Elijah’s Mermaid (15 page)

Even those times when he was at home he rarely emerged from his bedroom, what with all of the drawing and painting he did. Now and then I was invited in, my brother sketching my likeness while I lay on his bed and read a book, and sometimes I read the words out loud as if that imaginary stream of thought could build a wall around us both, or perhaps it was between us, negating the need for him to speak, to tell me about his adventuring; those new games from which Lily Lamb was excluded.

But I knew some secrets in his mind. Those times when I laid my book aside and sneaked a glance over his shoulder, curious to judge how his work progressed, when more often than not I would chance to see not an image of myself at all but a lovely girl with glass-green eyes and long waving tresses of golden hair.
She
did not smile at him in church.
She
did not work in the fields around. No one in our parts looked like that – though as far as Elijah was concerned, it was almost as if he truly believed that by drawing her likeness again and again, by some magic she
might yet materialise, right under our noses in Kingsland House.

There were times when I truly wished she would. She might warm that secret discontent, the splinter of ice in Elijah’s heart which did not truly start to melt until the year when we reached seventeen, when two gifts arrived which opened the doors that led us into ‘other worlds’ – and those doors, for a little while at least, drew my brother back to mine.

That May Uncle Freddie sent two wooden boxes. The one labelled up for me was what they call a stereoscope with tantalising instructions that promised the gift of binocular vision. When you looked through the lenses on the front and into the darkness of the cube, whatever the photographs placed inside – my selection included Italian scenes, the Roman Colosseum, the bridges of Venice – they all had the illusion of real height and depth as if in a three-dimensional form, only in Lilliputian dimensions.

Elijah and I loved those pictures. We longed to see such places ourselves. We imagined our mother being there, and perhaps that is what Uncle Freddie intended, to keep her memory alive – though such fancies did not amuse Papa, who thought Freddie was up to old tricks again.

Elijah’s box was much larger. It had gleaming brass handles on either side and was set on a kind of trolley, with wheels. Inside was a camera and tripod stand, and a tent to place on top of that which would form a portable darkroom in which to process any slides whenever the photographer was out and about. There were shelves with buckled leather straps to secure all the flasks for the chemicals. There were trays for fixing and ‘washing off’. In short everything that he might need to create a ‘flying studio’ without which, from that day on, my brother was rarely seen; his paraphernalia dragged behind when taking pictures of village life, or roaming through the fields and lanes in search of more natural subjects.

When the various techniques had been mastered Elijah’s compositions were wonderful. Such depths of shadow and
luminous light created with wet collodian, and though Ellen Page only tutted and scowled when her scullery sink and pantry store were sequestered as a ‘development’ room – the windows gloomed with dark red paint, the shelves now lined with more glass jars full of volatile liquids which were stinking of ether and alcohol, with a spirit lamp over which to concoct the magical photographic brews – well, for all the old woman’s dire mutterings of explosions and deaths from noxious fumes, she became as enthralled as Elijah was, next to me his most ardent assistant and aiding all his experiments – preparing the albumen paper for prints with coatings of egg whites mixed with salt (and so many jars of lemon curd being made from any unused yolks that we had to give most of them away!). She really didn’t mind a jot that her aprons were blotted with sepia stains. With such gusto did she fling herself into sourcing the costumes and all of the props used for creating his ‘classical scenes’, even deigning to wrap herself in sheets and to wear a false beard upon her chin when she posed as the ancient Methuselah, who was said to have lived nine hundred years, which I think was Elijah’s private joke, remembering that time when we were young when Papa had teased and we believed that Ellen Page was one hundred and ten.

Not even Papa was immune to the lure of the camera’s magic eye. He posed as Don Quixote, the hero sitting alone in his study and dreaming of empty victories – for which he wore trousers cut off at the knees to give the effect of pantaloons, stuffed into which was a nightshift of mine, the one with voluminous puffing sleeves. (Not one of Freddie’s favourite gifts.) As a backdrop we pinned up some old damask that we’d found in one of the attic trunks, and I painted a windmill to hang on the wall while Elijah made armour from papier mâché a breastplate and helmet that looked most convincing, and a lance that he’d carved from a fallen branch. The greyhound that lay at Papa’s feet had been loaned from Ellen’s sister, whose husband once used it for hunting down rabbits, though of late it did little but sleep and snore, growling and farting whenever
disturbed – whenever the shadows became too dense for a picture’s exposure to be assured, when Elijah would set a lighted match to a twisted strip of magnesium, the unpredictable flare of white creating a spluttering fizzing sound.

Fizz!
Elijah was taking my picture, or rather he fiddled with his reflector and yet more strips of magnesium which either refused to light at all or sizzled ineffectively to leave the air hanging thick and grey with acrid fumes of swirling smoke.

I was to be an Ophelia – inspired by the painting by Everett Millais, the one in which Hamlet’s doomed mad love was depicted as drowned in a flower-strewn brook though, for reasons of practicality, I did not pose in our garden stream despite Elijah doing his best to try and persuade me otherwise. We had settled instead on the open tomb (that looked like a horse’s water trough, only in this case it was perfectly dry) which was built against one gloomy wall inside the Volka Chapel; a small annexe attached to the church’s main porch, just large enough for the camera to stand and beside which Elijah was tightly crammed, right next to the chapel’s altar.

Outside it was sultry, a hot August day, but I shivered in that cold dank tomb. I was doing my best to look mournful – and dead. Both of my eyes were tightly closed. Both of my hands were crossed at my breast, which was sheathed in the finest muslin cloth; an old dress from another attic trunk that had once belonged to our grandmother, wrapped up in white paper, perfectly preserved, and fitting as if it was made for me. I wondered what age she had been when she wore it – if she had also been twenty years.

When I’d asked Papa he could not recall. Papa was starting to forget.

I tried to forget Ellen’s story about the Volka Chapel tomb – saying that it once held the bones of a nameless woman and newborn babe. But in one of his rambling sermons when I was still a little girl, the vicar had distinctly said that the tomb had never been used at all, but was what they call a ‘symbolic’ grave,
a memorial for the Wars of the Roses when, in the battle of Mortimer’s Cross – a field, no more than a mile away – over four thousand men were slain. It had been a time of great tragedy but one of signs and wonders too, for that day came a portent magical in those moments before the battle commenced, when all of the soldiers were praying to God to make their side victorious, after which the heavens began to glow with the light of not one, but several suns.

A ‘parhelion’ – that is the scientific term. A sun dog the more poetic. But then, being so young at the time, I imagined an actual dog in the sky, and only when walking back home with Papa, when I must have mentioned such a thing, did he throw back his head and laugh and say, ‘Now, Lily,
that
would be a sight to see! Such an occurrence is very rare, but nothing to do with a real dog, and certainly not a miracle . . . whatever the vicar chooses to think. It happens when the air is cold and crystals of ice form high in the clouds, and when the sun shines through them, and
if
all the angles of light are just so, then the rays begin to diffract and spread, much as they do when a rainbow appears. But instead of seeing an arch in the sky those soldiers saw many coloured stars. They say to look on such things brings luck and I dare say it did for the Yorkists that day – all those soldiers who carried battle flags embroidered with symbols of the sun.’

‘Well . . .’ I pondered a little while, ‘that
sounds
like a miracle to me!’

‘It does! And I wish I could have been there.’ Elijah, very quiet ’til then, now spoke while staring up at the skies, which that Sunday hung dense with a low grey cloud – and much too warm for any ice. ‘Will you tell us more stories like that, Papa?’

Papa reached out and took our hands, and with one of us standing on either side he tilted his head to look up at the sky and recited some lines from a Shakespeare play –

Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun;

Not separated with the racking clouds
,

But sever’d in a pale clear-shining sky
.

See, see! They join, embrace, and seem to kiss
,

As if they vow’d some league inviolable:

Now are they but one lamp, one light, one sun
.

In this the heaven figures some event
.

‘What funny words!’ Elijah said. ‘What a funny thing . . . for suns to kiss – and why did those men fight over Rose? Was our grandmother really so very old?’ And then, without a moment’s pause, he leaned across Papa and kissed my lips, and I screwed up my face and batted him off, complaining loudly in mock disgust while Papa just stood there, staring up, and—

That memory rushed vividly into my mind when I lay stiff and cold in the empty tomb, while Elijah coughed and waved his arms to dissipate the magnesium smoke and a bright ray of sunlight came shafting in through the Volka Chapel’s window. I had to squint through slitted eyes while concentrating on holding my breath, trying hard not to sneeze from the scent of the flowers that Elijah had placed around my ‘corpse’, a few of their stems threaded into my hair, out of which little insects were crawling, tickling over my forehead and cheeks. Unable to stand one moment more I lifted my hands to brush them off, at which my brother sighed with frustration. ‘Lily, you’re fidgeting again. Now the exposure’s bound to be blurred. You’ll look like a ghost . . . half disappeared, or some goddess from the Orient with twenty pairs of arms.’

A second slide was set in place. The cap of the camera was removed and I stiffened myself not to move an inch even though my nose continued to itch and, for some reason, I don’t know why, while Elijah counted the seconds down I found myself musing on Freddie’s friend, the one called Samuel Beresford, and how he had sneezed again and again when plagued by the pollen in Cremorne. But such thoughts were interrupted when I heard the sharp thudding of footsteps on gravel and I made the hushed whisper while rising up,
scattering petals all around, ‘Elijah . . . someone’s coming. What if it’s the vicar?’

My brother froze, then muttered low, ‘He’s supposed to be in Leominster . . . visiting the hospital. Ellen asked at the rectory yesterday.’

‘We’ll be in trouble if he’s not. Quick! Kneel down. We’ll say we’ve been praying. We’ll say we’ve been collecting these flowers to put on the family grave.’

‘But what about the camera?’

I had no answer to that, hastily snatching up the blooms and, as the state of our panic increased, as the footsteps grew louder upon the path – oh, what a relief it was to see none but Ellen Page herself, a wrinkled brown potato face peeping around the porch’s door, panting and puffing when she said, ‘Come on home, you two. There’s visitors! I’ve already set the kettle to boil but . . .’

‘Is it Freddie?’ Such spontaneous excitement there was in my voice at the thought of seeing my uncle again.

‘No.’ Ellen returned the sternest frown. ‘Some gentleman calls himself Osbert . . . or was it Oswald? Oswald Black?’

‘Osborne Black!’ Elijah broke in. ‘Lily, you must remember. The artist we met that day in Cremorne.’

‘Oh . . . yes.’ I remembered
him
very well, but what was he doing at Kingsland House?

‘You must hurry and come,’ Ellen pressed again. ‘Mr Lamb was most insistent.’

Worrying then about Papa, I left Ellen with Elijah, she helping to pack his camera box as I headed off through the churchyard gate and ran over the field that led to our house, and soon, having crossed the stream’s wooden bridge, I arrived at the end of the gardens, waiting a moment to catch my breath and brushing down my flimsy gown while peering through tangles of shrubbery to see Papa standing within the frame of the drawing room’s veranda doors – and Papa must have seen me there, calling out with a tremor in his voice, Lily . . . is that you? Where have you been?’

Of late, any unexpected events caused our grandfather undue distress, setting off that shaking in his hand – and now it was back, grown more pronounced when Osborne Black appeared at his side – though I wondered if I would have known him again, without Ellen’s previous intelligence. His broad muscled figure was much the same, though perhaps he was running a little to fat; a fact not entirely undisguised by the finely tailored jacket he wore, beneath that black trousers, striped with green, and no crumples or streaks of paint that day. His hair had been neatly cut and oiled; a dark gleaming red in the afternoon light. And the great bushy tangle of beard and moustache that he’d sported when we previously met had been trimmed to expose an unsmiling mouth, all at once sullen but sensual. To be honest, while walking towards them both, I felt as unnerved as Papa looked, my eyes become locked with Osborne Black’s when I heard the deep resonance in his voice, still edged with the bluntness of northern tones, ‘Miss Lamb, I presume? Well,
you’ve
certainly changed. I remember a skinny, plain mouse of a girl.’

I blushed and hoped he could not see that I wore no shift or petticoats beneath my ancient muslin dress. I was not so skinny any more.