Undersong

by Kathleen Winter

  That night I did not abandon my dream of bringing Penny into the Wordsworths’ fine world, but I vowed not to mention her to William again either, for fear it’d put an end to my own job and so end any prospect of Penny rising.

  On Rotha’s fourth day off in the mountains with that Miss Barker I had a mind to wonder whether she’d ever come back. She delayed first one day and then a couple more until William was beside himself asking after her—has she come home—he had done all the calculating he could do as well as all the poem writing and moreover his clothes desperately needed washing and finally he worried that she might be lost.

  I reminded him of Miss Barker’s surefootedness and of the fact that old shepherd Tom would never let them down, and I did not need to remind him that Rotha herself was like a goat as long as she was well, as she had leapt into pure wellness only days before her journey. It was as if the notion of going mountain climbing with her friend had poured life right back into her that had been draining away as long as she lay upstairs waiting for William’s company. I think the prospect of Borrowdale with Miss Barker had given Rotha a new passion and William—a bit of a dog in the manger—did not wholly like it.

  I know it could seem to Rotha as if it might hardly matter to William if she was alive or dead. But I could have told her that without her William lost substance and became like a flake of soot wisping round these gardens, worrying about not writing and about needing more money. After a week of her absence he worked up a restorative vision of himself as an important poet who must go on business to the city. He allowed Mary to clap and whiten two shirts and off he sailed to his publisher who would, he hoped, pay him to revise a guide to the Lakes that had made him quite a bit of money already, and which bore his name as sole author though only Rotha could have written many of the things in it. Things only she could have noticed in the first place.

  So William was away when Rotha came home from Borrowdale to a house going on about ordinary house business: its chimneys clinked as autumn cold contracted the stones, and briars scratched the walls. But the house was silent inside and Rotha climbed its creaking stairs and greeted her diary that always heard. She wrote her feelings about Miss Barker and the mountain and kept the diary with her in the bed. When I went up to her room to bring back the chair I’d patched while she was away I found her in a state of real excitement.

  Finally, a living soul, she says! Oh James—you will never credit what we did, what we gained, how high we climbed. I can’t wait for William to hear it!

  It wore on me a bit how she supposed William might listen to please her when he would—for anyone with eyes to see—take her tale down, not in.

  Aye well, I says, you will have to make do with my ear, Miss D, as William is yet in London talking to his publisher—

  James! I never fathomed when we started off to the head of Borrowdale past the black lead mine, the guardhouse and spoil-heaps and the wagonway and all the dirt and racket—and beyond it Seathwaite…

  Aye, I says, thinking of Penny. How I had once begged her not to work in that very mine, where you might be hanged for leaving your shift with a morsel of lead fallen by mistake into your pinny pocket, and not enough wages to keep you fed. And now here Penny was far worse off after that Pendleton stinkhole. Aye, Miss Dorothy Wordsworth would pass by a place like the black lead mine blithe as a moth. She would flit beyond…

  …And then the mountain I thought we were going to climb—Ash Course they call it, but it is really Esk Hawes—I believe it comes from German—

  And I minded not for the first time how Rotha insists on very proper names for things. Mind, I says to myself, you don’t get offended over that now. Remember your benefits in keeping clear of scorn. Remember the Miss D that little boy James met and will always…

  So I says, Aye, Miss, Ash Course, I’ve been up there. There’s a swirly beck with a smashing pool and two ash trees with deep shade under ’em…

  Yes! We stopped there, and James, we scrambled to the top with hardly an effort—it was as if my limbs were the same as they were when I was young. You saw me then—

  I did—

  And I have not felt invincible like that since the children died—little Catherine and Thomas—Or perhaps I have not been my old self since they were born—I mean my young self. Oh, James, I do not know when it happened…

  Aye, Miss, you have had a lot of strain and a lot of sorrow and it is no big surprise if—

  —But I found out with my friend that I’m not diminished at all! That’s the thing. Troubles are not what they seemed to be, once you are in the mountains.

  Aren’t they, Miss?

  No! Once Mary Barker and I rose to the top of Ash Course, what should we see but—you know it don’t you!

  I reckon on a clear day you’d see—

  —Oh, it was a clear day all right! I have never seen things so clearly in all my life.

  Then, Miss, you’ll have seen all of Borrowdale and Bassenthwaite as well as Keswick and Skiddaw, all the mountains from here to Helvellyn an’ all. And the other direction mebbe all the way to Yorkshire.

  Yes, and beyond! And Solway Firth and all the way to the mountains of Scotland.

  Scotland, Miss!

  Scotland was something the mere mention of which sort of made a fizzle in me and I know it did in her an’ all.

  But James, even that was nothing compared with what we accomplished next. Miss Barker had her eye on another summit—

  The other summit would be Scaw Fell, Miss, and by the sound of it you were already more than half-way up it.

  That’s it! She was breathless. There was a dancing feeling all round her as if she had run and run and run and wasn’t a bit tired, which from the sound of things was about the size of it. She reminded me of myself when I get out in the freedom of the hills.

  Scaw Fell loomed so near! But it wasn’t near—as we walked towards it, it moved away from us like a great ship sailing off, tricking us, and by and by we saw a dip appear before us and we would have had to climb down and down quite far before we could go upwards once more, so we were disillusioned and instead headed for another height on that same mountain, but closer—

  The pike?

  Scawfell Pike, that’s it! And James, there wasn’t a breath of wind. We unwrapped our dinner and the paper lay on the rock without a rustle, and there was no sound—we had left the waterfalls far below us and could not hear even a buzzing insect, only a world of silence and deep air going on forever. And I’ve since learned that we were far higher than even we thought, as Scawfell Pike has been measured and the mountain-measurers say it is higher than the more distant point of which we imagined ourselves to have fallen short. In fact, James, without intending to do it and without even knowing it, Mary Barker and I have climbed the highest mountain in all of England!

  She sat back and looked at me with a very pleased expression.

  Have you got your knife? she asked me. I have my favourite pen ready and I wish you might sharpen it, James. The ascent has done something to my desire to write. It has sharpened me and now I need my best pen sharp, but William is not here. Even if he was, he cannot sharpen a pen as well as you. I am going to bring my notes downstairs!

  And she carried them down—it was the first time I ever saw her bring her writing into the main part of the house. I tried to make myself scarce but she was eager to seek me out and read me little pieces, and they were so full of life I felt blown to bits as if I was out-of-doors in a big gale nowhere near a house at all.

  Was there a gale when you were up there? I asked her. For I could nearly feel the wind. No. I did feel it.

  Oh yes, she said. Were it not for your old friend the shepherd Tom we might not have made it back home! He saw, once we were at the peak, a mizzle of gauze fizzing off in the distance over Whitehaven. Mind, he says, we get out of that thing’s way, and he brought us to shelter under a crag whil
e the mizzle loomed and blackened and boiled and wrapped seven mountains!

  And she read me all about the lowland plants, and about looking through her microscope: flowers in surprising pockets beyond their summer comfort—the violet and the rose—and then alpine flowers, but once they reached the top—what was that? I had to ask her to read it twice. I was hearing it but not able to understand.

  Bones, Miss? Mighty neglect?

  I know what bones are and I know the meaning of neglect but not when they are put together on top of a mountain. I wanted to ask if I might read the words myself but before I could drum up the nerve she handed me the notes and said James, you read it to me.

  So I got frightened because I can read in my head but not always out loud, I mean not properly. I might get words wrong. Their sound. Words I knew from reading, like, but I might not have heard them said. And I didn’t want to sound them out wrong in front of her. William I didn’t mind—he was used to the way I read her diaries out. But I had never read her own writing to herself before. So I says thank you, Miss, but I have a bit of a sore throat.

  All right, then, I’ll read it again, says she—We came against bones of the earth once all the plants stopped, once we reached a height where nothing has green blood—only bone is left. Mighty neglect! The maker of worlds had bones left over from all the animals & people & even all the fish & spines of hardy plants & anything bound down by force of weight—the maker had extra bones & cast them down at the top of Scawfell Pike in a tumble of lifeless petrification!

  Petrification, I says—were you—were you frightened, then, Miss?

  It was thrilling. And James, but for your having mended our scope I would not have seen the life, only felt it. I felt it all right, it was fearsome, you’re right to mention a fright—who would have thought there is life in austere stone cast aground? Rubble left-over yet important! I had a feeling were it not for that piled rock devoid of softness, no real softness could endure here below. It was as if the bony rock held all endurance for us so we need hardly consider it down here below, but it considers us—

  Yes, Miss D, I says, I admit I have thought myself at times that the mountains notice us.

  I did not confess that sometimes I found myself talking back to them, as I talk to ye, or that whenever I was away from the mountains I felt lonely, that I missed them. My mam always said when my dad left us that she didn’t care because she had the mountain out back of our house for company. Me and the mountain, she’d say. Me and the mountain enjoyed a dollop of bramble jelly on toast for our tea, thank you for asking…

  And then, James, Rotha tells me, I examined the rock surface, which blazed with petrified paint—lichen that clung to the stones. I unfolded our microscope and saw that lichen is more important than any flower! Lichen is the efflorescence and voice of the bones.

  Efflorescence, Miss…This was one of her mystery words. I wondered if I would see it show up in the red diary. Sometimes she wrote lists that had no meaning, only a long snake of words, and they were not words you normally hear in the run of a day. She stored them, like, the way Mam lays up her best tablecloth and few tea towels, separate from the ordinary lot.

  Sizzling and miniature, she says.

  Lichen, Miss?

  Yes. Orange, white, green, pink, like the flag of a rock nation, the speech of the mountain itself if only a person knows how to translate it. And James, our lovely magnifier revealed to me that the mountain is always attentive and alive. I peeled my shoes off and felt its grave sermon enter me. It mineralized my bones, James, after everything had threatened to drain all the metal out of me.

  You mean it made you stronger, Miss?

  We have metal in us, James, and I had forgotten how to restore it. It drains out and you have to make it come back. No wonder that before the climb I had so often to lie down!

  But then she tells me a very strange story about the mountain, about looking over the sea far over Eskdale and seeing a ship that ended up being a bit of a wild ship. A ship I couldn’t quite understand.

  That ship, she says, gave me the best lesson of all the visions the mountain provided that day!

  Oh she was delighted to tell me about that ship. I couldn’t make head or tail out of the ship story but I didn’t let on. I couldn’t even tell if the ship was a real ship on the ocean in the distance, or some kind of dream. What did she mean? But I did not interrupt her.

  It’s all making me realize, she said, I need to get my Recollections out again and keep working on them.

  Scotland, Miss? I knew these writings were about having walked all over Scotland with William and Sam Coleridge when they were still young and they left Mary Wordsworth back in Grasmere—Mary and William’s first baby John was a newborn—and off Rotha and William and Sam went through the highlands as if there had been no wedding, no our wife Mary, only Dorothy and her two beloved men, three pilgrims on foot with a horse and a shambles of a cart that made children everywhere laugh it was so ramshackle. Off they had traipsed over the highlands. She never kept a diary that whole journey but she had not stopped thinking about it ever since, or writing her remembrances and wondering if one day she would publish it. It would be her masterpiece. Yet it lay in a heap forever growing and changing and being revised or laid aside. Perilously lay her notes near her bedroom fire, or on the floor, or they were gathered up and put away but then out they inched once again. And William would say no, don’t publish that, you’ll never be able to stand the glare of going public. Public! He said it as if he truly thought getting published would kill her. Still, she revised her Scottish walk over and over again.

  And now William was not in the house to argue and she says to me she says yes, my recollections of walking in Scotland—I could perfect the prose and add it to my account of climbing Scawfell Pike, and I am sure I could reap some income from it—I know I have talked of this before, but now I feel invigorated enough to work like a horse until it is done! If Miss Barker can sell her paintings and live in a house of her own then I can surely do the same with my own word-paintings of all the magnificent climbing and walking I have done—it’s only a matter of getting the work out there into the world!

  She had all the energy of the October wind from the mountains, a wind that knew her as it whirled round the eaves of Rydal Mount, trying to reach her and talk to her.

  And then William came home.

  ten

  and if you asked me to name the time when it all changed around her walking and climbing and yes her writing, I’d put it square on the nose of that moment when her brother clicked the latch on his return from seeing his publisher in London. He was all ablaze. He brought the streetlamps home from London and waved them round the house ’til they outshone all her thin bright air and bits of lightning fallen off Scawfell Pike which turned to silver and scrappy remnants fizzling out in her clothes next to his new moneymaking project which was the pure hard gold!

  By now money outweighed the shining hills for him and he even admitted it with a sad face that said, There is no other choice, unfortunately.

  My publisher, he told Rotha, has agreed to pay me to revise our guide to the Lakes for all the new visitors dying to see the place. They’re all searching, he says, for the very glory I put in my poems. Though I know they’ll never find it, not even if they traipse from here to Windermere with my poems dangling in one hand and their cheese and onion sandwiches in the other!

  My poems are too—something—he says—I forget his word—the poems are too something—but the Guide! The simplest one of them can buy my Guide and turn to page twenty-one or page thirty-seven and quickly find a place, a name, a tarn or stone or tree or fell all mapped and labelled and described clear as day—the location easy enough for a child to find, and all the flowers documented, and the feelings they produce, or should produce in any reader owning so much as half a heart or having one eye open…

  And soon as William says
that—I mean only once he’s finished—does he ask Rotha about her climb up the mountain. He listens for a minute as she begins to tell him things she told me but he interrupts her—

  Have you written it yet?

  Aye, she says, and he puts his hand out to take it like and she hands him the sheaf and off he goes with her writing upstairs to his private…cryptic! That’s the word. I get mixed up with cryptic and crypt. His poems were too cryptic is what he said. Did he mean like something you’d find in the crypt? Dead like? I dunno. Any rate that’s what he said about his poems, they just wouldn’t bring enough money to pay the bills. But the Guide now, with Rotha’s account of all the things she’s seen and done all her days scrambling over the fells and now up the very highest peak in all of England, that was something he could use and sell. For the benefit of everyone in the household.

  And while he was working on fitting her tale of Scawfell into the new Guide he’d get me to keep him in fresh nibs and he’d mutter a bit to me now and then, and one thing he says sticks in my mind. It had to do with a violet in the lowland bit below where his sister reached the heights. And I realized he was reciting again. He did that often, recited his own poems, and John Carter thought it was ridiculous but I liked it.

  A violet by a mossy stone…Half hidden from the eye!…

  Aye, that was one Rotha recited an’ all, for that one was about herself if ye ask me, although it’s supposed to be about someone named Lucy who lives hidden away. No one hears or sees Lucy except William himself. She lives all hidden away and no one but him understands how important she is. No one but him cares. And it isn’t really about Lucy of course, Lucy’s a made-up name. William told me nearly all writers use real people and then just give them a new name so as not to make it seem like they are only writing about themselves and their own families.