Alas, with snow upon the thatch, there is yet wildfire in the cellar, stoked with willow limbs and jutting trunks. So much for good intentions. Often now it seems that my desire is worse than ever, with nought but the flimsiest of hints required to set my meditations on their soil-strewn and indecent path.
The lurching of this coach along the pitted Kendal road is all too readily become the pitch of marriage-couch, the pelvises of all aboard rocked back and forth in unison so that the fancy comes to me that but for some few feet I might be rocking to and fro inside the young wife sat there with her daughter on the seat opposing mine. When her pond-coloured eyes (what glistening secret tableaux have they seen?) glance up to catch my own, their frog-spawn pupils seem to widen, dark and open; querying. Lest any of my musings may be glimpsed in miniature upon my gaze, I look away to where the Lakeland hills are sprawled beyond the carriage window, a titanic slate-skinned harem, all asleep with wet grass slick and tufted on their tilted mounds, or tracking in a spidery Jacob’s Ladder up each pregnant slope, to nipple cairns.
It has been some few weeks since I set out from Faxton for my tour of the judicial circuit, going first by way of Northampton itself, where to confirm my various schedules and appointments, then by coach out through the town’s North gate, off on my yearly rounds. The gate was hung about with heads like blackberries upon an iron thorn-bush, ripe and heavy, these the dire fruits of sedition. Though the heads of Catholic plotters hung here many years ago have long since come unglued and toppled down to shard and dust, the sharp saltpetre tang of insurrection lingers in the town’s stale air. The faces of the men seem all the time suffused with red like blisters on a firebrand’s fingers, that may yet result in blood.
Things are the same throughout the land. I have presided at assizes ranged from Nottingham to Crewe, to judge such ruffians as are brought before me: poor men who are thin and poor men who yet manage to be fat. The swaggering young, the cringing old, the crutch-bound and the incomplete. In all their eyes there is a kinship, though their skin be pale as oatmeal, pink as dawn or tan as saddles. Green eyes, blue or brown, it matters not. Their eyes have all one hue, which is the colour of their great resentment, flecked with spark and promises of flame.
The women are another matter. Though with bitterness aplenty of their own they carry out their timeless work and seem to all intents as if they dwell apart from our hot world and tread the byways of some other, female land; one unaffected by the thrust and surge of man’s enthusiasms, Empires or revolts. They bake the bread. They clean the clothes and bring forth babies they may smack and kiss. Between our wars we go to them and suckle at their fond indifference, their abiding constancy, these mothers; mothers once or mothers yet to be. These sauce-splashed deities.
Thus made divine, their desecration is at once made sweeter to the thoughts, and to man’s private sensibilities.
Skirting some rut or fissure in the road, the coital lurching of the carriage is now made more urgent and erratic, groaning like a harlot’s headboard as it bucks and jolts towards its shuddering conclusion, some fantastic spend of horseflesh, wood and iron. Amidst this jostling, the girl-child sat across from me has fetched her knee a clout upon the carriage door, so that her mother is now called upon to comfort her.
She does so in a strange, soft pigeon-murmur where what sense the words may have is not so soothing as her lapping, ebb-tide voice itself: ‘Ooh, there, what have you done now? Hurt your knee? Ooh, my poor darling, where? Let’s see now . . . Ooh. Ooh, never mind, the skin’s not broke although you’ll have a fine old bruise there, won’t you? Ooh, yes. Yes you will. A fine old bruise.’
These old, placatory rhythms lull the child, each dovecote ‘Ooh’ a drop of balm; a jig of oil to smooth the creased and choppy waters of her brow, where it is visible below the black rim of her little bonnet. Soon, the road beneath the coach becomes more even and the child falls back into the fitful doze with which she has elected to pass by the time that yet remains before we come to Kendal.
Though its bound-up majesty may not be glimpsed beneath the solemn, rigorously fastened hat, I know her hair is chestnut red and long, so that it falls about her waist when it is not wound tight and crucified by bodkins. She’s named Eleanor, although her mother for the most part seems to call her Nell, which is to my mind not so pretty. Both of them are come from further North, near by Dundee, to lodge with some old dame who has a room for rent outside of Kendal. Last night, when I first met with the pair there at the coach-inn where we each had paused upon our different journeys to a common destination, I was made acquainted with the facts of their predicament.
Her husband only recently passed on, young Widow Deene (such is the mother’s name) has come with Eleanor down to the Lakelands where a lady-friend of hers had vouched that she may find employment as a seamstress. Having spent such meagre savings as she had upon the journey here with but a little over for her first week’s rent, the luckless, lovely little thing has gambled much upon her friend’s advice and frets, now it is too late, upon the wisdom of her chosen course. Thus it would seem we both hope to have business waiting for us when we reach our destination, whether shirts to stitch or men to hang.
The widow’s bosom falls and rises, falls again, with its imagined whiteness hid neath buttoned black only to shine more dazzling and more livid in my thoughts. A scree of freckles, there across the steep ridge of her nose. Her pale, worn hands rest in her lap and cup her secret warmth.
It was the daughter that I met with first, and in a manner such as to occasion quite a start in me. I came upon her half-way up the coach-house stairs, stood with a narrow, westward-facing window at her back, afire with sunset all about her rim; less like a child than like some spirit of eclipse. I saw her and I stopped and gasped, so much did she remind me of another child, upon another stair, one that I had not seen but only heard of, years before.
Francis, the sole fruit of my union with Lady Nicholls, had regrettably become involved in dealings with John Dee, the famous charlatan who lived at Mortlake, near to Richmond. Called upon to visit Dee’s house overnight, he saw some few things it were better that he had not seen, yet nothing he had witnessed would come to perplex him half so much as having happened on a small girl standing half-way up the stairway of that dreadful doctor’s house, a western window spilling ruby light behind her. Later, having learned there were no children in the house save for Dee’s full-grown daughter, Francis came to be convinced that he had seen no mortal infant, but instead some spectral waif lost on her way to Paradise. His voice and hands both shook to tell me of it and so vivid was the picture he described it was as if I had myself met with the little wraith-girl, standing dark against her sunset. Thus last night, when I encountered Eleanor, lit just the same upon the coach-house landing, I was for a moment seized by fear of things I had thought put away with childhood, and I gawped at her with what must have appeared a fearful countenance until she spoke.
‘Oh, Sir,’ she said, ‘I do hope you are kind. I’ve played outside and left my mother in the room we have together for the night, and now I can’t find which it was. It’s dark soon, and she’ll think me lost if I’m not back.’
Although the child was reassured to find someone who might assist her in her plight, she was not yet so reassured as I, to learn that she had mortal voice, and kin, and flesh and blood. In my relief, I promised I would help her find her mother’s room, at which she beamed and took my dry, age-spotted hand into the warm pink shell-curl of her own, then led me up the narrow stairs.
It soon became apparent that the child, returning from her play, had looked upon the first floor for the room she and her mother shared, when all the while their billet lay just one floor higher, leading from the coach-inn’s topmost landing. Tapping hesitantly on the door, I was soon answered by a quite bewitching jade-eyed woman of perhaps some five and twenty years, her great relief at having found her child soon giving way to an effusive gratitude bestowed upon myself, her benefactor. T
hough I’d spent but moments with the girl and done no more than walk upstairs with her it was, to hear her mother talk, as if I’d single-handed snatched the infant from the slobbering jaws of wolves.
‘Oh, Sir, you’ve brought her back. I looked from out my window and the sky had come so dark. I had no notion where she’d gone and was that worried I was at me wit’s end. Nelly, now, you thank the gentleman for all he’s done.’
Her daughter here performed a brief, embarrassed curtsy, mumbling her thanks, gazing the while towards the warped boards of what little floor their narrow room possessed. I saw she had her mother’s ocean eyes; the same fine-bladed cheeks with their impressive line calling to mind the urgent frailty of Italic script. Two years at most would make a splendid bed-full of her.
While I smiled down at her child with what she no doubt took to be paternal fondness, Nelly’s mother did not cease professing her indebtedness and admiration, head tipped back, lifting her lashes like the lids of jewel chests deep with emeralds to gaze up at me.
‘To think a gentleman as grand as you would stoop to help the likes of me and Eleanor, why, Sir, it fairly takes the breath from out of me. Look at the handsome clothes you’ve got upon you! You must be a great physician, else a lord to dress so gay.’
I told her, in a modest and good-humoured way that should not seem too vain, that I was neither of these things, being instead a judge. I will confess the taking of a certain pleasure from her indrawn breath and widened eyes, having upon occasions in the past had cause to note that women will become enthusiastic, even wanton, in the presence of authority such as my station lends me. With one hand raised to her breast as if physically to suppress its palpitations, she now took a small step back from me, perhaps to reappraise my scale as one might do with mountains or some other scenic feature. Where she’d thought me small and near to hand she found me massive and remote. I saw myself reflected as a god in twin green mirrors and at her excitement was myself aroused in some small measure.
‘Oh, what must you think of us, turned out so poorly? Never seen a judge, nor thought I should, and here I am with one that close as I could reach and touch him. You’ll have come here on important business, I’ll be bound.’
I told her that I had a case to try in Kendal, whereupon her ardour doubled.
‘Kendal! Why, that’s no more than the place where little Eleanor and I are headed with the morning’s coach. Nell? Do you hear? We are to ride to Kendal with a judge.’
Though she could have but little comprehension of my office or that power it represented, Eleanor now looked at me for all the world as if she had been promised she’d be carried to her destination on the shoulders of Saint Christopher himself. She took her mother’s hand, seeming afraid lest one of them might suddenly ascend to Heaven from the sheer occasion of it all. The Widow Deene, as she would shortly introduce herself, was meanwhile fired by morbid speculation with regard to the impending trial at which I should preside. Although throughout her tone was one of fascinated horror, I have more than once observed that in the fairer sex preoccupations with the charnel often mask an equal inclination to the carnal side of life’s affairs. Whenever some rough sort is made to swing, one measures in the filthy-fingered gropings of the crowd the lewd abandon that this glimpse of their mortality awakes in them. The women, later, will perform an imitation of the hanged man’s final dance, writhing beneath their husbands’ lunging weight, so that I wonder if we were not most of us conceived to an accompaniment of creaking ropes and flailing, blackened tongues? Such a conception surely might account for our obsession, later on in life, with all the sudden, hurtful ways there are to leave it, such as Nelly’s mother now evinced.
‘It is a murder, Sir, you are to try? Please God that there are not such things in Kendal, not if me and Nelly are to make our living there.’
I reassured her that the fellow up before me was no cut-throat, but instead a sheep-thief of no great account, although this did not much relieve her curiosity.
‘And shall he hang, Sir? What a thing it must be, saying if men are to live or die.’ A colour had arisen in her cheek, so that I smiled a little, knowing her to be already taken by the glamour of my robe and gavel.
In response I held her eye and spoke in tones of great severity. ‘If he is guilty, Madame, and I have no doubt that such he be, then shall he dance a Tyburn jig, or else he has a friend to swing upon his legs and speed him to a hastier demise.’
Here, Eleanor grew pale and clutched her mother’s skirts. Cast on the ceiling by a low-set lantern, both their shadows merged to one; a dark thing with too many limbs. Noticing that her daughter had become afraid, the widow turned towards the girl and scolded her perhaps too harshly, no doubt hoping she should make a good impression on a judge were she to play the martinet.
‘Now don’t you make a fuss, my girl! You know what I have told you. We should thank the stars that we are being spoken to at all by such a noble gentleman as . . .’ Here her words trailed off and, glancing from her child, she offered me a querying look, at which I understood that she was still in ignorance as to my name.
I introduced myself, to spare her further puzzlement. ‘I am His Worship Judge Augustus Nicholls, come from Faxton in Northamptonshire, upon the circuit. Now you have me at a disadvantage, Madame. Who, I wonder, might you be?’
Seeming a little flustered, she announced herself as Mrs Mary Deene, late of Dundee, if it should please me, whereupon I let my gaze drop for an instant from her face to the more softly angled contours there below and told her that it pleased me very much. At this we both laughed, she a little nervously, while Eleanor looked first to one of us then to the other, half-aware that meanings darted underneath the surface of our talk like pretty minnows, yet unable quite to grasp them ere they vanished in a twist of silver.
We exchanged some few words more, stood at the threshold of her stoop-backed attic room, yet more than words were passed between us: certain measurements of breath were evident. Some phrases had a tilt to them, some silences an eloquence, or so it seemed to me. We both avowed we should be glad to have the other’s company upon the morrow’s ride to Kendal, and expressed the hope we might have cause to meet while we were in that place. At this, content that my preliminary work with Widow Deene would be sufficient to its task, I took my leave amidst much curtsying and scraping.
In my larger chamber on the floor below I punched my feather bolster till it had a shape more suitable for entertaining sleep. Settling back, I closed my eyelids, where the darkness rose behind like a theatre’s drapes as Widow Deene and Eleanor, both of them nude and with their autumn hair untied, danced with each other in a feverish arietta to high French fiddles, pale and twirling on that secret stage.
Out through the carriage window the November fields are made to dazzling mirror-flats by flood, where up above the clouds hang grey and heavy as cathedrals. Two drowned heifers floating swollen in a ditch; their staring eyes catch mine in passing, black glass bulbs now fogged, steamed white by death.
Besides a trade of pleasantries when first we climbed aboard the coach this morning, and of several lingering glances since, little of note has passed between the widow and myself today. Since I imagine we shall shortly reach the skirts of Kendal where the Deenes are to be lodged, then it were better I should soon promote the notion of an assignation, lest I miss my chance. If child and mother disembark a half-mile down the road from here and are not seen again for these three days I am in Kendal, why, what then? Then I must sleep alone, else pay some drab to warm my bed unless I would return to wife and Faxton without dalliance to keep me warm in mind and memory throughout the winter months.
Our carriage rolls along its track by open land with, in the distance, mountains steeped in cloud, or clouds that look alike to mountains. Some way off, across the fallow, ploughed-in fields, I spy a great black farm dog bounding at a furious pace across the ruts and frost-baked furrows, seeming easily to match its stride with our fast-moving carriag
e as it lopes along in parallel to us. I make attempt to estimate its distance from the coach, which is, perhaps, much further than I first assumed. Why, then, the hound must be of monstrous size to seem so large at such a great remove.
No. No, I see it now, the truth of it, and am embarrassed at my foolishness: the beast is not a dog at all, but rather is a horse. A clump of trees obscures its racing shadow-form from sight before I can confirm this logical surmise, while at the same time Widow Deene speaks from behind me so that my attention is diverted from the creature utterly to other, less ambiguous concerns.
‘We shall be getting off soon, shan’t we Nelly?’ This, though spoken to the child, seems largely for my benefit. Unless I miss my guess, with this announcement of her imminent departure Widow Deene hopes to provoke me to a suitable response. Not wishing that so radiant a being should be made to suffer disappointment, I turn from the window of the carriage now to speak with her, and lift my straggling eyebrows up towards their centre in a great display of something like bereavement.
‘My good woman, can it be that you and your dear child alike are to be taken from me in such haste? It really is too bad! In all my lonely weeks upon these roads at last I meet with true companionship only to have it plucked from me while it is new. I’d hoped that while in Kendal we might meet, the three of us, and thus continue our acquaintanceship, but now . . .’ I let my words trail off and spread my hands here, miserably, as if I hold a world of woe between them like some dismal Atlas.
Little Eleanor, awoken now, at least is moved to sympathy by my performance. Turning on her seat to face her mother, she takes up the older woman’s hands within her smaller ones and wears a look upon her pointed fox-cub face that is the very soul of earnestness.