Charles Palliser (7 page)

“What sort of books will he have chosen, do you think?”

“Well,” she answered, “because he has been a little unwell, he had to ask another gentleman we both know, Mr Sancious, to choose them.”

We passed the pond into which the stream drained, and at the end of the Green reached the bridge where the road forked. The left-hand road ran round the village in a large circle and was the way we always went, but the other went up Gallow-tree-hill towards the turnpike and we had never taken that road.

“Please let’s go up the hill.”

“You’ve been told over and over again that there is no gallows there now.”

That was true, but I could not believe that there could be nothing at all to see: “I don’t care about that. But you know what I want to see.”

“Oh very well, we’ll go a little way up it but not as far as the turnpike.”

To begin with the road was a deep, narrow lane between a high wall on our left and overgrown hedges on the other side so that it was impossible to see anything as we walked. Once we had to flatten ourselves against the wall as a great cart came rumbling down the hill towards us bouncing over the stones embedded in the surface of the road.

Further on, the wall on our left was broken down so low in places that we could see through it the rich, rolling green slopes of the valley decorated with occasional trees.

“I believe I can see something shining,” I exclaimed. “Do you think it can be a lake?”

“Those are the park-woods of a great estate,” my mother said softly.

“I can see deer!” I cried.

“Yes, they preserve game.” As we walked on she added: “And that reminds me, Johnnie, you must never ask Sukey about her father. It would cause her great pain. I will explain it to you when you’re older.”

I was hardly listening for the turnpike must soon be in sight. At intervals I jumped up to try to see over the high hedgerows, and once as I did so I caught a glimpse of the top of a big waggon up ahead of us at a right-angle

A WISE CHILD

27

to the way we were coming. A little further on I could see, without having to jump, the high bales of straw it was carrying and a man perched on top, but I could not see the driver or the horses so that the man seemed to be sailing magically over the tops of the hedges like the boy in the
Arabian Tales,
and moving surprisingly rapidly for so large a vehicle — certainly faster than I could walk. Excitedly I turned back and shouted: “It must be on the turnpike!”

“We must turn back now,” she said.

“Just a little further,” I begged.

“No. It’s turning bad and I believe it’s going to rain.”

It was true that the blue sky was darkening a little in the east, but in the west the sun was still shining.

She reached towards me but I ran off and up the hill. As the slope flattened towards the summit, the lane grew wider and then turned into a muddy delta-mouth with the ruts of cart-tracks radiating out from it to the left and right. Then suddenly I was upon the road itself: a wide, perfectly flat, stony strip extending in both directions, sometimes vanishing for a few yards in a hollow of the ridge’s summit but appearing again inexorably, until it disappeared from view at a distance of two or three miles in either direction. I scuffed at it with my foot, and only managed to dislodge a few small stones, for the surface was of a hard, tarred kind I had never seen before which was covered all over with gravel. Beside the turning there was a milestone bearing the legend: “L: CLIX”, and I knew now what city the “L” stood for.

It was late afternoon and the sky was beginning to change to a darker blue as a cool wind began to blow. I looked down towards the village which seemed very far away and very small and tried to make out which roof-top was ours. I turned in the other direction towards the park and I now saw that there was an entrance a few yards away that gave directly onto the turnpike. It had high pillars on either side, each surmounted by a stone globe, and its great gate was standing open.

At that moment my mother came up with me, panting hard, and seized my shoulder:

“You
are
wicked. Bissett is right.”

“Oh now that we’re here, do let’s wait and see if a stage-coach comes!” I cried.

Before my mother could answer, a carriage and pair emerged from the entrance. The equipage was of a magnificence that I had never seen equalled even in the days when the Rose and Crab had still put up travellers. It was a brightly-varnished canary-yellow landau with a splendidly-attired coachman on the box and drawn by two superb matching greys. But what particularly caught my attention were the arms emblazoned in the pannels.

The carriage turned towards us and I noticed my mother suddenly grow pale. As it came rumbling past us it seemed to me that it slowed down for I had time to take notice of the two figures inside who, as it appeared, leaned forward to the window and stared out at us.

The occupants were an old gentleman and a boy some years older than I. The gentleman was on our side of the carriage and I saw him clearly. He had scanty grey hair receding from a high-domed forehead that was disfigured, as was his face, by large blotchy patches that made me think of the brownish bodies of spiders. He had a long jaw that jutted out and over which his lower lip hung down. But most striking of all were his eyes which were red and deep-sunken with dark folds of wrinkled skin beneath them. As the carriage passed, his head seemed to turn as if riveted on my 28

THE HUFFAMS

mother’s face, and she, equally, turned as if unable to resist returning that sinister gaze.

“I knew we shouldn’t have come here,” she muttered when the carriage had passed us. “Oh Johnnie, what have you done? Come, we must go back immediately.”

She set off the way we had come and now I had to run to catch her up.

“Who was that old gentleman,” I asked her. “Did you know him?”

“Don’t ask me any questions, please, Johnnie,” she suddenly exclaimed. “You’ve already been very bad indeed.”

As we walked swiftly home almost in silence, I was thinking about something I dared not ask her: I had noticed that the shield emblazoned on the carriage-door was divided diagonally into two halves. One of them contained a crab, vividly portrayed with its numerous legs emerging from the shell and its ugly pincers at its head — so I was surely right about the Rose and Crab! But what had particularly struck me was the other half of the shield which contained exactly the arrangement of five four-petalled roses that I had seen only the day before on the silver letter-case.

When we got home I was surprised to discover that in our absence the carpenter and blacksmith, summoned by Bissett on my mother’s instructions, had been hard at work.

Both the front and back doors now had stronger bolts, and all the windows that could be reached from the ground had bars across them. Even the back-gate from the garden was now spiked and had a padlock. There was more to come for the next day the men would return and top the garden-wall and the gate with metal spikes. Moreover, my mother insisted that from now on the servants should ensure that the back-door was bolted at dusk and the garden-gate padlocked.

My attention was deflected from this, however, by the discovery that a large parcel had been delivered by the carrier. Although my mother tried to insist that I should not open it until I had finished tea, I made such a fuss that she at last agreed to let me unwrap it immediately. To my delight, it contained a box of about twenty horn-books which were illustrated by beautiful wood-cuts, many of them coloured.

“Oh do let’s start straight away,” I cried as I opened one after another in delight.

“Very well, but first I must answer Uncle Marty’s letter and thank him for advising Mr Sancious so well,” my mother said, and went out of the room.

A moment later I heard a cry of alarm, and she came hurrying back into the sitting-room.

“My father’s letter-case is gone!” she cried.

We started to search every conceivable place, summoning Bissett, Mrs Belflower and Sukey to help us. Eventually we had to concede that it was not to be found.

“He must have took it, ma’am,” said Bissett, not needing to be more specific.

“I suppose so,” said my mother. And then, as if to herself, she murmured: “I would rather he had taken almost anything but that.”

I looked at her in surprise and said: “Was it worth so much?”

“Why, Master Johnnie,” Bissett exclaimed, “it was silver!”

My mother, however, merely shook her head sorrowfully.

“And Mr Emeris,” Bissett confided when the other two had left the room, A WISE CHILD

29

“come round while you was out to say as how Mr Limbrick swore on his solemn oath as that tool ain’t nothin’ to do with Job nor with slatin’ neither.” She shook her head:

“The sinfulness o’ folks sometimes beggars believing.”

“I never believed Job did it,” my mother said. “Nor that Mrs Belflower recognised him.”

Bissett, however, remained convinced that Job had been involved, and would not be satisfied until she had carried her point.

The arrival of the parcel of books from London initiated a new era of my life. Every morning, after breakfast, my mother and I would sit on opposite sides of the table in the sitting-room, she with some work on her lap and a primer propped open before her from which she would read me my lessons, and I listening to her or else crouched over my slate or cyphering-book with my tongue between my teeth as I frowned in concentration over the letters I was forming or the sum I was trying to work out.

Although my mathematical studies made slow progress under my mother’s tuition, I greatly enjoyed being read to and persevered in learning to read for myself.

Even before I could make out the meaning of the letters, I was fascinated by the appearance of books — their illustrations and design. Above all, I was intrigued by heraldry and maps, especially the latter of which there were many examples in the house

— and in particular one huge vellum example portraying the land around Hougham and dated to nearly a hundred years ago which I used to study for hours. (Mysteriously, it bore in one corner in an ancient hand Uncle Martin’s name — “Fortisquince”.) Because of this interest of mine, my mother arranged for Uncle Martin to send me a map of London and so one day a huge parcel arrived: a vast and fascinatingly detailed map which had been published in twenty-two enormous sheets just the year after I was born.

I pored over it for hours, marvelling at the vastness of London. It became a city of the imagination to me rather than a real place, and my desire to read the hundreds of street-names spurred me on to learn my letters. Soon I devoured DeFoe’s
Journal of the
Plague Year
and Strype’s edition of Stow’s
Survey of London
and followed them on the map, fascinated by the changes I could discern taking place between the different periods. By this means I came to “know” the metropolis and believed I could find my way around at least its central districts.

I suppose I became what is called a queer child. I remember looking out of window at night and thinking how strange it all was, that the trees were just there and the houses, and the stars and the moon above them, and strangest of all that I was there and studying them. I knew God was looking down at me for Bissett and my mother had told me so.

My nurse had told me how if I was good I would go to Heaven for ever and ever and if I was bad I would go to Hell. Once as I lay in bed I tried to imagine “for ever and ever”. I perceived a vast gulph into which I was falling and falling and falling for it had no bottom to it, and the imagination of it made my hair prickle and my heart began to pound for everything I knew — my mother, my nurse, the village — became 30 THE

HUFFAMS

tiny and meaningless and far-away as I plunged on and on into this endless crevice —

until at last I was able to force myself to think of something else.

I was terrified — as I suppose all children are — of things being random and arbitrary.

I wanted everything to have a purpose, to be part of a pattern. It seemed to me that if I behaved unjustly I denied the pattern and by creating something ugly and meaningless, forfeited the right to judge that something unjust had been perpetrated against myself and, even more important, the right to expect that there was any justice or design in the world. I wanted my life to involve the gradual unfolding of a design, and whether I have been successful in this remains to be discovered.

Once I had learned to read, books became a great source of pleasure to me. In the histories and romances that I devoured — lying for hour after hour on the floor of the sitting-room with the light of the window falling over my shoulder — I found a kind of freedom and a richness of experience that I missed in the confined circumstances of my life. And if at times I grew tired of this, then for a diversion I would look out of the great window and watch the villagers pass the house. There went James Fettiplace, the surgeon’s assistant, and then Mr Passant, the post-master, with his little girl. And there in the rain balancing on her pattens was Miss Meadowcroft. And now that it was a sunny day here came the Yallop boys — the sons of the village’s general chandler — with the young curate who tutored them. The adults rarely looked at the house, but the children occasionally did so and it seemed to me that they often smiled and laughed as they glanced towards us. I had spoken to none of these people but their lives intrigued me and I made up stories about them — that Mr Yallop had run away to sea when he was a boy and made a fortune and married Mrs Yallop by elopement. And the curate was a wealthy duke in disguise who had come to the village in order to woo Miss Lætitia Meadowcroft, the Rector’s daughter. I asked Mrs Belflower and Sukey about them and what they told me seemed duller and yet in a way stranger than my inventions.

As the months passed and a year went by and then another, and I became bored with spinning my top and trundling my hoop around the terraced grass-plats, I chafed increasingly at my confinement to the house and garden. I might remark, incidentally, that I never saw the mole-spade in Mr Pimlott’s possession again. (And this confirmed my suspicion that he had lent it to the tramper to effect his entry.) Neither did I ever venture back into the Wilderness, at first through fear but then it was something else that restrained me — a superstitious desire, I think, to leave something unexplored, to have something that I feared as dangerous and yet knew I could face up to and find to be safe after all.