The 1st day of May 1753

May Day

Luminary: Sun rises 19 minutes after 4: no dark nights.

Observation: Venus an oriental evening star; Mercury is in the sunbeams.

Prognostication: The stars are most propitious bringing Amity and Friendship to all.

 

The pungent odour of May blossom releases its scent across the village; all of Netherlea has abandoned daily chores and drudgery to gather on the Church Green. Above the hum of chatter rises the rhythmic squawking of two fiddle players, their heads bent close together in pursuit of a melody. All the revellers wear their holiday best: white gowns and fancy stockings, treasured lace and pink-speckled blossom pinned at their breasts. The maypole stands at the centre, near twenty feet of tree trunk rising to the sky, bedecked with flowers and herbs and bound with a rainbow of ribbons from tip to tail. A circle of matrons and maidens are dancing, wheeling around the pole, reversing and advancing.

Nat’s consciousness is spinning circles, too: a Wheel of Fortune, the ouroboros snake biting its tail, the revolutions of two hands upon a clock face. To sow and reap, to circle-dance by day, to make love by night – are these our puny efforts to imitate the orbits of moons and planets? For an instant he is overcome by his own paltriness; he is nothing but a speck on an insignificant planet amongst the multitudes of stars – then he banishes such pessimism. Here and now is this May time, and it stands green-garlanded and glorious in the calendar of all his days.

The May cart arrives, dressed in boughs and flowers and drawn by a beribboned team of horses. Tabitha, Queen of the May, stands at its helm, her hair crowned with a loosely woven garland of lady’s smock, blue speedwell and red campion. Nat warms at the sight of her. Her white taffeta gown is rich with embroidered flowers, gathered across her swollen belly, where their unborn child grows like a miraculous harvest.

Nat greets his wife and leads her by the arm to the long table beneath the oak. Sir John sits at the table’s head, still slow and palsied, and costumed in black mourning for his brother, who died just as the New Year came in. The spring frolics seem to have given the old master new strength, though it is not likely he will ever again be the bluff and bumptious fellow he once was. Nonetheless, he rises tremulously to make a toast. He wishes good health and prosperity to them all: the May maidens, garland gatherers, wood wardens, cooks and, last of all with shining eyes, his son and heir Nathaniel, and his daughter-in-law, Tabitha.

Then all fall upon the feast, each taking a portion of the great pie flourished with a pastry Eden; sun’s rays, creatures and songbirds. It is the month of milk and increase, and all the villagers who can have contributed the cream of their cows so that Zusanna and her milkmaids may whip a gigantic syllabub. The wine has been donated by the new parson, a gesture that Mr Dilks, now exiled to a chaplaincy at a hospital for poor women’s foundlings, would never have countenanced. Nat looks around the table with settled pleasure; at the old folk nodding their white heads in the sunshine, the children ferociously feeding, and a crafty cat that steals away with jaws full of scraps. Bess is chattering with her young playmates; his little cousin is growing fearsomely clever. Tabitha has told him she will soon engage a governess for her.

As the ale is passed around the singing begins; the men’s voices tuneless and gruff and the women piping in an off-key.

For summer is a-come O!

And winter is a-gone O!

The earth has spun back to the healing warmth of spring, and all their blood is warming with reawakening urges. He watches as Jane brings Joshua a dish of sweetmeats and, soon afterwards, the pair eat from a shared plate, as Jane casts shy glances into his broad face. Tabitha has told him that though they know nothing of it themselves, it is as good as decided that they will be married by the summer’s end.

And the village women predict, too, that Jennet and Tom Seagoes will soon afterwards visit the altar. He hopes it will be a good year for bridals and bride cakes; a perpetual season of lusty hearts, and the staining of gowns on the green grass.

By evening time, Nat has found himself a leafy, solitary arbour in the garden at Bold Hall. He casts his mind back across a thousand pinpoints of time, dancing like fireflies in his memory. He has decided to fuse those kaleidoscopic pictures into one beam of steady light: a half-naked woman glimpsed through a telescope’s lens, the starry universe shining at the bottom of a water meadow, the sound of a silver skull’s jaws snapping closed, and the sweet almond scent of distilled laurel.

He wants to make a bubble in the tide of time and inhabit it. Can he fix on paper something greater than a crude pamphlet or foolish riddle? He wants to attempt it; to try his hand at a new-fangled fiction, with a heroine both ever-changing and immortal. Silently, he dedicates it to those time-leaping angels that he and Tabitha once speculated upon. Will they carry his words into the future, where beings command animated statues and inhabit cities made of curious clockwork? Today, he has hope of immortality, if only by means of ink and paper. So, dipping his quill, he begins to write that curious assortment of words some call a novel:

An unlucky day for travel. The phrase tolled like a doom bell in Tabitha’s skull when she woke to find all her possessions stolen …

A hand appears on his shoulder, and he looks up to see Tabitha reading his lines, her mouth twitching in amusement.

‘And does it have a happy ending?’ she asks.

He puts down his pen, slides his hand over her body’s ripeness, and feels the child quicken. It seems to him that all he has to do is direct his pen, and he can halt time.

‘In this present time of now,’ he replies carefully, ‘on this page, for this reader, I promise you it does.’