The wonder is that these exchanges have, to date, been conducted in so orderly a manner. I fear that it cannot last. Extremity of fear is a great undoer of civility. There will be ever fewer havens for those unhoused.
Hour upon hour I passed forlorn settlements where domesticity seeks to preserve itself without roof or walls. Cooking pots without hearths to set themselves upon, coverlets without beds, buckets without wells or pumps, groups of men discoursing, not snug in a tavern, or beneath a church porch, or upon an accustomed street corner, but in the vacancy of a field black with burnt-out stubble.
I shall be glad to get to Wychwood, to be once more in that blessed enclosure. A morning’s ride will bring me there.
*
The wind smelt of human excrement. All day long Meg Leafield sat near Wychwood’s iron gates. She sold nosegays with no gaiety in them, and she scanned the faces of the passers-by. At nightfall she took up the piece of sacking on which she had laid out her merchandise and walked round the outside of the park wall to a place where it curved like the belly of a serpent that has swallowed a goat. There she would lean against the stones of the wall, which being scarcely more than two years out of the quarry were still sharp-cut and clean. She mumbled and sang an hour or more.
The moon rising, she strayed through the woods, filling her sack with stalks of comfrey and feverfew and pennyroyal, and the thick stems of stinking hellebore.
*
As I breakfasted this morning the publican told me, ‘I’ll take no more travellers this season. You, sir, are the last.’ The morning was warm, but the fire in the room was banked up, as though to fumigate it. He stood by the door and kept his head averted as he spoke.
Good weather is unwelcome. There are those who believe that the sun, heating the ground, draws infection into the air. The walkers, who fill the main road westward as the spring thaw fills a river, hamper their own progress in their attempts to protect themselves. Already faint, they wrap kerchiefs across their mouths and noses. Breath, the very essence of life, is feared as a poison.
The people of the exodus are accompanied every step of the way by a lesser horde of conjurors and wizards. All along the flanks of the slow-moving crowd, wherever a gap in ditch or hedge allows it, some charlatan has set out his stall, selling the hope of survival in the form of amulets, or flasks of murky water. There are prophets, soi-disant, and preachers, their voices hoarse with shouting of repentance and salvation to the shuffling vagrants. Their apprentices, snot-nosed boys with the cropped heads and starved faces of unwilling novices, make their difficult way along the verges. There are ordinary pedlars there too, risking infection for the sake of inflated profit, selling baskets full of cobnuts and plums, but these youths’ wares are less wholesome. They are hawking quills of paper on which are scrawled the prayers or blessings or arcane dicta of sorcerers dead a thousand years.
Now that I am clear of that desperate crowd I am ready to concede that such chaff may at least bring comfort to troubled minds, however insubstantial the physical benefits. This morning, though, I saw only parasites sucking money from the limp purses of the wretched.
A young matron walked ahead of me. Her man was pulling a kind of handcart, laden with blankets and other stuff, a baby riding atop the heap. An old man was with them, now grasping the sides of the cart for support, now leaning on the woman, whom I took to be his daughter.
As I approached Wood Barton I found Meg Leafield. She sat alongside her wares. Muslin bags full of dried herbs. Posies of the same. Amulets made of twig and bone. A curiously shaped stone to which was attached a scrap of paper announcing that it was a piece of a thunderbolt launched from heaven. It is curious to see how the plague has driven even reformers back to the idolatry that seemed to have died out in these islands a hundred years ago and more. I do not believe Cecily would have wished to see her protégée trading in such rubbish. Recognising me, Meg scrambled to her feet and made as though to draw back into the trees.
‘Don’t go, Meg,’ I said. ‘I am glad to meet with a face known to me. Mine has been a weary ride.’
As I spoke the marching column seemed to check. The people around me paused, and as others came up behind they began to stumble over each other. There was shouting. I saw a woman hoist two infants, one beneath each arm, and lug them with remarkable dispatch through a ditch and up into the woods which pressed close upon both sides of the road. Others followed. What had been a column, albeit one whose ragged order would have shamed a military man, broadened and dispersed, as a flood spreads shallowly over water meadows when a stream’s forward progress is impeded by a fallen log.
Ahead, across the road into the village, I saw a barricade made of tree-trunks and furze branches. The travellers were too listless to attempt to force their way in, even had they been so minded, but I saw some men in Lord Woldingham’s livery standing before the obstruction, staves in hand. They watched silently as the travellers cast about, then passed by the village along a muddy path that circled it.
When the family in front of me arrived at the division of ways, the husband set down the handles of the cart and, leading the older man by the arm, walked steadily towards the barricade. Stopping at a discreet distance he called out loudly, ‘Will no one have pity on these white hairs? My father is too feeble for more journeying. Will no one take him in?’
He then coaxed the old man, who seemed to have no will of his own left, to sit himself upon a low wall bounding a garden-plot and, leaving him there, went back to his wife and child. ‘In God’s name,’ he called out in a great voice, ‘show that you are Christians. Show that you are the sons of that God, whose quality is ever to have mercy.’ His wife was weeping. He took up the cart handles again and, chivvying her on, went along the side road, looking back repeatedly as he went. The men at the barricade stood like statues. ‘Have you not fathers of your own?’ he shouted, as he came to the bend in the road that would take him out of sight. A girl came up from within the village, and seemed about to climb the barricade. One of its guards pushed her roughly back.
Meg was at my horse’s head. She took hold of the reins and led me onto a path, much overgrown with bracken, that ran obliquely down the riverbank. I had not known there was a ford there but we splashed through, Meg’s dress kilted up around her knees. The opposite bank was steep. I had to cling to the mane as my horse mounted it. Meg came up on all fours. We had arrived, as it were aslant, at Wychwood’s main gate. She darted past me to rap on a small shutter in the side of the gate-lodge. The keeper came out, opened the gate barely wide enough for my horse to pass, then swung it back and replaced the bolts, his boy helping him, for they were massive.
I turned to thank Meg but she was no longer with me. The gate-keeper said, ‘She stays outside.’
As I rode up the drive one part of my mind was marvelling at the luxuriance of the horse-chestnut trees I had planted on either side of it. Another part was writhing under the painfulness of the scenes I had witnessed. If, as some believe, this plague is a trial sent to find out who, amongst the living, is deserving of salvation, then I do not think I will have passed muster. Selfish, I thought. Cowardly. Weak. And unable even to say, ‘I preserve myself so that I may preserve my children.’ My only claim to usefulness is that I have made delightful a few patches of ground, but this, my finest creation, has flourished in my absence. I should have given up my horse.
*
Cecily Rivers’s mother was dead, and Cecily lived at Wood Manor with only two servants. There Mr Goodyear visited her.
‘“Him that cometh to me,”’ he said, ‘“I will in no wise cast out.” When Preacher Rivers was here we kept those words ever in mind.’
Cecily sat by a window so that the grey morning light fell on her needlework. Only a few more silken leaves to stitch. The piece, bundled on the bench beside her, was too large for convenience. From time to time she clenched her eyelids together as though her eyes pained her.
‘There were five families sleeping in the barn last nigh
t,’ she said, ‘and more in the stables. They endanger each other. If one falls ill, all will. We set out a table for them in the yard and place food and ale there, while they keep out of sight.’
‘You do what a Christian should.’ Goodyear shut his mouth tight. Cecily looked up and met his eye.
‘I do not have the responsibilities that puzzle others. My way is plain.’
Goodyear, standing, and turning his hat in his hands, looked out of the window and saw Edward pushing a small girl on a rope-swing slung from an apple-bough.
‘You should require the children also to keep themselves apart,’ he said. ‘Even the prettiest infant can carry the taint.’
*
Lady Woldingham has taken control of the house. I underestimated her. She is an excellent match for her husband. This morning she summoned me to the square room at the centre of the piano nobile in the new wing, which she has made her own. She met me standing among her people, and led me to the window.
‘This is the brightest gem in the necklace you designed, is it not, Mr Norris; the lozenge at the centre of your imaginary rug. And do you know that Lord Woldingham was content to let this room, which overlooks it, be treated as a passageway?’
She was talking about the parterre beneath.
‘I hope you notice that I have caused your instructions as to colour to be obeyed precisely. Wormwood and lavender. Silver, grey-blue, sky-blue and white. I apologise for the intrusion of yellow, but one cannot persuade daisies to produce blue stamens. At dusk, when they close their eyes, the effect is purer.’
She was laughing at me, and I was glad to see her playful. She is tiny and pale still, but regal. She invited me to a seat. Her secretary laid some plans before me.
‘When you last had those papers in your hands,’ she said, ‘they depicted an ideal. Now, a reality. The wall encircles us entirely,’ she said. ‘It is my wish, and my husband’s, that all who work for us upon this land should find a safe refuge within it. We have space within the park for all our dependants.
‘I have given directions for the construction of sleeping quarters. Barracks of a kind. Not luxurious but proof against wild weather. Those who choose to shelter there can bring their own featherbeds and such. We have venison, mutton, fowl and in the lake there are fish. We have instructed Mr Green to dig up four acres of parkland and plant them with edible roots. You can imagine how he laments at having to occupy himself with beets and potatoes when he is accustomed to fill his mind only with roses. His men, however, are glad to know there will be vegetables for their winter soup. The barns of the home farm are well stocked with grain. We have our own brewery. There is no need for anyone from this place to venture out into a world polluted by disease.
‘Would I, do you think, Mr Norris, have made a competent quartermaster?’
I bowed. I was a little taken aback.
‘You came to talk about ornamental waterworks, and so you shall, but we have all been obliged to postpone some of our plans. My Lord and I have enquired about your movements, Mr Norris. We know that you have been out of London for some months. We do not fear contamination from you. Once provision has been made for this present emergency, we will take pleasure in discussing with you the resumption of work on your designs. I trust you are pleasantly accommodated. I have asked them to make up your accustomed room.’
A gentleman came lollingly to us and leant over the table to see the plans. I wanted to snatch them from him. The wall is built, the avenues planted. They are there for all to see. The plans are only a representation of something now irreversibly made public, and yet I was jealous of them. I was like the dog who, having a cherished tidbit, seeks to consume it privately beneath a laurel bush. Something stirred in my memory, another dispossession. The gentleman was Sir Humphrey de Boinville, my Lady’s brother.
‘How droll it is,’ he said. ‘These drawings are so meticulous. They look as neat and pure as a young miss’s hem-stitching.’ He was clearly a cognoscento of stitching: the lace on his cuffs was some of the finest I have seen, and his stockings were ornamented with clocks. ‘And yet,’ he went on, ‘the park is full still of thistles. You are an idealist, Mr Norris. You do not draw the real.’ It is a thought I have often had myself, and yet I disliked him for it. He and my Lady were raised as papists. Sir Humphrey, Mr Rose has told me, is still fervent in that faith.
*
Oh my whirling thoughts. I have tired myself today by patrolling every hillock and covert of the park. I found the sentinels I posted over two years ago, my green young trees, all upright and faithful in their stations, and came back at dusk as pleased as a general whose captains have proved true. I thought to write, and then compose myself to rest. I laid down my pen, but take it up again to scrawl like an infatuated boy the one word that beats about my mind.
Cecily
Cecily
Cecily
I left here two years ago in a pother that was partly of my own making, partly whipped up by a drama into which I had wandered as oafishly as a performing bear straying onto a stage dressed for a court masque.
Cecily and her boy walking upon the water. That was a puzzle to which I held the key. The submerged causeway. I had discussed it at length with my employer: he declaring how much he doted on the illusion it rendered possible, how I was at all costs to preserve it; I retorting that, the water-levels changing as we dredged the lower lake, and built dams to hold back water for the upper ones, it would be more than I could do to keep the level of the water so precisely calibrated as to cover the hidden stones to barely the thickness of the peel of an orange. He saw the difficulty, but would not be deterred by it. ‘Alas then, Mr Norris,’ he said, ‘we must recalculate our water-levels, must we not?’ Then he put his arm through mine, the first time he had come so close.
We had walked out that day to view the little cedar tree, which mounted scarce to our knees but which will one day rise as high as the house, and cover a part of the garden with boughs as fragrant and umbrageous as those of which King Solomon sang. ‘Ah Norris,’ he said then, ‘would that you and I might see that! Do you suppose that, once one has joined the heavenly host, one might occasionally be permitted to peep back down through a chink in the celestial sphere to observe how one’s terrestrial ventures have prospered?’
Heresy, flawed cosmology, and mockery of me: I have learnt to hold silence and assume a peculiar expression, similar to that of a man stifling a hiccough, in response to such questions.
I remember that Mr Rose was observing us from the orangery. Lord Woldingham would manage the two of us, then, as adroitly as he manoeuvres the wooden balls when playing at pall-mall.
*
Meg came to Wood Manor and rapped on the window by which Cecily sat. Cecily opening, the old woman said, ‘Mr Norris is returned.’ Cecily laid aside her work and the two women, arm in arm, walked the afternoon away in the garden, going around and around the sundial as though they were the shadow of its gnomon, sweeping through the hours.
*
After the fracas down by the lake that day two years ago, I made my way back to the house, as bewildered in mind as I was bruised in body. Mr Rose, finding his horse where we had left it, had galloped ahead and forestalled me. As I toiled across the lawn I saw him on the terrace talking urgently to Lord Woldingham. He kept rising onto his tiptoes, and pushing his stumpy fingers through his hair as though, agitated, he wished he could make himself larger, and therefore more able to convey his agitation to another. My Lord, sipping chocolate (the household was as yet barely awake), his striped Turkish gown flapping open over his mournful black, listened impassive.
When I came up he said, ‘Mr Norris, you have had a puzzling time of it here. I beg you to pardon us for having embroiled you in our curious history.’
I said, as I would assuredly not have done had I been more composed, ‘I am owed no apologies. I would, though, be glad of explanations.’ What irked me most was that Rose was evidently more privy to the family’s affairs than I.
/> Lord Woldingham looked at me coolly. ‘So would we all,’ he said. ‘So would we all.’
A great convulsion of the state leaves its people hungry for calm. It’s a hunger that eclipses all other emotions. Had Prince Paris been long deprived of food when he first clapped eyes on Queen Helen, I believe he would have said to himself, ‘Let gallantry bide awhile,’ and allowed her to pass from the room unwooed, while he reached for a platter of meat. So might his opportunity have been lost, and myriad lives have been saved. In like manner the people of England, now, reach out and grab at tranquillity, thinking that teasing at contentious questions, doctrinal or political, is best left alone until their safety from further havoc is assured. I have come to understand that the workmen who set upon the dissenters’ women down by the waterside that day were not animated by sectarian passion, but by detestation thereof. They, and all England with them, had resolved to wrap their consciences in oiled cloths, that they might live muffled but in peace. The Chapel folk were like annoying children who persist in asking, when the adults have decided on sophistry and accommodations, ‘But did you not tell us God wills this? But surely you have said it is wrong to do that?’ Sometimes the impulse to slap such children is not to be contained.
I will lay out the story as coherently as I can, now that enough time has passed for me to arrive at a sense of it. I do not pretend to understand it all.
Both Cecily and the boy Edward left Wychwood that day. I do not know when or whether I will see them again.
There is witchery here. This story begins in superstition, and so continues. That this is not congenial to me is of no importance. So it is, and so I must tell it.
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