23

April 1703

A place far from the sea

I cannot sleep. Each night, it proves impossible to drift off without nightmares; my blood rises as soon as my head lowers to the pillow and I toss feverishly, shivering in the dark, imagining the turn of the earth through each interminable hour. Mary keeps her back to me, and holds the coverlet tight. She is awake, and I could so easily touch her, this woman who has been all my colour, all my music, but there is a hurt between us. The words she wishes to speak – and will not – have built a wall I cannot scale.

‘Keep still, Thomas,’ she says, irritably, as I shift again on the mattress.

I lie on my back and try to comply, counting, staring at the ceiling. The moon has waxed thick, but is still low and can’t be seen, and it is so dark I cannot tell whether my eyes are open or not. I squeeze my lids until it hurts.

Time elapses. For once I do not dream. I do not want to wake, but something tenacious pulls at me, as though a rope connects me to the real world and someone tugs at it. I am woken from half-sleep by a demented shrieking – it is several moments before I realise the sound is the wind, and then comes a sudden crash. I spring upright, still not fully awake. What was that? What age am I, and which house is this?

I anchor myself – you are old – and look above my head, but the sound came from this floor, from one of the bedrooms. It sounded like broken wood and glass. A window blown open, perhaps, and a pane shattered. Nothing to concern a person unduly. Not ordinarily. The sound comes again, just the banging now, but not so loud, dampened by the shrill wind against the walls.

Pulling on my robe, I whisper to Mary to stay in bed. ‘I’m not asleep in any case,’ she says. ‘Who could sleep through this?’ She follows me.

The window has indeed blown open. I walk over, and something bites at the ball of my foot, eliciting a yelp. Broken glass gleams on the floorboards. Hopefully, it has not cut too deep. Wrestling with the frame, I struggle to stand against the ferocious blast of air that comes through. I look out, squinting into the dark. For a moment nothing is visible at all, then the moon emerges, and I see the old barn shaking on its foundations, until clouds sweep in to obscure the light again. There are intermittent flashes, as if the moon is a great torch blown out and rekindled over and over, and as the trees in the orchard and about the low walls rock and sway, the stuttering light makes them seem alive.

Her voice is almost drowned out by the cacophony. ‘What does she want, Thomas?’

‘It,’ I say, too curtly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not “she” – “it”,’ I grunt, yanking the window closed. ‘That thing is not my sister.’

She cries out, a sudden, frustrated eruption. ‘By God’s heart, Thomas! Have I not been a proper wife to you? Not stood with you, through all these years of concealment and care?’ I start as she bites down on her fist, her whole body shaking. ‘Have I not… have I not given up…?’ She stops, speaking almost to herself, wrapping her arms about her middle. ‘No, not that, it is not fair.’ Again, she looks at me. ‘This must have an end. It must.’

‘Let’s go back to bed,’ I say. I am pleading with her, holding her arms, trying to draw her close to me, but she pulls away.

‘Will we not make an end?’ she repeats.

In the half-light, I can imagine that colour remains in her cheeks, can wish away the dark smudges beneath her eyes and her dilated pupils. ‘Come, wife. To bed.’

Now comes the storm.

With the gale skirling about the roof, I protect the windows, hammering in nails to secure planks over the glass. Soon, the wind has become a tempest, a shrieking fit that refuses to behave as it should, that will not build to a climax or exhaust itself in rain.

It goes on, day after day, that angry, full-throated wail, with air barrelling down the chimney to ransack the lower floor of the house. The mercury in the barometer is lower than I have ever seen it. Every morning Mary stays in the kitchen, exhausted and whey-faced, and every morning I go to the attic, filling holes in the roof where tiles have blown off. If we leave the house, we sometimes find the tiles a hundred yards away or more, but often they are not found at all, and we can only believe them carried off on the wind.

Each day, as I try to read to or feed Esther, it gazes at me, not at all stirred by the chaos outside. Her eyes, the precise cobalt shade of the absent blue sky, follow me across the attic as I beat in nail after nail. It won’t stop, they say. It won’t stop until you concede. Until you surrender.

‘I won’t do it,’ I say, at last, on the fourth day. I come close to her, picking up a smell of salt-spray and seaweed so potent my breath catches in my chest. When I have air again, I lean in. ‘I won’t.’

A laugh carries down the stairs after me.

On the morning of the sixth day, I shelter in my study, reading Bunyan, or trying to. Over the previous two days the storm has climbed to a roiling fever. The old barn fell down during the night, and pieces of the frame lie strewn about the orchard. Another upstairs window went in at daybreak, and I found a long batten of wood stuck through the pane. We dare not leave the house for fear of being swept up like last year’s leaves.

I am praying the roof is not torn off entirely when the familiar discomfort at my core returns. My lungs tighten and I start wheezing. A burning sensation spreads down my gullet, my chest, my arms, and when I rise, I almost fall back into my seat, but force myself to walk.

I hobble through to the kitchen, where Mary plucks a snipe for the evening meal. She is halfway through her task, surrounded by knives and mottled brown feathers. In this, the most protected room in the house, you could almost imagine yourself safe from the chaos outside, except for the turmoil in the chimney, where the wind keeps putting out the fire.

‘Mary…’

She hears me, turns, and sees my face. ‘What’s wrong? What is it? You’re grey.’

‘My chest,’ I say, coming down heavily in a seat at the table. I clench my fist and wrap my other hand about it, instinctively pushing on my sternum. ‘There… there’s nothing to be done. I must just wait.’

She comes closer, and I see she is frightened by my infirmity. She crouches, and places both hands on mine. ‘Let me prepare some honeyed water and mallow. It might loosen your chest.’

I nod, grateful. As the water heats, she busies herself at the table, expertly bending the head of the snipe around and trussing its legs with the beak. She hardly looks down as she does it. Instead, she is watching me. I inhale and exhale deeply, and within minutes the pain is more localised. ‘It’s easing off,’ I say. The feeling of being caught in a vice subsides, and soon I can breathe normally.

Mary pours the water and gathers ingredients. She moves swiftly, selecting bottles and pots from the drawer where she stores such things. She combines her palliatives, then brings the steaming pewter beaker. ‘Drink,’ she says, and holds the cup to my mouth. I take in its hot sweet vapour. Beneath the balmy scent of honey is something acrid. I sip. The liquid burns me. My wife’s eyes gleam with something softer than of late – a sort of pity, a gift I both crave and resent.

‘I’ll let it cool,’ I say.

‘But you will drink it?’

I agree, though it is more for her than for me. There is no remedy for a failing body. No potion or tincture that can rob Father Time of his due.

I take the tea back to my study and when it is cool, as has always been my habit, drain it quickly, to the last drop. Then I return to Bunyan.

But it is no use. For around fifteen minutes I study the same page, but can’t keep my concentration. The noise outside is bad enough, but a leaden tiredness has engulfed me. I turn back to the frontispiece of the book and place a polished stone on top of the page to hold it, then cover my eyes with my palms. Deprived of one sense, I am more aware of the rest: the yowling wind, the steady pulse of blood through my fingers, and a curious sensation of drifting.

I remove my hands, blink hard, and try again to focus, but the long title undulates before me: from this world, to that which is to come, delivered un… I cannot read the rest. Thinking of some dust speck or flying gnat, I scrub my right eye, then my left, and look to see if any dark blot emerges on my fingers. Nothing. But my hand looks peculiar, outlandishly large. My surroundings are a blur. The room spins like a whip top. Now I am sinking, clawing at the earth, going deeper and still deeper. No, it is not earth, but water, and I claw, not at soil, but at my own suffocating lungs. A phantasmagoria of light and shadow, currents and whirlpools, pulls me down, down, down.

I try to walk as the floor pivots and tilts like the deck of a ship. I grapple at the walls, trying to form Mary’s name, but silence has me by the throat. Between my study and the kitchen, I fall. I look through to the kitchen, and see her, watching me out of her unreadable eyes. I reach out – help me – but she does not move from her table. She stands, eyes screwed closed, the knife clutched tightly in her right hand, rocking back and forth on her heels with her forearms over her ears, to exclude something, some sound or voice she cannot bear to hear.

I realise I have been drugged. But why…?

Oh, Mary, no.

She turns towards the fireplace. One, two, three steps. The wind has quieted the flames, but the hearth is still searing hot and she moves with care. Her body partly obscures her actions, but I can just about see as she uses the knife to lever out a single brick, places it to one side, and removes an object from the cavity. What is it she has there? Something that jangles in her left hand. Something ancient and rusted, red with brick dust.

A set of keys.

She walks towards the stairs with the knife by her side. Her steps are strangely agitated, as if some outside force prevails on her, or she is divided in her purpose.

You cannot – must not… My words die on my tongue. My sight goes black.

I float back to the surface. Opening my eyes is agony, and for long moments I flounder, not knowing, not remembering. But slowly, the mist begins to thin. How much of what I have seen is real? Is this some trick, or delusion? I move like I am underwater, my senses blunted, cotton-wrapped. Yet the fear retains its edge. My limbs shudder, my heart gallops, and the distance between here and the attic might be a thousand miles.

Am I too late?

I drag myself to the door and lean against the frame. The stairs tower above me, an impossible feat. Is it my drug-clouded brain, or have the walls begun to shake?

With each step, I come closer to Mary. I hold to this thought. In my mind’s eye I see her, clutching her knife, moving as if under some spell.

Panting and wheezing, I reach the top. The door to the second stairway is open. Just a little, just ajar. And despite the knowledge that bites at me, that she has opened the lock with her old skeleton keys, my mind almost rejects the sight – of course the door is locked, and of course the key is safely stowed in my pocket. But no. It is open. The candles are all out.

I push the door. It strikes the wall, and admits the ravening wind. I trip on the third stair, then stumble up the rest, until I am in the attic. Inside, the wind whips at me like a lash. Furniture rattles like old bones. And there is no sea-salt smell; instead, the air holds the coppery hint of blood. In the corner, a dim light glints off steel. Perched behind Esther on the bench, Mary holds the knife to the notch of our captive’s throat. It is a wicked-looking thing, the blade whetted, the tip honed to a needlepoint. Mary’s other hand is in Esther’s hair, pulling back her head to expose her neck, like an animal. Above it, my wife’s face is a mask of pain and indecision, her skin waxen, blue on white. But now I see her hands are crimson-splashed, like the bright, bright flowers she loves to grow.

My sister’s blood pools on the floor, seeping into the wood. I skid in it, and fall, landing hard on my side. It is warm, congealing, coating my hands. ‘Stop! Mary, don’t!’

She does not answer. Terrible cries come from her mouth.

I can’t see where the blood is coming from. Has she cut deep enough? Will it – finally – be over?

Only now do I really look at Esther. In the midst of chaos – the spilled blood, the storm, Mary’s feral sobbing – she is the calm epicentre. Her face, smooth, unlined, registers no fear or shock. Her arms are in her lap, still shackled, and there is a weeping laceration from her wrist to her elbow.

I get to my feet, still sliding. Hold out my arms to my wife. ‘Mary, come here. Come to me.’ Her arm shakes, the knife wavers. I take a step forward. ‘Don’t, my love – it is what it wants.’

Doubt leaps in her wild eyes.

‘It wants you to set it free. It wants you to make yourself a murderess. But I cannot let you carry this for me; it is not your responsibility, but mine. Mine. I must decide.’ I face my sister instead, and those eyes bore into me like steel points. ‘Do you hear me? I will decide. And this will end.’

The pause before the knife clatters to the floorboards lasts an age. Mary releases her hold on Esther’s hair, and sinks back, sobbing, with her head against the wall.

The wind has dropped.

Now they come to me in my dreams, the dead. Joan. Goodwife Gedge. John Rutherford. Milton. My father. On Acheron’s distant shore they wait, and I greet them as people I will soon see again. Yet I am nervous as a boy, lest they have not forgotten my sins.

My father extends his long arms to me. His strength is given back in death, and he is now as I remember him – tall and solemn and wise. Milton often stands beside him, but for reasons I cannot fully grasp, in these moments, the poet remains blind, unrestored, his hair as thin and grey as mouse fur, as in his final years. His voice drifts towards me, like smoke across the water: remember that you have free will. Remember.

The dreams always develop in the same way. I wade into the water until the mist creeps as high as my thighs. The current is cold and strong. I try to cross, but my boots stick, and I am as heavy as if they have filled with mud. I reach for those on the other shore, but their voices rise in chorus: go back, go back! He is not finished with you.

Then, in the centre of the river, something ripples beneath the surface, and I wake, panting and shaking. I must decide.