Peculiar Ground - Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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treat each other with civility. Those of you who have been long abroad, as I have, may have a quarrel with some of our fellows who have flourished here. I say put those quarrels aside. We want no vengeance, no hunting down, no settling of scores. I have heard it said that to make peace with an opponent is shameful and unmanly. I say it is an honourable thing, a wise and benevolent thing, a thing on which God, however you may imagine him, will smile.’

      ‘I applaud our employer’s breadth of mind,’ murmured a voice in my ear. ‘Surely, though, to speak of “imagining” the divinity is over-bold.’ It was Mr Rose. I was surprised at his addressing me in such an insinuating tone. I dislike whisperers. I nodded, but didn’t turn my head.

      Now Lord Woldingham’s rumblings gave way to a thunderclap. He strode through the crowd, and mounted the plinth I have had prepared ready for the ancient marble figure of Flora, which is making its way towards us by painfully slow degrees. My Lord’s agent in Rome purchased it there. Now it is creeping along the canals of France, drawn by huge shaggy-heeled horses. Some time this summer, it will make the dangerous crossing to these shores before being heaved aboard another barge to float upstream to us here. The stone nymph will be twice the height of Lord Woldingham, whose quickness of movement and forcefulness can lead one to forget that he is, in person, just a wisp of a man. But on the plinth, his funereal satins lustrous in the sun, he seemed as darkly substantial as the improbably gigantic bronze mastiffs recently set up as guardians of Wychwood’s new front door. The assembled people had stepped nervously aside to let him pass; now they swivelled to see him again. The sun was in their eyes; he a silhouette against a background of white sky. For the first time he raised his voice.

      ‘A harmless, helpless woman has been ill-treated here. Shame on you. A member of my own family, to whom you all owe deference, has been slandered. More shame upon you. There has been nonsensical babble of witchcraft. We are not savages, to give credence to such piffle. My son is dead and you foul the pure grief of his family with superstitious blatherings. Let me hear no more of this. Those of you who have frightened Meg Leafield will come to me and explain yourselves. Lady Harriet is my aunt, and my honoured guest. When she pleases to return to Wood Manor, she goes under my protection. Any man or woman who breathes a word against her makes an enemy of me.’

      He stood silent for upwards of a minute. No one fidgeted or uttered a word. When he stepped down he did so deliberately, and walked back into the house with the demeanour of one following a coffin, but that his eyes were turned, not to the earth, but upwards as though defying the gloomy clouds to rain upon him.

      I went to my office and occupied myself with new sketches for the parterre. Seeing my Lord so elevated had brought home to me how the proportions of the terrace will appear altered once Flora queens it over the space. The eye must be led to her, and the flowerbeds must seem to flow out from her, the bringer of flowers.

      *

      I am as much a fool as that ridiculous peacock. The fowl, disdaining its proper mate, has become enamoured of one of the garden boys. The display it made for us all yesterday was an attempt to catch the youth’s attention. It follows him around with pathetic constancy.

      He was at work in the rose garden as I set off for my walk this afternoon. As he spread horse-dung on the beds (not all of a gardener’s tasks are fragrant), the amorous bird was on the pavement alongside him, its cumbersome fan extended, turning very slowly, first to one side and then to another, as though imploring him to notice how the vari-coloured filaments in its plumage flared and changed in the shifting light.

      The boy, who is very young, is being plagued by the others’ teasing. I think he hardly understands the game of love yet.

      I walked out towards Wood Manor and had a happy encounter. I have had much to think about these past hours – sad matters for the most part. Yet, as I write these words, I find myself absurdly gay.

      *

      I will allow yesterday’s entry to stand. At least it is evidence that I am sensible of my folly. There is no dishonour in loving an admirable woman, so long as I refrain from pestering her with my suit.

      What seems to me now most reprehensible is that my pre-occupation with things private to myself makes me negligent of my employer’s grief. Lovers, it is rightly said, are solipsistic imbeciles.

      Wychwood sitting nearly on the summit of a low hill, the land falls away from it on three sides. To the west, a set of ancient stone steps leads down to a sunken lawn, cupped by steep banks and floored with violets. This was a pond once, made by Romans perhaps, or by the monks who had a dwelling here after the Romans had gone. Mr Green tells me that when his men were levelling the ground they found a rubble of petrified sods within which time and decay had drawn the skeletons of ancient fishes. The tiny bones had dematerialised to leave an effigy of themselves made of nothingness, a vacuity which might, had the gardeners’ spades not chopped them up, have survived, insubstantial and indestructible as the soul is to a true believer, for ever and ever, amen.

      I walked there this afternoon. Lupin the pug snuffled about me. When he saw me take my hat and open the door to the garden he came scuttling bowlegged down the corridor to join me, his claws clicking on the flagstones.

      The world being full of graceful creatures, it puzzles me why the ugly should be so prized. After I had paced with Lupin half an hour, though, I found myself touched by the fortitude with which he bears the deficiencies of his bodily design. His walk is an ungainly waddle. His skin was made for a being twice his size and bunches around his neck like an ill-fixed ruff. He snorts and grunts, half suffocated. As he struggles for breath, liquid trickles from his nose, and he laps it up with a busy and repulsive action of his tongue, the only neat thing about him.

      I was meditating on the capriciousness of Providence, which kills a likely boy too young, and allows the survival of another being so evidently unfit, when I was struck hard at the back of my right knee.

      The blow felled me. Half recumbent on the grass, I looked around and could see no sign of my assailant. Kneeling beside me, clucking and fidgeting with my waistcoat buttons, was old Meg. I am ashamed to admit I pushed her back roughly. The pain in my knee was sharp, but I was more shaken by the force of my fall. My previous reverie continued ad absurdum. How much more stable our posture would be, I thought groggily, had we four legs. In this respect Lupin was my superior. Balancing precariously on only two vertical supports, my body – when one of those supports was knocked out from under me – had lapsed to the horizontal with a most unpleasant thump.

      Two people shot out of the thicket on the far side of the lawn. One was the boy I had previously seen with Meg. The other was Mr Rose, hatless, and demonstrating that a round belly is no diminisher of agility.

      Rose shouted, ‘Are you hurt, Mr Norris?’

      He caught the boy and hugged him from behind. The two swayed like wrestlers, the boy’s feet kicking. Meg went to them, met Rose’s eye deliberately and spat on his shoe. He let his arms fall limp. The boy sat sullen where he had dropped.

      ‘He threw that stone,’ Rose said to me.

      He was looking past Meg as though she were of no account. She slapped his face. I was astonished to see him flinch like a chastened scholar. When last I had heard of her, she was lying insensible. Now she was articulate.

      ‘One boy dead, and you bullying another,’ she said. She tied her shawl crosswise over her chest and returned to my side. She lifted from the ground, not a stone, but a sphere of solid wood, finely turned, about the bigness of an apple and painted blue.

      ‘The gentlemen give him farthings to find their balls for them, and fling them back,’ she said, addressing me as though we were old acquaintances. ‘That a child should have to pick up toys for grown men!’ There were iron hoops set here and there about the lawn, and mallets propped against a bench.

      I sat, then stood. I said to the boy, ‘Men are not rabbits, to be shied at.’ He looked up at me through his hair and I had a shock. His face was that of Lord Woldingham’s deceased son.

      Mr Rose approached, stroking the round hat he had retrieved from a bramble. He shook his head at Meg and came to inspect my

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