“I am not concerned with your gratitude to me. There is One Above who has a prior claim.”

The girl murmured, “How should I not know it?”

“To the ignorant it may seem that you are persevering in your sin.”

“If they know my story, ma’m, they cannot think that.”

“But they do think that. I am told they say you are looking for Satan’s sails.”

Sarah rose then and went to the window. It was early summer, and scent of syringa and lilac mingled with the blackbirds’ songs. She gazed for a moment out over that sea she was asked to deny herself, then turned back to the old lady, who sat as implacably in her armchair as the Queen on her throne.

“Do you wish me to leave, ma’m?”

Mrs. Poulteney was inwardly shocked. Once again Sarah’s simplicity took all the wind from her swelling spite. The voice, the other charms, to which she had become so addicted! Far worse, she might throw away the interest accruing to her on those heavenly ledgers. She moderated her tone.

“I wish you to show that this… person is expunged from your heart. I know that he is. But you must show it.”

“How am I to show it?”

“By walking elsewhere. By not exhibiting your shame. If for no other reason, because I request it.”

Sarah stood with bowed head, and there was a silence. But then she looked Mrs. Poulteney in the eyes and for the first time since her arrival, she gave the faintest smile.

“I will do as you wish, ma’m.”

It was, in chess terms, a shrewd sacrifice, since Mrs. Poulteney graciously went on to say that she did not want to deny her completely the benefits of the sea air and that she might on occasion walk by the sea; but not always by the sea—“and pray do not stand and stare so.” It was, in short, a bargain struck between two obsessions. Sarah’s offer to leave had let both women see the truth, in their different ways.

Sarah kept her side of the bargain, or at least that part of it that concerned the itinerary of her walks. She now went very rarely to the Cobb, though when she did, she still sometimes allowed herself to stand and stare, as on the day we have described. After all, the countryside around Lyme abounds in walks; and few of them do not give a view of the sea. If that had been all Sarah craved she had but to walk over the lawns of Marlborough House.

Mrs. Fairley, then, had a poor time of it for many months. No occasion on which the stopping and staring took place was omitted; but they were not frequent, and Sarah had by this time acquired a kind of ascendancy of suffering over Mrs. Poulteney that saved her from any serious criticism. And after all, as the spy and the mistress often reminded each other, poor “Tragedy” was mad.

You will no doubt have guessed the truth: that she was far less mad than she seemed… or at least not mad in the way that was generally supposed. Her exhibition of her shame had a kind of purpose; and people with purposes know when they have been sufficiently attained and can be allowed to rest in abeyance for a while.

But one day, not a fortnight before the beginning of my story, Mrs. Fairley had come to Mrs. Poulteney with her creaking stays and the face of one about to announce the death of a close friend.

“I have something unhappy to communicate, ma’m.”

This phrase had become as familiar to Mrs. Poulteney as a storm cone to a fisherman; but she observed convention.

“It cannot concern Miss Woodruff?”

“Would that it did not, ma’m.” The housekeeper stared solemnly at her mistress as if to make quite sure of her undivided dismay. “But I fear it is my duty to tell you.”

“We must never fear what is our duty.”

“No, ma’m.”

Still the mouth remained clamped shut; and a third party might well have wondered what horror could be coming. Nothing less than dancing naked on the altar of the parish church would have seemed adequate.

“She has taken to walking, ma’m, on Ware Commons.”

Such an anticlimax! Yet Mrs. Poulteney seemed not to think so. Indeed her mouth did something extraordinary. It fell open.

10

There runs, between Lyme Regis and Axmouth six miles to the west, one of the strangest coastal landscapes in Southern England. From the air it is not very striking; one notes merely that whereas elsewhere on the coast the fields run to the cliff edge, here they stop a mile or so short of it. The cultivated chequer of green and red-brown breaks, with a kind of joyous undiscipline, into a dark cascade of trees and undergrowth. There are no roofs. If one flies low enough one can see that the terrain is very abrupt, cut by deep chasms and accented by strange bluffs and towers of chalk and flint, which loom over the lush foliage around them like the walls of ruined castles. From the air… but on foot this seemingly unimportant wilderness gains a strange extension. People have been lost in it for hours, and cannot believe, when they see on the map where they were lost, that their sense of isolation—and if the weather be bad, desolation—could have seemed so great.

The Undercliff—for this land is really the mile-long slope caused by the erosion of the ancient vertical cliff face—is very steep. Flat places are as rare as visitors in it. But this steepness in effect tilts it, and its vegetation, towards the sun; and it is this fact, together with the water from the countless springs that have caused the erosion, that lends the area its botanical strangeness—its wild arbutus and ilex and other trees rarely seen growing in England; its enormous ashes and beeches; its green Brazilian chasms choked with ivy and the liana of wild clematis; its bracken that grows seven, eight feet tall; its flowers that bloom a month earlier than anywhere else in the district. In summer it is the nearest this country can offer to a tropical jungle. It has also, like all land that has never been worked or lived on by man, its mysteries, its shadows, its dangers—only too literal ones geologically, since there are crevices and sudden falls that can bring disaster, and in places where a man with a broken leg could shout all week and not be heard. Strange as it may seem, it was slightly less solitary a hundred years ago than it is today. There is not a single cottage in the Undercliff now; in 1867 there were several, lived in by gamekeepers, woodmen, a pigherd or two. The roedeer, sure proof of abundant solitude, then must have passed less peaceful days. Now the Undercliff has reverted to a state of total wildness. The cottage walls have crumbled into ivied stumps, the old branch paths have gone; no car road goes near it, the one remaining track that traverses it is often impassable. And it is so by Act of Parliament: a national nature reserve. Not all is lost to expedience.

It was this place, an English Garden of Eden on such a day as March 29th, 1867, that Charles had entered when he had climbed the path from the shore at Pinhay Bay; and it was this same place whose eastern half was called Ware Commons.

When Charles had quenched his thirst and cooled his brow with his wetted handkerchief he began to look seriously around him. Or at least he tried to look seriously around him; but the little slope on which he found himself, the prospect before him, the sounds, the scents, the unalloyed wildness of growth and burgeoning fertility, forced him into anti-science. The ground about him was studded gold and pale yellow with celandines and primroses and banked by the bridal white of densely blossoming sloe; where jubilantly green-tipped elders shaded the mossy banks of the little brook he had drunk from were clusters of moschatel and woodsorrel, most delicate of English spring flowers. Higher up the slope he saw the white heads of anemones, and beyond them deep green drifts of bluebell leaves. A distant woodpecker drummed in the branches of some high tree, and bullfinches whistled quietly over his head; newly arrived chiffchaffs and willow warblers sang in every bush and treetop. When he turned he saw the blue sea, now washing far below; and the whole extent of Lyme Bay reaching round, diminishing cliffs that dropped into the endless yellow saber of the Chesil Bank, whose remote tip touched that strange English Gibraltar, Portland Bill, a thin gray shadow wedged between azures.