The Ingenious Edgar Jones Read online

“Not a deformity as such.”

  “Then what, my dear?”

  “She came out a boy.”

  “A boy!” Mrs. Simm hooted with laughter.

  Eleanor did not echo it.

  “I do not mean to mock, child, but that is simply the most absurd thing in the world.”

  “Is it?”

  “Only think of the way the world is set! A woman is a daughter, a wife, and a mother or a mistress, and that is her lot in life. But a boy can be anything that he sets his heart upon.” Mrs. Simm dabbed at Eleanor’s tears with the edge of a tiny gown. Soft blue silk. “You are tired,” said Mrs. Simm. “It is only to be expected. But, in truth, the only sadness I can see in your predicament is that all these lovely bits of stuff will never see the light of day.”

  “You are right to say I am tired, Mrs. Simm. Tired of company. And of questions.”

  “Of course you are, my dear. I shall not exhaust you any further.”

  Mrs. Simm swept out of Eleanor’s workshop and made for the front door. Eleanor followed, pulled along in the wake of her rustling skirts.

  Hovering at the doorway, Mrs. Simm grabbed Eleanor’s hand again.

  “You are young, Mrs. Jones,” she said softly. “You should take pleasure in the surprises of this world rather than grieve over the disappointments.”

  And before Eleanor could reply, the door was hauled open and slammed shut behind the visitor. The floorboards jumped with the force of it; the water pitcher went down the slope of the table and crashed upon the floor. Eleanor squinted through the curtain, watching as Mrs. Simm bustled down the curve of the street, across that empty patch of land that separated Eleanor from the grander people of the world. The old woman turned into the nearest town house: a miniature mansion with a manicured garden and all the curtains closed.

  After the floor was mopped, the pitcher cleaned, the dresses stored away, and the flowers set in a vase, Eleanor went back upstairs. She inched open the bedroom door. William was spread across the bed, flat upon his back, mouth open, beached up on the shores of his dreams. Eleanor went across to the cradle. There was Edgar, sleeping with the same aspect as his father, mouth agape, sheets kicked aside, echoing the rise and fall of his breath.

  The more she looked, the more she saw. Beyond the surface strangeness of Edgar, there was William rendered tiny and dark—his long limbs, his shock of hair, the way he pawed the air as he slept. And was not William the best man she had ever known? Eleanor pulled Edgar’s sheets over him and smoothed down his hair. Seek Peace and Pursue It, said the scripture hanging above the bed. There would be time enough for her and William to set about making a daughter. Eleanor was resolved. Edgar was as Edgar was, and she would learn to love him for it, as she loved William.

  SO IT WAS that, at his christening, Eleanor tenderly buttoned Edgar into the robes made for the girl that he was not: a dress of ivory silk, patterned with lace and embroidered with doves, caught at the back by buttons of mother-of-pearl. But when the chaplain poured the blessing down on Edgar’s head, he squirmed as if the holy water burnt him, thrashing about until Pop! Pop! Pop! The buttons flew off and fell into the font. And there was Edgar in all his glory: his hair-crested spine, sallow skin, and arse tilted to the sky.

  BY THE TIME HE WAS SIX MONTHS OLD EDGAR HAD LEARNT THE trick of piling up his sheets into a mound and scrabbling up to the top of it. Eleanor would wake in the night to Edgar howling into the darkness, and find him standing, hands gripped on the edge of the cradle, chin upon the lip of wood, his shock of hair frosted by the moonlight.

  She would lay him back and weigh him down with blankets.

  But after such awakenings, Eleanor found it impossible to sleep. She would watch the sky turn pale and listen to the birdsong heralding in another day of motherhood. And as she lay there alone, the same question repeated with every rustle of the covers in the cradle: What kind of child have William and I brought into the world? What is this dark and wild little thing, more beast than boy?

  After eight months Eleanor had had her fill of fractured nights. As the dawn came, she took Edgar and bound him up in her bedsheets. Then she took the cradle and dragged it across the landing, into the room opposite: an upstairs echo of the back parlor. She hugged the belly of it to her and rocked the runners across the floorboards. The striking of wood against wood reminded her of her father, walking the beer barrels across the cellar floor. Her father who, once she left the tavern, had slipped his way to a liquid death within a month. It was no easy task, she knew, to protect a family against the difficult parts of itself. The room had been unopened since their arrival and was rimmed with dirt. Eleanor fetched a brush and a bucket of hot water from the scullery. The rhythm of the bristles against the floorboards soothed her. As the muck was washed away, everything came up gleaming. William returned home to find Edgar wrapped up in the center of the marriage bed, grinning at him.

  “Hello there, little man.” He laughed. “You set to take your pa’s station already?”

  William untangled Edgar, and the child was off in an instant, tumbling down the side of the bed, pitching himself on to his hands and knees, racing out the open door, across the landing, into the other room, and hauling himself up against the side of the bucket, set to plunge his fist into the water if Eleanor hadn’t tugged him away.

  William stood in the doorway, neither in the room nor outside it.

  “This is all very industrious, my love,” he said. “But surely it’s a little too soon to be best for Edgar?”

  Eleanor turned her face to the floorboards and scrubbed harder. The heads of the nails caught against her brush and twisted. “And how can you tell what’s best, Will, when you spend hardly a waking hour in his company?”

  William looked at his wife. He was a man who prided himself in his observant nature, and the change in Eleanor had not gone unnoticed. It seemed to him that for every month of Edgar’s existence Eleanor had aged a year.

  William leant down, kissed Eleanor’s forehead, and took Edgar from her, nestling his son to his chest.

  “What do you think, Edgar?” he said. “Shall we set you up with a room of your own and give your mama a little peace? Would that please you?”

  Edgar chirruped and smiled and grabbed at William’s watch chain.

  “Edgar is in agreement,” he said. “As am I. It’s never too early for a man to gain his independence, after all. Most likely it will bring him on for the better.”

  “It might.”

  William smiled and went racing down the stairs with Edgar set upon his shoulder. While Eleanor scrubbed she could hear them, father and son, babbling away in the rooms beneath her. When she put her cloth to the windowpane, she saw, careering through the brambled wilderness, William, with Edgar swinging from his arms, crying, again and again, “Edgar HO!” And with each great “HO!” he pitched Edgar up into the sky. Edgar flailed out with his fists and laughed his birdlike laugh, stretching up to the apple tree and ripping the golden leaves from the branches.

  SO THINGS CONTINUED, with Eleanor’s concerns and William’s dreams wrapping themselves around their son, and Edgar, tumbling his way through the beginning of his life, unaware of the hopes and fears set upon his shoulders.

  Then came the turn of the year. Edgar was ten months old. And as the old year passed and the new one came in, the sky opened up again. It began with the applause of the evergreens. As William walked the windswept road to the college, the trees whose branches had not been wasted by the winter bent their backs and bowed as he passed beneath them, and the branches came clattering together, leaves playing in the sway of the great wind, giving William an ovation. A polite kind of applause such as might be heard around a dinner table after an apposite observation.

  In Jericho the wind whipped through the wilderness to very different effect: brambles struck against one another, and the branches of the apple tree beat upon the windowpane. It sounded as if an army was gathering outside the house. Eleanor sat by Edgar’s cradle, rocking him to
sleep. Then the heavens roared and the sky broke across the meadows. The night was shot through with a web of light, a many-fingered claw. The rain followed, falling so hard it sounded like the roof was being hammered apart.

  Edgar kicked his feet against the cradle in an echo of the elements.

  As William whiled away the nightwatch, the bells of Oxford competed with the rain, pealing in the new year. At the chime of the final bell, the downpour ceased, as if a valve in the sky had been turned. Then came a bitter cold wind. It licked along the grass, and all that had been fluid was suddenly fixed. When William walked out on to the snow-strewn lawns, the college was a fragile place. It seemed the frost had seeped into the very bricks and turned the stone brittle. The walls shimmered as if they were half glass, half mirage. The dragons on the tower were bearded with stalactites of ice, and looked all the fiercer for it.

  In Jericho Eleanor woke to a street full of cries and hollers. From her window she could see a great crowd of people racing down the road, as if they were fleeing the city. She went across the landing to the nursery. Edgar was hauling himself up against the side of the cradle and pounding the wood with his fists.

  “That’s right, Edgar,” she said. “There’s something out there and no mistake. It seems like half the world is running to it.”

  She pulled back the curtains and there it was a changed land on the other side of the window: beyond the black stick silhouettes of the wilderness the meadow was gleaming liquid silver. The River Thames had burst its banks and the land was charmed into an icy mirror, which spread out to the mist-shrouded horizon. It was as if the house had upped in the middle of the night and replanted itself at the edge of the world. Eleanor’s reverie was broken by the slam of the front door, and William’s footsteps thundering up the stairs. He joined them at the window.

  “A new year!” he cried, kissing his wife and hauling his son into his arms. “And what a start to it! We must adventure and investigate. Would you like that, Edgar?”

  Edgar chirruped on his shoulder.

  “Quite right, you would!” said William. “Put on your warmest stuff, Mrs. Jones, and let us set out to the ice.”

  William wrapped up Edgar until there was nothing to see of him but his dark eyes peering out of a bundle of blankets. He stuffed the boy inside his coat and strode out of the door, across the bridge, and into the meadows, cutting an absurdly pregnant figure as he pushed through the crowds, with Eleanor trailing in his wake.

  It was as if the ice had drawn all of Oxford to it—all the tribes of the city, floating across the surface of the frozen world. A few dons clustered under the bridge, conducting cautious expeditions out along the line of the river and back again, their gowns folded behind them. They moved with slow determination, cutting through the sea of people like the great ships of the empire chartering the ocean. Roaring boys darted about like wheeling sparrows, their shouts and hurrahs snapping through the air. They were gathering snow up in their fists and letting it fly across the ice. Couples teetered across the expanse together, some matching each other stride for stride, others falling against each other as if their love had made them drunk. And there, skidding underfoot of all, was a congregation of fat-bellied ducks. Their paddle-feet were unable to find a purchase on the ice as they swayed this way and that, honking out their distress.

  The spectacle was matched by a fierce sound that sliced through the air. It was as if the frozen water still held a memory of its fluid form: the turn and tumble of the roaring river rendered sharp and brittle by the swish and sway of the iron against the ice.

  William braced his arms around his son. “See how slippery the world is, Edgar,” he whispered. “See how most folks spin their way across it without thought or direction. But find a straight line through it and there’s nothing you can’t achieve.”

  “Perhaps the ice is just ice, Will,” said Eleanor with a smile, “and there is nothing more to it than that.”

  William shook his head impatiently. “There is a lesson in most parts of life, my love, if you have the wits to apprehend it.”

  Eleanor looked out into the shifting crowd and saw that at the center of it was a man spinning free from the masses, turning in circles, dancing across the ice as if it were solid ground. His chest was shielded with armor, a shifting breastplate of sparkling silver. He looked to Eleanor’s eyes like a great coin set spinning across the meadow. It reminded her of the games she played as a child, setting shillings tipping across the bar, taking bets on which way they would fall. Heads or tails. As he spun closer Eleanor saw he was not wearing armor at all, but stacks of ice skates slung about his neck. He came to a halt before them and bowed, and the iron applauded with the movement.

  “Only tuppence for hire, sir!” he cried.

  William shook his head. “Still too high a price to pay for breaking my back.”

  “Nonsense!” crowed the hawker. “Take a slow passage, and there is no danger in it at all.”

  From the inside of William’s coat Edgar laughed. The hawker thrust his hand to William’s belly and patted it. “How about you, little fella? I bet you ain’t as lily-livered as your pa, are you?” The hawker swung a pair of skates from their laces. They spun like a weather vane, twisting the light around the metal. Edgar reached out toward it. “If not for your own pleasure, then for the boy’s, sir … ?”

  “You promised Edgar an adventure, after all,” said Eleanor.

  William sat down on the snowy verge and exchanged his boots for the skates. As he took to the ice the land beneath twisted against him. The metal teetered one way and then another, and William could not believe that such a thin blade could ever hold him. He curved one arm around Edgar to shield him from the inevitable fall. The other arm flailed in circles like a broken wing.

  “Courage!” cried the hawker, and he shoved William forward.

  All around there was slicing iron. The trees at the edge of the meadows ran in a black line, turned liquid by his movement. William spun and he twisted until he could not separate the sky from the land. The light on the ice dazzled him. All the elements were rushing into one another and nothing was safe.

  Edgar watched from his father’s coat as the sky and the land and the sunlight danced together and the iron shoes of the crowds sparked silver fire and spat up clouds of crystal. The black trees tipped sideways, the blue sky was at his shoulder; Edgar was flying over the skin of the world. The mists opened up in front of him; he was sailing through the clouds.

  Eleanor watched from the bank as William and Edgar skated away. She thought how a good mother would never let her child out into such danger. But she was not made of the stuff of good mothers, not completely. Other elements stewed in her blood also. Regret, loneliness, longing. And most of all disappointment. A sense that she had been cheated, or lost at a wager before she even realized that bets had been placed. A feeling that took her back to her time in the tavern, when a man might tip her with a wink and a golden coin only to find that when she bit into the sovereign to test the metal, it softened under her teeth and the taste of lead was on her tongue.

  She observed the spinning crowds. Near the tree line girls circled about one another, arm in arm. Girls with all their lives still ahead of them, their futures as wide open as the glistening meadow. Eleanor placed one foot upon the ice. It would not take much, she thought, just a little push and I could slip away into the mists and be gone. And there could be another life, out there beyond the grayness, a life with no mistakes. Her other foot left the snowbank, and then there was a tug and she was pulled back to land. She turned and there was Mrs. Simm, with the edge of Eleanor’s cloak gathered up in her fist.

  “It seems my lot in life, Mrs. Jones, to rescue you from disaster,” she said. “The ice is as treacherous as it is beautiful, like so many things in this world.” She patted Eleanor’s hand and smiled. “But it is a pretty picture, nonetheless, is it not, to see all of Oxford cavorting about?”

  “My husband is out there in the thick of it.
I rather fear for him.” She pointed to where William skirted along the tree line, teetering.

  Mrs. Simm followed her gaze and chuckled. “Tell me, how is the child?”

  “Edgar? He remains a boy.”

  Mrs. Simm let out a hoot of laughter. “He remains a boy!” she cried. “I do declare, Mrs. Jones, you have a sharp wit when you choose to use it. He remains a boy indeed.”

  Eleanor smiled.

  “And yourself, Mrs. Jones, are you content?”

  The question froze in the air before Eleanor. It hung there like a block of sparkling ice that burnt the skin when it was touched. What was it to be content? Was it to be set on a better path than she could have hoped for her life, and to have a clever husband who loved her despite her origins? To have her lap weighed down by a child? It was, in part. But then there was also another kind of contentment, which Eleanor had known once, in a different time it seemed, when her days were full of promise, and nothing was decided. The pure joy that came with the swelling of the belly and the unknown child it contained. And alongside it, a love for the beautiful things in life, the sensation of the push and pull of a thread across a piece of cloth. “I am blessed with a healthy child and a good husband,” said Eleanor quietly.

  Out on the meadow, William turned in circles among the ducks.

  “For some women that is all they need in life to keep them happy,” replied Mrs. Simm. She flicked the edge of her cloak and a cloud of snow went sparkling through the air like scattered diamonds. “And for others it is not. There is no crime in it either way.”

  Eleanor blushed. It was remarkable that Mrs. Simm spoke to her as if they had known each other a lifetime.

  “And with regard to your situation, Mrs. Jones, I do believe that you have a great talent, and if you let it go unpracticed, you will never be satisfied.”

  Eleanor frowned down at the ice. Beneath the sheen of the frost she could see pockets of black water stewing under the surface.

  “I am not sure I understand you, Mrs. Simm.”