The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham
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Название: The Element of Fire
Автор: Brendan Graham
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007401109
isbn:
‘A young man, too timid, perhaps, to directly propose to his Boston beauty, would ask, “Would you take the Long Path with me?” If she said “Yes” it meant she would marry him. They would never part. But,‘ Ellen paused, ‘if she stopped to rest – here perhaps, under this gingko tree, it meant she didn’t love him.’
‘Oh …’ said Mary, looking around for the ghosts of lost love, ‘that’s so sad – but at least she’d not said “No!”.’
‘That was it!’ Ellen explained. ‘The young man was spared that embarrassment. So ladies, if any young beau asks to walk the Long Path with you, consider carefully if you should rest along the way,’ adding, ‘I’m sure no young lady of Patrick’s choice would ever rest!’
Patrick, however, was not impressed and though he regularly accompanied them to the Common, at fourteen was less interested in marriage-making than in watching the haymaking, a custom that still persisted. Unless, of course, she recounted stories of Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty, and the military history of the Common, long a mustering-ground for armies of every flag and allegiance.
The Great Elm commanded attention from every element of the family, even boys. The giant tree, whose protective branches offered one hundred feet of shade, stretched heavenwards for seventy or eighty feet. But if Heaven was its aspiration, Hell was its application, for the Great Elm was once a place of executions. Witches, martyrs, adulterers alike, all swung from its gallowed limbs. United in fascination, all three would close in around her, fearing its embrace, wanting none the less to hear its dark history retold yet again. Tales of ‘the Puritans’, or of ‘the Reverend Cotton Mather’, who stalked the condemned, seeking to save their souls from a fate worse than death – eternal damnation!
‘Tell us Mary Dyer!’ Mary asked, though by now they knew the story well.
The Quaker girl had left the early colony, protesting the banishment of another young woman dissenter. On her return she was imprisoned and saved only from the tree by her son. Instead of her life she was banished for ever from the Bay Colony.
‘Mary came back again,’ Ellen told them in hushed tones, ‘to fight for her freedom. But the death sentence previously given had not been lifted. Mary still refused to repent, because she had done no wrong.’ Ellen paused, looked into the branches above them, before delivering the final verdict. ‘So the Great Elm took Mary Dyer.’
‘And her ashes were scattered on the ground here,’ the young Mary O’Malley put forward, fearfully.
‘Yes, we should be careful where we tread,’ Ellen told them, herself almost frightened by the notion of it.
The Great Elm where the dead and the living came together had a sobering impact on all of them. Yet, time and again, Ellen was drawn back to it. Sometimes, she would sit alone there, waiting for them while they played. It reminded her of the Reek – strange, silent, overshadowing. More than its trunk and limbs was the Great Elm, just as the Reek was more than its rocks and steep crags. Tree and mountain, both seemed to her to be warnings posted on the path of life. Grim, penitential listening places, for the strayed and the wayward. While the Long Path had its whisperings of love, the Great Elm had other darker intimations. Of love betrayed. Murmurings too of the terrible consequences its infamous gibbet had wreaked on the necks of those betrayers. She had yet not told them those stories, lest, in innocence, they should have sympathy for adulterers.
It took her into the following spring ‘to put a shape’ on No. 29. But she was not foolhardy, hunting down bargains – crockery ware on Washington Street, ‘sensible’ curtains from the Old Feather Store, a thick-in-the-hand, good-wearing Turkish counterpane for the floor of the good room; sturdy chairs, slightly shop-soiled, a chip or two gone from them but still perfectly good for sitting upon.
Lavelle did the heavy work – painted and decorated and put a snas on the backyard. Then Patrick wanted to ‘get at’ the gone-to-seed cabbages, but at her request left it. She decked the front and back borders of the cabbage patch with small yellow flowers – a Latin name, ending in ‘ium’ – she couldn’t remember when Mary had asked her. Peabody had told her when he’d given her the seeds, but she’d forgotten. The other two sides she left open, so she could ‘pluck the new cabbages, when they grew’, she hoped.
Eventually, the house was the way she wanted it; for the moment, at least. She had one other idea for the good room, but that could wait a while.
Lavelle, who had always maintained close links with those Boston Irish interested in the ‘Irish Cause’, had recently begun to attend meetings for the repeal of the Union of Ireland with England. She would have preferred he didn’t, that he’d leave ‘the past to the past’. Lavelle’s view was that ‘the past never goes away – the past is a road – always coming from somewhere and leading somewhere else’. She couldn’t win with him, so she gave up trying. She did once remark that with his increasingly frequent absences on ‘matters of Ireland’, ‘Now that the house is settled here, I have a mind to move back to Washington Street – and you could pay court to me every evening, as before!’
He knew she wasn’t serious, grabbed her and kissed her, laughing as he exited the door.
She read, instead, sitting at the rosewood bureau he had restored, her book on the baize-covered writing surface, vanishing her away from the world.
Her visits to the Old Corner Bookstore had been less frequent since they moved here, yet more precious. So that when she did go there she lingered over its store of treasures, lovingly fingering the gold-lettered spines, imprinting into memory the works and the lives within. The English poets: Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience – the two contrary states of the human soul – Byron and Donne. These were her favourites, opening her eyes to an England, pastoral, passionate, spiritually provocative, different from the ‘perfidious Albion’, she had known, an England of Cromwell and Queen Victoria, ‘The Famine Queen’.
At Christmas, Lavelle had presented her with Legends of New England, in Verse and Prose, by the Massachusetts-born John Greenleaf Whittier – ‘to wean you away from old England’. And she was much interested in New England writing. Emerson with his spiritual vision, his belief that all souls shared in the higher, Over-Soul, that nature is spirit, rang with a resonance close to her own, one which the organized pulpitry of the Catholic Church could never achieve for her. The women writers of New England, she also sought out, as much for their ‘Bloomerist’ agenda as for anything. However, the Old Corner Bookstore, Lavelle’s ‘Repeal’ meetings, and even the aggrandizement of No. 29 were only the trimmings of life in Boston. The education of her children, the steady growth of the business, and the unerring stability of life in general was what mattered, what she had always craved. What now was within her keeping.
The children all were flourishing. Patrick at the Eliot School, Mary, and even Louisa, with a little additional schooling from Mary, at Notre Dame de Namur. Peabody had now opened yet a further store, his third, in the affluent suburb of West Roxbury. And she had settled more easily than she had expected into the marriage life, seldom a cross word between them, Lavelle, unlike many, remaining sober in manner. Mrs Brophy’s ‘pool of contentment’ continued to surround СКАЧАТЬ