Part Two
James Miranda Barry was ten years old when he signed the Matriculation Roll of Edinburgh University in December 1809. He paid two shillings and sixpence for his university library ticket out of his own pocket, spoke to no one, turned up the collar of his greatcoat, which almost reached his ankles, and walked out into an icy wall of rain, becoming sleet. He was small, pale, red-haired and very quick to lose his temper. He lived at 6, Lothian Street with his mother, an elegant lady with a fine profile and impractical ideas, and her companion, a sinister woman called Louisa Erskine, who was known as The Black Widow in the butcher’s shop. They lived in absolute seclusion. Their landlady reported that the widow and the mother sometimes spent their evenings shouting at each other, that the mother wrote and received several letters every day, and that the boy was a studious little chap, who said nothing and read a lot of books.
This was the general opinion of the household at 6, Lothian Street. The neighbourhood awaited further information.
* * *
2nd January 1810
To General Francisco de Miranda
My Dear Sir,
In a letter I had the honour of receiving from my inestimable friend and patron Lord Buchan he says that in consequence of your kind enquiries about my health and pursuits he did not conceal his pleasure that I had applied myself so assiduously to all the subjects in which I am required to acquit myself to the best of my ability. Under your personal tutelage, for the which I am most grateful and bounden to you, always, Sir, I first made acquaintance with chemistry, botany, anatomy, Greek, natural and moral philosophy, to the which I must now add medical jurisprudence and two optional subjects upon which I have already embarked, that is, midwifery and dissection. Dr Fryer, who is to supervise the payment of my allowance, assures me that you are known to him by reputation and that he had been introduced to you, my dear General, upon your arrival in this country. I could not help telling Dr Fryer what a treasure you possess in London and how often you permit me to partake of it – needless to say, I mean your very extensive and elegant library. Excuse my troubling you with this letter but I could not deny myself the pleasure of wishing you many happy returns of the New Year in which my mother Mrs Bulkeley and Miss Louisa Erskine join with me. I must beg the favour when you see Dr Fryer to tell him that Lord Buchan desires me to say that we drank his health at his house in George Street this day week. Neither Dr Fryer nor anyone else here knows anything about Mrs Bulkeley’s daughter and so I trust, my dear General, that neither you nor my esteemed uncle will mention in any of your correspondence anything of my cousin’s friendship and care for me.
I remain, Sir, your admiring and obedient servant,
James Miranda Barry
Dissection was carried out on the remains of the unfortunates who had died either in the poor house or on the gallows. James Miranda Barry studied dissection as a private pupil with Dr Fyfe, who still wore a pigtail and was himself a relict of the previous century. He was well known in the town and reputed to encourage his medical students with personal chats and mouthfuls of hard liquor. The aspect of the corpse at the first meeting of the dissection class was so horrible that one of the pupils alongside Barry fainted away. He was a young man called Jobson. Barry caught the boy in his arms to prevent him gashing his forehead open on the edge of a table in the laboratory, then put Jobson’s head firmly between his knees and massaged his temples. The grim chill in the room ensured that Jobson’s unconsciousness would be a temporary affair.
‘Pull him out of the way, Barry,’ snapped Dr Fyfe. ‘It’s always one of the big ones who goes down. Now the muscles of the arm, pitifully shrunken in the case of this subject . . .’
Barry dragged Jobson into a corner. His face was quite white, indeed a little grey around the nose and mouth. Barry was convinced he was going to be sick.
‘Come on, old chap,’ he whispered, ‘you’ll be all right. Try to swallow.’
‘Oh God,’ Jobson gazed blankly up at an equally pale freckled face. ‘It was that white liquid which came out when he made the incision. White blood . . .’
‘It’s not blood,’ said Barry, pedantically.
‘When you’ve finished pretending to be old ladies, gentlemen, you will be good enough to return to the dissecting table. And if you can’t be sensible, don’t chatter.’
‘Ohhhh,’ groaned Jobson, and his head sank down again.
‘Hang on.’ Barry clutched his hair.
They sat silent on the floor, leaning against a rough scarred bench. Barry looked up at the specimens floating in huge glass jars. There was a sequence of foetuses, in different stages of development, high on the top of a locked cupboard. The first was a grotesque monster, an enormous elongated tadpole with tiny clutching limbs; the last looked like a sleeping child, ready to awaken. He could not see the corpse on the table. The other pupils crowded round. Dr Fyfe’s pigtail wobbled aggressively. It was freezing in his dissecting room. Barry felt the draught under the door. The doctor had his shirt sleeves rolled up over his jacket cuffs. He was talking about the muscles in and around the stomach. Barry ached to see what he was doing.
‘Come on. Try to get up. Are you going to be sick?’ Barry’s sympathy was now diluted with impatience. Jobson looked into the grey eyes, pale face and ginger freckles inches from his own. Barry’s hand was ice cold, but firm. They crept round to the side of the table near the feet of the slippery white cadaver. It no longer looked human, but was shrunken and smooth like a withered eel. The shrivelled genitals resembled aged and inedible giblets. Jobson shuddered again at the evil solidity of the corpse, Barry’s frozen hand clasped tightly in his own.
‘You watch now, boy,’ said Dr Fyfe to Jobson, ‘and remember everything you see. When you’re operating, you’ll have to work fast. There’ll probably be some miserable soldier groaning beneath you. And you won’t have much time. How many methods are there of dismembering this fragile and delicate building? And how many more to be invented? Listen. Watch.’
The doctor caressed his knife. In fact, there was a separate course on military surgery, but the internal geography of all men was much the same. Dr Fyfe nodded curtly at Barry, who already promised to be a good student. No nerves at all for a child, well, he looks like a child. But then, most children have no feelings, finer or otherwise. Or don’t appear to do so. What a row of pale, blank faces! Amoral savages, the lot of them.
* * *
Barry’s coat remained much too big for him. He never appeared to grow. His ears vanished below the collar as he pulled himself into the sleeves, then clamped his hat to his red curls and made for the door. Jobson caught up with him on the steps.
‘I say,’ he cried, ‘don’t run away, Barry. I want to thank you.’
‘That’s all right. Excuse me. I must go. My mother waits tea for me.’
‘Can you come out on Sunday?’
‘I don’t think so. I’ve got to study.’
‘Just for an hour after dinner? You’re never at the club. We could go to the river.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, go on. Ask your mother.’
Doubtful, hesitating, Barry suddenly relented.
‘All right. I’ll ask.’
* * *
The lodgings they inhabited gleamed with a hideous gold and green wallpaper, whose stripes were too close together, so that the family appeared to be imprisoned in a radiant cage. The furniture argued with the wallpaper, retaliating with a vulgar abundance of gold braid. Had it not been for the prospect of moving house yet again, Mary Ann declared, she would have cancelled the tenancy, whatever the penalties. Even if it had meant paying one quarter’s rent. But it was not only the ludicrous vulgarity of the wallpaper which depressed her. She hated the climate and built fires fit for Joan of Arc.
Their trunks had preceded them and were evenly distributed throughout the rooms with distressing finality. There was to be no escape. Louisa swept into the oppressive, musty sequence of ugly crowded rooms, each a masterpiece of bad taste, that was to become their home. She looked around cautiously and then pronounced, ‘Well. Hideous. But it will have to do.’
The air in the city was clear, hard, and very cold. Louisa walked out in the early morning. She paced the wide streets, arranged all their regular orders with the butcher and the green-grocers, hired the cook and the housemaid, and came to terms with the domestics after a good deal of hard-headed interrogation. She insisted that they should be able to provide written characters and, whether the prospective domestics could read or not, that they should be possessed of a mimimum of instruction. She attended public lectures, took notes and even asked questions. She went to exhibitions unchaperoned. Mary Ann, who was much more conventional, and cautious of other people’s opinions, accused her of causing a public scandal and attracting attention wherever she went.
Louisa paused, her scorn surfacing. ‘My dear Mary Ann, I will be forty this year. Women of forty cannot cause public scandals, however hard we try. You attract far more attention by living like a recluse than you would ever attract in the public street. If you will forgive me for saying so.’
Mary Ann turned pale, then red, then screamed. Louisa swung round to leave the room and found the child standing shaking in the doorway.
‘Please don’t quarrel with her,’ said a small firm voice from the bottom of an overlarge collar. Louisa stared for a moment, then laughed.
‘Persuade her to go out, James. You have more influence than I do. She’ll break her own spirit pacing the cage.’
Barry took his mother’s hand with great courtesy, but familiarity, as if she were an affronted courtesan who had been offered too little money. Then he made his request like a gentleman.
‘Will you do me the honour of accompanying me to the river walks this Sunday afternoon to meet my fellow student and recent acquaintance Mr Robert Jobson?’
‘Darling, you mustn’t take such risks.’
‘But it looks odder if we don’t see anybody. Louisa’s right. We’ve got to give the impression that we have an exclusive circle of friends. If you just avoid people, they’ll think we’re peculiar. Or hiding something.’
Mary Ann shrugged, all her frustration, boredom and misery expressed in the line of her shoulders and the dull sheen of her curls.
‘I’ll book a box at the theatre,’ Louisa said suddenly, stepping up to Mary Ann and kissing her before she could resist, ‘and you must get dressed and come with us, my dear. I’m sorry I was sharp with you. Look at that wallpaper. If you stay here, cooped up with that pattern for one evening more, the green and gold stripes will kill you.’
* * *
James Miranda Barry stood behind his mother’s chair, stiff and polished like a toy soldier just lifted from the box. He looked down at the gold chain around her neck, which Francisco had given her, and felt its duplicate hidden far beneath his ruffles and studs, against his own skin. She was still wonderfully beautiful. Other people were looking at them. The theatre was hot. Mary Ann and Louisa fanned themselves complacently, enjoying the undisguised interest and rustle of attention. In the first interval a messenger appeared with a card on a salver and bowed to Mary Ann.
‘Dr Robert Anderson presents his respects to you, ma’am, Miss Erskine and Mr Barry, and begs permission to wait upon you in your box.’
Louisa raised her eyebrows. Anderson was a well-known literary figure in the city. She had attended his lectures on Scottish literature and philosophy. He was an editor with considerable influence. He was a man other men sought to know. They were less anxious for him to be introduced to their wives and daughters.
The play included a terrifying mad scene and a tempest on cymbals and wind machine. During the deafening horrors of the storm, in which the heroine swayed upon the battlements, Louisa and Mary Ann had a swift, almost inaudible conversation.
‘No, I don’t know him, but Francisco does . . .’
‘Yes . . . I’m sure it’s all right . . .’
‘I think David must have had a hand in this . . . he’d not want the plan to fail . . .’
‘The child will say as little as possible . . .’
‘He’s the one with the very distinguished whiskers . . . the girl on the left is his eldest daughter . . .’
‘Oh heavens, he’s coming over . . .’
The rest was drowned by theatrical screaming.
Barry had ordered iced drinks for his mother and Miss Erskine. While the juggling interlude was proceeding on stage, Barry paid for the drinks. All his formulas were perfectly correct, but his voice was stilted and nervous. As he negotiated the process of command, the barrage of distinguished whiskers loomed over him.
‘Good evening, young man. I’m a good friend of Lord Buchan, and delighted to meet you.’
A giant clasp engulfed him. Barry’s manner often appeared to be disconcertingly rude. He rapped out his comments brusquely, to disguise his fear.
‘And a good evening to you, sir.’
Robert Anderson had been ready with his bluff, affable patronage and found himself confronted with a gleaming stare, as if he had just encountered a magic toad, awaiting the kiss. He peered down at the tiny, immaculate character, who stared back. The silent pause was just slightly too long to be polite. Finally, puzzled, and not a little curious, Dr Robert Anderson introduced his daughter.
‘Isabelle, this is Lord Buchan’s ward, James Barry, who is studying medicine with Dr Fyfe. Barry, this is my eldest daughter, Miss Isabelle Anderson.’
Barry bowed and kissed the girl’s hand with a swish as if he were an Austrian archduke. She bowed too, utterly serious, towering above him. Then she giggled.
The meeting in the box passed off extremely well, and a good part of the theatre enjoyed the incident, rarely in mid-season having new faces about which to gossip. Barry was pronounced quite a little gentleman and Dr Robert Anderson inspected Mary Ann’s very charming naked shoulders with undisguised admiration. Well, one way and another this was all very interesting. Lord Buchan’s ward. If a wealthy aristocrat with no children takes a growing child under his wing, that usually indicates a near relationship that cannot be openly acknowledged. But David Erskine is nearer fifty than forty and this ravishing girl with the creamy shoulders would have been no more than a child herself – unless, no, this is her child all right, the auburn colouring and the grey eyes are a perfect match. And Louisa is an ageless old lizard. I saw her at the back of the hall when I was giving those lectures. The audience always think you don’t notice them, but you do. There she was, always in the same place, sitting as still and watchful as a snake by the rabbit’s hole. I wonder why she never married. Ah, Mrs Bulkeley, may I have the pleasure . . .
Dr Anderson insisted that his carriage would be at their disposal when the performance was over. Mrs Bulkeley, Miss Erskine and Mr Barry accepted graciously. An invitation to dinner was already prowling in the wings when the orchestra struck up. There was a good deal of bowing and withdrawing. Mary Ann and Louisa had enough material for an hour’s whispering.
The last act began.
Our heroine was dying amidst Gothic ruins. She was beyond medical help. Her mind was shattered forever. She saw spectres of the loved and lost flit amongst the ruins. Her bandit lover, in peril of his life, muffled in dozens of cloaks, appeared on every part of the stage, broken by a gigantic grief. He was recognised by the ancient nurse, who must have been clairvoyant, as he was now ‘horribly altered’ by duelling scars and a wild forest of beard and moustachios. He admitted all his crimes, a catalogue of horrors.
‘Yes, I have sinned greatly! But I have also loved with the force of tempests and volcanos! My passions have outrivalled Nature! In a world of little men, I alone have withstood the blast. On rocky crags, in stealth by night, I have performed the justice of the avenger . . .’
Barry was entranced.
‘That’s all translated from the German,’ whispered Louisa.
‘Justice?’ The nurse wrung her hands. ‘How dare you speak of justice? You who have tormented peaceful sleep and flung your gauntlet in the face of God! Behold, my mistress, her mind adrift in the storm of her love for you! Thou wretch! Unworthy scoundrel! Thy fate awaits thee! Bend your proud heart before your judge – your God!’
‘God’s justice was not mine,’ snarled the desperado, and the audience gave a delighted gasp.
Little torches fluttered in the wind machine. There was a bell clanging offstage. Our heroine’s family arrived, swords drawn. The brigand took her in his arms. She appeared to awaken from a stupor. She knew him. She flung her arms around his neck. In her first moment of lucidity since the second act, she cried out in thrilling tones, ‘Rodolpho! At last. I am in heaven. For neither man nor God will part us more.’
Terrible pause. She launched into the ‘Daisy Song’, which they had sung together as infants, and which had been her chorus in her madness. The relatives closed in, forming a wonderful tableau, lit by glittering torches.
‘Rodolpho, my dearest . . .’ The song ended in a gasp, a convulsion and a wonderful dying exhalation, which thrilled every spine in the house. Rodolpho let out a terrific groan and then arranged her corpse in an artistic pose upon the boards. The doomed hero froze for a moment, his weapon lifted, so that during the thunderclap the public got the full benefit of the scene in all its pathos.
‘Nevermore!’ he shouted. ‘We shall part no more, beloved! I am thine forever!’
He cast his sword aside, whipped out a dagger, plunged the instrument into the midst of the cloaks and buckled with a mighty cry. The circle of torches closed around him and the curtain whirled across the stage.
The audience roared their approval. Yes, indeed, the last act, with all its horrid stage effects, was a work of power and magnificence.
‘I think that the song was rather better done in the London performance by Mrs Siddons,’ Louisa hissed above the applause.
Barry realised that he had bitten his tongue during Rodolpho’s suicide and that his mouth was full of blood.
* * *
The Anderson barouche arrived on Sunday at two, driven by a professional coachman with a postilion seated on the rumble. Mary Ann gasped with pleasure when she saw it waiting at the hall door. Their landlady became a flutter of politeness as they descended in their fine dresses with impeccable hems, pelisses, bonnets, top coats and fur muffs. It was windy, but not yet cold. Mary Ann was taking no risks. She kissed Barry’s nose, which was all that was visible, as she throttled him with a gigantic scarf.
‘Keep very close with your new friend Jobson, darling,’ she advised. ‘Thank Heavens Lord Buchan has sent us a protector.’
This was the plan. Barry was to be delivered to the park, where he would promenade for an hour with his peers, then make his own way to the doctor’s house in George Street. The child had learned the geography of the city very rapidly and insisted on his independence. But he never ventured into the rougher parts of town. For Barry attracted attention wherever he went: his coat was too huge, and his figure too small. He looked like a very well-dressed dwarf that had escaped, in full costume, either from the stage or from the circus. Sometimes children ran after him in the street, shouting and throwing pebbles. Mary Ann despaired of rendering him inconspicuous. And Barry’s surprisingly volatile temperament did not help. He picked fights with impunity whenever he suspected that people were jeering at him. He was ferocious in his solitude.
The barouche paused at the park gates and Barry climbed down.
‘Take care, my love,’ Mary Ann cried after him as he vanished among the barren walks, untouched by spring.
Jobson was waiting on the bridge, whittling sticks with his knife. They shook hands solemnly, like tiny ancient generals who have agreed on a truce.
‘Got a knife?’ inquired Jobson as they hunted for suitable pieces of wood on the muddy banks along the river, slipping on the dead leaves. Barry produced an assassin’s implement with a double blade.
‘That’s a splendid murder weapon.’ Jobson admired the knife. ‘Who gave you that?’
‘A South American revolutionary general,’ said Barry, who always spoke the truth if he was asked a direct question.
‘Go on with you,’ chuckled Jobson.
‘I’ll probably be going out to join him in Venezuela when I’ve finished my studies,’ Barry insisted. ‘He’s there now. He’s not coming back till the end of the year.’
‘I’d like to travel too,’ said Jobson, ‘but we’ve both decided on the army, haven’t we? We should sign up for the same regiment.’
Barry hesitated. Then agreed.
‘Look at this one,’ cried Jobson. He held up a bit of wood that boasted a keel. ‘It’s a schooner already.’
The winter afternoon gleamed silver. The river was a thick, cold rush of lead. The tree trunks shone brown and damp in the fading light. Barry slithered down to the edge, his boots sinking into the mud. Jobson, watching from the bridge, gave the signal and Barry launched their frail, fresh-created arks into the flood. Then he scrambled up the bank and raced through the trees towards the bridge. Jobson was scanning the waters, his hands turning his eyes into two small telescopes.
‘There they are! Look, Barry, look!’
Two small, shaped sticks jabbed and curled in the eddies. Barry’s face glowed a little from running. His coat now bore a dark rim of mud. Jobson looked down at the boy’s tiny blue knuckles clutching the iron railings and suddenly noticed the size of Barry’s hands. Dr Fyfe had stressed the advantages of a small, delicate hand for their bloody profession. The grey wind caught the sticks, pushing them out into midstream. The light flickered over the river as Barry’s stick lunged forwards, blocking the other’s path.
‘You’re winning,’ cried Jobson, generous in his enthusiasm.
Barry peered down into the cold grey waters, feeling the wind on his neck, the damp in his boots.
‘But yours hasn’t got stuck. It’ll get to the bridge in the end.’
They paced the empty gravel walks. The greenhouses were locked. The marsh-plant garden which was, in fact, a university botanical experiment, had been subdued to a barren flat patch of mud with small yellow signs bearing Latin names. Nothing broke the surface of the dark, tilled earth. Nothing sprouted alongside the evergreens. The two boys hunted assiduously for signs of life, getting colder and colder as the afternoon closed in. Dusk gathered around them, slate grey at a quarter past three. The city sounds ebbed. A solitary bird shrieked against the approaching dark. They stood, flinging pebbles into the pond, watching for ice at the edges as the temperature dropped, but the circles of cold still formed their eternal rings, pushed outwards, and vanished.
‘I’ve got to go.’ Barry was sinking into the sadness of winter afternoons.
‘Pity.’
They walked towards the gates.
‘Would you like me to teach you how to box?’ asked Jobson, as they stared at each other before parting.
Barry was so small; for his own safety he should learn how to fight. For a second the grey eyes gave nothing away. If Jobson expected enthusiasm from this child he had learned to admire, he never got it. Barry weighed every proposition with sinister cautiousness. Then the boy spoke, peculiar, quaint and courteous.
‘Yes, thank you, Jobson. I should like that very much.’
He offered Jobson a frozen hand.
‘Done.’ Jobson shook hands heartily. Then Barry was gone, invisible almost at once in the grey sinking light.
* * *
James Miranda Barry made a note of what he had done that day.
Rose at 7 a.m.
Read a treatise on the liver until 9 a.m.
Breakfasted with Mary Ann and Louisa. Quarrelled with Mary Ann about her remaining in Edinburgh.
Attended lectures and transcribed notes.
12–1 p.m. Walked the wards at the lying-in hospital with Dr Fyfe.
1–3 p.m. Dissection in the anatomical department. Did Jobson’s share for him too. Jobson contrives to mislay one of the feet. It is discovered in a bucket.
3–5 p.m. Dined with Jobson at his lodgings.
6–7 p.m. Attended Dr Fyfe’s midwifery lecture. Attended anatomical demonstrations.
9 p.m. Supper with Louisa and Mary Ann. Made it up with her. It is decided that she should speak to Dr Anderson and see what can be arranged.
Worked till midnight.
* * *
Mary Ann did a sum. She added up how much it was costing to keep Barry in surgeon’s fees, lecture courses and medical instruments. The boys had to register as surgical pupils and pay separate lecture fees for every course they attended. Barry had spent eight guineas on books in one month.
‘Look at this, Louisa,’ she cried, waving the figures in the air, as if the bailiffs had already been summoned.
‘Hmmmm.’ Louisa checked all the figures reflectively. ‘Thank God we’re not paying. Write it out neatly and send it all off to David. The child really is doing extraordinarily well. Something of a relief, isn’t it? Otherwise David would begin to think that this was becoming an expensive joke. Do it tomorrow. Put out the lamp, Mary Ann. Come to bed.’
* * *
There was no effective heating system at the lying-in hospital. A large fire with a cauldron suspended above the flames was perpetually bubbling in one corner of the ward. But it made no difference. The air remained chilly and menacing. Everything was ruthlessly clean. The corridors were vaults of polished cold. Barry’s knuckles emerged blue from his cuffs, his hands clenched tight as he pattered along at Dr Fyfe’s coattails, avoiding the little shower of powder which descended from the bouncing pigtail. The patient was a lady of quality who lay groaning in a little alcove, surrounded by curtains. They could hear her breathing in great hoarse gulps as they approached. The boiling water and lukewarm towels were ready. The nurses hovered. The waters had broken, but the lady had failed to cast her child into the world. The baby was coming, coming. Her breathing accelerated into a yell. Barry clenched his fists even tighter.
‘Well, madam,’ said Dr Fyfe briskly, ‘it looks as though we shall have to give Nature a helping hand.’
Barry observed the patient closely. The most remarkable aspect of her case was that she changed colour completely every ten minutes, from a deathly white as her breathing ebbed, then, as the pain of her contractions increased, she was translated into a deep shade of burgundy red. Dr Fyfe took her pulse. He listened to her heart. Then he made her cough, so that he could listen to her lungs. He felt her brow. She was sweating profusely with wasted effort. Her sweat-stained lace robe was now speckled with wig powder. She smelt like a cowshed. Jobson, clutching Barry’s elbow, murmured that she was a very fine lady, and very rich. Dr Fyfe refused to visit the great houses, no matter how much he was offered. Let them come to me, was his commanding refrain. And come they did. The fine lady began screaming. Dr Fyfe pounced and seized her in a wrestler’s arm-lock.
‘Come along, madam. Get up.’
The students stood aghast. This was unheard of and probably fatal. The nurse in charge of the ward tried to intervene.
‘Doctor! I hardly think . . .’
‘Out of my way, woman. Barry, take her legs.’
Barry seized the fine lady by her ankles and planted them on the floor.
‘Now,’ commanded Dr Fyfe, as if they were confronting the garden broad walk, ‘we shall take a turn about the ward.’
She left off screaming as they began to walk, her nightgown trailing behind her, and began a deep, rhythmic, undulating groan.
‘That’s it. Better at once, eh?’ reassured Dr Fyfe. The procession began to tour the long arched hall.
‘Barry, get a shawl for her shoulders. Jobson, refill the gin jar. Nurse, have the water and the scissors ready. We shall be there in less than twenty minutes.’
He thundered commands and his troops took up their battle stations. The woman faltered.
‘Steady as she goes,’ cried Dr Fyfe. ‘One step at a time.’ She changed colour again as the blood rushed to her face.
‘Yell your head off if it helps,’ Dr Fyfe shouted above her screeching wail of pain.
‘Barry, take her other hand. Mind out, madam, he’s got hands like an Eskimo.’
She gripped Barry’s tiny arctic fingers and screamed. They marched three times round the ward, then –
‘Oh God, it’s coming! It’s coming!’
She doubled up.
‘Don’t hold back, woman. Push, push, push. Blankets, one of you! Quick.’
They swept the woman through the curtains and hurled her onto the bed.
‘Push! Breathe! Scream! Push! Breathe! Scream!’ yelled Dr Fyfe, as if he too were giving birth. ‘That’s it. Breathe. Push. Push. Push. Exhale – push that child out with your breath. That’s right. Knees. Hold her knee up, Barry. Bravo. Give me a son, woman, push –’
The baby’s head was already in the doctor’s hands, and already dusted with powder, like an ancient rite of baptism.
‘Push, woman, push!’
Barry grappled in a medley of flesh, sweat, blood and powder. The event was ferocious, ungainly, undignified and profoundly dramatic. Dr Fyfe’s hands, which had been scrubbed white, immaculate, were now covered in blood that was pouring over his cuffs.
‘Scream! Push! Breathe!’ he yelled. ‘That’s it. That’s it, madam. We’re home. We’re there. We’re home! – Let me introduce you to your first son.’
He was grappling with the fleshy cord. The creature was bloody, reddish-blue, and wizened. It entered the world, screaming. The sexual organs appeared to be enlarged, unnatural. Yet the woman’s face was extraordinary. The afterbirth shot out, like a ghostly slime. She hardly noticed. There she lay, her genitals mangled, bloody and exposed, her huge breasts ugly and unbound, sweat trickling into her hair. Barry gazed at her face, which was pale, relaxed, ecstatic with relief and joy. Dr Fyfe laid her child upon her breast, wrapped in a warm towel. She kissed the doctor’s bloody fingers and he looked down at her with satisfaction, as if she were the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
‘There you are, my girl,’ he cried, triumphant.
Jobson clutched Barry’s hand and burst into tears.
* * *
Jobson began teaching Barry how to box in a converted shooting gallery, which was as cold as the dissecting room. Mary Ann protested. Barry insisted. Louisa sat with her eyebrows arched and her lips curled.
‘Well, don’t take all your clothes off, child,’ she commented, weary with arguments, as Mary Ann gave in.
Jobson stripped down to a singlet and breeks. Barry wore his shirt under his waistcoat, but undid his collar and studs. Both were small boys, but Jobson was still a good head taller. Barry looked like a well-wrapped mutant. Nobody bothered to watch them. There were other young men who presented a more entertaining spectacle.
The old shooting gallery had a creaking wood floor, solid stone walls in peeling whitewash and lime, and great rooflights, covered in cobwebs. Jobson’s cousin ran the establishment. He was a robust, red-faced man of forty with blackened front teeth, which he attributed to drinking down the granite in his home town of Aberdeen. There was a rudimentary gesture towards washrooms at the back of the gallery, nourished by a sequence of pipes and barrels fed from an iron tank on the roof. The tank froze solid for a week or so every winter. Once the downpipes had split inside the building and flooded the gallery. There were still high-tide marks left along the walls.
The gallery echoed with different sounds. Two other men were boxing in a medley of thumps and grunts. On the far side there was a fencing class. Four young men in a line, white ghosts, their faces masked, formal as nuns, moved forwards in a sequence of lunges, twists and arabesques, pushing against phantom opponents. The fencing master was French. He had a tightly corseted figure and a very fine moustache descending elegantly on either side of his white lips. His face was covered in a strange white powder, like a clown, which made his ears look obtrusively red. He rapped out his commands in French. The young men pranced before him, their weapons shimmering, all at exactly the same angle.
Barry kept his arms firmly across his body, raised, defensive.
‘You musn’t just retreat, man,’ cried Jobson, pounding his ears. ‘Attack! Look, like this. Quick jabs. Left. Left. Are you left-handed?’
He danced backwards. Barry was excellent at dodging quickly. He bounced back and forth, a tiny freak on springs. His rapid breaths showed white in the dusty air. But he never came close enough to place a decent blow on Jobson’s chin or ribs. They took a puff on the bench, steaming like horses. ‘What’s the matter, Barry,’ demanded Jobson, puzzled. ‘You’ve usually got plenty of aggression.’
Barry looked at his strangely magnified, bandaged fists and said nothing. Ever since they had begun their regular tour of the lying-in wards, James Miranda Barry had become increasingly uneasy. The cadavers procured for the medical school by the occasionally glimpsed, much-imagined resurrection men were white, empty and purely horrible. He looked down at their pitiful shrunken nakedness with indifference. Their past lives and lost histories, whether a story of murder or starvation, were not his concern. But when he was faced with a living woman’s bodily abandonment in the unselfconscious and bestial act of giving birth to monsters, Barry recoiled into himself. For this child, courage had become a daily necessity. All his life, he had watched, as if from the inside of a closed jar, the adult world of sensations, passions and desires, unjudging, shut out by his innocence. Now he was shut out forever by the very fact that enabled him to move, to act, to meddle with the privilege to which he had not been born. He watched the women, heavy as animals, bred to give birth, again and again, year after year, until they were either exhausted or dead. They heaved and screamed, terrible in their unloveliness, doing something they needed no training to do. Like day labourers, they flung forth their achievement, red and shrieking or pale, blue and cold into the waiting world. In the public hospital many of them died. Barry had closed the eyes of one poor woman whose unclaimed body was doomed to a mass grave.
At first he had hated them, repulsed by their smell and greasy, stringy hair. He had marvelled at Dr Fyfe’s tenderness and bitter grief when one of his patients, mother or child, fled from him to God. Barry had seen the doctor bowed upon his knees, his face buried in the bloody sheets, praying and weeping like a child. It was another man, surely, who hacked at the cold stomach of a corpse on the dissecting table, demanding of the pallid Jobson what would be found in his stomach were he to mount the assault there.
Barry feared the living, not the dead.
He was no longer at home in his stunted body. This unease pervaded his gestures, his gait, his habit of taking stock of his surroundings, as if he feared the approach of an assassin. He shrank from Mary Ann’s embraces. He hated to be touched. He wrote long stilted letters every week to General Francisco de Miranda, addressing him formally, as if they had never met, and detailing his activities with copybook precision. These were his military reports from the front on which the overall strategy depended. From Louisa he kept his distance, and he referred to her as ‘Miss Erskine’, or ‘my mother’s companion’. He mentioned no other relationship. The students jeered at him occasionally, then begged him to help them with their notes or drawings. He was guarded in his façade of perfect impersonal manners. He never drank in public. He confided in no one.
James Miranda Barry had cold hands and cold eyes. Only Jobson dared to take his arm or thump him on the back.
Barry now realised that the physical intimacy of boxing was beyond him. He looked at Jobson ruefully, breaking the long silence.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever be any good at this. Would you teach me to shoot?’
* * *
They walked back to Jobson’s rooms. Barry felt uncomfortable, prickly with sweat turning cold on his back.
‘Have a tot.’ Jobson rummaged with the lamp. His rooms were always warm, filled with reddish glows and a huge fire. He had a landlady who mothered him. Reluctantly, as if he regretted the loss of its protection, Barry dropped his overcoat onto a chair.
‘Not much for me. Here, I’ll pour in the hot water myself.’
They settled on the rug, backs against their chairs, their fingers almost in the flames, muffins balanced on the toasting forks. The two boys were intent as medieval devils in the apocalypse painted on the church mural.
‘Copied your notes? Have some more whisky. That won’t taste of anything.’
Jobson was at ease. He leaned back, his mouth open. Barry noticed a light prickle of hair on his upper lip.
‘I say, Barry, when we’re at the hospital, do you get – you know what I mean – are you ever afraid or excited?’
Jobson wanted to talk about sex.
‘No,’ said Barry. ‘I often feel a little sick.’
‘You’re a cold fish, you know,’ said Jobson, after a minute or two.
‘Am I?’
‘Mmmm. No nerves. And no feelings either.’
Barry suddenly became very alarmed. He straightened his back and said, with devastating formality, ‘There are some subjects, Jobson, which must never be broached between us.’
Oh Lord, thought the other boy. Now I’ve offended him. Then he looked at the pale face, ginger freckles and red curls, and saw all the mortifying seriousness of a child. He was overwhelmed with pity. And took an even greater risk. Drawing both of Barry’s still frosty hands into his own, he spoke with dreadful, embarrassing sincerity.
‘I owe you a lot, Barry. We shall in any case always be friends, won’t we? Whatever happens?’
Barry retrieved his hands from Jobson’s claws as quickly as was decently possible and said, from a now unreachable distance, ‘I hope so, Jobson. That would give me great pleasure.’
That night Barry dreamed that he was lying in bed, with Dr Fyfe bending over him. The good doctor’s wig was askew and the powder was descending in showers. Well, Barry, menaced Dr Fyfe, plucking at the sheets, let’s see what you’ve got to give me.
Barry awoke screaming.
* * *
Jobson began teaching Barry how to shoot. Barry’s cold eye and steady hand proclaimed him a natural marksman. Within a month he was a crack shot with a rifle and had made quite extraordinary progress with a set of duelling pistols.
* * *
Even this far north, the hawthorn was fully draped in bridal blossom when Mary Ann and Louisa left Edinburgh by the eight o’clock coach. It had been arranged that Barry was to lodge with Dr Anderson until the end of his short summer term, after which he was to spend the long holidays on Lord Buchan’s estate. They stood, all three of them, taking a last look around their gaudy rooms. The trunks, books and hatboxes had already been taken down. The rooms were becoming anonymous, girding themselves to threaten the next occupants.
‘Well,’ said Louisa, putting on her gloves, ‘thank God it’s over, and we’ve escaped from that wallpaper alive.’
Mary Ann afflicted Barry with advice and dietary prescriptions. He listened patiently.
‘. . . and keep up your guard with Dr Anderson. He’s a charming man, but so far as I know David Erskine has told him nothing. So it’s best if you keep to yourself. Mind that you do. And be careful in that dreadful shooting gallery. You know, Louisa, if this child doesn’t kill himself, he’ll kill someone else . . .’
The two women climbed into the coach, their faces changing in the flickering sunshine. They paused to peer at the other passengers, who were shrieking their goodbyes with vulgar enthusiasm. There was a sheet of liquid mud across the yard, so Barry stood at a little distance, forlorn upon the stable cobbles, among the sacks of grain and broken-down farming implements. Mary Ann turned to wave.
‘Louisa,’ she hissed, ‘I’m terrified that he’s going to start while I’m away and not there to help or to show him how to organise the cloths. He’ll have to wash them or burn them himself. He’s eleven years old. And he hasn’t started yet.’
‘You’ve surely said all that’s necessary . . .’
They broke off as an old man climbed into the coach, raising his hat to them.
‘Don’t worry, my dear.’ Louisa finished hitching her blanket underneath her toes. ‘I’m sure he’ll be all right.’
‘Did you check our trunk? Is it on board?’ Mary Ann twitched the curtains aside and peered out at Barry’s ludicrous hat and jacket. His shoes were heavy with mud and his trousers were too baggy. They hung in folds about his thin legs. He always looked extraordinary, no matter what garments she proposed. She felt the tears on her cheeks. Suddenly she began wailing uncontrollably.
‘Oh, Louisa, I shouldn’t have done it. He’s alone now. He’ll always be alone. I’ve done that to him. And now I’m leaving him too. I’m abandoning my only child . . .’
‘Nonsense,’ snapped Louisa, panicking. Mary Ann never cried. ‘Pull yourself together. Some of us manage perfectly well on our own.’
‘Take my handkerchief, madam.’ The old gentleman proffered an enormous square of green silk. Barry, now perched on a grain sack, drumming his heels, had been mesmerised by the raucous drama of departure. He looked up, saw his mother crying and went red to the tips of his ears. As the coach clattered out of the yard he was too ashamed and embarrassed even to wave. Mary Ann lost her child in that moment as she vanished into a sentimental fountain of silk and tears. Louisa’s yellowing face, shut like an ageing book, was the last thing he saw. But he had the distinct impression that, for the second time, knowing and complicit, she had held his glance and winked.
And so it was that James Miranda Barry, aged eleven years and two months, found himself alone, for the first time in his life, with no adults directly responsible for him. He looked up at the city, dark upon its assembled hills, and sniffed the chilly spring air in the crowded courtyard. The wind smelled of horse shit and molasses. He was free. He unbuttoned his coat and took a deep breath. Then he marched off in the direction of the hospital. There was nothing in the boy’s face or step to indicate that he was not perfectly sure of himself.
* * *
Barry’s silences at dinner were terrifying. Mrs Anderson went in for elegant conversation on intellectual subjects and daring floral arrangements. Her husband informed her that their young house guest was really quite a genius and under the very special protection of Lord Buchan himself. Mrs Anderson found it hard to believe in Barry’s genius. So far as she could see, he had no conversation. She was not in the least interested in the subject of his thesis, written in Latin, on the hernia of the groin. He had already begun this work, and, if pressed, explained. Mrs Anderson was very interested in Lord Buchan’s domestic situation and household management.
‘It must be charming – their country home, I mean, for we have often visited them in London. A little grand, perhaps? Do tell me, Mr Barry . . .’
Barry explained that the front hall always stank of the farmyard, and that hens sometimes covered their eggs in the coat cupboard. Geese were allowed on the front drive and so were the guinea fowl. He remembered that Lady Elizabeth liked pots and was often to be found upon her knees among the geraniums. Lord Buchan knew everybody, and didn’t care who sat round his table as long as they were energetic and interesting. He often played billiards with the local doctor. Barry couldn’t comment on the drawing-room chatter because he spent most of his time among the servants. Dr Anderson chuckled at his wife’s disappointments and suspected Barry of being a wicked little devil under his carapace of total seriousness. His daughters, set on by Anderson, urged Barry to describe his thesis, De Merocele, until even the doctor began to wonder whether the conversational turn was quite suitable. Anderson regarded Barry as a curiosity, living proof, if any were needed, that the old radical aristocrat, David Steuart Erskine, was capable of bizarre aberrations. When the ladies withdrew Dr Anderson found himself staring at a white-faced child, who neither drank nor smoked.
‘Barry,’ he said, getting a grip upon the situation, ‘I find myself in something of a parental position with regard to you.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So you won’t take it amiss if I offer you a little advice?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It wouldn’t do you any harm to try a little port and a very small cigar.’
‘If you wish, sir.’
‘It’s not as I wish, my lad. It’s the done thing.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Barry drank the undiluted port as if it were poisoned, and choked over his cigar in a professional way.
‘Keep it level, lad,’ advised Dr Anderson, ‘that’s the trick.’
They got through the ordeal, painful to both, in silence, apart from the doctor’s occasional peremptory suggestions. He assured Barry that they would try again on the following evening. After twenty minutes, they joined the ladies. Miss Isabelle Anderson played a little upon the spinet and Barry turned her music for her, standing bolt upright. But his conversation was a disaster. A polite enquiry concerning his medical studies from an unfortunate visitor drew forth a description of his new course on military surgery, giving more detailed information about gangrene and amputations than the company could possibly have wished to know.
* * *
Barry went back to the house in the country at the end of May, a month or so following his mother’s departure. As the coach jolted south the seasons appeared to advance. The chestnuts swayed darker in the hedgerows. A field stretching back from the gate basked in cowslips. The grass loomed waist-high by the river bottoms.
Barry’s cheek bore a purple mark where he had leaned against the worn leather seat and been jolted back and forth while he slept. The landscape rose, sank and swayed as the coach clattered on, like an unstable ship caught in a big wind, and the child, battered with exhaustion, half dreamed the thick hedges, the brambles massed with white flowers and the great trees, their candles glowing, now white, now rose-pink, in the hesitating sunlight and the rushing shadows. As the shade hardened and deepened, they arrived at The Green Man, crouched in caked mud at the northern end of the village. Barry’s trunk was unloaded and he sat solemnly upon it by the back door of the inn, waiting for the trap that would take him the last five miles to the house.
He remembered some of the faces he had seen over a year ago. But no one recognised him.
‘Would you like to sit inside, sir?’ suggested the ostler, who was impressed by Lord Buchan’s arms painted on the trunk. Barry stepped into the half-dark of the pub’s small dining room, laid himself out upon the cushions and fell instantly asleep.
Someone was shaking him.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the housemaid in his ear, ‘but there’s a young lady outside. And she says she’s a friend of yours.’
Barry sat up, rubbing his eyes. But she hadn’t waited for a reply. She was already beside him, her black curls swinging with enthusiasm. Her kiss had the force of a slap, her earring was cold against his cheek. It was Alice Jones.
‘I couldn’t wait. I’ve just run all the way from the other side of the tollhouse. In bare feet too. I cut my left toe. But I just had to be the first to see you.’
Her dirty left foot landed on the seat beside him. It was indeed bleeding.
‘Can you quench the flow?’ she demanded.
‘You must have got that expression out of one of the books.’ Barry smiled shyly, producing his handkerchief.
‘One of the ones you sent? I’ve read them all. The rector lets me have a go at his library now. But I’m only allowed to borrow one book at a time.’
Barry called for clean water and washed her grimy foot. Her toe now looked like a decorated parcel. Alice gazed at him, delighted.
‘But it’s wonderful. Wonderful,’ she giggled. ‘You’re perfect. No one’d ever guess.’
She leaned over and kissed him again.
‘We’ll go out courting. You’re smaller than me, but I can pretend you’re Napoleon.’
Barry reddened slightly. She noticed at once.
‘But I think of you as James. My special friend. I always did. So it doesn’t matter what size you are. I’ll always love you. Did you miss me? And are you pleased to see me?’
‘Yes. Very,’ said Barry, rigid with embarrassment. She took his hands in hers, insisting on their renewed complicity.
‘Is it really true that you’ve chopped up corpses? What do men’s broomsticks look like when they’re dead? Do they just shrivel right up? Old Mr Ellis died. I could’ve looked when my mother took me round because they were busy washing the body and he shat himself when he died, just at the very moment, so that the blankets had to be burned. My mum had to see to that. But I didn’t dare. Oh, you must tell me everything.’
‘I can’t believe that you didn’t dare.’ Barry was amused.
‘The trap’ll be here in a moment. Let’s go and wait in the yard.’ And she dragged him to his feet.
In the late-afternoon sun he screwed up his eyes and, over-coming his shyness, looked at her carefully. Tall as wild nettles, sunburnt, black-haired, her waist and hips slender and supple, her gold earring glimmering against the black. She wore an old faded blue skirt, a baggy white shirt, several sizes too large for her, with fine smocking and a torn sleeve. She was four years older than he was, so she must be fifteen.
Barry was amazed at her strength. She took the other end of the trunk and heaved it into the back of the trap with no difficulty whatsoever.
‘We’ve started the hay,’ she smiled. ‘You’ll come with us tomorrow, won’t you?’
And all the way back to the house, accompanied by the last crescendo of birdsong, she talked and talked, his hands firmly clasped between her own. David Erskine was waiting in front of the house, unkempt in his old waistcoat and shirtsleeves, his white hair bare in the fading sun.
‘Well, Barry . . .’ he said, staring.
Barry held out his hand.
‘Good evening, sir. I trust that I find you and Lady Elizabeth in the best of health.’
The old man roared with laughter. As he stood there rocking on his heels, Alice made her escape.
‘Well, Barry.’ He clamped the tiny white hand in his own. ‘Come here, young man. But it’s excellent, excellent. I can’t believe that it’s reading lessons you’ll be giving to that young scullery maid of mine who’s too pretty for her own good. Come in, come in. Elizabeth!’
He yelled for his wife, stumbling into the dark, rustling hallway.
‘Our young man has come home at last.’
* * *
The household took the presence of David Erskine’s young ward for granted. But not without comment. One school of thought concluded that he was probably a changeling. He was somewhat uncanny, and certainly not a normal child. Cook started a rumour that Barry was in fact a hermaphrodite, a story which Alice hotly denied.
‘Well then,’ said Cook, offended, ‘if you’re so sure of yourself, what is he?’
‘Everything a gentleman should be,’ said Alice haughtily.
Cook threw a basin of water at her and Alice abandoned the scullery to the enemy. But Alice was right. Barry took his place among the gentlemen. He drank with moderation, but he could hold his liquor. He smoked a pipe. He went out shooting, and his performance in the woods astounded both David Erskine and the gamekeeper. He always handed one of the ladies in to dinner, and then sat in a ferocious, diminutive silence beside her. No matter how charming the lady, Barry’s morose monosyllables never varied. He might be a perfect gentleman, but he could not learn how to talk nonsense in an amusing way.
‘Medical studies,’ declared Elizabeth, once Barry was safely buried in the library, well out of earshot, ‘have turned him into a German. Ask him a question about goitres or dropsy and he comes out with the textbook.’
‘But he’s very quaint and serious.’ Mrs Emmersley defended the boy, who had sat next to her, transfixed, for several hours. ‘I think he’s adorable. All his buttons always done up tight. His manners are so formal and polite.’
This was the judgement of the vicar’s wife, who was secretly convinced that, if Barry was not actually made of wax, he must be David Erskine’s bastard son, and said as much to anyone who asked.
Barry locked himself in the library and worried away at his thesis. Dedicated and correct, his daily rhythm never altered. His politeness was chilly and invariable. His only friend was Alice Jones.
And this friendship ripened like the pumpkins in the garden. Alice talked, invented, dreamed. And Barry clasped her version of the world to his breast, like a wrecked sailor. He felt that he had been locked up in a box. She made him understand the ways in which he had been set free.
‘First of all, you’ve got to travel. General Miranda’s in Venezuela, isn’t he? I looked it up on the rector’s missionary chart. They don’t have any workers in God’s vineyard there. It’s all gone over to the Catholics. But don’t you see, you’ll be able to go and visit him. It’s ever so easy. Passage on a ship as the ship’s doctor, maybe? No questions asked. Now I’ll be lucky if I ever get to London . . .
‘Your General’s got rich friends. Now that’s what makes it easier for you . . .
‘Well, you can’t do much about what you’re born into. But after that you’ve got to get pushing . . .’
Alice was an advocate of the meritocracy. She was all in favour of Barry’s proposal to join the army. She was jealous of Jobson. She demanded every detail of their lives in Edinburgh. She had views on Dr Fyfe. She derided their appalling wallpaper. She studied his anatomical drawings with ghoulish zeal. Barry was her advance guard into unknown territory. He was gathering intelligence. And she awaited his return like an experienced spymaster. In the afternoons he worked alongside her, hoeing the weeds among the lettuces, slaughtering slugs, searching for eggs in the hay barn, plucking the ducks under the ramshackle lean-to by the farmyard water trough. When Barry sat with the adults, silent and caged, he was dreaming of the mass of chickweed, spearwort and marsh marigolds down by the stream, where he sat in the warm grass, listening to Alice Jones.
* * *
It was another extraordinary summer. All the doors stood open and drops of water formed on the cold damp flags in the dairy. The house breathed out winter damp and the wallpaper in the dining room turned yellow in great patches and began to curl up above the skirting board. Immense redecoration operations were mooted over supper, colours were discussed and patterns sent for. The adults lay upon the terrace, indolent, limp and smiling.
The first crop of hay was rapidly whirled into stacks. The grass was long and green to the base of the stalks. On Great Acre it was left to wilt gently for several days, giving out the thick sweet smell of putrefaction. At first it was decided to cut one field at a time and not risk the weather, but as day after day rose upon thick, wet dew steaming in the still heat, the cows standing in the river and the low buzz of flies haunting the stairways, the bailiff and the farm manager consulted some of the older tenants who knew the weather signs, and then decided to cut all the hay. David Erskine forbade Barry to spend the mornings in the library for an entire week and he was ordered out to work on the land. The master and every able-bodied member of the household mowed in massed lines, moving slowly across the great fields, like the Israelites advancing on Jerusalem. Alice inspected and directed the boy’s every move, bound up his blisters when they paused to drink, lent him her old hat and swore that his backache would ease off. The scythe and the rake were far taller than he was and he felt his muscles stretched in all directions.
Alice strode down the straight swathes towards the trees, her brown toes gathering long stalks between them. She could tell who had cut every row by the style and height of their cut. Alice was a connoisseur. She had been born on the estate. She had grown up on this land. All around her, for field after field, she was able to name her world. Down at the stream, they dabbled their feet in cold, clear water, raced flowers over the eddies, and Alice gathered wild parsley and milkwort to make blue and white garlands, which always dropped to pieces when she arranged them on Barry’s head, crowning him as if he were Caesar celebrating a victory. Sometimes they fell asleep in the grass, waking up chilly and itching, their clothes damp beneath them. It was here that Barry first tried to express his own doubts at what he had become. He no longer confided in his mother, or asked for her opinion. His infrequent letters could have been written by a stranger. He now trusted no one but Alice Jones.
‘It’s odd. I sometimes hear my own voice. Talking at an immense distance. It’s like being two people. One is out there, talking, maybe even arguing with someone else. Like Jobson. We often argue. And the other is crouching underneath, all tensed up, waiting to spring.’
Alice wasn’t listening.
‘So it’s very odd. It’s like being an actor.’
Alice’s egoism triumphed at once. ‘Now that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Act in a real theatre. Not just charades. Dress up like a lady. Be a lady. Or be a soldier. Or a madwoman. Tell me again about the play in Edinburgh. Was Mrs Chiswick as beautiful as I am? Was her dying sigh really so very thrilling?’
‘Well, she looked quite different, with her white robes all torn and her hair down. Her hair wasn’t curly like yours is. It was all red. Deep red and flowing.’
‘Don’t be silly, James. On stage you can have hair any colour you like. She was wearing a wig.’
Alice chewed a long stalk of fresh grass. Barry saw a thin shaft of green sticking to her front tooth.
‘You have to be born into an acting family. The stage and the paint have to be in your blood. How can I acquire the right sort of blood, James?’
She leaned over, peering into his grey eyes. ‘Tell me how?’
‘Alice, I sincerely wish I knew. I don’t think that you can become something you’re not. And now I feel like two people. One of them is true and one is a charade. I don’t know which one is real. And mostly I feel that neither one really exists.’
Barry waved his hands in the air, gave up trying to explain and began chewing his fingernails. Alice did not believe in the truth of the body. The truth, so far as she was concerned, was what you could get away with. She sat up straight, eloquent with revelation.
‘Oh no. Don’t you see? It’s all changed. How can I explain? Look, when we first met I wanted to know what you were, because I couldn’t be certain. But now I am. Now you’re really a man. Soon you’ll be a real doctor. You can be a gentleman. Last year was a game. It isn’t a game anymore. Now it’s the real thing. Games are all finished.’
Barry looked at her hopelessly.
‘You’ve got to change your way of thinking. That’s all. What’d be waiting for you if the General and Mrs Bulkeley had brought you up as a girl? No real studies. Just a little French and piano playing. Maybe botany and flowers. Never any corpses to chop up or babies to haul out into the world or horrible diseases to cure. You’d have to go out in carriages to keep your feet clean, wait around for gentlemen to notice you and end up marrying someone old and rich and boring . . .’
‘Mary Ann made me promise never to marry,’ protested Barry.
Alice continued undaunted with the dire tale of women’s lives.
‘Did she? That’s odd. But if you’d been a woman you’d have done it anyway. And then when you were married you could never go anywhere unchaperoned, because it wouldn’t be respectable. Whereas now . . .’
She gazed up into the huge, flecked green ceiling of sunlight and shadow above them, dreaming of oceans and continents where the people were painted black, or wore nothing but feathers. Or the Arctic waste where ice cliffs, breaking free from the uninhabited mass, plunged into the freezing seas. The world was all before them, beckoning.
‘Louisa goes everywhere unchaperoned. You aren’t trapped. And you’re a girl.’
Barry looked at Alice’s feet. They were never clean, and servants were not called upon either to have morals or to be respectable. They surveyed one another, assessing their different states.
‘That’s true. I’ll get a better situation now that I can read. And you’ll teach me to write more than my own name. But I can’t go where I like. Not yet. Nor do all I want to do.’
Alice pulled Barry’s hat down over his nose, which was peeling, and picked greenfly off his collar.
‘Maybe you’ve got to think a bit like a Freemason. You’re part of a secret society. You’re gathering information. You’re learning all the things that you can use. You’re out for yourself alone . . .’
‘Like you,’ Barry grinned.
‘All servants are spies,’ retorted Alice, ‘That’s normal. You have to know things. Otherwise you wouldn’t get on.’
‘We aren’t children anymore.’ Barry felt the flaming sword of Eden at his back.
‘So much the better.’ Alice never had any regrets. She rolled towards him, her eyes glittering.
‘I’ll teach you women’s secrets. It’s all easy. There’s not much to learn. And you’ll teach me what men know.’
Her excitement was infectious. She gazed at Barry. She expected everything of him.
‘If I was you, nothing’d stop me.’
He believed her. And all around them the buzz and whirr of the insects crackled in the silence. Barry saw the dragonflies flit, dart, hover and vanish on the churning green surface of the stream. Alice’s nose was an inch from his own.
‘Like I said,’ she repeated, ‘nothing.’
* * *
Some way away from the track back to the house, well out of Cook’s yelling distance, lay Alice and Barry, reading in the long grass. They were invisible to passing eyes; even one of the men in the carts returning home would have been unlikely to notice them. They were reading novels. Barry was reading in French, a volume purloined from Louisa’s bedroom, guessing words he didn’t know. Alice was reading an old Jacobin novel, from which the cover and the title page were missing. By now she knew all the words.
‘Listen to this, James. “Madam, I have waited long enough for your reply. I can wait no more . . .” ’
Alice clutched her forehead dramatically.
‘ “Sir, you have had your reply. I am of the same mind that ever I was in the dignity and safety of my father’s house. Did you imagine, that, sequestered here, I would willingly yield to your desires?” ’
‘What’s “sequestered”?’
‘Locked up, idiot. Don’t interrupt.’
Alice stretched out one bare sunburnt arm, pushing her unwelcome suitor away from her. He promptly turned into a rapist.
‘ “Madam! Look not upon me so. I am a man, with all the passions of a man. You will make me desperate.” ’
‘ “Ha! And do you think that if you were to make yourself master of my person you would become the master of my mind? Nay, sir, you are deluded. Mind is the source of liberty, the rose of human freedom. Mind has a ductility like water. It can pass through stone walls, locked doors and prison bars . . .” ’
‘Get on with it, Alice.’
‘But that’s what she says!’ Indignantly. ‘If a man wants you and is determined to have you, just think otherwise and you’ll see it all differently and so will he.’
‘My arse!’
Alice giggled. ‘Shut up. Listen.’
‘ “I speak not of virtue. How should I be ashamed? No violation can ever touch my honour, sir. I can never be conquered by force.” This bit’s really good.’
‘Does he do it?’
‘What?’
‘Rape her! As in The Rape of the Sabine Women.’
‘No. He caves in and rushes back down the stairs. Then he gets sick and she goes and sits by his bedside and educates him in the powers of the mind.’
‘How do you know? You haven’t got that far.’
‘I read the last chapter to see if she dies.’
Insects buzzed indifferently across the text. The children were harassed now and again by a persistent horsefly. Barry lay biting his nails. Alice chuckled peacefully as the heroine persuaded the villain that all attempts at rape would avail him naught. He duly tottered back down the stairs to his decline. Then Barry found a passage that presented an adequate sexual challenge.
‘Alice, listen. Here’s a bit where it all happens. I’ll translate it.
‘ “The Marquis fingered the lock for a moment, then slipped silently into Céline’s darkened bedroom. He could hear the girl breathing gently behind the curtains. There was no sound from the adjoining chamber. He found the bolt” – I think that verrou means bolt – “and pushed it home.” ’
‘Who’s in the adjoining chamber?’
‘Céline’s mother. It all happens in a château. Lots of rich aristocrats at a country houseparty. Before the Revolution happened. They flirt like mad at dinner, then go on walks and boating trips, a bit like they do here, only in more expensive clothes, and then at night no one sleeps. They just creep round the corridors, hiding behind tapestries and trying to get into one another’s bedrooms.’
‘Just like here. Only you can hear all the floorboards creaking and we don’t have any tapestries. Why doesn’t the mother wake up?’
‘I don’t know. Wait a minute. She also admires the Marquis. She’s made that quite clear. So he’s been flirting with the mother in order to pass his time with the daughter. Listen.
‘ “As he parted the lace curtains, a shaft of moonlight fell upon the lovely sleeping form. Her robes were disordered and he discerned the pale curve of her bosom beneath the silk.” ’
‘Oh, yes. That’s good,’ cried Alice.
‘ “As she stirred in her sleep her lips parted and she murmured a name. He pressed closer. Was it his name that she whispered, betraying her dearest desires?” ’
‘Well? Was it?’
‘ “The Marquis, ravished in turn by her innocent abandon, her vulnerable loveliness, paused as he bent towards her soft face. Am not I the first, he thought, to pluck this Lovely Rose. She must be treasured, cherished, savoured . . .” ’
‘You can’t savour roses,’ said Alice.
‘ “His lips softly brushed the maiden’s cheek, then, as he gently plucked the lawn aside and bent to kiss her throat, the nymph stretched out her arms to embrace him. Into her dream he melted, caressing her soft loveliness . . .” ’
‘Sounds wonderful,’ said Alice, stretching out in the aspect of an expectant Psyche.
‘ “The Marquis was in raptures. His lips closed upon the piquant summit of her naked breast, and now his goal, that Heavenly Seat of Pleasure, was even within his grasp. His fingers were entwined within that Soft Foliage that had scarce begun to burgeon, and gently voyaging into the remoter reaches of the Beloved Promised Land, he found that Cave of Sweet Delight. His gentle touch had met with no resistance. He knew himself a welcome traveller, and he did enter there. The maiden yielded up her Rose with passionate abandon. The Marquis was within moments of achieving his desires, when suddenly –” ’
‘I knew it! The mother!’ Alice, mistress of the plot, diviner of events, the sibyl of all narratives, sat up shrieking.
‘You’ve got it, Alice. He bolted the wrong door.’
‘Cheat. You read on ahead too.’
‘I had to. To translate.’
‘Quick. Tell me what happens.’
Barry fluttered the pages, his nose puckered at the pale French print. Alice was sitting astride his thigh, leaning down, peering at yet another language, whose hieroglyphics were still unyielding and opaque.
‘He gets away with it! Look. The girl pretends to wake up and yells when the candlewax falls upon her arm. Ouch, Alice, you’re too heavy. Look here –
‘ “The Marquis, overcome with emotion, drew the outraged lady aside . . . Madame, I dreamed that I held you in my arms. I never doubted that we had an understanding and you, so generous and loving as you are, had consented to put an end to my sufferings and to bring me to those Delights, after which I have so sadly languished. My passion was welcomed! I was greeted with answering tenderness! What sweet scents and moist warmth were here . . .” ’
Alice rode Barry’s thigh like a jockey, urging him on with a makeshift grass whip.
‘Quick, quick. How does it end?’
‘How’d you think? He goes off to bed with the mother.’
‘Better an old hen than no white meat at all.’
Alice fell off into the grass, displaying a mass of grubby white petticoat and bare, brown legs.
‘Kiss me, James. Pretend you’re the Marquis and I’m the delicate maiden.’
Barry thumped his arm down across the girl’s chest.
‘There’s a beetle creeping up your left leg and aiming straight for your bum,’ he whispered, in a voice thick with menace.
* * *
DE MEROCELE
Do not consider my youth,
but consider whether I show a man’s wisdom.
Menander
TO
GENERAL FRANCISCO DE MIRANDA
with the author’s eternal gratitude and admiration,
remembering always the father’s solicitude, interest and care,
with which he has generously supported
every endeavour on the part of the author,
&
to his benevolent and magnanimous patron
DAVID STEUART ERSKINE
EARL OF BUCHAN
in whose debt the author shall always be,
This Thesis
is respectfully dedicated.
JAMES MIRANDA BARRY
Barry showed Alice his thesis, beginning with the dedicatory flourishes, the rest written in Latin, each page full of wonderful italic curves. Alice put on a clean apron and clogs in honour of the occasion. She read the dedication aloud, several times, but refused to touch it because she had been scrubbing potatoes. They stood together, in front of the lectern in the library, hovering on different levels of the steps. Alice was attentive and silent for about half a minute. Then she wrinkled her nose.
‘Hmmmm. Well done, James. I’ll stick to English, I think. I’ve copied out that passage from Gulliver’s Travels which you set me to do. Though I don’t see why I have to learn to spell Houhynhmn. They don’t exist. Why’d you have to write in Latin? Nobody speaks it anymore.’
‘You just do. Everybody does. And you have to defend it in Latin too. But it’s very formal. Like delivering prepared speeches.’
‘I see. It’s tradition.’ Alice was both sceptical and astute. ‘I don’t think much of tradition,’ she added in tones of decisive rejection.
‘You represent the modern spirit,’ said Barry sadly, ‘progress at all costs.’
‘You’ve got to have progress in medicine. So that we die off less.’
Alice wiped her hands on the pockets of her apron. Then she kissed Barry on the cheek. He trembled slightly at her warm touch upon his habitual cold. Outside the shut rooms with their smell of leather, termite powder and ancient dust, the summer sun glittered on thick banks of straw, spiky in the fields. This year’s crop was already home. They were gathering apples in the orchard. Despite the lateness of the season, Alice had a batch of new arrivals.
‘Come and see the chicks.’
Alice’s chickens were part of her economy. She took a percentage on all the eggs and live poultry which she sold in the market. David Erskine was trying to develop cooperative projects with his tenants so that the estate would increase its yield. The theory was simple. Each tenant had the right to a small profit from the increase in the estate’s revenues, if the new crops, one of which was Dutch Brussels sprouts, a new variety of doubtful provenance, proved successful. If the sprouts flourished, Lord Buchan threatened his agent with acres of tulips, purchased from the same dealer. Tulips were fashionable, especially dark ones with dull stripes. The Master truly believed that if the tenants had a vested interest in a successful harvest they would work harder and better. In practice, popular resistance was total and inflexible. The farm workers suspected a trick that would rebound upon them. David Erskine put on a clean waistcoat and made a radical speech from the mounting block in the stableyard and everyone dutifully gathered round to listen. A reference to ‘our courageous brothers in the colonies’ proved to be a mistake. Cook instantly detected revolutionary sentiments, emanating from France, and muttered about the kitchen that the Master was forgetting his place. Others said that it was a plot to keep them away from their own land and make them work harder on his. Alice said that of course the Master would do better than they would. But then, he always did anyway. That was the order of things. She negotiated a separate deal on her chickens with the bailiff. Although disappointed at the negative scepticism of his tenants and domestic staff, who felt excluded from any arrangement that would clearly only benefit the field workers, David Erskine was nevertheless heartily amused at the acumen of Alice Jones. He suspected Barry’s ingenuity behind her. But in that he was wrong. Alice called upon Barry’s skills, to which she had no claim, and exploited tham all she could. But she never relinquished her intellectual independence. Barry might know more than she did, but it was Alice who knew how to assess the weight and significance of rumours, events, whispered conversations, looks and smiles. She knew when to insist on having her own way and when to leave well enough alone. She knew how to flirt without consequences, how to cajole, persuade. She knew when to accept and when to refuse gracefully. She guarded her virginity with the vigilance of a poacher overseeing a rabbit trap. And she advised Barry to do the same.
Alice was his Virgil, his guide through the infernal kingdoms. He had given her all the education that she had, but it was he who asked her opinion, her advice, her views. Concentrated and rapacious, Alice applied herself to the acquisition of knowledge. But she remained critical, unintimidated. She bit hard on true gold and spat out false coin. She mistrusted easy answers and long words. She ate well, slept well, and never remembered her dreams. Alice looked outwards at the world. She accepted the immutable, being an excellent judge of what was in fact immutable, and put her shoulder hard against everything else. Hers was a philosophy of dailiness. She neither anticipated events nor regretted them. But she saved money. Money was the trump card she played against the future, the only card with which she could not cheat, the victor’s card in her hand.
* * *
James Miranda Barry was terrified of sex. Particularly if it occurred outside the pages of a book. It was the serpent at his feet. It would be the moment of his unmaking. Men and women of no ambiguity must be kept at arm’s length. He never laughed at the kitchen jokes. He never understood the kitchen jokes. David Erskine’s groom was a hideous man called Joss. His teeth were rotten and his fingernails were foul with ingrained manure. He drank neat gin for hours, without flinching. He made most of the kitchen jokes.
The groom decided that Barry needed to be taught the more fundamental truths, given that the General’s away at the wars, and the poor little midget clearly isn’t even given to fiddling with his own broomstick when the candle’s out. Joss trapped Barry in the coach house, a cavernous, dusty enclave filled with battered elderly carriages, some of dubious construction and indifferent suspension. The relics were now managed by a team of very successful spiders who left an ornate trail between the tarnished brass lamps and split seats. What’s a man’s best weapon in the bedroom battle? Well, one fine day, my boy, you’ll kiss that Jones girl right here where her throat meets her sloping breasts and right here where her nipple sprouts pink from those dark circles, and don’t think that she doesn’t let me suck them till they’re stone-hard points when she’s in the mood and feeling bored, and if she lets you close your mouth round those delicious little orbs, you’ll find that your gun is so loaded that white smoke is oozing from the barrel, and what should you do when that’s the case? Why, lift up her skirts, prise the target apart with your fingers, that’s what she wants, that’s what they all want, and don’t you listen to any of them that try to tell you otherwise, stick your gun down the hole as far as you can, and fire, fire, fire. Nothing like it. Sets a man up for the day. Puts a grin on his face and a bounce in his step. And if she’s let you do it once then she’ll want you back down there pumping away, often as you can take time out to reload.
Joss roared with laughter at Barry’s frozen, scarlet face, and prodded the boy’s groin suggestively. Barry stalked straight out of the coach house to find Alice, his cold fists clenched with insulted dignity. Alice was busy counting chicks to make sure that she hadn’t been robbed. The mother hen pecked at her bare, brown arms as she collected little balls of twitching fluff and packed them into a straw-bedded box. Her fingers closed delicately around the fragile specks of gold, twittering with anxiety. She met Barry’s glance, which was now a pale white glare, fixed with rage and fright.
‘Ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen . . . all right. They’re all there. Now tell me what’s happened.’
Barry narrated the incident, hesitated, then reported the fact that the groom had also given him a bold tweak between the legs to make his points clear. To his horror, Alice burst out laughing.
‘Oh dear, James! You can’t join the army and be serious about things like that. Why, it’ll happen every day. Anyway, Joss is a rogue. My mum warned me. He gets you alone among the buckets then lifts up your skirt, right up, to keep it out of the molasses, he says, and puts his hands in between to see if you’ve got anything sticky, there where you shouldn’t have. I’m surprised that he didn’t insist on undoing all your buttons to see if you’ve really got a road or just a mass of feathers . . .’
Two huge tears rolled down James Barry’s cheeks.
‘Oh, don’t cry, James!’ She bundled the chickens into the hutch, an armful of pecking and fluttering. ‘Come on down to the stream.’
The September sun warmed the dark, ploughed earth. Alice washed her feet in the river, then dried them on her apron. The air’s chill tongue licked her skin. She looked up at the changing willows shivering in the stream, and into the cool, vast quiet of England, the cattle standing by the green shallows, their white flanks streaked with gold, and above the great vault, guttering white high in the blue. James Barry lay beside her, following her gaze into nothingness. She sighed, feeling the burden of his curious innocence: this child, knowing and unknowing the things that Alice had always been able to whistle up towards her, or brush from her skin with her fingertips.
This boy’s first love had been the slender woman in muslin and ribbons, who had carried him firmly on her hip. His second love, the huge courageous revolutionary general with his prominent nose, widening girth, heart as boundless as the seas and all the distances he travelled. His third love was Alice Jones. He rolled onto his side to gaze at her black curls, tucked behind the golden ring. Slowly, he reached out and turned the ring gently in her ear. She put her fingers over his and smiled at the chill of his touch. Come into the garden, my sister, my love. Behold, thou art fair, my love – also our bed is green. The beams of our house are of chestnut and the rafters of willows and fir. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine.
* * *
Scenes from Shakespeare! Now there was mist coating the cedars in the park and the purple-blue clouds of Michaelmas daisies had been imprisoned with festoons of string. The gardeners were planting experimental tulips on the other side of the haha in the early day, and the swifts were already massed on the roof tops. James Barry was due to travel north within the week. And his departure was to be marked by Scenes from Shakespeare. There were still sufficient numbers of languid adults loitering in the household to make up a party of courtiers and mechanicals. We are all going to perform the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the audience seated in front of the first winter fire in the Great Hall, surrounded by trays of soft cake, roast chestnuts, and sweet wine. The boy will play Robin Goodfellow. Won’t that be charming? He’s quite perfect for the part.
But he wasn’t. Caparisoned in a rich costume of lace and velvet with pale silver stockings cut off at the ankle, Barry was to scamper through the Hall at the head of a troupe of fairies, non-speaking roles supplied from the stock of kitchen help, who, once scrubbed and dressed up could pass for wee folk of the magical kind, blessing this house, invoking the powers of darkness, only to banish them forever.
Now the hungry lion roars
And the wolf behowls the moon . . .
Now it is the time of night
That the graves, all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the church-way paths to glide . . .
Barry had already learned the part by heart. But alas! As soon as all eyes were fixed upon his tiny pallid face and open mouth and once the assembled household, radiant with expectation, leaned forwards to hear him, he was metamorphosed into a wooden mannikin, whose clockwork innards were on the brink of extinction. He struck an unlikely pose, one arm rigid at the hip, and chanted the words inaudibly, punctuating the poetry with a sequence of querulous gulps. Alice covered her face with her hands. The company shrank in their chairs, or looked into their glasses.
‘Oh dear,’ gasped Elizabeth, as he ceased his undifferentiated mutter, ‘and you’ve even taken the trouble to learn the wretched thing. What a dreadful shame. That won’t do at all.’
Now no one could imagine James Barry engaged in a lighthearted frolic through the corridors with a gaggle of laughing fairies at his heel. The idea had to be regretfully abandoned. No, Puck the mischief-maker was simply not Barry’s role.
‘Never mind, darling. We’ll think of something.’
Barry could not endure being patronised and stalked out in a huff. Alice dashed after him, her wooden clogs ringing on the stone floors.
‘We could end it all with “Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time,” and just forget about Puck.’
‘But then the boy has no role at all.’
David Erskine lit the candles. Dusk was closing early upon them now, and all the trees were filled with a dark twittering. They could hear the ducks crying through the twilight, far away among the browning reeds. The dogs lifted their heads for a moment, then subsided again with a sigh. Their fur smelt feral in the first hot wash of flame from the green logs.
Elizabeth stared at Alice, who was shyly hanging in the doorway, unsure of her place without James. She had failed to persuade him out of his temper and he was sulking on the cellar steps, his arse getting steadily colder from the moist brick stairs. Scenes from Shakespeare! Use another play. One where my dearest James can just sit there, as he always does, gazing at Alice. That’s it! Why, how now Orlando! where have you been all this while? You a lover! An’ you serve me such another trick, never come in my sight more. And he has damn all to say and that pert little maid will turn all the men’s heads. Just the courting scene. Utterly suitable! We need someone to play Celia. Grace Sperling. She’ll do. A bit mouse-like, but we can draw her out of herself. Alice will pout and flounce quite charmingly. She’s grown tall this summer and holds herself well. James can coach her in the part. But he only comes up to her shoulder. Won’t he look ridiculous as Orlando? Oh, what does it matter? It’s a breeches part. He can lie among some greenery and no one will notice how small he is. The gardeners can construct the Forest of Arden in half an hour. Then we can have it all in the background for the Dream as the play comes indoors. Yes, yes, that’s it! And so it was decided to abandon the fairies, who were not normally allowed in the house anyway and whose honesty was doubtful. The butler, who had foreseen that the awful task of supervising the delinquent magicals would have fallen upon him, was mightily relieved. And here comes Alice! The wiser, the waywarder. I can hear her saying it. Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that and ’twill out at the key-hole; stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney. There it is. As you like it.
‘Alice. Come here, my girl. Come here at once.’
Scenes from Shakespeare proliferated like a camel with an uncommon row of humps. Alice, whose talent for showing off in public proved little short of miraculous, was given the final word. She was to speak the Epilogue from As You Like It at the end of this hybrid performance, thus transforming two plays into one.
Everyone was over-excited. The adults rushed up and down stairs, showing one another their latest costumes and wailing for their lost figures. The gardeners constructed a large wooden wall which proved too heavy to move, and a sickle moon, like an ineffective knight’s shield with a handle on the back, painted an unreal shade of ochre. Starveling was supposed to carry the Moon, lest the audience should mistake his identity. Then David Erskine read the play carefully and announced that Moonshine should have a lanthorn, dog, and bush of thorn, because it says so, here, Act 5, Scene 1, can’t any of you read? It doesn’t say anything about a model moon weighing forty pounds.
None of the dogs in the household was sufficiently reliable to be presented on stage. Alice and Barry cut one out of stiff black paper, dug out of the old painter’s studio, then reinforced it on one side with batons, and set it up on little wheels. It took them two days to construct this thing and it looked grotesque. They were so delighted with the monster that they led it everywhere around the house. Its straw whiskers began to fall off, leaving a suggestive trail behind them, like bread crumbs in the fairy tale.
Everyone was involved in the performance. Thus the division between spectators and players ceased to exist. Theseus and Hippolyta, the Master and the Mistress, naturally, sat in the front row with the jeering courtiers all around them. During one of the rehearsals Moon really did lose his temper, yanked the paper dog’s lead a little too violently and pulled its head off. Desperate repair work was carried out on the spot, amidst an orgy of recriminations. Alice was accused of being insolent to one of the house guests, who, not realising that the beast was a domestic construction, created with love, had vilified the prop designers. Not my fault, Alice defended herself, if the Retort Courteous was received as the Countercheck Quarrelsome. David Erskine was enchanted, for she quarrelled by the book, and he found in her favour.
Barry and Alice learned their scene by heart within a day, but found themselves mortally inhibited by Grace Sperling’s censorious Celia. ‘Pretend she’s not there. She doesn’t count for anything. I’m the one you should be looking at,’ snapped Alice. And the insignificant Celia, slightly tearful at Rosalind’s brisk dismissiveness, sank into anonymity upon her rustic seat, clutching her bonnet.
The performance took place by candlelight in the Great Hall. Most of the audience were in full costume with whitened faces or bizarre masks, like the commedia del arte, escaped for the evening. And many were already roaring drunk, ready to shout and cheer, whatever the event. Barry wore a suit of lincoln green with a hat that collapsed over his nose, weighed down with bright red feathers. He hurled it into the air when he saw Alice, dressed as a brown leather huntsman, her legs revealed to scandalous advantage, nonchalantly carving hearts on a forest log.
‘Good day, and happiness, dear Rosalind.’
The household howled and clapped their approval at this suggestive scene. For the hero was perfect, if a little small, and his lady was provocatively moody, tantalising in her more coming-on disposition. Barry lay at her feet, delivering tentative interjections as Alice stalked back and forth among the autumnal branches delivering her cynical lessons in love, every gesture making a persuasive case for eroticism and perversity. The household was bewitched. O Alice, thou art translated. A glamorous boy looked her public in the eye, tweaked the nose of her plain little coz, whose startled look was quite unfeigned, as this cheeky pantomime had not been agreed in rehearsal, and declared in a voice lavish with innuendo, that her affection had ‘an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal’. Her audience stamped and roared. Barry, languishing on moss, was merely a foil, an occasion for this boy-girl’s barefaced offering of sex to every member of the audience, well warmed by David Erskine’s mulled wine.
And wilt thou have me?
Ay, and twenty such.
What sayest thou?
Are you not good?
I hope so.
Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing? (This to the assembled company, with an insolent wink) Come, sister, (Celia was dragged off the log) you shall be the priest and marry us.
The audience cheered. Barry’s ears burned beneath his curls as he knelt down beside her. The play was too much to the point. Alice did not believe in the love that swam Hellesponts, dared Grecian clubs, and dragged beautiful gods down from their horses to seduce them. But Barry did.
The kitchen staff never saw the performance, because from every feast someone is always excluded. And so they demanded an encore after supper. The scene was less suggestive, for Alice wore her skirts again, but Grace Sperling, that one restraining factor, had been abandoned in the drawing room. The two principals had drunk so much spiced wine that they performed with wild, drunken panache to a chorus of cheers, yells and lewd enthusiasm.
Alice climbed onto a stool and addressed the assembled kitchen, along with all the pots, tankards and crockery.
‘If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleas’d me, complexions that lik’d me, and breaths that I defied not . . .’ Here, she put out her tongue at Joss, who was leering from the inglenook, ‘and, I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsey, bid me farewell.’
She lifted her skirts provocatively, and bowed only to Barry.
‘Show us your cunt!’ shouted Joss, leaping up. Cook rapped his shins with a poker. Alice jumped off the stool and ran for the door, dragging Barry after her. In the kitchens nobody bothered. It was accepted practice in the household, or at least it always used to be when the old Master’s sons lived at home, that the young gentlemen carried on with the scullery maids.