The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  “What does interest you?” I felt called upon to ask.

  “Oh!” she said, as if this indeed were a question. But she did not at first go on, and we walked in silence for a time.

  “I feel quite trapped there,” she said eventually.

  I could think of nothing to say to this, so kept quiet.

  “What interests me,” she took up finally, and there was now no touch of her characteristic satire, “is a life in which I am engaged in discovering what interests me. Not just now, as a young woman, but when I am a wife, and when I have children, and beyond. A life of imagination, and experience, and engagement, and commitment to something beyond myself.”

  “And can you find none of those in the Brass Valley?” I asked.

  “I do not know, perhaps I can,” she said, and then, turning back to where young Harry and Alice tramped behind us that she might cloak what she was about to say: “But I’ve found them here!”

  Ah, my dear Miss Taylor, I beg of you: Do not attempt to remove the varnish from our painting. Do not take it down from off its wall and set its figures moving amidst the hurly-burly of the world. Do not mistake Art for Life!

  1778

  May 5

  I begin a new Volume of these my War Journals. I must recover some of the Equanimity I know myself to possess.

  Sought out Smithson, and as a Feint that my further Actions may be guised, apologized for this our late falling out, told him I had felt myself upon the Precipice of one of my Antic fits, but that thankfully it had passed. I told him he was a good fellow and that I valued his friendship. We went out into the yard and had a Smoke together.

  Two of my Spaniels returned last night from being about the Rebel towns and they report great Rejoicing all over the country on account of the Alliance with France. I spent the afternoon in my Interrogation of these returned Spies, to get from them what I might, and I have made my Report. Afterwards I had some Rum with one of them and questioned him how he manages to pass amongst the Colonials for it is a Subject that interests me, what Feints & Gambits might be employed. He says one must wear homespun, murder the King’s English, and fart a lot.

  I wait, I wait, and no word.

  May 6

  The Gibraltar of 64 Guns, Capt Vandeput, anchored this morning in the Harbour. She brings letters and amongst them I have one from His Lordship telling me that he has reason to believe that I will soon be attached to Lord Hazlitt’s Staff in Whitehall. He and I and William shall soon be dining at Burton’s, he writes.

  This business is but a waiting business. It does not alter how the Pieces are arrayed. The end will be played out. I will enjoy the Jewess, will let Da Silva know she has been enjoyed, and will sail for London where my tales of War and my Adjutant’s uniform will dazzle the young Virgins of Mayfair.

  May 8

  News finally that the Jew is back. I had both Rumor of this and, feigning business at the Waterside, saw him standing instructingly with one of his Draymen. He had a roll of Maps or Charts under his arm. No Judith, but her Note cannot be long coming.

  It is always a Delight to first discover how a woman is in the act of Love. The little Sighs & Cries & Gasps she gives, particular to her. And then the Collapse, the Surrender, the Possession, the Domination!

  May 12

  Four days and she does not write! Has she had time to bethink herself or has something Miscarried?

  I took myself to the Synagoge and asked after her, affecting a Disdain. Is the young Jewess I spoke to the other day about? I asked, stiff in my uniform. She was not, I was told. She was gone out of the city. But has she not return’d? I asked. They looked at me with Wonder, as well they might. I affected a great Distance, as if what I was about was beyond them, was a matter for the General’s Staff, one of the urgent Affairs of War. I felt a deuced fool!

  To knock upon Da Silva’s door as if I am still his Chess-playing, Sherry-drinking friend seems impossible now. Too much has passed, even if it is only in the Orb of my thoughts. Yet what other Course of action is there? Hang me, is the girl come back or not?

  May 15

  At last, at last! Some colonial Fellow who is come to the city from the Massachusetts, from Taunton which he says is where she is, has brought me a Letter. He was eager to be away, for I surmize he is not one of the Loyalists, but I importuned him to tell me of her, how she looked, what she said to him. But he could not Satisfy me. He is not Acquainted with the young Lady, he said. Rather she sought him out. How she knew he was bound for Newport he could not say, but she begged him deliver the present Letter. She paid him, and said the British Officer to whom he was to deliver the Letter would pay him the Sum yet again. This, I understood, as a way of insuring the Missive would be delivered. She is no fool, my Jewess.

  How my heart beat when I had unsealed the Envelope and beheld her hand! The Ecstasy I felt and yet hard upon the Despair! I could barely calm myself to read the note, for my Eye would fall down the page looking for something, some Sign, some Word, that would make things right. I had finally to sit down, press my fingers to my Temples, and commence to read.

  We are betrayed, she writes. Her Father has learned of our Love and has used the Ruse of a Visit to his Wife & Children as a means of spiriting her away. She did not understand this until it was too late, until she was already some days in her Step-Mother’s abode. It is not Phyllis who has betrayed us, she is sure. Perhaps Hannibal. Or who knows, for her Father has Spies about the City, about the Island. She says she has been Tortured by the thought that I must hold her now in such Contempt. That I must think her a shallow & inconstant Girl. But she is none such, she says. She is true & constant, she says. She has been most Bitterly tricked, she says. And now there is no way back. A Wilderness separates us. And a War. She begs me to remember her.

  Aye, how he must have enjoyed it! The Jew! The feint, the dissembling Face of the man! It all comes clear to me now, enacts itself like a Play. Smithson bent upon his righteous Errand. The Jew listening to tales of Perfidy. My friend excusing his Betrayal of a fellow Officer as the necessary duty of a Gentleman to the well-being of a Maiden. And Judith distraught at going away, yet Innocently writing to me it was but a Delay, could I wait for her? And after some several days, the Shock of learning she was not to return with her Father. That Major Ballard was not to be trusted. That he was a Man who enjoyed setting Snares for Women. Well, here was a Snare set for him. Aye, I comprehend it all!

  ’Tis Midnight now, and I have only just returned. For I wrote myself a Pass that I might be out past Curfew, and have walked all over the city. Oh, how I walked! From the Point to the Fort, out to the Ropewalks which are being taken down for firewood, and through the Cemeteries, through check Points and Sentries and finally back down along the Wharves. There were the Engineers’ fires out on Goat Island, and further out on Torpedo Island fires like the Devil was encamped there, and the dim-lit Masts of the Fleet in the Harbour, and the sailing Clouds across the dark-visaged Moon. And all of it, the darkness and the Ghostly lights and the hissing lap of the water, were the very Picture of my Thoughts.

  May 18

  I feel something like my Fit lurking at the back of my Mind. Like a Straggler following me at a neat Distance who, when I turn to confront him, slips behind a tree. He is there and not there simultaneously.

  I go about like an Automaton. I note the weather. I note what ships come in. I note Smithson in his daily duties.

  I am placed in charge of Spies, send them out, reel them in. I ask them Questions, write down Answers, distill a Summary for Genl Pigot. All the time there is another me, observing, waiting, mocking.

  No word of my Appointment to Hazlitt’s staff. Perhaps my Shadow is preferred.

  1692

  4th Day

  This matter that John Peele rais’d of Father’s having a secret place worked in me so that I spent the entirety of this morning looking through the house th
at I might discover a hiding place. I found none such but the most queer thing. In a space where a Purlin had pull’d away from a Rafter in the Attic I found hidden some shells and some other much broken worthless things, and also something like a Doll, though none such as I have seen here in Newport. I set these things before me, in my room, and ponder’d upon them. I could not think that either Father or Mother had hidden these things, and I knew I had not, and surely not Dorcas, so there could be none other than Ashes. I wonder’d at them, and then in the next instant felt it as a Stake driven through me.

  Of the many things we have heard tided of the late troubles in Salem Village was there talk of a Servant woman of the Islands who had been found to have little Dolls made up in the guise of Townspeople that she might conjure a Mischief to them. Had I most horribly discover’d another such Evidence? And Mother so lately ill! And Father lost!

  I went about the rest of the day in a Daze. I could fancy Ashes in a pique, angry with us, spiteful, but I could not fancy her to be in league with the Devil against us. Had she not laugh’d with us, had she not presents from us, had Mother not treated her kindly, work’d alongside her whatever the Chore? Had we not play’d hull-gull how-many when we were younger? Yet here were these queer shells and this terrible Doll. There is now much talk of the townspeople of Salem having seen Evil where there was none, and that by seeing that which was not they had done their own Evil. I would have no such fabricating Blindnesse about me. But is there not as well a Blindnesse in not seeing Evil when it lives with one, yea, even in one’s own Breast?

  After supper while Ashes clean’d up I quietly laid the Items on the Kitchen table that she might turn around and see them and I might register her Feeling at their sight. She did so and it was as I dreaded. For she did verily start, looking from the things to me with a most awful shock. Her look was as a Confession to me, and I felt stir in me the most awful Rage that she had kill’d Mother, driven Father’s ship upon the Shoals.

  But yet I controll’d myself, demanded of her what these things were, would she explain herself. She did answer then, and neither in our language nor the language of the Islands, but the language of Africa which we had but rarely heard her speak. It came out of her as in a Downpour, having no sense to my ears, yet with such a great Feeling behind it! In time she made me to understand that these things she had with her from her home, that she had had them with her when she was taken, and that she had carried them with her across the Ocean to the Islands and from Barbados to Newport with Father these eleven years ago. That the shells were accounted good omens in Africa, that there was a feather of a bird we have not here, and other things now unrecognizable, and that the Doll was her Doll that her Mother had made for her. She said these things in a state of such Emotion, in a Passion of, oh, I know not how to say it! of Despair and Torment and Anger and a Fear that they might be taken from her. Yet I could not at first credit her, and press’d her upon the matter of Witchcraft, for my mind was still taken by that Notion. She seem’d not to understand me, and her face grew yet more Miserable, and yet defiant of me, at which I felt my Suspicions leak out of me as from a wallow’d bung, and I relented. And in truth the Doll look’d nothing like Mother or Father. Indeed it look’d rather like a draggled Ashes.

  I did try then to mend things by saying might we not give the Doll to Dorcas that it might prove again a pleasure to a Child. But at that she snatch’d the things up from where they lay on the table and held them to her. Her face did work again with a most Mysterious emotion. And then with a Wail I have never heard come from a Human throat, she pitch’d the things into the fireplace! I was, I may say, now in a shock myself. Yet I cross’d to the fireplace and pick’d up the Doll which had landed in the ash, and brushing the hot stuff off, gave it her. She ripp’d it from me, and then ran out of the room, upstairs, and I have not seen her since.

  I am writing this in the dark. I have set my little table over against the small window of my room, where the Moonlight shines in, and the light from off the Snow. For I am fill’d with something I wish to explain, yet feel I cannot.

  Who was it who brought Ashes to New England? Who was it who took her and her Father and carried them away across the ocean? I used to think, when I was little, when I first came to understand that Ashes was not of us, that she came from so very far away, I used to lie in bed and imagine being so stolen. I would imagine someone coming into my room at night and carrying me off to Africa and how horrible that would be. It seem’d surely more horrible than it was for Ashes, for in my childish mind Africa was a place of Darknesse and Evil, and Newport was a place of Goodness and Light. I say in my childish mind, but do I not still think so? For Ashes was taken from a Heathen country and brought to a Christian. And tho’ I understand she must miss her Mother and her Sister, and wonder where her Father is, yet she is brought into the Light and may gain her Salvation and is that not worth a great deal?

  But O! if I could have Mother and Father restor’d to me would I not give up my Salvation? How wrong a thing to say! And yet it is true, so weak and feeling a girl am I! To have Mother back from out of the cold ground, and Father about the house, and Dorcas untroubl’d. Tho’ Ashes speaks of Christ and of the Light and comes with us to Meeting, I think I know that inside her it is the same. She would pitch us all as into the fire if she could return home, dark tho’ her home may be. How that strikes me in the Heart! For it is not God or Nature who has robb’d Ashes of her family, but us, we the people of Newport and our like. Is there not a sin in that?

  2011

  Half an hour later Sandy and Alice were seated at one end of the big dining room table with a Blue Onion tureen between them. They were a little drunk by then, and there was around them—to be resisted! Sandy kept trying to remind himself—the urging beauty of the room itself, the rich wood, the wall sconces with their gentle light, and the long-waisted French doors that looked out onto the veranda and the darkening lawn. He didn’t quite know how he got started, but Sandy found himself talking about tennis, not so much about the woe-is-me stuff, but the good stuff, the stuff that had brought him out onto the court ever since he was eight years old. How he had loved just hitting the ball! He could do that for hours on end, never mind the points themselves. Right from the start the thing that had motivated him (why did she look so lovely? what had happened to her?), even as a little kid, he said, was he wanted to make beautiful shots. Sure, he wanted to win—who didn’t?—but more than that, what he wanted was to be beautiful on the court. Not he himself beautiful, he hastened to add. Not Sandy Alison the man do-you-want-to-sleep-with-me beautiful. (At which she rolled her eyes.) But the thing he was doing. The sound of the ball coming off his strings, the arc of the shot, the spin, the angle, the heat rising off the court, the white lines, the hush of the crowd watching: he wanted it all to be beautiful. It didn’t even matter who won the point. It just mattered that the point itself, the play, the interconnectedness of it all, that it be beautiful and right.

  And that had made her talk of the beauty of Windermere—how deeply she loved the place. How her grandmother and then her mother had worked to bring it back—he should see the photos of what the place had looked like in the fifties! the fluorescent lights someone had hung in the hall!—and how now she, Alice, felt a duty toward it, toward its beauty and its perfection and toward her grandmother and her mother who had loved it too. Not just the house and the grounds, she said, but the history of the place. From when it was called Doubling Point, and the little farmhouse that had stood here during the Revolution with its rude dooryard and cowbells and sheep grazing out on the rocky point, and then the Gilded Age tearing everything down and putting up mansions all along the coast, and the tragedy of the original owners who had no sooner had the house built than the husband had died and left the wife with their two young children and a just-planted boxwood maze. They were in the house still, she said; could he feel them? And then they were back to that drunken night on the Point when he had
been so dense (she said) and she so charming (she said) trying to get him to see and hear and smell the seventeenth century in the crooked streets and the little Quaker houses. But he could see now, couldn’t he? He could hear and smell and feel now, couldn’t he?

  “I would love to give it to someone,” she said, reaching over and stabbing a mushroom off a platter. The sun had gone down and the wall sconces made the room—the silver on the sideboard, the china and the silk tapestry on the wall—glitter. “Windermere,” she said. “I would love to be able to give it to someone—I mean the experience of it. I think to bring kids up here, in the history and the beauty, in the idyll of the place, that would be everything to me. It would be—” and here she fixed him with a look; did he understand?—“a moral act, an aesthetic act.”

  He cocked his head, hoped he looked thoughtful.

  “Because being rich,” she went on, “is an inherently immoral act.” And again she looked to see if he followed. “You can do one of three things. You can just say to hell with the world and enjoy yourself, what we’ll call the Margo option. Or you can give it all away, which we’ll call the not-bloody-likely option. Or you can try to ameliorate the immorality by doing charitable work, sitting on nonprofits, raising money for the Redwood Library or whatever, which is how most people square their consciences, but really you’re only buying yourself a slightly higher circle, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged, smiled: he wouldn’t know about being rich.

  “It’s been a dissonance in my head for as long as I can remember. Two dissonances really, childish questions you can’t help but have: why me, why am I a cripple? And why me, why am I rich? There was a time, during college mostly, when I ducked the question by seeing one as paying for the other. Not just being rich as a compensation for the cerebral palsy. But the CP as a kind of punishment for being rich. They factored out. I was quit with the world. I could enjoy being rich because I was paying for it.”