Anna can only bear to read snatches. Her diary is a calf-bound book of Mama’s in a brown paper jacket, stuffed with smaller leaves. Tiny, secret writing, cryptic as she can make it, writing backwards often: you can do this if you’re left-handed. Think of the calf that made the binding, Lore would say; the creature many years ago butchered and eaten. Everything in this world makes me sad, she’d say, the next one will be better. It’s a topic Anna sometimes muses on and can get no further than wondering at the slaughter the Almighty has unleashed on the Creation. She has qualms about questioning His ways but when it comes over her to do so, she’s helpless to resist. Lore, who questioned everything and still believed, held it lawful to do so. The patriarch Jacob wrestled with an angel for three days, and threw him. If Jacob, why not Lore and Anna Pentecost?
You, Almighty Father, have killed my Mama and Mary and Lore and Papa, Anna challenges Him. I cannot accept that I shall never see their faces again in this world. Perhaps in another world but that scarcely comforts me. If You, God, had been my child, I could never have treated You in the way you treat us and just leave us to it.
She has wrestled the Almighty to the floor many times – just by thinking, by following a logical train of thought. How can it be helped? If her sister could see how far down the road to heresy Anna has wandered, she’d be appalled. There’d be retaliation. Mirrie and Baines Sala have crossed over: doubt has led to agnosticism. Humanism, Mirrie prefers to call it, emphasising her positive faith. She respects and honours the faith of others, though she cannot share it. Anna shrinks from taking that step: she could never be at home in a godless universe.
Opening her portable desk on her knee, Anna brings out her best pen; unscrews the cap on the inkwell and dips the nib. Her minute and costive script is meant to have a printed effect.
Watching the dragonfly on the pond I was amazed at the sapphire & emerald colours of his wings, his darting speed. They land on the water & I recall noticing as a child – face almost on a level – that they actually stand on a skin or film or membrane. Their feet dimple this membrane. A membrane of water? Dr Browne, who we had before Quarles, once allowed us to look at a water drop thro his microscope – what wonder! It comes over me how I’d love to travel the world – or just visit St Ives with the Salas – but if that cannot be done, a woman could curl up as Hamlet said in a nutshell & call herself queen of infinite space.
Laughter bursts from the parlour; there’s a crash, a stampede – and everyone’s streaming out into the garden. Anna looks down on the crowns of their heads as they bubble out of the door and float towards the summer house. Mr Crisp strolls in their wake and one sees he is in a sulk. Such a boor, snatching kisses from anything female with his little moist mouth – and you’re hardly better, Gwilym Anwyl, she thinks as the fresh-faced minister of Fighelbourn chases the squealing Peck girls into the arbour. Beatrice steps out in their wake, to stand, arms folded, in a dream, her head in its intricate maze of plaits a swirling blur through the pane’s irregularity.
How burdened Beatrice is. Go on, my love, join in, Anna silently urges her sister: don’t stand apart feeling lost. Just play. They hide their love from themselves and one another in frequent squabbles. She remembers Papa’s final delirium; he cursed them all roundly and called for his wife. Which wife did he mean? Anna quailed before the rush of filth from his tongue. Where had such gutter language come from? It was as if Pastor Pentecost had stored up the leavings of all the sinners tended through his long and virtuous life. Cramming it in some cellar of the mind, he’d shut the door on that heaving mass of ordure, until it rushed out on his dying day, to spatter the stricken hearers.
His daughters flinched, shawls tight across their bosoms, cleaving together. Dr Quarles administered a terrific dose of laudanum and after that no one could rouse Jacob Pentecost in the mortal world.
Papa taught that our whole life is a preparation for those sacred moments of deathbed trial and witness. A dying Christian’s a telescope trained on the other world. Looking over the wall, he sends back a message. Mr Montagu, penning the obituary, drew a decent veil over that harrowing scene. The illness spoke, he privately reassured Jacob Pentecost’s seared children, not our beloved; the illness was the last throw of our envious Adversary.
But did that not mean that Papa would go to Hell? The final breaths are ultimate moments of truth. But perhaps in the closing second of his life, faith flickered in Papa: and, if so, God, whose grace welcomes the least sign from repentant sinners, would take Jacob Pentecost to his breast. Imagine arriving in Heaven and finding … no Papa there waiting. Mama, saved but bereft – or, worse, indifferent. Or Mama absent: not, for inconceivable reasons, one of the chosen. I’ve never seen her, Anna thinks: my birth killed her. I must see her. Only one tenth of the elect is female, according to some Calvinists. How could Heaven be Heaven without those one had loved? It would be an affront to all that’s divine and human. ‘Send me to Hell to comfort Papa and Mama,’ Anna would plead. She has no wish to join the heartless angels who’d consented to be immunised to suffering and exempt from sympathy, just to save their skins.
God comes apart in one’s hands like an old toy, when one searches into Him. The child stares aghast, holding the mess together.
The young folk are back indoors and playing hide-and-seek, to judge from the sounds. Half-dozing, Anna remembers that there’s something in the wilderness she must find. Something spellbindingly lovely. Very secret. What was it? No idea.
Anna awakens to find Mr Anwyl in the room with his finger at his lips and his ear to the door. His sleeves are rolled up to the elbows; his collar’s open. Will has beautiful arms and hands, slender and supple. He’s always gesturing, so expressively. But his mouth is facile and perhaps the hands too. She thinks: Will’s body would be all but hairless, epicene. Soft as a girl’s. And perhaps Beattie will marry him after all, rather than Christian. Will’s nakedness will lie in their father’s sheets with Beatrice’s pale body where Anna lies now, for she’ll cede this chamber, with its spacious windows, green view and gracious morning light.
Feet thunder past the door towards the attic. Doors bang. Silence.
‘Annie fach,’ he whispers. ‘May I come and sit with you for a little?’
The tiny see-through creatures on the surface of the pond change shape to slip in every direction in search of their minuscule diet. Anna with her sharp eyesight has watched them pour themselves round their prey. Which victim could see them coming or fear these creatures’ motives when they slide so subtly where the spirit takes them, absorbing whatever comes near? And before you know what’s happening, you’re being digested in the acids of the predator’s stomach. You’re being transformed into his substance. Mr Anwyl can hardly be in a room without sliding close to you. How would he be then as a brother-in-law? Sarum House would sing and dance on its foundations. How long before it rocked and trembled? For Beatrice would be as exacting as Will would be capricious. But fun and games there’d be in abundance.
And, Anna thinks, he’d be a blithely wonderful father. She can see him now, on all fours, playing horses and riders with a row of white-petticoated, tempestuous toddlers.
Gwilym Anwyl stands to gain Sarum House. Lock, stock and barrel. In possessing Beatrice, he’d enter into all our property. Me he would not possess, Anna thinks, but I would diminish to a poor relation. She understands why Beatrice holds off and plays one suitor against another.
‘May I ask you something, Anna?’
She knows what’s coming. He wants to pour out his heart. Wants to know about Christian and when this paragon is expected to visit and what was in the long letter he saw in Beatrice’s hand last week. And oh, how much more eligible is the principled Christian Ritter than Mr Gwilym Anwyl. A manly Christian hero of the overseas cause. But who could advise Beatrice to accept Christian? He’d either kill her by taking her to foreign parts or arouse the anguish of long absences. And in all events, he’d flatten her.
‘Ask away. I may not give y
ou an answer, of course. Now, sit you down here.’ She pats the bed. ‘If we’re going to whisper.’
‘I always feel I can talk to you and you’ll give me honest answers – a pinch of mustard or pepper if I need it.’ And, yes, he knows he needs seasoning, in every sense, he acknowledges: too often he catches an unflattering reflection of himself in Anna’s eyes. ‘The thing is, I care about you very much. Do you mind my saying that, Anna?’ His warm palm covers her hand; she withdraws it but his follows. ‘As a friend. A sister. I came late to God and to my calling, comparatively. Not like the great Mr Spurgeon.’
‘You’re absolutely nothing like Mr Spurgeon, Will. I can’t disagree with you there.’
‘Exactly,’ he agrees, chagrined.
And I like you the better for it, Anna refrains from saying, rescuing her hand and hiding it beneath the covers. That moon-faced boy-preacher is a star in the Baptist firmament. Spurgeon is characterised by endless loquacity, towering over the massed thousands of hero-worshippers at Exeter Hall and the Surrey Gardens Musical Hall. She can’t stand it, not least because on the one occasion she attended, she wasn’t only tempted: she fell. Anna melted with the rest, wept, cried Selah! and worshipped God’s creature in his lofty pulpit. Never before had she been in the presence of such a multitude; the roaring murmur of mortals seeking salvation or entertainment, one was unsure which. Anna abandoned herself to the torrent of this man’s tongue. Mesmerised by his operatic voice, her body relaxed. She might have been asleep but when she came round, she felt … what was the word, handled.
Wasn’t it like worshipping a loin of pork? That’s how he struck her then, so well fed that his very being has congealed to a mass of marbled fat. No sense to the spell he wove with his angel’s voice.
‘What did you think of Mr Clifford’s sermon, Anna? I saw you were moved. Your eyes – they are, you know – what’s the English word? – unearthly.’
‘Don’t do that, Will.’
‘Don’t do what?’
‘Flatter. It’s ugly and demeaning. And you’re so bad at it. It might sound better in Welsh but – unearthly eyes! It’s unflattering actually. You do it to everyone. How is the way you are with women and young girls fair to my sister?’
What she thinks is that Will prostitutes himself. It’s a word considered sullying to a woman’s lips. But the Pentecosts support the mission to the London prostitutes. These women are paupers, rejects, human souls preyed upon by vile males, respectable by day, beasts by night, the conduits of disease to their women and children. Will, you prostitute yourself, she thinks, staring silently as he flushes.
‘If she would accept me, can you seriously imagine I’d ever look twice at another woman? Do you, Anna?’ He has never acted dishonourably to a woman, Will swears. That’s unfair. Well, perhaps he is a little susceptible. But he loves Beatrice with all his heart; he’s devoted to Anna too, and if Beatrice won’t have him, he has a good mind to ask their brother for Anna’s hand, only he’s sure she’d laugh at him.
‘Yes, I would.’ Oh very nice, to be always tagging along, second best. A bit like you, Mr Anwyl, never the first object of choice.
‘You would prefer someone like Mr Clifford.’
‘I admired Mr Clifford for more than his blue eyes.’
‘I dreamed of you all in blue, Anna,’ he says. ‘Do you want to hear it?’
‘No. But I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’
‘Forget-me-not blue. You wouldn’t look at me; I was beneath you; you stared straight past me.’
‘Sorry to have been so rude, Will, in your dream.’
They both laugh.
‘What do you think it means though, Anna?’
‘Blue is the colour of Heaven, Will, isn’t it? – the Madonna’s colour. So I am guessing you see me as a nun.’
The Madonna is a Papist idol; he wouldn’t dream of the Madonna, he insists.
‘Anyway,’ she says gently. ‘It was just a dream. Dreams can be very nonsensical.’
In her heart Anna recognises it as a dream of death, her death. He has seen his dead sister-in-law-to-be laid out for her funeral.
Chapter 3
Two pairs of eyes, startled by the creak of the door, swivel towards Beatrice like a single guilty creature. Anna’s face is unnaturally flushed; the bedclothes are rumpled. What’s he doing on her bed? Beatrice speaks no word. Her black heart bounces into her throat. She stands with her back against the door, sucking in breath to let him past, face averted.
Her underlip recalls the sensation of the feather; her breast remembers brushing against this light man in the garden before the day curdled. Night after night I break my own sleep to join you, Anna, to soothe your suffering. Praying till my knees hurt. And I’m repaid by this … what should one call it, canoodling? There is something that periodically unhinges Anna, hysterical damage to her integrity. It is situated in her disordered womb. But it’s also a modern infection brought into their house by the Salas of Toplady. Beatrice has sometimes vowed to herself: they shall enter my house over my dead body. But what authority can she assert over a twenty-six-year-old sister?
Dr Quarles will have to be brought in, to apply a drastic, dramatic remedy: a blister, a bleed, an enema, all of which Anna loathes and denounces as unscientific.
*
‘So, Beatrice,’ says Loveday Elias, seating her guests in the chilly parlour, which smells of damp, in front of a fire she’s only just lit, of green, wet wood. ‘What’s all this a little birdie has been telling me – about you and a certain young man?’
‘I wish you’d quash tattle like that as soon as you hear it, Loveday. It’s odious. Please.’
Mrs Montagu, ever practical, offers to draw the fire. She holds a newspaper over it; the flame roars up behind the page, which is open at a picture of a slave sale in New Orleans, the males dressed in dandy suits and the females in calico, wearing forced smiles. A smoking hole appears; flame licks and Mrs Montagu scrambles the paper into a ball. ‘Now then, there we are!’ The fire is soon in a state to receive coals and be left.
What do Mr Anwyl’s follies matter compared with the horror of godless cruelty practised in the slaving states of America? Providence, placing the newspaper in Mrs Montagu’s hands, brings this to Beatrice’s attention. She bows her head as her friends lament the heinous doings in the New World. How will it end? O my beloved Lord who shed his blood for my freedom, make me more patient and charitable. I could hardly be less so than I am now. Christian Ritter is on an anti-slavery speaking tour in the northern states: perhaps he’s mentioned in the burnt newspaper. For God is not pointing in the direction of the deceitful Welshman, that much is clear. And if – when – Herr Ritter returns to ask for Beatrice’s hand again, she ought to accept him. Mr Jones of Bedwellty with his sons is also in America and between them they may bring home that prince of liberation pastors, Henry Ward Beecher.
A fog of damp taints the air. The velvet mantel cloth, once purple, is so stained with moisture that its ball-fringe is discoloured into a kind of green. At least they have a fire. Leaning forward to the flames, Beatrice warms first her palms, then the backs of her hands; receives the steady heat on her face. She’d like to fall on her knees this very minute like a Methodist, and pray, racked with sobs, for a contrite heart.
Two small Eliases sidle in at the door. ‘Look, Ma!’ says Jack, holding up his hand. ‘Fish scales!’
‘Oh, you naughty Jack, whatever will your papa say?’ Loveday feebly protests. ‘What have I said about playing in the larder? Come here, let me wipe your hands.’
‘No! They’re my fish scales!’
‘I hope you put the trout back where you found it! Did he?’ Mrs Elias asks seven-year-old Patience, who shrugs.
‘Come on then, young man,’ Beatrice says. You see, I can be tender to children. ‘You may sit on my knee, Jack, but only once Mama has wiped your hands and face.’
Jack shakes his head, tongue out, eyes shut, and won’t stop. Instead, Patience dumps herself
in Beatrice’s lap. Slipping her arms round the child’s middle, Beatrice feels the warm, strong body through the woollen dress. The body heat seems to declare the untamed willpower of the child, something almost indecent in a girl. There has always been a problem regarding the children of the saved: brought up within the fold, how can they be awoken to conversion? How can they be shocked from torpor or bored rebellion?
Jack shrieks, dives across and fights to get onto Beatrice’s loaded lap. Mrs Montagu swoops the lad up and, advising Loveday to go and check on the whereabouts and condition of the trout he’s been playing with, clamps the boy to herself. Jack gives in; sucks his grimy thumb. Patience swipes at her brother with her foot.
‘Oh no you don’t!’ Beatrice slaps the child’s knee. Not hard.
‘You hit me, you – spinster!’
‘I tapped your knee, Patience. Behave yourself if you wish to sit with me, miss.’
‘I don’t want to sit with you, Miss.’ Patience wriggles down. ‘This is what your sour old face looks like.’ She inserts fingers in the corners of her mouth and pulls, wags her head, rolls her eyes. ‘Anyway my papa says you’re an old maid past your prime. He says you’re thirty-seven if you’re a day. Miss.’ Having dealt this blow, Patience whisks out of the door.
‘Well!’ Mrs Montagu whispers over the sleeping tot’s head. ‘What can one say? Sheer anarchy. 1848 all over again. Did I tell you about poor dear Mr Kyffin?’
The minister of Florian Street Baptist Chapel in Salisbury is a favourite with them all. But turmoil’s brewing in his chapel: accusations are being tossed around by Mr Prynne and his family, of perfidy and embezzlement and ‘something worse’.
Beatrice, ruminating on her wrongs, cannot bring herself to be interested. Thirty-seven? Of course I don’t look thirty-seven. I do look thirty-seven. My bloom has faded. Will floods her head with longing and disappointment. He’ll never change. Admit it. I’ll cut him out of my heart, Beatrice decides, that’s all there is for it; he is a tumour. Some of my heart will adhere to the malignancy and that must be cut out too, and the rest will bleed, but it will not go on forever. There’s no chloroform for the hurt Will’s dealt me.
Awakening Page 4