The Choir Boats Read Free Page A

was about to steer
the McDoon’s Mincing Lane counting house onto the salt-roads
in search of the Perouse expedition and Yount itself, when Sanford
pointed to the clock and reminded Barnabas that they were due at
the Exchange right after lunch. The India tendrils strained, and the
counting house bucked to leave the quay, but Barnabas with a great
sigh warped himself back to the clock and its demands. Barnabas
sighed, “Yes, yes, right you are, tempus fugit , as the old Tully would put
it. But tonight then, we can read the book this evening.”
    “No,” said Sanford. “Tonight we meet at the Jerusalem coffeehouse to discuss the business in camphor wood with Matchett &
Frew and their syndicate. Remember?”
    Barnabas sighed again and searched the key for clues about its
provenance. Finding none, he put the key in a vest-pocket. He took
it out, checked the key again, returned it to his pocket. One hand
soon found itself stroking the vest-pocket, sometimes fondling the
key within. He locked the letter in the lockbox.
    “We need to keep the book about so that we can read it, clear up
this mystery,” said Barnabas. “I know. We’ll hide it in plain sight . . .
in the library.”
    Neat and orderly , thought Sanford, who followed Barnabas out
of the inner office, up the back stairs, and into the library on the
second floor. Barnabas slipped Journies and Travells to Yount and the
Realms Within onto a lower shelf between The Life and Adventures
of Joe Thompson and The Female Quixote . Waving a hand above his
head, Barnabas declared that no one would ever think to find the
strange book there. But he was wrong.
    Tom could not believe his luck. For an hour, his masters had been in
the partners’ office, leaving him unsupervised in the clerk’s room.
Perched high on a stool at his scrivener’s desk, surrounded by ledgers
and inventory books, he at first diligently reconciled the accounts
for the Gazelle ’s latest voyage. Gradually, however, as the partners’
office door remained shut, Tom dwelled instead on the escapades of
various friends. His pen moved with languor as he thought of the
theatres in Drury Lane, Covent Garden and Vauxhall. The door to
the street opened, startling him into activity, but it was only his
sister Sally, back from her morning lessons.
    Tom was grateful for his situation but he longed for life beyond
the ledger books, especially at a time when England was fighting
for its life against the tyrant Bonaparte. The house of McDoon
dealt in goods from India and China, selling mostly to merchants
in Hamburg and Copenhagen and other ports in the North of
Europe, with an occasional foray into cochineal or campeche wood
from the southern Americas or figs from Turkey. While the trade
sounded exciting, Tom never ventured farther than the Thameside
quays and spent most of his days at his daventry-desk within the
four walls of the house on Mincing House Lane. Tom had never even
been back to Edinburgh, let alone seen Bombay or Madras: Bit unfair ,
Tom thought, his pen blotting. Uncle Barnabas was sent out to Bombay
by his uncle when he was my age!
    Thomas Tobias MacLeish and Sarah Margaret MacLeish had
come to their uncle as children. Their mother was sister to Barnabas,
a younger sister whose naval husband had died at the Battle of
Camperdown in 1797. Having nowhere to turn as a pregnant widow,
with a son aged six and a daughter aged three, she had left Edinburgh
to plead for haven with Barnabas. Haven he had gladly given her, his
only surviving sibling, but she died just months later delivering a
stillborn son. In the fifteen years since their mother’s death, Tom
and Sally had become as son and daughter to Barnabas and he was
both father and mother to them, with Sanford as much a parent to
them as Barnabas.
    Sally loved Tom with the comprehensive fierceness of an orphan.
Sally resembled Tom in more than just looks (both had dark unruly
hair, darting hazel eyes over high cheekbones, and chins a trifle too
small