Angel Language, AD 1618

I carry in my coat a snuff-box, though I’m not much in the habit now. Inside its lid there is a painting, done in miniature, of Greek or Roman ladies at their baths. They sit with thigh and buttock flat against wet tile and lean one on the other, nipple grazing shoulder, cheek to belly. Steam-secreted pearls are beaded on their spines, the hairs about each quim curled into little nooses by the damp.

I think, perhaps, too oft on women for my years. The maddening petticoated presence of them, every sweep and swish a brush-stroke on the sweltering canvas of my thoughts. Their sag and swell. Their damp and occult hinges where they open up like wicked, rose-silk Bibles, or their smocks, rime-marbled underneath the arms. Their ins and outs. Their backs. Their forths. Warm underhangs and shrew-skin purses, dewed with bitter gold. Imagined, they burn fierce and sputtering, singing, incandescent in my prick, my center. I may close the lid upon this snuff-box filled with nymphs, yet in my dreams its clasp is broke and its contents not so quickly shut away.

Once, I believed that when I’d grown into a man and married, I’d be plagued no more by the incessant posturings and partyings of my bordello mind. I would no longer suffer the relentless elbow-cramping visitations of these succubi, that mapped the foam-splashed shorelines of my passion; penned their snail cartographies upon my sheets and clouded my good sense with humid, feverish distractions.

So I hoped, but it was not to be. Though wed with an obliging wife whose cozy hole was made a velvet-curtained stage where to play out my lewdest skits, the tide of jiggling shadow-pictures did not ebb, but only boomed the louder in those bed-wrapped, warm-lapped latitudes upon the shores of sleep above the snore of spouse and cot-bug’s measured tick. Denied thus any hope of swift reprieve from satyriasis, I sought to slake my thirst for carnal novelty with whores and serving-maids. When this did little more than whet an appetite already swollen, I drew consolation from the thought that soon I should be old, the imprecations of John Thomas surely grown more faint and hopeless, easily ignored.

Alas, with snow upon the thatch, there is yet wildfire in the cellar, stoked with willow limbs and jutting trunks. So much for good intentions. Often now it seems that my desire is worse than ever, with naught but the flimsiest of hints required to set my meditations on their soil-strewn and indecent path.

The lurching of this coach along the pitted Kendal road is all too readily become the pitch of marriage-couch, the pelvises of all aboard rocked back and forth in unison so that the fancy comes to me that but for some few feet I might be rocking to and fro inside the young wife sat there with her daughter on the seat opposing mine. When her pond-colored eyes (what glistening secret tableaux have they seen?) glance up to catch my own, their frog-spawn pupils seem to widen, dark and open; querying. Lest any of my musings may be glimpsed in miniature upon my gaze, I look away to where the Lakeland hills are sprawled beyond the carriage window, a titanic slate-skinned harem, all asleep with wet grass slick and tufted on their tilted mounds, or tracking in a spidery Jacob’s Ladder up each pregnant slope, to nipple cairns.

It has been some few weeks since I set out from Faxton for my tour of the judicial circuit, going first by way of Northampton itself, where to confirm my various schedules and appointments, then by coach out through the town’s North gate, off on my yearly rounds. The gate was hung about with heads like blackberries upon an iron thorn-bush, ripe and heavy, these the dire fruits of sedition. Though the heads of Catholic plotters hung here many years ago have long since come unglued and toppled down to shard and dust, the sharp saltpeter tang of insurrection lingers in the town’s stale air. The faces of the men seem all the time suffused with red like blisters on a firebrand’s fingers, that may yet result in blood.

Things are the same throughout the land. I have presided at assizes ranged from Nottingham to Crewe, to judge such ruffians as are brought before me: poor men who are thin and poor men who yet manage to be fat. The swaggering young, the cringing old, the crutch-bound and the incomplete. In all their eyes there is a kinship, though their skin be pale as oatmeal, pink as dawn or tan as saddles. Green eyes, blue or brown, it matters not. Their eyes have all one hue, which is the color of their great resentment, flecked with spark and promises of flame.

The women are another matter. Though with bitterness aplenty of their own they carry out their timeless work and seem to all intents as if they dwell apart from our hot world and tread the byways of some other, female land; one unaffected by the thrust and surge of man’s enthusiasms, Empires or revolts. They bake the bread. They clean the clothes and bring forth babies they may smack and kiss. Between our wars we go to them and suckle at their fond indifference, their abiding constancy, these mothers; mothers once or mothers yet to be. These sauce-splashed deities.

Thus made divine, their desecration is at once made sweeter to the thoughts, and to man’s private sensibilities.

Skirting some rut or fissure in the road, the coital lurching of the carriage is now made more urgent and erratic, groaning like a harlot’s headboard as it bucks and jolts towards its shuddering conclusion, some fantastic spend of horseflesh, wood and iron. Amid this jostling, the girl-child sat across from me has fetched her knee a clout upon the carriage door, so that her mother is now called upon to comfort her.

She does so in a strange, soft pigeon-murmur where what sense the words may have is not so soothing as her lapping, ebb-tide voice itself: ‘Ooh, there, what have you done now? Hurt your knee? Ooh, my poor darling, where? Let’s see now ... Ooh. Ooh, never mind, the skin’s not broke although you’ll have a fine old bruise there, won’t you? Ooh, yes. Yes you will. A fine old bruise.’

These old, placatory rhythms lull the child, each dovecote ‘Ooh’ a drop of balm; a jig of oil to smooth the creased and choppy waters of her brow, where it is visible below the black rim of her little bonnet. Soon, the road beneath the coach becomes more even and the child falls back into the fitful doze with which she has elected to pass by the time that yet remains before we come to Kendal.

Though its bound-up majesty may not be glimpsed beneath the solemn, rigorously fastened hat, I know her hair is chestnut red and long, so that it falls about her waist when it is not wound tight and crucified by bodkins. She’s named Eleanor, although her mother for the most part seems to call her Nell, which is to my mind not so pretty. Both of them are come from further North, near by Dundee, to lodge with some old dame who has a room for rent outside of Kendal. Last night, when I first met with the pair there at the coach-inn where we each had paused upon our different journeys to a common destination, I was made acquainted with the facts of their predicament.

Her husband only recently passed on, young Widow Deene (such is the mother’s name) has come with Eleanor down to the Lakelands where a lady-friend of hers had vouched that she may find employment as a seamstress. Having spent such meager savings as she had upon the journey here with but a little over for her first week’s rent, the luckless, lovely little thing has gambled much upon her friend’s advice and frets, now it is too late, upon the wisdom of her chosen course. Thus it would seem we both hope to have business waiting for us when we reach our destination, whether shirts to stitch or men to hang.

The widow’s bosom falls and rises, falls again, with its imagined whiteness hid neath buttoned black only to shine more dazzling and more livid in my thoughts. A scree of freckles, there across the steep ridge of her nose. Her pale, worn hands rest in her lap and cup her secret warmth.

It was the daughter that I met with first, and in a manner such as to occasion quite a start in me. I came upon her half-way up the coach-house stairs, stood with a narrow, westward-facing window at her back, afire with sunset all about her rim; less like a child than like some spirit of eclipse. I saw her and I stopped and gasped, so much did she remind me of another child, upon another stair, one that I had not seen but only heard of, years before.

Francis, the sole fruit of my union with Lady Nicholls, had regrettably become involved in dealings with John Dee, the famous charlatan who lived at Mortlake, near to Richmond. Called upon to visit Dee’s house overnight, he saw some few things it were better that he had not seen, yet nothing he had witnessed would come to perplex him half so much as having happened on a small girl standing half-way up the stairway of that dreadful doctor’s house, a western window spilling ruby light behind her. Later, having learned there were no children in the house save for Dee’s full-grown daughter, Francis came to be convinced that he had seen no mortal infant, but instead some spectral waif lost on her way to Paradise. His voice and hands both shook to tell me of it and so vivid was the picture he described it was as if I had myself met with the little wraith-girl, standing dark against her sunset. Thus last night, when I encountered Eleanor, lit just the same upon the coach-house landing, I was for a moment seized by fear of things I had thought put away with childhood, and I gawped at her with what must have appeared a fearful countenance until she spoke.

‘Oh, Sir,’ she said, ‘I do hope you are kind. I’ve played outside and left my mother in the room we have together for the night, and now I can’t find which it was. It’s dark soon, and she’ll think me lost if I’m not back.’

Although the child was reassured to find someone who might assist her in her plight, she was not yet so reassured as I, to learn that she had mortal voice, and kin, and flesh and blood. In my relief, I promised I would help her find her mother’s room, at which she beamed and took my dry, age-spotted hand into the warm pink shell-curl of her own, then led me up the narrow stairs.

It soon became apparent that the child, returning from her play, had looked upon the first floor for the room she and her mother shared, when all the while their billet lay just one floor higher, leading from the coach-inn’s topmost landing. Tapping hesitantly on the door, I was soon answered by a quite bewitching jade-eyed woman of perhaps some five and twenty years, her great relief at having found her child soon giving way to an effusive gratitude bestowed upon myself, her benefactor. Though I’d spent but moments with the girl and done no more than walk upstairs with her it was, to hear her mother talk, as if I’d single-handed snatched the infant from the slobbering jaws of wolves.

‘Oh, Sir, you’ve brought her back. I looked from out my window and the sky had come so dark. I had no notion where she’d gone and was that worried I was at me wit’s end. Nelly, now, you thank the gentleman for all he’s done.’

Her daughter here performed a brief, embarrassed curtsy, mumbling her thanks, gazing the while towards the warped boards of what little floor their narrow room possessed. I saw she had her mother’s ocean eyes; the same fine-bladed cheeks with their impressive line calling to mind the urgent frailty of Italic script. Two years at most would make a splendid bed-full of her.

While I smiled down at her child with what she no doubt took to be paternal fondness, Nelly’s mother did not cease professing her indebtedness and admiration, head tipped back, lifting her lashes like the lids of jewel chests deep with emeralds to gaze up at me.

‘To think a gentleman as grand as you would stoop to help the likes of me and Eleanor, why, Sir, it fairly takes the breath from out of me. Look at the handsome clothes you’ve got upon you! You must be a great physician, else a lord to dress so gay.’

I told her, in a modest and goodhumored way that should not seem too vain, that I was neither of these things, being instead a judge. I will confess the taking of a certain pleasure from her indrawn breath and widened eyes, having upon occasions in the past had cause to note that women will become enthusiastic, even wanton, in the presence of authority such as my station lends me. With one hand raised to her breast as if physically to suppress its palpitations, she now took a small step back from me, perhaps to reappraise my scale as one might do with mountains or some other scenic feature. Where she’d thought me small and near to hand she found me massive and remote. I saw myself reflected as a god in twin green mirrors and at her excitement was myself aroused in some small measure.

‘Oh, what must you think of us, turned out so poorly? Never seen a judge, nor thought I should, and here I am with one that close as I could reach and touch him. You’ll have come here on important business, I’ll be bound.’

I told her that I had a case to try in Kendal, whereupon her ardor doubled.

‘Kendal! Why, that’s no more than the place where little Eleanor and I are headed with the morning’s coach. Nell? Do you hear? We are to ride to Kendal with a judge.’

Though she could have but little comprehension of my office or that power it represented, Eleanor now looked at me for all the world as if she had been promised she’d be carried to her destination on the shoulders of Saint Christopher himself. She took her mother’s hand, seeming afraid lest one of them might suddenly ascend to Heaven from the sheer occasion of it all. The Widow Deene, as she would shortly introduce herself, was meanwhile fired by morbid speculation with regard to the impending trial at which I should preside. Although throughout her tone was one of fascinated horror, I have more than once observed that in the fairer sex preoccupations with the charnel often mask an equal inclination to the carnal side of life’s affairs. Whenever some rough sort is made to swing, one measures in the filthy-fingered gropings of the crowd the lewd abandon that this glimpse of their mortality awakes in them. The women, later, will perform an imitation of the hanged man’s final dance, writhing beneath their husbands’ lunging weight, so that I wonder if we were not most of us conceived to an accompaniment of creaking ropes and flailing, blackened tongues? Such a conception surely might account for our obsession, later on in life, with all the sudden, hurtful ways there are to leave it, such as Nelly’s mother now evinced.

‘It is a murder, Sir, you are to try? Please God that there are not such things in Kendal, not if me and Nelly are to make our living there.’

I reassured her that the fellow up before me was no cutthroat, but instead a sheep-thief of no great account, although this did not much relieve her curiosity.

‘And shall he hang, Sir? What a thing it must be, saying if men are to live or die.’ A color had arisen in her cheek, so that I smiled a little, knowing her to be already taken by the glamour of my robe and gavel.

In response I held her eye and spoke in tones of great severity. ‘If he is guilty, Madame, and I have no doubt that such he be, then shall he dance a Tyburn jig, or else he has a friend to swing upon his legs and speed him to a hastier demise.’

Here, Eleanor grew pale and clutched her mother’s skirts. Cast on the ceiling by a low-set lantern, both their shadows merged to one; a dark thing with too many limbs. Noticing that her daughter had become afraid, the widow turned towards the girl and scolded her perhaps too harshly, no doubt hoping she should make a good impression on a judge were she to play the martinet.

‘Now don’t you make a fuss, my girl! You know what I have told you. We should thank the stars that we are being spoken to at all by such a noble gentleman as ...’ Here her words trailed off and, glancing from her child, she offered me a querying look, at which I understood that she was still in ignorance as to my name.

I introduced myself, to spare her further puzzlement. ‘I am His Worship Judge Augustus Nicholls, come from Faxton in Northamptonshire, upon the circuit. Now you have me at a disadvantage, Madame. Who, I wonder, might you be?’

Seeming a little flustered, she announced herself as Mrs Mary Deene, late of Dundee, if it should please me, whereupon I let my gaze drop for an instant from her face to the more softly angled contours there below and told her that it pleased me very much. At this we both laughed, she a little nervously, while Eleanor looked first to one of us then to the other, half-aware that meanings darted underneath the surface of our talk like pretty minnows, yet unable quite to grasp them ere they vanished in a twist of silver.

We exchanged some few words more, stood at the threshold of her stoop-backed attic room, yet more than words were passed between us: certain measurements of breath were evident. Some phrases had a tilt to them, some silences an eloquence, or so it seemed to me. We both avowed we should be glad to have the other’s company upon the morrow’s ride to Kendal, and expressed the hope we might have cause to meet while we were in that place. At this, content that my preliminary work with Widow Deene would be sufficient to its task, I took my leave amid much curtsying and scraping.

In my larger chamber on the floor below I punched my feather bolster till it had a shape more suitable for entertaining sleep. Settling back, I closed my eyelids, where the darkness rose behind like a theater’s drapes as Widow Deene and Eleanor, both of them nude and with their autumn hair untied, danced with each other in a feverish arietta to high French fiddles, pale and twirling on that secret stage.

Out through the carriage window the November fields are made to dazzling mirror-flats by flood, where up above the clouds hang gray and heavy as cathedrals. Two drowned heifers floating swollen in a ditch; their staring eyes catch mine in passing, black glass bulbs now fogged, steamed white by death.

Besides a trade of pleasantries when first we climbed aboard the coach this morning, and of several lingering glances since, little of note has passed between the widow and myself today. Since I imagine we shall shortly reach the skirts of Kendal where the Deenes are to be lodged, then it were better I should soon promote the notion of an assignation, lest I miss my chance. If child and mother disembark a half-mile down the road from here and are not seen again for these three days I am in Kendal, why, what then? Then I must sleep alone, else pay some drab to warm my bed unless I would return to wife and Faxton without dalliance to keep me warm in mind and memory throughout the winter months.

Our carriage rolls along its track by open land with, in the distance, mountains steeped in cloud, or clouds that look alike to mountains. Some way off, across the fallow, plowed-in fields, I spy a great black farm dog bounding at a furious pace across the ruts and frost-baked furrows, seeming easily to match its stride with our fast-moving carriage as it lopes along in parallel to us. I make attempt to estimate its distance from the coach, which is, perhaps, much further than I first assumed. Why, then, the hound must be of monstrous size to seem so large at such a great remove.

No. No, I see it now, the truth of it, and am embarrassed at my foolishness: the beast is not a dog at all, but rather is a horse. A clump of trees obscures its racing shadow-form from sight before I can confirm this logical surmise, while at the same time Widow Deene speaks from behind me so that my attention is diverted from the creature utterly to other, less ambiguous concerns.

‘We shall be getting off soon, shan’t we Nelly?’ This, though spoken to the child, seems largely for my benefit. Unless I miss my guess, with this announcement of her imminent departure Widow Deene hopes to provoke me to a suitable response. Not wishing that so radiant a being should be made to suffer disappointment, I turn from the window of the carriage now to speak with her, and lift my straggling eyebrows up towards their center in a great display of something like bereavement.

‘My good woman, can it be that you and your dear child alike are to be taken from me in such haste? It really is too bad! In all my lonely weeks upon these roads at last I meet with true companionship only to have it plucked from me while it is new. I’d hoped that while in Kendal we might meet, the three of us, and thus continue our acquaintanceship, but now ...’ I let my words trail off and spread my hands here, miserably, as if I hold a world of woe between them like some dismal Atlas.

Little Eleanor, awoken now, at least is moved to sympathy by my performance. Turning on her seat to face her mother, she takes up the older woman’s hands within her smaller ones and wears a look upon her pointed fox-cub face that is the very soul of earnestness.

‘Mama, shall we not see the gentleman again? He was so kind, I should not like him to be gone.’

Her mother looks now from the girl to me, and once more, though it is the child to whom she speaks, her words are meant for older and more knowing ears. ‘You hush now, girl. Why, think how all the Kendal folk should look upon the judge if he were seen there with the likes of us! With me not long a widow they’ve enough to whet their tongues upon, without us bringing shame upon His Honor in the bargain.’

Here I shake my head in pained denial, as though such considerations could not be more distant from my thoughts, although in truth there is much sense in what she says. It is not meet nor seemly that I should be seen abroad with persons of their type, and in my years I’ve learned that England is a smaller land than many would suppose. Sometimes it seems I cannot put a hand inside the underthings of a Yorkshire lass without it happen that she’s daughter to the second cousin of my wife’s best-trusted friend.

Though Kendal be remote from Faxton, I am having second thoughts concerning the advisability of a liaison with the Widow Deene, though now her child pipes up again, with fresh suggestion: ‘Could he not then come to visit with us, in the nice old lady’s house where we’re to stay? You said it was outside the town, so folks should have no cause to pay it mind where he was gone if he come calling. Do say that he might.’

The mother lifts her eyes once more to mine, and seems to hesitate. It strikes me that the girl’s proposal is ideally suited to my purposes, and I am taken by the furtive, secret bond that it already weaves between us; the suggestion of a mutual confidence that might be taken further. Widow Deene is watching me intently, waiting for some sign of my response to Eleanor’s idea before she dares to venture an opinion of her own. The moment has arrived to stamp my seal upon our tryst, and leaning forward in the rocking coach I set one hand upon the infant’s knee as might an uncle, chuckling the while. Beneath her skirt’s thin dark the sinew of her leg is spare and taut, much like a bird’s.

‘Why, what a clever mite you are, to think of such a thing! Though for my own part I care not a whit if I am seen in company with two such lovely ladies, it would never do if in this manner I should compromise your mother’s reputation in the town where she’s to work. Yet thanks to you, dear girl, we have the answer! I would be delighted to come calling at your residence and break the bread with both of you at your convenience, if it should be your mother gives assent.’

It seems I’ve learned the trick of speaking through the child, just as her mother does. The way to do it is to talk to one while gazing at the other. When the object of one’s gaze has such bewitching sea-spray eyes and lips plucked from a rose bay willow herb, this is not an unpleasant task. The widow, who returns my look, now seems to color in her cheeks. Glancing away towards the worn boards of the carriage floor and with a tiny, private smile, she stammers her acceptance. The suppressed delight upon her countenance invokes a similar elation in myself, though in a different quarter of my person.

‘Oh, Sir, I ... why, of course I gives assent. You’ve no need to ask my permission. Not for anything.’

Her eyes dart up now from the floor’s bare planks that have unraveling slivers of the Kendal road between their lengths. She reads my face to see if I have understood her last remark, its gauze-veiled invitation. Satisfied her imprecations have not fallen upon stony ground, she looks away once more before continuing. The tremor in her voice, so faint as to be scarcely evident, is thrilling yet to me. ‘You’ll see the house where we’re to be set down. It is not far from here, and no more than a mile’s walk out of Kendal. Better you should come by dark, though, people being ready to think ill of others as they are.’

I readily agree to this, and promise I shall call upon her this tomorrow night, before I am to sit at my assizes on the morn. A fuck will no doubt much improve my disposition and, in modest measure, may alleviate the dreary circumstances that attend to the condemning of a man. It comes to me that since she is a widow without funds and of uncertain character, it may be that a shilling would procure the services of little Nelly in with us as well. I think about the bathers in my snuff-box, how they plait each other’s lank and wringing hair; a foam of women risen from their spa’s warm depths.

The child is speaking to her mother now, pleased by the news that I’m to visit, clutching at the widow’s sleeve excitedly. ‘Oh, Mother, it will be so nice to have a gentleman attend to us. I’ve missed it so while Father is away from us in ...’

Mrs Deene here shoots the child a sharp, forbidding look, so that the words die on her daughter’s lips. Clearly, the pangs of widowhood are yet sharp in this woman’s breast so that she will not suffer Eleanor to speak of her late sire. Nevertheless, there’s something in the rueful face the child makes at this silent reprimand that stirs my pity, so that I am moved now to complete her speech in hope that I may smooth across her error and return her to her mother’s favor.

‘While your father is away from you in Heaven with Our Lord. Of course: it is but natural that you should miss his presence, and more natural still that you should long to know man’s company. In that, you are alike with all your sex.’

Here, Nell looks puzzled, but a smile of such relief and gratitude lights up her mother’s face that I am given courage to continue. ‘Fear not, for tomorrow night I shall come visiting, and though I may not hope to cut as good a leg as would your dear departed father, I am confident of my ability to substitute in what were, surely, his least onerous responsibilities. To whit, attending to his child, and to his wife.’

Before this last I leave the merest pause, in which I raise my stare from off the child and let it fall upon the dame instead. A look of such intensity and understanding is transferred between us that we cannot either of us bear it long and after moments must avert our eyes. A pleasant, gravid silence next descends. I fancy we’re each speculating heatedly as to the nature of the other’s heated speculations.

Smiling to myself, I turn once more to watch from out the carriage window, but the dog or foal that I saw earlier is not anywhere in sight. The bare, black trees fly past, clumped like the bristles on an old boar’s spine.

The silence lasts until we are arrived at some low cottage, all dun-colored stone and mouse-brown thatch, set back a little from the road that winds on up the hill to Kendal. Here the Deenes must disembark. Anxious to show that I have strength despite my years, I help to lift what little baggage they possess from off the coach, which, it transpires, includes naught but a single satchel made of threadbare canvas. As I pass it down to her my fingers brush, almost as if by accident, against the widow’s own gloved hand.

A slovenly and heavy-bodied girl about fifteen is come from out the cottage, with her tangled hair the same dull color as its thatch. Her features are impassive. Eyes that seem dull-witted and perhaps too far apart surmount a flat nose, more plan than relief. Her mouth is wide with lips too full, yet might lay claim in certain lights to its own ugly sensuality. She pauses with one lard-white hand upon the cottage gatepost and regards the coach without expression. When I look behind her to the front stoop of the house itself I see a fat and age-creased drudge who’s shuffled from indoors supported by a stick. She comes no further than the door, but stands unmoving with its pitch-stained frame about her in repugnant portrait. Her chins and jowls are like one rippled mass, this merging with the single massive contour of her dugs and belly. Tiny eyes a sticky black, like plum-stones pressed in suet, she stands leaning on her stick and, like the half-wit girl propped by the gate (who may, I fancy, be her daughter), gazes at the coach with neither word nor any look that may be read.

The Widow Deene smiles up at me and mouths, ‘Tomorrow, then,’ before she turns and moves towards the cottage with her child in tow. The string-haired girl slouched up against the post now silently draws back the gate, admitting Nelly and her mother to what shall be their new home. As I pull shut the carriage door and settle back into my seat both Eleanor and Mrs Deene turn round to wave at me just as the driver spurs his horses into life and I am hauled away and on to Kendal. Smiling fondly, I wave back as they recede from view. Tomorrow night, then.

Several minutes pass in fruitless scanning of the fields about for some sight of the beast spied earlier, and then the narrow, twisting jetties of the Lakeland town spring up about us and I am arrived. The courthouse, where I am to lodge in upstairs rooms built wholly for that purpose, is a low but dignified affair of brick and timber, near to Kendal’s center. Having quit the coach and paced a while upon the cobbles of the court’s rear yard to bring some circulation to my legs, I summon an attendant from within to haul my bags up foot-smoothed stairs of stone, thence to my bed-chamber.

I mount the steps ahead, while he, a man of middle years, trudges behind me, wheezing and complaining in my wake. There is a landing half-way up, where is a window facing West. I have arrived at Kendal late on in the day, so that the sky beyond the glass is red and I am struck by that uneasy sense of having seen before. As I approach the landing I experience a mad dread that young Nelly will be stood there with her hair aflame, though I have left her back along the Kendal road. Why this idea should wake such fright in me I cannot say, and when I reach the landing it is empty. We continue up the stairs.

My room is chill but comfortable. The attendant promises he will alert the various Officers of Court to my arrival and that I may meet with both these Officers and the accused upon the morrow. Setting down my baggage just inside the door, he takes his leave of me and I remain sat on my cot in sudden still and silence, foreign to me after all the pitch and clatter of the road. After a while I rise and, crossing to my window, close its bug-drilled shutters on encroaching night. For want of any better pass-time, I prepare for bed.

These empty rooms, upon the circuit: sometimes I believe that all my frenzied copulations are but efforts to drown out the wretched specters of these tombs; these absences.

Undressing now, my thoughts turn to my son, to Francis, back in Faxton. What a cloud there is about the lad (though, being close to fifty, I must own that he is lad no more). A foul miasma of the spirit seems to have quite overtaken him that neither wife nor his sweet daughter Mary, my own grandchild, can dispel. He mopes and stares. He only sometimes reads and seems without all motive in his days.

Dee was the cause of it, else I am not a judge. It is some five and twenty years since Francis suffered his regrettable enthusiasm for things thaumaturgical and first sought out the charlatan’s advice, going to Mortlake where he made the doctor promise of one hundred pounds if Dee should teach him how to fix and tine the moon, along with other dark things of this type. While Queen Bess was in life, Dee had her ear and was much sought after in matters sorcerous, for such dire practices were then respectable, however difficult it may be to accredit this behavior now.

Almost a year from his first visit to Dee’s house, something occurred which marked the change in Francis that persists and worsens to this day. Its details were not made entirely clear to me, but from what fragments I am able to assemble it would seem that Francis had occasion to peruse some documents pertaining to the doctor’s past experiments and rituals, performed while Dee had in his servitude one Edward Kelly, an unconscionable rogue who died in jail.

Although in later years I’d oft beseech that he reveal the content of those documents, my son insisted it were better for my soul that I remain in ignorance. To judge from how he starts and frights whene’er a window bangs and has always a wan, hag-ridden look about him, it may be that he was right enough in this. Such morsels as he did reveal were more than adequate to fire the most macabre imaginings, relating to the conjuring of awful presences, whereafter to transcribe their stark yet puzzling announcements. Dee, it seemed, had at some length compiled a grammar of the spirit language, that these ‘angels’ as he called them might commune with him and he might in his turn make plain their utterances. These etheric dealings were that aspect of the doctor’s work which most concerned my son and later came to trouble him, but for my own part I found more to entertain me in the hints that Francis would let slip as to Dee’s earthier transactions.

Of the papers shewn my son that cold March night in fifteen ninety-four were some describing ritual acts of a repellent carnal nature, while still other documents pertained to an arrangement, ordered by the spirits, that the doctor and his servant Kelly should both keep their wives in common. Whether Francis felt that with these revelations Dee was subtly proposing that my son should bring his own wife into some comparable arrangement, I know not. All I am sure of is that Francis made his outrage plain, at which a pang of anger passed between the doctor and my son, who stormed from out Dee’s study in a bate and made his way upstairs to where a bed was set aside for him.

It was thus while he mounted to his room with naught but furious words unspoken in his head that Francis happened on the child. Stood with her face in shadow and the bloody evening red behind her through the western window, she raised up her arms with palms turned flat towards my son as if to bar his way. Haloed in flame, she spoke to Francis in a foreign tongue, all aspirated vowels with scarce a consonant between that sounded much like ‘Bah—zoh—deh—leh—teh—oh—ah’ and on and on; a string of heathen nonsense.

Francis was upon the point of asking who the girl might be and what her business was with him when of a sudden she stepped from before the window to the landing’s shadows and the full light of the setting sun, now unimpeded by her presence, shone into his eyes so as to dazzle him and make him squint and glance away. When next he looked upon the stairway she was gone, nor was there trace of her remaining save a scent he said reminded him of myrrh.

Despite their quarrel and the fright that he had suffered, Francis could not seem to keep away from Mortlake. With the troubles between him and Dee soon mended, he made frequent visits to the doctor’s house across the next six years, on more than one occasion forcing my grand-daughter Mary to accompany him, against my best advice.

Dee, at this juncture of his life, relied upon one Bartholomew Hickman as he’d once relied on Edward Kelly, needing, it would seem, someone to scry the ethers for him with a glass and tell him of the messages his ‘angels’ would convey. All this came to an end around the turning of the century when, if my son may be believed, this Hickman was discovered as a fraud, or at the least a seer who had communed with naught but false, deceptive spirits. Near a decade’s work was thus undone, and in the late September of that year my son and grand-daughter alike attended bitter and defeated ceremonies there at Mortlake where the documents accrued from Hickman’s traffic with the spirit world were ignominiously rendered down to ash.

I will admit I thought it splendid that a faker should be thus exposed, but Francis would not be consoled. My son considered the affair to be a vast catastrophe whose true dimension I might never sound. Even my grandchild Mary seemed to have a pall about her, and would sometimes offer me a frightened look, as if she of a sudden knew me in another light. They neither of them went again to Mortlake after that, nor had they dealings with John Dee. It was not long before King James, a Godly Sovereign, ascended to the throne, whereafter the Magician found that he had fallen out from grace and so began his great decline. Not many years were passed before Dee had descended into penury and then, soon after, passed away at Mortlake tended only by his daughter, from which one assumes there were no spirits present in that instance to assist with his demise.

Pulling my night-gown on I mount the guest-room’s wooden-boxed commode to make my stool, this being hard and painful in its passing. With my labors thus accomplished I snuff out the candle that I have undressed by and leap straight into my bed, the blankets dragged up covering my ears, without which muffling presence, ever since I was a child, I may not sleep. I am annoyed to find that still my thoughts are turned to Doctor Dee, for there is something puzzling in him that I cannot leave alone. There seems a great predicament in how one measures such a man, that was too well-accomplished in the sciences material and politic to be discounted as a fool, and yet believed he spoke with angels. Can so fine a mind have found diversion for so many years in copying pointless syllables on to his endless tables, charts and journals? If this be not so; if by some fluke of reason all the messages that Dee transcribed were real, then what are we to make of a Heaven populous with incoherent angels, spouting nonsense credos in the speech of babes? I saw the ‘angel language’ once, copied laboriously by my son into a journal that he kept. It was a grid of what appeared to me at least a thousand squares, each with some symbol or notation written in so that it seemed in sum a veritable map of lunacy; that mist-bound continent whence few return to tell what they have seen.

I shall concern myself no more this night with thoughts of wizards nor astrologers. The skull-capped and white-bearded vision of the doctor as my son described him to me dances irritatingly behind my eyelids until, with an effort of the will, I am enabled to dispel it and put in its place some several pictures of the Widow Deene in various shaming postures, these soon supplemented by a memory of the slab-thighed servant-girl that stood there by the cottage gate and stared at me with empty, stupid eyes.

My steam of thought condenses, beading into dreams against the coolness of my pillow, and a mumbling cloud descends. A crack is opened in the night to let me enter in, and slide, and sink, and sleep ... I wake before the sun with the attendant who assisted with my baggage tapping at the chamber door to tell me that a breakfast is prepared for me down in the dining room below. I thank him with a grunt and rise to dress as well as I am able in the dark. Whilst buckling my shoes I am reminded of a dream that was upon me in the night, wherein I was at Mortlake with my son and Doctor Dee, save in the dream his name was Dr Deene. He held a yellowed parchment up to us and said, ‘Here is a map of lunacy’, and yet when Francis and I leaned in close to study it we saw it was instead a map of our own shire, which is to say Northampton. More, it seemed to me as if the map were not drawn on to paper but tattooed upon a substance very much like human skin. I thought to look for Faxton but could find it nowhere on the chart, which filled me with a sudden formless dread. Here Dr Dee or Deene was moved to reassure me that all would be well if he and I were but to have our wives in common, though he may have said not wives but lives. At this, and for no reason, I began to weep and afterwards remember nothing more until my waking.

Properly attired now and removed unto the dining room, above a meal of scaith cooked in an oatmeal crust I’m introduced to my chief bailiff for tomorrow’s trial, a doughty chap named Callow with a strawberry nose and great side-whiskers that surround his crab-pink face in white. As I pluck fishbones from my cheek to set as on some tiny ossuary shelf beside my plate, he reacquaints me with the details of the case I am to hear. A local man of no account called Deery stands accused of taking from their rightful owner both a ewe and ram, the last of which he sold, whereafter salted portions of the former were discovered on his property, so that his guilt is plainer than a wart.

Chief Bailiff Callow tells me that with breakfast done we both may walk to Kendal jail and view the miscreant there in his cell, along with those less serious offenders I am also called upon to judge once Deery has been sentenced: drunks and whores; a shopkeeper accused of giving out dishonest measure; several brawlers and a bugger.

Out of doors, with fish and oatmeal resting heavy on my gut and breath like smoke upon the frozen air, I walk beside the bailiff neath a gauze of shadow down the steep lanes slippery with frost. The sky is ribboned water-blue and gold along its eastern edge, where West of that there are yet stars and from the fields outside of Kendal comes a gradual fugue of birdsong, each voice lucid and distinct.

The jail, built out of rough gray stones, is in the very middle of the town where it squats like a monstrous toad that has been petrified by its own ugliness. Its walls have gaping chinks and fissures so that it is no more warm inside than out, consisting only of a cramped space where the turn-keys sit and whittle aimlessly at sticks, with several narrow cells crammed in beyond.

Sat in the first of these, a girl about thirteen with pale, untidy hair is suckling her babe, a ghastly, mottled little thing no bigger than a rat and by the look of it not long for life. Each time she makes attempt to tease her sallow, cone-shaped breast between the creature’s lips it turns its gray and shriveled face away to whine. The mother looks up briefly at me without interest, then turns her dull gaze back towards her child. The bailiff tells me that she is arraigned for brawling, and we pass on down the row.

Deery is in the next cell we approach. He sits upon his bunk and stares without expression at the wall, not even looking up at us when we elect to question him directly. Still a young man, Deery has the look of one once handsome and well-built now run to fat, the strong bones of his boyhood face yet visible, embedded in a bland expanse of dough. He sits there, feet apart, his forearms resting on his thighs with wrists as thick as infants’ waists and ham-hock fists, the fingers intertwined into a hawser-knot at rest between his knees. His stillness is unsettling and complete.

I ask him if he knows I am to judge him on the morrow, whereupon he merely shrugs and still does not elect to look at me directly. When I ask him if he is aware that hanging is the punishment for theft of livestock he seems only bored, and after some few moments hawks a quid of startlingly yellow phlegm into the corner of his cell. It is clear that conversation is impossible between the two of us, and after but a cursory examination of the lock-up’s other inmates, Bailiff Callow and I step from the rank miasma of the jail once more into the biting Kendal air. The skies are light now and the town is properly awakened. A wood-merchant’s cart with images of Saints and martyrs painted on its side rolls past drawn by a threadbare horse. Small boys climb on the baker’s roof to drink the warmth and savor from his oven-vents and down the lane there walks a stooped old man all hung about with wooden cages wherein bantams make complaint.

With little useful to be done before tomorrow’s trials I take the bailiff’s leave and pass the morning by inspecting Kendal, stopping in a hostelry at noon to dine on mutton pie and swede. Thus fortified, I spend the afternoon in pleasurable meander through the nearby countryside. Some short while prior to heading back towards my lodgings where I may prepare for this tonight’s encounter with the Widow Deene, it comes to me that I am in a mood of tense expectancy that is not all connected with that lady or her charms. I realize at length that part of me is half anticipating further glimpses of the animal that I saw yesterday as it raced there beside our coach, and laugh aloud at my own foolishness. This is not even near the place where I first spied the beast, that being on the other side of town. Besides, of what concern to me is some stray hound, or pony, or whatever else the creature may have been?

Returning to my rooms I change into a finer set of clothes and put fresh powder on my wig. Waiting until the Heavens’ nightly silent battle in the western sky has run its bloody course, I sidle out into the first mauve fogs of dusk, taking much care that I should not be seen by anyone associated with the Court and holding underneath one arm my iron-knobbed cane for fear of cut-purses.

A doleful blue which all too quickly cools to gray descends upon the Lakeland hills with twilight, and across the flooded fields a loon is driven mad by grief. I am soon come upon the outskirts of the town, whence I continue on the Kendal road towards the cottage where the widow and her child are billeted. The mustard-colored mud that now adorns my polished boots seems but a little forfeit weighed against the great rewards I hope may be in store for me. A widow who has much experience with married life and yet is eager to resume its carnal aspect makes for a more satisfying ride than any whey-skinned maid in service, and I dare suppose that the authority my office lends me may do much in making her receptive to my whims, peculiar though they be.

To each side of the darkening road the ditches pour and gurgle like a man run through the heart and all about an icy mist is rising so that I grow anxious for my first sight of the cottage lights upon the track ahead of me. When last I crossed this ground it was by coach and not so gloomy, yet I wonder if I have not made some error. Can the cottage really be this far outside of Kendal, or have I passed by it in the dusk so that it lies behind me now? Resolved that if I am not come upon the fat old woman’s habitation soon then I shall turn back for my lodgings though it mean I must forgo the widow’s company, I am afforded much relief to round a bend and sight at last the wan and jaundiced glow of lamplight seen through curtains, some way further down the lane.

With images of Widow Deene as I should soonest like to see her filling all my thoughts, save for those thoughts pertaining to the darling Eleanor, my pace is made more quick so that before I know it I am by the cottage gate. A flurry of emotion now descends upon me; a peculiar nervousness that I have known before when in such situations: partly it is lust, partly anxiety lest I have made too much of things and shall be disappointed. This time there is something else besides, an undertow of qualm I may not place, but all such trepidations must be put away. If I’m to hang a man upon the morrow, then I would this night impale a woman first, and so march briskly up a mollusk-skated path to rap the tar-streaked door.

A Pater Noster-while goes by until at last the door’s unlatched and I’m confronted by the half-wit girl that I saw loitering by the gate when we arrived here yesterday. Encountering her now, I am less certain if she be indeed half-witted, or instead has cultivated a tremendous slowness, as a form of insolence. She stares at me in silence an inordinate amount of time before she deigns to speak, and when she does a lewd and knowing grin is smeared, much like a riotous slogan, on the flat wall of her face.

‘You’ll be they judge, then?’

Voice as thick and slippery as waterweed, her lazy slur has a suggestiveness about it that I soon discover to be constant and habitual. When I reply that yes, I am indeed His Honor Judge Augustus Nicholls and inquire as to her own name, she returns a smile that is at once flirtatious and amused, and holds my eye for some few humid moments before answering.

‘I’m Emmy. You’ll be wantin’ Mary, though. You’d best come in.’

She ushers me into a lamplit passageway so narrow that, as she maneuvers past me to pull shut the front door in my wake, we are both for a moment pressed together, face to face, there in that closely bounded vestibule. Her heavy bust is pressed against my coat-front, flattened so it seems to disappear in much the same way as the blade of a stage dagger. This sublime compression lasts for but a moment, then she’s by me. As I turn and walk towards the lit room at the passage’s far end I hear her close the door and draw a bolt across.

Another doorway, partly open, leads off from the hall upon my right, and as we pass it by I glance inside. Though it is lit by nothing save such light as filters from the passage where we walk, I can make out a vast array of painted plates and figures made from porcelain arranged upon a huge old dresser just inside the room, which seems immaculately kept and has a richly patterned rug upon its floor. In company with the dresser I can also see an ornate footstool and a quaint low table made of polished cherry-wood. Though I may not view all this front room whilst in passing, I am given the impression of a small, neat space so filled with heirlooms proudly on display as to allow no room for one to enter in. It has a pristine and unused appearance quite at odds with the dilapidated façade of the house, but I move on towards the light there at the hall’s far end, and think no more upon it. Emmy walks behind me, and I hear her flat, bare feet upon the boards. I hear her breath.

The passage leads me to a room so different from the one I have just passed that they might be on separate continents, divided not by some few feet of hall, but by an ocean. From my contemplation of the neat front room so filled with beautiful possessions, I am plunged into a squalid hovel where the gnarled grain of the walls is choked by soot and there is everywhere a smell compounded out of mildew, broiling offal, and that odor that old women have, like tripes and piss. I understand that this is how the poor must choose to live, with all they have of beauty, worth or value hoarded in a room kept just for show, which they themselves may enter not, save that it be to dust or clean. Their true lives are played out behind these cluttered shrines in cheerless middens such as this, where I stand on the threshold now.

A hearth-cum-stove of iron and slate set in the end wall warms the room, but in a stifling way. Beside this, on a bow-legged stool that has her walking-cane propped up against it, sits the wrinkled and obese old dame that I spied yesterday, her eyes like coals in curds fixed fast upon me as I step inside with head bent to avoid the low oak beams. Seen closer to, I note she is afflicted with a moisture on the lungs, so that she wheezes, with her monstrous bosom heaving like the tide beneath her apron and a quiver rippling through her puddled flesh, across her jowls and goitrous neck at every breath.

Set out there in the middle of this noisome chamber is a table far too massive for so cramped a place, that looks as if the cottage were built up about it, being far too broad to fit the door and very old besides, its surface scarred by carving-knives long snapped in hands long dead. Five chairs are set about the table, two of them already occupied by Eleanor and her enchanting mother, both of whom look up and smile upon my entry. I had quite forgot how green their eyes were, and decide that I might bear these miserable surrounds if they should be illuminated by such pulchritude.

‘Judge Nicholls! You have come just as you said.’ It is the Widow Deene who speaks, and the excitement and anticipation in her voice elicits in me smug assurance that all shall be well between us. Scraping back her chair across the rough stone tiles, she rises from her seat and steps across the room to greet me, placing one weak hand upon my elbow as she steers me to my setting, opposite her own. Stood leaning up against the passage door-jamb, Emmy smirks at the assembly. While attempting to ignore the girl, I make small conversation with the widow and with Eleanor until the bloated crone sat by the hearth ceases her wheezing for a moment to address us all.

‘We’ll get the dinner up now. Emmy, you stop gawpin’ at the gentleman and pull us up so’s I can dish it out.’ Her voice, dragged up through a great surfeit of congestions, bubbles like a marsh.

Emmy, with an expressive sigh, quits her position by the door and crosses to the fireplace where she helps the swollen baggage labor up from off her stool. The two of them, who I am now convinced are child and mother, next proceed to ladle forth great bowls of hotpot from a vessel taken out the stove, these being set before us. Emmy takes her seat, next to my own, with many crafty sidelong leers, while the old lady, with some difficulty, sinks her gasping bulk on to the chair placed at the table’s head.

With breath sufficiently recovered, she intones a grace: ‘Dear Lord, bless this the meal we have prepared our guest, and may we have success in all our doin’s.’

Although rude and unconventional, the blessing is not inappropriate. Tonight, if luck is with me, I’ll be doing Widow Deene, and hope to have no small success in this endeavor. Murmuring, then, an ‘Amen’ that is heartfelt, I lift up my fork and start to eat, smiling across the table at the widow and receiving her smile in return. I fancy there is something secret in it, meant perhaps for but the two of us. Encouraged thus, with added relish I attack the mound of beef and vegetable heaped before me, pleasantly surprised by how agreeable its flavor seems.

Whilst picking at their food, the gathered females watch attentively as I wolf down my own, no doubt with apprehension lest such plain, rough fare does not meet with my cultivated expectations. Wishing to allay their fears, I heap great forks-full past my chin and, in between my mastications, comment on the dinner’s excellence, for in all truth it is delicious. Highly spiced and peppered, every swallowing promotes a film of perspiration on my brow and upper lip; a stinging in my palate by which means my mouth is made a smoldering, infernal cave of molar stalactites with every jot of my awareness centered there. With fellows of my stamp, who have a taste for fire and pepper in their food, the rigors of enduring such a meal are part of its attraction. Panicked by the blazings of the tongue, it is as if the other instruments of sensibility are similarly plunged into a new condition: eyes may water or the ears may ring, with everywhere throughout the body’s flesh a sympathetic tingling. I have often thought that such a state must be alike with that described by mystics, where all other bodily concerns are swept away by the intensity of a divine experience.

I think of Francis, hollow-eyed and stammering, filled with dread since the abrupt cessation of his work with Dee; with the demeanor of a man who has been sentenced, yet who must endure a long, excruciating wait until the gallows have been built. I cannot help but think he might have limited his own experiments with the sublime to the enjoyment of a simple dish such as I have before me now, my plate already half wiped clean, so hearty is my appetite.

Whilst I am lost within this culinary reverie, the women sat about me eat in silence save the chime of knife on crockery, with many glances made to me or to each other. Eleanor, who may have been provided with a smaller portion than we grown-ups, has already emptied out her dish and, turning, holds it out towards the gross and liver-fluked old woman seated at the table’s head, there on the infant’s right.

‘Grandmother? May I have some more?’

At this, the aged mountain made of fat swivels her head around towards the child in an unsettling fashion, with her neck so swollen that it does not seem to move, but only that her features have by some means swum across that doughy head to face another way.

Her voice is sharp and harsh, so that the small girl flinches and draws back, afraid. ‘I’m not your grandmother, you wicked girl!’

At the severity of this reproach an awkward silence falls upon the gathering, skillfully breached by Widow Deene who, smiling in a nervous way, attempts now to excuse her child. ‘Of course she’s not, is she, my lamb? It’s just that with her having been so kind to us, that’s how you’ve come to think of her. Now, Nelly, is that not the way of things?’

Here Eleanor, still pale and shaken from the scolding, nods her head and stares into her empty dish, which seems to mollify the wheezing dragon to her left. This withered old Leviathan now turns to speak with Emmy, sat here next to me, instructing the young girl to rise and serve a second helping for such mouths as may require it.

For my own part, I reluctantly decline the offer with a shaking of the head. A heaviness is come upon me, so that I become afraid lest I have rather ate too much already. If this well-stuffed lethargy should not abate, I fear for my performance with the widow later on. I shall not have the strength to mount her, having barely strength enough to raise another mouthful to my lips. Upon my mute refusal of a further serving, Emmy tilts her head upon one side and gazes down towards me quizzically, with ladle in one hand and oven-pot wrapped in a cloth beneath her arm. Those wide, plump lips crease now in a lascivious smile before she speaks.

‘I think the judge has had enough already. Look how thick the sweat stands on his brow, as if this room’s too hot for him.’

Setting the pot and ladle down upon the table-top she next stoops down a little, smiling all the while, so that her face is close to mine. The other three about the table seem to watch intently, all with rapt and yet unreadable expressions, much like birds. My fingertips seem numb. I hear a distant clattering that I think must be my dinner fork, now fallen to the floor. Near to, I see that Emmy has a spoiled complexion; yellow-heads in dense encampments, sheltering at the corners of her nose. Her voice is slow and thick as treacle pouring.

‘Don’t you fret about the warm, now, Judge. My mother says as we are all to take our clothes off for you later on. Then we’ll be glad the fire’s banked up so high.’

What is she saying? From across the table, Widow Deene speaks now in a reproachful tone I have not heard her use before. ‘You mind now, Emmy. He might not be quite so underneath-the-weather as he looks.’

The adolescent seems to take no heed of this, but only cocks her head to scrutinize me closely, as if making up her mind before she speaks. ‘Oh, no. I think he’s had it, right enough. Besides, I know a way we shall soon see.’

She straightens up away from me. Without abandoning her smile she lifts her weighty arms to curl behind her neck where lie the fastenings of her smock, which she commences to unbutton. No one speaks. The room is silent save the fat old woman’s ragged breath. My mind is swimming, and it comes to me belatedly that there is something very much awry here in this sweltering chamber.

Emmy has by now undone herself enough to work both shoulders from her dress, followed by one arm then the other. Finally, with a triumphant smile, she yanks the whole affair down to her hips so that above the waist she is quite naked. Do I dream this? Emmy’s breasts are large and dense, that now she lifts her hands to cup and weigh. Flat aureolae, brown and violet, surmount each bub, the purpled nipples thrusting out like baby’s thumbs. She steps towards me, cradling one teat in either palm and, with a vague anxiety that seems remote and distant to me, I discover that I can no longer move. The singing in my ears is louder, though I still hear Emmy as she speaks beside my ear.

‘There, now. What do you think of them? Aren’t they a lovely set of things? Why, I would wager that you’d like to suck upon them if you could. That’s what gents like to do, I hear.’

Now she inclines her body closer to me so the musky scent of her is overwhelming. Lifting up one breast she tilts the nipple to my slack and gaping mouth, wiping it slowly back and forth across my lower lip, so that it folds, and bends, then springs again erect against my teeth. I try to close them on the slippery bud, and yet cannot.

‘Now stop it, Emmy!’ It is Widow Deene who speaks. ‘I’ll put up with this family’s ways so long as I am married into it, but not all of us wants to see your lechery both day and night.’

In answer, Emmy lewdly rocks her body back and forth so that her breast pumps in and out between my numb, unmoving lips. It seems that the old lady seated at the table’s end finds this so comic an effect that she begins to cackle, deep in her polluted, rattling lungs. Hilarity being contagious, little Eleanor next starts to smirk while darting cautious glances at her taut-faced mother, Widow Deene, as if to ask if it is yet permissible to laugh. At length she can contain herself no longer, and her mirth is given vent in sniveling noises down her nose, whereon the widow may not any more maintain her scowling and affronted disposition, starting in to snigger too, so that the four of them are laughing now.

The merriment endures a while and then is died away as Emmy takes her breast from out my mouth, a solitary pearl of spittle hung by a saliva thread there at its gallows tip. She takes a step back so as better to regard me and her smile is scornful now, filled with contempt.

‘He won’t be long now. We could make a start on divying him up, once we’ve our clothes off so they shan’t be marked.’

Now the old woman speaks from somewhere to my right. My head hangs slack against the back-rest of my chair and I have not the strength to turn it, so must listen only to the phlegm-harp of her voice.

‘Don’t be so daft, girl. See the way his eyes move back and forth! There’s yet vitality in him and if we cut him now it would fly everywhere. We’ll bide our time until he’s gone. When blood no longer moves, the mess is not so great.’

I am afraid, despite the numbing fog that seems to hang about me. Did they say I should be cut? I make attempt at protest yet can utter nothing save a hollow moan. What has become of me?

Across the table, Eleanor now joins with the discussion, turning to the matriarch sat at the table’s end. ‘Is it all right to call you Grandma now?’ The woman coughs her gruff assent and Eleanor continues. ‘Grandma, it’s so very hot in here. Can I take off my things like Auntie Em? You said that we would do it later.’

Here her mother, Mrs Deene, makes hurried interjection. ‘Never mind what Auntie Emmy does. I won’t have you grow up behavin’ like your father’s family.’

Now Emmy’s mother, leaning in upon my field of vision, tips her great bulk forward in her chair to plant her elbows on the table-top and glare with hard resentment at the Widow Deene. ‘Your Nelly’s in this with the rest of us. That’s what we said, and that’s how it shall be. The reason it is being done at all is for her father, and your husband. Emmy’s brother, and my son. You’ve wed into this family now, young Mary Deene-as-was, and you’re a Deery. Deerys stick together.’

There is pause wherein the younger woman seems to wither under that indomitable gaze. Her eyes fall to her lap and she is cowed, at which the harridan continues, speaking now once more to Eleanor.

‘If you’ve a mind to take your clothes off as we all agreed then so you shall, that they might not be splashed and stained when we commence the bloody-work. Indeed, we might as well all of us be about undressin’. He’ll be gone before I’m out my underskirts, you’ll see.’

It is an effort now even to breathe and waves of crashing blackness break within me, rattling as they drag their foaming tendrils back across the shingle of my thoughts, churn buried notions up into the glistening light. I think of Francis, and I understand the way he starts at every creaking of a door. I think of Dee. I think of Faxton, but I cannot bring a picture of it to my mind. All I can see is empty streets that wind past pitiable ruins before even these are gone and in their stead there is a great forgetfulness of grass, unmarked by spire or fence or gutter.

All about me now the women take their garments off amid much whispering and laughter. Eleanor skips by, her skirtless, hairless body seeming almost without gender, to assist her grandmother in the prolonged unveiling of that huge, white form; the belly hung in folds above the almost bare pudenda where such few hairs that remain are yellow-gray, like spilled and dirty candle-fat. Propped naked up against the table’s other edge is Emmy, with her buttocks white upon the dark, scarred wood as she helps Mrs Deene comb out her auburn hair. Was Deene her name? Or was it Dee? Or Deery? I cannot recall.

She sits and faces me across the table, wearing not a stitch, and keeps her eyes upon my face as Emmy starts to plait her chestnut locks for her. The room is like a furnace and I watch a crystal globe of sweat traverse the seated woman’s collarbone to vanish in the smear of light between her breasts. The scene reminds me very much of something I have seen before, damp women tending to each other’s hair, but fog-bound as I am I cannot place it.

To my right, Nell’s grandmother steps shamelessly from out the tangle of her underskirts there pooled about her feet. Helped by the cherub Eleanor, she next retrieves a box of cutlery from somewhere up above the stove. Selecting carving knives from out the tray, she and the girl proceed to sharpen them against a hearth-brick that I cannot see, but only hear the measured slinth of iron on stone. There is a fierce pain in my belly that yet feels somehow remote from me, as if it were occurring to someone else. The waves of light and shadow that seem in my eyes to roll across the crowded room come faster now, like ripples.

Bored with waiting for my strangled breath to cease, the naked women next ignore me. Sat about their table, they make conversation over little things as if I were not dying here among them. They discuss their ailments, and the price of grain, and what they’ll do once John is out of jail. Without their clothes they seem not human but more like some cadre of weird sisters; Fates or Gorgons stepped from legend. All about them is a vaporous radiance that seems to boil away to subtle colors at its edge. The smallest gesture leaves its traces in the air behind, with a descending arm become instead like shimmering pinions, fanned and splendid. They are talking, but I can no longer tell the sense of what they say.

Their words are from a glossary of light, lips moving silently as if beyond the scrying glass and in my ears the singing has achieved a perfect clarity, the rounds and phrases of it now resolved. Above the roaring of the altitudes each foreign syllable is bright and resonant, is achingly familiar in its alien profundity, a layered murmur echoing in everything. I know this song.

I know it.