For how does a beloved servant question his mistress without turning into a prying nuisance? He doesn’t, is the answer. Instead he does what is asked and then some. He does a sort of work that gets done with no one quite sure who did it. A kind of enchanted tasking. And the tasker waits and watches the little family, and in particular he especially watches his Rotha to make sure she will be all right whatever circumstance may befall, at least while he is present. He decides she should never be frightened. For she might not be his own sister Penny but she is someone’s sister. Someone who has made himself scarce and has not realized what his sister is thinking and writing. William thinks she is only writing about her feelings which are not important and if they overflow he has asked the tasker to take care of the problem so as not to let those feelings flood Rydal Mount.
So I accept the pearl pin and she laughs that smashing laugh and moreover, James, she says, you’re the only one who hasn’t sounded incredulous.
At your planning to go mountain climbing?
Yes. My brother doesn’t want me to do it. Our wife Mary says I am mad. But here you are offering me the foot balm which is exactly what I need. And you are doing it with a straight face. James—
Miss?
Do you believe I can do it?
…Aye, I says. By now, I says, I think you can do anything you put your mind to as regards walking outdoors.
And I meant that. I did not lie to her about it.
But, she says, you’re remembering me from the old days.
Aye, I says. But time is funny.
And you’re still only twenty-two if that, and me, I’m nearly forty-seven. My mother was only thirty-one when she died, and my father forty-two. I hardly come from hardy stock!
Forty-seven you may be, I says to her, but from what I’ve noticed of your legs—she gave me a funny glance; was she surprised or amused?—I mean, Miss D, that they are strong legs, I says.
You’re right, they are, she says, and they are sometimes fast, but I am nevertheless becoming old and William does not wish to accompany me. He cannot take the time from his writing and I suspect the Toe prevents him as well.
She had taken to calling her brother’s sore toe the Toe as if it held a place in the world as the king of toes. When I told Mam this she laughed all right. Aye, says Mam, the brother’s toe is coddled very like our king. Because by then King George was laid down in velvet being fed goatmilk buns soaked in brandy and never coming up for air. And it’s true William’s toe saw the physician nearly as often as did the king, and he had Rotha talking about the Toe as reverently as if it had a life of its own.
And she says, James, it’s not only my legs and feet I’m thinking of. Or my bowels. Because her bowels were bad, they were sometimes good but all of a sudden they’d—but it wasn’t bowels she feared now. It’s things you have to be careful of on highlands, she says, things we forget about here low down in the vales, and you must know the things I mean.
Getting lost up there, I says.
Yes.
How easy it is, I says.
Nearly impossible not to get lost at some point, says she.
Yes, I says, I know what you mean. You’d never think it looking up at a mountain from down here. For it looks to reduce to a high point from where you can plainly see all that is below.
When in fact, she says—
Yes. The thing is, unless you’re at the pinnacle—
Which is so easily prevented! Getting to the highest height—
Yes, any hard gale—
Or sudden fog blanket—
Even snow, I says. For by then we were nearly into October.
Especially snow! Or sleet and hail and the north wind—
Or terrible cold—
Or falling off a ledge after fog or snow might have obscured the way—
Or getting nearly to the top, says I, and not being able to reach the summit, and so not being able to see the way down—
That’s it, she says—that last one is my greatest fear regarding the mountains. What if any of those circumstances we have mentioned traps me below a summit, where it can be utterly astonishing how big the mountain is, how far it stretches, and though you are very high up, exposed and far from home, you are not yet beyond the blind wastes as far as the mountain is concerned. You could wander on that level until you perish!
Shambling without food or water, says I.
Yes, and having to muster all your presence of mind in order to simply continue.
Aye, I says.
And we both knew she had often done all these things before in the hills around here. She had been lost and cold. And she had come back home. So then I says, Miss D—presence of mind is a thing you own in great measure.
Yes, I know. That, and the strength in my feet and legs, are all I have, or did have.
I saw then that she was asking me if I believed her presence of mind and the strength in her legs were still strong enough to get her up and down our summits. I said, It sounds, Miss, as if such a climb might give you the measure of what you still possess in that department.
Exactly.
Who are you going to go with?
I wanted her to have someone good. I was half-afraid she meant to set off by herself but I didn’t let on. Part of me was crying out to say I’ll come with you but I managed to refrain from speaking. Wait and see, that’s my motto. Wait and see what she wants.
My painter friend in Borrowdale.
That Miss Barker?
Yes.
I kept silent a minute. Solitary, that Barker woman traipsed mountain crag and ledge, lugging her paints. Now there was a one who knew how to mend her own boots. She was said to be bewitched.
I suppose, I says, if anyone can climb mountains it’s Miss Barker…but if you don’t mind my suggesting it, I can put you onto a fellow who tends sheep in those mountains and he’ll not get in your way, but he will be sure to know when a storm is coming long before you or even Miss Barker sees it…
At the mention of an old shepherd Rotha lit right up and said, Yes, James! Your shepherd friend will be our shepherd friend.
He won’t be obtrusive, I promised. Not auld Thomas.
And she allowed me to arrange Tom’s presence and I was secretly relieved. Tom might be seventy-odd but he knew those mountains.
And she says I know, James, I’ve asked you a lot already but if I am going to ascend the mountains of Borrowdale I have heard there are tiny rare lichen and plants of all kinds, and I wondered if—
The wee microscope?
I’d been fiddling around with it in my hut trying to mend the thing once and for all. Its hinges were not only small, they had a square hollow and I had yet to file replacement pintles I’d managed to scrounge from old pairs of glasses I had collected on my travels.
There’s only one or two more adjustments to make, I says, then if you want you and me can go for a ramble to one of the tarns and test it out.
Might I come to your hut and watch you mend it?
At this a leap of alarm hit my throat. My hut! I wasn’t having that.
I wouldn’t advise it, Miss, I says.
You can’t give them everything. My hut is my sanctuary. I didn’t want Rotha in it. It was my place. Long as I was the family servant I had to be careful I didn’t lose my own privacy. That hut is my own private haunt. Ye lot have been inside my hut. Ye know. Ye’ve perched on my tools. My saws and everything I’ve hung on pegs. You’ve seen the line I drew round them with chalk. Not so I’ll know if somebody’s gone off with them. I’m not a suspicious man. More so I will be certain I’ve put a thing back where it belongs. Having things be where they belong is key. You know where to find the right tool for any job as soon as you need it, long as you put it back where it belongs.
My hammers, mauls and spanners! My turn-screws and awls and my old carving
set, which is the prize. My wire, my sandpaper, my funnels and hooks—and my scrap paper and a few pencils for drawing out the ideas I show various ones in the fam’ly—Mary pretends interest, and her and William’s daughter Dora was a fine hand with needle and thread; the lass enjoyed my creations, my fences or the rockery or any of the small improvements I made over time.
Then there’s plant pots, trowels, edging tools…all the sticks and tags I use for labelling plants. Ye lot know how important it is to classify! My basket of gauzy bits of…haha it goes on forever…twine and wool and string and other bits I’d lash on a trellis for sweet peas or anything needing a stake. The scent of earth and boards! Wood, rain, my lovely scented twigs and composted dung sweet as barley malt. Ye know I do sweep the floor but I never mind bits and pieces of dried leaf and other vegetation. That scent means the hut is half in the outside world where I belong. My hut’s an in-between world betwixt the indoors and the outdoors and it is the heart of all I know how to make and mend.
Alone in it I would mend the microscope that let Rotha enter into your flower chambers, delving inside them like yourselves. I’m the one who looked after that for her. Helped her go into the heart of all wild rooms-out-of-rooms. But I had to work alone. No one can come in and look over my shoulder while I work in my own space. If they come in, then it’s their space, isn’t it. People like Rotha and her brother. They control the thinking. And when they control the thinking they control you. And I was never having that.
And funnily enough she did not argue. And I believe that is because she knew her place.
nine
and what happened next was a bit like what goes on with ye bees in the hive, because ye gather the honey yourselves, don’t ye, but someone else always takes it away. It’s hard to keep any of it for your own survival through the winter, yet without it ye’ll surely perish. Still we come and haul away your gold treasure, eh? And we replace it with the candy if you’re getting short, but the candy is not the honey.
As September broke into October did Rotha’s legs get better or worse? And her bowel complaints? One day this and the next that. I remember I kept thinking she’ll never in a million years make it up the mountains of Borrowdale with that going on in her limbs and her bowels. It was then, yes, that it got worse. Right before her climb. But it interrupted itself like. Over a matter of weeks it got worse but then it got better and nobody knew what to make of it.
Rise up, rise up! Get out of your bed and walk!
That’s from the Bible, isn’t it? That’s what it was like with Rotha just before her climb, or it got more like that every day. The occasional miracle whereby up she’d leap!
Then the next day unable.
Mary Wordsworth claimed she was doing it for the attention. I heard her say this to John Carter. Or did John Carter say it to Mary? The two of them considered themselves the sensible ones, I know that.
But Rotha. Headache one day, bowel agony untold numbers of days, and then the leg thing, where she’d tell Mary and Mary would tell John Carter and John Carter would tell me—Rotha’s legs are freezing cold and heavy as a pair of marble rolling pins and she durst not move them even if she could because of the pain. Any of this would last a day or two at first, in those days before her climb. Then miraculously she would rise up and get out of her bed and walk as if nothing had happened. And so it was in October that year, 1818, seeming free of her complaints for the moment, off Rotha set to Borrowdale to climb with that Miss Barker.
And poor William while she was gone—he couldn’t work on his poems if Rotha wasn’t there to aid him, so he worked on his accounts and ah, it was a constant calculation goin’ over and over, somewhere between the heart—in the breast—somewhere between the heart and the neck. A constant calculatin’ machine, an abacus, never stops, click click click click click have we got enough or have we got too little? Is there enough? There’s not much. There’s not much left. There’s not much to come! Accounts in, accounts out…He and o’course Mary along with him took care of all that. Paying me…I mean, John Carter they didn’t have to pay because he was paid for by the, it was included with the stamp job. But…click click click. Click click click. Click click click.
Money!
Gold hides the seed falling from your sycamore in a spiral. It drowns out the gentle lapping of Rydal Water on the stones. It drowns out the very soft crackle of the rabbit’s passage over the turf. It drowns out the wind’s voice and the cloud’s path. It drowns out the undersong of the leaves and the birds. It drowns out, most of all, haha, the poetry that’s welling up, that’s wanting to well up, that’s dammed inside ye. Dammed.
Rotha being gone up that mountain was torture for William. Why d’you think, he says to John Carter the third day she was gone off—and mind, William’s feeling very irritated with not being able to fix a sonnet without her—why, he says, do you think young men are poets and old men are mere husks?
As if John Carter could answer a thing like that!
I mean John’s all right but he’s one of those people, he’s lived in little villages but…so John is not a city person, but I think his mam was. So from when John was little, there’s something, some reason why the fells and the water and the soil are a bit, y’know, beneath him. And John, even though he’s never lived in a big important place like, he gives off the impression that he’s a bit above it all here. And he’s always got a smirk pasted on ’es face that’s more like a mask. He’s missing a key aspect of what I like in a person. A gravity where you know it’s really the person you’re talking to, he’s not putting it on.
That’s my thinking about John like, and that he would say the things he said about Dorothy—that for one thing she considered herself married to her brother. That she believed deep down in her heart and soul that William Wordsworth was her own husband, and if William had married Mary Hutchinson then Dorothy had married Mary an’ all. That was John Carter’s explanation for why Rotha often called William’s wife “our wife Mary.” I had to admit I had no answer to that one. But I mean John Carter gives the impression that he’s the, you know, he’s the man for William. He’s all loyal to William.
Well you cannot profess loyalty to William Wordsworth and be disloyal to his sister. That doesn’t wash. This man of William’s, John Carter, is unaware of crucial things. Or a piece of him is asleep. There’s a bit that is not thinking, a thing in John Carter that doesn’t understand and he, ye know when they say of somebody, he hasn’t got it in ’im. That’s how he, you know, John Carter, that’s how he is. He hasn’t got it in him to understand a person like Rotha. But he’s a loyal clerk for William, I suppose. Was.
But the real sympathy and devotion I’m talking about, and I don’t mean being a slave, mind, it’s more like having sympathy with anything at all. With the wrens, with the place itself—he’s floating around, John Carter is, disconnected from it all. He’s missing a connection. He’s missing a flame inside himself that warms and melts you into the bigger flame of these people and this place. John just hasn’t got it in him.
I suppose I should feel sorry for him.
John Carter, when the little fam’ly can’t hear him, rants, Somebody has got to keep these people in line! Somebody has got to keep these people from disgracing themselves by looking completely daft—wandering around, muttering to themselves—living in the selfsame garments year in and year out and year in again. And year out again. And year in again. The same coat, patched all over. Somebody has to make a little bit of money and that somebody’s got to be William! And he’d better do his job at the stamp office and not sit around making up verses all the time. Somebody’s got to have one foot in this world!
That was John Carter’s proclamation. It was his own self-proclaimed job to keep somebody in the little family with one foot in this world. But I’m telling ye that was the disease that made William claw Rotha’s inner life and grasp it for his own. One-foot-in-this-world disease. He knew he�
�d caught it when he wrote The world is too much with us…Aye if anyone siphoned the spirit out of me that William drew from Rotha I might have a pain in my guts an’ all, and sore bowels and stiff legs. William devoured her observations but he spat out her feelings. She saved those in the red diary knowing he had no interest. He delved for morsels of his choice with his pointy nose like a fox.
And I was the fox’s helper! I felt somewhat uneasy but he did pay for my keep. I could send a bit of money to Mam and Penny! Didn’t we both try to take care of our younger sisters, William and me? Big fox and little fox. Bandy-legged William Fox and the young Fox Dixon.
on the third day rotha was climbing in Borrowdale I hung around with William a bit more than usual because the two of us were at loose ends without her. We worked here in the gardens and he mentioned his dingy shirt and said that Fanny, the maid who helped with the washing and ironing, had pleurisy and could not work. I am a man who sees an opportunity immediately and when I heard this I sat on a stump, my eyes shut, for if I must ask anybody for something—I cannot bear seeing a “no” on their face before they utter it.
I says, Sir if Fanny is off more time than you can spare her, I’ve a…
Oh it’s all right, he says, Fanny will be back in a fortnight.
That’d be excellent, Sir, I says, only in case she’s not, I have my own sister Penny who’s a strong lass and nobody claps a flatter shirt or mixes a better pudding. And her sewing, Sir, Penny’s hands are nimbler than mine if you can believe it…
Silence. Bitter wind against my face. I unscrewed my eyes to see William look up from his prong with a question mark that seemed to doubt me and my whole place there. Exactly as I’d feared.
But of course, I says, you won’t need Penny once Fanny comes back and I hope she gets better.
Why wouldn’t she get better, Dixon, he says, and he resumes pulling the horseradish, and I lay awake that night and wondered what he thought. When a higher-up person won’t answer you after you’ve shown them a desire they didn’t expect out of you, your heart sinks and all kinds of fears flood you. A stream of shame no matter how proud you were.
Undersong Page 10