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Authors: April Bernard

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BOOK: Miss Fuller
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She had two daughters in three years’ time; and then they waited, anxiously, for a son, who arrived at last, as if the wait had been designed to make his arrival the more joyous, a few years later. By then they had moved into the main house, nicely set up on the hill, with Mother Bratcher, now a widow, and a bachelor uncle. Here the walls were elegantly papered. With her children Anne painted flowers and birds and fanciful landscapes on the furniture — except for the dining-room table and chairs, which Mother Bratcher insisted be left alone. In the nursery, she painted the life-cycle of the tadpole-to-frog around one window frame; around the other, that of the Monarch butterfly, with leaves and eggs on the bottom, three of the gaudy waist-coated caterpillars climbing up the left side, their chrysalides, jade green with dots of gold, decorating the top, and the butterflies taking flight along the right.

In these years, on the rare occasions when she and Henry were alone, Anne sometimes asked about the letter in the desk. Henry answered that it was still there, that no one had come for it or asked after it.

What Henry did not tell his sister was that on one occasion curiosity had successfully tempted him to look at the pages. His excuse was that he had been ill. It had been a cold spring, hardly a leaf in bud in April, and the rain was always mixed with snow. In a very heavy sleet, Henry had gone out to work. He liked the rain, he almost even liked it leaking into his boots, when he waded through pastures that had become ponds, and he loved it pouring off the brim of his hat.

A farmer whose fields abutted Emerson’s land in Walden Woods was selling off an additional parcel to the railroad. It was foolish to attempt surveying work in the wet — the steel needles and plates corroded, the plumb lines stretched — but he did it anyway, even knowing he would have to do it again. Henry stood knee-deep in the meadows for two days and then came down with a cough. Teas and broths and bed were his punishment for more than a week, while he lay feverish and dreamy. Once he woke to find the tabby cat stretched out on her back purring beside him. She seemed not the slightest concerned about the Canary-bird, who was chirping so indignantly from her cage in the window that it sounded like yelling. Henry dragged himself over to the bird and threw a cloth over the cage, silencing her, then, faint with the effort, turned back to speak to the cat.

“Oh, Miss Kitty, I feel like the devil.”

The tabby sat up and stared at him, cocking her head slightly. The dream he had just left came rushing back to
him, so overwhelmingly that he felt dizzy, laid his head down, and muttered aloud, “Margaret!”

The cat bounced off the bed and went straight to the little lap-desk, where it sat pushed against the wall at one end of the big table. With one light jump, she landed on the narrow flat part of the top and, ever so slightly, lashed her tail.

Henry saw, again, Margaret’s face — his dream of her talking, animated, at some gathering, then the water, water from the meadows, rising and rising, now a monstrous wave, over her face. He stared at the cat.

Slowly, he shuffled over to the lap-desk, weakly picked it up, and weakly shuffled it back to his bed. He re-made his nest in the quilts, this time sitting upright. He placed the desk on his knees. It smelled of salt and that medicinal tang of sea-weed.

Very gingerly, he tugged back the rickety hasp, lifted the lid, and touched the top page with his hand. Margaret was speaking to him, she wanted him to read this.

He bent over the desk, not taking the pages out, and began to read. He read the first page, then set it beside the pile. He began the second page.

A sense of cold dread filled him and recalled him to reality.

He dropped the page and shut the lid, replaced the hasp, and with more energy than before took the desk back and this time shoved it beneath the table and out of sight. Draped in his quilt, he paced the floor and said aloud, “I’m sorry,
that was none of my business, I’m so sorry, please forgive me, it will never happen again.”

Reading another person’s letter. And from one woman to another. He was, as well as a sneak, a scoundrel. But Margaret would forgive him, and Mrs. Hawthorne would not know.

He never liked having the desk in his room, but felt no temptation to read the letter again. It might as well have been bound with hoops of steel, and guarded by an angel with a fiery sword. Or something like that, fiery swords rising, spinning like spokes of a wheel from the cold undertow of his dreams.

TWO

IF FOUND, THIS LETTER IS FOR SOPHIA HAWTHORNE IN CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS. M.F. OSSOLI
.

On the 17th of May, 1850, hours out of Livorno, aboard the merchant ship
Elizabeth
bound for New York—

My dearest Sophie, as always you are to me—

How extraordinary to be on board & coming home —!

Here I must compose my thoughts. Perhaps I will not send this to you by post, perhaps one day soon I will sit beside you on a bench under a maple-tree — how I miss Concord’s maples! — & be able to sit beside you as you read & tell all that needs to be told. The pages and pages of words I have offered you & the entire public in print for four years have been true enough, certainly, & many may have felt that my partisanship in the cause of the Italian Revolution, & all revolutions of the people, was not sufficiently measured or cautious. But if they, if you, only knew to what degree I was exercising the highest degree of caution, of discretion,
by not telling my private story. Yet still I hesitate. Not from shame, but from something else — a fear of offending, a fear of disturbing the peace of so dear a friend.

— To whom did Jeanne d’Arc confide, when the angels & Mary told her to strap on her armor? & Did these friends weep, or laugh? Surely they tried to prevent her … & yet my own reasons, altho’ I cannot with that Catholic girl’s pious confidence assert they come directly from God, but only more likely that they be the promptings of the Divine within — may seem equally mad, tho’ not violent in intention.

What I want to tell you, & you alone my dear, comes from a full heart & an over-full, doubt it not, brain. But I trust that it will unfold, unfold as the pages of this letter unfold, best when you may be sitting quietly — & quite alone, my dear! — when the children have gone to bed & Nathaniel is sitting up in the parlor with his friends, the port & cigars in full fume, & you may scamper to a private attic corner to read.

You are a full-grown lady, by now; you will not
scamper
up those stairs but rather
wend
your
way
. I hope you did not find my earlier letters amiss; I spoke in riddles, perhaps, because I was too afraid to tell anyone the entire truth. (The Entire Truth! As if such a Universe could be told!) But it is all out now — or at least the public face of my life is unveil’d as I return home. Here I am, an old married woman, a Marchesa (such pomp as ill-becomes any democrat but my husband has held to the title for practical reasons) in
the bargain, with the best child in all the world & my dear husband beside me. That I did not receive return letters from you did not surprise or worry me unduly; perhaps half of the letters sent to me never arrived because of the war — & because, it must be said, of Italian ways in general. A saying there is: Nothing is urgent in all of Italia but the priest’s brandy & the husband’s dinner.

There! I am unfair, again, in my old jesting way. The noblest of men, & women, inhabit Italy as well. As you know if you have read my dispatches. Mr Greeley assures me that indeed they were widely read & I believe that this was so. But, despite all my pleas for financial assistance from my countrymen to help the cause of the Italian people, so little was sent.

3 June, Gibraltar

Alas, the journey has not begun well. Our Captain Hasty, a kindly & confident man who had all our trust, has died of the typhus. His good wife Mrs Hasty & I nursed him as he failed — it was a swift but agonized death, & the ship’s linen in short supply — and oh! the odors of sickness, again they press on me! — Now we are quarantined at Gibraltar, barely a step away it seems from Livorno.… We must wait a few days for more supplies. We will not be able to put his body ashore as he must be buried at sea as a precaution, & this is a great source of distress to Mrs Hasty. Two sailors show signs of typhoid symptoms as well. We are attempting to
exercise the same measures of washing & airing that seemed efficacious in the field hospitals in Rome. Also isolating the sick. This is a bad business & I am especially fearful for my husband, my Giovanni, about whom I have yet to tell you in detail — but he was weakened in body & mind from the days of battle — I have begged him to confine himself to the cabin. He, dear fellow, wants to help & so we have agreed he may assist in the galley, making ox-tail broth for the sick. (The cook is also stricken but only slightly.) God willing there may be no more cases.

7 June

We have received our supplies. The cook is well. We think he may not have had the fever at all, but some stray malady that departed quickly. One of the sailors, a hearty Malay fellow called Dark John, has survived. Alas poor redheaded Fredo has died & like the captain’s, his body has been slipt, knotted in shrouds, into the sea. The water at Gibraltar is a pale green, with white foam making lace over the surface. It was lovely as well as terribly melancholy to see the white-sail-wrapt bodies fall through that almost celestial green, to be absorbed by that greater Element.

There are no more suspected cases — & as the captain & these two sailors had spent some days together before the voyage in Naples, on an errand for the merchant company — all aboard hope that it was confined to these three alone. Mrs Hasty has become the titular captain under law, but as
she is no sailor (& if she were, ’twould make no difference!) the First Mate, Mr Bangs, is at the helm.

We are anchored one more day & then will be off with tomorrow’s tide.

The melancholy of the last several days having subsided somewhat, I am pricked with a greater urgency. I intend to tell the story of my heart since last you saw me. My companions on the voyage from New York to London, the Springs, tho’ excellent
companions
, were unlikely
chaperones
for a grown woman. They were not better informed about England than I — less so in truth in all matters but where to stay & what to eat. Nonetheless they had many friends & ties to assist us in England & on the Continent.

Moreover Mr Greeley felt that the radical step of having his Foreign Correspondent be a woman would be softened if periodically I could refer in my dispatches to my respectable travelling companions. They were sedate enough, heaven knows. My head-aches were extreme in the crossing, & Rebecca Spring was almost too assiduous with the application of balms & words of comfort. & From another good lady on that interminable voyage I learnt quite a lot about the social life to be had in the capital city of Albany should I ever have the misfortune to find myself visiting in that region. I also can recite from memory the receipt for a noxious-sounding comestible, a favorite of a garrulous Carolinian gentleman, called Brunswick Stew, that features squirrel-meat, maize & broad beans.

I thought of you on that crossing, little Sophie — how you were once upon a time the best ministering angel to my head-aches. How often to soothe me you would comb and braid my hair, and once I remember you wove apple-blossoms into my tresses. I had reason to think of you again, months later, when I was nursing the wounded in our hospital in Rome — I longed to have the magic of your touch in my own hands, to cure or at least to comfort the agonies of those who died in our care day after day.…

But to return to the subject of London. We arrived in August of that year (1846) &, as I dutifully reported to the
Tribune
, were busy as honey-bees about our sight-seeing, theatre-going, gallery-visiting & high-toned calling on heads of State, both the real (the Lord Mayor! & a member of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet who oversees American affairs!) & the
soi
-
disant
. The resident London genius, Mr Carlyle, is a stiff-necked man who would have done very well with the stiff-necks of Boston — & I cannot countenance his abiding admiration, nay hero-worship, of that monster Cromwell! No matter how polite I was in print, to you I can call him a Provincial, despite his fame.

His wife is of another breed entirely. She has a bold eye & a quiet step, like a Chippewa brave who would come up behind you with a hatchet in the night. I know she disapproved of me but I quite liked her & can imagine setting her loose on one of our Conversation parties in West Street to mightily great effect.

Mr E warned me months ago that rumors have circulated back home concerning my friendship with Mr Nathan in New York before I left — a lifetime ago now. Some have even said that he & I met up in England, or Munich, to continue our illicit liaison. This is absolutely
Untrue
.… I trust you believe no real ill of me, tho’ how the truth gets tangled with the lies in rumor remains a source of wonder to me. I did most sincerely love Mr Nathan — James — with a friendship that exceeded friendship — & hoped, believed, I would marry him. Yet how his being of the Jewish race could so discompose Mr E & others, the very preachers of universal Religion & tolerance — I cannot rightly say. It is harder to live than to preach one’s beliefs, I know to my own sorrow. Moreover Mr E has always believed I should remain a virgin vessel, pouring forth the female gospel of the spirit —!

BOOK: Miss Fuller
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