by Alix Nathan
Jenkins grunted with annoyance. ‘I said begin again.’
‘Let her read on, Mr Jenkins, for heaven’s sake!’ said Cook.
‘ “About twenty minutes afterwards the king left Buckingham House, and was violently hissed and hooted, and groaned at the whole way, but no violence was offered till he arrived opposite the Ordnance office, when a small pebble, or marble, or bullet, broke one of the windows.” ’
Mrs Rentfree took a swig from under her chair while all were concentrating on the report and burst out: ‘Bullet! It’s the Irish. Rabble. Papists. Thank the Good Lord we have nothing like them here!’
‘Read on!’ Jenkins commanded.
Catherine continued: ‘ “In returning, the crowd pressed closely round the coach, and his majesty, in considerable agitation, signified, by waving his hands to the horseguards on each side, his anxiety that the multitude should be kept at a distance.” ’
The listeners were silent. There was no sound in the kitchen except for a low bubbling from a large pot on the range. The room was steamy.
‘ “A considerable tumult took place when his majesty was about to alight, and one of the horses in the state coach took fright, threw down an old groom of the name of Dorrington, and broke one of his thighs, but it proved fortunately a simple fracture. His other thigh was considerably bruised, but not dangerously.” ’
‘Poor man!’ cried Annie.
Jenkins glared. ‘Don’t you interrupt!’
‘ “A few minutes after his majesty had entered the palace, the mob attacked the state coach with stones, and did it great injury. In its way along Pall Mall to the Mews, many things were also thrown at it.” ’
‘Tut, tut, tut,’ from Cook.
‘What things did they throw?’ asked Samuel.
‘What difference does that make? Stupid question,’ Jenkins said.
‘It don’t say,’ Catherine said to Samuel and read on: ‘ “After a short time the king went in his private coach from St James’s to Buckingham House; but on his way through the Park, the mob surrounded the carriage, and prevented it from proceeding, crying out, ‘Bread! Bread! Peace! Peace!’ ”
Catherine sat back in her chair, but raised the paper hastily before her face lest the others should see the sparks firing in her mind. How Abraham would long to be there with the mob! How she longed to be among the crowd herself, hissing, hooting, crying out! Her whole body stirred and she thought to get out if she could, take the newspaper and find Abraham.
‘Read on, then!’ commanded Mrs Rentfree. ‘Did they arrest ’em, the papist mob? Throw ’em in prison? There’ll be hangins, just you wait.’
‘It says that three or four persons were apprehended.’
‘Three or four? Three or four hundred, more like. Three or four thousand!’
‘ “Three or four were apprehended on suspicion of having thrown stones, et cetera, at the king and one of them was charged with having called out, ‘No king’, and other such expressions.” ’
A heavy drawing in of breath, another swig.
‘Disgraceful!’ Jenkins growled. Cook looked sharply at him lest he meant her.
‘ “The king, through the whole of the riot, displayed the cool magnanimity for which the family have ever been distinguished,” ’ Catherine read, to silence Cook and Jenkins. ‘But,’ she couldn’t stop herself from saying, ‘it said before that he showed considerable agitation, so that’s not true.’
‘Read on, miss!’ Cook and Jenkins accidently spoke together.
‘ “Confident in the attachment of his people, notwithstanding the alarms of the preceding day, the king, accompanied by her majesty and three of the princesses, visited Covent Garden theatre, and at their entrance was received with the usual burst of applause. ‘God Save the King’ was sung twice, and by a considerable part of the house overzealously called for a third time; this in a corner of the gallery provoked a few hisses, which however were soon overruled, and one or two of the most active of the turbulent party were turned out, after which the performance went on.” ’ She threw down the paper in disgust: ‘Surely, those dumplings will be cooked,” Mrs Rentfree? Quick! Let us take them off the fire before they boil dry!’
* * *
—
HE’S PROUD OF HIS WRITING. SUR PRIZIN JOHN WARLOW OF MOR HAM PLOW MAN
Picks up the book again. About the man like him. Rob Robin Robinson
Couldn’t niver write so many words. Look at all them pages!
Creaking. Dinner’s coming. He lugs the tray to the table. Meat under the cover, what is it? Picks it off the plate: pheasant! Oho! Niver ate a pheasant that weren’t stole.
A note on the tray:
Mrs Rentfrew says His Majesty the King do like apple dumplings
Under a smaller cover an apple dumpling. Puts his finger in a jug of cream and licks it off.
He thinks he’ll write back: I liks appl pye. But he doesn’t bother.
Best is apples off the tree. No cookin. Pinchin apples from Swaine’s orchard like we did. Early in the mornin or just when dark were comin. Throwin sticks and stones were no good, best climb up. Quick! Fill your pockets, throw down to Joe, the others, stuff ’em into their pockets. Whistle when you see Swaine.
Caught us many times got a thrashin, but he couldn’t thrash us all at once could he! One took the beatin, the rest ran off. Nex time another took the beatin.
They’ll be pickin the late ones now, sure to. Mashin for cider. Sun’ll be low. Ploughin. Cold’s begun seeping in, he’s felt it.
He’s eaten every bit. Drunk up the ale. Eyelids heavy, but he lights a pipe. Try a bit more about the man Rob like me.
Oh can’t read all that! I’ll pick a page. Like old Mrs Cattle did with her Bible. Funny name she had, Hez, Hezzy somethin Cattle. Pick a page, she said. That’ll tell you what’ll happen when you’s growed up.
Stabs a page; nail rips a strip.
my dogtwo cats
Can’t see no frog. Dogs wouldn’t like it down here.
Stabs another bit. Looks easy can read that.
But to re turn return to my new comp compan compan ion my new com panion
Companion?
I was great greatly de light delighted with him
teach him
What’s all that?
make him speak
Can’t read all that.
It was very pleas pleasant for me to talk to him.
Oh.
There were someone. Someone there. Robinson were speakin to someone.
Now my life be my life began to be so easy
Oh.
Not like him. The man is not like him. Has a friend.
His eyes close. Pipe’s out. He smells rain beginning, nods off.
* * *
—
SHE THINKS: the rain have poured down. It is November. Lane did flood, bridge by the ford were swept away. I could not get home after I went for the money. I did worry about the children. Jack so wayward. Turning bad I do think. Margaret do like to take my place, tell them what to do. But I cannot be from them long.
He did want me to stay but they will talk he said. I like him though I do wish it were not so.
I must wait in the kitchen till the rain stopped. They did question me but I said nothing. They are not friendly.
He have a small room with instruments, a tube to see things closely. He showed me. I looked through the glass and saw a butterfly wing.
He were pleased when I did name it. Father did tell me many names of butterflies and such.
Then a grasshopper. Did use to catch one so it jump inside my hands, watch it hop away. This one were dead.
He have a
telescope do show the stars he said only if I be there at night which I cannot.
He have kissed me many times. Many. But that is all. Not like Kempton and Mother. Perhaps it is a fortunate thing as I surely cannot live another birth. In any case I do think I am too old to bear more children.
Maybe he only like to kiss, why he have no wife. Maybe I am not clean enough. I shall wash my gown once more, my hair.
PART II
6
HAD HE BEEN ASKED, Powyss would not have said the experiment had broken down. Warlow was still there, after all. In April it would be three years.
One of the principal attractions of experiments for Powyss had always been their neutrality. You set them up (would the Chinese Daphne odora survive better on an east- or a south-facing wall; how much greater is the production of melons in the hothouse compared with the melon bed; what degrees of warmth and moisture are required for the germination of this or that seed), you detailed the origin and number of the plants or seeds, laid out the conditions of soil and climate, recorded the outcome carefully, day by day, then you drew your conclusion, your thesis thoroughly tested. Even when you lost plants, or seeds refused to sprout, or the experiment failed entirely, it always remained neutral. No emotion was involved.
He’d begun the Investigation as if it were another horticultural experiment, though much bigger, more important. But it hadn’t turned out that way.
And he went about it differently, now. Minutely detailed records, sometimes several a day, were no longer necessary. He knew exactly what Warlow would and wouldn’t eat. His tastes were becoming more finicky perhaps; he was eating less. Powyss had refused to increase three pints of beer a day, though Warlow had asked for it. Tobacco and fuel supplies remained the same.
He recorded only the unusual when reported to him by Jenkins, ignoring the butler’s undisguised relish: the possible illness, a request for yet more rat traps. If the man became really ill and required a surgeon then the experiment would certainly be at an end. The condition of Warlow’s clothes when erratically sent for washing was no longer unusual. That Warlow was not cleaning himself was apparent but Powyss ignored complaints from Mrs Rentfree conveyed to him by Jenkins. In truth the business of recording had become tedious. The promise of a week of fame in the Royal Society following the delivery of his paper at the end of the experiment, perhaps 1801 by the time he’d written it up, had begun to blur. As if there was an aberration in the microscope lens or as if he’d failed to adjust it. But he didn’t want to adjust it. The quest for fame had begun to seem wearisome.
He abandoned the listening tube completely and laboriously described and explained its failure for incorporation into the final paper. Investigation into the Resilience of the Human Mind Without Society. He still took pleasure from the title. Crucial to the experiment would be Warlow’s condition when he emerged in 1800, his frame of mind and what written evidence he brought with him, and there was nothing Powyss could do about any of those things now.
What had gone was neutrality. And surely it had been obvious from the start that that would happen. There never could have been neutrality. Yet if it had occurred to him then, he’d swept it away as inconvenient.
He did his utmost to keep Warlow from his thoughts. Yet there was ever a sense of a presence below, even that far down. A presence he’d begun to resent, at times to hate.
When Jenkins announced Hannah each week he awaited her by the south window, knowing that that part of the room was not above Warlow’s cellar. He handed her the money, announcing it in a voice loud enough to be heard at the keyhole, and then he’d lead her quietly into his small instrument room with its botanical and entomological specimens, its table for the microscope and the portable telescope perched on its brass column. Beneath he knew there was merely a corridor, not Warlow. And of course, were Jenkins to interrupt, initially they would be hidden from sight.
There he held her, kissed her face, her neck, for all like a youth, guilty, unsure. He longed to explore every part of her, but couldn’t, mustn’t. In time her fingers began to caress his neck, her diminutive body to press against his. And yet they remained celibate. Was it the room perhaps, so many shelves of books, the scientific instruments and priceless objects that oppressed them, held them back? How many men would have such scruples as he, he asked himself? As master of Moreham House he could do as he liked. As author of the Investigation, explorer of the solitary human mind, he couldn’t.
‘Shall you come to my house?’ she asked him one day.
‘No! No. I shan’t do that.’
‘I cannot leave the children.’
‘No, of course not. I…’
A loud knock and Jenkins entered the library.
Often, for what short time they had together before she must return, he simply talked to her, rapidly, frenziedly, as though to shut out the clamour of his lust. He drank in her expressions, their changes, how she would listen to him, colour, how in her eyes seemed to lie an expectation of enjoyment. The Lateral Effects section of the Investigation approached dissolution. All her earlier resistance had gone; they stood on the edge.
He thought of Jermyn Street. Over the years he must have occupied every over-furnished room at Mrs Clavering’s, each hastily smoothed bed. The girls whose names he could never remember varied in appearance and skill: that was part of the reputation of the house. And they were sometimes high-born, girls who’d fallen or been plucked from not-unknown families. There was even one whose exquisite voice pampered a wealthy, leering audience with Handel arias.
They were paid to please, not to be pleased. That was the difference.
His reply to Fox’s last letter remained unfinished, unsent. More than a year had passed, yet phrases from their correspondence would recur. This was not surprising given that Fox was the only direct voice from the outside world to which he’d ever listened. Despite their many differences and despite his new hesitancy of tone, Fox had an authority Powyss had occasionally welcomed, for it was a measure against which he could hold himself. Though they were the same age, he had thought of him, at times, as of a father whose ideas he respected.
But he found himself bored by Fox’s ‘understanding’ with Mrs Clarke. He envisaged them making their arrangements to shop, visit, dine together, all so civilised, all quite humdrum. Was he envious of Fox for finding himself a mistress from his own sphere? Did he envy their freedom in the sophisticated metropolis, meeting privately without lurking servants, for Fox’s household was small? Perhaps he did.
He couldn’t have explained himself to Fox anyway. This was not love: he didn’t know what that was, suspected it didn’t exist, was an invention of poets and Gothic novelists. No, it was desire that had something of the excitement and sensuous pleasure he felt when he brought back a tree from Chelsea or Hackney, some new, unusual specimen, barely known in this country, wonderfully rare. He’d plan its ideal site, dig a capacious hole. Untie the rope, unwrap the sacking. Gently disentangle the roots with his fingers, spread them out, place them in the earth. Water them generously. Crumble good mould, rich with vegetable and animal manure, pressing with both hands, firming, until the sapling stood without his help.
Or it was like the sensation of seeing an antique piece, unusual, fascinating, knowing he had to buy it, to own it, to hold it whenever he wanted.
More than both of these it was his body’s unbearable heat, stoked by restraint, that he couldn’t imagine restraining much longer.
He had told her how much he liked her, how he wished she were free. She had looked at him with a kind of sceptical contentment, said nothing. That was good: it was better he shouldn’t know her mind.
* * *
—
CATHERINE’S PREOCCUPATION with Abraham Price had the additional advantage of relieving her of hours of Annie’s company. However, if she was to keep the full nature of her activities with Price concealed from Jenkins a
nd Cook she must keep Annie sweet. Whenever she could, she would drop comments about Price’s much improved reading and had begun offering to write letters for others as part of the disguise.
‘I have written a letter to old Mrs Price,’ she’d say to Cook. ‘Shall I write one for you, then both can be sent to post together?’
One evening she was lying on her bed. At least she didn’t have to share a bed as she’d once had to do in a previous employment. She was halfway through Paine’s Rights of Man Part II, borrowed from Price’s Disputing Club. She wanted to keep ahead of Abraham and had indeed got much further than he. She struggled with the dry matter of constitution but laughed at the image of the monarchy hidden behind a curtain. Chewed on phrases for days as she polished or sliced: it has put down the dwarf to set up the man; a flame has arisen not to be extinguished. That last, for someone who lit fresh fires each day, was especially enjoyable.
Now her attention was interrupted by Annie’s noisy rummaging. Two padlocked deal boxes stood at opposite ends of the attic room they shared, marking out each woman’s cramped territory. Catherine’s was decorated with strips of wallpaper she’d garnered over the years: oak leaves, geranium leaves, loops, lines, sprigs and shells rioted all over it. Theft was unheard of with the present complement of servants, and yet Annie must needs check through her belongings daily. Perhaps after a day of cleaning someone else’s house, preparing someone else’s food, the familiarity of her own things – her best gown and shifts, her little watch and ring – reminded her small self of who she was. And after her six months’ punishment of no pay, the money she possessed was ever important to her.
Tonight she took each article and laid it out on her bed. Catherine closed her book.
‘Will you never tell me how you came upon the silver teaspoon?’ she asked.