CHAPTER 22

When I woke, the bandages had gone and the flame of memory blasted me. I jackknifed in the bed, yanked my knees to my chest and down again, stuffed my hands in my mouth to muffle my cries. Still no tears, just pain so throttling it would not let me breathe. Hold on. Hold on to something, anything. And the name of the glass palace came to me: Iranistan, Mr Barnum’s splendid pleasure dome in Connecticut. But it wasn’t made of glass, was it? Another stab pierced me, not of pain, but hope. I sat up in bed, gasping. The room was dark and quiet, Rodnia’s chair empty. I will build it a glass Iranistan, a beautiful grotto. Where had I heard that? No, not heard, read. The neat, cramped handwriting floated before my eyes, the pages fluttered to the floor in Dr Musgrave’s study. Iranistan. That was where Thomas was — I felt it in my breasts, arms, hollow belly. Pray God he was alive.

But where was this Iranistan? I screwed my eyes tight, clenched my fists, willed my brain to race through all its corridors of memory. Again, the same handwriting, in the same study, this time in a ledger. 16 Panes Glass, flat. Three Glass Domes. To the Temple. Lower Fort Street. And into my head came the Arcadian picture I had seen from Dr Musgrave’s window, the Grecian temple glowing on the headland. It was nothing like an Iranistan palace, and perhaps that was a flimsy hope, a mirage, but the temple was a solid stone building, and I could go to it. Must go to it.

I rose, peered through the curtains at a murky dawn. At least I could breathe now and must tell my hands not to tremble. My dress and underthings hung on a clothes horse next to a pile of linen. Quickly I took a towel from the pile and tied it around my leaking breasts, dressed, pinned up my hair, pulled on boots, shawl and bonnet. I might look a little frowsty but I must not look mad. Should I find Rodnia and wake him? But he did not believe in Thomas, he would only try to talk me out of going, or even change his mind and take me back to Charlie, and I could not risk it, could not waste a moment longer. Should I look for a police station? But if Rodnia did not believe me, what chance would a poor madwoman have with an officer of the law? I found a stub of pencil in a drawer, wrote The Temple, Lower Fort Street on a pillowslip, smoothed it out, left it on the bed, and crept out of the house.

I had assumed some huge magnet would draw me through the maze of Sydney to Lower Fort Street, but as I stumbled along a grey alleyway I had little idea where to go. North, I knew that much: the way back to Isis House, and Lower Fort Street was somewhere close by; it was one of the street signs I had glimpsed as Rodnia and I had fled in Dennis’s cab. Fire in the belly burned me and drove me along. Thomas, I am coming. I walked faster and faster, almost running.

Then I began to slow down. I could not just fly to Thomas’s arms — I must have a plan. If Thomas was at this temple, most probably Dr Musgrave would be there too. I had to outwit him, overcome him. No, impossible, he was too wise, too powerful. His words rumbled around me: Let us be reasonable. Let us be civilised. That was it, that was exactly how I would be: I’d tell him the truth, who Thomas’s father was, how the baby would never be a tiny Coming Man, how he would be quite useless for the doctor’s collection. Better to quietly hand him back, and Thomas and I would disappear into Sydney. He was a man of reason and science: how could he say no? Why had I never had the presence of mind to say it to him when I crouched on the windowsill? Again, my pace quickened.

As I moved further north and the morning wore on, the houses became smaller and crowded together. I pushed through drooping rows of washing, past foul gutters seething with dirty children. The air grew dark and thick, choked with coal fumes. The streets twisted and turned, became other streets, and on every corner was an inn: The Hen and Chickens, The Three Jolly Sailors, The Mermaid, The World Turned Upside Down. Where was Lower Fort Street? Was it close? Was I wandering around in circles? Would anyone help me? Men in flared trousers lurched across broken cobbles or slouched against walls blackened with slime; they called to me in slurred grunts and gurgles. A huddle of Celestials retreated from me in little shuffling steps, hands tucked into their sneaky sleeves. A fellow with tiger stripes tattooed over his face stuck out his tongue at me. A woman stood opening her shawl and baring a withered breast whenever a man passed by.

‘If you please, ma’am,’ I said when she had pulled her shawl closed again. ‘Can you direct me to Lower Fort Street?’

She looked me up and down with her coal eyes. ‘Second left, third right. Now clear off my patch afore I rake yer face.’

I hurried off, tried to follow the directions, fearing she had just said whatever came into her head. Soon I found another woman lying senseless in the gutter. Someone had thrown a bucket of filthy water over her matted hair, which streamed over her face. Next to her lay a naked baby. Not Thomas, I knew at once. Its limbs contracted and stretched, its mouth opened in a soundless scream. I came closer, bent down, stared at the woman’s half-hidden eyes as if there were some message for me. A powerful reek of gin steamed off her. In a nearby house, someone scraped on a cracked fiddle, and the keening seemed to come out of the baby’s mouth. When I straightened up, tears pricking my eyelids — why would I cry for another’s child and not my own? — I saw the sign at last. To Lower Fort Street.

Suddenly I was out of the dark maze of lanes, in clean air, on a hill with a view of the harbour, a place for the gentry if ever there was one. And there was Dr Musgrave’s Sydney mansion, unmistakeable with its dome and high walls. I felt so exposed to its arched windows, I wanted to turn and flee into the alleyways and hide myself. But I walked on, following the sign, down Lower Fort Street itself, right to the end of the road. Ahead and to the right there was a little park, and beyond it, the sea; and in between the park and the sea, the curious Grecian building, standing on its own headland, just as I had seen it from the window during my imprisonment. The Temple: it could be no other place, surely.

Slowly now, I walked down a stone path, between a row of young conifers, up the steps, round the side and on to the sea-facing frontage of white pillars and great double doors of heavy timber. At a distance, this elegant building had comforted me: close up, all I could see was cold and stony perfection. On either side of the doors crouched two sculpted figures, with the heads and breasts of women and the bodies and claws of lions. That’s what I must be, I thought: a woman in instinct, with a lion’s strength and courage.

I raised a trembling hand and knocked on the door. Silence. I knocked again, several times; I pushed the panels, I hammered furiously, with the same result. What was this place, so tightly sealed? Why were there no windows? And as the impassive sphinxes stared past me out to sea with their blind stone eyes, it came to me: this was no temple. This was a mausoleum.

I stood back, my eyes blurring. Either I had made a mistake and this was the wrong place, or Thomas was entombed. Surely this could not be the end. Should I give up, go back to Rodnia? Should I go hammer on the door of Dr Isis’s home? Or should I run to the edge of the headland and hurl myself off into the ocean, just as I had once thought of leaping into the Yarra Yarra? As I began to turn, the double doors swung open onto a pool of mouldy darkness.

‘Do come in, Mrs Richardson.’

I could scream, could run, and might have done both if I had stopped to think, but a need drew me that conquered all fear, all prudence. Without hesitation I stepped into the dark, into a hallway scarcely wide enough for one person. The doors slammed shut behind me, and for a moment I was in blackness. Then came the scrape and flare of a closed lantern opening, and Dr Musgrave’s face floating behind it, and his mesmeric rumble.

‘I apologise for not replying to your knock. I was not sure at first whether to let you in. But I must say, I admire you. Still the seeker after knowledge. I never thought you’d have the gumption to come after me. How on earth did you find me?’ He thrust the lantern towards me.

‘Dr Musgrave, the game is up.’ I tried to sound bold, triumphant. ‘The police have surrounded this place, they will break in at any moment now.’

He smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t think so. You might think my temple is blind. But I have my spy points. How do you think I knew it was you at the door? I can see a long way round about, from every angle, and all I have seen is sea, and birds, and trees, and yourself. Not that anyone would think of looking for me here. No one even knows it was I who built this edifice. Dr Musgrave lives in Isis House, everyone knows that. And this,’ he waved his hand at the blackness, ‘is not a place for the living.’

A shudder ran through me.

‘No, Mrs Richardson, I don’t believe the police are outside. I think you came here on your own, and no one else knows where you are.’

‘They will follow me. They will find me and arrest you.’

He laughed. ‘For what?’

This was all wrong. What had happened to my plan to be reasonable, civilised? As if he could read my thoughts, Dr Musgrave thrust his lantern towards my face again and I drew back, dazzled.

‘You are suffering.’ His voice was soft and full of wonder. ‘I don’t have medicine for that. But I can do one thing for you. I can let you see your child.’

‘My child?’ My heart gave a great lurch.

He did not reply, but held the lantern high, turned and walked further into the gloom, beckoning me to follow. I might still turn back, try the doors; he might not have locked or bolted them when they slammed shut. But I could do nothing but follow him, as if we were roped together.

My feet echoed on stone. My hand went out to steady myself, touched a sodden wall. It was even colder than the crypt where my sham wedding had taken place. The lantern flame bobbed ahead, casting monster shadows, until Dr Musgrave stopped at a door and opened it, stood back to admit me.

Warm, humid air and golden light. At first I thought I stood in a black dungeon illuminated by torches. The space opened out before me: it was huge, but I could make no sense of what was in it.

‘Welcome to the Temple of Persephone,’ said Dr Musgrave. ‘Or the Temple of Isis, if you will. I like to mix my mythologies. I had it built as a mausoleum for myself when I should pass from this world. It is not finished yet, of course. Very bare, very unadorned. But now I have found another use for it, as you can see.’

On the wall were six glowing gas mantles, but there appeared to be many more of them reflected in a great wall of glass in front of me, and perhaps more gas lamps on the walls beyond the glass; it was hard to tell where the real flames stopped and the reflected flames began. As my eyes adjusted, I stared higher and higher. Not just a wall of glass, a whole cube, reinforced at the sides and corners by cast iron girders, filling almost the entire room from floor to ceiling, and from wall to wall. On the roof was a row of three great glass domes, the largest rising from the centre. Inside, the air was greenish. A dark rocky structure loomed from the floor to somewhere shadowy above my head, and shapes flitted like tiny bats around its towers.

‘Iranistan,’ I breathed.

‘Well done,’ boomed Dr Musgrave. ‘I did not expect you to catch the allusion. I must say, you are surprising me more and more every minute.’

He held up his lamp and swept it slowly across the front of the glass. I almost turned away, but forced myself to look. The rocky shape behind the glass was like a ruined castle encrusted with moss and ferns. Perforated fanlike plants in yellow and rose sprouted from its walls, and in its centre, under the largest glass dome, soared a lofty tower with a platform at the top, but the light did not reach quite high enough to show it in detail. The ferns and fans moved in a queer, slow rhythm, and the miniature bats darting in and out of the ruins sparkled silver, gold, blue and red; they were not bats, they were … fish?

I saw it now, the way the plants moved, a circle of purple tentacles that bunched and swayed: the tank was a giant aquarium. Dr Musgrave smiled, suddenly lifted his arm high, and the lantern revealed the top of the platform: on it sat an open cockleshell, and in the shell a cradle, and in the cradle lay Thomas. He was wrapped in a white robe. He was perfect. He did not move. His eyes were closed forever.

From my mouth slipped a sound I did not recognise as a sound that any human being could make. I hurled myself against the glass. I spreadeagled myself on the surface, my breasts flattened as I willed my body to pass through the surface and into the water to join my son. Somewhere behind me Dr Musgrave talked and talked, at first calm and soothing, then more agitated, but I did not listen. Someone was howling, perhaps it was me. I threw myself again and again at the glass, hit it with my fists.

‘Enough, Mrs Richardson. Calm yourself. Your child is merely sleeping.’

‘But the water … he is drowned …’

‘No, no, please, let me explain.’ He took my arm and I wanted to fling him from me and smash his contraption, but all my strength had gone. I let him pull up a wooden stool for me and I hunched over, rocking to and fro, unable to look any longer at the beautiful glass tomb.

‘The tank is not entirely filled with water,’ said Dr Musgrave. ‘There is an inner compartment at the centre, a cylinder from top to bottom, but you cannot see it because it is also made of glass. It is watertight, and inside there is air. That is where the tower and the cradle stand. The child sleeps soundly because I have given it a draught, but in an hour or two, it will wake.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ I sobbed, hugging myself, tucking in my head and arms, rocking backwards and forwards on the stool.

‘Then look for yourself.’ He held up the lantern again, turned it this way and that. ‘Can you see the gas lamps reflected? See that fish, how it cannot go forward, it stops, turns? Its head has bumped the glass of the inner cylinder.’

Slowly I stopped rocking, raised my head, and gradually the ghostly outline of the inner cylinder revealed itself. Inside were no fish, no floating ferns. Thomas was still alive. A vast euphoria flooded me. I prepared to jump up, reach out, seize my child and run into the street. Then I remembered the glass. My stomach lurched, I put my hands over my face as if grieving and watched Dr Musgrave between my fingers. He had put down the lantern and was standing back surveying his Iranistan like an artist before his easel.

‘I did not mean to frighten you, Mrs Richardson. I have decided I owe you an apology.’

That was all he thought he owed me? Enough. I jumped to my feet, ran at him and hammered my fists into him as I had hammered the glass. But I could not even touch him: he raised his arms, grabbed my wrists and held them in the air, and as I struggled and shouted and tried to kick his shins, he gazed at me with such a look of pain and puzzlement, as if I were some ungrateful monkey he had shown nothing but kindness. His grip was very strong.

At last he let me go, and I spat at him. It was a gesture of defeat, and his look said so as he slowly took out a silk handkerchief and wiped his face. I retreated to my stool.

‘As I was saying, I owe you an apology,’ he said calmly. ‘I hope you will forgive me. I should not have concealed from you that your child was still alive. You are an admirable mother: you have willingly put yourself into danger in the hope of saving the infant. And as you have now demonstrated, you are a fighting mother.’

Was I some new species to him, like a fighting fish? Oh, he would pay. I swallowed my bile, breathed deeply to calm myself, made my voice low and meek. ‘I accept your apology. Please forgive me for my … outburst.’

He gave me a sharp look but then rubbed his chin, as if still surprised his beard had disappeared, and began to pace up and down the room. His fresh sweat, his breathing, the creak of his boots, the rasp when he ran his hand over his chin: he was worried. He had his treasure, but he did not know how to escape with it. He did not expect to be tracked down here, but he knew Rodnia might go to the police, and this cavern was just as much a dungeon for him as it was for me.

I would not take my eyes off him, not even to look at Thomas.

‘Tell me how you made your Iranistan,’ I said.

He stopped pacing, and a softness came over his features, as if I had asked him how he met his sweetheart.

‘It has long been a dream of mine,’ he said. ‘I have spent many years in the study of the preservation of dead infants and small children. I think it began when I saw Willem Vrolik’s Cyclops child in Amsterdam.’

Cyclops. One eye. The poor hideous creature in the jar in his study.

‘A melancholy rose in me,’ he went on, ‘as I considered what might have been this child’s fate, supposing science had the means to help him survive birth. Spurned by his mother, reduced to performing before the ignorant mob. Someone should care for him, I thought, even in death.’

Nausea rose in me. I struggled to keep it down, keep my face and body impassive.

‘I began to search out other masters of the craft. I went to Leiden and inspected Doctor Ruysch’s babies. Not the foetuses, not the little skeletons weeping or playing the violin. No, the faces. Such faces. Pink, framed in lace bonnets, lips slightly parted; you would swear they had just fallen asleep.’ He smiled tenderly. ‘Of course he had cut off their heads and faces, and he would insist on dangling an eye socket from one finger, like a precious earring. I fear vulgar sentiment was his downfall. I never cut up my own treasures. But I pay my tribute to his unborns — mine are all wreathed in his beads. No one knows why he did it, but I believe it was for the same reason that a woman adorns her wrists and her throat with diamonds.’

The floor was dropping away from me, but still I kept my look calm and attentive.

‘When Franz told me of your child, the General’s child, I conceived such a desire for it, I burned with such agony of longing. And I thought, this time I will build a palace, nothing else will suffice. I was already constructing my preserving jars with domed lids, but this would be on an altogether different scale. I engaged an architect in glass, instructed him to create to my designs a very special aquarium, a Crystal Palace for fishes — I think it was Franz’s reference to you as a mermaid that made me think of a watery grotto. My architect was adept at all the fashionable touches, the Nullipores, the Retipores, the Gorgonias, the Medusas …’ He swept his hand towards the towers, the fish, the ferns, but I would not look: they seemed the home of fantastical and evil creatures. ‘Of course this is just a prototype, it is not as refined as I had hoped, and the construction has its faults. The glass, I fear, is not quite thick enough. But I will have a sound and splendid one built by the time the child is ready for a sea change.’

‘You mean a tomb.’ I could no longer stay silent. Now was the time for my masterstroke. ‘Dr Musgrave, all your preparations are in vain. This is not the General’s child. I worked as a governess for the father, and he was an uncommonly tall man. Thomas will grow into a full-sized boy — he is no use to you.’

For a moment his face twisted into a sneer of revulsion. Then his features grew smooth and pink. ‘Mrs Richardson, think of it this way. If I let you go now, with the child, what would happen to it?’

‘To him. He is not a thing.’

‘Yes, yes … Perhaps the General and his wife might reclaim it. They would exhibit it for a year or two to hundreds, thousands; it would be offered as a spectacle for ignorant gawkers. You would not be allowed anywhere near it, needless to say. Or perhaps you would attempt to escape with it into the streets of Sydney. This is a hard town for a single woman of no means. Chances are it would die of disease or starvation. Think now of the alternative.’ He came close, bent down, looked at me with his mesmerising black eyes. ‘The child will be treated like royalty, will lack for nothing. No vulgar crowd will be permitted near. Only I will worship.’

I fought rising panic. ‘You don’t believe me? You still think the General is the father?’

He sighed. ‘Of course. But even if what you say is true, it makes no difference. I will just wait to find out. Months, years: I have plenty of time. And either way, the end, when it comes, will be swift and quite painless. A syringe. I will choose a moment when the child is … at its happiest and most unsuspecting. That is not such a bad fate, is it? What more could anyone want?’

‘A mother.’

His lids fluttered, a slight frown, quickly ironed out.

‘Where’s your pity, sir?’ My voice rose, trembled. ‘Did you not have a mother of your own?’

He stood, turned his back, and I remembered something he had said long ago to Franz, when we had visited Athena Hall.

‘She played the piano, didn’t she? You called her your dear mother.’ He did not answer and that made me bolder. ‘Dr Musgrave, if you care anything for motherhood, will you grant me one request? I want to hold my child in my arms.’

My eyes raked his back, the close crop of his white hair above his neck, the dark tailored coat that strained over powerful shoulders. Turn round, damn you.

At last he turned towards me. ‘Yes, yes, I should like to see …’ I watched two pale candlelit faces, the second reflected in the glass. ‘But not here, you will just try to escape and then I shall be obliged to …’ His fingers hovered around his belt. Was a pistol holstered under his coat? ‘Come with me.’ He led me round to the back of the tank, lit by more gas lamps on the cavern walls, and pointed to a ladder that rose from the floor and rested against the iron girder at the top of the glass panel.

There seemed nothing for it but to climb; I picked up my skirts and edged up the rungs, remembering my escape from Isis House and wishing I could risk such an annihilating fall many times over if it meant I could escape with Thomas. Dr Musgrave followed, I felt his breath, but he was careful not to touch me. At the top of the ladder, he reached over my shoulder, pulled a small lever and with a loud whirr the great central dome of the roof tipped slowly outwards on a hinge, until there was a circular gap wide enough to admit an adult body.

I looked down over the edge, and a gentle hothouse breeze, warmer and moister than the air outside, caressed my face. Directly below me was the inner cylinder, filling the space beneath the dome; and at the centre, about six feet below, Thomas’s cradle. Since I had first glimpsed my child behind the glass, terror of the grief that might erupt and destroy me had stopped me looking at him. Now I stared and stared in the dancing light, at the whorl of strawberry blond hair on the crown, the closed fist, the feathery eyelashes on the porcelain cheeks, and I searched for any flutter, for any rise and fall of breath. No fear, no grief, only a yearning that overpowered everything. My iron breasts were suddenly damp with milk.

‘The medicine makes sleep very sound, but it won’t cause any harm,’ said Dr Musgrave. ‘Go on, go down.’ He sounded eager. He indicated a rope ladder that hung off the iron girder and dangled down inside the cylinder, behind the pillar supporting the cradle.

I swung my legs over the side, climbed down as fast as I could — the ladder was only loosely fastened — and lifted Thomas out of the cradle. So little weight. His head lolled, he was warm, a pulse throbbed in his wrist and he slept very sweetly. His white robe was finely embroidered linen; Mrs Bleeker would approve of the stitching. Standing half on the ladder, half on a foothold in the pillar, I put Thomas over my shoulder, pushed the cradle aside, arranged my skirts and sat down on the cockleshell. I squeezed my eyes shut, hugged the little body to me, whispering over and over again, Hush, I’ve got you now, sleep tight, and other, nonsense words, surely more to soothe myself than my child.

Heedless for once of Dr Musgrave, I unfastened my dress, untied the towel from my breasts, pressed my left nipple into Thomas’s mouth. Milk sprayed out, but Thomas slept on and would not suck. Damn the sleeping draught. What strange hands, miniatures of my own, tiny webs stretching between his fingers. White and rosy, skinny and plump. Wisps of hair standing up on his skull like a cockatoo crest. I had never smelled skin so clean and new, like honey flowers. His eyes behind his closed lids moving like tiny fishes.

Under my dress I was sweating. Was he too hot in his robe? I fumbled with the buttons, gradually releasing the awkwardly perfect body with its necklace, wristlets and anklets of black and white beads. Then I saw my mistake, gave a broken laugh, knuckles to my mouth. I had been so sure. I had known Burden, Belly, Thomas so intimately for nine months, and yet I had known nothing.

‘I will have to call you …’ I thought of the adventurous little girl in the book I had read to Matilda. ‘Alice,’ I whispered.

Were all mothers so happy? Dear God, I prayed, let this moment last forever.

‘An affecting picture,’ came the rumbling voice from overhead.

I peered up into darkness, trying to pick scorn in his tone, but finding none. Perhaps he truly was affected.

‘Mrs Richardson, could you do me a favour? Could you please take off your bonnet and let down your hair?’

I was so surprised my hand went automatically to my bonnet strings and then to Franz’s hairpin that held my knot of hair in place, and it tumbled down over my shoulders. I unfastened the crescent-moon brooch from the hairpin and stuck it carefully in my bodice; I would do whatever he wanted if it meant I could go on holding Alice. The sounds from outside the tank were muffled, but I guessed he was climbing down the ladder. Thank God, he was leaving. A pause. Then the lights in front of me dipped, swirled, brightened. I looked up from Alice’s head. The doctor was holding up the lantern, speaking and gesticulating from outside the tank, his outline blurred by the water between us. The little jewelled fishes seemed to swim around a deep sea monster. I shook my head, mouthed, ‘I can’t hear you.’

He walked out of view. More scrapes and thumps, and then his soft purr from above. ‘How like a mermaid you look. A mer-mother on your throne. Or a Madonna, perhaps.’

I sat with head bowed, holding my breath, imagining him softer and softer, kinder and kinder, to the point where he would let me take my child and leave.

After a long pause, he spoke again. ‘You have had your wish. Time’s up.’

Without relinquishing my grip on Alice, I turned to the rope ladder that I had noticed was so loosely fastened. My weight had tightened the knot during my descent, but by lifting the rope and pushing it around a little, I was as sure I could dislodge it at the top as I would be of unthreading a needle. But I could not see above my head, and at any moment I dreaded Dr Musgrave’s shout as he discovered what I was attempting. Sweat poured down my face, I blinked it from my eyes, the child grew leaden in my arm, and still I pushed and pulled. At last the rope came away from the top of the cylinder and fell in loops and folds behind me.

‘Stupid girl, why did you do that?’ Now a tiger stood above me. But holding Alice gave me a new courage.

‘I want to stay with my child.’

‘But the pair of you could die down there. Is that what you want? I have only to put back this dome and move the lever to its tightest point. The air will give out, it will be slow and painful.’

I sat very still, willed my body not to shudder. ‘You’ll not do that, sir. Remember, I am a mother. Remember your own mother.’

A long pause. Was he moved? Was he doubtful? I twisted my head but still could not see his face in the darkness above me.

Then he spoke. ‘At least pass me up the child.’

‘So you can kill me now and kill her later?’

He would aim at me with a gun, or he would fetch a rope and climb down, or find some long sharp instrument to torment me. But not right away, please God. All I needed was more time, until Rodnia found the message on the pillow slip, realised where I was … But would he even realise? Dr Musgrave was so confident he could not be found, what if he were right? I clung to Alice. If the worst came to the worst and he closed the dome, I would breathe into her mouth until all air was gone.

‘Remember,’ I said again. ‘Remember your mother.’ Meaningless, perhaps, but what else could I say? Silence but for a faint lap of water and Alice’s soft breath, as the fishes flitted around my throne.

‘Desire is so huge, so ravenous, is it not?’ Dr Musgrave’s voice was surprisingly low and wistful. ‘And yet the object of desire may be so small. I have been as one-eyed as any Cyclops. I have filled mansion after mansion with the rare and wonderful, yet all I ever wanted was one thing, and still I do not have it.’

Then go find it and let me keep my baby, I wanted to say. Instead, I hazarded a guess. ‘Love?’

He gave a laugh that was more like a dry croak. ‘I was such a dreamer, and she saw right through me. A pathetic jellyfish of a boy. When I sat down at the piano to play she would push my fingers from the keys and make short work of my arpeggios. “Freddie dear,” she would say, “you are in my light.”’

‘She was impatient with you?’

‘She loved me so much, she wanted me to be as perfect as she was.’

What lost love was this?

After a long pause, he spoke again. ‘I came home too late. At first I thought they had put some other woman on show by mistake. Her loosened hair, white as an albino’s. But it was her, laid out in the drawing room in her finest morning gown. I sat with her through the night, my doctor’s bag at my feet. There were jardinières of massed roses, to conceal …’ A sigh. ‘The candles gave her face a soft flush until I bent over her and cast her into shadow. Two marks from her pince-nez dented her nose. I could swear she would open her eyes and tell me I was in her light.’

‘I am sorry,’ I whispered. But I felt no sorrow for him.

‘I reached very slowly into the coffin and traced the central parting that divided her curious white hair,’ he went on. ‘I turned back the lace shawl that concealed her upper body, inch by inch. Her bloodless hands were folded over her breast. There was no rigor mortis: her arm bent easily and it felt quite natural to drape it over the edge of the coffin. I held her hand in both my own, to put a little warmth back into that chill palm.’

There was no mistaking the sorrow and passion in his voice. I wished I could see his face. But it was what he wanted, to gaze unseen at me and my child, my loosened hair.

‘She must have loved you very much,’ I said, with no idea if it were true. A brilliant spark of hope was kindling in me.

‘Her poor jellyfish boy … When I reached down to my doctor’s bag, I did so with great caution, so as not to wake her.’

A pause. A picture came to me of Minnie upstairs in the room at Seymour, and the wicked sharp instruments the young doctor had left on the floor as he fled, and suddenly I gasped.

‘So that story about you and your hatbox was true after all.’ The word rose, I could not stop it. ‘You are nothing but a ghoul.’

‘You have understood nothing,’ he snapped. ‘It was all I could take of her at that time. I had thought … but no one understands. Enough, it is time. You must come out of there, or hand me up the child.’

I shook my head, held Alice tight, waited for him to close the dome-shaped lid and fasten the lever. But the thumps were his steps down the ladder, and then an indistinct grating, as of a large and rusty tap. A deep metallic judder, and suddenly a shockingly loud sound of water gushing. Had he broken the glass of the tank? The sound was so close. I looked around, above, down. At the bottom of the cylinder, not far beneath my dangling feet, was glint and movement. I put Alice very carefully back in her crib, placed it in the centre of the cockleshell seat and slipped down to the base of the pillar. Instantly my feet were wet: water was pouring into the cylinder from the surrounding tank. I bent down and my hands groped around to discover the water was coming from the mouths of six pipes, spaced evenly around the circular base. If I twisted my body around the pillar there was just room for me to block two of the pipes with my hands and the opposite two pipes with my feet, but water continued to pour out of the remaining two.

The poor lovelorn jellyfish, the ghoul, how dare he?

As suddenly as it had begun, the gushing water stopped. I stood upright, panting, soaked skirt dragging, water swirling around my knees. ‘You don’t scare me,’ I shouted. But it was the cry of a defiant little child.

‘That’s just a taste.’ Heard from the bottom of the cylinder, his voice had a hollow, inhuman boom. ‘Climb the pillar and hand me up the infant, there’s a good girl, and I promise I won’t harm you.’

‘Never.’

‘It makes no sense, you will both drown.’

‘Better to drown than to give her back to you.’

He did not reply. Again the steps on the ladder, the groan of machinery, the gushing. I tore off my shawl and stuffed it into one pipe. Five closed, one left. I tried to rip the hem of my skirt, but when my hands left the pipes the flow came more fiercely, my wet skirt would not tear, and then the force of the flow pushed my shawl out again. Despite all my efforts, the water was rising steadily, past my knees, and soon almost up to my waist. I held my breath, put my head under to block the pipes with my hands, but soon had to come up for air. Then I tried standing with my feet in two of the pipes, but the flood pressed and pressed, lifted me off the bottom of the cylinder.

The roar of the Yarra Yarra, the filth, the icy clinging mud. This water was lukewarm, clear green, with a chemical smell. A clean drowning. Little fish bobbed beneath my chin. I looked up into steam and darkness, around into fog and vague haloes of light: the one solid thing was the pillar of stone. I climbed back to the top — the pillar was rough-hewn, there were plenty of footholds — sat on the cockleshell and took my babe in my weary arms. How could any baby, however drugged, sleep through this deluge? The water was rising, rising: now I had to stand on the cockleshell and already it was lapping round my feet. Would the ghoul turn off the flood and give us one last chance? But it kept coming, up, up. I thought of how I had once borne General Tom Thumb out of the river. I kissed Alice’s brow and lifted her high over my head, starfished and limp on my hands, and then I saw something, two things, dangling from the very top of the cylinder, and I knew then that those two forked things were not sea creatures but the ghoul’s hands. He was waiting for the water to rise far enough to lift us, to place Alice in his arms, so he could whisk her away and push me under.

No. I pulled Alice down, pinched her sweet nose with one hand, closed her mouth with the other, took a deep breath and dived deep. Better to go this way together.

A thunder filled my ears, booming like the huge waves of Bass Strait, and I anchored my legs around the pillar, which was not so solid anymore; it shuddered and shook as if about to break loose from the bedrock. Breathe out, open your lungs. The end will be quick. Still some panicky fool in me kept my breath in, my mouth shut and my lungs bursting. The booming, the light growing, the water paling from dark green to light blue, muffled thunder. I looked down at Alice. Her eyes were wide open, she was gazing at the fish with utmost wonder, and a pearly trail of bubbles came from her mouth. And suddenly I had to get to the surface and get some air into her little lungs, Dr Musgrave or no. I released my breath in a storm of bubbles, let go of the pillar, kicked with my feet, rose to the surface, coughed and spluttered in cold wonderful air, held her high.

The arms reached down, almost touching Alice’s head. I lowered her a little, still keeping both our heads above water, held her close with one arm. I trod water, waited and, as I expected, the arms came lower and lower. The ghoul could not wait for the water to lift us; his whole upper body was stretching out over the cylinder, wriggling forward like a serpent, coins falling from his pockets, clawing at the air above us, his upside-down face only a little above me now, contorted and swollen with his blood. The tips of my toes found the cockle throne at the top of the pillar; I was not yet quite out of my depth. It was time: I had one chance. I must be quick, accurate, use all my strength. I unfastened and drew the moon brooch with its extra-sharp pin from my bodice, crouched down momentarily under the surface, pushed hard with my feet, shot up out of the water and rammed the pinpoint as hard as I could into his left eye.

The hands jerked back, covered his face, he screamed, the water around me turned red. He was trying to pull back but he had leaned too far over, he toppled down headfirst into the cylinder, his boot caught my ear a glancing blow as he passed. A great churning and frothing rose as he wriggled and kicked, trying to shift his body from where it was stuck, wedged head-down under the surface, between the pillar and the curved wall of the cylinder. I felt the pillar rock perilously; it must have been shakily fastened onto the bedrock — the construction has its faults — it was never expected to undergo such a pummelling, and his struggles were loosening it further. I put my back against it, bent my knees with my feet up on the glass, and pushed with all my strength. With a great crack the pillar began to topple and slip sideways, and the doctor with it. Now we were all slipping, sideways and down, as the pillar fell: a great smash as it carved through the cylinder and more grinding and groaning and smashing to follow, but my head was under red water and I could only hold Alice tight and pray, deliver us, deliver us, as we were sucked and spun around in the maelstrom. And then there was quiet, and air, and I was lying face down in a pile of shattered glass, gasping like a fish, and high-pitched screams filled the cavernous space. Was it the ghoul? My own keening? I sat up and the screams grew louder.

Alice was lying on her back, puny face screwed up, fists that could crush serpents waving and wobbling in the lonely air, mouth a square of shock, red hunger and rage.

I stood, brushed glass granules and grit and rubbery sea creatures from my arms, ignored my trembling legs and the thin trickles of blood from my skin. I picked Alice up. She had small cuts on her knees and elbows and would surely bruise later, but otherwise she seemed unharmed. My enveloping body must have protected her from the glass. I carried her to my stool, still miraculously standing in the knee-deep water and debris, where I sat and held her upside down. I slapped her on the back to make her choke up any remaining water, and she screamed even louder. I put her to my breast with no idea how to make her suck, but somehow between us it happened, and she fell quiet. I could not stop shivering. My wet hair plastered my face and shoulders, my skin stung and oozed in dozens of places, my right ear throbbed. The whole front of the aquarium had collapsed in a pile of glass and rubble, everything stank of chemicals, little fish lay twitching all around me, and a larger body hunched in a corner, legs thrashing silently, red hands clamped to its face. But slowly a vast calm came over me, and Alice was all to me, and I did not flinch when, God only knows how much later, the door was hacked open and the room was suddenly full of men in dark blue uniforms.

When Alice paused from her feeding, Rodnia was in front of me. I rose, put her into his outstretched arms, then hugged his barrel chest and his leather–tobacco–hay scent to me with a furious greed. The top of his curly head was almost level with my collarbone. For a while, Alice endured being squeezed tight between man and woman with a shocked silence, and then she howled her protest. So I disentangled myself, sat back on the stool and began to feed her again.

‘Will you fetch a blanket for the poor wet bab?’ I said to Rodnia.

The policemen sifted over the rubble, prised boards off a window to let in light. One fellow kneeled by Dr Musgrave’s now still body and felt his pulse. He talked in a low voice to a tall, gangly man leaning over him, and when I heard his American drawl, I knew Mr Bleeker had found us, and black spots swam before my eyes.

The man in charge, an inspector, introduced himself and made me a handsome little speech about my aid in capturing a dangerous felon long under police suspicion. Clearly there had been an accident. The felon was unconscious and had lost a lot of blood, and one shard of glass must have taken out his eye, but he would probably live despite his injuries, the inspector said. They already had his accomplices, including the red-haired man whom they had caught trying to burn incriminating letters. Then he turned to Mr Bleeker. ‘What charges do you want to bring, sir? We will have plenty of our own, I reckon, especially once we have searched his house.’

Mr Bleeker stared at me in silence, and I began to tremble with more than cold. His eyes were red-rimmed. He slipped his hand inside his jacket and rubbed his chest with great circular motions.

‘You said he had kidnapped General Tom Thumb’s heir,’ the inspector prompted him. ‘This is the child, is it not?’ He pointed to my bedraggled lap. Rodnia stood close to me: he had found a sack for Alice, and I was trying to tuck it round her to keep her from cold. He patted me on the shoulder, glared at Mr Bleeker. The manager stared at us, frowning as if he were trying to remember something, then dropped his eyes. I waited for him to confirm the inspector’s question, to hold out his hands for Alice, to take her back to Charlie and Lavinia with the law’s blessing, to leave me empty-armed, all my venturing for nothing. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.