The Specimen (32 page)

Later in the evening, after a faltering start, he told Tristan and Hettie Grindlock how he had left bait for the alligators and had stood ready with his guns primed. He had registered the broad,
flat snouts on the huge beasts and had not been afraid of their enormous length or their girth, or the rows of teeth which he later hacked from their stinking gums. He had no regard for his own
life in those hours of killing and butchering as he had searched for the remains.

“But you know the way they consume their prey, they rip and churn; I could not discern from the mess. The abomination of it was too much. I did not pause in my quest for twenty-four hours,
but then I was overcome. I had to leave the place. I brought their belongings with me, and I left everything else.”

He could not mention the fact that he and Gwen had spoken words that could never have been undone. That she had chosen, suddenly, to go with Augusta in the second canoe with Coyne, leaving
Edward to search for the black caiman with the hired men.

“I should have insisted that they stay behind. I told Coyne to look for hatchlings only. Something for—” He had been going to say that he’d thought the hatchlings would
be harmless and easy to secure with a woman and a child as company. “Coyne stayed on, when I came away, to continue where I left off. He would not hear otherwise. He claimed
responsibility.”

“Of course, he did,” said Hettie. Her face had not lost the ashen complexion it had assumed.

“I want to take a passage as soon as possible.”

“Trust everything to me,” Tristan said. “I’ll find you a good ship.”

Edward valued Tristan Grindlock’s blunt empathy, and the softness with which he had listened to Edward’s guilt-ridden ramblings. But now he knew he was making
Hettie and Tristan uncomfortable. In their position, he might have felt the same. A mammoth obligation surely, to console a man who has lost his wife and only child when one was literally
surrounded, overrun with one’s own progeny. The pressure of so many children at such close proximity did not disturb Edward. They were not Augusta.

He tried to project himself a few months forward, sitting at home, attempting to make sense of his collections. But he could not even picture which home that might have been.

“Regret,” Tristan Grindlock broke into his thoughts, and yet again Edward was grateful. They were standing together watching Edward’s few belongings being ferried over the
water to the ship. “Regret. There is no point to it, no usefulness to be had from it. If you give in to it, it’ll drain you till there is barely any part of you not smudged by it. But,
I tell you this for nothing, I’d hop on that boat with you in a trice.”

“Your kindness has been immeasurable, but I couldn’t let you part with your family on my account.”

Edward smiled at Tristan Grindlock weakly and briefly. They were standing on almost exactly the same spot where he had greeted Edward so effusively. Edward caught something odd in the
man’s eyes.

Tristan patted Edward’s shoulder. “There’s no need to worry. I wouldn’t burden you like that.” His hand stayed on Edward’s shoulder, and neither man said
anything more as the time came for Edward to be taken across the water. The pressure of Tristan’s hand on Edward felt immense.

Edward sat facing away from the steamer. He knew the sunlight glinting off the water into his eyes would make his smile seem grim. Tristan Grindlock held up a hand, half salute and half
farewell, before he turned and walked away. Edward promised himself that he would write to the man, as soon as he felt able, on his return to England.

London. February, 1864.

On the ship to England, Edward had taken a grim pleasure in the special violence of his sickness. His berth had a bucket, which he slopped out only once a day. He took his
meals in his cabin and never once took a turn on deck.

In the first days back, the extreme change in temperature, which had begun on the voyage, settled into his head. The cold winter air seemed to compress his skull as he walked and slipped on the
frozen shit and mud on the streets. He had arrived back in England in the most shabby state imaginable, but he had not realised this until he was among his own countrymen again. He affected
strangers in a different way. He had assumed it was because of his own misery—that others did not want to be infected with it—but catching sight of himself in the glazed shop-fronts he
understood that it was because he looked like a vagrant. His face was shaggy with untamed beard, and framed with a mass of unkempt, dirty hair. His shoes were coming apart again because the string
which had held them together had rotted and worn away. His bare toes were visible with every step he took. His clothes hung from him. He passed his nights in a cheap hotel, and the company of bed
bugs had kept him from sleeping. There was something so vile about the bugs in the hotel bed, which burrowed into his consciousness as well as his skin; they were far worse than any of the leeches,
ticks, biting flies or mosquitoes they had endured in Brazil. The thought of these bugs biting strangers in that same bed drove him out, and Edward finally returned to his own house. Scratching his
bug bites as he looked for a cab, Edward saw a shimmering black edge to everything in his path, and everything else around him. And as the wind bit his face and gnawed at his exposed feet and
gloveless hands, he was aware of an aperture opening in his torso, which grew with every step and let in the cold air. Fist-sized to begin with, now as he neared the rank of cabs it felt large
enough to admit a small dog. He was embarrassed at this, and hoped that the driver would not say anything about it. The black line around the edges of the man fizzed, and as Edward saw the
frightening bulk of the horse gush its steamy piss onto the ground, simultaneously dropping its manure, he wanted to dive under it, make it rear up and bring its hooves down on his head, and break
his spine. But the thought of what miscalculation might entail stopped him. Edward got into the cab. As soon as they moved off, Edward fell asleep, the dullness of his thoughts being composed of
nothing more or less than the knowledge that he would never be able to put his name next to anything definite except the death of Augusta and Gwen.

Many hours later, in his own old and unfamiliar bed the hole in his torso had gone, but the black lines remained. He took himself to a barber as soon as he could.

He knew that a letter would never do, but he still composed them with the thought that he could pull it off, and not have to face her. But the more he left it, the worse he knew it would be when
he finally did manage to get down to the business of breaking the news. The bag containing the few things he had rescued from the wreckage of the day he had lost them lay untouched. He took it with
him everywhere; he could not let the bag out of his sight, because although he had not the courage yet to look inside, it had slowly begun to dawn on him that Gwen’s notebooks contained his
only chance of gaining some measure of scientific celebrity. Edward packed an old overnight bag, musty from the back of a wardrobe. He took a cab to the bank and then to the train station, where he
bought a third-class ticket to Falmouth. It would not do for this journey to be remotely pleasant.

Helford Vicarage, Cornwall. February, 1864.

“You feel that the air around her is filled with an essence that, once it has touched you, some small part of you, will forever be there to determine the course your life
will veer down.” Edward glanced at Reverend George Sparsholt who in turn repressed the urge to look at his pocket watch. “You have to imagine her as you would a large gilded moth under
close scrutiny. The closer you get, the less of the initial attraction you see, yet still she pulls you in, inviting you to observe every scale. Under the microscope, the lustre disappears and yet
you seek the brilliance that you know is there. She holds an illusion you must step back to appreciate, all the while longing to bring her up close to your face.”

Reverend Sparsholt studied his cuticles; stiff and bored, he was not really paying attention to what Edward said. What little he had heard, he had not understood at all. When he spoke, he was
alarmed at his own volume; it was almost a bark. “Moths! What wonderful creatures they are. I never tire of watching the hawk moths on the verbena just outside the study during the summer
months.” He took a swig of sherry and sloshed it between the gap in his front teeth before swallowing it. He knew it was not good for his teeth but he could not help himself in the company of
this man. It was nervousness, and he stuttered a little. “In the late hours of a July evening, one can be induced into something almost resembling a trance; I have never yet been moved to
still one, however. This may seem contradictory to a scientist like yourself, but I always feel that to stop one (he did not like to say “kill”) would somehow diminish it, would remove
some of the magic of our Creator’s imagination. That is not to say I disparage your work in the least, I merely wish to say—”

Edward interrupted. “Reverend Sparsholt, I have managed to contrive a mess—an unintentional mess which I don’t know how to untangle.”

“That is hardly surprising, but you must not be disheartened. You must disentwine yourself in order that you may step back and view the situation from a more dispassionate standpoint, to
which, I think, you were alluding. And, really, I cannot see how you come to lay blame on yourself when you were a thousand miles away.”

“But that is precisely what I have tried to explain.” Edward’s voice began to rise. George began to sweat. Feeling the moisture accumulate on his top lip, he wriggled his nose
and mouth, and raised his eyebrows in what he hoped was a sympathetic gesture. He was flummoxed. Edward went on. “It is all connected; it is all because of me.”

George stood up and placed his sherry glass on the mantle-piece where gummy stains and other telltale rings marked the marble, now blackening with dust and a fine film of dirt. He caught sight
of his reflection in the mirror above the fireplace. The mass of wiry greying hair he had tamed with grease that morning had become unruly, and fell into his eyes. He pushed it back and wiped his
hand on the seat of his trousers.

“My dear fellow, Miss Carrick is, I am assured, merely suffering from a heightened sensitivity which is self-induced. I do not claim to have any knowledge in medical matters, but it seems
pretty obvious to me that her problems are nothing a few months’ rest won’t see to. Ah, notwithstanding, of course, the, ah, period of mourning, which, understandably—”

“No! No! That is not it at all. I am to blame for the most part. Oh, God, I wish I still had Susan’s letter.”

George Sparsholt wished that this twitchy, blasphemous man was not taking up space in his study. It had been something of a relief that morning to realise that here, finally, was another to take
an interest in Miss Carrick. He had waved aside a disinclination to invite the man in; his Darwinist views and his adultery and his wild look—despite being clean-shaven—should not be
impediments, not that morning, anyway. Now, it was afternoon, well into the afternoon. The sun had not only moved out of his study, it was beginning to set, and Mr Scales was still galloping
through his sherry. He had missed lunch because of this man. Whatever had been intended would be served up cold for dinner. The man was obtuse. George wished Mr Scales would vanish like the lustre
on the moth wing. But he would not. His eyes, rather disconcertingly, were glittering, and the prospect of George being able to relinquish some, if not all responsibility for Miss Euphemia Carrick
now appeared to diminish by the second. George was now responsible; he now had two persons under his roof whose normal faculty for straightforward reasoning had abandoned them, or was severely
depleted. With a feeling of hopelessness and a need to be in his kitchen where he might get some food, he grasped at the mention of Susan.