It was the morning of Emilia Frere’s departure from the Hall and for a few minutes Louisa found herself alone with the Rector, who fingered the brim of his hat and beamed like the milky sun outside.
Though she had foreseen the need for such a private moment, Louisa would certainly not have chosen it to occur so quickly. Her thoughts were muddled still, and her feelings scattered in small exclusive groups like members of a difficult meeting yet to be called to order. They kept slipping away, as her father had already slipped away, with no more than a mumbled excuse, to jot down a line of verse that had presented itself while he stood in some abstraction. Tom Horrocks, who might otherwise have furnished a convenient buffer, had been drawn to the kitchen by the smell of newly baked bread, and was doubtless flirting disgracefully with Tilly and the kitchen maids. In the meantime Emilia was in her room still, fussing for an unconscionably long time over her appearance. So Louisa must decide how best to employ the unsought opportunity of her confinement with the Rector, and she was entirely unready.
“Fortunately,” she said in belated response to Frere’s remark of a moment before, “the drive to the Rectory is not far.”
“And the day,” he observed, “moderately clement.”
“Emilia will be well wrapped.”
“Indeed.”
And there yet another exchange of platitudes gravelled on silence.
She had been trying to marshal a persuasive line of argument in her mind. If the truth is at last unavoidable, it ran, and if it must bring consolation in its train, then surely there should be no need to dread its disclosure? But there was something unsatisfactory about its far-from-syllogistical terms, and she was left unconvinced. As her eyes strayed, yet again, to the clock on the mantelpiece, she wondered whether it was, after all, a matter of timing – that what in auspicious circumstances might be helpful could, in others, be quite devastating. How difficult this was!
Evidently the Rector felt himself obliged to remedy the silence. “Tom Horrocks has put my mind quite at rest,” he said. “He is a considerate man.”
“And an excellent physician.”
“Yes. His reputation reaches beyond the county, I believe.”
“We are fortunate to enjoy his services,” said Frere, though he immediately regretted the choice of verb: heartening though Horrocks’s manner was, there was small occasion for pleasure in a doctor’s professional attendance.
“I know him better as a friend,” Louisa confessed, “having always enjoyed good health.”
“It is a great blessing.” The hat took a further turn in Frere’s hands. “We must count our blessings, Miss Agnew. They are manifold.”
For a moment Louisa wondered whether this platitudinous sentiment might be turned to advantage, but it could not be done without contrivance, and when she looked up she saw how the Rector’s face aspired to bravery. During the past few days’ anxiety had shadowed his eyes like bruises; they were brighter now and eager in their attention to the door through which his wife must soon enter. Plainly he was recovering himself. Were Louisa to speak what pressed upon her mind, it would, she saw, quite undo him.
“I was wondering…” Frere began again, hesitantly.
But Louisa was elsewhere still. She was reflecting once more how her continued silence might preserve the unsought trust confided in her, but it remained a betrayal of her friendship for this man. Never had she been so confused.
“I thought, once Emilia is with us…”
“Yes, Mr Frere?”
“I thought… a prayer of thanksgiving?”
“It would be entirely appropriate.”
“It would be a great joy.”
“Your father?”
“Has promised to return in a moment.”
“I felt sure you would consent.” Yet behind the grateful smile one cloud remained. “But the doctor…Tom? I would dearly wish him to be there and yet I would not impose on his convictions.”
“Nor, I feel sure, would he wish to give offence by abstention.”
“Then you think?…”
“I do.”
This was, apparently, a burden lifted from his mind. It was more than that, for now all anxieties were dispelled. The smile was clear. Handsomely, warmly so.
Louisa was filled with a terrible wonder at Frere’s ignorance. Again she found herself astounded that Emilia should have so little feeling for him. His diffidence was the shy guise of uncommon sensitivity. Other parsons of her acquaintance would have nothing but commination for Tom Horrocks’s head; they would have demanded brusquely that all kneel and at least pay lip-service to their own self-righteousness, but this man…
She wanted to cross the room. She wanted to press her hand on his, say, “My dear, Mr Frere, I beg you to forgive what must appear an intolerable intrusion, but I have reason to believe your present happiness must be short-lived unless…”
Unless what?
In her imagination Louisa saw the man confronted by the chill implacable will which had seized her own hand the previous night and imprisoned her in confidence… that sacred confidence. How fiercely Emilia had insisted on it. It lay now like a stone across Louisa’s tongue. And there was nothing sacred there. It felt like a curse rather. It profaned the very bonds of speech. If she herself was at a loss to cope with the perplexities it wrought, what chance would this tender spirit stand before it? Such happiness as had returned with his wife’s recovery would wither as she spoke. Her candour, however delicately phrased, would blight it. What was meant for a joyous occasion would shrivel to a general wretchedness.
There might be no other moment.
Louisa felt the palpitation of her heart. There was a flutter in her throat as she drew the breath to speak. “Mr Frere, there is a matter that I must…” She faltered at his eager eye. He waited, unwitting, ready to be of service. He was all unprepared. Again his encouraging smile discomposed her.
The door opened and Emilia was there, caped and bonneted, a pale disgruntlement in her face. “Ah, here you are. I had begun to believe the Hall quite deserted.”
Frere sprang to his feet. “Emilia, dearest, do you imagine I could abandon you now at the very moment I have longed for? Miss Agnew and I have been patiently awaiting your appearance.”
Emilia deflected the warmth of his approach. She turned an exact gaze upon Louisa, then a studied flickering of eyelashes affirmed complicity. “My dear,” she said, “you look a little wan this morning. Have I quite worn you out with my demands? Edwin,” she added, without moving her gaze, “Louisa has been so great a comfort to me I can hardly bear this parting.”
For a moment Louisa could not bring herself to answer the frail smile. How she loathed this web that had been spun so swiftly round her. She felt soiled by it.
“I believe it is possible,” Frere was saying, “that there may be some small service we can do in return. Miss Agnew, you were about to say?”
And she was caught between them. Fool, she was thinking angrily, and she could not restrain the quick glance that sought Emilia’s eyes. In a shocked instant she saw it: had she seized the moment that was lost for ever now, had she spoken to Frere, unfolded the unhappy fate in store for him, it would have spelt disaster. The scenes were acted swiftly in her mind: when Frere turned in bewilderment to Emilia, the woman would deny that any such confidence had been exchanged; accused of mischief, Louisa would be forgiven by neither; the “intolerable slander” (for such it would be called) would furnish a pretext for Emilia’s immediate departure from Munding; and Frere, if he remained, would be friendless.
Was it possible then that, in its impotence before a lie, the truth could do great harm?
She stood, numb with shame, fingers tugging at the bracelet round her wrist until it caused her pain.
“My dear?” Emilia encouraged.
Louisa looked away, out of the window – how she wished she was out there in the frosty air, in the simplicity of the Lodge, alone, in the one place where her tarnished star-fire might begin to gleam again.
But she must speak.
“It was nothing,” she said, “…a passing thought.” Then she willed herself to look back at them. “Nothing that may not be answered by the prayer that Mr Frere would have me join.” She took in his mild perplexity. “Excuse me a moment,” she added hastily, “I must find Father and Dr Horrocks. And I am sure that Tilly and the staff would wish to join us in expressing their heartfelt relief.” Before either the Rector or his wife could speak again, Louisa hurried from the room. Behind her she heard Emilia say, “I think the child will be quite desolate to see me go. Her life is very empty here.”
When the thaw came to Munding, it came as rain, a wind-driven chilling rain that flooded the water meadows and made the ford impassable. Pipes, sprained by the ice, burst now, reed thatches leaked; at least one low-lying cottage in the hollow was awash. Water, it seemed, was everywhere; the lanes were mired with it, dikes deep, clogged here and there by flotsam into dams that would sunder and flood under the pressure of constant rain. A sodden pedlar out of Saxburgh brought the news that the mill race there had broken its banks and the pond lay right across the Norwich road. The bridge at Pottisham was down. Further along the river, it was rumoured, a wherryman had drowned. Certainly people in Shippenhall were out on their roofs for boats to rescue them, and still there was no let up in the rain.
Only in Munding Rectory had there been no thaw.
Clearly Emilia Frere’s decline was more emotional than physical, for it would respond to no remedy. Visitors were not welcomed upstairs, and if Mrs Bostock haughtily insisted on the sovereign nature of her companionship, she met with little encouragement in that belief.
Mrs Frere’s refusal to respond (Mrs Bostock later informed Eliza Waters) was as dreary as the rain, and as impervious to her visitor’s desire that it should cease. My dear, one had positively risked an influenza to bring her some good cheer, and to what end? There had been nothing achieved by the expedition save the coachman’s cold which now threatened to lay low the rest of her staff. However, one knew one’s duty even if the parson’s wife seemed negligent of hers.
Eliza Waters, who was herself venturing upon a cold, would have found it difficult to agree more. Yet, to be quite fair, Mrs Bostock conceded, one must consider the possibility that the fault might lie with the husband.
Miss Waters was certain that this was so, but she would be most interested to hear how her friend had arrived at that conclusion.
Was it not obvious (she was answered) that the man felt sorrier for himself than for his wife? He was all milk and water. He lacked the fire to take a firm hand with the woman. Why, if Bostock treated her that way she would be inclined to fetch a stick to him, for the vapours (as Mrs Frere so dismally attested) would be the sole alternative. One must pity the woman, however tiresome she made the task. The fact was, the Rector had no sense of priorities – he would be happier washing the feet of the poor than ordering a dignified social life such as a woman in Mrs Frere’s position had the right to expect.
“If only she would not go on about Cambridge so,” Miss Waters regretted.
“My dear, the woman no longer does even that. Indeed, some tattle of Cambridge life would have been a pleasurable relief. The poor thing can hardly bring herself to speak at all. One might as well not be there.”
“And the Rector showed no gratitude for the interest taken?”
“But you know the man as well as I,” Mrs Bostock protested. “He bumbled and tugged at his ear and said he hoped I might call again at a more opportune moment, though I did not believe a word of it. He wanted me out, my dear. That much was evident. I greatly fear that there is something not right about the man.”
“Not right?”
“Not right.”
“I do agree,” said Miss Waters, then regretted that she had agreed too quickly, for Mrs Bostock would venture no further except to opine that the Reverend Frere was, at the very least, too little of this world to serve as a useful guide to the next. “Charity begins at home,” she concluded, “and that is not a home I shall seek to enter again in a hurry.”
And what more could Miss Waters do but affirm that if one could not perform one’s Christian duty without being treated as a busybody then the parish had come to a sorry pass?
Having fought to overcome his grief at the loss of the child, the object of this critical review had, in fact, sought every means he dared to stop the great gap it opened in the domestic life of the Rectory. Frere’s thanksgiving for his wife’s recovery was heartfelt, for that loss would have been irreparable, and his rejoicing at her return was genuine enough, but how short-lived. Muted as it was in consideration of Emilia’s still frail condition, the joy, which was inevitably tinged with sadness, had been allowed small room to breathe. Indeed, it had expired almost on the short journey home.
For Emilia, as for himself, Dr Horrocks’s reassurance that miscarriage was a kind of mercy had brought no deep comfort, and Frere would not remind her of it, for he had quickly seen that, in some way he was far from comprehending, the loss was more secondary to her than it was to himself. Was she then secretly distressed by the thought that she had failed him? If so, he would not have her blame herself. The failure was less hers than his own for not having taken better care. He would never forgive his absence at her moment of need – the fault was freely confessed in an agony of self-reproach, but such, it seemed, was not Emilia’s unspoken thought. Failure was not a word that answered.
Nor did his attempt to view their shared suffering as part of the Lord’s mysterious providence – a present ill from which a future good might spring – in any way ameliorate her condition. She listened to his earnest philosophizing and did no more than that.
Where she must take comfort, he insisted, was in the doctor’s assurance that there was no reason why she should not conceive again. Had Tom Horrocks not promised her so himself? Out of their love for each other, in God’s good time, another child would grow. An hour was sure to come when this very room would ring loud with infant cries. Why, on cold winter nights like this, they might even briefly rue the desire that had brought a howling babe between themselves and sleep.
Emilia was neither comforted nor amused. She sighed, her pale brow resting on the fingertips of the ringed hand. If Edwin did not mind, she wished only to be left alone. Conversation exhausted her. After a long moment’s unhappy shifting from foot to foot, Frere granted her wish.
That was the first day.
On the second night, at her emphatic request, Frere moved, temporarily, into another room.
It was not merely the weather that made the Decoy Lodge feel gloomier, more shadowy than Louisa remembered, not merely the damp that left her bones so chill. The rooms were hollow about her, unresponsive, as though, resentful of her absence, they had returned to desuetude and would not lightly be chivvied back. It was dispiriting, and Louisa found it hard to settle to her work. For too long she gazed at the rain across the lake. It swooped and gusted, then hung impermeably, aspiring almost to a solid state. There were moments when it felt like a portcullis downward-slammed between herself and the human community.
She had not expected this. As soon as the ice broke on the lake, she had returned to the Lodge with an appetite for work, for solitude. On her way to the boathouse that dawn – before the rain began and too early for her father to rise in protest – thin panes of ice had snapped beneath her feet. She saw leaves of the last fall encased inside them and, yes, it was cold, but there was a fine frosty light, and the mist over the lake made her think of a stoat’s white fur. With a sense of release, of invisibility almost, she slipped within its folds. Only out on the water with Pedro panting in the prow had she dared to admit that for the first time in her life she had felt herself a prisoner at the Hall.
Not one peaceful night had passed since Emilia Frere exacted her promise; not even after she and her husband were gone, back to whatever wretchedness awaited them in the Rectory. Alone in her room, Louisa had been unable to put them from her thoughts. She found it painful to anticipate the poor man’s misery, and was dismayed to recognize how ferocious was her dislike for the woman. Never had she experienced such negative intensity of feeling. It would not square with any value she had taught herself to cherish, for she believed herself above such petty sentiments, and could cope with them now only by turning her dislike upon herself. What sort of creature was she after all who could feel only loathing for a woman who had suffered so? Emilia had been long sick with pregnancy; she had lost the child; and somewhere she was terribly afraid. Having experienced none of these things, what right had Louisa to judge of this? Who knew what an unhappy woman might say in such straits, and how little she might mean it?
The memory of that cold hand on hers spoke otherwise.
Louisa had slept badly and dreamt ill. On waking each day, she had been out of temper. She wanted only to be free of this, for the lake to clear, so she could retreat to her task. Her invisible companions at the Lodge were pure hearts all. She longed only to be one among them.
And now she was here, and her mind was still shadowed by that unsolicited intelligence. Staring at the rain, she recalled her first conversation with Emilia, how they had discussed The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the woman had protested a righteous indignation at the thought of a wife deserting her husband. Yet with how much less justice than Helen Huntingdon did she contemplate it now!
Louisa strove for charity. It would not come. What displaced it was a sense of outrage that a man as kindly and compassionate as Edwin Frere should find himself shackled to a vixen. Almost it made one doubt one’s trust in the Divine Intellect that decreed such things.
There was no profit in these thoughts. They served only to make her own heart sore and to mar her concentration. She reached for her pen and dipped it into the well so fiercely that when she lifted it a blot fell across the page. She sighed crossly, was about to dispose of the paper when a wicked thought possessed her. Under the black splodge of ink she drew the neck and shoulders, then the severe, aloof posture of the woman she despised. It was a few moments’ work to have her sitting with her baggage in a gig, to crown the blot with a ridiculous hat, and to write the word CAMBRIDGE on a downward-sloping signpost. At the rear of the speeding carriage, she inked in a cloud of dust.
“Be gone, Emilia Frere,” she found herself thinking. “Get you from this parish. Abandon Munding Rectory and your husband. I shall keep my promise.”
It was in the realm of pastoral care that Edwin Frere believed himself most truly priest. After a discouraging start he had begun, he thought, to win the confidence of the villagers. He had hit the right note of playful yet dignified affection with the children – mischievous Sam Yaxley had proved an ally there, and even throughout the days of his own distress, he had comforted the sick and sorrowful, acting in the simple trust that, however removed those impoverished lives might seem from his own, they were members of one another.
Long before his ordination, Frere had been persuaded that the human heart was held in common and, therefore, a word truly spoken either way could touch and move it. Forgetful of the silence which prevailed over his own most troubling experiences, he believed that direct and gentle questioning might embolden even the least articulate sufferer to speak all the grief and rage of the heart, and so dispel it. In this conviction, he tried, as priest, to stand open to meeting, for it was in the ground of meeting that true comfort grew. He heard all patiently, taking the pain within himself in the hope that he might show by his own fallible example how much greater was the patient love of Christ.
So, yes, with a neighbour he would have known precisely what to do. With his own wife he scarce dared attempt it.
He stood before her wretchedness like an incompetent at the scene of an accident. Flowers, he had thought, surely they must lift her heart. But this was a lean season for flowers, so he had gone out into the rain looking for snowdrops. He had found them and he loved them: the little heads like frail iron, withstanding this wolf-month cold, and, when you opened the white petals, there were the green veins, promise of the spring to come. They were, surely, the perfect emblem of Emilia’s need? He had attempted a verse on the theme, but the lines lacked grace. He had abandoned it and taken the flowers to speak for themselves at her bedside, but she did not hear them. What he had seen there Emilia failed to see; when he pointed it out, she turned away.
She would accept no other visitors and yet, he sensed, she did not want him near. His very tenderness seemed a burden to her. But this was not the hardest thing to bear.
Alone in the room where he passed his nights, Frere closed the chapter of the Bible which had long ceased to occupy his thoughts. Tomorrow, he decided, he must press her to a full disclosure of the grief harboured in her heart. Yet no sooner was the decision taken than he quailed at the prospect, for he knew that a full expression of the rage lying at the root of Emilia’s melancholic condition must quickly overwhelm him.
Unspoken though they were, the facts of the case were plain, and he could no longer conceal them from himself. His wife hated their life here in Munding, and what had happened in the ice-bound park at Easterness had become for her the final bitter vindication of that hate. Munding was a place where her vitality bled away. There was nothing for her here, and if this was admitted between them it must swiftly prove an admission with only one exit.
Morose and fretful, Frere contemplated a further defeated return to Cambridge – his promises unkept, his congregation resigned to a curate’s care, his mind racked by remorse and a crippling sense of his own twice-proven inadequacy. No, it was intolerable.
She had promised him obedience. She had vowed to honour him for better or for worse, just as he must honour her in sickness as he did in health. His marriage to this parish was inviolable in its own sacred vows. He was as little free to renege on them.
So what was he to do but bear with her? Accept her cold rebuffs without anger or impatience; be there for her as best he might in the fond hope that this dreary rain must cease, that spring must come again, and she might wake one day to that glorious span of light across the water meadows. As he turned back the coverlet of the bed where he must sleep alone, Frere consoled himself with the thought that what he was incapable of accomplishing himself might be accomplished for him by time and that providential hand, of which, in his earnest efforts outside the home, he was the faithful instrument.
It was perhaps a coward’s answer, and he was honest enough to admit it. But he would pray – both for Emilia’s recovery from affliction, and for the strength he would need throughout the long thawing of the ice about her heart.
One person at least had emerged from the unhappy events at Easterness with a renewed enthusiasm for life. Alone at his desk in the library, Henry Agnew put down his pen, blotted the page and placed it neatly atop the growing stack of paper at his side. Then he looked up at the portrait of Sir Humphrey Agnew and smiled. What a day of work this had been!
For some time now he had been certain that he had at last evolved a diction appropriate both to the requirements of classical epic and to the subtleties of the alchemical process. No mean problem, this, in a time largely deafened to such sober music, and were it not for the incomparable examples of Spenser and Milton, he might finally have despaired, but what they in their day had achieved for their grave themes ought (he had long believed) to be possible for the richer store of myth and symbol at his disposal, and now the lines had begun to move with the majesty he desired. He too now soared “in the high region of his fancies with his garland and singing robes about him”. He too was poet. If only Louisa were by to share the joy of it.
Yet even the fact of her absence was cause for congratulation, for what she had presciently foretold had come to pass. He had indeed allowed himself to become too dependent on her, and he had paid the price of it. He had been so blinded by his need for her light that he had failed to see how deeply he stood in her shadow, and his work had been frustrated thereby. For a time, when she first took to the seclusion of the Lodge, days had been wasted in a sort of restless grief, but it had passed, resentment fell away, and gradually he found his way back into his own strength. It was he, after all, who was the master of the Art, and now that Louisa had taken upon herself the task of preparing his way, he was freed from the immediate pressure of time. He could work more calmly, and had even – so surely had his confidence returned – felt free enough to step outdoors to watch the skating, though the grip of the cold at his lungs had troubled him. Then he had thought all lost in the sudden distraction of the parson’s wife’s misfortune. All might have been ruined there, with that nervous, alien presence in the house, the comings and goings, the servants all of a huff. Yet considerate as ever, Louisa had shielded him from the worst of the intrusion. He had pressed on with the work, permitting no more interruption than common courtesy required, and had joined in the prayer of thanksgiving with a truly heartfelt gratitude not occasioned only by the woman’s departure.
Something in the quality of Frere’s devotion had touched him. Bumbler the man might be, but his unaffected tenderness reminded Agnew of the care he had lavished on his own wife in her dying days. He remembered his own great grief, and how he had finally emerged from it with a renewed sense of purpose; for though his epic was intended to address the spiritual crisis of the age, it had also been conceived as a requiem for his lost wife and a celebration of her unwavering faith in his ability. Reflecting on the parson’s fortitude in distress, his manifest care for his wife and his humble acceptance of divine will, Agnew had felt a sense of shame that his original impulse had been clouded by the passing years. It returned now as an act of rededication, and suddenly the work progressed.
So intense was the flow of inspiration, he had barely noticed the rain at his window, and was amazed to be told later of floods and drownings. He had been elsewhere, rapt in meditation, as the harvest of his long withdrawal from the world came home. Verse after verse had sprung from silence to run in fiery lines across the page. Never had he known such rapture. Gratefully he might echo the joyful cry of Trismegistus in The Golden Treatise:
Approach, ye sons of Wisdom, and rejoice: let us now rejoice together; for the reign of death is finished and the son doth rule; he is invested in the scarlet garment, and the purple is put on.
Across the lake, in the Decoy Lodge, the mood was less exalted, for eventually all the demons of solitude came to visit Louisa Agnew where she worked alone. How well she was coming to know them: the Mid-day Demon of Accidie who dulled her mind and drained the words of meaning; the Seraph-Serpents, ever hot upon his heels, whose bite flustered her to panic and anxiety; then, by dark, the Ochim – doleful screech owls whose appetite always demanded more than she knew how to give. Every anchorite had known and suffered from these phantoms of the mind: how naive she had been to imagine herself exempt.
Yet the visitations had begun innocently enough. The first indeed had presented itself as no more than vivid memory, though – if she were honest with herself – she would admit it had arisen from a kind of fear.
As had not been the case throughout her first sojourn at the Lodge, she would start from her thoughts at some unexpected sound – a movement of the timbers, a mouse stirring in the wainscot, a drenched thrush fluffing its feathers in the thatch eaves. Even Pedro, pattering nervily about the room, seemed more restless than usual, and when he slept his dreams were troubled. Gradually Louisa began to wonder whether her father had been right after all, whether she had been as unwise as he claimed to shut herself away in this sequestered place. At moments when her concentration was disturbed, when dusk came too soon and its shadows flittered dismally about the room, she might almost have thought she was afraid.
Once, when the shock of alarm thrilled through her with more than usual intensity, she began to sing, softly, to keep her spirits up, and several phrases had passed her lips before she realized that the song came from her childhood – that she had not sung those words for almost twenty years, had forgotten them even until this moment when, with startling clarity, her memory travelled back in time.
It was a summer afternoon – she could barely have been more than eight years old – and she had come to the Lodge with her brother and their cousin, Laetitia, who was visiting the Hall with her parents. Henry was thirteen then, Lettice a year younger. Henry had not wanted to bring Louisa on the expedition but she had cried to go, and the adults insisted that she not be left behind. No one had known that Henry planned to take the skiff and voyage across the lake into the forbidden territory of the Decoy Lodge.
If the Lodge was not quite ruinous then, it was in poor repair. No one had used it for years. The reed thatch was spiky and unkempt, windows were broken, one of the doors unhinged. Breathless with a sense of violation, the three children had entered.
At the time Louisa was more impressed by the fact that Henry had lied to their father than by the dreariness of the place. Irritated by her presence, Henry had mocked and teased her nevertheless, for he could be quite beastly when the mood took him that way. He found a rusty man-trap in a cupboard – an evil contraption of chains and springs and teeth – and assured her that it had taken the leg off more than one poacher in its day. “Look,” he said, pointing to some darker smudges of rust, “you can still see the bloodstains here, and here.” Gratified by his sister’s distress, he then whispered that he had a dark secret to tell them: the place was haunted.
What the girls had to understand, he whispered, was that his father’s father had used the Lodge for very wicked purposes, things so wicked that he had gone quite mad and died in a madhouse. From there, no doubt, he’d gone straight to hell, but there were times when he and his wicked mistresses were still to be seen walking here, their shades drawn back from hellfire to visit the scene of their sins.
The lie had a pronounced effect upon Lettice, who immediately ventured on a small excursion into terror. Louisa found her cousin’s whimpers more unnerving than the story itself, but Henry, older, shrewder, discerned an encouraging element of titillation in Laetitia’s fear.
“What sort of sins?” Louisa innocently asked, for this hitherto untold family news greatly interested her.
The sins were far too wicked to be named, Henry had answered with a confidential glance at Lettice, who held her dainty hands at her mouth, wide-eyed. Moreover, that was not the only spookish thing about the place: Henry knew for a fact that hundreds of years before, there had been a magician in the family. His name was Sir Humphrey Agnew, and he had consorted with a witch hereabouts.
Louisa had heard of Sir Humphrey, but not that he was a magician.
“He most certainly was,” Henry insisted, “and the witch’s name was Janet. Everyone for miles around lived in terror of them. I’ve seen the cauldrons that they used to cast their spells. Father keeps them hidden away in a room off his library.”
This was impressive. Had Humphrey and Janet been very wicked too, Lettice wanted to know, and did they too haunt the Lodge? Henry said that he wouldn’t be at all surprised, but Lettice need not be afraid as long as she stayed close to him.
“Are you very brave?” Lettice asked.
Henry assured her that he was. Much braver than Louisa – who was offended by this comparison and declared that she was not at all afraid.
“Oh yes you are,” said Henry.
“Oh no I’m not,” Louisa had protested then with all the virtue of truth in her small voice. She had been undaunted even when Henry said he’d wager that she dare not stay alone in the Lodge while he and Lettice explored the woods outside.
The stake had been set at a silver thruppence – a thruppence which (Louisa remembered smiling now) she had never seen, for the afternoon had ended in disaster. She must have sat alone there for a good quarter of an hour, singing to herself, before Henry and Lettice came crashing back through the woods, squealing that they had seen Humphrey and Janet and must take to the skiff at once. Genuinely frightened by their fear, little Louisa had rushed after them and sat trembling beside Lettice in the skiff while young Henry rowed for all he was worth. When she dared to look back, however, she saw nothing more alarming than Jem Bales, the woodman, and behind him, in the shadow of the trees, a woman who might have been Audrey, the kitchen maid, though she could not be quite sure. Perhaps Henry and Lettice had seen something else? Whatever the case, the exploit cost Henry a thrashing later that day, and Louisa had too much heart to ask about her thruppence.
Emerging from those rapt moments of remembrance, Louisa put down her pen. The work had been far from her thoughts all evening. She had written little in the hour before the sudden sound had startled her and she began to sing to herself, the words of that same song she had sung so long before in this same room. How clearly it had all come back to her – even the piping treble of her own childish voice.
The lamp guttered a little in the chimney draught. She was returned to the present now, to the papers at her desk, to the rain barracking against the window glass, but her thoughts were wandering still.
Had Henry spoken truer than he knew, she wondered, for at a dismal time like this the Lodge was a shadowy place. It had been a part of her intention in coming here to banish those shades: already it seemed they were darkening her mind as surely as they still lowered across her father’s. She sensed that, even in contesting her decision to make use of the Lodge, her father had found it impossible to speak his full revulsion for the place. The mere thought of Madcap Agnew – a name rarely mentioned in the Hall – appeared to stultify him. What could the man have done that had been so vile?
Her only reference was the behaviour of Huntingdon and his set in Acton Bell’s novel – the gambling, the womanizing, the drink and the meanness of temper such vices induced. Those activities were so evidently a waste of spirit that Louisa had never understood how men were so easily lured by them. Yet lured they were, ever deeper into the toils of matter, and women with them too. Was it only lovelessness then that made an evil of the flesh? For in the Hermetic Art – symbolic though its language was – the mating of Sol and Luna was a moment of great joy and exaltation. It was the healing of ills, the great mysterium. That humankind had been created male and female was, of itself, the promise that such mystery might be made flesh. Yet if the density of her father’s silence spoke true, then Madcap Agnew had used this place to make of that mystery something vile indeed.
Alone with the pages of her book, Louisa felt depleted by the knowledge that the world for which she wrote was so completely estranged from the values she cherished. It preferred, apparently, to revel blindly in its senses, as though life were no more than a rout of appetite and sensation rather than the dream of gold she sought to share. And then she recalled the words Emilia Frere had spoken: You have not known a man… you have not suffered at their nakedness.
If the words had chilled her at first hearing, it was more because of the cold light they cast on the woman’s most intimate life than for any reference to her own innocence. They troubled her more deeply now. From whatever inaccessible pit of bitterness, the words reached out to touch an empty place in her own life. In these matters Emilia Frere knew more than she, for the woman had crossed the threshold of the married state; she had delivered herself over to the meeting of the flesh as Louisa had not been called upon to do; she had experienced what the uninitiate could only surmise. For Louisa this crucial moment of a woman’s life – the very act by which life itself was assured of continuity – remained a mystery. In her preoccupation with other, larger and less accessible mysteries she had been too certain of the supreme value of her endeavours to attach great value to the consequent deprivations, but now she remembered also how Tom Horrocks had lightly berated her celibate condition while they skated with Edwin on the frozen lake. In their different ways both Tom and Emilia had alluded to the same experience, and before that experience she was utterly virgin. Yet her work touched on it at every point, and without such experience, without the knowledge of such suffering – if suffering it was – what authority did she possess to speak a word of meaning in the world?
With a pang of dismay she saw how everything she knew came only from a marriage between native intelligence and the wisdom of old books. Though the books were sound, her apprehension clear, the meeting joyful, could that possibly be experience enough?
She looked back through the many pages she had written, and saw the great names glitter there – Proclus, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Ficino, Pico, Agrippa. Ardent spirits all. Men who had known and endured the world. These and the adepts of the Art were her fiery masters. Apart from her father and her brother, these were the only men she had ever deeply known. She loved them all and, yes, she could write of them. Out of her mating with their books a small book of her own would be born. She had set her mind to it, and it would certainly be accomplished, but in that winter dusk, as the rain fretted at her window, as she recalled the innocence of the child who had once sung alone in the house where her grandfather had done such wrong, Louisa Anne Agnew, already twenty-seven years old, wondered whether her life had yet properly begun at all.
“As far as I am concerned,” said Dr Horrocks, “the matter is plain enough.”
“I am greatly relieved to hear it,” said Edwin Frere.
The noise in the doctor’s throat might have been a groan or a growl. “I am afraid you misunderstand me. The plain fact of the matter is, there is nothing I can do for your wife.” Then he saw from the sudden anxiety on the parson’s face that this too might be misunderstood. He hastened to add, “Physically, Mrs Frere is sound as a bell. There is no good reason why she should remain in her bed, and the darkness of the room can only aggravate her melancholic condition. She must stir herself, Mr Frere, and if she will not, then you must stir her.”
From the despair in the parson’s eyes the doctor saw that this remedy had already been tried to no avail. Clearly the dose had not been severe enough. But how, delicately, to suggest as much?
“At the very least, this taste for laudanum must be discouraged. The tincture has its uses, but restoration of active vigour is not among them. It does not help, Mr Frere, it does not help.”
Frere’s eyes were now wandering unhappily.
“Come, sir,” the doctor pressed. “You must take her firmly in hand. In so far as decorum allows, I have tried to do so myself, and at some cost to my reputation for a sympathetic bedside manner. As you will have observed, your wife was not pleased to see me; she remained impatient of my attentions throughout, and the only profit from the visit is my own. I need hardly say that I don’t care to have things so. Don’t care for it at all.”
Frere murmured an apology which Horrocks hastily dismissed. “Dammit man, I know these things can be difficult but some people must be bullied back to shape. And there are occasions – this is most certainly one of them – when it is the husband’s place, not the doctor’s, to do the bullying. You must learn to sharpen your tongue, sir. Even in the pulpit there are moments when mildness of manner is not enough. It is certainly the case in bed.”
Frere’s face reddened – a blush, yes, but also a hint of anger too. “I have exhorted my wife to the point where I am at a loss for patient words,” he protested. “Would you have me take a crop to her, Dr Horrocks?”
The doctor smiled. “You might show her one. A touch more of the spirit that is in you now can do no harm.”
Sighing, Frere flapped his hands at his sides like a seal. “You will forgive me if I insist that I understand Mrs Frere better than you do yourself. It will only turn her to stone, I promise you. It would do the same to me.”
“Stone against stone sparks fire, Mr Frere. Set a fire beneath her bed and I warrant she’ll be out quick enough.” Tom Horrocks had scented something suspect in Emilia Frere’s continuing frailty – it had been too sharply belied by the animus in her eyes. Yet he saw that this rough humour would not serve.
“It is not in my nature,” Frere appealed.
The doctor weighed his man. “Perhaps, after all, you are in need of help. Mrs Frere needs company, stimulus…”
“She will see no one but myself.”
“What about her own family? Has she no sister perhaps?”
“Indeed she does, but she will not have me write to her.”
“Good God, man, you don’t need her consent. Do it at once. Have her come. The surprise alone will be restorative. Take my advice, sir – put pen to paper instantly.”
The thought of Harriet fussing about the Rectory held little charm for her brother-in-law. In his opinion, though it had never been openly expressed, she was little more than a flibbertigibbet whose thoughts rarely ranged further afield than the next gratification. Neither was at ease in the other’s company. But the doctor was right: he stood in need of help, and where else was there to turn?
“Perhaps it would be wise,” he said. “I shall do it today.”
“Excellent. See to it that the resolve does not expire with my departure.” Dr Horrocks turned in search of his hat and crop, then decided that a further word was needful. “We are friends, I think, Mr Frere?”
“I have been happy to think so.”
“Then, as a friend, let me ask you to have a care for yourself as well. My manner can be a little brusque, I grant you, but there is a reason for it – a sound professional reason. The care of others can be a wearing business. One must take steps to preserve one’s own virtue – I use the word in the classical sense, you understand. I advise you to take some such steps yourself. Otherwise, my dear fellow, you will soon be of no use to wife, man nor beast. Remember – I saw you on the ice. You did not falter there. You displayed a rare vitality. I am certain that your wife is not the only one who would profit from its wider deployment. Delight and laughter, sir, delight and laughter! If you hear tell of better tonics I should be glad to hear of them.” But the doctor discerned no more than the ghost of either in the Rector’s smile. “Well, you must excuse me now,” he sighed. “I have other calls upon my time.”
Outside, Tom Horrocks stood for a moment stroking the nose of his great bay. He was fond of the man who fretted beside him, and a touch impatient with him too. But when ears were deaf, what use were admonitions? He put a foot to the stirrup and swung himself into the saddle. “Fish or mend nets, Mr Frere,” he said. “One or t’other and I don’t mind which.” And with that he reined the mare’s head about and was off down the lane, brandishing the crop, significantly, above his shoulder.
Frere watched him go, and such hopes as he might briefly have entertained receded with the clop of hooves. For an instant envying his friend’s unmarried state, he turned into the house to pacify whatever agitated waters the doctor had left in his wake.
Sometimes far into the evening she kept herself locked at the desk, writing, writing. No longer could she take any pleasure in the act; almost she had come to hate the interminable travail. Her wrist was stiff, her fingers calloused by the pen. And yet, as though not she but some other invisible agency were the true author of the work, page after page was done. It was a process of automatic writing such as she had heard tell of in the sillier drawing rooms of the county where idle men and women amused and, she suspected, sometimes alarmed themselves by tinkering in realms they did not understand; except that this was very different, for the entirety of her intellect was engaged. It danced in consort with whatever power it was that provoked her thought, and so energetically at times that, when a day’s work was over, she felt as weary as one of the dancing princesses from a fairy tale, exhausted by their demon partners.
Then, at what was to her the crucial moment of the work, the music began to fail. At the beginning of each new paragraph she must summon her strength to overcome enormous resistances. A voice whispered that the work was nonsense, too far removed from the interests of the age to be of value. It would be mocked, scorned, spurned. She merely revealed herself for what she was: a cloistered innocent, lacking the fashionable touch, too earnest by half in her endeavours to persuade a jaded world that she knew best. Still worse, her mind was recurrently invaded now by carnal fantasies.
She had reached the point in her argument where she must examine and explicate the emblems offered by the masters for the Coniunctio Solis et Lunæ, the redemptive marriage-dance of sun and moon. Such emblems were manifold and she was embarrassed by their riches. Only after considerable thought and a number of false starts had she decided to take for her key reference the mysterious poem called the ‘Enigma Philosophorum’ from Elias Ashmole’s Theatre of Chemistry:
There is no light but what lives in the Sun,
There is no sun but which is twice begott;
Nature and Arte the parents first begonne:
By Nature ’twas but Nature perfects not.
Arte then, what Nature left, in hand doth take,
And out of one a twofold work doth make.
A twofold work doth make, but such a work
As doth admitt Division none at all,
(See here wherein the secret most doth lurk)
Unless it be a mathematical.
It must be two yet make it one and one
And you do take the way to make it none.
Lo here, the primar secret of this Arte,
Contemne it not but understand it right,
Who faileth to attaine the foremost part,
Shall never know Arte’s force or Nature’s might,
Nor yet have power of one and one, so mixt,
To make by one fixt, one unfixed fixt.
It was, she thought, perfect for her needs. Gnomic, succinct, its puns and allusions introduced all the themes she must develop, yet it remained abstract enough for her mind to keep firm purchase on her errant feelings.
Such was her hope and her intent, but once launched upon her exposition she quickly found herself confused by the royal actors of the Art. They were not to be chastened by homilies like children at a Sunday school. Flamboyant, mercurial creatures, they had passionate wills of their own; they exercised a devious, seductive fascination. She struggled to preserve detachment, yet even as her mind appeared to perform its duty, covering page after page with swiftly written words, elsewhere it found ever more disturbing ways to misbehave.
Nor was it the mind alone. Her body had reached a climactic moment of its cycle, and felt famished and restless. Its clamourings against solitude were a constant distraction from the cooler processes of thought; yet even as her spirit chafed at this conflict between body and mind, Louisa understood that such stress was specific to her task and not to be avoided. Body and mind were among the contraries to be reconciled, and the true union of opposites was always preceded by bitter conflict. If her treatise was to fulfil the expectations raised by its prologue, she must make this difficult passage now – though it was, at times, an agony merely to remain seated at her desk.
The turns of the work became ever more perplexing as the themes she must address became ever more entangled with the tensions she endured. In former ages certain masters had solved the problem by avoiding words entirely and resorting to pictures alone. There had been nothing either prurient or arbitrary in their choice of frankly sexual emblems to embody the mystery of the Conjunction, but even in times less hypocritical than her own such pictures had proved subject to misinterpretation. How much greater then the difficulty of conveying the mystery in words, and to an age reluctant to contemplate those experiences where the pathos of our animal nature stands in greatest tension with the highest aspirations of the soul! Nor was she herself exempt from confusion. In the erotic landscape on which her thoughts now opened, the illusory and the actual were so intimately twinned that only the most cautious eye might distinguish between them, and at each passionate encounter the symbolic and the literal seemed to enfold their embrace more tightly. Day by day her bewilderment increased, and, such was the fascination exercised upon the mind by these anarchic powers, she might find herself at any step allured in folly, and dizzily unaware of her plight.
She had, in part, been prepared for this. After all, Mercurius was the tutelary deity of the Art, and it was of his very nature to beguile and confuse in this manner, but she could take no comfort from the knowledge, for she must pursue him as through a hall of mirrors, from one bride-chamber to the next, and at each remove he shifted shape with such dispiriting agility that, again and again, she might have cried out loud for rest. And then, one afternoon, with the rain still beating down outside, appallingly he assumed the face of Madcap Agnew.
Aghast, incredulous, she craned to see more clearly if this was indeed her own mad forebear toying there inside her thought, and he turned to leer at her.
Louisa recoiled. The image vanished, but for several minutes now she sat in shock. It had been his face. Those features were familiar from the portrait in the Hall – the raffish eyes, the shining cheekbones, the lines about the lips and nostrils, that air of derisive irony. All were unmistakable, but if the crazed face of her grandfather had elided with the beckoning features of Mercurius then something had gone very wrong.
She looked back over what she had written: the words were empty, devoid of all vitality. It was not merely a matter of correction here and there – these were ashes; at best a discord such as some chained bear might pound on a piano. She released her breath in a sigh of exasperation. It was an attempt to preserve her objectivity, but it could not suppress a rising panic. She had deluded herself; she had believed that innocence of spirit and a devout purpose were adequate guides through this treacherous domain, but the facts were clear enough now: she had diminished mystery to pious platitude, and some devious element at work in the deeps of her imagination was scorning her efforts even as she made them… Did you truly believe, it seemed to say, that I was to be so easily pinned down?
Suddenly she felt cold. Half-consciously, she reached to pull the wrap more tightly round her shoulders, and still some seconds passed before she realized. The fire was still burning in the hearth; all the draughts had long since been stopped; but the room itself had gone chill around her. The cold came like the dowsing of a light. It was like a smell on the air. She was surrounded by it. Her palms, she saw, were damp.
Simultaneously, it seemed, there had been a change in barometric pressure. The room was unnaturally still about her, but the stillness might shatter at any second. It was waiting for something to happen; as she too was waiting for something to happen – something which must, at all costs, be forbidden.
Then it felt as though the world was sliding inside out as, slowly, noiselessly, a panel swivelled in her mind. A hand somewhere might have touched a secret spring, for a whole wall was turning on a hinge to reveal a hidden chamber. There were figures in there, sounds.
Either she must close her eyes against this or she must enter. Unnerved, stricken with terror now, there was no choice, but the darkness of her tightly shut eyelids offered no release. It brought the images to sharper focus.
The chamber was candlelit. A man was there, reclining on a Récamier sofa, one booted leg slung along its length, the heel of the other cocked against the floor. His shirt was casually unbuttoned at the chest, the trousers high at the waist and tight about his hips. They were, she observed, of a cut long since outmoded. A ringed hand held a thin cigar which – as if in impatient expectation of her arrival – he stubbed in a silver tray. The Lodge had altered around her. She recognized none of the hangings, the furniture, the instruments scattered about. It was like a disorderly tack room, smelling of saddle leather – except that the air was also heavy with some dry exotic odour, dense and sensual. And everywhere – an emanation of the cold itself–there was a sense of incipient evil.
Distantly she could feel the tremor of a heart still recognizably her own – though whether it shook with terror or from the first stirrings of a ferocious excitement was hard to distinguish now. Her mind was no longer entirely her own. Every nerve smouldered on a short fuse. There was an insatiable need for action. With what remained of her objective consciousness Louisa strove to tell herself that this encounter was not of her reality, not of her willing… but even as she struggled, she felt herself drawn under the influence of a mind at once alien and familiar – a mind resolute to lacerate its own fine sensibility, and with a perverse, intellectual sang-froid. Slowly, as under the scientific patience of a practised tormentor, all things were disfigured now. Around her and – more terribly – within her, everything which had once promised exultation and delight was warping to extravagance and vice. Everything – however vile – was possible, and nothing forbidden. The consequences left her sick with shame.
So far did the experience lie beyond the normal province of time, she could not later tell whether it lasted for moments only or extended into hours. What was certain was that throughout its duration she felt wasted by an emptiness that no extremes of violence, and no throes of humiliation, could even remotely begin to fill. Bedevilled so, and moaning at her desk, she might have frozen there had not Pedro come fretfully to her side. He pushed his muzzle into her lap, wagging his rump, pleading to be let out. Louisa crashed back into time.
Instantly she knew that she too must get out of the Lodge. Even in the heavy rain she had to be out in clean air, running among the trees, anywhere other than inside the hot chamber of her skull.
As soon as the door was opened Pedro was gone. Louisa snatched her cape from the peg, banged the door shut behind her and leant against it, panting. She saw Pedro disappear among the trees, called after him vainly, then stood in the rain, hands holding the hood tight over her ears. Then she too was gone, running, making for the trees.
At that same moment, many miles away, Harriet Frogmore – Emilia’s younger sister and wife of a Cambridge gentleman-of-leisure – sat in what she was pleased to call her study, pondering the letter arrived that day from Norfolk.
Hattie was not the kind of woman ever to be troubled by demons. Her social calendar was far too full to entertain such disagreeable company, and should any turn up inadvertently among her guests then someone else must deal with them. Her own vague, frankly scatter-brained manner would always get away with it. Chatterboxes do.
Regrettably, however, she felt that Edwin’s importunate letter must be taken seriously. No doubt he exaggerated (such was his wont where his conscience was concerned), yet the only news she had received from Em herself had not been happy, and now – to learn that she had suffered a miscarriage in that desert place at such a time of year, and that she had not felt able to share the grief of it with her own affectionate sister… Well, something was plainly wrong, and it was evident that Edwin was far too feeble to cope with it alone.
Hattie read the letter again, and sighed. As if her father’s interminable complaints were not enough, no matter how she put herself out to please him. He had ever favoured Em – there were no two ways about it – and Em had been quite wrong to post herself to Norfolk in the first place. Sydney Smith had been wrong too; it seemed that the country was not even a healthy grave; though, judging from Edwin’s pusillanimous letter, Smith might have been in the right when he suggested that there were three sexes – men, women and clergymen!
What qualities Em had ever seen in Edwin Frere quite beggared comprehension. The thought of several days cooped up with the man in some dreary Rectory was… Well, it was uninspiring, and Hattie needed inspiration. But she must go. Plainly she must go. Her appointments for the following week could, at a pinch, be postponed. Frogmore must hold the fort.
Hattie opened her writing case, took out a sheet of paper and her pen, then sat gazing wistfully out of the window over Parker’s Piece while she wondered whether or not to cooperate with Edwin’s stratagem that this must appear a chance visit. How complicated the man made everything! Emilia would never be deceived; the sisters knew one another far too well. In fact, on second thoughts, would it not be far more sensible to invite Emilia to come to Cambridge? Surely, to get her out of that tedious place – if only for a time – must be a better answer. And that way she need cancel nothing. Em would enjoy the stimulus of old friends. It would cheer her no end, and it would delight their father too. Of course!
My dearest darling Em, she penned.
Then it occurred to her that this new plan would require two letters – this first and an explanatory note to Edwin, which was tiresome. Yet not half so tiresome as a February expedition across the fens.
How clever of her to think of this! She would remind Froggy of it the next time he ragged her for a noodle.
Calling vainly for her dog, Louisa pushed on deeper between the trees. She longed to encounter some other human presence and could not bear the thought of it. She felt contaminate. She would infect even the trivialities of conversation with the vileness of her thought. So she kept to the woods, following the way Pedro had led, until she came at last to the clearing at the head of the ride. It was the place where her grandfather, indulging some pharaonic whim, had planned to raise an obelisk. He might have done so, she reflected bitterly, had not madness made him its own monument first.
She stood with the cape drenched about her, the rain at her back, and knew she would never go back to the Lodge. The memory of what had happened there defied all thought. She had been too long the creature of thought, and now she had seen. She refused to think, to see, again.
She looked down the long ride to where, at the distant foot of its slope, the lake shuddered in the wind. She stared into its surface, which exercised a deep downward draw, as when one peered into a well and felt one’s thoughts involuntarily plummet. She stared and stared until there was no division between the lake and her mind. Both were unappeasable. Here, like the mingled waters of a flood, was the first chaos of things. It was the dead sea of being female. Here one drowned.
A gust of wind tugged the hood to her shoulders. Freed hair fluttered about her eyes in soft, damp lashes. She must toss her head to see the lake clear again, and the action recalled how differently she had felt on the day when she skated there with Edwin Frere and Tom. She wanted to feel the world real around her again. She wanted to touch and be touched. She wanted to be comforted with closeness, to forget everything in such immediate intimacy, to be told that it was all right, that the world was real, and she had woken from a bad, bad dream…
And there was nowhere to turn. Even Pedro had fled from her. And if she abandoned the search for him, and hurried to the Hall, back to her father, what comfort there? A forty-year madness, he had called it, one which had laid waste the best years of her young life, yet he was back in the thick of his obsession now, and so elated by his own recent progress that he lacked the time to ask about her own. A wave of rage assailed her. He was a self-absorbed old fool. He had drained all the virtue from her. He had taken her innocence and beguiled it, filled her childish head with enthusiasm for his own mad fantasies and left her depleted, a high-minded virgin on the rocks of her own barren dreams. A monstrosity.
There was so much anger in her she could not see what might be done with it. And how had all this happened? Because her father was afraid of life. As a child he had been unable to cope with the passions around him; he had hidden himself away in books, consoling himself with golden reveries. And then, as a man, he had needed a fellow conspirator to make those consolations real, to confirm him in the righteousness of his seclusion from the world. Wisely, her brother had refused, but she… She had wandered innocently into this self-sealing labyrinth of fantasy until she was afraid of life herself. As now, in this terrible rain, she was afraid.
Emilia Frere had been right after all. To be a woman was to be a shell-less creature, bereft and vulnerable. It was to be the sport of men’s insensitive obsession, raw matter tormented for the truth. One could survive only by silence and a strict refusal of complicity. One survived by guile.
But the thoughts sickened her. She was as much their victim as the naked flesh she had seen in that bleak vision had been victim to the flail. They did not fill the emptiness inside her; they only scarified it. She recoiled from the ugliness of it all, for the bitter reflections felt part of the epidemic of hatred she had encountered in the Lodge, and to brood on them was to remain its passive prisoner.
Had her father not tried to warn her after all? She should never have shut herself away in that dreadful place. And in another matter he was right: she had possessed no knowledge of the rigours of the task when she so confidently proposed it. On both counts he had tried to stay her impetuous hand. As always she had won her way, and now she was paying the price of it. She was suffering as he must have suffered, and, if he knew her pain, might he not come to her, as she had so often come to him, gently reminding her that despair was an unavoidable but essential ordeal of the quest?
He might; but would she believe him if he did? In this miasma of voices, which were to be trusted? And if she tried to tell her father what she had experienced in the Lodge, what then? He would, she knew, be terrified himself. He would immediately forbid her return.
But was that not what she wanted – for a voice outside the clamour of her own head to tell her that she need not go back, that she must not go back? That it was folly to persevere, a needless risk. What she wanted was permission to cease.
Was she a child then still, that she could not take the decision for herself?
In confusion again, Louisa looked up and saw that the light was performing wondrously now across the lake. The billows of cloud were gleaming as they moved through the rain, and briefly her senses lifted at the sight, but there was no instant consolation there – only, inside a crowded mind, a sudden increase of space. Animate or inanimate, indifferent or not, there was something luminous and terrible about these clouds, raining as they did on the just and the unjust alike. Willingly she would have surrendered the gift of consciousness if only she might drift like these in a blind passion of being, exempt from question, yet even as she yearned wistfully so, another voice inside her agitated mind was whispering the old caveat from the Rosarium: that all error arose from failure to begin with the proper substance, from a proud forgetfulness that the magisterium is Nature’s work and not the worker’s. She had no desire to hear it but the voice was insistent. It required a calmer appraisal of her predicament.
If she returned to the Hall and told her father what she had endured, she would be forbidden to return – that was what must happen. And what then would become of her days? The task would never be resumed. She would have no heart for it. She would drift listlessly about the rooms, her dreams extinguished. It would be the end of all her high ambitions, and though the world would not greatly suffer thereby – for by now she had lost all confidence that anything she might say would alter the course of things – that crisis which was privately her own would remain for ever unresolved.
If she did not return to the Lodge she might never experience such terror again, but the memory of it would never leave her. It might diminish with time, secreting itself away in some irregularly attended cranny of her brain, but it would be there, waiting, finding its moments. Somewhere, for ever, she would be afraid. Her sanity might be preserved, but wherein would its value lie?
Yet if she went back…
Again she found herself trembling at the thought. Nothing could persuade her to enter the Lodge again. Yet she could not remain here, huddled against the rain which ran down her face and still would disguise from no one the humiliation of her tears.
She was still sick at heart when she passed down through the last glade and found herself staring at the Lodge’s covert thatch, its closed door. She stood for a time in the yard outside, afraid to enter. She walked away, around the house to the jetty where her skiff bobbed on its painter, puddled with rain. She must bail before she could leave if she was not further to dampen her skirt, but what did that matter? She was already drenched. That alone might account for her shivering.
And still there was no sign of Pedro.
With more bravery than she had ever mustered before, Louisa retraced her steps. She pushed open the door on silence. The fire was dead in the hearth, the shadows gathering. She stepped inside and, still wearing the soaked cape, ready at an instant to flee, sat down at her desk. The pages of her book stared back at her. She waited.
For a long time she waited, and nothing more terrible came to enter that silence than her own dark imaginings. A decision was taken then. And Pedro’s continued absence insisted that she act on it at once.
Half an hour later, driven by a resolve almost beyond her comprehension, she was across the lake, informing Tilly that it had become necessary for her to take up more permanent residence at the Lodge. The wet journeys back and forth were, she explained, a weary imposition on her time, and she had decided that until the work was done she would pass the nights there. Provisions must be laid in, now, that day. Sheets and blankets would be needed, candles, food.
More alarmed by her mistress’s drawn features and wet clothes than by her brusque manner, Mrs Tillotson wondered aloud whether this could possibly be wise.
Wise or not, Louisa insisted angrily, it was essential. She would be grateful if Tilly would stir herself about it.
“I should be a deal happier,” Mrs Tillotson protested, “if the master were consulted first.”
“By no means must he be disturbed,” Louisa snapped. “Nor will I have you worry him behind my back. I am about his business and must accomplish it as best I may. Is that quite clearly understood?”
Astonished but not dismayed by this severity, the housekeeper surveyed her bedraggled mistress. With that homely air of perplexed affection that had so long endeared her to Louisa’s heart, she gave voice to a remaining consideration. It seemed, at that moment, to distress her above all others. “But there will be no one by at night to dress your hair.”
Louisa laughed then, though her laughter was close to tears. “Then I shall be a fright,” she answered. “Forgive me, Tilly, I don’t mean to dismay you, but you have no understanding of how urgently these matters press. You must trust my judgement. I am safe enough at the Lodge and with your help I shall make all snug. Now come, waste no more of my time. I must be back before light fails.” And how deeply she wished she could feel the confidence impressed upon her voice as she added with forced lightness, “Apart from any other consideration, I still have a wet dog to find.”
Unconvinced, shaking her grey curls under the mob cap, Mrs Tillotson did as she was bidden.
The bedroom was insufferably dark, though if he insisted that the drapes be further drawn they would open only onto a dour and leaden sky.
“You have heard from Hattie?” he enquired.
“I have.”
“And what does she have to say?”
There was a long silence. Which he must finally break. “My dear?”
“Did I not ask you that my family not be troubled?”
“Indeed you did, Emilia, but…”
“Do my wishes count for nothing in this house?”
“You know that is not the case. All of us desire nothing more than that you should take hold of your life again…more freely exercise your will. There is no future in this confinement from the world.”
“Do you think I would choose to be so?”
“Indeed I do not,” lied Edwin Frere. “Yet you must have help to free you from this condition and, frankly, I have found myself at a loss. When the good doctor suggested that I override your wish and write to—”
“That man was behind this then? I might have guessed.”
“He has only your best interests at heart.”
“The man has no heart. You have no conception how deeply he distressed me. He would be better employed as beadle, or as taskmaster in the Saxburgh Union.”
“Nevertheless, he wishes you well. If his manner was a little rough…” The sentence was stifled under the thick cushion of Emilia’s sigh.
“Well, the harm is done,” she said, and placed the letter at her bedside table next to the sal volatile.
“No harm, I am sure of it. Only good can come from loving company. Tell me, what does Hattie say?”
Frere was unaware of it but his sister-in-law had spared herself the burden of a second letter. He was, in consequence, in an agony of apprehension.
“She wishes the impossible.”
“She does?”
“Though she seems most eager to see me.”
“But why not? We have plenty of room here at the Rectory. It would be a delight to have her bright spirit about the place.”
“I know you do not greatly care for her, Edwin. Do not patronize me. I am not yet without my wits.”
Chastened, Frere said, “Hattie would be excellent company for you. You could take the country air together. Surely your sister could do what I have failed to do… restore your cheer, your vigour?”
“As always you grasp the stick by the wrong end. Hattie wishes me to visit her, in Cambridge.”
For a moment, Edwin Frere was stunned. How could the silly chit have so mistaken his intent? He had been at such pains. Never had a letter been more carefully worded.
“She is of the opinion that the loneliness of this place accounts for my condition. She believes that the respite of a holiday in Cambridge would speed my recovery. Of course, it is out of the question.”
“But I made it absolutely clear how frail you were… that it was imperative that she come here…”
Emilia looked up sharply in the gloom. “Imperative? You used that word? Harriet mentions nothing of this.”
Caught in the toils of his own deceit, Frere’s eyes scouted the room. He found its heavy odour suffocating.
“I thought… the surprise…”
“You would seek to conspire with my sister behind”
Suddenly he was out of all patience. “Dear God, Emilia, there is no pleasing you and your family. What am I supposed to do? Whatever motion I make you hasten to find fault. You terrorize the servants, insult the good doctor, accuse me of sedition… Is all the world to blame but you? Why, you become as tiresome as your father.”
Had he smacked her across the face, the result could not have been more devastating. Emilia stared at him with Medusa’s eyes a moment then eased herself further into the bed where she lay gripping the coverlet with white fingers. On the stone mask of her face no tears appeared. Frere got up from his chair, hating himself, to prowl the room like a caged panther. Damn the woman, he would not apologize. He was almost of a mind to tear the sheets from the bed, heave her out, send her sprawling in an agony of humiliation across the floor.
Emilia said quietly, “I think you have it in your heart to murder me.”
“Don’t be preposterous, madam.”
But a hot darkness sweltered at his head. The breath was constricted in his chest and he found it difficult to swallow. Dear God, what had he done that things should come to such a pass as this? He turned to face his wife who lay, it seemed, transfixed with terror at his unprecedented rage, and hating him, hating him.
Violently he shook his head and slammed his way out of the room.
If Louisa had not dreamt badly on her first night at the Lodge, it was because she hardly slept at all. Little enough daylight was left by the time Pedro came skulking back, and for most of the evening she had sat, talking to him, stroking the soft rug of his ear between tense fingers, and waiting for the fit to come again.
Nothing had happened. Louisa hardly knew whether she felt more relieved or cheated, for the act of summoning all the courage and then being able to employ it only against her own anxiety had depleted her to no useful purpose. She felt as a nervous duellist must feel when his challenger fails the appointment – angry, braver in the aftermath than in the apprehension, her stomach slightly queasy with unassimilated dread.
The truckle bed had been narrow and hard, and she was profoundly unwilling to surrender herself to sleep. Though the Lodge was quiet enough, it would have been a too perilous lowering of her guard, so she tossed and turned until not long before dawn, when her body took matters into its own exhausted hands.
The next day had been largely wasted. When she saw that her tense efforts to concentrate were getting nowhere, she made a swift expedition back to the Hall. She wished to collect two items overlooked in the haste of her first departure: her deck of Tarot cards and, for wise consoling company, the porcelain figure of a Chinese mandarin which had stood for many years in her bedroom at the Hall. His face was smiling and, when you tapped the head, it rocked on a concealed axle so that he seemed to chortle at the absurdity of human antics. It was the smile she wanted with her, for she had felt its lack about her in the Lodge, and now that lack was remedied. Yet even under the Chinaman’s cheerful protection the second night was little improvement on the first. Though she had slept longer, her dreams, if not alarming, had been most unpleasant, and she woke feeling unrested. Later that day she had been forced to catnap at her desk, having achieved little else of consequence there.
Brief as it was, the sleep did her good. On waking, it occurred to her with renewed conviction that the experience of two days before might have been no more than a temporary aberration of an exhausted mind. In the cool light of this brighter day it was hard to conceive of it as a visitation of demons. She looked back over the recently written unsatisfactory pages of her book, and there was no doubt that her mind must have been tired. She winced at their infelicities, at the clumsy way they beat about the bush. She saw that it had been a mistake – an evasion perhaps? – to hamper herself with the abstractions of that cryptic poem. Her attempts at explication had only clouded her own contemporary voice, and led her far astray from the feeling heart of the matter. She was fresher now, more confident; confident enough to scrap the entire chapter and begin anew.
An hour or so was spent drafting a new outline for this second approach on the mysteries of the Coniunctio and, when she was satisfied that its thread was strong enough to guide her through the maze, she took up again the pursuit of Mercurius through the bridal chambers of the mind.
Around nine o’clock on what was now her third night at the Lodge, she looked up from the page and saw a face at the dark window staring in at her through the rain.
Instantly the entire surface of her skin went cold. She stared at the window aghast, and the woman’s face stared back, shadowy and haggard, blurred by the streaming rain. She stared in at Louisa like a crazed creature, silently beseeching help.
Several seconds passed before the face of the strange woman dissolved into her own recognized reflection. Heart pounding still from the certainty that here was the returning shade of one of her grandfather’s mistresses, Louisa slumped back into her chair and dropped the pen. When she looked back at the window there was the face again, but it was attempting now to smile.
She had been foolish to neglect to draw the window blind, but there was no comfort in this self-reproof. The plain fact was she had been terrified by her own reflection, and this was not lightly to be dismissed. Anonymous anxieties still swirled inside her. Again the questions returned.
Why was she subjecting herself to this penal state of solitary confinement? Why was she afraid? Of what? And then – with final, frightening clarity – what inward turbulence of her own soul might possibly explain this sense of Madcap Agnew’s unrequited presence in the Lodge?
For a moment, like a scholar contending both with his own conscience and the uncovered fact which calls an entire thesis into question, Louisa gazed in fascination at the thought, then flinched from it. Surely it was disproportionate? What need to import further obscure perplexities into an already complex situation – particularly when simpler and convincing explanations lay to hand? She was a woman alone on a blustery night with no one by in case of need: here was reason enough for timidity. Were she not to experience such moments of trepidation, there would be something strange in her nature indeed.
To calm herself she scrutinized the evening’s work. Her heart fell again. If she had neutered the quick of mystery in platitude before, she was smothering it with symbols now. It was hopeless, hopeless.
Again panic seized her. Fighting it, she scrumpled the pages in her hands. There was no question but that something vital had been missed, ignored, neglected there… something scarily associated with the darksome presence of her grandfather. She was in flight from it – as she had imagined that woman in the rain in flight. And, like her, she was drawn back, again and again, to the very place of terror that she fled.
As her father had so often complained, to engage with this task was to enter a labyrinth, and it seemed that whichever way she turned she came to this impasse. Perhaps, like the frightened creature she had imagined in the night – it was after all herself – it would always be so until she turned and truly faced the thing she feared?
Louisa stared at her reflection in the drenched, dark glass. She stared until it was hard to know which was herself – the disconsolate woman in the chill room or the other sorrowful face in the night outside. Somewhere, it seemed, she was ignorant of both.
A further decision was taken then. She pushed back her chair, stood up and crossed the room to open her box of tarot cards.
Four hours later she had begun to understand. Almost the entire deck of cards – sixty-six of them – were spread out on the floor before the fire. At the centre of a triangle of twenty-two cards, within a rectilinear arch constructed from the rest, lay the single card she had consciously chosen to represent herself. It was The Queen of Swords. Louisa’s solitude, the wary alertness of her face, the way – symbolically at least – she brought the bright sword of her intellect to her defence – these and many other factors required this particular card and no other as her ambassador in the court of Le Grand Jeu. This was the name of the spread she had chosen, and it displayed an entire interior self-portrait on a scale she had never attempted before. Reading that wealth of images had tested her powers of concentration to the utmost, yet this act of unremitting self-scrutiny had left her more energized than exhausted, for much of critical importance had emerged.
The reading had fully revealed a fact which she had dimly apprehended before but lacked the courage to confront until she saw it reflected in the mirror of the spread. The fact was that for many years she and her father had been living with a dangerous illusion, and the illusion was that they were entirely virtuous in their endeavours, entirely on the angels’ side. She had striven to make her work perfect – forgetful that it was not perfection which life required, but completeness. And what a failure of sensibility this had been!
To make the recognition now was not to deny that she and her father had been aware of their flaws and petty vices, but to consider themselves only commonly fallible was less than half the tale. They had ever been larger than common in their aspirations, and the shadow they cast was correspondingly deep.
In angry self-reproach, Louisa saw how much sooner it should have been evident to her that in identifying so completely with his most noble ancestor, her father had been at pains to exclude all thought of his more immediate and darker legacy. Aware that Madcap Agnew’s name was scarcely mentioned in the Hall, that the Lodge had been for many years a forbidden place, and that her father’s heart still quailed to reflect on the terrors he had suffered as a child, Louisa had not dared to let her reflections on this unhappy history reach far enough. Still worse, she had allowed herself to be drawn into a conspiracy of exclusion. She had made – and with far less justification than her father – the same grave error as he. Had it not been for the ignorant impetuosity which demanded the Lodge as the most appropriate environment for her work, the truth might have continued to elude them. Nevertheless, the facts of the case were now plain enough in her spread: Madcap Agnew remained as much alive inside them as did the glorious seventeenth-century adept of the Art. He was, perhaps, more powerfully so, and not merely as a matter of proximate generation but precisely because such strenuous efforts had been made to exclude him.
In an enterprise such as theirs every aspect of the complex inward theatre must be brought into play and assigned its proper place, and this – though she shuddered at the consequence – included the daemonic figure of her grandfather. Refused admission by the front door, he had forced his way through the back – and with quite terrifying violence. It seemed that her brother had been right after all when he warned her that the Decoy Lodge was haunted. Madcap Agnew was still here. He was here because she was here herself. In part at least, she was his returning shade, and that shade was clamouring now to be embraced.
The truth was fearsome and unavoidable. She remain uncertain still what was to be done with it, though she consoled herself with the thought that in entering the court of Le Grand Jeu and submitting to its verdict, she had already taken the first tentative steps. Yet she knew that the ordeal to come must tax all her strength and, not impossibly, exceed it.
Nor was a reckoning with her grandfather’s shade the only sentence imposed by the spread. Another and equally disconcerting presence had materialized there – one which she had attempted to diminish some time ago and send packing from her thoughts. Yet there the figure remained and was, in a way, still less acceptable, for the mean spirit it betrayed lacked stature. To acknowledge it – as the cards insisted that she must – a portion of herself was to recognize features which were paltry and despicable; it forced the reluctant awareness that she was, in part at least, a smaller person than she believed herself to be. But there in her spread was Emilia Frere – afraid of life, querulous, cold-hearted – and they were, it seemed, sisters beneath the skin. Somehow she too must be embraced.
The whole picture ranged wider far, but two vital considerations immediately emerged. The first was that she and her book would have nothing complete to say to the age until her grandfather’s misspent energy had been redeemed inside herself. The second gave cause for more personal concern. It was evident from the spread that enormous powers were available within her – powers which might be channelled into rich creation, or which might, if not subjected to correct restraint, become destructive. She began to understand how the bleak vision she had been shown was no more and no less than the extremes to which such powers might go if once they lost touch with the exactions of a loving heart. Hitherto she had experienced the unruly masculine spirit inside her soul as little more than a matter for jocular asides or occasional remorse to see it bound like Pedro into mischief, but notice had now been served. The powers of this spirit were immense and impersonal. Unassimilated, they might one day wreak havoc in her life.
How to engage with it then, when at the first glimpse of its potentially monstrous nature she had fled? It still terrified her – even more now that it was acknowledged as a portion of her soul. She was far from confident that she possessed the moral courage to endure further revelations from that dark side of her moon. Yet the process of reading the spread had been like mounting a ladder that vanished beneath her: once started there was no return. She could not now pretend that none of this was known to her, that she was still simply a diligent and faithful daughter, loyal handmaid of a noble art. Consciousness exacted its price: as surely as it increased freedom so it diminished it. She must proceed.
Congenial or not, the truth had been made evident to her in the spread. She had seen it there not in terrible isolation but as a part, a vital part, of a larger pattern – one that pointed the way towards completion of her task. Completion must be her watchword now, whatever admissions it entailed, and was not completion at the very heart of the Coniunctio – the central symbol which had proved the stumbling stone of her work? It was the reconciliation of Sol and Luna after the violence of their strife, the chymical wedding of Sulphur and Quicksilver, the meeting of the dark and light in close embrace from which the golden stone was born. She had known this all along, but she knew it with a different knowledge now. It was a more than intellectual comprehension, and to write of it she must strive to become that meeting. She must submit to its ordeals.
Last time Madcap Agnew had stepped unbidden from the chamber of her mind. She must summon him now.
Unconscious of the hour, driven by a nervous certainty, Louisa crossed to her desk, smoothed her hand across a fresh sheet of paper, and took up her pen.
“Well, old fellow in the cellarage,” she whispered lightly to herself, though the breath was shallow in her throat, “it seems I must speak with you at last.”
If the domestic servants at the Rectory were surprised when their mistress came downstairs the following morning, her husband was astounded. Had his violent loss of temper done the trick after all? Was his wife human again?
Under her cold regard Frere quickly saw that his outburst would not easily be forgotten. And why should it, he reflected, when a sullen anger smouldered in him still? He had scarcely slept that night. He had let the sun go down on his wrath and woken with it. Anger, he saw, had not been lightly numbered among the deadly sins. For Horace it might have been a short madness; in Frere it threatened to become a running sore. Not even George Herbert’s counsel that the country parson’s rage might here and there be justified had comforted. Nor could he even remember now what he had said in that burst of spleen. He dreaded that it might be unforgivable.
“My dear,” he attempted, “how good to see you up and about again.”
Emilia informed the maid that she would take a lightly poached egg and some toast.
Thereafter there was silence in the dining room.
“I was about to visit old Will Yaxley at The Pightle,” Frere volunteered eventually. “I fear he cannot last much longer… But I will remain here and keep you company if you wish.”
Again there was no answer.
Frere swallowed, looked about him. “His will be my first funeral in Munding, I believe.”
“Then perhaps you had better attend to the mending of his soul. He is a spiteful man and a drunkard. One who appears to find more comfort in the Feathers than the church.” There was an absence of interest in Emilia’s voice.
“Yes, perhaps I should go.”
“As you wish.”
Frere’s breakfast was finished. He ringed his napkin, scraped back the chair, made to get up, then had second thoughts. “You are feeling stronger today?”
“A little.”
“I am glad to hear it.” Again he made to rise.
“There is dust on the banister rail, Edwin. You had not observed the servants’ negligence?”
Frere sighed. “My mind has not been on dust, Emilia.”
Studiously Emilia declined the implication. “Then I must speak to Mary myself,” she said. “When I have done so, I think I shall retire again.”
“A little at a time is perhaps best. I would not have you overtire yourself.” Frere hesitated, cleared his throat. “Emilia, about yesterday afternoon…”
“I prefer not to speak of it.”
“Surely we must?”
“You may speak if you wish. I shall not answer.”
“You will accept no apology?”
She regarded him without warmth. “In my opinion, if we are to survive together here it is best that we behave as though that… incident… had not occurred.”
That such a policy was entirely unfeasible was evident in her manner. He was on the point of saying so, when he despaired. No, thought Frere, this is my first funeral. Let us bury it and be done.
“Very well. If you prefer it so.” He got up from his chair.
“And how am I to respond to Hattie’s letter?”
Whatever way you choose, damn you, he thought. He said, “Can there be any question? You are not yet well.”
“That is true.”
“Then you must thank her for the invitation and suggest a postponement.”
Emilia nodded. “You would have no objection to my going when I feel ready to do so?”
“Of course not. Why should I?”
“As you are not free to go yourself, I merely wondered whether you might not feel my absence.”
Dear God, he was beginning to think he would be glad of it. “Of course I should. But a few days…”
“I was thinking of a longer stay.”
“You were?”
“As you know, Father has not been well and Hattie is not the most reliable of attendants. She says in her letter that he misses me dreadfully.”
She would not hold his gaze. A cold suspicion entered Frere’s mind. He realized that he could no longer trust his wife. “How long a visit did you have in mind?”
“Oh, I cannot possibly say at this point. The very thought of the journey wearies me… Several weeks perhaps.”
“Several?”
“Two or three. Perhaps more. I really cannot say.”
What was this sudden panic round his heart? As though he had stepped on a rotten floorboard and it had fallen through.
“Well,” he hedged, “as this is not an immediate matter, we must speak of it again,” and turned away.
“Of course, if you would rather I wilted here?…”
And there was the rage again. “Emilia,” he demanded roughly, “what are you saying to me?”
“If you continue to speak to me in that cold manner,” she answered, “I shall say nothing at all. Go to your dying drunkard – it is quite clear you are out of all patience with me.”
At which point the maid returned with a salver and a rack of toast.
“We will speak of this again,” said Frere.
“Do you sit up, Will Yaxley, and make yourself a bit more pleasant now, for Parson Frere is come to comfort you again.” The sick man’s wife pushed a cushion behind his head and brushed a wisp of white hair back across his brow. Then she turned to smile uncomfortably at the priest. “Will you take a cup of something, Rector?”
“No, thank you, Mabel,” Frere answered. “Don’t trouble yourself. Leave me and this old sinner alone awhile.”
There was an insanitary stink throughout The Pightle, but how should it be otherwise with the sick man, his wife, two sons, a daughter-in-law and three children crowded here? Frere was in the bedroom at the top of a winding stair, and the door to the only other upper room stood open on a clutter of pallet beds and dirty clothes. Through the tiny windows under the thatch eaves he could see the bare boughs of an apple tree and, beyond, the turned sods glinting in cold sunlight – land that this sick man had worked for thirty years or more, cursing the soil he tenanted from King’s to yield a narrow living. Somewhere downstairs came a clatter of pails, and the outraged squawk of a chicken rousted from the tabletop. There had been no sign of little Sam. If the child had sense, he was out somewhere in the fields, away from the squalor of this wretched hovel.
“How do I find you today, Will?” he said.
The eyes were barely open but they strove to see in the gloom, and the thin lips trembled as they shaped themselves into a grim smile. It was as though the man sought to focus him in his contempt. “Same as allus,” he was answered. “None the better for your comings and goings.”
“Do you say so, Will?”
“I do.”
“And have you said the prayers I taught you?”
“The only service I credit is the way old Parson Stukely served Amy Larner and the rest. That were honest man’s work.”
“I think your mind dwells too much on sin, Will. You have a soul to think of now.”
The man gave a little panting laugh which became a spluttering cough. He leant over the bedside and gobbed into a bowl.
“Come, Will, let us say a prayer together.” Frere closed his eyes. “Hear us, almighty and most merciful God and Saviour; extend thy accustomed goodness to this thy servant who is grieved with sickness…”
“Ain’t nobody’s servant,” muttered Will Yaxley, coughing still.
“Sanctify, we beseech thee, this thy fatherly correction to him, that the sense of his weakness may add strength to his faith…”
“Free man. My own master. Allus have been… Die that way…”
“Give him grace so as to take thy visitation, that, after this painful life ended, he may dwell with thee in life everlasting; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Frere opened his eyes on the sick man’s scowl. What of life remained there was no more than this surly defiance… the refusal to admit any need… a dogged going-under as he had doggedly survived, on his own bleak terms. Frere doubted that he would outlast the night. It were better to go and leave the man in peace – every nerve-end in his body shouted so. But this was the first death since he had come to Munding; he held responsibility for the man’s immortal soul.
“Be patient with me, Will,” he said, “for I have a Christian duty to perform.” He faltered, sought cover in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick. “Forasmuch as after this life there is an account to be given unto the righteous judge, by whom all must be judged, without respect of persons, I require you to examine yourself and your estate, both toward God and man; so that, accusing and condemning yourself for your own faults, you may find mercy at our heavenly Father’s hand for Christ’s sake, and not be accused and condemned in that fearful judgement. Therefore I shall rehearse to you the Articles of our Faith, that you may know whether you do believe as a Christian man should, or no.”
Frere looked up from the pages of his Prayer Book. “Do you understand me, Will?”
Eyes glazed and watering, the sick man did not answer.
…without respect of persons, Frere thought.
Dear God, this was terrible.
“Will, dost thou believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth? And in Jesus Christ his only begotten Son our Lord? And that he was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary; that he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; that he went down into hell, and also did rise again the third day; that he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; and from thence shall come at the end of the world, to judge the quick and the dead? And dost thou believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Catholick church; the Communion of Saints; the Remission of Sins; and everlasting life after death?”
Whence this despair as he read – the sense of the utter irrelevance of these questions to the haggard gaze in which he was gripped like talons?
“You must answer me, Will. You must say: ‘All this I steadfastly believe.’”
Would he have the man lie then – here, at death’s door?
But Will Yaxley was not even listening to the parson. His head was turned away, vaguely alert, as though he were trying to remember something – a song out of his childhood, something that had once stirred his bitter heart…
Frere’s eyes shifted to the 71st Psalm: In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust; let me never be put to confusion, but rid me and deliver me in thy righteousness… O Saviour of the world, who by thy cross and precious blood hast redeemed us, save us and help us, we humbly beseech thee…
All out of order now, but the words had passed only through the silence of his mind. It was to himself they were spoken. Again he looked down on this stubborn, yes, spiteful, hulk of a drunkard. He saw only the crabbed meanness of that life, written across the features in an illiterate scrawl. Suddenly the stink was overpowering.
“Do you hear that?” Will Yaxley muttered.
Frere frowned, bewildered, and listened. He could hear only the changed song of the chaffinch in the apple boughs outside.
“That’s what I believe in,” Will Yaxley said. “That ’n’ hard frost. All the rest is squit. You hear me? Squit.”
Throughout that long night in the Decoy Lodge the contest had been waged back and forth, sally following upon sally, with vehement force at times, at times as no more than the lurchings of an all but exhausted will. An eavesdropper peering through the still uncurtained lancet window would have observed nothing more dramatic than a lone young woman sitting at a lamp-lit desk, staring at an empty chair across from her. Sporadically she bent to write – her pen reaching for the ink so urgently she might have feared the nib dry before it touched the page; meanwhile, in the chimney corner by the dying fire, a young red setter dreamt of chase. But when, later, Louisa came to read over what she had written, she would remember that there are times when a mind struggling for greater consciousness must take risks which a less exacting soul might think insane.
That the dialogue could not be sustained in entirely rational terms became rapidly evident, and she found herself thrown from her first cool challenge into responses of anger and disgust. From there, gradually, she began to learn a grudging respect for her opponent. Diabolical he might be in his cold, ironical determination to twist her meaning and, wherever he saw the opportunity, defile it, but that icy heart was ruled by a formidable intelligence which took nothing on trust and subjected each of her assertions to sceptical scrutiny. Why – she was required to answer – should any authority be ascribed to her own limited experience when his own had a different and more bitter tale to tell? Not a weak spot in her argument passed unmarked; each dubious element in her motivation was rooted out and exposed for the sentimental evasions it concealed; the full exertion of her intellectual powers was required merely to hold ground she had long considered safe, and soon it became a fierce battle to survive…
Either a divine order rich with meaning, or an inane jumble of atoms in which nothing is forbidden: this was the ancient matter of the debate; though debate is too civilized a word for all but a few passages of the conflict she endured. Nor were the lines of the conflict clearly drawn. Seeing herself as the champion of light over against his dark, she was forced to recognize that Lucifer too is a light-bringer in his way, and there was, at the heart of much she tried to say, a dazzling darkness. There were long sessions too when both recoiled, or when they lay locked together in holds so tight there was an erotic, almost tender, intimacy between them. At such moments Louisa might yield a little, only to find the advantage lost. Her feelings injured and abused, furious again, she spat defiance – and heard him laugh.
At last she emerged from what had seemed a fathomless despair to admit this conflict endless. Point for point was answered; pawns, knights, bishops, castles fallen, until only her white confronted his black queen. Stalemate was reached, and not accepted either way. Staring unvanquished into his gaze, she saw that it was time to fold the board.
Strangely she no longer reviled him. Aware, quailing, of his power, she saw pathos too. He was a devil, yes, but a poor devil – a devil wrought from injured innocence – and she could find it in her heart to pity him. She saw too that it was only fear that had made her fight: that fear, as much as cold indifference, was the contrary of love; and here – at the climax of their bitter struggle – she could fear and love him at the same time. If victory mattered to him so much then he must have it – but only as a gesture of her love, for that was to concede no defeat at all.
Then, in a sudden relaxation of the room’s fraught air, he was gone.
She sat for a time, half-wondering whether this withdrawal was only the preliminary to some new, devious stratagem he had devised, for she was too exhausted to recognize the scale of her achievement. And then, when nothing came to disturb the sense of peace gathering like sleep inside her, she walked to the door, opened it, and stood, breathing in the damp night air. Far above the distant Mount the moon stood at full among a shoal of clouds. The rain had ceased and the night was a luminous silence, devoid of consciousness and consecrated only to itself.
She slept right through the following day and night, and when eventually she returned to her work the sole cruelty lay in the self-imposed discipline of those long hours at the desk. She ate little, rose from her chair only to mend the fire and answer her bodily needs, or let Pedro come and go, and worked on far into the evening until she dragged herself wearily to bed. Sometimes she fell asleep where she sat until her posture altered, and she woke, startled, uncertain where she was. Day by day the stack of written pages mounted higher. It was as if their volume had become her only concern: as to their meaning and value she had lost all compass. In moments of detachment she wondered who, in their right mind, could ever bring themselves to read all this.
Then the nature of the visitations changed. They came as dreams still, or as waking dreams – vagrant experiences which might have lasted hours or moments only, so little did they have to do with time, and interpenetrating through the states of wakefulness and sleep. Light-headed once, emerging from her trance, she recalled the story of the old Chinaman who dreamt he was a butterfly, and so vivid was the dream that when he woke he wondered whether he was a man who had dreamt himself a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming himself a man. And that, she thought, is surely my condition now: I am a case of butterflies.
She tapped the bald domed head of the porcelain figurine on her desk and made it seem to laugh. Watching the old mandarin’s sly nod, she fell to dream again.
She had come into the library where her father sat motionless at his desk like an allegorical statue of Contemplation, a hand at his brow, undistracted by and unaware even of her entry. She passed to the bookshelves, opened the glass door and took down that volume of the Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa of Joannes Jacobus Mangetus in which were depicted all the illustrations from the Mutus Liber. In the still air of the library she could smell the leather of its binding, and she was a little breathless with anticipation of delights to come, for to open that book was like unlocking a casket in which the contents changed each time one meditated over them. Carefully, with due respect for its age, she placed the volume on her lectern and turned its pages until she came upon the first picture where, from a garlanded ladder, an angel sounded a trumpet to wake the sleeper at its foot.
She heard the trumpet sound, for she was that sleeper, and when – still dreaming – she woke into lucidity, backwards she travelled in time, before her own birth, before the death and birth of her grandfather, back across the centuries until it was high summer at Easterness, the sun and moon stood in the sky together, and she knew herself returned to the golden age of alchemy.
And this was dream within dream, for she might have been turning the pages of the book still as she gazed on two figures who were bent at work before a furnace, sweating in the heat as they fed charcoal to its flame; yet unlike the figures in the illustrations these were present in rich colour and animated by lively enthusiasms of their own.
Then, with a gasp of sudden delight, Louisa recognized the man. Though he was younger here than in the portrait above her father’s head, and wearing no cavalier finery but a simple, soot-stained workman’s smock, she knew the lean, engaging features for those of her ancestor, Humphrey Agnew. He was scarcely out of his youth, in his twenties still, his eyes active and earnest, alert with fascination, and a calm, controlled energy seemed to flow through each sensitive movement of his hands. If he was at that age, and working with such ardent intensity, then this must be the very day on which he had made his successful projection of the Stone, and through the agency of this lucid dream, she had been granted the otherwise impossible privilege to observe…
And might do more than watch, for there was a woman working beside him who could only be Janet Dyball, his sweet soror mystica – she who had searched the mystery with him, and whose hands had stitched the sampler hanging in Louisa’s room at the Hall, on which were embroidered the words:
She too was instantly recognizable to Louisa, and not because any portrait of the young woman had survived, but because – and this was strangest of all – her face was Louisa’s face. She and Janet were one and the same, though her own wondering consciousness remained apart, and she was, it seemed, observer and participant at once as Humphrey paused in his labours to peer into the hot glass of the alembick, then turned to smile at her.
Soon, he was saying, the dissolution of the first matter would be complete, and she would see the alembick turn to a black so deep she might fear their work all lost, but this blackness was rather to be desired, and they must persevere throughout the time when it prevailed, for only through that darkness which some masters called “The Raven’s Head”, and others the Nigredo, could the passions of their matter rightfully be ordered. If they observed it well, a seed of light would glister at its heart, and she would wonder then to see it wax and magnify. When every shadow of the black had fled before this light, the work would have achieved its second stage, the white of the Albedo, from whence a saffron hue would then appear, which was the passage from the white to red. At last, if Hermes smiled upon their toil, the sanguine colour of Rubedo would appear, and bring the passion of their matter to perfection. “Therein, sweet love,” he said, “doth lie the true sperm of our male. From thence the splendour of the sun shall rise – for here is the fire of the Stone, the King’s own crown, the glorious son of Sol – and there these first of all our labours findeth rest.”
None of this was unknown to the Louisa who watched; yet to she who listened the words came virginal. She rejoiced to hear the golden promises renewed in that rich voice. The antique tongue was instantly familiar, and not only from her readings in old texts. It was the very language of her heart, as dear to her as was the voice itself – a gentle tuneful baritone she recognized from her own time, as though it had ever been a member of her dream.
Throughout that long day, they laboured there, tending the fire from change to change, until at last the sheen of gold was brought forth to perfection from the flame. And then, what lovers they were, the young alchemist and his mystic sister – naked as angels, white among green shade, and such laughter echoing from tree to tree, as though the knowledge of sin had never been conceived, and both knew only now the dazzling appetite to meet.
Was this then how youth, how life should truly be? No endless poring over books and dusty manuscripts, but acting out the glory of the word made flesh. Such tenderness! Such breathless apprehension of the mystery in things! And, afterwards, such peace!
Louisa dreamt like Ariel, and when she woke, like Caliban she cried to dream again.
“I have been thinking about my… accident… at the lake, that day.”
Frere looked up from his Bible, startled that his wife had spoken at all, and doubly so that this should be the subject, for since the day of her return she had refused all reference to the miscarriage. His confusion was further compounded in that his own thoughts had been quite other – he was agonizing over the problem of redemption. Will Yaxley had been buried that day and was, if stricter minds were to be believed, in hell by now, which was difficult to reconcile with Frere’s own concept of a merciful Christ who would take even a stubborn sinner to his breast. Yet the fact remained: Will Yaxley had rejected such consolation. To the end – an end which had been delayed much longer than Frere would have thought possible – he would have nothing to do with promises and admonitions of the life to come. Stubbornly he had insisted that his flesh would rot in “the owld mowld”, and that was the end of it. There had been a terrible cold certainty in the eyes of the dying man. It was impervious to words. And so in this, as in so much else, it seemed, Edwin Frere had failed.
“You have?” he said.
“It begins to come clear to me that this was a judgement visited upon us.”
Sitting in his chair, the Bible open before him, Frere felt almost dizzy with cold dread. Judgement – the second of the Four Last Things – had been much upon his mind, and now, at his wife’s words, he too stood in the dock, and the mercy seat was empty. Had Yaxley been right after all? Was it not far saner to conceive of a natural world devoid of judgement than of a heartless, black-capped Justice before whom all was bared, and who could pass such sentences on mortal flesh?
“How else,” Emilia pressed, “may one make sense of it?”
“It is not for us to question the Divine Will,” Frere said hopelessly.
“Merely to suffer it?”
“With patience.”
“As I must suffer the judgement you have passed on me?”
“Emilia, I have passed no judgement…”
“Have you not said you find me contrary and tiresome?”
“Were we not to speak of that?”
“I cannot bear your silence.”
“It is you who have imposed it.”
“See, there is hatred even in your voice.”
“No,” Frere hotly exclaimed. “What you take for hatred is despair.”
“Then you despair of me?”
“Emilia… I think that this will drive me…”
“Yes, what will it do? Come, out with it, sir. Let us see the selfish heart that lies beneath your parson’s vestments.”
“Emilia,” he pleaded, “we were never so…”
“In Cambridge?”
“…before…”
“We were not here before. In this dreadful place where there is not a soul that truly cares for me. How dare you seek relief in protestations of a coming madness? You have played that game before, sir. It is done. Yours is not now the need. If anyone shall go mad here, it is I.”
“Emilia…”
“I am your prisoner here. You are less my husband now than judge and jailer. You shackle me in a pretence of care and tell me I must bear all patiently while secretly you rejoice to see me suffer.”
“Dear God, it is not so.”
“Then take me away. Take me away from this barren wilderness.”
Frere’s hand was clutching at his hair. Was he again to abandon his mission, to collapse in ignominious defeat as once in India? To turn tail and run, become again a worthless shadow of himself? Did the woman know what she was asking? Was she, in cold deliberation, unpicking every thread that held his life together? O God forgive him, for she was right – he had, in truth, begun to hate her.
“I cannot do that,” he said. “I cannot do that.”
Hopelessly he looked across at her and saw only a stone mask. For a hideous moment it merged with the features of the abominable idol on his church. Here was the dreadful shadow that had always hung across his ministry. Here was the admission with no exit. He remembered the hollow thud with which the first shovelfuls of earth had fallen on Will Yaxley’s coffin. Sweet Christ, was there no escape from this?
“You would rather see me suffer?” she demanded. Frere looked up at her in desperation. “You leave me no room to breathe…”
“Oh come, sir, enough of this. It is I, not you, who lack air, scope… meaning in my days. Have you forgotten how you pranced about the ice while I lay bleeding? How you continued to spread sweetness and light through other homes while I lay in that darkened room alone upstairs? How you fobbed me off with that rude beast of a physician, and even conspired with my own sister to free yourself of me? And now you bid me hold my peace and suffer patiently the insults that you heap upon my family. You are unkind, sir. I have kinder friends elsewhere.”
“Then be gone to them, damn you,” Frere shouted from his frustration, his misery and rage. “If I have failed you so utterly, be gone, for I am at my wit’s end with your wretchedness…”
He fled, heart pounding, uncoated, into the pitch-black night outside.
Louisa put down her pen and read what she had written:
So confident now the vigour of our ingenuity, so beguiling its productions, that we scarcely pause to wonder how the Science with which we so excite ourselves has added not a jot to, nor subtracted any portion from, the Wisdom of Antiquity. Of another order, of another world even, that Wisdom patiently abides, and by its light the science of our age – investigative of, dependent on, the contingencies of the external world – appears a dark lantern indeed. Our earthly power, our speed, our comforts and the satisfaction of our mortal appetites – all these things increase. Yet ever the dreadful question rises: to what end? What profits all our ingenuity if this, the fundamental challenge, stands unanswered and unsearched?
As the very name attests, the ancient Doctors of Philosophy loved Wisdom, and Wisdom is in no manner to be found amongst externals. Wisdom’s Law, writ plain upon the temple wall at Delphi, has but a single clause: it is to know thyself. Yet if the proper study of mankind is man, we have neglected it. Not so the alchemist; for Man, we boldly now affirm, is the true laboratory of the Hermetic Art. He is its subject, he the alembick, he the Stone; and true Self-knowledge is the motive, mode and object of the Work.
She sighed, pinched her eyes, then thrust the paper aside. Too densely writ. At once too abstract and too explicit. Neither allusive nor provocative enough. It would not do.
And who was she to speak of Wisdom – she whose thoughts ran ever counter to her argument? How had she ever dared to dream herself the equal of this task?
Once more she tried to summon her glorious ancestor to her aid. What would he have to say to her now in this pass? She imagined a hand at her shoulder, that gentle voice saying, “Come, sweet chuck, plague not thy mind with doubt. You have but wrought yourself unto the pitch of weariness, which ever was the way with us philosophers.” But it was to the modern age that she must speak, not one long past. And the tone she had adopted in this passage was too Olympian for that. Her words must speak personally or they would have only the same effect as any general admonition: precious little. But when she wrote directly, person to person, there was only one face that with increasing frequency presented itself for audience; and, when she looked on him, all objectivity was gone. She erred, back from the symbolic plane to the literal. At the thought of him, forbidden though that thought was, she no longer wanted to say these things; she wanted to be them.
All error arises, she strove to remind herself, when the worker works not with the proper substance. And where should that be found except in venerable Nature? She had been too long in this chair. How long was it since she had been out to observe the motions of the light across the lake? Far too long.
Louisa tidied away the papers on her desk and went out into the day.
A sprightly breeze teased the surface of the lake, and though there was a frostiness to the blue against which a gull bent crisp white wings, at her own less exalted altitude the air was not so chill as to make her shiver. There was, rather, a surprising warmth to the afternoon sunlight, for the year had been unfolding while she worked indoors, and so exclusive had been her concentration, so absorbing each feature of the terrain on which her introspective thoughts had opened, she had failed to observe the alterations of the light, the comings and goings of the rooks and the way – this day at least – all things were breathing easily. If the fresh, delectable smell that cleansed her senses now was not quite yet of spring, it might soon, she thought, be made to answer for its promises.
Reflecting on the evident elation of the trees, one ought – she felt – to experience a responsive lightness of heart, yet she did not. She was too wistful for that, and though the emotion was accompanied by an almost pleasurable sensation, it was not enough to mitigate a suddenly oppressive solitude. Restlessness, which vented itself in small, intermittent and unoccasioned sighs, came between her and peace, and, strangely, for there were no censorious eyes about her, she was troubled by the thought of her appearance. She had been less fastidious of late than was her wont, and was weary of this dress which she had worn for three – or was it four? – days now. In a previous life such negligence would have been unthinkable. And there was a waxiness to her complexion which her fingertips detected, even if she had given the mirror no more than a passing critical glance. She was becoming dull. Even her powers of speech might have rusted from long silence.
What, she wondered, did this long work profit her if at the end of it she was no more than a shadow of her former self? After the final sentence was written and the last page blotted, she could conceive only of a great emptiness in which she would be for ever at a loss for things to do. Time itself must prove a tiresome condition. She would fret among its opportunities like a returned traveller in the certainty that nothing in the familiar scheme of things could equal the intensities she had experienced here. For a man such as her father the satisfactions of the inward realm might be enough, but for a woman – at least, for one such as she knew herself to be – true vitality resided in confluence with energies outside herself, and she would no longer be able to content herself with the old, almost juvenile connections. The revelation of her powers had brought with it the desire that those appetites be met and matched by the equivalent enthusiasms of a kindred spirit, and completion – it seemed to her now – was not merely a matter of singularity: it must inhere between.
Yet such reflections returned her, as did so much else, into the insubstantial theatre of dream, which was the only world in which those yearnings could be explored and given form, and the price of that, on return to circumambient reality, was this vexatious restlessness. And, deeper – she must learn to reconcile herself to this – a sadness which was finally unrequitable.
For some time Louisa stood at the jetty, gazing out across the water but not towards the Hall. Her eyes were fixed in a more northerly direction, west of the Mount, to the tree-line which concealed the village of Munding. The breeze tugged at the skirts of her dress and disarrayed her hair. It seemed to carry on its breath no answer. She shook her head, then turned, her attention caught by the wings of a heron flagging slowly across the lake towards the distant heronry. She was so rapt at the sight that only after it was gone did she become aware that she too was observed. She turned, alert, then smiled to see Tilly standing arms akimbo on the lawn outside the Lodge.
“So this is how they deal with pressin’ business this side the lake?”
“Tilly, dearest. You have found me longing for company.”
“I thought that were time you had some fresh greens here… and a delicacy or two. And I did fancy a walk, though I had forgot how far a turn it is round the lake.”
“Then you must put up your feet and I shall serve you tea, and we shall talk and talk before I row you back the easy way.”
“Don’t hold with boats,” said Tilly dubiously. “What with the drownin’ in the Bure ’n’ all.”
“I promise I shan’t let you drown. Not at least till I have all your news.”
Relieved that Louisa no longer looked quite so fraught and bleached as she had expected to find her, Mrs Tillotson smiled. Gossip was indeed on her mind – she had missed her occasional hour of mardle with the mistress – and as she sat down in the Lodge, tutting silently at its spartan comforts, she was pleased enough to embark on a long excursion into parish tattle. There was Will Yaxley’s death to shake one’s head over… and who was to keep a proper watch on that young scamp Sam now that Will was gone? Though he’d been an evil-tempered sot, the man had always kept a weather eye out for the boy. Then there was the brawl in Shippenhall Crown last Friday night, with two men bleeding and the constable called out, and one of the injured Sarah Pye’s young man. He were a wild’n that Jim Haycock – Tilly had grown tired of telling Sarah so, but would the innocent mawther listen? She would not. One might as well talk to the wall. Also Louisa would be relieved to hear that the boy Wharton was now making fish eyes at Fanny Hethersett, the solicitor’s daughter in Saxburgh, who was turning out a fine young madam with nothing more certain on her mind than the making of a handsome match.
Tilly saved for the last her prize piece of intelligence – after all, she was not a one to spread mere gossip, though what else could one do with it? Nevertheless she had heard – though she couldn’t for gospel-sure swear on it, because who knew what Mrs Bostock wouldn’t say? – but her maid had heard Mrs B. tell Liza Waters that all was far from well at Munding Rectory.
It took a little time to establish the credentials of this information (it had come from the vegetable-hawker who was sweet on the housemaid at the Rectory) before Tilly came to the point. “Now I don’t say as it is so, but the talk is of Mrs Frere packin’ her bags and makin’ off her way for Cambridge. And that poor Mr Frere – why, such a gentle soul, wouldn’t you think? – but there have been raised voices thereabouts and the parson driven to bad language by the woman’s mobbin’ him so.”
Louisa returned her eyes to the kettle where it hissed on the hob. “I fear she has never settled here in Munding. After her misfortune…”
“Which she have made a stick to beat the parson’s back with, if I may make so bold. To my way of thinkin’ there’s a hard woman lie behind that fussin’ ’n’ faintin’. If she be high-tailin’ it for Cambridge then it’s ’cos she wills it so.”
Louisa strove to inject into her tone no more than the appropriate concern. “And Mr Frere? How is he coping with this distress?”
A little surprised not to have been berated for dealing in rumour, Tilly shook her head and clucked her tongue. “Not half the man he were before that black day on the lake. He walk about like a soul stark-dazed. That’s not a happy business, you can be sure. I’m told there’s two beds slept in there at nights. And now there’s a hard Lent lie afore that man.”
Louisa poured more tea. The cup chattered a little to the saucer as she handed it to Tilly. “Has no one befriended him?”
“Why now, no one like to interfere. That’s hardly anybody’s place to come between a parson and his wife.”
Louisa was obliged to agree, and then fell silent. For the moment Tilly herself had nothing more to say, and both women might have been meditating on the woe that is in marriage, but one of them was not. Eventually Louisa looked up and stilled her breath. “And is it certain that Mrs Frere will leave?”
“All I know for sure,” Tilly answered, “is that there’s letters come and gone ’twixt Munding and Cambridge, and that there’s talk of it. As to the rest, the good Lord only know.”
That last remark of Tilly’s was not quite accurate. Even as she made it, Mary, the parlour maid at the Rectory, had her ear pressed to the panelled door of the drawing room where Frere and his wife were coldly agreeing that things could not continue so.
“I think it best,” Frere said, “that you take advantage of Hattie’s invitation now. You seem to be quite strong enough for the journey.”
“Is that what you wish?” his wife replied.
Frere paused before answering. Steady as his voice had been, he could scarcely believe that he was saying this. He knew that more than a temporary remission was imminent in his wife’s departure. Who could say now where this would end? They had hurt one another badly, and forgiveness was no longer a simple gesture. Everything remained too hot and murky for that, and if it might cool with this separation, it might also freeze over.
There was a sense in which Frere was already alone, and in bidding his wife leave for a time he was merely actualizing that solitude. Yet, frankly, the prospect unnerved him. Since his desperate return from India, he and Emilia had rarely been apart. She had been the agent of his recovery, the guarantor of his continued well-being. Alone again, in this great Rectory which now housed such unhappy memories, who knew what shadows might return? Yet life was presently impossible. There appeared to be no choice between a sham solitude and the real.
“It is plainly what you desire,” he said. “I shall not stand in your way.”
“You will not accompany me?”
To what end? Why must she complicate things so?
Such was his impatient thought. He said: “We must pray that a time away from here will alter your present perspective on our life together, and allow you to return in a more affirmative spirit.”
“Then I am dismissed?”
“Dear God, Emilia, I would not have chosen this.”
“But you do. By placing your parish over me you have always done so. It seems I have no choice other than to comply.”
“I cannot believe,” Frere exclaimed, “that there can be any prolonged and deep-seated conflict between love and Christian duty. I pray that in your absence you will come to agree.”
Emilia Frere, tight-lipped, conceded nothing.
“You will return for Easter, I presume?” he said.
“If you wish it. If you find my presence tolerable by then.”
“Emilia, is not this hard enough that you must injure me so?”
“Is that what you will tell the parish – that I have injured you? I see I shall have a cold reception on my return.”
“The parish shall know nothing other than that you are on an extended visit with your family.”
“Do you imagine that your hang-dog look does not already speak volumes more?”
“You have not been alone in suffering.”
Emilia sighed – perhaps in impatience, perhaps in belated recognition that all this profited nothing. “Well I, at least,” she said, “have some consideration for others than myself. How will you manage in my absence? I know you are less firm of purpose than you would have me believe. You made a poor showing the last time you were alone.”
What had he done that she should come to despise him so completely? He looked away, trembling. “I shall have a care for myself.”
“You will need help.”
“I have my work.”
“You had your work before. It was not enough.”
Was this, he wondered, some further cunning effort to unman him? Dear God, how well this woman knew his weaknesses, how completely he was delivered up into her hands! Had she preserved him from those demons only now to loose them back on him?
She saw her advantage in his frailty, and could afford now to soften her tones. “You will accept a word of counsel?” she enquired.
Dumbly he waited.
“The good Lord knows there are few enough compassionate hearts in this parish,” she said. “However, should you have need for comfort – and I greatly fear you will – it has been my experience that Miss Agnew is not without charity. If you are in difficulties, you must approach her.”
“I would not seek to…”
“You must promise me that, or I swear I could not in good conscience leave at all.”
Frere weighed his present choices with a heavy heart. “I shall remember,” he murmured, “…should occasion arise.”
Emilia sighed once more. For a moment Frere might almost have believed that some hidden consummation was achieved, though he himself experienced no more than a vast emptiness.
Behind the door, in the hallway, the parlour maid heard the movement of a chair and quickly slipped away.