The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  Solemnly, carefully, but with my quickened breathing filling the silence like some frantic bellows, I gathered up the other pages, got to my feet and went to the armchair. I switched on the old standing lamp (whose shade was still rather crooked after the encounter with John Evelyn), sat down, laid the letter on the chair arm in the bright pool of light, and, with Hartley watching intently from the shadows and Sarah turning her sad face away, began to read.

  5

  Holborn, 24th day of August

  SIR,

  It was a blessed hand that jostled me into your path for the sake of sixpence, and a curse that swept us apart. Each knows the other Hathe What He Lacke, but the world suffers not such happy exchanges lightly. Indeed, is it not a most comely geste of Nature that all men have in abundance what she herself hath rendered useless to them, and want what they most desire? Why spoil the joke?

  My particular reason for returning your friendship unopened, as it were, was that I already owed you a debt that had not been willingly offered. I have something to give in return, though it cannot make us even: you liked the good prieste Dowleie’s last ballad, I think, and in time you will see all those of his works that I have writ out in a fair hand, and with much labour for there are many.

  Of those men — and they be few enough — who would give so much as a penn’orth of pox for poetry, some will doubt the authenticity of Dowley. Others, I fancy, will apply their narrow wits to anything that absolves them of belief in a subchanter’s son. I have wondered where my last friend would stand in this Tilt of the Toms, and would save him the trouble of choosing. A game for fools!

  You already know the answer: the words themselves know not the hand that writ them — that, Sir, is poetry. What matter if it were Dowley or Furey? Upon the reader, and not the writer, do the burthen and duty of ownership settle: for they are his lines now. Perhaps it was noble Dowley invented Furey, after all, as scribe and moiling errand-boy, or perhaps it was the other — these are mere prefaces. The story has passed on: it is told now by the lines themselves, that weary not of the telling so long as they are read. And you will read them and own them.

  My second disclosure I make for your wife’s sake as well as yours. She and I happening to meet one fair day while her husband was keeping to his chamber, I took the liberty of approach, which she received kindly, I think, out of charity. I was bold, and she unpractised at polite deflections, and we had much discourse. We met again — by Chance, I fancy — and, her husband, that is you, Sir, being alternately more attentive to my poor Scribblings and his own dressing jacket than to her, she confided in me most affectingly. I am not ashamed to confess that my admiration was soon mingled with a few potent sparkes of Lust, which took flame when I perceived the same wholesome appetites in her, and only her husband will know how well they had been satisfied of late.

  He, who is most acquainted with her natural qualities of faithfulness and duty, can best imagine the unhappiness occasioned by this trial, which went the way it must. Aye, a whirlwind of fine feelings was visited upon the coarse beds of Chancery Lane, and its foul pillows watered by tears of Ecstasie and Sorrow. And if you spit jealous anger onto this page and think of spitting it upon your gentle wife, remember the man you believe yourself to be and act as that man should act. But what monster lays such a Poniard in his rival’s hand, when she perhaps stands nigh, that unhappy and unguarded queen? He must be a heartless braggart, unless he love you both and love Truth above all, and finds himself as it were pressed into a corner by the converging hands of time. I arm you thus that you might touch the blade to the bands of deceit and remorse, that she and you be freed to love again, and better than before if you are wise. If there be any rightful reproaches they belong to her, but she will have none.

  In some quarters, I own, you surpass your obedient servant (he has tried his hand). I hope you will continue to comb the beaches of the wide world with your pen, and that you can perhaps give it back some little of what it has lost — God knows, it needs mending. But the wide world don’t pay enough. Wake up, ask yourself now what it is you love, build a Temple to it, go there and write your true name and let the world make do with the other. Invite your friends if they are worthy of it and ignore your enemies. As for T.F., he was born into the wrong city, the wrong nation, the wrong time. I have done what I could with what I had, smuggled Truth under a cloak of lies and moiled myself out. Night falls here. I deliver myself now into the hands of my good Prieste, as I delivered him into yours.

  I am, Sir,

  Your servant no longer, but your humble and penitent Friend,

  Thos. Furey

  dieth.

  I got to my feet, gave nods of respectful acknowledgment to my two silent witnesses, gathered up the three leaves neatly and knocked on the door of the study. ‘Enter,’ came the familiar voice: the doctor was standing behind his desk, leaning his veined hands upon it and frowning down at his work. I stepped forward largo and laid the letter before him without speaking. His glance rested on it for a moment and then lifted to my face.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly, wearily, as though he too had suffered the hardships of the search. ‘You’ve read it?’ I gave him the same nod I had offered his thought-ancestors, walked out into the hall and thrust a long arm into my coat.

  6

  I entered the cottage by the dying light of my torch and struck my head squarely against the parlour lintel. Even a man touched by the sublime will utter the coarsest of oaths when his fine thoughts are mocked in this way — that crude exclamation that lurks inside him, ready to spring, ready to leave all his worthier words in the starting blocks. And I suppose that for most whom death catches at unawares, it is this angry seizing-up of the engine of language — and not a poignant theatrical direction or a cricketing metaphor — that freezes upon the lips for eternity. I hope I have more time (or not enough; the latter for preference).

  I laid a few sticks of kindling on the embers of the morning’s fire and the room started into eerie, flickering being as they took flame; then I buried them in coal and turned on the lamp. Dolly mewed from her basket and went back to sleep. I sat down heavily, still wearing my coat and scarf, and waited for my throbbing forehead to give up its complaining. My job was done.

  When M’Synder returned from her nameless labours at the house I ducked warily into the kitchen to tell her of my success.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, turning sharply from the stove and looking up at me. The four lenses of our glasses had steamed up in the relative warmth and to observe each other around them we both held our heads crookedly, like birds. ‘And is the doctor sure it’s the right one?’

  ‘It’s the right one.’

  ‘Oh. Well. Congratulations!’ Her voice expressed a blend of triumph and uncertainty that accorded well with my own mood, though I lacked her foundation of serenity. ‘Is he pleased with it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.’

  ‘I do hope you wunna be hurryin’ to leave us, Mr Browne. I have enjoyed our little chats. I’ve just got in another week’s provisions, too.’

  ‘I’ll — talk to the doctor tomorrow. See what he says.’

  Well, would he be pleased with the letter? Was I? Are you? The doctor had hoped it would be a valuable document in itself; Corvin had promised scandal; I had feared it didn’t exist. Furey’s disclosures were not revelatory — according to the encyclopaedia, everyone has long agreed that he wrote the Dowley poems (although there was indeed a fierce Tilt of the Toms for ten years or so), and Juliet had already hinted at Sarah Louise’s uncharacteristic dalliance with the poet. The last paragraph, whose figurative temple Hartley had chosen to interpret literally, suggested Furey as the first inspiration for the mysterious creed that united the names carved into the stone tablets: a creed of truth, the doctor had called it, and yet it was born out of one of England’s most notorious frauds.

  But as I thus examined my response to the long-awaited, long-imagined letter after dinner, the only reac
tion of which I could be sure was a gentle stirring in my affections when I thought of the proud, brilliant Thomas Furey and heard his calm words whispering across the centuries, keening through all the scribbled words of Hartley that had addressed me from a hundred different books. The feeling was not unlike that faltering of my wholesome disinterest in Rose, but fainter and more resonant: it was a kind of haunting.

  I did not go straight to the house in the morning: why should I? I thought. A damp wind tossed drizzle about and dragged marbled clouds slowly across the hills, and I zipped up my waterproof chin-high, nestled my hands in its cold but cosily windless pockets, set my borrowed boots into the steepening ground and let them and my thoughts wander where they would.

  Corvin’s disappearance without saying goodbye had given me the idea that I might do the same. If I packed my initialled suitcase and walked out of the combe, neither he nor the doctor would have any means of tracing me (a common name can be a blessing): they didn’t even know the name of the bank that had employed me or the suburb that had hosted my deluded past life. Why would they want to trace me anyway? We were all square. And if I did resort again to flight, and if I turned in the winding lane as the combe disappeared from view for the last time, what words would I utter aloud over the wind in the budding birches? As a desperate man lashes out at his friends, I repeated in my mind my previous utterance, ‘So long, you bastards,’ but I knew it would stick in my throat. ‘Farewell, my indeducible friends,’ I might say instead.

  All square: then what had I gained from my visit? As promised by the notice, my curiosity had been rewarded. Indeed, there was something suspicious about the steady flow of answers to my questions (only Rose had kept largely silent). Who was I to deserve such confidences? It was almost as though my sources — Juliet, Corvin, M’Synder — had been acting under instructions. If so, there could be little doubt as to the principal: who else but the all-seeing Magus with the pained smile?

  I paused for breath at the viewpoint above the cottage and looked out along the combe through its veil of drizzle. Its most obvious and troublesome benefaction to Samuel Browne had been to underline his ignorance — to show him up. This chronic ache of shallowness, of missing the point, of steadily wasting the opportunity of life was surely what my old friend Keats had called ‘the Burden of the Mystery’ (he was quoting another poet, but I did not know that — a case in point). And yet most people — my old self included — seemed to live their lives entirely free of this burden, crumpling suddenly if it were forced upon them by a death or the reach of some other eternal hand, tearing their hair then and wailing at the moon, but in-between-times quite satisfied in their ignorance; thus unencumbered they were happy to stay within the confines of the little maps of habit they had drawn on some corner of the huge blank sheet of the mind. Of course it was my ex-wife who had planted the burden firmly onto my own shoulders — a position surely preferable to its hanging unseen in the air above my head. She had taught me the old Socratic paradox, and the combe had driven the lesson home.

  Ragged skirts of cloud were just skimming the broad, sodden ridge, and I had to stow away my useless glasses and continue in a fitting double mist of hill-fog and myopia. It is one thing to know nothing about the decline of Rome, I thought, but quite another to blunder helplessly into love or death. I have twice mentioned that I have never been bereaved. I have observed death — the sudden absences of contemporaries at school and university, and the less horrifying declines of elderly relatives and bon-viveur tutors. I was fond of each of my grandparents, and I miss each of them sometimes, but I did not grieve for any of them. Even my parents grieved equivocally, thanks to my mother’s calm, rational will which mastered my father’s more sentimental bent.

  The further I advance through adulthood without suffering grief, the darker death seems to loom. Now as I plodded through the mist I wondered whether it might be possible to come to terms with grief — to be a student of death — in advance. Certainly the combe had provided plenty of case studies. Here I had learned that one might work day and night, wear out one’s soul by the age of seventeen and resort to arsenic, or be torn almost in half on the fields of Arras though yearning to live, or drink a bottle of Armagnac and silently, happily crystallise beneath the crystalline sky, or be loving and wise a week too soon, or find oneself entombed in a giant white outfield not knowing which way is up, but knowing for minutes and long minutes that the umpire has raised his fatal hand. Then of course there was Sam himself, running barefoot into a red canvas and leaving an eddy of unanswerable questions hanging in the air behind him.

  I found a new path leading around the far side of Grey Man, and the dim sky was growing dimmer by the time I joined the old grassy track that climbed into the combe from the west. As I neared the stiles at the top of the little pass and remembered Rose leading me over them, the giant figure of Meaulnes appeared ahead, loping up towards me. Droplets of water bobbed and swung from the peak of his cap and hung like improbable pearls on his fleshy earlobes. I told him I had finished my work for the doctor, and would be leaving soon. His answer came out as a sort of sombre couplet:

  ‘That, my friend, is what they all say. Some of them leave, some of them stay.’ We shook hands — it was like grasping the oversized hand of one of Rodin’s seven-foot burghers — and went our separate ways.

  7

  There was no answer to my knock in the study’s dark alcove. I was about to check the library by way of the dining room when through the open parlour door I glimpsed the silver crown of the doctor’s head peeping above the back of his favourite chair. The fire was lit and an unopened bottle of wine stood in its usual place on the hearth.

  ‘Is that my missing champion — Mr Browne?’ came his dry, contented voice, though he did not stir. ‘Vanquisher of prunes, keeper of promises, deliverer of the goods?’ I stepped forward and stood with my rain-chilled back to the fire while he beamed up at me. He pointed to Taboni’s merciless angel of truth, who glowed an eerie white in the yellow lamplight. ‘She shines a little brighter today, don’t you think?’

  It took me a while to dry out and warm up, but the doctor fussed over me and stoked the fire and soon we were both settled with glasses of the silky, tawny wine — an old claret laid down by his father.

  ‘Here’s to young Thomas Furey,’ he said solemnly, raising his glass, ‘an English poet.’ I murmured the name back to him, and felt again the odd haunting, the vertigo on that narrow bridge over the centuries. Tinted firelight veered and curled in the wine’s dark prism.

  ‘Hartley,’ began the doctor after a long, deliberate silence, ‘whom we left slumped in the stagnant wreck of his study, read the letter through twice and then hobbled slowly, dizzily over to the fire. His fire burned all year — feeling cold was a side-effect of the opium, or rather the lack of it: only the next dose could warm him. For several minutes he weighed the possibility of tossing the letter into the flames, but instead, after reading it a third time (and perhaps remembering the man he believed himself to be), he mounted the stairs to his wife’s chamber and handed it to her in silence before returning to the study.

  ‘He subsequently fell ill with some fever — all too common for him — and she nursed him for several weeks. From his bed he sent urgent enquiries after Furey and discovered he was dead and buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. The fever lingered, but when at last it began to recede Hartley found himself propelled forward as though from a run-up into a new dawn of health and vitality. He threw back dusty curtains, cleared his desk, and even climbed up to the summit of Grey Man to watch the sunrise. “Welcome back, O Life! ” he wrote. “Now I have strength enough to write both my names.” An odd statement, I always thought, but the letter explains it. He and Sarah named the wrongs they had done each other (his list was long!), and forgave each other though perhaps not themselves. He begged her to tell him everything Furey had said to her in London, and she obliged, more or less.

  ‘The next morning he ordered stacks of newspa
pers and journals and pored over the big questions of the day, and that autumn Beachcomber leapt back onto the journalistic stage. Over the next few years his articles addressed diverse subjects — the urgent American question, the abolition of slavery, the economic potential and social implications of mechanisation, and freedom of speech and religion, to name but a few — and became famous for their forceful prose. But he saved his best writing for private correspondence, holding long exchanges with many celebrated figures including the aforementioned Wilkes, Sharp the abolitionist, Arkwright the industrialist, and radical thinkers from Smith and Hume in Edinburgh to Diderot and d’Holbach in Paris. Not even your friend Gibbon escaped! These letters, lost and forgotten now, were the influential works to which I once referred. It was an exciting time for thinkers — a surge in the fitful Western progression — and Hartley was at the heart of it, always questioning, suggesting, encouraging, whether in public or private: writing both his names.

  ‘Meanwhile in the combe he steadily accumulated his library, simply as a by-product of his insatiable thirst for knowledge — a personal slagheap of processed words. But of course he recognised its worth — if Sarah questioned his expenditure he would call it the jewel of his estate. “The collection’s true value increases as the square of its number,” he wrote. “But who else will use it?” she asked, to which he replied, “I refuse admission to no one.”’

  ‘Was he still taking opium?’ I was thinking of his gaunt appearance in the portrait.