‘Come out!’ he shouted. ‘You’ll drown. Take my hand. Quick.’
But Maria did not hear. She was still calling for Georgie, and telling him that Mama loved her own boy, and that he was Mama’s little sugar plum.
He shrieked wordlessly at her.
‘Georgie, Georgie.’ Her voice was fainter now. ‘Mama’s own little boy.’
Her body was no longer there. Indeed, now there was nothing left except the thick, black water of the Long Pond, and it was rising higher and higher.
‘Georgie?’ The voice was no more than a whisper on the edge of silence. ‘Georgie?’
Holdsworth groaned. His ears hurt, and he had the curious sensation that his skin had been stripped away from the bleeding flesh beneath. His hands tingled. Underlying everything was still the disgusting, desperate desire to copulate.
Stiff as a ramrod.
‘Maria?’ he muttered. Something puzzled him, but he could not pin it down, a monstrous and unspeakable anomaly of some sort. ‘Maria? Maria?’
It was only then, as he said her name for the third time, that he realized what the anomaly had been. It was quite inexplicable that he had not noticed at the time. The face he had seen distorted in the water had not been Maria’s face. The voice had been Maria’s. But the face had belonged to Elinor Carbury.
Pain lanced into his chest. An iron band tightened around his ribs. It tightened, squeezing the breath from his lungs. He opened his mouth to scream but the rising tide of black water now covered his mouth. As his lips parted, the darkness flowed inside him. His body convulsed.
He wrenched himself from the blankets. He was falling. A jolt ran through him.
Full consciousness flooded over him, and he knew that he was in the bedchamber at the Master’s Lodge, lying on the bare boards between the bedstead and its surrounding curtains. His left elbow, which had borne the brunt of his fall, was exquisitely painful. He flailed with his arms and succeeded in finding the gap between the curtains. A cooling draught brushed his cheek. And there was a little light, too – a faint vertical line where the shutters failed to meet across the window.
Dear God – Elinor Carbury? He pushed the thought of her away. He despised himself and his treacherous, sin-ridden body.
A nearby clock with an unfamiliar set of chimes struck the three-quarters. Holdsworth stood up, steadying himself on the bedpost. He tore off his nightcap and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He shuffled across to the window and opened the shutters. His body ached. To the east there was a pallor in the sky, an easing of the darkness. Thank God, it would soon be day. His erection slowly shrivelled.
The air was chilly. The window seat had a strip of cushion running along the top. He perched on it, drawing up his legs, wrapping the hem of the nightshirt under his feet and hugging his knees like an overgrown child.
Outside the window, light crept back into the gardens of Jerusalem. He grew steadily colder. He made an irrational decision, again like a child who invents a purpose because even an invented purpose is better than none: that he would permit himself to return to bed as soon as he saw or heard another human being, an incontrovertible sign of life and sanity returning to the world.
He had not long to wait. Through the glass of the window came the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels on stone. He craned his head and caught sight of a hunched figure trundling a little barrow along the flagged path at the back of the Master’s Lodge. It was a man in a long dark coat and a slouch hat. He was making his way to a cluster of outbuildings on the left, near the northern boundary of the college.
The night-soil man. There was no one else it could be. The man who had found Sylvia Whichcote in the Long Pond.
The night-soil man. There was no one else to see. Not Maria. Not Elinor Carbury.
10
After breakfast, Ben, the Master’s manservant, directed Holdsworth to a stationer’s, where he purchased a plan of the town and its environs. Guided by this he set out on the road to Barnwell, which lay to the east of the town in the Newmarket direction. It was not quite a village and not quite a suburb of Cambridge, but something indeterminate between the two. Carbury warned him that parts of the neighbourhood were not agreeable. There were disreputable taverns and houses of ill fame, which attracted low characters from both the town and the University.
None of this was visible on Saturday morning. The road was busy, mostly with traffic going the other way towards the town’s market and shops. The house Holdsworth was seeking was on the eastern edge of Barnwell, where the houses were fewer and the air of the place was notably more rural.
The exercise and the morning sunshine made it possible to put the terrors of the night into perspective. A rational man need not chastise himself for his dreams, Holdsworth reminded himself, for they were quite outside his control and by their very nature replete with absurd fancies and sensations. There were difficulties enough in his waking life without wilfully manufacturing more.
Dr Jermyn’s establishment stood in its own small pleasure ground. The demesne was surrounded by a wall almost as high as Jerusalem’s. The gates were locked. There was a bell pull mounted on the right-hand gatepost, together with a notice advising visitors to ring and wait. Holdsworth pulled the handle. Thirty seconds later, the front door opened and a manservant came unhurriedly down the drive and inquired civilly enough how he might be of assistance.
‘My name is Holdsworth. I believe Dr Jermyn is expecting me.’
The servant bowed and took out a key for the gates.
‘You are well guarded against the world,’ Holdsworth said.
‘It’s not only to keep people out, sir.’ The servant locked the gate again when Holdsworth was inside, and began to lead the way up the drive. ‘It’s to keep them in.’
As they walked up the drive, Holdsworth glimpsed three or four men in the grounds. One of them appeared to be pruning a bush; another was hoeing a flower bed. There was nothing curious in that except for the fact they were attired not as gardeners but as gentlemen. Even at a distance, Holdsworth could see the black coats, black silk breeches and white waistcoats; and at least two of them had their hair powdered and arranged, as though at any moment they were due to pay a morning call upon a lady.
At the door of the house, the servant rang the bell as though he too were a visitor. Another servant admitted them and showed Holdsworth into a small drawing room, saying that Dr Jermyn would be with him directly.
Holdsworth prowled about the apartment. He came to the window and stared out over an expanse of sunlit lawn at the side of the house, with an extensive shrubbery beyond. At this moment the door opened, and Dr Jermyn appeared.
‘Mr Holdsworth, your servant, sir,’ he said briskly. ‘Mr Cross wrote me that you would probably honour us with a call this morning.’
The two men exchanged bows. Jermyn was a young man, little more than thirty, with a pleasant, open face. He dressed soberly and neatly, and wore his own hair.
‘I see you were examining our windows, sir,’ he said. ‘Were you expecting bars across them?’
‘I did not know what to expect. Were those your – your patients I saw in the garden?’
‘Indeed. Honest toil in the open air has much to recommend it. I am glad to say that a number of our gentlemen condescend to assist us.’
Holdsworth felt in his pocket. ‘I have a letter of introduction from her ladyship.’
The doctor offered Holdsworth a chair. Murmuring an apology, he broke the seal of the letter and read it slowly. At length he looked up. ‘These matters are always delicate. And I apprehend that Mr Oldershaw’s case is so in more ways than one. Her ladyship writes that you have her complete trust, and instructs me to give you every assistance in my power.’