Gibbous House 21

Leaning forward conspiratorially on the desk - an expensive piece, but as marked and worn as a pawnbroker’s counter – Brown began to steeple his fingers in an attempt to strike a more prepossessing attitude. Sadly his manual proportions echoed those of the rest of his person, and his chubby hands resembled more the dome of St Paul’s, than any towering spire. However, the voice from the pit ensured no levity, much less mockery, at least from my part. His hanged man’s voice, full of gravel and brimstone, put one in mind of that very deepest of pits; though I myself countenanced no gehenna beneath my feet, believing rather more in those hells I had seen above the ground. Still, I could imagine his voice as that of Malphas or Halphas escaped from Solomon’s urn.

But no demon ever spoke words of such circumlocutory tedium, punctuated with harsh clearings of the throat, sniffs and snorts, with ahs and ums of uncountable number. I remember clearly how he began:

‘Ah…. Mr…Moffat, is it? Um… Of course it is, yes.’ At which point he broke into a round of percussive non-verbal noises. As the unmusical rasp went on, in so far as I was able to gather, the man was attempting to establish my bona fides, without recourse to specifically asking me to prove it in any way. Maccabi retained an air of bored insouciance throughout. When satisfied -although I was unsure by what means - as to that good faith, Brown began to explain the legal points surrounding the inheritance. It seemed that, fortunately for myself, the property had only lately emerged from chancery. He elaborated on entail, detail and - for all that I could make head or tail of any of it - the devil’s tail as well. The property, as he continued to refer to the estate throughout, had passed to Coble himself by a somewhat circuitous route, Brown said, and he vouchsafed that Maccabi would describe it when he escorted me to inspect my property, in the fulness of time.

Brown’s acolyte stood at some unseen, at least by me, signal. Taking possession of a most prodigious bundle of papers of varied antiquity, he proceeded to place them one folio at a time before me and bade me peruse each one with diligence. Some required marks or declarations, some did not. I confess I passed quite into numb oblivion and the inky words ran before my eyes as if newly writ with no sand to hand. The last bore merely an anodyne form of words:

'As heretofore agreed, I pledge full payment

Signed

Alasdair Moffat.'

I was on the point of appending that much practised signature, when Brown asked for a final time:

‘Ah… you are quite sure…um… that you are, indeed…’ Coughs and phlegmous movements quite interrupted him, until he recovered himself enough to say:

‘Ah..Alasdair Moffat?’

Άδηζ Άδηζ Άδηζ Άδηζ Άδηζ Άδηζ

That I surely was, and had been long since. It had been the work of moments to become Alasdair Moffat, a decision taken as soon as the thought was formulated. As to who I was before that, the name is gone and all who would own to it too. That party left a middling estate near Largs at scarce eleven years, following the unfortunate death of a younger sister. Her mother, being recently delivered of a further son, would descend into peculiar hysteria in the presence of the elder. The older boy was despatched with a trunk to the care of a maternal great aunt in Edinburgh, shortly after the girl’s funeral. How the father must have loved his wife to exile his beloved eldest son so!

Euphemia Campbell lived and worked in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, and had done so since its opening in the previous decade. By the time she received the boy, she was indistinguishable in dress and deportment from some of the patients in Doctor Andrew Duncan’s model asylum - and as capable of his care.

I received no further schooling of course, and made myself useful in minor ways. Chamber pots were hardly a challenge, but I found the antics of the genuine lunatics a diversion. One fellow was exceeding odd: for days at a time, on the opening of the judas hole, his handsome face would appear; cultured tones would explain reasonably that - due to some unfortunate misunderstanding – he, Doctor J____ , was incarcerated in error. Less often, but with lunar regularity, his face would appear at the hatch contorted with rage and insanity and he would try to bite mine own through the bars, as I teased him with some beef on a stick. Several years passed in such boyish amusement, until the day my education began, when Alasdair Moffat was consigned to bedlam by relatives.