24th March 1703
A place far from the sea
She is awake.
And I must remind myself of how it began.
The end of all things. It was a time of witches, it was a time of saints. A time when rabbits hunted foxes, when children came into the world without their heads, and kings lost theirs on the scaffold. The world was turned upside down, or so some said. Weep, England, weep, the broadsheets cried, and the poets and philosophers, fearing for their own necks, delayed their poems and philosophies, or incarcerated them in Latin and impenetrable Greek, to be exhumed at a more enlightened date.
Now, less than a hundred years after men and magic began to drift apart, we walk a new earth. We have become reasonable, and cleave to our certainties as once we cleaved to our kings. Now, the buried stories are dismissed as old wives’ tales, exaggerations, falsehoods. But still they bubble through the cracks, clinging on, refusing to go down into the dark.
They develop strange qualities, words stored for too long. In the dim light of my small study, never bright enough now, I lay them down in honest black ink, but they are past their bloom. The candle wax runs low, but still they come, and my pen moves over the page as if of its own will.
But it was my intention to remember. I rise and cross to the bookcase, turning the key and opening the latticed door. The bookcase stands near the window, which I keep slightly open in spite of the cold. A draught comes through, sharp-toothed, carrying the chill of the late-winter’s eve and, drifting from the books, the smells that have walked with me since childhood: vellum, hide glue, resin, cuttlefish bone scattered across gossamer-thin pages.
Yet it is not a book I draw from the shelves, but a calfskin wallet, from which I brush long-abandoned spider webs and a thick coating of dust. The wallet houses many separate pieces of parchment: letters, pamphlets, other trifles collected over the years. Here is a sketch of the armies at the Battle of Edgehill, here a recipe for cherry wine I had thought lost.
There. Hidden amongst all that ephemera, cast out of sight and memory, is the sought-for object. I put my hand upon it, linger for a moment, and my intention falters. Perhaps I am just an old fool who should know better than to rake up what is buried. But I carry it back to my desk.
The handwriting – my father’s – is economical, his frugality echoing from the densely placed words. Not every word is readable: the inevitable result of repeat folding and unfolding, or of water damage, perhaps. It is testimony, a witnessing, dated 16th August 1628. The witnesses were my father, and his kinsman, John Milton. This, then, was where it all began.
We were late. The Guldern had been at sea five wretched months. We had lost the convoy weeks before. The waves and gales moved against us, so less experienced men moaned pitifully and emptied their bellies over the side of the ship. This was the Kattegat strait, off the coast of Anholt, Denmark, in late winter, with darkening skies, narrow and treacherous, full of reefs and sandbanks, shallow enough…
In a little while, Mary comes. She leans in, reading. The worry lines between her silvered brows are deep, but as I glance down at her hand on my shoulder, the wrinkles and liver spots fade in the gloom. I know we are lucky – if not among the luckiest – to have lived this long and in such relative bliss. I ask whether anything has changed since supper. No, she says, looking up at the ceiling; everything is just as it was. But the fine tremor in her hand, still resting on my shoulder, belies her words.
Brightly, she asks if I want more coal heaped upon the embers, but we can ill afford to run the fire high these days. Still, the room is chill. My breath clouds the candlelight and the cold creeps in beneath my breeches. I gather about my arthritic knees a woven blanket that once belonged to my father. Mary asks how long I plan to write. I lie, saying I might be another half an hour. She hates it when I strain my eyes and scolds me, so I tell her I am not straining, but exercising them, the better to see her beauty. She laughs, a sound as soft as down, and leaves, unhurried and deliberate as always, taking all certainty with her. Alone, I return to where I left the story.
…Now my steps were taken downhill, the ship was so tilted. Riches, treasure, plunder – all of a sudden they were will-o’-the-wisps, phantoms. There was something else here, something that breathed and whimpered, something still alive. I groped like a blind man. With my snaphance in my right hand, I took another pace forward.
I lean back, rubbing my eyes to sharpen the meandering edges of my sight. This is a distraction, only, from what I know I must do, and from the knowledge encamped in the pit of my stomach, which has squatted there since morning broke and Mary came down the stairs with cheeks as white as lamb’s fleece beneath her flyaway hair, and said the words I have so long known I would hear:
She is awake.