‘Ah. You say so. Perhaps, my friends, perhaps. But only the Christian is truly free. All hail, thou breaker of fetters! Glorious Jesus! Ah! that moment when first my bondage passed away!’
The Atlantic Ocean is a duckpond, Mr Spurgeon holds. What happens over there involves ourselves. The globe has shrunk. Beatrice sees in her mind’s eye a network of connections between Wiltshire and the whole world. She can no more huddle in her petty concerns than she can ignore the existence of the railway and telegraph. Jewel Randolph has crossed the ocean to make a claim upon Beatrice Pentecost. She must answer it.
But as for marrying Christian – what kind of life would that be for a woman? Following him from country to country, perhaps ill, bearing child after child amongst strangers, Beatrice would have to wrench herself up by the roots, to live and die far from Sarum House and Anna. And Will. Dorothy Carey, wife of the first missionary in Mudnabati, lost her mind, burying her children, a screaming harpy, accusing her husband of whoremongering, having to be locked up.
After Mr Spurgeon’s ministry she stands on the steps in the dark, gusty air, Mr Montagu at her elbow.
‘A word of warning, my dear.’
‘Warning?’
‘I’m afraid it concerns – my dear, don’t take this badly – some friends of yours. At a meeting of the joint missionary societies in Manchester I heard the unfortunate – I might say, disreputable – story of a Manchester family named Sala.’
‘No, really, they are not my friends.’
‘But I understand they visit?’
Miriam Sala. It all comes out: a sordid tale of illicit relationships, as Beatrice has always suspected. This is what Unitarianism is: a net to catch a falling Christian. A net made of string, through which men crash and continue to fall eternally. Mr Montagu has placed in Beatrice’s hands a weapon. And a vindication. The book-burning has begun to trouble her conscience. It should not.
Anna must be told, directly Beatrice is home. In the end, Anna will not forsake the fold. She must and will detach herself from this contaminating friendship – spinning in the vortex of ‘Mrs’ Sala. Beatrice stows the morsels of information to be tasted later. I knew, she thinks, I knew all along. It’s like a smell. She thanks Mr Montagu, in a level voice, for informing her. Distasteful as it is to deliver the message of the Salas’ infamy, it must be done.
‘And I understand,’ says Mr Montagu, glancing at his gold fob, ‘that congratulations are at last in order …’
‘Oh, no, Mr Montagu, nothing has been …’
‘But let me be the first to know, my dear. Your dear father had set his heart on this union …’
The news has gone before the event, with the resonance of prophecy.
Perhaps Beatrice can marry Christian but without accompanying him on his travels. If he agreed to let her stay at Sarum House, himself coming and going, she would not wholly forfeit the independence she cherishes. One might live as a husbandless married woman, neither fish nor fowl.
It would mean a final goodbye to Mr Anwyl. Though the excitement of London has driven Will from her mind, Beatrice now thinks, distinctly, and for the first time unambiguously: I do love him. Not just the sight and sound of him, not only the touch of him but, God help me, the very scent and smell of him. She shivers. His shirt: ironing it at the last minute for a service. Damp steamed off the fabric. Some intimate essence of Will came with it. She’d never have enough of it. Nobody was about. Beatrice raised the warmed cotton to her face and breathed Will in. Stood there inhaling the scent of the private place where the arm joins the side.
Beatrice’s face burns. I’m like the bitch in oestrus whose fishy stink calls all the dogs for five miles around, she thinks. The bitch that will rub her belly against the fence, other dogs, a man’s leg, anything.
There is attraction in Christian. Of course there is. His height and bearing carry a quiet command. He has thick fair hair, a pale complexion. There’s none of the sweetly treacherous yearning she suffers for Will.
If God has called Beatrice to be Frau Ritter, she cannot, dare not, refuse. Her vocation would be to stand as yoke-fellow and soulmate to one of the most eminent pioneering Baptists of their era. Besides, he’s already family. But how could the two Ritter cousins have been so different? The qualities that have made Christian a powerful preacher of the Gospel showed in Lore Ritter as flighty, opinionated egotism. Beatrice remembers Papa’s love for Lore and that late, lost child. And how, after her death, the babe, Magdalena, lay in its crib for seven long months, yellow-skinned, eyes wide but inert, head swollen with encephalitis. A monster scarcely feeding or moving. Dr Quarles offered no hope, but hope was fabricated by the elderly father and Magdalena’s aunt.
When the baby died, Anna was inconsolable. She declared she’d throw herself in Lore’s grave and be buried alive. That would make her happy, she said. The only thing that would ever make her happy again. Hush, don’t let Papa hear you being hysterical, Anna. You cannot rebel against God’s dispensations. Hush now. It’s for the best. Consider: the baby is with God. Magdalena was not a fully human being in any case, her brain being no more than a cauliflower. Dr Quarles told Beatrice so; said the sooner it died, the better. Suicide is a mortal sin; I know you don’t mean it, Beatrice told Anna. Anna slit her own arm from wrist to elbow. It hurts, it hurts so much to remember Anna’s urge to quit the world. For what would Beatrice do without Anna?
In Mr Leek’s boarding house in Paddington, Beatrice toasts her hands at the fire. Outside horses and carts go by; men shout. The stridor is indescribable: London seems to want to funnel in through the window. Muslin is nailed over the pane to keep out smuts; the corpses of bluebottles rot there in dust. Beatrice’s skirts, heavy with mud from the sordid streets, steam on the fender. Once they’re dry, she brushes off the worst of the grime; feels more herself, spruce and kempt. She settles to write Anna a long letter. Gradually the world composes itself around a busy, competent Beatrice; this happened, then that happened. Everything is in its proper place. She will tell Anna face-to-face about the Salas, gently, carefully, and comfort her. The fire, taking heart, rustles in the grate.
‘A letter for you, Miss Pentecost.’ Mr Leek hands over a long screed from Anna. She breaks the seal eagerly.
& I visited Mrs Kyffin, the poor lady is greatly afflicted. I believe Mr Kyffin is broken. & what other news do I have for you? Mr Anwyl arrived with Rose & Lily Peck. Remarkably silly girls & becoming sillier by the day, each convinced she is the apple of his eye. (All in their imagination). They have learned by heart a dozen words of French, which they name an accomplishment & their latest affectation is to speak English words with a French accent – their notion of a Gallic accent at any rate. As for me, I feel so much better, I’m riding Spirit every day – & am well enough certainly for a weekend excursion.
Rose and Lily Peck. One on either arm of their pet minister. In Regent’s Park there’s a monkey house. Will has dwindled into a mechanical monkey somersaulting a bar: you wind it up and it answers to its own invariable set of inane compulsions. One day it will wind down and who will care?
*
And there he is with his portmanteau, on the platform at Salisbury Station: ‘Well, what a coincidence, Miss Anna.’
‘What are you doing here? Have you come to wave me off?
‘No indeed. For I too happen to find myself travelling to St Ives!’
As the train rounds the long curve from Chauntsey towards the chalky downs with their gentle, maternal contours, there’s a moment when, looking back, you glimpse the grounds of Sarum House: a section of the wilderness area, her childhood haunt. Anna stands and cranes. Amongst those high grasses with plumes of purple, there’s something planted … something lost … whatever was it now?
‘What are you looking for?’
‘A … tump,’ she says.
‘A what?’
‘Oh, I’m not sure. The word just came. I like to look at the house from the train. I always do it – it feels like jumping out of yourself and looki
ng back at your world.’
‘Cae twmpyn,’ Will says. ‘The field of tumps. Out there.’
He means the rounded contours of the downs, mint-green in the milky sunlight, where the ancient people buried their dead. He seems to understand when she tells him of her passion for the barrows and stone circles and henges everywhere in her shire; and of the rambles with Papa, returning home laden with treasures: shepherds’ crowns, flint knives, tesserae. Nothing of what was unearthed disturbed the serenity of Papa’s faith in those days.
Bless him, Will is so kind and funny and considerate on the long train journey, handing Anna in and out of carriages, superintending luggage and laying out the picnic on his lap. He’ll be mother, Will announces: ‘Now, which sandwich would you care to start with, dear heart?’ A passenger, amused by the young man’s fondness, refers to Anna as ‘your good lady’. Anna makes no objection. ‘Hold still, cariad’: Will snares a smut in the bud of her eye on the corner of his handkerchief. Entering into the spirit of his game, she relaxes into Will’s surprising presence, having foolishly overlooked the extent to which the journey south would tax her powers.
Anna scarcely bothers to ask herself what her sister would make of this escapade. A reckless craving for flight, for life, sweeps her on. Yes, it’s my turn now. Anna will never forget reaching under the bed, to find the precious works replaced by pious tracts. She laughed aloud with dark incredulity.
Will’s portmanteau contains, he tells Anna, Bishop Morgan’s Bible – his childhood Bible in Welsh, plus one change of linen, for he’ll return by the next train, overnighting at Exeter. He chats in Welsh with a passenger from Bangor. Anna glimpses in Will a different man, easy and confident. More gentlemanly, if that’s the word. It comes to her that he exists amongst the English in cumbrous translation. ‘Teach me a few words of your beautiful tongue,’ she asks when the passenger disembarks.
Alighting at St Ives, Anna breathes in salty, blue air; tastes the tang of it. Mirrie and Baines are on the platform in sun hats, waiting to welcome her.
‘I am present solely as Miss Anna Pentecost’s porter, waiter and dogsbody,’ says Will. The freethinking Salas don’t faze him: he’s a minister without obtrusive theology or strictures. A man, Anna thinks, before he’s a minister. Mirrie and Baines won’t hear of their guest’s turning straight round and going back.
‘You came all this way!’ says Mirrie. ‘And brought my darling safely to me. You must stay at least the one night, Will. No – we insist.’
Mirrie, in this bohemian setting, seems more youthful, less burdened. You’ve come out into the light somehow, Anna thinks, and can be yourself. But, strangely, it’s Lore who surfaces in her mind. Ahead on the steep main street a young woman in a tawny shawl, fair hair all down her back, has a look somehow of Lore. When Anna comes abreast, of course the girl’s nothing like her, not really: a tanned fishergirl of thirteen or so. Before they reach their cottage, Anna has seen another phantom Lore, climbing some steps to the gentry houses on the cliff.
‘Is something troubling you, Anna?’ Will asks. ‘Is it because I foisted myself on you? Are you concerned at my staying the night? I can easily go back.’
‘Why on earth shouldn’t you stay? How is this different from Sarum House? You’re always staying over.’
In the fisherman’s cottage perched high in the village, low ceilings and doorways force you to stoop. The floor slants like a ship in a high sea: drop any object and it rolls westwards over salt-eaten floorboards. The walls are simply whitewashed and there’s no clutter of ornaments or small items of furniture, none of the modern conveniences they are accustomed to – neither wringer, mangle nor copper. No servant. Miriam declined the offer of a little girl from the workhouse as a general servant.
Mirrie’s appearance is distinctly odd: she adapts her clothes to serve for a life of practical activity. After all, in sultry weather, why should women be trussed up like sacks of potatoes? She pads around the house in bare feet, her opulent form shown candidly beneath light fabric. Anna kicks off her own shoes. Why not? While Mirrie makes a feint at cooking, Baines cleans. Not much of either, when it comes to it. Either they order in a mackerel supper or rely on bread and cheese, salad and apples. To Anna everything tastes delicious, especially the conversation, and she’s hungry all the time. Anything may be broached; thoughts extemporised. Nothing is censored or assumed. You have the tonic feeling of being listened to.
Getting ready for bed – the women are to share while Baines sleeps with Will – Anna watches Miriam take the brush to her thick, pale brown hair.
‘Let me.’ She takes the cool weight of it in her hand. ‘Your hair is lovely.’
‘It will do,’ Mirrie shrugs. ‘But it’s nothing compared with yours. So dark, so shining. Darkly shining. You are fearfully beautiful, Anna, I suppose you know that. And I am … not.’
‘Don’t say that. We don’t know how we appear to others. People love you. You are – I can’t find the words – but – properly alive, Mirrie. Very few of us are.’
There’s a pause. Is Miriam looking to be told she’s beautiful too? Physically she just isn’t. And she’s so sensitive that she’d detect and resent a fib. Mirrie meets Anna’s eyes in the mirror and asks, ‘Anna, did you read Freedom Seeks Her?’
‘I couldn’t, Mirrie. It was … lost. And I tried to replace it, along with the others, but the edition is all sold, apparently, and they’re waiting for the new one.’
‘How, lost? All of them were lost?’
Anna blushes deeply. It seems treacherous to Beatrice and degrading to yourself to admit that your sister censors your reading. Anna can hardly admit that she’s left her new books packaged up in the disused coal hole in the cellar. ‘All your books – went. I’ve replaced them of course, except Freedom Seeks Her. Please say nothing more about it.’
‘But I will replace the copies now. Of course. You must know, Anna, money is the last thing I have to worry about.’ Mirrie fetches a copy of Freedom Seeks Her from her box and places it on Anna’s side of the bed. ‘Oh and by the way, Anna, I like your Mr Anwyl so very much. Such a freshness and warmth.’
Mirrie is soon asleep; Anna can’t drop off. She opens Baines’s novel.
Can darkness shine? You wondered when you saw the lustre of her black hair in the sun, burning in some lights blue in its depths. But you wondered more when you heard her speak. Miss Cartwright was thought by some headstrong, by others original, and by all a dangerous presence in the town.
Can darkness shine?
Is that really me, Anna asks herself, a version of me, in Baines’s book? Mirrie said, ‘Your hair – darkly shining.’ Was that a quotation? Anna leafs forward, skimming for the story. It’s nothing like her own life but possibly something like Miriam Sala’s: a wealthy and idealistic young gentlewoman has an impetuous tongue, a freethinking intellect and an impulse to ardent actions which offend her kith and kin. Miss Cartwright is a great maker of well-meaning mistakes who donates a vast sum to an ill-run orphanage and marries a philanthropist who looks like Baines Sala. Freedom Seeks Her is written with rueful irony, long, sinuous sentences and a godlike commentator.
Baines has fused herself and Miriam in a composite figure. Or rather he has clothed his wife in Anna’s body and whether to feel flattered or queasy, Anna cannot decide.
After that there’s no sleep, though Anna cannot continue to read for long. At dawn she rises before anyone else is awake; takes some bread and cheese and lets herself out. Here you can come and go as the spirit takes you and nobody asks why or where. And perhaps I’ll never go home, she thinks, to the reins and halter, but find some cottage of my own and read and study and write.
Flocks of waders scurry in and out of a chalk-turquoise sea. The beach in the early light is primrose yellow. From the quay Anna climbs towards the ancient fort of Pendinas, or The Island as the Cornish call it, although an isthmus links it to the mainland. In the harbour fishermen haul in their catch, calling to one another; and a drowned fl
eet shifts and slides beneath the boats on the glassy water. Their voices liquefy into the shush-hush of the waves; Anna can hear her own footsteps and the rustle of her dress. She’s suspended in a dream of light and space, on an edge where earth, sky and sea meet.
The turf of the promontory is pitted with puffin burrows and strewn with their droppings. From Pendinas she looks across the immense sheet of bright water. Dolphins break the surface once, twice, and are gone. Smoke rises from a steam boat. A cormorant dips down, emerging with a silvery fish. With a swift motion, he turns it in his beak and swallows it head first.
Yes, I’ll start to be myself now. At long last.
Chapter 8
Yes, she has said yes.
Apparently. For he sat her squarely on his knee, as though this – in the deserted college chamber – was the most natural thing in the world. He would not allow her to rise until she agreed to marry him. The intimacy of it appalled Beatrice, the outrage. Through layers of petticoat she was aware of the man’s legs, his trousers, the intimate parts of him. And if someone should come in! But he knew, Christian said, with quiet certainty, that their union was God’s will. ‘Allerliebste Beatrice, I have loved you now for seventeen years. During all that time I’ve never been drawn to any woman but yourself. I have never polluted my imagination with the thought of another. To me that would have been an adultery. I asked your dear Papa’s permission to marry you when you were twelve years old.
‘Ten, I was ten. Or eleven.’
‘Twelve. Nearly thirteen. And Mr Pentecost, whom I revered, readily gave it. In my heart you are already my wife, for God has predestined you to be my helpmeet in this world … and all it needs is for you to say the words.’
‘It wasn’t fair,’ she broke out.
‘What wasn’t fair, dear heart?’
‘You took my – childhood. I was a child.’ She recalled the jouncing on his knee. She was a big girl, with a blue ribbon in her hair, wearing her Sabbath silk dress. Calling out with high-pitched excitement and distress in his iron arms.
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