Nat’s consciousness is spinning circles, too: a Wheel of Fortune, the ouroboros snake biting its tail, the revolutions of two hands upon a clock face. To sow and reap, to circle-dance by day, to make love by night – are these our puny efforts to imitate the orbits of moons and planets? For an instant he is overcome by his own paltriness; he is nothing but a speck on an insignificant planet amongst the multitudes of stars – then he banishes such pessimism. Here and now is this May time, and it stands green-garlanded and glorious in the calendar of all his days.
The May cart arrives, dressed in boughs and flowers and drawn by a beribboned team of horses. Tabitha, Queen of the May, stands at its helm, her hair crowned with a loosely woven garland of lady’s smock, blue speedwell and red campion. Nat warms at the sight of her. Her white taffeta gown is rich with embroidered flowers, gathered across her swollen belly, where their unborn child grows like a miraculous harvest.
Nat greets his wife and leads her by the arm to the long table beneath the oak. Sir John sits at the table’s head, still slow and palsied, and costumed in black mourning for his brother, who died just as the New Year came in. The spring frolics seem to have given the old master new strength, though it is not likely he will ever again be the bluff and bumptious fellow he once was. Nonetheless, he rises tremulously to make a toast. He wishes good health and prosperity to them all: the May maidens, garland gatherers, wood wardens, cooks and, last of all with shining eyes, his son and heir Nathaniel, and his daughter-in-law, Tabitha.
Then all fall upon the feast, each taking a portion of the great pie flourished with a pastry Eden; sun’s rays, creatures and songbirds. It is the month of milk and increase, and all the villagers who can have contributed the cream of their cows so that Zusanna and her milkmaids may whip a gigantic syllabub. The wine has been donated by the new parson, a gesture that Mr Dilks, now exiled to a chaplaincy at a hospital for poor women’s foundlings, would never have countenanced. Nat looks around the table with settled pleasure; at the old folk nodding their white heads in the sunshine, the children ferociously feeding, and a crafty cat that steals away with jaws full of scraps. Bess is chattering with her young playmates; his little cousin is growing fearsomely clever. Tabitha has told him she will soon engage a governess for her.
As the ale is passed around the singing begins; the men’s voices tuneless and gruff and the women piping in an off-key.
For summer is a-come O!
And winter is a-gone O!
The earth has spun back to the healing warmth of spring, and all their blood is warming with reawakening urges. He watches as Jane brings Joshua a dish of sweetmeats and, soon afterwards, the pair eat from a shared plate, as Jane casts shy glances into his broad face. Tabitha has told him that though they know nothing of it themselves, it is as good as decided that they will be married by the summer’s end.
And the village women predict, too, that Jennet and Tom Seagoes will soon afterwards visit the altar. He hopes it will be a good year for bridals and bride cakes; a perpetual season of lusty hearts, and the staining of gowns on the green grass.
By evening time, Nat has found himself a leafy, solitary arbour in the garden at Bold Hall. He casts his mind back across a thousand pinpoints of time, dancing like fireflies in his memory. He has decided to fuse those kaleidoscopic pictures into one beam of steady light: a half-naked woman glimpsed through a telescope’s lens, the starry universe shining at the bottom of a water meadow, the sound of a silver skull’s jaws snapping closed, and the sweet almond scent of distilled laurel.
He wants to make a bubble in the tide of time and inhabit it. Can he fix on paper something greater than a crude pamphlet or foolish riddle? He wants to attempt it; to try his hand at a new-fangled fiction, with a heroine both ever-changing and immortal. Silently, he dedicates it to those time-leaping angels that he and Tabitha once speculated upon. Will they carry his words into the future, where beings command animated statues and inhabit cities made of curious clockwork? Today, he has hope of immortality, if only by means of ink and paper. So, dipping his quill, he begins to write that curious assortment of words some call a novel:
An unlucky day for travel. The phrase tolled like a doom bell in Tabitha’s skull when she woke to find all her possessions stolen …
A hand appears on his shoulder, and he looks up to see Tabitha reading his lines, her mouth twitching in amusement.
‘And does it have a happy ending?’ she asks.
He puts down his pen, slides his hand over her body’s ripeness, and feels the child quicken. It seems to him that all he has to do is direct his pen, and he can halt time.
‘In this present time of now,’ he replies carefully, ‘on this page, for this reader, I promise you it does.’
Solutions to the Riddles
The eighteenth century saw an explosion of ‘riddlemania’, as word puzzles were widely printed in almanacs, magazines and books. Creating and solving ingenious puzzles was a popular pastime and some of the greatest wits of the day contributed to the golden age of enigmatography. The majority of the riddles set out in this book are anonymous, although others are based on the work of notable contributors listed below. In almost all cases I have rendered the language and style more accessible to the modern reader.
Preface: A Riddle
1. A letter
2. A telescope (Friedrich von Schiller, Dramatist and Poet)
3. Death
4. Jealousy
5. A candle
6. A coffin
7. Darkness
8. Fashion
9. Heart
10. An eye
11. The letter D
12. Moon
13. Scythe
14. A quill pen (Jonathan Swift, Satirist)
15. The gallows (Jonathan Swift, Satirist)
16. Tell-tale
17. Cherries
18. A dog
19. (1) Rue, (2) Sage, (3) Bay, (4) Laurel, (5) Pennyroyal, (6) Rosemary, (7) Savory, (8) Monkshood, (9) Marigold, (10) Thyme, (11) Mint, (12) Balm
20. The Planets
21. A dream
22. Fare-well (Charles James Fox, Statesman)
23. Inn sign
24. Ink (Jonathan Swift, Satirist)
25. A ribbon
26. Health
27. Ghost
28. River (Mrs A L Barbauld, poet and author)
29. Bed
30. Star
31. A name
32. Midwife
33. Because it blackens all it touches
34. Fire
35. A looking glass
36. Love
37. Blood
38. Time
39. Church bells
40. Brandy
41. Snow (Jonathan Swift, satirist)
42. Death-watch
43. Tomb stone
44. Footsteps
45. Pen-i-tent
46. A key
47. Friendship
48. The Devil
49. Sleep
50. A maypole
Acknowledgements
It was something of a revelation when I first discovered eighteenth-century almanacs; pocket-sized booklets combining calendars, astronomical observations, general knowledge and predictions. Contemporary records show they were indispensable references: for planning parties on nights when a full moon would ease travel, as guides in sowing crops and to carry out trade at local fairs. They offer tantalizing insights into the daily life of our ancestors: care of livestock, herbal remedies, weather lore, reckoning of money, and even lucky and unlucky times to travel or cut one’s hair.
There was an almanac for almost every taste and town; during the seventeenth century over two thousand different almanacs were published. The predictions on subjects from daily weather to world affairs attracted a vast number of readers. By the mid-eighteenth century, the leading almanac by far was the original ‘Old Moore’s’, Vox Stellarum (‘The Voice of the Stars’). In 1768 it sold 107,000 copies, reaching its peak in the n
ineteenth century, in spite of astrologer Francis Moore having died in 1714 – a drawback blithely ignored to this day.
Almanacs were generally bought from street hawkers, at a cost of twopence to sixpence depending on their quality, and it is said that at times their sales in England exceeded the Bible. Such was their profitability that unlicensed editions, such as De Angelo’s fictional production in this novel, were produced in great numbers by hack writers and charlatan astrologers.
Predictions were typically cryptic and ambiguous. So, for example, Wing’s Almanack predicted the death of a great man in August 1658 and later claimed this foretold the demise of Oliver Cromwell on 3 September. Moore’s Almanack cited the 1755 Lisbon earthquake as the beginning of the fall of the Antichrist, and claimed to unveil Bonnie Prince Charlie as the horn of the beast of Daniel. Much like today’s tabloid newspapers, the enemy was generally any foreigner, particularly from the Catholic mainland of Europe, with special vitriol reserved for the French.
At the same time almanacs were evolving to meet a largely middle-class desire for amusement and instruction. The Ladies’ Diary, founded in 1704, successfully featured essays on famous women, a short story, recipes and ferociously difficult mathematical problems. At the heart of its success, however, were the rhyming riddles or ‘enigmas’. Folk riddles had long featured in penny chapbooks but soon ‘riddlemania’ gripped British readers. Unlike cryptic crosswords or sudoku, riddling was often a communal activity, as we see in Jane Austen’s Emma, where the Hartfield party is invited to contribute ‘any really good enigmas, charades or conundrums’ to form a written collection.
The better sort of almanacs ran contests to compose and solve erudite riddles. Readers were left puzzling for a year before learning the solutions or winning a prize comprising both the kudos of getting one’s name in print, plus a free copy of the next Almanack. Such puzzles give an insight into the lofty intellectual levels in the Georgian era.
Certainly, in comparison to the present editions of Old Moore’s Almanack, with its celebrity horoscopes and lucky bingo dates, we can only be impressed – if not shamed – by the mental dexterity of our ancestors.
A great many books, articles, and experiences helped me in writing this book but the following deserve a special mention:
Mark Bryant, Dictionary of Riddles (Routledge 1990)
Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500-1800 (Faber and Faber, 1979)
David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford University Press, 1997)
Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300-1800 (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Tristan Gooley, The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs (Experiment, 2014)
Herbert Green, Village Life in the Eighteenth Century (Longman, 1976)
Charles Kightley, The Perpetual Almanack of Folklore (Thames and Hudson, 1994)
Robert Poole, Time’s Alteration: Calendar reform in early modern England (UCL Press, 1998)
Laura J. Rosenthal (editor), Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century (Broadview Press, 2008)
Aaron Skirboll, The Thief-Taker Hangings: How Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Wild, and Jack Sheppard Captivated London and Created the Celebrity Criminal (Lyons Press, 2014)
David Vaisey (editor), The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754-1765 (Oxford University Press, 1984)
In the early days of my research I anticipated long hours studying archives of almanacs in libraries, but instead found the best collections online. Google Play provided some of my favourites, including sight of the 1752 calendar change almanacs in ‘A Collection of English Almanacs for the Years 1702-1835’.
A daily delight was following nature’s changes through the seasons from my writing window. At night, I loved following the moon and stars using the app Sky Map.
As ever, while I have tried to capture some of the spirit of the Georgian age, I have played with certain facts to write this fiction. For example, the village of Netherlea is entirely fictional and its location is imaginary.
I would like to thank the many generous people who helped and inspired me:
My writer friends, Alison Layland and Elaine Walker, who continued to give invaluable feedback and guidance on my work in progress. Dr Derek Nuttall MBE, and his wife Ruth, also kindly read the early manuscript and offered valuable advice.
My friends in The Prime Writers, a group of hugely supportive writers who all had their fiction debuts commercially published at the age of forty or more.
The Society of Authors for part-funding an unforgettable spell as Artist-in-Residence at Hawkwood College, Stroud.
The staff at Acton Scott Historic Working Farm (the location of the BBC’s Victorian Farm), where I loved spending ‘A Day in the Life of a Farmer’s Wife’.
Chester Archives for a place on their ‘Horrible Handwriting’ course where I learned to read old parish records.
For their encouragement and belief in the novel, many thanks to agents Charlotte Seymour and Sarah Nundy at Andrew Nurnberg Associates. Imogen Russell Williams again provided invaluable assistance.
A special thank you to Kate Lyall Grant and Sara Porter at Severn House Publishers, for their crucial enthusiasm and commitment to the book.
And finally, thanks to my son Chris and my husband Martin, both ever ready with their encouragement and suggestions.
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