The World Before Us (3 page)

When Leeson and the girl caught up to him, they too took in the house hunkered in the distance. From the edge of the lawn it appeared as if some large and ornate stone had been dropped from the sky into an impossibly manicured setting. The scent of burning wood in the air lent
itself to the idea of warmth, a place to sit down, something to drink—tea perhaps, or a cup of water.

Leeson turned to Herschel and swung out his arm as if clearing the way of obstructions, and the farmer’s round face filled with delight, though he didn’t move. In the end it was Leeson who rapped the lion’s-head door knocker against its plate, adjusting his cuffs while he listened over the
chirr
of crickets for the sound of footsteps. A minute later the door opened and a young footman with a centre part and a thin moustache appeared; he cleared his throat and moved his neck from side to side as if just settling into his collar.

“May I help you, sir?”

Leeson recognized the man’s enunciation; it was the kind developed through practice. In better days he had heard the same forced diction from a variety of servants employed in the houses he visited for work. “Yes, you may,” he replied. He brought his heels together in an effort to stand taller. “Is the Master of the estate at home?”

The footman furrowed his brow and peered over Leeson’s shoulder at the others. “Might I ask who is calling?”

“Indeed.” Leeson smiled back at his companions, fighting the urge to explain Herschel’s lack of trousers or to flatten his own hair where the grey bits always stuck out from the brown. He turned again to the footman. Behind him he could make out a columned entry hall, a modest candle chandelier, a thick Turkish rug and a mahogany table set against the back wall holding five or six leather-bound volumes stacked on their sides. He caught a glimpse of a large mounted bear, its open maw and the spread of its brown claws, before he shifted his gaze back to the books. There was a time in his life when he’d spent whole days poring over tomes such as these, some of them half the size of his desk, all of them embossed and bound in similarly dyed leathers.

“Sir?”

Leeson sighed. It wouldn’t serve any purpose to be a probate solicitor
here, but the footman expected something. He glanced over the footman’s shoulder again, wishing a glass of claret might appear to relieve him of his thirst. “Please say that Mr. Charles Leeson is calling.”

“Mr. Leeson, is it?”

“Yes, and company—” He gestured vaguely behind him.

“And might I tell Mr. Farrington your business?”

“You may. I am here regarding a bequest.”

The footman furrowed his brow again, an expression that had annoyed Leeson the first time.

“Yes, a
bequest
,” Leeson repeated, savouring the shape of the word in his mouth, “of books. I regret I do not have my card.” He patted down the front of his shirt as if it might sprout a pocket.

“Books?” the footman repeated somewhat dubiously.

“Yes. I am here in my capacity as—” and here he paused, considered a variety of overtures, and then said “—the Assistant Librarian of the British Museum,” hastening to add, lest the footman turn them away, “London.”

In the end they stayed only briefly. George Farrington allowed his visitors to rest in the small parlour while he sent the maid for refreshments. Herschel plopped himself down on the horsehair sofa, which meant that Leeson had to take the wingback that was situated farther away from the fire. The room was full of the sound of ticking clocks: a pillared carriage clock on the mantel, an ornate brass skeleton model with an ebony face on the tallest of the bookshelves and an old mahogany longcase on the opposite wall wedged between a stuffed grouse and a mounted fox. Two of the clocks were out of sync, so that every second had two beats, the confidently announced tick of the larger clock’s brass hand followed by a faint echo from the bookshelf. Farrington did not seem to notice. His hospitality extended to a series of questions: Which way had they come
to Inglewood? Were they expected elsewhere? And, less pointedly, what particular flora or fauna might they have noted on the way? These questions were followed by a brief declamation on the state of the surrounding countryside, after which the maid intervened with tea. It arrived on a gleaming silver platter that she set down on a table with claw feet carved so realistically that Leeson believed they were gripping the rug. George Farrington’s mother, Prudence, joined them shortly thereafter, though she stopped upon entering the room, a strained expression on her long face as if she had suddenly come into contact with music she didn’t care for. It was only when George greeted her with a warm “Mother” that her beauty became apparent: the thin petals of her mouth relaxing into a pleasing fullness, her chin lifting to reveal the elegant length of her neck. She extended her hands and moved toward her son, and the pleated hemline of her mauve dinner dress shushed over the carpets behind her. Leeson bowed deeply as she approached, but Herschel remained seated, his head cocked to study the intricately fastened brown nest of her hair.

Once Mrs. Farrington had settled in a high-backed chair near a corner of the room, Leeson returned to the task of explaining his charge—which he did rather unconvincingly between bites of oatcake. It was only upon reaching for his second oatcake—glancing around to mentally divide the number of cakes by the number of those in the room—that he noticed the girl who’d come with them was missing. He craned his neck toward the entryway, trying to recollect if she’d followed them in through the door.

“Of course I am quite familiar with the museum library,” George Farrington was asserting. “Two of my own books reside there—one botanical, the other verse. Though I am,” he confessed, prodding the dwindling fire with a poker, “serious about one art and a dabbler in the other.”

Leeson glanced at Herschel, who had become wholly distracted, first by the rash on his thigh and then by the half-dozen or so watercolour landscapes that hung in gold frames on the wall behind him. The farmer
swivelled and rose on the sofa to get a better look, his smock lifting slightly as he did so.

“Those were painted by my uncle Reginald,” Farrington said, a hint of reprimand in his voice.

Herschel turned and sat back down, unsure of what exactly he’d done. He looked to Leeson, but Leeson was studying Farrington. The solicitor recognized his host now. It was the defect around his mouth that gave him away: an arced scar that tracked through one side of his dark-brown moustache and down onto his bare chin.
A climbing accident
, Leeson remembered the Superintendent saying, leaning sideways toward the Matron at the Whitmore.
Burma, I believe
. And Leeson, who had been standing nearby, had stepped forward to see whom they were discussing, and there was a gentleman—Farrington—in a top hat and bright blue waistcoat coming down the reception line at the Whitmore Ball, his boutonnière an exotic yellow bud with orange tips quite unlike any Leeson had ever seen.

It stood to reason, then, that if this was the celebrated botanist from the ball—and Leeson was fairly certain it was—he and Herschel were currently some ten or eleven miles from the Whitmore in the country house of the Farringtons, to whom much of the land they had traversed belonged.

Leeson stifled a yawn, realizing with a start that his host was speaking to him, saying something about the landscape the watercolours had been painted in. Obligingly he stood up to inspect the paintings, all the while wondering where the girl had gone off to, and whether or not some sort of sustenance beyond the oatcakes he’d already consumed might arrive. It did. His gaze had only just fallen into a rippled blue lake and the droopy willow that tickled it when the Farringtons’ maid re-entered the room. She curtseyed quickly, keeping her chin down while her eyes darted to further survey the guests. Wordlessly she handed a cloth sack
to Mrs. Farrington, who with one hand whisked the maid back through the door and into the hall. So it was that a mere quarter-hour after they had entered the house, they were sent on their way again, Mrs. Farrington ensuring they had the sack of ham and butter sandwiches in hand.

It was near midnight when Herschel climbed back over the stone wall, and he and Leeson trudged across the lawn and into their beds. The main building was dark save for a row of candles placed along one of the gallery’s ledges.

The following morning a letter arrived at the Whitmore, delivered to the hospital clerk by a scrawny young man on a dun pony. It read:

Mr. George Farrington presents his compliments to the Governor of Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics, and requests him to be so kind as to take precautions that his patients should not pay visits at Inglewood, as two did yesterday (one describing himself as an assistant librarian of the British Museum)
.

Mr. Farrington is very glad if they in any way enjoy’d themselves here, and hopes that they did not suffer from their long walk
.

George Farrington did not mention the girl in his note. And we know from the asylum casebook that in Leeson’s interview with the Superintendent the next morning, he said he hadn’t seen her after the walk up to Farrington’s door, though he did comment on her absence and on the changing weather and on Herschel’s discovery of a roe deer bedded down in a whorl of grass. Numerous times in his description of events Leeson
used words like
intestate
and
disinherit
; he also talked of returning to work in law. He said, “You cannot disinherit a ham, nor can you disinherit roast beef pie.”

Dr. Thorpe wrote
appears to be suffering from delusions
twice in the transcript margins, and five times wrote
tangent
 … before the description of “Activities Occurring on 2 August 1877” was returned to and set down.

The hospital logbook that Jane first examined when she was writing her dissertation detailed almost nothing of the inmates’ escape. It noted that on the 2nd of August the laundry had been collected at eight, that the new hen had not lain. In hasty black ink underneath that someone had written
Patients C. Leeson, H. Morley and girl N
——
missing
, and then, in another hand, there was an added note:
Patient Hopper restrained at 2 p.m
. Finally, scribbled in handwriting so tight and angular Jane had to read it with a magnifying glass:
Mstrs H. Morley and C. Leeson returned
. On the 3rd of August the first entry states:
Letter from G. Farrington received
. This was followed by the domestics of the institution: a list of objects needing mending, a detailed order of supplies and foodstuff requisitioned from Morrington, a change in staff schedules.

No further mention of N——was to be found.

2

Jane wakes to the whooping sound of the corner shop’s alarm. The shop recently hired a new assistant and the alarm has gone off at six a.m. three days in a row. Jane knows that if she sticks her head out the window the shop assistant will be on his mobile phone shouting in Punjabi and waving one hand toward the security gate. It usually takes five to ten minutes for the alarm to stop, so Jane presses her pillow over her face to muffle the sound, the metallic tang of last night’s sleeping pill still on her tongue.

It comes back to her then—the dream about the woods and the Whitmore, the dream about the girl she only knows as “N.” Jane is glad to be thinking about her again, but there’s guilt in the thought too. For the last six weeks, she’s been too busy with work at the Chester Museum to spend any time on the Whitmore; all the research she’d been doing was stuffed reluctantly into a box and shoved under her bed. What Jane wonders, tracing her way around the edges of the dream, is how N got out of the hospital—not the act, the hand that lifts the latch, opens the door, but rather what wells up in a person so that one day they do the
unexpected. She would like to know this because there’s something welling inside her too, although she doesn’t see it as clearly as we do.

The sound of a steel gate being kicked repeatedly clangs into the room from down the street and Jane groans into her pillow then slides it off her face. Those of us who were in other rooms come in and gather around her, our presence as invisible as the chutes of air drifting under the cracked-open window.

After a minute the alarm stops and London begins to rouse itself: delivery vans rattle down the road, taxis ferry people to their jobs and businesses, the man in the brown corduroy jacket trots his beagle out to the adjacent green—doing so with such dependability we could set our watches by him if we had a need for watches. Across the street, morning light sifts through the clouds to give back the terraced row houses their eggshell colour; the neon signs on the chip and curry shops down the road buzz and flicker. Jane pushes the covers away and thinks about the tea set sitting beside her desk at work, the one that Gareth, the Chester’s director and curator, said he wanted shipped a week ago. And for a minute, caught up in the idea of simple tasks, caught up in the drift of the Whitmore and N, she doesn’t remember what day it is or what will happen by the end of it; she simply thinks
work
and puts her hand out for her spaniel, Sam, who trots over to have his ears rubbed. Then it’s there, in her waking brain: the fact that the museum is closing, that she will be unemployed in two weeks and that tonight she is going to see William Eliot.