Billings Better Bookstore & Brasserie Read online

  First published by Clan Destine Press in 2020

  Clan Destine Press

  www.clandestinepress.net

  PO Box 121,

  Bittern Victoria 3918

  Australia

  Copyright © Fin J Ross 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including internet search engines and retailers, electronic or mechanical, photocopying (except under the provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data:

  Ross, Fin J.

  Billings Better Bookstore and Brasserie

  ISBN: 978-0-6488487-1-4 (pb)

  ISBN: 978-0-6488487-3-8 (hb)

  ISBN: 978-0-6488487-2-1 (eb)

  Cover & illustrations © Judith Rossell Cover type: Willsin Rowe

  Design & Typesetting: Clan Destine Press

  Clan Destine Press www.clandestinepress.net

  BILLINGS BETTER BOOKSTORE AND BRASSERIE

  The Story

  An extraordinary tale in which a young lexicographer finds adventure in colonial Melbourne

  The Appendix

  The compleat and wholly original songs and rhymes to be found within these pages

  The Glossary

  In which some remarkable words contained herein, many beloved of Samuel Johnson and others wholly invented, are defined to aid in the reader’s knowledge and education

  Author’s Notes

  In which the author explains herself.

  Acknowledgements

  In which the author reveals herself.

  ‘If you enjoy wonderfully written historical fiction, or if you want to be reminded of the marvels to be found behind the doors of a bookshop, you’ll love Billings Better Bookstore and Brasserie.’

  Meg Keneally

  Fidelia Knight is clever and delightful and, after you’ve walked the streets of colonial Melbourne with her, the Brasserie in Billings Better Bookstore would be the perfect place to take tea.

  Kerry Greenwood

  For Mum

  Wish you were here.

  This recommendation of steadiness and uniformity does not proceed from an opinion, that particular combinations of letters have much influence on human happiness; or that truth may not be successfully taught by modes of spelling fanciful and erroneous: I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the Sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

  Samuel Johnson A.M.

  A

  Amelia Audacious Admonished an Amateur Abecedarian

  and Absconded with an Antediluvian Aardvark,

  After Adjourning for an Arousing Absinthe at

  Billings Better Bookstore and Cafeteria.

  Did she Absolutely? She did indeed!

  Melbourne, March, 1875

  She was roused from her sleep by the sound of a chair scraping on the floorboards. Was someone there or had she dreamed it? The floor was as hard as a gravestone and her ear hurt from being squashed against Samuel Johnson. A pale flickering glow filtered through the lace cloth of her refuge – a side table adorned with photographs set around a loudly-ticking casement clock – casting dancing shadows onto her bare arms like an old zoetrope. She was not alone. She sat up, silent as a settled moth, and drew her knees up under her pinafore. She had been holding her breath since she heard the sound and now exhaled ever so silently.

  She peered through the veil of cloth and discerned the silhouette of a man – definitely a man – seated just four yards away. It was the exhalations of his breath which set the candle-flame aquiver.

  Was the man affected? Why was he here at near one in the morning? He sat at the desk writing, surrounded by books, spasmodically duffing his forehead with the palm of his hand as though inside his mind he had discovered a new intricacy of the universe.

  ‘C, C, what else starts with C?’ He spoke out loud. She stifled a gasp with her hand. ‘Hmm. Aha! Cross, Cutting, with C?’

  She thought these words prosaic. He had a dictionary there beneath his elbow – the one, in fact, that she had been poring over earlier – but never once did he open it. She was almost bursting. What about coscinomancy? No, people mightn’t understand it. The art of divination by means of a sieve seldom came up in conversation. What about cachectick or crapulence? Perhaps not. But cross? Cutting? So ordinary. So banal. She sighed. Not audibly mind, lest she betray her sanctuary; dispel her camouflage.

  She could not fathom what he was doing. Sitting there talking to himself like a lonely parrot. Hooty as a madgehowlet. She hoped he couldn’t hear her thinking and she was glad that he hadn’t come while she had been reading in that very spot. Glad also that the smell of tallow from the candle she had burned at the desk had long since dissipated and that he was unaware it was a good inch shorter.

  ‘Aha!’ he exclaimed. ‘Christopher Crabstick was Cross, Captious, Cutting and Caustic, whenever he could not get a book brought from Cole’s Cheap Book Arcade.’ He paused. ‘Ish dat so? Yaw.’

  She furrowed her brow. He was definitely a sailor short of a crew. Did he mean ‘brought’ when it should have been ‘bought’? Yes, the man was patently mad, answering his own question, even. Mother always said that talking to oneself was a surety of malaise. Looseness of the mind. But sometimes one had no other option. Mother never knew how it was to long for someone to talk to, like she had after Ninian and Permelia were gone. Now Mother was gone. And Father too. And the little brother or sister who might have filled the gap left by the untimely deaths of her younger siblings.

  She was alone.

  How she missed Father reading to her at night by candlelight. How she missed his vocabulary and grammar lessons. Ninian and Permelia wouldn’t have missed them. They never shared her fascination with words. She was always alone in her wonderment of language. And now she was truly alone. Oh, except for this nincompoop who spoke in alliteratives. Daft as a dingleberry, yet spellbinding. He interrupted her thoughts again.

  ‘D, D, hmm. Dolly Dumpling…ah, danced, yes, danced…’

  She rolled her eyes heavenward, noticing for the first time the cobwebs gathered in wisps on the underside of the table. She crinkled her nose. She didn’t like the thought of sharing her sleeping quarters, such as they were, with spiders.

  The man was mumbling to himself again. Was he writing a nursery rhyme like the ones Mother recited to her and her siblings as she prepared their porridge in the mornings? Mother Goose Rhymes she called them.

  Birds of a feather flock together,

  And so will pigs and swine.

  Rats and mice have their choice,

  And so will I have mine.

  She put her hand to her mouth. Had she spoken out loud? She peered through the lace. Not a whisker of his substantial beard had budged. He hadn’t heard her.

  She truly wanted to call out some more imaginative D words – daggledtail, dallop, dewbesprent, dandruff – admittedly not verbs, but nonetheless much more interesting than ‘danced’, but she bit her tongue.

  She would go on pretending she wasn’t there. He would never know he had an audience.

  Sometimes she wondered if she really were here. Nobody ever paid her any attention. Could they not see her? Was she a will-o’-the-wisp, unseen by those who didn’t venture out into the
darkness? She seldom saw her reflection in another’s eyes; or in the windows; or in the polished silver or crystals of the epergnes on the tables in the store beneath her.

  Was she a figment of her own imagination? Could she sit out there, in the open, and read all day? Would anybody notice her? She might try it. Tomorrow. Maybe she only existed to be the thing overlooked, lost, misplaced – but never found. It was helpful when she didn’t want to be seen but what if, one day, she did?

  She especially didn’t want to be seen by Mr and Mrs Exon or anyone else from the orphan asylum. They might make her return there. She would never go back. She didn’t belong there, refusing to believe as she did that her parents were truly gone.

  She only had the awful Mr Bartholomew’s word on that score and he had horridly told her never to speak of it. And so she hadn’t. Had not, in fact, spoken to anyone since. Speaking about such sorrowful things might only make them real.

  Nor had she belonged in steerage. Father had paid a small fortune for a handsome cabin aboard the SS Great Britain, yet she had spent the last week of voyage with those poor souls who could afford only the cheapest fare. She had spent much of that week avoiding one particular man, hirsute as a harvest mouse, who leered at her and brushed his tongue suggestively through his bristly moustache. He made her cringe.

  His beard was not unlike this man’s. But that was where the similarity ended. She did not get the impression that this man would harbour lecherous intentions. He looked too respectable for that. Who was this night owl who sat talking blather and balderdash? Was he, like her, a stowaway in this edifice of knowledge and learning?

  Could one stow away in a building? She had heard the expression on board the ship. A young lad, not much older than herself, was discovered hiding, three days out of Liverpool. The ship battled heavy weather in those first days of the voyage and she and her mother, heavy with child, both succumbed to seasickness. During a brief spell on deck for fresh air, she witnessed the discovery of ‘Stowaway Sam’. The wretched boy’s eyes pleaded as he crouched on the deck, surrounded by half a dozen crew. A startled fox set upon by hounds. While the men called for the captain and discussed, debated and deliberated what to do with the young interloper, he tilted his head at her and smiled. She was not mistaken. She could see it clearly despite the dirt on his face. His matted hair clung to his forehead like the dags on a sheep’s bottom and he licked his lips constantly. She could see that the boy was starving and lusting for water to quench his thirst. She dashed to her parents’ cabin to retrieve her tin cup and reappeared shortly, having filled it from the water cask below decks. She parted two of the crew members, pushing between their hips, to proffer the cup to the boy.

  Was this man like Stowaway Sam? Was he aboard this stone boat to nowhere for the promise it held? She wondered if Mr Cole, the proprietor, knew of this man’s midnight escapades. He looked dowdy and sleep-tousled. Did he, like her, have nowhere else to be in the night than in this candle-lit edifice? No bed in which to drive away the thoughts that swirled and competed for supremacy in his head? Maybe, like her, he had a mind which couldn’t switch off even in the depths of darkness.

  Or maybe, like her, he was on a quest to expand his mind – by sneaking into Cole’s Cheap Book Arcade in the middle of the night. She had done this many times in recent weeks, but never before had she had company. If one could call such a strange, self-absorbed person company. He was perplexing. He was odd. Yet he seemed a kindred spirit.

  The bearded man kept her awake for another two hours. He penned, pored and pondered over his peculiar alliterative verses until he reached the letter N.

  Nelly Neat Never Neglected her Nice New Needle,

  Which she bought at a shop just above Cole’s Cheap Book Arcade.

  Ish dat so?………Yaw.

  She was tired of his musings and certain that she could do better, yet sleep was not forthcoming. He was tiring too; the words not coming freely now. He startled her at three o’clock by abruptly standing and rolling his strange verse into a cylinder, which he placed under his arm. She knew it was three o’clock from the chiming of the myriad clocks in the building, all contrived, she decided, to deprive her of more than an hour’s sleep at a time. He pulled a silver candle holder from his pocket and lit the candle from the one on the desk which he then snuffed with his fingers. He paced silently towards the staircase, illuminating the austere paintings on the panelled walls as he passed. She waited a minute, crept from her hiding spot and peered down through the balustrades encircling the store’s mezzanine. It was dark as a cave but she could see the man’s candle flicker as he ventured through the door. He locked it from the outside, with a key. He had a key. Curious. He must be employed here, she concluded.

  She was glad he was finally gone. It meant she had the place to herself again. She was hungry. It had been hours since she had had a pilfered bite to eat. She threaded her way, with arms outstretched like a blind person, back to the desk and rummaged around the mess of books and papers for the candle and matches. Once lit, she clutched its holder and tiptoed downstairs and towards the entry. Early yesterday, she had seen a young boy place something wrapped in paper into a large Chinese urn. She plucked it out and unwrapped it. Just as she hoped, it was the remnants of a slice of bread plastered with lard. The boy had evidently found it unpalatable. Dry though it was, she stuffed it into her mouth and relished the prospect of it quietening her carping stomach.

  The flickering light danced in the mirrors before her and pirouetted off the brass wall fixtures and sconces. She glimpsed herself in a mirror and reeled at her ghoulish appearance. A trick of the light. Her face cast in amber glows, her hair a quandary of shadows. She wandered around the vast emporium, ran her fingers across vellum-clad tomes and flicked through pages of books whose contents she could only marvel at. Even if she read a book a day – a preposterous thought given she could scarcely manage fifty pages a night by the dim candlelight – it would take her two lifetimes to peruse the hundreds upon hundreds of volumes on the store’s shelves. By which time, of course, many more would have been written and printed. It was a daunting thought.

  She had better get started. Now that she was wide awake, it might be possible to read for an hour or so before the burden of slumber lay heavy on her eyelids. But what to read? She eyed the offerings on a table marked “American novels”, and stopped on one with a familiar name. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Mother had told her that it was the ‘most important book of the century’. How could she know that when the century was not yet over? Mother had explained a little about the story, and its ramifications for the American people. It was the first time she had heard the words ‘slavery’ and ‘controversial’, but it had been Father, not Mother, who had explained their meanings.

  Mother told her she would need to wait until she was much older to tackle it. Mother wasn’t always right. Mother tended to underestimate her.

  She studied a copy. Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly. She flipped past the illustration on the flyleaf and determined that if she could comprehend the first chapter, she would read on.

  IN WHICH THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO A MAN OF HUMANITY.

  Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P – – , in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subject with great earnestness.

  With the book in her right hand and candle in her left, she read out loud as she climbed the stairs, being careful not to let wax drip onto the pages. She reached the desk and was soon lost in Beecher Stowe’s words and descriptions of life in America’s troubled south. She had looked for a definition of the word ‘nigger’ in the dictionary on the desk, since it was foreign to her, but it seemed the dictionary didn’t know it either. She fathomed, however, that it applied to dark-skinned people, in a contemptuous fashion. What
made these white people regard themselves as superior? What gave them the right to own other people? The whole concept was anathema to her. She wished Father were here to explain. He had a knack of imparting logic where none was evident. Had Mother ever met a black person? Would she have regarded that person – for surely they were people too – with disdain? Surely Mother would not be so intolerant.

  But then she considered the episode with the young lad on the ship, when she had given him water, and Mother’s stern admonishment.

  The boy had grabbed her tin cup and sculled its contents, wiping his lips on his shirt sleeve when it was empty. He nodded to her and grinned a scungy-toothed grin.

  ‘Fidelia Patience! Whatever are you doing?’ Only her mother could speak in such a tone. She was most displeased. ‘Get away from that vagabond. Remember your manners.’

  Fidelia replied that she thought she was showing her manners, when nobody else had given thought to the boy’s plight.

  ‘That scoundrel does not deserve your manners, child. He’s not worthy of your second glance. Come now.’ She waved her hand frantically, as if to convey impending doom. Fidelia obliged reluctantly; glanced back to smile at the boy.

  Father heard that the boy was berated at length by Captain Chapman before being put to work in the galley. He came to be named ‘Stowaway Sam’ during the two-month voyage. His only possession was a tin whistle, with which he entertained the crew. Father had mentioned him later. A Liverpudlian, the boy was, who thought the SS Great Britain was sailing to Ireland when he stole aboard, not halfway around the world to Australia.

  Fidelia thought it probable she would never see the boy again. Mother would make sure of that. ‘You are the lioness,’ she said, ‘he is the jackal.’ Fidelia didn’t understand what she meant. Nor could she, at the time, recall what a jackal was. She had gone below to their cabin to look it up in Father’s dictionary.