by Adam Roberts
My days were prayer and meditation, and chastisement administered by the head of the house, Mr Magnoble. I know that other delinquent women were boarded in that house, tho’ of course I did not meet them. He also boarded some children, and those all boys; so I was perforce confined for the sake of modesty and necessity to one room. I would sometimes stand at the barréd window and watched the boys at work in Magnoble’s garden, or playing at games in the fields beyond the house. The wheat was green when I arrived, but soon paled and dried, and the poppies growing dotted across like freckles on a face.
The hardest thing I had to do was write a letter to Eliza, apologising to her for affronting her in the manner I had done. Magnoble was punctilious about this task. ‘Do not beg her for forgiveness,’ he instructed me, ‘for then she would perchance reply, and you must be allowed no correspondence from her, you know. Simply express how bitter your remorse, and commend her to the love and cleansing power of Christ. Simply abase yourself to her, in words.’
And so I did.
Her instant abandonment of me was the most crushing thing of all. There had been no hesitation, and she had thought nothing of it. It was that wolf of thought, that clasped its jaws about my tender neck and would not release it: I fretted and fretted. Did she not love me? Had she ever loved me? What had I been to her, that she might use me so? I knew she had a reputation, and might lose her sons and be banisht by her husband were her true nature to emerge, and in my more lucid moments I comprehended – tho dimly – how these circumstances might force upon her, and compel her to act in a defence-of-self, regardless of the promptings of her heart. But then the grief would move upon me again, in that inner tide governed by the motion of the heart’s great, massy moon of sorrow, and I would know nothing but the agony of being abandoned by the one person I loved most dearly in the world.
I would weep, and Magnoble would look on and nod, thinking I was pricked by conscience and praying to God.
Magnoble set me tasks, that I be not idle; and these – sewing, cleaning and so on – were tedious. But of course the taedium laboris was the purpose. I pleaded with him to let me work with my brain, and at first he refused, believing that my will, allied to my mind, must be crushed, and that brain-labour might encourage it. But I suggested pious work, and represented the Church Fathers Latin writing, and certain Protestant Divines of the XVIth Century, whose writings have never been traduced, as my subjects. He said he would talk with my brother, and some days later returned to say that I might be allowed a few hours a day to undertake such work. I wrote to George begging him, when he next visited, to pack my books and dictionaries and also writing materials into a small trunk and bring them with him.
My brother visited twice. The first he looked greatly distrait, and tyred. I knew the expense of confining me at Magnoble’s was very great and wished only that I could console him – for my undesire to be there was surely as great as his undesire to pay this burdensome fee – but of course I could not mention it. I asked in as mild a manner as I could, and with as general a focus, how things fared in the Parish, but he directed so hostile a look at me as I knew he thought me angling for news of Eliza, and so I put my gaze to the floor and sobbed a little, and told him I had prayed to God with more fervour and earnestness since coming into Yorkshire than I ever had before. At this he began to weep too, tears being most unusual addition to his eyes, and we knelt together and prayed aloud, the Lord’s Prayer.
Thinking to leaven the mood, I asked after Miss B.; but at this the muscles of his face contracted, like a frog’s leg subjected to galvanic shock, and he shook his head. ‘I released her from her promise to me,’ he said, ‘and begged her to feel no compunction in doing the same. She was willing to be my wife, Cynthia, but I could not proceed on even the suspicion of any untruth or impropriety. Hers is an antient name, a family whose nobility is threaded into the tapestry of English history over many centuries. I could not stain it…’ He stopped, here, and drew in a great sigh. ‘It is for the best. We may not comprehend the Providence of God now, in the instant; but there will be a time…’ He stopped again.
At least he had brought my trunk. We parted with an embrace, but I felt sick in my torso and sad through and through after he had gone, to see how profound is his disappointment with me. But at least I now had my books.
That night I slept poorly and woke before dawn; and so I sat behind the iron rods of my window and watched the sky grow into colour, through blue and the reddish pink of a robin’s feathers, and a tabby colour like a cat, and on, until it paled to white gold and cool and the day was started in its brightness. Vapour the pallor of bones pooled in the hollows, and the mist drifted in the breeze. Then the sun came and the clouds assumed the distinctness of white caulis-flower, and the mist was burned away.
I did not see the burned boy all autumn, not there, in that place. Sometimes, as I slept, I thought I felt again the chill pressure of his fingers against my arm, but when I woke I was always alone.
My shame was the only constant. I meditated long on the valence of shame and guilt, and realised as if for the first time that they are not distinct, as some hold; but rather that shame is merely the uncurtaining of the inner theatre in which guilt has always staged its drama. The disgust of others was my own disgust at myself, and these others who knew of it (as Mr Magnoble and – I presume, tho we never spoke of it – his three servants) were but mirrors to my hatred. I reconciled the misery I felt with the consciousness of desert; for I must be wicked to deserve such pain.
And the sky mackerel blue, and the air a sea in which I drown.
My work went slow, not because the Latin was hard, but because it was all I had, and I was loathe to complete it.
And so the autumn came, and I still there. Most days I kept to my room, and all days I stayed within the house, save only Sundays when I walked – accompanied by Big George, one of Magnoble’s servants, as chaperon – over the fields to the church at Wold. Here I wore a veil, and shook no hands; and after returned. This, my only outing, was that to which I looked forward; and that which I pondered long after. The sights I saw, the little glimpses of people interacting (tho surreptitious was my garnering of these glimpses), the unison of voices in song. For a moment I forgot my shame, and the music and words affirmed again my soul in the world.
Let me not dwell upon this period, and in truth there is little to say – the days the same, the monotony fitting punishment to the monomania of lust – until December. On the Friday [maginalium: December 11th] my brother visited a second time, and it stabbed painfully upon my heart; for he was drawn and thin, his skin ill and his eyes drawn back into his skull like a snail’s horns, and he coughed as often as he breathed, and the kerchief at his mouth came away dark. There was a blue-blackness in his lips, and his whole frame was bent over. ‘You have not been in good health, I see,’ I told him, and moved to embrace him – as why might not a sister embrace a brother? – except that he recoiled, and tho’ afterwards wished to make amends for his flinch and come to me, yet by then was I too wounded and sorry and angry and we sat in my room on two chairs and did not speak for a long time. Eventually he asked, timid enough, if I would like to pray with him, and so we did; and this melted the ice between us a little. I asked after some neighbours in the parish, and G. answered shortly but to the point. Then I asked after the Westmoreland Lunarians, and he told me that there had been no lights in the sky at all, all through the second portion of the year – the last had appeared the night of my (and here he coughed rather than say the word), and since my departure the lights had departed too. ‘There being no causal connection between those two things,’ I started, but was unsure how to proceed. He told me of another drowning the lake, a young girl this time who had gone fishing on a windy day; and I commiserated, tho I knew not the lass. I asked after Mr Sales, but it seems he had removed to Leeds and G. had no news. At this he began to cough hard, and each cough dislodged a larger fellow tussis from his chest, until he was shaking and barking l
ike a dog, and his face darkened. I grew alarmed and went into the hall to call Magnoble, but by the time he came G. had recovered his poise. He looked, I fear, even paler and more ill than before, but he stood and shook Magnoble’s hand and left. I told him he was in no state for the journey and should rest, but he insisted, and I, recalling his involuntary flinch when I came to embrace him, felt a spurt of anger and bade him go, and if he wished it, not to come back.
This, I regret.
I wept a little after his going, but not much; and for the morrow-day Saturday I felt nothing in my breast at all. Sunday was cold and clear, and the bare branches of the trees along the road looked braided and knotted, as if a tangle were in the nature of things. For the first time at that drafty little church I felt restless and unwilling, and my heart did not go up to God. Then we returned to Magnoble’s house and I ate a little tongue, bread and cheese in my room, with water. The boys were larking in the field outside, sliding down the frosted bank and whooping – from their yells I deduced that several were to be returned to their homes for Christmas, and they naturally joyed.
At this I thought to myself: I do not wish to be here. The words formed clear in my mind, with a chime-like, musical edge to them. I thought: I am what I am. Humans can make many things, but only God can make Love, from which reservoir we draw our daily rations. I had pondered this problem many times, and had told myself not to presume on the goodness of mere human appetite, tho we call it love, that people may love evil things – as, loving to murder, loving to hurt or hoard, or professing love for Satan Himself. Yet did I think this love no true love, but rather a hectic specie of enthusiasm and elation. My love for Eliza, tho, partook of the calm solidity of the sunrise air. And where love of wickedness fed the flames of hatred and the will-to-destroy, true love is known by its promptings to forgive. I asked myself the question as to whether I forgave Eliza, for not wishing to ruin herself along with me, for striving to keep her place in the world and her children.
Marvel: I did.
And once that thought sank into me, I found other thoughts. I found, as I had never found before, that I might pity her. I found it possible to imagine that she suffered, inwardly, in the worst manner because it had no vent into the world whatsoever, at what she had abjured in me. At what she had done to me. Christ suffered for us, but Judas suffered only for his own pride and his was the worse.
It may be that her sufferings, in the end, were worse than mine.
With this, the ghost-boy returned to me. There was a hiss, as of cloth drawn along cloth, or of the chilliest and faintest of breezes. I knew him there before I looked, and so I kept my head down, and drank some more water to clear my tongue of crumbs.
‘You drowned in the lake at Blaswater,’ I said. ‘But when?’
‘Does my face look as if wounded by water?’ he scoffed.
‘Why have you come?’ I asked.
He was an arm-reach way, yet did I not reach out to him. At so close a position, and in such bright light, I saw all the puckers and folds on the burned side of his face with nasty exactness. It occurred to me that these were arrayed in lines, like the stripes on a tiger’s back; tho the right side of his face was smooth as a girl’s, and the skin thereof pure. His face, from that unspoyled side, was well favoured and beauteous. His body was thin, and cloathed in blue cloth, not fine or well-kept, yet not so ragged as (I am sure) I had thought it before.
‘I have come to hear what you will affirm,’ he said.
‘I affirm,’ I replied, ‘that I wish no longer to remain here.’
He nodded at this, with a smile as might say: I understand. ‘And so it is affirmed.’
This seemed to me a smugness. For all I knew (I thought), he might be one of the lads confin’d down stairs, and here to play a prank upon me. I had never in all my months in that house seen any of those boys close enough to mark whether they had scars upon their face. Yet I felt it not so, for this was no boy of our age, nor of our world neither. He lived in the lights in the sky, I thought; and perhaps it was bending down to our world from the heat of those auroræ, and into the ice by which Dante’s lower Hell is characterised, that so scarred his face. For ice can scar as sharp as fire.
‘Affirmed?’ I repeated. ‘How?’
‘Affirm the thing itself,’ he said.
I could feel his head, without laying my hands upon it. There was a new force inside me. I report the events that followed as plainly as I may, tho’ they can hardly be accounted plain. But I would not you think me deranged, or hallucinating only. My experience was certainly realer than the muslin-blindfolded reality I had experienced at that house.
I reached out, tho not with hands, and at a single touch, as a musicians strikes a tuning bar to bring out a note, pure and simple. His head was a stone. Of his body I know not – save that when I spread both my arms wide, I saw nothing below the stone but air. I felt the weight and density of the stone, yet held it easily, or it held itself, I know not. Clouds passed from the sun as the bride’s veil is drawn away by the groom, and the globe shadow appeared dark and clean-edged on the wall by the door. At the sight of this, my heart overflowed with joyous force.
How a head, of bone and blood, became stone I do not know; save only that both are maintained upon the same substructure or βάσις, that is, atomic molecules, each mode or kind of atom differing from each other by accident rather than substance – such difference indeed, providing the very definition of accident. And there it was: an irregular spheroid, pale where his face had been, dark behind where once had been hair.
Then the clock belowstairs chimed three, and I was startled and the globe flew from my grasp. It shot through the barred window behind me, in a great noise of broken wood and snapped iron, to which the splintering of glass was a feathery addition The stone flew up and high and into the blue, towards the horizon. I was so scared by what I had myself done I called out.
Then I rose, and looked at the window behind me. The bars had been bent as easily as sticks of liquorish, and the two at the centre had been broken and pulled from their sockets.
The stone ball flew up and fell down; afterwards there was talk of a meteor falln from heave upon a farmhouse in Wold Newton. But I knew that not, then. My heart was still brimming. I thought to myself, I do not wish to be here, and for a moment considered climbing through the window and so freeing myself. What prevented me was mere triviality: that the window faced east, and my home (I knew) west. So I turned back towards the door, knowing it to be locked and bolted, and not knowing how to open it.
The air folded before me like cloth and I was standing beside Blaswater. It happened as instantly as the words suggest, and (it being December) I wished at once I had stopped to dress in my shawl and bonnet before going. It was shivery weather, much more overcast than the sky had been in Yorkshire. The surface of the lake puckered and trembled like skin.
The sight of the lake fascinated my eyes.
I heard the sound of cartwheels rolling and grynding upon the road behind me, and turned in startlement; but there was no cart. The sound was that of hailstones falling on the metalled road, falling from a black cloud that was being shepherded through the sky by high winter winds. The hail was coming along the road like a curtain, and soon it was on me, and my chill became much more severe. The sensation of the hailstones upon my pate and shoulders was sharp as needles, and I ran to a tree for shelter. It was bare, but provided some meagre cover. Behind the forward cavalry of hailstones came a massed infantry of cold rain, and my dress was soaked in moments.
I was quite alone: a rainy winter’s Sunday afternoon in mid-December. I could have made my way along the banks of the Blaswater and found the church, and the cottage, and dried myself before the fire. But I also knew how I had travelled to this place. I had travelled to this place via clarity. And that same clarity told me: what would my brother say? What would he do? Of course he would believe I had escaped from Magnoble’s, by trickery or deceit. He would believe I had effected this
release days earlier, and crossed the Pennine Mountains on foot, or having begged a ride in farmers’ carts. He would rail at me, rebuke me – and return me to confinement, either at Magnoble’s or elsewhere. Word would reach him, eventually, of the broken window, when Magnoble presented him with the bill for the damage caused, if not before. And what would I say to him? That I was a sorceress now, and could fly through the air in instants?
Clarity told me: my life, as it had been before, was over.
I was out from under the tree and running over the road before I had made a conscious choice. Indeed, the first I was consciously aware I was even in motion was when I hit the water and the crystal-cold bit into me. Those frigid waters were black and bitter, and I yelped and screeched like an owl in the night at the feel of it. Then I lurched forward and the cold waters touched my collar bone, and I felt as tho my heart would cease its beating at the froze shock of it. But then I lurched forward again. My shoe (only a house shoe) came away from my right foot, and chilled mud slid between my toes, as a comb moves between strands of hair. My face went under the water, and the affront of the cold intensified and then began to pass away. I had been shivering anyway, and now the cutting sensation of cold began, altho slowly, to numb.
My muscles were stiff as stale cheese, and creaked as I forced my arms to roll; but with a ponderous, childlike motion I swam away from the shore. Rain was falling all around, and in the dark grey light of the overcast afternoon the surface of the water bristled like a bear’s pelt with a million wriggling filaments. I thought of my brother in the cottage, and then I thought with a pang of anxiety of his harsh consumptive cough, and no sooner did this thought emerge in my mind than the stormcloud sent a great rasping bark of thunder echoing down the valley walls, like a giant boulder rolling in avalanche. I thought of his tears when he discovered my death, and the rain increased in intensity and the filaments that emerged in constant supply as they evanished upon the water’s surface thickened and rose. I thought of his secret relief, and the rain began to ease, and then – with a second great scraping noise of thunder – disappear altogether.