A humped bridge took me over the channelled torrent. I passed into the thicket of alders on the far side. Were anybody watching, he or she might have supposed my intention was to turn to the left and so pass along this more sequestered shore of the lake. Instead I went to the right, and let myself out of the park through the narrow gate alongside the place where the water runs into it. This gate is kept locked. On either side it is approached by a narrow, slimy, stone ledge overhanging the water. It is dangerous. I have had a key since the door was made: it is probable that others have forgotten that I have it.
Cecily was waiting for me. She was pale and quiet.
She said, ‘It amazed me when it seemed you had forgot the toad.’
*
Where the road came over the hill towards Wood Barton there was an expanse of heathy ground. Dry sandy soil with white pebbles in it, a bank riddled with rabbit warrens. No good for crop or cattle, but partridges flew up from it in autumn, as moths and midges did of a summer’s evening. There was water in the stream at the foot of the slope, and a straggle of white-skinned birches, and enough twiggy bushes to provide fuel for fires. Some twenty of the vagrants had settled there. The bracken was springy to lie upon, but one night a woman, upon setting herself down to sleep, was stung by an adder. Her leg swelled, becoming thick and hard as a bolster stuffed with sawdust, and as hot to the touch as seething meat. She whimpered and raved a day and a night. Her man went and stood near to the village, and called out about her trouble, and later an old woman, with skin wrinkled like a dead leaf, came and left for him a pannikin of water in which herbs had been steeped, and he washed his wife’s wound with it. The pain abated then, and the fever ebbed, but afterwards her fellows lay themselves down warily. There were children with them, and the little ones whined for home. For two nights and days it rained, and they could not get warm.
At first light one morning a man came from beyond the village, walking alongside a cart pulled by a donkey. There were others nodding in the cart. Two of the settlers walked up to meet him on the road and questioned him. He was one who had come, as they had, from London, to save himself and his family, but now he believed that it was time to go home.
He said, ‘My brother, who was with us, is a shoemaker, and he has found work in a town to the west. He has it in mind to settle there. But I have a shop in Spitalfields. The Lord stretched out his hand to smite the wicked with boils, that they might know him and fear him. But the Lord is not vengeful. He will hear our prayers. The pestilence will pass away.’ He stopped awhile to get water from the stream, but then he and the people with him went on towards London.
After they had gone two of the settlers walked aside as though to gather firewood.
One said, ‘I am a merchant, not a vagabond.’
The other said, ‘Patience. It is not yet safe.’
Before the next sunrise the one who called himself a merchant, who was a strong fellow travelling alone, left the encampment.
*
This morning the decoration of the great drawing room was declared complete. The plasterers and painters and gilders have finished their work. The carved wooden garlands wreathing the doorframes and mantels are done. There was but one more task to be acccomplished before it was time to dismantle the scaffold upon which the fresco-painter and his apprentices lay for so long on their backs, faces turned up to the blue heaven they were making. This scaffold, of rough posts roped together, has seemed an incongruous intrusion into the ever-augmenting refinement of the room, and yet it is upon it that so much meticulous artistry has depended. The Italians swing up and down it like acrobats.
That curious vertical bridge between floor and ceiling has been retained so long only in order that the silver chandeliers my Lord purchased in France might be carried aloft.
There are two of them, each as tall as a man; not as tall as I am, but as Lord Woldingham, for instance, or Mr Rose. They were carted up from the barn in which the furniture has been awaiting its new home. Each came in a wooden crate. My Lord fussed around them like a hen waiting for her chicks to break out of the eggshell.
The nails being drawn, the walls of the crates fell open and there within, packed around with wood-shavings, were two baize bags large enough to bundle a corpse in.
The necks of the bags were untied. The chandeliers were disrobed. They emerged blue-black. Mr Underhill was ready. Calling forward his cohort, he muttered orders (his lips are remarkably pink and soft: he never speaks above a murmur). Each chandelier was laid, with the utmost gentleness, on its side. Servants, male and female alike wearing long aprons, took its branching limbs upon their laps, and began to rub them with round puffballs of softest wool. It was wonderful to see the blackness transfer itself from metal to fibre, and the lustre appearing through the tarnish, not like something revealed, but like something absenting itself. Cleaned and bright, silver has no colour: it is light solidified.
Scarlet ropes as thick as a child’s arm were suspended from brass rings affixed to the ceiling’s concealed beams. The chandeliers were attached to them and lifted upright, the fluted spike which forms the nethermost part of each dancing a couple of inches above the floor. Their forms are complex but pure; globes, stems, slender curving excrescences and leafy flourishes all symmetrically arranged. Tapers of fine beeswax were fitted in their sconces, and while Underhill’s men, leaning out from the scaffolding, steadied them, they were hauled with infinite care aloft.
My Lord capered beneath them as they took flight, clapping hands half-hidden by his braided velvet cuffs, and calling out, as his eye fell upon me, ‘An omen, Mr Norris. A happy omen for our fountain. See how we have the knack of making shining things leap up.’
The word that comes to me when I think of Cecily is ‘limpid’. Her glassy fingernails; her hair as delicately tinged and translucent as Muscat wine; her eyes. I am not a mouther of texts, but there is one I remember well. ‘The soul is like a well from which flow only streams of clearest crystal, rising from the River of Life.’ The phrases are nonsensical, for crystal is rock-like, not fluent. Nonetheless, they have lately been a great deal in my mind.
*
There came a time when the woman Meg met each evening, and to whom she would give bread and small beer, did not show herself. When the moon was up Meg walked alone down to the quarrymen’s hut. The air within was foul. When she had seen what was there Meg went round the outside of the hut, piling up dried bracken and thin branches. She brought flint and iron out of a pocket. For a long time she fumbled with them. When the fire was set at last she withdrew across the clearing. The good smell of burning wood was mingled with one it was nauseating to have in one’s nostrils. She watched until the flames, which briefly seemed to reach up towards the branches of the tall beech trees behind it, had dwindled, leaving only lumps of smouldering matter. With a forked branch, she hooked a bone out of the ash. It was still hot. She wrapped it in a cloth, with some herbs she had about her, walked slowly back down to the lake and cast it in, mumbling all the while.
At first light she went into the village. Later she came to Wood Manor leading two children by the hand. They could barely breathe for sobbing and the fronts of their smocks were sodden with tears.
*
I was with Mr Rose this morning in the library, working at opposite ends of the long table, when Lord Woldingham’s two children hurtled in. They were in pursuit of a goat. The creature had come into the house unnoticed, following the men carrying in firewood, and had passed a contented hour or so in the corridor behind the kitchens, browsing on a bunch of the thistles that the maids use to comb out wool, and then, growing bolder, on some hyacinth bulbs ready for planting, and a straw hat.
It was a small and dainty goat, and its nuzzlings and snufflings, and the tittuping of its pointed hoofs on the paving, went unnoticed amidst the accustomed hubbub of comings and goings. It was only when it overset a pail, in which some of Mr Green’s finest carnations were standing ready to be arranged in vases, that its trespass
was discovered. The children and their nurse at that moment descending the stairs, they heard the clatter of the pail on the flagstones of the hall, and the shouts of the servants, and insisted on joining in the hue and cry.
The creature was afraid and skittish. It raced around the room, its twiggy legs as wayward as those of an unpractised skater, until it found one of the long windows standing open. Goat and children at high speed, and nurse less precipitately, crossed the lawn. There is a sunken walk bounding the greensward, the ground continuing beyond it at the same level as before, so that it is like a green moat. The goatling, reaching it, ran straight ahead, and such was the momentum of its going, and so great the power in its sinewy haunches, that it sprang across the void, its legs still making a galloping motion, landed and ran on smoothly towards the orchard. The children pulled up short, tumbling to the ground on the brink of the little precipice and whooping as they did so. ‘It flew! It flew! It’s a flying goat.’ The children’s governor waddled over the lawn to reassert his authority. He is a kindly man, but corpulent.
I resumed my chair. ‘Where did it come from, I wonder,’ I said.
‘From the infernal regions, of course,’ said Rose. ‘All goats are devil’s kine.’
‘That would explain the flying,’ I said.
We returned to our papers, but I was not easy. Something in our exchange snagged on something in my mind. I laid down my pen and looked up to see Mr Rose watching me intently.
‘I haven’t seen Meg these four days at least,’ I said.
‘And you so regular a visitor at Wood Manor,’ he said.
I have hoped my truancy from the imprisoning park had passed unmarked, but I wasted no time wondering how he knew my movements. I am accustomed now to his omniscience. If he could be devious, I could be direct.
‘Do you know where she is?’ I asked.
‘I don’t keep my eye upon her,’ he replied. ‘I expect that Mistress Rivers does.’
For no reason that I can understand dread rushed upon me. My hands felt numb. I pushed my papers together. I went straight to the stables. Once horsed, I made my way to Wood Manor. I had always before been discreet in my visits there. Now I cantered straight up the drive.
The door was bolted. I rapped on the latticed window. I could see Cecily in the hall. Her hands were wringing each other, as though without her volition. She looked at me, as a woman drowning might gaze up through the film of water at one who had come too late to rescue her. She made a curious gesture, putting up both hands with the fingers extended as though to set up bars between us. Then, coming up to the window, she slowly and deliberately undid her bodice, and pulled her smock down. I watched, deeply perturbed. She was all decorum. She had never, even in our most ardent moments together, made any movement that could be considered lewd. Yet here she was acting like a drab in a pot-house.
Through the window’s little panes, all bubbled like simmering water, I could dimly see that she had got her pale shoulder free of the linen. Her skin looked damp. Her breast was exposed. I could not take pleasure in the sight. I had understood what she was about to show me. I was profoundly ashamed of my former thoughts. She raised her arm, and there, in the pit, was the terrible posy. She looked me in the eye, very serious and still, and then, pulling her clothes roughly about her, passed into the far room, where I could no longer see her. She staggered as she went.
I beat on the door a long while. I shouted for Cecily. I shouted for Meg. I tried to break the window, but there were iron bars set to reinforce the lead. I went around the house, but all the windows I could reach were shuttered. I howled out that I loved her, something that, tongue-tied idiot that I am, I had never explicitly said. I imagined her lying inside, clawed by pain, with no one to tend her.
At last Goodyear came. His cottage is beyond Wood Manor. He was on his way home. He came up very softly, and found me slumped and blubbering. He did not try to comfort me. He stood before me and waited for me to be quiet.
I asked, ‘Is she alone, do you know?’
‘Meg Leafield is with her, unless she has already gone to God. It was she who took ill first. She would have preferred to go away and die alone in the woods, as other creatures do, but Miss Cecily would keep her, and Meg couldn’t stand. She couldn’t even crawl upon the ground, though she did try to.’
‘When?’ I asked, as though such a triviality as time of day mattered.
‘Yesterday,’ said Goodyear. ‘The servants deserted them. My wife met them on the path and scolded them, but they were running for their lives.’ He held out his hand to me, but I was not yet sufficiently in possession of myself to rise.
A woman came from the stables, hustling two children before her. She looked uncertainly at the two of us. She was one of the fugitive Londoners. She said, ‘These two are from the village. Mistress Leafield asked us to keep them with us, but now we are travelling on. Do you know them?’
Goodyear addressed the girl, ‘Who is your father?’
‘Dead in the wars,’ said the girl.
‘Your mother then?’
‘She went to live in the woods so she wouldn’t make us ill.’
‘Who cares for you?’
‘Grandfather Browning. And Grammer Meg.’
‘I know the family,’ said Goodyear. ‘Old Browning was pig-man on the home farm.’ He looked at the peaked faces of the little ones and made a gesture whose meaning could have been annoyance or could have been despair. ‘They can come with me,’ he told the woman.
Wallowing deep in my own troubles as I was, I thought that his taking them under his protection was a saintly act, and I thought that the lives of the saints never tell us that the holiest may be irritable or tired as they perform their good works.
He left me, the two orphans dragging behind him. For hours I haunted the place. Rain fell and ceased to fall. The Londoners who had been living in the stables – five families – gathered themselves together and set out, with but one donkey to carry all their packs. They looked at me fearfully and kept well away. At dusk Goodyear came back with a loaf and a pitcher of milk and berries tied in a cloth.
‘I doubt they’ll be wanting to eat,’ he said, ‘but they’ll be glad anyway of the kindness.’
I had done nothing so useful. He told me to move off, and when I looked at him with extreme agitation and made to answer, he explained patiently that the sufferers within would not open the door to take in the victuals until they were certain none stood by. I went meekly with him then, and we saw, as we stood amongst the trees a good way off, that the door opened, and an arm reached out for the things. It came along the ground, like a snake.
‘Go and rest, Mr Norris,’ he said. ‘Your watching here can’t save them.’
I shook my head. I was watching not for their sake, but for mine. Goodyear spoke to me sternly then. He is a man of great natural authority. He said, ‘Forgive me, Mr Norris. This is a time for relieving the pains of others, not for cossetting your own. You may be of use come morning. Now you are frantic, and can do no good.’
Chastened and broken-spirited, I found my horse. At the lodge-gate I dismounted, gave it a wallop over the rump, and watched it trot homeward as I turned away. What I have seen has made me a vagrant too. How I envy those who can believe that they have a kind father in heaven.
*
Once Edward was certain the two men had gone he came out of the woods, a bundle full of green stuff on his shoulder, and crossed the paddock. The garden door opened easily to his key. He went directly to the kitchen. Later he passed across the hall, carrying in one hand a basin, and in the other a lantern. He paused on the threshold of the tapestried chamber and stood waiting for his eyes to see again. When he knew where the two muffled forms lay, he set his basin down carefully, and crossed between them to open up the shutters. From the settle upon which Cecily was stretched he heard a kind of bubbling. The moonlight was wan.
Meg’s eyes claimed him. He turned back the shawl, and then quickly covered her again. Her fi
ngers, fumbling at her neck, were black to the second joint, the nails like flint. The pustules rose from within her body, but seemed alien to it, as fungus is to wood. He dipped a rag into his basin and stooped, but hardly knew where and how he could touch her. She flinched and turned her head away. When her gaze came back it was full of anger and meaning. Her mouth moved, but no sound came. He thought, as though the thought had passed from her mind to his without mediation of words, It is too late for soothing. Only stay with me now. Only let me be not alone.
He kept his eyes steadfastly on hers. He wanted to see how Cecily did, but he could not look away. The lantern light was reflected in Meg’s eyes, two tiny slits of flame in the blackness of them. As he watched, the flames seemed to be smothered by a dark haze. There was a ghastly noise in the room now, a caterwauling and then a rasping and then a knocking as of an unfastened window through which all that was warm and fragrant was seeping out into the night. Edward muttered words. He didn’t see it happen, but there came a time when he saw that it had happened. His legs and arms and all his body began to buck and shiver. He had to wrap his arms around his knees to try to hold himself still. Grief was shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat.
*
It is three full weeks since I wrote in this journal. I have scoffed at my Lady’s precautions. I deluded myself. It appals me to reflect upon the number of people I put at risk with my reckless comings and goings. Lovers may fool themselves, fancying that, because love ruptures the membrane which divides each lonely soul off from all others, it can therefore effect other miracles as well. It can do no such thing. Hundreds, thousands of lovers have died disgusting deaths this season. I was mad. Worse, I was frivolous. That night shook me into a better understanding.
Peculiar Ground Page 41
