I’m taking my little Google man for a walk on your street, Acacia Row in the heart of Kensington. He’s impressed. But close up, the white stucco sugar-coating of number 32 is in need of repair. The house is flats now.

I’m looking for Monday morning, April 3rd, 1871.

Census day. The decorators are papering your bedroom walls in vivid green William Morris. Nobody yet knows the arsenic in the dye is lethal. Below, in the poky kitchen basement, Ethel Spratt is making a pie.

I send my man in, to knock on your door. There’s no answer.

The enumerator is here, collecting your census return. Who slept here last night? You say it was you and Caroline in the four-poster, the boy with the nursery maid, the coachman in the mews, Ethel Spratt in her scullery bunk – but you actually slept with Annie Montgomery in her father’s ‘studio,’ surrounded by dated mythical paintings and jars of turpentine. You think, mistakenly, that Caroline doesn’t know, that she believes you stayed at the Club.

Don’t be afraid of my little envoy. It’s only me, haunting you through pixels, visiting from the future, from the other side of your blanket.

The boy in your house is playing with a Noah’s Ark. A fight between a lion and a rhino. ‘Fine little chap,’ says the enumerator. The boy runs his fingers over each animal. He’s blind.

The rhino is my paperweight. He’s lost his horn.
Your boy dies in 1875. You tell Caroline you’ve given the Ark to the poor, but you give it to your other, secret boy. My great-great grandfather.

You die in this house in 1882.

From tuberculosis. What they once called phthisis.

Caroline, a year later.

From myocardial infarction. What they once called a broken heart.

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