Born to parents who owned a 3,000-acre estate in Devon, Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924) was a sensitive and sickly child who was taken on Grand Tours by his father when young. He was fluent in five languages before he went to school, aged fifteen, where he was bullied. He remained an individualist and maverick all his life. After training as a vicar, he fell in love with Grace Taylor, a millworker’s daughter half his age who may have been the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Taylor was trained in upper-class mores before marrying Baring-Gould. For ten years, Baring-Gould was vicar of East Mersea on the Essex island. Although he disliked the place and its people, it inspired him to write Mehalah, perhaps the most enduring of his 130 books and hundreds of articles, stories, poems and letters. He was most proud of collecting folk songs but was also a hagiographer, historian, archaeologist and author of The Book of Werewolves. He also found the time to father fifteen children.
Between the mouths of the Blackwater and the Colne, on the east coast of Essex, lies an extensively marshy tract veined and freckled in every part with water. It is a wide waste of debatable ground contested by sea and land, subject to incessant incursions from the former, but stubbornly maintained by the latter. At high tide the appearance is that of a vast surface of moss or Sargasso weed floating on the sea, with rents and patches of shining water traversing and dappling it in all directions. The creeks, some of considerable length and breadth, extend many miles inland, and are arteries whence branches out a fibrous tissue of smaller channels, flushed with water twice in the twenty-four hours. At noon-tides, and especially at the equinoxes, the sea asserts its royalty over this vast region, and overflows the whole, leaving standing out of the flood only the long island of Mersea, and the lesser islet, called the Ray. This latter is a hill of gravel rising from the heart of the Marshes, crowned with ancient thorntrees, and possessing, what is denied the mainland, an unfailing spring of purest water. At ebb, the Ray can only be reached from the old Roman causeway, called the Strood, over which runs the road from Colchester to Mersea Isle, connecting formerly the city of the Trinobantes with the station of the Count of the Saxon shore. But even at ebb, the Ray is not approachable by land unless the sun or east wind has parched the ooze into brick; and then the way is long, tedious and tortuous, among bitter pools and over shining creeks. It was perhaps because this ridge of high ground was so inaccessible, so well protected by nature, that the ancient inhabitants had erected on it a rath, or fortified camp of wooden logs, which left its name to the place long after the timber defences had rotted away.
A more desolate region can scarce be conceived, and yet it is not without beauty. In summer, the thrift mantles the marshes with shot satin, passing through all gradations of tint from maiden’s blush to lily white. Thereafter a purple glow steals over the waste, as the sea lavender bursts into flower, and simultaneously every creek and pool is royally fringed with sea aster. A little later the glass-wort, that shot up green and transparent as emerald glass in the early spring, turns to every tinge of carmine.
When all vegetation ceases to live, and goes to sleep, the marshes are alive and wakeful with countless wild fowl. At all times they are haunted with sea mews and roysten crows, in winter they teem with wild duck and grey geese. The stately heron loves to wade in the pools, occasionally the whooper swan sounds his loud trumpet, and flashes a white reflection in the still blue waters of the fleets. The plaintive pipe of the curlew is familiar to those who frequent these marshes, and the barking of the brent geese as they return from their northern breeding places is heard in November.
At the close of last century there stood on the Ray a small farmhouse built of tarred wreckage timber, and roofed with red pan-tiles. The twisted thorntrees about it afforded some, but slight, shelter. Under the little cliff of gravel was a good beach, termed a “hard.”
On an evening towards the close of September, a man stood in this farmhouse by the hearth, on which burnt a piece of wreckwood, opposite an old woman, who crouched shivering with ague in a chair on the other side. He was a strongly built man of about thirty-five, wearing fisherman’s boots, a brown coat and a red plush waistcoat. His hair was black, raked over his brow. His cheekbones were high; his eyes dark, eager, intelligent, but fierce in expression. His nose was aquiline, and would have given a certain nobility to his countenance, had not his huge jaws and heavy chin contributed an animal cast to his face.
He leaned on his duck-gun, and glared from under his pent-house brows and thatch of black hair over the head of the old woman at a girl who stood behind, leaning on the back of her mother’s chair, and who returned his stare with a look of defiance from her brown eyes.
The girl might have been taken for a sailor boy, as she leaned over the chairback, but for the profusion of her black hair. She wore a blue knitted guernsey covering body and arms, and across the breast, woven in red wool, was the name of the vessel, Gloriana. The guernsey had been knitted for one of the crew of a ship of this name, but had come into the girl’s possession. On her head she wore the scarlet woven cap of a boatman.
The one-pane window at the side of the fireplace faced the west, and the evening sun lit her brown gipsy face, burnt in her large eyes, and made coppery lights in her dark hair.
The old woman was shivering with the ague, and shook the chair on which her daughter leaned; a cold sweat ran off her brow, and every now and then she raised a white faltering hand to wipe the drops away that hung on her eyebrows like rain on thatching.
“I did not catch the chill here,” she said. “I ketched it more than thirty years ago when I was on Mersea Isle, and it has stuck in my marrow ever since. But there is no ague on the Ray. This is the healthiest place in the world, Mehalah has never caught the ague on it. I do not wish ever to leave it, and to lay my bones elsewhere.”
“Then you will have to pay your rent punctually,” said the man in a dry tone, not looking at her, but at her daughter.
“Please the Lord so we shall, as we ever have done,” answered the woman; “but when the chill comes on me—”
“Oh, curse the chill,” interrupted the man; “who cares for that except perhaps Glory yonder, who has to work for both of you. Is it so, Glory?”
The girl thus addressed did not answer, but folded her arms on the chairback, and leaned her chin upon them. She seemed at that moment like a wary cat watching a threatening dog, and ready at a moment to show her claws and show desperate battle, not out of malice, but in self-defence.
“Why, but for you sitting there, sweating and jabbering, Glory would not be bound to this lone islet, but would go out and see the world, and taste life. She grows here like a mushroom, she does not live. Is it not so, Glory?”
The girl’s face was no longer lit by the declining sun, which had glided further north-west, but the flames of the driftwood flickered in her large eyes that met those of the man, and the cap was still illumined by the evening glow, a scarlet blaze against the indigo gloom.
“Have you lost your tongue, Glory?” asked the man, impatiently striking the bricks with the butt end of his gun.
“Why do you not speak, Mehalah?” said the mother, turning her wan wet face aside, to catch a glimpse of her daughter.
“I’ve answered him fifty times,” said the girl.
“No,” protested the old woman feebly, “you have not spoken a word to Master Rebow.”
“By God, she is right,” broke in the man. “The little devil has a tongue in each eye, and she has been telling me with each a thousand times that she hates me. Eh, Glory?”
The girl rose erect, set her teeth, and turned her face aside, and looked out at the little window on the decaying light.
Rebow laughed aloud.
“She hated me before, and now she hates me worse, because I have become her landlord. I have bought the Ray for eight hundred pounds. The Ray is mine, I tell you. Mistress Sharland, you will henceforth have to pay me the rent, to me and to none other. I am your landlord, and Michaelmas is next week.”
“The rent shall be paid, Elijah!” said the widow.
“The Ray is mine,” pursued Rebow, swelling with pride. “I have bought it with my own money—eight hundred pounds. I could stubb up the trees if I would. I could cart muck into the well and choke it if I would. I could pull down the stables and break them up for firewood if I chose. All here is mine, the Ray, the marshes, and the saltings, the creeks, the fleets, the farm. That is mine,” said he, striking the wall with his gun, “and that is mine,” dashing the butt end against the hearth; “and you are mine, and Glory is mine.”
“That never,” said the girl, stepping forward, and confronting him with dauntless eye and firm lips and folded arms.
“Eh! Gloriana! have I roused you?” exclaimed Elijah Rebow, with a flash of exultation in his fierce eyes. “I said that the house and the marshes, and the saltings are mine, I have bought them. And your mother and you are mine.”
“Never,” repeated the girl.