The Unseen (26 page)

‘A snake, now, am I?’ He laughs quietly.

‘I know what I see,’ Cat says again.

They make their way through the tall, tussocky grass, soaking their shoes with the fresh dew and kicking up insects which bumble away groggily. The dawn chorus grows louder as each second passes, flooding out across the grassland like a rising tide. In spite of everything, Cat feels herself grow calm. Impossible not to be calm, when the world seems so still, so at peace.

‘I love this time of day,’ Robin Durrant says, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. At once, Cat is on edge again.

‘Where are we going?’ she demands. It is cool, more so than she had expected. Goose pimples stand out on her skin, and she folds her arms tightly.

‘It’s not much further. There’s a wonderful old willow tree by a kink in the river …’

‘Yes, I know it. What of it?’

‘You know it? How do you know it?’

‘Can’t a person go for a walk, and use their eyes? Even a servant?’ Cat asks, tightly.

‘Why do you fight your status so? The Cannings are an easy
pair. Why aren’t you happy with your lot?’ Robin seems genuinely curious. Cat glares at him suspiciously.

‘I hear you were a poet, for a while. A minister, a politician?’ she says. Robin looks at her, frowning, and Cat smiles. ‘As you told me, Mr Durrant, word gets about in a small place like this.’

‘Well, what of it?’

‘Would you have been content if you had been told, when you were still a child: you shan’t be a poet, or a minister, or a politician. You shall be a clerk in a bank. Would you have been content, never to have been allowed to try other things? Never allowed to find out what you wanted to do, what you wanted to be?’

‘A clerk in a bank? Why—’

‘For the sake of argument!’ Cat snaps.

‘But you are working class, Cat. Such things are immutable …’

‘Oh?’ She pounces. ‘And what makes them so? What makes me working class?’

‘Your … lack of breeding and education … your birth, Cat. Surely you can see that?’

‘Ah, there we have it. My birth. Something in my blood. A servant is born, as Mrs Bell says. You agree?’ she asks. Robin looks at her, puzzled, and thinks before nodding.

‘I suppose so, yes.’

Cat smiles bleakly. ‘Well, there is your answer, then,’ she says.

They reach the willow tree after walking for ten minutes, with the village entirely out of sight behind them apart from the church spire, pointing up grey and fragile into the marbled sky. The land falls gently into a bowl, sloping down to the edge of the river, where the old tree hangs its branches, motionless; its supple twigs trail forlornly in the water, carving furrows in the glassy surface.

‘We must be quite quick now,’ Robin says, dropping to one knee in the wet turf and opening the leather satchel. ‘I don’t want the sun to come up. And it wouldn’t do for the vicar to get impatient and come looking for us.’ Over the river, a haze of pale mist hangs in
the air, to shoulder height, shimmering and shifting as the sun’s light grows brighter in the eastern sky.

‘What is this, for God’s sake? What game are you playing?’

‘No game, Cat Morley. I simply want to take your picture,’ he replies, now pulling paper-wrapped items from the bag.

‘My picture? With the camera? What on earth for?’

‘Yes, with the camera. I haven’t time to draw your portrait myself. And besides, a drawing would not give the same … proof. But the camera … the camera cannot lie.’ He glances up at her and smiles, then stands and hands her the packages.

‘What is this?’

‘Open them.’

Cat does as she is told. One package contains a garment of the finest white gauze, swathes of it like clouds of fleece. Cat fingers the fabric, confused; puts it over her shoulder to open the second parcel. She nearly drops it in shock. Human hair, masses of it. Long, slippery, white-blond tresses, coiled like satin ropes in her hands.

‘Is this real hair? I don’t understand.’

‘Put them on – the dress and the wig,’ Robin Durrant says, impatience creeping into his voice. He is readying the camera, unscrewing the lens cover. ‘But take your dress off first. I don’t want it to show through.’ Cat thinks for a minute, then tips back her head and laughs. ‘Quiet!’ Robin hisses.

‘It’s a
costume?
You mean to dress me up, take my picture and tell the world I’m an elemental?’ She laughs again, incredulously. Robin’s face flushes angrily.

‘Just do it. Put them on!’ he snaps.

‘You are a fraud! A phoney! You no more believe in fairies than I do!’ Cat scoffs.

‘I am
no phoney!’
Robin Durrant shouts, lurching to his feet and towering over Cat, anger swelling his chest and darkening his face. His declaration bounds off into the mist, and is swallowed up at once. Cat gazes up at him, unafraid.

‘At last, I can see inside you,’ she says, quietly.

Robin takes a deep breath. ‘I am not a fraud. The elementals are real. My belief is real – in truth it is
knowledge
, not belief. Intuition, not faith. They are real. It is all real.’

‘Then why must you pose a maid in a wig to catch a photo of one?’

‘I … I don’t know. Why I have failed. Why they will not be captured with the camera, as other beings not of the flesh have done in the past …’

‘You truly believe in them? In fairies?’ Cat eyes him intently. Robin nods. Cat studies him closely, then shakes her head. ‘Astounding.’

‘They will be the making of me. This … this
revelation
will be the making of me. It
must
be so,’ he declares.

‘I have never met somebody who really believed their own lies before.’

‘It’s not lies. And what of the vicar? You say his God is a lie, and yet he believes it.’

‘That’s true,’ Cat concedes. ‘Very well then, you are every bit as deceived as the vicar, if that makes you happy.’

‘Cat, Cat.’ Robin smiles. ‘I am not deceived. The world, blindly going about its petty business, unaware of the grand order of things … it is the world who is deceived. And this picture I will take of you may well be a falsehood, of a kind, but the most pressing demand of theosophy is that its followers strive to bring it to a wider audience. Strive to convince and enlighten people who would otherwise go through their lives unaware of the great truths our adepts have learned. And I have learned that people cleave to their ignorance as if it comforts them. They will not see reason unless they are made to. I will make them see reason. I will give them no recourse to back away,’ he says, with quiet zeal.

‘You have lost your mind,’ Cat tells him, blandly.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I have found it. Put them on. Or I will tell them what you do, and where you go; and that will be the end to it,’ he
snaps, the words short and hard. ‘Do it – quickly. I could ruin you, if I chose to. And don’t think for a moment that I would hesitate.’

Cat falls still, her eyes hardening. ‘What grace there is, in this theosophy with which you hope to enlighten me.’ Her voice is bitter. Turning her back on the theosophist, she strips off her work dress and puts the gauze gown on over her shift. It is long and loose, but so light that when she moves it clings closely to her body. She leans forward as she has seen ladies in London do, and positions the wig over her own hairline. Upside down she sees a damsel fly, not an inch from her nose, clinging to the underside of a pale iris leaf – electric blue body, glittering rainbow wings vibrating, warming up for flight.
So many hidden things, such hidden beauty
, she thinks.
Such lovely things truly do exist, and yet they are never enough for us. We must always search beyond
. The wig is heavy, and threatens to pull itself off with its own weight. Only the bobby pins Cat happened to be wearing keep it in place. She straightens it, then turns to Robin Durrant. He stares.

‘Well?’ she demands. The long tresses hang around her face. She can feel the unfamiliar weight of them bumping against her back. Not long ago, her hair was long – although perhaps not as long as this. How quickly she has got used to it being gone, when at the time it was shorn she felt as though she had been stripped naked in a public place.

‘You look quite lovely, Cat,’ Robin says, softly. ‘Yes. You will do very well indeed.’

‘Then let’s get this charade over with,’ she replies. Robin watches her for a moment, and then chuckles.

‘It won’t work if you just stand there scowling with your arms folded, my dear girl.’

‘I am not your dear girl. And how should I stand, then?’

‘Do not stand at all. Dance. Over there – down by the water’s edge where the mist is thickest. And take off your shoes.’

‘Dance?’

‘Dance,’ Robin says, quite firmly.

Cat walks away from him, the grass cold and wet on the bare soles of her feet. The soft fabric of the dress brushes the skin of her legs lightly, makes her shiver. She has never danced. Not properly. Occasionally, The Gentleman had musical evenings, not big enough to be called balls, but with a quartet of musicians to play waltzes and quicksteps for twenty or thirty glamorous pairs; and the staff would sneak to the bottom of the stairs, or even to the doorway of the grand salon, to listen, to grab each other and make a parody of the steps that set them all to laughing. This is her sole experience of dance, and this will not do now, she knows. An elemental would not waltz with an invisible partner. She thinks of the way she felt the first time she managed to ride the vicar’s bicycle all the way to George’s barge. The push of the wind in her face, the way her blood ran faster through her veins; the thrill of speed and movement. She thinks of Tess, in the workhouse; of The Gentleman who did not save her. Cat draws in a shaky breath, anger making her burn.

She throws out her arms and leaps, as high as she can; arching her body and tipping back her head. She lands heavily, coarse grass stems jabbing into her feet. She pauses, takes a deep breath and then runs forward, gaining more momentum and leaping again. And even though she feels ridiculous at first, feels as though the world is laughing at her, capering like an idiot, she soon forgets this. Her heart beats hard and she breathes fast, running and jumping like this, lifting up her front knee, pointing her toe behind her, holding her arms out wide or pulled back or high above her head. She kicks and storms and spins, and there is freedom in this, in the abandonment of propriety; the burn of her muscles and the rush of air into her nose and mouth. She pounds them all beneath her feet – Robin Durrant, The Gentleman, Mrs Heddingly, Hester Canning. She dances until she is out of breath, and leans against the old tree to rest, Robin Durrant and his camera all but forgotten; and then she dances some more, the same exhilaration in movement coming back to her – the possibility of life and freedom. When she falls still at last, the damsel
fly circles her curiously, wings humming, flashing blue as the first rays of the sun creep into the sky. She catches her breath, and realises that she is not coughing. Does not need to cough. She smiles, until in the corner of her eye Robin Durrant stands up, slowly screwing the lens cap back onto his camera.

With a sinking feeling, Cat lets her arms fall to her sides, and the damsel fly darts away, vanishing into the widening day. She tugs the wig from her head, runs her fingers through the sweaty hair at her brow and walks towards him.

‘That was simply wonderful. You looked … amazing. Beautiful, Cat,’ Robin tells her; his voice quite different, almost deferential. Cat looks away, holding out the wig for him to take.

‘There’s no beauty in a lie,’ she says, coldly. ‘Can I go now?’

‘Yes,’ he says, meekly. ‘Yes, we should get back before you’re missed.’

‘You have important work to do,’ Cat says sarcastically, nodding at the camera.

‘You must never speak of this to anyone, Cat. Not even to the man who can tempt you out in a thunderstorm. We must keep each other’s secrets from now on,’ he says, his tone peculiarly companionable. Cat glances at him in disgust, and walks a few steps ahead, to keep her back to him. An odd, desperate feeling gathers in her gut. She feels suddenly powerless, vulnerable. She feels that she will never quite be free of what they have just done.

8

2011

Leah drove all the way into Newbury to find a comfortable café with free wi-fi. The sky was low and sullen for the third consecutive day, and she frowned at the road as she crawled along, stopping at incessant traffic lights, hearing grey water crackling beneath her wheels. Finding a café from a chain she recognised, she collected a large hot chocolate from the counter, tucked herself into the corner of a sofa and turned on her laptop. The tips of her fingers were pink and numbed with cold. Blustery rain hurled itself at the window panes, smearing them with crystals of sleet, and the floor shone with watery footprints. The place stank of wet coats, wet hair; a pile of wet umbrellas by the door. She scanned through her inbox, finding little of interest until she got to the previous day’s emails. There was a message from Ryan. Leah’s heart gave an exaggerated thump. She took a deep breath, hating this reaction that any contact from him caused in her, and opened it.

What no goodbye? Most unlike you – you were always so fond of them. Thanks for taking on the little project I found you, I appreciate it. And so does our dead chum here. He’s been rather sidelined since you left – bumped back into the cold store. We’ve had a fresh batch in from the building site of a new housing estate – I tell you, corpses are ten a penny round here. Oh well, keeps the likes of me in pin money. Let me know how you get on. I’m coming over in a couple of weeks for Dad’s sixtieth. Perhaps we can meet up then to discuss what you’ve found? I did enjoy meeting up with you again over
here. Really. Even if you did let me pay for dinner, and then didn’t stay for breakfast.

Keep in touch.

Ryan

Leah read it twice, and then flicked the cursor angrily to the delete button, where her finger hovered, shaking ever so slightly. After a hung few seconds she sighed, moved the cursor away. She logged out instead, and ran a search of
Cold Ash Holt Fairy Photographs
. Various paranormal and new-age sites came up in a list and, halfway down the screen, the village’s community website. She opened this page, and steered away from church announcements and adverts for local workmen by clicking on the
History
tab. Two paragraphs sketched the life of the village from its meagre Domesday listing to the decline of the canal trade and the Second World War. There were black and white photographs of the church, and of long-dead farm workers leaning on their pitchforks in front of half-built hayricks. Leah stared into their eyes with the fascination she always found in old pictures of anonymous people. Eyes shrouded by shadow and blur – just pinpricks of white, or the steel grey of an iris. People who could not have known, when their likenesses were captured, that eighty years later she would be sitting in a café, getting to know their faces. Their lives, their thoughts, lost for ever. At the bottom of the page was a separate section of text, which read: