A Man of Genius Read Free Page B

one of them has a real understanding of physic. The eel of science, Madam, will not be caught by the tail. It will not, it will protest.’
    His gestures were so comical, so typical of the type he mocked that she had to laugh. She was flattered he did it for her. And it was for her, she the only audience of a man who could enthral a crowd of men.
    Sure enough the pain died away.
    He brought her a lily, some lilac, a rose, and all together. How could they have all been in season? But she remembered the scents mingling, so heady that they went beyond flowers. That was the point, he said. All making one.
    But why would separate smells mingle to make a better? Common sense would argue . . .
    â€˜Reason, my little Puritan, is the critic and interpreter of nature. Then intuition finds dark corners in the mind where reason stumbles. It is not common-sense to rely on common sense,’ and he pranced around holding a flower in each hand. He twined them in her hair and looked intensely at the result. Then very gently he stroked her cheek with the lily’s softness until she sneezed.
    They went to the theatre, but had to avoid Edmund Kean, all the rage among the vulgar. He’d once given his fragment of Attila to Kean to read aloud to auditors. The great man had turned his inward tragedy into fustian, the kind of melodrama Robert particularly despised. Horrified, he’d torn the pages from the little actor’s surprised grasp.
    She knew the story. She’d heard it from several sources.
    So she took Robert to The Castle Spectre with its bleeding nun and devilish seductress. No pretension there to high art, no bathos where no heights. He was bored.
    Better bored than furious, she reflected.
    What he liked, it seemed, were new tricks, the famous gas lighting at the Lyceum and Drury Lane. She couldn’t share his joy: an evening in gaslight made her chest heave and her eyes water – the effect lastedfor fully three days. He loved too the mirrored curtain which showed the audience itself; they saw it later when they went down to Lambeth Marsh to watch the jugglers and harlequinade of the new Royal Coburg. Such simple entertainment was, Robert declared, more real than the sensational stuff strutted by Edmund Kean.
    Her cousin Sarah was quietly amused when she saw the new pea-green gown and heard of the visit to Lambeth Marsh. She knew Mary Davies a little through some acquaintance of Charles’s sister and, from the trail of gossip, learned that Ann and a male companion had been seen walking in Hyde Park together, close together, and talking all the while. Mary Davies had been restrained: no hint of the dislike she’d felt at the behaviour of her boorish guest.
    â€˜Are you in love?’ Sarah asked playfully – on important matters like family and children her broad face became prettily serious, not now. ‘I know there’s a man in the case.’
    â€˜He’s not exactly in the case, an acquaintance,’ Ann replied. ‘You know me. I’ve done with that sort of thing. I’m growing an old spinster. I shall soon adopt the Mrs style. Gregory Lloyd was enough.’
    Yet on the tip of her tongue to say that this was so very different. ‘I just want to make my own living,’ she said.
    â€˜You know that I cannot believe you,’ smiled Sarah.
    â€˜I’ve always known I might have such a relative,’ Sarah Hardisty had said when years before Ann had fallen into her life from another world. She laughed as she often did to punctuate her thoughts, ‘but our mothers quarrelled. I was told yours was rather, shall we say, unusual?’ She glanced anxiously at this new cousin.
    â€˜We shall indeed,’ replied Ann, smiling back. ‘But I haven’t seen her for years.’
    â€˜I’m so sorry.’ Sarah was about to reach for Ann’s hand when the other’s expression stayed her.
    â€˜Don’t waste pity. Caroline and I are better