Paradise’s Only Map

By Alexandra Riley

Appleton House, 1650

When Adam delved and Eve span

Who was then the gentleman? 1381

It was carved into the kitchen table – deeply, or it would have worn away in the two hundred and sixty-nine years since its scribe had taken a blade and sawn at the grand old oak as if it were spare scrap for a child’s toy. Once, the writing had fascinated me. I had sat there while cook chopped and skinned and boiled, running my finger in the rough grooves, repeating the words over and over until I knew them as well as the Lord’s Prayer. And like the Lord’s Prayer, I do not think I knew its meaning then – if not for want of trying.

“What does it mean?” I’d asked cook once. She was so very old (I thought then, being so very young) that she must remember who wrote it and why.

“I don’t rightly know,” she lied. I could tell she lied because she tucked her hair into her cap in a nervous, fluttering way - just like when mother asked her if she’d sent away the stray cat that liked to nap on her petunias, and she hadn’t. I told her so.

“Truth is, Mary, I don’t think Lady or Lord Fairfax would have you know.” She spoke sharply and formally, quickly regretting it when my lip began to tremble. Cook softened her voice. “But I’ll tell you this: in that year of 1381 there was a great uprising against the king.”

“As there is now, cook?” I couldn’t fail to notice, however cloistered I was; everyone spoke of it.

“A little like now, yes.” But she was not comfortable with talking of politics, and chopped her parsnips with pointed vigour.

In these times, now that the king’s head had tumbled, the True Levellers propounded the evils of property, the House of Commons was sovereign, the Lords abolished, the army restless; now that I saw of all this, the meaning of the lyric was obvious. There were some in this world who would have no rich and poor – some who would have us all as humble as the first man and woman. But I did not like the humble; they were not humble at all, but grasping and sniping at what was not theirs to possess. There seemed to me something inherently unordered about it all, as if these poor men pulled apart a careful, balanced tapestry with their railing pens – and cut it outright with their blades.

Sometimes I dream of the king’s trial – perhaps because it frightened me to think of it when I was awake, and yet it was the most vivid, the most dreadful scene that poisoned the pages of my memory. My father was important and my mother believed she was important, so I was there - right there in the stands, as if we were at the theatre. I dream first of quivering in my too-thin dress and wondering at what a dirty, grand place London was. When father’s name is called as witness against the king, I dream of mother replying that he had sense enough to have nothing to do any of it. She was right; but it was a pity that she, too, didn’t have such sense. We were lucky that she brought no more on us than discredit by her hysterical cries of ‘God save the king’ - as if that would do him any good when all the hosts of hell were pushing him to the scaffold. For myself, I could not look away from the tiny man in his gorgeous robes - so proud and undaunted, yet so fragile, refusing to recognise the authority of the court, refusing to hear the charges against him, refusing to plea. I think I knew then what few suspected until the end, that they would break him like a china doll, and that the world would turn upside down because of it.

It was June, a year and a half since the king’s head had rolled. Father gave up his commission and returned home. Like a man waking from a nightmare only to discover that it was no nightmare, he found himself astray in a world he no longer recognised. These soft summer days wore their peace uneasily, turning from day to night like elaborate masque scenery. The whole garden felt unreal, as if all I saw, smelled, and touched was stage-illusion, like it could tumble down at any moment. I could not forget the troubles beyond our garden walls, the ugly machinery hidden by our falling paper paradise.

When Adam delved and Eve span… yes, we sat in the woods, my tutor and I, pretending there was no one else in the world. We did not learn or speak much, but wrote together as silence and sunlight tinged the air with fleeting gold and the brook made its music under the dappled forest-shade. I told him of the lyric on the kitchen table, and how it troubled me with past echoes of the present day. He smiled – he had a ready smile – and passed me the lines he had just written.

‘’Tis not, what once it was, the world,

But a rude heap together hurled,

All negligently overthrown,

Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone.

Your lesser world contains the same,

But in more decent order tame;

You, heaven’s centre, Nature’s lap,

And paradise’s only map."

[Andrew Marvell, ‘Upon Appleton House’]

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Alexandra Riley has recently completed a History BA. She specialised in early-modern cultural and social English history. She lives in Bath and works part time in administration and part time as a writer struggling to finish her first novel. She hopes to begin a Creative Writing MA in October.