The Specimen (3 page)

“I don’t know.”

Gwen surveyed the mess across the earth and saw two of the other three Lyell volumes. She picked them out and tried to brush off the dirt and still smouldering remnants of other books and garden
clippings. They made an awkward stack in her arms as she walked slowly back towards the house, the stink of bonfire clinging inside her nostrils, catching the back of her throat. Instead of going
in by the kitchen, she took the long way round and let herself in through the front door.

The library door was closed but not fast. Gwen kicked it with the flat of her shoe and stood in the doorway hugging the charred books to her body. She supposed she must have looked deranged. She
regarded her sister; so immaculately dressed, so tightly laced, gathering books with delicate soft hands off the shelves into a wheelbarrow.

She wanted to move into the room but felt herself stuck there. Euphemia in turn stopped. Neither of them said anything for a moment. Euphemia paled. Gwen heard her mother’s voice very
clearly in her head then. It was not, as some said of the recently dead, as if the person whispered into her ear, or stood at her shoulder. It was more a feeling that her mother was in the middle
of Gwen’s brain, and that the voice she heard was simply her mother’s thoughts.

“Of course, I know what he says, darling Gwen. But why should I let him know? After all, he would only do himself an injury. There are some things it is better we keep to
ourselves.”

Gwen straightened her back and continued to stare at Euphemia who had been about to place into the wheelbarrow another book, but now she took the smallest breath and turned around, and put the
book back on the shelf. One by one she placed the other books back on the shelves and never met her sister’s eye. Gwen settled into her heels, and as her sister reshelved books she simply
watched and waited until the last book was back in its place. Only then did Gwen move into the room. She placed the ruined three volumes of Lyell’s
Principles
on the wide empty shelf
they had come from. She poured herself a glass of water from the carafe on the desk and then taking up the wheelbarrow handles trundled it out of the room.

At the door, Gwen said, “Have you any idea what I am thinking?”

“No, because it is impossible to tell what a traitor thinks or feels.”

“You admit, then, that I have feelings.”

“And you admit it, finally. That is what you are, you can’t escape it.”

Gwen went out of the house and back to the kitchen garden. As she bumped the wheelbarrow down the steps, along the paths, pushed it past unclipped bushes, her anger at herself made her clumsy.
She should never have allowed Euphemia to draw her into the old argument again, but the previous evening over dinner she had been unable to contain her contempt for her sister’s dogged belief
that the fossils in their father’s collection were all remnants of the Great Flood. She had stormed out of the dining room and fetched
Strata Identified by Organised Fossils,
by
William Smith. The book had landed on the table next to Euphemia with an almighty thump and had sent an empty wine glass to the floor where it had smashed. Gwen blamed herself now for having been
influenced by the wine. The glow it had given her sense of righteous certainty over Euphemia’s stupidity had given Gwen’s tongue free licence to vent her derision. She opened the book
at the place where it was marked and pushed it under Euphemia’s nose.

“Are you really too stupid to understand what the words say? Yes? I’ll read them to you.” Gwen recited a passage, barely needing to look at the page. The words had danced in
triumph—now where were they? Euphemia had tried to burn them out of existence. But they clung to Gwen, and she to them: “. . . organic remains peculiar to each stratum . . .” She
pushed away the memory of her jubilance at having committed those words to memory for her father. Of having found herself standing at his desk, trying to talk to him the way she imagined he would
have allowed had she been born a boy. It didn’t matter. The knowledge was not his alone to keep.

Gwen rounded the last corner and stopped the barrow next to Murray. “We have miscalled the lad, Murray. This was nothing to do with him.”

Murray turned and looked into her eyes, and she returned his hard stare. His eyes flickered as she saw him understand her meaning. Together they set about pulling the books from the dirt. Some
were not very badly damaged on the inside and could be saved. But Smith’s volume had received special attention from Euphemia, and Gwen began to find small fragments of the pages torn by hand
from their binding and ripped bit by bit beyond repair. Here was a corner bearing the partial remains of an intricate illustration of an ammonite. Every book in the bonfire had been part of
Gwen’s armoury, as she had come to think of it, against the blinkered and determined stupidity of people like the vicar who had the intelligence to recognise the truth but turned his eye from
it, and Euphemia’s gaggle of black-clad visitors who shunned the truth completely in favour of spirits and their messages from the other side. Euphemia called her a traitor. A traitor to
their mother and her faith. Gwen knelt down and let the pain of her grief enter her body; she let it snake through her, probing its tongue into each dark crevice.

She told herself after some minutes that it didn’t really matter that the books had been burned. They were, in theory, replaceable, and the truth of what had been contained in them, the
spirit of them, still lived in her head and in the heads of others. What mattered was the vicious nature of Euphemia’s spite. Gwen chided herself for bringing Euphemia’s desire to take
possession of the house to the fore, to eradicate every memory of their blasphemous father who had detained Reverend Sparsholt in loud debate on the steps of Helford Church on the day of their
mother’s funeral. “She had her time in Heaven while she was alive.” Gwen remembered the passionate grief in her father’s voice. “Now her flesh will rot under the
soil,” he said, “And that is
all
, Sparsholt. That. Is. All.” And so every trace of his sinful library was to be purged from the house, in order that Euphemia could fully
dedicate and fashion the place to the memory of their mother. Gwen saw now that Euphemia was also attempting to annihilate Gwen’s sense of herself, and her right to belong to the place.
Euphemia wanted, she could see, to deny the house and its contents any hold on Gwen.

There was one thing she had now though, which Euphemia did not have, and did not know about: her new friend, Mr Scales. Gwen recalled the fossil in his hand as they had spoken that afternoon.
She went over and over their conversation. Parts of it had become lost, but most of it she could remember, and its urgency. The intensity of the conversation had soon eradicated all the usual
formality and convention. They had not made polite enquiries about each other’s history; they had existed fully in the moment with no regard for the past or the future.

Gwen tidied herself up, smacking dirt and ash from her clothes while Murray pushed the barrow of books to one of the potting sheds and she followed behind. Murray left her to it, and Gwen began
the ordeal of assessing the damage in detail. As she examined each part of Euphemia’s essay on destruction, Gwen knew that she would never mention Euphemia’s existence to Mr Scales.
There would be no poisoning the air with the mention of her, of what she had done, of the way she had made Gwen feel.

The Spiritual meetings held at Carrick House attracted a plethora of bizarre people. Like a bundle of strange insects, Gwen thought, batting at the glass in the door,
blundering around the dimmed lamps. She couldn’t bear it; she hated their sweaty hands and, in their wide hopeful eyes, that grateful admiration of her sister. No spirits, though, had ever
come into the drawing room to divulge their secrets, to deliver their messages or even to assuage some kind of guilt of their own or of the living. It tugged at her conscience, and the knot of
disdain grew in her stomach. She watched them arrive. In bundles of four they plopped out of carriages on to the drive. This Monday evening there were three carriages, and two clients had walked up
the drive on foot, flapping blackly with the setting sun at their backs. “Pity help them,” she said, and drew the curtains.

Gwen’s absence from the meetings was enough. Euphemia did not need to be told how much her sister despised her gift.

And what Gwen got up to in the evenings, whilst Euphemia held the Spiritual meetings, was of no concern to her. Her ladies (and some gentlemen) were attentive and appreciative of her talent.
Some, like the Coyne woman, Penelope, came to Euphemia in fear of a loss not yet happened. The tremble in Penelope’s lips was never quite still, always expecting the wash of her son’s
far-travelled drowning or some other likely misfortune to be revealed to her in those meetings. Connoisseurs, some of them, and full of stories about the charlatans of the profession, who performed
nothing more than parlour tricks. Euphemia did not have a repertoire of tricks, only an inexhaustible supply of voices, which could dance across the room and whisper into her clients’ ears.
There were never any rappings in Euphemia’s drawing-room, nor tinkling bells. She did not have a table with a wobbly leg apt to rock uncontrollably in the gloom. The only glistening things
were her clients’ wide and thankful eyes, and after they had gone, the coins in the discreetly placed dish. And most gratifying of all was not the counting out of the coins and the entries in
the book she kept, but the fact that she had never once solicited custom. Never placed anything so vulgar as an advertisement in a paper. In fact, Euphemia considered herself more than a little
apart from other clairvoyants. On the rare occasions when an introduction to another Medium looked as if it might have been in the offing, she was quick to discourage without appearing ungrateful
or rude; though she did often feel incapable of hiding her feeling of condescension. Her isolation seemed to induce a certain kind of expectation amongst her clients. Her talent was unsullied by
the riffraff. Like those young girls in Europe who suffered from visions of the Virgin, she was pure and she wanted to keep it that way.

It was a mixed bunch tonight; too many for the table in the drawing room. Many new faces, which always gratified her. Euphemia began with her induction talk. She didn’t like the way her
voice sounded in the dining room but there was nothing which could be done about it now.

“We must remember to keep in mind the fact that the spirits are sensitive,” she said. “And for this reason, of course, we will only refer to ourselves by our Christian
names.” She paused for a second. “There will be no communication from the other side for a ‘Mr Smith’ but a spirit may wish to talk to ‘John’ or
‘Harry’. And the spirits, of course, make no promises other than to speak to you if your heart is open and free of doubt.”

Naturally, Euphemia was always “Miss Carrick” to these people; how on earth would she manage to remain in control of the event otherwise. Her gaze travelled around the table and
settled for a moment on a young man whose complexion, temporarily ruddy with excitement, was sickly. He licked his lips and his hands trembled as the introductions flowed around the company, the
hush punctuated by the hesitant voice of each new client saying their name out loud. Euphemia smiled. They all looked at her and told her their names; the rest looked at the one speaking. It was
all ticking along, but she kept the young man in the corner of her eye. As it came to his turn, she could see that she had been mistaken; he was not so very young after all. She looked into his
eyes.

“Ch-Charles. I’m Charles. Hello.” He looked up at the ceiling and searched in the air above their heads.

“Welcome, Charles.” She noted him as difficult, perhaps an unbeliever, and moved on to the woman sitting next to him.

“Good evening, I am Penelope.”

“Welcome, Penelope. So lovely to see you again.”

Helford Passage. April 1859.

Paths meandered down each side of the cleft in the garden crowded with old rhododendrons. Palms, which had once been ships’ ballast, now sprouted rich fronds of growth.
Camellias flushed a pink frothiness into the wet green of spring alongside the magnolias’ burst of waxy petals. Stands of bamboo, once tidy and slim, were now out of control, pushing their
spiked shoots throughout the grounds. Bisecting the garden, a stream fled unkempt pools for carp where none swam; along its banks the formidable gunnera leaves pushed up from their hairy crowns.
Edward saw all of this in his mind because the night sky was especially overcast. The day had begun well, with a clear horizon over the sea, but the bank of cloud now obscuring the moon and making
his progress difficult had come and built up its volume as it moved over the sea towards this part of the south Cornish coast. He doubted, now that he had finally met Miss Carrick in daylight, that
she would be there waiting for him for a second time in the dark chill of the summerhouse. She had made him keep a promise, and already he had broken it. He had come back again hoping to redeem
himself, to explain that he couldn’t have kept away in daylight, that he couldn’t possibly have let the chance to see her face pass. Her manner on the beach had encouraged him. And yet
he was nervous, so much more nervous than he had ever been about anything in his life. And he was exhausted. The seven miles had tripled. Early that morning, he had set out intending to do
something very different. He had walked to the boundary of the small Carrick estate, intending to call at the house and present himself. He had turned back. When he had arrived at his rooms in
Falmouth, he had caught sight of himself in the mirror above the wash-stand. He’d stripped to the waist and passed a frenzied minute washing himself before putting a clean shirt on his damp
body and setting out again.

There were times on that walk as the gloaming turned to pitch when he thought he would fall over the cliff edge. And deservedly so, he told himself, deservedly so. You have behaved irrationally
towards Miss Carrick and too bad for you if you fall over the cliff and never discover her feelings. Too bad for you if you never have the opportunity to declare your own feelings. He had stopped
at several points to strike a light, but the pathetic flare cupped in his hands had been blown out almost instantly by the gusts coming in off the sea.