by H C Turk
Chapter 7
Dark As The Devil
What confidence could a young lady have in a tutor who smelled of snuff? Into her house the Rathel person brought a sinning woman who seemed a tall version of herself, though not so reeking of vengeance. No less diabolical was this Mrs. Cliffton, however, who upon espying me wished to insert a stick through my spine.
“We shall begin with proper sitting, in that this positioning is easier to correct than standing, which requires one’s weight to be balanced as well as properly situated.”
Apart from snuff, I sensed a bit of boasting in this woman, since the member of the audience she most desired to impress was her employer. Unfortunately, her pupil was the victim to be sacrificed on the altar of her expertise.
Sit I did, having been directed to a hard wooden chair made all of edges, Mrs. Cliffton immediately displeased because I was comfortable.
“Miss Alba,” she declared to both me and Rathel, “you do not sit as a lady. You have dropped onto that chair as though an injured cat. A lady sits delicately poised, not collapsed.”
The woman then roughly grasped my arms to pull me upward, replacing myself with hers in demonstration. She sat upon the very edge of the chair, about to fall off, I felt; though Cliffton alleged with a prideful smell that her position was exactly correct, a statement I had to append.
“For a lady, then, a chair is not a furniture for comfort, but a perch as though for a bird by which she clings with her buttocks.”
So flabbergasted was Mrs. Cliffton that some moments of arrested breathing passed before she was able to state how shameful and godless was my speaking to mention so low a body part amongst decent folk. Then Rathel with no pique explained my wilderness background, and et cetera, to which I replied:
“And sorry I am, mum, for mentioning the word ‘perch’ before my betters. And in advance of the sinister deed I herewith additionally apologize for such a great slip as I might make in which I use the term ‘bleeding arse’ instead of buttocks, and thereby cause the lot of us peers some flipping embarrassment.”
The next tutor was shorter and smoked a pipe, though not in the vicinity of employers. And though she seemed more of an intellectual Elsie than an elongated Amanda, this person did manage to insert the yardstick down my clothing. In advance of Mrs. Natwich’s arrival, Rathel and I had brief discourse wherein I again was offered employ as chambermaid, a position I would retain a lifetime if I preferred untoward humor to a minimum of cooperation.
Natwich determined my curriculum. British history would befall me, as well as marriage contracts, the laws and geography of England, and et cetera. Of immediate import was the verbal realm.
“Your speaking is remarkable for one unschooled, Alba,” Mrs. Natwich assessed. “Nevertheless, your enunciation is too harsh and quick, and your accent is only marginally couth.”
“And cor, love,” I replied, “me and the mum would praise yer bones to make me mouth fit a lady’s face.”
Rathel then calmly turned to Elsie, whose only purpose in dusting the library was to be part of the audience. The disgusted servant flicked her duster in my direction as though it were mine to take. Both these women I well understood. Sitting prettily I learned with a speed to please both my tutor and my flipping mum.
• • •
“And I’m saying the mistress has a treat for you which you’d best be enjoying in a pleasant manner, else I’ll be flogging you with bacon or other item you find wicked.”
“Thank you ever, gracious miss, for your own most pleasant greeting, one of such incomprehensible content as to have flogged my sensibilities. Hereafter, however, you might feign the identity of a normal person and convey the simple message that surely your plain mentality contains.”
“And bless you, lass, for calling me the simpleton,” Elsie replied with no rancor, such emotional distress scarcely available between us familiars. So comfortable was this woman in my presence that she no longer stood starkly vertical as she did before household guests. With me, Elsie constantly rubbed her fingertips on her white, white apron, a trait of informality, not tension.
“And a gracious continued acknowledgment I supply you and shall provide until you might eventually manage to—”
“What I’m saying now, talking lass, is that the mistress has an offer, and I am sent to tell you. Into the city she’s going to attend to business, and you’re to be traveling with her if you choose. I’m also saying that some cathedral is involved.”
Startled was the servant to see the bored youth lurch into an attentive state. But Elsie was not so taken aback as to allow me to depart without the proper cloak and hat, correct attire for a lady on business in London.
• • •
Never before had I stepped through the front doorway. Cooperation was the source of this false feeling, for I had become part of the household and would be allowed to exit without Rathel’s fearing my escape. As I moved to the covered stoop—in its columnar construction a tiny amphitheater for guests’ collection—I scarcely noticed Amanda waiting by a public coach, looking toward me along with the driver. My first step in the sunlight brought the impression of my never having left through this door, when in fact I had never departed while fully cognizant. My fleeing in a rush past Rathel returned as recollection to strike me with my second step, strike me as though sudden fear or surprising joy. That desperate escape I now found unreal, for though I had been gone days, scant memory had I of standing, sleeping, existing. That flight seemed strangely trivial, significant yet lacking influence over my further life. The falseness of that fleeing era dismayed me, for it was a separate life more real though less distressing than any dream of mine in which Mother died. And I wondered of unperceived existence, for how true is the life of a person unaware? How does God consider a human life unfelt by that human? How responsible can people be for acts obscured by ignorance, unforgotten days whose events are less real than the curiosity to follow?
As though I had tutored myself in that dull sort of living, I barely sensed those next moments as I praised great God for having answers to questions I could only contemplate. What answer had He for the following time in which I recognized occurrences but felt nothing? Felt nothing as I walked across the green frontage between Rathel’s townhouse and the street. Felt nothing as I stepped through the open gate in the privet hedge, nothing as I walked to the coachman and his waiting vehicle. Felt nothing as the male held out his arm toward me. Felt no ignorance, though I knew not his intent. Felt nothing as Lady Amanda grasped my hand and placed it upon the sinner’s wrist. Felt no revulsion from touching a man. But what state had taken this witch to allow her to step inside the coach with no further prompting? Then the lady joined me, and I began a better life, for thereafter I was able to perceive. Beside me, Rathel—beyond her smell of sinners’ eating and social coatings—emitted an odor of satisfaction, for somehow she was pleased. And I found no shame in having satisfied a sinner, accepting God’s likely interpretation that we were all the same, all His, even those diabolically manipulative somehow ignorant in living.
• • •
“The business I have is signing a paper with the manager of a landholding. Significant for you is the locale. Nearby is a cathedral. No, not St. Nicholas, but one called Christ’s Cathedral, whose architect is the ancestor of St. Nicholas’s builder. I presumed you would be interested to see how such constructions are fabricated.”
“How odd that such tremendous creations are formed by persons who are merely men,” I responded with improved awareness.
“‘Architect’ is the term for a person who designs buildings, even as Miss Elsie designs her needlework. The name of the ‘mere man’ designing Christ’s Cathedral is Edward Denton. For yourself you might decide the coincidence of his being father to your future husband.”
Again my living became incomprehensible. Not St. Nicholas Cathedral, but another; not an extant building, but one being constructed; not by any man, but one whose son I was to kill.
And which of this man’s traits would be more special: that he could envision such a construction, or that he was so involved with Rathel that his family deserved ruination?
“If this journey finds you satisfied and unfleeing, you will again be allowed from the household,” Rathel stated. “Perhaps you might go with Miss Elsie to the park on our Feltson Street, or with her and Delilah to the farmers markets. I am not speaking of being contained by a coach, but walking. This you might enjoy. The markets with their produce are certain to interest you.”
“I would enjoy the park,” I told her, recalling my sight during that previous journey. And with that rejoinder, I began my interest in such ventures, for I found myself immersed in the current experience.
I found myself immersed in fear, found myself locked in a box above rolling wheels that cut the air with the sound of their flight. How appropriate for the spokes to be enclosed by hoops of metal, that most satanic material beloved by God’s oversouled, overbrained race. Those flailing spokes were the coach’s greatest danger, for I knew they would either fly away and penetrate my body or reach out and pull me into their circle to club me dead.
Unfortunately, this danger was definitive of city life. The carriage was a stampeding cabinet to crush pedestrians after one wrong step. Thinking of Elsie’s parent, I knew my sense of danger to be recognition, not imagination. No help were these horses that smelled of straightforward acceptance in their task, so accustomed were they to having strips of their brethren’s hides slapping them, surrounding them, as though being lashed to wooden posts and a tiny house were natural for any earthly creature. The greatest horror here was that these poor beasts were controlled by metal rods HELD IN THEIR MOUTHS, which they bit against as though pleased to be eating Satan’s meal. Drag the sinners in their furniture they did even as I dragged Mother and her rock through my dreams, and surely we would meet. I would be in London so long, I knew, that my sensibilities would equal these blasé horses’, and we would become one.
Rathel’s rods for stabbing dead animal parts were an equivalence here, and I knew that one bite of the holiest manna if supplied my mouth by the devil’s silver fork would set me to being a sinner, not merely living with them. Then, from my horrific mentality fit only for self-torment, I recognized that even then I was passing as a sinner. How long before I became not Rathel’s servant, but her sister?
Scarcely could I imagine being upset at the sinning characteristics of Jonsway considering London, which seemed multiple, connected Jonsways, each taller and more intense than the one I knew, the accumulation greater than even a youth’s bright imagination could envision. Rathel’s was a moderate ward of expensive dwellings, but in moments our box came to London’s variety. The streets seemed unlimited, a new one extending to each side with every blink as I peered from the coach. Cobblestone, brick, clay, and packed and powdery soil. Satisfying areas I viewed down many streets, greens or squares with trees and various natural growths. And the buildings themselves: high and low and painted and wooden and new and decrepit and stucco and stone. Red brick everywhere, occasionally yellow. Precise chalets there, tall townhouses with gables, fine homes for Rathel’s peers, shops and offices for their businesses and provisions, signs with names and numbers of all colors as though needlework of wood and glass made by a thousand Elsies.
I found the thousand Elsies, sinners dressed in coarse working clothes, men and women passing on the walkways and crossing streets, merchants in their stores, folks guiding wagons transporting brick and cockles and straw, furniture and printing presses and looms and tarpaulin-covered secrets. A street with grander structures held another sort of person, those whom Jonsway’s best surely imitated, women and foppish men with white and silver wigs piled as high as a dunghill, all with the social accouterments of parasols and purses and walking sticks. Brocade was another necessity in this realm of gaudy folks and coffee houses, the men with pants and patent shoes tight enough to hurt them and red stockings to hurt me from the sight, women with hoop petticoats to reshape their arses fashionably, their upper breast skin revealed, doubtless drawing more sexual distress than the common witch.
I felt so conservative. Elsie dressed me with no hoops, no breasts leaping outward, no patch applied to my cheek, no periwig squashing my scalp. Perhaps I was merely too young for such finery. Perhaps next year, immediately preceding my suicide.
I could smell these sinners in my mind, though not my nose, for their distance and London’s heat were impediments. Heat of accumulated people, of their devices rubbing together, of their persons rubbing together. Shouting people ran along that street, adults reeking of grave activities, one individual bending from pain. Quickly our coachman had his horses move us past that crime. How immoral were we to move so completely away that scarcely would our memories be affected?
Turning often, we gained a dirt roadway with persons less exalted of apparel. This locale was unkempt, with no bright signs, only faded letters, no dandies with wigs, only people who worked with bent backs. On this poor street, women from upper floors dumped their slop onto crass merchants below whose spiels had become tedious, peddlers licensed by city justices calling out the superiority of their merchandise sold from carts, men with stacks of news pamphlets explaining the nation for a ha’penny, men not so eager in their selling after receiving feces flying around them from the sky; therefore, on to the next corner.
Then came poor sinners so decrepit of face and figure they seemed witches, but witches do not beg. Poor sinners approached our fine coach when it slowed for great wagons ahead drawn by ungrand donkeys. Alleging to be crippled or permanently diseased, these poorfolk chased alongside Rathel’s coach, begging for coins to purchase healing, being honest laborers with godly spirits needing the opportunity in life that was financial medication. Rathel emanated a tremendous smell of superiority toward these persons, the coachman loudly calling for them to be off, else taste his whip and receive true injury fit their lazy, irresponsible lives. Nevertheless, the driver had a scent of understanding to accompany his shouting, for was his stature in society not nearer these beggars than his fare?
This area was so inspirational that before passing the last cripple, I turned with suddenness to Rathel to ask if we would be crossing Hershford Bridge. She answered in the negative. Thereafter, I lost the terror that had risen in me like water for drowning, but my emotions remained acute, akin to that initial intensity of my first step outside. Surely, a secret language exists to describe the varieties of peculiarity I could only feel, not elucidate. Had the sinners themselves a language for odd emotion? No, for the products inspiring my sensations were familiar to the sinners by being their work, their world. No queer terms are required to explain the common.
Though my sensitivity to the manipulated landscape around me persisted, not so definitively emotional was the balance of our journey. Passing a bridge caused me minor distress. Smelling an apothecary and a thick, secluded building reeking of men that Rathel termed Montclaire Prison aggrieved me little. But as we passed unoccupied stocks for punishment, I prayed great God that I would encounter no ducking pond. My attention was saved upon Rathel’s mentioning that our goal was upcoming. Expecting to see a new, huge cathedral in some unfinished state, my attention was ruined by a pile of rocks.
Since ancient compacts had promised God only limited land for His usage, the adjacent lots had been filled with sinners’ buildings for commerce, not worship. Therefore, we could not settle our box at a fond distance to view the creative act of pious, professional people grow from the ground as though a mountain issuing from Earth. Instead, we were subjected to the stress of men’s labors, for males were the prevalent element of this construction. Great wagons arrived full and departed empty of masonry parts and coarse sacks of the unknown. Mounds of soil and channels in the land were formed. Huge stones were cut and adjusted. All these activities were produced by sinning men, accomplished by sinning men who were guided by sinning men. Being unnatural, these workers did not emulate ants
gracefully working together for a communal accomplishment. These massive insects were loud and conflicting. Well-dressed superiors shouted at incompetent, lazy workers, while individuals pushing barrows of mortar interfered with groups sighting the land’s layout for whom an entire crew impatiently waited. God’s implements here were males, their greatest effort anxiety, their grandest products perspiration and noise. Near enough we were for a witch to smell them and feel their stress. The odor of their working seemed nearly a natural force, but the sights and sounds of their activities did not satisfy. Was I to infer St. Nicholas’s grandeur from this crude beginning?
Rathel seemed prideful. Perhaps she was merely perspiring herself. Observing past the mistress, I noted that this site was adjacent to the River Thames, whose far bank held much brush and trees. Though not a forest, might this be countryside? I asked Amanda of this unpopulated land.
“You view Gravesbury Reach, coarse, disheveled land of little value.”
Rathel turned, staring from the coach in a different direction. The mistress viewed a person, not a landscape. A man walking from the depths of the future cathedral had caught her interest. She mentioned that we might step out and stretch ourselves, and the boxed witch agreed. But upon exiting the coach, only I accomplished any stretching. Rathel merely stared at this expensively clad man until he noticed his audience. Then he could see nothing else. As though gaining a sight sought a lifetime, the man ignored his peers to stare at Rathel—and at me, stare as Amanda placed her arm across my shoulders, her scent one of gloating.
We entered the coach and departed. At some office, the mistress proceeded with her business, leaving me alone in the coach with her trust not to flee. Pleased she was to find me upon her return. During the journey home, some conversation transpired, but mostly the witch was tacit. The last thing said was a question from the mistress: As mentioned before, would I attend services with her at St. Nicholas Cathedral the upcoming Sabbath? Yes, I said, not fully certain of my decision. Yes, I said, agreeing with the sinner, with her world.