The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  10

  Symbolic and Diabolic

  It was the morning of Emilia Frere’s departure from the Hall and for a few minutes Louisa found herself alone with the Rector, who fingered the brim of his hat and beamed like the milky sun outside.

  Though she had foreseen the need for such a private moment, Louisa would certainly not have chosen it to occur so quickly. Her thoughts were muddled still, and her feelings scattered in small exclusive groups like members of a difficult meeting yet to be called to order. They kept slipping away, as her father had already slipped away, with no more than a mumbled excuse, to jot down a line of verse that had presented itself while he stood in some abstraction. Tom Horrocks, who might otherwise have furnished a convenient buffer, had been drawn to the kitchen by the smell of newly baked bread, and was doubtless flirting disgracefully with Tilly and the kitchen maids. In the meantime Emilia was in her room still, fussing for an unconscionably long time over her appearance. So Louisa must decide how best to employ the unsought opportunity of her confinement with the Rector, and she was entirely unready.

  “Fortunately,” she said in belated response to Frere’s remark of a moment before, “the drive to the Rectory is not far.”

  “And the day,” he observed, “moderately clement.”

  “Emilia will be well wrapped.”

  “Indeed.”

  And there yet another exchange of platitudes gravelled on silence.

  She had been trying to marshal a persuasive line of argument in her mind. If the truth is at last unavoidable, it ran, and if it must bring consolation in its train, then surely there should be no need to dread its disclosure? But there was something unsatisfactory about its far-from-syllogistical terms, and she was left unconvinced. As her eyes strayed, yet again, to the clock on the mantelpiece, she wondered whether it was, after all, a matter of timing – that what in auspicious circumstances might be helpful could, in others, be quite devastating. How difficult this was!

  Evidently the Rector felt himself obliged to remedy the silence. “Tom Horrocks has put my mind quite at rest,” he said. “He is a considerate man.”

  “And an excellent physician.”

  “Yes. His reputation reaches beyond the county, I believe.”

  “We are fortunate to enjoy his services,” said Frere, though he immediately regretted the choice of verb: heartening though Horrocks’s manner was, there was small occasion for pleasure in a doctor’s professional attendance.

  “I know him better as a friend,” Louisa confessed, “having always enjoyed good health.”

  “It is a great blessing.” The hat took a further turn in Frere’s hands. “We must count our blessings, Miss Agnew. They are manifold.”

  For a moment Louisa wondered whether this platitudinous sentiment might be turned to advantage, but it could not be done without contrivance, and when she looked up she saw how the Rector’s face aspired to bravery. During the past few days’ anxiety had shadowed his eyes like bruises; they were brighter now and eager in their attention to the door through which his wife must soon enter. Plainly he was recovering himself. Were Louisa to speak what pressed upon her mind, it would, she saw, quite undo him.

  “I was wondering…” Frere began again, hesitantly.

  But Louisa was elsewhere still. She was reflecting once more how her continued silence might preserve the unsought trust confided in her, but it remained a betrayal of her friendship for this man. Never had she been so confused.

  “I thought, once Emilia is with us…”

  “Yes, Mr Frere?”

  “I thought… a prayer of thanksgiving?”

  “It would be entirely appropriate.”

  “You would join us?”

  “It would be a great joy.”

  “Your father?”

  “Has promised to return in a moment.”

  “I felt sure you would consent.” Yet behind the grateful smile one cloud remained. “But the doctor…Tom? I would dearly wish him to be there and yet I would not impose on his convictions.”

  “Nor, I feel sure, would he wish to give offence by abstention.”

  “Then you think?…”

  “I do.”

  This was, apparently, a burden lifted from his mind. It was more than that, for now all anxieties were dispelled. The smile was clear. Handsomely, warmly so.

  Louisa was filled with a terrible wonder at Frere’s ignorance. Again she found herself astounded that Emilia should have so little feeling for him. His diffidence was the shy guise of uncommon sensitivity. Other parsons of her acquaintance would have nothing but commination for Tom Horrocks’s head; they would have demanded brusquely that all kneel and at least pay lip-service to their own self-righteousness, but this man…

  She wanted to cross the room. She wanted to press her hand on his, say, “My dear, Mr Frere, I beg you to forgive what must appear an intolerable intrusion, but I have reason to believe your present happiness must be short-lived unless…”

  Unless what?

  In her imagination Louisa saw the man confronted by the chill implacable will which had seized her own hand the previous night and imprisoned her in confidence… that sacred confidence. How fiercely Emilia had insisted on it. It lay now like a stone across Louisa’s tongue. And there was nothing sacred there. It felt like a curse rather. It profaned the very bonds of speech. If she herself was at a loss to cope with the perplexities it wrought, what chance would this tender spirit stand before it? Such happiness as had returned with his wife’s recovery would wither as she spoke. Her candour, however delicately phrased, would blight it. What was meant for a joyous occasion would shrivel to a general wretchedness.

  Yet if she did not speak…

  There might be no other moment.

  Louisa felt the palpitation of her heart. There was a flutter in her throat as she drew the breath to speak. “Mr Frere, there is a matter that I must…” She faltered at his eager eye. He waited, unwitting, ready to be of service. He was all unprepared. Again his encouraging smile discomposed her.

  The door opened and Emilia was there, caped and bonneted, a pale disgruntlement in her face. “Ah, here you are. I had begun to believe the Hall quite deserted.”

  Frere sprang to his feet. “Emilia, dearest, do you imagine I could abandon you now at the very moment I have longed for? Miss Agnew and I have been patiently awaiting your appearance.”

  Emilia deflected the warmth of his approach. She turned an exact gaze upon Louisa, then a studied flickering of eyelashes affirmed complicity. “My dear,” she said, “you look a little wan this morning. Have I quite worn you out with my demands? Edwin,” she added, without moving her gaze, “Louisa has been so great a comfort to me I can hardly bear this parting.”

  For a moment Louisa could not bring herself to answer the frail smile. How she loathed this web that had been spun so swiftly round her. She felt soiled by it.

  “I believe it is possible,” Frere was saying, “that there may be some small service we can do in return. Miss Agnew, you were about to say?”

  And she was caught between them. Fool, she was thinking angrily, and she could not restrain the quick glance that sought Emilia’s eyes. In a shocked instant she saw it: had she seized the moment that was lost for ever now, had she spoken to Frere, unfolded the unhappy fate in store for him, it would have spelt disaster. The scenes were acted swiftly in her mind: when Frere turned in bewilderment to Emilia, the woman would deny that any such confidence had been exchanged; accused of mischief, Louisa would be forgiven by neither; the “intolerable slander” (for such it would be called) would furnish a pretext for Emilia’s immediate departure from Munding; and Frere, if he remained, would be friendless.

  Was it possible then that, in its impotence before a lie, the truth could do great harm?

  She stood, numb with shame, fingers tugging at the bracelet round her wrist until it caused her pain.

  “My dear?” Emilia encouraged.

  Louisa looked away, out of the wind
ow – how she wished she was out there in the frosty air, in the simplicity of the Lodge, alone, in the one place where her tarnished star-fire might begin to gleam again.

  But she must speak.

  “It was nothing,” she said, “…a passing thought.” Then she willed herself to look back at them. “Nothing that may not be answered by the prayer that Mr Frere would have me join.” She took in his mild perplexity. “Excuse me a moment,” she added hastily, “I must find Father and Dr Horrocks. And I am sure that Tilly and the staff would wish to join us in expressing their heartfelt relief.” Before either the Rector or his wife could speak again, Louisa hurried from the room. Behind her she heard Emilia say, “I think the child will be quite desolate to see me go. Her life is very empty here.”

  When the thaw came to Munding, it came as rain, a wind-driven chilling rain that flooded the water meadows and made the ford impassable. Pipes, sprained by the ice, burst now, reed thatches leaked; at least one low-lying cottage in the hollow was awash. Water, it seemed, was everywhere; the lanes were mired with it, dikes deep, clogged here and there by flotsam into dams that would sunder and flood under the pressure of constant rain. A sodden pedlar out of Saxburgh brought the news that the mill race there had broken its banks and the pond lay right across the Norwich road. The bridge at Pottisham was down. Further along the river, it was rumoured, a wherryman had drowned. Certainly people in Shippenhall were out on their roofs for boats to rescue them, and still there was no let up in the rain.

  Only in Munding Rectory had there been no thaw.

  Clearly Emilia Frere’s decline was more emotional than physical, for it would respond to no remedy. Visitors were not welcomed upstairs, and if Mrs Bostock haughtily insisted on the sovereign nature of her companionship, she met with little encouragement in that belief.

  Mrs Frere’s refusal to respond (Mrs Bostock later informed Eliza Waters) was as dreary as the rain, and as impervious to her visitor’s desire that it should cease. My dear, one had positively risked an influenza to bring her some good cheer, and to what end? There had been nothing achieved by the expedition save the coachman’s cold which now threatened to lay low the rest of her staff. However, one knew one’s duty even if the parson’s wife seemed negligent of hers.

  Eliza Waters, who was herself venturing upon a cold, would have found it difficult to agree more. Yet, to be quite fair, Mrs Bostock conceded, one must consider the possibility that the fault might lie with the husband.

  Miss Waters was certain that this was so, but she would be most interested to hear how her friend had arrived at that conclusion.

  Was it not obvious (she was answered) that the man felt sorrier for himself than for his wife? He was all milk and water. He lacked the fire to take a firm hand with the woman. Why, if Bostock treated her that way she would be inclined to fetch a stick to him, for the vapours (as Mrs Frere so dismally attested) would be the sole alternative. One must pity the woman, however tiresome she made the task. The fact was, the Rector had no sense of priorities – he would be happier washing the feet of the poor than ordering a dignified social life such as a woman in Mrs Frere’s position had the right to expect.

  “If only she would not go on about Cambridge so,” Miss Waters regretted.

  “My dear, the woman no longer does even that. Indeed, some tattle of Cambridge life would have been a pleasurable relief. The poor thing can hardly bring herself to speak at all. One might as well not be there.”

  “And the Rector showed no gratitude for the interest taken?”

  “But you know the man as well as I,” Mrs Bostock protested. “He bumbled and tugged at his ear and said he hoped I might call again at a more opportune moment, though I did not believe a word of it. He wanted me out, my dear. That much was evident. I greatly fear that there is something not right about the man.”

  “Not right?”

  “Not right.”

  “I do agree,” said Miss Waters, then regretted that she had agreed too quickly, for Mrs Bostock would venture no further except to opine that the Reverend Frere was, at the very least, too little of this world to serve as a useful guide to the next. “Charity begins at home,” she concluded, “and that is not a home I shall seek to enter again in a hurry.”

  And what more could Miss Waters do but affirm that if one could not perform one’s Christian duty without being treated as a busybody then the parish had come to a sorry pass?

  Having fought to overcome his grief at the loss of the child, the object of this critical review had, in fact, sought every means he dared to stop the great gap it opened in the domestic life of the Rectory. Frere’s thanksgiving for his wife’s recovery was heartfelt, for that loss would have been irreparable, and his rejoicing at her return was genuine enough, but how short-lived. Muted as it was in consideration of Emilia’s still frail condition, the joy, which was inevitably tinged with sadness, had been allowed small room to breathe. Indeed, it had expired almost on the short journey home.

  For Emilia, as for himself, Dr Horrocks’s reassurance that miscarriage was a kind of mercy had brought no deep comfort, and Frere would not remind her of it, for he had quickly seen that, in some way he was far from comprehending, the loss was more secondary to her than it was to himself. Was she then secretly distressed by the thought that she had failed him? If so, he would not have her blame herself. The failure was less hers than his own for not having taken better care. He would never forgive his absence at her moment of need – the fault was freely confessed in an agony of self-reproach, but such, it seemed, was not Emilia’s unspoken thought. Failure was not a word that answered.

  Nor did his attempt to view their shared suffering as part of the Lord’s mysterious providence – a present ill from which a future good might spring – in any way ameliorate her condition. She listened to his earnest philosophizing and did no more than that.

  Where she must take comfort, he insisted, was in the doctor’s assurance that there was no reason why she should not conceive again. Had Tom Horrocks not promised her so himself? Out of their love for each other, in God’s good time, another child would grow. An hour was sure to come when this very room would ring loud with infant cries. Why, on cold winter nights like this, they might even briefly rue the desire that had brought a howling babe between themselves and sleep.

  Emilia was neither comforted nor amused. She sighed, her pale brow resting on the fingertips of the ringed hand. If Edwin did not mind, she wished only to be left alone. Conversation exhausted her. After a long moment’s unhappy shifting from foot to foot, Frere granted her wish.

  That was the first day.

  On the second night, at her emphatic request, Frere moved, temporarily, into another room.

  It was not merely the weather that made the Decoy Lodge feel gloomier, more shadowy than Louisa remembered, not merely the damp that left her bones so chill. The rooms were hollow about her, unresponsive, as though, resentful of her absence, they had returned to desuetude and would not lightly be chivvied back. It was dispiriting, and Louisa found it hard to settle to her work. For too long she gazed at the rain across the lake. It swooped and gusted, then hung impermeably, aspiring almost to a solid state. There were moments when it felt like a portcullis downward-slammed between herself and the human community.

  She had not expected this. As soon as the ice broke on the lake, she had returned to the Lodge with an appetite for work, for solitude. On her way to the boathouse that dawn – before the rain began and too early for her father to rise in protest – thin panes of ice had snapped beneath her feet. She saw leaves of the last fall encased inside them and, yes, it was cold, but there was a fine frosty light, and the mist over the lake made her think of a stoat’s white fur. With a sense of release, of invisibility almost, she slipped within its folds. Only out on the water with Pedro panting in the prow had she dared to admit that for the first time in her life she had felt herself a prisoner at the Hall.

  Not one peaceful night had passed since Emilia Frere exact
ed her promise; not even after she and her husband were gone, back to whatever wretchedness awaited them in the Rectory. Alone in her room, Louisa had been unable to put them from her thoughts. She found it painful to anticipate the poor man’s misery, and was dismayed to recognize how ferocious was her dislike for the woman. Never had she experienced such negative intensity of feeling. It would not square with any value she had taught herself to cherish, for she believed herself above such petty sentiments, and could cope with them now only by turning her dislike upon herself. What sort of creature was she after all who could feel only loathing for a woman who had suffered so? Emilia had been long sick with pregnancy; she had lost the child; and somewhere she was terribly afraid. Having experienced none of these things, what right had Louisa to judge of this? Who knew what an unhappy woman might say in such straits, and how little she might mean it?

  The memory of that cold hand on hers spoke otherwise.

  Louisa had slept badly and dreamt ill. On waking each day, she had been out of temper. She wanted only to be free of this, for the lake to clear, so she could retreat to her task. Her invisible companions at the Lodge were pure hearts all. She longed only to be one among them.

  And now she was here, and her mind was still shadowed by that unsolicited intelligence. Staring at the rain, she recalled her first conversation with Emilia, how they had discussed The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the woman had protested a righteous indignation at the thought of a wife deserting her husband. Yet with how much less justice than Helen Huntingdon did she contemplate it now!

  Louisa strove for charity. It would not come. What displaced it was a sense of outrage that a man as kindly and compassionate as Edwin Frere should find himself shackled to a vixen. Almost it made one doubt one’s trust in the Divine Intellect that decreed such things.

  There was no profit in these thoughts. They served only to make her own heart sore and to mar her concentration. She reached for her pen and dipped it into the well so fiercely that when she lifted it a blot fell across the page. She sighed crossly, was about to dispose of the paper when a wicked thought possessed her. Under the black splodge of ink she drew the neck and shoulders, then the severe, aloof posture of the woman she despised. It was a few moments’ work to have her sitting with her baggage in a gig, to crown the blot with a ridiculous hat, and to write the word CAMBRIDGE on a downward-sloping signpost. At the rear of the speeding carriage, she inked in a cloud of dust.