None of this could have been anticipated. Disturbing dreams were common enough in his experience and, once out of his bed, things had appeared to take an encouraging turn. The Hall had been still as he made his way along the gallery and down the stairs. In the courtyard the first light came damp and sweet on the wind. Passing through the stable arch, down the yew-hedged drive, he could see the church in the distance, hunched like an immense snail peering at the day. There was no one about.
The ancient door had opened onto a sparse, cool space. His footfall startled the air. It was not (praise be!) the church of his dream, and the dream itself receded swiftly to oblivion as he took in the sturdy columns, the narrow pews, the carved canopy of the font. He walked towards the chancel and knelt at the simple rood screen, but he was too excited to sustain more than a brief prayer. He turned again to survey the nave. How compact this space was, how unassuming! So intimate after the soaring vault of King’s, and where he had delighted there to a rainbowed stippling of air among high pillars, here were narrow shafts of clear-glass light – plainsong, faintly elegiac. God’s scouring stone.
It was to his taste, his scale. It had the repose of simplicity, as of a gull alighting and folding its wings in one smooth motion. In all modesty he might fill this space with praise as it was already filled with the domestic peace of God.
He looked up at the pulpit but, no, he would not mount, not yet – though in his mind’s eye he saw a congregation assembled there below him, the well-born and the lowly joined in common prayer. He thought of the long generations committed to the earth outside; of parson succeeding parson down the centuries. He was part of a long procession through time, and already, by a quiet friendly stealth, this bare, barn-like church was becoming an enlargement of his life. In the still air faintly chrismed with damp he experienced anew the consoling mystery of his faith – one that needed no ornament save the soft devotions of this English light. His heart lifted to embrace the little parish.
It was in this state of mild exaltation that he had eventually stepped outside to inspect the outer fabric, and there the shadows of the early light picked out the living’s permanent incumbent, agape and waiting for him.
For a dreadful moment he had felt his heart stop. Then, with a violent lurch, as though he had been thumped across the chest by a giant fist, it restarted. The October dawn shimmered giddily about him.
When thought eventually returned, it was to question, though no more coherently than in a gasp of inward pain, what monstrous perversity in the scheme of things could have lured him to the one parish in all the vast reaches of the county where, it seemed, his madness might recur. Then he had staggered away, turning his back on the church for which his shaken heart had brimmed with affection only moments before.
He had wandered the lanes for a time, turning through a gateway to avoid the approach of a farm-labourer clad in sacks and leggings. The diversion brought him back into the Easterness parkland from the south where the lake glimmered before him. On the rot-riven stump of a felled oak he sat gazing out across the fretted surface of the water, trying to collect himself, but his mind was impervious to the gathering brightness of the day. He felt the old dark crowding there – the hot darkness of the Gangetic plain, the place where his reason had been unseated once before. He strove to remind himself that, in contrast to those Hindu effigies with their flagrant appeal to the sensual beast in man, this image was primitive and crude. It was coarse as a lewd and vulgar joke. But the point was it had no business there at all; yet there it was, as though appointed for his particular confusion. Small wonder his mind had reeled.
He should have been warned of this. Someone should have advised him that this church was distinguished from all others by a grotesquely unchristian feature… But why should they have troubled to do so? He alone knew the true nature of the mental turmoil he had suffered in India. He alone could have anticipated that what might seem to others no more than an antique curiosity would be to him a memorandum of despair.
He could not live with it. He could not take this living. Apologies must be made. He and Emilia must take coach for Cambridge now, that day. Somewhere another living would be found.
It was on this gloomy figure that Pedro had come bounding. There had followed the difficult, stammered conversation with Miss Agnew, which effected a shock of another order. The young woman had been alarmingly direct, and when the facts of the case emerged, or as much of it as he dared admit, there had been no hint of falsity in her response. Neither a coy reserve on the one hand, nor shamelessness on the other. There was rather a glow of sanity about her which sorted well with the morning’s breezy light. It made his sombre self-absorption seem disproportionate. It was like being smacked lightly across the face with a flower.
Edwin Frere had returned to his room, and his wife, in much hastily concealed disarray.
Later, while Emilia completed her toilette, he turned for guidance to the only book he had brought with him on the journey. It was a small calfskin copy of A Priest to the Temple or the Countrey Parson, his Character and Rule of Holy Life, published in 1652 under the authorship of Mr G.H.
The Countrey Parson, he read there, is exceeding exact in his life, being holy, just, prudent, temperate, bold, grave in all his wayes. And because the two highest points of his life, wherein a Christian is most seen, are Patience and Mortification; Patience in regard of all afflictions, Mortification in regard of lusts and affections, and the stupefying and deading of all the clamorous powers of the Soul, therefore hath he thoroughly studied these, that he may be Absolute Master and commander of himself, for all the purposes to which God hath ordained him.
…the stupefying and deading of all the clamorous powers of the Soul! How precisely the limber Jacobean prose prescribed his need! And how high the standard set to which the country parson must aspire! Yet the author of this little book (who was much better known as the composer of some of the most exquisite verse in the English language) had proved in his own life that such standards might be met – for who had laboured more sweetly than George Herbert to make Humility lovely in the eyes of men? His was a spirit that Frere had long revered. Under the gentle influence of Herbert’s exhortations the unhappy man had begun to think more calmly.
Now, over breakfast, entertained by Miss Agnew’s banter, he was beginning to wonder whether he had been, perhaps, too hasty… fallen too quickly prey to his own infirmity. It would be quite wrong to run so soon, improvising whatever excuses he could find. Far from being temperate and bold, that was the coward’s way. And, in any case, Emilia would demand explanation, and what could he say, after his earlier enthusiasms, that would not be immediately transparent? No, he must still himself. He must wait for some guiding word.
That something untoward had ruffled Frere’s composure did not escape his wife, but she had found scant opportunity to question him before breakfast and certainly none there. Nor was it possible that Emilia should fail to observe a certain diffident complicity between her husband and the young mistress of the Agnew household that had not been evident the previous evening. True, it was a slight thing – so slight that had their roles been reversed, Edwin would have noticed no alteration in her own demeanour – but then women are more sensitive registers of such nuance than men, and, by that same token, Emilia was also sure that Louisa saw that she saw. Moreover, the change – slight as it was – would not appear explicable by a simple sharing of the morning air. Curious that Edwin had omitted to mention this.
Not that Emilia was jealous: she was too little a sentimentalist to fall prey to such self-inflicted distemperature of the feelings. In any case, she had confidence enough in her hard-won ascendancy over her husband’s spirit not to doubt his loyalty. Emilia Davenport had been the companion of Frere’s youth. She had wept on his departure for India, and was there at the quayside to receive his returning shade. It was she, more even than his own mother and sisters, who watched over him when the brain-fever returned. It was she who supplied him with
the necessary resolve to live, which had seemed at times the only bar to his extinction. The illness had been prolonged and mysterious, but at last his health returned as a portion of her own. Their spirits had become inextricably mingled. Thus, when he asked her to become the wife and helpmeet of a life to be remade, the proposal justly ratified a secret conviction of her own: that the God he had perversely sought to serve among the heathen had found means to work what she had known all along to be Edwin’s true spiritual destiny. If he was here in Norfolk now, it was because, and only because, they were together.
Still, it was mildly irritating to witness her husband’s coy attention to Louisa’s chatter. When a restless night had left her longer abed than was her wont, it made for a disagreeable start to the day.
It was not to be denied that Louisa had an engaging tongue – so much so that Emilia’s smile was not entirely contrived. Yet listening to the young woman’s picturesque thumbnail portraits of some of the parish worthies they must meet that day, it was hard not to regard the condescension of her views as disproportionate to her youth. The young chatelaine of Easterness appeared to consider herself apart from the generality of the human lot. She might have been some buskined Olympian tripping impishly among the affairs of men, and, though her vivacity drew one willy-nilly into a warm sense of alliance, Emilia remained detached enough to recognize that it would require no other condition than one’s absence for that agile wit to conjure one’s own foibles into graphic focus.
There was, in brief, something about Louisa Agnew that Emilia did not entirely trust. The discovery added to her uncertainties about this eastward enterprise.
By now Sir Henry had heard enough. Not for the first time he tapped his watch as though dubious of its progress. “Mr Frere is a man partial to mystery, my dear,” he muttered. “Say more and you will quite dispel whatever mysteries our small parish might hold for him.”
The remark stopped Frere short in his thoughts. He could hardly protest that the young woman’s sparkling flow had made the world feel real around him again, and a little ridiculous even, for she had made him laugh – no mean feat, this morning, that. And now the baronet’s interruption reminded him of the glib manner in which he’d professed his knowledge of mystery the previous evening. How could he have dared such arrogance? Had he really believed himself intimate with the dark, often painful, always perplexing working of its ways? If so, he had been sternly schooled.
Emilia hastened to cover her husband’s inappropriate silence. “Have no fear, Sir Henry. My husband has mysteries enough of his own. Certainly he is often a mystery to me.”
“Then you are fortunate indeed,” Louisa replied. “I could imagine no sadder plight than marriage to the predictable.”
Emilia had intended her remark as a prompt to her husband, not as an invitation to comment upon her marriage. In her early thirties now, late married and still childless, there was a strictness to her finely boned nose and narrow lips that seemed sharpened at moments of careful thought by the way the lids of her hazel eyes reclined among shadow. Some of the more cavalier intelligences of Cambridge society had wilted a little under that chill appraisal. Miss Agnew, however, did not. And still Edwin did not speak.
“Oh yes,” Emilia said, “Mr Frere is a man of surprises.”
“Better still,” Louisa enthused, observing the parson’s fingers reach for the lobe of his ear. “In my limited experience I have yet to meet with a surprise that did not turn out to be an unexpected blessing.”
“However thickly disguised?” Emilia enquired without great interest, for she was irritated that the burden of this conversation should be left so completely on her own shoulders.
“I have often thought,” Louisa answered, “that the thicker the disguise the greater the blessing.”
“Perhaps that is your good fortune.” Emilia turned upon her husband. “Your silence is certainly surprising, Edwin. I trust it holds a blessing for us all.”
Frere smiled in some confusion. Wrongly, he had believed Miss Agnew’s remarks directly addressed to his own preoccupations. They had fallen on his ears as the guiding words he sought. Mystery thickly disguised as surprise, as shock… Perhaps that was it? For a dreadful space that dawn he had seen himself as victim of some malignant cosmic conspiracy. Now, under that engaging smile, he wondered whether the pressure he had felt on his heart might not be an insistent pushing by the hand of an all-seeing but compassionate God. He lifted the napkin to his lips.
“Good Lord,” said the baronet, “is that the time already?”
“I was thinking…” Frere began. “I was thinking…”
“That much was evident, Edwin. It is the nature of your thoughts that interests us.”
“My thought was that if all Munding proves as hospitable as the Hall, we are indeed fortunate.” Which was, of course, only partially true. He was thinking that George Herbert was right: a man was not priest to the temple because he had no loud clamourings of the soul, but because he had studied and mastered them. He was thinking that to spend a life in flight from demons was to remain their obeisant slave. He was thinking that if he was ever to become what he believed himself to be – a devout and worthy servant of his Lord – then he must eventually turn and face those demons. And now, having uttered only a small portion of his thought, he was thinking: Very well, let a start be made.
“The mountain has laboured,” said Emilia, offering her hosts the benefit of her patient smile.
“But the mouse,” Louisa responded, “is very genteel.”
It was with renewed commitment and a less entirely rigid smile than he would earlier have believed possible that Edwin Lucas Frere proceeded to meet the more distinguished residents of the parish later that day. In some matters still an innocent, he was not sufficiently so to entertain high expectations of their Christian charity. Nor had he needed Sir Henry’s warning that no parish is without its self-appointed monitors of virtue. No doubt in Munding, as elsewhere, the Pharisees had long since requisitioned the choicer pews.
There was Mrs Bostock, for instance, whose iron will must have supplied some of the sharper nails in Matthew Stukely’s cross. Her friend, Miss Waters, had less vinegar blended with her balm but might prove equally problematic in her precise knowledge of what form of service was acceptable in the sight of Munding’s God. As to the gentlemen, Mr Bostock was a lantern-jawed drone content to let his lady-wife rule in matters spiritual, but Mr Wharton, the wealthiest of the local farmers, was more exacting. Fierce memories of the agricultural disturbances of the previous decade burned in his mind undimmed; he was unimpressed therefore by Frere’s conviction that care for the parish poor should rank high among a parson’s priorities. “If it’s care you’re concerned with,” Mr Wharton recommended, “then have a care that the rascals do not abuse your good nature, sir. I warrant you’ll find hard work and a healthy terror of hellfire a surer road to their salvation.”
In short, Frere found himself facing a not untypical selection of the rural gentry, as characteristic in their established prejudices as in their shrewd evaluation of the parson and his more assertive wife. Mingling among them, Frere felt his confidence grow. Yes, there were a number of hard hearts to be opened here, but that prospect did not daunt him. In contrast to the steelier intellects of Cambridge society they were manageable enough. A little light, air, warmth, and their shrivelled thoughts might soon green again.
In a moment alone, a glass of sherry in his hand, he watched Emilia chatter happily with Mrs Bostock, and found himself smiling. And over there – how patient Miss Agnew was with Eliza Waters’s tattle! Even Sir Henry had troubled to engage with his neighbours on matters closer to the land than the sky. The whole room was lively with a sense of community. There was work to be done here. He was up to it. He might make his stand.
His sole regret was that circumstances should allow so little opportunity to meet the poorer families of the parish; but there would be time enough for that in weeks to come, and he was resolved no
t to be hamstrung in a client-chaplaincy to the local gentry.
He turned, beaming, as Mr Bostock approached. Yes, he responded, he would be most interested to hear the man’s view on the vexatious case currently before the ecclesiastical courts. Also – though this he did not express – he took quiet satisfaction in the discovery that Miss Agnew’s amusing observations on her neighbours had not greatly misled him.
Louisa, however, was less confident of her judgement.
Though I have schooled myself in discretion, she would write in her journal later that day, and though time upon time my dear father has counselled me in Patience and Prudence as the faithful handmaidens of the work, I remain – and it shames me to confess it – an impetuous spirit. There is that in me which seems wilfully seditious of all probity – will speak when it should keep silent, will act when it should hold still; and which, like Pedro (who is my joy and my despair) loosed momentarily from the leash, bounds recklessly to start what birds it may for the sheer joy of seeing them in flight.
I have striven to master it, but this mischievous spirit has been particularly virulent in recent weeks, and I must bring it to a reckoning. The better to know it and the better, mayhap, to conjure the imp more readily to my control, I shall give it a name. I dub it MERCURIUS, for it is a masculine sprite inhabiting my female form and, as surely is the case of our true philosophical Mercury, it is of a duplicitous and antinomian nature.
On the one hand I know it to be a vital and procreative energy – the little silver tongue of flame that flickers at the heart of such vivacity I have. On the other the sprite remains a prankster and deceiver; one who, if I do not have a care, will prompt me to extremities from which a nimble tongue, a ready wit, and the most earnest protestations of my good intentions will not easily reprieve me.
The Chymical Wedding Page 8