She consented, at last, to bringing in a wet nurse, and Skeys at once sent for one, but Fanny’s little boy contracted a sudden fever that night and died in my arms. Skeys didn’t want to tell Fanny. He wanted to say that the child had been sent to a wet nurse and was doing well, in hopes the subterfuge would be enough to revive her.
“He’s gone, isn’t he, Mary, my little boy?”
I took her hand in mine, as she so often did for me. “Yes, darling Fanny. But I held him to the last.”
“Do you think he could have known that I loved him?”
“I think all the world, and everything you’ve ever touched knows your love, Fanny. You shine with it, and all of us feel its rays.”
“I’m so very tired,” she said. “I think perhaps I’ll go and live with my little boy, wherever he is.”
“Must you, Fanny?”
“Will you forgive me if I do?”
“Forgive you?” I pressed my lips to her palm; even its lines seemed to be fading, as if she was being erased before my eyes. I studied both sides of her hand, trying to commit her to memory. The carnelian ring was the only color about her, burning, as it always did, like a warm fire. With tremulous fingers she slipped the ring off and pressed it into my palm, closed my fingers around it.
“With this ring,” she whispered, “I thee wed.”
Choked with tears, I couldn’t speak, but touched my forehead to hers, kissed her softly on the lips. She asked that I climb on the bed with her, and I did, offering my arm so that she could rest her head in the nook of my shoulder. There I stayed, holding her close, until she took her last rasping sips of breath.
* * *
In my grief, my spirits flown away, I didn’t have the strength to board a ship again so soon. And leaving her alone in the cold hard ground of the cemetery just beyond the city seemed a second abandonment too cruel to exact. Skeys was inconsolable, and wanted my company in his anguish. How could I leave when each day began with him crying over his toast, clutching Fanny’s shawl to his chest, and ended in a bottle of port and a recitation of his regrets at having taken so long to marry her? He’d lost everything, how would he ever go on without her, rebuild his life? I had to bite my tongue.
I haunted the streets of Lisbon by day, like a woman made of air. I would have been willing for even the lightest wind to lift me, all the way to Heaven if possible. I could think of nothing that would tether me again to this bitter earth. Maybe another great quake would come, reduce Lisbon’s new elegance to rubble, and swallow me with it. Despite what my eyes could see, the optimistic rebuilding of the city into great wide boulevards and grand buildings, parallel lanes named for their purposes—Gold Street, Silver Street, Leather Street, and so on—I had a sense at all times that the ground beneath my feet was not what it seemed. This alluvial soil so easily churned into unstable mud. For an earthquake is the collapse of the most basic trust in the world: that the very ground upon which we have built our lives can hold us.
* * *
The weather on my passage home to London, little bird, had teeth and a temper both. The ocean was like a monster with a thousand hands that slapped against our boat, heaved us up, and threw us down. We felt in imminent danger all the time. Even the captain’s hard face showed it. Day in, day out, and through each night, the gray brutal sweep of ocean waves pounded us, a storm furious and unrelenting. Our vessel rose and tilted on squalls, then descended into yawning gulfs. I wondered how we would ever hold together.
Then a respite came one morning, and a few of us, desperate for air, went out on deck to see what we could, while the captain inspected for damage. I saw it first, and pointed to it—a shredded French flag appeared like a mirage out of the thinning fog, and then the vessel below it off our starboard bow, dismasted and drifting. Part of it already submerged. Soon we were close enough that we could see the sailors’ emaciated faces. There were maybe twenty of them, waving their arms at us, calling out through cupped hands. “Rudder broken! We drift for days! No rations! S’il vous plaît! We starve! Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!”
“We must take them on board,” I said to our English captain.
“We’ve rations barely enough for us, with at least a week more at sea. We sail past, that’s all we can do.”
“I’ll not have it!” I could hear their cries on the wind, fading in and out. “While there is food to eat we’ll share it, and all land safely. All of us live! Take them on board, I demand it.”
“Who are you to tell me how to run my ship?”
“I am the person who will report you first thing upon landing to the maritime office, if you do not take these men on board, now. You would leave them to starve or sink? It’s a floating coffin! They have no rudder!”
“They’re not our countrymen!” he said, now red at his collar.
“They are fellow human beings who need our care.” I turned to see another wave batter their boat, and for three seconds obscure it from view. My desperation fueled my ire. “I will not be a witness to such cruelty! Take them on board, now!”
A handful more of our fellow passengers had scrambled to the deck, plus the parson, the cook, the boatswain among them, watching me fight with the captain, not coming to my aid or his. This, the battle of our two wills. I don’t know where I found the strength to stand such shaky ground, no ground at all, but undulating boards beneath me. We, too, had survived for two weeks on salt beef and hard biscuits, with barely enough ale to wash it down, if we’d the stomach for it, and little sleep. But I knew that once we slipped sight of shore, we became a floating island, unto ourselves, dependent on the integrity of our ship to withstand these beating storms, and the integrity of one another through moments of peace and terror. We make our own society, are responsible one to the other. And those French sailors pleading for their lives: They were us too.
I can still hear their cries of joy mixed with the roar of the waves as we took them, one by one, on board. I joined the rescued men in a prayer of thanks, but later, all alone staring into another coming storm, feeling the spray like a thousand pinpricks on my face, my soul mounting and sinking with the waves, I knew that I had saved them too. I felt my own insignificance on that vast ocean, yes, but also what power I have, we all have, to force the human heart. And I knew that to let that ship drown to the bottom of the ocean with all its sailors would have been to let new Lisbon die by sea again, and my dear Fanny be buried twice.
Mrs. B
September 5, 1797
Poignand didn’t have the nerve to show his face again, and wasn’t asked. Dr. Fordyce returned after his lunch at the chophouse to sit by Mary’s bedside through most of that first night. Mrs. Blenkinsop would have said that he slept in a chair and snored, while she kept watch, with strict instructions to wake him if there was any change. She was glad of being in charge. No one had said it out loud, for Mr. Godwin’s sake, but childbed fever was everyone’s worst fear. It was said to be caused by foul, noxious air that arrived on the wind, or came from a woman’s own body. For Mrs. B’s part, the more that doctors were about, intruding on the business of childbirth, the more women died of it. She didn’t need science; she had experience.
As for remedies, she had rarely seen more applied with greater diligence and less success. Bloodletting was one thing—early and often, according to Poignand. Others preferred Peruvian bark, an emetic for vomiting, or an emollient clyster—a mix of linseed tea and new milk, cream of tartar, rhubarb, or castor oil—to help carry off the morbid matter. If the patient was truly sinking, doctors often advised throwing everything at her: strong infusions of the bark, wine, and cordials, applying blisters to the abdomen, even injecting antiseptic solutions into the uterus. Mrs. B believed her only duty was to keep Mary comfortable and give her strength for the fight, whether this was an ephemeral fever or not. Only time would tell.
When Mary’s fever burned, Mrs. B stripped her down to her chemise, threw open the windows, and kept a cool cloth on her head. When the cold shivering fits took over, she
heaped on clothes and covers, gave her wool socks and bottles of hot water at her feet, offered sips of warm tea or broth, hot spices, and spirits. But she knew there was no amount of heat that could prevent the rigors in a puerperal woman. It was nearing twenty-four hours of fever taking turns with rigors for Mary; anything longer, after childbirth, was considered a terrible sign. There was little to do but keep clean linens about her and hope she would sleep. She tried to help Mary onto her side, then her back again, to give her a few moments of relief, but Mary struggled against each wave shaking her body. In the moments between she was thirsty and restless. Her skin was translucent yellow, her eyes red.
“I thought I heard my baby cry,” she said when morning came.
“Yes,” said Mrs. B, patting her hand. “Your little girl is hungry.”
Mrs. B had tried a few drops of thin gruel from her bubby pot when the baby fussed in the night, but of course she wanted the nipple and her mother’s sweet milk, now that she knew it.
“Let me feed her, please, let me,” Mary said, hanging on Mrs. B’s sleeve.
Fordyce was awake now, rumpled but accounted for. He felt Mary’s forehead, took her pulse. “For Poignand,” he said with a sideways wink.
Mrs. B, who hadn’t slept all night, picked up the little one in her arms and lightly bounced her, trying to buy some time for them all. She knew what was coming.
“Can you hear me, Mary?” Fordyce sat on the edge of her bed, and waited for her eyes to focus on him. “Yes, that’s good. Now, I want you to listen to me. Your girl needs a mother’s milk to grow strong.”
“I can nurse her. I want to.”
“I know you do. But your milk, just now, may not be healthy for her. It could even do her harm.”
“How do you know that?” It was an effort for her to think, to talk, Mrs. B could tell. Her tongue was thick and white.
“We don’t know that. In fact, we don’t know very much at all. We are observers, really. Asking questions, writing down what we see, looking for patterns. I do not like to admit it, but each patient is a sort of experiment.”
“Then experiment on me!” Mary held out her upturned forearms. “Bleed me. I don’t care. Anything. If it will let me nurse my daughter.”
“We don’t want to weaken your circulatory system, which may help to move whatever putrefaction you’re suffering out of your body.”
“I’m begging you,” Mary said.
“I’m afraid I must forbid it.”
Mary cupped her breasts with her hands. “They hurt,” she said. “I need to suckle her.”
Fordyce looked anxious at the prospect of examining the patient’s breasts. “Mrs. Blenkinsop,” he said, “would you mind?” He took the whimpering baby from the midwife’s arms.
Mary began to cry too. “It feels so cruel,” she said, “to both of us.”
Fordyce didn’t look to Mrs. B like a cruel man. In fact he looked at home holding the infant, even as she puled and squirmed. He was older than most of the doctors she encountered in her work, but she suspected he would fall on the modern side of the wet nurse debate: mother’s milk was better than animal milk, pap, or panada, and only a serious intractable illness could justify separating a mother and child. If the mother could not suckle, for whatever reason, a wet nurse was next best. It was said she should be between twenty and thirty, of good health, character, and manners, and no redheads, for their hot temperament, at which Mrs. B took special umbrage.
She sat on the edge of the bed and loosed Mary’s chemise. “I know what it means to you,” she said, rubbing her hands together to warm them. She then felt all around Mary’s breasts, pressing lightly with the flat of her fingers. They were hot to the touch, knotty in places, rock hard in others. A quick glance at Fordyce told him what he needed to know. She replaced Mary’s clothing with a light touch. “But for your little bird. We’ve got to get her to a wet nurse, today.”
Mary had sweated so much, wet through the sheets already three times, that she had hardly any tears to cry. Dry crying had no satisfaction in it, Mrs. B knew. Though her face showed all the same pain. A keening pain.
Mr. Godwin walked in quietly, wearing fresh clothes. Mrs. B understood that people, even in the midst of the most difficult things, and often without knowing it, perform small acts of optimism, as if a prayer. A clean, pressed shirt was of that sort, she knew, each button a rosary. But when the husband took one look at his wife, and the tableau around her, his whole being sagged. He walked to Fordyce and took the baby in his arms, then took Mrs. B’s place at Mary’s bedside.
“Darling,” she said, with a brave face. “We’ve got to send our little bird to a wet nurse.”
“Is that what you want?” he asked.
“It’s for the best. For her.”
Godwin looked between his wife, his child. “I will do anything you think right. Find someone nearby. Someone close, and kind. And our little girl will come back to us very soon, when you’re well.”
Mary smoothed the tussock of their little girl’s hair with her fingertips, pressing the feel of her into memory. “When I’m well,” she said.
“Of course! It’s only temporary,” said Fordyce, offering the only comfort he could. Mrs. B sensed the lie in his voice, but hope was the only medicine there was.
“I do wish our girl had a name,” said Godwin, looking into his wife’s eyes. “Before we … send her away—”
“A name,” she said. “Yes.”
Godwin held the child’s cheek to his own, and pressed his eyes shut for a long moment. His tears were ripe as raindrops. “I want to call her Mary,” he said. “After you.”
“Mary?”
“What else could she possibly be?”
“A thousand things,” said Mary, beginning to fade, whether into fire or ice, no one knew.
“Then let her be a thousand things,” said Godwin, “but Mary first of all.”
Mary W
Gray is the color of grief. Not black, not white, not color at all, but bland nothingness. Days that are dark all the time. Water, frozen in the washbasins of our school, the furniture pulled up, all of us hovering around our one meager fire in the large drawing room, the one we could afford. I’d been gone only two months, but our world had changed in my absence, and I didn’t have the will to correct its course. Eliza and Everina showed me little empathy, instead blaming me for having gone to Fanny, my leaving having prompted several parents to pull their children, others now planning to leave. How could I argue otherwise? Without Fanny, I didn’t care.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Burgh. I know I’ve let you down,” I said, when she called me back to her parlor upon my return, greeting me with a warm embrace. She sat close beside me on the settee and asked after Fanny without reserve, her final moments, my state of mind. I didn’t tell her about my recurring dream, Fanny calling me to join her, and how sad I was when I awoke to still be alive. “I can scarcely find a name for the apathy that’s seized me,” I said instead. “I am sick of everything under the sun.”
“With time, it will change. Everything does.”
I thought of John Arden, when he’d looked upon his wife’s portrait and said the same thing to me. But the now pressed on my heart.
“I blame myself, even still. It was I who persuaded her to marry Hugh, go to Portugal. She might still be with us if I hadn’t. The school would be thriving, our girls—our grand project, yours and mine.”
She patted my knee in the most motherly way, something my own mother had never done, not once. “There, there,” she said. “There’s nothing in it to blame yourself. We must look forward, not back.”
“I’ll find a way to make it right, Hannah. I promise you.”
Mrs. Burgh took in a deep breath and considered the ceiling. I had not the heart to tell her that despite her substantial backing, the trip to Portugal, the school’s expenses, including for me and my sisters, had far exceeded what we were taking in. I’d had to borrow money before I left, and now had creditors chasing me.
“I think we have no choice but to close the school,” she said. “As soon as the academic year’s done.”
There was no disagreeing. It was the practical thing to do. For the next three months I watched the students leave one by one, prefaced by last walks and long hugs. Each parting was for me another loss.
“What would Fanny want you to do?” our friend John Hewlett asked me when he dropped in for a friendly visit, and instead found me in despair. Dr. Price had introduced us when we opened our school, as Hewlett had done the same in Shacklewell, in Hackney. Aside from running his school, he was working on a chronology of ancient Greece, translating a book on algebra, and writing his own collection of sermons on various subjects. Fanny and I were fervent in our admiration, and reveled in his company, as he did in ours when we pounced with questions, bandied about ideas, and finished each other’s sentences. But now all I could do was shake my head. I didn’t know almost anything, least of all what Fanny would tell me.
“She would want you to learn from her loss, grow from it, remember the transient nature of human life,” he said. “But also remember your purpose—yours, Mary—here on this plane, before God calls you home.”
“My purpose was Fanny.”
“No, that’s not what I saw. Fanny exemplified your purpose, mirrored your highest ideals.”
“She was my path to virtue. Fanny made me better in every way.”
“But don’t you understand what she saw in you?”
I shook my head.
“I think she saw God in you, the way she did in her plants. Trying to understand their separate parts, admiring the whole.”
“I don’t know about God anymore. Except that he decided to forsake me.”
“You’re thinking about it all wrong. Think of pure intelligence, a perfect brain, but without our human weakness. And you, Mary, you make the purpose of your life the urgent improvement of your own intellect, and the thinking powers of those around you. There’s no higher calling. All we have, each of us, is our own perfectibility. I think that is the gift we return for the one we are given. If we are sparks of His great Creation, then we must make of those sparks a fire, and with that fire light the way, that we might be worthy, and made whole again in His eyes. Make the world whole with us.”
Love and Fury Page 13
