On Charlotte’s last day in the house on the cliff, Norvill asked her to come and live with him. He went down on his knees in the bedroom, his shirt half on; there was a sickle-shaped mark on his chest from where she’d accidentally scratched him.
“I couldn’t possibly.” She continued packing.
“Leave Edmund.”
“Again,” she said, “you’re being ridiculous.”
He sat down on the bed with his back to her. In the quiet they could hear the housekeeper gathering cutlery in the next room — the Inglewood maid George had sent to take care of Norvill. There was a pocket of silence and Charlotte almost spoke, but waited until the clatter of the breakfast things being loaded onto a tray in the dining nook resumed.
“I do think of it,” she said.
“What?” He turned around. He was still handsome — though wind-burnt from the survey work. The strain of the shooting, of having to leave Inglewood, had aged him.
Charlotte set the dress she was struggling to fold onto the bed and felt the billows of silk exhaust themselves in her hands. “I have, these past weeks, in your occasional absence, imagined”—she said the last word sternly so that he would not mistake it for sentiment—“a possible life with you. And dared”—again a stern emphasis—“once, to picture us there, on the beach with some child of our own, living out our days …” She searched for the word and then settled on “… simply.”
Norvill grabbed her hand. “And why not?”
“Because I love Edmund, too.”
Jane has read Charlotte’s diaries and Edmund’s letters, and in those months when she assembled the material for the Chester family display we read and reread them too. And we saw how time works — how it pulls some stones off the beach and casts others onto the sand — how Edmund became the kind of subject he’d once celebrated. A plaque was made in his name and hung beside the Chester family cabinet in the slant-roofed room that had been both storage and a servant’s quarters in the Chesters’ first residence. We think of him and of the Chesters often — even here, so close to the Whitmore and Inglewood House — because the home they made became ours, and because time in the museum moved in a different way than it did outside, and we liked that. Whereas the tourists and school children, the locals on weekend excursions experienced the Chester over the course of two or three hours, curious but swept up by the demands of their everyday lives, we lived there, had the patience to study the details. The museum was a place where we’d come to feel at home, where the clocks had stopped ticking, where time had settled into its rusted hinge.
We are certain that Edmund knew about Norvill and Charlotte. The summer she went to Scarborough he dashed off business letters with uncharacteristic indifference, slashed a week of appointments from his diary, proposed a new configuration of the board that would eventually see Norvill expelled. A stain of ink the size of a fist appeared suddenly on his desk and he wrote to his sister that everyone was at a loss as to how to remove it. We know how things were done in that world, but Jane does not. We understand that a man can stand in the hall while his wife receives a letter from a distant cousin, and intentionally not observe its arrival. We understand polite efficiencies — how the maid might knock the ladle lightly against the side of the tureen as Charlotte glances up from the flawless weave of the table linen to find Edmund smiling thinly. How Edmund might state that the morning paper has said that the weather has taken a turn on the coast; that he’s wondering if it’s still advisable for her to leave.
We are, all of us, observers. Even Herschel, who has lost his tongue, who sits on the outside of our circle to tweep his yes and whoot his no, sees what is happening — sees Jane and sees Blake, his chin pressed against the top of her head, his arm under her pillow while they are sleeping; sees the tidal pull one person can effect upon another. So we stand around the room, stir the curtains, watch the tap slowly dripping and wish we could feel even one water drop on our palms. And in the dark, in drifts of memory, we recall some of the people and things we have happened upon, moments that aroused us from the stupor of our lives — the plumes of a peacock unfolding under an elm, the bright platter of a sky coroneted by trees, a list retrieved from between an armoire and the wall of a house by the sea:
Flat of palm on abdomen
Shift of sheets
Hard shelf of his hips against the soft of mine
Curve of water glass against my lips — his hand trembling
Coarse planking of the wood floor
The hitch of a sliver
Blake’s phone rings at half-nine and he stumbles out of bed to yank it from the pocket of his trousers. He listens for a second and then covers the bottom of the phone to relay that it’s his father, asking why he isn’t at work.
Later, while he is in the shower, Jane uses Blake’s mobile to go online and check her new e-mail account for a message from William. After yesterday’s phone call she’d run upstairs from the records office to use the computer terminals in the public library and set up a generic e-mail account in Helen Swindon’s name. Before she lost her nerve she’d dashed off a note thanking him in advance for any assistance he could offer in relation to her search for connections between the Whitmore and Inglewood House in 1877.
William’s name pops up in small bold letters in her otherwise empty inbox just as the taps in the shower squeal off and the pipes in the wall groan and thump.
Ms. Swindon—
In regards to your inquiry … unable to find any reference to the three visitors … relevant sections concerning Whitmore death at Inglewood attached. Let me know if I can be of further assistance.
Regards, W.E.
Two minutes later, Blake stands naked in front of the window and announces that since he’s already late, he’s going to skive off work. He unwraps a ginger biscuit from the tea tray, shoves it in his mouth and asks Jane what she wants to get up to.
She throws his shirt at him. “Some of us actually have work to do.” The stretchy grey jumper her sister-in-law had left in the boot is sitting on top of her overnight case; she loops it over her head and slides her arms into the woolly sleeves. “I need to sort through some of the Farrington material at the records office.”
Blake rolls his eyes; then he whips his jeans up over his hips and slings his brown leather belt strap through its buckle, watching her watch him. “You’ll have to eat, right?”
“Ostensibly.”
“I’ll come and fetch you at one.”
Blake slips out on his own and a few minutes later Jane and Sam head downstairs to see if Maureen is still in the kitchen. Jane wants to tell her that she had a guest stay over, pay any difference, apologize; maybe say he’s a friend, the visit unexpected — though the village is so small that if Maureen saw Blake, she’d know him.
Last night, as Blake’s thumb traced Jane’s bottom lip, Charlotte Chester and her catalogue of touch had sprung to Jane’s mind; now, thinking about the complexity of explaining her “guest” to Maureen, about the social mores around relationships people don’t approve of, she’s reminded of Norvill and Charlotte, of the way they must have manoeuvred Victorian conventions — even in a seaside resort like Scarborough.