‘You are not here to question me about Alice Beckwith.’ He spoke in that flat, adamant tone again, cold and hard as steel. Rachel swallowed to ease her dry throat.
‘Why am I here, sir?’ she asked eventually, steadily.
‘You’re here because my mother will not stop trying to fix what cannot be fixed. You’re here because you bear a passing resemblance to a woman I loved, a woman I would have married, a woman who-’ He cut himself off, took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know why you’re here. There is no need for you to be. You may go.’
‘I understood I was here to read to you. To assist you in that, when it is beyond you these days?’
‘To assist me?’
‘Yes. What would you like me to read?’
‘You didn’t bring something with you? Something wholesome and healing, something that will be good for my soul? Psalms? A book of sermons?’ The question was sour. He wishes me gone. For a second Rachel almost stood up to leave, but something kept her in her chair. It would feel like failure, she realised, should she leave so soon, having achieved so little. Give every endeavour your best effort, her father had said, over and again, usually in reference to a page of unconjugated Latin. But what is my endeavour here? To help this man, or to know what ails him? To know Alice, who changed everything.
‘I’ll choose something from your shelf, shall I?’ she said, in as light a tone as she could muster.
Jonathan said nothing as she went over to the wooden shelves that filled one wall of the room. She ran her eyes along the spines of his books, many of which were dusty and faded, and had names she could barely understand, or which were written in foreign languages. There were other things on the shelves as well – strange implements, mechanical toys and little jointed wooden figures, like the ones her mother had sometimes used for her drawing studies. There were the three glass jars with their pale, fleshy occupants that seemed to look back at Rachel. She recoiled from such dead, unnatural scrutiny. For a while, she was so intrigued with her exploration of the shelves that she forgot her purpose in looking. She ran her fingers along a smooth wooden tube, nine inches in length and screwed together from two sections, widening at one end like a funnel.
‘It’s for listening to a person’s chest. To their heart, and their breathing, and all the strange mechanisms of the body.’ Jonathan spoke quietly, close behind her. Rachel hadn’t heard him approach, and tried not to show her unease.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘A Frenchman has invented it, lately; a man by the name of Laennec. Shall I show you? The sound is quite incredible. As though skin and bones and flesh have been peeled away, and the heart is left naked to be examined.’
‘No, I don’t want that,’ said Rachel, alarmed. ‘Your mother told me that you hated the French, and all things French. That you would not even have French wine to drink.’
Jonathan’s expression darkened. ‘She knows nothing of what I think, nor how I feel. It is quite astonishing, how much she misunderstands…’
‘I believe it pains her a great deal that-’
‘Stop. You know nothing, Mrs Weekes, and you make yourself sound foolish.’ Rachel bit her lip angrily, and said nothing. She took a step away from him, along the shelf, until her eyes fell on a tiny toy mouse.
It was life-sized – a little more than three inches long, with a delicate whip of a tail. Its body was made of thin, overlapping scales of copper, the edges crenulated to mimic the look of fur. Its tail was a piece of leather, stiff enough to stand out behind it, everything else was made of the same bright copper but for its eyes, which were round jet beads, large and lustrous. It was attached to a piece of ebony wood, as though it had been walking across it when it had frozen, and turned to metal. Rachel picked it up gently, and examined it. The detail was exquisite. Individual horse hairs had been attached to give it whiskers; it had tiny copper claws, and its ears were tiny, perfect circles.
‘You like it?’ Jonathan asked, his tone softening.
‘It’s charming,’ said Rachel.
‘Look – see what it does.’ He took the copper mouse from her, turned it around and wound a key that fitted into the wooden base, and then held it out on his palm. As the key wound down, the little mouse moved. Its feet pattered along as though it was running, then it paused, and lifted its nose as if to sniff at the air. Its tail curled higher and it sat back on its haunches, front paws dangling under its chin. Then it returned to all four feet and ran on. Again it performed this cycle, as Rachel watched, delighted; then after a minute or so the spring wound down and the mouse fell still.
Rachel looked up, smiling.
‘I have seen something like this before,’ she said. ‘A schoolfriend of mine had a box, and when the key was wound, the scene on the lid came to life, and little skaters slid about on a frozen lake. But it was just a flat scene, not a real creature like this. It’s wonderful… where did you come by it?’
‘I made it,’ said Jonathan.
‘Truly, Mr Alleyn? How came you by such skill?’
‘I was trying… I read a treatise on such mechanisms by a Swiss man, a maker of clocks. And I have taken apart several other such toys, to learn how they function. Most of my efforts were failures, but then this little mouse… continues to run.’ His tone was strange, almost embarrassed.
‘It is exquisite, Mr Alleyn. And a fine skill to have taught oneself as a hobby, to be sure,’ she said encouragingly, but her words had the opposite effect. Jonathan frowned, and turned the copper mouse over in his hands.
‘A hobby?’ He shook his head and thought for a while. ‘The philosophers have it that animals have no souls. That without a soul, the body is just a machine, like this. It performs mechanical functions with no thought, no governing mind. There was an automaton built by a Frenchman, the Canard Digerateur – do you know of it? The digesting duck? It can eat grain and digest it, just like a real duck. Does that not prove that animals are mere machines?’ He paused, and Rachel shook her head, baffled. ‘But if they have no souls, why is their blood hot, like ours? Why do they show fear? Why do they hunger? Why do they fight for life? Why will a cow stand and fight a wolf rather than let her calf be taken?’
‘I do not… but animals cannot have souls. It is written…’
‘In the Bible? Yes. A great many things are written in the Bible.’
‘Surely, you do not doubt the word of God?’
‘I doubt God a great deal, Mrs Weekes, as would you, had you seen and done what I have seen and done. And if animals have no souls, than perhaps neither has man. Perhaps we are all but machines.’
‘You cannot truly think so.’
‘Can I not? What can you understand of what I think? You have no knowledge of what man can do to his fellow man. I tell you, if there is a soul then there is also a beast in all men, which would take over all thought and deed if it could, and wreak havoc.’
‘There is not a beast in all men, sir,’ Rachel protested quietly. Jonathan’s voice had risen as he spoke, and she feared to provoke him. His words frightened her; they sounded like a warning.
‘You’re wrong,’ Jonathan said abruptly. He looked down at the copper mouse, and then thrust it into her hands. ‘But keep this trifle, if it pleases you. Let it remind you of what I’ve said today.’ He strode back to his chair in the window and threw himself into it. Carefully, Rachel put the clockwork toy back on the shelf where she’d found it.
Desperately, she scanned the books for something appropriate to read, and was relieved when she finally spotted a small volume of poetry by Dryden. She took it down and returned to sit opposite Jonathan Alleyn. His head was tilted back and his eyes were shut. As Rachel began to read she wondered if he’d fallen asleep, but he interrupted her at once.