He saw the corner of Gamut Street twenty yards ahead and slowed his pace to take pleasure in the moment of reunion. There were innumerable memories awaiting him there, the mystif among them. But not all would be so sweet, or so welcome. He would have to ingest them carefully, like a diner with a delicate stomach coming to a lavish table. Moderation was the way. As soon as he felt a surfeit, he'd retreat and return to the studio to digest what he'd learned, let it strengthen him. Only then would he return for a second helping. The process would take time, he knew, and time was of the essence. But so was his sanity. What use would he be as a Reconciler if he choked on the past?
With his heart thumping hard, he came to the corner and, turning it, finally laid his eyes upon the sacred street. Perhaps, during his years of forgetfulness, he'd wandered through these backwaters all unknowing and seen the sight before him now. But he doubted it. More likely, his eyes were seeing Gamut Street for the first time in two centuries. It had changed scarcely at all, preserved from the city planners and their hammer-wielding hordes by the feits whose makers were still rumored here. The trees planted along the pavement were weighed down with unkempt foliage, but their sap's tang was sharp, the air protected from the fumes of Holborn and Gray's Inn Road by the warren of thoroughfares between. Was it just his fancy, or was the tree outside number 28 particularly lush, fed perhaps by a seepage of magics from the step of the Maestro's house?
He began towards them, tree and step, the memories already returning in force. He heard the children singing behind him, the song that had so tormented him when the Autarch had told him who he was. Sartori, he'd said, and this charmless ditty, sung by piping voices, had come in pursuit of the name. He'd loathed it then. Its melody was banal; its words were nonsense. But now he remembered how he'd first heard it, walking along this very pavement with the children in procession on the opposite shore, and how flattered he'd been that he was famous enough to have reached the lips of children who would never read or write or, most probably, reach the age of puberty. .All of London knew who he was, and he liked his fame. He was talked about at court, Roxborough said, and should soon expect an invitation. People who'd not so much as touched his sleeve were claiming intimate association.
But there were still those, thank God, who kept an exquisite distance, and one such soul had lived, he remembered, in the house opposite: a nymph called Allegra who liked to sit at her dressing table near the window with her bodice half unlaced, knowing she had an admirer in the Maestro across the street. She'd had a little curly-haired dog, and sometimes in the evening he'd hear her piping voice summon the lucky hound onto her lap, where she'd let it snuggle. One afternoon, a few paces from where he stood now, he'd met the girl out walking with her mother and had made much of the dog, suffering its little tongue on his mouth for the smell of her sex in its fur. What had become of that child? Had she died a virgin or grown old and fat, wondering about the man who'd been her most ardent admirer?
He glanced up at the window where Allegra had sat. No light burned in it now. The house, like almost all these buildings, was dark. Sighing, he turned his gaze towards number 28 and, crossing the street, went to the door. It was locked, of course, but one of the lower windows had been broken at some point and never repaired. He reached through the smashed pane and unlocked it, then slid the window up and himself inside. Slowly, he reminded himself; go slowly. Keep the flow under control.
It was dark, but he'd come prepared for that eventuality, with candle and matches. The flame guttered at first, and the room rocked at its indecision, but by degrees it strengthened, and he felt a sensation he'd not expected swelling like the light: pride. In its time, this, his house, had been a place of great souls and great ambition, where all commonplace debate had been banned. If you wanted to talk politics or tittle-tattle you went to the coffee house; if you wanted commerce, to the Exchange. Here, only miracles. Here, only the rising of the spirit. And, yes, love, if it was pertinent (which it was, so often); and sometimes bloodletting. But never the prosaic, never the trivial. Here the man who brought the strangest tale was the most welcome. Here every excess was celebrated if it brought visions, and every vision analyzed for the hints it held to the nature of the Everlasting.
He lifted the candle and, holding it high, began to walk through the house. The rooms—there were many—were badly dilapidated, the boards creaking under his feet, weakened by rot and worm, the walls mapping continents of damp. But the present didn't insist upon him for long. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, memory was lighting candles everywhere, their luminescence spilling through the dining room door and from the rooms above. It was a generous light, clothing naked walls, putting lush carpets underfoot, and setting fine furniture on their pile. Though the debaters here might have aspired to pure spirit, they were not averse to comforting the flesh while still cursed with it. Who would have guessed, seeing the modest facade of the house from the street, that the interior would be so finely furnished and ornamented? And seeing these glories appear, he heard the voices of those who'd wallowed in that luxury. Laughter first; then vociferous argument from somebody at the top of the stairs. He couldn't see the debaters yet—perhaps his mind, which he'd instructed in caution, was holding the flood back—but he could put names to both of them, sight unseen. One was Horace Tyrwhitt, the other Isaac Abelove. And the laughter? That was Joshua Godolphin, of course. He had a laugh like the Devil's laugh, full and throaty.
"Come on, then," Gentle said aloud to the memories. "I'm ready to see your faces."
And as he spoke, they came: Tyrwhitt on the stairs, overdressed and overpowdered, as ever, keeping his distance from Abelove in case the magpie his pursuer was nursing flew free.
"It's bad luck," Tyrwhitt was protesting. "Birds in the house are bad luck!"