The Wilding

by Maria McCann

‘Go ask your precious Mathew Dymond,’ said my aunt. ‘He was the one – not me – that decided the child should never know. Oh, it might suspect, perhaps, with neither sisters nor brothers. Its stepmother is barren; the nearest she can get to a babe of her own is to deliver other people’s.’

  I sat down as if punched in the belly while my aunt stood over me and exulted.

  ‘Here’s a riddle!’ she exclaimed with diabolical jollity. ‘Riddle-me-ree, which would you be: the son of your supposed uncle, with a sister you’re already bonded to in love’ – the meaning she put into these last words turned me quite sick – ‘or a little keepsake from your mother’s army days, men swarming all over her like maggots on a dead dog? Really, there’s no knowing who spawned you!’

  Her mouth worked on, showering me with spittle, but I could no longer hear the words that distorted her lips. I felt like one sitting within a bubble or a crystal bowl, looking out upon the world: I was not connected with it. My body felt curiously light, as if at any moment I might take off and fly about the room, and there was a palpitation in my throat, or was it my heart?

  After a while I said, my voice seeming to come from far away, ‘I’m not my father’s son?’

  ‘You’re somebody’s,’ my aunt replied.

  Swaying like a drunken man, I got up from the table. ‘I’m Robin’s. He comes to me –’

  ‘Oh,’ my aunt cried contemptuously, ‘you flatter yourself!’

  ‘He’s not at rest – you, you should suffer such dreams!’

  ‘Perhaps I wish it,’ said my aunt with that dreadful smile of hers. I became aware of an added chill in the air, a dankness. I have said elsewhere that I am an enemy to superstition, and so I am, but I was afraid to remain any longer. Though I tried to walk slowly, I am afraid that by the time I reached the stairs I was going at a run.

  *

  As I emerged through the yard door my eyes watered: it had turned bright outside, the sky an icy cloudless blue. My father – I cannot help calling him that – stood by the shed door.

  ‘You took your time,’ he said, looking enquiringly into my face.

  ‘Home truths,’ I replied, hugging my arms to my body. The chill of that room seemed to have got into my bones; my aunt’s Perhaps I wish it whispered in my head, insidious as a curse.

  ‘You’re whiter than you were.’

  ‘I’ve had words with Aunt Harriet. I can’t tell you now,’ I cried as he put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Let’s be gone – gone!’

  We mounted the cart and turned out of the yard. Rose waved to me from the kitchen window but nobody else from the household bade us farewell. I looked back, until trees hid it from view, at the house where I had been conceived. Despite Aunt Harriet’s hateful words about maggots and dead dogs, words that turned me sick each time I recalled them, I knew I was Robin’s. It was as if my flesh had always known it; and besides, I had the Dymond hair.

  I tried not to think about my aunt’s festering mind, or about Tamar, and of course I could think of nothing else; those things, and the deception I had grown up in, were an agony to me.

  Father broke in on my silence. ‘Your mother didn’t want you to come here,’ he said when we were some little way along the lane. ‘She’ll be glad to have you home.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘She’s killing the fatted calf – leastways, opening the potted ham.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘And there’s something else, something I couldn’t tell you in the house: when you went back for Hob last night, Joan gave me another paper.’

  ‘Did she?’ I answered listlessly. For once I was not interested in Joan’s scribblings.

  Father slowed the horse and turned towards me. ‘Let’s have a look at you, child. Dear Christ, you’re green! We’re going back to Harriet’s.’

  ‘I’d sooner die,’ I said, and meant it.

  He stared. ‘Strong words! And you left that mess in her bed – why? What’s all this between the two of you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  My father now began to look grim. ‘Either you tell me or back we go.’ He raised the reins to make good his threat.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I burst out. ‘Only that my aunt tried to drown me in the hogshead.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ my father exclaimed.

  ‘She pushed me in.’ I told him of the dress, and the shift I had found dripping with cider. He listened in silence, his expression graver by the minute, and finally said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before we left the house?’

  ‘Because it can’t be proved. She’d only laugh in your face as she did in mine, and –’ I couldn’t bear that, I thought.

  ‘She admits it?’

  ‘Not in words, but she did it. She knows I helped them away.’

  ‘We’re going back this minute,’ Father said, and again made to turn the horse around.

  I laid a hand on his arm. ‘Wait. There’s more.’

  ‘More than attempted murder?’ he cried in exasperation. ‘Well, suppose you go on!’

  I could not think how to start. We sat staring at one another, our breath misting on the air, until I said, ‘It’s a long story. Let’s continue this way until you’ve heard it.’

  Father clicked his tongue and the cart rolled forward. He was bracing himself; though he tried to hide it, I knew him too well not to perceive the effort. I said, ‘I don’t know what names to give the people.’

  ‘You don’t know their names?’

  ‘No. Nor my own.’

  Father’s eyes flinched as if from a blow. I had seen that look of his before, when I accused him of keeping secrets from me. The innocent horse trotted on between the shafts as if no such thing as bastardy or incest existed in the world.

  At last I said, ‘Why did you move to Spadboro?’

  ‘It was a better house.’

  ‘It was to raise me away from Tetton Green.’

  My father let out all his breath in a sigh. For an instant I wished that I had not said anything, that I had let things lie and been as kind to him as he had been to me. However, it was done now and (I told myself) he had always been in possession of the truth, so that his kindness was from a position of strength, whereas I had been kept in chains of ignorance that I must break.

  He gave himself a curious little slap on the thigh, as some comfort a dog by patting it, before saying quietly, ‘If that’s what your aunt told you, it’s false. We moved to Spadboro before you were thought of.’

  ‘It’s no use, Father. She’s told me who I am.’

  His face darkened. ‘You mistook her.’

  ‘No. I’m the child of Robin and Joan.’

  ‘Harriet said that?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Then may Satan and all his crew roast her by turns.’ My father cut the horse with his whip. ‘You should’ve given her the lie!’

  ‘I couldn’t – can’t,’ I cried.

  ‘Can’t? Have you thought about your mother?’

  ‘What of her?’

  ‘She talks of nothing but your return.’

  We passed under boughs that tapped against our hats and powdered our shoulders with rime. There had been a frozen mist here, and the trees were spun into feathers. Their fragile brilliance made me wonder why, into the spotlessness of Creation, God had seen fit to introduce soiling, twisting, rampaging Man.

  ‘I do think of Mother,’ I protested. By this time I was close to tears and my voice betrayed it; Father must have heard but he turned his face away. ‘What am I to do?’ I wailed. ‘It’s not my fault!’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ he replied. ‘Every day we hoped to see you at home. No doubt you thought yourself a clever fellow, you and your letters! This is the fruit of that cleverness, and I hope you like the taste.’

  We sat thus wretched for some time, I weeping and Father refusing to pity me, until we were thrown together by the horse’s passing over some uneven ground, which obliged Father to place one arm around my shoulders. I seized hold of his hand, saying, ‘You’d f
orgive me if you knew how I long to be your son.’

  He at last permitted me to look him in the face, so that I saw that his anger had mostly gone off.

  I said, ‘I’ve brought all this on myself – and on you and Mother. I know that.’

  Father kept his arm round my shoulders as the cart jolted forward.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘God’s over Satan, now and forever="1em" aliuo;

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘And so it is. The wickedness at End House brought forth the love your mother – Barbara, I mean – has borne you all these years. Look at it in that light.’

  I wiped my face. ‘But – forgive me – first tell me how I came to live with you. Why wasn’t I told anything?’

  ‘We naturally wished to shield you,’ Father said. ‘Joan found her way to us in Spadboro. Whatever Harriet says, we were already living there. You recall Joan’s writing of the in-laws who paid her a wedding visit?’

  I nodded as understanding broke in upon me.

  ‘There you are, then. We were living at Spadboro when Harriet married, and Joan came to us there. May God forgive me, I almost shut the door in her face.’

  ‘Because you hated her.’

  He shook his head. ‘Her case being so desperate, I wouldn’t have turned her away for that. But she was big with child … your mother had just lost a babe of her own.’

  I pictured my poor mother looking sadly on Joan’s swollen belly.

  ‘We took her in. Barbara was still resting in bed, her breasts bound up. Joan’s pains began that very afternoon; everything came upon us at once. Barbara rose from her bed and delivered the child.’ His voice grew soft. ‘I never met her equal.’

  ‘Did Joan tell you I was Robin’s?’

  He laughed at my simplicity. ‘We could see for ourselves.’

  ‘But did she?’

  ‘She wanted it known, yes.’

  ‘Why, when she didn’t care enough to keep me?’

  ‘She knew Barbara’s childless condition; she hoped we would take you in.’

  I flinched. To be thus handed over seemed a crueller stain even than bastardy, as if my baby features had been marred by a hopeless ugliness not even maternal love could warm to.

  My father went on, ‘We’d already lost three little ones.’

  ‘Lucky that I lay to hand, then,’ I said coldly.

  ‘No, no! You must understand: we loved you like our own. Barbara unbound her breast and put you to it and her milk began to flow.’ He patted my arm. ‘We took that as a sign.’

  ‘Had I known all this … or had it not happened …’ I gestured for lack of words. How many things might not have come about!

  ‘We meant well,’ Father said. ‘Are we to blame?’

  ‘What I blame you for is keeping me in ignorance of my sister.’

  ‘I knew nothing of her until Robin’s letter. How should I?’ He urged the horse through a ford and up the slippery bank on the opposite side.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Father,’ I said when we were again on level ground. ‘It’s certain, then? She is my sister?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Robin acknowledged her.’

  ‘But she’s with child by me!’ I cried out, as if exclaiming could alter the case.

  ‘By someone. You must keep away from her and now you know all, Jon, I’m sure you will. Before was ignorance and folly; in future lies repentance, and a fresh start.’

  These words, intended to comfort me, had the opposite effect. Not that I wished to marry Tamar; but it was beginning to come home to me how much I was my father’s son – the son of Robin, who had never shown me any special love and for whom, as a boy, I had felt scant affection. A man all body and no soul, excited by food and drink, by a woman’s walk, by the smell of her flesh; a man who was weak and went after his pleasures in unlawful places. He had left Joan to her fate and had even fathered a second bastard on her … This thought brought on a still more terrible one: had there perhaps been more? Now I pictured my mother, my mother, walking away from the ditch where she had abandoned an infant. Its forlorn wail persisted far into the night but no rescue came. Towards morning it grew weaker. Dawn showed it stretched out stiff. Who could say what Joan might or might not have done?

  Thus I went on, my fancy multiplying horrors, until I saw Joan grown old and battered, too feeble to do more than beg, while Robin lived on in comfort until, falling sick, he grew fearful for his soul. And now I was to cast off Tamar likewise. I came of a divided family and there was no doubt which side of that family I most resembled. I sat in silence, my head bowed.

  After a while my father observed, ‘You don’t ask me what became of Joan.’

  ‘I think I know.’

  ‘As soon as she was recovered from her lying-in, she ran away.’ He sighed. ‘Utter folly! I had for some time been writing to Robin and was hopeful he might settle a proper maintenance on her. Perhaps she was afraid Harriet would follow her to Spadboro.’

  With an effort I banished my horrible imaginings and said, ‘I always understood she went back to Tetton. She said so, I’m sure.’

  ‘Then she lied to you, or to me – or her memory’s going.’

  ‘Or she went when she was carrying Tamar.’

  He shrugged. ‘The one thing we do know is that from time to time she returned to that cave. Now, about the document she gave me –’

  ‘I suppose I must read it.’

  ‘It’s not for you.’

  I blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘Nor for me or Barbara.’

  ‘Stop … !’ I pulled at his arm, causing the horse to look round in puzzlement. ‘Please, stop driving for a minute.’

  ‘I can drive and talk,’ said Father. ‘Joan told me it was given her by Robin, so last night, while you were at End House, I opened the packet. I’ll own that I was expecting some crude forgery.’

  ‘But … ?’

  ‘It looks real, and he appears to have signed it.’

  ‘Are you saying it’s the will?’ I breathed. ‘She’s had it all this time?’

  ‘You know the proverb about counting chickens before they’re hatched. I don’t know what it is. It’s all in lawyer’s Latin.’

  ‘I never thought Robin was so old-fashioned,’ I said, surprised.

  ‘He wasn’t. If it is a will, then my belief is he didn’t want Joan or Tamar to read it. It was meant for a lawyer.’

  ‘They might not even realise it was a will.’

  ‘Quite.’

  Not wanting to build up my hopes and then have them crash in ruins, I said, ‘It’s probably a recipe for hog’s pudding written by the learned and accomplished Aunt Harriet.’

  ‘I doubt it, Jon,’ said my father. ‘It has all our names in it, and Joan’s, and Tamar’s. I can read that much.’

  19

  Of Diverse

  Sorts of Inheritances

  By the time we reached Spadboro I had promised my father to repeat nothing of what I had discovered concerning my parentage. He said it would distress, to no good purpose, a woman who loved me as tenderly as ever mother loved child, a woman who had hoped to shield me from such knowledge. The sight of her flinging open her chamber window, bending perilously out from the sill in order to wave, would have persuaded a stricter conscience than mine; I raised my hat to her, and the next minute she was running across the yard to greet us, her breath smoking like a dragon’s in the bitter air.

  Most willingly did I embrace her as my mother. Joan Seaton might have borne me in her womb, but Barbara Dymond had poured out her generous maternal heart on me, and taken no end of pain in breeding me up.

  Dinner was late in the day, since it had been held back for my arrival, and in no time she and Alice were laying out the potted ham and other good things, my mother saying she was sure her boy would be hungry after coming so far in such cold weather.

  My father remarked that he hoped there might be enough for a mere husband. She laughed, saying he knew her well enough not to fret himself about th
at, before turning again to me.

  ‘Where’s your soiled linen? On the cart?’

  I now recalled that, having changed into dry clothes, I had left my sodden ones at End House. My mother pretended to scold me, but was unable to keep from smiling. ‘Oh, well, it’s nothing,’ she said. ‘I’ll write to Harriet to send them on.’

  Father glanced at me. ‘Jon and Harriet have fallen out.’

  ‘Oh?’ She looked up from the table. ‘Why?’

  ‘She dislikes my way with cider,’ I said.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with your cider-making.’ Unsatisfied with my answer, she continued to bustle about the table, not looking at me, and then said, ‘So you won’t be going back?’

  ‘Nor speaking to her, nor having anything to do with her. She’s a bad, cruel woman.’

  Mother was holding her favourite dish, a large piece of Delft decorated with birds. She laid it carefully down on the table to show she was about to deliver herself of something important. ‘Nobody ever thought Harriet too kind,’ she said. ‘But be very sure of yourself, son, before you cut her.’

  I understood. Harriet had much to bestow: who knew what hopes my parents – all of them – had secretly cherished for me over the years? I said, ‘You mean I should hold to her at any price?’

  She looked me in the eye. ‘No.’

  Father came to stand by her and put his arm round her shoulders.

  ‘I’m blessed in my parents,’ I said. How naked and defenceless would I have been, but for their love: the Seaton boy, unschooled, unfed, driven from any shelter I might find; the Seaton boy, whose mother lived off men. Instead of which I had grown up free and happy, thanks to the people standing before me. If they had deceived me, it was done in kindness.

  I could not call them guardians. Mathew and Barbara had been the two pillars between which I sheltered, all my young life. My natural mother, no matter how pitiful her tale, could never come near them.

  As for Tamar, my father was right. The best gift I could make her was to stay away. My selfish yearnings could do nothing for her; his purse, much.