A Beggar's Kingdom Page 40

  “A comma is not restrictive enough,” Julian says. “An appositive comma means you could delete what comes after it, and the meaning of the title would hardly be changed. And yet the word mystery is the point.”

  “An equal sign is absurd,” Mirabelle says. “I see that’s what Nora put down. That’s how we know it’s the wrong punctuation. Because Nora chose it. What is this thing called love, a formula in John Snow’s lab?”

  “By virtue of elimination, then, the em-dash it is,” says Julian.

  “My Love and I: A Mystery.”

  “My Love and I, a Mystery.”

  “My Love and I=A Mystery.”

  “My Love and I—a Mystery.”

  ∞

  The Patmores live a few blocks from the Museum, just past Grey Gardens. Emily Patmore, a female version of Coventry but less cheerful, thrusts the bonny child into Mirabelle’s arms and tearfully flees up the stairs.

  “What a relief,” says Mirabelle. “Mrs. Patmore is calm today. I never know what to expect.”

  With the baby in the pram, they head to the park.

  The afternoon sun is strong, and in her long light-blue skirt, peach jacket, and layers of lace, Mirabelle gets warm.

  “Would you like me to push the pram, Miss Taylor?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Cruz, thank you for offering. Would you mind if I take your arm?”

  “Of course not, Miss Taylor.”

  On a weekday afternoon in London, they stroll arm in arm under the elms in the green town square, pushing a pram with a baby, while all around them lunchtime London buzzes with shouting children and clopping horses. Taking the boy out of his carriage, Mirabelle plays with him on the grass, while Julian sits on a park bench, watching them. Her light skirt is discolored after she rises.

  “Best not to roll on the ground,” he says. “I should’ve mentioned it earlier. The enzymes and chlorophyll in grass act like a dye. They stain your clothes black.”

  “I could’ve used the advice ten minutes ago, Mr. Cruz. Well, you were too busy gazing at the child to offer it. You do seem to know a number of these tidy bromides. Have you considered publishing a handy book yourself? Cruz’s Compendium of Clever Creations.” She smiles. “I could edit it for you.”

  “I would enjoy that very much. Perhaps after our other work is done.”

  “Remember what I told you? Our work is never done. That’s what Charles keeps telling us. Like the work on our souls.”

  Again a silent shiver passes through Julian.

  They rest on a bench next to each other. Mirabelle holds the baby in her lap. The child is plump and happy, grinning up at Julian.

  “Would you like to hold the baby, Mr. Cruz?”

  Julian takes the baby. His name is Jacob.

  Mirabelle watches the man and the boy with warmth in her eyes. “You’re sure-handed with him,” she says. “You’re familiar with babies—to use your favorite word? Familiar, that is, not babies.”

  “Thank you for the clarification. Yes, I have three older brothers, all married. I have many nieces and nephews.” Julian is awash with guilt. His brothers, his mother, his family, Ashton abandoned by him as he chases the butterfly in his dream.

  “Do you imagine someday becoming a father, Mr. Cruz? Having a child of your own?”

  “Once in a while.” It’s painful for Julian to speak of it. He can’t get her to stay alive for two months. What’s the use of talking about other impossible things. “Do you, Miss Taylor?”

  “Not really.” Regret alters the features of her face. “My life and work has taken me in a different direction, I’m afraid. I don’t mind. Everyone has their own path in life, even women. It’s like Charles said. A modern revolution is coming. I’m hoping this means more independence for women. I like the idea of being at the vanguard of it.”

  Two ladies strolling by smile benevolently. “What a lovely baby you two have,” one of them says. “God bless. What a beautiful young family.”

  Before Julian can protest, Mirabelle speaks up. “Thank you,” she says. And into his stare adds, “That is how two unattached people sit together in a public park. By having an infant as their chaperone.”

  “Indeed, a tried and true method.” Brandon would always tell Julian that his present children prevented him and his wife from having future children. Babies: the best contraceptive available, Brandon would say.

  You know what else is a good contraceptive? Involuntary, unwanted, unwelcome, abiding, loathsome abstinence.

  After parting with Jacob, Julian and Mirabelle return to the Museum. In the early evening, Barnabus takes them to Upper Harley Street, to a square granite building that reads “The Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances.” Finally, the Institute! Mirabelle asks Julian and Barnabus to wait and disappears inside. She’s gone for hours.

  “What’s she doing there, Barney?”

  “It’s Mr. Hunter to you,” Barnabus says, “and why don’t you ask her yourself, what, the cat got your tongue? You two never stop yammering.”

  “Watch out, Barney, because rooster warts and thorny tongues don’t heal themselves.”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  As Julian waits for her, he negotiates with himself his impossible choices.

  He can always scram if he thinks biblical proximity is just around the next ride through the meadow. To protect her from his roving hands (his roving everything), he can leave at any time if he feels there’s a danger of imminent skin-on-skin intimacy. Otherwise, if he can manage to contain himself, he won’t have to leave and they can stay friends, remain good friends until the threat to her life passes. And maybe after that, she can choose to love him back.

  Here’s Julian’s daily challenge, however:

  “What are your intentions, Julian?” Aubrey keeps asking every time Mirabelle is out of earshot.

  “Aubrey, stop tyrannizing the man,” John Taylor says. “He will make his intentions clear if he wishes to.”

  But Spurgeon is at it, too. “It’s time, Julian. Time to announce your intentions toward our Mirabelle.”

  And the following evening, Aubrey, as if on a relay, despite her husband’s warnings, says apologetically, “I hope you can overlook her being headstrong. She gets it from her father. She is not easily dissuaded from what she wants.”

  “I have yet to encounter any stubbornness from her, Aubrey,” Julian says to reassure the mother.

  The father sits up. The mother sits up. “What do you mean by that?” Aubrey Taylor says. “Are you implying that Mirabelle has put up no resistance?”

  Oh, did that ever come out wrong. “I only meant she’s been nothing but agreeable.”

  “In all areas?”

  “Aubrey!” John exclaims. “Leave the man alone!”

  “Just so you understand,” Aubrey says quietly, “we’re fine with her being agreeable. We would just like to know your intentions.”

  Julian’s silence is his reply. They’re nowhere near September 20 yet.

  Maybe the fewer of his intentions, the longer her life.

  “I’m fond of your daughter, Aubrey…”

  “How fond?”

  “Aubrey!”

  “Hush, John! How fond, Julian?”

  “Very. But I must wait.” How can Julian explain to this gray, earnest woman why he must wait?

  “Forgive me for being so bold,” Aubrey says, “but are you promised to another?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why wait?” Aubrey asks impatiently. “Why not make your intentions clear? I hope you know that both John and I would fully approve this union, should you desire it.”

  “Aubrey, please,” John says, his face in his hands.

  Julian doesn’t say it, but he thinks it. Aubrey, please.

  And here is another daily, hourly, minutely complication: Mirabelle herself.

  The girl is trouble. It’s as if she doesn’t care about the length of her days at all. It’s as if she wants Julian to f
ail. She is constantly assaulting his senses with her smell and the swell of her breasts in her demure yet fitted corsets. The neckline has dropped. The hemline has risen. From dawn to dusk, her lips look dipped in cherry juice.

  Mirabelle is a proper young woman and well-raised. But because of that, she is the most dangerous, for she finds trails not in one epic open seduction—which in some ways would be easier to defend against—but in a hundred shiny, bobbly lures that add up to an utterly ensnared Julian. John 21. Truly he is a fish that cannot get away. He is wrapped head to toe in the silk threads of his very own virtuous nymph.

  She waits for him to open the carriage door and then leans on his arm as she gets in. She takes his arm as she gets out. She asks for his help carrying the manuscripts and pushing the pram and when it gets too hot, she rests her hand on top of his as they stroll with baby Jacob. When he carries the boy on his shoulders, she stands in front of him and adjusts the boy’s little shoes. She stands so close, Julian can smell her hair and her breath, he can see the fine lines and small pores on her face. He doesn’t but he could kiss her smiling lips.

  He doesn’t but he could.

  He could lean down and press his mouth into the cleavage of her breasts.

  He doesn’t, but he could.

  In the late evenings, on the way back to Sydenham, the conversation drifts. Mirabelle is tired after a long day. Often she falls asleep. Her head bobs forward. One pitch from the horse and she could go flying. Chivalrously, Julian switches seats to be next to her. As if reading his mind through her dreams, Mirabelle lists sideways and drops her head on his shoulder. He puts his arm around her. Like this they ride to Vine Cottage. Mirabelle wakes just before arrival.

  One night, she wakes unhappily.

  “Oh, Mr. Cruz,” she says, moving away (but not too far away). “I just had the most peculiar dream.” She rubs her eyes. “In it you were half-man, half-ghost.”

  Without you I cannot live at all, Mirabelle. Sometimes I think you’re half-woman, half-ghost. Julian could kiss her right now in the darkened carriage. How he wants to. His body trembles with yearning. “What was I doing in your dream?”

  “Diving into the Thames. Looking for a way out.”

  That halts his impure longings. Diving into the Thames? He moves away. “A way out of what?”

  “You wouldn’t say. But you kept begging me to come with you. I was arguing with you in my dream, too, Mr. Cruz.” Faintly Mirabelle smiles. “Except in the dream I kept calling you by your given name. I kept saying I’m wearing silk and satin, Julian, I’m not jumping into a river.”

  “It doesn’t sound as though I was very persuasive.”

  “You weren’t. You didn’t ask me to disrobe, for one.” She chuckles. “Even in my dreams, you didn’t ask me to disrobe.”

  “What kind of slapdash dreams are these,” Julian mutters. He can barely look at her.

  “My sentiments exactly. And then you said you wanted to give me something I didn’t have.”

  Julian’s heart skips two beats, three. “Like what?” He is almost inaudible.

  “You said, a future.”

  He tries to keep his voice steady. “I don’t know how I feel about the dream me.”

  “Me neither,” Mirabelle says. “I asked you how long I had.”

  Julian stops looking at her.

  “And you said, you have less than one silver moon.”

  His head is deeply lowered.

  “Mr. Cruz?”

  “Yes, Miss Taylor?”

  “Isn’t that an odd thing to say?”

  “The whole dream is odd. I’m going to give this dream Julian a good talking to. Explain to him what’s what.”

  “I wish you would. Here we are. Oh, and Mr. Cruz?”

  “Yes, Miss Taylor?”

  “You may call me Mirabelle.”

  “Yes, Miss Taylor. And you may call me Julian.”

  “Yes, Mr. Cruz.”

  Together they make not love, but happiness.

  And then, late one Friday summer night as they stroll down Langton Lane, they hear from behind them a pitched, distressing voice. “Mirabelle?!” the voice calls. “Is that you?”

  Just before Mirabelle turns around, her eyes fix on Julian, and in them there is sadness and disappointment and farewell, wordlessly expressing what she can’t articulate—that the simple beauty of the brief untroubled days they have spent together is about to vanish with the wind.

  “Filippa,” Mirabelle says, pulling her arm away from Julian and turning around to greet her friend. “Mrs. Pye. Good evening, ladies. Fancy running into you here. You remember Mr. Julian Cruz?”

  34

  The Sublime and Beautiful

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, PRUNELLA ARRIVES AT VINE COTTAGE without her daughter. She and Aubrey have tea in the parlor room, while Julian and Mirabelle, barely back from fishing, pretend to retreat to their rooms. Instead they perch on the stairs and listen to the two women, their faces wedged between the slats.

  “Aubrey, dahrling,” Prunella begins by saying, “you know I’m the last woman in London to point out impropriety to you whom I adore and whom I generally find faultless in matters of etiquette, but I’m afraid you’re not seeing things clearly. The tongues are wagging, Aubrey, there’s no question.”

  Horny tongues, Mirabelle whispers to Julian, and they both nearly blow their cover.

  “Whose tongues, Prunella?” says Aubrey. “And wagging about what, precisely?”

  “About what?” Prunella snorts. “About the unseemly situation you’ve got going on under your nose. Your very nose. About the improper way you’re parading your only child without heed or care on the arm of a man who is not her husband, a man whom you barely know.”

  “I find nothing wrong with him, Prunella. In fact, I find him thoroughly charming. John agrees. Julian has asked John to teach him how to make a pendulum clock. Could the man have said anything dearer to my husband, I ask you?”

  “This is not about your husband’s silly hobby, Aubrey. It’s about your daughter’s reputation. How can you be so cavalier with it, my sweet? It’s the only one she’s got, and you’re allowing her to walk down Langton Lane at night without a chaperone!”

  “Why do they need a chaperone, Prunella, when your concerned gaze follows them around? I couldn’t feel more at ease if I were keeping an eye on the child myself.”

  “Aubrey, as they were walking, Mr. Cruz made some offhand remark…”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know, we weren’t close enough to hear.”

  “Ah.”

  “But your daughter laughed out loud, so much so that her bonnet fell off! Have you ever? Unmarried women are not even allowed to speak to men unless it’s in the presence of a chaperone, and your dear girl laughed out loud! And then she laid her hand on his arm, Aubrey, as if to say, oh my, Mr. Cruz, you are such a witty man. And he bent and picked up the bonnet she had dropped and set it on her head and tied the ribbons under her chin.”

  “He did what?”

  “It’s scandalous. Yet you are barely aware what your own daughter is up to.”

  “Do go on, Prunella. What happened next?”

  “He tied it under her chin, his male fingers touching her naked throat! She lifted her naked throat to him, Aubrey! He stood half a step away. And she gazed at him the entire time he was tying the bonnet.”

  Mirabelle’s mother lowers her voice. “You don’t know the half of it, Prunella. Sometimes when they return home in the evening, I see them getting out from the same side of the carriage. As if they had been sitting next to each other!”

  “Aubrey, no!”

  “And do you know that every morning they go out riding together at dawn before work? Sometimes they stay out for as long as two hours. And at the weekend, well, I don’t have to tell you. You and Filippa have stopped by to visit. They’re never home. They’re out nearly all day. Why, just this afternoon, they returned from fishing, and they were both wet! I said what happen
ed, did it rain? They said no. Apparently my daughter, the clumsy antelope that she is, fell into the lake and he gallantly jumped in to rescue her—Prunella, what’s wrong, you’ve gone positively white!”

  “Aubrey, in a minute I shall require smelling salts. How can you be so blasé? Virtue is the only thing a woman has to lose. Everything else is vice. Have you any idea what could be happening on their little dawn rides in the glade, any idea at all?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Aubrey says, dry as parchment.

  “It’s a catastrophe! For all you know, her virtue may already be gone.”

  Aubrey laughs. “Oh, Prunella, I’m just joking with you. Calm down, my dear. I know what a catastrophe is. Believe me, that’s not it.”

  “What would you call it, dear girl? What would you call it?”

  “I don’t know, salvation?”

  “Salvation, bah. Well, she is not saving herself, that’s abundantly clear.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Not saved,” says Mirabelle’s mother, “but safe.”

  Julian and Mirabelle have been barely able to suppress their laughter, but suddenly Julian can find nothing to laugh about, and to his troubled dismay, neither can Mirabelle.

  ∞

  Later that Saturday night, Prunella and Filippa join them for supper. Charles Spurgeon comes, and George Airy, too, having returned from Wales. The evening animates with stories of mines and measures of the earth’s density. George Airy asks Julian if he’s found anything strange in his notebooks recording the unusual phenomena at the Observatory.

  “Yes,” Julian says. He’s had a chance to go through them. According to Airy’s records going back to 1834, the occasions of unexplained flares have occurred around the same four periods each year—the two solstices and two equinoxes. The solstices have produced the weakest phenomena, the equinoxes the strongest. The March equinox bursts are the most sustained and most visible. For some reason the September equinox flares don’t happen at noon but at various times throughout the day. None of the anomalies seem to be dependent on weather or temperature. They occur in rain or shine.

  “What does all that tell you?” Airy asks.

  “That something peculiar happens on these four dates,” Julian replies. “Something that’s outside what can be explained by astronomy or earth science.”