Free Tess by Emma Tennant Page B

of Kingston Maurward. He sees a milkmaid, a beauty who in 1888 is eighteen and who works in the dairy of her father, sharing in the milking and other chores. Her name is Augusta Way; and she will be his Tess, just as her father, Thomas Way, will be Dairyman Crick in the great novel that is forming in his mind. (Note: no shabby-genteel rendering of the old ballad will come from this.
Tess
is a rural drama in a landscape as old as myth, and, to Hardy’s great sorrow and sense of loss, turning before his eyes to the new world and away from the old calendar of the countryside: the first cuckoo, the last swallow, harvest, Easter and Christmas, christening, marriage and burial coming round as they always had done and until now had shown no sign of changing.)
    No,
Tess
will have none of the sordidness of these contemporary murders.
Tess
will be pure incandescence, the picture of woman wronged, the murderess as saint.
    Love and melodrama. If a seedy note does creep in, it’s at the lodgings in Sandbourne (Bournemouth, as we know) where Tess and Alec spend their second, unloving honeymoon. In these cut-price plush surroundings – as fake as the impostor Alec himself – Tess will be driven to the ultimate act of violence. And by killing him, she inevitably sentences herself.
    By killing him, she doubly kills – for it is the terrible betrayal of Angel Clare – the refusal to accept her when she confesses her lovemaking with Alec, her baby – that she avenges while immolating herself as well.
    Tess hangs.
    And Angel Clare, after standing under that prison wall with Tess’s young sister Liza-Lu, takes the girl’s hand and they go off into the future together.
    It’s no way, really, for a young girl to start out in life. In the shadow of the gallows of her sister. What can have become of them? – as the Victorians used to say.
    But I’ll tell you the rest of the story, as far as I can. Which means, as you know, that we have to go as far back as we can.
    For now, remember this: Hardy has found Augusta Way. They stand talking in the meadow. (How lovely she is. What a mouth! Hardy is driven insane by women’s mouths.) They go indoors (for in those days there was no marked distinction, in old rural communities, between gentry and dairyman farmer: Thomas Way and his family live in part of Kingston Maurward Manor, a delicate and grand eighteenth-century house that is used just as any house would be, by a large family busy with a farm).
    Do they kiss?
    Kissing is very much on the poet’s mind. At Evershot station on the way here, he has discovered some mistletoe that had been there ‘ever since last Christmas (given by a lass?), of a yellow, saffron parchment colour’. This mistletoe will come to him again, when he writes of Tess’s disastrous honeymoon with Angel Clare and her return to Wool Manor, where they had sworn to be so happy – before she told him of her past – to find it, mocking, discoloured, still hanging as a meaningless symbol above the bed.
    Thomas Hardy kisses the beautiful milkmaid, Augusta Way.
    And so begins the story, both literal and figurative, of your life.

When You Were Free
    The owl hoots and the old black-and-white TV ‘snows’ so you can’t see the face of the presenter, and to my eyes all those dots and whirling grains could be the piles of shale they’re shifting at West Bay – expecting? – half-expecting? – to find the body of a man buried under there and thirty years dead.
    So let me tell you, little Tess, before we go to the funfair that plays all day and all night in my memory – the fair where Tess losther sense of freedom and happiness and adventure, if not, at least, her maidenhood (but what does that matter when freedom had gone?), and Alec became for once and all the champion, the chief and overlord of us all.
    Let me tell you of the days when women strode and fought and were priestesses, druidic