The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [67]
Nor was she given time, in fact, to change her mind. There was a knock at the door. It was opened by Fulton. He bowed with flirtatious gallantry to Annabella and said with a smirk to his sister, ‘You have a visitor.’
‘He did call me nymph,’ Annabella called after her as she left. ‘Did your poet call you that?’
At the bottom of the stairs, Hannah found Thomas Rawnsley. Waiting outside were two horses. Hannah was invited to ride the good-natured grey. He stood behind her as she climbed onto a new two-pommelled saddle, the leather glossy and uncracked and smelling of the workshop.
‘So where shall we ride then?’
He looked startled, almost hurt.‘Nowhere in particular. Just through the woods. The air and so forth. I thought you might enjoy it.’
This had become a very agitating day. After so much panting and wishing and waiting and sighing, after so much nothing at all, life was finally happening, but not at all as she’d imagined. Firstly, an argument with Annabella and now, to escape from her, this ride. For much of the time she thought of the argument with clenchings of alternating regret and determination. Thomas Rawnsley rarely interrupted her.Although his intent was now overt, unquestionable, he did not seem to be making an effort to entertain her into an affection for him. He was not charming or expansive. He was not free and light like Charles Seymour. Nor did he have the profound, productive quiet of Tennyson. He was literal, direct and uncomfortable. His courtship (which this was, it seemed) was sullen and congested. Apparently it pained him. It was serious. Unlike the poet or aristocrat, he worked. It had made him rich, but the wealth sat on him like a garland, brittle and separate. Really, he was the work. His name suggested it. Rawnsley. Rawnsley. Hannah didn’t like that dragging long first vowel. What did it remind her of? Tawny. Brawny. Yes, brawn: the meat. Still, his clothes were beautiful, his possessions - his gloves, these horses - pristine. It was interesting, at least theoretically, to think that his wife would be similarly outfitted, sealed inside that wealth, sleek and secure and widely acknowledged.
The forest was darkening. Winter was not far off. The black fallen leaves, plastered down by heavy rain, were silvered here and there with frost.The tree trunks were wet. They passed the hooked, blustery shine of a holly. Good snail weather. Their reins creaked. The bits clicked in the horses’ mouths as they breathed large clouds. Hannah felt sorry for Rawnsley when his horse manured. He seemed visibly embarrassed by it, staring, stiff-necked, into the distance, as though he himself had done it.
The quiet was very calming. It was pleasant not talking. After a while Rawnsley said, ‘Would you allow me to show you something?’
‘Of course. I’m intrigued,’ she said politely.
They plodded on along soft paths until Thomas Rawnsley halted them. He turned with bright eyes and a finger pressed to his lips. Hannah’s day continued to work its elaborate stage machinery with another peculiar revelation. What Rawnsley then pointed to through the trees, and clearly in some way delighted him, was a gypsy camp. A fizzing, wet fire, dogs and horses and caravans, that unbounded, illicit life she had been taught always to avoid. They would steal from her. They might even steal her. The sight of them, at a safe distance and while she was protected beside Rawnsley, filled her with a lovely, crisp-edged fear and pleasure. She smiled at Rawnsley, who smiled back. They sat on their shifting horses and stared a moment longer, then rode quietly away.
Winter
The bishop’s chair was a church in itself: high-backed, winged, with projecting arms bearing candlesticks to afford illumination for reading and a shelf in its side for books. A small table with a lamp and gleaming spectacles stood close to this edifice.
Matthew Allen’s chair, set across the patterned rug at the other end of the fireplace’s breadth of stone, was less grand,