Curiosity (12 page)

n nights when there was only barley gruel for supper, Mary closed her heart against the ghostly children. How would they ever have fed them all? But her mother seemed to find no comfort in sharing the pot into five bowls rather than ten. And yet, whenever they talked about the dead brothers and sisters, Molly said the same things. The story of little Martha crawling up the quilt to open her mother’s eyes, for example. Molly had only one or two thoughts about each baby. How could you be so completely gone from the earth that you no longer lived even in your mother’s mind? Not that Molly did not grieve – but it seemed to Mary that she grieved for all the babies as one.

Some days, Mary woke up stony towards her mother. Mary herself was pale and thin no longer. Her eyebrows were bold and straight, her face in the looking glass beginning to show the bones of the woman she would be. Molly did not notice; she thought of nothing but Percival. She would not cut his nails or his hair until he was fully weaned, and it seemed he never would be weaned, because he did not have the strength to swallow porridge. Molly
fidgeted over him, she walked the floor with his wizened pixie face over her shoulder. When he slept, she laid him down and looked at him fondly, stroking his cheek with the back of her finger. “Pray keep your voice down,” she said to Mary, as though Mary’s strong voice were the cause of all their troubles. Mother would have sorrowed as much if all her children had lived and grown away from her (thought Mary on her stony days, hauling water from the spring in a bucket), for she found little pleasure in her big children now.

There was general misfortune and misfortune particular to them. All of Dorsetshire and Devonshire was hungry that year. Other joiners became undertakers. When people will not buy a china cabinet, they will find a way to buy a coffin. But Richard would not make coffins. When he did not have the capital to buy oak for the workshop, he collected on the shore, seizing every opportunity to look for one of the big stony crocodiles Mr. Buckland wanted. Whenever the tide would let him, he went back to Pinhay Bay, where he’d found the big jaw, and often he took Mary.

One day William Lock, the curi-man in Charmouth, sent word that he had something for Mr. Buckland, but Richard was busy with a cabinetry job all day and didn’t have time to go. After supper, he went to the Three Cups and the sun was sinking over the Cobb when he came back in. When there was a drop of cider in him, he had a way of appearing in the doorway before you sensed him on the step. Once inside, a line of his song escaped him and he picked Lizzie up and tossed her so she squealed, and then he said he was walking to Charmouth.

“The tide will be in,” said Molly.

“I’ll take the path.” He meant to walk up on the cliffs.

“What, in the dark?”

“It’s wonderful bright.” Richard went down to the workshop for his collecting bag and his wedge hammer and Mary knew he meant to collect along the shore on his way home; he was going now so he could collect at first light. No one else would do that. No one would climb the cliff path over Black Ven in the dark, not with three pints of cider in him. He’s had a taste of death on the cliffs, Mary reminded herself, reaching up to touch her pox-marks, and he’s safe from it. “I’ll be back before you’ve had breakfast,” he said.

It was Mary and Joseph who found him mid-morning the next day. Searching frantically from the cliff road, Mary spied him halfway down, lying on his side, a smudge of grey on a black ledge. He called up to them not to come down, so Mary stood on the path above him while Joseph went for help. The lip of the cliff was gouged by his boot where he’d skidded, going over. He had managed to hold on to his collecting bag; she could see it on the ledge with him. He did not look up at her again or speak. He lay on his side and seemed to be afraid to move. She watched the gulls circle the cliff until Joseph brought three men back with a rope. Mr. Lupton told Mary to step out of the way, so she stood back on the path and watched them put the rope down to him. He was able to tie it around his waist and then the men drew on it and shouted encouragement to him as he scrambled his way up. He came up over the edge of the cliff like a mackerel being pulled into a boat, and stood grinning on the path. His injuries were not so bad! But he was fainting with pain as he walked towards home.

They stopped at the first cottage on the Charmouth Road and the Widow Bradshaw who lived there said they must take one of the doors off her cowshed to carry him, and they did so, Joseph and Mr. Lupton on one side of the door, the wheelwright and his son on the other. Mary walked beside him into town, carry ing his bag and hammer. Coming up Bridge Street, she saw sea shining lustrous in a gap between the prison and the town hall. She
looked at her father’s still white face with his eyes closed on the door, and for a terrible moment it seemed to her that the men walking on either side of him were the pallbearers carrying him to his grave. A gull hung motionless above them and a shadow crawled at the corner of her eye and she seemed to see a long, snaking line of friends and neighbours following in a procession, crepe tied to their hats and their heads bowed in sorrow. Among them was a lone mummer who had come to the door one winter’s night, and she closed her mind to it and ran ahead to open the door.

He fell ill, an apt phrase for it because his illness began with the fall. They made up a pallet on the kitchen floor near the hearth so he would be warm, but when it seemed the convalescence would not be quick, Mr. Lupton brought in a cot. It was a sturdy cot; Richard himself had made it years ago. They did not spend coin on Doctor Reeves because Richard would not agree to be bled and there was nothing else. In all kindness, Farmer Ware brought an ass right to the door and milked it into a jug, and Richard drank it warm, warm ass’s milk being a powerful tonic. Molly bought butter, a butter made from the milk of a cow that had grazed on the churchyard. He did not quarrel with her for it, he ate it, winking at Mary when Molly’s back was turned. At first, he climbed the stairs to sleep, but then he did not. Molly would settle him for the night and Mary come in to see him lying on his side on the cot, the pot for night soil beside him. Molly herself sat with a rushlight lit on the table before her, not speaking, and Richard lay with his eye open and his cheek against the pillow.

Week by week, he grew whiter and thinner. His eyes burned black in his white face as though urgent thoughts were collecting in his mind, but he talked less and less, because his throat pained him. Instead, he coughed. It was a torture for them to
hear him because they knew the pain his ribs were giving him. That winter, Mary polished up their store of fossils for sale at the table, and she wrote a text on the monstrosities. It was a slight, cramped thing in the end, not what she had imagined. Working with pen and paper, she could not capture the ideas that fluttered like moths in her head. She would not send this text to Mr. Buckland. She had written this one for her father.

“Ye must add,” he said, handing it back to her with an admiring look, “
The remains of those animals that Noah wrongly judged could swim but could not
.” Which she liked, and did add, and set to work making a fine copy.

After she finished, Mary went upstairs and knelt by her parents’ bed. She knelt until the sound of the sea outside the window had washed everything out of her mind. Then, in her prayer, she led her father up a smooth wide path. He walked beside her and leaned against her shoulder because of his weakness. She led him up to where God sat on his throne in a white robe, and said to God,
You must make him well
. She tried to raise her eyes to God’s face, but she could not. He won’t answer, she thought in despair. He has already answered. Why do I plague God when He has already shown me the end of it?

But was it
God
who had sent her the vision of her father being carried to his grave? Mary bent her head back into the cover. Oh, let it be black mischief sent to trouble me, she prayed. Let it be the Devil who sends me such visions! For only the Devil could wish such a thing, to take their father from them.
If I see it in a vision then
, she thought, laying her cheek against the cover and feeling peace wash through her,
the contrary will befall us. If I see his death, he will be well
.

Her father could not talk a great deal, but others talked. Friends came and sat in the kitchen all through the winter, Walter Jones
and Mr. Dobson and Mr. Lupton. They sat and conversed heartily to Richard, even when Richard was too ill to respond. But there was something shamefaced about their manner to Molly – they would never meet her mother’s eyes. Mr. Buckland visited when he came down from Oxford on the coach to carry out his studies on the shore. Miss Philpot came, carrying a pot of rich broth. And the baker John Besley in his white coat, carrying in a gallon loaf and the lovely smell of bread baking.

“Himself’s back up to nine shillings,” Mr. Besley said, pulling the rush chair up to the cot. The price of a bushel of corn, this was, for
Himself
was always the miller, for whom Mr. Besley had an intimate and dignifying hatred. Mr. Besley’s hair was orange and his sidewhiskers and eyebrows were white, as though he had dropped his face in a bowl of flour. He leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at Richard with affection. It was clear now why Richard had abandoned them – he’d left them leaderless because he was ill. Soon he’d be well again, and then they’d show the miller! Mr. Besley looked around the room with kindly regard for them all, as though he had no memory of Molly standing in his shop not six months before, accusing him of cutting the flour with plaster.

He wanted to talk. He wanted to go back to the finest hour of his youth. Tenderly, he took them back to the Three Cups the night of the bread riot. He described how Richard had got their blood up, how he had persuaded Morris the bell-ringer to go to the tower and jangle the bells in the night, how they’d lit torches and run up and down the streets to get the dogs barking, to draw the sleeping townspeople out of the houses.
No man should profit from his neighbours in time of dearth
, he said, giving Richard the voice of an orator. “He were a true leader, this fellow,” he cried. “He were such a leader, he made rebels of the women!”

Molly, sitting at the table cleaning oysters, said what she always said. “Women! It were faint-hearted men. They took to the streets with their faces whited over and wearing their wives’ pinafores. They wanted a disguise to hide behind and it were the only disguise they had.”

Mr. Besley looked at Molly fondly for her innocence and went on to tell how, at the mill – men and women together – they smashed windows and threw their torches in and tore the cribbing off the bins.

“But the magistrate did not arrest you,” said Mary, to help him to the heart of the story.

“Oh, that cheese-paring old coot,” scoffed Mr. Besley. “That cowheart! He sent his boy out to post a notice in the butter market, telling how bad his gout were and the trouble he would drop on us the instant he were well. Then he heard us a-laughing and his pride swoll up and he sent a man on horseback to the barracks at Weymouth. It were William Cooper who went, the weasel. He sold his neighbours for the joy of a bare-ridge ride to Weymouth on a fine horse. He had the grace to die there, not two month later. But he raised up the army, he did, and they rode in with guns to their shoulders, and there we were, not an arm to our names but the two arms God give every man. Nought we could do but prise up cobbles from the square to pitch at the soldiers. And so prise them up we did, and pitch them we did, by Christ!”

Mary looked eagerly at Richard, who sometimes joked about this scene. And her father had lifted his neck up from his pillow, his thin neck clamped rigid by a cough that would not come out of him. The cough was like a chunk of bread in his throat choking him – he sought her with desperate eyes. Molly leapt towards him and Mary ran for the water jug, and suddenly she heard a cry from Mr. Besley. She turned, and the hen was peering in unconcern under its wing, but the rest were seized as her father had been
seized, all rigid around the cot, her mother bending towards him and Lizzie crouching with her little dolly, and Mr. Besley with horror on his kindly face, Mr. Besley in a white coat splashed with blood.

A consumption had laid hold of him and from that day on, it consumed him in a pitiless fashion. It seemed that the fall had broken a rib and the rib pierced a hole in his lung and let the consumption creep in. When James Wheaton heard, he came and sat in silence on the chair by the cot, his hand pressed to his brow and looking the whole time through his fingers. His lips were pulled into a grimace against his teeth. At the door, he finally spoke. “Let us pray for the night to come,” he said, “for then the day will soon follow.”

Mary ran after him out onto the street. She reached out and laid hold of the back of his jacket, unable to speak, and he turned and they stood looking at each other in Cockmoile Square. When her voice finally came, it was harsh, it was an accusation against his prayer. “Our Lord
healed
the sick,” she cried. “It’s on every page of the Gospels. I have read it.” Standing in the square while rain drizzled on their heads, she railed against her mother also, for the charmed butter and the mulberry bush hanging over the cot. She railed against her father. “He does
despise
jommetry,” she said, her voice shuddering out of her. “But he says nothing. He suffers her to do it.”