This Other Eden Read online

  By the Author

  Kings Ex

  In The Midst of Earth

  The Peppersalt Land

  The Runaway's Diary

  Hatter Fox

  The Conjurers

  Bledding Sorrow

  This Other Eden

  By Marily Harris

  Copyright © 1977 by Marilyn Harris

  All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without permission. Pubhshed simultaneously in Canada by Longman Canada Limited, Toronto.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  For Judge and Karen and John

  The secret of the entire world is whispered here at Eden Point in the tumultuous union of sea and land, cliff and air.

  And for a very brief space, every heart is touched and melted with the sense of things divinely fair, immeasurably great, immeasurably sad. . . .

  —From the diary of

  James Eden, First Baron

  by tenure of Eden Castle,

  written in 1232.

  Eden Castle

  North Devon,

  England

  1790

  The Public Whipping of Miss Marianne Locke, age sixteen, was scheduled to take place at seven in the morning on Friday, August the third, 1790, in the inner courtyard of Eden Castle, situated on the North Devon coast at the exact point where the Bristol Channel prepares to join the turbulence of the Atlantic Ocean.

  The cliffs veered sharply southward from this point, fronting the unbroken force of the Atlantic winds and waves, and were shattered by them into a grim array of jutting points. Here the gales and ocean were supreme.

  But atop the cliffs of Eden Point, supremacy resided in human hands, and the command for the Public Whipping, considered barbaric for the civilized late eighteenth century, had been issued by Thomas Eden himself, Thirteenth Baron and Fifth Earl. Thomas Eden possessed the power and had suffered the outrage, so on a hot humid Thursday afternoon he shouted at Ragland, his male servant, "Whip her!" As his anger showed no signs of abating, he added, "Publicly! And all those who fail to witness it may also find themselves in her unfortunate position!"

  The whipping had been announced to all the tenants and fishermen of Mortemouth, the village that sat at sea level at the foot of Eden Castle. These people were totally dependent upon the Lord of the Castle and his twenty thousand acres of rich sheep-grazing land.

  The prisoner was led by Ragland into the Keep through the Norman doorway. She found herself imprisoned in a small, windowless room, barely able to breathe. She waited for Ragland to say something to her, acknowledging the many evenings he had shared a pint with her father in their cottage in Mortemouth.

  But the old man refused to look at her. He kept his hand over his nose to shield against the poisonous vapors of the charnel house, and he kept his white head bowed. Only when he was closing the heavy door behind him did she hear him mutter, "Keep close to the floor, Marianne. There's life there. The breathing's easier."

  The door closed, the bolts slid into place. In terror and despair, she hurled herself at the solid oak barrier. Slowly sensing her predicament, she sank to the floor, still struggling for breath.

  A series of almost invisible shudders passed over her, over her mouth, and down into her shoulders and arms. A spasm of waking moved upward from some deep-shocked realm. She closed her eyes and then opened them. Instantly she tried to get to her feet, but fell back into a pose of annihilation.

  From this stunned state, she observed her surroundings, a small room of solid stone. On the floor nearby was a pile of straw reeking with the odor of urine and feces. And there, in the far comer, the pit itself, the deep hole of the charnel well descending thirty feet to the level of the courtyard outside, the place where the rotting carcasses of cattle and sheep were thrown, from which the stench of putrefaction arose to asphyxiate any prisoner long held in the room.

  Focusing on the hole, her face went rigid. The foul air burned her lungs, then her terror blended with a curious relief, since she had certain knowledge that she would never endure the pain and humiliation of the public whipping. She would not survive the night.

  She pressed closer to the door, still keeping her eyes on the charnel well as though it were alive. She remembered—although she did not relish gossip—about three weeks prior, shortly after she had climbed the cliff staircase to take her place in service at Eden Castle, that she had been warned by the House Warden, Dolly Wisdom, to stay away from the Keep. The serving women in the Buttery had told her a Comwellian, caught stealing sheep, had been thrown still alive down the charnel well, on top of the rotting carcasses. For a week thereafter, Marianne thought she had heard shrieks of death.

  She watched her hand ascend to her mouth, as though both belonged to someone else. She felt a long, slow convulsion in the pit of her stomach. Only at the last moment, threatened with unconsciousness, did she remember old Ragland's advice—"Keep close to the floor. There's life there." In spite of her torture, she flattened herself against the stone floor, her nose pressed against the hairline crack beneath the heavy door. It was true. She found, coming from beneath the door, a brief respite. Thus she lay with no sense of time, her body pressed against the crack.

  In an extreme act of will, she soothed herself. If the man had indeed been thrown into the well, he would blessedly be dead by now. The eyes in her back had nothing to worry about. But the flesh of her back did, for she had decided that she would survive the night, that at seven o'clock the following morning, she would still be here, that she would be led out into the inner courtyard to the whipping oak, would have her back bared, and would endure ten lashes and the greater pain of sober observance by people who had known her all her life.

  Imagining the coming ordeal was more terrifying than the resurrection of the rotting Cornwellian. Suddenly she tasted blood on her lips, the natural stress of image becoming fact. She sent her thoughts elsewhere, to the headlands along the top of Eden Point where she had run as a child, taking bread and cheese to her father at sheep-shearing time, to her roses which, by general consensus, were the prettiest in all of Mortemouth, to the grave of her dead mother in the tiny parish churchyard by the quay.

  Such thoughts produced a surprising change in her expression. From behind the fair hair fallen over graceful shoulders and slender neck framed by a crude muslin collar looked a face that was quite astonishing, not only for its beauty, but also for the strange intensity in the eyes, an appeal so gently and almost courteously denied by the mouth's civilized half-smile. Yet there was uncertainty in the face, even tentativeness, a surprising and alarming force.

  She longed for the comforting arms of her father. His agony was certainly as great as her own, as he blamed himself for her present ordeal. It had been his idea that she go into service at Eden Castle. "A good future for you, Marianne," he had said. "The only reasonable option for a young woman."

  She groaned aloud and longed to comfort him, although she knew his comforters were all around him, that the low-ceilinged cottage fairly was bursting with commiserating friends and neighbors, all dreading the ordeal of the morning as much as she.

  Her gentle features contorted. Quickly she reversed her last thought. No, not as much as she, for their backs would not be bared, nor their arms bound in tight embrace of the whipping oak. The flesh of their foreheads would not be ground into the tar-covered bark, nor their nerves and muscles resisting the cutting lash of the whip.

  The full horror of the ordeal swept over her. She made a curious sound as though she had already sustained the blows of the whip. Her arms lifted over her head. Her fingers went forward, hesitated, and trembled as if they had found the comfort of a hand in the dark. Her crying mouth tasted the grit of the stone floo
r.

  The tears continued for some time, a small indulgence, smaller comfort. Laboring under the weight of her own remorseless visualizations, she fell into a stupefied exhaustion. Outside she heard the faint deep voice of the night watchman calling, "All is well." Her tear-stained face now seemed possessed of a stubborn cataleptic calm. All was not well, not yet.

  Abruptly she lifted herself upward, first drawing a deep breath of clean air from beneath the door. Then, slowly, she crawled forward on hands and knees, as though she were a supplicant suffering some inscrutable wish for salvation, stopping at last at the very edge of the charnel well.

  She knelt, gasping for breath. The clean air from the door was depleted in her lungs. Still kneeling, she forced herself in the dying light to look over the edge and down. The features of her face set, as though convinced of this abrupt necessity. Something in her body commensurate with the weight in her mind where reason was inexact forced her to look down at the rotting liquid carcasses of cattle and sheep with stiffened legs, swollen, exploded bellies, entrails like red snakes in shimmering piles amid blood-encrusted hides. She forced herself to look closer until in the semidarkness she found it, a human hand, a human torso, a human head cradled in the burst brains of an animal, glassy eyes distended, mouth agape, frozen in a scream at the exact moment the poisonous air had suffocated him.

  Drawing back from the edge, she closed her eyes. The Cornwellian was beyond her prayers, yet she prayed anyway and her prayer was monstrous because in it there was no margin of forgiveness. For the man walking somewhere in the upper regions of Eden Castle who had put her in this place, she felt no compassion. She prayed only for the Cornwellian and for herself.

  After the prayer, she moved farther back from the edge of the charnel well. She felt a sharp pain in the pit of her stomach, the result of breathing the poisonous air. Shuddering in the double pain of poison and fury, she crawled back to the door.

  For three or four minutes she lost herself. Where she had gone, she had no idea. When she came to, she was pressed against the crack beneath the door. She did not wonder what had happened.

  She said aloud, "There is nothing in this place of which I need be afraid." For the rest of the night, she held her terror at bay with that gentle though misleading smile.

  In 1790, on the West Coast of England, to speak of castles was to speak of Eden. Seen from the coastline below, it looked like some great fortress, hewn roughly out of natural rock. Nature was taking back to herself the masses of stone reared centuries earlier. The giant walls and mighty buttresses looked as if they had been carved by wind and weather out of a solid mass, rather than wrought by human handiwork. Historically Eden had served England well, and by the end of the eighteenth century there was no reason to believe that it would not endure into eternity.

  On this sultry August evening, Thomas Eden, Thirteenth Baron and Fifth Earl, lay abed in his private chambers off the Morning Room, thinking not at all about the young girl he had imprisoned that afternoon in the charnel house cell. At forty, he was more his grandfather's son than his father's, a tall man whose face and features bore the unmistakable imprint of genes gone awry. Both strains of the unpredictable grandfather seemed to have been captured simultaneously in one unruly personality. Instead of dividing his life as his grandfather had done—forty years for dissipation and thirty years for a puritanical God, this Thomas Eden seemed to effect the change at the alarmingly rapid rate of every other week.

  In all fairness, he faced life unprepared. There had been a dazzling older brother, James, a fair, noble-hearted boy on whom both father and mother had placed their hopes for the future. Then Fate cast a contrary eye on Eden. James, in the throes of duty not only to Eden but also to England, and as head of the Militiamen of North Devon, went to fight in the unnecessary War of American Independence. He fought well and nobly, and died in the Battle of Yorktown. He was buried there, along with the hopes for the future of Eden Castle.

  Grief-stricken, both parents soon followed James to the grave. Thomas was left alone in a world he did not understand, facing responsibilities that he was ill-prepared by nature and training to meet.

  Thomas walked with a slight bend to the head as though anticipating future apprehensions. His face was a long lean oval which on certain days suffered a laborious though warranted melancholy. One feature alone spoke of the Edens and that was the mouth, which though sensuous and full, pressed too intimately close to the bony structure of the teeth. His nose was straight and even, pure Anglo-Saxon, as were his other features. But in the deep blue of the eyes it seemed another sense than sight had taken its stand beneath the flesh. On occasion and in certain indefinable moods, there was no respite from that stare, as though he had just awakened at sea without compass or anchor.

  Still, on good days, he was a kindly man, taking a considerable interest in his tenants and workers, mingling with his sheep shearers and overseers as much as one can mingle atop a white stallion. On occasion he even ventured down the side of the steep cliff to the village of Mortemouth. His father before him had created and launched a sizable fleet of fishing vessels, thus building the village's prosperity as well as his own. Those who did not work the land and tend the sheep put out to sea each morning in search of herring, grateful for their new wealth.

  During these walks through the village, Thomas usually performed with grace. But on other days he could be arrogant and exacting, lashing out against the slightest offense. He was an amateur musician, a keen sportsman, and in his younger days a halfhearted soldier. Unhappily, the semi-regal state in which he had passed the greater part of his life made few demands on his intelligence. When he visited London he made frequent company with the elder sons of George the Third, not on the whole uplifting companions. He was only vaguely aware of the world, for what mattered beyond Eden? There was some sort of trouble brewing in France, and taxes were climbing ever higher. The American conflict, which had taken the life of his older brother, eluded him altogether.

  In short, there were those who, when asked to define his basic character, would say without hesitation that he was essentially weak and intensely selfish. The next man, asked the same question, would reply, "A good man, brave, the most generous of Lords."

  In one area of his life, all were in firm agreement. His moral standards were rudimentary. During his twenties and thirties, an assortment of young women of mixed classes had been brought to the castle for his enjoyment. Not that he mistreated them. On the contrary, he treated them, one and all, like princesses, catering to their every whim, but finally tiring of them and sending them away, richer by several trunks of gowns and a few jewels.

  This dissipation took a heavy toll. It was common knowledge that no decent family would consider him as a proper suitor for a marriageable daughter, in spite of his titles and great wealth. At forty, he was still a bachelor and seemed destined to remain one.

  From the mixed passions that made up his past, out of the diversity of bloods, from the crux of almost eight hundred years of arrogant breeding, Thomas Eden had become the accumulated and single—Lord of Eden Castle.

  He was alone and lonely, but this night he was awaiting important news that would lift his spirits. In a state of semi-relaxation, he sat up, listening. There it was, old Ragland's step on the stairs. He'd been waiting all evening, waiting for word. Quickly he stood and drew the dressing gown tightly about him, stood at a position of attention as though he felt that the great past might mend a little if he bowed low enough, if he received even his manservant with humility and homage.

  Truthfully, Ragland was more than a manservant. As a boy, the old man had served Thomas' father. He now occupied a place in Thomas' life somewhere between butler, aide, adviser, and confessor. In spite of his low birth, there was a dignity and honesty about him that pleased Thomas, although unfortunately the old man's honesty had gotten him into trouble on more than one occasion.

  At the sound of a discreet knock at the door, Thomas called out in a slightly im
patient voice, "Ragland? Come in," and stepped forward to receive him.

  Ragland appeared, carrying a lantern aloft, something ferocious in his blue eyes. He knew too much to be cowed by Lord Eden. Indeed, he knew too much ever to be cowed by any mere man.

  Thomas stepped forward to greet him, taking the lantern from his hand and motioning him toward a chair. The old man was breathing heavily from the long climb. At the exact moment that Thomas invited him to rest, he also commanded him, "Speak! Is there news?"

  Ragland sat in the chair, nodded his head, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. Something about the glinting in his eye delivered the message moments before the actual words, for Thomas was already grinning when Ragland said, "The ship's arrived, milord. It's anchored off the cove of Mortemouth."

  Thomas smiled beatifically. He began waving his hands, saying, "Thank God, oh, sweet God," and abruptly he had a notion that he looked foolish in his dressing gown, shouting thank God. Now he waved his arms in distress and said, "Please, please," and stared at the floor, embarrassed.