When the wretched boy Charles died some people about the estate declared they had witnessed the consummation of an old prophecy. They said that it had been foretold that when the unrighteous returned to Wychwood the earth would gape and swallow up their offspring. It seems it was old Meg who recalled, or coined, this prophecy.
The boy Edward lived with Cecily and Lady Harriet at Wood Manor. I do not know from whence he came or whether it is true that he is the child of Cecily’s body. He was a skilled musician, and he aspired to be a naturalist. He would go out foraging with Meg, returning with baskets full of roots and bark and grasses. She was teaching him, and she had inveigled her way into his mind, converting his desire for knowledge, which is like a reaching for the light, into an awe of mystery, which is its opposite.
During those sad days she told him that he was like young Charles, that they were cousins and therefore in some hazy way interchangeable, that he and he alone had the power to save the poor dead boy from an eternity of desolation. ‘Would you leave him,’ she asked, ‘to snort on mud until doomsday?’ Worked upon by her, he became fixed in the belief that only when he had disguised himself as the dead boy and cast himself into flowing water could Charles be washed clean of moral taint and permitted to enter paradise.
All of this I heard from Mr Rose. In the intervening time we have on several occasions found ourselves partnered again. My respect for him has steadily increased. I have recommended him to more than one of my patrons: I think he has done the same for me. He grew up at Wychwood, the son of a smith. The father was killed fighting for the King. As a kind of recompense my Lord Woldingham took the son with him into the Netherlands and apprenticed him to a master builder there. I mistook him for a demi-Dutchman when first I met him. There is a peculiarity about his manner of speech. I took it for the intonations of a foreigner, but it is the accent of one raised in these parts. Now he is as much the gentleman as I am, but his grandam was one of those crones whose cunning so scared the populace that they made a bonfire of her. She showed him how to draw a quincunx. He watched, and learnt geometry. In these rural educations science and sorcery are helpmeets, not rivals.
Cecily is a completely rational being, of that I feel sure. And yet she, and her mother when she lived, were tolerant of strange doctrines. I walked with her once in the secret garden I had made for Lady Woldingham in the woods. It’s a quaint place, just without the park. The carts dragging implements in and tree-trunks out carved a track, but only temporarily. By now the undergrowth will have thickened sufficiently so that the only access to the garden will be by a serpentine path scarce wide enough for two to walk abreast, and so curving that the walker sees a mere few feet before or behind, and comes upon the garden as upon a present hidden ready to surprise a mistress.
Cecily and I wandered there on the eve of young Charles’s funeral. I do not know, because the workings of my own mind are sometimes as obscure to me as the contrivances of others’, what I had hoped to gain by being so secluded with her. The round pond was collared with stone flags. A toad squatted on the marge.
I am fond of toads. The loose skin pulsating beneath their non-existent chins puts me in mind of an elderly lady who was a kind hostess to me when I was first from home. Their goggling eyes entertain me. I admire the dexterity with which they fish in the air for flies with tongues so fine and fast-moving few humans have knowingly seen them. I am mightily amused by the complacent manner in which they swallow down said flies, and shrug themselves back into immobility as though to say, ‘Me? Fly? No, I assure you, sir, I know nothing about it.’
I am aware few people share this predilection of mine. I expected Cecily to draw back, or at best to ignore the creature. Instead she knelt beside it and tickled its back with a grass-stem. It was a big one. It would have overflowed my palm. ‘You know, don’t you, Mr Norris,’ she said to me, as I awkwardly lowered myself down beside her, impeded by my stiff boots, ‘you know how the paddock got his name?’
She then launched into a fable involving a dispute between a toad, a mouse and a raven, which ended with a false etymology. I barely listened. Her finger was now tracing the lines of the toad’s back. The warty beast seemed to sink into itself, as though intent on avoiding any movement that might interrupt this unexpected caress.
She said, ‘I am inclined to accept the doctrine of metempsychosis. It is not incredible to me that young Charles’s soul might now be contained within this blob of a creature. At least as credible, anyway, as that he is nowhere, or in heaven.’
I was certain that we were not overheard, but habit made me afraid to be party to a heretical conversation. She saw it.
‘It is very hard for the living to think about death,’ she said. ‘However often we may have seen it. A certain amount of speculation …’ her voice faded. The toad swallowed elaborately.
‘Meg has ideas that are still more strange,’ she said. I had no interest in the ideas Meg entertained. Cecily made to rise to her feet. I held out my hand to help her. I kissed her hand. I kissed her palm. I pressed her hand to my face. By now standing, we fitted together as sweetly as the two halves of a broken piece of porcelain restored by a cunning mender. I had never before fully appreciated how lonely it is to be a human being. How, without knowing it, every part of myself, body and mind, had for all my life been enduring a lack. With only the gulping toad to witness it, with only the sunlight falling on dark green water to celebrate our epithalamium, that lack was, for that happy, happy hour, alleviated, and wholeness supplied.
The next day down by the lake I saw Cecily, the woman who had seemed ready to merge with me, separate herself incomprehensibly. I thought that there was a pact between us, though no words had sealed it, but she spoke to me strangely and then stepped away without leave-taking.
Abandoning terra firma to walk upon the water, she forsook reasonable thought and allied herself instead with magic. She also forsook me. I was a dog who chases a pheasant. The dog easily gains on the two-legged scurryer, but then is left astonished when the feathery thing, with a rattle and a whirring, takes to the air.
*
Last night I embarked upon my narrative, only to be waylaid by a love story. Today I intend to stick to my purpose. The story in which I have become embroiled is full of obscurity. I record it now so that one day, perhaps, I may understand it.
Cecily and Edward walked deliberately out onto the pond. The labourers surged past Rose, ignoring his attempts to deflect them. Their fury was the more alarming for the steadiness with which they set to their disgraceful task, of terrorising a crowd of women. I shouted unconnected words. It was for a while as though I was calling upon the wind to oblige me by dropping, or begging night not to fall. Violence filled the clearing. Then it was as though the men awoke from the nightmare which sent them sleepwalking so savagely into this peaceable assembly. The late wars have taught us that people of the female sex can be as belligerent as men, but these women defeated their attackers by passivity. There is only so long that a man, however brutal, can roughly treat a woman who offers him no resistance. Their arms fell, their cudgels were laid back upon their shoulders, their knotted ropes were coiled and reattached to belts.
Still Cecily and the boy walked on. The preacher whom I had seen before, Cecily’s uncle, came to me.
‘We are not much liked by the workmen whom his Lordship has introduced,’ he said to me evenly. ‘A story has got abroad that Charles Fortescue’s death was a token that our presence at Wychwood contaminates the place.’
At the far side of the pond Cecily stepped onto the bank and turned for the first time. She must have seen the swarming masons, but she gave no sign of fear. Edward stood quite still upon the water, within arm’s reach of her, his figure as trim and colourfully clad as a new toy soldier. Meg hallooed to them, a wordless call like a bird’s, and Edward raised his arms, turned and stepped off the causeway and immediately was swallowed up. The water just beneath that bank is deep.
‘This ritual is not our teac
hing,’ said the preacher-uncle. ‘But to seek for redemption, by whichever road, shows a good heart.’
I think Edward was gone from sight a full minute. The women began to moan and cry out. Then he was climbing up the bank, his hair, which had showed mouse-colour, blackened by wetness. In his hand was something bright. He tossed it into the air and it fell into the water – a red-gold fish as long as his hand. He pulled off his blue coat, all streaked with mud as it was, and left it lying. He ran off, barefoot, up a track which led into the beechwoods overhanging the lake on the other side and thence, at last, to a gate opening onto the Finstock road. Cecily followed.
The preacher threw his arms up skyward and hollered out ‘Hallelujah’, and then led his flock into the chapel. We heard their voices raised in song as we made our way back up the bank. On the track beneath us the carts were moving forward again, the carters calling out to their massive horses. Patient creatures that they are, they must have been thankful for the intermission in their morning’s journey. For them, only, that strange episode was a simple relief.
*
Meg – You will welcome his return?
Cecily – I will be civil.
Meg – He is devoted to you.
Cecily – If so, he has been exceedingly reticent about it.
Meg – He fears to be thought a fool.
Cecily (exasperated) – He is thought a fool! I think him one.
Meg – My Lady’s brother will be put out.
Cecily – Do these people’s beliefs mean so little to them? I cannot marry a papist. I cannot feel any regard for a papist who would marry me. He knows what I have been.
Meg – Mr Norris will take no further step until he knows as much. In withholding knowledge from him you make him as nervous as a dog who barks at a familiar visitor when the man dons a hat. He cannot tell what you are.
*
Young Edward, and Cecily who was to him I knew not what, left Wychwood. Two years have since gone by. I, who had been so briefly complete, was once more a jagged shard. I begged my employer to help me understand what I had seen. He said, ‘Some of those who are fond of this family have been engaged in foolish conjuring. My son’s death has been the occasion for doings I cannot approve. Albeit well-meant.’ On another occasion he said, ‘This country has been warring upon itself for twenty years and more. We walk as through a battlefield still littered with weapons. Every step may see your foot come down upon a blade. My cousin’s life has been as strange as any. People of our generation, Mr Norris, must be careful in what they expect of others whose history is unknown to them.’
I went then to Wood Manor and sat a pleasant but useless hour with Lady Harriet. Without her daughter to prompt her she spoke vaguely, her thoughts as inconsequential as the discarded short lengths of silk in her sewing basket. Meg Leafield was with her. I said, ‘If I were to write Cecily a letter, could you ensure she received it?’ I spoke as to the mother, but my eyes briefly met Meg’s, and she gave a tiny nod.
The writing of that letter took me many hours of the night, but when it was finished it was barely four lines long. What I had to say could be contained in two sentences. It could have been said in two words. I do not know whether it reached her. I had no reply.
*
Meg – I hear the moaning every night now, there along the wall. Singing doesn’t soothe them.
Cecily – Meg, watch what you say. For your own safety, remember, the dead have no tongues to speak. And for my sake too. I don’t like to hear fantastic tales.
Meg – He said they would rise up again. And they will rise shouting with joy. How should they not have tongues?
Cecily – Let them be. It is the living with whom we must concern ourselves.
Meg – Today I sold near on a hundred posies. People offer me bed-sheets, pewter mugs, petticoats. A woman begged me to exchange an amulet for her baby’s coral ring. I asked, did the mite not want it to mumble on, and she said she had buried him in a meadow near Henley. Her eyes were dry. There are some things one cannot allow oneself to feel, for fear of being consumed by the fury of it.
Cecily – You do good.
Meg – Rubbish. What I give them is rubbish. The herbs are good for chafed skin or an itching nose in springtime. They can’t keep away the plague. I cheat them.
Cecily – Why then?
Meg – For money. And because they beg it of me.
Cecily – You risk your life.
Meg – Don’t fall into that error, my dear. Don’t treat people as though they were barrels of gunpowder ready to explode and kill all bystanders. How many apothecaries take sick from treating the desperate? None that I’ve heard of.
*
Here, those suspected of being diseased are kept without the wall. In London they are kept walled in.
Wherever a person is found to have the horrid marks upon his or her body, then the invalids, and all living with them, are boxed up in their houses and not suffered to come forth for three weeks or more after the marks of the disease have passed or the sufferer has died. Whole families are thus confined, their front doors nailed shut. Any window large enough to permit a person to pass through is barred. When one dies, the corpse is taken out at night and the door nailed close again. Passers in the street hear the whimpering of those within but none dare release them. In many, many families everybody dies. Those who survive do so only because of the kindness of those who leave a jug of milk or a loaf, or a few apples, on a window ledge which can be reached from within. Mr Rose has heard from an acquaintance in the city that Cecily was until lately one of those philanthropists. Whether Edward was still with her, he could not discover.
Lord Woldingham came upon me in the park this morning as I stood near to the old meeting-house, contemplating its roof-tree, which was all that I could see of it beyond the wall that now shuts it out. Mr Rose was with me. The slope down which we two had once hurtled so precipitately had been cleared of trees and boulders, and smoothed into a green swelling as featureless as the shoulder of a wave. Above it the wall rose, blank.
‘I did this,’ said Rose, ‘but I do not like it. I have never otherwise known his Lordship mean-spirited.’
And there was our employer, cantering towards us.
A groom came up behind him leading a spare horse. ‘Come, Mr Norris,’ he said. ‘I have yet to bid you welcome, but now I will immediately employ you. Ride with me.’ For the next two hours we toured the park.
The ownership of land is not natural. The American savage, ranging through forests whose game and timber are the common benefits of all his kind, fails to comprehend it. The nomad traversing the desert does not ask to whom belong the shifting sands that extend around him as far as the horizon. The Caledonian shepherd leads his flock to graze wherever a patch of nutritious greenness shows amidst the heather. All of these recognise authority. They are not anarchists. They have chieftains and overlords to whom they are as romantically devoted as any European subject might be to a monarch. Nor are they communists. They do not say the land belongs to us all. Simply they do not consider it as a thing that can be parcelled out.
We are not so innocent. When humanity first understood that a man’s strength could create goods to be marketed, that a woman’s beauty was itself a commodity for trade, then slavery was born. So, since Adam learnt to force the earth to feed him, fertile ground has become too profitable to be left in peace.
This vital stuff that lives beneath our feet is a treasury of all times. The past: it is packed with metals and sparkling stones, riches made by the work of aeons. The future: it contains seeds and eggs: tight-packed promises which will unfurl into wonders more fantastical than ever jeweller dreamed of – the scuttling centipede, the many-branched tree whose roots, fumbling down into darkness, are as large and cunningly shaped as the boughs that toss in light. The present: it teems. At barely a spade’s depth the mouldywarp travels beneath my feet: who can imagine what may live a fathom down? We cannot know for certain that the fables of serpents curv
ing around the roots of mighty trees, or of dragons guarding golden treasure in perpetual darkness, are without factual reality.
How can any man own a thing so volatile and so rich? Yet we followers of Cain have made of our world a great carpet, whose pieces can be lopped off and traded as though it were inert as tufted wool. My Lord has a swathe of it.
‘Come, Norris, I’ll race you,’ he said suddenly. He bent on his horse’s neck and the fleet creature (it is half an Arab) knew without touch of spur what was required of it. My own mount took off after. I was fortunate to have idly knotted my fingers in its mane and so given myself secure purchase. We galloped madly up the avenue known as Tower Light. The trees I had seen planted flicked past me, the glare of the low sun, piercing my eyes, repeatedly interrupted by the shadows of the young trunks. Light dark light dark. One day this broad sweep will be as grandly walled and roofed as an abbey. Already its columns begin to rise.
My Lord pulled up at the junction of the two broad avenues, so that he stood like an equestrian statue at the focal point of my design. He wheeled his horse around. It spun like a dancer. ‘See. See. See. See,’ he said, pausing at each right angle to gesticulate.
Twelve o’clock – church tower. Three o’clock – the broad ride ending in the magnificent black iron gates, and beyond them a wall of forest foliage. Six o’clock – another church tower. Nine o’clock – where the lake lay beneath the angle of our eyeline, the house low before it, showed only vacancy: a patch of sky. ‘We will fill that hole,’ he said. He was excited. ‘You have promised me a fountain, have you not, a column of water? And then, my boy dying, I lost my zest for such things. But now I see how fitting it would be. Where he sank down, something marvellous will spring up. We have worked to your plans. You are returned in time to celebrate the consummation of your design.’
We rode on. I had been awaiting an occasion when I could ask my question unobtrusively. That occasion not presenting itself, I was driven to abruptness.
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