Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

After an hour Bream handed Leeson off to Noble so that he could go and skulk around the Superintendent’s garden. It fanned out in a V shape between the gentlemen’s airing court and the ladies’, and if one stood on the mound under the flagging pear tree one could sometimes observe the women circling the lawn under their parasols. Noble watched his charge half-heartedly from the wall of the gatehouse where he was having a smoke. Leeson saw them then: the hall porter’s keys which dangled off a large hoop from his belt — keys that Leeson knew he hung on the back of the door in his quarters when he went to bed. It followed that if a search party was to be mounted, if he and Herschel — or whoever else might be willing to be counted in their number — were to escape to find N, the keys would need to be pilfered or something would need to be bartered — though Leeson couldn’t think of what he had to offer Noble that might earn him a half a day’s grace.

Before Leeson’s first “day out” there had been talk that suggested he might soon be ready for release, though Leeson suspected this had more to do with his letters of complaint to the Commissioners about Bedford’s shock treatments and less to do with being cured. The Superintendent’s refusal to look for N and Leeson’s irate reaction to his confinement — a total of three incidents that twice involved restraints — soon put a stop to Thorpe’s talk of Leeson being allowed to “return home.” This suited Leeson perfectly, for “home” had become a remote idea, a stuffy and enclosed particularity that had started to lose the draw it once held for him. Still, if he wanted to venture out again, if he wanted to become the kind of patient who could come and go more freely, he would need to be “better.” Any progress he made after that revelation was, of course, a ruse — actions undertaken in order to gain back his privileges. The more he focused on the questions Dr. Thorpe lobbed at him and on the responses of the others in Thorpe’s care, the greater his insight into how to fool the doctor into thinking he was making progress.

“Did you sleep well?”

“Very well, thank you. I haven’t felt this rested in years.”

“Do you want pudding today?”

“Pudding would be delightful.”

Now, as Leeson stood in a thicket by the lake, he remembered that it was these very same woods that had, a month ago, restored him to himself, stirring up memories he had long been avoiding: the excessive demands of work, his wife’s diminishing affections, the ineptitude of his very being. Cutting across a nearby field that August afternoon, Herschel and the girl ahead of him, he had marvelled at nature’s inherent symmetry and its embeddings: a whorl inside a whorl on the side of a tree. Touching his hand to the bark’s welt he’d been reminded that he had secrets, undisclosed debts his brother had discovered before his confinement. In a copse of alder he’d spied a moss bed that seemed to be growing out of some older bed of lichen, and stroking the two textures with his fingers he remembered having relations with the sour-smelling woman who came to sweep out the offices in the evening, though it had happened only twice, hurriedly and awkwardly, and late in Emily’s pregnancy when she refused to let him near her. And, too, he had remembered why he was at the Whitmore in the first place. Remembered it not in the way one tries to remember something another tells you, facts or words that hang like banners over some unseen reality; but remembered it in the body, as if it were happening again: Emily in bed in her nightshift saying, “Please, Charles, just take her,” imploring him over the baby’s cries. Leeson walking back to the rope on the wall, pulling at it harder this time, straining to hear Rose’s steps on the landing. The infant, six weeks and still ruddy, nudged toward the edge of the bed so that Emily could pull her shift down, press her hot face into the coolness of her pillow. The thought that she might die had lain unspoken between them since her return to bed, though once, in a fever, Emily told Charles that she believed the infant was stealing whatever strength she had left, a leech clamping on to its parcel of blood. The birth had not been at all what she’d expected — the baby caught in there so that more than once the doctor’s hands had come out empty and covered in her blood, the stench of her own body revolting her. And then there had been nothing, a perfect black hum that lasted two days. The ache was far off at first and then closer, arriving one note at a time, like a change in season, until it was over her and around her with its buds and sprouts, open mouth and tiny wings. When she had almost regained herself, the constant needling of the baby threatened to undo her all over again: its hands little curled things Emily both loved and wanted to slap away. Charles coming in to annoy her, to fawn and act stupidly and move around the room picking up and putting down books and coverlets, winding up the music box he’d bought her once on a whim. His manner as incessant as the infant’s: how was she feeling, had she slept well, should he send for the doctor again , asking, asking, asking.

“Please take her,” Emily had repeated into her pillow, her back to the screaming thing beside her. “Give her to Rose.”

But Rose had not come, despite his repeated pulls on the rope. She was the only person in the house other than Emily to have held the infant. Unsure how to proceed exactly, Charles bent over the swaddle that was his daughter and carefully took the bundle in his hands; one of the baby’s arms came free and scrabbled in the air. He glanced toward the door again for Rose, and when he did not see her he pulled his daughter up toward his chest, surprised at her lightness. He had imagined she would be weightier, as if already filled with the materials required to turn her into the adult she would one day become.

“Rose—” he called from the bedroom doorway, trying to make his request sound firm. She’d only been in their service for two months and Emily already suspected her of pilfering, first the pearl from a pair of her earrings and then a few coins from her purse. “Rose!” he called, louder this time. And then Leeson had stepped onto the landing to survey the hall and the entryway to the sitting room below. The runner at the top of the steps was untacked in the place where he’d asked Arthur just the day before to fix it. The baby was now blinking wide-eyed and silently up at him, which made him think that Emily might take her back, might allow her to remain in the room. Turning, he caught his foot, and unable to lift it over the bulge of carpet, felt himself going down. For a brief and amazing instant Charles believed that he might be able to correct himself, was falling forward slowly enough that it seemed he had whole minutes to plan his adjustments, angle his shoulders so that he might reel backward instead and take the brunt of the fall. Sets of instructions spun through his mind even as he teetered: free your right arm, keep the baby firmly in the crook of your left, use your hand to break the—. But his right arm did not do as instructed and so he tumbled sideways on the landing, meeting the floor with his shoulder, his eyes on his child’s fluttering lids as the soft cup of her head angled toward the hardwood and then lightly hit. Emily was in her nightdress in the doorway before he could even sit up, and the baby screamed so loud her face passed through two shades of red and into a mottled violet.

In the month before they found her dead in her cot she often screamed like that, and Emily, unable to meet Charles’s eye, would by her very silence imply that he had done that, that something was not right with the baby and that this fault, like all the other faults she’d found in the world, was his.