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After a spell at the spa, Alexander reports, ‘My brain felt clear – my heart throbbed with all the warmth of my youth.’ Both he and Austin are so thoroughly rejuvenated that they fall for a lady guest. They eventually discover that she is promised to the doctor himself. The doctor – with his serious, sweet profile, ‘so very tender, for all its steadfastness and strength’ – turns out to be the romantic hero of the piece. The story’s author may have had her own fancies about the gentle, yet commanding, Edward Lane.

A lawyer from Lincoln’s Inn (the Inn of Court to which the Walker family was connected) arrived at Moor Park in September 1854. He was welcomed into the house (‘comfort and elegance itself,’ he noted, ‘with a look of cheerful wellbeing quite captivating’) and shown to the study. There he and Edward discussed the poet and satirist Jonathan Swift, who in the late-seventeenth century had been employed at Moor Park as a secretary to Sir William Temple. The barrister found Edward ‘a perfect master and intelligent appreciator’ of the estate’s literary history.

In the month that he spent at the spa, the young lawyer threw off the ‘crushing tyranny of thought’ and regained his delight in his body. ‘How keen the pleasure, and how exquisite the delight, which we are sometimes permitted to feel in the bare consciousness of animal existence!’ he exulted. ‘Call it sensuous! I call it divine.’

Edward and Isabella crossed the pretty parkland laid out by Sir William Temple and climbed into the woods. It was a sunny, warm day in one of the finest autumns in memory. The main path through the trees on the hill was deep in slippery pine needles and sandy mulch, the light falling through the branches in bright, broad rifts. As the path ploughed east, the valley narrowed and deepened: the river drew close on the right, the hill steepened to the left.

A few hundred yards along the lane, halfway between Moor Park and the ruined Cistercian monastery of Waverley Abbey, a deep cave burrowed into the sandstone, its mouth overhung with trailing roots and weeds, and its floor flooded with a clear rill of water. It was known as Mother Ludwell’s – or Ludlam’s – Cave or Hole, after a witch who was said once to have lived there. In this cave at the end of the seventeenth century, Jonathan Swift had courted his first love, Esther Johnson, the daughter of Sir William Temple’s housekeeper. Swift wrote an ode to the well by which he and Esther used to meet, casting it as the source of an intimate, sensual landscape: ‘The meadows interlaced with silver flouds,/ The frizzled thickets, and the taller woods.’

Isabella and Edward took one of the trails that pushed up into the forest on the slopes above the cave, and emerged at the summit of the hill on to moors of bracken, furze and heather. The remains of Waverley Abbey lay to one side, the ripe hop fields and ferny heaths of Farnham to the other. The breeze carried the clean scent of Scotch pine and the marmalade tang of young Douglas firs.

‘We walked on,’ Isabella continued, ‘and again seated ourselves in a glade of surpassing beauty. The sun shone warmly down upon us, the fern, yellow and brown, was stretched away beneath us, fine old trees in groups adorned the near ground, and far away gleamed the blue hills. I gave myself up to enjoyment. I leaned back against some firm dry heather bushes, and laughed and remarked as I rarely did in that presence.’ As she reclined with pleasure on the shrubby ground, the natural world seemed to conspire with her: the sun warmed her skin, the trees and the hills decorated her view, the heather yielded to her body.

‘At last we roused ourselves,’ she wrote, ‘and walked on happy, fearful, almost silent. We sauntered not heeding where, to a grove of pines, and there looked over another view beautiful as that on this side, but wilder.’

As they descended into the park they caught sight of the Brown sisters, acquaintances from Edinburgh who were staying at the house. Isabella and Edward ‘thought it necessary slowly to join them. They had observed nothing – we were safe. Constraining ourselves to converse, we succeeded in disarming all suspicion, and reached the house together, but late for dinner.’

Isabella went to her room to ready herself for the meal. She was ‘flushed and excited’ on going down to the dining room, she said, ‘and neither I nor Dr L, fairly met one another’s eyes or spoke’. To her relief, a fellow patient – ‘Mr S’ – sat and talked to her at the table, and afterwards she and the children, along with Edward and Mary Lane, accompanied him in a carriage to the railway station. She hugged her secret to her. ‘We were a little crowded in going, but a sense of hidden happiness and satisfaction was glowing at my heart. We chatted in returning, but of indifferent matters, and dear little innocent Mrs L— sat behind with her fine baby asleep and laid under her cloak.’

After tea, ‘some time passed in a desultory manner’. Most of the guests had gone up to the drawing room on the first floor, but Isabella hung back. ‘I walked with Alfred in the hall, unwilling to go upstairs lest I might see him no more alone.’ Eventually Lady Drysdale invited her into the library, where Edward found her when he came in to the house from the stable yard. He was ‘cold, shivering, nervous, ill’, said Isabella. Alfred headed upstairs to listen to one of the Misses Brown read a ghost story. Edward and Isabella went into his study.

The doctor’s study was a corner room, adjacent to the dining room, with windows that looked out to the river on one side and to Sir William Temple’s sundial on another. In the evening, with the shutters and doors closed and a fire burning in the hearth, it was snug and warm. The walls and doors were covered with horizontal panels of red, rich-grained wood, so smooth and continuous that the doors when shut seemed to disappear, their presence betrayed only by the thin grooves cut into the panels and the rubbed shine of the doorknobs. A couple of feet behind each half-hidden door lay another door, the space between them a narrow chamber the size of a cupboard. This sealed off the study from the sounds of the house, and the house from the sounds of the study.

In the drawing room, Isabella busied herself by examining a book of autographs and chatting with a fellow guest. Edward and Mary came in together, and Lady Drysdale followed soon after. ‘What an escape I had had! What a calm appearance I could now make! General conversation followed. I turned to listen, and Dr Lane reported to Miss B— some of the finest odes of Byron. When they went I rose too, and was gliding away, when Dr L— gave me a warm shake, so warm that it crushed my fingers with the rings, so that I felt it for an hour.’ Edward pressed the rings into her flesh as if to awaken her to the force of his desire, the reality of their new compact. She was overcharged again by the memory of what had happened, her euphoria touched with fear.

‘Alas!’ ended the entry of 7 October. ‘I slept little that night, waking, rising, dreaming – and slowly came the morn.’

The next morning, Isabella was exhausted. From her bedroom, she overheard Edward talking to his wife. Later he came in to her apartment to show her a long letter he had written to a prospective patient in Edinburgh. ‘It was a nicely written letter,’ she noted. She went back to bed. ‘I lay down, wearied, exhausted, nervous. He tapped at half past twelve, and bade me come down and walk: but I refused, and dozed on.’ Soon afterwards Mary came up to see her, and she decided to dress.