Awakening (6 page)

‘What did you think of Mr Clifford's sermon, Anna? I saw you were moved. Your eyes – they are, you know – what's the English word? – unearthly.'

‘Don't
do
that, Will.'

‘Don't do what?'

‘Flatter. It's ugly and demeaning. And you're so bad at it. It might sound better in Welsh but – unearthly eyes! It's
un
flattering actually. You do it to everyone. How is the way you are with women and young girls fair to my sister?'

What she thinks is that Will
prostitutes
himself. It's a word considered sullying to a woman's lips. But the Pentecosts support the mission to the London prostitutes. These women are paupers, rejects, human souls preyed upon by vile males, respectable by day, beasts by night, the conduits of disease to their women and children. Will, you
prostitute
yourself, she thinks, staring silently as he flushes.

‘If
she
would accept me, can you seriously imagine I'd ever look twice at another woman? Do you, Anna?' He has never acted dishonourably to a woman, Will swears. That's unfair. Well, perhaps he is a little susceptible. But he loves Beatrice with all his heart; he's devoted to Anna too, and if Beatrice won't have him, he has a good mind to ask their brother for Anna's hand, only he's sure she'd laugh at him.

‘Yes, I would.' Oh very nice, to be always tagging along, second best. A bit like you, Mr Anwyl, never the first object of choice.

‘You would prefer someone like Mr Clifford.'

‘I admired Mr Clifford for more than his blue eyes.'

‘I dreamed of you all in blue, Anna,' he says. ‘Do you want to hear it?'

‘No. But I'm sure you're going to tell me.'

‘Forget-me-not blue. You wouldn't look at me; I was beneath you; you stared straight past me.'

‘Sorry to have been so rude, Will, in
your
dream.'

They both laugh.

‘What do you think it means though, Anna?'

‘Blue is the colour of Heaven, Will, isn't it? – the Madonna's colour. So I am guessing you see me as a nun.'

The Madonna is a Papist idol; he wouldn't dream of the Madonna, he insists.

‘Anyway,' she says gently. ‘It was just a dream. Dreams can be very nonsensical.'

In her heart Anna recognises it as a dream of death, her death. He has seen his dead sister-in-law-to-be laid out for her funeral.

Chapter 3

Two pairs of eyes, startled by the creak of the door, swivel towards Beatrice like a single guilty creature. Anna's face is unnaturally flushed; the bedclothes are rumpled. What's
he
doing on
her
bed? Beatrice speaks no word. Her black heart bounces into her throat. She stands with her back against the door, sucking in breath to let him past, face averted.

Her underlip recalls the sensation of the feather; her breast remembers brushing against this light man in the garden before the day curdled. Night after night I break my own sleep to join you, Anna, to soothe your suffering. Praying till my knees hurt. And I'm repaid by this … what should one call it, canoodling? There is something that periodically unhinges Anna, hysterical damage to her integrity. It is situated in her disordered womb. But it's also a modern infection brought into their house by the Salas of Toplady. Beatrice has sometimes vowed to herself: they shall enter my house over my dead body. But what authority can she assert over a twenty-six-year-old sister?

Dr Quarles will have to be brought in, to apply a drastic, dramatic remedy: a blister, a bleed, an enema, all of which Anna loathes and denounces as unscientific.

*

‘So, Beatrice,' says Loveday Elias, seating her guests in the chilly parlour, which smells of damp, in front of a fire she's only just lit, of green, wet wood. ‘What's all this a little birdie has been telling me – about you and a certain young man?'

‘I wish you'd quash tattle like that as soon as you hear it, Loveday. It's odious. Please.'

Mrs Montagu, ever practical, offers to draw the fire. She holds a newspaper over it; the flame roars up behind the page, which is open at a picture of a slave sale in New Orleans, the males dressed in dandy suits and the females in calico, wearing forced smiles. A smoking hole appears; flame licks and Mrs Montagu scrambles the paper into a ball. ‘Now then, there we are!' The fire is soon in a state to receive coals and be left.

What do Mr Anwyl's follies matter compared with the horror of godless cruelty practised in the slaving states of America? Providence, placing the newspaper in Mrs Montagu's hands, brings this to Beatrice's attention. She bows her head as her friends lament the heinous doings in the New World. How will it end? O my beloved Lord who shed his blood for my freedom, make me more patient and charitable. I could hardly be less so than I am now
.
Christian Ritter is on an anti-slavery speaking tour in the northern states: perhaps he's mentioned in the burnt newspaper. For God is not pointing in the direction of the deceitful Welshman, that much is clear. And if – when – Herr Ritter returns to ask for Beatrice's hand again, she ought to accept him.
Mr Jones of Bedwellty with his sons is also in America and between them they may bring home that prince of liberation pastors, Henry Ward Beecher.

A fog of damp taints the air. The velvet mantel cloth, once purple, is so stained with moisture that its ball-fringe is discoloured into a kind of green. At least they have a fire. Leaning forward to the flames, Beatrice warms first her palms, then the backs of her hands; receives the steady heat on her face. She'd like to fall on her knees this very minute like a Methodist, and pray, racked with sobs, for a contrite heart.

Two small Eliases sidle in at the door. ‘Look, Ma!' says Jack, holding up his hand. ‘Fish scales!'

‘Oh, you naughty Jack, whatever will your papa say?' Loveday feebly protests. ‘What have I said about playing in the larder? Come here, let me wipe your hands.'

‘No! They're
my
fish scales!'

‘I hope you put the trout back where you found it! Did he?' Mrs Elias asks seven-year-old Patience, who shrugs.

‘Come on then, young man,' Beatrice says. You see, I can be tender to children. ‘You may sit on my knee, Jack, but only once Mama has wiped your hands and face.'

Jack shakes his head, tongue out, eyes shut, and won't stop. Instead, Patience dumps herself in Beatrice's lap. Slipping her arms round the child's middle, Beatrice feels the warm, strong body through the woollen dress. The body heat seems to declare the untamed willpower of the child, something almost indecent in a girl. There has always been a problem regarding the children of the saved: brought up within the fold, how can they be awoken to conversion? How can they be shocked from torpor or bored rebellion?

Jack shrieks, dives across and fights to get onto Beatrice's loaded lap. Mrs Montagu swoops the lad up and, advising Loveday to go and check on the whereabouts and condition of the trout he's been playing with, clamps the boy to herself. Jack gives in; sucks his grimy thumb. Patience swipes at her brother with her foot.

‘Oh no you don't!' Beatrice slaps the child's knee. Not hard.

‘You hit me, you – spinster!'

‘I tapped your knee, Patience. Behave yourself if you wish to sit with me, miss.'

‘I don't want to sit with you,
Miss
.
' Patience wriggles down. ‘This is what your sour old face looks like.' She inserts fingers in the corners of her mouth and pulls, wags her head, rolls her eyes. ‘Anyway my papa says you're an old maid past your prime. He says you're thirty-seven if you're a day.
Miss.
' Having dealt this blow, Patience whisks out of the door.

‘Well!' Mrs Montagu whispers over the sleeping tot's head. ‘What can one say? Sheer anarchy. 1848 all over again. Did I tell you about poor dear Mr Kyffin?'

The minister of Florian Street Baptist Chapel in Salisbury is a favourite with them all. But turmoil's brewing in his chapel: accusations are being tossed around by Mr Prynne and his family, of perfidy and embezzlement and ‘something worse'.

Beatrice, ruminating on her wrongs, cannot bring herself to be interested. Thirty-seven? Of course I don't look thirty-seven. I do look thirty-seven. My bloom has faded. Will floods her head with longing and disappointment. He'll never change. Admit it. I'll cut him out of my heart, Beatrice decides, that's all there is for it; he is a tumour. Some of my heart will adhere to the malignancy and that must be cut out too, and the rest will bleed, but it will not go on forever. There's no chloroform for the hurt Will's dealt me.

I shall be an old maid. I'll lose what looks I have. I'll be alone. Anna will die. And leave me. Or she'll marry Will and take him from me. How could you bear to do that, Annie? Beatrice's eyes brim. But how could one be cross with Anna or wish to deny her anything she desires? The love between sisters is paramount
.
Mr Anwyl, you'll marry Anna over my dead body. Not only because it would kill me to see the two of you climb the stairs at night but because you'd divide me from my sister.

They are called in to dinner. Jack, flushed and grizzling, is put to bed. Patience has gone fishing with Henry.

‘Really, I shouldn't let her go off with the boys but what can you do?' asks Loveday. A faint smile licks her pouchy face. ‘Are your girls so wilful, Mrs Montagu?'

‘No
indeed
. My daughters are brought up strictly but kindly.'

Loveday, deaf to implied rebuke, placidly claims, ‘Oh, so are mine. Now do sit you down, dears, I shan't be a moment.'

A fur of dust coats the dining room in a disgraceful mantle. The bold forefinger of Patience E. Elias has signed her name in dust on the mirror above the fire.

‘Squalor,' whispers Mrs Montagu. ‘Never seen the like. Is this how they do things in Wales? I suppose it is. Ah, here is luncheon.'

A very good luncheon, as it turns out. The Elias family is beloved, for all its defects of housekeeping; gifts of meat, fish, cakes and puddings pour in, chiefly in a cooked form Loveday can't ruin.

‘What were you saying about dear Mr Kyffin?'

It seems that Florian Street is heading for a hurricane – either a secession or an expulsion. What it's all about is unclear. Mr Kyffin has been accused of sowing heretical doctrines but what's behind that? Something heinous is hinted at by Mr Prynne the shoemaker, a powerful deacon who has gathered a party against their pastor. Financial mismanagement, embezzling? An indelicacy? Suspicion of antinomianism – of placing the elect above the law? Mrs Montagu will get to the bottom of it, never fear: whatever it is, she will never believe ill of Mr Kyffin. Unless she's forced to.

Loveday appears anxious; her forkful of apple pie pauses on its way to her mouth. She's clearly pondering whether this might this happen to the Eliases? What if their flock decided to expel them? Why are Christ's people so quarrelsome?

Beatrice imagines the robe of Christ torn to shreds by his followers, dragging their wounded Saviour this way and that between them. Factious Baptists pierce his naked side with disputes as vicious as they are petty and self-righteous. They'll all quarrel one another out of Heaven, to the rejoicing of Papists and Congregationalists alike. But indeed all sects are at one another's throats. Cromwell and Milton had their hour. Then came the great Awakenings of the eighteenth century. What now? It's a new Dark Age. Beatrice's grandparents in their youth surely had the best of it. Baptisms in the Severn and the Avon; Russell Pentecost and William Carey taking ship together to convert Bengal.

The wave crested decades ago; now it falls and we fall with it. Only the nature of our punishment remains to be revealed.

*

Anna is harrowed and fascinated to read back fragments of her diary, as though a demon's pen had prised open the gaps in God's logic, inserting a steel nib, twisting it this way and that to see how much further the loophole can be forced. If – when – I die and the book gets into Beatrice's hands, she'll be shocked to her marrow.
Heathen
,
atheist.
But I am neither, Anna thinks. I am the girl who was baptised by Papa in the Avon. First the elder sister, then the younger, all in white, stepped down into the living water; they plunged beneath it, emerging as one day they will rise from the dead, as newborn creatures.

Grey weather: swans glided upstream, leading a fleet of cygnets. The willows, bent like penitents, trailed their boughs in the river. It seemed a day of dark mirrorings, the congregation casting its drowned shadow in the water. A breathless drama of eternal moment was enacted. On the bank the sisters waited, arms round one another's waists, while their father addressed the flock.

Anna, the less pious, had first undergone conversion. Tree-climber, fishergirl, she had run wild from her earliest days. Then her chest budded; her hips rounded. Her own dirt began to obsess her – the grime beneath her fingernails; fur growing in her armpits and a triangle of pubic curls in the smelly place between her legs; the monthly flux of shameful blood and its attendant cramps. Fits of wild tears shook her: how could the Lord Jesus look compassionately on such a beast of the field? Beatrice remained flat as a pancake, innocent of monthly blood. Anna's fingers slid on slick flesh; earthquakes shook her little world as Beatrice slept – Beatrice the clean daughter, always spruce and neat. Anna slid into guilty dreams and unfocused animal desire.