The Quickening Maze (24 page)

‘I hope this is your best set of china. I remember there were two at the wedding.’

‘Of course it is.’

Hannah felt a blush chase up her neck into her face. She was instantly ashamed. Dora’s snappish reply was perfectly in order. There was nothing here to be mocked. In fact, there was much that was considerable. Dora had always wanted quiet and decency and here it was. Dora had not asked about events at home because she did not want to know. The inventories being made, the sale of goods, were repugnant to her. She didn’t even ask about her father’s poor health because of what that invoked. She did not feel she had to know. She and James were a new generation, in a new home. There they would be safe from her parents’ extravagance and failures and would never meet another patient.

Fulton asked James polite questions about his work in the bank.

‘This is such a lovely window,’ Hannah said to Dora.

‘Yes,’ Dora answered. ‘It catches all of the afternoon sun.’

To love the life that was possible: that also was a freedom, perhaps the only freedom. A place like this was possible. Hannah could love such a life, the safety, the calm, her own children. Charles Seymour had sent her a letter after he’d fled. He thanked her for their conversation out picking blackberries. She had reminded him to be courageous. She had set him off with her words. He had misunderstood her completely and gone. She had read the letter once and burned it and cried alone.

She cut a triangle of cake with her fork and ate.

 

Abigail had grown. She knew she had because, running up the stairs, she was at eye level with the soaring diagonal of the dado rail. There were shelves in the larder she could now reach, resulting in Cook keeping currants at a safer altitude. She could see over tabletops and there she found her parents’ faces, tight, preoccupied, with flat, unseeing eyes.

She ran to her father’s side and put her hand on his knee. He looked down at her with those dull rabbit eyes and said, ‘Not now, child.’ Abigail tilted her head downwards, leaned back, and looked flirtatiously up past her eyebrows at him in the way that usually softened her parents, softened anyone, and brought them smiling towards her. No response. She swayed closer to take hold of his ear and squeeze it together, but he gave his head an angry horse’s shake. ‘Child, you will not deflect me.’

Abigail’s mother entered the room and Abigail’s father sank a little in his chair and coughed. Abigail could see - anyone could see - that he was making his malady look worse to get her mother’s sympathy. Indeed, Eliza stood behind him and ran a hand across the great width of coat stretched over his back. He coughed again as she did so.Abigail would have sympathised as well, but he didn’t seem to want her. He wanted Mama. Eliza didn’t look happy either and Abigail walked around and rested herself affectionately against her skirt. As a reward, her mother dropped a hand onto her shoulder. Abigail always tried to cheer people up, to make them happier, and she always would. She would live devotedly with her mother long after her father’s illness, which, although exaggerated at this moment, was real and would soon kill him. Finally she would migrate to a marriage in which her husband was never as kind to her as he might have been, having no need to be.

‘I’m not sure we can part with any more,’ her mother said to her father.

Her father coughed with tightly closed lips, then said, ‘They won’t leave us a stick. All these years of work. Not a matchstick. These Tennysons will have it all.’

Fulton entered then and stared with naked disgust at the sad gazes that met his, said nothing and went out, slamming the door.

 

Swish of leaves, of strong drink. One of them idly compressing a squeezebox, not playing, but pushing out a few quiet notes.The broth with hare’s meat hung over the fire, bubbles lumping up to the surface. And opposite, a row of the girls deft with short knives cutting pegs to sell, quick as coring apples.

Judith was telling him of the two missing men.

‘Said we’s an atrocious tribe and that we ought to be made outlaws from every civilised kingdom. These are his words I’m telling you. And that we ought to be exterminated from the face of the earth. Exterminated.’

‘And him a clergyman.’

‘A Christian man.’

‘Or pretends to be,’ said John.

‘That’s it. Or pretends to be. It was common land a few months back and what grew and bred on it was common as God’s air. Now it’s the railway’s and the boys are gaoled. And you could only tell it from signs they couldn’t read, not having the art. Now it’s chavvies without their fathers.’

‘When will they be out?’

She shook her head as though they never would be, then said, ‘A year or two. Less, maybe, I reckon.’

‘And you’re all going away.’

‘Forest is a good place for us, good for food, but we’ve had too many night visits, been shaken in our vardas, and their dogs going mad. So now it’s down to Kent for a fair. We want to, matter of fact. All our people gather.’

‘To have fun at the fair.’

‘Not me,’ Judith answered. ‘I’ll talk is all I’ll do, maybe tell the odd fortune. One time of day, I used to get up at four o’clock in the morning. I could run or jump or do anything you mention. But today I’m useless. That one, she’ll have a livelier time of it.’ She pointed with her pipe stem at one of the peg-making girls. ‘She’ll be seeing her lover boy there. See, the passion’s gone to her hands. Look at the mess she’s making.’

If the girl could hear, she pretended otherwise, whispering behind her hand to the girl on her left.

‘He’ll be there, will he?’ John asked immediately, unreasonably jealous.

‘He will. They haven’t see each other since they were not but nine years old, the pair of them, but they made promises and their words have been passed along in the meantime, their messages to each other, from mouth to ear between the travelling people, and now his people will be in Kent same as us.’

‘I see.’ John took another swig. ‘Got to go for a moment,’ he said, and stood up.

Soft light flaking through the leaves. He unbuttoned himself and let his stream go between the thick, down-diving roots of a hornbeam, his belly resting on his right foream. He thought about the girl, her love, the lovers’ separate paths through the world that now would join, reuniting them, fusing at last. The excitement that must be in her breast, the pure passion! In John as well, the loneliness, the wandering and desire for home, for Mary. How she’d stayed true and steadfast while all the world went wrong. He felt his toes wet and looked down to see his puddle rolling against his boots. What a fool’s mistake: to piss uphill! This is what came of living between walls and pissing always into china. He dried his toecaps, digging furrows on the ground.

As he thrashed back through the branches, he called, ‘Which way out is it? Tell me. Which way out of the forest?’

‘Out? Where to?’

‘North. To Northampton.’

‘North is the Enfield road.’

‘How would I find that then?’

‘We can leave you signs if you like, before we go. Ties on branches to show you the way.’

‘You will do it?’

‘If you like.’

‘I do. Our secret, though?’

‘Our secret? We are secret. We don’t talk.’

‘And I’ll find them?’

‘You’ll find ’em, no fear.’

 

‘There’s every chance, I suppose.’

‘You suppose?’

‘Well,’ Thomas Rawnsley shifted in his chair, ‘your husband has entered a marketplace which is new to everybody.’

‘So, he can’t know,’ Fulton said and stared into his mother’s worried eyes.

‘No, he can’t know precisely. None of us can. But that’s not to say . . .’

‘If it were your company, would you have proceeded in the same manner?’

‘Fulton, don’t interrogate out guest.’

‘But would you?’

‘I . . .’ Rawnsley raised his hands, glanced across at the silent Hannah. ‘Broadly, yes, I suppose I would.’

‘So, why are you a success and . . .’

‘Fulton!’

‘Your father is a very ingenious man, of that I have no doubt.’

The doubts he did have sat in the air. Fulton stared at the carpet, thinking.

‘But it wasn’t especially to discuss Dr Allen that I came.’

‘Oh, no?’ Eliza enquired.

‘No. I wanted, if I may, to speak to Hannah.’

‘I see.’

Hannah felt all their eyes on her and blushed painfully. Why did he have to announce it and make this public show? Now her mother and brother were getting up to leave them alone, as though she were about to be examined by a doctor and required privacy.

‘We shall leave you two alone, then,’ her mother said.

Hannah glanced up and met her mother’s gaze. She had her tongue tip between her teeth in that idiotic expression. Hannah looked down again quickly, clenched her teeth, felt her lips harden into a line.

The door closed behind them.The room was silent. They were alone.

‘Well,’ Rawnsley began, and stopped. He placed one hand emphatically on the table as though about to begin again, but didn’t. He drummed his fingers.

Why did he have to do this now? Why not when he was more alive and engaging? He could be, she knew that. Instead, he looked in Hannah’s direction, but not at her, and drummed his fingers. Eventually he said, ‘Why don’t we go for a walk? It would be nice to be outside, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, it would.’

So now they too went out and left the room empty. The fact that nobody was now in the room felt like another awkwardness to Hannah, although she couldn’t have said why. She thought of its silence and empty stillness as they went into the hall.

Thomas Rawnsley helped her into her coat, waited while she buttoned her gloves.

The breeze was cool, but not strong. There were small leaves on half of the trees and clouds in the sky. An ordinary day. It gave no sign that anything special, any event, was occurring.

Rawnsley, clasping his hands in the small of his back, led away from the house. Then at a certain distance, perhaps with a particular view onto the lane and forest in mind, he stopped.

‘You know that I have come to admire you very much, Hannah,’ he began.

‘Of course,’ she snapped back. ‘The flowers. The visits.’

He shook his head, as if interrupted, muttering to himself. He started again. ‘You know that I have come to admire you very much, Hannah.’ Hannah could see that he had it all rehearsed in his mind, this spot, these words, and that his seriousness, his apparent lack of pleasure, was because he wanted it very much to happen in exactly the right way. She had the power, evidently, to conform to his dream, to allow his imaginings to be realised. She, who’d wasted so many of her own fantasies, could grant him that, and suddenly she very much wanted to.

‘I would like your permission to ask your father for his permission,’ he blinked, as if unsure whether the sentence made sense,‘for his permission to ask for your hand in marriage.’

‘Yes.’

‘Hannah.Would you consent to becoming my wife?’

Hannah smiled, answering honestly, ‘I would.’

‘Ah!’ he smiled, raised two fists, then controlled himself. Apparently the business was unfinished, there was more of his dream to accomplish. ‘May I . . . may I kiss your hand?’

Hannah widened her eyes as her heart beat heavily at these words. Sighing and kissing at last. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, ‘you may,’ and held out her right hand.

Thomas Rawnsley reached for it with both of his own, and without saying anything turned it over and unbuttoned her glove. This too must have been part of the dream. She watched as he gently pulled the glove from her hand, held it still upturned in his own, bent forward, and with a warm crush of breath and beard against her skin, kissed her palm, then closed her fingers over the kiss as though he had given her a coin.

 

He smoked as he piled his books. He puffed with small pursings of his lips and read the spines.
Purgatorio
. He hadn’t got up enough Italian to read Dante. Of course he hadn’t. He never would. He would return to Somersby and would fail to do so there also, sinking into the place to dissolve, as smoke merges upwards into the air. The family shadows would surround him, their black blood would continue to circulate in his veins. There was no escape. He was the equal of any English poet, but he took with him a wallet that contained half-finished things only and had new ones about Arthur in his throat, but none of that made a difference. Eventually, if they were published, the critics would decry them again and there would be no Hallam to rise to his defence. No, he returned with nothing. He’d tried the world, tried enterprise, and now was bankrupt, his money gone into the mad doctor’s mad scheme. It was a humiliation. Worse, he had to return to the family home and live narrowly. He’d believed the doctor’s delusions, he’d written some poems and that was that. He remained the same stale person. He would finish packing up his books.The servants would straighten the place after him, pluck out the creases he had made. He would go back to Somersby to smoke and dwindle and, when his spirits allowed, to begin the poem about Arthur.

 

Hannah did not listen to what her father was saying. Seated beside her at the organ, her mother did. Head dropped forward, Eliza stared at the red, curled fingers in her lap. Hannah had discovered her sitting alone like this a few times recently. The posture tightened her mother’s narrow shoulders, made her look girlish and chastised. And then quickly she would be up and active again.

Hannah stared vaguely at the stops of the organ, bone-white, labelled with their voices, a litany that ran jingling through her mind whenever she sat there to turn the pages: Clarion. Bombard. Contra Posaune. Mixture. Gemshorn. Dulciana. Trumpet. It did so now, although not in the usual infuriating way it usually did, but happily, like birdsong in the background as she thought about the letter from Thomas Rawnsley in her dressing table, his promises, her future.