by D. J. Taylor
He would make me mistress of Easton Hall.
He is a stooped old man in a black suit, cawing at me like one of the rooks in his field.
There will soon be no Easton Hall to be mistress of.
I would rather be mistress of myself.
Mr. Conolly has prescribed more medicine for me, which I am bidden to drink. Half a teacup full, which Mrs. Finnie brings to me each morning. It is colourless, like water & at the same time unlike it. I drink it as I am bidden.
Today, as Mrs. Finnie stands before me—it is a bright, clear morning, but I know better than to quiz Mrs. Finnie about the weather—I ask, “Mr. Dixey was not ever married, I think?”
“Not to my knowledge, ma’am.”
Mrs. Finnie’s hair is so very like black patent leather that I have a vision of her polishing it each morning before the mirror.
“But was he ever engaged?”
And here, quite unexpectedly, Mrs. Finnie does not deny, ignore or deflect that which is asked of her. She says, “There was a young woman that he offered for five years ago, ma’am. A Miss Chell, the daughter of the brewing people that live at Bury. There was talk of lawyers & settlements & old Mr. Chell, as was the young lady’s father, came over several times to see the master. Indeed we thought that it was a settled thing. There was even a rose garden that Tom the gardener had orders to plant out. But then something happened between them, & the banns that were to have been put up a month after were never said & the turf as had been grubbed up for the rose garden is where the maids do bang out their carpets.”
I declare that I never heard Mrs. Finnie make such a speech. Mrs. Finnie, too, seems conscious of the novelty of the situation for she clasps her hands nervously before her, hangs her head—so shiny indeed that the sunlight nearly bounces off it—& declines to offer another word.
I find myself greatly fatigued. Doubtless it is the strain of these days that has wearied me so. I sleep in the afternoons yet am not refreshed.
He does not come & he does not come. And though I am glad of this, I confess that I grow more nervous of the time when he shall arrive.
Thinking of this, I recollect a day once when I was a little girl—it was just after Mama had gone away—& had been spiteful & bad-tempered. Whereupon the nurse had said to punish me, “Your Papa shall be told of this, miss, when he comes home!” This was a source of great anxiety, for I loved Papa & would not make him unhappy if I could. By some miracle Papa did not come home, dining unexpectedly at his club or being summoned to the table of some friend. And yet I was not in the least consoled, knowing that the reckoning was merely delayed & that every hour which passed before it had the power to distress me more.
Today I did a wicked thing.
Its wickedness was not in the aim I proposed but in the means by which I effected it.
I had determined that another day in this room—Mrs. Finnie’s sour face, Mr. Conolly’s draught, the sun streaming in through the open window—would be intolerable to me. Thus when at midday I heard the noise of Esther turning her key in the lock I retired to the sofa & lay there in a piteous manner, clutching my hands to my sides. Then as Esther moved into the room, the lunch things balanced on the tray before her, I turned upon my back & groaned aloud.
“Why, ma’am, whatever is the matter?”
In bringing me my luncheon, Esther has an infallible routine. First she unlocks & pushes open the door. Then she places the tray on the ground at her feet. Then she pushes shut & locks the door, placing the key in the pocket of her pinafore. Then she retrieves the tray & places it on my desk. But she has grown easy with me over the weeks & I, sly minx that I am, resolve to exploit this ease.
“Oh, Esther,” I moan. “I feel most dreadfully unwell. A pain in the stomach—truly.”
As I foresaw, Esther’s first thought was for myself. Placing the tray on the floor, but omitting to lock the door, she came immediately towards me.
“What is it, ma’am?” she asked again.
Whereupon I beckoned her to me & as she bent over my recumbent form gave suddenly a violent push with my hand that sent her stumbling backwards into a heap. How much it pained me to do this I cannot say. Then before she could rise up I sprang away & out of the door.
As to what took place in the ensuing minutes, so airy-headed was I at having attained my goal that I can scarce recollect their passage. I know that I tumbled down a flight of stairs, came into the hall, where Mr. Randall looked up from winding the grandfather clock, saw me & cried out, that I ran across the gravel at the front of the house, across a road—conscious all the while of a person or persons following at my heels—& into a field, where I asked the way of a girl out scaring the birds, & would have run further but that a man whom I had not seen approached from nowhere & caught me up in his arms & not unkindly brought me home.
It is a mystery to me why I did it, knowing full well, of course, what should be its end.
I sleep an entire day & wake with a great vacant space in my head where my thoughts should be.
“Esther,” I say, when next she comes, “I beg that you will forgive me for the trick I played, which was not meant to injure you.”
“Indeed, ma’am,” says Esther, who has locked the door as she steps into the room quite in the old way, “I was not hurt. It was only the suddenness of the thing that startled me.”
The teacup with Mr. Conolly’s medicine sits on the tray. A question occurs to me which I have several times shied away from asking.
“What is said about me in—the house?” By this I mean the servants’ hall. A distinction Esther appreciates.
“In the house, ma’am?” She sets down the tray & stands regarding me.
I do not mind when Esther stares at me. It is her master I abhor.
“In the house. Between Mr. Randall & Mrs. Finnie.”
“They say, ma’am, that you are…” Esther removes the cover that lies on my dinner plate. “That you are…not in your right mind.”
“Do you think I am not in my right mind?”
“No, ma’am.”
The teacup with Mr. Conolly’s medicine sits on the tray.
“Esther. Will you do me a great service?”
“If I can, ma’am.”
“Take up that teacup which is on the tray & drink what is in it. I promise it shall not harm you.”
“Very well, ma’am.”
Esther picks up the teacup & drinks the contents. Then she makes a most welcome & consoling gesture.
She smiles.
“I ask you only to think of it. That is all.”
I am seated in my guardian’s study once more. It may be eleven of the clock or midnight—I do not know. I have been here an hour & would be anywhere else.
But there is nowhere else.
“I assure you,” my guardian continues, “of the sincerity of my feelings. If they did not exist, I should not declare them.”
When I glimpsed him first, as he stood in my doorway an hour since, I saw that some change had come upon his person which I could not at once fathom. Then I remarked it. The old black vestments were gone, & in their place was a quite juvenile costume of a white jacket & a tie fastened with a sailor’s knot.
I fear that I preferred the old rook.
I remark, too, his nervousness. His hand darts now & then to his mouth to finger his yellow teeth. Yellow as the keys of a spinet that I saw once in my aunt’s house at Dover.
He talks of Easton Hall. Of what lies in its chests & strongboxes & beneath the ceilings of its attics. All this shall be mine to command, he says.
Three times in my life I have been paid court to by gentlemen. First Mr. Farrier—Richard—with his verses & his walks in the rose garden, & of whom indeed I was very fond. Then Henry, to whom I was married. And now this grey-haired old man with his rusty voice & his creaking politenesses.
Whose singularities Papa would have marked down in a trice, as was his habit, written up in one of his books &, as was also his habit, gently mocked.
�
�Say only that you will think of it,” he says again, patting my hand.
I will think of no such thing.
It is as I suspected.
Esther says that in the hours after she drank Mr. Conolly’s draught she grew unaccountably tired, could not keep from yawning, indeed fell near-asleep on her chair in the scullery, from which she was routed out by Mrs. Wates, crying that she was a lazy good-for-nothing & a slut that no man would marry, &c.
The next draught that Mrs. Finnie brings me I shall throw into the chamberpot!
Today a letter was brought up on the tray with my breakfast.
He asks only that I may think of it. But he desires an answer.
I would that I had cracked open his grey head with the poker rather than poor Sir Charles Lyell!
And now a great crisis is upon me! The letter from Esther’s lover has come & she proposes to join him in London. This she confided to me very gravely—yet suppressing, it seemed to me, a great excitement—as she stood in my room this forenoon (the door locked very thoroughly behind her) with the luncheon tray.
“When shall you go?” I ask her.
“He says for me to go immediate, ma’am.”
“And shall you give notice?”
“There was a man come from Norwich this morning, ma’am, & stayed ever so long with the master, with another man who came & stood in the drive looking at the house quite as if he meant to take it down brick by brick.”
Which I construe thus: What is the point of giving notice when the house is to be sold around us a month hence?
“And what will you feel when you get there, Esther?”
“As to that, ma’am, I shall have to take it on trust.”
But there is my plan. For which I do not require Mr. Dixey’s aid, nor anyone else’s save Esther’s.
“Esther,” I say, “you must help me. Sit in a chair and wait, just a moment, while I think.”
And so Esther perches on the chair, regarding me very curiously, as I sit at the desk & write a letter to Mr. Crabbe, Henry’s lawyer, explaining where I am, & what is happening to me, what my guardian proposes, &c., & much else, & how I would not stay here a moment longer. There is no envelope, but I fold it across & write on the back Mr. Crabbe, Lincoln’s Inn, & Esther says she will deliver it.
“And, Esther,” I say, as she folds it up & places it in the pocket of her apron, “I hope you will be very happy.”
“I hope it too, ma’am.”
“And, Esther…” But before I can say more I have taken her in my arms & kissed her.
Esther smiles, saying that she will come on the next day & bid me good-bye.
I listen to her footsteps, moving off along the passage.
The next day dawns but she does not come.
She does not come & she does not come.
Twice he has asked me for an answer. Twice I have said nothing. The second time he grasped my hand & said loudly that I was a foolish girl & he would not be gainsaid in this.
Mr. Randall brings my food now.
She does not come & she does not come.
I am so very tired.
Part Four
XIX
NORTH OF SIXTY
He awoke each morning just before dawn, groping about on the floor of the cabin for his mittens and his muffler before tugging open the door and staring out at the eaves of the forest, pale and grey in the half-light. At first, because he was new to the land and inexperienced in these matters, he had assumed that its contours were unvarying. Gradually, however, his eyes had grown keen enough to register faint variations in the landscape: the frown of the spruce trees softened by a fall of snow; a line of tracks not yet obliterated; the bent white branch of a fir sapling which would, in time, release its load with a snap like a pistol shot. All this reassured him, for he was a man who relished movement and the sense of things happening around him, and he knew, even in his inexperience, that the wild hated all movement, knowing it to be a symbol of the life force which it seeks to extinguish and subdue. Yet at the same time, he feared what he saw around him, for he knew that he did not understand it and that his ability to conquer it depended on the ingenuity of others. And so he stood each morning in the doorway of his cabin, twenty yards from the boundary of the forest, cold in spite of his mittens and his muffler, looking out at the frown of the first spruce trees and the pale sky with all manner of doubts and suspicions forming in his mind.
He was a resourceful man in his way, and he had devised certain routines to allay these doubts and suspicions. By the time that the short, sunless day was an hour old he had attended to the embers of the previous night’s fire, boiled a kettleful of melted snow, made coffee and chopped more wood to add to the pile beneath the cabin’s lean-to. Then, with a second cup of coffee in his hand, he would sit on the solitary chair and run his eye over the provisions that remained there: the grey sacks that contained their flour; the box of sun-cured fish; the strips of fat salt pork in their metal chest. As he did so he congratulated himself on his thoroughness. The boys would be pleased at how well he had kept the place in order, he told himself. They had left traces of themselves which he came upon with a pleasant sense of recognition: a deck of cards facedown upon the snow; a clasp knife that had rolled out of sight behind the flour sacks; a silver Canadian dollar lost underfoot. He collected these objects carefully and placed them in the pocket of his fur-lined jacket, anticipating the moment when he could return them. Later, as the day wore on and the sky to the south warmed to rose colour, he moved restlessly around the interior of the cabin, feeling at the little imperfections and blemishes of the wood with his fingers, or sat reading and coughing over the fire, whose smoke rose through a chimney made of a tin pail. At four the last of the grey light drifted into dusk, and the pall of the Arctic night descended.
The boys had been gone two days now. Another two—at the outside, three—would bring them back. He could hear in his head the sound that the sled would make as it came through the dried-up watercourse on which the canopy of spruce trees frowned and the barking of the five dogs drawn out in a wide fan before it. They had come here to the Powder River country in search of a supply of logs which, come the spring, could be floated back south as far as Fort Mackenzie if need be, or further. And those logs, he had been told, would make their fortunes. And this assurance, though he had no real need of money, having plenty of it in the land from which he had come, cheered him and invigorated him as he went about his tasks. And yet he knew, newcomer though he was to the land, that the winter was drawing on and there remained only a little time in which those logs could be found. Never mind! The boys would be back soon from their reconnoitre in the white country that stretches all the way north as far as the Arctic Sea and they would return along the trail they had come, eighty miles to Fort McGurry, where the traders and the Hudson’s Bay Company men put up for the worst of the snows.
Thinking that the boys would be pleased to find fresh meat waiting for them, he took the rifle and several cartridges from his store and, winding the scarf carefully around his face so that only his forehead and the tip of his nose were exposed to the raw air, plunged off beneath the canopy of the forest. Such was the silence around him that the noise of his breath and the sound that his moccasins made as he padded over the soft snow oppressed him. It was like no silence that he had ever known, immense, chilling and elemental, and for the first time in the course of his journeyings in the wild he began to wish that he had stayed in Fort McGurry. He corrected himself on the instant, telling himself not to be so foolish, that the boys would be back shortly, that the next morning, even, would see them home, and they would want a couple of snowshoe rabbits or a hare rather than a companion who took fright at so little a thing as silence. And in this way he recovered his spirits, settled his rifle more comfortably in the crook of his arm and moved deeper beneath the tall trees, taking care, however, to remember which way he had come and always keeping a sight of one very tall spruce tree, taller than any of the others, w
hich he knew lay in reach of the cabin.
A half hour’s search, though, turned up nothing, and he was forced to retrace his steps through the snow, wondering that the game should have vanished from a country that when he had first come to it two months before had been teeming with life. There was a famine in the land that had followed the cold, but he did not know this. He knew only of the cold, which it seemed to him had become a great deal more irksome since he had first come to the cabin. At last, in the deep undergrowth aside from the forest path, he turned up a ptarmigan that went squawking and fluttering from her nest. The noise startled him, and he stood for a second or two gazing stupidly at the bird as it took flight into the trees before he raised his gun. But his fingers, even in their fur-lined mittens, were chilled to numbness, and the shot whistled away into the depths of the forest. After this he grew sober and reflective. It certainly was very cold out here, and there was clearly no game to be had. The boys would have to make do with salt pork and biscuits. He went back to the cabin in the fading light along a path devoid of all living things and comforted himself by taking out from amongst his kit certain prized possessions which he had brought with him from home. There was a keepsake book that his sister had given him and a volume of Tennyson’s poetry, with an inscription in it that was not his sister’s, and he brooded over them by the fireside as he ate his pork and biscuits. Later the wind got up, and he lay in his shakedown by the dwindling fire listening to the creaking of the spruce trees.
Next day he woke at exactly the same time but with a feeling of expectation in his mind that he could not at first identify. The boys were coming! That was it! Another half-dozen hours would see them back and the sled rolling into view along the dried-up watercourse that did service for a road here in the extremity of the wild. There fell on him a feeling of grave responsibility, and he attended to his chores with more than usual determination, building up the fire until it seemed to pulse with heat and chopping yet more wood with which to feed it. As he chopped he rested occasionally with his foot on the axe and looked into the forest, thinking that he saw something moving within it and then deciding that it was merely a trick of the light. It certainly was very cold, he thought. At first, when he had begun his log splitting, he had taken off his thick jacket and draped it over a juniper bush, but within two or three minutes, despite the warmth brought to his limbs by the action of chopping, he could feel the numbness creeping into his body and put the coat back on. All the time that he did this he strained his ears for a sound, but there was nothing. Oppressed once more by the silence, he took to contriving small ways to break it, humming to himself as he worked and stamping his feet vigorously on the surface of the frozen snow. After a while the immensity of his solitude struck him once more, and he fell quiet. He was not an imaginative man—his skill lay in practicalities, in the devising of tasks and their accomplishment—but it occurred to him that there was something romantic in his situation here on the margin of the world. The wind had got up again, and he listened to it soughing against the trees and sending little flurries of snow to patter against the cabin door, and was thankful to hear it. Later, when the hour or so of rose-tinted sky had been and gone, he strode down the frozen hill to the point where it met the watercourse, along which the boys and their sled would come, and looked down the trail for a long time.