Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [15]
Now seventy-two, Peter continues to write steadily and has more than a dozen books in the publishing pipeline, including new novels (Summerlong and I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons); new collections (The First Last Unicorn & Other Beginnings, Green-Eyed Boy, 6 Unicorns, and Four Years, Five Seasons); revised and updated editions of older works (The Innkeeper’s Song, The Magician of Karakosk, Avicenna); new nonfiction books (Sméagol, Déagol, and Beagle: Essays from the Headwaters of My Voice and Me Is Us); and his first two children’s books. Since late 2001 he has made his home in Oakland, California. For more information on Peter Beagle and his works, go to www.conlanpress.com.
PETER S. BEAGLE
Music, When Soft Voices Die
THERE WERE FOUR of them living in the gabled rooming house with two chimneys on Geraldine Row, on the east side of Russell Square. This would have been perhaps six years after the Ottoman War, and quite shortly following the wedding of Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Maude Charlotte Mary, to Prince Selim Ali, who eventually became Sultan Selim IV. The marriage was not a happy one.
The four men’s names were Vordran, Scheuch, Griffith, and Angelos. They were not friends.
Scheuch and Vordran might have been thought to have something in common, since Scheuch was a bank clerk, while Vordran, eldest of the four, worked in a Bishopsgate law firm. But Vordran was not a clerk, nor ever would be, no more than he would ever be a barrister or a solicitor. He was merely a copyist and, since he took shorthand, an occasional secretary. Once, when jolly young Scheuch had the bad form to invite him to join him for tea, Vordran ticked him off sharply before the other two, saying coldly, in his slight, unplaceable accent, “I am a jumped-up office boy, and I will be treated so or left in peace. Do not ever dare to condescend to me again.” Scheuch kept his distance from then on.
Angelos was a second-year medical student at Christ’s Hospital, himself quite sensible of the fact that names such as his—further, his mother was Jewish—were rarely admitted to study at the ancient institution. Even younger than Scheuch, he appeared a much more serious soul, but on further acquaintance one discovered that his interests and fancies ranged from pigeon-racing to hot-air ballooning (very much in vogue since the Turkish bombing of London) to the newly recognized science of galvanic phrenology, by means of which one could unfailingly identify a future Mozart or a mass murderer-to-be through analyzing the electrical resistance in different portions of the skull, neck bones, and clavicles. He played the banjo, but never past eight o’clock, or before ten.
Griffith had been at Balliol. That was very nearly all one was allowed to know about Griffith, besides the fact that he was a waiter at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. His term at university had apparently been interrupted by his enlistment in the war, of which he was justifiably very proud; but why he never returned to Oxford after the Pact of Trieste remained a mystery. What was not mysterious about him was the fact that, where Vordran was undeniably brittle and prickly, Griffith was, quite simply, arrogant to the point of being unbearable. Everything in his life—and, consequently, every person as well—was viewed through the prism of his lost world, and found wanting. He seemed less a proper snob than a kind of wretched exile, but this understanding made him no more likable, or even tolerable; the others came to speak to him as little as they could, except when encountered entering or leaving the house, or meeting on the stair. Griffith appeared more than satisfied with