by Adam Roberts
I was distracted at this point, alas, for I had noticed one new thing I never noticed in London. Her left eye is white and blind from the pox (as I knew before), and only her green-hued right has any vision; but sitting so close as I was I saw for the first time that one of the pockmarks upon the left eyeball was a little outward protrusion of the corneal matter, like a tiny colourless nipple. When she turned her eyes towards me, this white, bobbled globe swivelled as the good eye did, and the fact of this – for some reason, tho what I cannot fathom – filled me with dread.
I replied, speaking too rapidly, of the stellar news – how stargazers had come to the district from far away as Potsdam and Callais, to observe the strange lights in the sky; and how the moon’s own circle betrayed flickers and glimmers of short lived light inside its crescent, where the silver arc hems the darkness. Miss B. was bored by such talk, and altered the topic with a suddenness that rebuked me.
14th
Mrs Gill being (she said) too bentbacked for the chore, I assisted her in hanging out the linen. A fine and sunny day; Miss B. sat upon the lawn and read. George kissed her hand a thousand times if he did it once.
That night I slept uneasy, and dreamy a vivid dream. First a will-o-wisp came into my bedchamber, and flew about, swinging shadows dizzy and rapid from my sideboard and shelf and the hook upon which my dress depend. It came close, and the light was fierce and hurt my eyes, but before I shut them I saw it to be a globe of white light, a perfect spherical pebble of brightness, save for one puckered protrusion upon it. I almost cried aloud, but then it was gone and I could hear a lapping, sucking sort of noise; so that I looked down to see that Blaswater had burst all banks and flooded my room, the water lapping at my bed and making it into a boat. I was concerned at once for the others in the house – for if the water had come up to the level of my chamber, then the downstairs must be fully submerged. I sat up, and saw the ghost of the boy standing, like Jesus, upon the water. ‘Why are you come?’ I asked him. ‘To call you to affirm,’ he replied, and opened his arms. ‘Are you the ghost of the boy who drowned?’ I demanded. ‘How could you be he, if I saw you before the lad perished? Come, tell me: are you the ghost of the boy who drowned?’ ‘Cynthia,’ he replied, and it shivered me to think he knew my name. ‘Could I ever be that boy’s ghost? Was he my ghost? How can we tell, without the ordered progression of time, and time the product of cause, and cause of geometry. Saint Peter holds the door open, and perforce the waters will flow through. But once you have stepped inside, let he and I force the door back to its frame, sealed tight, and we will be safe.’ Then the waters lapped higher and covered the bed, and they were so cold as they touched my skin that I awoke. I discovered I had disgraced myself in my sleep, and caused my bedcloathes to become wet, and I was ashamed. I pulled off the sheet and laid it out flat from the shelf to dry it; and slept on the bare mattress, with straw-spikes poking through the weave, and wrapped myself in a blanket.
16th May.
I mark this day with a white stone.
⓪
George took Miss B. to the coast – or, rather, she took him, for it was her coach they rode in – so she could lay her one eye upon the Irish Sea, a sight she had never beheld. I alone in the house, and happy to be so. At ten Eliza comes, and no surprise was ever sweeter in my life.
We walked arm in arm around the church three times, in the sunlight, and she told me of her days. Her husband (she says) is an amateur observer of the night sky, and possesses a telescope he himself commissioned from a Liverpool glass maker. He keeps an office in Broughton West from where he administers His Majesty’s levies and taxes, and this has a roof upon which he often observes the heavens. He has been in a veritable hog’s heaven of happiness (she said) that so many astronomers are come from London and abroad to watch the skies over Blaswater and the other lakes. I clenched my fist and shook it at the thought of her husband, and asked her how she could bear his embraces? How endure to have him kiss her face? She laughed, and shushed me and called me greenhorn, but with tenderness.
We came inside, and retired to my chamber, where we embraced upon my bed such that her clever fingers worked me. She rose from the bed to retrieve something from her bag, and the shadows of daylight through the draw curtain fell upon her nakedness in stripes. O, how beautiful she was! The mother tigress, and I her willing prey. From her bag she brought out a short truncheon of mahogany wood. ‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked, and I confessing ignorance she told me: her husband’s office had been furnished with a tallboy bench, upon which petitioners and visitors might sit, but that it had grown rotten with woodworm and he had it sold for firewood. ‘This was one of the ornaments upon the top,’ she said, turning it over in her hand: a foot long, the shape of an apothecary’s bottle, the solid wood smooth and varnished. ‘And I saved it from the lumber. Can you think what use I wish you to put it?’
‘I would hate such a breach in my flesh,’ I told her, clasping her as she lay again beside me. ‘It calls to mind the spear being thrust into the side of Christ.’ I trembled a little, afeared to have made so blasphemous a comparison, but Eliza laughed and kissed my face.
‘Nor should I do anything to damage you, sweet girl,’ she told me. ‘To deny your husband-to-be his rights to your veil. But I am an old goodwife and mother, and you can do me no harm, and rather much pleasure, by doing as I ask.’
And so I did, holding the truncheon firm and working it as Eliza bade me, and kissing her too where she instructed, soon she cried very loud and fell into a sort of swoon. So I clasped her and she kissed me again, and kissed my bosom, and kissed my whole skin, until I too cried aloud.
We dozed, and afterwards dressed, and walked out into the sunshine. But so contrary and warped is my soul that the thought of her words were a worm in the bud of my happiness. ‘Why must you talk of my husband to be?’ I demanded of her.
‘It is the world’s way,’ she said. And then, drawing her arm thro mine, she added: ‘and it has consolations. Children are a joy.’
‘No man will marry me,’ I said, in gloomy mood. ‘Have you not heard? I am the mad girl from London.’
‘My nephew does not regard you in that light,’ she teazed. She meant it kindly, I daresay, but it soured my mood. We stopped in an ingle along the way, and watched the sunlight shift intricately upon the waters of Blaswater. The thought of the drowned lad came to me, and I leaned in and begged Eliza’s pardon, and wept into her shoulder. She soothed me, and soon I was placated.
I asked if she had heard of the drowned boy. She had. I told her then that I had seen his ghost, ‘yet, I fear me, I saw him before he drowned. How could that be?’
She did not mock me for this, but sat serious and thoughtful. ‘I have heard of such things. Know ye the stories of Zoroaster, the Eastern mage? Precedent visions of those who would later day. He met himself, they say, in a garden in Babylonia – five thousand years ago!’
This thrilled me, the vista opening of great time and exotic locale. ‘And what did he say? Upon meeting himself?’
‘My goose!’ said Eliza, drawing me closer. ‘How avid you are for such stories! As I heard it, the mage met his own self, and greeted him fearfully. And his own self said to him, why hast thou not affirmed what thou art sent here to affirm? And so he vanished. But Zoroaster died in fire, a holy fire, and now the Brahmins – or the Parsees, I forget – worship him as god. What is it, sweet girl?’
She asked because I was trembling suddenly, like a fever-stricken thing, and she embraced me hard to squeeze the shudders away. I told her then what it was the ghost lad had told me, and she looked very serious and contemplative.
‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘he was no ghost. Perhaps he was a visitor from heaven?’
‘He looked no angel,’ I told her. ‘But only a beggarly boy.’
‘Do not think me a heretic, I beg you yet shall I tell you what the Hamiltonians believe about the crucifixion of Christ.’
‘Who?’
‘They are a
zealous group based in Edinburgh, but with many followers in the north country. They say Christ was but thirteen years old when he was crucified – and not thirty-three, as the Church of the Nation doth affirm.’
This interested me much, and she explained the beliefs. For thirteen is a magic age in the life of Jews, where they hold a special service to celebrate, as is well-enough known; and the gospel account of Jesus’ ministry is hard to reconcile with the fullness of thirty-three years, it seeming to leap from babyhood and the prodigy infant who amazed the rabbis in the temple straight to the end years. ‘And where,’ she asked me, ‘did those twenty years go, from thirteen to thirty-three? God made man and walking about the world! What did he spend his time doing? Carpentry? It is monstrous to think of it. Very God in the form of a human being – how could he dawdle so, and undertake no deeds? No, say no, say rather: God moved from boy to man at thirteen, and this consummation marked the time of his death and resurrection. For ceasing to be a boy and becoming a man is a form of death and resurrection; and Christ made literal what was symbolical before.’ These and many other proof she furnished me with, and for a while I wept anew at the thought of that terrible day, the first ever Good Friday – not a grown man spread-eagled upon the cross, but a mere boy!
‘Yet does not Luke chapter 3 state that Jesus was thirty when he began his ministry?’
She nodded, with a reverential expression on her face. ‘Luke 3:23: he began to be about thirty years of age when he started to preach. Began to be – which means, clearly, was not yet. And the Hebrew for thirteen and for thirty are very close, being letters rather than numbers. Say, then, that Luke wrote: he began to be about thirteen, and the scribes altered it or misread it, and the translators corrected it – who knows?’
‘Would so many people follow a mere boy?’
‘No mere boy – God in flesh!’
‘But the crucifixion took place under Pontius Pilate – and surely he did not become prefect of Judea until – AD 30, or some such date?’
‘The year 26, as Josephus confirms. Yet what but sentiment attaches us to the idea that Christ was born at nought AD? We know only that he was born under the reign of Tiberius, and that some census of edict recalled the Jews to their homeland. But there was such an edict – in AD 19, when Jews were expelled from Sicily by the thousands. And elsewhere in the Empire too – Tiberius expelled the Egyptians from Rome, and as they returned to Egypt they displaced Jews who had settled there. We know the Divine Family had connections in Egypt; perchance this was the time they came to Bethlehem. To Egypt they returned, when Christ was an infant; and he returns to Jerusalem for his bar mitzvah at the age of thirteen. It could be he was crucified upon his thirteenth birthday itself!’
I shuddered. ‘Were the Romans so barbarous – to torture children?’ But I knew the answer to my own question, for truly I have read enough in the Latin histories. ‘But to think of Christ – unbearded? A mere boy?’
‘A boy, nothing mere.’ She looked, abstractly, at the waters of Blaswater. ‘He is the lamb of God, not the sheep of God, is he not?
I pondered this as we walked. There seemed some strange potency in the notion, for all that it is (I daresay) heretical. I resolve never to mention it to George, who would rebuke me, as ever, with ‘Cynthia! Cynthia!’ in sorrow. Yet why should we picture Christ as a man, bestially bearded and full of the ripeness of maleness? Is it not more perfect – more perfectly fitted to the universality of the saviour’s mission – that he stand, as the thirteen-year-old boy may, before (as the antients say) his beard had come in, as both male and female in beauty? Or do you assert that Christ came to save men only, and leave women to their damnation? I vow: to explore this more carefully. Perhaps I shall surrender my present Latin, and return as G. has sometimes bid me to the Patristic writing. For in them may be some clew.
Home again, we embraced once more, with such purity and passion and bliss as I cannot frame in words. After I, timid, showed Eliza my precious print of the Tyger poem – pressed it upon her as a gift, for I have the lyric in my head. She reluctant was eventually moved by my importuning. I told her she was the tyger in a woman’s hide of which Shaks. spoke, and how I loved the grace and power of her beauty. She kissed me, as a bridegroom might, and when the men returned we were sat drinking tea as respectable as any old maids. As I sit a-writing, by candlelight and alone in my room, I believe myself happier than I have ever been.
17th May:
Church. Oh I am loved, surely I am loved, I must be loved – how can it be otherwise? The Holy Spirit is fed by the love aura that surrounds me.
18th May.
I wrote Eliza a long letter today, and paid a boy called Little Joe, who works upon a farm, twopenny to carry it – for I know he cannot read. I have studied such books are here, or in the church sacristy, on the matter of the age at which Christ was crucified. Eliza is quite correct that nowhere in the Gospels nor, I believe, in the early Patristic writings of the Church, is that age specified. It is likely he was born before the death of Herod (Ἡρῴδης), but I can find no warrant that this must refer to the Great. In Matthew it says “When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.” Yet did Herod Archelaus (which name also means ‘great ruler’ or ‘mighty’) not die until AD XVIII. If Christ were an infant at that date, he could only have been born perhap in AD XVII. And Archelaus is mentioned by name in Matthew 2:22. This Herod it was, not his father, who murdered all the baby children of the Hasmoneans. And the Census of Quirinius take place during Herod Archelaus’ life? As for the Crucifixion, it happened during the time of Pontius Pilate, who assumed his duties in ADXXVI; and it occurred upon the Friday before Passover, which – according to Reverend Ritson’s researches – must mean one of three dates: AD XXVII, XXX or XXXIII. Were he born before the death of Herod Archelaus in AD XVII then might he truly have been XIII years of age in AD XXX and crucified as such.
The more I read the more convinced I become and wonder only that the Church has not countenanced the idea. What, save habit and ritual, fixes our minds upon a hairy Christ in his middle-age upon the cross? Is there not more pathos, as well as beauty, in the beardless visage of a thirteener.
19th May.
A letter from my beauteous tiger returned to me this day, tho it be but cool in tone yet it is not actively rebuking or dismissive. It is, in truth, short and mere courteous. I try to rowze spirits but am gloomed nonetheless. O glimmering spirits! Be not so easily quenched!
Today also a parcel from Miss Bainbridge, of Cottle’s new Poems, from London (tho printed in Bristol, yet sold out of Paternoster Row). This is a kindness of her, and signals an attempt to heal the breech between us, I know; and G. is excessively pleased to have this token, and embraced me. ‘When we are sealed in holy matrimony and you two are sisters,’ he saieth, ‘how happy a family shall we be then!’
1st June.
I mark this day with a white stone.
⓪
I so mark this year, my whole life! To be loved to be loved. Eliza called, and tho G. was closeted with the printer Hebblethwaite (a good man, if gruff in manner) over the price of printing his sermons, yet did they two walk out for fresh air and my love and I thus gifted a precious hour together. We lay together upon my bed. She told me her letter of last week was for appearance sake, and that she cannot and I should not dare expose our connexion to the rebuke – and sanction – of public mores. We must keep it secret. ‘My boys will return from school in the summer,’ she warned. I care not for the summer to come, I only care for the summer in her arms.
G. marked the levity of my spirits; he thinks it occasioned by his betrothed’s gift to me, and I flirted with the devil’s falsehood by not correcting him. He spoke also of Eliza, but only to say that he suspects Mr Jones, her nephew, of aiming his heart at my hand in marriage. I pooh
-poohed this, but the look he gave me made me to wonder if he suspects that of being the cause of my giddy spirits.
At night, by candle, writing: a fox is on the roof – too large, I think, for a squirrel or mouse, and pittering its steps along the length, pausing, and running back.
The sound of the candle flame, like a tiny banner fluttering in a distant wind, the only other noise to stain the perfection of the night’s silence. The candle sheds many perfect pearls of wax into its dish.
5th J[une].
White stone, for tasting the bliss of my E.
⓪
14th June
Sabbath. Today G. preached a strange sermon, coughing much as he proceeded.
He began with the text from the VIIIth Psalm: ‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ and spake of how man holds a special place in the divine affections. But then he said (and it caused the congregation to stir somewhat in their seats) that there had been many strange sights in the night sky, and that astronomers had come to our lakes from as far abroad as Greenwich and Hanover to observe these. What did they portend, these lamps in the heavens? Were there lunarian beings, lighting fireworks for our benefit? Did men and women of alien form throng the spaces between the worlds? If so, he said, then we can be sure only of one thing – not their form, nor the number of legs they possessed, nor the hue of their skin, but only this: that in the blood of Christ they are redeemed, or not at all.
Afterwards, that very afternoon, he confessed he had borrowed money from Miss Bane to purchase a telescope, and watch the heavens. He spoke with great animation about conversations he had shared with Mr Powser of Greenwich, who was conversing with Hebbelthwaite to produce Glories of the Starry Heavens, observd from the Lakes of Northern England. A fellow called Paul Smith, a German despite his plain name, had come hither and was lodging in Alfield; and there were half a dozen others. At first I thought G. strange in his enthusiasmus, but after I bethought me how wrapt up in myself I have been, not to have noticed. I resolved to accompany my brother upon the next gazing at stars – tomorrow night.