Preface

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

There was too much furniture in the room. In this stifling midday heat, Lillian felt suffocated by the sofas with their down cushions, the Louis XIV bergere chairs, the thick purple drapes and carpets. The air smelled dusty. The drapes were tightly closed, to keep out cholera vapors and the sun.

She already forgot the name of the woman who'd asked her to perform at this hastily arranged salon concert. A distraction from the cholera, the woman had said. Lillian and Olympia arrived so late that there were only two seats, near the front and too close to the piano.

She was late because she had waited until the last possible minute to leave the house, hoping to get a note from John Snow. After their session in the office of The Times their parting had been cool, and she already regretted not telling him everything about Constable. There was no word from him, though. She ached to see him today, and had a wild hope that he'd be here at the recital, though it seemed completely unlikely.

She looked around as well as she could, but didn't spot him, and gave up. The salon was very crowded. Obviously the epidemic wasn't keeping the upper classes from enjoying their bit of music.

She had missed the introduction so she didn't know who the boy was. He played well. His dark head swayed and trembled above his sailor collar and the eyebrows frowned in concentration.

Lillian was on next. She wasn't nervous. In fact, she was washed over by elation at the prospect of performing. She always loved it. At home when she practiced she felt self-conscious, afraid of making as much volume as she liked, afraid the neighbors would complain. But here, where she was supposed to be heard, her voice could rise to a true swelling ring of sound.

The boy finished and stood shyly waiting for the polite applause to end.

The audience doesn't realize how good he is, thought Lillian. He probably doesn't know, either. I hope he gets some decent training. She forgot him as she made her way to the piano, settled her music, and readied herself to sing.

She knew the Schumann songs so well by now that she could sing and think of other things at the same time. Her eyes wandered around the room and scrutinized the audience, careful to make no eye contact. She assessed them. The music lovers' bodies were relaxed, their heads alert, looking straight at her. There were the bored ones with the crossed legs, the tight smile, the inward glance. And the ones engaged in blatant conversation, just using her music as a backdrop. She searched again, halfheartedly for John Snow's face. It was unlikely, but still — Then she spotted Philip Constable and the boy sitting together, the man's hand protectively cupping the small shoulder, the boy sucking on a candy and listening to her singing. Her first sense was a childish disappointment that it should be him and not John Snow. An image came to her of Snow's bleeding shoulder and chest after the dog attack. Could this really be who had done it? It seemed impossible. She stole another look at him, and the boy on his lap.

Then she realized.

For a moment it was as though the lamps in the room flared up for a second or two, and the volume of her singing even went up in her ears. The lies she had been told broke on her. The baby wasn't dead. He was here in front of her with his father's eyes and chin. Her father's mouth. And her own musical gift.

Her father had told her the baby died. Her father must have lied. The song faltered for a measure but she caught it again. She knew the notes so well that she functioned on some inner mechanism which pushed her along.

And if her father had known about the baby all along, perhaps he had known about Philip, too, that he was alive, where to reach him. That must be why he had left her so much money. "I'll make it up to you," he had said.

A suspicion began to grow as counterpoint to the expanding melody of the song. What if she were wrong? What if the boy were just some distant relation to Sir Philip?

A second doubt hit her, much worse than the first. What if Sir Philip himself was not the soldier she'd known? What if at Lady Tewksbury's she had imagined his glances and his embarrassment? The name wasn't uncommon. And what if Snow himself were mad, accusing this innocent official of wild threats and impossible plans?

The most disturbing thought of all, surfacing repeatedly through the bars of the Schumann, was the possibility that there was no young officer at all, never had been. She could have imagined the whole thing in a fever. No lover, no pregnancy, no dead child. There was no proof. Even the handwriting on the music, this very copy in front of her, was smudged. It could have been anyone's. The silver lines on her abdomen could have been from a pox, or some terrible rash when she was too young to remember.

And those little shirts that had lain in her box on the top shelf of the wardrobe? They could have belonged to a servant's baby. Or no baby, they could have been just shirts made for a doll, or for a sewing exercise. They were gone now and could prove nothing for her.

She was now on the sixth song of the cycle. Her concentration was failing. She smudged a string of notes on the piano and missed an entrance, hoping no one would notice. She looked at the boy. His eyebrows had gone up in childish derision, without malice. He noticed.

She didn't want to sing any longer. The notes started to sound like croaks to her, her voice harsh and ugly. She finally reached the end of the last song and somehow made her way to her seat amidst loud clapping.

"So polished, my dear," said Olympia. "In a different life you could have been a professional."

"Thank you. It was nothing, really." Lillian found that her voice was shaking so she just smiled at people. She kept looking over at Constable, and every time, she found his eyes on her. The boy, unconcerned, played with a cat that had wandered in from another part of the house, stroking its back and apparently telling it some story, for he looked as though he was chattering.

Two more performers went to the piano and began a Beethoven sonata for violin and piano. The violin whined in and out of pitch, and the cadences were overly dramatic. Lillian tried hard to block her mind from listening, so that she could think.

At Lady Tewksbury's she hadn't been surprised to see him, just mortified. The surprise was all at the opera. She never did recover any more of the pearls; just the two that John Snow had given her.

Even in the swell of her disorientation, her love for Snow didn't change shape or lessen one bit. It was like a live thing she carried inside her, a warm and dangerous animal hidden in her soul. The feelings she'd had for Constable ten years ago were nothing compared to this; this was based on no vaporish dream, but on the way the man's whole being shone through his eyes. It began almost the moment she saw him, at the party, and it was a feeling so new and unknown that for a moment she thought she was going mad, or had the first touch of cholera. After they danced she knew she wasn't mad. Only the terrible luck of running into Philip, and then the stampede afterward, had kept her from saying something to Snow that very night.

Constable still sat behind her, probably with the boy, but she stared straight ahead. At the end of the party, during the cholera panic, he had grabbed her arm so hard it hurt and pushed her toward the top of the stairs violently, apparently not hearing her protests. When Dr. Greeley joined her on the other side with Olympia, she felt cornered and wanted to pull free but the crowd was too tight to do anything but move toward the door.

"What happened?" she had whispered to him. "How are you here? I thought —"

"Don't talk," he had said. Or that's what she thought he said. Maybe he didn't hear her, maybe he had said "Don't fall." Maybe he hadn't spoken. The noise had been overwhelming, of crashing glassware and ripping silk. Men bellowed directions. As she went through the door she had heard the drums starting up again.

And then they had all been in a carriage together: Greeley, Olympia, Philip. All were silent except for Olympia.

"I knew it. I just knew it as soon as the lady fell. Dear Lord, first India and now this. I told you, Lillian, we shouldn't have gone. Not one foot out of the house from now on, dear, that's my advice. I knew it."

No one answered her. Lillian had looked hard at Philip but he stared rigidly out the window. Her knees bumped his as the carriage jolted over holes in the cobblestones.

The wailing violin broke in again, playing a fast movement of the sonata, missing a quarter of the notes. The man took false dramatic breaths and swayed from his waist.

Lillian finally looked over at Philip. The hostess's cat was in his lap now and he gazed, blankly, at the performers. Had those hands really unbuttoned her dresses, stroked her legs, taken the pins from her hair? She searched herself and found only the faintest stirring of desire and remote affection. The dream of stones was merely an image now, and evoked no more response in her than would a picturesque view seen too many times.

The boy was apparently restless. He kicked his heels against the chair legs. He didn't look like her at all, she thought. He whispered something to Philip, slipped out of his chair, and left the room. The cat followed him.

It could have been a stranger's child. She tried hard to dig up some love. What came instead was curiosity. Who had trained him on the piano? What did his voice sound like? What sweets did he like best? What were his dreams? What story had been told to him about his mother, his life?

And what was his name?

Even though her fascination increased every moment, if she had found out that the boy was struck down by a carriage outside the house, she would have felt shocked, and horrified, but not grieved. In this stifling room, she felt cold as an icehouse. How could this be her child and she feel so unmoved? Something must be terribly wrong with her. She must be making a mistake. It couldn't be hers; her father lying to her like that, it was impossible. She must have dreamed it all, even the pregnancy and the room in the hills and the view from the window.

This Constable was a stranger to her. And if she were wrong about everything—again there was the effect of shifting and changing light, with shadows appearing in midair, shadows of nothing, the lamps flaring up and dimming. If she were wrong about everything then nothing could be solid. The gilded chair in front of her could melt away or her skin could change color.

Then she remembered the look her father had given her that last night, his eyes uncertain, his mouth gentler than she had ever seen it. Of course the boy looked just like him. There could be no doubt.

The bad violinist finally stopped and Lillian breathed an automatic sigh of relief, then changed it to a polite cough. She looked again to Constable's corner but he and her son had left.

After all the performances were over a few of the guests wandered out into the hostess's walled garden, braving the August heat, flaunting the deadly vapors, hoping for an illusion of coolness in all the greenery. Lillian followed, blindly, still smiling vaguely to the compliments. She found a shaded bench under a mulberry tree and brushed off two pieces of bruised fruit. It would be a good place to think, alone, for half an hour.

A skirt rustled and she looked up to see a woman holding out her hand.

"Good afternoon, Miss Aynsworth. I'm Mrs. Beersdon. Perhaps you don't remember me after such a thrilling performance." Mrs. Beersdon didn't smile. "I met you at Lady Tewksbury's two weeks ago, when those poor souls fell ill."

"I remember you perfectly." The woman had been with John Snow. Lillian smiled broadly, not unhappy to have her thoughts pushed aside. The other's face remained stiff.

"Sit down," said Lillian. "Please."

Deborah lowered her skinny frame onto the bench. "You must feel terribly exposed standing in front of everyone like that." Disapproval trickled from her like drops of bitter medicine.

"I don't think about it that way at all. I just think of the music." Lillian felt dislike rising.

"I hope you haven't been unwell since that night, Miss Aynsworth.

She can't be much older than me, thought Lillian. Yet her face was dragged down, with lines leading from the corners of the mouth to her chin. Her long nose wouldn't have been so ugly on a kinder face.

"Quite well." Lillian clipped her words and gave up trying to be pleasant. She remembered what it was that had put her on guard with the woman in the first place. John Snow. When she had stood with him after the dance, before she saw Philip, this woman had given her such a look. As if she claimed the man for her own. But she was married herself.

"It was Dr. Snow who introduced us, wasn't it?" asked Lillian, smiling slightly. She tried to keep the love out of her pronunciation of his name. "Have you seen him since then?"

"We never see him. Never." Mrs. Beersdon's sudden anger was inappropriate and puzzling. "He spends all his time working on this dreadful cholera. And going into such houses! It's not just the dirt in these places but the moral decay which is so repellent. These people bring their downfall on themselves."

As she finished she began to swat the air around her face, clumsily, and she looked crazy to Lillian, unbalanced. Lillian spotted a hovering gnat, which explained the gesture, but the impression of irrationality remained.

Lillian found herself leaning forward and she could hear her heart beat. This woman was awful to have to talk to. But she wanted to hear more of John Snow, and to say his name again.

And even as she thought of Snow, a picture of Philip with the cat in his lap crossed her mind. He would probably seek her out. A short sense of exhaustion passed over her, and her thoughts reverted again to Snow.

"Has Dr. Snow been making progress, then?"

"Progress? You could hardly call it that. He certainly doesn't see patients in Sackville Street. He goes to the worst neighborhoods and takes notes. He has some wild idea about the source of the disease. Just spreading panic, if you ask me.

Lillian smiled to herself. It was obviously hopeless to get anywhere with this woman.

"He was explaining some of it to me — at Lady Tewksbury's. Fascinating."

"If you don't mind my saying so, young lady, it would be better that you occupy your mind with more suitable subjects.

Lillian couldn't think of any answer to this.

Deborah went on. "The people who suffer this scourge live in the lowest degradation imaginable. Information about them shouldn't be passed out to corrupt decent folk. It's all that John Snow's doing."

By now Lillian felt removed from the scene, as if she were watching it in a play. She knew the woman expected no response, and she stared as Mrs. Beersdon sailed out of the garden, her huge skirt blowing in a sudden hot wind.

A few hours later, Lillian was home, reading a volume of Wordsworth in the drawing room while Olympia slept. The maid opened the door without knocking and announced, "Sir Philip Constable."

He was in the room before she had a moment to think about seeing him or not. He sat down without speaking, first pulling at the knees of his gray trousers and nervously fiddling with his gloves but not taking them off. Sweat beaded up on his forehead and she could hear his breathing, as if he had climbed a steep hill and was trying to hide his exertion.

"Miss Aynsworth, although we have met several times since your arrival in London, this is our first session with no others present. It is awkward for me to begin. I hardly know what to say." He stopped to recover his breath.

His manner was so formal and distant that Lillian remembered her notion of having imagined the whole thing. That was nonsense, of course. She sat flipping through the poems.

"Miss Aynsworth — Lillian — for weeks I tried to get in to see you, before your — confinement — but they kept me out. Then your father told me you died."

"It seems it was convenient for you to believe that," she said. Her anger was on Snow's behalf; for Constable's desertion ten years ago she felt nothing. Her heart began racing. She drummed her fingers on the book, and pretended to still be reading. "You could easily have come to see for yourself."

Constable swallowed and toyed with a pencil from his pocket. "I know anything I say will sound like an excuse. But it wasn't that simple."

"And the boy. It's my son, of course."

"Yes. Our son."

She stood, walked to the window and gazed out at the empty street. It seemed to shimmer in the heat. She felt an urge to break the glass pane with her fist. What would John Snow have said in this situation? He would never have gotten into this situation.

"I came here today to ask you to be my wife." Constable sounded strained, ready at any moment to choke.

She turned to look at him. An image of his head on a white pillow, next to hers, crept into her mind. With it came a dim memory of the pleasures she had felt with him. Now he looked like a man who would speak of Marital Duties. "I don't love you anymore, you know." She hadn't meant the words to sound as harsh as they did.

The corner of his mouth twitched once with pain; emotional or physical, she couldn't tell. She had assumed he would feel as cold as she, going through the motions of this mock courtship. If he still loved her, that unspoken certainty of his love she had felt so many years ago was entirely absent. He looked and sounded like a man talking to his solicitor.

"For the sake of the boy, at least," he said.

"Yes. The boy." The words meant nothing to her. She could just as well have said "the vase" or "the terrier."

"Perhaps you could learn to feel for me again, Lillian. It's not that there's someone else, is there?"

Lillian thought of John Snow. Even though he hadn't said it, she knew he loved her, perhaps in the way Philip used to. His hands and searching eyes already occupied a permanent niche in her mind, an area set aside for speculations and memories, with his name on the label. What was he doing now, at this very moment? The smell of his study came back to her, with the taste of the tea they drank, the taste of his mouth when he had kissed her.

Constable cleared his throat and coughed.

Lillian's mind felt unclear. She wanted to simply tell him, "I can never marry you." She picked up a pottery dog from Olympia's bric-a-brac on the mantle and toyed with it as she spoke.

"I need time." Why did she say that? She'd never want to marry him. She turned her head sharply to Constable. "Does the boy know about me? What did you say to him?"

It struck her suddenly that if Constable were really responsible for Snow's attacks, and if it came to light, Constable would not be the only one disgraced. Her son, too, would be affected. But it seemed unreal to her, like a disastrous flood in a foreign country.

Constable looked at his gloved hands. "He thinks you're dead. As I did for so long." He ponderously rose from his seat and stepped over to her. Gripping both her shoulders, her looked into her face as though trying to see salvation. "Please. You don't know what's happened to me lately. I've made mistakes. If I had you to help..."

She still held the figurine and stood slack, passive, not meeting his eye. He pulled the tawdry thing from her and dropped it on the table where it shattered. With sad deliberation he began kissing her mouth, eyes, and neck.

She felt nothing; no desire, no fear, no inkling to resist. When alone with Snow, even with her eyes shut, she could feel the man's presence and sense the shape of his soul. But with Constable, it was as if he were invisible. She wondered if his was another kind of love, something she hadn't learned about. It felt like ashes.

A cologne was on his cheeks. His mustache pricked at her upper lip.

If I hadn't met John Snow, she thought, I would have made an effort to feel a quickening at this touch. It would have been like a hard stretch to reach something on too high a shelf. But I might have done it. As it was, she thought only of how Snow's kisses had felt, and how his hands had touched her.

He stopped and pulled away as suddenly as he had begun.

"I'm sorry. Please forgive me."

"It's all right. It's nothing." Some of her hair had been pulled loose but she made no attempt to brush it out of her face. He reached out to do it for her, but stopped midway, and turned to leave the room.

Just then the maid opened the door and brought in a note on a tray. Constable waited while Lillian read it to herself.

Can you come again tomorrow at ten in the morning? I need more help.

John Snow

An enormous weight lifted from Lillian's chest. "Should Dr. Snow's messenger wait for an answer?" asked the maid.

Lillian snatched a scrap of paper from her writing desk and wrote, "Yes," then folded it and handed it to the girl, who went out.

Constable looked at her, breathing heavily. He put a hand on the arm of the sofa and sat down again. "You know John Snow?"

"Yes, that is — yes. I met him at Lady Tewksbury's." She decided to say nothing of Snow's suspicions.

"Lillian — you may hear things of me. I've made mistakes. I want to change, I want to go back."

She sat down cautiously, but not next to him. "What mistakes?"

"It's not that simple — I can't just tell you all — and I haven't been well." He put his head in his hands for a moment, then sat up. He looked around him, vaguely. "I must go."

She felt an echo of pity, but didn't ask him to stay. As his footsteps faded down the stairs, she remembered that she hadn't yet found out her son's name.