Some early writers had tried to attribute such ideas to the gospel. In the sixteenth chapter of Matthew, Christ was reported as asking his disciples, “Who do men say I am?”; and they said, “Some say that you are John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias or one of the prophets.” The apologists for reincarnation had asked how else Christ could be thought to be Elias or Jeremias or one of the prophets. The doctrine, they said, appeared to be taken for granted, even by the Saviour himself.
Many other examples were held up by these authors: elsewhere in Matthew, in Mark and John; and in the Book of Job. All were ambiguous, and had effectively been debunked by Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, and Irenaeus, all of whom Godric had read.
Though she was trying to hide it, the question seemed of immense importance to Eloise.
He said, “The Bible teaches that we live once on this earth, and once only.”
“But what if … what if you can even remember things?”
“What sort of things?”
“Or people. People you meet, when you feel you already know them.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you remember?”
“The sea. From long ago.”
Godric perceived that she was under a tremendous strain.
“The sea in some other place,” she said. “A rocky shore I’ve never been to. And there’s something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Something. And when I hear the shorebirds … Godric, do you think I’m going mad?”
“Are you having trouble sleeping?”
“No.”
This was perhaps the first lie he had ever had from her lips. He wondered whether to raise Ralf’s name, or even hint at it, but decided against. “These people you think you know from before. Who are they?”
She hesitated, and was clearly framing another lie.
Just then Hubert knocked on the door.
“Please, Miss. Miss Grigg.”
In rising to his feet, Godric noticed a look of surprise on his sister’s face. She had evidently forgotten having invited her friend to the Hall.
Once he had made himself agreeable, Godric told himself he should leave the girls in peace and return to his Greek. But he liked Imogen and seldom had the chance of absorbing her charm. Moreover, he enjoyed looking at her. He remembered once telling her, only half in jest, that she was the prettiest girl in Sussex. Since then she might well have outgrown that county, and several others besides. Today, seated opposite Eloise, the light falling directly on her face, she no longer even had a rival. She was one of the Creator’s most exquisite ideas: for what was the world and everything in it, if not the speculations of God made flesh? He had spared nothing in constructing this young woman, desired by almost every swain in Mape. According to Eloise, brother Henry had also, one afternoon last summer, been struck down.
Ingenuousness invested much of Imogen’s appeal. She had no idea of her effect on others. She was also astonishingly outspoken.
“Really?” Godric said. “Mary Ibbott, you say?”
“Mrs Creech told my mother this morning.” Imogen glanced at Eloise, whose expression remained grave.
Godric said, “Who is the father?”
“That’s just it. She doesn’t know. It could be Aholiab Peake. Or John Hollins. They both say it was the other. Then again, it might not be either of them at all.”
“How many … no,” Godric said, changing his question altogether. “When is the baby due?”
“The spring. Five months away, no more than that.”
Mary Ibbott was a serf. What had happened to her was by no means unusual. There would be a hurried wedding. Father Pickard would officiate, and eventually wet the baby’s head at the old stone font, and after a few years no one would remember or even care that the child had been conceived out of wedlock.
Godric looked at Eloise and back at Imogen, trying to disguise his feelings. What had befallen Mary could easily befall his own sister. The outcome would not be the same.
He had no choice. He would have to say something, later, at an opportune moment, even though he had promised Eloise, last July, never to mention the subject again. He would have to put a stop to it, no matter if that cost him her friendship, and Ralf’s.
“Will you kindly excuse me, ladies?” he said, and stood up. “I must return to my studies.”
2
For over a month, almost without pause, rain swept in from the west. On some days amounting to no more than drizzle, on a few so heavy that it obscured the view, it fell and fell and fell. On the first of December ground-water broke upon the marshes in a new freshet: then two, three, ten, a dozen. By the middle of the month the coast road itself had flooded, forming a new river fed from below by springs never before known.
The fields turned to ooze. Dilute mud gushed from the banks beside the staith-track and made that another river down to the sea. The cutters’ craft remained inverted and unused, the reed stems and plumes bowed, pelted, mildewing, the harvest abandoned. All work on the mill was stopped.
The rain discovered the slightest errors in every wall and roof. In the church the priest put out buckets not only on the floor but on the altar too, for the rain seeped through the masonry above the rood and at intervals dripped, like transparent blood, from the base of the crucifix. Nevertheless, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve the Nativity play was enacted there as usual.
Ralf paid little attention to the youthful shepherds, to the three wise men, to the false-bearded Joseph, or to the diminutive Mary with her swaddled doll laid in a wooden manger.
Dusk had arrived. The lamps and candles had been lit. The interior of the church felt muggy: not only was the day unseasonably mild, but warmth was being generated by the breath and bodies of the congregation. Nearly the whole village was here, including the Baron and his household. Godric had arrived late last night. His two brothers, Henry and Gervase, were also home for Christmas.
From his place at the back of the nave, Ralf did not even try to look at Eloise.
They had been to bed together, in the workshop, four times in all. This despite the fact that Godric had told her, at the end of his last visit, that he had guessed what was going on. His initial attitude had been one of simple concern for his sister’s welfare, and for Ralf’s. She had denied his accusation, at which his tone had hardened. By mentioning their parents, he had as good as said that he was prepared to tell the Baron if the deception continued.
Having heard Eloise’s account of this, Ralf had at first been very angry with the absent Godric. To Eloise he had accused him of arrogance, meddling self righteousness, and of knowing nothing. What did Godric, the celibate, understand?
Later, on his own, Ralf had seen what lay behind his anger: guilt, engendered by the knowledge that Godric was right.
Even if Ralf and Eloise agreed to stop seeing each other, it was too late. She was disqualified from her own marriage. But they could not stop. Their need for each other only increased. As it increased it became ever more unhappy and oppressive.
Again Ralf had broached the idea of elopement. Again Eloise had rejected it. She had said that they could not hide anywhere without being denounced. No village would take them in, and they had no way of subsisting and passing unnoticed in a town or city, especially in London, where the need for money was greatest. If they tried to go abroad, things would only be worse.
Whether or not Godric carried out his threat, they would be caught. If the matter remained in the Baron’s family, it was unimaginable that he would allow his own daughter to be executed; otherwise she and Ralf would certainly be killed. In any case they would soon be parted.
An unspoken agreement had slowly become clearer to them both. Their only hope of staying together was in death, in making an escape on their own terms, at a time of their choosing.
Whether they did it was a question of belief. If they believed what Godric and Father Pickard, what the Bish
op of Alincester and the Pope, what the whole world seemed to believe, they would accept that suicide was the worst possible crime which would hurl them both straight through Hellmouth and into the flames.
But Ralf did not believe as Godric did. He knew that now. He had never truly believed, despite his admiration of Jesus the man and teacher. Ralf’s deity owned no name, expected no prayers or offerings or devotion, and indeed treated them with indifference – or contempt. It lived not only here in this church but in the sun and stars and clouds, in the curves of the downs, among the trees and in the wind that stirred them. It lived in the rain, in the plashes and rivulets, in the marshes and the waters of the estuary. It lived in the moon, in the tide-swell and the unending procession of grey-green waves, in the dazzle of the surf and the roar of the shingle-drag. And it lived in people, if only they would let it manifest.
This god lavished every luxury of effort and invention on all it did and made, for it knew only one quality: the best. Yet it cared nothing for any of it. Ralf’s years in a fishing-boat had taught him the value of an individual creature’s life. Were men not the same as crabs? Sorted by size and tossed into baskets, were they also not left to suffocate and be sold?
He had spoken of these ideas to Eloise. She had not been shocked. Nor had she sought to argue, though she remained steadfast in her Christian faith and thus in her belief in hell. Her tacit understanding and growing acceptance of their pact had raised in him a feeling of genuine awe. He had not been wrong about her.
Nothing had been arranged, decided, or even articulated. While Godric had been away they had let matters drift, but at their previous meeting, anticipating his return, their talk had been heavy with finality. Eloise had arranged to meet Ralf again tonight, insanely dangerous as that might be. They were becoming reckless, almost as if they wanted to be caught.
Flanked by his sister and grandfather, Ralf now for the first time considered the mechanics of killing himself and Eloise. A vague, contingent plan had formed in his mind. Somehow the workshop seemed inappropriate. Only the mill would do. They would go there and, perhaps, in the early hours of Christmas morning, make their farewells. If they failed in their resolve and survived beyond that time, nothing would be left for them but disgrace and pain.
A knife. That was the way. As sharp as he could make it, the blade drawn across their wrists. Such an end was supposed to be relatively easy.
There was a leather-knife in the workshop. He pictured himself honing it on the whetstone. He saw the streak of gleaming maroon appear in the white skin of her first outheld wrist, immediately swelling; the other wrist presented; her silent gaze as he turned the blade on himself. Would they speak after that? Would they embrace as extinction came?
And in the morning, when they were missed, how long would it be before their bodies were found? Who would find them, and what of the aftermath? He thought of his parents and sister. It would be far worse for them if he were brought before the Justiciar; worse for the Baron, worse for everyone.
Ralf looked up. The play was over. Father Pickard was already reciting the blessing.
The next time Ralf and Eloise would enter this building would be tonight, for midnight mass. They might not come here again, alive or dead.
Full darkness had set in. He noticed that the wind had increased. The rain had become heavier too, hitting the glass like pellets. The whole church seemed to vibrate to a dull, pounding percussion from the roof.
“Dear Lord, will it never stop?” said Ralf’s mother, as they shuffled towards the open church door.
Ralf was at one with the unremitting weather and the winter gloom, but, for an instant, moving towards the door with Imogen at his side, he felt through his misery a peculiar surge of exhilaration raised by the drama unfolding inside his head. This was akin to the adolescent pride, hardly admitted even to himself, that rose in him whenever he thought of Eloise as his “girl”. If she were that, then he was still a boy, and all this nonsense about knives and pacts was surely no more than childish fantasy.
But he was eighteen, and no boy. A fortnight ago Eloise too had passed her eighteenth birthday. They were both fully culpable under the law. Treason was not an occupation for children.
The worshippers were slower than usual to clear the porch. Parents were gathering children, struggling with hoods and hats, taking time to fasten the buttons and toggles on waterproofs. Father Pickard’s hand was wet with rain.
“Ralf,” was all the acknowledgement he made, smiling, friendly, easy, before turning to Ralf’s mother and father and then to those coming behind.
“Goodbye,” Ralf said, under his breath.
According to custom, the Baron and his wife, followed by his family and their house-guests and senior retainers, had left the church first. Ralf was half expecting Godric to be waiting for him. They had not yet spoken today. Ralf was dreading the encounter. Without, as far as he knew, making it obvious, he looked about among those few ill lit figures still lingering beyond the porch.
“Not there?” Imogen said.
“Who?”
“Godric. Who did you think I meant?”
“I’ll see him later.”
In their tallowed coats and broad-brimmed hats, the two made haste along the flagstones, into blackness and the driving rain. Most unusually, Imogen did not take Ralf’s arm. Even after passing through the lich-gate, she remained separate. Nor did she speak.
Their parents and grandfather had been detained by neighbours at the porch. Brother and sister were soon alone, making headway into the wind, splashing along the road beside the village green. There might have been, probably were, other people on the road, but nothing could be seen except, faintly, the verges and some stray slivers of lamplight behind cottage shutters.
The gale was loudest from the right and ahead, where stood the three oaks. The swishing of their branches, like the noise of the sea, was now being underlaid by a deep, insistent moaning.
Still Imogen had not spoken.
Ralf could endure it no more. He said, “Is something wrong?”
Her voice sounded harsher, more adult and resolute, than he had ever known it. “I saw Eloise today.”
“And?”
“I asked her outright.”
“Asked her what?”
“Don’t you start lying to me as well.”
He did not answer.
“You know what’ll happen to you? To you both?”
“We know.”
“Ralf, how could you?”
How could he explain what had happened? He did not understand it himself. He said, “Who told you?”
“No one had to tell me.”
“Not Godric?”
“Does he know about it?”
“Yes.”
“And he hasn’t tried to stop you?”
“He has. He will.”
“But he hasn’t stopped you yet?”
“No.”
“I must say I thought better of him than that.”
They reached the front path. Imogen halted in the darkness and grasped Ralf’s sleeve to make sure that he halted too.
“Do you love her?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you let it come to this?”
Once more he was unable to answer. This was the question at the core of his torment.
“Tell me you won’t see her again.”
“I won’t. I can’t.”
“What about Father and Mother? What about Grandfather? What about the Baron? What about everyone but yourselves? How could you be so selfish? I thought she was my friend. I thought —”
“Don’t blame her. Blame me.”
“Ralf, I shall never ask anything of you but this. Do as Godric wants. Will you promise?”
“No.”
“I’ll give you till tomorrow to change your mind. If you don’t promise me then, I’ll go to Father. I swear it.”
* * *
Ralf had little choice but to spend the rest of Christmas Eve at
home, wondering at Imogen’s ability to pretend that their conversation had never taken place; and at his own to behave normally in the face of his looming decision.
He had always seen himself as her protector. That comfort also had been lost to him. He could not rid his mind of the accusing bitterness in her voice. The word “selfish” repeated itself over and over again. Was it really so? Was that what he was? And Eloise?
It was not difficult to guess what effect Imogen’s confrontation was having on Eloise, and how badly each was feeling the loss of her friend.
Ralf had supposed Imogen’s devotion to him to be permanent. He had taken her for granted. That had been wrong. Her love, any love, had to be deserved. He had betrayed her just as surely as he had betrayed Eloise, the Baron and Baroness, and his own parents. His treason had spread like a stain, from the King downwards, to poison everyone he loved.
He had never argued with his sister before. In all her life they had scarcely even disagreed. Yet she still loved him. The strength of her feelings told him so.
After supper he remained, physically, in the parlour with the others. The smallness of the room always made it seem overcrowded when the whole family was present; never more so than tonight.
The hearth, smoky at the best of times, was unusable in a high wind, so the fire again remained out, the fuel of sodden driftwood being made even less flammable by the water dripping down the chimney.
Light came from three rush-lamps, one of which stood on the rough table opposite him, next to Imogen, casting its draughty glow across the knitting in her lap. With four wooden pins, she was making new boot-socks for her grandfather.
Jacob was seated at his usual place in the corner, by the stair-foot door, talking about past Christmases at Mape. The wrinkles on his face were less obvious in the lamplight. The ruddiness of his complexion seemed to be an emblem of good health rather than of a lifetime’s exposure to the weather. His scarf and his heavy woollen tunic, worn over a thinner one to compensate for the lack of a fire, concealed for the most part the marks of age in his throat, chest and shoulders. Had it not been for his white hair and beard, he might this evening have passed for a younger man. Even his firm, masculine voice, despite its slight and recently acquired whistle, made Ralf realize that Jacob too had once been eighteen.
The Tide Mill Page 28