By December, Mistress Mary was astonished at her power over this sweet little girl. The dreadful laugh had muted to a wheeze of merriment between wide lips. Margaret sat on a footstool below her governess's needle, and chanted French songs of which she understood half the words. At night, she had taken to pleading for Mistress Mary to come into her bedchamber; not Dot, nor any of the servingmaids, nor either of her sisters, only Mistress Mary might lift off the muslin cap and brush Margaret's long coarse hair. "My little friend," the woman called her, as a final favour, though when Margaret stood up she had a good inch over her governess. They shared a smile, then. Mistress Mary would have liked to be sure that they were smiling at the same thing.
Another thing the governess could not understand was why Margaret loved to read and hated to write.
Words were a treasure to be hoarded and never shared.
On Margaret's twelfth birthday two years before, an event marked only by one of her Ladyship's sudden visits to the schoolroom, she had been discovered sitting under a desk with a very blunt quill, writing "The History of the Quintumbly Family, The Third Chapter." Under interrogation in the parlour, Margaret could offer no reason for such an outlay of precious time. She licked the corner of her lips. Nor could she explain her knowledge of such an unsuitable family, who, it seemed, kept tame weasels and sailed down the Nile. Her Ladyship was disgusted at last to find that the Quintumblys were merely fanciful, a pretend family. The rest of the journal pleased her even less, being a daily account of Margaret's less filial thoughts and sentiments. Having read a sample of them aloud in a tone of wonder, her Ladyship picked the limp book up by one corner and held it out to her daughter. Margaret was halfway to the parlour fire before her mother's voice tightened around her: did she mean to smoke them out entirely? Dot was called for to carry the manuscript to the gardener's bonfire, where it would do no harm.
From that day on the girl would write no words of her own, only lists of French verbs and English wars. In the strongbox behind her eyes, she stacked volumes of stories about her pretend families. She sealed her lashes and reread the adventures only in bed before it was light, in case anyone might catch her lips moving. By day she stole other people's words: romances, newspapers, treatises, anything left beside an armchair or in an unlocked cabinet in the library. Margaret swallowed up the words and would give none back.
Laid low by one of her periodic fevers in January, the girl was starving for a story but could not concentrate enough to form the letters. What she did remember to do was to clamour for Mistress Mary to hold her hand. The governess flushed, and consented, after a little show of reluctance. Humouring the patient, she agreed to petty things, like brushing her own dark hair with Margaret's ivory brush. By suppertime, the girl was too worn out to think of anything endearing to say, but Mistress Mary leaned over and hushed her most tenderly.
In her sleep, the girl made hoarse cries, and threw even the gentlest hand off her forehead. "There was a girl in Dublin used to sleep in her stays," Dot remarked, "that died from compunction of the organs." The governess heaved a breath and knocked on the parlour door. "Most dangerous in her state of health, your Ladyship ... eminent medical gentlemen agree..." The stays came off. Margaret tossed still, picking at invisible ribbons across her chest.
The girl woke one February twilight to find that her lie had come true. She could not bear to let the governess out of her sight. Her puzzled eyes followed every movement, and her voice was cracked and fractious. She insisted that she could not remember how to sew. There was nothing comfortable about this love.
Scrawny children plucked at Margarets skirts as she walked between the burnt cottages, wheezing. She shared her pocketful of French grapes among them. Their ginger freckles stood out bold on transparent skin.
Hungry for the familiarity of words, the girl stole into the library. She knelt on the moving steps and pressed her face against the glass cases, following their bevelled edges with her lips. One of the cases would be left unlocked, if she had prayed hard enough the night before. Tides in winking gold leaf reached for her fingers. At first she looked for storybooks and engravings, but by March she had got a taste for books of words about words: dictionaries and lexicons and medical encyclopaedias. One strange fish of a word leapt into the mouth of another and that one into another, meanings hooked on each other, confusing and enticing her, until, after the hour or so she could steal from each day, Margaret was netted round with secret knowledge.
"There was a farmer went for the bailiff with a pitchfork last month," Dot said. "When they hanged him in Cork town his bit stuck up." Margaret knew about bits and the getting of babies and the nine months; Mistress Mary, flushing slightly, said that every girl should know the words for things.
"Why was I not born a boy," Margaret asked her governess while walking in the orchard, "or why was I born at all?" Mistress Mary was bewildered by the question. Margaret explained: "Girls are good for nothing in particular. In all the stories, boys can run and leap and save wounded animals. My mother says I am a mannish little trull. Already I am taller than ladies like you. So why may I not be a boy?"
"There is nothing wrong," began Mistress Mary cautiously, "with being manly, in the best sense. Manly virtues, you know, and masculine fortitude. You must not be afraid. No matter what anyone says. Even if they say things which, no doubt unintentionally, may seem unkind."
Margaret kicked at a rotten apple.
"You must stand tall, like a tree," explained the governess, gathering confidence. "No matter how tall you grow you will be my little girl, and your head will always fit on my shoulder. Tall as a young tree," she went on hurriedly, "and you should move like one too. Why do you not romp and bound when I say you may; why do you cling to my side like a little doll?"
"My mother forbids it."
"She cannot see through the garden wall. I give you permission."
"She may ask why we spend so long in the orchard."
"We are studying the names of the insects."
And the governess tagged her on the shoulder and, picking up her skirts, hared off down a damp grassy path. Margaret was still considering the matter when she found her legs leaping away with her.
In the April evenings, Mistress Mary entertained the household with recitations and English country dances. Her Ladyship looked on, her hair whiter by the day. They argued over the number of buttons on the girls' boots.
When she grew up, Margaret had decided, she would make the bailiffs give all the rent back. The redheaded children would grow fat, and clap their hands when they saw her coming.
By May the air was white with blossom. Margaret could not swallow when she looked at her governess. Their hairs were mingled on the brush; Margaret teased them with her cold fingers. She could not seem to learn the rules of bodies. What Mistress Mary called innocent caresses were allowable, and these were: cheeks and foreheads, lips on the backs of hands, arms entwined in the orchard, heads briefly nested on gray satin skirts. But when Margaret slipped into the governess's chamber one morning and found her in shift and stockings, she earned a scathing glance. Gross familiarity, Mistress Mary called it, and immodest forwardness. When she had fastened her last button and called the girl back into the room, she explained more calmly that one must never forget the respect which one human creature owed another. Margaret could not see what respect had to do with dressing in separate rooms. She hung her head and thought of breakfast.
"Has any of the servants ever tried to teach you dirty indecent tricks?"
"No, Mistress Mary. Dot is always busy, and besides, she knows no tricks."
It was June by the time she found that there were words for girls like her. Words tucked away in the library, locked only until you looked for them. Romp and hoyden she knew already. Tomboy was when she ran down the front staircase with her bootlaces undone. But there were sharper words as well, words that cut when she lifted them into her mouth to taste and whisper them. Tommie was when women kissed and pressed each othe
r to their hearts; it said so in a dirty poem on the top shelf of the cabinet. Tribad was the same only worse. The word had to mean, she reasoned, along the lines of triangle and trimester, that she was three times as bad as other girls.
Margaret knelt up on the moving steps as the page fell open to that word again; her legs shook and her belly-rumbles echoed under the whalebone. Tribad meant if she let the badness take her, she would grow and grow. Already she was taller than anyone in the house except her mother. The book said she would grow down there until she became a hermaphrodite shown for pennies at the fair, or ran away in her brothers breeches (but she had no brother) and married a Dutch widow. The change was coming already. When the girl lay in bed on hot mornings the bit between her legs stirred and leapt like a minnow.
One noon she limped into the bedchamber, phantom blows from her mothers rod still landing on her calves. Dot was sweeping the cold floor, her broom trailing now as she gazed into the frontispiece of a book of travels.
"Give it," said Margaret.
Dot regarded her, then stared at the book again, at its pages flattened by the gray morning light. She looked back at the girl as if trying to remember her name. Seizing the besom, Margaret threaded her fingers between the twigs, and set to bludgeoning the maid's thick body with the handle. The coarse petticoats dulled the impact; it sounded like a rug being beaten. She pursued Dot to the window with a constant hiss of phrases, from "idle ignoramus" to "tell my mother" to "dirty goodfornothing inch of life." Dot broke into a wail at last, expressive less of pain than of a willingness to get it over and done with. She stood in the corner, hunched over to protect her curves. Tears plummeted to the floorboards.
"Beg pardon," Margaret instructed. Her ribs heaved and sank under the creaking corset.
"Beg pardon, Miss," Dot repeated, her tone neutral.
The broom was lowered but the eyes held.
Margaret had made it to the door before, with a lurch, she found herself sorry. She turned to see Dot industriously brushing her tears onto the floor. She was so sorry it swamped her, left her feeble. Was there any comfort to give? A lump in one of the unmade beds reminded her, and she scrabbled under the coverlet. The doll she pulled out was missing one eye, but her pink damask slippers were good as new. The girl walked up behind Dot and tapped her on the shoulder with the doll's powdered head. "Take her," she said graciously, "and leave off crying."
Dot turned a face that was almost dry. "What am I to do with that, Miss?"
Margaret was disconcerted. Play with her, she could have said, but when? Dress her up, but in what? A shaky, benevolent smile. "Perhaps you could beat her when you are angry."
Weary, Dot considered the two faces. "Get away out of that, miss," she remarked at last, and walked from the room, trailing her broom behind her.
It was in the corner of the bedchamber that the governess found the girl a little later, her fingers dividing and dividing the doll's hair. She lifted Margaret's hands away gently. "Girl, you harass my spirits. You are too old for your sisters' dolls, and what need has a healthy girl of wax toys when there is the wide world to play in?" If she noticed the stiffness in Margaret's legs, as they strolled in the orchard, she said nothing. They spoke of birds' nests, and poetry, and unrest among the French.
Mistress Mary had taken to writing a story in the bright July evenings. What was it about? "Disappointment," she murmured, and would tell no more. Feeling neglected, Margaret became clumsier, tripping over shoes and toppling an inkstand. The governess forgave her everything. One morning Margaret found a double cherry hung over the handle of her wardrobe. She knew she had the power now. It brought her no joy.
"I govern her completely," Mistress Mary wrote to her sister. "She is a fine girl, and it only takes a cherry to win a smile from her. Her violence of temper remains deplorable, but I myself never feel the effects of it. She is wax in my hands. The truth is, this girl is the only consolation of my life in this backwater. How I look forward to my brief i" escape!
Nobody remembered to tell the children that their governess was spending two days with acquaintances in Tralee. Distracted by the details of mail coaches and hats, Mistress Mary was gone before breakfast. Dot, passing the girl on the back staircase, had only time to whisper that the governess was gone.
Margaret stood in the middle of the empty bedchamber. Sure enough, Mistress Mary's travelling cloak was missing for the first time since October. Margaret was oddly calm. Her mind was busy wondering what she had done wrong, what brief immodesty or careless phrase would make her governess punish her so, by leaving without a word. She noticed that the writing case had been left behind. No reason not to, now: she wrenched it open and took a handful of pages. "Pity is one of my prevailing passions," she read, and "this world is a desert to me" at the top of another leaf. For a few moments the girl stood, savouring the grandeur of the phrases. But then they were dust in her mouth. All these words, and not an inch of warm skin left. As if Mistress Mary, who had never seemed too fond of having a body, had escaped in the form of a bird or a cloud.
The words were building up behind her tongue, making her gag. Nine months she has been living behind my hair, thought Margaret; that is as long as a baby. She parted her lips to breathe and a howl split her open.
After that she remembered nothing until her mother was standing over her.
"Stop this fuss," her Ladyship advised. "You are making a grand calamity out of nothing at all. Recollect yourself. Who are you?"
"I don't know."
"You are Margaret King, of...?"
"I don't remember."
The girl stood, at the rod's pleasure. It beat and beat and could not touch her.
Due to the excessive regret the girl had shown at the briefest of partings with her governess, her Ladyship explained to the household, she had decided that Mistress Mary would not be coming back. The black trunk was sent off before breakfast.
By August, Margaret was bleeding inside. Feeling herself seep away, she was not surprised. But Dot saw the red path down the girl's stocking; she took her into a closet and explained the business of the rags. Margaret nodded but did not believe her. She knew it was the first sign of the change. Blood had to trickle as the growth sped and the new freakish flesh pushed through. When she was three inches long, she would run away to Galway fair and show herself for sixpences. The pretend families would come with her, riding in the ropes of her hair.
A republican in 1798, Margaret would spit at bailiffs. An adulteress in Italy, she would meet her governess's daughter, who never knew her mother, and would tell her, "I knew your mother."
Note
One of the puzzled of Mary Wollstonecraft's early career is her lading her job as governeds with the Kingsborough family in Cork. For "Words for Things," I have drawn on her Collected Letters (1979), but aldo her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Mary, A Fiction (1788), and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The character of "Mademoiselle" wad inspired by Mary Rusdell Mitford's "Early Recollections: The French Teacher" in Our Village (1826).
Wollstonecraft's pupil became Margaret King Moore on her marriage to the second Earl of Mount Cashell, to whom she bore eight children. The British Library had a letter from Bishop Percy to his wife in 1798 that mentions Margaret's vigorous defence of her former governess when Wollstonecraft was accused of being a bad influence on her charges. In 1805, Margaret eloped from her husband and children with George William Tighe; in Italy, they became friends with the daughter Wollstonecraft died giving birth to, Mary Shelley.
How a Lady Dies
Breathing hardly seems worth the trouble today. Elizabeth lets out her shallow mouthful of air. Her shoulders subside; her head sinks back against the obelisk. She stares up at the tapering stone, but the sight dizzies her. Her eye-lids fall. Fur is soft against her cheekbones.
There, between the breaths, is peace. A little more air seeps away between her withered lips. The forest inside her ribs is emptying. No sound, nothing stirring, no
fear, nor inclination. How the end will come. This winter, surely. Perhaps this very month. Could it be today?
This is all she has to do, thinks Elizabeth with a sudden inspiration. No vulgar act of self-destruction is called for; nothing to trouble her conscience or her taste. It is necessary only to relinquish: the daily effort, the stale cold air.
Her whole self hisses away through the crack of her mouth. Her stomach gives a startling rumble. She feels it fold in on itself. Soon she will be quite hollowed out. The weight on her chest grows, but she tells herself not to tremble, not to resist, not to bother with another breath.
"Elizabeth?"
The voice of love is a noose. It keeps you dangling between two worlds.
Her lungs suck in a huge mouthful of air. Her stays crack mightily, like a ship turning into the wind. How this worthless body fights for life. She turns to see her friend's anxious face, cooped up in a silk bonnet. Dark eyes, a high forehead traced like paper. By the world's standards, a plain woman, twenty years past her best. "I am only resting, my dear," Elizabeth murmurs.
"Do you feel a little better in yourself today?" suggests Frances.
"Indeed," faintly.
The only thing one can do in Bath that one did not do the day before is die. This is the undisputed bon mot of the season of 1759. Airs. Montagu's words will be misquoted long after these swarms of visitors have dispersed to their respective altars and graves.
Every year more yellowstone houses seize their share of tawny light. Every day more carriages scurry across the valley. Each duke married off is replaced by another five; every beggar arrested leaves room for fifty more. What was once a gracious maiden of a town has become a bloated dowager.
Bath is known for social rules and hard drinking, exquisite refinement and filthy jokes. Money is the air it breathes. Half a guinea to the Bellringers to herald your arrival, another to the City Waits for the obligatory serenade, then two guineas' subscription to Harrison's Rooms, where the tea is only ever lukewarm. People come to Bath to take the waters, but also to take the air in the Orange Grove, to take heart at the sight of a handsome face. They take their turns at scandal and glory, pleasure and spleen; they take their time about living and dying. The town is full of sound lungs proclaiming their sickness, old men insisting on their youth, married women whispering their unhappiness.
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories Page 13