Yearn by Tobsha Learner Page B

’appened.”
    D’Arcy studied the young sweep, who returned his gaze, steady and unflinching. The young biographer then held out his hand and the two men shook on the agreement. From a distance it all looked very innocuous.
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    Later that day, D’Arcy visited two wealthy cousins and an uncle. He borrowed the total of sixty crowns, then hocked his pewter mugs and received another forty crowns. After further study of Banks’s description of the ritual he went in search of a number of other essentials: a piglet (required as an animal sacrifice to Atanua, the Polynesian goddess of fertility and of the dawn); a sweet vegetable called a yam, which was also required as a ritual offering; a ground cloth, upon which the orgy was to take place, that had to be marked up with magical symbols and totems exactly as described in Banks’s notes; and, finally, a wooden bowl to be held up at the point of climax by the two male participants.
    The piglet he rescued from a slaughterhouse in Smithfields market. The small, cowering beast appeared so grateful D’Arcy couldn’t help but feel a little guilty for the innocent adoration of the animal, who had no idea that D’Arcy had merely substituted one nasty fate for another. The yam was harder to locate. After a lengthy search he remembered a shipping colleague of his father’s who imported vegetables and fruit from the colony of the West Indies. He visited the offices of the company at the London docks and, after paying a visit to the bemused gentleman, left an hour later with a box of the strange, twisted yellow vegetable. As for the ground cloth, he left this task to his tailors with a drawing of exactly how it should look. Discreet as ever, the Savile Row tailors asked no questions. The wooden bowl he bought from an importer of exotic goods off a small arcade on Bond Street. It was, to his immense satisfaction, actually from Tahiti. Finally the last but most essential ingredient of the ritual—an object belonging to one’s nemesis, the person one wished to inhabit for an hour—was already in his possession: Tuttle’s white glove.
    And so, after an exhausting two days of hansom cabs and brisk walking, D’Arcy discovered himself one street away from his publisher and found he could not resist a spontaneous visit. Pushing past Dingle, the secretary, D’Arcy made his way straight into Mr. Crosby’s office and caught the corpulent gentleman in the middle of a prolonged post–afternoon tea repose. He was accompanied by a snore that rattled around the room like a trapped djinn. Crumbs of Stilton cheese were still caught in the whiskers of his handlebar mustache, blowing, as they were, like snowflakes, abreast every exhalation.
    D’Arcy stood over the desk (with a dirty lunch plate ignobly placed over some poor fop’s manuscript) and coughed loudly. The publisher woke with a small shout, his flailing arms scattering pages in his surprise, his eyes finally focusing upon the young biographer. “Mr. Hammer, you shocked me! I was deep in thought,” he announced as he hurriedly plucked the soiled napkin from his shirtfront and placed the plate behind the desk. “You are audacious, sir, to interrupt a man from such a reverie.”
    â€œForgive me, sir, but it was the excitement of the hunt.”
    â€œThe hunt?”
    â€œThe hunt,” D’Arcy repeated.
    â€œI understand,” the publisher replied gravely, when it was patent he did not. “The spontaneous vigor of young writers, not least their imagination, is, after a time, somewhat tiresome,” he concluded philosophically, addressing the last observation to the portrait of the deceased Mr. Bingham. D’Arcy, fearing another of Crosby’s soliloquies to the dead, interrupted: “You don’t understand: I have found it!”
    â€œIt?”
    â€œThe element that will propel my biography into a