by E. J. Levy
“Have you forgotten that you have daughters as well as a son?”
“Our son will care for his sisters and us.”
“Tom cares for nothing but himself and his own ease,” my mother said. “He will squander everything, if you allow it; he will put his sisters in the street. And us.”
I was standing just inside the parlor, beside my sister, close enough to see our father’s jaw set hard, a muscle twitch in his cheek, as it did when he confronted a farmer who could not supply what had been promised.
“By God I’ll put you there myself, if you defy me. It’s a matter for men to decide.”
“Tom has squandered all, and you would give him more?” My mother beckoned me over with impatient hands and began tugging at my cloak and cap.
“You will do as I say,” my father said, stepping toward us. His tone raised hairs along my arms.
“I will do as my conscience bids,” my mother said.
“I am your conscience.”
“God is my conscience. You’re just a man, and little enough of one at that.”
I heard the blow before I felt my mother lurch against me. When I looked up, my father’s palm was raised to strike again; I don’t know if it was her expression or mine that stopped him. He dropped his hand, as if defeated, and pushing past my sister, he walked out.
In the months that followed, their arguments would grow common and cruel. My sister and I became accustomed to the sound of broken china and of blows, of chairs overturned. We lay in bed and listened to the storm below. Juliana was more yielding, more tender than I, sensible and patient; it was clear that she had our mother’s keen intelligence and the desire to apply it well. She was forever inventing some more efficient means for maintaining our household, for improving its economy without diminishing its comforts. But even she could not calm our father’s rage.
It turned out that in expectation of receiving the deed, my father had in our absence offered the house as collateral to the debt collectors. He pleaded with my mother to understand his position, claimed that if he went back on his word now he’d be made a liar and a fool. My mother said his premature offer of the house had made him both already.
My father talked of taking legal action against my uncle, of going to the West Indies to pay off the debt, but save for collectors rapping at the door there were few comings or goings. My brother moved in with his wife’s family after he lost the farm, and shortly thereafter both bride and brother moved in with us, when her family refused support. My father lived among them like Lear visiting his daughters, solicitous and mild, while my sister and I played the part of maids. My mother banged pots and dropped platters, spilled soup at dinner, clumsy with rage, and in a fury one evening said she’d rather be dead than see her family home go to creditors.
By the following January, we were in the street—put out not by creditors but by my father, who had taken my brother’s part and turned us out—my mother and me. My sister, Juliana, stayed behind to serve as maid. I hoped it might keep her safe. We stayed for a few weeks with Mr. Penrose, an attorney and childhood friend of my mother’s; we wrote to my uncle but received no reply, so in late February 1806 we made our way once more to London.
I was loath to travel, to make the exhausting journey by ship and coach, which would take the rest of my mother’s jewelry and all our courage. We had nowhere to stay; no friends there, no relations, save for my uncle Jonathan, who hardly qualified as either. But we could not remain in Cork, as I wished to do, for—as our mother explained—any labor we turned our hands to there would be our loss, our father’s gain, since a wife’s earnings belonged to her husband, by custom and law; we could starve, she said, and our labors benefit us nothing; the only course was to return to London. My mother and I would go alone to beg my uncle’s help—if he might settle on me the house that had been willed to her, it would be safe from my father’s creditors, saved; without the change in deed, that single piece of paper, we were lost.
We arrived in London after a difficult winter crossing by boat to find the city choked with fog, a suffocating yellow haze blotting out the dim winter sun. My mother seemed indifferent to the chill and the stench of sewage and stables. She hired a hackney coach directly from the docks to take us to my uncle’s; we were jostled through the cluttered, reeking streets, past bookshops and glass-fronted stores with heavy signs, coffeehouses and ale houses and taverns, circulating libraries and small brick churches and open markets, and glistening above it all the great dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral; sedan-chair men carried well-dressed passengers past gentlemen who might have been lawyers or doctors, past ballad sellers and beggars, while footmen clung to rattling carriages; the streets clogged with tradesmen of every sort—milk women and town criers, knife grinders and vendors who shouted out their wares, selling oysters, fish, and apples, until at last we reached the narrow door at Little Castle Street, on which a wreath tied with black ribbon hung and a simple handbill, confirming what my mother had most feared: my uncle was dead.
“We’re saved,” I said, thinking of the inheritance.
“We’re ruined,” my mother said, sinking down onto the trunk we’d carried from Cork, which contained all of what little we still owned.
Barred by both marriage and religion from ownership of land, her inheritance would pass to our father, she explained, leaving us destitute and now alone.
Had our family been Protestant, with a daughter even modestly dowered, my mother might have thought to marry her eldest girl to some young man of good prospects if not of actual fortune. But the prospects of a good marriage were not good at all. The most my mother could hope for her eldest daughter was a position as a governess to a respectable family, a post not lucrative but sufficiently genteel to reassure my mother and reasonably secure; Margaret might expect to earn a small income with which to support mother and sister, and in time perhaps make a modestly good marriage to a second son, a vicar, or possibly, with luck, even a rector or solicitor.
I was not keen on marriage and shared my uncle’s dread of children—the first of many traits I would discover that we held in common—but the options for a young woman from Cork without a father or brother or fortune or faith to lend her value were limited. London’s streets were proof of that, where thousands of prostitutes strolled the streets and solicited from doorways, a reminder of where poor prospects might take a country girl; what we might face.
Word of my uncle’s death was sure to reach Cork soon and my father, and with it would come a petition for the sale of the house, leaving us nowhere to go, save back.
It would not take us long to realize that if we were to save ourselves, we must rid ourselves of Margaret. Which is to say, of me.
My mother rose and knocked at the door, hoping we might find the charwoman in and collect a few family mementos, perhaps spend the night, but we found my uncle’s rooms beetled with men of indeterminate age and dark coats, who moved through the rooms like undertakers, unwilling or unable to offer my mother information or assistance. We were on the verge of leaving when I heard a familiar voice from the foyer, and turned to see General Mirandus in the doorway, consulting with the maid who had let us in. I could not tell from his expression if he was pleased or dismayed to see us. The past two years had been trying; perhaps we were unrecognizable.
My mother had been fastidious about her appearance in the past, ours and hers and that of her home. Now she wore a filthy dress and cloak without seeming to be aware of the mud or stains upon them. She no longer bothered to brush her boots or shoes. She often did not brush her hair or even sponge-wash the soot from her neck when she came in. I had observed the change without being aware of it.
“I was not aware you were in London, Mrs. Brackley,” he said, crossing to my mother.
“We’ve only just arrived,” my mother said.
“If I might know where you are staying, I will ask the solicitor to call on you. He is most eager of an interview.”
“We have no money for lodgings,” my mother sa
id. “We had depended upon my brother’s generosity in undertaking this trip. The journey has taken all we had.” It was a humiliating admission. For the first time, I was ashamed of our circumstances and afraid. But my mother spoke calmly, without petition. She had been a charming, beautiful, self-satisfied woman; adversity had stripped her of social graces; she had grown plain and modest and admirable in adversity; I saw that now. Perhaps the general did, too.
It was getting late; the light in the room had noticeably dimmed, and the few lamps were being lit by a different charwoman from the one who had let me in two years before, a lifetime ago. Mirandus asked her to build up the fire, to set out supper; he handed her some coins, then excused himself to speak to one of the beetle-men and presently they departed. Finally, he returned to my mother.
“It will take some time to catalogue the contents of the estate,” he told my mother. “Christie’s men are here but a few hours each day. Why don’t you and your daughter reside here for the time being?”
My mother’s expression must have betrayed dismay at the prospect of staying in my uncle’s decrepit home. Kindness had disarmed her, left her vulnerable to wanting.
“It lacks charm,” the general said. “But it has the great benefit of being without cost. And yours. You are the sole beneficiary of the estate, I believe. There was, I think, a brother.”
“We have had no word of him in many years.” My mother seemed to sway slightly, as if a breeze had caught her. “Perhaps we might sit down.”
“Of course. Forgive me. You’ve had a long journey.”
The general pulled up chairs before the fire, and soon after a tray was brought in. I heard the general telling my mother that my uncle had received a hero’s burial, a grand funeral, laid to rest in St. Paul’s beside his former friend Sir Joshua Reynolds. I took up my perch on the ottoman closest the fire, hearing but not attending to the adult conversation behind me, until I heard my mother laugh. A high, girlish laugh—a sound I had not heard in years.
When I turned, I saw my mother’s hand resting on the general’s arm. He smiled, did not withdraw it. I would learn in time that it was his particular gift to make whomever he spoke to feel like the singular focus of his attention, the most fascinating person in the room. Later I’d recognize this as the seducer’s art, but at the time it seemed to me generous, a species of genius, this ability to illuminate others with attention, as women of necessity do.
It was there by the fire that evening a fortnight after my uncle’s funeral that Margaret’s death warrant was written, that her life began to end and mine begin. I see that now; this must have been the moment that changed our lives, though none of us recognized it then; instead my mother and the general spoke of an education. I listened as they decided my fate.
I felt the general watching me, as I sat by the fire on the ottoman my uncle had rested his boots on, my cheeks warmed by the fire, my face lit like one of the women in my uncle’s paintings at the Royal Society. My muslin gown illuminated like a candlewick; a black satin ribbon beneath the bodice, an inadvertent nod to my uncle’s death.
“Let the girl come to my home,” he said.
My mother let her hand fall from his arm.
“She’s too young,” my mother said.
“Girls her age are married, Mrs. Brackley. They are mothers.”
“She’s only just eleven.”
“She will be thirteen soon enough.”
“She’s still a child. It would not be seemly to…to…”
“Educate her…?”
“Is that what you call it? She needs another kind of education, sir.”
The general seemed genuinely shocked. “I have a wife, Mrs. Brackley.”
“You have a mistress,” she said, finding her old courage. “It is said, sir, that you have many.”
Looking back, it occurs to me that he might have laughed, pleased that word of his conquests had traveled so far, even to the wives of Cork. He didn’t.
“You are speaking of the mother of my children,” he said simply.
“And I am the mother of Margaret.”
The general looked over at me.
“And as such, Mrs. Brackley, you have nothing to fear.”
My mother was too genteel to protest further. To name what she most feared and had to. What, after all, was the alternative?
“Let the girl come study in my home in the mornings and afternoons; in the evenings she will come home to you. It will take some months to put your brother’s affairs in order; you and your daughter might reside here while it’s accomplished. I will inquire after more suitable lodgings.”
I was delighted by the prospect, though my mother clearly was not. Neither by my uncle’s rooms nor by what she would later refer to as my so-called education.
My mother spent the following days issuing warnings. I was relieved by her bossiness, even her irritation, which seemed to bespeak a return of spirit. She instructed me in how to speak in the general’s home and when not to, urging me to be modest, self-effacing, obedient, silent. Never to ask for anything. No questions. No requests. I was to appear as a vase, a portmanteau ready to be filled with whatever they wished.
It was advice I would forget entirely as soon as I entered Mirandus’s home; I was dazzled, seduced the moment I crossed the threshold.
The woman who answered the door at 27 Grafton Street three days later was striking: she had a long and slender face, more handsome than beautiful; her gaze was direct, not the unfocused harried glance I’d come to expect in adults, as if they were weary of looking at what they saw. Her hair was loose; her figure shapely beneath a man’s linen shirt and breeches cinched with a belt, a boy of three hanging from one hand.
I can’t pretend I was not shocked to meet her, Sarah Andrews; I was acquainted with a mother who was not a wife (this had been true of the baker’s mistress in Cork). But I was shocked by the difference in class. The general was a man of considerable standing with a house in Grafton Street and the best library in London. It was rumored she had been his housekeeper. I was the child of a greengrocer and had the superstitious sense of propriety that is often a talisman of those in the ascent socially, eager to distinguish themselves.
“I have come to see the general.”
“You must be Jonathan’s niece. We’ve been expecting you.” She took me by both hands and drew me into the bright foyer in an affectionate assault.
“I’m afraid Fernando has been called away, but do come in, come in—” Her Yorkshire accent wasn’t delicate like his, but of another sort—like rivers rushing with words, a wild lushness. A sort of susurrus, as if a breeze blew through her phrases.
She introduced me to the children, Fernando and Leandro, and showed me over the house, telling me how she’d loved my uncle, how he was the best friend she’d ever had, the most sincere and disinterested of men; I wondered if we spoke of the same man. She introduced me to the maidservant and cook, whom she said I should ask if I required anything. “You are to be part of our family now.”
I spent that first afternoon alone in the general’s library, amidst his thousands of books, his maps of South America, looking over a volume of drawings I had found out on the desk, bound in the finest material I’d ever seen, leather smooth as river stones, with tortoiseshell paper from Italy (though I did not know it then), listening to the gentle reprimands of Sarah Andrews as she sat with her children in the small garden in back, warning them not to hurt their pet rabbit, but otherwise letting them run wild. They spoke a mix of French and Spanish and English, a delicious stew of words. But for all their lively chatter, I felt, even in his absence, Mirandus’s presence in the house, as if the whole of it were under a spell, waiting for him to break it, as if we were all slightly holding our breath.
For a long while I sat in silence in a large chair beside the general’s desk. Eventually I grew bored, then curious. I began to page through the book of drawings—its marbled boards the color of agate, its spine soft leather ornamented with gold
—Smellie’s A Sett of Anatomical Tables, with Explanations, and an Abridgement, of the Practice of Midwifery. The book was the size of a small traveling case, heavy as one full stone. It cost me much to lift it from the desk and shift it to where I might read it from the chair. Its cover looked like polished stone or like a pool of wind-rippled water, colors swirled on its surface. Opening it was like opening a door, a slight creak to the binding, a smell of age in the pages. The book was the size and proportion of a cabinet door, or a large coal chute, an opening I might fit myself through, enter, revealing another world—foreign, beautiful, terrifying, marvelous.
I was indifferent to the preface, in which the author set forth his purpose to aid the young practitioner of midwifery.
I turned to the first image: The First Table—Front View the Bones of a Well Formed Pelvis.
From the first I found it unaccountably unspeakably beautiful—the bones before me looked like a geologic feature, a stone cavern perhaps, a cave, the pelvis etched there seemed carved by water, like river boulders, the spine rising from it like a knobbed tree trunk; images of dragons could not have compelled me more; it seemed sublime, the shadow and light. It must have been an engraver’s trick, but the bones seemed lit from behind or from within, or perhaps that was simply how I felt. Looking at them. Lit within.
I turned the page.
I turned another.
Then another.
Table Four—The Female Parts of Generation—showed a woman’s fat thighs draped in cloth, her flesh dimpled and vivid as if she lay before me on the desk—sex exposed, as I’d never seen before, nor seen my own—not terrifying but exquisite, the labial folds like a river’s eddy, pubic hair like a decorative filigree, the dark delicate star of the anus. Flesh of legs dimpled as Michelangelo might have drawn.
Two blank pages followed, then Table Five—
One might have wondered what had befallen those that they should find themselves displayed here for the observer’s delectation, as I am now laid bare before you. It didn’t occur to me then. I was gripped by the body’s spell.