I didn’t know there was a storm, Miss.
It was a week of gales! And we had to stand on the beach with our baggage every day waiting for the breakers to subside before they would let us on the boat to cross the channel to Dover. And once they let us on the boat, we knew they should not have done so, for the ship was far too small—it was the only one they allowed as fit to sail the conditions—but it was insufficient, tiny really, with only one real sailor—and the waves wild and the winds malevolent—James, I knew then that I was on the ship that had been foretold and prophesied—
Prophesied, Miss?
And she proceeded—but I felt very sheepish because I knew the prophecy from having read it in her red diary—the story of Mr. William Blake and what he had said about the ship-cloud of Scawfell Pike foretelling a real ship that she would find herself on. I knew the prophetic part of the story already—but I let her go on telling me as if I had not read any of it in her private notebook.
And I resolved at that moment, because of the guilt I felt, that I would have to soon find some way to let her know I had been reading it. Some things are all right done in a devious manner, but other things are not, or things develop in a way that makes you change your mind.
So we shouldn’t have been on that ship at all, she says. There was an Irish woman and a little Italian man both curled up down the stairs in beds alongside mine—I descended there to shelter from the waves but William and Mary remained up on deck. And before we were out of the port ten minutes we had a frightful heaving on the waves! Our ship lurched and grated—parts of it flew asunder and water came rushing in—the grating noise went on for many seconds as we ran aground. The sound was like a building being razed. I thought the ceiling would crash down and crush us before water inundated and drowned us! The Italian man leapt off his bed and knelt praying on the floor. But the Irish woman was kind—she enfolded me—she was large and I am so small, it was like being enfolded in a mother’s velvet arms.
But the violent tearing-apart sounds kept on going and I saw William and Mary in my mind up top being cast into the sea and I saw everyone at home mourning for us as we had mourned when we lost my brother John—it was just the same as the way John was drowned! His ship was not far from shore either, yet all hands were lost, and now we were re-enacting his death!
All this happened in a few instants and with all my heart, she says, I wished I were a large, strong man able to save people, instead of a tiny person who might as well not even exist. So small was I and so large the wreck and the storm and the roar of the timbers being torn apart…
James! When you are in a boat running aground it is as if the boat’s bones—its beams and all the solid parts of its construction—are of one piece with your own bones—you become the grounded creature and as you lose equilibrium you fall askew. You know you will flounder and break apart on the stones. Water will flood the boat’s lungs and your own lungs, erasing your life’s every breath from first to last!
No, I says, for she was quaking. You’re here. Back safe.
No, James, she says. I’m not.
Yes, I says. You’re safe here, home at Rydal Mount.
And she says no, James, home is not safe. You think it is because you don’t know what happened next.
I says what was that, Miss?
She says, James, our ship tilted and swayed but I found my feet and rushed up to the deck. And found William with his shirt and coat off, stripped to the waist!
She waited for my reaction but saw I had not understood.
James, he was poised to dive for his safety and swim ashore! I shouted to him and he was right startled, and he muttered, Dorothy, I believed you and Mary were lost down in the cabins. For he had seen Mary flung down the stairs by the storm although I had not seen her. And he says to me, Sister, I thought there was no hope for either of you, so…
I asked her, incredulous, William was ready to swim and leave ye?
And she says he was.
And I says, No, Miss, surely not.
But she says oh yes, I know it true and strong as the storm we have just witnessed.
And I don’t know what to tell her for my troubles song is not the right song for a sunken heart.
But don’t worry, she says. It’s as if she feels she suddenly needs to save me from thinking what I am thinking. She turns stiff and brightens like. I can’t make out what kind of brightness it is. There is something about it that I don’t like.
We were saved, she says—we were in very hard shape but in half an hour we saw the tide was on its way out, and we were close enough to shore so as not to be engulfed—but—
She fell face down on her blankets thoroughly limp and I knew she had just been through the shipwreck again. I wondered if she had been reliving it again and again while we were all downstairs or outside, oblivious.
She spoke not another word about William having been ready to swim and leave her and Mary for dead. But her plight on that day remains a thing I cannot put out of my mind. Yet there was something in her that refused on the face of it to think any the less of William. She tried as hard as anything to believe he was as devoted a husband and brother as ever.
But in my mind the scene on the ship called into question the idea that he had ever been devoted to anyone but himself.
This is a hard thing for a servant to believe about his master and I am not saying I carry a grudge or that I think of it often. Only it is a thorn, a mind-prick, a puncture hole, in what used to be my dream about the little fam’ly.
A dream is a thing that can live even with a few puncture holes if the wind is right and the summer holds and a garden like this garden grows all around.
Yet somewhere in me on the day that storm came to Rydal and Rotha was sick and I helped her recover and she told me about the shipwreck and William’s plan to lunge off without her and Mary, I knew from then on that Rotha could not rely on a single soul, and maybe none of us can. And I vowed to do the best I could for her.
thirteen
and it was a funny thing—I started to wonder what might have happened if I’d gone on that expedition to Europe with them.
Would I have left her for drowned in the shipwreck to save my own skin?
Mam says when I get on like that, Son she says, you think you’re all right, you think you’re better’n anyone else, we all think that of ourselves. In the moral way. We all go yes me I’m the one you can count on to do best. But when push comes to shove, you never know what you might do or not do.
But I think I do know that I would never have peeled my own shirt off to dive in that water without Rotha in my arms safe. Or I hope I would not have.
So I was thinking about that, about going on travels with her over and beyond the ones we did increasingly at Rydal, which were travels without the miles. I mean we walked around the terraces as if they were many miles.
For she had me walk with her up and down and around the terraces like she and her brother used to do. Walking the sacred earth, he used to call it. But she just called it traipsing, plain like. That was how they both composed. The poet and his prose-writing sister. They never sat at a desk. Well, he—he hated sitting and he sat if he had to correct things but it gave him a headache like you wouldn’t believe. And if he got the headache that was it for the day. Neither one of them could be happy unless they were outside. And of course early on she followed him and wrote down whatever he muttered. But that was long ago when they both walked their feet off. And both let the ground talk to the soles of their feet.
Only now I was the one tagging along and hanging on her every word.
I kept my ears pricked open in case I heard talk of a new visit to some other place farther than our wee gallivants around Rydal. I made up my mind to be in the right place at the right time as soon as ever a proper new journey was mentioned.
It was dawning on me that home to Rotha was the
place she thought about if she went away. But once she came home, all she could think about was new journeys abroad. She wasn’t at home in either place, home or away. Her real home was somewhere in her dreams no matter where she ended up.
She said the Lakes around Rydal reflected the skies and clouds and same moon that she had seen in Liège or elsewhere. They were like mirrors or windows into a dream of being a pilgrim in a far land with her old wagon and one horse like the gypsy. And me, I understood that. And I think I understand it better than her brother William ever did.
And that’s why I wished I could go somewhere with her.
Yet it’s why, once she was at home again from Europe, after the shipwreck when William was ready to dive and leave her, I understood she felt glad to be home. She loved her home. And when she was away in the Italian lakes or the Scottish lakes or anyone else’s lakes, none could compare to her own lakes at home. Because her own lakes at home held all the other lakes in them. But at home, well no matter how much she loved it, off she longed to wander again.
And I wondered, I couldn’t help it, what about she wanders away with me?
I did wonder that and I kept my ear out for any possibility. And when it came, it wasn’t Brussels or Switzerland or Lucerne and it wasn’t steeples in the moonlight at Liège, but it was somewhere. So my ears perked right up.
First she says to me, James—would you do something for me, please? And she touches her jaw.
Yes, Miss? For by now I was ready to do anything Rotha asked of me. Do you need me, I asked her, to have another look at your teeth? For she hadn’t been wearing them and I was afraid the hinges had once again come undone and I felt bad about it.
They do need mending, she said. And I am afraid there is nothing more either you yourself or poor Cora Freetorch can do this time. For it is not only my false set giving me trouble, but my last three teeth on the top and those remaining on the bottom are going to have to come out, so it is, sadly, a question of paying Mr. Demergue fifty guineas and having him fit me with a whole new set.
Mr. Demergue, is he the tooth man in London?
Yes and it means I will have to stay with Mary and Charles Lamb and their little daughter and not show myself for a fortnight before all is back to normal inside my mouth.
There she was on about Charles and Mary Lamb’s little daughter again, the thing she had told me at Christmas, and I didn’t know what to say, for it was absurd, a brother and sister having a daughter between them. So I let that pass. Sometimes I get a bit paralyzed in my talking if I run across a thing I can’t make sense of. I sort of shove it in my pocket and try to find a way to make sense of it later.
So I says to her, I says, Miss, is Mary Lamb—but I got stuck again there because I did not know how to ask was Mary Lamb all right, was she at home? Was she mad or well or in-between…for Miss Lamb was in and out of the madhouse as we all knew. I mean, I says, how is the state of her health?
Mary Lamb, says Rotha, is of the same state as I concerning her poor teeth.
So she’ll be sympathetic, I says.
Yes, and she is sympathetic not only on that subject but regarding every subject under the sun. And sympathy or understanding, which Miss Lamb possesses in uncanny measure, mean more to me at this moment in my life than any amount of what is ordinarily called sanity.
She gave me a look. And to tell ye the truth I don’t know where I got the nerve to say what I said to her next.
I can understand that, I says. Miss, might you need a…a reliable person’s help, if you’re to stay with Miss Lamb a whole fortnight?
It dawned on her that I was struggling but she did not twig what I was getting at so I says, Miss, I could come along if you think it would be of any help to you. I nearly said and save William the trouble but I thought better of it.
Would you really want to come with me, James, for a fortnight in London?
The thought of it got a bit more real then and I became alarmed and she saw what must have been a look of fright on my face. But was only a small fright. It hung in the room along with her own surprise at the way things were shaping. It was like the air in the room altered a bit, for we were glimpsing an arrangement we had not thought of before.
Miss, I says, perhaps it’s not a good idea. I have never been to London before.
Are you frightened of it? she says. Surely not. You’ve been to Manchester, haven’t you? To see your family? A brother, I think?
Manchester is not London, Miss. I did not bother to correct her this time about the brother she still thought I had. It occurred to me that in Rotha’s world sisters must be invisible.
Here among the Lakes, she says, there are things just as frightening as any city. Look out the window now beyond the sycamore! The sky looks as if some hand has broken vast amounts of black cake all through it.
Aye, Miss, the sky does look like crumbled treacle cake.
And the wind! she says. Look how it gathers over the treetops in the village, ransacking the tips to reveal silver undersides that sizzle and thrash!
It’s a mad whoosh all right, Miss, I says.
Let’s you and I guess, James, how many minutes it will take for the incoming deluge to drench us. What do you think? How long before Rydal Mount is soaked?
I’d say, Miss, half an hour? I did not like to claim I was sure about the timing of weather, for that’s a thing uncertain at all times. I felt uncertain about that and the conversation took a turn that I felt even worse about. I mean she started talking in a way that I couldn’t understand, and I was worried. I wondered if the impending storm was going to make her sick like the last one did.
Have you noticed, James, how many souls in the village are women who are getting old?
Here in Rydal, Miss?
In Rydal or Grasmere…in Ambleside or any town hereabouts. Women labour down the road on their messages—look, there’s Mrs. Jackson who retains fewer teeth than I and has replaced none of them, flashing her black gaps and begging for ale—Parched, she cries, I’m parched!…And here I am as toothless and haggard as she is—
No, Miss—
As squat, James—as short, and as insignificant, if you look at me as men look at women, from the outside looking at her, or looking upon her…but you don’t look at me like that, do you?
No, Miss.
And I did not. For it was as true as anything that to me Rotha Wordsworth was still, no matter her age, a dark slip of night shot with starlight, I don’t know why. I’ll never know why. But I did not let on to her for I was not sure how that might sound in her ears.
And I am afraid, James, she says, that if I were to describe to you my inner state, I would tell you that my fatigue is so thick as to resemble a fog bank coming in off the sea. Muscular I am not. And people value musculature as it exists in a man such as my brother. Muscle fuels his rage and his inspiration. I am not supposed to have rage. Although lo and behold I have it. You have eaten oats, James?
Aye, Miss, I says. For I had eaten plenty.
And she says, I have eaten oats until William claims I look like oats. I look like a bowl round on its bottom—a bowl full of oats—each oat itself a round entity, oats being blips that nourish; greyish seeds having no legs nor horns nor wings. An old woman is an oat and she is the bowl that holds the oat and she is the spoon that digs the oat from the bowl and she is the mouth that sups the oat and she is the tongue in that mouth. Do you understand me, James?
I’m…Miss?
And if she isn’t an oat she’s a currant bun, inert and white with black eyes, many eyes, but eyes unable to transmit what they see because she is only a bun and is passed by, sitting in the larder. And what is the fate, James, of all buns you have known?
They get gobbled, Miss?
Yes or they grow stale and must be fed to the hens. Already I feel the eyes being plucked out of me by Little Jack Horner. You do know him?
Yes, Miss…and I couldn’t help it, I recited—
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner
Eating his Christmas pie—
He put in his thumb
And pulled out a plum—
And said, What a good boy am I!
Gobbled, she says! And who was in our Christmas pie? Who lay on a bed of currants and plums and was born on Christmas Day?
You mean the mince pie you fashioned, Miss? For the Christ child?
For whom?
She looked as if I had not spoken well and I wasn’t sure what she wanted me call Jesus. I couldn’t really call him by only his first name. Only people down in the fields listening to the Wesley preachers talked about him by name as if he was a friend they knew. Rotha owned a Bible but I seldom saw her look in it and she was never down listening to the preachers.
The Lamb of God, Miss? I says.
Other than the Lamb of God, she says, looking weary.
I didn’t want her to sicken of my stupidity. For I desired to go to London with her. I wanted it suddenly and badly. Just Rotha and me, on the road.
And I remember. Oh! Miss, I’m wrong, for you meant yourself. You were born on Christmas Day.
Yes, she says. I was. And I intend to jump out of the Christmas pie to see my Lamb, the Lamb who is also not the Christ child.
Mary Lamb, Miss?
Yes, she says. Neither she nor I is anything like Jesus or any man. We are both of us, Mary Lamb and I, something quite other than what Jack Horner imagines. Sitting in his corner with his thumb in his mouth.
Miss?
Get me out of here, will you, my dear James? And pack a bag for yourself and we will tell William we’re away for a fortnight while I get my teeth renewed, and he’ll think that is all I am about and he will be relieved he won’t have to do a thing.
I’ll see about the mail coach, Miss.
And tell them we want to ride on the outside and we won’t give a damn about the weather.
I’ll tell them, Miss. In fact, I says, seeing the look on her face, I’ll let them know that weather might be the very thing we desire.
Undersong Page 15