A Proper Education for Girls (13 page)

O
VER THE FOLLOWING WEEK
M
R.
B
LAKE AND ALICE
made considerable progress photographing the Collection. Alice suggested using the temperate house only for portable objects. The rest of the Collection, as Mr. Blake had discovered, was too cumbersome to be easily transported. Under Alice's instructions they had created two large white screens—made up of bedsheets stretched across wooden frames—which they carried through the house to be used as a backdrop and, in conjunction with a large mirror from Mr. Blake's dressing room, as light reflectors. They both agreed that the light in the temperate house was far superior to anything found in the crammed rooms and corridors of the great house, but it was the best they could do. At these times they would bring with them Mr. Blake's portable darkroom for immediate developing, though it was often difficult to find enough space in which to erect it without blocking out the very light they were struggling to capture.

The ether and guncotton necessary for coating the slides were mixed in the confined space of the portable darkroom. Despite the complicated heating system Mr. Talbot had had installed within the house, it was necessary to warm the resulting mixture over a low flame until it was sufficiently liquid to coat one side of a glass plate swiftly and evenly. Mr. Blake would then slide the covered plate into his camera. After the photograph had been taken one or other of them would dive back into the dark tent and see to the development
of the image. Once this was done the whole process would begin again. It was fiddly, cumbersome, and time consuming, and as the day wore on the atmosphere within became increasingly muggy and unwholesome. Mr. Blake felt as though he had not tasted fresh air for months.

Initially, he had wondered at the wisdom of being squeezed into the dark tent with a young woman. A not particularly attractive young woman, he insisted to himself, but one he was, to his surprise, increasingly anxious to please. Yet Alice appeared completely unaware of any impropriety, and not wanting to appear prudish, Mr. Blake said nothing. Now and again he found himself wondering whether Mr. Talbot had realized that his daughter's assistance with the project would, by necessity, take place in such an intimate, if fetid, location.

As the days passed, however, Mr. Blake found his concerns increasing. He told himself that it was simply the effect of the chemicals he was inhaling every day, but the fact of the matter was that he was finding it hard to concentrate on what he was doing whenever Alice was beside him. The tent was really only big enough for one, and with the two of them inside, Alice's skirts pressed against his legs, her hair tickled his cheek, and even above the reek of the chemicals he could smell the scent of her. He could not help but recall that on those occasions in the past that he had been ensconced in a cramped place with a woman he had also gained access to whatever pleasures could be found beneath her skirts. Latterly, such liaisons had taken place in the broom cupboards, pantries, and dressing rooms favored by Mrs. Cattermole.

Within the gloom Mr. Blake watched Alice's face in profile as she worked. Daylight entered through a panel of red-tinted muslin, and its pink brightness gave her a healthy glow and rendered the down on her upper lip invisible, so that Mr. Blake wondered whether he had imagined it. Of course, he said to himself, he had a weakness for beauty, and the female form in all its many manifestations could always be considered beautiful, one way or another. The aesthetic of the female face and figure—a dimpled cheek, a
slender neck, a neat waist, a dainty foot—these things were his artistic inspiration. As a man (and what brutes men were) he could not help it if they had also at times inspired in him a more physical response.

And yet, he could not deny that there was something about Alice Talbot he was beginning to find irresistible. Perhaps he could persuade her to have her photograph taken. Portraits had been his specialty, before he had become sidetracked by the contents of Dr. Cattermole's mortuary and the artifacts of Mr. Talbot's Collection. And then he recalled the other portraits he had taken: the portraits he kept in the hidden pocket in the back of his trunk. His missing trunk. He winced at the memory and hastily withdrew the hand he had been about to lay on her arm.

A
LICE HAD BEEN
watching Mr. Blake out of the corner of her eye. She wondered what he might be thinking as he leaned toward her, but the shadows made his expression impossible to read. Secretly, she suspected him of being rather in awe of her—clearly, he had never met a woman who spoke to him as an equal. Nor did he appear used to women who did not respond to his attempts at gallantry with a coy simper and a flutter of eyelashes. At first, that Alice did neither of these things seemed to surprise him. Latterly, he appeared merely relieved. Now, she watched as he put out his hand toward her … and then withdrew it, a look of shame and alarm on his face.

“Perhaps we should stop,” said Alice. “The fumes in here are becoming quite unbearable.”

“My sentiments exactly. A ten-minute break?”

“I was thinking of more than ten minutes.”

“But your father said—”

“My father changes his mind often. And I know for a fact that he's gone to London. He's meeting your old friend from the mortuary, Dr. Cattermole. Dr. and Mrs. Cattermole are to stay. They'll
be coming back with him tomorrow. You'll be pleased to see them, no doubt? Mr. Blake, are you feeling unwell?”

“I need air,” he muttered. He emerged from the dark tent and went to stand beside the window. Below him, the conservatory stretched in a gleaming expanse of glass.

“Perhaps we might go up to the roof,” said Alice after a moment. “The sun's out today and the wind is fresh. It's just the place to go to clear one's head.”

They made their way through the crowded corridors of the great house. By now Mr. Blake knew his way around almost as well as Alice, though he still relied on certain artifacts as signposts. At the head of a flight of stairs on the fourth floor stood a display case containing a lavishly embroidered red and yellow silk kimono. A gift to Mr. Talbot from the owner of a firm of Japanese porcelain importers (and a fellow member of the Society for the Propagation of Useful and Interesting Knowledge), it was pinned like a gargantuan butterfly within a glass cabinet. This brilliant marker told Mr. Blake that they were standing opposite the door leading to the attic.

Alice pointed to a ladder, dimly visible against the far wall of the attic and above which could be seen the outline of a trapdoor. Mr. Blake climbed up and heaved it open. A square of blue sky illuminated the dust sheets that shrouded the attic's numerous occupants—items of the Collection that were broken or unfashionable—so that those in the farthest reaches of the eaves glimmered like specters in the unexpected light.

Exhilarated by the sudden sight of springtime, Mr. Blake emerged like a jack-in-the-box onto the roof. He stretched out his arms and took a deep breath of the sharp air.

Alice's head appeared at his feet. “We can shelter from the wind over there,” she said, pointing to one of the huge brick chimney stacks that loomed fortresslike against the sky. She hesitated, before taking Mr. Blake's proffered hand as she clambered out onto the roof.

“I know you can manage without my help,” he said. “But I must
extend the courtesy nonetheless. Besides, those skirts must be a dreadful hindrance. Especially when negotiating the top rungs of a steep stair in a high wind. Perhaps I should take your arm too. After all, the wind might catch your dress and whisk you away to Bispham St. Michael like a seed from a dandelion clock.”

Alice hated gallantries. But, for once, she smiled—and took his arm.

At first, they sauntered over to the low iron railing that bounded the flat roof from the steep slope of slates. The wind was harsh on their faces, cold and unrelenting, so that they gasped for breath as it blew into their mouths and noses. Alice's skirts billowed and flapped around their legs. Mr. Blake held her arm close.

“Are you cold?”

“No.” Alice's hair was gathered tightly behind her head, but the wind pulled it this way and that, so that tendrils came loose to blow about her face like ribbons. “I love it up here. I feel as though I could fly, don't you? Watch this.” She stepped away from him, spread her arms and leaned forward over the precipice of the roof edge, into the gale. Mr. Blake watched as she swayed with the buffeting of the wind. If it dropped suddenly, she would fall.

“Miss Talbot, please!” he cried, horrified.

“Lilian and I used to see who could do this the longest,” she shouted. The wind snatched the words from her lips as soon as they were uttered. “Why don't you try?”

“If you must do it, at least come away from the edge. You might fall.”

Alice laughed. “But that's the whole point, Mr. Blake,” and she leaned farther forward. There was now more of her hair out of its pins than in. It streamed behind her, its wiriness smoothed by the wind and glinting with threads of gold in the spring sunshine.

At last she stepped back. Her face was illuminated by a spot of color high on each cheekbone and her eyes were sparkling as she tucked her hair back into some sort of order. The photographer was gazing at her, his mouth open, gasping for breath. Perhaps he was overcome by so much cold air after the warm mugginess of the
darkroom, thought Alice. Perhaps he was shocked to see a lady engaging in such foolhardy behavior.

“Will you not try it yourself?” Alice gave him an encouraging smile. “You might enjoy it.”

She watched as Mr. Blake stepped nervously up to the edge of the roof where she had been standing only a moment earlier. The roof slates hurtled downward in a brief lichen-blotched slope from the tips of his boots, but after this there was only air and space and the sound of rushing wind.

“Don't look down,” Alice whispered in his ear. “And wait for a strong gust.”

“I see my boots need cleaning,” Mr. Blake murmured. He spread his arms as the gale shrieked and whistled about him, tugging at his coat and his trousers as though at the sails of a ship.

“Lean into it,” shouted Alice.

Mr. Blake leaned forward. The wind held him in its invisible embrace.

Alice laughed and clapped her hands as Mr. Blake's hair danced about his head; his body swayed in the gusts and currents of air and he whooped and flapped his arms up and down, as though he were about to swoop out across the park that was spread out below them like a newly laid table. He turned his head to speak to her … but at that precise moment the wind dropped. Mr. Blake jerked, unbalanced on the roof edge. His feet skittered on the lead flashings, his arms windmilled furiously as he struggled to regain his balance. Alice heard a shriek of terror and realized with some surprise that it had issued from between the photographer's widely parted lips.

She seized his collar and wrenched him back from the precipice. “Don't lean out so far,” she said. She spoke as though advising a child on some innocuous social grace, such as “Don't eat so much cake” or “Don't go to bed too late,” rather than expressing alarm at the prospect of Mr. Blake's untimely death. “It clears the mind, don't you find?” she added, ignoring his ghostly pallor. She patted his arm. “You'll be feeling better in a moment. The fear is part of the pleasure, after all.”

“Indeed,” croaked Mr. Blake.

Alice took his arm and led him to a stone bench in the lea of a huge chimney stack. They gazed across the park in silence, their faces instinctively raised to the spring sunshine.

“I used to come up here with Lilian all the time,” said Alice.

“You must miss her,” said Mr. Blake after a moment, as though searching for but failing to find something more meaningful to say.

“Yes,” said Alice. “Very much.”

“She writes to you, I presume?”

“I have a letter, yes.”

“Only one?”

“Yes.”

Alice hesitated. She had read her sister's letter so often that it was in danger of coming apart. Despite her conviction that the letter was in code, she had been unable to fathom it, and the Lilian she remembered remained locked in a bland world of ladies' parlors and tiger-skin cushions. Perhaps she had been trying too hard.

“Mr. Blake,” she said at last, “are you any good at reading ciphers?”

“The sort lovers use to disguise telegrams? Or personal advertisements?”

Alice saw him blush. No doubt his own amorous assignations had sometimes been arranged through the pages of the
Times
personal advertisements—tender words of longing or demands for breathless couplings disguised as calls for absent friends, announcements about train times, or demands for the return of missing poultry.

“I have some knowledge of them,” he admitted. “Is it encrypted by word, by phrase, or by letter? Or perhaps it is a steganograph? This last is perhaps the most simple to work out, though can be difficult to write. Does the cipher itself make sense as a message?”

“It does.”

“Have you tried every second or third word? Or perhaps every fourth word if the cipher is a long one?”

Alice pulled out her sister's crumpled note. “My knowledge of
these things is slight,” she said. “And I am so eager to know what she says I no longer seem able to think straight. Perhaps I have been expecting something more complex—last night I stayed up reading Mr. Babbage's monograph on cryptography. It left me more baffled than before I began. Every fourth word you say? Might it be as simple as that?”

“Or every third, perhaps. Or every third word in each sentence.”

Alice gazed at Lilian's letter. Suddenly, before her eyes, the riddle was solved. Why had she not seen it before? “Every third word of each sentence,” she cried. “Apart from the last one, which is perhaps simply there to make the carrying message seem more credible. Mr. Blake, thank you!” How simple it seemed, and yet she had missed it, searching in vain for days for what Mr. Blake had pointed out in seconds. Feeling slightly foolish she skimmed her sister's letter.
How I miss you
, she read.
All is well. This life no hardship. Great surprise
—
the unexpected appearance of Mr. Hunter. Declares his everlasting love. Amusing, don't you think? My husband knows nothing. I have a plan to help both of us. Come out Alice. Come soon if possible
.