Turning the Stones (14 page)

*

I was always very fond of the summer house. It is constructed on the plan of a pentagon, which lends it the appearance of a temple, and it did seem like a sanctuary of sorts to me. A few days after learning that Eliza was to be sent away, I was dispatched there to work on Mrs Waterland’s design. Her drawing had been transferred to a grid scored on the walls and it was my task to affix the shells. I was elevated for the purpose on a trestle that Mr Otty had set up between two ladders. The glue was kept warm in a copper pot on a brazier below. My arms ached from the continual reaching up to press the shells on to the outline of the frieze, but I was not sorry to be out of the way of the basement, which was in a commotion preparing for the arrival of a chum of Johnny’s – the fellow Eliza had mentioned with his aristocratic connections.

Every so often I paused and rested my gaze on the leafless trees in the surrounding orchard, the tousled skeins of their branches imprinted against a metallic sky. The trees seemed to lean in, whispering among themselves as I worked. I remember hearing the unmistakable
tee-hee-hee
of a woodpecker laughing at its own joke and then the crunch of footfalls approaching on the gravel path. I hoped it might be Abby, bringing me something to eat. The feeble sun had clambered over its meridian and I was hungry. I patted another shell into place and deposited the glue brush in its pot.

I was wiping my hands on my apron when a sensation of being watched rippled across my back. I swung around to find a slender, spry figure leaning against the frame of the portal with straw-coloured hair rushing away from a pale face. One hand rested on his hip, the other swung a cane.

I almost did not recognise Johnny Waterland, the saviour of Sedge Court. He was turned out very burnished in a brilliant white neck-cloth, a black satin waistcoat, whose silver lacing winked at me, and a mustard riding coat, and yet he reminded me of nothing so much as fantome corn in the umber. Do you know the phrase? It is an expression we use in Cheshire. It means weak corn that has been planted in shade and grows up overlong in the stalk.

I offered a curtsy.

Johnny Waterland lolled, his cane oscillating ever slower like a retarded pendulum. The woodpecker laughed again. Johnny stayed without a word and yet he did not seem lost in his own silence as a person is when under the spell of contemplation. His lingering had something insolent in it, as if it were meant to unsettle. All at once he pivoted on his heel and faded away among the trees. He left behind a surprisingly forceful emanation of his presence.

I climbed down from the trestle just as Mr Otty and Croft arrived, followed by Abby with Dasher on his lead and a basket over her arm. She handed me a slice of pie wrapped in a cloth, and I sat down on a small stone bench near the portal to eat it, while Mr Otty and Croft shifted the trestle. I pushed aside the stems of a milkweed plant that had overpowered the bench and noticed that an early caterpillar was trimming a leaf of the plant to its liking.

Abby said, ‘There is a pickled egg and all if you want.’ At the squeal of ladders being dragged across the flags of the summer house, she poked her head through the portal and said, ‘What is the meaning of that?’

I explained that the mistress had made a design of the underneath
of the sea and that the cockleshells represented the crests of waves. Abby frowned. I wondered if all Welsh people were like her – not very impressed by anything much.

I said, ‘Actually, Mrs Waterland found those shells in Wales.’

‘Where are they from then?’

‘She says from Gwynedd.’

‘I am from Gwynedd, though. Near as. There is a world under water close by that place. Mayhappen that is where she took the idea.’

I grinned. ‘With the gentlemen riding around on their seahorses and the ladies tucking into their sea salads.’

Abby said, ‘Are you lampooning me?’

‘No, I am not. I am conjuring a scene.’

She shot me with a flat-eyed look.

Mr Otty shouted, ‘Go about your work now, wench. You have stayed out too long.’

‘All right, Mr Otty, I will be gone in a minute.’ Abby tossed her head and said, ‘Don’t you know it is not a joke, Mary Smith. There are lands under the sea, where people live as we do, only better, you know, and they are free to caper about as they wish. My mother told me so.’

*

As the light began to fail, I caught a whiff on the air of tarry smoke – the lamps had been lit in the courtyard – and judged it time to leave off my work. I followed the path through the orchard and entered the kitchen garden by the door in the south wall. The layout of the farm was reflected in miniature in the garden’s design of repetitive rectangles and I strode past the diligent beds of herbs and vegetables like a giantess. To my left was the village of the poultry, its inhabitants asleep,
and to my right the spaniels running up and down outside their kennels. I knelt at the dogs’ enclosure and they pushed their snuffling muzzles at me. With one hand I rummaged their foreheads while the other rested on one of the kennel’s bars.

All at once I felt a faint vibration pass through the metal and the strings on the empty trellises behind me seemed to hum. The dogs pricked up their ears. At the sound of a distant rumble, they began to bark. Affronted hens appeared in the dim openings of the poultry house, their squawking adding to the racket of the dogs. As I reached the wicket gate leading to the house, an uproarious four-wheeled chaise hurtled into the courtyard. The demented whooping of its postilion brought Mr Otty and Croft running from the coach house, while I took a step backwards into the shelter of the garden.

The horses pulled up with a gasp and the postilion, who was untypically ponderous of figure, slid from his saddle. The door of the still-shuddering chaise sprang open and Mr Otty found himself bowing before two sheepish passengers tricked out in orange and purple livery. The jape became clear then – the postilion was the gentry and the passengers his servants. I instinctively did not like this person, who had brought his pandemonium with him.

Johnny Waterland sauntered from the house into the pool of dirty yellow light thrown by the lamps and greeted the postilion with a mocking bow and a volley of laughter. They strutted through the back entry of the house like dandycocks both.

On coming indoors I found Johnny and his friend Barfield dallying in the servants’ hall. Rorke was hovering at Johnny’s
side in joyful subjugation and they were urging the friend to quaff a tankard of ale. The tankard was a trick one and Barfield was duped by its concealed aperture. The ale deluged his chin and his neck-cloth instead of his mouth, but he was game for the prank and guffawed loudly about it. I remember thinking that he looked as if he had been constructed from the parts of many different forebears, his bulbous head and fleshiness at odds with his pointy nose and girlish eyebrows. At once I made for the laundry, but not without catching the vulpine gleam of his teeth as his eye lighted on me.

PART THREE

The
Seal
, The River Avon, Bristol
April, 1766

The odour of brine and mud clings to my waterlogged hair and there is a smell of resin too, seeping from the rough planks on which I sprawl. My drenched skirts are twisted about my legs. My torso aches as though it has been pummelled. A consequence of my impact with the water. I remember tumbling head over heels in the depths. And shooting to the surface with a gasp. Someone passed a rope under my arms and pulled me through the water. Bruises smart where I bumped against the hull as I was hauled upward.

I blink away salt water and open my eyes. Above me looms a tower of huge, dark sails and beyond them a bronze sky and copper-tinged clouds.

I am on a boat. I have never been aboard one before.

I struggle to come to sitting, energised by a rush of elation. I am on the
Seal
. I have succeeded in my escape.

‘You idiot. You might have drowned.’

I turn my head to find a tall, broad figure silhouetted against the grainy light of the early-evening sky. His face is in shadow but I have the impression that he is glaring at me from beneath his slouch hat. His dark hair hangs untied and brushes the epaulettes of his coat. The coat is a buff colour with dark blue facings. It looks like a military uniform, but not one that I
have seen before. An indistinct memory flutters in my mind. Am I in the presence of someone I ought to recognise? But I do not know this surly individual.

I ask his name and he retorts in a tone that is quick and hard, ‘More to the point, who the devil are you? And what makes you take a leap as bold as bedamned at my vessel? Now I must go to the trouble of putting you off.’

‘No! I beg you, sir.’ As I lurch to my feet I feel the cut of the wind and a spasm of shivering overtakes me. ‘My name is Mary Smith. I was brought to this desperate play because of your ship’s boy, Terry Madden. He stole my money – and I am determined to have it back.’

‘Madden is no longer a hand on this vessel.’ The captain’s cold eyes glint in a dark face and I have no way of knowing if he is telling the truth.

‘He told me that he belonged to the
Seal
. Then he cut my purse.’

‘And is paying heartily for it, I warrant, since we have not seen hide nor hair of him.’ The captain’s attention lofts towards the rigging and he adds without apparent interest, ‘He was likely taken by a press gang for all his brightness, while he was drinking up your coin.’

‘Sir, I was bound for France, but now that I am robbed I cannot get my fare. Let me work my passage on board your ship. I am handy for any kind –’

He cuts me off with, ‘I have no accommodation to offer, madam,’ and turns towards the stern.

‘Why bother to save me then?’ I shout with a flash of anger – or fear. Those two emotions are always mingled in me.

He offers me no other reply than a look of scorn, but it is
eloquent enough. He calls to the helmsman, ‘Mr Guttery, when we come alongside our friends at Marsh dock, will you rustle them up with their wherry, which may return this lady to shore.’ Then he shouts, ‘Mr Robinson, do not let the wind back out of it!’ He is looking up at the luffing edge of the mainsail. A sailor in a short jacket and wide trousers hastens to tighten the sheet. He owns the beefy shoulders and barrel chest of those who work the canvas.

As the boat bounds forward, I stagger to keep my balance, and the captain barks at me, ‘Will you hold on to the binnacle and stay there!’ He points at a wooden box mounted on a pedestal that stands a few feet before the helm and I steady myself against this article, this ‘binnacle’, whatever it is, perhaps a housing for the boat’s compass, while the cutter skims the surface of a broad channel.

The captain removes from his coat a spy-glass and raises it to his eye.

Despite the chill in the air, sweat breaks out on my upper lip and I have the sensation of things slipping inside. I sink beside the binnacle. Has the shock of my fall arrived belatedly to play out its repertoire of blanchings and tremblings? But I know that it is not the leap into the water that accounts for my sudden state of distress.

It is the sight of the spy-glass; just that.

There was another spy-glass. A cunning glass. It was an instrument that belonged to Eliza’s second cousin Arthur Paine. It was an irregular kind of telescope that he called a jealousy glass.

I crouch at the binnacle, watching as the channel we are navigating grows wider. There are lanterns in the distance
delineating the shores of the river. They seem to be receding at quite a pace.

I do not know why the thought of the jealousy glass upset me so much just now. There is nothing very mysterious about the thing. It works by means of a slanted mirror. The mirror lets the viewer eye one object while giving the appearance of studying another – a useful function for a suspicious lover, which is how the glass got its name, no doubt. Mr Paine did not enlighten us on that point, but I wondered if he had employed the glass in relation to his wife. Mrs Paine is only ever to be found where Mr Paine is not – this isn’t gossip; it is common knowledge – and one senses his chagrin at that division.

*

Now the
Seal
’s hands are going at their work with greater urgency. There are perhaps ten or twelve crew that I can see, not counting the helmsman. Their appearance is uniformly nefarious. They are dressed in ticking waistcoats and tarred trews, which appear to be stitched from old sails, and they carry sheathed knives in their belts. I glance down at my own battered ensemble. This damp and dirty outfit was once my best gown, have I mentioned that? I used to be very pleased with it. I remember smoothing the skirt as I …

As I walked across a square!

I am beginning to remember
.

I was on my way to a soirée. In London, surely.

When was it? My mind scrambles after the scrap of recall. If I count back the hours, it was perhaps only three or four days ago. I was walking across Soho Square towards an assembly house. We were going to watch a show. And Eliza
brought along the jealousy glass, I remember that now. Mr Paine was in charge of the show’s effects – a storm. Thunder and lightning. He had been steered to the undertaking by Johnny Waterland.

I suck in my breath.

Johnny is dressed in his violet coat. In that case it was the evening of his death.

My heart begins to thud. With a great effort of will I try to control my emotions and to face the scene in my head. The soirée was one of Johnny’s money-making schemes. He has – he had – fingers in many pies. He had been impressed by the thunder machine when Mr Paine showed it off at Weever Hall last summer and had seen the machine’s commercial potential at once as a popular entertainment and also perceived Arthur Paine’s weakness. Mr Paine craves recognition. That is how Johnny would have persuaded Mr Paine, who reputes himself to be a lofty man of science, to involve himself in a show that was beneath his dignity and alien to his nature. It was a wanton show. And of course Arthur Paine would not have been difficult to persuade. He has always held Johnny Waterland in high regard. Johnny was a man about town. He knew how to generate admiration even if it were based on nothing. I can understand how Mr Paine, whose applications to the Royal Society have been numerously rejected, might find the applause of the rabble better than nothing.