by Adam Roberts
15th June.
An ordinary day succeeded by an extraordinary night. At G.’s invitation, a dozen men came to the cottage, most in carts or carriages to carry their observing gear. It was too many to entertain indoors, but luckily they were keen only to stay without and watch the heavens; and we heated some shrub in a pan and served it. Muffled in every scarf I loitered to peer through their devices, and saw the terrain of the moon in shocking detail. The Westmoreland Lunarians, one wagg called them; and I soon grew cold and came in again to sit by the fire.
Smith spoke to me: a lean, intelligent-looking man. He said his name the Deutzcher way as Powell, and kissed my hand, but coolly, not rapaciously as some do. Paul Rilke Schmidtt from Hanover. There was also a Mr Sales from Yorkshire, with the largest telescope of all the group.
I dozed a while, and then heard shouting and jubilation, and came out in a rush. The sky was filled with turning stars, shining with powdery white and yellow and some few with cooler, algae greens. Miniature comets, cometinas or cometicules perhaps, hurried left to right and right to left. Soon enough all the stars, shining with the light of a summer dusk, turned browner and redder and began to move in a mighty swirl, as birds do that flock before leaving English skies for the winter. And then they vanished, and we were left with the white nailheads of our own fixed stars.
How we shouted and hallooed at this extraordinary show! Mr Powser hurried indoors to write down an account and make sketches by the lamplight within. Mr Sales chattered excitedly to me, unconscious in his grinning at my reply, or lack thereof. Only Mr Schmidtt was calm in the teeth of this. ‘Some form of meteoric storm, characterised by luminiferous energy,’ my brother pronounced. ‘And akin to the Northern Lights, perhaps?’ I grew tyred, and went to bed, being woken from time to time by the excited chatter of the men downstairs, but always falling asleep again.
16th June.
Again the astronomers gathered upon the sward between our house and the church to watch the skies, but tonight there was no repeat of the splendours of the previous night. My brother out with them, the cold air agitating his chest and causing him to cough as regular as a grandfather clock; the sound muffled somewhat by the distance.
17th.
Again tonight. It grows tiresome, and interrupts my sleep.
19th.
News comes today that the King of France has died, Louis Seventeen, and he not yet 13 years of age. I, speaking with Herr Smith, who has again come to observe with the others, asked whether he thought the heavenly display we saw portended such a thing? He thinks not, since the French monarch’s death preceded that date by some days, and that the lights could not have been seen in France – indeed, London itself was too far south to have seen them. ‘Only here, Madam,’ he said, and looked at me most close and intense. He is a queer fellow, and chill, but I do not mislike him.
28th Sabbath.
This afternoon I read again the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry, picturing not a grown and bearded old-fellow but a beauteous faced thirteen year old boy. What a revelation and freshness this exercise brings to scripture! The rightness of it shines through the chapters – surely, surely it is the truth.
30th June.
Dreadful news today. Mr Sales, one of the astronomical men – raised in Leeds in Yorkshire, and visiting only, has drowned in the Blaswater. Drowned! The ‘Lunarians’ as they facetiously style themselves, had moved the sights of their observations up the high hill, and I for one glad that the hubbub has been quieted upon our lawn. But it seems this Sales took into his head the fancy that he must take a telescope out upon the lake – at night! in the coaldark, and all alone. ‘As to why,’ G. says, ‘he thought he would spy better down there than on the hill’s summit, I do not know.’ But he came not back, and the morrow his floated boat came back overturned, his equipment and himself nowhere to be seen. It is very sad, and Mr Powser of Greenwich, who esteemed Sales much, wears a black armband.
I should be sad, yet I cannot be; for this afternoon – and after a dismal stretch alone – I again saw my Eliza, and we had some half hour alone together. My heart swoops and soars as did the luminiferous borealis we observed upon the midmonth!
She again begged me to discretion, and pushed me away as I clung to her for she heard footsteps outside the door. ‘If only we be discrete my pretty thing,’ she whispered, ‘we may continue to commune with one another!’ She said we will be apart for the summer, but I refuse to countenance such a gulph. I have told her I shall press my brother to take me to the sea-side, and will call. She, shook her head and chucked my cheek.
2nd J[uly].
They have searched the lake and found no body. Mrs Gill says that motion of wind and waves casts flotsam upon the western and southern shores, but nothing had appeared. It seems poor Mr Sales is at the profoundest bottom of the waters. I exchanged no more five words with him, yet am I sad at his loss.
6th.
Strange news – Sales has returned. He was discovered wandering in Ambleside on Friday last, and indeed arrested for affronting the peace (on account of being naked, I believe; altho G. spares my ears such words, thinking me innocent). He has been released and returned to his lodgings in Alfield yesterday, and G., who has spoke with Mr Powser, passes on his account. The magistrate believes him to have been attacked by footpads and perhaps locked in a barn or stronghouse. His tale, it seems, is full of fancy, as he was hopped into the sky like a fish on a gleaming line, and sojourned naked in a brass-walled room, and fled from thence into a glass tank or chamber. He is much distracted, they say, and the doctor has given him opium to calm his nerves.
10th
My spirits are crushed – and shall never be restor’d. The devils are about me, in flashing lights and flickers of hellish luminescence. I copy these lines from Cottle’s Poems, for they speak to my life:
Whilst hidden fires her frantic bosom scorch
Whilst to her eyes the Furies hold their torch;
Adjust each feature with satanic grace
And dance their orgies round her kindred face.
Three
I write some months after, and in a calmer state, to attempt to recall what passed on the evening of the 30th June, and in the weeks and months that followed. Despair has been my constant companion, my lady’s maid, such that I am quite accustomed to her. The hand in which I writ my last entry, above, speaks clear enough of my agitation and grief – so sudden and so ghastly I pray I may nevermore experience it.
The viewing upon the hill being indifferent, G. hosted the largest party of the Westmoreland Lunarians of all upon our lawn again, and hung lanterns from the trees behind the house. This was in part to celebrate the miraculous return of Mr Sales, tho’ he being as yet indisposed from his experience – whatever it may have been – did not attend. Yet many people came and lined up their telescopes in a long row between our modest cottage and the church. The atmosphere was festive, and Eliza came, with her nephew. He was tiresome in his attentions to me, tho I flatter myself I responded courteous enough; and his face was apple red with the cold, or with the passion he felt for me – it seemeth to me now so remote a thing, I can record it here with equanimity. It was Tuesday June 30th, a date I shall not soon forget.
I sought some moments – only! – to be alone with Eliza, but people were in and out of the house, and there was much commotion. And, mirabile!, there were more lights to be seen in the sky, quite different to the ones spied before. These were globular, and misty, and coalesced and deliquesced in green-ish, white-ish pulses lasting perhaps a minute. The oddity of them was the impossibility of determining whether they were large objects far away, or smaller objects closer by. A reddish tint appeared in one, and the gathered astronomers lowed like cows with admiration at this thing.
This, at least, drew everyone out into the night air, and I, catching Eliza by the elbow, kept her in the parlour. ‘I must speak with you,’ I told her; ‘and it must be in camera.’ She was by no means willing, and hushed me, and shoo
ed me away. ‘There are too many people,’ she said. ‘We cannot be seen together.’ ‘And if we are seen?’ I teazed her. ‘We are friends, and perhaps exchange an embrace and a kiss as chaste as any two sisters might?’ ‘Chastity is not the currency of our kisses,’ she replied, yet I thought I saw in her eyes a kindling of light, so I drew her further in – and she did not break away – and kissed, and my heart sped faster than a sea under a storm-blast. I kissed her again and could hear the excited chatter of the men outside; and the thought of them outward, and my love and I inward, a sense of perfect well-being, of perfect affirmation of the cosmos, grew in my body. Never have I, I know, and never again will I, I believe, have this sensation. It was the perfection of human life, achieved only in a moment.
Eliza was wearing a coat against the chill of the summer night, but not a bolster, or scarf, and I unbuttoned its front and moved my hands upon her. She again told me to desist, but in weak tones, for she was also excited – my hand felt the motion of her heart, separated by me by warm skin only, and no dissimulation. I pressed us into the coign of the parlour, behind the door; she being taller than I, and of course older, yet did not push me away as I did so. With my other hand I felt my way below her belly. She, the while, bent her head down and bit into the cloth that covered my shoulder, for to quiet her own voice.
From the side of my eye I caught a glimpse of something, and turned my head a little, and saw Mrs Gill. She was standing on the far side of the parlour, and gawping direct at us. I had forgot she was even in the cottage, for her usual way was to pass home at dusk; yet my brother had hired her to help with the many astronomers without, and she was bustling. I stared at her, and she stared at me, and the moment sank through my innards like a stone through treacle. In a moment, like a fox spotted in the long grass, she was gone. I disengaged myself from Eliza, she saying ‘what, my coddle? what is it? what?’ the while. ‘We were observed,’ I whispered, and she stiffened.
By the time she had buttoned again her coat Mrs Gill was back at the parlour door, and my brother behind her, he pushing through and glowering at me in evident frenzy and coughing a long string of shallow coughs, as if unable to catch his breath.
‘How now, brother dear?’ I asked, but my voice betrayed me.
‘Mrs Jones,’ said my brother. ‘I tender my apologies, and the shame of my family upon the altar of your affronted modesty.’
‘George!’ I said, sharply.
‘No, Cynthia,’ he cried, veritably a shout. ‘It is too much – your wickedness has overcome you again.’ He lost the end of this sentence in a lengthy coughing fit, that turned his visage scarlet.
‘I hardly know what to say,’ said Eliza. ‘I am – in a shocked state.’
‘O my dear Mrs Jones!’ said G.
‘I had not known,’ said Eliza, drawing herself away, ‘that your sister’s affections tended so.’
‘Eliza!’ I begged. Oh, I was poleaxed. Poleaxed.
‘Cynthia, I am sorry for you,’ said Eliza, holding the front of her coat closed before her, and beginning – the first tears I ever saw from her face, and they crocodiles! – to weep. ‘I am sorry that my sisterly affection has been so misunderstood!’
At this, all words froze in my throat. I was too startled even to cry.
‘I can only say, Mrs Jones,’ said my brother, leading her away, ‘that this is not the first time my sister’s unnatural appetites have imposed themselves on another. The last time, she swore to me she would restrain the Gomorrhean devil within her, and I trusted her – alas.’
And with this, she was gone outside.
I sat down in the parlour chair, and Mrs Gill stood across the room and glared at me. This, then, is what betrayal feels like – I had read about it so oft in poetry and tales, and processed the iteration as if I understood it. Only now did I comprehend how intimate and overwhelming a sensation it is.
After a while, George returned to and stood over me. ‘I have been too forgiving, Cynthia,’ he told me. ‘I had convinced myself that I was dealing with my beloved sister, when all the time I have been conversing with the devil that peers through your eyes. This shall no longer stand. It shall no longer stand – I must find a way to make your spirit Lot, that it flee before the cities of the plain are turned to salt by a wrathful God.’
I stood up. I was a-tremble, but not much; and the thing that most appeared to me as I took my feet was an unnatural calmness. Only one thought occupied my mind. Eliza and her nephew had come in a small gig, drawn by a pony. The boy would have unharnessed the beast and put a blanket upon it and perhaps let it to chow on the grass by the road; and therefore it would be a little time before the mount was reinserted between the rods and the gig made ready. Eliza would demand it upon some pretext of feeling a sudden indisposition, but she would yet be there, at the side of the road. And I thought: if I run straight out, and straight to her, I could speak to her. And if I spake, she would listen. And – I know not, my memory is not exact, perhaps I fancied: the two of us fleeing together, leaving the Lakes, perhaps leaving England altogether – walking all the way to the snow at the top of the world and living in a palace made of ice.
I pushed past George & through the door. My gaze straight ahead, I marched along the long line of telescopes, their poles all angled upwards like Romans saluting, and their attendant human observers bustling about them and not noticing me at all. I walked to the end of this weird honour guard, and down the slope towards the road. Some carriages were waiting, but hers had gone. I daresay, as I look back, that their boy had not even unharnessed their pony. Indeed, since young Mr W. was not an astronomer, they doubtless planned on staying but a little time.
O, but this realisation churned my soul, and plowed my heart, and made my lungs into shreds of cloth. My throat closed up, and tears prickled my eyeballs. There was a shout behind me from the men, and I had the sense of lights bursting, firework-like, above my head. Before me was the road, and a low wall of dry stone, and then the scramble down the bracken slope to the lake edge. I was possessed of awful clarity. The lake itself was before me. I was almost preternaturally aware of the body of water, in shape like a great serpent, or worm – a dragon, it struck me, then: the wavelets on its back scales, and the steep valley walls meeting below its great fluid belly. I cannot say for certain that this beast rouzed itself and called me over; but I did feel a great force compelling me. My shadow split itself in four and danced starwise about me in the wizard light. I stumbled into motion and crossed the road, and my hand was upon the wall, when a pressure caught my elbow and drew me back, as Achilles is drawn back by Athena from harming Agamemnon at the commencement of the Ilias.
There was a coldness to the clutch of fingers upon my arm, and as I turned to look my grief turned somehow to dread within me. Of course it was he: the ghost boy, and I closer to him now than ever – tho the light that sparkled and smeared above, and my own tear-heavy eyes made the vision blearier still, so his scarred face seemed smoothed, mask-like. The touch of his hand was as palpable as any living person’s.
‘What do you want with me?’ I called, and my voice was higher and shriller than I thought it to be.
‘For you to hold to your affirmation,’ he said, and half his face moved fluently as he spoke, and half was motionless. ‘Go ahead. Step through the door of Saint Peter.’
I thought he meant to guide me back inside and prevent me from hurling myself into the waters. But then I saw he was pointing me on, and the thought of drowning suddenly filled my head, and fear gushed through me, and I started back. I stumbled back along the road, leaving the ghost-boy there. The sword was sheathed in my heart. I wept now, fully, and properly, and somehow I made my way up and over the grass and to the door, past star-gazers all of whom ignored my weeping, or did not notice it at all. My brother found me at last, sitting on the floor of the parlour, sobbing with a sheep-like baa-ing.
He guided me to my bed, and I lay upon it in misery, and then slept – to my own surprize. When I woke the h
ouse was empty save G. and me and I do not wish dwell upon him rebuking me again, and preaching an individual sermon on Genesis 19:29, as I wept and clutched his knees and begged him to stop – Oh, it is humiliating beyond the power of words. It was a Sunday morning, and he had to preach, which he did to his own bitter sense of shame, and certainty that Mrs Gill had spread word of my malfeasance about the whole congregation. I, of course, did not attend.
On the Monday, a closed carriage arrived and I departed therein, with G. as my grave-faced sentry. He read to me from Jeremy Taylor’s Sermons the whole way, and never looked me in the eye once. He left the volume with me to peruse during my incarceration and so I have it to hand: and have thought much upon the learned divine’s wisdom that the nature of sensual pleasure is vain, empty, and unsatisfying, biggest always in expectation, and a mere vanity in tho enjoying, and leaves a sting and thorn behind it, when it goes off. Our laughing, if it be loud and high, commonly ends in a deep sigh; and all the instances of pleasure have a sting’ in the tail, tho they carry beauty on the face, and sweetness on the lip. At Wold Newton I was admitted to a certain house, and did not leave it for the remainder of that month, nor the month after, nor the one after that.