Now she pulled the red book from the bottom of the stack and untied it and then unwrapped it—it was the only one she had wrapped up and I had never unwrapped it. But now I saw it had a red cover under its red cloth. The others were just bare books. She stared at the wall as if she saw something through it, and then she wrote in the red book but I couldn’t see what she wrote although I wanted to.
I felt as if she had forgotten my presence so I said, Miss—I still called her Miss Wordsworth then—I only started calling her Miss D after we got closer. I said, Did you eat any dinner? Aren’t you a little bit hungry?
A bit, she says, but I don’t feel like eating meat. What I would love while I’m writing, she says, is one boiled egg with salt on it.
I went back down and brought her an egg and I scalped its top off with my knife and this amused her.
Her diary lay open on the bed while she stared at that spot on the wall again and ate her egg.
I pretended not to be interested in the diary but of course I was, anybody would be, and I saw bits of what she had put down. She had written something but crossed it out, except for the title: Togetherness Committee. And Mary’s name was there, and fireside was there, and flames were mentioned. Half of Sam Coleridge’s name stuck out from some particularly strong, black lashings of ink. I had met Coleridge and for the life of me I could not see what all the fuss was about. He was folded in on himself and uninterested in anything around him. He was a ruined man by the time I saw him. But I knew, I had heard, that when he was young he was one of the loveliest young poets in England and Rotha had loved him. Many’s the tongue had wagged over her traipsing through the vales with him alone, lying sidelong on the turf until the stars came out.
In fact, tongues did nothing but wag about Rotha and her brother when I first came to Rydal.
People thought the fam’ly had a bit of money once they moved to Rydal Mount and William became the new tax collector. Oh, they said, William Wordsworth has got buckets of money now, you’re in the good books.
When Berthe Briggs came with the eggs she’d get me to mend her tin pail and she’d crow in the lane after, That Dixon, he can do anything, him, shove the arse back in a cat, but he won’t let on a word about what’s going on behind Rydal Mount’s walls! Aye, Berthe and all of Rydal were one and the same in concluding the handyman must know what’s going on, let’s get him by himself, once he’s off duty…I had a steady stream of visitors at my hut on Sunday afternoons, prying and thinking of me as the Wordsworth Times, a trusted source ready to provide them with all the news. They all thought I tacked on with the Wordsworths only for the pay.
But the wages are not why I came here to work. I could have made the same money working elsewhere. I could have made more, some places. There is more to it than the money when you are in the company of people who have an exciting way of thinking.
Ye know yourselves, when anybody gets even a little bit famous as the Wordsworths were starting to do, people respect them well enough to their faces. Oh yes, they show great politeness in person. You’d think, after the poet’s child was dead—little Catherine—simple as she was, more like a beloved fairy than a child able to grow up to read and write or anything—you’d think when the Wordsworths lost her that people might hold their tongues.
But question number one flying around the vale was, Poor dead Catherine was under a spell wasn’t she, her eyes weren’t right, was she a changeling? Question number two was, How did I expect anyone to believe that Rotha, a woman roaming the fells alone, had done so without a horde of wild lovers, some of them probably half-human beings in the dusk?
Yet she lets on so as to appear maidenly, they marvelled; surely that’s a canny disguise?
And what about the way Dorothy and her poet brother used to carry on before he married Mary?
Talk of the town, all that, and people expected me not only to know everything that had happened before I got there, but to be dying to inform them of the sibling pair’s every move.
Now Rotha said to me, Dixon, she says…she was tackling the bottom of her boiled egg…do you know what I wish you and I were doing?
No, Miss?
Hunting kittenracts.
Swallows banged against the glass—we watched their fluffy bellies and their forked fishtails and she said, They are trying to swim in an unsympathetic current!
The swallows distressed her.
I wish there was some way we could give them shelter! Did you know, James, that just there—she pointed her spoon at the blank spot in the wall where she had been staring—is a secret window?
I don’t see any window, Miss, I ventured.
I felt disappointed for her that I could not see what she saw but I wasn’t going to pretend to her that I saw a window where there was none. I felt there was a wee beck starting to flow between us and I did not want to dam it up with fibs. It wanted to become a living stream. I wanted it.
I know you don’t, she says. Because it has been concealed. It’s a very old window still inside the wall. I feel as if I can see right through it.
This certainly seemed odd to me but I did not explain it away by concluding that she was mistaken or feverish or, as her brother had mentioned, over-exuberant. I sensed even then that I was to learn more from Rotha’s strangeness than I could imagine.
I just can’t seem to gather myself, she said to me then, when there is a crowd like the one downstairs now. Even people I love, even Mary Lamb, who by herself is a fountain of refreshment to me. But together! They are all talking quite happily to each other and in the wild babble I can’t reach a place where I’m listening to somebody and they are listening in return, heart to heart. The way you are now—you’re listening, aren’t you, James.
I am, I says to her.
But downstairs, she says, it’s arm to arm and finger to finger and mouth to mouth and hair to hair and fire to song and wine to bread and meat to soup and ladle to knife—but one heart, mine, wants to run, cowering, shutting the covers over itself, closing the curtain. Making itself as small as possible like a child curled up. Hiding under the stairs! As if something frightening has come to the door…
I waited for her to say what frightening thing that was. But she scooped the last of her egg in little white-and-yellow moons on her spoon and continued looking at the white wall where she had said there was an old, hidden window. A window I couldn’t see, not even a slight impression in the wall.
There’s so much good will and love downstairs just now, she said—all happiness!
I did not mention Mary Lamb’s having murdered her own mother quite recently, or the fact that Miss Lamb’s brother Charles had brought a straitjacket in a sack in case he needed to slap it on his sister once again. These things went without saying in the Wordsworth house at the time, though it had certainly been said in all the papers.
All heat and cheer, said Rotha. But, James, do you notice none of it is any fainter now that we are here, away from the party?
Miss?
When you went down to get this egg, did anyone notice your presence?
I daren’t…
They didn’t, did they? You were nothing but a shadow.
I can’t be sure, Miss. They were all talking amongst themselves…
Our absence is—and don’t imagine me full of self-pity, James, I’m simply stating a fact—our retreat, our absence—does not take away from their jolly heat, from the heightened temperature of the gathering. She pointed at the real window, the one we could both see: Look, she said. Our swallows have flown away.
I felt a pang when Rotha said our swallows. I felt it deeply, and when I think about it all these years later I believe that day of the Easter party was the start of how she and I became a magic team, at least in my own mind. Am I imagining it? Ye lot are lucky, ye have each other—a hive of ye working together, keeping each other warm, always in the glow of one another�
�s natural company, and your old sycamore for shelter, and the whole garden nourishing ye.
But for some of us humans that Easter day was a cold, lonely day like today. Only the twigs of the swallows’ half-built nest showed through the rain-blurred glass. It had teemed cold rain that whole spring.
James, Rotha said to me then, can you see those two single droplets of freezing rain suspended on the eave?
Yes, I says.
Just quivering there and reflecting everything, she said, not adding to the warmth of the house nor drawing more than an iota of heat away. I don’t mean that the two raindrops are insignificant. I know I am loved, and you must be loved too. Are you loved, James?
Was I?
Rotha had a sixth sense when it came to knowing if you were alone in the world or not. If you had anybody. And I did have somebody—but I did and I didn’t. My somebody was not very well. Penny, my little sister. There was something not right with Penny’s shoulder, wasn’t there? She was hoarse an’ all—her voice the last time I went to Manchester croaked from the depth of a dry pit like a noise I once heard come out of a parched baby frog.
Have you got a girl?
No, Miss. I’m far too busy.
Have you any brothers or sisters?
I have a younger sister, Miss. Penny, named for her copper hair.
And do you see her?
I remained silent and Rotha said, Perhaps it is only that people like us do not know how to love a crowd. We cannot find the individual souls in it.
And I felt then that neither Rotha nor I had a clue what was going on in each other's family, and we had not admitted to ourselves why we each felt so alone. That day was when I started wondering how Rotha and I could help each other. Though I knew even then that to wonder this may be wrong, or foolish, or impossible. Because I was only the…what is it I heard their visiting preacher Edward something-or-other call me with a teacup in one paw and a goblet of elder wine in the other and currant-bun crumbs all over his gob? The factotum—What a good mute and earless and eclectic factotum you have—he can re-weave the seat on a beloved old chair or mend any irreplaceable tool! For all I knew, he was calling me a Peruvian hedgehog. It took me ages to find out the meaning of that word. But it only means handyman.
The rain grew louder and in the din I asked her, Miss—what did you mean by saying you wished to hunt a…some kind of a kitten?
William’s wife Mary was always on about getting a kitten. Mary longed for a household cat. It was a fierce argument at times, with Mary disgusted by mouse droppings and Rotha defending the swallows and all the other birds that came near. The birds would be massacred if Mary got her way. So I couldn’t fathom why Rotha had just now mentioned trying to find the very animal that would destroy our swallows, who were already battling for their lives against the gale outside.
My question made her laugh.
Then she said, You’re still the same lad that came upon me while I was crying, aren’t you. What a sad time that was, the time in Lady Wood—our baby Catherine had only just died, and Sam Coleridge was so lost to us, you might as well say Sam had died as well, but you wouldn’t have known, you were only a boy. It was you, though—I know it was you. You’re the little lad who caught me crying.
I had no reason to deny this, but at the same time I felt somewhat exposed. I guess I’d thought that with all the growing up I had done in the interim, Rotha had not recognized me.
I’d know your face anywhere, she said. All shy and funny and folded in strange ways, like a darling goblin.
She couldn’t have known my mam had often called me a little goblin.
But Rotha was very keen and sharp in her perceptions then, and in my eyes she has never lost that keenness. When everyone around would later lament she was no longer right in her mind I vowed she was the same Rotha as always.
I cannot say why I see her so differently from the general opinion. I only know that she never changed in all our time together, from that cold Easter of 1816 when we were alone together in her room until today. I know she is dead but even so I still feel Rotha has not changed. People don’t stop existing when they die, do they? They just go somewhere else. Some place where we cannot reach them.
My mam wasn’t an extra wise person. Haha! Far from it. But one thing she said feels very real and true to me now, and it was about the dead. Mam said the reason the dead don’t reach out and contact us and let us know where they are and that they are all right is because they are far more than just all right. They are having such a lovely time that if they gave us so much as a hint of how wonderful it is being dead, we would kill ourselves here and now. Don’t you worry, my mam says, the dead are only being kind to us.
A kittenract, Rotha said to me that Easter day, isn’t a kitten. Guess what it is, James.
I can’t, Miss. I don’t know.
Think about it.
I’m not a very good guesser.
She crushed her eggshell into pieces like sand and scooped the dangly pile up and handed it to me and said, Do you know what this is for?
I said to her, shaking my head no, Miss, I says—it’s starting to look as if I might not know much at all.
Come on, she said, we’re going out. Don’t worry about the party, we’ll sneak out the back door.
The box is still open, I said, with all your notebooks exposed—would you like me to put its lid back on?
No one is going to bother with my diaries, she said. I only put quiet observations in them. The family, Grasmere. The time the Green children lost their parents. The seasons. Times I waited alone for my brother while he was away, written to entertain him. They’re all in those books in that box. And my recollections of Scotland. Trips I’ve taken with William and Sam Coleridge, when we were young and before Sam fell out with us…
I did know about the Scottish recollections because there were copies—I won’t say flying around, but she had made five or six copies for friends, and there was one copy in her room that she was always working on, trying to make it better and better. It would come in and out of view again as she revised it or put it away.
I don’t know where I got the nerve—maybe because the red notebook she had been writing in still lay open on the bed—but I asked her then if I might look at any of her writings. And she said, Why not, they were written for the household. William looks in them all the time, she says.
So right from the start I felt, or I believed at any rate—she would not mind if I knew something of what was in her notebooks.
But she did say to me that day—I’ve got to confess—Only please don’t look in this one, which is for myself alone. And she picked up the red diary off her bed.
It was the only time I had seen her claim a particular object for herself.
So of course that became the diary I longed to see most of all.
I watched her shut it, wrap it, and tie it with a lace off one of William’s old boots. It was not a single knot and it wasn’t even double, it was a triple knot—but the tool for unfastening it was, and still is, in my pocket. I noticed she hesitated before sliding that book beneath the others. Maybe she suspected she should hide it elsewhere if I was not to look inside. But she stuck it under the rest…though that is not where I found it later.
Then we crept out the back door. No one in the party heard or saw us, and she took me along a winding walk William had made past the birches, and what did she show me but the struggling tips of a cluster of leaves belonging to a plant I recognized.
I knew it by the husks of its previous year’s flowers scattered around, papery edges tinged gentian blue.
I said to her, You managed to keep them alive all this time?
From their natural home near Dove Cottage, to Allan Bank, then to the cursed Rectory and now here, she said, and you’re the kittenlyst!
I remembered William’s tone in calling her exuberant, like
she had something amiss.
Is a kittenract, I says to her then—I had caught something of her glee out in the wind; the whole outdoors, the wind and everything it touched was her company and I saw she was recovering after fading at the party—is it a cataract that hasn’t grown up yet?
And she laughed, and said that now I was a real playmate.
Sam Coleridge made that one up, she said. I noticed the difference between her manner in and out of the house. It was night and day. Sam and I had found a waterfall, she said. Miniature but wild, just rippling and dripping like a thread loosened from a bridal gown. I’ll show you!
And she pulled me by my hand up the coffin trail and showed me a falls, a tiny one, beginning to grow ferns around itself though ice shards still lined the rocks, and we sat awhile in the sleet and got wet through while she listened to the water that sounded like bells in a hollow cave: a small voice that combs the bones in your neck and spine with soothing vibrations. It refreshed us and made us laugh.
This was our first kittenract, she said, and forevermore after that we kittenized anything that had cat in it. Sam once found a forked stick and pulled a ribbon out of my gown and picked a piece of—you know—that little—tiny yellow pincushion in the middle of the weed that smells like pineapple. He’d flick it at my face and that was his kittenpult. And at the lake, anywhere with a crease in the stones, any tiny indentation—if you could imagine yourself tiny enough to fit inside it, you were in the kittencombs. And if we had any minor misadventure, such as if we forgot to put leavening in the dumplings, or if William stubbed a toe—before his toe got real bad, if he just gave it a knock like, we’d say don’t worry, it’s only a minor kittenclysm.
I had not known Coleridge was funny and I did not realize until much later that it was his wife, Sara, who made up their secret language, though Sam made out it was his own.
After our day by the waterfall I would not find Rotha humourless even when she grew depressed. I never came to share William’s perception of her. I doubted myself in this at first, because I’ve noticed that people tend to be blind to very obvious things going on around them. I have asked myself, Why should I be any less blind?
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