Karen Essex

by Karen Essex

  Around this time I began to get out of bed at night and wander in my sleep. My parents found me in several different places—sitting in the garden, walking toward the river, or once, dancing under the moonlight and singing a song I had learned at church. My father, weary of my nocturnal adventures, took me by the shoulders and hair and dragged me inside and up the stairs. He threw me back onto my bed, locking the door behind him. I heard him yelling at my mother, using words about me that hurt my ears, so I put a pillow over my head and hummed to myself until they stopped and I could fall back asleep.

  I learned to be very cautious in front of my parents, but one time I slipped and asked my father to be quiet because the angels were talking and I wanted to hear them. Over my mother’s protests, my father locked me in my room without supper. My mother, despite her occasional feeble attempts to defend me, began to shun me for her own reasons. I often heard her private thoughts, but when I questioned her about them, she got very cross with me. She made the mistake of telling my father that I was a mind reader, and he demanded to know what evil entity was telling me what goes on in other people’s minds. When I could not answer his question, he gave me a spanking.

  After my father drowned in an accident, my mother packed a small black valise with my belongings and took me by train, ferry, and another train to Miss Hadley’s School for Young Ladies of Accomplishment in London. I was seven years old. I was to be grateful because it was not a boarding school for bad girls, which is what I deserved, and it was not an asylum for the insane, which is where my father would have sent me—had he lived, she emphasized—and it was not a workhouse for girls whose families no longer could feed them but a place where girls were sent to learn to become young ladies. I was fortunate, she said, because we had suddenly come into some money for this, provided by my mother’s late grandfather.

  “You are just like your grandmother,” my mother had said, “just the same sort of troubled creature. When she got older, she developed loose morals. She did not control herself or her urges. Do you want people to say that about you?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but I shook my head violently so that my mother would know I did not intend to be that sort of person.

  “And she came to a very bad end, so you must learn to control yourself and mind your behavior. If you learn to be good, then perhaps you will be allowed to come home.”

  And I was good. I became Miss Hadley’s star pupil and pet. “I have never seen a girl with such a lovely complexion and compelling green eyes,” she told my mother the day I arrived. I could tell that she was taken with me, and I foresaw that I could use that to my advantage. I listened attentively to whatever she had to say, both in the classroom and without. I assimilated her lessons with fervor unequaled by any other girl in the school. On the day of graduation, she said, “I have taught hundreds of girls, Wilhelmina, but none have I regarded as a daughter until I met you.”

  During my years as a student, my mother died. After I finished my education, Miss Hadley employed me to teach reading, etiquette, and decorum to girls between the ages of seven and seventeen.

  Despite my rigidly conventional exterior, I knew that I was unusual. I knew that there was something wild and terrible and frightening inside me, something that I must continue to suppress at all costs. Headmistress did not know what I had been like as a child before I was sent away. She knew only the sweet and docile girl I had trained myself to be. I knew the truth. I knew that I was different from other girls, and I knew that the difference was not a good one.

  I tried to rest before rising for the day, but I was terrified that I would fall asleep and once again hear the call of that voice. I got out of bed, washed, and dressed in the lace-collared brown linen uniform of the teachers. Our school motto was “Gentility Above All,” and Headmistress insisted on a genteel familial atmosphere in which a girl’s feminine and domestic attributes might be cultivated. Thus all teachers were addressed as “aunt,” and the girls addressed me as Aunt Mina.

  After last evening’s lurid incident, the irony that most of this day was to be devoted to the study of etiquette and decorum was not lost on me. A full day was devoted to these subjects, while the other days of the week were divided into the study of drawing, simple mathematics, dancing, French, reading, and religion and morals. Because Headmistress considered herself an enlightened woman, she treated the pupils to occasional lectures by visiting scholars in the fields of history, geography, and science. The school had a splendid reputation, though it was criticized by suffragettes and lady reformers who, along with the right to vote, also campaigned for girls to be taught the same academic subjects, and with the same intensity, as boys.

  Miss Hadley’s School was home and family to me, and I did not receive criticism of it very well. I knew that it was my education in the feminine arts that had enabled me to attract my fiancé, a solicitor of great promise. His affections would have been unavailable to an Irish-born orphan with no family to protect me or vouch for me had I not learned to assimilate the qualities of a lady. Besides, it was common knowledge that too much education hampered girls in the marriage market. I was a realist. I knew that marriage to a man like Jonathan Harker, not voting in an election or reading Greek, would secure my life and improve my station. Moreover, as one who had little recollection of living in a family, I relished the domestic virtues I had learned at school, and I was eager to have a home and family of my own. Sometimes when teaching, I felt like a play actress, and I could not wait to be cast as mistress of a real house.

  This morning I felt like even more of an imposter as I faced my young and innocent students, who looked like little angels, dressed in their crisp white pinafores with fluffy sleeves gathered at the shoulders. What would they think if they had seen me just hours before struggling beneath my attacker?

  We began as we did every morning with the students wearing boards across their backs, their arms looped through straps at the shoulders to perfect their posture. All the girls complained about this until I asked them to observe my own erect carriage, and how it enhanced both my figure and ladylike demeanor. Some of the girls immediately took to the lesson, intent upon developing a sense of graciousness, while others fidgeted, complained, and fought against their harnesses.

  “It is no use resisting the board, young ladies, for the board will always win. Aunt Mina has yet to meet the girl who could crack the plank with her shoulders,” I said, eliciting giggles from the cooperative girls and sneers from the few angry ones.

  “How ever does one get accustomed to being bridled like a horse, Aunt Mina?” A twelve-year-old looked at me with defiant eyes.

  I did not answer her, and she thought that she had won a small victory over me. But my silence owed to a vision that came to me as I looked past her challenging face. I saw myself at seven years old, as Headmistress threaded my arms through rope loops. I remembered feeling humiliated, as if I were being put into the stocks. The board had jerked my shoulders back, and I hated the feeling of being harnessed and tamed. My temper rose, and the wild creature inside me wanted to run backward and crash myself into a wall to break the wood. I was about to try that very thing when I saw a man standing in the back of the room. He was tall and beautiful, with the long hair of a French dandy and the clothes to match, and he carried a walking stick with the head of a dragon. I remembered thinking that I knew him and that I was happy to see him. He smiled at me, slowly shaking one long, elegant finger at me. That calmed my spirits and inclined me to obey Headmistress so that she would let me speak with my visitor after the lesson.

  “Be a good girl,” he mouthed with his full and preternaturally red lips. I heard the whisper of his words, but no one else in the room acknowledged him. I relaxed, letting the yoke settle across my back, and I began to walk around the room, following the other girls. I wanted him to see how proud and ladylike I could be if I tried. But as soon as I turned the corner to pass him, I looked up and he was gone.

  I had buried that
memory for many years and now it came rushing back to me. Was it the same man, or had I imagined it? Had I imagined them both? Were the episodes that had troubled my childhood coming back to haunt me again? I could not afford this to happen, not now, when I was about to embark on a new life with Jonathan.

  The girl who had asked the question was looking at me, waiting for an answer. It took me a few moments to collect myself before I could reply with the stock reply we gave to troublesome girls. “Girls sent home from boarding school are forever marked and usually end up spinsters,” I said. “Let that be your incentive to cooperate with the lessons.” The words sounded hollow and forced, but perhaps this girl would find, as I had, that once she succumbed to docility, it would suit her. She sulked—they all did, at least for a time—but then went through her paces around the room without further complaint; and for the remainder of the lesson, the ghosts of my past stayed safely tucked away.

  Relieved, I was better able to concentrate during the lesson in elocution, a subject that I was especially suited to teach. The school was known throughout England for eradicating any evidence of a country accent, and Headmistress admitted that I, with my thick Irish brogue, had been one of her most challenging cases. “Nothing is more detrimental to one’s marriage prospects than speech that gives away provincial origins,” she would say to parents as she recruited their daughters. “It is a shame and a waste that a father spend a fortune for his daughter’s dresses for the Season, but not a sou on polishing what comes out of her mouth.”

  With her diligent efforts, and nary a slap or a spanking that other girls had received, a soft, feminine, lilting voice eventually replaced the accent of my childhood. Headmistress often called me forth as an example to other girls, or to parents considering placing their daughters in the school. “Wilhelmina came to us sounding like a chambermaid and now has the voice of an English angel,” she would say with pride. And then I would recite some lines of poetry and curtsy, and be rewarded with polite applause and gratuitous smiles.

  After the elocution lesson, which passed without incident, we segued to the art of letter writing, so crucial to maintaining one’s social connections and to running a household. That a lady must be eloquent both in speech and on the page was another of the school’s tenets.

  “Letters to tradesmen and other subordinates must be written strictly in the third person to maintain the proper distance between servant and mistress.” I said. “However, one must not forget to be cordial at all times. When corresponding on a social basis, remember that there is a proper way to accept an invitation and a proper way to decline it. Never, never must a lady be condescending in rejecting an invitation, even when good taste prevents her from accepting it.”

  I set them to writing notes to imaginary staff, friends, relatives, and neighbors while I forced myself to remain awake until the teatime lesson, where we practiced how to pour tea, how to lift a teacup without rattling it (for no woman should rattle a man’s nerves), how to lower oneself into a chair (where the lessons of the boards became most apparent), and how to lower eyes slowly and gracefully when speaking to a gentleman, rather than dart them away like some embarrassed servant girl.

  “There is a precise moment to dilute the tea with boiling water, young ladies, and one should not be so distracted by idle parlor chatter as to miss it.”

  These banal lessons in decorum, repeated hundreds of times over the years, soothed me. I had not succumbed to this resurgence of what I thought of as my lower nature after all. I was still Aunt Mina Murray, who could preside over a roomful of girls, teaching them the ways of the drawing room that would net them the inevitable prize of a solid marriage.

  At five o’clock in the afternoon, the day students went home, and the boarders and teachers took a light meal together at six. I was relieved when Jonathan sent a note of apology explaining that unforeseen business with a new client would keep him occupied until the next week’s end. I finished my supper quickly, having a difficult time holding my eyes open, and fled to my room at the soonest possible moment that would not arouse suspicion.

  To prevent another incident like the one the night before, I barricaded myself in my room by pushing a small chest in front of the door. I opened the drawer where I had thrown my nightdress, which was still damp, a fresh reminder of that horrible event. I rolled it up and put it back, hoping that I could wash out the grass stains before I had to explain them to the laundress or, worse yet, to Headmistress.

  2 July 1890

  Meanwhile, quotidian life went on. In addition to my teaching duties, I sometimes helped my old school chum Kate Reed, now a lady journalist, organize her notes and research. Kate’s parents had sent their headstrong fifteen-year-old daughter to Miss Hadley’s to polish her for the matrimonial market, but their efforts had an adverse effect, creating an even more insubordinate girl. After graduation, while her parents thought she was devoting herself to charity work, Kate apprenticed herself to Jacob Henry, a journalist she had met while surreptitiously attending a meeting of the Fabian Society. She followed him around for the better part of a year, organizing his notes and proofreading his stories.

  Eventually he began to share authorship with her, and now she wrote stories both with him and on her own. She and Jacob were true comrades, she explained, meeting in the evenings to read the next day’s papers fresh off the presses, often “over a smoke and a beer.” Kate loved nothing more than to shock me, the teacher of etiquette and decorum, with her provocative new ways. She had tried once to include me in one of these evenings after she and Jacob had filed a lengthy story on crime against women. But I did not like Jacob’s looks, what with his fingers stained with tobacco and ink, his chronically unshaven face, and his eyes that roamed over a woman’s body without an ounce of respect.

  I had been studying stenography and other office skills so that I might be useful to Jonathan in his law profession once we were married, and I had become fiendishly fast both at writing in shorthand and on the typewriter. With these skills, I had begun to help Kate, just as she had helped Jacob. A few days before the riverbank incident, I had gone with her to investigate some cheap tenements slapped up in the narrow, grimy streets of Bethnal Green and Whitechapel to accommodate factory workers.

  Together we went into rooms of filth and misery, with no running water, where mothers and fathers were packed with eight and ten children in one room. Laundry, washed in the sewage-laden water of the Thames, hung everywhere, and stagnant privies sat in the yards. I have always been gifted, or cursed, with a keen olfactory sense, and I thought I would faint in the summer’s miasma of human waste, diapers, cheap ham-bone stew, and perspiration. The wives we met were workers themselves—knitters, lace makers, seamstresses, or laundresses—still young but wrinkled and hardened, with crippled fingers like crabs’ legs and callused skin. The women complained that no matter how hard they and their husbands worked, it was near impossible to meet the exorbitant rents.

  Afterward, Kate worked our way into the landlords’ fine offices using the feminine charms learned at Miss Hadley’s. Eventually, however, her agenda emerged. “How do you expect these people to sustain their families if the rent consumes ninety percent of their salaries? You are enslaving them with low wages and high rents. Have you no sense of Christian charity?”

  We had left the interview in a cloud of Kate’s indignation, but I was beaming. “You gave those men a verbal lashing,” I said. “I am proud of you.”

  Kate’s eyes sparkled. “I love being at the center of things, not just observing on the periphery. I suspect that you love it too, though you will never admit it.” Always dramatic, Kate selected the occasional word to single out for emphasis.

  “Watching you work is like attending the theater,” I said. “I observe, but I do not see the need to participate.” And then I wondered if what I said was true.

  Today, I walked through heavy summer rain to Kate’s rooms off Fleet Street, passing newsboys hawking evening editions of the papers, thei
r enthusiasm undiminished by the weather, and other street vendors selling their goods. She lived, to her parents’ dismay, on the third floor of an eighteenth-century building that hadn’t been renovated in fifty years and thus needed repairs. Her door was open, spilling soft yellow gaslight into the hallway, and I poked my head in. Sprigs of her dark blond hair escaped the haphazard bun at the nape of her neck, kept in place with a pencil. She held a burning matchstick in her bony fingers with which she had just lit a cigarette. She blew out the flame and waved the matchstick at me as if it were a magic wand, a big smile slashing her freckled face.

  She hugged me with her long arms so that I could feel her wide shoulders begin to wrap round me. Tall and wiry, Kate had sharp-cut cheekbones and even sharper blue eyes. She was without a corset today, in keeping with her feminist principles.

  “My editor is allowing me a full three thousand words for an article on the state of girls’ education in Britain, the longest story of my career. Only you, Mina, have the organizational skills to help me sort through all this data,” she said, gesturing to the pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers scattered about the room.