The turnglass, p.1
The Turnglass, page 1
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For Phoebe
Tête-bêche (n)
A book split into two parts printed back-to-back and head-to-foot.
Etymology: French lit. ‘head-to-foot’.
I have recently bought a tête-bêche. It is a beguiling thing. Two stories are printed in mutual inversion. One reads the first, then turns the book over and reads the other. These tales are intertwined and parasitic. Beguiling and, I think, a little strange too.
Letter from COUNT HORACE MANN, 20 March 1819
Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, ACT III SCENE V
Chapter 1
London, 1881
Simeon Lee’s grey eyes were visible above a kerchief he had tied to keep out the stench of cholera. It was the odour of bodies rotting in doss-houses and mortuaries.
‘The King’s come knocking,’ he muttered.
‘Can’t we call it something else?’ implored his friend Graham, who had a damp scarf bound over his nose and mouth. ‘I don’t like that name. It implies we owe it something. We don’t.’
‘And yet it’s going to collect.’
‘Do you think there will be another epidemic?’
‘I hope not.’ No, he hoped this was just a local outbreak of the disease.
The two, who had spent years training together for a career healing the sick and reassuring the healthy, walked on through Grub Street, deep in the ancient Roman heart of the city of London. The buildings in the thoroughfare were given over to the print trade – journals and periodicals cataloguing the daily intrigues, pleasures and sadnesses of life. The gutter along the middle of the lane ran with ink.
Simeon cast aside his face covering as they reached their shared lodging. ‘We need to find its weak point,’ he said. He thought of the disease in animal terms, like a rabid dog. Too small for the eye to see, and yet the bacterium was strong enough to drag waves of men, women and children to their graves. An insidious little murderer. ‘Every disease has a weak point.’
Dr Simeon Lee had long, slim features and a long, slim frame that rose lithely up the stairs to their rooms – their garret, in truth – above a print shop whose presses banged without stop around the clock. The place suited him, however, because he could work when most others rested. And it was cheap. Very cheap. After months when his research had stalled due to a lack of money, he needed to save every penny he could.
‘It’s there, I can feel it’s there,’ he continued without missing a beat. ‘Damn it, we’ve been able to protect against smallpox for a century. Why not cholera?’ He stared out of the grimy tilted window. The sharp darkness of a December smog stared back at him.
‘So you have said, once or twice. You’re getting a bit obsessive.’ Graham hesitated. ‘You know, you’re not making yourself too popular at the hospital.’
‘You astonish me.’ He did not care a cuss what the ancient bewhiskered creatures who ran the King’s College Hospital thought of him. Let them work in the tenements and rookeries around St Giles and they might see things differently.
His friend shrugged in dismissal. ‘How do you intend to find your miracle cure?’
‘How?’ He nearly laughed at the question. ‘With money. I need money. I need the Macintosh grant.’ He undid his tie and dropped onto the fire-damaged settle they had rescued from a pavement in Marylebone. ‘Meanwhile, they fall in their houses like it’s the Black Death.’ He swivelled on the scorched seat, trying to get comfortable. ‘A poor man in this street has less chance of making it to the age of thirty than I have of being knighted. Good God, if Robertson and the others would just listen, we could do something about it!’ His friend left the air unbroken as Simeon got into his stride, railing against the faculty of the King’s College school of medicine who had time and time again demonstrated their utter inability to entertain a single new idea. ‘Time and money. That’s all it takes to find a cure. Enough time and enough money.’
His anger was born of frustration. Few things could rile him so much as the prospect of his entire body of three years’ work growing dusty on his desk. Every month, the grants board of the medical school hummed and hahed over his proposals, and more men, women and children succumbed to the disease.
‘Think you’ll get it?’
‘It’s between me and Edwin Grover. Wants it for his stuff on analgesia.’
‘He’s bright.’
‘On paper, yes. In practical terms, he’s a cretin. It’s all too theoretical. No thought as to how you would actually get a needle in the arm of a seamstress.’ He rapped his knuckles on the table in irritation. Grover spent his days in a set of rooms on the upper floor of a rather fine house on Soho Square. He rarely left them. He had no need. No interest, probably.
‘What if you don’t get it?’
‘Then, my friend, I will be out sweeping the street for ha’pennies.’ He tugged his forelock.
‘Sounds frosty.’
‘No doubt it is.’
Graham cleared his throat. ‘What about that job in Essex? It would pay.’
Simeon raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘God, I had forgotten all about that.’ It had left Simeon’s mind almost as soon as he had laid the telegram aside the day before.
‘Your uncle, correct?’
‘Not quite. My father’s cousin.’
‘Well, it’s a paying job.’
That was true, but it was not an enticing one. ‘Ministering to a country parson who has convinced himself he’s at death’s door even though he’s probably fit enough to go ten rounds in the ring with Daniel Mendoza.’
‘Simeon, you need the cash.’
He brooded. There was absolutely no doubting that point. But he felt like a cheap hireling, treating a man who probably needed no more medical prescription than ‘cut down on the port and take a brisk walk from time to time’. And yet the money could restart his progress towards a cure.
‘It is an option,’ he conceded. ‘Though God knows how much I can shake out of him. A country parson isn’t exactly rolling in paper.’
‘True. Is he at least a pleasant chap?’
Simeon shrugged. ‘No doubt one of these quiet old priests who spend all their time reading treatises about Bishop Ussher’s calculation that the world is six millennia old.’
‘Well, it could be worse. Is it just him in the house?’
‘Ah. Well.’ Simeon chuckled to himself. ‘That is where it does become rather… intriguing.’
‘How so?’
‘It’s the family scandal.’
‘Scandal? Go on.’
‘I don’t even know half of it myself – my father wouldn’t tell me the details. I believe the parson’s brother was killed by his wife in strange circumstances. One of them was mad, I think. I should find out. True, true, a piquant history might be some respite from the boredom of the job. But no, I put my trust in Providence that the Macintosh board will come through first.’
* * *
The following afternoon, Simeon sat on a hard, well-polished bench outside a committee room in King’s College. Edwin Grover, primly dressed, sat on an identical bench opposite.
‘Still on cholera, are you?’ Grover asked.
‘Yes. Still on it.’
Grover had no more questions.
An elderly porter creaked out of the committee room. ‘Dr Grover? Will you come this way?’
Grover followed him in. The door closed with a bang that echoed up the hall.
It was an hour before he emerged, looking pleased with himself. Simeon swore under his breath at the sight; then it was his turn.
He entered, sat on a wooden chair before a panel of five men and laid out his plans to cure one of the greatest ills of the age.
‘Dr Lee. We have been reviewing your application and supporting documents,’ one informed him morosely. ‘One question kept arising in our minds.’
‘What question, sir?’
‘What evidence do we have that you will actually get anywhere?’
It was not a friendly question. ‘Can you be more specific?’
‘Your record seems,’ he glanced down at a file, ‘inconsequential. Nothing, we understand, has, in fact, come out of it.’
‘I don’t believe that—’
‘Unlike, say, another candidate’s record that shows two papers published in the Lancet alone.’ Somewhere in the walls, the water pipes banged and hooted with trapped air.
‘I have the utmost respect for academic publishing—’
‘Whereas all we can see from your work is a series of requests for more funding.’
Simeon gritted his teeth before answering. ‘I believe the return will be worth the capital, sir.’
‘But what return? And how much capital?’
‘I think three hundred pounds would—’
‘Three hundred pounds? For a disease now confined to the slums?’ There were murmurings of agreement from the rest of the panel.
‘And if you spent as much time in their company as I have, you would know that many of them are better off not living in it.’
‘Your meaning?’ the elderly doctor asked.
‘My meaning, sir, is that I can’t tell you the number of children younger than five years of age that I have seen who were condemned to nothing more than a short, pain-filled life. At times it has been tempting to cut their lives short then and there rather than watch their inevitable decline.’
‘Well, that is between you and God. Here, we are concerned with your application for a grant.’
‘Of course. I apologize for becoming distracted. To answer your precise question: we have been unable to identify vaccine-worthy material from human sources. My contention is that non-human animals may possibly produce the material we need. For example, if we expose our closest relatives, gorillas, to the disease, and we extract their blood, it is possible that consanguination may provide protection against the germ.’
‘So now he wants us all swinging from trees,’ muttered one of the men.
* * *
When Simeon arrived back in his rooms, there was an open bottle of dark wine on the trunk they used as a table. He drained its dregs, glanced at his friend gently snoring in his bed and looked out the window. The street was quiet as the grave.
He noticed then that the bottle had been resting on something: a telegram. The day before, he had sent a cable to his father, asking for details of the murderous events involving his relatives in Essex two years earlier that had set vicious tongues wagging. The reply had been swift. ‘Your duties are purely medical. Do them and no more. I understand that nefarious crimes were suspected even before the violence took place. It is no surprise to me. Turnglass House has always had something corrupt and malign about it. Leave it to God and the law.’
Simeon could not help but remark on the fact that his father – not usually a man for flights of poetic fancy – had said it was the house itself that had ‘something corrupt and malign’ about it, rather than the household. That was curious.
Simeon had never known the distant branch of the family who resided at Turnglass House. He had grown up hundreds of miles to the north, among the stone streets of York, a sole surviving child raised by parents with only a passing interest in him, and sent away for his education at the age of ten. His father, a solicitor with a dusty practice tending to the needs of dusty aristocrats, accepted medicine as a reasonable profession, although he supposed his mother would probably have preferred if Simeon had set his cap at a more fashionable business in Harley Street. Her subsequent disapproval of a career in researching and combating infectious diseases did nothing to slake her son’s thirst for it.
So it’s Essex then, he thought to himself.
* * *
The island of Ray lies in the salt marshes on the edge of the Essex coast. It is, or is not, an island depending on the tide – resting, as it does, between the open mouths of the Colne and Blackwater estuaries. At high tide it is quite cut off, and the sole house that resides on it feels adrift and isolated. The sea that pours in between the mainland and Ray is topped by a carpet of tangling Sargasso weed, like the fingers of so many drowned men. The weed drifts in its own time through the creeks of the estuary, up to the village of Peldon on the mainland, where the pond outside the Peldon Rose inn has long been a store locker for those supplementing their incomes as oyster fishermen with sales of brandy and tobacco that have been brought from the Continent without paying the ruinous excise duty. The bottom of the pond is wooden and can be lifted to drain away the water, revealing the tar-crusted barrels secreted therein. These barrels supply all the inns of Colchester with wine and all the haberdashers with lace.
Indeed, barely a penny of excise is collected in Essex, even though a quarter of the nation’s excisable goods are imported through that county. And don’t imagine that the excise men are unaware of the trade, but since twenty-two of their number were found in a boat one morning some years back with their throats slashed, their friends have been loath to interrupt the local tradesmen.
Beside Ray sits the neighbouring island of Mersea, which is ten times Ray’s size and home to fifty-odd homes and a shingle beach known as the Hard. Golden samphire and purple sea lavender decorate both islands, which have a gravel base packed together with clay that attracts wading and floating birds, such as oystercatchers and shelduck.
Yet human visitors to these islands must take care.
At low tide, a narrow causeway from the mainland, the Strood, is revealed by the departing brine. It runs to Ray, across the mile-wide island and then on to Mersea. But anyone who walks it must ensure they have checked the tidal calendar. The danger is not just being marooned on Ray, with its obscure house, but more that anyone caught on the Strood itself as the saltwater rises risks being claimed by the Sargasso weed. Almost every year since the Romans first populated Ray, at least one man or woman has become entwined in that weed. They float there still, making no sound, no complaint, their hands slowly joining.
* * *
Simeon could smell sea lavender on the wind as a pony trap set him down outside the Peldon Rose. The driver had laughingly boasted of the local less-than-legal industry on the way, and Simeon happened to peer into the pond but saw only murky saltwater. The very air tasted of salt, though. It burned a little at the back of his throat, and he tried swallowing two or three times to get rid of it before telling himself he would soon get used to the sensation as part of the landscape.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he heard. The publican, a wiry fellow with huge side-whiskers, was standing in the doorway puffing a long pipe. ‘Are ye comin’ in?’
‘I am, and glad for it,’ Simeon replied happily, hefting his travelling bag onto his shoulder and carrying his black leather medical bag in his remaining hand.
‘Right then. Ye’ll be wantin’ somethin’ to eat an’ a jug-a beer, I shouldn’ wonder.’
‘That sounds very fine.’ He looked over the building. It was a wide, single-storey country inn whitewashed to a dull grey in the winter dun. He was hungry and the prospect of hot food had nourished him for the hour-long ride from Colchester station on his way to see and treat the parson of the parish, Oliver Hawes – Dr Hawes, in fact, that gentleman being a Doctor of Divinity.
‘In ye come, then, lad.’
He gladly accepted.
The tap room was populated with seven or eight fellows wearing the clothes of fishermen. Every one was smoking a long, thin white pipe, identical to the landlord’s. Simeon wondered if they could somehow tell their own from their friends’. Three women had called in too, forming a trio of Fates in the corner, silently examining him.
‘Come on in, lad,’ the landlord reiterated. ‘Warm welcome always a’ the Rose. Put yer bag down. Tha’s it. Jenny! Jenny! Some bread an’ twelve – no, sixteen oysters. He looks a hungry one. Sharpish, girl.’ He made no attempt to ask if the order met his new patron’s needs. Within seconds, Jenny, a girl of about ten years, appeared with bread and a mass of oysters. The landlord handed over a jug of small beer and motioned for Simeon to eat standing at the bar. The whole inn was waiting for him to start eating or announce his business, it seemed. He chose to begin with the food. But if he had been expecting conversation to resume as he ate, he was mistaken. The air remained still, apart from the sound of him, or one other, drinking back ale. Ten minutes later, he had finished his meal.
‘Tha’ll be four shillings, three pence an’ one story,’ the landlord informed him.
Simeon chuckled. ‘And what story would that be?’
‘To tell us all wha’ ye’re doing here.’
It seemed perfectly friendly, rather than some sort of warning, so Simeon had no compunction regarding a reply. ‘I’m a doctor. I’m on my way to look after a relative of mine.’
‘Who’s tha’, then?’
Simeon wondered how they addressed or referred to his almost-uncle. ‘Dr Hawes.’
‘Parson Hawes!’ The landlord’s eyebrows shot up and there was a low rumbling in the room. ‘Ye’re his relative.’
