The Quickening Maze (25 page)

‘Affliction separates man from man,’ Dr Allen said. His hands gripped the sides of the lectern. He looked down at the mad and told them, ‘That is part of its purpose. It is sent us from God to force us to resort to Him, to see that He is our one true refuge, to lead us from the unreliable inconstancy of our fellow men to the sanctuary of Christ.’

Margaret stared at the speaking man. The red in his eyes was a giveaway: they had made their habitation within him as well. But he needn’t fear. She ought to tell him that. Even if they destroyed his mortal body, he need not fear.All would be well. It had been vouchsafed. It was near at hand. Her own release was only the beginning. The joy of it burned inside her.

Hannah was startled out of her thoughts when her mother’s hands flew up and started shaping themselves over the keys. Behind them the variable voices jostled together.

William Stockdale oversaw the patients’ departure.

George Laidlaw once again fervently shook the doctor’s hand.‘Thank you,’ he said.‘Thank you. I cannot tell you what comfort you give.’

‘I am glad of it,’ Allen said, gathering his papers, and George Laidlaw reluctantly hobbled away to his endless guilty calculations of the National Debt.

 

Away, towards home, at last, at last, he walked. He touched his hat to Peter Wilkins who, opening the gate for him, tilted his intricate face in acknowledgement. He walked out onto the path, into the forest. When he got to the place they were gone, as they said they might be. The vardas were gone, the horses. They had kicked loose stuff of the forest floor over the soft scorched heap of the fire. A wide-brimmed hat lay on the ground. It shuddered in a breeze not quite strong enough to lift it. It provoked a melancholy emotion, looking at that hat, but he had no time for it. There were no signs, no ribbons tied to anything he could see. Friendly and lawless and unreliable, they’d upped and gone. He crouched for a moment, read north from the shadows and the green side of the trees, and set off. Flickering shadows, the endlessly breaking fence of trees. He just had to keep walking, boring through, shouldering the distance with the low grunting strength of a badger, and he would get there, he would be home and free, with Mary. He was right, at least partly: Mary was dead, but he would get back and find his wife, his home, his life, and would stay there for a short time until his mind broke and he was again unmanageable. He would be taken then to Northampton Lunatic Asylum, which he would never leave. The remaining twenty-three years of his life would be spent inside those walls. He would die there, no longer a poet, obscure and incarcerated.

He left the forest, the doctor, the other patients, Stockdale’s tortures behind him. He broke through the incessant rushing sound of the trees into silence. A day. A breeze blew softly against him. He had to choose a road for Enfield and took the wrong one. He asked at a public house and was set on the right way. After Enfield it was the Great York Road, walking north until dark.

At dusk, he was staggering. He should have taken food, water at least, but that would have looked suspect. His knees were weak with sharp pains at their centres. He saw a paddock with a pond and a yard beyond it. He scaled the rotting fence, walked a wide margin around the pond for fear of falling in and drowning, and crept into the yard. Inside he found a fine bed of baled clover, six feet by six. He lay on it, the motion of the walk fading out of his exhausted limbs. He kept drifting down onto the bed like a bird landing from a height, kept sinking down onto it. He slept uneasily and dreamed that Mary lay by his side, but was taken from him. He awoke still in darkness and alone. He thought he’d heard someone say ‘Mary,’ but when he searched the place there was nobody there. He looked up at the stars to find the pole star. He lay down again with his head pointing towards it so he would know the direction to walk immediately that he woke again.

He awoke in daylight and late, with the mist burned away and the dew drying, but nevertheless he hadn’t been seen. He thanked God and got back onto the road.

Walking, head down, ignoring the occasional carts, counting milestones he passed. Soon he would have to drink something, to eat, would have to find a way to eat.

He removed his boots to shake out the gravel that was cutting him, the soles now worn down to paper and starting to tear. Passing the other way, towards London, a man on horseback said, ‘Here’s another of the broken-down haymakers,’ and threw down a penny. It sparkled on the path. John picked it up and called thanks after him. He exchanged the coin for half a pint in a pub called The Plough, finding refuge there from a heavy shower that pelted the thick, uneven glass of the pub’s windows.

Setting off again, he seemed to pass milestones very quickly, but by nightfall they had been stretched by hunger and exhaustion further and further apart. He stopped in a village and decided to call at a house to get a light for his pipe, having no matches, and there find the parson to fall upon his charity. An old woman allowed him into the parlour where a young girl sat making lace over a cushion and a gentleman smoked and stared. He asked them the way to the parson’s house, but they wouldn’t answer.Was his voice making a sound at all? He certainly heard it. The old woman brought him a lit taper. He sucked the flame in, growing light-headed. The girl said something with her head lowered. The man smiled.

On the road again, he found a countryman, chatty and amenable, on his way to catch a coach, who told him the parson lived a long way off, too far to walk. John asked if there was shelter nearby, a barn maybe, with dry straw.The man told him The Ram Inn would do and said to follow him. John didn’t make it far, however, before he had to rest on a pile of flint. His stomach was burningly empty, his legs refusing. The man was kind and lingered, but when he heard the church bells hastened after his coach.

John walked on, but couldn’t find the inn. He lay down to rest in the shade of a row of elms, but the wind blew through them and prevented sleep. He got up in the dusk to find somewhere better. The odd houses spaced along the road were lit up within, snug and separate.

Finally he came to The Ram but, having no money, did not go in. There was a shed that leaned against one end of it, but with people passing he didn’t dare try and sneak in. Instead, he walked. The road was dark and darker still where trees overshadowed, thrashing softly in the wind.

He came to a crossing of two turnpikes and in his exhaustion could not calculate which way was north and which south. He chose by not choosing, by starting to walk, and soon became sure he had made an error and was heading back the way he had come, heading back to it all, to Fairmead House, to Leopard’s Hill Lodge and the dark forest. He heard himself whimpering with the misery, almost too feeble to keep walking, shuffling forward in the dark. He almost felt he was not moving at all, lifting his feet up and down in infinite darkness. Eventually a light hung in the air, dipping and rising with his steps. A tollgate. His eyes cringed at its fierce brightness when he got to the door and knocked. A man emerged with a candle, peering and unfriendly, the candle’s flame streaming sideways. John asked if he was heading north. ‘After that gate you are,’ the man said and shut his door.

New strength flowed into John. As he walked he hummed an old song, ‘Highland Mary’. Singing her name. Getting closer.

His strength guttering out again. When he found a house by the road with a large porch, he crept in and lay down. He found it long enough to lie with his knotted legs straight out. He reminded himself to wake before the inhabitants did. He rested himself against the warmth of the place, like a child against its mother. All the inhabitants were asleep. He could hear their snores, the creak of straw mattresses.

He woke up at dawn feeling strong. The west was white and blue. Overhead, into the east, a cobbled road of bright rose clouds. He blessed his two wives, his daughter Queen Victoria, and set off again.

After some miles, he rested by an estate wall. From its lodge gate emerged a tall gypsy woman. He asked her where he was and she told him. She had an honest, handsome face.They walked together to the next town and she sang under her breath. She told him to put something inside his hat to hold the crown up. ‘You’ll be noticed,’ she said. When she left him to take her separate way she told him of a shortcut via a church, but he didn’t dare take it for fear, in his starvation and fatigue, of getting confused and losing his way.

Around him the world weakened, started vanishing. There was only the beat of pain from his feet, his hunger, his hands heavy and throbbing by his side. A dyke ran along a roadside field. He stumbled in to get some sleep. He woke and found himself wet down one side. He got up and carried on into darkness, into night, into dimensionless dark.

In the morning he had an idea. He got onto his hands and knees and began eating the damp grass. Sweet and plain, it was not unlike bread. There was something else he could eat, he realised, and pulled the tobacco from his pocket and chewed as he walked, drinking down the bitter saliva, eventually swallowing the whole thing down.

He kept going. It was hard to walk in a straight line. Around him the town of Stilton arose. Half-way through it, he rested on a gravel causeway and heard a young woman’s voice say, ‘Poor creature.’ An older woman’s voice answered, ‘Oh, he shams.’ He got up then and as he staggered to his feet the old woman said, ‘Oh, no he don’t.’ He didn’t look back to see them. He walked on.

At the other end of town he gathered his strength to ask a young woman, ‘Is this the right road for Peterborough?’‘Yes,’ she said.‘This is the Peterborough road.’ Home. He was almost home. He rubbed the tears from his nose.

Just outside Peterborough, a man and a woman in a cart called to him. They were old neighbours from his infancy’s village of Helpston. They’d recognised him. He bent over and held his knees and called to them that he hadn’t eaten or drunk since he’d left London. They found fivepence between them and threw it down. He picked it up from the road, thanking them, waving his ruined hat as they drove away.

A small pub by a bridge over a noisy stream. Inside, the fivepence became twopence of bread and cheese and two half-pints. He dozed as he chewed, struggling to keep his eyes open, but in a little while the food had dispersed into him as strength. Starting to walk again, the pain from his torn feet was sharpened by the rest, but he was too near home now to sit down on the road - he would have been ashamed to do it lest he be seen by people he knew.

Peterborough. Streets. Windows. People. Horses. Peterborough dwindling behind him. Then Walton. Then Werrington. A few miles only to go. A cart stopped beside him. It carried a man, a woman and a boy. ‘Get in,’ they told him, but he refused; he was so close, they needn’t bother for him. But the woman kept insisting with a passion that made him suspect she was drunk or mad. ‘It’s Patty,’ she said. ‘It’s Patty, your wife. Get in.’ They hauled him up onto the cart and he lay on his back to be carried the final miles home. He stared up at the clouds that moved with them. He felt the rough pressure of Patty’s kisses on his face. ‘John,’ Patty said. ‘Poor John. You’re almost home. You’re here.’ He’d made it. It was all behind him. Patty wiped the dirt from his face with her heavy clean hand. She stroked his head. His legs twitched. He turned his face into the smell of her. He licked his cracked lips. ‘Patty,’ he whispered. ‘Patty.’

‘That’s right. Almost home.’

‘Mary.’

Of the many books and journals consulted for this novel, I would like to acknowledge particularly Jonathan Bate’s
John Clare
, Roger Sales’
John Clare: A Literary Life
, Robert Bernard Martin’s
Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart
, and Pamela Faithfull’s PhD thesis
Matthew Allen MD, chemical philosopher, phrenologist, pedagogue and mad-doctor, 1783-1845
. Readers of these historical works will know that in shaping this material as fiction I have taken a number of liberties, compressing events that occurred over several years into the space of seven seasons and ignoring some significant individuals while inventing others.