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By Root 422 0

her that she needed to eat, that if she didn’t he would be forced to feed her. Milk and custard, he was saying. Soaked bread. She could hear that he was exasperated, as with an awkward child, whereas it was his understanding that was childish. But she couldn’t explain to him, the effort of speech made her head ache, and her voice seemed of late to emerge as a shock, a little live thing in her mouth, jumpy and peculiar. It had none of the smooth serenity it had in her mind. So she didn’t tell him that to eat was to join the ordinary world of bodies and murder, of lust and destruction, was to swim through the world like a worm through soil, eating, making ordure. Possibly it was a thought he could understand, but what she could not begin to try and explain to him was that in Heaven to see and to eat are the same thing. Looking is absorption, is union, without destruction. There nothing is broken. Light flows into light endlessly, in harmony, and is perfectly still.

‘You’re smiling,’ he said. ‘I hope that’s a smile of agreement. No recovery of animal spirits is possible . . .’ Animal spirits! There was his stupidity in a phrase. He lived in contradictions he did not even perceive. ‘. . . although you don’t yet lack energy to the point of ceasing to move, that will come unless you are less cruel to yourself.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose, sighed through it. ‘I have said all that I wanted to say. I trust it has been understood.’

Margaret inclined her head. Matthew Allen accepted it as all the response he was presently likely to get. He patted her hand, its few dry sticks, and walked back to his study.The Silent Watcher watched him go.

The drawing on his desk - its cleanliness, its power, its levers. It could make the whole asylum an irrelevance if he so chose, and that was tempting, but he would keep up both concerns and be finally the multifaceted man he was. He would flourish. The drawing was of a machine, a conception of his own, improving on past designs. The draughtsmanship itself gave him pleasure, a sign of his intellect. Sharp ink strokes joined at right angles to define a square, three-dimensional tiered object that stood in abstract white space. It had an angelic clarity. It would change his life. Not since his discovery of phrenology and the mental sciences as a young man had anything excited him so much. It was like falling in love, this profusion of harmonious thoughts, this coalescing of passion and possibility, this new life. Matthew Allen was deeply smitten.

He sat down and sobered himself with details. The two-tray system was clearly superior, with a tracer and drill connected in perfect symmetry. He lifted the drawing and laid it carefully aside. Today he would write to Thomas Rawnsley, the young man with the workshop in Loughton who fashioned machine cogs from hornbeam, and request an instructive visit to his establishment. Men of progress and industry conferring together, one of them a man of science.

He dipped his nib, shook away excess drops.‘Dear Mr Rawnsley,’ he began. He looked up out of the window and saw the idiot Simon backing away in fear from Clara, who was scolding him for something.As she shouted she opened her clenched fists and shook out handfuls of torn grass. Matthew Allen turned back to his letter.

When Eliza Allen made the joke she held her tongue tip between her teeth for the moment after, as she always did, mischievously awaiting Hannah’s reaction. Hannah looked away, blushing painfully, her skin swarming with heat. It wasn’t as though the joke was even amusing; it hardly was a joke.Her mother’s jokes rarely were obvious, hence that infuriating expression of hers while she stared around waiting. All her mother had said was why didn’t she seek Mr Tennyson’s opinion of the book she had in her hand. Hannah’s discomfort was made acute by the thought of what it was she was reading. Had her mother read over her shoulder? Among her father’s poetry volumes she had found an old Dryden and picked it out. Between the long, solid, dully rectangular poems in rhyming couplets she had found