The Lambs of London Read Free Page A

least one hour before he needed to sit before his high desk in the Dividend Office. Holborn Passage itself was little more than an alley, one of those dark threads woven into the city’s fabric which accumulate soot and dust over the centuries. There was a pipe shop here as well as a mantua-maker, a carpenter’s workshop and a bookshop. All of them wore with resignation the faded patina of age and abandonment. The gowns were discoloured, the pipes on display would never be smoked, and the workshop seemed untenanted. Yes. This was what he had seen. In the window of the bookshop was displayed a document, written in a sixteenth-century Secretary hand.
    Charles loved all the tokens of antiquity. He had stood on the site of the old Aldgate pump, and imagined water being drawn from the wooden pipe five hundred years before; he had paced the line of the Roman wall, and noticed how the streets naturally conformed to it; he had lingered over the sundials in the Inner Temple, and traced their mottoes with his finger. “The future is as nothing, being everything,” he had once told Tom Coates in a moment of drunken inspiration. “The past is everything, being nothing.”
    This Elizabethan document seemed to be a will; he was not a palaeographer, but he could make out the phrase “I bequethe.” A young man, standing in the dim interior of the shop, was staring at him from the other side of the window. With his pale face, and violently red hair, he seemed to Charles to be some kind of apparition. Then he smiled and opened the door. “Mr. Lamb?”
    “The very same. How do you know my name?”
    “You have been pointed out to me in the Salutation and Cat. I sit there sometimes at the back table. You would not have noticed me in the least. Come in, please.”
    As soon as he entered the shop Charles could smell the moth-scented coverings of the old folios and quartos; it was the dust of learning he inhaled, delicious in its specialty. There was a wooden counter around two sides of the room, upon which were laid out manuscripts, unbound sheets and parchment rolls. On the shelves he could see the collected works of Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden and Cowley. “In some respects,” the young man said, noticing his glance, “the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding. To be strong-backed and neat bound is the desideratum of a volume.”
    “Magnificence comes after?”
    “If it comes at all. My name is Ireland, Mr. Lamb. William Henry Ireland.” They shook hands. “I would not dress a set of magazines, for instance, in full suit. There is no point in a Shakespeare in gorgeous apparel.”
    Charles was surprised by this young man’s expertness. “You are quite right. The true lover of reading, Mr. Ireland, wishes for sullied leaves and worn-out appearance.”
    “I know the difference, Mr. Lamb. I know the pages turned with delight, not with duty.”
    “You do?” Here was a rare young man indeed.
    William Ireland was, as Charles surmised, a youth of about seventeen years; in his cravat, shirt and bright yellow waistcoat he seemed a curiously old-fashioned figure. He ought to have been wearing a powdered wig. Yet his intensity was such that Charles was drawn to him. “I prefer the common editions of Shakespeare,” Ireland was saying, “without notes and without plates. Your Rowe or your Tonson delights me. On the contrary, I cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in folio. The octavo editions are painful to look at, don’t you think? I have no sympathy with them. I abhor them.” He had pale green eyes, which widened with the inflections of his voice; when he spoke he clasped his hands together, as if he were engaged in a violent struggle with himself. “Do you care for Drayton, Mr. Lamb?”
    “Extremely.”
    “Then this will interest you.” He took down from its shelf a quarto volume, neatly bound in calf. “This is Greene’s
Pandosto.
But note the inscription.” He opened the book, and handed it to