Gwendolyn puts the diaries back into the file cabinet and locks it, then locks the dining room door behind them with a skeleton key. “I’ll only be twenty minutes or so.” She offers Jane the option of waiting in the library, warning her to avoid the man supervising the movers as he’s in a bit of a mood because one of the workmen dropped a Queen Anne side table. “You’re welcome to look at the books on the shelves. We’re just in the process of cataloguing them.”
Because the movers are traipsing in and out of the library — once hauling a wood bench so large that it takes four of them to carry it — Jane stands in the corner out of the way, near the brocade curtains, and surveys the titles the Trust is placing back on the shelves. Most of the books concern botany, geography and history, their spines splitting or warped, though they would have been relatively new when George purchased them, probably to keep current with the scientific discoveries and political boundaries of the day. She likes this about George — that he must have been less concerned with having a gentleman’s library than with the importance of the material in the books themselves. In a row of volumes that are mostly verse, Jane pulls out a tatty copy of Virgil, then a lightly worn blue calfskin Milton, then a book with a torn cover and no discernible title save for an illustrated embellishment of a hive of bees. She opens it up to the first leaf: To my muse. I see what I see.
“In the razed field,/in the cusp of its wealth,” says the poet, and Cat claps and Herschel tweeps. “We lay on the rough skin of earth,/and loved with our mouths.” The poet leans over Jane’s shoulder, reading as she is reading: “To speak and name the field song,/to pluck wonder like a flower,/is to waver between worlds:/the gods and ours.”
Jane closes the book and turns it over in her hands, looking for the author or publication date, and the poet seems to deflate. He knows he has been in this room before with that very book placed in front of him. He had stopped here with the succubus after being released from the Whitmore. He remembers feeling anxiety — a combination of terror at being outside the hospital’s gates and dread of being returned to what Dr. Thorpe had called “your wife’s care.” He had shredded his notebook in the carriage on the way over, and yet his wife had insisted they come, leading him straight into the house like a dog on a chain. All of it — the newness of the situation, the lightness of the air, the motes in front of his eyes — had induced in him a kind of panic. His hands scrabbling and near useless as his wife thrust his own book into them and demanded he sign it.
What the poet remembers most is how he wanted to knock her teeth out because she kept showing them to him, smiling widely, though her eyes were on George Farrington. Some sort of exchange was being made, an agreement he couldn’t keep track of. He remembers a peal of laughter emitting from his wife’s ugly mouth, then a “Delightful!” which led to the girl being called in.
It was the girl the poet knew from the other world, the world he had just been expelled from. She was the same one, he was certain of it, although she was healthier now — more substance to her, a rosy brightness to her skin. She curtseyed and smiled at him, left a tray of tea and biscuits, a pair of scissors nestled amongst the cups and saucers. For a brief instant he could breathe again, and so he closed his eyes to compose a line in his head about knowing.
The succubus beside him suddenly picked up the scissors, her hands touching so many surfaces — a desk, drawers, an envelope, a chair — until there was nowhere in the room where the poet could stand that was free of his wife’s contamination. “You take it,” she said to George Farrington, in a voice the poet had heard the first time he bedded her. She sat down and tilted her neck, and Farrington took the shears to the black snakes of her hair, clipping a tress from near her neckline. The Countess turned and levelled her eyes at the poet even as she spoke to Farrington. “Now,” she said, “let’s take one from him.”
Jane returns the poet’s book to the shelf and draws the curtains farther so she can look over the back lawn for Blake. The gardens have come a long way in the past week: the central mound has been turned over, a new row of rose bushes has been planted, and the trellises have been reset. There are so many changes that even as Jane cranes her neck to gaze over the grounds for the gardener whose body and gestures she knows, she’s wondering what work is his, what parts of the garden he might have planted in the stretch of days they were together, and what he would say if he came up to the house and saw her now.
The Trust’s plan, according to Gwen, is to open the grounds in the coming summer, to have the gardens trained and in full bloom by then, the alpine beds exactly as George had planted them. There will be teahouse seating just outside the library windows and a kitchen downstairs that will serve soups and sandwiches — the basics. The Farrington archives will be relocated to the old study and a small research library on Victorian plant hunting will be established. The main floor of the house will eventually be open to the public for admission. “A kind of museum,” Gwen had said, “mostly botanically themed,” and Jane had smiled politely, not wanting to say that these were difficult times for museums, that people seemed more content with looking at a jpeg of a glass-blown iris or a scarab bracelet, and less concerned with seeing the fragility and wear, the poignancy, of real things.
“We’re planning on having a concert on the grounds on opening day,” Gwen had added. “You know, get a big name to headline, make it a black tie and white gloves kind of do.” She smiled over at Jane warmly, as if they were friends. “I’m sure the Eliots will drive up for it. You should come too.”
When Gwen returns, Jane resumes making her way through Prudence’s narrative. In her diary entry on the 29th of August 1877, Prudence notes that the housekeeper has taken on a new girl who has come without references but is well educated. A few entries later, in blotchy ink that was probably the result of a change of pen, Prudence writes that Dr. Thorpe has paid a visit. He arrived at three and took tea, after which the men retired to the library. Thorpe gifted George with a handwritten copy of one of Mr. Samuel Murray’s unpublished verses — which I have yet to read. It was agreed that Nora would be allowed to stay on.
Jane stares down at the open diary for a full minute. Unlike with Dr. Palmer’s journals, where the writing was so tight, so nearly illegible that Jane was worried she was drawing a connection between the Whitmore and Inglewood House because it was something she wanted to see, Prudence’s writing is Spencer-perfect. Dr. Thorpe’s name isn’t a question; his involvement in Nora’s employment is clear.
Prudence’s subsequent entries mention fittings for dresses, the modification of old bonnets, and the mending of nightwear and undergarments, as if Nora was the first seamstress Prudence had had in her regular employ. There are notes as to who should receive the embroidered workbags Nora is making for Christmas — a thrift that might explain Nora’s value in a household whose finances were waning. As she reads through each entry, inching closer to the week of the picnic and the shooting, it dawns on Jane that William had either not read Prudence’s diaries carefully, or he’d misrepresented their contents in his lecture, stating dismissively that they didn’t have much to say about the Chester — Farrington picnic. That week, after the initial details of preparation — the airing of the rooms and the orders for lobster and exotic fruits to be sent up from London — there are a number of cryptic notes. On the day of the shooting, Prudence wrote: The children have been confined to the nursery, C— did not come down for dinner, tincture brought up to my room. This was followed by Norvill returned to consult the men, and extra room arranged—which could mean, Jane surmised, that Prudence had wondered if the constable they’d sent for might need to stay over.