The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  26. Owger’s Howe

  Lucas Simmonds said they would plot a Mental Map of the part of the earth on which they were. The biosphere was to be drawn up into the noussphere, where it was to be fulfilled and completed, so that change and decay should no longer corrupt or impede its full shining. This was to be aided by their instrumentation. Led by their, particularly of course by Marcus’s, intuitions, they would perform experiments, or rites, which were strictly different names for the same thing, in those Places of Power they could certainly locate in the area surrounding Calverley. Their proceedings must be both biological and mental, because they, partaking of both worlds like amphibia, linked both worlds. The night’s meditation would reveal the locus of the next day’s experiment.

  To assist the work he hung like mandalas in his room Ordnance Survey maps of the North York moors, photographs of Whitby Abbey, a marine pothole known as Jacob’s Ladder, Calverley Minster’s rose window, standing stones and geometrical earthworks on Fylingdales moor. He extended his eclectic reading to books on Fairy Mythology and druids. He told Marcus there were places which traditionally and for good reasons had been felt to be meeting places between the earthly and the unearthly, umbilici of the earth, hilltops and caverns, and there they would go. They would go in a scientific spirit and write up, neatly, their observations and conclusions. They would collect physically as well as mentally specimens, talismans, significant creatures. It was a scientific field trip combined with a spiritual pilgrimage, healthy fresh air, combined with mental gymnastics whose modes Marcus had not yet grasped. Any coincidence, analogy, concatenation, of dream and object, act and vision were pounced and worked on. Everything bristled with possible significance.

  Marcus, over-alert and tremulous, nevertheless enjoyed these exercises more than the rest of the discipline. Lucas had begun to record and exploit his waking visions, that endless train of detailed shape-shifting images he saw when idle, or betwixt asleep and awake. The spider-web in various forms, grey ropes and glassy fibres, hyacinth, iris, gentian blue, recurred frequently. Or cloth, unfurled and undulating, decorated with spangles and paisley coils, faces and hands, on and amongst the layers of tissue. Once he saw a long procession of creatures, reptilian, rhinoceroid, elephantine, marching on bleeding feet over ice and snow against a line of stunted bushes whose leaves and twigs he could draw but not recognise. Once a face in a helmet rose and would not go, though he opened and closed his eyes, though smoke flew across it, though its outer peripheries temporarily transmuted themselves into conger eels or layered black wing-feathers. Perhaps because Lucas talked of them he began to see flowers, anemones rising and uncurling like serpents into cups of crimson, sapphire and purple, branches of blossom snapping into light and taking flight into a black sky. (The vision of the bleeding creatures in the snow was almost the only one with a pale sky.) He saw sap rising in transparent reeded stems, clear green flowing light up to gold cups, and white throats, crimson-spotted, and trailing swirling speedwell-blue florets. Lucas said he was seeing the inner Forms of the Biosphere, flowers as they had been, or would be, or innerly meant to be. Lucas told him that Goethe had seen the Urpflanze, the Typical Plant, revealed in existing plants, though it did not grow in Nature. So maybe Marcus saw the species-pattern, the Plan of creatures as he had seen the mathematical Forms. He himself had recently been led to wonder whether the numerous fairytales about ointments which, rubbed on your eyes, caused you to see tiny species, moving invisible creatures under hills, in streams, even in market-squares, were to do with vision peculiarly attuned to the creation of species-patterns of microscopic or yet-uncreated life. Blake had drawn the ghost of a flea and had declared that if the gates of perception were cleansed man would see everything as it was, infinite. Imagine, Lucas cried lyrically, waving a crocus under Marcus’s nose, imagine being able to perceive the infinity of this creature, the matter and force that have flowed in and out of it through all time, the power that as we see it at this moment holds it in this pure and complex form …

  Marcus could not follow Lucas’s excited analogical leaps. He did see the crocus, the fine lines and channels on its sheen, the deepening gold, the almost transparent flower-flesh. He was in a perpetual daze of focused visions and things, real things, studied and learned with a hallucinatory closeness that was so like the visions that the memory-images of both ran into each other. This was bearable because it had the firm purpose of Lucas’s sense of direction.

  They covered their chosen ground in Lucas’s car, which was black and low and shining. Inside it Marcus was initially tormented by geometry. The way in which the sides of the road, the white lines, converged, were swallowed and vanished, filled him with the plughole and graph paper alarm. Trees and horizon were converted by speed to converging geometry: tall trees bowed and danced towards the windscreen in car-constructed lines. Lucas drove very fast, hissing between his teeth as he leaned extravagantly round corners. Marcus said he was afraid of speed and parallax. Lucas said this was good for vision. In the old days, did Marcus know, they suspended witches in sacks from the boughs of trees and gave them a good shove. In there, detached from time, space and the body, they were aware of other dimensions and saw visions. There was no earthly reason why sports cars shouldn’t have the same effect on moderns, at least passengers. He should empty his mind and stop fussing. Marcus said he was afraid of that. Lucas said he, Lucas, was there, wasn’t he, he could bring Marcus back from any temporary displacement of consciousness to hedgerow or white line. Thus encouraged Marcus began to enjoy speed. Disembodied he saw the overarching heaven and mapped the moorland as a series of turning concentric globes. He was carsick once and once only. Lucas said carsickness was a failure of the will, a failure of control in the solar plexus. He said he, Lucas, didn’t wish Marcus to be sick in his car. It was distracting and the smell lingered. He gave Marcus a barleysugar. Marcus was not sick again.

  One Spring Sunday they visited the Dropping Well at Knaresborough and a second powerful place, a long barrow on a tumulus known as Owger’s Howe.

  Lucas had read up on Mother Shipton who had once lived in a cave-house by the Dropping Well. This person he told Marcus must have had considerable Mental Power since she had foretold tidal waves in the Thames, the Plague of London, Wolsey’s death, the dissolution of the monasteries, the defeat of the Armada, the length of Elizabeth’s reign, and the execution of Charles I. She had power over nature: she threw her staff in a fire and retrieved it unharmed. She had predicted many of the advances of our own time.

  Around the world thoughts shall fly

  In the twinkling of an eye,

  Through hills men shall ride

  And no horse or ass by their side

  Under water man shall walk

  Shall ride, shall sleep, shall talk,

  In the air man shall be seen

  In black, in white, in green …

  Lucas thought it might well be that such persons were in touch with the motions of earth’s magnetic fields. Marcus had no views, but listened.

  It was grey when they came to Knaresborough. They proceeded, a usual pair of tourists, man and boy, along the river walk beside the Nidd, under the overhanging cliff, to which the spring-water, full, Lucas explained, of fine particles of nitrous earth, dropped through a pipe over what was now a stone fall of solidified streamlets, droplets, ferns, roots of trees and plants, bulging and sagging, to the shallow stone basin of the Well. In the early nineteenth century the conduct of the guardians of the Well had aroused serious aesthetic objections in lovers of the picturesque. Lucas had borrowed an old guide book from Calverley library. “The top of the cliff,” he read to Marcus, “with all its vegetation, has been naturally encrusted with carbonate of lime, which drops over in a continuous stony mantle. Beneath this the guardians of the spring have suspended dead birds and animals, branches of trees, old hats, stockings and shoes and various matters equally absurd which become ‘petrified’ under the dropping and are carried off as ‘objects de vertu�
� by the curious, chiefly visitors from Harrogate.”

  When Marcus and Lucas came there, there were indeed, suspended on strings, partially encrusted gloves and socks, a bowler hat, green around the still unswallowed band, over which the stony crust was slowly advancing. Lucas stood and watched Marcus eagerly as Marcus gravely considered the heterogeneous petrifying objects under the heavy, slow drops. There was a whole birdsnest, layered straw, smoothed feathers, clutch of tiny eggs, slowly becoming stony and durable. Marcus stared at this for a long time. There was also a book, its pages sealed by congealing lime, its title obscured already forever. There was something sinister about this uniform, permanent transmutation. If one broke off a stone bough, a stone fern frond, would there now be, inside, even a dark thread of what had once been alive?

  “I don’t like it. I wonder why people put things in.”

  “Curiosity about change of substance. Curiosity about curios. It’s like real sculpture, if you see what I mean.”

  Marcus stared at the pathetic dangling stone socks, every weighted crease fixed.

  “It’s all dead. I can’t see why it’s so fascinating.” But he was fascinated.

  “You have to put your hand in. And wish. And let the water dry naturally on your hand.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the customary rite. An invocation perhaps. A contact. We should put our hands in.”

  Marcus had no wish to do so.

  “Touch, smell, taste, hear, see,” said Lucas. “Rocks and stones and trees. This is where the lithosphere touches the biosphere. A point of entry and exit as I see it. We need to know.”

  He took off his jacket and rather solemnly and portentously rolled up his sleeve. Marcus discarded his blazer, opened his cuff, and rolled up his own sleeve. Side by side they extended their arms and hands into the frigid fall and pool. It bit. It burned cold.

  “Concentrate,” said Lucas, without specifying on what. Marcus fixed his eye on the limed nest. Addled liquid sealed in a stony shell. He looked away and was struck by a cluster of contorted stone bootlaces. For what might people require household objects stiffened into stone? He pulled out his dripping arm and hand which tingled and crimsoned. Beside it Lucas’s forearm, rosy and freckled, trembled slightly.

  “Did you wish?”

  “I can’t think of anything to wish for.”

  “Open your mind to the future.”

  “I can’t like this place.”

  “It has an aura.”

  “It is cold and wet. And tripperish.” The water was still freezing on his hand. He would be there for ever. If his hand was not stony it would crackle with ice.

  “We must leave something of our own. To maintain contact. A terminal as it were. Have you got anything?”

  Marcus poked with his left hand in his blazer pocket. His right hand flamed and tingled. He found a pen, some pennies, a handkerchief, some string. Lucas turned these over and decided on the handkerchief, which had Marcus’s nametape stitched neatly to it. Marcus said he might need to use it, it was cold. Lucas said he had several and would lend one. He placed Marcus’s handkerchief and his own pencil together under the drip.

  “Part of us. Part of the Well. A link.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “The pencil and the handkerchief should solidify together.” Lucas added rather plaintively, “It’s the pencil I wrote it down with, what you saw. It’s partaken in large areas of the experiment. It should make a powerful terminal.”

  Marcus had a brief vision of a stone wire appended to a stone pencil humming stony notes, and a distant crystal set. Lucas peered like an anxious dog into his face. Signs of scepticism, or boredom in his generally well-impressed colleague always filled him with alarm. He made further proselytising efforts.

  “You know, Mother Shipton lived in a house cut out of the rock. Like the Sibyl at Cumae, and the Pythian priestess. A striking coincidence. And they were known to be at the entries to the other world, umbilical points … known. It did seem likely you might be aware of … some field of force … or something.”

  “No. Everything seems solid and heavy and oppressive. I want to go.”

  “What form does the oppression take?”

  Marcus, tracing aimless figures on the still air with blotchy damp fingers, turned a stony face on Lucas and for the first time exploited his knowledge of his own dubious authority.

  “It takes the form of knowing we ought to get away from here fast. This place is against us staying. It doesn’t like us moving.”

  For a moment his mind’s eye saw turning corridors of polished smooth blue-veined stone, inviting inwards. He ignored this. He repeated, “It’s against us.”

  “But you see no more.”

  “No.”

  Lucas shrugged himself into his coat.

  “We’ll go then. We should take something.”

  In a nearby wood they found what Lucas said were some very satisfactory flowers, late winter aconites, dog’s mercury, hartstongue, the only true indigenous fern with undivided leaves. Lucas showed signs of wanting to offer these, green-ruffed gold, creeping hairy fœtid spurge with tiny green flowers, to the Dropping Well for preservation. Marcus said they were not going back there. Lucas acceded meekly. Marcus said with cunning, “Tell me about Owger’s Howe,” and Lucas brightened, and said it was on a moor south of Calverley near a place called the Obtrush Yat, or Gate, and was an imposing tumulus with door pillars and a threshold which had a long tradition of propitiatory rituals and sightings to do with it, special knockings and bowls of milk put out at certain times of year, ring-dancings and lights from inside at midnight, a vanished shepherd and dog who were believed to have entered Fairyland through those stone gates and never returned. It might take a couple of hours’ driving but it would be a good place. He had brought a picnic. Before they set out he read to Marcus an account by one William of Newbridge of a countryman in the Province of the Deiri (i.e. Yorkshire) who heard from a barrow “the voices of people singing and as it were joyfully feasting. He wondered who they could be that were breaking in that place, by their merriment, the silence of the dead night, and he wished to examine into the matter more closely. Seeing a door open in the side of the barrow he went up to it and looked in; and there he beheld a large and luminous house full of people, women as well as men, who were reclining at a solemn banquet and, as it were, raising their cups to a tall and excellently fair couple who appeared, from the woman’s wreath and fantastic garb, to be newly wedded. One of the attendants standing at the door gave him a cup. It contained a clear, red liquid, something like wine. He took it but would not drink, and casting the contents secretly upon the grass, was struck with terror on seeing that the ground flamed and smouldered where the drops had fallen. At this, still tightly grasping the vessel, he took to horse, and fled; the people of the place, making a shrill buzzing, pursued him with all speed, but he came safe to the town, and there gave the cup into the keeping of the Curate. Once the cup was out of his hands he could neither see his pursuers nor hear their shrill outcry, although his horse was maddened seemingly, and could never again be comfortable or quiet. The vessel, made of an unknown material, indescribable in colour and extraordinary in form, was kept in the Church a many years; and they could not come in at it; though he who held the cup could hear their wailing and singing and threatening sometimes on the wind.”

  Marcus asked what Owger meant, and Lucas said it was believed by some to be a corruption of Ogier le Danois, a Danish paladin who had gone into Fairyland for several centuries but had been promised release in time of great need – like Arthur and Merlin and other aeonic sleepers under stones and within hills. Others insisted Owger was just a local goblin, who took the offered milk and occasionally bothered cattle and sheep with his pranks.

  The Howe was reached by a grassy track running steeply up a hillside of fields so clotted with bracken, heather and thistles that it was hard not to see them as invaded by moor. The barrow, high and distinctive, stood on the top
of a raised circular mound surrounded itself by vestigial terraces, or furrows in the crust of the earth which, Lucas waggishly assured Marcus, beaming brightly at him as they tramped upwards, bearing canvas holdalls of picnic and specimen jars of fauna and flora, which were generally believed to be the marks of the dying wreathings and constrictions of a loathly worm or dragon which had secured itself to that tump for its last battle. Marcus, somewhat breathless, did not ask why Lucas was so sure that the idea of Worms was comically fictive whilst the ideas of little or good or green folk or people in barrows and mounds, or angels in cathedrals, or Mothers who sensed magnetic shifts centuries ahead, were somehow wrong-headed descriptions of actual forces. No doubt all would be made clearer, in so far as Marcus chose to seek clarity. He preferred, in fact, a certain area of cloudiness, as to the naming and categorising of things. His capacity for belief in particular propositions was no greater than it had ever been. Plans and patterns there might be; biospheres and lithospheres and entelechies were no more than evocative words.

  The terminals and focal objects Lucas was scattering about the surface of Yorkshire he treated with a mixture of scepticism and fear. They were almost certainly not what Lucas said they were. But what they were doing was instigating all sorts of tuggings, and urgings, and pricklings and singings and expansions and contractions in him which were connected with fields of force in which he did perforce believe, and which resembled things that were most respectably taught in schools, electricity, X-rays, magnetism. An electric charge could pick up a mouse or a sheep, or a man, and shake it till it chattered, singe and char it to a calcined clod. Something had gone through him when he saw the light, and something related went through and through him now, and shook him, so that without Lucas he might well, he considered, have been wiped clear of mind like a washed slate, or clear of body, like something set in a vacuum.