Soul

by Tobsha Learner

  Six months. She must have been pregnant when he left her, at least three months.

  ‘She stole my child,’ Julia whispered, too faintly for Andrew to hear.

  Slamming the front door behind her, Julia went straight to the bedroom. After opening the cupboard door she hauled out a box that had been tucked away at the back. Sitting it on the bedroom floor, she stared down at the cardboard lid, then ripped open the tape that sealed it. The baby clothes were still in their wrappers, pristinely folded under clear plastic. She pulled one package open. The cotton smelt fresh and was impossibly soft against her skin. She unfolded the jumpsuit and spread its arms and legs out on the carpet. It lay like an abandoned starfish, the sight of the empty hood lancing her heart in a sudden intake of breath. Julia reached for a second outfit and then another and another, until the floor was covered with baby clothes, arm touching sleeve, blind foot touching toe. She sat at the very edge of this carpet of loss, then suddenly swept the clothes up in her arms.

  They had used the incinerator—a wire basket full of ashes and charred wood, which was tucked behind Klaus’s work shed—to burn the dead leaves from the garden. It had been Julia’s task to keep the lawn raked while Klaus worked the flowerbeds. She stood over it now, the flames of the fire she’d made from twigs and newspaper crackling under her hands. Slowly she fed the baby clothes to the blaze, the blue cotton smouldering for a second before bursting into red as embers ate through the soft cloth.

  This is a funeral pyre, she thought to herself. I am burning my future.

  64

  Mayfair, 1861

  LAVINIA HAD SHUT HERSELF IN the bathroom to escape the constant vigilance of the household. She sat on a cane chair beside the huge enamel bathtub. She was thinner; her birdlike wrists poked beyond the lace cuffs of her blouse. It was hard to keep her fingers steady as she opened the lid of the whispering box. Fearful her voice might be heard beyond the locked door, she spoke even more quietly than usual.

  It is now September and weeks since I tried to escape. The little joy I have is in my child, my reading, and the thought that Aloysius might have finally escaped to America. Lethargy now possesses me, my silent friend: I move my mouth and limbs but melancholia has made me a sleepwalker. James now insists that I take two doses of laudanum daily, in the morning and at night, and, although it eases my grief, the drug has made me clay. He has also confiscated the money I had made from pawning my jewellery and claimed back both the necklace and the earrings himself; an embarrassment he is fond of reminding me of daily. But there is a far worse restriction: James has employed his aunt Madeleine Huntington as my custodian. This obsequious relative is in perpetual debt to my husband, who has provided her with a meagre stipend all these years. She is with me constantly and watches me like a hawk. She even insists on sleeping in my room at night. What can they be afraid of? That I shall sprout wings?

  To add to my humiliation, James, to stifle any rumour of my unhappiness, has taken to public displays of affection, caressing me at the dining table, proclaiming both my wit and my physical attributes. Yet he turns away from me in the privacy of our own chambers. If he will not love me, and will not let me go, what hope have I?

  At the sound of the doorknob being rattled, Lavinia shut the box and hid it behind the water closet.

  ‘It was gracious of you to accept my invitation, Lavinia. I am glad we have resumed our friendship.’ Lady Morgan stood in the centre of her elaborately furnished and now crowded parlour. ‘These luncheons are a wonderfully informal means by which one is able to maintain one’s female acquaintances. I see you are accompanied by the Colonel’s ever vigilant aunt?’

  Madeleine Huntington, an unprepossessing woman in her late fifties, her mouth irredeemably twisted by a hypochondria that resembled self-pity, sat perched several feet away. Lady Morgan, taking Lavinia’s silence as answer, tapped her fan discreetly in Madeleine’s direction.

  ‘Oh, she is legendary,’ she murmured in an undertone. ‘Lady Curton even hired her to guard her eldest daughter after she was found in flagrante delicto with a young swain. Dreadful creature, a veritable parasite who thrives on the misfortunes of others. May the good Lord save us from such a fate.’

  Then she spoke up. ‘Miss Huntington was a virtuoso on the harp when she was younger. Is that not so, Madeleine?’

  The old woman’s wooden dentures slipped a little as she smiled. ‘An exaggeration, but I did perform at a few soirées, which, I’m told, were memorable.’

  ‘Perhaps you could play for us now?’

  As Madeleine Huntington took her place at the harp, the rest of the guests broke into small clusters in order to exchange the gossip that was an essential commodity—who was courting whom, which Scottish estates one had to be invited to for the hunting season, the latest mode for riding skirts and so on.

  ‘Gwen, have you heard about the Tillings scandal?’ Lady Morgan leaned in close to Lady Gillingham. ‘Apparently Countess Tillings finally tired of the Count’s numerous liaisons. By fortuitous coincidence, the Count was a frequent user of Fowler’s Solution—for aphrodisiac purposes naturally…’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Which, as some of the ladies here know, contains arsenic and is fatal in large quantities…’

  Lady Gillingham’s eyebrows shot up in mock horror. ‘She didn’t?’

  Lady Morgan tapped her nose with her fan. ‘I have it on entirely reliable authority—directly from her maid. Of course, they can’t prove a thing.’

  ‘Well then, we must have a tea party to comfort the newly bereaved widow,’ Lady Gillingham concluded merrily as she reached for a sandwich.

  ‘Can it not be proved he was poisoned?’ Lavinia interjected, fascinated.

  Lady Morgan, embarrassed by the young wife’s blunt indiscretion, glanced around to see if anyone had overheard.

  ‘Poisoned? Goodness, child, the gentleman merely met with an accident, a natural consequence of his use of the drug. Why on earth would there be an investigation? My dear, you have so much to learn.’

  Lady Gillingham, determined to steer the conversation into safer waters, leaned forward. ‘You will attend the hunt this Sunday, Lady Morgan? You were sorely missed last week.’

  ‘I would, except I have lost my companion and it really does not suit a woman of my position to be seen unaccompanied.’

  ‘Frances, dear, just cultivate a replacement. The city is full of them, and we have all learned to tolerate the mercantile class.’

  ‘No, Mr Hamish Campbell was my final folly. I have arrived at the point in my life when I must surrender myself fully to the pursuit of charitable acts.’

  ‘There are worse fates than having a fountain dedicated to oneself.’

  ‘Indeed, a seat at the opera would be worse.’

  They all laughed, but Lavinia’s unhappiness undermined the frivolity of the moment. She fidgeted constantly and an unnatural brightness glimmered about her eyes—a consequence of an overuse of laudanum. Although she was painfully aware that her trembling hands and propensity to interject impolitely betrayed her, Lavinia could not help herself—she was no longer in control.

  ‘Well then, surely we can expect your company on Sunday, Mrs Huntington?’ Lady Gillingham enquired.

  ‘I’m afraid my husband has asked the aforementioned Mr Campbell to accompany him, so I shall take the opportunity to promenade with my dear little son through the park.’

  ‘The Colonel is seen with that young man awfully frequently these days. Why, only the other day Lord Birley remarked how Hamish Campbell is as close to Huntington as a son, “but twice as beloved”.’

  Lady Gillingham glanced at Lavinia, hoping to catch a nuance of expression that would betray a greater meaning.

  Lavinia winced, then allowed the laudanum to mute her flooding anxiety.

  ‘My husband has a penchant for nurturing aspiring young scientists,’ she replied, and fixed her expression into a grimace of pleasantry.

  ‘As he should.’ Lady Gillingham
, trailing silk, floated away to another group of women.

  Lavinia spent the following day in James’s study. She had placed a specimen of the root bark from Mimosa hostilis and a section of ayahuasca vine, used by the Bakairi to make their Jurema brew, on a small stand and was sketching it studiously while Aunt Madeleine executed her needlepoint by the fireplace.

  Lavinia stared at the withered bark and twisted vine, thinking on their properties. She remembered the book she had read, which described how the extracts could be lethal if mixed with opium or peyote fluid. Could it be administered in a manner that would be undetectable? And how would one mix it with opium? Was this a way she could win her freedom?

  She glanced across at her custodian, the danger of her observations making her pulse race for the first time in a month. And what of the moral ramifications? Even if she did succeed, her soul would suffer eternal condemnation. I would be less than human, she reminded herself. But the thought of her life petering away in the twilight of this house while she mouthed the platitudes of an empty marriage was overwhelming.

  The click of Madeleine’s needle against the rim of the sewing frame intermingled with the tick of the clock and the rattling rain dashing against the windowpane. The scarlet thread ran from a bag at Aunt Madeleine’s feet up through her skeletal hands, relentlessly twisting backwards and forwards. Lavinia was gripped by a desperate realisation: my life will never change; this is how the years will seep away, incrementally.

  James was to perform the shamanistic ritual in a week’s time and she was to administer the sacramental brew. Why had he given her that power? Surely he must know how much I have begun to loathe him, she thought; is it possible that secretly he wishes for his own death? Has he unconsciously chosen me as his deliverer?

  Completing the sketch, Lavinia lifted the root bark to her nose. The scent was of burnt wood and something else, something she’d smelled before but couldn’t quite place.

  She glanced over at the photograph of James in the Amazon. He was half-naked, his body painted with ceremonial mud, his masked face turned to the light that slanted through the jungle foliage—a changeling, half-man, half-god, a creature trying to live another man’s myth. If there remained a union between them, it was here, incarnate in the ideals of James’s younger self. I loved him, Lavinia told herself, despite his paradoxical character and his rejection, but now all that is left is smouldering resentment.

  She replaced the root bark, then recognised the other elusive scent: ground tobacco.

  The creature lay on the kitchen table, its shell a slimy leathery helmet, its flippers flailing wildly against the slippery wood, its neck extended as it snapped madly at all who approached it.

  ‘I should never have undone the twine,’ the cook wailed, backing into a corner armed with a rolling pin. ‘It’s a vicious beast. Do you see them gnashers on it?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mrs Jobling—turtles do not have teeth. They have beaks, like birds.’

  ‘Do they now? Next, you’ll be telling me they have feathers too! In which case, the bloomin’ thing might just take off and fly out the window!’

  ‘No need to get uppity, Mrs Jobling. But I suggest you kill it sooner rather than later. The soup takes a good four hours and we have to carve the flesh off well before then.’

  ‘I know my job, Mrs Beetle,’ the cook retorted. She tentatively crept forward with the rolling pin raised. The turtle backed away, made a clucking sound with its beak, and lunged, nipping at the cook, narrowly missing her apron strings.

  ‘For the life of me I can’t do it! You take charge.’ And she pushed the intended murder weapon into the housekeeper’s hands.

  Mrs Beetle, pulling herself up to her full height of five foot two, circled the reptile like an experienced hunter.

  ‘Right then, you little devil.’ She slammed down the rolling pin.

  As it descended, the animal scurried sideways and the rolling pin hit the table, denting it. The turtle tottered on the edge, then fell, its four flappers paddling wildly in midair. It landed on its back on the kitchen flags.

  ‘What is all the commotion?’ Lavinia entered, having heard the crash from the front hallway.

  ‘Sorry, ma’am, but we’re trying to kill the turtle for the soup.’

  The creature flipped itself upright and scuttled towards Mrs Beetle’s ankles. Screeching, she leapt onto a chair.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake! I’ll show you how it’s done!’ Lavinia grabbed a meat cleaver from the bench and turned to the animal. Immediately, the turtle retracted its head, arms and legs, becoming an impenetrable dome of chequered shell.

  Cleaver held high, Lavinia crept towards it, then stood as still as a statue, waiting. Slowly, the turtle emerged, neck swaying as it peered from side to side with myopic curiosity. With chilling dexterity, Lavinia brought the cleaver down onto its neck. But the blade caught the edge of the thick shell, only partially severing the head. The creature’s eyes turned up in aggrieved surprise.

  A great anger roared up in Lavinia and she slammed the blade down over and over, as if she were obliterating all the obstacles in her life.

  Horrified, the cook stayed her arm. ‘Ma’am, the animal’s dead now.’

  Lavinia watched the convulsing reptile—sounds in the kitchen rushing back into her pounding head as she lowered the blade.

  65

  THE HUNTINGTONS SAT IN THE open-topped phaeton, the Colonel resplendent in top hat and frock coat, his young wife in pale yellow satin with Aidan held securely on her lap. As they drove along the pebbled lane in Hyde Park, two men cantered up to the coach.

  ‘Huntington! Extraordinarily good game the other evening.’ The older man, in his early sixties and corpulent, sat high in his saddle, his riding jacket, jodhpurs and boots immaculate. ‘’Tis a pity you had to fall so heavily.’

  ‘It was a pleasure to lose to you,’ the Colonel replied, tipping his hat. ‘May I present my wife. Mrs Lavinia Huntington; the Marquis of Westminster.’

  ‘An honour, sir.’ Lavinia dipped her head.

  The Marquis assessed her charms with a blatant gaze that travelled from her waist across her bosom to the top of her feathered bonnet.

  ‘A wife, eh? Must have been out of town when you were presented.’ He turned to the Colonel. ‘My compliments, Huntington, you’ve done well for an old rake. By the way, I’ve spoken to my man about that apartment. Should be ready in a day or two.’

  ‘Thank you, sir, that’s very decent of you.’

  ‘Anything for an Etonian,’ the Marquis replied, and trotted off with his escort.

  ‘You have purchased a property?’ Lavinia asked as the Colonel relaxed back into his seat.

  ‘I have taken a set of rooms to continue my study away from the house. I felt it was more conducive to my research.’

  ‘And you will be studying there with Mr Campbell, I assume?’

  ‘He is my assistant.’

  They drove on in silence. Lavinia wondered whether this would mean new freedom for herself or merely further estrangement.

  ‘I shall, of course, continue to employ Madeleine as your chaperone.’The Colonel tapped the new coachman on the shoulder. ‘Home, John.’

  The phaeton swung around, scattering a flock of pigeons that had gathered on the gravel. Just then they heard the clatter of hooves.

  ‘Colonel Huntington! Colonel Huntington!’

  It was Lady Morgan, in a curricle. With a jolt, Lavinia recognised the coachman sitting beside her. She lifted her hand and Aloysius smiled back. The Colonel followed her gaze.

  ‘The confounded audacity!’ Furious and refusing to acknowledge either Lady Morgan or Aloysius, he turned his head resolutely forward. ‘Drive faster,’ he instructed his driver.

  The horses broke into a trot, but the curricle followed at a swifter pace. The pursuit started to draw the attention of the surrounding carriages and riders, several heads turning in amazement. Lady Morgan’s curricle, having the advantage of speed, pulled alongside
them.

  ‘James, dear, I do hope you did not intend to snub me?’ Lady Morgan called gaily.

  The Colonel, shaking with fury, tapped his coachman on the shoulder and the phaeton slowed down. ‘Not at all. I simply had not seen you, Frances.’

  ‘How uncharacteristic of you. I’d always thought that one of your greatest attributes was your power of observation.’

  ‘In which case I apologise for disappointing you.’

  ‘I find disappointment increasingly commonplace these days, but I accept your apology.’

  Tight-lipped, Aloysius tipped his cap at the Huntingtons. Catching his eye for a second, Lavinia smiled slightly.

  ‘I see you have a new coachman. My congratulations,’ the Colonel remarked cynically.

  ‘I found him wandering the streets of Kensington.’ Lady Morgan leaned towards the Colonel. ‘He’s a wonderful horseman, and even has some blacksmithing skills. Extraordinarily, he had no references on him, none whatsoever. Well, I said, a good stablehand is so very difficult to find these days. You don’t mind, do you, James?’

  The Colonel’s face twitched as he worked hard to contain his expression.

  ‘I don’t mind at all. Doubtless you will find him more trustworthy than I did. Good day.’

  As they drove off, Lavinia turned to watch Aloysius’s diminishing figure. Then she buried her face in her son’s fragrant hair.

  From her bedroom window, Lavinia watched James’s carriage leave for the evening. He was going to his club, where he now spent every night. The vigilant Madeleine had retired two hours earlier on the pretence of a migraine. After pulling the curtain shut, Lavinia left her room.

  The library was still cloudy with cigar smoke. James’s open diary lay atop a side table beside his usual armchair. Lavinia sat down and began to read.

  One morning I was called to the hut of the shaman, who wanted me to witness the execution of some local justice. A man’s mother-in-law had accused him of stealing her daughter’s soul through sorcery. The accused—about twenty years of age—seemed sullen and withdrawn. On closer inspection, I realised that the sullenness was in fact terror. Strangely, when the shaman questioned the man, he said nothing to defend himself.