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

& started on her old tales about how She was my only Wife with me and my sweet Mary never wed at all to hear Her tell it   She said that she did not want to hear about the brook nor what Mary & I had done there & if I had hurt my eye it was my own fault poking in the hedgerow while I might be out and earning wages when we were so poor   I grew indignant telling her that I had written some time back to Matthew Allen asking what has happend to the yearly sallary my daughter Queen Victoria had promised me for I was told that the first quarter had commenced before last haytime else I dreamed it so   here Patty wept and became vexed without a reason much as Women do & said a hateful thing of Mary I shall not write in these pages — next She said that she would not live like this for much longer & that come this Friday we must ride into Northampton Town to see a place she thought would suit me better than my time in Essex at which mention I coud feel a heavy stone of anguish sink inside me — would have asked her more but in a fierce & stormy temper she stamped off to bed so that I am left here alone to write these words by weak and yellow Lamplight spilling down from off the shelf above the table   so I am to be put back in an asylum for there is no other place within Northampton they would think me suited to — Well that is it then & it cant be helpd yet I am sorry when I think of all the walking that I did on my escape from High Beech only to discover still another prison here at home — I can recall the Sunday in July when I was freed from my incarceration for a little while to walk in Epping forest where I fell in with some travelling folk who I took to be gypseys such as I once livd with in my youth but these were of another type that dressed in reeking fur & cowskin with their hair unshawn and with barbaric paint marks on their faces — it seems strange now when I think of it yet did not seem so then — I got on readily enough with this rough company & they confided in me that they had but lately been bereaved laying to rest a travelling woman of their order in a Grave between the trees — they told me that she had been troubled by a bad foot & looked at me very queerly when they said these words so that I felt afraid but not for any reason I can say — after a time they pointed out to me a sallow & unhappy idiot boy that skulked at the far edges of their camp where other travelling childern cruelly made to drive him off with stones He wept and made a piteous yelp each time they caught him on his shin & my companions told me that this was the halfwit son of she they had so lately put beneath the soil who coud not keep himself nor work towards the common good & so was banished now he had no Mother to look out for him   I knew a great pang in my heart towards the boy but soon he ran from sight between the spreading summer oaks & was thereafter never spoken of according to the harsh & brutal code by which such people live though I confess we in our Towns and Villages are not so very different nor less keen to make an outcast of a man   one of the Gypseys seemed to take a shine to me and offered to assist in my escape from out the mad house hideing me there in his camp   this seemed to me a good enough idea so that I was decided but informed him that although I had no money I woud get him fifty pounds if he woud help me get away before next Saturday to which he readily agreed — I am not properly decided on what happened next — sometimes it seems to me as if all of my meetings with the Gypsey took place upon that single Sunday afternoon while other times I can recall a whole week passing with me going back there on the Friday where I found my new friend seeming less than eager to pursue our plan so that I did not speak much of it & went back there two days later when I found their camp deserted and they were all gone — whether these things occurred throughout a week or on a solitary afternoon I do not know but either way it was agen a Sunday when I stood between the sighing trees and only had a burnt & blackened circle on the grass to say my Gypsey friends had ever been there save an old wide awake hat and a straw bonnet of what they call the plumb pudding sort — I put the hat into my pocket thinking that it might prove usefull for another oppertunity which with God’s Will it so turned out to be   the hour is late & I am tired with all this writing — Patty is surely asleep by now and if I take care I do not disturb her getting into Bed then we shall have no quarrels   She is good to me despite her wicked tongue yet when I lie beside her I wish it were Mary Clare instead, who once was Mary Joyce I am a fool & so to bed

Novr 18 — Thursday — Did nothing

Novr 19 — Friday — Last night I had a dream where I returned to Northborough