The Specimen Read online

  “Then you must pursue it, as fully as is possible. There is nothing worse than a pursuit for knowledge left to wither and atrophy. I think it sinful.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of letting it happen.”

  “That is good to know, Mr Scales.”

  “Please understand me, it is my passion for you which overshadows everything else.”

  Gwen stood up; Edward scrambled to his feet.

  “Stay a while longer,” he said. “I have wanted to tell you this—please don’t reject me. I want so much to prove to you that I can be more than the person you must think I am.”

  “I’m not leaving yet. The tide is coming in, we must move further back up the beach or we shall be cut off here and have to climb the cliff, which I wouldn’t recommend, the topsoil of the overhang is—”

  The energy contained in his kiss, the taste of his wine-tainted saliva on her tongue and the force of his grip as Edward put one hand behind her neck and the other around her waist pulling her close to his body so that she smelled his sweat—wasn’t this what she had tried and failed to imagine after she had seen him in the summerhouse that morning? His own lungs seemed to be sucking the air from hers. His eyes were closed, and the image of his left hand working away at himself flooded her mind. The vivid colour of it. She found herself fighting for her breath, and he stopped the kiss but did not release her.

  “Will you reject me, Gwen? Will you tell me to go away and leave you alone?”

  “No, I don’t want that. But my feet are getting wet, and so are yours.”

  Edward picked up his knapsack, which was also wet, and put it over his shoulder, carrying the two wine glasses in one hand. Gwen lurched up the beach, hauling herself in sodden skirts, trying to gather them all in one hand, Edward holding her by the other. The wine bottle, the corkscrew and the empty caviar pot and serviettes were all left to the incoming tide.

  Edward and Gwen collapsed side by side onto the pebbles beyond the high tide mark. They watched the advance and retreat of the abandoned picnic articles. The waves churned the serviettes into the seaweed and they were lost from sight.

  “I’m sorry about your dress, and your good shoes. The salt will have ruined them.”

  “Yours, too.”

  “Yes, never mind it.”

  Edward’s second kiss threw Gwen off balance, and he clasped her so hard that she could do nothing to stop herself from being made to lie on her back. Edward’s mouth pressed to hers as the mussels stuck to crevices in the rocks. It did not frighten her. She felt that she was somewhere above her body, looking down at what they were doing. Just as suddenly as the kiss had begun, Edward finished it. He kept his face close to hers, so close that she was unable to focus, and after a minute she pushed him away, smiling at him. Her bottom lip had split and she tasted her blood.

  “I’ve made you bleed. I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. But talk to me now.”

  “What shall I tell you?”

  “A secret.”

  “I have none worth the telling.”

  “Everyone has a secret. Don’t be miserable about it. Tell me something about your distant past if you like. Then it won’t matter.”

  Edward looked at her and was stumped. He didn’t want her to become bored but what on earth could he tell her? He cleared his throat.

  “When I was nine, perhaps ten, my father took me on an expedition. Days of travelling. I was quite ill by the end of it all—the suspension of the carriage, the rocking and jolting. It was almost this time of year. There was hawthorn blossom in every direction. The scent of it; such a simple thing, but in such profusion. My father was a keen angler. He had a box of the most exquisite flies, which he made himself from feathers. I was clumsy as a child. Nervous. I wanted to please him. My feet were unused to the loose pebbles at the riverside, and my boots slid. I upset the box, almost crushing it, and the flies were scattered amongst the pebbles. I ran away down the riverbank after he had chastised me. He did not strike me. I ran away to the shade of some alder trees and brooded there.

  “And my eye came to rest on a strange thing: an insect, quite large, but almost completely transparent in a pool of sunlight, clinging to the overhang of a large rock by the water. I leaned down to look. It did not move. I don’t know how long I was like that, watching it. Eventually, I put out my finger to touch it, and it partly came away from the rock. I realised that it was not alive. I bent closer, and saw that it had an opening on its back. For some reason the thing frightened me.”

  Gwen sat up straighter. “You had found the empty skin of the mayfly.”

  “Yes, I understood that much later.” He had been about to tell her the rest and then held back how he had taken the thing between his fingers and crushed it. Over the years, Edward had remodelled this memory; telling it now with only his father and himself in the frame made the recollection easier to live with.

  “I don’t think I would recognise you if I were to meet you as you were then,” said Gwen. “Children can be so strange, can’t they?”

  Chapter IX

  THE TIMES, Tuesday, October 2, 1866.

  MURDER TRIAL AT THE OLD BAILEY.

  IT is anticipated that The Crown v. Pemberton will prove to be a most interesting case to observe. Mrs Pemberton (26) is accused of murdering Mr Edward Scales (38) on or around the 6th of August. The gallery in court was swamped with a surfeit of spectators by 8 o’clock this morning, some of whom had to be removed in the interests of public safety and decorum. The prisoner, when asked to declare how she pleads at the opening of the trial, said, “Obviously, I shall plead Not Guilty, my Lord. I may say I had supposed I would not plead at all, as I am affronted that I should even be in this position, and I do not wish to give one iota of credence to the charge by answering it. However, I feel even more strongly that I must dissociate myself from this dreadful affair by stating the plain fact that I am Not Guilty. I do not know what else I can say to support my case other than to look every single person here in the eye and say that I did not have a hand in this awful deed.”

  Detective Sergeant Gray, of the Metropolitan Police Force, gave evidence of his discovery at the Hyde Park residence where the body of Mr Edward Osbert Scales was discovered.

  “I attended the property of Mr Scales, on the morning of Tuesday, 7th August, accompanied by Constable Winters, and by Mr Pemberton, the husband of the prisoner at the insistence of Mr Pemberton. On entering the property, Mr Pemberton advanced before myself and my Constable, and began to open doors of the rooms and call to Mr Scales, whom I presumed to be still living at that time; that he must come out and answer for himself and that his time was up. Well, we soon after that found the deceased Mr Scales lying in the middle of the carpet in the morning room. Mr Pemberton spoke loudly to the tune that Mr Scales had better wake up. Constable Winters went to Mr Scales and turned him over whereupon it was obvious that the man was some time since passed away. Around the body were various bottles of spirits and spilled decanters of red wine. The room itself was in a state of great untidiness. At this moment, I had no reason to believe that Mr Scales had succumbed to anything other than a natural death. I sent Constable Winters for a doctor, and standing then in the hallway of the residence, I became aware of someone standing halfway down the main staircase. This person said he was Mr Morrisson, and that he was valet to Mr Scales and how could he help us. I informed him of his employer’s demise, at which he did not so much as blink an eye. He came calmly down to the hallway and proceeded without hesitation to the very room where Mr Scales lay. Asking him how he could know where the body lay, Morrisson answered that Mr Scales had kept to that room all the previous day and night, and had not moved from it.”

  Mr Probart asked why the prisoner’s husband had insisted the Police attend the property of Mr Scales.

  A: “It was some domestic matter, which did not seem to make any sense to me, and so to straighten it all out, I agreed to go there.”

  Q: “Could you be a little more s
pecific as to the nature of this domestic matter?”

  A: “I believe it was some quarrel that had occurred. Mr Pemberton made an accusation against the man regarding his wife’s—the prisoner’s—honour, sir.”

  Q: “Which part of the dispute did not make sense to you?”

  A: “Mr Pemberton seemed to think that a murder of some sort had been committed.”

  Q: “Which, it so happens, had, in fact.”

  A: “Aye, sir. Unfortunately, it turned out to be so.”

  Chapter X

  Helford Passage. June, 1859.

  There hadn’t been a single moment when Gwen had found herself thinking that she ought not to carry on. She did know, really, that this sort of encounter, might, in certain circumstances be dangerous but she didn’t care. He was more than she could have ever hoped for. Better than that, he made her feel—without sliding into cliché, she thought to herself, as she slipped on the steep path between the bamboo thicket and grabbed at the yielding green poles—alive. It made her laugh, to think of all the ridiculous introductions she had been through under the gaze of the Fernly household. Pointless, all of them. Apart from the fact that she had used the money from the sale of her gowns to buy the microscope. Freddie would never have understood her attraction to Edward, and she was glad that she hadn’t told Freddie about him, though there had been several times when Gwen had found herself almost on the point of confessing her secret.

  No one was watching her. No one knew. No third party expected anything, and nor could they disapprove. He wasn’t exactly any kind of romantic hero. For one thing he had the most peculiar sticking out pale hair she had ever seen and his skin was pale: freckled under his shirt and blotchy where the sun had caught his forearms. She stopped where she was amongst the stands of bamboo. This garden, she thought, we’re hardly managing to keep abreast of it. In fact, there were parts of the garden which were virtually impenetrable. Murray and his lad, they kept the paths down to the beach clear; and they kept the top lawns well. But still, more than three quarters had run wild. She was trying an experiment with two goats, tethered under a massive magnolia. They looked like stupid animals and by the end of each day they had managed to get themselves tied in knots under the tree but they did eat everything. There was a sort of scruffy clear patch now. This was where she was heading, along a winding path which took her in a zigzag of steep gradients to the place where there had once been a lawn, nestled in the scoop of a valley. It was sheltered from the wind but rather too much goat manure had spoiled the ground, so they couldn’t sit down.

  Last time, they’d moved the goats away from the magnolia and tethered them in a very wild patch, so that they’d been hidden. Only the goats crashing about and their silly bleating disturbed them for a while. They’d talked, exhaustively, about the stupidity of goats until the animals had settled.

  He’d pinned her against the tree, because of the ground being so littered with the dark pellets. Well, not pinned exactly. More supported. He’d kept her there anyway (perhaps, yes, she had been pinned, now she thought about it, because of her skirts being pushed up and to either side of her); and his head, she’d gripped his head to steady herself. None of it seemed wrong. The thrusting and the panting and the wetness between her thighs afterwards. He explored her with his fingers, running them back and forth until she was slippery and pliant in his hands and eager for anything that he would do, that he might think of doing; and then he would slip himself between her thighs. Make her keep them together, very tight, and he would delve there, and moan words in her ears that she hadn’t heard before she’d met him, and still didn’t know the meaning of.

  She didn’t like the smell. The runny then glutinous liquid which came out of him. It was too earthy. It caught in her throat like the smell of hanging poultry, and reminded her of certain flowers which attracted flies.

  As he tightened his grip on her, and breathed into her, Gwen remembered one of the young men she’d been introduced to. His own body odour had been strong. They had been dancing and even out on the balcony in a stiff breeze she had smelled his sweat. The pressure of Edward’s body reminded her of how the young man at that Ball had leaned in close; his breathing had been almost exactly like Edward’s was now. What hindsight was, indeed, she thought.

  “I was sorry to hear about your mother,” he had said to her, and she had pretended not to hear, but he had carried on. “I had the good fortune to have been introduced, once.” Still she had pretended not to hear, as the orchestra was very loud. “I am not one of those—” here she lost his words in the crescendo of the music “—you know, Miss Carrick.” She had thanked him for his company and had never spoken to him again. She couldn’t even remember his name. Charles somebody. A nobody.

  Edward clamped his mouth over a tender part of her neck near the collarbone and sucked hard. Gwen looked up into the branches of the tree as she tried to twist her neck out of his mouth. Edward’s groans were muffled; he let go briefly and then clamped his mouth again onto her neck, at the same time thrusting between her legs more furiously. Gwen concentrated on the sharp pinpricks of sunlight bursting through the leaves above her as they shifted in the breeze and made different patterns.

  Edward released her. He said, “I have found a place in town. I mean to establish a practice.”

  “A medical practice?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a doctor.”

  “The idea disappoints you.”

  “It surprises me.”

  “Oh. I had hoped to be able to see you more often. I hope I soon shall.”

  Gwen walked away and brushed down her skirt, buttoned up the collar of her blouse. She was upset that Edward had kept the secret of his life from her until this moment. How could he do this? One instant to be spilling himself between her clamped thighs, the next to be discussing some business arrangement. She had once asked him for a secret and he had told her some thing about a mayfly. He’s made himself out to be ignorant about science, she thought, and yet he must have spent years in his medical training. Edward came after her, tucking himself up.

  “I should have introduced myself in the proper way. For that I am sorry. It has been on my conscience. I would like to make amends.”

  “Why did you not?”

  “I have never thought myself particularly worthy of the title. Call it self-doubt.”

  “And now you are confident.”

  “My mind and attitude have altered considerably since meeting you. You must know that you have had a great effect upon me.”

  “I am disappointed by your secrecy, Edward.”

  He slid an arm around her waist. “I am sorry to have hurt your feelings.” He kissed her while he grabbed at the fabric of her skirt and pulled it up, slipping a hand underneath. He let his fingers rest, poised until he was sure of his impact through the kiss, and delicately drew her forgiveness from her as inevitably as the yolk in a blown egg must burst though the tiny aperture made by the pin.

  “We simply can’t afford anything so ridiculously extravagant. What on earth possessed you?” The irony of her own words were not lost on Gwen who looked at her sister across the breakfast table with cool fury.

  “He’s a gift.”

  “What? Oh, that makes it so much better. For heaven’s sake. As if it wasn’t already—”

  “Yes? You were going to say ‘bad enough’, weren’t you?” Euphemia’s lips were parched and cracked and as she pursed them into a thin line of satisfaction, Gwen saw a beading thread of blood ooze over the papery skin.

  “You are making us ridiculous, agreeing to have a pastry chef, of all things, in the house.”

  “I’m sorry, Gwen, to arouse such passion in you, but I can promise you that Mr Harris will do his best not to appear to be ridiculous under this roof.”

  “What kind of person, or mayn’t I ask, sends a, a dwarf pastry chef to a household such as this?”

  “An appreciative client. I knew it was his size which irked you, and not his culin
ary expertise.”

  “An appreciative—who exactly, which of them would—”

  “I have not the faintest idea.”

  “He’ll have to go back then; he’ll be poisoning us at the first opportunity. We simply can’t.”

  Euphemia threw back her head and shrieked like a herring gull. Gwen leaned over the table to slap her cheek and felt the smarting of it in her palm. Euphemia straightened up, instantly silent, glaring at her sister.

  “He comes with the highest recommendation,” she said. “From the housekeeper of a very good address in London.”

  Gwen regarded her sister in mute defeat for a few moments before telling her, “You appall me.” She left the table, snatching up the daily newspaper and stalked out with it, rolling it into a baton as she went down the passage to the kitchen to inspect this new servant.

  Chapter XI

  Helford Passage. July, 1859.

  “Let us be clear from the outset, Mr Harris—” Euphemia had invited him into the morning room to compliment his pastry, but a fever had lodged in her mind between the invitation being issued and her reading the letter Fergus Harris had given Susan for the post box that morning. It had been addressed to Mrs Isobel Scales in London. “Whilst you live under my roof, you are part of my household. You do not answer to anyone living in the establishment at which you were previously employed. Do I make myself quite understood?”

  “Ma’am.”

  “You will not write letters of any kind to my clients.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “And you will not make secret reports of any kind to any of my clients, nor to anyone else, about the private lives of people living in this house.”

  Fergus Harris looked up from where he had been staring at the floor. Euphemia saw no register of change in his expression as he replied that indeed he would not.