The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet Read online

  “Is your new bible also an autobiography, then, Father?”

  “Of course. Just as the Old Testament is the story of the doings of God among men, and the New Testament the story of the doings of Jesus among men, so the Bible of the Children of Jesus is the story of God’s younger son—I—among men and the children of men,” Father Dominus explained.

  “I see.” Mary sat down, pulled several sheets of cheap paper toward her and picked up a pencil.

  “Here!” cried the old man with a faint screech. “One sheet at a time, madam! It is too difficult to bring in my supplies to permit of wanton waste by anyone.”

  “Sir,” she said with like irony, “my pencil will go through one sheet of this paper, for the table surface is quite rough. I intend to use the dozen or so sheets under my writing sheet as a cushion. If you are a man of science, you should know that without needing to be told.”

  “It was another test of your intelligence,” he said loftily. “Now commence, as follows: ‘God is the darkness, for God existed before the coming of light, and is not Lucifer the Bringer of Light? He was Lucifer first, Satan only afterwards. He falls every day in the person of the Sun, does battle with God through the darkness, and rises every morning on another bootless journey into nothing. The scales, he thinks, are evenly matched, but God knows better. For long after light is a spent force, the darkness will continue, and the darkness is God.

  “‘This revelation burst upon me when, in my thirty-fifth year, I chanced upon the Primal Cave, the Omphalos, the Navel, the Universal Womb, that place I still call the Seat of God, His dwelling place. For where in this world of light is God to be found? Only when I chanced upon the Seat of God did I understand at last. There, in a blackness so profound mine eyes shrivelled for the lack of even one mote of light to see, there, in the silence so profound mine ears shrivelled for the lack of even one whisper, there, I stepped into the very belly of God. I was one with Him, and underwent the first of what were to be many revelations as He unfolded His darkness to me layer upon layer.’”

  Father Dominus ceased while Mary’s pencil laboured to catch up and her mind, reeling, kept a part of itself for her own thoughts and reactions.

  “Layer,” she wrote, and stopped, instrument poised, eyes on the seamed face and its smeared pale eyes with the pinpoint pupils. Why are they pinpoint? that exclusive-to-self segment of her mind asked. Has he drugged himself with something? The subject suggested it, certainly, yet—was it possible that he couldn’t see much? That it was not the crabbed hands forbidding his authoring his own treatise, but the quality of his vision?

  Say nothing derogatory, Mary! Say nothing that mocks him, or otherwise impugns his theology. “I am humbled,” she said, “to be the scribe of such a mind, Father.”

  “You see it?” he asked, leaning forward eagerly.

  “I see it.”

  “Then we will go on.”

  And go on he did, at great length; as the pages piled up to the right of her makeshift scribe’s cushion, Mary’s knees began to shake and her hand to cramp. Finally, when he paused for breath, she put her pencil down.

  “Father, I can write no more today,” she said. “I have a writer’s cramp, and given that you want all of this transcribed in a fair, copperplate hand, I must beg you to stop.”

  He seemed to come back into himself from a different place, blinked, shivered, parted his thin lips in a mirthless smile. “Oh, that was wonderful!” he said. “So much easier than trying to get meaning out of looking at words.”

  “What do you call this theology?” she asked.

  “Cosmogenesis,” he said.

  “Greek roots, not Latin.”

  “The Greeks thought. Those who came after imitated.”

  “I look forward to our next dictation, but there is no need to lock me up,” she tried again. “I need exercise, for one thing, and pacing a cell is not adequate. A shelf for my books, please.”

  “Think yourself lucky that I have given you the means to make a cup of tea,” he said, rising to his feet.

  “You are a bad master, Father Dominus, no better than those from whom you took your children. You feed me and shelter me, but deny me freedom.”

  But she said it to empty air; he had gone.

  She sat on her bed to give her body a change of posture as well as substance, and tried to come to grips with the fantastic drivel he had spoken. To Mary, a staunch adherent of the Church of England, he was apostate, worse than any heretic, for he talked of God as no Christian ought, and thus far Jesus had not even entered the theological world he painted. Which meant he had little in common with almost all the sects northern England could boast. If she, who never counted the cost of saying what people didn’t want to hear, had kept a tight rein on her thoughts and striven mightily not to offend him, she had done so because, by the end of their very long session, she had become convinced he was absolutely mad. Remained only for him to say that he was God, or perhaps Jesus, and her judgment would be irrevocable. Logic had no part in his way of looking at things, which seemed to be purely for his own comfort or convenience or aspirations. Though what his aspirations were, as yet she had no idea. He claimed to be God’s younger son!

  Privately she put his age at somewhere around seventy, but if she erred, it was on the younger side, not the older. He had been well-looked-after, whether by his children or by others was moot; it was even possible that he was eighty. So had he always been a madman, or was it a symptom of old age? Though he was not senile in any way; his memory was excellent and his reasoning powers acute. It was more that his reason was not reasonable nor his memory unwarped. What she had been exposed to was a person whose self owed nothing to the ethics and structure of English society. Were there really fifty children, thirty boys and twenty girls? Why had Therese’s face changed when she spoke those numbers? How rigorously would the little girl be quizzed by Father Dominus as to what questions Sister Mary asked? She had a duty to the child not to put her in harm’s way, and perhaps that expression had hinted at dread punishments.

  So Mary went gently with Therese, whom she could interrogate about less perilous things than numbers and punishments. Since Father Dominus had made no secret of his caves, Mary concentrated upon that aspect of her imprisonment. According to Therese, there were many, many miles of caves, all interconnected by tunnels; speaking with awe, Therese told her that Father Dominus knew every inch of every tunnel, every cavern, every nook and cranny. One system was called the Southern Caves, another the Northern Caves; Mary and the Children of Jesus lived in the Southern Caves, but the work went on in the Northern Caves, which also contained God’s Temple. What exactly the work consisted of took time to elucidate, but gradually Mary pieced it together from Therese and a new friend among the Children of Jesus, Brother Ignatius. He had appeared with an awl, a screwdriver, some screws, several iron brackets and three planks of wood.

  It was then that Mary learned what the iron hinges in her far wall were: a second cowled youth, tall and slender, had helped Brother Ignatius carry his load inside—but only after he had stood Mary against the wall and closed the hinges on her ankles to form fetters. Then, having used a rule to mark the screw holes for the brackets, he took himself off and left Ignatius to do the actual work. Brother Ignatius was shorter than the other lad, whom he called Brother Jerome, but more powerfully built, and very close to puberty. When Mary asked his age, he gave it as fourteen.

  “Therese and I be the eldest,” he confided, screwing his screws into the soft rock.

  “Why did Brother Jerome measure and mark, if he wasn’t to help you in aught else?” Mary asked.

  “Can’t read nor write,” said Ignatius cheerfully. “Jerome’s the only one of us who can.”

  She suppressed a gasp. “None of you can read or write?”

  “’Cept Jerome. Father brought him from Sheffield.”

  “Why hasn’t Father taught you?”

  “We be too busy, I expect.”

  “Busy doing what
?”

  “Depends.” Ignatius set a plank on two brackets, wiggled it and nodded. “Nice and level. Jerome’s a fussy one.”

  “Depends?”

  The rather dull brown eyes clouded with the effort of remembering something uttered a few seconds before. “Might be pounding powder, or steeping herbs, or filtering, or distilling, or thickening, or putting in a dab of colour. Blue’s for liver, lavender’s for kidneys, yaller’s for bladder, mucky green’s for gallstones, red’s for heart, pink’s for lungs, brown’s for guts.” His mouth opened to say more, but Mary stopped him hastily.

  “Medicaments?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “What does filtering mean?” she countered. “Or distilling?”

  He shrugged his broad and sturdy shoulders. “Dunno, ’cept we does ’em, and that’s what they’re called.”

  “He did say he was an apothecary,” said Mary to herself. “Do you make potions and elixirs for Father Dominus, is that it?”

  “Aye, that’s it.” He began to stack her books on the bottom shelf, and put what volumes were left on the middle one. “There, Sister Mary! You can fit as many again.”

  “I can indeed. Thank you, Brother Ignatius.”

  He nodded, gathered up his tools and prepared to leave.

  “Just a moment! I am still fettered.”

  “Jerome will come back for that. He’s got the keys.”

  Off he went, leaving Mary to wait what seemed an eternity for Brother Jerome to unlock the hinges binding her ankles.

  This lad, she thought looking down on his head, which displayed the bald spot of a tonsure on its crown, this lad is very different from Brother Ignatius. His eyes, almost as light as Father Dominus’s, were sharp and intelligent, and displayed that peculiar lack of emotion people usually call “cold.” That he was fond of inflicting pain became evident as he unlocked her, grazing her flesh on the iron until he drew blood.

  “I wouldn’t, Brother Jerome,” she said softly. “Your master needs me healthy, not laid low with some infection from a wound.”

  “’Twas you did it, not I,” he said, disliking the threat.

  “Then watch that you—or I!—do not do it again.”

  “I hate him!” said Therese through her teeth after Jerome had gone. “He’s cruel.”

  “But Father Dominus’s pet, am I correct?”

  “Yes, they’re thick,” she said, but would say no more.

  “What kind of work do you girls perform for Father Dominus?”

  “We bottle the liquids, put the pills in boxes, fill the tins with ointment, label everything, and make sure the corks are tight in the bottles,” she said, as if by rote.

  “And this work keeps twenty of you busy?”

  “Yes, Sister Mary.”

  “Father Dominus’s cure-alls must be famous.”

  “Oh, yes, very! Especially the choler elixir and the horse ointment. We have a special arrangement for those.”

  “Special arrangement?”

  “Yes, with an apothecary’s warehouse in Manchester. They go there, and then to shops all over England.”

  “Does Father have a brand name?”

  “A what?”

  “A name that every different kind of product you make has in common. Father Dominus, for instance?”

  Therese’s brow cleared. “Oh, I know what you mean! Children of Jesus. Everything is called Children of Jesus this or that.”

  “I have never heard of it.”

  “Well, lots must have, or we wouldn’t be so busy.”

  When Father Dominus appeared, Mary was able to hand him forty pages of exquisitely neat, handwritten manuscript. The hand that plucked it from the shelf trembled slightly; the sheaf of paper went up to his eyes and there was pored over, his face registering an awed delight that was not, she divined, counterfeited in any way. “But this is beautiful!” he cried, looking up before tucking the top sheet under all the others. “You write straight across the page, and have marginated perfectly without ruling it.”

  So he does see something, she thought, but not the sense of the words; she had deliberately put the pages out of numerical order. He can see the straightness and apparently a pencil line, but only if he holds a page five inches from his nose.

  “A publisher will be happy,” she said. “Where do we begin today? Is it to be darkness, lightness, or how God has formed caves?”

  “No, no, not today! I must take this and read it properly. I will see you tomorrow, Sister Mary.”

  “Wait! If I am to be idle this day, give me exercise!”

  Not long afterward, Brother Ignatius appeared carrying a coil of thin rope and two lanterns. Grinning like a conjurer about to pull a rabbit from a hat, he made a trumpeting noise and produced her boots from behind his back.

  “Exercise!” carolled Mary, leaping off her chair.

  “Of a sort,” he said. “Father will allow me to take you down to the river and back, but you’ll need your boots—’tis very wet in places. But I dasn’t let you keep the boots—they’re to go back to him after I lock you up again. And please don’t think of running away,” he said as he unlocked the door and came into her cell, loosening the rope. “There’s none place to go, and without a lantern it’s God’s Insides. I have to tie one end of this around you and the other around me, and we got a lantern each. The oil lasts long enough to do the round trip with a rest by the river, but there’s naught in it after that.”

  “I won’t try to escape, I promise,” said an ecstatic Mary, allowing him to knot the rope around her waist while she laced up her boots.

  Hoping to see what lay beyond the screen, she was disappointed to find herself led into the maw of a tunnel that, had she known it was there, she could actually see; she had dismissed it as a dense black shadow. At first the path, illuminated by his lantern in the lead and hers coming on behind, was dry and strewn with rubble, but perhaps ten minutes into the downward-sloping tunnel appeared the first puddle, and after that the floor grew steadily moister. At the end of half an hour Mary found herself standing on the bank of a rushing turbulence, a considerable body of water that formed the bulk of the floor in a cavern so vast that the puny light from their lanterns gave the merest hint of its dimensions. Now she could see what Charlie had sometimes talked about! Great glistening fingers pointed down from above, their encrusted surfaces glittering and sparkling; an occasional formation that looked for all the world like semi-translucent, scintillating cloth was flung across the abyss like a shawl; long crystal whiskers sprouted out of pools or from some source hidden in the shadows.

  “Beautiful!” she breathed, stunned.

  Now I begin to understand how Father Dominus formulated his bizarre concept of God. To be caught down here lightless might well trigger insanity, nor would the kindling of a tiny light remove the terror from such an immensity. I pray I am never lost down here.

  “It be pretty,” said Brother Ignatius, “but we got to go back now, Sister Mary.”

  Tramping upward was harder work, but Mary relished it; if she did not exercise, she would not keep up her strength.

  “How long have you been with Father Dominus?” she asked.

  “Dunno. Don’t rightly remember being anywhere else. Me and Therese are the oldest, been with Father the longest.”

  “So Therese said. Also that Father brought Jerome from Sheffield. Do you come from Sheffield too?”

  “Dunno. Jerome’s a special case, Father says. Reads ’n’ writes.”

  “Did you suffer a bad master?”

  “A bad what?”

  “A bad master. A nasty man who whipped you to make you work.”

  “Father Dominus don’t whip” was the answer, sounding puzzled.

  “What do you eat?”

  “Fresh bread we bake. Butter ’n’ jam ’n’ cheese. Roast beef for dinner on Sundays. Stew. Soup.”

  “What kind of soup?”

  “Depends. Good, but.”

  “Who cooks?”

&nb
sp; “Therese. Camille helps, so do the other girls in turns.”

  “So you don’t starve.”

  “What’s starve?”

  “Feeling hungry from too little food.”

  “No.”

  “What do you drink?”

  “Small beer. Hot chocolate on Sundays.”

  “Do you get pudding?”

  “Treacle tart. Steamed pud. Rhubarb tart. Cream.”

  “Have you cows?”

  “No. Jerome brings the milk ’n’ cream.”

  “Do you have a day of worship?”

  “Worship?”

  “Saying hello to God. Thanking Him for His kindness.”

  “No. We thank Father.”

  Well, that was interesting! So Father Dominus’s god was his god, did not belong to the children. Apparently they belonged to Jesus, though it would be interesting on their next walk to ask Brother Ignatius what he had been taught about Jesus.

  But when Father Dominus appeared the next day Mary feared that she might not be allowed to walk again. The Founder of Cosmogenesis was not pleased with his secretary.

  “You put my pages out of order!” he accused, still standing.

  “Oh, my goodness, did I?” asked Mary, looking blank. “I do apologise, Father. Not having a watch or a timepiece of any kind, I am afraid that I become confused. I was sorting the pages out to make sure that every single one was free from error, and you caught me unaware. I gathered them together in such a hurry that I forgot I hadn’t collated them. Pray forgive me, please!”

  His pose relaxed a little, though his face did not soften. “As well for you, then, that you had numbered the pages,” he said stiffly. “A pity that you cannot print, as in a genuine book.”

  “The only persons who ever did that, Father,” she said, her temper tried, “were medieval monks. I do not say I could learn to do it, but do you have the time to permit me to learn?”

  “No, no, no! Today we work. Begin as follows: ‘Light is evil, created by Lucifer to his own image. God has no eyes, but Lucifer took two sparks off his body and made them into eyes so that he could see his own beauty. That is the evil of light—its beauty, its seductiveness, its capacity to dazzle, to daze and numb the mind, throw it open to Lucifer to work upon.’” He stopped to look at her. “You have Lucifer’s hair,” he said. “I warn you, Sister Mary, that I saw the devil in you even while you lay comatose upon that bank. Yet God gave you to me to answer my prayers, and forewarned is forearmed. You proved the efficacy of my treatment for oedema, and now you serve me as a scribe. But I know your origins! Never forget that!”