“So we walk through a world already created by our preconceived notions?”
“Precisely.”
Precisely was also how she packed all the evidence back in the box. This, I thought, was Daphne Merwin’s coffin, as much as the one in which her body lay decomposing.
That was in Highgate Cemetery. It was the next to last place I would visit in London.
“I’ll look for your book,” said Dr. Patel as we shook hands. Mine felt odd from being inside those gloves.
“I’ll send you a copy,” I said. And when I do, I thought, you’ll see yourself in the acknowledgments. Thank you, Dr. Patel, for showing me what I could not have seen on my own: who killed Daphne Merwin.
—The British Freak Show at the Fin-de-Siècle, D.M. Levitt, Ph.D.
Dr. Daphne M. Levitt, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of English
University of Southern Vermont, Ascutney Campus
Ascutney Falls, Vermont 05001, USA
Dear Dr. Levitt:
I was so interested in the case of Daphne Merwin that I decided to look into it a little further. I hope you will forgive me, but your great-great grandmother was a fascinating woman. I did not find anything pertinent in our archives, so I asked a colleague of mine at the British Library to investigate as well. He suggested that if Daphne Merwin, or Daisy Potts, was living in Spitalfields at the time she was discovered by Lewison Merwin, she might be on the rolls of one of the poorhouses in that area. Most of those documents have been lost, so I did not have much confidence that he would be able to find anything. However, after several weeks, he sent me the following scan of a page dated March, 1880 from the record books of the St. Joseph Street Charitable Institution. If you look approximately a third of the way down the page, you will find the following entry:
Alfred Potts, 17 years of age, able-bodied workman, and sister Daisy, 15 years of age, cripple.
I believe this entry refers to your great-great grandmother and her brother Alfred. It would be a great coincidence if there were an Alfred and Daisy Potts of exactly the right age, siblings and the sister described as a “cripple,” in Spitalfields at that time. I hope this helps with your research. I very much look forward to reading your book!
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Devi Patel, MSc, PhD
Junior Archivist II
Metropolitan Police
Dear Daffy,
I read your book, and the chapter on Daphne just made me cry! I recommended it to the book club, and we’re supposed to talk about it next Thursday. Honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to get through the meeting without starting up again—I’d better bring a box of tissues. She was a remarkable woman, and Lewison was just rotten to her. Though I hate to think he was a murderer—maybe it was an impulse, as Dr. Patel said? Although I don’t know if that makes it any better. And I can’t help blaming that Eve person for helping him, although I’m sure Lewison was just as bad to her as he was to Daphne. It’s too bad we have to be related to him too, hunh? But that’s how families are, I guess—a mixed bag.
You inspired me to go through Grandma’s boxes up in the attic. I know I should have done it sooner, but it took me a long time just to get over her being gone. Even now, I keep expecting her to be in the kitchen baking biscuits, or in the living room watching her soaps. I guess your mother never leaves you, not really. When your dad comes into a room and catches me just staring out the window, he says, “You’re thinking about Judy again, aren’t you? I sure do miss her cooking.” Even he says she was the best mother-in-law, and I don’t know how he could give a bigger compliment than that!
Anyway, yesterday I finally went through all those boxes, and I found an old photo album I’d never seen before, under a prayer book. It’s filled with photos from her dad’s family, and you know she never talked to him after he forbade her to marry grandpa. Well, you won’t believe what I found, tucked right into the back—it’s a picture of Daphne Merwin! That photo you used in the book, the one you found on Ebay a couple of months ago and wanted to buy, except you said it was too expensive. Well, here it is! I used a photo envelope so it wouldn’t get bent and paid the earth for special delivery—you know how those postal people are! You send a package through the regular mail, and it’s like wolves tore it apart.
It’s a real original photo! The name of the studio is printed on the bottom, and on the back you’ll see some words—I’m pretty sure Daisy wrote them. It looks like a child’s writing, though children wrote so much more neatly back then, and with real ink! It says, My beloved Mama. Isn’t that sweet? There, I’m going to cry again. I’m glad her daughter remembered her. Seriously, someone should make a movie based on Daphne’s life story—except I wouldn’t want everyone to know my great-grandpa was a murderer. Your book is fine, of course—it’s all scholarly, with footnotes. But seeing it on a screen would be different.
I heard it snowed again up there—down here the crocuses are out, and Dad is complaining that he’ll have to start mowing the grass soon! Tabby brought in a baby bird—we put it out on the back porch and half an hour later it was gone. I don’t know if it got away, or if Tabby found it again. Drat that cat! That’s all the news from down here. I hope you get some time to rest, with all those students—you work too hard, sweetie! Dad sends a big hug, and we’re looking forward to seeing you this summer.
Lots of love, and we’re so proud of your book, Mom
After meeting with Dr. Patel, I stopped at a Costa for a chai latte and a cheese and chutney sandwich, then took the Northern Line up to Highgate Cemetery, where I knew Daphne Merwin was buried. My visit to the Metropolitan Police Archives had taken longer than anticipated, and I had just enough time to find her grave, then take some photographs for this book. Her gravestone was a simple obelisk, on the pedestal of which was written,
Daphne Merwin
The Living Dryad
1865-1888
Long ago, someone had planted a vine at its base, and it had grown up over the obelisk, almost obscuring it in dense, shrubby growth. That day, the vine was covered in green leaves and small white flowers. I wondered if Daphne would have liked that, if she would have considered it some sort of tribute.
It was getting late: the shadows of gravestones lay dark across the paths. So I took the tube back to central London. In the university dorm room I was renting for two weeks, I typed up the notes from my visit to the archives and started packing my suitcase. The next day would be my last in London.
That night I dreamed I was lecturing my students, back in Vermont. But when I looked down at myself, I realized I had become a tree. They did not seem to notice, typing on their laptops as usual, although I was standing at the front of the lecture hall covered with bark, waving leafy green branches instead of arms. I remember the lecture was about Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The next day, I slept through my alarm and woke up with a headache. I took two Advil and finished packing for that evening’s flight back to New York, where I had an appointment at the Barnum and Bailey Museum Archives, which contain a collection of Lewison Merwin’s papers and paraphernalia. I had already visited the Barnum and Bailey Museum once: there I had seen a transcript of Lewison Merwin’s lecture, taken in shorthand during one of Daphne’s performances, as well as letters and telegrams. After his death, Daisy Merwin sent all of his papers to the museum, but she kept the diary—the archivist there had not even known Daphne Merwin’s diary existed. (My family has agreed to loan it to the museum for a Merwin exhibit, focusing on both Daphne and Lewison, to coincide with the publication of this book.) Now, however, I would be looking at them from a different perspective. Now I would know how Daphne had died. Perhaps I would see things in Lewison’s papers that I had not seen the last time. After that, I would go back to Vermont, where I was scheduled to teach Classics of English and American Literature II during the second summer session. And I had a book to finish.
But that morning, my last in London, I would visit the Royal College of S
urgeons.
It was a gray, wet day, typical for summer in London. I got off the tube at Holborn and walked to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, then to the imposing gray building with its classical portico and Latin engraving across the front. There was a smaller sign for the Hunterian Museum, where I was headed. Once you enter the Royal College of Surgeons, you go up one flight of stairs, and there, to your right, is the Hunterian Museum: a collection of anatomical specimens and curiosities that dates to the late 1700s. You enter, expecting oak cabinets and dim lighting, as it might have looked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but no. What you see are glass cases, all around you, brightly lit as though you were in a dissecting room. The cases are filled with glass bottles, as anatomy students would have seen them a hundred years ago. Some of them still have their original labels, with Latin names written in ornate script. They contain animal embryos preserved at every stage of development, tumorous growths of various sorts, the brain of the mathematician Charles Babbage. There are skeletons, from a bat’s to the tall bones of Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant. The exhibit is arranged on two floors around a central space that allows you to see from the top of the museum to its bottom, so you can walk around and around that macabre display.
At the back, there is a small gallery, a dark alcove of paneled wood hung with paintings: some of prominent scientists, some of freak show performers. It is an unintentional reminder that to many Victorians, genius was a frightening, freakish quality—as much a deformity, in its own way, as a beard on a woman. Eng and Chang are in that alcove, as is Julia Pastrana. In a dark corner, under a prominent surgeon, are two paintings, hanging side by side. I had deliberately left them for my last day, not wanting them to affect my interpretation of the research. Now here they were, and here I was. Under one, on a brass plaque, was engraved The Living Dryad. Under the other, The Primitive Eve. Both were by the same artist, both set in an idealized natural landscape that resembled the Royal Botanical Gardens. In one, a woman dressed in a classical Greek chiton held up her arms, which were also branches—recognizably Daphne Merwin, although more arboreal. She even had leaves at the ends of her fingers. In the other crouched a woman dressed only in a loincloth, covered with light brown hair. Lucy Barker had died and been buried in France, but here she was reunited with Daphne. The both of them together, counterparts of each other, as Lewison had wanted them in his show.
I stood there, looking at them for a while … not sure, as a modern woman, what to think of that tragedy, long ago. That tangled relationship between two women, and the man who had helped and used them both. Who had been, directly or indirectly, responsible for their deaths. I blamed Lewison for what had happened. His was, after all, the hand that held the knife. But like everything else in life, it was more complicated than I had assumed it would be. History always is.
But I could not stay long. I had a plane to catch, a life in America to return to.
On my way out, the front desk attendant said, “I hope you enjoyed the museum! Bit gruesome for some …”
“I enjoyed it very much,” I replied, and put my last British coins in the donation jar. I still had ten pounds in notes, which would be enough to buy me coffee and a magazine at Heathrow before I boarded the plane for home.
If we had been living in the late nineteenth century, you and I, we might have paid a shilling or two to see the human wonders of the age: the Bear Woman, the Dog-Faced Boy, the Elephant Man, the Primitive Eve, the Living Dryad. A century later, we must rediscover Julia Pastrana, Fedor Jeftichew, Joseph Merrick, Lucy Barker, and Daphne Merwin: the human beings behind the labels and advertisements. Who were they? What did they think? How did they feel? By and large, they left no records, although perhaps there are papers moldering somewhere, like Daphne’s diary. We owe it to them to learn as much about their histories as possible. That has been, in part, the aim of this book: to see beyond social and ideological constructs and recover, to whatever extent possible, the voices of the voiceless. To let the spectacles speak for themselves.
—The British Freak Show at the Fin-de-Siècle, D.M. Levitt, Ph.D.
But do they actually see me?
Or only the creature he has created? To them, I am merely a curiosity, and sometimes I wish that I could speak—he has told me not to speak, that only he is to speak, ever. My speaking would destroy the illusion. But I wish to tell them … what? That I am real, flesh and blood, not wood. That I am a woman, not a fairy tale. I have a soul, as they do.
Would they listen?
You, beyond the lights, I would say. When you look at me, what do you see? When I speak, what do you hear?
END
About the Author
Theodora Goss’s publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; Interfictions, a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom, a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy Award. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Theodora Goss
Art copyright © 2017 by Allen Williams
Come See the Living Dryad Page 3