He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times. Most days Tristran was content — or as content as a seventeen-year-old youth with his world ahead of him can ever be — and when he daydreamed in the fields, or at the tall desk at the back of Monday and Brown’s, the village shop, he fancied himself riding the train all the way to Lon-don or to Liverpool, of taking a steamship across the grey Atlantic to America, and making his fortune there among the savages in the new lands.
But there were times when the wind blew from beyond the wall, bringing with it the smell of mint and thyme and red-currants, and at those times there were strange colors seen in the flames in the fireplaces of the village. When that wind blew, the simplest of devices — from lucifer matches to lantern-slides — would no longer function.
And, at those times, Tristran Thorn’s daydreams were strange, guilty fantasies, muddled and odd, of journeys through forests to rescue princesses from palaces, dreams of knights and trolls and mermaids. And when these moods came upon him, he would slip out of the house, and lie upon the grass, and stare up at the stars.
Few of us now have seen the stars as folk saw them then — our cities and towns cast too much light into the night — but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree.
Tristan would stare into the darkness of the sky until he thought of nothing at all, and then he would go back to his bed and sleep like a dead man.
He was a gangling creature of potential, a barrel of dy***ite waiting for someone or something to light his fuse; but no one did, so on weekends and in the evenings he helped his father on the farm, and during the day he worked for Mr. Brown, at Monday and Brown’s, as a clerk.
Monday and Brown’s was the village shop. While they kept a number of necessaries in stock, much of their business was conducted by means of lists: villagers would give Mr. Brown a list of what they needed, from potted meats to sheep-dip, from fish-knives to chimney-tiles; a clerk at Monday and Brown’s would compile a master list of everything requested; and then Mr. Monday would take the master list and a dray pulled by two huge shire horses, and he would set off for the nearest county town and return in a handful of days with the dray loaded high with goods of all description.
It was a cold, blustery day in late October, of the kind that always seems about to rain but never actually does, and it was late in the afternoon. Victoria Forester walked into Monday and Brown’s with a list, written in her mother’s precise handwriting, and she rang the small bell on the counter for service.
She looked slightly disappointed to see Tristran Thorn appear from the back room. “Good day, Miss Forester.”She smiled a tight smile and handed Tristran her list.
It read as follows: 1/2 lb of sago10 cans of sardines1 bottle of mushroom ketchup5 lb of rice1 tin of golden syrup2 lb of currants a bottle of cochineal 1 lb of barley sugar1 shilling box of Rowntrees Elect Cocoa 3d tin of Oakey’s knife polish 6d of Brunswick black1 packet of Swinborne’s Isinglass 1 bottle of furniture cream 1 basting ladle a ninepenny gravy strainer a set of kitchen steps
Tristran read it to himself, looking for something about which he could begin to talk: a conversational gambit of some kind — any kind.
He heard his voice saying, “You’ll be having rice pudding, then, I would imagine, Miss Forester.” As soon as he said it, he knew it had been the wrong thing to say. Victoria pursed her perfect lips, and blinked her grey eyes, and said, “Yes, Tristran. We shall be having rice pudding.”And then she smiled at him, and said, “Mother says that rice pudding in sufficient quantity will help to stave off chills and colds and other autumnal ailments.”
“My mother,” Tristran confessed, “has always sworn by tapioca pudding.”He put the list on a spike. “We can deliver most of the provisions tomorrow morning, and the rest of it will come back with Mister Monday, early next week.”There was a gust of wind, then, so strong that it rattled the windows of the village, and whirled and spun the weathercocks until they could not tell north from west or south from east.
The fire that was burning in the grate of Monday and Brown’s belched and twisted in a flurry of greens and scarlets, topped with a fizz of silver twinkles, of the kind one can make for oneself at the parlor fire with a handful of tossed iron filings.
The wind blew from Faerie and the East, and Tristran Thorn suddenly found inside himself a certain amount of courage he had not suspected that he had possessed. “You know, Miss Forester, I get off in a few minutes,” he said. “Perhaps I could walk you a little way home. It’s not much out of my way.” And he waited, his heart in his mouth, while Victoria Forester’s grey eyes stared at him, amused. After what seemed like a hundred years she said, “Certainly.”Tristran hurried into the parlor and informed Mr. Brown that he would be off now. And Mr. Brown grunted in a not entirely ill-natured way and told Tristran that when he was younger he’d not only had to stay late each night and shut up the shop, but that he had also had to sleep on the floor beneath the counter with only his coat for a pillow.
Tristran agreed that he was indeed a lucky young man, and he wished Mr. Brown a good night, then he took his coat from the coat-stand and his new bowler hat from the hat-stand, and stepped out onto the cobblestones, where Victoria Forester waited for him.
The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air — a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves.