33

Five Minutes in China, in Three Volumes

EVERYTHING IN JULIAN’S LIFE IS THE DEEPEST MYSTERY.

Trying in vain to stay away from her, instead he trails her like a lover.

He picks up the platonic crumbs that remain when the divine is denied him and carries her water. He needs to believe that this time will be different. And why not? She is different. And by keeping himself away, Julian is different, too.

They start their day at dawn with a horseback ride. They end it at nearly midnight in the dining room scarfing down their cold beef and pork pie.

With George away in Wales, Julian and Mirabelle sidestep the Observatory and head straight for New Park Street Chapel to pick up Spurgeon’s marked-up and corrected sermons and head to the British Museum, across town. They pass the time in the long carriage ride across congested London by inventing names of new diseases, making up titles of fake books, and by debating the pros and cons of a new elixir on the market called heroin.

Mirabelle is as solemn a masterpiece as Julian has ever encountered. His breath is perpetually short when she is within his inhale. He says solemn, but he means only in the emotion that she swirls in him, which is as profound a longing as he’s ever had for her. Because in her purest form, the masterpiece is not only breathtaking, and open, and friendly and trusting, but aflame with humor. There is a constant twinkle in her eye, a wry smile at her perfect mouth. The masterpiece likes to tease. She likes to discuss serious things with a light touch, and she likes to be made to laugh.

“I think Barnabus may have arachnid herpes,” Mirabelle says of their driver before they’ve crossed the river. She likes the game of making up diseases that Julian had started.

“How can you tell?” says Julian, squinting and rubbing his chin. “Because of his swollen ankles?”

“Yes, but now that you’ve mentioned swollen ankles, I realize I’ve misdiagnosed him. It’s not arachnid herpes. He’s got thorny tongue.” Mirabelle laughs even before Julian can laugh.

“Thorny tongue? How did you come by this crack diagnosis?”

“Because he also can’t pay attention and he’s got stiff elbows—two sure signs of the malady.”

“Barney,” Julian calls through the half-open front window to the oblivious driver. “Miss Taylor and I are in a quandary. What do you think you’ve got, arachnid herpes or thorny tongue?”

“What?” Barnabus says. “I can’t hear you. Did you say horny tongue?”

“Oh, he’s deaf, too? I take it back,” Mirabelle says. “It must be rooster warts.” She peals with laughter.

As they’re crossing the Thames at Waterloo, they invent some book titles.

“Giants and Swindlers.”

“Turtles Without Faith.”

“Swampy Rebels.”

“Fish in Stockades.”

Charles Dickens apparently has made up some book titles to emboss on the spines of fake books that furnish the nearly empty library of his new home, and this delights Mirabelle, to invent titles like the great Dickens.

They switch topics one more time after they’ve crossed the Strand by the Savoy Palace.

“I don’t know what you could possibly have against heroin, Mr. Cruz. It’s stronger than opium from which it’s made.”

“That’s what I have against it, Miss Taylor.”

“But opium is called God’s own medicine! How can you be against it? Among all the remedies which it has pleased the Almighty to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so effective as opium. And heroin, produced in a laboratory with modern scientific methods, is stronger! So, it’s even better. It treats coughing, pain, insomnia, digestive ailments, and hysteria.”

Julian tries to list some of the disadvantages of this miracle restorative. He is met with Mirabelle’s trenchant skepticism.

“What disadvantages?”

“Let’s see. Ferocious addiction. Diminished respiration, a slowed heart, agonizing withdrawals. Sweating. Vomiting. Death.”

“Piffle!”

The hour passes much too soon.

The grand British Museum, recently rebuilt from a mansion called Montague House, stands off Great Russell Street. Nearby, the newly constructed Oxford Street has cut a swathe through the rookery of St. Giles, severing its main arteries. There’s now a shopping quarter where the heart of the slum used to be. When Julian asks Mirabelle if she’s ever been to St. Giles, hoping she will say no, she pauses a moment before replying. “There’s a man in St. Giles I call Magpie Smith,” she says, “who lives under the stairs with his dog. You can’t give him any alms because he’ll spend it on drink, but you can bring him some dinner. Usually he shares it with his mangy cur.”

“And do you,” Julian asks, “bring him some dinner?”

“Not anymore.” She smiles regretfully. “Mummy found out I was visiting him and tattled on me to Father. Now they blame me for Father’s heart incident.”

“Magpie Smith must miss you.”

“He’s comforting himself with gin, I’m sure. You sound as if you’ve been inside St. Giles, Mr. Cruz. It’s much better than it was, you know. Maybe we can go there sometime, and you could meet my indigent friend. My parents might not mind if you’re by my side. Perhaps we can bring him some heroin and see which one of us he agrees with about the elixir’s merits.”

“He won’t be able to give you his learned opinion, Miss Taylor,” says Julian, “because he’ll be dead of an overdose.”

Coventry Patmore, the supernumerary at the Museum, is a skeletal man with sunken eyes and receding messy hair. He appears noiselessly out of the shadows of the research department on the second floor and speaks to Mirabelle in a tone so hushed, even Mirabelle can barely hear him. “Often, I’m reduced to guessing what he needs me to do,” she whispers to Julian. Being a supernumerary must be back-breaking work, because the man looks as if he’s on his last legs. Coventry sets up Mirabelle and Julian with pens and parchment in a small enclave deep in the poetry stacks (“because in his other life, Coventry fancies himself a poet,” says Mirabelle) and they begin. Their job is to transcribe Spurgeon’s marked-up and nearly illegible sermons onto a clean parchment, proofreading and editing the words as they go, and the polished text will then be checked by Patmore before it’s typeset onto printing plates.

“Make your queries quietly, Mr. Cruz,” Mirabelle says, “or you’ll upset Coventry.”

“I have a query, Miss Taylor.”

“Already? But we haven’t opened …”

“If you’re Coventry’s assistant, does that make you the supernumerary’s supernumerary?”

She giggles.

Julian’s eyes are merry. “But since I’m your assistant, does that make me the supernumerary’s supernumerary’s supernumerary?”

She laughs.

Coventry Patmore springs up at her elbow. “Misssssssss Taylor! Have you forgotten where you are?”

“I beg your pardon, Coventry.” She covers her mouth. “Mr. Cruz was being untoward, and I couldn’t help myself.”

“Do better, Miss Taylor. And instruct Mr. Cruz to be toward.”

“Coventry, wait!” Lowering her voice, Mirabelle whispers to Julian, “He is a funny man. Watch.” Clearing her throat and getting up, she approaches the supernumerary. “Have you heard that Thomas Robert Eeles has got hold of some new Charles Dickens titles and is planning to publish them?”

“Oh, that scavenging bookbinder!” Patmore exclaims. “How would he get his hands on them? We publish Dickens!”

“He met Mr. Dickens in a tavern. But don’t despair, Coventry. A friend of mine who was there and witnessed the encounter managed to purloin this coveted list.” Mirabelle opens a torn piece of blank parchment and pretends to study it intently. “We can make Mr. Dickens an offer for some of his new books if you like.”

“Let’s make him an offer for all of them.”

“Reserve judgment, Coventry, until you hear the titles. Here’s one.” Mirabelle pretends to read. “Five Minutes in China, in three volumes.”

Patmore frowns.

“Here’s another. A Catalogue of Statues of the Duke of Wellington. No, let’s have Thomas Robert take that one, that doesn’t sound very interesting. What about Drowsy’s Recollections of Nothing, in four volumes?”

“Miss Taylor …”

“No, here’s one we should publish, though it’s not Dickens. Edmund Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful, in six volumes!”

Once he understands he’s being pranked, Coventry Patmore turns to concrete. “Are you quite finished, Miss Taylor?”

She leans forward and kisses him on the cheek. “I am, Mr. Patmore.”

Julian and Mirabelle sit next to each other at a wooden table between imposing bookshelves. Reluctantly Julian wears the gold-frame spectacles Spurgeon had gifted him. He wishes he didn’t need them, but without them he can’t read a word of the pastor’s script. Wearing glasses makes him look and feel like a teacher, not a boxer, makes him feel as if he is standing next to a blackboard, not shirtless and brawny in the ring. Wearing glasses makes him feel like Ralph Dibny.

The only good thing he can say about it is that Mirabelle doesn’t seem to mind. She smiles at him just the same.

The work is painfully slow. Every few minutes they stop transcribing to discuss usage and punctuation. Sometimes even with the eyewear, Julian can’t decipher Spurgeon’s angry corrections of Nora’s first-draft transcription. Nora transcribes Charles’s sermons as if she is either new to Baptist teachings or new to the English language.

Mirabelle has a soft spot for Coventry. Mirabelle, Julian realizes, has a soft spot for everybody. (Even him?) “Coventry has a wife and four children, that’s why he never stops working. Is it any wonder he’s so stooped? Emily, his wife, has recently had another child, the poor thing. Even with help, she can barely cope with the three she’s got. I like babies, so I offer to take him to the park some afternoons. Would you like to join me when we’re finished here?”

“If we’re finished here.”

“Here’s the thing you must learn, Mr. Cruz, if you haven’t learned it already. You’re never finished perfecting words, never. Only the Word of the Lord is finished. Everything else is in perpetual need of improvement. I, for one, have many other things to do today than sit here and figure out if Nora meant to write “divine” or “sublime.”

“Either is fine. What else is on your plate today, Miss Taylor?”

“Taking the boy to the park, for one.”

“And then?”

“Can we get back to work, please? The baby is waiting.”

For hours they sit lit by two gas lamps, hunched over the parchment in the musty enclave, their heads together. Her fragrant perfumed hair is near him. Her glowing skin is a hand’s caress away. The sleeve of her jacket, underneath which lies her blouse, underneath which lies her bare skin, touches the sleeve of his coat, underneath which there’s a white shirt-sleeve, underneath which lies his bare skin. Who can pay attention to the semi-colons and exclamation marks when their naked bodies are three types of fabric away from pressing together? Silk on linen, silk on wool. Her coral lips are an exclamation mark, her warm breath an ellipsis.

The sermon they’re working on is called “My Love and I a Mystery.”

Julian fears it’s going to take longer than Mirabelle intends, for not only can they not agree on the correct words in the body of the text, they can’t even agree on the proper punctuation for the sermon’s title. Should it have a colon, a comma, an equal sign or an em-dash? There are only two of them in the poetry stacks and they are of four minds on the subject.

“A colon is not exclusive enough. As if it’s the beginning of a list,” Mirabelle says. “As if my love and I could be a mystery, but could be other things, too, like a play or an outing.”

“A comma is not restrictive enough,” Julian says. “An appositive comma means you could delete what comes after it, and the meaning of the title would hardly be changed. And yet the word mystery is the point.”

“An equal sign is absurd,” Mirabelle says. “I see that’s what Nora put down. That’s how we know it’s the wrong punctuation. Because Nora chose it. What is this thing called love, a formula in John Snow’s lab?”

“By virtue of elimination, then, the em-dash it is,” says Julian.

“My Love and I: A Mystery.”

“My Love and I, a Mystery.”

“My Love and I=A Mystery.”

“My Love and I—a Mystery.”

The Patmores live a few blocks from the Museum, just past Grey Gardens. Emily Patmore, a female version of Coventry but less cheerful, thrusts the bonny child into Mirabelle’s arms and tearfully flees up the stairs.

“What a relief,” says Mirabelle. “Mrs. Patmore is calm today. I never know what to expect.”

With the baby in the pram, they head to the park.

The afternoon sun is strong, and in her long light-blue skirt, peach jacket, and layers of lace, Mirabelle gets warm.

“Would you like me to push the pram, Miss Taylor?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Cruz, thank you for offering. Would you mind if I take your arm?”

“Of course not, Miss Taylor.”

On a weekday afternoon in London, they stroll arm in arm under the elms in the green town square, pushing a pram with a baby, while all around them lunchtime London buzzes with shouting children and clopping horses. Taking the boy out of his carriage, Mirabelle plays with him on the grass, while Julian sits on a park bench, watching them. Her light skirt is discolored after she rises.

“Best not to roll on the ground,” he says. “I should’ve mentioned it earlier. The enzymes and chlorophyll in grass act like a dye. They stain your clothes black.”

“I could’ve used the advice ten minutes ago, Mr. Cruz. Well, you were too busy gazing at the child to offer it. You do seem to know a number of these tidy bromides. Have you considered publishing a handy book yourself? Cruz’s Compendium of Clever Creations.” She smiles. “I could edit it for you.”

“I would enjoy that very much. Perhaps after our other work is done.”

“Remember what I told you? Our work is never done. That’s what Charles keeps telling us. Like the work on our souls.”

Again a silent shiver passes through Julian.

They rest on a bench next to each other. Mirabelle holds the baby in her lap. The child is plump and happy, grinning up at Julian.

“Would you like to hold the baby, Mr. Cruz?”

Julian takes the baby. His name is Jacob.

Mirabelle watches the man and the boy with warmth in her eyes. “You’re sure-handed with him,” she says. “You’re familiar with babies—to use your favorite word? Familiar, that is, not babies.”

“Thank you for the clarification. Yes, I have three older brothers, all married. I have many nieces and nephews.” Julian is awash with guilt. His brothers, his mother, his family, Ashton abandoned by him as he chases the butterfly in his dream.

“Do you imagine someday becoming a father, Mr. Cruz? Having a child of your own?”

“Once in a while.” It’s painful for Julian to speak of it. He can’t get her to stay alive for two months. What’s the use of talking about other impossible things. “Do you, Miss Taylor?”

“Not really.” Regret alters the features of her face. “My life and work has taken me in a different direction, I’m afraid. I don’t mind. Everyone has their own path in life, even women. It’s like Charles said. A modern revolution is coming. I’m hoping this means more independence for women. I like the idea of being at the vanguard of it.”

Two ladies strolling by smile benevolently. “What a lovely baby you two have,” one of them says. “God bless. What a beautiful young family.”

Before Julian can protest, Mirabelle speaks up. “Thank you,” she says. And into his stare adds, “That is how two unattached people sit together in a public park. By having an infant as their chaperone.”

“Indeed, a tried and true method.” Brandon would always tell Julian that his present children prevented him and his wife from having future children. Babies: the best contraceptive available, Brandon would say.

You know what else is a good contraceptive? Involuntary, unwanted, unwelcome, abiding, loathsome abstinence.

After parting with Jacob, Julian and Mirabelle return to the Museum. In the early evening, Barnabus takes them to Upper Harley Street, to a square granite building that reads “The Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances.” Finally, the Institute! Mirabelle asks Julian and Barnabus to wait and disappears inside. She’s gone for hours.

“What’s she doing there, Barney?”

“It’s Mr. Hunter to you,” Barnabus says, “and why don’t you ask her yourself, what, the cat got your tongue? You two never stop yammering.”

“Watch out, Barney, because rooster warts and thorny tongues don’t heal themselves.”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

As Julian waits for her, he negotiates with himself his impossible choices.

He can always scram if he thinks biblical proximity is just around the next ride through the meadow. To protect her from his roving hands (his roving everything), he can leave at any time if he feels there’s a danger of imminent skin-on-skin intimacy. Otherwise, if he can manage to contain himself, he won’t have to leave and they can stay friends, remain good friends until the threat to her life passes. And maybe after that, she can choose to love him back.

Here’s Julian’s daily challenge, however:

“What are your intentions, Julian?” Aubrey keeps asking every time Mirabelle is out of earshot.

“Aubrey, stop tyrannizing the man,” John Taylor says. “He will make his intentions clear if he wishes to.”

But Spurgeon is at it, too. “It’s time, Julian. Time to announce your intentions toward our Mirabelle.”

And the following evening, Aubrey, as if on a relay, despite her husband’s warnings, says apologetically, “I hope you can overlook her being headstrong. She gets it from her father. She is not easily dissuaded from what she wants.”

“I have yet to encounter any stubbornness from her, Aubrey,” Julian says to reassure the mother.

The father sits up. The mother sits up. “What do you mean by that?” Aubrey Taylor says. “Are you implying that Mirabelle has put up no resistance?”

Oh, did that ever come out wrong. “I only meant she’s been nothing but agreeable.”

“In all areas?”

“Aubrey!” John exclaims. “Leave the man alone!”

“Just so you understand,” Aubrey says quietly, “we’re fine with her being agreeable. We would just like to know your intentions.”

Julian’s silence is his reply. They’re nowhere near September 20 yet.

Maybe the fewer of his intentions, the longer her life.

“I’m fond of your daughter, Aubrey …”

“How fond?”

“Aubrey!”

“Hush, John! How fond, Julian?”

“Very. But I must wait.” How can Julian explain to this gray, earnest woman why he must wait?

“Forgive me for being so bold,” Aubrey says, “but are you promised to another?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why wait?” Aubrey asks impatiently. “Why not make your intentions clear? I hope you know that both John and I would fully approve this union, should you desire it.”

“Aubrey, please,” John says, his face in his hands.

Julian doesn’t say it, but he thinks it. Aubrey, please.

And here is another daily, hourly, minutely complication: Mirabelle herself.

The girl is trouble. It’s as if she doesn’t care about the length of her days at all. It’s as if she wants Julian to fail. She is constantly assaulting his senses with her smell and the swell of her breasts in her demure yet fitted corsets. The neckline has dropped. The hemline has risen. From dawn to dusk, her lips look dipped in cherry juice.

Mirabelle is a proper young woman and well-raised. But because of that, she is the most dangerous, for she finds trails not in one epic open seduction—which in some ways would be easier to defend against—but in a hundred shiny, bobbly lures that add up to an utterly ensnared Julian. John 21. Truly he is a fish that cannot get away. He is wrapped head to toe in the silk threads of his very own virtuous nymph.

She waits for him to open the carriage door and then leans on his arm as she gets in. She takes his arm as she gets out. She asks for his help carrying the manuscripts and pushing the pram and when it gets too hot, she rests her hand on top of his as they stroll with baby Jacob. When he carries the boy on his shoulders, she stands in front of him and adjusts the boy’s little shoes. She stands so close, Julian can smell her hair and her breath, he can see the fine lines and small pores on her face. He doesn’t but he could kiss her smiling lips.

He doesn’t but he could.

He could lean down and press his mouth into the cleavage of her breasts.

He doesn’t, but he could.

In the late evenings, on the way back to Sydenham, the conversation drifts. Mirabelle is tired after a long day. Often she falls asleep. Her head bobs forward. One pitch from the horse and she could go flying. Chivalrously, Julian switches seats to be next to her. As if reading his mind through her dreams, Mirabelle lists sideways and drops her head on his shoulder. He puts his arm around her. Like this they ride to Vine Cottage. Mirabelle wakes just before arrival.

One night, she wakes unhappily.

“Oh, Mr. Cruz,” she says, moving away (but not too far away). “I just had the most peculiar dream.” She rubs her eyes. “In it you were half-man, half-ghost.”

Without you I cannot live at all, Mirabelle. Sometimes I think you’re half-woman, half-ghost. Julian could kiss her right now in the darkened carriage. How he wants to. His body trembles with yearning. “What was I doing in your dream?”

“Diving into the Thames. Looking for a way out.”

That halts his impure longings. Diving into the Thames? He moves away. “A way out of what?”

“You wouldn’t say. But you kept begging me to come with you. I was arguing with you in my dream, too, Mr. Cruz.” Faintly Mirabelle smiles. “Except in the dream I kept calling you by your given name. I kept saying I’m wearing silk and satin, Julian, I’m not jumping into a river.”

“It doesn’t sound as though I was very persuasive.”

“You weren’t. You didn’t ask me to disrobe, for one.” She chuckles. “Even in my dreams, you didn’t ask me to disrobe.”

“What kind of slapdash dreams are these,” Julian mutters. He can barely look at her.

“My sentiments exactly. And then you said you wanted to give me something I didn’t have.”

Julian’s heart skips two beats, three. “Like what?” He is almost inaudible.

“You said, a future.”

He tries to keep his voice steady. “I don’t know how I feel about the dream me.”

“Me neither,” Mirabelle says. “I asked you how long I had.”

Julian stops looking at her.

“And you said, you have less than one silver moon.”

His head is deeply lowered.

“Mr. Cruz?”

“Yes, Miss Taylor?”

“Isn’t that an odd thing to say?”

“The whole dream is odd. I’m going to give this dream Julian a good talking to. Explain to him what’s what.”

“I wish you would. Here we are. Oh, and Mr. Cruz?”

“Yes, Miss Taylor?”

“You may call me Mirabelle.”

“Yes, Miss Taylor. And you may call me Julian.”

“Yes, Mr. Cruz.”

Together they make not love, but happiness.

And then, late one Friday summer night as they stroll down Langton Lane, they hear from behind them a pitched, distressing voice. “Mirabelle?!” the voice calls. “Is that you?”

Just before Mirabelle turns around, her eyes fix on Julian, and in them there is sadness and disappointment and farewell, wordlessly expressing what she can’t articulate—that the simple beauty of the brief untroubled days they have spent together is about to vanish with the wind.

“Filippa,” Mirabelle says, pulling her arm away from Julian and turning around to greet her friend. “Mrs. Pye. Good evening, ladies. Fancy running into you here. You remember Mr. Julian Cruz?”