When she asked me to sit beside her at a demonstration of her father’s portable scientific instruments, I couldn’t contain my joy. I thought Mama only assented because she, too, longed for us to be part of the Beverley crowd somehow. Jane sat in her chair, her hands folded as neat as a napkin in her lap. I tried to do the same, but kept inching toward the edge of my seat as John Arden revealed one instrument after another: an equinoctial sundial in a fish-skin case, a folding botanical microscope you could slip into your pocket, a compass with a steel needle “blued” at North.
When Jane led me by the hand and introduced me to him after his lecture, I saw up close how sympathetic his eyes were, but sad too. I’d heard whispers that his wife had succumbed to tuberculosis when Jane was small, and that he’d raised her to young womanhood by himself. He looked at Jane with the same pride that she did him, didn’t talk down to her, but straight across, as if she were capable of any understanding. He cocked his head when he asked her a question, waiting to hear her opinion. Had he covered the material too quickly? Too much history? Enough explanation of each instrument’s capabilities? I felt, by the way he shook my hand firmly, that Jane’s endorsement of me was good enough for him. We lingered over his cabinet of curiosities, laid out on green velvet, which I was careful not to touch. When Jane excused herself to say good-bye to a group of girls near the door, I didn’t know whether to follow.
“Here,” said John Arden, offering a small magnifying glass from his collection, beautiful in its simplicity. “Look through this, and tell me what you see.” He held out the walnut he’d used in his demonstration.
I pulled the glass close to my eye, but it made the world all wrong.
“Move it near and far until things come into focus. It’s different for everyone, since our own eyes are a convex lens, infinite shapes, no pair alike.”
I soon found the walnut shell in full relief.
“It’s said we have the Romans to thank, Emperor Nero, I think, who looked through a chip of some gemstone or other to better see actors on the stage. Don’t remember who figured out how to concentrate the sun’s rays to coax a flame. Useful, that. But our own Sir Francis Bacon was the first to turn it to a pure scientific use. Imagine, simply because the glass is thicker in the center, it changes everything. Marvelous, really.”
“It is,” I said, studying the intricate grooves of the shell.
“Also called a quizzer,” he said. “I suppose you know that. Jane reminds me I need not always explain everything.”
“Oh, not at all. I’ve heard of them. Just never held one in my hand.”
“Not the finest example. But I like the pinchbeck. Not as good as gold or brass, but that’s the point, really; it won’t tarnish either. Look, you can give it a ribbon and wear it, so it’s always with you.” He took it from my hand, pulled a velvet ribbon through, and tied it around my neck. I blushed at the feeling of his fingers near the collar of my dress, not for any impropriety; it simply felt what it must be like to have a father who cared for you, who might have once tied your laces, or patched a scraped knee. I raised the pinchbeck glass again to study the walnut, its grooves like dry riverbeds crusted with mud.
“How much the small world resembles the large,” I said.
“Untold worlds, big and small, right in front of us, everywhere.”
I lowered the glass and looked at him. His high forehead was shiny and smooth as a peeled potato. He was dressed plainly, like a clergyman, but his sparse hair misbehaved, as if ideas sprouted from the top of his head. A thought flew into me that maybe he’d turned all his grief over his wife’s death to curiosity, looked away from the pain inside to the wonders without, whether for himself or his daughter, I couldn’t guess.
“I can almost see the wheels turning,” he said.
“I can’t stop it, no matter how hard I try.”
“Why would you?” he asked, tilting his head as he did with Jane.
“Because it hurts sometimes,” I said, without thinking first.
He looked at me and smiled, the creases at the corners of his eyes deepening. “It’s a gift to be a thinker, to like ideas. But it’s a burden too. One can never turn away.”
“I don’t know many ideas, not really.”
“But you must be a great reader. All the girls at Jane’s school—”
I wanted to lie. I was embarrassed to tell him what counted as an education for me. I stammered instead. “I’m afraid I don’t go to school with—”
“Oh,” he said. “Apologies. I just assumed—”
“Though I do love to read. But books are … hard to come by.”
“Well, I’ve enough of my own for a small circulating library. When you come to Jane’s birthday, I’ll be glad to lend you whatever you like.”
My heart sank. I looked at the gaggle of girls by the door, all perfect curls, fine lace, and frippery. I would never be one of them, no matter how much I wanted it, or how hard I tried. Jane had not seen fit to invite me, or seen me fit to invite. “That’s kind of you,” I sputtered, trying to hide my hurt. But he saw it.
“I’m sorry. I’m sure Jane means to ask you. Still plenty of time. Hard to keep up with her social swirl.”
“Of course,” I said, embarrassed and grateful, a mélange of feelings unknown to me. I started to untie the ribbon from my neck. “Thank you for allowing me—”
“No, please. Consider it yours. I’ve more quizzing glasses than any one man should, and I’m afraid Jane’s had her fill of them. I’ve got her every color of ribbon known to man, and still she refuses to wear them. I cannot keep up with what’s au courant.”
I wrapped my hand around it, clutched it to my chest. “I shall treasure it.”
“Don’t treasure it, Miss Wollstonecraft, just look through it every chance you get.” He took the glass in his hand, and wiped it with his kerchief. “But best keep the fingers away from the glass itself.”
I was mortified that I didn’t have gloves on. But he skipped right past it, breathing his fog on the glass and wiping it clear. “You want clarity above all. You’ll be startled by what you see.”
I had never been so near a man who was not my father or brother, neither of whom had ever treated me with the regard I felt from John Arden in that moment. I realized I had never felt regard before at all. I mumbled a thank-you, bade a clumsy good-bye, and started for the door.
“Miss Wollstonecraft!” he called from behind. I turned back.
“Never worry. Ideas will find you, wherever you are.”
* * *
If only you could see me, little bird, clutching my brother’s kerchief so tight I almost forgot what was inside, my anger at Ned mingling with my envy of Jane, and my longing for her father’s regard. I wished I didn’t have feelings at all. But when I broke free of rough ground, the soft loam bulged between my toes and filled the arches of my feet. The sky threw a glimpse of morning the color of seawater. Even if I couldn’t see it—had never seen the sea—I smelled and tasted it on my lips. It stirred everything in me. I was thirteen, yes, but I was a soul, could feel it rising inside me like high tide, feel the pull of it in my belly.
Nature was my only home on earth, a place to rest, unbound.
Betsy sprinted ahead of me. She knew the way, the only path to it, the one we’d made ourselves. I tucked the hem of my skirt into its waist to climb the final “stairs”: flat rock, grass, flat rock again, and at its peak, the large, buff limestone where I sat sometimes on its carpet of moss and lichen, master of my own world, that small circumference with a view, I pretended, all the way to Calais. I pulled my knees up, wrapped my arms around them, and laid my cheek there, bone to bone, breathing it all in. Betsy panted in the grass, head resting on her speckled paws, feeling the wind in her fur. No one but Betsy wanted it, or would walk that far, so we kept it our secret. But I would have let Jane Arden come. Because then she would know me, then see me. On my hillock that spoke everything of who I was.
That, little bird, the only true
happiness I knew.
The barbed edge of my anger fell away. I knelt to the ground and set the kerchief on the level surface, untied the top, and peeled its corners away until one, two, three, and then thirty spiders at least, with what seemed like a thousand legs, skittered across the rock, under it, away, and into the wild. My realm had been theirs all along.
Could Jane Arden ever understand? She was refinement and elegance, knowledge and hope. How could I explain my letting loose a kerchief full of spiders on a nothing hillock that meant everything to me? How could I make her see that those spiders needed refuge, wanted to live as all beings want to live? Free.
* * *
I stood on the threshold of the cottage when Ned confronted me with his empty jar.
“Where are they?”
Eliza and Everina turned to him because Ned’s mood of the moment, whatever it was, preoccupied all the household, except when Father was home. I brushed past him, defiant. I was second-born, a girl, but I never knew which was the greater crime. I paid for it every day, but that day I was tired of paying.
“Take them off,” my mother said, before she even turned to face me. She could point to my stockings with the back of her head, from that spot the size of a pin cushion where her hair was always uncombed and ratted. Though she wore a cap most of the time, there were eyes underneath, I swear it.
“Don’t you want to hear my side?”
“And not a single word.”
I pinched my lips to hold in not a single word but a thousand. I untied my brogans and rolled the stockings down, one by one, seams inside out, my toes poking through. I held them out to her, an offering: Yes, I did it again, Mama, ruined everything. What shall we do now? She wanted me to fear her, but it wasn’t fear. It was boredom with our ritual, sadness that here it was again instead of anything else.
Ned stood between us, snorting like a bull. “Make her tell what she’s done with them, Mama!”
Eliza and Everina looked up sideways from their cross-stitches awaiting my next move, pretending not to. Their blank faces took no sides, as usual. Poor Henry, twelve years old, sat on the stone floor in the corner playing with dust balls and drooling into the rag tied around his neck. “I kn-kn-know where your spiders are, Ned.”
“Where, then?”
“Outside, l-l-lots of them. I’ll get some for you.”
“You imbecile,” said Ned.
“Don’t call him that!” I said.
“Not a single word, Mary, unless you’re prepared to tell Ned why his jar is empty,” said Mama, shooing little James away from her skirts. Not yet three, he came to clutch at my skirts instead.
“He stole my quizzer!” I pulled the magnifying glass, freed of its ribbon, from my pocket and held it up as evidence of his crime. “It was hanging on the back of my door, but I found it in his room. And a pile of spider bodies, without legs!”
“No one cares,” he said. “They’re spiders!”
“He pulls their legs off, Mama. And then burns them with the magnifying glass. In the most cruel way.”
“It’s science,” said Ned. “But you wouldn’t know that, would you? You go to a school for girls.”
“I’m the one who told you!” I shouted, but I couldn’t disagree. Of all my grievances against him, that Ned was seen worthy of a real education while I was not cut the deepest. “You’re not a scientist. You’re a torturer! Who pulls helpless spiders’ legs off to watch them suffer and squirm!”
“Mary!” Mama raised her voice to silence me.
But I was beyond her wrath, unafraid. “They’re not his spiders. They don’t belong to anyone! Why do you always take his side?”
This drew a slap across my face so weak I almost wanted to laugh. I knew she couldn’t stand me looking at her with pity. Betsy whined and scratched outside the door.
“Stop that dog’s scratching. Now.”
“She just wants to be inside, with us.” But Henry had already let her in. Mama narrowed her eyes, resenting even that small defeat. But she preferred to admonish me and ignore Henry. Sometimes she seemed bothered by the presence of so many daughters, when she’d only wanted sons. Henry she didn’t count, but doted on Ned as if he were her husband, a husband she might like to have, or wished hers was. I saw her once giving him dancing lessons in the drawing room. Ned was clumsy and four-footed, but she didn’t care. The way she looked at him, her face shining like a smitten young girl—maybe one she once was—who knew how to hold herself, and where a young man’s hand might rest on the small of her back.
Reliving this now, little bird, I feel some splinter of sympathy for my brother. I’m sure I saw him blush, not at the thought of touching his mother, but touching any girl at all. I see that despite his bravura, he didn’t know anything, and that my mother, who loved him best, was trying to prepare him for the world she thought he deserved, which was one she’d never had. Sometimes I’d pretend she loved me like that too. Pretend she did not send me to a wet nurse for the first two years of my life (unlike Ned, whom she let suckle at her breast)—that she delighted in my first smile, first word, first step, first anything. Even then, I visited five-month-old baby Charles in secret. His wet nurse, in the poorest part of town, had lost her one child, an infant, and had only my youngest brother’s care to shape her days. She was glassy eyed, and said nothing to him as he sucked, just stared at the wall. But she didn’t mind when I sat beside her and said nonsense words to him, wiggled his tiny feet, watched him laugh. I wondered if my wet nurse did the same for me, whether I took her as my mother, and then, when I was taken from her, the only home I’d known, found my own mother a stranger, as she found me.
If only Mama had looked at me that way, once, the way she looked at Ned. The way I’m looking at you now, little bird. I would’ve retreated to my hillock and been happy for all my days.
* * *
Mama took Ned’s jar from his hand. I was to wash my stockings and stitch each hole, then sit by the hearth for three hours, looking at a spot on the wall and saying not a word, an exquisite torture. Everina was careful not to make eye contact, but Eliza stole glances when she could, and I saw some mixture of awe and pity in her eyes, but wasn’t sure which of us she held in awe, and whom pitied.
When Mama turned to her needlework, I looked out the window that perfectly framed my mighty oak in the near distance, half as big around as I am tall, with an elephant’s foot for a trunk and strong, knurled arms. I took shelter in its leafy world when Ned banished me from playing the boys’ hardy games, and so declared it “my tree,” where I’d go to read, or make my own school. Eliza and Everina, when they weren’t playing with dolls, consented sometimes to being my students, and Henry as a last resort, who let me pretend to teach him things. I wished I were up there, cradled in my favorite bough, as strong as a hammock, reading whatever book I could find, or even my father’s Town and Country, filled with the latest London scandals.
An old housekeeper had taught me to read with the help of some alphabet cards, left over from Ned, no doubt, and her own Bible, tied with a ratty ribbon. I don’t remember the woman’s face so much as her thick, wrinkled finger moving across the page, word by word, as I sounded out each one. I think now that she meant to tame me—I was all scabbed knees and dirty elbows—but it was she who made books my companion, when I could get them, sating a hunger of the mind more compelling than the twitching of my eager legs.
Mama caught me staring at my tree, and gave me the eye. But when she turned to attend to James and give instructions to the cook, I reached down to stroke Betsy’s head, feel her brindle fur through my fingers. It was then that Eliza swept past to press a letter into my lap. I thrilled at seeing my own name in Jane Arden’s fine curling hand, and half turned my body to gently break its seal. Just as I did, the door opened and slammed shut, signaling that Father’s workday was done, such as it was. He fancied himself a “gentleman farmer,” though his true penchant was for failing at it. (He spent what money we had to hire others to do the w
ork, then barked orders at them.) My life to that point had been an ever-shrinking circumference he drew for us, dragging us from Spitalfields to Epping Forest to Barking to Walkington—whatever his diminishing inheritance would allow—to get far away from his own father and the silk weavers of London’s Primrose Street. He was ever in search of a living off the land, or at least a place we might pretend to be a small, genteel family (we were neither small nor genteel). Someplace near a pub and a racecourse suited him best. He sought erasure of his past in each new place, but who he was went with him everywhere. And we went with him, a household ever in thrall to his whims and deficits. Suffering for his mistakes.
Betsy lifted her head, alert to his presence. We were all alert to him, but it was better not to look, not to draw his attention. There was no pretending he wasn’t drunk already. Henry hummed in the corner, tracing raindrops on the window with his finger.
“What’re you singing about, Henry?” But he just kept on humming.
A worn-out Betsy, ever the optimist, lumbered to standing and went to greet Papa. When he slapped his chest, inviting her paws, and rubbed her head and ears, our cottage sighed and let down its guard.
“Ah, pup, how was your day? What a good dog, a good dog, yup.”
Mama appeared from the kitchen to gauge Papa’s mood. “Give us a hug, why don’t you, then?” he said, walking toward her. She shook her head with a wilted smile and let him pull her to his unbuttoned waistcoat.
When he trained his eyes on me, I looked into the fire, my letter tucked safely between my dress and the seat of the chair. “What’s Mary done now?” he asked, still in a good-enough mood.
Love and Fury Page 3
