Chapter 11 #3
She turned the pages carefully. Near the middle, she found a passage of La Belle Dame Sans Merci marked in pencil, the marks faint and careful beneath the four lines of the final stanza.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
As a girl, she had read the ballad as a romance, dark and bittersweet, about a beautiful and terrible lady and a knight’s helpless enchantment.
She had wept at the tragedy of a man undone by something too beautiful to resist. At fifteen, she had thought the intensity, the surrender, the gorgeous doom were the entire point of the piece.
She was fifteen no longer. She was a woman who had lost everything once and had rebuilt herself from the wreckage with her own hands.
As she read the lines now, emotion moved through her, not the sweet melancholy of a girl reading about the emotions she ached to feel, but something else.
The knight was not glamorous to her now.
He was a man hollowed, standing on a cold hillside he could not leave, a man who had nothing left to do but explain why he was still there, an explanation that explained nothing. A trap held him in its jaws.
She thought of Dashiell Penrose and wondered if he stood on his own cold hillside, and if so, why he did not leave.
Was she so different? She had bound herself to this house, this cliff, this view of the sea for the rest of her life.
She was not loitering. She had chosen, or been compelled to choose, which amounted to the same thing.
Perhaps that was why the poem had not felt like this before.
She had now earned the comprehension it required.
Alone and palely loitering.
An image formed in her thoughts of the trees she and Kitty had seen, bent but not broken. Whatever it was that Mr. Penrose carried had shaped him into the controlled and watchful man he was. Shaped. Bent. But not broken. She supposed they had that in common.
She traced her finger lightly over the lines Catherine had marked.
Had she noted the passage for herself or for him?
Perhaps it did not matter. What mattered was that he had kept this book for a very long while and, whatever the marked passage meant to him, he had decided she should have it. You will understand it now.
She smiled a little.
Outside, the sedge had not withered, the sea was alive, indifferent to knights and Keats and a woman sitting alone in her sitting room. Outside, the birds sang.
She was glad of that.
She heard Nessa and Kitty returning to the kitchen from the back garden and went to find them, drawn by their laughter. Nessa was mixing batter in a bowl. Kitty sat at the table with her mending. Both looked up and smiled as Minerva entered.
Minerva turned over questions in her thoughts, uncertain how to broach them. In the end, she decided the direct approach was best.
“Nessa,” she said. “What can you tell me about Mr. Penrose?”
Kitty blew out a short puff of air but offered no comment.
“What would you like to know?” Nessa asked.
“Something good,” Minerva said.
“There are many hereabouts who would say there is nothing good to be said about Mr. Penrose,” Nessa said.
Minerva studied her a long moment. “And you? Are you one of those people?”
“I think,” Nessa said carefully, “that there are things said about Mr. Penrose that are true, and things said that are only half true, and things said that are not true at all.”
Kitty snorted. “Much the same can be said about any person in any place.”
“Tell me something that is true,” Minerva said.
Nessa nodded. “All right then. Two winters past there was a woman. Wife of a tenant on Mr. Penrose’s land.
She died in childbed and the babe with her.
” She kept her eyes on the bowl though she was no longer stirring.
“The man had fallen behind on his rent. His wife was in the ground only a fortnight and Mr. Penrose sent his man Rowe with the eviction notice.”
Kitty drew a sharp breath.
Minerva sat very still, waiting for the rest of the terrible tale. She felt certain there was more.
“The village talked of nothing else for weeks,” Nessa said. “A widower, mourning his wife and child, turned out in winter.” Her voice was even, soft. “Mr. Penrose said nothing, only let tongues wag and people think what they would.”
“And what did they think?” Kitty asked.
“What you’d expect,” Nessa said. “That Mr. Penrose was hard and cold. Cruel. That he had no common decency.”
“But…,” Minerva said.
Nessa cut her a quick glance then looked back at the bowl.
“I did not say but.”
“You did not need to,” Minerva said.
Nessa scraped the spoon a half turn along the side of the bowl then fell still.
“The woman’s husband and my Da had much in common.
A fondness for drink. A temper. There were a few who whispered it was not childbed that killed her but the care her husband gave her in the days before, care that left her bruised—” She set the spoon down and looked at Minerva.
“Only whispers.” She shook her head. “Mr. Penrose never said a word on it one way or the other. He only let them call him what they would.”