Chapter Sixteen
Toby accompanied Mary Gladwell to a talk Timothy Crudge was giving at The Athenaeum, to launch his book on English folklore – finally finished after five years of endeavour.
It was a wet, windswept evening at the fag end of October.
Inside, the lecture room blazed with light, and the warmth of two hundred bodies.
Toby only half listened to the lecture; it wasn’t really of interest. It was the end of a busy week, and he was content to let Crudge’s familiar, sonorous voice lull him.
Mary was paying enough attention for the both of them – no fidgeting, no people-spotting.
She was the only woman in the audience. Somehow, the usual rules didn’t seem to apply to Mary Gladwell, and she pointedly refused to notice when disgruntled looks were aimed her way.
Toby drifted pleasantly, his mind wholly off guard.
‘Now, when we compare these prevalent tropes to the legends of Abrecan of Hallewell, in Wessex, as was,’ Crudge said, ‘we find, again, rebirth, endless life, a further iteration of the philosopher’s stone . . .’
The memory engulfed Toby. The scent of warm earth and summer grass, of cider apples on soft breath.
Candlelight reflecting in eyes that had filled with desire when they looked his way.
Theo Hallewell, turning her face into his hand.
Heat flooded him. A feeling like falling.
Toby swallowed hard, tugging at his collar, and ignored Mary’s enquiring glance.
Please . . . It is agony to know that you hate me . . .
For a few tormented heartbeats, Toby was consumed by the need to tell her that he didn’t. That he never had.
The assault was mercifully short. By the end of the lecture he had mastered himself, and took Mary over to be introduced to Crudge, as promised. The room thronged with conversation, as waiters brought out glasses of champagne on silver trays.
‘Delighted, delighted,’ Crudge said, as he shook Mary’s hand.
‘As am I,’ Mary said. ‘I thoroughly enjoyed your talk, Mr Crudge. I do look forward to reading more.’
‘Well, well,’ the old man said modestly, accepting the glass Nicholas Bourton had fetched for him. ‘You are too kind, my dear.’
‘Mrs Gladwell shares your love of exploration, Mr Crudge,’ Toby said. ‘She has travelled to many of the ancient places of the Near East.’
Crudge’s wiry eyebrows shot up. ‘Indeed? But how wonderful!’
They talked for a while about where they had been, what they had seen, and where they might travel to next.
‘Nineveh, if Nicholas and I can get ourselves organised,’ Crudge said. ‘The older one gets, the more complicated it seems to become.’
‘Try being female,’ Mary said, with a smile.
‘Ha! Indeed, I am sure.’
‘Speaking of which, Toby, what of your friend?’ Mary said. ‘The one who wanted to go to Mesopotamia? Perhaps Mr Crudge might have space for her on his trip to Nineveh.’
Her face registered puzzlement at the startled pause that followed, and the long look that passed between Toby and Crudge.
‘Have I put my foot in it?’ she said at length. ‘I do beg your pardon.’
‘Not at all, my dear Mrs Gladwell,’ Crudge said.
‘I was merely taken aback. I know very well who you must mean, you see. Mrs Anscombe is a mutual friend of ours, of long-standing. I should like nothing better than to take her travelling, should she still wish to go. Alas, things are not so simple. If I – or anyone – might think of a way to free her up for it, then I’d be delighted. ’
Toby took an inelegant gulp of champagne, and looked away.
‘It was only a . . . passing thought,’ he said tightly. ‘A memory that surfaced.’
‘Indeed?’ Crudge said.
Tactfully, Mary changed the subject. ‘Are you acquainted with Geoffrey Mortmain, Mr Crudge? I think I see him over there – now, he’s an interesting fellow, by all accounts . . .’
But for the rest of the evening, Toby felt precarious.
He kept catching Crudge’s glances, which were as penetrating as ever.
Seeing things that Toby didn’t want him to see.
Things he barely understood himself; things that were impossible.
There was a faint tremor in his gut. He gripped his glass too tightly, and only half listened to the conversation.
He wanted to leave the stuffy room, and the distinguished club.
Take a breath of cold air. He needed reality – his true and present reality – to reassert itself, because this growing sense of aimless urgency was alarming.
The sudden desire to grasp Crudge’s arm, and surrender to what the old man seemed already to know.
To blurt it out – something Toby had never thought could ever be true:
I want to go back.
That same evening, Theo sat for a long while by Arthur’s bedside.
A fitful wind threw bursts of rain against the window, and in the quiet lulls between she heard her son’s soft breathing, as regular and reassuring as gentle waves on a shore.
It lowered her heart rate, slowly restoring a sense of the calm she craved.
Her head was throbbing, but her cheek seemed to have stopped swelling.
It would go down in a few days, then the bruise could be masked with powder and she might go outside again.
Gingerly, she touched her ribs on the left side and felt the lance of pain.
But she didn’t think they were broken – she was learning how to tell: this time, it was too easy to breathe.
Where – or to whom – Ralph had stormed off to, she had no idea.
It hardly mattered. She counted her blessings instead: he was not there right now.
Arthur had not been touched. He had not discovered her letters from Albert Mackie, or Timothy Crudge.
He had not discovered her letter from Sarah Toller.
The nurse’s letter was well hidden. Theo knew it by heart – every inflammatory, damning, miraculous word of it. She could almost feel it reverberating, wherever she was in the house. It was a weapon, and a key. A gift so precious she was terrified of the responsibility of owning it.
Arthur breathed, and slept, and Theo thought of Kit, and of Missy; of her fleeting, ephemeral sister, Amy, and of Rosalind Mackie.
However hard she tried, she still couldn’t grasp where the dead went.
She’d been taught that the answer was to heaven or hell, but these days heaven seemed like a picture in a book, not a real place at all.
And if there was no heaven, what then? Why put a posy of flowers on a headstone, if the person couldn’t look down to see?
Why fret about an unlovely grave? The idea that a person stayed with their decaying body, trapped in the darkness, was too terrible.
But how, then, could they simply cease to exist?
All that life; all those thoughts and feelings.
It would happen to her one day. And it would happen to Arthur – a quick stab of agony worse than any broken bone.
The dead can suffer no indignity.
So, did it matter what became of their earthly remains?
Their memory? Logically, it did not, but Theo’s heart wouldn’t agree.
It mattered. In the same way it mattered that Kit was buried alongside murderers, in the prison yard in Dorchester.
It mattered that he had been executed for a crime he hadn’t committed.
It mattered that Missy had been robbed of her life, and then of her head, in the pursuit of surgical skill.
Both so young, and so full of life; so deserving of the futures that had been taken from them.
And Theo had married the man who’d killed them both.
All any of us can do, in any situation, is speak truthfully. So Ralph had said to her, around the time of Kit’s trial. And yet he had lied, and lied, and lied.
The proof was in Sarah Toller’s letter, thrumming with portent, loaded with possibility.
And with that proof Theo might find a way to clear Kit’s name, and bring him home.
A way to keep her promise to Missy. A way, perhaps, to free herself from a marriage that was slowly crushing her.
The thought was tantalising, terrifying.
Her knees ached as though she were somewhere very high; a place from which she might fall .
. . or perhaps fly. The rain fell, Arthur slept, and the night wore on.
With steady determination, Theo pulled her scattered thoughts to order, and searched inside for the strength to act.
Because she had to find it.