Notwithstanding (13 page)

‘Don’t make me laugh, now. I am serious. Do you swear that we shall be married? Do you swear it on the Holy Bible?’

‘I do. I swear it on the Holy Bible, and may the Devil have my soul if I don’t.’

‘You swear that the Devil may have your soul if you don’t?’

‘I do, Bessie, I do.’

‘Put your hand on your heart and say, “I Piers de Mandeville do solemnly swear that if I do not marry Bessie Maunderfield, then the Devil may have my soul.”’

The squire’s son sighed, and lifted his eyebrows in humorous resignation. Nonetheless he put his right hand over his heart and swore the oath. ‘There,’ he added, ‘the deed is done. I am yours, or Beelzebub’s.’

‘Now you may kiss me, sir, if you please,’ said Bessie. Piers de Mandeville discovered that she kissed very sweetly indeed, and soon they were lying side by side on the cape, kissing with ever greater degrees of oblivion. De Mandeville’s mare watched them indifferently as she waited to go home to her stable.

Their recklessness and ardour increased by the day, especially after a small room on the top floor of the house fell vacant owing to the departure of another servant. The housekeeper, wishing to spare Bessie her long trudges back and forth through the Hurst, allowed her the room, which was at the back of the house next to the top of a narrow flight of stairs. It was perfectly placed for a furtive liaison. They made love with his hand over her mouth as she bucked beneath him. Sometimes there was a full moon hanging in the window, filling the room with delirious silver light, and Piers de Mandeville and Bessie Maunderfield would lie crammed together on the narrow bed, confounded to find themselves in paradise, incredulous with happiness.

Their liaison had been established for about six months, when four things happened in quick succession. Firstly the Rector died of an apoplexy brought
on
by becoming infuriated about politics when drunk on claret, leaving behind him no son to inherit the living. Secondly the new Rector arrived with three accomplished and charming daughters who were looking for husbands to match their station. Thirdly the Rector’s wife quickly discovered that there was an unmarried son in the manor house, and the fourth thing was that Bessie Maunderfield came to the inescapable conclusion that she was pregnant.

Bessie said nothing for a month, frightened to tell her love, and believing that he would be angry with her. At St Mary’s Church on Sunday, beneath the stern gaze of Earl Winterton and his family in their own private gallery, she even begged God for a miscarriage. During that time she became ever more alarmed at the frequency of the visits from the Rector’s wife and her three marriageable daughters. They seemed to have an inexhaustible appetite for cakes, scones, tea and lively chatter, and it was quite plain to all that the eldest daughter was making specific efforts to be charming to Piers de Mandeville. She tossed her golden ringlets very fetchingly, praised his playing inordinately and listened wide-eyed to his opinions. When she passed by him, she brushed just a little closer than one ordinarily would, and he often caught the scent of lavender from her clothes. Emily Sutton went to the lengths of learning the fortepiano accompaniments to certain violin pieces that he
had
always wanted to play. Everyone who observed them also observed that they seemed a very well-matched pair. This thought was not lost on Piers de Mandeville, who now began to waver in his determination to marry Bessie Maunderfield.

Not least among his worries had been that he had proved himself too cowardly to confess his intentions to his parents. Terrified of their rage, and equally terrified as to what would become of him, once disowned, he procrastinated daily, despite many bold resolutions to grasp the nettle.

Bessie Maunderfield, entering and leaving the withdrawing room invisibly and discreetly as a servant must, could not help but notice what was happening, and she quickly became desperate. She foresaw fatal chasms opening up beneath her feet, a storm of recrimination and disgrace about her head. She was forced to tell her lover about the child.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked her repeatedly, as if there might be the slightest possibility that the swelling was an attack of colic.

‘You will marry me, won’t you?’ she asked him repeatedly, sick with anxiety and dread. ‘You will marry me before the little one comes?’

‘I will, I will,’ he promised, and she reminded him solemnly that he had vouched his soul to the Devil if he did not.

He fell into such a state of agitation that he
thought
his heart would give way. It seemed to flutter in his chest like a panicked bird, and his concentration left him. He would pick up his violin, and then immediately lay it back in its case. He went out and walked at furious speed, taking the sandy paths on Busses Common as far as Sweetwater Lake, or tramping along Vann Lane all the way to Pockford Road, or down Malthouse Lane all the way to Brook, where he could take to his cups in the Dog and Pheasant, believing that no one there would know who he was. Ultimately, because of the difficulty of walking home inebriated in the dark, Piers de Mandeville began to ride there on his mare, knowing that she would find the way home without any instruction or intervention from him.

Naturally, everyone knew within days that the squire’s second son was drinking and falling into bad company at the Dog and Pheasant. Bessie heard it from her cousin, the groom, and then she heard it again from her own sister who had heard it from the blacksmith’s wife in Sittinghurst.

It became impossible for Bessie to dissemble her pregnancy any longer. Her mother noticed first. She had in fact suspected for some considerable time, because she had not seen Bessie washing her clouts. Fury was followed by hand-wringing, followed by accusations of bringing disgrace upon the family, followed by the decision that Father would have to be
told
. Then the same sequence of rage and recrimination had to be endured all over again. Lastly came the sensible consideration of practicalities.

Bessie endured these terrible scenes with tearful resignation, at first refusing to name the father, but assuring her family over and over again that the culprit had promised to marry her before the child was due. ‘He said that if he didn’t then the Devil may have his soul. He swore it on the Holy Book,’ she told them.

‘Now that’s a fearful oath,’ said her father, ‘a fearful oath indeed.’

Another month went by, and Bessie lost her situation at the manor. At a stroke it became almost impossible to meet up with her beloved, and it even seemed to him that perhaps this was for the best. ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ she thought bitterly, when she had not seen him for a full week.

Finally, so desperate that she could hardly think, she confided who the father was, and her mother and father immediately felt better about the entire situation. How very advantageous it might be if only Bessie were to marry the son of a manor house. ‘I’ve got a plan, Da,’ said Bessie, and when she had explained it, her father leaned back in his chair, his eyes twinkling. ‘Well, Bessie my dear, I think that might be well worth a try. I’d enjoy doing that.’

There ensued many days of energetic and creative activity on the part of the entire household. Her
brother
John was dispatched to the slaughterhouse to fetch back the head of a cow. It was boiled to remove the flesh, which was soon eaten at dinner, and then he set about sawing off the crown. He bound the tips of the horns thickly with sackcloth, and soaked them in pitch. Setting off early one morning, mother and sister went all the way to Godalming on a cart to find bolts of red cloth. Mr Maunderfield rode down to Malthouse Lane on his cob to select a good site, and was fortunate to find an oak stump at the side of the road that was four feet high. At the back of it he cut toeholds with an axe. Bessie herself shredded paper and cloth into a pail, and mixed it all up with glue. She made a former out of clay, allowed it to dry, smeared it with butter, and then carefully coated it to the depth of her little fingernail with the mess from the pail. When it was dry she painted it red and lifted it off the mould. Mr Maunderfield stood in the kitchen and practised his speech, in the deepest voice he could muster. He sang bass in the church choir, and therefore began with a considerable advantage.

On the designated night, Piers de Mandeville, half asleep, his tongue stinging and bitter from cheap tobacco, stupid with alcohol, and as much drunk with despair as spirits, hacked slowly home on his mare. There was a half-moon, but it was dark beneath the overhanging trees, and the night was cold but quite still. Wisps of black cloud passed slowly across the
face
of the moon, casting gossamer shadows. Foxes coughed in the woods, and owls screeched or hooted according to their kind. When Piers de Mandeville passed the crossroad at Lane End, where once they used to bury the suicides, Bessie’s brother John, hidden behind the hedge, put his hands together and blew into the cavity they formed. Three long identical hoots were the signal. Quietly he slipped through the hedge, and followed Piers de Mandeville at a small distance. At the spot where in the distant future would stand the half-tiled house inhabited by the naked general and his rhododendrons, Mr Maunderfield opened his tinderbox and repeatedly struck the flint. Once the tinder was smouldering, he handed the box to his wife, and carefully mounted the stump, feeling for the axe notches with his feet. He then released the cord binding up his robes and let the drapes of cloth fall down around the stump. When Piers de Mandeville was barely twenty yards from him he bent down and whispered, ‘Now!’

With a lit spill caught in the cleft of a long stick, Bessie’s mother ignited the pitch-soaked rags, and Mr Maunderfield stood erect and roared.

So startled was de Mandeville’s horse, that she leapt sideways and then reared. De Mandeville, too drunk even to have managed to get his feet into the stirrups, slipped backwards off her hindquarters and landed in the muddy road on his rump. The mare
bolted
ahead, whinnying, and de Mandeville scrambled to his feet.

He beheld a most terrible apparition. Ten feet tall, robed in red, stood a vast creature. It had a huge and hideous red face, with large blank eyes, and above its head rose curved horns that flared at the tips, the flames casting violent shadows as the figure waved its arms and nodded its head.

‘Piers de Mandeville, of Notwithstanding Manor in the county of Surrey, Esquire,’ announced the creature, which had a strong local accent that Piers was too drunk to find peculiar.

He gazed at it, wordless with horror, clutching his hat in his hand.

‘How pleased we are, how very pleased we all are, that you have generously yielded up your soul. How very pleased we are that within such a short time we shall be relishing your company in Outer Darkness, where there is weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.’

De Mandeville fell to his knees. ‘I beg you,’ he began, but was unable to continue. He started to whimper with terror, but could not take his eyes off the figure of the Devil.

‘You shall be ours on the night the child is born, you shall be ours, you shall be ours on that fatal night. Is that not so, my brothers and sisters?’

From behind, in the trees, came laughter and
shrieking
, and whooping, and the dinning of wooden spoons on copper pans.

The Devil held up his arms for silence, and asked in his booming voice, ‘What do you plead to that, Piers de Mandeville?’

‘Spare me,’ said the young man, simply, ‘spare me.’

‘That was the bargain. Do you deny it?’

‘Only if I do not marry,’ said de Mandeville weakly.

The Devil hissed, ‘No, no, you must not marry. No, no, marry not.’

From the trees behind came howls of rage and disappointment. First one flame on the horn extinguished itself, and then the other. To be alone in the dark with a Satan that he could not see was too much for Piers de Mandeville. He crawled a short way, then struggled to his feet and ran, bent double as if to avoid blows, scarcely able to run in a straight line, scarcely able to run at all. Laughter followed him up Malthouse Hill, and a deer ran out across the road in front of him, adding startlement to his fear.

Three days later in the evening Piers de Mandeville arrived on horseback before the Maunder-fields’ cottage. He dismounted and began to tie his horse to the ring set in the wall. Bessie, by now heavily pregnant, saw him from the window and came out.

‘Oh sir, you do look terrible awful,’ she said. He did indeed look very bad. He was pale and wild-eyed,
and
seemed to have become wasted and thin almost overnight. He did, however, have a mature air of purpose about him.

‘Bessie,’ he said, ‘I have come to tell you that we shall do what we should have done a very long time ago. I have been a most shameful coward. We shall be married in St Mary’s as soon as the banns are read. My father is resigned to it, and my mother is saying nothing further against it. They ask only that I marry in your parish rather than theirs, and that they should not be expected at the wedding. We are fortunate indeed that I am not the first son. If I had been my brother, God knows what would have happened.’

‘Come in and meet my father, sir,’ said Bessie mischievously. ‘I believe you first have to ask him if he is willing to give me up. I fear you might have to overcome his reluctance.’

‘Ah, Bessie, there is plenty of time for that. All I want for now is to take a walk with you on my arm, and confer about what we shall do. I imagine you are sufficiently well to walk?’

‘Well, sir, it’s only fine ladies who take to their beds when a tiddler’s on the way. The rest of us just carry on as needs must.’

They walked slowly through the Hurst, with her arm through his for support. Piers raised his hat to those they passed, ignoring their astonished expressions. As they drew near the pond, Bessie said,
‘Shall
we go into the woods? We can find our special place.’

Piers de Mandeville laid his cape on the ground and they sat side by side by the stream, just as they had so many months before. For a little while they were silent, and then Bessie asked slyly, ‘What was it that made up your mind, sir?’