The Quickening Maze Part 7

Thrown onto the floor, the door slamming shut behind him, Jack Randall picked himself up and beat with his fists against its wood.

'Have none of you the pluck to come up to the scratch?' he roared. 'Blackguards! I'll take you all! Starting with that mincing bottle imp doctor!'

Matthew Allen spoke back calmly through the shuddering door. 'John, you had been warned. It isn't possible for you to sleep out in the woods.You know you must return in the evenings.'

'b.a.s.t.a.r.d! s.h.i.t-eating b.a.s.t.a.r.d! I'll . . . I'll . . .' He varied his rhythm and thumped the door with three s.p.a.ced punches.

'John, you'll do yourself more harm. Just look at yourself.'

'Son of a wh.o.r.e!' Darkness covered him. He grovelled at the crack of light under the door.

'You knew the punishment, John. Two days.'

'You cannot cage a man. You cannot. I'll tear this door down!'

'I'll return later.'

'A light! Just please give me some sort of light!'

Dr Allen walked away down the corridor. Back among the other patients he was aware of John still shouting like a dog yapping at the gate, but after a few hours it ceased.

Beyond any sound of the mad, Hannah walked with Annabella and m.u.f.fet, her dog. The snow had shrivelled, was crusted in hollows or on the lee side of trees only. The forest was wet and stretched away in soft tapestry colours.

m.u.f.fet didn't like the cold. She trotted ahead, turning back with mute worried glances, eyebrows fidgeting.

'Oh, I didn't say,' Hannah went on. 'He was skating when I arrived.'

'Skating?'

'On his pond.'This detail had come back to Hannah in good time. She had finished the first avalanche of narration, telling it all at once, and in the silence just afterwards she was beginning to wonder if it sounded like anything at all.Annabella was rea.s.suringly excited, though. She asked, 'Was he good? Did he "cut a dash"?'

'He was quite good, I think. I didn't see for very long. He stopped when he saw me.'

'That's good.'

m.u.f.fet had trodden on something. She stopped, stretched back a trembling hind leg, kicked with it, then carried on away behind a tree.

'So you spent all of the afternoon with him, talking?'

'About poetry mostly.'

'About poetry. That's very promising.'

'Yes. Do you think?' Hannah remembered the long glutinous silences and was embarra.s.sed to mention them in case they were a bad sign. But she did very much want her friend's opinion and found a formula. 'He was quite . . . morose.'

'He's bound to get lost in thought at times, given what he is.'

'That's what I decided.'

'No, no. I do think this is promising. We need to plot something more. And I still haven't seen him.'

'We were together for hours,' Hannah said, feeling the thrill of it again, but striding casually, in a worldly way.

Spring

She sat in the light of the window and looked almost too frail to bear its blast. He could see her fingerbones sharp and yellow through the cracked skin. The dent of her temple looked like the result of some violence. The skin of her face had drawn so tight that her lips were pulled against the hardness of her teeth. There were welts of shadow under her eyes and cheekbones.

He was telling her that she needed to eat, that if she didn't he would be forced to feed her. Milk and custard, he was saying. Soaked bread. She could hear that he was exasperated, as with an awkward child, whereas it was his understanding that was childish. But she couldn't explain to him, the effort of speech made her head ache, and her voice seemed of late to emerge as a shock, a little live thing in her mouth, jumpy and peculiar. It had none of the smooth serenity it had in her mind. So she didn't tell him that to eat was to join the ordinary world of bodies and murder, of l.u.s.t and destruction, was to swim through the world like a worm through soil, eating, making ordure. Possibly it was a thought he could understand, but what she could not begin to try and explain to him was that in Heaven to see and to eat are the same thing. Looking is absorption, is union, without destruction. There nothing is broken. Light flows into light endlessly, in harmony, and is perfectly still.

'You're smiling,' he said. 'I hope that's a smile of agreement. No recovery of animal spirits is possible . . .' Animal spirits! There was his stupidity in a phrase. He lived in contradictions he did not even perceive. '. . . although you don't yet lack energy to the point of ceasing to move, that will come unless you are less cruel to yourself.' He pinched the bridge of his nose, sighed through it. 'I have said all that I wanted to say. I trust it has been understood.'

Margaret inclined her head. Matthew Allen accepted it as all the response he was presently likely to get. He patted her hand, its few dry sticks, and walked back to his study.The Silent Watcher watched him go.

The drawing on his desk - its cleanliness, its power, its levers. It could make the whole asylum an irrelevance if he so chose, and that was tempting, but he would keep up both concerns and be finally the multifaceted man he was. He would flourish. The drawing was of a machine, a conception of his own, improving on past designs. The draughtsmanship itself gave him pleasure, a sign of his intellect. Sharp ink strokes joined at right angles to define a square, three-dimensional tiered object that stood in abstract white s.p.a.ce. It had an angelic clarity. It would change his life. Not since his discovery of phrenology and the mental sciences as a young man had anything excited him so much. It was like falling in love, this profusion of harmonious thoughts, this coalescing of pa.s.sion and possibility, this new life. Matthew Allen was deeply smitten.

He sat down and sobered himself with details. The two-tray system was clearly superior, with a tracer and drill connected in perfect symmetry. He lifted the drawing and laid it carefully aside. Today he would write to Thomas Rawnsley, the young man with the workshop in Loughton who fashioned machine cogs from hornbeam, and request an instructive visit to his establishment. Men of progress and industry conferring together, one of them a man of science.

He dipped his nib, shook away excess drops.'Dear Mr Rawnsley,' he began. He looked up out of the window and saw the idiot Simon backing away in fear from Clara, who was scolding him for something.As she shouted she opened her clenched fists and shook out handfuls of torn gra.s.s. Matthew Allen turned back to his letter.

When Eliza Allen made the joke she held her tongue tip between her teeth for the moment after, as she always did, mischievously awaiting Hannah's reaction. Hannah looked away, blushing painfully, her skin swarming with heat. It wasn't as though the joke was even amusing; it hardly was a joke.Her mother's jokes rarely were obvious, hence that infuriating expression of hers while she stared around waiting. All her mother had said was why didn't she seek Mr Tennyson's opinion of the book she had in her hand. Hannah's discomfort was made acute by the thought of what it was she was reading. Had her mother read over her shoulder? Among her father's poetry volumes she had found an old Dryden and picked it out. Between the long, solid, dully rectangular poems in rhyming couplets she had found a song which began:

Sylvia, the fair, in the bloom of fifteen, Felt an innocent warmth as she lay on the green.

This Sylvia 'saw the men eager, but was at a loss/ What they meant by their sighing and kissing so close'.

Hannah hadn't quite seen the men, or him, eager, but this was all very compelling.

And clasping and twining, And panting and wishing, And sighing and kissing, And sighing and kissing so close.

This was one of the most explicit clues she had had as to what she might expect actually to occur when pa.s.sions converged.The phrases, the little skipping tune, made her heart race. And sighing and kissing so close.

Hannah sat down at the table and ignored Abigail's protests as she tore a corner from the bread and b.u.t.ter the child was eating. She spoke over her. 'You have b.u.t.ter on your face, Abi.You are not a slice of bread, you know.'

Abigail appealed to a higher authority. 'Mama, she's eating my food.'

'Hannah, be kind to your sister. If you want bread and b.u.t.ter, there is . . .'

'I wasn't being unkind. I was sharing with her. Shouldn't she be taught . . .'

'Hannah, don't be contrary.'

'I'm not being contrary. I'm leaving.'

'Contrariness itself.'

'Not at all.'

The day was mild. Hannah let her shawl hang loosely from her shoulders as she walked to Annabella's. She pinched her cheeks as she walked onto the lane, in case of an encounter with him. Annabella was in her garden, under the early blackthorn blossom, reading. 'Good morning,' Hannah called.

Annabella looked up, enhancing the scene, as she always did, with her beauty. 'Greetings, fair nymph. Isn't this tree heaven?'

'Yes, it is.' Hannah studied it with the appropriate dreamy appreciation. There were no leaves as yet, just slender black branches and the damp white blossoms ruffling in the breeze. The tree looked ardent, single-minded, standing there and declaring its flowers straight out of the wet, gnarled wood. 'Very pretty,' she said. 'Shall we go for a walk?'

'Has something happened?'

'No. The ordinary torments of the familial life.'

'I'll just go and tell Mama.'

Hannah stood alone until Annabella returned.Alone. The quiet garden. Annabella's life was so different to her own, just the one brother, her books and blossom and beauty. Sometimes Hannah, surrounded by her family and the mad, by all those hurrying or drifting people, felt as though she lived her life on a public thoroughfare.

As they walked, Hannah watched the effect of her friend's beauty on the people they pa.s.sed. Did Annabella realise how much she lived in the tunnel of it, always enclosed within the circle of its impact? It aligned men, stiffened their backs, knocked their hats up from their heads.A farmboy leading three cows right now lifted his hat straight up, smirking at her. If Hannah had had that advantage, she might have been more sure of gaining Tennyson. It was a power at least. Hannah had no power. There was nothing she could do. There was nothing any girl could do in choosing a husband for herself beyond panting and wishing and hoping, making herself visible, agreeable.

'Snowdrops,'Annabella said, pointing at a little group of the trembling white things. 'Shall we go into the church?'

'Why not?'

This was becoming a habit on their walks. The first time it had felt like trespa.s.s, secret and wrong, to enter the church in their state of lazy reverie and admiration. By now it had an element of ritual. They pa.s.sed the leaning gravestones in melancholy silence without stopping as they had in the past to calculate the ages of the people when they'd died and pity the children among them.There had been one seven-year-old girl who had moved Hannah to the point of tears. She greeted her mentally now as she pa.s.sed on her way into the cold stone porch. Reverently,Annabella pulled open the heavy oak door and they stepped inside.The door closed solidly behind them, shutting them into a silence that magnified their footsteps and made them take shallower, careful breaths.An extinguished atmosphere, the sense of snuffed candles,of a room someone has just left.Annabella crossed herself. Hannah did the same, and prayed by whispering the name Alfred Tennyson once without sound and with her eyes closed. Ardently, her lips formed the syllables and she breathed silently through them.

Annabella pointed to the flagstones where the sun through a stained-gla.s.s window cast a delicate circle of coloured floating light. Hannah nodded.

She walked up the nave towards the pulpit and stopped at the bronze eagle lectern with the big Bible on its outspread wings. She looked at the page. And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from G.o.d. And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from G.o.d. The elaborate large initial reminded her of her explorations of how beautifully the letters AT and HA could be calligraphically combined. Afterwards she had burned the page in the stove, her heart pounding, as though destroying the evidence of a murder. The elaborate large initial reminded her of her explorations of how beautifully the letters AT and HA could be calligraphically combined. Afterwards she had burned the page in the stove, her heart pounding, as though destroying the evidence of a murder. To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary.

She looked up. Annabella was seated in a pew, her lovely eyes upcast at the east window. Hannah joined her, sitting on the pew on the other side of the aisle. She lowered herself into the creaking wood and looked up at the gla.s.s, the stiff translucent figures around Christ on the cross, His handsome head lolling on His right shoulder. She looked at the muscles of His body, at His sadness, until she felt a genuine pity bloom inside her.

After long quiet, the church door opened: the warden, Mr Tripp. He crossed himself and walked into the vestry, glancing across under heavy overhanging eyebrows at the two girls apparently praying, and recognised the doctor's daughter and the pretty one. When he was gone, they looked at each other. Hannah pointed at the door and they got up and crept away.

John was no longer allowed out of bounds, not even to return to work in the admiral's garden. For that he had been replaced. His key had been taken from him. He could wander only within the grounds of Fairmead House and knew that he was being watched. It was his challenge had done it.

His few days in darkness had been a living death, but worse: without rest, without G.o.d, without ceasing.When the door was shut the room had started to sink down and down until it was deep underground, deeper than a mine. He could call upward to the surface, but no one would hear. When the door was opened again and he was freed at ground level, the coloured world had rushed howling in, into the vacuum of his starved senses. The force of it had knocked him on his a.r.s.e. His head was too heavy to lift, his hands as feeble as leaves. He sat on the ground outside, feeling light hit the back of his head, the breeze swarming all over him, and stared down at the blades of gra.s.s between his thighs and one climbing ant until he could manage more. Later, he wondered if he was dreaming it all: he'd wanted the world back so much that maybe his crazed mind had made it for him and he was still underground. The clouds, the trees, the birds all moved so exactly as he knew they did.

After he'd regained himself, pieced the parts back together, he felt a terrible and righteous rage and John shuddered and faded and flinched while Jack Randall again took charge.The doctor he would never forgive, and there was no one from whom he would not seek redress. To proclaim this, he'd issued a challenge.

Jack Randall The Champion of The Prize Ring Begs Leave To Inform The Sporting World That He Is Ready To Meet Any Customer In The Ring Or On The Stage To Fight For The Sum Of 500 or 1000 Aside A Fair Stand Up Fight Half Minute Time Win Or Lose He Is Not Particular As To Weight Colour Or Country All He Wishes Is To Meet With A Customer Who Has Pluck Enough To Come Up To The Scratch Jack RandallSo Let Thine enemies perish O Lord That was a while ago. He was mostly John again now, but still he couldn't go anywhere. He looked up at slow, steep-sided clouds. He held a fine twig at the end of a branch and looked at its tight triangular buds like an infant's tiny fingernails. He heard a woodp.e.c.k.e.r drumming out in the forest and felt distance tug at him. He pulled on the branch and let go so that it whipped up and bounced.

John walked to a bench.When he sat he saw that he held the Bible in his left hand and remembered why. He pulled out a loose paper from his pocket and spread it beside him to continue his work.The large, final words were calming to write.They resounded.They were heard.

Weep Daughters Of Israel Weep Over Saul Who Cloathed You In Scarlet More Fair To Behold . . .

There were feathers in the clearing, three of them, connected at their shafts, a sc.r.a.p of torn wing. They stood on one edge, shuddering like the sail of a toy boat in the breeze. Around them the dark leaves and frail flowers of bluebells that glowed here and there where the sun struck through.

Margaret sat and heard the wind pouring in the leaves overhead. She had fallen in the river once, as a child, and heard the rushing deafness of drowning. But she had been saved. The flowing of the air around her seemed to intensify, to grow louder, until it was so powerful it reversed her breath. It almost lifted her from the ground.

The wind separated into thumps, into wing beats. An angel. An angel there in front of her.Tears fell like petals from her face. It stopped in front of her. Settling, its wings made a chittering sound. It paced back and forth, a strange, soft, curving walk that was almost like dancing. It reached out with its beautiful hands to steady itself in the mortal world, touching leaves, touching branches, and left stains of brightness where it touched. Slowly, unbearably, it turned its face to look at her. When it spoke, she felt that the words were spoken precisely in the middle of her mind, but that they somehow pervaded the whole forest. The leaves crisped and trembled. 'Do not weep,' it said. 'I am an angel of the Lord.'

'Forgive me,' she said. 'Forgive me. Forgive my husband.'

Inclining its head towards her, it smiled. 'There are things I must reveal to you.'

Margaret dared to look at it, hearing its voice quiet and full of love, and saw that angels' faces are subtler machines than human ones. There were parts that worked sideways as well as up and down. It registered the finest changes, momentary and delicate, as it moved, like the iridescence on a pigeon's neck.

'Is He . . . Is He coming?' she asked.

'Do not,' the angel told her, 'ask to see Him. His Love is a flood. His glory is a fire. You could not withstand it. And we have need of you. Hold out your hand.'

Margaret did as she was instructed. The angel dropped onto her palm something small and round, about the size of a hazelnut picked up from the ground. 'What is it?' she asked.

'It is all that is made.'

Margaret looked at it, marvelling at its minuteness, its delicacy. It had rivers narrower than a leaf 's veins that pulsed, seas that ticked back and forth, and around it was the brightness of its own sky, then other skies, then darkness.

'Only because G.o.d loves it,' the angel instructed, 'can it exist. Without His love . . .'

'It vanishes.'

'Vanishes. Vanishes. Vanishes.'

The angel removed it from her hand. Looking up, Margaret saw how the trees stretched their arms behind the angel, to protect it.

'Here now is your first instruction.'

'I submit. Utterly, I submit.'

'Your name is no longer Margaret. That was the name given you by your earthly parents, used by your husband. Today you are rechristened.'

'Rechristened.' At that word all the leaves and trees were still, expectant, formal. She waited, not breathing for long heartbeats.

'Your name is Mary.'

'It is too much.' Margaret covered her face with her hands.