A Maggot - John Fowles

A Maggot

John Fowles
1985

A MAGGOT IS the larval stage of a winged
creature; as is the written text, at least in the writer's hope. But
an older though now obsolete sense of the word is that of whim or
quirk. By extension it was sometimes used in the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth century of dance-tunes and airs that otherwise had
no special title ... Mr Beveridge's Maggot, My Lord Byron's Maggot,
The Carpenters' Maggot, and so on. This fictional maggot was written
very much for the same reason as those old musical ones of the period
in which it is set: out of obsession with a theme. For some years
before its writing a small group of travellers, faceless, without
apparent motive, went in my mind towards an event. Evidently in some
past; since they rode horses, and in a deserted landscape; but beyond
this very primitive image, nothing. I do not know where it came from,
or why it kept obstinately rising from my unconscious. The riders
never progressed to any destination. They simply rode along a
skyline, like a sequence of looped film in a movie projector; or like
a single line of verse, the last remnant of a lost myth.

However, one day one of the riders gained a
face. By chance I acquired a pencil and water-colour drawing of a
young woman. There was no indication of artist, simply a little note
in ink in one corner, which seemingly says, in Italian, 16July 1683.
This precise dating pleased me at first as much as the drawing
itself, which is not of any distinction; yet something in the long
dead girl's face, in her eyes, an inexplicable presentness, a refusal
to die, came slowly to haunt me. Perhaps it was that refusal to die
that linked this real woman with another I have much longer admired,
from rather later in history.

This fiction is in no way biographically
about that second woman, though it does end with her birth in about
the real year and quite certainly the real place where she was born.
I have given that child her historical name; but I would not have
this seen as a historical novel. It is maggot.

John Fowles 1985

(Historical Chronicle scans provided as
separate files)

IN THE LATE and last afternoon of an April long
ago, a forlorn little group of travellers cross a remote upland in
the far south-west of England. All are on horseback, proceeding at a
walk along the moorland track. There lies about them, in the bleak
landscape, too high to have yet felt the obvious effects of spring,
in the uniform grey of the overcast sky, an aura of dismal monotony,
an accepted tedium of both journey and season. The peaty track they
follow traverses a waste of dead heather and ling; below, in a
steep-sided valley, stand unbroken dark woodlands, still more in bud
than in leaf. All the furthest distances fade into a mist, and the
travellers' clothes are by chance similarly without accent. The day
is quite windless, held in a dull suspension. Only in the extreme
west does a thin wash of yellow light offer some hope of better
weather to come.

A man in his late twenties, in a dark bistre
greatcoat, boots and a tricorn hat, its upturned edges trimmed
discreetly in silver braid, leads the silent caravan. The underparts
of his bay, and of his clothes, like those of his companions, are
mud-splashed, as if earlier in the day they have travelled in mirier
places. He rides with a slack rein and a slight stoop, staring at the
track ahead as if he does not see it. Some paces behind comes an
older man on a smaller, plumper horse. His greatcoat is in dark grey,
his hat black and plainer, and he too looks neither to left nor
right, but reads a small volume held in his free hand, letting his
placid pad tread its own way. Behind him, on a stouter beast, sit two
people: a bareheaded man in a long-sleeved blouse, heavy drugget
jerkin and leather breeches, his long hair tied in a knot, with in
front of him, sitting sideways and resting against his breast - he
supports her back with his right arm - a young woman. She is
enveloped in a brown hooded cloak, and muffled so that only her eyes
and nose are visible. Behind these two a leading-line runs back to a
pack horse. The animal carries a seam, or wooden frame, with a large
leather portmanteau tied to one side, and a smaller wooden box,
brassbound at its corners, on the other. Various other bundles and
bags lie bulkily distributed under a rope net. The overburdened beast
plods with hanged head, and sets the pace for the rest.

They may travel in silence, but they do not go
unobserved. The air across the valley opposite, above where its
steepness breaks into rocks and small cliffs, is noisy with deep and
ominous voices, complaining of this intrusion into their domain.
These threatening voices come from a disturbed ravenry. The bird was
then still far from its present rare and solitary state, but common
and colonial, surviving even in many towns, and abundantly in
isolated countryside. Though the mounted and circling black specks
stay at a mile's distance, there is something foreboding in their
alarm, their watchful hostility. All who ride that day, for all their
difference in many other things, know their reputation; and secretly
fear that snoring cry.

One might have supposed the two leading riders and
the humble apparent journeyman and wife chance-met, merely keeping
together for safety in this lonely place. That such a consideration -
and not because of ravens - was then requisite is plain in the
leading rider. The tip of a sword-sheath protrudes beneath his
greatcoat, while on the other side a bulge in the way the coat falls
suggests, quite correctly, that a pistol is hung behind the saddle.
The journeyman also has a brass-ended holstered pistol, even readier
to hand behind his saddle, while strung on top of the netted
impedimenta on the dejected pack-horse's back is a long-barrelled
musket. Only the older, second rider seems not armed. It is he who is
the exception for his time. Yet if they had been chance-met, the two
gentlemen would surely have been exchanging some sort of conversation
and riding abreast, which the track permitted. These two pass not a
word; nor does the man with the woman behind him. All ride as if lost
in their own separate worlds.

The track at last begins to slope diagonally down the
upland towards the first of the woods in the valley below. A mile or
so on, these woods give way to fields; and as far away again, where
the valley runs into another, can just be made out, in a thin veil of
wood smoke, an obscure cluster of buildings and an imposing church
tower. In the west the sky begins to show amber glints from invisible
breaks of cloud. That again, in other travellers, might have provoked
some remark, some lighter heart; but in these, no reaction.

Then, dramatically, another figure on horseback
appears from where the way enters the trees, mounting towards the
travellers. He does provide colour, since he wears a faded scarlet
riding-coat and what seems like a dragoon's hat; a squareset man of
indeterminate age with a large moustache. The long cutlass behind his
saddle and the massive wooden butt of a stout-cased blunderbuss
suggest a familiar hazard; and so does the way in which, as soon as
he sees the approaching file ahead, he kicks his horse and trots more
briskly up the hill as if to halt and challenge them. But they show
neither alarm nor excitement. Only the elder man who reads as he
rides quietly closes his volume and slips it into his greatcoat
pocket. The newcomer reins in some ten yards short of the leading
younger gentleman, then touches his hat and turns his horse to walk
beside him. He says something, and the gentleman nods, without
looking at him. The newcomer touches his hat again, then pulls aside
and waits until the last pair come abreast of him. They stop, and the
newcomer leans across and unfastens the leading-line of the
pack-horse from its ring behind the saddle. No friendly word seems
spoken, even here. The newcomer then takes his place, now leading the
pack-horse, at the rear of the procession; and very soon it is as if
he has always been there, one more mute limb of the indifferent rest.

They enter the leafless trees. The track falls
steeper and harsher, since it serves as a temporary stream bed during
the winter rains. More and more often comes the ring of iron shoes
striking stone. They arrive at what is almost a ravine, sloping faces
of half-buried rock, an awkward scramble even on foot. The leading
rider seems not to notice it, though his horse hesitates nervously,
picking its way. One of its hind feet slips, for a moment it seems it
must fall, and trap its rider. But somehow it, and the lurching man,
keep balance. They go a little slower, negotiate one more slip and
scramble with a clatter of frantic hooves, then come to more level
ground. The horse gives a little snorting whinny. The man rides on,
without even a glance back to see how the others fare.

The older gentleman has stopped. He glances round at
the pair behind him. The man there makes a little anti-clockwise
circle with a finger and points to the ground: dismount and lead. The
man in the scarlet coat at the rear, wise from his own recent upward
passage, has already got down, and is tying the pack horse to an
exposed root by the trackside. The older gentleman dismounts. Then
his counsellor behind jumps off, with a singular dexterity, kicking
free of his right stirrup and swinging his leg, over the horse's back
and slipping to the ground all in one lithe movement. He holds his
arms out for the woman, who leans and half sinks towards him, to be
caught, then swung free and set down.

The elderly man goes gingerly down the ravine,
leading his pad, then the bareheaded man in the jerkin, and his
horse. The woman walks behind, her skirts held slightly off the
ground so that she can see her feet and where they are placed; then
the last man, he in the faded scarlet coat. Once down, he extends the
rein of his riding-horse to the man in the jerkin to hold, then turns
and climbs heavily back for the pack-horse. The older gentleman
laboriously mounts again, and rides on. The woman raises her hands
and pushes back the hood of her cloak, then loosens the white linen
band she has swathed round the lower part of her face. She is young,
hardly more than a girl, pale-faced, with dark hair bound severely
back beneath a flat-crowned chip, or willow-shaving, hat. Its
side-brims are tied down against her cheeks, almost into a bonnet, by
the blue kissing-ribbons beneath her chin. Such a chip or wheat-straw
hat is worn by every humbler English country-woman. A little fringe
of white also appears beneath the bottom of her cloak: an apron. She
is evidently a servant, a maid.

Unfastening the top of her cloak, and likewise
undoing the kissing-ribbons, she goes beside the track a little ahead
and stoops where some sweet-violets are still in flower on a bank.
Her companion stares at her crouched back, the small movements of her
hands, the left one picking, ruffling the heart-shaped green leaves
to reveal the hidden flowers, the right one holding the small sprig
of deep mauve heads she has found. He stares as if he does not
comprehend why she should do this.

He has a strangely inscrutable face, which does not
reveal whether its expressionlessness is that of an illiterate
stupidity, an ignorant acceptance of destiny not far removed from
that of the two horses he is holding; or whether it hides something
deeper, some resentment of grace, some twisted sectarian suspicion of
personable young women who waste time picking flowers. Yet it is also
a strikingly regular, well-proportioned face, which, together with
his evident agility, an innate athleticism and strength, adds an
incongruous touch of the classical, of an Apollo, to one of plainly
low-born origins - and certainly not Greek ones, for his strangest
features are his eyes, that are of a vacant blue, almost as if he
were blind, though it is clear he is not. They add greatly to the
impression of inscrutability, for they betray no sign . of emotion,
seem always to stare, to suggest their owner is somewhere else. So
might twin camera lenses see, not normal human eyes.

Now the girl straightens and comes back towards him,
smelling her minuscule posy; then gravely holds the purple flowers,
with their little flecks of orange and silver, out and up for him to
smell as well. Their eyes meet for a moment. Hers are of a more usual
colour, a tawny brown, faintly challenging and mischievous, though
she does not smile. She pushes the posy an inch or two nearer still.
He briefly sniffs; nods, then as if they waste time, turns and mounts
with the same agile grace and sense of balance that he showed before,
still holding the other horse's rein. The girl watches him a moment
more while he sits above, tightening the loosened linen muffler,
pulling it to cover her mouth once more. She tucks her violets
carefully inside the rim of white cloth, just below her nostrils.