The Great Unknown

by Peg Kingman

  “Oh, that was a good while ago. Joseph Dodd, did you hear that?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It was back in ’twenty-two. Now, that was the year the King came north, wasn’t it? Sailed right past us—never stopped in to have his hand kissed, even. Didn’t we all practice our curtseys, though, just in case! Do you mind that, Miss Mary? Just about the time your sister’s boy went to Canada.”

  Miss Mary, a very elderly wrinkled person in a starched though yellowed cap, was puffing juicily upon a tobacco-pipe. Abruptly she pulled the pipe from her lips to say, “Poor old Robert Todd at Tynemouth had a boy who sailed to the Indies.”

  “Nay, will it not be to China that poor old Robert Todd’s boy sailed?”

  “It was to China that he sailed at first. But not caring for the work when he got there, he quarreled with his master, and threw up the place his father had bought for him—cost him a pretty sum, too!—and came sailing back again, to all kinds of trouble, until he went off once more to the Indies, that second time.”

  “Oh, that boy . . . whatever became of him?”

  “Is that where he went? A rascal; a scoundrel. A trial and a sorrow to his poor old father unto his dying day.”

  “He never came back again, did he?”

  “Plenty of folks go out, but not so many come back,” declared Miss Mary. “Sailing here, and sailing there. Best to stay at home, where the Almighty has seen fit to put you.”

  “Joseph Dodd, don’t you remember him: poor old Robert Todd’s boy? What was his name?”

  “What’s that?”

  “What was his name? Upon my soul, I can’t recall it. It’ll come to me.”

  “Ask Mr Cotton. He’ll know,” said Miss Mary. “He was Mr Turner’s man of business in those days.”

  “Oh, Mr Cotton; spare us a moment, pray. Now think back, sir; do you remember poor old Robert Todd’s boy? The one that got a place in the Indies, or the Chineese, back in the year ’twenty or ’twenty-two?”

  “Nay, I can’t say that I do.”

  “Oh, but if you’ll just put your mind to it, Mr Cotton. We know yours for the most wonderful memory.”

  “Miles,” said Miss Mary, suddenly removing her pipe. “Poor old Robert’s boy was called Miles. Young Miles Todd.”

  “Oh, that one!” said Mr Cotton.

  “And wasn’t there some bad business about a girl, about the time he went away, for the second time?”

  “More than one, I’ll be bound,” said Mr Cotton.

  “Aye, there was, now that you remind me. There was a girl up at Seaton Delaval. The gardener’s daughter—gamekeeper’s daughter—”

  “Housekeeper’s daughter. The housekeeper who was sound asleep when the fire started—all of itself, she swore it! Now, what was her name?”

  No one knew.

  “Well, well; Miles Todd,” said someone at last, comfortably. “I’d forgotten all about him.”

  “What’s that?” said Joseph Dodd.

  “Miles Todd.”

  “Good riddance,” said Joseph Dodd.

  “Her father, she said?”

  They looked at Constantia and Livia with increased interest.

  “She doesn’t look much like a Todd, but she’s pretty enough all the same,” said Miss Mary from her wreath of smoke. “Favours her mother, I expect.”

  As easy as that? As common, as squalid as that? Constantia asked herself as she walked with Livia on her hip back to Newcastle’s center. The sun now shone so that the town, though grimy, wore a less forbidding aspect than it had the night before.

  Miles Todd, then? Perhaps.

  Now, for a father, she had (perhaps) Miles Todd, wastrel son of poor old Robert Todd, of Tynemouth.

  Why had she wanted to know this? Why go any distance at all out of her way to find out so discouraging a fact (perhaps) as this?

  Why had it seemed to matter?

  Once she had deposited her heavy carpetbag at the coaching inn, Constantia felt less burdened. Two hours of agreeable and unaccustomed leisure lay before her until the northbound mails would arrive and then leave again. With Livia warm in her arms, Constantia sauntered in sunshine along the pavement that curved around the garth under a massive square medieval keep, a vestige of the eight-hundred-year-old “new castle” from which the town took its name. Presently she found herself strolling along a busy street lined by the shops of grocers, saddlers, wine merchants, mercers, hatters, drapers, newsagents, and booksellers, their goods framed behind large clean windows. If these were not the marchands-merciers of Paris’s rue St-Honoré, neither were they the fishmongers of Musselburgh, by any means.

  In a bookseller’s window, her eye was caught by a book with a familiar red cloth binding and embossed gold lettering. She meant to pass on—almost succeeded in doing so—but was compelled instead to go into the shop, and inquire.

  “Only just published, ma’am,” said the bookseller, handing her the book. “By the author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Have you read Vestiges? You have? This, you see, is the author’s sequel; a reply—no, a retort!—to the critics of that book.”

  So it was. It was the same size and binding as Vestiges, though slighter; and from the same London publisher; the spine carried the same gold lettering. She opened to the title page.

  EXPLANATIONS:

  A Sequel to

  “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.”

  BY THE AUTHOR OF THAT WORK.

  “If this stirs up as great a sensation as the Vestiges, my five copies will all be sold by this time tomorrow,” said the bookseller. “At only five shillings.”

  Constantia opened the book; riffled through its heart. Her eye alighted upon a phrase: “The dew-drop is, in physics, the picture of a world.”

  Livia, drooling, reached wet fingers toward the book. She was growing restless and plaintive; and Constantia, reminded of her maternal duties and responsibilities, could not bring herself to part with 5 shillings; not even though she longed to possess this book; longed to plunge into such a world—this world, our world!—constituted of a physics manifest in dew-drops. Reluctantly she relinquished the little red volume to the bookseller, and went out.

  Down the street and around the corner, she came upon a fine view of the deep river gorge, and of the bridge springing from here to the south bank. Livia cried and squirmed, hungry again, and Constantia found a seat in a quiet corner against a stone wall, in sunshine. The sun-warmed stones against her back were pleasant; even the lowering sun in her eyes was pleasant. Unfastening her bodice, she placed Livia comfortably to the breast. No one took any notice of so ordinary a sight.

  No one, that is, but a well-dressed elderly lady on the far pavement, who stopped and watched for a moment. Then, dodging traffic, the lady crossed the street and startled the drowsing Contantia awake, saying, “What a pretty picture you make, you and your bonny baby! You make me think of my own dear babes—now bearded men, all three of them, and living so far away in South America! Now, do not be affronted, hinney; but only take this as a present—because one fine day, when I was a young mother nursing my eldest in the market square, just as you are doing, an old lady, a stranger, stopped and presented me with just such a token. Here,” said the well-dressed lady—tears suddenly, alarmingly, brimming in her eyes—and she pressed a large heavy coin into Constantia’s hand. “You must take this, and buy something for yourself—for yourself, mind, not for baby!” Then, not waiting to be thanked, the lady briskly turned and crossed the street again, and was gone, out of sight around the corner, before Constantia could think what to say, or whether to accept, or to consider herself insulted.

  It was a silver crown. Not all English coins were familiar to Constantia, but this, she knew, was worth 5 shillings. She studied the obverse: the young queen in profile (just a few years older than herself, but already a mother four times over); her hair dressed à la grecque, and the inscription VICTORIA DEI GRATIA—Victoria by the Grace of God. On the reverse, the cr
owned shield of the royal coat of arms within a laurel wreath, and the inscription BRITANNIARUM REGINA FID: DEF—Ruler of Britain, Defender of the Faith.

  A pound would have been too valuable to spend. A farthing would have been beggar’s alms. But a crown; 5 shillings: at this moment, how significant; even providential! As soon as Livia was sated, Constantia returned to the bookseller’s, and bought the book Explanations after all. The man took his time wrapping the little red volume in brown paper, and tying it with string. As she waited, she heard a bell strike the time—half-past three—and was suddenly filled with a sense of urgency. At last, the transaction concluded, she hurried back to the Tower Arms. The London mail had come in, and hostlers were backing fresh horses into position to be hitched to the Royal Mail coach.

  The inside seats were taken already, and no one offered to give up their place to a young mother with a baby. Constantia saw her carpet-bag loaded with the other baggage and then, with Livia, mounted to an outside seat on top. It would be cold. Blessing the remarkable tartan cloak again, she wrapped it well about herself and Livia.

  What is your name? Where did you come from? Where are you going?

  In India, everyone expected to be asked these questions by strangers, fellow travellers; and everyone asked these questions, too, in turn. Indeed, it would be impolite not to ask; not to manifest this degree of respect for and interest in others, not to acknowledge their human dignity by courteously inquiring as to name, origin, destination.

  Here in Britain, manners were very different. Here, Constantia had found, polite strangers thrown together by circumstance seldom unbent enough even to murmur, How d’ye do? Which meant nothing at all; no candid reply was expected, or welcome. As hours and days passed, one might eventually—as yesterday, with Mrs Todd—learn by chance a fellow traveller’s name. But not before the hours and days had duly passed.

  Outside passengers, however, were generally not so genteel as inside ones; and the three other passengers atop the coach this evening—a woman and two men—were, it seemed, one another’s old acquaintances. By the time the coach gathered speed upon the high road in the gathering dusk, they were already gossiping and laughing loudly together, ignoring Constantia.

  Constantia was revolted by their vulgarity; their loudness, coarseness, and ignorance; and glad to be ignored.

  Then she felt annoyance toward herself, for her instinctive revulsion. Was it necessary to be so exceedingly nice? Was she lacking in some element of simple humanity?

  And was her revulsion apparent?

  Perhaps it was, to the old woman. Or perhaps it was some generous impulse to include a stranger in their warm little social circle which moved her presently to lean across and say to Constantia, “And where are you and the baby bound this cold night, hinney?”

  “Oh! North,” said Constantia, “to rejoin my husband.”

  “Well, you’re on the right coach then, if you’re bound north! We’re all bound north, aren’t we, Tam? Did you hear her, Bob? I asked her where she’s bound, and she said she’s bound north!”

  The two men laughed, as though this were a very good joke indeed.

  “To join her husband!” the woman added gleefully, at which they laughed again. “Well, where north, hinney? It’s a big place, north,” said the old woman, turning back to Constantia once more. “Where’s this husband, that you’re going to join? What’s his name?”

  Now Constantia saw that she had been right to be disgusted; and, unwilling to be the butt of any further jokes, she drew herself up and said, “Why do you ask?”

  “Only out of curiosity, I suppose,” said the woman, suddenly mild and confidential. “Though mother always told me, curiosity killed the cat.”

  “Ah,” said Constantia, and attended to wrapping her cloak more closely around Livia.

  The old woman waited some moments, still expecting to have her curiosity gratified; then, having waited in vain, she turned to her companions and said, “Well! What monstrous luck for us, Tam: just fancy, we’ve got the Quality up here with us, on the outside seats! Us common folk mustn’t make a nuisance of ourselves though, by expecting polite conversation, or hoping for a civil reply to a civil question. But I already know where she’s going, for I axed the coachman, and he told me she is going to Amble. Unless she decides to get down sooner, to get away from me. She doesn’t like me. I can see that much. Her Ladyship doesn’t like me at all.”

  “Sure she does. She likes you fine,” said one of the men.

  “Nay, she does not.”

  Constantia thought, I was willing to like you, well enough; but now I find that I do not like you. I do not like your inquisitive bullying. I do not like your vulgar and impertinent curiosity. Have you given me any cause to like you? Why will you not leave me in peace?

  What is your name? Where have you come from? Where are you going?

  Why does everyone want to know?

  The moon rose nearly full, washing the fells at either hand in silver: the heights in repoussé; the shadowed coombs, chased. A bold young hare darted out upon the road and, beholding the approaching coach, promptly lost all presence of mind. There it squatted until the coach was nearly upon it. At the last possible moment it broke and ran across the verge to safety; then abruptly it doubled back into the roadway again and darted madly under the right rear wheel. The long arc of the ironshod rim rolled over the lower part of the hare’s long back, shattering the long hollow chain of vertebrae; bursting the spleen and liver, crushing stomach, intestines. From her high perch atop the coach, Constantia heard the hare’s cry, a breathy high wail; she had never heard a hare’s voice and did not know they had any. She could not help looking back, and in the moonlight saw it writhing against the rutted roadbed, thrashing, the short front legs running futilely in weakening spasms. For some moments longer, its strong heart, lungs, and nerves continued to work at their utmost pitch. It was still twitching in death spasms when it was lost to view as the coach rounded the next turn.

  Her milk let down. It was the hare’s cry that did it; the hare’s paroxysms. She felt the surge, the flush in her breasts; then the wetness spreading into her bodice. She drew her cloak closer about herself and her sleeping daughter.

  It is not so much the dying, thought Constantia, as the suffering. Why should that be necessary? Why permitted? Are we to emulate our Deity in this respect? Are we, like Him, to cultivate a lofty disregard for the sufferings of creatures less exalted than ourselves?

  No, we are better than that. We are the compassionate earthlings. Homo misericors.

  Some of us. Sometimes.

  The night was still, and coal-smoke lay heavy in the low places. At each small town, the guard threw down a mailbag to a waiting postmaster or postmistress and took up another; the coach scarcely paused, for the steaming horses must not get cold. Constantia did not know where she was, for all the towns, and the houses in them, looked very much alike in the gloom; all their chimneys smoked very much alike. Drawing the hood of her cloak up over her quilted bonnet, Constantia burrowed deeper into the rug furnished by the Royal Mail for the use of outside passengers, and succeeded in dozing a little from time to time despite the cold; her arms holding Livia were cramped to stiffness, like wood petrified.

  An abrupt voice awakened her: “See that dome, Bob,” the rude old woman was saying, “just nosing up above the treetops? That’s the moslem of the Delavals.”

  Hearing this, Constantia could not help but peer out of her rug. A Mughal dome? Here, so far from India? So far even from the Royal Pavilion at Brighton?

  “That’s the moslem that Lord Delaval built for his only son, the last of that line. Aye, and the place passed to the Astleys afterward, by the female line—as they were called before they became Lords Hastingses. But never a dead body has been inside of the moslem, because Lord Delaval couldn’t agree with the Bishop of Durham over his fee to consecrate it.”

  The old woman meant “mausoleum.” Only the lead dome itself was visible, rising above the
overgrown thicket of leafless trees. It was not at all like a mughal dome, for it was perfectly classical, and in the streaming moonlight Constantia could just make out the Doric capitals which supported it.

  “The Bishop it was, that made the difficulties,” said the man called Tam, “not approving of the Delavals. The heir wasn’t twenty when he died, but already a Delaval through and through—none of ’em ever died in their beds!”

  “Not in their own beds!” said the woman.

  “Not alone in their beds!” said Tam.

  “They say it was a kick from a laundry maid in defense of her honour that killed him,” said the woman.

  “A mighty kick then it must have been,” said Tam.

  “And well-aimed,” added the man called Bob.

  “Caught him in a—ha!—a particularly tender spot, they say!”

  “While he had his—ahem!—his ‘guard’ down!” crowed the old woman. “Oh, guard—did you hear that? His ‘guard’ was down!”

  “Down, do you say—or was it up? Eh? Ha-ha!” laughed Bob.

  The guard seated behind the coachman pretended not to hear them.

  “It’s haunted, or so they say,” said Tam.

  “What, the moslem?”

  “And Seaton Delaval Hall.”

  “There is no ghost at the Hall.”

  “But there is. She is sometimes still seen in the window of the tower.”

  “The housekeeper dusting the blinds, I fancy.”

  “Impossible, for there remains no floor below those windows that any mortal woman could stand upon—it was burnt away in the fire.”

  “Besides, Mrs Turnbull is the frowdiest housekeeper in the world, and never thought of dusting a blind in her life. Why the family keeps her on I do not know.”

  The guard behind the coachman now spoke for the first time, to say gravely, “The Almighty God hath served the unrighteous with the fruits of their wickedness; His justice hath been meted out at last: the family extinct and their palace burnt to ashes.”