The Ebb Tide

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We were at the Half Toad one evening early in the month of a windy May — Langdon St. Ives; Tubby Frobisher, and myself, Jack Owlesby — taking our ease at our customary table. Professor St. Ives, as you’re perhaps already aware, is one of England’s most brilliant scientists, and her most intrepid explorer. The Half Toad is an inn that lies in Lambert Court, off Fingal Street in London, frequented by men of science down on their luck: three rooms to let, William and Henrietta Billson proprietors. The inn is difficult to find if you don’t know the turning or if you fail to see the upper body of what is commonly called a Surinam toad leaning out of the high window over the door.

The carving of the toad was carried out of Guiana in the mid-century by Billson himself, aboard the old William Rodgers. The nether half of the creature blew to flinders when the powder magazine exploded in the dead of night, sinking the ship and half the crew in a fog off Santo Domingo. Billson found himself afloat and alone with half the toad, and he clung to the remains for close onto a day and a half before fishermen hauled him out nearly drowned. He went straight back to London on a mail packet, only to discover that his old father had died two months earlier and left him something over five hundred a year, and so he counted his many blessings, married his sweetheart, and set up shop in Lambert Court, where he put the heroic toad in the window.

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