Ophelia's Muse

by Rita Cameron

  “You’ve been consorting,” she said, her voice loud and even, “with whores.”

  Behind her, Fanny made an angry sound and moved toward Lizzie, but Ford had risen from the table and held her back. He took Fanny by the arm and dragged her away from the table. Lizzie paid them no attention at all. She had eyes only for Rossetti, and those eyes were filled with rage.

  “I am your wife. Your wife! Does that mean nothing to you?”

  “Lizzie!” Rossetti implored in a harsh whisper. “Control yourself! Please, not here!”

  “Why not here?” Lizzie stared around defiantly at the other tables near them, which had all, by now, stopped their conversations to watch. “Here is where you’ve brought me to dine among your whores. Excuse me, your models. I should know better, after all. I was one of them. One of many.”

  Rossetti grabbed Lizzie’s arm. Her face had lost all of its color, and she was trembling. She wasn’t in her right mind, he decided. The laudanum made her agitated. “You aren’t well,” he said loudly, for the benefit of their onlookers. “I’m taking you home.” He tried to lead her by the arm from the table, but she wrenched herself free.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like me to go home so you can be left in peace with your friends, and your drink, and your whores. I’m nothing but a bother to you, a nuisance to be overcome.”

  He began to argue, but she cut him off. “Very well. I’ll take myself home. Don’t bother about me; I’m not worth bothering over.” Without giving him a chance to reply, she pulled her shawl around her shoulders and darted off into the crowd, which watched her go with silent amusement before returning to its roar of conversation.

  Rossetti watched her walk away, Ruskin at his side.

  “She’s obviously not well,” Ruskin said. “You can’t let her go off by herself in that state.”

  “Can’t I?” Rossetti snapped. “She’s never well, is she? What am I supposed to do about it?”

  Ruskin looked at him reprovingly and Rossetti sighed. “Oh, I know that it’s my fault. I never should have brought her here. She can’t leave the damned laudanum alone and it makes her odd. I can never predict how she might behave.” He paused, and then went on. “And, of course, I haven’t treated her as well as I might. But I must make my art—you know that. And without models, without inspiration, I can’t work. She knows that. Anyway, it’s best that we leave her alone. She’ll go home and calm herself down and we’ll talk it out in the morning.”

  “If you think that’s best.” Ruskin frowned. “Or I could go look in on her.”

  “No.” Rossetti stiffened. “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Ruskin said, avoiding Rossetti’s eye. “Your work, of course, is of the utmost importance.”

  “Oh, my work be damned,” Rossetti cursed. He had no wish for more of Lizzie’s hysterics, but neither could he allow her to go off like this, on her own. “I’ll be back in an hour,” he said to Ruskin, and then rushed off through the crowds to find his wife.

  Lizzie stood on the sidewalk outside of the Sablonière and waited with her back turned against the brightly lit windows. She expected that Rossetti would be after her at any moment, and she watched the door out of the corner of her eye. When the doorman asked her if he could hail her a cab, she demurred. But at last the delay grew too long to ignore, and she had to admit that he wasn’t coming.

  Anger had carried her from the table, but standing alone on the sidewalk she felt deflated, and she seemed to grow smaller and more frail beneath her large shawl. Whatever the truth was about his betrayals, she had expected that he would, at the very least, make an attempt to mollify her, to pretend that it was all in her head, so that she could pretend the same. A few moments ago she’d been furious enough to shout in a public restaurant, but now she was mute. What could be said when there was no one to say it to?

  The doorman asked her again if he could be of some assistance, and Lizzie nodded dumbly and pointed toward the row of cabs at the corner. He whistled for one and gave the driver her address. Before she climbed in, she looked once more at the door, but there was no sign of Rossetti, or even of Ford or Ruskin. They had all stayed, preferring the company of Fanny and her sort, women who would smile with them and drink with them, and then lie in their beds and in the morning ask for nothing, because they were too accustomed to nothing to know that they should want more.

  She had just turned away when she felt Rossetti’s hand on her waist. In earlier days she might have protested, brushed him away, and drawn the scene out. But tonight she was simply grateful that he had followed her, and keenly aware that he might just as easily have not.

  In the carriage Lizzie was calm. She lay back in her seat, looking at Rossetti through half-closed eyes. Rossetti was disconcerted by the change. “Are you feeling better?” he asked. And then, more peevishly, for the scene in the restaurant was still fresh in his mind: “If you had only listened to me, Lizzie, and gone home when you weren’t well, we could have avoided all this trouble, and not made ourselves ridiculous, and an object for gossip. You know that I can’t help who comes up to our table at a place like the Sablonière. You used to enjoy it for just that reason, you know.”

  Lizzie shifted her gaze out of the carriage window, only half listening to his words. “But you were with Fanny last night, weren’t you? Is she your muse now?”

  “I paint, Lizzie, what I am paid to paint. Or have you forgotten that we must have something to live on? Dr. Hutchinson’s fees alone . . .” He trailed off. It was unfair, he knew, to blame her for being ill, or for losing the child.

  But she could read the accusation in his eyes. Counterarguments and accusations welled up in her, springing from the rawness of her hurt with clear and undeniable certainty. If he had said one word, made one accusation or rebuke of his own, perhaps her hurt and anger would have poured out in all of its ugliness, leaving her weak but purged of its poison. He would have taken her in his arms and whispered all the words she needed so desperately to hear: that he loved her alone, that he needed her, that the other women were nothing to him but pretty faces. But that scene had played out many times before, and neither of them had the energy for its hackneyed revival. And so instead they rode on in silence.

  By the time they reached Chatham Place, Lizzie’s anger had subsided. She knew how useless words were to mend the break between them. Her entreaties died on her lips, just as the child, the one thing that might have given some meaning to their union, had died in her womb. She had nothing left to give, and nothing left to ask, and so she let herself be guided up the stairs of the studio, with blank, unseeing eyes.

  Rossetti led her to the bed, and she lay down, fully dressed. He sat next to her, not quite looking at her. “You need to rest,” he said mechanically. “You’re not well.”

  “I would rest better if you lay down beside me.”

  Rossetti hesitated for a moment.

  “You’re not going back there, are you?” she asked, hysteria once more creeping into her voice.

  “No, of course not.” Rossetti reached for the laudanum bottle and poured a few drops onto her lips. “To help you sleep. Lie back, my dove, and if you don’t want me to go, I won’t. I’ll stay right here by your side.”

  Lizzie placed one limp hand on Rossetti’s arm and then, satisfied that he would stay with her, she let sleep overtake her, as the laudanum drew its strange and troubled dreams across her eyelids.

  When she woke again the studio was still dark, and she felt that not very much time had passed. She reached for Rossetti, but she was alone in the bed. She called out for him, but there was no answer, and no need to call again. She could feel the emptiness of the studio. He had gone back to the restaurant, after all.

  It was more than she could endure. She’d fought for so long to make this her home, and now she had the distinct feeling that she didn’t belong here, that she had driven Rossetti from his studio just as the summer heat and the stink of the Thames
had once driven them to the countryside.

  But no, he would come; he would not abandon her here.

  Her head ached and her stomach was wracked with cramps. Despite the heavy dose that she had taken, the laudanum seemed to have worn off, leaving her weak and shaking. She sat on the side of the bed and loosened her gown. She looked over to the table and saw that the little bottle was half full. It was enough, far more than enough, to get her through the night. She removed the stopper and put it aside; now was no time for carefully administered drops. She poured a generous dose into a glass and drank it down in one long sip.

  The effects were immediate and unexpected. She had thought she might lie down and wait for Rossetti to return, but she suddenly felt a great welling of energy, and she was compelled to rise and move about.

  She walked back and forth through the rooms of the studio, unwittingly tracing Rossetti’s path on the night of the stillbirth. She stopped at the window often, looking down into the street and listening for the sound of footsteps that would signal his return. He would come back to her, she was sure. He would not abandon her for the cheap pleasures of Fanny Cornforth.

  As she paced, her hands fluttered nervously, running lightly and insensibly over the familiar objects of the studio: the panels of rich cloth that Rossetti had hung along the walls, the canvases and sketches that covered every surface with their wealth of stories and history, and the blue-and-white willow dish, a wedding gift, which sat in a place of honor above the mantel.

  At last she came to the easel. She hadn’t paid much attention to Rossetti’s work lately, but now she turned the easel around and drew in her breath.

  It wasn’t a portrait of Fanny, as she had feared. But the drawing filled her with an ominous fear. It was a portrait of her, unmistakably, but one for which she could not remember sitting. He must have been drawing it, she thought with a chill, while she posed for The Queen of Hearts.

  The drawing was small, done only in pen and ink, but the detailed work showed that Rossetti had taken great pains with it. The two figures were done after her and Rossetti. The woman sat, half-fainting, in a chair, with her face turned away from the man as if he had assaulted her. The man stood over her, his face twisted with some strong emotion, sorrow or anger. But the most telling detail was his hand, which was open to the viewer in a gesture of frustration and assaulted innocence, an attitude that Lizzie well recognized. It was the very gesture that Rossetti often made during their arguments, as if to say, “I’m sorry that I’ve hurt you, but it was never my intention; in fact, you were the furthest thing from my mind.”

  Lizzie read the monogram in the corner of the drawing: “I did love you once.” The words were as familiar to her as one of her own poems.

  I did love you once.

  Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

  You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot

  so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you not.

  “I did love you once,” Lizzie repeated. “I loved you not.”

  He had drawn her as Ophelia, and himself as Hamlet. I was the more deceived, she mouthed silently. O, woe is me, to see what I have seen, see what I see!

  She stared at the drawing, and her eyes filled with tears. Once, she thought, he wished me to be his Beatrice, and he painted me in all her glory. But now he draws me as the doomed Ophelia. She remembered the icy grip of the cold bath in Millais’s studio and shivered. Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.

  In a burst of anger she knocked the drawing from the easel. Then she turned to his table and dug through the piles of sketches, tossing them to the floor until she found what she was looking for. There were dozens and dozens of them. Gorgeous drawings of Fanny, of Annie Miller, and of other girls that Lizzie didn’t recognize. Many of them looked new.

  What a fool, what a stupid fool she had been. She gathered up a great heap of the sketches and carried them to the window. She stepped out onto the small balcony that overlooked the river, and, with a heave, she sent the whole lot of them, months and months of work, over the ledge. They were caught by the wind, and a rising current sent them up, high over the water, before letting them float gently down toward the dark and swirling body of the Thames. Hundreds of Rossetti’s stunners, her own image mixed with those of the others, landed on the surface of the water, where they shone for a second in the moonlight, like a flock of swans, before sinking.

  As Lizzie watched them disappear she felt the cold water on her skin. First the icy shock, and then a creeping, unnatural warmth. It felt too real; everything looked too real, as if the whole of the London night were drawn in precise and awful detail. She longed for the soft fold of oblivion, the warm nothingness of sleep.

  She stumbled back into the studio. The bottle of laudanum waited for her, calling to her. She put it to her lips and drank, the medicine sliding hot and welcome down her throat. Already she could feel its relief, the promise of a deep sleep.

  And if, she wondered, she did not wake tomorrow? What would it matter? Why should she wake to the bitter recriminations and lies that such a morning promised? Or worse, she thought, the absence of those lies, the silence that would mean that those lies were not worth the telling. Better a true silence, one that didn’t ring with such sad echoes.

  The bottle drained, she sat on the bed, and the room around her faded in and out of focus, the shadows dark and foreboding one moment, welcoming the next. She felt the beating of her heart slow and she smiled, stretching her hands out upon the bed.

  She longed to lie upon it, as if it were soft spring grass under a spreading shade tree. But something tugged at her memory, something small and indistinct, yet terribly insistent. “Hush,” she said, flinging an arm over her eyes. But the thought grew louder, and then became a wailing and could not be ignored.

  She sat up straight in bed. It was a baby crying. My baby, she thought; she’s crying and there’s no one to comfort her! She rose unsteadily from the bed and stumbled into the studio.

  The cradle that Rossetti had stowed in the corner was visible beneath its drop cloth. Lizzie threw the cloth aside and dragged it into the pool of moonlight that shone in through the open doors of the balcony. The baby’s cries were growing louder, and she wished to quiet it, but she was so very tired. She sat down at Rossetti’s desk and pulled a sheet of paper from the drawer. She began to scrawl a note to Rossetti. Her hand was unsteady and she thought it odd how hard it was to write, when the thing she had to say was so simple. Finally she managed a short note:

  Dearest Dante, Please take care of the child. She will go on crying, and I’m so very tired, too tired by far to look after such a little thing. It’s late, too late for me, I’m afraid, but I know that you shall look after her the best that you can. If only you would come back to me. Your loving, Lizzie.

  Then, afraid that he might not see the note, and thinking it of the utmost importance, she pinned it to her dress. Feeling that she’d done her best, she lay down on the floor next to the cradle. She rocked it with one hand, softly singing an old lullaby. She couldn’t remember why she’d been so upset. Here, with the child by her side, she was peaceful and content. The motion was soothing, and the crying, which had begun to sound more like sobbing than the sharp wails of an infant, eventually ceased.

  To her surprise, she found that after a time she was floating on a gently rocking sea, and she relaxed into the pull of the currents, content to let the tides take her where they may. The water calmed her, and cleaned her, and sweetly welcomed her into its fold.

  She floated on the water, and the forest formed a canopy of silvery willow and wild roses above her. She was in a brook, so narrow that she could have reached out and touched the reeds and nettles along the banks.

  She’d been here before. She could remember the snap of a branch, and the struggle for footing as the water rushed over slippery stones. But now she didn’t struggle. The tide pulled her toward some unknown goal, and she l
et her hands drift down to drag beneath the surface like watery weeds.

  She sang a song that was little more than a whisper, and she was so pale and still that it was impossible to say at what moment the song ended on her parted lips and the light died in her half-closed eyes. Her fine gown, which had borne her along like a mermaid, became heavy with its drink, and pulled her down, gently and silently, to the muddy banks below. Drowned, drowned.

  CHAPTER 24

  It was nearly morning when Rossetti made his way home, but the dawning light did nothing to illuminate the foyer at Chatham Place. He felt his way up the stairs, the night’s champagne still warming his veins and fueling a spirit of love and forgiveness. He’d left the studio filled with resentment, but a night of dancing and laughing in Fanny Cornforth’s generous embrace had exorcised his demons, and now he was eager to slide into bed beside his wife, to be lulled to sleep by her gentle breathing.

  He opened the door, trying not to wake her, and slipped across the studio in the dark. His foot caught on something heavy and out of place, and he tripped. He dropped to his knees and felt around in the dark. First he felt the carved wood of the cradle, which he thought he had packed away in a corner. Then he felt something softer: Lizzie’s sleeping form.

  “Lizzie?” He gently shook her shoulder, but she didn’t reply. Her body was oddly pliant to his touch. He felt the first prickling traces of fear, and his mouth was suddenly too dry to call her name again.

  He stood and backed away, knocking over his easel, which clattered loudly to the floor. He felt for an oil lamp, and then burned himself trying to light it with shaking hands. Cursing, he finally got it lit, and in its blaze he saw Lizzie’s limp body curled around the empty cradle.