The Wilding (29 page)

‘You took me out of the lock-up,’ she replied, still looking away. ‘Got us blankets – food. You did more good than bad.’

‘Not enough,’ I said. ‘It can never be enough, not now.’

‘I bear you no grudge. I want for nothing.’

‘That’s the worst part. There’s nothing I can give you, and I, I –’

‘You love me best.’ Tamar nodded to herself, as if she was only now coming to understand. Then she added, more mockingly, ‘Hark at me. I sound like Joan.’

I thought: And I, like Robin.

The room was growing dark. We sat side by side listening to the spit and crackle of the flames, she smiling on me from time to time, I swallowing down a lump of sadness that kept rising in my throat and would not let me speak.

At last I took her hand. ‘Tamar, there’s one thing I must ask.’

She glanced around the fire-lit room. ‘Here we are, all peaceful. Don’t spoil it.’

‘I must. Please, Tamar, don’t look away.’

She obeyed; yet her fox-eyes, as she gazed into mine, held a reproach.

I asked, ‘Do you know why I can’t marry you? What we are to one another?’

‘
Why will you – !
’ she exclaimed with the quick anger born of fear.

A thread snapped in my heart. I had scarcely strength to go on, but go on I must, or live the rest of my life in ignorance. I said, ‘Be patient, I beg of you. The day we went to the inn … did you know then?’

‘So that’s your Great Question?’ She pulled her hand out of my grasp. ‘No, I did
not
!’

I was like one stunned. ‘But surely Joan, did Joan never –?’

‘It was Mathew told me.’

I stared.

‘When he brought me here. He told me why I mustn’t see you.’

‘You had no notion of it?’

She shook her head violently. ‘None. I cried myself to sleep, nights and nights. But then I got to thinking there was nothing to be done, and if I kept up my crying the child might be born blind. So each time I started, I would say to myself, Nothing to be done, and in time I came to feel a little better.’

I thought how like Tamar this was. She might be a mere scrap thrown onto raging seas, but she was a scrap of cork. Even as she was speaking, however, a troubling recollection came to mind. I said, ‘But, Tamar, you asked me to touch the wilding. You knew it was my tree.’

Again she shook her head. ‘Joan’s tree.’

‘So why … ?’

‘Oh, to see what you’d do.’ She shrugged. ‘Don’t think you were the only one. Lots of folk touched it.’ I was wondering whether I believed this when she added, ‘Why d’you ask? The wilding’s nothing, only a tree; it makes no difference, does it?’

‘I want to think well of
you
,’ I burst out. ‘Not to believe you apable … Tamar, don’t laugh, I beg of you – don’t laugh –’

My voice thickened and I broke off, humiliated. What a ridiculous creature I was; I was afraid to look at her. When at last I forced myself to do so, I saw her eyes were wide and glistening and very beautiful.

‘Nobody ever spoke to me like that,’ she said soberly.

I muttered, ‘I won’t again.’

‘To want to think well of me. Not even Mathew wanted to think well of me.’ Her mouth trembled. ‘Nobody. Ever.’

Her tears and sobs were fierce. I was witness to a rare transformation: Tamar moved. For years she had been driven with stones and blows, like an animal, from one place to another. An animal can only be punished; a human soul can be shamed and implored. I wanted to think well of her. I had spoken to her as to a human soul.

* * *

We sat in the darkness, holding hands. I would prefer to write,
Not like lovers, like brother and sister
, but it was not quite that; I cannot tell exactly how it was. A maid came in and went out from time to time, fetching and carrying. I am sure she came in more than was needful – she was perhaps that spy of my aunt’s – but we cared nothing for her as we sat in quiet talk, weaving together our two-sided tapestry. These were perhaps the sweetest hours of my life, passed not in lust but in mutual forgiveness, than which there is nothing more tender. I was at once a man who had at last come home, and a man who must go away forever; after that night we could be nothing to one another, and I must content myself with picturing her happiness. So that I should have some knowledge of her in the barren times to come, I asked how she was progressing in her studies.

‘Reading’s well enough,’ she said. ‘And writing.’

‘And embroidery?’ I had seen some coloured stitching, clumsy as a child’s first attempt, flung down on a nearby chair.

‘Oh,’ she exclaimed crossly, ‘Mrs Godolphin says a woman must embroider, to show off the hands and arms.’

‘To catch you a husband.’

She gave a wry smile. ‘I’m all scars up to the elbows, I don’t know who’d be caught by that.’

I knew one man at least. I said, ‘You can always wear your sleeves long.’

‘That’s what
she
says. She had me laughing, Jon, asking did Mr Eliot use to beat me. It’s only marks from work!’

She had a supper brought to us and served up on little tables, near the fire. Tamar’s manners were so improved, when I recalled her attempts to eat fried eggs at the inn, that I thought a day might come when she would indeed pass as a gentlewoman. Alas, the meal also reminded me of Father and Mother, who must now be waiting for me. To leave Tamar was a wound, but there was nothing to be gained by spinning out arting. It would hurt just as much when the moment came, and in the meantime my mother would be greatly distressed … yet I could not leave just yet.

After supper we still sat on in the firelight, no longer talking but perfectly harmonious.

‘I shall have to go,’ I said at last.

Tamar would not permit me to depart on foot. She explained that Mrs Godolphin would be brought home in a neighbour’s carriage.

‘You shall have hers,’ she said.

‘How will you explain to her tomorrow?’

‘Oh – my cousin required it.’

‘Will she believe that?’

Tamar shrugged.

So I was spared another cold walk under the stars. Tamar came outside, bareheaded, to wave me off. At the door of the coach we embraced.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Sister!’

‘Marry Poll.’ She kissed my cheek. ‘Live happy.’

One minute we were there, a torch casting its fitful light over us and the coachman, poor wretch, yawning at the reins. Tamar held out her hands and I clasped them. I gazed on her, on my darling, upright and fruitful as a young tree and with as little need of me. The next minute gravel rasped under the wheels, and Tamar went out of my life.

She has been true to her word. My father has no notion that I was ever at Chitton; so on that occasion I got the better of him, if on no other.

Since then I have been occupied in keeping a memorandum, to the best of my ability, of everything that passed during those few months. My account of myself is now almost complete and I shall not be sorry to make an end of it. For one thing, I have been obliged to keep the writing a secret, which is no small task in a house like ours. For another, I have been perplexed over whether I should omit certain passages. In the end I chose to keep everything in its place, and in this way much has been preserved that would otherwise have been lost and forgotten. Whether I now tear it out is another matter.

Our family, that was forever changing, is changed again: a child is come into the world, and an old woman departed. Mrs Harriet died a month ago. Her death had been expected a good year earlier; as Master Blackett said, she doubtless argued the case with the Destroying Angel but was forced to yield at last.

My aunt’s second marriage never took place and Robin’s will made ample, not to say lavish, provision for his widow’s funeral. We all thought it strange, therefore, when Dr Green paid for a brass plaque to be fixed above her grave; but nobody, least of all the Seatons, cared to interfere. The plaque is the largest on that side of the church, and deeply engraved. It represents a woman struck down by three skeletons, one of them clutching a scroll. Any man who sees it may judge for himself whether Dr Green forgave Father, Blackett and me for depriving him of a house in Devonshire.

So much for the old. What of the young?

Tamar is now able to write, after a fashion and with my father’s permission. The child appears to be a likely boy. With a father’s pride, and a father’s pangs, I gaze on a little painting she sent me. My son has hair like lamb’s wool; in him I see my youth again.

These days I often think of Robin, for whom the lad is named. Indeed, I have never stopped thinking of him, shamed yet returning like the dog to his vomit, as my father once said of me; and I am forced to bow to Father’s wisdom in keeping Tamar and me apart.

For all Robin’s wickedness, I pity him. Who would choose to die with such secrets weighing on his breast? Not I; nor would I wish to haunt any man’s dreams. After such painful thoughts as these, my way seems to lie clear before me: on my son’s coming of age he should be sent my private account and read every last word of it; in this mood, I would not withhold the dot of an ‘i’. Better he should feel anger or disgust towards me, than be taken in by a sham, told his father was an angel, &c., &c., and all the time be deceived as to how he came into the world. And if I can forgive
my
natural father, then he may bring himself, in time, to forgive me.

But then I come always to the same stumbling block: the boy’s mother. Were I to scratch out the worst of my meetings with her – as indeed I would – still,
brother
and
sister
are not easy words to soften down.

What, then, shall I tell him? Truth is a purge, best given full strength. Wrap it up in sugar pills and it fails of half its effect. Purge too much, however … I am in sore need of advice, and perhaps not my father’s.

How many people became lost to me, almost without my noticing, while I fancied myself the offspring of Mathew Dymond! I lost my natural parents from the start, and also my sister, and my son. Now that I come to reckon it up, I am like an orphaned child.

* * *

Joshua Parfitt has been here talking with my parents about the money Poll brings with her. I cannot say I care much for that. If I may say so without pride, I gave away more than her entire portion comes to when I handed over Robin’s will. Besides, we have land enough and everything we need. Father, though, says things must be done in the proper way, as is fitting. Put more bluntly, he is resolved we should not appear desperate to ally ourselves with the Parfitts. I cannot help but be amused at this, since it strikes me that
he
is indeed not far off desperation, not so much for their money as to get me off his hands at last. I am sure nobody could think it of
me
, whom the families have dragged to the altar as if to sacrifice.

Still, Father is in the right. Parfitt rents part of his land whereas we own all of ours; it is Poll, not me, who marries into the warmer nest, and her father should give her what he can.

We thought it best to say nothing of Tamar or the child. Wives grow curious and knowing a little, as Mother said, quickly turns to knowing a lot. It is a pity. I would have as few lies in my life as possible, and yet they go on breeding.

I wonder if Poll and I will have children – if there will be more Dymonds at last? If so, they will not cut out my boy. There is so much I would wish to say to him, were he old enough to understand. At nights I dream not of Poll, but of little Robin, a grown man and in conversation with me. I have written two or three letters that he might read upon coming of age, and torn them up again. I found part of one the other day, in the pocket of my coat:

That letter I destroyed. What could be less like a father’s embrace? And then, he would naturally wish to write back and ask why I had kept away so long. What could I reply?

*

Let me try again, and send the letter to Tamar to see how she likes it. If we can once agree on what the boy is to know, I shall go to my wedding as cheerfully as a drunken man to his hanging. Indeed, I shall go one better and put my head in the noose sober.

Is this enough? Still I am unsure. I will sleep on it, and perhaps send it tomorrow.