His Last Fire

by Alix Nathan

  The wager surfaced on a swell of frivolity. Once royalty, the old and infirm had retired, dancing and social intercourse began. For Edward a familiar pattern: flirtatious teasing from tipsy women, sparring from men. Women resented his lack of desire for them; his fine bearing, generous income lost to books, collecting, obsession with dull, faraway places. Men resented the women’s resentment. Remarks sharpened and flew.

  ‘If snowy wastes are so fascinating, dear Edward, why do you not go and live there?’

  ‘He would languish without his curiosities! He must touch and caress them every day.’

  ‘He prefers his collection to company, I swear it! He ignores us, even in our best attire,’ shaking elaborate curls beneath her ‘God Save the King’ bandeau.

  ‘I’d wager ten thousand pounds he’d prefer your company to some ice-cold, snow-capped Lapp woman!’

  Gibing finally provoked. Inebriated, having drunk rather than danced, Edward agreed to the wager’s ridiculous terms: return in six months with two Lapp women and two reindeer.

  Days later his father died, he inherited the estate, had no need of ten thousand pounds. Yet he prepared carefully, packed cases of wine, spirits, salt, tobacco, jewellery, boarded the Splendid and sailed for Christiania and the wild North.

  *

  Letters home gave Edward’s instructions for return in early November, within the agreed time. A large room was made ready for the Lapp women, who, it seemed, were sisters. Furniture was uncovered, fires lit, supplies of meat and fish ordered. Anticipation pulsed among his neighbours.

  Edward was a mystery to his peers. His interests were not shared, thought more suitable for old men. At best he was comical, a useful butt, at worst irritatingly abstruse, aloof. Mrs Clavering, celebrated for youthful indiscretions, failed in her ambition to take him in hand.

  Adored by his short-lived mother, he’d been a gentle boy, almost effeminate. He wandered the estate through bilberries and gorse-covered forts; collected birds’ eggs, paying boys in tied cottages to bring more. Set them out tenderly. In winter months, after a pint of port, his widowed father abandoned attempts to remove him from the library. Oneiric hours filled Edward’s mind with other worlds.

  The baronet resolved to push his son out on the grand tour. Edward was delighted. Words, architectural plans, engravings became flesh, stone, heat, colour, Nature. He moped among ruins, sketched, scribbled. He learned how much to give for desired objects. Haggled. Took lessons in love from the Roman demi-monde; thereafter only found women desirable who laughed in a foreign tongue.

  He bought the usual classical fragments, but travel and inexhaustible funds bit like addiction. He’d take a common thing, seek every variation: Japanese silk shoes, Pyreneean espadrilles, Indian wooden clogs, Moroccan leather slippers; funerary flasks and caskets from crude to exquisite; scores of coffee pots.

  He loved natural objects made more extraordinary by human ingenuity: carved hornbill skulls, ivory powder horns, a geometrically perfect nautilus shell painted with the Spanish naval defeat of 1639; snuff boxes, cups, knife handles, rings of jade, cornelian, lapis, amethyst, nephrite; a tiny cameo of reindeer in pink agate. He built an extension to the library with countless cupboards, glass cases, batteries of drawers. Encouraged his servants to look and be amazed; never imagined collectors among them.

  Edward’s excursion to Lapland had been difficult within the wager’s time-limit. It was summer when he arrived in Norway: lack of bread, wine and salt in the far north mattered little in the exhausting beauty of the light. His gifts swiftly bought the two sisters from their father, such was the value of tobacco and spirits, gold brooches, bangles.

  Demonstration of success completed the wager. On the Herefordshire estate with its mountainous backdrop, neighbours and friends saw picturesque reindeer nibbling last leaves beyond the ha-ha; found the Lapp sisters quite acceptable, their features almost delicate, figures shapely, clothed not in mephitic skins but dresses of coarse cloth, with belts, necklaces of silver and copper. The two women stood by timidly as Edward explained his hoard of Lappish artefacts, encouraged his guests to try morsels of dried fish and reindeer meat.

  Perhaps there was disappointment at the women’s pleasantness, their shy smiling. Two more decorative oddities in Edward’s collection. The guests had hoped for signs of disorder, feculence, something more deliciously rancid.

  Edward’s obsession with Lapland had begun years earlier in his father’s library where he’d found John Schefferus’s History of Lapland on a distant shelf. The book, already antique, promised ‘a new World diʃcovered’ where lives were lived in hunger, cold, solitude. Edward already liked solitude. In the first year of his reading he tried all three, striking out in wintry Marcher dusk, shivering beneath rocks at midnight with half a game pie. His paltry stick fire died, the cold skewered his bones, he stamped and chanted a mesmeric declension:

  Immel Immele Immela

  Immel O Immel Immelist

  Immeleck Immeliig Immewoth

  Immeliidh O Immaeleck Immaeliie

  By the time of the wager swathes of Schefferus were committed to memory; he knew well what deprivations to expect, what attitudes to anticipate. Anni and Mari were Christian. He could take them to church but they might need more; he purchased certain stones, drums with brass rings, deer’s horn hammers for divination.

  He’d read of the Lapps’ ‘immoderate lust’; both sexes, all ages slept in the same hut. Blushing, he accused himself of accepting the wager because of it. Yet the Lapps also esteemed marriage, said the book, rarely violated it.

  On the return voyage the sisters stayed below deck and for a week after their arrival wouldn’t come out of their room, in which, Edward understood, his housekeeper eventually washed off smoke-grime. When finally they appeared, how charmed he was by their penetrating dark eyes, exotic smallness, broad breasts, slender waists, their childlike pleasure at his glittering gifts! That was how he wanted them, beautiful, innocent; to admire, to learn from.

  Of necessity there had been a small exchange of vocabulary, though Edward was not a natural linguist. He was albma – a gentleman, he told them, Mari was kiscardasche – a sister of Anni, at which they giggled. He would be wellje – like a brother, he said, but they looked dismayed, speaking words of which he recognised none. He struggled to explain that they should sleep in beds, not on the ground, convinced them only by gestures. Under shaggy reindeer skins, according to household gossip, they slept naked.

  He instructed his cook to lightly boil the reindeer meat kept in the ice-house (jenga kaote – ice shed: he was pleased with that). This satisfied Mari and Anni while it lasted; they rejected tasteless mutton, vegetables. Reported pulling at raw topside in one of the pantries, he bribed them with bracelets and smiles, understood their need, sent out a man to catch trout.

  One of the reindeer had to be killed. By now it was summer: Mari and Anni placed strips of meat along the terrace balustrade to dry in the sun. Around the plinths of Pan, Bacchus, Mnemosyne and Jupiter in shepherd garb. In late afternoon crows grew bold. Dried meat was abandoned.

  They foraged for berries in the kitchen gardens, annoying gardeners, delighting Edward with their pleasure and stained fingers. He explained to Cook how burying a dish of boiled strawberries in the earth was a hedge against winter. He wanted everyone in his household to learn.

  Looking from his window on a wonderful July night, he saw Mari and Anni gather leaves below the terrace, lay out reindeer skins on them, lie down to sleep in the full moon. On subsequent nights, they moved to another patch of ground, speeding agilely over the grass with their leaf mattresses and skins.

  Following the description in Schefferus, whose illustrations greatly excited the women, Edward helped build a tent, stretching woollen, linen, skins obliquely across poles, ramshackle but dry enough, with a smoke hole at the top. There they’d sit after a day swiftly sweeping the estate for fruit
, embroidering winter gloves and caps with stars, flowers, birds, reindeer, knots, spangles of gold and silver thread. And there at the opening they welcomed Edward in, into the smoke-filled warmth.

  *

  Robert Sanders was small, brawny, unflappable, with practical ingenuity grown out of years of difficult employment by a woman of notoriety. At her death her daughter dismissed him with sorrow. He took another unusual post, helping Edward Gage with his collecting. Edward found Robert an excellent help-meet, common-sensical, unromantic, utterly unlike himself.

  Tales of Edward’s past poured into Robert’s ear when he arrived, gossip, rumour which, though years old, shone with repeated telling, sparkled with semi-precious phrases.

  It seems that Edward had fallen in love with two Lapp women.

  For months he’d spoken of nothing else, courted the women with gifts, created a stir taking them about in his vis-à-vis, conducted them one on each arm to church, eaten their dried fish and meat. Was seen on his knees outside their tent chanting from a book in Lappish tongue. A sharp-eyed maid found the translation in his script. One verse, ripped from the rest, was passed from hand to hand of those who could read:

  What stronger is than bolts of steel?

  What can more surely bind?

  Love is stronger far than it,

  Upon the Head in triumph she doth sit:

  Fetters the mind,

  And doth controul,

  The thought and soul.

  An honourable man, not one to court scandal, what could he do? Hardly marry both of them. Nor, as Christians, would they have agreed to it.

  In others’ telling, the tale was of lust not love. The naked, black-haired doxies bewitched him with their magic, reading the runes of their drum with its palimpsest of little figures drawn as if by fingers in blood; its jingling rings. They invoked spectres, demons in the wood and drew him in with their repetitive songs until he was no longer master of himself. The sounds that came from that construction of skin and twigs! Such laughter!

  Whichever version he heard, the story-tellers agreed on one thing: mushrooms brought all to an end.

  Edward’s estate contained ancient woods into which as summer died the women moved their tent. Warmth lingered into autumn and gorgeous amanita muscaria burst up through the mould. Later, shrivelled stalks and caps were found on a sill in the hottest kitchen, but at first there was no explanation for the climactic event.

  One night the women staggered up the stone steps as if drunk and collapsed on the terrace. From attic windows, from behind shutters, eyes stared, mouths gaped as the women’s bodies twitched in convulsions then fell into deep sleep. The impatient went to bed. Edward was in his library, didn’t know. Suddenly, stupefied but awake the women rose, made frenzied movements. Someone called Edward who now saw the women cavort, stretch their arms in wildness, step with enormous strides over tiny growths of lichen between the flags, crying out.

  Soon after, the fly agaric was found, drying, ready to be swallowed. Edward made arrangements once again for travel to Lapland.

  His public explanation was the Lapp women’s homesickness. He must return them to the land for which they longed. Few believed him. For years stories entertained his neighbours and friends, sustained the servants. Yet most made an effort to hide their mirth when he returned after six months, aged, melancholic, increasingly irritable like his father.

  He turned away from the north, travelled south and east. Robert, fair-minded, wise, made no judgment of the tales. He was pleased to travel, arrange, carry, organise Edward’s comfort and his own. He picked up languages remarkably well so that even procuring was easy in foreign lands. Edward preferred two women, laughter.

  The collection grew, its fame spread. Scholars visited though Edward was often alone with his curiosities. No one saw his nightly inspection of cribs, his gentle stroking of the Lappish carrying cradle like a small boat out of water.

  A TULIP SKY

  A disorderly parcel was handed in at the Turkish Embassy. It was brought by a boy who, panting, had carried it some distance through dung-thick streets to ever grander gateways. Painstakingly written on the outer covering was: to xlensee turckush ambassad with decorative flourishes beneath. Brown paper, too much thin hemp rope, newspaper and household cloths had been used to wrap five handsome copper coffee pots.

  There was no indication who’d sent the parcel and the boy fled, intimidated by armed, turbaned guards at the door. The pots gleamed with years of polishing, but the embassy kitchen was fully equipped with similar vessels, so dust soon dulled them in a far pantry.

  Alice White had watched the wrapping, waiting to demonstrate her writing skill and earn three pence. She tried unsuccessfully to charge more for the flourishes. She was a canny young woman, severely cut, constantly critical, certain of a higher destiny. Of course Betsy Hoddy knew more of the world, but she was old and could neither read nor write. Alice would never end up like her, unmarried, still a housemaid, senior only by dint of age.

  Alice didn’t know the pots had been stolen. Over several years Betsy had secreted each one into her box of clothing. They’d come from a vast collection of curiosities belonging to a previous employer. The thefts were never discovered, Betsy eventually left and in her final employment she’d felt free to display all five on her meagre mantlepiece. As head housemaid in a newly-built country house she had a room of her own under the eaves, warmed by a tiny coal fire. Here, when not buffing the pink-tinged copper, she contemplated clouds and stars through the roof window, her only light. The younger maids admired the pots, curvaceous, exotic, glowing in the firelight. They accepted her vague explanation, quickly forgot them.

  Alice was wrong to make no connection between the parcel and Betsy’s new-found piety. She assumed increased church-going was just a feature of old age. Betsy was often in a huddle with the curate. She placed an unopened prayer book on the deal table by her bed and sometimes mumbled as if in prayer. The prayer book had gold-edged pages. Betsy ran her fingers along its closed goldenness and felt doubly blessed.

  She had never made a living from thieving, hadn’t the wit, but she knew a lovely thing when she saw it. At fourteen she was sacked from employment as a kitchen maid in Red Lion Street. Mrs Nancy Mason found her rifling her drawers, placing silver thimbles on each of her fingers. Mrs Mason had always been exacting but her anger on this occasion was unprecedented.

  Betsy returned to her East Anglian village, walking for several days, arriving faint and unwelcome at the shack from which young mud-bound siblings ran out.

  ‘What a come back for?’ her mother shouted. ‘What will a eat? Got rid of a last time. What a come back for?’

  Her father had taken her up to London and left her. It was extraordinary that she had found harmless employment, retained her virtue, for she was comely, her face a soft symmetry, her peasant origins suggested only by slight squareness of jaw and hand. And now she was back, prettier than before, a burden to indigent parents.

  At first she refused to sleep in the bed with the rest of the children, but winds from the North Sea drove her to it. She wore her kitchen maid’s shoes until they dropped to pieces, combed her hair enough to draw disparaging comment. She proved her value when the father fell into a mill race and drowned, leaving her to gather wood, trap rabbits and, had she wanted to, while away hours smoking on an upturned trough. She was still there at eighteen, knowing she should leave, her resolve impoverished.

  *

  It is August. Betsy kicks carefully through stubble, taking a longer route to delay her tasks. The edge of the wood is still; birds, leaves, too exhausted to flinch. In the heat only insects thrive. She stops by a mound high as her knees to watch wood ants running back and forth, carrying twigs as big as their bodies, eggs, carcases.

  Men’s voices, nearing. She backs behind a great pine in time to see two figures hurrying along the dirt road she’s just le
ft. Glimpses moustaches, long and black, extraordinary clothes, colours. They carry a heavy wheel between them, presumably taking it to the wheelwright; a carriage broken down.

  Alert now, she hears more voices and follows the sound, but parallel to it, into the wood. Here is the clearing, bright with fractured light, where she sometimes sits and dreams. She makes for a thicket of ash sprouts and elder to watch.

  She’s never seen men like this before. They wear huge turbans of white and red, long-sleeved jackets, voluminous striped trousers, flat boots, belts with daggers. Several unroll an immense carpet, drive brass poles into the ground, raise a canopy over it. Others cast around for wood – Betsy shrinks into her thicket – drag logs together and light a fire.

  The leader appears. A man both tall and round, bearded, turbaned, dressed in a long green silk coat patterned with leaves and sinuous stalks, he sits cross-legged on the carpet, made comfortable with cushions. From a tripod over the fire they hang a pan, measure spoonfuls from a box painted with tulips, pour hot liquid into a small copper vessel, fat-bellied, squat, its beak-spout like a bird Betsy once saw in a print shop window.

  Coffee, dark, biting. She knows the smell, if not the taste, from coffee-houses she’s passed in the city. Her nostrils and palate are dry; she longs to drink. Excitement and the sound of pouring press on her bladder. She lifts her skirts, plants a leg sideways in a half-crouch, pees on dry leaves and the next minute is hauled out of the thicket by two turbaned men. They carry her off, arguing in their rapid gibberish. She’ll always remember how she felt no fear, for all the daggers and the strangeness.

  They take her a little way off to where, on another carpet under another canopy’s nacreous shade, several women recline on cushions and drink coffee while children sit with them and eat small cakes.