On turns the tilted world, and the starry hunter walks the Essex sky with his old dog at his heels. Autumn fends off the diligent winter: it’s a warm clear-eyed month, with a barbarous all-too-much beauty. On Aldwinter common the oaks shine copper in the sunblast; the hedgerows are scarlet with berries. The swallows have gone, but down on the saltings swans menace dogs and children in the creeks. Henry Banks burns his ruined boat down on the Blackwater shore. The damp wood spits, the black paint blisters. ‘Gracie,’ he says, ‘there you were, all along.’ Beside him Naomi stands very straight, warily watching the turning tide. She feels herself arrested in motion, pausing for a moment with one foot in water and one on the shore. What now? she thinks. What now? Deep in the flesh that joins thumb and forefinger there’s a black splinter from the boat’s hull: a talisman she touches, awe-struck by all her hands have done.
London capitulates too readily and hangs out her white flags: come mid-November there’s frost on the windows of the buses on the Strand. Charles Ambrose finds himself playing at fatherhood again: there’s Joanna, always at his desk, with an unerring taste for his least suitable books, and there’s James, who at breakfast found in the gutter a broken pair of glasses and had made a microscope by supper. He conceals his particular fondness for John, in whose appetite and placid good nature he recognises himself. He lies on his stomach playing cards; on Guy Fawkes’ Night he tears his coat, and doesn’t mind. In the evening he catches Katherine’s eye, and they shake their heads: the presence in their ordered tasteful house of these three is as strange as any number of river-borne beasts. Letters pass between London and Aldwinter with such frequency and speed they joke there’s a night train in the sidings waiting just for them. John believes it, and asks if he can bake a cake to keep the train driver going.
Charles receives a letter from Spencer. It lacks the vigour of his earlier efforts: certainly he remains ethically committed to better housing policy, but is concentrating for now on prudent investment of his so very burdensome fortune. Property, perhaps, he says (vaguely, though there was no need to elaborate), property’s the thing these days, and Charles is not for a moment deceived. Over in Bethnal Green there’s a new landlord, he’d wager, and one with a good heart and correspondingly poor business sense.
Edward Burton, not yet returned to work, looks up from his blueprints and sees Martha at the table. Cora Seaborne has given her a typewriter and it makes quite a racket, but he doesn’t mind. How can he? In the space of a month he’s moved from threatened homelessness to a degree of security and peace that bewilders him when he wakes in the morning. The entire tenement block has been bought up by a landlord who employed two clerks to make an audit of each home. They came with a camera and refused tea; they noted the damp window-frame, the buckled door, the creaking third stair. Within a week these were remedied, and the street took on the scent of whitewash and plaster, and over breakfast and supper, factory-workers and nurses, clerks and mothers and elderly men braced themselves for a punitive rise in rent that never came. Now neighbours gather in stairwells and scratch their heads, and it’s generally agreed the man’s nothing but a fool. There’s a degree of resentment in public – I stand in no need of charity, more than one tenant says, bullishly – but behind closed doors they’d bless his name, if they knew it.
Martha keeps in her pocket a folded note from Spencer, wishing her happiness. ‘For a long while I wondered what use I was, with only money to recommend me. I play at being a surgeon because it’s a respectable way to pass the time and it appealed to me once when I was a boy but my heart’s never been in it, and God knows I’m no Luke Garrett. It’s because of you I’ve found a purpose which allows me to look in the mirror and not be sickened by myself. I do wish you’d loved me, but I thank you for helping me find a way to love you, and try to right the wrongs you showed me.’ It’s so humble, and so kind, that she briefly wonders whether her path might better have run alongside his. But no: in the absence of Cora it’s Edward Burton she wants, with his near-silence and his clever hands, her comrade and her friend.
Her longing for Cora is strangely no greater in Bethnal Green than it was in Foulis Street, in Colchester, in the grey house on Aldwinter common. It is as fixed as the Pole Star, and she need not look for it. Nor does she resent their years of companionship: she understands the alterations of time, and how what was necessary once may be no longer needed. Besides (she looks up from her typewriter – sees Edward frowning over his plans – touches the magazine which has lately published her work) it’s a poor woman whose ambition is only to be loved. She has better things to be getting on with.
In Luke Garrett’s rooms on Pentonville Road a marriage of true minds has taken place. There are moments when each heartily wishes the other at the bottom of the Blackwater, but no more devoted couple can be found from one end of the Thames to the other.
Early in November Spencer leaves his home in Queen’s Gate (one which he increasingly considers an embarrassment) and takes up residence with his friend. Luke feels it his duty to protest at some length (he doesn’t need a nursemaid, thanks; he’s got no wish to see anyone, ever; he’s always found Spencer a more than usually annoying companion), but in truth he’s glad. What’s more, Spencer has unearthed an ancient maxim regarding the saving of a life, and points out with some regularity that since Luke prevented his dying, Spencer is both his possession and his responsibility. ‘I’m your slave, in effect,’ he says, and hangs a photo of his mother beside the portrait of Ignaz Semmelweis.