The Specimen

by Martha Lea

  Augusta slipped out of my hands, came out from our hiding place, running. He picked her up too roughly. He shouted that I should come out.

  “Where is Edward?”

  “My conscience is saved. However, you’re still alive.” His face for a second looked stupid with incomprehension. But he recovered himself.

  “Mr Coyne. Two days ago, you told me that you would be gone for one hour, and that you would bring Edward here. Where is he?”

  “You think he respects you. Do you really suppose that a man like Scales could ever respect a woman like you the way he respected Frome? And do you think by not being his lawful wife, you have elevated yourself to some higher position? Think.”

  “What? Put my daughter down, and tell me where Edward is.”

  “Go on, think. What promise did Scales ever make to you? No one is ever quite what they seem to be, are they, Miss Carrick? You should know that more than most.”

  “Augusta is innocent. You can talk to me, but put her down.”

  “Think, Miss Carrick. Thinking, working things out. That is your gift, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is, Mr Coyne. Please put Augusta down; you are frightening her.”

  “Miss Carrick. Which one of you did he really fall in love with? Do you think he really fell in love with you? Or was it the woman who would never question his authority, who would never be able to put his own intelligence in the dock? Which woman, Miss Carrick, do you think Scales really fell in love with—you? Or was it Euphemia?”

  “Your mother was one of her clients. If you suppose that you surprise me, Mr Coyne, with your little revelation, you do not. Augusta, please, give her to me now.”

  “No. Euphemia hated you enough to employ my assistance. But I don’t believe she would bear a grudge against the innocent party. Scales’ bastard child is coming with me.” Augusta, my child, the only light I possessed. To hear that ugly word used to describe my beautiful daughter. He turned his back on me and went to put Augusta in the canoe.

  These things are done without thought.

  His guard was down for a second. Just a second.

  I had been walking slowly towards him over the sand but now I ran. I fixed my loose plait round his neck in a quick tourniquet. He dropped Augusta. He tried to shake me off, and in his confusion, and in the struggle, he and I fell.

  He, face down in the sand; myself, landing on top of him. All of my strength was taken by the determination not to let him free of my throttling.

  Augusta stood at the water’s edge and screamed for her father. Over and over. Bright macaws took off from the trees and called over our heads.

  After a while, he became still; I don’t know if he meant to fool me or not. I wrapped both ends of the tourniquet around my left hand and brought out my pocket knife. And then a new vigour, I didn’t know whether he was trying to throw me off or if these were his death throes. My knee in his back. All of my strength.

  Being a mother, protecting Augusta. These were the things on my mind as I pressed the point of the knife into his neck, just below his jaw, turning the blade handle, driving it deeper. And I thought of the stillness of oppressive afternoons as I dragged the knife across his neck, messily, inexpertly, towards the other side of his jaw. I thought of never having to wonder what he would do next. What the next insane plan he might concoct in his addled head or conduct on behalf of my sister would be. I shushed Augusta. I waited.

  When I rolled him over, I saw that his bladder had emptied. I am ashamed now to say that I scraped a handful of sand and let it drop into his open eyes; to verify his death, only to know, not out of malice for the corpse. I washed my hair, face, hands in the river.

  Her hands shook, her body convulsed, she poured with a sweat that went cold on her skin. Her vision was blurred, the image of his spectacles slipping down into the river, released from her fingers. The silver frames and the blue glass catching the sunlight so briefly before being covered completely by the black, tannin-stained water. She wanted to run; her legs felt twitchy, and yet they barely supported the weight of her. It was impossible to think that it could have happened. Should a letter like this contain every detail, she thought, it loses its purpose.

  We drank some of his water, we ate some of his food. I covered him with sand. We got into his boat. I paddled.

  We came that night to the place where we had stayed. We were ghosts. But ghosts who were clothed and fled and looked after.

  You know the rest of it already. And now—

  Gwen read it through. She was tired. Behind her on the bed, Augusta shifted in her sleep—her legs and the sheets tangled, her arms thrown wide. Gwen wanted him to know the depth of it. Had to get rid of him herself; no one else was there to do it for her. Gwen put the letter onto the table. She folded it up. She unfolded it. She read it again. She cut it into flaccid spills and fled them into the flame of her candle, letting them drop, brittle, grey flakes of her confession, onto the rim of the candle-holder. The top half of the window was open behind the thick, heavy curtains. Gwen listened to the stillness. She looked over at Augusta. She’d agreed to take her to the Zoo the next day. It would be a day to make up for her long absence today, just the two of them. She crawled gingerly onto the wide bed, as though it were a trough of sinking sand, not wanting to disturb her daughter, spreading out her limbs, waiting for the tincture of morphine to work.

  The afternoon she’d spent with Edward at his house drifted in and out of her mind as she tried to push it firmly out of reach so that she might be able to sleep.

  Time and again, Edward had tried to pull her into an embrace, and each time she had evaded him he had become more determined. Eventually, stepping back, putting a physical distance between them, she said, “Because I don’t love you, you see. And because I can’t begin to love you. I know too much. Yes, once I was gullible, Edward. From before the moment you met me you were already hiding things, but I am not that girl. I have a different life now. The person you knew no longer exists. I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

  Edward had made a show of intending to see her out, but at the door he was more insistent than ever. “A different life? What different life?” He grabbed her hands, pulled off the fine gloves, painfully tugging at her fingers, forcing them into his mouth where he sucked drily on them. She felt his teeth closing on her bones.

  “You have no different life now,” he said. “You are the same, just the same and more; you still wear that cheap ring I gave you. You can’t bear to take it off when you put on your gloves. It looks better than I remember. It grows well on you. It used to slide between your knuckles, but now—”

  Gwen tried to close her fist, get her fingers away from his mouth, pull free.

  He pressed his cracked lips to her mouth and drew breath from her lungs. “Say the words,” he said. “Tell me what you used to say.”

  In her corset, bound and stiff, she was unable to gather the wit of her strength to block him. She pushed her face aside, nauseated, gasping. “I can’t remember any words, Edward. Let me go now.” She reached out for the door handle, but he grabbed her wrist, holding her painfully, pressing skin to bone.

  “Tell me about the weather. Make it the way it was.”

  “What?” She twisted her arm in his grip. His determination was manic; rub turning to burn.

  “The rain, that we’ve been having this week. Say, ‘This rain, this rain’, say it to me.”

  “Edward, you must let go of me, you must stop this. I am married. Gus Pemberton is my husband.”

  “Whore.” Edward shoved her against the wall and spat into her face. Her anger dug at her as his hands scrabbled at her clothes tearing a seam in the silk. He pushed her back along the dingy hall into the room across the floor and down. She lost her footing in her heels on the rucked carpet, and knocked her head against some part of the daybed as he thrust a hand up under the heaps of expensive silk, his fingernails scraping her, his grotesque heaving panting, shoving her into a corner of the bed, her legs parted now with t
he full weight of his hips bearing down on her. She took hold of his neck and squeezed. He slapped her across the face. A raw, flesh-stinging swipe, catching her lip against her teeth. She felt the swell of it, the butcher-block taste of it.

  “Tell me about the foul weather, Mrs Pemberton, you obstinate bitch.”

  “I don’t care to.”

  There came an enormous crack from somewhere. Gwen realised that her hearing had failed, and just as the black edges began to close in around her she knew that the crack must have come from her own head.

  She woke face down. Her head throbbing, hanging over the edge of the daybed. He wasn’t finished. She made no sound, her eyes fixed on a plate of half-eaten food, a glass half full of claret gone to vinegar. For a long while, it seemed, she simply couldn’t believe that it could have happened so suddenly, and without warning.

  She remained immobile as he gripped the flesh on her thighs and pulled himself away from her. Thumbs pressed in, he ground the meat of her as he followed the contours of her lower back to her buttocks and hovered there.

  “Do you realise,” he murmured, “that I have not fucked you since that horrible day when I had to unpick your sister’s needlework?” He seemed not to mind that she made no answer or that she might be unconscious. Perhaps he wished it that way. Gwen felt the wet and cooling weight of him resting now between her buttocks. He pulled himself closer again.

  “No,” she coughed, and tried to right herself.

  “I’ve always wondered,” he said. And Gwen thought that he spoke through gritted teeth. She tried to edge away from him. He caught her up and pressed down on her back. Gwen yelled, angry at her incoherence, as he spat at her again; a great gobbet of phlegm landing on her buttock.

  She twisted herself around, and flung her arm up, elbow jagged, catching him somewhere soft.

  “Stop.” She managed to get the word out as she heard Edward grunt in pain and swear, before he hit her again and pressed her back down into the daybed. “Don’t, Ted,” she said. “Ted. That’s what she calls you now, isn’t it? You have a different—” The thump from his fist into her side winded her completely. A searing pain rent through her as he drove into her and thrust harder, harder, shouting, “Tell me about the rain, you bitch,” until his shouting became incomprehensible, the words catching in his throat until they became one long yell of anger.

  He pushed her aside as he rose and left her, walking to the end of the room. She heard the cold, clear ring of crystal meeting crystal as he poured.

  “Ted,” she murmured, inaudible to him. She thought for the first time of her sister being his wife, letting him into her bed. She wondered what room Effie had now. Was it her old one or the one she had always wanted? She thought of Effie doing as she was told, and saying the words. Of Effie refusing and of her lying as she was, thinking as she was, that he might have cracked her rib. Concentrating on the bones. Just the bones.

  The light had almost gone from the room. Her view of the floor, tipped on its edge, saw Edward’s trousers and shoes pacing over the floor, coming to the fringe of the carpet and swivelling on the first inch of wood before turning. The different kinds of pain she felt astonished her. Her right arm was caught up underneath her ribcage, a dead limb. I can’t leave, she thought. I shouldn’t even move, until I have my arm back.

  “Drink?” he said. “You’ve got to tell me now, how did you survive? You were thrown from the canoe. The river was teeming with alligators.” Edward did not seem to be talking to her now, and when she replied, Gwen was not sure that he heard her.

  “Vincent Coyne was a parasitic lunatic,” she said, and studied the pattern in the carpet as she felt with her good hand for her hair. He was a lunatic, she thought. But you, Edward, are just a disgusting parasite. Letting her hair down slowly, the pins collected in her fist as she unwound the coil.

  As she began to fall asleep, the pain of it played over and over in her mind, ghastly and dulled now by the tincture, still present and livid in her mind. She wondered in her stupor on the nature of pain embedded in the memory, trying still to distance herself from the thing which kept her from sleeping.

  She’d waited a long time for Edward to get drunk enough to become enfeebled. And for the life to come back to her arm so that she could begin to plait her hair.

  Her mind had been clear.

  Gus Pemberton smiled at his wife as she lay sleeping with her daughter on the big bed. He’d come in and drawn back the curtains. The window had been left open a little all night, and the room was only slightly fusty with their sleep. He bent over to kiss her forehead and stopped. There was a large bruise above her nose, and the swelling had spread down, puffing up her face. Her lips were misshapen and dark with the lively purple of trauma.

  Gwen opened her eyes. Seeing him standing over her, she moved without remembering and winced.

  “You’ve suffered some kind of injury,” he said. “What on earth has happened?”

  “I stumbled,” she said, her voice masked with a dry tongue.

  Gus passed her a glass of water. “Tell me,” he said quietly, helping her to sip it.

  “I lost my footing. On the omnibus. People were very kind. I ripped my dress. It wasn’t so bad at the time. But —”

  “You’ll be feeling it now. Oh, dear, poor love. My poor dove.” He cupped her cheek with a soft hand, and she closed her eyes. “I wish you’d have said yesterday.”

  “It seemed just so silly. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Here, let’s get you sitting up.” He tried to ease her into a heap of pillows. She tried to keep the extent of her injuries hidden from him but she couldn’t stop herself from crying out at his touch.

  “Don’t move me, please.”

  “No Zoo today. Not for you, anyway. I’ll send for Rathstone.”

  “Don’t bother Dr Rathstone, I don’t want to see him. I just need to sleep.”

  “But, surely, just to see that nothing —” He stopped as she shook her head.

  “I look as if I’ve been knocked rather badly, I know, but don’t waste money on it.”

  “Hell! Who cares about that?”

  “Just a drop of tincture.”

  “That will not do, you know it. See sense, let me send for the doctor.”

  “Bring the scissors from the table, will you please? I’m so hot, and my head hurts.”

  Gus put his hand on her forehead. “Now, why on earth do you want the scissors?”

  When she told him, he wouldn’t do it.

  “But it is matted, and I shan’t be able to dress it; no one shall. It is better to cut it off to my shoulder. My head aches with it, the weight of it is too much.”

  “When the doctor has seen you, you will feel differently.”

  “I don’t think I shall.”

  Gus glanced at the sprawled child who was beginning to wake. He scooped her up as she became instantly conscious. From the child’s hand he saw a pale grey, pearlescent sphere drop to the folds of the sheets. It was a very good example of a balas diamond, the best he had ever seen. He had no idea how Gwen had come about it. She had never said that she knew what it was, and had given it to Augusta to play with a long time ago. Gus jollied Augusta out of the room, making trumpeting elephant noises. It had always been on the tip of his tongue to say that she had given her daughter a small fortune to play with.

  Now, as he looked at his wife in her state of distress, just as during the voyage back home on the steamer, he knew it was better to drop all thoughts of probing her deeply over things he could see she did not want to discuss. He knew that she must have spent the day with Scales again; Gwen taking the omnibus was unusual. But here she was, home again. And he knew that whatever she did, wherever she went, she’d always do the right thing. But he couldn’t bring himself to cut her hair.

  He handed Augusta over to the nanny and sent for Rathstone. While he waited for the doctor to arrive, Gus went back to his rooms to inspect the map of New Zealand he’d recently acquired. As he took the
map from its paper casing, he remembered the way the servant girl at Carrick House had shut herself in the study with him.

  “You’re a detective, sir, aren’t you?” she’d said. “From Scotland Yard.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Aren’t you, sir? I thought you was.” Her shoulders sagged hopelessly.

  “Oh, I see.” He’d wanted to be kind but he’d wanted to laugh so very badly, as well. The girl had spilled out her speech anyway, ending with, “I do what I can, sir. But my mistress, she’s married him, and I can’t look out for her all the time, if you see what I mean.”

  He’d said that he did see, and that he understood her to be a very loyal kind of person.

  “I always thought it were funny peculiar, what happened just before Miss Gwen went away. He’s always made it seem like she was afficted. But I’ve known them girls longer ’n anybody. There’s nothing mad about her. It’s all just to hide what’s happened, see. Because of her not being able to say now.”

  Scales’ words then had come back to him, that Gwen would know what to do. And he had no doubt that she would, if he were to tell her. But, whatever they were, he knew she would keep her conclusions to herself, as would he. A servant’s ravings were hardly a sound basis for such a serious accusation. Scales, for all his faults, was after all, a scientist, and scientists were in the habit of collecting macabre objects of interest.

  He put his forefinger to the map and traced the lines of the mountains, the contours of the coast. He paused, the servant girl’s words trammelling his head: “I can’t look out for her all the time, if you see what I mean.”

  “God’s sake, I’m an ass. An eejit of the first order,” he said out loud. He rang for the maid.

  “Tell Cook hot porridge for Mrs Pemberton. I want you to take it up to her as soon as you can—tell Mrs Pemberton.” He tapped the map on his desk as he thought it through.