The Quickening Maze Part 12

'There's a Doctor Bottle imp who deals in urine A keeper of state prisons for the queen As great a man as is the Doge of Turin And save in London is but seldom seen Ylcep'd old Allen - mad brained ladies curing Some poxed like Flora and but seldom clean The new road o'er the forest is the right one To see red h.e.l.l and further on the white one.'

He wanted to be out of that cell. It was a nightmare, simply a nightmare - his old friend mad and gabbling and laughing as he read from a greasy notebook. It was like a possession. And the air was rank. And there were noises from other chambers.

'Earth h.e.l.ls or b.u.g.g.e.r shops or what you please Where men close prisoners are and women ravished I've often seen such dirty sights as these I've often seen good money spent and lavished To keep bad houses up for doctors fees And I have known a b.u.g.g.e.r's tally traversed Till all his good intents begin to falter - When death brought in his bill and left the halter.'

John Taylor walked back from Leopard's Hill Lodge with Eliza Allen under the fragmenting trees. Thin puddles split beneath their feet. Leaves flowed down around them.

'A sibyl's prophecies,' he said. He was upset by what he'd seen, by the dwindling lives of his friends. This cla.s.sical thought now set a seal on his mood and slightly a.s.suaged him.

'I beg your pardon?'

'A sibyl, a prophetess,' he explained. 'She would write her prophecies on leaves and let the wind scatter them, read them who can. I spend my time now in ancient studies, mostly Egyptian, the pyramids and so forth.'

'I see.You should tell my husband. I'm sure he would be interested. But how did you find Mr Clare?' she asked.

'Not well,' he answered. 'He was . . . agitated. He kept asking after his childhood sweetheart, Mary. I hadn't the heart to tell him that she has died. Also - it would be amusing if it weren't the index of quite appalling suffering - he seemed at times to be under the impression that he is Lord Nelson.'

'Oh. Sometimes it is Byron, I am told.'

'That makes more sense. He's is rewriting one of Byron's poems. He also spoke very violently, obscenely in fact, against the place and your husband, whom he says he hardly sees at the moment. He showed me part of the poem "Don Juan", where these sentiments were also expressed. How long has he been in there, rather than Fairmead House?'

'I'm not exactly sure. More than a month. Many patients do spend time there when it is necessary and return later. And as to my husband, John Clare can hardly have seen him, he is so busy with the wood manufactury.'

'You didn't know him in his pride, I suppose. You can only have seen him distraught.'

'I am used to seeing people distraught.'

'But you should have seen him as I knew him.'

'His intelligence is still evident.'

'Intelligence I'm not so sure about. I mean, no doubt he has a good deal and he was always very astute about people. But the height of his powers, his inspiration - it was something to behold. He lacked rhetoric. He lacked shape and used many unfamiliar words of his own dialect. But the living earth, the world he knew . . . if you will permit me an extravagant formulation, it sang itself through him. England sang through him, its eternal, living nature. Thousands and thousands of lines, and all of it fresh, seen, melodic, real. It was genius, absolutely. How can that power be destroyed, he asks, knowing there is no answer. Excuse me, I simply wanted to think of him then for a moment.You said, didn't you, something about your husband's manufactury?'

'Yes, the carving machine.'

'Oh, of course. The Pyroglyph. A fine Greek name a sibyl would have liked: the fire mark. He wrote to me on the matter. Unfortunately, I'm in no position to invest at the moment. So, he's all taken up with that, is he?'

'Yes. In his headlong fas.h.i.+on. Not to say that he is neglecting the asylum.'

'And how are you, Mrs Allen? It has been such a long time since I saw you last.'

John Taylor had a certain dry charm, Eliza remembered, appropriate to a literary man, a bachelor, and a scholar. She a.s.sociated genteel, well-kept rooms with him. In their clean silence she imagined she'd hear only the scratching of a pen or the eager, quiet sound of pages being cut.

'Not since you brought John.'

'No, longer, my dear. I saw only your husband then. And your son. Is that correct? No, it was when I published your husband's book. Some years.'

Eliza smiled. John Taylor regarded her face, softly ageing, handsome in the flaring autumn light.

'And are you well?' he enquired.

'I am. We prosper, I suppose. We are all in health. Dora is now married and lives not too far away.There is the wood carving.'

'Your husband isn't neglecting you for it?'

'No, no. We both have much to do, I suppose. You must come now and see him.'

'Indeed, I must. I have to settle John's expenses.'

'We have guests you might like to meet. Perhaps you have already. Do you know the poet Alfred Tennyson?'

'I'm afraid I'm not much concerned with poetry any more, but I have heard of him. He's here, is he? I'm afraid the reviews have chewed him about a bit. They've grown no kinder since my poor Keats suffered them. I hope he hasn't been crushed. He's a patient?'

'No, no. His brother is. A melancholic. In fact, the family are here visiting; they comprise the party. No, Alfred is heavy for spells, I understand, but not deranged.'

They turned off the path and towards Fairmead House. They found the party at tea. Matthew Allen was standing, a cup in his hand, holding forth to a party all younger than himself, mostly women, two of whom were examining a piece of wood. He broke off when he saw the publisher, greeting him with his eyes while he finished the sentence.

'Mr Taylor, what a pleasure. Do take a seat. Fulton.'

Fulton obediently stood to offer his own seat.

'Oh, no. I'm afraid I can't stay. So you're Fulton. You have grown.'

'Thank you,' Fulton said and looked down, embarra.s.sed at the stupidity of his answer.

'Allow me to introduce you. John Taylor, these are the Tennysons.'

'A number of them,' one mumbled.

'Alfred Tennyson you may have heard of. Alfred, this is John Taylor, erstwhile publisher of Keats, Hazlitt, Lamb, our own unfortunate Mr Clare, and, I suppose I must confess, one of my own works on the cla.s.sification of the insane.'

'I have heard of you,' Taylor a.s.sured Tennyson, who had risen to shake his hand. 'You have been called c.o.c.kney, I know, and compared to Keats.'

'I'm not much of c.o.c.kney, being from Lincolns.h.i.+re, but they accuse me of similar sensuality and indolence, as they see it. They do me too much of an honour, did they but know it. It is an honour, of course, to shake the hand of a friend of Keats.'

'I was honoured to know him.'

Alfred Tennyson was tall and dark with lengthy limbs, a wide-mouthed bronze face and large hands. Taylor, comparing him with his dead friend, saw a different languor, a kind of tired ease about his presence that was unlike Keats, but there was a similar something - the gravid silence, perhaps. But not Keats's quickness, his darting anger.

'You are with Murray, aren't you? They are a very good house. I hope you will produce more.You must not let the magazines discourage you in any way.Theirs is a barbarous form of coffee-house entertainment. Yours is infinitely higher.'

Tennyson heard the voice of an older generation in that 'coffee-house'. Encouragement from this older man who'd known real poets was welcome. 'I thank you for those words. I don't think that they will stop me. There's really nothing else I'm fit for. Do you still publish poetry?'

'No, I'm afraid I could not make it pay. The public's taste has moved on to useful works and prose novels, as you know. But poetry will survive. Civilisation has never been without it.' Taylor's eye was caught by the flash of a brilliant silver teapot of fas.h.i.+onable design. Evidently what Eliza Allen had said was true: they were prospering. 'It won't pay, but it will survive. We want it, at least. Now, on the subject of payment, Dr Allen, would you favour me with a moment of your time.'

'Certainly.'

'It was a pleasure meeting you.' He bowed to the company.

Tennyson watched him leave. A small man, not particularly smart, with a tired, kind face, but a friend of immortals, a survivor of poetry.

With her hope blasted and withered and unexpected tears not impossible, Hannah had intended not to like the Tennysons - she wouldn't have been there at all if Father hadn't insisted - but she hadn't succeeded. The ladies were clever and distinct, sharply characterful and expressive, particularly the beautiful older sister Matilda, who might have put Annabella in the shade. Her fascination was only enhanced by the fact that she walked with a slow, semicircling limp. And when they spoke about their home, it sounded like the warm refuge she'd always imagined for herself, full of books and animals and invented games, with no patients and no business on the premises. Abigail had liked what she'd heard also, especially the idea of having a pet monkey and a big dog pulling Mother along in a carriage. She had immediately requested a monkey from Papa, who had laughingly refused as though the idea were ridiculous and he wouldn't even think about it at all. There were enough of them to look after a monkey. It would be amusing. Hannah tried not to look at Tennyson. She had convicted him of indifference and then the susceptibility to Annabella that affected even the stupidest people, but she could not, of course, entirely extinguish her feelings for him. Disdain twisted painfully together with yearning. She looked at the tablecloth. She sipped her tea.

Matthew Allen returned to the party with Taylor's money safely stowed in his desk. He liked handling money, liked possessing it, but the more potent and secret pleasure was risk. There was a pent force in having things at stake that seemed to charge one's limbs with energy and made eventual triumph more intense than could be imagined. This dream had been the cause of his early imprisonments in the past, but look at him now with his buildings, his patients, his distinguished reputation, and orders already acc.u.mulating for machine-carved wood. He held the new teapot high above his cup and poured a long, musical arc. By the end of the afternoon he had all the other Tennysons investing, except Septimus, whose nerves were to be spared the strain of capital adventure.

John felt the warmth of a hand on his shoulder. He knew its touch, its weight. 'Patty!' he said, turning.

'I thought you was all alone,' she said. 'It's dark in your room, ain't it?'

'It is dark. I am alone. Just that tiny window. Stars and clouds, never a bird or living thing. In h.e.l.l. I'm alone in h.e.l.l, Patty. At night, in darkness, doors get opened. Things happen.'

'Hush, now. Don't you want to know of your children? '

Patty sat down beside him on the hard, sour cot and pulled his head onto her shoulder, a strong and comforting woman. Her heavy cool fingers held his brow. She pulled him into the smell of her. He snaked an arm around the soft curve of her belly and grasped the cloth on the far side of her waist.

'The children are well,' he said. 'I know they are. They're free. John carpentering for the railways. Charles a clerk to that lawyer. Anna Maria to marry. I want to come home.'

'Why do you want to come home? The people aren't free there either.'

'They're not shut up. They're not locked away.'

She shook her head. 'The land is fenced. Can't walk across nothing.We're kept in narrow tracks.The common land is owned.The poor are driven away, the gypsies also.'

'The rich man is a tyrant and we are all prisoners. No one cares for the poor. They can burn ricks and riot. Nothing. Transportation. A whole continent is made a prison for them.'

'You're safer here.'

'No, I'm not. At night . . .'

'Shh. There's someone here to see you.'

Mary approached the bed.

'You! But how did you get in? Through the walls?'

'What are walls?'

John laughed. 'In your innocence you don't know.' While Patty held him, Mary approached, the beautiful child, barely taller than him seated, and kissed him, a flake of gold that fell spinning into his mind.

'Sit beside me,' he said. 'Sit beside me. Now, here we are.'

Between the two women, John sat, his two hands joined with theirs rested in his lap, linked.

'We're together,' he said.

The flow between them, kindling smiles from each other, their gazes touching, until John felt a warm drop on his right hand. Blood, branching immediately into the tiny channels of his skin. He looked up, saw the small wound beneath Mary's left eye.

'Oh,' he said.

'Why did you do this to me?' she asked. 'I was ever gentle.'

'I was a child,' he protested.'I never meant.You were so pretty in the orchard. I wanted to touch you. I felt so far away. That's why I threw the hazelnut.'

'Look. My face is healed.' The cut closed as he watched. Her skin resumed its placid surface like water.

'It's beautiful.'

Mary smiled back at him for a long moment. She held his gaze. She radiated love.

'Do you miss your sister?' she asked.

John felt his face crumpling. 'Yes,' he said. 'And n.o.body ever asks.' Along his side he hurt, frost-bitten, scoured by the winter wind, exposed.

'They don't know of her. Barely she glimmered in this world. You didn't know her.'

'She was a baby, my twin. Where did she go?'

Patty explained. 'Into a rich man's coffin. She died before baptism. She had to be snuck into holy ground.'

'So she's safe. But she would have been here. We would have loved one another.'

'You say that,' Patty said, 'but you were a solitary child, dreamy and distant.'

'Cause she wasn't there!'

'Here she is,' Mary said, and placed into his hands a sleeping baby. Closed purple eyes, curled fingers, a blunt, breathing nose, a soft swirl of hair. The warm weight of her head lay in his left palm.

'This is her,' he said. 'This is my sister.'

He looked up at Mary and Patty, disbelieving, overcome. When he looked down again, he held in his hands a bird's nest. He didn't recognise the type although he knew them all from his egg collecting. It was light, springy, tightly woven. Nor did he recognise the eggs. There were four of them.

'There we all are,' Patty said. 'Better now.'

The eggs were white as bone china. They glowed, tender and natural, lightly resting against each other.

'There we are,' he said. He lifted the nest and the eggs rolled with the irregular, delayed movement they had when there were chicks inside. 'There we are.'

'It's this part here that's the trouble.'

'This frame.'