about people like you, called ‘Concerning the English’. You bawbags think you’re God’s gift to the world, but if you could only see yourselves as others see you, you’d soon change your tune.”

“What the devil! Nobody gave you permission to film us! I certainly didn’t,” blustered “handlebars moustache”.

“May I remind you that you are on my property, so you automatically gave your consent. That’s the law,” I retorted.

As my videographer retreated to a safe distance, the mourners glanced at one another, remembering that they knew one another from innumerable previous funerals.

“We’ve been had, boys and girls,” exclaimed “Hamish was James Bond”. “The bloody jock’s ambushed us.”

“Do you know what you are?” hissed Hamish’s “lawfully-wedded wife” viciously. “Pardon my French, but you’re a cunt, a prize Scottish cunt.”

“Exactly,” I replied calmly. “A Cunt of Old Cuntsby.”

For a moment Hamish’s mourners stared at me, like a herd of water-buffalo eyeing up a bothersome lion and deciding whether or not to charge. Then “handlebars moustache” let rip a stupendous fart and doubled over in pain. Suddenly, it was every man and woman for his and her self. The Sassenachs bolted for the doors, and emptied their bowels in our village’s gardens and lanes, and in their cars all the way home to suburbia.

Later, two ageing Beemers had to be pulled out of hedges by the local garage, and the coppers nabbed the retired financial advisor for drunk driving. Meanwhile, back in the village the “vicar” and I scooped and shovelled up the poop, and weighed it up, coming to the figure of four kilos per head - for as every true Scot (no matter how anglicised) knows, the English are quite extraordinarily full of shit.

I do not know what Sir Hamish Gordon Innes Crombie of Old Crombie would have made of his farewell fun-for-all had he existed. Perhaps he would have slapped his thigh, thrown his head back, and roared with laughter when he’d learnt that I’d given the “auld enemy” a long-overdue enema. Perhaps he would have coldly informed me that I was a disgraceful cad unworthy of his blood and cut me out of his will.

I only know that Sir Hamish’s mourners had the last laugh. For when I’d done mopping out the lavatories and fumigating the house, I discovered that two silver candelabra, a silver Christening spoon, and an antique carriage clock had gone missing. Because, as a quarter of the world knows from bitter experience, if you invite the Sassenachs into your home you won’t get them out again until they’ve dumped ordure over your carpets and filched your family silver. And the radge bawbags even expect you to thank them for the privilege of being, so to speak, colon-ised.

The Resurrection of Alfred E.

Be it known to all persons that I, William Percival Pease esq., Solicitor of the Courts of England, solemnly make oath and declare that the following is a true and full account of my encounter with Alfred E.

Not being a literary chap, or what you might you call “artistic”, I shall tell my story the only way I know - that is, by beginning at the beginning, and by going on to the end and then stopping. I have read in the newspapers that this way of writing is not “trendy” or “with it” any more, but I have never been mistaken for a fashionable or an impulsive man, not even when I was a trainee solicitor completing my articles. And those giddy heydays of my youth are long gone. As I write these words at 4.32 a.m. in a bare soulless hotel room I am sixty-four years old.

To begin my story, I had worked alone in my law office until late. Please do not think this odd. To be frank, I do not much like people. Do not misunderstand me. I am not angry with them. I have no axe to grind; no cause to promote. I am not even disappointed in them. I simply find it tiresome to pretend that I care for their trials and tribulations when I don’t.

So, except in the way of business, I do my best to have as little to do with people as possible. This is why I have severed ties with my family. I have a sister, and she has a son, but I ignore the cards they send me for my birthdays and at Christmas. I suspect that they are angling for an inheritance and I do not wish to raise false hopes. They will get nothing.

Thus, as an unmarried solicitor of an unsociable disposition and frugal habits, I prefer to work late in the evenings than to employ additional daytime staff. And, to be frank, even the intricacies of house-conveyancing are more entertaining than the tedious gibberish that is broadcast on television nowadays.

It was nearly midnight when I switched off my computer, shut the ledgers in the safe, put on my overcoat, set the alarm, turned out the lights, and locked the street-door. I am recalling these events precisely because I know that you will find it difficult to credit the tale I am about to tell, and, as man of the law by trade, I would not wish my last words to be doubted or contested in court. You see, I still have my professional pride. I have heard it said that hope dies last. It is not true, for I have lost all hope. It is pride that remains.

I stepped out into the street. It was a dark and dreary night in mid-November. It had rained during the day, but the sky had cleared and now it was turning cold. I had left my car at home, for I live within ten minutes walk of my office and I am grateful for the physical exercise. I find it reduces my regrettable propensity for haemorrhoids.

I shivered, gripped my overcoat tight against my throat, and walked with my head down. The streets of my town (one of those quintessential English seaside resorts whose economies were ruined by the advent of cheap package holidays to Spain and which are now the end of the line for ageing drug addicts and washed-up alcoholics) were deserted. My footsteps rang out confidently as I strode along and I did not feel a day older than forty-five.

As is my wont I cut across the graveyard of a mock-Gothic church. As I closed its gate behind me, the church-tower’s bell clanged midnight like a spoon banged against a metal saucepan. At the same moment the full moon cleared a wisp of scudding cloud and its brilliant light illuminated the graveyard. Perhaps it was because I had been drawing up the monthly accounts, or perhaps it was because we solicitors really do only care about money, but I thought that the moon looked like a silver coin worn almost blank by years of constant use. I jangled the loose change in my pocket in mute reverence. In reply the wind gusted, and the tossing yew branches cast fingery shadows across the graves.

It was then that I heard it - a faint cry. I stopped and looked around, fearing that our town’s lamentably numerous heroin addicts had started to use the churchyard as a shooting gallery. Instinctively my hand closed over my wallet. However, as I peered into the darkness, I saw nothing untoward, only mossy headstones and moon-shadows.

I persuaded myself that the cry was a stray female cat in heat. However, as I was about to walk on, I heard the cry come again, louder now and clearly human. My heart jumped a beat and the hairs of the nape of my neck stood on end. I turned off the gravel path, waded through some dank sopping grass, and bent down over the grave from which I thought the cry had emanated. After a few seconds the noise came again, this time accompanied by a feeble knocking from inside the earth.

My blood ran cold as I imagined some poor soul buried by mistake had woken up inside their coffin, and that they were crying out to me from that stifling and terrifying darkness. But when I examined the grave’s headstone, it was moss-covered and overgrown, and I could only make out the half-obliterated name “Alfred E…” and the weathered dates “1833-18…”

It was absurd. I told myself that I had been working too hard. But then the cry came again, louder than before, accompanied by a muffled knocking on wood, as if the grave’s occupant had sensed that salvation was agonisingly near. I knew, as a practising solicitor, that it is always a bad idea to get involved in other people’s business - unless you can bill them for your time and trouble, of course. But curiosity got the better of me. I had to know who or what was buried in that grave. I could not walk away. I had to act.

I looked round. Near the gate of the churchyard a wheelbarrow had been left propped up against a wooden shed. Next to it was a pile of rotting compost, and sticking out of it there was an old spade. I fetched it and started to cut away the turf. Beneath the grass the earth was loose and easy to dig, and it smelt of humus and earthworms. Soon I was standing in a hole two feet deep. The unfamiliar physical exertion made my heart thump painfully and my head pound, but whenever I paused to breathe I heard the cries and knocking coming from below. I could not stop. I had to go on. It was like I was in a trance.

At last my spade struck wood.

“Hey, you be careful up there,” a croaky voice called out from inside the coffin. “You carry on like that and a body might get hurt.”

I stumbled backwards in surprise and sat down in the dirt. I got back up, lifted my head out of the hole, and looked round the churchyard, worried that I’d been heard, or worse, seen. I pictured the scandal of a respectable solicitor being discovered exhuming old graves in the dead of night, and I broke out in a nervous sweat. But, luckily, nobody had seen or heard me.

I picked up the spade again and cleared the loose earth away from the wood. Then, so anxious that I could scarcely breathe, I dug the edge of the spade into the crack between the coffin and its lid, and levered them apart. The half-rotten coffin lid bowed and bent, and then broke apart with a loud crack.

A half-whiskered grey-haired man lay motionless inside the shattered coffin. His skin was a ghostly chalky-white and he was dressed in an old-fashioned charcoal suit. For a moment I thought he was a wax doll or a well-preserved mummy. But then the dead man opened his eyelids and looked up at me. His eyes were as grey as a January sea.

“Well, you took your time, squire,” he grumbled in an old-fashioned accent as he sat up. “So who’ve I got to thank?”

The pain shifted from my chest to my jaw. I stammered out my name. Then I asked in amazement, “But who are you? And how did you get down there?”

“You sound like an educated man but you do ask some dumb-fool questions,” the man retorted, picking dirt and splinters off his suit. “You know my name already. I’m Alfred, Alfred er... oh there I go, forgetting my own name again. Any road, I’m Alfie to my friends, of whom you’re not one, so don’t get familiar. You can call me Mister, proper and respectable like. And I got in here the usual way. I died. Worst mistake of my life.”

Alfred was so surly that I wasn’t afraid of him, even though I wasn’t sure if he were alive or dead or undead. “Pleased to meet you,” I murmured.

“Much obliged I am, too, I’m sure,” Alfred replied, pushing aside the broken coffin lid and thrusting a pallid hand up at me.

I could count the bones in his hand through his glassy skin. I stared blankly at the faded ship’s anchor tattooed on its back, not knowing if it was good manners or good hygiene to shake hands with a corpse.

“Bless me! What’s wrong with you?” Alfred griped stroppily. “Ain’t you going to help a body get out of this hole? Are you a good Samaritan or not?”

I took his hand. It was cold and clammy, like a dead fish. I pulled hard. Alfred stood up in his coffin. His head came up to the level of the ground, and he turned round to look at his own headstone. Once he had deciphered the timeworn inscription, he snorted, “Well, thank the Lord for small mercies. At least they didn’t bury the wife in with me. That prude, she made my life a proper misery; always banging on about my fancy girls and my swearing and drinking.”

Alfred clambered out of his grave, muddying his hands and knees as he did and cursing under his breath. As he stood on the grass, he shook an earthworm from his trousers with a peculiar disgust and looked down at a hole in one of his soles. “Damn her eyes, the stingy fish bucket buried me in my old boots!” he griped. Then he looked round the crowded graveyard, whistled softly under his breath, and exclaimed: “But would you look at all these stones! It used to be quite roomy in here. I guess that’s progress for you!” Finally, like a man asking casually after the time of day, he inquired: “So what year is it now, squire?”

I climbed out of the grave as well and told him.

“Well, I’ll be jiggered! I overslept my watch alright,” Alfred exclaimed. He coughed and patted his empty pockets forlornly. Then he leant towards me, and whispered conspiratorially, “Listen, I know it’s late, but it’s been donkey’s years, and my gullet’s as parched as Egypt’s sands. There used to be a pub, opposite the harbour mole, it didn’t close all night. You just knocked quiet-like on its shutters and the landlord let you in. I bet it’s still there. I hate to cadge, squire, but dammit, the wife was too stingy to even put pennies on my eyes.”

I could understand how a man might be dying for a drink after more than a hundred years trapped in his own coffin. Nonetheless, I hesitated.

“God save us, are you too tight-fisted to stand even a dead man a drink?” Alfred complained.

It is true that I am a careful man, and that I seek to count the cost and calculate the consequences of any particular course of action before I commit myself. But I did not think it fair that Alfred E. should criticise me for my circumspection. He did not have a reputation to consider. However, my hands were shaking and I thought a shot of whisky might help calm my nerves. So, despite my usual caution, I told him to lead the way.

Alfred walked clumsily, weaving from side to side of the narrow streets like we were on a ship in a rolling sea. Then, just as I thought he was getting the hang of bipedal locomotion again, a car whooshed by at a crossroads and I barely managed to pull him out of its path.

“What the blazes! Where are that damn carriage’s nags?” he blurted out in his shock. “Invisible horses, who’d have thought it? That must be what they call the March of Mankind! Well, you’re the officer on deck, you’d better read your mate the ship’s log.”

I stared at Alfred, not understanding his gist.

Alfred explained, “You know, squire, like Queen Victoria, even she must be dead by now. And how’s the grand old Empire doing? Does Britannia still rule the waves?”

I told Alfred about the two world wars and the loss of our empire; and about the discovery of relativity and penicillin; and about the invention of motor-cars, aeroplanes, telephones, computers, and atom bombs; and about how men had walked on the moon. I was happy to talk. It was reassuring to hear my own voice. I felt in control of my own destiny again.

I thought Alfred would be awed by our achievements. But when he’d heard out me out, he just spat and grunted, “I got you, squire. More machines. More money. More madness. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?” He walked on a few more steps, then stopped and gazed up at the full moon for nearly half a minute. At last, he shook his head in disbelief, turned to me and asked, “But what about the important things?”

“What do you mean - the important things?” I wondered, unable to conceive of what could matter more to humanity than our comprehension of the cosmos and the spectre of nuclear Armageddon.

“You know, squire,” Alfred explained, “are the girls still as pretty? What’s it like to watch a babe take its first steps? Can you still smell the salt on the morning breeze? Where’s the best beer? And how are the Town doing in the footie?”

My mouth opened and closed but no sound came out. I did not know the answer to his questions.

Alfred stared at me with naked contempt and muttered, “Oh, I get it. That’s why you were working so late. And why you don’t have a family, most like. You’re that kind of man that hides his face in books so he don’t never have to face up to life. It’s ink that runs in your veins, not blood.”

I was offended. Alfred was being impertinent and ungrateful: I had rescued him from the grave. I wanted to explain to him how times had changed, but I knew he would not understand my lawyer-talk about the calamitous financial consequences for a moderately successful professional man of marital breakdown. Or how teenagers nowadays did nothing but sponge off their parents so that they could buy drink and drugs. Instead, to change the subject to a safer one, I coolly remarked that he had hardly spoken kindly of his own wife.

“Aye, and a hard-praying woman she was, but she gave me five bairns,” Alfred retorted vigorously. “You, you’ll never know the joy a man feels when he cradles his young in his arms.” Then, all of a sudden, sorrow ghosted across his gaunt features, and he went on, “Only my one boy, he died, he did. We buried him in an apple box he was so small. It proper broke my heart. But I suppose you could say that’s life, too.”

Alfred looked away and snuffled quietly, like he was trying to hold back tears. I didn’t intrude on his grief; a good solicitor never lets a conversation become too personal. Even in the bitterest divorce cases it always pays to disregard emotional outbursts and to focus on the money.

We turned a corner in silence and walked along the empty sea front. A stiff breeze skimmed a salty spray off the foaming breakers and grey clouds raced across the night sky. “It’ll blow a Nor-Easter good and hard tomorrow. It’ll be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, don’t think it won’t,” Alfred muttered at last, and I understood that his heartache had eased.

The pub was where Alfred had said. Despite the late hour, its facade was festooned with strings of brightly-coloured light bulbs and its windows were lit up. Alfred marched straight in the drinking hole. The barmaid looked at me oddly as I followed in his wake, but only in the usual way that barmaids look oddly at professional men when they bring penniless tramps onto their premises in the dead of night. I bought two pints of bitter and two pork pies at the bar and brought them to the table at which Alfred had sat down. But Alfred didn’t touch his vittles or his ale. He just watched me drink and eat, his cold grey eyes hungrily following every sip and bite that I took.

“It must feel good, eh, slurping that beer? And that pie, it must fill your innards up nice inside?” he griped enviously.

He was right. It did feel good. And I had not even noticed it.

“Take it from a man who knows,” Alfred advised me, “you’re dead a long time. Enjoy life while you can.”

I looked him in the eye questioningly.

“Yes, dammit, it does that, too,” Alfred answered my unspoken thought. “You ache for a woman so bad it hurts, but you can’t have one, not for nothing. Not even your own wife, damn her bones.”

I took another bite of my pie and washed it down with a gulp of beer, savouring them both. My heart was calmer now and it felt good to be alive. I even felt proud that I had, so to speak, “discovered” Alfred.

“So what did you do, well, before you know what?” I asked my protégé.

“Before I popped my clogs, you mean? I was a master mariner. I sailed the tall ships before the mast,” Alfred bragged. “We brought home tea from India and rum from Jamaica and spices from Java and opium from China. I crossed the line a dozen times.” Then he winked and broke into a grin, revealing a mouthful of yellow stubs instead of teeth, and recalled, “And in every port you can be sure there was a girl, squire. Black ones, brown ones, white ones, yellow ones; girls of every possible colour. Oh, me and my mates, we had such fun in them days.”

I thought he wouldn’t mind me asking, so I did.

“Oh, that. I had an apoplexy,” he said, casually tapping his chest. “My pump’s tubes got all clogged up. And then one day the main pipe burst. Just like yours did.”

I did not like hearing myself talked of in the past tense. We all like to think that we’ll live forever, and even mentioning death in polite company is a social faux pas worse than flatulating at a dinner party. But I made nothing of it.

Now I am not what you would call a religious man, but I could not restrain my curiosity. After all, my companion was only the second man in recorded history to have risen from the dead, and the first instance was, so to speak, unproven in court and entirely dependent on hearsay evidence. So I asked, “Is there, well, you must know, like in the Bible…”

“A heaven or hell?” Alfred finished off my question. He shrunk his shoulders into a shrug and went on, “I couldn’t say, squire. I wouldn’t know. I never was much of a believer. I left all that gibberish to the wife. To my mind, maybe there’s both, but you get them before you die.” His eyes misted over and he concluded, “And with the same woman, too, most like. You marry a dream, but before your eyes she turns into your worst nightmare.”

Alfred looked down at his untouched beer, and I discerned that, for all his cursing, he had once loved his wife. Of course I had also formed fleeting romantic attachments in my youth, but I realised that, if I were honest with myself, I could not say I had ever loved any woman. I had always held a part of myself back. I recalled my companion’s words about ink and not blood running in my veins, and I wondered if I had ever truly lived at all.

The pub’s door opened and closed and a couple of strangers walked into the saloon bar. They sat down in a dark corner silently without ordering drinks. I sensed my heart skip a beat again and I felt giddy and weak at the knees.

Alfred E. didn’t notice my discomfort. Instead he patted me on the shoulder and murmured confidentially, “Come on, squire, you’re only human. Admit it, you’re wondering what it’s like down there in the dirt, eh?”

I must have nodded, because Alfred went on, “Well, mostly it’s regrets. Not for the things you did do, good or bad. Mostly you can live with them. No, the worst of it’s regrets for the things you didn’t do. The girls you didn’t ask to dance. The ships you didn’t sail. The ports you didn’t tie up at. The life you didn’t live.”

I thought he’d said his piece, but then a look of horror came over his pale bloodless features, like he’d seen a ghost himself. “And the worms, the worms,” he whispered hoarsely, “you lie there in the pitch dark in that blasted box, listening to them wriggling towards you, and there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop them crawling into your mouth and eyes and eating out your memories.”

Without thinking, Alfred reached out for his pint of beer, but his hand passed right through the glass without spilling a drop. In his annoyance he swore like only a man who has sailed the high seas before the mast can.

A few more harmless night-people wandered into the pub. Without buying drinks they stood around the bar, silently motioning to one another with signs.

I felt the pain in my chest and jaw come again. “So what are your plans now?” I asked my companion, to keep up the pretence that we were just two casual strangers having a drink and nothing was out of the ordinary.

“My plans, squire? Now there’s a thorny question,” Alfred muttered, shaking his head. “I guess my home, well, it was only a cottage, but even if it’s standing, and it’s still in the family, it’s not really mine now, is it? I can’t imagine my great grandchildren will be overjoyed if their great grandfather comes back from the dead and robs them of the roof over their heads.”

As Alfred talked I mused idly how questions of inheritance could become rewardingly complex should resurrection become a commonplace phenomenon. Alfred looked me in the eyes, like he was looking straight into my soul. “Aye, you’re right, squire. There’d be a fortune in it,” he went on. “I bet all those clever wills you drew up never considered circumstances like mine, did they? A good lawyer could make a killing if us dead rise up and walk again.”

He broke into a cackling laugh. But I didn’t laugh with him. Instead, I felt dizzy with fear. Because I hadn’t told him what I did for a living. He just knew.

Alfred didn’t notice my consternation. Instead, he rambled on, “No, it won’t do, pestering my descendants, bless them. I guess I’ll have to tramp about a bit and sleep under hedges. Any road, it’s a damn sight better up here than down there with the worms. And if a copper asks me where I’m going, I’ll just have to say I lost my train ticket, won’t I?”

Yes, that was it, I thought. Alfred had lost his train ticket. Or maybe I had lost mine.

Alfred cackled at his own words. But I wasn’t listening to him now. More and more lost souls were coming into the pub. Even though it was the dead of night the saloon bar was getting crowded - only no one was talking or drinking. The air was turning cold and clammy, like I was in a morgue. The pain darted from my jaw to my left hand. Suddenly, I felt so tired that I felt that if I closed my eyes I could sleep for years. I knew instinctively that I had to get out of the pub whilst I could. I downed my beer, glanced at my watch, stifled a fake yawn, and said that I’d better call it a night.

“Well, go on home, squire, if it’s past your bedtime,” Alfred remarked, unimpressed. “I guess you’ll never learn that life’s too short to waste in sleep. But, mark my words, as you lie in your box you’ll be sorry you never danced the darkness down to dawn.” Then, as I stood up, he asked again, as though he’d forgotten already, “Eh, what year did you say it was again?”

I told him again.

“Who’d have thought it? Who’d have thought it? Doesn’t time fly!” he exclaimed, and whistled under his breath.

I started to walk out of the pub. But then it came to me - the question. I turned back to Alfred and asked him, “Why? Why me? Why tonight?”

Alfred stared blankly at me, feigning that he didn’t know what I was talking about. But I knew that he could read my mind. And I had to know. I had to be sure.

“Why me? Why tonight?” I insisted. “I must have walked home through that churchyard a thousand times. And you were buried there all those years. Why could I only hear your cries for help tonight?”

Alfred shook his head in disappointment, as though I’d failed a simple intelligence test. “And I made you for a proper headucated man, squire,” he replied. “I guess it’s like the old song goes: those who blow their horns the loudest often have the thickest fogs in their skulls.”

I didn’t know what he meant. Then the penny dropped. I felt my heart race uncontrollably. My knees turned to jelly and I gripped the back of a chair just to stay upright.

Meanwhile, Alfred picked up his beer glass, gestured towards the other shadows in the bar, and chuntered, “Us dead, we aren’t really rising up from our graves. It’s the other way about, squire. It’s you who’s coming down to join us. It’s your ticker; the main spring’s broken. It’s your time. You won’t live to see sun up.”

Alfred drank his pint of beer down in one, belched, and smacked his lips with crude pleasure, as though he had been dying for a drink for a century or more. I watched the liquid drain down his half-transparent throat in horror. Then a wave of sound broke over my ears, and I heard the roar of voices and the clinking of glasses and the tinkling of an old-time piano as the night-people partied the night away. I panicked. Mumbling insincere apologies, I pushed and shoved my way through the bar’s clientele, desperate to escape. Behind me voices cursed and muttered, but I didn’t turn and look back.

I reached the pub’s street door and staggered out onto the sea front. I gasped in the cold night air. For a moment I thought that everything would be alright. But then I felt my heart stutter and stop, and I was overcome by a numbing black despair. I slumped against a lamppost, sweating and panting horribly, and crippled by an agonising cramp that started in my chest and spread throughout my body. Then, after a pause that felt like eternity, my heart beat again.

I don’t know how long the cramp lasted. But, very slowly, it eased. The numbing black despair lifted and I breathed again. I glanced back at the pub, wondering if the old sailor were partying inside it. But the pub’s windows were dark, its door was locked, and the unlit light-bulbs strung across its facade looked like hollow glass tears. I decided that the barmaid must have called time whilst I’d been slumped against the lamppost.

Or, perhaps…

I began to hope that my encounter with Alfred E. had only been a crazy hallucination and that the dead weren’t really rising from their graves. But I had to know. I had to be sure.

I staggered unsteadily back to the town centre, stopping in the pool of dim light beneath each lamppost to catch my breath. I didn’t think about telephoning for an ambulance, because if Alfred had been real then it was too late for doctors and hospitals. And if Alfred had only been a dream then I’d got nothing to worry about.

I shuffled past my office, out of which I’d stridden so confidently only an hour or so before. I caught sight of my reflection in an unlit shop window, but I barely recognised the feeble bent old man I saw reflected in the plate glass as myself. I’d aged ten years in a single night!

I came to the church again. To my horror my encounter with Alfred E. hadn’t been a bad dream. In the centre of the cemetery I found the hole where I’d dug up his corpse. As I gazed down into the empty grave it hit me: the deafening banshee-like wailing of the dead shrieking to be released from the other graves all around me. And underneath the wailing I could hear another sound, like that of rats scuttling under floorboards: the sound of corpses desperately clawing with their fingernails at the wooden lids of their coffins.

The church-bell clanged one o’clock. I gazed up at church’s mock Gothic tower, pleading for help from the God in whom I’d never believed, even when I’d sworn on the Bible in court. However, instead of the heavens opening and a train of angels singing hosannas appearing in glory, the full moon just slid behind a bank of cloud. The churchyard went dark and I felt the ground shudder gently beneath my feet, like an animal in its sleep. Then the church itself trembled and shook as the dead honeycombed into its walls and floor all pushed open the lids of their tombs and sarcophagi at the same time. A moment later the church’s stained glass windows burst outwards, its buttresses gave way, and the whole edifice collapsed in a cloud of dust. Meanwhile, in the churchyard graves sank down into the earth. In each yawning hole a coffin burst open, and a ghost-white corpse sat bolt upright, opened its eyes, and looked round.

I staggered backwards, frightened that I was losing my mind. More and more ghosts emerged from the earth and swarmed around me, screeching and wailing horribly. Their touch was cold and clammy, like damp sheets flapping in the wind. I closed my eyes and jammed my fingers in my ears, trying to shut them out. Then, terrified that at any moment a grave would open beneath my feet like a trapdoor and I would be plunged downwards into a bottomless black pit, I dashed blindly out of the graveyard, only stopping when my racing heart cramped up again in the street.

I leant against a chestnut tree to recover and looked up at the cracked sky through its bare branches. I was certain now that Alfred E. hadn’t been lying, and that all that was left to me was to die in darkness. Then I remembered Alfred’s horror of the worms and I realised that I couldn’t go home. No, I had to find somewhere where I knew my body would be found when my time came.

I staggered back to the town centre. The dead now thronged its streets like the living do every Saturday morning. A few of the ghosts looked at me curiously, as if they were puzzled how I could see them. But most of the shadows only gazed into nothing and jabbered to themselves, like lunatics or teenagers with mobile phones.

At last, I found what I was looking for: a neon sign blinking “HOTEL”. The hotel’s door was locked, but I rapped my signet ring on its plate glass. After a couple of minutes a young night-porter appeared, yawning and pulling on his liveried jacket.

“Busy night?” I asked distractedly, as I filled out a registration card in a shaky scrawl.

“No, only you, Sir. The town’s as quiet as a graveyard,” the night-porter replied, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

I glanced behind me. The dead were clearly visible through the hotel’s windows, but the young man couldn’t see them. They were real only to me.

“Are you quite sure you’re alright, sir?” the night-porter asked as he gave me a room key. “You’re as white as a sheet. I could call a doctor if you like?”

“No, no. I’m fine, I’m fine,” I stammered guiltily. “I’m sure you know why a man checks into a hotel in the middle of the night without any bags.”

“Alas, we all have arguments with our loved ones,” the spotty youth replied glibly. “Have a good night, Sir.”

So here I am writing this affidavit on hotel notepaper, waiting for the dawn to break with the same dread a condemned man faces his execution. As I look out of my room’s window it is still dark outside, but soon enough the sky will begin to grey in the east.

I am dog tired but it is too late to sleep now. My end is racing up to meet me; my failing heart aches, and every few seconds it skips a beat. Already I am experiencing bitter regrets for the life I did not live and for the love I did not give: regret that I never danced naked in the rain; regret that I never told a woman I loved her; regret that I never cradled my newborn offspring in my arms; even regret that I never let tears for a dead child fall from my eyes. And I feel an overwhelming terror of worms munching through my face and eating away my memories as I lie helpless in my grave.

This bleak soulless room will be a lonely place to die. But it is better that the chambermaid has an unpleasant surprise in the morning than that my corpse lies undiscovered at home for several days whilst it bloats with gas and flies lay their eggs in my mouth and eyes. I have left the poor woman a generous tip - an exceedingly generous tip - to compensate her for her understandable distress.

And so I, William P. Pease, solicitor of the courts of England, being of unsound heart but of sound mind, wish to to append the following codicil to my last will and testament:

• I no longer wish for my body to be placed in a coffin and buried in the ground. Nor do I wish for my body to be cremated. Rather, I desire that my body be dressed in my best clothes, and placed inside a glass capsule that may be easily opened from the inside.

• I desire that this capsule be placed in the conservatory of my current abode.

• I also desire that every endeavour be taken to prevent the entry into the capsule of flies, maggots, worms, bacteria, and all other agents of decay.

• I furthermore desire that the capsule shall be equipped with a working telephone, and that a generous supply of banknotes and gold coins be placed about my person.

• Finally, I hereby cancel, annul, and void all financial arrangements in my current will and disinherit my current beneficiaries absolutely. Instead, I decree that my entire estate shall be placed in a trust which shall be used to maintain and secure my abode in vacant condition in perpetuity, for my spirit to haunt in peace.

Signed and Witnessed: William P. Pease, Solicitor

Editor’s Note: Mr. Pease’s terror turned out to be well-founded. The hotel’s Polish chambermaid discovered his corpse the following morning. However, as she barely spoke English, she believed that this affidavit was a suicide note. Fearful that she would not be allowed to keep the generous cash tip that Mr. Pease had left her if she disclosed the note to the police, she concealed these papers from the authorities. As a consequence, Mr. Pease’s death was recorded as from natural causes (heart failure), and he was buried and his estate distributed as per the instructions of his pre-existing will.

It is only now that Mr. Pease’s affidavit has come to light. Inquiries have been made regarding its veracity. The church concerned is still standing, but it has been determined that a grave was indeed disturbed in its burial ground that night. However, no sightings have been reported of the ghost of Alfred E.

As for the unfortunate writer of this document, he rests six feet down in the earth, hopefully in peace, and not listening to the sound of worms as they crawl into his coffin, and eat away at his mouth and eyes…

Pitt’s Paradox

Extracted from the journal of Rev. Bartholomew Pitt, Naturalist

December 2nd, 1786

At first glance I assumed that the creature was a hoax.

I am, of course, familiar with the fanciful creations of the Chinese taxidermists, who sew together the body parts of sharks & lizards & swans & goats & monkeys & unfortunate orphans in order to confect “angels” & “mermaids” & “imps”, which they pickle in jars of formaldehyde & tout to credulous travellers along the wharves of the Orient. However, upon closer examination of the creature’s hide, I could not see any of the tell-tale stitch-marks that are habitual in such frivolous deceptions. So, despite my first misgivings, I purchased the skin from a sailor recently returned to London from the South Seas, intending to place it in my cabinet of curiosities.

I had chanced upon the hide’s owner in a public house in Billingsgate. The sailor was “half seas o’er” with strong spirits, but he conveyed to me that his whaler had been blown off course by a typhoon & that it had drawn fresh water in van Diemen’s Land. He had bartered the creature, then still alive, for a pocket-knife from the savages that inhabit that part of Terra Incognita Australis.

He had housed the creature, which he referred to as a “mole-duck”, in a cage on the whaler’s deck & he had attempted to tame it. However, the ungrateful creature had rewarded his ministrations by striking him with a spur located on its hind leg which contained venom. The poison had been exceedingly painful &, in the words of the sailor, his thumb had burnt “like Lucifer’s own blazes.” After several days of agony the ship’s barber had been obliged to amputate the sailor’s thumb; a bodily mutilation which my intoxicated interlocutor saw fit to brandish in my face. The so-called “mole-duck” had subsequently refused to eat ship’s biscuit & shortly thereafter had perished. Its innards had been served up in a stew by the whaler’s cook & pronounced good eating by all who partook of it. Fortunately, the sailor had successfully cured the beast’s skin.

The sailor accepted a glass of gin, a mutton pie & a guinea in gold for the creature’s hide. I fear I haggled but poorly & had I let the old tar swill more I could have purchased the skin for less. But I was anxious to return to my parish in Hackney before nightfall & it did not seem proper for a gentleman of the cloth to promote public drunkenness.

To describe the creature’s skin, it is of a quadruped about the size of a large rabbit. However, I am persuaded the creature is no earth-burrower. Rather, its dark brown fur is as short & fine & thick as an otter’s coat & its front & rear paws are webbed, from which I surmise that its native habitat is aquatic. Its tail is broad & short, somewhat like a beaver’s paddle, & it evidently once held the creature’s store of fats, as with our own goats. Needless to say these traits are all characteristic of animalae of the class mammalia, as described by Herr Carl Linnaeus in his great ordering of nature, Systema Naturae.

However, I have searched the creature’s skin most diligently for nipples & found none. Nor can I discern a navel. Furthermore, unless there has been a mistake in curing the skin, the beast has only one rear vent for the purposes of excretion, urination & reproduction; that is, a cloaca, a trait which every taxonomist knows is typical of the class amphibia. As indeed is its employ of venom, for innumerable snakes, toads & lizards produce poison, but no mammals.

Moreover, I have not yet come to this creature’s most astonishing feature. Growing above its mouth is a plate of ludicrous appearance, somewhat resembling a duck’s bill, although the creature is most definitely not of the class of the aves, that is, of the birds. The bill itself is not horny & brittle, but somewhat rubbery. The creature’s mouth lies directly beneath it & I hypothesise that the bill is in some manner a greatly modified nose, similar to the proboscis of the elephant. However, whereas the function of the elephant’s trunk, that is to drink water & to manipulate objects, is immediately evident, I can not conceive of the purpose of this creature’s peculiar appendage.

I have closely examined the cuff of skin between this bill & the creature’s hide for signs of manipulation, but I have found no signs of fraud. I am therefore convinced that the skin is the remains of a creature as paradoxical as the chimera, the part-lion part-goat part-snake of myth. And yet the beast is no aery illusion of a poet’s fevered imagination. It lies before me on my desk as real & substantial as the horse in my stable or the domestic fowl in my yard.

As the creature’s discoverer to science, it will be my privilege to christen it, as once it was Adam’s honour to name the common beasts. I confess it fascinates me. How did it come to be how it is? And where it is? For if Nature is God’s sermon, & if by studying His Creation we may know more closely the mind of our Creator, I ask why did our all-loving & almighty Lord God fashion this strange animal? The goat, the cow, the dog, & the humble bumble bee, these all serve Mankind in some manner. But what possible use has this bizarre beast to God or to Mankind? What higher purpose does this spiteful “mole-duck” serve? And why did our Lord hide it away on the other side of the Earth, far from his chosen people, where only the most primitive & godless savages abide?

It is a mystery indeed!

April 3rd, 1787

I have been rebuffed where most I sought admittance & repudiated by those whose esteem I most crave. It is  insupportable, but bear it I must!

Wishing to apprise the scientific community of the peculiarities of my paradoxical creature, and eager to earn a reputation as a Naturalist of importance, I exhibited its skin to the Society’s fellows, whose company I have frequented with pleasure on previous occasions, & into whose ranks I am desirous to be elected. At first my hide aroused curiosity, for there has been great interest in the fauna of Terra Australis since Captain Cook brought back the hide of a kongourou aboard the Endeavour.

However, when I read my paper on the creature the learned gentlemen’s curiosity turned first to skepticism, then to incredulity, & finally to outright disbelief. I believe the stumbling of my speech, for I am afflicted since childhood by an unfortunate stammer, did not aid my cause. Perhaps my clerical collar also provoked the learned gentlemen’s mirth, for the Society’s fellows are notorious free-thinkers & scoffers at organised religion.

The crisis came when I had finished describing my creature’s physiognomy, and I questioned whether it should be classed as a mammal or as a reptile or as something new & previously unknown to science. Finally I dared propose that it should be named Pittus paradoxus - that is to say “Pitt’s paradox” in our vulgar English tongue. For if our monarch King George III can be so bold as to claim an entire continent as his possession by the act of planting his flag upon its soil, why should I not claim this singular beast as my own from my possession of its hide?

I fear it was this audacious attempt to immortalise my name that caused the learned gentlemen to shake their heads & to mutter in disapproval, for there is a blinkered (and to my mind, out-dated) convention that one should not name a species after oneself. The unrest rose to such a level that I had to abandon my paper with my peroration unread. The general opinion was that I was an innocent dupe of the Chinese taxidermists, but I sensed that my own honour was not beyond question. I was particularly incensed by one gentleman’s observation that my creature had no place in a temple of science & that its hide were better displayed to the hoi polloi at the Royal Exchange, alongside the tumbling dwarf, the bearded woman & such like fanciful extravagances. Even the great Linnaeus was not so ridiculed when he included such dubious beasts as the monoceros or unicorn, the phoenix & the draco or dragon, under the order monstrosi in his encyclopaedic catalogue of nature.

To add to my discomfiture, as I was leaving Somerset House, I was drawn aside by Mr. Banks, the Royal Society’s President. He regretted that the Society could not consent to the publication of my paper in their Philosophical Transactions, for “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, & a single hide of doubtful provenance was insufficient backing for my large claims. Etcetera, etcetera.

Thus I am dismissed in disgrace & my creature remains nameless & unrecognised by science! I am a proud man, and the humiliation cuts deep.

Nonetheless, I shall be vindicated, for though “the mills of God grind slow, they grind exceeding small”. I have contracted privately with a certain Captain Anderson of the ship Cerberus, who is to set sail shortly with a cargo of convicts - thieves, bankrupts, worn-out whores & such like dregs of our society - for our proposed penal settlement in Terra Australis. In return for a generous commission he is to fetch me further specimens of my creature. As a country parson of thirty-eight years of age, unmarried & possessed of a good living, & of that middling estate, neither too high nor too low, which philosophers ancient & modern agree is the happiest state of Man, I thank the Lord that I have sufficient means to pursue my quest for knowledge in this wise. I am a fortunate man!

I must exercise patience, for Captain Anderson’s circumnavigation of the globe will take nigh on two of our planet’s circuits of the sun. Also, I must pray fervently for his vessel’s safety when it rounds the dreaded Cape Horn. But, if God wills it, I shall prove incontrovertibly that my Pittus paradoxus is no fraud, nor I any fraudster; & that, instead, my “mole-duck” occupies a unique place in our Lord’s creation.

Until that day dawns, I must busy myself with my sermons, & with my studies of the insects & fowl native to Hackney.

December 13th, 1787

It is Saint Lucy’s day, the darkest day of the year, and the day on which Annette, my servant girl, was born.

I am sat in my armchair in my inner sanctum, my study, drinking an infusion of tea & eating the sweet-meats that Annette has brought in. The house is still. Only the crackling of the fire in the hearth disturbs the hush. From where I am sat the flickering of the fire’s flames is reflected in the glass frontage of my cabinet of curiosities. Behind the play of fire I can see my particular treasures on its shelves: my globe, my herbarium, my well-thumbed edition of Linnaeus, my collection of beetles, the ivory tooth of a type of whale called a narwhal (which the ignorant commonly mistake for the horn of the mythical unicorn), a lump of sweet-smelling ambergris (which is the vomit of one of the great whales), several beads of amber (one of which encases a beetle of a peculiar morphology), & in pride of place the hide of my Pittus paradoxus.

As I sit here in my “den” I lack for nothing. Though I am not immune from the urgings of the flesh & I am in possession of a good fortune, I most certainly do not lack for a wife. For who would willingly tie a knot with his tongue that he can not untie with his teeth? No, a discreet visit when required to a certain establishment in the Haymarket is sufficient in that regard. And, though I love to turn my globe with my fingers & to picture foreign lands in my mind, I have no desire to venture upon the high seas or to seek my fortune in our colonies. No, I am content with my lot; my world is round & orderly & complete.

I suppose that I have always been possessed by a mania for classification. As an infant, whilst my older brother & his fellows would play rough & tumble in the woods, I would sit quietly at my mother’s knee, sorting through her needlework basket & settling her needles & threads & thimbles & buttons neatly in their ordained pockets. I can not express the tranquility I felt when I was so engaged. Never again have I felt so certain of God’s goodness.

Later, when I had mastered pencraft, I affixed labels to all the pots & pans & other implements in the kitchen, with the name of each & every object & where it should be kept stored written out in my careful hand, to the great amazement of Sarah, our cook. At school I took a particular pleasure in Latin, with its plethora of cases & declensions, whilst in the holidays I made an inventory of my father’s library & organised his books by author on its shelves - no small endeavour!

Given this peculiarity I was inevitably drawn to the study of natural history with its precise divisions of all vegetable & animal life into kingdoms & phyla & classes & orders & families & genera & species, & its multitude of names to be conned & memorised. Some of my happiest & most untroubled hours have been spent sketching & cataloguing my collection of beetles & ordering them in little boxes by genera & species. And truly our Lord God has singularly blessed we entomologists, for He has created beetles in the most extraordinary abundance for us to classify!

In my darkest hours (for I am periodically afflicted with a poisonous necrosis of the soul) the world threatens to overwhelm me with its terrifying tumult & disorder. At such times not even my beetles or the smiles of Annette are able to dispel my dejection. But by naming each object that presses in on my consciousness & by thus so to speak cataloguing it, I find I can impose a limit on the bedlam in my mind & obtain some relief from my despondency - for I believe that through the mere act of naming an object in some wise we cast a spell on it. Indeed, was it not by naming the elements that Almighty God first ordered the primordial chaos & separated the light from the darkness & the waters from the land?

It was, I suppose, this compulsion for order (as well as a younger son’s need for a living) that drew me to holy orders. For, as a priest, I keep two cabinets in my mind. In one I file human virtue in little drawers labelled chastity & temperance & charity & diligence & kindness & patience & humility; & in the other I file human sin in drawers labelled pride & greed & wrath & envy & lust & gluttony & sloth. In this way I tidy away the muddle & chaos of my flock’s all-too-human affairs. And all that remains for me is to perform the ceremonies required of a village priest, that is to christen, to marry & to bury my congregation, & to lecture them on Christian virtue for a quarter of an hour on Sundays.

It grows late. My fire has burnt down to a bed of embers & I can hear a mouse scratching beneath the floorboards. It is more than six months since the Cerberus set sail. She must have rounded the Cape of Good Hope & be approaching the terra nullius of Australia by now. Before I take to my bed I will pray for Captain Anderson & her crew.

May the good Lord bring all those who venture on the high seas to safe harbour!

September 20th, 1788

Lauda finem! Praise be to the end! Today I have completed my monograph on our native English songbirds.

My faith has been unexpectedly shaken by its making. In the course of my study I observed sundry nests of dunnocks, meadow pipits & warblers discovered for me by Thomas, my gardener. By my count no less than two-thirds of these nests were visited by a female cuckoo. At first the interloper would hover hawk-like over the songbird’s nest, the barred plumage of her breast & her square tail imitating the appearance of the songbirds’ natural predator, the sparrowhawk. Once the cuckoo had startled the mother songbird off her clutch, she quickly laid a single egg in each nest before departing. The songbird’s own eggs she left untouched. Shortly after the cuckoo’s visitation, the mother songbird returned &, unable to recognise the interloper’s imposition, she resumed the incubation of her clutch.

As far as I can discern the cuckoo builds no nest of her own & relies on this fraud to procreate. It is wondrous that the cuckoo’s eggs, though a little larger than the songbirds’ own, closely imitate in pattern & colour those of her hosts. And this even though the dunnock’s, the meadow pipit’s & the warbler’s eggs are dissimilar to one another. I know not how the mother cuckoo works this prodigious deception.

A fortnight later, I witnessed the newly hatched cuckoo-chick cruelly murdering its innocent step-siblings by pushing them out of its nest, for it tolerates no rivals for its step-parents’ affections. Then, as the summer progressed, it was terrible to behold this monstrous parasitical chick, grown to many times the size of its step-parents, so incessantly & voraciously demanding food from them that it drove them to their deaths of exhaustion.

Truly the cuckoo is an abhorrent bird. It perpetrates a heinous outrage on its hosts’ natural love for their own young. And yet it does not sin, for it is merely acting according to its innate instincts. So how can it be that our Lord God who directs us to love our neighbours as ourselves, not only permits such an epitome of ingratitude to exist, but indeed created it? How can He combine such wanton cruelty towards harmless songbirds with His supposed bounteous love for all living things?

Understand me rightly. It is not that I do not believe in God. I am not so foolish as to be an atheist. The idea that a creature so miraculous as Man assembled itself from nothing, without a Maker, is too absurd for words. How could such a complex mechanism - featuring such marvels as a beating heart, breathing lungs, seeing eyes & a functioning brain - have somehow made itself? It would be like finding a gold pocket watch in a glade & believing that the timepiece assembled itself from the leaf litter & detritus scattered over the forest floor. Such a thought is a folly so patent no man of reason could ever countenance it!

Nor do I question God’s omnipotence. To question the power of our universe’s Maker would be equally absurd. No, I only question God’s benevolence. For if Nature is God’s sermon to us, & if by studying His creation we may know His mind, of what goodness can one speak of a Creator who created the cuckoo?

I have no answer to this perplexity. For what is God if He is not good? But as I seek out God’s countenance reflected in His creation, I do not perceive the face of the New Testament God of forgiveness. Instead I behold the stern Old Testament deity who commanded his chosen people to slaughter the Midianites, man & boy, & to rape their daughters. For is not His creation as pitiless & bloody as that savage edict? Such a God must be feared, but He can not be loved!

And what does it speak of us, creatures created in God’s image, that we have permitted such a monster as the cuckoo, which indeed is listed as an abomination in the Book of Leviticus, to be celebrated as our herald of spring?

These reflections disturb my soul. I sleep poorly, in fits & starts, for I am a sinner like other men, & I have need of God’s love & forgiveness. But what if He has none? What if He is the God of the cuckoo?

I have no news from Captain Anderson, nor indeed can expect any, until he returns home. Or not. By my estimation, the Cerberus should currently be battling the perilous winds & waters of Cape Horn on the final leg of his circumnavigation of the globe. I shall pray again for his vessel’s safety before I take to my bed.

March 21st, 1789

Praise be to the Lord! The Cerberus has anchored safely in the pool of London!

In the morning I will ride up to London. I am in a mania of impatience & curiosity. Shall I have the proof I require of my creature’s existence? Shall I be vindicated? Shall my reputation as a naturalist be restored to me? And will the learned gentlemen of the Society elect me to their number?

It has been two long years of intellectual agony. Tomorrow I will know all!

March 22nd, 1789

Captain Anderson has excelled himself beyond all expectation. He has brought back a pair of my creatures from Terra Australis - alive!

I rode up to London & was shown to the Cerberus’s mooring. Most of its crew were ashore, “drinking & whoring or worse, most like,” as the Captain was pleased to put it. Those men who had remained on board were of a most unkempt & ferocious appearance: their clothes were ragged & their hair untrimmed, their flesh was unwashed & tattooed like that of savages, & their language was unGodly & barbarous in the extreme.

I went below decks. The very timbers of the ship stank of confined humanity. In Captain Anderson’s narrow cabin I was greeted by two of my creatures imprisoned in wicker cages. I can scarcely describe the emotion that swelled up in my breast as I watched them scamper about in their cages. Had I been another man I would have hollered in triumph: I had my vindication!

Over a bottle of Madeira wine Captain Anderson told me of his voyage. The colonists had set sail in a convoy of two warships & nine transports with eight hundred and nine convicts aboard, which number was increased by seven babies born to loose women en route. Though the convicts packed into the ship’s hold had suffered horribly in the stifling heat & had been sorely afflicted with thirst, the Cerberus had made good time & it had only lost five units of its cargo in transit - two whores & a new born babe from the lack of water, & one thief killed in a fight over ship’s biscuit, whose murderer the Captain had summarily hanged from the yardarm to deter further squabbles.

After eight months at sea the convoy penetrated the coral reef that protects the shores of Terra Australis & dropped anchor at Botany Bay. However, the colonists quickly found the proposed site of their settlement unsuitable, and moved to a better suited cove & there began to build their huts & to farm the land. The convicts were much discomfited by hunger & by the thieving of the natives. Captain Anderson described these natives as utter savages, ignorant of the use of metal & of farming & of any form of law, with only the use of fire & stone tools to raise them above the level of brute beasts.

In the Captain’s telling Terra Australis (or “that damned devilish hell-hole” in his parlance) is a hostile, scorched, God-forsaken land. He lost three men to snake bite, spider bite & scorpion sting, whilst the remainder of his crew fell sick with strange fevers or were plagued to distraction by bull-ants, leeches & biting insects. Even the plants of that new land were hostile to the settlers’ plans: the Captain told me of a brood mare which foolishly browsed on the leaf of one shrub & which then became so violently deranged that it had to be shot.

As for the new continent’s fauna, Captain Anderson said his men had shot a running bird which looked something like an ostrich or a cassowary, & also many kongourou, which were good eating. He related that the kongourou hops about swiftly on its hind legs & that the females have a pouch in their belly inside which they keep their young, much as a housewife might keep her keys & purse in a pocket of her smock. I confess this description amused me!

I inquired if he had seen any of our native creatures there, bar the farm animals the colonists had brought with them aboard the ships. The Captain answered that the beasts & fowl of Terra Australis had been wholly novel to him, excepting one swan. However, unlike our own swans, this contrary bird had sported black plumage. “Rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno” indeed!

Captain Anderson’s account of this strange new world perplexes & confounds me. Why did our Lord see fit to make two entirely separate creations? And of such different character, since by the Captain’s account, almost every creature in this perverse new world is poisonous or otherwise hostile to Mankind in some wise. What is the meaning of it? Did the kongourou lie down in Noah’s Ark to escape the Flood alongside the lion & the lamb? I find it hard to countenance. Or was Terra Australis somehow spared the flood, even though in the Book of Genesis we read that the firmament’s waters closed over even the highest mountains on Earth & that all the animals of the earth not housed inside the Ark were drowned? And, for that matter, whence came such a huge volume of water? And whither has such it flowed away since? Or should I doubt the foundation of my faith - the truth of God’s Word as given to us unworthy mortals in the Bible? I know not what to make of it.

To return to the Captain’s tale: after four months riding in harbour, the Cerberus was dispatched to carry news of the new colony’s fortune back to London. Before their departure Captain Anderson’s men succeeded in netting a freshwater creek & capturing two of my beasts. The beasts had thriven aboard his vessel on a diet of chopped fish. I thanked him fulsomely, paid him his commission in gold & said I would send a cart to collect the creatures.

I thought that was the end of our business. But, as we were about to part on deck, Captain Anderson halted, jingled my guineas in his waistcoat pocket & said he hoped, as a man of God, I would not be offended, but he had one more curiosity to show me. Naturally, I was much intrigued by this introduction.

I followed my guide down into the ship’s hold. There in the foul-smelling darkness I saw a pair of brown eyes, more frightened than frightening, staring back at me. As my own eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw the eyes belonged to one of the savages of whom the Captain had spoken. He was naked bar a pair of tattered breeches & he was shackled by an iron collar around his neck, to which a chain had been fixed, as one might chain up a ferocious guard-dog.

Captain Anderson explained that his crew had roped & tied this blackfellow & a female as they had attempted to pilfer some of their supplies shortly before their departure. It had seemed equitable to the Captain that, as he had transported common English thieves to Australia, so he should transport these native thieves back to England, supposing there might be some value in their public exhibition.

Once the Cerberus had cleared the sight of land the two savages had roamed freely aboard ship. However, the female had been so foully misused by the crew (wild men all) that she had suffered a dislocated pelvis &, in excruciating pain, she had hurled herself overboard & drowned. After that mishap this fellow had become sullen & morose & the Captain had considered it prudent to chain him up in the vessel’s hold. Though reluctant to learn at first, the blackfellow had mastered a few words of our English tongue on the voyage home.

I must admit the presence of the savage placed me in a quandary. There is some dispute in law about whether “the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe”, for our law makes no provision for subjugation but neither forbids it absolutely.

Likewise, the Church of England does not object outright to the institution of slavery. It is evident from the Old Testament that the Hebrew patriarchs kept both concubines to share their beds & chattel slaves to till their fields. The twenty-fifth chapter of the Book of Leviticus specifically decrees: “Both thy male slaves & thy female slaves, which thou shalt have, shall be of the Heathen that are around you; of them shall ye buy male slaves & female slaves.” Nor is this approval of human bondage limited to the Old Testament. In the New Testament St. Paul returns a runaway slave to his master, thus upholding the institution by implication. Indeed, in our own time, the Church benefits richly from its sugar cane plantations in Barbados & Jamaica, which are worked by negro slaves uprooted from Africa.

However, despite such ancient precedent, I believe slavery is “a custom best honoured in the breach than in the observance.” If I had been present in Terra Australis I would have encouraged the release of the thieves, with perhaps a whipping to discourage repetition of their pilfering. But now the savage was here in England there was no going back on what had been done, for it may be many years until a new fleet is sent out to our nascent colony. Thus, if I did not take responsibility for the savage’s bodily & spiritual welfare, the likelihood was that he would be sold to another master & put on public display. Then, when the public had tired of the novelty, as they invariably do, the savage would either be sold on to another, crueller master & worked to death, or he would fall prey to the surgeons & his body used to practise their butchery.

So, having but little choice in the matter (or so I conceived), I bargained with Captain Anderson for his captive. And, for the price of twenty guineas, I am become the owner of a slave. I shall not drive a nail through my new possession’s left earlobe & into my doorpost, as the Book of Leviticus instructs us slaves are to be marked. Nor shall I keep him bound in chains. Instead I shall treat him with kindness & instruct him in our faith, in the hope that the Lord will have mercy on my soul.

I write this at home in Hackney, having returned from London saddlesore & dog-tired. I have hired a carter to bring my purchases here on the morrow & I eagerly anticipate their arrival.

March 23rd, 1789

My creatures have arrived by cart. To prevent their escape we opened their cages inside my walled garden. I was correct to surmise the beasts were aquatic, for as soon as they realised that they were at partial liberty, they sought security in the lily pond in the centre of my garden.

Their gait on land is interesting: their legs extend sideways from their body in the reptilian manner, rather than supporting them from underneath, as is typical of mammals. Once in the water the creatures swim powerfully, using their two webbed front paws in turn as paddles, whilst holding their back paws sleek against their body. We allayed their hunger with earthworms dropped into the water, which tidbits they devoured voraciously. Fortunately, the weather is mild & their mammalian fur seems to insulate them sufficiently against the cold. I have warned my servants (that is Sarah, my cook, who came with me out of Sussex, Annette, my servant girl, & Thomas, my gardener) that the creatures carry poison & that they are only to be handled with leather gauntlets. My people are greatly afraid of the creatures & I do believe, if I were not their protector, they would be killed forthwith.

The savage also arrived by the same means, running on his chain behind the cart. He was a picture of misery, bound by the iron collar around his neck, caked in mud & shivering against the cold. To look at him I was reminded of the ancient dictum: “I thank the gods that I am a Greek & not a barbarian; a free man & not a slave; & a man & not a woman.” For at that moment I was truly grateful to my Maker that I was bred an English gentleman & not born a savage!

I asked my new possession his name, but he stared blankly at me, as if he did not understand my question. So I will call him Christian, in the hope that he may become one, so far as his apprehension allows.

My first act of friendship was to release him from the iron collar & its accompanying chain. Once unshackled he looked around my garden warily, as if he could scarcely countenance his freedom. For a moment I thought he might run & we would have the trouble of recapturing him, but Annette fetched a plate of jam tarts from the kitchen. The savage gazed gog-eyed at the pastries & then gobbled them up greedily, thrusting them with both hands into his mouth & smiling broadly as he chewed open-mouthed - for his manners leave much to be desired.

I shall now attempt to describe him. He is a young man of perhaps seventeen or eighteen summers of age. His skin is the colour of tea, his hair woolly, his beard thin & wispy, & his nose wide & flattened & to my eyes of a repugnant appearance. In contrast, his brown eyes have a natural quickness about them. The teeth are strong; the lips full; the skin smooth.

So much for the head. The body is splendid; lithe & muscled, the body of a runner of long distances. The male parts have been circumcised, as with the Jews. The feet are wide & flat, & their soles thickly calloused from a lifetime of walking without shoes. I dare say if you saw a young stallion in such fettle at a fair you would purchase him & enter him in the Derby!

According to Captain Anderson in their native state the savages go about without clothes. However, as our climate is considerably less clement, I have given Christian some of my old shirts & breeches & a wool blanket to keep him warm. I do not trust him so bladed tools are kept from him & I have forbidden him the house. Instead, he is to sleep in my stable with my horse & dog.

Naturally the arrival of such an exotic stranger caused much curiosity & consternation in the village. I have had many calls from local children, the elder of whom consider the newcomer to be a devil or gypsy or bogeyman, or some other monstrous outsider fetched from their storybooks. The younger children, in contrast, scarcely notice the colour of his skin & after playing with his hair awhile, they befriend him.

I am uncertain how to classify my new possession. My master, Linnaeus, in the Tenth Edition of his Systema Naturae, argues against Man being a separate kingdom of nature & of divine origin. Instead, he concedes the animal nature of man, placing him in the order Anthromorpha, together with the quick-witted monkeys of the genera Simia (such as the orang-u-tan) & the incurious sloths of the genera Bradypus.

The learned Swede delineates four “varieties” of Mankind: Homo americanus rubescens, the unyielding, cheerful & free-spirited redskin of America; Homo europaeus albus, the light, wise & inventive white man of Europe; Homo asiaticus fuscus, the stern, haughty & greedy yellow race of Asia; & Homo africanus niger, the sly, sluggish & lazy black race of Africa. However, I believe Christian to lie outside this scheme, & to be a representative of a fifth sort of human, unknown to Linnaeus, whom I shall provisionally christen Homo australis primoplastus. That is, primordial man.

Whether Christian be a representative of merely a new sub-species of humanity, or a wholly new species I can not tell. According to Aristotle’s definition of a species (that is, that any male & female of one kind can couple together & produce fertile offspring) it is evident from many lamentable examples in our colonies that a white man may successfully copulate with the females of the three other varieties of humanity recognised by Linnaeus & sire fertile progeny. However, I do not intend to make test of this distinction with Christian by attempting to breed him with a white woman. It is too disturbing a thought to contemplate.

I confess I am troubled by Christian’s existence. Did our Lord create this primordial human race as He created us? Is Christian a lineal descendant of Adam & Eve, as we are? And, if so, why did our Lord leave Christian’s people in such an extremity of indigence & ignorance? Why did He deny them His blessings? Or is Christian the fruit of a second & lesser creation? Does he, like we do, possess an immortal soul? Can he be saved? Or is he ab initio damned?

I have no answer to these questions. I regret that I did not ask Captain Anderson if the female savage had a pouch in her stomach to keep her young, as the kongourou does. I shall write & inquire of him.

April 18th, 1789

My creatures have dug two burrows in the earthen banks of my lily pond, inside which they rest. They are mostly active at night, although I sometimes see them swimming at dawn & at dusk. They do not seem interested in my golden carp. Rather, they hunt for tiny creatures hidden in the pond’s muddy bed.

I was puzzled how the creatures detect their food at night & in such silty water; occasions when their eyes must be of little use. I decided on an experiment. I had Thomas catch one of the creatures with a net, a task he performed with understandable trepidation. I anaesthetised the creature with a drop of ether placed on my handkerchief. Whilst it was unconscious I examined it closely & determined that it indeed possesses a single cloaca, like a reptile. I was thus unable to determine its sex; or if, indeed, these peculiar creatures have a male & a female, as other animals do. Likewise, despite its thick fur, I could not discover any nipples. Thus, I can only conclude that if my paradoxical beast is a reptile then it is unlike any reptile known to science, & if it be a mammal then it is unlike any other mammal. As for its duck-like bill, it lacks teeth, as birds do, & it consists of two plates of a hard yellowish substance.

Before the creature recovered consciousness I placed a ribbon around its head, so as to blindfold it, fixing it with horse glue, which will weaken in water. Once it had recovered, I released it back into the pond, placing several live shrimps in the mud. Though unable to see, the creature swam through the water, swinging its head from side to side as it did. It located its prey & snapped it up with marvellous accuracy before its blindfold fell away.

Lately, it has been discovered (by Mr. Williamson & others) that our thoughts are electrick in nature, & similar (though weaker) to the charge of the electrick eel. Is it this electrick life-force that the creature senses with its bill? Does it use its prey’s own thoughts to doom them?

I have heard much the same said of Satan; that he can detect our wicked intentions & use them to lead us to our damnation. Is it not terrifying to imagine the devil sweeping over our houses at night with a great duck-like bill, sensing our most shameful & sinful thoughts & snapping up our souls, as though they were no more than tasty tidbits? I shudder at the thought, for who amongst us does not have secrets he would wish remained hidden and forgotten?

I shall now make some observations on Christian.

I directed Thomas to put him to labour on my land (which consists of my garden, a horse-paddock & a fifteen acre oak wood). However, he has little interest in any activity, such as planting, pruning, watering, or weeding, that does not bring him immediate reward. I believe he lives only in the present, without taking thought for the future, as well he may in his native clime where his winters are as comfortable as our summers. Furthermore, when mattocking up the earth, he has a vile propensity to seize upon & devour bugs & grubs. In a moment of misdirected generosity he even divided up an earthworm & offered me a half. I refused in disgust & he was offended. I regret my action now, for it was a proffer of friendship.

Our domestic animals are as unfamiliar to him as his native creatures are to us. At first he was much afraid of Argus, my mastiff, though since they have become the best of friends & they sleep together in my stable. He stood stock-still & gazed open-mouthed in amazement the first time he saw a rider dismount a horse. I do believe that he had thought he was looking upon a whole creature, like a centaur, & he was astounded when it fell apart into two living halves. Milking likewise astounds him.

He ran & hid when he first came upon a windmill. Perhaps, like Don Quixote, he beheld not a machine for grinding grain, but a terrifying giant brandishing whirling blades in its four wheeling arms. As for the blacksmith’s forge, he will not go near it. I suppose the hammering of iron unhappily reminds him of his former collar & chain.

My attempts to interest him in religion have so far fallen on stony ground. However, he gazes at pictures & prints with fascination. As an experiment I gave him an old hand-mirror. When Christian caught sight of himself in its glass he jumped up & down with excitement & babbled in his own tongue. However, when his reflection did not reply he grew frustrated & threw it down. Then, realising that the mirror was not a window through which he could communicate with his own people, & that he was merely gazing on his reflection, he began to whimper inconsolably.

He does not sit on his tail-bone, as we do. Rather he squats on his haunches to rest. Yesterday I found him like this in my barn. Beneath him he had placed the mirror on its dirt floor & he had made a sort of path across it from different coloured pebbles. I inquired of him what it meant, & he explained in his broken English that the mirror was the great water that he had crossed, & that each stone was a memorable event on that journey. It was, I suppose, a kind of map or chart so that one day he could retrace his steps to his native land. I asked him what one particular pebble meant, but his face went dark & he refused to answer. Foolishly I persisted, & I asked him if the female savage who had been so cruelly misused aboard the Cerberus had been his woman or his wife. He muttered bitterly that she had been his mother, kicked away his memory stones, & wept.

After that I did not dare ask if she had a pouch in her stomach, like the female kongourou. I do not think so now.

I am sorry to say that my one real influence on Christian has been a bad one. I gave him a pipe of tobacco to try & he has quickly become addicted to it & he begs the weed from me at every possible occasion.

I fear to offer him strong liquor, or even small beer, for the effect it may have upon him, for he was not suckled on gin & milk to quiet him as a babe, as we English are.

In contrast to Christian’s defects as a labourer, his skills as a hunter are remarkable. He has fashioned himself a spear from a bough of a tree blasted by lightning, sharpening its point with the edge of a shattered flint & hardening it in fire. Armed with this weapon he prowls my woodland & hunts squirrels, rabbits & hedgehogs, with which he supplements his diet.

However, he does not understand fences or the laws of property. In his mind all animals are fair game & it is only with difficulty that I have restrained him from murdering my neighbours’ livestock. As for trespassing on their land, he seems to believe that the Earth is a living creature, & that we belong to it, as fleas might belong to a dog, & not it to us, & I can not bring him to understand otherwise.

My parishioners are much afraid of him. I have received a delegation requesting me to send “the darkie” away, or to chain him up before he commits some abominable outrage. I believe it is only my prestige as a gentleman & a priest that has saved him from a cudgelling, or perhaps worse.

However, I am more & more convinced that Christian is a person as others are, & perhaps more intelligent than many, & that we differ only in the colour of our skins & the fortunes of our birth. But, if that is so and we are of one kind, then how did his ancestors arrive on that terra nullius where all the other animals are of a different creation from our own? There is a profound mystery here. It seems most unlikely that a people who live so poorly could have built & sailed ships across the treacherous waters that surround that great island continent. But how else could they have found their way there?

On a lighter note, I can also report that Christian has a sweet tooth. Annette, who pities him, has been taking pastries to his stable. Yesterday her cone of sugar ran out. When Christian learnt of this, he ran into my wood & climbed nimbly a tree where he knew there was a beehive. Ignoring the stinging of the bees (which fortunately were drowsy at this time of year) he raided the hive for her, bringing home combs dripping with golden honey & smiling broadly despite the stings on his arms & face.

I am eating Annette’s honey-cakes with my tea as I write this in my study & I thank him for his feat, for they melt most pleasingly in my mouth.

April 29th, 1789

The cuckoo has returned from its wintering grounds. I hear its call heralding spring in my wood. I have given Thomas orders to shoot it on sight. The world would be better without it. It should not exist.

I am also troubled by Annette. She has completed sixteen winters & this spring she is blossoming into a woman. There is something of her mother in her smile & the way she moves & I think of her in a way I must not. I hope the devil can not detect the urging of my flesh!

Lastly, my melancholy is upon me again. My remaining faith in God’s goodness seems but the fragile flickering of a candle hemmed about with an immense darkness of night. And, as I stare into the void of disbelief, I sense its terrifying emptiness staring back at me & entering my soul.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I will complete forty years of age. I will ride into London & pay a visit to the Haymarket. Perhaps that will alleviate my abject despondency.

If only I could sit at my mother’s knee & order her sewing basket again!

May 25th, 1789

Argus, my mastiff, is dead.

Thomas had let him off his chain for exercise in my stable-yard. By accident or design I know not, (for Thomas is no friend to either Christian or to my “devil-rats”), he omitted to close the gate of my walled garden. Though usually stolid & phlegmatic, Argus scented my creatures & charged into the garden. As I looked down from my bedchamber’s window, I watched Argus plunge headlong into the pond. He seized one of the creatures in his jaws before it could find refuge in its burrow. A moment later he howled in pain & dropped the bloodied creature. Evidently, the beast had spiked him.

I hurried to the scene. Argus writhed on the ground as if he were being burnt alive. I watched him suffer terribly for half an hour but the pain did not subside. At last, I begged Thomas to fetch my shotgun & put the poor beast out of his agony, which he did.

As for the creature Argus attacked, it fled through the open garden-gate & onto the public road. It bled as it ran & I do not know if it is now dead or alive. Thomas offered to shoot the other “devil-rat” & to be done with “the damned beasts”, but I forbade it. The creature is too important to science. To lose one “duck-mole” is a heavy blow to my hopes, but to lose both would be a catastrophe.

Christian was deeply affected by the death of his friend. He sat over Argus’s corpse weeping & singing softly in his own language for an hour. He has now taken the dog’s body to my wood & wedged it between two branches halfway up a tree. I presume he is repeating the funeral customs of his people. I will not interfere.

I am angered by Thomas’s negligence & I must remonstrate with him. I must also warn my flock of the escape of one of my creatures & the danger of its poison in my sermon. I fear it will not improve their uncharitable disposition towards Christian.

May 28th, 1789

Thomas has shown me a strange thing that Christian has made.

At the heart of my wood there is a clearing where an old oak tree, its trunk rotten with fungus, fell in the storm of ’85. Where the sunlight penetrates wood’s broken canopy a copse of hazel has sprung up. In the midst of this copse Christian has made a sort of bower by bending & weaving the green hazel shoots into an arch. Beneath this arch he has scattered last year’s leaves to make a sort of bed, whilst at the archway’s entrance he has arranged with an artist’s eye various objects that he has collected in his roving - cornflower heads, shards of Delft pottery, robins’ eggs, a piece of painted wood, & two or three of Annette’s ribbons - all of them as blue as Annette’s own eyes. The overall effect is striking. I suppose it is a shrine to his one of his pagan gods or goddesses.

Thomas (who is fierce & narrow in his religion) begged my permission to destroy “this devilry.” He also proposed that we baptise Christian by force in the village pond “an’ if the heath’n won’t go, then duck ‘is head & drown ‘im.” But I will not consent to either suggestion. There is no coercion in matters of salvation. Christian must be brought to our faith willingly, if at all.

Alas, there have been no sightings of my fugitive “duck-mole”. I assume that it has either died of its wounds or it has been taken by a fox.

June 1st, 1789

As I laboured on my sermon this morning, my literary endeavours were interrupted by a loud splash. I looked out of my study’s window & saw an extraordinary sight: Christian had jumped into my lily pond & plunged his arm up to his elbow into the burrow of my remaining creature. Before I could cry out & warn him of its poison, he pulled his closed fist out of its burrow, grinning triumphantly.

I hurried outside & Christian unclasped his fist to reveal two small eggs. I begged them of him. The eggs were white & the size of marbles. Their shells were soft & leathery, like the eggs of a lizard.

Annette ran out of the kitchen. She quarrelled with Christian, upbraiding him for his recklessness. But he, as familiar with the creature as we might be with a rabbit, laughed at her fear & declared that he had used no courage at all, for only the male “duck-rats” (his chosen name for my creature) were poisonous & (pointing to the eggs as proof) the animal whose burrow he had raided was a female.

I was astounded, nay, dumbfounded, by the proposition that a creature with fur laid eggs. In my disbelief my first thought was that the eggs must have been deposited by a newt or a snake which had ventured into the creature’s burrow. To test the truth of my supposition I opened the two eggs in my study & examined their contents with my looking-glass. Naturally Christian was right: the minuscule hairless foetuses inside were the young of my paradoxical creatures - they must have paired before the escape of the male. I could even discern an egg-tooth, or caruncle, on the young creatures’ bills. Both embryos squirmed & wriggled a little before they perished.

I do not know how to account for this bizarre revelation. What disorder in creation can be responsible for an animal that so defies every rule of taxonomy? In my darker hours my creature seems to me to be one of those nightmarish combinant monsters pictured in the hellscapes of the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch.

Thomas is right: it is indeed the devil’s work!

June 3rd, 1789

Yesterday Christian told Annette a legend of his people which I persuaded her to relate to me. Christian talked of a time of dreams during which the world was made, recounting that in this time the land animals, the water animals & the sky animals went severally to the “duck-rat” to ask him to join their respective tribes. However, the “duck-rat” decided not to join any one tribe, but to remain apart, for he did not need to be a part of any group.

It seems that Christian’s people also sense the singular nature of my creature! I am more & more convinced that the beast holds the key to unlocking a great mystery.

Christian has also told Annette his name in his own tongue. She will not tell it to me, for she has made him a promise. Apparently amongst his people it is forbidden to share your name with strangers & knowing it gives her a power over him.

I must warn Annette about Christian’s attentions, for he is a favourite of hers & she does not sense the danger. I do not think he will force her, but his eyes do not leave her. I do not blame him. It is only natural that he wishes to elevate his blood. But it must not be. He has no prospects. And though Annette is illegitimate & a servant, I am fond of her like a daughter & I would see her raise her station in life. The blacksmith’s oldest boy, although coarse in speech, is sweet on her. He will inherit the forge, which prospers, being situated advantageously on the Great North Road. I am sure Annette’s love would improve the boy’s manners. I will encourage her to place her affections there.

June 5th, 1789

Alea iacta est. The die is cast! I have killed & anatomised the remaining beast, as science demands.

Thomas stopped up its burrow with earth whilst it was resting, so that it could not escape into the pond. Then he dug down into its refuge from the top. As he pulled one last clod of earth away he opened a window on a sight scarcely to be credited. Three tiny pink pups, no larger than my fingernails, lay wriggling upon the creature’s chest, lapping at a milky substance that had leaked out from her flesh & pooled in her fur. Beside the mother another egg lay, waiting to hatch.

I killed the creature by pressing a handkerchief dipped in laudanum to its mouth, so as to not damage its hide. I took its lifeless body to my office & dissected it upon my desk. I paid particular attention to its jaw, knowing that the arrangement of the bones at its corners is different in reptiles & mammals. However, I discovered that my creature is neither one thing nor the other, but a higgledy-piggledy mish-mash of both, as if an inferior hand had botched together a lizard & an otter. Whilst dissecting the creature’s mouth-parts I also noted that the branch of the trigeminal nerve that animates its bill was uncommonly large. This supports my hypothesis that the sensibility & discrimination of the bill is great, just as the sensibility of the hand is in man, or the trunk is in the elephant.

The creature’s hide I have sent away to London to be stuffed & mounted, alongside its unhatched eggs & one of its young, who I have directed shall be placed feeding on the creature’s milky breast. It will make a fine exhibit. I shall also clean & wire together the creature’s bones & make fair copies of my anatomical sketches.

I have not wasted the creature’s meat. It is indeed it is good eating, to my palate not unlike rabbit. Of the white substance that leaked from its breast, there was only an acorn’s cupful. But I tried it & it tasted much like milk.

I can not believe that the learned gentleman of the Royal Society will pass over my creature a second time, for I possess in abundance the extraordinary proof that even the most extraordinary claims require. I fully anticipate my soonest elevation to the rank of fellow.

July 14th, 1789

Alas, fear has grown from curiosity, & not familiarity. Any evil that happens in the parish is blamed on Christian. Though the Bible commands us to love our fellow man, Christian falls outside that definition in the eyes of my parishioners. He is a devil, a “darkie”, a less than human “other” on which any mishap can be pinned.

If my parishioners were to be credited Christian is a wizard of great power. If a horse goes lame or if the milk goes sour, then it is because Christian has put the evil eye on it. If a cow wanders out of its field & grazes upon a yew bough in the churchyard, its death is upon Christian. And if the rope frays & the bucket falls into the well then that is also Christian’s working.

There is an evil whispering in the village, particularly at night in the tavern. It is led by the blacksmith’s son, who foolishly supposes that this is the way to win Annette’s heart. I believe Thomas also rails against Christian in his cups. Last Sunday I deemed it necessary to remind my flock from the pulpit that Christian is my property, & that whoever deprives me of my property is guilty of theft, for which the penalty in this life is transportation to Terra Australis, & in the next damnation.

By such stratagems I aim to preserve my slave’s liberty!

July 21st, 1789

It was foolhardy, of course. I should not have shared my thoughts about the cuckoo’s true nature with my congregation. Such abstruse philosophical speculations are to be kept for the learned gentlemen & not shared with an audience of “coarse mechanicals”.

And now I have the consequence: a letter from my bishop inquiring into my “spiritual welfare”. That is, in plain English, his lordship is worried that a scandal is brewing in my parish. Evidently, he has informants amongst my flock. “Let God’s people believe God’s creation is good,” he reproaches me. “Do not frighten them with this talk of a devil-bird. Leave such fear-mongering to the Methodists. That is their stock in trade, not ours.”

In his letter his lordship also inquired about Christian. He does not criticise me directly for the possession of another human being. He is far too circumspect to venture into such a thorny controversy. No, as always, he is more concerned with the appearance of propriety than with the substance of morality. He wonders if it is appropriate to maintain “a savage” in such a tranquil corner of King George’s realm as Hackney. My parishioners, he informs me, are frightened that Christian will spear their cattle & rape their daughters. Etcetera, etcetera. His Lordship suggests it might be better if I sent Christian abroad, perhaps to the West Indies, where he could be employed in profitable labour. Perhaps, indeed, upon the Church of England’s own sugar plantations!

I know not how to reply. I do not mistreat Christian. I have unshackled him. I have never whipped him. How many fathers can say that of their own sons? Many a farmer treats his farmhands & his own children worse. I have no way to return him to his own people in Terra Australis, as I might wish. I refuse to sell him to another master, who will most likely maltreat him. And if I were to set him free & drive him away, what would I achieve? Dogs would be set on him were he to roam the roads of England. All I can promise to his lordship is that I will disarm my slave & instruct him to keep strictly to my land.

As for my unfortunate sermon on the cuckoo, I must obfuscate. I will supply a written copy of the offending disquisition to his lordship, as requested, but I shall omit certain passages. And I shall promise his lordship to speculate no more on God’s role in His own creation & His tolerance, nay, His apparent acquiescence, of evil. Henceforth I will limit myself to reading out his lordship’s own sermons verbatim from my pulpit.

In Paris the Bastille, that is to say the French Tower of London, has been stormed by a mob & the King of France’s prisoners confined inside released.

Everywhere old certainties fail & chaos reigns. My only refuge is my beetles!

August 10th, 1789

Calamity!

I have been mocked & driven out of the temple of science. I am mortified!

I rode up to London to find the city in ferment. The news from Paris is that the French King’s liberty is constrained. There is a palpable fear of an overturning of the social order amongst the better classes in the city & a scarcely concealed enthusiasm for a revolution amongst our own sans culottes.

But enough of politics; I care not for them!

I exhibited the articulated skeleton & the stuffed hide of my creature to the learned gentlemen of the Society. They examined both with curiosity, scarcely able to credit that a furred creature had a cloaca & one that laid eggs nourished its young with milk.

I also read the paper that I had prepared. The gentlemen listened attentively to my description of the behaviours of Pittus paradoxus, including its poisoning of my dog & its mysterious ability to detect the life force of other creatures with its bill. I then recounted my discoveries from my dissection of the creature. Although I sensed that some of the learned gentlemen were resistant to there being such a disorder in nature as to permit the existence of such a singular & paradoxical creature, I judge that if I had stopped there the evening would have been a success & my name immortalised.

Alas, it was the question of the cuckoo, the problem of evil, that drove me on to my ruin. I chose to speculate more broadly on the fauna of Terra Australis, that unexplored land beneath our feet where our midday is its midnight & our midsummer is its midwinter. Drawing on Captain Anderson’s experiences, I noted how its pouched land creatures were entirely different from our own beasts of the field, & how even its swan sported ebony plumage & not ivory.

I then rashly ventured beyond natural history into the realms of theology. I noted that in the histories & legends of all faiths, both pagan & Christian, hell was located beneath our feet, just as heaven was to be found above our heads. What if, I speculated, hell were not located in the innards of the earth, but on the other side of it, at its antipodes? Was not Terra Australis subject to scalding heat? Were not its fauna so misshapen & ill-favoured that they defied classification, & so poisonous & inimical to Mankind that even my humble Pittus paradoxus carried venom? Was it not possible that these perverse creatures had been made not by the master hand of our divine Maker, but that they had been bungled & botched together by an inferior craftsman in savage parody of our Lord’s original creation? That is, was it not possible that these monstrosities were the handiwork of the Prince of Darkness, Satan himself?

It was at this point the learned gentlemen began to look at me as if a lunatic had escaped from Bedlam & erupted into their midst. However, it was too late to turn back. To support my contention that Terra Australis was the underworld of legend I argued that the inhabitants of this “damned devilish hell-hole”, as Captain Anderson had termed it, were most likely the descendants of the corrupt & sinful people who the Bible teaches us were washed away in Noah’s great flood. And that was why the Lord had left them in ignorance of His religion; because He had damned them & all their generations & denied them His salvation. I concluded by urging the immediate evacuation of our colony in Terra Australis, for who could be so foolish as to settle Lucifer’s abode & to seek commercial advantage from it?

I finished reading my paper to a stony embarrassed silence in the hall. The silence was broken after a few seconds by a loud guffaw from one gentleman & a snort of “balderdash!” from another. A general muttering followed that the Society was no place for such religious ravings & that it was reserved for serious scientific inquiry. The meeting broke up with the consensus being that I was a lunatic & my creature almost certainly a fraud.

My heart boiled with a most unGodly rage at my honour being impugned in this manner. Being a gentleman of the cloth, mild by nature & not skilled in steel or lead, I dared not seek satisfaction from the fellows. Instead, I ground one of my molars down to the quick as I strode out of Somerset House in high dudgeon, more angry than I have ever been in my life.

May God forgive me, but I kicked a stray dog in the street in my wrath. I shall not visit the Society again.

So ends my career as a natural philosopher. Lauda finem!

August 11th, 1789

I shall never forget the look of utter helplessness in his eyes. Had he not been chained up I think he would have fallen on his knees & begged me for mercy. I dare say he would have even licked my riding boots!

But I did not defend him from the mob. Instead, still bitter & resentful from my humiliation at the hands of the learned gentlemen, I gave in to my nature. My true human nature. Because He who made the cuckoo also made me. And I, who by all rights should be a civilised man, reverted in my hour of trial into the worst kind of savage.

I had arrived back in Hackney around midday. I had stayed the night in a London inn, though barely sleeping a wink from chagrin & bed bugs. In the morning I had ridden out of the city with my mind in a tormented black haze, scarcely noticing the harvesters working in the cornfields or the woods in their summer glory.

There was an ominous silence in the village as I rode through it. The door of the tavern was open & it was empty inside, the forge’s flames were unwatched & animals were wandering about unattended. Then, as I passed the church, I heard a tumult coming from my house.

I dismounted & hurried through the rectory’s gates. In the stable-yard I saw a sight I shall never forget. Christian, as naked as the day he was born, was surrounded by a baying mob led by Thomas & the blacksmith’s son, with half the older children of the village amongst its number. Somehow the mob had managed to place the iron collar around Christian’s neck again & to shackle him to a post. The blacksmith’s son held in his hands the cup & shears his father uses to geld colts, whilst Thomas was holding a bottle of gin to Christian’s mouth. The firewater scorched Christian’s throat & he tried to spit it out, but Thomas roughly forced the bottle between his teeth. Meanwhile Annette, dressed only in her night-shirt, was wailing desperately for the mob to stop what they were about.

I discerned at once that she & Christian had been surprised in bed. I knew at once from the desperation of her pleas that he had not forced her, but that she had consented willingly to his caresses.

I should have stopped the savagery there & then. I should have ordered the mob off my land. I should have insisted on the law. But my pride was offended because I had been duped & deceived, & I was envious because in my secret heart I had lusted after Annette myself, & I was angry because Christian had presumed to rise above his allotted station, & I was covetous because I had supposed he was my property to dispose of as I pleased. But most of all I simply wanted to hurt, to hurt blindly, like an angry child, as I myself had been hurt. So I took the revenge of a coward who, when beaten by the strong, returns the blow upon the defenceless. For when Thomas asked me if I wanted to “breed devils” or if the rapist should get his just desserts, I nodded my consent for the mob to continue what they were about.

I shall never forget Christian’s howls as he lost all that he held most dear. The blacksmith’s son was the worse for liquor & unskilled & blood spurted out grievously from Christian’s parts as he emasculated him.

Once the deed was done Annette glared at me like her world had come to an end. I perceived instantly that she would never forgive me. A poisonous bitterness overwhelmed my consciousness. Determined to make the final break between us myself, I growled at her pitilessly, “This is your handiwork, hussy. Your mother was a whore & now you are made one as well.” Then I turned my back on her & strode into the house.

The mob slunk away like beaten dogs, knowing that they had worked evil. Annette unshackled Christian, helped him into the house & laid him in her bed. Sarah tells me that he has lost so much blood that his life is in danger.

I write this in my study, drinking strong spirits & full of regret. I have sent for the doctor to tend to Christian’s wounds & I have turned out Thomas. Let him find another master. Let him starve to death. I care not.

I pray to God for guidance but He is as silent as the grave. A dark chaos fills my mind, overwhelming my thoughts, & no amount of naming can drive it away.

All is darkness.

August 14th, 1789

We buried Christian this morning.

It was raining hard & nobody attended his burial except Sarah & myself. She had sewn his body into a bed sheet & between us we rolled it into a freshly-dug grave. Though I do not know if Christian accepted our faith at the end, I read from the Book of Common Prayer. Then I shovelled the dirt over him myself.

Christian lost consciousness in the night after his mutilation & developed a high fever. In his delirium he began speaking his own tongue & I think visited his own land in his dreams. Annette sat by his bedside nursing him for sixty hours straight. However, for all her ministrations & prayers, Christian’s fever did not abate & he died in the small hours of the third day.

I have my definitive proof, if I needed it, that Christian, for all his lack of manners, was as much a human being, a Homo sapiens, as I am. Though Annette had claimed it was their first time that they had lain together as she had begged for his life, her belly gives her the lie, for judging by her swelling she is three or four months with his child.

I discern now that Annette loved Christian with all her heart. I do not know how I could have been so blind, except that my own prejudice made me so. Like the nose in front of mine own face, the truth lay right before my eyes, but I could not see it.

I do not know what will become of her. In the village the word is that the blacksmith’s son will not have her now she is with “the blackie’s bastard.” She fell into a coma once she realised Christian had slipped away & we buried him without her. She is still sleeping like the dead now & I do not know if she will ever wake.

As for myself, I await another missive from his lordship the Bishop with dread, for the scandal is the talk of the village, & indeed the county.

August 16th, 1789

She knew. She knew.

Though sworn to secrecy, my old cook Sarah must have told her; it can only be so.

I awoke this morning early & rang for my usual infusion of tea. Annette (who awoke yesterday after sleeping for over twenty-four hours) did not appear. It was like the sun did not rise for me. I rang again. Again, no reply. I got up & proceeded in my nightshirt down to the kitchen. The stairs creaked beneath my feet. The silence in the house was evil.

I had been so afeared that I would find the poor girl hanging from a rafter that I was almost glad when I found the note addressed to me on the kitchen table.

But that was before I read it.

Annette accused me of killing Christian, of course. Even though I had released him from his chains & I had treated him with all possible kindness. At least, I had until I had been put to the test & my mettle found wanting.

But there was worse. “My mother was no whore,” she wrote, her usually neat handwriting rendered shaky by her white-hot anger. “My mama thought you would marry her, but you decided that she was beneath you. You ruined her. And the shame killed her. But the shame should be yours.”

I shook uncontrollably as I read her words & I blurted out to the empty house that it wasn’t true. Yes, I had refused to marry Annette’s mother, but she would have died in childbirth all the same had we been married or not. And she had been beneath me. She was the daughter of one of my father’s tenants; I was a gentleman’s son. And had I not taken care of her child as best as I could?

Annette concluded that she was gone to Portsmouth to take ship as a free-woman on the new convoy bound for our colony in Terra Australis. It seems that she & Christian were planning to elope together, but were caught in flagrante mere days before they could effect their escape.

Annette did not call me father, “for you are not worthy of that name”, nor bid me adieu, but there was a post script: “p.s. I beg you, do not leave him without a stone. So you may know what to write, his name was Bunga-karee. He was of the Kuringgai people.”

Sarah is gone as well so I am left without attendance. Perhaps that is as well, for I could not look her in the face.

I disgust myself. Though the law absolves me, I am responsible in some manner for two deaths. And for two ruined lives as well. I do not know why the earth does not open up & swallow me whole, unless it is as repulsed by me as I myself am.

I have written to my bishop resigning my living & in a few minutes’ time I will bid farewell to this house, mount my horse & ride on. I know not whither. I will let the road decide.

January 3rd, 1800

The new century is born.

So far it is much like the old. The hopes of the Revolution in France have ended as revolutions often end - not in liberty, but in an even more constrictive tyranny. Vive le roi Napoleon!

A few weeks ago I came across a yellowing & dog-eared copy of “Nature’s Miscellany” in the lending library here. A certain naturalist called George Shaw has described my creature based on a hide sent to him from from Terra Australis. Mr. Shaw has named it “Platypus anatinus”, or, so to say, “flat-footed duck”. He makes no large claims about the creature’s nature or provenance & so his work is accepted by science.

I could claim precedence & insist on my name of Pittus paradoxus, but I have no wish to reopen old wounds. It is many years since I last leafed through my copy of Linnaeus, or studied my collections of beetles & songbirds, or indeed opened this journal. Let Mr. Shaw have the glory of naming the creature - “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

Though it is no longer my concern, I have concluded that I entirely misunderstood the platypus. It is not misshapen & disordered at all. It lives. It feeds. It breeds. It survives & thrives in its native habitat, that is, the rivers of Terra Australis. In its place it is perfect - just as the camel & its hump are suited for the desert, & as the tiger’s stripes permit it to blend in with the foliage of its jungle home.

As for the platypus’s rightful classification in the catalogue of nature, & whether it be a reptile or a mammal or something else, & how it can came to be how it is, this is a mystery greater than I can solve. Perhaps this new century will bring forth an answer.

But I believe now I was wrong to seek out God’s reflection in His creation. That endeavour was no more valuable than speculating how many angels can crowd together on a pinhead, as the scholiasts did in the Middle Ages. Science & religion, like blood & milk, do not mix. We mock the ancients for believing that they could divine the future from the flights of birds or the entrails of sacrificed animals. Perhaps a time will come when future generations will similarly mock our first feeble attempts to comprehend the natural world.

I also now believe the true paradox of the natural world is not the platypus, but we humans. For we are at once almost God-like in our intellectual capacities & able to appreciate the music of a Mr. Haydn. Yet we are also an animal, capable of the most brutal & bestial deeds. As I know only too well from my own history.

How do I live?

I live without love, as befits a man who killed love not once, but twice.

I live without a past. I scarcely remember now that I once sat at my mother’s knee, sure that I was loved both on earth & in heaven. That child inside me has died.

I live in fear. I am frightened of being recognised in the street & exposed to public scorn. I do not think my heart would survive the shock.

I live without faith. I can not pray & I do not go to church. I reason with Epicurus: “Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able & willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?”

The rest of my tale I can tell in a few words. After I resigned my living I took furnished rooms in this seaside spa town in Kent where my name & past repute are unknown. I rely upon my private means, which are not ample, but which are sufficient to keep body & soul together.

I do not live a wholly solitary life. There are many ageing gentlemen here home from our colonies in Barbados & Jamaica, or who made their fortunes with the Royal Africa Company or the East India Company. One suspects that many of them have done dark deeds in their pasts, for no “primitive” on Earth is more savage than a white man hungry for gold. However, these men have sloughed off their histories with their return & they pretend to an honour that they most likely do not merit. They have a hollowness about them, as if they left some part of themselves at the scenes of their crimes. I associate with them, for, though I never left the confines of this island, I am something like to them & “birds of a feather flock together”. We play cards at the assembly rooms, or we take the air along the seafront, or we bump into one another at a certain house of ill repute. We hail one another as good fellows, but we are always too wary of revealing our past indiscretions to be true friends.

Other than that I drink spirits to alleviate my melancholy & I spend much time despising myself without ending my life. Lately I have developed a persistent cough & a troubling tightness in my chest which means I may not need the draught of laudanum that I have laid aside in readiness for when I can go on no more.

I have not heard from Annette.

But my thoughts often turn to our colony in Australia, as it is now called. I hope she is prospering there. I am sure she has not lacked for offers, despite her bastard, for she is young & free & fair of face & the newspapers say there is a great want of women of any kind & a great abundance of opportunity for men of enterprise.

As for her child, my grandchild, I do not know if it is a boy or girl, or even if it came safely into the world. But if I could pray, it would be my last prayer on earth that he or she grows up knowing both their parents’ tongues, so that he or she might explain the white man’s ways to those Australians there from the beginning, & also their ways to us, & so make a bridge of understanding between our peoples.

However, I fear that this is a vain hope, for I read that the first Australians are much depleted by smallpox & indeed by the common pox, & that many violent disputes have arisen between them & the rabble of thieves & murderers that we are settling there. If the new continent has indeed become a hell on earth, it is not the devil’s doing, but because we ourselves have made it so.

As for my former slave, Bunga-karee of the Kuringgai people, I do not ask for his forgiveness. That would be more than I deserve. I only hope his spirit lives on in his child.

And with that wish I lay down my pen & glance again at the bottle of laudanum on my bedside table. Perhaps I will find the courage to drink it tonight & put an end to my misery. Perhaps not.

Lauda finem! Praise be to the End!