The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(65)

Claire knew perfectly well that these fits of frustration, besides being self-indulgent and futile, did her no good at all, especially at such a crucial time in her life, when her main concern ought to have been finding a husband to support her and provide her with half a dozen offspring to show the world she was of good breeding stock. Her friend Lucy used to warn her she was gaining a reputation among her suitors for being unsociable, and some of them had abandoned their courtship after realizing that her offhanded manner made her an impregnable fortress. Nevertheless, Claire could not help reacting the way she did. Or could she? Sometimes she wondered whether she did everything in her power to overcome her gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, or whether on the contrary she derived a morbid pleasure from giving in to it. Why could she not accept the world as it was, like Lucy, who stoically endured the torments of the corset as though they were some sort of atonement aimed at purifying her soul, who did not mind not being allowed to study at Oxford, and who put up with being visited by her suitors in scrupulous succession, in the knowledge that sooner or later she must marry one of them? But Claire was not like Lucy: she loathed those corsets apparently designed by the devil himself, she longed to be able to use her brain the way any man could, and she was not the slightest bit interested in marrying any of the young men hovering around her. It was the idea of marriage she found most distressing—despite the great progress since her mother’s day, when a woman who married was immediately stripped of all her possessions, even the money she earned from paid employment, so that the law, like an ill-fated wind, blew straight into her husband’s grasping hands. At least if Claire were to marry now, she would keep her possessions and might even win custody of her children in the event of a divorce. Even so, she continued to consider marriage a form of legal prostitution, as Mary Wollstonecraft had stated in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—a work which to Claire was as sacred as the Bible. She admired the author’s determined struggle to restore women’s dignity, her insistence that women should stop being considered the handmaidens of men, whom science deemed more intelligent because their skulls—and therefore their brains—were bigger, even though she had more than enough evidence to suggest that such enhanced proportions were only good for filling a larger hat. On the other hand, Claire knew that if she refused to place herself under a man’s tutelage, she would have no choice but to make her own living, to try to find employment in one of the few openings available to someone of her position: that is to say as a stenographer or nurse, both of which appealed to her even less than being buried alive with one of the elegant dandies who took it in turns to worship her.

But what could she do if marriage seemed such an unacceptable alternative? She felt she only could go through with it if she were truly to fall in love with a man—something she considered virtually impossible, for her indifference towards men was not confined to her dull crowd of admirers, but extended to every man on the planet, young or old, rich or poor, handsome or ugly.

The niceties were unimportant: she was firmly convinced she could never fall in love with any man from her own time, whoever he might be, for the simple reason that his idea of love would pale beside the romantic passion to which she longed to surrender herself. Claire yearned to be overwhelmed by an uncontrollable passion, a violent fervor that would scorch her very soul; she longed for a furious happiness to compel her to take fateful decisions that would allow her to gauge the strength of her feelings. And yet she longed without hope, for she knew that this type of love had gone out with frilly blouses. What else could she do? Resign herself to living without the one thing she imagined gave meaning to life? No, of course not.

And yet, a few days earlier something had happened which, to her amazement had roused her sleeping curiosity, encouraging her to believe that, despite first appearances, life was not completely devoid of surprises. Lucy had summoned her to her house with her usual urgency and, somewhat reluctantly, Claire had obeyed. Although she feared her friend had organized yet another of those tedious séances to which she was so partial. Lucy had joined in the latest craze to come out of America with the same zeal with which she followed the latest Paris fashions. Claire was not so much bothered by having to make believe she was conversing with spirits in a darkened room as she was by Eric Sanders, a skinny, arrogant young man who had set himself up as the official neighborhood medium, and who orchestrated the séances.

Sanders maintained he had special powers that allowed him to communicate with the dead, but Claire knew this was simply a ruse to gather half a dozen unmarried, impressionable young girls round a table, plunge them into an intimidating gloom, terrify them with a preposterously cavernous voice, and take advantage of their proximity to stroke their hands and even their shoulders with complete impunity. The crafty Sanders had read enough of The Spirits’ Book by Allan Kardec to be able to interrogate the dead with apparent ease and confidence, although he was evidently far too interested in the living to pay much attention to their responses. After the last séance when Claire had slapped him after she felt a spirit’s all too real hand caressing her ankles, Sanders had banned her from attending any further gatherings, insisting that her skeptical nature was too upsetting to the dead and hampered his communication with them. At first, her exclusion from Sanders’s supernatural gatherings came as a relief, but she ended up feeling disheartened: she was twenty-one and had fallen out not only with this world but with the world beyond.