That’s where my little cart took her and I was careful to keep its wheels oiled and the planks sanded for whenever she wanted to come outside.
No matter that once I’d drag her home and park it against the back of my hut, our cart looked for all the world no more elegant than a barrow with a board for a bench.
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and what are we going to do with ourselves now she’s gone, me an’ ye lot? Ye bees and all the glory that surrounds ye?
And Mary.
Aye, Mary, alone on the stairs after they laid the body out. Ever alone, that one. A space around herself at all times.
Did ye know—ye must’ve—we all did—what Mary really was?
Aye, William’s biggest poem of all, the daffodil one. Saying he wandered lonely as a cloud…yet he was with Rotha when they saw all the golden daffodils. I’ve told ye Rotha saw them first. And Rotha first wrote their glory, William used her eyes for his poem and her eyes were all he needed but for one detail.
The best line of all…where the great poet lies on his couch remembering the golden glory…William couldn’t figure out how to write that part. How you hold onto a vision after it has gone. Rotha had no trouble letting it fly free. She never tried to capture it! But William would grope. Oh it drove him nearly insane.
How do visions work? William asked the fireplace. It did not answer.
But Mary, sewing in the corner, keeping quiet until she could hold it no more, the missing line growing bigger inside her till it burst forth—They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude!
Aye, we all knew Mary made up the wisest line her husband ever wrote.
For solitude was what our wife Mary knew more than any of us! Yet she was content in hers.
Mary is that rare self-sufficient person.
And this morning on the landing Mary says to me, James, now that Dorothy has died, don’t worry about losing your position with us.
Us, she says to me. As if anyone but herself remained.
And I minded how Mary had said those same words to me when William died five years before. John Carter had made no bones telling me there was only enough money to keep either myself or William’s horse. And that horse was a favourite with Mary for it had known William well and Mary stood for a long time with her face against that horse’s head after William’s death. I nearly said, Mary, don’t fret, keep William’s horse. I can always find a job don’t you worry. But I still had Rotha to think of then. So I said nowt and I stayed, and Mary did have to say goodbye to that horse.
But now this morning of Rotha’s own death when Mary says to me, James, you have been faithful to us and I will be faithful to you, I says to her, I’m not a bit worried, Mrs. Wordsworth. For as you know, I am here at your service if you need me, but only then.
And she looks right into me and I understand her as I have always understood Mary. I have always heard her as I have always listened to everyone here at Rydal and she knows that. Oh, she’s a lone one, that one.
Sometimes ideas are struggling to be born. An idea thriving in one place is mebbe something everybody there has known about for ages. And somewhere else, not far away, that same idea or mebbe a similar idea is behind a membrane having a very hard time being able to pierce through, struggling for its life. Aye, I think all of life is like that, ideas struggling to be born. Oh the difficulty they have. And the stillborn ideas, and the maimed ideas, beautiful they would’ve been had they had a chance to beak or claw or scratch their way through that membrane and burst into full life…Mary Wordsworth!
I mean Mary was never one for gallivanting but she wanted to see people. She was not a pondering person. Not a person that needed to write poetry unless her husband was having an emergency. If it were left to Mary, Rydal Mount would be the most temperate and peaceful place on this earth.
But I cannot stay with Mary.
And neither will ye, my lovelies. Aye, I’ll read ye the red diary now, today, before we leave, ye and me. And we’ll do the thing that I promised Rotha I would do, at the last.
For she reckoned I’d been peeping in it—when I got the chance—I had to peep in the red diary to see if she had put down anything we did together or thought together. I was anxious for it, looking for the story of myself—myself counting—in the whole story of the little family. My place in it. I kept leafing through the new bits looking for myself. As if Rotha Wordsworth would write about the likes of James Dixon. But I kept hoping.
One day she mentioned our little gateways!
Little gateways made of light
Naught of darkness told
Ephemeral Continuum
Inscribed with dust of gold—
And on the very day I read that part—I had been trying to find a time to confess to her that I had stumbled upon her book—but didn’t she catch me holding it lovingly in my hands reading that verse over and over again!
Do you like my couplets, then, James?
She stood over me having moved soundless on her small feet.
I had warned myself about the soundlessness of those little feet. They could steal up on a fly or a midge or even a thrush. Not one of ye, mind. Ye’d know. She weighs no more than seven stone but she’s spent that much time among ye I think she turned into one of ye at times, weighing no more than a bee herself. Going about on small wings like yours from here to there, now plunged in speedwell, now in the crab blossom, now in celandine—
Oh I felt terrible. A crawl of pure shame singed up from my chest to my neck over my face and closed around my scalp like a fish net closing over a fat trout that was my own stupid head with a big innocent grin on it like, as if she could count on me to be both a dunce and a deceiver. Well I never felt so ashamed in all my life. I might as well have never abstained from drink, only become the village drunk. I would rather in that moment have been anything and anybody but James Dixon, faithful deceiver of Dorothy Wordsworth.
Well? she says—do you?
Bravado was not in me and I never said a word of an excuse for I had no such thing prepared. I knew I was found out.
But Rotha doesn’t calculate things the way other people do.
It’s all right, James, she says. No need for you to play rigid rabbit. What you’ve read can’t be unread. But tell me, James…
She was struggling and I do not want to admit I felt some small power surge up in me like a blade.
Sometimes you cannot help feelings that arise in you. My mam said that. You can’t help the feelings, the only thing you can do is watch yourself in how you act.
Quiet, I have discovered, is a good weapon against your own worst self. It feels like a useless thing but it is very useful. I keep a little piece of quiet folded up in my back pocket. I know that with it I have wiped away quite a few of my own mistakes before they spilled over the whole of my world and spoiled it.
I didn’t make up the little couplets, you know, she says.
Didn’t you? I leapt gentle as I could upon this topic—where she came up with her secret words—instead of the topic of why I was anywhere near them.
They came to me of their own will, she says.
I remained quiet.
Sometimes it works, she said, and sometimes it doesn’t. Listening. Knowing which message is of freedom and which issues from the prison of my own smallness. That is why this book is secret. Only in this book do I dare write my own sorrows. Might you read some of it out loud to me, James?
Out loud, Miss?
What about this part? She took the book from me and found a section and handed it back, open.
I tried to argue but she says no, go on. I need to know how it sounds in the mouth of another person. For when William hears me speak in the way of the red diary, he warns me that I might yet join poor Mary Lamb. That I am mentally unwell. So read to me, please. I want to hear how it sounds, myself, with fresh ears.
>
So I says, Miss, don’t mind my nose down in the book and my not looking up, for that is how I have to read, slower than you would do it yourself.
But she says never mind slow, James—I know my handwriting is bad. Read this part about the tree roots—
And I read a bit about roots reaching out like hands, but not reaching for her. There was nothing in their hands for her—and she says, Do you know what I mean by that, James? Do you?
And I says I think so, Miss. I’ve often felt the roots of trees were a bit like hands myself.
And she says go on then.
And I read as smooth as I could, like. She’s right, her writing is slanted and squashed and some of her lines are like string pulled nearly straight with only a few kinks for letters.
I do the best I can and after I finish she says to me, Do you see? How a tree plunges its roots—her roots—like arms into the earth and her beautiful head is underground, and her trunk splits in two as her legs reach into the sky. The tree is an upside-down woman. Head buried in moss, James. Legs flung up like limbs of a great, petrified acrobat! Ears under the ground, unhearing. Mouth underground, unspeaking. One with that tree, James, I have heartwood instead of a human heart and there’s nothing I can do to make it flesh. And now you’ve read it.
I have done, Miss, I’m sorry…
Stop it. What do you think? Do you think, as my brother does, that I need a few more drops of medicine?
How would ye lot have replied?
Look down the bank will ye—pieces of ice are floating past us on the lake. The water isn’t disturbed enough to wrinkle, only ripple in spots—halves of circles colliding soft on a misty mirror—a mirror with polish smeared on it but no one’s wiped the polish off yet with a cloth. Everything soft grey except the reeds, and they’re that quiet gold. And snowflakes floatin’. And the old gold grasses bowed and swaying and all the leaves brown as dead mice.
Miss, I says, I’m not the one who’d know if you need more medicine.
No, she says, I suppose you’re not. But you have known me a long time.
Aye, Miss, I says, I have. And I wondered then how many more rides in the cart we’d have, though I said nothing about that.
We’ve eaten quite a few blackberries together by now, you and me, she says. And drunk the juice.
Aye, Miss.
I had wiped purple dribbles off both our chins with my hanky.
Have ye ever eaten a purply-black bursting-with-sunshine blackberry sticking through somebody’s fence? Have ye ever—o’course ye have! Ye lot feast and slurp on ’em, I’ve seen ye with my own eyes. Quaffing blackberry wine with the fairies! And so did we, Rotha and me over the summers. We grew hungry and thirsty with wandering and that’s what we ate and drank.
Blackberry is made of a sky dull and leaden but cracking with lightning. A berry like that knows the flight of swallows and robins that’ve fledged then grown up near the bush—the berry only comes out once the robin has grown and learned its song. All that song and all that lightning and all that blackness and all that rich redness of the robin’s breast is in that berry and ye know it—and Rotha did an’ all. But more than only taste, she’d look in each drupe of that berry, the little mirrors…they were little mirrors, this is the thing. And Rotha knew they were gems. She was a gem-seer.
William and Rotha were once twins inside your world.
Ye’d think nobody like me could get in there. Really, I never thought I would.
It was well-brambled. It was hidden. It was secured from anyone that can’t understand, but ye understand. Ye were born inside the columbines. Ye were born between the layers of the leeks. Ye were born in the bluest wings of the blackest bird…Ye know. Ye know the land where Rotha lived.
And her brother saw it. William. He knew where she lived, but some people see a thing and they can’t abandon themselves to it. They’re not wild enough. He wasn’t wild enough. Aye, she was never tamed. He had the church. He went to church and so did Mary, but she couldn’t. Now why couldn’t she? The pain. Oh but the pain was not only medical pain. The pain was a thorny barricade that prevented her from entering the tame world. She wanted William to go the whole distance into the wild land but—he had a grain of caution, didn’t he. He was the one that had the grain of caution.
But me—what would I be doing with caution?
Here’s the diary, look—she stitched it herself like all her notebooks. The thing is, now like, I’ve got to do the right thing by this red one, haven’t I. You can’t just leave it lying around. Her other ones—with their shopping lists for this and that—sewing needles, special ingredients for the custard and bits of material to lengthen the curtains in the room downstairs, and on and on. A mustard spoon, all listed, and, heh, lovely bits and pieces of her day. Then they flip to her real song…or pieces of her song like bits of bread along the path or notes you hear of a bird’s song. In all her tattered books she’s scattering crumbs or taking down the notes from birds’ throats as they sing. She’s not changing the notes into anything. They’re the plain wild notes. And in those books there is no Dorothy. There is hardly ever an I. But the red diary is not like that…
Here ye go. Here it is…I will read it to ye because she asked me to read it out loud in the fresh air after she was gone. All her feelings. Disperse them out of doors once and for all, she says to me. And I’m here to not only read it to ye now, but to do the other thing she asked an’ all.
Aye, ye lot won’t be long here at Rydal and nor will I, not without Rotha.
Mary will not want ye in the sycamore without Rotha and Dixon to keep ye happy, to tell ye things, to tend ye.
I’m going to be gentle and I’m going to take ye with me. I promise ye that. And if a few wisps of smoke come in it’s only me doing as Rotha wanted, ye understand. I’ll smoke ye but I won’t use much. Every one of her pages I’m about to read to ye now, I’ll light each one and I’ll blow the smoke in your hollow.
Don’t mind it! I’ll never harm ye.
I’m only burning the red diary as Rotha begged, for its ashes to fly with all her feelings to where only ye’ll find them.
I’ve put a comb of your honey in my skep and ye’ll be safe when the smoke comes in your sycamore, just crawl out into the skep and it’ll hold ye.
I’ll wait here for every one of ye. I’ll wait here for your queen as I waited on my own queen all these years. And off we’ll go.
Our wife Mary won’t pay no mind and there’ll be no harm to ye. For Mary won’t be much longer following the dead and then, aye, it’ll be strange coming back to visit the little churchyard in Grasmere once I’m the only one left of the fam’ly.
Do ye know the first thing I’ll buy with my railroad shares? A railing to place ’round the Wordsworth gravestones. So no one will disturb them, only lichen and moss. I’ll bring my flask of tea and I will think about them and all the time we had together. And there’ll be lots of visitors like that big spider with yellow stripes, look. Rooks and thrushes and the flowers she loved, and the church bells ringing.
And us.
Rest in peace they say and yes, she’ll love that. Hated any hustle unless at the fair like. Oh she loved that all right, hawkers and the pie man, horse traders, lasses and lads at play. As long as she had only to nod to gypsies and children. None of the stifling talk regular people get on with. And she’d say after an hour, James, I’ve had enough! Take me home into the quietude. As if she was saying let’s go to the willows where the cold moon shines. Or bulrushes where a duck might hide. Away from all glare or noise.
Aye, quietude. She said that word so many times it was like a brooch on her breast.
It’s daft me talking about the fair in January isn’t it. The wind’s blown me hat right off. Hang on while I nab it—rolling like a wheel! That’s ’im. Aye, the fair’s nice. Summer’s fine. But Rotha always loved frost and a cold moon. Not anothe
r soul about. Under frost glittering on the bare branches. She loved a winter tree.
The little family. Have they left each other desolate?
They tried not to. They tried, each one of them, not to abandon each other.
What will I do with the cloak William dropped in the grass the very first time I laid eyes on him and Rotha? He never knew I kept it. It was a dandy cloak then, but it’s threadbare now. It’s in shreds! I have it yet in my hut, wrapping up some of the tender bulbs all winter to keep them alive. Would ye like me to wrap our basket in it when we go?
When you see somebody for the first time and you’re nowt but five and she’s a white moth—away on the wind she flies after her brother, who has left his cloak on the grass in his big rush to meet the mail coach…
And you pick that coat up even though your mam says Eh, you shouldn’t, but of course she doesn’t stop you, your mam can’t help but be a bit proud of your nabbing the cloak…
I had it for a blanket for a long time.
The red satin lining was the be-all and end-all in finery as far as I was concerned, even if it had been mended twenty times by the time William left it on the ground. Rotha was the one who mended it for him. She mended his everything.
And I never forgot that later day in Lady Wood, with the mushrooms and the blue flowers. She was still young and quick then, and yet so sad.
He had three fairies looking after him, didn’t he. He had Mary and her sister Sarah and he had Rotha. People talked. How pampered he was. But he was the one who wrote, The world is too much with us—that was one poem he managed to write all by himself! Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. That’s what powerful people do with their powers isn’t it. Lay them waste. Little we see in Nature that is ours. That was his tragedy and we all knew it, and I wouldn’t want anybody to think that I hold it against him.
His life was a sacrifice.
For Dorothy held the keys to the kingdom.
Oh, Lady, you held the keys.
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