Strange Music (9 page)

Behind the woman I picture the slender shape of a gentleman, proud nose, noble head dark-haired, finely dressed in a tall hat, brown suit, lemon-coloured kid gloves and cravat. His eyes are filled with painful devotion. He is a lofty mountain peak clouded in silver mist. Brushing tears from my face, I experience a horrifying notion sprouting inside – a feeling of misappropriation, or a misreading of the world – the true nature of which I cannot imagine, nor the implications fathom.

‘Sweet, sweet Miss Elizabeth,' Crow says comfortingly as she clears away my tray. I can barely hear her. I hear the other woman's sobs distinctly. She moans as though there's a hole in her heart. The man places his arms around the shoulders of her black satin dress. Tears stream down her cheeks. Bravely she turns to him. He exchanges for parchment and quill pen the sodden handkerchief scrumpled in the hard ball of her black-gloved hand. He murmurs reassurances in her ear. Warmth radiates from his face. Shell-pink as a tongue, sunlight sheers across the bay. She is pulling herself through years of anguish, shaking off the ache of loneliness – a path leading to hell – her lips melt into a smile for the first time. For a while the couple blend together completely against an auroral sky. Clasped hands cast in stone. Such trust, such intimacy, cannot be quantified. A pang of envy shoots through me. Were she to die in his arms could he breathe life into her again? Could I escape to the blessed land from whence they came?

. . . your last two delightful letters were received by me when I was
quite
confined to my bed, & in such a state of debility as rendered writing a thing impossible. Even at this time, altho' more than a month has passed since this
laying up
began, the extent of my strength is to bear being lifted to the sofa for three hours a day – & I have not left my bedroom for six weeks. The cold weather at the end of January irritated the chest a good deal – & then most unaccountably – I never suffered from such a thing my whole life before – I had for ten days a kind of
bilious fever
which necessitated the use of stronger medicines than my state cd. very well bear – & then came on a terrible state of debility – the stomach out of sheer weakness, rejecting all sustenance except wine & water, & the chest, seeming to grudge the exercise of respiration. I felt oftener than once inclined to believe that the whole machine was giving away everywhere! But God has not willed it so! . . .

We are now stuck in the month of March. To my surprise, Crow's reading of the thermometer is sixty-five. Sharp winds weave their fingers beneath the sash windows, making me shiver. A good hour after Crow had lit the fire she returned to clear away a hamper-full of eagerly opened cards and presents. Another birthday has passed. Uneventfully.

Crow preens herself before my dressing-table. This maid and I share the same Christian name, thus the necessity of calling her by her surname. She may be a young creature but I can talk to Crow as if she were a friend. Whether it is good etiquette I care not. I like to be managed and she manages me well.

Outside, waves thrash and beat the rocks round the bay so frantically it is a wonder any creature survives.

Flopping down on the company side of my bed, Bro says he does not feel alive any more. ‘Is Bro in love?' I ask.

‘No,' he replies.

‘Is that true?' I say. Because, if he were, Papa would not approve.

Bro slopes over to the armchair and lights a cigarette. ‘In some aspects of life we must be invisible to Papa,' he says. ‘I am invisible. No, not to you, Ba. To you I am transparent. You see far more of me than others do.' We are at this moment looking into each other's eyes; vulnerable, like sea snails without shells; me curled in bed; Bro torpid in the armchair opposite.

‘I would have loved a water-colour from you on my birthday,' I say. Bro replies by calling his water-colours sundry and ungainly.

Bro says he is bored. Interminably. Never have I seen his spirits so low. He misses Sam sorely. I suspect it is Sam's good company at the parties Bro frequents here that he desires most – but funny Sam amused us all with his odd pranks.

‘Where are you going today?' I ask.

‘I don't know,' Bro replies mournfully. ‘I was up after eleven again last night writing to Sam.'

‘He has suffered all winter long from shivering fits, feeling hot and cold and with fever. I suggested to Arabel he take arsenic.'

Bro yawns. ‘I know. I have asked him to bring from London boots from Judd's, and for Henrietta a pair of yellow satin kid gloves.' He trudges downstairs from my room to lie in his.

I shout after Bro, ‘Please take my letters to catch today's post,' and there is a dormant pause on the stairs. This post will carry a long despatch from Henrietta and a note from me to Sam, requesting he visit Torquay as soon as Papa and his health will allow.

‘Is it not true that one man's greed is another man's hunger?' I ask Bro after he has read from
The Times
an article accusing West Indian plantation owners of a continuing excessive desire to possess more than they need.

‘There are probably exceptions,' he replies.

Poor Bro looks strained, puffing on that cigarette – his hair remains as long and lanky as ever. I would prefer it if he would refrain from smoking in my chamber; smoke does affect my chest so. I wish indeed, as does Henrietta, that Bro was independent. I have advised him to pursue his interest in painting water-colours. He says he will, when the weather improves, but I don't see what the weather has to do with it. He can paint just as well inside as out!

I have asked Henrietta to tell Sam that a black elastic band for my waist – one of the ones worn over the gown – would be very acceptable, and to bring a bottle or two of eau de cologne; my stock has dwindled. She suggests we write to Sam now but I am exhausted, having undergone the fatigue of being brought down stairs, carried up again, undressed, and put to bed.

‘Ba, I can tell when you're awake,' Henrietta says, and giggles.

I peer from one eye, ‘How?' searching for an angle from which to broach discussions on my recent preoccupations.

‘Because I just saw you lay your book down.'

During our exchange, which, on account of my hoarseness, is brief, I tell Henrietta to use her head just this once. Is she too thick-skinned to feel the swords of truth? Henrietta's nice – I'm not thinking she isn't – I am making my best effort to explain to her the conclusions I have reached: that we must see poetry, suffering, as the way to truth. Is not the Bible poetry? Are not hymns poetic expression of the love of God, however unworthy? I ask. All things were created by the poet, God. Christ is poetry. The accumulated benefits of the wealthy have been derived from others' suffering, and our sinful debt to Christ is best represented in poetic utterance.

‘Have you never wondered about this?'

Scratching her neatly arranged hair as though trawling for a thought in there, Henrietta replies, ‘Do you
always
have to be serious?'

I look away from her face, wishing Arabel would hurry up and arrive, for she is graced with much more sense. I should love Arabel even if she were not my sister; and even if she did not love me.

The skirts of Henrietta's new violet dress swish across the red Persian rugs as she sails from my bedside to fetch my tray of wine and oysters from the drawing-room.

Bro excused himself from coming to wish me good-night, having disappeared to I know not where. Another party I suspect.

Bro said this afternoon he heard that Tennyson, who I understand to be handsome despite having an unduly large head and fathoming eye, has separated from his family because they distracted him. He is settled in a cottage not far from here, in Devonshire, where he composes poems and smokes all day.

I miss London. I miss busy shops. The jostle of London's streets.

I long for my doves and my little slip of a sitting-room, my shelves of books. My window-panes ivy-trailed and draped like curtains drawn. The heads from Brucciani's – busts of poets and philosophers, Chaucer and Homer in particular – which kind Papa, how I know not, found time to purchase, and to remember such light a thing as my pleasure in all the bustle and vexations of his life.

I meant to have written to my own beloved Papa – but altho' beginning days ago this series of replies to letters sent to me so long since, I am tired today, & Henrietta, scolding like a virago! Tell him how he is missed every night, & all day too – but
most
at night! & tell him he shall have a long letter from me very soon in reply to your blank corner – dearest dearest Papa! . . .

. . . I meant to have written too to dearest Sam.
Tell him so.

. . . They carried me downstairs into the drawing-room for two weary hours about ten days ago – but the weather has since kept me upstairs. For weeks before I was reduced to all but the harmlessness of babyhood – lifting a spoon to my own lips being the only point on which I cd. claim precedence. Even now I am sure I cd. not stand a moment alone – but here is summer,
coming
tho' not in sight, & she sends a sort of mental sunshine
before
 . . .

Though I suffer enormous embarrassment for my eating habit I will not, and
can not
, devour and digest that stringy yellow substance identified by Bro as chicken. I would rather starve to death than eat chicken, or, worse, red meat. When dinner – a dish of transparent greenish gravy-like soup, broccoli florets, chicken in some viscid sauce whitish-yellow as custard and grainy as tapioca (a sort of bread sauce with saffron), tasteless rice pellets that resemble white mouse droppings – was set before me on a tray just now, I so very nearly cried. Bro saw my disgust and ordered the cook bring oysters and macaroni, then Crow gave me an additional opium dose and the world came back to me again. Or I to it. But now I am bloated I cannot sleep. Or write. Or anything!

What a dreadful year is this? The sudden death of Cousin Richard, Custos of St. James, Jamaica; Speaker of the House of Assembly. Richard, dear Papa's illegitimate cousin, had blood from we know not where, and now rumour has reached us that Richard was murdered – may the Lord God rest his soul.

Handsome, after a fashion, though not as dark and handsome as Papa, Richard's was a face that I, as a child, did not care to look upon. His short upper lip was full of expression. His laughter rang harshly through Hope End. All too well he described his daily path as leading from cane fields – a world of vindictive torture, where the standard punishment for any act considered a misdeed was thirty-nine lashes of a thick cattle whip – to Barrett Hall great house, a residence to him of exquisite comfort and bliss.

Contrary to Papa's belief, I was neither sleeping nor in bed when Cousin Richard related fateful tales of runaway slaves. Straining to hear from my seat on the stairs, I glimpsed the Negroes' untold misery and the savagery of white Jamaicans. Heartily Richard described punishments impossible to forget, yet ones I wish I could not remember; described wrong following greater wrong. Described how he galloped from Falmouth along Jamaica's north coast to Greenwood then Barrett Hall and Cinnamon Hill. Clouting the door, ‘Open up! Open up!' he had shouted to summon each militia member. He described the militia, all with horses and in their best finery, mustering around one hundred slaves to track down the runaways; one a man, one a woman. ‘Cousin,' I said with tears in my eyes, ‘speak no more of this.' Yet his voice has never left my ears – such a frightfully terrible tale he did bestow upon them that I now cannot help my thoughts dwelling on that black woman slave they cornered.

I am an abolitionist. I belong to a family who have long been West Indian slave-holders, and if I believed in curses, I should be afraid. Richard said of the slave in question – Quasheba – was that her name? – ‘We trapped her, but it occurs to me that she did not die from that or a flogging.' Richard then had the audacity to say that slave women should be treated more kindly when about to give birth. That night with us at Hope End he drank heartily. Five bottles of the best Bordeaux claret; rum; whisky.