by Anne Choma
19TH OCTOBER 1832
Whatever the truth of Miss Walker’s past entanglement with Reverend Ainsworth, the death of his wife had brought to the fore intense feelings of guilt and shame. Ann was deeply God-fearing, and the periods of depression that had marked her life to date had been characterised by bouts of religious mania. Now, her increased anxiety forced her to question how her relationship with Anne Lister would appear in the eyes of the Lord.
Unlike Anne, who had spent years combing the bible for passages that helped her to understand her lesbianism as a God-given quality, Ann Walker had had almost no time to reconcile the sexual attraction she felt to another woman with her rigid interpretation of the scripture. Now, the memory of the adultery she had committed with Ainsworth forced her to confront the transgression of her relationship with Anne. It would mark the beginning of a rapid descent.
‘There is some grinding trouble of the heart, some aching voids (if voids can ache), or something other that neither medicine nor I can reach’
The following day, further detail emerged. Miss Walker revealed that Ainsworth had pressed her to have sex with him. ‘He had asked her to yield all, assuring her it would not hurt her’, Anne wrote, recording her response (‘I held up my hands and exclaimed infamous scoundrel’). Miss Walker went on to tell Anne that the carbuncle ring she wore had been a gift from him. Anne took it from her finger. ‘She would see nor hear of it no more.’ Miss Walker ‘made no reply or resistance’ (8TH NOVEMBER 1832).
A note from Miss Walker to Anne, sent later that day, demonstrated that Ann was unable to find solace in their relationship. She was depressed and regretful, ‘humbled’ by her involvement with Ainsworth. Calling at Lidgate the next morning, Anne found her languishing in bed, ‘nervous and unwell’. Though she ‘talked and reasoned her into being to all appearance better’, Anne noted that there was ‘no foot or queer washing’ in Anne’s ablutions, that her personal hygiene was beginning to suffer. It was in contrast to Anne’s own fastidious cleanliness (9TH NOVEMBER 1832).
A friend of Miss Walker’s had also called at Lidgate that day. Miss Parkhill listened with Ann as prayers were ‘read aloud’ by Anne. But even the bible could bring no comfort. Miss Walker, feeling unable to sit for long, left her friends and retired to the sofa. An attempt was made to rouse her spirits with an outing to Cliff Hill, but there too she lay on the sofa in a hopeless languor. Most strikingly, she began making attempts to rescind her agreement with Anne. ‘Thinks she has done wrong to say yes to me,’ wrote Anne, ‘is remorseful – thinks she was bound to Mr Ainsworth.’
What might under other circumstances have been a happy time for the newly engaged women was anything but. Anne found herself forced into the role of counsellor and care-giver. She inhabited it as best she could, offering words of love and patient encouragement, and gestures from the small – sending a ‘stomach tin’ (hot water bottle) against Ann’s complaints of the cold – to the grand, proposing that she write to her jeweller for a beautiful turquoise ring. Ann was unable to appreciate them. She begged Anne not to send for the ring: ‘she could not wear it in mourning’.
In the presence of Miss Parkhill, Anne was careful to moderate her behaviour ‘for fear evidently of her gossiping about us’ (27TH NOVEMBER 1832). Anne knew that to arouse Miss Parkhill’s suspicions would be to further increase Miss Walker’s anxieties. ‘My conduct altogether bespoke a more than common influence tho’ nicely done,’ she wrote. ‘What will Miss Harriet Parkhill think? But she likes me (Miss W says)’ (9TH NOVEMBER 1832).
In private, it did not take long for Miss Walker’s familiar vacillations to resurface. She now told Anne that she could not possibly think of travelling with her. ‘So weak as I am it would be madness in me to leave the kingdom,’ she wrote. ‘I must talk seriously with you on this subject tomorrow.’
If she was beginning to perceive that it was a hopeless cause, Anne persisted in attempting to allay Miss Walker’s anxieties:
You know how well I can and do enter into all your feelings . . . Excess of sorrow is in the very nature of things its own remedy – our mind and nerves will be stronger by and by. Even conscience is not always strictly just. She may be too lenient or too severe, or lulled to sleep . . . We cannot judge ourselves, we are too mistrustful, too confident, too fearful, or too presumptuous. We walk in a vain shadow, but as I cannot believe you to deserve the ‘torments of conscience’.
9TH NOVEMBER 1832
Ann Walker’s ‘torments of conscience’ were not abating. In fact, she appeared inclined to sabotage her chances of happiness with Anne. ‘She said . . . she should be a deal of trouble to me if I had her’ Anne reported on 9th November 1832. In spite of her condemnation of Ainsworth, Anne began to wonder if she was right. ‘Shall I let her take the fellow, and myself have done with her? Will she not be more pother than she is worth?’
But Anne would not yet withdraw her support and affection. She promised Ann to ‘talk over any plan most likely to re-establish your health’ and within two weeks she was back in contact with Dr Belcombe, giving him her own diagnosis:
The mind is worse than the body, and in this respect I confess I find a nervous young lady much more difficult to manage than I expected. We have relapses which I can neither understand nor guard against. There is some grinding trouble in the heart, some aching void (if voids can ache), or something or other that neither medicine nor I can reach.
26TH NOVEMBER 1832
In the face of a problem, Anne Lister’s instinct was to seek a practical solution. She was used to managing her tenants, workers, staff and family members on a daily basis. She exercised an uncommon level of control over her life and circumstances. Yet now, she found herself unable to help Miss Walker. ‘I see the best way is to speak as one having authority’ she maintained, but even having ‘parried all her arguments’ against Miss Walker’s fears of foreign travel, she could not fully convince Ann that leaving the country would not mean imminent death (16TH NOVEMBER 1832).
Anne found herself increasingly exhausted by her attempts to cope with Ann’s ‘moody melancholy pother’. By 23rd November, she had resolved to ‘give her back her purse, and “yes” and be off’. More letters from Ainsworth, accompanied by another ring for Ann in remembrance of his dead wife, sent Miss Walker deeper ‘into the dolefuls’. Anne started to make plans for ‘getting off’ in January alone.
The two women were still physically intimate. Suspicions about Miss Walker’s level of experience had never left Anne Lister, who now revisited the thought that ‘she must have had some man or other’ and that consequently, as a woman, she would ‘never satisfy her’. Privately interrogating Ann’s account of what had gone on with Ainsworth, Anne convinced herself that he had ‘deflowered and enjoyed her’ (25TH NOVEMBER 1832).
That afternoon, Anne was threatened by a stranger as she walked from Lidgate to Shibden. Whether this was a random attack or a premeditated ambush, the man did not appear to have been prepared for Anne’s spirited response to his assault:
An impertinent fellow with a great stick in his hand asked if I was going home and made a catch at my queer. ‘Goddamn you’ said I, and pushed him off. He said something which I took as meaning an attack, so said I ‘if you dare I’ll soon do for you’ and he walked one way and I the other. I did not feel the least frightened. How involuntarily and bitterly I swear on these occasions!
25TH NOVEMBER 1832
The following day, a visit from Jeremiah Rawson reopened the negotiations over Anne’s coal. ‘He asked if I would take 200 per acre,’ reported Anne, who was determined to stay firm on her original quote and replied that she had already ‘had £230 bid . . . said I was determined not to take less’. Without revealing Hinscliffe’s identity as the rival bidder, she sent Jeremiah away to consider her terms. He would have to consult his brother. Christopher, he told Anne, ‘would think him mad to talk of that price’ (26TH NOVEMBER
1832).
Anne had also been trying to purchase a farm and some land on the Godley road, near Shibden. She believed that she had seen right through Mr Carr’s inflated price: ‘I am of the opinion that he has no customer, and if he has, no-one will give more than the sum [£2,200] I have mentioned,’ she wrote. She decided to keep the deal to herself, not saying ‘a word of Godley to my father and Marian’ lest they should try and dissuade her from taking the financial risk (26TH NOVEMBER 1832).
In fact, Anne had already been offered the extra funds as a loan from Miss Walker, but, feeling that it would be wrong to accept it without any formal commitment between them, she had resolved to stick to her original offer. She eventually let Marian in on the deal, but begged her not to tell their father. ‘He was so deaf,’ she wrote, ‘I dread at people overhearing what is said’ (30TH NOVEMBER 1832).
When a letter arrived from Mariana Lawton full of doom and gloom about ‘many vexatious hindrances’, it hardly contained the content Anne relished under present circumstances:
What the future brings forward, Fred, we can neither of us guess at, but I still hold to my not very recently adopted option that Mr Lawton will outlive me. With this impression I shall leave all belonging to me here in such order that there will be little trouble beyond burning one parcel and sending off another, and something too like a Will I have made.
27TH NOVEMBER 1832
Mariana seems to have known something of Anne’s plans to travel. While wishing that Anne ‘could learn to have a little more care for old England’, there is a hint of relief in her reference to the fact that Anne’s next trip should be taken alone: ‘Tells me I am far better off without a companion, than if I had one that did not suit me’.
Despite her husband’s robust health, Mariana held onto the possibility that she and Anne might someday live together. For Anne, the relationship seemed more firmly at an end:
M’s thought of ever being with me is quite gone by. I would not let her leave Charles and on this account she has made up her mind to stay with him, and will not be sorry should her life not last very long. Whatever is, is right. The less I think of her the better.
27TH NOVEMBER 1832
Two days later, Anne heard from Miss Walker. An invitation to visit Lidgate that Saturday would give Anne an opportunity to present the Book of Common Prayer she had ordered for Miss Walker from Whitley’s, ‘bound in crimson Morocco with purple water silk fly leaves – and richly gilt’ (29TH NOVEMBER 1832).
In the event, Anne was called upon sooner than expected. On 30th November, James Mackenzie delivered an urgent note. Miss Walker was ill. Dr Sunderland had been sent for but Anne was required too. With pressing business to attend to at Shibden, Anne composed a comforting note for Miss Walker with instructions on how to fill the time until she arrived:
Keep yourself as quiet and your mind as tranquil as you can and banish from your thoughts everything that is unpleasing. Remember that the desert has its green spots and that in anger or in mercy, Heaven never afflicts us beyond that we are able to bear. You have at least one comfort if I may hope that it can be a comfort to you to be assured of this affectionate interest and regard of yours, very faithfully Anne Lister.
30TH NOVEMBER 1832
Anne dispatched her business as quickly and efficiently as possible, telling land valuer Mr Mitchell not to ‘lose sight’ of the Godley deal. A note from Jeremiah, informing Anne that he ‘had almost persuaded his brother to let him take the ten acres at £230.10.10’ on the condition that they were given the ‘whole coal surface measure, and all the coal’ was given short shrift. ‘They want to smuggle both beds into the agreement which will not do,’ wrote Anne, who was only prepared to lease one portion of her land.
By midday Anne had arrived at Lidgate. Though Dr Sunderland was officially attending the patient, it was Anne who made the diagnosis. ‘When all trades fail,’ she would write drily to Steph Belcombe that evening, ‘I will set up for the cure of bodies’. Anne judged Miss Walker’s fever to be a result of the medicines that Dr Belcombe had prescribed in York. ‘An effect, not a cause, and said I was persuaded she had some mental uneasiness’ (30TH NOVEMBER 1832).
Ann Walker’s ‘mental uneasiness’ was bound up with her belief that she had lost Anne for good:
She had been fretting all yesterday and last night because she thought from my note of yesterday that all was over and I had made up my mind to end the thing between us and she could not bear to part with me. Could not think what she meant. It was that I had concluded with ‘affectionately yours’ leaving out ‘faithfully’. She said if I had gone away, she should never give up the hope of our coming together sometime. She had never felt drawn so close to me since Tuesday and now thought that I could make her happy and had prayed for us to be happy together. I did not say much but asked why, with these feelings, she refused me?
30TH NOVEMBER 1832
Ann Walker went on to admit that Miss Parkhill, who had left Lidgate ‘in a huff’ just before Anne arrived, had been bad-mouthing Anne in her absence. ‘Miss Harriet Parkhill is all jealous and wrong’ Anne wrote, implicating her in a wider network of Halifax gossips with whom she was unpopular, ‘and has done all the mischief as Miss Walker owned’. In this instance, her attempt to discredit Anne seems to have backfired. Praying that she and Anne might ‘be happy together’, Miss Walker became tentatively protective. Their conversation was testament to how reliant she had become on Anne. Whenever Anne left Lidgate, she told her, she would sink into a depression from which ‘nothing could raise her’. ‘Said I would do all I could for her as long as I could’, wrote Anne. ‘She said she should never have much confidence in anybody else.’
If Anne Lister’s attitude seems hubristic, nobody else seemed able to give Ann a level of support approaching that which she was offering. Her interest in Miss Walker’s welfare remained avid and heartfelt, as did her determination to prevent her from dwelling on her ailments by removing her from the limiting environs of her drawing room. She firmly believed that if Miss Walker could travel abroad, her experience of the wider world would speed her recovery.
In appreciation of Ann Walker’s inability to contemplate their agreement in her current condition, Anne Lister reinstated 1st January 1833 as her decision deadline. In a parallel attempt to buy herself more time, Ann Walker told Anne that she would like to write to her sister Elizabeth in Scotland for advice.
Replying to Mariana’s letter on her return from Lidgate, Anne was able to be honest about the ‘blue devils’ she periodically experienced, without giving specific mention to her relationship with Miss Walker:
Somehow or other, my dearest Mary, your letter is a comfort to me . . . you almost persuade me to forget what I have longed for all my life, and to believe that I am better as I am, than I should be if I had a companion. If I have not the pleasure, I shall not have the pain, and I shall certainly get rid of the blue devils which are by no means concomitant of a temperament like mine . . . you will be agreeably surprised when you see me at Leamington. I am out all day long in all weathers and it does me good. I am much stronger than I was a few months ago and my spirit, though bending for long beneath the tyranny of disappointment [of Vere], is really starting up again with something like its former elasticity . . .
I perpetually talk of getting off in January, but perhaps I shall not be able, for I have several things in hand not likely to be settled and done so soon . . . what do you advise me to do about a manservant? Do think about this for me. I should like to have a good, steady, enterprising English groom, who would take care of the carriage and do anything I wanted doing while abroad. If I had such a man to depend upon I should do well enough for the rest. And this man of confidence might have the place he liked at home, and stay with me to my life’s end. Do pray give me your opinion.
30TH NOVEMBER 1832
Though Anne did not name Miss Walke
r, her ‘several things in hand not likely to be settled and done so soon’ may have been enough of a hint for Mariana, who had heard about the medical difficulties of Anne’s ‘friend’ as a patient of her brother. In an otherwise affectionate letter, Anne could not resist signing off with a dig at Mariana. ‘I have sometimes been not so good as you thought,’ she wrote, ‘but very often not so bad. It is probable that you have never appreciated me exactly as I deserved.’
‘Well! Here is the end of another year!’
As the end of 1832 approached, Ann Walker’s mental health was deteriorating further. By 6th December, she had abandoned any thought of leaving home, in spite of her sister Elizabeth’s advice:
Miss Walker read me last night the passage from her sister’s letter respecting me. Very sensible. Advised Miss Walker going abroad with me. Thought it would do her good, and be of great advantage to her, all my acquaintances being of a high order. Yet all this did not seem to have much influence. She will not go abroad, and now, will not leave Lidgate on my going away.
Aunt Anne was there to absorb Anne Lister’s frustration. ‘Said I had made up my mind, I should not bother myself – but Miss Walker was not fit to be left at Lidgate, and I should contrive some way for her’ (7TH DECEMBER 1832).
Lady Vere Cameron, in contrast, seemed deliriously happy. Writing from Rome, she gushed about her husband’s ‘affectionate nature’, which shone forth ‘with a degree of unselfishness, and real good feeling, which of many worldlings could not understand’. Following his father’s death, Donald Cameron had acceded to the title of twenty-third Chief of Lochiel. ‘How can I bear to be left so many weary, long months at such a distance?’ wrote Vere, contemplating her husband’s premature return to his vast Scottish estate. Her enthusiasm for travel fuelled Anne’s own appetite to quit England. She quoted passages of Vere’s letter in her journal:
