I had not known to expect their return so I had quite a few jobs I was doing here and there around Ambleside. So for me it was a Christmas surprise. But I always found a way to put off anybody who wanted me if the Wordsworths needed me an’ all. Mrs. Hills and Mrs. Aglionby and all the rest of them who I have helped over the years—they have all been very kind to me and for that I can tell ye I have always considered myself a favourite of Fortune. But my gratitude has been always and forever foremost towards the little family at Rydal Mount.
And if I’m telling the whole truth, I had another reason to look sharp soon as the note came telling me of the Wordsworths’ Christmas Eve arrival—I had invited my sister Penny for Christmas dinner at my Ambleside lodgings and she was on her way from Manchester. I had sent her the money and she was coming. Ye’d be surprised how much money I’ve managed to save up. I’ve even got quite a few railway shares, but don’t tell that to any of the family! For they despise any talk of a railway. Although who minds that now, with Mary the only one left? Aye, Mary likely wouldn’t be averse to having a few railway shares herself. Any rate, Penny was coming to share my ham and bread with me for a small Christmas at my lodgings, but soon as I heard the Wordsworths were coming home, I felt then that this was my one and perfect chance to bring our Penny over to Rydal Mount and get her foot in the door.
I thought the family would be glad to be home and good cheer would prevail and no one would think twice about Penny’s presence.
I told Penny to wait until noon on Christmas Day then come to my hut which I would have warmed up for us, and we would have our ham and bread together and she could wait for me while I did my afternoon’s work. And I’d keep an eye out for the right moment to tell the Wordsworths that Penny had come to see me for Christmas, and that by the way she happened to be free should they need a hand with the multitude of tasks involved in settling back into Rydal after their journey…
All of that I would figure out how to say in the moment, when that moment came. I was relying on Christmas happiness to carry the day as Christmas Day was as ye know Rotha’s birthday as well as the Christ child’s. It had always been a time of opening summer’s cowslip wine, and card games and mince pies and a great roast and a slab of jellied tongue.
So help me I should have known by that time in my life—I mean yes I was still young but I had been through enough to know that the best-sounding predictions in the world are often the most foolish, and no one can tell what might fall asunder just when you think you have a keen eye for a situation.
So me and the maid Fanny and even John Carter were all looking forward to the family’s return on Christmas Eve. We had the house bright with holly branches and the larder ready. But when they arrived—William and Mary looked all right if a bit tired—but Rotha looked to me as if she had all her force kicked out of her. Her force was ousted by some violent sort of kicking! The same as if ye lot were—imagine—flying over your fields with all your summer powers, honey and everything all full-charged, revellin’ in your own flying, going Whee! Over the fields ye carouse—
But then ye get the air swept out from under ye by some vicious storm.
Aye, as violent as that.
Some sort of storm had happened, and Rotha stumbled out of the carriage and hardly acknowledged me though I felt my heart leap for her, sad as her state appeared. She was still my wild-eyed Rotha and her curls still bounced. But I saw straight away and I confirmed this over the next days that Rotha’d had her will—to walk, to stay upright, to move, to live the life she was made for—blasted out from under her by a force of, aye some gale force of…disappointment.
Some unexpected letdown.
Punctured breath—aye, something took her breath away.
And it’s one thing for ye with your wings, but for us without wings ye might need to be told our breath feeds the movement in our legs. Aye, it was all one wasn’t it, with Rotha? Her leg-power was all one with her breath. And her breath’s what she’d had kicked or pushed out by the time they came back…
And I knew there had to be more to it than what William told me, which was that the journey had been long and Rotha was very tired. And when he said it his face was made of very well-placed stones while Rotha’s face looked like anything but, or like stones that were dissolving to powder and forming some completely new kind of face as she struggled upstairs away from us.
Will your sister be all right? I says.
And William says aye, you know how Dorothy cannot stand hustle and bustle, and it was true. But when he said it his face closed in over that story very final and clever.
I mean, people are a bit self-clevering, aren’t they. You cannot get away from it. They…we…all want to be thought well of. We don’t want to put forth our failings and foolishness. But ye know, from start to finish, from the first minute I ever laid eyes on William’s sister, I knew she wasn’t self-clevering in any way. She was simply laid out like a field full of daisies. Not simple, mind. Ye know how deep, but even that’s not the part I mean. Self-clevering…making yourself into a pleasing or nicely complicated intelligent person for other people to look upon and admire. There was none of that with her, but plenty with William.
Admiration?
Haha, I can’t imagine in Rotha the bit of people’s brains that wants admiration, and nearly everbody’s got it. I suppose even pigs and lambs have got it. They want to be looked on with favour. And William did. But she was lacking that bit. You could say she was missing it…but that wouldn’t be right. Missing is when something leaves a space. She had an absence of something that made for a glory of something else. Maybe glory’s a strong word. But I know ye have seen a long view over the fells from up at the top—seen the way things are laid out, just themselves.
Oh the bits of sun fallen like melted coins on the green. Ha, the tarn like pewter. And the old rough stones, nothing to be admired haha, yet you can’t help feeling something dissolve that hard, persistent stone in your own heart.
And on Christmas morning she came downstairs early, looking for me to help her with the part I help her with every Christmas morning after we have put the finishing touches on the greenery. And that is the pastry figure of the Christ child, which goes in the pastry manger full of sweet mince.
I hope the mince is all right, she says, as I am using leftover from last Christmas.
You’ll have topped the brandy up though, says I?
Aye, she says, in April and June before we went away, and she hands me a bit on the end of a spoon and I pronounce it fine indeed. It has a fatty edge and a fruity depth and is not too sweet and the brandy wasn’t cheap, nor were the nutmeg and mace.
Sometimes, I says, mince gets better the longer it ages.
Aye, she says, mixing very cold water into the fat and flour for the pastry, but her hand is trembling.
Are you all right, says I?
I wasn’t a good traveller, she says.
No?
The others got up very early each day, she says.
But here we are up before all today, I says.
Yes, she says, but I’m home, aren’t I. I am all right when I am home. But on our travels the others rose early while I had not the strength. And, James, I did not see what they saw. I lay in the carriage and slept through the loveliest parts of the road all along the Rhine! I overdid it walking in Ghent and my bowels raged, and James, you know how when my bowels give out, it is not long afterwards that I will lose all power in my legs.
Oh, Miss.
Bowels! Leg weakness! Exhaustion in Brussels…
I’m sorry, Miss D.
I loved watching her do the part of the pastry where the fat gets cut into the flour so that it is like wet sand with knobs of fat throughout. It goes from silky fine flour to that knobbly damp sand and then in goes a splash more of cold water and magically she swirls the wooden spoon until it gathers the dough in a fine, fat ball r
eady for my part. I was sorry that while she seemed so sad at the pastry board, here I was finding it satisfactory to watch the pastry form like God forming Adam and Eve out of fine, dry dust. For that was what us two were about to accomplish, myself and Dorothy, except it was the other way around. Instead of God making man, man was making the form of the Christ child. You make the ordinary mince tarts like, by the dozens, then at the last comes this, where you make the manger in a wee loaf pan and you make the baby Jesus out of the last of the pastry and you lay him in the manger. And I was the head one for carving the little baby if I do say it meself.
Even though neither of us went to church this was a blessed moment and I waited for her to give me the pastry in my hand, for the feel of it—so fat and cold—gave me a thrill like etching the Pace eggs over Easter. Because with the Christ child I was standing near Rotha and we were making the body of the Christmas child together as if we were its earthly mam and dad. But I never said this to her of course. I wonder what she would have thought if I had.
And I thought of what she said about being home. How she was all right as long as she was home.
Home was a funny thing with her. When she was at home, all she wanted to do was dream of travels afar. Glorious travels, either remembered or planned. Over Scotland’s highlands and the Alps and now all those places she had just been, places a man like me hardly dreams of unless there is a war. Days after her last topping up of brandy in the mincemeat she had left England and gone to Brussels and Cologne, and up the Rhine to Switzerland, then Lucerne and the Italian lakes and Milan, and back to Switzerland and then France, for they stayed in Paris a whole month. I was giddy thinking about it.
But she had not been happy.
Were you thinking of home all the while, Miss?
Home, yes, she says. All through the Italian lakes I could think only of our own dear Lakes here. And the spires and glorious towers of Liège I saw only by moonlight, for I lay faint through entire days. The same happened in Cologne. I had to resist the temptation to walk because if I did walk even a little bit too far I would pay for it dearly soon afterward.
But what about London, Miss?
I knew she loved London and I knew she had spent November there and no matter how much she loved the Lakes she saw beauty in London. She saw it when she visited Mary and Charles Lamb. She’d go in a courtyard or back lane and she’d look at the way old stones had worn on the corner of a building and she’d marvel at the loveliness of a puddle, only a rain-puddle. She’d come back and she’d say—I mean I think sometimes she should’ve been a painter—she’d say James, there was a pigeon in the puddle and I watched it have a drink. Its bright brown eye looked straight at me, and its neck was iridescent turquoise, indigo and amethyst.
And I’d say, Miss, if you don’t mind me saying, a pigeon to me looks completely grey.
Yes, she’d answer, but the drab, grey bits only serve to make it shimmer the more.
She’d go on like that and all she’d been to was some sooty lane behind Mary Lamb’s house, and you’d think she’d been to that place Sam Coleridge made up that begins with an X or a Z, I forget the name. Domes and that. But I think like Sam she was in that place even when she wasn’t there. I mean she could go in any ordinary place and she would see it exalted, like.
And she finishes up the pastry so it’s springy like the flesh of a real newborn babe and she lays it on the floured board and she says, London was all right, James. In fact I would like to go back and spend more time with Mary Lamb. But before we got to London I knew I was a failure as a traveller. I felt so very far from the way I felt on my travels twenty years ago—or even five years!
I looked at her sideways, puzzled. When somebody has made an impression on you while ye were both young, and later you see them and they have grown a lot more haggard, you mightn’t notice them getting old at first. You still have an outdated version of them in your head. It hovers over their new-old self and you don’t see at first that big changes have taken place, that the person is closer to death, or some jolt has caved them in like a shore that has been eaten away.
And I knew from my mam that when a woman turns fifty she becomes different. I could see that Rotha had not for some time looked young on the face of it, but I had to make a real effort to see this because to me I did not see the surface of a person and never had. But I could tell something in Rotha had been shaken.
I clamped the urge to remind her how little more than a year and a half earlier she had climbed Scawfell Pike with no hint of weak legs and if anything she had more power than a woman half her age! But I could feel the letdown in her at her European failure, and even as she lamented, I had the feeling there was some shock she was leaving unsaid. What was it?
What had happened to Rotha when they were in Europe, her and William and their wife Mary?
She gave me the pastry and I started feeling the lump with my hands and stretching it ever so gentle here and there to make the parts change to living limbs, or limbs and a body and a wee face belonging to a living child, and not just any child but the Christ child. Baking the pastry Christ was one of the old-fashioned things she loved to do and she took my finished babe in her hands with great care and she says to me, James, you know I once had a little boy child of my own?
And I says hesitant like, Miss, you mean your young nephew Tom? For I knew Tom had been the son of William and Mary and had died when he was little, soon after Catherine, and I did not want to start a mournful conversation.
But she says no, not the son of our wife Mary. Our own son—William’s and mine! Little Basil.
Now I didn’t have a clue what to say as this seemed very unlikely. But so had other things, like the window concealed in her bedroom wall. So I kept quiet and kneaded the pastry Christ child best as I could without interrupting or looking worried.
And she says yes—William and I had a child together just as Mary and Charles Lamb have theirs even now.
So I says, I couldn’t help it like, Miss I says, you mean Mary and Charles Lamb, brother and sister, have a little one between ’em?
And she says yes—a brother and sister can be very excellent parents together, as William and I were for our little Basil.
That’s when I wondered for the first time if John Carter and half the village were right all along—she must be raving and how had I not seen it before?
And she takes the baby Jesus made of pastry and slides him in the cooker and I must say he’s fine-looking when he goes in and I hope he’ll weather the heat all right and not shatter or sink and lose his perfection, and here she hands me a second lump of pastry and says, James, can you please make me another child?
I wonder what she’s about. I hope she’s not wanting me to make the baby Thomas who died. Or is she trying to have me make young Basil who I don’t believe is real? I don’t know what to think but then she says, And James, make it a girl.
A girl, Miss?
Yes—a Christmas birthday sister for the Christ child.
At last I twig that she means make herself as a babe, for this is the day she was born. And she says please, James, do make the girl. So I fashion the baby lass and she pops that one in the cooker right beside the Christ child. The two of them together come out looking absolutely perfect.
And she says there. There’s little mortal Dorothy and her Divine brother, both born on this day, keeping each other company in the manger. She can be his little doll.
And the way she says doll I remember how only William ever calls her that, and hardly ever, only when he thinks nobody else can hear. Other Dorothys get called Doll all the time, but not her. She’s nowt like a doll though she is small. If you could trap a lion inside a doll maybe. Anyway she lays baby Jesus in his manger on the mincemeat, and in she lays the baby Dorothy right beside him for all the world as if he has a doll, and she says, I forgot to make them a pastry blanket!
But the hous
e was waking up—it was getting on for ten in the morning and they were all still tired from their journey but they vowed they would have a good Christmas all the same, with the roast and the mince pies and a few games of cards, but there was one window not done up yet—the kitchen window—and I went out to gather a few branches to deck it out same as the others. And from what I can gather while I was out William came downstairs lured by the fragrant mince tarts that had come out of the oven and he was not exactly jolly but he felt happy enough about the tarts and he poked his nose over the loaf-pan manger with the baby Jesus in it and he says, What’s this? And he picks up the pastry Dorothy. And he says, You made a spare? And he cracks the legs off it and pops them in his mouth before she can stop him. And I think, mind ye cannot be certain but all the same, something about that…a doll made in the likeness of a person, then someone by mistake, not knowing like, breaks part of it…Well my mam had candles like that, she fashioned her neighbours out of stubs while the wax was still warm. And anything good she wished for a certain neighbour, she wished it over their wax figurine. And if anyone crossed her, well their wax figure would meet a pin or two and that was how many a fate was met, according to my mam. Of course ye don’t know if the good or the bad was a direct cause like.
But I was out cutting the holly boughs and I got carried away in the woods. I found a sweet-smelling spot to sit, very quiet, and a few snowflakes floated down, and a bird or two sang their carols for me and maybe I dozed off but surely not as long as all that! For I woke and saw by the sky that it was already past noon. And I frowned because I’d told my sister Penny to come to my hut at noon so I could eat with her then introduce her to the family and try and see if she could stay for a little while into the new year. That had been my plan or my hope. And if into the new year by even a few days, why, then, it couldn’t be too hard to extend Penny’s stay and maybe have her start doing some little job or other. A new start for Penny.
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