The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [81]
Away, towards home, at last, at last, he walked. He touched his hat to Peter Wilkins who, opening the gate for him, tilted his intricate face in acknowledgement. He walked out onto the path, into the forest. When he got to the place they were gone, as they said they might be. The vardas were gone, the horses. They had kicked loose stuff of the forest floor over the soft scorched heap of the fire. A wide-brimmed hat lay on the ground. It shuddered in a breeze not quite strong enough to lift it. It provoked a melancholy emotion, looking at that hat, but he had no time for it. There were no signs, no ribbons tied to anything he could see. Friendly and lawless and unreliable, they’d upped and gone. He crouched for a moment, read north from the shadows and the green side of the trees, and set off. Flickering shadows, the endlessly breaking fence of trees. He just had to keep walking, boring through, shouldering the distance with the low grunting strength of a badger, and he would get there, he would be home and free, with Mary. He was right, at least partly: Mary was dead, but he would get back and find his wife, his home, his life, and would stay there for a short time until his mind broke and he was again unmanageable. He would be taken then to Northampton Lunatic Asylum, which he would never leave. The remaining twenty-three years of his life would be spent inside those walls. He would die there, no longer a poet, obscure and incarcerated.
He left the forest, the doctor, the other patients, Stockdale’s tortures behind him. He broke through the incessant rushing sound of the trees into silence. A day. A breeze blew softly against him. He had to choose a road for Enfield and took the wrong one. He asked at a public house and was set on the right way. After Enfield it was the Great York Road, walking north until dark.
At dusk, he was staggering. He should have taken food, water at least, but that would have looked suspect. His knees were weak with sharp pains at their centres. He saw a paddock with a pond and a yard beyond it. He scaled the rotting fence, walked a wide margin around the pond for fear of falling in and drowning, and crept into the yard. Inside he found a fine bed of baled clover, six feet by six. He lay on it, the motion of the walk fading out of his exhausted limbs. He kept drifting down onto the bed like a bird landing from a height, kept sinking down onto it. He slept uneasily and dreamed that Mary lay by his side, but was taken from him. He awoke still in darkness and alone. He thought he’d heard someone say ‘Mary,’ but when he searched the place there was nobody there. He looked up at the stars to find the pole star. He lay down again with his head pointing towards it so he would know the direction to walk immediately that he woke again.
He awoke in daylight and late, with the mist burned away and the dew drying, but nevertheless he hadn’t been seen. He thanked God and got back onto the road.
Walking, head down, ignoring the occasional carts, counting milestones he passed. Soon he would have to drink something, to eat, would have to find a way to eat.
He removed his boots to shake out the gravel that was cutting him, the soles now worn down to paper and starting to tear. Passing the other way, towards London, a man on horseback said, ‘Here’s another of the broken-down haymakers,’ and threw down a penny. It sparkled on the path. John picked it up and called thanks after him. He exchanged the coin for half a pint in a pub called The Plough, finding refuge there from a heavy shower that pelted the thick, uneven glass of the pub’s windows.
Setting off again, he seemed to pass milestones very quickly, but by nightfall they had been stretched by hunger and exhaustion further and further apart. He stopped in a village and decided to call at a house to get a light for his pipe, having no matches, and there find the parson to fall upon his charity. An old woman allowed him into the parlour where a young girl sat making lace over a cushion and a gentleman smoked and stared. He asked