The Wilding (14 page)

And then, how could this happen? How could one sister cast out the other under the eyes of – I was about to say, her husband, should I not rather say, her sister’s seducer? – and the cast-off sister vanish from the sight of decent people while Robin Dymond continued in comfort and respect? She had lost her name and her honour, to be sure; she would never be able to marry – but were allin, and all her neighbours, so lacking in charity towards this lost lamb that none would help her to a crust of bread? She should have been brought before the minister, counselled, made to repent, punished and reclaimed, before she vanished down the broad road that leads to destruction.

What of my own father? This account, if true, made him Joan’s brother-in-law. But then I pictured his kindly, honest face, and I knew he would never share in anything so wicked.

I snatched up the paper again and turned it over. There was no more writing. With trembling hands I thrust it into my shirt. That there
had
been a sister I knew from my aunt’s own lips; Aunt Harriet had called her a fool. I could think no more, only that I must go home with all speed and talk with Father. I put out the lantern and lay down in the straw, waiting for the cart dream to come and crown my misery. Would I had never read that scrap of letter from my father’s pocket, never gone to End House, never set eyes on the maid there, never gone into the wood and most especially not to the inn, because in doing so I had put my fist through the world, and rent it.

* * *

Thanks to my clever trick of reading Joan’s letter while at Brimming, I found I could not go home just yet. I was a prisoner until the apples were pressed, and passed the next two days hopping from one foot to the other, eating without tasting, conversing without hearing, drinking without getting drunk. I even tried to dismantle the cheese before it was dry, causing an outcry among the people: ‘We’ve not waited all year for you to squander our apples,’ they said, so fiercely that I had to pretend I was mistaken and in short, to back down.

‘You’re looking sickly, Cider-Rat,’ said one of the more peaceable men. ‘You’re wanting to get home, I reckon.’

I said that was it and set myself to wait their miserly pleasure. Only when the last few wretched drops had been squeezed out, and the cheese was ready to scatter over the fields, was I permitted to leave. The villagers were constrained in their farewells. I did not even return them; I was onto the cart and gone before the words died on their lips.

‘Lord, Jon, what is it?’ My father half rose from his beloved account books as I came stumbling into the room. ‘Has your mother seen you, child? You’re green.’

‘I’ve heard something very bad, Father.’

‘Bad? What?’

‘About Aunt Harriet – Uncle Robin.’

The warmth faded from Father’s face. He seated himself and indicated that I should do likewise.

‘Now, son,’ he said, pressing his fingers into a steeple, ‘start at the beginning. First tell me who spoke to you.’

‘Yes?’

‘That my Aunt Harriet had a sister –’

Father nodded, his eyes never leaving mine.

I stammered, ‘And this sister was – was –’ Why didn’t he help me? Why didn’t he take over, telling me it was true, or lies, instead of watching and waiting? ‘Was ruined,’ I finally brought out.

‘Ruined?’

‘By my uncle – Uncle Robin.’ I brought out the words in a rush, expecting Father to cry out in rage at the insult to Robin’s name.

‘Did he say any more?’

‘There was a child.’

Was it my fancy, or did his eyes flicker there, as if I had hit him a blow in the face?

‘A child,’ he repeated.

‘A daughter.’ I wondered should I tell him that this daughter was even now – no, God, no, that might lead to further revelations. I flinched from the idea of
those
as from the flames of Hell.

‘And did your drunkard say anything else?’

I shook my head.

‘Yes, surely. Surely he did.’

I took a deep shuddering breath. ‘He said this sister and her child were cast out. Aunt Harriet – and Robin – left them to perish.’

‘So my brother and his wife behaved with pitiless cruelty while your mother and I stood by and let them? Is that the story?’

‘Yes.’ I put out my hand to him, touching him on the arm. ‘Don’t mistake me, Father, I know
you’d
never be cruel, nor Mother. But my aunt had a sister. She said as much herself.’

‘If you weren’t told, you can be sure we had our reasons.’

I waited for more, but nothing came. At last I said, ‘Then what this man said is right?’

He regarded me a moment, then said abruptly, ‘Your aunt’s half-sister was debauched.’ The ground seemed sinking away beneath me as he went on, ‘Harriet’s father married twice. Don’t think I …’ He paused, picking his words. ‘Don’t think I know it all. The younger creature, Joan, continued to live with Harriet after she and Robin were married. She was a strange girl: meek and downcast in appearance, but spiteful.’

I recalled Joan’s mention of the kindly in-laws who had talked with her: my own mother and father. Trivial matters that had seemed tedious in the reading now loomed like Fate. ‘How was she spiteful?’ I asked faintly. ‘What did she do?’

‘Oh, not much, at first. But your aunt warned us of her nature, and in time we witnessed it for ourselves. The thing was, she envied Harriet – envied her sister’s superiority, and also her being married. As I’ve told you, Robin was an exceedingly handsome fellow. Women pined for him.’

‘Why would he marry Aunt Harriet, then? For property?’

A melancholy smile gleamed on Father’s face. ‘I won’t say he hated the property, but he married for love. Harriet was an excellent match for him, you know: she was a beauty then, and, as far as a woman may be, a wit.’

I was willing to take that much on trust, but as Father himself had said, he did not know everything. Joan had written that Robin went to her as Harriet lay dying. A corpse is not beautiful or witty, and grief makes any comfort precious. By the time Harriet recovered it was too late; the lovers were infatuated with one another. None of this could be revealed without revealing who had told me of it, and that would lead on to the lewd act I had committed, so I held my tongue.

‘Joan was nothing by the side of Harriet,’ my father continued. ‘You wouldn’t look at her; such a mousy little thing!’

‘Somebody must’ve looked at her, if she was debauched. If you please, Father, I should like to know what happened. Truth is best, after all.’

‘Dear boy!’ my father exclaimed. ‘You don’t know what it is, yet!’

‘Then tell me. Let me judge.’

‘Very well,’ said Father, with an air of taking up the gauntlet. ‘Joan was not cast out, as you put it. She left the protection of her home and went along with the soldiers.’

‘Went along with them?’

‘As a camp follower, a whore, a drab. You understand those words, I daresay.’

I stared at him. ‘I understand.’

‘But you don’t believe me,’ he said, almost triumphantly.

That something of the kind must be Joan’s fate, once she left home, was only too plain; yet I had never pictured her embracing it of her own free will. ‘She could’ve married one of them,’ I suggested. ‘Wives also follow –’

Father shook his head. ‘She wasn’t among the wives. She was one of the other sort, and she departed with the rest of that crew.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I went after her as soon as I heard from Harriet. I thought the girl might be reclaimed.’ He shook his head. ‘The men had broken camp so I hi horse and overtook them. I spoke with officers, with the men, with the wives. Joan wasn’t married, that was plain as day. She’d already parted company with the army, or didn’t want to be found.’

‘So you –’

‘We never saw her again.’

There was a silence. I felt as if someone had gripped my head and swivelled it right around on my shoulders, like an owl’s.

I said at last, ‘I
cannot conceive
why a woman should degrade herself so horribly.’

‘Who knows?’ he replied. ‘Perhaps the cravings of a diseased appetite, perhaps to bring disgrace on Harriet.’

‘And did she have a child?’

He shrugged. ‘As I said, we never saw her. She lived such a life … who can tell?’

* * *

I stayed at home after that. My excuse, a good one, was that having neglected our earlier crop, I would make it up to my parents by pressing our ‘lates’ before other people’s. The truth was that I shrank, as if burnt, from contact with anyone outside our house. I needed time to reflect.

My father’s revelations had shocked me, not least the fact that he had kept quiet until now. I understood his reasons, of course: since Father himself was blameless, why should he polish up and display such a shame attaching to his family? Then I recalled that it would be remembered only too well by some of the neighbours, regularly brought out and polished up by
them
; it was a measure of how well my parents were liked at Spadboro, or perhaps of the distance between there and Tetton Green, that my first inkling of all this had come from Joan. And yet I was a man, and had been for some years; surely Father might have told me before! And I remembered that when Rose, the cook at End House, told me of the saying, ‘None so deep as a Dymond’, I had laughed, and said they could not know my father.

I shall not conceal that from the very first, a feeling of selfish relief was mingled with that of shock. Whether Joan had run away with a single soldier or had been the common property of all, the outcome was the same: there was every chance that Tamar was some trooper’s child, and consequently not blood kin to me.

Which brought me back to Joan. What –
what
– should I think of her? What a figure she cut, now I had spoken with Father! Yet I could not deny that in places her account chimed with his, or might be made to do so. While reading her words I had been convinced of their truthfulness, the more so because she took no pains to hide her hatred of Aunt Harriet or her unlawful passion for Robin – or, for that matter, her fear and dislike of the soldiers, though that might be a lie framed to cover up the truth of her dealings with them.

In one way she was only too easy to understand. Uncle Robin had no legitimate offspring; now he was dead, she wished to present Tamar, honestly or dishonestly, as his child. Had she heard somehow of Robin’s illness and returned to Tetton Green, or was she already settled nearby? Whichever it was, dug in behind End House the mother and dghter were well placed to receive silly women and lustful men, to pick up village gossip and to spy, under guise of begging, on Aunt Harriet. It was just as the laundress departed, leaving my aunt desperate, that Tamar had fallen foul of the authorities. Was this by accident, I wondered, or by design? At any rate, my aunt had seized on this seemingly helpless creature and from that point onwards the enemy were within the gates. Here it came to me that Robin’s illness might not have been chance, that Joan might indeed have powers I had failed to reckon with, but I soon rejected this notion since in that case she would surely have killed off Aunt Harriet many years ago.

She must have rejoiced when Tamar told her of my arrival. She had seen in me an innocent, had begun to shape her tale for Master Jonathan’s ear, and had so far succeeded that I had felt pity for the outcasts and tried to sweeten their lot. But Aunt Harriet had not taken to me, which meant my powers were fatally limited. Had I been the most passionate advocate ever fee’d, it would be of no use.

*

I did not say so to his face, but my father’s story also had its flaws. I never doubted that he had gone in pursuit, striving to snatch the wandering sheep from the jaws of the wolf. He would have done that, I knew, without a moment’s delay. But it troubled me that so much of his account came from Aunt Harriet. Father had not been present at Joan’s running-off. It might even be that the reason he failed to find her was that she had never been with the soldiers at all, in which case … what? Had Harriet swept her from the house with a broom? And meanwhile, what of Robin?

Had Joan been with child by him, or had she only thought as much? There was no proof either way, and there could be no further comparison of accounts, let alone judgement, until I could read more of hers. How I was to obtain more, after my quarrel with Simon Dunne, I did not know. I supposed I must return to Tetton Green, but I had a horror of seeing Tamar. Not for the first time, I was going round in a circle: until I learned what Joan had to say of her departure, I had no hope of knowing whether I had used my own cousin as a whore, yet while I remained in ignorance of this I could hardly bear to go back to Joan. I fancied she must be waiting for me. She would expect her tale to fetch me running, and if not for events at the inn I would be hurrying there even now.

My greatest perplexity came from my musings upon Tamar, and these I found impossible to leave off. Not so long ago I had thought to understand her: she had seemed a hard, blank thing, like the walls of the cave she inhabited. Now she was again become as shadowy as its deepest, darkest reaches. If she shared, as she surely must, in her mother’s ambitions, pretendings, delusions – I knew not what to call them – what had she told Robin during the time she was nursing him? Had she received the ring as his daughter, or for some other reason which my mind shrank from contemplating?

I wondered, too, if after all these years my father would still wish to rescue Joan from her degradation. Chasing after her had been an act of charity bordering on foolhardiness, but it had at least the virtue of promptitude. He might have carried Joan home, soiled and unmarriageable but forcibly prevented from sinking any further. Now there was no knowing how deep she had sunk, and it was a very different matter to take on a woman hardened in degradation, with a daughter far advanced along the same road.

If I did real to him who lay in the woods behind End House, I should have to reveal all my dealings with them, and I could not think how to do it.

At last I resolved as follows. There was no need to tell my father as yet: Joan’s tale had been so many years in the making, that the few days since I had read it were as nothing.

* * *

I therefore stayed at home, as I have said, and pressed the apples. Our principal late variety was the same as Aunt Harriet’s: the Redstreak, king of cider-apples. From it we got a drink so brilliant and fragrant that some folk preferred it to Rhenish. I had always held that our house must be specially blessed to have such fine cider in our hogsheads and I worked with a will to replenish them.

What does Solomon say? ‘Comfort me with apples.’ Everything about them is kind and comforting: the mild eating apple, the sharp or bitter fruit that crushes to a miraculous sweetness, the homely apples, like tried and trusted friends, that serve all purposes. Comforting too is the steady rhythm of milling, the scent of the murc, and the first tricklings of the must which Mother Nature, without need of hops or yeast, turns to the purest crystal. The drink’s virtue lies in its noble simplicity, and I wished everything in life could be as clear as the task I was about.

But cider, too, goes amiss, and my thoughts turned another way: to apples that are naturally bad-fleshed and inferior, to must that grows slimy, or ropey, or sours to a vinegar only fit for sauces, to drink that men are obliged to doctor with honey in order to save anything at all. And I wondered if Joan was naturally bad-fleshed, or if living with Harriet had rotted her, and whether she could have been corrected and doctored with love, and if anything could sweeten Harriet and bring her back from vinegar, and whether Robin were really as weak and washy as I thought him; for that was not like our family.

* * *

The horse went before me with a strange jerking movement of the head, his mane floating on the air, and I realised it was lighter than any horse’s mane ever seen, and this was because it was of spun gold. I was about to reach out and touch it when I perceived a swirling in the mist ahead, a darkness forming, as yet suspended but clotting and thickening even as I observed it.

I at once tried to pull the horse around, but the strength was gone from my arms. The beast drew steadily towards the place, forward and forward, the shape now elongating, becoming upright, a figure, a hat. The hat moved and (oh, horror) a pale glow broke upon the mist.

No, no, I must not see, I
would
not. I laid on the whip and put my other hand over my face, ready to drive blind rather than look; I breathed deeply and screamed so loud as to fill the air, deafening myself, and thus, blind, deaf and screaming, rattled past. At last my voice cracked and I could scream no more. I opened my eyes and looked behind.