The Ingenious Edgar Jones Page 4

  “Oh, I think you do, my dear.” The old lady chuckled. “You are a born seamstress and no mistake.”

  Eleanor did not shift her gaze. It was even more remarkable the way that this woman could pull out Eleanor’s innermost thoughts without even stopping for breath.

  “And I do confess that I am in dire need of one.”

  “Of what?”

  “A seamstress, dear girl, a seamstress.” Mrs. Simm smiled. “I have some bits and pieces requiring attention.”

  “I am indebted to you, but I do not think—”

  “It is what you can do that matters, Mrs. Jones, rather than what you think.”

  “What William thinks matters also, Mrs. Simm. I must seek his approval.”

  “In my experience it is easier to gain a man’s approval after the event, my dear. I shall call on you in the evening, when your husband is at the college and your son is sleeping, and we may go about our business undisturbed.”

  Eleanor shrugged. It would be ungracious to begrudge this woman her favor. What were a few hours of dressmaking when set against the matter of the child turned in her belly, and lives saved?

  “I am at your disposal,” she replied.

  Mrs. Simm patted Eleanor upon the arm, turned upon her heel, and went tramping back over the bridge. As the old woman retreated, Eleanor tried to shrug away the unsettling sensation that crept across her skin. Again, she felt that her life was nothing but a sideshow amusement, a world in a box that could be squinted into for tuppence. And yet, and yet, she could already feel the cloth gathered in her hand. The softness of it.

  A cry came from across the ice.

  “Hold fast! Hold fast!”

  Eleanor turned and there was William, flying straight for her. His skates spiked the bank and he pitched forward, falling into her arms, with Edgar pressed between them, chirruping with laughter and William echoing it.

  That evening, while William knelt by Edgar’s bed and chanted his prayers, Eleanor went through to the back parlor. There were the shelves stacked with silk. There was her pincushion, with its spiked back of needles and pins. There were the rolls of ribbons, peppered with dust. She looked out at the wilderness. The snow had gathered across the bracken, and the thorns were lost in the darkness, and all that could be seen was the cobweb carpet of whiteness laid out across the land: a blanket of lace, every loop and curl and curve of it a fragile, shimmering beauty.

  THAT FROZEN NEW Year marked a change for the Jones family. Within a week Mrs. Simm bustled into the parlor with a sack of stuff cradled in her arms. There were petticoats, gowns, bodices, all tangled up together, torn along seam and hem.

  “That’s what all this inventiveness brings you,” said Mrs. Simm, shaking out the silks. “It seems that every day men are dreaming of a new bit of machinery to snare us up in.”

  Eleanor smiled, but in truth it was unthinkable to her that such beautiful things could be treated with such disregard. But over the following weeks, when she set her hand to the work, while Edgar slept and William watched, as the ice slipped its hold on the world, something inside Eleanor also began to thaw. Something inside her settled. There was a simple pleasure in putting back together the puzzle of the cloth, turning the tears in upon themselves and making the damage invisible. And with the mending of the dresses it was also as if Eleanor’s day was corrected. She was no longer stuck in great expanses of time: never-ending hours when there was nothing in the world but her and Edgar. Eleanor stitched together two weeks of work, and never even noticed, so caught up was she in the run of the needle. When Mrs. Simm returned to collect her wares, she ran her fingers over the seams, cooed out her approval, and placed a stack of coins upon the table.

  Eleanor shook her head. “There is no need, Mrs. Simm. I could sew back together all the dresses in Oxford and that still would not be payment enough for your kindness to me and Edgar.”

  “Nonsense! No man would give away his trade for free, and no woman should either.”

  “It’s hardly trade.”

  Mrs. Simm pressed the coins into Eleanor’s palm, bunching her fingers into a fist around them. “Wait and see, my dear. We shall form a great alliance, you and I.”

  After Mrs. Simm left, Eleanor found herself spinning the coins across the tabletop, a child again, laughing at the tumble. When she told the tale to William she kept the alliance simple. There was no need for William to know about their crude introduction across the hearthrug, on that night of blood and starfall. He would not thank her for the detail. So instead Mrs. Simm was nothing more than a chance meeting upon the ice. A skirt ripped by a stray blade, and Eleanor offering to help her. Good work begetting good work. She dropped the coins into his hand and a grin spread across his face.

  “I do declare,” he said, “I am the luckiest man in Oxford.”

  “Truly, Will? Many folk would think it a common thing to have a wife at work.”

  William laughed and embraced Eleanor. “Many folk are misguided, Mrs. Jones. You continue on this road, my love, and you and I shall live like king and queen, and Edgar will want for nothing. And where’s the shame in that?”

  So it was that the back parlor became Eleanor’s workroom, a room of color and softness and pleasure. A room where she was neither wife nor mother, but just Eleanor, who loved a bit of finery, who loved beautiful things. And as she worked through the nights, Eleanor put away her uncertain thoughts of Mrs. Simm, burying them as deep as she had buried away those tiny dresses of her daughter’s. The old woman had brought a bit of brightness and laughter back into her life. She was not going to turn that away all for the sake of intuition. Intuition was not everything.

  THINGS WERE DIFFERENT FOR WILLIAM, TOO, AFTER THAT DAY on the ice. When he returned home, red cheeked, breathless, with Edgar shaking the sides of his coat with his laughter, William was invigorated. Edgar was an adventurous child. And who had made the greatest mark upon the Empire but the adventurers? William was decided. He and Edgar would walk hand in hand through God’s great landscape, they would investigate and experiment together, and William would give him a proper way of looking at the world, and show him the utter ingenuity of the creator: in all his works most wonderful. He would develop Edgar’s rational mind, his ability to observe and assess, qualities that would prove invaluable when he set out into the world. It was just a matter of waiting for him to be a little older.

  Meanwhile, every night before he departed for his watch, William would rock Edgar to sleep in front of the map of the Empire. It was studded with pins to mark the places that had been conquered. William would recite the names of these foreign lands and mix them with half-remembered tales from his own childhood. Tales told by the cook in the depths of the college kitchens, tales of battles, and heroes. Tales of men who built machines of war and ransacked cities. Tales of sailors lost at sea, who tricked ogres and witches and spirits of the wind, and made their way back home with the bows of their boats weighed down with treasure. Edgar would stare at the light dancing off the pinheads, like jewels set into the wall, and open and close his little fists as if he could pluck them out of their fixtures.

  WHEN EDGAR WAS two years old the investigations proper began: William introduced him to the wonders of magnification. He would put Edgar upon the parlor table, place the telescope in his son’s fist, align the eyepiece, and show him how the sweep of the heavens could be brought to just the other side of the window. But Edgar preferred another trick of the machine. While his father was flicking through his sky maps, Edgar would turn the instrument around. He laughed to see all the things that towered above him about the house reduced to nothing, just pinpricks of color set within a curved world.

  Thereafter, every New Year would herald in the arrival of a new invention. The parcel would be placed upon the parlor table and Edgar would be given the privilege of ripping away the paper. The first unwrapping revealed a brass barrel with a tipped end, encasing a red liquid: a thermometer. Edgar was shown the miracles of measurement when snow from the
garden was gathered in a cup and the thermometer thrust inside. Down the line shrunk, to nothing, just a rolling red eye settled in the bulb tip of the brass. Then it was placed against a piece of coal hauled from the fire and the red stuff raced upward like the streaming of blood from a cut. For weeks to follow, the thermometer was William’s constant companion, plunged into the teapot in the morning, into Edgar’s bathwater at night. It was even taken down to the meadows and tied to a piece of string, then Edgar was given the task of casting it out into the depths of the canal. Again and again the brass flashed through the sky and went plummeting down into the swirling waters, and again and again it was pulled back out and the run of the line noted. Again and again William applauded Edgar’s strong and certain throws.

  The next year the parcel’s paper was ripped away to reveal a glass box containing a stack of paper coiled upon a spring, with a needle set above. The spring turned, the needle scratched, and the machine spat out its measurements in a rolling white tongue that peeped through the mouth of the box. Edgar grabbed at it and set the spindle trembling.

  “What do you think, Edgar, of your father’s toy?” asked Eleanor. “His barograph—can you say it?”

  Edgar smiled and waved the paper tangled up in his fist.

  Edgar’s fifth year was heralded in by the arrival of an orrery: a miniature model of the universe set upon wires in a box. The planets could be made to dance simply by the turn of a handle. “See how balanced and beautiful God has made his universe,” said William, placing Edgar’s fist around the handle. Edgar tugged and turned, tugged and turned until the planets were spinning whorls of color.

  Eleanor laughed. “He thinks it’s a kind of fairground invention,” she said, “as if it should be playing us a tune for its troubles.”

  BUT IT WAS not just William’s inventions that Edgar was eager to get into.

  As the months turned to seasons turned to years, Eleanor spent her daytimes running after Edgar, catching him as he crawled from room to room, as he clambered up his father’s bookshelves to get to the telescope, as he ran through the scullery beating out tunes upon the saucepans. But at night, as the house stood silent, Eleanor retreated into her world of stitches. Mrs. Simm kept her word, and the alliance between them went from strength to strength. In the summer nights Eleanor would often find herself working until the light turned. The early dawn, with its pink feather clouds and sea blue sky seemed an echo of the dresses laid out before her. A net of silk stretched over the land, lace-fringed, beautiful.

  And along with learning the trick of setting stitches that were so fine they were all but invisible, Eleanor was learning another skill. The sway of the cloth across her table became a landscape that she could lose herself in. There Eleanor opened up a world of touch and texture, that was hers and hers alone, and where everything was exactly as it should be. So very different from the world on the other side of the workroom door: the rooms of books and scripture; the wilderness and, even worse, the road beyond it where boys Edgar’s age and younger ran hurtling down the street, hollering to one another with the kind of voices that boys should have.

  It was after one such night during Edgar’s fourth year that Eleanor forgot to lock the workshop door. She was in the scullery, washing out the breakfast things, when she heard a great thud and the sound of something tearing. She ran through to the parlor and her workshop door was wide open. The floor was a sea of silk. And the sea was rolling and laughing. Edgar.

  Edgar wrapped the rainbow around himself, and crawled through the heart of it. There was gold and there was blue and there was green and red and pink, and all was soft and all was light and all held the smell of roses. The smell of his mama. He laughed and laughed, twisting about in the world of color. The cloth bound tighter and tighter around him. He pushed and pulled, pulled and pushed, and there was a great rip and the rainbow split, and there was the room, and there was the table, and there was his mama, reaching into the softness and yanking him out.

  Eleanor pulled Edgar out of the skirts and a night’s work was torn to shreds around him. She dragged him through the parlor and out onto the doorstep.

  “If you will run wild, Edgar, then you will be put out of the house until you learn better.”

  The door slammed shut behind Edgar. Before him, the wilderness ranged. A tangle of brambles, wild weeds, flowers, and grasses.

  In the workshop Eleanor knelt by the wrecked silk. She shook out the fabric, wide wings of color set upon the air. And for a moment, playing hide and seek between the folds, there was the girl that Edgar should have been, fair haired, blue eyed, bunching up the cloth in her fat little fists. Helping her mama roll up the running ribbons and the dirtied lace, smiling. Then she was gone. And there was only Eleanor and the ripped skirts, and the knowledge that Mrs. Simm would come to her door that very evening expecting everything to be fixed.

  Eleanor sat upon her chair and began to make good. Lost in the play of the needle, it was late in the day before hunger pulled her away from the work. The grandfather clock declared four o’clock; the cherub-faced sun smiled out of the frame. She went to the doorstep and called out: “Edgar! Edgar Jones!”

  But there was no reply.

  She walked the rounds of the garden. But there was no sound or sign of him, just the wide-ranging wilderness. Eleanor ran up the stairs and pulled William out of bed. Nightshirt flapping at his ankles, he ran into the garden. “Edgar!” he called. “Edgar HO!” He pushed his way into the brambles. “Edgar!”

  And somewhere deep in the heart of the tangle, the wilderness laughed.

  William dropped down onto his hands and knees and peered into the bracken. There, at the very edge, was a hole in the thicket, no wider than his head. He thrust forward, and the wilderness opened up before him. The brambles had been pulled apart from each other and bound into a bower, thorns and flowers tied up together like the open arch of the college gate: vaulted, beautiful. The weeds were trampled flat and the tunnels snaked away into shadow. But the shadow was laughing and there, crawling down the curve of it, came Edgar. He burrowed out of the bushes and tumbled into his father’s arms.

  “Well, well, little man,” said William, “aren’t you quite the architect, Edgar Jones?”

  He held up Edgar in the sunlight, gazing at his son as if he were some kind of prize that had been won.

  “There, my love,” he called across to his wife, “safe and sound and no damage done.”

  Eleanor hovered by the doorway. She looked at William, with his nightshirt torn, his hair sticking up every which way. She looked at Edgar riding high upon his back, grubby faced, with not a scratch on him. And again, that question that had never quite left her came calling down the wind: What kind of child is this? What have William and I brought into the world?

  ONCE EDGAR HAD been given the run of the wilderness, it was impossible to keep him from it. He would sit by the door, howling fit to shake the walls until Eleanor put him out to play. He took the poker and shovel from the fireplace and they proved excellent as a rapier and a spade for cutting through the undergrowth. Edgar played out his father’s stories: he was the brave hero, fighting his way through the forest, slaying bramble dragons. But most of all, Edgar loved to climb. The marbled skin of the apple tree was a face of furrows and handholds. It was easy to dig his nails in the bark, set his knees to the trunk, and shin his way upward.

  In that fifth year, Edgar advanced farther and farther, chirruping up at the sky as he went. By autumn he made it to the level of the rooftop. He would walk along the branches and bounce the apples free, sending them hurtling like cannonballs into the thorn bushes. To him, the cries and calls of the street boys who chased one another down the road to the meadows were of no more interest than the calls of the birds: Edgar was the master of his own wild world, and it was enough.

  As Edgar explored the tangled land of the garden, shredding shirts and trousers in his wake, Eleanor found she was mending the same garments that summer that she had in the previous
spring. She shared this and other evidence with Mrs. Simm. Pulled out the patchwork suit of her tiny son, and told of the tales of him running wild, and her fears that he was turning savage.

  “Don’t worry yourself. It is more likely that he is simply remaining a boy.”

  “I have long since accepted that I have lost a daughter, Mrs. Simm. And I am sure that the work you have provided me has also been a remedy for that discontent. However …”

  “However what, my dear?” Mrs. Simm picked a loose thread out of the patchwork.

  It was a strange thing for Eleanor, to see her son’s garments laid out across the sea of silk: tiny, frayed, like a discarded skin. Eleanor blushed with the shame of it as she spoke of how every Sunday she scoured the chapel congregation for evidence of how boys should be. Watching over the years as mere babes outgrew Edgar and now stood obedient beside their parents singing hymns learnt by rote while her own son twisted and turned beside her, staring up at the ceiling, mouth agape and silent.

  “It’s not such a rarity as you might think. Some men are slow in their early years. In my experience they tend to spend the rest of their lives lording it over us in compensation.”

  Eleanor studied Mrs. Simm. There was such a certainty about this old woman and yet Eleanor had no notion of where this might come from.

  “And your husband, Mrs. Simm, is he such a man?”

  Mrs. Simm frowned, folded up the suit, and handed it back to Eleanor.

  “I confess, Mr. Simm departed from this world so long ago that I struggle to recall anything remarkable about him at all.”

  Eleanor blushed deeper. She had the same feeling she did when William asked her to lead the suppertime prayers and she would be tripped up by her own words and unable to find her way out of the sentence.

  “More’s the question, how does your husband fare with Edgar’s oddness?”

  “He does not see it. Edgar is a miniature miracle and that’s all there is to it.”