by Peg Kingman
Then the Twinnies clamoured for a turn, offering to sing—as they often did—“The True Lovers’ Farewell.” “Very well, my dears,” said their mother, “but I want you to attend very closely this time to your enunciation. And let Jenny take the young man’s part, for a change, and Lizzy, the lass’s.”
Their enunciation was exaggerated to the point of brittleness; but for the first time, Constantia found herself attending not only to the pretty melody but also to the ache, the longing and loss in the words of the old song. Jenny sang:
Farewell, my love! I must be gone
And leave you for a while.
But wherever I go, I’ll come back again,
Though I go ten thousand miles, my dear,
Though I go ten thousand miles.
(No, thought Constantia, not ten thousand . . . less than a hundred miles, as the pigeon flies.)
Lizzy replied:
Ten thousand miles! It is so far
To leave me here alone,
Whilst I may lie, lament and cry,
And you will not hear my moan, my dear,
And you will not hear my moan.
(What good can come of lamenting and crying? thought Constantia.)
Jenny sang:
The crow that is so black, my dear,
Shall change his colour white;
And if ever I prove false to thee,
The day shall turn to night, my dear,
The day shall turn to night.
And Lizzy replied:
O don’t you see that milk-white dove
A-perched on yonder tree,
Lamenting for her own true love,
As I lament for thee, my dear,
As I lament for thee.
(Doves and pigeons pair for life, Constantia knew. But men? And women?)
Both girls sang the last verse together:
The river never will run dry,
Nor the rocks melt with the sun;
And I’ll never prove false to the one I love
’Til all these things be done, my dear,
’Til all these things be done.
(Alas! thought Constantia. How was comfort to be derived from such lover’s promises as those? Rivers do run dry! Rocks do crumble, and wash to the sea! All of them do, eventually. She could not help but remember the petty rajahs and chieftains of the hill tribes above Assam, who, as a token of contract and agreement, would present each other with a stone, and these solemn words: “Until that stone crumbles into dust shall our friendship last; and firm as its texture, so firm is our present resolution.” Those contracts, agreements, and alliances were sometimes long-lasting; sometimes not. Stones always do crumble, eventually. Do they not? Constantia fingered the flat-backed pearl on its fine chain at her throat.)
“Who has not given us a song?”
“Mrs MacAdam has not!”
“You must give us a song too, Mrs MacAdam! Do, pray!”
“Indeed you must!”
“But I do not know any songs,” protested Constantia.
“No songs! Surely you must. Everyone knows songs.”
“Sing us something savage—from the jungle—from the Indies!”
Shirking was impossible; sing she must, among this company. Constantia drew a deep shaky breath and, clasping her hands tightly together to conceal her trembling, was astonished to hear her own voice in the room, actually singing. It was a song her mother used to sing to her; the old song that Constantia now sometimes sang under her breath to the babies:
A fair maid going by the jail-house door
heard a prisoner bemoan himself there.
She was the fair flower o’ Northumberland.
(But do not think of her! my mother!)
“Fair maid,” said he, “will you pity me?
If ye’ll steal the keys and let me gae free,
I’ll make you my lady in fair Scotland.”
(nor of that soft freckled arm)
She’s went to her father’s stable,
She’s stown a steed baith wight and able,
To carry them on to fair Scotland.
(nor of her hair)
They rode till they came to Crawfurd muir,
He bade her light off; they’d call her a whore
If she didna return to Northumberland.
(Mama’s hair!)
When she went thro her father’s hall,
She looted her low amongst them all,
She that was the flower o’ Northumberland.
(nor of what happened to her)
But spake her mother, she spake with a smile,
“Ye’re nae the first that his coat did beguile,
Ye’re welcome again to Northumberland.”
Constantia felt herself faltering, but plunged into the last two stanzas nevertheless. Upon the last line of the last stanza, however, she could sing no more. Her throat closed, choking upon a thick sob, and she turned away from them, to hide her tears.
“But that’s all right, Mrs MacAdam,” said Mary’s voice.
“Hinney, oh hinney, don’t cry, then,” said Jenny, and Constantia felt herself patted and caressed as the girls closed around her; and one of them said, “Do you know, Tuckie used to cry, sometimes, when she sang, but now she never does. It’s ever so much easier when you get used to it, you know.”
“And it’s a sweet voice you have, Mrs MacAdam,” said another.
But Constantia, though she tried to compose herself, could not stem her tears; and after a few moments, unwilling to distress them with her own distress, she withdrew. She got as far as the broad landing of the stair and sat, quite unexpectedly, on the top step, for her legs would carry her no further. She pressed her blazing forehead against the chilly iron baluster and tried to steady her breathing. How mortifying! She had upset Tuckie, too; on her way out of the room she had caught a glimpse of Tuckie’s face puckered and red, tears of sympathy glistening in her eyes. When she could, Constantia fled to the privacy of her room, and the comfort of warm heavy babies.
At length there came a tap at her door, and Mrs Chambers entered. Constantia stood with Charlie in her arms and said, “I beg your pardon, Mrs Chambers; I am so sorry to have distressed the children, and spoilt the evening—”
“Oh, never mind that, Mrs MacAdam. They have forgotten all about it already. We erred in pressing you so hard. Or, perhaps, the song itself . . .?”
“My mother used to sing it to me. My late mother.”
“Oh aye,” said Mrs Chambers gently. “May I sit down? Northumbrian, was she?”
“From round about Newcastle, she told me.”
“It is a fine old ballad, and one of my favourites, that ‘Fair Flower of Northumberland’—although it must be conceded that we Scots do not come off to advantage in it. A great many variants there are, too; some of them more to my taste than others. But I don’t think I have ever heard any precisely like yours.”
“No? My mother always sang it to me thus.”
“I have never heard that conclusion. I should be very much obliged if I might hear it again.”
“Oh, but I—I don’t think I could bring myself . . .” said Constantia, ashamed at feeling tears well up once more.
“The last two verses? Will you say them, perhaps, if you cannot sing them?”
It is a disgraceful old ballad. The loveliest girl in Northumberland, taking pity upon a handsome Scots prisoner, springs him from jail and rides north with him, casting her lot with his, body and soul—until, upon crossing the Tweed, he declares himself already married, and sends her back, ruined, to her old parents. Matters arrange themselves satisfactorily, however, in the concluding verses. Constantia whispered them:
A swain once scorn’d she’s recall’d the next day,
Now she’s yielded, she’s let him take her away—
Across the border to fair Scotland.
Comes their firstborn child, a gift from heav’n,
No nine-months’ baby—nor scarcely seven!—
Now s
he’s the fair flower of Northumberland!
(Now she’s the fair flower of Northumberland! her mother would sing to her, and kiss her until she laughed; and little Constantia had known—known!—herself to be her mother’s dearest darling, her beloved, her very own fairest flower!)
“Clever!” said Mrs Chambers. “Where did your mother get it, I wonder? I suppose you miss her dreadfully.”
“I do, very much indeed,” said Constantia, “especially now that I am become a mother myself.” And the room swam before her eyes again.
“If there is anything I can do,” said Mrs Chambers, and let her hand fall over Constantia’s. “I would not press you, not in the slightest—but if there is anything I can do to ease your lot—your husband at a distance, too, during this difficult time!—I beg you will not hesitate . . . I think I can promise discretion, and sympathy. Certainly we owe you a great deal more than that, on Charlie’s account.”
Eve must have looked just thus, when offering Adam the apple: so kind, so gentle, so generous; fine eyes shining with affection and sympathy for a fellow creature. Constantia was tempted, sorely tempted! to confide her secret. A secret was so hard to bear! So heavy a burden for one alone! For a long moment, she held her breath for fear that she might speak; not daring even to exhale, for fear that some words, a whisper, might escape with her breath.
But no secret was safe, once eased; once the burden of it was shifted, shared with another, it remained secret no longer.
“You are very good to me,” said Constantia at last. “You and Mr Chambers do show me every possible kindness.” But (she did not add), there are some things which cannot be helped; which must only be endured. She could not even meet Mrs Chambers’s frank gaze, in case it might penetrate too far into her thoughts. How dreadful it felt, to repay Mrs Chambers’s warmth with such coldness! And no explanation was possible. Mrs Chambers could not be expected to sympathise with the necessity of concealment for a husband’s sake.
Presently, Mrs Chambers patted her hand once more, and rose, and went out.
The book Vestiges went missing for several days, until Constantia happened to find it behind a sofa cushion in the library. The orange thread she had been using for a bookmark was gone, but someone had left a copy of the newest Edinburgh Review tucked into it. She carried it all upstairs to her own room, hoping to find time soon to resume reading.
That night, having fed both babies to bursting once more, Constantia took gratefully to her bed, aching for sleep. With luck she might snatch four or even five hours of sleep before one (and then the other) of the babies awakened again, howling with hunger. But sleep, alas, would not, could not, quite engulf her, for she was startled awake—over and over again—by the bark of Willie’s cough from the adjoining nursery, where both he and Jemmie had been put to bed with heavy colds. Constantia could have wept with fatigue and despair; but after a time, harrowed into hopeless wakefulness, she sat up and relit her lamp. As she took up Vestiges from the table beside her bed, the Edinburgh Review slipped out, onto the floor. She leaned down to retrieve the thick quarterly; she could reach only a corner of it, and it flopped open as she drew it onto her lap.
Someone had written all over its pages.
These pages of the Review, she saw from their header, contained that notorious critique of the Vestiges; that sarcastic, contemptuous, unsigned review said to be—nay, known to be—from the pen of the eminent Dr Sedgwick. Someone had annotated these pages minutely; had underlined Dr Sedgwick’s phrases, lines, even whole paragraphs; had starred and bracketed and commented; and had filled the margins, top and bottom, left and right, with a small dense black handwriting. She turned over the pages. Page after page was annotated thus.
Whose was this handwriting? It was unknown to her. She could not even guess whether this hand—this Annotator—was a man or a woman.
She held the Review close under her lamp, riffling through the pages until her eye was arrested by a constellation of asterisks and underlinings. Where Dr Sedgewick’s printed text read, “It is true that we see polypiaria, crinodes, articulata, and mollusca; but it is not true that we meet with them in the order stated by our author”—the Annotator had written furiously in the margin, “humiliating to answer an objection so mean as this! no claim made that the animals came in this order! only the words are in this order—in accordance with scientific usage!”
Where Dr Sedgwick had identified “three distinct propositions, and all three are false to nature, and no better than a dream,” the handwritten comment in the margin was this: “which party is the falsifier and the dreamer?”
Where Dr Sedgwick had written of “a grand and at the present day an unpardonable blunder,” the handwritten comment in the margin was “another dream of S’s! & proof of his recklessness in making charges—”
Where Dr Sedgwick had written “But who is the author?” and proceeded to discuss whether the nameless author’s style of mind betrayed more of manliness or of womanliness, the Annotator had written, “How could it matter? Why does S suppose it matters?”
Dr Sedgwick had declared, “We have spent years of active life among these ancient strata—looking for (and we might say longing for) some arrangement of the ancient fossils which might fall in with our preconceived notions of a natural ascending scale. But we looked in vain, and we were weak enough to bow to nature.” That grand editorial “we” at its most sarcastic and condescending had roused the Annotator to triple underlines which nearly scored the paper through, and the scribbled comment: “Having studied one little patch of the earth, S believes it to be a criterion for all the rest. As though, having met plenty of grown men but never an infant in arms, he were to declare that he bows to nature in pronouncing babes a mere fancy!! Has yet to learn that knowledge is acquired by communication as well as examination.”
Where Dr Sedgwick had complained of “difficulties in the way of this theory,” the Annotator had written: “What difficulties, sir? Why do you not state their nature? so that the argument may be reframed so as to satisfy you?—risky and arrogant too, so dogmatic a tone in a field still so uncharted—”
Dr Sedgwick had gone on to declare that “species were found, in living nature, to be permanent. To this law not one exception has been found.” Opposite this the Annotator had written, “bald falsehood.”
Dr Sedgwick referred to “a personal and superintending God, concentrating his will on every atom of the universe.” He wrote of “a personal and superintending God, who careth for his creatures.” And all the contrivances of nature, he asserted, “are wise and good.” In the margin beside each of these statements, the Annotator had written, “Evidence to support—ex scripture??”
Constantia’s lamp flickered; the wick needed trimming. The house was still; no one even coughed.
Many people do annotate their books and papers. It is a practise of attentive, thoughtful readers. Anyone—any intelligent, keen, well-informed reader—might have written these comments into this copy of the Edinburgh Review. There was no way of knowing whose comments they were; and Constantia did not want to know. They were private. They were something she ought not to have seen, just as she ought not to hear Mr and Mrs Chambers in their bedroom below. Rising, she donned her dressing gown and carried the Vestiges and the Edinburgh Review downstairs. Moonlight flooded the staircase. At this hour there was no one on the stairs; no one in the passage; no one in the library. She returned the borrowed texts to the place where she had found them, behind the sofa cushion.
One or two mornings after this, when Constantia was in her room nursing Livia, Hopey appeared in the doorway and said, “The gardener asked me just now to bring up your book. He said he picked it up in the garden, some days ago, and meant to bring it up to the house directly—but found it just now lying forgotten among his hurdles, and begs your pardon.” She set the book on the table under the window. It was the Vestiges—with the orange thread that served as a bookmark, just as Constantia had lost it, marking the chapter about the
Origin of the Animated Tribes.
6
“MR MACAULAY! His facts beyond dispute!” burst out Constantia, provoked at last to rude contradiction. “There can scarcely exist, Lady Janet, another man whose utter disregard—nay, whose contempt!—for facts equals Mr Macaulay’s!”
“Indeed,” said Lady Janet, offended.
When Mrs Chambers had been called out of the room by some catastrophe in the kitchen, Lady Janet profited by her position of temporary authority to read extracts aloud to the girls from a recent speech given by Mr Macaulay at Westminster. Nina, at her easel, and the other girls, cutting out silhouettes in red paper, were paying scant attention; and Constantia managed to keep silence until Lady Janet, in conclusion, had commended “the excellence of our Member, whose factual arguments are always beyond dispute.”
“I have known of Mr Macaulay’s imaginary ‘facts’ ever since his unfortunate posting to Calcutta,” said Constantia, “when he wrote that infamous Minute on Education. Oh yes, my lady; though I was only a girl at the time, I remember very well the disgust—yes, disgust!—excited by Mr Macaulay’s ignorance and arrogance, among the people with whom I then lived, in India. Six months after Mr Macaulay’s arrival in India—still the rawest of griffins—he felt himself qualified to declare that in all of Sanskrit literature, there was nothing worth reading! And that the language was not fit for conducting the education of Indians. And how had he reached this conclusion? Had he learned the language, so that he could study its literature, and arrive at a proper and informed estimate of its value? No, my lady, he had not. No! He admits in the Minute itself, quite coolly, that he had not bothered actually to learn any Sanskrit—”
“Well, of course he had not; I daresay it is a very strange and difficult language,” said Lady Janet.