Undersong

by Kathleen Winter

  Though her real place is she doesn’t know where, for after London and then Whitwick she tries and tries to find it and cannot. No one has a spot for her in their plans. And they do not look at her writing any more. Oh she writes. She writes her Scottish book and makes copies and gives it to people and they claim to treasure it but I hear Mary Wordsworth tell their friends Mrs. Ellsworth and Mrs. Luff not to bother reading the whole thing. It has a bit, for instance, says Mary, about the flowers in a Scottish potato field! Those rustic insignificant flowers on a potato plant!

  This is when ye lot perk up, isn’t it. This is when ye remind me ye have been in on the story all along. Careful on me face!

  Mary would go upstairs to Rotha’s room and find her staring at the wall, or staring through more like it, that part of the wall where the old window was concealed. Mary was perplexed, for Mary never gave a thought to that window.

  Here, Dorothy, Mary says, a new book for you to read.

  And Rotha says—Mary tells me this dumbfounded—she says Mary, I don’t care to read. I need no new book, for I am busy with my own feelings. I’m on an edge.

  Busy with her own feelings! Mary’s astonished. On an edge! An edge of what?

  And I fathom it better than Mary can, but all I says to Mary is, Mrs. Wordsworth, never mind, I’ll take Miss Dorothy outside once the rain stops.

  And Rotha won’t need any book.

  But I don’t say that part.

  The thing about being a servant is you can’t let on you see something another member of the family is blind to. And we’re funny blind things, people. Ye know that. Ye can see everything but we can see very little. For one thing, ye know about time past and time to come and together with the time we are in, it is for ye all one big golden day. It must be nice. I feel it as soon as I sniff ye’r honey, without a drop on my tongue.

  Just the scent. It goes on forever. And that’s where we’d go when I took Rotha outside in the little cart whenever the rain stopped. Out to your world.

  Our faery phaeton she called it—our rude phaeton, its wheels my liberty—and you, James, my trusty steed.

  Ye know our little cart. Ye’ve seen us traipse the land, me at the helm and Rotha alighting among your flowers. Really your flowers lit on her, aye, dangling on her lap and falling round her shoulders like a garland for the queen of the fairies.

  For she was to me a queen as your queen is to ye.

  Was it spring of 1830 I built it? I know the year numbers mean nowt to ye. It was spring for we were coming out of the usual lingering sleet and dark. I modelled it on a rough but fairy-like cart she saw a tinker ride with his lass and his pots when she was still walking the roads herself forever on the move. I scrounged the wheels and various bits—the biggest job was only a matter of changing a fixed axle to a mobile one and it meant whittling a knob and reaming a nice deep groove so it’d hold over the rough bits of the terraces. But as it is with any common task that takes half an hour, you might go a week before you get a chance to do it, what with one thing and another demanding your attention. William had been all week trying desperately to write a poem about spring to send to his friend Bob Southey for inspection and he wanted to go through Rotha’s notebooks to see what she had written about it first.

  My sister has a rough way, he says to me, you can get a grip on that roughness like you would grip a well-knotted rope and clamber up it and spy the view she has—it’s like the view I had a long, long time ago. When I was a youth, he says. Before I was even fifteen. Aye, I had what she has then. He says this with a kind of rage and his bad eye watered and his face went mottled like it gets when his head is killing him. Robert Southey is waiting for the poem, he says. Robert Southey was still the laureate that spring and William was practising for when his turn came around. Every year the laureate is supposed to come up with something for the King and William had an awful time getting anything ready by a certain date. He found it was torture. I was still helping him find in Rotha’s notebooks the things she had written that might suit him, for by then I knew where everything was in her notes. When you have always done something for a man, done it for years, how can you deny him? Even if you feel awkward about it.

  But once I had William satisfied do ye think I could nip to my hut to fix Rotha’s cart? No! Because all hell is breaking loose over a bloody chicken. Sometimes I felt like I was in a madhouse. No sooner am I clear of William than Mary Wordsworth needs me to help her get something off her chest about the same chicken she’s been on about all the day before. Of all the family, Mary is the stable one. But I knew this made her wild inside with things she’d never mention to William. Instead she’d tell me. I have always been different things to different people in the family, and for Mary I have been a bare corner where she could unload burdens the others never suspected she was tired of carrying.

  All Dorothy wants, says Mary, is more food! All last week asking for a whole chicken to be roasted only for herself! A whole chicken! For one small woman! No wonder she’s getting fat. And she wants a fire in her room and will want it stoked through the middle of July. Mayflowers will pass. Daffodils will have come and gone. Bluebells will be here. Cows making butter unlimited! And all Dorothy wants is fire in the grate. A hundred degrees in her room, nobody can breathe in it. Or she wants fried fish. Or porridge with butter in a molten puddle. She wants new knitting needles but never knits! You should see how much she ate last night, James—no wonder she has problems with her bowels. Then somebody has to clean up after her and who is that somebody? Not that I mind one little bit. Never will I be said to have minded! But mind you, she says, Dorothy with that chicken—it is pure greed.

  I said to myself—not out loud—I says no, I don’t think that’s what it is at all.

  The chicken was plump and studded wi’ herbs all right, a gorgeous crackling skin—The smell of it filled the house and was tantalizing. I’d have devoured it alone in my hut and it wouldn’t have taken me long either. It had fat little legs on it and crisped wings, and Mary knows as well as I do how smashing it is to fall on a well-browned wing and gnaw the crackling and the shreds of meat off it and wash it down with tea or cold, clear water.

  I says to Mary I says it is true Miss Dorothy did devour it…I stifled a chortle to myself over Rotha’s enjoyment of it—like a wolf. A real wild animal she was, feasting on that crisp and fragrant bird.

  But, says Mary, it’s not the way she devoured it that mystifies me. It’s how she went on about wanting it all week until I couldn’t stand talk of it anymore and had to get you, James, to go have Tom Sharp slaughter the thing. And no, it wasn’t good enough we should share it—me, William, Dora or any of us—as I know how to stretch a chicken dinner amongst company.

  I know you do, Ma’am.

  Add a few parsnips, the last couple of sausages from Ambleside, Mary says. But no, Dorothy wants that chicken. For my own self, she says. What sort of desire is that, and William going right along with it? Everyone going along with her strange desires, day in and day out?

  I mean, I’d hardly call that true. I would call that one of Mary Wordsworth’s fantasies—we all have our illusions and I might say that one of Mary’s is a perpetual notion of Rotha as a gaping scream. A loud demand. A clamour for more—the kind of lament you hear from one of the trapped hares on the mountain at night. The hunter far off asleep. The trap digging into the creature’s foot so it can’t move yet it won’t die. No wonder the lament can never stop but for one thing alone.

  Aye, Mary says, all Rotha wants is more food. But me, I say all she wants is human touch.

  Aye. Ye look at somebody ye know over the minutes and hours and days and weeks and years and decades and ye look at how much human touch they’re given. And eh, Rotha’s little dog, Little Miss Belle…that dog clung close to her ankles every time she wrote. The dog knew she was writing. The dog knew that was when its mistress needed a warm body touching her skin, and th
e dog provided that, didn’t it. Now the dog never clung. It wasn’t a clinging dog. But it pressed itself against her ankles. She told me this. She laughed. She giggled like a girl and she said, I feel the dog’s hot body against my skin as I write. It’s lovely, oh it’s lovely. And I had an eye on that.

  Eating a whole chicken, well that’s one way of having another hot body press against your skin from the inside, isn’t it. And that’s your throat. The ankles and the throat—the dog and the food. And then the fire she wanted. Never warm enough. Never often enough, the fire. The warm body of the wood with the sun’s borrowed radiance as she called it. In the flames.

  Aye, a warm touch. I could not provide that, other than the few times our little cart broke down. And I took her in my arms. Aye, I did. She weighed, even when she was plumper at the end, not very much more than—than a bird! I mean ’course she weighed more than a bird but, felt like, aye it felt to me like carrying a plump little bird that…sank into my embrace. Oh how she sank into my arms as I carried her. And she’d drape an arm over my embrace and gather a mugwort or henbane or a lovely little—sometimes we’d stop and I’d help her pick a rose without getting pricked. Or an iris. Oh she loved to gather blooms when she was in me arms and together we’d carry them home. Ha like a little bride and groom. Aye, I loved that. I loved it…I loved helping her to feel…cradled…Did she write about that? I had no way of knowing unless I looked for myself in her diary. Oh you look for yourself, don’t you. You have a glance, looking for your name.

  As for that roast chicken, just burstin’ with lovely gold juices. The aroma alone set my mouth to watering an’ all, I tell ye. You could not fault Rotha for getting enthusiastic about it. Even so, the mouthwatering appetizing part of it wasn’t the real nourishment it gave her. No. It wasn’t until we were well into our travels in the phaeton that she told me what it meant.

  It was all about the little maps. All the places she had travelled with William and Sam Coleridge on foot or in their own outlandish cart that people scoffed at all over Scotland. Draw me a pair of Scottish maps, she says to me, and we’ll affix them to the inside of our cart. Each map had a key on it that she labelled Our Legend. I made one for the lowlands and another for the highlands. She’d pencil in the names of all the lochs and mountain horse-paths and trackless heaths, the castles or any inn where they’d stayed the night. No more than caves, some places they’d stayed, moonlight shining on the dripping roof like melted gems.

  And here, she says, draw in the Trossachs, the hills around this lake called Ketterine—Coleridge and I were faint with hunger—look, here is where our boatman put us into a tub so leaky his wife had to ladle the water out—William was so nervous that when we got down the bay he stood up near shore and dropped our food bundle in the water! Spoiled the sugar and the coffee and the pepper-cake—but our roast fowls were intact! Sam and I fell upon them faint with hunger. How I’ve craved a roast chicken like those ever since, but nothing ever compares with our roast fowls in sauce made of the lake! William had run off—he explored the coast without us…Here…sketch the heather I stumbled through running after him. I found him sitting alone on a hilltop…Here she faltered.

  Miss, I says, perhaps it’s too much…these maps, remembering. You know how good you are at remembering. You take yourself right back there again. I never said right back running after William. But I was thinking it. Always running after the one she loved, with Sam Coleridge not far behind. The three of them. And now with our maps she did it all again, through memory, like, and I was her horse. I dragged her wherever she wanted to go and we kept the maps up to date with each new journey we made. The rest of the family thought we never went beyond Rydal.

  Thunder cracked her open as if she were sky. I saw it from the time she told me about William jumping ship. Thunder affected her as if it might kill her but then it did the opposite.

  I’ve seen many an animal killed by lightning but there are some creatures that come to life after a thunderstorm strikes them. A pony my uncle Jim had revived itself after lightning struck it down and lived to be twice the age of any normal horse. He changed its name after that, from Blackie to Flash. I remember Flash being a lovely pony with one star glinting in her deep eye and I kept wishing lightning would come near her again, for Uncle Jim says to me son, if it happens again she’ll sprout wings!

  And thunder knew Rotha. It was forty years since she’d loved Coleridge under the winter boughs if you go by a calendar, but thunder and lightning know no time, like ye yourselves. Thunder told her Sam Coleridge was dying. She was out in our phaeton as lightning flared over Nab Scar. She went rigid with its white light and would not take shelter.

  I cannot come inside! she says. I must feel it.

  And up she stands in the phaeton, rain running down her face and soaking her clothes. William would be very angry. Mary an’ all, if they knew I let that happen. Three days that was, before the death of her beloved Sam. And when the letter came to say Sam had died, she had already felt him go, standing in our wild little cart in the wind and rain, the thunder crashing through our bodies like a nightmare. Only it was day. Her new kind of day where she’s busy with all her feelings and the day crashes into her, full wind and rain.

  She was the one that noticed the little gateways. All of a sudden on our rides around the terraces there’d be little gateways everywhere. She was the one—is that right? Or was it me that noticed first? Aye, I might have said it to her because I’m used to—with the rabbit snares—finding tiny—not human-sized but rabbit-sized gateways, and after that, other little ones that all the animals make. I noticed—aye—one in the reeds. Them big reeds that grow tall. People don’t like them, frightened the reeds will choke small plants. But I like the way they whisper, and sometimes an animal will have gone in before you and made a—trod down a little area.

  Yes it was one of them, leading down to the lake. I says, come on, Miss, look at this.

  She says aye, it’s a little gateway. And in we went. Yes that’s it. I found the thing and she called it by the name.

  And ye’ll remember yourselves—that was when she stopped caring about all that went on inside the house. Stopped forever.

  Aye, I don’t think most people know about the little gateways. Once you go through them…

  Rotha kept her microscope in a pocket at all times and let me look through it to see what she saw and what ye see when ye go in the chambers of your blooms. Ah, she needed to read no book! Needed to write, yes. Not read.

  She wrote plant names in a guidebook she had and started coming to see ye with her reports of where and when they bloomed. Heckberry! Crab blossom! Anemone! Speedwell! Aye they sped well, our four wheels. Only around the terraces mind, but on our map she covered all her old ground. Our map signified not only Grasmere and Rydal but all the ground she’d once trod with William and Sam. Helm Crag, Stone Arthur, Nab Scar, Loughrigg, Elter Water, Ambleside and up Kirkstone Pass—Geraniums! Gowans! Little star plants with no flowers, or flowers that only opened under the stars like white lights in the darkness leading their way home. Her and William and Sam. Rotha still surefooted as a goat.

  I took her back to all that in our little cart.

  She nearly forgot I was not William.

  The gateways everywhere. We searched high and low. Here under the willows or there in the grasses. There’d be a gateway in the sycamores or in the rocks themselves.

  She noticed any tiny difference in sound. I saw well enough but she heard an’ all. I mean ye can hear it now, the wind in those reeds, listen…(wind sound, whispering reeds)

  Aye, that was music to her ears. She loved that. Loved it if a natural sound gently overcame all the other sounds of the village…of someone hammerin’ and workmen bellowing to each other about a step they were digging, or even William’s din…he could make a racket when he was working on the terraces. She couldn’t abide his mallet on the stone. We’d go through the little g
ateways and the rushes and leaves softened all other sounds and she would become very peaceful.

  Then she’d lie against my shoulder like somebody who—aye like a lass who’d—might I say gone to sleep on the breast of its mother? No. I was still a youngish man in my thirties and she old enough to be me own mam, yet…

  Aye, in the phaeton we travelled, didn’t we, through gateways. All through those late years she called down to me from her bedroom, and out we ventured in the wagon. Into a world far deeper than her brother’s.

  She’d tell me, Look, James, at that ash tree! Each of its leaves is a lantern. And look how each pendulous lantern is lit! Oh, James. And she’d get out of the cart and we’d run to it. Just her and me.

  The others indoors. And she had no need of a cart then.

  I had a wisp of Mam’s magic in me, and I had my ears, with which I have listened to the wind and to ye and to Rotha through my faithful years. So I knew me and Rotha were in the world between worlds that I had always felt to be just out of grasp. Through her, standing there, our phaeton like something out of a fairy tale with the light catching its ordinary wooden wheels yet changing them—I saw her lamps lit throughout the ash tree.

  But after a moment—not even a moment—the blaze faded and she said, crumpled like, so I had to catch her and seat her in the cart propped up by an old cushion, she said that’s it, James—it has left us.

  In clock-time indoors people saw her in agony, in her bed, trapped in a terrible state of mind. But ye know pollen! Each golden speck seems as dust to the ordinary eye…yet any pinpoint of golden time I had with her in the cart went on forever for us just as pollen does for ye.