Curiosity (5 page)

Two shillings each they paid, he thinks afterwards, as he stands on Piccadilly watching well-dressed Londoners wander out of the hall. The cost of a roast beef dinner in an inn, to ogle an ordinary Negro woman with her breasts bared. Across the Circus, an itinerant clarinet plays. A hawker with a pack on his back calls, “Ole clo,” and he perks up – in his blue and scarlet uniform, he’s an illicit Union Jack. But he doesn’t have a pence about him. Rain begins to mist down. His mother will know of his disgrace by now; they lay three days in the guardhouse waiting for the king’s envoy to arrive to sign the writ. He presses against the building, trying to avoid the rain, wondering where he can go. To Mrs. Butterworth, maybe, their old housekeeper in Ottery St. Mary. Or to Uncle Alger in Bristol, his uncle on the other side. Alger will know where Mother is – she keeps in touch with him because of Halse Hall business. But I’ve got to get out of this uniform, he thinks, before they arrest me. The previous morning, he had lain for a while on the bench listening to the chain of small metallic noises coming from the hen on the window ledge above him. In that moment, he understood that what you do does not necessarily define you. You can choose to say,
Yes, I do this. But I am separate from it
. You can give them the callow gesture, because that’s what they’re worth, and you can be as you were.
As you were
– it’s a military expression.

Clement emerges from the entrance, wiping his brow. “You left too soon,” he says. “I swear I caught sight of a tail.” He does a little dance of excitement and revulsion on the pavement, flapping his handkerchief. When Henry doesn’t respond, he sobers. “That will be nothing new to you,” he says. “It’s the heat that does it, as you know. You’re familiar with pawpaw and breadfruit. Grows in three days, breadfruit does, as big as an archbishop’s hat.”

They set off for home. Henry is thinking of Marlow, the sunlit study hall. His folio, and the narrow shelves under the windows where they kept their pens, the solid oak tables where they sat copying
Muller’s Artillery
. Afternoons hiding in the mouldy barracks attic with Chorley and Wyndham, an earl’s son, all of them working on copies of his drawings (tuppence a copy, he paid them), their admiration for his skill and wit and daring evident in their assiduous journeyman efforts. Crossing the Circus with Clement chattering at his side, he thinks of the truest moment there was, in the guardhouse at Marlow after the flogging, when they lay on the packed earth floor without a blanket (Chorley a little apart and silent), he and Wyndham lying side by side in their pain and exaltation, and the torch outside the barred window shone on his friend’s head and he saw tiny movements in Wyndham’s hair; lice, delicately illuminated.

But he’s fallen into a new drama. As they walk up Halfmoon Street, he sees a carriage with his own arms stencilled on the door, and Algernon De la Beche descends in his queued and powdered wig, looking like an advance agent from the Captain Cook exhibit in Bullock’s Egyptian Hall, and evidently astonished to encounter Henry here.

Properly indoors, Alger declines a drink. He likewise declines the divan and lowers himself onto a chair, the carved back of which he declines to use for support. His indignation of manner is theatrical, his real indignation having been exhausted, Henry can guess, over the temperature of his tea at breakfast. Ignoring Henry, who stands by the mantel, he addresses himself to Clement. “I was in London town, as it happens, yesterday. Having made my way here to tend to the business affairs of my sister-in-law, as prearranged. My meeting was with a solicitor at Lincoln’s Inn.”

Henry offers his uncle a sober, attentive countenance. “We had just settled nicely into our affairs,” Alger goes on, “when a letter arrived informing us that this young chap’s mother had been summoned to Great Marlow on a matter of great consequence and urgency, and asking if I would present myself there on her behalf. Your sister is prostrated, Mr. Mollot, as you can imagine. She is entirely unable to travel. And so I took myself to Great Marlow, anticipating bad news and, upon my arrival, hearing worse. And now, after a day of to-ing and fro-ing and exhausting the horses to no avail on the Great West Road, I find the lad on your premises. Well, Mr. Mollot, whatever your intentions in sheltering him, I must inform you that my sister-in-law has conferred on me the responsibility of paterfamilias. No slight towards you, I’m sure, Mr. Mollot, no slight at all intended.” His next observations are broken by throat clearing. Henry hears
my brother
,
safe from this
,
God’s grace
.

“Sheltering him?” asks Clement. “Safe from this?” “Ah?” says Alger, sitting back then with satisfaction, casting his eyes about Clement’s drawing room, every surface of which, Henry sees now, is felted with dust. What he took for laurel wreaths stencilled on the wallpaper are circles of mould. “He’s not told you,” says Alger. “He’s not had the courtesy to enlighten you as to the true circumstances of his visit.” He takes up the vial hanging from a chain on his bosom and painstakingly extracts two peppercorns to chew as a tonic. “Our mutual nephew,” he says, looking directly at Clement, his eyes glittering, “has been sent down. From Great Marlow. By royal edict.” “Sent down?” cries Clement. “Royal edict?” Henry is still standing by the fireplace. “My mother. My mother, where is she?” he asks, chagrined to hear his voice revert to the treble notes of boyhood.

THREE

here was a war on that year, and a naval blockade that left the English with only their own corn to eat, and then the crops failed. But Lyme Regis did a respectable domestic trade. That it was a port town at all and not a squalid fishing village was down to its sturdy, black-haired citizenry, who, hundreds of years in the past, had hauled stones from the beach to build a massive breakwater the shape of an elbow, turning an inhospitable stretch of Lyme Bay into a harbour. For centuries, the weight of those stones and their affinity for each other was all that held that breakwater together. The Cobb, they called it, and by the time Mary was a girl, it was a wide, tilting road capped with massive blocks of dark limestone from the Isle of Portland, with the revenue office and the isolation hut built right onto it.

Mary often followed Marine Parade west along the shore to the Cobb, to buy fish. And often she walked out past it with her father, to collect on Monmouth Beach. There the walking was perilous, the stones a queer shape and neither small enough to be called shingle nor large enough to bear the flat of a boot. It was a common boast of smugglers washed up there in fog that
they knew their bearings by the shape of the stones, but that was not such a feat; Mary would have been able to do the same.

The Devil had made Monmouth Beach on a wager, people always said. Mary held such comments loosely in her mind now, thinking of the man with the blue bag. But the curiosities they collected on that beach, they were still a puzzle. They were given to the poor like manna to the Children of Israel, Richard said, although not as regular. And so it would seem God had made the curiosities, although James Wheaton, the pastor at the Independent Chapel, feared and hated them. It was true that some of the curiosities had an unwholesome look to them, especially the curved grey stones the townspeople identified as the Devil’s discarded toenails. Even the beautiful ammonites were a mystery. They had the weight of stones, but they were unlike any stone God had made. So intricate and patterned, they had almost the hand of an artisan upon them.

One Sabbath morning, walking out early, Mary and her father met the hedge carpenter Walter Jones and his son, on their way to the Independent Chapel to get the fire started. Walter Jones lifted the cap from his tufted hair and said, “We’ll see ye in chapel anon, then,” offering them a view of the narrow brown teeth spaced like fence posts in his gums. “Not today, friend,” Mary’s father said agreeably, and turned to walk on, and Mr. Jones said to his back, “Ye’re niver taking that child to the shore on the Sabbath morning.” They kept going and then they heard a bellowed, “Oy!” and they stopped and turned. “Or up on the boogerin’ cliffs!” Mr. Jones shouted.

When had her father stopped going to chapel? Mary couldn’t say exactly. He’d always complained about James Wheaton at the pulpit, for his twitching and his eye fluttering and his knuckle cracking. When money was tight and the foreshore gleamed in the morning sun just at chapel time, Richard would declare a
holiday from sermonizing and spend the morning collecting, eager to have first chance at the treasures the waves had brought in overnight and would batter and smash by noon. Eventually, he began to avoid chapel even when the tide was high.

As for Mary, when the tide was low she went collecting with her father, and when it was too high to walk the shore in safety, she went to chapel. She went with her mother or, if Percival was too fretful, she went alone or took Lizzie. She went out of sympathy for James Wheaton, the clever young pastor who had a clockwork spring inside him that pressed him into postures he would not have willed for himself. James Wheaton could not turn his queer white-fringed calf eyes on the congregation but must preach to the side window, and Mary thought she understood why: it was how fiercely he loved them and how mercilessly the Lord’s words gripped him.

They were almost at the Cobb, and Mary could sense Walter Jones still watching from behind. No one knew what to do with her father. They looked at him the way she did, with the same bewilderment and longing. He should have been hanged for starting a bread riot in the Year of Our Lord 1800, when Mary was just a baby, a year the crop withered in the fields and the price of a bushel of corn went up to nineteen shillings. But he was not hanged. The army spent a month trying to ferret out the leader of the riot, beating the townspeople and offering them bribes, but there was not a single crimp among them, they were solid against the soldiers. And they did not hate Richard for it – they loved him for the way he taught them their rights and led them up the streets to the mill, with torches burning in the dark, crying, “Bread or blood!” This was ten years ago and they still loved him for it.

It was a book that made a rebel of him. For weeks, Holly said, he’d been reading an unlawful book by Mr. Thomas Paine. After the riot, when the soldiers filled the town, Molly built up a
roaring fire and threw the book into it, and she always claimed she’d brought him out of a spell by burning it. The night after the army left, people were at the workshop again, wanting more riot. But standing in his doorway, Richard asked where it was written in Holy Scripture that the price of a bushel of corn was five shillings sixpence. He’d dropped them in it and then he acted as though he had no memory of it ever happening. Everyone retreated confused to the Three Cups and Richard went out and mended the cobblestone in the square, which lay a mudhole since they’d pried up stones to throw at the soldiers. He was the one who’d got their blood up and it was their blood that turned him against rioting. So Molly said. There was more grain strewn along the road those nights, she explained, than was ever carried home for the children.