Curiosity (49 page)

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, floating 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.

In December, Mary found it. It was evening, and so cold that she had no fingers at all as far as she could tell. She had been about to turn back home when she spied the characteristic rounded surface and defining edge of a vertebra. On closer examination, six or eight smooth discs peeped out. The matrix was shale and limestone. It would be hard to excavate, but the fossil would be more enduring.

“Stay,” she said to her dog, and he crouched conscientiously, guarding the fossil. In the town she recruited Henry Marsden, her brother Joseph, and then Simon Larch and George West, whom she encountered as they left the quarry. They all ran home to fetch lanterns. At Black Ven, Tray was still guarding the fossil, although he had edged a foot or two backwards to avoid the rising water.

“About here?” said Joseph, setting his stone chisel a foot beyond the bones.

“Use your wits!” Mary cried. She forced them to cut a slab that allowed for three feet at either end. The vertebrae were three inches across; you had to assume a body length of five feet for every inch of diameter to a vertebra. All the time they dug that
huge trench, they were cursing her under their breath. But they did it. They worked through a freezing night in sea spray to chip out a pedestal under the fossil, and then, in early light, they recruited a gang of helpers and broke it off and carried it up to the workshop in its matrix.