The Quickening Maze Part 5

'I don't expect we will see him again for some time.'

'You're forgetting the wedding.'

'So I am.'The wedding. For which he needed money.

n.o.body wanted to play. Abigail's attentions slid off her father. She clambered up his legs, received a quick flinch of a smile, and was handed down again. Even her trick of folding his ear so that the top bendy part touched the bottom bendy part only resulted in a stubborn horse's shake of the head and a reprimand for disturbing his papers, which she hadn't done in her opinion. He apologised when she told him, even smiled at her, and pressed a firm, furry kiss to her forehead, but after that he sent her away.

Hannah wasn't anywhere to be found and her mother was little better, talking tediously with Dora. Abigail pulled at her mother's skirts and was firmly disengaged. Her mother then fetched her outdoor clothes, fitted her into them, deafening Abigail as she fastened her hat, and ushered her out to run around in the gardens.

Snow. Fresh snow that covered the gaps in the old snow and shone evenly everywhere. Abigail squinted at the hard bounce of bright light, breathed the sparkling, almost painful air. She ran a little way to stamp her footprints, looked back at them, continued onto the lawn, which gave way differently under her so that she stumbled, whitening her knees and mittens. She tasted the snow on her palms: a nothing taste, but full of an unnameable big thing, full of distance, full of the sky. Quickly it soaked through the wool and chilled her skin. She rubbed her hands on her coat and set off running again - she'd remembered the water pump by Fairmead House.

Yes, there were! There were icicles hanging from its nose.They were smooth at the top and tapered down, with bulges, like a pea pod, to a stopped drop round as a gla.s.s bead. She snapped one off and sucked it, holding it along her tongue until she could drink its melt.

The idiot Simon found her there. He looked padded and enormous in his coat, gloves and hat pulled down tight. Abigail showed him the icicles and he snapped one off as well. It darted out of his grasp and he had to pick it up from the snow to eat it. 'Cold,' he said.

'Shall we make a snowman?' Abigail asked.

Simon shook his head.

'Oh, please. Oh, please.'

Simon shook his head again. 'Do a cat,' he said.

So together they rolled two b.a.l.l.s that peeled up the snow from the ground, one big and one small. Simon set the small one on top of the larger. With soaked hands that itched and tingled and that she shook when they were too cold, Abigail helped to make the triangular ears to put on top. But then Simon wouldn't let her do any more; he had to be in charge of everything. He tried to put the last three icicles in for whiskers, but that was uneven and anyway they stuck straight out and, after pauses, dropped off. Abigail didn't think it looked much like a cat in the end, more like a snowman with silly ears.

When Matthew Allen had the idea he stood up out of his chair. Was it workable? Of course it was workable. Hadn't he read of similar? All the elements of it were there, scattered through journals and treatises and out in the world, before his very eyes, hidden in plain sight. All of a sudden they had flown together in his mind, bolted together in this singular, hotly alloyed, all-solving thought. His body clenched with excitement, as though gripping the thought inside him so as not to lose it. Then he applauded the ramifications, the social aspect, the spiritual, the financial, the end to boredom, actually clapped his hands. Yes, indeed. He couldn't possibly keep still, so skipped off for a walk.Without hat or coat he left his study and stepped out into the white morning.

The world was sharply displayed. Frost on the lawn, each and every blade of gra.s.s, each single one of them crusted with crystals. It creaked underfoot, fracturing. He pressed down, crushed and dissolved the ice with each step and left behind footprints - he looked back at them - of mineral green, of wet malachite. He rubbed his hands and laughed as he walked. There they were, the trees, beautiful friends, out there all this time, waiting to receive him. Ranks of lean footmen, they awaited his instructions. Their leafless twigs bounced responsively in the wind in front of a scratched, white sky. In one of them small birds, t.i.tmice, swapped their places, switching back and forth, then flew off together in a pretty wave of panic. His eye followed them and saw a hunched, short figure walking towards him from Fairmead House. He knew that gait, the weight carried low around the hips, the strides balanced and forthright, the shoulders held tensely up to carry the burdensome head. John Clare.

John approached the doctor who looked remarkably animated, without overcoat or hat, dancing on the spot to keep warm, blowing warmth over his hands and intermittently smiling. Perhaps he had the good news he'd been yearning for, despising himself for wanting it, but unable to prevent the painful increase of hope.

'Good morning, doctor.'

'Yes, indeed. It is, it is. Beautiful morning.' He inhaled theatrically through quivering arched nostrils. The air entered his head and chest in delightful lengths of chilly clarity. He felt very tall and awake.

'Do you have something for me?'

'I'm sorry?'

'I mean, has anything come for me from, you know . . . ?'

'Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I actually do. A letter arrived for you yesterday, but I didn't see you. Here it is.' Allen reached into his jacket pocket. 'I don't know who it's from.'

John took the letter. No sender's address on the back. 'Are you not cold?' he asked when he looked up again. The doctor had his hands tucked into his armpits, was jiggling his legs.

'Yes, I suppose I am. Shall we go inside, have some tea, perhaps?'

Inside, Dr Allen led the way to the kitchen, John trundling after in his wake. Allen shooed the cook and her girls out of the way and set about making tea himself, humming as he popped open the caddy, unhooked cups from the shelf. John sat down at the table, clasped his hands with the letter between them, and looked towards the girls huddled against one wall, talking from the corners of their mouths. He wanted to make some sign of his being one of them. By his posture he tried to demonstrate this, holding himself tightly in place, an awkwardly wrapped parcel of a man carried in and left there. But they wouldn't meet his gaze. No, they could barely see him. This wasn't how it used to be: the times he'd been embarra.s.sed by the clumping of his hob-nailed boots on the polished floors of his n.o.ble patrons, an unlikely prodigy invited across the divide for conversation and inspection, then delivered to the servants' quarters to be fed before he walked back to his cottage. Then, he'd felt the muscles of his face, stiff from smiling, relax as he chewed bread and bacon, allowed to forget himself as he listened to their conversation. But he wasn't a country man any more, or even a poet.What they saw, if they saw him at all, was one of the doctor's patients, a madman.

Ignoring them now, he opened the letter.

Most esteemed poet, Mr John Clare,Like you I am a simple man, outwardly at least. I hope that you will forgive my great temerity in addressing you. Be a.s.sured I do not take up my pen without trepidation!I am a labouring man of the county of Dorset. I make my living as a farmhand as you yourself did if I'm not much mistaken, but this is not the end of my story. For many years I have had a strong predilection for the heavenly art of poetry and have wors.h.i.+pped at the Muses' temple. Some have been kind enough to say that my own efforts are not without merit, even genius . . .

Nothing. No help, no response from the literary world that had turned its back on him, cast him off to die in the wilderness. John skimmed down to the familiar request for a.s.sistance, and would he be good enough to cast his 'terrible eye' over the enclosed efforts? Might one of his friends, sympathetic to rural versing, be interested in publis.h.i.+ng one of them?

'Tea,' Dr Allen said, handing John a cup.

John crumpled the letter into his pocket - later he'd watch it blacken and curl on a fire - while the doctor remained standing, drinking quickly.

'Is there any news, perhaps?' John asked. 'Of those poems of mine that you'd sent to friends of yours?'

'Oh. Ah, yes.Yes, I'm sorry. It had quite slipped my mind.' John watched the doctor wrestle that persistent smile from his lips and knew that the answer would not be good. 'Yes, I'm afraid it seems that you were correct in your supposition that your type of genius is no longer the fas.h.i.+on. That fas.h.i.+on should have anything to do with such matters, of course, can only be deprecated in the strongest terms, but there are phases, I suppose . . .'

The doctor's high spirits now flowed into a disquisition on recent trends in literary taste while John, whose cup of tea was now an unwanted enc.u.mbrance, began composing loudly in his mind a reply to E. Higgins Esq. that would tell him precisely what he should know.

. . . under no circ.u.mstances entrust the least of hopes . . . changeable whims . . . estrange you from your fellows . . . took from me my peace of mind, my native country, my wives . . .

It was still dark when Margaret awoke. She lay still for a moment, eyes open and dry, holding the upper edge of the bed clothes, discerning before she moved the soft grey outlines of her room.

The world is a room full of heavy furniture. Eventually you are allowed to leave.

She felt her own Silent Watcher lying there inside her.That was what she called it, the thing that watched it all happen, that wanted her to live and sometimes let that be known, but could do nothing about it. It observed only, from deep behind her eyes. It had watched her husband's wet eyes as they bore down on her and had watched that time he made her eat rotten meat, already blue and green and stinking, iridescent with decay. It had watched and remembered that, and watched when he locked her in the outhouse. And watched when she took to spending days in the parish church and liked the calm safety in there.

She raised herself out of bed and released a quiet flow into her chamber pot. She walked over to her basin of water and broke its frail covering of ice. She undid the strings at her neck and lifted off her night-gown. She stood then naked and unable to see herself in the gloom, her body a shadow that held her from the floor. She picked up cold water and dropped it over her head and neck. It fell on her like blades. She loved the winter, the purity of its punishment, and the purity of being awake before the rest, a single candle burning. Her husband had been always there, doubling her, filling the lucid emptiness, and he could never stand the cold, swearing and stamping, whacking the fire to a blaze with the poker, drinking, eating, laughing with his red mouth, and hot as a wasp's tail at night, alone, stinging, stinging.

She patted herself dry. Her skin was smooth and numb. She put her nightdress on again. Holding the table edge, she lowered herself onto her knees to pray. The small wooden cross was a certain black form against the grey bloom of the wall. She fixed her eyes on it. She began.

Matthew Allen lifted his head and looked out at the morning. Beyond the blue lawn the trees were there. Their fine twigs, at this distance, made a russet mist. He looked back down at his page of calculations.

They added up to something, and that was with a very modest number of predicted orders. He smiled. He looked up again and saw a fox trotting silently across the lawn, its low body slung from its spine, its narrow head angled to the ground. How light it was in its movements, and quick, all travel and purpose.

John woke in a rage, knowing exactly where he was. He rolled out of bed, thumping his bare feet on the floorboards. He relieved himself into his chamber pot, clearing his throat and spitting also through the froth. He shunted it back under the bed with his toe against the warm china.

He rubbed his face in cold water from the jug, rubbed away at the dream still smeared across his thoughts. A girl with dark, unruly hair. She had secrets to tell him that he would understand. Her eyes glittered. His p.e.n.i.s had stiffened as she brought her moist lips to his ear and whispered, words he could not now remember detonating softly inside his mind, urgent, full of meaning. Something to do with a place she could show him if he would just follow her. He'd wanted so much to know what she was saying that he'd woken up, tense, tumescent, straining to follow. He opened his eyes now so as not to see the intimate dark s.h.i.+ne of her eyes and feel her hair minutely touching him. He wetted down his own hair, then quickly dressed. Fully clothed, he sat back down on his bed.What could he do now? Where could he go? Just out. That would be enough. He had a key after all. He could wait in his room until after breakfast, cadge some bread from the kitchen girls, and head out and away.

William Stockdale finished polis.h.i.+ng his boots by stretching a rag over the toe, holding the rag at both ends, and working it back and forth with a rapid milking action. Then the other foot. He tightened the trouser straps that hooked under his shoes between heel and sole.

He refolded the rag and placed it back in the drawer.

He swung his arms around, pivoting his body left-right, right-left at the hips. He windmilled his arms over and over to fill them with blood, his hands feeling heavier, more useful, once he had finished.

He neatened his jacket, tugged at his sleeves. Unlike the inmates, he wore his clothes with precision, correctly fastened and at the proper angles to his body.

He picked up his heavy ring of keys and went out. He locked his door behind him.

Hannah sat in front of her mirror and brushed her hair. It hung in two drapes either side of a neat parting of white scalp that she thought too wide because of her hair's regrettable fineness. She brushed down from the top, fifty times on each side, until it was glossy and fluent, and, floating, followed her brush up as she lifted it away.When she was done the light set around it an even garland of s.h.i.+ne.

With adept quick fingers she divided it again and wove two plaits with their roots at her temples. She left them hanging there while she swept the rest back over her ears and pinned it, then rolled the length that hung down her back into a rope and pinned it to her crown.Then she looped the two plaits under her ears, pinning them behind so that her ears were framed: delicate, white, sculptural.

She regarded herself, wearing the careful expression she maintained before mirrors - her lips pressed together and lowered, her eyes looking appealingly upwards, her face devoid of movement. She turned this frozen face from side to side and looked. Good enough. Unlikely to be better. Today she would make something happen. The situation was clear: there he was; here she was. It simply needed to begin.

John heard the gate swing shut, its lock grinding round again, and swift footsteps behind him. He moved from the path and hid behind a wide, wet trunk. Chewing on the hunk of bread that he struggled to moisten with sufficient saliva to swallow, he saw the right-angled figure of William Stockdale set off on his way, presumably, to the mythically worse place, Leopard's Hill Lodge. John leaned. A damp twig cracked softly under his boot. William Stockdale stopped. John ducked his head and pressed himself against the cold slime of the tree trunk. Again a fragment of the same twig split under his weight. He heard William Stockdale walk back the way he'd gone. He must have caught sight of John because there were a few quicker paces that scuffed through the leaves, then a thump on John's shoulder. He was pulled from behind the tree, almost lifted like a cat by its loose collar of skin as Stockdale wrenched with a strong grip on John's coat.

'I have a key,' John said. 'I have a key.'

'Then why are you hiding, you fool?'

'Look. Look.' John pulled the key from his pocket, dangled it in front of Stockdale on its frayed string.

'So why are you hiding?'William Stockdale let him go and brushed at his own jacket.

'I don't know.'

'I thought you were someone trying to make an escape.'

'No, I'm not.'

'Well, then. Just playing the fool.' He patted him harshly on the cheek.

Stockdale strode away again and John bent down to pick up his bread, brus.h.i.+ng crumbs of broken leaf and earth from it and biting. He panted and cursed, struggling to swallow.

For hours as he walked, he re-enacted the incident with much more satisfying and violent conclusions. He could have unleashed his strength. He could have given Stockdale a lick of boxer John, and that would have shown him. Repeatedly Stockdale staggered away, apologetic and impressed, feeling his face, blinking at the blood on his fingertips. John was magnanimous, feeling that as long as the blackguard had learned his lesson, they would say no more about it. Or he didn't, and John carried on until the man lay knocked out on the ground, breathing through scarlet bubbles.

Alfred swirled the branches around him. His cape caught up behind him in the wind imparted the sensation almost of having wings. He pressed his steps down to the sides and his skates bore him over the ice with a fine sound of grinding stone. It broke up the thickness of his blood to move like this, to feel the sharp winterness of the day. Scribbling to himself, turning his patterns over his frozen pond, he could almost not think of Arthur, his dear, dead friend Arthur Hallam, who would not leave his thoughts.

As his revolve carried him round to the far side of the pond he was startled by a girl's shape dark against the tarnished silver of the sky. He slowed towards her. She stood quite still, above him on the bank. 'Good afternoon?' he asked.

His dark eyes, wind-polished, shone in the clayish yellow of his face. 'Good afternoon,' Hannah said.

'Yes?'

'I've come . . .'

'You're Allen's daughter, aren't you, the fair What-was-it? '

'. . . to pay you a visit. I've come to pay you a visit. In case . . .'

'I see. Do you have a message?'

'No. In case you are lonely.'

'I see. You've come to pay me a visit.'

'That's right.'

'And it is . . . ?'

'Hannah.'

'Hannah. Of course it is.'

Curious, he leaned forward precariously to get her face into focus. He saw her pale lips fluttering as she drew in a breath and backed ever so slightly away. 'You're cold,' he said. 'Shall we go in?'

She nodded.

'One moment.' He skated away to an easier point of exit. She walked around to meet him and silently offered a hand to help him out, but he didn't see it and hobbled up onto the gra.s.s unaided.Together they walked back to the house, Tennyson teetering over the girl, who wondered why he didn't think to unstrap his skates and walk comfortably in his boots, but said nothing. She walked beside him proudly at his careful slow pace, as though in a procession, and was only slightly distracted by the sweet-sharp human odour that came from his clothes. At the door he finally did remove his skates, bending down so that she could see the top of his head.Thick hair, actually thick hairs - a wide diameter to each hair - flowed from the crown in strong waves. A leaf fragment had somehow lodged in there. She wanted to tease it out with her fingers, but of course could not, nor could she say anything.

Tennyson opened the door and ushered her in. She entered looking hungrily at everything for signs of the remarkable life that was lived there, but found an ordinary vestibule - wallpaper, a table, a mirror. There on the antlers of the coatstand, however, hung his coats and that wide black hat. He twirled the cape from his shoulders and added it. With proper care, with gentle fingers that seemed unafraid as he touched her shoulders, he took her coat from her and draped it beside his own. 'Thank you,' she whispered.

His gentlemanly etiquette appeared variable: he now led the way, striding ahead rather than walking behind her quietly directing, and she had to hurry after. She was rewarded, though, when she followed him into a room that was most certainly inhabited by a poet. As he bent to the fire, positioning fresh logs with his hands so that afterwards he had to wipe s.m.u.ts and blown ash from them onto his trouser fronts, she looked around at a gracious, intellectual disorder. The piles of books and papers, the rumpled sofa and littered desk, the short-stemmed pipes that roosted on nests of ash and spent spills on ledges all around the room, showed this to be a working room, its objects gathered without thought of their effect. The room absolutely radiated from him, now stalking about its centre, thumping cus.h.i.+ons. It flowed from him, and visiting it without him there would have been like listening into his thoughts or hearing about him from his friends. And on the desk, in that big open ledger that looked like a butcher's book - could that be a new poem? Certainly the lines did not cross to the far side of the page. His handwriting. The charged page vibrated in her sight. A poem lived on it. If she could walk across and read those fresh words, seen by no one besides herself and the poet who chose them, they would sing through her mind. What sentiments might they express?

'Do take a seat,' he said, 'and I'll arrange some tea.' Having pulled the servants' bell, he sat down on the sofa opposite the seat on which she'd perched. He stretched his long legs in front of him, crossed at the ankles, and pushed his fingers through his hair, pa.s.sing tantalisingly beside but not finding the bit of vegetation she'd seen at the door.

'So, you're Dr Allen's daughter,' he repeated.

'Yes, I am.'

The door opened. A servant entered, a woman. An old woman, white-haired, raw-handed, ruddy streaks in her face from the cold day and the kitchen fire, she looked at them quickly and curtsied.

'Ah, Mrs Yates.'

Mrs Yates nodded her head slowly, looking across at her master and his young female guest. Hannah, shamed, stared down at her knees, plucked her skirt straight with brisk, matter-of-fact fingers, attempting an unconcerned composure. She hadn't thought of them being seen by anyone.

'Yes, as you see, we are entertaining this afternoon. So tea, please, and et cetera. Plenty of et cetera, if you'd be so good. Skating has sharpened the appet.i.te.'

'Very good, sir.'

Mrs Yates backed out of the room. Tennyson smiled at Hannah. He looked as if he were about to say something. Hannah sat with her head very erect, her neck stretched as long, as much like Annabella's as possible, and waited. But Tennyson didn't say anything. Instead, his gaze wandered to the fire. Fortunately Hannah had prepared some questions.

'How are you finding the area, Mr Tennyson?'

'Oh, very well.' He looked back at her. 'Pleasant enough.'

She blushed.'Have you visited Copt Hall?' she asked.