Soul

‘Your vocation, Lady Morgan?’ Lavinia ventured, wondering what that might be, other than to act as catalyst for the scandals of Mayfair.

‘It is men and the study of them, to put it bluntly. And I have not regretted a second of it, no matter what that lewd scandal sheet Punch might insinuate. For, you see, widows have a moral duty to enjoy all the pleasures long-suffering wives are denied.’

Lavinia glanced back at Aloysius driving alongside them, sitting up on the phaeton seat and oblivious to their conversation. Lady Morgan’s carriage followed behind, flamboyantly embellished with her late husband’s family crest and a pattern of fleurs-de-lis.

‘Is that how you perceive me—as a long-suffering wife, Lady Morgan?’

‘My dear, you are the very archetype. And that is precisely why I am telling you that we women must not allow the peccadilloes of our husbands to oppress us.’

Taking care to hide the distress that suddenly gripped her, Lavinia turned away to admire a milliner’s window display.

‘The Colonel was, arguably, the most accomplished of my salon. He is an extraordinary individual, Lavinia.’

The young woman started, for it was the first time Lady Morgan had used her Christian name. It led her to believe the aristocrat was, for once, speaking entirely without irony.

‘And extraordinary individuals have extraordinary infatuations,’ Lady Morgan went on, ‘as I have recently experienced myself. I am losing someone very dear to me, just as you are. Mr Hamish Campbell is my touchstone of youth; he was to be my last indulgence. But I find now, to my great chagrin, that I cannot do without him.’ She took Lavinia’s arm. ‘So now you know: even the most cynical of us have our follies.’

The phaeton pulled away from Hanover Square and made for St James’s Square. Although there was still a faint chill in the breeze, it was evident to Lavinia that summer had arrived. The streets were full of couples walking arm in arm. Lavinia enviously watched a man and his wife promenading: the synchronicity of their stride indicated a seasoned knowledge of each other, the ease of trust, she thought. The husband was portly in tails and a top hat, his brocade and satin waistcoat gleaming like the breast of a punchy cockerel, his wife fluttering beside him.

A few yards on, a young clerk skipped around a couple of girls, both skittish in striped damask. The young man’s antics drove the girls to laughter, and they fled their pursuer, their ringlets bouncing. A watching rat catcher, his traps hanging from his belt, lounged against a lamppost, pipe in hand, while his terrier snapped at the passing girls.

Courtship was everywhere; even the pigeons nesting precariously on the ledges of the soot-blackened buildings seemed to be either engaged in the act of fornication or in contemplation of it.

And what of my marriage, Lavinia wondered, is it just a pretence? A sham union? What right did her husband have to banish her from his study and his bed?

Was Lady Morgan insinuating that James and Hamish Campbell were lovers? Horrified, Lavinia contemplated the possibility. She had hoped the encounter with Polly Kirkshore was an abnormality, a weakness for the exotic in which her husband indulged occasionally, an indulgence that would not destroy their marriage. The notion was barely tolerable, but she had found a logic within herself to accept such behaviour. But if James’s friendship with Hamish Campbell was that of an intimate nature—she remembered how Hamish Campbell had looked when the Colonel complimented him. She knew that sensation, that excitement at having won a rare tribute. Was James really capable of such a betrayal.

The breeze lifted a mass of dead leaves, discarded newspapers, chicken feathers and an abandoned child’s bonnet blackened with horse manure; the medley whisked down the cobblestoned road like a whirling dervish. Watching, Lavinia could only think of this spinning confusion as herself.

Prospero’s face, lit by the gas footlights, was instantly transformed into a wizard’s head of shadow as he lurched toward Caliban to grasp a handful of the half-man, half-beast’s matted hair.

‘Abhorred slave,’ the actor’s voice rumbled across the stage.

‘Which any print of goodness wilt not take,

Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,

Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour

One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,

Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like

A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes

With words that made them known. But thy vile race,

Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures

Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou

Deservedly confined into this rock,

Who hadst deserved more than a prison.’

Caliban reeled blindly under Prospero’s hand, and for a moment Lavinia felt a great rush of empathy for the ragged creature, here depicted as a primitive man, a manifestation of primal emotions unfettered and unchecked. Caliban cannot help himself, she suddenly realised, he is the victim of his mother’s polluted seed. It was an epiphany that depressed her greatly.

Caliban, a great mane of hair hanging down his naked torso, whirled violently, like a Minotaur cornered in a labyrinth of his own making, yet he could not reach Prospero.