by E. J. Levy
“You will recover your strength,” I said. “You need only rest for a month or two, somewhere warm and dry, where I will join you come summer.”
I wrote to Dr. Fryer, who had helped General Mirandus arrange funding for my education, and asked to borrow money to send my mother to Italy for the remainder of the term. Dr. Fryer was the only one besides the general who knew my secret. He reluctantly agreed, but she refused to go without me. We both knew she hadn’t the strength to travel alone, and I had not the option to interrupt my studies. We agreed to wait out the term, then travel together.
At night I attended her as any dutiful daughter would—brewing tea, making bone broth, serving both in bed by lamplight, the shadows in the rooms deepened by the light, but glad to be in her company, to be together in the night. It rained, the sound beating the roof tiles and the windowpanes like buckshot, as I held my mother’s hand, her skin soft as calfskin but chilled; inside we were warm, dry, but my mother complained of the chill, even under heavy blankets and her feather-down quilt, brought from Cork.
My studies slipped. In anatomy class I misidentified the gastrocnemius and soleus; once in a physic lecture, I fell asleep and woke to Dr. Gregory’s cane striking between my shoulders. I shouted in pain. The hall erupted in a roar of laughter that even Jobson could not suppress. The laughter echoed in the vaulted ceiling, off the tall glass windows that framed the lecture hall.
My mother’s condition worsened. I knew that she would not last the spring here. When I received the advance against the legacy from Dr. Fryer, I packed her trunks; I took a carriage to Leith and walked to the docks and bought passage on a Leith smack set to sail direct to Barcelona in a week’s time. Dr. Fryer had friends there, who would house her until I arrived. For the first time, I cut classes so that I might launder clothes and pack her trunk to prepare her to sail for Spain, where the heat might return color to her cheeks, warm her blood again.
On the night before the voyage, I stayed up late reading and listening to my mother cough; when the sound ceased I was relieved, until I felt an absence, as if she’d already left, and fearing for her ran to her room, only to hear the awful coughing resume, and I put out the candle for bed. When I woke, the silence in the house was peaceful, the stillness after snow, a promising pearl sky, and I stepped into her room to rouse her. When I touched my mother’s shoulder it was stiff and cold, her cheek was grey; she was gone. Like a candle snuffed out. I fell to my knees and leaned my forehead on my mother’s hand, my cheek against the quilt she’d brought all the way from Ireland.
I had never believed in my mother’s God, never shared her faith, but in the wake of her death I longed for the parish priest who’d seen us through other losses, who’d have known the proper way to say goodbye and mourn. Who might have given her last rites.
My mother had dreaded burial among Protestants more than she’d feared death itself. I thought to send the body back to Cork for burial, but I knew that no one must discover who we were or where. All we’d planned for would be undone if her identity was discovered, and with it mine. My mother’s death would raise too many questions, alert my father to my whereabouts, and bring his creditors down upon the modest legacy that my mother had labored so hard to arrange.
It was clear that she must be buried here in Edinburgh, at whatever plot I might find, and that no one must suspect our identities. Inquiry into her family would reveal my own. So I told no one, save for Jobson, of my loss, and to others said only that my aunt had returned to Ireland, so I’d be seeking other lodgings soon, should they know of any.
I moved through my classes like a somnambulist, rotely taking notes, conscious of all that was said but numb, given to bouts of sudden rage and piercing longing, unable to speak to anyone of either, save for Jobson. Jobson felt keenly my loss and said so, gently setting a hand on my shoulder to commiserate, saying how very sorry he was for the death of my dear aunt. He accompanied me to the churchyard, where she was interred and blessed by a local priest, who prayed for her soul and wished her what she had for so long lacked—rest and peace.
I would have neither.
Chapter Three
Passing
It was Lord Basken, my late uncle’s friend, who arranged that I should move into Dr. Anderson’s home in town as a lodger, shortly after my mother’s death in the late summer of 1810. Under other circumstances the move would have been a happy one, promising as it did connection and stimulating conversation of the sort I craved more than any meat; Dr. Anderson was an editor of Edinburgh Magazine, a renowned biographer and scholar, whose home was a center of fashionable literary society. His fourteen-volume edition of the poets of Great Britain had made him an intellectual celebrity, and his home hosted many ambitious literary young men. But I was indifferent to society’s charms.
I was relieved to have an excuse to close myself off from company and the sentiments that importuned when I found myself not alone. Misery does not love company; it loves rigor, absorption in something inhumanly abstract, in anything other than fellow feeling. I understood in an instant the drunkard’s logic—not to surround oneself with others when in despair, but to drink them out of existence, to drown them like sorrow itself. Never having acquired the taste for spirits, I drowned my sorrows in my work and took comfort there.
The taste of ambition is metallic, like a bit in the mouth or blood, strong as love but of another order, a feeling fierce and ancient, a drive as powerful as desire but colder, steelier; in its possession or perhaps in possession of it, I felt urgent as lust, still as the eye of a storm. It was potent as strong drink; made me feel invulnerable, indifferent to everything save for success. I was confident I knew what that was then.
It became my custom at Dr. Anderson’s to hide my dirty monthly linens in an empty chamber pot in my armoire, until I could wash or dispose of them in the fireplace of my bedroom. If there was a scent of burning meat late at night, or of blood, it would offend no senses but my own. It was an age of eccentricity, a romantic time when idiosyncrasy was honored and everyone had their passions and the only true vice was a lack of strong sentiment. Convention was the crutch of lesser men. The greatest could do without it.
So it was easier than it might otherwise have been to disguise base necessity as charming whim and pass off my need for solitude as an excess of fastidiousness. I refused a valet, insisting on dressing myself, even when later a guest at Lord Basken’s Dryburgh Abbey, and I laundered my most private linens in my own basin, regularly refusing maids access to my room. I justified all this as attention to sanitation, but I knew that in truth I feared the keen observations and inquisitiveness of those who serve.
Sometimes I would wake in the night to the sound of my mother’s voice or my sister’s, only to find it was some servant in the corridor. I was frightened by how quickly I had lost them—in the wealth of new acquaintance. (I missed my sister, but I could not write to her for fear of being found out; she was as dead to me as my mother was.) My past seemed more and more remote from the life I lived now, the young man of fashion I was rapidly becoming. Inattentive, lost in a fog of grief and routine, I grew careless.
I had been at Dr. Anderson’s a month or two in the autumn of 1810 when I arrived at the morning’s lecture without my notebook and was forced to return home to collect it. I took the stairs two at a time and burst into my room, where I startled a maid, mid-cleaning, despite my instructions that none was to enter my rooms. When I walked in, it was hard to say who was more surprised. At her feet were piled the bloodied rags that I had stored that morning beneath my bed in an empty chamber pot to burn that night.
She turned to me, her face confused, embarrassed as I.
“Sir?” She seemed to be asking whether I was one.
“Who gave you permission to enter these rooms?” I shouted, and understood in an instant why men used rage to cover vulnerability: the advantage was immediately mine.
“I’m…I’m beg your pardon, sir. I was sent to clean up.”
; “You appear to have accomplished quite the opposite,” I said, ignoring what lay between us, as if it were her doing.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Get out,” I said. “Now.” As she passed, I grabbed her arm. Our eyes met briefly, but we said nothing before I let her go.
It was the first and last time that I would be thus unprepared. When on occasion I bled onto the sheets after that, I took pains to cut myself to explain the stain. When the necessity arose, I would enlist a female friend to provide an alibi. I developed quite a reputation for deflowering local girls. I learned to bring my own linens wherever I traveled, and bleach. I maintained this was an article of sanitation. As a surgeon, few questioned when the water in my washing basin was bloodied.
Still the bellow of iron each month would remain hard to explain, the stench impossible to cover, so when the time drew near each month, I was careful to leave out my cutting kit by the washing table, to rinse the bloodied tools in the basin each night. Leaving the polluted water there for a curious maid to see, should any inquire. If the household staff suspected anything, no one spoke of it. Later, in the barracks at Plymouth and Chelsea and aboard ships, the general stench of unbathed men and overflowing chamber pots, rotted fish and flatulence overwhelmed any concern for my monthly reek of blood. On the battlefield and in the barracks, the pong of blood was nothing new.
I wrote a single letter to Mirandus that year, after the New Year’s dinner at Lord Basken’s, but I had not heard back. It seemed likely that he was traveling, or too absorbed in obligations on his arrival in Caracas to reply. Still, I waited eagerly, whenever a rider came to the door; ready to frank the letter. But none arrived.
I was comforted by the thought of a reunion with the general and with his family, a family that at times had seemed as much mine as my own kin. Now gone. I had no other friend or relation to confide in, no one else who knew my past, no one to work for, save the dream my mother and I had shared those evenings by the fire. Every plan we’d had was gone, like fog. I moved through a shadow-scape of former plans and ambitions, pursuing the course we’d laid out together.
Though I continued to study with fierce self-discipline, I could not shake off my grief. I lived in a state of agitation and languour, in which disbelief replaced mourning; I lived in anxious anticipation, as if awaiting my mother’s return. As if—were I to perform my duties well, study hard, pass my exams—she might come back, casting off death like fancy dress. I vacillated between sorrow and longing, as if I carried a storm gale within me. I was acutely self-conscious, then full of rage. I longed for company and in company longed to be alone again. It was as if my skin itself no longer suited me, no longer fit, always too tight, too thin, aching.
During the long summer vacation of 1811, a year after my mother’s death, I was invited to stay at Dryburgh Abbey, the country estate of Lord Basken. The eleventh Earl of Basken had been a great friend of my late uncle’s, and ours, though I’d met him only once, at New Year’s dinner in St. Andrew’s Square eighteen months ago.
Lord Basken was an ebullient man on whom the concept of a private pleasure was wholly lost—for him, the phrase was an oxymoron: all pleasures for him were public, shared. He had only to happen on a person reading a book to be inspired to interrupt them with a query, or an ejaculation about the beauty of the day or a quote from Hume, or to ask whether it was an absorbing work you were reading, hmmm?
He took a lively and proprietary interest in the arts and intellectual fashions of the day, and his library rivaled that of General Mirandus’s, which for me was recommendation enough, as was his selfless kindness to my family.
I had been shown into the library shortly after I’d arrived, while waiting to be received by Lord Basken, and there happened on Smellie’s atlas.
I startled as if glimpsing an old acquaintance in a crowd. I was flooded with the memories of London, those long languorous lit afternoons of solitary reading; the taste of warm chocolate and milky coffee; the radiant rose-red innards of a rabbit disemboweled against the grass, revealing fetal young. I took it down from the shelf.
“Smellie,” Lord Basken said, coming up beside me. “Magnificent volume. Have you encountered it before?”
“I own one,” I said, turning to greet him.
Lord Basken raised his brows.
“I have it on loan from General Mirandus.”
“I understood he never parted with his books.” He looked skeptical for a moment, as if perhaps I’d pinched it.
“He gave it me as a going-away gift, with a promise of its safe return.”
He looked at me as if taking my measure anew. “He set great store by you,” Lord Basken said.
“I endeavor to prove worthy of his esteem.”
“I never knew a better judge of character,” he said, before continuing his perusal of the books. He pointed to a volume of Charles Lamb’s and pulled it from the shelf to offer me. “I never knew a subtler mind,” he said portentously, as if judgment of art were itself a kind of artistry. “Though I met his sister once—a most peculiar woman. She seemed quite witless; she startled at our arrival as if she’d seen the dead. You’d think a clever man would choose clever companions.”
“I have noticed men choose female companions for many reasons. Rarely for their wit.”
He laughed. “Do not let Lady Margaret hear you say it,” he said, referring to his wife. “I like my company clever.”
“I must be grateful that elegance is not the measure here. I’d not measure up.”
“You’ll fare well enough with our young ladies,” he said. “They’re simpler than the fashionable young women of London. I’ll be delighted to make introductions.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that I would be in the company of young women here; Lord Basken was known to be devoted to the study of antiquities; he’d bought Dryburgh Abbey in order to preserve the twelfth-century ruin there. I’d not thought contemporary company would much interest him, a fact that had recommended this retreat for the long vacation.
“I’m sure that I will be much obliged,” I said, though what I felt was panic.
Lord Basken was possessed of a generous, exuberant spirit; his one fault was that he required an audience for his wealth in order to enjoy it. He kept his house full of guests throughout the long vacations, a revolving set of artists, intellectuals, a mix of landed gentry and intellectual aristocrats. Unlike General Mirandus’s, Lord Basken’s circle of acquaintance exceeded his own attainments, leaving a gap which he filled with elaborate hyperbole, referring to George Washington as “my dear cousin,” as he did the King, his family tree bent low with such claimed cousinage. But true to his words, his dinners were never dull nor was the house.
At Dryburgh Abbey, I attended balls and parties, recitals and picnics and readings; we took boats onto the River Tweed and strolled through the picturesque stone ruins of the abbey under radiant blue skies and scudding clouds. I developed a passion for whist and amateur theatricals, hats and dancing.
To an observer, our diversions must have seemed idle pleasure, but for me they were simply another classroom, where I learned the manners of those I would now live among—aristocrats, politicians, writers, radicals, painters, progressives, and sundry flâneurs. Conversation was lively—from the Venezuelan independence declared in July to Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique with its novel concept of animal evolution, from the merits of Pleyel versus Haydn to the promise of steam-power locomotives and the stain of slavery. We stood self-conscious on the threshold of great discoveries, new possibilities, revolution, machines that seemed capable of making men more than they had ever been before, new capacities that stood in stark contrast to the barbarity we countenanced—slavery, sickness, starvation, poverty, war.
But as soon as decorum allowed, I made my way back to the privacy of the library to read. Occasionally a guest would intrude upon my studies, but Lord Basken kindly kept them at bay, stood guard over my solitude, save for when he wished to interrupt it himself.<
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He had a most annoying habit of coming in to read beside me in the large and splendid library, only to erupt a moment or two after he’d settled to exclaim over some passage in his book. “Listen to this,” he’d say, and proceed to distract me utterly from the lesson I was on. “Fascinating,” I would reply, while he returned to his reading without a comment, as if I had interrupted him. “Oh, by Jove,” he’d say again. And if I failed to respond, he’d simply carry on as if I had: “This is really most extraordinary,” he might say. “Do listen to what Plutarch (or Burke or Mrs. Wollstonecraft or Mr. Lamb) has to say about X or Y.” I found myself bracing for his entrance, sneaking upstairs to my room with a volume tucked under my arm at the sound of his voice in the corridor.
I passed most days in the library, and after the evening’s diversions I retired there to study further. Lord Basken seemed to approve my sedulousness; we both knew that I would have to write and defend my dissertation within the space of a year. I knew, if he did not, that my life depended on passing the exams.
I was governed by a singular desire: to become a man of consequence, a brilliant physician like those I studied under, my mentors, to possess a name as great and honored as my past was obscure. It became my life raft—what I clung to when every other support fell away in the storm of days. Love did not last, those we loved did not last; honor might. I could not let affection distract me nor allow the temptation of security to weaken my resolve. There is no security. We can only be courageous.
I had been at Dryburgh Abbey a fortnight when she arrived with a party from London. I noticed her first at dinner. A lovely brunette with the subtle expressions that are too easily overlooked in more effortful, showy company. While other guests preened at table, striving to outdo one another in their wit and acquaintance, she observed them in what appeared to be a thoughtful silence. You could not call her pretty. But she had an open, handsome face, across which emotion moved like shadows over summer hills; her eyes were grey, her neck long and delicate as a calla lily.