The Trespass (22 page)

‘My friend of the second-hand bookshop, Mr Dawson, knew I was interested, because of Edward, and one day recently when I went in he’d found me something else.’ Mary sighed. ‘I could not decide,’ she continued slowly, ‘whether to give the book to Edward or not. It was too late of course, and I wanted his long journey to be happy and full of anticipation. But – listen.’ And Mary limped to a shelf and took down a small volume and brought it back to the fire. ‘This is written by someone who, like Edward, bought land in London, without seeing it, from the New Zealand Company. I comforted myself with the knowledge that it was written six years ago, and so may be out of date. She began to read to her sister.

With New Zealand we have been partially disappointed; by the New Zealand Company not a little deceived. Their glowing one-sided representations of the ‘Land of Promise’ induced respectable families to forego the substantial comforts of a home for the dream of independence abroad. Ship them off! Ship them off! is the cry, careless of what fate awaits the emigrant on reaching his destination.

‘This must be some disgruntled person, surely,’ said Harriet in puzzlement, ‘and six years ago. Things will have changed, surely?’

‘That is what I have told myself. Yet the book implies more serious things: that roads and bridges have not been built; most importantly that the land they are offering people has not been properly purchased by the New Zealand Company from the natives.’

‘Would the natives understand “purchase”, do you think?’

‘I don’t see why they would not. And listen.’ And Mary commenced reading again.

The climate of Wellington is boisterous rather than agreeable. The winds are its scourge. Whaleboats are staked down to the beach to prevent their being blown away. A house upon our own town acre had its verandah torn off by the wind; the poles were dragged out of the ground, and the entire fabric, composed of one-inch plank and heavy rafters, lifted clear over the tops of trees and carried to another acre some distance beyond the dwelling.

Harriet began to look a little alarmed.

‘But it does say,’ Mary went on quickly, ‘that because of the wind it is a very healthy place and there is no disease found there at all.’

‘But then imagine such a thing!’ cried Harriet at once. ‘No disease at all. Then I am still glad he went. He will not be put off by a little wind. I would not be. I love the wind. And for the rest, in six years they will have improved things. You were right not to give this to Edward.’

Mary did not reply. She sat so still for such a long time that Harriet said at last, ‘Mary?’

Her sister smiled. ‘I think I’ll rest now,’ she said. ‘I am so glad you are home, my darling. I hope Lucy will prove to be a good maid for you.’ And kissing her sister she limped out of the room. She spoke back over her shoulder, but very quietly. ‘I will be awake of course, till Father comes.’ And then Harriet heard her very slowly ascending the stairs.

Then there was just the faint hiss of the lamps in the drawing room. Harriet walked to the window, pulled aside the heavy curtains for a moment and looked out over the Square. Two carriages rolled along past the door, the horses’ hooves echoing on the cobblestones, and some young street boys argued about something in high, sharp voices and laughed. Even though every window was closed she could hear, as she always could, the roar of the traffic from Oxford Street and Park Lane. One of the gaslights in the street flared in the darkness, and the smell of old cooking wafted up from the kitchens. Harriet suddenly understood that she was back in Bryanston Square and the life that came with it. She called several times for Quintus, but her voice echoed around the silent house and Quintus did not come. Shivering, she pulled a shawl about her shoulders and then she too slowly made her way upstairs to her room.

*   *   *

She was sitting by her window when she thought she heard an odd sound. She walked quickly along the dim passage to her sister’s room.

‘Mary?’ she said, partly opening the door.

Mary, her hair falling over her face, was half on and half off her bed, vomiting uncontrollably into a basin.

‘My darling, I must have eaten something,’ she managed to say and then she gave an almost animal-like cry of pain and vomited again. Harriet tried to loosen her sister’s corset as Mary’s body retched and heaved; terrified, she called to the servants, her frightened voice went echoing down and down the stairs. The doctor was sent for; servants ran with soiled petticoats and clean sheets, the new maid Lucy ran up and down with basins of hot water from the basement. By the time the doctor arrived Mary was almost unconscious and the bedclothes had been soiled again and changed again. At first Mary had cried out with that animal cry over and over, now she lay still and Harriet felt her cold clammy skin as she knelt beside the bed, clutching her sister’s hand in a frenzied desperation.

‘She must have eaten something that disagreed with her,’ said Harriet wildly to the doctor, ‘she must have. We have been to Gravesend, she must have eaten something. Or she is just overtired.’ The doctor looked at Harriet but saw her pain, said nothing, felt again and again for Mary’s pulse.

There was the sound of heavy footsteps running up the stairs. A voice called out, uncontrolled:
Harriet!
The door burst open. Sir Charles Cooper was breathless, his hair dishevelled, he saw Harriet kneeling, he saw Mary on the bed. He paused in the doorway.

‘I had a message that my daughter was ill.’

‘I must speak to you, Sir Charles,’ said the doctor, and he took him by the arm, led him outside into the passage. In the shortest moment they were back.

‘Leave immediately!’ Sir Charles addressed the servants first, and with a backward, fearful glance at their mistress lying on the bed they obeyed him quickly.

‘Harriet, you must go to your room at once.’ The urgency of his tone that had frightened the servants seemed not to affect Harriet. She did not move.

‘It is the cholera,’ Sir Charles whispered to her, ‘you must not stay here.’

‘It cannot be the cholera.’ She did not even look at him, still held her sister’s hand. ‘The cholera is with poor people. The cholera is over. You said yourself it was over. I cannot leave my sister. She will never leave me.’

‘The cholera has never been a respecter of boundaries,’ said the doctor. ‘And it is not over. This is the cholera, my dear. I am certain. I think – there is nothing to be done.’

Still Harriet held Mary’s hand. ‘We were talking together only a few hours ago. We were in the drawing room, by the fire. If you check you will see the fire, I am sure it is still burning. She could not get ill so soon.’ Then she bent to her sister and whispered something:
we will go to New Zealand as soon as you are better for we have heard there is no disease there. Because of the wind.
The father and the doctor did not hear the words: but they looked at each other.

‘You must go to your room, Harriet. I am ordering you to go to your room. It is not safe for you here.’

But if Harriet heard her father, her father’s anguished voice, she gave no sign. Still she stayed kneeling by the bed, holding and feverishly stroking her sister’s hand and arm. Little gasps kept coming from her, little puffs of pain in the room, over and over.

‘Get her out of here.’ Sir Charles’s voice was twisted and hoarse with fear and he moved towards his daughter.

The doctor moved towards her even more quickly. ‘Harriet, my dear. When cholera strikes it moves faster than any disease I have ever seen. You can see your sister’s face. See how something has happened to it. She appears older. That is one of the signs.’

‘She is still alive,’ said Harriet, not looking at him, only looking at Mary. ‘I feel that she is breathing.’ Then she looked up uncertainly for a moment and the odd little gasps came faster. ‘She is alive, isn’t she?’

‘She is breathing faintly,’ said the doctor, and he held Mary’s pulse. ‘Yes, she is still alive.’

He was rewarded with the oddest flash of a smile. Then it was gone again. ‘I knew she could not leave me,’ said Harriet, ‘I cannot live without her,’ and she bent over her sister and bathed the somehow wizened face, but the face she loved, with a cloth.

‘She must be moved,’ said Sir Charles impatiently, ‘she must not sit in this room,’ and he made at last as if to force Harriet to her feet. The doctor somehow stopped him with his arm.

‘Sir Charles,’ he muttered, still holding Mary’s wrist, ‘it is almost over. Leave her. She is blue now. It will be over immediately.’

‘No,’ said Harriet.
Not blue.
And she put her arms around her sister.

There was a kind of silence in the room of gasps and breathing and anger and fear and pain. And then the doctor let go of Mary’s wrist and straightened up and nodded at Sir Charles. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said. ‘Your daughter is dead.’

‘No,’ said Harriet.

Still she held her sister.
No.

‘No,’ said Harriet.

She stroked the face of Mary, the shrivelled face of the cholera.

Then she took the cloth and dipped it into the warm water that had become cold. She wiped her sister’s face, wiped the blue-tinged lips of the cholera.

‘No,’ said Harriet.

There was no old retainer, no loved servant from childhood to put her arms around the girl and help her to cry and lead her away. Mary had been the one who comforted Harriet.

So the last sound of that long, long day was an eerie kind of keening, low at first, then rising higher and higher like a wild scream, a sound of grief which the doctor, so used to sounds of grief, had not heard in all his life. And the doctor saw that Sir Charles stood, impotent, staring not at his dead daughter, but at the one who was alive. At last the doctor somehow forced Harriet to drink something from his bag and finally led her away from the bed where Mary lay.

*   *   *

Sometime in the night Harriet started awake from her heavily drugged sleep. She saw her father sitting beside her bed. She tried to scream for Mary but no sound would come.

FOURTEEN

First the high hats of the undertakers festooned in black appeared over the hill as they walked before the horses; then the black plumes attached to the heads of the funeral horses waved in the air as the animals trotted into view with funeral bells ringing, pulling the funeral carriage towards Highgate Cemetery. In the glass hearse the closed coffin of Mary Cooper, daughter of the Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper, MP, lay covered in white wax lilies. As Sir Charles was a large shareholder in the suburban Highgate Cemetery, having been persuaded some years ago that death could be profitable, there was no question of the burial being elsewhere.

Sir Charles Cooper, MP, his two sons Richard and Walter, and his remaining daughter Harriet travelled behind the hearse in a closed carriage. The Rusholme Coopers and Aunt Lydia travelled behind them. Members of Parliament and Members of the Chelsea Water Board, businessmen from various enterprises who had connections with Sir Charles (all with their families, all dressed in black) travelled behind the bereaved. It was a large procession, befitting Sir Charles’s position. Lord Ralph Kingdom and Sir Benjamin Kingdom and their elderly mother were commented upon. Quietly at the end of the procession came the doctors and the women who had been with Mary in Seven Dials, the man from the second-hand bookshop: Mary’s friends.

People noticed, in the chapel, how kindly Sir Charles supported his wraith-like daughter:
she will be a comfort to him,
they told each other,
the poor man is a widower.

Lord Ralph Kingdom, bending over Harriet’s hand once more, saw briefly, as his eyes caught hers, a look of such utter desolation that his heart contracted with a kind of pity. And behind the desolation there was something else, some wild, desperate, unwomanly madness. (That night he felt relieved to be back in the company of his ballet dancer, where he knew where he was. But in the night the eyes of the girl behind her glass wall haunted his dreams.)

Harriet was made to wait in the chapel with two maids while the public burial took place on the hill; she was of course considered too frail to be at the final resting place. The procession went slowly forward; it was Benjamin Kingdom who lingered, looked back through the door into the chapel. The black figure, the small picture of utter desolation, carved into his mind: it was as if, like some mythical creature, she had turned to stone. Again he felt something beating at his heart, like a warning.

Not even Asobel could reach her cousin. As the family spoke in low tones at Bryanston Square, surrounded by servants wearing dark armbands and caps handing funeral meats to industrialists and Members of Parliament, the little girl realised that Harriet hardly saw her. She could not understand. She tried to take Harriet’s hand and felt it was cold and unresponsive;
Harriet seemed not to know her.
She whispered to her father, away from the servants and loud men and the black-clad old people who reminded her of eagles, ‘Papa, she looks like a ghost.’ So that William broached the subject with his brother of taking Harriet back again to Rusholme. ‘This has been a terrible, terrible shock for her, Charles. She will need time to recover.’

He saw, and so did their sister Lydia, who had absolutely decided that Harriet should come to Norfolk, the obstinate set of their brother’s mouth that they knew from long ago.

‘The Doctor has assured me that if she was to have caught the cholera from her sister she would have done so by now. I feel she is best with me, where I will watch her day and night. And when she is recovered she will of course learn to be the mistress of my house.’

‘It is ridiculous, Charles.’ Lydia spoke briskly. ‘You are too busy. Anyone can see she is in a state of shock at Mary’s death. Mary was like a mother to her. She needs to get away.’

William looked across at his niece. He could not get out of his mind what Asobel had said:
Papa, she looks like a ghost.
Perhaps it was the way the light shone, as Harriet stood, quite still, by the window. ‘She will be a great asset, Charles, of course, in the days to come. But she is not – well.’