Pugg's Portmanteau

by DM Bryan

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  The next evening, Sarah returns to her drawing, despite the fact that her head is no better. She sees concern marking Lady Barbara’s face, but Sarah ignores the chair her friend sets out beside her own. Her quill pens she has carefully prepared, and now she sits at the table where bands of light faint and swoon across the paper. With her pen she makes a margin, scoring her page three inches from the top. From the sideboard, yesterday’s drawing watches. Tonight, Sarah will consider her obligation to rakes.

  In her book of Mr. Hogarth’s prints, she’s seen how rakes progress. They hold fluted glasses between long fingers. They set their buckled heels upon a table covered in cards, in dice. Six dots on a die, twelve harlots in a room, ten syllables in Mr. Pope’s verse. Sarah hums a line from a lyric she heard somewhere. Two Harlots for every Rake, she sings, drawing now, her pen tripping across the parquet page. To the rakes she gives a panelled hallway, with sash windows on left and cell doors on right. A solitary life, as penitential as that the harlots lead—no, more penitential, for the rakes will have no clouds of jasmine. For them, no neat rows of laundry strung in lines. Harlots need to tip back their heads and see sky. Harlots require deep mouthfuls of country between their teeth. Rakes already have had their chests caressed, their ears nipped, their pockets picked. They keep their mouths open when they should close them tight. Sarah Scott thinks.

  “Why would rakes come to Sarah’s new Hall? Why would they stay?” Sarah asks Lady Barbara, forgetting, just for a moment, their unaccustomed enmity. Lady Barbara has taken up her mending, a nightdress. She shakes her hair, smooth and grey, although her face below is, like Sarah’s page, only lightly lined.

  “Perhaps they are distempered,” says Lady Barbara.

  In Sarah’s drawing, wet ink scales the page, squares set within squares. She renders shed roofs, workshops for the manufacture of useful items: eatables, useables, saleables. A metal shop, its furnace red-faced and puffing, where rakes heat and beat into plowshares the puncheons and silver platters that once made harlots tipsy. Now, even the swords rakes carried when teasing, rousting, duelling will be refashioned into tools for weeding, stooking, threshing. In the furnace’s cleansing fire, metals temper and cool.

  Rakes break bread at long tables. Sarah draws these, as the rakes wait upon one another. Never speaking except to say brother, may I offer you more cheese? Because another shed contains a place where white rounds ripen in wooden racks. Rakes heat milk and drain whey. Dressed in aprons, they squeeze squares of rough cloth and then unfold the edges to discover milk solids glowing like morning. In their hands, they cup the soft balls of curd, finding them pale and pliable as breasts.

  Sarah lifts her pen. Contemplates the cheese.

  Without preamble, she tells Lady Barbara what is on her mind, what has been in her head since she set herself to alter the peach-coloured silk.

  “You knew,” she says. “We all knew.”

  Painfully, Lady Barbara rises and sets aside the stocking she mends, her needle and thread. She walks awkwardly, but when she reaches Sarah her movements are firm and certain. She takes the quill from between trembling fingers. Soothes her with a feather soft stroke, finger to cheek. Banks the fire on her friend’s forehead. Trims her like a lamp.

  Chapter 9

  Where I am going I know not, what will become of me, I am still less able to guess.

  Sarah Scott’s The History of Cornelia.

  Batheaston, 1762.

  Sarah decides to visit the ingenious Mr. Hogarth, taking him her drawings to see if he can assist her in finding a suitable engraver for their reproduction and circulation. For three days she has been hard at work, despite her churning head and sparks at the corners of her eyes. Now, a pile of papers sits on the sideboard: her projection, her scheme, her halls and cottages and sheds and gardens. She recognizes the oddity, the awkwardness of her preoccupation with her project for harlots—she has been drawing when she should catechize the girls or supervise the size of their stitches. Well, Barbara might take up that task while she is away. Barbara understands the girls better than she. No, Sarah corrects herself—Barbara better understands her duty. Sarah understands the girls.

  Lady Barbara hears her intentions in silence. Then she says, “You will only cheapen your drawings if you sell them to the highest bidder.”

  “I give my books to Mr. Millar, or to the Misters Dodsley, or now to Mr. Newbery, and he sells them quite openly at the Bible and Sun in St. Paul’s Church-yard. You do not scruple at that.”

  “That’s different,” says Barbara.

  “I don’t see how.”

  Barbara bends to the work in her hands. Mending again—a fine white stocking this time.

  “I know Hogarth’s house in London,” says Sarah. “I have seen it many times. There is a Golden Head above the door.” She does not say George showed it to her, although Barbara knows this very well.

  “London is a tiresome journey, and we are neither of us in good health.”

  “I am very well.”

  “You complain of your head,” says Lady Barbara, “until I am nearly distracted.”

  “Then you will be pleased if I should take a trip to London without you.”

  Lady Barbara says nothing.

  Sarah says, “Stop sewing will you? Look at me. I am improved. I am quite myself.”

  Lady Barbara stops sewing and looks directly at her. At night, Sarah can easily bring to mind Meg’s face, and the girls’ faces come to her often. Her father and her brothers’ faces she sees, whether she will or not. Her sister Elizabeth she can evoke from all angles and wearing many expressions. But she cannot fix Lady Barbara’s features in her memory.

  The object of her scrutiny looks down at her sewing, frowning as if at something awry in her stitchery. With her little silver scissors, she snips the thread and puts the end of the stocking on her hand to shape it. Sarah supposes the mend is in the heel, although she cannot see it from where she sits. Barbara pulls the fabric first one way and then the other, and Sarah knows she is testing the tightness of the little mesh she has constructed. Then Lady Barbara rolls the stocking off her hand and replaces it in her workbox for distribution. Whose stocking is it? Mine, Sarah thinks.

  She says, “If my prints sell well, we need not give up this house.”

  “That has already been decided. We are both healthier in Bath,” says Lady Barbara.

  “Rooms,” says Sarah. “Spinster lodgings.”

  “You exaggerate our poverty. We will find a very good house, perhaps with a stretch of garden.”

  “And what of my garden here? Who will take care of my flower roots? What of our beautified chair rail and chimney pieces?”

  “Sarah, you should not mind these things.”

  “But I do.”

  Lady Barbara has her workbox open and takes out another stocking. She threads her needle, slowly and with several failures.

  Sarah says, “You did not scruple so when we helped produce Mrs. Pattillo’s Cards.”

  “Those had an educational purpose.”

  “So do my prints.”

  “Mr. Richardson was a very respectable man.”

  “And I suppose Mr. Hogarth is not? He sells by subscription to many excellent people. I do not see any difference between his actions and those Mr. Richardson undertook on behalf of Mrs. Pattillo’s geography lessons.”

  “The mess we had with Mr. Leake,” says Lady Barbara as she begins to plunge her needle in and out of the fabric.

  The charge is unfair. James Leake, a local Bath man, had been Barbara’s choice. He bore the name of a character in a pantomime, but there could be no enjoyment of the happy coincidence, for Mr. Leake suffered by it. Damp moistened the walls of his workshop and burst the plaster ceiling. His eyes and nose ran continually; he spat phlegm; and he drank liquor until it spilled from his lips. With kindness and co
mpleteness, Mr. Richardson, married to Leake’s sister, mopped up after his cheat of a brother-in-law. The cards were printed, but they did not sell well.

  “My head pains me,” Sarah says, remembering too late that she must not mention her head.

  Barbara sews.

  “I need fresh air.”

  Lady Barbara looks up at her.

  Once in the farmhouse yard, Sarah walks over to the low stone wall that separates the house from the road. She looks back at the evenly spaced windows. Behind those glowing curtains Barbara sits, trapped. Sarah moves from the road to the gate in the fence that gives onto her garden. Up from the valley floor comes the trickling sound of the river, rocking the roundest stones with invisible fingers. From this viewpoint, she cannot see, although she can scent, her garden that thrives in the blanket of the compost her gardener spreads at the roots. Night blooming honey-suckle and flowering tobacco grow beside the path, where accidental contact intensifies the fragrance. Regularly, she and the man walk between green swells, their feet sinking deep in the gravel. He pinches jasmine between fingers and inhales, while Sarah watches. Jo More came for charity, having heard she would employ a beached sailor, but now he is all gardener. If the fellow were with her, she would walk out between the plants, for the moist darkness is a balm, but something holds her at the gate. Overhead are stars, reminding her of pincushions. She misses the warmth of the fire.

  She already has her hand on the door latch when she hears the hollow knocking of horse hooves coming up the road. Turning, she sees, at first, nothing, and then, riding into view, a woman tall on the back of a high-withered draft horse. The woman sits easily on the animal, despite her lack of a saddle, and the reins rest loosely in her hands. Her cloak covers her head, making a kind of cowl and hiding her face. Her easiness on horseback, Sarah realizes with dismay, results from her position astride the horse, skirts bunched up over her knees. Heeled boots, thick with clay, dangle at the widest point of the animal’s girth. As horse and rider pass in the night, it is the horse that turns its head and glances at Sarah, giving a low snort. Then the lane narrows and turns, and the woman and her mount disappear into the sound of their own footfalls. A moment later Sarah hears nothing but the Avon’s trifling.

  Back in the parlour, Meg has stirred up the fire, doubtless at Barbara’s call, and has brought out the frame with its crewelwork. Lady Barbara sits before it, laying stitches side-by-side to imitate the variegated green lozenges of vegetation. Sarah stands at her shoulder, watching a silken garden appearing line upon line. In just this way, the close rain of an engraver’s burin might fall over Sarah’s hall, her cottages, sheds, and gardens, rendering each shape with hatches and cross-hatches. Printed on fine paper, an engraver’s lines lie as straight as a crewel worker’s stitches, but with what a difference. A print might last forever, while Barbara’s work makes only a resting place for a parson’s fat bottom. Why the difference between ink and wool? But Sarah knows it is not a matter of material.

  Sarah thinks of the woman on horseback. She should have called out, asked her in for something to eat. Such travel at night might mean a breeched birth in one of the farmer’s cots, but the plodding pace and the covered head suggest other things as well. And so, Sarah left her hand on the latch and said nothing.

  Barbara changes her thread, setting down the skein of leafy green and choosing a length of scarlet for a petal. “The cold air still comes off you,” she says. “Will you bring a chair up to the fire?”

  “I will not change my mind,” says Sarah. “I am determined to go to London.”

  In reply, Barbara only threads her needle and sets it flashing against the white cloth. Scarlet stitches fill the frame.

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  Lady Barbara’s illness, always with them, worsens. The doctor comes and finds her condition serious, confines his patient to bed, prescribes and bleeds, sends his bill. Sarah reviews the scraps of paper alone at the table, before an unlit fire. The doctor’s charges, she suspects, have been shrunk to fit the circumscribed incomes of two decaying gentlewomen. No matter, the bill confirms the necessity of the long discussed, long delayed move to Bath, and the giving up of the Batheaston house. Of Sarah’s trip to London, nothing more is said.

  The weather changes for the worse, and every morning the charity girls arrive with sodden skirts. Sarah seats them in a row before the fire, where they steam as they sew. They look like a row of small, sad demons pricking their own fingers in eternal punishment. It is in the afternoons that the doctor sometimes comes. In the parlour, he sits and takes tea. He listens to Sarah’s descriptions of the spasms that shake her friend, of the pain that comes and stays. He listens and goes, leaving behind instructions. Clysters. Plasters. More bleeding. Can he be as disappointed in his recipes as she is, Sarah wonders. She does not think so. The glint of his coat braid, the crispness of his neck cloth speak to the abiding satisfaction the man takes in himself, and she must bite her tongue as he adjusts his collar in the mirror by the door. In Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters Sarah finds the quote she wants: “ ’Tis in the power of a surgeon to make an ulcer with the help of lancet and plaister, and of a doctor to kill by prescriptions.” Perhaps they should be grateful that the doctor does no harm. He comes; he goes; Barbara remains the same.

  And yet they must somehow cover his fee.

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  Their agent in Bath writes to them of a new house, well-appointed and central. Rooms in Bath are an economy—in town, the doctor can come more often and with less trouble to himself. Sight unseen, she and Barbara take the place. The rooms are high ceilinged and bright, the agent says, and Sarah imagines the smell of new wood. She must arrange to have the trim painted. Cream would look very well, or so Sarah writes in letters to her sister and her brothers. Elizabeth writes back to ask if they will have carpet in the sitting room. Elizabeth has carpets both at the Priory and in Hill Street, and she likes them very much. Yes, perhaps a small carpet might provide some cheer, or at least a painted cloth. Sarah measures the bookcase and finds it will not fit. Brother William, who has agreed to assume the remainder of the lease at Batheaston, must suffer to add it to his own domestic appointments, or he can have it chopped and burned in the winter—Sarah will remember not to ask. The books will come to Bath, of course, but they will need a new bookshelf—something less massive and lighter of line. She has printed catalogues from several of the cabinet-makers in Bath and the one in London her sister patronizes. Under the catalogues lie pages of loose paper—her project for harlots, her communication for Mr. Hogarth. Sarah moves the catalogues and tidies the pages. She has not forgotten.

  Meg comes out of the back room with a tray, the napkin slightly displaced to show thick slices of bread and butter untouched on a plate. Barbara, who makes the back parlour her sick room, eats very little. Meg passes Sarah but says nothing. If there is nothing to be said, then nothing need be said—Meg understands this better than anyone, and Sarah learns daily from her silences. In Bath, Sarah must find a girl to come daily. Meg will stay in Batheaston to help William and his new bride. Here, in this house, Meg has her own small room, which Sarah has not seen since the day she first showed it to her. She tries to imagine it now. What might Meg own? A brass thimble. A strongbox for her earnings. A brush and a polished piece of mirror.

  In the kitchen, the fire spits and pushes eagerly. Meg has filled a small basin with water from the kettle and is washing a cup clean. From the dresser Sarah takes down a teapot, a useful piece out of Mr. Astbury’s pottery. It is not new by any means, with an outmoded decoration of creamy sprigs, but Meg has not seen what Sarah is obliged to notice with each fresh visit to Elizabeth: that endless parade of fashionable teapots across the tea tables of the bon ton. Chinese ladies with parasols, blushing country maidens, pink putti.

  Patiently Sarah waits for Meg to turn towards her before she proffers the gift. Sarah recognizes in the other something of her own dislike of
the pressure of fingers, the brush of a hand. Theirs is a language of looks like nymphs in a poem, their eyes meeting, drooping, lifting. A sigh between them says much. But nothing coquettish survives in the verse they compose, which makes its numbers out of cooking and laundry. Sarah watches Meg’s face as she gazes at the teapot in Sarah’s hands. “The new kitchen will be smaller,” says Sarah when the other’s eyes at last meet her own. “I’ve no room. Perhaps you might find it useful?” Sarah speaks more rapidly than she intends, and before she is done she has turned her head nervously, thoughtlessly. On account of Meg’s deafness some of her explanation must slip incomprehensible to the floor between them. Sarah knows this, so she steps closer and pushes the teapot towards Meg, still not touching her. The latter’s hands come up, wrapping tentative fingers around the handle and spout. Sarah watches as thought moves like muscle behind Meg’s eyes, and then the weight of the fragile vessel lifts fully from her hands.

  Sarah nods briskly at Meg. “Keep it safe,” she says needlessly and exits the kitchen.

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  When she enters the back parlour cum sickroom, Lady Barbara is awake, sitting upright with the bed curtains pushed back. Sarah sees a grey day, a boxwood hedge, with a row of trees beyond. Leaves tremble in the wet air, each a tarnished coin. “Darling girl,” says Sarah, pulling at the window curtains so that their rings click.

  “Leave them,” says Lady Barbara. “The light cheers me, despite the cloud. Have you been out? You look flushed.”

  “I have been nowhere,” says Sarah.

  “Well, no mind,” says Lady Barbara. “We should not complain.”

  For a moment Sarah is silent. Then she says, “As always, I endeavour to keep my imagination in the sunshine. I have given an old piece of Staffordshire to Meg. The shelves in the Bath rooms are on a more convenient design, but they will not hold as much.”