Our Hideous Progeny, page 6
‘WHAT EXACTLY IS it that has Henry so bothered, anyway?’
It was a grey afternoon, the sky hung heavy with clouds, and Maisie and I were out by the shore. Henry had shut himself in the study since the morning, declining lunch and all attempts at conversation, but even on an ordinary day it was unlikely he would have accompanied us. The firth in winter was ‘hopelessly bleak’, he said, and although I could not argue otherwise, I was always glad of a chance to breathe fresh air. Maisie knew the country well, but not too well in winter, I think; she was forever ushering me down winding footpaths, saying there’s a wonderful meadow this way, a beautiful little burn! – only to find the place as grim and barren as everywhere else. She would frown then, and twist her lips in exasperation in the very same way that Henry did whenever something irked him, and I would laugh and promise her that I did not mind.
‘You mean about Mr Waterhouse Hawkins’s sculptures?’ I asked, as we turned on to a little fenced lane we had never taken before, winding up the side of a nearby hill.
‘Yes. I’ve never seen anyone so . . .’ She paused, clearly struggling for a diplomatic choice of words.
‘So enraged by a lot of statues?’ I suggested, and I watched her stifle a laugh. ‘Well, it isn’t so much about the sculptures themselves as Professor Owen’s design for them. His Plesiosaurus, for example; Owen has its neck curving like a snake or the neck of a swan, when its vertebrae really don’t look as though they could have bent in such a fashion. And the Iguanodon Owen has standing like an elephant or some other mammal – with its legs placed squarely underneath its body – while Henry proposes that it would actually have crawled along like a lizard.’ I frowned as a suspicion came over me. ‘You know, Owen must have modelled it like a mammal on purpose – I’m sure of it. If he had given it a lizard-like stature, that would have fitted with Lamarck’s theory that life originated in simple forms which have become more complex over time, but Owen hates Lamarck, of course, and so seeks to discredit him by proving that the Iguanodon was more advanced than modern lizards and . . . well.’
I made myself stop then, not only because it occurred to me that I was rambling but because we had reached a stile. After we’d clambered carefully over it, Maisie clutching my hand to steady herself as she hopped down off the last step, she swept her hair from her forehead and asked:
‘Does it matter?’
I blinked, taken aback. ‘What?’
She seemed to realize herself then, grimacing in embarrassment. ‘I only meant . . . does it change anything? Whether the creatures moved one way or another? It’s not as if . . . knowing will bring them back to life.’
I opened my mouth and closed it again, trying to put aside my indignation long enough to formulate an explanation. Of course it mattered; perhaps the knowledge would not help to build bridges, or make new medicines, but that was not all that science was about. Science was about the truth, about knowing what was possible and what was not; it was about the fervour I had felt looking upon the beached whale, or the fossil tooth in Catherine’s palm. I had spent my whole life since in service to that same longing: the ravenous beast that was curiosity.
But how to explain such a thing? Could I explain it to someone who had never known such a feeling themself? Perhaps I could tell her about the whale, or the tooth – but would she be able to look past the bloodiness of it to the wonder within? I cast her a worried glance, imagining her lip curled in disgust. It was unbecoming, this hunger of mine. I knew that all too well.
But when I glanced at Maisie again, I realized that she was clutching a hand to her chest.
‘Heavens, are you all right?’ I asked, stopping in my tracks.
‘Of course!’ she cried, though her voice was too high. Her chest rose in short and jagged bursts; now that our footsteps on the gravel path had stopped, I could hear the terrible wheezing that accompanied her every breath. ‘It’s merely . . . the hill is perhaps a tad too . . . too steep for me.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’ I ushered her over to the side of the path. ‘Come now, let’s rest a bit. There’s an outcropping here, see – we can even see the water through the trees.’
‘But what if . . . Henry wants your help this afternoon?’ she gasped as we sat down. ‘I don’t want him . . . to be cross with you.’
‘Oh, let him be cross. And besides, you saw the frenzy he was in this morning. He’ll hardly have noticed we’re gone.’
We sat there for a spell, staring out to sea while Maisie breathed raggedly in and out. After a quarter of an hour, however, I began to worry as her breath simply refused to be caught. I wondered if I ought to get her mare from the house; she had taken it on our walks before, when she was particularly tired, so that she might ride it on the way home. The prospect did not thrill me, for Henry’s warning of the creature’s temper had proved true, but just as I was about to steel myself and ask, Maisie reached into the pocket of her skirt.
‘Speaking of things that will make Henry cross,’ she muttered, with a ghost of a smile – and, to my utmost astonishment, she pulled out a packet of cigarettes and a little box of lucifer matches.
‘Maisie!’ I cried, somehow shocked and delighted and reproachful all at once. She gave a nervous chuckle and showed me the side of the packet.
‘They’re only for asthma! My doctor recommended them. Father never let me try them before.’ She fumbled with her gloved fingers to light the match. ‘They’re supposed to calm the lungs. Or warm them up, at least.’
‘And do they work?’ I asked, incredulous. She did not reply at once, for she was busy taking a long breath from the cigarette. I stared at her in fascination. I had never seen a woman smoke before; not in person. Only in cartoons and caricatures, where the woman in question typically wore bloomers and a top hat, ordering her beleaguered husband to feed the baby while she went to the races. But looking at Maisie now, sitting with her elbow propped upon her knee, I forgot all that nonsense. She was a study in contrast: her dark mourning dress against the washed-out sky, the shadow of her bonnet against her pale cheek, the cigarette against the entirety of her personality. She reminded me of something, though I could not say what – a charcoal sketch, perhaps, or an actress resting between performances.
And then the image shattered as she snatched the cigarette out of her mouth and coughed, spluttering, into the crook of her elbow.
‘Not . . . very well, evidently,’ she croaked.
I nearly laughed at that, which made me feel quite terrible, until I realized that she was laughing, too – albeit in a raspy, watery-eyed sort of way. A moment later, we were lost in a fit of giggles.
‘I don’t make a very good rogue, do I?’ Maisie managed, her hand pressed to her mouth.
‘I’m afraid not.’ I grinned. ‘A shame. I was hoping to see the look on Henry’s face when you started carrying around a pipe.’
Abruptly, her smile faltered. I cursed myself, feeling a pang of regret, as I always had in childhood when I managed to coax some small tide-pool creature from its shell only stupidly to scare it back in a moment later. She waved the cigarette back and forth, letting it blow out in the wind.
‘Yes . . . I expect he wouldn’t like that,’ she said carefully, sliding the remainder of the cigarette back inside the pack. ‘He never did like smoking. It reminds him too much of Father, I think. And drinking, too. He used to say he’d never touch a drop. But I suppose that must have become quite difficult, at social functions and such.’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I murmured, rather surprised at this; Henry had never expressed to me any great moral hatred of liquor. But he had never seemed overly fond of it, either. ‘That explains why that wine at Christmas made him so ill, then. And last year, when we—’
I froze, having sailed myself into dangerous waters. I had been thinking of the previous October, the night before the anniversary – not our anniversary, you understand, but the anniversary – when I had come upstairs to find Henry sprawled in an armchair with a bottle of whisky in hand. I ought to have chided him, I supposed; I ought to have pried it from his hand like a good wife and begged him not to start down that road of sin. Instead, I had pried it from his hand and drunk from it myself. I nearly choked in the process, as it was the first (and only) time I had ever had true liquor. Nevertheless, Henry and I nearly finished the bottle, and in the morning I was sicker than I had ever been in my life – sicker, even, than I had been the summer before, when in the throes of morning sickness I had been sure I would die before I saw my daughter born.
And the part that struck me most, even now, was how glad I had been to have him with me. How glad I had been that that night, of all nights, he had chosen not to go out.
Maisie was looking at me, a wary curiosity in her eyes. When had she heard the news, I wondered? When had Henry sat down and put those awful words to paper, as I had done for Mr and Mrs Jamsetjee? Had Maisie mourned, or sent condolences? She must have; I remembered seeing her letters pile up unanswered, along with the rest, on the corner of Henry’s desk.
Had she looked forward to being an aunt? Any more than I had looked forward to the slippery, terrifying prospect of becoming a mother?
I wondered, but I did not – could not – ask. It was all I could do to sit and stare out at the grey and anxious waters of the firth, a lump sitting hard in my throat.
‘Oh,’ said Maisie suddenly. I turned to her blearily and found that she was staring at her gloved hand. A moment later, I felt it myself – the pin-prick shock of something cold landing on the tip of my nose.
‘It’s snowing,’ said Maisie wonderingly. I made a soft sound of agreement, watching as she caught another snowflake on her palm. And then, in sudden realization, I leaped to my feet.
‘Oh! You shouldn’t be outside in weather like this! We really ought to—’
But to my surprise, Maisie reached up and pulled at my arm to stop me.
‘Let’s stay a little longer,’ she said, eyes shining. ‘Please? I want to watch it fall.’
And so we did. By the time we walked home, little drifts had gathered at the sides of the road and the bare branches of the trees were dusted white. Maisie took it all in with utter glee, crunching tiny frosted weeds beneath her boot heel and gathering up handfuls of snow to press between her gloved hands. As we made our way down a particularly steep portion of the path, she reached out and took my arm to steady herself – and then, to my surprise, did not let go. I looked down at my feet, pleased to see the way our footsteps began to fall in sync.
‘You act as if you’ve never seen snow before,’ I chuckled.
She shot me a slightly conspiratorial smile. ‘I haven’t.’
I nearly tripped at that. ‘What? But surely it snows here every winter?’
‘Oh, yes, it does. What I should say is, I’ve seen it snow before, but only from my window. I’ve never been out in it.’ There was a wistful note in her voice. ‘In fact . . . before this year, I’d hardly been out in winter at all. Never past the end of the garden.’
‘Truly? Not even when you were a girl?’
‘Oh, especially not then. Ever since I was small, I’ve . . .’ She seemed to be snatching for words again. ‘I had scarlet fever, first. Very badly. And then, after that, the doctors thought I had consumption, but it turned out to be bronchitis, and then troubles with my heart, and asthma, and that’s when my headaches started as well . . .’
‘Good Lord,’ I murmured, before I could stop myself.
‘Yes, exactly.’ She heaved a sigh. ‘It was years ago. I’m better now. Mostly. I’m out of bed more days than not, but . . .’
Her face did not so much fall as drift gently downwards. She seemed too lost in thought to continue. I thought then that we would walk the rest of the way in silence, so that she might rest her lungs, but instead, after a rather shuddering breath, she burst out:
‘It’s the sometimes of it that no one understands. Father and Henry, they always acted as though if I climbed the stairs too quickly, I’d die, or else I should be able to do it again the next day or it was proof I’d been pretending, but it’s not like that, it’s not like . . . a missing leg or something of that sort, where I’d need to go about with my wooden one all the time. It’s more like . . . the weather. Some days I can go out and walk and ride and sing and kick about in the sea, and other days I’m simply—’
She stopped again, as if she had bitten her tongue. I turned to look at her properly, at her cheeks flushed from the cold and the thin curls of frost-laced hair that had escaped from her bonnet, and I saw in her face something I had not seen before: anger. It was there only a moment; as soon as she saw me looking, she hid it away again.
It was as if I was uncovering her, I thought; bit by bit, grain by grain. I was reminded then of my honeymoon in Lyme, when I had watched a girl at a stall chipping out an ammonite from its bed of chalk. I had stood there for an age, entranced by the notion that there, smothered beneath layers of stone, lay whorls and ridges no human eye had ever seen before. Henry had stayed barely five minutes before announcing that he preferred his own fossils clean and tidy and ready to classify – that he would never have the patience for such a task.
But I thought I might.
THE MOMENT WE were back inside, stopping in the hall to shake the snow from our boots, Henry accosted us.
‘I’m rewriting my lecture for the Geological Society this May,’ he said, holding a stack of papers aloft with a flourish.
‘But why? What for?’ I cried.
Henry grinned. There was a slightly mad look in his eyes, like a man riding into battle, a general forging on against unwinnable odds. ‘The evidence on which Owen based his creation of Dinosauria and their upright stance is pitiful. It’s clear to anyone with a brain that he’s only doing this out of vanity; the man thinks himself Cuvier, a prophet of science, creating entire orders out of mere handfuls of bones, but I shall expose him! And then we shall see who is one of the “great names” of palaeontology, eh? We shall see!’
‘Henry,’ I said, resisting the urge to press my fingers to my temples, ‘Professor Forbes will never allow it. Owen is one of the Society’s vice presidents.’
‘And that makes him infallible? Immune to all criticism? Surely that old debacle with the belemnites disproves that. Besides, he is retiring as vice president this year. He is on his way out of the door, and I shall help shove him through it.’
I could see that he was in no mood to be reasoned with. Still, I thought sadly of the diagrams of marine fossils I had worked so hard to produce these past weeks. I heaved an irritated sigh. ‘Will it require new illustrations, this lecture of yours?’
At this, at least, he looked a tad apologetic. ‘A few, perhaps – but only simple ones, to demonstrate the differences between Owen’s mammalian design and the traditional lacertian model. I promise we shall find some use for your other pictures; perhaps that book on introductory geology that Mr Murray proposed I do. I am sure a chapter on ancient sea life would fit quite nicely.’ His lip curled. ‘We shall just have to hope Owen doesn’t turn his attention to ammonites next. He’ll have them cartwheeling across the sea floor.’
‘Perhaps your ancient reptiles stood up on two legs,’ Maisie said absent-mindedly, pulling off her gloves. ‘I did see a lizard do that once, at a fair. And a monkey, too. It ran around just like a person would.’
There was a prolonged pause. Henry looked rather startled, as though he had entirely forgotten she was there. I glanced between the two of them, catching Maisie’s eye, and nearly laughed.
‘Margaret, that is patently ridiculous,’ Henry said at last. He turned back to me. ‘I propose, my dear, that we leave this week. The annual meeting is on the seventeenth of February, so I shall talk to Professor Forbes about my change of topic then, but there are several books I will need to consult first. And besides,’ he said, with a disgusted sweep of his hand towards the outdoors, and the clumps of muddy snow that we had tracked into the hall, ‘I am sick to death of the countryside.’
He bustled out of the hall with his papers once more, leaving us in a metaphorical wake of dust. I turned to Maisie, wondering how I might wrangle Henry into giving her a proper goodbye before we left.
‘Back to London it is, then, I suppose. I am . . . sorry to be leaving you here on your own again.’
‘Oh, I shall be all right.’ Her tone was perfectly unruffled. I watched as she carefully folded her gloves, carefully laid them on the hall table, carefully straightened the vase Henry had set awry on his way out.
‘I shall write.’
The words had spilled out of me with far more force than necessary. Maisie’s head snapped up, and she blinked at me, owl-eyed. For a moment I was afraid I had been too bold. Perhaps she preferred her own company; perhaps there was a reason she did not receive letters; perhaps they were only a bother to her.
Perhaps, yet again, I had misread the situation.
But then, to my utmost relief, she broke into a smile.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly, her face bright as the daisies she had spent all that morning picking out in tiny white stitches. ‘Yes, I should like that.’
6
The prospect of such an occupation made every other circumstance of existence pass before me like a dream, and that thought only had to me the reality of life.
*
Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies.
— MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
THERE IS AN art to socializing, I think; one, like many arts, which must be practised from infancy if one wishes to be any good at it. But then, I suppose, some people will never be masters, no matter how young they start. For I remember that the first time I sat before the pianoforte, watching my teacher’s fingers flit across the keys, I thought, That will never be me. I do not have it in me.
It was the very same thought I had my first summer in London, while visiting with Mr and Mrs Jamsetjee.
It was my twentieth year then, in life and in Norton Green, and despite all my love for the island’s chalk-white cliffs and crashing waves, I felt in that town like a tiger pacing its cage. My schooling was long over; my only occupations were drawing, reading, and agonizing over my prospects. My grandmother had made exceptionally clear to me from the beginning that she had promised my father she would provide for me for the rest of her life – though not, crucially, the rest of mine. In fact, the law forbade it, as, being illegitimate, I could not inherit her estate. Two paths stretched ahead of me, then: marriage or destitution. But with neither a dowry nor any of the practical skills required of a working man’s wife, my options were few. The most likely candidate seemed to be the widower Thomas Doyle, whose three raucous children I watched slapping each other like feral cats in the backmost pews of All Saints’ Church each Sunday, and whom my grandmother was continually inviting over for dinner. For someone who had for the previous nineteen years expressed no interest whatsoever in helping me find a match, this sudden fervour was both confusing and suspicious, founded not at all upon any indication of interest from Mr Doyle that I could see, but rather – I was sure – upon the fact of his recently having purchased a sizeable house overlooking the sea. Our own home was a mediocre affair, its furnishings and decorations hastily redone following the awful fire thirty years before; clearly, after all the years my grandmother had fed and clothed me, she expected repayment in the form of more elegant lodgings in which she might spend her final years. But, to her credit, it was also true that Mr Doyle was likely the only man on the island who would overlook my shortcomings, so long as I could be a mother for his children.
It was a grey afternoon, the sky hung heavy with clouds, and Maisie and I were out by the shore. Henry had shut himself in the study since the morning, declining lunch and all attempts at conversation, but even on an ordinary day it was unlikely he would have accompanied us. The firth in winter was ‘hopelessly bleak’, he said, and although I could not argue otherwise, I was always glad of a chance to breathe fresh air. Maisie knew the country well, but not too well in winter, I think; she was forever ushering me down winding footpaths, saying there’s a wonderful meadow this way, a beautiful little burn! – only to find the place as grim and barren as everywhere else. She would frown then, and twist her lips in exasperation in the very same way that Henry did whenever something irked him, and I would laugh and promise her that I did not mind.
‘You mean about Mr Waterhouse Hawkins’s sculptures?’ I asked, as we turned on to a little fenced lane we had never taken before, winding up the side of a nearby hill.
‘Yes. I’ve never seen anyone so . . .’ She paused, clearly struggling for a diplomatic choice of words.
‘So enraged by a lot of statues?’ I suggested, and I watched her stifle a laugh. ‘Well, it isn’t so much about the sculptures themselves as Professor Owen’s design for them. His Plesiosaurus, for example; Owen has its neck curving like a snake or the neck of a swan, when its vertebrae really don’t look as though they could have bent in such a fashion. And the Iguanodon Owen has standing like an elephant or some other mammal – with its legs placed squarely underneath its body – while Henry proposes that it would actually have crawled along like a lizard.’ I frowned as a suspicion came over me. ‘You know, Owen must have modelled it like a mammal on purpose – I’m sure of it. If he had given it a lizard-like stature, that would have fitted with Lamarck’s theory that life originated in simple forms which have become more complex over time, but Owen hates Lamarck, of course, and so seeks to discredit him by proving that the Iguanodon was more advanced than modern lizards and . . . well.’
I made myself stop then, not only because it occurred to me that I was rambling but because we had reached a stile. After we’d clambered carefully over it, Maisie clutching my hand to steady herself as she hopped down off the last step, she swept her hair from her forehead and asked:
‘Does it matter?’
I blinked, taken aback. ‘What?’
She seemed to realize herself then, grimacing in embarrassment. ‘I only meant . . . does it change anything? Whether the creatures moved one way or another? It’s not as if . . . knowing will bring them back to life.’
I opened my mouth and closed it again, trying to put aside my indignation long enough to formulate an explanation. Of course it mattered; perhaps the knowledge would not help to build bridges, or make new medicines, but that was not all that science was about. Science was about the truth, about knowing what was possible and what was not; it was about the fervour I had felt looking upon the beached whale, or the fossil tooth in Catherine’s palm. I had spent my whole life since in service to that same longing: the ravenous beast that was curiosity.
But how to explain such a thing? Could I explain it to someone who had never known such a feeling themself? Perhaps I could tell her about the whale, or the tooth – but would she be able to look past the bloodiness of it to the wonder within? I cast her a worried glance, imagining her lip curled in disgust. It was unbecoming, this hunger of mine. I knew that all too well.
But when I glanced at Maisie again, I realized that she was clutching a hand to her chest.
‘Heavens, are you all right?’ I asked, stopping in my tracks.
‘Of course!’ she cried, though her voice was too high. Her chest rose in short and jagged bursts; now that our footsteps on the gravel path had stopped, I could hear the terrible wheezing that accompanied her every breath. ‘It’s merely . . . the hill is perhaps a tad too . . . too steep for me.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’ I ushered her over to the side of the path. ‘Come now, let’s rest a bit. There’s an outcropping here, see – we can even see the water through the trees.’
‘But what if . . . Henry wants your help this afternoon?’ she gasped as we sat down. ‘I don’t want him . . . to be cross with you.’
‘Oh, let him be cross. And besides, you saw the frenzy he was in this morning. He’ll hardly have noticed we’re gone.’
We sat there for a spell, staring out to sea while Maisie breathed raggedly in and out. After a quarter of an hour, however, I began to worry as her breath simply refused to be caught. I wondered if I ought to get her mare from the house; she had taken it on our walks before, when she was particularly tired, so that she might ride it on the way home. The prospect did not thrill me, for Henry’s warning of the creature’s temper had proved true, but just as I was about to steel myself and ask, Maisie reached into the pocket of her skirt.
‘Speaking of things that will make Henry cross,’ she muttered, with a ghost of a smile – and, to my utmost astonishment, she pulled out a packet of cigarettes and a little box of lucifer matches.
‘Maisie!’ I cried, somehow shocked and delighted and reproachful all at once. She gave a nervous chuckle and showed me the side of the packet.
‘They’re only for asthma! My doctor recommended them. Father never let me try them before.’ She fumbled with her gloved fingers to light the match. ‘They’re supposed to calm the lungs. Or warm them up, at least.’
‘And do they work?’ I asked, incredulous. She did not reply at once, for she was busy taking a long breath from the cigarette. I stared at her in fascination. I had never seen a woman smoke before; not in person. Only in cartoons and caricatures, where the woman in question typically wore bloomers and a top hat, ordering her beleaguered husband to feed the baby while she went to the races. But looking at Maisie now, sitting with her elbow propped upon her knee, I forgot all that nonsense. She was a study in contrast: her dark mourning dress against the washed-out sky, the shadow of her bonnet against her pale cheek, the cigarette against the entirety of her personality. She reminded me of something, though I could not say what – a charcoal sketch, perhaps, or an actress resting between performances.
And then the image shattered as she snatched the cigarette out of her mouth and coughed, spluttering, into the crook of her elbow.
‘Not . . . very well, evidently,’ she croaked.
I nearly laughed at that, which made me feel quite terrible, until I realized that she was laughing, too – albeit in a raspy, watery-eyed sort of way. A moment later, we were lost in a fit of giggles.
‘I don’t make a very good rogue, do I?’ Maisie managed, her hand pressed to her mouth.
‘I’m afraid not.’ I grinned. ‘A shame. I was hoping to see the look on Henry’s face when you started carrying around a pipe.’
Abruptly, her smile faltered. I cursed myself, feeling a pang of regret, as I always had in childhood when I managed to coax some small tide-pool creature from its shell only stupidly to scare it back in a moment later. She waved the cigarette back and forth, letting it blow out in the wind.
‘Yes . . . I expect he wouldn’t like that,’ she said carefully, sliding the remainder of the cigarette back inside the pack. ‘He never did like smoking. It reminds him too much of Father, I think. And drinking, too. He used to say he’d never touch a drop. But I suppose that must have become quite difficult, at social functions and such.’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I murmured, rather surprised at this; Henry had never expressed to me any great moral hatred of liquor. But he had never seemed overly fond of it, either. ‘That explains why that wine at Christmas made him so ill, then. And last year, when we—’
I froze, having sailed myself into dangerous waters. I had been thinking of the previous October, the night before the anniversary – not our anniversary, you understand, but the anniversary – when I had come upstairs to find Henry sprawled in an armchair with a bottle of whisky in hand. I ought to have chided him, I supposed; I ought to have pried it from his hand like a good wife and begged him not to start down that road of sin. Instead, I had pried it from his hand and drunk from it myself. I nearly choked in the process, as it was the first (and only) time I had ever had true liquor. Nevertheless, Henry and I nearly finished the bottle, and in the morning I was sicker than I had ever been in my life – sicker, even, than I had been the summer before, when in the throes of morning sickness I had been sure I would die before I saw my daughter born.
And the part that struck me most, even now, was how glad I had been to have him with me. How glad I had been that that night, of all nights, he had chosen not to go out.
Maisie was looking at me, a wary curiosity in her eyes. When had she heard the news, I wondered? When had Henry sat down and put those awful words to paper, as I had done for Mr and Mrs Jamsetjee? Had Maisie mourned, or sent condolences? She must have; I remembered seeing her letters pile up unanswered, along with the rest, on the corner of Henry’s desk.
Had she looked forward to being an aunt? Any more than I had looked forward to the slippery, terrifying prospect of becoming a mother?
I wondered, but I did not – could not – ask. It was all I could do to sit and stare out at the grey and anxious waters of the firth, a lump sitting hard in my throat.
‘Oh,’ said Maisie suddenly. I turned to her blearily and found that she was staring at her gloved hand. A moment later, I felt it myself – the pin-prick shock of something cold landing on the tip of my nose.
‘It’s snowing,’ said Maisie wonderingly. I made a soft sound of agreement, watching as she caught another snowflake on her palm. And then, in sudden realization, I leaped to my feet.
‘Oh! You shouldn’t be outside in weather like this! We really ought to—’
But to my surprise, Maisie reached up and pulled at my arm to stop me.
‘Let’s stay a little longer,’ she said, eyes shining. ‘Please? I want to watch it fall.’
And so we did. By the time we walked home, little drifts had gathered at the sides of the road and the bare branches of the trees were dusted white. Maisie took it all in with utter glee, crunching tiny frosted weeds beneath her boot heel and gathering up handfuls of snow to press between her gloved hands. As we made our way down a particularly steep portion of the path, she reached out and took my arm to steady herself – and then, to my surprise, did not let go. I looked down at my feet, pleased to see the way our footsteps began to fall in sync.
‘You act as if you’ve never seen snow before,’ I chuckled.
She shot me a slightly conspiratorial smile. ‘I haven’t.’
I nearly tripped at that. ‘What? But surely it snows here every winter?’
‘Oh, yes, it does. What I should say is, I’ve seen it snow before, but only from my window. I’ve never been out in it.’ There was a wistful note in her voice. ‘In fact . . . before this year, I’d hardly been out in winter at all. Never past the end of the garden.’
‘Truly? Not even when you were a girl?’
‘Oh, especially not then. Ever since I was small, I’ve . . .’ She seemed to be snatching for words again. ‘I had scarlet fever, first. Very badly. And then, after that, the doctors thought I had consumption, but it turned out to be bronchitis, and then troubles with my heart, and asthma, and that’s when my headaches started as well . . .’
‘Good Lord,’ I murmured, before I could stop myself.
‘Yes, exactly.’ She heaved a sigh. ‘It was years ago. I’m better now. Mostly. I’m out of bed more days than not, but . . .’
Her face did not so much fall as drift gently downwards. She seemed too lost in thought to continue. I thought then that we would walk the rest of the way in silence, so that she might rest her lungs, but instead, after a rather shuddering breath, she burst out:
‘It’s the sometimes of it that no one understands. Father and Henry, they always acted as though if I climbed the stairs too quickly, I’d die, or else I should be able to do it again the next day or it was proof I’d been pretending, but it’s not like that, it’s not like . . . a missing leg or something of that sort, where I’d need to go about with my wooden one all the time. It’s more like . . . the weather. Some days I can go out and walk and ride and sing and kick about in the sea, and other days I’m simply—’
She stopped again, as if she had bitten her tongue. I turned to look at her properly, at her cheeks flushed from the cold and the thin curls of frost-laced hair that had escaped from her bonnet, and I saw in her face something I had not seen before: anger. It was there only a moment; as soon as she saw me looking, she hid it away again.
It was as if I was uncovering her, I thought; bit by bit, grain by grain. I was reminded then of my honeymoon in Lyme, when I had watched a girl at a stall chipping out an ammonite from its bed of chalk. I had stood there for an age, entranced by the notion that there, smothered beneath layers of stone, lay whorls and ridges no human eye had ever seen before. Henry had stayed barely five minutes before announcing that he preferred his own fossils clean and tidy and ready to classify – that he would never have the patience for such a task.
But I thought I might.
THE MOMENT WE were back inside, stopping in the hall to shake the snow from our boots, Henry accosted us.
‘I’m rewriting my lecture for the Geological Society this May,’ he said, holding a stack of papers aloft with a flourish.
‘But why? What for?’ I cried.
Henry grinned. There was a slightly mad look in his eyes, like a man riding into battle, a general forging on against unwinnable odds. ‘The evidence on which Owen based his creation of Dinosauria and their upright stance is pitiful. It’s clear to anyone with a brain that he’s only doing this out of vanity; the man thinks himself Cuvier, a prophet of science, creating entire orders out of mere handfuls of bones, but I shall expose him! And then we shall see who is one of the “great names” of palaeontology, eh? We shall see!’
‘Henry,’ I said, resisting the urge to press my fingers to my temples, ‘Professor Forbes will never allow it. Owen is one of the Society’s vice presidents.’
‘And that makes him infallible? Immune to all criticism? Surely that old debacle with the belemnites disproves that. Besides, he is retiring as vice president this year. He is on his way out of the door, and I shall help shove him through it.’
I could see that he was in no mood to be reasoned with. Still, I thought sadly of the diagrams of marine fossils I had worked so hard to produce these past weeks. I heaved an irritated sigh. ‘Will it require new illustrations, this lecture of yours?’
At this, at least, he looked a tad apologetic. ‘A few, perhaps – but only simple ones, to demonstrate the differences between Owen’s mammalian design and the traditional lacertian model. I promise we shall find some use for your other pictures; perhaps that book on introductory geology that Mr Murray proposed I do. I am sure a chapter on ancient sea life would fit quite nicely.’ His lip curled. ‘We shall just have to hope Owen doesn’t turn his attention to ammonites next. He’ll have them cartwheeling across the sea floor.’
‘Perhaps your ancient reptiles stood up on two legs,’ Maisie said absent-mindedly, pulling off her gloves. ‘I did see a lizard do that once, at a fair. And a monkey, too. It ran around just like a person would.’
There was a prolonged pause. Henry looked rather startled, as though he had entirely forgotten she was there. I glanced between the two of them, catching Maisie’s eye, and nearly laughed.
‘Margaret, that is patently ridiculous,’ Henry said at last. He turned back to me. ‘I propose, my dear, that we leave this week. The annual meeting is on the seventeenth of February, so I shall talk to Professor Forbes about my change of topic then, but there are several books I will need to consult first. And besides,’ he said, with a disgusted sweep of his hand towards the outdoors, and the clumps of muddy snow that we had tracked into the hall, ‘I am sick to death of the countryside.’
He bustled out of the hall with his papers once more, leaving us in a metaphorical wake of dust. I turned to Maisie, wondering how I might wrangle Henry into giving her a proper goodbye before we left.
‘Back to London it is, then, I suppose. I am . . . sorry to be leaving you here on your own again.’
‘Oh, I shall be all right.’ Her tone was perfectly unruffled. I watched as she carefully folded her gloves, carefully laid them on the hall table, carefully straightened the vase Henry had set awry on his way out.
‘I shall write.’
The words had spilled out of me with far more force than necessary. Maisie’s head snapped up, and she blinked at me, owl-eyed. For a moment I was afraid I had been too bold. Perhaps she preferred her own company; perhaps there was a reason she did not receive letters; perhaps they were only a bother to her.
Perhaps, yet again, I had misread the situation.
But then, to my utmost relief, she broke into a smile.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly, her face bright as the daisies she had spent all that morning picking out in tiny white stitches. ‘Yes, I should like that.’
6
The prospect of such an occupation made every other circumstance of existence pass before me like a dream, and that thought only had to me the reality of life.
*
Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies.
— MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
THERE IS AN art to socializing, I think; one, like many arts, which must be practised from infancy if one wishes to be any good at it. But then, I suppose, some people will never be masters, no matter how young they start. For I remember that the first time I sat before the pianoforte, watching my teacher’s fingers flit across the keys, I thought, That will never be me. I do not have it in me.
It was the very same thought I had my first summer in London, while visiting with Mr and Mrs Jamsetjee.
It was my twentieth year then, in life and in Norton Green, and despite all my love for the island’s chalk-white cliffs and crashing waves, I felt in that town like a tiger pacing its cage. My schooling was long over; my only occupations were drawing, reading, and agonizing over my prospects. My grandmother had made exceptionally clear to me from the beginning that she had promised my father she would provide for me for the rest of her life – though not, crucially, the rest of mine. In fact, the law forbade it, as, being illegitimate, I could not inherit her estate. Two paths stretched ahead of me, then: marriage or destitution. But with neither a dowry nor any of the practical skills required of a working man’s wife, my options were few. The most likely candidate seemed to be the widower Thomas Doyle, whose three raucous children I watched slapping each other like feral cats in the backmost pews of All Saints’ Church each Sunday, and whom my grandmother was continually inviting over for dinner. For someone who had for the previous nineteen years expressed no interest whatsoever in helping me find a match, this sudden fervour was both confusing and suspicious, founded not at all upon any indication of interest from Mr Doyle that I could see, but rather – I was sure – upon the fact of his recently having purchased a sizeable house overlooking the sea. Our own home was a mediocre affair, its furnishings and decorations hastily redone following the awful fire thirty years before; clearly, after all the years my grandmother had fed and clothed me, she expected repayment in the form of more elegant lodgings in which she might spend her final years. But, to her credit, it was also true that Mr Doyle was likely the only man on the island who would overlook my shortcomings, so long as I could be a mother for his children.
