by Alix Nathan
Powyss began: ‘Catherine, did you open the door to Mr Warlow’s apartments?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘I took the key from Mr Jenkins’s room. He left his door open; the key was hanging on a hook. I have put it back. It wasn’t theft, it was borrowing.’
‘And the planks nailed across the door?’
‘I prised them off with a crowbar that I did find in Samuel’s room.’
‘The men must keep their doors locked against you!’ Fox laughed, hoping to keep the mood light. He’d decided that Powyss should ask the questions, but at this point Powyss paused for so long that Fox felt a need to prompt. ‘Why, Catherine…’
‘Yes, why.’ Powyss pulled himself together. ‘Why did you do this?’
‘We did think it were time he were let out.’
‘We?’ Fox asked.
‘I myself did think so,’ she corrected herself.
‘You said “we”. Does that mean you and Abraham Price?’
Catherine looked down. ‘Yes.’
‘Was it his plan that you open Warlow’s door? I am surprised at such cowardice to make a woman do it.’ Fox had taken over the interview. Powyss shifted back in his chair.
‘No! No, sir. It was my idea.’ She looked at Fox with considerable annoyance. ‘It was my plan. I got the key and the crowbar. I went down on my own. I went into John Warlow’s place on my own.’ She shuddered.
‘What part did Price play in this plot then?’
‘He did make me think.’
‘A philosopher!’ Fox said scornfully, hearing Powyss draw in his breath at this unnecessary unpleasantness.
‘He did make me realise it was not luxury for John Warlow underground,’ Catherine responded, showing her anger again. ‘Abraham do know about rights.’
‘So I learned last night! And what has he told you about them?’ Fox was still disposed to be light-hearted.
‘I have read the book Rights of Man.’
‘He gave you that, did he?’ he said, amused.
‘It is I who helped him read it,’ she said with pride, then dismay at having exposed her lover.
‘Admirable! But Catherine, do you understand that your action has brought an end to Mr Powyss’s important scientific experiment?’
She thought for a moment, then addressed herself to Powyss: ‘Mr Powyss, sir, I am sorry for spoiling your experiment. But John Warlow is living worse than an animal. It is not right so to keep a human being.’
Powyss buried his face in his hands and Fox dismissed Catherine, telling her that Mr Powyss would call her again later when they’d decided how she might be punished.
‘She shouldn’t be punished at all,’ Powyss said when she’d gone. ‘She has brought me to my senses. Shamed me.’
‘Well, let us see what Abraham Price has to say for himself, shall we?’
Fox found it hard not to like Price. Their confrontation the night before had stimulated him greatly. We bookish men do sometimes relish action, he said to himself. And Price was so wonderfully woody in appearance, so earth-brown and hard, standing firm as a thick-trunked tree, quite unashamed, if a little uncomfortable in such surroundings.
Fox began: ‘Citizen Price. Last night I explained my position to you and, I hope, convinced you that I am myself a follower of Tom Paine. But can you deny that you tried to break into Moreham House and wanted to set it on fire: crimes for which you may hang, for which you might be lucky to be transported?’
‘Powyss do employ me, isn’t it. I answer him.’
‘Mr Powyss is happy for me to ask questions for him. Do you deny trying to break in and set fire to the house?’
Price would not answer Fox, would not even look at him but turned pointedly towards Powyss. ‘You imprisons two people unlawfully!’
Powyss stirred and Fox controlled himself.
‘No, Price. No,’ Powyss said quietly. He looked up at the man and Fox saw how well they knew each other. Years of whatever it was they did in greenhouses and new plantations had brought them closer together even than Powyss and him, for all their thousands of words penned.
‘I did not imprison him, Price. Warlow agreed to the arrangement.’
‘Now it’s prison, isn’t it.’
‘I fear that it has become so. You are right. He is to be released anyway.’
Price was not so easily disarmed.
‘You locked up Catherine!’
‘She should have come to me first and asked. And she has been let out now.’
Price waved this away contemptuously.
‘And Hannah Warlow, you do…’
‘Citizen!’ Fox had to intervene. ‘Neither Warlow nor Catherine was unlawfully imprisoned. Both are free or will be shortly. Mr Powyss will make all good with all parties involved. But meanwhile you have attacked property, broken windows, brought fire with you. You should be tried at the assizes.’
Price raised his chin and gazed over the heads of his inquisitors through the window at a dun sky. Fox could feel Powyss beside him sinking under the weight of accusation and doubted he knew what to do. He reached across for Powyss’s pen, scribbled on some paper and pushed it to him. As Powyss read, Price continued to stare at the sky and meanwhile Fox couldn’t help wondering if there would be any disagreeable mail for him today from London.
Powyss spoke: ‘Price, if you will promise never to attack the house again, to call off and calm down your men, I shall bring no charges. You shall none of you be tried, let alone hanged. I shall deduct the cost of repair from your pay and then we shall speak no more about any of this.’
There was a heavy silence. Neither Price nor Powyss moved. Suddenly Fox understood that they never would move while he was there, and he left the room.
Afterwards he chose not to ask Powyss what happened: what more was said, if Price had fully agreed to the terms, just what kind of promise he’d made. Powyss had become quite morose and was emptying a bottle of brandy, from which he offered Fox none.
In the afternoon Catherine was told that she was not to be punished. She had cleaned herself up, and Fox thought she looked altogether less unattractive when she received this news. How interesting are the effects of emotions on the body, he observed to himself.
Jenkins came to report that he’d unlocked Warlow’s door, but upon trying to open it found an enormous pile of furniture immediately behind it, such that no one could either enter or leave. He’d shouted the announcement of freedom as loud as he could, he said.
The following morning there’d been no sign of Warlow. Instead, Jenkins appeared at breakfast to announce the arrival of a magistrate and two constables. Powyss and the magistrate, his neighbour Valentine Tharpe, greeted each other with familiarity if also detachment. Tharpe was embarrassed, the constables rather less so, and as for Jenkins, Fox caught sight of a smirk disappearing round the side of his face.
They brought a warrant for Fox on a charge of criminal conversation with Mrs Clarke, to appear at the King’s Bench in two days’ time. There was no choice. Fox left for London immediately.
9
CATHERINE HATED the cold January mornings, rising when it was still night, splashing icy water on her face, shivering into her clothes. She tried to warm herself by rapid dressing, running downstairs. She hung over fires she lit, over the gradually heating water in the copper.
Annie had wished her a happy new year, but she saw little to look forward to in the year ahead. Annie had decided that marriage would make Samuel reasonable so she had something to be happy about. Except that she’d have to wait two more years until the new century when, Samuel said, he might be ready to propose. They seemed to think, absurdly, that marriage in 1800 would be more certain to guarantee happiness than in 1798.
There had been a cheerless Christmas. Cook’s intransigence
meant that certain food was still prepared and eaten and Jenkins, too, insisted on the traditional extra cleaning with threats should it be poorly done, yet everyone knew that Mr Powyss cared even less than ever about any of it, requiring only that supplies of brandy be obtained now that the cellars filled by his father were empty. They stuck to the old forms, knowing them to be cracked and hollow.
There was little spirit for the games and songs of previous years. Catherine refused to play the spinet. Jenkins grudgingly produced less primrose wine than usual while reminding them all that it was far superior to the bottles Boney was holding back. Samuel, more concerned about his master than anyone else was, tried to avoid Annie and bit his nails till they bled.
Abraham Price came merely to collect his food and drink, taking it back to his own place, from where, the day after Christmas, sounds of drunken bawling were heard. While there had been no more attacks on the house, it was known that ‘meetings’ were frequently held, and in the village and around the estate Price’s surliness was generally found to be threatening.
Warlow still cowered. His door had been lifted off its hinges and placed to one side, but it was thought wise to leave his barricade untouched. Cook in particular said she would not stand to hear the shrieking again which might follow from its dismantling. At first, notes from Mr Powyss had been sent down, reiterating that the experiment was over, that Warlow was free to return to his home, that he would still be paid, but there had been no response. Mr Fox, who might have given good counsel, had gone back to London.
Catherine was haunted by what she’d seen in the underground apartments. There was nothing with which she could compare it. It was not like the meanness and disorder of her childhood home, nor yet the miserable dinginess of the blind pauper’s hovel tacked on to one of their wattle and daub walls. This was wreck. Wreck and verminous squalor. Yet the man was living there. She was ashamed of her cowardice, should not have run away, should have stayed and talked to Warlow, persuaded him to come out. How foolish to have been scared like Annie! In fact she had made things worse, for it was then that Abraham had taken it into his head to make his stupid attack. And no doubt Cook’s invasion had finally convinced Warlow to remain where he was.
Breaking with Abraham and her disgust at what she perceived as his pointless, thoughtless display of hatred, risking his neck and those of his followers, had left Catherine dismayed. Under his influence her sense of humour had gradually worn away; her tendency to laugh whenever she could had evaporated. The corners of her mouth drooped and she knew she was beginning to look sour.
As a further consequence, she lacked occupation. Teaching Abraham, being fucked by him in return, had been a novel and satisfying way of using what free time she had. That is until his revolutionary frustrations transformed it all and her tremulous anticipation turned into trembling dread. Now she must spend more time in Annie’s company again, bored even more than before, but no longer inclined to shock her or make her giggle with embarrassment.
She rejected Abraham utterly. Refused to speak to him; made sure she was never out in the dark lest he waylay her. She tried not to think of the worst moments of the last months. Tried instead to dwell in that part of her mind that was newly charged with the ideas of Tom Paine, illuminated not by Abraham’s explosions but by what she’d read.
One day she thought to push a plate of food under the leaning legs of the table that formed the base of Warlow’s barricade.
‘Mr Warlow, your food is here,’ she shouted out to him. ‘I’m going back upstairs and shall collect your plates later.’
It surprised them all when, hours afterwards, clumping loudly down the stone steps so that he would be warned of her approach, Catherine found not only empty plates for her to collect, but also his full pot and a bundle of clothes so foul they had to be burned directly.
* * *
—
POWYSS WOKE AND SLEPT, woke and slept again. Samuel had been in, he knew, for the fire was lit, his clothes laid out. A line of pale light showed at the top of the shutters, but in January he wouldn’t expect more. His mouth was dry, his head hurt between the eyes, compelling him to close them again. The bed was warm; why get out of it? He was alone, but then once, before that time with Hannah, he’d rarely not been alone in this bed. That time! When was it, that time?
He had no reason to get up. When he surveyed his grounds in his head, wandering through them in his mind, he knew that everything would either live or die without his presence. Most growth was static now in any case. Everything that needed to drop leaves had done so, stood waiting. Endured whatever came. Anything that could burst through frozen earth would do it with or without him: snowdrops, aconites. The wintersweet would smell without attention in its southern corner. The glasshouses had been cleaned in December; the labourers were employed elsewhere or not at all. Price would potter, stoke the hothouse boiler, sharpen his pruning knife. Fire up his followers. Powyss was certain he’d not heard the last of rebellion.
Fox was in London, so he wouldn’t arise for him. He’d been relieved when he’d left, called to trial, quite downcast for a man so ebullient. He’d found him overpowering, though he was glad enough of his dealings with Price. What with the eruption in the underground apartments, the attack from outside and Fox’s incursion into his private rooms, he’d felt cornered like an animal. Only his bed was his own. It was surprising there’d been no letters from Fox, he thought. Occasionally he wondered what had happened.
Sudden sunlight shone through the crack where the shutters met. He rose, kicked a bottle and three phials back under the bed, went to the window and opened the shutters to inspect the sky, slipping back into his matutinal habit of years: to assess the state of the weather, its threats and promises, then plan the day’s horticulture accordingly. The cloud was high, driven by a south-westerly, patches of blue growing and shrinking rapidly, the sun appearing and disappearing. He felt its warmth through the glass, saw a frost melting. Looked down as he always did to check the Magnolia virginiana and thence out to the fields awaiting snow.
Someone was walking in the lane beyond the garden. Hannah with three of her children, two boys and Polly tugging at her hand, wanting them to turn into the garden. Hannah was looking straight ahead.
His heart surged.
‘Come! Oh yes, come now! I’ll get Samuel to call her in.’
As she neared then passed from his sight he perceived the slight change in her shape, an alteration in the way she moved. An explanation for her refusal to look towards the house, towards him, that sped him back to bed to drive his face into the pillow, bury himself entirely under the bedclothes.
* * *
—
A GREAT COLDNESS comes in from behind his wall of wood. At first he tries to close the door them’d opened. On his knees, half under the table. Poking with a broom through the narrow gap. Can’t. Hayfork’d do it. But no door’s there! Nothin!
Then it puts food there. The voice is the first she-devil, but he’s so hungry. And it don’t try to move his wall. Too heavy. A woman can’t. Even a woman devil.
Once afore there was Jenkins’s voice. They took him, sure to. After, papers come all written on. Three, four. Can’t be from Powyss. They must have took him. It were divils writ them.
He doesn’t read them; puts them on the fire. Won’t read no more. Words are bad. Weaver’s shuttle. Swift nor a weaver’s shuttle. Won’t read no more words.
The she-devil sometimes speaks. Kindly. Of course it’s a trap. She’s feedin him up to make a meal for other devils. When them do try to drag him down to hell. Them’ll try again sure to. But them won’t get in!
He thinks he’ll speak to it. So it knows he knows who it is. He sits behind the wall, out of sight. Waits in the cold. Hears it coming down the steps, opens his mouth and nothing comes out. Hears how it calls his name, piles up the plates. Just near him. Could jab it with a stick if he
dared. Hears its breathing. Shapes his lips into a word, but he can make no sound.
It goes back up the steps, shuts the door at the top. He tries to groan. His throat squeaks. When did he last speak? He called out when the last devil came in. Big skirts it had. Covering the hairy flanks. Saw its hoof. It must’ve laid a spell on his voice when he shrieked at it.
He crawls back to the grate. Sups beer from the jug and tries again. Coughs his throat clear, spits a fizz into the fire.
Voice comes, growling, squeaking. He repeats his curses over and over. Starts the Our Father, goes as far as he can. Devils can’t abide them words.
Church. Parson, he says. Steeple. Bells. Christmastide. Eastertide. Think hard! Holy Book. Jesus. Says them all again; counts off three for each on his claws. Gets rid of the spell.
He creeps back, sits and waits till it comes down the steps again. Practises beneath his breath. It comes. Puts plates down. He smells fish.
‘She-devil. Listen!’
‘Oh! What’s that? Are you there, John Warlow? Are you just there, behind all this, all this furniture? Do you want to speak? Do you want me to listen?’
‘She-devil!’ he hisses.
‘What’s that? Did you say devil?’
‘She-devil!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! There’s no such thing. I’m Catherine Croft. I work for Mr Powyss.’
Lie. Trap.
‘Devil!’
‘John, come out now! You have no need to stay there in the dark. In all that mess. I saw it myself. You surely cannot live in that.’
He growls.
‘Shall I bring you scissors to cut your hair and nails?’
Scissors! Could stab the next devil that comes in. Don’t answer. Wait.
‘If you won’t speak to me then write what you want, John Warlow. Oh. Cook’s calling me.’
He hears it go up the steps.
Is it a woman? No, no. Lies. Traps. Here he is safe. Nothin can get in.