When Annie was recovered enough from the flu to travel, Charles and Emma decided it was time to take her for the water cure. Emma was pregnant again; she was seven months along, and they decided she should not make the trip. So Emma and Annie would be parted for a month at least. None of them was happy about that. But Charles would take Annie and Etty (for company), along with their nurse, Brodie, to Malvern. He would stay a few days, get them settled, and then come home. Miss Thorley, the governess, would join them there, too.
Annie and Emma sat on the sofa together as the bags were being loaded into the carriage. Annie cried and cried; she did not want to leave her mother.
Chapter 21
God Only Knows the Issue
Without you when sick I feel most desolate…I do
long to be with you and under your protection
for then I feel safe. God bless you.
—CHARLES TO EMMA, MAY 27, 1848
If Annie hadn’t been so sick, the trip would have been exciting. The girls loved Brodie, and going to Malvern was an adventure. They went by train to London, and the four of them—Charles, Annie, Etty, and Brodie—stayed overnight with Erasmus, which was always a treat. Erasmus was a kind, funny, charming man, and an indulgent uncle. From his house they took a Growler—a horse-drawn carriage with two seats facing each other, big enough to fit all of them and their luggage—to Euston Station for the train. They had to take a train north to Birmingham, which they reached by lunch-time, and then go south to Worcester, where they arrived in late afternoon. From Worcester, they took a stagecoach to Montreal House, one of the main hotels in Malvern.
Charles got them settled in Malvern and then he left to go back home to Emma. Annie would be in good hands—Miss Thorley would be arriving soon to help Brodie—but still it was hard for Charles to leave. He’d come back in a month to collect them—including, he hoped, a cured Annie.
Charles stopped again in London for a longer visit with Erasmus and other family before heading home. The relatives in London thought he looked “uncommonly well and stout,” though that was often misleading. Even when he was feeling his worst physically, Charles’s ruddy complexion made him look well. Inside he was sick with worry about Annie.
At first, all went according to plan at Malvern, and the letters home to Emma were happy. Etty reported that she and Annie bought oranges, that “yesterday I fell down twice,” and that they were going to buy combs. They were doing art and looking forward to playing with the children of one of the doctors. Miss Thorley arrived, and they went on a donkey ride. Annie started getting the water treatment, and soon she was doing well. Charles, once home again, went back to work, and even started to return some of the barnacles he had borrowed from other collectors. One phase of his barnacles work was done.
But then things at Malvern took a terrible turn. Annie started vomiting. At first the doctor did not seem concerned. But then Annie got a fever that wouldn’t go away. Within a week, she was very frail. Not willing to admit defeat, Dr. Gully assured Miss Thorley that Annie was progressing slowly and that there was no need to call Charles back.
Soon, though, Gully changed his mind. When he examined her on Tuesday evening, April 15, the doctor felt certain that Annie was dying. He wrote to Charles immediately, asking him to come to Malvern. The postman brought the terrible news to Down House at midday on Wednesday. Reading the doctor’s letter, Charles and Emma decided he should leave right away. Emma achingly wanted to be with Annie, but since she couldn’t take care of her daughter, she took care of everyone else. She arranged for Etty to come home as soon as possible and for their sister-in-law Fanny to go to Malvern and help Charles. She also prepared for her upcoming confinement. She asked one of her aunts to come stay with her. And she asked Elizabeth to get her some chloroform.
When Charles arrived at the hotel in Malvern the next afternoon, Miss Thorley took him aside. Quietly, in an outer room, she told him how bad it was. Charles flung himself facedown upon the sofa. Poor Etty watched in horror; she had had no idea how sick Annie really was.
Dr. Gully had diagnosed Annie with a bilious fever, which meant that along with a fever and stomach upset, she was vomiting bile. What this also meant, as Charles knew, was that Annie was in mortal danger. Unless there was a miracle, she was likely to die.
Miss Thorley took Etty out of the room so she didn’t have to see Charles so upset. Now Charles could cry alone.
After he gathered himself, Charles went in to see Annie. “She looks very ill: her face lighted up and she certainly knew me,” he wrote to Emma. He told her the doctor said that Annie was doing a little better. They were giving her camphor and ammonia to stimulate her and to stop her vomiting. Medicine had not advanced much in the twenty years since Emma’s sister Fanny had died; all that could be done was to treat Annie’s symptoms. There was nothing to directly attack a bacterial infection. (Antibiotics, such as penicillin, would not be discovered for almost eighty years.) Dr. Gully came in the evening and felt Annie’s pulse. It was irregular, and he was afraid she would die that night. Gully stayed there to help however he could, and Charles wrote the next day to Emma that he had been “most kind.”
On April 18, Good Friday, Annie had another bad vomiting attack, which this time they chose to interpret as a somewhat hopeful sign. At least she had the strength to vomit. And her pulse was regular again.
Charles reported all to Emma and responded to a letter of hers. “Your note made me cry much,” he wrote, “but I must not give way, and can avoid doing so by not thinking about her. It is now from hour to hour a struggle between life and death.”
And he added, “God only knows the issue.”
When she vomited more green fluid, bile from her liver, they all knew it was very, very bad. But Charles kept up hope. “She appears dreadfully exhausted,” he wrote to Emma again, “and I thought for some time she was sinking, but she has now rallied a little. The two symptoms Dr. G. dreads most have not come on—restlessness and coldness.” While Charles was writing this letter, Dr. Gully came in and examined Annie. He felt sure she was dying, but he gave Charles something to hold on to. Charles continued his letter. “Dr Gully has been and thank God he says though the appearances are so bad, positively no one important symptom is worse, and that he yet has hopes—positively he has Hopes. Oh my dear be thankful.” But he knew the situation was dire.
Charles wrote to Emma every day, even twice a day, and she wrote back to him. He told her what they were feeding Annie when she could eat (gruel with some brandy), what fluids they gave her (“Fanny gave her a spoonful of tea”), and what the doctor said at each visit. If Charles put a letter in the post by six thirty in the evening, it would get to Down around noon the next day. And if Emma gave the postman a letter in Down, it would get to Malvern by the next morning. On some days, Charles wrote every hour. It was the best release for him (he could cry while he wrote to her) and also for Emma. She wanted to know every single thing that transpired with her darling girl. As a result, Emma experienced the illness as much as Charles did—almost. He was bereft without her. She was in agony not to be there. She thought of Annie constantly.
Charles, Fanny, and Miss Thorley took turns sitting by Annie’s bed with Brodie. Charles found the company a great comfort, especially Fanny, but when it was his turn to be with Annie, he just couldn’t sit still.
When Annie had a peaceful night’s sleep and Dr. Gully told Charles that she was turning the corner, Charles was so happy he sent an electronic telegram to Erasmus and asked him to send a servant to Down House so Emma would get the good news before she became distraught over the last letters. Emma was in the yard “looking at my poor darling’s little garden to find a flower of hers” when the messenger drove up. Emma read the telegraph: “Annie has rallied—has passed good night—danger much less imminent.”
Yet Charles wrote that Emma “would not in the least recognize her with her poor hard sharp pinched features.” She looked nothing like “our former dear Annie.” No wonder
he couldn’t sit still by her bed and just stare at her.
Annie drifted in and out of consciousness, often delirious. Even in her discomfort and illness, she was polite. When Charles moved her and it hurt, she said, “Don’t do that please.” When he stopped, she thanked him. “I never saw anything so pathetic as her patience and her thankfulness,” Charles wrote to Emma. “When I gave her some water, she said, ‘I quite thank you.’ Poor dear darling child.”
On Monday morning, the day after Easter Sunday, Emma received the letters from the weekend, which told a very different story from the telegram. She wrote back to Charles while the postman waited. “I am confused now and hardly know what my impression is, but I have considerable hopes…Every word about her is precious…Except at post-time my sufferings are nothing to yours,” she told her husband.
Although she didn’t know what to think, Emma kept hope alive. And she so appreciated Charles’s letters: “Your minute accounts are such a comfort and I enjoyed sponging our dear one with vinegar as much as you did.” Planning for Annie’s recovery, she thought of what food they should give her first when she was up to eating more. She told them to try rice gruel flavored with cinnamon or currant jelly.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Gully came to see Annie. He told Charles and Fanny that she had not gained ground. They had to prepare for the worst. Fanny wrote to Emma that “he thinks her in imminent danger…Oh that I have to send you such sad, sad news.”
As the day wore on, Annie’s pulse weakened. Her breaths became more and more shallow. She dropped into unconsciousness. At noon on Wednesday, April 23, with Charles beside her, Annie took her last breath.
Charles threw himself on his bed in physical and emotional agony.
At Down, with a gap in the letters, Emma feared the worst.
On Thursday, the postman brought the news.
“My dear dearest Emma,” Charles had written when finally he could get up from his bed, “I pray God Fanny’s note may have prepared you.”
Emma read on. “She went to her final sleep most tranquilly, most sweetly at twelve o’clock today.”
Dr. Gully had written up the cause of death as a “Bilious Fever with typhoid character.”
“Our poor dear child has had a very short life, but I trust happy, and God only knows what miseries might have been in store for her,” Emma read. “She expired without a sigh. How desolate it makes one to think of her frank cordial manners.” A year earlier, Charles had had a picture of Annie made. He told Emma, “I am so thankful for the daguerreotype. I cannot remember ever seeing the dear child naughty. God bless her.”
Charles ended his letter with another hope, a most heartfelt prayer: “We must be more and more to each other, my dear wife.” Losing a child ruins many a marriage; he could not bear to live without Emma. “Do what you can to bear up, and think how invariably kind and tender you have been to her. I am in bed, not very well.”
Emma wrote Charles that he should come home. “You must remember that you are my prime treasure (and always have been).” She needed to be with him as much as he needed to be with her. She feared for his health and his life, so she told him not to hurry. She could not bear it if he died, too. But she knew “we shall be much less miserable together.”
In her diary, on the day for April 23, she noted simply, “12 o’clock.”
Chapter 22
A Dear and Good Child
She must have known how we loved her. Oh, that she could
now know how deeply, how tenderly, we do still and shall
ever love her dear joyous face! Blessings on her!
—CHARLES, THE END OF HIS MEMORIAL TO ANNIE, APRIL 30, 1851
When he was on the Beagle voyage, Charles had witnessed the funeral of another beloved daughter, the daughter of a native chief in New Zealand. Charles recounted the scene in his Journal.
The hovel in which she had expired had been burnt to the ground: her body being enclosed between two small canoes was placed upright on the ground, and protected by an enclosure bearing wooden images of their gods, and the whole was painted bright red, so as to be conspicuous from afar. Her gown was fastened to the coffin, and her hair being cut off was cast at its foot. The relatives of the family had torn the flesh of their arms, bodies, and faces, so that they were covered with clotted blood;…On the following day some of the officers visited this place, and found the women still howling and cutting themselves.
There would be no howling, no tearing of flesh at Annie’s funeral in Malvern. It would be a quiet ceremony in the graveyard in the town where she died, but Charles did not want to stay. He would get no relief or release from his daughter’s funeral. What comfort could he get from a Christian service? How could he believe that his dear Annie suffered for sins she committed? She had been an innocent; nothing could convince him otherwise. Even while she was dying, she was sweet and polite. Even while she was dying, she worried about her little sister. “Where is poor Etty?” she had asked Brodie. Annie was Annie until the end—sweet, considerate, sensitive.
Although Charles felt torn about leaving, because he was not one to shirk his duties, he just could not remain in Malvern. Fanny would stay, and Hensleigh would come, too. They, with Brodie and Miss Thorley, would be there to see Annie buried. He knew the only thing that would give him any consolation would be holding Emma and being held by her. Although Fanny had been a comfort, and although he wrote to Emma constantly, it was he alone who had watched their cherished daughter leave the earth. His letter to Emma telling her that Annie had died seemed calm and composed. He had been anything but. As the end came near, he had sat beside her crying, knowing there was nothing he could do; knowing deep in his soul that no matter what Emma believed about heaven, he would never see Annie again. Death was the true end, and his little girl was gone forever.
At home Emma waited for Charles and tried to comfort the other children. She had written that “my feeling of longing after our lost treasure makes me feel painfully indifferent to the other children, but I shall get right in my feelings to them before long.” Yet according to her sister Elizabeth, Emma was being wonderful, crying at times, but also coming to the meals with the little children and helping them with their food, attending to their needs. Willy had arrived from school and, though he was grief-stricken, his presence was a gift to his mother. And she had the new life growing inside her. That was a gift, too. But she was bereft.
When Charles got home, Emma met him at the door. They clung to each other and wept. They went over the details of the last days again. It was necessary to go through it all together, side by side.
Charles said he took some consolation in the thought that had Annie lived she might have suffered a life of ill health, as he was now suffering. He also took solace in the knowledge that he had never said a mean word to his daughter. But these were small comforts compared to his grief.
Everyone at Down was devastated. Brodie, Annie’s beloved nurse, took her death especially hard. She came back for a while, but at sixty she found it was just too painful to be at Down without her Annie. She was close to retirement anyway, so she left the family and Charles provided her with an annual pension for the rest of her life. She came back to Down House many times afterward for long visits.
Charles asked Erasmus to put a notice in the Times of London in the “Deaths” column: “On the 23rd inst; of April, at Malvern, of fever, Anne Elizabeth Darwin, aged 10 years, eldest daughter of Charles Darwin, Esq., of Down, Kent.”
A week after Annie died, Charles took out pen and paper and wrote a memorial portrait of Annie. It was just for him and Emma to capture the essence of their child on paper.
“We have lost the joy of our household,” he wrote, “and the solace of our old age.”
Emma experienced premature labor pains the day Charles wrote the memorial, but then the pains stopped. Twenty days after they lost Annie, on May 13, a new child, a son, Horace, was born. Emma’s sister Elizabeth was still there, and she and their aunts had hope
d that Emma would be healed by the birth. When Elizabeth reported that Emma was still very much in grief, an aunt wrote, “We are disappointed at your account of dear Emma…However, we must have patience and wait.”
In July, with Emma recovered enough from the pregnancy and birth to travel, she and Charles took the family to London for a week. Emma held baby Horace close. The baby and the normal activities of everyday life were starting to help a little. In London the Darwins stayed with Erasmus, who hired three horse-drawn cabs for Charles, Emma, and all the children and their nurses and governesses to go to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. It had opened a week after Annie died. Held in the architecturally magnificent Crystal Palace, the “Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of all Nations” was a celebration of technology and progress. Charles enjoyed the exhibits. There were displays of power looms, rope-making lathes, marine engines, hydraulic presses, steam machines, and other tools, machines, and crafts from around the world. The children enjoyed the sweets Uncle Erasmus gave them. But the exhibit itself was boring for the young Darwins, and given a chance to go a second time, Etty stayed at her uncle’s house to scrub the back stairs, which she thought would be much more fun.
Charles and Emma Page 13