by Joan Thomas
Outside the city Henry falls asleep, and sleeps until they stop at Chertsey. He wakes in an easier frame of mind. Grateful to the cautious Babington, relieved not to have opened that most fraught subject of debate. There was a day when he saw science as the most manifest expression of reason. But really, it’s a cauldron of bubbling lava; without warning, it will spill over and destroy them all. He, certainly, doesn’t have the stomach for it. He’s a thinker no longer, but a meticulous clerk, his intellect reduced to sorting, compulsively sorting everything he sees. He’ll make a detailed set of charts of the Lyme Regis coast, that’s what he’ll give himself to, using colour to indicate the type and age of rocks. The thought of it is deeply comforting, a return to an old passion. In the front cover of his notebook is a list of the strata. He takes a pencil out of his bag. As they drive, he begins to make a list of corresponding pigments. He’ll hire a boat and do a small-scale schema first. Ink in the general outlines and the major strata, and then begin with the pigments. It will be an immaculate, detailed chart, devoid of explanation. Asking nature to explain itself is pointless. Ask nature a question and it replies with a bank of navy clouds or the red dots in a frond of seaweed, it explains mystery with mystery. He will not ask; he will observe and chart. Others can theorize, those equipped by temperament or circumstances to afford that luxury.
They stop at an inn at Overton for their dinner and rest the horses until mid-afternoon. Back in the barouche, he falls into a reverie of Lyme. He’s walking slowly up to the jetty, carrying a mackerel wrapped in a paper. The tide is high; Mary won’t be collecting until almost noon. She’ll be working at home, rinsing and sectioning and polishing fossils. As he reaches the outlet of the Lyme, she crosses the shore from the back of her house and bends to fill a bucket at the water’s edge. He knows her: his knowledge of her life is the deepest comfort of his.
He drives all morning of the second day through rain. After Salisbury he gives the reins to Thomas and dozes with his chin in his chest. All through Wiltshire, he has the sensation that the coach is fixed and the rising landscape of the Southwest is being pulled towards him. In and out of sleep, he develops the happy conviction that his mother-in-law is in Lyme: she will be supervising. But of course, Mrs. Auriol is in Bristol, he realizes when he pulls himself awake. Letitia is alone with the servants. They stop at Sherborne and he takes the reins again.
It’s early afternoon of the third day when they roll into town, a Lyme scrubbed clean and heartbreakingly beautiful in the sun. He pulls up at the stable and Tom gets down to open the doors. A tall black gelding with severely docked tail and military caparison stands in the first stall of the stable. A single, material horse. “Coldstream Guards, sir,” says Tom.
A plumed hat rests on the stand just inside the door. Daisy hurries down the hall to meet him, to take his hat, her smile frightened. In the slice of drawing room framed by the door, Letitia is reclined on the settee, caught just in the moment of sitting up and swinging her feet to the floor. “Mrs. De la Beche be in the drawing room, zir,” Daisy says, “with Colonel Wyndham.”
Henry Wyndham! He has his back to the door – he’s sitting on a chair drawn up to the settee. He and Letitia both jump to their feet as Henry enters. Letitia is bright-eyed and smiling, intensely present, visibly arranging her thoughts. Wyndham is still taller than Henry. Stouter now, his bland, handsome face a little haggard, sandy hair beginning to retreat from his forehead, but Henry would have known him immediately. His eyes glaze with what can only be fear. Or shame. He begins to talk in an excessively amiable manner. He was staying with friends in Exeter and heard that his old comrade lived in Lyme Regis. He thought to renew an old acquaintance, and to meet De la Beche’s wife.
Henry crosses the carpet and shakes his hand. “But you and Letitia are acquainted. It was at Ascot that you met, wasn’t it?”
“Indeed, as I discovered this afternoon,” says Wyndham. Henry is surprised at how inept he is, how ill-equipped for the perfidious enterprise he’s launched himself into. He was always inept, but one might have expected ten years as a military officer to have sharpened him. Henry feels his own energy concentrate, as it always did in Wyndham’s presence at Marlow, feels himself grow darker, quicker, more audacious and sardonic. He sits down beside Letitia. Clumsily, Wyndham pulls his chair a few feet away from the settee before sitting.
“You discovered?” Henry says, preternaturally calm. “I understood you to have unearthed Letitia’s connection to myself on the occasion of your meeting two or three years ago. But never mind. It’s remarkable that our paths have not crossed in some drawing room or other in all this decade since I was removed from Marlow. However, my travels have been prescribed by my profession and have taken me in directions very different from yours, I dare say.” For the first time in many months, he is exuberantly alive. He has all of his faculties after all; it is tremendously reassuring. He stretches one arm along the back of the settee, looking at the two with gratitude. Now it’s Wyndham’s turn to speak, but apparently he can’t manage it. “This is really a very pleasant room,” says Henry, providing the requisite line. “I’m always glad to return to it after a day in the field.”
“You work as an engineer?” Wyndham says finally, shifting in his chair.
“As a geologist. It’s a profession that suits me better than I could have imagined. I would have made a poor soldier indeed. And you command a battalion of the Coldstream Guards. Butler told me. I encountered him some time ago in London. Tell me what action you’ve seen. I believe Letitia mentioned Waterloo?” It’s a delightful scene and he wishes it to go on forever.
“We were part of the brave assault on the fortress of Bergen op Zoom in ’13. Then we garrisoned in Belgium, and were still there when Napoleon escaped Elba. And so we fought in Waterloo. We held the fortification at Hougoumont, the right flank. I was grievously injured, but my valiant men were able to hold.” He has an imprecise articulation that Henry recalls from boyhood – almost a lisp.
“As Napoleon said, long wars make good soldiers. What was the fortification like at Hougoumont? I have heard much of that battle, but I’ve never been able to envision the site.”
Letitia is silent. Her face is pink and her lips pinched together in an uncharacteristic expression. Doubtless she is trying not to cry.
“They call it a château,” says Wyndham heavily. “But it was just a farmhouse and outbuildings, with a wall around.”
“And the French broke through the wall with axes?”
“They had axes, but no call to use them. I regret to say the gate was left open. We were setting up, bringing supplies in. We thought the French miles away. Of a sudden, they burst from the wood nearby and were inside, and we must struggle to close the gate and get the bar across before the fortification was entirely lost.”
“Didn’t Wellington himself acknowledge that Waterloo turned on the closing of that gate?”
“I believe he did.”
“I remember your father from Marlow days. He must be tremendously proud of your military honours. Or – is he still alive?”
“He is.” Wyndham inclines his head politely.
There is a dreadful silence.
“You will dine with us?” Henry asks. “Letitia, have a word with the cook.”
“No, no. Thank you,” says Wyndham. “Very kind, I’m sure, but I’m expected in Exeter.”
“What a pity. It would have been amusing to reminisce about our youthful follies. Well, in that case, let me have your mount brought round.” He rings for Daisy. They fall back into silence. The Swiss clock ticks in the adamant manner it assumes when you are alone in a room. This must indeed be a wrenching separation for Letitia, for both of them – if regret and pain can make themselves felt through all the other sensations of the moment. Henry watches her, wondering if she will risk a glance at Wyndham, but she does not. She sits with hands clasped, her eyes on the lozenge border of the rug. She’s wearing a rose-coloured gown that particularly suits her (as he ha
s often told her, his favourite among her dresses), and it seems the worst of it, that she donned this gown that morning. He suddenly loses his stomach for the scene. The walls of this room are intolerable: it is the blue of insanity. Then Daisy is at the door and he refuses to look up, and so Letitia is obliged to ask to have Colonel Wyndham’s horse brought round.
The silence resumes. Finally, Letitia rallies herself to speak again. “Bessie has been a little madame since you went away.”
“I’ll go upstairs and see her. Excuse me.”
He gets to his feet and walks across the room. Up in the nursery, Bessie lies with flushed cheek against the flannel sheeting, deeply asleep. Daisy appears at the nursery door. “Where is Sally?” he asks.
“Her mother be taken ill, zir, and Mrs. De la Beche give Sally leave to see to her. I been seeing to Bessie these three days.”
A bright object the shape of a root vegetable lies on the mattress. It’s a wooden top, painted blue. He picks it up and thumbs the sharp point at its base. “This is not a toy for such a small child. She will injure herself with it.”
Daisy takes it from him. “Oh, I know, zir. But she would not give it up. There was such fits of crying as you wouldn’t credit. She must sleep with it these three nights.”
“Where did she get it?”
“Colonel Wyndham brung it, zir,” says Daisy, meeting his eyes steadily. “As I said, zir, she has not once let it go in all this time.”
Wyndham has parted from Letitia. He is moving down the hall to the front door as Henry comes down the stairs. “I hope you were not about to leave without a farewell?” says Henry, taking his arm.
Daisy has left the main doors wide open. They walk past the portrait of Letitia, towards the sunlit green square at the end of the hall. “Tell me – do you have a wife of your own?”
Wyndham is breathing audibly; he will not dare to resist. “We’ve been estranged some years. The military life and family life are difficult to reconcile.” He delivers this last line as though it’s a profound and original thought.
They stand at the open doorway by the massive ammonite, waiting for his horse. Henry has picked up Wyndham’s hat, and he hands it to him. The grove around the house is tremulous and green, glistening loyally with sun.
“At Hougoumont,” Henry says, “by the time you were able to close the gate, how many enemy soldiers had penetrated the château?”
“There were thirty forced their way in.”
“And you had to kill them all in close quarters?”
“We must needs fight them in a courtyard no bigger than your parlour.” He holds the plumed hat to his chest.
“What is it like, hand-to-hand combat with a French soldier?”
Wyndham has flushed. Henry can see perspiration gleaming on his temples. “It was not the sort of fighting we were trained for at Marlow. I was always an artilleryman.”
“Indeed,” says Henry. “But tell me what actually transpired.” Tom comes up the shingle drive leading Wyndham’s horse, but Henry puts a hand on Wyndham’s arm to detain him. “How does one fight at such close quarters, and unprepared? Did you have your muskets about you?”
Wyndham shakes his head. “They would have been useless in any case, or certainly after one shot. It was a schoolboy brawl to the death.” He puts his hat on. He will not meet Henry’s eye. “To this day, I am sick to my stomach to hear a man scream, or to hear Frenchies shouting their oaths. I have been left with a horror of a closed door.” On his face is the misery of having given up something he did not wish to disclose.
“Letitia alluded to something of the sort several years ago,” Henry says. He moves into the entrance. “I’d like to understand such an injury. Such a pronounced wound to the spirit. A wound that is not physical.” The horse tosses its head impatiently and again Wyndham makes to leave, but Henry blocks his way. “How, physically, does one kill a man with bare hands?”
There is another anguished pause. Henry is filled with pity for Wyndham, and disgust, that even now the man cannot withstand him. “There was strangulation,” Wyndham says finally in his halting way. “Cracking heads on the paving stones. That sort of thing. Those that had daggers used them.”
“And I suppose the French had the axes you spoke of,” Henry says.
They do not take a formal leave of each other. Colonel Wyndham has a slight limp, Henry notes as he makes his way to his horse, the physical souvenir of an injury sustained in a battle that he won.
Letitia has not moved when he returns to the drawing room. He stands in the doorway and looks at her. “You are elaborately bedecked, Letitia, for a chance social call.”
She looks at him defiantly. “Is a gentlewoman, the instant she crosses the threshold of marriage, to abandon all the delicacies and decencies by which she attracted her husband?”
“Do we consider lace and corsets a particular of decency?” She doesn’t answer. From the kitchen comes the sound of dinner preparation. “Come upstairs with me,” he says. He goes quickly up the stairs and into her room, and she follows. He reaches around her and closes the door. The bed is made and the room is tidy. On her dressing table is her little clock and the clay curlers, lined up on their warming tray. The remains of a fire burn in the hearth; she often occupies herself in her room past midday. There is her pitcher and basin, a few inches of cloudy water in the basin. The first time he undressed her, when the meagre muslin gown was still in vogue, he discovered her trick of wetting her petticoat before she donned it so that it would cling to her. Removing it was like peeling back a skin.
He stands at the side of her bed. “This door, at least, he is prepared to close?”
She is very frightened. When they argue, he often feels he’s exploiting an advantage with words, as low as a man’s use of strength to lay a woman back on a mattress. He’s surprised by how gentle his voice is now. “You have deceived me, Letitia, in a most egregious way.” If she were clever in the way that he is clever, she would not deny the affair, but she would protest this charge. There was no deceit, she would say. Five minutes after I first laid eyes on you, I followed you into the woods alone.
But she is not clever in that way. In a high and shaking voice, she professes indignation at his lack of trust. She professes her right to innocent companionship when her husband is so often away. Gathering confidence, she asks herself whether she can live with a husband who so impugns her honour, who so neglects her, who treats her with such cruelty. By then she is crying – it is the piteous image of her own plight that finally releases her tears. His composure, the pride and indifference that served him so well this last hour, crumbles. He snatches up his last resort, his mother’s customary last resort, and threatens her with Jamaica.
Later he sits alone in his study, watching the light gradually withdraw from the ash grove outside the window. Within his chest cavity, a relentless thrumming is causing him pain. There was one insane moment in her bedroom when he contemplated undressing her, saw himself undoing the laces of her corset, laying her back on the bed, running his hands up her thighs, exposing the warm, wet place within her skirts, an entry prepared by his rival. As a sort of experiment, he would do it (with his eyes on her face the whole time): to see how far she would go in her duplicity, how far she would suffer him to go. A hideous, lost opportunity to know himself, to see whether and in what fashion his body would respond, to learn what it is that his manhood comprises.
He opened the door to this, to all of it, he thinks heavily, although he lacks the energy to trace that thought to its source. He did not speak of the baby to Letitia – he can’t give Wyndham that. They will go to Jamaica. Mentally, he casts his family into his long-ago childhood: Little Bessie plays on the wide, airy veranda of Halse Hall, reaches her plump arms up to her coloured nanny, is carried down a wickered path, lying in pseudo-sleep with her eyes open against her nanny’s bosom. Letitia clutches the hull of an upside-down lifeboat, tossed by indifferent turquoise waves, while he lies alone in a tropical inn, floati
ng on fever under a mosquito net, eyes half open to a dirty room he’s never seen before.
“You are a child,” Mary said to him once. Somewhere on the Continent, in one of the reeking cathedrals, he saw in an illuminated bible the depiction of a dying man. A hanged man – Judas Iscariot, it must have been. The Devil hovering over him on black wings, pulling the poor wretch’s soul out from between his ribs, his soul in the shape of a sturdy little boy.
THIRTY-TWO
n the second day of October, when a gleam in the clouds over the Channel told her Henry was at home, she went to his door, walking across the shingle drive in her renovated plaid skirt. For all it was past Michaelmas, the air was warm and close, like an August day, and the notion of inviting him up to the Undercliff had raised its head like a bright-eyed fox looking over a mound. In the library, she told him about her strange find, and they talked about the fact that mammals have always the same number of vertebrae, even in the case of the camelopard with its long neck, while in birds and reptiles, the number of vertebrae varies. Their conversation (which began in the library but took them to the western shore and continued in the Undercliff) distracted them from making even a pretence of collecting. But she came away from it sure that he would help her, and at the stationer’s on Broad Street, she paid seven shillings for a leather-bound book with blank pages in which they would draft a text about the new fossil. After that, she felt more driven than ever to find a full specimen. As winter set firmly in, she spent all her time in the area of Black Ven, where, if one serpentine reptile had died and been preserved, surely others had as well.
Meanwhile, Reverend Conybeare visited Colonel Birch in Charmouth, with the express purpose of studying the new find. She did not see him, but Colonel Birch told her. She had not seen him for years, in fact. If Henry had been there, she would have asked him why his friend had such a consuming interest in this fossil. But Henry had gone away again. She’d been standing on Church Cliffs and seen him leave with his groom driving him. Well, there was enough in their last conversation to sustain her for the entire winter, if need be.