by Kate Forsyth
She needed spit.
Every Sunday, when Janey was a little girl, she had got up before dawn to search for flowers in the meadows and woods to sell. At Christmas time, she found holly and ivy and mistletoe. In springtime, primroses and violets. Poppies and cornflowers in summer, and snowdrops and wild clematis in early winter. She would stand on the street corner, dressed in her ragged dress and battered boots, holding out her little bunches tied with twine, crying piteously, ‘Oh, please, kind lady, buy me flowers. Help a poor li’l girl?’
Janey remembered one day acutely. It had been winter, and snow had fallen overnight. Her boots had holes in them, and she had stuffed them with rags to try to keep the cold out. It had taken her almost an hour to reach the woods near Iffley, slosheting through deep snow the whole way. Her dress was damp and bedraggled, and her feet were like lumps of ice. But she was too glad to be worried about the cold. Janey loved the winter woods at dawn. Everything was so pure and clean. It felt as if she was alone in the world, with no-one to shriek at her or beat her. There was no sound but birdsong, and nothing to look at but winter-bare trees with rooks’ nests hanging in their branches, their roots buried in snow.
Janey made her way to one of the secret glades she knew, far from the road or the railway track. Snowdrops pushed their green leaves and drooping pale bells out of the snow, and Janey gathered them quickly, glancing about her all the while in case someone should come. By now, the sun had risen and glittered through the icicles hanging from the tree branches. A fox ran past, leaving tiny pockmarks in the snow.
When Janey’s basket was full, she turned to trudge back to Oxford. She wanted to be back in time for the morning service, in case the vicar’s wife might like some flowers for the altar, or some parishioners a bunch to brighten their Sunday dinner table.
Her legs were leaden, but Janey pushed on. As she came over the hill, she saw the towers and spires of Oxford floating above the snow-dusted trees. It was beautiful enough to catch one’s breath. But Janey knew that stinking rookeries were hidden in the shadows of those golden walls, never more than a few steps away.
Janey came to the old lychgate and stood within its arch. As ladies and gentlemen in their Sunday best hurried towards the church, she held out the bunches of drooping snowdrops imploringly, calling, ‘Buy me flowers. Candlemas bells, the first sign o’ spring! Please, sir, buy some fer the lady?’
One woman gazed at her in pity. ‘Why, look at you! You’re quite blue with cold. And so ragged and thin.’
‘She just dresses that way to try to cozen you out of a few more coins,’ said the gentleman with her. ‘Really, it’s a disgrace. The idle poor in this country should all be locked up in workhouses and taught the value of industry.’
For a moment Janey could not speak, a lump in her throat. The lady looked troubled. ‘Here, let me buy your flowers. They’re so pretty, they give me hope this interminable winter will soon be over. How much will you charge me?’
‘A penny a bunch,’ Janey answered huskily. ‘Lor’ bless ye.’
The lady paid Janey and took the bunch of snowdrops. As she walked away, arm-in-arm with the gentleman, he scolded her about encouraging social parasites. Janey stared after him. She knew what that word meant. Fleas, and lice, and bedbugs, and worms in the gut. She wondered if he had ever scratched his own skin raw.
One day, Janey had thought, I’ll have my own little house in a garden, with a mattress that’s as soft as clouds and sheets as white as new snow. I’ll have teacups that all match, and a silver spoon to stir the sugar. The house will be as clean as scrubbing can get it, and I’ll have fresh flowers and books in every room, as many books as I can find. I’ll wear a silk dress as blue as a summer sky.
One day, I’ll escape from here and I’ll never ever come back.
The morning after her wedding night, Janey opened her eyes and looked around the room in which she lay. The linen was white and crisp, the counterpane rich red velvet. Flowers stood on every surface. The maid had just brought in a tray, set with fine china patterned with roses and a silver teapot. Everything was clean and ordered and sweet-smelling.
It was as if she had longed for this life so hard that she had somehow conjured it into being. Janey hardly dared breathe or blink in case it all dissolved away.
‘Morning, Janey,’ Topsy said and brought a cup of tea, setting it on the table beside her. He kissed her clumsily.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and on an impulse caught his big, square hand and brought it to her lips. ‘Thank you so much.’
She knew she had made the wisest choice, the only choice.
And yet there was still so much sadness inside her.
Don’t ask for too much, she told herself. Keep your dreams small.
Their honeymoon was a whirligig of cathedrals, churches, castles and cobbled laneways. It was as if Topsy wanted to show her everything that had ever inspired him. Janey was content to go with him, listening quietly as he poured out his heart to her. As she gazed up at the immense vaulted stone ceilings, raised so high and so long ago, she thought to herself that all this was built, brick by brick, stone by stone.
It made her think anything was possible.
In Bayeux, she and Topsy went to see Queen Mathilde’s famous tapestry. It was not really a tapestry at all. It was the longest piece of embroidery in the world. Janey walked along its immense length, protected by sheets of glass, as Topsy told her the history it revealed. Betrayal and anger, banquets and battles.
She saw each careful stitch, and imagined the hands that wielded the needle. Had they been young and smooth, or old and gnarled? Had the seamstresses seen what they described in coloured thread – the sword thrust, the screaming horses, the tumbling severed head, the arrow through the eye? Had their fingers been pricked by the needle, smearing the thread with blood?
It made her long to make something as powerful. Janey had never thought that her skill with a needle was anything more than a useful pastime. Yet now she saw that, stitch by stitch, a woman’s needle could bring the past alive. It could tell a story.
She longed to do the same.
10
Death-Watch
Spring 1860
Lizzie lay motionless.
Her eyes were fixed on the small square of glass above her. Clouds drifted across the blue. Sometimes the light darkened for a moment. She could feel the heavy pound of her pulse in her temples.
Her thoughts were untethered. Memories, dreams, lists of things she had not done, splinters of conversations both spoken and imagined, slivers of poems.
Dim phantoms of an unknown ill float through my tired brain … unformed visions of my life pass by in ghostly train …
For years, Lizzie had heard the faint insistent click of the deathwatch beetle in her rafters. She did not understand how she had lived so long. Her brother Charlie had wasted away so rapidly. Within months he had been gone. Yet her spirit lived on in this frail husk of a body, defying all the doctors and all the doomsayers. If she survived another dozen or so weeks, the local church would be tolling thirty-one strokes for her death knell. And anyone who heard would wonder, for a moment, who had died, then go on with their daily business.
It had been two years since Gabriel had abandoned her. Lizzie had thought she would die that very night. Yet it seemed one did not die of a broken heart. The doctors had enforced their cruel rest cure, then sent her back home to her parents. Lizzie could not, she thought, bear the humiliation.
Yet, in the end, what did it matter? The days passed, each as grey and empty as the day before. Her father died, and Lizzie was barely able to muster enough strength to help her mother drape the mirrors and stop the clocks.
Frozen like a thing of stone …
Her body was barren, her poems unpublished, her art ridiculed, her lover unfaithful, her ring finger bare, her soul a desert of ice.
No-one knew what to do with her. Finally Lizzie agreed to go back to Hastings. She had been happy there, once.
Can God bring back the day when we two stood, beneath the clinging trees in that dark wood?
She thought of Gabriel a lot. Almost as often as she thought of food. Her hunger for one was like her hunger for the other. Gnawing away at her flesh. Apparently Gabriel had a new mistress now. A voluptuous beauty with hair like rippling wheat-fields and breasts like melons. Not that Emma had written so. Lizzie had read between the lines. She never answered Emma’s letter and after a while her friend stopped writing.
The hills grow darker to my sight
And thoughts begin to swim.
A door opened somewhere. Footsteps, slow and heavy. Then a knock at her door. Lizzie did not turn her head. She just wished her landlady would stop bothering her. It was no use anymore. She did not need to jam her fingers down her throat to purge herself. Even the smell of any food was enough to start her retching helplessly.
The door opened. ‘Miss Siddal?’ Her landlady’s voice was shrill and anxious. Lizzie guessed she did not want anyone dying under her roof, particularly when they were so far behind with the rent. ‘You have a visitor.’
Lizzie took a slow painful breath, and managed to look towards the door. Even that small motion made the world spin. She pressed her hands flat against the bed, trying to steady her nausea.
Her name was whispered. She knew that voice. She had to wait for the dizziness to subside before she could see him. He was staring at her with black dilated eyes.
‘Lizzie. Oh my God.’
She could only stare at him. Was he real?
O Heaven help my foolish heart
Which heeded not the passing time
That dragged my idol from its place
And shattered all its shrine.
Gabriel looked older. His forehead was higher, the lines about his mouth deeper, the flesh of his body softer. His eyes were bloodshot. He came and sat beside her, gingerly taking one of her hands. He spread her fingers, looking at the knots of bone beneath the papery skin. Her knuckles were red with callouses, the veins standing out like purple cords.
‘What are you doing here?’ she whispered.
Her words were so weak he had to bend his head to hear them. She smelt the sharp citrus of his hair oil, the warm musk of his skin. Her stomach heaved. She managed to roll away from him, bringing her knees up to the hollow of her chest as she retched into the bucket beside her bed. The paroxysm lasted a minute or so. Nothing came up. After it was over, she laid her head down on the pillow and closed her eyes.
‘The landlady says you have barely touched a bite of food in days.’
She lifted her shoulders a fraction of an inch.
‘Lizzie, if you don’t eat … you’re going to die.’ His voice broke. She opened her eyes and looked at him. His face was contorted. ‘Please, Lizzie …’
She lifted his hand, bringing it to her mouth to kiss. ‘I can’t.’
Impossible to explain. She did not understand herself.
Food was poison.
Yet she longed to devour it.
She had to be strong.
She could smell it.
She could lick it.
But she could not taste it. She could not swallow it.
Each time she did, she was sick.
So she had to try not to tempt herself.
‘Lizzie, let me give you just a little broth. It’s as clear as spring water. Nothing that could harm you. Look, I will have a sip.’ Gabriel lifted the invalid cup to his own mouth and drank a mouthful. ‘Mmmm. So delicious. Here, now it’s your turn.’
She stared at him. She must have swooned a while. The window was dark. A lamp had been lit, finding threads of grey in his dark curls. He lifted her up. His arm like an iron bar. ‘Just a sip, Lizzie. Just one. Then I will let you rest.’
She swallowed a mouthful. So rich and greasy in her mouth. She gagged. He rubbed her back soothingly. ‘There, there, it’s all right. Take a deep breath. Lean on my arm.’
She did as she was told. No strength left to fight. Her stomach roiled like the ocean. Then up it came again.
He dampened a towel and washed her face and throat. The vomit had collected in the little cups behind her collar-bones. He had to dip the towel inside to clean it up. All the while, he talked to her in a low, reassuring murmur. ‘Your landlady is very worried about you, did you know that? She’s been at her wits’ end. She wrote to your sister, who wrote to Mr Ruskin, who wrote to me. So I came down.’
Lizzie could remember the landlady begging her for a name, an address, anything. She had said Gabriel’s name. Her landlady had thought she was praying to the holy angels. The thought made her smile.
She looked up into his dear face. ‘I wanted to say goodbye.’
The movement was too much. Once again her stomach rebelled. Once again Gabriel washed her face. He gave her some water to drink. She refused it. He insisted. ‘You need something in your stomach, Lizzie. It will hurt less if you have something to throw up.’
She shook her head.
‘Please, Lizzie. I don’t want you to die. This is all my fault. Please, just eat a little.’
She shook her head.
‘If you’ll just eat, you’ll get better. Please, I promise you, if you can get strong enough to walk to the little church just down the lane, I’ll marry you, I’ll take you home, I’ll look after you. Please, Lizzie, please. I mean it this time.’
She gazed in wonderment at the tears in his eyes. He buried his face in her arm, and she felt the wetness through the cambric of her nightgown. She stroked his hair and murmured something. After a while he sat up again, dashing his arm across his eyes. ‘Just a little mouthful, Lizzie. What harm could that do?’
To please him, she sipped the soup. Once. Twice. Then she shook her head and pushed her cup away. She was tired. She wanted to sleep. With a trembling hand she reached for her laudanum.
Gabriel took it away.
She tried to snatch it back, but did not have the strength.
‘Finish your soup, and you can have your medicine,’ he told her.
Lizzie did not want to. If she drank all the soup, she would have to throw it up again, and she did not want to lose her laudanum too. It was the only thing that stopped the burning in her stomach. She began to weep.
Gabriel did not relent. He held the brown bottle out of her reach, bringing the spout of the cup close to her mouth. ‘Two quick mouthfuls, that’s all you need to do. Just drink it down, Lizzie, then you can rest.’
She drank resentfully. When the soup was all gone, he passed her the laudanum bottle. She measured out her drops and drank them down eagerly.
‘Let’s get you clean and tidy, and then you can sleep.’ Gabriel washed her face and hands with lavender water, helped her into a fresh nightgown, and changed her sheets. He put the vomit-filled bucket outside her door so she did not need to smell it.
She was afraid to be without it.
‘I will get it for you if you need it,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right here for anything you need.’
She lay in her clean sheets, hands gripped together. It was her habit, every night, to run her fingers from the uneven flutter of the pulse in the hollow of her throat, over her protruding collar-bones, and then to tap down her ribs, pair by pair, as if playing some kind of macabre xylophone, counting all the way, until she reached the deep swoop to the skin of her belly. She was afraid that her belly would not be still and flat tonight. It would be swollen and sore. It would slosh if she laid her hands on it. She wanted to hurl it all away from her as hard as she could.
Yet Gabriel would leave her again if he saw her purge.
She laid her hands flat on her chest, feeling the awful bang and hesitation of her heart, and willed herself to endure.
Somehow, she slept.
So the days passed. Gabriel alternated between begging and threatening her. He ate and drank a little from every dish to prove it was not poisoned. He pretended the spoon was a train and her mouth the train tunnel, trying to make her smile so he c
ould slide the food inside her. He brushed her hair and plaited it into a thin braid. He lifted her, as easily as if she was a doll made of china and cloth, and set her in a chair by the window. She could look out at the people passing by. He took away her laudanum until she submitted, and watched her every mouthful like a cat watching a bird pretending to be dead.
‘Just a little more, sweetheart,’ he’d say. ‘Then, when you are strong enough, we’ll get married. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
She swallowed and gagged, then wept and begged him to leave her alone. He coaxed and bullied her, she swallowed some more, then hated herself for her weakness.
It was frightening and shameful. Lizzie felt as though her body was a battleground, between the dark demon of hunger and the avenging angel of her lover. She hated Gabriel too at times. Knocked hot soup over his hand, accused him. He tried to keep his temper, tried to be gentle and kind. She tried to find ways to flay him.
It was like she was reeling about in a world in which all laws of nature had been violently overthrown. There was no vertical, no horizontal, no heaven, no hell, no laws of gravity to stop her from simply drifting away.
Yet each day she somehow managed to swallow a little more.
Mid-May, Lizzie could bear it no longer. The very thought of food touching her lips sent her into a frenzy. She accused him of wanting to be rid of her so he could marry his mistress. She sneered over her name. ‘Fanny Cox … oh that’s subtle!’ She wanted to know when Gabriel had first slept with Fanny, and then would not believe him when he said it was long after they had parted ways. She did not believe him when he said it was over. She threw her bowl of beef tea at him, and then her glass of water. It smashed on the wall. When he begged her to be calm, she flung herself on the bed, screaming and flailing her arms and beating at her own head with her hands. Someone was hissing evil things in her ear. Someone like the Devil himself.
Gabriel could not stand it. He went out, slamming the door behind him. He was gone for hours. Slowly Lizzie grew cold and afraid. When he at last came back, she crept into his arms and promised that she would try, she would eat, just, please, please, don’t leave her.