by D. J. Taylor
“Mrs. Henry Ireland is your ward, I believe?”
Mr. Dixey looked up very keenly at the window and at the bookcases before answering.
“Mrs. Ireland is indeed my ward. Have you come to enquire after her?”
This, too, was very bad. But Mrs. Carstairs, like her son in the lawyer’s office, satisfied that Mr. Dixey could not at any rate eat her, veered off at a tangent.
“We are related to Isabel—to Mrs. Ireland. She is a connection of my late husband. We had heard nothing since”—and here Mrs. Carstairs hesitated—“since those events of which the world knows.”
“There has been very little to hear.”
There was something in Mr. Dixey’s articulation of these words which suggested that this was not a profitable line to pursue. Mrs. Carstairs understood this and marked it, yet at the same time she was not altogether quelled. No doubt the memory of Watton Station and Jorrocks’s cart had a little to do with this. Mrs. Carstairs was a prudent woman, but she had been inconvenienced, put out, driven to a stealthiness that did not at all accord with her notion of how the world should operate. Consequently, she determined to say what she had come to say.
“I declare, Mr. Dixey, I do not think that I was ever in such a remote spot in my life. Is Mrs. Ireland here?”
“She is not. If she were, I regret that I could not let you see her. She is…deranged.”
“Deranged!”
“You will excuse me, but how else would you have me put it? When I last saw her—it was in this very room—she did not recognise me, and she screamed because the girl who brought her wine had mixed too much water in it. Believe me, madam, that you would get no joy from her, nor she from you.”
Still Mrs. Carstairs did not altogether quail. She knew that it would be another five hours before she saw her drawing room in Marylebone, knew, too, of the further subterfuges and concealments that would be required of her. Mrs. Carstairs was not afraid of her son, but she knew that were he ever to find out about her excursion to Norfolk, or rather were he to find out about it in circumstances that were not satisfactory to both parties, things would go very ill with her. So, and with the memory of Jorrocks’s cart still hanging before her, she resolved to persist.
“Where is she then?”
“I do not know, madam, if even that is a question which I am obliged to answer, but I shall answer it. She is at present in the care of Dr. Conolly. You are familiar with Dr. Conolly’s work?”
“I…that is, I have heard his name.”
“As I say, she is under the care of Dr. Conolly. What would you have me do? You may write a letter, I daresay, but I very much doubt that she could read it. I have no wish to alarm you, but when she was first brought here it was all that we could do to restrain her. Would you wish to write a letter? I assure you that it shall be put into her hands.”
There was something altogether reasonable about this, and Mr. Dixey’s expression as he stood before the dreary window, against which the rain continued to fall, was one of grave attention. Once again, however, Mrs. Carstairs found herself placed in a quandary. The mystery of Mrs. Ireland’s disappearance—to Norfolk, to Dr. Conolly’s establishment, to wherever it was that she might be lodged—seemed to her so obviously a mystery that she could not believe that any other person could not imagine it so. And yet Mr. Dixey had greeted her courteously, given civil answers to her questions, done everything, in fact, save produce Mrs. Ireland for her inspection. Still, though, Mrs. Carstairs felt—she did not quite know why, but she felt it nonetheless—that she was being misled.
“But this is all so very mysterious, is it not, Mr. Dixey? You will forgive me for saying so, but there is poor Mr. Ireland dead and his wife not…not herself” (even now Mrs. Carstairs did not like to say the word mad ) “and yet nobody has seen her.”
“Mr. Crabbe has seen her. I have seen her. My servants have seen her. Would you wish to question them?”
“And now you say she is in the care of Dr. Conolly. That may be all very well…”
“My dear madam”—Mr. Dixey’s face as he said this was as genial as Mrs. Carstairs had seen it during the course of their conversation—“I must disagree with you. If there is a mystery, I cannot see it. Henry Ireland was my very great friend. His wife is my ward. She is not of sound mind. That being so, she has been placed in the care of an eminent gentleman who may do her good. I am very sorry indeed that you should have come all this way to learn such a simple truth.”
Mrs. Carstairs, hearing this, was conscious that there was not a great deal more to be said. She was conscious, too, of Jorrocks’s cart waiting in the lane. And yet she was forced to admit that she had no idea whether she had won a great victory over Mr. Dixey or suffered a great defeat. Sensing this indecision, her host—who did not at any rate carry himself like a man who has suffered a defeat—became anxious to conciliate her. Would she take tea? He would have it brought in at once. Where was she travelling, and how might he assist her? One of his domestics would escort her to the village. Each of these offers Mrs. Carstairs declined, but in doing so she felt that she had conceded another point and that nothing remained for her to do save depart from Mr. Dixey’s doorstep. She became aware now that the man was watching her as he stood by the window, not in any obtrusive fashion but in the way that a man gazes at a painting or a horse. There was no harm in Mr. Dixey’s glance, but still Mrs. Carstairs felt that she did not like it.
And in the end, it being three o’clock in the afternoon and Mrs. Carstairs ever more conscious of Jorrocks’s cart waiting in the lane, they did take tea together: brought in on a tray by the girl who had opened the front door and tasting, Mrs. Carstairs thought, unlike any Bohea she had ever chanced upon. Mr. Dixey drank his sitting down in his chair with the walking stick propped up against his side. A very benign and demure old gentleman he seemed now, as the housemaid attended to the fire and he blew on his tea to cool it.
“You will have to excuse me,” he remarked as he performed this act. “The fact is that I have been so long out of society that I am quite unfit for a civilised drawing room.”
And so, as will occasionally happen in such circumstances, if only for a brief moment while the tea was drunk and Mrs. Carstairs ate a biscuit, they became almost intimate with each other.
“Dear me,” Mrs. Carstairs observed, with her undrinkable tea before her on her lap, “but this is a very lonely spot in which you live.”
“Lonely? I suppose it is lonely. At any rate, I find that I can never get anybody to come and stay with me. I congratulate you, madam, on your persistence.”
“But you have your studies, I believe? They must take up a deal of your time.”
“Oh indeed, madam, a great deal.” &c., &c.
Consequently, when Mr. Dixey escorted her to the front door and shook her hand on its sunken step (“I may write, I suppose?” Mrs. Carstairs enquired. “Yes indeed, write by all means,” Mr. Dixey assured her), Mrs. Carstairs told herself that it could all have been a great deal worse. She had surprised the lion in his den—quite a benevolent lion, he now seemed—and emerged unscathed. At the same time, Mrs. Carstairs hardly knew whether she had achieved the object she desired. True, she had discovered Mrs. Ireland’s whereabouts, or rather she had been told them, and yet hardly one of the mysteries that had attached themselves to her disappearance had been satisfactorily explained to her. Had she in fact done a foolish thing, merely intruded herself onto a situation that would have been better left alone? Mrs. Carstairs was not quite prepared to believe this of herself, but her mood as she traversed the gravel path that led to the dense coppices and woods of Mr. Dixey’s estate was by no means sanguine.
It was by now perhaps half past three in the afternoon. The rain had ceased, although black clouds still hung low in the March sky. Retracing her steps across the gravel, with the first great hedges of evergreens rising up on the path on either side of her, Mrs. Carstairs reached a point in the path where a small subsidiary track branched off at a ri
ght angle through the trees and, insofar as she could judge, doubled back in the direction of the house. It was then that Mrs. Carstairs did something that, at a time when she could bring herself to think once more of the event, she could not satisfactorily explain. Perhaps it was that in her heart of hearts she did not believe Mr. Dixey, believed, if it came to that, that Mrs. Ireland was living under his roof and could be spied out by subterfuge. Perhaps it was merely that her curiosity was aroused by the great banks of trees and the lonely house behind her, the thought that here, enveloping her in its scent, was a place where secrets were kept. Whatever the explanation, Mrs. Carstairs altered her course and set off between the trees and along the side track.
There was not, indeed, a great deal to see. Within a moment or two she came upon a clearing with a melancholy gamekeeper’s gibbet, where a couple of shrikes and a weasel hung pinned up and mouldering on the board. It was a desolate spot, and she did not linger. There was a building behind her, she fancied, through the trees which she took to be the laurels she had passed on her incoming journey, but the hedges were grown up so dense that it was impossible for her to grasp her bearings. Mrs. Carstairs had just begun to assure herself that one of the several amenities lacking in the management of Mr. Dixey’s estate was a regiment of gardeners, when the tail of her eye registered movement away and to the left behind her. She was now standing at a point in the track where a further subdivision crept away into hidden undergrowths of scrub and bracken. Here, half-concealed by shadow, thirty or even forty yards distant, a grey, long-muzzled creature was moving silently up through the wood. To be sure, Mrs. Carstairs had led what is politely known as a life of genteel seclusion. But its gentility had once admitted a visit to the Regent’s Park zoological gardens, and she knew instantly that the creature she now saw before her was a wolf.
As has been said, Mrs. Carstairs was a resourceful woman. What seemed to be no more than a few seconds found her back on the gravel path, in sight of Mr. Dixey’s outhouses and his estate cottages, and, in the further distance, Jorrocks’s cart dimly visible in the lane. On tottering feet and with her breath coming in great exhalations, Mrs. Carstairs made her way to the lodge gate, ever fearful of what might leap out of the hedge beside her or be heard pursuing her from the rear. But there was nothing there, no living thing except the carter, whom she found hunkered down in the back of his vehicle between the hay bales regarding the world from beneath a piece of sacking. Greatly relieved, Mrs. Carstairs allowed herself to be carried off to Watton. And if his passenger seemed more than usually silent, and inclined to cast the most agitated and imploring glances back along the gloomy road, the carter did not remark it.
Part Two
FROM THE DIARY OF THE REV. JOSIAH CRAWLEY, CURATE OF EASTON
22 November 1864
A year now past since I commenced my cure. The people civil and God-fearing yet, me judice, credulous. Viz a woman dying this last week in Watton discovered to have carried on her abdomen a tumour weighing eleven pounds, shunned by her neighbours as “the devil’s mare.” I had this story from Mr. Stanhope, the surgeon. In truth, the winter evenings wear heavy on me. The tapers are brought in at four. Beyond that, all is dark and silence. Resolved to continue with my Defence of Episcopacy, wh. shall be my salvation.
13 December 1864
A curious conversation with my parishioner, Mr. Dixey, whom I chanced upon in the churchyard roaming—there is no other word—among the graves. He began by enquiring, did I believe that madness was an affliction sent by God? I answered that all afflictions came from God, and all blessings too. Man could only endure the one as he embraced the other. Mr. Dixey admitted the justice of this. He then demanded, if madness were divinely ordained, did it then have supernal sanction? Thus, were an attempt to cure it not simple blasphemy? Again, I replied that God’s purpose was necessarily beyond us, yet we had our Christian duty, that Our Lord himself had healed he who spoke in tongues. He seemed satisfied by this and shook my hand very warmly.
29 December 1864
Met Mr. Dixey in the fields walking with a pair of hunting dogs. On my remarking their great size and singularity—for I had seen nothing like them before—he declared that he bred them himself and that some people would wonder at their parentage. The foregoing said with a very marked emphasis…. Later, a brace of pheasants sent up from the Hall. This, I fear, will please my landlady more than it pleases me.
5 January 1865
Dixey calls. He seems eager for my company. He enquired, had I read Mr. Gosse’s book Omphalos, whose reconciliation of natural science and divine purpose seemed to him most ingenious? I replied that I had not, indeed that I made it my business to avoid such things, a reconciliation in matters spiritual being tantamount to a capitulation. Dixey most pressing, however, undertook to procure me a copy, or even to lend his own.
[Later. The Gosse, as I suspected, arrant blasphemy. Viz. that if we accept the fact of absolute Creation, God becomes a Deus que deceptus. It is not my reason but my conscience which revolts me…. Nevertheless, wrote a note to Dixey thanking him for his kindness.]
22 January 1865
Met at my gate by Dixey’s tall footman, very civil, with a cockade in his hat, bearing an invitation to dine. Mrs. Forester, my landlady, much impressed: “There’s rarely company up at the Hall.” Knowing my friend’s solitary habits, I had supposed that we should dine alone. In fact a third gentleman was present, Mr. Conolly, the celebrated mad-doctor, late of Hanwell Asylum, whom I was interested to see. Much talk about the American war, condition of the Southern Negroes, &c. Conolly a well-conducted fellow, sober in his cups. Dixey offered me his carriage. It being a moonlit night, and wanting distraction, I purposed to walk. Dixey keeps some creature confined in his park. At least, passing a timber fence on the edge of the estate, I became aware of movement behind it and, I am ashamed to say, quickened my step not a little.
14 February 1865
No word from Dixey. A copy of this month’s Cornhill containing an article by Mr. Gosse that I had sent up to the Hall unacknowledged.
27 February 1865
The days lengthening. I continue to work at my Defence. No word from Dixey.
11 March 1865
No word from Dixey.
IX
ESTHER’S STORY CONTINUED
(III)
Later Esther would remember her time at Easton Hall as being hedged about by numbers.
Fifty-six was the extent of the pieces of cutlery in the great mahogany canteen kept upon the sideboard in the dining room. Viz.: a dozen bone-handled knives, curved like scimitars and rising to sharp points at their ends; a dozen ancient two-pronged forks of a kind she had never glimpsed before; a dozen soupspoons with the Dixey crest engraved upon their backs; a dozen dessert spoons so small that you could lose one in the folds of a dishcloth and spend an hour searching for it; a half-dozen serving spoons, a great carving knife and fork full eighteen inches long. These must be cleaned each week with knife powder and polished with an apron end, for if the master found that one was not to his liking he would send it back.
Seventeen was the number of keys that hung from the brass ring in Mr. Randall’s pantry. A key for the front door; a key for the back. A key for the pantry itself, and a key for Mrs. Finnie’s storeroom. A key for the wine cellar and a key for the dairy. A key for the strongbox that lay in the master’s study and contained the title deeds to the house. Keys for the laundry cupboard and the two glass-fronted bookcases in the drawing room and the box in the pantry where Mr. Randall kept his religious books and his copies of the Missioner’s Gazette. A key for the lid of the drawing-room piano. A key for the empty parrot cage that hung in the hall. A key for the cover of Mr. Dixey’s field glasses, and a key for the cover of the great family Bible. A butterfly key for the grandfather clock in the hall. And a final key, of which no one, not Mr. Randall, not the master, not anyone else in the household seemed to know the use.
Twelve was the number of copper saucepans that hu
ng on great hooks from the scullery wall. A great boiling cauldron in which Mrs. Wates made preserves. Nine for the cooking of vegetables, steak puddings and the like. Two for the boiling of milk. These must be scoured on the inside and burnished on the outside until their surfaces glowed, for a dull saucepan was ill luck to a kitchen and those that worked in it, Mrs. Wates said.
Nine was the number of engravings, each a foot square, that hung on the wall of the servants’ hall. They showed ladies in voluminous dresses with their hair à l’impératrice and gentlemen with periwigs and knee breeches and square-buckled shoes, the ladies riding sidesaddle on great horses or being handed down from their carriages; the gentlemen walking together with their dogs or engaged about their occupations. And Esther wondered at them: in what century they lived, and how their hair was kept in such a way; and what the gentlemen talked about, their right hands kept carefully on their sword hilts, their square toes pointed neatly before them.
Six (this information came from Sarah) was the number of kitchenmaids that had come and gone during Mrs. Wates’s time as cook at the Hall, having excited that lady’s displeasure.
(IV)
The thing that Esther fancied above all that she would find in the country proved not to be there. That thing was silence. Easton Hall was a house filled with noise. The wind blew against the windowpanes. The carriage horses stamped their feet upon the gravel. A woman’s voice laughed somewhere in a room far off. At night came ominous creakings and patterings and the sound of trees blown against each other in the wood beyond. With the noise, though not always a part of it, came movement: a fox stealing away from the corner of the kitchen garden in the half hour after dawn; a stoat bounding across the path at her feet as she walked with Sarah in the orchard; the rooks soaring above the elms. Amidst the noise and the movement lay things that were silent and solitary: a kitchen drawer pulled open to reveal a nest of squirming field mice; an earthenware pot a thousand years old and a handful of silver coins dug up by one of Mr. Dixey’s men in a ditch; a signet ring glimpsed between the flagstones of the kitchen floor and brought winking into the light. Once, on a grey afternoon when Mrs. Wates and Mrs. Finnie were in Watton and Mr. Randall sat asleep in the pantry chair, Sarah took her to a room under the roof where there was a trunk full of high-waisted dresses with hooped skirts and tiny slippers that might have been worn by Cinderella.