The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  Then Tom sang for a while – he had only two notes, like a cuckoo – the most insulting and vulgar tunes he could dream up. We started a fancy in which we had beef every day and pheasants and duck for supper, and our mouths began to water, and our stomachs popple like a pan of water on a stove, though we had full six hours to go before the lunch. We watched a heron stand guard at the river and wished ourselves half as talented at spearing a fish. Tom threw stones but could not distract the bird.

  I spied Susie at the moment the procession began, when twelve men carried a stage decorated with laurels and roses and began solemnly to parade, carrying Susie Spencer, atop the platform, all dressed up with a crown of fruit on her head and a wheatsheaf in her hand and a stone lion at her feet, and followed by a band playing ‘Rule, Britannia’. The dress clung to her witching form. I felt my face turn red as flame. There was nowhere to hide.

  Her dress was flimsy, made of some kind of pale cloth, and Susie sat straight as a pound of candles, then waving, then laughing, then shouting to the crowd. After I’d done with blushing I fell to laughing as I didn’t know what else to do. Tom dug me in the ribs and tried every kind of coarse word on me, to see the blood rise in my face again. (Tom’s jokes was like a pack of cards: always the same but told in a different turn.) He said it was his ‘favourite spectacle’ to see me redden – better than all the fireworks and flags of the day itself. Tom said, with a sideways glance at me, that on the other hand she was indeed a fine-looking lass and he wished he could reach and knock that crown of fruit off Susie Spencer’s dark head and have a nibble.

  ‘I’ll knock your head to the ground!’ I shouted, and Tom and me locked arms around each other’s heads and scuffled, though only in fun, and the singing parade trooped passed us. Pa was with the crowd, full of strong ale and merriment. Susie was carried off, high above us. Nothing could have better expressed how out of reach she was to me. And yet I followed, dodging after her, elbowing others in the crowd, shouting, leaping and ducking when my view of her fruit-crowned curls was threatened. The smell of tobacco smoke was the only thing powerful enough to distract me from pursuit of her. We filled the clay pipe and someone at another stall offered Tom and me a tot of Tant Brown’s ale. The tables – set out along the Market Square – groaned with food but you had to fight to get it.

  ‘What sort of a lass sets herself up as Britannia?’ Tom mocked, his mouth now full of hot mutton. He was being Tom; that is to say, provoking. The only answer could be ‘a popinjay’, or ‘one above her station’, so I said nothing, filling my own mouth with the plum pudding that Henry Rickwood’s wife handed me. Struck me that Tom was teasing me for cocksuredness in picking a beauty like Susie Spencer, because surely she hadn’t set herself up as Britannia, but been chosen. Tom contented himself with plainer girls, or ones who charged a half-shilling and was within his reach. Was a rare novelty to feel myself envied by Tom. So I swaggered across the Market Square back towards the cathedral, trailing behind the band members in their poke bonnets who was banging their drums and singing ‘Rule, Britannia’, hoping to get another glimpse.

  Seemed her stint of duty was soon finished because suddenly she was shoving her way towards me in the Market Square through the crowd, still in her flimsy dress but with a blue cloak tossed over it. She waved and grabbed my arm and – here I confess, I looked behind me, as if to see some other lucky chap the object of her attention.

  ‘Quick – there’s donkey racing starting down Fore Hill,’ and as if she was but a school-friend or perhaps a sister, she took my hand. Little could she have guessed the chill that ran from her touch, and struck directly at my heart. I felt it hit like a bell.

  Such foolishness . . . Why choose one lass over another? Until that moment I’d not fancied myself a romantic at all, but only a Beamiss with brains and more book learning than was common in Littleport, a stubborn streak, a love for birds and a resolute temper. Wasn’t prone to self-reflection but the matter of the suddenness and the stuck-fastedness of the choosing of a love-object: that interested me wonderfully.

  Was more than beauty, though, that drew me. Something in the way she tore at things, so heartily, pleased me too. All was impulse, loudness and vitality with her. When the donkeys lined up and was ready to race Susie shrieked with laughter. She ventured a bet at once, tossing her hair around her shoulders and shrieking again more loudly still, when I admitted I had not the shilling she needed. Kept seeing her as she’d first appeared as Britannia – held aloft above the crowd, queenly and magnificent, but giggling wildly behind her hands and then foolishly waving, and accepting all laurels and praise without a simper, more of a slapping of her thigh. To any question she had an impertinent answer – to my timid ‘What would your father say if he saw us?’ she laughed and pushed me in the shoulder and told me, ‘Bear up! Be more gallant!’

  Amused myself then, imagining what sport Tom would make of me weighing her so thoughtfully. His view (to know it I need not trouble myself to ask him) would be that it was an animal feeling, nothing more than what the bull feels for the cow, that was drawing me to Susie Spencer. Pa no doubt would say the same. Had Pa ever felt this way for my stout, grey-haired mother, nowadays crooked from pricking willows and half blind from her sewing? What did people marry or couple for in the Fens? To bring children into the world and to be companions to one another in old age. That much I could fancy. But to feel anything more – to feel warm affection like this, or this heated, gathering feeling, this wildness that swept over me whenever I looked now at Susie and her lively, hazel eyes or heard that lusty, ridiculous laugh – did everyone feel this?

  Susie held my hand throughout the races. More clutched it than held it, truth be told, and I began to wonder if she knew she did, or was it to her some warm object to be squeezed in excitement whenever her chosen donkey came close to winning?

  When the poor beast straggled in and was declared the winner she leaped on her wooden bench and jumped up and down on it, utterly heedless of the people to the left and the right of her, and the ways that her dress became transparent, allowing me full appreciation of her lovely jiggling form beneath. She swept my hand right up to her mouth to kiss it.

  Then the crowd bellowed and more fireworks was fired and the scent of smoke and gunpowder filled our nostrils and it seemed as if the whole of Ely celebrated with me. She never left my side the rest of the evening. She flung herself into dancing all the reels and country dances with me, screeching anew at my poor technique, she shared a pot of ale with me, she showed no shame when her friends spied us together, nor when Tom came threatening more mischief. The miraculous thought began to shape: that luck had just dealt me the best hand. Susie Spencer was as smitten with me as I with her.

  And there was more. Later that night I learned that Tom’s swaggering knowledge of the fair sex was more limited than we knew, because he’d always assured me that they none of them had interest in letting you get your tarse out, except to laugh at it. His assurances – that only if you showed them a coin would a lass even pretend an interest (an interest she didn’t truly feel) and that ‘Farmer Spencer’s daughter’, Susie, would be ‘tight as a drum’ to unpick – proved untrue.

  We lay ourselves under the stars near the area we called the island of Babylon, as the evening celebrations rolled on. We could hear the voices from another party in a boatwright’s shop, and the clacking of the geese, and felt the slide of their droppings everywhere underfoot as we picked our way down to the black river. The lanterns along the bank was full bright, glazing the water with fire, and we thought we’d be lucky to find a darkness to hide us, so we climbed into a boat, untied it, and pushed it out with only the softest of splashes to betray us.

  And there on the cold wooden base, with the fireworks and the fires of Ely blazing against the cathedral, a glorious sight, more lovely than ever I saw, Susie Spencer showed me what true joy there is, in the warm flesh under her skirts and the sweet pleasure when she gathered me in her arms and kissed my ears and my thr
oat heartily and made us ply one another fiercely with all our might and main, all the time with my mouth hot on hers and my hands on the firm flesh of her buttocks, acting for all the world as if we was both desperate, but she wouldn’t let my tarse find its home; she would hold it and prevent it as it knocked to gain entry, she whispered that this would be painful for her and could wait for another day and she showed me that even her touch, her hand, would make my pizzle leap and play, and we went on like this, and she took my fingers and guided them to a wet dark place, until we was both gathered up in an approaching sweetness and then just as suddenly, shockingly, was spent; and then she called me her darling, and whispered that never had another made her blood rise like that and that if I would only be hers I would be surprised.

  ‘You will collect frequently, Willie Beamiss,’ she said, ‘you will rise up.’

  What a girl was Susie Spencer! A girl like no other. I knew I was in love now for ever, for how could another ever win my heart with an explosive start like that? And if Tom was to be believed about a feminine nature and aversion to passionate feelings, Susie Spencer’s talent for joy was a rare gift indeed.

  Didn’t have to wait too long before coupling with Susie again. Later that summer when Pa’s rheumatics was playing up it fell to me to make enough to buy bread for the family so was working hard in the fields, loading hay, forked and spread on the field onto a cart and in between times beating the flies from the horse’s arse with a flail. Sweat poured down my back and my hands steamed raw and red from the hauling; Tom was at a short distance from me, doing his own pitchforking, and further still, at tidy distances the length of the field, could be seen the dotted figures of a dozen boys of my childhood. Rowed up, we called this. The Fens is divided with ditches to mark them, not hedges, and when we needed to relieve ourselves we strode over to these, mindful that if we was caught luxuriating in this necessity by the farmer we would have our wages docked. I often found myself ruminating on what used to be beneath the fen. I knew the banks of some dykes at fen borders was made by the Romans and the legions of that army passed by my fancy on many an occasion.

  The task was to make a big heap of hay on each cart and, after a time, despite the tiredness, and the aching in your back, there was satisfaction in seeing the mound of hay grow and smelling everywhere the heat of it and feeling the buzz of flies in your ears and the hay-dust clogging your nostrils; if we had not been so empty in our bellies and so longing for our docky we might have been charmed by the sun and sweat into some kind of delirium. I looked up, in this exalted state: there she was, dazzling her way towards me. Seems her father had sent her on some errand.

  Naturally my face flamed redder than a setting sun and Tom was not slow in noticing it. I was clownish and shy and could do nothing to hide it. Susie gave some message to the oldest member of our crew – man named Cornwall – and seeing her point with one slender outstretched arm towards her father’s barns at Prickwillow a hot liquid seemed to flow suddenly through my veins – as if the memory of her flesh under my hands was the most fiery of liquors still firing up my blood. Picked up my fork and threw myself into the work so that I could look down at the ground and not meet a soul’s eyes. Tom stared queerly at me but quit his beefing and chiding me, and Susie turned on her heel, picking her way through the hay still lying over the ground in a way that reminded me at once of her dainty way of picking through the goose-shit that night.

  Her father’s barns at Prickwillow was away over the other side of the fen. There was a row of black wind-pumps on the horizon. Once she’d put some distance between us, I looked left and right about me, and then followed her. It wouldn’t do for the others to see how keen I was; nor her father either. I reached the rickyard at Prickwillow and gasped aloud at the stacks of wheat – two, each forty paces long, with a lane between them. Suddenly, from behind one, there appears Susie.

  Her face is flushed. She has a guilty look and I feel my tarse harden at once, thinking on its own, obeying some law of nature I’ve no control over. When she comes close and kisses me and looks about her, she laughs at this (putting her hand in my britches, boldly fetching it, like it was some muscled eel) but then she pushes at it, calling it naughty.

  ‘There’s no time for that, Willie Beamiss. I told you you’d rise up – but not like that!’

  And there’s something she says she wants to show me. ‘Look to the house. That sign means a curtain is drawn; Father takes a nap at this time of day after rising at crack of dawn. Here would be the perfect time to bring your friend – the saucy one – and look, did you ever see such ricks as these? There are rats and mice in here, feasting, while your families starve! You could come with a horse and I would distract Father—’

  I sweep her up in my arms then, kiss her all over her neck and face, and then I put my hand over her mouth. I’m almost crying, so great is my joy at discovering that Susie Spencer would risk all, for me, like this.

  ‘I’d hang for it,’ I tell her. ‘We all would. Don’t you think the fancy tempts us? Look at the young stock – the bullocks and heifers. They have more meat on them than we do!’

  I spin around in the rickyard, fearful of her father’s return, or overhearing us, out here in the sun like this, pressing her against me, kissing her feverishly. Daring my mouth further and further down her neck, pulling at her dress to kiss at the brown freckled skin of her breasts.

  She ruffles a hand in my hair, tries to lift my head from my intense task, saying: ‘There’s turf. Look at that. Father has piles of turf too, there for the digging, some ten – fifteen – twenty feet of it. That could warm your cottage. I’ve seen how you live – your ma is like a sow with the pigs all pulling her to pieces – you could dig it out and take that turf to market and sell it for sixty pounds an acre.’

  In between kisses I say: ‘But what will it help anyone, any of them, Ma, me, you, if I’m thrown onto the Hulk and sent to Botany Bay?’

  Susie’s eyes fill with tears. She takes me by the hand to a spot behind the hayrick and begins pulling at her stockings, ruffling up her skirt.

  ‘Come, be quick. I’ll let you.’ She lies back on the straw-specked ground, and licks her fingers and, to my astonishment, begins rubbing at herself under her skirts, saying, ‘This will hurry things along. You’re a good man, Willie Beamiss. An honest man – who would have thought it? I think I love you. Ten minutes. Can you manage it in ten?’

  Needless to report, I managed it in five. I exploded in her like a dam bursting. She laughed at me and told me she would teach me ways to make it last longer but I was proud of my work as a lover, I thought I couldn’t be bettered. Time was short. I was back in the fen with the others before our docky break was over, with only the smell of me and the stain on my britches to hint at what had happened.

  Susie asked me to meet her at one of the wind-pumps, she told me which one, she pointed it out, the black-winged mill, the one slightly larger than the rest – Black Wings, she called it, and said she’d be there any night or morning – she’d sleep there most nights under pretence of taking care of the pump, she often did this for her father and there was a wooden cot there for the purpose. I could come to her late at night and leave early morning before the rest was up, if I could arrange it.

  ‘There’s not a man alive could stop me,’ I said.

  So that was where we met and conducted our loving, and that was where I discovered the wonders of the body of Susie Spencer and the thousand different ways she could please me, and I her. I soon learned to smell that sedge that grew around the mill and stiffen automatically in my britches, before I’d even reached her, the way a dog begins slavering as soon as you put the meat in the bowl. The rush of wind in the sails, the creak of the wheel turning, the grinding of the cogs, the paddle hitting the wooden box that covered it and the splash of water as it was scooped up, and thrown from the dyke to the lode; the moaning and sighing of Susie Spencer. Those became the sounds and flavours of my days, and the happiest ones I’d known. I might b
e starved and skinny but I had a great youth and vitality where Susie was concerned. I never tired of her. If she suggested horseback mode or facing away from me or putting her mouth around me or me climbing on her back and crawling around on all fours, bucking and behaving like animals, or any new approach, I was always willing, if surprised. I never knew a girl could have such an interest; such a craving after life and variety as my Susie had.

  One day the inevitable happened and her father appeared among the line of black painted wind-pumps on the horizon just as the sun was flushing the Fens pink. The dog with him was barking, we knew he would run to our platform high inside the framework of the mill and give us away. We lay barely breathing, and then Susie said the oddest thing.

  ‘Pa would turn a blind eye, you know. He’s not the bad sort. That’s why I tried to show you the wheat. Pa’s not like Farmer Martin or the landowners. The Bishop of Ely, or Reverend Vachell. This is just a small tenant farm – he works hard too, nobody granted it to him.’

  This was news to me. A farmer was a farmer, someone who had land when we didn’t, someone far above us. I hadn’t truly thought about the shades and degrees of farmering until then. It was an important lesson. Have told you it was Pa who was the seditious one. I was only ever a reluctant, one might say, accidental rebel. At heart I was tender; that was the character and nature of me, and too late by then to change it.

  Days did not pass with my benefit in mind, however, and my entering the lists of Cupid made no difference to the way my life in the Fens continued. No. Not long after the Peace celebrations Old Boney was up to his tricks again and we was back at war with France, as some of us readily predicted. And more soldiers and seamen was needed; this would bring us better fortunes than farm labouring, Tom was told in the Globe. Also how the French had reached Northampton, but even he was not fool enough to believe that.