I sighed and nodded, knowing that for all he relied upon my advice, this was one decision upon which he was determined to have his way.
“Capital!” he cried, striking a match and allowing it to burn for a few seconds to disperse the sulphur before holding it to the chamber and sucking on the bit so contentedly that I could not help but smile at how much pleasure it afforded him. The darkness of the room, coupled with the mixed light from candles, fire and pipe, made his skin seem ghostly thin and my smile diminished slightly to recognize how much he was ageing. When had our roles altered so much, I wondered, that I, the daughter, should have to grant permission for an outing to him, the parent?
Chapter Two
FATHER HAD ALWAYS been an impassioned reader. He maintained a carefully selected library in his ground-floor study, a room to which he would retire when he wanted to be alone with his thoughts and memories. One wall housed a series of volumes dedicated to his particular study, entomology, a subject that had fascinated him since childhood. As a boy, he told me, he rather horrified his parents by keeping dozens of samples of living insects in a glass box in the corner of his bedroom. In the opposite corner he kept a second display case, exhibiting their corpses post mortem. The natural progression of the insects from one side of the room to the other was a source of great satisfaction to him. He did not want to see them die, of course, preferring to study their habits and interactions while they were still alive, but he was industrious in keeping a series of journals relating to their behaviour during development, maturity and decomposition. Naturally the maids protested at having to clean the room—one even resigned in protest at being asked—and his mama refused to enter it. (His family had money back then, hence the presence of domestics. An older brother, dead many years by now, had squandered the inheritance and so we had enjoyed few such extravagances.)
Gathered next to the volumes describing the life cycles of queen termites, the intestinal tracts of longhorn beetles and the mating habits of strepsiptera, was a series of dossiers that gathered his correspondence over the years with Mr. William Kirby, his particular mentor, who had offered him his first paid employment in 1832, when Father had just acquired his majority, as an assistant at a new museum in Norwich. Subsequent to this, Mr. Kirby had taken Father with him to London to help with the establishment of the Entomological Society, a role which would in time lead to his becoming curator of insects at the British Museum, a position he loved. I shared no such passion. Insects rather repelled me.
Mr. Kirby had died some sixteen years earlier but Father still enjoyed re-reading their letters and notes, taking pleasure in following the progress of acquisition which had led the society, and ultimately the museum, to be in possession of such a fine collection.
All of these, “the insect books” as I facetiously referred to them, were shelved carefully, with a curious order that only Father truly understood, on the wall next to his desk. Gathered together on the opposite wall, however, next to a window and a reading chair where the light was much better, was a much smaller collection of books, all novels, and the most dominant author on those shelves was of course Mr. Dickens, who had no peer in Father’s mind.
“If only he would write a novel about a cicada or a grasshopper instead of an orphan,” I remarked once. “Why, you would be in heaven then, I think.”
“My dear, you are forgetting The Cricket on the Hearth,” replied Father, whose knowledge of the novelist’s work was second to none. “Not to mention that little family of spiders who set up home in Miss Havisham’s uneaten wedding cake. Or Bitzer’s lashes in Hard Times. How does he describe them? Like the antennae of busy insects, if memory serves. No, insects appear regularly throughout Dickens” work. It is only a matter of time before he devotes a more substantial volume to them. He is a true entomologist, I believe.”
Having read most of these novels myself, I am not so certain that this is true, but it was not for the insects that Father read Dickens, it was for the stories. Indeed, the first time I remember Father smiling again after Mother’s passing, in the wake of my return from my aunts’ home in Cornwall, was when he was re-reading The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, whose protagonist could always reduce him to tears of laughter.
“Eliza, you must read this,” he said to me in my fourteenth year, thrusting a copy of Bleak House into my hands. “It is a work of extraordinary merit and much more attuned to the times than those penny fancies you favour.” I opened the volume with a heavy heart which would grow heavier still as I tried to discern the meaning and intent of the lawsuit of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, but of course he was quite right, for once I had battled through those opening chapters the story opened itself up to me and I became deeply sympathetic to the experiences of Esther Summerson, not to mention utterly captivated by the romance pursued between her and Dr. Woodcourt, an honest man who loves her despite her unfortunate physical appearance. (In this, I could relate quite well to Esther, although she had of course lost her looks to the smallpox while I had never found mine in the first place.)
Prior to his bout of ill health, Father had always been a vigorous man. Regardless of the weather, he walked to and from the museum every morning and evening, discounting the omnibus that would have taken him almost directly from our front door to the museum entrance. When, for a brief few years, we had the care of a mongrel dog named Bull’s Eye, a far kinder and more temperate creature than Bill Sikes’ mistreated companion, he would take further exercise twice daily, taking the dog into Hyde Park for a constitutional, throwing a stick for him in Kensington Gardens or allowing him to run free along the banks of the Serpentine where, on one occasion, he claimed to have spotted the Princess Helena seated by the waterside weeping. (Why? I do not know. He approached her, enquiring after her health, but she waved him away.) He was never late to bed and slept soundly through the night. He ate carefully, did not drink to excess, and was neither too thin nor too fat. There was no reason to believe that he would not live to a good age. And yet he did not.
Perhaps I should have been more forceful in attempting to dissuade him from attending Mr. Dickens’ talk but in my heart I knew that, although he liked to give the impression that he deferred to me on domestic matters, there was nothing I could say that would prevent him from making the journey across the park to Knightsbridge. Despite his ardour as a reader, he had never yet had the pleasure of hearing the great author speak in public and it was well known that the performances the novelist gave on stage were the equal, if not the superior, of anything which might have been found in the playing houses of Drury Lane or Shaftesbury Avenue. And so I said nothing, I submitted to his authority, and agreed that we might go.
“Don’t fuss, Eliza,” he said as we left the house that Friday evening when I suggested that, at the very least, he should wear a second muffler for it was shockingly cold out and, although the rain had held off all day, the skies were turning to grey. But Father did not like being mollycoddled and chose to ignore my advice.
We made our way, arm in arm, towards Lancaster Gate, passing the Italian Gardens on our left as we bisected Hyde Park through the central path. Emerging some twenty minutes later from the Queen’s Gate, I thought I saw a familiar face appearing through the fog and, when I narrowed my eyes to make out the visage, I gasped, for was this not the same countenance that I had seen in the mirror the previous morning, the reflection of my own late mother? I pulled Father closer to me, stopping on the street in disbelief, and he turned to look at me in surprise just as the lady in question appeared from the miasma and nodded a greeting in my direction. It was not Mother of course—how could it have been?—but a lady who might have been her sister, or a cousin, for the resemblance around the eyes and brow was uncanny.