He holds up the candle and runs its light over the backs of books, pausing at old favourites to tap softly on the spines. His tattered, grammar-school Homer, his father's Collier edition of Marcus Aurelius. Pilgrim's Progress, illustrated, bought in Bow Lane on his first trip to London. Ovid, deliciously louche, given him by a friend at the University who hanged himself the following year. Two volumes of Milton in stiff black leather, another gift, these from Lady Hallam on his first being appointed to his living, and valued by him more for the lovely swirls of her dedication than for anything of Milton's. Voltaire's Candide, bringing instantly to the Reverend's mind the small, dark, intelligent face of Monsieur About. Fielding, Defoe. A much-unread volume of Allestree's Whole Duty of Man. Tillotson's sermons.
Turning from the shelves, he opens a chest beside his desk and
pulls from it a canvas sack, lodges the sack beneath his arm and hurries back to the parlour, just as the clock shudders through ten. He sets down the bag, strips off his coat and drops it over a chair. With his back to the empty grate, he finds himself, as usual, face to face with his father, the Reverend John Lestrade of Lune in Lancashire. A very middling sort of portrait, his father's face a shiny, one-dimensional oval against a background of brown varnish, like the reflection of the moon in a muddy pond. They exchange their silent, nightly greeting.
The Reverend endeavours to recall what he knows of James's father. A farmer, of that he is reasonably certain, though whether great or small he does not know. Of the mother he knows, if possible, rather less. Some slim reference to her having died young. What did such reticence conceal? The elusiveness of a self-invented man? Some doubt, some niggle concerning his true progenitor? Ah, what questions he should like to put to that poor, cut-about head in the stable! Mary must know a great bundle of things. He has long considered setting down the Petersburg stuff. The rest might be uncovered, somehow.
He eases himself down a little way, breaks wind into the fireplace. Immediately he experiences the pleasant urge to shit, which, after enjoying the sensation a while, he acts upon, dragging over his close-stool, a noble piece of furniture, solid as a pulpit, and setting it with its back to the candles. With a kind of flourish he debreeches himself, removes the padded seat and settles on the wooden O. The canvas sack is to hand; he leans and draws it up to his feet. The mouth of the sack is closed by a length of cord. He unties it, slips in his hand. The first thing he touches is a smaller bag, this also of oiled canvas, rolled like a small log. He draws it out and sets it on his hairless thighs.
Unrolling it, the implements seem to wake as they catch the light. Knives, scissors, a handsaw, needles and other objects whose name and purpose he can only guess at and which might expressly have been made the better to terrify a patient. He draws out the longest of the knives, double-edged, sharp still as a sack of limes. This surely is the knife James used on the unfortunate postillion, though w^ithout it, its very adequate bite, they w^ould have buried the fellow at the monastery. And this curved mirror about the size of a child's palm he first saw the night of their arrival at the monastery when James used it, fixed to a candle, to sew up his own head. None of the implements has been used since then, though when James came to the house, when it seemed he had regained the better part of his senses, the Reverend offered them back. James had not wanted them.
The Reverend rolls the bag neatly and sets it down. He dips again into the sack and withdraws a sheaf of documents, stashed willy-nilly from the last time he examined them. Indeed, he has been through the sack several times, but with James's death the contents have assumed a new and important character. Tomorrow, when the body is in the ground, these will number among the very few proofs of James's existence. The papers he now examines, holding each one up six inches from his face - his spectacles are in his coat pocket and he is loath to disturb the delicate business of making a stool - are mostly certificates, some of which, perhaps all, are forgeries.
The first and prettiest purports to be from the Hotel Dieu in Paris. Three black seals on it, a half-yard of ribbon and a frantic, indecipherable signature. The Reverend is tolerably sure that James never studied in France. Next, and more credible, is a certificate from St George's hospital in London, stating that James Dyer attended classes in anatomy and materia medica. A third is from the Surgeon's Hall, rating James as fit to serve as surgeon's mate on a sixth-rate of His Majesty's Navy. Dated 1756. James would have been barely more than a boy. There is a companion piece to this; the Reverend fishes it out of the sack. A snuff-box, ivory-topped, and inscribed on its base:
