Changing Heaven
Authors: Jane Urquhart
Tags: #Haworth (England), #Fiction, #Historical, #Man-Woman Relationships, #Ghost, #General, #Literary, #Balloonists, #Women Scholars
BOOKS BY JANE URQUHART
FICTION
The Whirlpool
Storm Glass
(short stories)
Changing Heaven
Away
The Underpainter
The Stone Carvers
A Map of Glass (fall
2005)
POETRY
I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace
False Shuffles
The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan
Some Other Garden
CONTENTS
This novel is for Emily B. and Emily U.
and in memory of Ken Adachi
How still, how happy! Those are words
That once would scarce agree together;
I loved the plashing of the surge,
This changing heaven, the breezy weather
–E
MILY
B
RONTË
S
HE WANTS TO
write a book about the wind, about the weather.
She wants the words
constancy
and
capriciousness
to move in and out of the sentences the way a passing cloud changes the colour of the page you read outside on a variable day. She wants there to be thunder, then some calm, then some thunder again. She wants to predict time in relation to change and to have all her predictions prove wrong. She wants recurrence. That cloud that looks like the face of a man you might fear or love-she wants that cloud to appear on the horizon, then disappear, then appear again. She wants to be forced indoors by tempests and driven into air by heat, to be caught miles from shelter by a squall. She wants to see the Great Lake altered by the activity of the sky, to see a still moorland reservoir develop white-caps for the first time in its life, to look upon the spines of animals whose fur is being blown in the wrong direction; to see their eyes reflect rain, sleet, snow. She wants the breath of the wind in her words, to hold its invisible body in her arms. She wants the again and again of that revenant, the wind-its evasiveness, its tenacity, its everlastingness.
“We’re blessed and cursed by the wind here,” one of the villagers might say to her, shouting to make himself heard above the gale. And in the weeks, the months to come, she will change her mind about the wind, as often as the wind itself will change its mind about the organization of the sky or how much further it should twist the trees.
Sometimes this is a direct, purposeful wind, which, if you are to believe the villagers, inhales deeply on the Russian
Steppes and hurls itself, with remarkable speed and accuracy, across vast distances to Haworth Moor in Yorkshire, England. Not a subtle wind, but one that is icy, fierce, and constant. It brings the white invisibility and lack of detail connected to Arctic places. It brings sound-a roar rather than a whistle or a howl; a brutal statement. Because it is a pure wind, a wind of the sky rather than of the earth, it brings weather. In the manner of a swift parade, patterns of clouds are moved by it to announce their intentions over and over again on the horizon.
Sometimes the wind rarefies, becomes more amorous, less aggressive, more disturbing. Then it is a wind that has been around for a long, long time; a wind that, according to the ancient Greeks, was born about the same time as chaos; or that other semi-human, a Cyclops called Brontë–the Greek word for thunder. And what is thunder, hereabouts, but a strong voice making itself heard in a rough wind?
She wants to write a book about disturbance; about elements that change shape but never substance, about things that never disappear.
About relentlessness. About sky, weather, and wind.
PART ONE
Wind
This is my home, where whirlwinds blow,
Where snowdrifts round my path are swelling;
’Tis many a year, ’tis long ago,
Since I beheld another dwelling
.
–E
MILY
B
RONTË
A
RIANNA
E
THER
and her entourage climbed the steep main street of the village. All except one of the small assemblage bent their heads into the fierce north wind which, though not cold in early September, was not warm either. The one who walked tall, took the wind in his teeth and the low evening sun in his eyes, was a man of perhaps thirty-five years, dark-haired, of a slim, strong build with wide shoulders and broad hands. He wore a red scarf and a waistcoat of green corduroy-the latter having the effect of turning his eyes the same colour-for he had the eyes of a changeling: eyes that are fickle and true in their colour only to that which is near to them. These eyes, surmounted by perfect black brows, were the predominant feature in a face of extraordinary beauty. He was a beautiful, beautiful man with a character to match-if we are to take as evidence his unwillingness to let the wind, the sun, the hill get the better of him. However, on closer examination, one could see undeniable lines of acute anxiety branching out from the jewels of his eyes like the spidery threads of railways on a map. This man was clearly anxious, and had been for a long, long time. Around his mouth as well (this time like small streams on the same map) were traces of continued unhappiness mixed with the very stubbornness that would not allow him to bend his head to accommodate the dogged wind.
At his side walked a woman who appeared to be the most delicate lady in England: a tall, pretty woman, exceptionally slender, with fine, fair, curly hair that would not lie flat upon her head regardless of the army of tortoiseshell combs and barrettes called into action for that purpose. Her hair, or part of it, was now lifted by the ridiculous wind as were
her pale blue skirts and, it would seem, her arms as well since she held them slightly out from her sides, and walked as if she were balancing on a wire. In fact, it seemed the wind might carry her away altogether, so weightless did everything about her appear to be. Every man in the village who was watching this little parade, and most of them were, fell immediately in love with her, wanting to hold her down with his strong shepherd’s arms, wanting to construct black millstone grit walls to protect her from the weather, wanting to smooth the wind-tossed tresses from her forehead. And at exactly the same moment every man in the village fell to hating her handsome companion, who was apparently oblivious of this angel at his side, staring straight ahead, offering her no help at all in her negotiation of the perilous ascent of the main street, at the top of which waited the Olde White Lion Hotel, and shelter.
All of the men knew the stories about Arianna Ether, which was, of course, not her real name at all-though they didn’t know that. It was rumoured, for instance, that she had levitated in the cradle, so lighter than air had she been, from the beginning, that her mother had to use twenty blankets secured by large stones merely to confine her to her bassinette. Her father’s pet name for her had been “Milkweed” since she had, as a child, and even now, resembled the interior of the pod of that plant; both in her almost white, silky hair and in her inclination to float away. Later it was said that he had special iron shoes made for her, so that she would not be in danger of drifting up into the clouds when she played with the other children. And at night … at night her parents dared not leave the window open even a crack, for Arianna M. (for Milkweed) Ether could easily, as a result of her incredible thinness, have sleep-floated through even the smallest opening and disappeared into the cosmos beyond.
So why, the outraged men wondered, as they searched shyly beneath her skirts for the iron shoes, and they wondered if perhaps she wore iron undergarments as well, why
did her handsome companion not lay, at least, a friendly, steadying hand on her shoulder to weigh her down as she made her way up the street of this unfamiliar windy village?