There were two light footsteps. The baby gave a little whimper as Aunt Harriet picked it up. She came towards the door and lifted the latch, then she paused.
‘I shall pray,’ she said. ‘Yes, I shall pray.’ She paused, then she went on, her voice steady and harder: ‘I shall pray God to send charity into this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if it is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish of the body. . . . And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken….’
Then the door closed and I heard her pass slowly along the passage.
I moved cautiously back to the window, and watched her come out and lay the white bundle gently in the trap. She stood looking down on it for a few seconds, then she unhitched the horse, climbed up on the seat, and took the bundle on to her lap, with one arm guarding it in her cloak.
She turned, and left a picture that is fixed in my mind. The baby cradled in her arm, her cloak half open, showing the upper part of the brown, braid-edged cross on her fawn dress; eyes that seemed to see nothing as they looked towards the house from a face set hard as granite. … Then she shook the reins, and drove off. Behind me, in the next room, my father was saying:
‘Heresy, too! The attempt at substitution could be overlooked; women sometimes get strange ideas at such times. I was prepared to overlook it, provided the child is notified. But heresy is a different matter. She is a dangerous as well as a shameless woman; I could never have believed such wickedness in a sister of yours. And for her to think that you might abet her, when she knows that you yourself have had to make your own penances twice! To speak heresy in my house, too. That cannot be allowed to pass.’
‘Perhaps, she did not realize what she was saying,’ my mother’s voice said, uncertainly.
‘ Then it is time she did. It is our duty to see that she does.’
My mother started to answer, but her voice cracked. She began to cry: I had never heard her cry before. My father’s voice went on explaining about the need for Purity in thought as well as in heart and conduct, and its very particular importance to women. He was still talking when I tiptoed away.
I could not help feeling a great curiosity to know what was the ‘ little thing’ that had been wrong with the baby – wondering if, perhaps, it were just an extra toe, like Sophie’s. But I never found out what it was.
When they broke the news to me next day that my Aunt Harriet’s body had been found in the river, no one mentioned a baby….
8
My father included Aunt Harriet’s name in our prayers on the evening of the day the news came, but after that she was never referred to again. It was as though she had been wiped out of every memory but mine. There, however, she remained very clearly, given form at a time when I had only heard her, as an upright figure with a face drained of hope, and a voice saying clearly: ‘I am not ashamed – I am only beaten.’ And, too, as I had last seen her, looking up at the house.
Nobody told me how she came to die, but somehow I knew that it had not been by accident. There was a great deal that I did not understand in what I had overheard, and yet, in spite of that, it was quite the most disturbing occurrence I had known yet – it alarmed me with a sense of insecurity far greater, for some unperceived reason, than I had suffered over Sophie. For several nights I dreamed of Aunt Harriet lying in the river, still clasping the white bundle to her while the water swirled her hair round her pale face, and her wide-open eyes saw nothing. And I was frightened. …
This had happened simply because the baby was just a bit different in some way from other babies. It had something, or lacked something, so that it did not exactly accord with the Definition. There was the ‘ little thing’ that made it not quite right, not quite like other people. . ..
A mutant, my father had called it…. A mutant!… I thought of some of the poker-work texts. I recalled the address of a visiting preacher; the detestation there had been in his voice when he thundered from the pulpit: ‘Accursed is the Mutant!’
Accursed is the mutant. … The mutant, the enemy, not only of the human race, but of all the species God had decreed; the seed of the Devil within, trying unflaggingly, eternally to come to fruition in order that it might destroy the divine order and turn our land, the stronghold of God’s will upon Earth, into a lewd chaos like the Fringes; trying to make it a place without the law, like the lands in the South that Uncle Axel had spoken of, where the plants and the animals and the almost-human beings, too, brought forth travesties; where true stock had given place to unnameable creatures, abominable growths flourished, and the spirits of evil mocked the Lord with obscene fantasies.
Just a small difference, the ‘little thing,’ was the first step. . . .
I prayed very earnestly those nights.
‘ Oh, God,’ I said, ‘ please, please, God, let me be like other people. I don’t want to be different. Won’t you make it so that when I wake up in the morning I’ll be just like everyone else, please, God, please!’
But in the morning, when I tested myself I’d soon pick up Rosalind or one of the others, and know that the prayer hadn’t altered anything. I had to get up still just the same person who had gone to bed the night before, and I had to go into the big kitchen and eat my breakfast facing the panel which had somehow stopped being just part of the furniture and seemed to stare back at me with the words: ACCURSED IS THE MUTANT
IN THE SIGHT OF GOD AND MAN!
And I went on being very frightened.
After about the fifth night that praying hadn’t done any good, Uncle Axel caught me leaving the breakfast-table and said I’d better come along and help him mend a plough. After we’d worked on that for a couple of hours he declared a rest, so we went out of the forge to sit in the sun, with our backs against a wall. He gave me a chunk of oatcake, and we munched for a minute or two. Then he said:
‘Well, now, Davie, let’s have it,’
‘ Have what?’ I said, stupidly.
‘Whatever it is that’s been making you look as if you were sickening for something the last day or two,’ he told me. ‘What’s your trouble? Has somebody found out?’
‘ No,’ I said. He looked greatly relieved.
‘Well, what is it, then?’
So I told him about Aunt Harriet and the baby. Before I had finished I was talking through tears – it was such a relief to be able to share it with someone.
‘It was her face as she drove away.’ I explained. ‘I’ve never seen anyone look like that before. I keep on seeing it in the water.’
I looked up at him as I finished. His face was as grim as I’d ever seen it, with the corners of his mouth pulled down.
‘ So that was it -‘ he said, nodding once or twice.
‘It was all because the baby was different,’ I repeated. ‘And there was Sophie, too … I didn’t understand properly before … I – I’m frightened, Uncle Axel. What’ll they do when they find out I’m different .. . ?’
He put his hand on my shoulder.
‘ No one else is ever going to know about it,’ he told me again. ‘No one but me – and I’m safe.’
It did not seem as reassuring now as it had been when he said it before.
‘There was that one who stopped,’ I reminded him, ‘perhaps they found out about him . . . ?’
He shook his head. ‘I reckon you can rest easy on that, Davie. I found out there was a boy killed just about the time you said. Walter Brent his name was, about nine years old. He was fooling around when they were felling timber, and a tree got him, poor lad.’
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘About nine or ten miles away, on a farm over by Chipping,’ he said.
I thought back. The Chipping direction certainly fitted, and it was just the kind of accident that would account for a sudden unexplained stop…. Without any ill-will to the unknown Walter I hoped and thought that was the explanation.