restlessness. I could not get my fill of churches, and paintings, and sculpture; but these were not at all in Le Grice’s line. One church, he would say wearily, looked very like another, and he expressed similar sentiments when confronted with a succession of Crucifixions and Nativities. At last, in the second week of September, we finally took our leave of each other, promising that we should meet again in London as soon as our circumstances allowed.
Le Grice departed for Trieste to take ship to England, whilst I, after a few days on my own in Venice, headed south again. For the next year or so, with Murray’s
On our first visit to the city of the Medici, we had met an American couple, a Mr and Mrs Forrester. Once back in Florence, I presented myself at the Forresters’ residence and, finding that the position of tutor to their two boys had become vacant, owing to the unsuitability of the previous incumbent, I immediately offered my services. I remained in the well-paid and undemanding employment of Mr and Mrs Forrester for the next three and a half years, during which time I grew lazy and, in my idleness, neglected my own studies grievously. I thought often of my former life in England, and how I must one day return; this, however, would always call up the shade of Phoebus Daunt, and the unfinished business that lay between us. (Even in Florence I had been unable to escape him: on my twenty-third birthday I was presented with a copy of his latest volume,
It was from this time that I began to form certain habits that have occasionally threatened to nullify irrevocably any vestige of the higher talents with which I have been blessed. My lapses were modest then, though I began to hate both myself and the life I was leading. At length, following an unfortunate incident concerning the daughter of a city official, I made my apologies to the Forresters and left Florence in some haste.
I still had no desire to return home, and so I set my course northwards. In Milan, I fell in with an English gentleman, a Mr Bryce Furnivall, from the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum, who was about to depart for St Petersburg. My conversations with Mr Furnivall had rekindled my old bibliographical passions; and when he asked whether I had a mind to accompany him into Russia, I readily agreed.
In St Petersburg we were kindly received by the celebrated bibliographer V. S. Sopikov, whose shop in Gostiny Dvor became my daily place of resort.* Then after a week or so, my companion, Mr Furnivall, was obliged to return to London, but I chose to remain. For I was bewitched by this extraordinary city of white and gold, entranced by its great public buildings and palaces, its wide vistas, its canals and churches. I found a set of rooms close to Nevsky Prospekt, began to learn the Russian language, and even embraced the fearsome winters with a kind of delight. Bundled in furs, I would often wander the streets at night, with the snow falling all about me, to stand contemplatively on the Lion Bridge by the Griboedova Canal, or watch the ice floating downstream on the mighty Neva.
Nearly a year passed before I began to set my sights homeward at last. Before departing, Mr Furnivall had requested, with some warmth, that I should come to see him at the Museum on my return, to discuss the possibility of my filling a vacancy in the Department that had recently arisen. As I had no other career in view, it began to seem an attractive prospect. I had been an exile from my native country for too long. It was time to make something of myself. And so, in February 1847, I quit St Petersburg, travelling leisurely westwards, occasionally deviating from my route as the fancy took me, and arriving at last in Portsmouth at the beginning of June.
Billick brought the trap to meet me off the Portsmouth coach at Wareham. Having heartily slapped each other on the back for a second or two on first seeing each other, we travelled back for two hours and more in complete silence, save for the sound of my companion’s incessant chewing on an old piece of tobacco, to our mutual satisfaction, until we arrived at Sandchurch.
‘Drop me here, Billick,’ I said, as the trap passed the church.
As he continued on his way up the hill, I knocked on the door of the little leaning cottage next to the church- yard.
Tom opened the door, spectacles in hand, a book that he had been reading tucked under his arm.
He smiled and held out his hand, letting the book fall to the ground.
‘The traveller returns,’ he said. ‘Come on in, old chap, and make yourself at home.’
And a second home it had once been to me, this low, dusty room tumbled from floor to ceiling, and up the stairs from ground to roof, with books of every shape and size. Its dear familiarity – the three-legged dresser supported by a groaning stack of mouldering leather folios, the fishing rods crossed above the fireplace, the discoloured marble bust of Napoleon on a little shelf by the door – was both poignant and painful. Tom, too, his long lined face shining in the fire-glow, his great ears with grey tufts growing out of them, his lilting Norfolk accent, brought a sense of childhood rushing in on me.
‘Tom,’ I said, ‘I believe you’ve lost what little hair you had when I last saw you.’
And we laughed, and there was an end of silence for the night.
On we talked, hour after hour, about what I had done and seen during my time on the Continent, as well as reminiscing over old times, until at last, the clock striking midnight, Tom said that he would get the lantern and walk up the hill with me to see me safe home. He left me at the gate beneath the chestnut-tree, and I entered the silent house.
After nearly nine years of wandering, I lay down that night in my own bed again, and closed my eyes once more to the sound of the eternal music of sea meeting shore.
The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal, and attempting a little work about the house and garden. But as autumn came on, I began to feel restless and dissatisfied. Tom would come and sit with me most days, and I saw plainly that he was troubled by my indolence.
‘What will you do, Ned?’ he asked at last.
‘I suppose I shall have to earn a living,’ I sighed. ‘I have used up nearly all my capital, the house is in a very bad state of repair, and now Mr More has written to say that, before she died, my mother borrowed a hundred pounds from him of which he now has need.’
‘If you still have nothing definite in view,’ Tom said after a pause, ‘I might venture to suggest something.’
Whilst travelling in the Levant, I had written to him of my new passion for the ancient civilizations of Asia Minor. Apprised of my imminent return to England, and unaware that I was considering the position at the British Museum, he had acted on my behalf to make some tentative enquiries concerning the possibility of my joining an
