The Specimen

by Martha Lea

  An hour had passed since Susan had been called into the study and she had not yet emerged.

  Susan had told her all sorts of tales about the actual, Mrs Isobel Scales, and her visits to Carrick House. She’d nodded knowingly when Susan had mentioned the vast quantities of tonic previously consumed by Miss Euphemia Carrick upstairs. Elizabeth Brewin had suffered with the stuff herself for a short time—whilst her husband had been alive.

  Now, she stood at the study door again, aware of the scum forming on the fruit pulp back in the kitchen but not moving to do anything about it. She heard Susan’s high voice laughing nervously behind the door, and the rumble of Reverend Sparsholt’s church voice. When the Reverend’s voice vaulted through the keyhole Elizabeth Brewin retreated down the passage to the kitchen.

  Among the mess of her jam-making on the kitchen table she began to draft a reply to a letter from her brother. The letter had been a little distressing, to say the least, and Mrs Brewin still felt that, compared to camels and mysterious Black Brethren of the Australian desert, life at the vicarage was unmentionably dull. Her brother’s admonishing words filled her with sorrowful vexation, and she pictured her small letters of the previous months; how those small packets had braved tumult and tempest to arrive at last in her dear brother’s hands, only to disappoint him. He’d said that her letters made him lonelier than ever. She dipped her finger into the pooled jam at her elbow and pushed it along. The jam made a wave at her fingertip and then settled back to its puddle without showing any sign of a skin. Not the slightest little wrinkle. She sucked her finger and began to write.

  Dearest Brother,

  How I dread to think of you alone in that tent all those long and strange nights. What you told me of the stars vexed me, and I can’t stand to think of you under the peculiarness of that odd sky, like as if you were in another world altogether. If the stars are upside-down, then does not the blood rush always to your head? Since last I wrote to you two souls more bide here at the vicarage. Miss E. Carrick from the big house on the river, and her girl, Susan Wright, who is fine company for me; and I often speak of you to her, and I know that you would find her a fine person as well . . .

  Elizabeth Brewin considered what she had put down, and thought that it didn’t much matter that the way it came out sounded like matchmaking. Her brother would likely laugh about it; for a person like him was never interested in taking a wife nor would he let anything of the kind pass through his mind. Certainly, he wasn’t the sort to entertain beneath. It was true he thought himself better. And what was it that he had written? “Here, a man may be anything or anyone he chooses to be as long as he minds his way.” Her thoughts ran to the way her brother had been as a child. She remembered the particular habit he’d taken a liking to, of clearing his throat before speaking. He’d been a very dry little bodkin, even then, and it pained her to think that he’d wandered so very far from her. She looked about her and heard the tinkle of the bell, and realised that it had been pinging for a while now. All this jam. If she could just get the stuff to set, she could send a pot of it to her brother. She would pack it tight in a box of straw. She was sure that Susan would think it a fine idea. Very fine.

  She looked up when she heard the click of the kitchen door opening and Susan coming back in. Down the hall, the Reverend’s voice could be heard indistinctly.

  “I’m to go up, and fetch Miss Carrick,” Susan said.

  Edward waited in the study, and the Reverend rocked back and forth on his heels, his hands clasped behind his back, until Susan came into the room with Miss Carrick, and then vanished.

  “Miss Carrick,” Reverend Sparsholt said to her, “do make yourself comfortable. This gentleman whom I believe you have met once before, erm, has come bearing some grave news.”

  “Edward Scales.” Edward bowed to Euphemia who stood apart from the two of them and refused to sit on the settee. She inclined her head to Edward.

  “Susan has told me that you have come to tell me that my sister is dead, Mr Scales.”

  “I wish it were not so, but I must beg your forgiveness, Miss Carrick.”

  They each looked into the other’s eyes. Then she said, “I am sorry for your loss, Mr Scales. I understand there was a child, also.”

  Edward hung his head. “My daughter, Augusta.”

  “That must be hard on you. I expect she was very lovely.”

  He could not think how this had happened. He felt insubstantial in the presence of this woman he had known so privately and so intimately. He realised how different she sounded from Gwen. He had been afraid of hearing her voice, but Euphemia looked and sounded quite different. Her movements and the clarity of her diction were a little slurred from a recent dose of tincture, but she was not as he had feared. And perhaps it was this which changed everything.

  Chapter LII

  Two Years Later.

  Carrick House. June, 1866.

  A hot day in the middle of June. Swifts flew overhead, almost clipping the man’s wide-brimmed hat as he walked over the scorched gravel of the drive. The windows were all open in Carrick House, and a warm breeze lifted the edges of papers on the library desk. Susan watched the man make his progress up the drive. The rustle of papers distracted her for a moment, and she patted the paperweight holding the pile of letters and bills in place.

  The screeching of the swifts cut through the air as deftly as their scimitar wings. Susan left the room, giving it a cursory glance, and went to find her mistress. It would not be difficult, she had only to follow the sounds of the children playing. With all the doors in the house propped open, she followed the children’s noises and their mother’s voice through to the playroom. Mr Scales had insisted on the playroom being located downstairs with direct access to the garden. Susan had thought it strange. The new French windows let the twins career in and out at will. They had not employed a nurse or a nanny. Euphemia spent all her time with the children. She was sitting on the floor surrounded by snippings of paper and string. The twins ran clumsily up and down the room trailing kites in each hand. Susan eyed the mess with distaste.

  “Ma’am, there’s a gentleman coming up the drive. Shall I show him into the library?” Euphemia turned and stood, still smiling at her children, not looking at Susan. “Yes, show him in. I’m not certain when Mr Scales will be back, but it can’t be any more than half an hour. Give him something to drink.” She clapped her hands. “Let’s fly them outside now, yes?”

  As Susan stepped into the hall the bell sounded and she ran to open the door.

  The man stood straight, clasping his hat to his crumpled, linen-clad chest. He was so tall. He bent down courteously. “Is this the home of Mr Edward Scales?” He gave Susan his card, but she did not look at it. She put it in her pocket.

  “Please come in, sir. Mr Scales’ll be back dreckly from his afternoon walk.” She took his hat, but he kept his walking stick. He followed Susan into the study and accepted a brandy. There was something about his manner which made Susan want to stay in the room. “We’re having such a blast of hot weather, sir. I hope you haven’t had to come far.” She put the glass next to Edward’s armchair, hoping the man would sit down in it. The warm wind shouldered the smell more or less out of the room. Susan felt her spine ease. The smell from the cellar had come and inhabited the rest of the house; intruder that it was, greeting all at the doormat and on the stair carpet. It was the brother of mothballs and sister to the worst kind of sin.

  “You’re not so easy to find, out here on the river, are you?”

  As if it was she, and not Mr Scales, he had come to see. “Depends on whether you’re local, sir.”

  “Ah. Well, I’m not local.” He sat in the chair and motioned for Susan to sit in the other. She remained as she was. The man swirled the brandy around in the glass and looked into Susan’s eyes. “You say he’s out for a walk. Does he take a walk every afternoon?”

  “And every morning, too, sir. Since he come back, he’s not able to—break the habit.”
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  “No, I should think it would be hard. Is he well?”

  “Very, sir. Thank you.” Susan shifted, left to right and back again. She excused herself, dipping a curtsey, and left the room.

  Alone, Gus Pemberton paced a circuit of the room, and stopped at the bookshelves along the back wall. He let his eyes wander along the titles without paying attention to them and then turned to look back into the room. It seemed dead. He faced the bookshelves again and made a couple more paces. He stopped again at a slim door set into the wall of books. The papers on the desk behind him rustled as he tried the handle and the door swung open under his fingers with the faintest of clicks. The smell of mothballs and some other kind of clinical taint he’d noticed pervading the air when he’d stepped into the house was now a suffocating fug of determined preservation. He whipped out a handkerchief.

  Here then, were the things he had expected to see. A display cabinet, waist high, half timber, half glazed; it bisected the length of the room.

  The walls were lined with cabinets and cupboards. Gus opened a drawer and looked down at the ranks of pinned butterflies: luminous, metallic, unearthly blue, shocking in their vivacity. He couldn’t remember ever having seen them in flight. He remembered something Gwen had said about Vincent taking her a gift of a pupa. He’d never been much interested in butterflies. He understood that they were beautiful to look at. And, yes, they were like jewels; but no more or less significant to him than a cranefly or a wasp. In another set of drawers, he found bird skins. Hyacinthine macaws. Miniscule hummingbirds. Bright green things. More parrots. All the eyes padded out with cotton wool, the empty bodies stuffed so much like feathered lozenges. A milliner’s wet dream, he thought. He closed the drawers.

  Gus paced the room, his fingertips skimming the surface of the central display cabinet. He stopped short. There laid out were Gwen’s belongings. A pair of filthy kid gloves, which he had never seen on her hands. A pair of combs he had seen her wear on a couple of occasions, which had not suited or complemented her colouring. She’d worn them very deeply, probably aware of this fact. He remembered her hair had fallen heavily when he’d pulled the things out. A truly ghastly letter knife. Her paint-box, opened; the mixing tray still cupped the dried traces of her last study done in South America. There, next to it, her paintbrushes laid out in neat ranks like the insect specimens. Gus felt a wave of sickness and pity and guilt wash through his gut and end in his throat. What could it have been like, to have been Edward Scales? Was this an embodiment of his guilt, his grief? Was it here to ward off madness? Ghosts?

  More; and worse. Scraps of paper, scribbled on by Augusta, precocious, of course, with such a talented mother. A tiny smock was laid out, still slightly stained with mud and clay around the hem and around the neck and down the front; the evidence of some dripping fruit, messily consumed. It was too horrible to contemplate, the care with which these artefacts of loss had been laid out. No labels, of course. These things were not meant for visitors. Gus felt his neck prickle.

  At the far end of the room was a single armchair; an old thing, covered in worn, frayed and light-damaged watered silk with stains snaking here and there. Delicate structure. He went and stood next to it. He could see that it had once been a good piece. The chair was flanked by a pair of identical cupboards; deep-bodied, they seemed ill-matched to the rest of the room. Gus imagined rails full of Gwen’s clothes hanging there, falling apart and still musty with the residues of the forest. He turned a key and opened one of the doors. It swung out fast on its hinge and Gus had to step back. At the same time he caught sight of the contents.

  He swore sharply out into the empty room. A crude word to match the raw sight. And then, more softly, “Jesus.” He cleared his throat and peered into the chamber. The specimen jar was huge. He stood for some moments regarding the thing critically, and then had to look away as he composed himself. He turned again to the body in the jar. It had sunk down to the base, the feet turned in horribly under itself and one side flattened against the glass. The features of the face looked slightly swollen.

  He found the edge of the cupboard door, pushed it home, turned the key. He left the room smartly and pulled the door closed. He wiped his teary hands on his balled handkerchief and his trousers, and poured himself another drink. The screaming of the swifts sliced the hot air. With the first mouthful of his drink, his pulse began to return to its normal and steady rhythm.

  Gus Pemberton closed his eyes. It’s all right, he told himself. It’s all going to be fine now. But he knew that couldn’t be true. All could only become much more complicated. He still had to speak to Edward Scales. He’d been prepared for it this morning. He wasn’t so sure he was still prepared for it now.

  “In a hurry again, Susan?”

  “Gent to see you, sir.” She gave him the card, aware that the man could hear her every word.

  “He’s not been waiting very long. I gave him a brandy.”

  Edward said quietly, “Good Lord, I wonder if it can really be him, after all this time.”

  “Madam said I was to give the gent a drink.”

  “It’s quite all right, Susan. You did the right thing.”

  Susan followed Mr Scales down the hall and, taking her duster from her pocket, began to flick it at the stairs and banisters, climbing up a few steps where she knew the sound of Mr Scales’ voice would still reach her.

  “What the devil are you doing here?!” Susan heard Mr Scales kicking the wedge away from the study door. He slammed it shut.

  Susan thought how odd it was, that a person could say what he was thinking but cover his meaning up with the way that he said it.

  Gus stood up. “Been availing myself of your hospitality again, Scales, as you can see.”

  “My God.” Edward shook his hand and clapped him tentatively on the shoulder. “What on earth brings you to Cornwall?”

  “You, as a matter of fact. I’ve been sent to see you; I’ve got a bit of news.”

  Chapter LIII

  Carrick House. June, 1866.

  Edward stared at Gus Pemberton. The sound of his two small boys crashing about in the hall and playroom was muffled; audible, the sound of his wife’s laughter.

  Helpless in the face of Augustus Pemberton’s news, he sat quite still. Gus, seeming to have anticipated this confusion, also sat quietly, moving now and then to take a sip of his drink and to cast a sidelong glance out of the window.

  “Where is she? Did she come with you?” Edward pushed himself up from his seat and went over to the window.

  Gus turned, half rising, to speak to Edward: “Gwen and the child bide in Richmond. She didn’t want to come here. She and her sister—there are, shall we say grievances—”

  “Does she know? Does she know? Christ.”

  “Come and sit down, man.”

  Edward’s shoulders drooped, and he stood immobile. Gus got up, led him back to his chair and poured some more brandy into both their glasses.

  Edward said, “When I came back to England everything was in turmoil without and within. There had been so much loss, so much death—there was a feeling, a need—in both of us, Effie and I, to salvage something.” He rushed to qualify. “Of course, my own conscience, but also to do something good for its own sake. At first our own private griefs bound us, but it is so much more than that; especially, since the twins. My wife—my first wife—had been quite ill. An obstruction of the bowel. A rather twisted turn of events.”

  Gus Pemberton said, “Yes, I know. But your deed was an act of chivalry few would contemplate, let alone carry through.”

  Edward looked up at Gus questioningly and said, “It was not a simple case of finding comfort in shared grief. Euphemia was on the precipice of madness when I found her at the vicarage. Amongst so much confusion, the least I could do.”

  Edward began to shiver slightly and then his body shook, in quiet convulsions; he hugged himself to try and stop it.

  “Have a drink,” Gus said. “It’s the shock, that’s all
. I should have written first, if I could have been sure that you’d have received it.”

  Gus waited for the shaking to subside, not allowing Edward to speak until he’d downed at least half the brandy in his glass.

  “I’ve been alone with it. With how she is—potentially. I’d never, I couldn’t ever have expected anyone else to understand the complicated nature of her. I’ve felt responsible, at every level. Will she want to, to see me, at all; what does Gwen say? Did she give you a message?”

  “I can arrange for a meeting to take place, if that is what you would like.”

  “Say nothing of it to Effie. This, it will tip her over. I have to think of the boys. I can’t have them being—” He was going to say “ruined”, but let his sentence peter out.

  “I’ll be discreet.”

  Chapter LIV

  THE TIMES, Friday, October 5, 1866.

  MURDER TRIAL AT THE OLD BAILEY.

  MR SHANKS, for the Defence, called the prisoner’s doctor, Dr Rathstone

  Q: “You were called to the Pemberton family home on the morning of August 7th, were you not?”

  A: “Indeed, that is quite so. I was summoned to the aid of Mrs Pemberton. I put off another call, as this call was urgent, but the nature of the call only became apparent when I examined the patient, Mrs Pemberton. It was rather a delicate matter. The patient was in a considerable deal of pain, and unable to rise from her bed unassisted. It was immediately apparent that Mrs Pemberton had suffered injuries to her torso, limbs and to her head and also to her face. There were abrasions and bruises which I tended first. But, as I suspected a broken rib and further examined the patient, I questioned her in earnest about the nature of her injuries. At first, she was reluctant to reveal how she had sustained the bruising and so forth, but after an hour or more, I learned that Mrs Pemberton had been beaten severely the night before. Of course, I did not want to press for further details, but Mrs Pemberton was anxious for the reputation of her husband. She asked me to pass the Good Book, lying at her bedside and told me, with her hand upon it, that her husband had not harmed her. She was most anxious about it. Then she asked me if I had spoken to her husband. When I told her that I believed he was out of the house, she became very agitated, saying that she thought Mr Pemberton must have gone to see the man about it himself and that the thought of the two men fighting over it was worse than the injuries. Mrs Pemberton said over and over again that she didn’t want her husband to come home battered or worse.”