by Alix Nathan
‘Then I shall write the letter about adultery.’
‘Pah! Adultery! Sin!’ He sucked his fingers, earth-brown and hard like twigs. ‘Letters is not enough.’
‘What can you mean?’ Catherine often felt she was one step behind Abraham. Sluggish his reading might be, but his thoughts shot about like mad stars.
‘Ponder him in thy little head, clever puss,’ he said, pulling her hair back and biting her neck till she cried out.
Hampstead, 8 May 1797
Dear Powyss,
I was greatly relieved to receive a written communication from you in addition to an edible one. I was mighty glad of the Christmas fruit of course, but I have missed hearing about Moreham. And I am grateful, too, for in the inclusion of the half-penned letter you say has lived in a drawer for a year. Reading of Warlow’s outburst and of the intimations of subversion from your servants, I understand how you have been occupied. I must reiterate my previous computation: that the greater good for Mrs Warlow and her children outweighs even the fortissimo suffering of Mr Warlow.
Here, in the seat of government, subversion is dealt with with vile severity. Even a whiff of complaint sniffed out by carbuncle-nosed spies means imprisonment without trial.
Yet in the public mind treason has been usurped by war. People talk of nothing else, especially since the French invasion attempts in Devon and Pembrokeshire. People demand peace. I attended a meeting with a friend who is an inhabitant of Westminster (has there not been such a meeting held in Hereford?). You should have heard the great cries of Peace! Peace! that rose to the skies. And to the skies it was as they had been shut out of Westminster Hall and were obliged to meet in Palace Yard!
The speakers rightly made much of the outrageous, wicked, delusive conduct of ministers, their corruption and iniquity for eight years ever since the storming of the Bastille set them aquiver in 1789. From 1792 they have cast our enemies not as those against whom we fought abroad, but as those at home. They have increased the numbers of military in preparation for putting down domestic insurrection. Worst of all they have sent about a rumour of famine to raise the price of corn prodigiously so that honest labourers and industrious mechanics should save themselves by joining the army!
Perhaps this information will distract you from your troubles. I am myself troubled by the imminent release of Mr Clarke. While I am pleased that a good man, wrongfully imprisoned, should at last retrieve his freedom, I am concerned for my friendship with Mrs Clarke and tremble at the prospects before me.
Yours ever,
Benjamin Fox
* * *
—
WARLOW HAD BEEN SENT buckets of hot water, more brooms, rags for cleaning and a note supposedly from Jenkins to ask if anything needed replacing. There had been no reply. At first the entire household held its breath. Then, when meals were evidently consumed and full pots for the cesspool appeared, a disgruntled normality seemed to return.
In fact Price wasn’t the only person to think Warlow should be let out, though nobody else’s methods were likely to be the same as his.
Bottles of sherry were piling up in Joseph Jenkins’s pantry. His theft from the cellars was in direct proportion to Powyss’s loss of authority, each bottle representing an action or utterance of which Jenkins heartily disapproved. He’d known a handful of masters in his time, but none as spineless as Powyss. Damage to the master’s authority had a way of damaging his own rule, he found. That Croft hussy, for instance, with her pert replies.
He drank little of what he stole. An occasional glass at the end of the day or after a particularly tiresome event was all he ever took. Quite unlike Mrs Rentfree, who was bosky as a stewed fruit. Rather than being for the purposes of consumption, he saw what he did as rightful possession on account of the master’s failings.
Not that he didn’t admire some of Mrs Rentfree’s qualities. Her beef was never overcooked, her plum cake never sad. He enjoyed the way she lashed those worthless maids with her scorn. A harsh puritan childhood and a little learning informed Jenkins’s attitude to his fellow men, most of whom he despised, but he was certainly not a revolutionary. Toppling Powyss never entered his mind. Order was what he required. Order was all.
‘He should be made to clean the place up and got out. Send him back where he come from. And the wife. Thinks she’s better than everybody because her mother was a lady’s maid. Her mother went mad carrying all Kempton’s bastards.’ He was standing in the kitchen doorway after decanting some wine for Powyss.
‘Disgusting,’ said Mrs Rentfree.
‘Should never have let the woman into the house.’
‘ ’E never goes to church. ’E’s no religion, the master.’
Samuel leaned up against the wall, having served the first course. He bit his nails fiercely.
‘You’ll be wanting to leave us, Mr Jenkins,’ Mrs Rentfree said, cutting and doling out slices of pie.
‘I can’t tell if you’re guessing or hoping, Mrs Rentfree.’
‘You’ve been complaining for years is all I say.’
Samuel dared to speak: ‘Mr Powyss is a clever man. He read books.’
Cook exchanged a glance with Jenkins and handed Samuel the master’s portion and a jug of crème anglaise. They ignored the footman’s remark.
Warlow’s dishes appeared at the top of the shaft; Catherine and Annie unloaded them and placed a second course and a small dessert of nuts and fruit on a tray, Cook tutting loudly.
‘Powyss don’t eat much these days,’ Jenkins remarked. ‘He’s thinking about something else and we know what that is. Won’t look at me.’
‘You should tell the master your mind, Mr Jenkins.’
‘It’ll all come to grief in its own time, mark my words.’
‘You’re wrong!’ Samuel said in a sort of strangled shout. ‘The experiment’s an important thing.’
‘What do you know about it, you whippersnapper? Just because the master lets you dust his knick-knacks.’
Laughter from Cook, and Annie tittered, not exactly sure why.
‘It’s you as don’t know,’ said Samuel, galled by the women.
Jenkins grabbed him by the collar. ‘Telling me, are we? Think you know what you’re talking about? You know nothing, you little rat. And don’t go running off to the master and telling him everything we’ve said when you’re laying out his breeches.’
More laughter. Samuel raised a fist but Jenkins caught his wrist.
‘Hit me, would you? There’s insubordination for you,’ he said triumphantly to the others. A favourite word, its syllables strung out grandly. ‘I’ll haul you over if there’s any more of that. Get out! And don’t you whimper, miss!’
He put his face close up to Annie, who backed away, not knowing whether he might bite or kiss her. She hated the thought of either.
* * *
—
POWYSS HAD POSTED FOX a carefully incomplete account of Warlow’s explosion so that Fox’s reply, drawing an analogy between subversion sniffed out by ‘carbuncle-nosed spies’ and put down by means of imprisonment without trial, and what had happened in Moreham annoyed him greatly. He crumpled the letter and threw it on the floor.
Perhaps Warlow’s behaviour was domestic insurrection. But were he to analyse the discontent in Moreham House, apart from wreck underground, he wasn’t sure what he could give as evidence. Jenkins and the other servants continued their routines. His clothes were laid out, meals were cooked, the house was clean. Work in the gardens and grounds was maintained. And yet he sensed a hint of revolt. His orders tended to result in a fractional hesitation. He’d seen the maid Catherine come out of the library more than once without cleaning apparatus, a smile slipping from her face. He couldn’t help hearing Jenkins’s heavy emphasis on ‘Mrs’ every time he announced Hannah’s arrival. Samuel, whom he trusted more than the rest, who w
as willing to do anything he asked, looked anxious all the time.
A few days later Jenkins handed him a note from Warlow, apparently written with his finger on paper torn from Defoe’s Plague Year – he recognised the list of deaths from fever, spotted fever, surfeit and teeth that Defoe gave for the first week of August. Scrawled along the margin was:
I no yor lisnin
He felt the steel edge in Jenkins’s stare as he read the crude letters.
The irony was that he’d not used the listening tube for months. But Warlow must have found his end of it in the ceiling, which had provoked his outburst, he supposed. He could reassure him about that at least.
However, if Warlow were indeed to remain below, the terms of the arrangement must still hold.
‘There’s to be no direct reply of course, Jenkins. Please find something to plug Warlow’s end of the tube. By now, I take it, you yourself know about my copper device.’
‘Sir.’
‘Ask Samuel to cut a piece of cork; he should be able to remember the original measurements. Send it down with a sheaf of fresh paper, ink and pens. Evidently he has destroyed his pens.
‘After that I should like you and Samuel to transfer some furniture, books and so forth upstairs into the small sitting room. I shall make a list and give it to you in the morning.’
Moving upstairs placed another floor between him and Warlow, but his relief at this was swamped by revulsion. It was inevitable that he’d hate Warlow – proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris; he could hear Fox’s pen scratching Tacitus at him. Of course he’d recorded the explosion and all that was known about it. But the whole experiment was now a shackle, heavy, painful, irremovable. It was as if all that ambition to enter the world of natural science, inchoate as it had been at first, then finally focused, had withered, blackened, died. And now rotted and stank. It sickened him to remember. Moving up a floor removed Warlow further.
He stood by the window in the upstairs sitting room. His young Magnolia virginiana was on the point of flowering, its candle blooms firm, serene. He was expecting Hannah shortly.
This room was far less satisfactory than his library. He missed the presence of his globes, his Apulian vases, the cabinet with the sloping top, the possibility of consulting any one of hundreds of books. The view from the window was the same, only smaller, confined and he had to stand to see certain plants and trees of which he was particularly fond. On the other hand it was a pretty room, light, comfortable, pleasing with its delicate, pale-green geranium-leaf wallpaper. His essential books were there, the desk, his microscope and telescope, not that he’d gazed at the night sky for months. Of course he could use the library if necessary, find books, reorder his drawers of curios. But he wanted to be in that room as little as possible.
And nowadays almost the only book he actually used was Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary. He would always need to refer to the dictator of English gardening, but concentrated reading on any other subject was something he failed to do now. His eyes slid over pages of words, his mind elsewhere. Books would thud to the floor as he fell asleep over them, often followed by the shattering of his brandy glass on the hearth.
He held on to the authority of Benjamin Fox’s arithmetical logic. Repeated the formula at moments of greatest doubt, like a daily prayer: the happiness of Hannah and her children is greater than…Otherwise, he almost never thought about Fox himself. He could not recall the content of the last letter from him.
Jenkins knocked.
‘Mrs Warlow, Mr Powyss, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jenkins. Please leave us.’
* * *
—
HE KICKS PATHS THROUGH THE DEBRIS. From bed to pisspot to lift shaft. Most days he lies in bed wrapped in the smell of himself. Won’t light a fire. Listens to vermin back and forth beneath the bed, infernal buzzing of flies.
Sleeping, waking, there is little difference. Dreaming. Not dreaming.
Is it morning? He lights the stump. Walks the path to the big room. He’d pulled the table back up from where he overturned it, but a leg’s broken. Dishes slide. Liquid slops. Now he sees plates on it. Congealed lamb’s fry. Empty beer jug. His full pot on one of the lift shelves. He’d returned to bed, not rung the bell. Must have been morning.
There’s no path to the grating. No debris there: couldn’t smash the bath or the cistern could he. But he doesn’t go to the grating anyway. Cares not for the outside world. The tiny, distant outside world.
When buckets came down, the thing creaking again and again, he put his face in the warm water. Pulled at his beard with his claws. Scratched out lice. Threw it all in the bathtub. A lake for frogs. Except there are none.
The roar of anger has gone out of his mind. He tears a page from a piece of broken book and scrawls with a nail dipped in ink. But only to remind himself:
I no yor lisnin
Puts it next to the full pisspot. Forgets about it.
He looks at the mess. He’s glad he smashed everything of Powyss’s, but he never thinks of that time when he did it now. Powyss can go to hell. They can all go to hell. Hannah, children, the others. To hell.
His heavy body occupies him. He picks, scratches, gnaws. Pinches biters out from under his vest, squashes them hard. Rubs where they get him in his sleep. Presses on sores that hurt, that weep. Goes back to bed.
Summer passes.
* * *
—
SHE SAYS TO HERSELF: when I think on Mother it cannot be the same. She surely cannot have wanted Kempton.
In Herbert’s room the bed is soft. So soft! It have sheets and pillows and beautiful cloth about it. It is warm.
The man Jenkins always do take me upstairs, not the library. He smile harshly into my face but I look away if I can. He wish me ill, though not as evil as the other.
John will stay.
When it do seem wrong I try to think if John changed place with me and I were below. He would sure to God take another woman. Many. He did complain of me often.
I know it is not an answer.
But he will get the money, that will please him. He wanted the money.
He were always a rough man. It is true he did save me from Kempton. And Kempton then be always hard on John and never mend our house. But after, John did come and take me himself: were no better than Kempton. Worse. Did crush me often almost to the death.
I do wonder what will happen when John come out. I dare not ask Herbert.
Sometimes he do groan then I think he be sorry I am there. He drink too much brandy. And the cordial. He do call it the tincture.
* * *
—
SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING to Abraham Price and Catherine wasn’t sure what to make of it. He’d become more impatient and quite unpredictable. He’d leap up in the middle of his reading, which progressed but haltingly, grab the household mending she’d brought with her, cursing and ripping it before she could prevent him. He would pace around angrily, thumping furniture with his fists till she had to tell him to stop, for it made her dizzy. But that only angered him more. She wondered if it was because he was displeased that he still stumbled when he read and did so in front of her. Accordingly, her corrections were often hesitant. Or was it simply that he was fired by the news of the great gatherings there’d been in London. He’d tell her what he’d heard of the meetings, of the huge numbers of people. He’d repeat fine stirring phrases in a loud voice, waving his arms, then suddenly rush at her, bending her back onto the table as though she were a recalcitrant sapling.
It had been a mistake for her to quote at him once more, but she’d been delighted to read of Paine’s February walk in the country, his finding a bud on a twig, that though the vegetable sleep will continue longer on some trees and plants than on others, though some of them may not blossom for two or three years, all will be in leaf in th
e summer except those that are rotten. How delightful, she thought, how Abraham will like this, and she read it aloud, but he dismissed it with a wave of his twiggy fingers. Metaphor didn’t move him.
She already knew never to laugh at him even though to laugh was her way, her tendency. She’d pointed at his mud-encrusted clothes one day.
‘Do you live in the ground?’ she said, amused at the thought. ‘You look as if you’ve come out of the earth to visit me!’ He was, she thought to herself, something of a goblin, from the world of nature, likely to appear or disappear without warning. She remembered his look of malice more than the fact that he had struck her.
Then she was foolish enough to suggest that they might marry and live a respectable life.
‘Abraham, do you hear me? Would that not be a happy thing, and then, you know, we might…’
‘Get out!’ He slammed the book down, jumped out of his chair. ‘Get out! Never say that again!’ She ran out before he could reach her.
Two weeks later he opened to her timid knock, but she was careful and made sure to bring an offering.
It was a newspaper she had taken from the library. She and Annie still cleaned there even though Powyss hardly ever used it. She would look along the shelves sometimes and wish heartily the books were hers.
‘Mr Powyss, he do have so many books, Abraham. If only I had some. Then I would not need to listen to Annie every night.’
‘Take them. Him’ll not miss ’em.’
‘I couldn’t take books.’
‘You did steal his newspaper.’
‘That’s nothing.’
‘Him’ll never notice. Him’s with Mrs Warlow all day long, isn’t it. Everyone do talk of it in the village.’
‘People exaggerate. She’s not often there. But he have begun to drink somewhat, Jenkins said. Bottles of old Mr Powyss’s brandy laid down years ago.