by Jane Jakeman
Edmund Crawshay had seemed a real catch for the landlord’s daughter, so I understand. At that time, things at Crawshay’s had not declined so badly, and the farm was one of the biggest in the district. Edmund was the old man’s only child, and the inheritance would fall to him in due course.
Marie pictured herself in charge of all her domain, the mistress of a prosperous farmhouse, with servants for the rough work. After the old man died, the farm could easily be brought up again, by dint of good management.
Edmund was in the full flush of his good looks. He had that fair-haired handsomeness often found in the English countryside, blond locks and corkscrews of hair, an open, ruddy face, and an easy charm of manner that must have been entirely natural to him, for he certainly did not learn it from his father, and his mother had been long dead.
I have to picture him in their courting days, as Marie described him to me, for when I came to meet him first, he had already declined: his pink cheeks were red-veined pads of flesh, his hair was usually darkened with grease or perspiration, and he was generally showing signs of the decline into sottishness that was overwhelming him: he would go the same way as his father, I thought often and enough. Nevertheless, as I have said, when he went courting Marie, he must have been the catch of the neighbourhood, and a most beauteous young man.
But above all, I think, she saw that he was pliable. She did not, of course, express it quite like this in her talks with me, but I understood her to have perceived that particular weakness in Edmund, with a kind of penetrative shrewdness which she possesses — not intellect, perhaps, but she has a way of grasping certain things about people very quickly. Or rather, she formerly had this ability: she too is now sadly declined. In fact, that handsome young couple who were wed ten years ago has disappeared unrecognisably: both of them, bride and groom, have had their minds destroyed by that wicked old man. Edmund has lost his life, and I almost feel it would be better for Marie if she had perished with him.
But when she met Edmund, she was attracted by his very softness, for she understood that she would have her own way after their marriage. She used some words such as “I knew he would always respect my wishes,” or “He would never have me running about at his beck and call, of that I was certain, before our marriage.” She, by force of personality, would be the dominant partner, and she knew it. Under Marie’s pretty exterior, there were ambitions, you may be sure.
Ambitions that were thwarted by old Crawshay.
In the early days of their marriage, he had not appeared to be an obstacle, for he seemed dreadfully old to her then. With the optimism of youth, callous but innocent, she thought he must die soon, and then her Edmund would come into his own.
But somehow he kept his strength from year to year; it seemed rather to grow, in spite of his drinking bouts, the gross dinners with which he regaled himself, the way in which he would ride through rain and storm for a wager and fall into bed in wet clothes and riding boots. The old man was like a tree; thick-chested, strong-thighed, with black bushes for his eyebrows. His face was weatherbeaten into a kind of leather: he seemed inhuman, indestructible.
And Marie now perceived that Edmund’s weakness was fatal. She could not persuade him to challenge his father over anything. That was something she had not considered — if Edmund was feeble, it was because his father had made him so. He had long ago broken his son and demolished his pride, as he had demolished Edmund’s mother, who had once argued with her husband and found herself bruised and shaking on the stone flags of the farmhouse with blood on her mouth. She had never again attempted to challenge him. It was Edmund’s mother, I believe, who brought the piano, and that pretty parlour chair, those small luxuries, into the harsh old house. What pathetic relics they now seem, reminders of her charms and hopes!
Marie herself had always refused to crawl to her father-in-law, and the old man was induced to treat her with some respect. She said that her father would always have her back if he thought his daughter were misused, and he would not see her mistreated. She threatened Crawshay with reprisals if he should offer her any violence. It is more likely that he was amused by her defiance, than deterred by her threats, for he certainly would not have shrunk from a fight. But he would have other ways of breaking her to his will. I can see him, with those deep-set eyes, the upper lids drooping down, contemplating her, waiting for some chance to master her, some way of gaining absolute dominance over the one being who dared challenge him. It was his way to study his victims: I know, for I was one.
Marie had kept table at home after her mother had died, and was an excellent housekeeper: her desire for gentility made her maintain her domain in good order, and she had learned the art of catering for large country appetites. In the little dining room and the parlour, which Crawshay and Edmund had never used, the tables which had been unpolished since the death of Edmund’s mother now gleamed with beeswax polish. Silver that had lain black and tarnished in cupboards was taken out and brought to a glitter with jeweller’s rouge, ordered expressly from Callerton for Mistress Crawshay. Pantry shelves were filled with preserves and bottled fruit. Linen, old but fine, was shaken out of the presses, and the worn sheets and pillowcases on which the male Crawshays had been content to lie were consigned to make dust sheets and floor cloths.
Crawshay dispensed with the services of the old woman who had kept house for them before Edmund’s marriage. After all, he reasoned, Marie had the services of the girl, Mattie, who came up from the village to help her with the floor-scrubbing and the laundry. What more did she need?
A kind of truce thus prevailed between the two of them, old Crawshay and Marie; each knew the other’s strengths and values, each assessed the battle lines. Edmund was a pawn between them, and one day they would fight for control of him. He was terrified of his father, but passionate for his wife; in bed Marie knew that, as her husband panted and thrust away over her slim body, so her influence was secure.
The birth of her son should have settled the balance decisively in Marie’s favour. She would have the prestige that accrued to the mother of a male heir: she was no longer a young girl whose wishes might be flouted as of no consequence whatever, but a matron.
Yet in this very event that should have seen Marie’s ascendancy, old Crawshay found his leverage to destroy her.
Lord Ambrose, false modesty and simpering hints can have no place in this account. I am simply a gentlewoman, and I reckon it better breeding to be plain about the matters whereof I must now speak than to flutter with genteel embarrasment.
Let me set it down boldly, therefore. Young Edmund’s birth was very difficult. Marie, who is a slender woman, had the narrowest of passages for the birth of a baby that the midwife had ever seen. She was in labour for two whole days; the physician was fetched, and cut her with his instruments, but not enough for the head of the child to come through, and she was dreadfully torn and lacerated when at last young Edmund forced his bawling way into the world.
Afterwards, the pain was excruciating. She lay in bed, scarcely able to move. She had lost a great deal of blood, but the midwife had managed to staunch the bleeding, packing poultices of some herb into her torn flesh. Yet the pains continued.
Edmund was patient at first, but a while later they tried again until at last he moved away, then got up and left their bedroom. So on all following occasions, the experience was repeated, husband and wife despairing separately as her body fought against his demands.
Marie told me that, one night, he did not come to their bedroom at all.
The next day, when she went down in the morning, the Crawshays, father and son, were seated at the dining table. Edmund was nursing his head, and turning his face away from her. She saw that his eyes were bloodshot and fumes of stale wine rose from his body. He scarcely seemed to dare look at her. There was something else mingled with the wine, an odour of some cheap perfume, patchouli or something unfamiliar.
She looked at the old man, and caught him unawares. He was staring at her
with triumph in his eyes.
He knew. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, he knew how things lay between husband and wife. And now Edmund had left her bed and gone whoring — probably his father had encouraged him in it. For she had lost her chief weapon in the warfare for possession of Edmund the pawn. He could get his pleasure elsewhere.
Marie slept alone for the next fortnight, but she did not despair. She was but in retreat, not vanquished — she thought and plotted for her future and that of her child.
She sent a message to the midwife.
“Laudanum,” said the druggist in Callerton, to whom Marie sent me for fresh supplies of the medicine which she had been taking since then. She asked me not to mention my visit to that particular shop to anyone, but said that she had a private need for certain medicaments, and she was so glad now that I had come to Crawshay’s as governess, and would perhaps be able from time to time to help her in little ways.
“Oh, many a gentlewoman takes it in such a case, I assure you,” said the druggist. “It helps with certain — how shall I put it — helps to cope with certain demands that are made on a lady from time to time — demands made by her husband … and it is not in any way injurious — I always recommend it myself in such cases … ”
“It was suggested to Mistress Crawshay, I believe, by old Kezia Hannington, who attended her at the birth of her child … ”
“Oh yes, well, they are giving up their pots and herbs, these old creatures — their country medicines. Laudanum is a real remedy, not some old wives’ tale, I assure you, Miss Anstruther. Oh yes, I know your name — everyone in the district knows the Crawshay household. What a handsome young son Mistress Crawshay has, your charge Master Edmund — my, what a fine fellow he will grow up to be! Thank you, ma’am, I have wrapped it up, you see, and the instructions are on the bottle, but Mistress Crawshay will know what to do. I guarantee, it is an end to … how may I put it with delicacy to an unmarried lady such as yourself … an end to marital … disharmony. And I always have a little supply in stock, so don’t fear to ask me when Mistress Crawshay next requires some.”
The druggist spoke the truth, in his dark little shop. Within the fluted blue bottle Marie found ease and relief from pain, joy and light and the sweetness of most lovely dreams, as she described them.
After a little sip from her first magic bottle of laudanum, Marie was laughing, floating, drowsy. After some experimenting with the delicious juice, the sweet double decoction of opium wrapped up in brandy, she called Edmund into her room one afternoon. She was coy with the details as she retold them to me, but did not spare her hints, for I fancy she might have taken a certain pleasure in the recounting of them.
That afternoon, Edmund found his wife lying in their great oak bed, and she was laughing as she sat up to greet him, naked under the covers. Her eyes were unafraid of pain and she reached out to him in the old way, the way she had before Edmund was born and all the difficulties had started.
For a few moments, it seemed to Marie that Edmund hesitated. Perhaps he feared that this was all on the surface, that she would not really have become her old self again, that there would be the shrinking and weeping as before. But he climbed into bed beside her, and mounted on top of her, and there was the same joyous old way that he remembered, intimate with relief at having got his wife back.
Over the next few weeks, their life seemed to have resumed its old patterns, except that her appetite appeared to have vanished. As I observed when I came to stay at the farm, she picked at her food and grew hollow under the eyes. Sometimes she broke out into clammy sweats, and sometimes she wept for no reason at all. But the demon between her legs that had barred her husband’s way, that had vanished — there was no doubt about it.
And old Crawshay, I believe, old Crawshay saw the subtle changes in manner between the two, the way in which Edmund did not fear to give his wife a small caress in public, the closeness with which she leant against him as they mounted the stairs, and knew that in the battle for control of Edmund, Marie had regained her weapons.
CHAPTER 12
This was what I, Elisabeth Anstruther, learnt from Marie, at first partly from seeing her in the privacy of her chamber, partly from what she let fall by chance, and then, later, as she grew more desperate, what she told me outright as she begged me to get her supplies of the drug. In fact, it was for laudanum that she had sent me to Callerton on that very morning of the murders, and as I drove back in the pony-cart I had the little bottle safely tucked away in my pocket. I forgot all in the confusion of finding the bodies and it was not till Marie begged me for it after you had left that l remembered to hand it over to her.
But I must tell you how I came to be in the role of confidante to the lonely mistress of an isolated farmhouse. And will have to trust you with my history, of which nothing is known by any, save for the little that old Crawshay had gathered in the short time that I was under his roof.
I am from a very respectable family indeed, I assure your lordship, a family who would doubtless be appalled if they should discover anything of the events that have recently happened to me, and I earnestly beg that you will keep silent as to my personal history.
The Anstruthers are far too upright to be mixed up in the doings of the aristocracy, Lord Ambrose. They regard your class, the aristocrats and great land-owners, as licentious and dissipated wretches who know nothing of countinghouses, investments and the like. The Anstruthers are the kind of solid bourgeois family that positively abhors any kind of “showiness.” They live in terror of flashiness, debts, gambling and all the other commonplaces of upper-class society.
In the world in which they move, solidity and stability are the chief virtues. Their wealth is solid. And it comes from one of the very few respectable aspects of trade. For some reason, the provision of drink has always been regarded as a gentlemanly occupation in England, free from the stigma associated with iron foundries or cotton mills. The great brewers and vintners have always had a respectable place in English society, and my family is from what may be regarded as the upper echelons, the cream, if one may so put it, of that trade.
The Anstruthers were wine-importers, and as such were among the untitled nobility of the West of England. They needed no further qualifications for this position than their old-established port and sherry business, where men wearing discreet coats of dark broadcloth sipped from little sample glasses in rooms panelled with fine wood.
The family home was over our business, in one of those tall houses in Bristol where the top floors received generous daylight through Georgian windows that reached practically from floor to ceiling, while the sounds of the harbour, the shouts of sailors and the bustle of loading and unloading, drifted up from the port.
It was my father who formed a connection with the French wine trade. The family fortunes had been founded a century before, importing port wine, so they had connections with Portugal and maintained a representative in Lisbon, but French wines had never formed much of the business of the Anstruthers. By special requests, for favoured customers, they would occasionally import fine cognacs or champagnes through agents in Paris, but they preferred to concentrate on the business they knew. “A cobbler should stick to his last” was a typical Anstruther maxim.
My father was an ambitious young man, determined on expanding the business. The Napoleonic Wars had prevented regular imports from Spain and Portugal for some time, but France was beginning to recover from the effects of war, peace having been but recently established. In most parts of France, in spite of the terrible strife the country had endured, the grapes were still somehow gathered and the vintage still trodden, the great wines famed throughout Europe still produced. And, word came to the Anstruthers, the great cellars lay mostly untouched, although many chateaux might have been burnt down over the heads of their owners. Beneath them, locked behind iron grilles deep in the musty, cobwebby vaults, the wine had slumbered as battle and famine raged above, as revolution came and went, as the owners of the vineyards
lost their heads on the guillotine and the starving peasants raided the fields for corn and potatoes.
There came a time when it seemed safe for an Englishman to travel discreetly in France once again, at least on such peaceable errands as the buying of merchandise. My father set out and here began a love story.
My father fell in love with the countryside of Northern France, with its moist grey-blue skies so like those of home, and its shiny countryside, bright green, dotted with brilliant red fruit and black and white cows. And little glasses of a thousand golden fluids.
On his very first visit, Henry found a cellar, which he bought from a widow living alone in the great château above it. She was more than willing to sell. Her husband and her two sons had frozen to death somewhere in a blizzard on Napoleon’s Russian campaign. She had no heart to remain in the lifeless château, which had been legally returned to her family with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France.
The contents of that cellar retailed at a handsome profit in Bristol, and upon it my father built the fortunes of his family, for he now felt well set up enough to marry my mother, the daughter of a wine merchant. She came from a solid and well-respected family similar to my father’s own relatives, and with the marriage there disappeared, I believe, the last trace of romance or rebellion which my father had possessed. Perhaps I have inherited some of that venturesome spirit that motivated him as a young man.
The young couple were installed, soon after the marriage, in one of the fashionable Bristol houses which overlooked the Downs, in an airy and delightful part of town. They duly proceeded to produce offspring — they “blended,” as my paternal grandfather rather tastelessly joked at the christening of their first child.