The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  All of this dressing had to have been accomplished before dawn, because at 4:30 in the morning on the day of the coronation, Mary and Mrs. Garland, a friend, were wrapped in their cloaks, so early for the event that the doors of Westminster Hall (where the processional began, and where the newly crowned monarchs would return to dine) were not yet open. They repaired to one of the new variety of gathering places, a coffee house, filled with men (but where women were certainly allowed), that served as people’s home bases; some received their mail at the coffee house they frequented.30 After hanging out for three hours, they decided to try to get to the coronation again, left the coffee house at 7:30 with a grenadier, and plunged through a terrifying crowd that surged like a riptide. In the battering of these human waves Mary’s cloak came off behind her, and as she fought for her footing, her arms were bruised. “For some minutes I lost my breath, (and my cloak I doubt for ever).”31

  At last they were inside Westminster Hall, where George II and his Queen were to eat their coronation meal,32 and Mary had a ticket to watch them. She and her friend swept their hooped mantuas toward a balcony and a table where they sat down, carefully adjusting their gowns to balance on the chairs. The King was nearly hidden from her view under a canopy, despite the fact that the “room was finely illuminated, and though there was 1800 candles, besides what were on the tables, they were all lighted in less than three minutes by an invention of Mr. Heidegger’s, which succeeded to the admiration of all spectators.”33 (James Heidegger was Handel’s impresario.)

  Mary loved looking at others – and, on this occasion, being looked at herself. “It was not disagreeable to be taken notice of …” Her modesty abandoned, she stepped out into her freedom. All her friends were there and brought her food. “Everybody I knew came under the place where I sate to offer me meat and drink, which was drawn up from below into the galleries by baskets at the end of a long string, which they filled with cold meat and bread, sweetmeats and wine.”34 She, who was filled up by looking and noticing, could look and be looked at the whole long day, finally limping back to her aunt’s by 10:00 that night.

  What do clothes have to do with late-life paper botanicals? Precision, of course, and an avid interest in detail. A devotion to couture, as any passionate visitor to the displays at museums understands, trains the eye for detail. As Mary matured, her eye was educated on the silkiest spans of textiles. Her gaze developed with a scientific precision and a sensuous apprehension. And she had literary talent for writing her observations. “The beauty of writing,” she mused, “consists in telling our sentiments in an easy, natural way.”35 Around this time, from her fireside she wrote, “My clothes were grave, the ground dark grass green, brocaded with a running pattern like lace of white intermixed with festoons of flowers in faint colours. My ribbons were pink and silver, my head well drest, French and a cockard that looked smart, my clothes were a French silk, I happened to meet with a great penny-worth – they cost me seventeen pounds.”36 (A cockard was a feather headdress.) We can loosely calculate what she spent on her outfit in today’s currency: just over two thousand pounds, or just over three thousand dollars.37

  Spending 6 percent of her income on a single outfit – including a feather for her hairdo – indicates how important self-embellishment was to Mary as a young woman. (In 1776 Mrs. Delany dressed her poppy to the nines.) Young Mary dolled up for socializing, as well as for court levees or assemblies. This meant that she accompanied someone to an assemblage of other aristocrats and waited for King George and Queen Caroline to appear and possibly to speak to her, recognizing her existence. It meant that she stood in their majesties’ presence, never turning her back on the King or Queen. It meant that she curtsied and that she spoke prettily. Do not equate this with the superficial. It meant that her whole life depended on how she looked and what she said. Her recognition might lead somewhere, such as to a court appointment, or to Lord Baltimore, who certainly attended court, or it might lead only to compliments. Compliments aren’t superficial, either. They are the foundation of recognition of who we are in life.

  Papaver somniferum, detail (illustration credit 6.1)

  Mary Pendarves had been hidden at Roscrow in Cornwall, but now she was back. When she dressed up for Queen Caroline’s birthday on March 4, 1729, she borrowed her friend “Lady Sunderland’s jewels, and made a tearing show.”38 There was a huge crowd, and her cousin, Lady Carteret, literally pushed her toward the Queen, who “thanked her for bringing me forward, and she told me she was obliged to me for my pretty clothes, and admired my Lady Carteret’s extremely; she told the Queen that they were my fancy, and that I drew the pattern. Her Majesty said she had heard that I could draw very well (I can’t think who could tell her such a story).” Here’s a slip of evidence with its self-deprecating parenthetical modesty that she was designing her own clothes and those of friends and family by the time she was in her late twenties.

  She spent the almost two decades from 1724 to 1743 going to court, seeing and being seen. Toward the end of these twenty years, she designed her own court dress. Like the poppy, the dress she designed is theatrical – full of stagy couture drama. The petticoat is black – not occasioned by mourning but by choice – and it is embroidered with botanically accurate English garden flowers. One look at even a fragment of this dress (it survives only in fragments) convinces you that couture presages the mosaicks. Those flowers share both the accuracy and the fantasy of her cut-paper works decades later. The black background, suggestive of melancholy, allows her Lily of the Valley, her Harebell, her Geranium, her Rose, and yes, even her embroidered Poppy to step forth. She designed the dress and she orchestrated its embroidery, ordering it professionally sewn.39 Some amazingly preserved fragments show that the brilliantly colored blossoms were slightly stuffed to lift them off the surface of the fabric. Imagine the gown in candlelight, where the black background would recede and the flowers would glow.

  A few months before her outburst to Aunt Stanley against matrimony, Mary went with Lady Sunderland “to the Princess Royal’s, where there was a vast crowd of people.”40 There she heard a story about rich Lord Thanet, who died leaving his daughter two thousand pounds, as long as she didn’t marry the man she loved. Just hearing of this will provoked Mary, who wrote Anne, “[W]ho can judge of our happiness but ourselves, and if one thousand pound a year and a great deal of love will content me, better than ten thousand with indifference.… I have no notion of love and a knapsack, but I cannot think riches the only thing that ought to be considered in matrimony.”41

  By 1729 Mary had taken a place of her own, living apart from her aunt and uncle. She managed to make her independence a priority and gracefully extricated herself from their household. She accomplished this by accepting long-distance invitations and spending “the greatest part of the summer and the winter following” out of town. “Towards the next spring I came to town and settled in a house by myself”42 in Pall Mall. For the first time in her life, she had a room of her own. Immediately she invited her mild-mannered younger sister to stay. On March 13, 1729, she offered Anne “half a maid, half a room, half a bed, and half a French roll for breakfast.”43

  With this invitation, though, came a caveat about the health of their Aunt and Uncle Stanley. “All Sunday,” Mary explained about their aunt, “she complained extremely of her head, and was very hot, her spirits very much upon the flutter, and for four-and-twenty hours she neither slept nor lay in a posture for a minute together.… I was very much frightened, and begged her to send for a doctor; but she would not bear the thoughts of it till Sir John came.… When he came to town I thought him almost as ill as my aunt.”44 Her ailment (never diagnosed) first flared, then sputtered. After a terrible weekend, she appeared to be all right again. But the sense of her aging, of waning, was powerfully apparent to Mary, who spent a great deal of time with her aunt and uncle, though this did not impede her going to the theatre, to concerts, to visit friends, or to her paying court.

  Peppered among
the comings and goings in her letters are the names “Guyamore” and the “American Prince,” her pseudonyms for Lord Baltimore. She encountered him at court in November 1728, “the only bright thing in the circle,”45 and again in February 1729. He visited her twice. The following December she met him once more at court, and after he asked about her sister, they talked about the time when he was shipwrecked and people concluded he was dead. He demanded to know if she “had once thought of him or was sorry when I heard he was cast away?” She in turn asked him if he thought she was so cold as not to be sorry “for so unfortunate an accident to an acquaintance. ‘That common compassion’ (says he in a tiff) would give me but little satisfaction.’ ”46 It’s a zigzag of an exchange as she records it. He leaned toward her and whispered to her, making her pleased – and uncomfortable.

  All this she confessed to Anne. Anne of the long, straight nose and level gaze, Anne the confessor and sounding board who, her older sister presumed, didn’t really have a life, living in the country with Mama. “I expect an answer to every paragraph. I believe this is the fourth letter you have to answer,”47 Mary once wrote with the imperiousness of need, mirroring a bit of Baltimore’s implacability. She understood the necessity – the value – of expressing distress, both for the one who is sorting out her conscience and for the patient soul who hears it. “It is a mistaken notion that speaking to a friend of the affliction they are under adds to their pain – far from it: ’tis a comfort, for when the mind is possessed of any particular object, it is the greatest satisfaction to talk it over.”48 Mary doesn’t stint on saying what it is that Baltimore is causing her: pain.

  Yet the Baron’s money and position kept exerting their influence, and Mary continued to be drawn to him. She literally drew him, too: his portrait, that is, and sent the sketch, which has not been preserved, to Anne, writing in a juicy letter of March 13, 1729, about both this sketch and one of Henry Hervey, “I am glad my drawing pleases you. I endeavoured to keep up to the originals, but fear I have done them an injury.… Regular features may easily be expressed, but there is a certain agreeable air that no limner can hit off, where there is a great deal of variety it will pose the most skillful to describe.”49

  To draw someone is to employ the sense of touch at an intimate distance, moving an extension of one’s fingers, the pencil or pen, to touch the face that one observes. “Limning” means drawing in miniature, a word that has been sidelined, as art historian Kim Sloan reminds us, because miniatures are often undervalued.50 Mary could not resist drawing her American Prince, as she called him with a mix of irony and appreciation.

  She understood that she might shipwreck on the shoals of marriage because of her anxiety about financial security, and she needed to figure out how she felt about him. In the absence of a psychotherapist, one way to accomplish that was to write to her sister. These letters, which always lament Anne’s absence, were possibly better therapy than in-person conversation. Letters required Mary to formulate her dilemma, to shape her stories, to do what all personal writers do: become a sympathetic witness to the character of herself as she drew it in words on the page. As a result, she acknowledged the remedy her pain required: an opiate. A few years earlier she was reading the work of French essayist Charles de Saint-Evremond, so taken with what he said about friendship (and for Mary that very much included sisterhood and family) that she described it in detail. “Without the communication of a real friend, sorrow would sink one to the lowest ebb … the compassion a friend affords one … is like opiate to one in violent racking pain.”51 Friendship doesn’t reduce pain, Mary mused, but it can numb it.

  In April 1729 Aunt Stanley “continue[d] very weak and low,” but on February 7, 1730, even though Mary “grieved at the painful condition she lies in,” Aunt Stanley convinced herself that she felt much better, and it was time to take in the opera with her niece.52 Mary escorted her aunt to the opera, only to find Lord Baltimore sitting in the seat behind them, accusing Mary in the intermission of being the cause of all his erratic behavior. He insisted that she “was to answer for all his flights and extravagance. I told him it was so large a charge, that I should be sorry to have it placed to my account.”53

  Over the weekend Aunt Stanley relapsed.

  The following Monday, Baltimore came to see Mary at her own house on Pall Mall. Unlike his initial visit to her, supervised by eagle-eyed Aunt Stanley, now they were alone. She’d never seen him looking better. He asked if she didn’t think that “they were miserable people that were strangers to love” and told her that he dreaded her answer. She said, “I endeavoured to make my life easy by living according to reason.”

  “My opinion of love,” she then quoted herself to Anne, “was that it either made people very miserable or very happy.”

  “He said it ‘made him miserable.’ ”

  “ ‘That, I suppose, my Lord,’ ” she went on to say, “ ‘proceeds from yourself: perhaps you place it on a wrong foundation.’ He looked confounded,” and changed the subject. No kiss? No touch? No disordered dress or wrenching away from an embrace? Not in the letters Anne saved, though we don’t know what she burned, and not in the letters Lady Llanover edited, though she most certainly did not put in every word or every letter. Not in the surviving letters in public collections, such as the ones you might read at a blond library table surrounded by high school kids doing their homework at the public library in Newport, Wales.

  While swimming in the sea of Mary’s handwriting, I realized that even though the Newport Library has volumes of her epistles, all attached by library tape into neat leather-bound albums, many of the letters are missing, and the memoir isn’t there at all. Yet even among the jostling of high schoolers, the hard chair, the stale air, and the hunger triggered by the smell of a surreptitious cinnamon bun some nearby patron was sneaking, I feel I can trust myself to have woken up for a hint of a sex scene between Mary and Charles. But, no. He “went away immediately after.”

  { BUDDING FORTH }

  Often in her paper mosaicks, just when you think it would be easy for Mrs. Delany to cut more pieces of paper, she simplifies and does less. The bud of the Papaver somniferum is a perfect example, made of only two pieces. The stem and main almond shape of the bud are cut from a lime-green paper. She painted a line to give the impression of the parts of the bud as it begins to open. Then she placed a sliver of beige paper on the right side of the bud for sculptural weight and depth. Her eye both simplified and tried to represent the complexity of the bud. There is an aspect of this mosaick that is similar to the drawings Mrs. D. made to serve as patterns for embroidering the flowers on her court dress.54 Botany, the feel for the flesh of the flower, and aesthetic positioning are so intertwined they are like the double helix of DNA.

  This steadiness of observation, the ability to focus – did she cultivate it, or was it simply always there? If the flowers have the feel of a memoir, do they relate to how she remembered things? I decided to test her process of remembering, to check how accurate she was in the recollection of her own experiences. It’s possible because we have the letters she wrote at the time of the earlier events in her life as well as the partial memoir she wrote some eleven or so years after. She herself didn’t have the letters to refer to – she thought they were destroyed – and she had no way to check herself against what she had said earlier. One can discover the unfolding of Mary’s feelings toward Baltimore in the letters she wrote to Anne at the age of twenty-nine, just as the romantic sparring was happening, and also the aborting romance retrospectively in the memoir she began when she was forty.

  Her memory has the same unerring ease of exactitude as her hand. Over a decade later she reconstructs her confusion nearly exactly, re-entering it with the emotional flexibility of someone who can dissolve herself again in old feelings. With this access to a central core of experience, she is the living answer to skeptics who buttonhole memoirists and insist they prove how they can repeat whole conversations recollected after many years. The narra
tive is more settled in her memoir, but it has the same snap as the red poppy making its entrance on the black stage – well, page. The memoir, with its narrative nips and tucks, fits the dress on the diva, detailing it, trueing it, adding color and shadow, but faithfully follows the contour of that core.

  At the opera Baltimore “told me he wondered where I had buried myself” and that since his opportunities were so few he could no longer help declaring that he “had been in love with me for five years,” during which time I had kept him in such awe that he had not had courage to make a declaration of his love to me. I was in such confusion I knew not what I saw or heard for some time.… I softly begged he would not interrupt my attention to the opera.… He then asked “if I should be at home the next day?” I said, “I should.”

  I cannot say I listened much to the music.… The next day he came punctually, very much dressed and in good spirits.

  They chit-chatted, and finally he got down to it.

  At last he said he was determined never to marry, unless he was well assured of the affection of the person he married. My reply was, can you have a stronger proof (if the person is at her own disposal) than her consenting to marry you? He replied that was not sufficient. I said he was unreasonable, upon which he started up and said, “I find, madam, this is a point in which we shall never agree.” He looked piqued and angry, made a low bow and went away immediately, and left me in such confusion that I could hardly recollect what had past, nor can I to this hour, – but from that time till he was married we never met.55

  It is almost as if they had a scuffle. She’s confused, he’s confusing. What we’d say now is that he jerked her around. (And that’s what Lady Llanover says, more formally, in a footnote to this story in the edited letters.) But Mary sent Baltimore her share of mixed signals as well. He approached and she withdrew and she approached and he withdrew. Each of their unsatisfactory but fiery and enticing encounters had a similar pattern. Lady Llanover felt it came down to money; Mary just didn’t have the dowry for the dashing confuser Lord B. But Mary seems never to have sent him a wholeheartedly affirming signal. They sparred. They had an operetta, full of bumps on the head for Lord Baltimore and not one but two physical illnesses for Mary, the second one quite serious.