Strange Music

by Strange Music (retail) (epub)

  ‘Slavery’s over and they are free,’ Bro says finally.

  ‘Many died cruelly. They needed our help.’

  ‘They are dead. There’s nothing we can do for them.’

  That West Indian planters caused such grief is incomprehensible. I long to seek forgiveness for them yet I know not how. ‘I’m not good at being alone, Bro, and I know you are here. But I feel wretched and miserable. I feel alone.’

  Bro sinks heavily into the armchair opposite my bed. He takes from his pocket a small rectangular card. He emits a sort of lassitude as he turns the pale blue calling-card bearing Annie Shropshire’s neat copperplated handwriting, and paints, with his eyes, her lively, determined, innocent face. He prickles with frustration. Something truly terrible happened between them.

  ‘Papa said you attract all the wrong women.’

  Bro’s blue-green eyes are ready to turn to anger. ‘Papa could not, would not, even join me in my room for tea before he left for London.’

  ‘He was busy with business in the study. You know what happened, Bro. Papa had re-arranged his plans and was going to catch the stagecoach a day late for the sake of wishing us all a hearty farewell. Suddenly he changed his mind and almost flew from the house when an article on increased taxes for cargo imported at the London docks appeared in The Times. He barely said farewell.’

  Quietly Bro stands and turns for the stairs.

  Each farewell I endure feels like a preparation for death. A morbid notion to be sure – one that leads to a much exaggerated response – I am prone to faintings and uncontrollable tears when anyone I love departs. Good-byes remind me of leaving dear Mama for the sake of my own poor health. To live without a mother’s love is to live without hope. Is that why my family avoids involving me in good-byes? Is that why, when Bro went to join Papa on business in London four years ago, what I was told would be a two-week separation ended with him sailing to Jamaica without any farewell?

  Bro had to assist our uncle on the estates before the slaves’ emancipation, how well I know that. The ship that took Bro away to Jamaica, away from me, was the David Lyon, the ship in which I now have shares. That is a curse if ever there was one.

  I lie on the bed in this chamber, with the shadow of my distant father – in girlhood I thought only of how to win his smile. Counting memories, I stumble across some forgotten treasure. Hand in hand, I – in a little white muslin dress and frilled pantalettes – am running with Bro; slipping, slithering in and out of the sheets of sunlight shooting down between parted leaves.

  ‘Ba,’ Bro says, ‘let’s not play hide-and-seek.’ He has reneged on plans we made at luncheon, and at the last minute.

  I return stubbornly, ‘Yes, now. Before the school bell rings.’ We race across the cobbled yard, under the great clock tower and along shady gravelled walks, round lily ponds fringed with bullrushes, past the home farm cottages, past the dairy and gun-rooms, by haylofts and back to the lake – a fine sheet of water fed by springs and well stocked with the fish it is our pleasure to catch – past cascading streams, over the Alpine bridge, by the summer-house and ice-house, which is under construction, the walled garden, the hot-house’s massive flues where peaches, figs and grapes ripen, around the cinder shed, back through the gateway to the stables and harness-rooms, past the cider-house, brew-house and cellar to the laundry, and hide in the knife-and-shoe hole. We hear the bell and the governess, Mrs. Orme, calling all the way from the south gate, and tear down the subterranean passage, through the ornamental shrubbery to the chapel and school-house. Bro gazes from the school-room window to the lawn where at the weekend he played cricket with Papa and Sam; beyond, the obelisk of Eastnor Castle peeps above treetops.

  Bro was aged two and I three when Henrietta was born and the family moved to Hope End in Herefordshire. After Henrietta came Sam, Arabel, Charles – nicknamed Stormie for being born during a thunderstorm – Georgie, Henry, Alfred – who we nicknamed Daisy – Septimus (Sette), Octavius (Occy). At Hope End we lived in a world of our own.

  How can life be so treacherous as to take childhood away? But since he first moved on this earth Bro has always been my sanctuary. My adytum. It is true I was jealous of him when he abandoned me at Hope End to study at Charterhouse – how the tide turns. Although Bro is wanting in his sense of direction and purpose – particularly passion – my love for him increases with each hour he spends at my bedside, with each passing day. We were jointly baptized, Bro and I. Never was there a truer love between brother and sister. The invisible sun burning within us feels as comforting as the distant lowing of cattle strolling across hills, past trees bent inland; the pale yellow sunlight streaming across moving waters reaching forever away from me.

  Dearest Arabel,

  Will Georgie really go . . . I am sitting up in bed wondering & wishing perhaps vainly about it . . .

  15 November 1838

  This afternoon, vain or not, I have felt particularly anxious, though dear Bro will say unduly, about my appearance. One can put up a mirror to oneself but can one turn the image back to truly see how one is viewed? Can a woman see herself from her own reflection? I have long been displeased with the plainness of the face that peers darkly from my glass. I am small and black. (Black, I imagine, as Sappho.) A thin partition divides us; why do I regard the woman who watches me with distaste? She has a searching quizzical look, slightly remote and mischievous; the features, wasted, compared with my sister Henrietta, who sits quietly sewing by the window overlooking the bay, and certainly is very pretty – there is no nose to speak of; the brow, furrowed and pain-worn. I take objection to the hands for they are the fairy-fingers of an invalid. The mouth is large, obstinate, projecting – she is full-lipped – and has dark eyes, deep and calm, and long thick ringlets, again, dark brown, almost black, which Crow must brush very, very soon lest they lose their silkiness. Funny though it seems when I think on it, the droopy locks resemble Miss Mitford’s dear spaniel’s long floppy ears.

  17 November 1838

  Darkness is lowering. The garish red sea, framed by my two bedroom windows, is shot with a jealous shock of yellow from the last light of a fast-disappearing sun.

  Yesterday evening when Crow brought my opium draft I wore the silver locket inscribed with Edward & Judith Barrett of Cinnamon Hill, a family heirloom given to Papa by his mother and brought from Jamaica by Bro to be passed down to me. This evening the locket has vanished. We have shaken out the coverlets and the couvre-pied warming my feet, searched beneath the bed, under the carpet. Crow swept all four corners of the floor and emptied the small box of sharpened pencils by the oil-lamp on my bedside-table; she even scoured the stairs lest somehow the locket was transported down there.

  I am naked beneath Papa’s accusing gaze. All is undone. My relationship with Papa, with the great-grandmama I never knew. Gone.

  A vivid sky of dazzling silence casts shards of ochre light which invade this space I already know too well. Gilt-edged scrolls on red-cushioned chair backs glint amber; the family griffin crest glows gold; the sofa’s elegant claw feet shine sharply, waiting to pounce. Never has fear gripped me more firmly. An undefinable fear. I am inside a glass bowl surrounded by distorted bulging serpent-like furniture. Loneliness gnaws at my stomach like hunger as I reach across the bedside-table for my writing-case.

  A sentence resounds in my head: Ba, pull yourself together. Climb down from the bed, do away with the chair, and walk along the cobbled street!

  Crow once supported me to the door. She steadied me each time I stumbled, and when it became evident I could not walk alone, she wept into my hair, hiding her face. That was so many days ago I can barely remember. Opium colours my life here. Dresses my world in radiant crimson. Yet I want to cross this vast desert unaided, I want to walk once more.

  Now, if I can practise sitting myself up, then spend time swinging my legs over the side of the bed until my toes reach the floor, I can begin the process of hobbling, or crawling should it come to that, to the door.

>   For a while I stare into the fire. The acrid odour of burning coal snags in the back of my throat. Flames can change their character, making extravagant shapes, but the wild forms into which they bloom only wither, fading to feebly glowing embers.

  Even the carpet is hard and hostile. I find the courage to stand up. I am groping, unstable at the window-sill. Someone is watching me – not through the window, for one cannot see up into here from the street. Torrents of sound gush in my ears like water flooding from sluice-gates. I turn my head – am thumped on one cheek – feel warmth on my face, and open my eyes towards the hearth, which holds the blackness of a grave. I must have fallen. I lie, unable to move, and the dark figure that haunted my thoughts disappears.

  Footsteps approach. ‘Ba, are you all right?’ Henrietta’s voice.

  A biting wind dashes up stairs, awakening me fully to the perplexing view of Crow’s and Henrietta’s green and red slippered feet advancing across the spread of carpet weave expansive as the blue heaving sea.

  ‘She must have attempted walking,’ Henrietta is saying.

  Once more I feel faint. In my dream I see the woman again – a dark shape flitting across the doorway, down the staircase where the wind whistles, and out into the hall. She is standing at the door to her life beneath the black pavilion of sky; branches sway like waving arms. She launches into the blustery night. Ebony ringlets swirl round her head, stream across her face. The fire lights easily. She is burning a house of memories. Flames, like some great beast, shoot through a bedroom similar to mine at Wimpole Street; a blazing heat consumes the chaise-longue, the armchair; drawers crowned with a coronal of shelves to carry her books. She moves past sheets of crimson merino paper. Smoke streams round the window where a box full of deep soil is fixed. The scarlet-runners, geraniums and nasturtiums are charred tentacles about a great ragged ivy root with trailing branches so long and wide the tops fasten to a window of the higher storey, whilst the lower feelers cover all the panes; her face; arms; legs. Ivy tendrils mesh with her wild matted hair.

  As Crow and Henrietta peel me from the floor, the admonition resounds again: Ba, pull yourself together. Climb down from the bed, do away with the chair, and walk along the cobbled street!

  18 November 1838

  When Bro came to my bedside at his usual hour this morning worry was written across his face. ‘Crow, Henrietta and I find ourselves faced with a deuce of a dilemma: either we lie to Papa and hide the fact that you not only stood but are walking, or we live in blatant denial of who you are.’

  ‘This act of which you speak entailed such appalling suffering it would be preferable to be dead,’ I return. My thoughts are in harmony on this matter. But I long for contentment and a sense of peace without a draught of that dusky-brown drug. In my cloudless state of mind, I have discovered I think not less clearly, as I had feared, but with more precision. I have entered into what Papa and Henrietta call my ‘rebellious state’.

  Seating himself in the armchair, Bro stretches out a closed hand. ‘Is this what you were looking for?’ His hand opens gently, as though protecting flower heads. The locket and chain make a small silver mound on the opened flat of his palm. ‘Henrietta found it beneath you by the fire-place.’ Bro’s words come soberly, ‘You must try to live your life less cast down by the weight of sadness.’

  He folds his fingers back over the locket and leans forward, talking with greater intensity. ‘When I was in Jamaica, the number of Africans on the estates given to committing suicide had greatly reduced. The governor allowed them to air their grievances. In the newspapers I read of thousands of ordinary folk rallying in London’s streets against the apprenticeship system. One churchwarden was reported as saying the traffic in human bodies and blood had injured the perpetrators as much as their victims, and was a disgrace to the religion they professed to preach, and to our nation – in fact, all those concerned had been plunged into an abyss of iniquity.’ He pauses, clears his throat, and shows his sense of contrition by turning his eyes to the floor. ‘Papa wrote to me of what you and Arabel did. Why do you fight Papa? Why do you fight your illness when what you need is rest?’

  I think back to the churchwarden, an ardent emancipationist closely linked with the Society of Friends, and his merry band of children with their peaches-and-cream complexions of the moors. His enthusiasm was contagious.

  The chapel door had flown open. Papa burst in. He bristled. His face a ghastly white. Needless to say, he heard that Arabel and I had volunteered to sign a petition to end the apprenticeship system on West Indian estates.

  ‘Did your ancestors work for you to throw their achievements back in my face?’ Papa demanded, quite on fire. To the warden he exclaimed, ‘We won’t need your help eating dinner tonight!’ With Arabel and I, protesting, in tow, he marched through the arched doorway, proceeded along the road to the gateway of Belle Vue, our rented home, went straight to the dining-room, knocked back his gin aperitif, snatched the ham we were all to have eaten for dinner from the table, charged along the grassy path running behind the house, and threw the ham to the neighbour’s dogs. After Papa blew that meeting apart he demanded we attend a different chapel and wrote banning the warden from Belle Vue.

  Like a great wave despair rolled up, ballooned within my heart and burst. How the apprentices must have prayed for freedom’s cool breeze, prayed to do whatever they pleased. A furnace of guilt smouldered within me. Sour hatred permeated through those Belle Vue walls which were more frail than even I have become – I feared the entire house would collapse under the weight of the atmosphere. Arabel scowled and moaned. I hid my emotions. But that night Arabel and I did not eat – we shared in the apprentices’ suffering. Papa got no pleasure out of that whipping. Yet his expression of desolation purged my sense of injury. I determined never to cross him so again.

  I say to Bro, ‘I don’t want to fight Papa. I’m scared inside. Afraid of who I am.’

  ‘We mustn’t fight him, Ba. There’s more to this than you know. News reached Papa from the West Indies last year,’ Bro says, ‘news Papa has kept from me, news which gives cause for much more grief. Papa was advised that Sam is swayed by very bad influences and in conflict with church ministers, overseers, attorneys, even the Chief Justice of Jamaica, Sir Joshua Rowe, for hosting parties which have become notorious across the island.’

  A few years ago, sweet Sam proudly announced in a letter to Papa that he was serving as an ensign in the St. James and St. Elizabeth Militia. Mention in our uncle’s will of his approval of Sam’s ‘general conduct’ implied that incidents concerning Sam had recently occurred which were not favourable. This was a great worry and brought tears to my eyes. Bro has now confirmed our uncle was alluding to some disgraceful behaviour. Yet Sam’s rise in rank and the overall tone of the will persuaded our dear, ever-forgiving father to pay expenses Sam ran up on an American voyage. We none of us have been certain of Sam’s whereabouts since March last when Papa wrote to Sam that he didn’t know whether he was still in Jamaica, or preparing to leave, or determined to remain. Needless to say Papa, Bro and I are worried sick.

  27 November 1838

  Double the usual opium dose tonight has not relaxed me in the least and leaves me wondering whether I should take less, or more. Slanted up against piles of cushions and pillows, taunted by screaming gulls, I am unable to find comfort and unable to sleep. I am troubled by a dream I had last night in which all the passengers of a West Indies vessel, except two rescued by Bro, were drowned. I fear I have dreamt this before – that makes my heart tremble and I fear it is a portent of something terrible. Sweetest Sam, I pray the angels in heaven are watching over you.

  The woman in the mirror has returned. I hadn’t seen her for days but have felt her presence outside the door. I’ve been aware of her moving about my midnight candle and amongst shadows clipped by dawn. I’ve sensed her creeping into my thoughts, smelt her in lavender-scented sheets. Tonight she stands in shadows on the far side of the room.

  She is
superstitious. I can tell because the way she stares at me is the way people gaze into a crystal ball, deeply, as I examine my own reflection in the mirror Crow holds before me now.

  I have tried to talk to the woman but I can’t speak when I cry. Crow comforts me like a child in her arms. The other woman cries too. But not in the same manner as I. She does not weep.

  Then this small-boned woman with thick ebony ringlets, moving smoothly past the window drapes in a dress of magenta-coloured velvet veiled in black lace, vanishes into the wintry wind.

  Am I possessed by fever, or drowsy from over-intoxication? I swelter yet am shivering, bound by sheets sodden with perspiration.

  Whirling before me now is a wheel made of my brothers’ and sisters’ faces: Sette, Occy – noisy, smiling, fit and fair, they seem to be teasing me; eyes half closed, lazy Daisy’s dozy grin lurches towards me fast and smooth; Sam’s witty smile; Bro’s features come with a glow bright as a halo; absorbed, angled forward, Henrietta’s face peers at me, eager with her fondness of music; Arabel’s face, shaped and focused as though for sketching a rural scene; Henry’s frowning heavy brow; shy, tongue-tied Stormie. Mama’s face escapes me. It is barely thinkable that that good-bye at Hope End was to be our last. Mama died without me. Georgie’s face is almost the image of Papa’s, although Papa’s expression is not peaceful but fixed with horror and pain. Rushing by the faces blur and re-emerge as poets: Homer, Wordsworth, Keats . . . Milton’s eyes strike piercing-dim: The shapes of suns and stars did swim Like clouds from them, and granted him God for sole vision . . . And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men . . . Features I know grow violently vivid then fade then protrude and merge into family again. Moving on and on the wheel splits open; inside is the face I know as well as my own, shrinking back on itself – tear-streaked; torn and dark, caged like a bird – a poet’s, fragmented, in exile from herself.