Awakening (43 page)

What Mrs Sala wanted, it appeared, was the correspondence she'd shared with Anna. She came straight to the point, without prelude or prevarication. The woman's eyes were powerful, a pale colour, intense, arresting, burning in the plain face, which might have been that of an agricultural labourer clothed in a lady's finery.

All Beatrice said was, ‘I cannot oblige.'

‘But are there letters of mine? If so, I hope you will return them to me, Mrs Ritter. This is my dear son, Johnnie.'

The introduction meant: for Johnnie's innocent sake, return my letters which might perhaps cause scandal for him at some later date.

‘How do you do, Johnnie,' said Beatrice. ‘But you are mistaken, Mrs Sala, there are no letters extant.'

‘Nothing whatever?'

‘Nothing whatsoever.'

Beatrice spoke in an even tone, without animus. She perceived her visitor's flinching vulnerability to insult. But after all, the woman should be relieved to know that no record survived to distress either herself or her heir in years to come. Mrs Sala however seemed heartbroken. Nothing was left, nothing whatever. There was no echo, no trace. She had to leave with empty hands. Her son opened the gate onto the road; she turned, an autumnal figure, and looked back for a moment. The mist rolled in and took her away with it.

*

Entering the room Anna had called her study, Beatrice seated herself at the desk and turned the key in the lock of the metal box. It was brimming with papers. Scraps and shreds. Blank pages torn from old books. Wrapping paper. Wallpaper. Anna's childish writing, crabbed, backward-leaning, crawled everywhere. Some of it was written backwards. Often there were no spaces between words; punctuation was absent. Anna had been transcribing the fragments and linking them up into a sequence of observations or stories.

As Beatrice dipped her hand in the sea of papers, she came up with a flour bag crammed with letters. Letters from Miriam Sala. Letters from Lore.

She began to read. The children romped with Amy in the garden. The baby screamed. She ignored it. She read on. The grandfather clock struck the hour. Someone was knocking on the door. Beatrice read on. She closed the lid of the chest. She let herself out. The rest of that day was a blank.

Beatrice wandered – vainly – around the wilderness in search of the tump. She came upstairs with scissors and began to cut out and glue. She locked herself in. It went on for weeks, the deciphering and the sorting and the separation. Beatrice was inside Anna's locked mind. Fascinated, enthralled. And yet judging, censoring. Saying, This may be kept but this must be discarded. She had pledged herself to preserve a picture of Anna that would represent her best qualities for those who came after. And later she would transcribe it in her own handwriting and destroy everything else.

One has a duty to one's children.

Was it the following week that Beatrice lit the fire?

‘What are you burning?' Joss strolled out to ask.

‘Just some old papers.' I am burning our shame, your shame, Papa's shame, Beatrice didn't say. I'm burning a stigma. It will be completely forgotten and erased.

‘What in God's name
are you doing, Beatrice?' Joss demanded. ‘These are my sister's papers. They don't belong to you.'

Joss was angry and cursed. She was shocked at his gutter language. But I'm doing this in God's name, Beatrice thought. You should thank me. It's my clear duty. Whatever that was with Lore, it was – what can one say? – unnatural. A sin against Papa, against the sacred bonds of family, against God's law. Beatrice's face flamed in the scalding fire. It's impossible to unknow something one knows but nevertheless let me try. Draw the veil, decently. The fault was in Lore, not my sister. Christian can never have had the slightest suspicion. Will cannot have known. It's over now, Beatrice thought, thank Heaven, over, and Joss, down on his knees and raging, was unable to salvage more than a few scraps, which he took into the house as if they were sacred scriptures. Finally Beatrice fed the odious books to the flames.
Freedom Seeks Her
was the last to burn.

*

Within a generation all trace of Anna's waywardness will have vanished. And already Beatrice's own memory of her sister has softened. The price is a sense of having somehow mislaid something. She's forever casting around for something she can't quite name. Whatever is it? Beatrice occasionally finds herself standing in the wilderness not quite sure what she came out here for. Doubtless pregnancy does strange things to the memory. This endless fruitfulness of hers.

Where have you gone, Annie? Beatrice can't help asking in the still reaches of the night. Her sister's faith was, at best, intermittent and anomalous. Heresy was a magnet. She'd go out of her way to make provocative assertions, which perhaps she didn't mean. Where a line was drawn – thus far and no further – you could be sure that Anna would be tempted. And yet wasn't it also the case that whenever she did cross the line, she'd keep fairly close to it, in case she wanted to skip back? And, oh, if Anna
had
gone too far, surely our kind Lord would have gone the extra distance, made up the difference for her. Curious how much easier it is to believe in the possibility of mercy for others than for oneself. People have had to remind Beatrice that theirs is the God of love who died for all of us, including herself.

But my shortcomings, Beatrice would lament. My failings.

One day, not long before he left for his ministry in Manchester, Will caught her unawares. He stood with her beneath the larch at the edge of the wilderness and ministered to her. He said, ‘Shortcomings? You have no shortcomings. None. The anchor has gone. The winds blow. The earth spins. But not because of your shortcomings. Do believe me. I would know, wouldn't I, if you had? Annie and I agreed, we two were both much of a muchness and God makes do with that, if we have loved – or tried to love. Annie understood that very well.' He explained that he, like Christian, no longer believed in Calvinism or hellfire. It had all been superceded.

Beatrice stands by the hearth, rocking to and fro, with Harry quiet in her arms. Although he has been cross and irksome all day, the teeth piercing the lower gums making him drool and whimper, Beatrice doesn't feel inclined to lose his company. Everyone is in bed. The only light comes from the hearth. She lays the baby on her lap and they look at one another. Quite steadily. The fire rustles and flaps.

She thinks of Will and he comes. One moment he was in her mind, the next he's in the room. He hesitates, explaining that he came down to smoke a pipe. He's sorry if he's disturbing her.

‘No, you're not. Of course not.' She relaxes and smiles. ‘Come and sit with me for a moment.'

‘There's something I need to ask you, Beatrice.'

‘Yes?'

‘About Magdalena.'

‘No, don't ask me.'

‘Dearest – I know you love her – but, think, I love her too. And my wife is eager to take care of her. We cannot have children of our own and it makes sense –'

‘I can't lose Magdalena, Will, and she can't lose me. No. I promised Annie. No. Don't – please – ever – even speak of taking her away from her home. You will kill me.'

‘But I'm her father.'

‘I'd rather give you Florence. Take Florence. Take her. Go on. Tell your wife I am giving you Florence. By far the easier child. I mean it. And your wife – with the best will in the world – which I know Jane has – forgive me, Will – your wife cannot love the daughter of your first marriage.'

And when he's gone, Beatrice, faint with relief, clutches at Will's promise. It's all he can do for her now and he has done it.

Magdalena is nowhere to be found. She hasn't said goodbye. Perhaps she couldn't bear it. Or maybe she feared that, at the last moment, her father and stepmother would bundle her up and force her to go to Manchester with them: she'd never see her home again.

There are hiding places. Beatrice knows them all: how could she not? Niches and alcoves. The cellar. The store cupboard. She pauses at every point in Sarum House to listen. Mice stir in the wainscots. She sees the black crumbs of their droppings. She listens for the sound of sobbing. Nothing. The clock chime skirls the half hour. Lunchtime soon. No healthy girl of eight can ignore hunger pangs for long. Magdalena may not be in the house at all – but as it's pouring with rain; she's unlikely to be in the garden. Beatrice ticks off all the secret places where the Pentecost girls used to hide and tries them all.

She thinks of one more possibility indoors before she tries the outhouses. Instinct leads her to the broom cupboard under the stairs, with its triangular door.

How is that you know there's someone behind a door even when that person is making no noise at all? But you do.

She pulls open the stiff door and there are the grubby pinafore and scuffed shoes of a foetal girl making herself as inconspicuous as possible as she huddles beside the buckets and mops. Beatrice kneels down. She speaks Magdalena's name softly. Trapped smells of carbolic, lavender polish and menthol flow out. Maggie won't answer. She won't come out. Rather than try to coerce her, Beatrice gets down on her knees and crawls in.

*

Afterword

A writer of historical fiction, imagining within the gaps of the historical record, plays host to the voices of extraordinary strangers. My story originated in diaries, memoirs, essays and sermons of the nineteenth century: in, for instance, Darwin's notebooks; Emily Brontë's diary papers and the French essays she wrote in Belgium; Edith Simcox's amorous journal; the writings of Mary Benson, the extraordinary lesbian wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury; the personal testaments of the Thomas sisters, the Pountneys and the Winkworths. I followed Philip Gosse to Tenby, G.H. Lewes to Ilfracombe and George Eliot to Swansea.

Such Victorian dissidents, arguing vociferously amongst themselves in my head, contributed to my story's invented composite figures. In Sarah Thomas's wonderful Fairford diary (The Secret Diary of Sarah Thomas: A Victorian Lady, 1860-1865) I found two Baptist sisters and a circle of very human pastors; in George Eliot's journals and letters a narrative of the freethinking female author. Some of my sources invited themselves into my pages to make cameo appearances: Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Baptist luminary, and his wife Susanna; the lovable John Clifford; Philip and Edmund Gosse; the American revivalist, Phoebe Palmer; Arthur and Hannah Munby; feminists Barbara Bodichon and Bessie Parkes.

I decided to open the story in 1860, the year following both the publication of Darwin's
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
and the outbreak in Wales of a spectacular religious Awakening. Anna's ‘tump' sprang in part from Darwin's famous ‘entangled bank' in the last paragraph of his great work, exemplifying the connection of biodiversity with the laws underlying the ‘war of nature'. The setting is an invented village near Salisbury, my mother's home town, where Dissenters and free-thinkers alike were overshadowed by one of the world's most beautiful cathedral spires and where the great plain was the scene of crucial Victorian archaeological discoveries. My people are Baptists partly because my own path led through this branch of Dissent into humanistic agnosticism. The surname Pentecost was the maiden name of a Wiltshire great-aunt, Florence – a rather blessed inheritance, since at Pentecost the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles, endowing them with the gift of voice.

Locked in sororicidal struggle, the Pentecost sisters test the limits of what was permissible to women in a world of politicised medicine and misogynist law and custom.
Awakening
is a story of virtuous transgressors and transgressive virtue, in which some characters, like the renegade minister, Mr Kyffin, dance on the edge of madness; others turn to the séances of Spiritualism; Dissenters look to Revival or Awakening to deliver them from the age's perceived infidelities. When Awakening comes, it happens darkly and in singular ways: as sexual discovery or as motherhood, as the finding or hearing of a voice in a fractured modern world. ‘Christianity is fissiparous,' as Anna remarks, to Beatrice's disgust: the Church splinters into sects and then the sects splinter and the splinters splinter, until each man's hand is against his neighbour's.

Many years ago Alan Shelston of Manchester University introduced me to the study of Victorian literature: I am grateful to Alan for passing on his passion and knowledge. Over the years I have received invaluable help from the staff of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth. I am grateful to the Revd. Stephen Copson, Honorary Secretary to the Baptist Historical Society, for generously furnishing me with documents relating to nineteenth century Baptist ministers. I thank Dr Lyndall Gordon for our ongoing conversation about our Victorian foremothers. Of course, any errors and eccentricities are the sole responsibility of the author.

I should like to thank friends of many years for their encouragement and support – especially Helen Williams, Rosalie Wilkins, Barbara Prys-Williams and Andrew Howdle. Andrew will recognise some words of comfort memorialised in the text. I am grateful to M. Wynn Thomas, Neil Reeve and Glyn Pursglove of Swansea University, most learned and kind of colleagues; also to my fellow writers at Swansea, Anne Lauppe-Dunbar, Nigel Jenkins, David Britton, Fflur Dafydd, Alan Bilton, Jon Gower and Jasmine Donahaye. I owe a considerable debt to the staff at Parthian, Richard Davies, Claire Houguez and especially my wise and thoughtful editor, Francesca Rhydderch. I'm endlessly grateful to my children, Emily, Grace and Robin, for their tender support.