“How can you begin to change rumors that have been put about as truth for over 300 years? That's a long time, and a lot can be said in it. But in terms of literary criticism, what is worse is how little has been said about Aphra Behn in that time. Who in the twenty-first century knows anything about the incomparable Astrea, one of the giants of wit and sense, as Daniel Defoe called her? A few scattered literary historians, a few more scattered feminists, a few scholars specializing in seventeenth century literature. 'Here today, gone tomorrow' is on every tongue, but the author of the lines is nearly unknown, proving the truth of her words.”
Billie stepped back to allow Aileen to present the remainder of their hastily written paper. As Aileen launched into what was known of Behn's family background, weaving it with passages from her paper on Kent in the Interregnum, Billie examined the audience again. In the front row, Fogerty was in one of his states: squirming in his seat, leaning back and clearing his throat, wiggling his bushy eyebrows. Only two days ago (in her own time, that is), Billie would have been intimidated by the professor's strange mannerisms. Now she felt more like laughing.
The accusing face next to Fogerty did not make her feel like laughing, however. Billie felt a vague sense of guilt about her revenge on Richard; at the same time, he was so far away from her now, farther than he would ever be able to understand. That stupid letter in her pocket was closer, the letter that would never be available to posterity if she didn't return it.
“Thank you,” Aileen said, concluding the lecture. Two simple words, but the response was enormous. The applause wasn't coming from the men in the front row; it was coming from the women filling the lecture hall, the incorrigible feminists overrunning the convention, out to rehabilitate Aphra. Billie grinned.
The applause took Fogerty by surprise. Billie saw him turn around in his seat as he clapped his hands politely. When the applause showed no signs of abating, Billie had the impression that he actually started clapping more.
Maybe it was just wishful thinking.
The first person to ask a question was Richard. “The evidence you present on Behn's background is interesting, but I don't see the point. This doesn't prove anything we didn't already know, such as her middle-class background. And you don't address the question of her sources for her descriptions of Surinam at all.”
“It certainly does prove something,” Aileen asserted, shaking her head of frizzy red hair. “Behn was of genteel stock on her mother's side, if not on her father's. It was her claim to being 'of a good family' while the Countess of Winchilsea wrote of her father being a barber that made the critics begin to doubt the little biographical information we have on her in the first place.” Aileen turned to Billie. “Would you like to take the Surinam question?”
Billie nodded and stepped to the mike, looking at Richard steadily. “It is quite feasible that Behn used a reference source on Surinam while she was writing Oroonoko — she hadn't been there for over twenty years, after all. Besides, several critics have pointed out that some of the things she describes are not in the Warren book on Surinam, the book Bernbaum claims is her source, and her knowledge of the residents would have been difficult to come by for someone who had not lived there herself. Most critics now accept that she was in Surinam, even if some are a bit behind on their research.” A spurt of laughter erupted from the crowd.
After the discussion session was over, there was another deafening round of applause, and Billie and Aileen were swamped with well-wishers — congratulating them, complaining about the tenor of the other papers, and proposing a beer in a pub nearby. Billie heard Aileen accepting for both of them and broke in. “Well, I don't know. I have to get back to the exhibit.”
“If it can't wait, you can join us later,” Aileen suggested.
“Yeah, maybe I'll do that,” Billie said, making her escape. But what was she going do when she got to the exhibit? It was only for one more day; she couldn't keep jumping back and forth between centuries forever. And if the mirror was stashed away in the cellar of the Victoria and Albert, the time travel might not even work anymore; geographical proximity could be key. Was it really that important for her to return the letter? The important things about Aphra's biography could be proved without it — what did it matter if she was a lord's by-blow? It was the fiction and the plays she'd written that were important, the way she had lived her life, refusing to be kept down by an era that left women few choices besides wife or whore.
Then there was Ravenscroft — the man she couldn't understand, the man who tempted her beyond reason.
As Billie headed for the doors of the lecture hall, she noticed Fogerty waiting there. Richard was nowhere in sight.
“That was an interesting presentation you gave with Professor McCarthy,” Fogerty said in his intentionally generous tone of voice. “I've been wanting to talk with you, Miss Armstrong. Do you have some time?”
“I need to get over to the exhibit,” Billie said.
“Would you mind if I walk you there?” It wasn't a request, it was an order, but for Fogerty it was gracious behavior.
“Certainly not,” Billie said, although she would have preferred being alone.
“We have obtained some additional funds for the graduate department,” Fogerty began, and Billie's discomfort changed to shock. Any mention of additional funds usual meant they would be shared. “I thought perhaps you might be interested in an assistantship,” the professor announced, confirming Billie's hunch.
“Oh,” she said. “That's quite an honor, Professor Fogerty.” Before her trip to the past, Billie would have jumped at the opportunity, but now all her previous plans and goals were up for grabs. Perhaps she would write a biography of Aphra. But there were several biographies of Aphra out already, and what good would a biography do? Maybe she should write a novel. But whatever she decided, Fogerty would have no place in her future, of that she was certain.
“Ah, there is your friend Richard,” Fogerty said, and Billie turned, her stomach churning. The simple walk down the hall was starting to resemble an obstacle course.
“I will leave you two young people alone,” Fogerty said with a grin which showed how aware he was of his own benevolence. “I'm sure you want to tell him the good news.”
Until this moment, Billie would never have believed she could actually regret Fogerty's absence, but it was with regret that she watched his broad brown back move away, stopping briefly to greet her sometime boyfriend. And it was with resignation that she stood waiting for Richard to join her.
“You certainly put me in my place there, didn't you?”
“I tried.”
“Can we go somewhere more private?”
Billie shook her head. “I have to check on something in the exhibit.”
“There's no making up anymore, is there?”
It had been so long since the last time she'd talked to him, she could hardly remember the conversation; for him it was the day before yesterday. One of these days, time would start to feel normal again, but not yet. “I'm afraid not. Please, I have to go.”
He took her wrist. “Can't we talk?”
“I — I don't know what to say. It's over, Richard. I can't really explain why.”
She pulled away and hurried up the stairs.
At the top of the steps, she stopped. There, the door to the exhibit room, and behind it, the mirror. With the magic to take her back to the past. If she used it again, she might never be able to come back — the exhibit relics were to be picked up tomorrow morning. The Victoria and Albert was far from the location of the Duke's Theatre, and if physical proximity in space had something to do with the magic, the mirror might lose its power.
Billie leaned against the wall, dropping her head back to stare at the ceiling. Yes, the past held Aphra and Ravenscroft — a married man — but it also held lack of sanitation, short brutal lives, public executions, syphilis, debtor's prisons, and social injustice far more rampant than any she was familiar with in the twenty-first century
. Could she risk getting stuck there?
The thing was, she wanted to see home again, her real home, Oregon and Washington, her parents and her brother, the Cascades, the coast, wanted to breath air free of both the smell of manure and exhaust fumes.
If Aphra could reinvent herself under such adverse conditions, Billie had no excuse not to try and do the same. She could go home and start over, just like Aphra had done, more than once.
Billie pushed away from the wall and headed down the stairs. First, she had a pub to visit.
31
Fair lovely Maid, or if that Title be
Too weak, too Feminine for Nobler thee,
Permit a Name that more Approaches Truth:
And let me call thee, Lovely Charming Youth....
In pity to our Sex sure thou wer't sent,
That we might Love, and yet be Innocent:
For sure no Crime with thee we can commit;
Or if we shou'd — thy Form excuses it....
Thou beauteous Wonder of a different kind,
Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis join'd;
When e'r the Manly part of thee, wou'd plead
Thou tempts us with the Image of the Maid,
While we the noblest Passions do extend
The Love to Hermes, Aphrodite the Friend.
Aphra Behn, “To the fair Clarinda, who made Love to me, imagin'd more than Woman”
Billie entered the pub, searching the crowds for Aileen's bright head. It occurred to her that it wasn't far from one of the coffee houses she'd visited with Damon — in space if not in time. She closed her eyes briefly, took a deep breath and opened them again.
A freckled arm waved her towards the back of the room. Billie passed the ever-present dartboard and some American tourists and joined the table of women scholars. A lively discussion of the unfairness of literary history was underway, but it was interrupted to conduct introductions all around. Billie was greeted by a jumble of names she would never be able to keep straight and slipped into the seat on the end of the bench next to Aileen.
“Glad you could still come,” Aileen said with her cheery smile. “How is the exhibit doing?”
“Fogerty offered me an assistantship,” Billie said, in lieu of an answer.
Aileen threw back her head and laughed out loud. “Are you going to take it?”
“No. I think I need to reinvent myself.”
“Good for you.” Aileen clapped her on the back. “If reinventing yourself involves switching majors from literature to history, please get in touch.”
Billie smiled. “I will.” She glanced around at the table of women, the many styles from professorial to punk, but all of them here, in a pub, after attending an academic lecture — a privilege none of them would question. Their freedom of movement, their freedom to make their own way in the world — that was something Aphra had dreamed of, something she had achieved even, but at a very high price. Some philosophers and academics liked to claim that there was no such thing as progress, but all who did were probably male. A group of women like this would be unthinkable in the seventeenth century.
“Aileen told us you were a Behn expert,” an attractive brunette across the table said.
“I'm working on a dissertation on the influence of Behn on the early novel,” Billie replied. “I'm not sure how much of an expert that makes me, though.”
“She's a fascinating figure.”
Billie nodded. “Too bad there's so little biographical information. Her life would make a great story.”
“Is it true she was a lesbian?”
“A lesbian?” Billie asked. She hoped no one noticed her surprise.
“Bi maybe,” contributed a woman with a gray bun and round glasses who looked like a librarian. “She wrote a couple of very explicit love poems to men.”
“The love scenes in Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister are all hetero too, as far as I can remember,” Billie said. A waiter came to their table and she ordered a beer. In the half-light of the bar, she could almost swear his eyes were the same golden color as Damon's. “And her affair with John Hoyle was common knowledge,” she added.
“But what about that love poem to Clarinda?” the woman next to Aileen asked.
“To Clarinda?” Billie's throat felt squeezed. “I haven't read much of Behn's poetry, I have to admit.” That was true enough, but she liked to think she was familiar with all the Behn texts most popular with feminist scholars. Why hadn't she ever heard of a love poem to Clarinda?
“Wait, I think I have copies with me,” a long-haired blonde said, pulling a folder out of her handbag and handing her a sheet of paper.
Billie read the poem with growing consternation. The waiter with the golden eyes brought her beer and she took a sip gratefully, but the choking feeling refused to go away. She definitely had never seen this poem before — and given the subject matter, it was probably in every Behn biography and collection printed in last few decades.
Could it be that Billie's presence in the past had changed history? Or perhaps “tweaked” was the more appropriate word. Against thy Charms we struggle but in vain / With thy deluding Form thou giv'st us pain.... Billie handed the poem back, doing her best not to let her reaction show. She was almost sure this poem — a poem that hadn't existed before she stumbled into the past — had been written for her.
What did that mean for her brother's theory of time travel?
And more importantly: had Aphra really cared for her so much?
London, 1687
Sick and weak as I am, I have decided to undertake the Story of my Life; a long tale, I fear, but as my days become fewer, and Mortality is more than a Youthfull Jest, the dangers of Posterity too draw near. Already skeptical tongues wag, doubting the Authorship of my plays, and say my lovers did 'em. Let me assure you, I did 'em all, and much else besides. The World is full of legions of empty-headed Fools who do not believe a Woman capable of the slightest thing; those who berate Women loudest are usually Capable of little themselves and need someone to look down upon.
I have enjoyed a life more full than that of most Men, much of it the stuff of which Fantastick Tales are made; I need no Art for the story of my life — here Fact is enough and no embellishment necessary. I have travelled into undiscovered territories and spoken with those ignorant of Civilisation (and ignorant of Vice as well, for the one seems to go hand in hand with the other); I have been in the secret service of his late Majesty, of Sacred Memory, during the recent Wars against the Dutch, and had my information been heeded, the War might have ended otherwise; I have enjoyed Fame and Fortune writing for the English Stage, and that for almost two decades.
Tales mean and lying circulate about me aplenty; yet the Fame of my Pen is enough that I hardly need introduce myself....
* * *
Aphra put down said pen with a frown. She didn't like writing about herself — the temptation was too great to try to prove something to her critics, and she would never write an entertaining narrative that way. But the more her illness plagued her, the more Clarinda's words from so long ago came back to haunt her.
They will alter your biography and belittle your accomplishments, saying you could not have done what you did because no woman could. Some will say Ravenscroft wrote your plays, others will say Hoyle. That particular prophecy had been fulfilled already. It made Aphra all the more anxious the rest of what Clarinda had predicted would come true as well.
Your plays will be forgotten and only few will know your name.
But perhaps Clarinda had been wrong; perhaps she had not seen everything. And she had only mentioned Aphra's plays, not her poems or prose. Aphra clung to that. If she believed Clarinda's words completely, she would lose all courage, and she needed everything now to battle the sickness eating her, bringing such pain in her joints that at times even writing was impossible.
If she could not write about herself, at least she could write about someone whose story she'd carried with her more than half her l
ifetime, someone whose story she had told dozens of times; so often now that she no longer knew for sure which incidents had actually happened and which were the embellishments she'd added for her many audiences.
She would write the story of Caesar, the noble slave.
She crossed through what she'd written, turned the paper over, and dipped her pen in the ink again. “I do not pretend, in giving you the history of this Royal Slave, to entertain my Reader with the adventures of a feigned hero, whose life and fortunes and fancy may manage at the Poet's pleasure ...”
After she had rapidly completed several pages, she heard the knocker of the door, and a smile of anticipation touched her lips. When Ravenscroft sauntered into the room, she stood to greet him. “Damon. My dear friend. So good of you to come visit an old woman.”
“I would remind you, Astrea, that you are a mere three years older than I, and I would not care to be called an old man just yet.” He took his plumed tricorn off and set it on an ornamental side table.
“Four years,” Aphra corrected him.
Ravenscroft's boisterous laugh filled the sitting room, and he took one of her hands in both of his own. “You cannot be as ill as all that.”
“Ah, but I am, Damon. And when my fingers cramp in pain, Clarinda's predictions will not leave me in peace.”
“I doubt that was her intention.”
“Of course not. If she had been my enemy, her words would be much easier to bear.” She looked down at the strong fingers clasping her hand, a hand that looked infinitely older than his. “Sometimes it seems there is nothing left to me.”
Chameleon in a Mirror Page 34