“How do I find you today, Will?” he said.
The eyes were barely open but they strove to see in the gloom, and the thin lips trembled as they shaped themselves into a grim smile. It was as though the man sought to focus him in his contempt. “Same as allus,” he was answered. “None the better for your comings and goings.”
“Do you say so, Will?”
“I do.”
“And have you said the prayers I taught you?”
“The only service I credit is the way old Parson Stukely served Amy Larner and the rest. That were honest man’s work.”
“I think your mind dwells too much on sin, Will. You have a soul to think of now.”
The man gave a little panting laugh which became a spluttering cough. He leant over the bedside and gobbed into a bowl.
“Come, Will, let us say a prayer together.” Frere closed his eyes. “Hear us, almighty and most merciful God and Saviour; extend thy accustomed goodness to this thy servant who is grieved with sickness…”
“Ain’t nobody’s servant,” muttered Will Yaxley, coughing still.
“Sanctify, we beseech thee, this thy fatherly correction to him, that the sense of his weakness may add strength to his faith…”
“Free man. My own master. Allus have been… Die that way…”
“Give him grace so as to take thy visitation, that, after this painful life ended, he may dwell with thee in life everlasting; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Frere opened his eyes on the sick man’s scowl. What of life remained there was no more than this surly defiance… the refusal to admit any need… a dogged going-under as he had doggedly survived, on his own bleak terms. Frere doubted that he would outlast the night. It were better to go and leave the man in peace – every nerve-end in his body shouted so. But this was the first death since he had come to Munding; he held responsibility for the man’s immortal soul.
“Be patient with me, Will,” he said, “for I have a Christian duty to perform.” He faltered, sought cover in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick. “Forasmuch as after this life there is an account to be given unto the righteous judge, by whom all must be judged, without respect of persons, I require you to examine yourself and your estate, both toward God and man; so that, accusing and condemning yourself for your own faults, you may find mercy at our heavenly Father’s hand for Christ’s sake, and not be accused and condemned in that fearful judgement. Therefore I shall rehearse to you the Articles of our Faith, that you may know whether you do believe as a Christian man should, or no.”
Frere looked up from the pages of his Prayer Book. “Do you understand me, Will?”
Eyes glazed and watering, the sick man did not answer.
…without respect of persons, Frere thought.
Dear God, this was terrible.
“Will, dost thou believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth? And in Jesus Christ his only begotten Son our Lord? And that he was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary; that he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; that he went down into hell, and also did rise again the third day; that he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; and from thence shall come at the end of the world, to judge the quick and the dead? And dost thou believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Catholick church; the Communion of Saints; the Remission of Sins; and everlasting life after death?”
Whence this despair as he read – the sense of the utter irrelevance of these questions to the haggard gaze in which he was gripped like talons?
“You must answer me, Will. You must say: ‘All this I steadfastly believe.’”
Would he have the man lie then – here, at death’s door?
But Will Yaxley was not even listening to the parson. His head was turned away, vaguely alert, as though he were trying to remember something – a song out of his childhood, something that had once stirred his bitter heart…
Frere’s eyes shifted to the 71st Psalm: In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust; let me never be put to confusion, but rid me and deliver me in thy righteousness… O Saviour of the world, who by thy cross and precious blood hast redeemed us, save us and help us, we humbly beseech thee…
All out of order now, but the words had passed only through the silence of his mind. It was to himself they were spoken. Again he looked down on this stubborn, yes, spiteful, hulk of a drunkard. He saw only the crabbed meanness of that life, written across the features in an illiterate scrawl. Suddenly the stink was overpowering.
“Do you hear that?” Will Yaxley muttered.
Frere frowned, bewildered, and listened. He could hear only the changed song of the chaffinch in the apple boughs outside.
“That’s what I believe in,” Will Yaxley said. “That ’n’ hard frost. All the rest is squit. You hear me? Squit.”
Throughout that long night in the Decoy Lodge the contest had been waged back and forth, sally following upon sally, with vehement force at times, at times as no more than the lurchings of an all but exhausted will. An eavesdropper peering through the still uncurtained lancet window would have observed nothing more dramatic than a lone young woman sitting at a lamp-lit desk, staring at an empty chair across from her. Sporadically she bent to write – her pen reaching for the ink so urgently she might have feared the nib dry before it touched the page; meanwhile, in the chimney corner by the dying fire, a young red setter dreamt of chase. But when, later, Louisa came to read over what she had written, she would remember that there are times when a mind struggling for greater consciousness must take risks which a less exacting soul might think insane.
That the dialogue could not be sustained in entirely rational terms became rapidly evident, and she found herself thrown from her first cool challenge into responses of anger and disgust. From there, gradually, she began to learn a grudging respect for her opponent. Diabolical he might be in his cold, ironical determination to twist her meaning and, wherever he saw the opportunity, defile it, but that icy heart was ruled by a formidable intelligence which took nothing on trust and subjected each of her assertions to sceptical scrutiny. Why – she was required to answer – should any authority be ascribed to her own limited experience when his own had a different and more bitter tale to tell? Not a weak spot in her argument passed unmarked; each dubious element in her motivation was rooted out and exposed for the sentimental evasions it concealed; the full exertion of her intellectual powers was required merely to hold ground she had long considered safe, and soon it became a fierce battle to survive…
Either a divine order rich with meaning, or an inane jumble of atoms in which nothing is forbidden: this was the ancient matter of the debate; though debate is too civilized a word for all but a few passages of the conflict she endured. Nor were the lines of the conflict clearly drawn. Seeing herself as the champion of light over against his dark, she was forced to recognize that Lucifer too is a light-bringer in his way, and there was, at the heart of much she tried to say, a dazzling darkness. There were long sessions too when both recoiled, or when they lay locked together in holds so tight there was an erotic, almost tender, intimacy between them. At such moments Louisa might yield a little, only to find the advantage lost. Her feelings injured and abused, furious again, she spat defiance – and heard him laugh.
At last she emerged from what had seemed a fathomless despair to admit this conflict endless. Point for point was answered; pawns, knights, bishops, castles fallen, until only her white confronted his black queen. Stalemate was reached, and not accepted either way. Staring unvanquished into his gaze, she saw that it was time to fold the board.
Strangely she no longer reviled him. Aware, quailing, of his power, she saw pathos too. He was a devil, yes, but a poor devil – a devil wrought from injured innocence – and she could find it in her heart to pity him. She saw too that it was only fear that had made her fight: that fear, as much as cold indifference, was the contrary of love; and here – at the climax of thei
r bitter struggle – she could fear and love him at the same time. If victory mattered to him so much then he must have it – but only as a gesture of her love, for that was to concede no defeat at all.
Then, in a sudden relaxation of the room’s fraught air, he was gone.
She sat for a time, half-wondering whether this withdrawal was only the preliminary to some new, devious stratagem he had devised, for she was too exhausted to recognize the scale of her achievement. And then, when nothing came to disturb the sense of peace gathering like sleep inside her, she walked to the door, opened it, and stood, breathing in the damp night air. Far above the distant Mount the moon stood at full among a shoal of clouds. The rain had ceased and the night was a luminous silence, devoid of consciousness and consecrated only to itself.
She slept right through the following day and night, and when eventually she returned to her work the sole cruelty lay in the self-imposed discipline of those long hours at the desk. She ate little, rose from her chair only to mend the fire and answer her bodily needs, or let Pedro come and go, and worked on far into the evening until she dragged herself wearily to bed. Sometimes she fell asleep where she sat until her posture altered, and she woke, startled, uncertain where she was. Day by day the stack of written pages mounted higher. It was as if their volume had become her only concern: as to their meaning and value she had lost all compass. In moments of detachment she wondered who, in their right mind, could ever bring themselves to read all this.
Then the nature of the visitations changed. They came as dreams still, or as waking dreams – vagrant experiences which might have lasted hours or moments only, so little did they have to do with time, and interpenetrating through the states of wakefulness and sleep. Light-headed once, emerging from her trance, she recalled the story of the old Chinaman who dreamt he was a butterfly, and so vivid was the dream that when he woke he wondered whether he was a man who had dreamt himself a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming himself a man. And that, she thought, is surely my condition now: I am a case of butterflies.
She tapped the bald domed head of the porcelain figurine on her desk and made it seem to laugh. Watching the old mandarin’s sly nod, she fell to dream again.
She had come into the library where her father sat motionless at his desk like an allegorical statue of Contemplation, a hand at his brow, undistracted by and unaware even of her entry. She passed to the bookshelves, opened the glass door and took down that volume of the Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa of Joannes Jacobus Mangetus in which were depicted all the illustrations from the Mutus Liber. In the still air of the library she could smell the leather of its binding, and she was a little breathless with anticipation of delights to come, for to open that book was like unlocking a casket in which the contents changed each time one meditated over them. Carefully, with due respect for its age, she placed the volume on her lectern and turned its pages until she came upon the first picture where, from a garlanded ladder, an angel sounded a trumpet to wake the sleeper at its foot.
She heard the trumpet sound, for she was that sleeper, and when – still dreaming – she woke into lucidity, backwards she travelled in time, before her own birth, before the death and birth of her grandfather, back across the centuries until it was high summer at Easterness, the sun and moon stood in the sky together, and she knew herself returned to the golden age of alchemy.
And this was dream within dream, for she might have been turning the pages of the book still as she gazed on two figures who were bent at work before a furnace, sweating in the heat as they fed charcoal to its flame; yet unlike the figures in the illustrations these were present in rich colour and animated by lively enthusiasms of their own.
Then, with a gasp of sudden delight, Louisa recognized the man. Though he was younger here than in the portrait above her father’s head, and wearing no cavalier finery but a simple, soot-stained workman’s smock, she knew the lean, engaging features for those of her ancestor, Humphrey Agnew. He was scarcely out of his youth, in his twenties still, his eyes active and earnest, alert with fascination, and a calm, controlled energy seemed to flow through each sensitive movement of his hands. If he was at that age, and working with such ardent intensity, then this must be the very day on which he had made his successful projection of the Stone, and through the agency of this lucid dream, she had been granted the otherwise impossible privilege to observe…
And might do more than watch, for there was a woman working beside him who could only be Janet Dyball, his sweet soror mystica – she who had searched the mystery with him, and whose hands had stitched the sampler hanging in Louisa’s room at the Hall, on which were embroidered the words:
ARTIS AURI ARCANUM ET MARE ET FEMINA CONSTITIT
She too was instantly recognizable to Louisa, and not because any portrait of the young woman had survived, but because – and this was strangest of all – her face was Louisa’s face. She and Janet were one and the same, though her own wondering consciousness remained apart, and she was, it seemed, observer and participant at once as Humphrey paused in his labours to peer into the hot glass of the alembick, then turned to smile at her.
Soon, he was saying, the dissolution of the first matter would be complete, and she would see the alembick turn to a black so deep she might fear their work all lost, but this blackness was rather to be desired, and they must persevere throughout the time when it prevailed, for only through that darkness which some masters called “The Raven’s Head”, and others the Nigredo, could the passions of their matter rightfully be ordered. If they observed it well, a seed of light would glister at its heart, and she would wonder then to see it wax and magnify. When every shadow of the black had fled before this light, the work would have achieved its second stage, the white of the Albedo, from whence a saffron hue would then appear, which was the passage from the white to red. At last, if Hermes smiled upon their toil, the sanguine colour of Rubedo would appear, and bring the passion of their matter to perfection. “Therein, sweet love,” he said, “doth lie the true sperm of our male. From thence the splendour of the sun shall rise – for here is the fire of the Stone, the King’s own crown, the glorious son of Sol – and there these first of all our labours findeth rest.”
None of this was unknown to the Louisa who watched; yet to she who listened the words came virginal. She rejoiced to hear the golden promises renewed in that rich voice. The antique tongue was instantly familiar, and not only from her readings in old texts. It was the very language of her heart, as dear to her as was the voice itself – a gentle tuneful baritone she recognized from her own time, as though it had ever been a member of her dream.
Throughout that long day, they laboured there, tending the fire from change to change, until at last the sheen of gold was brought forth to perfection from the flame. And then, what lovers they were, the young alchemist and his mystic sister – naked as angels, white among green shade, and such laughter echoing from tree to tree, as though the knowledge of sin had never been conceived, and both knew only now the dazzling appetite to meet.
Was this then how youth, how life should truly be? No endless poring over books and dusty manuscripts, but acting out the glory of the word made flesh. Such tenderness! Such breathless apprehension of the mystery in things! And, afterwards, such peace!
Louisa dreamt like Ariel, and when she woke, like Caliban she cried to dream again.
“I have been thinking about my… accident… at the lake, that day.”
Frere looked up from his Bible, startled that his wife had spoken at all, and doubly so that this should be the subject, for since the day of her return she had refused all reference to the miscarriage. His confusion was further compounded in that his own thoughts had been quite other – he was agonizing over the problem of redemption. Will Yaxley had been buried that day and was, if stricter minds were to be believed, in hell by now, which was difficult to reconcile with Frere’s own concept of a merciful Christ who would take even a stubborn sinner to his breast. Yet the fact rema
ined: Will Yaxley had rejected such consolation. To the end – an end which had been delayed much longer than Frere would have thought possible – he would have nothing to do with promises and admonitions of the life to come. Stubbornly he had insisted that his flesh would rot in “the owld mowld”, and that was the end of it. There had been a terrible cold certainty in the eyes of the dying man. It was impervious to words. And so in this, as in so much else, it seemed, Edwin Frere had failed.
“You have?” he said.
“It begins to come clear to me that this was a judgement visited upon us.”
Sitting in his chair, the Bible open before him, Frere felt almost dizzy with cold dread. Judgement – the second of the Four Last Things – had been much upon his mind, and now, at his wife’s words, he too stood in the dock, and the mercy seat was empty. Had Yaxley been right after all? Was it not far saner to conceive of a natural world devoid of judgement than of a heartless, black-capped Justice before whom all was bared, and who could pass such sentences on mortal flesh?
“How else,” Emilia pressed, “may one make sense of it?”
“It is not for us to question the Divine Will,” Frere said hopelessly.
“Merely to suffer it?”
The Chymical Wedding Page 35