13 July 1854
Lord Lucan, bored as usual, was riding a horse as fast as possible around the decks of the Dryad. Despite its patented tight-fitting India-rubber socks, the horse felt uneasy on this smooth surface, with the sea lurking so close. Though Lucan lashed it mercilessly, the horse slowed to a walk at each corner it was forced to round.
The crucial talks with the Russians had just ended for the day. Those nincompoops Baron Raglan and Marshal St Arnaud had been talking with the Tsar’s representative, Prince Vorontsov. For the talks, the Dryad (Raglan’s private yacht) had been anchored just outside Russian territorial waters. Thus they were now three nautical miles south of Cape Sarich, near Sebastopol in the Crimea.
Lucan was irritated at being excluded from the talks. As an acquaintance of Vorontsov, and the only Russian-speaker in the English party, he’d have shone. Instead, he and that moron Lord Cardigan were left to occupy themselves. As his horse rounded the stern deck for the 98th time that afternoon (Lucan was trying for 100), he again saw the Gromovnik (Thunderer), a Russian armed paddle-steamer, which was to take Vorontsov back to Sebastopol. Vorontsov was currently in his longboat, halfway between the two vessels.
A light north-easterly was blowing, and the Dryad was about to head south to join its companion ship, the HMS Fury (which had accompanied them from Varna, in case the Russians tried any hanky-panky). It was anchored 10 nautical miles south of them. The crew were now busily unfurling the mainsail, preparing for the voyage, which would have taken an hour or two.
Cardigan was on board, too. Lucan didn’t care where. He and Cardigan were (unfortunately) brothers-in-law. They hated each other. In fact, Cardigan was up on the poop deck, practising rapier thrusts into a velvet cushion suspended on a cord, imagining it to be Lucan.
St Arnaud and Raglan were alone in the stateroom, discussing the outcome of the negotiations.
"Very satisfactory," said St Arnaud.
"Quite," said Raglan, looking daggers at Cardigan as the idiot galloped past the porthole for the 99th time that afternoon.
"Vorontsov was quite conciliatory, do you not think?"
Raglan emitted one of his affirmative grunts.
"It seems that the Russians are ready to withdraw from the Dobrudja, and that there need be no war."
"In my considered opinion," said Raglan stuffily, "the nations are poised on a knife-edge. The slightest incident may precipitate us into peace or into outright - "
He was interrupted by an enormous crashing sound from above.
"We are being fired on!" shouted St Arnaud, jumping into a cupboard. His nerves had never been the same since that time he’d had to flee from a jealous husband at Dieppe.
"The mast!" cried Raglan. "I know that sound all too well! But how is it possible, in such a light breeze? Damnation!"
He rushed out onto the deck. As he had feared, the tip of the mainmast had snapped. The mainsail was twisted up in a fat bundle, rigging was scattered everywhere, and the deckhands were speechless with confusion. They had been raising the sail, and the force of the impact had knocked several of them overboard.
Raglan was interrupted by shouting from somewhere below him. He rushed to the rail.
Lucan was in the water, swearing at the top of his voice, using words more terrible than Raglan (a veteran military campaigner) had ever heard before - words so terrible, in fact, that mere letters would be incapable of spelling them.
Beside Lucan, his horse was snorting to death. When a terrible crash had come from above, and something had hit the horse in the neck, it had panicked, and failed to negotiate the tight turn at the bow. It had kept galloping, its forelegs had tangled in the bow rigging, and now, with a bad break in two legs, it was noisily drowning.
While a group of seamen hastily lowered a boat to rescue Lucan and three dislodged sailors, the bulge inside the sail swayed overhead and made an ominous creaking sound.
Cardigan had rushed down from the poop deck and was studying the bulge through field-glasses. "I know what that is!" he shouted, gesturing at the lump with his rapier. "A bomb! Those dastardly Russkies have fired a bomb at us! It debagged the mainmast, but it hasn’t exploded."
He scowled at the Gromovnik, now raising steam for its return to Sebastopol. "Cowards!" he proclaimed.
Cardigan hated the Russians, partly because Lucan had served with them in the Caucasus, and partly because their traditional garment, the drzvyshky, was too much like his eponymous invention, from the rights to which he drew much of his ill-spent income. He marched across to the rail, and smirked at the sight of Lucan, half-drowned, being pulled from the water. "The Russians have attacked us!" he shouted at Lucan. "Do you not agree?"
"No!" spat Lucan - meaning Yes. On principle, he disagreed with everything his brother-in-law said.
Raglan (as always) misunderstood. Turning to St Arnaud he said gravely, "It seems we have been attacked by the Russians. If my two young Lords agree on something, it must be incontrovertible."
St Arnaud, who did not welcome war, nodded. He had an excellent command of Cockney, which he had learned in London several decades earlier, while teaching fencing and dancing. However he had never quite mastered the English double negative. "This has been an act of war," he said.
"‘Fraid it’s on now," said Raglan, sounding more pleased than afraid. Even though the last time he’d been in action (at Waterloo) he’d carelessly lost his right arm, he found he was rather looking forward to this.
High above the Dryad’s deck, cocooned in a sail with a large dead bird, Edward Lear uttered a muffled groan. On his arrival, his thigh had whacked the mast at great speed, and he had then tumbled into the mainsail. The momentum of his landing had ripped the great sail partly away from its rigging, and snapped the mast at a weak point near the top. The sail had rolled itself around him, and he was now trapped between it and the remains of the nupiter piffkin. His thigh, severely bruised after cracking the mast, was aching awfully. Partly recovering his senses, he groaned again.
"D’you hear that?" gurgled Lucan, who now stood on the deck, water dripping out of his ears and nose. (The unfortunate horse had expired. Lucan hadn’t noticed - he went through a lot of horses.)
"It’s the wind!" snapped Cardigan.
"No!" said Raglan. "The bomb creaked. It may explode at any moment. It is my duty to inform all aboard that we must now abandon ship."
"What, now?" said Lucan. "I’m not dry yet, old chap."
"Not to be an idiot!" St Arnaud hissed, marching solemnly to the other lifeboat. Cardigan was already sitting in it, idly swishing his rapier.
"Hurry up and abandon ship!" shouted Raglan. "Leave that boat down, and lower the other one!" The bomb had emitted yet another sound. Fortunately the HMS Fury was nearby. Its thick black smoke was just visible, 10 nautical miles due south.
They had a lucky escape. No lives were lost - except for one AB who had drowned in a vain attempt to rescue Lucan’s horse. The Dryad had not exploded - yet. The breeze was behind them, and the waves were gentle. Soon after nightfall, the refugees from the Dryad were boarding the Fury. There, Raglan and St Arnaud conferred with Generals Brown and Canrobert, who had remained on the Fury. When the latter pair heard of the calculated Russian insult to the Dryad (and therefore to the Allies it represented), they were unanimous: this was an act of war.
Prince Vorontsov, in his longboat, was en route between the Dryad and the Gromovnik. Halfway back, he had been seized with an urgent need to empty his bowels. Against the wind, with only a dozen oarsmen, it was a long way to the Gromovnik’s water closet. Vorontsov could not wait - perhaps due to those figs that the perfidious Raglan had provided after luncheon.
Fortunately, Vorontsov was a master problem-solver. He had urgently called to Lev Nikolayevich, his young equerry - who had not only gallantly provided his helmet for a chamber pot, but also had improvised a screen to protect the privacy of the defecating prince. This screen was made from two flags: the one that normally fluttered at the stern, and its spare. The flags were now tied around the pillars of Vorontsov’s four-poster platform.
Enclosed on all sides by the naval ensign of his Motherland, Vorontsov squatted over his privy. Concentrating on his bowels, he did not look up. That was a mistake. He was just on the point of standing up when he was struck by the Thing from the sky.
One moment, he was beginning to pull up his regimental trousers. The next, he was flat on his back, trousers around his knees, the helmet spilling its precious contents over his boots, and both flags ripped down in tatters.
The oarsmen were in agony, trying not to laugh. Vorontsov could be vicious, they had heard, but this was... contagious smiles slowly crept over their faces.
The gallant Lev Nikolayevich had rushed to his master’s help. As the furious Vorontsov refastened his braces, his equerry prodded the intruder. It was a huge canvas bag, the shape and size of a seal.
They both examined it. The first thing Vorontsov noticed was the Union Jack drawn above its nose, a London address, and the words LORD PRIVY SEAL - in English. Vorontsov’s face darkened.
"How could they do this?" he exclaimed. "They are trying to make a fool of me! They protest that Britain and France do not want war - then they insult our Motherland! The Tsar must be told of this outrage!"
Lev formed the opinion that the Lord Privy Seal was part of a British reconnaissance balloon, which had been spying on the Gromovnik, then deliberately shot down by a British sharpshooter while over the longboat. In support of his theory, he showed Vorontsov a hawser, one end tied firmly to the seal’s tail, the other cleanly broken, as if by a bullet.
"And why a seal?" asked Vorontsov. Through his fury, he dimly perceived that something was wrong with his equerry’s theory.
"Like a horseback, my lord: a good shape for a spy to crouch on."
Vorontsov, in agreement, gave one of his low animal-like growls.
"You!" he shouted, pointing at a smirking oarsman. "Lieutenant: have that man whipped like a cur!"
On docking at Sebastopol that night, Vorontsov had the offending Seal locked in a yard adjacent to his rooms at the Admiralty, to show the Tsar in two days’ time when he arrived in Sebastopol. Vorontsov then called for his koliaska (coach-and-four) to take him home to his Alupka Palace, a five-hour drive along the Crimean coast, on the road which he himself had had built - as the saying goes – though in fact thousands of serfs had built it. Some had died on the job, but they had no pressing reasons to live.
15 July 1854
Two days later, the still-unexploded Dryad had drifted closer to the Fury, and could now be seen with the naked eye. The Gromovnik had sailed out the previous day to deliver a message of protest from Prince Vorontsov, and found the Dryad unmanned, with a suspicious lump in the mainsail. The Russians, deciding it was booby-trapped, had returned hastily to Sebastopol.
The English had noted the Russian ship’s visit. "Checking why their bomb didn’t go off and blow us all sky-high," Raglan muttered.
He now faced pressure to abandon the Dryad, return on the Fury to Varna, and from there telegraph the Foreign Secretary that negotiations had failed, and the war would proceed. But the Dryad was his own personal yacht. Raglan, though stinking rich, was most reluctant to abandon it. He decided to take a party of volunteers to board it. Perhaps they could cut the mainsail, and the bomb would fall harmlessly into the sea. But perhaps the shock of that fall would set off the bomb, destroying the Dryad and the rescue party. Still, they were soldiers - born to die. Raglan shrugged.
He called for volunteers, but too few of the craven seamen came forward. Thus he commanded the unwilling Lucan and Cardigan to join him. The two sat at opposite ends of the longboat, sulking, trying to ignore one another.
When they were within a mile or so of the Dryad, Raglan anxiously scanned it with the field-glasses. "Can’t see any damned bomb yet," he muttered.
"Silly old fool," thought Cardigan and Lucan.
Something large and roan floated nearby.
"You!" shouted Cardigan to his brother-in-law. "Your horse, sir!" He pointed at the floating lump.
Lucan, of course, ignored Cardigan, but Raglan ordered the men to row to the lump. It was indeed Lucan’s horse. The tastiest parts had been nibbled away by fish, but the regimental colours on the bridle were unique in that quarter of the Black Sea.
What most attracted Raglan’s attention was that the horse’s neck had been pierced by an umbrella. He directed a sailor to pull the umbrella out, but, like a fish-hook, it was impossible to remove, without endangering the longboat.
"Bloody Russkies, eh?" Raglan swore under his breath. He had heard rumours of an umbrella-weapon, about which Whitehall was admitting nothing. Somehow those dastardly Russians had got hold of the plans, built a replica, fired it from the Gromovnik, and killed a perfectly good British horse. (Pity it didn’t hit Lucan, he thought.) Very worrying. A bomb was mere poppery, but an umbrella was the essence of Albion. The City would never be the same again.
"All of you!" Raglan shouted. The volunteer rowers and Cardigan and Lucan looked up. Raglan pointed at the umbrella. "See this?" he said. "You haven’t seen it. Never dare mention this to a soul - ever! And that includes you two!"
Lucan shrugged. That sneaky Cardigan was obviously responsible for the umbrella, as a way of getting back at him for riding a horse on deck. Was the rotter planning to extend his "cardigan" factories into the manufacture of umbrellas? He’d have it out with Cardigan later.
Cardigan shrugged. Absolutely typical of the brutal Lucan to spear a horse with an umbrella. Probably trying to make it round the bow corner more quickly. He’d have it out with Lucan later.
Nearby, Raglan spotted something to larboard: suspiciously like a large brass object. Nobody else saw it: they were too busy bickering. He pulled them up again, and they rowed to it cautiously. Could it be the bomb in question?
No, it just was a large dead bird, floating on the water. In fact it was a very large dead bird: the size of a small horse.
"Bloated with stomach gases," said Raglan, who’d seen a thing or two on battlefields.
When the sunlight caught its smooth feathers, they looked very like brass.
"Or gold!" said Lucan, who was notoriously acquisitive.
"Does gold float?" said Cardigan rudely.
"It’s a bird, you fools," Raglan declared. "Press on!"
At half a mile range, it was clear there was no lump in the sail.
"Fallen on deck, what?" said Cardigan.
Raglan scanned the Dryad’s deck. "Bloody hell!" he muttered, turning the field-glasses over to Cardigan. "What do you see?"
"A man," said Cardigan. "Waving at us."
"Impossible!" said Lucan.
"Not a soul was left behind when I abandoned ship," said Raglan. "I made damn'd sure of that." (This was an indirect reprimand to Lucan and Cardigan, who tended to be a trifle careless with their men.)
"A Russian spy," Lucan conjectured, ignoring Raglan. "Sent to dig out what papers he could find. Left behind by the Gromovnik blighters."
As a precautionary measure, they cocked their rifles and rowed around the far side of the crippled Dryad. No Russian boats were visible. As they drew alongside and aimed their rifles, the man stood above them, gesticulating and shouting.
Unarmed, Raglan saw. Both hands waving in the air. "What’s he saying, Cardigan?"
"He appears to be requesting help, sir. In English."
"Bit of a foreign accent," Lucan said suspiciously.
Cardigan snorted. As always, he disagreed.
Edward Lear was vaguely aware that his arrival on the Dryad had caused a little bother. He decided to say as little as possible till he found out how the land lay, from these men now boarding the vessel.
"What are you doing here?" snapped the man in the silliest uniform - the one with the hat that resembled a banana tree.
"May I welcome you aboard," said Edward Lear, cheerfully shaking Raglan’s hand. "I’m able to offer you tea and jam-cakes, but unfortunately the larder is quite out of runcibilities."
Since wriggling his way out of the sail, and finding a good stock of food on board, Edward Lear had been quite cheerful – despite the disappearance of the nupiter piffkin. However, he hobbled badly (from the bruise on his thigh) as he led the boarding party to the aft stateroom, where he had indeed prepared tea and cakes.
"Outrageous!" Cardigan whispered. (The man had been sleeping in his bed - and hadn’t even bothered to remake it.)
"Pretty damn civilized of you, Mr Lear," said Raglan, sipping his own best Darjeeling tea. "But how the deuce did you get here?"
While Edward Lear ransacked his mind for a believable excuse, Cardigan stepped in.
"English, aren’t you? Damn Russians deported you, what? In the Crimea, were you? Expecting war, what?"
"Yes, yes, yes, yes," said Lear gratefully, remembering what Stratford de Redcliffe had told him in Constantinople. "There is to be war in the Crimea, they say. I am a mere landscape painter. Quite harmless." He performed a left-legged dance, miming a few brush-strokes on an imaginary easel.
"Painting military installations, were you?" Lucan asked.
"Rocks and crags are my delight," the man chanted, taking his words from what might have been a Scottish song.
"And they delivered you here?" snapped Cardigan.
"Yesterday," Edward Lear said nervously, wondering if these uniformed ninnies would catch him out. "This being the nearest British ship."
"And your paintings?" said Lucan, still hoping for military intelligence.
"They kept all my baggage," said Lear, sucked deeper and deeper into a cycle of lies. He hoped these people hadn’t found his Seal - but, then, it had all his paintings, and his journal - the proceeds of which, when published, might have sustained him for months. He uttered a small groan.
"Trouble?" said sympathetic Raglan. "Beat you up, did they?"
"I have a terrible bruise on my right thigh," Edward Lear admitted. "I can scarcely walk."
"Deuced cruel blighters!" said Raglan. "We’ll pop you back to the Fury, and Doctor Barry will fix you up."
Raglan was feeling quite cheerful now, but one thing still puzzled him. "Mr Lear, did you by any chance notice a large bomb entangled in the mainsail?"
"I did sense a species of lump up there" (Lear lied desperately) "but when the Russians brought me here they locked me in this cabin. They banged around above, then as they left they unlocked the door. When I crawled back on deck I noticed that the lump was missing."
"Idiots!" roared Lucan. "Lucky it didn’t blow them sky-high."
"Didn’t want us to capture their ordinance," Raglan sniffed. "Standard military practice, what?"
Seamen semaphored to the Fury that it was safe to approach. The Fury then steamed across and took the Dryad in tow. Two days later, they were safely back at the British camp in Varna. For their valour in rescuing an English gentleman from a ship booby-trapped by the enemy, Raglan, Lucan, and Cardigan were later awarded the Order of Merit - to add to their already-jangling chests.
The following week, Edward Lear (who had disappointed the British military by his inability to describe any fortifications in the Crimea), departed Varna on the HMS Agamemnon, which set him off at Rome. Because he was penniless, he was loaned ten guineas from the War Office’s Succouring Fund. From Rome, he immediately set out for Zermatt, where months earlier, he had arranged to meet his good friend Husey Hunt. He arrived in Zermatt somewhat breathless, only a week late.
At almost midnight on the 13th of July (it had been a long day), Prince Vorontsov reached his favourite home, the Alupka Palace. No sooner had he alighted from his koliaska than his major-domo came rushing up. "Bad news, sir," said the major-domo, bowing his head in shame. "A man has fallen into your hothouse, and broken the plants."
Vorontsov’s face fell. His conservatory, attached to the back of the palace, was his pride and joy. Over several decades, he had built up a priceless collection of plants from the South Seas. These included the Metrosideros excelsa (New Zealand pohutukawa), the Broussonetia papyrifera (paper mulberry, from which bark-cloth was made), the incredibly toxic Tarentaculata venomosa, and the astoundingly rare Ypotoglaxia jasminifolia.
Without a word, Vorontsov rushed through the reception hall, into the conservatory. Everything was ruined. Huge shards of broken glass from the roof had pierced the most sensitive plants and embedded themselves end-on in the sandstone floor. Shattered remnants of the Broussonetia papyrifera littered the paths. Pulverized pohutukawa twigs were scattered over the sandstone, and the only Ypotoglaxia in the northern hemisphere had shrivelled away to a string. Vorontsov was almost in tears, at the ruination of twenty years’ work.
The culprit was dragged before him: a cold, dead man, wounded by numerous cuts, but scarcely bleeding at all. One ear had been sliced off by the glass, and was delivered in a separate wrapper. To hold the body together, the servants had wrapped it in the Union Jack that the man had tried to use as a disguise. Underneath the flag, the man was dressed in a monk’s habit. He had obviously been a spy.
"Those perfidious British!" Vorontsov shouted. "First they drop a seal on me from a hot-air balloon, immediately after protesting their wish for peace - and now they destroy my life’s work by bombarding my palace with deep-frozen monks. It’s clear that they don’t want peace at all! Our Tsar will hear about these unprovoked attacks on Russian sovereignty!"
"What do you want done with the body, sir? It’s already starting to smell. The surgeon believes it could have been dead for some time. Shall we bury it?"
Vorontsov uttered one of those deep, evil laughs for which he was so feared. "Bury this putrid body, yes! But not in a grave. Put it in the compost heap: we need more blood and bone. The English devil who ruined my garden shall help it grow again."
The flat site on which the Alupka Palace was built had been carved out of solid rock, overlooking the Black Sea. The soil was poor, and the surviving gardeners needed all the blood and bone they could get.
The heartbroken Vorontsov, though it was now midnight, decided he could not bear to stay at the Alupka. With fresh horses (but the same tired driver) he returned to Sebastopol. As for the monk’s ear, he absent-mindedly put it in his pocket.
He arrived at dawn, groggy with sleep, and found his equerry preparing to dissect the Seal. The equerry had slept in a room adjoining the locked yard, and during the night had been awoken by suspicious sounds emanating from the Seal.
"Yet another British plot!" Vorontsov stormed.
"Be sure to stand back, sir!" Lev warned. "This could be a booby-trap."
With elaborate care, he cut the Seal open. A shower of pale-green pebble-like things flew up, disappearing into the sky.
"What was that?" Vorontsov gasped.
"Insects, probably," said Lev, calmly severing the threads. The Seal seemed at first to be full of pencil sketches and water-colours. Seaside scenes, many with a woman clad in white.
"Aha!" Vorontsov exclaimed, pointing at a wharf. "See that? Port fixtures! Strategic diagrams. Do you know, Lev Nikolayevich, I believe this is the property of a spy. That looks like Kherch to me."
"But the woman," said Lev. "Always the same woman. Would a spy do that?"
"Of course, lieutenant. For decoy purposes - to make these seem innocent amateur paintings. There will be secret messages, encrypted in the folds of her dress. Don’t be fooled - look at the fine detail on those wharf pilings! Would a Sunday painter do that? I think not."
Digging down further, they found two notebooks, scribbled in an illegible script, with the odd preposterous drawing.
"Aha!" said Vorontsov. "More code! And this cartoon: the fellow that destroyed my hothouse. Here he is again, destroying a church. I knew he was a spy."
Below the notebooks was a top hat, bearing the label of a well-known hatter in London. Tucked into the hat was a letter in code, using strange symbols, the like of which they had never seen.
Down still further, wrapped in a heap of men’s clothes, they found a girl. She was pretending to sleep, but they soon fixed that.
"Where am I?" she asked in Batronian - an uncouth language that neither of them recognized. Then she remembered: she had followed Edward Lear. "Am where?" she asked.
"English! Told you!" said Vorontsov to Lev (who, after publishing his Army Tales a few years later, was to become a moderately successful writer).
The following day, on the Tsar’s arrival at Sebastopol to inspect the fleet, Prince Vorontsov obtained a private audience with his ruler. He described the spy materials contained in the Lord Privy Seal, the pictures of military installations, the journal in an unknown code, the letter in another code, and the dead-monk spy who had laid waste his collection of exotic plants. (To spare the Tsar any embarrassment, he did not mention the exact circumstances of the seal’s arrival in the longboat, nor the sleeping girl, nor that the monk’s body had been unaccountably mislaid.)
"Did not some of your plants have secret messages encrypted in the folds of their leaves?" Nicholas inquired.
"Sire, you are correct!" Vorontsov exclaimed. (It was safest, he had found, to enthusiastically agree with these crazy ideas of the Tsar’s.)
"An insult to the motherland!" declared Nicholas, his brow darkening to the utmost shade of sepia. "So it must be war."
So it was war.
The offending Seal and most of its contents were sent to the Moscow headquarters of the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police. Vorontsov kept one painting which particularly intrigued him, and appeared to have no military importance. It showed a woman at the seaside, wearing only a fish, frolicking knee-deep in the waves. Vorontsov never put this on public view in the Alupka Palace, but stored it (for some eccentric reason) with his huge and disgusting collection of erotica.
Also among the effects, Vorontsov found a crude map of the Isle of Batrony, labelled in English. Having never seen a map of that isle before, he filed it away for possible future use.
Vorontsov wrote to the Okhrana’s Archivist-in-Chief (a distant relative named Ploffskin Pluffskin, who owed him a favour), asking his staff to analyse the Seal and all documents contained within it.
When the Seal and its contents arrived in Moscow a week later, locked inside a Top Secret railway wagon, the archivists were a little surprised to find that the "documents" included a top hat, men’s clothes with English labels, a box of painting equipment, a letter in Arabic (or was it Chinese?), and a selection of utterly useless utensils including a pintacle, a bezulion, and a runcible spoon.
That was no problem: they had in the past interrogated such objects for hidden connotations. The girl puzzled them, though. Ordinarily, she would have been sent across the road to the Lubyanka and put through the standard tortures till a suitable confession had been extracted. But when the junior archivist cataloguing Case 43908 suggested this to Count Pluffskin, he was sternly rebuffed.
"Prince Vorontsov is a very important man," he was told. "This letter specifically states that everything in the Seal is a document. The reason that the girl is to be treated as a document is that she understands no Russian. Is not that obvious, you fool?"
The junior archivist had to agree.
Thus Mazinta had the number 43908/2 carefully stamped on her forehead She was instructed, by sign language, never to wash it off.
While the Okhrana continued its search for somebody who understood her outlandish language (whatever it was), Mazinta was put to work on miscellaneous duties in the archives. Because she was illiterate, she could file the files with no danger of putting them in numerical order and thus jeopardizing their secrecy.
As the Moscow winter began to bite, she came to realize how lucky she was to be a document rather than a person. Late at night, from the Lubyanka jail on the opposite side of Furkasovky Pereulok, she could hear the wails of its inmates, as icicles pierced their flesh, and they slowly froze to death. Documents, though, were State property, and had to be well preserved. Therefore the archives were maintained year-round at a temperature of 18 degrees Réaumur - like a mild summer’s day on Limbo.
Deputy-Investigator Alexander Sergeyevich Marmaladov was put in charge of case 43908. He called for the documents, but was told only one could be found. He shrugged. Documents were always being incorrectly filed. He ordered this one to be brought to him. When it walked into his office and grinned at him, he was so taken aback that he was unable to sleep that night.
After a few months, Mazinta had picked up enough Russian to hold conversations with the staff. In a careless moment, she confided to a friendly furnace-stoker that she was Batronian. This information was immediately reported to Baron Pluffskin, who in turn sent a request to the Army for an interrogator fluent in that tongue.
Finally, in 1857 (a year after Russia had annexed the Isle of Batrony) an interpreter was found: a young corporal called Xyxspyx. He was summoned, led blindfolded to the Okhrana headquarters, and asked to interpret the interrogation of a human document. By all accounts, this interrogation was notable chiefly for its lack of vowels and consonants, e.g. "Yes [grunt] [snort] but because [growl] the [whine] had [belch-like woggle] I had to [long doglike howl]."
When Marmaladov heard these disgusting sounds, he stormed out of his office, hid himself in a hole in the wall, and listened to Xyxspyx and Mazinta hold a conversation in their extraordinary language. They were getting on extremely well. When Xyxspyx touched Mazinta’s shoulder, Marmaladov rushed back into his office and ended the interrogation.
Mazinta knew why. She smiled sweetly at Marmaladov.
At this point, any humane person might have expected that Mazinta would be released, but regulations strictly forbade the removal of any official documents from the premises. Mazinta did not object. She had made herself quite comfortable in the building: she had created a secret room behind some filing-shelves, and decorated it with documents relating to the Case of the Lord Privy Seal.
Over the next few years, Marmaladov became quite charmed by Mazinta - at that time around 18 years old. By falsifying records to make it seem that accession number 43908/2 had applied only to her cloak, he set her free. (By now the Crimean war had ended, and she was no longer of any strategic military value.)
Finally, Marmaladov applied to the Directors for permission to marry her. Though official approval was reluctantly given, she declined: she would never marry, she said.
He begged and begged. She steadfastly refused. One night, in a fit of drunken melancholy, the desperate Marmaladov fired a bullet through his brain.
Such inconsiderate behaviour caused a considerable problem for the Archivist-in-Chief. For arcane political reasons, the Okhrana archives at that precise moment could not afford to lose any staff. Therefore, Mazinta was placed on the Okhrana payroll to replace the late Marmaladov. As case 43908 had come to occupy all his time, it seemed economical for the case to investigate itself - especially as it seemed to be one of those cases which never produced any useful information, nor came to any conclusion.
In charge of her own case, Mazinta unfalsified the papers again, so that she could not be forced to leave.
In 1878, following the end of the war in Servia, Mme Marmaladova (as she was known for payroll purposes) was visited by a Batronian sergeant, who had a few hours to spare in Moscow while waiting for a train. He had heard about her, he said, at eleventh-hand through the Batronian who had interrogated her in 1857. She recognized the sergeant instantly: he was her brother Vivonu.
But prevail on her as he might, she refused to return to Batrony. She held an important Government job, she told him.
"Don’t you miss our homeland?" Vivonu asked.
"I have the entire Isle here," she answered. "Come and see my gallery."
My great-grandfather followed her down creaking staircases into the dim sub-basement, through long and winding corridors. Rows of shelves towered far above them, and great spiders scurried back into the privacy of their dusty files. Finally Mazinta led the way through a dark, narrow opening, and he found himself in a space formed by the backs of four shelves placed in a square. It was sparsely furnished, with only a bed and a battered suitcase marked E.L. in gold leaf. But its cardboard walls were entirely covered with 246 watercolours of Batrony.
"One day Ellelear will come to visit," Mazinta said, smiling at the panorama surrounding her. "He is a great traveller, that man. We agreed that one day we shall meet again. So this is my life now. Small on the outside, large on the inside."
Their parting must have been a sad one. Vivonu was never able to visit Moscow again, and Mazinta never left the Okhrana building. She died around the time of the October Revolution. Whether her death was related to those events, we do not know. She would then have been around 75 years old.
Her remains are preserved in the same building, which is now managed by a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA. Following the glorious re-establishment of capitalism in Russia, case 43908 may be inspected between 0845 and 0945 hours every second Tuesday, for an almost exorbitant fee, payable in U.S. dollars.
The available documents consist of:
- The skeleton of a human female; the skull has 43908/2 painted on its crown.
- A greyish canvas bag, the shape and size of a ball-balancing seal.
- 14 utensils of No Particular Purpose, such as a coppery gong and a nutcracking sugar-tong.
- A bag of pencils, water-colour pigments and moth-eaten brushes.
- An assortment of men’s clothing, which includes a top hat inscribed on the inside Edward Lear, Esq., London.
- A letter in a mysterious script (neither Arabic, Batronian, nor Chinese), that has defied all attempts at code-breaking.
- A battered calf-leather volume containing the first and last parts of E. Lear's journal: the main source of the book you are reading at this moment.
- A black-bound notebook, of Japanese manufacture, recounting E. Lear's travels from Underednu to Coromandel.
The 246 water-colours, however, have not been found. Perhaps they are still in Mazinta’s secret room - wherever it may be. But nothing ever leaves that nameless building on the north side of Furkasovsky Pereulok, so perhaps some day the paintings will turn up.
Edward Lear, as far as we can determine, never referred in public to his visit to the Isle of Batrony. In fact, he seems to have taken some pains to skate over it. For example, in the preface to the final edition of his Nonsense Books, he quotes an autobiographical letter in a "strict recital of date and fact":
In 1854 I went to Egypt and Switzerland.There appear to be three main reasons for this silence:
- ITEM: his unwillingness to admit to the British public that he had been the prime cause of the Crimean War;
- ITEM: his worry that the War Office might discover that he had lied about how he came to be aboard the Dryad;
- ITEM: his embarrassment at returning without documents that would give substance to claims which might otherwise seem far-fetched - even, perhaps, nonsensical. Later diaries refer to the reputation of James Bruce ("the Abyssinian"), which Lear was at pains to avoid.
Late in 1871, at the age of 59 (and a steadfast bachelor) Lear wrote the famous poem "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo." This may now be read, in the light of the Okhrana manuscript, as an expression of his love for Jingly Jones. Peter Levi, in Edward Lear: a Biography (page 245), records that "as an old man he could break down singing it."
There is no record of Lear having any further contact with Lady Jones after he left the Isle of Batrony. Indirectly, he constantly pestered the War Office, on topics such as "Postings, Foreign, Generals" and "Pensions Awarded to Military Widows (I to K)". But all his inquiries, it seemed, were doomed to failure.
Our Last Epilogue will explain.