Mr. Hambridge had clutched at the broad wooden rail of the banisters in his alarm at the surprising movement of a piece of inanimate matter, nor was it now much lessened, since a toad that awaited his home-coming at such a moment might well be an emissary from old Goody Crickle. One of her eyes was growing red and he had noticed it leering at him in an unpleasant fashion. When next he administered justice on the bench, he would have her ducked, and see if she did not bob up to the surface of the pond as lightly as if she rode in one of her accursed egg-shells. He strode after her messenger to stamp on it, but it leaped away, and if he pursued it in the darkness there was no knowing but what it might spring upon his neck and there fasten unnaturally long and clammy claws about his throat till he was strangled. In any case he had received no good omen for a newly married man.
He went up the stairs and down the passage to the bridal chamber where he again paused to mop his face, to wish that an angel would come down from heaven to rescue him, to wish he were dead. Nobody would miss him, Bess had asked him for more money, a witch had sent her familiar to him, his bride was waiting for him. With a deep sigh he pushed open the door.
He stood in the doorway and his astonished gaze rolled round the room, over the bed, out at the window. The shutters stood wide, the bed-curtains were drawn back, the room was light, the bed empty, the window open. Outside a bird was singing, so that he said to himself, “The bird has flown.” Astonishment gave way to relief, but that in its turn changed to alarm. Had the girl run back to her mother? A cold sweat broke out on his forehead at the thought of again being faced by that badger-like mouth, and this time in anger. He must ask the maids, but they were none of them up, the sluts, still hogging it in bed though it was now broad daylight. There was no order in his house, everybody robbed him, taking his money for nothing. He had married a wife but she would not look after it, she ran away almost before she had come, that was what came of marrying a woman, they were all alike, they got what they could out of you and left you in the lurch.
He bawled to the servants. One or two were stirring. A maid had seen Mrs. Anne run out of the back part of the house not ten minutes ago. She had nothing with her, she did not look as though she were running away, so the maid assured her master, tittering behind her hand until he caught her a box on the ear.
Nan had not run away. She had gone to gather mushrooms, but returned instead with a cluster of toadstools, some scarlet, some yellow, some of a dull purple and shaped like hoods. These she placed on the flat pewter dish in the oak room and said to the girl Keziah who was sweeping the room, “Here’s a fine dish of mushrooms.”
Keziah leaned back against her broom so that it looked like a long tail. Her dress was slatternly, her face freckled and kind, her hair a rich copper colour, but she would have been better looking without it, for the other maids had so teased and snubbed her on its account, telling her to hang herself on a Judas tree, that she was persuaded she was a fright and that young Jim, the tallest of the stable boys, would never look at her.
She said, “Lord, Mistress, but those are all toadstools.”
“Then leave them there for the toads to sit on.”
What a sauce-box. She would stand up to the master. Keziah laughed admiringly, then, pointing at Nan’s new clogs, her giggles grew hysterical, for one was fastened with a plait of hay. Nan had lost one of her red leather thongs as she was climbing a haystack, and sitting on its dewy summit had begun to cry, until she remembered that she was no longer at home and that even Nurse could not scold her overmuch now she was married. At that she clapped her hands and laughed instead, she looked round on the strange world that the rising mist uncurtained before her eyes, here a bright pool and there a mound sprinkled with daisies, and thought it all new made for her delight. In the distance rose the hill that she had seen from the window last night, but a ray of white sunlight transformed the cabbage field that crowned it to a steel-blue peak, so that it appeared encased in armour like a wizard’s fortress.
The larks sang invisible, high in the white air. The grass was covered with dew and gossamer and showed itself only in a straggling path of green footprints, so small and sharply pointed, so little resembling the shape of the human foot, that they looked as though some goblin must have passed that way. They came up to the haystack where Nan sat perched, and she looked down on them and perceived a special glory in the world that could so clearly take the imprint of her new clogs.
After that first evening, she forgot that she was a neglected wife, except when Mr. Hambridge reminded her by a marital visit inspired by a sense of duty and policy, and encountered a wild cat. She had no attraction for him, she was too small and meagre; he could crush her easily in his grasp, but lust was not sufficiently strong in him for that to please him, nor was he so active as to enjoy resistance. It hurt his feelings to be repulsed, the old wound to his youthful sensitiveness was then reopened, and he saw himself again as a lumpish clod that no woman could ever regard except as an object of ridicule.
“God knows,” said he, “I’m willing enough to let you alone but that I thought to please your mother.”
“That is impossible,” said Nan, “and she is not here so we can do as we like.”
Her elfin grin reminded him uneasily of an old-fashioned play, the only one he had seen, in which the Queen of the Fairies caressed and cajoled an ungainly peasant with the head of an ass. His sense of the latent power and mercilessness of women was increased by this tiny creature he had inadvertently married. With Bess he at least could be sure of what she was thinking, since she was not thinking at all.
After that the husband continued to be out all night while the wife was out all day. Nurse might shake her head and hand her the keys again and again, but Nan lost them in so many odd places, in a bucket, in a horse-trough, in Mr. Hambridge’s fishing-basket, in Mr. Cork’s high-crowned clerical hat, that the other servants begged Nurse to give up the attempt to make her mistress perform her duties. Nor did her husband demand it. Instinct bade him let sleeping dogs and particularly bitches lie. The dish of toadstools remained on the sideboard as evidence of her only order to the household.
Protected by the presence of another male, Mr. Hambridge could assert his manhood, swagger with the best of them and tell his stories with an added zest now that they were heard by someone for the first instead of the fiftieth time; he could display his indifference to his wife by throwing her at another man’s head. The glummer Mr. Cork looked, the more Nan laughed and helped to provoke him. Mr. Hambridge egged her on to twit the chaplain, roared with laughter at her sallies and Mr. Cork’s sarcastic responses, declared it was as fine as a play to listen to them.
A defiant turbulence reigned at the supper table between the half-drunken husband and the increasingly reckless wife, watched always by the chaplain. She would rather he scolded than so look at her. She did her best to make him. She spoke slightingly of her mother, having divined that his own opinion of Lady Ingleby and her treatment of her daughter did not prevent his counting this as a heavy mark against her.
“But you hate your mother,” she said, “for all that you never say so.” She tossed back her hair which had fallen over her face like a gipsy’s; her eyes were bright with excitement. Her freedom had gone to her head more than Mr. Hambridge’s wine to his. No longer was she herded with the children, made to finish the fat and gristle, forbidden to speak. She could eat, drink, and answer back what she liked and there was no one to reprove her, for she did not care what Mr. Squaretoes thought of her, he was only the chaplain for all that he gave himself such airs and seemed grander than any of them. Her husband was cheering her on as though she were a terrier.
“At him, girl, at him! Bait the Puritan bear,” he roared across his tankard. “Look to yourself, my Benjamin Joseph. She’ll bring you to her feet yet. The ugly ones are the most determined, hey, Joseph?”
That was bad; she did not like to be called ugly even by her husband. Mr. Cork would not trouble to answer him or herse
lf. She did not care. If no one would speak she could sing as her father had used to do. Out came one of his deep-mouthed songs in a childish treble, accompanied by Mr. Hambridge a note late, for he could not remember the words and had not yet got the hang of the tune.
Let us drink and be merry, dance, joke and rejoice,
With claret and sherry, theorbo and voice!
The changeable world to our joy is unjust,
All treasure’s uncertain
Then down with your dust!
In frolics dispose your pounds, shillings and pence,
For we shall be nothing a hundred years hence.
A changeable world. A King’s head on the block. A brewer on the throne. A beggar come home to be King. Anything might happen any minute. One foot up and one foot down and she would be in London yet with the world at her feet.
Mr. Hambridge called “Brava” for another verse. Mr. Cork had after all begun to speak in a low tone, and looked hard at her.
“I never knew,” he said, “the mother whom, as you say, I hated for bearing me as a footman’s bastard. But I know that the virtues admirable in a female are those of filial piety, dignity in manner, decorum in conduct, discretion in speech. I am therefore in no danger of admiration of my patron’s wife, however my patron’s zest for sport may thrust me to it.”
“What’s that? Say it again. He’s pinked you, has he? Give him it back, girl, show fight now. Stand up to the footman’s bastard, said it himself, didn’t he?”
But Nan would neither stand nor look up; the tears had come smarting into her eyes and she would not show them. She had thought she was a woman with the world before her, and she had found she was nothing but a rude girl. She had wanted to make Mr. Cork angry, but not in this cold, still way. Nor had he been only angry. She had hurt as well as insulted him.
“I don’t care for your being a footman’s bastard,” she said at last in a choked voice, but if she did not speak, she would sob outright. “I never meant to remind you of it. And if I did, it cannot matter to you what I do or say.”
A sudden snort proceeded from Mr. Hambridge. His eyes were shut and his expression was one of lofty oblivion. Her voice died as she looked at him, she forgot Mr. Cork and her halting apology to him, her tearful, twisted face grew calm in its intent observation. This creature thought her witty where Mr. Cork found her odious; this then was her fit companion and she must expect no better. Leave her own level and she would be despised, as she in her arrogant folly had despised her husband. The thoughts that sped across her mind threw their shadows on her face.
As Mr. Cork watched her, he saw in his mind the lawn where he had paced that evening, and across its surface the swift and silent passage of curved shadows, until at last he had looked up to see a flight of swallows. He did not know why he remembered this, nor what had brought the unexpected lightening to his heart. Hope rose within him, he thought it was because the wisdom he had acquired through bitter experience might yet be of some service to another. He told himself that Mrs. Anne’s education had been at least as much at fault as her nature, that it would be a pity if her thoughtless folly brought her to disaster. And he noticed for the first time, with a pleasure that passed into annoyance since he had no mind to confuse it with his disinterested desire to be of service, that there was a charm for him in her small, bent head, and the turn of her neck, brown as it was, in this rare pensive curve.
He leaned across the table and said in an odd, rather harsh voice, “I did not mean to make you sad.”
She looked up at him, and her husband, who just now had been the only company she could hope for in life, ceased to exist. She put out her hand to him across the table and said, “Nor I you.”
Mr. Cork smiled. “Then let us make a bargain of it,” he said, and took her hand, “that neither of us shall make the other sad.”
The words echoed in his mind. It was perhaps the loneliness of his present life after the crowded business of his intrigues that made a simple sentence ring like a memory or else an omen, as though to all eternity they would sit holding hands across a table in front of a sleeping sot, and promise not to make the other sad.
The spell was broken. They sat back in their chairs, neither knowing who had moved first; the husband sat up and said, “What’s that? I’m not asleep. I hear every word you say when you don’t mumble.”
“I was asking your permission,” said Mr. Cork, “to undertake Mrs. Anne’s studies, since fortune deprived her family of tutors too early for her to benefit by them.”
Mr. Hambridge rolled an eye on him and closed it. “Undertake her then,” he approved. “Teach her what you like, since I’ve no mind to.”
“No mind indeed!” cried Nan, flaring up at the notion that Mr. Hambridge could teach her anything. But Mr. Cork’s face had shut down again in reproof or warning, and she would not again offend him.
With a cunning that should have served him better in his career, Mr. Cork showed Nan a new play from London which the King and all the Court had been to see. All the actors’ and actresses’ names were printed on the front page. When her father had gone to plays there were no actresses, only boys dressed up as women. People had been strangely foolish and old-fashioned in those days. Now perhaps she too might one day see her name on that list, might dance and make fine speeches before the King. She ceased to object that she could write her own name if need be, and spell out most words if written in clear capitals and not too long and hard. She caught the play-book to her as if it were a living creature, and said “Yes I will read.”
After that she learned with surprising speed when she gave her attention to it. But more often she employed all her efforts to induce Mr. Cork to tell her of the world. In her awed attention to him, spiced though it often was with irrelevant laughter and peppered with pert answers, he could catch a reflection of himself as a great man.
She heard that the subtle and devilish Papists had undoubtedly caused the Great Fire, that a true and worthy divine such as Mr. Bunyan was imprisoned for refusing to take the Communion on his knees in his own church, while the impious Parker was made Bishop of Oxford though he had openly declared that the best body of Divinity was that which would help a man keep a coach and six horses. These echoes of rumours and complaints, muttered under the heavy wigs that leaned together in taverns and the new coffeehouses, criticisms of the laws and demands for the freedom of the Press, were of less importance to her than the fashionable new Eastern drink that had accompanied them in the fashionable new dishes of porcelain. To see plays, to drink coffee, to collect china, only these visible signs of an advancing civilization could impress Nan.
She wanted stories of the King, undeterred by Mr. Cork’s criticism that that was all a King was good for, to provide a common ground of gossip through the nation. In the remotest corners of the countryside yokels could drink and shout themselves hoarse because King Charles had won a race at Newmarket on his topping horse Blue Cap. Old women such as Nan’s nurse loved to tell how the Queen had gone masquerading to a fair and ridden home in a fright. Mr. Cork only gossiped about the Royal Family to political purpose. King Charles’s youngest sister who died, was it true that her jealous husband had poisoned her? that she, the leader of fashion in Europe, had as a baby been smuggled out of England in a bundle of rags? Mr. Cork replied that she had been a Papist married to the French King’s brother, and that King Charles’s intense affection for his sister had therefore been of more danger to the nation than his lusts. The State was ruled by women, the men had grown slack and effeminate.
The very evening that the Dutch sailed up the Medway and burnt the English ships in their own country, the King was fooling with his mistresses and worthless courtiers, all of them chasing a moth like mad.
“A moth, Mr. Cork?”
“Aye, a poor moth. An acquaintance of mine had it on good authority from one Mr. Pepys, Secretary to the Naval Board, a sound sober man who has no patience with folly and vice. They made a scapegoat of Pett the shipbuilder wh
o was not more to blame than I was.”
She sat entranced by the image of that gorgeous company racketing after a moth, just like herself and the children at home, while Mr. Cork in indignant tones read her the following remarkable passage:
Who the Dutch fleet with storms disabled met?
And, rifling prizes, them neglected? Pett.
Who with false news prevented the Gazette?
The fleet divided? Writ for Rupert? Pett.
Who all our seamen cheated of their debt,
And all our prizes who did swallow? Pett.
Who did advise no navy out to set?
And who the forts left unprepared? Pett.
Who to supply with powder did forget
Languard, Sheerness, Gravesend, and Upnor? Pett.
Who all our ships exposed in Chatham net?
Who should it be but the fanatic Pett?
The pewter dish, now divested of the toadstools that had remained on it till they shrivelled, stood upright once more on the trestle table against the wall. On its smooth surface there shone the reflections of the round bottles of gin and brandy; and in these Nan could see herself reflected, but upside down. She interrupted the satire to inquire into the phenomenon, but for all his learning, Mr. Cork could not explain it.
She snatched up one of the bottles and ran with it to the window. In its dark globed shape, she saw a little back dot of a man walking on his head along the straggling path over the hill. “It’s a topsy-turvy world now,” her father used to say. “All turned upside down.” She had never thought to look at it upside down in a brandy bottle with him, and now she could only do so with Mr. Cork. He should not have died. She beat her fist against the small leaded panes, snatched at the latch, and in passionate protest against his death, flung open the window. The wind blew damp and keen on her face; the little man was still going up over the hill, for one moment he made a spike on the top, and then disappeared. He was perhaps going to London.
None So Pretty Page 5