London Bridge in Plague and Fire: A Novel

7. Lucien Comes onto Morgan’s Ship

7 LuCien CoMeS onTo Morgan’S SHiP as the Poet-Chronicler imagined Peter de Colechurch building London Bridge, Morgan, a son of the Bridge, continued recording his memories in the margins of his books. at first, Morgan took little notice of two of the three men the Captain had hired in Surinam to replace men who perished in a typhoon , but the third stepped up to the door of the cabin as sudden as the shadow of a seabird swooping across the deck. He gave out his name as Lucien, which seemed to explain the strange aura Morgan felt, more than saw, about the man. Tall and sinewy, he was so thin that, standing sideways in a certain light, he seemed to be there and not there. His eyes cobalt blue and cold as the air just before a typhoon became soft when his sad mouth reshaped into a saintly smile. in Morgan’s first steady look at the man—from which the man did not flinch—it seemed that he had come somehow to the rescue, to take him home before he had served out his father’s debt. on deck, as if etching his portrait in stone, Lucien seemed to limn Morgan from crown to foot. The look, when Lucien turned away with the rope he had given into his hands, seemed to take Morgan away, LuCien CoMeS onTo Morgan’S SHiP 110 leaving only something suspended in the space between him and that tall, reed-like back. The hammock above Morgan’s, that the typhoon last week had emptied, Lucien now filled, at length. Swaying in perfect rhythm with the ship’s response to the agitation of the waves that made Morgan stagger , Lucien had tightened the thongs to the iron ring in the bulkhead, making a canvas drum of the hammock. Morgan looked up, before the lamp was snuffed, at little sag. The voice, neither fetched from a depth of chest nor pitched high in the nose, was thin as a taut wire and sent out as its basic timbre a tremulousness that created a zone inclusive of Morgan himself. “You may call me Lucien.” “Lucien is a French name, but you are english.” “it means light, as does Lucifer.” “So does Luke. May i call you Luke?” “if i may call you Morg.” “But that is the opposite of my name, which means Sea-dweller. Morg makes me a small farm.” “Tell me, little brother, who you be and from whence you come to be here?” “This is my story.” Morgan told him a brief version of his short life. “. . . and so my father went hunting for shop space. When one searches for a shop on London Bridge, one always also finds a house. everything is ‘at the sign of’—one enters under a sign into a cool, dim cave, a shop. The salt merchant, five doors south of our stationer’s shop, keeps a parrot that repeats ‘my fair lady,’ a voice so strident it carries across oceans into my dreams and nightmares.” * * * ‘i imagine stars seen from the rumored skylight of nonesuch House mid-Bridge. i do remember the look across the roadway of a shop and house half-finished between older shops and houses, stars between. ‘i feel the roadway underfoot now, foot shod—barefoot before.’ 111 LuCien CoMeS onTo Morgan’S SHiP * * * Fort Saint George on the Coromandel coast in the Bay of Bengal. “We are privileged, living on the Bridge, not in the City,” Morgan whispered to Lucien, in the dark of others’ sleeping. “We do all the things of daily living that others the world over do, but for us, those things are different, however intent we are, oblivious—even so, it always brings us back to it—the smells and noises, the tingle in the soles of our feet, walking on the Bridge, that’s always a sort of trembling.” * * * Indian ocean, en route to Malacca. after several days of a silence like an unbroken dialogue, Lucien spoke, drawing Morgan back from the verge of sleep. “i want to hear you tell again about this Bridge you lived on and that you’re going home to, this nosuch House, little brother. Me, if i ever go back, it will be to the self-same pile of cow shit i left behind and sour apple trees. even my name—radford—i pissed into the ground, turned my...