Love and Fury Read online

  “She stole my spiders!” said Ned, standing from his seat with that pouty face.

  “I know where the spiders are,” said Henry, half singing it.

  “What’s this about spiders?” Papa looked to me for an answer.

  “She’s not to say a word, not one word, for one hour more,” said Mama.

  “Oh, let her go, Elizabeth. What’s the point of keeping Mary from talking? Mary will talk-talk-talk all day long. But it’s harmless. Nothing that matters.”

  Papa’s greatest gift with words was that he could sting two people at once. I looked between them, but I could see Mama had acquiesced already. When I stood, at last free of my penance, I forgot Jane’s letter, which drifted to the floor. Papa pinched it between his dirty fingers. Out of instinct I grabbed for it, but he pulled it away, looked at the envelope, and laughed.

  “Ah, our Mary has a little friend in Beverley, does she?”

  I pulled my shawl close as he finished breaking the seal, unfolded and read it.

  “‘Dear Miss Wollstonecraft, I am pleased to send this letter in return for your staying from church yesterday to write me. There is no need to excuse the badness of your writing, as you call it, nor should you beg pardon for not writing sooner.’” He read it with contempt, in a high-pitched voice, with nothing of Jane Arden’s assurance and delicacy. “‘I delight in your having enjoyed my father’s demonstration Friday last, and his rather discursive lecture on magnetism.’ Magnetism? What use is that in the world? Rubbish, is what that is.”

  Ned smiled, enjoying my humiliation.

  “‘And presume we will have the pleasure of your company on Thursday evening in Beverley at six o’clock, when we will enjoy supper and light a cake (as the Germans do) to celebrate my fourteenth birthday—’”

  My heart lifted. Jane Arden wants me there! Me! Tonight!

  Papa must have seen the look on my face. “Think you’re too good for Walkington, do you?”

  This from a man who pretended to cultivate an air of leisure without reading a single book, as far as I could tell. I fought not to shrug my shoulders. If I didn’t make a fuss, he’d move on to something else. I could wash up and dress—I still had the gown pressed and ready for just this—and be in Beverley by six.

  “No, Papa,” I said.

  “Think you belong in Beverley, do you? Fancy friends. Assembly-room dances. Think a young man wants to dance with you?” I glanced at my sisters, who looked at the floor. “No man’ll want you, Mary. You’re not pretty. You’re not good at things men care about.”

  “I don’t mean to be good at things men care about.”

  His neck jerked back into his collar. I could almost feel his stinging hand across my face.

  “I’m sorry, Papa.” It griped me to say it.

  He cackled, leaning to the side of my face, practically spitting in my ear. “You think you’re better than all of us, don’t you, Mary? Better than me, that’s what you think, isn’t it? You think you’re somebody.”

  “Please, Papa. May I go? This once?”

  “What about my spiders?” Ned cut in.

  “He stole my quizzing glass!” I protested.

  “What use do you have for it, Mary?”

  “Spiders, spiders, spiders,” Henry sang, crawling his fingers up the window.

  “He can have my stupid quizzer!” In an angry instant I pulled it from my pocket and threw it at Ned’s chest. He tried to catch it, but it landed on the hard stone floor. He picked it up and held it to the light, cracked in two places, the length of it.

  “Look at that,” said Papa. “It’s no good to anyone now.”

  Ned smiled again, victorious. It sank me to see what I’d done. Was I no better than he was?

  “Please, Papa!” I heard myself begging, which is what he wanted from me. I looked into his eyes, trying to find some shred of kindness in him—some remembering what it was to be young, to want to belong to the world.

  “You’re nobody, Mary. Less than nobody. That’s who you are.” He crumpled the letter, but he might as well have crushed my heart in his fist. “You’re not to set foot out of this house. Do you understand?”

  My eyes burned, but I looked at him, saying nothing. My fury a mirror of his.

  Eliza and Everina looked at their laps. Betsy stood, ready to defend me. Smug Ned waited for my inevitable answer. For Papa must be answered.

  “Yes, Papa,” I said, wishing I were dead. “I understand.”

  “Spiders, spiders, spiders,” Henry sang.

  “Shush, Henry. Dinner’s nearly on,” said Mama, who appeared at the door.

  “I’ll take mine at the pub,” said Papa, who would use Jane Arden’s invitation to justify drinking another meal. He let the door slam, the thin windows shuddering behind him. Betsy whimpered, and then silence. I leaned down to snatch up the letter and held it dear in my trembling hands.

  * * *

  I refused dinner and retreated to my room where, by tears and candlelight, I wrote a thousand letters to Jane, raging against my fate, my brother, my father, the tyranny of men. I wanted to ruin him, tell all his secrets, say that my father was everything hers was not: a failure, a gambler, a drunkard. He beats his children, I wanted to say, even if sometimes he wrestles them onto his lap and kisses their heads, he withdraws his affection as easily, a double cruelty. Ned is the only one he won’t touch, protected as he is by my mother’s skirts. Henry, who is his shame, he boxes about the ears until my sapling brother cowers in the corner. We girls he always hits with a wide-open hand, careful to leave no lasting marks that might be seen by curious townsfolk. I wanted to tell her that he stopped hitting me a year ago when Betsy bit the arm he raised to strike me, piercing cloth and skin. I had never seen him afraid before, and now I see it in everything, even his refusal to let me go to Beverley. Polite society would find him out to be the pretender he is.

  I knew I wouldn’t send any of it. Because they were my secrets too. I was railing against the night, but it only agitated poor Betsy, who laid her head in my lap, then on my feet, circled around her own tail, and finally settled in a sighing heap. When my hand hurt from writing, I paced the room, telling myself what I ought to have said to him: Look at you. You’re less than nothing. That’s why you hurt everyone else. Because it’s the only thing you can do. The only thing you’re good at. I looked out the window and saw my tree, its quaking leaves dipped in moonlight. I sat on the floor with Betsy and laid my head on hers, to feel her velvet warmth against my skin.

  But I knew I was waiting for him. I was done ignoring my mother’s bruises, done covering my ears trying to drown out his nightly pawing, her refusals and pleading, then surrender, followed by grunts and moans, and a bedstead that banged like a hammer against the wall. Even worse, his drunken snoring while Mama whimpered until she finally slept. I didn’t know what I would do, but I could stand it no more.

  Betsy heard him first. I followed her to the top of the short flight of steps, and waited under the low ceiling, alert to the sound of his shoulder pushing open the front door, the creak of it closing, heavy footfalls. He stumbled, then cursed the furniture. There was something like a song on his breath, but he didn’t know the words. I watched his dark figure careen into the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

  When he climbed to the top, it took him a moment to realize that I was lying across the threshold of my mother’s room, blocking his way.

  “Mary? What’re you doing? Go to bed, stupid girl.”

  “Not tonight, Papa.”

  “Outta my way.” He nudged my side with his boot. Betsy gave a low growl. “And tell that feckin’ dog to shut up.”

  “Not any more nights,” I said.

  He teetered on the landing. I thought he might fall backward. Hit his head and die and be gone forever. And then hated myself for thinking it. Betsy stood close by, ready to defend me.

  “I could just walk over you.”

  “Then walk over me,” I said. “But you’ll have to do it, Papa. Eve
ry night from now on.”

  * * *

  I woke in my bed that morning, with no memory of how I got there. Heard Betsy downstairs, pawing at the door to get out, and was surprised to hear Papa’s voice: “C’mon, girl. Out this way.” As if all was forgotten. Soon little James was crying—I can still hear it now—the clatter in the kitchen, the cook’s voice, Everina singing a nursery rhyme. I heard Eliza tell Mama that I was sick and ought to stay in bed, as if they knew what I’d done.

  When I got up and dressed, pulling my shawl tight around me, and ventured downstairs, everyone but Mama looked at me. I stood on the threshold.

  “Good morning, Mama.”

  “Morning, Mary.” Her shoulders sank with shame; I could feel it, but she didn’t turn to greet me. “Too sick to fetch some eggs from the chicken house?”

  The cook offered to do it in my stead.

  “No. I need the fresh air.” I took the basket from a shelf and left by the front door, stopping to take in the bright morning. I looked around for Betsy, who ought to be waiting for me at the front step. I called her name, then headed down the path, still calling, thinking she would rush from the hedgerow any moment to frolic by my side. Maybe we’d breach the gates of Walkington this fine day.

  And then I saw her. Dear Betsy.

  Hanging in a noose from my tree.

  Mrs. B

  September 1, 1797

  As the sun rose in the new September sky, Mrs. Blenkinsop lay awake in the adjoining study where Godwin had insisted she rest for the first time in so many hours, or was it days? It all seemed to pour from one vessel and slip through her fingers. The settee was too small for her, but she adjusted, as she had all her life, to whatever circumstances allowed. She’d slept in fits and starts, but with the door cracked open, as agreed, that she could be alert to any stirring in the bedroom. Mr. Godwin now took his turn at watch, sitting on a chair pulled up close to his wife’s bed, with his “little bird” tucked into his arms. Mrs. B thought she heard him softly humming. It sounded like a hymn, one from childhood, maybe, that he didn’t know still lived inside him.

  Mrs. B rearranged her aching body, put her arms behind her head, and tried to re-create the last day in her mind, something to keep her tethered to the waking world. If the sun was up, so must she have been, as was her daily habit. She could remember Poignand closing Mary’s loins with dry cloths, that was yesterday morning, when Mary shut her eyes and slept at last. Then she’d offered him a clean towel, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, to wipe his bloody hands. It was coming back to her now, clear and in the right order. The sight of his wife’s blood—mixed with ecstatic relief—had required Mr. Godwin to steady himself on the back of a chair.

  “You’re sure, then?” he asked the doctor.

  “She’s out of danger,” said Poignand. “Get some rest, or you’re no good to her at all.”

  Mr. Godwin asked him to inspect the newborn before he left, but assured Mrs. B, taking her aside, that it was not a slight, and she took none.

  “Do you mean for me to go, sir?” Mrs. B whispered.

  Mr. Godwin rubbed his forehead in that way that was now familiar to her. “I don’t think so. Honestly, I think Mary will want you here when she wakes. Unless of course you’re needed elsewhere.”

  Mrs. B was used to carriages and messages coming and going from the Westminster Lying-In, all the time, but none had come, and she was glad of it. She wanted to be here, only here. Some part of her never wanted to leave, though she didn’t know why. She was old enough to stop delivering women altogether. Her husband had wanted her to. She could go home now and rest for good. But even if Mary no longer needed her, the languid infant did.

  She laid the babe at the foot of the bed, near her sleeping mother, and loosed her swaddling cloth. There was no visible trauma to the baby, except some bruises not uncommon after a long labor, the swollen eye and lip.

  “I’ve treated the black-and-blue with an ointment of chamomile and hog’s grease,” she said, anticipating Poignand’s questions.

  “Any evidence it swallowed meconium?”

  “Not that I could tell. But I’ll give her honey and castor oil when she’s strong enough.” Mrs. B didn’t like him calling the infant an ‘it.’ She was a girl, even if she didn’t yet have a name.

  “You cleaned out its nose?”

  “I did.” Of course she’d done this thing and that thing, and more, as she had for years and years, probably before Poignand was born.

  Poignand looked around the room, searching for something else, no doubt, to judge. “Why is the window open? And no fire lit?”

  “Because it’s August.”

  “It’s September, Blenkinsop.”

  “The missus likes the open air. She can’t breathe.”

  “It’s not her breathing that worries me.”

  He pressed his ear to the baby’s chest. Mrs. B hadn’t told the anxious parents that when she was washing their newborn with warm wine, it seemed the child had stopped breathing altogether. She’d scrubbed her little feet with a rough cloth, sprinkled wine in her face, eyes, nostrils, ears, and, feeling her own heart pounding, blown puffs of breath into the baby’s mouth and lungs until she let out a squeak and seemed to breathe again on her own.

  After assuring Mr. Godwin that mother and child would no doubt gain strength with each passing hour, Poignand asked that Mrs. B see him to the door. He was all put back together, leather bag under his arm, but something in him seemed unsettled.

  “For god’s sake, the woman needs some rest. Remove the child to another room, and no visitors at all. She must not be disturbed, except to suckle, only if she insists.”

  “She did mention it, sir. No spoons or papboats for the little one. Mary made me promise. Like the laudanum.”

  “You call her Mary?”

  Mrs. B tightened her jaw. “She told me to.”

  “Well, formalities fall away, I suppose. But so do promises, when necessary.” Poignand wiped his sleeve across his forehead and looked up at the ceiling. “I feel certain I got it all,” he said, as if reassuring himself.

  “I’ll keep watch, sir.”

  “And don’t forget yourself, Blenkinsop. They need your strength.”

  “I take care of myself, sir, and drink porter like any fishwoman.”

  The rest of the day and night swirled in the midwife’s head, but she remembered a sort of peace settling on the house while Mary slept. Mr. Godwin had showed her his wife’s study—a sliver of a room with one tall window, a writing desk, a chair, the settee. A housemaid brought up a blanket. The cradle was moved in. Whenever Mary stirred, Mrs. B propped her up with some pillows, gave her something to drink, and laid the baby at her breast, with no success. Even when Mary pleaded with pretty words, the child’s cries grew fainter every hour, her little breaths shallower.

  When Mr. Godwin took his turn to rest, Mrs. B gave Mary clean linen pinned lightly around her waist, and then set to work, as quietly as she could, making the chamber sweet and fresh. She opened the door and window, asked that the room be brushed, the carpets cleaned and aired. She’d seen enough births in small houses, crowded hospitals, and jails, where the whole air was foul and unfit for breathing. She’d seen women, new-delivered, covered up close in bed, extra clothes piled on, curtains drawn and pinned together, every crevice stopped up, even the keyhole. She wanted Mary to feel September on her skin, to breathe free and grow strong after her ordeal. It was her child’s best hope.

  When it was Mrs. B’s time again to rest, her mind wouldn’t stop turning circles. She smelled bread baking, heard little footfalls on the stairs, Fanny crying, begging to see her mother, then laughing outside just minutes later. She could see a slice of Mr. Godwin through the crack of the door, clutching his fragile newborn with ink-stained fingers, opening to a page from his journal, it looked like, reading to Mary, soft and low.

  “‘I am overcome with love.…’”

  Mrs. B closed her eyes and let his voice, and the fain
t morning breeze, wash over her.

  “‘Never shall I forget in the moments after her birth, the effusion of soul, the kindness which animated us, increased as it was by peril and suffering, the sacred sensation, the way we read in each other’s eyes a shared and melting tenderness and inviolable attachment.…’”

  Mrs. B could hear his voice catch in his throat, feel a lump in her own. This was why she meant to stay with them. She had delivered, over some forty years, the wives of traders, shopkeepers, innkeepers, sailors, clothworkers, artisans, but never this. Two people who seemed to think and write for a living. Who pressed their foreheads together, who said things, in all her years, she’d never heard anyone say. These married people made her own home seem wanting. Her whole life, wanting.

  “‘Let other lovers testify with presents and tokens, we record and stamp our attachment in this precious creature—the result of our common affection, the shrine in which our sympathies and our life have poured together, never to be separated.’”

  “What shall we call her?” Mrs. B heard Mary say in a rusted voice. “Our little bird.”

  She crept to the door to see Mary’s eyes wide open and shining, gazing on her husband and child. She turned onto her side and reached to feel the tuft of hair peeking out from the blanket wrapped around the newborn still tight in her father’s arms. She saw Mr. Godwin take her outstretched hand and kiss it.

  “We have time and time some more to choose,” he said.

  Mrs. B had not the heart to tell them she thought the child might not live.

  Mary W

  Picture me, little bird, near Whitsuntide. A different springtime, full of hope. At a ball, in gleaming new assembly rooms.

  Of course my father hadn’t wished me a happy fifteenth; we’d barely spoken for two years. But when he gathered us around to say we were to leave Walkington for Beverley, my young body buzzed with joy. He’d taken a place in Wednesday Market, where the new terraced houses were “elegant at an easy rent.” I took it that he’d determined being a farmer was beneath him—never mind that the sick sheep and failed crops made it so—and that he’d now be a gentleman, without the farmer part. When he broke out a bottle of gin to toast his new endeavor (speculation of some sort that was sure to make him a fortune), he cursed the uncongenial land, the middlemen, the laborers. Anything but himself. And then celebrated with a shot.