The World Before Us (45 page)

“In the razed field,/in the cusp of its wealth,” says the poet, and Cat claps and Herschel
tweeps
. “We lay on the rough skin of earth,/and loved with
our mouths.” The poet leans over Jane’s shoulder, reading as she is reading: “To speak and name the field song,/to pluck wonder like a flower,/is to waver between worlds:/the gods and ours.”

Jane closes the book and turns it over in her hands, looking for the author or publication date, and the poet seems to deflate. He knows he has been in this room before with that very book placed in front of him. He had stopped here with the succubus after being released from the Whitmore. He remembers feeling anxiety—a combination of terror at being outside the hospital’s gates and dread of being returned to what Dr. Thorpe had called “your wife’s
care
.” He had shredded his notebook in the carriage on the way over, and yet his wife had insisted they come, leading him straight into the house like a dog on a chain. All of it—the newness of the situation, the lightness of the air, the motes in front of his eyes—had induced in him a kind of panic. His hands scrabbling and near useless as his wife thrust his own book into them and demanded he sign it.

What the poet remembers most is how he wanted to knock her teeth out because she kept showing them to him, smiling widely, though her eyes were on George Farrington. Some sort of exchange was being made, an agreement he couldn’t keep track of. He remembers a peal of laughter emitting from his wife’s ugly mouth, then a
“Delightful!
” which led to the girl being called in.

It was the girl the poet knew from the other world, the world he had just been expelled from. She was the same one, he was certain of it, although she was healthier now—more substance to her, a rosy brightness to her skin. She curtseyed and smiled at him, left a tray of tea and biscuits, a pair of scissors nestled amongst the cups and saucers. For a brief instant he could breathe again, and so he closed his eyes to compose a line in his head about
knowing
.

The succubus beside him suddenly picked up the scissors, her hands
touching so many surfaces—a desk, drawers, an envelope, a chair—until there was nowhere in the room where the poet could stand that was free of his wife’s contamination. “You take it,” she said to George Farrington, in a voice the poet had heard the first time he bedded her. She sat down and tilted her neck, and Farrington took the shears to the black snakes of her hair, clipping a tress from near her neckline. The Countess turned and levelled her eyes at the poet even as she spoke to Farrington. “Now,” she said, “let’s take one from him.”

Jane returns the poet’s book to the shelf and draws the curtains farther so she can look over the back lawn for Blake. The gardens have come a long way in the past week: the central mound has been turned over, a new row of rose bushes has been planted, and the trellises have been reset. There are so many changes that even as Jane cranes her neck to gaze over the grounds for the gardener whose body and gestures she knows, she’s wondering what work is his, what parts of the garden he might have planted in the stretch of days they were together, and what he would say if he came up to the house and saw her now.

The Trust’s plan, according to Gwen, is to open the grounds in the coming summer, to have the gardens trained and in full bloom by then, the alpine beds exactly as George had planted them. There will be teahouse seating just outside the library windows and a kitchen downstairs that will serve soups and sandwiches—the basics. The Farrington archives will be relocated to the old study and a small research library on Victorian plant hunting will be established. The main floor of the house will eventually be open to the public for admission. “A kind of museum,” Gwen had said, “mostly botanically themed,” and Jane had smiled politely, not wanting to say that these were difficult times for museums,
that people seemed more content with looking at a jpeg of a glass-blown iris or a scarab bracelet, and less concerned with seeing the fragility and wear, the poignancy, of real things.

“We’re planning on having a concert on the grounds on opening day,” Gwen had added. “You know, get a big name to headline, make it a black tie and white gloves kind of do.” She smiled over at Jane warmly, as if they were friends. “I’m sure the Eliots will drive up for it. You should come too.”

When Gwen returns, Jane resumes making her way through Prudence’s narrative. In her diary entry on the 29th of August 1877, Prudence notes that the housekeeper has taken on
a new girl
who has come without references but is well educated. A few entries later, in blotchy ink that was probably the result of a change of pen, Prudence writes that Dr. Thorpe has paid a visit.
He arrived at three and took tea
,
after which the men retired to the library. Thorpe gifted George with a handwritten copy of one of Mr. Samuel Murray’s unpublished verses—which I have yet to read. It was agreed that Nora would be allowed to stay on
.

Jane stares down at the open diary for a full minute. Unlike with Dr. Palmer’s journals, where the writing was so tight, so nearly illegible that Jane was worried she was drawing a connection between the Whitmore and Inglewood House because it was something she
wanted
to see, Prudence’s writing is Spencer-perfect. Dr. Thorpe’s name isn’t a question; his involvement in Nora’s employment is clear.

Prudence’s subsequent entries mention fittings for dresses, the modification of old bonnets, and the mending of nightwear and undergarments, as if Nora was the first seamstress Prudence had had in her regular employ. There are notes as to who should receive the embroidered workbags Nora is making for Christmas—a thrift that might explain Nora’s value in a household whose finances were waning. As she reads through
each entry, inching closer to the week of the picnic and the shooting, it dawns on Jane that William had either not read Prudence’s diaries carefully, or he’d misrepresented their contents in his lecture, stating dismissively that they didn’t have much to say about the Chester–Farrington picnic. That week, after the initial details of preparation—the airing of the rooms and the orders for lobster and exotic fruits to be sent up from London—there are a number of cryptic notes. On the day of the shooting, Prudence wrote:
The children have been confined to the nursery, C
——
did not come down for dinner, tincture brought up to my room
. This was followed by
Norvill returned to consult the men
, and
extra room arranged
—which could mean, Jane surmised, that Prudence had wondered if the constable they’d sent for might need to stay over.

The last note on the page is in looser writing, as if she’d woken up in the night or taken up her pen after a few glasses of sherry. It reads simply,
Poor George
.

Two weeks later, in a short entry, Prudence notes that Norvill is leaving for the coast. She carefully lists the departure time of his train and all of the stops along his way, as if tracking his journey from Inglewood to Scarborough, trying to imagine him arriving. A week after that she writes,
Thwaite’s photographs have been delivered. They are of good composition though memories of the day itself are wrenching
.

“Gwendolyn?”

She raises her eyes but keeps typing. She’s been transcribing a local history of the estate for almost an hour.

“Are there any photographs? Prudence is talking about a Thwaite? He came up and photographed the gardens.”

“There are, but they haven’t been sorted yet. That’s my assistant’s job. She’s actually a volunteer so it’s slow going. They should be in the lower drawer over there—” Gwen points over her laptop at the file cabinet and then glances at the time on her computer screen. “It’s almost four, so can we say another hour? I have to head down to London tomorrow so
there won’t be anyone here to help you. You can come back on Monday if you’d like.”

Jane finds three squat boxes of photographs neatly stacked in the file drawer but when she opens them the mix of originals, copies and photocopies is disheartening. She’s already anxious someone will find out she’s here, that Maureen will have called the police, or that Blake will see her through the window and tell Gwen that she’s been lying about her name, lying about her connection with William.

At first glance there’s nothing that seems to distinguish one box from the other. Jane can’t discern any system or rationale but surmises, once she’s rummaged through a handful of photos on the top of each pile, that the boxes might be organized roughly by era. She starts with one where the clothes in the photos match the 1870s and ’80s, and leafs through the images, waiting for something she recognizes to present itself.

George Farrington appears in about a third of the photographs Jane is working through. He strikes Jane as far more handsome in these candid shots than in his formal studio-based portraits, where he stands stiffly with a top hat in one hand and a book in the other. The studio portraits are the ones that crop up in the books Jane’s been reading. One of them, a static image of Farrington in front of an urn, is familiar from William’s last chapter in
The Lost Gardens of England
, and for a second Jane remembers how she felt when she arrived at the start of that chapter, how she read every word that William had written, looking for some trace, some thought of her.

Norvill is less expected. In one photo where he is in his early twenties, he is standing without a jacket in front of a scarp of rock, holding a length of rope. He has a gentle face, fair hair with sun-kissed streaks in it, and an athlete’s body. His steady gaze makes him appear both arrogant and honest. It has always struck Jane as odd that he would have been a climber, in the footsteps of his famous brother; it occurs to her
now, studying him, that maybe he had been the climber first, because he was studying geology, and it was George who followed.

The majority of the photographs are of the gardens, albumen prints from glass negatives that have browned over the century, the trees dark and shadowy behind the bright patches of light flowers, their pinwheel shapes, the closed fists of the roses, captured crisply. The close-ups of the gardens seem to have been copied multiple times, and as Jane sorts through the duplicates it occurs to her that the gardening company outside had probably used the images to ascertain what was planted where. These detailed images would fill in the blanks in the Farrington gardeners’ notebooks, in George Farrington’s own garden journals.

In a packet of
cartes de visite
and personal photos, there is an image of Charlotte Chester in a paisley dress. The image has been cut in a circle, as if placed in a small bedside frame or carried inside a pocket watch. It shocks Jane to see her in this context, to see her here at Inglewood, pared off from Edmund and the children.

The rest of the figures in the packet are strangers: a man in a hack, another in a hammock, an Indian who must be George’s valet standing by the stables with a seed bag in his hand, surrounded by peacocks. Jane’s gaze slides quickly over the theologian because she does not know him—although he, now standing at her shoulder, recognizes himself: a man invited to pose against a stone wall in order to establish scale, a trivial embellishment in an image intended to show off the first blooms of the spring garden, the lilting magnolias.

The photograph of the Farrington household is near the bottom of the second box. It is from a later period than interests Jane: the small day-hats and high collars on the female servants suggest the mid-1880s. It was taken on the front lawn between two spheres of ornamental shrubbery, and the group is arranged around Prudence, who stands solemnly beside Norvill in her black mourning dress. She is plump and soft-chinned, her
arm looped under her son’s. Cato—the lurcher who’d featured in almost every image of George—is gone, replaced by a terrier curled up next to a Doric column, a young boy’s hand on the dog’s head.

We watch Jane study each face the way she first studied the hummingbirds: one after the other, equal weight and consideration given to every person.
There is the stable boy, the under butler, a man in a wide-brimmed straw hat who must be the head gardener; here is an aging footman with a side parting
. Jane moves her eyes over their features and at the end of the second row she sees the smiling face of a young woman in a housemaid’s uniform, a simple black dress with lace cuffs. She is in her mid-twenties here, her expression less wistful than when Jane first saw her photo in the records office, but Jane remembers her exactly—the gloss of dark hair, the narrow shoulders and bright complexion of the girl with the sewing basket sitting on the lawn of the Whitmore.

Jane asks Gwen if she might borrow a piece of unlined white paper from the photocopier. Gwen says, “Go ahead,” and watches as Jane draws circles on it that correspond to the positions of the staff in the household photograph. She writes Prudence Farrington’s name in the middle circle and Norvill Farrington’s beside it, and in the place of the housemaid in the second row she writes:
Nora Hayling
.