Larkspur

The glass in the windows dripped, not now, but as they made those panes, the hot glass had dripped, forming ridges and swirls, which now, as the sunlight streamed through the panes, made it appear as if the glass were running. Running like the water in a stream, but slowly, so slowly one would miss it, if they were preoccupied. Preoccupied with nonsense, or sensibility, depending on the perception of the one perceiving, it always depended on the perceptions of the one perceiving, this was naturally the case, even if no one, and no one meaning especially her uncle, thought this to be true, it was in fact absolutely and unequivocally the case.

Crows or ravens out in the garden, depending again on the person perceiving, were a noisy lot. Always raising a hue and cry, when food was spotted or danger presented itself, no matter how far away, if danger was sensed, they arose into the air, with such a clatter, that one might think a storm was brewing. In fact a storm, was brewing and at its center, she stood, so still, like a garden statue.

Although right now she sat. Posed, on the settee, a tea cup in her hand and a vacant look on her face, like a garden statue, only there was no garden and the only babbling brook for miles, was agitated, not calm. Her uncle sat behind the desk and that creature sat across from him. That creature looked a bit like a mangy cat, who felt superior to other creatures, because precisely it could smile, or encourage the cook to part with some cream, it thought therefore, that this was license or entitlement, that it ruled the roost and all other creatures, would upon seeing its beauty and sensing its mastery, would simply fall in line and heed its wishes.

Heed. Not likely. Defy mightily. Defy mightily and with pleasure.

“She refuses to speak. I address her and she is insolent.” The cat hissed. Spittle flying out of his mouth and raining down on the ample lap in front of him, a landscape which stretched well beyond the confines of the chair’s frame. Like the sputter of a tea kettle, as it boils dry. Only this one, this stout, dower little kettle never seemed to boil dry. No this tea kettle, was never poured out, nor could it be waited out, like so many other kettles before him. This was the little tea kettle, which thought he could. Only he couldn’t possibly.

“She receives me and stares at me vacantly for an hour. Not one word. Is she mad or daft; is what I want to know?” For emphasis, the cat, springs from the chair, his bulk unseating the poor unsuspecting chair, sending it across the room to collide with the small tea trolley, causing a crash of amazing clatter.

Suppressing a smile, she remained stoic. Even if the garden cherub is tickled by a trickle, he must remain resolute to his duty, she reminds herself silently. It really was funny, that no one had caught on just yet. Every few months another one would appear to call. All wrapped up like a present, only no amount of paper can hide the present, which well, isn’t really a present. Appear they did, with an agenda and a plan. Only the plan was generic and the target was elusive, because the target was, perhaps better prepared than the shooter. The target’s goal was not to be shot. The shooter, who should have been prepared to size up the target, came preloaded, thinking that one target was like another target and while other targets had proven similarly elusive, the problem lies with the target and not with the shooters aim.

Delicious.

Delirious.

Dubious.

Devious.

Delphinium.

Yes, Delphinium.

Delphinium tea. That is it-- that is what should be served. Or rather perhaps that is what was being served. Do you suppose that is what happens when one blindly eats cakes and drinks unlabeled vials? Is that what causes one to lose all sense of manners? Perhaps not, perhaps it is rot. Could it be rot? Fiddle Faddle and Rot! Indeed, next time, next time delphinium goes into the pot.

“Do you hear me, Sir? This woman is mad. Mad I tell you. She doesn’t speak. She refuses to greet me properly. Doesn’t she know? Doesn’t she understand I am it; there is no one else who would have her. Think of your reputation, Sir. I command you to compel her to speak. She is uncouth and wild. She needs tamed; she needs a firm hand, to prune back the unruliness.” Waving his arm and pointing, in a gesture she assumes was meant to be authoritative, but rather resembled the death dance of a flailing fish in the hands of an excited monger.

First too much stillness and now unruliness, really, he ought to have decided which vice was most objectionable. This was the thing, when one does not understand the target, the target takes control. How was it that these men, these men about town, were really such an easy lot to unseat? Here he was, a well respected solicitor, with ties to parliament, sputtering like a tea kettle, because she, wouldn’t speak to him. She had heard it said, he had said, on more than one occasion, that he felt, nay actually required, that women be silent in his presence. So silent she remained. She had yet to utter one word. Not a single word had passed her lips. Here she sat like a statue, as he had said he wanted, and she knew this to be true, because just a year ago, at Mrs. Smootherson’s dinner party, he had loudly complained to Mr. Smootherson, that women today prattled on too much, that a proper woman was silent in the presence of her betters.

Really, this one ought to consider his complaints a bit more carefully.

Larkspur.

Sing sweetly like a lark, my beautiful sparrow. Sing to me, in the silence of the moon. Oh my sparrow, who in the meadow is but a lark.

Spur, spurn the devil, and his temptations, ye sinful creature. Be gone from my sight, oh evil witch, possessor of tricks. Do not bewitch me, with games in the moon light.

Larkspur, Larkspur, Larkspur.
Spur of the moment, spur in the path, on a lark, strutting to and fro larking about…

A spurn suitor, Oh the evils of a suitor spurn. Oh the trickle of the spittle of a suitor spurn.

Tis a pity really, that the spur of the moment sip, in a few hours, will cause one to rethink –

Larking about.

It was easy to sit still when one was lost in thought. Poem, poems, poems, like poises everywhere; so easy to pluck at the words, but as with poises, sometimes harder to arrange, so time consuming, all the better that she had the time.

So lost in her wandering, she had not heard the tea kettle being shown the door. Not that it mattered, while he was terribly wrong about nearly everything, and she was quiet sure this to be the case, because more than once, after being subjected to one of his interrogations, she had made it her business to investigate some of his claims, and truth be told, which it seldom was, he knew nearly half as much as he thought he did. However, that he was last, the end of the line; to be sure he was right about that.

“Well I hope you are happy. You win – I lose. Right, isn’t that what you want? He was it, that buffoon, that hot wind bag, he was the last. Quite an accomplishment my dear, you have convinced them you are crazy as a loon.”

“Why is it that I am crazy, but you are discerning? You are no different, every day calling cards come, mothers and aunties, pushing and shoving up our stairs, looking to unload a bit of baggage. So why then, is it fine for you to be discerning and I am crazy, I am vapid and mindless and a bore or hysterical, unruly and wild? Why must I consider the overblown, bloated and half-witted men about town, men missing hair and teeth, just like Mr. I-am-King of the third rate barristers? I don’t and I won’t. So there, the queue is empty, I have entertained the lot of misfits and now I can retire. Retire back to my country home and be at peace.”

“It is my duty to see you properly cared for, damn it.”

“No it isn’t. It is your duty to ensure my welfare. I have means and I am perfectly safe in the country. There is the housekeeper and her husband. They can see to my safety. Mother made it possible for me to be independent and luckily for me, my taste runs to books and not to clothing and parties and fashionable events. I shall be just fine, as I was before you forced this insufferable season up on me.”

It was his turn to sit still like a stony statue. His turn to hold it in; she knew he was furious and she didn’t care. She had done as she had promised; she had endured the season, the endless nonsense and the endless parties. Then men who wanted a quiet bride, until they were actually in the room with the quiet possibility, the men who wanted a beautiful ornament, even if there was nothing beautiful underneath the veneer, when before them sat a fine artifact, which the patina, which while not shiny spoke of experience and age and would someday speak to enduring good grace. She had sat and listened to endless theories on a woman’s intellect, all the while, she had studied more and read more than the man pontificating.

Seeing that there would be no further outburst, she retired to her room. Tomorrow she and Jenny would make one last round to the book shops and the stationary shops. Then she would return to home. A place that while very much a cage, a container, a place for her to be kept, it was her place, within the house; she was mistress and master of her day. She did not need anyone’s permission to read this or that, to paint this or that, to eat this or that. It was freedom, within the lines of a specific fence and at the end of the day, it was a fence she could live with.

The garden is treacherous place. Beautiful, riotous blossoms, whose color belie their darkness.

Remember my sweet, remember the larkspur.

Today the poppies sang loudly. Their clashing, brash reds and oranges, loud in the normally quiet garden of soft pinks and purples, lush greens, and riotous yellows, deadly soft purples and sleepy bright reds, nature’s way to confuse or perhaps even amuse.

Home.

Home in the riot of blooms, the tangle of bramble and strong scents from tissue fragile blossoms. Neat cropped hedges, building a fence, a fence to hold the clamor of the chorus of color in, inside the lines, like a child’s art book. I had read that while a chorus is the harmony of many voices that in New Orleans, there were choirs, who broke lines, clamored loudly, warred with the musicians and turned funeral hymns from dirges into a celebratory riot of life and song.

So was my garden. From the outside, it was green rows, of orderly color blocks, but inside the lines, inside the lines was a riot of danger, grandeur and mystery.

Is art the restraint with which the painter paints or is art the carelessness of a far flung spirit. Is it not both? For me, my garden was my canvas to control and the fields and meadows leading up to the wooded edge of my property were my inspiration, my free reign. For as with a horse, how does one learn to yield to restraint, if one has never truly run wild, free.

“Ma’am, be you taking your walk today? The boys in the public house, once again, be talking about the specter.”

“Burt, really, they always say he appears at midsummer and yet in all these years, after all the many miles I have walked, I have yet to see him.”
“But Ma’am, there be strange doings, ye know that.”

“Strange is as strange does Burt, and methinks the strange doings has more to do with idle young men, too far into their cups, home on holiday, than a super natural disturbance on the shortest night of the year.”

“I has a feeling ma’am.”

In truth I did too. I felt that tonight would be like no other night. Even though I had taken this pilgrimage every midsummer for nigh on six years, the first year here, after I had returned from my season, it hadn’t been planned, I had just decided to walk, felt compelled to take a night walk, to stay up and enjoy the shortest night. Remarkable, how quickly the sun could take its sleep on this one night of the year, magically allowing for just a bit of inky blackness.

Six summers. Until this moment, I hadn’t counted. I had merely enjoyed the days, my days. In the time I had been here, I had never been alone, Miriam and Burt always about. They gave me my space, honored me as Mistress of the house and yet looked after me like the little girl I once was. Miriam the age I am now, a newly married woman, when my mother birthed me on a cold a November night.

They were both maternal and paternal and deferential. We co-existed. It was symbiotic, not parasitic. They looked out for me, the way birds on hippopotamus might in the Serengeti, and I was grateful. Grateful for their silence, for their labor and for their care, for their choice to stay on, in the only home they knew, which allowed me to stay on; in the only home I wanted. Perhaps they had secretly hoped I could wait that season out. If I hadn’t, their choices would have been in the hands of my husband. They would be no more a contemplation, than the furniture might have been. Even if I had chosen wisely, it would have impacted them in unimaginable ways. Oddly enough, I would have likely been the purse, but the three of us would have lived forever, with it completely out of our reach, beggars in our home, beholden to the beholder.

Instead, I am sure they bore the questions of the townsfolk, the talk of witches, of the Mistress being off. The reality was I was who I was. I was the woman, who made the herb preparations, blended the healing and soothing teas, who wandered her gardens and who read her books. I was the woman living apart and happily so. We cooperated, I living in the big house and they in the quaint cottage, just on the opposite side of the gardens. Miriam kept both houses and I tended all the gardens, even her little vegetable garden. I let her pretend to grow amazing delicacies and she let me pretend I somehow controlled the orderly flow of the household with the same precision I control the menace of weeds and the chorus of color. It worked, because for the three of us, our very lives depended on it.

That night, after an early dinner, one we shared, which was not always the case. The social boundaries blurred in our house. If I were to eat in the formal dining room, there would be no question, they would not be eating with me, but after the first few months, we always ate in the kitchen, together. Why bother with linens, it was one task none of us needed and the food, it tasted better in the kitchen anyway. I subscribed to the no one needs to know philosophy. When we had company, which was the vicar in the first few years and occasionally my Uncle, also in the first few years, we kept up appearances, but now, six years in, no more visits and we don’t pretend.

I packed up a basket, after our dinner and headed out into the meadow, just to the left of the lane that runs from our garden to the main road. I planned to sketch and read, watch the sun set and stay in the meadow. I had also packed up a tonic, I had brewed, something to bring out the magically qualities of the sun’s slow, slow sink on this very long or short night.

I had told Burt, that I did not believe in the supernatural. I had implied that the strange doing in the woods was the work of overly idle University boys, but I knew that wasn’t true. The woods were alive, the meadow too.

I continued this pilgrimage because it spoke to me and not just on a metaphysical level. Certainly, the flowers and the insect s and the grasses spoke to me daily. Their beauty to be sure, their sensuality, the smells, all of that moved me beyond measure, daily as I took in the air and did my duty to the grounds. It was a vocation, a love of the natural world. I was one with my garden. I had spurned the idea of husband, but I was more than willing to invest time in a lover. That my current and only lover was multi colored, overwrought with weeds and often a challenge to tame made no difference to me. My lover, my garden had depth, passion and proved an enlivened challenge daily.

No, every midsummer, since the first one I heard him. He spoke to me, the wind his voice and his hand, allowing me to experience his caress, voice second hand. No—that was wrong-- he spoke directly to me, as I lay on my blanket and watched the sky shift from blue to black, from light to light dotted.

Lie still and quiet
So that I may know you
Your every breath
The rise and fall of your chest

Tonight I knew would be no different. As I settled and cleared my mind, I began to sketch the field, taking advantage of the movement of twilight, the shadows, which grew and slowly blanketed the meadow. Tonight was the night, where shade fell more slowly, but fall it did, like a lazy lover’s caress.

Lie still and quiet
So I may learn the curve
of your face while you neither
smile nor frown

Each year his voice grew louder and surer of itself. Like he had watched me, and the more he watched the closer he longed to be. Was I truly going mad? Had my isolation brought about a change, was I longing so much for male companionship, that my mind was inventing a phantom lover? Surly not, I was not unhappy with the life I had chosen. I simply wasn’t. My independence had a cost, certainly, but it was not without its benefits too.

I knew it was about suppertime, or 6 o’clock and that many people would be sitting down for their evening meal, but me, I was making a meal of the sun, a feast to the senses from my spot in the meadow. The landscape dotted with riotous color and intense sunlight.

I lay down on the blanket, to look up at the sky, my sketchbook long forgotten. I knew now, why those who dedicated themselves to Apollo, were so entranced, heat and light, so powerful and yet so potentially destructive. During the second year, convinced I was hearing Apollo’s voice, feeling the effects of his seduction, I spent the winter reading up on his cult and their distinctive practices, practices long since abandoned but still not completely erased from our collective memory.

Lie still and quiet
And let your body melt
Into the ground - - fear not
I am your fortress, surround

Feeling warm I lay there watching the clouds float in the sky and watching the birds as they danced on the evening air. The larks, the swallows and the birds of prey, the hawks, knowing that in the distance, in the forest, owls slumbered on, content to indulge in an extra long sleep, just as I was content to enjoy an extra long day.

Lie still and quiet
So that the sun may
Kiss your hair, warm your pale skin
Preparing you for my touch

That made me shiver, the third summer, this was the night when the voice had gotten louder and more sure. As if reassured that I had come back and in return, I had earned some extra bit of honesty. It is this summer now, my sixth that I feel especially called.

Lie still and quiet
So that you may hear
The song of the lark
Standing guard nearby

Lie still and quiet
As the sun begins to sink
Painting your features
With nature’s palette

Relaxed and happy, I close my eyes and every noise is louder and the sun’s kisses sweeter, warmer, more intoxicating. I think of the tea tonic I had brewed, too lazy to move closer to my basket to imbibe. Last year I had imbibed and perhaps the mixed results more than my lethargy kept me from indulging again just now. Instead I lay there content and warm, smelling the smells of the meadow and enjoying the symphony all around me.

Minutes stretched into hours and with each passing hour, the sun danced its slow ballet against the sky. The wind a heartbeat, gentle and steady, the larks song fading slowly as the light dimmed. Time ceased and carried on all at once.

Enraptured by Apollo’s majesty I floated half in the realness of the meadow and half in the dreaminess of meadow. It was as if I was free of the world I knew on every other day and totally free in the world of today, the specialness of the shortest night, when really it was any other night, but tonight it wasn’t.

Lost in my thoughts or in the absence of thoughts, I missed the new noise at first. Neither I, nor the larks noticed him, until, very magically he was there, in the flesh, standing by my blanket. I sat up, shocked and yet not. There he was, in trousers and a shirt, and while certainly a gentleman, he was wild, like my meadow. His smile the color of lace and his hair as dazzling as Apollo’s treasure, spun gold, like fall grasses, only softer, like that of spring duck down.

What was once a low whisper sang to my ears in a deep baritone:

Lie still and quiet
While my lips meet yours
The night dew’s sweetness of kisses
Wet lips pressed

Lie still and quiet
While I hold you this night,
Our hearts so close
And our breath unites

I think for a moment, I should stop, I should demand he release my hand. I should protest that I am a virtuous woman. Only I am not, I have been coming to this same clearing, every midsummer’s night, with love in my heart and now, here he is.

The affair began six years before and now, here he is, close, his warmth burning me through my dress, more real and more dangerous than Apollo’s caress. His lips firm, pressed against mine, he is of substance, not the illusion of love divine; his voice a vibration upon my skin, stronger now than when it was merely a whisper on the wind.

There are so many questions, I should ask, but I don’t. I just relax into the strength of his arms and even the larks now know that the tide has shifted and the night is like any other night before it. For out of the woods, has come a woodsman. Not a little person, not a fanciful creature from a fanciful tale, but a man of the land.

My voice is silent and I know of the choice, do I take the spur, which had come to divide my path? Do I on a lark, throw caution into the seeping darkness. Do I trust the jaunty song of the lark, to lead me to safety on the morrow’s morn?

His warm hand is around my throat, gentling me, holding me close, pressing me into his chest as the sun sinks ever deeper, ever deeper into the night. It is as the sun slips below the covers, sinks to the point where it is gone, but still pinks the sky, that I decide, that I too will sink into the night, trusting that I will once again rise with the sun.

“Kate, come along now. All will be well. Let us go, greet the evening.”

I smile down into the cradle, Evelyn’s cherubic face dazzling in the late afternoon sunlight, as she sleeps, quiet now. Miriam will watch her, feed her the evening meal. I shut the window, run down the back stairs and out into the garden and into his arms, fully prepared to lie still and quiet, as I do every night, since last year’s midsummer’s night.

“It is as natural as the air we breathe and yet noteworthy.”
I smile, for there are no words needed, the answer is the beating of my heart.

 

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