‘Sweet, sweet Miss Elizabeth,’ Crow says comfortingly as she clears away my tray. I can barely hear her. I hear the other woman’s sobs distinctly. She moans as though there’s a hole in her heart. The man places his arms around the shoulders of her black satin dress. Tears stream down her cheeks. Bravely she turns to him. He exchanges for parchment and quill pen the sodden handkerchief scrumpled in the hard ball of her black-gloved hand. He murmurs reassurances in her ear. Warmth radiates from his face. Shell-pink as a tongue, sunlight sheers across the bay. She is pulling herself through years of anguish, shaking off the ache of loneliness – a path leading to hell – her lips melt into a smile for the first time. For a while the couple blend together completely against an auroral sky. Clasped hands cast in stone. Such trust, such intimacy, cannot be quantified. A pang of envy shoots through me. Were she to die in his arms could he breathe life into her again? Could I escape to the blessed land from whence they came?
7 March 1839
Ever dearest Miss Mitford,
. . . your last two delightful letters were received by me when I was quite confined to my bed, & in such a state of debility as rendered writing a thing impossible. Even at this time, altho’ more than a month has passed since this laying up began, the extent of my strength is to bear being lifted to the sofa for three hours a day – & I have not left my bedroom for six weeks. The cold weather at the end of January irritated the chest a good deal – & then most unaccountably – I never suffered from such a thing my whole life before – I had for ten days a kind of bilious fever which necessitated the use of stronger medicines than my state cd. very well bear – & then came on a terrible state of debility – the stomach out of sheer weakness, rejecting all sustenance except wine & water, & the chest, seeming to grudge the exercise of respiration. I felt oftener than once inclined to believe that the whole machine was giving away everywhere! But God has not willed it so! . . .
We are now stuck in the month of March. To my surprise, Crow’s reading of the thermometer is sixty-five. Sharp winds weave their fingers beneath the sash windows, making me shiver. A good hour after Crow had lit the fire she returned to clear away a hamper-full of eagerly opened cards and presents. Another birthday has passed. Uneventfully.
Crow preens herself before my dressing-table. This maid and I share the same Christian name, thus the necessity of calling her by her surname. She may be a young creature but I can talk to Crow as if she were a friend. Whether it is good etiquette I care not. I like to be managed and she manages me well.
Outside, waves thrash and beat the rocks round the bay so frantically it is a wonder any creature survives.
10 March 1839
Flopping down on the company side of my bed, Bro says he does not feel alive any more. ‘Is Bro in love?’ I ask.
‘No,’ he replies.
‘Is that true?’ I say. Because, if he were, Papa would not approve.
Bro slopes over to the armchair and lights a cigarette. ‘In some aspects of life we must be invisible to Papa,’ he says. ‘I am invisible. No, not to you, Ba. To you I am transparent. You see far more of me than others do.’ We are at this moment looking into each other’s eyes; vulnerable, like sea snails without shells; me curled in bed; Bro torpid in the armchair opposite.
‘I would have loved a water-colour from you on my birthday,’ I say. Bro replies by calling his water-colours sundry and ungainly.
Bro says he is bored. Interminably. Never have I seen his spirits so low. He misses Sam sorely. I suspect it is Sam’s good company at the parties Bro frequents here that he desires most – but funny Sam amused us all with his odd pranks.
‘Where are you going today?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ Bro replies mournfully. ‘I was up after eleven again last night writing to Sam.’
‘He has suffered all winter long from shivering fits, feeling hot and cold and with fever. I suggested to Arabel he take arsenic.’
Bro yawns. ‘I know. I have asked him to bring from London boots from Judd’s, and for Henrietta a pair of yellow satin kid gloves.’ He trudges downstairs from my room to lie in his.
I shout after Bro, ‘Please take my letters to catch today’s post,’ and there is a dormant pause on the stairs. This post will carry a long despatch from Henrietta and a note from me to Sam, requesting he visit Torquay as soon as Papa and his health will allow.
11 March 1839
My dearest Miss Mitford,
Thank you for all your encouraging kindnesses (how they multiply) about my poetry. But dearest Miss Mitford, if it were really the fashion to like it, wdnt it be a little so to buy it! And Messrs. Saunders & Otley gave bad accounts in the early part of the winter. Do you think there shd. be more advertisements? . . .
27 March 1839
‘Is it not true that one man’s greed is another man’s hunger?’ I ask Bro after he has read from The Times an article accusing West Indian plantation owners of a continuing excessive desire to possess more than they need.
‘There are probably exceptions,’ he replies.
Poor Bro looks strained, puffing on that cigarette – his hair remains as long and lanky as ever. I would prefer it if he would refrain from smoking in my chamber; smoke does affect my chest so. I wish indeed, as does Henrietta, that Bro was independent. I have advised him to pursue his interest in painting water-colours. He says he will, when the weather improves, but I don’t see what the weather has to do with it. He can paint just as well inside as out!
28 March 1839
I have asked Henrietta to tell Sam that a black elastic band for my waist – one of the ones worn over the gown – would be very acceptable, and to bring a bottle or two of eau de cologne; my stock has dwindled. She suggests we write to Sam now but I am exhausted, having undergone the fatigue of being brought down stairs, carried up again, undressed, and put to bed.
‘Ba, I can tell when you’re awake,’ Henrietta says, and giggles.
I peer from one eye, ‘How?’ searching for an angle from which to broach discussions on my recent preoccupations.
‘Because I just saw you lay your book down.’
During our exchange, which, on account of my hoarseness, is brief, I tell Henrietta to use her head just this once. Is she too thick-skinned to feel the swords of truth? Henrietta’s nice – I’m not thinking she isn’t – I am making my best effort to explain to her the conclusions I have reached: that we must see poetry, suffering, as the way to truth. Is not the Bible poetry? Are not hymns poetic expression of the love of God, however unworthy? I ask. All things were created by the poet, God. Christ is poetry. The accumulated benefits of the wealthy have been derived from others’ suffering, and our sinful debt to Christ is best represented in poetic utterance.
‘Have you never wondered about this?’
Scratching her neatly arranged hair as though trawling for a thought in there, Henrietta replies, ‘Do you always have to be serious?’
I look away from her face, wishing Arabel would hurry up and arrive, for she is graced with much more sense. I should love Arabel even if she were not my sister; and even if she did not love me.
The skirts of Henrietta’s new violet dress swish across the red Persian rugs as she sails from my bedside to fetch my tray of wine and oysters from the drawing-room.
Bro excused himself from coming to wish me good-night, having disappeared to I know not where. Another party I suspect.
Bro said this afternoon he heard that Tennyson, who I understand to be handsome despite having an unduly large head and fathoming eye, has separated from his family because they distracted him. He is settled in a cottage not far from here, in Devonshire, where he composes poems and smokes all day.
I miss London. I miss busy shops. The jostle of London’s streets.
I long for my doves and my little slip of a sitting-room, my shelves of books. My window-panes ivy-trailed and draped like curtains drawn. The heads from Brucciani’s – busts of poets and philosophers, Chaucer and Homer in particu
lar – which kind Papa, how I know not, found time to purchase, and to remember such light a thing as my pleasure in all the bustle and vexations of his life.
1 April 1839
My ever dearest Arabel,
I meant to have written to my own beloved Papa – but altho’ beginning days ago this series of replies to letters sent to me so long since, I am tired today, & Henrietta, scolding like a virago! Tell him how he is missed every night, & all day too – but most at night! & tell him he shall have a long letter from me very soon in reply to your blank corner – dearest dearest Papa! . . .
. . . I meant to have written too to dearest Sam. Tell him so.
10 April 1839
My beloved friend,
. . . They carried me downstairs into the drawing-room for two weary hours about ten days ago – but the weather has since kept me upstairs. For weeks before I was reduced to all but the harmlessness of babyhood – lifting a spoon to my own lips being the only point on which I cd. claim precedence. Even now I am sure I cd. not stand a moment alone – but here is summer, coming tho’ not in sight, & she sends a sort of mental sunshine before . . .
Give my kind & grateful regards to dear Dr. Mitford! How kind of him to drink my health – & to think of me at any time. He shall have more fish when they will be caught. Did you send the basket? We have not heard of it! . . .
14 April 1839
Though I suffer enormous embarrassment for my eating habit I will not, and can not, devour and digest that stringy yellow substance identified by Bro as chicken. I would rather starve to death than eat chicken, or, worse, red meat. When dinner – a dish of transparent greenish gravy-like soup, broccoli florets, chicken in some viscid sauce whitish-yellow as custard and grainy as tapioca (a sort of bread sauce with saffron), tasteless rice pellets that resemble white mouse droppings – was set before me on a tray just now, I so very nearly cried. Bro saw my disgust and ordered the cook bring oysters and macaroni, then Crow gave me an additional opium dose and the world came back to me again. Or I to it. But now I am bloated I cannot sleep. Or write. Or anything!
19 April 1839
My dear Sam,
. . . Tell Arabel that I can’t wait any longer for Miss Bordman’s note . . . She must have quite forgotten me to have such an idea of my patience. Tell her she had far better put everything into a bandbox &, with them, a packet of letters & my satin bonnet. Dr. Barry told me two or three days ago that he hoped to get me into the air in a month’s time!! & I can’t go out without a bonnet. That’s certain! & I have not any here except a black one. So tell Arabel to pack up the bandbox, & send it – not in a month but NOW!
27 April 1839
What a dreadful year is this? The sudden death of Cousin Richard, Custos of St. James, Jamaica; Speaker of the House of Assembly. Richard, dear Papa’s illegitimate cousin, had blood from we know not where, and now rumour has reached us that Richard was murdered – may the Lord God rest his soul.
Handsome, after a fashion, though not as dark and handsome as Papa, Richard’s was a face that I, as a child, did not care to look upon. His short upper lip was full of expression. His laughter rang harshly through Hope End. All too well he described his daily path as leading from cane fields – a world of vindictive torture, where the standard punishment for any act considered a misdeed was thirty-nine lashes of a thick cattle whip – to Barrett Hall great house, a residence to him of exquisite comfort and bliss.
Contrary to Papa’s belief, I was neither sleeping nor in bed when Cousin Richard related fateful tales of runaway slaves. Straining to hear from my seat on the stairs, I glimpsed the Negroes’ untold misery and the savagery of white Jamaicans. Heartily Richard described punishments impossible to forget, yet ones I wish I could not remember; described wrong following greater wrong. Described how he galloped from Falmouth along Jamaica’s north coast to Greenwood then Barrett Hall and Cinnamon Hill. Clouting the door, ‘Open up! Open up!’ he had shouted to summon each militia member. He described the militia, all with horses and in their best finery, mustering around one hundred slaves to track down the runaways; one a man, one a woman. ‘Cousin,’ I said with tears in my eyes, ‘speak no more of this.’ Yet his voice has never left my ears – such a frightfully terrible tale he did bestow upon them that I now cannot help my thoughts dwelling on that black woman slave they cornered.
I am an abolitionist. I belong to a family who have long been West Indian slave-holders, and if I believed in curses, I should be afraid. Richard said of the slave in question – Quasheba – was that her name? – ‘We trapped her, but it occurs to me that she did not die from that or a flogging.’ Richard then had the audacity to say that slave women should be treated more kindly when about to give birth. That night with us at Hope End he drank heartily. Five bottles of the best Bordeaux claret; rum; whisky.
I saw Cousin Richard last five years ago. Still a man of violence, and some malice. A man too of ill repute – the house of which he was Speaker was known as the House of Forty Thieves. A man of talent, I have to say, who at one time did all he could to trample down poor Papa. His speech in the House of Commons was not well received, in particular his views on flogging women. It was around that time, or possibly a little before, that Bro read to me of a large West Indian proprietor examined by a committee of the House of Lords who could not name any overseer, driver, or other man in authority who did not keep an African mistress.
Did my own father’s cousin commit murder? Was the victim a child or with child? Might the child have been his? God forgive us and help us. The moon’s silver mantle shines boldly. And although Bro sleeps nearby on the sofa I cannot, gripped at night by such thoughts.
30 April 1839
Ever dearest Miss Mitford,
. . . It seems so long since I heard last, & there are so many disagreeable & painful things in the world notwithstanding all these spring flowers, & I have such a knack of imagining them, that I wd. gladly be sure of none of them having touched you. Don’t fancy me forgetful of the fish basket. But our servant seems to be a very nervous person as to the qualifications of travelling fish – and I told you before that fish in this market, when worth anything, is not very often fish directly from the sea . . .
. . . Did you look into Blackwood this month – & (apropos to fish) perceive how Christopher’s ‘Oystereater’ congenially with Tait’s Opium Eater, apostrophizes the ‘charming & adorable Mary Russell Mitford’? – You see, no sort of diet will expel the admirations due to you – & the imaginative with their opium, & the literal with their oysters come to the same point at last. Nay – the oysters are infected, if it be true that ‘the WORLD’S mine oyster’.
. . . Again disappointed about the fish! But there is hope for tomorrow . . .
Dear Hugh Stuart Boyd,
. . . I have a confusion of poems running about in my head – a chaos of beginnings & endings & little pieces of middles, which are not likely to end in an Iliad & so help Atheism to an argument. I shd. be glad to be allowed to get them (not in the character of an Iliad) into some little nutshell of my own, but Dr. Barry insists upon my not writing, and as you taught me passive obedience a long time ago, I have been practising it like St Aylmer – not that I mean to do this all summer, if it pleases God to spare me through it. I ought to say with a deep-felt thanksgiving, how much better I am . . . The weakness was excessive – & indeed, I have not even tried to stand up since January – but everything is in ‘good time’ Dr. Barry says, & it is planned for me to go upon the sea before the present week closes, which would be a ‘vision of delight’ for me if it were not for the fatigue . . .
I do so hope Hugh Stuart Boyd can read my handwriting – as I look back over my pen-strokes I see they are rather irregular and cramped from my writing this horizontally in bed. Why has he left my last three letters unanswered? Has he not managed to read them? Why, when we spent so much time together at Hope End, precious happy literary hours over cups of strong black West Indian coffee, can he not reply?
&nb
sp; 15 May 1839
This continuing aching sense of weakness I suffer is intolerable. I have told Dr. Barry that Dr. Chambers tried every other kind of narcotic in vain. Opium does me no harm. Despite taking twenty-five drops daily, I have mastered seven languages – French, Italian, Latin and German, Spanish, Hebrew and Byzantine Greek.
Yet today Crow forgot an afternoon dose.
I now experience restlessness till it makes me quite mad, like an imprisoned bird, impotently beating and fluttering at all the doors and windows to escape. My elixir should be served throughout the day, first as a breakfast when wafting up to my room is a disturbing odour of kippers, the crunch of toast, the clatter of knives and forks and cups against saucers and plates.
Imprisoned on the sofa close to the window, close to a cold and violent sea, I lie listening to the dry wind as it leans eastwards, whipping up surf. My face, reflected in the glass of the bookcase opposite, is yellowed with jaundice. I am glad setons are not used as a method of curing my ailments, for I cannot bear the sensation caused when tape is passed by means of a needle through folds of one’s skin – I have no folds of skin to pass through.
Old books are stacked at my bedside, each holds the fragrance of the past, like the scent of lavender – remote, fragmented – pressed into sheets. The woman drifts through my thoughts and into the room. Standing at my bedside, she is in girlhood and seems to be suffering a general feeling of malaise, aches and pains and convulsive twitches of the muscles. Her skin is blotched red as if affected by measles. Natural ill health impedes her movements with paroxysms, until she enters a hell of writhing agitation, into which most would feel loath to look. Vainly does she struggle. She’s been buried for thousands of years in a coffin of the thickest wood, the conflicts and horrors and evil nightmares are over-powering. Already the gates to her freedom are locked, draped with black garments and funeral cloths, the key thrown away.
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