The Opium-Eater Read online

  “There was other milk in the house, a small quantity of skimmed milk, of little value, purchased cheaply the last time her father had journeyed down to Grasmere. Agnes worried that it might spoil, even though it was kept near a cold wall. She remembered her mother telling her that a way to stop milk from turning sour was to scald it, so Agnes put the old milk in a pan and boiled it. When the skin on it cooled and thickened, she divided the milk among the children, providing their midday meal.

  “She kept peering out the window but still detected no sign of her parents. When the wind slanted the falling snow toward the cottage, she assigned the children the task of stuffing rags beneath the windows and the door to keep drifts from blowing under. She went to a corner of the kitchen where potatoes were stored in a bin, but as it was near the end of winter, few remained. She chose the two that were least spoiled, cut off the bad parts, and boiled them, providing supper. She dressed the children for bed. She led them in their prayers. She drowsed near the fire, taking care to add more peat whenever she snapped awake.”

  “I feel cold,” someone murmured.

  Others in the tavern hugged their arms and nodded their agreement.

  “On the second morning, the snowfall continued. Normally, the children might have been able to walk the several miles to Grasmere, with Agnes carrying the youngest, but the weather made that impossible. The force was too wide for them to leap over, and the narrow wooden bridge could not be crossed, as the deep snow concealed where the treacherous hole in its timbers was located. A false step would drop them into the raging, ice-cold water.

  “Agnes assured her brothers and sisters, ‘As soon as the snow stops, Mama and Papa will come back to take care of us.’ She wound the clock. She put more peat on the fire. She boiled the last of the oatmeal, of which there was so little that when she discovered a small quantity of flour, she added water and baked tiny cakes on the hearth. She persuaded the smallest children, who didn’t realize the danger, that they were having a party. Agnes even made tea, although the family was so poor and the leaves had been boiled so often that there was almost no taste.”

  “You’re making me hungry,” someone in the tavern told De Quincey.

  “After milking the cow, which gave even less than on the previous day, eleven-year-old Agnes discovered that the water in the cow’s trough was frozen. In the house, she boiled snow and carried a pail of the steaming water to the barn. She did this several times until the gathering darkness felt so rife with threats that she ran through the drifts back to the cottage, afraid that she would lose her way. She prepared the last two potatoes for supper. She put the children in their nightclothes. She led them in prayers. She went to sleep.”

  “Pray God that she didn’t let the fire go out,” someone said.

  “Indeed she did not,” De Quincey assured the crowd. “Not Agnes. She slept upright in a chair. Whenever her head jerked, she opened her weary eyes and made sure that the fire had more fuel.”

  “I knew it!” the man exclaimed.

  “The third day brought a gleam of hope,” De Quincey told them.

  Everyone straightened with excitement—except Ryan, Emily, and Becker, who knew the harrowing direction that the story was about to take.

  “The wind changed, shifting the drifts so that portions of the ground were exposed,” De Quincey resumed. “Agnes put on her coat and hurried to the bridge, but it remained blocked, the hole in it still hidden. Farther along the force, a wall had been exposed. Agnes rushed to the house and brought her younger brothers. The wall was made from rocks that weighed upon one another without the need for cement. In the chilling wind, Agnes and her brothers pushed the rocks away until the wall was low enough for them to climb over. They picked up the rocks and threw them into the water, ignoring how difficult the labor was, until they had created a small island. Agnes’s brothers watched in dread as she leaped onto it and then to the opposite bank, the cascading water splashing on her. She waved good-bye, then raced from one bare patch of ground to the next, disappearing into the snowfall. The brothers hurried back to the cottage and prayed for her.

  “The difficult route to Grasmere took Agnes over ridges and through dense trees. Sometimes she had to wade through hip-deep snow. But other times, she reached wind-cleared ground and rushed onward in her desperate mission. Cold gusts numbed her cheeks. Her hands and feet lost sensation. Exhaustion made her plod. At last, the odor of smoke pinched her nostrils and directed her toward a screen of trees, where she found a house.

  “With senseless hands, she pounded on the door. The woman who opened it looked surprised that anyone would come visiting on so hostile a day, especially a little girl. The woman smiled in welcome, then opened her mouth in horror as Agnes screamed, ‘Help us!’

  “‘Is that Agnes Green?’ the woman asked. ‘Good heavens, child, come in where it’s warm! What happened?’

  “‘Mama and Papa didn’t come home!’ Agnes cried.

  “‘From the auction at Langdale? But that was three days ago!’

  “As the woman warmed Agnes by the fire, her husband quickly dressed and braved the storm. When he finally reached Grasmere, he banged on the rectory at St. Oswald’s Church. He and the minister took turns ringing the church’s bell, sounding the alarm.

  “Perhaps only sixty families lived in the village. Meeting at the church, the men of those families made their plans. One group would climb to the Greens’ farmhouse and rescue the children. The rest would proceed over the ridges toward Langdale. There was still a possibility that the Greens had stayed with a family in that village, and there was also a chance that they’d found shelter in a hut along the way, although without a hearth and a fire, a hut would offer little protection from the cold.”

  The crowd squirmed nervously.

  “Each group of searchers carried a bell so that they could signal to the others if they found something or if they themselves were suddenly in need of rescue,” De Quincey told them. “Indeed, the dangers of the expedition were considerable, and the women of Grasmere didn’t relax until night brought their men back unharmed.

  “George and Sarah Green hadn’t been found, but at least their children were now safe. As various families sheltered them, the village learned what Agnes and her brothers and sisters had endured, how brave the children had been, and how heroically Agnes had acted. The village also learned how truly impoverished the Greens were. Whenever they’d come to town, they’d worn their least-mended clothes, never letting anyone see the tattered garments that they were reduced to in their cottage. Only the most meager of furniture remained, everything else having been sold to buy food, of which there was now virtually none.

  “The next day and the day after that, the search teams pursued their desperate mission, never giving a thought to the risk. Every half hour of daylight was made use of. No man came back to eat and rest until long after dark.

  “On the fourth night, Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, asked a neighbor—a young shoemaker—what he intended to do the next morning.

  “‘I’ll go up again, of course,’ the young man replied.

  “‘But what if tomorrow should turn out like all the rest of the days?’ Miss Wordsworth asked.

  “The young man told her, ‘Then I’ll go up with greater determination on the next day.’

  “It became evident that George and Sarah Green must have veered off the direct route from Langdale, if direct route can be used to describe the uneven landscape that they needed to climb and descend to reach their cottage. Falling snow can cause a person to wander off course without knowing it, possibly moving in a circle, becoming hopelessly lost.

  “Finally, dogs were added to the search, in the hope that the animals might hear faint cries for help that the searchers couldn’t. Few men said out loud what everyone was thinking—that the dogs might also detect the odor of corpses, even if the cold kept the bodies from deteriorating.

  “Around noon on the fifth day of the search, the clanging of a bell echoed throug
hout the mountains. A shout from a misty ridge produced other shouts that spread with what we would now call telegraphic speed from group to group. The Greens had been found.”

  “Alive?” a man asked breathlessly.

  “George Green lay at the bottom of a precipice,” De Quincey answered.

  “No,” someone murmured.

  “The severe damage to his body indicated that he had fallen. The precipice was in the opposite direction from the Greens’ house, which showed how severely he’d become disoriented in the blowing snow.

  “Sarah Green’s body was at the top of the cliff. Trying to establish what had happened, the searchers concluded that husband and wife had stopped in confusion. Sarah wore her husband’s greatcoat. Perhaps George Green had gone forward, hoping to catch a glimpse of a ridge or a peat field that he might recognize. The precipice from which he had fallen was only a few yards from where Sarah’s body was found.

  “It was later decided that the mountain voices heard in Langdale on the night of the auction were in fact only one voice, Sarah Green’s, first calling to her husband and then, when she didn’t receive an answer to her repeated calls, shrieking. Perhaps she had stepped forward to do her best to help her husband, but when she realized how close she was to falling, she lurched back. One of her shoes was found at the edge of the precipice, as if she had recoiled so violently that the motion caused her to lose the shoe.

  “Her body was on an outcrop of the precipice, with steep drops on three sides. Wanting to find a way to reach her husband, but with danger seemingly at every turn, she must have remained in place in the darkness, hugging his greatcoat around herself as numbness crept up through her shoeless foot and invaded her body. She was found covered with snow in a seated position, as if she had succumbed to exhaustion or as if she had never stopped waiting, convinced that her husband would somehow return. She probably died dreaming of the warm fire in her house and of the darling faces of her little children whom she would never see again.

  “The funeral took place eight days later in the graveyard at Grasmere’s church. The weather provided a perfect contrast to the conditions that had killed George and Sarah Green. Although snow remained here and there on the ground, the azure sky was unstained by a cloud, and golden sunlight warmed the hills over which they had struggled. What had been a howling wilderness was now a green lawn in the lower regions and a glittering expanse of easily crossed snow on the higher bluffs. Wordsworth himself read a memorial poem, referring to the ‘sacred marriage-bed of death / That keeps them side by side / In bond of peace, in bond of love / That may not be untied.’”

  “What happened to the children?” someone quickly asked.

  “In a letter, Wordsworth’s sister told me that the grief of Sarah Green’s illegitimate daughter was the most overwhelming she had ever witnessed. Throughout the valley, people volunteered to take the children. Even the poorest families put in a claim. But it was decided that none of the children should be entrusted to those who, because of slender means or old age, might need to surrender the obligation they had asked to assume. Two of the orphans were twins and stayed together with a childless couple who took them in. The others were dispersed, but into such kindhearted, attentive families that there were constant opportunities for the children to meet one another on errands, or at church, or—ironically—at auctions.

  “Thus in the brief period of a fortnight, a family, which by the humility of poverty and the simplicity of their lives seemed sheltered from all attacks, came to be utterly broken up. George and Sarah Green slept in a single grave in Grasmere’s churchyard, never to want for anything again. Their children were scattered among guardians who offered opportunities that never would have been available to them otherwise.

  “Meanwhile, the Wordsworths applied themselves to raising funds for the children’s education. Wordsworth’s sister circulated an account of the terrible deaths, prompting people to offer what they could, sometimes only sixpence and sometimes several pounds. I was a student at Oxford during that fateful March, and if Wordsworth’s reputation had been what it is now, I would have had no difficulty collecting a large sum from my classmates. But given the low esteem with which his poetry was then regarded, no Oxford contributions were forthcoming. When the royal family heard about the children’s plight, however, they sent a generous donation. In the end, more than one thousand pounds were collected, enough to ensure the children’s welfare.”

  “What happened to Sarah Green’s illegitimate daughter?” a man asked.

  “She was rescued from working at the tavern where Sarah Green had feared that the girl’s reputation would be destroyed. A better position was found for her. As for Agnes, the brave little girl grew up to have a happy marriage with a loving husband and many sons and daughters.”

  “So the story had a satisfactory end. Although the parents died, the children triumphed,” the better-dressed man decided.

  “But that wasn’t the end.”

  “Father, please don’t take your mind in this direction. I beg you to go away with us,” Emily said.

  But De Quincey seemed not to have heard. “Consider the perfect symmetry of these events. A desperate woman leaves her six children at home while she and her husband journey down to an auction so that the woman can attempt to protect another of her children, one who seems destined to repeat her mother’s misfortune. Sarah Green fails in her frantic appeals. Despondent, she and her husband return to the mountains and die miserably in their effort to reach their farmhouse, where their other children wait for them. But the deaths of Sarah and George Green result in every success that Sarah Green wished for her children. Without knowing it, by dying she achieved her desperate goal. I could never hope to invent a story that contains such geometric proportions. Even the family’s last name, Green, is perfectly apt, suggestive of springtime, new life, and new hope. If I put that name in a story, readers would accuse me of being too obvious. But in life, we say ‘How appropriate that the family was named Green.’”

  De Quincey picked up the glass of ruby-colored liquid.

  “Only God can create a story like that,” he said, his voice edged with anger.

  He swallowed the rest of the laudanum.

  The crowd gasped as they had earlier, only this time louder. The shocked expressions on their faces made clear that they didn’t understand why so much opium didn’t put De Quincey to sleep or into a coma. For him, the drug wasn’t a sedative but a stimulant. As he had told the story, his voice had become faster, energized by anguish.

  “Father, it’s time to leave,” Emily insisted.

  “Indeed,” Ryan said, he and Becker stepping forward. Ryan knew where the story was going, and he feared that De Quincey’s attempt to confront the harrowing memory wouldn’t restrain it but would only make it worse.

  De Quincey resisted. “We say that what happened to George and Sarah Green was a terrible accident,” he said. “But if we look closely, we realize that it wasn’t an accident at all. It was the unavoidable result of a series of events that began years earlier when a young man convinced Sarah to succumb to his faithless charms. Everything followed from that. If not for the illegitimate daughter, Sarah Green would never have gone to that auction. She and her husband would never have died. The children would never have enjoyed a future free of poverty. The faithless suitor began the decades-long sequence that led Sarah Green to be accepted into the Wordsworth household.”

  “Your mind’s jumping around again!” someone objected. “You said that Sarah Green died in a mountain storm.”

  “But one of the rescued children, nine years of age, was also named Sarah—after her mother,” De Quincey said, “and that Sarah Green…”

  “Please,” Ryan urged, trying to raise him from the chair. “Don’t take this any farther. We should have left a long time ago.”

  Despite being a little man, De Quincey squirmed from Ryan’s hands, telling the crowd, “In October of 1809, eighteen months after George and Sarah Green die
d in that winter storm whose anniversary is tonight, I moved to Grasmere. I established residence in Dove Cottage, the humble white dwelling where Wordsworth had lived until his growing family required him to move to larger accommodations. Wordsworth’s new residence wasn’t far from Dove Cottage. I often walked there to visit him, hardly able to believe that only two years earlier I had finally met my idol and that I now lived in the cottage where we had first shaken hands.

  “Wordsworth’s younger daughter, Catherine, was then an infant. A more adorable child was never seen. I made faces to her or ducked below her cradle and popped up waving, making her giggle. She enjoyed my company more than that of any other person except her mother. In April of 1810, more than two years after the Greens died, the Wordsworths assigned young Sarah, now eleven, to watch over her, but this Sarah Green was listless and inattentive, as far removed from the energy and duty of her mother and of heroic Agnes as it’s possible to imagine.

  “Coleridge told me of the morning when, as Wordsworth’s guest, he came down to the kitchen and found young Sarah Green feeding uncooked carrots to infant Catherine. Coleridge warned Sarah that raw carrots were an indigestible substance for an infant and might cause her to choke. But this warning went unheeded, and a short time later, Catherine was seized with strong vomiting. I was shocked to find her convulsing when I arrived that afternoon. By sunset, the convulsions finally stopped, but the fit affected Catherine’s brain, and from that time onward, her left arm and left leg drooped, capable of only limited motion. Perhaps because of little Catherine’s pathetic affliction—or perhaps because of my dead sisters—I became more devoted to her.”