Fourteen soldiers swarmed the adult quarters of the house, as well as two officers and two messengers. The Granvilles were besieged. The maid would have helped shimmy the girls into their gowns right over their chemises (no distinction then between sleeping clothes and underwear), perhaps doing the dressing under the covers, for it was cold in those Little Chelsea rooms. The stale pee in the chamber pots may have formed ice crystals. After the girls were ready, the epauletted soldiers swooped them up and carried them, Mary Granville wrote, “to my father and mother, whom we found surrounded.… My father was extremely shocked by this scene, but supported himself with the utmost composure and magnanimity; his chief care being to calm and comfort my mother, who was greatly terrified, and fell into hysteric fits one after another.”
Shortly, however, the prow of Aunt Stanley’s bodice burst through the door and commanded the soldiers, shaming them as she had shamed the niece once in her charge, and applying similar tactics to the men who were arresting her brother. “She was not,” Mary recalled, “to be denied; she told the officers that she would be answerable for everything to Lord Townshend, and insisted on passing, with a courage and firmness that conquered their opposition.”
Aunt Stanley, all business, cowed eighteen swarming intelligence and security officers and messengers and rescued Mary and Anne. She convinced the men that they had no business carting the children off to jail with their parents, and that she should harbor them. She soothed their mother, she argued for their father, she used her hound’s tongue for good. “I can never forget her meeting with my father,” Mary said of her aunt at this moment of panic, “she loved him with the extremest affection, and could never part from him, even for a short absence, without tears; they embraced one another with the most tender sadness.” As their father and panicked mother were escorted off by the soldiers, their aunt led the girls to her own coach, and they stayed with her through the ordeal.
Sixty-one years later, as Mrs. Delany sat cutting and pasting, severing the Hound’s Tongue leaf and inserting it into her mosaick, across an ocean the British troops had secured Quebec, while George Washington, in Boston, was inoculating his troops against smallpox – by making a cut in the skin and pushing a pox in – turning poison into medicine, and saving lives that would turn a war.12 The world was never black and white to her – it was black and bright, surprising colors. She never saw her aunt in only two tones, but in all the variations she would later bring to the blues and greens and browns and white of the Hound’s Tongue.
The embraces that Mary witnessed between her father and her stern aunt were a kind of inherently contradictory flowering. In reaching out with such warmth of emotion to her brother, it was as if Aunt Stanley had grown out of the rough leaves of the Hound’s Tongue and had reached up like the thin stems of the plant to its impeccable blue flowers. The woman who had tried to curb her niece’s impetuosity with censure also demonstrated a courage and a loyalty that allowed her to bully the soldiers, soothe her brother’s wife, take charge of her nieces. She failed at interfering in her brother’s arrest but at least valiantly tried, and, best of all for Mary, threw her arms around her beloved Bernard, and Mary saw it. Aunt Stanley, too, had grown up being boxed by rules, and she, too, had contained – and preserved – her impetuosity.
Love in extremity, such as this was, an embrace in the middle of the night, surrounded by soldiers, is like a blue flame in the midst of darkness – or even, perhaps, a blue flower against a ground of paper washed in the blackest, mattest pigment. Scenes of our parents blur from day to day into indistinguishable childhood routines, but scenes such as this freeze-frame in a child’s mind, becoming talismans for an artist later in life. No wonder Mrs. D. called Aunt Stanley “Valeria” when she nominally disguised her in her letters. Valeria, the valiant, witnessed by Mary, swollen-faced from tears, on the cusp of adult complexity. Life has an unbounded complexity; the simplest plant is complicated in its growth. The eye can barely take in the planes of connections among stems, flowers, pistils – the whole organism of life as it grows.
And is transplanted. Down the steps Mary went with her sister and her aunt and into the coach. She would never come back.
Mary had survived her first transplant when she went to Aunt Stanley’s, then survived the planting in the soil of her return to her parents, absorbing transitional shock after shock in the bumpy forward motion of childhood, in the way that creative children do: in all likelihood she had her scissors and her needlework with her, and no doubt there was a spinet to play. These activities require focused attention. To truly listen so that one can perform, as Handel did, communicating life in a series of notes, or to imitate life in its silhouettes, following an outline minutely with scissors, is to be like a cartographer mapping a river. It requires an all-absorbing skill, and learning that skill requires an attention that moves the mapmaker, the music maker, the cutter-outer beyond the self to the focused-on thing. All else drops away, all that would tear at us: the restrictions of others’ words, the denigrations of others’ absences, and, for Mary Granville, the soldiers, the hysterics, the rushing maids, the messengers, the fact that she was back at her Aunt Stanley’s again and that her father was in jail.
Dumped from the Tower, returned to a newly powerless life, Bernard Granville, who hadn’t been incarcerated for more than a few days, acted fast. Even though he’d been quickly discovered to be of no consequence to the Jacobites, and therefore no threat to the throne, his older brother George, Lord Lansdowne, was retained in the Tower, where he would languish for nearly two years. Bernard swept his family out of London and prepared to wait out the downturn in the Granvilles’ political fortunes at Buckland, a quiet house in the country that Mary called “The Farm.” They were to live like the Bennet family in Pride and Prejudice a century later – in a kind of exile away from intrigue. But intrigue happens in the country, too, and the ground had been laid for it. Bernard Granville, anxious wife, two sons, and two daughters became the tiniest of x’ s on a vast and complicated cross-stitch that was English politics after the death of Queen Anne.
It was cramped and cold in that coach in November 1714. As Mary shifted her hips against her sister and Anne shifted her feet against her mother and as her father leapt out of the carriage to see what had stopped them on the journey, a trip she described as “miserable,” Mary repeated the words of a poem to herself. The poem was written by Alexander Pope, a Catholic, who received the patronage of her jailed uncle (though Lord Lansdowne was a Protestant). The poem was “To a Young Lady, on Her Leaving the Town after the Coronation.”
As some fond virgin, whom her mother’s care
Drags from the town to wholsom country air,
Just when she learns to roll a melting eye,
And hear a spark, yet think no danger nigh; …
Thus from the world fair Zephalinda flew,
Saw others happy, and with sighs withdrew;
Not that their pleasures caus’d her discontent,
She sigh’d not that They stay’d, but that She went.13
As she was being dragged from the town to boring rural life, as she flew from the world she knew, where others were happy, she engaged in the comforting mental play of repeating memorized verse. Memorizing lines engages a person with the rhythms of another mind and allows the thought of another, perfectly preserved, to act as a comfort to be turned to in emergencies, like a house that remains standing.
Childhood, that place where purity of feeling reigns, was merging into adolescence, where ambiguity begins. She had begun to have experiences that repeated earlier ones. This one layered itself over the earlier disappointment at leaving Mademoiselle Puelle’s school, plucked each time from one place and sent to another. The uprooting of her family in hysteria and disgrace both replicated the earlier dislocation and provoked a new set of emotions: now she was exiled.
It’s nearly impossible to see the shape of your life as you are living it, swimming through the bobbing detritus of the everyday. Bu
t occasionally huge events scissor your living into a shape, and you feel it sharply. At these moments, lived life takes on the feel of a found novel, as if you were a character in a piece of fiction, your author reaching in to cut you from one section, then paste you into another.
The Granvilles’ coach arrived at Buckland in a fiercely cold winter. The whole family was snowed in, and the snowfields swept down to the River Avon. Their windows opened to a stunning vista. Even Mary, wrenched from London, thought so. “The Farm is a low house,” she wrote, “with very good, convenient room in it, the outside entirely covered with laurel, the inside neat furnished with home spun stuff, adorned with fine China and prints. The front of the house faces the finest vale in England, the Vale of Evesham, of which there is a very advantageous view from every window.”14 And under cover of snow, the first part of a romance began.
Up to the house rode a young man in riding boots named Robert Twyford. He was “twenty-two, tall, handsome, lively” and in need of companionship, just as Colonel Granville was. The Colonel, enervated after his escape from London, appalled at his ever-diminishing income, drained by his wife, who had taken to her bed, and constantly summoning up energy to entertain his children, needed a friend. A young man such as Robert, of a similar political persuasion, was a likely candidate. “The first Sunday after he came he met us all at church, and my father asked him to eat beef and pudding with his landlord: he came the next day – he came again. He pleased my father extremely.”15 Twyford was the last of twenty-two children born to a hateful mother.
While the Colonel was making a friend of Robert Twyford, and his wife was sinking and moaning under her covers (except when rousing herself to extend encouraging invitations to Twyford), his daughter was concentrating on her artistic interests. Before breakfast at nine, Mary would practice at her harpsichord. It had been seven years since she had met Mr. Handel. Now her fingers were lithe, strong, and flexible because she loved to play. She went willingly to the discipline of it. If you’re living a life out of control, your mother weeping into her hankie, your father making jokes, London so far away, then to lift your hands above the harpsichord keys and play with your whole melancholy fifteen-year-old heart is a consolation. You might even conjure up Handel’s white cravat and the smell of the brown-black ink he used for transcribing his notes. While Mary Granville poured her loneliness and passion into her instrument, Robert Twyford was attending. He should have been listening to his new older friend, her father – and with half an ear he was. But the other half was hearing a girl burgeoning into womanhood, and doing it in musical notes.
Then the young man was called away.
Spring passed into summer and fall at Buckland.
“I took great delight in a closet I had,” Mary wrote, “which was furnished with little drawings and cut paper of my own doing; I had a desk and shelves for my books.”16 She doesn’t mean the kind of closet we know now; she means a little room that was her own. This was her first studio. Buckland became a de facto home school. “I was kept to my stated hours for practising music, reading, writing, and French, and after that I was expected to sit down to work.”17 (By “work” she meant the handiwork of sewing such as crewelwork, as well as drawing and cutting silhouettes.) In this sentence she describes a young artist’s ideal day.
Ideal, but lonely. About this time Mary made a much-needed friend who matched her own ebullience, Sarah (Sally) Kirkham Chapone (1699–1764). Mrs. D. called Sally an “intrepid spirit,” but her “appearance of being too free and masculine” alarmed Colonel Granville, who “loved … reserve in the behaviour of women.”18 The girls met secretly “in the fields between our fathers’ houses” and became fast friends. “She entertained me with her wit, and she flattered me with her approbation.” Mary worked on her father to accept Sally, and eventually he did. The girls played their adolescent games while Mary’s little sister Anne, their hanger-on, was “offended at our whispers and mysterious talk.” Later Mrs. Delany would dub Sally Chapone “Sappho,” a name that to our twenty-first-century ears, along with the touchstone word “masculine,” conjures up an electric atmosphere of intense teenage connection. Their friendship would prove lifelong. They would stay friends through their marriages, and Mrs. D. would become the godmother to Sally’s daughter.
Soon, Mary passed her fifteenth birthday, and in an ideally romantic spot.
The back part of the house is shaded by a very high hill which rises gradually; between lies the garden, a small spot of ground, but well stocked with fruit and flowers. Nothing could be more fragrant and rural: the sheep and cows came bleating and lowing to the pales of the garden. At some distance on the left hand was a rookery; on the right a little clear brook run winding through a copse of young elms (the resort of many warbling birds), and fell with a cascade into the garden, completing the concert. In the midst of that copse was an arbor with a bench, which I often visited …19
By the fall Twyford had returned. He began arriving at Buckland early in the morning as Mary was practicing the harpsichord, and he sat beside her, watching her in profile. He seemed to be in an agony that Mary couldn’t quite face – and didn’t have to, because she was looking down at her keys and playing, seeing him only in sideways glances.
Her chirpy little sister skipped in, poking fun at her, making the eighteenth-century equivalent of “Mary’s got a boyfriend!” teases, and Mrs. D. remembered the sting of Anne’s mocking all of twenty-five years later – and also recalled how she and Robert blushed. She wasn’t entirely sure why he was there, but Mrs. Granville understood and forbade her elder daughter to leave her room in the morning. If Robert Twyford came around, which he did, again and again, a servant was dispatched to attend Mary at all times.
Thus Mrs. Granville maneuvered Twyford into speaking to her husband. Colonel Granville responded to him with bitter candor. Mary hardly had a dowry, there wouldn’t be much of a marriage settlement, and Twyford would have to take his daughter as is. Not a devastatingly pretty girl, but a fresh girl, rose-lipped, with quick eyes in her longish face.
One day on the stairs Robert Twyford grabbed his love by the hand and burst out in frustration that he wished he had never known her, so overwhelmed was he by his dilemma. But he had to have her, money or no.
Above the leaves of the Hound’s Tongue are two stems of blue flowers, and the white ring in their centers makes them look as though they have eyes. One stem leans to the left, the other drifts to the right, as if they were growing toward two separate light sources. One group of flowers seems to be gazing at the other, which almost seems to be struggling off in the other direction. By positioning them so delicately, Mrs. Delany infused the portrait of her specimens with personal affect. Just because they seem to have faces, the blossoms appear to have their own eccentric characters. She fixed the two stems in opposition – yet they face each other. The apt verb for how the stems behave is “cleave,” a word that contains its opposite, suggesting both to cling together and to separate. You don’t know whether the Hound’s Tongue flowers are cleaving or leaving.
Robert Twyford set off again, home to his mother – who had borne twenty-two children and who felt that her son deserved more than a fancy connection to the Stuarts when it was the Hanovers who were on the throne. But her son persisted like a politely buzzing fly. No, again and again, no, Mama swatted back. He didn’t quite have whatever it took to flout her – or did he? He left for Buckland. This time he outmaneuvered the Granvilles, going directly to Mary herself. Despite his mother’s disapproval, he pressed her. He could go out on his own, he could find some money somewhere, they’d be fine, really they would, if she would just run away with him.
She said no.
The very same word his determined mother had used, now coming out of the mouth of his beloved. She didn’t want to refuse him, but Mary Granville was too pragmatic to elope. Unlike Robert, she did not want to embarrass her family or lose her own position. If she were a character in a novel she might strike boldly off on h
er own, but she was a practical girl who was very aware that her family was dependent on her Uncle George, Lord Lansdowne, now out of jail and writing poetry again at Longleat, the fabulous house of his new wife.
No, she said to him unequivocally. And to release them both from this torture, he had better leave.
Leave. Leaf.
Did Robert Twyford steal a kiss? He did steal something from her closet at Buckland, as she would find out later.
{ BUD, UNFOLDING }
Mary Granville could have rebelled, she could have moped, she could have let a bowl slip from her hand and smash to bits on the floor, she could have sulked. Instead she returned to a routine, back to the schedule her father had invented for her. Back to the relief and attachment of Sally Chapone. Back to her lessons, her handicrafts, her harpsichord with just herself on the narrow seat, looking at the keys. And at night, for entertainment, she listened to her father read to the family, to cheer them all up, and to try to cheer her mother, depressed at how far they had fallen in the world.
At Buckland, when Mary looked at her mother, she saw a woman victimized by her own disappointments and hysteria, yet when she looked at her father, she saw a man ordering his diminished existence. For me, it was the opposite. When I looked at my father, who was an alcoholic, I saw a man victimized by his own disappointments and hysteria, yet when I looked at my mother, I saw a woman ordering her diminished existence. Like Mary’s father, my mother was a reader, though she did not read aloud. She plowed through her romance or Wild West novels every day or two, assuming I would do the children’s book equivalent of the same. Even though she herself would abandon crafts, reacting against my grandmother’s life of embroidery and quilt work, she bought boxes of craft projects for me. A routine in our household was established of mealtimes and reading times and homework and crafts. It was disrupted a thousand times by my father’s rages, but after each drunken tsunami, time folded back into the household syllabus.
The Paper Garden Page 5