Gibbous House 40

There was no sentimentality in taking the adolescent journal belonging to my late wife: it puzzled me that such a thing still lay in her former bedchamber so long after her departure from Gibbous House, whenever that had occurred. Besides, my recent learning of my wife’s earlier incarnation as the wife of one Cadwallader had provoked in me some curiosity about her, such as to which, heretofore, I would not have owned. Equally baffling was the good repair of the room itself.

Book under my arm, I advanced to the door opposite the Professor’s midnight blue. The shade applied liberally to this door enjoyed the recently – but a decade earlier – coined name of navy blue. There was a lever arrangement, where the handle should have been. Brass – as the other door furniture had been - neither carelessly filthy, nor diligently polished. I glanced over my shoulder at the portal to the professor’s lair. His door boasted an identical lever in place of the usual knobbed handle. I knew that such things had been appearing on fashionable doors in the capital of late: latterly, however, there had been few doors of fashion open to me. It vexed me somewhat that I chose to force the lever upwards for a moment. By this I mean that given a simple binary choice I mischose, and a lick of anger flamed in me because of it. My determination, in this corridor of blue doors, to thwart probabilities -and the nonsense of Boole’s Laws of Thought - meant, naturally, that random choice encouraged the nugatory or vain endeavour.

Choosing downward pressure on the lever I swung the door wide. The walls were void of paper or hangings of any kind, being painted with limewash. There was a mean cot cramped against one wall and the room was not large. There was a window, of sorts: a tiny square of glass and wood with no apparent means of aperture. A rough wooden garderobe stood in one corner and, magnificently, in the center of the rough carpentry of the floor boards, stood a chamberpot, or – more correctly – a bourdeloue. The room reminded me of nothing so much as the asylum in Edinburgh. I tossed my late wife’s diary on the cot and was pleased with my choice of bedchamber.

It was time to inspect the professor’s inner sanctum. Pressing down straightway on the lever, I entered the room, enervated by curiosity. There were several unusual aspects to his retreat; for one, an entire wall consisted of the most magnificent mahogany shelves filled with leather spined books and sundry papers, many of which the professor - unless he possessed the agility and balance of a colobus – could have no earthly hope of perusing. The remainder of the room was almost filled by the largest bed I had ever seen; bare of tester or other drapery the posts rose like vacant flagpoles toward the ceiling. At last I had found a room in possession of a looking glass, although it would have been of little use in adjusting one’s dress. The entire ceiling was of mirrored glass. It showed the reflections of murals as outrageous, if not more so, as those rumoured to have been discovered in Pompeii and Herculaneum in the previous century. Indeed, I would not have been surprised if Francis I of Naples had fainted dead away in the presence of depictions of such lubricious lasciviousness, were those murals of antiquity in similar taste. I wondered how the professor slept at night, or indeed if he preferred not to do so.