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CHAPTER ONE
An Introduction
The table was laid for more than a feast. It had all the outward appearance of a feast; the birds had been freshly killed, the pigs slaughtered, the calves had bubbled their last breath. Cakes had been summoned from scarce flour, sugar for a year’s tea had been poured into fantastic meringues, and the liquor hoarded for many Christmases had been poured into tall bottles for one expected evening.
Farmer Jigger regarded the bowed table. He tugged his ear and scowled. Everything looked up to scratch, but one could never be too sure… He moved a plate. His wife snorted. He shifted it back again.
“What do you think?” he asked finally, turning to her.
Wife Jigger frowned. She was a short woman, fast crossing the line between pleasantly stout and demandingly obese. She had produced eleven children before the age of thirty, and her body still appeared to be in shock. She had had a brief bloom of beauty, somewhere between the age of eleven and her second child, but the endless demands of work and babies had scraped the glow from her cheeks like a neurotic painter raging at a portrait of youth. Her purpose was production, but her purpose remained largely unfulfilled. Of her eleven pregnancies, only four came to term, and only the last had survived. Her husband had turned from an enthusiastic champion of virility to a sad spectator of fading hopes.
The Jiggers had given up naming their children, calling them only “Lad” or “Lady” in the hopes that death would have a harder time tracking the nameless. The trail had ended with the last baby, and the name had stuck for good luck. Lady was a pretty child, precocious, flirtatious, and her mother had regarded her with wondrous suspicion. She turned rather hysterically to religion, forgetting the line of tiny graves behind her in sudden joy. “We’ve passed some test, Husband,” she cried over and over, hugging her child in her meaty arms.
Lady blossomed into a young beauty, with lustrous fair hair and skin so soft that, the villagers said, one could sand mist by rubbing it against her cheeks. Her possessive father shielded her from all demands of labour. She milked a little, cooked some, and spent a large amount of time walking country lanes and tossing her hair in the sunlight. Farmer Jigger watched her with a fierce, almost malevolent pride, elementally aware of the rarity of beauty in a land of want. His wife was unrestrained in her sacrifice; he made no complaint when she came to bed after midnight and rose long before dawn to make up for the lost labour.
This nurturing side went almost entirely unrecognized by Lady. In the world of the village, Lady was Queen. Her ragged court paid homage to her in countless ways. Flowers were laid at the Jigger door, little gifts hung from branches where she walked, and the village scribe (a grubby altar-boy of nine) had even turned his hand to poetry, which she constantly found tied to milk pails or cow’s udders. She had never learned to read, and so turned to her best friend Mary for translation.
Mary was the polar opposite of Lady; an almost elemental fusion could be seen when they were together. She was an orphan, the discharge of a distant relative who died of scarlet fever when Mary was an infant. A passing tinker brought her to the Jigger farm. The note tied to her foot could not be read, but she was accepted into the household without question. It was a harsh world, and irregular castaways, while they could not always hope for love, could usually find shelter of some kind.
Mary was a silent child who accepted praise and punishment with the same unblinking stare. She made people uneasy; her hands were always wandering and her face always still. When she was picked up, her little fingers would run over the smiling faces, exploring, tugging, caressing, storing sensations and textures. Wife Jigger was worried that the infant was mute, until one day, when she was carrying Mary through a field, the child had pointed and said “cow” quite clearly. Wife Jigger had gasped, almost dropping her in shock. Mary was six months old.
By the time she was two, she could repeat the Sunday sermon back word for word.
Mary’s mental abilities were sharpened by a willpower so savage that, for a time, she became the terror of the household. One evening she was nowhere to be found, and the whole house had been roused in a frantic effort to locate her. When the cook tore open the pantry door, Mary was sitting, staring intently at a curious arrangement of peas she had placed on the floor. There were two rows of three peas, and underneath, a row of nine more. The cook, understanding nothing of the mysteries of multiplication, had, in her frantic anxiety, aimed a blow at the child. Mary had raised a thin arm and warded off the hand with surprising strength, and taken one pea from the top row and three from the bottom. Then she had picked up the peas and eaten them, gazing up imperturbably at the shocked cook.
Mary and Lady regarded each other at a strange distance for a time. They were almost the same age, but seemed worlds apart. As they grew up together, they grew apart physically. While Lady seemed to spread into a gentle caricature of voluptuousness even before puberty, Mary grew up ramrod straight and unnaturally thin. She had an enormous appetite, but her mind seemed so demanding that it merely tossed leftovers at her body. Her hair was kept short, because she kept taking knives to it when it interfered with her vision, while Lady’s hair lengthened like a blond shadow at sunset. Mary never seemed to change her clothes – and the cook gave up trying to change them after discovering several biological specimens stuck in the pockets – while Lady seemed a clotheshorse for her mother’s endless alterations and inventions. While Lady’s hair was always adorned with flowers, Mary’s was adorned with the material they grew in.
Both girls were teased mercilessly. Boys pulled Lady’s hair longingly; they grabbed her shoes so she would chase them; they threw water at her to reveal her form. Their teasing of Mary spoke little of subverted attraction. They threw sticks at her, punched her arms and pushed her into the ponds she studied. Mary took these insults without comment, waiting until the jeers faded in the distance before resuming her inspections. As time went by, she earned a sort of grudging respect from the boys. They never asked her to play, but whether that was due to hatred of her habits or fear of her indifference was never clear.
One spring, two boys were climbing a tree to get at a bird’s nest when they suddenly realized that they could neither climb further up nor go back down. After a short span of trying to brave it out, they began crying piteously. Mary arrived and spent a few moments inspecting their dilemma, ignoring their cries for help. She reached down, picked up a stone and flung it at the bird’s nest. The nest wobbled, toppled, and a tiny blue egg fell out, right past the two boys. They both grabbed at it, the motion dislodging them from their precarious perches. They fell with a scream, but since the distance was only about ten feet, scrambled to their feet, then burst into shocked tears. Mary muttered something under her breath, pocketed the egg she had caught, and strolled off whistling.
One boy, on hearing this story, began trying to frighten Mary. One morning, John Mudder stole up on her while she was reading in the barn and dropped a spider on her. She blinked, picked up the wriggling thing and studied it.
“Do you know its name?” she asked, looking up at him.
“Sure,” he said scornfully, “‘Billy’.”
“You’re wrong,” Mary replied. “It’s an arachnid. Part of the arachnid family, anyway. Thank you.”
“Huh?”
“I had one, but it escaped.”
“Yer weird.”
“It’s true.”
“So if you’re not a-scared of spiders,” the boy said, throwing himself down in the hay and sneezing. “What are you a-scared of?”
Mary frowned. “You frighten me.”
“There’s nothing to be a-scared of about me, girlie,” said John, looking pleased. “Why would I scare you?”
“Because the only thing that frightens me is stupidity,” Mary replied, shaking her head slightly and walking off.
John frowned, chewing on a stalk, then rolled off the hay and ran after Mary. Suddenly she found herself flung forward onto the ground.
“What was the point of that?” she asked, standing up and brushing her ragged dress. “You’re bigger than me, but we already knew that.”
“Yer just a little girl,” the boy had said, scowling suddenly.
“So why did you push me over?”
He blinked. “Why not?”
“I’ll tell you why not,” said Mary with a rare smile, stepping forward. “Because if you don’t push me over, I’ll teach you all about spiders.”
“Yuck! Who’d want to stick around with a girlie poking at bugs?”
Mary’s smile disappeared – it was not replaced by anything, it simply vanished from her face, like a shadow under a passing cloud.
When she turned to go, of course, he leapt after her and threw her down again.
Whether Mary was beginning to understand anything other than spiders and peas was unclear – her face remained strangely stable. But a change slowly overcame her. She began to give the odd impression of shrinking as she grew. Her eyes became less curious and more intense. An intense, waiting energy hung around her, like the mutterings of an impatient line-up. Sometimes, while the household was at dinner, there would be a clatter of cutlery at the rough-hewn children’s table, and they all would turn to see Mary staring into space, her cheeks reddening, and the room would grow silent, as if fading in the sound of distant thunder. While they watched, Mary would blink, pick up her fork in a trembling hand and attack her food once more. Conversation was always a little limp after such occurrences, despite Lady’s near-constant giggling.
Wife Jigger became a little afraid of Mary, but took extra care to hide it. She was a powerfully instinctive woman, whose maternal perceptiveness seemed designed for an immense family. The depth of her perceptions, being focused on only two children, grew almost supernaturally acute, and she was prone to scolding them for transgressions they were only starting to contemplate.
When they were twelve, Lady sat with Mary on a fence out by the back fields and listened to her first talk of the future. It was a beautiful day; they had finished their chores early in expectation of miracles. They sat, gazing at the endless spread of the land, the men toiling in the distant fields, the jackdaws wheeling and diving to the rutted earth. The sight gave a luxuriously contemplative air to the unfolding young minds. Well, one of them anyway.
“That Jack – he’s your boyfriend!” giggled Lady, pointing at the hunchback passing like a whale through the wheat.
Mary didn’t reply, but sat with her hands folded in her lap, staring out over the waving fields.
“That Todd, in the village, he sent me another poem,” said Lady, tugging at the pocket of her dress. “Read it to me.”
“Not now, Lady,” murmured Mary, her eyes distant.
Lady pouted. “Oh poo. You said: let’s go to the back fence and watch the clouds. Well now we’re here and I want you to read to me!”
“Why? You don’t even like him.”
“He’s – you know. He’s funny. It’s funny what he writes.”
“Not to him. He loves you.”
“Oh, don’t they all?” giggled Lady.
“And that’s all they’ll ever do, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“All their lives, they have so few true feelings, and here they are wasting them on one spoiled little girl.”
“Who’s spoiled? And I don’t see it’s such a waste,” said Lady.
“Don’t you imagine that there’s a great army over that last hill?” said Mary suddenly, pointing at the horizon. “Don’t you think that they’re kneeling in a field, swords glittering and muskets raised, just waiting for the signal to charge?”
“You silly – what would they charge for?”
“Because everyone has a farthest hill. Even an army. They’re probably looking over here and thinking: there is a fabulous kingdom, rich in gold and open for plunder! Can’t you almost see them, trembling, waiting, their metal shivering, shaking the sun’s rays? Oh, how I wish they would come and take me away!” she cried.
“A fine figure you’d cut in an army,” said Lady, stroking her golden locks. “You’d be set to carrying water and washing their feet when they’d been marching all day.”
“That would be all right,” murmured Mary. “As long as I could march with them.”
There was a short silence.
“John Mudder was mean about you yesterday,” said Lady after a while.
Mary shifted. “What – did he say?”
“That you are nothing, with no family, and that someone has to teach you what that means.”
“Oh.”
“He said it many times, that someone had to teach you what that means. What does he mean?”
“He means that he thinks himself something, and he hates anyone who disagrees. Because he’s not much of anything.”
“He’s very strong. He hung from a tree branch for the longest time.”
“Yes,” whispered Mary. “He’s very strong.”
“Does that frighten you?” asked Lady, turning to look at her friend.
Mary didn’t answer for a moment. Her thin face was pale, taut, and her hands slowly clenched in her lap.
“No,” she said finally, “not that he’s strong, but that he may be right. Maybe I am nothing…”
“Well looky here! It’s the girlies!” cried a frighteningly exuberant voice. Mary whipped her head around and saw John walking along the fence, his arms wagging from side to side.
“Well, well!” cried John. “The spider and the princess – what a pretty fairy tale!”
A sudden shove from behind sent Mary spinning off the fence. She landed in the dirt with a thump, tasting blood from her lip. She turned around and saw Clive standing on the other side, his hands stuck in his pockets, grinning madly.
“Quite a wind today, hey girlie?” he said.
Mary stood up silently and dusted her dress. Clive was John’s shadow, a weak boy who only needed the permission of a stronger soul to become darker.
“What did you do that for?” asked Lady.
“Because we takes a notion,” said John, leaping off the fence and walking forward. A piece of wheat jutted out from his mouth, wagging as he spoke. “And what is the weight of this little girlie?” he asked, sneering at Mary. “A wind blows, and she flies off the fence – fat head and all!”
“Oh, leave her alone, John. You’re so mean!” cried Lady.
He turned to her and grinned. “You, my pretty, you don’t know what’s good for you. Hanging around with this ‘un when there’s already those that’d show you what’s what.”
“I know what’s what!” cried Lady. “I know that it’s mean to push a girl. And not very gentlemanly.”
No, thought Mary, don’t say that…
John’s cheeks flushed. “Is that what you say?” he demanded. “I don’t push no nice girls, but those that ain’t nice gets no protection from me. I know what a gentleman is. It’s not all in yer picture-books. A gentleman is him that takes the time to set things right. And when someone steps out of line then wham! – he let’s ‘em have it. For their own good. This ‘un,” he said, jabbing a finger at Mary, “this ‘un, she don’t know what’s what. She’s parading all airs, when she don’t have no brothers, no father, no mother. She’s making out like she’s better than the rest of us put together, a-cause she can read and talk back. But that’s not what’s what. What’s what is that don’t make anyone better than anyone else, a-cause she don’t have no family that makes her not talk back. Because she doesn’t know what’s what.”
“You leave her be!” cried Lady.
“She needs to know what’s what. And, as a mere favour, I might see my way clear t’showing her!” leered John, rising to full height.
“Let me!” cried Clive, leaping over the fence.
“That’s as we’ll see fit to say,” replied John. He walked over to Mary and stood with his hands bunched in his pockets. “So, missy-girl, are you going to tell me what’s what?”
She stood there silently staring at him.
John took a step back, tsk-ing between his teeth. “Hard to tell what’s what, ain’t it, ‘specially when you’ve no family to tell you. I’ll tell you some though, an’ we’ll see if you’re smart enough to figger out th’rest.” He leapt forward suddenly, pinning Mary’s head in the crook of his elbow. She did not resist; her eyes narrowed. Lady gasped and leapt forward, but found herself pinned by Clive.
“Here’s a sample of what’s what,” growled John, his lips very close to her ear. “When someone tells you what to do, you do it, with no ‘words’, no ‘books’, no ‘whys’. When I tells you something, you just nod and say ‘that’s very clever, master John; I wish I’d ‘uv thought of it!’ Can you do that, girlie?” he asked, grabbing her hair tightly with his free hand. “Can you nod for yer Uncle John?” Mary closed her eyes. “Can you nod for yer Uncle John?” he repeated, yanking her head back and forth. “There! Y’see – I’ve already got you started! It’s not so hard when y’think about it! And y’know,” he said, continuing the motion, “since I know you like the ‘whys’, I’ll give you some. You nod because you’ve got no family. You nod because there’s no-one and nothing looking out for you. You nod because you’re a girlie, and that’s what girlies do when someone tell’s ‘em what’s what. And the simplest is why you nod for me! You nod for me a-cause I say so, and if you think that’s not good enough, I’ve no choice but to take it as a very – personal – insult!” he finished, using the rhythm of his last words to yank her head even more viciously. Then he released her and let her fall in a heap on the ground.
“And that,” he whispered, bending over her in mad glee, “is what’s what!”
Mary rose slowly, welts rising on her neck. She looked at John, and suddenly he felt unsteady, as if she were not looking at him, but rather through him, or beyond him to some vast puppet-master who controlled his every move. It was a moment he was to remember for a long time; as an adult, when the true scope of what Mary was capable of was becoming clear, he often woke from a dream of that gaze, his sheets soaking wet.
“I know what’s what, and what is not,” she said slowly, distinctly, with the simplicity of great clarity, “– and you are not!”
He exhaled in a great whoosh, taking a step backward. His eyebrows knotted together. Suddenly, with all the might of his sturdy young frame, he lashed out and punched Mary full in the stomach. She doubled over, tottering on thin legs, then fell over sideways, her face slamming into the ground. There was a shocked silence, broken only by the strangled sounds of Mary labouring for breath. Lady turned her pale face aside.
“Never say that again!” screamed John, dancing around nervously. “If you even think it, I’ll know, and I’ll make you pay, you nothing! You think you can say that to me? I am everything! You are nothing but doing what you’re told, and you’d better do nothing but what your told, nothing else your whole life long! Your mummy and daddy gave you away because they didn’t want you, and that means you keep your mouth shut! No-one steps aside! Do you understand me, you nothing? None step away! Everybody stays right where they are! And that’s with me up here and you down there in the dirt! Do you hear me, girlie? Don’t try to change nothing, or this is what you’ll get – and more!”
John’s face was flushed; he panted as he spoke. His words roused him to frenzy, and he drew his foot back for a kick. Mary watched him from the ground, and slowly closed her eyes.
An odd shadow suddenly drifted over the tableau. A large flat rock came out of nowhere and landed with a dull whap on John’s cheek.
“Go-wan, you little bullying crumb,” cried a raspy voice. The children turned and saw Knotted Bob standing on the other side of the fence.
“Go-wan, you milkmaid, you side-order, go back to your hovel and leave the ladies in peace,” cried Knotted Bob, “or I’ll toast you both sides, inside and out!”
John put a hand to his cheek and stared at the old man, a supernatural horror in his eyes. He turned without a second thought and sprinted away over the fields, falling, scrambling and running again, only slightly behind his shadow, who had released Lady at the first sound of the old man’s voice and bolted too.
“Are you all right, younger?” asked Knotted Bob, opening the gate and levering his twisted frame over to Mary.
“Just – nothing. We were playing,” said Mary, wiping the blood from her lips.
“Hah, yes, but you can’t gaf a gaffer,” rasped the old man, helping her up. “That sort of play the world can live on less of. You, sunshine, go-wan and get some water and a rag and tail it like a rabbit!” he added to Lady, who turned and flew away only slightly less rapidly than the two boys.
When Mary had composed herself, she turned to her saviour.
Knotted Bob leaned over her, his rough face softened in concern.
Knotted Bob was a sort of living monument to the idea that human beings are capable of being indecently exposed to time. His nickname came from the strange gesticulations that erupted from his passionate need to be understood despite his crippling arthritis. He was in charge of the milkmaids; having grown too old to be a shepherd, he had been put out to pasture with those considered even more domesticated than sheep. Knotted Bob had no last name – even the thought that he had once been fathered caused misty visions of eternity to rise in people’s heads. He had never married, which to some was further evidence of his oddness, for it was whispered that no man should have the wisdom to make such an intelligent decision before reaching the age which made it redundant. Others argued that he had not married because his arthritis had struck young, for even Wife Jigger could not remember a time when Knotted Bob had been able to strike the dinner-gong without the odd creaking sound his joints made being audible from the kitchen.
For all that, though, Knotted Bob had retained a savage desire for life, as if he had accepted the burden of his physique only on the condition that he would be required to worry about nothing else. His still-active convolutions at the county dances made him a local celebrity, and he was the recipient of much attention from the younger women, who greatly valued the chance to practice their charming arts on a disposable canvas, so to speak. His gallant ease with women was the natural result of a man who has never had to raise his voice to one; were it not for his kaleidoscopic body, Knotted Bob would have been the recipient of a good deal of resentment from other men. As it was, fortunately, they saw him as the only kind of gentleman they admired – a harmless one. Only a few of them realized that Knotted Bob was in fact the last revenge of romantic bachelorhood, which is to raise the expectations of wives to the point where their husbands were open to attack if they did not traipse through the fields with flowers for their lovelies at least once a month. The few who had the sensitivity to realize this, of course, were little troubled by it, for they were also smart enough to pre-empt such chivalric demands by regular maintenance of the romantic ideals of their wives. The women, in turn, met them halfway, greeting their gifts of meat, wheat and news of new piglets with the air of those who receive French chocolates procured by long and hazardous journeys.
Mary had been aware of Knotted Bob’s attention for a long time. One of her earliest memories was of the creaking of her crib as he rocked it far into the night. (It wasn’t until she was much older that she realized that the sound actually came from his elbow.) During one of her dinner-time revelations, he looked at her a long time after the others had resumed conversation, gazing at her with the air of one who waits for understanding – not his own, but of the object of his observation. She was intensely embarrassed by his scrutiny, by her youthful inability to answer his silent question, but when she saw him he held her gaze for only a moment before turning back to his food with a shrug that said only: not yet.
As she grew, Mary began to withdraw from her life. Knotted Bob was the first to notice, but it wasn’t long before her gradual diminishment began to be evident to all. The demands of her intelligence could not be slowed or vanquished – it was as if, seeing her surroundings in such a blazing way, the only survival she could find was to turn her wick down to its lowest level. Her eyes grew at once hysterical and listless, and she often seemed to sort of halt, as if waiting for something. She became careless and forgetful; sometimes she would stare at her bucket of milk for hours, as if awaiting a vision. This slowness began to be combined with an almost supernatural irritability – many times, as she was ascending the steps to yet another pre-dawn breakfast, she could be heard muttering under her breath, and she would become distracted at the table by the shape of her food, or the colour of her plate, and would suddenly look up, her cheeks red, to discover that everyone had left.
To many she appeared almost simple. The tales of her early prodigality were all but forgotten, and she began to be regarded as someone who had squandered her life’s ration of common sense in premature displays of pointless ability. She irritated those around her; she had to be forced to do her chores, and went about them with a resentfully hesitant air. Whenever external pressures ceased, she fell slack at once, her eyes turning dull and introspective. She became sullen, furtive, and stole knick-knacks on occasion. Wife Jigger caught her once, when she had stolen a goose-egg, and had been utterly perplexed as to why someone would steal something so worthless – and keep it under her pillow besides, until it cracked and betrayed the stench to the whole house. Mary did not respond to Wife Jigger’s persistent questioning, sitting on her bed and picking at her blanket, face red and voice low, relaying in a monotonous tone preposterous lies and justifications for her theft. The absurdity of the girl’s replies drove the woman to distraction – and almost to violence – but when she finally raised her hand to the girl, Mary stared up with such vengeful spite in her eyes that Wife Jigger positively shuddered.
Her vast spread of maternal feeling began to flow around Mary, as if the girl were a sharp rock in a wide river; the more she tried to apply love, the more Mary seemed to resent her. One night, when she came up to tell Mary a bedtime story, the youngster pulled her blanket up to her eyes and stared at the older woman, her eyes wide and red.
“To think of stupid stories – in the midst of this!” cried Mary, her lips trembling.
“In the midst of what, dear?” Wife Jigger asked with the cloying concern that comes from resisting an urge to smack.
“All this! All of you!” Mary said, turning her face to the cracked white wall.
“Whatever is the matter with you?” asked Wife Jigger. “You have a good home, which is more than most orphans can hope for.”
“There is no good home,” Mary replied, her hands wandering over a mottled and much-mended blanket.
“What are you saying? You have enough to eat – Lord knows you aren’t burdened by many chores, and there is enough cheer in this house to brighten a Russian! How can you be so murky about it all?”
“Because,” replied Mary, still staring at the wall. “Because – it is boring!”
“Well – if it’s time you have on your hands, there’s the south fence to be mended, the cattle to be bled, the well-rope to be replaced…”
“Better not send me there. Like as not, I would throw myself down,” said Mary with a strained laugh.
“But – why?” asked Wife Jigger.
“Why not?” cried Mary. “Why – because for the rest of my life I have little more to look forward than pricking cattle and weaving ropes!”
“Oh, my girl! That’s scarcely all!” exclaimed Wife Jigger. “You’re growing up a strong lass – you have a whole life of children and husband ahead of you. You’re thirteen already. It’s not all chores, you know…” she said with a wink.
But she stopped, all of a sudden, because Mary shuddered in an almost-tangible revulsion.
“Pah! You’ll make me sick!” she cried. “The boys here! To be a drudge for the stupid, to breed stupidity and answer stupidity with nods and smiles! Ugh!”
Wife Jigger took a deep breath. To her view of life, Mary had just committed blasphemy.
“Then what is it you want to be?” she asked finally. “Sure enough – there’s not a mess of choice. We must be content with our lot.”
“I know that,” said Mary. “I know what I am built for, what I was born for. I don’t have to like it.”
“What else would you have?”
But the young girl did not reply. She just stared at the wall. “Then perhaps there is nothing to do,” she said softly, “but nothing…”
“That’s your spite talking,” said Wife Jigger, rising to leave. “This world may not fit all who wear it, but there’s no use in fighting the seams, else soon that’s all you’ll see.”
“To some, that’s all there is,” replied Mary, biting on her thin sheets.
“Then that’s all they look for,” said Wife Jigger decisively, leaning over and turning down the lamp. “Now get some rest. It’s a big day tomorrow.”
“Why? Sun rising earlier?”
“No, child,” sighed Wife Jigger. “Lord Laurence is coming to dinner!”
Mary’s eyes lit up at once. She started up feverishly, her fists knotting over her covers.
“Is it true what they say?” she asked. “Is he very rich?”
“Richest I’ve seen, which is none too rich, mind you, but then they tell of wealth, and so I think. Rich enough for you, no doubt.”
“Why is he coming?”
“Every year he came, since he was a little boy. You were too young to remember. Now, though, the past four years he’s been abroad.” She grinned excitedly, her hands on her cheeks. “Abroad, child! And now he’s come back to take over his lands, which have been run by his mother since his good father died – oh, six years ago now.”
“Where has he been?” asked Mary, her eyes wide.
“Where has he been?” exclaimed Wife Jigger, sitting down again on the bed and sighing happily. “Overseas, over many seas! To Italy, to France and other such countries. Four years of travel he has under his belt. I saw him the other day in the village – gosh but what a fine figure he cut! I remember his father when he was young, and young Laurence is the spitting image – spitting! Just as a Lord should look, I dare say. He’s been up to some adventures abroad, that much I can guess! His cheeks are so fair, and his eyes dance like faeries! It’s a God-given vitality, no question. Some of the upper folk get all plumpy and angry, but not him! He’s lost weight – used to be quite a chubby lad, not that I’d remind him now, except as a joke, but he’s grown so straight and tall that you’d never know he once had trouble getting over a fence! All the women have a new pillow-mate, I dare say – all worship him like the good Lord,” she said, crossing herself, “and though it may be blasphemy, it’s hard to complain. Just the other day I heard how he had rescued a girl from the rain – he put her in his carriage and danced alongside it – it’s quite tiny, you see – just danced alongside it in the rain, laughing and making jokes! That girl, she can live forever on that day, though God have mercy on her husband, who has no carriage, nor even a horse. Still, there’s life here now. Our Lord has returned! The girls all put a bounce in their step, and they look so pretty – they wear flowers in their hair and rub themselves with sweet herbs. Listen to me, getting quite out of breath, but Husband isn’t around, so it’s all right to be out of breath!” laughed Wife Jigger, patting her heaving bosom. “So listen, child. You put aside your frowns for one day, and come to dinner dressed in your best – we’ll see what we can find, one of Lady’s old frocks perhaps – and you laugh when he does and maybe we can put in that you can read, and perhaps this will do some good. I know Clem’s full of talk about some farming methods the good Earl picked up abroad, in Holland I think, and perhaps something can come for you there.”
Wife Jigger’s excited speech was cut short by a bellow from downstairs.
“Wife!”
“Oh – that’s me!” giggled Wife Jigger, standing hurriedly and brushing her hair from her flushed cheeks. “Good night, sweet child. Sleep well – and look forward to the future!”
Mary lay staring up into the darkness long after Wife Jigger had gone. Unrealized greatness – how it worships the pomp of privilege! Her heart pounded in her throat, like a beaten horse glimpsing the barn door ajar. He will know! she thought rapidly, visions of halos and crowns dancing in her head. He will be beautiful, he will look past my grubby dress and trembling hands and see my true soul, my hidden heart! Her intelligence, roused like a snake after a long slumber, fastened its fangs on the image of the Lord’s outstretched hand. Such a mansion he will have, she thought, such trinkets hidden in the library, where one might live, quiet and unheard as a mouse, scurrying from book to book in the midnight hours. So many rooms, one might get lost in the cobwebs, hidden deep among old furniture and dust. Occasionally he will ask me to dinner and ask me what I have learned, and I will talk him to the moon, and the wine will sparkle in our glasses and I will leave him polishing his spectacles and shaking his head in wonder at his hidden guest! Outside, an owl hooted, deep in a tree. Mary pulled her blanket over her head. And sometimes I will be in the garden, resting from my studies, pruning peach trees and wearing a big white hat. And he will ride up on a horse, with another beside him, and we will go thundering through his woods and then there will be no talk of books or deep thoughts, only the thudding of wild hooves and ducking of branches as we fly past. And once in a very great while, we will come to a clearing with a big, wide pool, and under the shade of the leaves his laughing passion will get the better of him, yet so gently, and he will kiss me softly on the lips, and on his lips I will taste all the admiration I deserve, all the wonder that is myself, and the future will widen like avenues of fire parting before a shudder of spring wind. How his hair will slip between my fingers; how the leaves it has gathered will fall about us; how he will bear me down on the soft heather and open me to the skies above…
Mary’s breath was coming short. A sudden elemental restraint cut through her wild thoughts, slicing like a dark knife through her web of soft pictures. How shallow he could be, she thought; how his laughter might be nothing more than the froth on a rivulet, a gaudy spinning heartiness around a tiny narrow parcel. And what of his looks, and all these other women? (and with that her breath almost stopped.) What of his clothes and hair – what if he should he care about them? What if, lost in lies, he sees nothing but falsehood in others? What if – and this was the worst – what if tomorrow night his eyes barely slide over the ragged little girl at the children’s table?
She felt an awful sinking sensation in her stomach at the last thought. If I could only grow two feet by morning, it would be a start… Or have Lady’s hair… He will surely notice her hair, even pass his hands through it and remark what a wonderful bedspread it would make if woven… Mary shuddered, closing her eyes tightly.
All through the night she watched the shadows shifting over the ceiling, wondering what movements he would have to make in the garden to produce such shapes.
CHAPTER TWO
A Son Returns to a Different Home
Lord Laurence Carvey was a creature of boundless energy, whose every gesture sprang from the kind of certainty that can only come from taking too many things for granted. When he leaned against the wall and talked, it was with such ease that weaker wills seemed to fall in line like salmon before a strong current. His eyes were focused, sharply kind, and radiated such a sense of purpose that one could find oneself agreeing that the world was indeed flat, and moreover, one could repeat such observations with the same subtle earnestness – and find oneself oddly irritated if they were opposed.
Laurence was raised by his mother and sister; his father had been a great traveler, and his son had become the focus of those odd kinds of feminine obsessions that naturally unfold when the expected roles of wife and daughter remain unfulfilled. His childhood was a long stretch of bidding and lazing, of days lying on couches with picture-books and finger-puppets and nights of breathy abandon with the wilder boys of his clan. Such a coalescing of all that is pleasurable, so few demands and so much desire, so much the center of cloaking femininity – is it surprising at all that Lord Laurence had grown up with such an ease of manner?
In many men such pampering would have decayed their sense of purpose to feeble sequences of pale demands and flushed rejections, but Lord Laurence had grown into a beautiful young man who impressed all he met, a theoretician of social ills and earnest devotee of the new philosophies, a man who diagnosed his class and performed verbal post-mortems on social ills with pale-cheeked matrons whose tea cups rattled with the soft intensity of his speeches. Here is a man of conscience! they thought with daring admiration; here is such an improbable amalgam of power and possibility that he is capable of anything he sets his mind to!
The young god of the oldest pantheon was tall, with dark hair that hung in tight curls. His cheeks swept in flowing ridges from ear to hollow, his lips were precise and relaxed, and his hands wonderfully expressive – when he talked they fluttered quickly, outlining plans and thoughts like racing doves. He was quick, but not quick-tempered. He was an aficionado of Plato (Aristotle had bored him immensely), and like that old master, he had developed the art of erecting ideas on clouds with such breathtaking elegance that they seemed more real than the dessert-plates which trembled in his listener’s hands.
For all that, Lord Laurence was a man who prided himself on his practicality. Taking his cue from the integration of the Greeks, he applied his intellect to practical problems with the same energy he used to sculpt abstractions. First and foremost he learned the arts of agriculture for, as he often said, if masters were not to earn their keep by education, then servants had every right to cut their throats at night. (Such observations, uttered with an intensely earnest air, made his female listeners positively shudder – though perhaps more at the thought of the young Lord entering their rooms at night than murderous servants beating down their doors.)
Relations with his father had been strained but not unpleasant. The elder Lord Carvey had been a rambler who had long mourned the final discoveries of the known world. Rather than waste his time exploring discovered geography, he had plunged into a hearty but confused study of Eastern religions, producing an impressive tome shortly before his death, a work universally admired for its ability to show well on a bookcase. Lord Carvey had devoted the majority of his work to graphic descriptions into Eastern sexual mysteries. These sections were written with just enough departure from objective opinion to give the impression of a man whose interests as a scholar had succumbed to his enthusiasm as a tourist during his surveys of the fleshy realms. His book was always kept on the third or fourth shelf, for the sake of the children, which had the effect of turning it from a work of investigative theology to a handbook of practical physics, so earnestly did youngsters devise ways of reaching it. A favourite trick of young wags was to take the book from the shelf while visiting relatives and let it fall open in their hands – since it inevitably widened to rather vivid prints of ritual sensuality it created good opportunities to wiggle eyebrows and say ‘mmm’ and ‘ahah’.
Laurence’s mother, Lady Barbara Carvey, had found the book quite disgusting, because it gave the erroneous impression that she was an enormously fortunate woman. She found herself forced to meet the inevitable question of “does he really?” with acute and stony stares. To her profound relief, her husband had not approached her in that way for many years – he actually seemed quite relieved that his firstborn was such a spectacularly healthy boy, for it absolved him of the responsibility of grunting his way through the indignity of future “sowings of seeds”. This had been no great loss to Barbara; although initially quite curious, had been quite disappointed by the awkwardness of it all. That, and the odd desire of her husband to keep his hat on during the act, had quite snuffed any latent desires she may have had.
They had married as a matter of course, to avoid stigma and make entertaining easier to organize. Their bond had been one of companionship; they had made their aims clear from the beginning, and would have regarded any attempt at passion vague distaste of watching someone embellish a white lie. Barbara had always been a solitary woman who enjoyed reading and vigorous walks, and her marriage suited her perfectly. Those of her companions who threw themselves into stormy affairs seemed to Barbara to be rather missing the point of life, which was to live quietly and pleasantly. She regarded the endless soul-searching and torrid impulses that constantly shook her friends with the complacency of a large vessel that watches rowboats smashing against rocks during a violent storm. Why ride the silly things? was her constant (though silent) question.
The third part of the Carvey family was Laurence’s sister, Lady Kay. She was two years older than Laurence and had an appearance that combined the demandingly hesitant impositions of a live-in spinster with the unbearable sensitivity of a poetic child. Her face was long, pale and drawn – a “white skinny horse” was how Laurence had described her in a rare moment of cruelty. Her hair was flat to the point of paint, and hung below her ears like a broken awning. Her eyes, however, did a lot to make up for such defects – they were sensitive without being soppy, and were prone to wonderful shifts of mood that almost seemed to change their hue.
Kay’s favourite word was “kind”, and she had spent most of her young life lamenting its absence. Certain souls have the misfortune to adhere to ideas that act as a constant friction against their natural state, and Kay was one of those. She was by nature quite uncomplicated, but had a romantic streak, and so found herself torn between common sense and self-dramatization. She believed that passion was the unconscious pursuit of dark secrets and undefined longings, and so spent a good deal of her teenage years yearning after various things. She had yearned for travel, gotten seasick going to France, yearned for the continent before being robbed in her Pensione, yearned for Frenchmen before discovering they smelled, yearned for freedom before discovering that most suffragettes were rude, yearned for poverty before discovering it was dusty, and was now believed herself to be in a sorry state of suspended desires and denied expectations.
Kay spent an oddly dreamy four years while Laurence was away. Plans came and went; inspiration trailed off into lassitude, and she began marking off her calendar over a year before he was due home. If she were questioned long and hard, Kay would have admitted that everything she did was for the sake of her brother’s return. I read Gibbons to talk with Laurence about Rome; I study father’s book to talk about religion; I learn about architecture to argue the merits of the Taj Mahal (he had visited it, of course – she had filed his letters alphabetically, by location). I know where he stands, the progress and evolution of his thought, the impressions of his visitations, and when he returns we shall talk far into every night…
At the same, though, a strange dread began growing in her. As her brother’s return grew imminent, she became confused and nervous. The sudden reality of his inevitable question – and what have you been up to? – began to haunt her. Her diary sprang fascinating backwards pages as Kay frantically attempted to live her life retroactively. Here we went to the old ruins, and oh yes! – there we went to Land’s End, and I had the most fascinating talk with an old lighthouse keeper – such stories he had of storms and imagined invasions! So much to tell you, Laurence. And by the way – how was your trip?
Of course they would laugh, sitting there on the couch, and there would be lazy curtains swaying in the breeze… Still, Kay could not repress the dread in her heart. A crushing tension seemed to take hold of her, and she spent many hours sitting by the window of her room, gazing out over the hills to the distant forests, and at such times she could have sworn with her whole soul that there was not another person in the entire world, that they had vanished and she waited only for a phantom that would never come. Tears came to her strangely, tears that seemed to course from the tearing of an endless fabric, tears with no sense or purpose or release. And at times she would find herself in the grip of a soaring exultation, and an urge to shout would rise in her breast. But again – to what purpose?
Yet for all Kay’s hopes and fears, Laurence’s return would affect most the girl who learned of it last: Mary O’Donnell...
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