The Quickening Maze (12 page)

Jack didn’t stop. Matthew Allen had to run after him and catch at his arm. John tried to whisk his arm away. Allen caught at him again and turned him around. ‘John. John, good Lord, what has happened to you?’

Again Jack tried to whip his arm free. Doing so, he struck Dr Allen lightly on his temple.Allen then lunged for him and held him in a hugging restraint, his arms pinned to his sides, Allen’s hands locked together, squeezing into the softness of his belly.

‘Unhand me! Unhand me! Blackguard, I’ll knock you down. You think you’re man enough for Jack Randall? Eh? Eh?’

‘John. John, you are John,’ the doctor panted. ‘And you were warned that you couldn’t stay away overnight. There will be consequences now.’

‘Let go of me! I’ll knock you down!’

‘Mary! Mary!’

Suddenly Margaret wasn’t just watching the pitiful play. The doctor was shouting and looking directly at her. She pointed slowly to her chest.

‘Yes, you.’

‘I’m Margaret.’

‘Yes, Margaret, sorry. Can you call Stockdale. He’ll be on the second floor.’

‘I was out fighting!’ John pleaded. ‘That’s all. It’s an honest man’s trade!’

‘You’d been warned,’ the doctor repeated. ‘It’ll be two days in the dark room.’

By the time Stockdale arrived the doctor was almost on the floor with John, trying to struggle out of his looped grasp like a drunken man trying to get out of his trousers. Stockdale intervened, securing John absolutely.

Margaret watched them drag the poor wounded man away to be shut in the dark.

Thrown onto the floor, the door slamming shut behind him, Jack Randall picked himself up and beat with his fists against its wood.

‘Have none of you the pluck to come up to the scratch?’ he roared. ‘Blackguards! I’ll take you all! Starting with that mincing bottle imp doctor!’

Matthew Allen spoke back calmly through the shuddering door. ‘John, you had been warned. It isn’t possible for you to sleep out in the woods.You know you must return in the evenings.’

‘Bastard! Shit-eating bastard! I’ll . . . I’ll . . .’ He varied his rhythm and thumped the door with three spaced punches.

‘John, you’ll do yourself more harm. Just look at yourself.’

‘Son of a whore!’ Darkness covered him. He grovelled at the crack of light under the door.

‘You knew the punishment, John. Two days.’

‘You cannot cage a man. You cannot. I’ll tear this door down!’

‘I’ll return later.’

‘A light! Just please give me some sort of light!’

Dr Allen walked away down the corridor. Back among the other patients he was aware of John still shouting like a dog yapping at the gate, but after a few hours it ceased.

 

Beyond any sound of the mad, Hannah walked with Annabella and Muffet, her dog. The snow had shrivelled, was crusted in hollows or on the lee side of trees only. The forest was wet and stretched away in soft tapestry colours.

Muffet didn’t like the cold. She trotted ahead, turning back with mute worried glances, eyebrows fidgeting.

‘Oh, I didn’t say,’ Hannah went on. ‘He was skating when I arrived.’

‘Skating?’

‘On his pond.’This detail had come back to Hannah in good time. She had finished the first avalanche of narration, telling it all at once, and in the silence just afterwards she was beginning to wonder if it sounded like anything at all.Annabella was reassuringly excited, though. She asked, ‘Was he good? Did he “cut a dash”?’

‘He was quite good, I think. I didn’t see for very long. He stopped when he saw me.’

‘That’s good.’

Muffet had trodden on something. She stopped, stretched back a trembling hind leg, kicked with it, then carried on away behind a tree.

‘So you spent all of the afternoon with him, talking?’

‘About poetry mostly.’

‘About poetry. That’s very promising.’

‘Yes. Do you think?’ Hannah remembered the long glutinous silences and was embarrassed to mention them in case they were a bad sign. But she did very much want her friend’s opinion and found a formula. ‘He was quite . . . morose.’

‘He’s bound to get lost in thought at times, given what he is.’

‘That’s what I decided.’

‘No, no. I do think this is promising. We need to plot something more. And I still haven’t seen him.’

‘We were together for hours,’ Hannah said, feeling the thrill of it again, but striding casually, in a worldly way.

She sat in the light of the window and looked almost too frail to bear its blast. He could see her fingerbones sharp and yellow through the cracked skin. The dent of her temple looked like the result of some violence. The skin of her face had drawn so tight that her lips were pulled against the hardness of her teeth. There were welts of shadow under her eyes and cheekbones.

He was telling her that she needed to eat, that if she didn’t he would be forced to feed her. Milk and custard, he was saying. Soaked bread. She could hear that he was exasperated, as with an awkward child, whereas it was his understanding that was childish. But she couldn’t explain to him, the effort of speech made her head ache, and her voice seemed of late to emerge as a shock, a little live thing in her mouth, jumpy and peculiar. It had none of the smooth serenity it had in her mind. So she didn’t tell him that to eat was to join the ordinary world of bodies and murder, of lust and destruction, was to swim through the world like a worm through soil, eating, making ordure. Possibly it was a thought he could understand, but what she could not begin to try and explain to him was that in Heaven to see and to eat are the same thing. Looking is absorption, is union, without destruction. There nothing is broken. Light flows into light endlessly, in harmony, and is perfectly still.

‘You’re smiling,’ he said. ‘I hope that’s a smile of agreement. No recovery of animal spirits is possible . . .’ Animal spirits! There was his stupidity in a phrase. He lived in contradictions he did not even perceive. ‘. . . although you don’t yet lack energy to the point of ceasing to move, that will come unless you are less cruel to yourself.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose, sighed through it. ‘I have said all that I wanted to say. I trust it has been understood.’

Margaret inclined her head. Matthew Allen accepted it as all the response he was presently likely to get. He patted her hand, its few dry sticks, and walked back to his study.The Silent Watcher watched him go.

The drawing on his desk - its cleanliness, its power, its levers. It could make the whole asylum an irrelevance if he so chose, and that was tempting, but he would keep up both concerns and be finally the multifaceted man he was. He would flourish. The drawing was of a machine, a conception of his own, improving on past designs. The draughtsmanship itself gave him pleasure, a sign of his intellect. Sharp ink strokes joined at right angles to define a square, three-dimensional tiered object that stood in abstract white space. It had an angelic clarity. It would change his life. Not since his discovery of phrenology and the mental sciences as a young man had anything excited him so much. It was like falling in love, this profusion of harmonious thoughts, this coalescing of passion and possibility, this new life. Matthew Allen was deeply smitten.

He sat down and sobered himself with details. The two-tray system was clearly superior, with a tracer and drill connected in perfect symmetry. He lifted the drawing and laid it carefully aside. Today he would write to Thomas Rawnsley, the young man with the workshop in Loughton who fashioned machine cogs from hornbeam, and request an instructive visit to his establishment. Men of progress and industry conferring together, one of them a man of science.

He dipped his nib, shook away excess drops.‘Dear Mr Rawnsley,’ he began. He looked up out of the window and saw the idiot Simon backing away in fear from Clara, who was scolding him for something.As she shouted she opened her clenched fists and shook out handfuls of torn grass. Matthew Allen turned back to his letter.

 

When Eliza Allen made the joke she held her tongue tip between her teeth for the moment after, as she always did, mischievously awaiting Hannah’s reaction. Hannah looked away, blushing painfully, her skin swarming with heat. It wasn’t as though the joke was even amusing; it hardly was a joke.Her mother’s jokes rarely were obvious, hence that infuriating expression of hers while she stared around waiting. All her mother had said was why didn’t she seek Mr Tennyson’s opinion of the book she had in her hand. Hannah’s discomfort was made acute by the thought of what it was she was reading. Had her mother read over her shoulder? Among her father’s poetry volumes she had found an old Dryden and picked it out. Between the long, solid, dully rectangular poems in rhyming couplets she had found a song which began:

 

Sylvia, the fair, in the bloom of fifteen,

Felt an innocent warmth as she lay on the green.

This Sylvia ‘saw the men eager, but was at a loss/ What they meant by their sighing and kissing so close’.

Hannah hadn’t quite seen the men, or him, eager, but this was all very compelling.

This was one of the most explicit clues she had had as to what she might expect actually to occur when passions converged.The phrases, the little skipping tune, made her heart race. And sighing and kissing so close.

Hannah sat down at the table and ignored Abigail’s protests as she tore a corner from the bread and butter the child was eating. She spoke over her. ‘You have butter on your face, Abi.You are not a slice of bread, you know.’

Abigail appealed to a higher authority. ‘Mama, she’s eating my food.’

‘Hannah, be kind to your sister. If you want bread and butter, there is . . .’

‘I wasn’t being unkind. I was sharing with her. Shouldn’t she be taught . . .’

‘Hannah, don’t be contrary.’

‘I’m not being contrary. I’m leaving.’

‘Contrariness itself.’

‘Not at all.’

The day was mild. Hannah let her shawl hang loosely from her shoulders as she walked to Annabella’s. She pinched her cheeks as she walked onto the lane, in case of an encounter with him. Annabella was in her garden, under the early blackthorn blossom, reading. ‘Good morning,’ Hannah called.

Annabella looked up, enhancing the scene, as she always did, with her beauty. ‘Greetings, fair nymph. Isn’t this tree heaven?’

‘Yes, it is.’ Hannah studied it with the appropriate dreamy appreciation. There were no leaves as yet, just slender black branches and the damp white blossoms ruffling in the breeze. The tree looked ardent, single-minded, standing there and declaring its flowers straight out of the wet, gnarled wood. ‘Very pretty,’ she said. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’

‘Has something happened?’

‘No. The ordinary torments of the familial life.’

‘I’ll just go and tell Mama.’

Hannah stood alone until Annabella returned.Alone. The quiet garden. Annabella’s life was so different to her own, just the one brother, her books and blossom and beauty. Sometimes Hannah, surrounded by her family and the mad, by all those hurrying or drifting people, felt as though she lived her life on a public thoroughfare.

As they walked, Hannah watched the effect of her friend’s beauty on the people they passed. Did Annabella realise how much she lived in the tunnel of it, always enclosed within the circle of its impact? It aligned men, stiffened their backs, knocked their hats up from their heads.A farmboy leading three cows right now lifted his hat straight up, smirking at her. If Hannah had had that advantage, she might have been more sure of gaining Tennyson. It was a power at least. Hannah had no power. There was nothing she could do. There was nothing any girl could do in choosing a husband for herself beyond panting and wishing and hoping, making herself visible, agreeable.

‘Snowdrops,’Annabella said, pointing at a little group of the trembling white things. ‘Shall we go into the church?’

‘Why not?’

This was becoming a habit on their walks. The first time it had felt like trespass, secret and wrong, to enter the church in their state of lazy reverie and admiration. By now it had an element of ritual. They passed the leaning gravestones in melancholy silence without stopping as they had in the past to calculate the ages of the people when they’d died and pity the children among them.There had been one seven-year-old girl who had moved Hannah to the point of tears. She greeted her mentally now as she passed on her way into the cold stone porch. Reverently,Annabella pulled open the heavy oak door and they stepped inside.The door closed solidly behind them, shutting them into a silence that magnified their footsteps and made them take shallower, careful breaths.An extinguished atmosphere, the sense of snuffed candles,of a room someone has just left.Annabella crossed herself. Hannah did the same, and prayed by whispering the name Alfred Tennyson once without sound and with her eyes closed. Ardently, her lips formed the syllables and she breathed silently through them.

Annabella pointed to the flagstones where the sun through a stained-glass window cast a delicate circle of coloured floating light. Hannah nodded.

She walked up the nave towards the pulpit and stopped at the bronze eagle lectern with the big Bible on its outspread wings. She looked at the page.
And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God.
The elaborate large initial reminded her of her explorations of how beautifully the letters AT and HA could be calligraphically combined. Afterwards she had burned the page in the stove, her heart pounding, as though destroying the evidence of a murder.
To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.

She looked up. Annabella was seated in a pew, her lovely eyes upcast at the east window. Hannah joined her, sitting on the pew on the other side of the aisle. She lowered herself into the creaking wood and looked up at the glass, the stiff translucent figures around Christ on the cross, His handsome head lolling on His right shoulder. She looked at the muscles of His body, at His sadness, until she felt a genuine pity bloom inside her.