The Trespass (19 page)

‘No, I watched her. She was the same with him as she was with me.’

‘My dear Ralphie, you “reach”, as you put it, more women than any man I know, and no doubt you will reach Miss Harriet Cooper if you put your mind to it! Mind you, if Mamma knew the half of it – of your activities in London and your latest interest in
corps de ballet
and Mimi Oliver – I believe she would disinherit you at once and you would have nothing to offer Miss Cooper!’ Both brothers laughed. They knew very well of course that the Reverend Cornelius Boothby, their mother’s distant relation, kept their mother informed of their activities: they derived much enjoyment from setting him off on wild-goose chases. Once they got him as far as Stoke-on-Trent before he realised that he had mistaken a lecture on fossils for an assignation with a woman: he never reported that particular journey to Lady Kingdom. This week they had managed to inform him that the glorious Italian ballerina, Fanny Cerrito, had shown Ralph favour; the Reverend Boothby had been informed (by a friend of the brothers) of scenes of jealous uproar during a performance. The Reverend Boothby was not aware that Fanny Cerrito was most respectably married. So the brothers laughed together safely down the dark country lane: they were both terrified of their mother, in their way, but Lady Kingdom could not disinherit her son, of course; more than that, Benjamin Kingdom lived in a world of books and rocks and birds. Should his elder brother be removed in any way as heir to their deceased father, Benjamin would be most extremely inconvenienced.

‘But I say, Ralph,’ and Benjamin’s voice suddenly rose with enthusiasm in the darkness, ‘I should like to go, like Edward, to the farther reaches of the world. I mean, to make discoveries. Europe is so known to us, in comparison. What secrets would we find in the African interior, I wonder? Or that of Australia? What islands of the Pacific are still waiting for their mystery to be unfurled?’ and they let their horses go at last and galloped the last mile, and young ladies with invisible walls around them were not discussed again on that journey.

*   *   *

Yet Ralph Kingdom, leaving for London and Mimi Oliver early next morning (formally kissing his severe mother goodbye, bowing politely to the Reverend Boothby, leaving with no regret the cold, high rooms of his childhood), drew up his horse as he turned out of the valley. He hated returning to this country seat, somehow it chilled his blood: he wanted to be back to the warmth of his life in London as soon as possible. But in the grey morning he sat for several minutes with an unaccustomed feeling in his heart; looked back across the fields to where Rusholme lay, unseen in the distance, and thought again of the beautiful girl in the pale yellow gown, surrounded by something she had erected between herself and the world.

*   *   *

Several hours later, having gone over some estate accounts for his mother, and dealt with some trivial matters with the Reverend Boothby, Benjamin Kingdom too set out for London and his home near the Regent’s Park. He was to meet with Isambard Kingdom Brunel (a distant relation) and talk of bridges; the prospect of such a meeting filled him with excitement and delight. But when Benjamin rode out of the valley he impulsively turned his horse back towards Rusholme, galloped past the empty fields in the grey morning. He was passionately interested in all the new sciences. He totally believed that his friend Darwin would soon prove to the world that old certainties could no longer be relied on. He certainly did not believe in premonitions.

Yet as Rusholme came into view, as he sat there on the ridge looking down across the fields to the house, his horse breathing heavily from their ride, he felt it again, even as he tried to push it away: it was his brother Ralph who had perhaps set his wild heart on Harriet Cooper, Benjamin accepted that as he must: he was the younger brother. But he felt absolutely certain that
something,
some action, some decision of his, Benjamin’s, was to change Harriet’s life.

He shook his head in a kind of puzzlement, and then suddenly, because life almost always amused him, he laughed at himself.
This may just be another version of courtly love!
he thought, smiling, and, glad to be alive in this exciting world, he turned his horse and galloped off towards London and his life.

ELEVEN

On the last Sunday all the Coopers attended the morning service at the little church where Alice had been married. The congregation sang loudly.

Speed thy servants, saviour speed them

Thou are Lord of wind and waves

They were bound, but thou hast freed them

Now they go to free the slaves.

Rather as if, Harriet thought, Edward was a missionary not a farmer.

Then the vicar, who had visited for wine and Madeira cake the previous day, fixed his eyes first on the ceiling of the church, then on the tombstone of Edward’s grandfather; finally on Edward himself.

‘Today we say farewell to one of the young men of our parish who is preparing to make a new life in another country. We countenance him to place God before all things, to travel in the spirit of the Lord, to at all times honour our country, our Queen, and our God. To impart to all whom he may meet the word of God, and to remember that God above sees all things no matter where we may be and will call us to account on judgement day.’

As the vicar went on, at some length, about Edward’s Christian duties, Edward sat with his head bowed. Harriet wondered what he was thinking: how he was feeling to leave the security of Rusholme where he and his family had always lived. The congregation stood and sang one more hymn to calm the traveller:

God moves in a mysterious way

    His wonders to perform

He plants his footsteps in the sea

    And rides upon the storm.

*   *   *

Back at Rusholme the painted copy of the cherubic picture of Augusta and Alice and Asobel was one of the last things to be packed into the cases and boxes that now stood in the hall. It was wrapped in a big farmer’s coat and some blankets, to keep it safe from harm.

‘But I shan’t forget any of your dear faces,’ said Edward, his face full of emotion as they sat around the dining-room table on the last evening. Yet it was hard to be sad: the cart was piled high with his worldly goods, the horses were already groomed for tomorrow’s journey. Despite the cholera the London Coopers as well as the Rusholme Coopers would travel to Gravesend to see the
Miranda
and farewell Edward. The family was in such a state of high excitement that somehow the grief of the parting, the uncertainty of the long journey into the unknown was able to be pushed to the back of their minds and William Cooper filled the glasses.

‘To Edward and his future on the other side of the globe!’

‘To Edward!’ called the Cooper family, and recalled family stories and laughed, the way many families meeting, or parting, do.

Edward felt things most keenly when, one last time, the gentlemen joined the ladies for tea. He had always been surrounded by loving women; for a moment he wondered when such domestic warmth would be his again. Conversation languished at last: it was high time for Asobel to be in bed, for the ladies too to retire in preparation for the early start; there were tears in the air.

Harriet surprised them all by asking a strange, unexpected question in the tentative uneasiness.

‘How do you
feel,
Edward?’ she asked at last. Her voice was odd, and her face was filled with a kind of naked, curious intensity. ‘About leaving everything behind that you have ever known.’

The Cooper family looked embarrassed: it was not a question a lady asked a gentleman. Lucretia frowned as if Harriet had made a large social blunder.

But Edward had repeated her question: ‘How do I feel?’ How he felt was not something he was at all used to discussing but he rubbed his face; he would like an answer himself. He looked at all his family, all the familiar faces, and the room where the fire had been lit, and his mother’s flushed cheeks from the wine, and the wax fruit, and the shadows made by the candles on to the painting of his sisters that he had had copied, and the bright, delicate teacups. For just a moment he faltered, they saw, and then something else, some other energy, crossed his face.

‘I feel—’ he hesitated and then gained courage, ‘I feel so
lucky!
To be part of a generation of men from our great country who are taking our heritage and our Queen and our God to the further reaches of this world about which there is still so much to discover! It is as Father said, I am a kind of explorer. I will be working on land where no man has ever been – is that not an amazing thought? I will be building a life with all the things I have learnt, I am twenty years old and there will be, God willing, adventures in my life that I cannot yet conceive of. Although we do not know when we shall meet again I am optimistic that it need not be long. New Zealand is now part of our Empire, Her Majesty is still my Queen although I will be so far away, and it seems clear to me that life will be full of chance and adventure.’ His round face was lit up with enthusiasm and who among his listeners could weep after all when such hope shone, that night?

*   *   *

The servants ran about with hot water long before dawn but Lucretia had already risen: in the night she had realised that her son would need a medicine box, the main ingredient of which should be of course Morison’s Vegetable Universal. To this cure-all she added castor oil, camphorated oil, black pepper, liquorish pills and Quinine Dentifrice in case of toothache. Finally, from a bottom drawer, she took her precious Allingham’s Rotterdam Corn and Bunion Solvent. William, waking from uneasy dreams, saw his wife in her voluminous nightdress bent over a small box in the candlelight and, enquiring what she was doing, made the suggestion that some of her laudanum might be added. He himself pulled on his boots and could have been seen, a strange figure in his nightgown, making a further, final collection of horseshoes from the stables: ‘I can after all obtain these more easily,’ he said to the groom who was already harnessing the horses, ‘than my dear boy might, so far away.’

By six o’clock Alice and her husband had arrived in their carriage into which Augusta, Harriet and Asobel were ordered. The Squire’s carriage and the cart of luggage travelling behind it were ready. Horses snorted, ladies gathered their petticoats about them. John and Edward and their father and Donald and the groom all checked ropes again anxiously in the half-light. The cook and the maid waved tearfully as first the carriages and then the heavily loaded cart rattled away down the gravel drive past the blackcurrant bushes and the green and overgrown grass, past the familiar fields of the old farm, finally turning, as the dawn light showed on the horizon, towards the road to London.

*   *   *

Along the Thames huge chimneys spewed out black smoke; along the docks drains ran into the river; on the river coal was unloaded from the sailing colliers by lightermen on to the small boats and the barges that were ferried ashore. Yellow fog entwined itself with the smoke from the big chimneys of the tanneries and the factories and the new steamboats and the chemical works and the loud, bustling railways. And as the black grime covered the buildings and the population of the city, people said to each other:
how beautiful London is, look at our beautiful gaslight, look at our wonderful railways.

The yellow-black fog rolled along the river and into the city, insinuated itself into the houses of the rich and of the poor indiscriminately; into the churchyards where so many bodies had been piled; into the hospitals, where doctors breathed,
hardly daring,
a sigh of relief. That week the cholera deaths had declined to thirty-one. The General Board of Health was still not able to pinpoint the cause of the epidemic but they pointed to its passing and gave again advice: the public should avoid over-exertion, late hours and excitement; they should take meals at regular intervals and preserve a quiet frame of mind. The General Board of Health had also issued orders to the Metropolitan Burial Grounds: graveyards must be covered in quicklime and burials in the city churchyards were to end forthwith. There was much talk of further baths and wash houses for the poor like the one already opened in St Pancras, and the Prime Minister fervently hoped that the frequent, unwelcome visits from health officials to his chambers would now cease.

The composer Chopin, who had played in London, had died in France, to much regret. Books such as ‘Jane Eyre’ by the mysterious author Mr Currer Bell were described as ‘anatomies of the female heart’ to much outrage, and The Hungarian Vocalists were touring the country. Cart-boys whistled ‘Yes! I Have Dared to Love Thee’ through the murky air, trundling with their vegetables and their bread and their parcels through the sawdust and the rotten fish and the vegetable peelings; trudging over the mud and the horse excrement and the human excrement all turned to slush; and ignoring the continual, all-embracing smell of that which most people didn’t mention, and which the lower orders called piss.

*   *   *

It was already night when the carriages, followed doggedly by the packed cart, rolled into Bryanston Square. In the foggy darkness, with the street gas lamps shining through as best they might, Mary waited at the door, her face wreathed in happiness, her two brothers dutifully standing in as hosts while Sir Charles was still at the Palace of Westminster. Lucretia Cooper was almost overcome as she climbed heavily down, overcome by London, asking for her laudanum. She spoke like one possessed of the crowds, of the dazzling carriages they had passed coming in to London, of seeing bejewelled ladies, of thinking their coach should crash. Asobel was also overcome because before it got dark she had seen a balloon in the sky with people in it. Now she hopped up and down clutching her globe, staring with open mouth at the streetlights; had never used a water closet, was taken hurriedly there by a maid instructed by Mary. Edward and John with their cousins and the grooms at once attended to the ropes of the cart; Uncle William could hardly manage to climb down after such a long journey; the footmen bowed stiffly at all the commotion. Immediately Harriet got out of the carriage, running towards Mary, the smell of the cesspits of Bryanston Square hit her so that she gasped even as she ran. She had forgotten, at Rusholme. The exhausted horses snorted and whinnied and were led round to the mews. Harriet and Mary at last held each other tightly and walked up the steps.