Gates of Paradise (16 page)

‘Tomorrow?' Blake suggested.

Tomorrow it would be. They shook hands on it.

‘And now I must be off,' Blake said, ‘or I shall be late for Mr Hayley.'

That gentleman was already mounted and waiting for him, his handsome face pink with excitement, but instead of calling out that they must hurry or they would be late for their breakfast with Miss Poole, he waved his umbrella in the air and shouted, ‘Such happy news, my dear chap! You will be astounded. We have a new commission, my dear friend, and such a commission. I simply cannot wait to tell you of our good fortune. My dear Lady Hesketh has suggested to me that I write a biography of my dear friend William Cowper, who was her nephew, as I dare say you know. Such an honour, is it not? She will kindly provide me with any information I might require and I have persuaded her that you are the man to engrave the illustrations. Such an honour. It is a first rate commission and good will come of it, for Cowper was a truly magnificent poet and his life, however sad, will be worth the telling. I shall set to work at once, this very afternoon.'

Blake was crushed by the news. ‘I brought the engraving for your ballad of the horse,' he said. ‘Are we not to take it to Mr Seagrave this morning?'

‘Oh, that must wait,' his patron told him airily. ‘All other work must be set aside. This is far too important. We must not disappoint my dear Lady Hesketh. That would never do. She ain't a lady to endure disappointment. Well, come along then, my dear fellow, make haste. We've a deal to do today and the sooner we're about it, the better.'

William mounted his pony and gathered the reins ready for his long ride. The joy had gone out of the morning. There seemed to be no end to the work this man required him to do. But he couldn't refuse it. He had to earn a living, especially with a sister to entertain and a gardener to employ. Ah Jerusalem, he grieved, when will you ever see the light of day?

Out in the fields beyond the pound, the reapers were at work, scythes sweeping in unison, gathering their delayed harvest. They'd been hard at it since daylight, so they were glad to stop for a minute and take a sip of ale and wave to the two poets as they passed. ‘Mornin', Mr Hayley, sir. Mornin' Mr Blake.'

‘'Twill be a poor crop, I fear,' Mr Hayley said, pointing his umbrella at it, ‘but what of that. A poor crop is nothing compared to the great work we are about to undertake.'

Blake thought of his own and greater work that would now have to wait even longer thanks to this man's benevolent stupidity and he opened his mouth ready to say that a bad crop would mean
high prices and that many would starve in consequence. But Mr Hayley wasn't listening. He was riding ahead and in the full flow of his self-congratulation. ‘What joy it is to have such a commission!' he called. ‘Deserved, of course, for it was entirely due to my endeavour that the dear man was given his pension and I think I may safely say that I knew him better than any man living. And loved him dearly, of course. What a perfectly splendid morning we have for our ride to Lavant! Are we not the most fortunate of men?'

The harvest was bad that year, but contrary to Blake's expectations, it didn't put up the price of corn. That stayed low for the third year in succession. But there were reports of more bread riots in London, where leaflets were distributed claiming that the soldiers were taking bread from the very mouths of the poor, and the men who farmed in Sussex were miserably out of pocket. Rough weather in the Channel had kept Napoleon at bay but it had ruined the corn. ‘Seems we can't have peace an' a good crop together,' they said. ‘There's no justice in the world.'

That was William Blake's opinion too. He'd come back from his breakfast with Miss Poole in a towering temper. ‘Just, when I was prepared to illustrate a ballad a month for him and I'd made up my mind to it,' he complained to Catherine, ‘and bought the paper, what's more, which was a considerable expense to me, as he well knows, £30
being a much greater sum than I should have spent in any quarter. More than I should have spent in a year. However 'tis done now and complaint is useless. Though all the more reason to keep to our plans. But no, that is not the way Mr Hayley does business. Just at the very moment when all is prepared, when we were due to ride into Chichester and show my work to Mr Seagrave, what does he do? He decides to turn everything topsy-turvy so that he can write this life of Cowper. I try to be grateful for all the help he's given us but this last is insulting, insupportable.'

Catherine did her best to comfort him but his bad temper growled for days and that displeased his sister. ‘It's no good going on about it, William,' she said. ‘What's done is done. You earn good wages here.' And when her brother cast his eyes to heaven ‘Good enough to employ a gardener at any event, which is more than I ever could. I see he's in the vegetable patch again this morning. Be glad of your good fortune.'

‘Write to your brother James,' Catherine suggested. If he grumbled on paper his sister wouldn't hear it. ‘You owe him a letter and Catherine can deliver it when she goes back home.'

But William was in the grip of his old enemy, nervous fear, and knew that he couldn't trust himself to speak or write on personal matters without giving way to black fury. ‘I shall work on Cowper's portrait,' he said. ‘The sooner 'tis done, the better.'

It took him longer than he expected because the sketch Mr Hayley had given him to copy was small, poorly printed and difficult to interpret, but it was done at last and taken up to Turret House with considerable relief. The celebrated poet pronounced it ‘Capital!' and, after treating his ‘esteemed friend' to a reading of the latest chapter of his new work, he sent the drawing and the chapter to Lady Hesketh for her approbation. ‘She will be delighted,' he promised. ‘You can depend on't.'

He was wrong. Lady Hesketh was very far from being delighted. Lady Hesketh was
not pleased
. The chapter had ‘
omitted several matters of
extreme importance', which she corrected at length and with much underlining, but the drawing was worse. That sent her into a paroxysm of fury. ‘
The Sight of it has in
real truth
inspired me with such a degree of
horror,' she wrote, ‘
which I shall not recover from in haste! I cannot restrain my pen from declaring that I think it is
dreadful! Shocking!'

Both men were upset but they covered their feelings, each in his own way, Blake by silence, Hayley by declaring that the lady had right on her side. ‘She was his aunt – we must take that into our considerations – and her sensitivities are extreme, as you would expect of such a lady. I will amend the text as she suggests and you will undoubtedly wish to comply with her wishes in the matter of the drawing, will you not?'

‘The lady is a fiend,' William said, when he was back in his cottage and had recounted the whole
miserable episode to the two Catherines, ‘worse than Satan and Beelzebub put together. She bullies and berates us as if we were foolish children and she was a schoolmaster or a stern father. 'Twas a monstrous letter. I could see the chastening rod in her hands. This will prove worse than the portrait of Thomas Alphonso.'

But however much he might rage against her, the lady's instructions had to be carried out. The portrait was drawn three more times and rejected on every occasion. The rewritten chapters were criticised, yet again. It was painful work. And living with anger and anxiety made it worse.

There was altogether too much anxiety in Felpham that autumn, especially when moon and tide were propitious for an invasion. Even Jem Boniface took to watching the sea, and he was renowned as the most phlegmatic man in the village. Chichester was thronged with troopers; plans for the evacuation of women and children were circulated to all the churches; carts and horses specified to carry them away ‘in the event'; and to make matters worse, rain continued to clog the ditches and churn the trodden paths into quagmires, so that the sky seemed perpetually dark and every soul was cast into depression. It was quite the worst time to be courting.

Johnnie and Betsy made light of cold weather. They were young and strong and sure that a bit of rain never hurt anybody. They slipped away to their
haystack for as long as it was there to welcome them and even when it was really too damp and cold to be used as a love nest, and had been diminished to a mere mound of straw which offered them no cover at all. What did such difficulties matter? Love was an increasing delight and love was all they thought of. They were caught up in the magic of it, living from one rewarding moment to the next, taut with desire for hours and hours and then so drowsed with pleasure they could barely summon up enough energy to walk back to the house. Their bad start was soon so far behind them they'd forgotten all about it. Now it was all new pleasures, new sensations, new experiments. When they'd first made love, Betsy had been afraid that she would fall for a baby like Sarah Perkins and had told him so, but now he'd learnt a new trick that he assured her would prevent such a thing. It was a difficult trick and at first it wasn't easy, but soon he was playing it well, pleasuring her first before he fell away from her to groan into his own pleasure. Their working days crawled by, lightened by an occasional glimpse of one another and by the even more occasional chance to snatch a kiss as they passed in an empty corridor or found themselves alone together in an empty room.

But eventually it was plain that summer and autumn were over. The fields were swathed in such thick sea mist that Betsy shivered, even when she was wrapped in her red cloak, and as October shrank into November and all the leaves fell and the
first frosts of winter broke the ploughed earth into an easy tilth, and even the most pessimistic villager was prepared to allow that Boney wasn't going to invade that year, they too had to admit to an inescapable truth. It was much too cold to be courting out of doors. Soon they were miserable with chill weather and lack of lovemaking, feeling that they were doomed to celibacy until the spring came round.

‘Which aren't to be endured,' Betsy said, as the two of them walked in the rain-soaked garden at the end of their working day. ‘Oh, Johnnie, Johnnie, my dear, darlin' Johnnie, what are we a-goin' to do? We can't keep on like this, not nohow for I can't abide it. What are we a-goin' to do?'

‘I don't know,' Johnnie confessed, sighing into her hair. ‘Except get wed, I s'ppose.'

But Betsy Haynes hadn't changed her mind about the wedded state. After the luxury of life in a big house, marriage would be a bad exchange. Marriage made you poor and kept you tethered to a damp room in a dark cottage, wearing shoddy clothes and living on cabbage and bacon, with children to look after. Much better go on as they were. ‘I don't see why we should,' she said. ‘Time enough when we has to.'

‘Least we'd have a bed of our own,' Johnnie said. ‘That'd be somethin'.' Even the thought of being in a bed with her was making him yearn most painfully.

‘We got beds of our own
now
,' she pointed out,
‘onny we aren't allowed to sleep in 'em together.'

‘Which we couldn't, could we,' he said, trying to be reasonable, ‘not when you're in with Nan and Susie and I got Robert alongside a' me. They
would
have somethin' to say if we was to go climbing in together. P'rhaps we
should
get wed. I'm willin' if you are.'

But she was sure that marriage wasn't the answer, however often and however lovingly he might offer it, and as their celibacy continued, she said so over and over again. ‘We can't Johnnie. What would we live on?'

That was a serious problem, for as a married couple they would have to manage on whatever wages they could earn and provide their own food and rent, to say nothing of work-clothes and boots and such, and even if he went on working for Mr Hayley and was fed and clothed, what would become of her? A gardener's wage wouldn't keep a wife. ‘I could take a job on one a' the farms,' he said, rather sadly, because he'd never wanted to be a labourer. ‘That'ud give us a cottage which'ud be something. Father'd find a place for me I daresay.'

‘No,' she said, ‘you mustn't. It aren't right. Leave that to them as likes it.'

‘No one likes it,' he told her. ‘They does it on account of they has to. ‘Cept ol' Reuben, with those pigs of his'n.'

‘
And binding with briars my joys and desires
,' she quoted bitterly.

‘What?'

‘'Tis that poem I read. The one Mr Blake wrote. The one I told you ‘bout. He don't reckon to keepin' lovers apart. He says love is right and proper an' should be allowed. He's a good man. I wager if we was
his
servants he'd let us sleep together. He'd give us the bed for it.'

Johnnie scowled. Poetry was a nonsense at the best of times and at this particular time it was just plain annoying. ‘But we aren't his servants,' he said, crossly, ‘so there's no point a-thinkin' about it. We works for Mr Hayley an' there's an end to it.'

‘So what are we a-goin' to do?'

There was no answer. They were going round and round over the same hard ground, exhausting themselves and getting nowhere, like dogs in a treadmill. And as one frustrating day followed another, they began to quarrel.

‘Don' keep on a-sayin' such things,' they shouted at one another. ‘What's the good of it?' ‘'Tis allus the same. It makes me fair sick to hear it.'

Finally on one dank, dark evening in early December, when they were walking pointlessly round the grounds, feeling cold and dispirited and unhappy, he lost his temper with her altogether and shouted at her that if she couldn't find anything sensible to say she'd be better to keep her mouth shut.

She was mortally upset. ‘How can you speak to me so?' she cried. ‘I thought you was s'pposed to love me.'