Awakening (12 page)

Christian's fame burnishes his charisma. He smiles down into her eyes, only to be swept away, for the great Charles Haddon Spurgeon has made his entrance. He is, in himself, a one-man Revival. Ministers, students, newspapermen, missionaries' wives flock around Mr Spurgeon, Miss Randolph and Mr Ritter, putting questions while the guests drink tea. Ladies encircle Christian, who seems more interested in the newspaper reporters. And he's hers, isn't he? Beatrice has the sense that her life is on the point of changing, and for the better.

‘Miss Pentecost! Glad I am to see you.' The white-haired little man pumping her hand is Idris Jones of Bedwellty. ‘Am I right that congratulations are in order? You and – Herr Ritter – ?'

‘Not that I'm aware, Mr Jones.' Beatrice invokes a formula she regularly deploys to parry insinuations about her other suitor, Mr Anwyl. Mr Jones passes on to his great theme of Revival, which must come from Wales, for Mr Beecher cannot be spared from his great American work. Already at Aberystwyth and Ynys Môn the fires are lit and the saints kindled.

‘I trust you're right, Mr Jones. But shouldn't we return to our places?'

Beatrice steals glimpses of Christian on the platform, the freed slave girl having retired to rest. Dr Angus, principal of the college, thoughtfully stroking with white fingers his considerable beard, is seated next to the guest of honour.

Mr Spurgeon rises.

Already the great hall of the college is spellbound – if puzzled. For he seems to be criticising the great Beecher.

Mr Beecher is a man of prodigious gifts but he is not a Calvinist. No!

Mr Beecher is not a gospel preacher. No!

But on the subject of slavery, Mr Beecher is categorically right! Yes!

Mr Spurgeon, plump and snub, is transfigured into a seraph before Beatrice's eyes. What produces this magnetism, she can hardly tell. But who does not surrender to Mr Spurgeon's spell? You're not your own but the seraph's. Fast-paced oratory; jests where you least expect them; rustic anecdotes and soaring rhapsodies. Spurgeon's voice reaches with perfect clarity the scarlet and golden ceiling of the college; carries into the intimate self its honey and sage, the sweet and the bitter.

‘I thank my Maker; England is a free country! Aye or nay?'

A roar from the audience: ‘Aye!'

‘No slaves here in the home of liberty. Aye or nay?'

‘Aye!'

‘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 looking 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.'