by Alix Nathan
He’s dozing after eating the legs of a smoke-black, barely cooked rabbit. The wood store needs replenishing even if a third winter is not upon him yet, but he lets his eyelids drop, dreams that Hannah has returned, greets him, tells him she cannot stay, she must go back.
Opens his eyes to two children staring at him, fascinated. Watching him for some time, he suspects. The older child holds a thick stick. He stares back at them and for a while the looks lock as he wonders whose children they are, realising in dismay that unlike Aaron they cannot be trusted to stay silent. Which means he’ll have to go away at last, far away and soon.
At this, he groans aloud, begins to stand, and the girl screams in terror while the boy yanks her by the hand, clutching his cudgel, and they run off screeching over and over so that he hears it for minutes after.
Now they’ll come. They’ll all come and gawp and interfere and advise, those neighbours he always disliked, can barely remember. Now he can never be on his own with his remorse. He must go back, prepare himself and leave forever.
But he ran away, isn’t that what he did? He ran away like a child.
How complacent! To imagine that physical suffering would suffice! It comes to him that he must return. Return and face those very places where everything happened: library, bedroom, the Warlows’ desperate cottage, Hannah’s grave, for surely she was buried nearby.
He must face it all, face everything. Even Warlow, wherever he is.
It is an awakening.
* * *
—
IN THE CRAMPED KITCHEN of the master gardener’s cottage, Catherine is making bread. With her hands wrist-deep in dough, she tosses her still black hair out of her eyes. She’s thirty-six, will never marry now, abandoned the idea of marriage when she took on the Warlow children and when she gave birth to Abraham Price’s child, the fruit of his vicious triumph over her after he’d stolen the keys to the kitchens.
When she was carrying the child she dreaded giving birth to an infant with Abraham’s face, flailing its limbs, arching its body, uncontrollable. That had been a recurrent nightmare. She longed, prayed, inconsistently, for a girl whose character would be like hers, not his, who’d surely look less like him, more like her. Not that that was anything to wish upon a child. She’d had a sister, though, better looking than herself. Perhaps a girl child would resemble her. In the last weeks of her pregnancy she often thought of Hannah, wishing she were still alive, to talk to her freely, absorb her quiet wisdom.
Although Price made a brief return, he vanished completely before the child was born, and Catherine suckled and cared for the baby as though he were hers alone. She hoped that Price would never hear of the birth. Was relieved to find the child looked like no one in particular. She called him Tom after Tom Paine. Of course she wanted to forget the violent months with Price, but she found she was able to disassociate him from the book that had cheered and inspired her back then. After all, it was she who’d completed the reading of the Rights of Man first, and, she believed, understood it far better than Price ever had.
There was a surge of disapproval and gossip in and around the village about her involvement with the dangerous gardener, and her pregnancy with his brat, but it was cancelled out by admiration for her taking on the unfortunate Warlow children, bringing them up with patience. With affection. It was an odd family. Six children of all ages, one woman, no man, but never short of money, living in a small cottage, charmingly papered and furnished, with pieces that were rather too good for it. The baby was frequently watched over by Margaret, the oldest Warlow child, and, as he grew, played with by his erratic, adopted siblings. That so many children claimed Catherine’s attention was fortunate, enabling her to push little Tom’s dreadful conception to the very back of her mind.
Now the house is quiet. Margaret has become a housemaid in Valentine Tharpe’s nearby mansion and the two older boys are labourers in Hereford. Jack has never returned.
George and Polly, the two youngest, still live with Catherine. George is simple and Polly too good-natured to let go, Catherine feels, though they both find casual work on occasion. Tom, an unexpectedly contented child, is fussed over by the others, his days spent close to his mother. Her tasks are fewer, but there are still three children to care for, bread to make, hens to feed, washing, drying, mopping. In the evenings she reads with the children.
She makes a journey, leaving Tom in the care of the other two. For some time she’s thought of taking Polly to see her father, for according to Warlow she was his favourite child. Well, the one and only child out of the lot he liked. Polly is just old enough to withstand whatever shock there might be, but Catherine decides it’s wise to check on the conditions in which he lives first.
After his trial for Hannah’s murder and on the advice of the magistrate, Valentine Tharpe, to whom Powyss wrote before he left, Warlow was placed in an asylum in Kinnersford, some twelve miles from Moreham.
Catherine sets off walking then takes the post-chaise: it’s the longest journey she’s made since she left home, a disenchanted yet hopeful girl.
Kinnersford Hall is new, an ‘enlightened’ asylum, she’s been informed, a rather fine house among acres of woods and cultivated ground. The inhabitants are put to work in the fields, the flower and vegetable gardens and greenhouses. All eat three meals a day together and are expected to behave well and converse with each other in an orderly fashion.
Dr Josiah Grew greets her in his study. A small man, quite dwarfed by piles of books and busts on pedestals, he shakes her hand, his eyes darting impertinently over her face and body. He doesn’t meet enough women who aren’t mad, he reminds himself.
‘Please be seated, Mrs Croft.’ It’s simpler for Catherine to be thought married. ‘You have come to see John Warlow. May I ask in what way you are related to him?’
‘I am no relation.’
‘Ah. What is your interest then?’
‘I have brought up his children these last two years.’
‘I see.’
Catherine strongly dislikes the way Dr Grew’s eyes flit about her, settling finally on her mouth. Now I know what it’s like to be a bowl of cream put down for the cat, she thinks.
‘It is not you who are paying his fees, Mrs Croft, and as he’s here for the rest of his life I cannot quite see the purpose of your visit.’
‘I thought I might bring his youngest daughter to visit her father and wondered if that would be a suitable thing to do. I’d like to be able to see him if possible.’
‘You will have passed Mr Warlow on your way to the house.’
‘Oh! Where?’
‘At present he works in the vegetable gardens.’
‘But I walked past the vegetable gardens and saw no one that looked like him.’
‘His appearance is vastly different from when he arrived. I take it you saw him when he was released from his underground apartments?’
‘I saw him before that. It was not release, doctor. He would not come out, you know.’ Dr Grew’s inspection of Catherine becomes intense. He’s pretty sure he’s guessed who she is. Warlow’s account of himself was incoherent; yet as always with the insane, there was a story to be found, its details forming their own logic.
‘As to Mr Warlow’s appearance we could not keep him in that condition of course. Upon arrival his hair and beard were shaved. The nails on both hands and feet were cut with great difficulty. You understand that we use no manacles here, but Mr Warlow was reluctant at first and we found it necessary to hold him down and cut his maculated clothes from him. His verminous and scabrous state required much bathing and the application of leeches.
‘Throughout these procedures I addressed him with firmness but without harshness, in accordance with the latest practice, particularly as described by Drs Ferriar and Pargeter. For insane persons much resemble children, Mrs Croft. They respond to kindness.’
‘And of course, all this was done in the first place in semi-darkness, since Mr Warlow had lived for so long without daylight.’
‘But now he’s out of doors!’ Catherine protests.
‘Yes. However, we have seen to it that he wears spectacles with darkened glass and will always do so. Moreover, he keeps his own room dark, very dark. I see you are much concerned about him, Mrs Croft.’ She’s coming, coming.
‘In the last weeks of his life underground I took him his meals three times a day and we would often speak to each other.’
‘Ah, Mrs Croft, then you are Catherine!’ He knew it; oh, how he loves an emotional scene! ‘At first we had much difficulty in making Mr Warlow eat, for he’d say always that Catherine would bring him his meal. We were obliged to, to…’
‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ Poor Catherine remembers it all so well and Dr Grew finds it necessary to shoot round his desk and comfort her, holding her against his expensive velvet jacket.
But it’s not for this that Catherine has come. She wriggles out of his grasp.
‘Please, can I see John Warlow and judge for myself whether Polly could stand to see him?’
‘Or whether he could stand to see her.’
‘Of course, that’s so.’
‘Indeed, Mrs Croft, and so you shall.’ He rises, his hand resting on a pile of impressive new books. ‘Join us for dinner and you will be able to observe Mr Warlow for yourself. You will also witness the orderly behaviour of all our patients as well as savour the excellent quality of the cooking here. It will be quickly apparent to you that after some early difficulties Mr Warlow has become calm, cooperative and content through the Kinnersford regime and by working with the soil as he was wont.’
* * *
—
THE DOOR IN THE WALL lies on the verge. Powyss goes straight into the gardens, stepping through knee-high grass and tall nettles drying after springs and summers of rampant growth. Picks his way to flower beds just discernible beneath smothering weeds. Asters, rudbeckia, coreopsis, Phlox paniculata, penstemon, all have lost the battle: things rank and gross possess it merely, he can’t help but think. He passes skeletal glasshouses, glassless, the hothouse open to wind and rain, crouching cold frames, cold.
Most of the lower lights in the house have gone, too, smashed and roughly boarded over by someone, the main door streaked black where flames failed to catch. At the back he pushes open the door to the kitchens. Dank, denuded except where birds have nested. Abandoned by mice and rats.
Above, the main rooms are quite empty of furniture and carpets, and random wounds to doors and walls indicate violent attacks with implements of some sort. His collection has gone: Apulian vases, marble busts, engravings, fossils, Vesuvian lava. Stolen and sold or simply looted? Is there a trophy on every cottage mantelpiece: a Roman praefericulum, an erotic statuette? Do farmhands eat at elegant tables, bear the moral of Dutch fruit and flies?
Neither microscope nor telescope. His mother’s ghostly portrait still hangs, though at a mad angle: he’s not surprised it hasn’t been taken, it’s enough to scare a simple mind. Papers, pamphlets, torn pages cover the floor; yet many books remain on the shelves, some powdered with mould, their pages cockled. Books have no value for raiders who can’t read, he thinks. He feels a muted joy: he’s not seen a book since he left. Of course they’re part of the life he discarded in despair, but sometimes, since then, trying to sleep in bitter cold or axing till his back ached, he caught himself longing for print in which to lose himself, listening to written voices that surfaced from his memory.
They’ve been upstairs, too, the invaders. He closes windows, opened presumably for the heaving out of desks and other large pieces, and through which snow and rain have blown and leaves gathered in drifts. The bedroom was stripped, the bed frame alone remains.
He clears a space by the fireplace, pushing aside leaves and broken glass. His mind is blank with hunger: he curls up on the floor and sleeps.
* * *
—
THE DINING ROOM at Kinnersford Hall glows with late afternoon light. Eleven men and a woman are already seated at the long table when Dr Grew stands aside with exaggerated courtesy for the entry of Mrs Croft.
A polite nodding of heads takes place as he introduces his visitor and Catherine, seated on his left, soon identifies Warlow staring at his plate on the other side of the table. He’s too far away for her to speak easily to him; on the other hand Grew’s view of her face as she watches Warlow could not have been more perfectly angled by a billiard player.
Warlow certainly looks odd with his large features, squamous skin, close-cropped hair and eyes hidden behind small dark spectacles, the lenses smoke-coloured. Although his huge bulk seems awkward in his formal dress, he sits patiently waiting for his meal, perhaps willing it to appear upon his plate. He speaks to neither of his neighbours, nor to a fashionably dressed, florid woman sitting opposite him.
As in every superior house in England at four-thirty on this day, footmen and a butler bring in dish after dish and place them around the table. Covers are removed, Dr Grew carves and all help themselves from plates passed politely from one to another. Almond soup, mutton cutlets, ham, beef olives, jugged hare, celery and cardoons are succeeded by a fresh cloth and a second course of pigeon, roast duck, custards, stewed pears and jelly. The butler pours very small quantities of thin, dry port.
‘Now you can see what a fine table we keep here, Mrs Croft,’ says Grew in a loud voice.
‘The jugged hare is delicious,’ Catherine replies politely.
‘Whoop, Jug, I love thee,’ sings out a thin, tragic-faced man.
‘Mr Stone has acted before His Majesty, you understand,’ Grew says. ‘He will quote you from any number of plays.’
‘Tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited.’
‘You always say that!’ the florid woman protests. ‘Tell us about your life in Drury Lane.’
‘Drury Lane, Bury Lane, Fury Lane, Newry Lane,’ a low voice intones, ‘youry lane, myry lane, fiery lane, diary lane, hirey lane, spirey lane, LIARY LANE.’
‘Thank you, thank you, Mr Furlong, that is enough.’
‘The ear trieth words as the mouth tasteth meat.’
‘Dr Hunter was a renowned preacher in his time, Mrs Croft,’ says Grew, referring to this last speaker. ‘He has a saying for every occasion. Isn’t that so, Mr Warlow?’
Warlow looks up, unsure who has addressed him.
‘I said Dr Hunter always has a saying for us, does he not?’
‘Ah,’ Warlow grunts, looking down at his plate again. But Grew is not to be put off. Mrs Croft must see how civilised he is.
‘These are vegetables you have grown in the kitchen garden, eh, Mr Warlow? The celery, the cardoons.’
‘Doons, spoons, moons, boons, loons, noons, runes, tunes, dunes, Junes…’
‘Mr Warlow,’ Catherine breaks into the incantation. ‘Is there a cat in this house?’
‘How prescient you are, Cath, er, Mrs Croft,’ says Grew. ‘I have heard that Mr Warlow does often take a cat upon his lap at rest times.’
Warlow looks up when Catherine first speaks. Ignoring Grew, she asks him: ‘Does the cat like fish, John?’
Now Warlow stares towards the voice with his strange little black spectacles and all fall silent, forks poised, mouths agape. It must be a rare occurrence for him to speak. Although his eyes cannot be seen, his face begins to contort, his mouth to twist with the effort of remembering, of placing the voice, of summoning up an answer. Catherine suddenly regrets that she’s spoken. The sound of her voice, which was more or less all that he knew of her, might provoke him in some unfortunate way.
>
Finally he gives a groan.
‘I hates fish,’ he says.
‘Oh, I cannot abide fish,’ says the florid woman. ‘It does not agree with my constitution at all.’
‘Madam,’ says an earnest man with sandy hair, ‘I shall correct you, for a fish is in no position either to agree or to disagree with you, it having neither speech nor learning, nor any command of logic. Moreover, it having been cooked, its brain or seat of learning, even if it possessed learning, which, as I said, it does not, would have been rendered inactive. And as to your having a constitution, with which the fish might agree or disagree, there I must correct you again, a constitution being rightly an ordinance or decree, the form of government used in any place or the law of a Kingdom and as to your being a Kingdom, Madam…’
There’s a prolonged growl from Warlow, to whom everyone turns. Is he ill? He clears his throat. They wait.
‘Words,’ he says with disgust. Then he stabs a piece of roast pigeon and chews it vigorously.
So the meal continues until everything has been eaten, all disperse to their rooms and Catherine walks off to collect the post-chaise. Warlow is well fed, clean, neatly dressed in his black coat and white waistcoat, she thinks to herself. He’s not ill treated like people used to be in the old madhouses. However much she dislikes Dr Grew, Kinnersford is unquestionably calm, well run and, my goodness, full of grand furniture and paintings! She can’t help but recall Moreham House as it once was. Bumping along in the coach, she wonders if they dine like that every day in Kinnersford. Grew is determined to impress, that’s easy to see. Yet they all look healthy enough; it’s apparent that no one is starving and all seem quite used to these occasions.