by Sara Collins
My wife. My first act as a husband was to disappoint her. I remember how she settled herself on the bed and stopped to take a swallow of laudanum and brandy, a concoction I’d made for her, thinking it would soothe her nerves. ‘It is all your brother ’s money?’ she said. Yes, I told her, most of it. She’d thought me wealthy because I lived at Longreach. But England’s second sons share the elders’ blood, not their fortunes. By dint of primogeniture I am Percy’s second in every way, and not just the speed of our respective occupation and vacation of dear Mama’s womb.
It is for Marguerite’s own good that I ask the girl to keep an eye, though no one is less likely to recognize her own good than Marguerite. I married her knowing I made myself more caretaker than husband. That suited me. Marriage as self-flagellation. A perfect irony. The counter-weight on the scale. Marriage as redemption for my sins. Let marriage stay my hand, I thought.
I remind myself of Johnson: A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused and laugh at the time, but they will be remembered and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion.
Reputation is everything.
I confess only to God.
I reminded the girl I want a record of everything. Who visits and who writes and who is written to. To whom Meg pays calls. How much laudanum, how often. Told her it is on this condition she stays on. When she asked how she’d manage for ink, I told her to dip her pen at my wife’s own inkwells, if she had to. Made her startle like a pigeon. She’ll do it, of course. No other choice.
Why do you want it written down? she asked.
My motives are none of her concern.
To quote Ovid: Exitus acta probat. The result will justify my deeds.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.
The heat – a slow syrup on my face, her voice dripping Shakespeare straight into my ears. The line should stop after love, she used to say. Love is not love. ‘Have you read Shakespeare before, Frances?’ Fingers hot on my wrists. Her laugh a shop-bell. Then her face shut, and she sat up, remembering. ‘Did he really send no reply?’
‘He didn’t.’
‘La! Well, never mind. I will simply write again. He wants to be persuaded. A bit of flattery. Bring him to the cause.’
‘Is it not more his cause than yours already?’
She shot me a look.
‘Mr Cambridge said you should go to the Devil and he didn’t want your sport.’ The words tumbled out on a single breath.
‘Did he?’ She smiled. ‘Well. That is to his credit.’
The following day, I came upon her scratching notes onto her walls. She bubbled like something boiling. All nerves and sweat. ‘I have to learn to fend for myself,’ she said, without turning her head. She laid her hands flat against the wall, her nails shivering like moons. Ink dripped in black beads from her forefinger. Nothing could be made out against the dark paint, so she took up the poker instead, and scored ash across the skirts of the woman in red. She stepped back and nodded. Become your own WOMAN! she’d written.
I lifted a napkin from her tray, dampened it, scrubbed at the wall until my arms ached. The wet ash clung stubborn as moss, and the entire wall looked as if there’d been a fire.
Her voice, from behind: ‘Are you never tired of cleaning up after me?’
Her words ate at me. Stitched a cruel embroidery on my brain. I set the napkin down on the bed. ‘There you are. Fend for yourself, then.’
She was two women. One confident, the other nervous. One bright, the other dark.
I’d seen from the start how her moods swung, but she’d seemed so happy for a time I’d almost forgotten it. Now they grew rickety and black again, hanging like a burned bridge. I continued to note her doses, as instructed, but the gap widened between the amount I wrote and the amount she took. The cabinet doors stayed open, and the bottles uncorked. The room flooded with that sweet slack smell.
‘You remember how it was when you got here,’ said Pru, when I went down to the kitchen to make up a tray. Watery tea and rusks. Pru cut a slice out of a loaf curved like a jaw, and made me take that also, with some marmalade, to see if she could be tempted. ‘She’ll keep to her bed for a few days, but then she’ll swing around.’
We were closed in her room (which was why none save Linux remarked on it, later, when we were locked in there again). Benham said Dr Fawkes must be fetched, and I heard them whispering: ‘. . . bleed away a few ounces . . . hysteric . . . increase the paregoric . . .’ I heard Fawkes saying it was an imbalance of the humours, an excess of the black bile. From Benham’s response, it seemed it wasn’t the first time. Benham said I must fetch a soup bowl and sit with her while she was bled.
When I went back in, she’d cast her covers aside. Worrying about what lay in store. Fawkes swore by bleeding, dieting, hot baths and opium, to restore the balance. ‘Those are his articles of faith,’ she said. ‘Only the opium is pleasurable.’ I coaxed her with barley broth, teas, mashed carrot. Nursery food. And I poured out her doses. A little for her, a little for me. I washed her blood from the bowl. I cleaned her. I did it gladly. And never allowed myself to think of Phibbah, or of Miss-bella.
Melancholia. Black bile. The very thing that stains black skin, and that I’d scribed about, for Langton. Even her affliction is the same as mine, I thought.
It shrank the world to her bed, and blackened the windows. A great hand pressing her down: she felt it in her head, and her aching joints.
The first evening after Fawkes came, she wanted to sit near the window. The sky was just turning pink and she wanted to see it curling like a ribbon around the clouds. That night, this is what she wrote: Whenever I stand on the edge of a great height ‒ a bridge, a balcony ‒ I am swept by a sudden desire to leap. But melancholia is not the leap, it is the desire. The constant irrepressible agonizing urge.
Sad for no reason, Pru said, sniffing.
But it seemed to me she had more than one.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Two days later, Fawkes came again. He told me to warm some tumblers over the stove, and then he cupped blisters high on her back, between her shoulders. When all else failed, he brought in a jar that had LEECHES printed on it, holes punched into the lid. There were hundreds of the creatures inside, like little black tongues, blind as earthworms. I propped her against my chest while he fastened them one by one across her shoulders, and then we waited, him at the window with his hands clasped behind his back, her in one of the chairs, the fastenings of her bodice still loose, and her gown slipping off her shoulders. The leeches grew like soap bubbles, until one by one they fell away and we could carry her to bed.
The only good thing about it was that it drained her enough to sleep, curling and withering, like paper in a fire.
I am sorry to say that my own taste for laudanum grew then. It had started with single drops, but now built to a need that shook through my hands as soon as I took out the bottle to prepare her dose. Before it begins to eat your insides, opium is like a flame. It is all energy, and at the same time all rest. It pulls close all the meshwork of your own brain. Joys become raptures. Best of all, it drains the world away. I grew to need it as she did, the only thing that could soothe my cracked heart. Yet that is one of my most bitter regrets. For that evil substance made it impossible to keep my wits about me, and smudged all my remaining days with her.
During one of those weeks, Mr Casterwick came upon me, as he said at my trial: once in the kitchen, writing upon the table with a pen that wasn’t there; the second time, in the garden, searching for a baby in the hawthorn, saying that I’d taken an infant, and needed to return it.
That frightens me, even as I write it. Because I’ve no memory of it, but it sounds so much like something that could be true.
Laudanum stripped me of memory, as well as shame.
‘You hear such stories,’ she told me. ‘But all that is needed is self-control. Accord
ing to Paracelsus, it is the dose that’s the poison.’
She ran her fingers over the lip of the vial. I sucked and sucked, and she did too. Liquid stuck to my lips. My feet glided over the carpet, the furniture thickened to dark shapes. The blighted world passed before my eyes in a sweet numbness. I had opium dreams. I dreamed a field, stretching as far away as the eye can see. I dreamed cane into it, in long, straight rows. The earth was wet and dark. The cane has had a good rain watering, I thought, but when I looked down I saw that the wetness was blood. Mud, blood.
When I looked up again, towards the horizon, Miss-bella was there. This is always how it happens. She looks from me to the small boy who kneels in the grass, his head bowed, gripped by calipers. Then I dream Langton. His voice: Note this, Frances. Write this down. The bones of the head are moulded to the brain. The size of the cranium, the quantity of the cerebrum. Then Miss-bella raises her hand, points a trembling finger, and shouts, You are a monster, you are a monster, you are a monster. And I look around. Who is she talking to? Who does she mean?
Then I realize that the person she is looking at, the person she is pointing at, is me.
The next morning I woke in a lather of sweat, drawing the laudanum vial towards me. The more I drank, the more I needed.
The air thickened to wool, soured my armpits. The day wore on. I fetched down a novel, lay beside her trying to read aloud. Laudanum blurred the pages, so I put my finger between them, tilted my head back. The woman in red stared as if she’d spring from the wall. Her skirts still stained. Become your own WOMAN! The more I watched, the whiter her face became. The paint washed together until it could have been anything, until it could have been ash and blood and bone.
I sat up, head whirling.
Madame was too restless to pay attention. A panic had come over her, and now it catapulted her into the cabinet for her dose. A few weeks before she’d fallen ill, we’d attended a Blacks’ Ball held in a public house near Fleet Street. More blacks there than I’d ever seen in any one place before, skin from tar to coffee to milk. Some so pale only their hair would tell you the truth. She had gone in her boy’s disguise, but now she was fretting that we could be found out. The time for worry would have been before we went, I told her. I hadn’t written a word about it in the notes I delivered to Benham. I felt a stab of guilt that I’d written anything, though it had been mostly lies and inventions. I did it because I had to give him something since he’d commanded it. Same reason as I’d answered his questions about Paradise.
The room had an air of waiting for something to happen, while knowing it never would. I wanted to stop her nail-biting, and her chatter, so I asked, ‘What would you take if we could leave?’
‘What do you mean?’ she said, lowering her hand. ‘Leave? Here? What an idea!’
‘What if you could take only one thing?’
‘It would be hard to leave my books, certainly . . . but I would take . . . my portrait. La femme en rouge. No question. And the egg-chest. La! Two things, then! I am a cheat, I know.’ She smiled. ‘Maman would just have to roll herself up and consent to be stored inside Papa.’
I looked up at the woman in red. Her dress a stopped heart. Madame didn’t ask me what I would take, perhaps because nothing in that room belonged to me.
White doctors are more curse than cure and Fawkes was no exception. Useful for drumming up their trade, I suppose, but not for making anyone better. I told her the energy was draining out of her with her blood, that we needed to leave the room.
Leaves swung heavy as apples, and sunlight cast green shadows across the pond-water, where flies looped like black thread. But the light hurt her eyes, and she found it still too warm, and would not walk far, though she consented to sit in the parlour instead. I arranged her on the window-bench where she could look out, with her white lace shawl across her knees. She asked if I might fetch her the newspapers, usually left on the sideboard in the dining room after breakfast. When I brought them to her I instantly wished I’d told her they’d already been cleared. For there’d been a bout at Five Courts, a ‘blood-soaker’, and he was in there. Black fists, blacker grin.
‘Look.’ She pressed a finger to the sketch. ‘Laddie.’
‘I can see that.’
I drew away, folded myself at the far end of the bench. Looked out towards the garden, snaking away to the pond. But it had the opposite effect on her. It pulled a thread through her spine, and put a singing note through her voice. She turned the page, said perhaps she’d take a cordial, and some fruit, and did I want to see if Charles would set up the card table?
Until that moment, her melancholy had seemed to be a kind of rootless grief. Now I wondered if the source hadn’t been the very man whose image had been the first thing to pierce it.
What was it she’d said, the night of his lecture? Laddie Lightning had become his own man, and that was what she admired. Then she had spelled out her own misery on her walls: Become your own WOMAN!
Suspicion began to eat at me like rats on leather.
Perhaps she’d still be alive if I’d been able to stopper up that jealousy. But instead I let my doubts stick fast, like mud on a heel.
She kept mostly to her bed, though venturing out into the garden more and more. One morning, as far as the park. Two weeks later, Benham insisted she attend a dinner party with him, a feat she managed only with the help of laudanum, bringing back the smells of all those other people on her. Tonics and potions and pomades.
After a time, she opened the house. Her friends dribbled in. She started going out again. When she did, whispers followed her.
Another spell. The black drop, you know.
Perhaps all that whatever-it-was with the boy should have been a warning to him.
She spoiled him, like a little lord. Instead of the servant he was. Cruel, of course, to raise a child in a manner that exceeds his expectations. Especially a black.
They should have no expectations at all, of course.
Their gossip wounded me, but also became the only thing that would soothe those wounds. I wanted more and more. Needing to know what had happened between her and him. But she wouldn’t speak of it, and Pru, who’d been my only steady source before, chose that moment to clamp her lips. ‘It wouldn’t be seemly, Fran, gossiping about all that, not when Linux might spring up any minute.’
I would soon learn more than I cared to about all of it.
Chapter Thirty
They weren’t her friends. That was merely the label hanging off them, like those Piccadilly sweets.
One afternoon Hep Elliot paid her a visit, bringing Laddie Lightning with her. An act of pure mischief, if you ask me.
She and I had planned to spend the afternoon at the park. Now I had no choice but to smile through my misery, shift along the bench. Just breathe in all my crackling frustration. Keep it locked inside. I had some pastries with me, which I’d brought up from the kitchen. Little currant pastries in the shape of pigs. Hep Elliot spied the plate, and leaped on it, handing them around, and asking if Madame thought Linux could be persuaded to bring up some of her famous elderberry wine.
I tried not to look at Laddie, but of course he drew the eye also. The great stampede he made of himself, pulling to a stop at the mantel. He was suited again, and at least had managed to ensure he was clean of blood.
‘Took the painting down?’ he asked, scratching at one of the bayoneted horses. ‘What a shame.’
She flinched. Her eyes flew to mine as if asking for help, knowing full well no help could come. She’d have to sweep him out of there on her own.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Not happy to see me unless it’s you who picks the place?’
‘Of course I am happy to see you, Laddie.’
‘Olaudah. I prefer Olaudah, unless I’m in the ring. And I believe your exact words were that the entire Benham family would be gratified to know how I had fared.’
Well, what could she say to that? She pinched her mouth shut. I saw her throw
ing glances towards the door. Oh, she was anxious. He was right: she might have been happy to see him, but she was not happy to see him there. Two of her coils slipped their pins, running into little dark pools that hid her face. He grinned, and shrugged his shoulders, eyeing the mantel again and looking as if he would bite it. I saw nothing there to catch his interest, save for a spray of lilies in a vase that Linux had made up that morning, and wondered if he was staring at it simply not to stare at her. He had just crossed to the window bench and she was reaching up to tidy her hair when Benham walked in. The silence that unfurled then seemed a solid thing. Went up like a sail. She struck up some stream of nervous chatter but Benham shushed her, looking for all the world as if Laddie simply wasn’t there. He just looked around at each of them, and nodded. Though when he sat and swapped words with Hep Elliot, I heard his voice straining behind its leash of teeth.
Later, I went down to the empty parlour and sat on the window-bench to finish up the bit of white-work she wanted to lay on her mantel. It was in a spider’s web pattern, and difficult, with that laudanum-quiver in my hands. All that thread, and having to prick white violets onto white cotton. But she’d wanted violets, and I wanted her happy. She’d said Laddie had caught her by surprise, that afternoon; she was worried Benham might object. I pointed out that she’d been the one to write him, and seemed to be forever changing her mind.
After a time, I heard her and Benham in the hallway, him saying the boy was not welcome, her saying surely opening their doors to him was the best way to pour water on the rumours, then asking would he come inside and sit with her awhile. Trying to appease him, I thought. When they came together into the room, I looked down again, hoping to stay invisible, and kept on pulling the ant-bite stitches through the cloth. The drawn curtains sieved out some of the heat, left the room dark enough for them to want candles lit, which Pru came in and did for them. When she’d finished, Benham asked would she fetch him a plate of Linux’s almond cake, and then he sat sucking marzipan from his fork. His shoulders sloped like hillsides. For a time, it was quiet, but she sidled looks at him, the way you come at a bad dog sideways. She turned a page of her magazine and reached for a sip of brandy. I had a thirst for it too, but no one had offered me any.