Guilty Thing (15 page)

‘Pensive citadel' comes from Wordsworth's ‘Nuns Fret Not' (‘And students with their pensive citadels'). Over the mantelpiece in his room hung a picture of the Duchess of Somerset, a seventeenth-century benefactress of Manchester grammar. De Quincey had gazed at the image a thousand times, and he now kissed her frozen lips before closing the door ‘for ever'. His possessions, mainly books, were packed in a trunk which the groom, whose back was ‘as spacious as Salisbury Plain', carried from the attic. Down the staircase they crept, De Quincey leading the way. ‘The silence was more profound than that of midnight,' he recalled, adding that ‘to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching than all other silence.' He stood at the foot of the last flight, listening to the ‘slow and firm' tread of the groom as he reached the ‘dangerous quarter' of the house, an area called the gallery. This was where the headmaster slept. With only a few steps to go, the groom slipped and the trunk fell, hitting ‘each step of the descent' like a series of great chords. It leapt, when it reached the floor, ‘with the noise of twenty devils, against the very bedroom door of the archididasculus', who lay within, sequestered in some deep recess. The groom began to laugh; the world of ordinary life was arrested as De Quincey waited, breathing hard, for what would happen next.

No one stirred. The groom retrieved the trunk and sent it to the carrier to be delivered to the Priory.
Lyrical Ballads
in his pocket, De Quincey stepped out of the school and onto the stinking street. Above him, the sky was ‘beginning to crimson' with ‘radiant lustre'. He launched himself into the dawn of the new day, drawn by the ‘
deep, deep magnet
' of William Wordsworth.

Soho Square, De Quincey's ‘stony-hearted stepmother'.

4

Residence in London

. . . and when the deed was done

I heard among the solitary hills

Low breathings coming after me, and sounds

Of undistinguishable motion, steps

Almost as silent as the turf they trod.

Wordsworth,
The Prelude
, Book First

His plan had been to head ninety miles north to the Lakes, but once he was on the road De Quincey changed his mind and bent his way south-west towards Chester. He wanted to see his sister, Mary, and reassure her that all was well.

There was a difference between running away to meet a revered poet and running home to see your sister, and De Quincey carried his sense of failure. He was running from, rather than to, Wordsworth; more like a man flying from something he dreaded than one who sought the thing he loved. Wordsworth had taken on such a ‘
hallowed character
' that any journey in his direction was, De Quincey felt, like that of a ‘devout Mahometan' to Mecca, or a ‘Christian devotee' looking with ‘rapt adoration to St Peter's at Rome'. He needed to approach his god with the solemnity of a pilgrim on a saintly mission, and not as a grammar school dropout in need of a loan and a good wash. This was the wrong time to make his introduction: the prospect of Wordsworth's first hearing his name ‘associated with some case of pecuniary embarrassment' was intolerable to him.

There was another risk attached to meeting Wordsworth at this precise moment. The morning before leaving the school, De Quincey had received a letter addressed in the aristocratic script of a foreign hand to a ‘Monsieur Monsieur De Quincy, Chester'. The envelope, postmarked ‘Hamburg', contained a banknote for forty guineas. Deciphering the accompanying message – a ‘
Sphinx's riddle
' – it became clear that the ‘windfall' was meant for another De Quincey, a French émigré wanting, now that the Channel was open once again, to return home. ‘Monsieur Monsieur De Quincy' not being known in Chester, the post office delivered the letter to the eldest son of their newest resident, the redoubtable Mrs Quincey. Receiving such a sum at the very moment he needed it was an astonishing coincidence which deepened De Quincey's resolution to abscond, and to waste no time in doing so. But equally astonishing was his growing realisation that there was someone else in Chester – a Frenchman, no less – carrying his name, and that this man was also living with ‘friendlessness and exile'. Thomas felt a quickening sympathy for his other.

De Quincey had wanted a new identity, and this is what he got. ‘By the touch of the pen' he had been ‘translated. . . not only in a
Monsieur
, but even into a self-multiplied
Monsieur
'. But of the two De Quinceys, he was the dissembler. His excitement at receiving the banknote turned to guilt: he was in possession of another man's money; if he kept it he was a ‘robber', if he cashed it he would ‘be punished inexorably with death'. If he returned it to the post office he ran the risk of being arrested; had Monsieur Monsieur De Quincy been expecting the banknote, he may have already informed officials of its possible theft, in which case uniforms would be waiting for him. To enter the post office would be equivalent to a ‘fawn' walking into a ‘lion's den'. De Quincey was now not only a runaway but a fugitive; throughout his long walk home he could hear footsteps approaching: ‘Two separate parties, I felt satisfied, must by this time be in chase of me; and the two chasers would be
confluent at the post office
.'

His fears were not ungrounded: the minute De Quincey's absence from Manchester Grammar was discovered a horse had been dispatched to the Priory, which had flown past him on the Chester Road. And an hour after Mrs Quincey was informed by the school that her son had absconded, she was visited by a post office official who explained the problem of the misdirected missive. The two incidents naturally segued into one: Thomas, reasoned his mother, had used the money to run to that Jacobin, William Wordsworth.

Had it not been for the ‘accursed letter', De Quincey would have luxuriated in his liberty. To exchange the fug of Manchester for an open road beneath high summer skies was wildly exhilarating. This, he later wrote, is ‘
what Wordsworth
, when describing the festal state of France during the happy morning-tide of her First Revolution. . . calls “
the senselessness of joy
”: this it was, joy – headlong – frantic – irreflective – and (as Wordsworth truly calls it), for that very reason,
sublime –
which swallowed up all capacities of rankling care or heart-corroding doubt.' He was crippled, however, by rankling care and heart-corroding doubt, and would remain so until he had rid himself of the ‘odious responsibility' of the money. Always convinced of his powers of destruction, De Quincey was made frantic by the thought that he was denying the Frenchman the freedom that he himself was currently enjoying. He had to return the banknote, but how?

By breakfast time he had reached Altringham, a small town he had last visited as a boy recovering from whooping cough. He remembered it clearly: at eight o'clock in the morning on another ‘
dazzling day
in July', his nurse had held him up to an open window where he had looked onto a market square filled with fruit, flowers and bonny women wearing aprons and caps. The gaiety ‘rose up like a fountain' to his casement. It was once again eight o'clock when De Quincey found himself returning to the same square where – to his delight – he saw the same fruit, the same flowers, the same caps and aprons. Perhaps, in the same house, the same window was opening onto the same scene. ‘All places, it seems, are not Whispering Galleries,' he told himself with relief. He ate his fill and then walked throughout the day, sleeping that night at an inn. On 4 July 1802, the ninth anniversary of his father's death, he reached his new home town.

To prevent his capture he kept close to Chester's city walls, where his route to the Priory took him along the banks of the River Dee. Here, apart from a country woman walking up ahead, he was alone. Suddenly a ‘tumultuous' sound came roaring towards him. ‘
What was it?
Where was it? Whence was it? Earthquake was it?' It came from the river where, wheeling upstream ‘at the rate of forty miles an hour' was a ‘huge charging block of waters'. The river was flowing backwards: it was as though ‘the Atlantic ocean had broke loose'. De Quincey and the country woman ‘ran like hares' to the top of a hill as the wave passed ‘with the ferocious uproar of a hurricane'. ‘How,' De Quincey asked, approaching his companion, ‘did she read the mystery' of the river's sudden ‘hysterics'? It was a phenomenon called ‘the Bore', the woman explained, caused by high sea tides from the Dee estuary. It was well known to the locals. Having shared one near-death experience, De Quincey confided in her the problem of the banknote and she agreed to return it to the post office on his behalf in exchange for half a crown. At which point, like the colossal tidal wave, De Quincey's own hysteria passed. Everyone was now free: he was ‘suddenly released' from the burden of guilt, the ‘poor emigrant' was released from exile, the post office was released from ‘the scandal and embarrassment of a gross irregularity', and De Quincey's family were ‘released from all anxieties. . . on the question of my fancied felony'. He could safely return to the Priory and talk to Mary, his ‘soul auxiliary'.

But to prevent her son's arrest, Mrs Quincey had already made plans for his expatriation. She had put Mary in a coach to the Lakes with orders to scoop up the wretched boy and put him on the next boat to the continent. So when De Quincey arrived at the Priory to find Mary, she had gone north to find him.

It was dusk when Thomas appeared in the garden of ruins and stood beneath his sister's window. No light came from her room, so he scribbled a note asking her to meet him outside and gave it to a servant to deliver. He had waited for only a few moments when he ‘heard a step' behind him. ‘Blindly and mechanically' De Quincey turned around and ‘stretched out' his arms to greet the young girl but found instead, gliding between the Lilliputian arches, the bronzed figure of his military Uncle Penson, back on leave from India: ‘a Bengal tiger would not have more startled me'. De Quincey was in luck. Uncle Penson, who had been expecting him, heartily approved of the boy's spirit: far better to be al fresco than sweating over Greek grammar. Elizabeth Quincey of course disagreed; her son's behaviour represented ‘
total revolt
' from her ‘rule'. But she was close to her brother and respected his views, so after reminding Thomas of the many sacrifices she had made on his behalf, she gave in and allowed him his ‘unnatural liberty'. She would not immediately return him to school; he could cross the border to Wales and walk amongst the mountains he had admired on his journey to Holyhead. Moreover, she would fund his trip to the tune of a guinea a week; any more than this and her younger sons would think there was a reward for disobedience.

De Quincey was horrified by his mother's suggestion that his ‘
headstrong act
' might have ‘evil consequences' for his brothers, and his awakened conscience ‘rang like a solemn knell'. Her drubbing had given him a dreadful – and correct – foreboding that his ‘error' would ‘magnify' itself at every stage of his life; he was reminded once more of the Belshazzar thunderings upon the wall of the Whispering Gallery.

He had achieved his freedom. But when De Quincey wandered in Wales, a period he describes in his
Confessions
as one of great suffering and hardship, he was less a romantic ‘pariah' than a student on his gap year. This was not running away; it was licensed misrule.

Setting out in late summer, his first stop was seven miles from home, in the vale of Gresford. Here, in a manicured cottage where ‘
even the brooks
were trained to behave themselves', lived two ladies, friends of De Quincey's mother. Their pampering was not what Thomas had in mind, and so he packed his bag and headed a further fourteen miles, into Llangollen, where another two ladies resided. Miss Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler, celebrated eccentrics, were a local tourist attraction. De Quincey knocked at the door. Courtesies followed, but neither party had much interest in the other. ‘It was not ladies I was seeking in Wales,' he conceded, as he set out on the road once more.