Gates of Paradise

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘We can have fires in all the rooms now my love,’ he said to Catherine as he stepped into the kitchen. She was concerned about the damp, which was rather marked. ‘Here’s a commission will keep us in fuel and vittles for a good long time. I shall start on it directly and you will help me to print it, will you not.’

  She would indeed. Had she not always been his helpmate? ‘I’ve found us an excellent butcher while you’ve been with Mr Hayley,’ she told him. ‘Meat is a deal cheaper here than in London and a deal fresher into the bargain, and there’s fresh fish to be had when the tide’s right. I’ve been talking to Mrs Haynes about it.’

  The name was new to her husband. ‘Who is Mrs Haynes?’ he asked.

  ‘Why, the woman who lives across the way,’ Catherine told him. ‘Our nearest neighbour you might say. Her husband is the miller’s servant so she’s up on all the local gossip. Oh, and there’s a letter come for you from Mr Butts.’

  Mr Hayley’s dinner party that night was a huge success. The wine he’d chosen was excellent, the meal well cooked, and after he’d treated them to a reading of his latest ballad, his guests were full of praise, both for his literary skill and for his latest charitable endeavour.

  ‘That widow woman will count herself blessed to have you as a friend,’ Mr Cunningham said, sprawling back in his chair. ‘Damme if she won’t. When are we to see the finished print?’

  ‘Mr Blake has given his word that it will be ready for sale by the beginning of October,’ Mr Hayley said. ‘All proceeds to go to the lady.’

  ‘I shall take three copies.’

  ‘You are pleased with your new assistant then, William?’ another guest asked.

  ‘I find him admirable in every respect,’ the celebrated poet told him. ‘Engraving, of all human works, requires the largest portion of patience and he possesses more of that inestimable virtue than I have ever seen in a man. Moreover, he is modest of his abilities and not a man to speak out of turn. If he does well with this commission, I shall make him my secretary. I might even set him to work to paint some portraits for the library. I have a set already planned.’

  ‘He’s a lucky man,’ Mr Cunningham said. ‘I hope he appreciates what you are doing for him.’

  Mr Hayley preened. It was always a pleasure to hear his charitable nature being given due praise. ‘I do what I can,’ he said, modestly. ‘Little enough in all conscience when I consider all the troubles of the world, but I am a man of principle. I do what I can. More port, Mr Cunningham?’

  Back in his damp workroom, William Blake had stoked up his log fire, lit two tallow candles to give him enough light to see what he was doing and was bent over the round table, engraver in hand, ready to start work. He had decided to print Mr Hayley’s ballad using a new method, which he called woodcut on pewter, in which the ground of the pewter was smoked and the outline cut into the darkened surface. He hoped it would make for greater clarity in the final printed work but of course there were risks entailed as he had never done it before and this was an important commission. He steadied his hands and made the first scraping incision, carving the first of Mr Hayley’s trite words. I will start my own work tomorrow, he thought, and when the village is at prayers, Catherine and I wall walk along the shore and take our own communion there. My sister will keep within doors I fear – she was never much enamoured of fresh air – but Catherine will join me.

  After the heavy winds and high tide of the previous evening, the beach was scoured clean. The incoming waves rolled joyously into shore, their onward movement a rush of rhythmical sound, their tips frothed into snow-white foam above glass-green water, where the sunlight reflected, bright and bold as if the surface of the sea was a mirror. The sky above their heads was heaped with rolling billows of blue and white cloud, and was higher than he’d ever seen it, and the morning sun, half hidden by a cloud, sent out visible beams of pale golden light. It was all movement, freshness and promise. The very air seemed to sparkle.

  And as he stood with his feet on the dry white sand, shapes rose from the surface of the sea, at first faint and transparent like steam or smoke but then as they rose higher and higher into the busy sky, elongating until they were six foot, ten foot, fifteen foot tall, and he recognised the forms of human beings, noble and benign, gazing down upon him with intelligent eyes and infinite compassion, and knew he was being blessed with another vision, and stopped, still and entranced, to receive it in all its glory.

  Minutes passed and he didn’t move. His breathing was so shallow it was a wonder he didn’t faint, but his eyes were wide open and full of wonder. Catherine could see nothing but sea and sky, but she knew that a vision had come upon him and stood beside him quietly until he could recover himself sufficiently to tell her what it was.

  ‘Isaiah!’ he said at last. He spoke faintly, like a man in a fever. ‘Ezekiel. I am given a fourfold vision. The Spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters. The Lamb of God descends through the gates of Jerusalem. As a man is born on earth so He is born of fair Jerusalem. We delude ourselves when we speak of three dimensions. Vision is fourfold.’

  He was beginning to tremble as he so often did at the end of a vision. ‘We will sit down, my dear,’ Catherine said to him. There was a large piece of driftwood a little further up the beach. It looked fairly dry and would serve until she could coax him home.

  He allowed himself to be led, his face still glowing from his enchantment. She knew he couldn’t see her although his eyes were blazing. ‘To justify the ways of God to man,’ he said, ‘is a mighty work for any man to undertake. Milton gives evidence of that. But no less will suffice. I must begin at once.’

  ‘And so you shall,’ Catherine assured him. ‘Are you ready to walk my love?’

  ‘Aye. I am,’ he told her. ‘To walk and to write.’

  But she noticed that he was glad of her arm on their way back to the cottage.

  His sister was aggrieved that they were so late. ‘I’ve been waiting on you this last hour,’ she complained. ‘It’s unkind to leave me so long. What have you been doing?’ Then, as Blake walked past her towards his workroom, she noticed the pallor of his face and knew. ‘Oh, not again!’ she said. ‘I thought he’d done with such folly.’

  ‘’Tain’t folly,’ his wife cried, defending him at once. ‘’Tis a vision.’

  ‘Folly or vision, ’tis all one,’ his sister said tartly. ‘It makes him ill and does him no good. You shouldn’t encourage him. Unless you wish to be married to a madman.’

  ‘My William is not mad,’ his wife said fiercely. ‘He is a visionary.’

  ‘He’s a fool,’ his sister said scathingly. ‘And you’re another to believe his nonsense.’

  ‘I wonder at you,’ Catherine said. ‘If you can hold such an opinion of your brother, you do not understand him. His visions are no folly. They’re the stuff of life to him.’

  ‘They’re unhealthy nonsense. Papa would have whipped him for imagining things.’

  The two women were toe to toe, glaring at one another, too deeply into another quarrel for either to back down. ‘And he would have been wrong,’ Catherine said hotly.

  ‘My father was never wrong. He did as any father would have done, took a stick to chastise a bad child, which is the right and proper way for a father to behave.’

  ‘It was wrong,’ Catherine said, fighting on. ‘You should never hit a child.’

  ‘This child was telling lies,’ her sister-in-law said, ‘pretending he could see God looking through the window, if you ever heard such nonsense, and him only four years old, and screaming blue murder into the bargain. Do you tell me that a child should be allowed to scream?’

  ‘I tell you that a child should be loved, or how else is he to learn to love? A screaming child should be comforted not beaten. Any fool could tell you that.’

  ‘What do you know of it? I see no children in this house.’

  ‘Nor in yours neither.’

  ‘You overstep the mark, Catherine. I will not be spoke
n to in this way. I shall speak to my brother.’

  But William was working in his badly lit room and not writing but engraving. He looked so cast down and so weary that his warring women grew quiet at the sight of him. ‘I cannot write,’ he said wearily. ‘I have to finish the ballad.’

  Half a mile away, the congregation of St Mary’s church were gathering on the church path in their Sunday finery. There was no rush to enter the building for, apart from the necessity to wait until the village worthies had made their more important entry, this was a time for parents with working children to become a family again, for daughters to kiss their mothers and fathers to extend a gruff welcome to their sons. The vicar was well used to delay for such Sunday rituals were long established in a place where so many children went straight from their own hearths as soon as they were twelve years old – or big enough to be considered twelve – to live and work in a great house.

  Betsy Haynes had dressed with more than usual care for the service that morning, for she was wearing her new red cloak for the very first time and she wanted to cause a stir. She was the prettiest girl in the village so why shouldn’t she cause a stir?

  She did, but not quite in the way she’d planned. As she came skimming up the path with her hood over her cap and the scarlet cloth wrapping her in warmth, she knew she was the cynosure of all eyes and was cheerfully proud of herself. But then she reached the porch and came face to face with her mother and realised with a painful sinking of the heart that her mother was not pleased.

  ‘Borrowed finery now is it?’ she said and her mouth was down-turned with disapproval.

  Betsy decided to confess at once. ‘No Ma,’ she said, lifting her chin, ‘tha’s mine. Paid for fair an’ square. An’ so warm you wouldn’t imagine.’

  Mrs Haynes was blue-eyed like her daughter but there the similarity ended. Where Betsy was all burgeoning curves, glowing skin and shining eyes, her mother was all uncomfortable angles, with bony hands and sharp shoulders, her face wrinkled and her eyes guarded, her mouth pulled sideways by disapproval. Now she looked as if she could cut the air by breathing it. ‘And where d’you get the money from, if I may make so bold as to ask?’

  Betsy was stung. ‘I saved it from my wages,’ she said. ‘Two whole years it took me.’

  Her mother snorted. ‘What nonsense. An’ we so short we can barely manage. If you’d money to spare you should have brought it home to us an’ we’d ha’ made proper use of it. I don’ know what the world’s a-comin’ to, I don’ indeed.’

  Tears welled from Betsy’s eyes. She couldn’t stop them. To be scolded for thrift was so unjust. Thrift was one of the virtues. Wasn’t it what the vicar kept dinning into them week after week? And anyway, they were her wages. Why shouldn’t she spend them on a cloak? Other women did. Mrs Beke had had her cloak for years and years.

  ‘You’re gettin’ above yourself, my gel, tha’s your trouble,’ Mrs Haynes scolded. ‘You’re forgettin’ your place.’

  ‘Times are changin’ Ma,’ Betsy said, fighting back. ‘We don’t have to know our place, no more. We can rise out of it if we wants. Look what they done in France, stormin’ the Bastille an’ openin’ the jails an’ choppin’ off the king’s head. If they’d know’d their place they’d never ha’ done that, now would they?’

  ‘And look what happen to them after,’ her mother said tartly. ‘Think a’ that. They had their heads chopped off too, every last one of ’em. You don’ want to go follerin’ the Frenchies. They’re a bad lot.’ She glanced back at the path, her face hard. ‘Now here’s your father comin’. I don’ know what he’ll say about it, I’m sure.’

  Mr Haynes was a man of some consequence in the village partly because he worked for Mr Cosens the miller and partly because he was so strong, tall, thickset and muscular, with fists like hams and shoulders that could carry a full sack of flour with no apparent effort. He had the reputation of being able to crack ribs if annoyed. But on this occasion he was in an affable mood and no help to his wife at all. ‘Mornin’ Betsy,’ he said, as he joined them by the porch. ‘You look pretty.’

  It was praise but it was too late to soothe his daughter’s lacerated feelings. Her occasion was ruined. She’d been scolded – and publicly scolded what’s more – when she should have been praised and admired. As she followed her parents miserably into church and took her place at the back behind the worthies, she was cast into a gloom. She wished she’d never worn her cloak to church and never bought it neither, even though she looked extremely pretty in it – she couldn’t help but know that – and felt warm and snug wrapped in its folds, which was something she’d never known at a winter’s service before.

  Watching her, from his place on the opposite pew, Johnnie was torn by her distress. He rarely paid much attention to the service and usually contrived to doze during the sermon but that Sunday the sight of her biting her pretty lip and surreptitiously wiping those pretty eyes kept him in a state of painful alert, and as soon as the praying was done, he made an excuse to his parents and slipped out of the church so that he could hide behind the yew tree and join her on her way out without anyone knowing. She was almost the last to leave, dawdling so far behind her mother that she’d only just stepped out of the porch when her parents had spoken to the vicar, said goodbye to their neighbours, walked through the churchyard and were out in the road and on their way home. All he had to do was put out an arm as she passed and pull her behind the shelter of the tree.

  Then what a torrent of tears was shed and how angrily she detailed the undeserved unkindness of her treatment. ‘I’d every right to buy it,’ she wept. ‘It was my wages. She disapproves of everything I do. She as good as told me I was a spendthrift. A spendthrift, can you imagine that? She knows very well I saved up for it for years and years and hardly spent a single mortal penny in all that time. I thought ’twas a good buy. I thought I looked pretty in it. But not her. Oh no! She just sniffed at me. She said I was gettin’ above myself. You don’t think I’m gettin’ above myself do you?’

  Oh, he didn’t. He truly didn’t. He thought she had every right to buy her cloak – it was her money – and she looked beautiful in it.

  His admiration cheered her. ‘Do I? Do I really? You’re not just saying it?’

  ‘Beautiful,’ he said, devoutly. ‘Like a princess.’

  She found a rag in her pocket and blew her nose. ‘It’s so unfair,’ she said. ‘She’s always a-goin’ on at me. ’Tent my fault I’m pretty. To hear her talk you’d think I’d done it a’ purpose.’ Then another thought struck her. ‘Are my eyes red?’

  ‘Why don’t we go for a walk?’ he said hopefully. ‘Fresh air’ll clear them.’ There was no need to rush back. People were expected to talk a little when they went to church. So she blew her nose again and they set off together to walk through the bean field behind the church, heading north to the barn and the village pound, and to his great delight she held onto his arm and allowed him to wipe away her tears with his thumb. And as they walked and he admired, she gradually calmed.

  When they reached the barn, they stood indecisively in its shadow, not wanting to return. ‘We could go further if you’d like,’ he hoped.

  ‘Best not,’ she said, looking up into his eyes, but not flirting this time, simply looking, ‘or they’ll be wonderin’.’

  The earth was so damp he could feel the chill of it through his boots. ‘We shall take cold if we stand here long,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. But she didn’t move. And neither did he. How could he? He was bewitched by the mere sight of her, with her mouth so soft and her eyelashes still spiky from all the tears she’d shed and her washed eyes not red at all but blue as the summer sky.

  ‘Oh, Betsy,’ he said. And as she still didn’t move, he put his arms round her red cloak and, greatly daring, bent his head to kiss her. It was the merest touch, a gentle brush of lip against lip, but it was a commitment and it left him breathless. ‘Oh, Betsy, my dearest dear.’

  She stood b
efore him, plagued by the oddest thoughts. Over the last year, she’d grown used to having young men make sheep’s eyes at her. At first she was confused by it, because it was all so obvious and the other girls teased her about it, but after a while she learned how to flirt and then she found it flattering – for it showed how pretty she was – and comical too because they made themselves look such fools. But here with Johnnie everything was different. He wasn’t making sheep’s eyes and he didn’t look a fool. He looked – well, strange really. Sort of intense. ’Twas just a kiss, she thought, and not very much of one, if the truth be told. She was used to kisses, for lots of young men had tried to snatch a kiss when they were alone with her – and had had their ears boxed for their pains, which had been splendid fun. But Johnnie was gazing at her as if he couldn’t bear to take his eyes from her face. Was there really so much power in one little soft kiss? It was a sobering thought and really rather exciting.

  ‘Oh, Betsy, my dearest dear,’ he said again. The sky was huge and white behind her bright hood and a sea mist was rising out of the village to swirl across the field in long grey swathes. It reminded him of those odd clouds in Mr Blake’s funny paintings. But it was horribly cold. ‘We must go back now,’ he said, trying to be sensible. ‘But we’ll walk out again, won’t we?’

  She began to recover, managed a smile, rallied and began to flirt. It was easier when you could flirt. ‘Well, possibly,’ she said. ‘I shall have to see.’

  Chapter Four

  Sunday April 18th 1852

  My dearest Annie,

  Your most welcome letter arrived late yesterday afternoon, which I have to admit was a relief to me, for I was beginning to worry lest you had been caught in Friday’s April shower and had taken cold. You will say that you are a good deal too sensible for such foolishness and your letter proves you right. So I will tell you simply that I am glad of it, and that as my work here goes on apace I shall soon be home with you again and then I can shield you from the showers in person.