Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  I slept a few hours in a shelter one of the rangers had left. I believe he used to watch there by night, with the intention of apprehending poachers. It was dry enough. At dawn I went back to Wood Manor. The front door was open, but barricaded with benches and other furniture pulled roughly across.

  One of the Londoners stood watching. He has a girl in the village, and has elected therefore to stay and make his home here.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ he said. ‘Young Edward woke me, and paid me to stand and keep folk out until the infection has spent itself.’

  ‘Who’s gone?’ I asked.

  ‘Not old Meg. He dragged her to the trench where they used to store turnips, and tipped her in and covered her up. He said there’ll be time for bell and book when the pestilence has passed.’

  ‘Miss Cecily?’

  ‘He carried her out, all muffled up, and laid her on a cart. She was mewing like a cat.’

  For hours I cast about, hurrying first in one direction, then another. But there were cart-tracks on every road, and no way of telling which were those I sought to follow. Around noon, I found myself at a crossroads some miles away and thought, I cannot find them. I must return so that they can find me.

  I collected myself then and went slowly – for, being accustomed to ride, I was very footsore – back into the village. It had become a sombre place. Doors were closed, windows made fast. The day was almost spent. I found an empty house and ensconced myself. An old fellow who was its caretaker came and shouted out to know what the devil I meant by it. He stood in the street and hollered at me but would not come near. I answered him civilly. I told him I was not minded to live for long in such a hovel, and that I would pay its owner a fair rent. He grumbled, but he went away.

  I had paper with me. The next morning I used a half-sheet to write a note to my employers. I feared I was contaminated, I wrote, and must absent myself. I thrust it in through the bars of the great gate. After a while a servant from the house gathered it up. I knew the man, and made a sign to him. He nodded and raised his hand, as he turned back up the drive. I thought he pitied me.

  *

  In the encampment a man was beating his wife. No one else stirred. The evening was so still that the thwack of his hawthorn was audible from twenty yards away. So was the woman’s gasp each time, and the shuddering of her breath in the intervals between blows.

  Another woman sat at the mouth of a makeshift shelter, her arms spread to stop her children coming out to see what was the matter. Mucus poured from her nose and tears from her eyes, and her shoulders shook. The low sun dazzled her, so that the man with the cudgel, when he came back up from the riverbank, showed black as a troll, outlined in flame. He paused before her.

  ‘What has my sister done wrong?’ She gulped as she spoke.

  He was waving something in front of her face. She noticed the dirt under his ridged fingernails, he who always kept himself so nice.

  ‘She says this was your mother’s,’ he said.

  She rose to take it, a string of stone beads, translucent, mottled green and black. As she held out her hand he pulled back the beads and used them to thrash her across the palm.

  ‘Idolaters. Idolaters. Idolatry.’

  She put her forearms up to protect her face. The children had not come out. He mastered himself and waited, his jaw working within his sunken cheeks. She watched him from beneath her arms, her knees bent ready to run, or to throw herself between him and her brood.

  He said, ‘There was a time when the chosen people lived in the great house there, and I was their comforter and guide. And now beings as useless and impure as the gilded flies have overrun it again.’ A tendon in his neck vibrated. His eye-whites were yellow. He muttered to himself, his hands closed like fists on the polished stones, ‘They cast me out. They cast me out.’ There were flecks of spittle in the corners of his thin lips. ‘And now my own woman pollutes our worship with the toys of vanity fair.’

  He pulled the string tight. Her grandmother had had it from a pedlar, who said he had been to Byzantium, and had bought it from a Turk there, who had it from one who claimed to have gathered up the pebbles on the slopes of Calvary hill. ‘Our saviour’s bare and bleeding feet,’ the pedlar had said, ‘stepped on these stones.’ She could hear her sister moaning still.

  She understood that her brother-in-law was perplexed. There were others watching. A man may chastise his wife, and his neighbour will not prevent him, but a wife’s sister, who is herself another man’s wife (even if that man is abroad), with her he must guard himself, and submit to being overseen. He wound the string around both hands, as children hold yarn when they play at cat’s-cradle, and yanked at it repeatedly. It was a strong cord. Her father had reinforced the silk with long hairs from the tail of his black horse.

  A neighbour-woman stepped forward at last and handed him a blade, one she used for paring vegetables. ‘I’ve no liking for prayer beads, Pastor,’ she said, ‘but the stones are pretty. You can have the use of this if you let me keep them.’ He cut the cord, but bungled it. He dropped the beads on the ground to show how little he cared for them, the blackened metal cross falling among them.

  The neighbour-woman said, when he’d walked off, ‘I’ll keep the silk tassel, but the stones are for you, Goody. Pastor won’t come searching if he thinks I have them.’

  Late that night the sisters lay facing each other on the dried bracken, their children sleeping between them.

  ‘I have sworn to obey him,’ said the one whose back throbbed and stung. ‘I have sworn to love him.’ She was twenty-three but her voice was like that of an old woman.

  ‘Every night I miss my husband,’ said the other, ‘but I do not want him with me now. It is easier to face hardship alone.’

  ‘Such a pother about a rosary. He is far more of an idolater than I am. He believes these beads, which are mere pease of rock, have the power to damn him.’

  ‘I would that we could go.’

  ‘We could go. We could go now.’

  The women loaded a cart with bundles and with sleeping children. They wrapped the donkey’s hooves with sacking, and trudged away from the rising sun.

  *

  Before my father was made steward he lived like this. He was lifted up, as many boys have been, by the purity of his voice. A child carolling to himself as he walked to the fields at sun-up; a priest overhearing; a clean face and cleanish cassock and a seat in the choir; the priest’s need of a clerk and the boy’s readiness with lettering; a place in the counting house of the priest’s college; a gentleman in search of a secretary; a young woman with an ample dowry. So it goes for a lucky few, and my father had the knack of catching fortune’s eye. And so I was raised in rooms with glass in the windows and rush matting on the floor.

  How quickly the past is forgotten. My grandmother was with us a while before she died. I remember her as a mumbling ancient thing, grinding her teeth ceaselessly. But I never saw the place my father came from. Now I live in the sort of village house that was his first home, and it is as strange to me as an Indian’s wigwam would be.

  I exchange letters with Mr Rose, and with my Lord, and so the work necessary for the fountain goes forward. The passing of missives through the bars of a gate feels like a childish game, but it is efficient, and so I am able to follow the unfolding of events within Wychwood. In the absence of any certain news as to Cecily’s whereabouts, my extreme perturbation makes me thankful I am released from the need to present a smooth face to those who know me there.

  The sequestering of the family in the big house feels to those within the walls like a strange curtailment of their liberty. To those in the village it is no great novelty. For them, even before the wall’s building was complete, to stray about the park, without express permission, was to risk having a leg bitten off by a mantrap. Prisoners lament their confinement. Sometimes to be at large is an equal deprivation.

  I have led a peregrinating life. My rooms near Gray’s Inn are neat and pleasant, but I
have been content to leave them repeatedly. Only now have I understood how poignant a thing it is to feel shut out.

  I have made it my habit each day to visit the migrants. I teach the children to calculate, which pleases their parents, and to draw, which pleases the little ones themselves. They have been here near on a month and in that time they have established a kind of polity. They have a forum, a level place ringed with white-skinned birch trees, where a fallen pine provides a bench for the elders. Here the able-bodied can speak generally, or walk to confer apart, as they please. They receive visitors. Since the deaths of the old man from London, and the village-woman who tended him, some – villagers and travellers alike – keep themselves ever more close, but others have grown nonchalant, and, for the sake of society, cock snooks at fear.

  This morning I sat among them, discoursing with an intelligent man, an apothecary, about the possibility that a trust in divine protection might save one from the sickness, not through God’s agency, but because one convinced of his own invulnerability might be fortified against the onslaught of disease. I argued that such a thing was likely, because terror thins the blood and shakes the nerves as well as fraying the spirit. He said no. Before leaving London he had seen, he said, the hearty and confident struck down as surely as the pusillanimous. ‘The pestilence,’ he said, ‘makes as little enquiry as to a person’s state of mind as it does of a person’s virtue. In truth I think it is not interested in persons at all, but only in the elements of which our flesh is constituted. It feeds on us. When you eat bacon, sir, you do not stop to wonder whether the pig was of a cheerful disposition before it met the butcher.’

  His fatalism I found consoling. If the pestilence strikes as indifferently as rain, then we are absolved of blame and excused all effort. What can we do but let it come down.

  A gaunt-faced man was pacing back and forth along the margin of the river. He is one of their chiefs. He is deferred to not out of respect, but because he is intimidating. His clothes were brushed, and his hair smooth: he looked wild nonetheless. He had been walking by himself, with hands clenched, a good half-hour, before he joined the circle.

  ‘I have been debating with myself,’ he said, ‘how to inform you all of what has befallen me. My wife and her sister have abjured my protection, and forsaken your fellowship. They have left our community here. They did not see fit to inform me of their intentions. Nor am I certain of their destination. My daughters are with them.’

  Glances exchanged. A tightening of mouths. I was ready to pity the man, however unamiable he might be, but I saw no trace of sympathy for him in the lowered faces around me. One woman met my eye and seemed to laugh silently. There was nothing unseemly or overbold about her manner. I thought how, when a mass of people are set in motion, there is a rattling and a joggling which unsettles the structures of a society as surely as it causes crockery to chip and cloth to fray.

  I have received a letter from Edward. He tells me that Cecily is too weak to write, but that she asked him to send me a verse, one I recognised about a ‘garden walled’. He writes that she said I was to reflect upon the folly contained within it. The message puzzles me, but to know that she is alive, and thinking, and thinking of me, rejoices me beyond measure.

  *

  A crossroads, with an inn. On the painted sign a pair of pistols held in gloved hands so as to form an X. Catty-corner to the inn two stout posts, with a crosspiece running between them at the top, in the semblance of a doorframe. Many men had passed through that invisible door to eternity. They swung there, three or four at a time, in the months of insurrection before the coming back of the King. The posts were rotted now, their bases embraced by brambles. The only swinging thing the inn-sign, creaking on its iron bracket. Beneath it a board set on trestles, with upon it bread, and a cooking pot from which steam arose. Travellers on the road, of whom there were many, though it was not yet day, stopped and dipped bowls or spoons into the savoury mess, before turning onto the road towards the south-east, towards the gathering light, and going on their way. The woman of the inn watched them eat. Her hospitality was generous, but her eyes were as hard as hammered coins. Said one traveller to another, ‘They are glad to provide for us, now that we are all but gone.’

  Later came cows, plodding with distended udders through the churned mud where the roads met. And then again, when the white sun was fully visible through the flimsy clouds, they passed by the opposite way, following their leader back to the meadows along the river valley. As the last one went by, the woman of the inn gave the cowherd a heel of bread, all that remained of that morning’s abundance, and he handed her a pail of milk.

  ‘Will they find their homes again, do you think?’ asked the man, who had never ventured more than a day’s walk from that place.

  ‘The Lord alone knows,’ she said. ‘I know only that our homes here will be the safer now they’re gone.’

  *

  It is many days since I wrote in this journal and night falls sooner by over an hour.

  Yesterday a letter came for me. Not the one for which I yearned, but a summons from Lord Woldingham. He informed me that, the plague abating even in London, and no further person having fallen sick in the vicinity of Wychwood, the gates to the park are to be opened and intercourse between the domain within and the outside world resumed. He likes to make a ceremony of anything, from the cutting open of a pie to the first flowering of his precious tulips. For what he called, with cheerful blasphemy, his ‘second coming’, he aimed to lay on a show to match those the Italian papists stage when their miracle-working effigies are brought out from behind their altars and paraded through the streets.

  All were invited into the park for a feast to celebrate the reopening of the gates. By the time the dew had dried off the spider-webs this morning the entire population of the village was jostling and chattering in the rounded open space before the gates.

  Exactly as the sun reached its zenith my Lord and Lady appeared beneath the archway before the house, and rode out slowly, their black horses keeping pace. Behind them, in procession, came their entire household in holiday attire, and at the rear two strapping footmen returned to their boyhood calling of beating upon drums.

  I thought my Lord would have expected to hear a cheer go up, but the villagers watched in an uneasy silence. If the migrants from London had been altered by their exodus, so had their coming wrought a change in the community upon which they had descended. For near a month the Woldinghams had sealed themselves in their place of safety, leaving those without to defend themselves as well they could from calamity. Their issuing forth now that the danger was passed, as though their very presence was a blessing for which their tenants (who had managed well without them for near on two decades) should be grateful, was folly. I have often been amused by my employer’s extravagance, but this time I was ashamed for him.

  The gates swung open. While the procession of servitors halted within, my Lord and Lady passed through and rode around the circle, my Lord flourishing his hat, my Lady nodding to all and sundry. There were murmurs, polite enough, and many of the women curtsied. Still the crowd was quiet as an audience at a bear-baiting, when – as happens on occasion – something in the bear touches the spectators’ hearts, and they are distressed to see him so illused. Lord Woldingham leant to murmur to his wife, perhaps having decided to cut short all further ceremony, and standing up in his stirrups he called out, ‘Follow me, and welcome.’ He made his horse prance a little, then cantered back through the gates and veered off down to the lakeside. On the level ground alongside the remnants of the Roman villa long boards were set with some of the great abundance of provisions my Lady had been storing, needlessly, against a long winter’s siege. A second crowd awaited there, those of the estate’s people who had lived all this time within the walls.

  There was ale to help to dispel the awkwardness. It was, to all outward showing, a joyous day, a rustic festival. I had some pleasant conversation with Master Lane, the gentleman whom my Lord
has appointed his steward. He is an active fellow, who has seen Italy, as I have not, and will show me his sketches. He is officious, and will need guidance as to whom he should respect here. I noticed him addressing Masters Armstrong and Goodyear, twin potentates of this little world, as underlings, a mistake my Lord, for all his faults, has never made in my presence.

  My Lord said to me, ‘We once hoped, Mr Norris, did we not, to make our watery volcano erupt on the day of the autumnal equinox? We must postpone that pleasure until the spring.’ I will soon to London.

  I retired early. So did my Lord and Lady. But the pipes and the singing sounded on long after the glare of the bonfires had begun to outshine the light from the sky.

  *

  ‘So who am I?’ said Edward.

  ‘You are my brother,’ said Cecily. ‘My mother was your mother.’

  She was propped with pillows so that as he leant forward from the window seat each could look the other in the eye.

  ‘Our mother was ashamed of the truth,’ she said. ‘But I do not like mystification. You were born from an act of violence, but you were reared with love.’

  ‘Tell me about my father.’

  ‘He was a God-fearing man who believed he was God’s appointed, and wanted all others to fear God in him. He was full of rage and self-love. He was a terrible man, but he was sincere.’

  ‘How could he believe that God condoned his crime?’

  ‘It was not a crime in his eyes. “Go forth and multiply.” He prided himself on his obedience.’

  ‘And you? He laid hands upon you too?’

  ‘Yes. But I was very young. Other girls about my age, three of them, conceived his children. I was not yet capable.’

  Edward sat back and closed his eyes. He was almost a man and his skin, in the greenish evening light, was pimpled by the coming beard.

  He said, ‘My very existence is an abomination.’