What Empty Things Are These

by Crozier, J. L. ;

  I rubbed the back of my neck. Good gracious! I begin as spinner of tales! I chuckled, softly, though only Mr Hadley was there as audience. The greatest obstacle is this consciousness of display! One writes alone, yet imagines all those who will make judgement. An invisible crowd, so to speak… I rolled my eyes and shook my head at myself. The room, indeed, was silent but for the small clock and Mr Hadley’s shallow breath. Some small sounds came from somewhere in the street—a child’s voice, a little sharp. Perhaps commanding an animal; perhaps disobeying a governess.

  I read over what I had written.

  I was self-conscious; I was not certain if I would ever let another read this tale, let alone publish it. I could not discern whether I was guilty or merely shy. I was uncertain whether I should explore further this child who was, of course, Toby. It was the portrait of a child, a boy, that I was building, and I began with my own son as its cornerstone. The child in this story of mine had Toby’s arrogance, which placed him more distant from she who loved him than the furthest stars; he had such untried innocence as to make his mother ache for his frailty. This story was an exploration; it was a stroll down a path that grew less familiar, that split into other paths that were, in turn, sometimes more and sometimes less familiar.

  While the room continued silent, and the voice outside had ceased, I was clutched of a sudden by an emotion somewhere between excitement and fear; there was something of anticipation in it and yet something that was very like a need to hide oneself away. My heart, I fancied, might be beating fast, beneath the layers of my clothing. It was time to take a breath, a slow and deep one, and close my eyes to gain the comfort for a moment of a personal darkness.

  Then I was ready to bend over the paper once more.

  Somebody laughed in the street outside the house, and there may have been an answer as the small sound moved seemingly from one side of Mr Hadley’s room to the other, carried perhaps on the travelling rumble of a handcart. Indeed it was a handcart, undeniably, for it I guessed that it struggled—from the scraping of the wheels and the grunting of its owner—with the large cobble I had often noticed standing up a little loose from the rest.

  Otherwise, within Mr Hadley’s room the only noises were the scratching of my nib, and the faint, dry rasp that came from my husband’s bed, so faint and so regular as to have become a part of the room itself and therefore almost forgotten.

  I paused, the ink drying in the air. I had been writing for an hour already and my back ached from leaning over the writing surface. The lines drawn through unsatisfactory phrases had become less frequent upon the page, I judged, within the last half an hour or so, and the penmanship more confident. Enough for now. I was content with it. I thought that it would do very well in serial form, if Mr Thackeray could be persuaded to publish it.

  Hush! For it is she, Adelaide Hadley, the lady novelist! I smiled.

  Blotting the last line written, I wiped at the nib with my cloth, straightened the papers and placed them inside my writing box, in company with the bottle for ink and my pens, the cleaning cloth, the blotter. I closed the lid and regarded my husband, his hair, soft as any baby’s, spread upon the pillow.

  His neckcloth was wet through, I could see, and so I rose to him and took it, placed it on the tray that sat by the bed for just this purpose, and picked up a dry cloth that was folded there.

  Lord. Mr Gordon. It is droll, I suppose, all of it.

  I wiped Mr Hadley’s mouth and chin, and tucked the cloth at his neck. Droll, even that I should have been unaware. Can I have been so unaware?

  It dawned on me then that more was changing, and would continue to change with Mr Hadley’s passing. I was to become a woman alone, with all that may betoken speculation, by gentlemen, about me. I felt, of a sudden, exposed and expectant, all at once. And then, with that prickling at my cheeks, I thought that some of that speculation might be mine. At which I recoiled, for the physical presence of Mr Gordon had reared itself before me.

  Oh! ’Tis too much!

  Mr Gordon had for so long been the whispering stick figure who arrived sometimes to be closeted with Mr Hadley in his study for an hour, two hours, once for almost half a day. Afterward, Mr Gordon might be invited to stay for luncheon or the evening meal, and he would crouch over his soup or his viands and agree with Mr Hadley at the correct moments, bowing to me and bending his features into some semblance of smile, all of which would require him to look up, as it were, from his crouch. I recalled Mr Gordon’s mouth moving around his food, and the dabbing of his lips. The papery rasp of his voice seemed to insinuate so, and made the listener yearn for a cough. I considered my forthcoming position as widow, inheritor of a widow’s mite. He would be the only man, surely, of my husband’s acquaintance, to imagine (if indeed he does) that he would benefit socially from marriage with me. Perhaps marriage to your deceased client’s wife is to rise in the world…

  I pulled my mind away from further thought of Mr Gordon, his person, his ambitions, the very notion of his creeping to my room in his nightshirt. I shuddered, surprising myself with the violence of it.

  Then, as I returned to smoothing both cloth and sheet, I considered that there had been one small advantage as a result of this absurd misunderstanding with Mr Gordon. Subsequent events may well pull me down in Mr Gordon’s eyes. Sadly, this small advantage arose from the note that came from Dickie, which said only:

  Alas. Too late or I was misled—there was no profit, only loss. I am chastised by fate and my own foolishness.

  On reading this, I was, most naturally, pensive for a time, was sad indeed for my brother and Amanda, who must learn another harsh lesson through financial loss. I had sat with the paper in my hand, thinking. How can this be? Was Dickie mistaken, and there had never been a profit? Was there no profit, and Dickie simply misled into believing there was?

  But sad as I was for my brother, a burst of a thought had then occurred: how little I knew of Mr Hadley’s own investments! Would he have been so remiss? How well had he known Mr Farquharson? Was he vulnerable to grandiosity and overlarge gestures, whether Mr Farquharson’s or anyone else’s? Could this be the case, I wondered, even while he himself (I had often witnessed) could persuade through flattery any fellow from his uncertainty. Surely Mr Hadley would have known better! Then I blushed to think how close I had, myself, come to falling in behind the knave, Mr Farquharson.

  It is a thing of which I must be certain. I closed my eyes at the thought of Mr Gordon nibbling in his rooms. I suppose.

  The thought of a visit to Mr Gordon was discomposing enough, but then came the notion that Toby might misunderstand my purpose entirely. This washed over me like cold brine, and was so mortifying I must catch my breath. I cringed still to think that Toby had ever considered I might look on any possible advances by Mr Gordon with favour. Sitting thus, my eyes closed and slowly—as Mama had always dictated—filling and emptying my lungs, I formed a plan.

  This might do. Yes, this might do very well.

  Thus, I would seek out Toby in his room. He might accompany his mother to enquire of Mr Gordon whether their life had in fact been exposed to Mr Farquharson’s dubious practice. Here was a plan that covered many needs. There was time still before Toby left for his friend’s place.

  My son looked up, when I tapped, very gently, and entered. He saved his place with his finger in the book he had been reading. It looked, from where I stood, like a volume that had always been his favourite and, while I could not think why, this very fact closed my throat with emotion so that I must cough a little in order to speak. We all find comfort in the things of our childhood. He listened with his wide-eyed gaze on me, with that innocence that could speak equally of love or of contempt.

  ‘It is right that you should have some little involvement in your father’s affairs, for they will be your own when you are a man.’ I folded my hands at my waist. ‘And—’ I was most serious with him. ‘—your c
ompany as chaperone would be most fitting.’

  Toby was my small and serious companion, then, seated very straight all the way in the landau to Mr Gordon’s chambers. I could not help looking long at him, for here was my son travelling with me for my own sake, and on business that affected us both, and my pride in his presence was all undiluted. His father, I must be frank with myself, is not here to declare possession and leave me bereft. My head swam a little to think of all that was being enacted here, while Toby and I sat in this cocoon as the world passed by, and it made me smile. So near to this boy, who was my own and yet a stranger. Whose eyes may yet, one day, turn to me and see me.

  In the end, there was little time spent with Mr Gordon.

  ‘No, no, all seems to be in order,’ he said, bending his long, black-clad body over his desk and leafing through papers and bound documents. The scraping and shuffling echoed the dry crawling of his voice. ‘There is nothing outstanding nor, indeed, about which to be concerned.’ He looked up at me with curiosity.

  I smiled and was gratified that, for this moment at least, I

  appeared to Mr Hadley’s solicitor to have some small grasp of finance.

  Or at least, of the import of some influences upon it.

  ‘There is no reference to a Mr Farquharson?’

  ‘No, no. Mr Farquharson, Mrs Hadley?’

  ‘He is a financier and broker in the City, Mr Gordon, whose dealings are being uncovered as quite questionable.’ I knew I appeared to know of rumours—pertaining to Mr Farquharson—of which Mr Gordon had not heard. Yet, although there was a deal of satisfaction to be had from this, I could not help the heat that came and went on my cheeks (though I was annoyed by this betrayal of myself), for really I did not believe myself to have been particularly clever. I felt I lied in concealing the depths of my actual ignorance. And yet lying is what all this has been about, with Mr Farquharson-Forster, his life and his promises. How much of business was, I wondered, a performance. A ruse. A trick. A sleight of hand.

  And then, it came to me with a start, Toby himself might now take either the road that declared his mother an unwomanly meddler in men’s affairs, or the one that declared her to be plucky and sensible for a woman. What to do, if he despises me even for this? For this knowledge does come from experience, where a gentlewoman is normally innocent of such. He may rebel, again, at one more sign that I abandoned my rightful place at the hearth, at the bedside, to venture into business none of my own. It was quite possible that no way could be found to marry, as it were, his esteem and my growing capacity in my own affairs. And yes, I decided, my capacities are growing. Yet would he thrust himself further from me because of it?

  I threw a secret glance at him, but there he sat gravely by the desk, looking from one adult to the other. He listened, it was evident, and although he did not understand, he strived to do so.

  Look, he is flattered, it came to me, child that he is, to be included in such talk. Perhaps, in this, he had forgot his disdain; he had forgot to put on his look of Mr Hadley, just this once. There may come a time when he will forget to do so altogether. I felt I floated with relief, as I smoothed my gloves and drew the veil back over my face.

  A pale sunshine hesitated through cloud as we descended Mr Gordon’s stair, and light glinted from new puddles upon the road. Two gentlemen passed by at a fast walk, and one clapped the other on the back and laughed.

  Mr Brent awaited his mistress, horses clattering one step forward and another back on the cobbles, ready for the drive home. Toby turned to me.

  ‘I am glad you brought me here today, Mama,’ he said, and I smiled at his young dignity. I delighted in it.

  ‘And I—’ he cleared his throat. ‘I assure you I understand you must involve yourself in some little way in these matters, but that I will be proud to care for you in all things when I am older.’

  I regarded him, the smile still on my face, while my delight faltered and sank. It is a dance—one step closer, one step further away.

  ‘We shall see what must be done when the time comes.’ I swung the small hand that I held in mine. ‘Would you care for an ice before we leave town, Toby?’

  He looked up at me and took his hand away. I had never in his life before behaved so lightly with him, had certainly never swung his hand.

  ‘It is not so unusual, my love, for a mother to take her boy to have an ice.’ Instead, I patted his shoulder. ‘You might tell me about Phillip and his pony.’

  He ate his ice in a small shop with me, and spoke of his friend and his pony, for all the world as if he did indeed wish his mother to know and enjoy what he so enjoyed; and I thought that I might later search in my great cupboard for journals put away from many years gone past. I fancied I might find there Mrs Gaskell’s excellent tale of ghosts, The Old Nurse’s Story, and my son might shiver in delighted dread to such lines as had affected me, too, when I had been a child:

  As winter drew on, and the days grew shorter, I was sometimes almost certain that I heard a noise as if someone was playing on the great organ in the hall.

  Reaching under Mr Hadley’s head and neck to support him the better, I held to his lips a teaspoon part filled with water. I held my breath as I did this, for he exhaled in feeble gusts a moist and foul stench. My reaction—my holding my own breath—was now what I did as a matter of course, with barely a thought.

  Indeed, my thoughts were elsewhere, and that vexingly frequent heat came and went on my cheeks. For this last Sunday I had pretended to a slight cold and so had put Mr Gordon off rather than attend church with him, since Toby was gone and I still feared the man’s advances, or at least that he may plan to make some. I had sat inside near a curtain as if I considered hiding behind it (perhaps I did), while Cissy made her apologies to the lawyer standing at the door in his Sunday best and his hat in his hand.

  I had done something very like, I recalled, when at the height of my coming out. There had been a young man, not favoured by many of those giddy girls and certainly not by an Adelaide drunk on music and admiration and late nights, who I left standing while I swirled off with another, despite having permitted that poor boy to mark my dance card.

  Imagine thinking of that now. Poor boy, poor boy. He had stood, so unhappy, striving not to look it at the edge of a laughing group of young men, all fevered and animated in their arrogance. I caught glimpses of him in snatches as faces and feathers swept past, and the music played on.

  What a coward I am and always have been. I pressed my cool hand to my face a moment, then bent back to my work.

  In any case, it was not long after that all my headiness was silenced. By Mr Hadley.

  I looked at my husband, tilted my head away to take a breath, and reached with the spoon for more water.

  My mind wandered down another path: The sewing machine takes up too much space in the morning room. We are perpetually having to find our way around it.

  I tipped the smallest sip of water to Mr Hadley’s mouth so that it would slip between his lips without choking him. Lowering his head a little at just the right moment, I had discovered, would enable him to swallow and the water not dribble out and onto the cloth.

  Mr Hadley’s study. I tipped the spoon again. Else there is no use for the room at all.

  I reached for more water.

  We should put the drawing room under sheets. I will spend days in flattering Mrs Staynes; she will be persuaded that though things change, there is no wrong in it. The morning room does for all occasions, I fancy.

  I stood for a moment, teaspoon in hand.

  Judging that Mr Hadley had had as much water as he needed, I sat once more and glanced at the clock on the mantel. In the hearth, the fire was burning low, though Cissy would be along soon to encourage it. Luncheon would be served, once my husband’s fouled cloths and sheets had been changed and Cook’s gruel—whose thickness was now become so well judged—fed to him. />
  Lord. The dining room. The very thought of it made me draw my shawl close and tight.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I think you should speak, Sobriety.’

  The maid’s silence, in the days after Toby’s departure for his friend’s house and horses, had hung about the house like a doom-

  laden wraith in weeds. Our inescapable passenger, I considered it. It accompanied us from room to room, from meal to meal. It sat with us as a third at luncheon, a presence cold as the room itself, and the gelid soup, and the fish lying yellow in its congealing sauce before us.

  It had wrapped itself around the little woman like a shawl, something knitted from the yarn of a deep despondence. When Sobriety paused in the hallway to regard the dish with its few visiting cards and notes, the inspector’s topmost, and turned away without expression, I knew the very claylike emptiness of her face held meaning. This meaning spoke in its very stillness even while she watched Albert carry the sewing machine to the study, while Cissy followed with the heavy piles of folded material that had these past days taken up so much space in the morning room.

  Sobriety sat now and stared unmoving at the mending in her hand. The light from the window fell on the whiteness of her face and it glowed faintly, for sadness fed a lingering physical weakness, and both lent her translucence.

  ‘Please speak to me, my dear.’

  Sobriety looked at me, slowly, as if she were not inclined even toward this much movement. There was a small flicker pinched about her eyebrows, and I fancied she was about to speak, but instead she shook her head and looked back down at her sewing.