Выбрать главу

& the blacksmith, a great hairy fellow who blows out his cheeks before he speaks, and strikes his knees as tho’ they were his anvil (I colour the description somewhat — all tedious here — he is a smallish fellow that reeks of beer-shops and has grey hands) will Hang for certain, as he is down for robbery, Arson, machine-breaking, and extortion. He told me he had robbed only his own shop. He sobbed in the middle point of his Deposition. A fellow sobbing is a most ungainly sight, like seeing a horse limp.

that he has nothing to say.

it aid matters and move your father to be more disposed to this legal fellow who is swollen with love for his daughter more than a Judge with muffins, if this said legal fellow rapt with speechless admiration for a certain countenance was to place his spectacles firmly on his nose — and dip his pen — and commiserate whole-heartedly with said paternal being in his mercantile misfortune?

no answer to this Charge.

ing the sole path, as the said legal fellow sees it, out of anguish and sobs and into illumination namely that glittering Paradise of unearthly delights namely betrothal to said counten

hedging in Little Hangy, by the crab-apple. I saw the Mob come over the crest towards me & I thought it was Whitsun, for they were merry & dressed in their best cloathes & wore ribands. They broke the hedge in many places. Some of them came up to me. I asked them why it was Whitsun now, & where was the feast

I merely blackly gloom my days away to an attenuated end — forever yearning — in the Exile, as it were, of love? No more of this. The Horse proceeds upon the hill in all its creamy glory with men about it like flies, tho’ this horse cannot flick its mane. There is a frosty glistening to it of a morning and when the mist settles of a late afternoon I almost think it looms like a spectre, like some ideal mount searching for its rider

I read the Riot Act to the assembled Mob. Upon perceiving the riotousness of the said persons to be unabated, I returned immediately to the House, to await the said force of Yeomanry Cavalry. The force came at about eight o’clock. It was fully light by then and the force proceeded to position itself in the woods behind the Doric Temple as it had been ascertained that the Mob were feloniously intent on causing destruction to my own Household,

most tedious supper, announced by a gong, and a gurgle in the throat from the housekeeper, who does not speak, and has a chin mottled in the pattern of a leaf — as if one has fallen thereupon, and sunk in long ago. The Squire, when intoxicated, glares across the dining-table as if intent on finding in one’s waistcoat the horizon that might settle him, and his voice has no need of a speaking-trumpet were it to be issuing instructions on a battlefield. He has eyes like a cotter’s windows under thatch — suspicious, yet promising warmth that on further exploration — turns to a chill — and grows damper by the long hour, until it altogether hisses into a kind of well, dark and dismal. Yet on the morrow he will be in a crumpled cheerfulness, and all bustle — if the weather allows it. His White Horse has turned him boyish, tho’ he powders his head in the fashion of his portraits. Several of the farmers here wear pigtails still. Yesterday I visited the House (a stiff and lofty pile) to Examine (if that term might be used of the discourse) his Lordship Chalmers. His ears are uncommonly large, and his nose looks at you in the place of eyes. He has a thumb-joint that clicks alarmingly in the spaces between words, like a fowling-piece. But I don’t think him a bad fellow.

saith: he does not answer the Charge for it will not stand

& we went riding. The rides here are thro’ beech. Beech and more beech, and then downland — nay more more & more downland. The whole world might be composed of turf & nibbling sheep, were one to be as these peasants, and not venture forth enough miles to break the downland spell — and see happy clay, and our sweet Thames. There is a dreadful Rollingness to these wretched minds, that need a right-angle sorely to shake them up. I am not a bad rider over gates and hedgerows, tho’ I have never taken horse out of London before. I stumbled only once — in an infernal patch of briar and mud that nearly had me threwn headlong. How does Matlock, sweetest Emily? The Special Commission arrives in a fortnight: I must have all the Briefs ready. We hear report that Field Marshal the Duke of W. himself will sit with the Judges, as if their scarlet will not terrify these wretches enough without that great Nose. They shall be dealt with in batches of twenty, or the assize will last till Doomsday — or certainly over Christmas. Alas — still a hundred remain. I must haste them on — they persevere in telling one every twist and turn, as if they are embarked on a yarn of the sea — of marvellous Adventure, such as I would hear from my father as a boy. One has to cut these yards of fustian cloth, as a tailor for a dwarf. A few, I am grateful to report (these the hardest & most guilty) say nothing, and set their jaws (tho’ their hands tremble). Sometimes I am in a fog of accent, that is made blinder by the majority of the labourers having severe catarrh, arising (or so I am informed by the Doctor, a bristly young fellow) from the draughts in their dwellings, or the wet straw they reportedly sleep on — but whatever the origin of the Complaint, it causes their accents to sound as tho’ slinking past — sunk into themselves, as it were — a quality that makes interpretation a deal more difficult. I have a man beside me, a local fellow of some education (he writes verse) — who lights my way by Translation. So the days pass without you, sweetest Emily.

I do not know who carried the shillings

My regards to your Uncle, & Mrs Hawkes.

Lancelot Heddin of Ulverton labourer aged 27 who was apprehended at Ulverton House on the morning of the 22nd of November and has been discharged on his own recognizance to appear and answer at the Sessions — stated on his Examination on the 5th of December as follows

not a carpet or rug in the place: all is beeswaxed floors and the whole resounds like a perpetual thunderstorm when persons are moving about. The distance the Examinants must cross to stand before my table is a decent one, and I must wait until the echoes of their approach have taken leave of the room (by dint of not finding another wooden surface to bounce off) before I open my mouth at all. It is a very old house, with a groaning flight of stairs too dark — and grim diamond-paned windows — and more beam than is good for the constitution of one’s pate. There is a smell of stabies throughout. I will soon be munching oats. Please to send more water-colourings — to see the brush of your fair hand in a blue wash of sky is to see Heaven through a sunlit cloud

forced the unwilling. We passed the Gore and into Gumbledons Bush

Horse — who be truly very large — is now complete, barring the eye, which is to be made of smashed glass (Norcoat’s servants have been breaking drained Port and Brandy bottles against the walls all morning, an infernal clatter that has set my teeth on edge) — I find the idea vulgar, but appropriately reflective of the progenitor’s thirst as much as soul. I had to Examine a beggar this morning, who used foul language against the Squire in his capacity as justice of the Peace, upon which insult our good fellow clapped the bad fellow (who stinks unmercifully) in the Cage, or Blind House — this being a place as small and low as those confined there, off the aforementioned Square — dating from the halcyon days when this settlement was sufficiently swaggering to have its own penal dwelling. The poor fellow being almost blind, I could not draw a word of sense out of him, but only a kind of self-pitying jabber. If he had not been released — he would not now be up for robbery and extortion: he was unlocked by the Rioters. That is an anecdote for your uncle’s supper-table, a perfect Exemplum to puff his melancholy. How does his illness fare? If my readings of judicial oratory (I know Lord Erskine almost by heart) has served any purpose, it would be to move your uncle to spill his doubloons out of his codicil as your beauty evidently has not. ‘I say by G — d that man is a ruffian who shall, after this, presume to build upon such honest artless conduct as an evidence of guilt.’ I have been practising my Lord Erskine in the mirror. I will solicit with the eye and the hand & the voice and woo him from your father. ‘Such, my lords, is the case.’ I am not very good at tones of thunder, however: my frame buckles frigh