Free Away by Jane Urquhart

languages in the world and wondered about the possibilities and the clamour of unfamiliar collections of sounds.
    Night after night the small book in her hands overwhelmed her. The very idea of Poland left her stunned; its cities and rivers and paintings and population and indistinguishable sounds all going on while she was quiet in their cottage. And when she had recovered from Poland the page describing Holland would disorient her to such an extent that she wouldhave to put the book down so that she could compose herself before facing Silesia.
    “Is it true, then?” she would ask Brian after being shocked by the Maltese Islands or Tasmania, her eyes huge as if seeing it all there in front of her.
    Laughing, he would cross the room, stand behind her with his arms encircling her neck so she felt the dry wool of his jumper next to her cheek. “Soon I’ll teach you Latin,” he would whisper, “and Greek.”
    Italy. Greece. Their temples built themselves in her imagination. She needed, she said to Brian, an example of the colour turquoise, as that was the colour of the sea there. He searched for days and then appeared with a shard of china where two and a half turquoise birds were frozen in flight. The baby clasped it in his fist and then put it in his mouth from where it was rescued shining. “It’s a sky colour,” she said then, “a colour of birds.” “So I believe,” Brian replied. Mary carried the fragment in her apron pocket from then on, so that it would not harm the baby. It nudged in her a frail image of a landscape shown to her by a pale hand, but the memory was confused with the jumble of information gathered from her recent reading.
    Her legend, which had preceded her to the mainland, stayed with her, of course, and denied her the kind of easy company another young wife might have had with those of the same sex, so she was often alone when Brian was working. But she was not unhappy. The world held her full attention, the same world from which she had been parted two years before. It absorbed her in exaggerated ways. Its vastness – continents, seas, and solar systems – described in the book seemed to break through the bounds of her body while she was reading. And the rest ofthe time the particularities of her daily life with its attendant objects and rituals gave her calm pleasure. The child alone was universe enough for her, his perfect body in her hands: the clear eye and small ear, sweet breath and smooth skin. But blankets and buckets, water or milk in a jug, a shelf that displayed her few pieces of blue willow china, a cast-iron pot, a knife, puddles outside the door, turf ready for the fire all gave her joy.
    Brian had not called her back but she had come nevertheless into the world he had offered to her. The other had drifted away on a concealed current, floated elsewhere, visiting her only occasionally at night in dreams that disappeared in the new light of these mornings at the sound of the child’s awakening cry.

 
    O N a sunny autumn day in 1845 the Sedgewick brothers were working on their shell collection – a full morning dedicated to conchology.
    Osbert had his watercolours arranged in front of him – rose, a touch of ochre, soft grey, eggshell white, burnt umber – and his thoughts moved cheerfully back and forth, as he worked, from these colours to gold, which he had been reading about in the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia the night before; that pure substance, stabilizer, he believed, of the universe. He imagined veins of it as the earth’s ligaments, a binding force without which the planet would simply fly to pieces. He disapproved of mining it, he had explained to Granville, for precisely this reason. All this removal of purity from the ground could lead only to disastrous consequences. Some of the sorrows of Ireland, he maintained, were undoubtedly based on the fact that gold was not prevalent in the makeup of the country’s rocks. Instead of trying to get the precious