The train drew in to Embankment, and he was borne along the platform with the crowd. Grief of a kind came to him then, though it was not for Michael Seaborne, nor for his widow: what troubled him most was that this might mark the last of his meetings with Cora – that his final view of her would be as he looked over his shoulder while mourning bells tolled. ‘Still,’ he said: ‘I must be there, if only to see the coffin-lid screwed down.’ Beyond the ticket barriers ice melted on the pavements; the white sun was in decline.
Dressed as the day demanded, Cora Seaborne sat before her mirror. Pearl drops on gold wires hung at each ear; the lobes were sore, since it had been necessary to pierce them again. ‘So far as tears go,’ she said, ‘these will have to do.’ Her face was powdered pale. Her black hat did not suit her, but had both a veil and a black plume of feathers, and conveyed the proper degree of mourning. The covered buttons on her black cuffs would not fasten, and between the hem of sleeve and glove a strip of white skin would be seen. The neckline of her dress was a little lower than she’d have liked, and showed on her collarbone an ornate scar as long as her thumb, and about as wide. It was the perfect replica of the silver leaves on the silver candlesticks that flanked the silver mirror, and which her husband had pressed into her flesh as though he were sinking his signet ring into a pool of wax. She considered painting it over, but had grown fond of it, and knew that in some circles she was enviously believed to have had a tattoo.
She turned from the glass and surveyed the room. Any visitor would pause puzzled at the door, seeing on the one hand the high soft bed and damask curtains of a wealthy woman, and on the other the digs of a scholar. The furthest corner was papered with botanical prints, and maps torn from atlases, and sheets of paper on which quotations were written in her large black capitals (NEVER DREAM WITH THY HAND ON THE HELM! TURN NOT THY BACK TO THE COMPASS!). On the mantelpiece a dozen ammonites were ranked according to size; above them, captured in a gilded frame, Mary Anning and her dog observed a fallen fragment of Lyme Regis rock. Was it all hers now – that carpet, these chairs, this crystal glass that still gave off the scent of wine? She supposed so, and at the thought a kind of lightness entered her limbs, as if she might come untethered from Newton’s laws and find herself spread out upon the ceiling. The sensation was decently suppressed, but all the same she could name it: it was not happiness, precisely, nor even contentment, but relief. There was grief, too, that was certain, and she was grateful for it, since however loathed he’d been by the end, he’d formed her, at least in part – and what good ever came of self-loathing?
‘Oh, he made me – yes,’ she said, and memory unfurled like smoke from a blown candle. Seventeen, and she’d lived with her father in a house above the city, her mother long gone (though not before she’d seen to it that her daughter would not be damned to samplers and French). Her father – uncertain what to do with his modest wealth, whose tenants liked him contemptuously – had gone out on business and returned with Michael Seaborne at his side. He’d presented his daughter with pride – Cora, barefoot, with Latin on her tongue – and the visitor had taken her hand, and admired it, and scolded her for a broken nail. He came again, and again, until he grew expected; he brought her slim books, and small hard objects of no use. He’d mock her, putting his thumb in the palm of her hand and stroking, so that the flesh grew sore, and it seemed her whole consciousness dwelt there at the touching place. In his presence the Hampstead pools, the starlings at dusk, the cloven prints of sheep in the soft mud, all seemed drab, inconsequential. She grew ashamed of them – of her loose untidy clothes, her unbraided hair.
One day he said: ‘In Japan they’ll mend a broken pot with drops of molten gold. What a thing it would be: to have me break you, and mend your wounds with gold.’ But she’d been seventeen, and armour-clad with youth, and never felt the blade go in: she’d laughed, and so had he. On her nineteenth birthday she exchanged birdsong for feathered fans, crickets in the long grass for a jacket dotted with beetles’ wings; she was bound by whalebone, pierced with ivory, pinned by the hair with tortoiseshell. Her speech grew languid to conceal its stumble; she walked nowhere. He gave her a gold ring which was too small – a year later another, and it was smaller still.
The widow was roused from her reverie by footsteps overhead, which were slow, and measured out as precisely as the ticking of a clock. ‘Francis,’ she said. She sat quietly, waiting.
A year before his father died, and perhaps six months after his disease had first appeared at the breakfast table (a lump in the throat restricting the passage of dry toast), Francis Seaborne had been moved to a room on the fourth floor of the house and at the furthest end of the passage.
His father would’ve had no interest in domestic arrangements even if he’d not at that time been assisting Parliament with the passage of a housing act. The decision had been made wholly by his mother and by Martha, who’d been hired as nurse when he was a baby, and never, as she herself put it, quite got round to leaving. It was felt that Francis was best kept at arm’s length, since he was restless at night and made frequent appearances at the door and even, once or twice, at the window. He’d never ask for water, or for comfort, as any other child might; only stand at the threshold holding one of his many talismans until unease raised a head from the pillow.
Soon after his removal to what Cora called the Upper Room, he lost interest in his nightly travels, becoming content with accumulating (no-one ever said ‘stealing’) whatever took his fancy. These he laid out in a series of complex and baffling patterns that changed each time Cora made a maternal visit; they had a beauty and strangeness she’d have admired if they’d been the work of somebody else’s son.
This being Friday, and the day of his father’s funeral, he’d dressed himself. At eleven years old he knew both one end of a shirt from the other, and its usefulness in spelling (‘It is NECESSARY that the shirt has one Collar, but two Sleeves’). That his father had died struck him as a calamity, but one no worse than the loss of one of his treasures the day before (a pigeon’s feather, quite ordinary, but which could be coiled into a perfect circle without snapping its spine). When told the news – noting that his mother was not crying but was rigid and also somehow blazing, as if in the midst of a lightning strike – his first thought was this: I cannot understand why these things happen to me. But the feather was gone; his father was dead; and it seemed he was to attend church. The idea pleased him. He said, conscious of being quite affable given the circumstances: ‘A change is as good as a rest.’
In the days following the discovery of Michael Seaborne’s body it was the dog who’d suffered most. It had whined at the sickroom door and could not be consoled; a caress might’ve done it, but since no-one would sink their hands into its greasy pelt, the laying-out of the body (‘Put a penny on his eye for the ferry-man,’ Martha said: ‘I don’t think St Peter will trouble himself …’) had been accompanied by that same high keening. The dog was dead now, of course, thought Francis, patting with satisfaction a little wad of fur collected from his father’s sleeve, and so the only mourner was now itself to be mourned.