‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God and in the face of this congregation to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony, which is an honourable estate instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency…’
They might have been any village man and maiden standing before him, Rafe thought, for all the sentiment the parson allowed into his voice as he prepared to forge their marriage bond. ‘…an honourable estate; and therefore not by any to be enterprised nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly to satisfy men’s lusts and appetites like brute beasts that have no understanding…’
By the Church’s definition, both bride and groom were unadvised and could be seen as wanton - although perhaps their problem lay less in the appetites they shared, than in their separate views of them. For whereas Ellin could look forward with thrilling trepidation to her release from chastity, Rafe saw the act more as a test of his control than an emancipation, equating the ‘brute beast’ of the Christian service with Plato’s wild stallion of desire; a creature which, according to the ancient Greek, might yet be tamed to run in harness with the gentler dispositions of love and of respect.
So while his young bride flushed and fidgeted her nervous way through their long wedding feast at Chalkdean, Rafe found the patience to reply in kind to all congratulations – and through it all, hour after hour, to do his best to calm and reassure the volatile young woman at his side.
Ah! When will this long weary day have end,
And lend me leave to come unto my love?
How slowly do the houres they’r numbers spend!
How slowly does sad Time his feathers move!
Yet somehow the time passed; and however ploddingly it might seem to the groom, however painfully to his impatient bride, in fact at quite its usual pace. Until at last a little after midnight, Ellin had been free to leave the derelict feast and to retire; waited on above stairs by her husband in due course, swept to the door of their bedchamber by a roistering selection of his guests – although, thanks largely to Queen Charlotte who had put a stop to ruder customs – followed beyond it only by suggestion, and the lewd extravagance of their imaginations.
She was abed already when he entered, with the covers pulled up to her chin, her hair confined within a plain night mob, her grey eyes wide with apprehension; so slight and slender that her body barely showed beneath the quilting. ‘Like a mere child,’ Rafe thought, his secret hopes diminishing while he closed the door. ‘There I have locked them out, and now not even a maid may enter,’ he said, hastening to break the silence.
She smiled shyly. ‘Nor leave neither I suppose, Sir?’ A tremulous attempt at coquetry which in the circumstance he found a little shocking. But of course, she must be wearied half to death, poor child - and fearful; trembling on the brink of a dark mystery, which no doubt she’d heard transformed the most civilized of men into brutal despoilers.
‘My dear,’ he said gently, ‘I’d like you to know…’
‘What in tarnation are ye waitin’ for, boy? ’Elp to thread the needle?’ The interruption was Sam Ashby’s, directed through the keyhole on a plangent blast of alcohol that conveyed the sentiment a further twenty yards through the night air beyond the chamber - to the ears of his daughter Ann, and one of his own labourers, Jack Copper, whose business in the shrubbery needed no encouragement.
The effect on Rafe was rather the reverse; and by the time that he came back from clearing the farmer and his drunken companions from the stairhead, he’d also come to a decision.
‘My dear, this has been a long and taxing day for both of us,’ he told her from the doorway. ‘And whatever those rude fellows may expect of us, I think that we should try to sleep.’
Was it relief he saw in Ellin’s fading smile, or just surprise at his complaisance? ‘We have years of marriage ahead of us, in which to attain a very handsome knowledge of one another,’ he continued as he crossed the room. ‘Time for understanding to develop as it should out of affection and respect.’
The tester and hangings of the bed shielded the girl’s face from the light. Her eyes in the shadow of their lashes were as dark as charcoal; the change in their expression too subtle to interpret for one as new to husbanding as Rafe. So when she simply nodded her agreement, he’d turned from her to snuff the candles one by one. All but the single flame he carried with him to the dressing closet.
The new furbishments for Elizabeth Corbyn’s old four-poster were of printed cotton, illustrating Phaeton’s foolish encounter with the sun. From between his horses’ prancing hooves and the rays of Helios, Ellin watched the candle shadows of Rafe’s movements in the closet – as first wig, then dress coat, weskit, shirt and breeches were removed in orderly progression; to be followed by the sounds of water, then of urine, splashing into vessels – until presently he reappeared; self-conscious in his cap and night-shirt. To pinch out the final taper and climb into bed beside her.
The succeeding night they were abed, the pair of them, before eleven. The house was quiet this time and intimate. But for the rest it was the same; the sag of the mattress to accommodate her husband’s large and decently shirted form, the brush of his lips on her forehead as he saluted her with a solicitous ‘Goodnight’. Then nothing, just as before.
Ellin could hear his breathing, feel the drag of the covers as they lifted to each intake. She could even feel the warmth of Mr Corbyn’s body, when its weight drew her to within inches of his left arm and thigh. They lay as close as two wax figures in an old-fashioned picture frame.
But how long? Oh merciful heaven, how long before he would reach out and touch her? How long before that helpful little slope could bring her down to meet him?
Had his wife but known it, Rafe was as sensible as she of the exact position of his arm, the incline of the mattress – even of the cadences of his own breathing. For he held them all within the same heroic grip. He’d sworn to grant her time, to subjugate his own desires for weeks together if needs must, until she was prepared to come to him of her own free accord. So he too lay unmoving in the bed, like Tristan in the legend, with only the sword-blade of his honour to divide them.
He lay awake that second night long after she had slept; dry-mouthed and faintly moist - and somehow, as he lay there his right hand had found its way into the open neck of his nightshirt. It fumbled – as her hand might fumble – to explore the contours of his chest; the bristling hair; the steady beat of his own heart – to tease a useless nipple to arousal, while all the time his inward eye tormented him with images of copulation. Until in Rafe’s imagination his arms were already around her; his flesh – as much of it as he could press, pressed hard against her. Yet only the right hand could move. Because to move the left but by a fraction, by no more than its span, would be to touch her. And to touch her would be to lift the phantom sword between them.
Then Ellin had herself stirred in her sleep. She turned away from him to hug her legs into the softness of her belly – only to extend them promptly; bracing back, as if at his express command; back through the rising curtain of her nightrail - backwards and downwards into warm collision with Rafe’s redundant hand. And not all the philosophic volumes in his library could have saved their student then from his Promethean fate!
He was never afterwards to know if Ellin was awake or sleeping at the moment of her body’s penetration - so acquiescently, so openly it came to him. Nor, to his shame, could he recall if he’d sought her permission in words, or merely thought to do it and then shed the thought as his own knees came up behind her. He knew, because his body knew, that she moved beside him as he pressed hard down upon her shoulders. But if he forced her or if she had resisted, he could not recall. He knew only that she cried out – that he’d heard her cry and had ignored it, ruthless in his passion – that despite his resolutions he’d deflowered her from beneath with no more consideration than any lumbering stock bull might feel for the heifer he serves; without a vestige of restraint.
Yet it was a measure of his character, that Rafe’s first thoughts afterwards concerned the course of his immediate duty to his injured wife; and in a little while he’d risen to pull on a bedgown, light fresh candles, fetch clean linen and prepare a sedative for Ellin, while she attended to the blood-stained bedding.
‘Drink it while it’s still warm,’ he advised on his return. ‘’Tis a sack-posset with the addition of a little laudanum, to induce sleep and to help soothe your…’ His professional manner faltered before the brilliance of her smile, and something tightened in his throat. ‘That is to say ’t’will ease any discomfort you may still be feeling,’ he concluded huskily.
‘Thank you.’
She took the cup from him without hesitation, holding it in both hands to sip at the milky posset; her slim fingertips translucent in the candlelight. ‘Thank you, Rafe,’ she repeated, awarding him his Christian name for the first time and thereby increasing his discomfort.
He stared at her stupidly; a stranger in his bed; a sheltered innocent of but nineteen summers but recently subjected to a brutal and degrading act. In pain perhaps, with the impression of his body still upon her – yet smiling up at him implausibly, as if he was the one who needed comforting, and not herself!
As a physician who’d attended the parturitions, the complaints and the deaths of more women that he could recall, Rafe was aware – had even recorded in his case notes – that despite every convention to the contrary, the female was invariably the more resilient of the sexes. But like so many otherwise intelligent men, he saw nothing inconsistent in the exclusion of his own circumstance from professional observation. As Rafe viewed the case, he was a man eleven years his new wife’s senior; educationally and venereally experienced as it was impossible for her to be - a man, with a man’s privileges of intellect and emotional control; and the guilt he felt for abusing such advantages, obscured the fact that Ellin’s suffering at that moment was actually a good deal less acute than his.
‘My dear, you shame me!’ A juvenile confession that he instantly regretted; blurted as it was more in the way of an accusation than a confession. ‘I mean that the grossness of my behaviour cannot deserve your thanks,’ he felt bound to explain with a kind of desperate pedantry that to his own ears sounded hardly less objectionable.
He tried again, forcing himself to hold fast to those pellucid grey eyes of hers by way of penance. ‘Below stairs in the dispensary just now I determined to ask for your forgiveness,’ he said miserably. ‘Not to condone or to exonerate, but only to forgive me if you could.’
‘To forgive you, Sir, for claiming your due as a husband?’ The girl’s surprise at the idea was clearly unfeigned – which only made things worse.
‘No, but you must not,’ he almost shouted in his agitation. ‘You must not forgive me until you’ve heard me out. My dear girl, don’t you see that I can only look you in the face on the understanding that there will never be a repetition… that I can place my hand on heart and swear I’ll never touch you but when you tell me that I may - never treat you but with courtesy and a very proper…’
He was dripping candle grease on the turkey rug; and in the midst of his self-abasement saw a spasm pass across his wife’s pale features.
‘My dear, what ails you? Are you well?’ He started forward anxiously to help her.
‘No, oh no,’ she gasped. ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry…’ as helplessly she began to laugh.
No really, it had been too much for her sense of ridiculous; so different to anything she might have imagined. Like the time down at the Gap when she’d started on a catalogue of abuses aimed at his abominable brother, and ended laughing like a hyena! Unforgiveable, intolerable to laugh at Mr Corbyn – and at such a time. But then how could anyone expect to keep their countenance when the man was so determined to place himself in the wrong – and to look so droll while he was at it, with hand on heart and candle dripping wax; the dignified effect of his silk bedgown offset so comically by his want of wig or slippers, his cropped and tufty pate and great bare toes!
‘Dear me, I fear ’tis I who should apologise for my monstrous rudeness,’ she’d managed in the grip of another paroxysm. ‘You’ll think me a dreadful giddy-head, Sir, as a fact. But you must see that there is laughing room in our situation.’
‘And now surely he must laugh as well,’ she thought. ‘He’ll start to smile, then in a minute laugh out loud to make us friends again.’
But it seemed that Mr Corbyn was unable to find any of the laughing room that she’d discovered in the situation – and slowly, unwillingly, her own smile retreated; confronted as it was by the very portrait of discomforture that was her husband’s.
‘So, dear heaven, how to do you propose to tell the man you never slept?’ she asked herself, with one of those little reflex shudders that sometimes follow sudden laughter. ‘How can you tell him that you were awake from first to last and all along?’
The answer was plain. She could not if she lived a thousand years!
A single horseman climbed the chalk track out of Jevington village, with his étui of surgeon’s instruments strapped to his saddle, his hat pulled down against a westering sun. It was July. The fragrance of making hay drifted to him across the combe from Oxendean, and from the clematis along his path the trace of a lighter perfume. ‘Bethwine’, they called the vine in Sussex, or more often ‘Traveller’s Joy’. But little joy in it today for the gentleman physician, plodding homeward by Long Brow from the most ill-conditioned set of patients in all the five parishes of his practice.
There must have been a witch’s curse on Jevington that summer of 1797, its villagers supposed. For why else should misfortunes pile so on each other? A wet haymaking; an epidemical outbreak amongst cattle or Christians, these were things that all could understand. Such natural afflictions were commonplace in any country district. But in the summer to be so afflicted; and in place of typhus or the smallpox, by such an unaccountable variety of ills? A witch’s curse – it had to be the only explanation!
Rafe Corbyn naturally had no belief in witches, or in any other supernatural origin. For all their horrid diversity, the outbreaks of fever and consumption, the scrofulae, the scurvies and digestive distempers he’d been called on to attend, might rather be attributed, he thought, to the debilitated state of the poor folk themselves – and to the destructive combination of another fruitless war, two years of hopeless harvests, and the hardest winter anyone remembered.
In January of 1795, unprecedented frosts had iced the Thames across in London, the Ouse and Cuckmere rivers down in Sussex, and the chamber pots above stairs at Chalkdean Manor. The weather decimated livestock and exhausted food reserves; continuing so cold that downland folk declared that someone must have left the weather-gates open after the Lewes sheep fair in September. Across the Channel, the British troops in Flanders, with nothing more substantial than flannel weskits to protect them, suffered greater losses from sickness and exposure than from actions with the enemy. In Holland, the freezing of the Texel allowed the revolutionary armies to complete their conquest in original style, by deploying mounted Hussars to surround the helplessly ice-bound Dutch fleet. Meanwhile, back in England, gales and floods had followed the great freeze to ruin the spring planting. Bread and fresh meat had already been in short supply before the failure of that season’s harvest – and although the Corbyns, the Stanvilles of Hadderton, even the Ashbys of Sellington, distributed such grain as they could spare, it hadn’t been enough.
Over the river Cuckmere at Blatchington, provision riots amongst troops quartered there had ended in the looting of Seaford shops and flour mills. In London, the windows of the State Coach had been smashed, and King George himself petitioned by a starving rabble, chanting: ‘Bread! Bread! Give us peace and bread!’ Ballots the next year to raise men for a Supplementary Militia made matters even worse; leaving fatherless households everywhere to support themselves on a shilling a week of army pay and dwindling parish funds, with wheat as high as twenty-eight shillings a bushel, and quarter-loaves selling nowhere for less than ninepence.
Part-way up the hill from Jevington, Rafe turned to rest his eyes from the glare of the chalk track. Beneath him it descended to the thatched and ivied houses of the village, dwarfed into miniature by the pale slopes of Combe Down and Bourne Hill beyond; a scene worthy of the poet, Thomas Gray, or the artistic brush of Gainsborough - if they could overlook the filth, the hunger and disease that it concealed. Rafe Corbyn who could not, turned back into the glare
The sun by then had reached the summit of Long Brow; a dazzling golden ball, poised as it seemed to roll down out of sight through Lullington to Cuckmere and the sea - gold on the far side of the ridge for Lullington; the shade of wretchedness for Jevington the other. Harris and his gang at Lullington, growing ever richer out of war shortage and rising taxes, with Aaron as their agent feathering his own nest in some great merchant’s house in Normandy – smugglers’ gold on one side; poverty and sickness on the other! Was it for this he’d saved his brother from a soldier’s death in Flanders? Was Aunt Drusilla in the right? Had honour lost all meaning for the boy?
Rafe frowned into the sinking sun. If only he could leave Aaron to find his own way to the devil by the shortest route – and then forget the rogue, as he knew most other men in his shoe leather would have done. If only he could put out of mind their poor Mamma’s last words upon her deathbed: ‘See after your brother, will you, Rafe? See after Aaron, will you?’
But since he could not do the one, and must uphold the other – Rafe tried again in June to seek the prodigal’s return.
Chalkdean. Tuesday June 13, 1797
My dear Sir, or is it still to be ‘dear Brother’?
I confess in writing that I hardly know how to give title to one who is so estranged; and yet the mother we both loved, the years that we have shared beneath this roof must make a claim on both of us. There is so much of malice, envy and nonsense in the world, that I wish you to perceive my true affection, however I may preface it.
It has been a good while in my head and in my heart to tax you with some further correspondence; for all that I’ve yet to receive an answer to my last. Believe me, I would willingly set down my pen and take ship to France, if only I could think that it would help to bring you to your senses.
In the past I have tried to reconcile myself to your adventures in the belief that they were detrimental in effect to no one but yourself. I could not have then foreseen, I think, that this war would continue for so long, nor that a little trade with Normandy could so affect our country’s interest. But now we see things in a different light. It is asserted in Westminster that what began as a diversion has now become a felony.
You know as well as I do, Brother, that our national prosperity depends on gold. Yet our reserves of that commodity are so diminished that the banks must issue paper notes, while smugglers’ gold is paid to France to purchase contraband and finance the French army.
In the past you have represented contrabanding as a means of keeping our poorest village folk out of the workhouse. But that metal no longer rings true, with so many going hungry whilst that vagabond of Lullington grows fatter with each day that passes. His pack-horses run untaxed. He buys substitutes to meet the militia quotas, and dares to laugh in the Commissioners’ faces. Yet unwisely I assure you, for the tide has turned against the trade in Sussex, and they have sworn to bring him down.
A man may be seduced by greed, if I may term it so. But from the degree of sense I believe you to possess, Brother, and knowing you have come into this world too greatly favoured to have need of such a trade, I am persuaded that you will see the folly of siding with these felons against the interests of your country. Indeed I cannot conceive that at the last you will choose to forfeit your heritage and waste away the promise of your youth in such a cause as theirs.
I fancy that you must be weary of my lecture. But you who know me so well will surely comprehend that I have your best interests at heart. For the last time I put it to your conscience, Sir. Return now to the right side of the water before it is too late. Become a Voluntary Patroller. Train as a militiaman; or if you must, list with a fighting regiment – only return!
For to see you yet where you belong, with your two feet firm on Sussex chalk, is the most earnest wish of your affectionate brother,
R. Corbyn
PS: I am placing this letter in the hand of one you know, who has assured me of its safe delivery within the week and without interference of the seal. I trust that he has not deceived me for the sake of all I put at risk by sending direct to France. R.C.