The Specimen Page 11

  Chapter XX

  September, 1860.

  In the last moments of daylight, Gwen wrote hastily.

  September 27, 1860.

  Dear Effie,

  I feel no compunction in my leaving, as I think it would do more good for me to do so. You must see now that your efforts to thwart my plans will go no further—stealing and hiding my correspondences from Mr Scales will not help you at all in whatever scheme you may have devised. But I will not admonish you further.

  On a purely practical note, I suggest that you take on another servant. I cannot say more, Effie, as I write in haste, other than to say that as your sister I have to forgive you, as I hope you will be able to forgive me. I remain, forever, your loving sister,

  Gwen.

  The tide had long since begun its climb up towards the place where she sat when Gwen heard Edward’s approach over the pebbles. In the last of the gloaming she had stared intently at the place he would appear from, and regretted not asking him to come earlier. The failing light played tricks, and once or twice she had started, thinking that a shadow among the rocks was his human form. Now it was unmistakably him.

  He greeted her and wanted to hold her, but she asked him to stand still. Suddenly, she was breathless. She didn’t want him to understand her surprise until he could see it. She didn’t want to let him anticipate what she was about to do. The waves lapped gently, hardly making a ripple as they hit the shore. Gwen could not have hoped for better conditions.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes, though I hardly know what it is I should be ready for.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “But it is dark.”

  “Close them in any case. Do it for me.”

  “Will you tell me when to open them?”

  “Count to ten very slowly, facing the water, then open your eyes again.”

  Edward began to count too fast. She flung off the coat she had been keeping wrapped about her and ran into the water. She let out a gasp as the chill touched her thighs but she plunged on further into the water up to her shoulders.

  “Gwen! My God, what has happened?” He had run to the water’s edge.

  “Be calm, Edward. Look at the water. Look at me.” She ducked her head under and resurfaced, beginning to swim back to the shore. The pinprick sparks of unearthly light, grouping in thousands, faring in the water around her body like waterborne fireflies had silenced Edward in his cry of panic. Gwen thrashed the water and lunged, throwing up armfuls. “Can you see it, Edward. Do you see?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I am dumbstruck. I have never seen anything like it in my entire life. You have brought the heavens down into the water. There are entire constellations falling from you. You are lit up, like a miracle, like Venus.”

  “Take off your clothes, Edward.”

  “What? Oh, no. I couldn’t.”

  “Yes. Take them off, come into the water.”

  “But the vision of you is so lovely. I don’t want to spoil it.”

  “Rubbish. Come in!”

  But he would not be persuaded. Gwen swam out in the dark, where the water was colder and where the lights no longer burst so readily about her. It gave her a thrill to be utterly suspended in the dark water, with the dark night above her. She turned on her back and looked up at the stars coming out in the sky, then, suddenly too cold, she began to swim hard, back towards Edward. The eerie, bluish lights in the water began to stream into life about her again as she neared the shore, and as she stood up, her legs weak, gravity pushing her down, she laughed as Edward caught her in his arms, wrapping his own coat about her, pulling her into his warmth.

  “I have a towel, Edward. There is no need to make your clothes wet.”

  “Look, the light is still falling from you, from your hair and, my God, it is truly astonishing.”

  He cannot swim, she thought. That is why he wouldn’t come in, why he did not rush into the water after me.

  Part II

  Chapter XXI

  October, 1860.

  Gwen leaned on the rail of the ship and held her head over the water, the spray stinging her eyes. She tried to imagine what it would be like to lean over a fraction more and then more—and then she tightened her grip. What was she thinking? That she had come unprepared for the boredom as well as the enervating effects of excitement. And where was her travelling companion? She saw him once or twice a day gripping the rail of the ship with a grim face, and the desperate character of him got on her nerves. That he was so sick at sea seemed such a miserable outcome. His greenish pallor had settled after a week to a general debilitation and waxiness. It was not fair. The bilious nausea she felt herself on waking was soon dispelled by rising and taking exercise on deck. When the captain asked after Edward at the dinner table in his scruffy quarters the compulsion to ridicule Edward almost overtook her sense of loyalty towards him. She looked down at the stained tablecloth and tried to make herself remember how much she had felt about him that had been revelatory in a very different way. Her recollections made her blush at the table, so that the captain imagined that his conversation was too much, and became solicitous, which made her agony even worse. Trapped in the conversation she wished herself outside. Outside she dreaded seeing Edward being ill over the side of the boat, the force of his vomiting not strong enough to get past the updraft, sending his expulsions back up to his face. This had happened only once; but it was the way she pictured him now at every hour of the day. It wasn’t fair.

  If she had been his wife she would have asked the captain for advice; or she may have felt obliged to stay at his side. She did neither.

  Under her blankets at night the press of the vast water bothered her sleep. The groans of the ship, and the activity of the men who marshalled the wind to her sails and got her across the unimaginable depths swam with her jumbled memories. She went in and out of sleep each hour, and once she thought that Edward had come into the tiny room. She thought that he had heard her muttered misgivings, but she couldn’t face him and turned her back to the cramped space and buried her face in her hammock. When she next saw Edward he seemed slightly better. He met her in the sunshine and blustered out something, but she misheard, or thought that she did, and so they tried to talk until the embarrassment of having nothing new to say to each other was overtaken by Edward’s embarrassment at having to excuse himself.

  When they arrived in New York and spent the day and night there together, Gwen’s spirit was repaired by Edward’s brief recovery. For the rest of the voyage she tried to hold on to the memory of those hours. But having to dine alone at the captain’s table every evening did test her.

  Swithin knew he was ugly. This woman was lonely, and he liked to see her smile. Her husband was in a bad way. Swithin couldn’t get much of a hold on his character. You couldn’t tell a man’s character from the way he wrote a letter or through the woman he chose. There were moments when Swithin almost became jealous of the fact that this pair were newly wed. But this eased off, and his sympathy for Gwen came back again.

  Gwen had spent as much time on deck, away from her own cramped quarters, as possible. One hour into the voyage she had begun writing in her journal.

  This barque is primarily a vessel for goods, for things; & I think that I am but a very small thing amongst the boxes in this makeshift cabin. Despite staring out to sea for much of my life, the fact of its vastness had somehow, somewhere slipped from my imagination: now I am surrounded by this ever moving, ever changing & never changing grey swell of fathomless water, without the security of a rock at my back. The wind, a different animal out here, tugs from all sides—and I had never imagined how swift the shift in temperature might be. A penetrating salty chill to the air, even on a day so warm on land—Land & the people upon it seemed so insignificant & small very rapidly as we drew away from everything solid & still. The elements rush us all along on this unknowable voyage. Level with the Manacles & I spent a quiet moment in contemplation and prayer, strangely wordless, but
more prayer than I have ever made, for the souls, past & future whose lives were & are yet to be lost there. Past the rolling breakers, crashing over the hidden treachery, I could not turn to look at the last view of our small river; instead determining my gaze on the horizon I saw a host of white gannets plummet one after another into the waves at tremendous speeds. Our course altered very slightly & as we neared the birds, the glistening bodies of dolphins broke the surface all around us, leapt along the rolling push, & I am sure I could spy as much joy in their dark eyes as there must have been in mine . . .

  Edward read this passage two days after it had been written. Looking for Gwen one morning, and finding her little space empty, he’d put his hand into the neatly folded blankets in her hammock. Perhaps, he told himself, to feel some of the warmth her body might have left behind. His fingers discovered her journal and closed in around the newness of the leather binding. How could he help himself from opening it? He’d only wanted to see some part of her. And so it was in that cramped space he had first seen that Gwen was happy to find a substitute.

  And now at the end of this journey he watched Gwen with the captain. He was tutoring her on the correct way to use a telescope. Edward watched how Gwen covered one eye with her hand and gave the captain her full attention.

  “The city of Pará is seventy miles up the river of the same name,” The captain spoke with his face close to her ear—he brushed Gwen’s elbow. “Although, as you will have noticed, there is still plenty of wind to carry us along.” Edward thought of moist breath on her earlobe: the captain’s, then his own.

  “Then where is the Amazon river, Captain?”

  “In the simplest terms the Amazon proper is two hundred miles, or sixty Spanish leagues from here.”

  She fingered the leather pouch at her neck and appeared agitated. Perhaps, thought Edward, she is recalling the scene she had imagined waiting at her destination as described to her by Swithin. Faced with the enormity of scale, he felt painfully aware of the smallness of the life she wanted to discard.

  “The largest river in the world,” Edward forced a cheerful note. He grasped the rails, inhaling deeply and leaning back, trusting his weight. “Good morning, Swithin.”

  “A good morning to you, sir. I trust this day finds you well?”

  Gwen murmured a greeting and did not look at Edward as he stood beside her.

  “Perfectly, thank you.” Edward’s hand slid along the rail and as he clasped her hand briefly, he noticed the appalling state of her kid gloves; they were stained with salty watermarks, smudges of dark stuff and paint. He suddenly felt that he should have thought of something as simple as gloves. He’d only thought of getting her enough good paper. And then, in New York, trinkets; he couldn’t remember what. He’d never thought of the look of her hands, only of what they might give him.

  Now that they were beyond the reaches of the open sea, Edward felt his nausea vanish. It was strange to be beside her on deck again. It had felt as though they had made the journey across the Atlantic on different boats.

  “You must excuse me, madam. I will leave you in the capable hands of Mr Scales.”

  “Your telescope, Captain.” Gwen offered it back, but Swithin put up his hand, glancing quickly away and then back to her. Edward noticed how the captain’s gaze flitted back and forth, landing on anything except her face. Edward revelled for a moment in Swithin’s discomfort.

  “I have another; don’t be concerned. In any case, this part of the river contains no surprises which may be detected by telescope. Besides, that kind of event is to be avoided, I should hope, by the skill of our pilot there.”

  Edward caught her eye and saw the look on her face. He saw the satisfaction in Gwen as she breathed in the knowledge that land was not an impossible distance from her.

  The wind dropped slightly for a moment, and Gwen shut the telescope. She opened the small bag at her feet, putting the telescope in there for safekeeping, and took out her paint-box, brushes and sketchbooks. She sat on a coil of rope and began to make a sketch of Edward’s profile as he leaned on the rail. He let her think that he was oblivious to her endeavours, but he noticed how awkwardly she sat.

  Captain Swithin approached them again to tell them that the Opal must wait awhile as the customs officer cleared it for docking. Gwen stopped drawing Edward and held the telescope out to Swithin, but he declined again, saying, “Please, I would like you to keep the glass.”

  “I couldn’t possibly steal a piece of equipment from you, Captain.”

  “Please,” Swithin insisted. “A memento of your first voyage across the Atlantic.”

  “Jolly decent of you, Captain,” Edward said. “A most essential piece of equipment, indeed. I’m sure it will prove very useful.”

  Gwen flushed. “Thank you, Captain. I hope you realise that I will have developed a squint by the time you make your return.”

  “That may well be; but I tend to think—and you may agree—that one should always have an alternative view at one’s disposal.”

  Chapter XXII

  Pará, Brazil. Late October, 1860.

  Just look at him. Seeing Edward prancing about among the crates being landed was something of a shock. It was a wild, bareheaded, leggy kind of dance under the flattening sun. All trace of his debilitating aversion to open water was miraculously vanished. Only the spikiness of his frame, his bony wrists, jittery as a cranefly, gesticulating at everything and nothing, spoke of his month-long ordeal on the Atlantic Ocean between Cornwall and here.

  Gwen thought, Great men, great thinkers, have suffered the same; and look at him, he’s well again now.

  Edward grimaced against the glare and picked his teeth with a long fingernail. Gwen turned away. The telescope in her hands slipped. Her palms were slick against the warm metal; its topmost section came to a slithery halt as she tightened her fist and sat down on one of the crates.

  It was a vast array of collecting equipment—Edward’s announcement of his unfailing enthusiasm and faith in himself and everything he turned his hand to. She remembered the list, four columns deep and two pages long. Inside the crates were Wardian boxes, elegant insect frames and cabinets, glass jars of all different dimensions. Gallons of formalin. New books.

  But Edward’s optimism was infectious, too. And as she watched him again, the pale hair flaming from his scalp, she remembered the lick of fire in her bowels and gut. She stood, feeling her petticoats clinging to her sweating thighs. Someone, a man, came up to her.

  “Grindlock,” he said. “Consignee of the Opal.” Mr Grindlock grasped her hand as if she were a man and pumped her arm. Grinning like a lunatic, he let go of her. Oh, God, let him not be a lunatic, she thought.

  “Mr Scales!” Mr Grindlock lurched towards Edward and clapped him on the back. Edward flinched in pain.

  Gwen said, “Mr Grindlock, I was about to buy some oranges, I wonder—”

  “No need to waste your money, good lady. There are fruit trees aplenty at my humble abode. You may pluck as many oranges as you fancy.” He ushered them away from the quayside up to his townhouse, talking all the time about how wonderful it was to see them. “My home is, of course, at your disposal. Consider yourselves most welcome whilst we look for something suitable in the suburbs—it being more convenient, I’m sure you’ll come to agree, for your collectings. Do you have a particular area of interest, Mr Scales?”

  They followed Mr Grindlock and tried to keep pace with his banter. She felt her underwear becoming soaked with sweat and then, by degrees, the rest of her clothes. Struggling to keep up, she bumped her parasol against several people; one of them was a priest.

  “I beg your pardon, Father.” Drips from her forehead ran down between her eyes and off her nose.

  “Senhora.” The priest barely turned. He touched his wide black hat and disappeared.

  By the time she entered Mr Grindlock’s cool house, every part of her body was running. Her clothes clung and dragged, and she felt as if she was drowning. Edward and
Mr Grindlock were both drenched. Their host wiped his square, fattish face vigorously with a large handkerchief and kept the soggy material in his hand. Several children shouting, “Pai! Pai!” ran up to Mr Grindlock as they walked in.

  “Hettie,” Mr Grindlock called into the gloom of the house, over his children’s heads, “I have brought two fine young people to keep us entertained.”

  One of the smaller children tugged on Gwen’s sleeve and spoke to her in Portuguese.

  “Remember to speak English to our guests, Pippi. It is polite. Now, here is my good wife. Hettie, I have brought Mr Scales, a naturalist, and his lovely wife. Mr Scales wanted to oversee the unloading of all his boxes of equipment, but I’ve put one or two of my men to the job.”

  “Another scientist!” Hettie clasped her hands in front of her large bosom. “Mrs Scales, you are the first lady I have heard of to accompany her husband. And I don’t blame you. If Mr Grindlock had to travel again, we should all have to go with him.”

  Hettie’s skin was mottled with a blue tint and quite dry. Gwen was conscious that her tendency to stoop was becoming more pronounced. She was a good head taller than Hettie.

  “But Mrs Scales is an artist, my dear.” Grindlock’s words echoed off the cold walls. “Very sensible of Mr Scales to bring her along. Keep it all in the family, much the best way. Now, let’s see about something to drink. We almost lost Mrs Scales in the market for the sake of an orange but what about some cold tea?”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs Scales,” Hettie said. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. We have it weak, with a slice of lemon. I have never acquired the habit of coffee. Mr Grindlock is partial to a cup in the morning, but I find it compounds the heat somewhat.”