Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “As soon as I saw him in the window I knew he did not believe in God,” she said to Fanny. “If only I had driven him away, but if I had, we wouldn’t have had you, and then where would we be?”

  It was Antoinette who told Fanny, beginning when she was very young, that Fanchon had nursed her even as she died.

  “The life ran out of her and you drank at her breast. I thought my heart would break. That’s why you’re such a sad child and it’s why you look just like your mother.”

  In reality Fanny was not sad except when she was with Antoinette, who lived in a state of melancholy and disappointment. Since puberty she had been trapped in England among Protestants and enemies of France. In all that time she had never had a happy moment, except for the joy that Fanny gave her. She taught the child to speak French, to be a Catholic, and because she was a Catholic, to live like a spy among her father’s people. She sewed secret pockets into Fanny’s petticoats in which to hide her rosary.

  “Don’t even tell your father about your holy pocket,” Antoinette said. “The Protestants kill Catholics in England, even little girls like you.”

  “Father is not a Protestant,” Fanny said.

  “No, he’s worse, a man who denies God,” Antoinette said. “Of course he would never harm you and you must love him because he’s your father, but you will not be together in heaven.”

  When Evans the Jesuit came secretly to Henry’s house and said Mass behind locked shutters, Antoinette felt that she had struck a blow against the Protestants that God would surely notice.

  “One day you’ll return to France and be happy,” Antoinette said. “I feel it in my heart.”

  When she was small, it seemed to Fanny that they could all be happy in Honfleur.

  “You’d be a Catholic then,” she said to her father, “and we wouldn’t have to have all these secrets.”

  “That would be a miracle,” Henry said. “I promise you we’ll go one day.”

  But France and England were always at war, and it was against the law to take a child out of England without royal permission, so they never went.

  Except for his voyage down to the Isle of Wight aboard the Pamela, Henry had never been far from London. The city was all the world to him, a great smoky theater that never closed. He loved to show it to Fanny. On their three birthdays—Fanny’s, Henry’s, and Oliver’s—and at Easter and Christmas, and each time the Pamela came home, Henry took Fanny out to celebrate. These outings lasted the whole day, and always ended with a feast in a tavern, with Henry’s friends calling to him as they came and went and joining him at table for a glass of wine.

  “How do you do, madam,” they would say to Fanny, bowing solemnly.

  Usually she fell asleep before supper was over; Oliver would carry her home through the streets. All her life she would remember waking up with rain or snow falling in the night, to look up into Oliver’s massive face and hear the thud of his big feet on the ground.

  “Almost there, angel,” Oliver would say, smiling and letting out a steamy puff of brandy breath. No matter how small she was, Fanny always had a new dress and hat. Henry had them made for her at a dressmaker’s in Watling Street, the same woman who had made Fanchon’s clothes. The colors and the cloth—bottle-green velvets, claret silks, deep blue satins that matched Fanny’s eyes—were intended for grown women, but they suited Fanny well. Henry would spin her round, laughing with pleasure.

  “What a beauty you are, Fanny!”

  In winter and spring, when the streets were choked with mud, Henry would ride in the same chair with her; and he and Fanny together weighed no more than a single passenger of ordinary size. Oliver required four chairmen, twice the usual number, to carry him.

  Fanny went with Henry and Oliver to Lloyd’s Coffee-house, where she listened to her father do business and watched him take part in auctions by the candle. He was famous now for his ability to judge the dying of the flame.

  One winter the Thames froze, and Henry skated among the bonfires with Fanny in his arms.

  “We’re skating over the place where Oliver and I lived on the water during the plague,” he said. “People would come out in boats and sell food and drink.”

  He made it sound like an idyll of boyhood; listening, Fanny went to sleep watching the flames whirl by and dreamed about this, too, for years afterward. Henry took Fanny to Saint Paul’s in the rain, so that she could smell the Great Fire of London on the scorched stones thirty years after the burning. In the Royal Museum they saw the entire tanned skin of a Moor with the hair still on it, and on a February morning looked down into Fleet Ditch where a drowned man, frozen stiff, stood up in the muck with a dead dog tied to his wrist. All around them people were pointing and making jokes. Henry did not warn Fanny to look away and it never occurred to her to look away; the dead were common in the streets of London, and like everyone else, she was used to them.

  From earliest childhood she knew the churchyard at Saint Andrew’s, where her mother lay among the other Hardings. They brought flowers on Easter, on birthdays, and on the anniversary of death. All these dates were fixed in Fanny’s memories.

  “They’re not here, of course,” Henry said.

  “Then why do we come and leave flowers?”

  “Because they’re here,” Henry said, touching his head. “And because you must always have them here.” He touched her forehead. “That’s where the dead live on, in the thoughts of the living.”

  Fanny said nothing about souls ascending to heaven. She wasn’t sure that she believed that this happened. Although her father had never told her what to believe, and had even paid a priest to instruct her in her faith, the fact that he did not believe had planted doubt in her own mind.

  When Henry and Oliver brought Fanny home late at night, or after a long day at Lloyd’s Coffeehouse or the Exchange, Antoinette was always waiting at the door with accusation in her eyes. It was no life for a child, Antoinette said, dining at taverns and staying up all night and making friends with bad women and worse men.

  “She won’t be a child forever,” Henry said. “The more she knows of the world, the less unhappy the world can make her.”

  Fanny loved the Pamela, the scent of coffee and chocolate in the holds, the Genoese crew in their striped shirts and tasseled caps, the creak of planking and rigging even when the vessel was lying quietly in the Thames. She wandered through the ship, talking to the sailors or playing hide-and-seek belowdecks with Oliver, while her father and Joshua Peters discussed voyages and cargoes in the master’s cabin. Antoinette had been taught that it was bad luck for a virgin to step foot aboard ship. Henry would not listen to her protests, so she spoke directly to Fanny.

  “Do you enjoy playing in the ship?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Fanny answered. “Better than any other place.”

  “You mustn’t go there at night. An old man died of rabies on that ship, and he and the mad dog that bit him are ghosts now. When it gets dark, they walk. You can hear the old man calling for mercy. He wants to go to heaven, but the dog still has his teeth in him and won’t let him go. It’s horrible.”

  Giacomo Cerruti, raving for salvation, and the mad dog growling and biting him, entered Fanny’s dreams. The next time the Pamela came home, Fanny refused to go down to the Thames to visit her.

  “Why not?” Henry asked. “Joshua has brought you a present from Italy.”

  Fanny explained.

  “Ah,” Henry said. “Ghosts, is it?”

  That night, which was moonless, he took Fanny down into the hold, lighting their way by a candle inside a lantern. The cargo was only half-unloaded. In the feeble light of the lantern, the boxes and kegs and sacks took on sinister forms. Henry blew out the candle. He put his arm around Fanny’s shoulders in the dark.

  “Let’s call the ghost,” he said. “I’ll call the man, you call the dog.”

  Fanny shrank against him, trembling.

  Henry lifted his voice. “Giacomo Cerruti,” he called, “Gia-co-mo Cerru
ti.”

  There was no answer. “Try the dog,” Henry said. Fanny could make no sound.

  “Whistle,” Henry said.

  Fanny pursed her lips, blew, and made no sound. Closing her eyes in case the whistle brought the dog and its master, she whistled a string of notes.

  A dog barked in the hollow space behind them. Henry whirled around and called again: “Giacomo Cerruti … Giacomo Cerruti.”

  He was answered by musical notes—the scale played up and down on a spinet.

  “What’s this?” Henry said. “A ghost that plays the spinet? Come, Fanny, let’s find him.”

  Pulling her along by the hand, he walked toward the sound. Fanny’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness now and she could see indistinct shapes all around her. The spinet sounded again, very close now. Fanny saw a chink of candlelight.

  “Giacomo, my old friend, is that you?” Henry asked. “No,” said a voice in the dark. The same voice barked like a dog.

  Suddenly there was light—another lantern that had been muffled and was now thrown open. In its light Fanny saw Joshua Peters seated on a stool at the keyboard of a spinet.

  “Happy birthday, Fanny,” Henry said.

  She would be twelve in a week and Joshua had brought her a new spinet from Italy.

  “It’s the latest thing,” Joshua said. “The legs come off and the whole thing fits into a bag for traveling.”

  “Let me see,” Henry said, curious at once.

  The two men dismantled the instrument, then set it up again. It was very cleverly made, and the procedure took only minutes.

  “Sing ‘Heureux qui peut se plaindre,’” Henry said. “Will you, Fanny darling?”

  Fanny struck the first chord. The spinet had a lovely sound.

  “Wonderful,” Henry said. “We can take this with us when we go to France and have music on the ship, music along the way, music wherever we are.”

  “It sounds as though I’ll be pretty tired by the time we get there,” Fanny said.

  “Play,” Henry said. “Let’s see if the dog will howl.”

  4

  It was Rose who changed everything. Nobody, not even Henry, thought it possible that Oliver might fall in love and marry at the age of fifty-one, but that is what happened. It happened after a football game on Shrove Tuesday, the best of all possible days from Oliver’s point of view.

  Oliver had gone up to the village of Chesham in Buckinghamshire to play football. His host was a sporting baronet named Cecil Lockwood. He and Oliver had met fifteen years before, when Sir Cecil passed him on the stairs in the Widow’s. Sir Cecil was going up while Oliver was coming down with a squealing girl under each arm and a third riding on his shoulders with her legs wrapped around his neck.

  “By God, sir,” Sir Cecil said. “If you can do what I think you’ve just done and have the strength afterward to carry three fat wenches down the stairs, I wonder what you can do with a football.”

  Oliver’s giggling girls were pounding on his body with their soft fists, urging him back up the stairs.

  They introduced themselves. Sir Cecil immediately recognized Oliver’s name, which was known to everyone in England who loved football.

  For fifteen years thereafter, always over a bottle of claret at the Widow’s, Sir Cecil tried to persuade Oliver to play in the Shrove Tuesday match at Chesham. Oliver always declined—he had the habit of playing in Saint Andrew’s parish and he didn’t want a change. But as the years passed, and all the fellows he had played with as a young man grew too old to take the field, Oliver decided that he might as well play one match in Buckinghamshire.

  “Just this once, mind,” Oliver said. “I’m far too old to be loving mud and blood.”

  “But you do love it,” Sir Cecil said. “I know you do. By God, Chesham is in for a treat.”

  Sir Cecil himself loved football even more than other Englishmen. “I tell you, sir,” he told Oliver, “there would have been no civil war in England if Prince Charlie’s father had let him play football. But no. Old James, God rest him, bloody Scotchman that he was, was afraid his boy would break a princely leg. The football field is the one place in England where a man can knock down his betters and not be hanged for it. If the boy had been knocked on his royal arse a few times by some good strong country lads, he’d have had a better idea of where the divine right of kings started and stopped.”

  Sir Cecil lived for games. He even taught them to his dogs. His mastiffs, beasts bred for size and obedience, had been trained to play a game called Trespasser. When someone wandered onto the grounds of the estate, Sir Cecil would ride out with his mastiffs and hunt him down like a stag. Then the mastiffs, slavering and growling, would tear the clothes off the man without hurting him. “By God, sir, trespassers seldom come back for another game,” Sir Cecil told Oliver and Henry in the Widow’s. “I have to keep on finding new ones.”

  Oliver said, “Have you ever tried it on a girl?”

  “Once. But she fainted dead away while the dogs were rolling her about on the ground and I couldn’t wake her up to fuck her.”

  Sir Cecil’s side, the yokels, won the match that year against the villagers. Oliver scored the only two goals. Sir Cecil, giddy with happiness, wrung his hand at the end. Oliver was so completely covered in mud after more than four hours of play that only his eyes, the white of his teeth, and the bright scarlet patch that was his bloody nose could be seen.

  “By heaven,” Sir Cecil said, “our side will never lose again. You’ve put the fear into the rest of them.”

  Sir Cecil always gave a masked ball on Shrove Tuesday, a holy day known in southern countries as carnival, for the gentry of the county. Oliver, who had a fondness for costume, came dressed as a sultan, with a turban on his head and a scimitar thrust through a broad sash at his waist.

  “Splendid costume,” Sir Cecil said, reaching up to clap Oliver on the shoulder. He was still overflowing with triumph at winning the match. Sir Cecil himself was dressed as a sorcerer, the costume he wore every year.

  It was early still and he and Oliver were the first ones downstairs. No guests had yet arrived. Oliver was tremendously happy, as he always was after playing football, and looking into his battered face, Sir Cecil was seized by an inspiration.

  He had a stepdaughter-in-law, the widow of his wife’s son, who had just come out of mourning. She was beautiful but penniless, poor material for a match. But Oliver might not care about that once he saw her. His stepson hadn’t.

  The girl herself wouldn’t object. How could she? Oliver looked a lout, but he was a good fellow and he was not badly off at all—owned an interest in a ship, dressed himself up, spent money like water in the Widow’s.

  A servant came by with a tray of glasses. Sir Cecil took two off the tray and handed one to Oliver.

  “You ought to marry, Barebones,” Sir Cecil said. Oliver was startled. Nobody had ever before suggested marriage to him. “Marry? What for?”

  “Well, you’ve got some money to leave behind you, haven’t you?” Sir Cecil said. “You ought to have a son to leave it to before you’re too old to get one.”

  “I have a goddaughter who’ll serve as heiress if I have anything left when I die,” Oliver said. “Besides, I’ve never seen the point of marriage. It’s cheaper the way I do it—a guinea a time for a different girl every time and a brandy wash afterward to keep off the pox.”

  Sir Cecil hardly listened to Oliver’s words. He had seen his opportunity. He was saddled with a young widow who ate too much, burned too many candles, and had no family to go back to.

  “Don’t say no before you’ve seen the goods,” Sir Cecil said. “I’ve got a pretty widow for you, yellow hair, lovely tits, nicely broken in by a young stepson of mine before he fell off his horse and killed himself.”

  “Very kind of you, but I’m happy as I am.”

  “I say again, don’t say no till you’ve seen the goods,” Sir Cecil said. “Ah, here she comes now.”

  Rose came down the stairs
dressed as Salome in a gown made of filmy veils. Her hair was down in a silvery curtain around her face, and her lovely body with its high, wide-apart breasts shimmered inside the translucent cloth as she descended.

  Oliver had never seen such a beautiful girl, or one who seemed so untouchable. He could scarcely believe that she was human, much less that she had ever lain on her back and lifted her knees for a husband. The thought of her engaging in that act had a quick effect on Oliver.

  Sir Cecil saw what was happening. “What did I tell you?” he said. “Amazing tits, aren’t they? And she’s very willing, according to my late stepson. Slow-thinking, Robert said, but that’s not a bad thing in a beautiful woman. Come, let’s get your foot in the stirrup.”

  Sir Cecil pulled Oliver across the floor and introduced him. Rose looked up at him for a moment, then covered her face with a mask on a stick as her eyes filled up with boredom. Although the music had not started, Oliver asked her for the first dance.

  When the dancing began, Oliver claimed his partner. Rose was not a large girl, and she had never been touched by such a strong person. Dancing with Oliver was like dancing with a bear—interesting but impossible, something you would only expect to do in a dream.

  After the dance, she could not get rid of him. He brought her drinks, ices, sweets. He sat next to her at supper and watched her in fascination, eating nothing himself, while she sliced up her meat and placed it into her mouth with her slender ringless fingers. She hadn’t eaten meat for several days—Sir Cecil kept a thrifty household—and she ate even more greedily than the others at the table. When she was done, her lips, which looked like the lips on a statue of a Greek goddess, shone with grease. It only made her more beautiful. Everything made her more beautiful: the lock of hair that had escaped from her pins and hung along her cheek, the expression of complete indifference to others that made her glow with mystery. She never laughed, never answered when spoken to.