‘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.
‘The gentleman I represent is looking for men of stout heart,’ Mr Perry had said, ‘men who are unafraid of hard physical labour in the blazing summer sun of distant lands. Not pasty-faced hobbledehoys who spend their days behind a draper’s counter in Holborn.’