The Honeymoon (15 page)

“As I have always said,” Charles told her, when he read Combe’s notes to her.

Her father was wasting away, skeletally thin, coughing up phlegm, his legs swelling. His arms and legs ached so much that he couldn’t sleep. She tended to him fervently, and laid
mustard plasters between his shoulders to try and draw out the illness and the phlegm.

Spring came, soft rain, new green on the garden’s gray soil, the branches of the trees swollen with buds. His heart beat so rapidly, he coughed so uncontrollably at times, that she was terrified he was having a stroke. He couldn’t climb the stairs to his bedroom anymore, so she made a bed for him in the dining room and slept by his side on the sofa. He became strangely peaceable, all his irascibility suddenly gone.

“Thank you, dear girl,” he said to her now, whenever she washed his poor withered body or gently shaved his grizzled face. “You are a dear girl,” he said. He smiled up at her feebly now, as if he were a child and she was his mother.

Finally, he lapsed into unconsciousness, his breath rattling in his chest. She held his hand and stroked his head as he died.

She wept in Cara’s and Charles’s comforting arms. “You have us,” Cara said. “You always have us.”

And then they swept her up and took her on a holiday to the Continent. Strange brother and sister, but always there for her.

A
lone now in her bed in the Hotel Europa, she said the word “Papa” softly aloud into the dark air. It was a name she could never call anyone again. But it was always there, the memory of saying it, even here in Venice, of being a little girl carried along in his strong arms, born aloft by him over all the harm and dangers of the world, in those moments when he wasn’t stern and rough, his secret favorite, his “clever gel.”

After he died and the Brays took her away, what a weight she must have been on them in her grief at her father’s death, spoiling their adventures.

They crossed the Alps on horseback, the women riding sidesaddle through the Simplon Pass, thousands of feet above sea level, amid the splendid, jagged peaks. As she looked down from her horse at the plunging ravines and the icy torrents roaring below, she became giddy and cried out hysterically, “My saddle’s slipping. Help!” The group came to a stop, the guide clipped a lead rope to her halter, and Charles led her behind him till they reached the safety and warmth of the hostel.

In Geneva, she announced she wasn’t going back to England. Geneva, the home of Calvin and Rousseau, was so clean after Coventry. Her father’s will hadn’t been probated
yet — he’d left her a tiny inheritance, £100 in cash and £2,000 in trust, which would yield only about £90 a year, hardly enough to support her. But she could live here more cheaply. “I’d be pleased to advance you the money,” Charles said. He and Cara were anxious to get rid of her, she thought, because she was such a burden to them.

The Brays returned to England and she found rooms at a pension just outside the city, the Campagne Plongeon, a large, gleaming white house with a meadow sloping down to the blue Lake Geneva. The place was filled with people, refugees from all the revolutions sweeping through Europe, most of whom seemed to spend their days playing whist in the parlor.

She spent her days alone, sitting on the terrace of the pension, overlooking the vivid blue lake, watching the sailboats, and reading. She read more Rousseau, and Voltaire. She’d discovered the novels of George Sand and was transfixed by them. She knew of Sand’s scandalous reputation, leaving her husband, taking lovers, dressing like a man, smoking tobacco — her affairs with Chopin and Alfred de Musset. But that was no reason not to read her novels. She was compelled by their passion and tragic power, by Sand’s compassion for ordinary people, for the underdog — Consuelo, the Gypsy singer, a
zingarella
who rises from nothing to become a great diva. Sand refused to write simplistic moral maxims, but embedded them in the delineation of her complex characters.

Sometimes, to occupy her mind, she worked on mathematical theorems. One night, she attended a lecture on experimental physics at the Athenée by Professor de la Rive, who had been one of the inventors of the electromagnetic theory of batteries.

But the summer ended. The snows came, and the cold swept in off the lake, bitter and wet. It was daylight now for only a few short hours. She noticed clumps of hair in her brush — her hair was falling out. In November she passed her twenty-ninth birthday. It was obvious she’d be a spinster all her life. There was nothing here for her to do for her life’s work. What was her future to be?

She was homesick for Chrissey, and for Charles and Cara, for their comfort and the brightness they brought to her life. Inevitably, she’d have to return to England, to face the future, whatever it was.

In March she journeyed home. She felt obliged to visit Isaac and Sarah at Griff, but they were busy with two children now, and Isaac was relishing his role as manager of the estate, giving out orders, confident in his importance and authority. As she sat to the side while they went about their days, she felt like an outsider. She couldn’t stay in Meriden with Chrissey and Edward. They were mourning the loss of another child, Clara, seven years old, dead the past year from scarlet fever. And Chrissey had a brood of six other children to manage. Edward was still struggling to set up his practice. The Clarkes were near bankruptcy.

Marian was rootless; all she had was her portmanteau and her carpetbag. She was destined to be a stranger on the earth.

Again, Charles and Cara came to the rescue. They invited her to live at Rosehill, and refused to accept rent. It would do for the time, though there was no work for her in Coventry. The only skills she had came from her learning and her
writing — and these weren’t just skills, she thought, but what she wanted to do. The only place to deploy those skills, to find some meager way in which she could use them, was London. But she hardly had the funds to live in London, and how would she go about finding work in that distant city?

In October, John Chapman, the publisher of her Strauss book, arrived at Rosehill to visit Charles and Cara. As before when she’d met him in London, she was awed by his presence, his vigor and good looks, his intensity.

They sat outside on the bear rug under the acacia. It was a lovely autumn day, the sun bright in the sky, the leaves falling in golden spirals to the ground, the air rich with the fragrance of moldering vegetation, ripe apples, and smoke from the fireplaces in the houses below in the valley. Chapman’s energy and curiosity made her forget her shyness. He drew her out. They had a lively discussion about French and German philosophy, subjects she knew well.

“This is marvelous!” Chapman said. “I do wish we could continue the discussion. I could use someone like you in London to help me with the firm and stop me from making mistakes.”

She was conscious as they reclined there of his dark curls, the cleft in his chin, his long thin legs.

He’d brought with him a copy of a new book he was publishing,
The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews
, by Robert William Mackay. Mackay was a philosopher and theologian and his book carried on the arguments of Hennell and Strauss. Mackay went further, arguing that as human beings developed, so too would their intellects and their ability to understand the basic moral laws embedded in religion.

“I’ve arranged to place an article about the book in the
Westminster Review
,” Chapman said. “Perhaps you’d agree to write it?”

“I’d very much like to do that,” she said diffidently. “I’d like to make something of a living writing reviews, and this would be a good start.”

She would have an essay in the
Westminster Review
! All the great thinkers had been published there, John Stuart Mill, who’d also been the editor, and Carlyle. She was so pleased at the thought that she dared say nothing more lest he realize how unworthy she was, and how inexperienced.

She remarked to Charles and Cara that Chapman reminded her a bit of Byron. “Oh, Byron!” mocked Charles.

But he did indeed look like Byron.

The review of Mackay took her over a month to write. She quarreled with some of Mackay’s analyses of the Greek myths, but his arguments, she wrote, were
“admirable, both from their panoramic breadth and their richness in illustrative details.”

In November the review was ready and she wrote Chapman offering to bring it to London. She was thinking of taking lodgings in town, she said. She’d heard he was renting out rooms in his house at 142 Strand to visitors and inquired about his rates. A first-class room was £2.10s. per week. But a second-class room could be had for five shillings less. A fire cost an extra three shillings and sixpence. This she could just manage because meals were included. She could perhaps supplement her income by writing reviews.

“We’d be delighted to have someone of your brilliant character among us,” Chapman told her.

Number 142 Strand was in a tall building which had once housed a coffeehouse and tavern, next to Somerset House, on the bank of the Thames.

Chapman lived there with his wife, Susanna, who was fourteen years older than he, a plump, dour woman from a wealthy family of Nottingham lacemakers. She’d spent her own money to set Chapman up in his business.

The Chapmans lived with two children and their governess, Elisabeth Tilley, a pretty girl with a tiny waist, porcelain skin, and dark, wavy hair. The children, a boy and a girl, seemed a bit wild, racing through the hallways up and down the stairs, stopping only for a second when introduced to the new lodger.

Chapman showed her to her bedroom on the third floor. It was at the end of a long, dark passageway, with a dim little window. “It’s quieter here, away from everything,” he said. She went to the window and glanced down into the street below. She was aware of him standing close behind her, his clothing touching hers.

That first night she couldn’t sleep with all the excitement, the hustle and bustle and noise coming from the street below.