THE CARVED IVORY HEAD OF the walking stick was in the form of a snarling gorilla and had a ferocity that, privately, Colonel James Huntington found comforting. Just as Moses had held up the golden calf, he could hold up the stick and wave it at the indifferent gods in righteous indignation, the monkey sneering for him. But the Colonel was not a righteous man. In all his soldiering, all his travels, he was yet to find a reason to believe in anything but the relentlessness of Nature, that onward grind called life—the grimacing ape.
He flicked a ribbon of seaweed across the pooling sand. The tide was on its way out and the foreshore was broken by a ridge of rock pools, each glassy pond a still, tepid eye beyond which the Irish Sea thrashed. I should like to be a better man. Would marriage make me so? It was a rhetorical question. He had already made up his mind, sometime in the early hours, having examined his options from every angle, turning them over like an hourglass, calculating the various ways the sand might trickle, finally concluding that whichever way the instrument was turned, the sand did indeed travel grain by grain. Time ran only one way.
At forty-seven, the Colonel was haunted by his own mortality. Arthritis beat hollowly in his left shin—a battle wound from Sebastopol—and there was more grey in his whiskers than he cared to acknowledge. He had arrived at that time of life when a man is confronted with the legacy of his conquests; in his case, a series of unsatisfactory liaisons that he regarded as a festering collection of regrettable memories. A libertine, whose sensual pleasures transcended the notion of gender, James Huntington was, naturally, intensely private about his pursuits. Recently, old diversions had ceased to excite and he was now driven to extremes to experience any stimulation—intellectual, emotional, sexual or otherwise. Consequently, his erotic expeditions had of late become increasingly perilous, as if propelled by an unconscious compulsion to destroy his social standing. He was at a crossroads: the path he was on could lead to social disgrace, or worse, but all the future seemed to hold was further decadence and an erosion of the primary morals he, at least mentally, subscribed to—truth, honour, fidelity.
A bubble broke in the sand ahead and he wondered about the sandworm beneath. Did such creatures mate? Or did they reproduce asexually? The answer escaped him but his resolution rushed back anew. The epiphany he had experienced in the Amazon held true: he must procreate, and the seventeen-year-old girl approaching him was a destiny any hedonist might wish for.
‘It is an uncommonly beautiful day, do you not think, Colonel Huntington? It is early for the west coast to experience sunshine as glorious as this.’
The Colonel looked up from his sandworm and smiled, amusement crinkling around the eyes that Lavinia could never quite decide on as blue or green; they seemed to change with the emotions of their owner.
Lavinia glanced back to where the grey stone and wood of the cottages and fishermen’s shacks followed the mouth of the river to where it spilled into the sea. She knew that Maggie O’Dowell, the postmistress, would be spying on her, tutting like a parrot as she fantasised about all kinds of immoral behaviour that she could report to the four local widows who sat in judgement on every young woman this side of Killarney. Lavinia knew she was already damned: for her arrogance, for her youth, and for the worst sin of all—ambition. Lord help me if I am also to be condemned as whore, a woman who walks hatless and chaperoneless with a man.
Laughing at her own irreverence, Lavinia pulled off the straw bonnet, letting her hair fall to her waist. Her neck, bared, burned under the Colonel’s gaze and, tilting her head at an angle that she knew would flatter the strong planes of her face, she prayed silently, Ask me, ask me now, you must. You will be my husband, and I your wife, and you shall lift me high like the wind and carry me away from this atrocious backwater that is a murder for my spirit. The silent invocation bubbled under the crashing waves.
Colonel James Huntington was the first man—aside from her father—who had taken her aspirations seriously and she had decided to love him for it. He was also the only man she’d met who wore spats and a velvet waistcoat and had an expensive gold pocket watch with his name inscribed on the back. The Colonel was the epitome of the cultured English gentleman, inhabiting a world he had described to her as a fascinating paradox of ambition and greed, beauty and terror; a world Lavinia was now convinced would be her salvation.
The cottage chimneys were smoking and under the fecund odour of burning peat, she imagined she could detect the very smell of the prejudices and fears that shackled all of the village’s one hundred and fifty-six inhabitants, censoring even their dreams. It was a stench composed of body grime, the blistered ink of fading postcards from relatives in faraway places and other people’s infidelities slipped like whispers between the billowing laundry—rags worn for so long they had become threads.
Lavinia skipped a few paces on the sand, then waved her hat defiantly at a clump of seagulls that threw themselves into the air screaming. Even the birds sound disapproving, she thought. A pox on them all; she was determined that Lavinia Elspeth Kane was destined for bigger things, for a life that would leave an indentation on the world, even if it were less than a chicken’s scratching.
Watching her dance the Colonel lifted his head to breathe in the breeze. The fresh salt air chased the exhaustion from his bones. The young woman standing before him, so charmingly seductive in her violet smock and buttoned leather boots, the heels of which were now splattered with wet sand, her inky hair loosened like a shimmering waterfall, was from an entirely different class altogether. In fact, it was only by a capricious and wondrous synchronicity that the two individuals there on the strand, buffeted by the Gaelic wind, knew each other at all, brought together by a coinc
idence of events that pivoted entirely upon the very humble Liparis liparis, otherwise known as the common sea snail.
The Reverend Augustus Kane—Lavinia’s father—was a widower Presbyterian minister whose lack of passion for the sermon was matched only by his passion for the study of all things natural, including Man himself. In Nature, he had told his daughter more than once, lies God and in Nature alone. Blasphemous words, particularly in that part of the world where the apostles, the moneyed landowners and the English had abandoned the ordinary man during the terrible years of the famine. Perhaps it was this profanity, and the Reverend Kane’s noticeable want of enthusiasm for the theatrical, that had caused his parishioners to dwindle to a mere loyal seven.
The patronage of Lord Lahmont, the local landowner, kept the small church open as its graveyard, packed with tombstones jammed like playing cards, was the only Protestant cemetery within a fifty-mile radius.
One blustery damp morning, the minister had made a minor discovery about the gender and sexuality of the Liparis liparis. Elated, he had danced in the churchyard in the rain, wearing just his dressing gown and Wellington boots—an act that set many of the local Catholics to muttering about the powerful disrespect of the Protestants for all things sacred.
Despite a subsequent heavy cold, the reverend wrote up his findings and they were published in the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and the Journal of Science. His florid and compellingly graphic prose had caught the attention of Colonel Huntington—himself an amateur naturalist—and a correspondence had been fostered upon this commonality of interests. The letters had blossomed into a friendship of sorts, and the Colonel became a regular visitor to the Kane household.
Now, Colonel Huntington walked alongside to the next rock pool. A small crab scuttled from under a piece of seaweed and threw itself with endearing desperation into the glassy shadows of the stilled seawater. Catching a glimpse of Lavinia’s narrow ankle as she negotiated the uneven terrain, he was reminded of the first time he had set eyes on the young woman—then a shy pubescent, whose swelling curves were just beginning to soften her birdlike frame.
A slim figure lipped with a crescent of sunlight, Lavinia had stood before her father’s desk, a huge conch shell held deferentially in her hands as she recited first the definition of the creature then a précis of its habitat, both in fluent Latin, to the proud delight of the reverend.
Despite the recent additions of frills and petticoats, the young woman relished still the dissection of specimens and could converse easily about the distinctions of various plant life and the manner in which species varied and mutated. The promise of mentoring such innocence was dangerously tempting to the Colonel. He needed a wife to relieve him of the increasing stress of compartmentalising his private life from his public life, and he needed a child. With the detached eye of a scientist he assessed that Lavinia had three major assets: intelligence, youth and, most enticing of all, anonymity. Her lineage was so mundane that Society would not be able to place her. Inherently a provocateur and a maverick, the Colonel was excited by the audacity of introducing such a creature into his circle. As his wife, Lavinia would be entirely his creation.
When Colonel Huntington had arrived unexpectedly from London the month before, Lavinia, whose notions of love were informed solely by copious readings of Victor Hugo, Stendhal and George Sand, had assumed that the long walks they took along the shores of the Irish Sea must be a form of courtship. But after weeks of convoluted small talk, she had begun to fear that his only interest might genuinely be her education.
Then one evening, after her father had discreetly retired, the Colonel had lifted her mouth to his and slipped his hand inside her bodice. Shocked, she had stood there frozen, with his warm hand over her breast, astounded by the trickling excitement that ran from her nipples to the very core of her.
But that was a week ago and the Colonel still had not proposed. Could he be exploiting her status? After all, Lavinia was the penniless daughter of a Presbyterian minister with no dowry and few marriage prospects, and he was the son of a Viscountess, independently wealthy with a town house in Mayfair and a country house in West Scotland. There was little but the gossip of the village to stop him making her his mistress.
It was this anxiety that had kept Lavinia up most of the night. At the very least, respect for her father would surely prevent him considering such an arrangement. But the Colonel was a worldly individual who could afford anything and anyone he wanted.
Today, however, he appeared nervous, unexpectedly formal—like a noble predator, normally so in control of its territory, suddenly cornered and befuddled by an unforeseen change of locale. Lavinia would have found it amusing except for her own fears. He must ask her; any delay now would endanger her reputation.
The Colonel took her arm and together they peered into the rock pool.
‘These habitats are a microcosm of the greater world, my dear,’ he said. ‘A miniature metropolis filled with predators, prey, scavengers and those individuals who cling to the edge of life and simply observe, praying that today will not be the day they are eaten. Lavinia, London society is far more ruthless, far crueller, particularly towards a species it cannot place.’
Lavinia peeled off her glove and wove her fingers through his. Her skin felt deliciously cool and, to his surprise, the Colonel felt the stirrings of genuine emotion.
‘Yes.’The girl’s voice was confident, determined.
He looked sideways, trying to read the blue band of her eyes, dazzling in the sun.