The Wintering House · novella
6The Woman in the Ground
There was a church at Fellgate, three miles down the ridge, and on Christmas morning I walked to it, and no one at Wintering House walked with me.
That, if you had asked me on the day I arrived, would have been the strangest thing in the whole long strangeness of that house, and by the time it came round I had folded it so small and put it so far back that I had to be reminded of it by the bells. They came up the moor thin and far, the way sound does over snow, and I stood at the landing window with the mistress’s water in my hand and thought, with the ordinary part of me that I had by then almost taught to be quiet: a family keeps Christmas. A family that keeps a warm room for a woman who is not in it keeps Christmas most of all. And then I went down to the small parlour, where the table was laid for four and would that day be laid, I did not doubt, for five — the fourth place set and served and cleared untouched, as it was every night of my life there — and I asked Mr Ravenscar, very lightly, over the tea, whether the family went down to the church.
He was a courteous man, and tired, and he did me the courtesy that morning of not lying quickly. He let a moment go by. Then he said that they did not; that the walk was long and the ridge treacherous in the snow; that Mr Marchbank, the rector, was good enough to come up to them at the New Year and read to her — he said her, and did not blink at it, and I had by then learned not to blink either — and that of course I must go, if I wished, and take the whole of the morning, and Susan would give me bread and a hard-boiled egg for the road.
“She was fond of the Fellgate bells,” said Charlotte, from the end of the table, brightly, into her cup. “She’d not have missed them for the world.”
And there it was again — the great tense of that house, the was that meant is, the past laid over the present like a dust-sheet over furniture that is still, underneath, being sat in — and I said that I should be glad to go, and I put on the grey shawl, which was the dead woman’s shawl and mine now, and I went out into the cold.
I want to set down what the walk was, because it was the first time in six weeks I had been out of the reach of the house, and I did not know until I was out of it how far its reach had come.
The moor was white and the sky was white and the ridge went down before me pale and folded like a sleeping thing, and the wind came off it clean, and I found that I was crying, and had been for some while, without any grief that I could name — only the plain animal relief of a creature that has been too long in a warm dark place and is let, of a sudden, into the cold. I had not understood that I was being kept until the keeping stopped. Three miles I walked, and with every one of them some small knot in me that I had not known was tied came quietly undone, and by the time I saw the squat grey tower of Fellgate church down among its yews I was myself again, or nearly — the cold clear self that had put up its head in the gallery and could not now be got back to sleep.
The church was warm with breath and candle and full of the whole small parish, and they made room for me, and were kind, and I was a stranger. And when they learned, by the low sideways country method by which such things are learned, where I was from — for a woman does not walk three miles down the Blackmoor ridge on Christmas morning from anywhere but the one house at the top of it — a thing happened along the pew that I have thought about a great deal since. It was not unkindness. I want to be exact, because it would be an easy thing to make them cruel and they were not. It was that they went, all of them, a very little quiet; and an old woman beside me, who had given me half her hymn-book without a word, took my hand where it lay on the wood and pressed it, once, hard, the way you press the hand of the bereaved at a graveside — and let it go, and looked to the front, and would not look at me again.
They pitied me. That was the thing I carried out of the church into the churchyard, turning it over, not yet understanding it. The whole of Fellgate pitied me, and had made room for me the way you make room for the sick, and none of them had asked me a single question about the family up the hill, though a stranger from a great house is the natural meat of a village on a feast-day — and I have been poor, and I know what it means when the poor decline to gossip about the rich. It means the thing is past gossip. It means they have said it all, long ago, and worn it smooth, and put it away where they put the deaths of children and the year the beck rose, in the quiet place that is not spoken of on Christmas morning to a girl with a good shawl and a frightened face.
I found her on the way out. I was not looking; I want that understood; I had not gone down to that church to dig. But the path from the porch runs along the south wall where the good families lie, out of the wind, under the yews, and the Ravenscar stones are there, a whole grave grammar of them, three generations deep — and I read them as one reads such things, idly, doing sums of other people’s sorrows, until I came to the newest, which was not new, and stopped.
It was a plain stone, good and grey, and the moss had begun on it but had not got up over the letters, and the letters were these:
HONORIA RAVENSCAR. Wife of Aldous. Mother of Aldous and Charlotte. And a date, twelve years gone that spring. And under it, cut deep and kept clear of moss by some hand that came, I thought, oftener than the moss allowed — She is not here.
I stood in the snow and read it a long time.
I had not known her Christian name. That was the first thing, and it went through me colder than the date. Six weeks I had changed the water of a woman whose name I had never once heard spoken in her own house — for they did not use it; they said she, they said the mistress, they said your loving Mother; her name lived nowhere in Wintering House at all, not on a letter, not on a lip, and here it was in the frozen ground three miles off, Honoria, given at last to the one place they could not warm — and I understood, standing there, that a name is a small hard true thing, and that they had buried hers along with the rest of her, and kept above ground only the warm nameless she that could be fed and dressed and answered and never, ever, laid down.
And the date. Twelve years. I did the arithmetic I had done in the warm room with the letter in my hands, and it came out the same, and worse for being cut in stone: twelve years this woman had been under the yews at Fellgate, and four days since I had held a letter in her hand with the ink not browned, wet-tailed where the pen lifted meaning to write more. She was here. The stone said so, plain as the stone could make it, in a text a mason had been paid to cut. She is not here. Someone had answered the churchyard. Someone had come down the treacherous ridge with a chisel, in the twelve years, and cut a contradiction into her grave — she is not here — not as the angel’s comfort it pretends to be, he is not here, for he is risen, but as a plain flat household fact, the way you would write it on a door. Not here. Upstairs. Warm.
The old woman from the pew came out of the porch while I stood there, tying her bonnet against the cold, and saw where I was, and came down the path to me, though it took her from her road. She stood beside me and looked at the stone and not at me, which I had begun to see was how the truth was told in that country.
“You’ll be the new one,” she said.
“I’m companion to Mrs Ravenscar,” I said, and heard, in my own mouth, in the churchyard, over the grave, the enormous folded lie of it, and could not stop myself saying it, because it was my place and my bread and the only belonging I had.
The old woman nodded slowly, as if I had confirmed something she was sorry to have confirmed. She was quiet a while. Then she said, not unkindly, looking at the deep-kept letters and the twelve years’ moss that had been kept from them: “There’ve been three or four of you, love. Good girls. They come up that hill in the autumn with their boxes.” She tucked in the end of her scarf. “We don’t see them come down.”
And she pressed my hand again, once, hard, the graveside press, and went away up the path to Fellgate and her Christmas dinner and her living family, and left me in the snow with Honoria Ravenscar, who was not there, and was, and with the four days’-dry ink still somehow wet on my two cold hands.
I did not go straight back. I stood until the bells had done and the parish had gone in to its dinners and the churchyard was only me and the yews and the white ridge going up and up to the one grey house at the top of it with its one red fire. And I found that I was not crying now. The relief of the cold was over, and something harder had come in behind it, and I knew — the way you know a stone is cold before you touch it — that I would have to climb back up that hill and change the water in the glass that evening, and lay the fourth place, and call the woman upstairs she, and be fed and be warmed and be wanted; and that I would do it; and that the doing of it was the whole of the horror, and that the horror was mine now, cut deep, and kept clear of the moss.