Soul

by Tobsha Learner

  Lavinia faltered, wondering at her own lack of social credentials. James is right—I need to win Lady Morgan’s patronage if I am to have any life outside these four walls, she chastised herself, then took comfort in remembering that Lady Morgan’s lineage was as insubstantial as her own.

  The rustlings of the staff, already on their rounds of carpet sweeping, polishing and general maintenance, floated in under the door. Lavinia’s aching breasts suddenly reminded her of her son.

  ‘Daisy, have I slept late?’

  ‘It is past nine, madam.’

  ‘Past nine! Why wasn’t I woken earlier? Does Aidan not need feeding?’

  ‘The nursemaid has the child. The Colonel insists that Master Aidan must be completely weaned, or take a wet nurse,’ the maid added, sensing Lavinia’s chagrin.

  ‘I must speak to my husband at once!’

  ‘Colonel Huntington is not in the house, madam, he is already off to a lecture then to the Carlton. He left instructions that you are to expect him back late tonight and should not wait up.’

  ‘Then I must be dressed and to my child as quickly as possible.’

  The kitchen was situated in the basement. A huge room equipped with a large fireplace and vast stove, it was the domain of the cook, Mrs Jobling, and the other servants: Mrs Beetle, the housekeeper; Mr Poole, the butler; four manservants and six maids. A small room adjacent to the kitchen served as the laundry, and on the other side was the chute that delivered coal directly to the cellar. There was also a cool room, lined with thick stone, that had once served as a dairy. Now it held the icebox, within which the ice man dropped his weekly delivery.

  The water for the household came from the well at the back of Chesterfield house, a nearby mansion. The spring was famous for the purity of its water, which was brought in daily by the lowest-ranking footman.

  The laundry looked out onto a landscaped courtyard that boasted a struggling lilac tree in its centre. An old marble horse trough delineated the stables from the garden. There was a cobbled area in front of the coach house and stables, which fronted onto a mews lane, enabling easy access to the main street and square. These were also the living quarters of the head coachman, two grooms and four young stablehands who slept in a loft above the stables.

  Next to the laundry was the butler’s pantry, the command post of Mr Poole, a sanctimonious Scottish misanthrope in his fifties, who had served James during his army years. The chamber was furnished with a plain wooden table, an armchair and a watercolour of Loch Fyne hanging on the wall. It also contained a large Dutch display cabinet in which the silver plate and fine china were kept locked when not in use. There was also a safe built into the wall for the very expensive pieces, which Mr Poole guarded jealously.

  The kitchen was a terrain separate from the rest of the house. Since the recent installation of a dumbwaiter—of which James was fiercely proud of—there was hardly an occasion to bring Lavinia down into this nether world of steam, meaty cooking smells and raucous robustness.

  The hiss from the clothes press and the rattle of the immense boiler that dominated one corner of the laundry fractured the murmuring that drifted through the half-open kitchen door—a flurry of whispers that finished in a staccato of female laughter.

  Pausing, Lavinia wondered whether to enter or not. Back in Ireland, she had never been excluded from life below the stairs. The minister kept only one housekeeper and a young scullery maid, who lived in the village, and Lavinia had helped with both the laundry and the cooking. Here, in this huge house with its hidden service stairs and quarters, the two worlds were carefully divided. Lavinia missed the earthy humour of the women she had grown up around, their easy direct speech and, most of all, the magic of their superstitions. The village mysteries had included the ghost of a young woman who had killed herself over a philandering sheep farmer some seventy years earlier, a forty-eight-year-old woman who had fallen miraculously pregnant after the Virgin Mary had appeared to her youngest in a cabbage patch, and the sinister possession of a chimney sweep in his death throes—a circumstance that had terrified even the priest as he leaned over him to administer the last rites.

  This parallel world had fascinated the imaginative young girl, but there was one mystery that was never mentioned in the household, upstairs or down. When she was five, Lavinia asked why she could not remember her mother’s funeral. The old housekeeper had pulled the child onto her lap and, letting her play with the rosary beads she kept in the pocket of her kitchen apron, explained that she herself had looked after her because at the age of one she had been too young to attend.

  ‘But oh how your father wept. I have never seen a man more distressed, not since the first Famine. Whatever they tell you, Miss Lavinia, she was a loved woman, your mother.’

  Now, encouraged by the memory of the housekeeper’s flour-dusted affection, Lavinia entered the kitchen.

  Her son was strapped into a high chair as the nursemaid, a stoic young woman from Leeds, bent over him, spooning a thin stew into his mouth.

  ‘So he’s taken to the stew?’

  The nursemaid paused, a guilty look on her face, then hastily wiped the babe’s soiled chin with her apron as Lavinia bent down to kiss her son.

  ‘The master instructed me, madam. I would have waited for you but he was most insistent.’

  The cook hurriedly cleared a place for Lavinia at the oak table. Mrs Jobling was a laconic skinny creature, one of the few servants who had warmed to the young wife, correctly perceiving her abrasive arrogance as a way of masking her lack of confidence.

  ‘You think me a fool for feeding my own child?’ Lavinia sat down and took an apple from a pile waiting to be peeled and baked into a pie.

  ‘No, madam,’ the nursemaid replied carefully, acutely aware of the dispute between husband and wife. ‘However, it is a most unconventional choice for a mother of your social standing. But the child is happy; it was time he finished on the breast, madam.’

  ‘We all hate letting them go, madam,’ the cook interjected as she hovered over a scullery maid who was chopping fruit. ‘I had to let mine go to the baby farmer—’course she neglected them something terrible. My two newborns died of the colic and I had to send my son to work at six year old. It’s hard for a mother, it is. But they grow so fast, and before you know it he’s a rake with three bastards of his own.’

  As if in reply, Aidan belched loudly. All four women burst into laughter and a classless unity fell momentarily over the kitchen.

  It was only when Lavinia noticed the nursemaid blushing and straightening her apron that she realised someone else—most likely a man—had entered the room. Then she smelt him; the sharp tang of horse manure interwoven with tobacco and saddle soap. It was a familiar aroma that she associated with Ireland and the farm of her childhood. Lavinia did not turn; instead, she waited for him to announce himself—as would be the protocol of servant to mistress. But the silence lengthened until it threatened to become sullen in its obstinacy. Finally, the nursemaid gestured towards the stranger.

  ‘Madam, have you met the new coachman?’

  Lavinia remained seated, her spine a ramrod. Coachmen were the Colonel’s domain, and she was convinced the man’s insolence was an indication of her husband’s lack of support for her own authority with the servants.

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Please excuse my rudeness but I fear to tread mud around the kitchen.’

  The voice was young but mellow and Lavinia instantly recognised the accent. He stepped around the table to face her.

  ‘You’re from County Kerry?’ she said.

  ‘I am indeed, originally from the McGregor estate.’ He bowed, his hair a thick helmet of dark locks that tumbled almost to his shoulders. Beneath his riding coat he wore the vertically striped waistcoat that defined him as a coachman.

  ‘Aloysius O’Malley of Dingle, at your service.’

  ‘We call him John, madam, as we do all the head coachmen here,’ the cook added, worried that the serv
ant’s manners might be considered audacious.

  The young coachman looked down truculently. Lavinia guessed, correctly, that he resented the anonymity.

  ‘Then you shall be the first coachman called Aloysius,’ she replied.

  The young man grinned, a smile that entirely transformed his otherwise grim countenance.

  The nursemaid looked sharply at Lavinia, then knowingly at the cook. Typical of the new mistress, she thought, not to know her own place and that of others.

  Ignoring her disapproval, Lavinia turned back to the coachman. ‘I know Dingle well. There is an excellent blacksmith there.’

  ‘That would be my second cousin, madam.’

  ‘You are very young to be head coachman.’

  ‘My credentials are excellent, madam, and I have been in service since I was six years of age.’

  He looked directly at her now and she saw that he had barely reached manhood. The wizened cast to his features gave him a deceptively older appearance. A third of the indentured workers of the McGregor estate had starved to death and it had been one of many places that Lavinia had visited with her father, bearing paltry gifts of clothing and food. She recognised the aged appearance of the coachman’s face as the legacy of childhood malnourishment—the stigma of the Famine.

  The young Irishman’s green eyes were set below a heavy brow and his slender face was a medley of angles placed crookedly above one another, thus creating a jaw, a chin, cheekbones and so forth. A thin mobile mouth twitched beneath a long broken nose, giving the tentative smile a certain vulnerability. His broad shoulders jutted out like awkward coat hangers from which the rest of his body fell like a cascade of bony planes. His livery—obviously inherited from his corpulent predecessor—was loose around his waist and hips, the wide leather belt buckled tight in an attempt to keep his trousers up.

  ‘You’re not long in England?’ Lavinia asked, breaking into a brogue that made the cook’s jaw drop.

  The coachman, unwilling to be pulled into an intimacy that could compromise his position, stayed with his formal English. ‘Madam, three months yesterday and I am mighty thankful for the job. I will not disappoint either you or the master.’

  ‘Good, in that case you may collect me at two o’clock this afternoon. I wish to attend church and then visit Bond Street, where there is a book I wish to purchase.’

  ‘Very good, madam.’ He tipped his cap and left.

  Returning to the stables, he wondered if she was the daughter of the Protestant minister Reverend Augustus Kane, infamous for his outlandish scientific hypotheses and for fighting with his patron over the fate of his lordship’s starving Catholic tenants. If she was Kane’s daughter she must be a good woman, he thought, then remembered his grandfather mentioning some disreputable rumour involving the minister’s wife. But that was years ago, and what did he, a Catholic, care about a Protestant scandal?

  Before leaving the house, Lavinia slipped quietly into the Colonel’s study. It was a large room with ceiling-to-floor windows through which the English sun struggled periodically.

  The pungent scent of dried plant specimens mixed with old tobacco, wood polish and turpentine, reminded her of her father and his own study. In the middle of the room stood a magnificent circular table, the top inlaid with a marquetry of exotic flowers, the ornate border depicting all manner of tropical fruits—each section representing a part of the world James had explored. A commissioned piece, the table had been a gift from the Royal Society to celebrate the Colonel’s achievements. Atop its varnished walnut surface were scattered various specimens and papers—the anthropologist’s current work. Apart from the chair at the table, there was an alcove containing a cushioned window seat, and several green leather armchairs grouped around the fireplace.

  A majestic mahogany bureau bookcase presided against one wall. Always locked, it held the Colonel’s collection of skulls, which he had gathered in his youth when under the brief tutelage of the Scottish phrenologist George Combe. Behind the decoratively glazed glass doors, the shelves were stacked with a variety of tribal artefacts, a single skull on each ledge, representing the different tribes the Colonel had studied. Each was surrounded by the icons of its people—masks, small statues, hunting tools.

  Smaller display cabinets lined the opposite wall, their shelves bursting with books, manuscripts and bound notebooks full of dried flowers, pressed insects, scribbled pencil sketches, each description illustrated with excited annotations in the margin. The enthusiasm of the younger man radiated from these pages, his fervour visible in the jittery handwriting.

  The sun, breaking through the clouds, streamed in through the skylight, carved a thin arc across the parquet floor and fell over her head, warming her in one delicious lick. The Colonel’s recent presence in the room had left an olfactory shadow of sandalwood soap, leather and hair oil. The rustling leaves outside melted into the sound of the Liffey River as the scent drew Lavinia into the memory of one particular afternoon—the first time they had made love in daylight.

  Kneeling, James had fumbled with her waistband, peeling each layer away—of silk, of damask, of lace—until she lay in her undergarments. Trembling with frustration, Lavinia had untied the ribbons at her side herself, then lifted his hand to that secret part of her she had now discovered for herself. Leaning into her, he had shut his eyes, his face inches from her own, as he let her guide him. Watching him, she wrestled with her own raising orgasm until the moment she felt herself clenching. Then she pulled him into her, begging him to take her.

  ‘Look at me,’ she’d whispered, and in that moment when the Colonel opened his eyes, her bliss had become his and she had screamed, overwhelmed by a pounding rapture that drowned out the sound of the river outside.

  Would they ever love like that again?

  Lavinia walked over to the secretaire. Her husband’s diary rested against a carved walnut lectern, open at its last entry.

  The use of certain poisons during the initiation rituals of the Amazonian peoples and the Indians of the South Americas must not be underestimated. Belladonna, mescaline, Spanish Fly, Morning Glory are just some of the flora used to enhance religious trances and often to communicate with the ‘Gods’ themselves. I myself have experimented with ayahuasca, used by the Bakairi in their spiritual practices. Naturally, the administration of such dangerous substances is hazardous and it is only the shamans or wise men of the villages that have both the skill and the permission to wield this ‘sorcery’…

  Pinned next to the note was a curiously twisted root. Lavinia squeezed the spongy substance lightly between her fingers. Its toxicity was evident in the acrid scent.

  15

  Los Angeles, 2002

  JULIA DROVE UP THE WIDE tree-lined Westwood Boulevard and turned into Le Conte, where red-brick university buildings now dominated either side. There was a bland affluence to Westwood that she loathed. After the eclectic architecture of Haight-Ashbury in San Franciso, where she had grown up, the suburb appeared insipid with its relatively new shopping malls plastered with the generic consumerist icons that littered middle America—the movie house, the hamburger joint, the supermarket, the Mex-Tex restaurant. A district designed to service the student community and medical facilities, there was nothing to distinguish it from a thousand others across the country. As in much of Los Angeles, most of the historical landmarks had been torn down and with them any organically evolved sprawl; the place was user-friendly but soulless. Why did rampant capitalism always reduce history to a bulldozed cliché, Julia wondered as she turned into the research centre. Still, it was good to be back on her own territory, with all the necessities within reach—no more living out of a suitcase, packing samples in polystyrene coolers, going days without a shower.

  Despite their disagreements it had been more profoundly emotional to return to Klaus than she had imagined. Sometimes when Julia went on field trips, she became so preoccupied she forgot that she missed him, really missed him.

  Remembering their embra
ce before she left the house, she decided to ring him when she got to the office, then made a second mental note to check on Carla to see if she’d recovered from her drinking stint at the restaurant. Humming to the radio Julia parked the car.

  The Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center was a red-brick and sandstone building constructed only two years before. At the front of the block was a small landscaped quadrangle with a futuristic bronze sculpture, an abstract representation of the double helix of DNA. Privately sponsored, the Center housed several cutting-edge research laboratories; Julia’s laboratory was located on the first floor.

  Clutching her briefcase, Julia ran up the granite stairs, past the eucalyptus trees and into the cool shadow of a stone arch leading into the building.

  Her office was a small room removed from the bustle of the main laboratory, which was separated into a wet lab and a dry lab, with a low white partition dividing the two.

  The dry lab consisted of two wooden benches facing one another, holding five computers that were constantly running. Invariably, at least three of Julia’s eight employees were using the space to work on their individual research projects as well as the larger commissions the lab took on as an entity.

  The wet lab—where the hands-on experiments were carried out—was lined with benches stocked with equipment and bottles of various chemicals and reagents. All available floor space was occupied by fume hoods, huge freezers, and centrifuges plastered with instructions and warnings.

  Down the corridor, in their own separate alcoves, were the electron microscope and the culture room. A photograph of someone’s eighty-five-year-old grandmother suspended in a full lotus position smiled beatifically down on all the activity, and jazz played constantly from a CD player in the corner. Julia prided herself on creating an atmosphere that allowed the imagination of her employees to soar—the laboratory’s record for innovation evidence of this.