Jane nodded and Mobbs pulled out a notebook and a stubby pencil. And for the next half hour Jane recounted the story of the cave at Fontde-Gaume, telling Mobbs how Lily had been listening to her describe it to William, and how later, when Lily had to pee and she and Jane discovered the grotto, Lily had mistaken it for a cave. She’d thought they could go inside it, that they’d find painted bison and mammoths and oxen and horses. “She kept going on about the reindeer,” Jane said, because the kissing reindeer was the part of the story Lily had liked best, that and the part at the end about the domed cavity at the back of the narrowest tunnel, the wall that was marked, almost like a finger-painting, with the splayed fingers and narrow palms of human hands.
23
The archivist helping Jane is called Freddy. He’s a paunchy and bald middle-aged man who spends the first hour of the morning moving fussily around the local records office reshelving books and indices from a squeaky trolley. When Jane walks over to his desk to request a biography of George Farrington, he produces a slip of paper from under a stapler and flusters, “Miranda left a note for you. Sorry, I forgot it was here. She thought you might like to look at Lucian Palmer’s journals. Do you want me to call them up?”
“Sorry, who is Lucian Palmer?”
Freddy lifts the piece of paper to indicate he’s told her everything he knows.
“Why not?” she says. “Thanks.”
Palmer, Jane discovers, is Dr. Lucian Palmer, and his medical journals — two deteriorating calfskin booklets with marbled endpapers — show that he was a village doctor who was occasionally engaged as a Visiting Physician at the Whitmore. His notebooks list his patients by a coded system that includes their initials, the location where they were tended to, their symptoms, treatments and outcomes. Some entries reference hospital visits and certificates he’s signed: B for births, D for deaths, and S for statements made on behalf of those committed. Jane leafs through a hundred yellowing pages of tight, almost illegible handwriting looking for capital Ws, for Whitmore, which Palmer tended to mark with a flourish.
The seventh reference to the Whitmore says Whitmore patient where the deceased’s initials usually go, and INGWD for the location. Jane checks the page twice. She’s been connecting the two places in her mind for so long that it is strange to see proof of it. A short paragraph follows in which Jane can only glean called upon and G.F. and “death by—” She tries a few more times to make out Palmer’s microscopic cursive, then takes the journal up to Freddy. But after several minutes with a magnifying glass he can only add carriage to—.
“May I get a copy of this?”
Freddy examines the delicate binding. “What pages?”
“Just that one for now. Is the other archivist—”
“Miranda.”
“Is Miranda coming in today?”
“At noon.”
There is nothing else in Dr. Palmer’s journals that references both Inglewood and the Whitmore, and the best that Jane can discern, after she comes back from a quick and early lunch in the parking lot with Sam, is that the coded entries take place in or around 1877, the year N disappeared. She wades back into the birth and death records in the Farrington folder, but finds nothing related to 1877 there. George died in Tibet in 1881, and Norvill in Scarborough in 1890. Prudence lasted until 1912, still tucked in at Inglewood House, and died at the ripe old age of ninety from pneumonia.
Jane scans the material she has amassed on the table and picks up the Biographical Sketch of George Farrington, Esquire, by S.B. Atkinson, which Freddy had dropped off last: an exaggerated turn-of-the-century account that hadn’t seemed credible when Jane glanced through it. She places it on the book support, gently opens its flagging millboard and skims the contents again. It is the kind of biography that was typical of its day — embellished and flattering, with enough anecdotes of a personal nature to cement the authority of the writer. Some of the details she recognizes from the chapter in William’s book on George and from his lecture at the Chester: George’s birth at Buxton House, his father Hugh’s rise through government, the move to Inglewood, Hugh’s death in India, George’s growing renown as an importer of rare species. She turns to the last few paragraphs of the book — a book that she now knows William must have read — and tries not to picture him in this very same room with George’s death unfolding in eloquent detail before him, his thumb on the corner of the nicked page the same way hers is now.
In The Lost Gardens of England William describes George’s death in what was then a closed-off region of Tibet. William’s version is less florid than the Victorian biographer’s. Unlike the drama posited by S.B. Atkinson — brimming with details he’d likely never have had access to — William is matter-of-fact: George was climbing along a steep crevasse where he’d heard there was an unusual strain of poppy. His Sherpa, moving up ahead, came into some kind of difficulty and George misstepped in his rush to reach him. He fell some distance down a cleft in the rock. The Sherpa survived, though he was days getting off the mountain, and two weeks later returned with ropes and men from his village to retrieve George’s body. George was given a sky burial in the Buddhist tradition, as he’d instructed — his corpse left to the vultures — though his Sherpa honoured his request that a lock of his hair be sent home to Prudence.
When Miranda comes in and settles behind the desk to relieve Freddy, Jane walks over with Lucian Palmer’s journals and asks what made her recommend them. She knows an archivist can’t reveal information about other patrons, but she asks anyway — was this one of William Eliot’s sources? The gentleman who was up from London?
“I really can’t say if the gentleman read it during the course of his research. Was it of any use?” She smiles, and her arched eyebrows give her away.
“Yes, it was helpful, thanks.”
Jane moves slowly to her table and sets Palmer’s journal on top of the stacks of material she still has to read through. Her hands are trembling. Sitting down she tries to sort out what exactly is unsettling her — it’s more than the way that William’s name recalls the scene she caused at the museum; it’s more than just the hazy sense of his presence here with her again as she’s going over the Farrington material. Jane smooths her hands over her hair and takes a deep breath. No, it’s more like anger; anger at the possibility that even here, doing the only piece of research she’s ever chosen wholly for herself, she’s following in his tracks again: William up ahead in the woods, William ducking in and out of view, William turning the corner. What if Jane doesn’t find N? What if William has already found her?
The old pay phone in the hall takes credit cards. Jane nestles her notebook between her knees and swipes hers before she loses her nerve. When the operator answers, Jane asks for the Natural History Museum number. “The botanical division if you can find it.”
The phone at the museum rings three times, and when a woman answers Jane’s chest hitches with relief. “Hello, sorry, I’m looking for William Eliot’s number.”
“I can transfer you. Who’s calling?”