“Thank you, Mr Burton,” Mamma replied. “You are very kind. And we are delighted to receive you.”

  There was a silence. It lengthened.

  Mamma drew a breath, but Burton said nothing.

  Eleanor felt the spiderish rustlings of embarrassment in her innards. Was she truly to marry this man? It was too hard to believe. Such a man! Mamma drew another breath, and then launched into some politely meaningless utterance to at least fill Burton’s silence; but as she spoke Burton coughed into speech himself, and they overlapped one another.

  “I trust you are well…”

  “I hope I am not forward in…”

  They both fell silent. Burton was blushing a deeper portwine shade.

  “After you sir,” said Mamma, lowering her eyes.

  “After you Madam.”

  “Please, Mr Burton.”

  “No, Madam, I insist.”

  Mamma gave a little shriek of laughter; Burton flinched as if stabbed. “But this is ridiculous! We are all friends here, sir… your betrothed, sir!” She smiled, and gestured languidly in Eleanor’s direction. Eleanor smiled in turn at the prompt. Burton’s beard waggled minutely, ambiguously. It was possible he was smiling underneath it. There was sweat on his brow. Little star-dots of sweat.

  “What was it,” he said, doggedly, in a low tone, “what was it you were about to say, Mrs Davis?”

  “I was merely enquiring after your health, sir.”

  “My health is good, Madam. And yours?”

  “We are both well.”

  Another silence grew, mould-like, between the three of them. Eventually Mamma prompted him. “Mr Burton? You were about to say something?”

  Words tumbled out. “I was hoping that Miss… Miss Davis would accept a small gift, a small gift, a little book that I purchased at Arthur Shipley’s bookshop upon the Strand, Ma’am.” He fumbled in his jacket pocket and brought out a small red-bound volume. As he held it out for Eleanor to take up his hand was visibly trembling. “I was hoping that Miss Eleanor… that Miss Davis…” The sentence floated away with conclusion.

  Eleanor plucked the volume from his fingers. “Thank you indeed, sir,” she said. “This is very kind.” She checked the spine: Poems, by Elizabeth Barrett Barrett.

  “Is it a book of science, or political economy?” enquired Mamma, with another piercing shriek like a whistle. “Is it a book of mathematics? My darling Eleanor loves mathematics. ‘Tis hardly natural; I sometimes think I have brought a calculating machine into the world, not a feminine being at all.” She laughed at her own joke with a little whinny. Nobody joined her. “Sometimes think I have brought a calculating machine into the world,” she repeated.

  “Do you not read poetry?” Burton asked, his face bent in two by sudden concern. Eleanor, irritated, nonetheless could not help but console him.

  “It is a fine present, sir, and I shall enjoy reading it very much.”

  “I enquired at my club,” said Burton, “and they… the members, I mean… thought that poetry was an appropriate gift for a young lady.”

  But Mamma, with one of those startling absences of tact of which she was often capable, said in a giggly voice: “Oh, Eleanor’s the least poetic girl in Europe!”

  “Mamma!” Eleanor rebuked her. “Don’t listen to her, Mr Burton. She is teasing you. I like poetry a great deal.”

  “Like it?” echoed Mamma, mockingly. She seemed to have worked herself into one of her occasional little hysteric states. “Lord, she could no more like it than a natural girl could like books with numerical tables and diagrams of levers. Like it!” She laughed again. Then, belatedly, she blinked, peered about her. “Not,” she said, looking a little confused, “not but that your gift is not greatly appreciated.”

  “Indeed, I am very grateful for the book.” She opened the volume, but the pages were uncut and she did not have a paper-knife to hand. “I do not know the authoress, however,” she said. “Is she famous?”

  “I am informed so,” mumbled Burton.

  Of the whole volume only half a dozen pages could be read without cutting the paper. Eleanor opened the volume in the middle. The phrase “deep-hearted man” caught her eye, and she thought to read the verse aloud in tribute to Burton himself. She cleared her throat and read:

  Deep-hearted man, express

  Grief for thy dead in silence most like to death;

  Most like a monumental statue set

  In everlasting watch and moveless woe,

  Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.

  Touch it: the marble eyelids are not wet—

  If it could weep it would arise and go.

  She stopped; Burton and her mother were looking at her with widened eyes. “Perhaps that is not a very well chosen piece,” she said.

  “Is that poetry?” said Mamma. “But that is merely dismal! Dear me, how dismal that is. That’s not my idea of poetry at all.”

  “It is a little dismal,” said the wretched Burton. “I should apologise again.”

  “Tush,” said Eleanor. “It is fine poetry. Fine. I’m sure other pieces in the volume have a lighter tone. Thank you, Mr Burton.”

  She closed the book.

  The Dutch clock on the mantel ticked quietly to itself. It had a miserly and a muffled tick, as if it were hoarding seconds to itself and counting its fortune out to itself, tick by tick. Burton shifted in his seat.

  Eleanor started to draw a breath, and was abruptly aware that she was breathing roasting fire and violence. Why? Wherefrom? It hardly mattered. A sudden, piercing sensation of hatred ran up and down Eleanor’s body like a galvanic shock—she wanted Burton to leave, wanted him away from her for ever, wanted him dead—wanted to strike the blow herself with a switch of her arm across his face, his idiotic and ugly-flabby face. The feeling swept through her, like fluid forced through a pipe-section at tremendous pressure. She froze in her chair.

  The intensity of the emotion shocked her, scared her, even, but at the same time it carried her away, like a modern Saint Theresa in an angelic ecstasy. The sheer weight of this Burton-man, the huge, lumbering physical presence of him in their little room, was too provoking, just too provoking. It was all too provoking, the mass of him, an immovable deadweight dropped upon their lives. She held herself perfectly still in her chair, afraid that any movement would cause her to burst out, to leap up and scream. She could feel her cheeks colouring slightly but otherwise the internal tempest vortexed round and round with such velocity that it seemed to acquire a stillness of its own, of the sort that they say is to be found in the middle of tornadoes. Every blockage in her life, every repression of passion and every sacrifice she had ever made in the name of necessity and respectability became focused intensely in the awkward male form seated before her. On some savage inner level she thought that if this man could be knocked aside then all her life would lighten and brighten—everything would then be all right. And why not? Why couldn’t her mother and she live together, as they had done for seven years now, just by themselves, without interruption or adulteration? They lived modestly enough, didn’t they? They never asked for luxury or expensive flimflam. Eleanor knew many people for whom £150 was a mere trifle—why should those people have that money and she and her mamma none at all? How was that fair? It was a crushing weight laid across them, and the weight was this large man, with his absurd bear-like beard and his sack-of-meal belly. He was the weight.

  The inevitability of Burton, the inescapability of him, stung her again and again, a vicious horsefly inside her head. And, yes, she knew the reasons: but they all boiled down only to money, to money. One hundred and fifty pounds; three hundred half-sovereigns; three thousand shillings; and (three-twelves-are-thirty-six) 36,000 pennies, the money multiplying like biblical locusts in her head, pennies swarming down from the sky copper-skinned to plague her and her mamma. And Burton owned more money than he could possibly need, he had sacks of coins as large as his own belly, had them scattered around his ogre-palace down by the river, that ogre-palace he called his manufactory, in which all the little faerie people were enslaved. And so, only because he had money, she must marry him, and spend not just one afternoon but every afternoon, and morning, and evening, in this gross company. Only because he had the money, a superfluity of money, more than the £150 they needed, so much more, doubtless more than £15,000, than £150,000, more (for all she knew) than £1,000,000; and the zeros spawned in her mind like maggots.

  Her clenched self-control quavered, and a little gasp escaped the enclosure of her teeth. Burton twitched forward in concern.

  “My dear?” said Mamma.

  Eleanor looked up, with feigned innocence in her eyes. “Mamma?”

  “Are you alright?”

  “Quite alright, Mamma. Perhaps you could ring for Sally? She might bring us a glass of water. I feel a little dry.”

  “It is dry,” said Burton, fumbling for a comment. “I feel a little dry myself.”

  “Water,” said Mamma, and tinkled the little handbell that stood, in their reduced circumstances, for a proper bell-pull. Sally, who (of course) had been waiting directly on the far side of the door hoping to overhear the conversation, came straight through, and was dispatched for water from the pump downstairs with some severity.

  Eleanor breathed out, and the passion to squeeze the life from Burton’s flesh relaxed within her, her hatred diminishing and diminishing. And by whatever mysterious process that governs these subterranean and irrational emotional forces, after a few moments Eleanor felt calm again, calm enough to turn to the man and smile at him. His beard twitched. Perhaps he was returning the smile.

  The Dutch clock ticked on.

  Ten minutes grew into twenty, and then thirty. From time to time Burton essayed a clumsy conversational gambit: the weather; the latest British success in the Continental war; the last lecture of the Fitzroy Society (John Percy FRS had talked on the metallurgy of lead, with added remarks on desilverisation and cupellation, “a most interesting talk,” Burton said), at which neither Mrs nor Miss Davis had been able to be present. A shame. Such an interesting talk. But each conversational exchange died quickly, and the parched silences between them grew longer and longer. Eleanor, her head still buzzing faintly with the aftershocks of her violent inner flux, settled only slowly back into boredom. But the boredom claimed her eventually.

  Eventually it was clear that time had elapsed to sustain the polite fiction that Burton had enjoyed Mrs Davis’s company. He shuffled in his seat, coughed, and said: “I wonder whether Miss Davis would enjoy a stroll around the square?”

  Eleanor almost sighed with relief; not because she relished the prospect of walking with Burton, but because it marked an end to the parlour-torture of merely sitting there. She rose abruptly, and hurried through to her own room to dress herself for outside. She called Sally in with her to give the impression that she was being dressed by the maid, but in actuality she dressed herself, because Sally was inept at the task. Away from her future husband she gasped with a release of pressure. Maddeningly there were tears somewhere behind her eyes. She had to focus, to lock them away there.

  Burton and she stepped out together into the grey afternoon. Eleanor felt a little light-headed, with a touch of nausea in her abdomen, but that could doubtless be ascribed to the fact that she had eaten no luncheon. They strolled to Soho Square, Burton’s cane tapping the pavement as he walked.

  “I am so glad to find you well, Miss Davis,” he said.

  This might have been the occasion for her to say Call me Eleanor, please do; but she found herself disinclined to encourage such further intimacy between them. She was to marry the man, after all. That was surely enough.

  “And I,” she replied, looking briefly in his direction, “you.”

  For several minutes they walked in silence around the central green of Soho Square. Then Burton spoke, more forcefully than before.

  “I confess myself anxious, Miss Davis, that my gift to you was ill-chosen.”

  She smiled, but the anger was hard as a conker in her belly. She had already thanked him for the present. Was he fishing for more gratitude? Did he expect her to reassure him for ever? “It is quite alright, Mr Burton,” she said. “My mamma has perhaps misled you a little. It is only her teasing manner, she means no harm. But, truly, I shall enjoy the poems very much.”

  “I remember our first meeting was at the Fitzroy Society,” said Burton. “And I see now that your interest in science is genuine. Perhaps I would have pleased you better by bringing you a copy of Mrs Somerville’s Molecular and Microscopic Science, or something along those lines.”

  This struck home. Eleanor had seen that very book advertised in the endpapers of the latest Quarterly, which she had read at one of Lady Fonblaque’s soirées—and upon seeing the advertisement she had surrendered herself immediately to a hopeless covetousness. The book had been advertised as two volumes, post octavo, 21s. A fortune. It might just as well, for Eleanor, have been twenty-one pounds. And two volumes would mean two shillings for a week’s perusal out of the library; even that petty sum could not have been expended without hardship in some other quarter. And yet she wanted to read the book very much indeed. Could such work be hers, truly, as a gift?

  She tried to keep the eagerness from her voice. “Do you have that work, Mr Burton?”

  Burton looked away as if embarrassed. “I do, Miss Davis. The,” he added, with a little spurt of anxious expression, “the publisher sent me a copy.”

  “The publisher?”

  “Mr Murray. I know him through a mutual acquaintance. I, in turn, provided some of the microscopic equipment used to make the illustrations. My workers, my Blefuscans, are extremely skilled in fine optics work. If it would give you pleasure, I will lend you… pardon me, give you… the book.”

  Eleanor’s bibliophilic avarice flared in her breast. She wanted the book intensely. “That,” she said, with a tightly controlled inclination of her head, “would be very kind of you, Mr Burton.” Two volumes! With illustrations! Glee moved inside her, she couldn’t quell it. But immediately behind the delight came a sense of humiliation—that she was dependent on such a man as Burton for gifts of books. And with the humiliation came the anger again. That she could not buy the book herself!—twenty-one paltry shillings. That Burton could dangle the thing in front of her, as a treat for a faithful lapdog. That she was now beholden to him. Her hate crystallised inside her again; not so vehemently as it had done before, but with a sharp edge to it.

  Burton stopped suddenly, and stepped in front of her. “Miss Davis,” he said, earnestness making his big face look ridiculous. “May I call you Eleanor?”

  There was no avoiding it. “Of course,” she said.

  “Eleanor… I know it is conventional when a man makes a proposal of marriage, and when that proposal is accepted… conventional for the man to declare himself the happiest creature on the planet. But believe me, in my case the phrase is no mere form of words. You indeed make me, you have made me, happier than any man in the world.”

  His eyes, moist with unshed tears, glinted slimily in the sunlight.

  “Mr Burton…” Eleanor said.

  “It is hard for me to express, because I am no orator. I am not eloquent. But I never thought to find a woman… to find a wife… who would share in any way my own interests. My own passions.”

  “Interests?” queried Eleanor, choosing the less indecent word.

  The bare skin above Burton’s beard warmed orange-red again. The man blushes, Eleanor thought with annoyance, at the drop of a handkerchief. “My interest in the mechanical sciences, I mean to say,” he gabbled. “I only meant… but I am putting it poorly. I know I am an old man, my dear Eleanor. I know that I am but a poor catch for a beautiful young woman such as yourself.”

  He paused. Eleanor knew that she ought to frame some conventional contradiction at this point, to murmur No no, or Not at all, but the words stuck in her throat. Burton’s observations were nothing but the truth, after all.

  “I know,” he went on, stammering a little now, “that I am come from no fine family, that I bring no great dignity with me—except money, I suppose, and trash such as money can have no appeal to a woman of your breeding.” He ground to a halt, coughed, cleared his throat, and started again. “But I bring a true heart, Eleanor,” he said. His eyes were glistening. “I hope you will believe me, for it is the simple truth.”

  “Mr Burton,” Eleanor murmured.

  “Jonathan!” he cried, almost shouting. His blushing cheeks deepened their shade. “I’m sorry,” he stammered, “Please call me Jonathan.”

  His emotional distress was so intense that Eleanor began to feel almost alarmed at it. It was painful to watch a full-grown man reduced to such a state.

  “Jonathan,” she said.

  “Allow me,” he said, straightening his spine and endeavouring to speak with a more level voice. “Allow me to finish what I was saying, Eleanor. Perhaps it is foolish, but I feel I must say it, for my own peace of mind if for no other reason. I know that people gossip about our match. A man, although wealthy, of no family marries a woman from a better class than his own. They gossip that I have consented to the match only to raise my social standing. But it isn’t true! It isn’t true! I must tell you why I have fallen so in love with you…”

  “Jonathan,” she said again, vaguely rebuking.

  “I feel a commonality of spirit between us, Eleanor. It is not that you are young and beautiful, although you are both those things. It is not that I have come to a period in my life when I have the money and the inclination to start a family, although that is also true. It is that I sense, I sense, that you share my own passion for the sciences. For the mechanical sciences. For mathematics—your mother said so. Women so rarely see the beauty of science. Women are so often vain and foolish, so caught up in nonsense and vacancy. But not you, my darling.”

  He stepped towards her, as if he would embrace her, or even kiss her—right there, in the street: that would be just his sort of vulgarity, Eleanor thought, despising him with a panicky intensity. She could not stop herself stepping backward, and Burton pulled rapidly back as well, as if dancing cumbrously.