The Quickening Maze (19 page)

‘I trust you don’t go walking with any old lunatic? I’m not mad, you know.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Hmm. You are bored as well, aren’t you?’

‘I . . .’

‘Good afternoon. Well met.’ Her father’s voice. She was discovered. And with her father was the young man Rawnsley.

Charles answered for both of them.‘Good afternoon to you. I’m Charles Seymour,’ he said, extending his hand to Rawnsley.

‘Thomas Rawnsley.’

Matthew Allen smiled at the three of them, his child and the wealthy feudal relic, who’d been too stupid to invest in the Pyroglyph, greeting the energetic industrialist. Rawnsley bowed to Hannah. She felt him trying to hold her gaze as he did so. There was a heaviness of meaning in his look, of questioning. She didn’t know what it meant and wondered if the others had noticed, but they gave no sign of it. Charles Seymour continued the conversation.

‘Your daughter just suggested to me . . .’ Her heart bumped. ‘. . . that you might be kind enough to allow me use of your library. I could do with the entertainment. ’

Matthew Allen thought that typical. ‘Entertainment, no doubt,’ he answered, ‘and instruction. It would be my pleasure.’

The exact same weight of dark.

It was a source. Out of it flowed that time. He himself flowed out of it, a youth, a child really, as he had been when he had woken in this exact dark.

He walked out back then, into that time, a lad under stars with the excitement beating inside him. Come gentle Spring, ethereal mildness come. He stumbled as a cart rut gripped his boot. He had a headache but without pain; the fierce expectation made his head bones light, his skull noticeable under thin skin. He wanted to cry out and sing, but had to be secret.

In the darkness of the stables the horses whinged and shifted. John spoke softly to them. He kept a calming hand flowing over their flanks as he walked around them, then soothed their heads towards him to throw over and fit the halters. The horses had to be out early this time of year to graze themselves full before the flies woke to torment their eyes and twitching skin.

He led them out, stumbling quietly behind him. They pulled against him, then obeyed as he led them to a different field where the other boy earned his halfpennies watching two other horses. As he unfastened the halters John called to the other boy in the dark.

‘Over here,’ he answered.

John jogged over, handed Tom the halters.

‘And what you promised.’

John had them ready in his handkerchief, separate from the rest. ‘One penny for watching them and one for not telling.’

‘Where’re you going?’

‘I’ll be back before they have to go back.’

‘But where?’

‘Stamford. Doesn’t matter.’

‘To a shop, is it? Buying ribbons for a girl, is it?’

Hearing the horses already cropping the grass, John set off towards the town. Come gentle Spring, ethereal mildness come. And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, While music wakes around, veiled in a shower of shadowing roses, on our plains descend. That was where he was going. He didn’t know why, but the first time he had read these words, in the tattered copy of Thomson’s
Seasons
the visiting weaver had allowed him to see, his heart had twittered with joy. On our plains descend. The weaver had laughed at his transports, his sudden breathlessness. The weaver was a Methodist and rated Wesley’s hymns far above Thomson’s bucolic pentameters. His copy held only half of ‘Autumn’. All of ‘Winter’ had flaked away. John desperately desired his own volume. He bothered his father for money unrelentingly, hoarded his own pennies, and finally gathered enough.

The bookshop was empty, its blinds down. John sat staring at it in the empty centre of Stamford, listening to a dog bark. He loitered like a thief, hands in pockets, the words dancing along his nerves. Come gentle Spring. Picked up and blown off course, still a child, obsessed by a few words and not knowing why. He sat and waited and almost felt he ought to hide when the owner arrived and unlocked his premises.

He watched until the man had lit his lamps, light softly blooming inside the window, then knocked at the door.

‘Yes? I’m not open yet.’

‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘What is it, lad?’

‘I have to go, you see, back home. Can you sell me Thomson’s
Seasons
? I have the money already exactly.’

‘Ah. Oh.’The man looked about him as if searching for an excuse, but couldn’t find one. ‘Very well, very well. Poetry, is it? Give me the money, then.’

‘Yes, yes.’ John scooped the coins out of his pocket and poured them into the man’s hand.

The owner, who within a few years would be publishing John’s first poems at a profit, stood and counted slowly while John danced from foot to foot as though needing to relieve himself. ‘It is exact,’ the man said. He opened a box and parsed the coins into its compartments, then finally took the volume from a table and handed it over.

‘Thank you,’ John said. ‘Good day to you. Thank you,’ and hurried out under the sprinkling notes of the bell.

As he walked back towards Helpston with the book in his hands, not daring to open it until he was somewhere safe, the dawn started to come up, wide and coldly dazzling and raw.

He lay and watched through his window the same ascent of strengthening light.

The maze of a life with no way out, paths taken, places been. He heard his door unbolted, saw a wooden plate of food shoved in.

 

She lay on the floor of her room and tried to bear it. She could hear them all, could hear the devils in this new place shrieking as they rioted in their hosts, but there was nothing she could do, locked in this foul room. She was exhausted anyway, spent, an excremental husk. No brightness was left by the touch of her fingers.

She lay in her open grave, miles down, with the sharp voices of the place like dim clouds far above. She lay as still as she could. Her heart kept up its hateful slow tread in her chest. Warm tears that gave no relief now and then rolled into her ears, stopped, started again. Ever so slightly, she moved her hands, closed her fingers a fraction and felt the joints creak. An event: her hands’ minute twitch like something killed. She felt killed. Everything felt final. She was covered in death as with a thick paste. She lay at the bottom of this well, stinking of death, on dead wood, enclosed within dead walls, but she wouldn’t die. Everything was terminal and nothing ended. God kept His Presence from her. Unimaginable that it would be otherwise. The idea would have pushed a laugh out of her mouth if she’d had the energy.There was nothing else. Just the empty light moving across the room until it died in the evening and she would again survive it, lying in darkness. Her Silent Watcher stared upwards, saying nothing. She would like to kill herself, if she had the strength or freedom to do so, to take her rotting mind and kill it, to fuse her darkness with the world’s and wait for the music, the wailing, the streaming bloody colours of Judgement Day. Tears made loud thumps and rustles in her ears.

 

Polly had been very naughty. You cannot eat flowers - they make you bilious - and Polly had nibbled the flowers embroidered on the cushions, so she had been reprimanded and shut in her room until she could behave like a lady, and that ended the game. Polly sat on her shelf stiff-legged, reproved, staring into space. Abigail set off, leaving her there.

Her boots clobbered on the floorboards as she ran. Her mother greeted her with, ‘Who is this trotting pony?’

‘It’s me,’ Abigail said and fell against her mother’s legs.

‘Well, do try and make less noise,’ she was told. ‘And stand on your own feet, child.’

Abigail felt her mother’s hand over her head, the fingers spread too tightly over her skull, and with ease Eliza pulled her upright.Abigail stood solitary, deprived of that merging contact. She stared up at her mother.

‘Child, I am occupied at present.’ A new patient was shortly to arrive whom she would have to receive, Matthew being away at the factory. And that was only her immediate concern. Eliza, while in her husband’s study finding the admissions book, had seen a page of his calculations. If she had understood them correctly, then the investment was deep. It had put a sea beneath them with the establishment riding on it. It was a good thing her husband was who he was. She had reminded herself of that, but found that she kept needing to.

Abigail stretched up a hand. Eliza grasped it, rocked it from side to side and released it. ‘Go and play,’ she said and walked away.

With a painful bulk of anger and sadness inside her, Abigail watched her mother withdraw. She stood there panting until her mother was gone, then ran away again on her terrible loud boots.

One of Alfred Tennyson’s significant deficiencies, Hannah had decided, was his lack of conversation.This was not unimportant. It had rendered matters practically impossible. Conversation was one of Hannah’s only resources. With conversation she could engage and entangle and forge the strong sympathy of, well, possible lovers, and she had certainly tried that with Tennyson, but he’d been dull, unresponsive, dumb as a beast. There was that one occasion on which he’d done that extraordinary thing with his face and he’d been amiable. The rest of the time all her brilliance had elicited only faint glimmerings. Her attention was a light shone into murky water that had revealed gloomy inward depths, but she’d seen nothing more, nothing provocative of hope. Besides, it wasn’t charitable to notice it, but he wasn’t clean and he did smell. Of course poets made themselves sound exciting and wonderful in their poems; the reality was bound to be different. It was unfair, really, that other sorts of people were not written about so much.

Now, Charles Seymour was someone who engaged readily in conversation. He was social and open, a gentleman, and probably lonely, with his broken heart slowly healing. He was evidently an intelligent man, but he was courteous and to a greater extent available to others. He was not always away inside himself making poems for the journals to read and dislike.

Hannah was seated in her room making out a list of possible subjects for conversation when Abigail ran in and found her. Her page read:

She closed her journal as Abigail ran in and held out her hands to her. Abigail charged between them and bumped into her knees. ‘Ooh,’ Abigail said, doing one of her impressions of the patients, moaning and fidgeting and holding her hair.

‘Don’t do that,’ Hannah instructed, taking hold of her wrists. ‘Now, tell me, little sister, what do you like to talk about?’

‘Farms,’ Abigail replied.

‘Indeed? Farms?’

Abigail nodded. ‘Farms. Or presents.’

‘Come here,’ Hannah said, and fitted her hands into Abigail’s warm armpits and lifted her onto her knee.

 

It was worse, worse even than the absence. Her Silent Watcher stared out in desperation, but there was nowhere to go.

It seemed her husband had returned, or someone like him, stronger even and more determined. He would stand and watch her relieve herself in her chamber pot before he started.

Sometimes there were two of them.

Days grew light then dark against her window. It was the dark that brought him. She prayed. She prayed with every waking thought, her whole being a shout that was not heard, brought no release. They had her in that room. At night, not every night, but unpredictably, they came.

 

Hannah had observed him for long enough now to know his habits, had watched through a narrow vivid strip in her drawn bedroom curtains. They were usefully regular and today she deployed herself to cross his path. She waited at her chosen place. The day was fine. Her hair would look well in the autumnal sunlight that lit branches and moss, formed soft gold pools between the trees. Nearby a rattling holly bush shone with berries. There was a distant sweet aroma from the charcoal burners: they must have opened a pile and were now scooping it into sacks. Beside the path, blackberries hung from long, straying loops of thorn. She picked one and put it in her mouth. It dissolved in a smear of flavour, sharp, thin, alert.

And then he was approaching, as planned, hat in hand, along the path. But what was she doing there? He must have seen her standing there doing nothing. How could she not have thought of this? But it was immediately obvious what to do. She started picking more berries, crushing them as she plucked with nervous, indelicate fingers. She had been looking at him when she saw him and he had most likely seen her. Now she was looking away as though she hadn’t seen him. What would he think of that? And she had nothing to put the berries in, no receptacle, except her other hand. She laid them, dented and leaking, in her left palm.