The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  Louisa and Horrocks exchanged anxious glances. “You can make your way back without me?” he asked.

  “Of course. Hurry.”

  On his way to the lake-head Horrocks learnt from Frank that the parson’s wife had swooned all of a heap by her carriage. “As soon as we get back,” Horrocks ordered, “fetch my bag for me. It hangs by the saddle of my bay. Be sharp about it.”

  The doctor was sweating from his exertions as he pushed his way through the silent ring around Mrs Frere. “Stand back there,” he snapped. “Give the woman air.”

  Panting and frightened, Frere cradled his wife’s head in the crook of his arm. A cape had been laid beneath her and she was wrapped in Frere’s own coat. Emilia’s face was white almost as the snow, but she was conscious and moaning now.

  Mrs Tillotson stood wringing her hands. “That happen all of a flash,” she was saying. “One minute she were up by the carriage, the next she were down on her back like a tumbled ewe.”

  Horrocks knelt, put his hand to the woman’s brow then to the pulse at her wrist. “All right, my dear,” he murmured, “we’ll have you right as rain in a moment. Are you in pain at all?”

  Emilia closed her eyes and nodded. “I think…” she faltered, opened her eyes again. Horrocks saw the fear there. He cast a quick glance into Frere’s anxious face.

  “It is the morning sickness?” Frere asked.

  “Stand over her a moment,” Horrocks said. “You too, Tilly. You must forgive me, Frere.” He moved the coat aside, quickly lifted Emilia’s skirt and the petticoats beneath, then drew them down again. The glance had confirmed his suspicions. He looked up at Mrs Tillotson. “Can we fashion some sort of stretcher? We must bring her into the Hall.”

  Emilia heard the urgency in his voice. For a moment she stared, wide-eyed, then her head drooped to her shoulder. “Where the devil’s Frank with my bag?” the doctor snapped, for – as much in shock as in pain – Emilia had fainted away again.

  “I should have taken her home sooner,” Frere was saying. “We should not have come at all.”

  “Don’t berate yourself, man,” the doctor answered gruffly. “If this was going to happen, it would have happened anyway.” He saw the terrible realization dawn on Frere’s face. His voice softened a little. “It may not seem so now, but I promise you a miscarriage is one of nature’s mercies.”

  Louisa arrived in time to hear this and to see, a moment later, the tears start to Frere’s eyes, then she was down beside the unconscious woman, holding her head. When she looked up again, she saw the tears roll in silence to Frere’s chin. “I’m so sorry,” she heard herself saying. “I am so terribly sorry.”

  *

  Frere was stunned with grief. It was Louisa as much as the doctor who supervised the carrying of Emilia into the Hall, holding her cold hand, murmuring small phrases of consolation and encouragement as the improvised litter was lifted carefully up the stairs and the invalid laid in the same bed where she had passed her first night at Easterness. There was an expression of frozen terror on Emilia’s face. It stood between her and tears, as though they too were frozen even before they might reach the air. The careful procession into the Hall had felt like a kind of funeral.

  At the doctor’s bidding Frere waited outside the bedroom, awkwardly attended by Henry Agnew. “It may be for the best, man,” Agnew was saying, “though God knows I know how you must feel. My own wife you know…” But he halted there, seeing more cause for anxiety than consolation in his path. “Perhaps some brandy… for shock?”

  Staring at space, Frere shook his head. There was a great gash torn in his world. Nothing would focus. Everything was frozen yet strangely unstill. Outside he could hear children shouting on the lake. The world went on, ignorant of how everything was changed. The Hall had become an island in space, its time altered, its atmosphere scarcely breathable. Everything there was very fragile.

  There had been some error. This was not how it was to be.

  Edwin Frere looked into Agnew’s old face and saw only hopeless consternation there, as though he too were overwhelmed with feelings so vast and flood-like that no word might answer them.

  Somewhere a clock was chiming.

  Louisa Agnew was feeling not faint but dazed. The contrast with her exhilaration on the frozen lake had come so swiftly. In the bedroom she had done everything that Tom Horrocks had bidden her, reflexively, without panic; yet she had known herself for the first time up against the frailty of the human organism – the mess of it, the degradation. There had been a great deal of blood. Emilia was tallow-pale, a frail parcel of flesh, shedding a life that was her own and not her own. There were things to be done, and they had been done, and everything was inexplicable. Tilly and Alice, she knew, would be able to speak of it; already, below stairs, the events were becoming narrative, being talked into a kind of submission. She herself was silenced now. There was no adequacy of words – only this tranced awareness of mortality, and of the pain that the Rector and his wife must share to the exclusion of all others, alone in the bedroom, while Louisa stood between her father and the doctor in the hall, her limbs aching, her mind strangely uncertain of itself.

  “It would be unwise to try to move her back to the Rectory,” Tom Horrocks was saying. “Not for two or three days, I think. There is some risk of infection, of fever.”

  Henry Agnew cleared his throat and nodded.

  Louisa saw that some further response was required. “Of course, she must stay here,” she answered. “I will care for her myself.”

  “I’m as much concerned for her emotional as her bodily welfare,” the doctor warned. “I understand that the Freres had long wanted this child. She may seek to blame herself. She may feel that she has failed her husband. Such feelings are understandable but she must not be allowed to brood on them. They are without foundation and can only injure here.” Tom Horrocks reflected for a moment on the little he knew of Emilia Frere. “It may not be easy, I fear.”

  “She’s not an easy woman,” said Agnew. “Mrs Frere is less strong than she would have us all believe.” Secretly, and with some self-reproach, he found himself resenting the circumstances of this imposition.

  “The husband too will require attention. The shock of it will come hard.” Remembering the parson’s delight on the ice, Tom Horrocks shook his head. “I tell you, there are times when I could agree with the good doctor of Norwich, old Tom Browne, that it were better if we humans propagated in the manner of trees. There would be a sight less suffering in the world.”

  “And less joy,” Henry Agnew muttered quietly, remembering his wife and finding his better feelings in the memory, “less joy.”

  With a sudden access of cold doubt Louisa Agnew recognized that, beyond the narrow world of her books, of neither suffering nor joy had she any great understanding.

  *

  Emilia Frere spent three nights in the bedroom at the Hall before Tom Horrocks professed himself satisfied that all danger was passed and she might return to the Rectory.

  At first – perhaps under the soothing influence of laudanum – she had seemed grateful for, even to enjoy, the attention she received. Soon, however, she confessed to finding Mrs Tillotson a fusspot and Alice a tiresome chatterbox. She would receive visits only from her husband and Louisa.

  Louisa was patient with this choice. Though she was not entirely at ease with Mrs Frere, her heart flooded with sympathy for her loss. As best she might, she encouraged her to speak her grief, but soon saw that her efforts, however tender, were experienced as intrusion, as invasion almost. Emilia showed little wish to speak, Louisa had to content herself with reading aloud beside the bed, though the books she suggested were soon rejected in favour of such verses as those of Felicia Hemans and Anna Letitia Barbauld – works that were not at all to her own taste. Yet the reading appeared to bring Emilia a kind of doleful peace.

  After both his first two visits, Frere came unhappily from the bedroom, managing a brave but unconvincing smile and admitting
only his boundless gratitude to Louisa for her pains. He had the look of a punished dog, but he too was unwilling to speak whatever troubled feelings lay behind his mien.

  Louisa felt a little helpless before his diffident manner, and she was surprised when Emilia insisted that she remain in the room throughout Frere’s third visit – surprised and discomfited, for it was not a happy interview. The parson was as effusive in his attentions as circumstance would allow, but Emilia petulantly resisted them. Louisa was left feeling that she had been appointed audience to a play of the wife’s devising, one in which the heroine’s suffering was the principal theme and which might, indeed, have been moving had not the sense of theatre been so pronounced, and had the script been less expressive of a plaintive heart than of its tribulations.

  In the hope that it might cheer his wife, Frere had brought a letter from her dearest friend in Cambridge, who was, of course, as yet unaware of Emilia’s condition. The letter was opened and read in silence. “How Charlotte misses me,” she said at last, “and how well she understands! She quotes Hazlitt, Edwin: ‘There is nothing good to be had in the country, or if there is, they will not let you have it.’” Emilia smiled across at Louisa. “Of course, my dear, it is not entirely true. When I am quite well again I must inform her so. Edwin, I would be utterly desolate were it not for my faithful companion here. We owe a great debt of gratitude.”

  “Indeed we do, my dear.” Observing Louisa’s embarrassment, Frere tried a change of course. “I have written to your family,” he said. “I am in hopes that your sister Hattie will come to ease your convalescence at the Rectory.”

  “Is it yet posted?”

  “Not yet. I was intending to…”

  “I should not wish her to come yet. Nor that my father be made unduly anxious on my account.” She looked to Louisa again. “My father is not at all a well man. Indeed, I had the greatest reservations about leaving him.” Her gaze returned to her husband. “I think you have been too forward, Edwin. We should wait until we are quite certain that all is well. Then I myself shall write in reassurance.”

  “If you think it best.”

  “I do. Do you not agree, Louisa?”

  “As I do not have the good fortune to know your family, Emilia, I am hardly in a position to say, though I feel sure they would wish to know of your distress.”

  “They shall. In good time they shall. But one must not burden others unnecessarily. I am already distraught that you yourself have been put to such pains.”

  Even as she reassured Emilia once more that her concern was groundless, Louisa found herself reflecting on the power of the weak, its hold upon the minds of others. How sad was the Rector’s face, she thought – sad as the sound of a cello on a rainy afternoon. Deeply as she sympathized with the woman’s condition, she saw no reason why the husband should be made its victim. She was troubled by the contrast between Edwin Frere, ice-dancer, and this submissive comforter. Yet even as she felt humiliated on his behalf, she recognized that she too had been drawn into complicity with Emilia’s will. Where had the woman learnt such stratagems?

  Like father, like daughter, she guessed – but then had she not herself devoted her days to a father’s needs? And with what consequences, she wondered, for her own development? How complex was the human world! How much more so than the enigmas of her books! All that had once seemed clear was clouding now, and she chafed under the demand for moral adjustment to this difficult guest with her very real needs. Did she have so little charity after all? Almost she disliked herself.

  On what was to be the patient’s last night at the Hall, Louisa looked up from her reading and saw that Emilia was in tears. Something akin to gratitude overwhelmed her. Many times Louisa had wished that the woman might weep as her husband had done, might permit something deeper than care for her creature comforts to reach her. Delicately Louisa had tried again and again to create the opportunity, but she had been allowed no room. Whatever pangs of grief and guilt and shame Emilia might suffer had remained locked inside her, an unapproachable wound. Astringently if politely, Louisa had been held at bay – till now, when at the lines:

  Here must I stop;

  Or is there aught beyond? What hand unseen

  Impels me onward through the glowing orbs

  Of habitable nature, far remote,

  To the dread confines of eternal night,

  To solitudes of waste, unpeopled space,

  The deserts of creation, wide and wild,

  Where embryo systems and unkindled suns

  Sleep in the womb of Chaos?

  she heard Emilia sniff and saw the tears in her eyes.

  “My dear.” Louisa put down the book, crossed to the bed and wrapped an arm about Emilia’s shoulders. There was no deep release of grief, but a tense shuddering of the muscles, a stifled whimpering behind the handkerchief held tightly at Emilia’s face.

  “You must let the tears come now,” Louisa murmured. “You must own your grief. You have tried to be too strong.”

  “It is true,” Emilia cried, and her breast shuddered again, and the handkerchief was pressed more tightly against her face. For a long time they clung together so until, with a haggard shaking of her head, Emilia freed herself from the embrace, struggled for, and found, a measure of composure. Louisa sat back a little on the bed to allow her greater room to breathe, to speak.

  “We are friends, are we not?” Emilia asked weakly.

  “Of course we are.” With her own handkerchief Louisa dabbed the tears from Emilia’s cheek. It was not precisely true, but since Emilia’s first frail arrival in the room there had been no such promise of intimacy between the two women.

  “My dear, since we first came to this terrible place you are the only person to show me true consideration.”

  Astonished as she was by this bitter description of the home she loved, Louisa kept her voice gentle. “I am sure that cannot be so. Everyone here cares for you.”

  Emilia was shaking her head. “Be true with me,” she said. “We must be true with one another or I fear I shall go quite…” The handkerchief stifled at birth the terrible thought.

  Alarmed now, Louisa stroked the woman’s shoulder. Too well she knew how difficult the others in the Hall had found her, how most of the parish regarded the Rector’s wife as an aloof, critical figure who acted solely from duty, with little warmth. And this was not the moment to suggest that Emilia, with her refusal to let go of Cambridge, to be truly present in the parish, might herself be at fault. “I think at least,” she suggested carefully, “that you are forgetting your husband. He is…”

  “My husband is a man,” Emilia interrupted with the impatience of her pain, “with a man’s insensitivities.”

  “He is grieving very deeply.”

  “For his child, don’t you see? He is grieving for his child.”

  “But not that alone. My dear, he is distraught with anxiety for you.”

  Breathing heavily, Emilia stared at the younger woman as though bereft of all hope that she might be understood.

  “You should hear the poor man…” Louisa began again, but faltered when she saw Emilia close her eyes and shake her head in the little bonnet she wore. Then the head was turned aside on the pillow, staring across the room.

  “It is natural that you should suffer from such doubts,” Louisa attempted. “Dr Horrocks told me that you would feel the pain of this experience as…”

  “You do not understand.”

  Distressed by the dull anger in her voice, Louisa waited.

  “I am so alone.” If there was an element of self-pity there, it was also a statement of fact. Louisa received it so, and her heart went out to the suffering woman.

  “Oh, my dear.”

  Emilia withdrew at her approach.

  “I think I am not long for this place,” she muttered quietly.

  “Oh come now,” Louisa answered. “The Doctor is more than happy with your progress. Why, I would guess that after tomorrow’s visit he will send
you packing back off to your home. You are on the mend, I promise you. This very distress is a sure sign of it.”

  “That is not my home,” Emilia said.

  Louisa saw immediately that she had misunderstood. Emilia turned her head to look at her again. “You are such a child,” she said. “You cannot know.” The expression on her face was strange – part sympathy, part derision – and the weakness had gone from her voice.

  “Then you must try to tell me.”

  Emilia lay in silence for a long time, biting her lip. Louisa saw that she had misjudged this woman. So little had been released from that tight grip, and there was so little natural affinity between them that, for all the hours they had spent in this room together, they remained strangers to one another. Louisa had lied when she said they were friends. If she had spoken in charity to an unhappy invalid it had also been negligent of a larger truth: that they were representative of two very different principles – principles that might meet only in an hour of need, or in honest confrontation with one another. They might almost have been of a different species. That Emilia thought her a mere child revealed how little she understood, but then Louisa herself had only limited comprehension of what remained dark and unspoken in this woman who studied her, almost coldly, summoning resolve.

  “You will listen to me now?” Emilia said.

  Swallowing, Louisa nodded. She held Emilia’s eyes in her own grave gaze.

  “And you will hold everything I say in confidence? In sacred confidence?”

  To demur would be to banish the woman still deeper into the wastes of her own loneliness. Away from the fireplace now, Louisa was beginning to feel cold. She pulled her shawl closer about her shoulders and said uncertainly, “Of course.”

  Emilia sighed. One hand seemed to test the quality of the coverlet between her fingers. “You have not known a man,” she said. “Really known, I mean… not as a daughter knows her father, however deep the affection she holds for him. You have not yet suffered at their nakedness, and therefore you have never known how blind they are, how weak. Nor do you know how cruel that blindness and weakness can be – and all the more so when they are sugared over with sentiment and concern, with the pretence of tenderness. I promise you, it is quite terrible. Until you have known it, you will have no conception of what it is to be truly lonely. To feel yourself a shell-less creature, bereft and vulnerable.” Emilia stared up, sharp-eyed, at her listener, who was amazed, almost horrified to see the narrow smile at her lips. “I think, my dear, you have not yet learnt what a curse it is to be born woman. You think it is all a matter of love and loving, of care and caring… Very well, I too have had such thoughts. Before I came here, I too believed that love and duty were the compatible ingredients of a woman’s life… that loyalty and patience and service were all. I had not seen that hatred might prove an indispensable friend.” Again she studied Louisa, smiling at the impact of the word. “Now you will misunderstand me again. You will think that I hate my husband. I assure you I do not. He is too weak to bear the force of that… even if I felt it, and I am not a cruel woman. But I hate this life here. I hate this place. And I have grave doubts that I will be able to endure it for long after this… débâcle… this hideousness.”