Mamma kept her eyes upon me, and I felt everyone else’s eyes as well, wide and waiting. And then my mother turned her head away, as if from the sight of something monstrous, and moved toward the doorway.
“Your uncle,” she said, “will hear of this, as I said. I will return to Rosings Park in the morning and await your return to sanity.”
We all watched her go, Mrs. Jenkinson following after a moment’s hesitation, though my mother did not even look at her before sweeping from the room. Our faces remained turned toward the doorway as we listened to the sound of her footsteps disappearing down the corridor, to her voice cracking out an order for her hat and cape to be brought, immediately. And then the front door opening, closing; and silence.
My body sagged. I stumbled backward until my knees bumped the seat of my chair, and then I sank into it and pressed my fingers against my face. The air was suddenly thick and clogged my nose and mouth, and I thought, half-hysterically, that perhaps Mamma was right and London would kill me after all.
At last Mr. Watters, his voice sly, broke the silence.
“I think you could perhaps use a little more wine after that, Miss de Bourgh.”
I raised my face to meet his laughing eyes.
“In fact”—he gestured to a footman, who had already taken up the crystal decanter—“I believe we all could.”
The footman poured wine into each of our glasses—just a splash into mine, for I had only tasted it before Mamma arrived—and then Mr. Watters raised his glass and said, “That was a bit of a triumph, I should say.”
I could not decide whether he mocked me. John rolled his eyes; Mrs. Fitzwilliam said, “David, really,” though she smiled.
Chapter Sixteen
After my mother’s spectacular arrival and departure, I found myself so ravenous that I had to consciously set my fork and knife down between bites to prevent myself from gobbling the entire contents of my plate. Pigeon pie, the crust buttery, the gravy rich; parsnips and beetroot; warm apple puffs. Mamma and Mrs. Jenkinson kept my diet free of heavy sauces and anything that might be too stimulating. Even vinegars, usually considered so healthful, might overpower me. The extraordinary bounty now on my plate and the sudden eagerness of my appetite were like those first sights and sounds as we drove into London: more clamorous than my anxious thoughts, more intoxicating than wine.
After dinner concluded, Mrs. Fitzwilliam and I removed to the drawing room. She took up some sewing, and I sat foolishly idle, my fingers tugging at one another in my lap. My eyes darted to the drawing room door, through which, at any moment, John and Mr. Watters would enter.
Mr. Watters had been out for most of the day, and when he returned to the house he did not recognize me, though we met once before, when he visited Rosings Park with his sister upon her engagement to John. That day at Rosings, he bowed to me quite properly, then spent the rest of the evening ignoring me in favor of ingratiating himself with Mamma. Not that I minded; the stripes on his waistcoat, created of gold thread that shone distractingly in the candlelight, were the most interesting thing about him.
This evening, however, rather than greeting me as he ought, he stood back, awaiting an introduction, which would have been right and proper if we had not, in fact, already known one another. As it was, my blood rushed with embarrassment when Mrs. Fitzwilliam at last reminded him of our prior acquaintance. There was a light of recognition in his eyes then, and though he came forward, bowing and saying how glad he was to see me again, I could feel his remembered contempt and dismissal of the invalid woman he had met then.
But after the confrontation with Mamma, there was a shift, as Mr. Watters discarded his disinterest like a coat. He watched me, studied me, taking in every particular from the careful curls Spinner constructed at my crown, to the pearls at my ears, to the striped green silk of my gown.
“When you are fully recovered,” he said as his sister and I rose to withdraw, “I hope you will let me escort you to some of London’s best sights.”
I stumbled over my thanks, noticing Mrs. Fitzwilliam’s sharp, contemplative gaze.
Falling asleep sounds like such an easy thing—falling, after all, being a swift endeavor, often inadvertent. And so it had always been for me, except for the rare occasions when I forewent my laudanum.
But tonight my mind and body were both still restless. I listened to the creak of the ceiling above my head, the heave and thump of feet and bodies as the servants readied themselves for bed in their attic rooms. My thoughts darted toward and back from my mother’s stricken face as she turned away from me; and in between, I saw Mr. Watters.
My father owned a pocket compass, small and silver, and on its face a precise eight-pointed star. He brought it out for me once, when I was a child and lying, muddled by my drops, in the drawing room, and spent an unaccustomed few minutes sitting with me there. His hands, so big and warm, caught one of mine like a butterfly in a net, turned it over gently so the palm faced up, and pressed the compass into the resulting hollow, as a gardener pressing a seed into the soil. With two fingers, he rotated the compass within my palm.
“See how the needle remains steadfast?” he said, and I nodded, astonished by such everyday magic. After a moment, Papa patted my shoulder and took his leave, but I lay there and kept turning the compass with my fingers, slowly at first, and then faster, watching and watching the needle, convinced that if I looked away it would turn contrary and jerk suddenly around to point in another direction.
When at last he and John had joined us in the drawing room, Mr. Watters’s eyes had found me unerringly, as if they were the compass needle, and I were North. And like the needle, they remained fixed and steady. For a breathtaking moment, I thought of my drops; they would cover me like a blanket, and I would revert to the safety of the chaise, recumbent and bland as the sauceless meat and dry toast I was accustomed to eating. I caught my left wrist in the circle of my right hand; it was narrow enough that my fingers and thumb overlapped. The nails cut my wrist’s tender underside, harder and harder until at last the pain became sharp enough that my thoughts went scattering.
I rolled over in bed now, rested my head on my arms, felt the dip of the mattress under my breasts and belly. My stomach was full, satisfied. My ears picked out noises from outside; my eyes roved around the shadowed room. My breaths, even and measured, came in cold through my nose and left warm from my mouth. I could feel everything; there was no gauzy medicinal padding to my thoughts or the sensations of my body.
There were also no distractions in the form of sleep rushing toward me like a sea wave, or visitors stealing into my bed. My neck prickled as I waited, but no one joined me; not the fat woman with the pointed teeth, not Papa in all his plumage. I was quite alone. Even the dead boy, whose existence I was so grateful not to have to explain to John, would be welcome just now; but he, too, kept away. I’d known that they were false visions; like the voice of Rosings Park, they appeared when my dose was increased, and any rational person would know that they were a product of too much laudanum. But in my sudden loneliness, I did not feel rational at all, but so sad that saltwater trailed from the corners of my eyes, leaving damp spots on the pillow.
I remembered Mrs. Jenkinson as I left Rosings—Have you gone mad?—and concentrated on the sliver of moonlight shining through a gap between the curtains and the edge of the window frame. My fingers plucked at the bedclothes. I wondered whether it was, in fact, madness that brought me here, and not, as I had thought, a long-delayed understanding.
To distract myself I softly, softly began to whisper, and my voice sounded, in the great dark hush, like Nurse’s. “Once upon a time, there lived a king and queen whose great sadness was that they had no child . . .”
The story, of the longed-for princess who lay protected for so long in her enchanted sleep, was as familiar as my own. As my eyes closed at last, I saw the princess so very clearly—unnaturally still and silent on her narrow bed until the moment the enchantment broke. As I watched from behind
my lids, the princess blinked, sloughed off the covering of cobwebs, and rose, looking astonished, from her bed.
Mrs. Fitzwilliam asked me, as she adjusted her bonnet, whether I would like to accompany her as she paid calls.
“It would be a perfect way to make some other acquaintances in Town,” she said, glancing at me in the glass. “And, of course, it would signal to society that you are ready to receive invitations.”
Pressure was building inside of me. I put one hand against the back of a chair, leaning a little, and the other to my chest. My breath escaped in short bursts; I felt a vague dismay, as if my skin might tear apart to release the rest.
“No,” I said. “I—not yet.”
When she left, I stood at the window, looking out over the gray-skied city and all the glorious motion and humanity it contained. There was a draft; I felt it cool my cheek, and took it as a small triumph that there was no one, at least, to urge me away from it, nearer the fire.
If I could, if it were something ladies did, I would go out into the city on my own, with no purpose other than exploration. I would be entirely anonymous—not Anne de Bourgh, but just another person, one of thousands. I would test the strength of my legs along London’s twisting streets, and the strength of my lungs against its air. I could be among people without being expected to know what to do with any of them. My feet stepped in place against the carpet.
And then I looked outside again, and suddenly there was death everywhere. It lurked behind a loose cobble on the pavement, waiting to catch walkers unaware. It rode, self-satisfied, under the heavy iron hooves of passing horses. A nurse and child were walking hand in hand down the street; I pressed my face to the window, opened my mouth in a silent warning cry. At any moment, the child was going to trip, stumble, slipping sideways into the horses’ path. I saw it—her bonnet flung away, her bright yellow pelisse crumpled, her little body crumpled, too. I squeezed my eyes against the sight.
When I opened them, the horses had passed, and the child and her nurse were just rounding the corner.
At breakfast earlier, as John and Mr. Watters discussed their plans to go to John’s club and Mrs. Fitzwilliam read some correspondence, I stirred my tea to cool it, and had a sudden flash—my father at his death—just a flash, but so vividly detailed that I shut my eyes, as if in doing so I could shut the vision out. Papa’s mouth, open and shouting in surprise; Papa’s eyes, wide. His fingers spread, as if braced to catch himself when he fell—but of course, he fell twisted all wrong, and headfirst. My body was left shaking, subtly enough that the others at the table did not see it.
Here I was, in the city to which I’d long dreamed of coming; the storied place into which my father spent my life disappearing until, at last, he never returned from it. I felt as if I had climbed a great crag, only to be too afraid to clamber down the other side. There I teetered, waiting, as if for some toothy thing to come charging at me over the crest of the hill, to battle me to the ground, to prove that I was not safe at all.
Almost, I wished I could still blame my drops for these terrible, intruding thoughts, for would it not be better to be crippled by medicine than by my own fear?
Chapter Seventeen
While I held myself captive inside John’s house, I ate through the days like a woman starved, gobbling up all the things I was never allowed before. Dr. Carter explained to me, when he called to see how I was getting on, that laudanum often curbed feelings of hunger; but if my appetite was held in check before, now it had been given its full head. I was sublimely gluttonous, tasting bits of everything and enjoying second helpings of many. Cheese, in particular, was a novelty to me; long deemed too rich and binding for my already bound-up insides, it was now available to me in all its endless varieties. The blue-veined Stilton was my favorite, and I ate it with fruit at almost every meal.
I was very aware of my tongue as it tasted and my teeth as they bit. My jaw working to chew and my throat to swallow; and then my belly sighing its contentment. In the mornings, for the first time in all my life that I could remember, my body emptied itself easily without first requiring a purgative. My life’s rhythm had always been set to my body’s sluggishness, many days in which my food bound itself to my insides like Flanders glue, followed by mornings wracked with the cramps that always attended the use of a purgative, while it all came out in humiliatingly spectacular fashion. These mornings brought the fancies of traveling, in which I sometimes indulged, crashing down around my aching head—for, other symptoms notwithstanding, I could not imagine enduring such miserable hours anywhere except in my own home. But now, I had traveled—I was here—and my body had proved that it could function as cleverly as anyone else’s. The entire world was suddenly available, whenever I gathered courage enough to face it.
Outside the house, new leaves flexed like fingers on long, branching arms as the trees stretched after a winter of sleep. I wanted to pluck those leaves; to smell them and feel their tenderness between the pads of my fingers. I tapped out my impatience with my cowardice on the window frame instead. From my bedchamber, below which so much of the city sprawled like a rolled-out carpet, I watched the rest of London bloom with spring. John’s and his neighbors’ gardens, with their plum and apple trees espaliered against tall walls, went abruptly heavy with blossoms into which bees and butterflies eagerly dipped.
I closed my eyes and imagined Rosings Park, where little delicate shoots would be pushing up in the fields. Our head gardener, Mr. Saxon, would be starting his spring work: separating overlarge clumps of plants, pruning, making reality whatever improvements he and Mamma had dreamed up over the long frozen months. The woods would be noisy with life, all the creatures from Mr. Thomson’s “Spring” stepping into courtship rituals as solemn, and as ridiculous to an outsider’s eye, as our own. When I left, Rosings sent me off with cries like shoving palms; I tried now to imagine what it would say to me, hovering here as I was, unwilling to step back but afraid to step forward. Not yet, it might say. Wait just a little longer.
Or so I told myself.
All my life, I had been dormant as a winter tree, waiting for a spring that never came. But now it had come—it was all around me. I spent my years in detached observation of the wheeling seasons, but there was nothing detached about me now. Green and birdsong burst forth across London, and I watched, avid. Like the world outside, I was full, full of so much feeling I knew not what to do with it all. Like a child, I was all curiosity, every moment a discovery.
This fullness extended to my body, which, with the benefit of all the nourishment I’d been putting away in greedy gulps, changed subtly under my curious fingertips. My body was a mere thing before, inert and trapping me inside it; but now it was a wonder. I liked to imagine myself like one of the fat, bursting buds on the trees outside, but in truth, the changes were slower, gentler, all my hollows filling in, my angles rounding out.
More dramatic was how my body felt—that my body felt—a quickening of blood through my veins, like the rush of white rootlings underground; a tingling at the pads of my fingers, like a gathering summer storm. Under my shift, my breasts ached. Every sensation seemed exaggerated as a line of poetry; and as poignantly true.
I woke one morning to blood.
The evening before, a pain had sprouted, so deep in my belly it seemed unreachable. It began dull but grew into a fist that pulled and clenched and released; by the time I excused myself from dinner, I thought I might vomit. Spinner put me to bed, her face creased with worry, her fingers, calloused from needle pricks, testing the temperature of my skin.
“You’re cool, ma’am,” she said, though her brows drew together to see my hand pressed futilely against my abdomen. “But perhaps I should send for Dr. Carter?”
“No,” I said, miserable, closing my eyes. “I think—perhaps I ate too much.” I curled on my side and eventually fell asleep.
When I awoke to the thin light of dawn, I could not at first understand what had happened. I was lying in something wet, and
for a dreadful moment I thought I had voided my bladder or my bowels in the night. I scrambled back, shifting aside the bedclothes, to find the white sheets stained bright as a butcher’s apron. The great, spreading stain was still wet, and as I shoved myself backward, away from it, I realized there was more coming, seeping from between my legs.
A bright rush of horror and then, suddenly, I understood. I’d had my first monthly bleeding when I was seventeen, and more, erratically, in the years since; but they were never predictable, not as Nurse and Miss Hall said they would be—though Dr. Grant assured my mother that such sparse and sporadic bleeding was to be expected in a delicate young woman—and never presaged by this burrowing ache. I was abruptly aware of my womb, of its existence somewhere in the deep mystery between my hip bones.
I rose up onto my knees on the bed. The insides of my thighs were streaked with blood; my chemise was ruined. I would be embarrassed, except that it felt not shameful, but joyful. This was a torrent; a glorious abundance that had been stored and waiting, and was now released. I felt borne along on it, like a leaf caught in a river.
I pressed my fingers over my eyes and, laughing, wept.
Spinner came in soon enough, took one look at my sheets and shift and the tackily drying blood, and sent for a bath. While we waited for the tub to be brought and filled, a housemaid came to bundle away my soiled linens, returning with salt and a basin of cold water. She blotted at the pinkish smear on the mattress, then sprinkled it over with salt, all the while pretending, in the manner of well-trained servants everywhere, that I was not the source of the troublesome stain.
The hot water eased away the deep-down ache even as Spinner scrubbed the blood from my skin. I stayed in the tub until it cooled, then let her clout and clothe me. The pinching pain began to return, however, and I curled over, fists pressed to my belly.
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