‘Your house,’ I whispered.
‘And yours, now, too. Where we shall hang your clock so that it can keep count of the days, the weeks, the months, until we return. In fact –’ he smiled – ‘I thought we would invite everyone to Birchwood for the summer, before we leave for America. It will be a way of saying goodbye, although they will not know it. What do you say?’
What could I say but yes?
There was a knock at the door then, and Edward called out, ‘Yes?’
It was his littlest sister, Lucy, whose glance swept the room in an instant, taking in Edward and me, the new satchel on his shoulder, the paper wrapping on the floor, the clock. Not the tickets, though, for at some point, though I did not see it happen, Edward had managed to conceal them.
I had noticed before, the way she watched. Always observing, taking mental notes. It got on the nerves of some – Edward’s other sister, Clare, had little time for Lucy – but there was something about her that reminded me of Lily Millington, the real Lily: an intelligence that made me fond. Edward, too, adored her, and was forever feeding her hungry mind with books.
‘What do you say, Lucy?’ he said now, with a grin. ‘How do you fancy spending summer in the country? At a house on the river – perhaps even a little boat?’
‘At … the house?’ Her face lit up even as she darted a look in my direction. I noted the invisible emphasis upon the words, as if they were a secret.
Edward laughed. ‘The very same.’
‘But what if Mother—’
‘Don’t you worry about Mother. I’ll take care of everything.’
And when Lucy smiled at him, a look of rapture came upon her face that changed her features completely.
I remember everything.
Time no longer binds me; my experience of time is no longer bound. Past, present and future are one. I can slow memories down. I can experience their events again in a flash.
But the months of 1862 are different. They gather speed, no matter what I do to stop them, rolling like a coin let go at the top of a hill, picking up pace as they hurtle towards the end.
When Edward told me about the Night of the Following, the trees of Hampstead wore only the merest of buds. The branches were all but bare and the sky was low and grey; yet, once the tale was told, the summer of Birchwood Manor was already upon us.
PART THREE
THE SUMMER OF BIRCHWOOD MANOR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Summer, 1862
It was Lucy’s first time on a train and for the half-hour since they’d left the station she had sat very still, trying to decide whether or not she could feel the velocity impacting on her organs. Edward had laughed when she asked if he was worried, and Lucy had pretended she was joking. ‘Our organs are safe from the railways,’ he’d said, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze. ‘It’s the wellbeing of the countryside we should be concerned about.’
‘Better not let Fanny hear you say that.’ This was Clare, who had a habit of listening in. Edward frowned when she said it but didn’t answer. Fanny’s father’s role in encouraging the spread of train lines across the surface of Britain did not sit well with Edward, who believed that nature should be valued for itself, and not in terms of the resources it yielded to those inclined to exploitation. It was not an entirely easy opinion to hold – as Thurston enjoyed pointing out – for a man who intended to marry into railway money. Mother’s friend, Mr John Ruskin, went a step further, warning that the push of the railway lines into every hidden corner of the globe was a human folly. ‘A fool always wants to shorten space and time,’ he had announced when he was leaving the house in Hampstead the other day. ‘A wise man wants to lengthen both.’
By and by, Lucy stopped thinking about her organs, and the vandalism of the countryside, and found herself becoming distracted instead by the sheer marvel of it all. At one point, another train travelling in the same direction swept onto an adjoining line and when she looked across and into the other carriage it appeared stationary beside her. There was a man sitting adjacent and their eyes met and Lucy fell to thinking about time and motion and speed, and began to glimpse the possibility that they weren’t actually moving at all – that it was the earth instead that had started to spin rapidly beneath them. Her knowledge of the fixed laws of physics suddenly loosened and her mind exploded with possibilities.
She was overcome with a fierce desire to share her ideas, but when she glanced across the carriage table to where Felix Bernard and his wife Adele were sitting, her excitement fizzled flat. Lucy knew Adele a little, because before she had married Felix, she used to come to the house to model for Edward. She was in four of his paintings, and for a time had been one of his favourites. Lately she had ambitions to be a photographer herself. Adele and Felix had argued about something at Paddington station and were now at odds, Adele pretending engrossment in the English Woman’s Journal, Felix properly engrossed by the inspection he was carrying out of his new camera.
Across the aisle, Clare was making eyes at Thurston, a common enough state of affairs ever since he’d asked her to model for his new painting. Everybody said that Thurston was very handsome, but he reminded Lucy, with his strutting gait and heavy thighs, of one of Grandfather’s prize racehorses. He was not returning Clare’s attentions but was focused instead on Edward and his current model, Lily Millington. Lucy followed his gaze. She could understand why they drew his attention. There was something about the way they were together, as if unaware of everybody else in the carriage, that made Lucy want to watch them, too.
Finding no one available with whom to share her thoughts, Lucy kept them to herself. She decided it was probably for the best. She was eager to make a good impression on Edward’s friends, and Clare said that such pronouncements, about energy and matter and space and time, made her sound as if she belonged in Bedlam. (Edward, of course, said the opposite. He said that she had a good brain and that it was important she should use it. What hubris it was, he said, that mankind should think to halve the powers of the human race by ignoring the minds and words of the female half of it.)
Lucy had pleaded with Mother that she might have a governess or better yet be sent to school, but Mother had only looked at her concernedly, felt her forehead for fever, and told her that she was a strange little thing and would do well to put such foolish thoughts aside. Once, she had even called Lucy in to see Mr Ruskin, who was having tea in the parlour, and Lucy had been made to stand by the door as he instructed her gently that a woman’s intellect was not for ‘invention or creation’, but for ‘sweet ordering, arrangement and decision’.