The Specimen Read online

  Their carriage came to a stop and Edward opened the door for her. He got out and helped her down. She was pitifully weak on her feet.

  “We did not bury my child, Edward. You had him put in a box lined with lead and locked him into a cold, dark place. He will not be happy, and I need to let him know that it was not me who put him there.”

  “Your father and I did what you yourself asked us to do. You did not want him to be under the ground.”

  “I did not want him to be dead; I did not want to let him go anywhere. At least allow me this.”

  “I will be here again in one hour.”

  He took her up to the house and surveyed its facade with distaste. The afternoon light made the masonry glow, and a blackbird sang in a branch somewhere above his head. It was very ordinary. In spite of everything, he did not want to leave her here, but he did not stop her. He reached up for her and knocked on the door and watched her go in. My God, he thought, this is ridiculous. And where was Charles, in all of this? In Cornwall, in exactly the place Edward wanted to be. Edward felt he had more right to be in Cornwall at that moment than any other man. He told the driver to take him to the park.

  “Which one, sir?”

  “Oh, just any park, I don’t care.”

  “Right you are then, sir, won’t take five minutes.”

  When he went back to collect Isobel he could see that she had been weeping. They travelled in silence. He didn’t know how to tell her that he would be returning to Cornwall the next week. She went to her room and he followed her.

  “Isobel, I can’t stay here and watch you do this to yourself.”

  “Don’t use pity for myself or my child as your excuse, Edward.”

  “I am sorry. I must go.”

  “Curiosities again, is it? Or some other brilliant new idea of yours?”

  “I know that it might seem—”

  “Edward, stop now. I am tired.”

  Chapter VII

  Falmouth. May, 1859.

  A Masqued Ball. If he was trying to make up for having neglected his favourite cousin, Freddie was doing it in the only way he could manage. His house in Falmouth town was overspilling with guests when Gwen arrived in the carriage Freddie had sent for her. Freddie leaped down the front steps of the house to greet her, wearing a grotesque papier-mâché grimace on the top of his head and waving an elaborate feathered mask in his hand.

  “No one but I shall know who you are. There will be no introductions, no ghastly formalities. We are going to have so much fun. No singing for those who don’t want to. No polite trivialities.”

  “This isn’t a little gathering, Freddie.”

  “I’ve a wicked mind, dear Gwen. Do put this on.” He tied the tapes at the back of her head and admired her hair. “The beetle looks lovely on you.”

  “It is too extravagant, Freddie. I can’t keep it.” The brooch he had sent her, a brilliant green beetle, was stunning in its design and the delicate craftsmanship of the goldsmith. Freddie had no regard for the amount of money he spent. It was only money, he always said. Happiness and love are more valuable. But Gwen knew that the money Freddie spent so easily was minted from the sweat and degradation of human beings he never had to see and never chose to dwell upon. It was the only subject which they could never discuss. If they did, then they would lose each other irrevocably.

  “Such rot, of course, you shall keep it. No one else could wear it with such an audacious charm. Besides, it was made for you. Now, come with me. All these people think that they have abandoned London mid-season for a bit of riotous sensational whatsit, so we had better give it to them.”

  “You’ve been planning this for weeks.”

  “Months, if we must be truthful. I have missed you so much, and I know how you hated the way those half-wits swooned over you at my mother’s gatherings. But I know you too well to know that you can’t actually like the way you’ve gone and cut yourself off from the whirligig of life.”

  “Don’t let’s get into that again.”

  “But this fixes everything! You can say whatever comes into your head to whomsoever you choose. No one can form an opinion of your opinions, if you get my drift.”

  “I think Effie would be better at this than me.”

  “Your sister has chosen her own amusements. She prefers mothballs to masqued balls.”

  Gwen laughed, and Freddie pulled his own mask down onto his face and put his arm around her corseted waist.

  Some of the guests had already spilled out onto the lamplit lawns of the garden and were having a treasure hunt among the topiary. The drawing room was set up as a gambling parlour and was a clamour of noise—music, the rattle of the roulette wheels, the chink of crystal and money, and shrieks of laughter. Everyone was playing Freddie’s game to the letter and wore a mask of some kind; even the musicians.

  Freddie spoke into her ear as they walked past a roulette table. “You see, dear cousin, we all need a mask to be our true selves. Look at them all, having such fun. In two days’ time they will be back in London; the last thrill of this mid-week excursion to the precipice of debauchery will be the rattling speed of the express locomotive, and when they alight at the station they will pretend it was all just a dream. Now, come and trot a gavotte with me.”

  Three men sat at one piano playing the music to which Freddie and Gwen began to dance among the crowd of guests. Freddie’s mask was the embodiment of the frustration Gwen knew he suffered in real life; the mask he was forced to wear and could never remove in the company of those who believed they knew him so well. Gwen was whirled about and lifted from her feet by Freddie’s exuberant interpretation of the music. She felt herself swept along in thrall to his enthusiasm. She glanced at the other masked guests in the confusion of costumes around them and recognised no one at all though she knew there must be people in the room who were known to her besides Freddie. When the gavotte came to an end another man took Gwen around on the next dance until someone else cut in halfway through. Over the next hour, Gwen drank punch and danced with more strangers; she lost sight of Freddie. The mask’s feathers stuck to the sweat on her face. She eventually went outside to find a private place to take it off and cool down. Others had the same idea, and there were several ladies wandering about fanning themselves among the tightly clipped hedges. She couldn’t find anywhere private enough and so kept her mask on.

  “Marvellous stroke of genius, wasn’t it?”

  Gwen turned to face the man who had obviously crept up behind her. “You refer to our host’s flair for entertaining.”

  “I do, indeed. I’ve been trying to work out which mask is Fernly’s ever since I arrived. Dark fellow.”

  “I think you mean that he has entered fully into the spirit of the evening.”

  “Absolutely. Yourself likewise. I may not be permitted to ask your name, but may I bring you some refreshment?”

  “A glass of water, thank you.”

  He left her, and Gwen finally lifted her mask away from her face and craned her neck up to the night sky. Some of the lanterns hung about the garden had burned out; where she stood, another guttered its last as she waited for the man to return. She heard the approach of a voice and put her mask back on, even though there was not enough light now to make out more than the outlines of figures backlit by the bright windows of the house. But it was not the man bringing her a drink. She heard Freddie’s voice and was about to come out of the shadows to greet him when she heard that he was speaking to another man. She pulled her mask off again and stayed out of his sight. The punch had made her woozy; away from the swirl of the company of others she felt it more acutely. She tried to listen to what Freddie and his companion were saying on the other side of the hedge. It seemed that at last Freddie had found someone with whom he could wear his ideal mask. Gwen leaned against the thick hedge, slightly jealous of his romantic success and his utter disregard for rules. Freddie and the other young man moved further on into the deeper shadows where they would not be chanced upon b
y anyone.

  Gwen retied her mask, but, unlike Freddie, she didn’t want to go through life feathered up in an elaborate disguise. She loved Freddie for his sincere and elaborate efforts to make her happy despite his own deeply melancholic nature, but he didn’t understand her desire to be treated with respect when she spoke openly about the things she cared for most.

  The man who had gone off to fetch her a glass of water now came holding it out in front of his person, his view of the ground limited by his mask. He picked up his feet and raised his knees in a very comical way. Gwen thought he looked like a grey heron.

  “I am very much obliged to you, sir.” She took the glass and drank all the water.

  “The lamps are going out. I’m afraid I left you standing alone in the dark longer than I anticipated.”

  “I didn’t notice. I was looking at the stars.”

  “Ah, a romantic nature. Much like myself.”

  “Actually, I was reflecting on the fact that I so rarely take the trouble to study the night sky, and that I can’t distinguish between the stars and the planets.”

  “I don’t bother about it myself. They all twinkle, and they are all a very long way away, so I understand.”

  “Yes. A long way away. Perhaps tonight is not the time to be thinking about the planets.”

  “They are playing a waltz, madam. Would you do me the honour again?”

  Gwen was disconcerted that she hadn’t remembered dancing with the man and that he had taken the trouble to seek her out in the garden, but she agreed to dance with him again. As she waltzed she wondered how long Freddie would spend out in the dark with the other young man and whether either of them would take off their papier-mâché masks. She thought of Edward Scales and wanted to know what he was doing at that precise moment. The sudden thought that he might even be there, at Freddie’s Ball, gripped her mind and would not leave her, even though she was convinced that a place like this was the least likely venue in which she would ever find him.

  Chapter VIII

  It was seventeen days since Gwen had received the letter from Edward, and she had heard nothing more from him until this morning. His short note told her that he would be taking a walk and begged for her company on the beach. Gwen picked up Freddie’s beetle brooch and fixed it into her hair; then she took it out again and put it back into the velvet box. She changed her clothes again, swapping her good dress for the things she had been wearing the first time and looked at herself in the long mirror. The feathered mask she had worn at Freddie’s ball hung by its tapes from the frame of the mirror. She unhooked it carefully and found some tissue to wrap it in. She placed it inside a hat box with some sachets of cloves and rosemary. When she picked up her jacket, her hands were shaking.

  “I know I promised to send the poems to you by post, but I wanted to give them to you myself.” He presented the book wrapped in paper to her. She opened it.

  “Thank you.”

  “I hope you haven’t minded the wait too much.”

  “It’s a very handsome volume.” In fact, it was a very tiny volume covered in a loud, blue-and-green tartan silk; it slipped into her pocket very easily.

  Edward was relieved and sighed through his nose as he opened up his knapsack and began to spread out on the beach a lunch better prepared than their first picnic. The giving and the receiving of the gift was over. It had troubled them both, and they were both glad that it been done. The pebble containing the ammonite was still there in the bottom of his bag; he took it out and tossed it up and caught it, before putting it down next to the bottle of wine and the corkscrew. Gwen picked it up and ran her finger over the ridges.

  He opened the wine and unwrapped wine glasses from newspaper. Gwen was touched by the effort he had gone to. He had brought delicacies and silver cutlery and starched fine linen serviettes.

  “Tell me why you like fossils so much, Mr Scales.”

  “They intrigue me. They are a conundrum. And I like to discover them, to uncover a creature never before seen . . . At Lyme, in Dorset, it was possible to pick up glorious specimens from almost any random part of the cliff or the beach. Yet, here in Cornwall there seem to be no fossils at all.”

  What he had really wanted to say was that he believed he could find something new, and that he constantly hoped for this because he wanted to name a creature himself. He’d even gone so far as to write out invented names of half-imagined curiosities. They came out as badly as the shapes he couldn’t quite fix in his mind’s eye, always ending with ‘scalesii’. He burned the scraps of paper afterwards. It would be as mortifying to be found out at that as—no, not today. He concentrated instead on Miss Carrick’s voice, the pleasant breaking of the waves, the sun on her skin.

  “Yes, they are very rare so far to the west,” she said, “though not entirely absent. It is possible to find trilobites, for instance, at a place further west from here, but I would be surprised if you were able to find one after six months of searching. But, surely, it isn’t so much of a conundrum, Mr Scales, since the geology of Dorset is quite different to that of Cornwall.”

  “Now you have stoked my attention, Miss Carrick. I was under the impression that your area of interest was the live flora and fauna of the region.”

  “But one specialism cannot exist without its complementary subjects, Mr Scales.”

  “Although, a creature like the ammonite, long since made extinct by the Great Flood, surely has but a slight connection to the live creatures with which we now inhabit the world.”

  “Mr Scales, I do hope you are being deliberately provocative.”

  “I am not insincere, Miss Carrick. I am impressed by your scope.”

  “You misunderstand me. I meant that I hope you don’t really believe that Noah’s Flood was the agent responsible for the distribution of fossils?”

  “I take it you do not.”

  “Mr Scales! Good heavens. People once believed that the earth was flat and that the sun moved around the earth. Scientific thought, experiment and deduction always bring us closer to the truth. Have you not read Mr Smith’s Strata?”

  “I have not. I wish that I had.”

  “I would lend you my own copy, if my library had not recently suffered fire damage.” Gwen had not been able to stop herself. She was aghast to find that Mr Scales’ interest was based on the assumptions she so despised in her own sister.

  “I’m sorry to hear about that. I hope no one was hurt.”

  “The damage was limited to a small area. It was caught in time.”

  “But, still, it must grieve you.”

  “It does. Books may be replaced, though. And you may find a copy, I am sure, quite easily in London.”

  “And when I do, I shall send it to you immediately.”

  “There’s no need, Mr Scales, though your offer is very kind. I would rather you read the book for yourself. It is a revelatory volume.”

  “I will make it my priority, Miss Carrick.”

  “I’m glad. But, Mr Scales, you must have had cause to wonder about the geology of this place, as opposed to that of Dorset.”

  “Your knowledge of rocks is superior to mine. I must confess that, before this year, I have never had reason to study them in the way you obviously do.”

  “I have lived with these rocks all my life, Mr Scales. Perhaps my advantage is unfair.”

  “But I think life cast you an unfair disadvantage, Miss Carrick. I have thought about what you said to me about the beetles you study and paint. If you had been born male, you would have been sent to university. You would have had an even greater advantage. Yet, that also would have been to my great loss.”

  “I wouldn’t wish to be a man, Mr Scales. Only that I should have the freedom to expand my knowledge of the world at first hand without attracting derision from all sides.”

  “All but one, Miss Carrick. I admire you a great deal.”

  “Thank you, Mr Scales.”

  “One very rarely meets a person like yourself. I consider myse
lf extraordinarily fortunate.”

  Gwen could think of nothing to say to this. She was annoyed with herself for having been harsh with Edward. His ignorance was perhaps not his fault. Why should a man have cause to stop and wonder about the strata of rocks when he had, as she assumed Edward must have, spent his life in the city. And now that she had told him he would be unlikely to find any more fossils in Cornwall, he would have no reason to visit again. He said he was glad to have met her, but she knew that he must have a life of some kind outside her own world and that he would not be able to accommodate a passing interest at the expense of his other commitments, whatever they may be.

  All of the food and most of the wine had been consumed. Gwen was drunk. She let Edward pour her a last half glass of wine.

  “I consider myself fortunate, too, Mr Scales. I hope you will write to me again when you return to London.”

  “I have no need to return to London for a good while, Miss Carrick, though that shall not prevent me from looking for the title you recommend.”

  “I expect that you shall return to Dorset and continue your search there.”

  “Indeed not. I believe I have finished my search for fossils, at least for the time being. There are only so many one may find room for in a cabinet.”

  “But your collection from the south coast of England will be incomplete. Perhaps I can help.”

  “Miss Carrick, you have already inspired me more than you can know.”

  “Rubbish. I have told you to read a book. Anyone could have done the same, and you would probably have found Mr Smith’s Strata without my help.”

  “It is by no means a certainty. What I have been trying to say, Miss Carrick, is that my interest in fossils has been supplanted by a much greater passion.”