Undersong

by Kathleen Winter

  Rotha seldom said I. She said we meaning herself, William and Coleridge, as if the three were one person. It was a funny way she had, and even, later, when Sam and William were both dead, she still said we. I fear I was daft enough to believe I might become part of that we once William and Sam were gone.

  Practically every day, James, she said to me, we have a kittenclysm. Just yesterday we sent a letter off to the wrong person. And they’ll read it and see immediately it wasn’t meant for their eyes. But it was only about the curtains so it’s a tiny kittenclysm. It was not about anything harmful or troublesome.

  She sounded joyful, explaining this game the friends had made amongst themselves. But in the diary she forbade me to examine—is forbade too strong a word for the quiet way she asked me not to look? In the red diary I would find a page she had titled Kittenclysm, but then crossed that out and scrawled Cataclysm instead.

  Sometimes no matter how beguiling a kitten is, you cannot deny it will grow up and slaughter the swallows.

  four

  her brother was the one who had hired me, but he hired me to be all and everything for his sister. And it became very evident once I began working regular days at Rydal that two streams were going on as regards my assigned tasks.

  For William I did small repairs and brick work and big lifting, using my hands and my reasoning to get the family out of practical fixes and various messes. It amazes me how intelligent people like the Wordsworths cannot think their way out of the simplest everyday problems such as a smoking chimney or a leaky sill.

  So when I was not doing the gardening grunt-work for William or listening while he hemmed and hawed about how to form his steps and garden terraces, he assigned me small tasks for the household, some outdoors and others inside: papering and sanding, or patching this and that such as the family umbrellas, pattens and clogs, or their bellows and coal-scuttle. And mending the candle tin or gathering straw for the boots or making the candy for ye bees and bringing it to your hive when it became apparent that we were not going to have good weather at all. In fact I found out by only a slight inspection that ye were starving! That spring of 1816 we had starvation all around us with beggars coming to the door and Rotha enlisted me to help the odd traveller, especially if they had young ones, by handing them a sixpence and sometimes giving them clean straw for their shoes, if they had any shoes.

  Strictly for herself she asked me to provide very little but there was one thing—James, she said, do you see much fallen wool on your travels? Locks of fleece on the fences, tufts in the brambles? Wool in the sticks and on the stones, caught, from the lambs and the sheep?

  And I says, Aye, Miss, I see it all the time, I know just what you mean.

  She says well, I gather it myself when I am out walking, to stuff cushions, but any time you’re on your rambles, if you don’t mind putting some in this sack and giving it to me, I’d love that.

  So that was a thing I did wholeheartedly and happily because you can shove a bit of wool in your sack and it weighs nowt. It compresses. And she was delighted with that. She was over the moon. She made me a small cushion for my own and it’s lovely. I’ve still got it. It’s got leaves on it. She stitched leaves all around it twined like a laurel wreath, like something off a Roman coin or an emperor’s head. It was like a royal wreath that’s been lost, fallen on the ground, weathered and left for a long time and found by a child in the field.

  Everything she fashioned by hand was like that, wasn’t it? It was weathered and a bit lost. And everything she said to me was weathered and lost an’ all.

  Rydal Lake has an ever-changing skin, she said to me on a frozen day that first year. A smoky sheen, she said, clouded underneath as if by one layer of smoke, yet mirror-shining. She said things like that. Mirror-shining…or, cut like a ransacked facet of garnet attacked by an axe! And as she said the word axe she looked fierce and alarmed.

  I comforted her and I said don’t be frightened—look, the water’s lovely green all the way through, clear to the bottom. Look—coins and fish and glass bottles and glimmer-stones. Look at the glinting fish, trying to catch our eye, wanting us to see them.

  I’d say them things to her. Comforting things.

  Looking back on it all now I can barely tell if William pushed me closer to his sister because he saw she and I were getting along so well, or if he had planned me as a kind of replacement for himself all along. At any rate I did a lot of little things for her, and our resulting friendship—was it a friendship?—it grew gradual, like.

  That first summer we never stopped making fires because all the land was so bitterly cold. Furrows from the year before couldn’t be worked because they were frozen to mid-May in the fields. I’d gather sticks after Rotha pruned the trees, and I lit them and in those fires I toasted many a slice of bread-and-dripping for my luncheon and ate it happily while she continued her orchard work humming like a wren, though I had my doubts over any gooseberries or damsons appearing. She’d sit nearby for a break and say how she savoured the smoke and wasn’t it a pity William could not smell its fragrance, in fact he couldn’t smell anything whatsoever, and she had no one with whom to share the fragrance of wood smoke or of lily of the valley except myself.

  Can William really not smell anything? I said.

  And she says to me, My brother can only engage with certain forms and colours. Fragrance eludes him and I cannot bear to talk of it with him for fear I might seem to be gloating. I have to wait until he reads of fragrance in my diaries and then he can use it in his poetry as if his own nose had smelled it.

  I could hardly credit this. Did her brother really read her sensations and then put them in his poems as if they were his? I thought how painful this must have been for him. Knowing glory was there second-hand, like.

  All this she confided to me with our heads bent into the cherry wood smoke and our two noses twitching at the waxen bells’ musk which floated that May through the cold. Those lilies of the valley are a hardy marvel. Most flowers are. You think they haven’t a chance against the wind but away they bloom. And William couldn’t smell them! I knew his eyes were bad but between that and not smelling anything and being hard of hearing, no wonder he needed to comb Rotha’s diaries for sensation lost to him.

  This cherry smoke is lovely, Rotha said of our outdoor blaze. But when coal smoke fills the house from that wretched chimney in our kitchen it fills me with despair!

  I knew their chimney smoked and I had my own idea as to why, but I had been busy with my other tasks and no one had yet pressed me to address that problem.

  It only smokes on cloudy days, she said, but it reminds us of all the awful smoke in all our other houses that we dreaded, smoke that made us ill—especially the children…

  I knew she was thinking of wee Catherine and Thomas, both dead with pneumonia, and I said yes, I know the Rydal chimney smokes. Have you checked inside it for any blackened heart?

  And she says, do you mean there is something wrong with our hearth?

  I felt offended but I did not let on what I was thinking: I know how to say hearth when I mean hearth, Miss, and heart when I mean heart. My name may not be Wordsworth but I do know how to properly say the words I know.

  But I did not say any of this. I said, Miss, I meant only that sometimes there can be a heart blocking a chimney.

  What in the world are you talking about?

  I’ll show you, I says. We’ll have a look tonight after the fire’s died out. Once the fam’ly is off to bed.

  And at half past midnight she crouches on the floor while I reach up with tongs clamped on a stick holding a ball of snarly wire and down tumbles the very heart I suspected of blocking the flue, much petrified and charred.

  There you are, I says. More than a hundred rusty pins sticking out of this one.

  I see Miss Wordsworth hasn’t got a clue what to think. Eyes darting all over the place. Those eyes, they dart
ed everywhere. They were deep and—they were like water. They were like the blackest, fastest-running stream, but with pools and becks that slowed or bent back on themselves but then gushed forward again. People said her eyes were the wildest they’d ever seen. Her friends all said so, but I was the one who saw where gold flecks were located in that stream, those eyes. And I loved showing her my tricks, like finding a heart in the chimney.

  It’s nowt but a sheep’s heart, I says. Someone has lodged it up there for revenge, judging by all the pins. Some previous tenant or their servant. Someone unlucky in love.

  I didn’t tell her my mam had done this very manoeuvre after my father left us or that she credited the act with his having been killed in his accident at Windy Brow forge. The sheep’s heart stands in for the heart you want to bring to harm.

  All that day and into the next week Rotha and William and everyone in the house talked about the blackened heart in wonderment. It was as if they had discovered it themselves. I had given them a thrill. And I realized I had a kind of a hidden influence.

  And gradually there grew that second manner of task I have mentioned, all concerning Rotha, though purely at William’s bidding at first. It had nothing to do with the hefty things I did for him, such as hewing stone for the terraces.

  This second responsibility was a task that was not stated. It was never outlined or written in any list or note, nor spoken out loud, though it had to do with the things William had said about Rotha’s mental state and how she needed him.

  All through 1816, that year without a summer, I was hardly aware it was being formed, this main duty of mine concerning Rotha. If I had noticed it I might have had to put a stop to it. But then again, maybe I did notice it and perhaps I did not want it to stop.

  William had complained to me that for no good reason she grieved and grew distant but I could not agree with him. In my company she was never absent-minded and hardly seemed unhappy at all except over sorrows that would make anyone sad.

  Visions impressed themselves on her. I mean real visions: a dove in a puddle or anything she saw, whether the smallest bit of sedge or…it’s funny…a little insect, anything. I mean, I’m looking at a bit of clover now, commonest thing in the world, a bit of red clover. Yet she’d look at that and she’d sense the sweetness of every creamy point plunging into the heart where the nectar is. As if she was one of ye. That bloom called to her and she’d take it right to heart, that little bit of clover. It could be her companion for a day. Aye. Some people, it might look as if they’re going through life the loneliest person in the world, but they might be the ones that have a companion in a tiny unremarkable hiding place.

  My replacing William in her days happened in a quiet stream at the beginning.

  All that first spring he would plan to go out with Rotha doing one of her favourite things: hunting waterfalls or climbing the fells. She would talk about it all day beforehand—falls edged with frills like milk frothing from the cow or lavish as a wedding veil! Imagine! Falling waters and fallen water crashing together into an opalescent pool! She said things like that. She got very excited and baked small pies to carry in their pockets. How William could let her bake those pies I don’t know. She was all thrill. But then morning came and he would say to me, furtively, Dixon—please, you go with Dorothy instead of my going for I’ve been called away.

  He could be called away anywhere like this at any time, and by the time Rotha flew downstairs and started wrapping her pies—it was heartbreaking—she’d glance around for William like a bird looking for its mate and she’d finally ask me, James have you seen him? And I’d say, As a matter of fact, Miss Dorothy, he’s had to go off to Carlisle on an errand to do with his stamp duties and has asked me to accompany you in his stead.

  i suppose there might be some that would call me worshipful, subservient—a hangdog bloke following after Dorothy, and after William as well, in their gardens, the beautiful terraces that William made to walk in, to compose in, to be with his sister in, although it became plain that he didn’t want to be with her as often as she wanted it. Through the years he wanted more and more to be alone. Even his wife Mary had her own activities and could make herself scarce. I fear I was not there for Mary. But Mary was self-sufficient. I was there for William. But more and more, it was for Rotha. Him and her both, that was my balancing act. And whatever William wanted and Rotha wanted is what I tried to arrange and provide. I suppose, heh, there were times when anybody watching me could’ve said, That bloke’s gone soft in the head. Dixon. He’s gone along with the madness in that household. Well that’s for them to think, and ye can think it all you want if ye like, yourselves.

  But I just want to tell ye here and now that I got as much from the Wordsworths as they ever received in the way of service.

  Ye have to understand this was the first time in my life that somebody wanted done what I know how to do. What I want to do. The very sort of task that makes me wake up with a song in my heart. Ye must know how satisfying that is.

  And as regards my being only a servant, she’d forget. Rotha would forget that I was only the hired hand. I mean, forget is not what she…no, she didn’t forget, but she…She never forgot. But…she fully listened to anything I had to say.

  Didn’t she?

  And she—I mean yes I slept in my hut and I—I never ate inside the house with the family but…that cushion Rotha made me is on my cot even now, so lovely. And it’s—haha—it’s soft, and I like to think that the softness of that cushion matches the gentle way I helped her, gathering the wool. The fleece. But not only gathering the wool. All the ways I helped her over the years. They were little ways, I know. But I like to think they were tender ways. I mean apart from the times when I didn’t know what to do.

  And I had days off like any servant but…And I was a servant, all right. I was their servant. But what I’m trying to say is that I was made to feel…I mean, maybe this was a thing that was done by the family very skillfully, eh, but I don’t think…

  They tried—but I don’t think it involved effort, I think it was real. I think they really liked…I mean…I mean I hope they…I’m trying to say that…there was a string from my heart to theirs, we had heart-to-hearts, it wasn’t as if I was some sort of…lackey or fella off the street that just came and hoisted stones…

  I mean, it wasn’t like that at all. At least I—I look back now and I hope, I hope I’m remembering it right.

  I mean they felt…affection for me, I think? I mean I hope they did, because I certainly…I’ve got to stop telling ye all this for a minute for I feel a kind of—dread? A kind of horrible feeling that I might’ve been wrong—but—I don’t think I am wrong…

  Do ye think I’m wrong?

  I got more from them, companionship like, than I ever knew in my own family, the one I was born into: my mam and my uncles, or anyone in all the hellholes I stopped in as a lad.

  Ha.

  Some people get a chance in their life to touch gold, to live in a kind of heaven while their hands squelch in the muck, weeding. And I’ve been one of those people. And I think…(are those crows cawing in the distance?)…I’ve been…I’ve been a lucky man.

  2

  In a cowslip’s bell I lie

  Have you been a lucky man, James?

  Now you are a decade older than Dorothy was when you came to her, and what have you to show for your dedication? Her story? I, Sycamore, already know the bones of her tale!

  How Once Upon a Time there was a lass whose mother died, then her father, and she, Dorothy, lived alone without her brothers, for the children were all separated. Isn’t that correct, James? And she lived for a Time with her stern and unloving grandparents, until lo, she was reunited as a young maiden with her beloved brother William, from whom she vowed never to part…

  I know her history. But the bees have been busy with future events; just this morning they brace for destruction in Benson
’s Wood and the slaughter of whole tracts of Luckan gowan—their kingcup—to make way for quarry and road. They see a time when the railway will not only arrive, but become obsolete. A time when machines replace their wings, and life as we know it is a quaint antique. The bees sense in every bluebell the myriad ways humans may destroy their haunts. Yet they endure errand upon errand for the world, and though they live many-as-one they feel a supernatural loneliness.

  Comfort them, Sweet James. The Royal Botanic Society should call a flower after you, like Sweet William's flower! Tell the bees about your Rotha, who looked inside ten thousand star-chambers—bluebell, potato-flower—and saw each mote as a bee does, each ray or spear or flare, shaking. Tremulous. Never still, but all efflorescence, fluorescence, signal…

  So that is her red diary on your wicker skep? The wind blows its first pages open! Why don’t you read it to us? Why do scout bees nose around your skep? Have you candy in it for them? Why have you brought matches? To melt beeswax and seal my wounds after you prune my dead winter branches? It’s half past ten o’clock—time for pruning, raking, preparing the ground for spring. Speak, James, and then act, for today’s light is a third gone.

  five

  i reckon there were three ways, says Dixon, that I ended up reading her diaries.

  The first was innocent enough. It was that she grew used to me. We both cared about the poems William was making up, him muttering in bits and pieces out on the terraces. But I cared about her ideas more.

  Hers were different.

  Have ye noticed how the feet of certain small birds when they are running over the ground, their feet they go so quick it’s as if the birds are on little wheels?