The Lady's Slipper

by Deborah Swift

  When they entered the cabin Geoffrey’s breath was rattling in his chest. He was blue now around the lips, his cheeks grey with stubble, purplish stains under his eyes.

  ‘He asked for thee,’ said Richard to the parson. ‘I think he wanted to make his peace with God.’

  ‘Aye. It looks like it is time.’ He leaned over close to Geoffrey’s face. ‘The Lord bless and protect you. You wish to repent, and turn to God?’

  There was no answer, the breath began to falter and rasp in his throat. Richard and the parson exchanged glances. Suddenly, Geoffrey’s eyes fluttered and looked up.

  A word half formed on his lips. Richard spoke the name for him. ‘Yes. I’ll get word to him, tell him you love him.’

  A silence descended in the chamber, a silence bigger than the slapping of the waves and the sound of the spume from the bow. The parson put his hand on Geoffrey’s forehead. ‘I anoint you thus, so may our heavenly Father show you an inward anointing of the Holy Spirit of his great mercy. May he forgive you your sins and release you from suffering. May he deliver you from all evil, preserve you in righteousness and bring you to everlasting life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

  ‘Amen.’ Richard’s was the only voice.

  It was over. Thanks be to God. At last it was over.

  Chapter 40

  On the day of Geoffrey’s burial, the sea was the grey of charcoal, great saddles of cloud hung over the horizon. The ship forged relentlessly through the undulating water. The bell clanged out but the sound was swallowed by the wind.

  Geoffrey’s body had been wrapped and wound in the sheets from his bed and his canvas hammock. The gathering of hushed crew in their black armbands brought back memories of Flora’s wake, but the day of Flora’s funeral seemed to lie in a distant history when Alice was quite another woman.

  She could not imagine now that she had ever been that person–Thomas’s young wife, immaculate in spotless black mourning gown, sorrowing for the loss of her sister. A quite different person stood here now, swaying on the deck in her salt-spattered clothes. It seemed to her now that she had put on a suit, or a life, as the times demanded, and that she had always been in some sense a dissembler. The real feeling of who she was, like a seam of coal, was buried deep inside.

  She looked to where Richard heaved the white bundle, heavily weighted with shot, onto the chute. He was labouring in his wet shirt sleeves; no doubt this was considered strange by the crew, given that he was a gentleman. But they stood aside from him with respect nonetheless.

  Alice had given up anxiety about the future or predicting what might come to pass. She simply stood, watching Richard struggling, the wet cotton transparent against his forearms. She saw his face as the bundle disappeared over the side, and the involuntary rise of his palms as if he would call it back from where it sank, leaving not a trace behind it, not even a bubble or speck of foam. For hours he stood at the rails, looking back, a silent hulk, oblivious to the activity in the rigging, the winding up of ropes and the scurrying crew.

  In the days after the burial Alice was soft with Richard, for she knew the ache of grief herself, and ached with him. She could not help him, she saw that, and it hurt her to see him hide his anguish. He took it on himself to pack Geoffrey’s most personal possessions into his trunk–his suits, his fine cambric shirts, his comb and razor. And each time he emerged from Geoffrey’s cabin his jaw was set and his face was grey. He asked her if he should write to Stephen.

  She had replied, ‘No hurry, time enough for that when we reach New England.’

  It would be a hard letter to write, and one that would sound like a sort of nonsense had you not been there.

  The Master saw no reason not to honour Geoffrey’s ongoing trade commitments, which would pass now to his son. Richard had told him that the Fair Louise would belong now to Stephen Fisk, Geoffrey’s heir. In the weeks after Geoffrey’s death Richard had somehow grown to talking of him to the Master. It seemed to help him, to talk with another man, and now they bore each other grudging respect.

  A gentle acceptance had grown up inside her. She saw how her life was tied to Richard’s by an invisible cord. It tugged at her heart, so that the thought of life without him was unimaginable. And they were so small, on this huge table of water, their lives so tiny. There was something about the ocean that gave everything its proper perspective–a great stillness, for all its continual motion.

  The days became routine. Life at sea was full of discomfort, every thing was damp; even on fine days the dried salt sucked water into their clothes, but she hardly noticed it. It gave her time to rest and take stock. She needed time to marvel at how her life had turned over like a flipped farthing. She wondered about Thomas, why he had abandoned her at the last, and she wondered about Hannah, but she hardly gave the orchid a thought. It was lost forever. Geoffrey had seen to that. There would be no more lady’s slippers in the English woods. She heard Thomas’s words echo back to her. ‘It’s only a plant,’ he had said, and at the time she had thought him insensitive and boorish, caught up as she was in her ideals of art and refinement. Now she saw that perhaps he was right–in the grand scale of things, it was only a plant.

  During the weeks that followed the Master sometimes sat in Geoffrey’s cabin, but neither Alice nor Richard could bear to spend much time there. The Master occasionally brought out one of Geoffrey’s books or maps, so that Alice grew to appreciate Geoffrey’s fine collection of works on natural history, and she and Richard spent many evenings studying his map of the new territories together. In the evenings there was improvised music from the pipes and tabor and the crew told them tall tales about Virginia and the natives there, though many of these proved to be so hair-raising that in the end Richard ceased to ask for them.

  The sea took its toll, they frequently had to lash themselves to their bunk, and oft-times she was so terrified by the immensity of the waves that she wished the ocean would swallow them up and have done with it. She hated the miserable diet of ship’s biscuit and the way everything tasted of salt. She longed for some honey, longed for dry clothes and the crackle of a wood fire. And she yearned for the green fields of England with an almost physical passion that wrung her heart, but when her thoughts turned that way she would look over to Richard, and the sight of his chestnut hair and thoughtful expression was enough to soften her and make her count her blessings.

  She would catch him sometimes, staring down at the waves, a far-away look in his eyes, a slight furrowing of his eyebrows, and know he was thinking of Geoffrey. At those times she knew not to go to him but to leave him with his thoughts, to let the constant conversation of the sea soothe him.

  One morning she awoke early, feeling even more restless than usual. She left Richard sleeping and went up onto the deck, staring out behind them at the wake of white foam. Her eyes stung from the brine in the air, her hair whipped round her mouth. She turned to face the prow and inhaled. The air smelt softer somehow; afterwards she fancied she had sensed the damp freshness of the vegetation, but she would never forget the taste of that moment.

  ‘Land ho!’ came the shout from the crow’s nest, followed by sudden activity on the rigging as the men clambered aloft for their first view of the New England.

  She ran to the rails. She was transfixed. On the horizon the blurred outline of the coast appeared as a smudge, almost an illusion in the wavering heat. She looked at it with disbelief, a sense of unreality, as if looking at an illustration in a book.

  So many colours and textures after the months of dark cabins and unrelenting grey seas. The plants so tall and green, the wooden jetty built out of thick timbers with rough bark that was almost red. As they hoved into sight of the unfamiliar harbour with its strange collection of squat timber buildings, Richard came to stand wordlessly beside her. He wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her close so her head lay on his shoulder.

  ‘There it is,’ he said, ‘and I cannot tell what kind of land it is. But I hope it is a place of new begin
nings, a place to inspire us. A virgin land, where we can build something new with our own hands.’

  ‘What will we do? Find the seekers who have gone before?’

  She felt his body tense. There was a long pause before he answered. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I realize now, I can never be like them. The seekers are good people, right enough. But sometimes the world needs fire as well as peace. I cannot live their life, only my own.’ She pulled away from him, but he looked into her eyes and said softly, ‘I cannot make promises of peace when I may feel called to break them–cannot live by their certainties when life will give me none.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Maybe in another age, a golden age, we will have no need to protect those we love. Lord forgive me, but I cannot live the Quaker way.’

  She moved further away, astonished.

  ‘Art thou done with the seekers then?’

  He paused for a few moments before giving his answer. ‘I do not know. I have been thinking on it. When I took sword to defend thee, in that moment I came to life–too much control destroys a man. I was more truly myself then, with a sword in my hand, than any amount of digging vegetables in Netherbarrow. It led me to ask whether God is truly as much in the soldier as in a peacemaker, and to try to fathom when soldiering ceases to be God’s work and becomes an instrument of terror.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ A great fear had arisen inside her.

  ‘When my men butchered Geoffrey’s mother, they had lost sight of themselves, turned from God. The house was already surrendered, it was madness–bloodshed for no cause, designed for no end but to cause suffering.’

  She heard the passion in his voice. His face was alight with a kind of fierce pride.

  ‘But there is an honour and a glory in fighting. It is life that is holy, not our warped view of God. A soldier aims to preserve the lives of the old and the vulnerable, the women and the children of their homeland–oh, Alice, it is a glory I can taste but cannot express in words. That is what I mean. And that is what I am called to do.’

  ‘But thou hast no land now, but this one. And we have not yet set foot there. And thou art telling me thou desirest more strife? How canst thou speak of such things?’ She searched his face.

  ‘I do not know. All I know is that I defended thee with my sword and would do so again. That is the truth.’ He turned his face into the wind before returning to place one hand on her cheek. His brown eyes looked into hers. ‘Thou knowest, I care for thee so much that I would cut down any man that tried to hurt thee. And I would lay down my own life gladly to save thine. The seekers have taught me one thing–and that is, to search out the truth of ourselves, to see clearly who or what we are. And in my deepest being, I have found I am a soldier. Canst thou love a soldier, Alice?’

  She put aside her misgivings and reached up to kiss him. It was her act of faith.

  ‘I love thee whatever thou art,’ she said. And she resolved in that moment to be true to her word, although a great flutter of uncertainty hung over her heart. She took in a deep breath.

  The Fair Louise strained against its anchor, and the timbers creaked as the ropes were flung to the quay to secure her down.

  Alice held tight onto Richard’s arm as she walked down the gangplank, a little unsteadily, her scuffed black boots reaching out towards the dazzling quay and the painted buildings of the New World.

  Epilogue 1695

  From the water the dark silhouette of the twin landmarks of church and castle were hidden behind the façade of grey that flanked the quay, but as soon as the horses turned uphill to pull away up to the town, there it was, as if carved from blood-red sandstone.

  Time had stood still there; the crenellated tower of the castle gaol and the neighbouring priory were unweathered by the storms of change, the coming and going of kings and queens, the shift of empires and boundaries. Alice stared and stared at the castle’s craggy outline as the carriage rattled its way over the cobbles. From inside she had thought the gaol to be a vast underground territory, like a maze of damp labyrinthine corridors, and she remembered it as black, like something that might house a minotaur. She was surprised to see that it was a jutting protuberance in the landscape, much loftier than she had thought, a grisly red landmark sitting above the town like a crown on a royal head.

  After all this time the memory of it had begun to blur, her remembrance of it becoming worn like a washed-out tapestry, but she could not help but wonder if innocent people were even now incarcerated in its bleak vaults. The thought caused her to shudder and pull down the leather blind on the window.

  She had hired a post-chaise for herself and her maid and manservant to travel from Lancaster, for she could afford it now, and the sea journey had made her stiff and uncomfortable. Aboard ship, by careful negotiation and by dint of her age she had been able to secure them a private cabin, but after all this time she had forgotten how the incessant dipping and bobbing on the water and the constant struggle to remain upright taxed the body. Despite the autumn chill, Alice had braved the open deck to get the first glimpse of the old port as she drew within sight of land; despite everything, she was surprised to find she still considered it to be a homecoming. The sheer quantity of smacks and barges, the hoys plying their routes to the other tallships at anchor in deeper water took her breath away. The wharf had become a wall of huge stonework buildings with gantries and loading bays, pulleys and cranks to load and offload the cargoes of herring, or wool, or tobacco, or tea. The familiar landmarks were overlaid by new features, which gave the peculiar effect of looking through a mist into the past.

  After a night’s rest, she asked the coachman to call first in the village to see if she could find Thomas’s grave. In the early years she had wondered about him, the mysterious illness Geoffrey had mentioned, and had sent word to him on several occasions by letter but had no reply. Her letters had been stilted and brief. She had asked him to release her from the marriage, to sell her forth, as was the custom. It rankled in her heart, the thought that when she wed Richard she was already in some way wife to Thomas. But when several years had passed with no word, she had written to ask Stephen about him. At first she had been reluctant to ask Stephen for news directly, fearing that his enquiries would bring trouble in their wake. Stephen replied that he had assumed they already knew–Thomas had died some years before. He must never have received her letters.

  She rubbed her fingers through her mitts; they were stiff and aching in the unaccustomed cold, and the knuckles were hard as fetlocks. These days her hands were bent out of shape with age, dry and peppered with liverspots. When she looked down on them she found it hard to remember that they had ever been smooth-jointed and rosy.

  From the window of the carriage the hedges of Lancashire gave way to the walls of Westmorland. The fields were full of fat wethers and she saw pheasants standing golden in the verges. These sights constricted her throat; she felt her youth sweep in, threatening to overwhelm her with bittersweet memories.

  Her house at Netherbarrow had a new whintin slate roof and a front gate made from a wagon wheel cleverly inset. The globed box trees by the door were gone. As she alighted, stepping down awkwardly, holding the doorframe in one hand, several small curious children appeared from around the back and looked up at her with wide-eyed faces, wondering who had come to call.

  She explained that she had lived there once and asked if she might walk in the garden. The housemaid shrugged, and Alice nodded back, an exchange that Alice took to be permission. The garden was more unruly and overgrown than when she had left it, but some of the plants she had set as seeds were still there, thriving, all this time after. She ran her hand over a sturdy rosemary shrub, brought her fingers to her nose. She had planted this, not expecting it to survive the harsh Westmorland winter, yet here it was, its pungent tang reminding her of the warmth of New Hampshire. The apple trees had grown tall and thick-trunked, so she wended her way between them down the path towards the octagonal stone building she could see just peeping
out from behind the already yellowing leaves.

  When she got closer she could see it was in disrepair. Ivy had grown up over it and seemed to be clasping the building against collapse, its tendrils creeping in through the roof, pushing the slates aside. She stepped inside, felt the sudden rise in warmth now she was out of the wind. It was empty of furniture, there was no glass in the window frames and the door was missing. The sills were curded with bird droppings and the roof beams thick with cobwebs. Alice took in the bare walls, the whitewash mottled with patches of damp. She could not help but admire the patches of pink Indian willowherb sprouted in the corners. She had expected to be moved, to feel something, but the building was an empty shell; the wind and weather must have scoured the place of memory. She looked down. Two plump brown bantams at her feet scratched at some scattered seed and the couch grass in the gaps between the flags. One of the children had followed her down the path and into the summerhouse. ‘That one’s mine,’ he said pointing to one of the hens.

  ‘She’s a beauty.’

  ‘You can have an egg if you like.’ The boy ran to the back of the summerhouse and came back with a brown hen’s egg cradled in his hand.

  ‘It’s still warm,’ he said, handing it to her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, opening her bag and gently placing the egg inside. ‘That’s a lovely present.’

  ‘Are you going home now?’

  ‘Yes. I was looking for my sister but I can see she’s not here.’

  ‘Is your sister an old lady like you?’

  ‘No, she was about your age.’ Seeing the boy’s perplexed face, she said, ‘I am not making much sense, am I? But never mind, my carriage is still waiting. Thank you for the egg.’ She followed the skipping figure down the path, without looking back.