by Anne Choma
As 1832 progressed, the situation between the two women deteriorated further. Anne recorded the details of a disastrous trip to Eastbourne, during which she and Vere argued to the point that Vere slammed out of their carriage and refused to get back in. Incidents like this caused an uncharacteristic downturn in Anne’s spirits. She suffered a dip in her usual energy. She was so reluctant to say or do anything to upset Vere that she completely withdrew her attentions. There were no more goodnight kisses.
Any residual hopes Anne had of a relationship with Vere were dashed by the appearance of Captain Donald Cameron on 9th January 1832. Anne’s first impression of her rival suitor was that he was an ‘amiable, agreeable enough person’. The tall, red-haired Highlander had clearly come to establish his interest in Vere’s hand. His short visit to 15 Pelham Crescent was enough to convince Anne that a marriage between them, if not yet officially decided, was a fait accompli.
Anne’s rather bullish diary entry betrays the insecurity she felt, knowing that her chances of winning Vere’s heart were slipping away:
I think she will have him but what do I care? I shall have all the good I can out of her acquaintance, and not having more will not break my heart. Lady Gordon may suit me better. Somehow poor Mariana at all events seldom occurs to me, as destined for my future companion.
9TH JANUARY 1832
By 17th January, Anne was ready to pour out her feelings in a long, heartfelt journal entry. She was entirely candid about the ways in which Vere’s behaviour were hurting her:
Thinking of Miss H – annoyed and hurt . . . My whole life with her is one effort to be what I am not naturally. I feel it more this morning than I did last night. It began with – she came out from dinner to get her bag – and I followed to light her [light the way with a candle], and unluckily, was going to kiss her forehead which she refused, saying it was indecent, not a usual time. I laughed but submitted. I had not seen her of so long. The seeing now put me in spirits. I then, at table (George was not by), joked about having taken three glasses of wine and would have more. Then, said she, ‘I shall have a headache and go to bed.’ All this passed off, but when I repeated afterwards how little I had seen of her during the day (only the half hour at her breakfast and eleven minutes on coming home), she said, ‘Oh, I had seen as much of her as usual,’ and my allowed time was an hour counting from the time she had done breakfast, and from seven to twelve in the evening. It is the thinking over this that so annoys me. For she said she could not lock the drawing room door (insinuating or meaning the room was much mine as hers) . . . When she was cross on Friday morning, and as I told her without the smallest reason, she would not allow this, saying she did not know I did not mean to stay. For I often went in for a minute, and staid twenty, when she was busy. Thus there is now no doubting that I am in fact excluded from all but my own bedroom, save as above . . . No great love therefore, of my company. Besides, I now begin to feel that I must look a little like I know not what to all her friends, who never see, and now never will see me, downstairs in a morning.
But, why write so much about her, why waste so much time and paper? I hope it may instruct me afterwards, and cure me of all folly about her, by forcing me to remember what sort of time I have really passed with her. How chequered with mortification and pain. I have in fact never been so solitary. We can hardly be said to have one feeling in common, and here I am alone in heart and sighing under mortifications. That shame can never let me breathe, but which is all my consolation that none can dream of . . . Do I, or do I not know what I wish? Lord have mercy upon me, thou orderst all things wisely, and thy will be done. No more of her at least at present . . . If I had indeed five thousand a year, how all things would be smoothed over, and easier than now, when I ought not to spend seven hundred. I must employ my mind, get all my accounts done and then think seriously of authorship. Why not try myself to make a few hundred? Would do some good, and at least that of diverting my attention. Thought of Miss H, with all these mortified feelings as I walked . . . She began to joke at dinner, about not having come down to her for my half hour. I merely replied I had come in after my walk and had been very busy, but not being inclined for joking or much conversation, no more was said, and my gravity was unmoved during the evening . . . Surely no more nonsense, no more playfulness and ease. She will like it better. Let her. I shall get accustomed to it, and find it easier or less irksome by and by . . . Let all this fire my ambition to write, and cut some figure, and in the race, leave Miss H a little behind. How surprised she would be, and how silently delighted, I.
17TH JANUARY 1832
Vere seemed oblivious to the pain Anne was feeling. To Anne she appeared callous. ‘She said I was too different,’ she wrote on 8th February. ‘Wished I was a little more blended [ordinary]’. Vere told Anne that she ‘wanted what she [Vere] could not give’. It was ‘a great pity’ that she ‘expected so much’. It was becoming painfully clear to Anne that Vere did not want her particular brand of love.
‘It is not pleasant to hear one cannot be loved, and that others not more worthy must be preferred,’ wrote Anne some weeks later on 18th March 1832. ‘Let Pett be my watchword,’ she told herself, recalling the day of yet another memorable argument at Pett Levels. Anne’s instinct for self-preservation was kicking in. She resolved to be more guarded around Vere, who responded to Anne’s complete withdrawal of affection with tantrums and tears.
Finally, on 6th February, the two women attempted to resolve the emotional impasse. Anne told Vere that she was ‘cured’ of the ‘unaccountable phrensy [sic]’ of emotion that Vere had found so unattractive. Vere explained her shock at Anne’s latterly cold behaviour; she had not expected ‘such a violent change’. This open exchange enabled a truce. Their normal backgammon schedule was resumed, and Anne continued with her reading of Gibbon. However, the change in Anne’s manner from loving to distant was felt deeply by Vere. She appeared to be missing the tenderness that Anne had once offered. When Anne noticed Vere looking at her on the sofa, she remarked, ‘Well, how will it all end. She certainly likes me, and seems almost as if she could not bear to lose me . . . well after all, I am in for it now. How strangely things turn!’ (7TH FEBRUARY 1832).
Between their ‘tiffs’, which Anne described ‘like lovers’ quarrels’, there were still affectionate moments:
After dinner she sat down on the sofa. I asked her to put her feet up – ‘Yes – if you will put them up’. I stood by her and after looking for a moment as if I intended the thing, took this kiss to which she made no resistance, and I pressed her lips thrice – once with mine rather open or finding hers so. She merely joked and said she afterwards could not possibly close her lips again after this. It was all fun, and I took notice but sat a proper distance and quietly at her feet. We then had music. On going to her room, I said I should only stay two minutes, but she kept me, and her eyes filled with tears.
10TH FEBRUARY 1832
A week later, Vere’s encouragement was beginning to confuse Anne:
I gently leaned down my head. She placed it to lie on her knees. I perceived without looking that she was a little moved and attendrie [touched]. All the little she said was kind, and gentle. I felt the tears in my eyes, and after some moments or perhaps minutes, silence made an excuse to stir the fire, with my back turned. I just said I think I will go upstairs, and left her – will she end in liking me better than she thinks, or in fact, and in coolness wishes?
16TH FEBRUARY 1832
It appears that Vere was genuinely conflicted. When Anne kissed her forehead, there was a hint of what Anne interpreted as sexual feeling: ‘She said she did not like it, it tickled her down to her knees and all down her back’. ‘So we are all right,’ wrote Anne. ‘She certainly likes me, and really I myself cannot guess how it will end’ (20TH FEBRUARY 1832).
Either way, the emotional uncertainty of her relationship with Vere was getting to Anne. ‘Is s
ociety worth this to me?’ she asked herself, in a searching crypt-hand diary entry on 20th February 1832.
Anne was always careful about disclosing details of her private life to people she did not fully trust. Though she had revealed very little about her former relationships to her, Vere was aware on some level that Mariana was a person of significance to Anne. For her part, Mariana would have hated to know that Anne was spending a six-month sojourn in Hastings with an aristocratic mystery woman. She still held out hope for a relationship with Anne after her husband’s death. For Anne, it was not so simple. Though Mariana had been the love of her life, their shared past was full of ‘bitter remembrances’. Mariana’s marriage to Charles in 1816 had broken Anne’s heart. It was part of the reason she was so loath, now, to play second fiddle to Donald Cameron.
‘Liberty is still mine. She shall lose me almost without perceiving it’
A ‘newsy’ letter from Aunt Anne, including details of the theft of three dozen bottles of wine from the Shibden cellar, provided a welcome distraction from the claustrophobic atmosphere at Pelham Crescent. Aunt Anne also had news of Anne’s younger sister, Marian:
I can’t help smiling at Marian saying she goes nowhere, when at the same time she is going everywhere, dining, lunching, or calling – she has not the happy knack of getting rid of acquaintances if she tires of them, but whether she does or not, she retains them, as she says, ‘she likes to know everybody’.
23RD MARCH 1832
Anne’s sister was able to annoy her, even at a distance of nearly three hundred miles. ‘Well! I can’t change her in anything,’ wrote Anne to herself, ‘however much it might be for the better – she has always liked to be cock of the dunghill. I have no taste for scratching at her; and the less we are in each other’s way the better.’
By this time, Vere had started to think about leaving Hastings. But she was aware that her future was not yet certain. It appeared that she was keeping Anne within her sights as a potential ‘companion’ in the event that Captain Cameron did not make an offer of marriage. When Anne mentioned travelling with Lady Gordon, Vere became jealous. Despite everything, Vere did not want to lose Anne’s affections to another woman, especially their mutual friend Lady Gordon.
By mid-April, Anne was making preparations to leave Hastings herself. On the thirteenth, she wrote to her aunt with instructions about the books she was sending ahead of her, including, of course, the Boydell’s Shakespeare:
Thought the Shakespeare, had better be put on top of the mahogany drawers in the blue room . . . the first volume . . . to be put in the top end drawer next the window of the deal chest in the blue room . . . should be off from here on the 23rd, stay the 24th at Tunbridge Wells, and dine in London on the 25th – ask Cordingley to get me 2 pair of small, men’s-sized black worsted stockings at Mounsey’s – to be washed and sent in the parcel.
Two days later, Anne received the news that she had feared. Captain Donald Cameron had proposed marriage, and Vere had accepted. ‘We talked it over,’ Anne wrote simply. ‘She will not say no. So, tis done’ (15TH APRIL 1832). It was not a surprise, but the fact that her aristocratic ideal woman was destined to find happiness with a man drove a dagger through Anne’s heart.
In an act of either masochism or catharsis, Anne wrote a detailed journal entry about the day leading up to Donald Cameron’s proposal. She began with the afternoon walk she had taken with Vere. As they had approached the High Street, she recounted, Vere had spotted an odd-looking man in the distance. ‘How very long that man’s arms are from his side,’ Vere had pointed out, ‘I don’t like that.’ Anne too had noted how strange it was that ‘one saw the light between the upper arm and side’.
On closer inspection it emerged that the long-armed man in question was, in fact, Captain Cameron of Lochiel. As they walked with him past the nursery garden and along George Street, Anne noted that Vere’s misgivings about her suitor’s physical attributes had evaporated. Indeed, she seemed ‘very satisfied’ with him, going so far as to ask him to dine with them that evening. ‘I shall be very glad to see you,’ Vere told him. ‘Will you really?’ Captain Cameron replied, in what Anne described as ‘a low voice’.
Surely fearing what was to come, Anne left Vere and Captain Cameron to dine alone. When the news of their engagement subsequently came, it had a devastating impact on Anne. ‘Flow on my useless, miserable, foolish tears,’ she wrote. ‘She little guesses the misery of this tearful moment.’ Vere had made no attempt to soften the blow or hide her excitement from her.
The following morning, still in ‘an agony of grief and tears’ Anne stayed hidden in her room:
Cried and sobbed miserably . . . I was ashamed of my swollen eyes, but doing very well till about near 9½ when Miss H knocked to ask if I was up . . . I faintly answered yes, but the sound of her voice set me wrong, the tears started and I was bad again as ever.
16TH APRIL 1832
All day Anne lay in her great coat, with a handkerchief over her face. She refused all food apart from a ‘spoonful or two of the soup’ and ‘a bun with brandy and water’. Vere, catching sight of her tear-stained, swollen face, seemed to understand the reason for Anne’s grief. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘you are thinking of me.’ She expressed surprise, rather than sympathy, that Anne ‘should take on so’. She ‘did not know what she should do’ to make things better for her. For Anne, the pain of rejection seemed intolerable:
Miss H tapped at my door . . . asked if I was up, let her in. ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘you do not look ill, I see what it is, what an odd figure you are’ (in my great coat). She asked if it was her fault . . . she is not worth a heart or friendship like mine . . . she said she always told me I cared too much for her . . . what I feel now will pass away and then she has no qualities to engage me. Let me make what I can of her as an acquaintance, and that perhaps will not be much . . . my pride might be wounded, but no I shall not care for all that. She may think what she pleases.
Tis 4½ as I write this last word – my head aches shockingly yet I feel better than I did – cannot sleep – it seems to me she is flippant . . . she is selfish, as witness her whole conduct in not letting me slip till she was sure of another . . . proud her prudery was, more pride than modesty . . . vain, for she said the first thing there were many people it would be so nice to tell (of her engagement), and where is her real modesty for now that he has offered . . . perhaps my feelings are more those of mortification at failure than anything else. Well my journal does not flatter her much – proud, vain, not good tempered, selfish, flippant, proud and vain, heart-doubtful, certainly none towards me.
16TH APRIL 1832
Vere was a young woman about to embark on a bright married future. Anne was two weeks past her forty-first birthday, without a life-partner and lacking the funds to restore her crumbling ancestral home. But she would not stay cast down for long. With a typical rousing of spirit, her thoughts turned to foreign travel. At the end of the blisteringly raw, painful day, she ‘looked at the road map of France to go to Geneva by Calais, Arras, Laon, Chalons, Chaumont and Dijon’, wondering where her next adventure might take her.
From Hastings, Anne travelled to London. But with more time alone to reflect, the failure of her society plans played heavily on her mind:
Fine day, but I too fine to take a good walk out. What splendid slavery. Fine rooms, dressed in my silk redingote, all for company and nobody to see. Musing of . . . Mariana again, giving up finery and fine people . . . I have had a little trial of great people. I have had my whim, which has cost me pretty dearly. Now there shall be an end of it? Well, I wait but to see Lady Gordon.
29TH APRIL 1832
Visiting Lady Gordon in Cheltenham was a bold move, and one by which Anne laid herself open to more hurt and humiliation. Lady Gordon was surprised to see her, declaring Anne ‘the queerest creature in the world’ for turning up so suddenly and without warni
ng. She made it quite clear to Anne that travelling together would mean separate bedrooms: ‘different establishments and independent of each other’ – in other words, it would require access to the kind of money Anne just didn’t have. Her mortification was complete:
I felt myself, in reality, gauche, and besides, in a false position. I have difficulty enough in the usage of high society and feeling unknown, but I have ten times more on account of money . . . my high society plans fail . . . I shall now get out my scrape as well as I can . . . Well, I have gained experience. Lord have mercy on me. I will eventually hide my head somewhere or other . . . The mortification of feeling my gaucherie is wholesome.
29TH APRIL 1832
Anne continued to muse on what she thought of as her failures. The importance of her diary to the maintenance of her mental equilibrium is especially clear in passages like this one:
May never see Miss Hobart or Lady Gordon again . . . muse of having my aunt back . . . Lady Gordon’s proposal to be independent of each other opened my eyes. She would not be bothered by having me to society for Florence . . . I may bury myself somewhere in comfortable seclusion and study and then have fortune enough for happiness . . . What a change in all my plans and thoughts . . . What a comfort my journal is. How I can write in crypt all as it really is and throw it off my mind and console myself – thank God for it.
29TH APRIL 1832
By 4th May, Anne was staying with Mariana at Lawton Hall in Cheshire. The brief visit did not do much to lift her mood. ‘I had little need to speak,’ she wrote. ‘She enjoyed her own volubility, and I sat, tired to death, but too civil to shew it. Well, I am reconciled to be off.’