40
London, 1861
THE COLONEL SMOOTHED OUT the sheet of paper and stared down at its blank expanse. Then he dipped his pen in the ink and, pensively, almost shyly, wrote across the top: Advice from an old father to a young son.
Dearest boy, he continued, I am writing this as you lie asleep in your cot in the nursery, a mere babe, but I am imagining you to have grown into a fine young man. Some instinct—the premonition of an old soldier, if you will—instructs me to immortalise my authority in case I am no longer of this world by the time you are of age.
Follow my advice, my son: always live according to your true nature, whatever the cost to the loved ones around you. To do otherwise is to live a lie, and I have discovered this to be untenable and unethical.
Exercise both your curiosity and your imagination, for there are no greater gifts; and no greater wisdom than the breadth of experience—learn not by example but by following the courage of your convictions.
I do not know what you will think of me. I know I have been weak and fallible, but I have never lacked valour, either on the battlefield or in other arenas of human affairs. When you look upon my writings and my portrait, do not make a myth of me, but see me as a man. And, like all men, I have been made vulnerable by my humanity…
He heard the slam of the front door in the distance, footsteps ascending and then filling the hallway outside. Lavinia, returning from the park with the nursemaid and Aidan. Quietly, the Colonel closed his writing desk.
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise,
And, freed from all that’s earthly vile,
Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle,
All bathed in liquid light.
As dusky mountains please the eye,
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-notes that, passing by,
In distance die away;
As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar—
So memory will hallow all
We’ve known, but know no more.
The bookseller was right: Abraham Lincoln was a better statesman than poet, Lavinia conceded as she sat reading on the window seat. Gazing at the journal, she was reminded again of her encounter with Polly Kirkshore. Why had the whore asked if Lavinia had a sister, or even a mother? Could it be that her mother was living, perhaps even here in London?
She replaced the book on the shelf and perused its companions. Pressed up next to George Combe’s definitive text on phrenology, The Constitution of Man, was a book whose spine read:Flowers, herbs and cacti of delirium: the New World flora of a tantalising and dangerous nature. The feathery head of a flower protruded from its pages.
Intrigued, Lavinia pulled the book down. Settling back into the sun-filled warmth of the window seat, she turned to the inventive bookmark. The page showed an illustration of the ayahuasca vine, Banisteriopsis caapi.
Lavinia read on.
In the north-east of Brazil, the natives worship a goddess called Jubbu-jang-sange. To conjure her, the shaman will brew a magical potion made from the root bark of Mimosa hostilis mixed with the ayahuasca vine. Although not poisonous, fatality has resulted when the potion is taken with other hallucinogens, such as opium or peyote.
She paused, wondering on the properties of a goddess who not only promised her worshippers the ability to see with the eyes of God, but who also held the hidden danger of death. Was this part of her seduction; to walk at the edge of one’s human existence and stare Death fully in the face? To taste immortality just for a few hours? Was Death female to these people? The idea fascinated Lavinia.
41
THEY HAD AGREED TO MEET at Trafalgar Square. It was not covert so much as convenient: they were to drive to the Royal Academy together. As Lady Morgan sat waiting in her carriage, she stared up at the Nelson Column. A monstrous act of pomposity, she thought to herself, remembering the square as it had been twenty years before. Her late husband had been an associate of the architect Charles Barry, who had complained bitterly about Nelson’s plinth being imposed upon his design. In the end, celebrity had triumphed over art and the column had been erected, to loom over Barry’s design forever.