'I hear tell their seed is black - beggin' yer pardon, Sally.'
'I cannot say.'
'And what of their hearts,' enquires Caxton. 'Are they black?'
James says: 'No more than yours, sir, or mine.'
To James's irritation the remark is mistaken for humour and he is forced to leave to a chorus of cheery farewells. I fail, he thinks, stepping cautiously on to the icy road, even in conveying my contempt.
He clears his mind with a dozen deep draughts of cold air, thinks of the morrow, trusts it will be another brilliant, fiery day, another with air like champagne. He grins, remembering the Reverend's sudden vigour of the morning. A man must make a quiet store of such mornings, hoard them against more desperate times. If tomorrow is fine perhaps I shall take out my ink and paper, up to Lady Hallam's place, and do that little temple by the water there.
He has begun to sketch it in his head when the sound of iron-shod wheels bouncing over the road behind him makes him step on to the greensward. For some minutes the cart exists only
as a collection of noises; the groaning of axles, the crazed timpany of rattling pots and pans; squeaky, inebriated singing. Finally, he discerns the vehicle's form, a covered one-horse wagon, swaying down the hill from Cow. Coming up by James, the voice ceases to sing and calls out: 'Who goes there? Are you a Christian or what are you?'
Says James: 'You have nothing to fear from me.'
He is able now, beneath the soft halo of starlight, to see two figures, one very small, sized as a child, yet clearly, from her tone, and from the clouds of gin that wrap her words, not a child. The other is the Negro from Caxton's place.
'Not decent, creeping 'bout in the 'edgerow this time a night,' says the woman, then, in the space of a breath, her voice fills with honey. 'Ain't you got nowhere to go, then? Poor bleeder. Cam 'e stop wi' us, John? He ain't got nowheres to sleep.'
'Hush,' says the Negro.
James says: 'Your offer is a kind one but I have a roof and a bed a short walk from here.'
'Well, that's all right, then. Get 'er goin', John.'
John clucks his tongue, the horse takes up the strain, and the wagon rolls forward, trailing its thin ribbon of song behind it.
'Wouldyatastethemoontideair. . . toyourfragrantbowerrepair. . . wherewovenwiththepoplarbough . . . themantlingvineshallshelter-you . . .'
James sleeps with Mary, finds her between his sheets when, candleless, he feels his way to his room. He climbs in behind her, his chest to her back. His leg aches like the devil but it does not worry him. He knows he will sleep, inhaling her skin as if it were one of his narcotic sponges. He kisses her shoulder in greeting, also in farewell, for she will have returned to her own small room while he is still sleeping and long before any of the household stirs.
In the next chamber, the Reverend is sitting, in his dreams, naked and perfectly companionable with Lady Hallam over a hand of cards. Dido dreams of a man, tenderly sucking the blood from her elbow. James dreams of a cherry tree large as a house and of looking down through the flaked green flesh of its leaves to where the Negro, dressed in cherry silks and satins, holds up his arms to catch him.
THIRD
The winter of 1739 is the worst in living memory: a bitter, petrifying season that grips the country like a biblical revenge, beautiful and murderous. On the Ouse at York, on the frozen Thames, presses are dragged on to the ice to print news of the ice-world, as though from a freshly minted kingdom, suddenly and miraculously overlaying the old. In the cellars, wine and beer choke their barrels; cattle are found rigid in their stalls at dawn; strange lights are seen. The darkness crackles. Crows and other birds fall stiff as ornaments from the open sky. Driving, bone-infesting cold gathers the poor, the very young, the old, the sickly. Infants are buried beside hooped grandmothers and veterans of Blenheim. The gravedigger's heart-faced shovel rings like an axe on iron, and graves are so shallow there is talk in western villages of grave-robbers, until a pack of dogs tearing at the boards of a pauper's coffin in the yard at Kenn are shot at by the watchman.
In Blind Yeo, a village that has dawdled from the grey walls of a medieval priory, and now, in the thirteenth year of the reign of King George II, straddles the road from Bristol to Coverton like a set of poor teeth clenched on a strap, little is moving save blue smoke uncoiling from thatched or slated roofs, and a few figures out of doors, hugging themselves in long
coats, stumbling over ruts, each footfall audible in the glassy air, each breath visible.
Tw^ilight comes hard on second milking, light seeping from the windows of farmhouses and cottages.
Behind the village a hill-fort rises island-like above the moors. From there, an observer, stamping his boots for warmth, might assume the day was all used up, and that the village would slide into the long night like a launch slipping into black water. But by the bank of the river there is a gleam of light, then two more, then a dozen, and with them voices, cries of 'Clear the way!', and the grating, swishing, unmistakable hiss of skates.
The skaters hang their lanterns from the lower branches of the trees. The trees arch, black and shiny, over the frozen river. A party, fifteen or twenty strong, glides over the illuminated ice. Some gracefully, propelling themselves with flicks of the trailing skate, hands clasped behind their backs, bodies leaning forward into the icy tunnels of their own progress. Others are hunched as if preparing to catch an enormous
