Didn’t go to Rawblood. I never will. I send the letters but I won’t set foot in it. Old man Shakes still there I hear. Think of him old and alone in the empty rooms. Hope he stays in the stable. I was only in the house once. that day. It was Enough. That house.
Never thought I’d be glad to see the trenches but I am. Even very flooded which they are. came back here to the mud bad bread and weevils and found things were solid again. The relief. And the company. Men are easier. These buggers know how it is. you don’t start thinking it’s all painted on.
Others feel it. I’m not the only one. England isn’t the real place. Not any more. There’s a song that goes round. ‘we’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here …’ Just goes on like that. Always thought it maddening but not now. it’s the only true thing left to say.
not everyone thinks like this of course. Not those with families and so on. If you’ve someone to go back to you cling on you see. to home and all that. Those fellows have a terrible time. They can’t be content. They don’t last long as a rule. you have to leave all that behind if you’re going to keep your mind. easier and better if you know this is it. the front is all there is.
We were always the greatest of friends you and I. friends might sound weak I suppose. To those who don’t know. It’s not weak. Every memory and all the years.
Hope you understand. Why I must let it all go now. this is the last time I’ll write. I can’t keep doing it. You don’t reply so either you’re gone or you can’t forgive or these never reach you at all.
I should have done something. I know. You told me to run. shouldn’t have run. Shouldn’t have left you. I’ve said sorry a hundred times. Hope you believe it. Can’t know whether you do. Are you getting these? Anyhow. this is the last. can’t keep seeing you everywhere.
Think am at the very end of what a person can be or stand.
Your ring. Kept it with me all this while. Not in a pocket or with my things. On a string round my neck. Was afraid I’d lose it in the mud. Or it’d be stolen. There’s as much of that about as you’d expect. thought I might give it back to you one day. that won’t happen.
Left it for you. in the cave. on the stone. The water in the walls sounds like death. That’s where it is if you want it. Do you remember? That the ones you love may never die. people used to believe that sort of thing. What a joke. Anyhow this is goodbye.
Yours
T
Meg Danforth
NOVEMBER 1881
Near Grimstock, Lancashire
Blood bonds can’t be broken altogether. More’s the pity. I feel it when Charles dies.
In general I try not to think of him. I have a letter on my birthday, and a letter at Christmas. That is that. I have not seen him since I was a baby. When I was but little I wrote him pleading notes. My older brother. He did not answer and I told myself that I must have the direction wrong, somehow, or that he was on a long voyage, and when he returned home he would read my letters, come to Bantry Farm post-haste, kill Samuel Bantry, give me cake, take me to London, give me dresses and so on. He did not.
Later Mrs Bantry told me that cock tail-feathers were for summoning. So I burned them each night. Come and save me. Cocks on all the nearby farms were bare that summer. But still he did not come and I learned not to hope for it. It was a slow learning. Later still, I tried to see him with the Eye. Many, many times. But never did I, not once. His mind must close me out powerfully. He must bury me deep. My Eye is very strong – if I cannot see him, it means he keeps no memory or love of me in his heart.
I’m in the hayloft with the ladder pulled up. Samuel Bantry is below, wandering the farmyard, calling for me. He doesn’t know I’m up here – he’s just chancing it, idling away his time. It’s easing into mid-morning and he’ll be into the village for Friday drinking soon. All I must do is hold tight.
‘Meg,’ he says, ‘come out. If you do not you shall have the strap. You do not want the strap, do you?’ I keep my scorn silent. Does he think I will answer? Chancing it or no, he’s got that slinking black tone in his voice.
‘Copperknob,’ he says. ‘When I find you you’ll pay.’ The leather hits his palm with a thwack. As insults go it is weak. I’ve had worse all my life. Red hair means witches round these parts and there’s nothing more to be said about it.
Below, a bucket rings with Samuel’s kick. A hen flaps across the yard in a rattle of clucks.
His pace slows. He’s thinking. His footfalls are quiet. I move behind a tower of hay. I dig in and down into the musty warm. The loft feels unsafe, of a sudden. But I can see the rickety pine of the ladder against the wall. It is here, so how would he get to me? And what would he do if he did? Slaps. The strap. My ears would be soundly boxed. And that would be that. Bruises, a few welts and tears are nothing new, to be sure.
But I am not sure. There is another look which sits deep in his eye lately. I am lately fifteen. Women are punished differently from children.
Scuffling below. Something is dragged across the muddy cobbles. It bodes ill for me. I make myself a mouse and burrow deeper into the hay. It is difficult, because something is happening.
The loft blinks about me like a great eye. Planks creak and there is hay in my nose. Below, the sound of metal ringing on cobbles … But behind that, through that, I see … A purple sky over a far moor. Dawn, over warm land. Dew on the velvet grass. Two men on a hill, crouched by a dead dog. I cannot hear. But their anger, their despair comes from them in waves.
The hay is hot, the seed trickles into my ear. Something clangs as it comes to rest on the edge of the trapdoor. I must move but I am slipping in the sky over a house with many gables and chimneys and … Samuel’s eyes and ears rear up into the loft like a sea monster surfacing. An old sheep hurdle makes a handy ladder, after all.
Mrs Bantry’s eyes are round and owlish. She fills my vision like a landscape. Behind her, a corner of blue sky. I start to say – she puts a finger to her lips. I hush.
The earthy mucky stench and the gluey mud cover me. In my mouth, under my nails, in my ears. My hair is rat tails of brown. An acceptable colour at last. Under the mud there is blood in various places. I’m on the midden, where I fell, I suppose. When pushed. Above in the loft, Samuel is whistling. He is off to Friday drinking, having shown me what’s what.
We scrub me in the horse trough by the lane. I climb in, sit down. The water rears, a high and glassy cliff; then crashes. Mrs Bantry pours the cold cupfuls over. I wince under her hands but we do not discuss it. What would be the use? The bruises are dark feathers on my wrists, my neck, my back, my legs.
I am splintered. The outside of me is weeping, and holds Mrs B, for her comfort and for mine. Another part of me is thinking, how long, then until, until … Because Samuel has never strapped me on my thighs before.
A little of me, the clearest deepest part of me, is thinking of my brother.
Mrs Bantry counsels me, as always, not to cross him, not to cross Samuel. We both know, from long experience, that it will serve no purpose. However closely I obey, he will find cause. Today was not too bad. I have been bed-bound for weeks in the past. Each one of my ribs or fingers has been cracked or broken, over the years. My collarbone was broken twice.
The truth is that were I not first in line, the black eyes, the loose teeth, the ringing ears would be for Mrs Bantry. Still, she wants me to be spared; as if it would not mean her pain. She is behaving as if there were justice and some kind of reason in the world, which is admirable. She is a good woman.
Mrs Bantry taught me the first steps. She taught me that the witches’ ladder is made with yarn, of certain colours. She taught me the feathers and the flowers, their sakes when whole, when burnt.
She never really believed. I saw that the first time that they sang in my hands; the feathers, the blood. The first time I had the Eye. They were little games for Mrs Bantry. Women’s games, passed down through her family, thrilling and secret. Ritual
, habit. Without consequence. It must have been a great shock when they leapt for me, with bright fire, and with power.
She was afraid then. She never taught me more. But it was too late. By that time the roots and the earth and the blood spoke to me themselves, and told me their uses. Mrs Bantry has always cared for me in her way, though she did not understand me. But in some things she cannot defy her husband.
I know something that they do not, not yet. My brother will die. Is perhaps dead already. Who will send the letter? I have a day, three at most before they know that there is no more money. I breathe and banish fear. I scold myself. All is not lost. There is always something to be done. I will discover my course.
It’s a clear dawn, pale moon still suspended. The heather is springy and good under my feet. I run, my bruises singing; there is not much time for this. The vale beneath Bow Peak is soft in shadow. The brook is a crooked silver seam on the valley floor. I follow it up along the thin slice of bank, against the current, morning dew creeping through the soles of my boots. At the head of the valley the spring leaps like an eel from mossy stone.
I take from beneath my shawl the stoppered phial of vinegar and oil, and the tin plate. Copper is good. Silver is better. But this is what I have. I put the tin plate under the spring. Water rushes over, good hard sound. The light is coming, the valley glows. The moon thin, bitten silver.
When the moment is right I take the dish of spring water and put it on the grass. I pour in the oil and vinegar and wait. The water goes still as glass. The moon and the dawn are in it. I breathe deep. I say what I need to say. Then I ask. Show me the answer.
Nothing. A tiny midge lands in the dish. The surface of the water shivers in concentric circles. I wait. Nothing happens. Perhaps it is the wrong question. Who will help me? I ask. I wait. Nothing.
When the Bantrys find that I can no longer be kept, they will turn me out. I understand it. There is so little to go around. Samuel will do what he will before they put me out, though. I would stake my life on it. Money has been the thin invisible line that kept me from disaster and now it is removed. I will be a hedge beggar, and sooner or later I will die; of cold, of hunger, raped and beaten to death in a ditch. That is what becomes of hedge beggars.
What is to be done? It is borne upon me that my situation is hopeless. I look at the blank moon in the pale water; I laugh a little. It reflects the truth: there is no one who will help. He never gave me cause to love him, Charles. But I think of him dying and my eyes burn. Tears strike the still water; it whorls and shivers. Tears for him and for myself.
The moon scatters and rearranges itself. It’s all about me in strange silver shards. A terrible white face with madness in the eyes. Horror binds my heart … The water shivers, there’s a sound like cards shuffling and it’s gone, I am somewhere else entirely.
Around me, warm stone walls. A house. Passages and rooms open out as I go; in the centre is a hall, like the chamber of a heart. Faint, without, the sound of rain on good wet granite. The scents are everywhere, rain and stone. A room now, a library, perhaps, a study. Leather and panels of burnished wood. Through the leaded panes, wild grey hills.
Below me a chair, kicked hastily aside. I swing in space.
The pain is immediate and savage. I cannot pay much mind to anything but the great crushing sorrow wrapped tight about my heart and the rope, coarse and bristling even tighter about my throat. These are not my hands, it is not my throat; I look through the hanging man’s eyes. This man … his flesh holds things in common with my flesh. It remembers. We have seen the same mysterious things in the warm nothing dark that comes before birth. As I feel the shape of our noses, which are the same, and the pond-green of our eyes, which is the same, I understand with a lurch of sorrow. Here is my brother, at last.
We sway, creaking, from the beam. We choke in agony. Our legs kick useless in space. Our air-starved body gives up, bit by bit. I am to know him only for a heartbeat, as he dies.
A face is in my brother’s mind. This is his dying thought: a man. Dark, vast and still as if carven. Black hair streaked with white, long elegant hands. The light in his eyes which is like the sun on brown river water. Deep. The love Charles feels moves into me like a blow. I am stunned. I am weeping with it. Who is he? I will never know. A most torturous gift, no sooner given than torn away.
But there is this.
As my brother’s brain becomes a bonfire, as it fires thousands, millions of stars into the endless night, as his flesh changes from living pink to dead, I hear it. My name. As his throat is crushed and blood bursts in his eyes, he feels me.
Meg? he says. Whatever, how? Oh God, I am afraid …
Hush, I say, I’ll be your guide.
He is glad. He lets me touch his heart with mine. At the last.
When it’s done I am very weak. I sit and clutch the turf with my fists. I weep. I claw the ground. He has left me again, and this time for good.
Mary Hopewell and Hephzibah Brigstocke
1839
Mary Hopewell was endowed with the kind of beauty that seems not long for this world, so composed is it of the symptoms of sickness: pallor, delicacy, languor, a low voice and a cheek painted pink with the hectic flush. Though much admired she had never married, it being pronounced by physicians that her health could not endure it. This would not have troubled her, having attained the ripe age of thirty without encountering anyone whom she wished to marry. But she was of a generation of women whose brothers, father, uncles and cousins had all been lost to soldiery, to that small French tyrant who terrorised the world so for many years. The Hopewells were an old family, hailing from Devon, but Mary was not long to have the benefit of them. Having lost all her menfolk to Bonaparte when she was a child, most of her female relations perished, as the years passed, from the same complaint that plagued her. The consumption took each in quick succession, and then Mary was alone.
Miss Hopewell sold her cottage at Brighton and went to live with her one remaining cousin, a Mrs Anstruther, who was married to a legal gentleman with a promising career at the Inns, and a young family, which showed a marked tendency to enlarge itself at every opportunity. Miss Hopewell asserted that she considered it her duty to contribute her monthly portion to the household; but this was considered parsimonious, the fault which Mrs Anstruther deplored more than any other, and could not be permitted. They preferred that Miss Hopewell should lean upon them. Were they not, after all, perfectly beforehand with the world? It was nonsense. Cousin Mary must put all such thoughts from her head. No, she should enjoy what she could of London and be quite peaceful.
But perhaps … if she wished to take the children for a drive now and again … that would relieve Mrs Anstruther when she had one of her heads, which she often did in the mornings; the little angels would love it so! And Mary’s skills on the pianoforte were quite superior – perhaps Alice could be set to practise with her a little in the afternoons, for the girl would never do in a drawing room as it was. The cook, too, could be taught by Miss Hopewell to make that béchamel which Mr Anstruther had so enjoyed at Brighton; it had been her sister’s receipt, had it not – dear Anne, God rest her soul! – some trick with the scalded milk, perhaps? And were Mary not too wearied in the evenings it would be so kind in her to help with the darning, for Mrs Anstruther was not nacky with a needle, one of her many failings, she was sure, and there was always mountains of the stuff … Some little favours such as these, and Mr and Mrs Anstruther would consider themselves richly repaid. Yes, it was positively distressing for Mary to speak of money so!
Miss Hopewell supposed London was well enough; she did not become very well acquainted with it. She mended and darned and scrubbed and nursemaided and taught French and Italian and the piano. She found herself often obliged to retire to her room in the evenings, and in the colder months could not leave it. She was attended at these times with all possible solicitude: when Mrs Anstruther brought up to her the handkerchiefs to hem she brought also syrup of poppies, and a bas
in to cough in.
‘It’s little enough I can do for the poor soul,’ she said comfortably to her husband. ‘She will not likely be with us for long.’
Miss Hopewell remained with the Anstruthers for three years, during which two additions were delivered into the family. One winter morning at the beginning of the fourth year, during the bitterest season in living memory, Mrs Anstruther visited Miss Hopewell’s chamber for a cose. Mrs Anstruther confided to her cousin that she was expecting, this summer, yet another happy event! So blessed were they. Although, it did put one to great shifts, five children, and soon another which must in its turn be schooled and fed and shod … And Mr Anstruther’s prospects, though ultimately magnificent, had run aground here and there recently: some occurrence in the labyrinthine bowels of that great masculine entity, the Royal Exchange, which she could not fathom … At any rate they must draw back on the reins for a time; a little, only a little.
Mrs Anstruther’s household economy had ever been perfection; she was a devoted adherent of the dictum of Bishop Hall: ‘He is a good waggoner, that can turn in a little room.’ Mrs Anstruther’s rooms now became little indeed. She weighed the tea jar at weekly intervals, to determine the rate of usage, and shaved from the block the butter that Miss Hopewell should take with her breakfast. Every mouthful of which Miss Hopewell partook was watched, and she suspected, measured. When she asked to remain in her room for the dinner hour, claiming not to be hungry, her hostess exclaimed, ‘But you took only seven and a half spoons of ragout last night! And you know it could not be kept another day, so Betty had the rest.’
Betty, the second housemaid, had grown hearty, for Miss Hopewell’s consumptive condition worsened winter by winter. From her pillows, Miss Hopewell heard Mr Anstruther murmur to his wife, as they strolled down to dine: ‘And yet she shows no sign of a permanent decline.’
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