Curiosity (9 page)

“Why would they lock him up?”

“It’s alchemy, ain’t it. Flesh rots, it don’t turn to stone.” The sun was high, it shone crimson through her father’s nostrils. His thin face was pale, the skin under his eyes was smudged. She thought of Mr. Buckland with his fleshy, high-spirited face. Beside Mr. Buckland, her father was a ragged sparrow.

They angled up the foreshore to where the way was smoother, and Richard began to sing his walking song:

It was his only hymn and he never sang it right through, but brought out a verse of it from time to time. Two years before, he’d been up on Church Cliffs when the land fell away under his feet. But he was not like other men – he’d ridden on top of the landslip and landed unhurt on the shore. Now he’d had a taste of death on the cliffs, the way Joseph and Mary’d had a taste of the pox, and he was safe from it.

As Mary lay in the dark, she turned her thoughts to the seventh son in Exeter, dislodged from his place in the family by the death of another. At first, it seemed he had been chosen, as she had been. At a time when she was too young to know what she was, a lightning bolt had killed three others, but Mary Anning it had taken from one sort of child and turned to another. Even her hair was improved, becoming a rich, glistening black. The lightning bolt did not heal – it transformed. But whether its transforming powers had been exhausted in her on that August day ten years ago, she did not know.

SIX

n Uncle Alger’s house in Bristol, he’s given a bedchamber that was shut up for years, a perfectly square, whitewashed room with one wide window. The bed itself is a hulking affair, two hundred years old and fitted with brocade. The fireplace is still boarded over and a smell of must exudes from the curtains. Henry keeps the window open when he can. It looks onto the garden of the house next door, where a tangle of blackberry vines and the dried spikes of delphiniums rise out of the mist.

This is the house where his father was raised. It’s not one of the great merchant houses of Bristol, but a two-storey thatched cottage. The heyday of sugar was past by the time the De la Beches came to the trade. It was as chief justice that Henry’s grandfather went to Jamaica, leaving his twin sons in Bristol with their mother. He had accepted a four-year term, but he took to island living and found the money to purchase Halse Hall and never set foot in England again. When he died, the Bristol house was left to Alger and the plantation to Henry’s father, an uneven bequest on the face of it, for the plantation comprised four and a half thousand acres, and its hundred-year-old great house was
the finest in Clarendon County. But not so unfair when you consider that Henry’s father had to sell his commission to go to Jamaica, and that when he arrived, he had first to remove a Creole wife and his father’s five natural children from the great house and set them up in the nearby town of May Pen, then to arrange a mortgage to settle the generous bequests to these surprising relations, a branch of the family not acknowledged in any way in the house in Bristol. No, not so uneven after all.

There is, in the drawing room, a grand painting of Halse Hall itself, with a grey curtain hung in front to keep the sunlight and flies off. In fact, the drawing room is crammed with paintings, and Henry spends afternoons unveiling them one by one, setting himself the exercise of seeing something new in each one. He always starts with his favourite, a painting signed
Chardin
. A robed monkey looks at coins with a magnifying glass and a discriminating eye. He’s an antiquarian by profession, a model of decorum. His hair is white over the temples and brushed neatly back. Curled on the rug lies his tail. For the first time, Henry notices a stove smoking into the room, warming the monkey’s naked long-toed feet, the most human part of him, somehow.

Next to the intelligent monkey is a portrait of Uncle Alger and Henry’s father as small boys. They’re about eight, identical brown-haired boys dressed like miniature men in red jackets and riding boots. One stands with a hand buried in the ruff of a collie, light playing over his eager face. The other, erect with a testament in the crook of his arm, turns a sober and wary eye to the painter, as though he’s sulking from a morning scolding. Whenever Alger catches Henry studying the painting, he bustles over to assert his identity as the more appealing child, to claim possession of the dog, recall the sittings, what a trial it was to get the dog to stand still. He’ll discourse for hours on
the entertaining question of how he differed from his twin brother and how he was the same.

But what an exercise, to paint identical children – to represent, through pigment and brush stroke, two opposite natures in the same form! Henry studies the boy with the dog. How do you paint curiosity? As a glow laid onto the temples, he decides: white flake and lead-tin yellow in equal proportions. He gets the magnifying glass from the map stand and holds it up, gazing into the swirls of Kassel umber that make up the eye itself. The eye (he chooses to believe it is his father’s eye) looks warmly back through a dab of zinc white.

At the beginning, there was just twenty minutes between them. Uncle Alger was born while Henry’s father lay wailing in a receiving blanket and the doctor was out in the latrine, thinking his day’s work done. The women were pouring tea and waiting for the afterbirth when out came a foot! How could you have a second infant in your stomach and not know it? Henry carries this question over to the next painting, a portrait of his grandmother dressed in a handsome gown in the Chinese style that accentuated her homeliness, her hair powdered and her hands folded over her stomach, hands arranged to display her wedding ring (a fretted gold band with some sort of pebble mounted in it).

Alger comes in, wigless, his hair chopped short and unevenly powdered. Sullivan follows with two glasses of port on a tray. From the armchair by the hearth, Alger moves through his preparatory throat clearing. “A lady in London has been left a fortune of 1,800,000 gold sovereigns!” he announces finally. He’s labouring over the London
Times
, brought to him courtesy of the daredevils on the Bristol post. “Think of it! Reckoning sixty sovereigns to the troy pound, that’s a weight of thirteen tons, seven hundredweight, twelve pounds.”

“Indeed, you are quick,” says Henry.

“It’s all here, they’ve done the sums for you. The ordinary man needs assistance in comprehending this sort of wealth, and the
Times
has kindly provided it. This is how we must think of it: if porters were hired to carry the coin, and each of them carried 298 pounds, 107 porters would be required.”

“Why not give each porter an even three hundred?” asks Henry, pulling the settle closer to the fire. As he sits down, his father stands momentarily on the edge of his vision, on the edge of the veranda at Halse Hall, dark-haired in the sun. He’s dressed in white, his face looking questioningly down to Henry, who’s on the lawn below. Sums – was his father talking sums? And then his father is swallowed up again, swallowed by Alger’s moving mouth.

“Why, it’s the weight of a sack of flour, isn’t it,” the mouth says. “That’s all you can ask of a labouring man, however stout. Ten weeks, two days and four hours it would take those porters. It’s all here, they’ve worked it all out here.”

“But where are they carrying it from and to?” Henry asks. “And why are they moving it at all?”

“Why,
I
don’t know, do I?” cries the mouth, irritated. “To her marriage home, I suppose.” The tumbler is raised to mottled lips, the pleated throat pumps warm port downward. “Now there’s a match for you, supposing she could be prevented from discovering your recent history!” The corners of the mouth turn down; this is in the nature of a joke. “Although the lady in question is twenty-six. Twice your age, what?”

“No,” says Henry, reaching for his own drink. “I’m fifteen in February.”

For the first week in Bristol, while Henry’s scabs fall off and his bruises bloom privately brighter by the day, it is Alger who
presents a wounded aspect to the world. His inaugural duty as paterfamilias hangs over them: the speech castigating Henry and all youthful folly, evoking Henry’s honourable, tragically dead father, rendering in dark strokes a life of failure and disgrace. A speech that remains undelivered, although Alger alludes to it from time to time. No doubt he worked it to a perfection of furious rhetoric in his mind and thinks he’s delivered it.

In any case, Henry’s uniform, which he’s still wearing, is a moment-by-moment reminder of what he was and is no longer. In the famous Marlow mutiny five years back, all conspirators were stripped of every vestige of uniform by drummers – jacket, cap, boots, braid, in full public view – and driven out of town in their underwear. No one spoke of drummers in Henry’s case. Of course, there was real arson in the 1806 mutiny, not just incendiary drawings. But daily, annoyingly, needlessly, Alger forbids Henry to leave the house, banishes him at the sound of the door. Soon Henry will divest himself of the uniform and then it’s just his name that will remind people. For all time. So said the king’s envoy when signing the writ.

A trunk of Henry’s civilian clothes finally arrives, packed up and sent on by the housekeeper at Dawlish. He can’t get into anything. Alger agrees to communicate to Henry’s mother the extent of her son’s rampant growth. A week later, a bank draft arrives and a list of what his mother deems necessities. A frock coat, a dress coat, an overcoat,
four
morning coats. Alger sends for his tailor. Bolts of wool are carried into the upstairs sitting room and fittings conducted. Gradually, the wardrobe in his bedroom fills. He’s being costumed for a drawing-room life. It is a hermetic life he wants.

He could weep with relief at having his own room again. Before Marlow, he never contemplated the fact of a barracks. The bodies packed in rows like stalls, the quarrelling and crying
out, the bedbugs, the rats, the foul smells. The insane laughter, the tiresome pranks, your response at every moment scrutinized to decide whether you were more truly a pillock or a ponce. Oh, they were the sultans of minute discrimination! He stands by the window and breathes the vile air of it out of him.
Burn in the flames of hell
, he cries to the barracks at Marlow.

With its heavy brocade curtains, his bed is a Bedouin tent. Henry opens the tent and sits cross-legged inside it. The tent takes him back to the bed nets of his childhood, hung against mosquitoes. He has no memory of anything before Jamaica. When he woke up to himself, he was running on the road with Belle’s sons Cuthbert and Ben (it’s the road to the boiling-house, they’re rolling an iron hoop, passing it back and forth between them with sticks). And then they’re in Belle’s cabin, and Tallo is there, it’s the dinner break, and he’s whittling a green coconut open for them with the cutlass he keeps hidden in the floor, and they’re drinking thin, sweet milk and scooping the jellied flesh out with their fingers. Then they’re stealing through the bush, on wickered paths that wind through dense foliage, Henry and Cuthbert and Ben, tormenting themselves with the terror of duppies, who look human but have their feet put on backwards.