And I think my uncle Jim did suspect I might turn out like my father—not able to put two and two together without some sort of mix-up. I mean ye lot don’t have to take what I say as gospel, it’s just I am trying to look at, you know, William and Rotha and myself and dear Mary an’ all, everything I saw over our many years and, ye know, this is just me trying to…look at it all for ye…and yes, put the two and two together. For ye now, telling you all this, now Rotha’s gone.
So about John Carter, the Wordsworths’ other servant, he says to me one morning it was the most curious thing, he says William is…he’s having trouble, y’know, with Miss Wordsworth again.
This was probably a year after I started with them.
And I says John what do you mean? Is she sleep-walking again?
Because Rotha was, I’ll grant, a sleepwalker at times, and one of the housekeeper’s jobs was to keep an ear out and not let her roam all the way to William’s room. Many’s the night, I was told, she’d end up on the edge of William and Mary’s bed fast asleep in the morning and sometimes on the floor.
But John Carter says no. He says Dorothy’s on the lament about never seeing her brother and he’s always out and he’s not coming up to her room to see her and he’s eating his mutton at different times from her mealtimes or he’s just not there.
And I said well, John man, I’ve been working on it. I’ve been trying to keep her company.
By rights I couldn’t really argue with John Carter. He had a point. I had gone to Stickle Tarn with Rotha only days before. At the summit I had thought she might like to dip her feet in the water and I was unwrapping the pies and putting our lemonade in the shade of a rock when I saw her throw herself on the turf. And she cried something out very loud, but whatever she cried the wind carried away.
Pardon, Miss? I says…
William, she says in a heartbreaking tone, is a different man when he’s alone with me.
Aye, Miss, I says, I reckon we’re all different according to who else happens to be around.
But my brother is hardly ever alone with me, in fact he’s never alone with me anymore.
Aye, Miss, William is a busy man.
When he was alone with me, we had a world! Everything else, all his business and all the parties and people talking on and on about small things, they are not our world. They are things he tells me he must endure. I always believed him. Tell me, James, what does he say about it to you?
I had not yet managed to repair her botanical magnifying glass. At that moment I wished with all my heart that I had mended it so I could draw her back to the exact observations she loved to make out of doors. Calyx, stamen, ovary…But I had not found the right parts—the pins I fastened it with kept dropping out.
William doesn’t endure his business, does he? He enjoys it! What has he told you, James? You are the one with me now. Sometimes I wonder if my brother has brought you among us so as to prevent his being alone with me ever again…
I didn’t know what to make of it all. We sat like a pair of stones. Us and the wind. And then very quiet I started up a song. Not my old, private song, but a new one I had made up after coming to work for the Wordsworth family. I only hummed it, as I did not feel like letting her hear the words in case she recognized herself.
But she said, James, that is a lovely tune. Has it any lyrics?
Not really, I said, which was not true, but I am convinced she could always spot an untruth, especially one coming from her brother or from me.
She said it has got words hasn’t it.
So I says Miss, it is a song I made up about…about a dear sister.
I didn’t know you had a sister, James. Is she older or younger?
Penny is younger, Miss. I realized Rotha did not recall I had already told her I had a sister.
Sing it for me. If they belong to such a tune as that they will be words I’d like to hear.
Clouds raced over our heads and there was nary a soul to be seen for miles over the Langdales, and Lake Windermere glittered far below us and it seemed safe enough to give in to her request. Sometimes you feel reckless.
Once upon a time a very wild girl
clambered the fells all night:
Her eyes two living lumps of coal
with diamond flames alight
Her feet were clouds all tiny and fleet
that raced o’er sky and vale
And I yet see that same wild girl
In the rain and wind and hail!
And as I sang my song the wind crept in with my voice. I looked at Rotha and she looked at me. The song was about a sister all right, but whose sister?
I was not sure if my song calmed her or further agitated her and it took a meeting with some stitchwort—counting and naming its parts—to bring her to her regular precision of mind where I knew she would be safe.
And while we were yet up near the tarn she said, If only I had money, James. Do you know what I would have done?
It took resolve on my part not to answer, But you do, Miss. You do have money.
For compared with myself and my kind, such as our Penny now destitute in Manchester on account of her injuries not being able to work, Miss Dorothy Wordsworth had plenty of money indeed. Some survival instinct in her had seen to it that her brothers signed over sufficient for her keep. More than sufficient, for she had made them promise extra for books, and for going places she wanted to go such as London, and for giving sixpence to those who came to the door after losing their land. She had plenty for beggars so as to feel helpful in this world. Only those who have extra feel that way. But I said nothing. It was dawning on me that where money is concerned everybody seems to believe they have far too little.
Money! There’s either a small bit of your soul or a medium-sized bit or a giant portion that’s taken up with money.
My small salary I know how to stretch.
I grow my own onions and potatoes and leeks. I hunt a few rabbits. And like I told ye, I come from a long line of sheep-stealers. But the Wordsworths? Aye…William…I think money is what changed him. The Wordsworths thought they were going to have money. And then it didn’t come. According to John Carter it got lost. They had to wait. And it was years before they saw any of it. It was owed to them by a man that owed their dad. Something like that. And then their brother John got lost at sea and with him all their investments.
Their rent. Their tea. I mean who knows, if I were them maybe I’d have drunk the enormous quantities of tea they drank. How they quaffed it. Maybe they couldn’t imagine a day without that consolation. After all the freezing cold wind and rain and sleet and hail, and more wind, and lightning and thunder on their walks—walking and walking. They needed a cup of tea. But Rotha—she stood up for herself when it came to money. John Carter told me. It was when William married Mary Hutchinson and William asked Rotha what she wanted.
He didn’t mean, what did she desire?
He meant money. And Carter told me Rotha gave William written instructions, very detailed. A stipend each year. A roof over her head—William’s roof. William’s and Mary’s. That roof, over her head, for her lifetime. Which has happened. I mean we’re looking at that roof now. And extra to give tinkers or gypsies or families who have lost their homes. Have I mentioned books? She had to have her books. I mean she read William’s but she had to have her own.
Aye, she stipulated all that. And once William promised it to her, she signed off on all her soul’s care over the material things in life. Whereas William, that job he had at the stamp office, and his other bits and bobs he had going, well he was the one who had to see to it all. And trying to sell his poems—she helped there. There’s no doubt his sister was his biggest salesperson…
well? do you, james? Rotha asked me again. Do you know what I would have done if I had money?
I had to be careful. The wind from those pikes had a
mind to push us both to blurt whatever we felt. I had to watch what I said but Rotha did not. That is another thing money does for a person.
What would you have done, Miss D?
Because money has eluded me but not before love eluded me! And the two, money and love, well, James, surely you yourself know this—without one or the other, nothing can be accomplished. And a woman without money cannot do the thing I should have done.
What should you have done, Miss D?
I should have become like my powerful friend in Borrowdale.
Which friend, Miss D? Though I knew who she meant straight away.
Surely you know my friend—everyone talks of her—they call her wilder than the rivers or mountains. They even say she is mad, but she is not mad at all. My friend is simply free.
Who, Miss?
But I knew she meant her friend Mary Barker. The Barker woman was unusual. She was unmarried and had built a house for herself to live in all alone, miles from another soul. Miss Barker was a wild one all right, traipsing the land all by herself, carrying her paintbox to hidden places and making paintings of thunderheads and crags, paintings she did not need to sell because she was well-off. The Barker woman could surround herself with rock and thunder by day, and with her own paintings of rock and thunder by night.
My friend Miss Barker, Rotha cried, does not have to answer to anyone, and I wish to god I could go and live like her, since my brother is to be only my pretend companion!
I began coaxing her by way of attention to detail.
I pointed out to her this and that bit of plant.
But she said, There is something in both you and me akin to rage, isn’t there. Oh! Do you see that anger has the word rage hidden in it?
Pardon, Miss D? I was not up on word games like she was, but I saw some new idea was calming her down.
The word anger has r-a-g-e in it, she says. But anger contains an extra N. Is N for never, James? Do you never show anger?
Miss—I can’t say…
Or is N for new? Maybe your anger is newer than mine, James, because you’re young.
She was wrong about that. My anger went generations back and yes, it did contain rage. But I had mine under control. I knew where my income came from and I knew how to maintain the sweet world I enjoyed so much. My work-hut and my Sundays and my being the lord of everything William thought he created in his gardens. Such is the way with gardeners. We don’t serve a human employer. We work for the place that came before the boss and carries on without him.
My friend Mary Barker has escaped, Rotha said.
Aye?
Yes! Miss Barker is free. Whereas I am forever in danger of losing my world in every aspect.
Are you though? I tried not to sound incredulous.
It is not like that when you are a man, she glared at me. Even a manservant such as yourself owns more say in his own freedom than I do. Through money and through reliance on her own mind and her strong will my friend Mary Barker has indeed escaped! But for me, and for anyone without money, being a woman and running free are diverging forces, and agony to contain at once.
Aye, Miss D, I said. The world of money won’t help anyone locked outside it. And the world of love is a daft illusion…better not cave to it at all, eh?
But as soon as I said that she suffered an episode whose frenzy I needed to quell or I’d never have got her home. She’d have clung to the rocks and remained as lichen under the snows. What a job I had to run after her that day and to bring her home again.
She had a way of vanishing that frightened me. I don’t mean that her body vanished.
but i did not admit a word of this to the other servant John Carter, not a peep.
And now Carter says, Dixon I know you’ve been doing the best you can but the fact is, Miss Wordsworth is not settled. She is anything but settled.
And I says, Well is she confiding you this herself? Or is someone else telling you tales?
And he says no, no, no, I see it in the way she is with that dog of hers.
Little Miss Belle, I says—how d’you mean?
John says, Well you know how Miss Wordsworth renders the dog’s fur all damp.
I said what do you mean she renders…?
He says have you never seen the times that dog goes around with soaked fur and it hasn’t been in the lake it hasn’t been in the rain and she’s crying over that dog and you know yourself it’s only a very small animal. After an hour of her crying over that dog it’s sopping wet, man. The woman’s not right in the head.
I did not like John Carter’s saying this.
For I had paid attention to the same topic, the matter of Rotha’s mental state, and had not come to his conclusion at all.
Right at the start of my time with Rotha, when she told me about the secret window in her room, hidden in the wall, I asked William did he have any idea what she might have meant by that. I was trying to get to the bottom of her strangeness and find out how deep it went and if it meant I should believe the things she told me or instead believe the things other people said. Oh, said William, yes, there is a window hidden in Dorothy’s bedroom wall. It has been covered up these many years to avoid paying the window tax. The more windows in a house, you see, Dixon, the more tax the owner must pay.
Now John Carter said, it pains William every time he sees that wet dog because he knows it means Dorothy has been crying again.
I said, have you tried slightly licking it?
He says have I tried what?
And I said, The dog: have you tried touching your tongue upon the dog to see if it’s a bit salty? Maybe it’s not Miss Wordsworth’s tears, maybe it’s the rain.
He says man, you’re as daft as she is.
I went off before I could respond in irritation. I had tomatoes to stake and plenty of other tasks to do that day, and tasks save my mind. I knew John Carter was not alone in his thinking. My own mam had claimed both William and Dorothy Wordsworth were more than a bit daft and so did a lot of others. Most people lumped the pair together. All their muttering and the pacing out in all weathers…people said that was why they had to leave their first house, before Dove Cottage. Their lease never got renewed because the villagers looked on them and on Sam Coleridge and thought—no, knew—the three of them were mad.
But this was the first time John Carter had said anything to me.
And William paid John to do a lot of intelligent work for him, head-work more than my kind of work. Still it never occurred to me that John Carter might think William had a level head but Dorothy didn’t. I mean this was a new idea to me—that William was sane and Rotha wasn’t—and I never came to adopt it myself. To me both brother and sister were above and beyond the ordinary.
But I did tuck John Carter’s notion away in the back of my mind as something certain people thought.
And I came across it again down through the months and the years…
People had much to say about Rotha that they never said about William.
And what I have to conclude—what I want to tell ye now—is that I am of the mind that part of it was simply because he was a fella and she wasn’t.
I mean I don’t know if that’s right or not. Maybe I have got the wrong end of the staff.
But I failed to make any sense of John Carter and the things he said, the things anybody said, regarding Rotha being mad.
I thought to myself, John Carter, you haven’t got a clue. So Rotha has been crying. So what?
I mean what’s wrong with, if you do find—that she’s cried—what’s wrong with going and asking her, Have you been crying? What’s the matter, pet?
That’s what a brother should have done!
Any rate I touched my own tongue ever so lightly to Little Miss Belle’s fur, and of course I found it wasn’t salty at all—it was only rain that had splashed through the window.
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A wee shower of early summer rain.
I mean anybody can recognize rain on a dog. It’s not a smell of sadness at all. In fact, what could be happier?
But I did keep in my mind that John had seen Rotha crying. She did burst into tears at times but it did not always mean she was sad. Has nobody heard of tears of happiness? What did William call her? Exuberant!
Still, after John Carter said these things, I kept an eye out.
Because it was part of my job to keep an eye out if anybody in that little family had a heavy heart. Laugh if ye want. True, I might not always know how to help, but just being companionable can lighten the atmosphere, even if you never say anything out loud. Even if you’re just with the sad person in a quiet way. I think this is where me and John Carter were different.
He thought weather outside had nothing to do with weather inside. But I have always known that with Rotha the two kinds of weather touch each other. Rain splashes through the window and looks and feels like tears. Or thunder crashes louder and louder until you can’t tell anymore if it lives in the sky or in your head.
And with Rotha that was something I understood. I helped her withstand the roar of any weather that rose up; thunderclaps or lightning and the like. That was something I knew how to do because I knew the weather was in her.
Right inside her was the weather!
So there was I, doing as her brother had asked me, plodging beside her in my boots.
Crows.
Sere, yellow grasses.
Puddles.
Reflections of bare branches in the puddles.
The lake.
Caw, caw!
Rotha would say, The water’s sullen. She’d say James, the hay bends at the waist, its brow touches the mud, desolate. The hay is desolate!
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