Peculiar Ground

He was looking past Meg as though she were of no account. She slapped his face. I was astonished to see him flinch like a chastened scholar. When last I had heard of her, she was lying insensible. Now she was articulate.

‘One boy dead, and you bullying another,’ she said. She tied her shawl crosswise over her chest and returned to my side. She lifted from the ground, not a stone, but a sphere of solid wood, finely turned, about the bigness of an apple and painted blue.

‘The gentlemen give him farthings to find their balls for them, and fling them back,’ she said, addressing me as though we were old acquaintances. ‘That a child should have to pick up toys for grown men!’ There were iron hoops set here and there about the lawn, and mallets propped against a bench.

I sat, then stood. I said to the boy, ‘Men are not rabbits, to be shied at.’ He looked up at me through his hair and I had a shock. His face was that of Lord Woldingham’s deceased son.

Mr Rose approached, stroking the round hat he had retrieved from a bramble. He shook his head at Meg and came to inspect my injury. The damage to my stockings was greater than that to my person. ‘You’ll do,’ he said. He bent and murmured to Meg, and passed on up towards the house.

I turned to the old woman and addressed her formally. ‘Mistress Leafield,’ I said, ‘I have wondered about you. This mishap has at least had the advantage of making us known to each other.’

We hobbled together, I leaning on her shoulder, to a stone bench. There, with Lupin and the boy growling at each other on the ground beneath us, she explained herself, and other things beside.

She was playmate to Lady Harriet, and to my Lord’s father, when they were all infants, because she was their wet-nurse’s child. She stayed with Lady Harriet, studying alongside her. ‘My Lady is an artist,’ she said. ‘You have seen it. The rich don’t honour silk-workers as they do paint-workers, but artists know their own. Mr Rose has the greatest respect for her. He brings the woodcarvers and plasterers to Wood Manor, and urges them to emulate her designs. I, though, was the better scholar.’

I had thought her ignorant and mute. How often in these past few days have I had to repent of a hasty judgement.

‘I learnt mathematics indoors,’ she said, ‘of my Lady’s governor. I learnt physic in the wood, taught by fairies.’ She looked carefully at me with small lashless eyes. I betrayed no scepticism, nor any inclination to burn her alive. ‘You are phlegmatic, Mr Norris,’ she said.

‘I am readier to learn than to condemn.’

The fairies, she explained, came to her not as weird visions, but speaking across aeons of time through the stories preserved and cherished by the people of the locality. From them, and from her own experiments, she had found out ways of using plants as remedies and preservatives. She had discovered that she had the gift of calming the frantic with incantations. She knew how to alleviate pain with simples. ‘There are some agonies which are too piercing for anyone to suffer them and live,’ she said. ‘I can help the sufferer to escape the pain by trauncing, by passing over temporarily into the place of death. There are some who do not return, and I have been blamed for that, but I do not doubt they were grateful to me.’

A silence fell. Perhaps she expected remonstrance. I waited for her to continue.

‘Lady Woldingham is in a grievous state,’ she said. ‘I can help her. Or rather this boy can.’

‘He is your grandson?’ I asked.

She looked taken aback, as though I had displayed extraordinary ignorance. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, not mine.’

Mr Rose came back down the steps.

Meg called the boy to her. They went hurriedly away through the little bushes.

‘You are shaken up,’ said Rose. ‘Here, take my arm.’ I was glad to do so. It is true that I felt atremble. My face in the looking-glass was like porridge, lumpen and grey. I went to my room and slept an hour or two, as babies do when they have been dropped.

My habits are regular and somewhat ascetic. I rise early, and go punctually to my rest. It is unusual for me to be abed in daylight. Perhaps that is why I had such visions in my sleep. I seemed to be lapped around in a mist in which all colours were present, glimmeringly pale. I was swirled as in mother-of-pearl liquefied. I had no weight. Nothing grated upon me or pinched me. ‘Comfort’ is a state we do not prize enough. It is not so sharp as joy, or so exalted as rapture. But in my sleeping state I felt how delicious it is to be warm, to be wrapped in softness, to feel clean and smooth as milk, to be caressed by things silken and delicate. I rolled as in a heavenly cloud, freed of the dizziness one might feel if truly suspended in air, freed of the downward pressure that makes our flesh a burden to us. I was as jocund as the cherubs on my Lord’s painted ceilings.

The delight, intensifying, awoke me. My knee was aching. The pearly flood in which I had revelled had dwindled to a patch of slime on my sheet. My celestial tumblings had had an all-too-earthly outcome. I am glad that I had not seen Cecily as I dreamt.

I went downstairs to find a lugubrious silence. It is late. I asked for some supper to be brought to my room. I sit now to write in a state curiously suspended between contentment and anxiety.

I think about that boy. I wonder how Meg means to use him for the consolation of the bereaved mother.

*

Walking in the park, I met Cecily Rivers. I showed her the secret garden I am making in the woods for Lady Woldingham. We passed a remarkable few hours. I think it has not, to ordinary observers, been a bright day, but as I view it now, in retrospect, it dazzles me.

The mother of Ishmael told the angel that her name for the divinity was Thou-God-Seest-Me. To be seen, is that not what we crave? An infant reared by loving parents is cosseted by the vigilance of mother or nurse. Fond eyes dote upon its tiny fingernails, the gossamer wisps of its hair. Once grown, though, we fade from sight. We merge with the crowd of our fellows, all jostling for notice, all straining to catch fortune’s eye. To believe, as many do, that God has us perpetually under surveillance must be a very great consolation for our fellow-men’s neglect.

It is years, now, since I have felt myself held in the beam of a kindly gaze. Today, though, Cecily looked at me. She spoke to me. She touched my sleeve and laughed at me. She carried herself towards me not as though I was Norris the fee’d calculator of areas and angles; not as though I was the desiccated fellow politely withdrawing when the company dissolves into its pleasures; not as though I were a kind of gelding, neutered by misfortune and hard work. Thou-Cecily-Seest-Me. She sees me industrious, and full of energy. She sees me bashful, and considers it a grace. She sees that my eyes and hair are brown and my fingers long. She sees that I am a young man, and proud. She sees me not as a paving to be stepped on uncaring, but as a path to be followed joyfully. How do I know all this? Not by words.

I have been startled by her seeing. I have felt the carapace, in which I have lived like a tortoise in its shell, crack and fall away from me.

She did not have to reveal herself to me. She was already admirable in my sight.

What passed between us today is not as yet for writing down. Unshelled, I shudder with happiness, and I am afraid.

*

What I call the ‘secret’ garden is no such thing. How could it be, given that it has been dug and planted not by elves, but by men? It is, however, well secluded.

It was my Lord’s fancy to make his wife a place where she could walk unregarded. He promised it to her while they were still in London. ‘I will refrain,’ he told her, ‘even from looking at the plans. This will be as private to you as your closet. I hereby swear – with Carisbrooke and Mr Norris as my witnesses – that, except in some extraordinary emergency, I will never set foot within its bounds.’ Carisbrooke is a grey and red parrot whom my Lord’s father kept in the castle of that name, when he was there with the late King. It is much given to screeching.

Lady Woldingham, who does not share his mania for privacy, made a pretty speech as to how her husband would always be welcome, wheresoever she might be. He waved it aside. We were in the drawing room of their great house on the Strand. Through the windows we could see the sluggish river-water, the woods on the south bank and, near to, the garden through which servants were carrying barrels up from the landing stage towards the low-arched kitchen entrance.

‘See there,’ said my Lord. ‘This garden is a thoroughfare. How can you muse on the beauties of creation, when you are likely to be knocked aside by some stout fellow lugging a tub of molasses?’

He had then been only a few weeks back in his family’s home and he was full of fidgets. For many of those returned with the King, London felt full of hostile eyes. I think one of the reasons he summoned me so frequently was that it comforted him to think that as soon as his presence at court could be dispensed with he would remove to Oxfordshire; to the Eden I was to create for him there. London is too historied. The park at Wychwood seemed, in his imagination, as unsullied by humanity as the first settlers imagined the Americas to be.

The secret garden became my pet project, my hobby-horse. When the complexities of the great park bewildered me, when I could struggle no more with the awkward geometry of its slopes and hollows, with the inconvenient patches of infertile ground, whether boggy or parched, which threatened to interrupt my lines of planting, then I would pull out the portfolio in which the secret garden’s plans were stored. I have heard of an architect, who when at work on a palace, built himself a flimsy house of cards for his recreation. So I, worn out by the consideration of trenches and drains, would play at designing this sylvan enclave, barely the size of a tennis court. Surrounded by woodland trees, it would show like a fairy’s bower. There would be a pond, fed by a stream, and paved walks on which my Lady could tread with ease. The plants would be chosen for their fragrance, and for the daintiness of their blooms. My Lady is small. I had sometimes to remind myself that she is nonetheless a grown woman, as I found myself designing a garden in miniature, a plot as pretty as a Persian rug on which a child could play among tiny tufted flowers.

There I was today with Cecily. There my life swung around, as a shutter upon a hinge.

*

The boy’s funeral took place this morning. Afterwards, I was abroad until late. When I returned to the great house, I found it a peopled darkness. My Lord and Lady kept to their rooms. The paucity of candles signified mourning, but the sumptuously dressed people still thronging the state rooms talked with an animation that shocked me. I am not censorious of elegancies of appearance – such frivolities are too slight to merit moralising upon them. But there is something brazen about the contrast between the blackness of mourning garb and the vanity of adorning the dreary cloth with black lace and glinting jet, or of wearing an inky bodice cut low as that of a courtesan out to snaffle herself a king.

The funeral feast was still upon the table, and a cabal of ancient gentlemen sat over it, exchanging lugubrious reminiscences as the wine went round. I profited by the strange disruptedness of the household, to dine informally, setting myself alongside this chorus of old vultures, and accepting a dish of venison brought to me by a footman who seemed quite done in by weeping. His bleary eyes and puffed face hauled my mind back to the scenes of the morning. The children gazing at their brother’s catafalque, their faces grey as though they saw it seethe with worms. The rector, his surplice probably unworn since the late Lord Woldingham went out, fumbling with a ring that had snarled itself in the redundant flurry of lace about his wrists. My Lady swaying like an ill-propped effigy. Choirboys with censers sending up fumes of music and incense together. An awful ache in the throat, as though to draw breath in that gilded chapel were to risk suffocation.

*

I have reached the sanctuary of my room at last, much torn about and bewildered. I will not write more tonight. I have been detained by events that have so puzzled me I am not yet ready to set them down. I have been abominably ill-treated. I am half-minded to depart this place tomorrow.

*

This morning a maid brought me a letter from Cecily. She has asked me to destroy it, but first I will make a digest of it in this journal, which I believe is secure. No one in this household has any wish to delve into the secret thoughts of Norris the landskip man.

I have been culpably ignorant of the community in which I temporarily dwell.

We have all become accustomed to suppressing our curiosity. Just as among felons in a gaol it is held to be discourteous to enquire for what heinous deed one’s companion is condemned, so we citizens of this unhappy country have learnt to close our eyes and ears to the vexed histories of our fellows.

We do so at peril to our humanity. To be inquisitive may be dangerous, but to be wilfully blind is cruel. I had no inkling, before, of the consequences to humankind of the grand schemes my Lord and I have been elaborating.

Cecily’s prologue can be rendered in brief. She makes no allusion to what transpired between us in the secret garden. Instead she apologises for having involved me in matters that may prove troublesome. She regrets her failure to confide in me earlier. She explains that our fortuitous meeting yesterday, and its sequel, have taken me so far into a tangle of secrets that she feels it is her duty to help me understand them. Here I stand back. Let her continue in her own words.

‘My mother and I are of the dissenting party. There. You already deduced as much. For all that I know, you may be of our mind. Or perhaps you find us stiff-necked and perverse. I think, though, that you would not do us unnecessary harm.