Awakening

by Stevie Davies

  Ah, but if not now, then later Anna will come begging, cap in hand. She’ll never endure the heartbroken life of a rural minister’s wife, the strain of pinching and saving, of having to do the family washing, sewing, housework, with not a soul to help, ending each day weary and sobbing. The Anwyls will never be able to afford a servant. And Anna is hardly the world’s best housewife: look at the flour she’s managing to transfer to her arms and hair. At present the whole thing’s a novelty but Anna will never last.

  Will cannot even afford to buy books for himself. And books are the bread of life to Anna. Books on shelves, books in her chest amongst her dresses, books under her bed, in her bed even, in those days when the Salas fed Anna all the latest perversions and perversities. I had to confiscate the worst of them, Beatrice remembers: is that what this is all about? Has Gwilym Anwyl the least idea what goes on in his fiancée’s mind? What in heaven’s name is her wayward sister doing marrying a Baptist minister at all? Let alone a minister innocent of the Higher Criticism who has never had to confront those who question the account of the Creation in the Book of Genesis. What does Will know of the German Scissors? A man without formal training whose first language is Welsh; a jester and ladies’ man and a stammerer whose English is no better than adequate.

  You’re in a delicate condition, Beatrice counsels herself: show Anna how much you rely on her for support. She’ll not leave your side. Lapsing back on the couch, Beatrice slips down, down, into a welcome torpor as the fire shifts in the grate. Drowses. When Anna returns with a tray of tea, Beatrice jolts awake.

  ‘Did she actually eat it?’ she asks, yawning. ‘That’s quite grotesque.’

  ‘Can you manage a slice of toast with this? Who eat what?’ Anna begins to pour the tea; she has brought in a toasting fork, with bread and butter.

  ‘Lore. Coal. You said she craved coal.’

  ‘Oh, well … she told me she licked a piece. I saw it on her tongue. I doubt if she actually swallowed much.’

  ‘Poor Lore,’ says Beatrice. ‘Oh dear.’ A sigh slips out. A moment of startled grace. She has seldom spoken kindly of their stepmother to her sister. Never, really, spoken at all. Who wants to plunge her hand in fire, even for a moment?

  A sister should.

  There are times when you see into a soul. Quite nakedly. The core of a person is revealed, terrible as the pink, nude heart of a field mouse Dr Quarles exposed in vivisection. When Lore died, Beatrice recoiled from Anna’s wound, afraid not least of the godlessness her sister’s anguish implied. Not just absence of belief but apostate hatred of God. Anna cut her own arm from wrist to elbow and the scar’s still there. She threw herself on the grave, shrieking, ‘I’m jealous of the worms that have her! I want to be where they are!’ Beatrice shrank, embarrassed, from Anna’s extremity. She became preachy; counselled patience. Lore was better off with God, she said, than here below.

  This was true, one devoutly hoped (and doubted), but was it for me to criticise Anna’s grief? And Papa’s, come to that. He locked himself in his study and scarcely ate or slept. And in the end he was to make a bad death.

  ‘You loved her,’ stammers Beatrice. ‘And she loved you. Perhaps I was jealous. Forgive me. Love is always a good thing, isn’t it? That’s what Christian keeps reminding me. He said I was too liable to neglect this and I think it’s true. I hope he’ll make me a bit wiser and better, Anna – I’ll try, I really will.’

  Anna’s face is twisted and ugly. She murmurs something. Don’t touch my pain, she seems to be saying; it’s my love’s sole surviving child. Once I let it go, Lore and Magdalena and the last remnant of my faith will be dead at last. Beatrice sees that. But how can you live with that degree and quality of pain? Opening the wound again and again, probing it.

  What was the hymn they used to hear the Methodists singing, from the chapel in West Grimstead?

  O blessed Side-hole’s cavity – I want to spend my life in thee –

  Beatrice and Anna wrinkled up their noses at the thought of taking up residence in a bloody, stinking, pus-filled hole. Even the sacred wound of the Saviour. The girls would block their ears and run from the obscenity.

  Yes, yes, I will forever sit – There where thy blessed Side was split.

  Something carnal there, almost Papist in its prurience; a violation of good taste.

  ‘Could I ask you something, Beatrice?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘What did you say to Quarles before you left?’

  ‘Why, dear?’

  ‘I just want to know. What did you ask him to do?’

  ‘Well, just to keep an eye on you.’

  ‘And the other quack – Palfrey?’

  ‘I didn’t see him after they came and spoke to us about marriage and so on.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Why, Anna, what happened?’

  Anna has rapidly collected herself. ‘Nothing I want to talk about. They are animals,’ she says. ‘You weren’t to know.’

  Weren’t to know what?

  Beatrice watches Anna inspect the singed side of the toast and turn the other to the flames.

  ‘Do you know what they’re doing to women in Southampton?’ Anna asks.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Habeas corpus suspended. Only for women. We are back to the Dark Ages. The Contagious Diseases Act. Any woman can be arrested by the police and examined for venereal disease. Anyone. I could be, you could be. If you refuse to comply, you could be held indefinitely. That’s the kind of thing doctors are allowed to do, Beatrice.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this, Anna?’ If true it is monstrous. But surely in this day and age it cannot be true.

  ‘Oh – I thought you’d want to know. Someone very brave will have to get up and oppose it. Very brave indeed. Because these are things we are not permitted to talk about. Like so much else.’

  Spreading butter and honey on the toast, Anna leaves Beatrice to eat and drink her fill. She goes off to the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. Beatrice is aware of a weave of voices behind closed doors; scourings of pots and pans in the scullery; Mr Elias’s gruff man at the door with a consignment of coal. Something unspeakable has been mooted. Beatrice floats swiftly away from the perilous region into which the Pentecosts have ventured together.

  Chapter 14

  A rape? Was I raped? Anna asks herself. Is that what I should say, if I could speak about this to anyone? Which I cannot; how could I expose myself in that way? What could I accuse them of? There are no words for what has been done to Anna, none at all – and if there were, she’d never bring herself to speak them. Since Quarles and Palfrey’s visit, she has lost the sense of herself. If she looks within, she glimpses someone answering her description but cloaked and hooded, a woman forever turning away at the end of a dim corridor, at vanishing point.

  In Fighelbourn there’s a deaf-mute boy, the blacksmith’s apprentice. The lad gets on with his work, communicating by signs, but the face is a blank. He’s never seen to smile.

  Was it rape though? Or was it simply medical treatment?

  ‘Oh never fear, Miss Anna, you are still virgo intacta.’

  This the bridegroom will be able to determine on a night which slides perpetually nearer.

  ‘Plato tells us – erroneously as it happens and yet we divine in the fable an allegorical relevance – that the uterus is a wandering organ. It is not fixed. It becomes dessicated and detaches. When in the course of its wandering the dessicated organ reaches a woman’s chest, it maddens her. This is the derivation of the term hysteria. My dear lady, it is the commonest of female maladies. You should not feel ashamed. There are remedies.’

  Anna wrenches her mind from the horror as she settles in her pew. Joss, sensitive enough to catch vibrations of his sister’s moods but not to interpret them, reaches across to squeeze her hand. The congregation has begun to gather early at Florian Street for Mr Kyffin’s return to the depleted and contrite flock. This will be a shining moment of justification f
or him.

  Anna feigns prayer until the throbbing in her chest slows. The wandering womb sinks back into its approved place. Skirts swish and subside as ladies take their pews; umbrellas generate rivulets in the aisle. Mrs Kyffin’s daughter leads her to a pew. Leaning forward, Anna touches her friend’s shoulder and smiles encouragement, reassuring her that she’s among friends, in a safe place. The Montagus are present, and the Eliases. The deacons file through, depleted in number. A majority of the leading tradesmen – draper, banker, baker – seceded with Mr Prynne.

  Glancing sideways, Anna registers the fact that Joss’s hand and Amy’s are nearly touching. No, they are actually touching, surely? Or if not, their little fingers are separated by a hair’s breadth. His on his right thigh, hers on her left knee.

  Mr Lascelles has put up the hymns for the day and Psalm 118. O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good.

  Anna bookmarks the first hymn; then she finds the psalm. Mr Kyffin has entered his pulpit. Halleluja! His congregation welcomes him home with penitent joy. It awaits admonition. The pastor looks down upon his flock with a grave, shy smile, right hand raised in a gesture of blessing.

  ‘I have come home to you,’ he says in quiet, shaken voice.

  The congregation’s faces wear an expression of stricken fellow feeling. But what outlandish doctrine will Mr Kyffin have brought home with him, Anna wonders. The pastor has been snatched up into a cyclone of theological rotation and it is not clear that, restored to the earth, his visionary intuitions will have returned to the fold.

  ‘The ways of Zion have mourned,’ he tells them. ‘And doubtless I have been to blame. Who is more accountable than the shepherd? The flock has been divided. But your pastor is not here to crow over his enemies; I acknowledge no enemies. I have precious announcements to make! A Revival! The last great Awakening. Before He comes! And now let us sing Psalm number 118. This is the Lord’s doing and it is wonderful in our eyes!’

  Anna lifts up her voice with the rest: she well understands why Mr Kyffin has chosen this psalm. It speaks of the greatest of Christian paradoxes: the lower we fall, the higher we rise.

  ‘The Lord is on my side,’ she sings. ‘Thou hast thrust sore at me that I might fall: but the Lord helped me.’

  And perhaps too the Lord she has half-abandoned will help Anna. Is it so unthinkable? The chapel is beautiful to her: its whiteness, its simple lines, broken only by the sequence of gilt scrolls near the ceiling, painted with gold lettering reading FAITH HOPE CHARITY. It would be hard to quit this world of the spirit, her home since earliest days.

  The stone which the builders refused Is become the head stone of the corner.

  And perhaps there’s no one in the chapel untouched by the thought of a second chance. No, a thousandth chance. The flock has settled into the psalm; a measure of peace and order has been restored.

  The vestry door opens. Mr Prynne enters. Mr Swales. Those Florian Street deacons and members who had revolted against Mr Kyffin. All their womenfolk in black. Nine young Prynnes with scrubbed necks and red faces, aged from nineteen to three, in descending order.

  Swales makes his way to the hymn board, reaches into his coat pocket and substitutes Psalm 119 for Psalm 118. The singing wavers. Mr Kyffin, after the first startlement, waves on his singers and welcomes the arrivals, gesturing to empty pews and smiling hospitably.

  What’s happening Anna at first fails to grasp. The Prynnites, standing in a block down the aisle, begin to holler out the alternative psalm, Blessed are the undefiled. Number 119 is a psalm of devastating length, much loathed by children, for it runs to 176 verses. The Prynnites sing slowly in a foghorn boom. Bedlam. With the advantage of ambush, the latecomers threaten to outpsalm the Kyffinites. Psalm 118 terminates while the Prynnites have only reached Verse 9 of theirs: How can a young person stay on the path of purity?

  Mr Kyffin is at a loss. Up leaps Mr Elias and starts the Kyffinites on Number 120. Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue. What shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue?

  He stands beneath the pulpit to conduct, his tenor voice audible above the rest, conducting the loyal flock.

  Faint and weak, Antigone is supported out of the chapel. Red-haired Charlie Kyffin has to be restrained from laying violent hands on Mr Prynne. Assisting the fainting Antigone out, Anna turns and the last she sees of Mr Kyffin alive on this earth is of a man staggering as if shot and Charlie thrusting Mr Prynne out of the way as he rushes up the steps to his father.

  *

  ‘It’s a form of parricide,’ Mrs Elias says. ‘What if all our people should rise against their pastors and sing psalms against them? It goes too far, the democratic spirit in our free churches. How is dear Antigone, Anna?’

  ‘Very ill, I’m afraid. You know, Mr Kyffin truly believed that he was one of the favoured saints who’d never taste death. He expected to be caught up in a whirlwind with the rest of the justified, to meet Christ in the air.’

  ‘But did he know he was dying?’

  ‘I’m afraid he did and it was a bitter disappointment. He felt betrayed.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  Anna goes back upstairs to Antigone, who keeps to her bed and does nothing but weep. Her husband, who was in debt, has left her destitute and she will soon be forced to vacate the house for another minister’s family.

  ‘I’ll pour us a drink,’ Anna tells her. ‘You are to drink it. You mustn’t have it on an empty stomach though so I’ve brought some cake.’

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘You must. It’s medicinal.’

  ‘Where is Ellen, Anna? I need her.’

  ‘I sent her over to her cousins.’

  ‘But I depend on her so. Don’t send her away. What shall I do?’ Antigone’s tears begin to flow again. ‘I rely on her.’

  ‘Yes, but you mustn’t. She’s a child. It’s too much. Charlie can support you.’

  ‘Charlie can’t stop crying.’

  ‘He will have his cry out, darling, and then he’ll be ready for the world again.’

  ‘He’s a child too, though.’

  ‘No, dear, Charlie’s a man. But Ellen is a child.’

  ‘What will become of us? What shall I do? I’m alone in the world.’

  ‘You’re not alone, Antigone. The first thing to do is to eat and drink.’

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘Well, try.’

  As she drinks, Antigone repeats the story of her husband’s deathbed. Cheerful nearly to the last, John Kyffin assured everyone that God would not let him die. The children were brought in and requested to kneel in prayer, to welcome the coming Saviour. Nothing. The dying man lapsed into sleep. The family scrambled up from its knees and rubbed them. Every time the door opened, Mr Kyffin awoke expecting an angel visitor and every time was disappointed.

  ‘He did not make a good death. So where is he now?’

  ‘In Paradise. A good death, whatever’s that? My poor father did not make a good death. God is not so petty as to judge us in extremis. His own son cried out in despair on the cross.’

  ‘My sister Sophia is coming from Bradford on Avon,’ says Antigone. ‘To look after me.’

  ‘That’s good, dear. A comfort to you.’

  ‘Not really,’ Antigone whispers. ‘I’ll be a poor relation, of small account in Sophia’s house, with none of my lovely things around me. We must sell everything. Not that I care about my china and linen any longer.’ She gestures round the room. ‘My possessions became worthless when all this started. But when did it start? I’ve no idea. Where is he, Anna? Do you know?’

  ‘At peace,’ Anna says. ‘Mr Kyffin is at peace. That’s what we need to remind ourselves.’

  ‘They called him a drunkard. He was not a drunkard. We both found that brandy on occasion would calm our nerves. But inebriated? Never. I will not say that Mr Prynne is a wicked liar – who am I to judge? – but this was a wicked lie! Oh, but Anna, I’m forgetting my manners. When is the wedding?’ asks Antigon
e with a jolt. She remembers that the world goes on and that there’ll be marrying and giving in marriage. ‘Do try to ensure that your husband – for the life of a minister is enormously taxing, Anna, and many die in harness, they crumble in the pulpit – as witness my dear late husband – they go off with heart attacks and strokes, often in their prime – I do not mean to alarm you, I’m sure your betrothed is of hardy Welsh stock and he feeds himself well; I’ve noticed how congenial he is in company and how he enjoys his food and drink, that will be a comfort to you – what was I saying? Yes, whatever you do, Anna, guard Mr Anwyl against obsession – try to cajole him from too dedicated a study of St John’s Revelation, this is what I wanted to say. Even dear Mrs Spurgeon confesses that she keeps a close eye on Mr Spurgeon whenever he seems apocalyptically inclined.’

  *

  Nobody at Sarum House is up and about except Amy who, yawning her way into the parlour with a hod of coals, greets Anna with vague surprise as she passes through. Anna puts her finger to her lips: Shush, don’t let’s wake anyone. Amy grins, nods. There can’t be much that goes on in the Pentecost house that Amy doesn’t turn over in her mind while scrubbing and scouring.

  The dew’s on the grass: the rising sun makes prisms in water-beads hanging from every branch. Appetite for a ride is a thirst that must be slaked. Wearing thick woollen breeches beneath her skirts and a close-fitting jacket, Anna is proof against the chill in the air. She leads Spirit out of the dim stable and saddles up. No one’s around to help her mount, so, hoisting her skirts, she uses a pile of timber as a mounting block; flounders as Spirit wheels round in protest; struggles to swing her right leg around the pommel and fit the other beneath the leaping-horn. When Anna’s foot finds the stirrup, Spirit steadies to her will.

  One day she’ll do as Max Hays did in Tenby: ride astride. Max was a tiny creature, fey and boy-like, cutting a caper with everything she did, making a joke of her transgressions. But when the womanly Anna rides astride, she’ll need courage. Perhaps when I’m married, she thinks. One good thing about Will is that he’s pliable, he’ll let her do as she wishes.