Peculiar Ground

‘When we encountered you yesterday we were carrying beribboned baskets, as though stepping out for our pleasure, in quest of spring flowers. We often do so. My cousin’s men are accustomed to seeing us bearing home primrose plants nestled in damp moss.

‘You, though, may have wondered what might have induced my mother to venture so far abroad. At the same hour on the previous day she had returned to Wood Manor, exhausted by the effort of sustaining her part in the funeral. Nonetheless she insisted on sallying out.

‘I had not intended to invite you to accompany us to the meeting-house, but my mother’s sudden weakness rendered your assistance most welcome.

‘I believe that you were amazed when you saw such a numerous congregation, and began to learn how such a gathering has come to be a regular occurrence in these woods.’

Here I resume the thread. Cecily is right. I was amazed.

When I awoke yesterday I had not slept easy. My night-time musings were delicious, but not restful.

The morning at my desk was unproductive. The house was sombre. Black cloth draped the looking-glasses, and hung in ugly festoons over the long windows. I continued, because I had not been ordered to desist, to plan for happier times. I was puzzling over the design for a stage al fresco.

My Lord, until fate smote him so cruelly, had been amusing himself with plans for masques and ballets to be performed on summer evenings in the fan-shaped hollow, so like an ancient amphitheatre, which closes the vista across the great lawn. He has asked me to consider it, and I took delight in the task. Narrow terraces, sustained by stone walls, will be planted in spring with rare tulips. In high summer the bulbs will be digged up, and mats laid down, with cushions upon them. My Lord’s friends, gorgeously dressed, will be ranged along the terraces like Chinese porcelain displayed upon ledges.

I was planning the pergola that will back the stage. My sketches are attractive, but I was vexed by some technical matters. More seriously, I felt uncertain for whom I laboured. Who now in this house thinks of plays and players? I asked a servant to bring me a bite to eat and, fortified with ale and cold mutton, I was glad to go forth into the park.

There I met the two ladies of Wood Manor. I cannot pretend that I had been unaware that I might intercept their walk, nor that that consideration had not been chief among my motives for walking out. (See how a lover’s bashfulness contorts my syntax.)

As I came upon them it was evident that Lady Harriet was fatigued. I took her basket from her and gave her my arm as far as a fallen oak that made an adequate, if scarcely luxurious, seat. I offered to return to the house to ask for conveyance home for them. But Lady Harriet insisted that she would soon be rested and would not disappoint ‘the brethren’.

To give the ladies time to recover themselves I explained what I have planned for the western end of the park, over which, from our makeshift seat, we enjoyed a fine prospect. I talked of groves of the balsamic poplar, whose myrrh will fill the park with celestial odours, and of the fallow deer (some dozen of whom were grazing in our eye-line) whom I would have banished for the protection of my stripling beeches, but on the retention of which Lord Woldingham has set his heart. He has even sent abroad for a pair of albinos in the hope of breeding a race of white harts. Animal, vegetable, mineral. He favours the first; I the second; Mr Rose the third. Despite his name, the architect thinks only of stone and of water.

The course of the wall (our triumvirate’s joint venture) in this quarter is now partially cleared. Where soon there will be a sturdy barrier there is now a vacancy, a strip of no-grass, no-brambles, no-bracken, no-trees. In my mind’s eye the wall is already handsomely there, its stone the colour of a breadcrust, its solidity giving definition to the park as a fine frame does to a picture. To the others, I suppose, the band of raw and rutted earth must have looked as shocking as a wound.

After some half an hour had gone by, Lady Harriet appeared restored. I offered to accompany them on their way. Cecily accepted. Despite what had passed between us, she treated me as formally as ever. When I pressed her hand, in assisting her, she turned away.

We crossed the wall’s foundations, traversed a part of the wooded periphery which the workmen have yet to reach and made our way downwards through dense, low-growing holly trees whose blackish foliage left the forest floor bare but for the skeletons of leaves, crisp and lacy as carvings done by midgets. We went silently, our feet sinking softly into mould. I had never come this way before. Of a sudden we stepped from our dim passage into brilliant light.

Across the glade rose a barn-like structure. Its roof was of thatch, its walls of wattle panels fixed to stout stone piers. Gathered before it was a company of about a hundred souls. Some I recognised. Before I could take in more of the scene my arms were grabbed and pulled behind me, and my wrists tied. I was hustled across the grass towards the great door of the building. My two companions watched this outrage serenely. I called out as I struggled, but they seemed absorbed in converse with those about them. It was as though they had led me deliberately into a trap.

My captors were middle-aged men, decently dressed. They spoke not a word to me. A boy, running backwards before me the better to jeer in my face, was as voluble as they were taciturn. The little lordling’s landskip limner. Porky pig the pug-dog. Verminous village vandal. Mr Long-nose. Mr Long-wall. Mr Long-wind. Windy wabbler.

It is true my nose is long, but not monstrously so. The allusions to pig and pug had more to do with the lad’s taste for alliteration than with my appearance.

The interior of the building was fitted up like a parliament, with benches facing each other to either side. I was led to the very centre and invited to sit on a low chest. My bindings were loosened, though not removed. I waited quietly – really I did not know how else to comport myself – while all those who had been standing about on the grass filed in. The majority of them looked like working people, some like desperate vagrants, but there were gentry as well. They seated themselves in orderly fashion, the men to one side, the women to the other. Cecily entered with Lady Harriet, and found seats on the front-most bench, so that, had I felt it fitting, I could have reached out and touched her hand. She looked steadily at me, and made a tiny shrug, as though seeing a reproach in my eye that I did indeed most heartily intend.

A gentleman passed between us, brushing awkwardly through the cramped passageway to assume a commanding position by a lectern directly in front of me. He asked me to rise, so that we two were posed like play-actors, visible to all eyes. There ensued this exchange.

He – You may be surprised, Mr Norris, to hear me say that we welcome you to our assembly. Your treatment at our hands has so far been rough. We pray you to forgive us. We have reasons to be suspicious of strangers.

I – I await your explanation, sir.

He – I must ask you first if you are one of the chosen.

I – If you mean by that, sir, am I one of those who believe God has singled them out for grace in this life and glory in the next, and who maintain – on no grounds other than their own conviction – that all others are to be damned to perpetual torment, then I must answer in the negative. I am not of that sect.

I think now it was pompous of me, and unmannerly, to reply so downrightly, but I was ruffled up by the man-handling to which I had been subjected.

He (laughing) – I thank you, sir, for your candour.

I – I am a Christian. I bear ever in mind Christ’s teaching regarding the love we owe to our neighbours. He was not particular as to the manner in which that neighbour might worship, or the minutiae of that neighbour’s conception of the Almighty. Nor am I. I have my own ideas, which I will keep private. I do my work. I make my living. I hope to be useful.

He – And virtuous, Mr Norris?

I – By my own lights. With whom do I speak?

He – We do not reveal our names here. It is a matter of courtesy as much as of security. We are under the King’s protection, as all his subjects are. Nonetheless, there are those who believe they are acting for the monarchy when they chase and torment us. Just as there are people in Lord Woldingham’s following who thought to please him by bullying one of our sisters.

I thought, Meg?

The man was suave. I supposed him to be some kind of a preacher, but nothing in his dress distinguished him as such.

He – You see that we have established a settlement here in the forest. Since the coming back of the King we have thought it prudent to remain here in seclusion. We are not hide-aways. Our presence is common knowledge in all the villages around. By keeping ourselves apart, though, we avoid provoking rancour. This hall, rough as it is, is our temple. Nature provides us with the materials for our dwellings, and with most of our food.

I – Why do you tell me all this?

He – Because you endanger our peaceable and harmless existence. I will explain. But first please join us in our worship.

My bonds were removed. I was led to a place opposite Cecily and her mother. The people rose to their feet as one. The small sounds of the forest, the rustlings and chirpings, the twitterings and flappings, came clearly to us through the open door. And then those sounds were progressively erased, rather as the goings-on of the world become muffled for one who is overcome by faintness. Something had taken over my auditory faculties. Time passed before I understood that that something was itself a sound.

A droning – wavering but insistent – not unlike that which emanates from a beehive in midsummer. Not melodious, not expressive; a kind of energy, the musical equivalent of the air that can be seen to pulse and shimmer above heated iron. I glanced to right and left. The rows of men stood intent, their lips loosely set. The sound surged and ebbed, surged and ebbed. I saw that a stocky man at the farthest end from the door was gesticulating discreetly, as though regulating its flow. I do not know exactly when I understood that the sound was human, that all the men around me were emitting sound as simply and powerfully as all day long we emit breath.

The hum became a rumble and then, as though borne on its powerful wave, an answering call, articulate this time, arose from the benches opposite as all the women lifted up their voices.

We are a garden walled around,

Chosen and made peculiar ground;

A little spot enclosed by grace

Out of the world’s wide wilderness.

Cecily and Lady Harriet were singing with the rest, though I could not distinguish their voices amidst the consort.

Like trees of myrrh and spice we stand,

Planted by God the Father’s hand;

And all His springs in Zion flow,

To make the young plantation grow.

I bowed my head. The Woldingham boy’s funeral did not touch me as I felt it ought, for all the beauty of Wychwood’s chapel with its curiously twisted ebony columns, and for all the skill of the musicians and the purity of the castrato’s voice. This woodland ceremony, though, moved me. The tears that had failed to fall before pricked at my eyelids. It was as though I grieved, not for a boy with whom I was barely acquainted, but for all that have been lost. So many, many dead in a lifetime of wars. My brother. The children that he might have begotten. The children whom I have not had.

Our Lord into His garden comes,

Well pleased to smell our poor perfumes,