The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  “That sound,” Louisa interpreted, “is the cry of the male Agnew impatient for its brandy. Shall we withdraw, Mrs Frere, and leave the gentlemen to mend the troubles of the world in peace?”

  Edwin Frere added water to his brandy and prepared himself for inquisition. Above the crackle of the fire and a hoarse draught in the chimney, moorhens could be heard across the lake outside, like the squeezing of tiny horns in fog. Otherwise, with the ladies departed, there was silence in the room. Agnew had settled back in his chair, lit up a pipe, and was now staring into the fire as though into the deeps of meditation.

  Uncertain whether his host was marshalling a line of enquiry, or simply absorbed in the business of digestion, Frere sat out the silence for a while. Like many large-boned men, he was rather shy, and rarely gave a new acquaintance the full advantage of his ardent brown eyes which, in consequence, appeared more shifty than soulful beneath the dark curls of his hair. A keen observer, however, would mark the long eyelashes (like a giraffe’s, Louisa had thought) and their silent agitation when, as now, he was a little at a loss. He admired the panelling once more, and worried over the lubricious glint in the stare of the portrait above the fireplace. Eventually it became clear that if there was to be conversation then he must open it.

  “You have a fine house, Sir Henry. I greatly look forward to seeing the park by daylight.”

  Agnew grunted on his pipe. “I’m content enough at Easterness. Give me my library and the Norfolk light and let the busy world go hang, I say.”

  “It is a peaceful spot.”

  “It’s that all right. I should warn you, Mr Frere, I’ve had guests from town who complained they could not sleep for the silence.”

  “I believe I could sleep on a clothes line tonight.”

  Agnew eyed his guest dubiously. His thoughts had been elsewhere and the preposterous image of a parson on a clothes line was momentarily perplexing. Then he returned to his preoccupation. “I’m trying to find a word other than mixed to rhyme with fixed,” he said, as though no further explanation of his abstraction was required. “Damned if I can.”

  Frere took the problem upon himself. “Betwixt?” he suggested after a moment.

  “Hmmm. Hadn’t thought of that. Might do. Might do very well.”

  Frere was encouraged. “I see you share my enthusiasm for versifying, Sir Henry.” He had once dreamt that he might one day be numbered among the Anglican poets – the work of George Herbert lay close to his heart – but it had been a long time since the verses flowed, and if he had hoped to stir his host’s interest, he was disappointed. Agnew was nodding his head in time to the tap of his finger on the chair arm – counting out the numbers of a line perhaps. After a time he scowled, rubbed his chin, then glanced awkwardly at his guest. The suggestion of the rhyme had at least secured the parson a larger place in his attention.

  “But you, sir,” he said, “you’re a youngish man still. Will you not find country life tedious after Cambridge? Munding Street is a far cry from King’s Parade, you know.”

  The clergyman smiled. “My fears are not on that score. Believe me, on a January night with an east wind cutting across the fens, Cambridge can be the most desolate place on earth.”

  “And then,” said Agnew, as though in mitigation, “you have a wife for company.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Unlike Matt Stukely. His undoing that, I say.”

  “I don’t believe I follow you, Sir Henry.”

  “The flesh, you know. Our late lamented Rector burned with it. Did you not hear tell the manner of his passing?”

  “An apoplexy, I understand.”

  Agnew snorted. “He ate well, drank well and took precious little exercise save of the kind that brought him to his maker. A big man – built like my bull Jonas. That night he was riding his housemaid full gallop when his heart burst on him like a fig.” Agnew snapped thumb and finger. “Poor Amy Larner lay across the mattress with this great corpse dropped on her and couldn’t move an inch. Screamed till half the parish was awake. It took two men to lift him off her, and she with her shift up round her neck.” He took another philosophical puff on his pipe. “On reflection I doubt that Matt could have wished for a choicer way to go.”

  A shy man, anxious to be exemplary, and aware that his resilience was under trial, Edwin Frere smiled, then instantly blushed. “I had no idea,” he said.

  “Don’t mistake me. Stukely was a good enough sort in his way. Didn’t terrorize his parishioners like some rectors in these parts. But he had a weakness, you see… I’d surmise that his favourite text for his housemaids was ‘Sleep not, for you know not when the master cometh’. There’s more than one brat about Munding that’s half-parson already. Will you take more brandy?”

  The clergyman raised a hurried finger and lowered it across the snifter like a lid.

  Agnew contemplated without enthusiasm the confusion he had caused in his guest. Put two shy dogs together, he was thinking, and you’ll soon have a confounded mess on the floor. He looked for another stone to turn. “I hear you are a travelled man, Mr Frere? India, the letter said.”

  He had tried to put the man at his ease and could not understand why the parson should now shift even deeper into recoil. Frere was overly diffident perhaps, with a curious way of pinching his earlobe as he listened, but rather that than holy condescension or the locum’s sanctimonious rantings.

  “I was there for a time… when I was still a single man. The Evangelical Mission to the Heathen…”

  “You found it not to your taste?”

  “Not exactly that…”

  Things were going badly for Edwin Frere. He was attracted to the figure of the old eccentric across from him, and would dearly have liked to discover some ground where they might both relax, yet from the first the conversation had slipped out of his control. Now he must find a way of steering round this innocent enquiry.

  “India is a great mystery, Sir Henry,” he suggested. “Alexander could not encompass it, and neither could I.” He had attempted a witticism but he had little gift for such matters and it had come out sounding as though some serious comparison were intended. He fumbled for a handkerchief and, behind its cover, sought to slow his breathing and, with it, the heart. “I discovered,” he said at last, “that mine is not a missionary spirit.” Then he saw how the question might be turned. “Have you been a traveller yourself, Sir Henry?”

  Agnew shook his head. “No time for it. It’s my contention that there are mysteries enough in here to keep a man occupied without meddling in foreign parts.” He had tapped his breast with the pipe stem to indicate the direction of his own explorations. “I could wish the boy had seen as much.” Agnew’s only son was active in Lord Palmerston’s Foreign Office, and Frere had been surprised earlier to discern in the father a certain scepticism towards the son’s ambitions.

  “Indeed,” he agreed, a little hastily. “I see you are a philosopher, Sir Henry, as well as a versifier.”

  Agnew’s eyes were half-closed in scrutiny of his guest. “And perhaps something more than either,” he offered, “ – as they are commonly understood.”

  The baronet, Frere sensed, was as little at ease as he was himself with the trivia of social conversation. Perhaps here was an opening onto more substantial ground. “I have often thought,” he returned tentatively, “that mystery is what I know, not what I don’t know.”

  “Indeed?” said Agnew, interested, though he was already regretting his admission of a moment before. “But then,” he added cautiously, “as a wise man once said, ‘Mysteries profaned and made public fade and lose their grace. Therefore, cast not pearls before swine, nor spread roses for the ass.’”

  For an instant Frere wondered whether he was being rebuked as such himself, but there was a glint of enthusiasm in the old man’s eyes, and something akin to hunger. And that quotation – referring to Matthew’s Gospel, but not of it – was puzzling. “If you would take me with you, Sir Henry,” he said, “you must sa
y more.”

  For a long time Agnew considered the younger man over his pipe. Out of such approaches either a true friendship or a confounded nuisance might be born. Yet for the first time in many years he sensed himself in male company that would not find his own heart-deep convictions entirely ridiculous. Stukely’s had been an indolent mind. The rest of the local gentry were a philistine rabble. His only close friend, Tom Horrocks, was a doctor of the new school, a rationalist and a man of science, excellent for an honest dispute or a game of chess, but good-naturedly sceptical of Agnew’s “mumbo-jumbo”. It had been a long time since he had met a kindred spirit. So long that he had thought the need outgrown. But, yes, this one ran deep. Somewhere along the line the fire had touched him. And yet…

  Frere sensed the man’s hesitation. Yes, Agnew too was shy. A small risk perhaps? Something light?

  “I can assure you a more discriminating eye for pearls than you might fear,” he said, venturing a smile, “and, if Apuleius is to be believed, even asses have been initiated into mystery.”

  The smile was answered. “I take you for no ass, Mr Frere. On the contrary… But one wonders…”

  “Sir Henry?”

  “The rectors hereabouts. One has not found them overly tolerant of questioning.”

  “At King’s, Sir Henry, one encounters little else.” Frere’s confidence had grown with Agnew’s manifest uncertainty. The baronet was no free-thinker – that much was clear; so what was the secret he was clutching to his bosom with such reticent fervour? “I have always found an open mind the surest ground of faith,” he added, smiling again.

  “Then consider this,” Agnew responded with the gusto of a man launched upon his favourite theme. “Christ came into the world eighteen and a half centuries ago. He taught love of one’s neighbour and forgiveness of sins. He healed the sick, raised the dead, resisted the Devil, took our sins upon himself, suffered for it, died, and rose again. All that could be done for the world he did. Yet it remains a sorry place, sir, and man a sorry creature within it.”

  Frere was a little startled by the sudden vehemence. “But our Redeemer liveth, Sir Henry,” he protested mildly, “and God’s grace abides.”

  “Precisely so. But is that the end of the matter, sir? All the evidence proclaims that the work of redemption remains incomplete. It is up to us now. We were created in the Divine Image, Mr Frere, and a residual germ of that divinity remains occulted within us even in the fallen state. We are more, far more, than the beasts that perish. But if we are to raise ourselves from the blind world of the senses into which, like poor Stukely, we have fallen, there is much to be done.”

  “For which reason we have a church, surely?” Frere answered, then added: “…with all its frailties.”

  “And I remain a faithful member, sir. If you take the living, you will find me praying and singing with the best of them. But is it enough, I wonder, to put on our Sunday faces and recite the Apostles’ Creed?”

  “Indeed not,” Frere answered.

  “Is it enough even to practise good works, to keep an open, charitable heart? How am I to love my neighbour as myself, sir, if I remain in ignorance of who I myself deeply am? And how is a man to know himself, to discover the elemental constituents of his own being, unless he takes a conscious part in the great experiment of Nature? As you yourself opined, man, there are great mysteries.” By now there was a hot light in Agnew’s eyes.

  And a flutter of anxiety in Frere’s. “There are also great dangers, Sir Henry.”

  “Of which, Mr Frere, your Hermetical philosopher is more aware than most.” There, it was out. Let the parson make what he might of it.

  “You consider yourself to be… a Hermetic?” It was difficult for Frere to keep the surprise, the incredulity from his voice.

  “That question was once put to a philosopher by a king,” Agnew returned. “I might answer with him that I am a Christian, and it is no disgrace to be that and a Hermetic at the same time.”

  “You see no conflict?”

  “On the contrary, sir: I see a complement.”

  There was a silence between the two men, pensive, a little uneasy, into which there came the sound of a piano from another room. A moment later they heard Louisa’s voice lifting with graceful, lucid confidence between the lower and upper reaches of an air. For a moment Frere found himself regretting that they were not with the ladies. His own voice, a polished baritone, was never so poised as when raised in song.

  Perhaps Agnew was grateful for the reprieve as well. Frere sensed the old man’s loneliness like an ache on the air where he sat in silence staring into the fire. The clergyman felt warmly towards his host, and displeased with himself. Had he not invited the challenge, encouraged intimacy, only to slip away the moment it was offered? Must his entire life always stretch itself on this rack of contrary impulse? Perhaps he was wrong to imagine himself cut out for the pastoral role? The edifice of his reconstituted life was frail. Perhaps frailer than he had thought.

  The two men listened in silence until the song in the next room came to an end and they heard the sound of Emilia’s applause.

  “Your daughter certainly has the voice of an angel,” said Frere, uncertain as yet how to respond to the old man’s asseveration.

  “And an angel’s intellect and disposition too.” Agnew was disappointed by the withdrawal, remorseful at having said too much. Had he not yet learnt that such impulses of candour were invariably occasions for regret? “In this life,” he said, “she is my one true friend. And often enough my inspiration. Without her…” He faltered there, grimaced, tapped the dottle from his pipe against the firedogs, then composed himself with a sigh. “I have been too long among my books, Mr Frere. I am a poor host, I fear. You must forgive an old man his enthusiasm.”

  “On the contrary, Sir Henry…”

  Agnew waved a dismissive hand. “You’ve had a long journey and you must be weary. And tomorrow you must face the church wardens and their lady wives. I hazard you’ll find that there are already two or three rectors and at least six rectors’ wives in the parish… if you take my meaning.”

  Edwin Frere smiled. Perhaps he had not lost the man after all. “It is my earnest hope, Sir Henry, that if I should prove acceptable to the parish we may enjoy more hours of stimulating conversation together.”

  The face was frank and guileless. Though Henry Agnew preferred his solitude, he had a magnanimous heart. It was his custom to keep under restraint that prodigality of spirit which, in his father, had warped to extravagance and vice. He was like a shy animal, hungry somewhere for the hand it shunned. “Dammit, man,” he said, “it’s not us but the Provost of King’s you must please, and you would appear to have done that already. If you want the living, it’s yours.”

  The wind gusted to rain beyond the casement. It was as though the night were throwing small stones at the glass.

  This evening (Louisa Agnew wrote in her journal) the great world came to Easterness to see whether it might squeeze into our parish without too tight a pinching of its heels. As a growing testiness all day foretold, Father left the burden of entertainment largely to me, though it was far from unwelcome as an easterly has made a dreary time of it of late, and I have been a vexation to myself. What, however, to make of this admirable pair?

  Was Mrs Frere merely out to impress a country maid, I wonder, or is Cambridge so emulous an environment that even such a simple soul as she must continuously aspire to brilliance? Yet I must not be too censorious, for she listened sweetly while I sang and responded most sincerely in her approbation.

  As to the aspirant himself, he seems a tender spirit, with more of the dove’s harmlessness about him than the serpent’s wisdom. I have seldom seen so roseate a blush in a man his age (unless it be from an excess of port); though I would judge him of a more melancholic than sanguine disposition. He wants a touch of Jupiter to lighten his humour a little, or perhaps a dash of Mercurius’s mischief. When he is in a consternation, he will so tug upon his ea
r that my chief anxiety is lest a few tea-time conferences with Mrs Bostock and Eliza Waters will leave his left lobe so distended he might be able to pass a saucer through it as they say the savages do in the darker parts of Africa!

  I am unkind, and one day I shall answer for it.

  No, my truer intuition is of a profound, unanswered darkness in our Mr Frere. Behind the reticence of his manner I scent a seeker. One wonders what promptings of the spirit should lead him to this rural fastness? I have a fancy he will take the living, though whether his lady wife will rest content with that, I hesitate to judge. She will certainly follow, however, if her husband has the will to lead.

  The closing chords of the hymn ascended through the light and settled in dust upon the hammer beams. In the gallery the bassoonist and key-buglers lowered the instruments from their lips. There was a general shuffle and coughing along the nave.

  Frere had mounted his pulpit and stood now, hands gripping the woodwork to steady him. How white, like so many china beakers, was the blur of faces below. The air was redolent of dust and jaded lilies. From where it hung in chains a clock ticked out his hour.

  Frere announced and repeated his text: “Have ye not read that he who made them in the beginning made them male and female?”

  He began to preach extempore, but there was some commotion among the pews. He spoke on, though that shifting of feet and exchange of glances was breaking his transport. Only moments into the sermon and he had lost them. His eyes travelled down to the rear of the church where Agnew and his daughter were seated. And this was strange: why were they not in their family pew at the head of the nave? Stranger still, Agnew observed him with a rudely sardonic eye. He seemed the one attentive person in the congregation, but detached, ironical, finally dismissive. How long, the bored smile seemed to say, will you detain us with this pap?

  Then, astoundingly, Agnew stood, raised a single finger to beckon Frere, and walked out of the church.