Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  “Next day I tried to warn my brother, and it was as the black artist had said. When I opened my mouth to speak on this topic it was as though my lips were sewn together with great stitches in the flesh, and my tongue would not move in my mouth. Yet I might ask to have the salt passed, or discourse of the evil weather, and so my brother, to my great chagrin, noticed nothing, but set out blithely to go hunting with his new friend, leaving me at home to sit by the hearth, and to feel silent anguish at what might ensue. All day I sat so, and in the late afternoon, when the shadows were long on the castle lawns and the last rays of the sun were brassy and chill, I knew with certainty that something terrible had happened, and ran out of the castle, and away to the dark woods. And out of the dark woods came the black man, leading his horse on one arm, and on the other a tall grey hound with the saddest face I have ever seen on any creature. He told me my brother had suddenly gone away, and would return no more for a great and uncertain length of time and had left me, and the castle, in charge of him, the dark magician. He told me this gaily, as if it did not much matter whether I believed it or no. I said I would by no means submit to such injustice and was glad to hear my own voice steady and confident, for I feared my lips might again be sewn into silence. When I spoke great tears fell from the eyes of the grey hound, more and more, heavier and heavier. And I knew in some sort, I think, that the animal was my brother, in this meek and helpless form. Then I was angry, and said he should never come into my house, nor come near me, with my good will. And he said that I had perceived correctly, that he might do nothing without my good will which he would strive to gain, if I would allow it. And I said, this should never be, and he must never hope for it. Then he became angry, and threatened that he would silence me forever, if I would not agree. I said that without my dear brother I had little care where I was, and no one I wished to speak to. Then he said I should see whether that was so after a hundred years in a glass coffin. He made a few passes and the castle diminished and shrank, as you see it now, and he made a pass or two more and it was walled with glass as you see. And my people, the men and maidservants who came running, he confined as you see, each in a glass bottle, and finally closed me into the glass coffin in which you found me. And now, if you will have me, we will hasten from this place, before the magician returns, as he does from time to time, to see if I have relented.”

  “Of course I will have you,” said the little tailor, “for you are my promised marvel, released with my vanished glass key, and I love you dearly already. Though why you should have me, simply because I opened the glass case, is less clear to me altogether, and when, and if, you are restored to your rightful place, and your home and lands and people are again your own, I trust you will feel free to reconsider the matter, and remain, if you will, alone and unwed. For me, it is enough to have seen the extraordinary gold web of your hair, and to have touched that whitest and most delicate cheek with my lips.” And you may ask yourselves, my dear and most innocent readers, whether he spoke there with more gentleness or cunning, since the lady set such store on giving herself of her own free will, and since also the castle with its gardens, though now measurable with pins and fine stitches and thumbnails and thimbles, were lordly and handsome enough for any man to wish to spend his days there. The beautiful lady then blushed, a warm and rosy colour in her white cheeks, and was heard to murmur that the spell was as the spell was, that a kiss received after the successful disintegration of the glass casket was a promise, as kisses are, whether received voluntarily or involuntarily. Whilst they were thus disputing, politely, the moral niceties of their interesting situation, a rushing sound was heard, and a melodious twanging, and the lady became very agitated, and said the black magician was on his way. And our hero, in his turn, felt despondent and fearful, for his little grey mentor had given him no instructions for this eventuality. Still, he thought, I must do what I can to protect the lady, to whom I owe so much, and whom I have certainly, for better, for worse, released from sleep and silence. He carried no weapon save his own sharp needles and scissors, but it occurred to him that he could make do with the slivers of glass from the broken sarcophagus. So he took up the longest and sharpest, wrapping its hilt round in his leather apron, and waited.

  The black artist appeared on the threshold, wrapped in a swirling black cloak, smiling most ferociously, and the little tailor quaked and held up his splinter, thinking his foe would be bound to meet it magically, or freeze his hand in motion as he struck. But the other merely advanced, and when he came up, put out a hand to touch the lady, whereupon our hero struck with all his might at his heart, and the glass splinter entered deeply and he fell to the ground. And behold, he shrivelled and withered under their eyes, and became a small handful of grey dust and glass powder. Then the lady wept a little, and said that the tailor had now twice saved her, and was in every way worthy of her hand. And she clapped her hands together, and suddenly they all rose in the air, man, woman, house, glass flasks, heap of dust, and found themselves out on a cold hillside where stood the original little grey man with Otto the hound. And you, my sagacious readers, will have perceived and understood that Otto was the very same hound into which the young brother of the lady of the coffin had been transformed. So she fell upon his grey hairy neck, weeping bright tears. And when her tears mixed with the salty tears that fell down the great beast’s cheek, the spell was released, and he stood before her, a golden-haired young man in hunting-costume. And they embraced, for a long time, with full hearts. Meanwhile the little tailor, aided by the little grey man, had stroked the glass case containing the castle with the two feathers from the cock and hen, and with a strange rushing and rumbling the castle appeared as it must always have been, with noble staircases and innumerable doors. Then the little tailor and the little grey man uncorked the bottles and flasks and the liquids and smokes flowed sighing out of the necks of them, and formed themselves into men and women, butler and forester, cook and parlourmaid, all mightily bewildered to find themselves where they were. Then the lady told her brother that the little tailor had rescued her from her sleep and had killed the black artist and had won her hand in marriage. And the young man said that the tailor had offered him kindness, and should live with them both in the castle and be happy ever after. And so it was, and they did live happily ever after. The young man and his sister went hunting in the wild woods, and the little tailor, whose inclination did not lie that way, stayed by the hearth and was merry with them in the evenings. Only one thing was missing. A craftsman is nothing without the exercise of his craft. So he ordered to be brought to him the finest silk cloth and brilliant threads, and made for pleasure what he had once needed to make for harsh necessity.

  5

  The ploughman, turning sullen clods may see

  (Air whistling in his brain that rose in sighs

  From belly griped by famine) the soil work

  And work, to extrude a demon, with knobbed brow

  And golden eyes, that opens a brown mouth

  To promise—not the dream of avarice—

  But pots of gold to buy the pots of pulse

  Of which, no more, he dreams. So she may feel

  Whisk past her skirt and scamper, hairy feet

  Of an old gentle godling, who leaves tracks

  In the warm ashes, or whose grincing voice

  Laughs even in the cradle, saying “Love me,

  Rock me, and find your treasure, never fear.

  The old gods keep their gifts to give their own.”

  From such small demons, what harm might they fear?

  —R. H. ASH, from The Incarcerated Sorceress

  The wolds of Lincolnshire are a small surprise. Tennyson grew up in one of their tight twisting valleys. From them he made the cornfields of immortal Camelot.

  On either side the river lie

  Long fields of barley and of rye

  That clothe the wold and meet the sky.

  Roland saw immediately that the word “meet” was precise and
surprising, not vague. They drove over the plain, up the rolling road, out of the valley. The valleys are deep and narrow, some wooded, some grassy, some ploughed. The ridges run sharply across the sky, always bare. The rest of the large, sleepy county is marsh or fen or flat farmed plain. These slightly rolling hills appear to be folded out of the surface of the earth, but that is not the case; they are part of a dissected tableland. The villages are buried in the valleys, at the end of blind funnels. The green car went busily along the ridgeway, which was patterned with roads and paths like the branches of spines. Roland, who was urban, noted colours: dark ploughed earth, with white chalk in the furrows; a pewter sky, with chalk-white clouds. Maud noticed good rides and unmended gates, and badly crunched hedgerows, gnashed by machine-teeth.

  “Down on the left,” she said. “Seal Court. In the hollow.”

  A carpet of treetops, not homogeneous, and a glimpse of battlements, a round turret, another turn, and a sort of keep, perhaps.

  “The land’s private, of course. We can go down into the village. Christabel’s buried there. In St Etheldreda’s churchyard. The village is called Croysant le Wold; it’s a lost village, more or less—there are a lot of lost villages scattered round the feet of these hills, no more than a grange and a church still standing. I don’t think the Croysant church is in use nowadays. Christabel thought Croysant was derived from Croyance, meaning belief, and Saint—but it was one of those inaccurate guessing nineteenth-century etymologies. They say it really came from Croissant, meaning crescent, because there’s a bend in the valley and the river there. She liked St Etheldreda, who was a Virgin Queen, although she was twice married—she became Abbess of Ely and founded a great House, and was buried in the odour of sanctity—”

  Roland was not very interested in St Etheldreda. This morning Maud seemed again remote and patronising. They descended the switchback road and turned off in the valley towards the church, which stood in its walled graveyard, solid, square-towered. Outside its gate a battered estate-car was parked; Maud drew up at a distance, and together they walked in. The earth was wet. Blackening beech leaves, from a tree near the gate, clogged the path through the little graveyard, which was overgrown with damp, dun hay. Flanking the heavy stone porch were two large yews, heavy-shadowed. Maud, sensible in trench-coat and Wellingtons, her head still scarfed, strode up to the wrought-iron gate across the porch, which was bolted and padlocked. Water, containing a brilliant green sediment, dripped from a gutter onto the stone, leaving a sinuous stain.

  “The Baileys are in the church,” said Maud. “But Christabel’s out on the edge, in the wind and the rain, where she wanted to be. Over here.”

  They clambered over tussocks and humps. They put their feet in the rabbit-runs between the dead. There was a shoulder-high stone wall, rooted with ivy-leaved toadflax. Christabel’s tombstone leaned over at a slight angle. It was made of local limestone, not marble, and roughened by weather. Someone had cleaned the lettering, not very recently.

  Here lie the mortal remains of

  Christabel Madeleine LaMotte

  Elder daughter of Isidore LaMotte

  Historian

  And of his beloved wife

  Arabel LaMotte

  Only sister of Sophie, Lady Bailey

  Wife of Sir George Bailey of Seal Court

  Croysant le Wold

  Born January 3rd 1825

  Laid to rest May 8th 1890

  After mortal trouble

  Let me lie still

  Where the wind drives and the clouds stream

  Over the hill

  Where grass’s thousand thirsty mouths

  Sup up their fill

  Of the slow dew and the sharp rain

  Of the mantling snow dissolv’d again

  At Heaven’s sweet will.

  Someone, again not recently, had sheared the hay from the grave, which was surrounded by a low and crumbling stone rim, thrust apart by couch grass and thorny trails of bramble. On the grassy mound lay the ghost of a large, indeed opulent bouquet, held together by bridal wires, now rusted amongst the mop heads of dead chrysanthemums and carnations, the skeletal leaves of long-faded roses. A green satin ribbon, water-stained and earth-stained, held these fragments together; there was a card tied to this, on which was palely visible in typewriting

  For Christabel

  From the women of Tallahassee

  Who truly honour you

  Who keep your memory green

  And continue your work

  “The stones I shaped endure.”

  Melusina, XII, 325

  “Leonora was here,” said Maud. “In the summer. When Sir George threatened her with a shotgun.”

  “She had a go at the weeds perhaps,” said Roland, who felt threatened by damp and melancholy.

  “Leonora would be very shocked at the state of this graveyard,” said Maud. “She would not find it romantic. I think it’s all right. A slow return to nature and oblivion.”

  “Did Christabel write that poem?”

  “It’s one of her quieter efforts. You see it’s not ascribed. The tombstone mentions her father’s profession, and doesn’t say a word about her own.”

  Roland felt briefly guilty of the oppressions of mankind. He said mildly, “It’s the poem that sticks in the memory. Rather sinister.”

  “As though the grass were supping up Christabel.”

  “Well, it was, I suppose.”

  They looked at the grass. It lay damply, in decaying tufts.

  “Let’s walk up the hill,” said Maud. “We can look down on Seal Court from a distance. She must have come this way often enough, she was a diligent churchgoer.”

  From behind the church a ploughed field slanted up to the uncompromising skyline. Silhouetted against the grey sky, on the top, was a figure Roland at first took for a seated monarch by Henry Moore, enthroned and crowned. Then it inclined its head and struggled fiercely with arms pointing earthwards, and Roland caught glints of silver and reconstituted it as a person in a wheelchair, possibly in difficulty.

  “Look!” he said to Maud.

  Maud stared upwards.

  “Perhaps they’re in trouble.”

  “Someone must be with them or they wouldn’t have got up there,” said Maud reasonably.

  “Perhaps,” said Roland, setting off nevertheless, his town shoes thickening with mud as he climbed, his hair ruffling. He was in good health, owing to the cycling perhaps, despite carbon monoxide and lead in London streets.

  In the wheelchair was a woman, wearing a deep-crowned, wide-brimmed green felt hat, obscuring her face, and a paisley silk scarf at the throat of a caped loden coat. The chair had spun out of the central track along the ridge and was now skewed at the precipitous edge of what would be a steep and stony career. Leather-gloved hands strove with the huge hoops. Leather boots, beautifully soft and polished, rested placidly on the shifting step. There was, Roland saw, a huge flint embedded in the mud under the back of the wheel, preventing all attempts at manoeuvre or reversal.

  “Can I help?”

  “Oh,” on a long stressed sigh. “Oh, thank you. I do s-seem to be b-bogged down.” The voice was hesitant, old and patrician. “S-such a b-bother. So so h-h-h-h-helpless. If you please—”

  “There’s a stone. Under the wheel. Wait. Hold on.”