The World Before Us (26 page)

“Did you sleep well?”

“Very well, thank you. I haven’t felt this rested in years.”

“Do you want pudding today?”

“Pudding would be delightful.”

Now, as Leeson stood in a thicket by the lake, he remembered that it was these very same woods that had, a month ago, restored him to himself, stirring up memories he had long been avoiding: the excessive demands of work, his wife’s diminishing affections, the ineptitude of his very being. Cutting across a nearby field that August afternoon, Herschel and the girl ahead of him, he had marvelled at nature’s inherent symmetry and its embeddings: a whorl inside a whorl on the side of a tree. Touching his hand to the bark’s welt he’d been reminded that he had secrets, undisclosed debts his brother had discovered before his confinement. In a copse of alder he’d spied a moss bed that seemed to be growing out of some older bed of lichen, and stroking the two textures with his fingers he remembered having relations with the sour-smelling woman who came to sweep out the offices in the evening, though it had happened only twice, hurriedly and awkwardly, and late in Emily’s pregnancy when she refused to let him near her. And, too, he had remembered why he was at the Whitmore in the first place. Remembered it not in the way one tries to remember something another tells you, facts or words that hang like banners over some unseen reality; but remembered it in the body, as if it were happening again: Emily in bed in her nightshift saying, “Please, Charles, just take her,” imploring him over the baby’s cries. Leeson walking back to the rope on the wall, pulling at it harder this time, straining to hear Rose’s steps on the landing. The infant, six weeks and still ruddy, nudged toward the edge of the bed so that Emily could pull her shift
down, press her hot face into the coolness of her pillow. The thought that she might die had lain unspoken between them since her return to bed, though once, in a fever, Emily told Charles that she believed the infant was stealing whatever strength she had left, a leech clamping on to its parcel of blood. The birth had not been at all what she’d expected—the baby caught in there so that more than once the doctor’s hands had come out empty and covered in her blood, the stench of her own body revolting her. And then there had been nothing, a perfect black hum that lasted two days. The ache was far off at first and then closer, arriving one note at a time, like a change in season, until it was over her and around her with its buds and sprouts, open mouth and tiny wings. When she had almost regained herself, the constant needling of the baby threatened to undo her all over again: its hands little curled things Emily both loved and wanted to slap away. Charles coming in to annoy her, to fawn and act stupidly and move around the room picking up and putting down books and coverlets, winding up the music box he’d bought her once on a whim. His manner as incessant as the infant’s:
how was she feeling, had she slept well, should he send for the doctor again
, asking, asking, asking.

“Please take her,” Emily had repeated into her pillow, her back to the screaming thing beside her. “Give her to Rose.”

But Rose had not come, despite his repeated pulls on the rope. She was the only person in the house other than Emily to have held the infant. Unsure how to proceed exactly, Charles bent over the swaddle that was his daughter and carefully took the bundle in his hands; one of the baby’s arms came free and scrabbled in the air. He glanced toward the door again for Rose, and when he did not see her he pulled his daughter up toward his chest, surprised at her lightness. He had imagined she would be weightier, as if already filled with the materials required to turn her into the adult she would one day become.

“Rose—” he called from the bedroom doorway, trying to make his request sound firm. She’d only been in their service for two months and
Emily already suspected her of pilfering, first the pearl from a pair of her earrings and then a few coins from her purse. “Rose!” he called, louder this time. And then Leeson had stepped onto the landing to survey the hall and the entryway to the sitting room below. The runner at the top of the steps was untacked in the place where he’d asked Arthur just the day before to fix it. The baby was now blinking wide-eyed and silently up at him, which made him think that Emily might take her back, might allow her to remain in the room. Turning, he caught his foot, and unable to lift it over the bulge of carpet, felt himself going down. For a brief and amazing instant Charles believed that he might be able to correct himself, was falling forward slowly enough that it seemed he had whole minutes to plan his adjustments, angle his shoulders so that he might reel backward instead and take the brunt of the fall. Sets of instructions spun through his mind even as he teetered: free your right arm, keep the baby firmly in the crook of your left, use your hand to break the—. But his right arm did not do as instructed and so he tumbled sideways on the landing, meeting the floor with his shoulder, his eyes on his child’s fluttering lids as the soft cup of her head angled toward the hardwood and then lightly hit. Emily was in her nightdress in the doorway before he could even sit up, and the baby screamed so loud her face passed through two shades of red and into a mottled violet.

In the month before they found her dead in her cot she often screamed like that, and Emily, unable to meet Charles’s eye, would by her very silence imply that
he
had done that, that something was not right with the baby and that this fault, like all the other faults she’d found in the world, was his.

In the end it didn’t matter that Herschel hadn’t come with Leeson when Leeson had wagged the keys in front of his face victoriously; Herschel
was indifferent to the fact that N was not dead, but missing. Or, if not missing, then a kind of changeling who had walked so long in the woods she’d turned into hairgrass or foxtail, into a tree or fern or fawn, invisible to anyone who didn’t know to look for the part of the meadow that moved against the current of the breeze.

Standing in a bower a stone’s throw from the lake, Leeson remembered what old man Greevy had said about his plan: that if Leeson found N and brought her back he would be made a king, and could set a national holiday, and would be given keys to the kitchen where they could all have as much butter and jam as they desired, jar after jar they could take for themselves or give to anyone. And Leeson had agreed, adding that N could be queen and guest of honour at the next annual ball. “If she isn’t
fffffft
,” Greevy added, miming someone hanging from a rope. Herschel had gone along with that, had slung his tongue out of his mouth in an enthusiastic parody. For a second, Leeson had tried to imagine the girl that way, her neck stretched and bruised. The awkward nature of the image convinced him that she couldn’t be dead, and he said so, and Herschel shrugged and returned his attention to the Greek alphabet that Professor Wick had scratched onto the chalkboard. “
Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon
,” Wick said, instructing his fellow inmates to follow along. But none of the other patients cared, and the words made no sense to them, so Wick went on with his lesson, and the others, one after the other, got up and wandered away.

Above all else, Charles valued tenderness. He knew, as he made his way toward the shore to get his bearings, that his wife wasn’t coming back, that she had excised him from her concern, that she would recoil if he presented himself to her, even cured. He knew, in full account, what he was and what he’d done. He also knew that more than anyone it was the girl who saw him, who had given something of herself by touching his head in the clearing in the woods that August day and saying, “There, there” after she heard about Bedford and his shock therapy.

All of which meant there was nothing to do but look to a new set of possible futures, futures that he could unfold like a sheet of sums, a sheet that said “one plus one equals two,” that said “evens”: go and find the girl.

The first shot from the boat resounded around the lake and Leeson’s head jerked up. The crack was followed directly by a light clattering of pebbles falling high over the rock face to the right of where Leeson had stopped. The noise of children calling out to each other ensued—“Thomas! Celia! This way!”—and then the bushes not too far from Leeson’s station parted and a lanky blond boy leapt through, brandishing a stick and shouting, “Beware! Here come the invaders!” as he whacked at the foliage. Leeson ducked and held his breath and the boy charged on toward the path Leeson had come in on, the white glimpse of his shirt receding from view as he hacked his way through the low branches. Leeson listened for more voices. He had been drawn this way by the convivial sounds of a picnic, but not wanting to be discovered he’d decided to stay a respectable distance from the clearing. After a minute of silence Leeson stood to go. He would circle back to the woods that led to the estate and leave whomever it was on the other side of the bushes to the comfort of their privacy. He was about to turn back to the path that led away from the lake when he saw the little girl: a young thing with a rope of wet hair and pleasing features marching toward him, her complexion as bright as that of a porcelain doll he’d once seen in a shop window. Her eyes were to the ground so that she didn’t slip, hands holding up the hem of her frilly skirt.

“Celia!” a boy’s voice shouted from the nearby verge of the woods, and the girl glanced up and ran directly into Leeson.

17

No one is in the breakfast room when Jane comes downstairs, so she takes a seat at the table set for one by the front window. The lace curtains are pulled aside and offer the same view of the river that she saw from her room, but lower to the ground so that she is now level with the short bridges that arc over it. She’d stopped in the lounge on her way through and had spotted a dog-eared book on the history of Inglewood, written in the 1970s by a local historian. While she waits for Maureen to come out of the kitchen and take her order she thumbs through it.

Inglewood House was built in the 1840s as a shooting lodge for Walter Finley, a pineapple importer who wanted a rural retreat. The original structure was a modest two storeys built in the imported classical style by an Italian architect. When it was finished it represented many of the Italian’s Palladian values—strength, austerity, symmetry, dignity, reverence—and, according to the less-than-charitable local historian, none of Walter Finley’s. Within two weeks of the last paintings being hung, Walter was dead. The local doctor ascribed the suddenness of his departure to a strain of the heart. When Mrs. Finley arrived from the city the next morning she found her husband laid out behind his bed
curtains, completely naked. In the kitchens below she found no fewer than twenty pheasants taken in the previous afternoon’s shoot lined up on a long work table for plucking. Within a month, the house was in the hands of the Finleys’ son Lawrence, who was in the process of bankrupting himself overseas; he sold the house almost immediately, never having set foot in it.

Hugh Farrington purchased Inglewood House intending to use it as a summer estate, but on the family’s first foray up from London, his wife, Prudence, fell in love with its remove. They stayed for the better part of eight months, during which time Prudence oversaw various improvements and added feminine touches to make the rooms less austere.

We know that George Farrington’s early years in Inglewood were as delightful for him as they were miserable for his brother, Norvill. William Eliot had alluded to this in his talk at the Chester, citing a short nineteenth-century monograph of the family written by a local headmaster who’d been acquainted with the Farringtons. Norvill was caned regularly by his tutor, had no friends to speak of and was forced to stay home and take extra lessons, while George, three years older, was allowed to travel with his father when he visited the House of Commons. One spring Norvill gathered the nerve to enter his father’s study to complain about the inequity, and Hugh, in a bout of unpredictable anger, struck him in the head with the sheaf of papers he was reading. Thereafter he refused, out of shame, to allow Norvill to bring up either issue again. Norvill that year was made all the more miserable by George’s happiness with village life, by his friendship with the head gardener’s son and his tireless enthusiasm for the outdoors. This misery he exhausted by setting snares in the woods for hares, taunting the blacksmith’s daughter and, once, catching a grass snake by the river and releasing it in the scullery.