David Teall
[ Biography ]
England's Ark ...
(Opening)
England’s ark that autumn, for so long thrown on a bloody sea – in spite of Noll’s resolve and Rupert’s Burning Love – settled awhile in calmer waters. Essex, Warwick, Manchester, and Fairfax, along with the iron hand of their emergent leader, assured her Miraculous Preservation and steered the three-roofed vessel over an ocean heavy with the fallen, a flood as wild and waved as their cavalier-locks, as well as toppled mitres, smoking cannons and striking swords. For too long the shepherd had cowered, as under the shears of his own sheep, beset on all sides by so many beasts: by the Lion of the wood, the Wolf of the evening; the Owls and the Satyrs there, and the Prophets like Foxes; and a Leopard watching all his cities. But at last the monster had fallen, the many-headed hydra revealed that long ago dawn as between the arms of the clouds.
And so one evening, towards the end of October, a poor soldier of the King’s army found himself walking alone, footsore and weary, through the narrow streets of a small village in the far north of the country, along the roof of England as it were. He passed cottage after cottage, a tavern and a church and a pele tower, itself a relic of older conflicts, between the town’s people and the Reivers, border-folk who on a Hot Trod or Cold Trod used to come creeping down to pillage and pilfer after dark, armed with latch and dirk. Then a bell would toll and a basket above flame with a warning fire, alerting the town to the coming of the graynes or the riding surnames. But all was still this evening, all quiet in the brown deserted streets of Croglin village. A cottage door opened, a white-haired old woman looked out, glared at him and slammed shut the door. He needed to rest, needed sleep, and longed for a warm fire and something warm to eat. But where to stop, where to rest tonight? The wind groaned in the dying trees and the leaves crackled in the doorways along the road. He passed out of Croglin village and continued on into Croglin Parva and stopped at last on the edge of a great field, beside a ruined chapel. Here perhaps. Stars glistened overhead about the precarious spire, shone upon the old grey ivy-infested walls. Had the enemy been here too, broken down this ancient chapel as it had broken down so many others? He passed by the still-intact front door and walked amongst the tombstones and the tombs, running his cold fingers over the tops of some of them. They did not think of the poor dead lying below. The wind agreed drearily in the tree-tops and the leaves shivered in the grass. The poor soldier paused a moment before the entrance into some very-ancient family vault – Towry was the name on the door – stood before the heavy portal then passed on to the further end of the churchyard and settled himself down beside a large gravestone. Something moved in the bushes nearby and slithered away. Ah, Robert, he thought sadly, thinking of his old friend Robert Lucas, who had died the summer before. A cannon ball had come rolling quite slowly through the grass, seemingly harmless enough, trundling on, but had knocked both his friend’s feet off. Down he’d gone shrieking into the long grass. And Simon Chadwick a few months before had been shot in the head. Simon had been running before him and his head had come apart on his shoulders. The soldier rummaged in his meagre bag, found a crust of bread and bit into it. So many friends dead or turned to the other side. Even his own brother Cal. Always had been a strange boy Cal… A large leaf landed on his thigh, blown from out the shadows, and he brushed it away. He felt very cold now. Would be warmer below, down in the dark earth below.
A sound then behind him. The heavy whine, the creak of a door opening somewhere in the darkness behind him. Someone coming out the ruined chapel. Some tramp like him perhaps. He almost turned and peered about the tall gravestone to see but felt too tired, too exhausted to move now, was close to falling asleep. Something moved in the long grass behind him, some animal passing through the churchyard on its way home to its lair in the woods. Or perhaps the tramp from the church. A pale spectral mist shrouded the great field, obscuring the dark crooked trees and the lights of a long low single-storey house on the other side of the plain; crept silently about the churchyard, wreathing itself about the archaic, lichen-encrusted stones. Another noise close by, a rustling as of garments. There was someone there, a faint shadow had fallen from the stars, across the grass, and a figure moved silently into view. The soldier turned his head, looked up and saw an old man in an old brown smock standing two or three feet away, staring at him. He could not see the face too well but the man appeared very old and rather dirty-looking, quite brown with dirt in fact, as though he’d been living out-of-doors many years, and was bald with large pointed ears.
“Friend,” said the old man with the voice of the leaves about the gravestones.
“Yes,” said the soldier. “Friend. And cold.”
“Cold. Cold.”
“Have anything? Wine?” he asked sleepily, aware of something unpleasant now. A smell: some ancient smell coming from the old man or else from the dream he felt pressing softly, even warmly against his eyes, seeping murkily into his eyes. It began to smother him, that dream scented with death, and to suggest a landscape of sorts to the eyes inside his eyes, a garden perhaps still shrouded in darkness but brightening imperceptibly under the light thrown in from his brain. His mother’s garden perhaps, with the sea tinkling behind the leaves at the back, and someone moving there. Mother? Sarah?
“Wine, wine,” the old man said and that one word, wine, changed the colour of the leaves in the dream. The old man knelt down beside him, one hand on the side of the gravestone; and the smell grew stronger, blowing into the garden and withering the flowers there, changing further the leaves hung over the childhood sea and ageing the woman bent beside the fountain, feeding the birds. She bent further forward, altering rapidly there in the garden, and the old man bent towards the soldier, cocked his head to one side and kissed him.
***
A few nights later, in a small room above the churchyard in the village, a young boy lay awake in his cot. His name was Thomas Woodcroft and a stone in the cemetery bore that very name, a rather paltry monument to which his mother had led him every spring, summer, autumn and winter of his life, since his earliest years. So he had known it half smothered in snow, the letters of his father’s name, of his own name, half filled with snow; lashed by the rains, glistening and dark, and the long shadows of the windy trees; and radiant throughout the summertime, half lost in the luxuriant grass. Tom had no memory of his father, for he had died a month or so before his birth – though the town had. Thomas Woodcroft remained a name known by the whole village and evoked memories of a strong ruddy-cheeked young man toiling in the harvest-fields not so long ago; a Christmas kiss under the mistle-bough; a dance in the great barn at the end of harvest; a promise made one April afternoon by the side of Croglin Water.
But Thomas Woodcroft was dead and few immediately associated the name with his namesake, with the boy who slept in the small closet above the churchyard. Though he was just like his father, they said, had his dark eyes, his thick brown hair, his high brow and his sudden smile. Just like him and his father was dead and buried in the churchyard under his window. Except that he wasn’t strong, never had been, and had been growing steadily weaker over the last month or so, during the last weeks of summer and the onset of the autumn. Therefore the early summer, the last time he’d felt truly well, seemed a dream-time, a blessed time, out playing with his friends in the woods or walking with May along the side of Croglin Water or simply sitting with his mother in the parlour downstairs. She spoke of Thomas senior sometimes, of how good and kind he’d been and how everyone had loved him, and the boy tried to imagine him during those quiet still evenings in the parlour at the beginning of the summer, the moon rising in the casement, the owls hissing in the chimney. He had kept a tame sparrow in a hat and a robin with a scar had visited him some nights, had dodged in through the open casement and fallen asleep in a corner. Had taken food from his fingers and seemed as tame as the sparrow, that robin with a scar. His beautiful friend May used to visit often in those days and he remembered how one fine summer morning a butterfly had fluttered in through the open lattice and settled on a bowl of milk; the butterfly had drunk the milk, flapping its tiny coloured wings, and they had watched it, Tom and beautiful May. What had distracted them then, made them turn from the bowl? For when they turned back they saw the butterfly had drowned in the milk. May had been upset at first, had fished the sodden body from the bowl and blown on it in an attempt to revive it, but had wondered afterwards what might have happened if they had drunk the milk. The milk and the secret colours within. They might have been able to fly. Or at least been able to fly in dreams. And sometimes he drank it in his dreams, the milk the butterfly had drowned in that summer morning, and his thoughts grew wings and battered at the casement to be let out.
Now the child slipped out of bed, went to the window and looked down into the dark cemetery. A wind gasped in the trees and the autumn leaves shifted in the dark paths between the stones. He pushed open the casement and breathed in the chilly night air. Was there someone there? For he thought he had seen a shadow briefly skirting along by the side of the church. Jack most likely, Jack Maggs the sexton.
“That’s my name on that grave,” he had told Jack one day. “Thomas Woodcroft.”
“And your father below. I dug it myself eight years ago. He was a good man, your father.”
Sometimes May and other friends visited and brought things, flowers, toys, chapbooks. Toy boats carved out of wood and stories about the sea, for they knew he loved the sea, wanted one day to see it and live on it. For he had never seen it with his own eyes.
There was Jack passing beneath his window, a dark figure caught in the moonlight. Or someone else taking a shortcut home through the cemetery. He might have called out to whoever it was. Whoever it was stopped beside the wall, very near the grave with the child’s name inscribed on it, and stood looking back over the churchyard. The boy shivered and dashed back to his bed, leaving the window open and the old curtains wavering in the cold October wind. The trees breathed mightily in a sudden gust and the leaves skittered about the tombs and tables below. Another noise now, a sort of crumbling sound, as of little pieces of stone breaking from the wall beneath the casement. Tom pulled the cover up to his chin, more because of the cold than through any fear inspired by the lateness of the hour or the shadow seen in the moonlight. Something more broke from the wall it seemed and dropped. Was it the wind? Perhaps a branch of the tree close to the house knocking against the stonework. But no, neither the wind nor any branch banging in the wind. For a brown hand appeared suddenly on the sill of the window – a filthy brown hand with long dirt-caked fingernails – then another hand. Tom groaned with surprise and pulled the covers up to his nose. Jack? Was it Jack Maggs the sexton climbing up the wall to his window? The hands strained on the sill and hauled a body up behind them and an instant later a face as brown as the hands appeared in the casement. Whoever had decided to visit Tom this crisp cold October night dragged himself forward and stuck his head in between the curtains, fixing the child with large burning yellow eyes and grinning from ear to ear.
“Ahhhhh!” said the old man with the voice of the autumn wind in the elm trees, through the old yew which stood like a black bonfire in the middle of the graveyard below. He heaved himself over the sill and crumpled to the floor on the other side, almost wholly concealed a moment beneath the filthy brown smock he was wearing. Then the face resurfaced once more from amidst the rustling folds and Tom opened his mouth to speak, to shriek, but nothing came out.
“Who–?” he managed.
“Who?” his visitor said and grinned again. “Who!”
The old man rose to his feet, crossed the little room and sat down on the edge of the little cot, while Tom tossed back the covers and cowered back into the far corner of the bed. It sat quietly a moment looking out the small window at the stars then turned, looked the child over then reached out a long brown hand and took him by the ankle. Seized him and pulled him violently closer. The next instant the child was in the old man’s arms, wriggling and writhing under those horrible brown fingers and coughing in the great puffs of dust that arose with every touch. He wriggled and writhed but to no avail and the man yawned suddenly in his face, opened his black and tongueless mouth wide, wide – so wide the child might have peered in and glimpsed the monster’s dry and shrunken heart down in the gloom – and switched his head this way and that. Tom coughed again at the stench arising from the depths and began kicking with his feet. Whereupon one long crooked brown hand grabbed the side of his head and pulled it over to one side.
“Please,” Tom whimpered.
“Pleassssssse…”
And then the old man started to eat him.
And so it was that poor Thomas Woodcroft never got to see the sea.
***
The old house full of lights and laughter, Master Danby on the opharion and Mistress Winter’s Jump. Jump! And Amelia Cranswell leapt, landed neatly on the blades and swept along the edge of the pond with the wind singing in her ears, the peaks reeling about her, and the trees tumbling by. Edward stepped out onto the ice, tottered unsteadily a moment, then thrust off and sped quickly after her. Master Dowland’s Midnight had found them alone in a corner, talking of the season, Jane Charwell’s unlikely marriage and the Holton scandal, drawn together like conspirators. How kind, how gentle he had seemed that first night, Toby Wincott, and how handsome with his thick black hair and brilliant blue eyes.
And she wished, in spite of everything, he was here with her in this high lonely place amongst the mountains, where the sky lowered, preternaturally near, the wind felt ten times colder, and the old trees smelled of the stars. Master Danby played on and pretty Laura Sparrow sang those songs of the silver swan, addressing anyone in the room whom Love or Fortune had betrayed and left with tears, sighs and ceaseless cries, how she too had bid farewell, farewell to one who had proved Dear, Sweet, Fair, had kissed Despair and contemned sweet Hope – down, down, down she would fall and never arise! – how the lowest trees have tops, the ant, the fly their melancholy, and the slenderest hairs cast shadows; and Love is Love… Amelia followed the edge of the pond around in a wide arc, expertly exchanging one blade for another on the ice. It had been their uncle’s idea, the move. A friend of his, a certain Captain Fisher, had described the place, how he needed tenants; and Michael and Edward had jumped at the idea. And, of course, Amelia had gone with them. Where else did she have to go? She liked it too, the long low rambling Grange and the little village nestled amongst the fells. But missed nevertheless her old home far to the south, Worth Matravers – the old church, the duck pond, and the ancient lynchets marking the hills to the sea. And the walk to Seacombe and St Aldhelm’s Head and the view from the Devil’s Chapel over to the Portland and the Isle of Wight. The red girls of Portland had saved the king, walking round and round the cliffs one evening. Then the summer months at Melcombe Regis with her uncle and aunt and those evenings of music and dancing, Laura Sparrow reciting the silver swan and Master Danby at the orpharion. Amelia and Toby Wincott had danced that night and afterwards he had often called on her and walked with her down passed the church and the tavern to the old quayside…
“Come on, Michael!” she called and her voice echoed amongst the dark snow-quilted mountains.
Michael remained on the bank smoking his pipe. He waved and stepped out onto the pond and skated towards them, one hand behind his back, the other still holding the pipe in his mouth. Amelia rushed off again, darting around in tight little circles, cutting lines in the ice beneath her, the wind roaring in her ears. Edward sped past, silver skates glinting, hissing along the ice. He stopped near the bank and stepped gingerly into a small rowing-boat someone had left at the side and which had gotten caught in the ice.
“Come for a ride!” he shouted and someone amongst the mountains shouted back, “Come for a ride… for a ride… a ride…”
Amelia laughed and lifted her head to look up at the stars.
They had settled in quickly and had even made a few friends in the village. And it would soon be Christmas and they’d been invited to a Christmas party at Croglin Hall.
***
One night, the following summer, Marion Badwood of Croglin Hall awoke suddenly and sat bolt upright in her bed.
Some noise outside or else in a dream had disturbed her and she sat staring out at the pale sky, the dark trees, and the blue fields of the summer night stretching away into the distant hills.
Had it been the wind perhaps? For the wind, suave as it was tonight, breathed everywhere – in the canopy above her head, in the curtains at the open doors, and in the black trees beyond the balustrade, shaking them against the dark sky and the ranks of luminous white clouds adrift there. Those soft airs of June had breathed on her closed eyes and whispered to her, whispered in to her and tiptoed down the stairs behind her eyes to groan amongst the leaves and the flowers preserved from summers past, as in a mirror, whose very life-force sprang from her own depths, from the blood of her dreams. The blood of her dreams throbbed at her temples and she leaned out of bed and lit one candle of a candelabra at her bedside. And instantly the wind stroked it, as it stroked the branches of the trees beyond the grey mossy balustrade and fingered the crimson canopy above her head. Humphrey come, she thought, come back to me now, tonight – though Humphrey was dead and she had seen him killed. Had watched him struggle with his matchlock rifle in Birch’s field, pouring the gunpowder into the barrel and packing it in hard with the stick. In went the ball and the wadding and he was ready, even as John Branton fell beside him, dead on the spot, and Arthur Slingford dashed forward, wielding his musket like a club. Humphrey discharged the shot and struggled to load another. But the enemy, grouped amongst the trees on the edge of the field, had levelled their muskets, the serpents snapped in a row and both Humphrey and Arthur had fallen. They had brought him in afterwards and lain him on his bed and he had died early the following morning. Now the golden moon floated free of the clouds and spilled its splendour down over the blue hills and the dark fields and the wind leapt into the room once more: the candle switched and swivelled, the trees bellowed, and the moonlight slithered in the white curtains along the balustrade. And all the shadows went mad about the chamber, flapping their dark wings in the canopy.
Humphrey was out there on the balustrade now, silent and still between the billowing drapes, with the wide midnight landscape fluttering and flailing at his back. Marion pulled back the covers and slipped out into the cool air, took up the candelabra and held it before her, so the candlelight, whipped by the breeze, lilted crazily all about the bed-chamber, swinging over the floor and the bed and the white latticework on the walls. In it blew, flung from the horizon, and rushed about the room, the canopy running with shadows, dripping with ghosts. Her husband lurched forward then, not really her husband at all but a shadow, a phantom, and entered the bed-chamber and Marion said, “Humphrey?”
“Humph? Humphrey!” the thing replied.
“Is it you, my dear?” she said, approaching the latticework. “Oh, but who–”
And she backed away again, moving back towards the bed. She set the candle back in its place and climbed back onto the bed. Who was it? What was it? Not Humphrey but Death, Death come to her on this windy summer night, and the shadow of Death slipped over the white latticework on the walls and trailed over the floor at its own ancient feet. It skirted about the side of the high bed, the bed on which Humphrey used to come to her on brief hot summer nights of old, and then joined her upon the covers, clambering up and approaching her from the bottom. Marion thought to escape a moment but then forgot the thought as the thing took hold of her ankles in its cold bony hands. It pushed them back so her legs parted and lifted them so her white nightdress fell back and then turned her so she rolled onto her side, whereupon the ancient man lifted one leg over his shoulder and pressed his face deep in between her thighs, right up against the soft curved mane of hair. It grunted to itself and she felt its teeth against her, felt the hard skull butting against her, Death addressing her dark sex while one crooked spider tiptoed over her belly and crumpled one breast between its fingers. What held it there a moment? Some memory of long ago nights of passion?