thought. Maybe she was only a lost, impecunious young creature, driven by pure hunger and cold to offer heat and hearing which I took for understanding. I think differently of it from day to day, from phase to phase of my own moon-cycle. I did form the intention of making her my wife. I needed her so abjectly. It was when I found her that I found my vocation—fingers in clay running with water, fingers puddling in divine female flesh—I made vessels that were metaphors for her and our dealings with each other, coiled mermaidens and fern fronds uncurling—oh, it was all innocent enough, despite her trade and my madness.”
He stopped. Frank had a crazy moment when he wondered if this Magdalen had become Seraphita Fludd, and if that explained her inhibited stiffness.
Fludd was doing something which Frank saw was wringing his hands; he thought he had never seen it done before. Fludd said
“The next bit is nasty. You are the first person to whom I have told this—this thing. I went to see her at my fixed time—I had a key, but we had agreed when I should and shouldn’t visit—and I went up the stairs, two at a time.”
He stopped again. Frank waited, his own hands folded.
“There was a stench. I noticed it, I think, before I opened the door. She was on her bed. She was quite dead. She was a mass of raw, open wounds and blood, and blood. The edges of the pools of it were congealing, like glaze, on the surface of her thighs, and on the linoleum.”
“Yes,” said Frank, to interrupt the flow.
“She had run about, all over the room, pouring blood, grasping at things with bloody fingers, the marks were everywhere. I couldn’t look at her face—it was simply a mass of bloody
“Yes,” said Frank, more firmly. He said “What did you do?”
“I stepped back, and closed the door, and went home to my lodgings. What else could I do?”
“Called the police?”
“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. It was too late for help. And I became—ill, sick, debilitated.” He came to a stop. “This is all?” said Frank. “All? It is a horror.”
“But not a horror of which you are—by your own account—guilty.”
How to find the voice of a confessor, or a judge. It slipped across Frank’s mind to wonder whether Fludd had really killed the woman, in a brainstorm, and was either lying or had forgotten. And it slipped into his mind to wonder whether the story was
“I am not lying, you know.” Then he said
“I am faithful to her, involuntarily. I do not love my wife, as I promised to do. There are thick walls between us. She is a beautiful woman, who expects to be desired, and I do not—often—desire her. I should not have married her.”
“It is very late to say that,” said the priest.
“She is a stupid woman. A plucked chicken in a serge carapace. Sometimes I think she has no soul.”
“You promised to love and cherish her.”
“I have tried. I may sneer to you, now, but I have tried. There is no love in our house. I am not the only one guilty of that.”
“I cannot judge, there.”
“I am not asking you to judge. Or to interfere. If I thought you had the
“I expect it was partly your intention to make me shake. What do you expect me to do?”
“Nothing, nothing, nobody can do anything. I shall go home and slide for a time into my private compartment of Hell. I am horribly afraid—always—of never finding the way out or of—”
“Or—?” Frank prompted. But Fludd had come to the end of his confession, just as abruptly as he had begun it. He stood up, and stumbled out of the church without a backward glance.
Frank Mallett had thought to himself that what had been “confessed” was not what Fludd had come to confess. He lived for a few weeks in fear of Fludd doing something to harm himself, or his family, or some outsider—he had been afraid of something in the future, and had confessed something far in the past. Fludd did indeed enter a black period, alternately swearing and breaking pots, or taking long solitary marches along the shingle beach at Dungeness, waving his arms, and shouting at the sky. Frank Mallett made timid attempts to visit Sera-phita and “bring her out” and Seraphita, remorselessly, made minimal tea-party comments on the weather, or the jam, or the servants, and waited for him to go away. Geraint’s schoolwork suffered when Fludd was in a black mood. His arithmetic deteriorated. So did his Latin translation. And then one day—or so Frank imagined it, for he was not, naturally, present at the time—Benedict Fludd shook himself, and went back into his studio and began beating out wedges of clay.
The two friends cycled into Winchelsea on a very hot summer day, to discuss the preparation of a series of lectures, in Lydd, for the darker months in the autumn. They took paths across the Walland Marsh and along the Camber Sands, which covered the drowned town of Old Winchelsea, as though it had never been. They skirted Rye Harbour, and wheeled past Camber Castle along the flats, with the hill on which Winchelsea had been rebuilt in the thirteenth century, a mediaeval planned town, in front of them. They were visiting Miss Patty Dace, who lived in a small house facing the part-ruined church of St. Thomas the Martyr, across peaceful turf, marked by ancient leaning gravestones. Like many Winchelsea houses this one resembled the white clapboard houses of New England. It had a small, well-tended front garden.
Miss Dace was waiting, and opened the door before they could knock. She was in her forties, and made of bone and muscle, with a fierce face, hooked nose, high cheek-bones and deep-set dark eyes under brows like bristling caterpillars. Her hair looked as though it had undergone intense applications of the curling-tongs, but in fact coiled itself naturally, as though she had African ancestors. She liked to be busy. She was the acting secretary of many groups: the local Theosophists, the local Fabians, the Winchelsea and District Dramatic Society, the Circle of Watercolourists, and a group which worked for women’s suffrage. She had taught at a London girls’ school in her time, and had worked briefly as an assistant almoner in a hospital. She had been very active in the agitation to extend the franchise for local authorities and Poor Law boards to married women, and women who were not
