The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  Pendarves’s stay lengthened. Day after day he met her at dinner, served at about 3:00 p.m. in those days, and supper, at about 10:00 p.m. The reason why he loitered began to dawn on Mary, and she placed her only stone, a pebble really, in her slingshot of behavior against him. She decided to make herself brusque and ugly. “[I]f he came into the room when I was alone, I instantly left it, and took care to let him see I quitted it because he came there,” Mary wrote to the Duchess about Pendarves, slumped in a funk, “much afflicted with gout, and often … in a sullen mood.”6

  While Mary dressed her worst, her aunts, of course, did not, especially Lady Lansdowne, the mistress of this stately household. Along with the spinster Aunt Granville, she reinforced Pendarves’s desirability. “I was often chid by my two wise aunts,” Mary wrote, and “I told them plainly he was odious to me, in hopes they would have had good-nature enough to have prevented what I foresaw; but Laura called me childish, ignorant, and silly, and that if I did not know what was for my own interest, my friends must judge for me.”7

  However ugly she thinks she can make herself, a seventeen-year-old is beautiful, and young Mr. Villiers found her deliciously rude. Across the dinner table he flirted casually. (In retrospect Mrs. D. calls it “undesigning merriment.”) Yet Mary, tickled by the young man, became a tickle beneath the old man’s skin. “At last a violent fit of jealousy,” she wrote, “made him resolve to address himself to [her uncle], and make such proposals as he thought might gain his consent.”8

  By this time Alexander Pendarves had lingered at Longleat for two months.

  “One night,” Mary wrote, “at one of our concerts, all the company (I suppose by agreement) went into the room where the music was performed, which was next to the drawing-room.” Everyone was in on the plot. “I got up to follow them, but my uncle called me back,” she wrote. Was he nervous, about to sell his niece? He “desired I would bear him company, for he was lame and could not walk into the next room.” She became a character to herself when she described this night: “when he bid me shut the door, I turned as pale as death.” As if depicting an out-of-body experience, she looked at herself turning into a ghost. “He took me by the hand …”9

  From the music room the chords of the players dimly resounded. Who knows whether she heard them, or only the buzz of foreboding as her uncle informed her that he had found an ideal suitor for her, one who could provide a large house, a castle, in fact. He did not have to remind her that her father, mother, sister, and two brothers depended on him for income. “After a very pathetic speech of his love and care of me,” she wrote of her uncle, “and of my father’s unhappy circumstances, my own want of fortune, and the little prospect I had of being happy if I disobliged those friends that were desirous of serving me, he told me of [Pendarves’s] passion for me, and his offer of settling his whole estate on me.”10 Mary Granville had not once seen the old man entirely sober.

  Sixty-three years after she was handed by her uncle to Alexander Pendarves, at Bulstrode Mrs. D. replicated a Rosa gallica. She labored over the petals, cutting and pasting to achieve a weird translucency by layering paper over paper, as if the petals were the strata of semi-transparent skin at a young woman’s temple. Then she concentrated on the stems. Twenty-three thorns she cut out from strips of paper.

  Since George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, was lame, he was likely to have been sitting down as he delivered the blow. Was Mary permitted to sit or required to stand? Decades later, she leaned over her rose. She made the leaf at the lower right-hand side of the main stem as jagged and prickly as a real rose leaf – for she was determined to replicate what her eye saw, to make it palpable, though it appeared out of nothing but a piece of paper. She poised her scissors or knife. She dove down, as a heron’s beak dives through the water for its fish, plunged the point into the leaf, and cut a hole.

  Rosa gallica, detail of leaf (illustration credit 4.2)

  In the context of the finished collage, the hole is less than a hundredth of the parts, and you might not notice it at first. It is as round as a bullet hole. Could she have used a paper punch? No, a magnifying glass reveals that the hole was hand cut. Is it absurd to put the whole turning episode of a woman’s life into a single composition she made so many years later? It’s no news to anyone that we make art out of the substance of our lives. Still, is the hole that very moment? Better to resort to a simile: the hole is like that moment. George Lansdowne bit into his niece’s life. When she was eighty, she replicated a hole, a cut circle representing an insect bite. Yet a real insect bite, though round, is also jagged. Mrs. Delany certainly could have cut in a more irregular way. Instead, she made a perfect piercing.

  Once you notice the nibble in the leaf, you cannot see the rose in the same way again. It becomes a rose with a story, a bitten bloom. But we all know that a bite, while less than a thousandth of the surface of our body, can be an itchy, overwhelming thing. A person can die from one. But Mary Granville, soon to become Mrs. Pendarves, lived a long life. And a selfish lord, from the vantage point of decades, can be reduced to a bug.

  “He then,” wrote Mary of her uncle, “with great art and eloquence, told me all [Pendarves’s] good qualities and vast merit, and how despicable I should be if I could refuse him because he was not young and handsome; and that if I did refuse him he should conclude my inclinations were engaged to [Robert Twyford], a name I had not heard or thought of for above half a year – a name that had never before given me much disturbance, though now it added to my distress.”

  The pressure produced in her the confused state of extreme anxiety.

  How can I describe to you, my dear friend [she wrote to the Duchess], the cruel agitation of my mind! Whilst my uncle talked to me, I did not once interrupt him; surprise, tender concern for my father, a consciousness of my own little merit, and the great abhorrence I had to [Pendarves], raised such a confusion of thoughts in my mind, that it deprived me of the power of utterance, and after some moments’ silence I burst into tears.

  The tears infuriated Lansdowne. “I see, Madam,” he said, in a puffed-up manipulator’s rage, “you are not to be gained by merit; and if [Twyford] is the obstacle to my friend’s happiness, and he ever dares to come to this house, I will have him dragged through the horse-pond.”11 Mary said she trembled after this, for what he said “plainly showed me how resolute and determined he was, and how vain it would be for me to urge any reasons against his resolution.”12

  And so she thanked him. Like one of the vanquished after a battle, she had to submit to him, as Lansdowne himself had had to submit to his jailers in the Tower. “With great difficulty I said I was so sensible of his goodness to me, and of the gratitude I owed him.”13 A year after Mrs. D. made her Rosa gallica, on October 19, 1781, across an ocean from Bulstrode, British general Lord Cornwallis was so sick at having to surrender to George Washington at Yorktown that he retreated to his tent. He summoned his Irish underling, General O’Hara, and ordered him to ride out to hand over the British troops.14 But as a teenage girl, Mary had no O’Hara to substitute for her, and so she stated to Lansdowne in her own voice “that I would submit to his commands.”15

  Then she asked to be excused. Lansdowne “gave me my liberty, and by a back way I avoided the company and went to my own apartment, locked myself up in my closet, where I wept bitterly for two hours.”

  Downstairs the party went on.

  “Several messengers came to the door to call me, and at last my uncle sent me word he absolutely insisted on my coming to supper.”

  No, she wasn’t getting out of it, though she clung to her sign of rebellion, her tear-swollen face. “Nothing could be at that time more vexatious to me, but I proposed one consolation, which was, that [Pendarves] and the rest of the family should see how unacceptable the proposal that had been made to me that afternoon was.”

  Mary’s parents were called to Longleat, and though the marriage was planned, she seized at a last, feeble teenage strategy. She decided she would turn to
someone for help, but “I had nobody to advise with; every one of the family had persuaded themselves that this would be an advantageous match for me – no one considered the sentiments of my heart.”

  Of course the campaign of asking for help from the very upholders of the system that the whole society depended on completely failed. “To be settled in the world, and ease my friends of an expense and care, they urged that it was my duty to submit, and that I ought to sacrifice everything to that one point.”16

  How does an intelligent, desperate girl keep her mind whole in the face of what she herself describes as a human sacrifice? And what does this have to do with a talent that lies dormant for decades? “I acted as they wished me to do, and for fear of their reproaches, made myself miserable.”17 To be aware that you are performing for others creates a kind of mask that can also act as a scab behind which you can heal. Mary knew she had to act her part because “if I showed the least reluctance, my father and mother would never consent to the match, and that would inevitably expose them as well as myself,” she wrote, to Lansdowne’s “resentment.”18

  And retribution.

  Maybe the Granvilles’ daughter needed to pretend that her parents would have stepped in had she allowed it, to protect herself from an even worse idea, that her parents had willingly let her uncle, well within the norms of their time, sell their daughter to a slobbering rich old man. She told her friend that Lansdowne “represented it” to her parents “in the fairest light,” and her parents “wished for nothing more than to see me well married, and hoping I might be so now, came readily to this proposal.”

  In her commentary in the notes to the volumes of The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany, published in 1861, Lady Llanover, Mrs. D.’s great-great-niece, reinforces how impossible it was to marry for love.

  The evidence there is that her father and mother (for whom she ever expresses so much affection) approved of her marrying Mr. Pendarves, and were not at all disturbed by their disparity of years or the complete absence of congeniality in their dispositions, tastes, or habits, not appearing to have even a suspicion that her tears flowed from any other cause than parting from her family, is a very striking illustration of the complete disregard shown in marriage at that period to everything but the worldly settlement in life. Even Lady Stanley [Mrs. D.’s aunt], though represented as so virtuous and so amiable, evinces in the … letter of congratulation to her niece, written to Mrs. Pendarves in 1717, that she considered “riches, honours, and length of years,” properly to represent “happiness.”19

  For obvious reasons, and very much unlike a fictional heroine, Mary had to say yes to Alexander Pendarves. “I was married with great pomp.… I lost, not life indeed, but I lost all that makes life desirable – joy and peace of mind.”20

  The Pendarveses stayed at Longleat two months, Mary trying to be civil to Alexander, and Alexander civil to Mary. He “shewed me all the respect and tenderness he was capable of.”21 Tenderness? How did it feel as the pendulous body lowered itself? She doesn’t say.

  Then they left Longleat, and her sentence, as well as her artistic dormancy, began. “The day was come when I was to leave all I loved and valued, to go to a remote country, with a man I looked upon as my tyrant – my jailor; one that I was determined to obey and oblige, but found it impossible to love.”22 It took them two weeks to go from Longleat (just south of Bath) to Roscrow in Cornwall, since Pendarves stopped the carriage along the way, visiting everyone he knew, to show off his young wife. And in each of these places, the minute she would find herself alone, she would cry.

  Finally, they arrived at his castle. Surrounded by high walls, hidden from view – she called the house at Roscrow “Averno,” the Roman lake that was thought to be the entrance to Hades. “When the gate of the court was opened and we walked in, the front of the castle terrified me. It is built of ugly coarse stone, old and mossy, and propt with two great stone buttresses.”23

  She had walked into a Gothic tale.

  She had also stepped into the myth of Persephone and Hades – but without a vengeful Demeter mother to seek her out. Not that Mrs. D. herself would have said that, or maybe even thought it. She never utters a word of disrespect to her mother in her letters.

  When Mary entered the front hall of the castle, it was so dark that she lurched toward a parlor that did have light, but when she stood in the dilapidated room she realized that the light streamed in from a gaping hole in the roof, and when she stepped farther in, her foot sank into the rotten floorboards. Then she threw herself down on a damp divan and wept. The body of the house was the body of the man.

  Another look at the thin neck of the uppermost rosebud in the collage reminds a person how the neck of any rosebud looks as though it will barely support the head of full bloom. That neck recalls Iphigenia, the innocent daughter of the ancient King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra, who was sacrificed so that the gods would release the wind and the Greek warships could sail to Troy. Often when Iphigenia’s story is told, she herself has no speaking part. Her father kills her, and then he goes to war. Mrs. D. likens herself to the daughter of the ancient king when she describes the pomp of her wedding ceremony in the dazed, deadpan tone of a disaster survivor responding to an interview question. “Never was woe drest out in gayer colors, and when I was led to the altar, I wished from my soul I had been led, as Iphigenia was, to be sacrificed. I was sacrificed.”24

  But it is palliative to note that the name Iphigenia means “born to strength.”

  { FLOWER, AUDIBLE }

  Georg Dionysius Ehret was a botanical artist who taught the Duchess of Portland’s daughters to paint flowers. He suggested that they dissect them, and likely Mrs. D. dissected them, too. This small fact launched my minor career as an autopsist of dead blooms. With grisly gusto I approached the flowers I grew on my balcony with my kitchen shears, seeking out the ones to deadhead, and yes, deadheading prematurely to get my best specimens. Then I carried them to the kitchen and lay them on my dissection table, the cutting board. It takes a small, sharp paring knife to make the slice that really shows the stamens and pistils, the organs of flowers that make more flowers, and a longer slice down into the ovary at the bottom of the pistil to get to the juicy pre-seeds, what will ultimately dry into a seedcase. Intriguingly, miraculously, steadfastly, the four basic parts appear in every investigation: sepals, petals, stamens, pistils. Even as complex-looking a flower as a muddled rose shares the simple four-part structure.25 All flowers have both ovaries and semen- (a.k.a. pollen-) forming organs. Pollen is the plant’s sperm, so to speak, its fertilizing agent.

  “The career of flowers differs from ours only in inaudibleness,” Emily Dickinson famously wrote in a letter. “I feel more reverence as I grow for these mute creatures whose suspense or transport may surpass my own.”26 She was a bit of an autopsist, too, taking apart the minutiae of life. Do flowers muffle their sobs as young Mrs. Pendarves did, weeping to herself on every visit to every one of her new husband’s friends and political associates? Everyone I have ever told the story of the selling of the teenage Mary Granville to the drunken Alexander Pendarves has audibly gasped. We all vibrate with a horrified sympathy at the prospect of that girl with the old man. (Except that he was a year younger than I am now.) She was a being who heard a heavy door clang shut on her life. I did not hear such a door clang so distinctly shut in my own, but I continually thought it might.

  Parts of a Flower (illustration credit 4.3)

  In a house dominated by a violent, alcoholic father, I lived in fear of something happening that would prevent me from getting out of Buffalo, going on to university and my own life. Sometimes I even feared I would die. There is a strange way in which the young Mrs. Pendarves’s life lays a ghostly silhouette onto the atmosphere of my own experiences. I was not a sexual victim of my father, though Mary was likely one of Pendarves, despite the fact that there were no children. But as my father stomped through the house in his underpants throwing fur
niture, he exuded an aura of sexual threat that seemed as much a part of the atmosphere of the house as the alcohol-and-smoke-fumed air. There is a way in which the body of the small suburban house I grew up in was besieged by the body of the man who periodically attempted to destroy most of the objects in it.

  One dismal night, in the wake of his having broken the legs off a coffee table when my mother wasn’t home, my father insisted that I tell him I loved him. I wasn’t rebellious, but at sixteen, I was thorny. I held out, refusing, for … could it have been a whole hour? I dug in my heels until his sad, bull-like face hung over me, sobbing. He pinned me to a chair, and I was scared for my life, as, in a different way, Mary Granville Pendarves had been scared for her life, too. Viscerally I recall the moment when I realized that I was too frightened not to say “I love you.” To stop his harangue, to remove the crying, vulnerable man whose arms gripped the arms of the chair I had curled up in, I lied. My yes kept me safe – by allowing me partly to disappear under a close, matte darkness.

  Black pigment is made from charred organic matter – and that includes burnt bones. This chilling fact contributes to the black background of Mrs. Delany’s Rosa gallica, Cluster Damask Rose. Not that burnt bones necessarily produced the pigment that Mrs. D. used to create the black backgrounds of her flowers – her pigment could have been made from tar, pitch, lampblack, pine soot, anything charred to get a noir so deep it looks as if it came from the mouth of Hades. But whatever the composition of the dry crystals she ground with a mortar and pestle, then mixed with liquid and adhesive, its source is something burnt. Carbon. Organic. Ashes. Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don’t think it is. But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience.