I had fallen asleep with Eleanor’s singing still echoing in my mind but it was Daniel who visited my dreams, visible as a vague thickening of the darkness at my bedside, his voice sweeter and clearer than in life. Come with me he fluted, taking up the Erlking’s theme, wheedling, coaxing. He moved in close and I felt his fingertips play lightly over my face, his lips brush my ear. Come. I started back from his touch and woke drenched in sweat, trembling with desire and dread. I lay in bed until the darkness began to draw off; then I rose and towelled my damp skin before dressing and making my way downstairs.
The eastern horizon was brightening as I left the house, and the air was ringing with bird-calls. Not the sweet tones of an English dawn chorus, but something altogether wilder and more disquieting – a babble of contending shrieks, whistles and warblings with an undercurrent of lighter piping sounds. More than anything I had yet experienced, those cries spoke to me of the distance I had travelled from my native soil, and as I walked out through the gates I was gripped by a spasm of something like vertigo and my heart lurched in my chest.
Once at a reasonable distance from the villa, I positioned myself among the shrubs at the edge of the track and waited, my gun at the ready. Vane had mentioned the passage, at dawn and dusk, of small groups of waterfowl, and I was eager to try my luck. I had barely settled back when a dozen or so duck winged over, low and fast. I jerked the rifle clumsily forward, fired both barrels and, as the second shot rang out, saw the hindmost bird stagger and drop.
I thought at first that I had lost it, but after a few minutes’ searching I discovered the body half buried in a clump of low scrub, one wing twisted stiffly upward like a flag marking the spot. It was a beautiful thing, I saw, as I tugged it clear, its underparts a deep cinnamon-brown, flecked with darker mottling, and the gleam of its bottle-green head-feathers shifting with the loose swing of its neck. I placed it carefully in my satchel and returned to my makeshift hide.
I had no further success but I was pleased enough with my prize, and after a hasty breakfast I hurried down to the barn to skin the bird. Eleanor was there before me but her glance, as I entered, seemed less unfriendly than before, and I had no sooner placed the duck on the table than she set down her brushes and stepped over to my side.
‘Teal,’ she said. ‘Chestnut teal.’ She stretched out her hand and gently touched the bird’s breast with the backs of her fingers. Something in the gesture – some quality of hesitant tenderness – stirred and confused me.
‘So soft,’ she said, with a little catch in her voice. ‘Do you remember what Milton says about the waterbirds – bathing their downy breasts on silver lakes?’
‘You’ve read Milton?’
She must have caught the note of surprise in my question. She bridled, glared. ‘Why shouldn’t I have done? You take me for a dunce, don’t you? A little colonial flibbertigibbet.’
‘Of course I don’t. But I always think of Milton as a peculiarly masculine writer. I imagine that young ladies tend, as a rule, to prefer something a little less—’
‘Perhaps,’ she interrupted rudely, ‘you need to widen the circle of your acquaintance.’
There was a moment of tense silence. Then she reached out and touched my arm, half propitiatory, half coercive.
‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I want to show you something.’
She marched over to the hayloft ladder, hitched up the front of her skirt and began to climb. I hung back, inhibited by a faint, unsourceable anxiety. As she reached the platform, she turned and held out her hand.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It looks unsteady, but it’s safe enough.’
‘I’m not afraid of a fifteen-foot drop,’ I said stiffly.
‘What is it, then?’
I couldn’t have explained it to myself, let alone to her. ‘Nothing,’ I answered, moving over to the ladder.
I’d imagined the loft very differently – hay bales, twine, dust and shadows; not that swept space, amply lit by the window and skylights and furnished like a nursery. Against one wall stood a low table, set as though for tea with a miniature porcelain service, sprigged with rosebuds; against the opposite wall, a small bench occupied by three exquisitely dressed china dolls. A blanket-chest, loosely draped with a fringed woollen shawl, had been positioned immediately beneath the skylight. Eleanor was looking at me, her head tilted a little to one side, evidently waiting for me to comment.
‘I take it this used to be your playroom,’ I said.
‘In a manner of speaking. When I was sixteen my father told me I was to clear my bedroom of the trappings of childhood. That was the phrase he used. I said I wouldn’t – told him I saw no reason to – but he wouldn’t drop the matter. He quoted scripture at me – as if St Paul would have cared whether or not a young girl kept her dolls by her bedside – but I raged and cried, biting my wrists and knuckles until they bled, making him frightened I might do myself worse harm. In the end we agreed that I should be allowed a few keepsakes, so long as I removed them from the house. That was when I began to make a place for myself out here – a place where I can be as I am, not as he’d have me.’
Her voice, I noticed, had hardened as she was speaking; her expression was cold and distant. It seemed sensible to shift ground. ‘You told me you had something to show me,’ I said. ‘Did you mean …?’
‘No, not these things. Something more important.’ She stepped over to the blanket-chest, removed its covering and eased back the lid. Peering over her shoulder, I saw a neat bundle – a thick cylinder of tightly wrapped burlap about two feet long, tied at each end with a length of grubby cream ribbon – lying diagonally across the top of a disorderly heap of books. She removed the bundle, placing it carefully on the floor beside her, and rummaged through the books until she found the volume she was looking for.
‘Do you know,’ she said, quickly scanning the pages, ‘I think no-one else has ever described things the way Milton does. Listen to this.’ She settled back on her heels, angled the book towards the skylight and began to read.
And higher than that wall a circling row
Of goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit,
Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue
Appeared, with gay enamelled colours mixed:
On which the sun more glad impressed his beams
Than in fair evening cloud or humid bow,
When God hath showered the earth; so lovely seemed
That landscape: and of pure now purer air
Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires
Vernal delight and joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair: now gentle gales
Fanning their odoriferous wings dispense
Native perfumes and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils.
She sighed and gently closed the book. ‘Fanning their odoriferous wings,’ she breathed, lifting her eyes to mine. ‘Can you imagine?’
If, as I suspected, she had brought me to her hideaway in order to impress me with her little library and her modicum of learning, her rapture was no less genuine for that. I smiled, touched and faintly excited by her wide-eyed gaze. ‘They’re glorious lines,’ I said.
‘Yes, and frightening too.’
‘Frightening? Why?’
‘Because,’ she said, and her mouth twitched uneasily, ‘he’s already there.’
‘Who?’
‘Satan. It’s Satan approaching the garden. Prowling around, looking for a way in, plotting mischief. We’ve waited for our glimpse of paradise, and here it is at last, but he’s there with us. And when we enter, we enter with him. Or he enters with us – I don’t know exactly how it is. I want to see the garden pure and clear, and I can’t. Milton won’t let us. It’s as if he’s telling us the evil’s deep in our own hearts and can’t be rinsed out.’
‘The gospels tell us otherwise. And Milton himself knew that the loss of paradise was only part of the story. It might be said that our fall can only be understood in relation to the act of redemption that follows it.’
‘Are you a believer, Mr Redbourne? I mean, do you believe we can all be saved? Supposing someone sins – I mean a sin so terrible she can’t speak of it, though it’s not her fault – and goes on sinning because she has no choice. Might she still find her way back to paradise?’
‘Everyone has a choice,’ I said. ‘That’s the point. Sin is a choice, and so is repentance.’
There was a long silence before she spoke again. ‘I don’t believe that,’ she said at last. ‘It’s too simple.’ She turned away with an odd grimace and began to fumble nervously among the books in the chest. It struck me that I had not given her the answer she wanted.
‘I’m no theologian,’ I said gently. ‘I may be wrong.’
She appeared not to have heard. ‘Cowper,’ she said, tugging a worn clothbound volume from the heap and handing it to me. ‘All of Cowper’s poems. And Crabbe’s. Some of Byron’s too. Bumped and battered, but that’s all I can afford.’
‘Don’t you have access to your father’s library?’
She gave an ugly, mirthless laugh. ‘My father has no library,’ she said. ‘He thinks books are a waste of time and money. He’d be horrified if he knew of my own few shillingsworth.’
I opened the volume she’d handed me and made a show of examining the text, but found myself intrigued and vaguely distracted by the bundle on the floor. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘I can show you,’ she said, ‘but you must promise not to say anything about it in my father’s hearing.’ Without waiting for a response, she lifted the bundle on to her lap, untied the fastening and began to unroll the cloth with quick, eager movements of her slender hands. I caught a glimpse of polished wood, a dusky gleam between the folds.
‘Do you promise?’ she asked, pausing suddenly in her task.
‘I promise.’
She spread the cloth to reveal a carved figure lying on its back like a small brown baby, its stumpy legs slightly splayed and thrust a little forward from the hips. Neither the legs nor the skimpy arms suggested a great deal of care on the part of the carver, but the torso, though crudely modelled, was intricately decorated with tiny gouge-marks, and in the space where the thighs met under the rounded belly, the vulva was carefully delineated – a stylised leaf-shape bisected by a deep slit and fringed with finer incisions.
But it was, above all, the face that compelled attention: a polished oval, longitudinally ridged to form two distinct planes and dominated by the enormous, deeply sculpted eyes. I stared down at it, perplexed by its teasing inscrutability. It wasn’t that the face was inexpressive, but that its expression was so deeply ambiguous as to engender a kind of confusion in my mind. Was the thing grieving, or were its features set, as the protruding tongue half suggested, in a mocking parody of grief? Was it angry? Lustful? Or had it perhaps withdrawn into some calm, contemplative space beyond the reach of passion? I stooped to examine it more closely and, as I did so, Eleanor smiled up at me.
‘Don’t you think she’s beautiful?’ she asked.
It wasn’t the adjective I should have chosen. For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by sculptural form, and I regard the sculptors of classical antiquity as having attained a level of artistic expression unmatched, in any medium, either before or since; among their productions are works of such refined and exquisite beauty that I have, on occasion, been moved to tears in their presence. In what sense, I asked myself, could this crudely worked totem be said to share their qualities?
‘The piece has a certain power,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t call it beautiful.’
‘The power and the beauty are the same thing. I came across her in a curiosity shop down by the harbour and the minute I saw her I began to shake, my whole body trembling so that I had to lean against the counter to steady myself. There was something about the way she stood, so sure of herself among all that dust and clutter. And something in the set of her face too – look at it – as though she were saying, very simply and firmly: this is what I am. There’s beauty in that, Mr Redbourne – in the thing she’s saying and in the manner of her saying it – and though it’s a kind of beauty I hadn’t met with before, I recognised it at once.’
‘I’m not persuaded,’ I said, running my fingers across the roughly tooled surface, ‘but perhaps I’m missing something.’
‘I’m not trying to persuade you. Either you see it or you don’t. But I want you to understand that, for me, the world changed when I found her.’
I was taken aback by the extravagance of the claim, and my face must have betrayed my feelings.
‘I mean it,’ she said, looking hard at me. ‘Nothing was ever the same again. When I came home that evening I leafed through some of my watercolours, and it seemed to me I was looking at a kind of trickery – all soft tones in those days, washes so delicate they barely tinged the paper – and seeing clean through it. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d found. And it wasn’t just regret at having had to leave her in the shop—’
‘So you didn’t buy the piece there and then?’
‘I couldn’t. The asking price was two guineas.’
‘Not a vast sum.’
‘An impossible sum at the time. My father keeps a tight grip on my allowance – wants me to account for everything I spend. Every so often the odd shilling might stick to my palm, but two guineas called for extreme measures. I waited my chance and filched a couple of sovereigns from his purse one evening after dinner.’
It was her matter-of-fact tone as much as the disclosure itself that shocked me. ‘Surely you knew that was wrong,’ I said.
‘He owes me more than that.’ She was repacking the books, but her hands fell suddenly still and she lifted her eyes to mine. ‘You’ve promised, remember. You’re to tell him nothing.’
I nodded. She leaned over the little totem and placed her hand gently against the curve of the brow, the way a mother might touch her child in greeting or fond goodnight; then she swaddled it again and carefully returned it to the chest.