The passage of a very few years would see the visitation of my siblings’ own families, a seeming crowd of nannies and babies accompanied by quarrels and crying. But there were still those other masculine evenings, when I visited with Papa and his friends, all bewhiskered and grey, before my supper and Nanny’s summons. I sat silent and flounced, as golden in my prettiness as my own precious porcelain poupeé, while men such as Mr Hadley smelt of whisky and cigars, and spoke of business and trade, of the escalation of crime, sometimes of discoveries in foreign parts, of politics and capital and power. Mr Hadley and Papa spoke of their adventures in investment and of their plans for partnership.
They toyed with my curls as I bade them goodnight.
My father’s estate beckoned children to play in its vast spaces; crafted, as it was, at great expense with a rolling grassy slope and a small, reflective lake next to trees. I would climb high to hide among the shivering leaves. It was a game I held to myself, for otherwise there were those of my brothers’, where I might be obliged to play the soldier to Harry’s General and Dickie’s Colonel, or the prisoner to their pirates. I could see for a very great distance from these branches, and could not myself be seen. My favourite tree was very old, I believed, and an elm; it cupped me within its boughs. Harry and Dickie were glad enough to be off by themselves to play at their boys’ games, and none of we three ever told that I was thus left unaccompanied for hours.
When there was little else to do on days of inclement weather (and there was often little to do, for my very few friends lived too far for easy visiting; Gwendolyn was so often improving herself somewhere in the library or the sewing room; and Harry and Dickie tended more toward wrestling and bickering when it rained, and were to be avoided) I would wander throughout the great house where we Brooms lived at some distance from London, down the long corridors dark with doors and aged timbered floors worn into grooves. The world through the windows was blurred with wind and rain. Inside, I imagined, the very shadows breathed their boredom, and the very fringes of our elderly oriental carpets were limp with it.
‘These carpets were swept from the East by an earlier Broom,’ Mama would say frequently with her half-smile, a play that I did not yet fully understand though believed very clever. Mama found it amusing not merely to toy with words but also to tease Papa. ‘So many Brooms for one house!’ she would murmur behind her tucked smile, and I always laughed with her.
Up the stairs I went, until these narrowed from a wide sweep with an intricate banister to a steep and narrow tripway for maids at the end of their day. I peeked sometimes into the two rooms newly built at the top of these stairs, large enough only for a tiny bed and a clothes-horse under a sloping ceiling, chill and damp in winter and hot as Cook’s kitchen in summer. These rooms were always empty with the maids off working, except for the time when I had forgotten or had not known that Ida was ill, and found the girl trembling with an ague, clutching a thin blanket with a shawl spread over the blanket up to her chin and the snow eddying and silent beyond the window.
‘Leave me be, Miss, please,’ Ida said and I, caught out, ran off, tap-tap-tap-tap down the little steep stairs, embarrassed from the surprise but also with a tight envy in my chest, of Ida, who had a space of her very own, just my size.
The envy—and it was some time before I confessed it to be unreasonable—stayed throughout my bedtime in my own room and all its bustle, where Becky had been to turn down the bedclothes, light the fire, and draw the curtains; Nanny had come with hot cocoa, taken my clothes for airing, and shaken out my nightdress; Mama had entered for the goodnight kiss and to read a story. It lasted, my envy, until the morning, when Nanny swept open the curtains to a day like a sudden, too-bright pearl.
For some days, then, I searched for and tried out cupboards and wardrobes for myself, tap-tap-tapping along floorboards, with muted footfalls along the old carpets. I looked for dark-timbered spaces breathing a history back to the earliest Broom of all, even beyond the history of Papa and his importation of Indian silks (Mama referred to ‘new Brooms of Empire’, smirking lightly into her
embroidery when Papa, in irritation, snapped the pages of his journal).
I was intent on finding a small, dark space with a smell of dry dust and the faintest line of light at the crack of the door. Here, I could close my eyes in the silence and fancy ancient footsteps beyond the panel, a rustle or a clatter as of some awkward thing being dragged.
Perhaps (I imagined) there was once the body of some sad young man, dead in his doublet, slain in a duel by another in hose, both consumed by an urgent passion for ladies in farthingales; such ladies themselves wilting for love behind the disguise of their jewelled masks.
Both the notion itself, and the fact that I had invented it myself, sent a frisson of excitement racing through my veins. Here were worlds to anticipate, worlds where the whispers were of my praises.
Hush! For it is she: Miss Adelaide, the brave…
I found a space under the stairs and Ida swept it clear of spiders.
My Lord of Rothesay, my father would never allow this marriage, for I am betrothed to another… I began there in the near-dark, and continued in this way for hours, alone (for Ida had left to carry out polishing).
I collected candle stubs and matches, snippets of wool and material from Mama’s sewing box, and clothes’ pegs that I turned into well-dressed dolls, pasted with flour-and-water stirred together in the kitchen. They wore tiny curling feathers in their headdresses. There were books, borrowed from —and, usually, returned to—tables and shelves in the big house; scraps of paper, with a small pot borrowed from the kitchen for paints and my brush; and a much-sharpened pencil for short tales of heart-rushing heroism (My Lord of Rothesay…I wrote).
Dickie was invited, on occasion, for songs and recitations especially learned for the performance, for he was my most precious brother and I yearned toward him. For his sake, I had even learned to adore his toy soldiers and to tell the difference between the ranks. In return, I think, he indulged me, and sat for perhaps half an hour at a time on a tiny stool as I performed, and even clapped, before declaring that that was enough and returning to his own pastimes.
Here under the stairs, I began years of musings and misspellings into writing journals that I kept in an old hatbox of Mama’s under my bed. The short, childish tales became longer stories of mystery or love or daring, revolution sometimes, and once a tale of a lady spy who faced the guillotine. I read these tales in instalments aloud to Ida right up until the first of my coming out parties.
After which there was little time to write of adventure, what with hours of standing straight, withstanding the pinpricks of the dressmaker who circled and circled, adjusting and tweaking, forever glancing at the clock—for she had, as she often muttered, a great crowd of young ladies awaiting her skills.
‘Oh, my admirable Adelaide,’ Mama whispered in my ear. ‘What a new Broom is this, who will sweep all before her!’ I giggled, which loosened pins at my waist and caused the seamstress to snort and tut.
And there was no time and there were few words to describe the nausea of anxiety that was anticipation of my first great ball, to which I travelled with Mama on the one side and Dickie on the other. Mama pinched my cheeks, for, she said, they had turned a pale green from fear. That first time, I trembled as I danced and dizzied at the swirl of movement about me, the golden twinkle of jewels in the glare of gaslight, the heat, the twittering of voices as in an aviary, behind which beat music, music, music, and the heavy sweep of skirts a-swing over their layers of petticoat and frame. Such a weight was fashion then!
I grew braver, of course, and nights grew longer; each begun with two hours of preparation—Ida dithering at the side of the woman Mama had hired for her experience in these things—and ended with the dawn faint above the chimneys. We stayed for the time being at Harry’s house in London, yet—the hours being what they were—often did not see h
im or his wife from one evening to the next.
The looking glass told how the hectic pace of it all now made me both pale and pink. I whispered to various of my new and glittering circle—girls who swam in giddiness as I did, whose love for each other was ecstatic, for the moment—that I would kiss a certain boy who was tall, with dark falling curls, and whose full mouth spoke (metaphorically) of fruit and poetry. And I did so, truly, and was thus short of breath behind a column in a darkened corner of the hall, my pulse pattering and my cheeks hot. His hands, and the hands of others, were at my waist; his mouth, and those of others, murmured in my ear as I danced, and society and all its lights swung about me.
But then it was that both mood and tone altered, oddly, and I found myself at dinner, not once but several times, seated next to Mr Hadley. He took my arm into and out of these dining halls. I listened from my bedchamber to the raised voices of my mama and my papa, who had unaccountably arrived to stay some days.
There was a scene where little was said directly, and little understood—by me, at any rate. I was called to Harry’s drawing room and told to sit, and Papa, as if continuing some thread of conversation that I should, surely, have noticed, said, ‘Mr Hadley, as you know, is my oldest friend and business confidant. He will elevate you greatly in life.’
I must have seemed very stupid indeed, looking from one parent to the other. My mind was full, still, of young men with soft, direct eyes and whose hands I imagined about my waist. Each night I looked about myself as I entered another ballroom, and all around were young women and young men, looking about themselves.
Mr Hadley, let it be said, was the furthest possible thing from my thoughts.
After a silence, Mama said, ‘You will have children and your own house,’ though she did not look at her daughter. At me. She put her hand to her side, for she was to bear another child and had been quite unwell. Since my own birth, Mama had not borne another that could continue more than a few days alive.
All of a sudden, I was affianced to the old man, and bewildered at how it had come about, at what had been in my hands that had shone and promised breathless mystery in worlds beyond my own, and which now had been pulled away. All that brightness, all the breathless anticipation of every twinkling, dancing evening, circling and circling within the arms of young men…all receding pell-mell into darkness, the music fading with it as it took all my friends away.
Some of this I had written down, though it was difficult to find the words, and these scraps stayed in the dark of my space beneath the stairs, forgotten, and no doubt were lying there still when Mr Hadley, years later, wheezed and waned on the floor of his grand house, far away at London’s comfortable centre.
Chapter Three
This house, that I now decided I had never felt to be mine, loomed heavy about me. It sat, that great weight of bricks, loaded and draped with velvet and tapestry, its carved banisters like forearms; a dozen precious, ugly objects crouched on every mantel. Its clocks ticked, endlessly through all the man-made segments of Time, all separate from sun or season. I was compressed by it; there was not enough air about me. My stays creaked as my lungs filled. Wandering from room to room, I felt myself a child again, examining the spaces about me and imagining their history, though there was no history here save that of a loveless marriage.
Doctor McGuiness gave his orders. And so I spent hours on duty in the sickroom, staring at the disorder of Mr Hadley’s white hair, the pleats and folds gathering now about his emptying face, the eyes gone moist, yellow, resting fractionally open yet unknowing; the man himself, mute and shadowed in the half-light. His brocade bed-jacket was wet at the neck from dribble; his breath had begun to smell of rot; his lungs laboured on like sodden bellows.
I gazed at him—interested that I could do so in so nearly a disinterested manner—and began to think. Had he breathed in that way, with the whisky blowing in gusts, while I listened in the dark to thumps and short, wordless cries, and muffled, urgent clattering in Sobriety’s room, directly above my own? That clattering that resolved into a rhythm like aggression (the bed, I knew, rammed again and again and again against the wall, a declaration to me and to Sobriety both). Then the great shout of his climactic triumph; then a brief pause; then the slam of a door and his steps down the narrow stairs. A long, long moment of silence before the creak of movement from the room above.
I remembered thinking, lying and listening that night in my bed as he lay claim to and outraged my Sobriety, of the visit made once with my husband to the National Gallery—because one is seen to visit the National Gallery now and then—and the viewing of The Rape of the Sabine Women, how celebration was made in this painting of the seizing of women’s flesh against their will. I looked long, wondering that such celebration could be made of violence against those who did not even take up arms, whose pain, somehow, was their tormentors’ triumph. I wondered what was to be attained by this subjugation, this usage of women. Mr Hadley, bored, sauntered away to gaze elsewhere.
Here, in this house (I thought to myself that night beneath my coverlet, listening to Mr Hadley’s assault of my maid), was no splash of colour or vibration from sensual flesh and drapery; here were but one man and two women in the dark, one of whom struggled while the other heard it.
There followed at least a week, I fancied, where the three of us moved in different parts of the house, we women avoiding not only Mr Hadley but also each other. Our eyes did not meet; we barely stirred the air about each other. I made my choice of dress in the quiet of my bed before rising to wash at the basin, and to powder; Sobriety, in silence, passed drawers (with myself so sensitive to the presence of Sobriety’s fingers, her arms rising and falling with the lifting and folding, the busy swing of her skirt), which I slipped on beneath my nightdress, and my under-petticoat. She hooked up the corset over the chemise; she tied at my waist the tapes of the steel-hooped crinoline; she passed the flounced petticoat with the daily flurry over my head.
At night were the undressings, without a word between us two. Sobriety flitted, when these duties were finished, from my bedchamber, head bowed, and somehow very small indeed.
Mr Hadley’s breath whistled infinitesimally. I moved to sit by the window and look out, the lace pulled a little to one side. The small fire in the grate snapped from time to time; the room was too warm and dim.
On the wall behind Mr Hadley’s bed, Rosetti’s Lady Lilith stared down, all lushness and spreading hair and fur and glowing wantonness, and I, as I had when he first bought the painting and had it raised onto the wall, avoided the woman’s eyes.
Once again, the thought occurred: The painter is so forthright, his statement of licentiousness so plain, yet his sister the poetess is so troubled and questing…
I knew my embarrassment to be humiliation in itself.
I looked back to the window.
In the street outside, hansoms passed from time to time, the cabbies wrapped to their red noses against the cold.
I rested my hand against my side.
Cissy placed a small table, brought up from the morning room, by the window in Mr Hadley’s room. It had struck me that this little table could have more uses at last than the merely decorative. On my finest notepaper, I wrote notes to relatives and to my husband’s business associates:
Mr George Hadley suffered an apoplexy this Tuesday last and, while he is with us still, he recognises no one and his physician is not encouraging of an eventual recovery.
I paused before dipping the nib again into the inkwell.
Of a sudden, there reared the appalling possibility of a stream of frock-coated gentlemen come calling, grey whiskers well-kempt and on display, perhaps in company with wives whose faces had settled long ago into unsmiling dourness, all of whom I may have met briefly and by whom I had, often, been chilled into silence. Mr Hadley would be entirely unaware of their visit, while I would shrivel under their superior gazes, the arroganc
e of their sympathetic duty. Perhaps there would be pity (which I doubted would be
sincere). I would read into those faces—whose expression was all of one controlled kind, that of very little expression at all—that I now lacked or would soon lack position, and they would no longer consider me as anybody of moment.
Might I hold them at bay?
My hand not altogether steady, I put pen back to paper, my cheeks heated at what was, I knew, my cowardly stretching of the truth:
While I assume of course your very best wishes toward him, visiting is not advisable.
To my son’s headmaster I added:
We feel that Toby ought not to come home as yet, since it is not known how long the illness will continue. Michaelmas is not far, when he is in any case expected here. I shall write to him myself…
I paused again with my child in my mind, straight-backed as was his habitual stance, cool with a child’s contempt and his father’s hand on his shoulder, turned away as if I was of no account. As if I was not there.
Neither was I prepared for that.
…in a few days.
And at the last, for I had put off the writing of one note until all others had been done, and while I considered, indeed, whether I would write it at all, I dipped my pen once more into the ink.
Dear Mrs Charles,
It is my sad duty to inform you…
Mrs Charles, to whom my husband would bow his lowest and smile his widest. She would turn her head, elegant with its streaks of smoke and silver and altogether assembled like an item of great value, to regard me as if I were rather ordinary china or, if we were out of the house, as if I trailed Mr Hadley like some puppy at heel. It was so the very first time she and I met, when Mr Hadley had taken me to promenade one Sunday in Hyde Park, with Toby, our very new baby, muffled up in his carriage and pushed by Nanny. We were all paraded thus, though I was weak still, and slow, and very conscious of it, and folding and refolding my shawl about me the whole afternoon.
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