Later, what Herschel would remember most clearly about the girl was her absence — how after the three of them had passed through a clearing bobbed with flowers, Herschel had lost her. He’d wanted to communicate his happiness at the good weather, had wanted to try a word, to say “open” or “yes” or “glad,” to point to the lifting arms of the shaggy trees, but when he turned he saw nothing but bird-flit and the scrabbling of a small mammal in the root-hem of an alder. Suddenly lonely, he’d doubled back in the direction from which he’d come, finding the girl and Leeson in a sunlit sward at the edge of a clearing. The girl was sitting on Leeson’s jacket, resting against a tree. He’d watched them for a minute, then chirped, and both of them glanced in his direction. The solicitor offered the girl his hand so that he might help her up, holding it in his as he led her over a fallen oak. It was a trifling gesture that Herschel knew he ought to ignore, even as he felt petty jealousy take root.
In the week after his return from the woods Herschel had not been subject to the same degree of interrogation as Leeson. The solicitor had been ushered in and out of Thorpe’s office at least once a day until the matter seemed miraculously resolved, like a cloth wiping away all trace of a stain. By then, Herschel mostly recalled the Farrington paintings — a variety of landscapes inside of a landscape broken up by walls — and the roe deer they’d happened upon in the copse wood, how it matched and did not match the one whose head dipped down from an oak board in George Farrington’s parlour.
Eventually he went back to painting class and to listening to the poet’s words and to his own tongue’s chirruping indecision. Words or no words? Sound or silence? He wondered what he would want to say in a human language if he recovered the tools with which to engage in it. His thoughts becoming more birdlike every day: tree, roost, lift, flight.
There is a photograph of Herschel on a card tucked into the back of his casebook. When Jane discovered it yesterday she set it aside on the table at the records office while she continued to work. The photograph is one of forty studies made by a physiognomist called Merrifield who had sought to prove that muscular and cranial indicators could be used for diagnostic means. Herschel appears in the painting smock he was most fond of, his dark hair messy, eyes pouched with exhaustion, nostrils flared.
When Jane first saw it, the one who never speaks whistled, and understanding that he meant Look, we gathered around him. We felt one thing slide into the other: Herschel’s knowledge of himself alongside our knowledge of him as he was before and as he has been with us. Our growing knowledge of Eliza Woodward and Alfred Hale and John Hopper is almost the same even if it isn’t captured in a photograph: “That’s me!” Cat had said when she saw herself in the dining hall, when together we remembered our old mischief. And the musician standing beside her had faltered, and John had gone to stand beside him so he would feel less alone in his shame. A sheet of sums that seemed to add up perfectly.
There is a trick to looking at an image. Jane may have seen Herschel’s unblinking eyes and twisted mouth but she was still not seeing him as we do. We see him as if he is passing through the photograph: a man who was escorted to the stool and who sat on it, who arranged his features into a question. We see the farmer who was permitted to leave after the work of the dark hump behind the drop cloth was done. We understand how that particular afternoon unfolded into days and weeks and months and a year or more of thoughts and deeds and reveries. It doesn’t matter that memories can sometimes be misshapen, that there are a hundred ways to fix or lose a sense of self.
When Herschel bristled at his photo we turned to him and said, “Yes, but that is not who you were; that is not all of it.” Cat air-kissed him and we made an effort to think of her as Eliza; John looked at the clock on the wall of the reading room and we remembered with him that time was once his life’s work. That afternoon at the records office is the kind of time that we exist for: one in which we are brought back to some semblance of self. Jane only had the photo, while suddenly some of us could remember Herschel lumbering in to dinner in a top hat, making wood benches in the workshop, marvelling at lantern slides, offering Greevy his allotment of meat. A few of us saw Herschel in his best suit on Visitors’ Day, greeting the poet’s wife and pretending through mimicry to be the poet while the wordsmith hid behind a high-backed wicker seat and snickered at the Countess’s annoyance. One of us saw him as he stood in the woods in a stream of light, cupping his hands under it. As if light might pool there, containing a world of wonders, the kind most people never see.
A fortnight after the trio’s escape a bout of cholera erupted in the village, and shortly after that the hospital logbook states that two attendants and fourteen patients, including Alfred Hale, became ill.
In those weeks of fever and quarantine, we longed for the kinds of distraction that had come with the summer balclass="underline" for music and movement, the declarations of the poet, a sip of ginger beer or elder wine. It was suggested by some that it was more pleasant to be at ease in the world than to rail against it, and so a number of patients gave up trying to make themselves well.
When the worst wave of fever pressed through the wards some of us believed the building was on fire. Those who had glimpsed the river through the iron bars of the infirmary gate dreamed of it constantly. Whether ill or not we all thought about the gardens we had missed, what it would be like to ride to Inglewood in an omnibus, to walk the trails with the fresh afternoon air swaddling our faces. Sometimes lying in our beds we thought of N, believing as Leeson had that she might still be out there, lost in the gathering night. Though it is difficult, even now as we stand at the hip of the woods waiting for Jane to leave Blake and walk back to the inn, to remember what night meant to us. Not night the way Jane knows it, with its electricity, street lamps and neon shop signs, the ambient glow of distant cities; but night as we knew it then: its bale unfurled overhead. Hours so dark and moonless not even the needle holes in the sky could guide you home.
21
Blake promises to walk Jane back, but says he wants to show her something first. And even though she feels self-conscious about what has passed between them, Jane agrees to go with him, caught up in his infectious happiness as he takes her hand and pulls her under the hoops of light cast by the street lamps and toward the start of the trail. When they reach the gate he stops and kisses her, pressing her back against the wood stiles as if he wants to start all over again. She pushes him away, laughing, and he carries on through the gate, doing a slow jog backward down the trail, cocky and enjoying himself. It’s only when she insists on knowing where they’re going — uncomfortable because he is pulling her into the dark, past the short, numbered posts and the moon-glossed plants that she and William and Lily had once passed — that he turns to look at her fully, aware of the tug of resistance in her hand.
“The grotto.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see. It’s just a little farther along.”
Those of us who had stayed with Jane follow her and Blake down the trail. Our attention is divided between them and the woods because that’s where Cat took the children when Jane’s sweater came off, and they have yet to return. They were playing a game as they wandered across the waving field, Cat asking, “What sounds do you hear?” and the girl answering, “Crickets.” A dog had barked in the distance, and then the boy said, “Dock.” And the theologian had called after them that they shouldn’t wander too far.