Soul

She looked at him. It was a genuine question; a leap into the abstract that had taken her by surprise. She thought about the soldiers she was interviewing, about war, holocausts and all the other morally careless and culpable acts human beings had committed against one another, and in that moment, looking at this boy-man sitting awkwardly astride a chair, the afternoon coming in the open window behind him, she realised that she did. She did believe in amorality.

‘Does a genetic disposition to kill without emotional regret absolve the killer?’ Gabriel persisted.

‘It’s never that simple. External events, a combination of genetic factors—all come into play to trigger an action—’

‘—or reaction.’ Gabriel finished her sentence.

34

Mayfair, 1861

WELL, MAMA, YOU WOULD NOT believe the crusade I have been forced to undertake by my husband and his co-conspirator to establish myself in this uppity village of Mayfair. I am to host an At Home—a high tea of cucumber and watercress sandwiches for a select group of eminent guests. Surely there can be nothing more dreary, and all of the persons I wished to invite have been dismissed by Lady Morgan as too ‘bohemian’ or not of ‘our’ class. Naturally, doctors and lawyers are not to be allowed entry. Any single man has to be a baronet, a peer, or at least a commissioned officer. Lady Morgan is partial to the dragoons, and, as the Charge of the Light Brigade and the current misfortunes of the Russian Empire are still of interest, she assures me she will do her utmost to secure an actual eye witness. Frontline raconteurs, she calls them, and tells me such gentlemen are invariably handsome and penniless but essential for ambience.

I have sent over forty cards to all manner of mansions and city palaces—an exhausting and demoralising experience. Lady Morgan is convinced that the majority of the invited will attend, if only to gape at the exotic Irish renegade. It is a travesty: she has decided I must have an impeccable lineage and has commissioned a family tree from a draughtsman who specialises in such forgeries. It is an impressive piece of foppery, with a family coat of arms of a mermaid seated upon a unicorn, and an ancestry going back to the King of Connacht himself. Papa would die of embarrassment if he should hear of it. Lady Morgan has insisted I hang it in the parlour, where the high tea is to take place. I just pray no one will ask me about my illustrious forebears.

Even more mortifying is the rumour Lady Morgan has deliberately planted suggesting James is on the brink of publishing a book as scandalous and as controversial as Charles Darwin’s. Suddenly everyone wants to meet the young wife of the man who may be the next candidate to take the scientific world by storm. If only it were true, and if only James had let me continue as his assistant. The ennui of piano lessons, sewing and endless trivia about who is about to marry whom shall yet be the death of me.

My husband has banned me from both library and study and I now have only dear Aidan to entertain me. I should not complain; the child is a delight. But I miss the hours of industry by James’s side more than I could have possibly imagined.

Our marriage is much changed, and not for the better. I do not trust this young man James has taken into his circle, and I fear we grow further apart by the

day—’

‘Mama!’ Aidan’s exclamation brought her back to the room. Playing at her feet, he held up a toy rabbit. ‘Kiss!’ he demanded.

Reaching down, she embraced the toy then softly closed the lid of the whispering box.

It was late and most of the household had retired. James had not returned from his club and Lavinia in nightdress and dressing gown, unable to sleep, found herself pacing the corridor. Before she realised, she was standing outside the door of James’s study. The door, a portal most recently locked from her, now stood tantalisingly ajar. The faint scent of cigars and more masculine odours—leather, boot polish and the lemon-scented cologne the Colonel was fond of wearing—drifted out from the room, drawing Lavinia into the sphere she so missed. The glowing embers of a recent fire still shone from the hearth and she could see the scattered papers of his work abandoned on the desk. She paused, breathing in the scent, then stepped quietly into the study, locking the door after her.

It was as if her husband had just left the room. Running her hand along the leather of the armchair, she imagined that she could still feel the heat of his skin, the weight of his body still impressed upon the cushion. She wanted him then, wanted his arms around her, his lips on her mouth, her neck, her breasts. She sank into the seat, her thin silk nightdress riding up between her legs. Lit just by the dying fire and the street lamp shining in from outside, the Colonel’s primitive artefacts looked like beautiful libidinous onlookers, consensual in their own erotic writhing.

Lavinia’s hand wandered down, caressing her thighs. She imagined her hand was James’s hand and that he was taking her there—in the most sacrosanct of all his territories. She was wet, lost in the fantasy, pleasuring herself. She opened her eyes, her gaze falling upon a smooth ebony figurine of a man, his polished head glistening in flicking light. She reached across and picked it up from the low table before her, then spread her legs wide, one over each arm of the chair. She ran the head of the figurine up her thigh and across her sex. The satiny touch of the polished ebony became her husband’s yard, the thickness and weight of it against her skin. Then, imagining his urgency, his measured strokes, she pushed the head into her, faster and faster until exploding, she felt herself contracting around the smooth wood.

Afterwards, she wiped it with her nightgown and placed it carefully back onto the table where she had found it.

The day of the At Home had arrived and Lavinia, stiff from sitting upright for three hours and profoundly bored by the chatter that dominated her parlour, felt the irresistible desire to jolt the two young heiresses sitting opposite out of their conceited self-righteousness. A pair of smugly rotund eighteen-year-old twins aptly named Celeste and Clementine, they were the daughters of an immensely wealthy merchant. Lord spare me such ignorant women, Lavinia thought. Have they no interests beyond securing a husband? Her mind turned to her husband and Hamish Campbell ensconced in James’s study—how she longed to be there rather than enduring this parody.

She leaned forward. ‘All aristocracy has blood on its hands. There is not one family south of the Scottish border that does not have some history of enslavement. The French understood this. And now America, whose own Declaration of Independence took its cue from the French Revolution, is in the throes of a bloody civil war. Mr Lincoln is a brave man indeed.’

At which Clementine dabbed a few tears from her eyes. Her sister, however—a more corpulent version of Clementine—puffed up her skirts in readiness to defend her father’s reputation as the owner of several cotton plantations in America’s South as well as one on the island of Jamaica.

‘Papa is a good man,’ she announced sanctimoniously. ‘Why, he gave all of the slaves a picnic for last Easter Sunday, and we had raised the pork ourselves.’

‘I have seen men dying of starvation, and you talk of the seating arrangements at the Derby Day banquet as if it were a matter of life or death.’ The compulsion to shake the sisters out of their twittering complacency threw Lavinia into a further rant.

‘Which proves my hypothesis correct,’ Lady Morgan interrupted, with an eye to the sisters’ chaperone, a dowager of great social influence who, at that moment, was fortunately having trouble locating her ear trumpet, ‘that an Englishman, unlike an Irishman, would die of embarrassment long before he died of starvation.’

There was an awkward pause during which Lavinia silently vowed never to trust a woman who regarded human suffering as appropriate material for a witticism. Deciding to ignore the comment, she turned back to the sisters. ‘Tell me, how has your dear papa educated you?’

The twins exchanged flustered glances: the Irishwoman confused them; she was so unpredictable in her conversation. Clementine finally spoke up.

‘Well, Celeste has a wonderful soprano, and Mama is forever boasting of my needlepoint.’

‘But what of intellectual matters—books, the classics, the pursuit of science, the arts…Are you really devoid of all curiosity?’

‘Papa does not approve of books, oh no, not at all, he is always reminding us that a bookish woman will drive a husband away. He has educated us for marriage.’

‘My father educated me as if I were a boy. I am fluent in Latin and have a good understanding of mathematics, biology and the physical sciences. I can only imagine how you must view the world without the benefit of such faculties?’ Lavinia’s voice was full of mock sympathy.