Tess (14 page)

But now I'll take you up to Mapperton. From there you can see right across to Lambert's Castle – where Tess went that fateful evening – and I'll tell you how the battle was won, by cunning and stealth, by a foot soldier from the valley, who didn't even have a motorbike, let alone a white E-type with a cassette player that blared the Everly Brothers in the high, quiet lanes that run down to Powerstock and West Milton.

I'll tell you how you came to have a mother, and how all the defences of our mother country, and all the aggression of the ancient Morgan territory could do nothing to combat the force that drove Tess up to the high, open promontory that night.

It's not a pretty story.

From here – from the hundred acres of stubby coarse grass and heather that form the top of this Iron Age fort, not a castle at all really and still unexcavated – we can see all of Marshwood Vale and the sea beyond, pale blue and thin as the shell of a robin's egg, waiting for the September storms to come and blow it to smithereens. We see Whitchurch Canonicorum, where our mother Mary
lived some of the time, by the church of St Wite, the martyred Saxon saint who became St Candida – and we can tell, as we look down on the spire of that peaceful church, dedicated to the memory of that healing woman, and containing her bones and a shrine where people to this day place pleas for recovery, wholeness, balm – that there was nothing she could do to stop the rape and pregnancy of her daughter. The soft, green air of Marshwood, with its feminine promise of acceptance and healing, was poisoned by the fumes – the stench of petrol from the old, unmended exhaust pipe on Morgan's E-type (he liked to keep it that way, so the male roar of him preceded his coming, in the twisting lanes of dairy farms and high hedges) – and the wild flowers crushed by his wheels could never find the strength to stand upright again. He was stronger than any woman, you see – and, as we know, Morgan and Alec and all the men, whether Celt or Angle, had been the stronger and more powerful sex for as many centuries as most of this landscape can remember. Stronger than St Wite, St Candida – for all that the wild periwinkles that come up every year here on Stonebarrow Hill are still called St Candida's Eyes and the well at neighbouring Morcombelake is said to have water that has curative properties – particularly for sore eyes. The power and aggression – what St Augustine recognized as ‘the blight of male domination' had ruled since time immemorial by then. (Yes, we're looking back to 1963, two years after the scene in the attic at the Mill, when our father caught us at our games. It was Tess's misfortune to be caught, too, in history, and to fall for what seemed to be the answer to the terrible imbalance, when her Angel came along. But each incarnation of Tess has been caught in history, you might say – and no fall has been better or worse than another.)

Tess was sixteen years old and she was just coming out of that time when guilt and shame at incurring our father's anger mixed in with a determination to ‘behave badly' – as shown by our truancy and general wildness, our escape on a train that brought us straight back to Weymouth, where the ferries left each night for Cherbourg or St Malo and we never quite had the nerve to stow away, boarding on a frosty autumn evening amongst the freight and lying in the hold until dawn on the French coast. Tess was just coming out of
that time, as I say, and the attentions of Ralph Morgan had brought her into a sudden new phase of her womanhood.

What I remember of Tess in those days was that she looked like a Spanish girl, a young infanta, perhaps, who had come to live in Dorset, stepping gently ashore on Chesil Beach, marriage in mind, dark hair piled high with a Spanish comb fixed at the back. Her mouth all at once grew fuller and her lips red without putting anything on them at all. When we went out that summer, and tourists in Burton Bradstock saw us on the beach, she was once or twice taken for a gypsy and young mothers down with their families from Birmingham would push their husbands off to the kiosk for ice cream, beach balls, rubber shoes, rather than let them meet Tess's eye. Once a man who owned the travelling circus that came every summer to Dorchester came up to Tess and asked if she'd like to learn to fly the trapeze, to ride bareback in the sawdusty ring, crack a whip and wear a scarlet satin top hat, live in a caravan with the rest of them.

Tess said yes, of course – but by the time we got home there was another phone message from Ralph: he'd like her to come up to Mapperton tomorrow; there was a big dance for his twenty-first. And bring Liza-Lu, the message said. The circus was forgotten.

So that was the night it happened, Baby Tess. And as I carry you down from here and we make our way back to Abbotsbury, to Ella who needs us now, I'll tell you the rest. But look once more at this high escarpment, at Lambert's Castle, where the crime on that late summer night took place, and imagine the days of the power of moon and water. For this great fort, with its immense natural ramparts, was once the fiefdom of Canute – he who commanded the sea to retreat, he who tried in vain to turn the tide. (When he was Christianized, Canute took the name Lambert.)

Then, the sea conquered. Canute retired here, high above the disobedient waves, to a mountain kingdom where pine and fir and stunted oak thrive amongst the gorse and bramble.

Now, what you see are the heights of his castle and the eminence of Mapperton, across the fields and valleys. Whichever way Tess turned, she found herself in a stronghold from which there was no escaping. And it probably didn't occur to her at all (although it did,
perhaps, to me) that the worst danger came from the peaceful, sheltered valley itself: the cry of battle a screech of a garage door by the petrol pumps at the bend on the Beaminster-Yeovil road.

Local folk talk of the stone griffins on the gateposts when they talk of Mapperton. I'd been up there, of course, when it was fête day and the toffs from the manor house at Four Ashes brought picnic hampers and pretended to praise the crude pottery Meg Keech (the first hippie, I suppose, but we wouldn't have known the word then) had for sale in the old stables, while the rest of us licked ice cream from the tub and then ran down those very steep grassy paths to the stone-rimmed pools, slimy with green water, below.

The griffins were said to fly down to the water to drink, every midsummer night. Or maybe it was the sea they were seen flying to – out over the lagoon, stone wings flapping above the heads of the swans and my father looking up sleepily at them as they went over. (So I imagined, anyway: I had no way of knowing what route the birds would take.) But one night, I'm sure, I heard them. There was a rush of cold air in my room and I opened my eyes to see them outlined against the moon, blackened with grime and lichen accumulated over the centuries on the gateposts at Mapperton but flying grimly on, heraldic, slightly chipped.

So on the day of the fête, while crowds collected by the plants stall to buy cuttings from the famous Mapperton garden – fuchsia, marigold, phlox, shrubs like daphne and the spring-flowering cistus bush – and the few jumble stalls and children's games drew grannies and whining pin-a-tail-on-a-donkey kids to the apron of flat lawn by the side of the old house, I would go and stand by the gates and stare up at the stone birds. They wore a harassed, determined air. Perhaps they would fly straight out over us, with half the people not even looking up until it was too late and the gateposts were empty, stone stumps with the guardians of the old Jacobean house gone. Perhaps only the child on the little piebald pony – who every year wandered off out of bounds into the woodland and down the dangerous gorge, slipping and slithering until at last they both fell and the gardener had to be called for, perhaps only that little girl, in the moment of her dizzying tumble, saw the stone birds flying low over beech and oak trees, showing their dark underfeathers,
harbingers of the ill fortune that some said had been since the time of King Charles the fate of Mapperton. (But the child was always rescued; there was a scolding, in the gravelly courtyard where the birds sat silent and disapproving on their plinths, a threat of no ice cream for the rest of the holidays and then the fête was over, cars edged politely in the driveway, while Sir Joseph, hoarse from showing the public his gaunt, sparsely furnished rooms, sat down to tea and scones.)

Every year the fête was the same at Mapperton – and always for that reason flat, disappointing. The drama promised by the house and the ravine where it stood perched, as if about to dive headlong into its own Italianate terraced garden, and sink in the stagnant water of the stone-rimmed pools – was never to be enacted. There was a calm, sad air to the place – which I later learnt was the air of death, for the Plague road had wound down by the side of Mapperton House and thousands of dead were carried along there from Beaminster to the burial grounds at Netherbury. There was – and it still stands – a hollow tree, the Posy Tree, which marks the sinister crossroads, just a short way along from the house our father John saw in his mind's eye already as the future home of his Tess (he'd a plan to breed peacocks, I know: where better than at Mapperton, where the fans of the blue and green iridescent birds would fall like exotic suns below the horizon, as they strutted down from one level of the garden to the next?). This tree, an oak without a centre, a husk that sprouts leaves and acorns but is heartless, dead, was the tree for which the area was best known. Death and bad luck, the locals said – though nothing could be pinned on it since the Plague days, at least, and the old box hedges, planted as a prophylactic against the tell-tale Ring o' Roses of the fatal malady, were creaking with age now and no help to anybody, should the swellings, the dizziness, the fever come again. Nothing bad – but something waiting in the wings – that's what you felt up there, windy, sunny or rain.

As far as we were concerned, the one worst thing that can happen to any foolish girl came to Tess as a result of her engagement to the heir of Mapperton. The night of young Ralph's birthday party – that night (but whether it was a prank played by some of his fast
friends down from Oxford or whether it was the old story coming true, we'll never know) the stone griffins left their gateposts, never to return. And Alec Field came up to Mapperton.

It was a dark night, no moon. The house was strung out like an ocean liner with lights glimmering and twinkling on every deck – over the great black swell of the valley beneath, with the tops of the trees in Sir Joseph's fancy arboretum catching the light from the servants' quarters, and from the pantries where all the rich food was being laid out.

I was too shy to go in, at first. Tess was in a short, black dress – our father had looked angrily at her for a split second, as if one of his cygnets had been dragged in covered in tar or mud – before pretending to smile, and congratulating Tess on the way she looked.

– You look lovely, dear, John Hewitt said.

And Tess smiled at him, pityingly.

Because, of course, the balance of power had changed completely since the day our mother left. The days of penance, and rebellion, were over. Tess had young Ralph Morgan eating out of her hand; and even if she hadn't had that, she was just too sheer beautiful to stand any nonsense from a shabby, eccentric man like our father. (John grew a moustache after Mary went and it was grey, sparse, as if it were there by mistake: it gave him a constantly apologetic air.)

– You look nice, too, Lizzie, my father went on, after one glance at me in the white dress with the pink roses I'd got in Weymouth with the money earned working part-time at Mrs Sturgess's chemist's shop. Now, don't be too late, will you, girls?

Even as he spoke, the power drained out of John Hewitt's voice. He saw the night, perhaps, the fatal night that was so dark and would end only in disgrace and violence. Or maybe he saw Tess, at the end of a night thousands of nights hence, walking the dark, panelled halls at Mapperton House with her husband and children, while the portraits of the Morgan family, the blade-nosed
proprietors of the old forts and terraced vineland of this part of west Dorset, looked complacently down at her.

Whatever it was, our father knew there was something momentous about that night.

He went to the oak sideboard in the musty-smelling and never-used dining room and took out a box.

– These are for you, John Hewitt said to his daughter Tess.

Tess was patient with me, at first. She could have been daunted, too, by the lines of expensive cars all incongruously parked in a field where earlier there had been a herd of sitting cows, their supine posture warning of coming rain. And the people! We'd never seen anything like them. All the women looked like fairy-tale creatures, half-human, half-beast – in mink stoles and short fox jackets, faces peeping over the top of the fur like cunning vixens: their hair was bouffant and hard. They wore long gowns, mostly light colours, with satin slippers that gave out a creak of surprise on encountering muddy grass and little hillocks of thistles. The men, invisible in the darkness in their tuxedos, showed only patrician faces and blinding white shirtfronts. Like an army of ghosts, these gentry from Loders and Uploders and as far west as Lyme (Jane Austen's Lyme Regis, of course), advanced on the house, their voices as sharp and sly as arrows. We stood back,
for a while, to let them pass. Then Tess started to get impatient. ‘Come
on
, Liza-Lu,' she said. ‘Do you want to stay out here all night?'