“Be gone, Emilia Frere,” she found herself thinking. “Get you from this parish. Abandon Munding Rectory and your husband. I shall keep my promise.”
It was in the realm of pastoral care that Edwin Frere believed himself most truly priest. After a discouraging start he had begun, he thought, to win the confidence of the villagers. He had hit the right note of playful yet dignified affection with the children – mischievous Sam Yaxley had proved an ally there, and even throughout the days of his own distress, he had comforted the sick and sorrowful, acting in the simple trust that, however removed those impoverished lives might seem from his own, they were members of one another.
Long before his ordination, Frere had been persuaded that the human heart was held in common and, therefore, a word truly spoken either way could touch and move it. Forgetful of the silence which prevailed over his own most troubling experiences, he believed that direct and gentle questioning might embolden even the least articulate sufferer to speak all the grief and rage of the heart, and so dispel it. In this conviction, he tried, as priest, to stand open to meeting, for it was in the ground of meeting that true comfort grew. He heard all patiently, taking the pain within himself in the hope that he might show by his own fallible example how much greater was the patient love of Christ.
So, yes, with a neighbour he would have known precisely what to do. With his own wife he scarce dared attempt it.
He stood before her wretchedness like an incompetent at the scene of an accident. Flowers, he had thought, surely they must lift her heart. But this was a lean season for flowers, so he had gone out into the rain looking for snowdrops. He had found them and he loved them: the little heads like frail iron, withstanding this wolf-month cold, and, when you opened the white petals, there were the green veins, promise of the spring to come. They were, surely, the perfect emblem of Emilia’s need? He had attempted a verse on the theme, but the lines lacked grace. He had abandoned it and taken the flowers to speak for themselves at her bedside, but she did not hear them. What he had seen there Emilia failed to see; when he pointed it out, she turned away.
She would accept no other visitors and yet, he sensed, she did not want him near. His very tenderness seemed a burden to her. But this was not the hardest thing to bear.
Alone in the room where he passed his nights, Frere closed the chapter of the Bible which had long ceased to occupy his thoughts. Tomorrow, he decided, he must press her to a full disclosure of the grief harboured in her heart. Yet no sooner was the decision taken than he quailed at the prospect, for he knew that a full expression of the rage lying at the root of Emilia’s melancholic condition must quickly overwhelm him.
Unspoken though they were, the facts of the case were plain, and he could no longer conceal them from himself. His wife hated their life here in Munding, and what had happened in the ice-bound park at Easterness had become for her the final bitter vindication of that hate. Munding was a place where her vitality bled away. There was nothing for her here, and if this was admitted between them it must swiftly prove an admission with only one exit.
Morose and fretful, Frere contemplated a further defeated return to Cambridge – his promises unkept, his congregation resigned to a curate’s care, his mind racked by remorse and a crippling sense of his own twice-proven inadequacy. No, it was intolerable.
She had promised him obedience. She had vowed to honour him for better or for worse, just as he must honour her in sickness as he did in health. His marriage to this parish was inviolable in its own sacred vows. He was as little free to renege on them.
So what was he to do but bear with her? Accept her cold rebuffs without anger or impatience; be there for her as best he might in the fond hope that this dreary rain must cease, that spring must come again, and she might wake one day to that glorious span of light across the water meadows. As he turned back the coverlet of the bed where he must sleep alone, Frere consoled himself with the thought that what he was incapable of accomplishing himself might be accomplished for him by time and that providential hand, of which, in his earnest efforts outside the home, he was the faithful instrument.
It was perhaps a coward’s answer, and he was honest enough to admit it. But he would pray – both for Emilia’s recovery from affliction, and for the strength he would need throughout the long thawing of the ice about her heart.
One person at least had emerged from the unhappy events at Easterness with a renewed enthusiasm for life. Alone at his desk in the library, Henry Agnew put down his pen, blotted the page and placed it neatly atop the growing stack of paper at his side. Then he looked up at the portrait of Sir Humphrey Agnew and smiled. What a day of work this had been!
For some time now he had been certain that he had at last evolved a diction appropriate both to the requirements of classical epic and to the subtleties of the alchemical process. No mean problem, this, in a time largely deafened to such sober music, and were it not for the incomparable examples of Spenser and Milton, he might finally have despaired, but what they in their day had achieved for their grave themes ought (he had long believed) to be possible for the richer store of myth and symbol at his disposal, and now the lines had begun to move with the majesty he desired. He too now soared “in the high region of his fancies with his garland and singing robes about him”. He too was poet. If only Louisa were by to share the joy of it.
Yet even the fact of her absence was cause for congratulation, for what she had presciently foretold had come to pass. He had indeed allowed himself to become too dependent on her, and he had paid the price of it. He had been so blinded by his need for her light that he had failed to see how deeply he stood in her shadow, and his work had been frustrated thereby. For a time, when she first took to the seclusion of the Lodge, days had been wasted in a sort of restless grief, but it had passed, resentment fell away, and gradually he found his way back into his own strength. It was he, after all, who was the master of the Art, and now that Louisa had taken upon herself the task of preparing his way, he was freed from the immediate pressure of time. He could work more calmly, and had even – so surely had his confidence returned – felt free enough to step outdoors to watch the skating, though the grip of the cold at his lungs had troubled him. Then he had thought all lost in the sudden distraction of the parson’s wife’s misfortune. All might have been ruined there, with that nervous, alien presence in the house, the comings and goings, the servants all of a huff. Yet considerate as ever, Louisa had shielded him from the worst of the intrusion. He had pressed on with the work, permitting no more interruption than common courtesy required, and had joined in the prayer of thanksgiving with a truly heartfelt gratitude not occasioned only by the woman’s departure.
Something in the quality of Frere’s devotion had touched him. Bumbler the man might be, but his unaffected tenderness reminded Agnew of the care he had lavished on his own wife in her dying days. He remembered his own great grief, and how he had finally emerged from it with a renewed sense of purpose; for though his epic was intended to address the spiritual crisis of the age, it had also been conceived as a requiem for his lost wife and a celebration of her unwavering faith in his ability. Reflecting on the parson’s fortitude in distress, his manifest care for his wife and his humble acceptance of divine will, Agnew had felt a sense of shame that his original impulse had been clouded by the passing years. It returned now as an act of rededication, and suddenly the work progressed.
So intense was the flow of inspiration, he had barely noticed the rain at his window, and was amazed to be told later of floods and drownings. He had been elsewhere, rapt in meditation, as the harvest of his long withdrawal from the world came home. Verse after verse had sprung from silence to run in fiery lines across the page. Never had he known such rapture. Gratefully he might echo the joyful cry of Trismegistus in The Golden Treatise:
Approach, ye sons of Wisdom, and rejoice: let us now rejoice together; for the reign of death is finished and the son doth rule; he is invested in the scarlet gar
ment, and the purple is put on.
Across the lake, in the Decoy Lodge, the mood was less exalted, for eventually all the demons of solitude came to visit Louisa Agnew where she worked alone. How well she was coming to know them: the Mid-day Demon of Accidie who dulled her mind and drained the words of meaning; the Seraph-Serpents, ever hot upon his heels, whose bite flustered her to panic and anxiety; then, by dark, the Ochim – doleful screech owls whose appetite always demanded more than she knew how to give. Every anchorite had known and suffered from these phantoms of the mind: how naive she had been to imagine herself exempt.
Yet the visitations had begun innocently enough. The first indeed had presented itself as no more than vivid memory, though – if she were honest with herself – she would admit it had arisen from a kind of fear.
As had not been the case throughout her first sojourn at the Lodge, she would start from her thoughts at some unexpected sound – a movement of the timbers, a mouse stirring in the wainscot, a drenched thrush fluffing its feathers in the thatch eaves. Even Pedro, pattering nervily about the room, seemed more restless than usual, and when he slept his dreams were troubled. Gradually Louisa began to wonder whether her father had been right after all, whether she had been as unwise as he claimed to shut herself away in this sequestered place. At moments when her concentration was disturbed, when dusk came too soon and its shadows flittered dismally about the room, she might almost have thought she was afraid.
Once, when the shock of alarm thrilled through her with more than usual intensity, she began to sing, softly, to keep her spirits up, and several phrases had passed her lips before she realized that the song came from her childhood – that she had not sung those words for almost twenty years, had forgotten them even until this moment when, with startling clarity, her memory travelled back in time.
It was a summer afternoon – she could barely have been more than eight years old – and she had come to the Lodge with her brother and their cousin, Laetitia, who was visiting the Hall with her parents. Henry was thirteen then, Lettice a year younger. Henry had not wanted to bring Louisa on the expedition but she had cried to go, and the adults insisted that she not be left behind. No one had known that Henry planned to take the skiff and voyage across the lake into the forbidden territory of the Decoy Lodge.
If the Lodge was not quite ruinous then, it was in poor repair. No one had used it for years. The reed thatch was spiky and unkempt, windows were broken, one of the doors unhinged. Breathless with a sense of violation, the three children had entered.
At the time Louisa was more impressed by the fact that Henry had lied to their father than by the dreariness of the place. Irritated by her presence, Henry had mocked and teased her nevertheless, for he could be quite beastly when the mood took him that way. He found a rusty man-trap in a cupboard – an evil contraption of chains and springs and teeth – and assured her that it had taken the leg off more than one poacher in its day. “Look,” he said, pointing to some darker smudges of rust, “you can still see the bloodstains here, and here.” Gratified by his sister’s distress, he then whispered that he had a dark secret to tell them: the place was haunted.
What the girls had to understand, he whispered, was that his father’s father had used the Lodge for very wicked purposes, things so wicked that he had gone quite mad and died in a madhouse. From there, no doubt, he’d gone straight to hell, but there were times when he and his wicked mistresses were still to be seen walking here, their shades drawn back from hellfire to visit the scene of their sins.
The lie had a pronounced effect upon Lettice, who immediately ventured on a small excursion into terror. Louisa found her cousin’s whimpers more unnerving than the story itself, but Henry, older, shrewder, discerned an encouraging element of titillation in Laetitia’s fear.
“What sort of sins?” Louisa innocently asked, for this hitherto untold family news greatly interested her.
The sins were far too wicked to be named, Henry had answered with a confidential glance at Lettice, who held her dainty hands at her mouth, wide-eyed. Moreover, that was not the only spookish thing about the place: Henry knew for a fact that hundreds of years before, there had been a magician in the family. His name was Sir Humphrey Agnew, and he had consorted with a witch hereabouts.
Louisa had heard of Sir Humphrey, but not that he was a magician.
“He most certainly was,” Henry insisted, “and the witch’s name was Janet. Everyone for miles around lived in terror of them. I’ve seen the cauldrons that they used to cast their spells. Father keeps them hidden away in a room off his library.”
This was impressive. Had Humphrey and Janet been very wicked too, Lettice wanted to know, and did they too haunt the Lodge? Henry said that he wouldn’t be at all surprised, but Lettice need not be afraid as long as she stayed close to him.
“Are you very brave?” Lettice asked.
Henry assured her that he was. Much braver than Louisa – who was offended by this comparison and declared that she was not at all afraid.
“Oh yes you are,” said Henry.
“Oh no I’m not,” Louisa had protested then with all the virtue of truth in her small voice. She had been undaunted even when Henry said he’d wager that she dare not stay alone in the Lodge while he and Lettice explored the woods outside.
The stake had been set at a silver thruppence – a thruppence which (Louisa remembered smiling now) she had never seen, for the afternoon had ended in disaster. She must have sat alone there for a good quarter of an hour, singing to herself, before Henry and Lettice came crashing back through the woods, squealing that they had seen Humphrey and Janet and must take to the skiff at once. Genuinely frightened by their fear, little Louisa had rushed after them and sat trembling beside Lettice in the skiff while young Henry rowed for all he was worth. When she dared to look back, however, she saw nothing more alarming than Jem Bales, the woodman, and behind him, in the shadow of the trees, a woman who might have been Audrey, the kitchen maid, though she could not be quite sure. Perhaps Henry and Lettice had seen something else? Whatever the case, the exploit cost Henry a thrashing later that day, and Louisa had too much heart to ask about her thruppence.
Emerging from those rapt moments of remembrance, Louisa put down her pen. The work had been far from her thoughts all evening. She had written little in the hour before the sudden sound had startled her and she began to sing to herself, the words of that same song she had sung so long before in this same room. How clearly it had all come back to her – even the piping treble of her own childish voice.
The lamp guttered a little in the chimney draught. She was returned to the present now, to the papers at her desk, to the rain barracking against the window glass, but her thoughts were wandering still.
Had Henry spoken truer than he knew, she wondered, for at a dismal time like this the Lodge was a shadowy place. It had been a part of her intention in coming here to banish those shades: already it seemed they were darkening her mind as surely as they still lowered across her father’s. She sensed that, even in contesting her decision to make use of the Lodge, her father had found it impossible to speak his full revulsion for the place. The mere thought of Madcap Agnew – a name rarely mentioned in the Hall – appeared to stultify him. What could the man have done that had been so vile?
Her only reference was the behaviour of Huntingdon and his set in Acton Bell’s novel – the gambling, the womanizing, the drink and the meanness of temper such vices induced. Those activities were so evidently a waste of spirit that Louisa had never understood how men were so easily lured by them. Yet lured they were, ever deeper into the toils of matter, and women with them too. Was it only lovelessness then that made an evil of the flesh? For in the Hermetic Art – symbolic though its language was – the mating of Sol and Luna was a moment of great joy and exaltation. It was the healing of ills, the great mysterium. That humankind had been created male and female was, of itself, the promise that such mystery might be made flesh. Yet if the density
of her father’s silence spoke true, then Madcap Agnew had used this place to make of that mystery something vile indeed.
Alone with the pages of her book, Louisa felt depleted by the knowledge that the world for which she wrote was so completely estranged from the values she cherished. It preferred, apparently, to revel blindly in its senses, as though life were no more than a rout of appetite and sensation rather than the dream of gold she sought to share. And then she recalled the words Emilia Frere had spoken: You have not known a man… you have not suffered at their nakedness.
If the words had chilled her at first hearing, it was more because of the cold light they cast on the woman’s most intimate life than for any reference to her own innocence. They troubled her more deeply now. From whatever inaccessible pit of bitterness, the words reached out to touch an empty place in her own life. In these matters Emilia Frere knew more than she, for the woman had crossed the threshold of the married state; she had delivered herself over to the meeting of the flesh as Louisa had not been called upon to do; she had experienced what the uninitiate could only surmise. For Louisa this crucial moment of a woman’s life – the very act by which life itself was assured of continuity – remained a mystery. In her preoccupation with other, larger and less accessible mysteries she had been too certain of the supreme value of her endeavours to attach great value to the consequent deprivations, but now she remembered also how Tom Horrocks had lightly berated her celibate condition while they skated with Edwin on the frozen lake. In their different ways both Tom and Emilia had alluded to the same experience, and before that experience she was utterly virgin. Yet her work touched on it at every point, and without such experience, without the knowledge of such suffering – if suffering it was – what authority did she possess to speak a word of meaning in the world?
The Chymical Wedding Page 31