We had supper: boiled salt pork, pickled cabbage and cider followed by stewed apple. Ferris scarce spoke, and when Rebecca put the dish of apples on the table he jumped. Since he did not serve himself, Aunt set out some fruit for him. ‘These apples have kept well,’ she said to me. ‘They are our own, from the courtyard.’
‘Ginger,’ murmured Ferris.
I watched him eat. His face was heated, perhaps from the spice, and he lifted the apple absently to his lips. His eyes were not on us but on the future. Before Aunt or myself had half finished, he dropped his spoon clack into the dish and rose to leave.
‘Will you not stay and talk with us?’ his aunt demanded. ‘It is almost Nativity.’
‘When will the press be ready?’ I asked cunningly.
He sat down again. ‘It is not too rusted. I’ve got all the letters cleaned and polished. You can be my crophead prentice.’
‘To do what?’
‘O, set up the type. You’ll learn to read backwards.’
‘I meant, what are we going to print?’
‘I told you! To draw like-minded men together – women too—’
Aunt’s face darkened. ‘What, Christopher, are you still talking of leaving here?’
‘I have to, Aunt, it’s all I’ve wanted since I joined the army. The New Jerusalem.’
I sighed and covered my eyes.
Ferris stamped back down the stairs to his press.
‘You know,’ I said to Aunt, ‘if he wishes to break virgin ground, he should be at it now. Better wait another year and plough in good time.’
She chewed on a thumbnail. ‘He can’t wait to leave me.’
‘I’ve never seen him like this,’ I told her. ‘He’s not the same man.’
‘That’s what it does.’
‘Excitement?’
‘Drink.’
I stared at her.
‘Couldn’t you smell it on him?’
We went down together. He was bending over the machine as I had once seen him crouch over a pot of beans, and made a feint of not seeing us. That was like the army too, when I waited by the fire for him. So much of a man is wasted, I thought, wasted on the watch for that look which says, Welcome, at last.
The empty bottle was lying just inside the door, and a freshly opened one under the press. Aunt seized it straight off. ‘You’re never going to finish this?’
He stood up as if he would bandy words with her, but she at once cut in, as if speaking to a young boy. ‘You’ll hurt yourself fooling with a press drunk.’
‘I know what I do,’ Ferris said.
She took both bottles away without further talk. Her nephew sat down on the dirty floor and sighed.
‘Why don’t you leave it until after the holiday?’ I coaxed him. ‘Two days is nothing.’
‘I want to get started.’
‘Yes, but two days?’
‘I want—’ and then he choked. I thought, Out it comes, but he was not sick of the drink. He seemed to be crying. I stepped towards him and he turned away from me.
‘Why don’t you go to bed?’ I asked. ‘I’ll get Rebecca to put the warming pan in for you.’
He shook his head.
‘Your aunt fears for you, Ferris.’
At this he turned to me, blinking. The tears, if tears there had been, were already dried. I led him back to the upstairs room, he kicking the stairtreads as we went, I wondering if this would now be the pattern of our life. He swayed into a chair and sat quietly by the fire while the bed was being warmed.
‘Are you sick at all?’
‘No. Now sneck up! You’re worse than Aunt.’
I dropped the hand I had offered to him and when the girl came to say the bed was heated, I let him fumble his way up the next flight of stairs alone.
‘How did he get like that?’ Rebecca asked me, hearing him thud on the boards above us. A slam informed us he had dropped onto the bed if not beneath the coverlet.
I shrugged. ‘The usual way. Best keep the cellar locked.’
‘What, will he go on like it?’
‘How should I know?’
She took a long look at my countenance and went, ‘Pfui!’ evidently taking me for an unfeeling friend. If only I were Nathan, who in pain shows so soft and tender: misery only renders my face more rigid. And yet just then I could have wept and had she but given me one word of kindness I would have put my head on her breast like a babe. God alone knows what might have been the sequel, so perhaps He hardened her heart against me. Aunt came back from the cellar and I told her Ferris was abed.
‘He’s not taken so much, only the bottles we found,’ she said. ‘Here, help me finish it.’ She banged down the opened bottle, and two goblets, in front of me.
It was good wine, and I said so. She told me it was from Ferris’s own cellar. ‘The wines weren’t sold off, he gave them to me.’
‘So can you lock them from him?’
‘Whether I can or not, I have done so.’
We sat drinking and watching the fire, and O, the gentle song of comfort the drink set up in my soul, Suffer no more, so that I very well understood its charm. My eyes began to feel sore and red as if I had been in a smoky tavern.
‘Will you go with him into the country?’ Aunt asked me.
‘If need be. He’ll never make a farmer.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He seems to get no further forward here. If he is going to drink, then best he go.’
The sand of her cheeks glistened. I gently pressed my palm onto her fingers, all knotty with their stiff bones and raised veins: the coarse, honest fingers of one who has always worked. That razor, pity, began chivvying in my breast. And as always, I felt myself a poor comforter. After a while I kissed the sad hand and walked up to bed. The stairs were unsteady beneath my feet, and in my room I felt the walls drag after me as I turned about.
I was fighting for my life with a cruel yellow beast somehow got into my chamber. It ran over the walls and across the ceiling, talons skittering, and its cry was the savage mating call of cats on a summer night. I knew it for an emissary of the Devil, waiting for me to sleep in order to smother me. At last I griped it by the tail, and having forced it to the window, dropped it out there. I saw it shatter to powder on the cobbles, but turning back to my bed I found someone in it, evidently dead, for all was bound up tightly in cerements, even the features. I was now grown young and called out for my mother but Caro came in instead, dressed in her bridal gown, and said that the dead man was Zebedee. I knew at once he was all corruption under the graveclothes. She began to unwrap the face, continuing though I screamed at her to stop. I covered my own face so as not to see. Then Isaiah (who like Caro was of full mature size though I seemed much smaller) came up behind me and, with a strength he never possessed in life, tore my protecting hands from my eyes and forced me over to the bed saying Zeb had been killed in a weapons drill. Still I kept my eyes shut but soon felt his fingers plucking at them and screamed for Mother and Father and his nails now began to dig as if they would blind me and when I next tried to scream my tongue was dry and stilled so that I could hear that there came a rustling from the bed—
I was greased with sweat. There were stabbing pains in my chest; I put my hand over it to feel the heart punch against my ribs and I thought, a man may well die from a dream. The candle was lit and this sent a flash of fear through me until I understood that I had forgotten to snuff it. The back of my neck was awash; I turned over the bolster to find a dry place.
When I finally lay still and assured that I was awake, I caught some little noise in the room. I at once thought of the cat-beast, for there was something of a whimpering sound to it. I glanced round and even under the bed: no cat there. Then it came again and I realised it was from the next chamber, where Ferris slept. It grew louder, and I knew it, now. Though preached against as the sin of Onan, unnatural and a filthy vice, it was heard everywhere we had made camp; to wake any night was to catch the rustling and some man’s quick furtive
breathing. Russ had called it the lullaby of the army…Ferris was now groaning, must be greatly carried away. I wondered if he would end by waking Aunt. Despite myself I smiled at that thought. And then came a thought which splintered my smile. The maid slept by herself in an attic room. I recalled his laughter, picking up the crumbs with his tongue, calling her ‘Becs’ and making her his witness that he was a pig, while I was not – his quickly masked displeasure at my hint that she liked me. All of a piece.
That he could play the widower by day and do thus at night! I was glad of the candle now. The latch of my door lifted sweetly, sweetly, and as I stepped out into the corridor his noise seemed so loud I was amazed to be the only one roused by it. His own door – O, the heedlessness of lust! – was open, standing in a gilded frame of candlelight. I extinguished my flame and crept forward. The door yielded to me silently and I saw a woman’s dress lying over the chest in the corner. Judas! I thought. I sprang to the bed and ripped back the hangings and covers. His candle flared to show me Ferris, alone, his head partly framed by a heap of linen. I recognised the white cloth as Joanna’s nightgown. Her widower lay, face pressed to its soft folds, his cheek smeared and shining. When he looked up at me, it was with eyes desolate and defenceless. I heard him fight to calm his breath, unable to speak or look anger, but only because he was too brutally torn from his grief.
Ready to cry out in horror at my vile mistake, I dabbed at his face with the shift, pulled the coverlet back over him and blew out the candle. Then I sat silent and unmoving on the edge of the bed, confounded, waiting for him to sit up and tell me to leave his house. My face burnt in the dark.
Ferris did not move. It even seemed to me that his breathing grew quieter. I began to hope that the sudden darkening of the room would send him off to sleep. Come the morning, he might believe it all a dream. But no, he had been awake, pressing her shift – pressing her – close to him in his lonely bed as he must have done every night since we came to London.
I have no idea how long I stayed there. Sobs rose in my own breast, so that keeping them down was a strangulation. I bit my hand to get mastery over myself. At last his breathing lightened, and sounded as if he might be going off, when there came a clicking from his throat. He might wish to speak to me. Most delicately did I raise myself from the bed and go to stand over him. I peeled back the coverlet. It felt cold and slippery on the outside, hot and dragging where he had wept into the underside of it. Without the candle I had so foolishly extinguished I could not tell if I was exposing a sleeping face or one which looked up through the darkness and could distinguish me. At once a very Flood of tears rose on me. Like Izzy had he befriended me, like Izzy had he paid for it. The more I tried to battle back my crying the worse it came on: I hiccupped and forced my breath. At length there came a sigh, and a rustling from the bed. I lay down on top of the coverlet and brought my face level with his.
‘Forgive me. I’m the Fool of Fools—’
I could not say it. Speech rose in me but was dammed at the throat. Atonement. I craned forwards in the dark until I could press my streaming face on his as I used to with Izzy. The scent of sleeping flesh, of hair and neck, came up to me; his face was blubbered and slippery, warm under the cooling salt. His nose hurt my cheek; there was a smell of wine on him. A cluck rose from his throat as if he would start sobbing again. ‘Hush,’ I said. I licked his tears away, in the dark. For atonement. And so it happened that while drinking the tears I licked some from his mouth, which was open and tasted of sour wine and salt. Wet hair trailed on my neck. He mumbled something. Hush. I pressed on his lips to quiet him, pushing deeper, tasting his spittle. I wanted to lie still with him and let him know he was as welcome to me as myself, burrowing into him in the safety of the darkness.
There was a gasp; he pulled away and the kindness of our mouths was ended. I froze in the darkness, a child torn from the nipple, one great ache of loss, Let me, let me. His breath faded against my lips.
‘Jacob?’
His voice was sleepy and unsure, but my own name struck violently into me. I felt doused in cold water, or as if looking round I had suddenly seen the rest of the household watching us. I got up from the coverlet, groped for the shift and pressed his hands into it. He breathed fast, but made no further sound. I could still taste his mouth inside mine. The air of the chamber striking chill on my wet face, I laid my finger on his cheek, dragged the covers up over his head and left the room.
Fighting the sheets in my own bed, I could not conceal from myself that my blood was up and that this – comfort – had stirred the animal spirits in me exactly as an encounter with a woman might. I ran my tongue round my teeth and swallowed. His mouth had already been open when I – the word kiss was enough to so inflame my face it was a wonder it did not light up the chamber. At the thought that I must meet him at breakfast I groaned inwardly.
Nor was this the worst of my torments: the Devil refines upon these things and hones His barbs for each particular soul. Now He whispered to me, And if he had not pulled away…? The question was put inside my head with a dry and sandy merriment, His very voice, I swear. And with this whisper He set up such a tumult in me as to starve me of sleep all the rest of the night.
FOURTEEN
An Incubus
Poor Aunt. The next morning, when we should have been prompt and merry in our celebration of Nativity, her nephew and myself were so evidently not right that she hardly knew which of us to coddle more.
Ferris was at the table and already eating when I entered. My eyes went straight to him and though my bowels turned to water, yet I feigned (I hope) a passable smile in giving him good morrow. He returned my greeting civilly enough, but his eyelids being much swollen I could not tell how he looked at me.
Aunt came up to kiss and wish me a happy Nativity. On seeing my face up close she gave a squeal.
‘Do you mark this, Christopher! What a sight for Our Lord’s birthday!’
‘We both of us look ill,’ said Ferris. These harmless words had me quivering like a fern in a moorland gale.
‘O, the wine,’ I said hastily. ‘You know I seldom, ah…’ I broke off, all in a terror lest Aunt’s chatter set off some echo in her nephew’s head.
‘First I tell Christopher that he must take care,’ she went on, ‘and now I find Jacob in the same case! Is it possible, a big man like you? You had no more than myself!’
‘It troubled my sleep. I dreamt my brother was dead,’ I returned shortly, and then could have torn out my tongue for the word ‘dreamt’.
‘Ah, I am sorry!’ Her face softened.
‘I saw him laid out.’ I shuddered: that at least was unfeigned.
Aunt pinched my cheek. ‘Sit you down and eat something. We should be joyous today.’
I wondered how many times I would be told ‘Be joyous’ before I died. Can a man arrange the sorrows and joys of his life to the Christian calendar? But of course, all particular and temporal sorrow should melt before Salvation’s timeless sun. I gave her a hypocrite’s smile before closing my eyes to say Grace. Opening them again, I kept them fixed on her, as in gratitude; anything was easier than looking at Ferris. I took a roll and some butter, carefully placing myself so that I was not opposite to him.
He picked out two boiled eggs from a dish and proceeded to crack the shells.
‘Jacob, did you come into my room last night?’ Directly before Aunt! My mouth seemed full of clay as I answered, ‘No, not I.’
‘Ah…’ he put pepper on the first egg. ‘No matter.’
‘Is something gone?’ I made myself ask.
‘No.’ He took butter on his knife, pushing it down into the yolk. After a minute or so he announced, ‘Aunt, I think we should leave off that wine.’
‘One of us might drink less of it,’ she replied. ‘It is not the quality at fault, methinks, but the quantity.’
‘I’m not talking of sore heads,’ Ferris insisted. ‘My head is clear, at least, it is now. That wine provokes dreams.’
> ‘Not in me,’ said Aunt. ‘And I drank my half bottle with the best of ‘em.’ She winked at me.
‘Jacob had a dream. And I – well, it was either a dream or an incubus!’
‘A what?’ asked Aunt.
I did not want to hear him tell her. My face felt scalded and I was convinced they must both remark it.
Ferris patted the table as if the wood needed calming. ‘A dream. A dream.’
‘Is an incubus a spirit?’ asked Aunt.
He rubbed his eyes, smiling. ‘Aye. But this was a dream.’
‘Dream of what?’ Her face was grown uneasy. ‘Not another death?’
‘No, no. I’d be hard put to tell—’ He burst into outright laughter. ‘Your nephew’s a wondrous wanton dreamer.’
Aunt pursed her lips; Ferris continued to laugh, shaking his head incredulously. A wanton dreamer. I felt warmth return to my hands, arms, belly; I sat back in the chair and was able to taste the bread again.
‘No wantonness today if you please,’ said Aunt. ‘Of all days.’
‘Agreed,’ said Ferris. ‘Or rather, no more of it, for a man can’t unthink what’s been thought – eh, Jacob?’
‘I beg your pardon,’ I fenced, ‘I was not paying attention.’
‘I was saying one can’t unthink a wanton thought.’ He took the spoon out of the eggshell and shifted slightly in his chair so that his eyes were full on me. ‘But Jacob, why fear a dream?’ He held up the spoon for emphasis. ‘It was the wine working. My life on it, you’ve lost no brother.’
‘I would I knew that for sure,’ I said.
‘Nor any friend,’ he added.
His voice was gentle. I tried to thank him for this reassurance but my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth; I could bring out nought but a confused babble. He bent his head over the egg and began spooning out the yolk. I would have undergone public penance to understand him aright. I dared not ask…did he know I was there in body? Who, to his mind, was really the wanton dreamer? Who had the wanton thought a man can’t unthink…?