Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (essential reading txt) 📕

there’s something in the rueful face the child makes at this silent reprimand that stirs my pity, so that I am moved now to complete her speech in hope that I may smooth across her error and return her to her mother’s favour.

‘While your father is away from you in Heaven with Our Lord. Of course: it is but natural that you should miss his presence, and more natural still that you should long to know man’s company. In that, you are alike with all your sex.’

Here, Nell looks puzzled, but a smile of such relief and gratitude lights up her mother’s face that I am given courage to continue. ‘Fear not, for tomorrow night I shall come visiting, and though I may not hope to cut as good a leg as would your dear departed father, I am confident of my ability to substitute in what were, surely, his least onerous responsibilities. To whit, attending to his child, and to his wife.’

Before this last I leave the merest pause, in which I raise my stare from off the child and let it fall upon the dame instead. A look of such intensity and understanding is transferred between us that we cannot either of us bear it long and after moments must avert our eyes. A pleasant, gravid silence next descends. I fancy we’re each speculating heatedly as to the nature of the other’s heated speculations.

Smiling to myself, I turn once more to watch from out the carriage window, but the dog or foal that I saw earlier is not anywhere in sight. The bare, black trees fly past, clumped like the bristles on an old boar’s spine.

The silence lasts until we are arrived at some low cottage, all dun-coloured stone and mouse-brown thatch, set back a little from the road that winds on up the hill to Kendal. Here the Deenes must disembark. Anxious to show that I have strength despite my years, I help to lift what little baggage they possess from off the coach, which, it transpires, includes naught but a single satchel made of threadbare canvas. As I pass it down to her my fingers brush, almost as if by accident, against the widow’s own gloved hand.

A slovenly and heavy-bodied girl about fifteen is come from out the cottage, with her tangled hair the same dull colour as its thatch. Her features are impassive. Eyes that seem dull-witted and perhaps too far apart surmount a flat nose, more plan than relief. Her mouth is wide with lips too full, yet might lay claim in certain lights to its own ugly sensuality. She pauses with one lard-white hand upon the cottage gatepost and regards the coach without expression. When I look behind her to the front stoop of the house itself I see a fat and age-creased drudge who’s shuffled from indoors supported by a stick. She comes no further than the door, but stands unmoving with its pitch-stained frame about her in repugnant portrait. Her chins and jowls are like one rippled mass, this merging with the single massive contour of her dugs and belly. Tiny eyes a sticky black, like plum-stones pressed in suet, she stands leaning on her stick and, like the half-wit girl propped by the gate (who may, I fancy, be her daughter), gazes at the coach with neither word nor any look that may be read.

The Widow Deene smiles up at me and mouths, ‘Tomorrow, then,’ before she turns and moves towards the cottage with her child in tow. The string-haired girl slouched up against the post now silently draws back the gate, admitting Nelly and her mother to what shall be their new home. As I pull shut the carriage door and settle back into my seat both Eleanor and Mrs Deene turn round to wave at me just as the driver spurs his horses into life and I am hauled away and on to Kendal. Smiling fondly, I wave back as they recede from view. Tomorrow night, then.

Several minutes pass in fruitless scanning of the fields about for some sight of the beast spied earlier, and then the narrow, twisting jetties of the Lakeland town spring up about us and I am arrived. The courthouse, where I am to lodge in upstairs rooms built wholly for that purpose, is a low but dignified affair of brick and timber, near to Kendal’s centre. Having quit the coach and paced a while upon the cobbles of the court’s rear yard to bring some circulation to my legs, I summon an attendant from within to haul my bags up foot-smoothed stairs of stone, thence to my bed-chamber.

I mount the steps ahead, while he, a man of middle years, trudges behind me, wheezing and complaining in my wake. There is a landing half-way up, where is a window facing West. I have arrived at Kendal late on in the day, so that the sky beyond the glass is red and I am struck by that uneasy sense of having seen before. As I approach the landing I experience a mad dread that young Nelly will be stood there with her hair aflame, though I have left her back along the Kendal road. Why this idea should wake such fright in me I cannot say, and when I reach the landing it is empty. We continue up the stairs.

My room is chill but comfortable. The attendant promises he will alert the various Officers of Court to my arrival and that I may meet with both these Officers and the accused upon the morrow. Setting down my baggage just inside the door, he takes his leave of me and I remain sat on my cot in sudden still and silence, foreign to me after all the pitch and clatter of the road. After a while I rise and, crossing to my window, close its bug-drilled shutters on encroaching night. For want of any better pass-time, I prepare for bed.

These empty rooms, upon the circuit: sometimes