Yet there had remained locally a feeling that Ware Commons was public property. Poachers slunk in less guiltily than elsewhere after the pheasants and rabbits; one day it was discovered, horror of horrors, that a gang of gypsies had been living there, encamped in a hidden dell, for nobody knew how many months. These outcasts were promptly cast out; but the memory of their presence remained, and became entangled with that of a child who had disappeared about the same time from a nearby village. It was—forgive the pun—common knowledge that the gypsies had taken her, and thrown her into a rabbit stew, and buried her bones. Gypsies were not English; and therefore almost certain to be cannibals.
But the most serious accusation against Ware Commons had to do with far worse infamy: though it never bore that familiar rural name, the cart track to the Dairy and beyond to the wooded common was a de facto Lover’s Lane. It drew courting couples every summer. There was the pretext of a bowl of milk at the Dairy; and many inviting little paths, as one returned, led up into the shielding bracken and hawthorn coverts.
That running sore was bad enough; a deeper darkness still existed. There was an antediluvian tradition (much older than Shakespeare) that on Midsummer’s Night young people should go with lanterns, and a fiddler, and a keg or two of cider, to a patch of turf known as Donkey’s Green in the heart of the woods and there celebrate the solstice with dancing. Some said that after midnight more reeling than dancing took place; and the more draconian claimed that there was very little of either, but a great deal of something else.
Scientific agriculture, in the form of myxomatosis, has only very recently lost us the Green forever, but the custom itself lapsed in relation to the lapse in sexual mores. It is many years since anything but fox or badger cubs tumbled over Donkey’s Green on Midsummer’s Night. But it was not so in 1867.
Indeed, only a year before, a committee of ladies, generated by Mrs. Poulteney, had pressed the civic authorities to have the track gated, fenced and closed. But more democratic voices prevailed. The public right of way must be left sacrosanct; and there were even some disgusting sensualists among the Councilors who argued that a walk to the Dairy was an innocent pleasure; and the Donkey’s Green Ball no more than an annual jape. But it is sufficient to say that among the more respectable townsfolk one had only to speak of a boy or a girl as “one of the Ware Commons kind” to tar them for life. The boy must thenceforth be a satyr; and the girl, a hedge-prostitute.
Sarah therefore found Mrs. Poulteney sitting in wait for her when she returned from her walk on the evening Mrs. Fairley had so nobly forced herself to do her duty. I said “in wait”; but “in state” would have been a more appropriate term. Sarah appeared in the private drawing room for the evening Bible-reading, and found herself as if faced with the muzzle of a cannon. It was very clear that any moment Mrs. Poulteney might go off, and with a very loud bang indeed.
Sarah went towards the lectern in the corner of the room, where the large “family” Bible—not what you may think of as a family Bible, but one from which certain inexplicable errors of taste in the Holy Writ (such as the Song of Solomon) had been piously excised—lay in its off-duty hours. But she saw that all was not well.
“Is something wrong, Mrs. Poulteney?”
“Something is very wrong,” said the abbess. “I have been told something I can hardly believe.”
“To do with me?”
“I should never have listened to the doctor. I should have listened to the dictates of my own common sense.”
“What have I done?”
“I do not think you are mad at all. You are a cunning, wicked creature. You know very well what you have done.”
“I will swear on the Bible—”
But Mrs. Poulteney gave her a look of indignation. “You will do nothing of the sort! That is blasphemy.”
Sarah came forward, and stood in front of her mistress. “I must insist on knowing of what I am accused.” Mrs. Poulteney told her.
To her amazement Sarah showed not the least sign of shame.
“But what is the sin in walking on Ware Commons?”
‘The sin! You, a young woman, alone, in such a place!”
“But ma’m, it is nothing but a large wood.”
“I know very well what it is. And what goes on there. And the sort of person who frequents it.”
“No one frequents it. That is why I go there—to be alone.”
“Do you contradict me, miss! Am I not to know what I speak of?”
The first simple fact was that Mrs. Poulteney had never set eyes on Ware Commons, even from a distance, since it was out of sight of any carriage road. The second simple fact is that she was an opium-addict—but before you think I am wildly sacrificing plausibility to sensation, let me quickly add that she did not know it. What we call opium she called laudanum. A shrewd, if blasphemous, doctor of the time called it Our-Lordanum, since many a nineteenth-century lady—and less, for the medicine was cheap enough (in the form of Godfrey’s Cordial) to help all classes get through that black night of womankind—sipped it a good deal more frequently than Communion wine. It was, in short, a very near equivalent of our own age’s sedative pills. Why Mrs. Poulteney should have been an inhabitant of the Victorian valley of the dolls we need not inquire, but it is to the point that laudanum, as Coleridge once discovered, gives vivid dreams.
I cannot imagine what Bosch-like picture of Ware Commons Mrs. Poulteney had built up over the years; what satanic orgies she divined behind every tree, what French abominations under every leaf. But I think we may safely say that it had become the objective correlative of all that went on in her own subconscious.
Her outburst reduced both herself and Sarah to silence.
Having discharged, Mrs. Poulteney began to change her tack.
“You have distressed me deeply.”
“But how was I to tell? I am not to go to the sea. Very well, I don’t go to the sea. I wish for solitude. That is all. That is not a sin. I will not be called a sinner for that.”
“Have you never heard speak of Ware Commons?”
“As a place of the kind you imply—never.”
Mrs. Poulteney looked somewhat abashed then before the girl’s indignation. She recalled that Sarah had not lived in Lyme until recently; and that she could therefore, just conceivably, be ignorant of the obloquy she was inviting.
“Very well. But let it be plainly understood. I permit no one in my employ to go or to be seen near that place. You will confine your walks to where it is seemly. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes. I am to walk in the paths of righteousness.” For one appalling moment Mrs. Poulteney thought she had been the subject of a sarcasm; but Sarah’s eyes were solemnly down, as if she had been pronouncing sentence on herself; and righteousness were synonymous with suffering.
“Then let us hear no more of this foolishness. I do this for your own good.”
Sarah murmured, “I know.” Then, “I thank you, ma’m.”
No more was said. She turned to the Bible and read the passage Mrs. Poulteney had marked. It was the same one as she had chosen for that first interview—Psalm 119: “Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.” Sarah read in a very subdued voice, seemingly without emotion. The old woman sat facing the dark shadows at the far end of the room; like some pagan idol she looked, oblivious of the blood sacrifice her pitiless stone face demanded.
Later that night Sarah might have been seen—though I cannot think by whom, unless a passing owl—standing at the open window of her unlit bedroom. The house was silent, and the town as well, for people went to bed by nine in those days before electricity and television. It was now one o’clock. Sarah was in her nightgown, with her hair loose; and she was staring out to sea. A distant lantern winked faintly on the black waters out towards Portland Bill, where some ship sailed towards Bridport. Sarah had seen the tiny point of light; and not given it a second thought.