The Lady's Slipper (41 page)
Read The Lady's Slipper Online
Authors: Deborah Swift
Stephen nodded. ‘No matter. Thou art here now.’
She leaned towards him. There was one more mystery she needed to lay to rest.
‘But tell me, do you know what became of Ella Appleby, the girl who used to work for me as housemaid?’
‘An odd thing–they say that when Thomas died, she just disappeared. It was quite a scandal at the time. She took as many valuables from the house as she could carry, and she and her sister just vanished. The king’s men tried to catch up with her, and there were rumours she was seen in London. But she must have covered her tracks well. There’s been no more word of her since.’
‘She would be getting on in years, anyway,’ said Alice, ‘like the rest of us. It all seems so long ago. But I would still find it hard to forgive her.’
‘But she was so young. Scarcely more than a child.’
Alice could find nothing remotely child-like in her memory of Ella. But then, Stephen had never met her.
He carried on. ‘And in a strange way, without Ella Appleby your future would have been quite another story. She gave thee a life thou couldst never have foretold, just as surely as meeting Richard transformed me.’
They sat companionably, mulling over this thought.
‘Wilt thou join us at the meeting for worship tonight?’ said Stephen.
She smiled her agreement, and later that evening found herself in the great hall, now transformed into a meeting room. The quiet of the meeting lulled her, the busyness of the day banished by the calm faces. Nobody spoke. Alice looked around and was oddly moved. She understood now what Richard had talked of, the presence he had felt on the field when George Fox spoke. It was the same presence she had felt when she had first seen the lady’s slipper, standing so still and alone in Richard’s wood.
Her head was heavy, and before long it dropped forward onto her chest and she let her eyelids close. And there was Richard, smiling at her in the miller’s, asking the miller for a fair price, his brown eyes oddly familiar in his young face. A while later she awoke to find Stephen’s hand on her arm, shaking her gently. Strange–she had not meant to fall asleep.
The next day Stephen offered to accompany her on her carriage ride to the village, but she refused him. For this was one journey she needed to make alone. She left her maidservant at the top of the lane and pushed the kissing-gate open, pausing for a moment on the threshold of Helk’s Wood. She took in the speckled lichen surface of the posts, breathed in the dampness of the day. She would want to remember this when she returned to New Hampshire.
Her feet, that had once trod this same route in the dark of the moon, nimble in her pretty yellow shoes, stumbled over the stones and roots in her path. The wood was denser and the way a little more overgrown; the wall was plush with green moss; beech trees dripped overhead. But she recognized the route even after all this time.
At the overhanging branch she put her hand out to the wall to support herself, but in her mind she was still the young woman who had come here thirty-five years ago. The clearing was velvety underfoot. The swish of her skirts scattered the beech nuts as she searched for the right place.
She bent over the spot and began to open the ties on her painting basket. When they had settled in New Hampshire, it was a long time before she had wanted to take up her brush and paints. One day she had been persuaded by a neighbour to visit a local trading fair, and there had been a small display of paintings by the governor’s wife. As she walked along the row of paintings, a deep wistfulness overtook her. She realized how much she had missed her drawing, how she longed for the touch of the brush in her hand. She was musing on this when she came face to face with a painting of a lady’s slipper. She stopped, her mouth dry and her heart hammering loudly in her chest.
Her friend said, ‘Are you all right? You look pale.’
‘This flower, the lady’s slipper. It reminds me of home. England I mean.’
‘I like it too. It is one of my favourite wild flowers.’
‘You mean, it grows here?’
‘Yes, they are everywhere out in the pastures. They should be easy to find now because the flowers are so showy.’
She had stood there a long while, in front of the picture. The next day she had driven the buggy out to the woods and, sure enough, the dark shadows of the redwood trees were full of lady’s slippers, nodding and dipping in the breeze, drowsy bees buzzing as they hovered between one pouch and the next. Not just creamy flowers, but bright yellow and pink ones too. She had been staggered by the sheer numbers, unable to take it in. But then she had started to laugh. She laughed until she cried, until she had to hold on to the ache in her side, until, breathless, she had to sit down on the grass.
She had taken one home to show Richard, and he had stood up from cutting wood, and he had laughed with her and fetched some to plant out back under the plane tree. As the years passed her children had picked them, called them, as their friends did, ‘moccasin flowers’, put them in jars of water as if they were buttercups and thought nothing of it. But here now, in the dark woods of England, the memory of that one single flower, its beauty and strangeness, flooded back.
She opened the sackcloth in the basket and drew out the orchid. Her hands were clad in black, just as they had been the last time she was here, except the mourning was for Richard now, not for Flora. Carefully she dug a well for the little plant and lowered it into the ground, tamping down the earth around the roots until it stood sturdy and upright in its leafy setting. She stood up and paused, looking down on it, and inhaled deeply. She imagined the sweet smell of tobacco drifting over the wall. Then she spoke, her voice soft amongst the call of the birds, the Quaker form of address springing naturally to her lips.
She leaned down towards the flower. ‘Do well, little plant,’ she whispered, ‘for thou art far from thy New Hampshire home, and I would not have brought thee, but for love.’
She stepped away then, and hurried back up the path.
In the glade, the rain began to fall, but one flower shone bright against the green like a single star.
by Deborah Swift
About the Author
Behind the Novel
Keep on Reading
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Could you tell us a little bit about your personal and professional background and when it was that you decided to lead a literary life?
I was brought up in the countryside in a small village, but as an adult I spent much of my time in cities, working in the theater as a set and costume designer. Working in the theater was a fantastic experience that gave me access to some of the literary giants of the world through their plays. How can you beat having to work with the language and imagery of Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams! I returned to country living again about ten years ago and now live in the English Lake District, a place immortalized by poets and artists such as Wordsworth and Ruskin.
In a way I feel I have always led a literary life, right from picking up my first book. When I was five years old I won a school painting competition and a prize of a copy of
Black Beauty
, gloriously illustrated. It was the first book that made me cry. I am an avid reader and will read anything and everything. As an older child I used to enjoy reading an ancient encyclopedia, and can still remember the old, musty smell of its pages and the yellowish glue of its binding.
Is there a book or an author that most inspired you to become a writer?
Apart from
Black Beauty
, I remember as a teenager being massively impressed by Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
and Anya Seton’s
Katherine,
both of which probably sowed the seeds of my interest in historical fiction. And I love classics such as
Jane Eyre
,
Wuthering Heights
, and
Little Women
, which have strong female voices despite being written in a time when literature was dominated by men. Later I was much more influenced by plays and poems. I love reading poets who observe nature in all its moods. Ted Hughes’s work is timeless because of its precision, and Mary Oliver has a yearning inherent in her work that seems to be a part of my impulse to write. Initially
The Lady’s Slipper
began as a poem—my attempt to convey the lone flower’s strangeness and fragility.
“I have always led a literary life, right from picking up my first book.”
You mentioned working as a costume designer. How has your work in theater influenced your writing, not just content-wise, but stylistically as well?
I tend to naturally think in terms of scenes, and let the dialogue drive the action. I am also very aware of making internal dilemmas “visible” to the reader, in the same way an actor makes his state of mind obvious to an audience through actions.
Stylistically, I have a love of the theatrical, which draws me toward a story that is plot driven. Twists and turns make for good drama. I love deceptions and intrigue. And very much as on stage, I like to allow each character a moment in the spotlight, so that we see the whole picture through several pairs of eyes. When writing, the action literally unfolds in front of me like a film. I write feverishly and then have to go back to refine and re-tune and add the internal dialogue—the soliloquies—later. I think of the end of the chapters as the blackout in the theater, a blank space for the mind to rest before a new scene.
Years of converting text into images as a designer means that I view the background or settings as integral to the characters. Alice’s character at the outset is drawn as much by her summerhouse, for example, as by her conversation. The research process for a writer is very similar to that of a designer, and I have always enjoyed this aspect, as it gives me a great excuse to poke about in museums and old houses. I prefer to research through books or visits rather than online, and most of the settings for
The Lady’s Slipper
are based on real places. Lingfell Hall is based on Swarthmoor Hall, the actual house at the hub of the Quaker movement in the seventeenth century.
Do you scrupulously adhere to historical facts in your novels, or do you take liberties if the story can benefit from the change? To what extent did you stick to the facts in
The Lady’s Slipper
?
I think it is important that I feel the novel is coherent, and that it has a sense of its own history, and for that reason I like to get in touch with genuine artifacts or writings of the period. My parents collected antiques, and sometimes one small object can convey the texture of a whole era. A pair of shoes can say so much.
When researching
The Lady’s Slipper
I read the diary of George Fox to find a date on which my meeting on the hill at Lancaster could feasibly have taken place. While doing so, at the University of Lancaster, I discovered quite by accident that Fox himself had rewritten parts of his diary toward the end of his life and changed settings and events even within his lifetime—presumably aware of his future readership! So anything we regard as fact is only a story someone else has told us.
I do make creative decisions regarding the historical facts if it benefits the story; since I am not a historian, the story has to come first. For example, early Quaker meetings were often segregated by sex into male and female meetings. In my initial draft, the meetings at the Hall were written in this way until it became just too cumbersome for characters to keep tramping back and forth from room to room, and I decided to ignore this fact to strengthen the identity of the meeting room.
Creating a believable world is a kind of alchemy. With today’s media, we are so used to a constant stream of images that I wanted to convey the freshness of vision itself during the seventeenth century—a time when everything was seen for the first time directly with the eyes, and the first encounter with something could indeed be a wonder. News was spread mostly by hearing the tale of it from someone else, complete with the additions of the person’s own imagination. I like to think that I am weaving tales from the people of the time with my own tale, and hope that the result is as seamless as possible.
“Creating a believable world is a kind of alchemy.”
Why do you think readers are so drawn to historical fiction?
Our own lives become history as we go forward from day to day, so I think it is natural to look back and learn from our experiences. We use history as a mirror that we can hold up to our own times for comparison as we ponder the perennial questions. It serves to remind us where we have been, what attitudes we have ditched in favor of more compassionate ones, for example. The character of Geoffrey is very much of his time, and this excites me as a writer—to develop a character who conveys seventeenth-century attitudes and not merely a modern man walking about in period clothes.
I think there is a degree of nostalgia too: people are looking to reconnect with the slower pace of the past, when we were not ruled by the clock and daily commutes. There is a resurgence of interest in craftsmanship, as it represents a visible sign of the time and patience we now seem to have so little of. The past can seem simpler, although I suspect this simplicity is an illusion, since we tend to gloss over the inevitable hardships of history.
Who are some of your favorite historical figures?
At the risk of being obvious, top of the list would have to be Shakespeare! Over the years I have seen many productions on stage and screen, yet I am always amazed by how fresh the words are to audiences today.
I admire that there are so many layers to each play, and the more you study and analyze them, the more they reveal. Working on a Shakespeare play makes you realize how skillfully he managed to leave enough space within the text for new interpretations.
Many of my favorite historical figures are not kings and queens but artists or scientists, since they have left a permanent legacy through their work. I don’t think you can ignore the cultural influences of, for example, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Darwin, or Van Gogh.
Are you currently working on another book? If so, who or what is your subject?
While working on
The Lady’s Slipper,
Ella cheekily demanded her own book. And so the novel I am working on tells her story, after her flight from Netherbarrow.