How Do I Love Thee?

by Nancy Moser

  But I enjoyed seeing others pleasure in our baby. Wilson was a doting auntie, and Signora Bondi, his wet nurse, supplied him with more than enough nourishment. Although I had come through the birth with laudable ease, Dr. Harding had drawn the line at my nursing the babe. Seeing how the stout and rosy Signora accomplished this feat, I did not let disappointment gain a foothold. For my son to be surrounded by four adults who loved him . . . considering the distance between real family, I was happy to provide him with willing substitutes.

  Flush was the only one who did not appreciate the boy. Used to getting my full attention, he now barked more often and sulked. I tried to give him his due but found my affections had been transferred from dog to son.

  Wilson entered. “The post,” she said.

  My daily hope was that Papa had written to me, but once again I was disappointed. “It’s from your sister,” I said to my husband.

  “Read it aloud.” Robert paced with Pen in his arms, rocking as he walked from sofa to window and back.

  I cleared my throat. “ ‘Congratulations on the birth of your son! Nothing can give us more joy. And joy is what we need right now because I am grieved to inform you that—’ ” I stopped reading aloud as soon as my eyes glanced upon the words our mother. But I could not stop reading. Yet as I came to the climax, my legs gave out beneath me.

  Wilson was the closest, caught me, and helped me to a chair. “What’s wrong?”

  “Ba?”

  Robert came towards me, the baby well satisfied in his arms. The sight of him now, with his child, after the news I had just read . . .

  He handed Pen to Wilson and took the letter from me. I would have done anything to keep its contents from him—to erase the awful reality.

  He grazed over the letter, verbalizing a word here and there like stepping-stones taken towards a far shore. “ ‘Congratulations . . . birth . . . son . . . joy . . . need . . . grieved . . . our mother passed away March the eighteenth. I am so sorry that—’ ”

  Robert looked up and staggered. I helped him to the sofa, sinking beside him. “I am so sorry, dearest. So, so sorry.”

  He perused the letter again. “She never knew she had a grandson. She never knew!”

  I thought about the date of her death. “But surely your family received notice before she died.”

  Robert slapped the letter against his thigh. “The doctor told them not to tell her. Her heart . . . she did not even get to see the lock of hair we sent to her.”

  This seemed especially cruel. To have lived to know, and yet to have not been told . . .

  Robert rose and began pacing again—solo. “The last time I saw her was the week after our wedding. Two and a half years ago.”

  His head shook back and forth. “She was the kindest, most noble of women. As a child she knelt every night at my bedside and heard my prayers.” He turned to me, his face contorted with grief. “We were going to England to show them our child. To show your sisters . . .”

  “We can still go,” I said. “Your father and sister would love to see—”

  He shook his head vehemently. “It would break my heart to see my mother’s roses over the wall, and the place where she used to lay her scissors and gloves.”

  I went to him and leaned my head against his shoulder. I had no words sufficient—”

  He broke away from me, his emotions too intense to contain. “We should have been contacted that she was ill! It’s not fair to know too late. I would have gone to her and—”

  “Sarianna knew that. I am certain she kept the news from us because I was in the last weeks of my confinement. She knew the complications we anticipated over the birth. That Pen and I came through with our health is an unexpected miracle.”

  He stared at the floor, his hand clutched to his chin. “I have to go. Out. I have to be alone.”

  He strode to the door, letting it slam. Wilson bounced Pen with soft cooing, but her eyes revealed her panic and distress.

  “What should I do?” I asked her. “It is because of me he was away from his mother and his family. Because of me his mother never enjoyed the wedding of her only son, because of me she didn’t know of her grandson. I never even got to meet them. How can I make that up to him?”

  Wilson had no answers.

  There were none.

  As our child grew roly-poly, his father grew pale and wan. He did not eat. He did not sleep. He did not smile.

  Robert grieved.

  The heat of summer added an oppressive shroud to our home, and I knew that we needed to escape to cooler climes as we had done the previous year.

  Robert had handled those preparations, but now he was no more able to plan such an exodus than he was able to plan an outing across the street. The tables had turned. I was the strong one, the one who had to put the needs of my spouse before myself.

  And so . . . I found us a place to stay for four months, at Bagni di Lucca, sixty miles northwest of Florence. Its thermal baths brought tourists to the towns nearby, but Bagni di Lucca was the highest town, and as such was fairly free of travelers. It was near the Lima River, at the foot of the Apennines. Our house lay at the heart of a hundred mountains, sung to continually by a rushing mountain stream. Robert took to long walks in the woods, where he could be alone and not meet with a soul.

  His soul was the problem.

  Although his physical self improved in the lovely surroundings, his inner self was scarred. His mother’s death and the guilt that followed made him question his essence, and question the purpose of love. He had been a good son to her—until he had left her. He had loved her as well as any mother could wish. But now that she was gone . . . had his love been worthless? Without her present in the world, the love they had shared seemed meaningless.

  But love was eternal. Although I may not have known that before I met Robert, I knew it now. I knew it in his gentle care, his vibrant laughter, and the smile of our son sitting upon our laps. I had been on the edge of death when Robert came into my life, and it was he who had lured me away from the brink and made me see the possibilities in love and in a future where two lives could become one—and create another life in the process. Robert had saved me from death.

  Now, it was my turn.

  “I am off,” he said at the door one morning. He donned a straw hat and gathered his walking stick.

  “Would you like me to come with you?” I asked, for I had found strength in this place that had allowed me to wander the woods with Robert, for miles and miles, without feeling the least bit of exhaustion.

  “If you’d like,” he said.

  My stomach clenched at his acquiescence, for this walk would not be like other walks where we said little. I had determined a way to give something to my husband that I had kept secret from him. And today, together in the loveliness of the woods, I would do it. I would share with him . . .

  “Just a moment,” I said. “I need to get my bonnet.” And the other thing too . . .

  Robert did not notice the small leather notebook as we kissed Pen good-bye and walked into the woods. I kept it at my side, concealed within the folds of my skirt. I slipped my other hand in his arm and we made our way up the path.

  My heart beat in my chest with reason beyond exertion. Would Robert like my gift? Or would I find myself wishing I had kept it secret?

  Neither one of us spoke, which was fine with me for a while, as I feared if words escaped they would tumble over themselves in a meaningless chatter. This day was not for chatter; it was for communion. And consolation. And compassion.

  We came upon a clearing. A meadow of wild flowers lured Robert to pluck some blooms for me.

  “For my Ba,” he said.

  I put my nose to the flowers out of habit rather than the need to enjoy their fragrance. My senses were elsewhere and threatened to expose themselves in odd ways unless I put an end to the waiting and—

  “I have something for you too,” I said.

  “What is that?”

  I spotted a fal
len log, leaning against a rock. “Sit,” I said.

  He removed his handkerchief and began to wipe the rock for my own seating. “No,” I said. “You sit. I must stand.”

  His eyebrows rose, but he took a seat upon the log and stuffed his handkerchief into his vest pocket. “So?” he said. “You have piqued my curiosity.”

  I attempted a deep breath to calm myself but was only partially successful. Would this be a mistake? Once given, I could never take it back. . . .

  And yet I sensed it was time. I had prayed for my husband for many months, prayed that he would live rightly and turn his face forward, and press forward, and not look back morbidly for the footsteps of those beloved ones who traveled with us only yesterday. They themselves were not behind but before. . . . It was love that bound us—forever. Yet I doubted that, in his grief, Robert felt that love. He felt alone. Abandoned, and full of regrets.

  My hesitation was proving to be onerous, for Robert said, “Ba, you make me worried. What is it?”

  It was best just to say it. “Do you know I once wrote some sonnets about you?” My hand removed itself from my side and presented the notebook to him. “Here they are, if you care to see them.”

  He opened the leather cover where I had kept them. He turned the pages, stopped at a page past the middle, then read aloud:

  “The first time that the sun rose on thine oath

  To love me, I looked forward to the moon

  To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon

  And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.

  Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;

  And, looking on myself, I seemed not one

  For such man’s love!—more like an out-of-tune

  Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth

  To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,

  Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.

  I did not wrong myself so, but I placed

  A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float

  ’Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced,

  And great souls, at one stroke, may do and doat.”

  “I have not the master’s hands,” he said. “And you had no need of such a master. You are a priceless instrument.”

  My throat tightened and I sat beside him. “If I am, it is only because of you, loving me.” I had to say more. This was not about me, but about Robert. “And I love you, Robert. During our courtship you drew me away from death and gave me a new life. You loved me, a woman who had resigned herself to never knowing such love, a woman who felt unloved in ways more than she could dare acknowledge.”

  “You deserved to be loved. It was unconscionable that you were never allowed to be so.”

  “I thank God I was never allowed to love, nor to dream of it. For when your love came upon me, when my heart was awakened from its sleep, it was a miracle revealed. I would not give up that miracle for a few false loves in my past. Better for my heart to be untested than to experience a counterfeit to this love we have between us.”

  He pulled my face close to be kissed, then closed the sonnets upon themselves. “I wish to read these now. All of them. May I?”

  I nodded my encouragement, though my nerves gave testament to my fear that he would not like them, or e’en more, that they would not lift him out of his grief.

  He kissed my hand, then shooed me away. “Go on now. Go pick a bouquet and let me read.”

  I meandered away from him and did my duty picking the wild flowers that carpeted the clearing. But with every bend of waist or knee, I tilted my face to see him. Watch him. Gauge his reaction.

  He placed the leather cover on the log beside him and removed one sonnet at a time. He read them aloud—though softly—which I knew would offer them at their best.

  Suddenly, I panicked. I had not reread the sonnets for a long time. They had been written during our courtship and revealed both positive and negative emotions that had visited me during those months. Would some of those emotions hurt Robert? Confuse him?

  I could not risk it. I approached him. “Robert, I have been thinking and I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think it’s a good idea you read those—”

  He pulled the current sonnet to his chest and I noticed there were tears in his eyes. “You will not stop me, Ba. These verses . . .” He wiped a tear away. “I thought I knew you, knew all about you, yet these verses show me a new depth of your being.”

  Probably so, but did he like that depth? “Do they . . .” I hated to ask for affirmation but found I could not resist. “Do they please you?”

  He slipped the sonnet in with the others and stood to take my hands. “Dearest Ba, these sonnets are a strange, heavy crown.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that.

  He saw my distress. “They are a crown fit for your imperfect king, a wreath of sonnets to crown our love.”

  I nodded and let relief take its proper place. “I only give them to you now to let you remember the change you made in my life. We were such opposites, Robert. You knew about the outside world but had no struggles within. I suffered within but had little experience with anything beyond the walls of Wimpole Street. But now . . .”

  “We complete each other.”

  “Yes!” My relief was palpable.

  He nodded and took me into his arms. “I have been walking blindly in a world of destitution and pain, Ba. But these sonnets have replaced my grief with joy, replaced my depression with hope, and replaced my regrets with acceptance. I cannot change the past and be present with my mother in her last days. But I—”

  I thought of a Bible verse that had given me comfort. “ ‘I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.’ ”

  Robert looked at me, confused. I tried to explain. “Regret is a human condition, but our God is the God of restoration. He urges us to let the past be past. The hole in our hearts carved by sorrow provides us with a larger vessel to be filled with love and happiness. Our pasts made us who we needed to be to love each other, Robert, and that very same love is the balm that leads us towards our future.”

  He put a hand on my cheek and drew my head to his chest. I thought of one of the last sonnets I had written, soon before our marriage. I quoted to him the first lines . . . “ ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’ The list is long, Robert. Very long. And will grow longer still.”

  He smiled. “Then let us begin with number one. . . .”

  EPILOGUE

  Elizabeth never intended to publish the sonnets, but Robert considered them masterful, at an equal with the sonnets by Shakespeare. At his insistence, they were published in a volume of her poems in 1850 under the odd title Sonnets From the Portuguese. It was purposely odd, as the couple wanted to veil the love poems in something ambiguous. In actuality Elizabeth was “the Portuguese.” The poem that preceded the sonnets in the volume was called “Catarina to Camoens” and it was a favourite of Robert’s, bringing him to tears. And since he likened Catarina to Elizabeth, and Catarina was Portuguese . . . They realized people would think it meant from the Portuguese language, but they didn’t care.

  Although the Brownings stayed in Casa Guidi for years, they never felt settled there and traveled extensively, often subletting their apartment. They visited Rome, Venice, and Paris, and hoped to travel to Jerusalem and beyond, but Elizabeth’s health and their income held them back. Her lungs were still affected by cold weather. And yet, considering the lack of good medical care, they were very adventurous.

  After five years away, they also traveled back to England. Robert was hesitant to visit his family’s home, so went alone at first. He found his father in love with a much younger cousin, and his sister Sarianna happily running the household. They had moved on with their lives. Robert disapproved of his father’s courtship and forced an end to it, which led the elder Browning (and Sarianna) to move to Paris.

  Both Elizabeth and Robert continued to send letters to Papa, trying to reconcile. In resp
onse they received a packet containing all the letters Elizabeth had ever sent—unopened—along with a scathing letter that astonished both of them in its hatred and vindictiveness. Perhaps Papa had never loved her at all. . . .

  Elizabeth’s sister Henrietta finally married Surtees Cook on April 6, 1850, and moved to the country in Somerset, where they eventually had three children. They had asked for Papa’s approval, but he sent a harsh note condemning her for the insult and threatened to disown her. They eloped. Afterwards, visiting Papa at Wimpole Street, they encountered a “grand battle scene in the drawing room.” But in this case, the brothers were on Henrietta’s side. Eventually, the brothers came to forgive Elizabeth too.

  Elizabeth’s other sister, Arabel, never married and continued her charity work while living at home. In her later years, she too came to question her father’s love, and his hold over her. . . .

  Alfred was also disinherited when he married his cousin Lizzie in Paris, when he was thirty-five. She was twenty-two, and as a child had lived with the Barretts on Wimpole Street because her mother was mentally unbalanced.

  The brothers and Arabel continued to live in the family home until their father’s death on April 17, 1857, from erysipelas—St. Anthony’s fire—a skin disease that could poison the blood. Soon afterwards, with astonishing speed, all the remaining Wimpole children embraced their freedom and moved out of the house.

  Elizabeth grieved her father’s death deeply, the regret of never being able to reconcile devastating her. She wrote to Arabel: “My soul is bitter even unto death.” Papa had died “without a word, without a sign. It is like slamming a door on me as he went out.” She hoped “that what he did and the extreme views he took” were the result of “a false theory . . . he did hold by the Lord and walk straight as he saw . . . but as for me, in these days of anguish I have wished—well, there is no use now of writing what—but I did love him. . . . Certainly I would have given my life for his life—yet he went without a word.”

  Their son, Pen, met his grandfather once by accident. If Papa found out the Brownings were in town, he usually sent the entire family away to prevent contact. But a few times he didn’t know, and the Brownings visited Wimpole Street on the sly. On one occasion, Pen was playing boisterously with his uncle George when his grandfather came into the room and “stood looking for two or three minutes.”