The Honeymoon

by Dinitia Smith

She lay back in the bed, her senses quickened, alert. He was not her laughing man now. It was as if he had been transformed by his journey, that voyage that only happens once.

  She couldn’t go back to sleep.

  Gradually, the morning light filled her eyes. He’d been there. She knew it and believed it.

  But maybe it was just a vision, an aggregation of love and memory fueled by grief and desire. Someone, not the God in whom she did not believe, but her own God, the accumulation of some universal spirit and moral force, all the love she had inside her, had sent him. Just as he had been sent in those dark autumn months in London, after the awful ending with Spencer, when her life seemed fixed forever, when she had no hope left, only the drudgery of work.

  Chapter 11

  He would come to the Strand in the relentless autumn rain, all wet, shaking himself off like a dog, and find her in the office in the back of the house, her legs over the armchair with her feet toward the fire as she worked through her manuscripts. He’d sit down opposite her and warm himself, steam rising from his damp coat. When she looked up, he was watching her.

  “You really are the backbone of this place, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Well — the unpaid backbone.”

  His eyes drifted to the fire. His habitual gaiety seemed muted these days, his manic jokes. “You seem a bit sad,” she remarked.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But I’m very pleased with the Goethe article.” He’d written a piece on “Goethe as a Man of Science” for the Westminster.

  “Yes, it worked well,” she said.

  “Thanks to your editing. It was a bit disorganized, I’m afraid.”

  “A little. But I’m glad we published it,” she told him. “I think you’re right, people don’t know about all of Goethe’s scientific work, the botany and geology.”

  “He said he didn’t take any pride in his poetry, that he was proudest of his work on the theory of color.” Lewes had been trying for years to write a life of Goethe, but his efforts were constantly interrupted by his having to write articles for money.

  She patted the pile of proofs in her lap and sighed. “Oh, dear. This is just endless.”

  “What about Chapman? Why isn’t he doing any of this?”

  “He spends every minute urging his creditors to pay him and soothing his investors.”

  He looked at her intently. “What say you to this?” he asked. “I have press orders for Masks and Faces tomorrow at the Haymarket. Would you go with me to cheer us both up?”

  “But —” She hesitated. “Would Mrs. Lewes be with us?”

  “She’s got the children to take care of. I promise you, Mrs. Lewes won’t mind in the slightest if we go to the theater together.” She thought she detected a faint bitterness in his voice. “It’ll be very funny.”

  That night, as they sat next to one another in the theater, she was conscious of his physicality, his masculinity, the vague scent of his wool jacket and his skin. At first she didn’t look directly at him, and held herself nervously apart from him. But soon, they were laughing together, touching one another’s arms at the silly jokes — the married squire Vane courting Mrs. Woffington; the main character, Triplet, frantically writing comedies in his garret to earn money to feed his starving family; and the two critics, Soaper, who praises everything, and Snarl, who hates it all.

  The play over, they stepped out lightly from the theater, their spirits cleansed by laughter. They walked home along Haymarket, through the thick yellow fog and the damp cold coming in off the Thames. She shivered and tucked her scarf around her neck. He moved around her so he was nearer the river, to protect her from the cold, then he took her arm and moved closer to her.

  “Shall we get a hansom?” he asked. “Is it too cold for you?” His body next to hers was warm, wiry, her own height, shielding her.

  “It’s too expensive,” she said. “I’m so glad I came. Laughter does make one forget one’s sorrows.”

  “Indeed.”

  He accompanied her to the door of 142 and followed her inside. It was late, the drawing room was deserted, the lights dimmed, the fire was down to its embers, the only sound the steady nighttime ticking of the grandfather clock. Standing in the entrance hall, before she’d removed her coat, she smiled at him. Then he kissed her on the lips. Instinctively, she wanted to pull back, but his lips were soft and full, the kiss unexpectedly enveloping.

  He stepped away. “Pardon me,” he said. “I’m afraid I couldn’t help myself.”

  She looked about. “You really shouldn’t be here.”

  “Could we just sit awhile in the drawing room? There’s still a bit of a fire.”

  “I suppose so.” She removed her coat and sat down on the settee opposite the fireplace, clutching her arms around her body for warmth. He crouched down and stoked the coals, threw a log on, and the embers burst into flame. He came around and sat beside her. The room grew warmer.

  “You’re married,” she blurted out. “I don’t think I could bear …” She left it unfinished. She didn’t say, “another married man, a man who belongs to someone else.”

  “My marriage is dead,” he said firmly. “I’ve got to move out of Bedford Place, as soon as I can do it. But I can’t afford to at the moment. I have to support my family.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “I had …” He paused, as if this was difficult to say. “I have three boys, Charley, Thornie, and Bertie. We lost our littlest one, St. Vincent, a year and a half ago.” His face dropped in an expression of inexpressible sadness.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Twenty-two months old. Measles. We lost another one too, early on, a little girl. Only four days old.”

  “There must be nothing like it,” she said. “I’m not a parent but surely, God, whoever He — or She — is, didn’t mean this to be.”

  “And … in addition to my own three boys, there are two others now.” He took a breath. “Or at least they bear my name.”

  He paused. “I feel I should explain.” He hesitated. “You have a way of listening that makes one want to confide in you.”

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling grimly. “Yes, that’s been said. I have one attribute, at least.”

  At this bit of self-deprecation he looked at her sharply.

  He went on. “In the beginning, Agnes and I were both believers in free love.”

  “ ‘Free love,’ ” she echoed with bitterness. “I’ve seen the results of that — only pain.”

  He paused, looking at her as if thinking this through, but he didn’t answer.

  “We were happy,” he said. “We had our little boys. But I’m afraid I left Agnes to manage by herself too much. I was always out and about, furthering my career, trying to earn money, at the theater. Then my play The Noble Heart went on at the Olympic. My friend Thornton Hunt and I were trying to raise money for the Leader. I admit that I — I foolishly strayed. Agnes sensed it, asked me about it. I told her the truth, perhaps I shouldn’t have. To my surprise, perhaps stupidly, she was distraught.

  “Then Agnes became pregnant.”

  He stopped. “She told me that the baby was Thornton’s. I was — there’s no other way to describe it — shattered. Our agreement hadn’t included having children with other people. Thornton was my best friend. I’d even named my son, Thornie, after him. But as I admitted, I — strayed first. Agnes said she’d never get rid of the baby. We’d lost our little girl early on and she couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t punish her for it. Look what I’d done. The baby, Edmund, was born just three weeks after little St. Vincent died.”

  “But how did she know it wasn’t yours?”

  “He looks just like Thornton, very dark-skinned. The Hunts are from Barbados, you know.”

  “Did you confront Thornton?”

  “No. In an odd way, I couldn’t blame him either, though he’s married with children himself. He’s got seven with his wife, Kate.”

  “Seven? It can’t be!”
/>   “Yes. Then Agnes had Rose. She’s Thornton’s too. By then Agnes and I had ceased all intimacy.

  “That’s when I met you at Jeff’s Book Shop,” he said. “I noticed you at once. I’d heard about you, that you were the brilliance behind the throne at the magazine. You had a way of looking at a man, making him feel he was the most important person in the room. And you have such an enchanting voice.”

  He hesitated. “I think you should know, I allowed Agnes to put my name on the birth certificates of her first two children with Thornton.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d acceded to our arrangement that we could each have other lovers to begin with. And the children were innocent. It wasn’t their fault they’d been born. I couldn’t let them be bastards. I never knew my own father. He abandoned my own poor mother when I was a baby. I never saw him again.”

  As he told her his story, she thought, he wasn’t ugly at all. His eyes were dark and searching, he had full, red lips, a thin, tensile little body.

  “That means that I can never divorce Agnes,” he said, “because, by giving the children my name, under the law I condoned Agnes’s adultery.”

  He waited, letting that sink in.

  “And Thornton,” she asked, “does he acknowledge them as his?”

  “He and I, we haven’t ever discussed it. Some things are better left unsaid. He knew that I’d been unfaithful to Agnes. As I said, we were all freethinkers …” He gave a grim little laugh. “Free to be miserable would be a better way of putting it.”

  “Does he give Agnes money for them?” She knew that Lewes wasn’t rich, he was always foraging for money by selling articles.

  “How well do you know Thornton?” he asked. “He’s always begging for loans, saying he’s got all his children to support. If anything, he’s poorer than even I am.”

  “You support Thornton’s children, too?”

  “How can I feed some of the children in the house and not the others? Yes, I feed them.”

  He drew back. “I’ll go now,” he said. He stood up and waited a moment. Then he said, “But I’m never going to let you be alone again.”

  He took his hat and coat and umbrella from the rack and was gone.

  She sat there, contemplating what he’d said. Here was another man who believed in “free love.” And yet he seemed so worn down by despair, broken. She believed, or she wanted to believe, she thought, the truthfulness of his regret, his sorrow. In spite of herself she was moved, that he refused to let Agnes’s children with another man suffer, that he took the full blame for what had happened between them, that he refused to condemn his wife. He didn’t ask for sympathy or praise for his decision not to abandon his family.

  He came the next day and once more took her to the theater. And that evening, in the darkness of the house, everyone out or asleep, they crept up the stairs to her room, conscious of the treads squeaking, giggling like two naughty children. They didn’t have to speak about their intention. In the peace and darkness of her room on the third floor, it was their first time.

  After they had finished, she quickly drew the sheet up to her chin to hide herself. But he reached over, lit the candle by the bed, and firmly pulled the sheet down again. He held the sheet back away from her body. “No,” she said, and tried to grab it from him.

  “Yes,” he said. He moved the candle slowly up and down her naked flesh, studying her.

  “It’s cold,” she protested.

  But he continued silently contemplating her body, and she allowed it, wordless and frightened.

  “Your body is so beautiful,” he said. Then he pulled the covers over both of them and wrapped her in his arms. “And I’ll never let you be cold again,” he told her, drawing her to him and rubbing her hands and feet to warm them.

  He made love to her once more, and this time she wasn’t afraid. Her desire was at first baffling, unexpected in its intensity and freedom, for this was desire mingled for the first time in her life with reciprocated love, desire reflected in the love of another person. No need to question it, to wonder about it. It was far stronger than her capacity to stop herself.

  On November 22, her thirty-third birthday, he came bearing red roses, out of season, seizing a kiss in the back office when they were alone. “You shouldn’t have,” she said. “They’re much too expensive!”

  “It doesn’t matter. I need far more money than those cost. You deserve them.”

  She put the roses on the windowsill of the dark room so she could look at them while she worked, at the deep, dusky red emerging from the winter gloom, a glamorous gift no man had ever offered her before, a gift of romance and honor.

  When Chapman came in to consult with her, he asked, “Who’re those from?”

  “A friend,” she said curtly.

  He raised his eyebrows. But she didn’t offer more.

  Christmas was approaching. A letter came saying that Chrissey’s husband, Edward Clarke, had died, bankrupt, leaving Chrissey with six children to feed.

  She dropped her work immediately and took the next train to Meriden.

  Isaac was there when she arrived, standing strong and bearded with his big, hooked Evans nose. Relishing his own success in the midst of the crisis, she thought.

  Chrissey sat clutching her youngest child, Katie, only fourteen months old, while her other five children stood forlornly around her, brave young Edward, her oldest, and Robert and Emily and Christopher and Fanny. Chrissey’s youthful prettiness had vanished. She was only thirty-eight, but her teeth had fallen out from all her pregnancies, and her hair had turned gray. She was worn to the bone from Edward’s bankruptcy and the deaths of two of her children.

  “I’m willing to let her live in the Attleborough house rent-free,” Isaac said. The house was a broken-down hovel on the estate, not big enough for seven people. Isaac continued in his inimitable way. “And Katie and Fanny can go to the Infant Orphan Asylum.”

  From where she sat, holding dirty-faced little Katie to her breast, Chrissie shrieked “No!”

  “They’ll get food and a bed,” he said impassively. He was always so sure of his rightness.

  “Never!” Chrissey cried. She buried her face in the baby’s neck.

  Marian interrupted. “Isaac, please. I’ll help Chrissey. I’ll change my situation and earn some money.”

  She tried to make a Christmas for the children by filling a sock for each with an orange and some nuts. The day after Christmas, as she was gathering her things for the journey back to London, Isaac appeared again at the house. “Where’re you going?” he demanded.

  “Back to London to try to earn some money to help Chrissey.”

  “I’m the head of this family now,” he said angrily. “I am trying to ensure our sister’s survival, and now you’re leaving without telling me. In future, don’t ask me for anything.” He stormed out.

  “What have I ever done to make him hate me so?” she asked Chrissey.

  Chrissey shook her head. “Perhaps he’s jealous of your mind, your intelligence. You were always the clever one. Or perhaps it’s that he once loved you so,” she ventured, “and now you’re independent of him.”

  When she got back to the cold, bleak streets of London, she arranged with the solicitor for their father’s estate, Mr. Holbeche, to have a portion of her allowance sent to Chrissey.

  In her brief absence, the finances of the Westminster had slipped further into arrears. George Combe had agreed not to be paid for his article on phrenology and education in return for advertising for his books. But Chapman had inadvertently left the advertisement out of the issue and Combe was again threatening to pull his money out.

  Charles Bray offered to give Chapman funds to pay Marian her wages, but she wouldn’t allow it. She wrote to Charles in Coventry thanking him: “You are the dearest, oldest, stupidest, tiresomest, delightfullest and never-to-be-forgotten-est of friends to me,” she teased.

  She was working so hard now that she developed an intense pain in her s
houlder from the writing and editing. She could hardly hold her pen. George came daily now to see her. He’d find his way to the back office, and if no one was about, he’d lay his hand on her cheek. “Poor soul,” he said, “your worries are great, aren’t they?”

  “But so are yours,” she said.

  At night she let him into the house and he followed her upstairs to her room, and there he held her, kissed her, and warmed her with his body. Somewhere, Chapman and Susanna and Miss Tilley must know, she thought. Perhaps they were relieved that she had someone of her own now.

  Once, at midnight, Chapman came in the front door just as George was arriving. Chapman looked askance at them, said “Good evening,” and went upstairs.

  The next day in the back office, he told her, “You should watch yourself with Lewes. He’s a scoundrel.”

  “Well, you should know,” she said, letting the anger out as she never had before. He daren’t say anything to that. He had no idea who George really was. He only cared that she had shifted her allegiance to someone else and might leave him stranded at his magazine.

  Every night that George didn’t come was a void of loneliness, an unnatural state. There was now between them an attachment, profound and inevitable. He buoyed her with visits to the theater, tried to make her laugh when her spirits were down about Chrissey. His existence was woven into the fabric of her own, their separations unnecessary, a needless interruption in the inevitable continuity of their love.

  Then, one February day, George arrived at 142 with his usual ebullience dampened. “Agnes is pregnant again,” he said flatly.

  He could endure it no more. His friend, Frederick Ward, was in Brussels and said George could live rent-free at his house on Cork Street while he was gone.

  And she could endure it no more at the Strand. By the following autumn she had found rooms for herself on Cambridge Street, nine pounds a month for rent and food. Somehow she’d find the money. The rooms were on the ground floor, noisy and drafty, but it was only fifteen minutes from Cork Street and she and George could go back and forth unobserved.