Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The hosts of Israel, eight men strong, came prancing on, helmeted in painted card and flourishing wooden swords. All would have been lost for the people of Canaan had these doughty warriors set seriously to work, breaching the walls and sacking the city as was surely their duty. Instead they formed themselves into a row and performed a kind of volta, kicking their legs about with admirable energy but imperfect timing.

  Mr Rose, the architect, was standing near me and had saluted me cordially. Now he leant over and said, ‘It is no wonder that the Romans found the chosen people so easy to dominate. Discipline and exactitude. Those are the qualities a fighting force requires.’ He is a carping man, too much inclined to make a mock of others, and I did not like his enlisting me as his accomplice in cynicism, but he meant to be friendly, so I smiled a little. He said then, ‘Does John know that you are returned?’

  For a moment I was puzzled. I had never used Mr Norris’s given name. This other’s doing so felt impertinent. I was glad to be distracted by a tremendous din from the stage. The Israelites had formed up in pairs and were spinning each other around, red-faced and heavy-footed, whooping the while. Some sort of climax was approaching. I looked about me, vaguely expecting someone or something – a monster, an army, an angel – to spring up from the crowd as my Lady had done, and I found myself meeting Mr Norris’s gaze.

  He was seated on the opposite side of the curving rows of seats, high up. He didn’t smile, or nod, or make any sign with his hand. We stared at each other. Sometimes a cat and dog meet and become as still as statues, eye to eye, until it seems that only a merciful interruption – some horse or human clattering by – can free them from a lifetime of immobility. They are held by mutual distrust. My friend and I were held by something stronger. I was all in my eyes. He seemed to soften, his whole face gentled as wax in a warm room. Whether Mr Rose was still speaking I couldn’t have known. I had awoken that morning avid and proud. Now I was entirely subdued.

  A boy was tugging at Mr Norris’s arm. From the stage came a rumbling of wooden wheels and a squealing of metal hinges. We had been within the city of Jericho, in the harlot’s house. Now screens were being trundled about so that their backsides faced us. Where drapery had been depicted, and shelves cluttered with golden vessels and clumps of ostrich plumes, now we saw only palm trees and masonry. Fluted columns crowned with carved acanthus leaves, all executed ingeniously in trompe l’oeil style, and sandy-coloured stones. ‘Shockingly anachronistic,’ said Mr Rose, ‘but skilfully done. We were fortunate to have a team of Italian muralists at our command.’ Two palm trees of cut paper were wheeled on, and the Israelite army marched back on led by a bear, whose second, human, face was visible through the slit in its hide only when it reared up. The audience rose to its feet to salute it.

  The bond which had held me to Mr Norris had ruptured at the moment he turned away. I looked for him again but he was gone. I glimpsed him just outside the playing floor, in earnest conversation with the trumpeters.

  The ladies and gentlemen settled back into their seats, the brave colours of their clothes making a rippling beauty like that of oil in water. Lord Woldingham stood up. His wig was in every sense hyacinthine. Its luxuriant dark curls were just perceptibly tinted blue.

  The Israelites and the bear, the latter beaming with one face, snarling with another, withdrew behind the palm trees. My Lord stepped onto the stage, his shoe-buckles twinkling in concert with his rings, and addressed us. He said, ‘The people of Jericho congratulated themselves upon the sturdiness of the walls that encircled their city. As you will presently see, their confidence was ill-founded. It is not upon heaps of stone that our safety depends, but upon the loyalty of our friends.’

  ‘My walls,’ said Mr Rose, ‘are not heaps.’ His tone was still facetious, but I thought his irritation was real.

  ‘We welcome you all here,’ went on my cousin, ‘because you are all friends of that loyal stamp. My wife has chosen to represent one who did God’s will by offering succour and protection to strangers. Rahab had strayed from virtue’s path, but there was still kindness in her. For many years we were, as it were, walled out of our own country, our own home, but there were always some, under the Canaan of the commonwealth, who were ready as Rahab was to risk their own safety to aid those who sought to reclaim this nation for legitimacy. Now, safely restored to Wychwood after the tumbling down of that commonwealth, we open our gates and invite our friends to celebrate with us our own return to this blessed spot, and the return of right government to this realm. And now I must ask you once more to pay attention as the climax of our show approaches.’

  He bowed and performed a quite astonishing flourish with his hat, as though he were inscribing the design of a labyrinth upon the air with its plume, and then resumed his place where his small daughter now awaited him, having scrambled up, to the detriment of her sky-blue petticoats, into his vacated seat.

  ‘Ingenious,’ said Mr Rose. ‘I had wondered how he could preach out of that text.’

  Now came the moment for which all this pageant had been merely a prologue. The biblical Joshua informs us that his followers, preceded by trumpeters, carried the Ark of the Covenant around the walls of Jericho day after day for seven days. We were spared that iteration. A herald announced in a piping voice (I think he was one of the chambermaids, breeched) that when he commanded us to do so we were to shout out as loudly as our lungs would allow. We nodded and clapped in sign of assent. Then on came Joshua – Mr Goodyear resplendent in buskins and with a mane of plaited straw. His breastplate was one my Uncle Rivers had worn, before he left fighting for preaching.

  Joshua spoke at length, and in rhyme. Then he spread his arms wide and called upon the trumpets to sound. On came my Lord’s huntsman with his horn, followed by young Arthur with his trumpet. And behind my young cousin came five more boys, each smaller than the one in front, each furnished with a pipe or a whistle, or in the littlest one’s case, a rattle with bells. The band formed up to one side of the stage. The huntsman turned towards them and fixed them with a commanding gaze. As he raised his horn to lip, they began to emit as cacophonous a sound as was ever heard on earth or beneath it. The boys’ cheeks puffed out and pinkened. Their chests pumped like bellows. Their feet stamped. And then, the huntsman leading, they strutted across the stage, the army following and swinging their arms vigorously to mark time. They passed behind the paper walls and re-emerged. The herald reappeared. The horns gave a final eldritch screech. Joshua shouted, ‘Let the walls of Jericho come tumbling DOWN!’ The herald cupping his hands, and waving them expressively, gave us to understand we were to echo him, and so we did, lustily. ‘DOWN!’ we hollered. ‘DOWN! DOWN!’ Joshua’s voice boomed out above the din. Mr Goodyear is a serious man, a man of prayer, one who played a dignified and authoritative part in the community of my youth, but he is also known for his skills as an entertainer. Under his influence a stately masque was shaking itself free of stilted artifice and becoming raucous.

  Another blast fit to awaken all the devils of Pandemonium, and with a certain amount of twitching and juddering, the walls were wheeled apart, and tilted over, and while the boy-trumpeters jumped up and down on them in a merry ecstasy of destructiveness, Rahab was revealed devoutly placing a cross upon the altar of the unbelievers, her hair escaping from its gilded net in the most becoming disorder. She clasped her hands, she rolled her eyes, and then abruptly Lady Woldingham became herself again. With a disregard for theatrical convention as brazen as her employing a Christian symbol in a story which predated Christ’s incarnation by several centuries, she stepped to the front of the stage, gathered up her trumpeting son and then set him down again to hold out her arms to her husband and her little girl. A flurry of blossoms and green leaves were tossed down by mechanicals clinging to the top rail of the pergola.

  The audience rose to applaud. I saw Mr Norris, his responsibilities ended, circling around behind the rows of auditors looking purposefully at me. And of a sudden I was abducted by
bashfulness, something that had never before weakened me. I pushed away, I dodged, I ran. Passing Edward, I dragged him with me. He came, alarmed, thinking I had had some fright, as I suppose I had. I saw my future approaching and it scared me. I despise coyness, but coy I was. We ran through the shrubbery and out into the park. I wanted just to be at peace to collect myself. I didn’t know what I wanted. I looked back, but neither Norris nor anyone else was following. At once I was chilled by regret.

  *

  The day began inauspiciously. I woke to hear someone weeping beneath my window. It was not the snivelling of a child, but the painful gasping and snorting of a grown man. Looking out, I saw one of the gardeners on his knees on the grass. I hallooed to him, asking if he had injured himself. ‘Oh Mr Norris,’ he said. He started and looked aghast, as though it had not occurred to him that the rumpus he was making might have been audible to those within. He shook his head, got hastily to his feet and hurried round the side of the house. Even in his anxiety to be gone he didn’t fail to obey Mr Green’s most strictly enforced edict – that all those who work in the gardens must carry a besom with them and sweep the gravel behind them as they go, leaving the pathways pristine. Poor lad. I recognised him by his frizzled hair. He is the youth of whom the peacock was so enamoured.

  A thousand spiders had made of the lawn an expanse of lace, night had hung the fabric with dewdrops and the new-risen sun had made it scintillate. I leant upon my sill to admire the effect, and as I loitered there I learnt the reason for the boy’s lament. One of Mr Armstrong’s men came by, trundling a handcart. In it lay the corpses of a pair of peafowl, the hen bedraggled, but the cock arranged with utmost care, to preserve his plumage. They will be eaten tonight.

  The birds have bred. Two can be spared. Wychwood will still have its exotic guests, stalking the lawns and shrieking. But I found myself sharing in the grief of the under-gardener for his unlikely paramour. It is chastening to reflect upon how much destruction we humans wreak in pursuit of transient pleasure.

  The performance went off satisfactorily. This is not the London stage. The actors were rustics, for the most part, the musicians untrained children, but no one disgraced himself, and my Lady turned out to have a histrionic gift that surprised me. I have heard of actors reserved in their own persons, who are shameless and brilliant onstage, when in the guise of another. It seems she is one of them. At the subsequent feast she was once again reticent and aloof, but as the Canaanite whore she flaunted and flirted as though come straight from Drury Lane.

  To my eye, though, our proudest achievement was the stage itself. How ingeniously our arches framed the spectacle, how well the tiered rows of seats transformed the audience into a secondary spectacle, and how comfortably that audience was accommodated. In my role as manager I stood to the side of the scene, chivvying the choruses on and off, but there came a moment when I had leisure to look about for Mr Rose, meaning to meet his eye and signal to him my satisfaction with the outcome of our joint labours. Amidst that patchwork of faces I found him, and there, standing at his shoulder, I found Cecily. The change in her was ghastly.

  I knew her at once. My gaze and hers seemed to fly to each other, as a swallow swerves by all distraction to find its nest. There is, I knew at that instant, a sympathy between us which transcends mere visual recognition. Because she barely looked herself at all. She was thin. Her neck had become a bundle of cords – every sinew and vein standing proud as though there was no flesh left in which they could be swaddled. I saw her hands: they were pale and dry as stubble. Her hair had been cropped, and stood upright, a sparse bristling. She had wreathed herself in wild flowers. Perhaps she thought she was the heroine of a pastoral. To me she looked crazy. Her face was lustreless as ash.

  Seeing her so, and so suddenly, I was seized by a greater passion than she had ever aroused in me when she was trim and thriving. Faded and pitiful she was. And something moved within me. What a derogation of our dignity it is that we each have but one body in which to experience our most exalted and our basest feelings. There is nothing poetical about the belly, which bothers us when it is empty or bloated. And yet it was there, or thereabouts in the middle of my person, that I felt a shifting as though the organs of my corporeal self – those brown and purple things that butchers toss aside – were being obliged to make way for the flourishing of something which I suppose is what the poets call love.

  I had duties to attend to. I looked away. As soon as I might I went to find her, but she was gone. Rose shrugged. I felt an unreasonable impulse to shake him.

  Cecily

  ‘Cecily, wait,’ called Edward. We were by the ice-house, that quaint structure shaped like a woman’s breast or a beehive, and – like both those others too – full of nutriment. Seeking, for no reason I could articulate, a hiding place, I opened the door and beckoned him in after me.

  The chamber is usually hung about with dead game. I suppose all the flesh available was that day in the kitchen, undergoing a metamorphosis into pies or platters of roast meat. In place of blood-caked feathers, or the sad carcasses of flayed deer, there were laid out in the niches around the circular space a hoard of sweet edible treasure. Junkets and custards in glazed bowls. Translucent jellies, displayed in long-stemmed glasses, with mint-leaves or scraps of candied peel floating suspended within them like fish trapped in the frozen northern seas. Fantastic structures made of sugar and solidified egg-white. Pinnacled palaces, piled clouds, conical mountains – all pure white. And in adjoining niches pyramids of fruits, their rich colours showing through a veil. Each plum, each fig, each apricock, had been dipped in molten sugar which, solidifying, left them with a diaphanous rind that had kept them sweet all winter. There are stories of travellers coming across houses made all of delicate foods, and being bewitched if they are foolish enough to break off a piece to eat. This was simply the storehouse for the sweetmeats that would provide a climax to this day’s feast, but all the same I slapped down Edward’s hand when he reached for a candied nut.

  The viands were all placed well above the ground. We stood carefully on the crisscrossing wooden slats that made up the floor. A sound of seeping water arose. Then our feet were wet, and then our ankles. A rising tide was passing through the ice-house, flowing in from a pipe level with the ground, and rushing on out through an aperture that faced it. We had entered a storehouse. We found ourselves in a cavern bisected by a torrent. A goldfish came flailing by, tumbled on its back as it was shot out the lower opening.

  ‘The fountain,’ said Edward, and hurried me out, slamming the heavy door to behind us. Water seeped around its edges. ‘We’ll watch from the bridge.’

  The terrace beneath which we ran, with its bushes and lead urns laid out as neat as the pattern in a carpet, had been invaded by a torrent too. The company previously lined up neatly in the amphitheatre was now swirling over the design Mr Norris had been at such pains to regularise. Wide taffeta skirts overflowed the low box hedges. The gravel was kicked up by scores of gentlemen’s high-heeled shoes. The young limes, their branches pleached and bound, crucified, to rigid poles, were brushed by undisciplined hat plumes.

  I once had taunted Norris, telling him he was a man all made of straight lines and right angles. I meant to make him laugh and unbend a little but he took me seriously and led me to a portrait of a court lady masquerading as a nymph. ‘See,’ he said, ‘how her hair, her shift, her very flesh, are all in disarray. And see how the painter has placed a column there, a four-square altar there, to prop her up and contain her drapery, and see how the placing of all that voluptuous tousling within the right angles of the frame, with its exact repetitive decoration, has saved the composition from chaos. I plant avenues with set-square and rule,’ he said, ‘because I know that my trees will spread waywardly within them. Vitality and order. They need each other, as man needs woman.’ He looked at me then, very fleetingly, and perhaps it was the first time I knew for certain that he had noticed me as anything other than one of the gentry to whom he w
as obliged to be civil. Now, as we hurried down the slope, I looked back and saw the terrace crowded with onlookers, the great cuffs of the gentlemen’s sleeves overhanging the stone parapet, their wigs, and the ladies’ fantastical head-ornaments, breaking the skyline above it.

  We left the park by the narrow gate alongside the cascade. I saw Mr Rose directing a party of labourers on the dam above us. We passed along the narrow ledge, Edward leading. The workmen were turning a great bar, the kind that wretched donkeys drag round and round upon a threshing floor. The water in the channel beneath us was strangely dimpled. I looked up again and there was Norris. He saw us. He saw me. But there was no gentleness in his gaze, no welcome. He waved at me as one might wave at a herd of bullocks. Giddy up. Go back. Get away with you. Then he turned and ran away. It grieves me that in the last seconds of Edward’s life I was too taken up with that other man’s odd behaviour to give my unhappily begotten brother any of my thoughts.

  *

  The water descended gradually from lake to lake, controlled by gated sluices. The greatest fall was that between the third lake, out in the forest, and the fourth, within the park wall. The dam between them had been fashioned according to the plan agreed by Rose and Norris, with advice from a Dutchman with whom the former corresponded. The land dropping down each side of the valley, the wall dipped with it but at a steeper angle, so that at last its crest was all but level with the higher water. For a distance of near on forty yards it was not so much a wall as the stone facing for a great bulwark of earth and rubble that held back the flow. This dam was topped with a fine parapet, and two little domed pavilions, one at each end. These latter looked like mere architectural flourishes, mere lead parasols held aloft by stone cylinders prettily pierced with arches. Within, though, they were businesslike. Shafts opened beneath them. Wheels turned the moving parts of contraptions reminiscent of the steel worm with which one may remove the cork from a bottle. By this means could be controlled the vents in the dam through which water passed to the lower lake.