When Norvill and Nora returned to the lake they found George sitting on a rock some distance from the blanketed body. What was left of the picnic — the roast, cheeses and fruitcake — had been carefully packed away as if in the absence of help George wanted to busy himself with some task, to be useful.
As soon as Norvill was within earshot, George said, “You’ll have to go away, find some excuse, take a commission.” His voice was gruff but there was also a streak of satisfaction under it.
“Why?”
“Why!” George was beyond angry; he slid off the rock and approached Norvill, not caring that Nora was there. “Where do I begin? The dead man? Or the married woman? Or Mother? Imagine her having to make idle chatter with you across the breakfast table after this!”
Norvill picked up a stone and tossed it sideways into the lake. “I see.”
George gasped. “Do you?” He stepped forward as if to strike his brother, but then stopped short. “And,” George huffed, his eyes settling on Nora as if to ascertain what she might or might not already know, “you must put a stop to this dalliance with Chester’s wife. You both appeared ridiculous.”
We know from Jane’s work on the Chester archives, and from Charlotte’s later admissions to Nora, that Norvill did not end things. That even though he let the strings of the relationship go while preparing for his removal to the coast, Charlotte was more reluctant. It wasn’t just that she thought she could love him; it was that he had become entangled in a tragedy borne of his feelings for her. That afternoon of the picnic, sketching and lingering on the rock, she’d felt as if some sort of palpable organism, some natural order, was humming and expanding, encompassing everyone in the party but her. She imagined that if she looked around the lake or dared to step even a little distance into the woods she’d see the world pulsing, like a giant bed of moss or the great banyan Edmund had told her about — something the others felt connected to, but that she could never be.
Once, later, standing on a chair in Scarborough while Nora stitched a hem, she confessed that it was Norvill who had changed this, who had brought something inside her back to life.
Jane parks the Mercedes in the church parking lot and lets Sam out. Since she left the station she has been trying to imagine what sort of shape her wrongness might have taken; she has been playing at it as if it is a puzzle, removing one piece — William’s indifference — and replacing it with another — William’s possible concern — even as she knows that his concern isn’t, or ought not to be, the central part of the equation. This has led her to thoughts of Charlotte and Norvill, to what it is people are looking for in each other, and what, by extension, Jane is looking for in N. Prudence’s diaries — her disdain for Charlotte, for the headmaster George befriended, for the East, or for anything that might take her sons away from her — are making Jane rethink the contents of Charlotte’s diaries; though really it’s the gaps that interest her now. There were, after all, two hiatuses in Charlotte’s diaries that Jane hadn’t paid much attention to. These, she now understands, correspond to the trips Charlotte made to be with Norvill at the coast, trips that Edmund, in his defeat, likely permitted so long as his wife was discreet — although Jane imagines his compliance would have come without formal declaration.
It’s not improbable that he wanted his wife’s happiness after all. Not impossible that both times, she’d come back flushed and rejuvenated and, perversely, more in love with him. Perhaps, although the cost was high, seeing Charlotte’s spirit returned to her was a relief to Edmund — especially if she shared her renewal with him.
Jane hasn’t realized until now that those years of struggle for Charlotte and Edmund correspond to the years when the Chester museum was fully realized — when the collections that had been idling pleasantly alongside Edmund’s factories and family concerns were given almost everything he could offer in terms of money, attention and time. The clocks cleaned and working perfectly, the whale knit to the ceiling, the hummingbirds purchased, and the Vlasak plant specimens procured: each glassy piece a true correspondent to the animate thing it was modelled on, a marvel of petals, stems and leaves, the strawberry plant weighted with a glaze of frost — captured exactly as it might have been in the last brisk days of autumn.
The day of the picnic, Nora shifted from one foot to the other; she had yet to purchase a second pair of shoes and the sole of the left one had lost some of its stitching and was flapping annoyingly near the toe. She’d confided this to Charlotte, who had reluctantly allowed her to station herself at the slip between the alders where the Chester children had shouldered their way through, the shrub’s green leaves silvering while she waited. The conversations of the men, when they stood close enough for her to listen, were wonderful. Mr. Chester was telling Mr. and Mrs. Sutton about his museum, the rarities of nature he’d collected and seen. “The world is a large place,” Chester said, and he ran his hand over his vest, lightly fingering his pocket watch. “Though I suppose you know that.” He was speaking to the Suttons, but sensed Nora’s eyes on him and nodded in her direction. He said this last phrase looking at her face, as if he could discern a worldliness at work there.
When Leeson burst through the bushes, Nora was feeding Cato a bump of bread. The dog spun and Norvill appeared with a shotgun, and Nora did not have time to reach him. Leeson halted when he saw Norvill and the shot that stopped him again was loud and strangely flat, a burst that arced and tattered. Leeson’s arms swinging in a circle as he sought to right himself.
Nora’s face was above Leeson’s before George reached them, her hands cradling his head. And she was there when Norvill bent down and saw what he’d done. A flicker of understanding crossed Norvill’s countenance: he saw that Nora knew the man.
This is why it came as a surprise a month later when Prudence, taking her tea in the gazebo, announced that Norvill needed a maid for the house in Scarborough and that she had been requested. “The footman has no skills, he can barely mail a letter, and Norvill needs someone who can clean and cook, and take dictations related to his work; his hands are sore from the constant chiselling.” Prudence stood up and smoothed her skirt, her eyes welling because she preferred Nora to the others and because now that George had gone back to the Himalayas, the house was too quiet. That night, taking her tinctures, she confessed that Nora’s leaving would be difficult, that she was beginning to feel that she was alone in the whole of the world.
Norvill came to Inglewood a week later to visit his mother and to collect Nora. The day before their departure he put on a tweed jacket and announced that he was heading out to the main cave to make strati-graphical sketches; it would consume most of the afternoon should anyone — meaning Prudence — need him. In a moment of compassion, or perhaps with sudden awareness that he would need someone to assist him, he’d stopped and turned just before the French doors to ask Nora if she’d like to join him.
The entrance to the cave was a narrow slit at the base of a limestone cliff. Step into its darkness and you were suddenly in its throat: damp and dripping and hollow. There was almost an entry hall, Nora could sense it: a high sand-coloured vault framed by jagged columns that hung from the ceiling and rough balusters that sprung up from the ground. Nora lifted her hem and stepped over the puddle in the walkway. As she squeezed between two large mounds that looked like petrified mushrooms, Norvill chided her for not removing her bustle, held the lamp in each hand higher so that she could see where her skirt had caught. There were pools of water in the depressed regions of the warped floor and Norvill took her hand to guide her along the slippery wall. At the first intersection, dripping sounds came from three directions, a plik plonk plik that reminded her of the clocks in the small parlour. The world smelled of an absence of grass, an absence of green things.