If On a Winter’s Night a Visitor
by Genevieve Methot
We now come to an artefact of true beauty: the Cleft Family diptych. Isn’t it something special, scholars? Isn’t it the most unconventional family portrait you’ve ever seen? Well, unconventional to the rest of us, but for the Clefts, who knows? Maybe if it wasn’t worth a fortune, it might have been packed away in an attic somewhere.
Now, let’s focus our attention on the left panel. Do we recognise the scene?
Notice the artist’s use of true ultramarine, Tyrian purple, and gold foil. If we needed any other clue as to the significance of that event to the Cleft Family, let’s consider how much those three materials alone would have cost.
Do you see how the artist (Laura Knight, according to some art historians) used tones of dove grey to indicate Mary Cleft’s illness? We know that she’d been misdiagnosed with consumption, but we can’t say for certain what exactly she was suffering from when she met our dear Sirius.
Why don’t we proceed with the reading? If we could all turn our booklets to page one: an extract from Stella Cleft’s book, Light is Thicker Than Blood. Please reserve all questions until the end.
Winter 1840. A night when the clouds brought snow from the northern mountains and chimneys tossed bouquets of woodsmoke in the air for the frenzied wind to catch. The young Widow Mary Cleft wrapped her late husband’s cape around her shoulders and stepped out to collect the last of her firewood. Despite the cold, she was too distracted to feel the whistling pitch in her ears or smell the metallic tang of snow’s imminent arrival.
She was even too distracted to hear the star’s call from the hedgerow in his booming immortal voice. At first anyway. When he howled a second time, the accompanying thwump struck her chest, and branches tumbled from her arms.
What in God’s name was that?
Was she afraid? Not Mary Cleft. For what was a dying beast to her when Death had slipped its booted toe over the threshold? What was more frightening in those days than the sight of blood on one’s kerchief? What could top that?
She held the lantern above her head and peered into the dark.
‘Where are you?’
Just at that moment, the wind sweeping across the Clyde and over the trees and pastures gathered speed and ripped the cape from her shoulders, sending it hurtling it into the air.
‘Och!’ she cried and breathlessly chased after the flying cape.
It should be said that the cape was ordinary in every way except one: it was the warmest garment she owned. Washed, carded, spun, plied, woven, and made from the dirtiest bits of fleece that were too base to sell, Mary had lovingly sewn this cape for her late husband as a wedding present; without its warmth, she reasonably expected to freeze to death before the night was through.
In the end, she needn’t have worried, for that clever wind had only been directing her search. At last, there it was, draped over the dying animal’s immense shivering body.
Mary peeled back the cape and gasped at what she found beneath.
It was not a dog. Not a bear. Nor a tiger. It was a man. But with skin the colour of a ripe damask plum, he looked like no other man she had ever seen before.
And there was the source of his suffering: his body, save for one leg, was tightly wound in a tangle of fishing net, giving the impression of a trapped whale.
When he shivered, the ground beneath her trembled. ‘Please,’ he croaked in a voice that butted against her beating heart. ‘Have m-mercy.’
Puzzled, she faced the half-frozen River Clyde that curved through the landscape some several hundred yards beyond the hedgerow. Had he pushed himself here in the dark all the way from the riverbank on his one free leg?
‘What in the Virgin Mary’s soiled petticoats happened to you?’ she exclaimed.
‘Oh, w-why don’t we ask the drunken fisherman who thought it a w-whimsy to c-cast his net skywards,’ he cried. And then, holding himself, he said, ‘P-please, that shawl of yours had comfort m-me for a time. Do us a favour and...’
As if compelled by mechanical crank, she draped the cape over his body, pulled up her skirts, and clambered breathlessly back to the house. When she returned with her husband’s shears and hoe, her coughing was so relentless that her eyes felt nearly pushed from her skull.
Weakly now, she bade him lie still and got to work snipping the tangles apart, careful not to touch his already shredded skin. It was easy work once she found the outer seam, and when he was free at last, he used the hoe to draw himself up from the ground and stand at his full towering height. No longer a caught whale but a mighty tree.
Even then she was not afraid. For there was some part of her that understood that in saving his life, they had struck a covenant. It would take a devil of a man to harm the person who saved one’s life, and though he looked more devil than man, she sensed no evil lurking beneath his peculiar outer shell. Still, she did warn him to mind himself with an artful flourish of her shears.
Hoisting his good arm around her shoulder, she bore his weight as best she could across the field, which is to say, they walked arm in arm. The warmth of his flank against hers was strangely comforting, even though the odour of mud and river sediment was not.
They reached the door just as the first tufts of snow were released, and within minutes, he was resting on her matrimonial cot. She watched his sodden body for two shallow breaths, in which time she allowed herself to pretend that the man lying there was not a stranger, but her husband. Come back to her from the river.
Then, with a sharp pair of scissors she kept in her mind, Mary cut the thought loose and carried on with the business of nursing him back to health: stoking the fire, heating the water, and preparing his soup of tubers and kale and oats.
By the time she pulled up a stool and brought the wooden spoon of watery potage to his lips, a sheen of sweat had risen to her upper lip and the nape of her neck. Half conscious, he took tentative sips, then pushed the bowl to Mary’s chest and urged her to take nourishment, as though her suffering were obvious.
The bowl’s steam wafted up to her cheeks, and the earthy, nutty smell of the kale was just tempting enough to twist her stomach. She took one sip – if only to remove the taste of phlegm and blood – then poured the soup back into the pot and got to work stitching his deeper cuts. The man flinched and held fast to the blanket as she poked the needle around the edges, sewing him shut like a girl and her patchwork doll.
It was then that Mary noticed it. Where the wounds were cloven deepest, a strange brightness was emanating from his exposed underflesh. But how could this be? Where was it coming from?
Ask the drunken fisherman who thought it a whimsy to cast his net skywards.
Skywards. He had said that word, hadn’t he?
She studied his skin, which was the colour of the night’s sky, and shoulders the breadth of oxen yoke, and the silvery light leaking through his stitches.
Mary’s face lit up in surprise when she solved it.
Neither devil nor angel, she thought. But a star.
In her care. On her bed. And (for Christ’s sake) eating soup too bland to tempt a starving dog.
With a flare of inspiration, she drew her widow’s dress over her head and began to stitch it into a new shape. She worked in her thin chemise until time became unimportant, until the candles melted into stubs.
And drowsed by the evening’s efforts and the sensation of the fire’s warmth on her bare ankles, her eyelids grew heavy. She fell into a quiet sleep, and even then, she continued to move the needle across the warp and weft of the threadbare fabric.
When Mary awoke, she was greeted by two miracles: The first, was that the new garment was already finished. Her fingers, all with little minds of their own, had continued stitching the seams while she slept. All that was left to do was trim the threads.
The second miracle was that the man’s silvery brightness was spreading from an invisible flame that now spilled out beyond his scars to light up every corner of the little cottage.
How beautiful he was.
Cautiously, and holding her kerchief over her mouth, Mary leaned over and cupped his forehead. Warm but not feverish. Blessed Christ. Another miracle.
‘Am I going to make it?’
Immediately, she withdrew. This appeared to strike the man as somewhat amusing, for his eyes twinkled over the hem of the cape.
Mary cleared her throat. ‘Aye, sir. I think so.’
‘I’m feeling quickly restored, thanks to you,’ he said, then his eyes roved about the one-room cottage and back at her. ‘What life have I interrupted, curious little woman? Are you destitute?’
There was no flaw in his power of observation; heat rose to her scalp. She looked at this glowing being with a pauper’s pride. ‘What of it, sir?’
‘But where are your people?’
‘I’ve no people, in fact. My husband is drowned in the Clyde and we’ve no children.’
She fetched the last of the simmering potage from the hearth, but as much as she urged him to finish the bowl, he refused it.
‘You really ought to eat something, you know. And what? You’re saying there’s no one to help you through your condition?’
As if to mock her, Mary’s body erupted into a fit of heaving coughs that drew pearls of sweat to her forehead and of blood to the back of her teeth. A large hand gently came to rest on the space between her shoulder blades.
‘It’s getting worse,’ she admitted once she could catch her breath. ‘There’s no one to help. And I’m past all that, besides.’
The man stared at her with such raw sadness that she almost laughed.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said. ‘I’ve made my peace with it. Here.’
She bade him try on his new nightshirt, which fit him as well as a foot in a well-beloved shoe. He looked resplendent all in black, if not somewhat ecclesiastical.
‘You’ve got a touch of magic about you,’ he said, admiring the stitch work.
The way he said it brought her a strange sense of pleasure. As if where he came from, speaking of magic was as common as discussing the day’s catch.
‘Is that what it is, then? I did not know it until tonight,’ she said. ‘My hands do that sometimes. Make stitches all by themselves.’
‘But this is all wrong,’ he said. ‘You should not be ill.’
Mary snorted. Oh aye, that was a lovely thought, wasn’t it? And bad men should die young, just as good men should grow old.
‘You speak as if I had a choice.’
‘This isn’t right,’ he repeated, and his tone was more bewildered than defiant. ‘I’ve seen your fate, Mary Cleft, and I assure you, this is not what happens.’
This made Mary pause.
And he fixed her a look that stirred something deep inside her belly. Was it a flicker of hope? Desire, perhaps. Maybe the fear that should have been there earlier.
Outside, a shutter had loosened itself from its hook and was banging against the house like a traveller begging for shelter.
‘What is this? What are you doing?’ she asked him.
‘Quid pro quo, apparently,’ he said, then looked about the cottage. ‘This must be how it happens.’
‘How what happens? You’re speaking in riddles.’
He sat up in his new nightshirt, and insisted they change places.
‘Finish that soup and come and warm up, and think no more of dying, Mary Cleft. Let us see about this cough of yours.’ (Cleft, 1979)
How remarkable. That was an extract from Light is Thicker Than Blood, by our patroness, Stella Cleft. We will be returning to the left panel during our discussion in a few minutes, but now, let’s move on to the right panel. As you can see, the artist has covered quite a lot of ground here. For the sake of brevity, we’ll now be reading from the diptych's 1970 exhibition catalogue entry for the National Gallery’s celebration of Scottish textile designers.
Mary Cleft never told her children nor another living soul how she survived that winter. And in the absence of truth, we have only to hypothesise that either by duty or kindness, the Star tended to Mary Cleft until she was recovered.
We know that her skill with needle and thread eventually became famous; first in Paisley, then Glasgow and Edinburgh, and eventually the entire country.
Then, a little over a year after her illness, Mary Cleft bore twins: a boy and a girl. There is no father listed on their birth certificates (images 2.5, 2.6).
In October 1935, the grandson of Mary’s daughter, Leo Cleft, awoke from a dream in which a pair of giant hands tore apart his flesh until his body was cleaved in two. The effect on the young man was so profound that he immediately bought a pass for Edinburgh and enrolled himself in medical school. Seven years later, in the Battles of Tunisia and Sicily, his intricate stitch work saved the life of every soldier his healing hands touched.
Unfortunately, no one stopped to consider whether the young man’s other characteristic he inherited – not from his great-grandmother, but from his great-grandfather – would have been considered a medical condition that rendered him unfit for service. Naturally, no one thought to check (see bioluminescence: image 2.1).
In the end, Leo Cleft’s glowing skin had been mistaken for a signal passed between Italian infantry, and on 14 August 1942, on a night much like the one that cleaved his grandparents’ fate together, Leo was shot down by friendly fire.
Upon hearing of her cousin’s death, Nova Cleft, Mary’s great-granddaughter, attempted to enlist as a Royal Army nurse. By then, the Cleft family trait had become so well known that the army sent her home, and in doing so, saved her life.
Nova rode back to Paisley where she subsequently tried to commit suicide by slitting her wrists with her father’s straight blade. Tried, because the blade refused to cleave the flesh of a Cleft.
Instead, Nova found a job in a factory sewing silk parachutes for the RAF. She sewed with such singular attention that every officer who deployed one of her parachutes was safely transported behind friendly lines—conjecture of course, but a Cleft’s a Cleft. And by saving other soldiers, Nova’s grief began to mend.
At 104 years old, Mary Cleft did eventually die, but not without ceremony. An official ceremony, that is. As a farewell gift, Nova had made the beloved matriarch a hot air balloon sewn from the smallest scraps of silk His Majesty could spare. That way, Mary would not be laid to rest six feet under, but in the clouds.
When it was time, the family brought her to the garden where Nova unfolded and unfolded and unfolded the white silk until the whole property was as perfect as a Christmas postcard. And sitting at the centre of the silk was a basket strong enough for a dancing bear to pirouette on.
They waited until dusk, and then Mary’s family helped her into the wicker basket and wrapped her in an old cape that had once saved a star’s life. Then, the warm summer breeze lifted the hot air balloon like a dandelion seedling taking flight. And in these last moments, Mary Cleft’s laughter tumbled softly down to earth, as she turned her face to the deep violet sky and waved. (Cleft, 1979)
* * *
Now then, Scholars, we encourage you to have a closer look at the paintings. Bring your notebooks just in case – you’ll probably notice more detail this time around. Might even feel good to stretch your legs for a few minutes. There are also signed copies of the book at the back of the hall, next to the refreshments. In five minutes, we will open up the floor for discussion, starting with a short demonstration by the Royal Astronomical Society. For those who’ve been inquiring about Cleft Society membership, please see one of our organisers.
BIO: Genevieve Methot is a Canadian writer living in Central Portugal. She is currently a Creative Writing master’s student at Open University and holds a degree in English Literature. She loves reading, road tripping, and exploring the woods with her dogs. IG: @genny_met