Peculiar Ground Page 5

  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.

  ‘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 me
eting-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 eyeline) 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 oursel
ves 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,