This Other Eden

By
the Author

Kings
Ex

In
The Midst of Earth

The
Peppersalt Land

The
Runaway's Diary

Hatter
Fox

The
Conjurers

Bledding
Sorrow

This
Other Eden

By
Marily Harris

Copyright
© 1977 by Marilyn Harris

All
rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form
without permission. Pubhshed simultaneously in Canada by Longman Canada
Limited, Toronto.

PRINTED
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For
Judge and Karen and John

The
secret of the entire world is whispered here at Eden Point in the tumultuous
union of sea and land, cliff and air.

And
for a very brief space, every heart is touched and melted with the sense of
things divinely fair, immeasurably great, immeasurably sad. . . .

—From
the diary of

James
Eden, First Baron

by
tenure of Eden Castle,

written
in 1232.

Eden
Castle

North
Devon,

England

1790

The
Public Whipping of Miss Marianne Locke, age sixteen, was scheduled to take
place at seven in the morning on Friday, August the third, 1790, in the inner
courtyard of Eden Castle, situated on the North Devon coast at the exact point
where the Bristol Channel prepares to join the turbulence of the Atlantic
Ocean.

The
cliffs veered sharply southward from this point, fronting the unbroken force of
the Atlantic winds and waves, and were shattered by them into a grim array of
jutting points. Here the gales and ocean were supreme.

But
atop the cliffs of Eden Point, supremacy resided in human hands, and the
command for the Public Whipping, considered barbaric for the civilized late
eighteenth century, had been issued by Thomas Eden himself, Thirteenth Baron
and Fifth Earl. Thomas Eden possessed the power and had suffered the outrage,
so on a hot humid Thursday afternoon he shouted at Ragland, his male servant,
"Whip her!" As his anger showed no signs of abating, he added,
"Publicly! And all those who fail to witness it may also find themselves
in her unfortunate position!"

The
whipping had been announced to all the tenants and fishermen of Mortemouth, the
village that sat at sea level at the foot of Eden Castle. These people were
totally dependent upon the Lord of the Castle and his twenty thousand acres of
rich sheep-grazing land.

The
prisoner was led by Ragland into the Keep through the Norman doorway. She found
herself imprisoned in a small, windowless room, barely able to breathe. She
waited for Ragland to say something to her, acknowledging the many evenings he
had shared a pint with her father in their cottage in Mortemouth.

But
the old man refused to look at her. He kept his hand over his nose to shield
against the poisonous vapors of the charnel house, and he kept his white head
bowed. Only when he was closing the heavy door behind him did she hear him
mutter, "Keep close to the floor, Marianne. There's life there. The
breathing's easier."

The
door closed, the bolts slid into place. In terror and despair, she hurled
herself at the solid oak barrier. Slowly sensing her predicament, she sank to
the floor, still struggling for breath.

A
series of almost invisible shudders passed over her, over her mouth, and down
into her shoulders and arms. A spasm of waking moved upward from some
deep-shocked realm. She closed her eyes and then opened them. Instantly she
tried to get to her feet, but fell back into a pose of annihilation.

From
this stunned state, she observed her surroundings, a small room of solid stone.
On the floor nearby was a pile of straw reeking with the odor of urine and
feces. And there, in the far comer, the pit itself, the deep hole of the charnel
well descending thirty feet to the level of the courtyard outside, the place
where the rotting carcasses of cattle and sheep were thrown, from which the
stench of putrefaction arose to asphyxiate any prisoner long held in the room.

Focusing
on the hole, her face went rigid. The foul air burned her lungs, then her
terror blended with a curious relief, since she had certain knowledge that she
would never endure the pain and humiliation of the public whipping. She would not
survive the night.

She
pressed closer to the door, still keeping her eyes on the charnel well as
though it were alive. She remembered—although she did not relish gossip—about
three weeks prior, shortly after she had climbed the cliff staircase to take her
place in service at Eden Castle, that she had been warned by the House Warden,
Dolly Wisdom, to stay away from the Keep. The serving women in the Buttery had
told her a Comwellian, caught stealing sheep, had been thrown still alive down
the charnel well, on top of the rotting carcasses. For a week thereafter,
Marianne thought she had heard shrieks of death.

She
watched her hand ascend to her mouth, as though both belonged to someone else.
She felt a long, slow convulsion in the pit of her stomach. Only at the last
moment, threatened with unconsciousness, did she remember old Ragland's
advice—"Keep close to the floor. There's life there." In spite of her
torture, she flattened herself against the stone floor, her nose pressed
against the hairline crack beneath the heavy door. It was true. She found,
coming from beneath the door, a brief respite. Thus she lay with no sense of
time, her body pressed against the crack.

In
an extreme act of will, she soothed herself. If the man had indeed been thrown
into the well, he would blessedly be dead by now. The eyes in her back had
nothing to worry about. But the flesh of her back did, for she had decided that
she would survive the night, that at seven o'clock the following morning, she
would still be here, that she would be led out into the inner courtyard to the
whipping oak, would have her back bared, and would endure ten lashes and the
greater pain of sober observance by people who had known her all her life.

Imagining
the coming ordeal was more terrifying than the resurrection of the rotting Cornwellian.
Suddenly she tasted blood on her lips, the natural stress of image becoming
fact. She sent her thoughts elsewhere, to the headlands along the top of Eden
Point where she had run as a child, taking bread and cheese to her father at
sheep-shearing time, to her roses which, by general consensus, were the
prettiest in all of Mortemouth, to the grave of her dead mother in the tiny
parish churchyard by the quay.

Such
thoughts produced a surprising change in her expression. From behind the fair
hair fallen over graceful shoulders and slender neck framed by a crude muslin
collar looked a face that was quite astonishing, not only for its beauty, but
also for the strange intensity in the eyes, an appeal so gently and almost
courteously denied by the mouth's civilized half-smile. Yet there was
uncertainty in the face, even tentativeness, a surprising and alarming force.

She
longed for the comforting arms of her father. His agony was certainly as great
as her own, as he blamed himself for her present ordeal. It had been his idea
that she go into service at Eden Castle. "A good future for you,
Marianne," he had said. "The only reasonable option for a young woman."

She
groaned aloud and longed to comfort him, although she knew his comforters were
all around him, that the low-ceilinged cottage fairly was bursting with
commiserating friends and neighbors, all dreading the ordeal of the morning as
much as she.

Her
gentle features contorted. Quickly she reversed her last thought. No, not as
much as she, for their backs would not be bared, nor their arms bound in tight
embrace of the whipping oak. The flesh of their foreheads would not be ground
into the tar-covered bark, nor their nerves and muscles resisting the cutting
lash of the whip.

The
full horror of the ordeal swept over her. She made a curious sound as though
she had already sustained the blows of the whip. Her arms lifted over her head.
Her fingers went forward, hesitated, and trembled as if they had found the
comfort of a hand in the dark. Her crying mouth tasted the grit of the stone
floor.

The
tears continued for some time, a small indulgence, smaller comfort. Laboring
under the weight of her own remorseless visualizations, she fell into a
stupefied exhaustion. Outside she heard the faint deep voice of the night
watchman calling, "All is well." Her tear-stained face now seemed
possessed of a stubborn cataleptic calm. All was not well, not yet.

Abruptly
she lifted herself upward, first drawing a deep breath of clean air from
beneath the door. Then, slowly, she crawled forward on hands and knees, as
though she were a supplicant suffering some inscrutable wish for salvation,
stopping at last at the very edge of the charnel well.

She
knelt, gasping for breath. The clean air from the door was depleted in her
lungs. Still kneeling, she forced herself in the dying light to look over the
edge and down. The features of her face set, as though convinced of this abrupt
necessity. Something in her body commensurate with the weight in her mind where
reason was inexact forced her to look down at the rotting liquid carcasses of
cattle and sheep with stiffened legs, swollen, exploded bellies, entrails like
red snakes in shimmering piles amid blood-encrusted hides. She forced herself
to look closer until in the semidarkness she found it, a human hand, a human
torso, a human head cradled in the burst brains of an animal, glassy eyes
distended, mouth agape, frozen in a scream at the exact moment the poisonous
air had suffocated him.

Drawing
back from the edge, she closed her eyes. The Cornwellian was beyond her
prayers, yet she prayed anyway and her prayer was monstrous because in it there
was no margin of forgiveness. For the man walking somewhere in the upper
regions of Eden Castle who had put her in this place, she felt no compassion.
She prayed only for the Cornwellian and for herself.

After
the prayer, she moved farther back from the edge of the charnel well. She felt
a sharp pain in the pit of her stomach, the result of breathing the poisonous
air. Shuddering in the double pain of poison and fury, she crawled back to the
door.

For
three or four minutes she lost herself. Where she had gone, she had no idea.
When she came to, she was pressed against the crack beneath the door. She did
not wonder what had happened.

She
said aloud, "There is nothing in this place of which I need be
afraid." For the rest of the night, she held her terror at bay with that
gentle though misleading smile.

In
1790, on the West Coast of England, to speak of castles was to speak of Eden.
Seen from the coastline below, it looked like some great fortress, hewn roughly
out of natural rock. Nature was taking back to herself the masses of stone
reared centuries earlier. The giant walls and mighty buttresses looked as if
they had been carved by wind and weather out of a solid mass, rather than
wrought by human handiwork. Historically Eden had served England well, and by
the end of the eighteenth century there was no reason to believe that it would
not endure into eternity.

On
this sultry August evening, Thomas Eden, Thirteenth Baron and Fifth Earl, lay
abed in his private chambers off the Morning Room, thinking not at all about
the young girl he had imprisoned that afternoon in the charnel house cell. At
forty, he was more his grandfather's son than his father's, a tall man whose
face and features bore the unmistakable imprint of genes gone awry. Both
strains of the unpredictable grandfather seemed to have been captured
simultaneously in one unruly personality. Instead of dividing his life as his
grandfather had done—forty years for dissipation and thirty years for a
puritanical God, this Thomas Eden seemed to effect the change at the alarmingly
rapid rate of every other week.

In
all fairness, he faced life unprepared. There had been a dazzling older
brother, James, a fair, noble-hearted boy on whom both father and mother had
placed their hopes for the future. Then Fate cast a contrary eye on Eden.
James, in the throes of duty not only to Eden but also to England, and as head
of the Militiamen of North Devon, went to fight in the unnecessary War of
American Independence. He fought well and nobly, and died in the Battle of
Yorktown. He was buried there, along with the hopes for the future of Eden
Castle.

Grief-stricken,
both parents soon followed James to the grave. Thomas was left alone in a world
he did not understand, facing responsibilities that he was ill-prepared by
nature and training to meet.

Thomas
walked with a slight bend to the head as though anticipating future
apprehensions. His face was a long lean oval which on certain days suffered a
laborious though warranted melancholy. One feature alone spoke of the Edens and
that was the mouth, which though sensuous and full, pressed too intimately
close to the bony structure of the teeth. His nose was straight and even, pure
Anglo-Saxon, as were his other features. But in the deep blue of the eyes it
seemed another sense than sight had taken its stand beneath the flesh. On
occasion and in certain indefinable moods, there was no respite from that
stare, as though he had just awakened at sea without compass or anchor.

Still,
on good days, he was a kindly man, taking a considerable interest in his
tenants and workers, mingling with his sheep shearers and overseers as much as
one can mingle atop a white stallion. On occasion he even ventured down the
side of the steep cliff to the village of Mortemouth. His father before him had
created and launched a sizable fleet of fishing vessels, thus building the
village's prosperity as well as his own. Those who did not work the land and
tend the sheep put out to sea each morning in search of herring, grateful for
their new wealth.