April 1703
A place far from the sea
Days pass, then weeks, and a stillness settles over us. The winds slumber. What air there is is thin, cold and bright, as though something pulls at the fabric of the world. The subtle dance from winter to spring seems delayed; buds do not peek from the soil, the birds have not returned from their migrations. When once or twice I have passed our boundary for supplies, I have felt like a ghost in an unrecognisable land, moving through small hamlets, encountering no beggars, hearing only the noise of closing doors and mothers scolding cowed children inside. Even the deer flee from me.
On one occasion, just as the sun begins to fall, I am returning from the vegetable garden when a tinker with his jangling cart drives a donkey up the track. He is the first person I have seen for a month besides Mary. I approach the cart, examining my visitor. He is squint-eyed, sun-burnt, heavy-bearded, and the cart groans under the weight of the dross he lugs about with him, from baskets of sulphurous eggs to torn leathers to broken-down pocket watches; anything, in short, that he might have acquired through barter, beggary or theft.
I spy bottles filled with dark, doubtful liquids, and two filthy, crudely carved puppets with tangled strings, presumably for entertaining the children of those whose silver he wishes to pocket. He asks for the lady of the house. For a fraction of a second, seeing his missing teeth and the deep-scored wrinkles of his face, I think, he is so old, before realising he might be twenty years younger than I; it is hard to tell through the dirt of the road. I tell him we need no pots or pans, and think, though I do not say it, none of his rancid cheeses. Yet I would pay him for news. And, though it pains me to say it, a few moments of his company. I offer the exchange.
He thinks on it with a choleric frown, chewing on a piece of dried meat like a cow at the cud. It takes him longer than I expect – perhaps a slow thinker, or perhaps he has questions about why a man of the gentle classes, even one falling on hard times such as myself, would pay him to stand on his land and pass the time of day. Eventually, though, he nods.
I realise I have almost lost the art of talking to those I do not know. I stutter. ‘What news of the villages?’
‘Bad, most,’ comes the laconic reply.
‘Any good?’
‘Less.’
‘Have there been any happenings you would call unusual?’
This brings another long moment of reflection, during which he scans the house and me. The donkey brays, and the curiosity in its master’s eyes sharpens to a wily suspicion. ‘I see your meaning, mister. Some things be all up and the wrong way about. An almoner got trampled Monday Hocktide.’ He nods wisely, conspiratorially. ‘And nestlings in the old loft at St Lawrence’s ate the hen.’
Yes. Up and the wrong way about. My companion eyes me closely. He is not used to being listened to by men like me; rather, he expects to be shooed and abused, and chased off. That I do not do these things seems to give him no comfort. There is something he does not like about this place – I see it in his pinprick eyes. Soon he is asking for his sixpence, and soon after that, ambling off down the track again. ‘Tell the lady I’ll have those herbs for her next I call,’ he mumbles, over his shoulder, as he departs. I almost call after him, to check what Mary has asked him to procure, as she grows almost everything we need, but he rattles away and the moment is gone.
Mary avoids me, too, more and more as the days get warmer. She keeps to her bedroom, or the garden if it is fine. When forced into my company, she talks without stopping about inconsequential things: the fruit trees, a shelf in the buttery that is bowing, a cracked trencher. This outpouring does not stop until I withdraw, either to my study or upstairs, to the attic. When she is not talking, she bites her nails down to the bloody quick, then purges the resulting wounds with rosemary. It is alien to feel such distance from her, like one of my limbs has decided to go its own way and depart from the rest. But I do not know how to close the breach. Well, that is not strictly true. What she wants, I know very well, but I cannot give it to her.
I try to read to Esther every day. I vary the themes, aspiring to Dryden and Greville, resorting more often to Pepys, but, remembering my sister’s simple piety and love of her Bible, inevitably, God creeps in, in one form or another. Today, it is Milton, not Paradise Lost, but Regained.
My lengthy reading seems not to bother the creature I have always thought of as Not-Esther – an inadequate name, but since it refuses to name itself, I have had to improvise. In my mind, over these many years, I have given it many names, but it answers to none.
But Esther… my silent and unwitting charge these last six decades, I cling fervently to the belief that she is still there. That her essence, her soul, whatever constitutes her, survived the chaos that overtook us in those days. It is a frail hope, a foolish old man’s dream, I know, but it is all I have.
Today, it talks of war. Not of its pity, but of its glory.
‘Tsaritsyn. Volgograd. Stalingrad. Over a million souls. A peerless battle in the memory of man. They were reduced to the level of primitives. Many of them ate human flesh, because, when all was said and done, they did not want to die. They did not want to sink into the deeps below the deeps. And who can blame them for that?’
Yesterday it was copulation; specifically, of animals and man. This is typical. It is a creature of spiteful enjoyments, of cryptic divinations, and of lies. It is a storyteller, first and foremost. I cannot know how much of what it says bears weight, so I do my best to ignore it all. On this occasion, though, I sigh, and look over the top of the book. ‘The reading would go more quickly, dare I say, if you did not maintain a constant commentary.’
For the first time, it sounds tired. ‘The reading would go more quickly were it to be overseen by an arthritic gibbon. But we cannot always have what we want.’
‘Indeed.’ I lower my eyes back to the page. I prefer sarcasm to its other contributions.
‘But I do not dislike you reading, in point of fact,’ it goes on. ‘It passes the time, such as time is.’ Then, slyly, as I try to find my place, it adds, ‘Esther likes it.’
The words achieve their desired effect. I put aside the book, looking closely at her face – I still think of it as her face, in spite of the creature’s long occupation. Several moments go by while I try to form the question. Finally, I say, ‘Is she still in there?’ The gesture the creature makes is almost a shrug, but could be a nod. ‘My sister lives?’ I lean forward. It has been over a month since it regained its consciousness, after sixty years of what I can only describe as hibernation: eating, passing waste, sleeping, but never looking, hearing or speaking. But this is the first time since its return that it has deigned to share anything other than macabre drivel. ‘Can I speak to Esther?’
‘She is too far away,’ it says, with desultory regret.
‘Where?’
‘Where are any of us?’
‘No more riddles, demon. Where is she?’
It sighs. ‘In here, somewhere. I am aware of her and she of me, but she cannot come to the surface while I inhabit this shell. Yet nor can I leave her. And as I cannot leave this…’ it looked down at Esther’s withered form ‘…wreck of a body, I suppose we are stuck with one another. And you, too,’ it says, with something like a laugh.
My breath is tight in my chest, hidebound, as if someone sits on me. This is more information than I have had from a lifetime of questions. ‘Why can’t you leave her body?’
‘She will not allow it.’
I sit back, stunned, but then press forward; while the creature feels inclined to speak, I must elicit as much from it as I can. ‘How does she prevent it?’ The pain radiates through my chest. I must not agitate myself. I breathe in deeply.
‘She has some influence, some small, residual force,’ it says. ‘I must admit I do not understand it fully. But it is the same strength that prevents me from harming you. She is vigilant, and stronger than I had anticipated when first I entered her.’
I am thinking, furiously. There are things I have inferred – guessed – of course, from my first encounters with the creature, such as how it came to inhabit my sister, and where it came from. But there are things I still do not know for certain. ‘Then why did you possess her, if you could not leave?’
‘Why did the first woman take the apple? Why did she sink her teeth into its flesh?’
‘Curiosity,’ I say. ‘A thirst for knowledge. And, although she knew it was forbidden, she did not know the price of disobedience. Her temptation was too strong.’ But it does not respond. It hums a sailor’s ditty as I say, ‘What could have tempted you?’
The humming continues, and I realise I will not receive another hint. Instead, I say, out of my own curiosity, ‘What has kept you asleep for all this time?’
‘All of what time?’
I shake my head. Of course. Foolish. To this creature, a year, even a century, might pass like the dying breath of a sparrow. It does not matter. ‘Well, why have you woken now? What has prompted it?’
‘Your death,’ it says. ‘It comes swiftly now.’
The brutality of this statement does not torment me. The creature lies, but not about this. I swim in muddying tides. I feel the weakening in my limbs and bones that comes with old age. My time draws short. My concern is for what will happen after.
‘And with my death? What will happen to her, and to you?’
‘You will act before that.’
‘How will I act?’
It begins to hum again, closing its eyes, shutting me out.
Outside, though I do not know it, the wind has begun to rise.