by Paul Butler
“They’ve set fire to your house, you know,” comes the carefree, confident voice of Emma Rose. “I suppose they had to burn something, poor things, while they’re waiting for the main event.”
“My house!”
“Yes.” She crouches down to the side of my chair and I turn my head to see her grinning face. “It was Father’s idea. He likes to keep people happy, and he’s very clever at it.”
I turn my head away and moan.
“I don’t know why you should be worried about your house,” she says. “You’ll be next, after all, and no one else will want to live there.”
I sigh, keeping my head stretched as far away from the girl as possible.
“Do you know what they’re going to do with you?” she asks.
“No,” I groan.
“That’ll be fire too, I know it,” she says. “Father loves fire. It’s part of his … I don’t know what you’d call it … part of his mystery. He always picks out Bible passages that talk about fire. It’s his thing. The men who found him drifting in a boat when he was a baby—you know, my grandfather, and his people—were supposed to have set the boat alight as a kind of offering.” She says the last word in a deep, portentous voice, then laughs.
A vision comes into my head of scorched driftwood bobbing on the surface of the tide and I feel a curious tug of coincidence somewhere. I shake the feeling from me as I would dry leaves when walking through the woods in autumn.
“No one is supposed to talk about Father being found,” continues Emma. “We’re not even supposed to know, although everyone does. But when it comes to fire, Father can never resist. You know, I think he feels rather frustrated merely following a religion. I think he’d really rather start one and be the next Moses or Jesus or whatever.”
I look away again and Emma pauses. I sense her looking me over closely.
“Do you mind about what’s going to happen to you?” I turn as much as I can to catch her keen eyes and the ghost of a furrow on her brow. “It probably seems like a stupid question, but if I were you, all old and horrible-looking, I’m not sure I would.” She shuffles a little closer and I feel her breath as she speaks. “I mean, it’s not really as though you’re living for very much, is it? If you were to carry on the way you are, you’ll just get older and older and die anyway. This way at least it will be over quickly.” I glare at her, not answering. She looks to the floor for a moment. “Tell you what,” she begins again, in cheerful tones, “I’ll ask you two questions, and if you get the answers right—by right I mean the same answers that I have in my head—I’ll cut you loose. How’s that?”
She’s smiling, her clear green eyes expectant. In her white hand is a small, sharp fish knife.
“Why? Why should I?”
She tilts her head to the side knowingly. “Because, old woman, you’re terrified, and you don’t want to die.”
My eyes lock on hers for a moment and I realize with some surprise that she is right. Despite my weariness, my suffering, and a thousand layers of disillusionment, I mean to live. There are mysteries still to unravel, relationships to understand. There are people—many people—Gilbert, my children, my neighbours, Thomas Ridley, the playwright, my father, even my mother—whose memory I cannot allow to burn.
“Ask your questions.”
“Here’s the first,” she says, then pauses. “If I let you go, would you—old and feeble that you are—be able to survive in the forest without shelter?”
I moan and almost tell her to leave me. Terrified or not, this is more than my final strands of dignity can bear; she is surely only playing with me as a child tortures an insect. But as I catch her eye again I see an intensity in her expression.
“Yes,” I say defiantly. “I will survive.”
“Correct,” says Emma.
She smacks her lips and braces herself. “Now the second question. Listen closely.”
I sigh and wait.
“If you did survive in the woods, would you remain in a place where I could find you, and in return for food, render me services as I ask them of you?”
“Yes,” I reply quickly, before I have had a chance to think about it.
“Also correct!”
Emma springs forward and slips the knife under the rope holding my left arm. She works with it quickly and the hemp gives way, releasing little clouds of dust as the sheathes burst apart. Suddenly my left side is released and my body sags forward as the coil around my chest loosens. Emma scuttles to the other side and cuts through the rope holding my right shoulder. Both my arms throb, but I stand quickly.
“Hold on!” Emma whispers and runs to the door. She turns the handle and presses her head to the widening crack. “They’re still on the hill. I can hear them.”
She turns to me and beckons. I hobble towards her, a knot of aches and soreness. She opens the door. “Now, you can escape if you go down between those houses, then along the beach.” She points the way. “You can gain the forest from the northern cove. But you must move quickly.” She steps out of the way, then grabs my arm. I gasp from the pain; she has touched my rope-chafed skin.
She eases her hand away and almost—I think—apologizes. She just stops herself in time.
“You must tell me where you will be,” she whispers.
“There is a beaver pond,” I reply, “not far within the forest. Your father used to hunt there.”
“He took us there once, yes.”
“There is a clearing to the east, and a narrow path leading from it. Take the path and I will listen out for you.”
Emma backs away from the door. I slowly ease myself from the stairs onto the turf.
I tramp through the deserted settlement to the beach. Voices of celebration waft down from the hill—yells, the odd shriek, and children singing. The noises are carried upon a wave of softly crackling wood. The afternoon sunshine is dulled by the haze of smoke as I crunch my breathless way along the beach to the northern cove and towards a dark wing of the forest which descends to the shoreline.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
How long will you have to wait?” asked the playwright. He looked over to the window and frowned at the dying sun.
“Just until they can arrange a passage to France,” I answered. “I think they want to make sure that when I leave this prison my journey will be swift and without pause. They want to be certain I’ll have no time to change my mind.”
My cellmate looked to the floor. “So,” he said distractedly. “It won’t be long … not long. There is constant shipping to France.” He picked up a straw and stared off at the window again.
“Maybe I could persuade them to give you a quill and some paper so you can write,” I said with a brightness I did not feel. “I’ll tell the governor some nonsense about how it helps you exorcise evil thoughts.”
The playwright continued to stare at the window and I was about to repeat the offer, when he turned to me. “What?” he said.
Then, “No, there’s no need. I’ll soon be out myself. The guard passed me a letter earlier.”
He pressed his hands into the floor and shifted position. Still, he seemed far away and preoccupied.
“You know something,” I said suddenly, “I don’t know your name.”
He met my eyes this time and smiled. “No, you don’t. And I don’t know yours.”
He wiped his palm on his breeches to clean it of straw and grime. For a moment I thought he would come forward and give me his hand. But he just sat there and looked at me.
“You first,” I said.
“Will,” he said. He was about to gaze out of the window again, but thought better of it and gave me a tight smile instead.
“I need to know your whole name,” I insisted. “I need to tell everybody I once knew the celebrated Will … so and so. When you’re celebrated around the world like Dante or our own Sir Philip Sidney, I’ll tell them I once shared a dismal goal cell with you!”
Will laughed and threw his head back so his crown was hard a
gainst the wall, then he sighed deeply, put his hands behind his neck, and drew his head back into position. He looked at me seriously. “You will never need to tell people that, I assure you. I am destined for obscurity.”
“Why would you say that?” I demanded. “You write plays that make money, you said so yourself, and you’re about to be let out of prison.”
“That’s just the thing,” he said, looking down and picking at the straw. “In prison, you can nurture extravagant ideas about yourself. You can believe yourself immortal and quite set apart from the rest of mankind.” He sighed, glanced towards the window once more, then fixed his stare upon his hands like a sculptor examining the tools of his trade. “Once I get out into the world again, I’m just one playwright among many.”
“I see,” I said quietly. “That’s what distracts you.”
“Well, partly,” he says with a sigh. “What about you? What’s your name?”
“Sheila,” I told him. “Sheila MaGella before my mother married my stepfather, and I don’t want his name.”
“You should take whatever name you wish and then live up to it as best as you can,” he said. “Sheila MaGella is a fine name and very like a song I have heard during fairs and at street corners.” He thought for a moment, narrowing his eyes. “Sheila is an old name for Ireland, I think, and MaGella is like NaGeira which, if I am not mistaken, means ‘the beautiful’ in the tongue of your country.” He gave me a warm smile, not unlike the kind I used to receive from my father, and it comforted me to the core.
“My country?” I exclaimed, but my protest was mild and playful. “My country is England. My father was a servant of the Crown.”
“To be English, you must live your life in England. You are a child of the country that mothered you. You breathed Ireland’s air and walked Ireland’s trails. If Spain were to invade England, if they were to send another vast fleet, and if this one were to prove successful, that turn of events would not render me Spanish, would it?”
“No,” I say doubtfully.
“Then you understand we are the land from which we draw our knowledge. No amount of politics and war can change that.”
I didn’t understand him completely, but I wasn’t going to argue now. It was late and our imminent parting was in the air; it made me tingle with uncertainty.
“And being in a French convent will not render you French,” he added sombrely and then paused. “Which is why you must promise to escape as soon as you’re able,” he added with no discernible change in tone. “You must not remain in a nunnery.”
“I’m only just breaking free from one gaol,” I said, laughing. “You’re already plotting my release from another!”
He nodded, but suppressed a smile. “Sheila, there are a hundred ways to make yourself free, and we were not born to be stifled. Life is raging about your ears. You don’t want to wake to the realization one day that it is already half over and you have not yet begun. You must not go to the nunnery.”
“It is a condition of my release,” I said with a sigh. “If I break it they will recapture me and bring me here again, or worse.”
“A contract made under duress is no contract at all,” he replied, “and a young woman of your wit should know how to remould your identity. You can make sure they do not find you.”
I gave a weak laugh. “My life isn’t one of your plays, Will. I don’t think it’s so easy to disappear.”
“There is a new world, Sheila, a place where your stepfather and all the governors of all the gaols in England cannot reach.”
“And how am I to get to such a place?”
Will paused for a moment and stared at the ground. He was so still that for a moment I thought he must have gone to sleep with his eyes open. But then slowly he drew in his breath.
“The guard who comes to us sometimes …”
“Gilbert?”
“Yes. He has a cousin in trade in the New World. In Newfoundland to be exact.”
“So?”
“I think he means to go, and soon.”
“But I hardly know Gilbert,” I said rather feebly, as it was not quite true. What I did know was that Gilbert and I seldom spoke. But that did not mean he was unknown to me, not at all. Through the minutest changes in his stonelike expression, through the myriad tender feelings which I held down in myself, but which rose to the surface anyway each time his stoic presence appeared, I had gotten to know him in ways that required no words. The rhythm of my pulse whispered to me that we were as known to each other as young birds reared in the same nest, as sympathetic in mind and feeling as people who had exchanged a thousand evenings of convivial conversation. It was a familiarity that pulled me to him as a bee is drawn to a flower.
Had I been told I would feel this way for another when the fever for Thomas Ridley was upon me, I would have been horrified. But Thomas Ridley’s sand-like hair and his pale-blue eyes had spoken to a freshness in me, a belief in an evergreen spring, and I had now cast off that layer of youth. Gilbert spoke to me of the world as it really was; he delved into the bleakness of things and emerged with something hopeful and true. He was silent compassion in a world of confinement. He was concern in the midst of torment. He was as solid as a church gargoyle and as permanent too. Thomas was a subtle brush stroke in a battle scene of cannon and flame. In my present inner world, he blew away unnoticed, a pale ghost against the harsh reality of day.
“Well, he knows you,” said Will, attempting to suppress a smile for the second time, this time not so successfully.
“He asked you to speak for him?” I prompted.
“Not exactly, but I felt that he meant to.”
The knowledge made me breathless for a moment. I thought of Gilbert and the New World, and I could hear the crackle of burning and the crash of falling glass. I had made a decision. My nunnery was burning.
———
Sometimes the whole of life seems like an escape gone disastrously wrong. Every time the jaws of imprisonment, death, or religious orders have opened to take me, I have eluded them. And what is my reward? A safe and comfortable home full of laughter and love? A paradisal garden of verdant, plump leaves, warm sunshine, and clean, running water? No. The final consequence of all my amazing luck and agility is an old woman scrambling up a forested hill with the stench of her burning home in her lungs. A woman without husband or child, a crone who will hereafter rely on a malignant child for her survival.
I pause again, weighing all this as a farmer might weigh his last grain after a long drought. Now I am under cover, there is no sense in rushing. These people know nothing of the woods that surround them, and I know everything. A weasel scurries past and a crow flaps its wings in the branches overhead. The sun is sinking and dusk makes me calmer. I recite to myself the words of the green man. The forest is yours, he said. While the woods embrace you, no spirit or beast can harm you, no strangers or neighbours smite you, no dank ague infect you. When death lies all around you, the leaves and boughs protect you.
The rhythm of the words soothes me as before, but there is an undercurrent of disquiet. For the first time I feel something is missing. I remember how I felt tricked by my father’s death, how it seemed that the man of the forest had misled me when I realized that the words addressed only me and not my family.
Was there some other loophole? Some other omission that might deceive me into believing I am safe? The phrases run through my mind like a breeze through rippling foliage: No spirit or beast can harm you, no strangers or neighbours smite you … For the second time in my life it sounds too specific. Spirit … beast … strangers … neighbours …
I have no idea why I should be doubting these things now. I feel like a bird who, sensing a change in the wind, prepares for sudden flight without any detailed knowledge of the danger it faces. It is intuition only that ruffles my feathers, yet I have learned to pay attention. Something happened in that schoolroom. Something was said to cause this shift in the breeze. I touch the bark of the nearest tree with m
y fingertips and hold my head very still. I wait for a recent memory to return.
I hear Emma’s taunting voice as she crouches on the floor beside my chair. They took the baby from the boat, she said, and then … yes, then she said they “set the boat alight as a kind of offering.” She had spoken the last word in a deep, portentous voice before breaking into laughter. And what came into my mind when I heard this story?
A vision of scorched driftwood bobbing on the surface of the tide. I knew this was a discovery even while I shrugged it off. And now as I prepare for the implications to seep in, a rogue thought slips into my mind before I can lower the drawbridge against it: So I have not been as alone as I thought all this time. I have not been stranded from all my relatives. This is why the words of the green man no longer make me feel safe! Spirit … beast … strangers … neighbours … Simon Rose is none of these. Simon Rose is my grandson.
Easing myself down on the coarse grass, I gaze up at the pines towering above me. They trail old man’s beard like seaweed from their branches. Nothing is proven! Nothing is proven! Yet my search for the child, Matthew, comes back into my mind. I scour the beach once more, calling his name. I skirt the rims of the forest until the tree trunks are a blur. I look again under the woodpile. Then I remember what I have so often tried to forget: Katherine ducking from the pirate’s blade, disappearing under the rim of the boat, then pushing herself off from the side and running from the man, her toes skimming the waters. Why was she standing by the boat? The forest would have been safer, I had told her that. But in a forest, an answer returns like an echo, a motherless child would perish. Placed in a boat, under a blanket, there is always the chance of rescue.
Inwardly I watch again as the boats drift out of the bay and the pirate ship sails towards the horizon. The dark branches loom knowingly overhead, sages of the forest. Is it cruelty that imparts this knowledge to me now? What else can the nature gods and goddesses have in mind? I remember poor Will’s play, how the ending hinged upon the idea that a man was “not of woman born” if he was taken by surgery before the time. How little I respected the idea, yet how pertinent such trickery has become!