Gates of Paradise (29 page)

So a letter was composed and because it would hardly be possible to ask for gossip about the army unless there was very good cause, he wrote a full account of what had happened, saying he was ‘in a bustle to defend himself' and finishing with the hope that Mr Butts might be in a position to ‘learn
somewhat' about Private Scolfield. At this point he remembered that in his last letter to his old friend he had said some extremely uncharitable things about Mr Hayley, and now he was ashamed to have done such a thing, and begged ‘burn what I have peevishly written about any friend' adding ‘I have been very much degraded & injuriously treated, but if it all arise from my own fault, I ought to blame myself.

Oh why was I born with a different face
?

Why was I not born like the rest of my race
?

When I look each one starts! When I speak, I offend;

Then I'm silent & passive & lose every friend
.

When the letter was written he took it through into the kitchen so that Catherine could see it. But to his distress she was sitting beside the grate, white-faced and weeping. She had found Private Scolfield's deposition and knew that she was being accused too. ‘What are we to do?' she cried. ‘They will hang us both.'

Now it was his turn to try to comfort and his turn to fail. She wept for a very long time. They'd had nothing but ill fortune ever since they came to this place. ‘You cannot deny it.' He'd been given work to do that was an insult to his talents. He'd had no time for his own work, which was better in every way than the poetry he was required to illustrate. His great epic was unwritten. He'd laboured day and night and all for what? She wished they'd never come, she did indeed. The
cottage was damp, even in the summer. It had made them both ill.

‘The lease is up in three weeks' time,' Blake pointed out, ‘and then we will go back to London, as we intended, and you will have better health.'

But she was stuck fast in her fears like a bird in lime. ‘What if they put us in prison?' she wept. ‘We could die there and never see one another again. Oh, my dear William, what are we to do?'

‘We will fight,' he said. Her weakness had made fighting not just possible but imperative. ‘We will fight and we will win. I will write my memorandum and refute all these charges with all my strength. I will not allow them to send you to prison. I will send my letter and then I will go to The Fox and see Mr Grinder and make a list of all the people who saw what happened and then I will visit them all and ask them to witness for us. You must not despair.'

Mr Grinder was busy but helpful. ‘Betsy Haynes is the one you want,' he said. ‘She's been makin' a list. Could be just what you want. I'll send her across to you as soon as she comes in.'

She and Johnnie arrived the next morning, she with an empty jug in her hand, he with a list of all the witnesses. Blake was touched by how many there were and how clearly they had made their feelings known.

‘You see what good neighbours we have, my love,' he said to Catherine. ‘They do not desert us in our hour of need. I will name them all in my
memorandum and then the judges will understand that the charge has been trumped up and should be dismissed out of hand.'

He took great pains with his statement, making sure that he named all the people on the list ‘so that we may not have any witnesses brought against us that were not there' and offering all the relevant facts. ‘The soldier's Comrade swore before the magistrate, while I was present,' he wrote, ‘that he heard me utter seditious words, at the Stable Door, and in particular Said that he heard me D—n the K—g. Now I have all the persons who were present at the Stable Door to witness that no Word relating to Seditious Subjects was uttered, either by one party or the other, and they are ready, on their Oaths, to Say that I did not utter such words.' And he finished with a flourish, ‘If such a perjury as this can take effect, any Villain in future may come & drag me and my Wife out of our Home & beat us in the Garden, or use us as he pleases, or is able, & afterwards go and Swear our Lives away.'

Two weeks later the chaise arrived to be loaded with their printing press and their sixteen heavy boxes and carry them back to London. They had arrived by moonlight with only Mr Grinder, Will Smith and the potboys to welcome them, they left in sunlight with half the village gathered at their door to wave them goodbye. ‘Write and let us know how you get on,' Betsy said to Catherine, ‘and when you're to appear in Petworth.' And added, with sober truth, ‘I shall miss you.'

Felpham village seemed oddly empty after the Blakes had gone, closed down and denuded of colour as though winter had arrived prematurely. To Betsy's clear eyes, the cottage seemed to have shrunk and grown cold without them. She missed the sound of their voices, the wood-smoke rising from the chimneys, the yellow light shining from that familiar western window. Now the windows were empty and the thatch forlorn and a film of dust dulled the doorstep.

Three weeks after the Blakes left, the troopers were recalled to Chichester. The last high tide had passed without invasion, autumn was well and obviously on the way and there was no likelihood of another attempt until the spring. In the emptied streets and quiet farms, the villagers went about their now wintry business in their age-old way. Thatchers patched as many roofs as needed their attention, barns were checked and mended, fodder laid in, vegetable gardens dug over, the last apples and quinces picked and stored, pigs slaughtered and non-laying hens killed for the pot, firewood stacked high in the outhouses and sea-coal delivered by the ton to those who could afford its luxury. The village air prickled with the scent of many bonfires, wild geese honked their V-shaped formations towards
the salt flats in Pagham, a grey sea rolled inexorably into shore and the beach was scattered with the debris of the autumn tides, lengths of frayed rope, torn nets and driftwood, the white bones of dead cuttlefish and the black shreds of dead seaweed. It was a time for tidying up and winding down. A melancholy time. And nobody felt the melancholy more acutely than Johnnie Boniface.

While he and Betsy had been busy collecting names for their list and visiting their neighbours to persuade them to give evidence, he had been so happily occupied that he'd given little thought to the fact that his love affair was still in abeyance and showed no signs of being resumed. Now with only digging and repairs to keep him busy, his mind returned to its summer-time frustration. He still contrived to be in The Fox when Betsy arrived with Miss Pearce's jug and sometimes she allowed him to carry it back to the house for her, and on rare, rare occasions she even allowed a kiss or two, and he still made a point of strolling down to her mother's house on her afternoon off to talk to her there, but nothing he said or did could persuade her that they should be lovers again.

There was a weary sadness about her that hurt him more than a quarrel would have done. ‘If we starts that up,' she said, ‘'twill onny lead to trouble. We'll want to be on our own together, you know we will, an' where would we go? Tha's nearly winter an' there's no stable for us now nor like to be.'

‘We could ha' been on our own together all
summer,' he said, rather crossly. ‘There was plenty a' places then onny you wouldn't.' Her refusal had made no sense to him at the time and it made even less now. It was silly and it felt like a rejection.

‘We couldn't Johnnie,' she said, wearily. ‘I told you. I got a reputation to think about. Someone would've seen us, an' they'd ha' called me names. 'Tis all very well for you, men don't get called names. 'Tis all sowin' wild oats for you an' what a lad you are an' ha-ha-ha.'

That was true but it wasn't his fault. ‘Well then, we should get wed,' he urged. The more he thought about it the more it seemed the only solution. ‘If we was married we could be on our own together whenever we wanted. What's to stop us?'

‘I'll tell 'ee what's to stop us,' she said, bitterly. ‘Bein' called names. Tha's what's to stop us. They'd say you were makin' an honest woman of me an' that'ud start 'em up again. It'ud be how I was a slut an' a trollop all over again an' I couldn't bear it.'

He tried to argue against such pessimism. ‘No they wouldn't.'

But she knew better. ‘Yes they would. That's how they goes on. Besides, what would we live on?'

It was a crushing question because there was no answer to it and it had been asked and unanswered for so long. It was a thorn embedded and growing into his flesh and the irritation of it was perpetual.

‘Let's wait till the spring,' she said. ‘It might be better then.'

He sighed. ‘Tha's years off!'

That provoked a sad smile. ‘Well, till our Mr Blake's had his trial then,' she said. ‘Tha's onny a week or two. We'll all feel better when that's over.'

‘If he gets off.'

Something of her old fire flickered in her. ‘He will,' she said. ‘He must. I've set my heart on it.'

The trial was the main, and sometimes the only, topic of conversation at every gathering place in the village. It was the one thing Johnnie really enjoyed in those depressing days, for he and Mr Hosier were the bearers of the latest news from Turret House and there was excitement in being a messenger. They reported when Mr Blake's first letter arrived to say that he and Catherine were back in London safe and sound and were living in Broad Street with his brother. They spread the news that Mrs Blake was sick with worry. ‘Is it any wonder, poor woman, with that sort a' thing hangin' over her head?' And they delivered the date of the trial as soon as Mr Hayley knew it himself.

It was a surprise to his neighbours that Blake proposed to attend the court on his own. Some said it was a sign of confidence, ‘He knows they'll let him off, tha's the size of it,' others that it was a mark of folly. ‘What if they was to ask for evidence an' he couldn't give it?' and some were annoyed to have had their offer of help ignored. ‘What's the point of us puttin' our names to Betsy's list if he aren't a-goin' to take no notice of it?'

But when the day arrived, most of them were anxious on his behalf and impatient to hear the
outcome. There was an outcry of disbelief when it came.

‘'Tis a civil case seemingly,' Mr Hosier explained. ‘They found a bill of indictment against him.'

His listeners were baffled by such terms. ‘What's that when it's at home? Was he found guilty or not?'

‘That I couldn't say,' Mr Hosier confessed. ‘All I knows is they found a bill of indictment against him an' now 'tis a civil case, seemingly, an' he's to appear at the next quarter sessions here in Chichester an' be tried by a jury.'

‘Which means he'll have to engage a counsellor to defend him,' Johnnie told them, ‘though how he'll pay for that I can't imagine, for they costs the earth. And he'll have to call witnesses, so you'll get to see the trial after all. Mr Hayley's gone to Lavant this very morning to tell Miss Poole.'

‘Samuel Rose,' Miss Poole said. ‘If anyone could prevail against the military establishment, he would be the man. You must write to him this very afternoon and acquaint him with the matter. We cannot have our Mr Blake sent to prison, that would be intolerable, for not only is he totally innocent of the crime imputed to him but he is also a man of exquisite sensibilities and has too tender a constitution for harsh treatment. 'Twould be the ruin of him.'

The two of them were sitting in the delicate sunshine in her delicate drawing room, drinking her delicate tea, and the mere thought of incarceration was making her shiver.

Mr Hayley had ridden to Lavant in a fury, enraged to think that his dear friend should be put to the misery of another three months' anxiety before this ridiculous matter could be resolved. Now, under her gentle influence he was eased and reassured. ‘I entirely agree,' he told her. ‘Entirely.' It went without saying that he would cover the costs. ‘Your advice is admirable as always, my dear Paulina. Quite admirable. I do not forget how superbly he handled the case of the Reverend Boaz, and, of course, my dear friend Cowper thought most highly of him. Oh, most highly. I will write to him at once and the letter can be dispatched post haste.'

Ten days later, the regulars in The Fox were excited to hear that a famous barrister had been hired to defend their old neighbour, had gone to meet him up in London, and was coming down to Felpham in a week or two to stay with Mr Hayley so that he could talk to the witnesses.

Betsy and Johnnie and Mr Hosier were interviewed in Mr Hayley's library. They were very impressed by their new ally for he wasn't at all the sort of figure they'd imagined a barrister would be. For a start he was a young man and very slender and they'd expected somebody old and stout, then he had a pale face and dark eyes which made him look more like a poet than a man of law, but he was obviously a gentleman, for he wore fine clothes and spoke gently in an accent that none of them recognised, but that Johnnie discovered afterwards was Scottish.

‘Tell me,' he said, ‘exactly what you can
remember. Omit nothing. I will be the judge of those things that should be stressed come the time.'

So they told him what they could remember and left out everything they didn't want him or anybody else to know. ‘A lot of hollerin' an' shoutin',' Mr Hosier said, ‘same as there allus is when there's a fight. Scolfield was threatenin' to knock Mr Blake's eyes out, I remember.'

‘Did he often offer such threats?'

‘When he was drunk, yes he did.'

‘Was he drunk on that occasion?'

‘He was drunk on most occasions,' Mr Hosier said. ‘Famous for it, you might say. Accordin' to the rumour that's why he was demoted. Used to be a sergeant, seemingly, an' they demoted him.'