My little girl fell on the beach but picked herself up laughing, such a sturdy rounded shape she was, and ran on up to me to brush the sand off her.
'I saw a fellow could be he,' said a fisherman. 'At Blythburgh, I think it were, not far off from here. Old, he was old as Moses, carried a stick and had few words about him as I could tell.'
There was an uncle of my wife's who lived in a village close to the marsh. He came by and stopped with us a night, and spoke of an exorcism that had taken place in that village the year before, a stranger who had appeared from the mist and saved a child and cast out a devil from a man possessed, and done it by some special magic and without recourse to the Name of God.
'What was he like, this man?'
'Old. A tall man grey and stiff like a piece of weathered oak. He made me afraid just to see him.'
'Did you learn his name?'
'If anyone learnt his name they did not say it. Seems he goes without names and pleasantries. No words to him that I heard.'
'And where does he live?'
It appeared that the man had vanished as mysteriously and suddenly as he had come, and because of this people were afraid and said when they saw lights that he was still out there with the spirits on the marsh. Our visitor did not give much credence to their talk. There were some who said the man had turned himself to vapour and blown back north from whence he came. 'No such magic to him, I'll reckon. There's many like him, has the knack of turning a spirit, but he'll have a trade too, no doubt, he'll just have wandered on, and because the mist was in none noted where he went.'
'No, indeed,' said I, but as he spoke the memory had come back to me of Cave and the Biscayan's fit of madness.
For the first time I asked myself if it were possible that Cave were still alive. It could be so, I thought. A man who had honed his endurance to such a degree might well live long.
For some days after he had left I thought on this and my preoccupation must have showed.
'What is it troubles you?' my wife asked me.
'It sounds as if this was a good man, this man you knew,' she said, when I had told her everything. 'How foolish men are to be afraid of someone like that, just because he does what they cannot do or explain. There is so much that we must accept and that cannot be explained, we cannot be always making conspiracy or judgement over it. For sure you must go, if you once cared about him, find this man my uncle spoke of and see if he is the same. I see that you will have no rest until you do find out and it is settled.'
There are not many women would be so understanding.
The children climbed on me as I took my leave. My daughter cried that she did not want her father gone off again to sea. 'But I shan't be at sea, my sweet,' I said. 'This time all my journey will be on land, and I shall be back before you know it.'
The village was a small place at the edge of the estuary where the marsh gives way to the farmland, where you can stand beneath the height of the church and turn one way to see tilled fields and the other to see a salty wilderness. I went there and asked about the story he had told us.
There was an old man who had a bench before his house on which he sat all through the day. His eyes were beginning to cloud and grow milky but he could still observe well enough.
It was a sailor, this man said, who had come back from distant parts; he could not say where, only that he had been in some piracy or battle there and become horribly disfigured, with an arm cut off at the elbow and a sword slash across his face, so that the sight of him brought fear to the minds of his children who did not know him and ran away. His wife recognised him despite his awful wounds, and took him in and called the children back, and cooked his meals and made his home about him. But the sailor could not settle, and whatever horrors he had seen came back and raged before his eyes, until one day he fell into a fever and began to scream and rave with such violence that his wife became frightened of him and ran off to ask others for help. And almost all of the village came by, those who wished to help and those who were just curious, and when he saw at his door the crowd come to stare at him as if he were not himself, not a man of the village but some exotic alien creature, the poor sailor went quite mad. There was a baby in the house, a youngest child born to them even while he was away at sea, and the moment he opened his door and met the crowd of villagers, the baby began to cry. A great, ear-splitting squawl it was, that rang out through the village, as if the baby understood all the danger of the moment, and the sailor went quite mad and snatched it up.
The old man said this, and more, but I had better details later from the woman herself when I went to seek her out. The sailor now that I met him seemed a silent, sulky fellow who could remember nothing, but the woman could tell it all like it was happening again immediately before her eyes: her husband's wild look, the stupidity of the villagers like a herd of staring, snuffling heifers, the sudden rending sound of the baby's cry.
'Oh, sir, you would remember that cry if you had heard it. Even if you had been a mile away.'
She was standing at the side of the door, suddenly alarmed at the attention she had brought to the house but unable now that she had called the others to fend them off. She saw the look of rage come into her husband's face, saw him grab up in his one hand the bundle of the squawling baby, stood by powerless as he shouldered through the passive crowd, like a battering ram pushing them aside, and ran out into the village street and to the church at the edge of the marsh.
They saw him next on top of the tower. The baby was still screaming and its noise carried down to them from the height and spread like the sound of bells. It was a great high tower with a parapet cut like a castle wall. He stood close against this and yelled down at the crowd, holding the writhing baby beneath his arm and leaning over so that at any instant they feared that it might struggle from his grip and drop down into the churchyard beneath. And then he swung one leg over the flint parapet where it faced the marsh, and in the awful hush of a moment they thought that he would jump.
'It was the Devil in him,' the woman said.
She looked up to where her baby cried, up the tower with the sky bright and white above it.
'It was not him my husband there, I swear, but the black figure of Beelzebub. Thin, horrid, weirdly hunched, a black shape that it did hurt the eyes to see. It was the Devil and not any form of man.' The poor woman paused and clenched herself, and looked to me for reassurance before she could continue. 'And this creature did put his leg over the parapet and sit astride it, as a man does on a horse, and set to rocking back and forth as if the horse were galloping, back and forth, the Devil galloping away up there with my baby under his arm. The Lord is my witness, that is how I saw it. Ask others here if they did not see the same.'
And I did ask others, and all whom I met in the village concurred that this was how it seemed.
All of that day and through the night the madman rode the parapet. The stars came out, and a moon just full enough to make out the shape like an excrescence on the tower. The baby was silent a long time and then set to whimpering, long slow waves of whimpering that ran on like the gusts of wind through the reeds. The woman stood below, and others with her, only the ones who cared now for the mere spectators had grown bored and gone home asking to be called again if any change occurred. What change could there have been, she asked, but the final drop, the image of which ran and reran vividly before her watching eyes, so fast it would occur that she knew there would be nothing for them to see, no action, no occurrence but only its consequence: a flicker before the eye and then on the ground a misshapen tiny bundle of blood-spattered cloth. So fast it could occur and at any instant that she could not bear for any amount of time to look away. All through the night she kept vigil, and the parson and the others kept up beside her, praying. For so long she stood looking up that her neck and back and the calves of her legs shot through with pain.
In the morning the sun rose on the silver estuary and he had not moved. There was no whimpering, no wind, no sound
that reassured of the continuance of life. All that day he held there, and another night.
The second dawn a tall man came into the village. Streaks of pink sky behind him, a soft threat of rain. The man walked with a stick as he had a slight limp. He made his way to the churchyard and announced to those who waited there that he had been told to come. His pale eyes glanced up to the parapet where the sailor still sat with his one hand clasping the bundle to his chest, his body swaying gently now as if with a breeze, his face raised to the fine drizzle that had begun to fall.
'How long's he been there?'
'Two nights,' the woman said. Her voice was stiff from the silence.
'May I see if I may help?'
'If you can deal with devils. It is the Devil in him, for sure. The man he is would never, could never, do such a thing.'
The stranger's look was quite without alarm. 'Mistress, you would be surprised what a simple man can do.'
And the parson held open the heavy wooden door of the church but none of the others would enter with him.
They moved away then, stood down by the churchyard gate with the road and the village like safety at their backs. They saw the head of the stranger emerge on the far side of the tower and hold still for a long while. The rain intensified and the scene on the tower became no more than a blur, the man on the parapet a vague solid against the mist. The rain poured into their upturned eyes. 'My baby,' the woman cried all of a sudden, a piercing scream that must have risen shrill to the tower, 'Save my baby!' and threw herself down thrashing on the muddied ground. Just at that moment those who still looked up saw a puff of smoke as from an explosion and a strange black bird, long and ungainly in the start of its flight as a heron, take off from the tower into the raincloud. Or so they said later. They said it was the Devil.
And the stranger came down from the tower and with him the sailor whose body trembled all over and whose face was white like lard. The woman grabbed the baby from his arms, and its cheeks were cold in the rain but it reached out feeble hands to her and she gave it her breast to suck and she was bursting with milk. The stranger stood apart and none approached him. The people were more afraid of him than of the other man who seemed now so pale and broken and without power.
'What can I give you?' the woman asked, but her eyes were all for the child, the mouth latched on to her, the eager eyes and outstretched tiny fists as it revived.
'Nothing,' he said. 'You can give me nothing.'
And as he went to the churchyard gate the cluster of people parted wide to let him through, and the villagers who had come out of their houses stood back as he limped away and out of sight.
22
I TOLD MY WIFE.
'I feel sure that it was he.'
My little girl was too lively on my knee, wriggling, pulling at my beard, turning until her thicket of hair was before my eyes. Her mother sat solemn, waiting for what I had to say, but my talk was all disjointed.
'It would be too great a coincidence that it could be any other. No, I believe that it is him and that he is alive to this day.'
'Did no one give you hint of where to find him?'
'No one seemed to know. In your uncle's village they said only that he went into the marsh. In other places where I think he might have been men said he left to go inland, or to the coast, that he had come from Bury or they had heard of him at Lowestoft, that he was gone into Norfolk or south to Ipswich or to quite other parts. Then a man would mention a little event that happened somewhere or other, that might have been him, somewhere quite close, and I would follow this up and it would yield nothing and I would find only another story to take its place. It became hopeless. For many days I heard only gossip and rumour. Every fact that might be in it seemed embroidered, there was so little that I could recognise as truth.'
'Poor Tom, so you have been gone for nothing then? But it was important to you.'
'Sometimes it has come so that I have wished I had never begun it. You do not know, living here with the family about you in this one place where you belong, you do not know how it is out there. There is unreason, anger and madness in the world that I do not understand.'
When we were alone and the children gone to bed, I told her how on my way back I had stopped at a ramshackle village inn and found people talking in a fever about some witchcraft that had been done there and how a woman and a man were to be put to the test that next day and swum in the pond before the green.
'It was the kind of story, Mary, that one has heard too many times: a woman who lived alone and was wanton and had a dispute with her neighbour. She had taken in a man and it was said that these two together had persecuted the neighbour and sent an imp to stampede his cattle, and bewitched his cart so that four horses could not move it, even making one of the horses to kick his pregnant wife in the stomach - all such circumstantial nonsense as commonsense would see through in a minute, and yet I was interested, because the man that was with her, that they blamed for at least the half of this, they described as an itinerant shoemaker but eerie, and old enough to be her father. So I stayed the night in the village, with just the possibility in my mind that this could be Cave, and the village was a dismal place, even in summer, set up alone and exposed, and nowhere better for me to sleep but this same flea-ridden inn.'
'And was it him?'
Excitement in her question, yet it was a time before I could bring myself to tell it all. So soft it was there, sitting in the house with the light failing outside, with Mary's face half shadowed across the table and the children sleeping silent on their beds in the other room through the open door. There was such peace and innocence in the moment that I was reluctant to bring into it the ugly scene.
One of the children stirred and a blanket fell to the floor. Mary went and settled them and sat there a few minutes, and I recall that I got up and paced about, and came back and sat again as I had all the evening. I did not speak until she was back beside me. I knew that her eyes were on me though it had become dark.
'I will tell you what I witnessed, as it did meet my eyes. I cannot say how it might have seemed to me if I had only come by idly and happened upon it. If I had but chanced by, then I might perhaps have thought it, as others did, a diversion and a spectacle. But you know what thoughts were in my mind, and because of these what I saw seemed only cruel and evil.
'It was a pretty day, even in that dreary place, and the whole village came out to watch, and maybe people from other villages roundabouts, because I would not have thought those few hovels could have produced such a crowd: men, women, children, all out on the green as if it there was a fair coming, seated on the grass and plucking daisies between their fingers. And then this wagon came through and they stood and jeered, and as I was away at the back I could not see well, and there was a tall man in black like a preacher or a justice, and two dishevelled figures were unloaded from the wagon, a plump woman and a thin and white-haired man, conspicuously tall though he was bent with age - and at that distance, Mary, and with so many standing between us, I could not have said if he was or was not Cave or any man that I might or might not once have known.
'I pushed through the crowd and made my way down to the edge of the pond, and by that time they had stripped the pair of their outer clothing and tied their thumbs and toes together and were throwing them into the water. Just bundles they seemed, but the woman screamed plenty, and the crowd yelled behind me. A horrid bullying, it was. Devil's whore, they called her, and other such things. See, they shouted out, there's proof. She floats like a plank. I could not have said if she floated or no, for she was fat and the water was shallow, and they pulled her out so muddy that you might have thought her behind had rested on the bottom. And the man had scarcely been in time enough to sink, and yet they pulled him out also.
'I saw his face then, and he was not my Thomas Cave. Just some piteous old man, all wet, and staring and shivering like a trapped hare. And I left then and came directly home. I did not have the heart to see more.'
That night I had a troubling dream.
I dreamt that I was back there in the North. It was late in the season. I knew that because ice already closed the bay. I knew that I was stranded, a prisoner for the winter though there were no walls or bars to my prison but only an endless space cut about by wind. I stood with my back to the mountains and with the sea of ice ahead, and the wind came down between the peaks and whipped hard-formed grains of snow in waves along the ground and past my feet. In the distance this driven snow seemed like a knee-high flood swirling above the surface of the beach and the frozen sea.
And then I saw men coming towards me as if they were floating, though I understood that they were walking with their boots obscured in the snow. Three men in tall black hats, taking form out of the distance, strangely tall because of their hats and because their feet did not appear to touch the ground. They passed so close that I saw the knuckles of their hands and the lines of their faces, but they did not seem to see me and went directly to the tent where Thomas Cave lived, which was close by though I had not noted it before.
When they came out two of the men dragged Cave between them. They had tied him about the arms and the ankles with rope so that he could not walk but barely hobble. They took him to a point out on the ice and their leader made a hole in it with the staff he carried, working it around like an auger until the hole was large enough to take a man. And they threw Cave in head first and then turned their backs and walked away.
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 15