The Skull and the Nightingale

by Michael Irwin

  How rash my letter is! How outrageous to propriety! Yet I am proud to be writing it: I exult in being so blunt and taking such risks. Sustaining me in my intrepidity are two mighty considerations.

  First, you and I are matched in mind. I have known you all my thinking life. We share memories, of course, but also beliefs and tastes. We understand one another very well. We can communicate not only through words, but through the language of eyes, expression, tone, and gesture.

  And we are attuned in passion. I need say nothing further on that score: you know as I know how we have caught fire when we have so much as touched.

  I write this letter hastily in the heat of a compelling mood, but I mean every word that I have said. I long for an answer—a declaration of ardent acceptance. But do not answer yet. Consider my plan to be no more than hypothetical. I know, and so do you, that in matters of moment I have weakly changed my mind before now. So wait: ponder what I have said. Do not reply until I have written once more, probably in a very few weeks. If I then confirm, as I am sure I will, that my intention holds, I will hope for an answer from you which will seal the compact between us.

  Yours, &c.

  I had to read the letter twice before I could fully comprehend what it meant for me. Having just been transformed, my life was to be transformed once more. Curiously my first response was one of disinterested mental relief, as though at a difficult mathematical calculation producing a neat answer or a philosophical speculation resolving itself into a compact proposition. All was clear, all was well. But this abstract satisfaction was almost immediately overwhelmed by a rush of exultation. I was like a man fallen from a tower and alighting safely on his feet—with his pockets stuffed with gold.

  I sat savoring the elegance of what had happened. My godfather had unknowingly cajoled and bribed me into the very predicament which was to free me from his clutches. Mr. Ogden, in his anxiety to avoid cuckoldom, had kindly bequeathed me not only his wife but his fortune.

  My life, which I had hitherto improvised, now took on shape and sequence. Two years previously I had been in France; two years hence I would be living in London, a wealthy married man, ready to become a respectable citizen. I was not, after all, condemned to be an outcast like Francis Pike: I had been born under a lucky star. As one cornucopia was snatched from my grasp another was proffered. After weeks of despair and guilt I was bubbling with facetious glee.

  It was true that I would have a tiresome secret to hide from my wife: the fact that I had—if unintentionally—killed her first husband. Perhaps I could all but forget the matter. Or on some mischievous night when we had both drunk more than we should, perhaps I might tell her the truth, and we would giggle with horror at the enormity of it.

  The thoughts that energized my mind began to activate my body. I threw aside coat and wig and paced the room, pausing at the mirror to grin at my grinning reflection. I poured myself a glass of wine and drank it in a single draft. I burst into song, aware that Mrs. Deacon would hear me down below:

  “Pray fill up my glass: I must drink again.

  A beggar I may be—what then? What then?

  My credit is good, though my coat may be poor:

  Old Nick will come later to settle the score.

  Pour me some more, pour me some more:

  Old Nick will come later to settle the score.”

  Rejoicing to be frivolous again, for the first time in weeks, I reached for pen and paper and composed some burlesque couplets to celebrate the occasion:

  Thus random deeds sequentially connect:

  Effects breed causes, cause begets effect.

  The plan which fails to achieve what we intend

  Perchance conduces to some unseen end.

  Today’s confusion may, in time to be,

  Revert to pattern and to symmetry.

  So monstrous billows, that convulse the deep,

  Subside at last, and rock themselves to sleep.

  The sapling rises as the old tree dies,

  And one man’s fall procures another man’s rise.

  I was half sorry that I no longer had my godfather as a correspondent. He might have been intrigued to see how neatly the old hackneyed maxims applied to my situation. Perhaps he would even have been blackly amused by the turn his experiment had taken.

  I drank more wine and read Sarah’s letter yet again. For weeks I had all but exiled her from my mind. What a fool I had been. Here was an exceptional woman. How fearlessly she spoke out, heedless of caution or convention. How generously she offered me everything she possessed. Together we would forge a remarkable partnership, shining together in London society as solitary Mr. Gilbert withered toward death at Fork Hill.

  She was once more fully alive to my imagination. I remembered her as she had been in the landau, in darkness, all warmth, all longing, her breath mingling with mine. Closing my eyes to lose myself in the memory, I was at once swelling with lust. Not since the nonsense with Mrs. Hurlock had I known venereal relief of any sort. Now body displaced mind, my whore pipe was once more in my hand, and in moments, with a joyful roar, I was spending exultantly, snatching up my poem to protect my breeches.

  Chapter 28

  My dear Richard,

  After my recent illness I was for some time a little weak, but I recovered sufficiently to compose a letter to you. Before it was posted, however, I myself received a letter from Matthew Cullen, the content of which you can guess. In the light of what he said I discarded what I had written. Subsequently I made a number of attempts to start afresh. However, each time I attempted to set down my thoughts, the emphases shifted: something had been omitted or exaggerated. I conclude that there can be no perfect version of what I wish to say; what seems true in the evening may appear doubtful next morning. This letter will fall short of my intentions, but will be as complete as I can make it. I admit to certain inconsistencies in my character: it follows that in trying to speak the truth from day to day, I will prove guilty of self-contradiction.

  I gather from Cullen (who has now received a final payment and is out of the account) that you are resentful and wish to sever all contact with me. It irritates me to know that, through ill health, I myself let slip the clues that aroused your suspicions. On the whole, however, I do not regret what has happened. The time had come for clarification. This letter is intended as a step in that direction, and is an attempt to reconcile us.

  Where to begin? As a boy I never learned to swim. I knew the strokes and practiced them on land, but to no practical effect. I could never yield myself to the water and trust that I would float. When I grew older I experienced what seemed to me to be comparable difficulties elsewhere. Brought up to value self-command, I shrank from drunkenness: repeatedly I found myself the one sober man at a carousal. In the company of women my social self was rendered clumsily incapable by my observing self. I was deeply envious of those such as your father, who freely and easily followed their instincts. Lacking such confidence, I would flinch from a courtship on the pretext of some physical reservation rather than risk rejection. I affected fastidiousness as a cover for my fears, and the affectation hardened into a habit. Rather than repine at my lack of animal vitality, I preferred to pride myself on discrimination and clarity of thought.

  When I inherited the Fork Hill estate, as a young man, I therefore seized eagerly on the excuse to preside over the lives of others rather than take the risk of living my own life to the full. At the practical level I enjoyed some little success: my estate flourished and my tenants prospered. Some of my more ambitious ventures, however, fell short of my hopes. I sought to nurture a second Pope, a second Newton, but engendered merely a Quentin and a Yardley. Several doubtful marriages, including that of the Hurlocks, took place at my instigation, as I found husbands for those I had feared to embrace.

  Over the years I became increasingly dissatisfied with the detached existence to which I had
condemned myself. At Fork Hill House I had everything I needed to gratify eye and ear and palate. I was considered a man of taste—but what had become of my appetite? Where were my Passions? My contempt for Hurlock could be transmuted into contempt for myself. I feared I had become his fleshless obverse, an elegant shell, merely.

  It was no doubt for this reason that I acquired a relish for tales in which an author assumes an alien personality. Thus Defoe can write as seafarer, whore, or pickpocket. Through an imaginary traveler Swift exposes his own obsession with the odors and what he sees as the ugliness of the human body. Fantastically he seats himself, as Gulliver, astride the jutting nipple of a stinking giantess and the self-denunciation is lauded as satire. Yet more revealing has been Richardson’s immersion in his fictional works. Why is Clarissa so grotesquely long? Because the author could not bear to let it end. It gave him freedom to dress and to undress his heroine, to observe and to assault her—and all in the name of morality. Does he not display a self-deception indistinguishable from hypocrisy? Of course he does. But it enabled him to write, through Lovelace, with a wit and iconoclasm that he could never have achieved in his own voice. By indulging a moral weakness, he discovered an artistic strength, and a hidden dimension of his own personality.

  It was in this spirit that I myself looked to experiment. For better or worse I wished to know myself. The possibility of involving you in the project emerged only by degrees. Although your godfather, I saw you but rarely in your early years. When I assumed responsibility for your upbringing, you were a child. At this stage I did not think to make plans for you. I was already conscious, however, of a small seed of curiosity. As you know, your father was a friend of mine at university. He charmed me, dominated me, and in certain activities surpassed me. I found myself wondering—rather in the spirit of Yardley—whether as you grew older you would recapitulate the Fenwick I had once known. As the years passed you did indeed prove to resemble your father, both in appearance and in disposition. I came to be intrigued by the possibility that you could become both a reincarnation of your father and a substitute self for me. You could be my Roderick Random, my Lovelace, but a flesh-and-blood instigator rather than a verbal figment.

  It seemed to me that our partnership promised well. We have enjoyed a happy division of moral responsibility. My excuse can be that it is you, not I, who have been the active performer. But you have had available the disclaimer, equally specious, that you indulged yourself only at my insistence. Setting aside such casuistry, I confess to having learned a great deal about myself, much of it discreditable. The human body still disgusts me, but I enjoy that disgust. I have succeeded in vindicating my detachment, skepticism, and fastidiousness, but through the very process of participating greedily, if vicariously, in their antitheses. Your awareness of the duplicity of my position cannot be keener than my own. I confess that my pleasure at Hurlock’s humiliation was exquisite, and that my conduct with regard to his wife was essentially more gross than yours. But it is in just this respect that my experiments have been bolder than Richardson’s. He escapes the implications of his tale by the arbitrary imposition of a “moral” conclusion in which the good are lauded and the wicked condemned. In any case he purports to stand to one side as a mere narrator. I have been denied recourse to any such crude evasion. I cannot tell how the stories I initiate will conclude—and it is that very uncertainty which most particularly solicits my attention. Moreover, I cannot anticipate just how deeply I will prove to be immersed in them and perhaps deformed by them. I have been as much a subject of these experiments as have you.

  The disappearance and apparent murder of Ogden was the extreme instance of a story taking an unexpected turn. As I told you, I was intrigued by the fact that, far away in Fork Hill, I perhaps knew more of what had happened, and what might have happened, in that case than any of those on the spot. I knew of your hostility to Mr. Ogden and your intended tryst with his wife, knew that you had previously pursued her at a masquerade which her husband also attended. I knew that you visited the coach station on the morning of his departure; I knew of his altered note to Lord Downs, and (through Cullen) of his strange demeanor as observed by Mr. Gow. I even knew of the seemingly coincidental injury to your tongue. Now I learn, from Cullen’s last letter, that by a strange chance your informant, Francis Pike, unexpectedly left the service of Mr. Crocker at this very time . . .

  I think you would share my view that it would be a pity if more should come to be written on this subject.

  You cannot have regretted the opportunities that I put in your way: to go to Oxford, to travel and study abroad, to enjoy a life of leisure in London. How would you have preferred to spend those years? You are offended because I employed Cullen to report on your doings. Is that not a little squeamish? It would neither surprise nor disturb me to learn that you had compared your impressions of my character with those of Thorpe or Mrs. Jennings. Cullen provided an additional perspective on my experiment. In the main he usefully corroborated your own account. He reported certain slights and jests at my expense, but I was never such a simpleton as to think that you would always speak of me with grateful reverence. Through him I was reassured that you were faithfully keeping your side of the bargain. In respect of episodes and characters, his accounts and yours were at one.

  Since that last unfortunate meeting between us, some little time has now elapsed—sufficient, I hope, for your original indignation to have subsided. In a cooler spirit think back once more over your experiences of the past half year, and reflect also what you have learned about me in that time. You may find reassurance in noting that I have shown loyalty to those I have chosen to patronize. Mrs. Deacon, whom you apparently admire, continues to live at ease. Quentin was not discarded when his muse failed—indeed his widow remains in the house I provided for them. Even Hurlock has been allowed to retain much of his estate.

  You have lived comfortably enough, I think, since returning to London. Do you really wish to relinquish this way of life—to exchange the constraints of experiment for the constraints of poverty? Why end an arrangement that we have found mutually beneficial? Your anger with regard to Cullen confirms that you are what I already knew you to be: a young man of spirit—and I have enabled you to exercise that spirit.

  We have need of one another, you and I. It would be an embarrassment to me if it appeared that my godson had been disowned, but an embarrassment I could sustain. More significant is the fact that, to some extent, we are in one another’s power. I have revealed more of myself, and of my secret self, to you than to anyone else. Let me go further: I have come to depend upon you as an external projection of my Passions. You are a necessary prop to me, and one that is irreplaceable. On the other side of the question, this letter may have suggested to you that I have acquired a comparably close insight into your own character and certain of your doings. Mere prudence suggests that we should remain allies.

  I urge you to stay with me, to experiment again, to continue to take risks and to deal in compromise and ambiguity. What will your ultimate reward be? I am averse to making promises. But you are a young man who enjoys a wager. Will you not take your chance?

  Yours, &c.

  * * *

  Dear Mr. Fenwick,

  In my last letter I said that I would soon write again, whether to confirm or to retract the forthright offer I made in it. Am I still of the same mind? Yes, yes, and again yes. I endorse, in this cooler frame of mind, everything that I so precipitately set down. I wholeheartedly renew my offer and long for you to accept it.

  I am compelled to admit, however, that in the intervening time a circumstance has arisen which you may see as an obstacle, although I hope you will not. I will say more on that subject below.

  I am now both calmer and happier. The people here know something of my story from the newspapers or from gossip, and of course they see that I am in mourning. On the whole they have been kind and tactful. Their good feeling perhaps
comes easier because London seems so far away. What is said to have happened there can seem as insubstantial here as a fairy tale. I am real to those I encounter, but my recent past in London is not.

  During these further weeks in York I have become habituated once more to the life within which I was brought up. I have walked familiar streets and met former friends and acquaintances. I have talked with shopkeepers who have worked on through the past three years—years which have so radically altered you and me—exactly as they had done through the previous ten or twenty. To come from London to York is to step back half a century and enter a different world. It is one that seems to suit me: I am happy here.

  Miss Martin professes to consider me greatly changed, and even says that she finds me intimidating—a claim I do not believe. I find her just as she was, still warm, lively, and entertaining. Yet against my will I feel myself somehow wiser and more mature. Is this because I have seen a little of London, merely? Or, still worse, because I am richer? No—rather, I think, because I have lived more fully, have known stronger emotions and temptations, and the sharp taste of guilt.

  You are still remembered here: there have been several inquiries about you. I say that I have met you since your return from your foreign travels and that you are now a fine gentleman. Some speak of you as you were when you were fifteen years old, and if they saw you now could hardly credit what you have become. But I think that if you visited York you could find refreshment here, as I do.

  With regard to the possible “obstacle” mentioned above, I will speak out plainly, since I more and more detest equivocation in all its forms. The truth is that I find I am with child. I would no doubt have perceived the indications a little sooner if my last weeks in London had been less taxing.

  I cannot think that this news will be anything but unwelcome to you. What can I say to make it more acceptable? Let me continue in my candid vein. It so happens that I can calculate exactly when the child was conceived. It was in the early hours of the morning that followed the masquerade. I told you, I think, that my husband returned home with me apparently half frantic with angry lust. I did not add, although I could have done, that he found me physically more receptive than was customary because my embrace with you had fired me with desire. This poor orphan, when it is born, will truly be a child, not of Mr. Ogden merely, but of the masquerade.