The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  The housemaid was still on her knees beside the dead man, bloodstains on her hands and white cuffs. She was glaring up at Norvill, her face flushed in a way that George suddenly remembered having seen before.

  “Edmund, would you please escort Miss Hayling to the lake to wash her hands? And might I suggest that the ladies be taken back to the house with the children?” George glanced at Sutton, who was pacing nervously, and looked around for Rai. Norvill would be useless—he had never shot a man in his life, had little experience of death at all. “Mother, would you please fetch me a blanket?” George kept his voice even, but inside he was seething—such a waste, such stupidity, and over, in a tangential way, a woman. Norvill responding too dramatically to Charlotte’s frenzy and stupidly picking up a shotgun.

  Edmund made a cup with his palms and dipped his hands into the lake. The housemaid was beside him, water lapping at her knees. He washed her hands clean and then wiped at her stained cuffs with a handkerchief, wanting the bloodstain erased, all traces of what had happened gone. Behind him he heard the boys whispering and he turned toward them. “Tom, Ned, come here.” He smiled weakly at the housemaid, trying to remember her name. She’d been very good with the children, though he wasn’t quite clear as to why Celia had been allowed off on her own and why this girl hadn’t stayed with her. He vaguely recalled some debate about the housemaid’s shoes.

  “Is that better?” he asked. The cuffs were still tinged pink.

  “Yes, Mr. Chester, thank you.”

  They stood up and the boys moved dutifully toward their father, a trace of excitement still palpable between them, and a hint of a smile on Thomas’s face.

  “Go and wait by the boat,” Edmund said, more sternly than he’d intended.

  The boys looked over at the grey blanket covering the body, then turned to where the boat was sitting farther along the shore. They did not move until Edmund stood and took a step in their direction.

  As he offered the maid his hand, Edmund noticed a fleck of blood on his own cuff. “Why don’t you go and wait with the boys? Mind them.”

  The maid nodded but her lip twitched.

  “What is it?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s all right, speak your mind.”

  “It’s just that he wasn’t a bad man, sir, he wasn’t going to cause any harm.”

  “You said you knew him?”

  “I did, sir.”

  “In what capacity?”

  “He was a friend.”

  George stood a few feet away from the body, mulling over how the situation was going to play out. There was no question of fault: the man had been trespassing on private grounds and he was, or had been—though George hated to take advantage of the term—committable. It wasn’t a question of reporting the matter to the authorities, but of how to handle it. Without care, word of the incident would spread and Norvill would be marked by the gossip, and so, too, would he and the rest of the party, the Chesters and Suttons included. Already it must have struck Edmund as odd that Norvill would charge forth with such authority to protect a child who wasn’t his, strange that Charlotte’s panic would cause him to act so quickly and aggressively.

  “What must we do, George?” his mother asked, placing one hand under her son’s arm. “The poor fellow.”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “What was he doing here,” Sutton asked, “skulking about like that?”

  “Did he say anything?” Charlotte stepped forward shakily.

  George looked to the boat where the housemaid and children were waiting. The maid had rushed to the man before anyone else had, would know if he’d spoken.

  “His death was instantaneous,” George said, meeting Sutton’s eye. “Has anyone seen Rai?”

  “I think he’s scouting the area,” Norvill said, “looking for others.”

  “Rai!” George called.

  The Hindu emerged from the bushes just as Leeson had done, the dog behind him.

  “I need you to summon Wilson. Tell him only there’s been an accident, say nothing else. Edmund will go with you to see the ladies and children safely back to the house.”

  Rai bowed almost imperceptibly and turned to go.

  Edmund recovered his hat from a nearby boulder. As he did so, he glanced at the blanket that was covering all but the dead man’s tufted hair and dress shoes. When he’d first reached him, the man’s mouth was open and hanging to one side as if he’d been stricken with palsy, when only a minute before, in the instant when he’d emerged from the woods, he had seemed jubilant, as if arriving late for the picnic and delighted at the day. He’d alarmed no one but Norvill. The shotguns Rai had lined up for the afternoon shoot were leaning against the rocks near where Norvill was sitting, ready enough to hand that Norvill had picked one up after Celia’s first scream. Not a word had passed between Norvill and the man, Edmund reflected, none of the pomp that usually preceded engagement: no “Halt,” no “Declare yourself.” Still, the man’s proximity to the women, his muddied appearance and wild look were enough to justify the assault. Any investigation would support the claim of self-defence and, for George’s sake, the authorities would be careful to avoid incriminating language in their report. In the end George would be unmarked, but Norvill and, Edmund supposed, Charlotte would be much affected, whether word of what happened went beyond those assembled or not.

  We believe that the shooting did not make the papers. What had happened took on the form of village gossip—stories that said more about the person telling them than they did about the Farringtons or the Chesters. In later years the events of that day were let slip here and there as a kind of confession—a line in a letter or a thought in a diary—declarations that now make sense to us, and to Jane, although it was hard to see them for what they were, to sense the reverberations of the day when the matter at its centre—Leeson himself—was absent from the account.

  “The day of the exploring party was sunny,” the one with the soft voice says, as she watches Jane enter the pub. “The photographer waited on the far side of the lake. He had on a greatcoat and when he stepped out of the boat with his tripod and boxes everyone applauded.”

  “They were probably applauding the sun,” the poet said drily, “because they’d forgotten what it looked like.”

  “I think I was let go shortly after the picnic,” the theologian says, though he’s roused from his daydream when a group of hikers straggle out of the pub door, slipping back into their jackets and donning their caps as they pass through us.

  “Let go from what?” the idiot asks.

  “From my post. Farrington hired me. It lasted …” He squinted up at the globe light that hung outside the pub and in his concentration we could see some semblance of a man with cropped grey hair, a trimmed beard and a prominent nose. “It might have lasted a year.”

  George Farrington would later admit that when Bernard Hibbitt presented himself at Inglewood estate with three trunks and a bamboo aviary containing, of all things, a linnet, he was taken aback. Not only was Hibbitt older than George had expected by almost a decade—a man in his fifties, not forties as he’d claimed—but also he appeared incapable of uncurling his lip, as if everything he set his eyes on left him with a sense of distaste.

  George could only blame himself. He had arranged Mr. Hibbitt’s hiring solely through letters. On paper the man had a superior education, and the reference he had provided from his last post was excellent. More importantly, Hibbitt had written that he was willing to step in for the former village tutor immediately. Still, by the time Hibbitt had entered the parlour, George knew that if the agreement had not been hastily arranged because of his own impatience, it was likely that Hibbitt wouldn’t have been hired. And if there had been other applicants, Hibbitt wouldn’t have lasted the day.

  Standing beside the sofa as stiffly as the stuffed pheasant under the nearby glass, Bernard Hibbitt listened while George Farrington outlined the terms of h
is employment. He inquired after the pupils and Farrington elaborated on the number and disposition of the boys who would be under his tutelage. Hibbitt conveyed his enthusiasm as best he could, restating his belief in the duty of the educator to ensure opportunities for advancement to all children, regardless of the conditions from which they’d risen.

  Things did not go well from there. Within a week of that conversation a number of the parents in the village had complained about how sternly religious they found Hibbitt to be, citing his threats of damnation as a means of enforcing studiousness. It wasn’t that a handful of them didn’t employ similar tactics; it was Hibbitt’s enthusiasm they objected to: how he wed his threats to corporal punishment. Which is why, a mere ten days after they’d first been introduced, Hibbitt found himself standing in Farrington’s small parlour once again, casting his eyes nervously over the watercolour landscapes gracing the walls, the clocks tick-tocking unevenly while he waited to see if he was going to be sent out.

  Hibbitt prided himself on engaging with other men, especially those of ways and means, without duplicity, so when Farrington, having offered tea that Hibbitt refused due to a welling discomfort in his stomach, asked if he meant the boys harm, he replied stiffly from the sofa, “Only when they deserve it.”

  Farrington paused to consider his tutor’s logic, and Hibbitt became conscious of the way he was sitting, each bone in his torso stacked in perfect alignment, his hands resting flatly on his knees.

  “Did your own father strike you when you were a child?” Farrington asked at last.

  “He did.”

  “Well”—Farrington sighed, as if the difference ought to indicate his stand and instruction on the matter—“mine did not.”

  The walk Farrington proposed out over the lawn and through the gardens was uncomfortable for Hibbitt. Although his anxiety was diminished, he was still conflicted as to what exactly had been decided, from which families the complaints had come, and how he was expected to maintain order without corporal means. In the end he did all but ask if he could still strike them a little. The walk was made even more awkward by the fact that Hibbitt preferred to move with purpose whereas Farrington strolled like a woman. They were also under surveillance: the stable hand Dawes, who was the older brother of one of Hibbitt’s more amiable pupils, watched them unabashedly as he filed the hooves of a carriage horse. Mrs. Farrington was similarly caught glaring down at the men from one of the upstairs rooms, turning away when Hibbitt looked up from his inspection of the alpine plots. He attempted a quick smile but she had released the curtain before it reached his lips.

  Hibbitt checked, as he always did in these situations, that his coat and felt bowler were in order. It was, after all, vital that he take great pains not only in his presentation but also in his manner if he was to conceal his attraction to other men. He needed to appear innocuous, and believing himself to be so, he regarded those who watched him overlong as subjects requiring greater dissimulation on his part.

  On their last turn at the end of the property Farrington gestured to the trellis he was putting in by the folly, and Hibbitt thought that he detected a similar quality in his companion, a looseness of the body and lightened manner that had become more evident the farther removed he was from his house—an animation that, although directed toward the progress of the magnolias and Daphnes, was most pleasant to behold.

  As he opened the cottage door for Farrington two weeks later, the tutor tried to parse what he’d done wrong. The boys had been behaving better since he’d softened his approach, and all but one were memorizing their verses and handing their lessons in on time.

  Farrington took his hat off and brushed his coat sleeves as if the fog had affixed itself there. He closed the door behind him and said, “Bernard,” as if they were friends.

  Still perplexed by what kind of business might necessitate a visit so late in the evening, Hibbitt suddenly realized that he had no wine or sherry to offer. He said stupidly, “Mr. Farrington, I hope I haven’t failed you in some way, to bring you out at this hour—” Though even as he said the words, he started to suspect by the man’s expression that it was the other thing.

  “No, Hibbitt, you have not.”

  They were still standing, and Hibbitt was thinking he ought to manoeuvre the chairs nearer to the flagging fire when Farrington stepped in front of him. In all of his previous experience, it had never happened like this. Still, Hibbitt knew in an instant that he would be required to declare himself first, and that if he did not, nothing would happen. So slowly, and without stepping back, he went down on his knees, and George Farrington removed his coat.

  Rules were quickly established. Hibbitt was not allowed to visit Inglewood House or the grounds and could only approach the property when messaged because George suspected his demeanour might give the recent nature of their acquaintance away. Norvill Farrington was a regular visitor and George knew his brother would relish having a suspicion to wield against him. The beauty of the message system was its simplicity: if one of the servants was cleaning George’s best saddle on the wood frame by the stable this meant wait inside the mouth of the first cave at the end of the trail. A book sent to the school with a blue bookmark meant that Hibbitt would be expected in the pumphouse by the lake after supper. In each case he was to drop a handkerchief on the path if he was seen. Once, however, in daylight, the two men fell to walking the trail from the village within visual proximity of each other and George dared, unexpectedly, to turn up the trail toward the grotto, lifting a gloved hand to indicate that he should be followed. It was an absurdly easy business for them to meet in those spring months, and even in the rainy stretch of the summer, although once Hibbitt felt certain he’d been seen in the woods as he cut back from the caves. He was peeling a fig George had brought him, and looking up the trail from under the dome of his umbrella he thought he caught a glimpse of one of Prudence’s maids.

  What Hibbitt thought then, in his arrogance, was that the world was ordered in a way that served him: that the stable boy, or the footman, or the house girl who sometimes came to the schoolroom with a wrapped book he’d “requested loan of” from George’s library, were somehow his emissaries as well as Farrington’s. It gave him a slow pleasure to have them stand on the threshold of the cottage or in the door jamb at the school and wait while he unwrapped his offerings and composed a receipt of thanks. And so, that autumn, when the books stopped coming and the saddle stopped receiving its extra care, he pushed the idea of what was really lost out of his head and tried to convince himself that he missed being waited on as much as he missed the object and acts that occurred beyond the purview of the waiting servant’s patient stare.

  Hibbitt was never sure if it was George or Prudence who suddenly called off the affair. What little he eventually gleaned came from the gossip of the house’s low-ranking servants—gossip that habitually spread to the village and, if lascivious, to the older boys under his care. All he knew at the time was that shortly after one of his rendezvous with George in the cave, Norvill had arrived for a picnic, along with a number of other guests from London. George, thrusting himself angrily into Hibbitt on that last occasion, had seemed almost enraged, complaining afterward about the pressure of the arrangements, the suffocating details, the idea that he had to whore himself out for funding.

  Talk of Norvill Farrington’s entanglement with a married woman had cropped up in the butcher shop the day after the picnic. According to a stable hand known to one of the boys under Hibbitt’s care, a fearful row at the house had occurred, followed quickly by a set of early departures.

  25

  The waitress from last night, Katie, her hair in a high ponytail, smirks at Jane when she walks into the pub, so Jane sits in one of the booths in the dining area and a different girl in a short black skirt comes over to take her order.

  We are starting to feel like locals here. It doesn’t take much for us; we seize on the familiar, crave routine. We recognize the workbooted men at the bar, the r
ough cluster of boys Blake’s age guzzling pints at the high table and the smell from the deep fryer that wafts to us when the kitchen door swings open. Those of us who can read stand behind Jane and survey the specials on the chalkboard, play at making informed decisions; try words like fennel and parsnip in our mouths to see if a taste or texture appears.

  Blake arrives well before eight, unaware that Jane has been here almost an hour. He slides into the booth, offers Jane his hand palm-up on the table, and says, “I don’t even know your last name. You could fuck off back to London and I’d never be able to find you again.”

  Jane narrows her eyes. “I don’t know yours either.”

  He laughs, retracts his hand. “I think I’ve got it worked out that you wouldn’t exactly be racing around the country trying to find me.” His eyes settle on the empty bowl of soup and the last scraps of lettuce on the plate she’s pushed toward the wall. “Heading out?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, back in a minute.” He stands up. As he passes her side of the booth he leans in and kisses her on the mouth.

  Blake brings Jane a glass of wine and then clears her plate, taking it over to the barman and coming back with his pint. He’s showing off, and she lets him. A petty part of her is thinking that he wouldn’t know what fork to use in a good restaurant, that he probably doesn’t own a suit, that she ought to be tolerant and let him have his little display. But then, when he’s sitting across from her, when he takes her hand and rubs his thumb back and forth over her skin, she’s buoyed despite herself; even though he’s only nineteen, he’s been sweet and tender and honest with her.

  “So is now a good time to ask if you have a girlfriend?”

  He raises his eyebrows. “You applying?”

  “What about the waitress over there? Or that girl from two nights ago, in the silver vest top?”