And then he realises, it is not too late. This ghost of a moment is not one that is lost, but one waiting to happen. He has a wife, does he not? He has a fortune, and soon he will have a fine house. Why, then, is the possibility of a child truly so unreachable? It is all before me. It has been waiting for me here all this time. This is what Mr Hancock is thinking as the agent leads him between slender Doric pillars and across the threshold of the folly.
It is musty inside, with the dense damp cold of a place that rarely sees sunshine. The crumbs of last year’s dead leaves are accumulated in the corners and against the legs of a large stone bench. The floor-tiles are cracked and dirty, and the seashell-shaped niches that line the walls are empty, save one, where a trapped gust of wind makes the bleached vertebrae of a pigeon chatter like teeth.
‘It wants a good scrub,’ said Mr Hancock. ‘Is this what you brought me to see?’
‘Certainly not, sir. There’s more.’
And indeed there is, for behind the bench is an alcove, and in the alcove – black with soot and gauzy with cobwebs – is the entrance to a tiny spiral staircase.
‘Is it the coal hole?’
‘No, no. This, sir, is the Curiosity.’
‘The Curiosity?’
‘An oddity, merely. Something to see. Go on, sir.’
The stairs, vanishing into darkness, are narrow and uneven. There is a smell of wet stone. ‘You want me to go down there?’ Mr Hancock asks.
‘You’ve looked over the rest of the place thoroughly enough,’ says the agent balefully. ‘I thought you would want to see it. It is the only irregularity in the whole property.’
‘Very well, very well.’
The agent rummages through his pockets with little urgency before producing, from one, a tinderbox, and from the other, a stump of tallow candle. He hunches over this equipment and huffs, his hands cupped around it as if concealing a secret. Once he gets a light he holds the candle up in his fingers, inspecting the flame. ‘That will do,’ he says. ‘You’ll not need it very long. Go down and take a look.’ He puts the candle stub into Mr Hancock’s hand, and propels him to the top step. ‘Excuse me if I do not join you. It is not very clean.’
The extra light does not reveal much: the stairs creep steeply out of sight between walls and ceiling daubed with rough plaster, which as he descends the first few hesitant steps gives way to – what? Lumpy medallions, as if the wall were built from flint, or is it – no? – yes? – seashells. Yes, seashells indeed, caked with dirt, and when he buffs a little away he sees that they are not exotic specimens, not worth displaying, but mussel shells, cockle shells, oysters and winkles, the leavings from a thousand humble dinners. The next thing he observes is that these are not haphazardly jammed into the plaster, but carefully arranged: concentric circles of mussel and cockle and mussel again; chevrons and stripes and rosettes. The stairs are narrow and uneven, so he feels hobbled: he presses himself against the inside wall, fingers spread helplessly as he lowers his feet out into the darkness, groping for the next step if it exists, if he can trust it with his weight. Shale slithers under his feet: for a moment he loses his balance and tumbles, his heart leaping into his throat as he sees his own death rise up to meet him. He had not expected it to be so soon. He had not expected to come to it with such terror.
But then he lands again, his backside coming down hard on the edge of a step in a burst of pain: he bounces off the wall and down the flight to land on a bare stone floor. The silence is extraordinary, as complete and as elemental as darkness, but he has seldom been more painfully certain of his own corporeality. After lying flat on his back for a few seconds at the foot of the staircase, he fumbles and staggers and creaks to his feet. Nothing broken, although he can feel the cloth of his breeches flapping around his right knee, and subterranean air cold on the raw skin beneath. His knuckles, too, are smarting, and when he brings them to his mouth they are sticky and taste of iron. He has heard of the agonies of hellfire, but never an eternity of grazes. Purgatory would be the likeliest place for skinned knees, but he does not believe in purgatory. If I were dead, he consoles himself, I would be more certain of it.
The candle is no longer in his hand, and yet as he regains his bearings he finds he is able to see a little. A greenish glow illuminates the brick floor and the walls all encrusted with shells, arranged into the outlines of urns and lions, acanthus fronds and fish-tailed women. Such a peculiar light, though, like nothing he has ever seen. It emanates from somewhere to his left, maybe thirty feet away, and despite the pain sparking from his tailbone, he begins to move towards the archway from where it seems to him to leech out into the dark. He is at first afraid to leave the foot of the stairs, his route back to safety, but danger occurs when one walks into darkness, not away from it, and as he passes into the next chamber he finds it identically adorned, but lit just a little brighter. Light spills from the next archway. And so he goes on. It is startlingly silent under the ground, the sound of his footsteps not quite his own. The air is thick and heavy, but stirred by little currents of cold air. And on he goes.
There are four chambers in all, with vaulted ceilings encrusted with some queer rugged rock, and shell-encrusted walls, and each is a fraction brighter than the last. In the final chamber he comes upon the source of the light: it flickers softly up the far wall, spreads and trembles across the floor. It expands across the darkness in little semicircular flutters, which grow out of one another, expand and fade.
What can it be? It is almost beneath his feet now. The air about it is particularly cold.
‘God’s wounds!’ comes the voice of the agent, who has finally followed him down. ‘Do not fall in!’
‘Fall in?’
‘Fall into the pool. Don’t fall into the pool. Do you not see it?’
‘Oh. Of course I do. I do see the pool.’
He perceives it clearly now: a black wedge of water dug into the black floor of the grotto, rippling with a very faint light all of its own, converging into stars that sway and shiver and then disperse.
‘What is this?’ demands Mr Hancock.
‘This is your folly,’ said the agent.
‘I beg your pardon?’
The agent’s expression is that of a conjuror whose favourite trick has fallen flat. ‘Your grotto,’ he explains. ‘A shell grotto. It comes with the house.’
‘This!’ Mr Hancock gestures to the pool, almost wordless in his confusion. ‘How is this done?’
‘I cannot say, sir. I am not an engineer.’
‘But …!’ His hand traces the weird flickering light up the wall. The agent shrugs.
‘I do not know. It is ingenious.’
‘What is it all for?’
‘It is not for anything.’
‘It has no function? There is no reason for it?’
The agent sighs. ‘Mr Brierley was a person full of curiosity, and addicted to amusement and novelty,’ he explains slowly. Mr Hancock’s face is blank as a pudding. This ink-stained man, who demanded a yardstick so that he might measure the bedrooms, cannot perceive that sometimes a thing’s beauty is in its very uselessness; he utterly lacks the genteel instinct to own something simply for the pleasure of calling himself its owner. ‘Ask your wife, sir,’ says the agent. ‘Your wife will understand perfectly.’
But Mr Hancock himself understands. His wife – yes, she is his. The house, aye, will shortly be so. The child he dreamed of, indeed may one day be flesh. But if this grotto is also to be his, he ought to take it as a very particular sign. A slow and wondering smile crosses his face as he realises that it has been vouchsafed for one reason and one reason alone: he is also due a mermaid.
FOUR