Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Water must go down. That is the imperative that governs it, and nothing movable that gets in its way, be it tree-trunk or sheep or hapless human, can deflect it, or retain a footing against its rush.

  On the day of Lord Woldingham’s fête five men were stationed at the foot of each lake – four to work the winches whereby the sluicegates were opened, the fifth to signal, with sunlight flashing from a mirror, to the party on the next dam. The timing must be exact. Each lake was to be filled in turn to its fullest capacity, so that the maximum volume of water could be released at the appropriate moment, its onward momentum growing greater incrementally as its mass increased.

  The upper lake was all but drained. Its contents roiled over the surface of the second lake, like a tumbled blanket drawn rapidly over a smooth sheet. The second dam being opened, the waters of the first and second lake merged to rush through it, and this time the turbulence of their passing stirred up the third lake, their host.

  When the tailgates of the quarrymen’s cart are opened, and the cart tipped to release a load of broken stone, the noise the falling rubble makes is tremendous; the sound of violence being done to that which is designed to lie inert. The noise the water made as it pelted towards the third dam was as awful, and as eloquent of the weight and power of insensate things, but it was an insinuating noise, not a mere crashing. It spoke of the water’s mobility and its penetrative slipperiness. Falling water is to falling rock as a snake is to charging boar, cleverer and much more frightening.

  Edward and Cecily, walking along the slimy flagstones paving the verge where the third lake narrowed towards the dam, were seized by the churning flood. For a moment Edward saw what was upon them. He turned. Cecily had lagged three paces behind, looking up at the men on the dam. Edward reached out his hand, but then the water clubbed his back and he flew at her, transformed from helpmate into missile.

  A person in racing water can do nothing to help a companion. As they hurtled through the precipitous downward channel brother and sister were rammed together and cast apart. From where Norris stood, or from where he crouched after he had fallen, bellowing, onto his hands and knees, a head was discernible for an atom of time and then gone again. A shoe. A pinkish staining of the water where it roared through the narrow passage between stone piers.

  Cecily

  All I can remember are brilliant refractions of light. Shards of brightness. As though in my lungs’ craving for air my mind opened itself only to those flashes and gleams travelling from the breathable element into the wet darkness in which I was rolled. I wonder now whether my eyes were really open at all.

  I lost Edward on the instant of the water taking us. Perhaps our useless bodies jostled each other as we were dragged along. I cannot tell. I was being pulled and pummelled by a force such as I had never felt. When, afterwards, my child was born, I screamed not so much for the pain of it, as because the creature forcing its way out of me, with no regard for my will or any other part of my intellectual being, brought me back to the helplessness I felt as that body of water drove me hither and thither. If every birth is a near escape from drowning, then it is a mercy that we can none of us recall it.

  I was swallowed down and vomited up. The noise prohibited thought. There was a moment when I fought to the surface and heard myself hauling in air with a sound as ugly and desperate as a donkey’s bray. My skirts dragged at me. Then came another assault. I was tumbled until there was no up or down. I was pulled under what felt like a bombardment, pelted and punched and forced down again. And then, all of a sudden, I was released into stillness.

  It was very deep there, and cold. I had no strength. All the light had gone. Inert as the pale piece of cloth that I could see a little way off, undulating aimlessly as the current lifted it, I drifted upward. The water let me go. My elbow found solidity. My hands grasped at it. My knees skidded over mud. I was holding tight to a willow root. I wormed my way into the shelter of a bank. I saw sky. Air went in and out of me. I pulled myself a little higher. I have never known or imagined anything could be as heavy as my body was then but I dragged it until there was solid ground under it all. Water ran from my mouth in spurtings and dribblings. I was just a limp thing propped against the trampled bank where the deer came down to drink. There was a smell of dung and water-mint. My head lolled sideways. I thought, Edward’s shirt, but my mind was incapable of pursuing the thought further.

  At the other end of the lake a trunk made of light and water stood trembling. As tall as the trees behind it, it was spreading itself at the top as a tree does, and showering all around it the glittering droplets that fell back, exhausted like me, to resume their fated purpose – always to go down.

  *

  There is something puerile about the keeping of a journal. When it came to the point where to continue my narrative of the day’s events I would have had to record the moment when I saw Cecily and the boy whirled away, I found I had no wish to do it. Let me put that more strongly: the very idea of using that event as stuff to be primped and patted into literary shape filled me with revulsion.

  Cecily survived, and is now my wife. When she informed Lord Woldingham that she intended to marry me he was incredulous. He is not, I think, especially proud of his aristocracy. He has learnt how useless it was to save him from the humiliations of exile. Nonetheless he thinks of himself, and therefore of his kin, as being different from the common ruck of mankind. And members of a species set apart, on the whole, mate only with their fellows. It was as though she had told him she was betrothed to a bird.

  He gave her a dowry. He has been gracious, but I find I am no longer seduced by his graces. He invites us to enjoy his park, and a grudging spirit in me says, ‘Your park? Was it not I who called it into being?’

  I go about the country, as I have always done, beautifying other people’s domains. My wife accompanies me. She is compiling an illustrated compendium of botanical knowledge. Her drawings are meticulous. ‘I am not,’ she says, ‘so fine an artist with the needle as my mother was, but she taught me well, and this I can do.’ Each time that she has a portfolio filled I present it, as my own work, to the gentlemen of the Royal Society. It was she who suggested the deception. She says that as I become more celebrated as a botanist, she is warmed by the glow of my fame, and that she is therefore content. I do not believe this.

  We have a daughter. Her name is Meg.

  The fountain was a thing of a moment. Mr Rose and I had planned it with great exactitude, but our plans were flawed. We measured the fall of the land. We made careful observations of the speed of water descending at various inclines – observations that have been praised for their punctiliousness by the gentlemen of the Society. We talked about the weight of water, and about how that weight is to be multiplied by the force generated by velocity and volume. We were scientific and mechanical and mathematical. We were mightily pleased with our own ingenuity. We built channels and we designed sluices and winches. We said to all who would attend to us that we were not really artists – no, not we – for the thing we were creating would be all made of natural elements; that water is unfailingly elegant when it tosses and falls, the lines it effortlessly composes sinuous and lovely. We were dissembling. Whatever we may have said aloud to others, to ourselves we said secretly that we were the masters of a new art. The twisting helices forming in water as it flows from a spout, the luxurious darkness of deep water, the spangles of light in water as it flies in spray; these were our materials, and we would deploy them as no others had yet even thought to do.

  We were proud. We were dazzled by the imagined spectacle. But we failed to give sufficient consideration to the outflow. We would bring the contents of three lakes hurtling all at once into the basin from which it would be forced upwards, and in that we succeeded.

  In moments of great fear time becomes commodious. We see and feel more. Even in my extreme distress, even as I ran along the bank, even as I plunged in and waded uselessly through the slime as though my immersion in the lake w
ould somehow persuade it to restore Cecily to me, even in those dreadful minutes, or perhaps they were only seconds, I was – I do not know whether I should be ashamed of this – I was exulting in the knowledge that all our contrivances had been effective. A column of water was shot up in the air, a prodigy, an apparition of great beauty.

  I reached her. I lifted her – she was starveling thin. Muddy water poured from her mouth as I cast her over my shoulder. I ran with her up the slope. I knew the descending waters would raise the level of the lake. What I had not anticipated was that they would break through the next dam. There was a sound like the uproar of a fire. Another sound like the collapse of a building whose rafters have been burnt through. The lake, that had briefly become a turbulent sea, was draining away, and a new river raced over the marshy ground beyond, and poured, with a gabbling, through the water-gate Mr Rose had made for it, which was momentarily transformed into a weir. Villagers have told me of the freakish wave that rushed past them, bearing with it branches and torn-up ferns. Several saw red fishes in the torrent.

  *

  After the fountain had subsided the gentry withdrew to the house. The chandeliers and sconces were lit and the light fell through the unshuttered windows, making panels of gold on the gravel beneath.

  News came from the village that Edward’s body had been cast up on the bend of the river where children habitually went to dip for crayfish and sticklebacks. Mr Lane conferred briefly with Lord Woldingham. Nothing was said to the assembled company, either about the boy’s death, or about the inadvertent draining of the lakes.

  Edward’s funeral was held four days later. He was buried in the village churchyard next to his mother and his cousin Charles.

  After the ceremony Pastor Rivers waited by the church gate.

  Mr Goodyear walked down the path with his wife, the two orphans lagging behind. The children wore stiff new smocks of whitey-brown linen with black ribbons around their skinny arms. They had black rosettes pinned to their little caps. Their faces were clean and they no longer looked so pinched.

  The pastor stepped forward and said, ‘Brother.’ Mr Armstrong, who stood nearby, looked round sharply and moved away.

  Goodyear took the pastor by the hand, bowing his head as he had never done when addressing his employer. He gestured to his wife to go on home with the children. Goodyear and Rivers spoke for a considerable time and then they walked together to Wychwood, going up the front drive and following the beech avenue, whose trees were now a little higher than their heads, across to the great iron gates at the far side of the park and out through the narrow wicket alongside them, into the forest.

  The meeting-house stood empty. Its benches had been taken out for use in the garden at the time of the fountain’s inauguration, and not returned. Thus denuded, the rectangular space seemed larger, and more tranquil. The floor’s wooden planks had been laid tidily, but never fixed. They rattled as the men stepped on them.

  Rivers stood at the centre, facing the high east window. The morning sun used to flood through it, blessing the worshippers with its radiance, interrupted only by a tracery of tree branches that cast a lacy shadow on the assembly. Now the window looked onto a wall, lately erected so close that a man standing between with arms stretched wide could touch stone wall with the tips of the fingers of one hand, and the building’s mud-plastered side with those of the other.

  ‘It is an insult,’ said Rivers, ‘but perhaps it was more careless than ill-meaning.’

  ‘His Lordship is not as much of a flibbertigibbet as he’d have you think,’ said Goodyear. ‘He knows what he does. Mr Rose remonstrated with him. The wall could have passed higher up here, but he would have it as it is. He knows where our graves were dug, but he would not leave them out of his enclosure.’

  ‘The sisters and brethren go to church in the village then?’

  ‘For the main part.’

  ‘And for the rest?’

  ‘I pass by here most evenings on my way home. There is sometimes a light to be seen, and singing.’

  Rivers nodded.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Let us look at it again.’

  Moving neatly and efficiently in concert, they began to lift and set aside the boards from the mid-section of the floor.

  ‘It is a very fine one,’ said Rivers. He was looking down at the two flying boys with their wonderful lapis-blue drapery. ‘Some of the elders preach that all such things should be destroyed, but it seems to me it is enough that they should be hidden from sight. I will not take a pickaxe to a work made with such devotion.’

  There were spades set in a corner, and a hand-barrow outside. Four of Goodyear’s men came, as he had appointed that they should, and until it was near dark they were busy. They lifted up all the planks. They shovelled up leaf-mould and spread it over the coloured pavement, with brushwood and small stones above, and then a layer of smoothed dirt. They laid new joists, and then set the boards back so the floor was as it had been, only raised up by two foot-spans. The building seemed lower now, and dingy.

  ‘It is a marvellous thing, but harmful,’ said Pastor Rivers.

  Goodyear’s ruddy face was a mask of sorrow and his small blue eyes were wet.

  On Ascension Day, Lady Woldingham walked the length of the chain of lakes with her husband, their attendants following. The verges had been scythed to make a sylvan promenade. There were dragonflies over the water. She leant on his arm, but their conversation was not harmonious.

  He said, ‘You once played Rahab, who welcomed the strangers.’

  She said, ‘Jericho was afterwards laid waste. And now two boys have died.’

  She left Wychwood with her brother. Returned to London, she established an oratory in the house on the Strand. She kept her children close by her until their marriages, and was little seen at court. When the Prince of Orange came to assume the government of this country, Lord Woldingham, who had known him well as a child, became a man of influence, but she chose not to share his great position, taking herself off to a religious house where she lived secluded. At the end of her life the sisters who cared for her waited on her in her room. To leave its narrow compass had come to seem to her a terrifying thing.

  *

  ‘The flaming sword,’ said Mr Goodyear, ‘turned this way and that. By day it was as a pillar of smoke, by night a pillar of fire.’

  ‘And a pillar of salt at dusk, I suppose,’ said Armstrong, surly. ‘If you tell sacred stories, confine yourself to the scripture. I don’t like to hear holy writ muddled.’

  There was a shifting, but none of the other listeners spoke up.

  ‘This is a story the book doesn’t tell us,’ said Goodyear smoothly. ‘This is the story of the garden shut up. It was a garden made as a haven for all the creatures of the earth, and its master was to be our father Adam. But Adam and his woman Eve were disobedient, and were cast out. That’s in the book. But scripture doesn’t tell us what happened next. How all the birds and beasts and fishes were left there without their guardians.

  ‘There was discord and violence. The larger beasts preyed upon the smaller beasts, and ate them. The serpent’s brood multiplied, and the snakes that were as thick as a man’s leg reared up and spat their venom at the blackberries so that they were poisoned, and the little worms curled themselves in the heart of the apples and apricocks so that to eat the fruit was perilous. Where Adam and his mate had made clearings, and dug up the stinging weeds, strange plants appeared, the stinking hellebore and the deadly nightshade, and others whose names we have forgotten, with berries as luscious as a harlot’s mouth and hairy stems. The clear streams became thick with weed, and the darting silvery fish were eaten by long brown whiskery ones who rootled in the mud. Wild pigs trampled the corn that had grown in such profusion, and there were no flowers for the bees to sip from, and the bees’ nests dried up and fell empty to the ground. The cows bellowed for days to be milked, and after that there was no more milk.

  ‘A mouse said to a beetle, “We must leave t
his place. This is only one part of the world, and it has been blighted. Let us find another part where we could live.”

  ‘The beetle said, “I will come with you.”

  ‘They went together to the place where the cherubim stood. The mouse and the beetle could not see them, for their bodies were like glass and it was impossible to discover where they began and where they ended. But the little creatures could hear the cherubim’s song, which was very high-pitched and pure, like the sound of a glass rubbed. And they could feel the power that emanated from them, which was like the heat that trembles in the air above a heated forge. They said to each other, “These beings are fearsome. Whatever it is we wish to do, they can prevent us.”

  ‘They saw how the wall around Eden stretched away on either hand, with only the one opening, as though to guard those within from hungry hordes who might wish to come inside. And next to the cherubim they saw the flaming sword.’

  Here Goodyear paused, and cocked an eyebrow at Armstrong, who shook his head and stirred the dust with his stick.

  ‘The flaming sword turned this way, to prevent any intruder entering from the east, and that way, to prevent any intruder entering from the west. But it did not ever turn in the direction of the garden. The mouse and the beetle stood together watching it for a long time. Beyond it the country stretched away, with winding rivers and low hills and stands of trees and no moving thing in sight.

  ‘The beetle said, “These are formidable defences. No one can enter Eden. But I do not see that there is anything to prevent us leaving.”