by Jo Baker
—
The damsons were warm and soft and bluish-bloomed. They came away easy from their stalks. I was thinking of the last spate of books that Mr. Moore had left me, of the bewitched Medea sailing off with Jason, her dismembered brother’s body drifting in their wake. I was thinking of the smell of crackling fat, the skin stretched crisp and golden, a roast child on a platter carried into a wedding feast. These things of such horror and gravity and darkness, that had, at the same time, a kind of conviction and certainty that seemed wonderful to me. A poet lost in a forest and confronted by wild beasts; Ulysses lashing together tree trunks on Calypso’s island; Ophelia adrift in the water, trailing flowers, because there was really nothing left for her to do but die.
Once I had picked the damsons, I would have to finish the dress. There was only the hem left to turn. Then I would wash and dress and pin up my hair and go to the dance, and I would dance with Thomas. And Mr. Moore would leave, if not today then very soon; he had to leave; he had to be made to go. I would stay, and Thomas and I would marry, unless I could think of some way out of it, and I was beginning to see that I could think of no way out of it at all. I felt angry with Dad, and with Thomas, and with Mam, and with Mr. Moore, but most of all, I felt angry with myself. Other hands may have cut out the pieces, but I had sewn every stitch of my situation.
I was standing underneath the drooping damson branches, my bowl not yet half full. I had stood there I don’t know how long, without picking a single fruit. I closed my eyes and took a long slow breath. The gentry were fled. The clergy were gone. The strike continued. The troops were on their way, no doubt of it. However little I wished him to be gone, he had to be made to see that he must go. He had stayed too long already. I had to make him leave; I had to know that he was safe, even if that meant I could never see him again. He could not be sent half a world away to die. I would not let it happen.
—
He’d left the door open. He was sitting on his bed with his legs stretched out over the counterpane and his patched boots dangling over the edge. He was leaning back against the wall, so that he could look up the village street, at the passers-by, the flower garlands, the corn dollies, the streamers. I watched him in silence for a moment, then he turned from the window to look at me. His face was drawn; it seemed to be in strange contrast to the childlike way that he was sitting.
“There you are,” he said.
I nodded. He had been thinking of me: the realization made other thought difficult.
“Did you get your dress finished?”
The question was even more unsettling. I watched his right thumb stroke the back of the left, following the length of the white scar.
“I haven’t done the hem yet.”
Then the band started up on the green. It was faint enough due to the distance, but the music seemed to buzz around me, and I wanted to bat it away, like a wasp. An annoying tune, bright and cheerful.
“You’d better get it finished then,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Your mother will have your hide.”
“I know.”
His fingers interlocked, separated. Nails pinched at a scrap of skin, pushed back cuticles; just like that first night, his hands were restless, never still.
“That boy will be lucky to get a look in.”
I shook my head, vexed by the distance between his thoughts and mine.
“With you in your new dress,” he said, “every man there will want to dance with you.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Anyway, they won’t. It doesn’t matter.”
His eyes were so clear and direct that although I was colouring I could not look away. I was still holding the bowl of damsons; I hadn’t thought to put it down. I knew I must look bad-tempered and ridiculous; it didn’t matter. I took a step towards him, into the room.
“You must go, Mr. Moore.” The subject finally broached, words kept tumbling out. “There was a boy hurt last night, up at Storrs; Sammy Tate.”
“Sammy? Is he all right? What happened?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. But you must leave now, as quickly as you can, you must get out of here before they blame you for it.”
He blinked. “I can’t leave you.”
And though everything was just as it had been, the bookcase, the bed, the table and chair, and him sitting there looking pale and tired and like a child, it was as though the sun had come through clouds and lit everything differently, and everything seemed transformed. He shifted himself to the edge of the bed and got up. The wooden frame creaked just like it used to.
“I know you hate to sew,” he said. “I know you have no patience for it. Every time you’ve picked up that dress to work on it, your face has been a picture of vexation, and you don’t know it but you look so—your skin, and the cotton in a heap in your lap, it’s the perfect colour for you, that boy isn’t entirely witless. And the light catches in your hair, and maybe you don’t know that there’s a tint of red there, and you sit there squinting at your work, and your forehead’s all furrowed and you’re muttering under your breath.” He took a breath then and let it go thinly, between narrowed lips. “It’s been breaking my heart every day, watching you, knowing that you’ll wear the dress for another man. For him.”
I felt that I was standing in openness and sunshine and air, the sky great above me, the prospect limitless. He came closer.
“Not even a man; a youth, a boy. I have to ask you, I’m sorry, but I have to know. Are you going to marry him?”
Up on the green, the band lost their timing, the individual instruments stumbling to their separate halts. For a moment there was peace.
“My parents think I should.”
“And so you will?”
“I have to do something, I can’t go on living here forever. It’s been far too crowded since they let out my room.”
His face went as grey as ash. “You can’t resign yourself to this, to being a beast of burden, a brood mare—”
“Do you have a better idea?”
I couldn’t help but smile. He caught my smile and answered it.
“Yes.”
I didn’t know why there were tears. I moved towards him, and his arms were open to receive me, and there was a moment’s space between us, and my eyes were on a level with the open neck of his shirt, the brown skin and soft curls of hair. Then he put his arms around me and drew me to him, and I reached my arms around him, and his body was warm; I felt the warmth of him, and rested my head against his shirt, and pressed myself tightly to him, and I could hear the thud of his heart, and feel his breath press against me, and I could hardly breathe for happiness.
Each type of wood has its own particular scent. Where woodlands are old and mixed it is not always easily determined, but where only one type of tree is planted for timber or coppiced for charcoal or basketwork, or where one tree stands alone, distinct and separate from all others, the individual scents are unmistakable. In sunshine, after rain, sycamore has a greenish sappy scent, beech trees smell sweet and nutty. Shelter under an oak from a shower, and you will become conscious of the fragrance all around you, a wholesome smell like moss and oatmeal. Willow, on the other hand, retains through all processes a bitter yellow taint: it seems to linger on the senses, remain a sourness in the throat.
Robert Moore smelt of oak.
I know I smell of willow, it is worn into my skin.
—
We ate the damsons, sucked the melting toffee flesh from the stones. We lay there without speaking, lying on the bed, on my old bed, on my old patchwork quilt, me in nothing but my shift and loosened stays, him in nothing but his shirt. I felt shy of him, very conscious of the sounds of my eating, and of the places where our limbs still touched. I turned a damson stone around on my tongue, and picked it from my lips, and held it warming in my hand with the other ones, not knowing what else to do with them. The street was quiet below, and there was distant gentle music from the green.
He touched the cool flesh of my arm with his scarred hand. I glanced around at him. He smiled an awkward, shy smile.
“Now you have to marry me.”
My future had seemed set in stone, but we had thrown that stone into the air, and it had landed with a smash and shattered, scattering into a thousand little pieces, and the pieces had rolled and tumbled, and were settling into a new pattern; a beautiful new pattern, any pattern at all: I could arrange it as I wished.
“Do you remember how you told me about that shrew?” he asked.
He lifted the empty damson bowl and held it to me: I dropped the fleshless stones into it; he tumbled his palmful in after.
“I remember.”
“And you said, We flicker into life, and out again, like candle flames. Do you remember that?”
He put the bowl down beside the bed; I closed my hand, feeling the fruit-juice film of stickiness.
“I think so.”
He turned back to me. “And you said about fishes turning into stones, and everyone going about from day to day ignorant of the fact?”
“Yes.”
“I always thought that you were pretty. But since that day, the idea of you with that boy—” He shook his head.
A thought blossomed in my head, making me smile: “Is that why you kept lending me the books, to keep me from my sewing?”
He smiled back at me. “My motives there were purely scholarly.”
The clock struck the half-hour, and he asked what o’clock it was, but I didn’t know. He said that we should get dressed and I agreed, but neither of us moved. We lay in silence for a while. My shyness had melted entirely. He reached out an arm, and I pressed myself to him; his arm under my head, my cheek on his chest, a knee curled onto his leg, an arm around his waist. His hand touched my hair.
“It’ll be unsettled, Elizabeth. Our life together; it’s bound to be.”
“I don’t care.”
“It’ll be difficult.”
“I don’t care.”
And I really didn’t. No obstacle was insurmountable; anything could be achieved.
“I’ve been thinking about America. Could you fancy America?”
America. The boy had sailed there in the ballad. In a ship with sails that bellied out like linen on the line.
“I think I could.”
The three-quarter bell struck, and he stirred, slid his arm out from underneath my head, and he got to his feet, and then took my hand and I stood up with him, and he took a step back from me, and just stood looking at me as I stood there, and he was so serious and sober in manner, that I didn’t feel ashamed, and I knew that this was a time more real than any other, and unchanging, permanent. He pulled me to him and held me again, the length of his body pressed against mine.
“Did you know, before Eve, Adam had another wife? God made her out of clay, just like Adam.”
I smiled against the soft linen of his shirt, the warmth of his chest. “Nonsense.”
“No, it’s just not in our Bible. They left it out.”
A moment passed while I considered this. “What happened to her?”
“They didn’t get along so well.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Adam was a fool. I love you.”
—
He helped me with my stays. He drew them just tight enough, making me breathe high and shallow, but not pinching too much. I found myself wanting to ask about his wife, about the child, but I knew that it was not the time. He bent close to peer at the tiny hooks and eyes of my new dress.
He would leave that evening and walk to Lancaster, taking the footpath along the riverbank, avoiding the main roads. He could go unobserved that way, he said. The most he’d be likely to come across would be a poacher or a gamekeeper, and the lack of interest would be mutual. When he got to town, he would make arrangements and send for me, and for his books. We would be married in Lancaster, he said, that is, if I consented, since I hadn’t actually given him an answer yet.
“But you haven’t actually asked.”
“Didn’t I?”
“No, you instructed.”
“Well then, that must be remedied.” He took my hands, looked into my face, half smiling, half serious. “Would you do me the honour of consenting to be my wife?”
It was dizzying, the way things had changed, the way we’d changed towards each other. I was so conscious of my own happiness that it made me shy again.
“Yes,” I said.
He touched a hand to my cheek. I still remember the feeling of it, the cool hard dryness of his palm, as if the flesh there is somehow haunted by his touch. “Just to do that; to touch you—” He shook his head.
He said he’d a friend who had a packet boat at Glasson Dock, it would take us down to London. There, he had other friends, and we could stay with them while he found work, since there was always work in London. And it was easy to go unnoticed there. He would keep his head down, stay quiet for a time. If that did not fall out well for us, we would go to America. He knew people who had gone there, and been prosperous. They’d help him find work and establish himself. Whatever happened, we would be together, and therefore happy.
I was so giddy with everything that if he’d just suggested emigration to the moon I wouldn’t have raised a single objection. He loved me. His happiness depended on my company. We would be together. Anything seemed possible now.
He found paper, and folded it, and wrote a direction on it. He fixed a stamp to it.
“If anything goes wrong, if something happens and you find you need me urgently, write to me. You know how this works, don’t you. All you need do is write your message, seal it, and leave it in the box, and it will be collected and brought to me at this address. If I can’t come for you myself for whatever reason, I’ll send for you.”
I took the paper and tucked it inside my bodice. I reached up and combed my fingers through my fallen hair. I divided it into three and began to twist it into a plait.
“You must be patient,” he said. “It will take a while to find lodgings, to make arrangements and send for you, it might take days. But I will send for you as soon as I can.”
“I know.” I felt a new kind of calm. All would be well. The certainty must have shone from me like light from a candle flame.
“Enjoy yourself,” he said. “Dance yourself giddy. Behave as though nothing is out of the ordinary.”
I lifted the plait, coiled it around with a ribbon and pinned it into place. “Everything is out of the ordinary.”
He touched the nape of my neck. “I used to have to try so hard not to hate him, and now I haven’t even a shred of guilt regarding him. I don’t even feel sorry for him. I really must be a wicked man.”
“You’re irredeemable,” I said.
“And yet uniquely blessed.” He paused for a moment, suddenly grave. “You don’t mind leaving all this? You won’t miss your family, your friends?”
I found myself thinking about this a moment longer than was comfortable. His expression clouded with concern.
“Not second thoughts?” he asked.
“Not second thoughts,” I said, fumbling for the right words. “The opposite, perhaps. I feel like I’ve been missing people for a long time now; that they’re already gone.” I smiled to show it didn’t matter. His looks clouded deeper. He touched my face, kissed my lips.
The piece of paper, that I had tucked so carefully inside my bodice; I knew it would not be needed. It would be my talisman, my charm. Nothing would stand between us, not Thomas, not my father, not the whole of Her Majesty’s Militia. To me, at that moment, it didn’t matter whether we were married in Lancaster or London or not at all. This had been my wedding, this was my wedding dress. Though I hadn’t had the chance to finish it: the hem was still held up with pins.
—
There was a smell of woodsmoke, the peppery scent of fern, and sweet straw and late roses. I could hear music from up on the green, and as I got closer, laughter, and talking. It seemed as
though the houses were decorated in honour of my passing, the music was playing for me, everyone was gathered on the green to wait for my arrival. I was the heart and purpose of it all, and at the same time set apart, observing and appraising like a queen. The skirts were soft and rustling around my ankles; only now and then did the point of a pin snag my stocking or prick my skin. Everything was beautiful and strange and familiar, and none of it mattered at all.
The road was almost blocked with gigs and traps and wagons; horses were cropping the grass banks. The green swarmed with people like ants in a broken anthill. From the elevation of a wagon’s tail, the musicians gave out a vigorous rendition of “Grimstock,” and on the ground in front of them the dance was in full swing. Children raced about in packs or sat in conference over a posy or a ribbon. Older folk were ranged on benches and clusters of stools, rehearsing ancient gossip. It was the same as last year, the same as the year before and the year before that. The same people, bar a few losses and additions; the same decorations, the same tunes, the same dances. The same smell of horses, sweat, ferns, flowers and smoke. It was the same as every year that I could remember since I was a little girl, except that now I was changed and was no longer part of it.
I walked out onto the green. I caught Mrs. Forster’s eye quite by chance; she was standing with her husband, who was in conversation with Mr. Aitken; seeing me, she turned uneasily, and I saw that Sally was with her, on her other side. It was unexpected to see them there, after everything. Perhaps, I thought as I went over to them, things were not quite as bad as I had feared. I greeted them, and ducked in to kiss Sally, and she straightened her bonnet. I hadn’t seen it or her dress before. They were both remarkably pretty.
“You’re looking well, Lizzy,” she said. I thanked her. “It was considered important that we be here.”
I nodded; I didn’t register then the significance of her words, or her look, which was much older than her years. I was thinking that this might be the last time I ever saw her, and that I loved her, and that she was a perfect little madam but I’d miss her.
“Sally?”
She was scanning the dancers, her sharp face at once aloof and curious.