Bod walked with care. He knew the area well, and he knew how dangerous it could be.
When Bod was nine he had been exploring in just this part of the world when the soil had given way beneath him, tumbling him into a hole almost twenty feet down. The grave had been dug deep, to accommodate many coffins, but there was no headstone and only one coffin, down at the bottom, containing a rather excitable medical gentleman named Carstairs who seemed thrilled by Bod’s arrival and insisted on examining Bod’s wrist (which Bod had twisted in the tumble, grabbing onto a root) before he could be persuaded to go and fetch help.
Bod was making his way through the northwest quadrant, a sludge of fallen leaves, a tangle of ivy, where the foxes made their homes and fallen angels stared up blindly, because he had an urge to talk to the Poet.
Nehemiah Trot was the Poet’s name, and his gravestone, beneath the greenery, read:
Here lies the mortal remains of
NEHEMIAH TROT
POET
1741–1774
SWANS SING BEFORE THEY DIE
Bod said, “Master Trot? Might I ask you for advice?”
Nehemiah Trot beamed, wanly. “Of course, brave boy. The advice of poets is the cordiality of kings! How may I smear unction on your, no, not unction, how may I give balm to your pain?”
“I’m not actually in pain. I just—well, there’s a girl I used to know, and I wasn’t sure if I should find her and talk to her or if I should just forget about it.”
Nehemiah Trot drew himself up to his full height, which was less than Bod’s, raised both hands to his chest excitedly, and said, “Oh! You must go to her and implore her. You must call her your Terpsichore, your Echo, your Clytemnestra. You must write poems for her, mighty odes—I shall help you write them—and thus—and only thus—shall you win your true love’s heart.”
“I don’t actually need to win her heart. She’s not my true love,” said Bod. “Just someone I’d like to talk to.”
“Of all the organs,” said Nehemiah Trot, “the tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste our sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sour with the same tongue. Go to her! Talk to her!”
“I shouldn’t.”
“You should, sir! You must! I shall write about it, when the battle’s lost and won.”
“But if I Unfade for one person, it makes it easier for other people to see me…”
Nehemiah Trot said, “Ah, list to me, young Leander, young Hero, young Alexander. If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”
“Good point.” Bod was pleased with himself, and glad he had thought of asking the Poet for advice. Really, he thought, if you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust? Which reminded him…
“Mister Trot?” said Bod. “Tell me about revenge.”
“Dish best served cold,” said Nehemiah Trot. “Do not take revenge in the heat of the moment. Instead, wait until the hour is propitious. There was a Grub Street hack named O’Leary—an Irishman, I should add—who had the nerve, the confounded cheek to write of my first slim volume of poems, A Nosegay of Beauty Assembled for Gentlemen of Quality, that it was inferior doggerel of no worth whatsoever, and that the paper it was written on would have been better used as—no, I cannot say. Let us simply agree that it was a most vulgar statement.”
“But you got your revenge on him?” asked Bod, curious.
“On him and on his entire pestilent breed! Oh, I had my revenge, Master Owens, and it was a terrible one. I wrote, and had published, a letter, which I nailed to the doors of the public houses in London where such low scribbling folk were wont to frequent. And I explained that, given the fragility of the genius poetical, I would henceforth write not for them, but only for myself and posterity, and that I should, as long as I lived, publish no more poems—for them! Thus I left instructions that upon my death my poems were to be buried with me, unpublished, and that only when posterity realized my genius, realized that hundreds of my verses had been lost—lost!—only then was my coffin to be disinterred, only then could my poems be removed from my cold dead hand, to finally be published to the approbation and delight of all. It is a terrible thing to be ahead of your time.”
“And after you died, they dug you up, and they printed the poems?”
“Not yet, no. But there is still plenty of time. Posterity is vast.”
“So…that was your revenge?”
“Indeed. And a mightily powerful and cunning one at that!”
“Ye-es,” said Bod, unconvinced.
“Best. Served. Cold,” said Nehemiah Trot, proudly.