Carver's Quest (2 page)

‘I am sure that your reasons for acting as you have done are important enough to outweigh any minor transgressions of etiquette, madam.’

‘You are right. I
do
have important reasons for coming. But, before I vouchsafe them to you, I must tell you something of myself.’

Not a moment before time, Adam thought to himself but he said nothing.

‘My name is Emily Maitland. I am not a native of London. Indeed, I have not spent time here since I was a small girl. My mother and I have been abroad for many years. We have made our home
in a number of places. Constantinople. Athens. Rhodes. For the last three years we have lived in Salonika. A city which, of course, you know.’

‘An unusual city in which to make your home, Miss Maitland.’

Adam was surprised. He recalled the harbour at Salonika and the houses rising gradually from the water up the steep slopes to the castle on the summit. He remembered the white walls of the city
and the long stone fingers of the minarets pointing heavenwards. From a distance it was a beautiful sight, but it was also an unhealthy spot with a reputation for malaria. Why would a young woman
and her mother choose to live there? Salonika, he remembered, had its small English community, mainly merchants and traders, but he could not believe that it included many women living on their
own.

‘There are reasons for our choice of Salonika,’ Emily said, sensing his surprise, although she made no attempt to reveal what they were. ‘We travelled to London in the spring
of this year. A distant relative of my father had died and we were beneficiaries in his will. We needed to visit the lawyers to make the proper arrangements to receive our legacy.’

The young woman paused and looked up at Adam. He smiled and made a gesture that he hoped would be interpreted as an encouragement to go on.

‘However, I need not trouble you with the details of our family affairs,’ she continued. Adam found himself very nearly agreeing with his visitor but he bit his tongue. ‘I must
hurry on to the point in my story when it will become clear why I have called upon you in so unconventional a fashion.’

Miss Maitland moved her hand across the front of her dress, as if brushing from it a fragment of lint she had just noticed.

‘When your expedition arrived in Salonika in the summer of sixty-seven, my mother and I had only just become residents of the city ourselves. We were staying in a hotel by the waterfront.
We saw you land from the Constantinople steamer. As you disembarked we could see you were English. We decided that—’

Adam was never to know what Miss Maitland and her mother had decided. Her words were interrupted by the most terrific uproar from the direction of the dark room. The sound was as if a shell had
exploded in a glass factory. As the noise ceased, Adam and his visitor looked at one another in shocked surprise. He was the first to recover composure.

‘If you will excuse me for just a moment, I will endeavour to discover what Quint is doing.’ He bowed himself out of the room, leaving the woman sitting amidst the disordered books
and papers. ‘And why he is making that infernal racket as he is doing it,’ he added to himself as he left.

He was gone just long enough to learn that Quint, his
amour propre
injured by the remarks about dirt and dust, had been cleaning the equipment in the dark room when several of the glass
plates had – of their own volition, according to Quint – crashed to the floor. Lingering only briefly to curse his servant for his clumsiness, Adam made haste to return to the sitting
room and his guest. ‘I must apologise for Quint. A bull in a china…’ His words dried up as he realised he was addressing an empty room. There was no one sitting in the chair.
Emily Maitland was gone.

T
he following day found Adam sitting in the Marco Polo Club, listening to Mr Moorhouse talk about whatever subjects flitted briefly through his
butterfly mind. The Marco Polo, established in the early 1800s by a group of army officers who had served in India and travelled in the rest of Asia, was not the best-known of London’s
gentlemen’s clubs but it was, its members felt, the most agreeable and, in its own particular way, the most prestigious. Only those who had, at some time in their lives, travelled extensively
beyond the comforts of civilisation were allowed membership in the Marco Polo: a little
dilettante
journeying through France or Italy was insufficient qualification for admission. Adam
himself had been hard pressed to convince the membership committee that his travels in the mountains of Macedonia had been dangerous and discomforting enough to allow the doors of the Marco Polo to
be opened to him. Only the support of the club’s secretary, Baxendale, a man who had spent two winters in the 1850s sharing an igloo with a family of Eskimos in northern Canada and was thus
able to speak authoritatively on the subjects of danger and discomfort, provided Adam with an entrée. Baxendale had enjoyed
Travels in Ancient Macedon
and let it be known that he
believed its author would be a worthy addition to the club’s membership roll. Within days of the secretary expressing his opinion, Adam was admitted to the Marco Polo. In the thirteen months
since his admission, he had grown to love the club and had spent many happy days in its Pall Mall premises.

Mr Moorhouse, Adam’s conversational partner on this particular day, was the oldest member of the club. Many decades before, when Lord Byron had set a fashion for discontented young men of
fortune to journey abroad in search of experiences unavailable in England, the 25-year-old Mr Moorhouse had set sail for the Middle East. Landing at the ancient port of Sidon, he had travelled on
to Damascus and then set off through the wilds of the Syrian desert, accompanied only by a supposedly faithful Arab servant named Ibrahim. Eighty miles into their journey, Ibrahim had handed Mr
Moorhouse over to a Bedouin chieftain in return for two camels and a dozen goatskins filled with water. The Bedouin, delighted to gain a young and handsome Frankish servant for so low a price, had
immediately set Mr Moorhouse to work on a series of humiliating, indeed disgusting, tasks about his encampment. It had cost the British consul in Damascus three weeks of negotiation and ten more
camels to arrange his countryman’s release.

By the time he was free and able to sail home, Mr Moorhouse had been cured permanently of any further desire to leave his native land. Now, more than fifty years after his Levantine adventure,
he rarely set foot outside London. He sat for hours in the smoking room of the Marco Polo, puffing contentedly on a succession of foul-smelling cigars and indulging in amiably inconsequential
conversation with anyone prepared to join him at his table. Adam found him a curiously relaxing companion.

‘Clever fellow, that Boucicault,’ Mr Moorhouse remarked out of the blue, after several minutes of silence. ‘Saw that play of his,
After Dark
, at the Princess’s a
couple of seasons ago. Did you see it?’

Adam said he had not had the pleasure.

‘Damned great train comes thundering across the stage halfway through it.’ Mr Moorhouse made vague, waving motions with his hands to indicate the size of the train. ‘Man lying
bound to the tracks. Engine getting closer and closer. Train whistle going like billy-o. Terribly exciting. Thought I was going to have conniptions.’

Adam said he was sorry he had missed it.

‘Train didn’t hit him, though. God knows how. Think I must

have looked away for a second and next thing you know, the man’s up and free. Never did work out how the blazes they did it.’

Mr Moorhouse fell silent again, as if he was still struggling to understand the logistical details of the sensational scenes he had seen two years earlier. Adam returned to his own thoughts,
many of which circled around the attractive figure of the young woman who had called at Doughty Street the previous day. Who had she really been? Was her name really Emily Maitland? And what had
been her purpose in flouting convention so flagrantly by visiting him in his rooms? Although his vanity had been tickled by her claim to be an admirer of his book, he was not sure he believed her.
Nor was he sure he believed her interrupted tale of watching the Fields expedition arrive at Salonika’s waterfront. The professor, he remembered, had gone out of his way to ensure that they
had arrived without fanfare. It was unlikely that she and her mother could have learned their names or that they were English. And why would she knock on his door three years later in order to
inform him of the fact that she had seen him in Salonika? It made no sense. He was at a loss to imagine
any
reason for her visit. And, once she was there, why had she left so suddenly and
without a word of explanation? Quint’s noisy destruction of the plates in the dark room had been a shock, but surely not sufficient to scare a young woman into flight. Certainly not one who
seemed so self-possessed as Miss Maitland. Adam was faced with plenty of questions but few answers. After a minute, his companion broke in upon his thoughts.

‘By the way, Carver. Almost forgot to tell you. Fellow was in here asking after you last night. Asking if you’d be at the memorial dinner for Speke on Thursday. Told him I thought
you would be. Hope you don’t mind.’

‘Fellow, Mr Moorhouse? What sort of fellow?’

Mr Moorhouse seemed taken aback by the question. ‘Tall-ish chap. Balding.’ The old man quickly exhausted his powers of description. ‘Don’t recall much more about him, to
be honest… except, now I come to think of it, he did have a scar you couldn’t help noticing. Above  his  eye. Like  a crescent moon. Here.’

Moorhouse pointed to his own brow. ‘Sorry, old chap. Hope I haven’t committed a faux pas of any kind.’

* * * * *

With Adam at the Marco Polo, Quint Devlin was alone in the rooms in Doughty Street. He had seated himself in the best chair in the sitting room and was busily engaged in packing
his favourite pipe with the villainously smelling tobacco he favoured. His intention was to spend the next hour doing nothing more strenuous than inhaling and exhaling it.

Quint had gained his present name one day in 1828, when he was but a month old. Perhaps he had had some other name bestowed upon him before he was discovered, wrapped in a blanket and lying on
the steps of the St Nicholas Hospital for Young Foundlings in Ely Place, but if he had, it had been lost. The Reverend Malachi Merridew, spiritual director of St Nicholas, who had been presented
with four other orphaned infants that week decided that, as the fifth, this one should be named ‘Quintus’. The ‘Devlin’, more prosaically, had come from the blanket in which
the baby had been found. On the blanket was a label which read: ‘The property of Devlin’s Boarding House, Ardee Street, Dublin’. So it was as Quintus Devlin that the Reverend
Merridew presented this particular foundling to the world. The foundling no sooner reached an age when he could speak than he decided that a two-syllable Christian name was simply too cumbersome.
Quintus became Quint and had remained so for forty years.

During those forty years, Quint’s life had had both its ups and its downs. Downs had included a short spell working the treadmill at the Coldbath Fields House of Correction, after a
misunderstanding with another man involving the ownership of a horse; and an even shorter spell spent soldiering in one of the least illustrious regiments of the British Army. Quint had found being
a soldier a tiresome business and had deserted after only a month. Luckily, he had taken the precaution of enlisting under a false name. Even more luckily, the name he had chosen had been
‘John Smith’ and he had decided, quite rightly, that the chances of the army catching up with a deserting John Smith were so negligible that they could be dismissed from his mind. Two
days after leaving his barracks in Aldershot without the necessary permission, Quint had been back in familiar haunts in the Borough, renewing his acquaintance with London street life.

If anyone had questioned him, as he sat blowing plumes of smoke in the direction of the bookshelves, he would have acknowledged that his association with Adam Carver represented a very definite
up. He might also have acknowledged that the association was an unlikely one. However, Quint was a firm believer in fate. Fate, he thought, had to be behind the events which had brought master and
man together. It had surely been fate that had led Quint to join the Fields expedition to European Turkey in the first place. What else would have led him to pick up the discarded copy of a morning
newspaper in a Southwark pub? He was not usually a great reader. What else but fate would have drawn his eyes to the advertisement that invited men of stout heart and strong body, interested in
shaking the dust of England from their feet, to present themselves at an office in the Marylebone Road at nine on the following morning, where they would learn of certain plans that might prove to
their advantage? Money, it was clearly suggested, might be offered to those who possessed the qualities the advertisers sought. Quint had been intrigued. He was unsure whether or not he had a stout
heart but he did have a strong body. He was also enduring one of his periodic spells of pennilessness. His creditors, of whom there were several, had begun to insist on payment. One of them,
familiarly known as Black Ben, had let it be known that broken bones might well follow failure to cough up. Cash, or the opportunity to leave London – or both – seemed an appealing
prospect to Quint. On the principle of ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’, he had decided to turn up at the Marylebone office at the appointed time and see what game the advertisers
were playing.

A queue of men who had read the advertisement had already formed outside the office of Mr William Perry, the agent Professor Fields had appointed to recruit half a dozen dogsbodies for his
expedition. Quint was there to join it. While every other man waiting in the line looked like a disgruntled clerk or unemployed shop assistant, he was the only one who could be vaguely described as
belonging to the labouring classes. The distinction was a decisive one.