The Famulus

 THE FAMULUS

A servant sat in the small attic at the top of the large Victorian house, a working-space apportioned for conducting his duties to the head of the household.  It was a modern house, because Queen Victoria was still alive.  The walls were too intact for the absorbing of time and ghosts.  The floors remained for a while uncreaking.  The family faces were still fresh and dewy: as yet unpainted.  

The sky was blue. A swish of cloud was a barely visible tourniquet of weak wind. The sun was a pure white oblong hung where the orange ball would eventually replace it should the power of history become capable of doctoring primary sources with the pretence that such an oblong had never existed at all.  Not all Victoriana was grey.

The servant was a famulus, intended to take control of the unfiled and often heavily ink-blotted paperwork that the master who lived downstairs had left in the attic.  The master’s children, meanwhile, were noisy and unschooled.  Their governess had no discipline.  So our scribe and sorter of papers often suffered a headache, and he would sneak out into the clean streets to absorb some of the white light that the ‘sun’ permanently shimmered amid a uniform consistency of  buoyant air, night and day.  Even the pickpockets had no place to hide.

Refreshed, he often returned to the attic by ill-concealed stairways that served as secondary chutes of passage parallel to the main stairways. Despite the relative openness of his route in and out of the house, he was barely noticed. The maze of his pathways to which blind eyes were turned became a secret he failed to keep, but a secret that was effectively never given away by reason of nobody else in the house realising it was a secret at all.

One of the concerns of the famulus was the relationship he had with the master.  Was it merely cerebral?  Or was he due to summon up physical skills to satisfy secret lusts? The children had to be considered and never allowed to see things they shouldn’t be allowed to see.  And the pretty governess was surely sufficient for most needs.  The lady of the house remained a mystery, a fact that was a mystery in itself, it being otherwise such a generally unmysterious establishment.  Nothing Dickensian about Dickensian London in those days, it has to be remembered.  No cat’s meat men.  No noisy costermongers. No street sweepers, because if any such sweepers were about they would have to sweep themselves up to return the place to its previous tidiness.

The tangle of papers was mystery enough, in the end.  The writing delved into philosophy, broaching many questions of identity, reality, mind and matter.  How much could one take from X bit by bit before it ceased to be X?  If one transported parts of a bridge elsewhere and then built it into a castle and then took down the castle and rebuilt the bridge, was it the same bridge it started off as being?  If one took off one’s toes at their tips did one still remain the same person?  What couldn’t you take off and still remain the same person?  And many similar considerations.

Would the sun always be the same sun?  And is a man naked the same as the same man fully dressed?

Does death alter anything?

He was beginning to get a headache again.  Could a headache think?

A knock at the attic door brought the famulus back to the here and now, awake in the bed he had chopped himself short enough to fit.

A face looked in.  One of the household’s children who would later die during the Boer War without leaving descendants of its own.  It looked startled upon hearing a noise of fluttering paper in the darkness. The attic had no windows, thus no possibility of checking whether the sun was still up.  The slates rattled on the roof at the first fitful suspicions of a storm.  The child vanished, screaming that it had seen a ghost.

The muffled distant sounds of the governess on a far deeper landing were her cooing some comforts at the vaguely sleep-walking child.  And a reprise of fluttering was the head of the house scurrying on tip-toes back to the master bedroom along a tertiary chute of passage.

Then came the even more distant sounds of costermongers crying their wares: “Dirty sheets for beds.  Dirty sheets for beds.”