Awakening (14 page)

‘Very well said, my own.'

‘You know,' Susannah goes on, as her husband moves away to speak to others, ‘I hold firm views on matrimony. Mr Spurgeon urges me to publish them in a pamphlet. I maintain that one ought not to choose a wife blighted by hereditary disease. Should disease come, well and good. But we have no right to tamper with the health of subsequent generations, do you not agree, Miss Pentecost? And, again – quaint though this may sound – avoid choosing your wife on a holiday or at a pleasant party. Surprise her by dropping in during the week: catch her in her workaday clothes.'

Respectfully as Beatrice receives these precepts, privately she cannot help but hope that Christian will not address her as ‘Wifey' when they marry. He receives Mrs Spurgeon's effusions with courteous gravity. From the corner of her eye Beatrice observes Mr Spurgeon over by a gigantic tea urn as he posts a succession of small cakes into his mouth, addressing himself betweenwhiles to Miss Randolph. In the same circle stands Mr Montagu, who will shortly join the hands of Herr Ritter and Miss Pentecost.

The ghostly Anna who lodges in Beatrice's head reassures her: Dear, you can change your mind. There is still time.

Beatrice's husband-to-be has enquired of Mrs Spurgeon whether she has matrimonial advice for ladies as well as for gentlemen.

‘Oh certainly. As I see it, a
smoking,
idle fellow may leave off his bad habits for as long as his new toy amuses him – but, depend upon it, he'll soon revert. It comes down to this: only marry another converted one. Or fear a blighted hearth.'

To Beatrice's eye Mrs Spurgeon looks less than well, her face thin and gaunt. Does her husband's well-known partiality for cigars disturb her? Is Mrs Spurgeon happy with her lot, seeing her husband besieged by infatuated thousands? How can one see beyond the façade of married love to gauge the intimate truth of human beings? The front door closes upon the private world. The married parties remove shawls and overcoats. They let slip their guarded courtesies. And they never tell. No one tells. Only the servants who empty our slops and view our intimate linen see and whisper. Husband and wife are dumb. When Miss Beatrice Pentecost becomes Mrs Christian Ritter, she will not be free to confide, even to Anna, the secrets of her life. A married woman is alone in the world.

But no. What is she thinking of? As Mrs Spurgeon moves away, Beatrice looks up at Christian with a small smile: ‘I hope you will not prove a smoking, idle one, Christian.'

‘I shall earnestly try not to. But even so, my dear, you must keep a close watch on me at all times. I am so happy, Beatrice
.
I shall do all in my power to ensure that you never regret your choice. With your agreement I shall draft some precepts for our conduct, from which we must never deviate.'

*

Autumn has descended on Wiltshire. The fields are waterlogged, cattle having retreated to higher ground. From the streaming train window Beatrice watches labourers wade through floodwater to drive them back to shelter. The locomotive pauses. Through greenish light she sees a drowned sheep, bloated, just below the embankment. Her betrothed looks up from his book and smiles into Beatrice's eyes. ‘My love,'
he mouths and a fellow passenger peers swiftly from one to the other.

Beatrice, surveying this landscape of deliquescence, worries about her own sheep. In this unseasonably protracted downpour, foot rot is a very real danger. She needs to get a good price for them. There's some relief in returning to the banal practicalities of her daily world; her habits of control and her dignity as head of the family. But is this to be her world now? For I am his, and this is my life. Anna, I am to be
married.
The die is cast. Beatrice sees that this was always the plan and that, however she struggled in God's web, the more strongly the silken filaments netted her.

As the train inches towards Salisbury, thoughts of Will Anwyl haunt her. He loves me. I truly think he does. He'll be bereft. But for how long? Beatrice glances over at Christian deep in his book. She reverences him; looks up to him as she never has to Will. Even so, I never did say yes, she thinks. I never spoke the words. They were assumed. I went with it. You have forced me. God has forced me.

*

The carriage awaits them, sent by Joss. Only three quarters of an hour and Beatrice will be snug at home with Anna. There's so much to tell and ask. Rain souses down and the ford in spate is almost impassable. They stick fast; under the lash of the whip, the horses' labouring haunches haul them clear. Beatrice sits hand in gloved hand with her husband-to-be. Chauntsey: One Furlong. Nearly home.

At the market cross a crowd, some with umbrellas, most without, surrounds a dark figure waving his arms. It's Mr Kyffin.

Stepping down, Beatrice and Christian join them. The minister is expounding calculations of the end of the world. The sums appear complicated and he's obliged to move between the more abstruse verses of the Book of Revelation and a notebook in which the calculations, noted in blue ink, have bled into one another. Mr Kyffin flounders, appealing to his Maker to help him decipher the columns of figures. For never since the Flood has there been such a deluge in Wiltshire and this in itself, he feels, may be part of that mysterious system of signs with which Heaven guides and tests men of faith.

The Open Plymouth Brethren are out in force and there are even a few Exclusive Brethren, breaking their rule of separation from the cholera of sin that infects their neighbours, for they imminently expect the Lord's coming.

Mr Kyffin gives up on the apocalyptic mathematics; he'll have to repeat his calculations from scratch, he confesses, and stuffs the soggy notebook in his overcoat pocket. For perhaps this rain should be read as a criticism from on high: his sums may be wrong. It's God's way of putting Mr Kyffin to his abacus again.

‘He leads his chosen out of error! And here is a chosen Boy – come and speak, Isaiah!'

The boy – isn't it the baker's boy from Grimstead? – comes complete with disciples, who break into song but what they're singing Beatrice can't make out in the gusty rain. Incredulous, she turns to Christian, only to discover that he is listening respectfully.

The baker's boy stands in an attitude of prayer. When he speaks, Beatrice is surprised by the music of his as yet unbroken voice; hardly less pure than those of the choristers in Salisbury Cathedral, where she has sometimes worshipped in a spirit of critical tolerance. Proof against stained glass, marble bishops, the Luciferian pride of funerary memorials, she has been reduced to tears by those angel voices. She notes the confidence of Isaiah's gestures. Mr Kyffin gazes down at him with respect.

‘Never weep for Harry!' pleads Isaiah.

‘Who's Harry?' asks a voice from the crowd.

‘Harry Fribance, the blacksmith's son of Grimstead. Our dear little brother, now departed to his Father. For Harry was a saint. Elect before the world. He was two years and eight months old in this vale of tears. And when the profane Punch and Judy show came to West Grimstead he cried and covered his eyes so as not to see the wickedness of this bad Mr Punch.'

‘Here's your rope To hang the Pope And a penn'orth of cheese to choke him,' bellow the boys.

‘Harry's with his Father. Where perhaps according to Brother Kyffin, them of us as be chosen'll be snugly lodged by winter. Playing with Harry in the snow and he not coughing.' He pauses for this to sink in. ‘Never coughing more. Knowing that Rome is doomed, Harry has gone easy to his grave, not but what we don't miss him.'

‘He comes! He comes!' Mr Kyffin, pointing to the west, face ashen, convulsing with fear or ecstasy, takes three steps, reels and falls.

Dr Quarles pushes through the crowd: Mr Kyffin is suffering an epileptic seizure, he says. ‘For goodness' sake, let me through to treat the patient. Everyone go home.'

Mr Kyffin, dead to the world, is carried into Beatrice's carriage and thence to Sarum House, where he remembers nothing but a sense that all this has happened before, in some other universe.

‘Oh dear me.' He labours to sit up on the sofa. ‘I fear I have bitten my tongue. But I have seen a great light. There are pins and needles in my arm, Miss Pentecost.'

‘Quietly now, dear Mr Kyffin,' counsels Beatrice. ‘You had a nasty fall. Amy shall bring you some brandy and you'll soon be restored. Dr Quarles has promised to come and ease you by letting blood. This gentleman I think you will remember? Herr Ritter?'

‘I don't think I have had the honour,' says Mr Kyffin. ‘Are you a postman?'

‘Well, in a certain sense, dear sir, perhaps I am a messenger. I am come from America,' says Christian. ‘Where there's a great Awakening, such as I think you are expecting.'

‘You're an American? You don't sound …'

‘Not an American by birth, no. I have just been visiting New York, Mr Kyffin.'

‘And where is your homeland?'

Christian, about to complicate things by mentioning Germany, is illuminated: ‘I am a citizen of
your
country, my friend. A citizen, I praise my Jesus, of Heaven.'

Mr Kyffin sighs. ‘Then I must confess to you that the Lord has bruised me but I have faith in him, for has he not promised,
A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out.
And I am smouldering. Yet radiant. Miss Pentecost, am I welcome in your house? Mrs Kyffin has shut her door upon me.'

Amy has grand fires blazing in the drawing room. Copperware and brassware shine like mirrors. Beatrice's father's clock in its glass cover ticks its reassuring pulse beat and tings the quarter hour and all around Beatrice is her father's presence, right down to … yes, they are in the bureau drawer … his spectacles and tiepin. Thank heaven she's home. Her wet gloves and shawl are off; her feet are cosy in their worn slippers.

‘But where's my sister, Amy?'

‘Oh, she is not back yet, Miss.'

‘Back from where?'

‘From Cornwall, Miss. She left a couple of days after you did. I'm sure she wrote to you to say.'

‘Ah. Of course. Do we have her address?'

Beatrice studies the address, written in her sister's backward-sloping handwriting: c/o Mrs Sala, ‘
Gwenily
', St Ives, Cornwall.

*

Round the dining table, Mr and Mrs Elias join Christian, Beatrice and Joss for a six o'clock dinner, to discuss what's to be done for their friend. He lies on a spare bed sleepless or roams the bedroom conversing with God. He has drunk tea but refused food, saying that he could no more eat than Elijah when the land of Israel was cursed with famine.

‘I'm the last one to judge, and hurt me it does to suggest it,' Loveday says, ‘but I do believe he is deranged. That's what I've been telling Mr Elias.'

‘You have, my love. But let us think the best.'

‘Which is more than Josiah Kyffin's afflicted wife has done,' Loveday fires back. ‘She has shut the door on the man. She can stand no more. Nor, in my view, should she.'

‘And yet we are taught, my love,' says Mr Elias equably, taking a sip of wine, ‘that the husband is the head of his wife.'

‘Not when the husband is
gorffwyll,
Mr Elias.'

‘But who shall judge when a husband is mad? I trust you will not go calling me mad, Mrs Elias, and sending for Mr Croft to remove me to the Lunatic Asylum.'

‘Only if you try my patience extremely
.
But seriously, Beatrice, Dr Quarles is right; our friend requires treatment and restraint. For his own good.'

‘Although I'm bound to point out,' says Mr Elias. ‘That this is what a High Anglican like Dr Quarles
would
say of a dissenting visionary.'

Beatrice, preoccupied with Anna's absence, cannot attend to the conversation
.
Her sister has absconded, cunningly waiting until her back was turned. Anna has associated herself with Mrs Sala, adulteress and infidel. Somehow this desertion seems of a piece with Mr Kyffin's running amok. It's the age we live in, Beatrice thinks. Certainties spin like tops whipped by manic children.

Dessert is served – Brown Betty, baked by Amy with new apples and stale breadcrumbs – and the room is fragrant with cinnamon. There's a knock at the back door. Beatrice leaps to her feet for it's Will, she knows it is. She'll go herself, she tells Amy.

It's only Charlie Kyffin, soaked to the skin and spattered with mud. ‘I heard Papa was here.'

Mr Kyffin sits in the drawing room with Charlie holding his hand and calling him darling Dad. A more tenderly filial boy there never was, despite his taste for tobacco and alcohol. Mr Elias seated at the piano plays ‘The Moonlight Sonata',
Andante sostenuto
. He smiles across at Mr Kyffin and sways his head at him, as if to say, ‘Here we are, my friend; it's not so bad, is it?' Mr Kyffin appears less electrocuted by the minute but how old he looks, drained and spent, though he's only in his early forties.