“It won’t prove anything.”
“No.” His eyes gleamed, piglike, in the dark tavern. “But it’ll give you satisfaction, if you keep an eye on them, when they slip up.”
A PECULIAR VISITOR [LAWLESS]
A wizened old fellow was waiting to see me when I got back to the Yard. His face was scored with wrinkles, as if he had been left out in the rain too long. There was a light in his eyes that spoke of honesty or being a simpleton.
I had no time for time-wasters. “What is it you want?”
“To talk.” His voice was soft and weather-beaten, wrapped in a sailor’s brogue. He hesitated, shifting from foot to foot. “The ship. I heard you found that body after all.”
I looked at him. I had not expected to hear more of the SS Great Britain corpse.
“I said it weren’t a sound notion, and it ought to be reported to the captain.” Jedediah Longthrop was an oddball and a misfit. He was a lowly cleaner aboard the Great Britain. And he knew something about our body. “He insisted it were the honourable thing. Otherwise we’d be getting the ship’s owners in trouble.”
“Slow down, Mr Longthrop.” I thrust the fellow into a seat. I had called for tea. Not your standard way to deal with a suspected criminal. I tried Jeffcoat’s style: he had the touch when dealing with recalcitrant witnesses. “Or may I call you Jed? Yes? Take the weight off your feet. You look like you’ve been hard at work.”
Jed flexed his hands, as if to shake off the toil. “Refitting the ship.”
“You’ve been on the ship this whole time?”
He straightened with pride. “Since it were built, sir.”
“My, my.” I poured the tea, watching our witness intently, until I judged the moment right. “What do you know about the body, Jed?”
Jed stiffened. “They told me down the dock as you’d found it in the lifeboat.”
“Why should that concern you, Jed?”
He looked at me in distress. “He’d died already. The gentleman said it were the ship. He been poisoned. So as it were best just roll him overboard.”
It took half an hour of such garbled declarations to get the picture. Five or six years ago, Jed was called into a cabin by a young gentleman. His valet had died in the cabin; he looked consumptive, but the gent insisted it was the ship’s fault: the mephitic air in the lower decks had done for him, along with the dreadful food.
“I told him I’d get the ship’s doctor, but it were too late for that, said he. The best thing for it was to throw him overboard, and the less said the better. He was a scrawny fellow, from abroad. No family, no friends. Wouldn’t be missed.”
They wrapped the body in bedsheets and a tarpaulin. In the dead of night, they dragged him up on deck. Jed fetched some kentledge to weigh the body down. The gent kept watch while Jed pulled him to the side of the ship. They piled the stones into a basket and wrapped it all tight. “I couldn’t do it. He said there was someone coming. So he pushed him off and we both of us cleared off. When I saw him the next day, he gave me a florin, and reminded me how much trouble there’d be if anyone knew of it. And I never said not one word to anyone more about it.” He recalled the crew complaining of a smell, back at the time, but nobody could find where it came from. “I never knew he fell in the lifeboat. The boats hung off the side of the deck, see. I thought he was long gone to Davy Jones’s locker. I wish he was.”
As to the gentleman’s name, he could not help us.
“Jed, come along.” I leaned towards him. “You must have thought it was worth remembering.”
“That’s it exactly, though, sir. I didn’t want to remember.” All he could tell us was that it was a young fellow, spoke English with an accent. “He scared me so witless, I’ve prayed and prayed I won’t ever see him again. You won’t make me, will you?”
Poor Jed. I had no doubt he was telling the truth, though I would bet our Lodestar greased his palm with more than a florin to help him forget. I took his details, of course. The burial at sea may have taken place in the Atlantic, beyond our jurisdiction, but it was still unlawful: the death should have been reported, as he knew well. But there had been no murder. Nothing further to be done.
LADY ELODIE’S JOURNAL, PART THE FIRST [MOLLY]
Only then did I start reading her parts of the diary, after Roxy had spoken of her that night, as if to give me true permission.
He was a man changed: removed from energetic business to these reclusive experiments. On our walks, he began to speak of her more, to point out the roses she loved, the outcrop amid the rockery where she would stand, midway between house and Iron Bridge, to look back at the turret she loved.
I laid aside all the other documents: doctor’s prescriptions; recipes for cravings; concoctions for baby; speculative treatments; advertisements for curative contraptions.
I turned at last to her diary. I treasured that volume, tucked away alphabetically under Roxbury, as if she placed her story among these romantic tales and scientific expositions. I read these pages in a flurry, electrified by Roxy’s recent revelations, troubled that I was still missing something, a key to the household that would finally open the doors.
BOOK VII
A LADY’S DIARY
WHEN YOU ARE AWAY [ELODIE, DIARY ENTRY, EARLY IN MARRIAGE]
Sometimes, when you are away, I imagine that you are dead.
I hear the dire news. I lock myself away. How I would sit at the rain-soaked window, gazing out at the blurry undergrowth. How I would descend to the breakfast table in a half-daze, neither rested nor wakeful, push the toast back and forth, sighing every ten minutes, not heeding the hours flitting by on the grandfather clock, which I so loved to see you wind every Sunday with diligent care. At your writing desk, replying to sevenfold parliamentarians before breakfast. How you could write sentences at that hour amazed me, with my dangling modifiers and bungled metaphors, which made you laugh and then hide your laughter for fear of hurting my feelings.
I am no academic, no deep thinker like you, yet you cherished my foolish observations, collecting them in your little notebook as if I were a deep thinker in my own way: how I notice midwinter, so as to remember that summer would return; how I unpack my summer wardrobe so promptly every spring, watching for moths; how I list the birthdays of our godchildren and the presents we distribute around the estate; that I know all your employees and their wives, when you did not; and my ledger on their homes, which had privies, which mud floors, which larders, so that a portion of your profits might improve the lot of these old workhorses; and how, if they disdained such modernisations, I would visit unannounced and persuade them that the next generation expected them and what a pity to see them fly the coop just for the sake of a house with its own privy.
When you are away, I sweep the house and grounds, finding in each spot its particular memory: here we walked hand in hand and saw the swallows arrive that first spring in the north, flocking on the trees’ branches barely beginning to sprout; here you proposed; here, when you did not expect, I kissed you, within view of the house, not caring if the servants saw, because I loved you, I simply loved you and that was enough.
Why are those days past? We were in the summer of our love: how grew the skies so dark, how fell the leaves? Too soon, too soon you have fled to the breezes of the underworld.
Until I hear a door shut. You?
But (in this game I play with myself) you are dead.
And then, my heart brightening with expectation, you appear, thoughts elsewhere, brow furrowed, and your glance makes me gleeful: a walk, down to the arboretum? And I take your hand, as I have learnt to without babbling of inconsequential nothings, waiting for your brow to unfurl and your thoughts to return from distant battlefields, from brickworks and clay pits, engines and castellations. The cloud shifts. Sunlight through the rains illumines the keeper’s pool, and a fish leaps. You clutch my arm, and point, and yes, I have seen it, for once, and yes, you are back, and not dead, and with me, and our story still has time to mend. I tel
l of Tennyson’s new poem, and you ask me to recite; and we speak of the game keeper’s new pups; the draper’s bill is in, but the payment from Japan is arrived, so we need not go without dinner tonight (your constant joke).
So many matters of the estate that we shared. I hope my efforts ease your burdens.
Still my deathly fancy saddens me. For these happy days are rarer than they should be. We are both fools, wrapped in our own affairs, too quick to hurt, too brusque in manners, caring too much for our worldly station and too little for love, and family, and each other. Yet I love you, and one day you will be gone, and I wish to meet that day unabashed, and say, he is gone, but—glory be—how I loved him; and how he loved me.
LADY ELODIE’S JOURNAL, PART THE SECOND [MOLLY]
Lady Elodie’s diary was not all so highly strung and feverish. Much of it was workaday: talks and dinners, correspondence listed, chores achieved; but every so often, when she returned from charitable campaigns, when Roxbury was away, her poetic nature flooded.
She was a woman who wanted the world. At times, she got it; and I loved her for that dogged lyricism, her argumentative romantic style. I ached that she was gone, or rather incapacitated, and their love sundered.
Romantic teenage fool I am. But so many stories of love spoiled or foiled or embroiled one hears. To find one so true, although strained to the point of breaking, was a redemption.
Soon enough, I found Lady Elodie’s discovery that she was, again, pregnant.
My love today is bursting for Roxbury. And—dare I write—for the little one. I have felt stirrings. Changes. Today Edward’s doctor, blasted automaton though he is, confirmed it. “Lady Roxbury,” quoth he, with an unprecedented smile, “you are expecting.” Many things have I expected in these fierce years of marriage, but nothing has prepared me for the thrill of electricity that jolted through my being.
Reading these fragmented entries, the Lady Elodie’s longing for the child to come was redoubled in my own longing for these fragments to be made whole; I felt I knew her, but still she eluded me, as if, turning another page or the next, she would suddenly appear fully-fledged, sat here before me in this Lady’s Library of longing, hidden behind the chapel.
And yet Lady Elodie suffered doubts. Grave doubts. She feared she was old for giving birth, and older still for bringing up a child. The anxiety welled and ebbed through the pages. I wanted to reach out and say it was a needless panic, to tell her that for any child to have a mother at all is better than none at all, and she would be… She would have been a wonderful mother.
My fervour wore away as I remembered the fruitlessness of it all, and thought of the Norphans Practickly and their wayward habits. I rooted and rooted for a happy ending; I knew what finale must come.
* * *
Did these morbid reading lists tell all I needed to know? Between the accounts of Skirtle, Birtle and Roxy, and Lady Elodie’s own annotations and marginalia, the sad tale was coming clear: a longed-for pregnancy, an ill-starred birth, and loss. Then illness, fading of causes I could not understand. How it ended I yet must discover.
Her local library card listed volumes taken out 1860–62:
Fertility, and How to Improve It
The Approaching Disaster
Remedies for Catastrophic Pregnancy
Hysterical Problems, Mind and Body
Post-partum Melancholia, and other Maladies
Epilepsy, St Vitus’ Dance, the Falling Sickness
Convulsions and Their After-Effects
Sleepwalking and Night Terrors
Melancholia Numinosa
The Lunacy and County Asylums Act
Reaching the Unreachable
Lethargy and Ataraxy: New Treatments and Stimulations
REVELATIONS [ELODIE]
Today my love for him is fraught. (I am sure it is “him”.)
I woke, sick, filling the chamber pot with acrid distillations. They make me eat. I’d rather not. Nor drink. No breakfast. I can barely rise. Edward’s doting indulges my worst habits. I do not wish my sloth to be indulged. I am no paragon of self-denial, as so many wives aim to be. Self-denial I shall never achieve. If nuns and monks claim godliness in self-denial, they are misled; surely any loving god would offer the surer way to enlightenment through acknowledging desires, indulging and redeeming. That is the only path, I think, certainly the human path.
I am avoiding the nub of the problem.
I am afraid.
* * *
Something strange is happening. To me. In me, I dare not tell Edward. He will consign me to “lie in”, and I have no intention of “lying in” yet. The fatigue is fatiguing, the sickness is sickening; but these I could cope with. What troubles me is this confounded confusion of senses.
Today Birtle brought the coffee up. “Morning, madam,” says he, and something in the way his lips move makes me think of beef stock—no, not think—I’d swear I tasted beef stock. The glorious coffee smell was quite displaced by the odour of beef. How can that be?
* * *
“Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” said the minister.
I could smell lardy bun with golden syrup, and wished I had not dragged my weary limbs to church.
I stared about to see who was eating. Nobody was, everybody at their prayers, but my senses buzzing with an onslaught of tastes, smells, colours, textures, replacements. I stared at the minister’s face for a full minute and saw his cheeks turn to pastry, lightly baked; then the choir (all six) had pastry faces: sopranos uncooked, tenors flaking, the altos nicely browned.
I made an excuse during the second psalm and stumbled home to bed.
INITIAL DIAGNOSIS [BY A DOCTOR BROUGHT BACK FROM FRANCE]
Patient describes an aura—firstly psychic, became somatic: a prodrome, as I term it.
Hears voices, single or several, chattering.
Sensation of embrace, kiss on right cheek.
Hallucinations, but she knows them for tricks, e.g. window panes tinted: colours reflect on visitors’ faces.
Visions: black & dirty rats. Scenes from novels she has read. Coming & going rapidly in daytime; at night, played out slow.
None of their British doctors have done anything for her.
We may rule out everything they have suggested. They are obsessed with finding new-fangled diagnoses. Myalgia, encephalitis, dementia praecox, arthritis. Yet there is no physical evidence, no inflammation. Patient showed no loss of cognitive abilities, neither impairment of memory nor aphasia, apraxia, agnosia, and disturbed planning.
In the Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, we are known for breakthroughs in the realm of hysteria and female diagnoses, viz my own tract, Maladies of the Spirit, treating of magnetism, morphinism and grand delirium.
I am more convinced by immunological disorder, consonant with epileptoid and synaesthetic reports. Either way, hypnosis serviceable.
Successfully hypnotised. Several muscles contracted in order to shake off debility. I was unable to release the muscles that constricted her vocal tract. Frustrating. Even when brought out of the hypnosis, tongue and larynx remained frozen, rendering her unable to speak.
A hysterico-epileptic of the most pronounced type. This leaves her vulnerable to the stresses of ordinary life, and, I believe, unfit for giving birth. I stayed with her, but was unable to discuss with Roxbury while he was called to national business. I eventually released her tongue, but larynx remained contracted. (I was obliged to administer chloroform to relax the larynx and enable her vocal chords to function.)
When he came back, all was well.
* * *
THE JUMBLE OF PERCEPTIONS [MOLLY]
Lady Elodie recorded the swift ebbing and flowing of this strange sensual equivalence, for which she discovered the name: synaesthesia. The interconnection of senses, mingling experiences with words and objects not apparently connected.
She described in minute detail how Kitty’s sandals made her think of butterscotch. Birtle’s hair tasted of meringue: not that she tasted
it; the sight of it tasted of meringue.
DESCENT [ELODIE]
I am become uncommonly odd; I must touch only cotton, or I desire on a sudden to stroke silk. I taste words like leather, jam and fireworks. Numbers, colours, sounds, tastes, all are commingling. I had to stop talking to Birtle because the lemon kept dripping over the meringue.
Edward told me of our glasshouse extensions—to distract me, I think, from my obsessive talk which scares him rather—and that there will be 8008 panes (and the number glows pink in my mind) with 7734 stanchion frame pieces (a fiery red). As he sketches out the new scientific quarter, it lurks in my mind like vast hellish innards, plants and animals tasting of brimstone and sulphur, as if serving a banquet to spite me for my hunger.
If the savour of the inventory is so strong, how will the greenhouse itself taste?
Edward is building it for me. Really, he is occupying himself, while he feels so powerless. I am glad. At least he has set aside business a while, and is near. (Lodestar does lighten his cares, though the business redoubles).
I am afraid. This joyful season so long wished for; now it is here, I feel bizarre. I even feel alone. Though Edward is on hand, his doctors ever investigating me, I feel a blackness whirling around me.
WOMEN’S DIAGNOSES [CUTTINGS IN THE LADY’S LIBRARY]
ADMISSIONS TO YORKSHIRE’S WEST RIDING LUNATIC ASYLUM, 1863–64:
2 YEARS’ SNUFF EATING
BAD COMPANY
BLOODY FLUX
BRAIN FEVER
CHRONIC MANIA
CONSECUTIVE DEMENTIA
DERANGED MASTURBATION
DESERTION BY HUSBAND
DISSIPATION OF NERVES
DISSOLUTE HABITS
DOMESTIC AFFLICTION
EGOTISM
EPILEPTIC FITS
EXPOSURE AND QUACKERY
Lawless and the House of Electricity Page 27