'¡ªand there are these books on the table, medieval books! Tiny medieval prayer books. But picture this: drowsy summer afternoon there, I'm fifteen and lonely, and Old Captain invites me in, and there on the table in the second parlour¡ªhe rents the two front parlours¡ªhe lives in a sort of wonderland of collectibles and brass and such¡ª'

'I know it, I've seen it, I've seen you stop in front of it. My mother had inherited it from her mother.' See, this is how it happened, the boarding-house was shabby-elegant, you know the kind, my mother didn't get her own hands dirty, she had three maids and an old colored man who did everything the old people, the boarders¡ªthey were on hefty private incomes, limousines garaged around the Garden District, three meals a day, red carpets. I thought if I could find all Wynken's books I'd have it made.' Wynken's books were completely different from those of others. And so the monks were jealous, but my concept of this as a boy was all wound up with Wynken, whom I knew to have been influenced by German mysticism and all those popular movements, Meister Eckehart, et cetera, though he worked in a scriptorium and still did old-fashioned parchment prayer books of devotion by hand. 'You didn't have to be a priest or monk.' 'Yes, popular mysticism, late Middle Ages, that anyone could know God.' This was of course 1964, the time of the flower children, marijuana, Bob Dylan seeming to be singing all the time about ethics and charity, and I wanted a new Brethren of the Common Life, one in tune with modern sexual values. But I got it mixed up in my head when I was seventeen that I was going to start a new religion, a cult¡ªfree love, give to the poor, raise one's hand against no one, you know, a sort of fornicating Amish community. 'What was this Wynken de Wilde all about?' I mean my lifelong passion¡ªaside from Dora¡ªhas been Wynken de Wilde, but if you don't care about him after this conversation, no one will. 'And I'll tell you right now, Wynken de Wilde amounts to nothing, absolutely nothing, except a dream I had once, a very perverse plan. But Wynken de Wilde, that started with Old Captain and the antiques he sold through the Quarter, usually small, portable things. My mother had sent me to Andover, then brought me home, couldn't live without me I went to Jesuit, I didn't belong with anyone or anywhere, and maybe Old Captain was the perfect person.

THE POINT is, Old Captain was a smuggler, a collector.

Memnoch the devil by anne rice