Elijah’s Mermaid (19 page)

He asked me to sit with my hands in my lap, and when he had finished he showed me why. In his drawing I held a small glass jar – a jar with some string knotted round its rim. And inside was some water, all swirling with silt, and through that murk there swam three fish.

Did he miss me? I missed him terribly. At night I behaved as I had when a child. I lay in my bed and pressed my fingers against the wall, pretending that he was still
that
close, still there, still on the other side. But Elijah’s room was empty. The sheets on his bed were cold, though there was that time when I thought him back, waking at the creaking of feet on the boards and the twanging groan of the mattress springs – and when I got up and went to look, what I thought was Elijah was only Papa, sitting there on the end of the bed, hunched over and holding his head in his hands.

Most nights there was nothing more to hear than the rustle
of ivy on windowpanes, and so often my dreams would be of that vine – a dream where a demon was trapped in its core, something dark and evil at its heart that was gradually waking and stirring to life. Green sap pumped like blood into gnarled dry roots which were twisting and tearing up from the soil as the house bricks cracked and opened up, as branches extended like outstretched arms, at the end of which tendrils were sharp as nails. Tap, tap, tap. They beat at my window glass. Scratch, scratch, scratch. They burrowed down into my thoughts. They hissed in my ear, like poison – at which I would wake in a shivering sweat, my heart thumping wildly in my breast, seeing the eyes of Osborne Black – eyes full of a jealous burning spite which glittered with little tongues of fire. But the strange thing was, when morning came I could never recall what those secrets had been. I heard no more than the cooing of pigeons, or the church’s muted clanging bell, and I hoped for a blast of the postman’s horn to announce that some mail had been left in the box that was fixed to the wall by our main front gates – into which, hardly more than week elapsed, my brother’s very first letter dropped.

How eager I was for the news from Thames Mall, where Elijah now resided. I must have read a hundred times that Dolphin House was –

the last of many fine residences with a frontage of trees and high hedges to further shield its privacy, although the house is only disturbed by those intent on visiting, of which there have been none at all since the day of my arrival here. A peculiar quiet air it has, almost of rural isolation despite the breweries around and the river traffic sailing by.

The interior is very opulent, and everywhere Osborne’s paintings hang. Almost all are water-themed which suits the decoration well. There are windows stained in blues and greens, the same with the hallway’s ceramic tiles, which Osborne says his grandfather sourced when employed by the East India Company. There is a stuffed
peacock with tail feathers fanned. There are antique statues in marble and bronze, Turkish carpets. Satsuma vases. An enormous fretwork marriage chest inlaid with ivory and gold, now adapted for use as a sedan.

I closed my eyes. I tried to imagine I was there, standing in that hallway, right next to my brother’s side – the same when he wrote about Chiswick House, a grand Italianate villa that was, in the grounds of which Osborne was setting a painting –

where we come and go at will, by means of a gate in the garden walls for which Osborne holds a set of keys – some arrangement he has with the owners, though as yet I have never met them.

Elijah said Osborne’s studio was a newly built construction where the plaster was barely dry on the walls, but –

full of a glorious natural light, and most unlike the rest of the house where rooms are kept shuttered and steeped in gloom. Tall glass doors allow access to the lawns and from there on down to the river Thames. Many storage rooms are hidden away behind the wooden panelling to house Osborne’s props and materials. One leads into a passageway and that to my very own ‘darkroom’, its sinks plumbed with water for washing the plates, and shelves set above for the chemicals. Ellen Page would be most impressed to see the camera I work with here, being far more advanced than that at home. Osborne has spared no expense whatsoever. I feel myself very ‘professional’.

I think what tugged the most at my heart was when Elijah wrote to describe the Sunday he met Uncle Freddie for lunch, when they ate a roast chicken at the Bell, a public house on Strand on the Green – a riverside walk near Dolphin House. Afterwards, they followed that towpath to cross the bridge that spanned the Thames, just on the other side of which they found the Botanical Gardens of Kew. Elijah said Freddie had been most keen to go and view the tropical palms, and my brother
sent me the studies he’d made – a banana, a pawpaw, a mango – and the Latin names inscribed beneath all copied from labels fixed on to the plants. And there was Uncle Freddie too, as dapper as he had ever been, sitting down on a bench with his long legs crossed, and wearing a very tall top hat.

I did not show that letter to Papa, who still blamed his old friend for setting the trap and luring Elijah away from him, who now seemed to bear such a virulent grudge it was best not to mention Freddie’s name.

A week later, another envelope came. But that proved to be disappointing, containing only the briefest of notes – and the same with the next – and the one after that. And then they all stopped. Ten weeks, and no more letters came – though I wrote to Chiswick religiously, every Sunday afternoon, with sections dictated by Papa too, who by then could hardly hold a pen, with his tremors becoming so severe.

Not knowing what had caused the blight, the doctor suspected a passing depression for which he suggested the Malvern Cure. But Papa refused to be convinced that being half-drowned in a vat of cold water could help revive anyone’s spirit or health, whether or not Mr Darwin did! So, the doctor prescribed a tonic instead with a fancy French label attached on the front, with swirling gold letters that spelled out the words:
BROMOCARPINE ~ Traitement des afflictions nerveuses
.

To my mind, that tincture made Papa worse, bringing on strange hallucinations, though the doctor insisted that those were signs of the ailment being purged from within, for which he then gave an antidote, which was some injections of opium after which the shaking did lessen some, but Papa was left in a dreamy state, unless ridden with sudden spasms and cramps, after which his whole body would freeze and lock, his fingers curled into rigid claws.

Poor Papa. It was as if he had been cursed – and what would we have done without Ellen Page, who nursed him as if her very own, and no task too vile or oppressive to bear. Not that she couldn’t still act the witch and, one day, when Papa was
sleeping, when I went to sit in the kitchen with her, both of us sharing a pot of tea, she fixed me with her bird-like eyes and pronounced, ‘That quack don’t know his arse from his elbow, driving around in a flashy gig . . . far more intent on impressing you than trying to cure poor Mr Lamb. Hmm,’ she sniffed and tilted her chin, ‘I could do the job as well as him, handing out bottles of laudanum and charging a guinea a pop on his bill, when the pharmacist sells the very same for less than a shilling, I’ll have you know. I could tell that doctor a thing or two. I’ve seen others beset with such symptoms before. To my mind there’s no pill or potion on earth that will make your grandfather well again. He’s got the shaking palsy he has. There’s not a moment of doubt in my mind. I’ve seen it coming on for years just as it did with my father before. I know that mask he sometimes wears . . . his face all blank and staring. That’s how they all seem to go in the end.’

‘The shaking palsy? What does that mean?’

‘It means . . .’ and at this she reached over the table, one bony hand clasped either side of my face as if not to let me fall apart when the shock of her diagnosis was made, ‘it means he’s going to get much worse, worse in his body as well as his mind. He might even come to forget who you are, and . . .’

‘Stop it. Stop it!’ I shouted back, pulling away from her embrace, no longer able or willing to listen to such a dire prediction as that. I flung my cup of tea to the floor and then, stooping down to collect the smashed china, sliced open a finger on one of the shards. A bead of red welled up like a ruby before trickling over my wrist and the soft white flesh of my inner arm, and I found myself thinking about Pearl Black and how, when she’d paddled in our stream, her foot had been cut on a broken shell – such a strangely formed foot with its white-webbed toes – those toes upon which, even now, my brother might be gazing. Or were his grey eyes lost in hers so green, forgetting Papa, forgetting me?

Heaving dry sobs of lonely resentment, I crouched there and rocked like a thing gone mad, until I was calm, when I looked
up at Ellen and started to plead, What can I do? I want things to be as they were before, with Papa well, with Elijah back home. I don’t even know if he’s happy or sad, or whether he’s safe, or . . .’
Or what?
When I tried to picture Elijah his features were blurred and indistinct, lost in some drifting sea of mist that went by the name of Dolphin House.

‘Well, missy,’ Ellen took my hand, and only the slightest catch in her voice when she said, ‘now you’ve got that self-pitying out, you’d best let me see to that cut of yours before you get blood all over my floor. And then you can fetch a pen and some paper and write to your Uncle Freddie in London . . . see what
he
has to say on the matter. There’ll be some explanation, I’m bound. Letters get lost in the mail, you know. People get ill and . . .’

‘If Elijah was ill . . . if he was so ill that he couldn’t write, then wouldn’t the Blacks have let us know?’

‘You’d think so.’ Ellen’s eyes were narrowed to slits, the crow’s feet around creased to tiny pleats, and her voice very gruff when she carried on, ‘From the little I’ve seen of
that
gentleman, I’d not trust him as far as I’d throw him. And there’s something not right between him and his wife. I noticed Elijah gawping that day. I know when a couple are smitten . . . or not. Moths might be drawn around a flame, but a flame is fire and fire burns. I warned Mr Lamb and he called me deluded. But you mark my words. You see if I’m wrong!’

Something
was wrong, that was for sure, and while Ellen bandaged up my hand, while I bit on my tongue at the stinging pain, I thought of Elijah, I thought of Pearl, and those longing, intimate, yearning looks that had passed between the two of them.

I told Papa that I had written to Freddie. I wrote to Osborne Black as well, politely asking for news of my brother. The artist never did reply, but Freddie responded within a few days, and in the form of a telegram –
TRAVELLED TO CHISWICK. BLACKS
GONE AWAY. INFORMED ELIJAH BEEN DISMISSED. MAKING FURTHER ENQUIRIES

Why had Elijah been dismissed? And where on earth could my brother have gone – if not to Freddie in Burlington Row – if not home to us in Kingsland? Could there have been an accident, on the train, coming back to Herefordshire?

Papa tried to allay my fears. ‘Don’t worry, Lily. We would have heard of a rail disaster. People don’t simply disappear. We must write again . . . to Osborne Black. We must . . . we must . . .’ As so often he started to lose his thread, eventually whining like a child, just as I’d done with Ellen before, ‘Oh, Lily . . . what can have occurred? What can we do . . . what can we do?’

The telegram dropped from my hands to the floor when I ran to kneel at Papa’s side, and I – I felt strangely composed when I took his shaking hands in mine and said, ‘
I
can do something, Papa. I can travel to London. I can go to Thames Mall. I’m sure Freddie will help me to look for Elijah and . . .’

Papa began to moan, a high keen, almost like an animal. ‘Lily, don’t go. Not you as well. Frederick Hall stole my only son before. He stole my . . . he stole . . .’

‘You’ll be all right, Papa. Ellen is here.’

‘It’s not that. It’s not me. I shall worry for you. I lost Gabriel. Now Elijah too. What if he’s dead? What if . . .’

‘Papa!’ I shouted through my tears. ‘You must never ever say such things! Elijah’s not dead. I would know if he was. But something is wrong, and I must try and find him. Please, Papa. I have to go.’

Oh, such a clamour at Paddington station, clinging on to my bag for grim life, enveloped in steamy clouds of smut through which I was jostled this way and that, and very nearly knocked off my feet by a porter hurrying past with his trolley. But with my balance and vision restored I saw Uncle Freddie, right there on the platform, and just as he’d looked all those years before but for the loss of the black in his hair, those silver streaks now
everywhere. How happy I was to see him, dropping my bag, rushing forward, embraced again in my uncle’s arms while inhaling his perfume of leather and spice – and feeling like a child again until overcome with embarrassment to have acted with such abandon, to see his expression of surprise when he held me back at his full arms’ length, taking some time to appraise my looks before exclaiming with a smile, ‘Lily . . . but, how you’ve altered! My dear, you’re quite grown up.’

For a moment or two he disappeared, retrieving my bag from the platform edge, but continued when he swiftly returned, ‘You must be exhausted from such a long journey, and the weather tonight so bitterly cold. Come . . . we must get you into the warm.’

I must have dozed off in the cab, only waking again at our lurching halt, when Uncle Freddie was touching my hand, saying, ‘Lily. Wake up. Here we are. Back home again, in Burlington Row.’

‘Home?’ I was yawning, rubbing my eyes, thinking:
This isn’t home. Home is Papa!
Such a panic there was in my mind, for a moment not knowing Freddie’s house, with its tall iron railings like prison walls. And still confused and shivering when Freddie assisted me down to the pavement, from where I found my eyes were drawn to look at the house standing opposite, just as Papa’s had been that time before, and just as before that house was in darkness, such a contrast to Freddie’s, all colour and light, and a brand-new maid to take my things – very young, very pretty I thought she was.