‘You must understand that this is strictly confidential. The situation complicated itself. The county papers got involved, and I was forced to pretend that I possessed occult mediumistic powers. It seemed easier for people to believe that I had found the child with some hocus-pocus or other, rather than imagining that a woman was capable of using her brains. It was entirely unavoidable, and if there is a God somewhere, he can attest that it wasn’t my intention to mislead anyone. It all happened in the most natural manner: the mother of the missing child presented the solution of the case to the police as the result of some young lady having a “dream”, or a “vision”, that led her to the hut where the poor child had been hidden by his own father. And I saw it then: the policemen’s glances at one another. Where previously there had been suspicion, disbelief, demands for an explanation, now everything fitted into its place in their poor little overworked brains. Let it be so, I thought; I would have them believe anything they wanted to believe, if only the child could be found, the mystery solved, the father sent to jail, the mother and her son reunited before something more dreadful happened.’
‘I see.’
‘It did cost me my studies. I was summarily expelled.’
Silence hung in the air.
‘Psychology, Lady Matthews, the study of the mind. I constantly deal with the same human traits—deceit, fabrication, duplicitousness—and their obvious result: the suffering of the most innocent of creatures for other people’s selfish purposes.’
‘That is a very sad way of looking at the world,’ the older woman ventured.
‘It is also frighteningly accurate.’
Lady Matthews didn’t reply. She simply allowed Helena to carry on talking.
‘Afterwards, I could not deny the usefulness of what had happened. And now, tell me: do you despise me for pretending to have supernatural powers? I assure you I hardly ever request that people come to see me and have their palm read, and I absolutely refuse to “do” séances. In fact, I cannot help you, Lady Matthews, in the way that Mrs Ashby, and perhaps even Mr Bale, assume I would. No, I cannot communicate with ghosts; I don’t have a “spirit guide” at my command. However, I can assure you people get results from my efforts, albeit through methods different from those they are expecting. They get to know the truth.’
‘So you don’t believe in ghosts?’
‘I believe in physical proof, and as far as the supernatural is concerned, no one has been able to provide me with that, at least not yet.’
‘We were fully aware of the situation, Miss Walton. And you may know that we have tried many… unusual means to get to the bottom of this over the years. However, your particular… double sensibility on the affair is precisely what we are looking for. This sad business requires more open-mindedness than usual…’
‘I understand.’
‘Correct me if I am wrong,’ the old lady continued, ‘but the main purpose of what you do is to demonstrate that our daily interactions are more determined by what people hide and don’t say, or even what they don’t know about themselves, than by what gently simmers on the surface—as if every one of us was in possession of a parallel existence that has somehow to be unmasked.’
‘Yes… I believe so. I would have never put it in those words, but I guess that is right. Finding the truth beneath the surface.’
‘But then, it is not that simple, is it? What is the truth?’
‘What do you mean? The truth is the truth.’
‘Really? What we count as reality might simply not be there in the first place. Different people tell stories in different ways; family stories are usually reshaped to conform to the rules of society—and the stories we tell our children.’ Lady Matthews laughed sadly. ‘How can we feed them all that rubbish, fairyland and all that?’
‘You think there is more to the children’s disappearance than foul play?’
‘I know that there is more to the children’s disappearance than foul play, yes.’
For a fleeting moment, alone in the Round Reading Room days after their conversation, Helena had believed her. But there was something else, she thought. It happened to her often, as soon as she immersed herself in a story; some instinct flourished, a missing piece she could almost see hanging in mid-air, a part of the puzzle that she knew would shed light over some dark corner. She was sure there was something else and, whatever it was, it was letting Lady Matthews’s guilt show.
* * *
She found it, eventually, perusing records and deeds of ownership. Lady Matthews and her neighbour Charles Bale had been partners in a failed business, a kind of extraction agreement on the Norfolk coast. It wasn’t exactly clear what they were extracting and it seemed void of connection to the case at hand. It gave Helena a further perspective, nonetheless, of the kind of trusting relationship between Bale and the old dame, if after failing at a business together they were still good friends. Of course, they could have been complicit in keeping quiet about something related to the issue, some misdeed. One thing was true: she had asked Lady Matthews for as much background as possible, and she had failed to mention the extraction business altogether. In Helena’s experience, that kind of behaviour pointed at one thing only: guilt.
She also unearthed some oddities connected to the case at hand: Samuel Moncrieff had been born in the year of the girl’s vanishings, or at least ‘found’. For Helena had not been able to find any record of his birth. True, perhaps his birth certificate was still waiting to be discovered somewhere or other. She suspected he might have been abandoned somewhere in the estate, and wondered where it could have been. Perhaps in the ruins of the Tudor house?
During her inspection of the ruins, she had tried to imagine those three little girls playing there. She wondered if the dirt had stained their silk slippers, the hems of their skirts. They obviously had to be very clever children, as a certain amount of care needed to be exercised if they were to avoid being caught. Going to the ruined manor was strictly forbidden, or so Lady Matthews had insisted. They probably had needed to learn to keep clear of the broken panelled windows as well, the ruined glass sharp as carving knives. They had to learn it all again, how to walk, how to move quietly through those rooms, like silent ghosts, those children. They had to learn to pretend and to lie; perhaps learn to disappear.
On the left-hand side of the fireplace a few steps led down into a back garden. A broken door hung open, allowing a bit of light to enter. It smelled different there, of recently cut grass, of woodsmoke, of life; or perhaps the intense smells of the deepest forests, three times magnified.
Three is a magical number, and they were three.
Helena felt observed. It was the quiet secrecy, and the light, as if the house itself was looking back at her.
And then she entered the room, whose walls would later be revealed to have witnessed such portents.
There she could feel the haunting of the place at its fullest. The room looked like an image in a daguerreotype, and it felt like a wrong room, a mirror image of another. She was reminded of the frozen fens, of skating over those colossal mirrors the fields turned into after a few days of frost. One of her Cambridge friends had said something to her that now she felt was truly perceptive: that it looked sometimes as if the skaters, speeding in that manner so typical of the fenland, were doing so followed at all times by their head-down doubles, an inverted mirror realm. That room was like an image as well. Here, it was as if the real room in the real house in the real world had been left behind, and she had crossed some kind of boundary. The sudden burst of unmoving time was off-putting; it revealed something oddly untrue about the place.
Helena swallowed a gasp when she saw that she was not alone.
The woman, for it was obviously a woman, although she was wearing trousers, was standing with her back to her, her face deep in one of the corners, as if she were a child chastised by a stern teacher. The unnatural stance sent shivers through Helena’s spine, for she had the idea that the woman was looking into th
e wall in such an odd manner as a way to avoid looking at the room.
Her clothes were in shreds and covered in dirt; her grey hair was uncombed and interlaced with everything imaginable— leaves, feathers, little sticks—as often happens when you sleep rough for a long time; there was an indeterminate greyness around her, around her clothes and her hair and her skin and her eyes. She must have sensed Helena’s presence, as she started slowly turning, and she looked at her eventually, with such longing and sadness that Helena felt for the first time the enormity of the task ahead of her.
‘Good afternoon,’ Helena said.
The old woman didn’t reply, but extended her arms and slowly stumbled in her direction. She noticed then a further oddity, for it was odd for an old woman to be holding a little rag doll, tattered and dirty.
‘Do you live here?’ she continued, for once she saw her fully it was obvious she was a beggar. The woman still did not reply, but Helena felt that might be the case, and mumbled an apology for disturbing her.
Then the woman opened her mouth.
She babbled for what seemed a long time, gesticulating and trying to explain something about the wall, from the way she insistently pointed at it. But Helena could make nothing of her strange sounds; she sounded exactly as if someone had cut out her tongue, although she had a tongue inside her mouth. She looked like a grown woman who had once known how to communicate, but had lost the ability to do so.
Helena was carrying an apple and a bit of bread and cheese, and this little bounty she offered. The old woman gathered it all and, with strange elegance, didn’t put it into her mouth coarsely, like those less fortunate usually do when offered something. She found pockets somehow, crevices in her dirty clothes, put the food inside them, passed next to her, and was gone. Helena thought that the woman might despise her, the way she could not understand what she was trying to tell her, and that she was right to do so.
CHAPTER FIVE
The missing tern, the birdsong, all those vanishings had brought to her mind other vanishings.
Eliza had stumbled upon Eunice’s article in a library in Manchester, which miraculously held a complete set of The American Journal of Science and Arts—libraries; losing access to them was one of the things that made her heart ache—and she had at once noticed the similarities with a much better-known experiment, performed three years later. By a man.
Coincidence, bad luck?
This made her curious—though a woman should never be curious, as everyone was fond of repeating. But it was too late for her, for she was curious; she had always been. Curiouser and curiouser. And so, she continued digging, meddling, learning, finding out… She discovered that Eunice Foote, the celebrated American female scientist, had not been able to present her paper on the circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays and carbonic acid at the 1856 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A male colleague had done it for her. It hadn’t been easy, but Eliza had managed to find a contemporary account of the occasion, from which she had copied some passages: ‘Professor Henry then read a paper by Mrs Eunice Foote, prefacing it with a few words, to the effect that science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true.’
Eliza did not know if women held the truth; and who did, really? Did the true even exist? But she was incensed nonetheless, furious. And so, Eunice had become her new subject. Meanwhile there were other things to look forward to, of course; for very soon it would be spring, and she might catch a few dragonflies from the region, the Aeshna isosceles, which she had never before had the pleasure of seeing—if the elusive tern did not appear, they would have to do instead.
What really, truly infuriated her were the stories that these men of science insisted upon, bending certainties into whichever narrative they wanted to impose on the rest. Surely they had a duty not to be fanciful; what could they be thinking? The gentleman to whom Eunice’s results were attributed—he seemed to have reached exactly the same conclusions, made exactly the same observations as the American, in another country and years after she published her paper—had insisted on a preternatural, almost mystical explanation for this energy that men so voraciously were consuming, sending the wrong message, as if announcing the arrival of a fake God, claiming that it was infinite, that it would never end, and that there would be no time of reckoning.
The sun digs the ore from our mines, he rolls the iron; he rivets the plates, he boils the water; he draws the train. He not only grows the cotton, but he spins the fibre and weaves the web. There is not a hammer raised, a wheel turned, or a shuttle thrown that is not raised, and turned, and thrown by the sun. His energy is poured freely into space, but our world is a halting place where this energy is conditioned. Here the Proteus works his spells.
Proteus? Spells? How dared this man of science imbue the Empire’s ravenous need for consumption with such cosmic, fanciful notions? Worst of all, the passage conveniently forgot about all those men and women, all those children, who were the real force behind the building and rebuilding, which started each day with each new dawn. This man’s ‘metaphors’, for lack of a better word, were deliberately forcing them into oblivion, conveniently rendering invisible all those who, with their hard toil, generated the energy that progress needed, demanded. In a way, Eliza thought, these stories were hiding the fact that, in order for voracious growth to continue, the rest of us were, in effect, sucking the energy out of them… their vital impulse. Their lives were mere particle of dust, needed to propel those of others. London, she knew, was consuming as much as 13,000,000 cubic feet of gas every night; and, in order to be lighted and heated, required the burning of 3,000,000 tons of coal per year. The results were all too well known: blackened skies, soot-covered buildings, filthy waterways and streets, and respiratory disease. And most of it falling on those poor souls who made it possible, who ended up chewing the toxic atmosphere with their daily bread. The Earth itself would soon be rendered uninhabitable for mankind—and all these men did was to look the other way, and pretend they were special, somehow predestined for progress.
How were they different from the charlatans, the penny-theatre magicians, the palm readers who traversed the roads of this forsaken county, disturbing true observations with the promise of a new dawn? Fake idols, all of them. It was clear that these ‘scientists’ were as versed in storytelling techniques as Mr Dickens had been, and too fond at times of creating fancies rather than presenting facts. Equally, she had also encountered many literary men who seemed well-versed in the scientific and mechanical branch of natures that most interested Eliza, and at times these men of letters were those who saw the metropolises of the Empire for what they really were: big-mouthed monsters intent on devouring it all, vomiting in return a sad melange of noxious gases, effluvia, soot, smoke and ash. One only had to read Dickens or Ruskin to see that these men understood the root of the problem all too well: the consumption of everything nature offered, and the damage done to agriculture and the landscape of places like the one she had retreated to, creating a never-ending cycle of chaos and an altered order that could have no good end.
But, was that what was happening here?
By now, Eliza had collected and compiled enough evidence: the measurable data, as well as the dreams of eerie greenish light that tainted the morning mist. And she knew, or at least suspected, that whatever was happening here needed the two strands of knowledge. But where to gift her findings? Who to share them with?
* * *
She had her own reasons to allow her curiosity to be courted by the two strands of knowledge: she needed to gather as much information as possible if she was going to be successful in her quest. It was an exercise in dispelling the shadows, no more and no less than that.
She might have been ten or twelve when it happened, on a morning that started like any other. She woke up, too early to jump out of bed, to the electricity of a summer storm. She remembered clearly that odd f
eeling. As if she weren’t alone, and, at the same time, as if she were the most alone she would ever be.
So Eliza sat up in bed. And there it was, the oddity, a silhouette moving in the anteroom she used as a classroom, a strange clinking noise, like a delicate china tea set on a trolley; or bells, perhaps, like those woven into the manes of funeral horses, black horses, ominous horses; little chinking noises that are deceptive in their childish simplicity—deep down you know they announce something terrible.
It was curious how, after all these years, the memory was as clear as a summer morning, as disturbing as that summer morning; shadows revealing themselves in plain daylight. She could hear the woodpigeons outside, endlessly chatting. That world belonged to them, that world of white, heavy light, in that indeterminate hour where dream and reality collide.
But she was a child, a curious one. So she got up and went in search of that sickly-sweet sound, and it revealed itself to be none other than she; she, she! The person Eliza most longed to see in the world—the woman she loved, mourned. And she looked like a porcelain doll, so beautiful she was.
And when she moved her head, the little bells sounded, here and there; and the distant memory of something else chiming rushed to her, something lost in the depths, a bracelet she thought, with silver amulets hanging from it— she remembered it then, her mother’s bracelet, with its little charms, memories of her voyages. Her father had taken that bracelet, and it should go to her, and Eliza knew right there and then that she wanted it.
Was she gone now? She was. Eliza remembered not feeling scared, not exactly; she remembered thinking that if she could see the living, why not the dead? The logic of that early hour was the logic of dreams. She went back to bed, closed her eyes, tried to get back to sleep. When she woke up again to full morning, ‘normal’ light, it all felt like a distant scene, something that had happened aeons ago. For a long time Eliza did not know if she had dreamed it. The longing was so unbearable.
The Golden Key Page 7