The Lady's Slipper

by Deborah Swift

  The carriage took her to the green, from where it was a short walk along the lanes to the church. Alice scanned the hedgerows for familiar plants from her youth, saying the long unused names as she passed, until she came to the lychgate with its tall yews either side. The wind whistled round the church and inside it was not much warmer. She was not used to the cold now; she had been too long in the warmth of New Hampshire and she felt the draught eat into her bones. In the side vestry the new curate brought her the ledger and laid it out where the light from the domed window would enable her to read it. She took out her eyeglasses, for these days she was never without them.

  The book was thick as a coping stone but the pages thin calf-vellum. Each entry had a name, a date and some details of the manner of death. Her finger traced each entry, going back over the years, seeing the black fates of her dimly remembered neighbours written out in copper penmanship and gall.

  Here were Audrey and Tom Cobbald, little Lizzie Pickering, the Hardacres and the Armitages. And dear Betty Tansy, the cook, who stood up for her so bravely, dead these twelve years of a fever. The book brought forth the sad ghosts of their smiles, their hard graft, their determination to outwit a death which in the end can never be outrun. Their faces swam before her until her head reeled with people and dates.

  Her hands had grown stiff by the time she reached the name she sought: Thomas James Ibbetson, moneylender, right back in October 1660. So he had been dead all that time. Right from the very beginning. She touched the entry with her finger, smoothed it over the grit of the ink as if it might tell her more, but the words were simple, ‘felled by the palsy, never recovered’. She wondered who had gone to help him, what had happened. A great pity rose in her, for she had never really found him, the way she had found Richard. He had always been already lost to her in some sense, even when alive.

  His headstone was not hard to find. Someone had kept it tidy and tended she was glad to see. She did not go to Flora’s grave, for she had already said her farewells, and knew that if she had not found her in the summerhouse she would not find her here.

  She left the church then and the horses pulled away from the village, out towards the estuary.

  At length they drew in between two stone pillars. Alice was apprehensive. Although Stephen had corresponded, even now she was not sure what kind of a welcome she would receive at Fisk Manor.

  ‘Stephen?’

  ‘Alice!’ She need not have worried. He grasped her in an indecorous bear hug. He was much thicker round the waist and his hair was greying at the temples, but the slightly apologetic grin was the same. He was dressed in plain brown worsted and his cheeks were ruddy from fresh air and exercise.

  She looked around in amazement at the activity in the yard–there were carts full of turnips, some tethered horses, two goats, two men in broad-brimmed hats carrying what looked to be wet laundry and spreading it out over the bushes, a fish-wagon making a delivery and, on the driveway, now almost completely grassed over, a group of children chasing hoops and squawking with delight.

  Stephen saw her amazement, and said, ‘It has changed, I know. People refer to it simply as The Fieldings now. I did not like the idea of it being a manor, it sounds too forbidding. But come, I’ll show thee round.’

  She followed him while he showed her the schoolroom, the meetinghouse, the almshouse and even a place for caring for the sick. The whole time they were walking he was constantly interrupted by people asking him his opinion or his advice, which he gave effortlessly and with good cheer. The great gardens, once formal parterres and grids of mathematical precision, had been given over to root vegetables, and there were a number of women engaged in digging the plot, their skirts hitched about their thighs. Slightly shocked, Alice looked away, but then thought to herself that perhaps her views on a lady’s dress might be considered a little old-fashioned these days.

  Everywhere was a veritable lather of activity. It made her tired just to look on it, so she was glad when he took her into the quiet, dimly lit drawing room and brought her a handled glass with some dark nettle tea. She was flagging, but the feel of its smooth warmth in her hands and its bitter taste revived her.

  She asked after the seekers at Lingfell Hall and was told that after Dorothy died the Hall was repossessed by her nephews and the seekers thrust out. He had offered them refuge at Fisk Manor, The Fieldings as it was now known.

  ‘Hannah Fleetwood, and Jack?’

  ‘Jack Fleetwood died the night he was arrested.’

  Oh no. Poor Hannah. Suddenly she felt weak and old. Her hand shook as she reached out to put the teacup on the table. The unfairness of it roused a deep anger within her, but she was exhausted. The anger died, betrayed only by the rise of her chest.

  Stephen seemed to read her mind.

  ‘I know. It was cruel. Hannah was never told, not until she appeared in court. But it made her all the more determined to uphold the cause in his memory.’ He told her then how Hannah had never remarried, but that she had an inner light that touched all who saw her.

  ‘Where is she now?’ asked Alice, seized with a sudden desire to see her.

  ‘The last I heard, she settled with our friends in Barbados in the Indies.’ Alice knew she must have looked astonished, for he nodded and continued. ‘Thou knowst there are Friends now all over the world.’ He leaned towards her, and added, ‘And thou amongst them. For without Richard and thee, none of this–’ here he opened his arms to embrace his expanding domain–‘would have come about.’

  ‘And without thee…’ She did not need to finish, he was waving it away as if it was of no account.

  The nervous young man she remembered had gone. The whelp with the be-ribboned breeches that flapped on him like flags from a flagpole had been replaced by this solid middle-aged man whose clothes seemed to be grafted onto his skin as if filled from within. Stephen had a calm assurance about him, a maturity that had not been apparent from their correspondence over all these years. He asked after Richard, and the manner of his death, so she told him.

  ‘Since we moved north to New Hampshire, there has been constant fighting to guard our territories from the French. He was garrisoned in the new fort at Hampton. A native on the French side shot him in an ambush.’ She looked down into her lap, reluctant to show him the extent of her pain, which was raw even now. ‘It is five years since.’

  She looked up again, to see that he had read it in her face.

  ‘He did not die fighting then?’ There was a moment’s awkwardness.

  ‘Do not disapprove of him,’ she said. ‘You know he was always a man of action, the way he expressed his love was always through his sword.’

  ‘One man should never judge another. But I know him for a truthful man, and one who examined his heart. It cannot have been easy for him to tell me of the manner of my father’s death.’ There was a pause, whilst they weighed the past.

  Stephen went on, ‘My father and I were never close as a father and son should be, Alice, but I like to think he would be proud if he could see me now.’

  Alice nodded but kept her thoughts to herself. She had never been able to come to terms with the mystery of Geoffrey. She seemed to have known so many different, conflicting Geoffreys.

  So instead she said, ‘We should have come sooner. Richard would have loved to see this. But life there was hard and bitter to begin with, we had to dig our existence out of the earth. We fought for it with our sweat and toil. And later somehow we were afraid to return, we feared to lose what was so hard-won–and we were happy as we were, we had our children to think of, and we had put the cold dark of England behind us.’

  Stephen nodded. ‘No matter. Thou art here now.’

  She leaned towards him. There was one more mystery she needed to lay to rest.

  ‘But tell me, do you know what became of Ella Appleby, the girl who used to work for me as housemaid?’

  ‘An odd thing–they say that when Thomas died, she just disappeared. It was quite a scandal at the time
. She took as many valuables from the house as she could carry, and she and her sister just vanished. The king’s men tried to catch up with her, and there were rumours she was seen in London. But she must have covered her tracks well. There’s been no more word of her since.’

  ‘She would be getting on in years, anyway,’ said Alice, ‘like the rest of us. It all seems so long ago. But I would still find it hard to forgive her.’

  ‘But she was so young. Scarcely more than a child.’

  Alice could find nothing remotely child-like in her memory of Ella. But then, Stephen had never met her.

  He carried on. ‘And in a strange way, without Ella Appleby your future would have been quite another story. She gave thee a life thou couldst never have foretold, just as surely as meeting Richard transformed me.’

  They sat companionably, mulling over this thought.

  ‘Wilt thou join us at the meeting for worship tonight?’ said Stephen.

  She smiled her agreement, and later that evening found herself in the great hall, now transformed into a meeting room. The quiet of the meeting lulled her, the busyness of the day banished by the calm faces. Nobody spoke. Alice looked around and was oddly moved. She understood now what Richard had talked of, the presence he had felt on the field when George Fox spoke. It was the same presence she had felt when she had first seen the lady’s slipper, standing so still and alone in Richard’s wood.

  Her head was heavy, and before long it dropped forward onto her chest and she let her eyelids close. And there was Richard, smiling at her in the miller’s, asking the miller for a fair price, his brown eyes oddly familiar in his young face. A while later she awoke to find Stephen’s hand on her arm, shaking her gently. Strange–she had not meant to fall asleep.

  The next day Stephen offered to accompany her on her carriage ride to the village, but she refused him. For this was one journey she needed to make alone. She left her maidservant at the top of the lane and pushed the kissing-gate open, pausing for a moment on the threshold of Helk’s Wood. She took in the speckled lichen surface of the posts, breathed in the dampness of the day. She would want to remember this when she returned to New Hampshire.

  Her feet, that had once trod this same route in the dark of the moon, nimble in her pretty yellow shoes, stumbled over the stones and roots in her path. The wood was denser and the way a little more overgrown; the wall was plush with green moss; beech trees dripped overhead. But she recognized the route even after all this time.

  At the overhanging branch she put her hand out to the wall to support herself, but in her mind she was still the young woman who had come here thirty-five years ago. The clearing was velvety underfoot. The swish of her skirts scattered the beech nuts as she searched for the right place.

  She bent over the spot and began to open the ties on her painting basket. When they had settled in New Hampshire, it was a long time before she had wanted to take up her brush and paints. One day she had been persuaded by a neighbour to visit a local trading fair, and there had been a small display of paintings by the governor’s wife. As she walked along the row of paintings, a deep wistfulness overtook her. She realized how much she had missed her drawing, how she longed for the touch of the brush in her hand. She was musing on this when she came face to face with a painting of a lady’s slipper. She stopped, her mouth dry and her heart hammering loudly in her chest.

  Her friend said, ‘Are you all right? You look pale.’

  ‘This flower, the lady’s slipper. It reminds me of home. England I mean.’

  ‘I like it too. It is one of my favourite wild flowers.’

  ‘You mean, it grows here?’

  ‘Yes, they are everywhere out in the pastures. They should be easy to find now because the flowers are so showy.’

  She had stood there a long while, in front of the picture. The next day she had driven the buggy out to the woods and, sure enough, the dark shadows of the redwood trees were full of lady’s slippers, nodding and dipping in the breeze, drowsy bees buzzing as they hovered between one pouch and the next. Not just creamy flowers, but bright yellow and pink ones too. She had been staggered by the sheer numbers, unable to take it in. But then she had started to laugh. She laughed until she cried, until she had to hold on to the ache in her side, until, breathless, she had to sit down on the grass.

  She had taken one home to show Richard, and he had stood up from cutting wood, and he had laughed with her and fetched some to plant out back under the plane tree. As the years passed her children had picked them, called them, as their friends did, ‘moccasin flowers’, put them in jars of water as if they were buttercups and thought nothing of it. But here now, in the dark woods of England, the memory of that one single flower, its beauty and strangeness, flooded back.

  She opened the sackcloth in the basket and drew out the orchid. Her hands were clad in black, just as they had been the last time she was here, except the mourning was for Richard now, not for Flora. Carefully she dug a well for the little plant and lowered it into the ground, tamping down the earth around the roots until it stood sturdy and upright in its leafy setting. She stood up and paused, looking down on it, and inhaled deeply. She imagined the sweet smell of tobacco drifting over the wall. Then she spoke, her voice soft amongst the call of the birds, the Quaker form of address springing naturally to her lips.

  She leaned down towards the flower. ‘Do well, little plant,’ she whispered, ‘for thou art far from thy New Hampshire home, and I would not have brought thee, but for love.’

  She stepped away then, and hurried back up the path.

  In the glade, the rain began to fall, but one flower shone bright against the green like a single star.

  THE LADY’S SLIPPER

  by Deborah Swift

  About the Author

  A Conversation with Deborah Swift

  Behind the Novel

  Historical Perspective

  Fun Facts

  Keep on Reading

  Recommended Reading

  Reading Group Questions

  For more reading group suggestions, visit www.readinggroupgold.com.

  A Conversation with Deborah Swift

  Could you tell us a little bit about your personal and professional background and when it was that you decided to lead a literary life?

  I was brought up in the countryside in a small village, but as an adult I spent much of my time in cities, working in the theater as a set and costume designer. Working in the theater was a fantastic experience that gave me access to some of the literary giants of the world through their plays. How can you beat having to work with the language and imagery of Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams! I returned to country living again about ten years ago and now live in the English Lake District, a place immortalized by poets and artists such as Wordsworth and Ruskin.

  In a way I feel I have always led a literary life, right from picking up my first book. When I was five years old I won a school painting competition and a prize of a copy of Black Beauty, gloriously illustrated. It was the first book that made me cry. I am an avid reader and will read anything and everything. As an older child I used to enjoy reading an ancient encyclopedia, and can still remember the old, musty smell of its pages and the yellowish glue of its binding.

  Is there a book or an author that most inspired you to become a writer?

  Apart from Black Beauty, I remember as a teenager being massively impressed by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Anya Seton’s Katherine, both of which probably sowed the seeds of my interest in historical fiction. And I love classics such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Little Women, which have strong female voices despite being written in a time when literature was dominated by men. Later I was much more influenced by plays and poems. I love reading poets who observe nature in all its moods. Ted Hughes’s work is timeless because of its precision, and Mary Oliver has a yearning inherent in her work that seems to be a part of my impulse to write. Initially The Lady’s Slipper began as a poem—my attempt to conve
y the lone flower’s strangeness and fragility.

  * * *

  “I have always led a literary life, right from picking up my first book.”

  * * *

  You mentioned working as a costume designer. How has your work in theater influenced your writing, not just content-wise, but stylistically as well?

  I tend to naturally think in terms of scenes, and let the dialogue drive the action. I am also very aware of making internal dilemmas “visible” to the reader, in the same way an actor makes his state of mind obvious to an audience through actions.

  Stylistically, I have a love of the theatrical, which draws me toward a story that is plot driven. Twists and turns make for good drama. I love deceptions and intrigue. And very much as on stage, I like to allow each character a moment in the spotlight, so that we see the whole picture through several pairs of eyes. When writing, the action literally unfolds in front of me like a film. I write feverishly and then have to go back to refine and re-tune and add the internal dialogue—the soliloquies—later. I think of the end of the chapters as the blackout in the theater, a blank space for the mind to rest before a new scene.

  Years of converting text into images as a designer means that I view the background or settings as integral to the characters. Alice’s character at the outset is drawn as much by her summerhouse, for example, as by her conversation. The research process for a writer is very similar to that of a designer, and I have always enjoyed this aspect, as it gives me a great excuse to poke about in museums and old houses. I prefer to research through books or visits rather than online, and most of the settings for The Lady’s Slipper are based on real places. Lingfell Hall is based on Swarthmoor Hall, the actual house at the hub of the Quaker movement in the seventeenth century.