‘Extinction of species is indeed a lamentable fact,’ says Mr Stevens. ‘But a fact nevertheless. Here at the Museum we’ve done our best to record the local flora and fauna that have been, in the course of things, sadly (as you say) lost. Natural selection, if you take that view, is the law that creatures who cannot adapt must die.’
‘Oh no,’ says Beatrice, blushing deeply. ‘I don’t take that view.’ She says no more.
Christian does take that view, of course, and sees no discrepancy between Genesis and Mr Darwin’s revelations. So much of what ten years ago was regarded as atheistic has lost its sting and been assimilated into an idea of progress. When the ladies retire for coffee, Beatrice, feeling queasy, eyes the Great Bustard she has just devoured in its glass case. A beautiful piece of work, as the ladies agree.
*
Magdalena is out playing in the wilderness. Again. She has given Beatrice the slip. She’s always doing it. And of course she has taken Florence with her – Florence who’d never have gone of her own volition and really doesn’t like to dirty her pinafore but who can rarely say no to her strong-minded cousin. She cannot say no to her mother either, or Papa, or anyone in the world, which places her in a constant dilemma. A premature frown mark has imprinted itself between Florence’s eyebrows. Sitting with her eldest daughter, Beatrice often finds herself trying to smooth the frown mark away with her finger tips. Florence wants to please, to defer, but will do it promiscuously, without regard to the structure of the hierarchy.
All this changes when Florence’s Papa is at home. A model household greets Christian, dreading his awe-inspiring silences, the straight blue looks from his handsome all-seeing eyes. Christian never raises his voice; never has to. Sitting each child in turn on his knee, he enquires after their little deeds and offers them loving counsel, as once he did to Beatrice as a youngster. A great man in the church, known on five continents, a powerful speaker and a tireless fund-raiser, Christian has founded an orphanage and an almshouse. Mr Beecher, the subject of sexual scandal in his New York church, is no longer Christian’s watchword. His gaze is bent on the momentous business in which God has engaged him. We all creep on tiptoe, Beatrice thinks, around the aura of perfection Christian carries. Those tender moments when their firstborn died seem like dreams.
And of course we have to welcome his protégées. Ruth Leyton has given place to Esther, the daughter of the missionary Herbert Thoms. Esther, who is being educated in London, spends her vacations at Sarum House. She’s a pious child rather too eager to declare herself a backsliding daughter before any and every congregation where personal testimony is sought. Beatrice has given up attempting to warn her high-minded husband. She locks herself into the room Anna used as her study when she can stand it no more.
Florence appears as if on cue and looks at her mother with melting eyes. She holds up her hand, dripping with blood where a blade of crabgrass has pierced the webbing between thumb and forefinger. Making no complaint, she brings her hand to her mouth and sucks it, then takes another look. To her dismay beads of blood seep out. It’s bleeding rather freely and must be smarting. Florence seldom acknowledges pain in front of the spartan Magdalena, who now appears beside her, skirt hitched up in her belt, and says, ‘Flossie’s cut her hand, I’m afraid. A little bit.’
‘I can see that. We’ll bind it up for her now. And where’s her hat? Pull down your skirt, Magdalena, do. I’ve told you before about that. Haven’t I?’ She binds the cut, which is tiny. ‘Hundreds of times. You’re a young lady now and must behave like one. I saw a little girl in the cathedral close turning cartwheels. And she reminded me of you, darling. You are nearly a young woman now and cannot afford to behave in this way. It will be thought immodest.’
Obligingly Magdalena drags down her wayward skirt. Beatrice, who has indulged her niece more than any of her own, is concerned for Magdalena. Have I spoilt her? No, but I’ve come close to it. She’s so original – and along with this goes such a blitheness of disposition. She’ll achieve something in the world, the child has recently announced, something tre-men-jous! Isn’t that pride, Magdalena dear? Yes! Good pride, proper pride! Hopping from foot to foot, she spun like a top until she tumbled in a heap. With every minute Magdalena draws nearer to obstacles that will floor her or force her to fight. The leaking of blood, the griping of pain, sensations of shame, tight corsets. Beatrice winces at the premonition of what is about to thwart agile, intelligent, never-say-die, affectionate Magdalena, who now comes up close to say, ‘Sorry, Auntie cariad. It’s up the tree, her hat.’
‘For goodness’ sake! I hope you’ve not been luring Florence up trees. It’s so dangerous and it’s not ladylike. Is it?’
‘Not really.’
‘Not at all. Which tree?’
‘Oh no, I wouldn’t let her climb. I was the one who threw it. We were playing catch; it skims really well. The beech tree.’
The straw boater is resting on the cross-bough. Beatrice hoists Magdalena so that she can grab for it. As she brings the child down, the scallywag’s dark, sparkling eyes arrest Beatrice’s and although Maggie is flaxen-haired where her mother was dark, they’re Annie’s eyes and also the eyes of Will. Beatrice’s heart squeezes, a double pang. She holds Magdalena’s lithe, light body up against her own for a moment and feels the drumming heart under the layers of cotton. In her mind’s eye a dead sister is whirling round the Pentecost lawn, face brown as a labourer’s, around and around until you’re dizzy watching her. Papa is egging her on, her stepmother’s asking, ‘Who’ll have dear Anna if she grows up like this?’
‘Don’t lead Florence on, Maggie my sweetheart. Now don’t. She’s only a little person, isn’t she? And small for her age. She could hurt herself badly and you wouldn’t want to have caused that.’
‘All right, Auntie Bee. I won’t.’
‘Don’t just promise, do it – or rather don’t do it. Florence would follow you anywhere, you know that. It gives you a special responsibility. Do you understand that?’
‘Yes.’
A small hand with grime under the fingernails, stained with juice from stolen berries, is placed on Beatrice’s own. The raspberry mouth comes close and offers a kiss. Anna’s daughter waits to be absolutely sure she is forgiven. There’s that urgent look on her face: she cannot live if she is not certain of forgiveness. Beatrice can’t help but smile. There’s purple juice round Florence’s mouth too.
‘Ah, Maggie, whatever shall we do with you?’
Magdalena’s promises don’t mean a thing, when it comes down to it. I really should speak to Will about this, she thinks, when he and Jane visit. But I might not.
Mr Moody the revivalist and Mr Sankey the singing evangelist have been staying with the Anwyls in Manchester. This is where the future lies, according to Will, in mass meetings staged at the Free Trade Hall, witnessing tens of thousands of conversions. Powerful forces are required in this day and age to defend against the tides of atheism and secularity. Beside Moody and Sankey the Welsh Revival seemed a sideshow. The Chauntsey Awakening could only be accounted a brief prelude. For the Holy Boy of West Grimstead, the great hope of Wiltshire Dissent, burnt out. Occasionally you see Isaiah Minety at the back of his father’s shop, taking batches of loaves from the oven or pummelling the dough. And what to make of this Beatrice has no idea. Isaiah stretched himself too far, is Mrs Elias’s view: the odd lad had no background, no education and perhaps in the end no calling. Her own sons have avoided the ministry. Piano tuners and music teachers, they have quit the nest for Huddersfield and Sheffield. Of the new generation not one has entered the ministry.
Will uses such horrible slangy language; he has caught the modern idiom. The American missions to Britain leave Beatrice cold. To her the old ways still seem best: what she has received from her father and her father’s father stand her in good stead. Will’s mind at the best of times resembled the feather they used to blow round the drawing room in those games that seem so long ago.
‘Businesslike e
vangelists!’ Will has said. ‘That’s what we want. Modern professional men, oh, and ladies, of course, like my wife, who know how to stage events. Conversions by the thousand – tens of thousands – hundreds of thousands. The Florian Steet Awakening was less a precursor than an echo. Using up-to-date methods, if you add up the figures, you’ll have the whole population of our islands Christian within twenty years. That’s the modern way! How else could we stem the rot of freethinking and scepticism? Ah, Beatrice, you should have heard seventeen thousand people singing “There is a fountain filled with blood!” It nearly took the roof off! Music you’d normally hear in a tavern or music hall is now captured for God! And then we were all asked to bow our heads in silent prayer. As we did so, a whisper began, the organ sighed. And then, oh so softly, Mr Sankey was singing a solo – “Come home, come home, o prodigal child”. And the massed choir took up the chorus, with the organ bursting out in majesty. Come home, come home. Knocks poor old Spurgeon into a cocked hat. We were all in tears.’
Oh yes, she thought, God’s circus in a big top.
How thankful Beatrice feels to be resident in a backwater where, after that unprecedented convulsion, talk centres on church redecoration and the next bazaar. Can it really be eight years since Anna went? And Mrs Sala insisted, against all protocol and decency, not only on attending the funeral but on speaking too. Well, don’t think of that.
What she said, of course, was beautiful. Allegedly. There was no gainsaying that. Apparently. Mrs Sala – who had no business there on any grounds, as being a female, a notorious adulteress, an infidel and hardly a true friend to Anna – arose and insisted on speaking. She described Anna Pentecost, so Beatrice was told. She’d prepared a text from which she had the effrontery to read. But what did she say, Christian? Beatrice asked, dry-mouthed. What exactly? He couldn’t reproduce the message, he said, for the effect depended not only on the words but on that exquisite contralto voice. It seemed to them all that Anna rose up there in the midst of them, to the life, in all her loveliness. At first Christian had been taken aback; he could not approve of Mrs Sala’s behaviour, what he knew of it. But when she spoke … it was necessary to listen. It was not long, he said. Or it did not seem so. When she had spoken, Mrs Sala left. And when Beatrice asked Will, he said more or less the same.
I’ll never forgive her, Beatrice thought. The harpy. Snatching my sister from me at the last moment. The bitterness of it, the fury. And, even worse, Mrs Sala seems to be outliving her shame. Her writings soar above it. Crowds of worshippers, so Mrs Elias has reported, gather at her AtHomes, where the authoress gives readings from her works, dressed in black evening dress hung with diamonds. That great ugly horse-face. That almost-not-a-woman at all.
Forget all that. With time the fury settles; only at night Mrs Sala will keep appearing in Beatrice’s dreams, veiled sometimes; when the veil’s removed the pockmarked face of Lore Ritter is disclosed.
When Will left Chauntsey for a church in Manchester, he seized the chance to change his reputation. Will has charmed his way into powerful circles; he speaks a different language. Beatrice shelters his child in her garden and puts off the day when Magdalena must be yielded up to her father and her evangelising stepmother. Perhaps that day will not come. At least do not let it come soon. Annie’s daughter with her harum-scarum ways and her ravishing smile tugs at Beatrice’s heartstrings more than any of her own brood, nearly as much as Luke did in that other world when her wound was fresh.
God has chastised Mrs Ritter. She has bent, chastened, to the lash. But then, it appeared, He withdrew his wrath. The torture became less. Beatrice lay where she had fallen until the sense came that the angel of death might have passed over. For now. She ventured into the garden, bareheaded, under the fine rain and found calm. Anna’s pony was led riderless from the stable, hooves clopping in the quiet. Anna’s robust daughter slept soundly in her cot, her face flushed in sleep.
One by one her own children arrived, and lived. Then Beatrice knew that God’s wrath was appeased.
Gradually she began to flag under the endless childbearing. I am a broodmare, Beatrice sometimes thinks: my body is not my own.
Amy Pentecost comes rushing out, calling that Mr and Mrs Anwyl are here. No change has been as strange as the embarrassed adjustment forced on Beatrice by the transformation of a servant into a sister-in-law. Mr and Mrs Jocelyn Pentecost had been secretly married, it appeared, for a year. Married, not even in a church but in a London register office, their union witnessed by Mr and Mrs Munby. Good that Mama and Papa never lived to see their one son descend to this breach of protocol.
Not that Amy isn’t one’s spiritual equal – of course she is. Equality before God is at the foundation of Christian belief and Beatrice scorns anyone who questions it. Oh, but our social equal? – no, never. Joss is not without wry enjoyment of the general consternation. Sometimes, he confesses, to a burst of hilarity from his wife, it was a near thing. For instance, when you came into my room to clear or clean, many a time my Amy was hiding under the bed! – ha! – with her lord and master perched on it in case you decided to look for dust and smoke her out. Yes! Really! What a joke! He couldn’t bring himself to look particularly shamefaced. Rather the reverse. Beatrice, stunned, senses that Joss positively relished the conspiracy and will hanker after his secret and forbidden world now that things are out in the open.
What does he see in Amy? Plump and waddling in gait. Hair rather thin and mousy brown. No sense of how to drink a cup of tea, though you’d think she’d have learned in the years of studying Pentecost manners. Her Wiltshire burr, raucous, snorting laughter, muscular arms and broad hands. And worst of all is Amy’s indifference to the things of the spirit. Will Joss ever be baptised? Probably not now. To treat Amy as an equal is out of the question and Joss sees and resents the slight. ‘My wife has more reality in her little finger than some of us have in our whole bodies – and a jolly sight less pretension,’ he has rebuked his sister. Did Anna have any inkling? Or perhaps she was party to the secret? Joss has never said. The one fly in his ointment is Amy’s growing jealousy of the two servants who’ve replaced her, Tabitha and Jenny.
The children harbour no such prejudice. They flock around Amy for the barley sugar she carries in her pocket. Her solid, comfortable body is as pleasing to them as it is to her husband.
Magdalena hugs Beatrice. ‘Is it my Papa, Auntie Amy? Oh lovely, lovely! Is she with him though?’
‘Try to be courteous to Jane, dear,’ Beatrice advises. ‘And call her Mama without being asked. Your father wishes it. She is a good woman and fond of you.’
Magdalena’s face is expressive on that subject but she says nothing, allowing Beatrice to tidy her hair and stoop to pull off the sticky catchweed from her skirts.
‘Smile nicely at Jane when you see her, dear, and let her kiss you and don’t scowl.’
Magdalena gives a wriggle and a squirm. She pouts, scuffing the toe of her shoe against the paving stone. Florence does the same, without knowing why, her underlip over her upper one, tears coming to her eyes although she has no idea of feeling sad. Harry, coming into this scene of woe in the nurse’s arms, howls, arches his back and hurls his body backwards. Beatrice removes him from the nurse and pacifies him.
She understands. Magdalena is worried that, if her behaviour is too accommodating, Jane will want to take her back with them. Magdalena is bright and intuitive. Beatrice will not remonstrate with her. You know I’m on your side, heart’s darling, don’t you? she says silently to her niece. You are mine. I shall never willingly give you up but one must be canny and proceed by indirection: you understand that. With you I shall not fail, I never shall. She straightens the ribbon in Magdalena’s hair and, with Harry morose and snivelling against her shoulder, takes her niece’s hand.
Amy is entertaining the Anwyls in the parlour. You can hear it from the kitchen door, her loud, crude patois. Better relieve them.
What a shock: Will’s hair has gone completely white. The fac
e still young beneath the abundant silver curls is piquant and arresting. He has put on weight and has a small paunch. He affects dandy clothes, doubtless selected for him by the second Mrs Anwyl. Bounding in, Magdalena flings herself into her father’s arms. He scoops her up and spins her round. Begins to romp. Throws her in the air. Catches and clasps her tight against him. ‘My, how you’ve grown! Are you sure it’s really you? Are you Maggie Anwyl or a very tall fairy?’
One can read on Jane’s face, through the mask of propriety, how little she wishes to be at Sarum House. But you knew what you were getting, Beatrice thinks, when you married Will. She shakes the resolute smiler’s mauve-gloved hand and asks the usual questions. You’ve netted a widower nineteen years your junior, with a daughter and old ties you will never break – so of course you’re bound to think of me as a rival. Jane is one of the lady evangelists who’ve sprung up in the wake of Mrs Palmer and have no hesitation in preaching alongside the menfolk on public platforms.
Jane pats the sofa beside her; Will sets Magdalena down. He cannot take his eyes off his child; is mesmerised and saddened, at once famished and fed. No doubt it’s the mirror of the beloved face he sees – and wants to see – and can’t bear to see, which may be one reason why he visits rather rarely.
‘Come and greet your dear stepmama, Maggie,’ he encourages her. ‘She has brought you something nice, haven’t you, dear?’
Jane’s smile pleads. It says to the child, ‘You are strong and I am weak. Give me a chance to please you.’
Magdalena’s composed, sharp features reply, ‘I’m sorry to have to disappoint you but you’re wasting your time and money. I do not like you. I cannot be bought.’
Jane takes from her bag a parcel wrapped in a piece of lace. ‘Just a little something for you, dear. And how are your lessons going, Magdalena? Does the dear one attend church and Sunday school regularly, Beatrice? I always did at your age, you know, three times a day on the Sabbath … Ah, the little angel! Has the angel hurt its wing? Do come to Auntie Jane!’
Awakening Page 30