Wild Grows the Heather in Devon

by Michael Phillips

  She smiled but said nothing. Charles was so kind to her. Yet sometimes she wondered if he would ever really understand the anxiety and stress being out in public caused her. Would her lingering doubts ever disappear?

  She dabbed her napkin to her lips and then laid it beside her plate. “You know that I am proud of you,” she said. “And I will be there at your side, as I promised. But now,” she added, rising from the table and giving him a kiss, “I have some things to do.

  “If you want me,” she added, disappearing through the doorway, “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

  4

  Reflections and Dreams

  An hour later, Charles Rutherford stood gazing absently out his study window.

  The final reminders of an early summer’s storm swirled about overhead. A tempestuous wind had preceded last evening’s warm drenching rain, and now its lingering gusts were blowing and pushing the last grey clouds ahead of them in the direction of Land’s End and out to sea.

  Through constantly opening and closing holes between them, a bright sun was doing its best to shine out. Its rays, working in harmony with what rain still wrung itself from the clouds in occasional spurts, produced now and then a momentary curve of rainbow. The clear sky above the eastern horizon was steadily lightening, and by afternoon it would doubtless be blue overhead. Pastures and trees, hedges and meadows, forests and cultivated gardens, dripped clean and fresh from their dousing, and the sun, when it finally triumphed, would send sparkles reigning across every inch of the earth’s showered surface.

  But this silent, blustery music of the universe was lost on its observer this morning. Heedless of both rainbow and its meaning, Charles gazed out over the landscape of the estate. Though all thought of tomatoes had long since left his mind, the morning’s incident had put him in a temporarily nostalgic mood. As he gazed out over the landscape of the estate, images from his own childhood came back to him.

  Actually, he smiled to himself. Amanda was not so very different than he had been at her age. The realization brought to mind the old couple of the woods to whom as a youngster he had more than once voiced his own independent spirit.

  ————

  “Ay, Master Charles,” came the slightly high-pitched but melodic voice of the Irishman, and he could hear the words as if it were yesterday, “’tis any fool can see what’s wrong with the world and ought to be changed. But ’tis the wise man who can see what’s right and ought to be preserved.”

  Bobby McFee’s Irish accent gave the words almost a mystical import in the boy’s youthful imagination. This reaction was strengthened no doubt by a somewhat wild appearance, as well as the fact that he was in the habit of saying such odd, out-of-the-way things.

  “New is not always better, Master Charles,” the man went on. “It may seem better, God only knows. But it may be a step backward in the end.”

  It was a day not unlike this. The sun shone and the wind blew. Charles peered across the mown and hedge-lined field to the edge of the woods beyond. In his mind’s eye he could almost make out the remnants of the well-worn path across the grass, which then disappeared into the trees.

  He continued to smile with almost a nostalgic longing. Those were happy times, the days of his childhood. During the summer months he must have tromped over that path to the McFee cottage nearly every day. And as his reflections carried him away, he recalled one such visit.

  The white-plastered dwelling where Robert McFee lived with his wife, Margaret, known to everyone for miles as Maggie, was in actual fact far more than a mere cottage, though such it had always been called. The very size of the thatch-roofed structure indicated an original ownership higher on the social scale than any of the peasant dwellings scattered throughout the hills and dales surrounding Milverscombe.

  The commonly accepted legend concerning the place was that it had been constructed in the early eighteenth century as a lodge for the gamekeeper of Heathersleigh Hall, for at that time the land upon which the cottage rested had lain well within the expansive borders of the estate. The passage of time, however, and the financial misfortune of Charles’ grandfather, had succeeded in vastly diminishing those borders and forcing the sale of much property, including at one point the gamekeeper’s cottage.

  It was a credible theory. There was no reason to doubt the truth of it, and no one did. Old deeds and records buried somewhere within the Hall’s thick stone walls would have in fact confirmed most of the details of the cottage’s early history, if they ever chanced to come into the light of day. The story of its later years, however, was another matter.

  How exactly the property came into the hands of the McFees, if they knew the details at all, Bobby and Maggie never said. The villagers speculated that if a father or grandfather of one of the two had bought the place, then he surely must have had considerably more resources than had come down since, for the old couple lived very simply and frugally, keeping to themselves.

  Some called them queer; others called them quaint. The townspeople in general considered them a strange lot, though Bobby’s knowledge of animals was so vast that none of them could have gotten along without him. They were therefore willing to put up with his eccentricities. And his wife made herself indispensable to the villagers in a thousand ways. She knew much that was not commonly known, about medicine and weather, about herbs and other plants, and about humanity in general. In times long past Maggie would doubtless have been burned as a witch. The poor of the region now thought of her as an angel. The well-to-do didn’t know what to think of her, and cared even less.

  Charles had heard his own father comment on their various peculiarities more than once. But when he was young he never saw anything so unusual about them—only that they were old-fashioned and looked as woodsy as their surroundings, as if they had indeed stepped out of the pages of a fairy tale.

  There was nothing he liked better, in fact, than visiting the McFees. There was always so much interesting going on about the place, Mr. McFee in his barn and his wife busy in her garden. Whenever he came they made time for him, and never minded the childish importunity about modern things which had possessed him even as a boy.

  He had made the mistake of taking his cousin to visit them once. But he had been just like the rest, and had come away making fun of the two, and him along with them. But on the day of the visit he now remembered, he had been alone.

  “Come, Master Charles,” said McFee, laying down the blade with which he had been planing a plank of wood. “I think Maggie’s about t’ call us for lunch. Then afterwards, you and me will go up into yon hills t’ see if we can fetch a trout or two from the lake for ye to take back t’ yer mother.”

  He led the way from the barn into the dwelling which sat in front of it, where his wife awaited them in her kitchen.

  “Sit down, Master Charles,” said the woman, “and be welcome as always to our humble fare.”

  As the future lord of the manor took his seat, she placed a plate of sliced brown bread on the plain wooden table in front of them.

  “We have white bread every day,” said the boy in a boastful but innocent tone.

  The two McFees glanced at one another and both smiled.

  “You’ll discover one day that sometimes the simple pleasures are best,” said Maggie. “And that what comes from the earth satisfies more than what comes from the hand of man.”

  “Why is that?” asked the lad.

  “Because it’s closer to the hand of God,” she replied. “The further back and nearer to God’s making of a thing you can get, the better and purer it’s likely to be. The hand of man spoils more than it improves what God has made.”

  “But God doesn’t really make things, like people do.”

  “Oh, doesn’t he, then? Who do you think made the world? Who do you think made you, Master Charles, if not God himself?”

  “My father says this is the age of science. He says God is just an old-fashioned story.”

  Again the two smiled, this time with sa
dness.

  “He’s much more than that, lad,” now said McFee. “But that’s something ye’ll have t’ discover for yerself. For now, we’re going t’ give him thanks for providing for us. Bow your head, Master Charles.”

  He did so. The man prayed.

  “Lord, our God, we thank ye for taking such good care of us. Thank ye for the earth and the sun and the rain that makes things grow so that we might have bread t’ eat. Thank you for my good Maggie’s hands that serve both yerself and me so faithfully and lovingly. Thank ye for our wee friend, Master Charles. Take care o’ him too, Lord, and when the time comes show him that he owes his life t’ you, and that he came from nowhere but yer own heart. You are ay good t’ us, our Father, and we’ll never tire o’ saying thank ye. That’s all we can return t’ you for the life you’ve given us, our thanks, and the obedient work o’ faithful hands. Amen.”

  The boy scarcely understood the words, though every time he sat at the McFee table young Charles Rutherford felt a strange sense of contentment. He neither took offense at the couple’s words, nor found them peculiar. He accepted them as he accepted the air he breathed. There was a simplicity and serenity here that drew him, and thus he came to visit whenever he could.

  As Maggie McFee now handed him a thick slice of the rich earthy bread, he spread on a generous supply of the fresh butter he and Bobby McFee had churned only an hour earlier from milk taken from their one cow the day before. The boy’s teeth bit into the hearty slab with greater vigor than would have been required for the white bread back at the Hall. When he and Bobby set off along the bank of the stream toward the lake an hour later, poles and lines over their shoulders, laughing and chatting freely, the lad who would one day be lord over all this region felt refreshed and invigorated. Truly indeed had he partaken of the food of life.

  ————

  Charles Rutherford’s thoughts returned to the present.

  His youthful fondness for the strange couple in the woods had not diminished, though he had seen not nearly as much of them in the last twenty years as perhaps he should have. When they crossed his mind, as they had a few moments ago, with their faces came wistfully pleasurable reminders of days gone by.

  Yet he was the little boy of his reminiscences no longer. He was a man who now stood at the very center of that modern empire he had only dreamed of then.

  He turned from the window into the room and glanced down once again at the invitation on his desk.

  “The honour of your presence is requested . . .” began the ornate script, hand-lettered by the royal calligrapher. He must have read it over a hundred times since it had been delivered by special courier a month before. And now at last the appointed day had nearly arrived.

  This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life! thought Charles Rutherford, Devonshire landholder, and by reason of his inherited position, Lord of the Manor of Heathersleigh.

  He was to be knighted in the chivalric order as a Knight Grand Commander. Tomorrow he and his family would travel to the capital. The following afternoon, at one of the many Diamond Jubilee celebrations honoring the sixty-year anniversary of her coronation, Queen Victoria would receive him personally and bestow the honor herself.

  The event represented the high point of a career that showed all the signs of becoming yet the more noteworthy, for he was but thirty-eight years of age. The London Times had already dubbed young Charles Rutherford one of England’s top ten politicians to watch. Though the title of lord of the manor, which had been his father’s, grandfather’s, and great-grandfather’s before him, was legitimate and of ancient date, it was a feudal title that did not entitle him to sit in the House of Lords.

  This blemish, as some might have considered it, upon his rank, was actually, for a modern like Charles Rutherford, a great blessing. For it made him eligible for election to the House of Commons, a position not available to English or Scottish peers, and which Rutherford had enjoyed as a Devonshire M.P. for some years.

  He allowed his eyes to wander up from the royal seal and drift about the expansive office on the second floor of the west wing which he called his study. The hardwood floor, well worn in places from centuries of use, was accented by two Persian rugs. A leather couch sat before a wide fireplace in which a small fire crackled. Several ornate high-backed oak chairs stood about, along with one leather chair and footstool that matched the couch. The ceiling was high, painted in white. Tall windows framed with heavy gold drapes, nearly always pulled to the side except on the bitterest of cold winter’s days, opened in a northwesterly direction. Around the room, rich paneled wainscoting separated wood floor from walls, white like the ceiling, and upon these walls hung numerous paintings and small tapestries.

  His gaze now passed across two oil paintings, one of his father, the other his grandfather, then his eyes moved to the adjacent wall where they fell upon an original pen drawing of Leonardo’s he had purchased some years back at a London auction. It was of some unidentified mechanical device, which, as far as Charles could fathom, had never existed anywhere but in the great artist and inventor’s clever brain. Its gears were not so hard to understand as the way they had been arranged together and the means by which they connected and moved, as well as what purpose they had been designed to achieve.

  Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the drawing, which made it priceless, was the incomplete sketch in one corner of the face of a woman. If it did indeed represent the beginnings of Mona Lisa, as he suspected, painted between 1503 and 1506, that would date the mechanical drawing in the neighborhood of 1502, when the great artist was engaged in various engineering projects in northern Italy. Placing the drawing in its historical perspective, however, did not unlock its secrets.

  From the drawing his eyes moved to the shelf nearby which contained his own attempt, in iron and bronze and links of chain, to duplicate Leonardo’s two-dimensional drawing in the three dimensions of reality, a fabrication which still sat incomplete and revealed no more clue to the potential use of the thing than did the original. Charles had tinkered away at it in his shop down in the basement of Heathersleigh Hall for three or four years with forge and various tools, before finally giving up.

  On the corner of his desk, however, next to the gold-plated hand-telescope his father had given him on his twenty-fifth birthday, sat an invention of his own which had come to fruition, emerging largely out of his work on the Leonardo project—an ingeniously designed miniature electromagnetic motor, mounted on a base of wood. He was in the process of securing a patent for it, and hoped eventually to find some industrial function, once electricity came into more widespread use in the nation’s factories.

  It was not that Charles Rutherford needed the money that this invention, or any of a half dozen others he was working on, might potentially produce. He was a creative man who admired the likes of Leonardo, men of vision in advance of their fellows, men who changed the world with their intellect and their daring, men who inquired into the unknown and challenged the norms of their times.

  Notwithstanding Bobby McFee’s words to him as a child about the value of the old, his was a brain that by nature could not help probing the new. He had grown up doubting tradition, questioning established methods, asking why such-and-such couldn’t be, and dreaming about what might be and could be. And he was already teaching son and daughters to think in like manner. His mind persistently sought to push the limits of his own personal creativity and mechanical skill to see what he might be capable of thinking or designing or making—when he was not, that is, writing some political manifesto for presentation in the House of Commons, or for publication in one of London’s progressive political or socialist magazines.

  Rarely, however, did his questioning mind turn itself inward. Charles Rutherford was a man of supreme personal confidence, and thus had yet no need to question himself.

  Beside the motor, between two carved ivory bookends, sat one of Charles’ other most prized possessions, along with the Leonardo drawing—an
autographed first edition of the 1859 printing of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. He had met the great naturalist personally in 1881, shortly before his death, when he was himself yet a young man. Both the meeting and the book had exercised a profound impact upon him. He had read the Origin four times.

  Along with Thomas Huxley, H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, and others in the new wave of socialist and progressive thinkers, Mr. Darwin had helped formulate his views on life and the universe. The modernistic perspective conveyed to him as a youngster by his father expanded and grew within him with the years. His personal development in many ways paralleled that of the age.

  Rutherford was no scientist himself. But the Darwinic worldview of rationalism and scientific determinism resonated with his youthful brain during his years at Cambridge, where he had discovered the book. At the university his socialistic tendencies sent the roots down further that would define his later views and political orientation. Afterward, his outlook grew yet stronger during his stint in the navy.

  Like Leonardo before him, Charles Darwin was a bold pioneer in his field, unafraid to challenge long accepted ideas, though religious conservatives were doing their best to tarnish his reputation and ban the Origin altogether. They would never succeed, thought Charles. Progress was on the side of scientific advance, and religious intolerance could do nothing to stop it.

  Western civilization had not come to this high point of industrial might by sitting on its laurels, or by clinging to a religion for old men and women, with little practicality in its ancient creeds. As fond as he was of the McFees, they were the sort of people that progress left behind. Religion had been replaced by science, progress, invention, and rationality. Men like Leonardo and Darwin had challenged men’s minds and forced them forward into new eras and new times.

  Such was his dream, to exercise similar impact, to change the world in his own sphere—perhaps not invention like Leonardo, perhaps not science like Darwin, but in the world of practical parliamentary politics where he was growing to be recognized as one of the nation’s leading free-thinking progressives.