Free Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey Page A

one at a time, as instructed by Piggott, leaving them hidden inside the trapdoor to be taken in the night.
    What happened to these parcels was a mystery I would not solve for many years. They disappeared, leaving no clue but a mess of broken sealing wax like the remains of something eaten by a dog. The wax was hard as broken glass and I was mostly concerned about the pain it caused my skin. But whether I was torturing my knees or strapped in the harness of the dog cart, I thought about not much else except how to make Mr. Watkins teach me to engrave. The deep green oaks arched above my head but I was blind to all their splendor. I imagined the burin in my hand, carving with a flick and a push, feeling the steel moving through the hard wood like a knife through butter. I arrived in Mr. Watkins' presence like a beggar on my knees.
    I could hardly look at him, nor did he deign to glance at me.
    If I had asked him to teach me he would have been haughty as a goose. So I sat in my place beside the door. On sufferance, I observed his long fair hair falling like a curtain across the mystery of his hands. I dared not ask to touch that unforgiving steel. I saw how his four long fingers were drawn back and curved and how he pressed the tool against the ball of the thumb. It looked so easy, but on the fetid night when at last--without warning--he pressed the tool into my warty hands, I found it completely resistant to my passion.
    "You see," he said to me, "it is a gift."
    And took his burin back.
    I was not worthy, but I would not go away and something in my willfulness must have stirred him for he finally allowed me to ruin one of his brushwood blocks. How many nights was this for? Three? I sat cross-legged in the stinky hole, trying to engrave--not the rural scenes I had imagined, but ten straight lines close together. That was all he would let me do.
    I was tired. I was very angry. I would not quit.
    "You'll never be an engraver's bootlace," he said. I will not say this did not hurt my feelings.
    "Yes sir, I know."
    "Then go."
    With his long spidery arms he opened the door for me and was nice enough, on this occasion, to personally hand out the wrapped parcels of his day's production. Then the door closed as usual, and I was outside in the blackness. No skerrick of light snuck around his door and I knew he had put out his lamps and set to clean his equipment in the dark, his long hands fluttering across blade and type bed like a blind watchmaker. When his labor was done, he had earlier informed me, he would lie in bed pulling the rope of his ventilator, removing the flammable white spirit in time for work. Lighting the first lantern each morning, he feared he would be blown to bits.
    One overcast dawn I arrived inside the fireplace to find an entire red wax seal broken as a biscuit. Then, deep in the dark of the crawling space, I came upon an item that must have spilled from the parcel--a sample of Mr. Watkins' labor, a job so fine, I decided when I brought it into the light, that he would have found employment anywhere on earth. The strange pale silk spinner was an artist, and although I already knew this from watching him work the burin, this single assignat confirmed him as the highest of the high.
    Of course you, monsieur, know that an assignat was, at that time, the paper currency of the revolutionary government of France. Although the Parrot was only an ignorant printer's devil who had no clue about the assignat, the hair on my neck prickled. I recognized the power and danger of this ornate and clever forgery. I had only seen one British banknote in my life, the one my father had me draw, that had been as pale and ordinary as a cabbage moth, requiring the endorsement of Lord Hob-Knob or I knew not who. The assignat was a power unto itself, a goldish color, one part butter yellow, the remainder mustard, printed on pearly linen paper--DOMAINES NATIONAUX. Although I was no lawyer I believed that a man could be hanged for printing