by Kate Forsyth
Topsy tried to reach her, almost tipping them all into the river. Janey and May held him steady, crying out to Jenny. When her head did not break the water, Topsy dragged off his coat and plunged into the river. For a long awful moment both were gone. Then Topsy’s head broke free. Jenny lay, limp and unconscious, in his arms. He managed to swim to shore, and dragged Jenny on to the bank. Wielding one oar each, Janey and May struggled to bring the boat about.
When Janey reached her daughter’s side, she thought at first that Jenny was dead. Her face was colourless, her eyelids bruised with shadows. Topsy turned her on to her side, and water gushed from her mouth. Somehow they managed to get her home, water dripping from her sodden dress and boots, and found a doctor. He thought she had fainted, perhaps from studying too hard, and recommended rest.
A few days later, Janey and Topsy and the two girls were eating dinner when one of Jenny’s arms suddenly stiffened, knocking over her glass. Her body twisted and jerked, then she fell, slamming her head into the sideboard. Her body shuddered and shook most strangely. Janey and Topsy tried to hold her still, but she thrashed under their hands like a fresh-caught eel. One hand caught Janey a glancing blow across the jaw. One foot juddered spasmodically.
Gradually the tremors subsided. Jenny lay still, her eyes twitching under their lids, one finger jerking. Janey’s heart was racing, her breath coming as unevenly as if she had just run upstairs. Topsy was ashen. May stood nearby, her hands at her mouth, her eyes dark with shock.
‘What is it, what’s wrong?’ Janey cried.
Topsy crooned his daughter’s name, brushing the heavy hair away from her face. She looked dazed and vacant, and did not respond. He helped her sit up. She gazed about her, bewildered, then put up one hand to touch the back of her head. It was a few minutes before she seemed able to talk, or understand what had happened.
Janey helped her daughter to bed, tucked her in with a hot-water bottle, gave her water to drink, a lavender-scented handkerchief to hold. Janey hardly knew what she was doing. She felt strange and disconnected, as if her limbs would not quite work properly.
Topsy had gone out to fetch the doctor. After he examined Jenny, he took Topsy aside. Janey waited in a fever of anxiety outside the study door. When at last the doctor left, looking very sombre, Janey went in hesitantly.
Topsy was weeping.
‘She has epilepsy,’ he said roughly. ‘The doctor says we need to send her to an asylum.’
Janey’s knees weakened. She sank into a chair. ‘No. No.’
‘She’ll never have a normal life. She won’t be able to marry or have children. She can’t go to university. The doctor says the seizures cannot be predicted or controlled. He’s given me the name of an asylum in Kensington …’
‘No!’ Janey struck her hands against the chair arms. ‘No, I won’t have it.’
Topsy scrubbed his hands through his hair. ‘You want to keep her at home?’
‘Yes. Of course. We must.’
He dashed his hand across his eyes. ‘Are you sure? I must say I cannot bear the thought …’
‘Jenny will stay at home,’ she said, trying to steady her voice.
Topsy gazed at her in gratitude. ‘Thanks, old chap,’ he said huskily. The highest compliment he could give.
That night Janey could not sleep, tortured by the fear that she had somehow brought this terrible affliction upon Jenny. It was the first of many sleepless nights.
The seizures came without warning. Once Jenny fell down the stairs and ended up with a badly bruised face and a twisted knee. Another time she stumbled while carrying a tray loaded with a steaming teapot and teacups. She burned her hand and arm badly and broke all the china. Only a few days later she fell heavily while standing on a chair to reach a book on a high shelf. Running to her, lifting her up from the ground, Janey hurt her back. She paid no attention at all to her own pain, only cradled her jerking daughter in her arms and tried to wipe away the blood pouring from a cut on her forehead.
Janey could never rest. Any sudden noise or cry brought her running. Sometimes it was another fit. Sometimes it was just children at play in the street, or a servant dropping a hearth-brush. Either way, Janey would startle like a hunted animal, her pulse accelerating.
The doctor prescribed bromide for Jenny, a type of sedative. It made her slow and stupid. She no longer read much, or wrote very many stories, or climbed trees, or practised dance steps with her sister. She sat, staring into space, her hands limp. Until the next fit came upon her, and she fell again, convulsing, as if stricken with lightning.
Janey would let no-one else care for her daughter.
It was her punishment.
The afternoon wore away, Janey and May keeping themselves busy with their embroidery and Jenny staring sullenly into space. She had grown podgy and round-shouldered since her diagnosis, and her eyes had a vacant look. She paid no attention to May’s chatter about her studies at the South Kensington School of Art, and did not laugh when her sister called the Queen Mrs Brown. Janey was sorry she had made her anxiety too obvious, and tried to coax Jenny out of her sulks.
‘I can have the lap desk brought out for you if you like,’ Janey said.
Jenny shrugged. ‘What’s the point?’
‘If you’d like to finish what you were writing.’
Jenny made no response.
‘Were you working on a new story? I’d love to read it.’
‘I’m not a child, Mother. You do not need to pretend interest in what I do.’
Janey was hurt. ‘I’m not pretending. Please show me.’
Jenny jerked one shoulder. ‘It’s not worth showing.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
Jenny got up so abruptly her chair fell over backwards. Janey was on her feet at once, ready to rush to her side.
‘Just leave me alone,’ Jenny said in a voice of suppressed tears. She ran into the house.
Janey bent and picked up her fallen embroidery, making sure the fine linen was not stained by grass. She began to follow her daughter into the house. ‘Mother, just leave her be,’ May said. ‘You’ll hear soon enough if she has a fit.’
Janey did not answer. She went quietly up the stairs and stood for a while outside Jenny’s door. She could hear her daughter sobbing. She went down the hall and into her own room, sitting on her bed. A feeling of suffocation. Head pounding. Back aching. She took out her letters and poems from Gabriel, and lay back on the bed, undoing the ribbon and unfolding them one by one, reading all her favourite lines.
I have just kissed your handwriting, the most welcome thing in the world that I could have seen today …
… my deep regard for you – a feeling far deeper (though I know you never believed me) than I have entertained towards any other living creature at any time of my life. Would that circumstances had given me the power to prove this, for proved it wd. have been …
I really feel, seeing you so little, as if I must seem neglectful and careless of all you have to endure. But I hope you believe that it is never absent from my thoughts for a moment and that I never cease to long to be near you and doing whatever might be to distract and amuse you. To be with you and wait on you and read to you is absolutely the only happiness I can find or conceive in this world, dearest Janey …
Janey lifted the letters to her lips and kissed his handwriting, as he had once kissed hers.
She remembered Gabriel as she had first seen him, handsome and laughing and telling her she was a rare beauty and that he must paint her. And then she remembered how she had last seen him, hobbling on a stick, his eyes pouched and sunken, his hands palsied.
It was cruel.
His last portrait of her had been another Proserpina. The eighth time he had drawn her as the goddess of spring trapped in the Underworld. In this last version, however, he painted her with Lizzie’s auburn hair. It was as if he could not remember who was who.
It hurt so much.
If only things could have been dif
ferent.
Janey lay on her soft four-poster bed, hung with richly embroidered cloths. There was a thick Oriental carpet on the floor, and a beautiful old gilded jug and bowl on her washstand. On the wall was one of Gabriel’s most beautiful drawings of her. The curtains were open, showing a view of the garden and the vivid flowers of the tulip tree.
Janey would have given it all up if she could once again be a barefoot girl selling violets on the streets of Oxford, with her life before her and the chance to put her arms about Gabriel and never let him go. Looking back at her life, it seemed one long chain of mistakes and misunderstandings.
Yet here she was, a rich man’s wife, in a house any sensible woman would envy.
She and Topsy had moved to this Georgian brick mansion after Jenny’s diagnosis. They had needed room for servants to help with Jenny’s care, and privacy where Jenny could be kept away from the stares and sniggers of the world. Epilepsy was considered a social shame by most people. Akin to idiocy, lunacy, catalepsy. If Jenny’s condition was known, May might never be able to marry. They had to keep it secret.
The house had wonderful views over the river to Hammersmith Bridge, a coach-house where Topsy had set up his spinning-wheels and looms, a big garden and orchard, a glasshouse. It had once belonged to George MacDonald, who had written his beautiful fairytales At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and the Goblin whilst living there. Topsy liked to think some of his fantastical imagination would rub off on him. The house had been called The Retreat, but Topsy thought it sounded too much like an asylum and changed its name to Kelmscott House, to link it with the other house that lay on the Thames one hundred and twenty miles away.
Topsy was busier than ever with work. There had been an arsenic scare, which culminated in Queen Victoria stripping all the wallpaper out of Buckingham Palace after a guest had complained of headaches and nightmares from sleeping in a room with green walls. The public had, of course, followed suit and sales of Morris & Co wallpaper had plummeted. It infuriated Topsy, who stormed about tearing at his hair and offering to eat a pound of the stuff to prove it wasn’t poisonous. The Firm had to issue statements declaring they had already switched to arsenic-free dyes and paints, only to find that many of their products did, indeed, still contain arsenic.
Janey could not help wondering if Topsy’s wallpapers were the cause of her own aches and pains and illnesses.
She never said a word, though.
That too was her punishment.
Janey became aware of feet pounding on the stairs, her name being shouted.
It was like being touched with a live wire. She was on her feet, the letters thrust under her pillow, her feet running towards the floor. ‘Jenny!’ she cried. ‘What has happened? Is she hurt?’
Topsy was hurtling up the stairs before her, a telegram in his hand. His grey curly mop was wild, his face wet with tears.
She had only ever seen him weep once before.
‘Oh God,’ Janey whispered. ‘What has happened?’
‘He’s dead,’ Topsy wept. ‘Oh, Janey, he’s dead.’
Janey did not need to ask who.
The world tilted. She sank to her knees, her skirts ballooning about her. She stared without seeing before her.
Gabriel was dead.
5
Love-in-a-Mist
Spring–Autumn 1882
‘It is like seeing a colossus come crashing down,’ Ned said sadly.
‘It’s left a hole in the world that will not be filled in a hurry,’ Topsy said.
The two men were sitting in the garden at the Grange, drinking tea. Georgie sat with them, her darning in her lap. It was a bright, brisk day, with daffodils tossing their yellow heads and a chaffinch chirping in the budding apple boughs. Georgie wore a warm woollen jacket over her dress, but was bareheaded. Ned was in his usual loose smock, daubed with paint, while Topsy was dressed like a sailor in a rough serge coat and loose trousers. His hands were woad-blue from his latest experiment in dyeing wool and silk.
‘I went a few times to visit him, but it was just unbearable,’ Ned said. ‘It was like he was a ghost already.’
‘Such a waste,’ Topsy said. He went to say something else, then thought better of it, closing his mouth firmly over the words. Georgie knew that he felt a great deal of bitterness over Gabriel’s betrayal of him, and a kind of grief over the tarnishing of his idol. He stood up. ‘I had better get back to work. Thanks for tea, old chap.’
‘Good to see you, Tops,’ Ned said, standing up. His thoughts were already turning back to his painting.
‘I’ll walk you out,’ Georgie said.
She went with Topsy to the garden gate, then asked him quietly, her hand on the latch, ‘How is Jenny?’
‘Worse. Much worse.’ Topsy kicked at the damp ground with the heel of his boot. ‘She’s having seizures nearly every day now. When you see it … well, you can understand why they used to think epileptics were possessed by demons.’
‘I’m so sorry. Is there nothing they can do?’
‘No. I’d do anything … anything …’ He stopped himself again, his face screwing up with the effort. ‘It’s all my damned fault, Georgie. She got it from me. How can I forgive myself?’
Georgie was surprised. ‘But you don’t have epilepsy, Topsy. Do you?’
‘My mother had it … and I … damn it, sometimes I lose all control … I don’t know where the hell I am or what I am saying …’
‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ Georgie said, giving his arm a squeeze.
He sighed. ‘Who else am I to blame?’
God, Georgie thought but did not say.
‘And what of Margot? Is she any better?’
Georgie thought of her beautiful, delicate daughter, who felt everything so intensely. ‘I’m hoping she’ll start feeling better now that spring is here. It was such a long, dark, hard winter, wasn’t it?’ She heard the melancholy in her voice, and tried to smile.
Topsy nodded. ‘Indeed, I feel it’s been an evil year. So much war, so much death. It’s not just Gabriel. The troubles in Ireland … the Tsar being assassinated and the American President too … and even some crazy damned fool shooting at the Queen … because she did not like his poetry. It’s madness!’
‘Perhaps this year will be better.’
‘I feel as if I must do something.’
Georgie smiled at him. ‘You do so much. It’d be impossible for you to do any more.’
Topsy made one of his characteristic restless movements, broad hands gesticulating. ‘I mean about the world. I want to leave the world a better place than it was when I came into it.’
‘You already have,’ she said firmly. ‘Your poetry … your beautiful designs … your wonderful speeches on the importance of the arts.’
‘That’s all very good,’ Topsy said, ‘but who the hell ever listens to me?’
‘I do,’ Georgie said.
He flushed and shuffled his feet a little. ‘Oh, yes, but you don’t count, old chap.’
She gave his arm one last pat. ‘Go on, off you go. I will see you soon.’
Georgie shut the gate behind him, and then went up to her daughter’s bedroom. Margot lay curled around her cat, reading. There was a tottering pile of books next to her bed. Georgie recognised Margot’s childhood favourites. Black Beauty. The Princess and the Goblin. The Water Babies. Alice in Wonderland. Georgie smiled a little. She had always thought Gabriel had been the model for the Mad Hatter, with his purple velvet coat with dormice peeking out of his pockets and wombats sleeping in pie dishes on his dining-room table.
Then her smile faded. It was impossible to think of Gabriel without grief.
Georgie steeled her nerve, then dragged back the curtains and flung open the window. The cold spring wind rushed inside, rustling the book’s pages.
‘Oh, Mammy, please don’t,’ Margot said.
‘It’s a beautiful day. I want you up and dressed and out in the sunshine.’
Margot heaved a
huge sigh. ‘Oh, do I have to?’
Georgie sat down on the end of her bed and took one of her thin, nervous hands. ‘Jenny has been very sick.’
Margot was still at once, her eyes fixed on her mother’s face.
‘The fits come upon her any time of day or night. She cannot be left alone anymore. She can’t have a bath without someone watching her, or go out to tea with friends.’
‘That’s so awful.’
‘Her whole future is blighted, Margot. And there’s nothing anyone can do.’ Georgie stood up and went to her daughter’s wardrobe, pulling out a warm blue dress and some thick stockings. ‘Which is why you are going to get up and walk in the fresh air and give me some help in the house. I don’t know why you’ve been so sad, Margot. I’m sorry for it, you know I am. I’m not, however, going to stand by and watch you wallow in misery when there’s no need for it. You have your whole life lying before you, filled with every possibility of happiness. So get dressed and come downstairs. And whenever you feel a fit of the blues coming on, you just think of Jenny and be grateful that it’s not you.’
As Georgie went out, she heard Margot slowly moving about her bedroom and felt a rush of relief. She had been so afraid that her daughter would sink into the slough of despond as her mother had done, never to recover.
Not while I have breath in my body, she vowed and went downstairs to start gathering daffodils.
In late summer, the whole family moved down to Rottingdean where they had bought a little house by the sea. Georgie loved it down there. She had no need to fear the notorious Madame Zambaco lurking in the bushes.