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Overview
To escape Puritan England, naturalist Edward Popple signs on to be a ship’s doctor on a journey across the Indian Ocean, and his daughter, Rosamund, stows away to accompany him. But a wreck leaves them stranded on an island off the coast of Africa.
Amid the lush vegetation, the birds and the sea turtles, father and daughter set about exploring, Edward passionately studying the island’s horticulture and Rosamund wandering about to discover its mysteries. Then a Chinese ship, with the last heir to the Ming dynasty among its passengers, arrives—and changes everything.
“The prose is ripe, laden with a sense of the forbidden, and with doom.” —Publishers Weekly
“A luminous historical novel.” —Booklist Online
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468302004 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 701 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Delia was a girl, when Edward married her, scarcely older than his beloved daughter Rosamund was now. The match was arranged by Delia's brother when Popple was a youth of promise at the Inns of Court, and Edward, at any rate, considered himself lucky to have a pretty, smiling bride whose fair complexion complemented her well-informed mind. Delia had been a good wife to him these near twenty years as the wheel of their fortunes turned with the times, moving on through descents as it failed to rest at the heights. Popple's talents found patronage, but some discontent in himself would bring him sooner or later up against his patron's limits. Then Delia complained in case the family's fortunes should alter irreversibly too. She had matured well, with a splendid head of hair and a delighting eye, but she knew that Popple would have the benefit of youth for only a little longer. His particular successes in the garden or at the desk scarcely justified his high aspirations. Yet she had faith in him, if only their future could be secured, if only, in these spinning times, she could hold fast to something!
Lord Brougham was a weathervane and his Lady a beacon, and distinguished people passed through their retreat at Brougham House to take guidance for the new world. In conversation with the household the visitors also discovered that Edward Popple was a delver and his wife Delia Popple a charming optimist who sought advice in the most unaffected manner.
Once, on an excursion through Brougham Park, Delia fell behind with Lord Brougham, whose gout made him florid and as slow in setting one foot before the other as he was tentative in his political move-making.
She asked him how, when things were settled, Edward might best advance in the new order.
'A natural philosopher must serve by bringing to light things that benefit the common good. Edward has yet to understand this. He must give form to things that glorify the polity. Do you hear me?'
'I do, sir.'
'His ideas must turn to gold and in that strengthen the foundations of the state.'
She took the breathless old man's arm. Her son Henry was bowling through the meadow with two unleashed hounds. Edward had stopped ahead with Rosamund and was pointing at the sky.
'Do you have any particular advice?' Delia asked Lord Brougham.
'He must compound with the Society of Fellows. Politicians all.'
Delia cherished Lord Brougham's words after he passed from their midst. In the summer of 1651 he set off with doubtful heart to command a parliamentary force and only his corpse returned, in state.
Lady Brougham, long prepared for grief, made the house his shrine. The day came when she must ask, not Edward, but Delia Popple, what the family's plans were. To expel Popple and his brood would defile Lord Brougham's memory and she had no intention of that. She wished only to know how they proposed to honour the charity Lord Brougham had boundlessly bestowed. Lady Brougham fancied that the boy Henry might join the army, not perhaps the wrongfooting parliamentarians, but the old royalist remnant.
'A reciprocity of loyalty,' whispered the lady, making Delia's eyebrows jump.
Then Lady Brougham asked what Popple did all day in his plot, in his laboratory, living off the estate while producing nothing of visible use.
'He makes a fine lazybones, dear.'
Delia made quick reply that her husband was preparing for admission to membership of the Society of Fellows. She was never so cool. She saw that if her husband and her son could be disposed to Lady Brougham's satisfaction, then the way was open to establish herself with the lady on proper and propitious terms. Lady Brougham was frankly mad. Although she had not declared that they must depart Brougham House, she might in future provide for them less and less. But she would not lightly cast out an anxious mother and daughter.
'She doesn't notice me,' protested Edward when after another uncomfortable meal they retired to their chambers. 'She's mad,' he repeated.
Snuffing the candle, Edward came to bed. Delia waited for him with creamed face under the puffed-up feather quilt. They lay on their backs, apart in the darkness.
'My dear, you shall apply to the Society of Fellows.'
Creaks, groaning. There was no sound but for the house noises, and the elements, as she waited for his reply.
'Go into London again?' he questioned. 'No! I miss you too much.'
She was taken aback by his flattery.
'We cannot afford to miss so much.'
Popple knew his fruitless activity contributed to the family's difficulties, and when he feared that their standing at Brougham House would be upset, he trembled to think of the haven as temporary, his garden and the avenue of trees down which Rosamund cantered towards him on her dappled horse. What if he failed to gain membership of the Society ...? It was, he scarcely dared acknowledge, his only recourse.
'I do not know their conditions.'
'You are too proud. Go into their service in whatever way they want you.'
'I cannot bend myself like that.'
'What holds you? It can be made right with the Fellows, but only if you comply.'
He stared at the ceiling. He was thinking of his daughter. Then he saw, behind the black curtain, as he had not seen on the day, the axe blade slice through the king's neck. A prophesying image ...
'Be my husband.'
Her hand reached for him. Her fingers ran down his motionless and unresponsive body. She tried to arouse him. He lay as if on the dissecting table, his body lifeless, his lifelessness a form of cruelty and denial.
Her silence balanced on a knife's edge of despair and wrath.
'You are a spent man indeed,' she judged harshly, and turned away to sleep.
* * *
Edward Popple went on foot to the Society of Fellows through the obscure winter daylight. His black cloak was crumpled and soiled from travel, although he had hung it out overnight. The sun had no warmth, diffused through ice-laden cloud, save to thaw the hard mud, causing damp to seep through the leather soles of his boots, and perhaps, in a hidden way, according to his theories, encouraging the underground seeds on their journey towards germination. However harsh nature could be, her processes were impartial, unlike humanity's. If nature were to judge him, Edward Popple knew he would impress. His merits were clear. But it was a different matter with men whose perspectives were clouded by intrigue, caprice and the noxious motions of self. It was a mere interview that would decide the outcome! The chance fall of a moment.
The luck the innkeeper had wished him turned to a sense of doom as he entered the Society's stone portico and knocked. His cloak caught as the smirking servant closed the door. From inside came a strain of bass violin music, and a woman's voice holding a phrase in the modern manner ... a bed of down ... broken off. He was in a high state of anxiety. Yet confident, quite confident, that he could impress the Society of Fellows. He must show his abilities, his projections, the superlative possibilities of the results he would produce, absolute and beautiful beyond any awkwardness that might be found in him. But the more he was determined that they should see through his manner to what he might achieve, the more he would draw attention to himself as an agitated figure reaching for his last desperate chance.
The meeting-room had a frieze of mahogany panels carved by an artisan from the Low Countries in the costly heavy style of the new era. Garlands of crude rosebuds looping the chamber in chains of dark wood polished to catch blood-red lights, with tumorous cherubs lolling and strangled at intervals among the flowers. Popple was satisfied by how far the artistry fell short as, taking his seat, he raised his eyes above the level of the men who turned to consider him. The interview was called to order. Already he was hiding his rage.
Great gentlemen all, and offputting in their consistency, so Edward Popple judged his interlocutors, made of one substance, their mind one mind, their flesh and style, pedigree and standing, uniformly solid. Even their allegiances, for the storm-tossed times, considering the about-face of each, had the smooth resolution of chocolate balls.
Benign and wise in wrinkled pouches, their eyes gazed at the petitioner with equanimity. In this age of the many-headed monster, the Fellows of the Society continued to see as one. Thus was their science, thus the terms a person must accept if he were to be admitted and his work to prosper. The distinguished gathering was no committee of clerks, but the great scholars of the day. Experimenters, travellers, speculators. Names like Lord Brouncker, Dr Fry, Sir Joshua Sprigg, van Wenkenhoek. The genius Lake himself. So at home in themselves and in everything that Edward Popple felt he had a sack of potatoes interrogating him as he sat more and more uncomfortably facing them.
He knew at once that the Fellows registered something unright in him. His clothes were black, exactly like theirs. The black clothes of the men across the table were the uniform of harmonizers, betokening practicality and neutrality. Yet Popple's black clothes seemed to give offence. Black was merely the fashion, no longer a badge of the like-minded, yet might still encode warring extremes, concealing extravagant mourning behind severe austerity, or, the other way, letting the shabby dignity of the past stand in for the Puritan cut of the present. The king's head was chopped off more than two years ago now.
Or was it his provincial accent they took against, displaced as it had been during his secretary's years, in roving emissaries, when a form of Latin was the language spoken? Would the committee have liked it any better if he spoke in Latin? The more he tried to conform, the more he seemed to reveal his resistant grain. He wanted only not to draw unfavourable attention to himself.
The execution of the king had stiffened social relations once and for all. Any sort of relaxation might open up another jaw of the many-headed monster that had entered the kingdom, or commonwealth as she was proclaimed. While army men feasted round large tables, saying it was all for duty and never enjoying themselves, the royalists drowned themselves in oceans of wine at secret parties, and some drank blood from each other's veins in vows of faith. Yet it was not done for someone lodging by himself in an ordinary London inn to eat other than frugally, nor to dance, nor to accept the entertainment offered by the innkeeper. The wrong tone, like vinegar, would curdle the milk of getting-on. How could Edward Popple hope to be embraced by those whose patronage he must secure? By avoiding feasts he had become skin and bone; underfed, hungry, starving. The Fellows, solid as their science, must wonder what sort of philosophy inhabited his frame. How reliable were the lesions of mind to body in him?
Hands laid flat to the oak table, Popple breathed steadily. The chairman thanked him – Sir Astley Neville, a dabbler if ever – and Popple returned the thanks. Predictably a passage on the training of bees was singled out. Neville was little more than a gardener after all, distinguished for his grapes. Could bees be trained to pollinate grapes such that new varieties of wine would occur? The clown had, of course, missed the point. Other Fellows butted in with experiments of their own that they deemed more pertinent than the bees and the grapes. How pertinency defines itself in such a gathering!
The optics of the fly, hybrid honey-scented garlic, rare stones that behave as sponges, whales and guinea pigs, frost-hardy lettuce, fleas in amber. The Society was committed to identifying characteristics and cataloguing species. The more that could be listed, the better. It was like counting money. The scientists might seem to heed each specimen in its own right, as an example of the manifold handiwork of the Demiurge (God non-personified in the modern style). The greater purpose was to achieve an expanding aggregate in which each specimen was merely one further addition to an impressive total. Popple offered a different view.
Nevillia nevilliensis. The chairman was preoccupied with having new species named after him. He had been fit and handsome once, was tired now, and judged his life by the simplest measures of performance. His eye was sleepy, his brain shrunk, his flesh responsive only out of habit. Once more, once more, would it be possible? Would it happen again this time? When the young man said that there was a 'higher motion' to perceive, Neville was irritated. (And Popple, at forty, was scarcely young.) Nothing showed up the withering of faculties more than a new idea that did not immediately declare itself. Neville hated unthought-of ideas. He farted aloud, making Popple's mouth tighten like a fish's anus.
Popple said: 'I tell you, each delicate astonishing little study merely proves that there are laws of creativity in nature of which we have no understanding. And in ourselves, as natural phenomena. Laws, I call them, of which we have no earthly idea. I am not a philosopher. My concern is for what can be made. Each of my experiments shows that the laws of creation, of connection and union, invisible and abstract as they may be, can be drawn on in particular cases to produce things of which we cannot yet dream. I speak as no virtuoso, but the most humble beginner. Gentlemen, we can move to a further sphere of our humanity through your natural philosophy.'
'Refreshing,' murmured the brilliant Lake, stirring from intense dormancy. Others sniffed. The man's hot air was a bad joke after the chairman's flatulence. Popple knew he had gone too far, though not far enough, not far enough at all.
Neville replied that the Society was dedicated to the Light of Reason, indicating that he had missed what Popple was saying.
'Our principles are tablets of stone. Our means are few. Through not diverging from our way, we have achieved great things.'
'The reforming of the state,' observed Popple slyly. There was still some hope.
'Our work continues unabated, of course, and we hope you will join with us, sir. We are impressed. Gentlemen?'
Popple felt himself grow excited. 'I should be honoured.'
'We have our requirements, you see. I suggest you approach piecemeal. We are not in a position to accommodate all that you propose.'
'Chop your logic,' said Lake. Bulging tendons worked his cheek. 'Step by step. Block by block.'
'We should be most grateful if you would return another day. Be present at our next meeting. You'll be informed. Now, sir, I'm sure you would be pleased to join us in the dining room.'
'I am talking about life ...' bleated Popple.
'Yes, of course.' Oaken chairlegs scraped the stones.
'... and what makes life.'
'Let's banter as we consume. You'll be intrigued by our several new wines.'
Popple was excessively angered. All they were good for was cash, which he could not do without, alas, and could think of no other way of getting. Science was for them a hobby, knowledge mere cultivation, where for him it was existence itself. In his mind he poured buckets of sour milk over them as, over dinner, they admired the tastes and colours and sensations they were stuffing into their mouths.
'To the advancement of learning,' came the toast, followed by a brazen expression of thanks to Edward Popple, Esquire.
Their wine should have been vinegar.
Popple sulked. 'I shall return,' he said, when forced to reply.
The Fellows were relieved they had kept the uncongenial petitioner at arm's length.
Then Lake threw him a lifeline.
'Have you thought of a journey, sir? Our ships are in need of observers, our oceans of observation. The Society is frequently asked to supply such competency yet for reasons of health or obligation at home most of our Fellows are unable to avail themselves of the opportunity. For you, sir, a place on ship might appeal.'
'Is it your courtesy to pack me off in a cramped, stinking, unsecure vessel?'
'You fantasize,' calmed Lake.
'You don't know how cosy, how rich in rewards, a sea life can be.' The chairman applied his persuasiveness.
'You do not dispose of me so easily, gentlemen. I have commitments too, and a skin to save.'
'They are not as proper as they seem,' said the innkeeper, who knew perfectly what men and women wanted.
'How's that?'
His legs splayed by the fire, Edward wiped the ale froth from his whiskers and raged at the treatment he had received. The Fellows were nothing better than complacent committeemen living off intellectual annuities. They had earned no power over him. Even the best of them, Lake, confined on all sides, had been moulded to their shape. Mediocrity, self-satisfaction, the stupefying forms of dullness. Why should Popple play their game, except that his own burning genius, if it were nothing more than a grass fire in his head, would be thwarted otherwise? His mind ran fast on stratagems of revenge.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Rose Crossing"
by .
Copyright © 1994 Nicholas Jose.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
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