Free Childish Loves by Benjamin Markovits Page B

hour. And so, very dutifully, at a little after eleven o’clock, I knocked on her door.
    When she called out, I took the lamp in with me, and she sat up in bed rather crossly and complained that she had been fast asleep and that the light hurt her eyes – did I mind at all turning it out of her face?
    Not at all, I said. I should be only too happy to retire to bed myself and take it with me. It was at her request that I looked in. I should be much happier in future – but then, it hardly mattered, as I intended in the morning to avail myself of Lord Grey’s generosity and remove to Newstead for the rest of the summer, or until he should return.
    By this point, she had got her wits about her and found her spectacles, and she sat with her hair spread wildly against the cushions behind her, looking frightful. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘You have only just come home.’
    â€˜Southwell is not my home. If you were a Byron you would understand. I mean to spend the summer at Newstead.’
    â€˜There is a jug on my dressing-table and a glass beside it. Give me a glass of water; thank you. It is too hot to be always arguing – we can discuss it again in the morning.’
    â€˜In the morning, I shall be gone.’
    There was more of this, on each side, which I don’t exactly recall – I never can remember what sets off her tears. She complained of her loneliness, with a kind of simper, but then, growing in voice, began to abuse my father and me and everything else. I had no notion of what she suffered as a widow . There were houses in Nottinghamshire, she said, from whom she could expect an invitation only as the mother of a lord . But in these cases, it was understood, she must ‘bring the article with her’. She had supposed that my obligations to the Pigots, if nothing else, would keep me here. But this involved her in contradictions, for she could not help scoring a point off Elizabeth. ‘She sets her cap at you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it is just as well you should spend the summer at Newstead.’
    I have learned it is best in these cases to let her talk and stood with the lamp growing warm in my hands till she was quite talked out. At last she said to me, ‘You harden your heart against me. You harden your heart.’
    â€˜On the contrary,’ I said, ‘no one can feel for you what I feel.’
    *
    I don’t suppose I have passed so solitary a week, as this past week, since I was four years old and my mother, having the ague or some other Scottish affliction, in the summer, too, demanded the full attentions of our maid, who consequently let me run rather wild. The Abbey itself is full of wonders. The great hall and refectory are given over to the storage of animal foods, for the use of the farmers, and cats, bats, foxes, crickets and mice have made their homes inside them. But besides hay bales, grain sacks, cobwebs, droppings, and bones – fox skulls, mouse skulls and the like; a hundred feathery skeletons of dead crickets – I have discovered a halberd, blunt with use, an iron pot, a leather boot, and a Bible. Mr Mealy has been telling me stories about my great-uncle. Before his death, he lived and dined and slept in the great hall and used to let the crickets run races over his body. He had been very wicked in his youth and killed a man, for drink; only he repented too greatly and despised everyone for his own sins, preferring creature-company to the company of men. ‘For he could kill them as he liked.’
    Mr Mealy has employed Alice, the gardener’s daughter, to provide my meals. Her father is square-built, dark-set, a little humped with work; and there is also the beginning of a crook in the line of Alice’s neck, where her apron is tied. I believe her father beats her. Her face and arms and shoulders (for I have seen her shoulders) are covered over in red marks. Of me she has no fear, but when her father