The Wilding

by McCann, Maria

It may appear that in recounting this affair, I blacken Tamar in order to clear myself. Let me repeat that I acted in full knowledge, compelled by stupidity and lust; I cannot be cleared of this, nor do I want to be. I am resolved that everything of importance should be told – not to injure her, for I hold her no worse than myself, but to shine a light into dark corners. Some pure-minded folk in this world, who had rather leave such nooks unlit, may cry out in disgust: what good to go peering into them? I can only answer as follows: a man who walks in darkness, from dislike of the cobwebs, may catch a spider in his mouth unawares.

  * * *

  The day after my nightmares I took Tamar back to Tetton Green. Knowing what I knew, I found it curious to see her sitting on the cart, transformed from shivering drab to warmly clad country girl. Nobody so much as glanced at us, now: our outward show was respectable and corrupt, like the times. Even Tamar’s voice was healed, and as we passed through the villages she would call out to food-sellers by the road, asking how much for their wares, and then purchasing (with my money) pies and pastries for her mother. I did not like her manners, nor her making so free with my purse. I may add here that she had ordered up dishes of food again and again as we lay in the inn, until I thought she would never leave off eating; I let her go on, all the while observing privately that it is as they say – put a beggar on horseback and he rides to Hell.

  As we approached Tetton, I remembered that I had said nothing to Father of staying away two nights or more. When I had set off, it had been without thought of where I should sleep; there had been no call for thinking, since at that time of year, with the roads empty, I was sure of a bedchamber wherever I went. I must now season him a dish of lies to account for my two days at the inn: not the truth, but something very like it. Thus I went on from lust and waste to fear and deceit, all in the grand old way.

  *

  We reached Tetton Green just as dusk began to fall. Lights were burning in Aunt Harriet’s house and I whipped Bully quickly past; since I was not paying a visit, I could hardly put the horse and cart into her yard. Nor could I drive them into the wood or leave them, in the growing darkness, in the lane. I therefore dropped off Tamar and her bundle (all that she was not wearing on her back, plus the blankets) at one end of the path leading to the cave. I then drove the cart to the inn in Tetton Green, to be called for later, before following Tamar on foot.

  She was at home, if I may call it that, before I could overtake her. As I approached the cave I heard her muttering impatiently, ‘He’s with me, I tell you.’

  ‘I’ve been fretted with worry,’ came the older woman’s whine.

  ‘Here are the blankets, look. Move your legs.’

  ‘What about the constable?’

  ‘Never mind him. Move your legs.’

  I entered in time to see Tamar bend and tuck the blankets round her mother’s prostrate form. There was something new: a lamp in a corner of the wall.

  ‘Has your mother been lying without any covering?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘She’s two dresses on,’ said Tamar.

  ‘But in this weather – at her age –’

  ‘We’ve slept in less.’ She pulled out a pasty from under her cloak and handed it to Joan. ‘It’s not the lock-up.’

  I did not feel very friendly towards her just then, nor was I inclined to be easy on myself. Between us we had forgotten that Joan, too, must lie alone without even those wretched blankets. This was bad enough in me, but how much worse in her daughter! At the same time, I was forced to agree that the cave was snugger than Tamar’s cell had been, perhaps from Joan’s constant presence, or the heat thrown off by the lamp, or merely some softening in the weather. While pondering this I became aware of a rustling sound and realised the old woman was lying on straw.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘Near here,’ said Tamar. ‘You thought I’d left her naked, eh?’

  I guessed that ‘near here’ meant my aunt’s stable, and wondered how she had got into it. Did she perhaps have some arrangement with Paulie? She might; he was not likely to receive comfort from any other woman. At that point, a hank of straw floated down from the cave ceiling, causing both women to exclaim in amusement.

  ‘Hob’s a naughty thief,’ said Joan. ‘Stealing our bed to line his own. See, he’s made himself a little house up there.’

  She pointed. I was just able to make out the creature’s head turning from side to side, and the gleam of its cruel beak.

  ‘Don’t you want to know about the lamp?’ Tamar asked.

  I was curt. Dilsquo;No.’

  She flashed me a warning look before turning to her mother. ‘I got out this morning. Master Jon fetched clothes for me.’

  Joan eyed the plain, serviceable garments. ‘Beautiful,’ she said. Was she mocking Tamar? I could not tell. ‘You’re a true friend, Sir. Oh, and I’ve something for you. Tamar, fetch my paper.’

  ‘The rest of your history?’ I asked.

  ‘Not all, not yet.’

  ‘It’s a memorable one, indeed,’ I said, trying to remember: she had been seduced by her sister’s husband, and then the sister had recovered, and war was come to the village. It was a history, certainly; yet just at that moment my own life interested me more.

  ‘Robbing!’

  I jumped at the dry little voice of the raven. The women, on the contrary, seemed to have lost all power of motion and stared at me, unblinking.

  At last Joan said, ‘He babbles night and day, now, what with the lamp.’

  ‘Don’t come here.’

  ‘He wants you to go,’ said Tamar maliciously. She thrust a single folded sheet of paper into my hand.

  ‘Is this all?’

  ‘You’ll find it plenty,’ said Joan.

  ‘Has Tamar read it?’

  ‘She can’t read.’

  ‘And wouldn’t want to,’ said her daughter, ‘it’s for fools’ – and she laughed in my face.

  I perceived that this scorn of reading was put on in order to mock me, and I was not a little angry. Only yesterday she had pulled me down to her in bed at the inn. True, she had shown the way throughout, as befitted a woman of her kind; but even so, I had anticipated having to comfort her, if not to swear love, then at least to extend protection. I had always understood that when a man lay with a woman outside marriage there was a price to pay, that sooner or later the woman was overcome with shame and then began the sighing and the pleading (which in the man’s case went before the act rather than afterwards) and that even harlots feigned these regrets, going through the motions while clamouring for gifts. Yet Tamar gave no indication of throwing herself on my mercy; rather, she seemed possessed by growing scorn for me. Even now she was saying, ‘I’ve more pasties here, Mother, and a piece of boiled beef,’ laying them down on Joan’s blankets without a word of thanks to me, who had purchased these good things.

  ‘I’ll be gone,’ I said.

  Joan peered up at me. ‘You’ll not stay a little, Sir?’

  ‘I must hasten home. It’s almost – time.’ I had nearly said ‘Christmas’, but that would be cruelty. ‘And’, (I wanted to be thanked) ‘the tale ends well, since you have your blankets.’

  ‘You’re all goodness,’ Tamar said shortly. Then she bent down as if I were not there and began to make room for herself next to Joan. The last I saw of them was the two women huddling together, Tamar pulling the blankets over both.

  *

  Fortunately there was a moon that night, or I should have been lost. I came out of the wood and hurried towards the inn, brought away the cart and started at once for home. In my coat was Joan’s paper; from time to time, hearing it rustle as my body swayed to the motion of the cart, I had a strong impulse to fling it away. What were these women to me? I had been drawn in, as Father had foretold, and had performed an act of stupid lust – but here I stopped; I could not call it an act, precisely; it had resembled a state or condition lasting an entire day. So much the worse. When it passed, like the fit of madness it w
as, nothing remained but deceit, extravagance and shame.

  The extravagance had very real consequences, one of them being the loss of the best part of my earnings. I had nothing in hand for my father’s accounts or (I realised with horror) for Simon Dunne. I should now break off from these beggarly leeches; I should shake the dust of their dwelling from off my feet, as the Bible says, wipe them out of my recollection and pray that when I came back to my aunt’s house I would find them drifted away like the vagabonds they were.

  In this fashion I berated myself as I was first starting out, miserably heated and distressed. When I say ‘heated’ I mean just that: in the physical turmoil brought on by my agitation I was obliged to leave my coat unbuttoned; my cheeks burned in the night air. As I drove on, however, my body cooled, and then my brains, and I at last began to think.

  I had been enticed into lewdness. Very well: many young men did the same or worse. I could at least say for myself that it was over. Nor had my conduct been always and entirely shameful. Nobody hearing of my exploits at the inn would now believe it, but I had honestly pitied both women – had wished to stand their champion and friend. No maiden had been debauched, no innocent ensnared – unless, I realised with fresh humiliation, that innocent was myself. No wife could now bestow on me the delighted surprise that should bless the bride-bed. The first time could come only once, and I had thrown mine away upon Tamar. I fancied I saw my father look sadly at me and shake his head.

  But Tamar – I had done nothing to offend her. Why, then, had she treated me with such contempt? Mist lying across the road like a veil, illuminated and thickened by the moon, seemed the very image of my perplexity. I pulled my coat more tightly about me and drove on, my head above the mist-layer as the cartwheels cut through it.

  Solitude is the mother of thought. Without that drive back to Spadboro I might never have understood, at least in part, the events of the previous two days. Even now, I would scarcely offer my interpretation in a court of law; I will only say it accounted for much of what I had witnessed, and it ran thus. Tamar had acted out of neither love nor lust. She disliked being in my debt for so much as the clothes andthe inn might come to, and had settled in the only coin she had. Having done so, she need thank no more. This, then, was the key to her insolence: she did not like my angling for gratitude, and would give no more, because it was demanding over and above the settled price; in effect I was demanding to be paid twice, in lewdness and in honest respect. Be he the King of England, a man cannot have both.

  Yet why such marked contempt? As a rule, a man feels little respect for a woman whose virtue he has conquered, whereas a woman becomes attached to her conqueror – yet here was a notable exception. I was obliged to turn these notions inside out, as it were, and spy into them through Tamar’s eyes. Thus examined, it appeared that she had my measure now: I was like the men who came to the cave. At the beginning, I had given without taking; this had pleased her, but also troubled her notions of the world and its workings. Since our adventure at the inn, I presented no such puzzle. I could be laid in the same box as all the other men, and was the more contemptible in that I had foolishly paid over more than was necessary. Tamar’s trading was of the simplest kind: she gave pleasure in exchange for money or goods. Male protection, of the kind that obtains in the marriage contract or, in a lesser way, when a whore finds herself a bully, was not one of the goods she sought; she had never known it. Men and women were to her a perpetual market, in whose dealings she and I were now quits.

  Here I recalled the gold ring she had clung to and still hoped to retrieve. Was that merely because of the comforts it would have purchased, or because it was freely given? To know, I would have to pry into the relations between her and my uncle. I was not sure I had the stomach for that, even if I could have done so to any purpose.

  I was now crossing a damp place where the mist, which had dissolved as the cart came uphill, began to set round it again. My heart beat furiously when a woman with a white clout round her head loomed up close by me; I shouted at her, demanding what in the Devil’s name she meant by wandering there so late at night. After that I whipped Bully on until we were high up on the dry ground near Spadboro. From there he knew the road, and how close we were to home, and consequently needed no whipping.

  * * *

  I refuse to dwell on the pleasures of the Twelve Days. Let it suffice that my mother and Alice had wrought marvels of baking and roasting; that my late return and the suspicion attaching to it – which my father chose not to broach, for fear of spoiling the holiday – nevertheless cast a shadow over our merriment; that on Christmas Day itself a man came to say his wife was in mortal agony with a breech-birth, so that Mother was obliged to leave the table and go to her aid, and came back a day later with tear-swollen eyes, having saved neither mother nor child. In short, that our festival, so lovingly prepared for, mostly came to nothing.

  The patient disappointment of my parents touched me as deeply as if I were the tender father and they my little ones. This was the first time, I think, that I ever experienced that particular grief, which was doubled by knowing my own part in it.

  I could not think of recent events without shame, and with Tamar and Joan to point the comparison I was more than ever struck by the honest and open respectability of the home in which God had placed me. More: I was ready to don sackcloth and ashes, and to become as prompt, obedient and humble a son as anyone could wish for, to abide by their wishes in the matter of marriage (excepting only Ann Huxtable). I would give them no more pain. I would marry and bring forth children. All the labour of my breeding would then be crowned with success and my mother and father could rest content. So I thought, and I began immediately to put aside my own wishes and fit myself to theirs.

  This was not altogether well judged. The fact (I may say it plainly, without vanity) was that I had always been a good son, leaving aside my reluctance to wed and my recent overlong stays at End House. The first effect of my resolve, therefore, was a show of fanatical virtue that (as my father later told me) rendered them both uneasy, suspecting as they did that only a severe singeing in the fires of wickedness could have brought it on.

  I was not virtuous to the point of madness, however. I had settled in advance that I would permit myself a measure of deceit in everything relating to my stay at the inn. As yet my father had asked nothing about my time away from home. He was the last man to let such things go; I therefore kept my lies ready and polished up, for at some point I was sure to need them.

  So I passed the holiday time, in waiting, and most uncomfortable it made me. On New Year’s Eve we stood at the front door, wrapped up against the frost, and watched the burning bushes being taken over the fields. We had done this as long as I could remember, from the time when I had to be hoisted on Father’s shoulders before I could see the lights. At last, far away but high and clear, came the cry of ‘Auld Ciderrrrrr … !’ We went back to our blazing fire, smiling at one another, but somehow the thing had fallen flat. It was the same at Twelfth Night: a lad with toast and cider was hoisted into our oldest tree, the guns were fired off and everyone drank deeply before the Wassailers passed to the next orchard. It had been my joy to drink as deep as any and to bawl out each verse of the songs. As it was, I felt as if someone else, not me, were singing, and when the men trudged away under the trees and their farewells faded down the lane I felt a Puritan’s relief that all was done with for another year. I wondered much at myself, and could only think that my secret wrongdoing had bled these honest, neighbourly customs of the pleasure they had once given me.

  On the seventh of January (having scrupulously waited until the end of the feast) Father called on me to account for the time spent away from home. I told him that I had gone at once before the constable, given evidence, seen the girl released and set off home (thus despatching all that part of the business in a single sentence). Becoming ill on the journey, however, I had pulled in to the side of the road where, overpowered by weariness, I had fallen a
sleep at the reins. (Note that I did not say I fell from the cart: I had given due thought even to bruises.) I had a vague remembrance of shouting, and of a dark man bending over me, before waking in the house of some excellent Christian people, the very type of the Good Samaritan. It seemed that the dark man I remembered on the road was not of their persuasion, for they had found him in the act of picking my pocket. He had been seized on, however, and deprived of his spoils. My rescuers then looked after me until I was ready to continue my journey.

  This farrago seemed to me impregnable until my father looked hard at me and asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell us before?’

  I said it would have been a pity to frighten my mother and spoil the festival, particularly when the affair was past and no harne.

  ‘So you think, I daresay!’ Father said. ‘But young men exposed to viciousness may receive great harm without knowing it. In your place, son, I should shun that road.’

  His face showed plainly that he guessed something close to the truth, and I felt I had disappointed him all over again.

  * * *

  I had yet to decide what to do with that other history, Joan’s. I was at first disinclined to read it; I had turned my back on these tricksy people.

  Had I been as honest, or as strong, as I believed myself, I would have thrown the paper away, or given it into my father’s keeping so that one day I might return it to her unread. Instead, like the weak, divided creature I was, I put it under my mattress, too far in to be detected by Alice’s busy hands. After that, it was the old story. A few days after Twelfth Night the itch started up: I grew curious and I must needs be reading. Excuses are never lacking in these cases. I told myself it was wrong, and cruel, to take away something that had given an old woman so much labour if I would not read it as promised, and thus talked myself by degrees into what I wanted to do.

  My parents must not catch me at my studies, but I soon found a way: the orchards in Brimming had late cider-apples that I usually pressed about this time. I would take Joan’s writing with me, reading it while I was there. I could easily burn it before I returned home, and then it would be as if the thing had never existed.