by DM Bryan
“No no,” Sarah says faintly, unable to look at the glinting fabric, the gilded spindles. A cup of tea hovers between her fingers, and she wills it to remain there. Elizabeth has put some acid-patterned cover on the floor that puts tears in her eyes. “Everything is perfectly lovely,” she says, focusing on her sister’s set mouth.
Complaint to Elizabeth on the matter of Mr. Gotobed proves impossible. Elizabeth allows to Sarah that Mr. Montagu, Edward, disappoints his wife more than he can ever sadden his sister-in-law. His affairs, great and small, fill the dressing room one flight below them, but the man himself, as always, declines to be in London. When Sarah seeks to draw her sister out on the subject of her coachman, Elizabeth evades with descriptions of Montagu’s conversation. “He brings me nothing but sums,” says Elizabeth.
And diamonds, thinks Sarah catching the flash at her sister’s elegant neck. At forty-three, Elizabeth achieves a sleekness unavailable to Sarah. The look of her sister’s lace fichu and high velvet band make Sarah’s own neck itch, and she jiggles her cup in her hand so that she might lay a soothing finger upon her skin.
The blankets in the inn where she lay last night were hairy and heavy. She rarely sleeps well, and the novel, which she jots on pages shuffled in her portmanteau, kept her more than usually awake. Still, when Elizabeth scolds her for leaving the coach on the Bath road, for enduring a dirty bed, and for arriving in this pressed and folded condition, Sarah protests. She is not a letter and cannot be creased in transit. Fields green her soul, and the lowing of cattle is a psalm to those who have ears to hear it. Waving her teacup, she tries to describe the fortifying sheen of Minorcan hens and new grass in the rain.
Elizabeth claps her hands in pleasure, and for a second Sarah is fooled. But, her sister has only remembered the items of dress she’s had altered against Sarah’s arrival in town. “Fresh growth on a yellowed ground,” says Elizabeth, “the exactest description of the patterning—I knew you would like it. You have the complexion to wear yellow, and I do not.”
She means well enough, Sarah tells herself, really, she tries.
A girl—Sarah does not recognize this one’s chestnut handsomeness—is commanded to bring forth a gown of jaundiced silk, sprigged in twists of green. She takes away Sarah’s teacup so that that lady might better enjoy the clever amendments to the garment. Elizabeth has commanded the insertion of panels at the shoulders and at the waist to accommodate Sarah’s spreading flesh, and the fall of the skirt itself has been narrowed to suit changing fashions. “It is very narrow,” says Sarah, examining the fabric that falls across her lap and into Elizabeth’s. Her own brown travelling habit vanishes beneath a garden of unlikely blossom.
“The fullness comes with the pleats in the back,” says Elizabeth.
Obediently, Sarah puts her finger to a row of careful gathers.
“And the sleeves are both scalloped and pinked.”
Sarah takes the sleeve and inspects its layers of fabric. The skin of her hand shows, coarse and red. “One day,” she says, “we will, all of us, men and women alike, wear breeches and stockings, plain coats with serviceable pockets attached. No woman will be clapped into skirts, unless she decides upon it herself. Imagine London on that day, sister, when everyone will be allowed two legs on which to stride.”
“I have two legs, sister, but I wish to keep them to myself.”
“And so you may, but you will not be obliged.”
Elizabeth has clasped her hands together, holding one wrist—Sarah knows the gesture of old. Such thoughts are well enough in fiction—in speculation—but they have no place in this well-appointed dressing room. Her sister dismisses the girl, who withdraws, her hair, under its cap, a curl of coffee.
“The dress pleases me very much, Pod,” says Sarah, hoping praise might mend what tactlessness has broken.
“No gown has ever pleased you.”
“You know I am content to appear respectable rather than a la mode. Although, I do not approve this recent fashion for imaginary flowers—I prefer silken botanicals to strictly mimic those of field and wood.”
“The intention is decoration, not scholarship, Sarah.”
“I am already some years past any hope of appearing decorative. Nature and fortune mistook themselves with me—I ought to have been born a man and a gardener.”
The women sit, divided by the ruffling expanse of Spitalfields silk. Once they were pea and pod, but now they are only sisters. Elizabeth once knew Sarah’s heart, but now even Sarah herself finds it mysterious. It is, she suspects, only a cavity beneath her ribs, filled with rich, dark humus—the rotting product of leaves, stems, fruitful hulls that flourished there before. By contrast, Elizabeth’s heart has been remodelled many times. She negotiates with Mr. Adams or Mr. Stuart to fill it with Chinese birds and bamboo caning. Carpet in the style of the orient. A chrysanthemum chair cushion. But this is woolgathering. Both organs are made of scarlet blood and tubing flesh, like the beef hearts Lady Barbara tries and cannot eat.
What then might that mean? On the basis of hearts—their weight and shape and colour—nobody can distinguish between sisters—or any other persons either.
The heaviness of the silk dress causes her to flush, and under her own clothing, a layer of moisture forms, a prickly dew. Sarah pushes the gown off her knees and into a chair, where it reclines like a third sister.
“You smile,” says Elizabeth, leaving unsaid: at me?
“I smile,” Sarah says, pointing, “at the part that separates us from our brothers. Who would think a few layers of boning makes so much difference in the world?”
Elizabeth does not speak, but Sarah hears her anyway. Stays do not make the difference. The palings lie deeper under flesh, a cradle of bone swathed by a rising belly. You cannot escape that girdle, Elizabeth thinks. But she is wrong.
“Without my stays, I do not feel myself,” says Elizabeth.
“And I am never myself with them.”
“Do not pin so tight.”
“I thank you for your good advice.” Sarah allows her voice to imply the opposite.
But Elizabeth is undaunted. “I thought you would be pleased to have something suitable to wear in the evenings,” says she. “I have said you are coming, you know, and people are pleased.”
“Coming to what?”
“Coming to London. Coming here to Hill Street.”
“And?”
“Coming to my assembly tonight. Do you not long for something new to wear?”
This news comes as a little shock to Sarah, although she knew it likely.
“Then I doubt the gown will be new to any but myself,” Sarah says. “Most of the party will have seen you in it before.”
In reply, Elizabeth rings for the girl, who, catching her mistress’ mood, takes the yellow robe prisoner. Slumped before her, the gown marches from the room. Sarah knows she behaves with insufficient kindness, but each detail of her sister’s dressing room hurts her head—she cannot easily forgive Elizabeth the glinting, hovering points of light.
“This room is over-bright,” she says.
“It faces north,” says Elizabeth.
“It is the noise of the street. I do not like it in Bath either.”
“We are not on the street,” says her sister. “Why must you make problems?”
“Why must you never see them?”
Are we to fight? Sarah wonders, pinching her forehead with her thumb and forefinger. She searches out anger, crushes it, plants sisterly affection in its place, but wrath re-grows, demonstrating the persistence she lacks. She admires its tenacity, as it twines and climbs, producing blossoms the colour of a flushing face, veined with all that is unsayable.
“How do you progress with your writing?” asks Elizabeth.
Sarah takes a moment to understand she must open her mouth to answer. “The printers composite the text of my Hall,”
she says.
“You are arrived in town for a consultation?”
“I am not. They know their business tolerably well, I think.”
“So, how goes the new work—you told me the title, but I have forgot it.”
“The Perils of Mrs. Pauline Page: Or, Love in a Mirror,” says Sarah, pleased with the lie.
“Yes, I remember now. And how does it progress? Well, I hope.”
I burnt it all in the fireplace in Bath, Sarah does not say, for she burns nothing. She does not know what reply she can make. The silence pleats, folds.
“Sarah, do not shut me out. Perhaps I enquire too closely, but I have ever been a friend of your work.”
“You have, Elizabeth. You must pardon my reticence. I have set those pages aside in favour of something new—the history of an orphan boy.”
“Mr. Newbery will take it? When do you see him?”
“I am not here to see Mr. Newbery.” Sarah decides to tell the truth, or some of it anyway. She says, “Sister, my head aches so much these days, I can no longer write as easily or as swiftly as I did. Long hours of composition are painful, and I do not expect to be much engaged with the book trade for the time being.”
“Forgive me,” says Elizabeth, “then I do not understand your purpose in coming to town. I showed your letter to Edward, and he could not guess either. But when you wrote, I felt some urgency behind your words. Is it Lady Barbara? Is she worse? Is it another financial embarrassment? Do you wish for me to speak with our father again? Your letter did not say, and I wish you would confide in me. You need but say the word, and I will do anything in my power to help.”
What remains of Sarah’s anger extinguishes. It collapses inwards and like all rotten husks, proves to have no inside. “I have come,” she says, “to see you.” And, as she speaks, the claim proves as truthful as anything else she might say.
e
Sarah Scott has taken to her bed in one of the upper rooms. Her sister’s taste has made few inroads this high in the house, and so these plaster walls remain covered in the same powdered distemper they received when new. Only a mantle, decorated with insets of Sienna marble in the style of William Kent, betrays the chamber’s ambitions. Well, Sarah does not have to look at it. Her room faces south, and the sun and the street filter in past the billowing red curtain, but Sarah lodges above the cares of the common man. Off her feet, fed and watered, she at last feels equal to a little warmth and life. Nobody on Hill Street cries buy my mackerel or fresh country milk—the neighbourhood is too genteel—but the nasal honking of footmen and near the constant sound of hooves still signal London.
Two gowns, her own and Elizabeth’s hopeless primrose affair, hang over chair backs, where the girl has left them against that evening’s entertainment. This is not the lovely girl from the dressing room, but another—Sarah thinks her name may be Grace. Grace has asked Sarah to choose between the gowns, so that she may help Sarah dress, but Sarah—being Sarah—waved the girl away. Still, the gowns remain, awaiting Sarah’s choice. How much easier, Sarah Scott thinks, if my dresses behaved more like dresses and less like unloved children.
A letter noting her safe arrival must be penned to Lady Barbara. Eyes closed, flat on her back, Sarah composes it, moving her finger a little to aid composition. Dear Lady Barbara, she begins. Dearest. I have reached London after nothing more disastrous than an overturned carriage—the cause, a drunken coachman.
What should become of the inebriated fool? Sarah has failed to take the man up with Elizabeth, just as she has not succeeded in raising the matter of Edward Montagu’s shabby treatment of Mr. Gotobed. Each matter returns to the tip of her tongue, but the thought of telling Elizabeth how to manage her affairs stops her.
A drunken coachman I have decided to forgive. Absolution in his case is not especially merited as the intoxicated fellow delayed my arrival by an entire day. Nevertheless, my forbearance will be rewarded by the preservation of amity between my sister and myself.
I am writing a fiction, Sarah realizes. Epistolary nonsense. I should take my lies more seriously.
What if she wrote, Darling Barbara, between Bath and London I saw a rhinoceros, grazing in a farmer’s field just west of the Thames Bridge. This creature is known as the real unicorn to those traveling shows who advertise the living production of Camels and Zebras.
Sarah has noticed the bills for such spectacles, posted on Bath fences and walls. The rhinoceros, with his pitted skin, seems especially worth seeing. The Zebra resembles Elizabeth more particularly, with its elegant nose and fashionable pelt. Again, Sarah writes with her finger in the air. Elizebreth. Rhinosarah. The camel has a mild and gentle manner, according to the printed puff. The camel is Lady Barbara, to the life. Who could capture the likeness? Why Mr. Hogarth could.
The letter to Hogarth must also be written. An obstacle to be sure, for the matter of an introduction is a tricky one. Elizabeth, if Sarah but asked her, would produce, from her many shining friends, one who might easily make the connection, but Sarah will not ask Elizabeth. “Sarah Scott,” said Sarah, softly into the over-warm spring air of the little room, “wishes to do this alone.” She understands why. She, active agent of so many charitable projects, cannot stand to be the recipient of one. The very sting against which she counsels her girls also torments her. And what is the name of that needling wound? Why, it is pride that pricks me, she writes in the air.
The wood frame of the bed squeaks as she rises, and moves to her portmanteau for her traveling quills and the carefully capped glass bottle of ink she carries. The room has no desk, so she sits beneath the window and places the leather case in her lap, writing against its surface as best she can. Filled with something resembling resolve, she quickly composes her letter to Barbara—filled with easeful half-truths and empty of beasts. She makes no mention of her project and, after some consideration, none of her accident. Barbara, she hopes, continues to feel better, sitting by a Bath window as full of city sounds as this one.
The room has no bell or cord. Unsure of how to call the girl, Sarah goes to the top of the stairs and looks around. Out on the landing, she finds only closed doors and polished floorboards. She remembers a floor cloth on this level—has Elizabeth taken it up, intending to replace it with something grander? The plainness of the stairs pleases Sarah, and she realizes her headache has eased. The twisting of her stomach no longer causes her discomfort, perhaps because while resting she allowed herself to suffer several percussive instances of those effusions unknown to ladies in public. In short, she has been farting. Sarah laughs at her own thoughts and stretches in the doorway, realizing she is still a little hungry.
After a moment, she takes her letter firmly in hand and starts down the stairs. On the first floor she calls for Elizabeth and hears no answer. She enters her sister’s dressing room, which sits empty, the silver tea still upon its tray, its contents cold. The door to the bedchamber behind is closed, so Sarah moves into the long drawing room along the front of the house. In this room, the sun slips in sideways, evading the heavy curtains. Shadows stretch along the dado and cornice, reminding her for some reason of numbers entered into an account book. She goes back out into the stairwell and stumps down another flight.
“Elizabeth,” she calls, remembering too late the bell pull amongst the chinoiserie of the dressing room. No matter, she has reached the ground floor, where she will certainly find Elizabeth in the hall or the dining room. But her sister exists in neither place, and Sarah will not open the door to the rear parlour, for that is Edward Montagu’s private territory. Even though the man is not in London, the smell of port and leather issue past the oaken door. She backs into the dining room and rings for a servant, but nobody comes. Surprised, she rings again, and again she hears no answering tread. Then, letter in hand, stomach grumbling, she takes herself back through the hall and down the final set of stairs, to the servant’s level.
How ever
ything alters as she descends. The bright stairwell, lit by a skylight above, metamorphoses into rough-boarded steps. Now the earthy odour, underlying all other smells in the house, grows dominant. She reaches a confusing set of doorways, opening on all sides, and she chooses one she hopes leads to the kitchen. “Hello,” she calls, an elderly, irritable Persephone, eager for a piece of pomegranate. Light filters from above, from windows impossibly distant. Water drips, and a draft cools her overheated flesh. A room full of bottles proves a dead end, and Sarah retraces her steps.
At last, she finds the long corridor running towards the back of the house. It carries with it the smell of cooking. Mould alters to mushrooms. She sniffs, imagining a potage of greens, of ramps and other spring plants. Voices on her right take her to a closed door, on which, after a moment of trepidation, she knocks. Every sound ceases absolutely, and Sarah hears the generalized silence which only confusion brings. Slowly, the door swings open.
The servant’s hall receives all its light from a sunken well far above their heads. All this she works out later, from upstairs, where she belongs. But in the instant, she perceives, in the subterranean gloom, a wooden table and mud-coloured plates. The Montagu family servants sit at the table, pale faces aqueous. In the corner lurks a smoking hearth, its chimney and ceiling sooty. It does not draw right, and Elizabeth should see to that—thinks Sarah.
A boy comes to the door, and the girl from upstairs—the plain one with the suit-yourself face—rises to follow, yanking the knob from his hands.
“You needn’t have come down.” The words suggest apology, but the tone is pure correction. “Those bells,” says the girl, “ain’t worked right since the refitting. They broke the cords and stitched them up worse than before.”
Sarah ignores the girl, hands the boy her letter for Barbara. “After dinner,” she tells him, “you might post this. It needs franking,” and she looks for Elizabeth’s butler, who sits at the head of the table, glowing greenly by the window well. He nods, but Sarah knows she has broken the rules. Her own household is not like this. She has not been on the servant’s level in a real house since she was a child.