by Sophia Tobin
She watched him turn. Took a breath. ‘Last night, I remembered.’
He was already two steps away from her, but he halted at her words. Halted, and did not move.
Livy thought of the things she could say. Thought of the explanations she could produce. Tried to form sentences that would make things better. And then realized: the sand had slipped through the hourglass. And there was only one thing which he really needed to know, and which she really needed to tell him.
‘Christian.’
He half-turned, and looked towards her. And his eyes seemed truly haunted, and fearful. Livy felt it: the turn in the air, like gears. The reverse magnetism which had kept them from touching each other beginning to uncoil itself.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m your wife. Aren’t I?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
1840
Henry pushed aside the drawing of a basket of flowers which he had prepared for the plaster carvers.
On his desk, he sought, and saw, the expected letter which had come by hand; the dear, untidy writing. He remembered the first time he had received this daily note. I have found a way to write to you. I had to find a way to write to you.
He had folded away the night with Foi, put it away in his mind. He had not stayed at his West end club again.
The letters were brought to the Mirrormakers’ Club each day by Katie, Charlotte’s maid – for the building was now secure enough that Henry had his own surveyor’s office, one of the first rooms to be finished. Charlotte had taken the maid into her confidence, bribed not just by affection but with money too. It was the first crack in her grand edifice, thought Henry. His own trusted ally was the housekeeper at the Club, whose warm-hearted, incurious nature meant he simply trusted her, without a word, or any money. He knew better than to try and tell her what the letters were, respecting both her intelligence and his own lack of talent at lying.
They had been helped by the fact that Ashton had returned to Redlands, having engaged Peregrine to design his tomb. Henry had dissuaded him on his many visits to the Mirrormakers’ site, saying again and again how Gothic-friendly Peregrine was and more suited to the task than Henry. Yet, he had still been astonished when Ashton had one day suddenly agreed, as though some well-defended citadel had fallen.
He wished me to return with him, but I said I was too unwell to travel, Charlotte had written. He agrees that the best doctors are here. She would not tell him what her illness was, or whether it was feigned. But he suspected that she had had a miscarriage. And the thought that she might have been carrying another child of Ashton’s, even on the night when he had kissed her at the ball, made Henry so miserable that it silenced him. The thought returned to the surface of his mind, again and again, hideously and repetitively buoyant, but he would not admit it to the light by asking her, for her sake as well as his own.
He did not want the Charlotte that Ashton presented to the world.
He wanted the traces that he saw of her, the real Charlotte, to coalesce and become real. There was an austerity he saw in her, and an intensity, which matched his own. Oh, it was buried, of course: wrapped and scented in manners and artifice. But some deep kindling had brought them together.
Or is it just the flesh, he thought? The strange alchemy of desire. It was the touch of hers that had wakened him to her. The way their gazes met and sparked off each other. And yet, he did not want her smooth, pale, plump flesh. He wanted her brown after days walking through wheatfields with him, in the sun. He wanted her to pull her bonnet back, and let the sun freckle and blemish her marble face. With the edifice taken down, he would show her how he still loved her. He would draw not just a smile from that watchful face: he wanted to hear her laugh.
These visions were dense and vivid. He imagined drinking a cup of tea in the evening, her sitting beside him, and think how comfortable it would be to see her lift the pot in her capable hands – hands that could be capable, if she were released from her director – and pour the tea, the room warmed by the flames in the grate. Or her, eating her eggs across from him in the morning, the way in which she would lift her cup to her lips and what they would speak of: a book she had read, or an idea he had had, or even his vagabond workmen. The visions were comfortable, and domestic. They had the materiality not of wishes or fantasies, but of things that would come to pass.
*
He had grown to depend upon the letters. He would wake each day feeling relaxed, but then the tension would gradually rise in him, until two, when he would come into his office and find the letter lying there, amid business correspondence. And then, released from his purgatory, reassured, he would put it in his pocket and wait until the evening to read it, at home in Russell Square, when he would write a reply which would be collected by Katie the following day from the housekeeper at Mirrormakers’, when she delivered Charlotte’s latest note. Their letters crossed each other, and a thousand coloured threads of delayed answers and reassurances wove their story.
Henry had never realized how closely he was watched until he fell in love with Charlotte. It seemed impossible that they might meet, alone. Once, she had come to the Mirrormakers’ Club herself, ostensibly to see how the building work was going on. She had confessed to the whole room of people, labourers and craftsmen alike, that she intended to surprise Ashton with a written account of how things were progressing. But during that whole visit they had been surrounded, not one word unheard by others. They barely looked at each other. It had caused, if anything, a breach between them which could only be healed by the following day’s letter. He had taken a risk: he had written it when he should have been supervising the plastering of the Red Parlour. He had taken it to the Kinsburg townhouse himself, and asked that it should be put into the mistress’s hand, as it pertained to urgent business. Did I seem cold, my darling? he had written. Do not think it, do not. I seek only to protect you.
He did not trust his own words which were, he thought, sometimes over-fevered, sometimes pompous with convention, for how was he to express what he felt for her, truly? There were not words for such things. He asked her to tell him the meat and bones of her life. He wished to know of her as a real being, not an angel or a goddess. What she ate, what she wore, how her clothes felt against her skin. These brief sentences of intimacy unlocked what he truly sought. I am bleeding today, she wrote once, and her trust pinioned him, a sharp needle of both privilege and intimacy. He saw her breath on the page. He wished to know her hurts and her pleasures; the things she thought of in the moments before sleep. Only in this way did he know that he knew her better than her husband. Once or twice she wrote briefly, and politely, and the convention of it maddened him so much he thought about bringing the world down about their ears. Publish it in The Times, he thought, and let us be ruined. But the day was coming when they would be together, if only briefly. Ashton could not be held off for ever, and had forced them to decisiveness. Barbara had written to Charlotte and told her it was her duty to return, ill or not. It was nearly winter, Barbara wrote: surely Charlotte had healed now?
*
It was a Monday, and Henry had given his servants the evening off. It had all been arranged and yet, when he heard the door knocker, he broke out into a sweat. A part of him had thought it would never happen, and that she would never come. There were so many hurdles to all parts of their relationship that seeing her again, touching her, seemed impossible. He felt their love to be a healing force, but the waiting sickened him.
He ran down to the kitchen, to the servants’ entrance. In came Charlotte and Katie, both cloaked and bonneted. He looked at one, and then the other. Katie seemed cheerful enough, more cheerful than Charlotte, who was pale.
‘I have madeira for you, and eat as much cake as you wish,’ Henry said to the maid, who took her seat eagerly by the fire. He scooped up the over-excited Polly, and Katie stroked her and cooed over her. Then he went silently from the kitchen, with Charlotte behind him, so quiet that he looked back more than once to che
ck that she was there.
In his room, they stared at each other with what seemed like misery, until he finally smiled at her, and she at him.
‘It is strange, but I feel shy of you,’ she said.
‘It is only natural,’ he said, but he did not think it was. He was nervous of her, but also eager, although he did not wish to frighten her. As though newlyweds, as though embarrassed, he helped her to undress, a long and difficult process; and when at length he undid his shirt, he could only think that, of course, she had seen a man naked before: she had seen her husband, and that chilled him. Then he reached out, and ran his hands through her long hair, which she had just released from its pins. He kissed her, and as her mouth opened beneath his, it was as though he were in the study on a long-ago ball night, with the music and the chatter fading from his mind.
*
Charlotte knew she could be free with him: he had demanded it of her, in his letters, and she had decided to take the chance. If he was disgusted with her, this night would remain a secret and she would return to what Ashton had shaped her to be, cool and calm and obedient. But for this moment, she grasped at life, at pleasure; and Henry both followed her and led her. Each moment was as passionate as she had hoped; but she had not been prepared for the moments of delicacy, as exquisite as a feather turning as it is carried by the currents of air to the floor. When the moment of deepest pleasure came she found herself weeping at it, the moment when everything met in a place as tiny as the point of a feather’s quill. Wept for the brevity of it, the torturous brevity of the deepest pleasure she had ever known.
But she also wept because she had been proved right. She knew now what she had been reaching for, with Ashton. But it was something that her husband could not understand and, even if he had understood, he would never have granted it to her. It was strange, she thought, how he had defined her. Even in another man’s bed, her thoughts were full of Ashton.
Henry tried to wipe her tears away but she smiled and shook her head, and kissed him again, and held him close to her, the perspiration cooling on their skin. She tried to commit to memory the feeling of his skin beneath her hands. The line of muscle in his upper arms, and the coarseness of the dark hair on his chest. ‘You know this cannot happen again,’ she said to him.
‘Be patient. We have managed it now, so why not in the future?’
She shook her head.
‘Believe it, Charlotte.’
She said nothing. If he wished to dream, if it made him happy, then she would not seek to erode it. It was such a gift.
They held each other for a few moments, moments that seemed both long and short; and then she told him to go and fetch her maid. He put on his coat, which he had left on his chair, and went downstairs. She heard his little dog yapping in the distance, and then Katie came, and helped to dress her, her fingers nimble, not saying a word. They went downstairs again, and Charlotte saw the half-eaten cake and crumbs on the table, the madeira all gone and sweet on her maid’s breath. She stood on her tiptoes and whispered in Henry’s ear. ‘I will not wash tonight. I will sleep with the scent of you on me.’ And she kissed the side of his neck, and put her hood up over her bonnet, and was gone. Afterwards, he realized she had not worn her lily of the valley scent; there was no trace of her left behind, in the air.
*
He slept late the next day, and missed a committee meeting. When he came to the Club he looked for her letter on his desk, as he always did, but it was not there. He did not hear what his assistants asked of him, and they had to repeat themselves several times before they got an answer. His clerk of works asked what was wrong, and he said he thought he might be sickening. At the end of the day he threw his own letter to Charlotte into the fire, worried that someone might find it. He walked home from the Mirrormakers’ Club to Russell Square, and there was no letter there either.
He wrote again, that evening, a more innocent and straightforward letter which could be read by anyone without danger, but Katie did not come. He slept fitfully, and when he woke it was five in the morning, and he had slept with his fists clenched, so that his finger joints ached with it.
There was no letter the next day, and that evening he walked to the Kinsburg house to leave his card, to see if there might be someone at the window, looking for him, thinking that the maid might be sick, and had not managed to deliver. Whatever happened, he knew that he and Charlotte would find a way to communicate with each other. But the servant who answered the door said that Mrs Kinsburg had gone to the country, and that she was not expected to return for some time. The covers were being put on in the house. That she had left no message, and that she had said, distinctly, that she did not expect any callers, now or in the future.
He wrote strained letters after that, to Redlands. Odd, he knew, but respectable in their language. Asking her to come. Asking her to visit the Club. Strange letters, with words underlined so that she might see what was in his heart.
He received no answer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
1941
BASEMENT VAULTS, THE MIRRORMAKERS’ CLUB
‘What’s going on here?’
Jonathan stood, faintly flushed, in the doorway of the Document Room. He was dressed in a grey sweater and trousers, and the colour cast his gauntness into relief, painting the hollows beneath his cheeks with shadow.
He looked between them: Livy and Christian, seated alongside each other at the table in the yellow light, books and documents spread out before them. His mouth set in a hard line.
‘Have you seen Peggy?’ said Livy.
‘No. Bill let me in. What are you doing?’
‘Looking at the evidence,’ said Christian. ‘I’ve been doing some research in your absence.’
‘What it has to do with you, I have no idea.’ Jonathan looked at Christian’s arm, resting along the back of Livy’s chair. He put his hand to his pocket, and realized he had left his cigarettes upstairs when he had washed and changed.
‘Thank you would be a more appropriate response,’ said Christian. ‘But never mind.’
‘Henry’s letters,’ Livy said. ‘There were words underlined. Do you remember?’
‘And?’
‘And I think he was trying to say something. Now you’re here, we can open the trunk. I didn’t want to do it without you.’
Jonathan felt obscurely touched by the gesture. In a moment, Livy scrambled up, and heaved the trunk open. No perfume now: the contents belonged to the Club’s air, as if they had always been there. Henry’s letters, where Jonathan had left them, newly tied in string, on the top. ‘I’ll say the words, you write them down,’ she said, to Christian. To Jonathan’s intense annoyance, he saw the man already had his notebook out.
My dear Mrs Kinsburg, I am late writing to thank you for your great hospitality. Nothing can excuse this – I am without any good reason. Other than the building work, which consumes me. I know you to have a generous heart. Forgive me.
But in the end he did not need to write anything, because as she said them out loud, they all made sense. Clear, precise, and with no code to break.
I am
Nothing
without
you.
‘How conventional,’ said Jonathan, and Livy thought she saw the beginnings of a sneer on his face.
She turned the next letter and began the process again; then the next, and the next.
Do you remember that day
One word
I beg you.
Livy’s face was flushed as she stopped speaking. Her eyes were bright. ‘It’s so sad,’ she murmured.
‘Don’t get overwrought,’ said Jonathan. ‘It just confirms what we thought – that there was a relationship.’
‘And there are other mysteries too,’ said Christian. He patted the leather-bound book on the table in front of him. ‘This morning, I read the building committee minutes. And I found something in 1841. The Club had been opened. Dale-Collingwood was just stationed here to oversee the
last details. He was the building surveyor, so kept an office here afterwards too.’
‘You read several years’ worth of minutes in one morning?’
‘I can speed read, didn’t you know?’ he said. ‘One of my many talents.’
He opened the book and pointed at a line of script, crossed through.
Miss de la Fointaine called at the Club to make a complaint about Mr Dale-Collingwood.
‘I’m sorry, what?’ said Jonathan. ‘What does it say?’
Mr Dale-Collingwood was not present at this meeting of the committee, owing to an illness which had taken him to the country. Mr Kinsburg oversaw the questioning of Miss de la Fointaine and found her accusations to be utterly unfounded and malicious.
‘Scoring through doesn’t quite fulfil its purpose, does it?’ said Christian. ‘Draws the eye somewhat.’
‘I haven’t seen that name – Miss de la Fointaine – mentioned anywhere else,’ said Livy. ‘Do you have any idea who she was?’
‘None whatsoever,’ said Jonathan, frowning.
‘And I hate to seem unbearably smug,’ said Christian, ‘but I found something else too. Livy told me that Dale-Collingwood’s last notebook was missing. It’s not. It’s out of sequence. I found it in the box for the 1870s. Just having a rifle through.’
Jonathan glanced at Livy irritatedly. ‘Why didn’t you find that?’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘We were concentrating on when the Club was built, if you recall.’
He looked back at Christian. The wretch still had his arm draped over the back of Livy’s chair. ‘What does it say?’
Christian leaned forwards, and opened an ivory leather-coloured notebook from the back. There were several folded pieces of paper there.
‘See for yourself,’ he said.