More Sport for our Neighbours

by Ronald McGowan

  Thus, with one astute stroke, I freed myself from all the inconveniences of packing, of dealing with feminine objections, of retracing my steps only to have to repeat them again, and all the other annoyances which an immediate return to Sunderland would have involved, and settled down to complete my journal for the day, and to contemplate the prospect of two whole days at liberty in an ancient and unharvested library

  Chapter Thirty-one : The Patrimony of St. Cuthbert

  What a joy those two days were! Two whole days of uninterrupted study! I had long since given up hope of such luxuries, and, now that I found myself with so much time on my hands, I was almost overwhelmed, at first, by the thought. To have the run of a library in which one might reasonably expect to find the collected wisdom of the early English saints, of Cuthbert, Bede, Aidan – aye, and Hilda, let us not forget Hartlepool. The ‘Patrimony of St Cuthbert’, Durham had been called in olden times, the last refuge of the relics of the northern saints against the marauding Danes. And no research to speak of had ever been done into its great collection of manuscripts and incunabula. I found myself almost quivering in my excitement at the prospect.

  This did not last very long, however. The sight of a pile of old manuscripts, perhaps untouched for hundreds of years, full of who knew what hidden wisdom, was not something that would let me be idle. My discussions with Mr Potts, and our continuing correspondence, had left me with a good idea of which scrolls and codices to examine, and I started upon them with a right good will, full of such hope and enthusiasm as I had not expected to suffer again.

  The hope and enthusiasm had faded somewhat by the end of the first day’s travails, with nothing of any great interest to show for them, but the good will was still as strong as ever, and a brisk walk along the river bank in the fading sunshine of a summer’s evening, followed by a wholesome meal and a good night’s sleep, lulled rather than disturbed by the murmuring of the river outside my window, set me up for another day’s labour to be entered on, if not with any great expectations, at least with some faint semblance of optimism.

  Optimism was needed, too, for I should be back in the chains that bind a family man the following afternoon, and by the time that all other readers were beginning to show signs of readiness to leave, I had still discovered nothing out of the ordinary. By now the light, never very strong in the corner which had been assigned me, was no longer conducive to the close study of crabbed, gothick handwriting.

  To make matters worse, I was interrupted in the afternoon, by Potts himself, who would prose on about how lucky he had been to find that I was in town, and what a fine dinner he was looking forward to at the Dean’s, and how I must come with him next time. Why is it that everywhere I go fools and mooncalves spring up to hinder me? But I suppose he meant well, and I did my best to be polite.

  The sensible thing would have been to set greater store on preserving my eyesight than on the off chance of some scholarly triumph, but I fear that sensibility – in either sense of the word – has never been my forte. This was my last chance – my very last chance, I told myself – to ensure a ‘nomen vivus per ora virorum’, and I must not let it slip. I called for candles, and more candles as the light continued to fail, and still more, until at last my desk was a mass of candles, surrounding a small space where I pored over crumpled parchment well into the night, so overpowering had my obsession become.

  And then I found it. I did, I found it. A trick of the light on a page I had previously consigned to the outer fringe of dullness, some monastery laundry-list, was transformed by the flicker of a candle into the greatest treasure I had ever held in my hand.

  A flicker of a candle, that was all it was, but it made all the difference, bringing out the faint marks between the lines of the sheet that I was about to consign to the rubbish heap. Faint marks between the lines on a sheet of parchment are the sort of thing that every textual critic dreams of. They betray the palimpsest, the sheet of vellum that has been scraped to a vaguely clean state and used again when its original significance has been forgotten.

  I was onto them faster than any dog would chase a rabbit, tracing their faint outlines, coaxing sense out of their smudges, tracking them from one sheet to the next.

  I was dimly aware of the light failing, so that only the glow of the candles was left, but I was aware of it only in so far as it meant that I needed to move the candles nearer to my work to make out what I was seeking. I was even more vaguely aware of faint noises in the background, repetitive, even insistent at first, until they, too, passed away, and I was left with the pure knowledge, that none had seen for what it was for a thousand years or more.

  I copied it all onto my sheaf of paper, too, every last word of it, and rejoiced to myself that it was all there, intact and pristine.

  It was only then that I became aware of a voice repeating my name.

  “Mr Bennet?” it said, “Mr Bennet? Are you all right? Are you quite well?”

  For the first time in I know not how long, I looked up from my desk, to see an old friend, himself looking not too steady on his feet, and sounding a trifle slurred in his speech.

  “Why, Potts!” I cried, “Just the man I should have wished to see! But how came you here at this moment of triumph?”

  “Are you sure that you are quite well, Mr Bennet?” he repeated. “The servants have been trying to get you to leave for hours now, so that they could close up. None of them dared to disturb you, they said, you looked so fierce, but one of them recollected that I was a friend of yours, and that I was dining with the Dean tonight, and sent to ask me to come and take you home. I should have come sooner but the Dean insisted that we should finish the bottle of port that we had just started before I leave. It was only our third bottle, so I could not in all conscience refuse, and the Dean does have the most excellent port, and there was no denying him, but, excuse me, I find I must sit down.”

  “I am perfectly well, sir,” I replied, “and what is more I am triumphant. Yes, sir, that is what I am, I am triumphant. I have found it, sir, I have found that missing text to which you referred me all those years ago. Here it is sir, here it is.”

  And I held out the parchment, which he received in a hand that trembled, as well it might.

  “But this is no more than a monkish washing- bill,” he said.

  “That is all it is now,” I agreed, “but what was it before? Look more closely, sir, hold the candle closer and look between the lines. Look here in particular sir. You are conversant with the uncial script, and with the futhark. Look closely, and tell me what you see.”

  He peered at it, holding it nearer the light. “I have it now!” he cried, “a palimpsest!”

  “A palimpsest indeed! And such a palimpsest! Read it sir, read it aloud so that I may hear it with my own ears from someone else, and be assured that my senses do not fail me.”

  “Very well, let me see, what do we have here? B, E, D, A, E……Bedae Venerabilis, de Elementis Paganis apud Somnium Crucis. The Venerable Bede’s treatise on Pagan Elements in the Dream of the Cross.”

  “Say, rather, ‘in the Dream of the Rood’,” I interrupted him. “This is it, sir, this is the proof of that connection between paganism and the earliest Christian practices in this country that I have been seeking all my life.”

  Potss’s eyes widened, looking more glassy than ever, and he rose, unsteadily to his feet.

  “Give you joy, sir!” he cried. “This is marvelous news, truly marvelous! Give you joy, sir!”

  And he spread his arms to embrace me. In that gesture, lay our – lay my - undoing.

  For, along with his arms, he opened his hands, forgetting, for the moment, that one of them contained a three-branched candlestick. The latter fell with a clatter onto the pile of parchments, which, tinder-dry as they were, flared up at once.

  I was on them immediately, batting foolishly at them with my bare hands, which cost me some pain and proved wholly ineffectual.

  Potts, in a way, displayed more presence of
mind, which was only to be expected since he was not so intimately concerned. After his first aghast stare, he seized the ink bottle and poured the liquid upon the flames, reducing them sufficiently for the remaining embers to be snuffed out with our sleeves.

  Alas, it was too late! The palimpsest, which had lain undisturbed for a thousand years and more, and which contained the incontrovertible proof of all my theories, was now a heap of smouldering ashes.

  I stared at them as if expecting the arising of the Phoenix.

  “But wait,” cried Potts, “perhaps all is not quite lost yet. Your notes! Your transcription! I can testify to viewing the original, and that they are a true record. Perhaps that will suffice for provenance, and at any rate you will still have your information.”

  A thorough search through the remaining papers soon disabused us, however. My notes – and my transcription – remained to us, indeed. But they were a soggy mess of sodden papers, flooded with indelible black ink, completely illegible.

  “Write it all down again!” cried Potts. “Quickly, before you forget.”

  “There is no need,” I replied. “ There is no point. Every word, every symbol is graven in my memory. I may reproduce them at my leisure whenever I care to. But it will do me no good. Without the source they are useless. Men will only say that I fabricated it all myself. You may swear on a stack of bibles, that you saw the original before it was destroyed, and, no matter how many times you may swear, they will give me no more credit for my discovery than they give to Mr MacPherson and his Ossian.”

  By the waters of Dunelm I sat down and wept.

  Chapter Thirty-two : The Consolations of Family Life

  Of how I returned to Riverside Cottage that night I have no recollection. I assume that I owe it all to Potts, but the next thing I remember is being shaken awake in my bed there by the ancient Mr Wright.

  “Best get up, Mr Bennet,” he creaked. “I think your Missus is coming down the lane, with Captain Wickham and all, and I doubt she’ll be any too pleased to see you in the state you’re in.”

  A quick look in the mirror revealed his doubts to be all too well-founded, but not even the prospect of facing Mrs Bennet could prevail to make me do any more than wash my face and throw on a powdering gown.

  She did not neglect to make the most of the occasion, however.

  “Just look at you, Mr Bennet!” she cried immediately upon catching sight, without staying for greeting or salutation. “What do you think you are about, appearing like that? And at this time of the day too! It is always the same. Men are mere savages without women to take them in hand and tell them what to do.”

  This was but the opening salvo of the first broadside of what she had to say on the subject, of course. She took care to make the most of the opportunity while it presented itself. Mrs Bennet has ever been one to make the most of her opportunities, although not always in perhaps the most fortunate of ways.

  I endeavoured to explain the cause of my distressed state, but I might just as well have been calling spirits from the vasty deep.

  “Pooh, Mr Bennet”, was her retort, “such a fuss to make over an old piece of paper! I am sure there must be a dozen more where that came from. I begin to wonder what you have been up to without your wife to look out for you. Had we had a son travelling with us, I should have sent him after you when you failed to return that first night, and gave us all that extra trouble of seeing to your bags and things. ‘Go and find out what your father is doing,’ I should have said, ‘and tell him to stop it at once’, but, of course, there is no doing that sort of thing when there are only daughters in the case.”

  “Had there been a son in the case, my dear,” I replied, “we should not have been travelling in the first place. Had there been a French Spy in Hartlepool, we should not have been here in Shincliffe. Had the moon been made of green cheese, we should have no fears of starvation. I have just suffered a very great loss, madam, a very great loss indeed, to all my hopes for futurity for the name of Bennet, and you prate to me of packing valises and transporting mantuas and imaginary offspring! I do not deal in hypotheses, madam, but in facts, and the fact is….”

  At this point I was cut short by her tears, as had always been the likely outcome, had I only stopped to consider it. When a lady unsheathes her ultimate weapon, there is, of course, no more to be said. I should have known better than to have attempted coherent explanations. Lizzie might have understood me, or Jane, but now….

  Further ruminations on this point were, however, curtailed by the entry of Wickham and my daughters, giving rise to the inevitable sighs, hard looks and reproachful glances as Mrs Bennet was led away for comforting.

  For my comfort I was left with but Wickham to look to, and all he had to say was the sort of “The ladies, God bless them!” platitude that I had heard a hundred times before. As for expecting him to be capable of telling the difference between a palimpsest and a palfrey, I had not the heart to make enquiry.

  It was not, then, the happiest time I have spent, those last days at Shincliffe, and I will not deny my relief when they proved to be quite short.

  It was yet another letter that occasioned the brevity of our stay. This one came from Pemberley, and had been written by Lizzie. It seems to be my destiny, of late, to lead letters a merry dance, as it had had to follow us from Newcastle to Sunderland, and from Sunderland to Shincliffe. Had Hartlepool been included on its itinerary I dare say we should be waiting for it yet. Had it arrived a few days earlier, I should never have gone to Durham, nor met with the triumphs and disasters I found there. How strange is destiny! But let us not deal in hypotheses.

  We had scarce been at the cottage for a week, long enough for my daughters to tire of riverside walks, and quite long enough for them to discover that Durham City was ‘so inconvenient, with all those narrow, winding streets, and every one of them so steep, and no men about but clergymen, no officers at all’, when this portentous missive came upon us.

  “My Dear Parents,” it began, “ Fitzwilliam and I send you our dearest love, and in this sending both Jane and Bingley wish to be joined. It is to be comprehended that the destination of said love is also to be assumed to include our dear sisters, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia, our dear brother Wickham, and dear little Francis Fitzwilliam. Having thus avoided forgetting to include anyone in the warmth of our greeting (unless, indeed, by now your household also includes Tib the cat, Toby the dog or any other addition previously unknown, in which case please inform me as soon as may be, so that appropriately contrite apologies may be offered) it may now be supposed that all the formalities have been satisfied and we may proceed to the meat of our news.

  Jane has specifically requested that I remind Papa of the ‘little chat’ he had with Bingley before you all left Garthdale, and to tell him that it has proved truly wondrous in its efficacy, the signs of which she has noticed both in him and in herself.

  She remains determinedly mysterious about the exact nature of these signs, but I think I may hazard a guess as to what they are, and not too hazardous a guess neither, for, I too, have noticed them, both in my beloved sister and in myself.

  In short, we both of us have reason to believe that dear little Francis Fitzwilliam is about to be blessed – or cursed, for who can tell - with two little cousins, and we join in begging you to return to us as soon as you may find it convenient so that we may rejoice with each other on the blessing or condole upon the curse as the event shall testify.

  In this invitation, we both wish to make it particularly clear, that you are all of you included, including all whose name may not at present begin with a B. Mr Darcy at the moment is making some little difficulties about the accommodation of persons whose name begins with a W, but I do not expect them to be insuperable. It may be that such persons may require to be lodged in the West Wing, but if so, you may be sure that a West Wing will be built, although we are not at present in possession of such an article, and that it will be at least the equal of all existing accommodatio
ns at Pemberley.

  Please come. Please come, all of you, that we may be all together again at this time. Come as quickly as you can. If there are any difficulties with Wickham’s post, let him come as soon as he may, but do not wait upon his coming. I am mad to see you all, and I am sure Jane is too.

  But I will say no more just now, for I must work upon the West Wing, and leave you to conjecture whether a maternity smock or a bricklayer’s apron will be the attire in which you will soon be greeted by

  Your loving daughter and sister,

  Elizabeth Darcy.”

  Cats among pigeons were nothing, of course, once this missive had been received. All other concerns went immediately out of the window, including the cloud under which Wickham still languished.

  “Oh, that will all sort itself out soon enough, I make no doubt,” was Mrs Bennet’s rejoinder at her son-in-law’s protest that he could not leave Shincliffe until his position in the regiment was clarified. “There are plenty of other regiments, after all. I am sure Mr Darcy will find you something in another one if they will not have you here any more, although I am sure that no-one else could have done any more than you did at that dreadful Hartlepool place. Why! Mr Bennet was there too, was he not, and he has nothing but praise for your conduct.”

  Lydia might have provided an obstacle, but she proved to be so delighted at the prospect of at last being admitted to the glories of Pemberley that all thoughts of leaving her ‘darling George’ behind were very quickly suppressed, if, indeed, they occurred in the first place, for I have long since given up conjecturing as to what goes on in Lydia’s head.

  Her husband, understandably, was not so delighted, but the suggestions he made as to keeping the family together until his fate was settled were largely ignored, as those of the man generally are in marriage, whatever may be said about the ‘weaker’ sex.