Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

“Sorry, I’m looking for Maureen.”

The man turns around. He has a lean face and slack features, deepset lines around his mouth, a stamp of exhaustion that Jane equates with manual labour.

“She’s gone out. I’m Andy, her husband. Can I help?” He turns back to the television as if he’s afraid he’s missed something.

Over his shoulder Jane can see bleary black-and-white footage of a shirtless man lit up in a dome of light. The camera pans sideways and three more men peer out of the darkness. They are thin, shirtless and ragged, and for a second, Jane thinks they are ghosts.

“The footage has just come up,” Andy says, over his shoulder. “They got a camera down through one of the boreholes and this is the first time—” His eyes well up and he turns back to the telly. “My family were all miners, four generations, so …”

For the next twenty minutes Jane and Andy sit together and watch the video: the men blinking at the camera as they wave blurrily to their loved ones. The newsreader cuts to vigils occurring in countries all over the world — a horseshoe of candles in a village’s main square, a group of men camped outside their own mine with a sign that says, Bring them home . It is early morning in the country where the miners live, and reporters have gathered at dawn around the camp the families have set up in the desert near the entrance to the shaft. The light in the film taken above ground is unexpectedly strange after the dusk of the men’s world underground — the bright red of a woman’s sweatshirt, the surprise of a yellow scarf, the intricate weave of a little girl’s poncho.

A bar of light moves across the glass plate of the library’s photocopier and Jane shakes her head. She forgot to put the pamphlet she’s holding down on the glass. A sheet of blackened paper slides out the far end of the machine and the librarian at the nearby desk catches Jane’s eye and tweaks her mouth up in a half-smile that means, Please don’t waste the toner . Jane angles the pamphlet in place, lowers the lid, hits “copy” again, and a page of names, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses spouts out the other end. Blake hasn’t asked much about it, but Jane knows that everything she’s said to him about the research she’s doing reaffirms his belief that she’s involved with the Trust and the work they’re doing at the Farrington estate. She feels some discomfort over the lie but also a sense that — because N figures in the Farrington story — her affiliation with the estate and her investment in its history is based on a kind of truth.

At the computer bay between the New Arrivals shelves and the beanbag chairs of the Young Readers section Jane sends the attachment that William had included in his e-mail to the library printer, then pays the clerk. She hadn’t wanted to open the document on Blake’s phone, afraid that it would download and he’d find it later, see William’s name. In total, William has sent typed excerpts from three letters, the first dated just a few weeks after the shooting party in 1877.

Inglewood, September 25, 1877

George Farrington to Mr. P. Eaton c/o Eaton, Roberts & Henley Ltd.

… Norvill has gone to the coast in the wake of the regrettable incident — the Commissioners are, as of last week, satisfied. The brother of the deceased has been contacted and states he has no grievance. I have met with the Superintendent who is inclined to document the event economically — the situation appears thusly resolved.

Inglewood, October 21, 1877

George Farrington to Norvill Farrington

I trust you are settling at Harrison’s. I understand the accommodations are modest. Grierson has extended your survey nine ten months and agreed to let use [ sic ] monies in the Granton account. Nora has sent two notes to Mother and indicates that your spirits are improving. I have had a last call from the magistrate Flynn and the regrettable incident is — I assure you — behind us. Mr. Leeson has been reburied at the Whitmore.

Yunnan Province, March 12, 1878

George Farrington to Mr. P. Eaton c/o Eaton, Roberts & Henley Ltd.

Please ensure the agreed-upon transfer of monies to the Whitmore on my behalf should I encounter further difficulties crossing the border, or in the event that I fail to return.

Walking back to the records office, Jane absorbs how clearly Norvill is implicated in the shooting. This would explain William’s delicate aside at the lecture: he wanted to communicate that the Chesters and Farringtons were connected, needed to state that the shooting party had occurred, because it led directly to expedition funding from the Suttons for George’s 1878 trip, and more crucially, from Edmund in 1881. But because William’s focus was on Norvill Farrington’s contributions to both the Chester Museum and the Geological Society, he’d demurred when it came to the tragic events of the day, stated that little was written about the gathering, that Prudence’s diaries said almost nothing. Given William’s focus, Jane realizes, nothing would have been gained by implicating the Farringtons and the Chesters in a long-dead scandal they’d successfully quashed. And, perhaps the site of the shooting party and the picnic at the lake was too close for him, too raw. Maybe this was why he’d skipped over Leeson’s murder and enthused about Primula and Rhodiola , about Norvill’s geologic maps and his hypothesis of “faunal succession,” knowing crates of Norvill’s brachiopods and mollusks were stored in the Chester’s vaults below him as he spoke.

When Jane gets back to the reading room she pulls out a chair and sets her pencils and notebook on the table in front of her. Then she studies William’s references more carefully. It is only on her second reading that she sees the name “Nora”: Nora has sent two notes to Mother and indicates that your spirits are improving . Jane’s eyes flick back to the name and she shivers. It feels so strange to come across a woman’s N name after years of searching, and even though there’s only a remote possibility that the woman George has mentioned is the same one who walked to Inglewood House from the Whitmore, Jane can’t help but follow up on the reference, so she opens the Farrington index and runs her finger down the list of the estate’s archives again.

The Farrington index indicates that the records office holds two ledgers concerning Inglewood staff. One is an account book of taxes paid on servants and the other is the estate Register of Employment — a large red book she’d glanced through a few days ago. While Jane waits for the Register to be sent up from the stores, she sifts through the Farrington material she’d requested yesterday: a binder of mottling business letters in plastic sleeves, a box of invoices and receipts in ornate calligraphy. Most of it doesn’t concern the household staff. The majority — deposited by George’s executors — appears to relate to botanical work, expedition costs, investments and the daily — and diminishing — economies of the estate.

When Freddy returns to his desk after delivering a microfiche to the gentleman working at the table behind Jane’s, she asks him about Prudence’s diaries: Does the Trust that is borrowing the diaries keep them in London, or are they here?

Freddy frowns. Perhaps he assumed she’d know more about the work on the estate than she appears to. “No,” he says, “everything’s local. The Trust has an archivist named Gwendolyn. She was based here for a bit but now she’s working out of the Farrington House at Inglewood. The diaries are with her.”

Two weather systems are converging overhead. If we look up and to the right of the parking lot where we are standing, clouds net the sky; to the left there’s a canopy of blue. Jane is waiting for Blake, who is already ten minutes late, and so we are waiting with her, the breeze lifting the ends of her hair as she looks down to check her watch. If she hadn’t left her mobile in London she would text him to say not to come or ask him to hold off until the Employee Register comes up from the stacks.