Voice of the Fire

by Alan Moore

  Properly attired now and removed unto the dining room, above a meal of scaith cooked in an oatmeal crust I’m introduced to my chief bailiff for tomorrow’s trial, a doughty chap named Callow with a strawberry nose and great side-whiskers that surround his crab-pink face in white. As I pluck fishbones from my cheek to set as on some tiny ossuary shelf beside my plate, he reacquaints me with the details of the case I am to hear. A local man of no account called Deery stands accused of taking from their rightful owner both a ewe and ram, the last of which he sold, whereafter salted portions of the former were discovered on his property, so that his guilt is plainer than a wart.

  Chief Bailiff Callow tells me that with breakfast done we both may walk to Kendal gaol and view the miscreant there in his cell, along with those less serious offenders I am also called upon to judge once Deery has been sentenced: drunks and whores; a shopkeeper accused of giving out dishonest measure; several brawlers and a bugger.

  Out of doors, with fish and oatmeal resting heavy on my gut and breath like smoke upon the frozen air, I walk beside the bailiff neath a gauze of shadow down the steep lanes slippery with frost. The sky is ribboned water-blue and gold along its eastern edge, where West of that there are yet stars and from the fields outside of Kendal comes a gradual fugue of birdsong, each voice lucid and distinct.

  The gaol, built out of rough grey stones, is in the very middle of the town where it squats like a monstrous toad that has been petrified by its own ugliness. Its walls have gaping chinks and fissures so that it is no more warm inside than out, consisting only of a cramped space where the turn-keys sit and whittle aimlessly at sticks, with several narrow cells crammed in beyond.

  Sat in the first of these, a girl about thirteen with pale, untidy hair is suckling her babe, a ghastly, mottled little thing no bigger than a rat and by the look of it not long for life. Each time she makes attempt to tease her sallow, cone-shaped breast between the creature’s lips it turns its grey and shrivelled face away to whine. The mother looks up briefly at me without interest, then turns her dull gaze back towards her child. The bailiff tells me that she is arraigned for brawling, and we pass on down the row.

  Deery is in the next cell we approach. He sits upon his bunk and stares without expression at the wall, not even looking up at us when we elect to question him directly. Still a young man, Deery has the look of one once handsome and well-built now run to fat, the strong bones of his boyhood face yet visible, embedded in a bland expanse of dough. He sits there, feet apart, his forearms resting on his thighs with wrists as thick as infants’ waists and ham-hock fists, the fingers intertwined into a hawser-knot at rest between his knees. His stillness is unsettling and complete.

  I ask him if he knows I am to judge him on the morrow, whereupon he merely shrugs and still does not elect to look at me directly. When I ask him if he is aware that hanging is the punishment for theft of livestock he seems only bored, and after some few moments hawks a quid of startlingly yellow phlegm into the corner of his cell. It is clear that conversation is impossible between the two of us, and after but a cursory examination of the lock-up’s other inmates, Bailiff Callow and I step from the rank miasma of the gaol once more into the biting Kendal air. The skies are light now and the town is properly awakened. A wood-merchant’s cart with images of Saints and martyrs painted on its side rolls past drawn by a threadbare horse. Small boys climb on the baker’s roof to drink the warmth and savour from his oven-vents and down the lane there walks a stooped old man all hung about with wooden cages wherein bantams make complaint.

  With little useful to be done before tomorrow’s trials I take the bailiff’s leave and pass the morning by inspecting Kendal, stopping in a hostelry at noon to dine on mutton pie and swede. Thus fortified, I spend the afternoon in pleasurable meander through the nearby countryside. Some short while prior to heading back towards my lodgings where I may prepare for this tonight’s encounter with the Widow Deene, it comes to me that I am in a mood of tense expectancy that is not all connected with that lady or her charms. I realize at length that part of me is half anticipating further glimpses of the animal that I saw yesterday as it raced there beside our coach, and laugh aloud at my own foolishness. This is not even near the place where I first spied the beast, that being on the other side of town. Besides, of what concern to me is some stray hound, or pony, or whatever else the creature may have been?

  Returning to my rooms I change into a finer set of clothes and put fresh powder on my wig. Waiting until the Heavens’ nightly silent battle in the western sky has run its bloody course, I sidle out into the first mauve fogs of dusk, taking much care that I should not be seen by anyone associated with the Court and holding underneath one arm my iron-knobbed cane for fear of cut-purses.

  A doleful blue which all too quickly cools to grey descends upon the Lakeland hills with twilight, and across the flooded fields a loon is driven mad by grief. I am soon come upon the outskirts of the town, whence I continue on the Kendal road towards the cottage where the widow and her child are billeted. The mustard-coloured mud that now adorns my polished boots seems but a little forfeit weighed against the great rewards I hope may be in store for me. A widow who has much experience with married life and yet is eager to resume its carnal aspect makes for a more satisfying ride than any whey-skinned maid in service, and I dare suppose that the authority my office lends me may do much in making her receptive to my whims, peculiar though they be.

  To each side of the darkening road the ditches pour and gurgle like a man run through the heart and all about an icy mist is rising so that I grow anxious for my first sight of the cottage lights upon the track ahead of me. When last I crossed this ground it was by coach and not so gloomy, yet I wonder if I have not made some error. Can the cottage really be this far outside of Kendal, or have I passed by it in the dusk so that it lies behind me now? Resolved that if I am not come upon the fat old woman’s habitation soon then I shall turn back for my lodgings though it mean I must forgo the widow’s company, I am afforded much relief to round a bend and sight at last the wan and jaundiced glow of lamplight seen through curtains, some way further down the lane.

  With images of Widow Deene as I should soonest like to see her filling all my thoughts, save for those thoughts pertaining to the darling Eleanor, my pace is made more quick so that before I know it I am by the cottage gate. A flurry of emotion now descends upon me; a peculiar nervousness that I have known before when in such situations: partly it is lust, partly anxiety lest I have made too much of things and shall be disappointed. This time there is something else besides, an undertow of qualm I may not place, but all such trepidations must be put away. If I’m to hang a man upon the morrow, then I would this night impale a woman first, and so march briskly up a mollusc-skated path to rap the tar-streaked door.

  A Pater Noster-while goes by until at last the door’s unlatched and I’m confronted by the half-wit girl that I saw loitering by the gate when we arrived here yesterday. Encountering her now, I am less certain if she be indeed half-witted, or instead has cultivated a tremendous slowness, as a form of insolence. She stares at me in silence an inordinate amount of time before she deigns to speak, and when she does a lewd and knowing grin is smeared, much like a riotous slogan, on the flat wall of her face.

  ‘You’ll be they judge, then?’

  Voice as thick and slippery as waterweed, her lazy slur has a suggestiveness about it that I soon discover to be constant and habitual. When I reply that yes, I am indeed His Honour Judge Augustus Nicholls and enquire as to her own name, she returns a smile that is at once flirtatious and amused, and holds my eye for some few humid moments before answering.

  ‘I’m Emmy. You’ll be wantin’ Mary, though. You’d best come in.’

  She ushers me into a lamplit passageway so narrow that, as she manoeuvres past me to pull shut the front door in my wake, we are both for a moment pressed together, face to face, there in that closely bounded vestibule. Her heavy bust is presse
d against my coat-front, flattened so it seems to disappear in much the same way as the blade of a stage dagger. This sublime compression lasts for but a moment, then she’s by me. As I turn and walk towards the lit room at the passage’s far end I hear her close the door and draw a bolt across.

  Another doorway, partly open, leads off from the hall upon my right, and as we pass it by I glance inside. Though it is lit by nothing save such light as filters from the passage where we walk, I can make out a vast array of painted plates and figures made from porcelain arranged upon a huge old dresser just inside the room, which seems immaculately kept and has a richly patterned rug upon its floor. In company with the dresser I can also see an ornate footstool and a quaint low table made of polished cherry-wood. Though I may not view all this front room whilst in passing, I am given the impression of a small, neat space so filled with heirlooms proudly on display as to allow no room for one to enter in. It has a pristine and unused appearance quite at odds with the dilapidated façade of the house, but I move on towards the light there at the hall’s far end, and think no more upon it. Emmy walks behind me, and I hear her flat, bare feet upon the boards. I hear her breath.

  The passage leads me to a room so different from the one I have just passed that they might be on separate continents, divided not by some few feet of hall, but by an ocean. From my contemplation of the neat front room so filled with beautiful possessions, I am plunged into a squalid hovel where the gnarled grain of the walls is choked by soot and there is everywhere a smell compounded out of mildew, broiling offal, and that odour that old women have, like tripes and piss. I understand that this is how the poor must choose to live, with all they have of beauty, worth or value hoarded in a room kept just for show, which they themselves may enter not, save that it be to dust or clean. Their true lives are played out behind these cluttered shrines in cheerless middens such as this, where I stand on the threshold now.

  A hearth-cum-stove of iron and slate set in the end wall warms the room, but in a stifling way. Beside this, on a bow-legged stool that has her walking-cane propped up against it, sits the wrinkled and obese old dame that I spied yesterday, her eyes like coals in curds fixed fast upon me as I step inside with head bent to avoid the low oak beams. Seen closer to, I note she is afflicted with a moisture on the lungs, so that she wheezes, with her monstrous bosom heaving like the tide beneath her apron and a quiver rippling through her puddled flesh, across her jowls and goitrous neck at every breath.

  Set out there in the middle of this noisome chamber is a table far too massive for so cramped a place, that looks as if the cottage were built up about it, being far too broad to fit the door and very old besides, its surface scarred by carving-knives long snapped in hands long dead. Five chairs are set about the table, two of them already occupied by Eleanor and her enchanting mother, both of whom look up and smile upon my entry. I had quite forgot how green their eyes were, and decide that I might bear these miserable surrounds if they should be illuminated by such pulchritude.

  ‘Judge Nicholls! You have come just as you said.’ It is the Widow Deene who speaks, and the excitement and anticipation in her voice elicits in me smug assurance that all shall be well between us. Scraping back her chair across the rough stone tiles, she rises from her seat and steps across the room to greet me, placing one weak hand upon my elbow as she steers me to my setting, opposite her own. Stood leaning up against the passage door-jamb, Emmy smirks at the assembly. While attempting to ignore the girl, I make small conversation with the widow and with Eleanor until the bloated crone sat by the hearth ceases her wheezing for a moment to address us all.

  ‘We’ll get the dinner up now. Emmy, you stop gawpin’ at the gentleman and pull us up so’s I can dish it out.’ Her voice, dragged up through a great surfeit of congestions, bubbles like a marsh.

  Emmy, with an expressive sigh, quits her position by the door and crosses to the fireplace where she helps the swollen baggage labour up from off her stool. The two of them, who I am now convinced are child and mother, next proceed to ladle forth great bowls of hotpot from a vessel taken out the stove, these being set before us. Emmy takes her seat, next to my own, with many crafty sidelong leers, while the old lady, with some difficulty, sinks her gasping bulk on to the chair placed at the table’s head.

  With breath sufficiently recovered, she intones a grace: ‘Dear Lord, bless this the meal we have prepared our guest, and may we have success in all our doin’s.’

  Although rude and unconventional, the blessing is not inappropriate. Tonight, if luck is with me, I’ll be doing Widow Deene, and hope to have no small success in this endeavour. Murmuring, then, an ‘Amen’ that is heartfelt, I lift up my fork and start to eat, smiling across the table at the widow and receiving her smile in return. I fancy there is something secret in it, meant perhaps for but the two of us. Encouraged thus, with added relish I attack the mound of beef and vegetable heaped before me, pleasantly surprised by how agreeable its flavour seems.

  Whilst picking at their food, the gathered females watch attentively as I wolf down my own, no doubt with apprehension lest such plain, rough fare does not meet with my cultivated expectations. Wishing to allay their fears, I heap great forks-full past my chin and, in between my mastications, comment on the dinner’s excellence, for in all truth it is delicious. Highly spiced and peppered, every swallowing promotes a film of perspiration on my brow and upper lip; a stinging in my palate by which means my mouth is made a smouldering, infernal cave of molar stalactites with every jot of my awareness centred there. With fellows of my stamp, who have a taste for fire and pepper in their food, the rigours of enduring such a meal are part of its attraction. Panicked by the blazings of the tongue, it is as if the other instruments of sensibility are similarly plunged into a new condition: eyes may water or the ears may ring, with everywhere throughout the body’s flesh a sympathetic tingling. I have often thought that such a state must be alike with that described by mystics, where all other bodily concerns are swept away by the intensity of a divine experience.

  I think of Francis, hollow-eyed and stammering, filled with dread since the abrupt cessation of his work with Dee; with the demeanour of a man who has been sentenced, yet who must endure a long, excruciating wait until the gallows have been built. I cannot help but think he might have limited his own experiments with the sublime to the enjoyment of a simple dish such as I have before me now, my plate already half wiped clean, so hearty is my appetite.

  Whilst I am lost within this culinary reverie, the women sat about me eat in silence save the chime of knife on crockery, with many glances made to me or to each other. Eleanor, who may have been provided with a smaller portion than we grown-ups, has already emptied out her dish and, turning, holds it out towards the gross and liver-fluked old woman seated at the table’s head, there on the infant’s right.

  ‘Grandmother? May I have some more?’

  At this, the aged mountain made of fat swivels her head around towards the child in an unsettling fashion, with her neck so swollen that it does not seem to move, but only that her features have by some means swum across that doughy head to face another way.

  Her voice is sharp and harsh, so that the small girl flinches and draws back, afraid. ‘I’m not your grandmother, you wicked girl!’

  At the severity of this reproach an awkward silence falls upon the gathering, skilfully breached by Widow Deene who, smiling in a nervous way, attempts now to excuse her child. ‘Of course she’s not, is she, my lamb? It’s just that with her having been so kind to us, that’s how you’ve come to think of her. Now, Nelly, is that not the way of things?’

  Here Eleanor, still pale and shaken from the scolding, nods her head and stares into her empty dish, which seems to mollify the wheezing dragon to her left. This withered old Leviathan now turns to speak with Emmy, sat here next to me, instructing the young girl to rise and serve a second helping for such mouths as may require it.

  For my own part, I reluctantly d
ecline the offer with a shaking of the head. A heaviness is come upon me, so that I become afraid lest I have rather ate too much already. If this well-stuffed lethargy should not abate, I fear for my performance with the widow later on. I shall not have the strength to mount her, having barely strength enough to raise another mouthful to my lips. Upon my mute refusal of a further serving, Emmy tilts her head upon one side and gazes down towards me quizzically, with ladle in one hand and oven-pot wrapped in a cloth beneath her arm. Those wide, plump lips crease now in a lascivious smile before she speaks.

  ‘I think the judge has had enough already. Look how thick the sweat stands on his brow, as if this room’s too hot for him.’

  Setting the pot and ladle down upon the table-top she next stoops down a little, smiling all the while, so that her face is close to mine. The other three about the table seem to watch intently, all with rapt and yet unreadable expressions, much like birds. My fingertips seem numb. I hear a distant clattering that I think must be my dinner fork, now fallen to the floor. Near to, I see that Emmy has a spoiled complexion; yellow-heads in dense encampments, sheltering at the corners of her nose. Her voice is slow and thick as treacle pouring.