The Quickening Maze Read Free Page B

heart of the wood. No, not darkness - she must be proportionate, clear-minded to receive Him - but twilight. Their trivial falling leaves coloured the air.
    She was a poor creature with sin’s stink on her and must sit and wait on the far side of unbearable distance. That distance was larger than any in the mere world alone. It was absolute. But there was comfort there: the distance was a sign of His mastery and power. The wall that separated them connected them also, joined them by separation. In her inmost nearness that distance touched her and hurt her and was itself a revelation of Him. It was something she could hang on to.
    Margaret stretched a fresh piece of muslin across the frame and fixed it there. Several samplers were already piled on the small table of her room. Soon she would give them away. They were weak signals of the Truth, but she was soothed by making them, by the image of the cross forming starkly in front of her and the purring of the thread drawn through the cloth. It was a task that sealed her spirit in contemplation until she couldn’t hear the shouts of the mad or the weather, the branches grinding and clicking in the wind.
    But how long would she have to wait? She might die. She might die and never know it again and be forgotten in darkness.
    Margaret wondered if she should start to fast once more.
     
    Alfred Tennyson screwed in his monocle, stooped and peered closely at the phrenological bust on top of Matthew Allen’s writing desk. He read a few of the labels on the glossy surface of the head that named the mental organs corresponding with that area. Amativeness.Agreeableness. Ideality.The whole bland, stereotyped human head was speckled with these faculties.
    ‘Ah, that, well,’ Matthew Allen, who was talking rapidly, changed the course of his speech as he saw his guest examining this medical ornament. ‘I’m increasingly of the opinion that these categories are by and large symbolical.There may be an overall right-ness of attribution, but I can’t say that in my clinical work I’ve found watertight correspondences.The map is useful, however, for keeping in mind the panoply of things to be considered.’
    ‘I had my bumps read once,’ Tennyson said. ‘And was not dazzled by any brilliance of analysis.The fellow rather overestimated my quantity of animal spirits, perhaps because I’m large and was with friends after a lunch where let’s say some wine was consumed.’
    ‘Indeed. Indeed, there are vulgar practitioners out there, in their hundreds now, but really they aren’t to be thought of. Vauxhall Gardens stuff.’
    Matthew Allen looked round, wondering what to draw his guest’s attention to next. He felt excitable at the literary young man’s presence in his private study and was eager to impress upon him the range of his researches. He watched Tennyson relight his pipe, hollowing his clean-shaven cheeks as he plucked the flame upside down into the bowl of scorched tobacco.The head was massive and handsome undeniably, with a dark burnish to the skin. Behind the dome of the forehead, strongly suggestive of intellectual power, very promising poems were being formed. He was very different in appearance to poor little Clare, but the forehead was reminiscent. The poet had been right about himself - he did seem deficient in animal spirits. The case was not nearly so morbid as his brother Septimus’s, but Alfred Tennyson also moved slowly, as though through a viscous medium of thought, of doubt. Being so short-sighted might have exacerbated that, the world dim and untrustworthy around him.
    As Matthew Allen stood diagnosing his guest, Tennyson now reached out and picked up a mineral sample. He brought it close to his monocle, saw its many metallic facets. It was a glittering tumble of right angles, little walls and roofs jutting out from each other like a town destroyed by an earthquake.
    ‘Iron pyrites,’ Allen explained. ‘I’ve many other samples you’ll see ranged around