The Quickening Maze Part 14

She turned, attempted but overemphasised and made unconvincing the appearance of having seen him for the first time. 'Mr Seymour, good day to you,' she answered and made a shallow curtsy.

'Picking blackberries?'

'Yes, I was walking and saw them and thought . . .'

'Do excuse me,' he said. She felt his fingertips on her skin as he took one from her hand and ate it. 'But you don't have anything to carry them in.'

'Yes, I do. I mean to say, I'll only gather a few.'

'Here.' He offered her his hat.

'But they'll stain.'

'The inside. And, anyway, what's a hat?'

Hannah, trying to respond to the question, found herself suddenly philosophically stumped, her mind full of abstract hat.

'Or, wait. Here,' he said, taking a handkerchief from his pocket and spreading it inside his hat.

'Oh, thank you.' She dropped her handful in.

'I like this path,' he said.

'Do you?'

'Hmm. It's one of the more attractive ways, don't you think? Can be dreary here. And I like to get away from Alfred.'

She panicked at the name. 'From whom?'

'My man, my valet. I can't have him looming behind me all day; it is tiresome. Careful. Stand aside.'

He spread his arms as though shooing geese, keeping her to the edge of the path. Hannah hadn't heard the pony approaching behind her. It pa.s.sed: stocky, skew-bald, with s.h.a.ggy fetlocks, without a saddle, and with a young boy on its back. The boy wore loose, lace-less boots. He touched his hat. Charles Seymour did not acknowledge the gypsy's greeting. A few yards on the boy turned the pony from the path and began vanishing and appearing between the trees.

'Gypsy,' Charles Seymour said. His soft fair hair was beautifully lit by the sun. 'Good thing I was here.'

'Do you hunt?' Hannah asked.

'I do,' he said. 'Why do you ask?'

'Oh, I simply thought, well, it must be very thrilling, and perhaps you miss it.'

'Speaking truly, it is not the first thing that I am missing.'

Her heart thumped. Unable to think of anything else to say and unable to picture her list for a change of subject, a way out of the moment, she said, 'Sentimental attachments?'

He raised his eyebrows. 'Does your father tell you everything?'

'No, no, not at all.You mustn't think that. But, you see, you wouldn't be the first young gentleman of rank to be here for that reason, and clearly you aren't a lunatic.'

'I see. Perhaps it would be better if I were,' he said vaguely.

'Don't say that.' She was warming to her role as fearless interlocutor. Now she offered important advice. 'I think that the thing is to be definite and courageous, to be strong with yourself. If I may claim any experience.'

He widened his eyes. 'May you?' She said nothing, confused and reddening. 'I'm sorry,' he said. He hung his head and thought for a moment, then looked up, inhaling sharply. 'Would you like to pick any more?'

'Oh, yes.' Hannah leaned forward to do so.'Will you remain here much longer?' she asked, facing away from him.

'I am to be kept here for a while yet. Her family believe me mad, but the fear, you see, is elopement.'

'I see. And would you?'

'Really you are an extraordinary girl - discussing such things alone with a gentleman. I suppose your situation is extraordinary. Talking to lunatics all day.'

'I suppose it is. It doesn't feel extraordinary. And I rarely talk to lunatics although, unless my . . . circ.u.mstances change, I will be expected to work with my mother soon enough.'

'Let's hope that doesn't happen.'

'Yes, let's.'

'But to answer your question, I suppose, now that you've asked it, it is . . . it is difficult to establish a household with nothing. She has nothing. I would be cut off. Do you think that ugly and prosaic? I think you do. Nevertheless . . . good day!'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Good day.'

Hannah turned to see another rider approaching. Thomas Rawnsley on a well-brushed bay. He lifted his hat.

'Good day to you.'

'Do you two,' Hannah stuttered, 'do you often collide?'

'I don't know about that,' Rawnsley answered, wearing an expression of humorous confusion.

'You have flowers,' Seymour said, patting the horse's neck with a rider's firm slaps.

'I do, I do,' Rawnsley answered, swivelling in his saddle to take them from the saddlebag.

'Roses,' Hannah said. 'At this time of year.'

'Yes. I had them from a friend's gla.s.shouse. Here, why don't you take them?' He handed them down to Hannah. Yellow roses, with a cold, fresh fragrance, wrapped in paper.

Hannah held them, was silent. Thomas Rawnsley saw that they pained her. He eased her mind.'I thought you might give them to your mother. I imagine they might brighten a corner.Well, I won't keep you. Good day.'

When Hannah returned home, a note was waiting for her. 'Dear Hannah, the roses were for you. I hope it does not distress you to learn this. Perhaps you will look on them and think of me. Respectfully, Thomas Rawnsley.'

Lord Byron was awoken.The bolt of his chamber door was lifted, slapped across. The door swung open. He wiped his mouth and sat up, then scratched himself thoroughly through warm, soiled clothes.

Lights bounced in the corridor outside, the servants' swinging lanterns as they opened other doors.

In truth, Byron did not greatly enjoy these nighttime revels. The tumult of high spirits around him sharpened the sensation of his own solitude, his lofty and painful isolation. But he liked to step out if his door was opened, not only because if he did not do so of his own free will, a servant would return and grab him and d.a.m.n near throw him down the stairs, but because he liked to sidle round and test whether the front door had also been unlocked. If it had been, he could slip out finally, finally escape into the night.

People slouched past his door to the stairs, moaning and shuffling. He stepped out to join them. Their voices were quieter than those of the people still in their cells yelling to be let out. At the bottom of the stairs, bottles were being opened. A fiddle, unwrapped from a blanket, was put in the hands of one who knew how to play. Lord Byron, who played himself, felt slighted, but recalled that he kept this talent a secret here, that he preferred to play among gypsies and free men.

He stepped through the throng, carefully out towards the front door. Locked. He could smell the cold world outside and pressed himself flat against the wood. A sliver of air breathed through a crack onto his eyeball. He blinked.

'Away from there.' A heavy slap on his back. 'Drink, instead, old fellow me lad. Let's all be jolly, eh. Who's your money on tonight?' He accepted the bottle. The servant's friendly hand gripped the meat of his neck as he swallowed a long flame of liquor. 'There's a lad.' He took another swig.

'Flash company,' said Lord Byron.

'What's that?' The servant raised his voice over the shrieks and barks and pleadings of the other revellers.

'Flash company. I used to gad about with in London. Glory days. My reputation then at its zenith.'

'That so?'

'You give your all.You sing and sing.You write your heart wide open and in the end the crowd turns, will insult you, will tread on that heart as they rush to a new amus.e.m.e.nt.'

The servant didn't answer this. His head was turned away as he shouted, 'Lay in!'

Byron wiped his eyes and watched the ruction of bodies. Servants pulled one man from another to restart the bout. Confused, seated heavily on his a.r.s.e, piebald with blood on his face, the man was helped up onto his feet. A servant whispered into his ear as the man wiped the greasy blood onto his fingers and licked them. Whatever that servant said had a clear inspiriting effect. The fighter's face fell open with grief and rage and he ran at his opponent. The fiddle played, a thin lonely thread curving among the claps and cheers and sobbing and shrieks. Two men were being unnatural in the shadows; he could see their stiff thrusts. Another suddenly screamed loudly enough to get everybody's attention and fell into a fit, his rigid arms circling slowly in front of him, his eyes white, breath snoring and seething in his throat. An attendant stood over him and poured drink, or tried to, into his mouth.

John Byron looked away. This was not the proper thing, not the sport he loved. As the men tumbled he heard a head knock against the floorboards, clear and sharp as a stonemason's hammer, and there was laughter. A full moon, he noticed, looking away. He saw that one of the small, high windows was crammed with its cold white. A doctor acquaintance of his had once told him that a full moon vexed the mad.They certainly seemed vexed. He pa.s.sed the bottle to another. Drink was not having its enlivening effect this evening. He wasn't feeling freer or warmer. Instead he was simply loosed into his melancholy, drifting down and down.

In the commotion it seemed possible that he could slip away, back to his room to rest and perhaps even regain himself with a little versing. Slowly, he abstracted himself from the bellowing crowd and crept back upstairs.

He pa.s.sed a door that still juddered with the impacts of one angry to be pent inside, past one of soft moaning, and one that was ajar and that he knew immediately was wrong. He wouldn't have been able to say how he knew, but those stifled voices . . . he just knew. Gently, with his fingertips, he pushed the door further open. Legs along the floor, a man shoving, another man standing, his face in shadow, a lamp by her head, and as she sensed him in the doorway, her head rolling slowly towards him. Mary! No, no, not Mary. Her eyes were dark and open and still. They fluttered slightly in the breath of the shoving man, but their gaze was so deep Byron felt himself almost falling towards them, as though the floor sloped down into a pit and she was at the bottom staring up. From deep inside herself she seemed to watch him and beg for his help. Below those eyes her mouth was moving. Go to . . . no. G.o.d is . . . something. G.o.d is . . . something. She looked like Mary, didn't she, a bit? Byron felt his face crumpling as he started to cry.

Stockdale noticed her staring and turned, staring back over his shoulder. 'You,' he said.

'No, no, no,' Byron said. 'I never. Just let me go back to my room.'

Stockdale was up and out of her, walking towards John, not bothering to cover himself, distended, wet and raw. Behind him, the woman held her part with one hand, crossed herself with the other.The shadowed man knelt down on her chest.

'Let me go back to my room.'

'How mad are you?' Stockdale asked, finally tucking himself away. 'What do you know?'

'I know when I smell sulphur. I know when people have forgotten shame.'

'So mad, then.'

'I know when crimes are committed. I, Lord Byron, have spoken against slavery and abuse.'

'You didn't see anything and you won't remember anything.' Stockdale drew back his right hand and threw his fist into John's face. He saw the attendant's knuckles suddenly huge, big as the palings of a fence with creases of shadow between them as his eye was struck, a vivid visual arrest he was still pondering when the second shadowy blow swum like a pike towards him and knocked him out cold.

Alone together in Hannah's room, their conversation veered between the worldly, ladylike and implicit, and the girlish, rapid and amazed. Hannah had decided for the first time not to tell Annabella everything, it being perhaps better for her not to meet Charles Seymour. His was the name Hannah did not say. Her silences and elisions were full of him. Rawnsley she would perhaps talk about. They could disparage him together.

Annabella used Hannah's brushes on her own thick, dark hair. They made a scuffing, electrical sound. Annabella looked very maidenly or mermaidly with her untied hair draped over her shoulders, although her facial expression, vacant with concentration, looked to Hannah like a small girl's or an animal's.

Hannah found that she could talk about Alfred Tennyson. The poet's name, when she said it, was cool and solid in her mouth. Very recently it had dragged after it a sensation of panicking flight.

'Oh, yes. I saw him the other day,' Annabella said. Tilting her head and brushing her hair into a gathering hand, she stared up at the ceiling.

'Did you?' This did make Hannah start, that she did not know about this.

'Yes, I did.Wrapped in his cloak, out in the cold fog,' she said in her recitation voice.'Amid the spectral trees.'

There was that tone of light scorn, of satire, and it displeased Hannah. She could dislike Tennyson, but not easily find him comical yet. And it suggested that Alfred Tennyson would not have been considered good enough for Annabella. She was a nymph or dryad to him. She was a nymph or dryad to everyone. She would wait and make a choice.

'Did you speak to him?'

'I said "Good day" and he answered "Good day".' She had imitated his Lincolnshire accent unsuccessfully and tried again. ' "Good day," and raised his hat off all that tangled hair and walked on.'

Hannah was suddenly, surprisingly, angered by this. She didn't like the thought of these people out there moving independently, meeting and having conversations she would never hear, not thinking of her. It killed her, made a ghost of her. And even if she had given up on Tennyson, she did not like Annabella's contemptuous tone. It was too typical of the person that she knew lurked behind that beauty.

'Perhaps he had no desire to talk to you because he was thinking more interesting thoughts.'

'What's that?'

'Simply because you are so beautiful, Anna, doesn't mean the whole world has to fall down and worship you.'

'What?'Annabella asked again dumbly, her face innocent and stricken. She blushed in that ridiculously pretty way she had - two thumbprints of rouge above her dimples - not the painful red stain Hannah could feel spreading up from her neck.

'I know that you can have anyone you want to have. You know you're beautiful.You don't have to try and pretend: oh, no, I'm just a plain simple comfortable girl.'

'Why are you saying this?'

'Because.'

Hannah didn't know quite why. She was much angrier than she could have antic.i.p.ated. Annabella's beauty was not fair; it pulled the world towards her, drew in her future without effort, and Hannah was sick of pretending it wasn't there. It was as though she were conniving in her own betrayal, knowing that Annabella would safely, lightly, contemptuously surpa.s.s her at any moment she chose. They could not be real friends, Hannah decided at that moment, because they were not equals.

Nor was she given time, in fact, to change her mind. There was a knock at the door. It was opened by Fulton. He bowed with flirtatious gallantry to Annabella and said with a smirk to his sister, 'You have a visitor.'

'He did call me nymph,' Annabella called after her as she left. 'Did your poet call you that?'

At the bottom of the stairs, Hannah found Thomas Rawnsley. Waiting outside were two horses. Hannah was invited to ride the good-natured grey. He stood behind her as she climbed onto a new two-pommelled saddle, the leather glossy and uncracked and smelling of the workshop.

'So where shall we ride then?'

He looked startled, almost hurt.'Nowhere in particular. Just through the woods. The air and so forth. I thought you might enjoy it.'

This had become a very agitating day. After so much panting and wishing and waiting and sighing, after so much nothing at all, life was finally happening, but not at all as she'd imagined. Firstly, an argument with Annabella and now, to escape from her, this ride. For much of the time she thought of the argument with clenchings of alternating regret and determination. Thomas Rawnsley rarely interrupted her.Although his intent was now overt, unquestionable, he did not seem to be making an effort to entertain her into an affection for him. He was not charming or expansive. He was not free and light like Charles Seymour. Nor did he have the profound, productive quiet of Tennyson. He was literal, direct and uncomfortable. His courtship (which this was, it seemed) was sullen and congested. Apparently it pained him. It was serious. Unlike the poet or aristocrat, he worked. It had made him rich, but the wealth sat on him like a garland, brittle and separate. Really, he was the work. His name suggested it. Rawnsley. Rawnsley. Hannah didn't like that dragging long first vowel. What did it remind her of? Tawny. Brawny. Yes, brawn: the meat. Still, his clothes were beautiful, his possessions - his gloves, these horses - pristine. It was interesting, at least theoretically, to think that his wife would be similarly outfitted, sealed inside that wealth, sleek and secure and widely acknowledged.

The forest was darkening. Winter was not far off. The black fallen leaves, plastered down by heavy rain, were silvered here and there with frost.The tree trunks were wet. They pa.s.sed the hooked, bl.u.s.tery shine of a holly. Good snail weather. Their reins creaked. The bits clicked in the horses' mouths as they breathed large clouds. Hannah felt sorry for Rawnsley when his horse manured. He seemed visibly embarra.s.sed by it, staring, stiff-necked, into the distance, as though he himself had done it.