I became accustomed to the strange way he laid himself on top of me, and poked at me with his part, and clutched at my bosom, his dog breath clouding onto my face, the prickle of his whiskers against my skin. He liked to snake his tongue into my mouth and both this and the tang of his spittle disgusted me, though I told myself it was all my duty to bear, and so did not complain. Once he got himself inside me and started at his thrusting, I could be calm, for I knew I could pass the time pleasantly enough conjugating Latin verbs in my head. I learnt to let my limbs go slack and heavy, and lay there gazing at the canopy of the bed, which was a sky wrought in soft silk. On one side bloomed a great orange circle: the sunrise, embroidered, its curling flames rippling outwards. At the other end of the awning, an expanse of violet with pale purple planets and sharp yellow stars: the night sky. I stared at it often, while he moved above me, and let my mind float upwards, the loamy smell of him all around. Later I would sleep, and dream that I had a young and gallant lover of the sort that was writ in verses, who would try to win my hand with love tokens, pretty words and ardent declarations.
‘Soon you will bear our children and they shall have my dark hair and your light eyes,’ he told me one morning, as the sun rose up and made the room glow pink. I gripped my hands into fists and did not answer him, though he tipped my chin towards him.
He bought me a new night-shift, with a high old-fashioned collar. Such a strange thing for a man to buy his wife, my eyes said when I unwrapped it, but he only said, in a voice that was deep and low, ‘I hope you will wear it.’
The first time I put it on, he bit at me and clawed at the strings and had no sooner got under it and pushed himself into me, than he ended his labours with a great convulsing. I held him to me and, over his shoulder, suppressed my mirth.
My mother had told me of the getting of babbies, and what I must do with his seed inside my womb, so at first I would lay abed, not daring to move, for fear it would spill out of me. It seemed that it always oozed onto my thighs, and onto the sheets, which were marked with it in the mornings, and I knew the servants must titter over this, as they did the bloodstains from my courses. I was a child in those early days, and did not know what the getting of children might mean. I knew only what I had been told, and did not think beyond my duty as a wife. Later, I learnt. And then I did not stay still.
It was a crisp, grey day in early spring when the Dowager bade me visit her chamber. Sibeliah was gone from her usual place at her mother’s side, and there was only old Sarah, sitting on a stool, untangling the knots of crewel work gone wrong. I never liked to stay in her chamber over-long, for it was a dark, sombre place, oppressively hung all about with tapestries, which were woven depictions of ancient hunting scenes. There were purple grapes and brown dogs; green trees and golden goblets; flaxen-haired youths and galloping deer. Despite the heavy beatings administered to these hangings by the servants, the air was always thick with their dust.
‘Ignore Sarah,’ said the Dowager, fluttering her hands about in the way she had. ‘For she pays what I say no mind, and knows I’ll have her tongue cut out if she speaks a word of it backstairs.’
At this Sarah grunted.
The Dowager looked at me with her dark eyes half closed. ‘I have bidden you here to ask you how goes the getting of my husband’s babby, for we must have an heir, and you do not look as fat as you ought.’
‘Well, madame,’ I said, feeling my cheeks growing instantly hot at her directness. ‘I am not yet with child, though I pray for it every night.’ (This was an untruth; I prayed every night that God might send Catherine and Mary to live with me and keep beside me, as once they had.)
‘What are you doing for the getting of it?’ she said roughly, scratching at her collar. ‘Come now and don’t be bashful, for the goings on of my son are my business, as well as yours.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I do not know how to answer you.’ I clasped my fingers behind my back.
‘Is he having you, child?’ she said, and now her eyes were wide and staring into me. ‘You know what I mean, I think, for I cannot speak plainer.’
‘Why yes, my Lady,’ was all I could say in reply. ‘I think so.’
She leaned forward in her seat. ‘And do you let him do his duty?’
‘I – I do not know. I... Yes.’
‘For ’tis well known – though mayhap your mother did not speak of it to you, which was remiss of her, for she should have instructed you in every wifely thing – that a woman shall get with child much quicker if she let her husband do what he will, and not be slapping him off, and pinching his nose, and crying rape.’
‘I have not cried rape,’ said I. ‘I have not slapped him.’
‘Well then,’ she said. ‘But mind you never do, and you let him go about the thing when he will.’ She smoothed the inky fabric of her dress. ‘’Tis harmful for men if they do not have the release, for it blocks up the humours and can cause all manner of complaints, and kill a man besides. You would not want to murder your husband, would you, child?’
‘No, my Lady,’ I said slowly.
‘Well then,’ she said. ‘See that he has you often and with the grace of Christ Jesu we may soon have an heir for Turvey, and the title assured besides.’
I went away then, and began to muse on the possibility of my having a child, for I had pushed it to the back of my mind, with all the strangeness of my new life to distract me. My mother had not said overmuch on the subject beyond her commands that I try to lie still, for I knew how babbies came, having seen her at her lyings in. Mother had assured me that I would not have need of instruction in the subject at the first, for, as she had said: ‘Your husband will not bother you much for it yet, you being a child still.’ But in this she had been wrong. Should I write and tell my mother and ask for her to bring me home?
I thought of Mother, groaning in her unlaced gown, and the little white bundles, and my father’s face. Childbed was a thing fraught with danger, for my mother was always saying what luck she had with Mistress Knagg, when so many midwives were filthy sluts who tore at you with sharpened fingernails, thrust a strap between your teeth to bite on and left you to your fate. Mistress Knagg was too far away to be sent for if I had a babby, and I did not think Beck or Sibeliah much help in the matter. My mother might come, or Mary, if my husband allowed it, but I did not know if he would.
The fear of getting with child began to bloom in me, growing stronger with every day that passed at Turvey. What good would getting a babby do me? If it did not kill me in the birthing of it, the Dowager was like to send it off for nursing, and I would hardly see it until it was grown. I said nothing to my husband of this, but grew restless after his lovemaking. Instead of lying docilely down to sleep, while he snored, I began to creep into my closet, where I went behind the chamber pot screen. Here I tried to scrape his seed out of me with a cloth I had hidden there, and, as quietly as I could, I danced and jumped and rocked and shook my body about like a mad thing, and my luck held, for I did not get with child.
MY MOTHER-IN-LAW AND I, A CONVERSATION
May 1681, night, the parlour.
DOWAGER: Are you quite well, child? You look pale, but not pretty.
URSULA: [Shyly] I do not know, Mama. I have been feeling a little strange these past few weeks, mostly...
DOWAGER: [A greedy look on her face] Yes?
URSULA: ... mostly in the mornings.
DOWAGER: [Seizing hold of her about the wrist] You have been sick in the mornings?
URSULA: Aye. I have brought up the flux...
DOWAGER: [Eagerly] Aye?
URSULA: And I feel... that I do not have the appetite that I did.
DOWAGER: The food, perhaps, tastes more strongly than afore? A bitter sort of taste to it, perhaps?
URSULA: Aye, ’tis so. The only thing I can stomach – oh but it seems so foolish. And we do not have it much. Perhaps ’tis better that I go hungry…
DOWAGER: Out with it, girl.
URSULA: Sugar pies and hazey pudding. And
iced cream. And honey wine.
DOWAGER: ’Tis the way of these things. I shall tell Mrs Jickell to make you some, for ’tis important you eat and get the nourishment from it.
URSULA: [Eyes downwards] I suppose so. Thank ye kindly, Mama.
DOWAGER: Are you tired child, as you are sick?
URSULA: [Pause] Gad, I do not like to complain, but I suppose I do have a weariness that runs through my limbs. I do not much walk about, for my body feels so swollen – and full – somehow. I know Sibeliah means to be kind, but praying can be fatiguing and...
DOWAGER: Well now, today you shall not pray but shall lie abed the whole afternoon. ’Tis blowing a gale outside, and there you will be warm and in no danger of taking a chill.
URSULA: But oh – Sibeliah’s embroidery of blessed St John the Baptist! I had promised to help her with it, for she struggles greatly over the blood drips which issue from the severed head.
DOWAGER: She will well understand when I explain it to her. ’Tis not your fault you are not well.
URSULA: You know best, Mama. But will Tyringham not be angry with me? He cannot abide the sin of idleness, for ’tis against the blessed Bible, amen.
DOWAGER: Do not disturb yourself, for I will talk with him also. ’Tis not sinful when there is good reason.
URSULA: If you say so, dear Mama.
DOWAGER: I do.
Ending: A glorious afternoon feasting on puddings and laying cosily abed with no one to trouble me, reading play scripts and working on my scribbles.
HOW TO RECOGNIZE WHEN the CANKER HAS SET IN
MAKE no mistake, thou shalt know when thou have a mother-in-law who thinks to rule thee for she shall seem mild mannered but as soon as thy husband’s back be turned she shall open her jaws and snap with all the evil of SATAN. If thou will not have her rule thee, throw thy head back proud and high and perceive her with a fiery look and say ‘I am mistress here, for I am Lady Whatsit’. If that does not sate her, throw scorn upon her suggestions that thou do not go out of doors, or read edifying books, or romp about the house, and if that does not work, then ignore her and do as thou please. Remember: ’tis not a sin to make merry, nor to continue as thy father hath taught you when thou were in thy own house, which was a better house than her one in many ways, in character, if not in size.
THE SYMPTOMS of this TERRIFYING CURSE
THE first sign that thou hast a dreadful and fearsome mother-in-law is that she will not let thee be, no matter if thou try to creep about the house and hide from her; whether thou be shut up in a closet, or crouched on thy bed with the curtains drawn, she will sniff thee out with her animal sense, and ask why thou be not darning the stockings of her lambikin, her first-born son, with his feet so wet and stinking that the fug of them burns through the cloth and would have thee at thy needle mending the holes from morning ’til night. And if thou pay her no heed, she will have thee by the elbow and pinch at thee until thou submit. And so I warn thee, wives, conceal thyself with as much art as thou may, for then she will not find thee, and there will be no strife.
WHAT ye MUST do to BEAR THIS ABOMINABLE AGUE
THERE is no cure for this cursed ague, the malevolent germ that is the mother-in-law, for once thou art wed, none may break thee asunder, save for those who may divorce and give thee thy freedom, but only after heartache, for be sure that a mother-in-law will not yield her fortune, but hang onto it with a gnashing of her sharpened DEVIL’S teeth. So I say to ye unwedded maids: do not enter into matrimony until thou hast first earnestly discovered the nature of thy husband’s mother, and if she be mean, or cunning, or sharp in her habits, think thee carefully before thou contracteth thyself, for ’tis the mother thou wilt be wedding as much as the husband, and unlike him, thou cannot pacify her with love-kisses on the nose and a tweak of the hindermost part. HEED YE WELL.
YE CAN OUTWIT THE CREATURE if THOU CANNOT RULE HER
IF thou wouldst fox the mother-in-law thou must plaster a look of such sweet innocence upon thy phyzzog and go about the house with a look of the utmost devotion to her nutmeg-pie, her son, and if she discover thee at something she liketh not, put on a look of the most enduring sorrow, and say in the saddest voice that anyone ever heard: ‘I shall try to do better, canst thou forgive me mine errors?’ And then fall down on her person and weep and beat thy fists against thy chest, and if thou can bear it, tear out thy hair and chew at it, and believe me she will leave off her scoldings for fear thou hast lost thy mind and be shut up in a madhouse, which will look bad upon the family name.
ON the COMING of THY CHILDREN
ONCE thou hast borne children it may be worse or better with thy mother-in-law, I know not, but if you do not have them, thou shalt suffer, for there is nothing this wrathful HELL creature wanteth more than the spread of her own withered fruit about in the world. And so thou mayest submit to her proddings and pokings and interferings with the maids as to whether thou hast gotteth the curse or nay, and what hast been on the sheets or nay, and to this I say: let her do it, for while thou dost not have a babby, thou will not be trapped like a slave in a cage, and so there is reason to be merry, for even while she is rooting through thine underthings, thou shalt go to thy chamber and dance and sing a merry ditty on the freedom and lightness of thy body which shall not enslave thee, nay, not for a good while yet.
IX
SISTERHOOD
In which I spend time with Sibeliah
My husband’s sister was a curious girl, such as I had never come across before. At two-and-twenty Sibeliah was six years my elder but as yet unmarried (though I suspected this was not for want of trying). You would not think her a full-grown woman to speak to her, for she had little conversation, and was as winsome and vague as her mother was snappish. She had a soft way of walking about with her arms floating out at the elbows, and she would always appear when you least expected it, from an unexpected direction, like a wraith.
Sibeliah had rooms near her mother’s at the east side of the Hall, for it was their regular habit to bundle up together under the bedclothes and whisper, a thing I overheard the servants talking of when I was reading out of sight, hidden behind the painted screen in the withdrawing room, where there was a squat little chair that was low and comfortable.
’Twas the fashion amongst ladies to keep a cabinet of curiosities, and being otherwise devoid of occupation save for her religious embroideries, Sibeliah was one of these ladies. In the withdrawing room her collection stood, arranged on shelves in a large ebonised-wood Chinese cabinet, which teetered on scaly dragon-legs. Inside were ornaments got from all over the world: a little hopping monkey from Paris juggling gold-leaf oranges; a Dutch girl from the Low-Lands with a high white coif and sabots painted with tiny yellow tulips; a fuddling cup in the form of a black cat with pointed ears and an upheld paw from which water could be poured, which had come from Venice, on a packet ship.
Though cosseted by her mama as an invalid, Sibeliah was gorgeously plump, and seemed to enjoy good health as much as any person, save for her teeth, for she was a martyr to toothache. She went about with a mustard plaster pressed to her jaw, carrying a phial of oil of cloves in her hand, which she dabbed on her gums each time she passed a looking glass, perfuming the air with spice even as she grumbled at the pain. Though her teeth seemed to be rotting in her head, Sibeliah was mortally afraid of the barber-surgeon, the apothecary and the physician too and would not have the teeth out, though her mama and Sarah cajoled her daily to submit to any one of these medical ministrations, and my husband went after her with a set of pliers, which had her screaming and running about the house. It was the rotten teeth which made her breath foul, and against this she had taken to sucking sugared almonds, which she kept in a little velvet pouch strung with ribbon at her waist. The sweet-rotten scent of her breath told you when Sibeliah had been in a room, for the smell was wont to linger there, long after she had left it.
At Tyringham’s encouragement, rather than her own, I attempted a friendship.
&nb
sp; ‘Will you not walk with me, Sibeliah?’ I said to her one fine day after a week of rain in which I had felt restless and trapped in the house. ‘I thought to take a turn about the fountain – and we may walk under the bower if you wish for shelter.’
Clank, clank, the sound of the sugared almonds against her teeth as she sucked on them and thought of her answer.
‘Mama says my constitution is too weak for exposure to the air,’ she lisped, pulling at the velvet pouch and popping another nut into her mouth. ‘For I am bound to get a rheum after all this rain, and the last one I had laid me up for above a month, and Mama was afeard it might carry me off and kept vigil by my bedside every night, praying on her knees for Jesu to deliver me from the snapping jaws of the Devil.’
They were a great family for praying in general, and I suffered to attend regular devotions in the chapel, which were led by the Reverend Bainbigge, who I suspected had a stipend which was increased by the Dowager the more fire and brimstone he could bring into his sermon. We slouched there, docile and sleepy in our seats, until the time for the ‘Te Deum’, when we would lift up our voices, Sibeliah’s reedy tones wavering high above the rest and sliding around the notes, inventing new ones that were never there to begin with.
‘Oh Lord, in thee I have trusted. Let me never be confounded.’
Early one morning Sibeliah came into my chamber. I did not hear her tap and she found me humped underneath the bedclothes, and poked at me until I started up in fright.
‘What is it?’ I said, turning over and scowling at her. The stench of her breath filled the room and I scrunched up my nose at it.
‘I am sorry to wake you, Sister,’ she said, swallowing the grit of a sugared almond, and sliding a new one into her mouth. ‘But I have come to keep company with you. I rose at dawn, and have been praying with Mama since then, and so it feels famous late to me.’
I sat up and peered at the lantern clock which stood on the dressing table. It was just after eight o’clock. ‘Oh,’ I yawned, stretching my arms up. ‘I am weary. What is it? I thought to doze a while yet. For I have had horrid cauchemars all the night through and woke up sweating every hour.’
The Illumination of Ursula Flight Page 16