The World Before Us (47 page)

It’s not improbable that he wanted his wife’s happiness after all. Not impossible that both times, she’d come back flushed and rejuvenated and, perversely, more in love with him. Perhaps, although the cost was high, seeing Charlotte’s spirit returned to her was a relief to Edmund—especially if she shared her renewal with him.

Jane hasn’t realized until now that those years of struggle for Charlotte and Edmund correspond to the years when the Chester museum was fully realized—when the collections that had been idling pleasantly
alongside Edmund’s factories and family concerns were given almost everything he could offer in terms of money, attention and time. The clocks cleaned and working perfectly, the whale knit to the ceiling, the hummingbirds purchased, and the Vlasak plant specimens procured: each glassy piece a true correspondent to the animate thing it was modelled on, a marvel of petals, stems and leaves, the strawberry plant weighted with a glaze of frost—captured exactly as it might have been in the last brisk days of autumn.

The day of the picnic, Nora shifted from one foot to the other; she had yet to purchase a second pair of shoes and the sole of the left one had lost some of its stitching and was flapping annoyingly near the toe. She’d confided this to Charlotte, who had reluctantly allowed her to station herself at the slip between the alders where the Chester children had shouldered their way through, the shrub’s green leaves silvering while she waited. The conversations of the men, when they stood close enough for her to listen, were wonderful. Mr. Chester was telling Mr. and Mrs. Sutton about his museum, the rarities of nature he’d collected and seen. “The world is a large place,” Chester said, and he ran his hand over his vest, lightly fingering his pocket watch. “Though I suppose you know that.” He was speaking to the Suttons, but sensed Nora’s eyes on him and nodded in her direction. He said this last phrase looking at her face, as if he could discern a worldliness at work there.

When Leeson burst through the bushes, Nora was feeding Cato a bump of bread. The dog spun and Norvill appeared with a shotgun, and Nora did not have time to reach him. Leeson halted when he saw Norvill and the shot that stopped him again was loud and strangely flat, a burst that arced and tattered. Leeson’s arms swinging in a circle as he sought to right himself.

Nora’s face was above Leeson’s before George reached them, her hands cradling his head. And she was there when Norvill bent down and saw what he’d done. A flicker of understanding crossed Norvill’s countenance: he saw that Nora knew the man.

This is why it came as a surprise a month later when Prudence, taking her tea in the gazebo, announced that Norvill needed a maid for the house in Scarborough and that she had been requested. “The footman has no skills, he can barely mail a letter, and Norvill needs someone who can clean
and cook
, and take dictations related to his work; his hands are sore from the constant chiselling.” Prudence stood up and smoothed her skirt, her eyes welling because she preferred Nora to the others and because now that George had gone back to the Himalayas, the house was too quiet. That night, taking her tinctures, she confessed that Nora’s leaving would be difficult, that she was beginning to feel that she was alone in the whole of the world.

Norvill came to Inglewood a week later to visit his mother and to collect Nora. The day before their departure he put on a tweed jacket and announced that he was heading out to the main cave to make strati-graphical sketches; it would consume most of the afternoon should anyone—meaning Prudence—need him. In a moment of compassion, or perhaps with sudden awareness that he would need someone to assist him, he’d stopped and turned just before the French doors to ask Nora if she’d like to join him.

The entrance to the cave was a narrow slit at the base of a limestone cliff. Step into its darkness and you were suddenly in its throat: damp and dripping and hollow. There was
almost
an entry hall, Nora could sense it: a high sand-coloured vault framed by jagged columns that hung from the ceiling and rough balusters that sprung up from the ground. Nora lifted her hem and stepped over the puddle in the walkway. As she squeezed between two large mounds that looked like petrified mushrooms, Norvill chided her for not removing her bustle, held the lamp in
each hand higher so that she could see where her skirt had caught. There were pools of water in the depressed regions of the warped floor and Norvill took her hand to guide her along the slippery wall. At the first intersection, dripping sounds came from three directions, a
plik plonk plik
that reminded her of the clocks in the small parlour. The world smelled of an
absence
of grass, an absence of green things.

In the cavern Norvill called “the Inverted Forest” he took his sketch pad out of his satchel, gave Nora one of the lamps and asked her to hold it against the wall she would find some twenty paces past where she was standing.

“Go slowly,” he cautioned, and just as he said so a large glinting tooth—what she could only conceive of as a giant incisor—appeared hanging from the roof of the cavern inches above her head. She lifted up the lamp and saw dozens, no, hundreds more.

Norvill stayed where he was, even though he could see she was frightened. He said, “It’s as if the trees stripped by winter have been strung upside down. That’s why we call it the Inverted Forest.”

“No,” she replied, even though she knew it was not her station, “it’s as if we are inside the mouth of that bear you have stuffed in your entry, and are about to be swallowed.”

What Nora didn’t tell Norvill, even as the years progressed and they fell into an easy affinity—he always treating her as help, though he gave her secretarial tasks and praised her liberally—was that she’d had a strange sensation in the cave in that hour when she was asked to hold the lamp up toward the lined and glittering wall behind her. She did not believe in spirits or ghosts, and she was not deceived by the mesmerizing theatrics she’d once seen Samuel Murray perform in a comedy for the Superintendent—the poet with black around his eyes and a gypsy scarf over his head, predicting everyone’s future in return for coins made of
paper. No, what she felt instead was a kind of tenor—like on those rare days when a shift in the weather or a word dropped by a stranger recalls you to some other time, to how you felt or where you once stood or what work you were doing; recalls you to the person you were then.

The tenor of the cave reminded her of Leeson. Of how she had been cold in the woods that day they left the Whitmore, and how, in one of the clearings, he’d seen that and had suggested she move to a spot of sun. Herschel had come back then, conveying urgency, so their movement had resumed; and Leeson had plucked her hand and tucked it into his when they reached the fallen tree, escorting her over it.

In the cave the memory of Leeson had been there—so vitally present it was as if he had left his body by the lake and remained with her, watching.

“Higher,” Norvill said, a second pencil in his mouth.

Nora lifted the lamp and debated asking him if he felt something similar.

But then he spat the pencil onto his lap. “Come now, Miss Hayling, lift it back up to where it was. Or is your arm getting tired?”

The late-afternoon air carries the first fusty smell of autumn, and even though the trees are still green, the leaves, here and there, are letting go. Overhead a crow on the ridge of the church roof caws, then flaps up and over the bell tower.

“Accck,”
replies Herschel, and he lifts his arms up and down.

A group of hikers with walking sticks and stuffed packs walk past Jane as she heads across the road and into the field that sits between the woods and the trail. One of the women lags behind to pet Sam, looking around for his person until she spots Jane standing along the grassy verge. Jane waves as if to say,
He’s with me
.

It’s here that we briefly lose the girl—though she
is
a child and prone to do this: run headlong out of our orbit on the promise of some great adventure.

“I’ll go,” Cat sighs, moving off toward the trail.

But then the one who has been circling us for days says, in a gentle voice, “I’ll find her”—because he is good at that, and there are four slats on the gate, and two low branches bolstering the oak, and six hikers coming off the trail, and the world, today, is evens.

A hundred years ago, Jane reasons, Nora Hayling was a flesh-and-blood human being who probably walked across the road she herself has crossed almost daily this week, coming out of the servant tunnel and passing between the church and George’s waterfall as she strode smartly into the village on errands for Prudence or on her half-days off, her body ghosting the same places Jane’s body has been. In one of Jane’s imaginings, the sun is on Nora’s face and she is closing her eyes under it, breathing in deeply through her nose; in another version, it’s that hour before rain when the air feels like dew. Or maybe it’s winter, the first lilt of snowfall, and Nora stops to lift her glove to see if she can catch a crystal of snow, study it before it disappears. And in that wondrous, short span of time, when the perfect sphere of it is there on her palm, maybe Nora sees Herschel, standing in the woods with his hand out to the field the day they took their long walk. Or maybe she sees Leeson sitting in the net of sun on the stump beside her, saying that the countryside was theirs to wander over as they saw fit, his face lit up and his eyes accidentally meeting hers, and Nora thinking,
How lovely, how lovely it is to be seen
.

We see Jane. See her as she walks Sam along the stone wall, as she stops under the oak, tugs a leaf off its lowest branch and slips it into her pocket. Leaning against the wall by the stables she writes a note to Blake and at the bottom she adds
call me
and includes her number in London. Then she does what he’d done in his note to her, and underlines
please
.

• • •

Jane stretches out the kink in her neck and looks back to the woods, to the place where Lily went missing, and some of us feel the shape our hearts once took hang like pendulums in the hourless clocks of our chests.

Sam barks at Jane and wags his tail and she picks up a stick and tosses it, says, “Go on!” And we watch as Sam runs nose-down through the waving grass, and we are as happy as she is to watch him run, to witness his unfettered pleasure.

Some nights when there were only a few of us in her room, and it was still early and we were not yet tired from watching, we would ask each other to name the first thing we could remember.

“Sand,” one of us said, “the good kind, not like the pebbled bits by the sea, but the fine grain you’d find in an hourglass.”

And then we would try to puzzle if this sand was a memory from life or from a story—or something we glimpsed in the in-between we think of as “now.”

“Was it in your hand or under your feet?” we asked. “Was it warm or cold?” “Was there water nearby?” “Did you swim?” “Who were you with—a man or a woman, a boy or a girl?”

“I remember a park,” another said, “with gas lamps and a bench near the water.”

The boy remembered a terrier bouncing up to catch a stick, and a carousel with brightly painted horses. The girl remembered her mother’s face appearing over hers so that they could rub noses.

“Mwah!” said Cat at this, and she went around blowing kisses at everyone.

“What we saw first is less vital than what we saw last,” the theologian droned, though the idiot corrected him, waved his hand at all the
talk of Ceasing, said, “It is what things
become
, sir. The world is congregated by force, and no force is lost, it can only be converted.”