Free Mr. Timothy: A Novel by Louis Bayard Page A

caps and sink to our knees. In lieu of prayers, the captain begins muttering instructions.
    --Don't pass over the shoes now. Amazing how many on 'em keeps bank-notes next to their feets. And mind, if there's a watch, you leave it be. Just the sort of thing they trace, ain't it? And no breakin' the fingers, the coroners can't abide it. If he's got hisself a ring on, Gully has a special grease, slicks it right off.
    I don't think he's even addressing me in particular. I think it must be the litany he goes through each time.
--And don't be goin' and gettin' any of them screw -pulls. You think the police'd have any? Gorr, they'd be doin' the same as us, and it'd be them gettin' rich 'stead of us, is the only difference.
    And now, through its vestments of mud, our haul begins to assert some of its original identity. The crook of a knee, the swoop of a buttock, an arm bent at the elbow--all of these point synecdochically to a larger whole, a life once lived. Funny how long one can carry on before fronting such a basic fact. Even Captain Gully seems daunted by it: his voice has dropped to an awestruck whisper.
    --My, but he's a little un, ain't he?
    Like the boy pharaohs, I want to say. The ones Mr. McReady used to show me in the British Museum. Except that instead of being fitted out for the afterworld, this one has his knees drawn up to his chest and one arm flung behind his head and a torso so contorted it seems locked in eternal recoil.
    And something else: a pair of hands, curled into the form of talons.
    I don't remark the transition. All I can say is that one moment I'm crouched next to Gully, and the next I'm sprawled headlong in the boat, grubbing through the mud, wiping the dead face clear. In the dim nimbus of Gully's lantern, I see two distended eyeballs, bleached grey and jellied over. Then a pair of water-bruised lips. And as my hands smear away the clay remnants, the bladders of the cheeks emerge from a field of purple-blue skin, skin of an ancient pallor, like the frontispiece of a medieval romance.
    --Bollocks!
    I turn and find Gully straddling the torso, gesturing bitterly at something I can't quite make out--a bare leg, perhaps? a telltale declivity? I can guess his import even before he declares himself.
    --A bloody girl , ain't it?
    Sore disappointed is our captain, and I should be the last to blame him. Someone of such a young and female persuasion--from such a low aquatic vicinity--how likely is she to be carrying coin or valuables? Tuppence at best, for butter and potatoes (her mother still wondering, weeks later, where she's made off to). No, it's a fair waste of good net, as far as Gully is concerned. Small wonder the fire has gone out of him.
    --Dunno, dunno...maybe got a, a bag tied round her, like. Got a, got a change purse, p'raps.... Could be lots of places for secretin'....
    But his heart's not in it. He's written her off, hasn't he? Whereas to me she has become steadily more engrossing. Holding the lantern just above her head, I examine with great interest the short, blunt object that is her nose: a speckled mushroom cap, frozen in the act of tipping upwards. Nothing like the dark, aquiline version I saw on the Embankment yesterday.
    My hands travel to the hair, which after a week's immersion in the Thames, clings stubbornly to its original curl, and which, even in its owner's lifetime, could never have reached her shoulders. Nothing like the lank black hair I saw yesterday, done up with red ribbon. Nothing at all like that.
How strange! To stare into a dead girl's face, to study it as intently as one would a rune, and to feel at the same time such a curious lightness, as though one had just saved a life.
    --Come away, Tim. There's no use worryin' it.

    And I want to tell him I'm not worrying--not at all--but already, I feel the lightness in me filling up with something else.

    It's the hands.

    Tiny, brittle talons, exotic and also familiar, doubling and redoubling in my mind until they rhyme like a