Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  It was a mistake he knew he could not afford to make again. He must take Mary back to Africa with him, though it would mean sharing hardships more extreme than those she had yet faced. For her part, Mary could not contemplate being abandoned. It would make her ill again. But as Livingstone made plans for them to return to Africa in the January of 1858, there was the painful problem of what to do about the children, Robert now twelve, Agnes ten, Thomas nine and Oswell six. Mary could not possibly submit them to the dangers of exploring the region of the upper Zambesi, which was her husband’s new ambition. It was obvious – to her, to him – that a choice would have to be made. She had obeyed her husband’s decision before on this subject (rather than make a choice of her own) and had come to England with them; now, she had to think about her children and her own mental health, as well as her husband. Could she be a good mother if she were on her own, even with financial support? Livingstone, from all he had been told by observers during those previous four years (including the objective Tidman of the London Missionary Society), as well as the evidence of Mary’s own account, knew she could not manage on her own. She had said it all in her poem – ‘It seems as if t’would kill me to be parted from you now / You’ll never part me, darling, there’s a promise in your eye.’ Whether there had been that ‘promise’ or not, he realised that to leave his wife again could well end in disaster.

  But there was a new way out of the dilemma. Relations between Mary and his family in Scotland had finally improved. It had taken a death to achieve this harmony – Neil Livingstone’s. He had died as his son was on the way home and, though this had distressed Livingstone greatly, it changed everything. In the test of loyalty with which he would have been faced – to his father or to his wife – it is by no means certain Mary would have won. But with Neil Livingstone dead, their differences were forgotten. Agnes Livingstone and her two daughters had, since his death, been happy to receive Mary. They would also be happy to provide a home on a long-term basis for the children while other appointed guardians looked after the financing of their care.

  But it was agreed that Mary should take one child with her, the youngest, Oswell; fortunately by temperament he was the best suited to travel. To take Robert would have been insane. His stubbornness and moods had intensified during the years in Britain and he would have been a demanding companion, doomed to clash with his father. Besides, there was the question of his schooling, endlessly disrupted and only now settling down at the Hamilton Academy. Yet Mary also knew that Robert was likely to suffer most through being left behind. The most unruly and least charming of her children, he would find that with his mother gone nobody would love him enough to make allowances and give him the unconditional affection he craved. Agnes would fare much better. There had been no question of taking an almost eleven-year-old girl on such an expedition – yet to leave her would be painful for Mary. She was close to her daughter, in a way she was not close to her sons. To leave Agnes, not so far off puberty, was a different kind of betrayal. As for nine-year-old Thomas, his frequent illnesses barred him from accompanying her – his health was much less robust than the others’ – but his very frailty made him precious to her. Who would give him the special tender attention he needed? He was the one, so used to his mother’s care and nursing, who would find himself the most bereft physically.

  It was agony for Mary to leave her children but there would have been far greater agony had she herself been left there by her husband. She could not even console herself with the thought that she would be back with them soon. Her husband had intended to rejoin her ‘soon’ and that had turned out to be four years. She was too experienced a traveller in and resident of Africa not to be aware that she might well never see them again – and then they would always know that being a good wife had been more important to her than being a good mother. Nevertheless, whatever others thought, she herself felt she had no choice – happiness, health, mental and emotional serenity, all depended on her going with her husband. Only one thing could stop her: another pregnancy. This was her greatest terror. In the autumn of 1857, at the age of thirty-six, she became pregnant again but had a miscarriage, the only miscarriage she ever had. Since she knew that pregnancy would bar her absolutely from going with her husband it is tempting to speculate that her anxiety may well have contributed to the miscarriage. Whatever the cause, she was safe – unless, of course, she were to become pregnant again before the date of departure …

  This was set for March 1858. There was a grand farewell banquet for Livingstone during which three cheers were called for his wife. This made her feel awkward, as always among such company. In Africa, she was ‘MaRobert’ (the Africans called mothers by their first-born’s name), respected and admired by all for her competence and skills, held by the Africans to be an eminently suitable wife for David Livingstone. There were plenty who thought him the lucky one. In England, she was that odd little fat woman, so badly dressed, so lacking in refinement, almost a disgrace to her famous husband. She was not sad to be leaving this world, but she was heartbroken at parting from her children. Livingstone too found it hard. The farewells were painful and protracted, taking place in Hamilton at the Livingstone family home, where the children were to stay. Then Mary and her husband and the excited Oswell departed for Birkenhead to board the Pearl. The weather was bitterly cold and as they stood on deck waving goodbye to the dignitaries who had come to see them off, flurries of snow whirled round them.

  Mary was now the wife of one of Her Majesty’s Consuls. Her husband had been appointed Consul at Quelimane (the town on the east coast of Africa, near the mouth of the Zambesi, where his cross-continent trek had ended). He was granted a generous stipend plus £5,000 in provisions for the Zambesi Expedition, which he now headed. He had all but severed links with the London Missionary Society, though he still considered himself a missionary. The government was sponsoring his expedition not from a noble desire to convert Africans to Christianity, but for the possible commercial gain, as his commission made plain. His parents-in-law would not be pleased – ‘Christianity through Commerce’ was not a gospel they had ever preached or expected their son-in-law to preach. But none of this made any difference to Mary. She was his wife, whatever new career path he had taken, at his side, as she liked to be, and ready for anything.

  Except another baby.

  IV

  ON BOARD THE SS Pearl, as medical adviser to the Zambesi Expedition, was Dr John Kirk who got to know Mary rather better than he had expected during the voyage to the Cape. Kirk was a shy young man, ten years younger than she was. In spite of his youth, he was an experienced doctor who had served in the Crimea and been Royal Physician at Edinburgh Infirmary before a spell at Kew researching rare plants. He’d accepted Livingstone’s invitation to join the Zambesi Expedition with alacrity – Livingstone was a hero to him as to so many others. But right from the start his opinion of Mary Livingstone was not high and he seems to have developed a prejudice against her which coloured everything he wrote about her in his journal.

  His first encounter with her came a week after the Pearl sailed, when Oswell injured his little finger, and Kirk had to cut half the cartilage off the joint. He was impressed that Oswell ‘never uttered a cry’ but less impressed by his mother, who was so prostrate with seasickness she could scarcely supervise her energetic son. On 11 April, a month into the voyage and the day before Mary’s thirty-seventh birthday, Kirk was called to attend her and diagnosed a condition rather more serious than seasickness: Mrs Livingstone, in his opinion, was undoubtedly pregnant. The suspicion is that she must have known this before she set sail otherwise Kirk could never, within a mere four weeks, have been so certain in his diagnosis. But desperate though she was to accompany her husband, would Mary knowingly have set sail in a condition of early pregnancy? She would have realised exactly what it would mean: being left at the Cape, condemned either to find somewhere to live there or else to go to her parents in Kuruman, the very fate she had always rejected. It is
far more likely that after her previous miscarriage and more recently the distress of parting with three of her children her menstrual cycle was upset, and she simply did not know. Or, of course, it could have been a case of wishful thinking: since being pregnant would wreck everything, she refused to acknowledge that she might be.

  An awful birthday, then. Kirk noted unsympathetically: ‘she and the young ’un will be left at Cape Town … I cannot but think that this is a lucky move for the expedition.’1 Livingstone himself did not think it lucky any more than did Mary. He was appalled at the implications, and also embarrassed. What would folk think of a fellow, a doctor no less, who got his wife pregnant at the same time as agreeing to take her on a dangerous expedition? No comments about birth control ever enter his letters or journals, but since Livingstone made a feature of keeping up with medical advances by having Mrs Sewell send medical journals out to him he cannot have been unaware that there were in existence pamphlets on this tricky subject. By this stage of his marriage, with four children, he certainly hadn’t wanted Mary to become pregnant again, and the miscarriage had served as a timely warning of the ever-present danger, so it seems likely that he would then think about ways of avoiding this calamity and decide on some method, or perhaps, because of his religious beliefs, abstain from sexual intercourse. But he obviously had not abstained, so whatever his preventative tactics, if any, they failed.

  In his correspondence, he shows himself in a poor light (as he often did) seeming to have little sympathy for Mary and also, in his use of certain casual phrases (‘this is a great trial to me’) to blame her. She would now be ‘a hindrance’.2 And as a hindrance, she would be dumped at the Cape, because of course nothing must be allowed to get in the way of the expedition. Mary knew, for the rest of that long voyage, what would happen. She went on being sick and feeling wretched, stirring herself only to minister to her husband who in May developed a complaint which resulted in his ‘opening his bowels thirty times’ at night. In these circumstances, arrival at the Cape was a relief, even though for her it spelled misery.

  Exactly what kind of misery was at first unclear, and now Livingstone expressed genuine concern and anxiety, though a good measure of his worry was for himself and not for her. He wanted to leave her in good hands, otherwise concern for her would prey on his mind and it was essential that he should not be distracted – all his energies, mental and emotional as well as physical, must go into leading the expedition. It was not within Mary’s power to smile and assure him she could look after herself while he did his so-important work. She was sick, and incapable of deciding what to do. So once again he decided for her: she should return to Kuruman with her parents, who fortuitously had come to Cape Town to meet another ship bringing their daughter Jane home to Africa. There Mary could have her baby and once she was recovered she could rejoin him (How? No mention of that). Livingstone was vastly relieved.

  The other members of the expedition, when they heard what was to happen to Mrs Livingstone, were to a man pleased. She had, in their uninformed opinion, been an encumbrance. Their hero was well rid of her. None of them had the slightest idea of her true value to him, never having seen how she aided her husband on the expeditions they had already made. (William Cotton Oswell could have told them a thing or two.) Her pregnancy was hailed as a blessing in disguise and they watched the parting of her and her husband, perhaps not with anything quite as malicious as pleasure, but with something close to it. Livingstone himself, however, seemed dreadfully distressed. ‘It was a bitter parting with my wife,’ he wrote, ‘like tearing the heart out of one.’3 Mary herself was inconsolable.

  Mary remained at the Cape until August, by which time she was six months pregnant and dreaded the long, rough trek to Kuruman. They were waiting not for Jane, who had arrived, but for her brother John, who was also due from England with his new wife Emily. It was almost the end of August before everyone was ready to go. A cavalcade of three ox-wagons, each pulled by a dozen oxen, set out. John’s and Emily’s wagon took the lead, followed by the Moffat parents’, and then came Mary’s. It was a terrible journey, one of the worst the senior Moffats had ever made. The rain for the first part was heavy, turning the ground to mud – ‘surely we shall be drowned’,4 wrote Emily to her father. Then, crossing a swollen river, Mary’s wagon became stuck and when finally it was extricated her team of oxen began to fail – ‘we do literally creep’, Emily observed. She, too, was pregnant but, unlike her sister-in-law, not ill. Regularly, she got down and walked alongside the wagons while Mary cowered inside. To Emily, everything was new and exciting; to Mary, horribly familiar and depressing.

  By October, Mary was drawing perilously near her time, and the nights were bitterly cold. Another of Mary’s oxen died, and with three already dead she had only eight to pull her wagon. Crossing a river, one of the remaining animals became restive, kicking and plunging, and the whole span was disarranged. With unwitting irony, Livingstone wrote to John and Emily at this very time: ‘I wish I had taken Mary with me. She would have been more comfortable …’ Comfort was the last thing his wife enjoyed on that last stretch before reaching Kuruman. Emily notes, nervously, that Mary ‘though far from well … must go on …’ She remained in her wagon, ill, looked after by her parents and sister, simply getting through the days by doing what she had always done: enduring.

  The party arrived exhausted at Kuruman on 10 November. Mary gave birth six days later to a daughter, named Anna (after Mrs Braithwaite of Kendal, to whom she owed much). It was the first time she had gone through childbirth without her husband, but she had plenty of close relations around her this time, all willing to help and support her. Apart from her capable if overpowering mother, there were her two youngest sisters, Bessie and Jane, her brothers Robert and John, and her sisters-in-law Ellen and Emily. For Oswell there was plenty of company too – Robert had two boys and a baby girl. The mission station had never been more busy, or more crowded, with two other missionary couples there, the Ashtons and the Prices, as well as all the Moffats. Yet from the moment Anna was born Mary was agitating to leave this reassuring group of friends and relatives. She wanted to join her husband and rejected the sensible idea of spending her time waiting in the security of Kuruman till he had finished his exploring.

  At first, she considered going overland, through Makololo country, with a missionary, Holloway Helmore, but this plan fell through. She was still stuck at Kuruman under her mother’s rule as the new year came in, and the atmosphere was not good. Her sister Bessie was rebelling, in a way Mary herself had never done, against her mother’s expectations, and Jane was not settling down well after her ten-year absence in England. At the beginning of February, Mrs Ashton died in childbirth. As if this did not cause enough misery, rumours grew that the Boers were planning to attack. Mary wanted to get away, far from the quarrels erupting between her sisters and her mother, from the tensions existing between her sisters-in-law and her mother, and from the encircling Boers who might prevent her leaving at all. But she was not going to be able to travel to the Zambesi to meet her husband. He, as usual, had moved beyond lines of easy communication and she did not know where to reach him. She had to do what she found so hard, which was to make her own decision. She decided to return to England and go on to Scotland. Shortly after her birthday in April, she was taken down to Hope Town by her brother John, and from there continued to the Cape coast where she embarked with five-month-old Anna.

  Her reasoning, not so difficult to understand, was that if she could not be with her husband she could be reunited with her other children – a natural enough desire. But she had not thought out how she would manage, and seems to have suppressed all memories of how difficult she had found living in Britain. Her problems began as soon as she arrived. Even money was, after all, still a problem because, although she had access to it, she did not know how to handle it. As a wife on the three mission stations where she had lived with her husband there had not been much to handle – they were so poor that budg
eting was pathetically straightforward. Her husband’s small stipend came in and the list of what it should be spent on was simple, just the bare necessities. There was no rent to pay, and no bills in the European sense. When supplies ran out, they sent to Kuruman for more, to tide them over. Mary had had no training in how to run a household European-style, and unlike her mother had no natural aptitude for the task.

  But far more serious than her inability to spend wisely was her feeling of isolation in Britain. Her children, though of an age to be good company, were not enough. They kept her busy, and the baby Anna was a great physical comfort, there to be hugged and held, but like many a wife of her times, obliged to be separated from her husband, she craved adult society. She longed, in particular, for a gentle, reassuring masculine presence, a man with whom she could discuss problems, such as the children’s education, some kindly man who could take the place of her husband so far as making decisions and offering guidance went. She needed a figure like her friend, the explorer Oswell, a man who would value her modesty and patience, and feel respect for her and sympathy. Such a man would not worry about their friendship being misunderstood – she was, after all, a solid, matronly figure, a middle-aged mother of five children.

  The man who appeared to fill this role was James Stewart. He was a Scot, ten years younger than Mary, eighteen years younger than her husband. Tall, at 6 feet 2 inches (nearly 1.9 m) and well made, he was a young man who kept most people at arm’s length and had a reputation for being aloof and distant. He’d trained as a medical missionary and, just before he met Mary, had applied to the Free Kirk Foreign Mission Committee for funds to inaugurate an industrial station in Central Africa – to develop the allegedly cotton-producing land there and convert the Africans. He was an independent spirit, in spite of his association with the Free Kirk, and determined to join Livingstone in his exploration of the Zambesi. Recommended to Mary as a suitable tutor for Thomas, now ten and still not strong enough to be sent away to school (except during his mother’s absence), he saw this as providential – through Mrs Livingstone he would increase his chances of being allowed to join Livingstone himself. Mary was delighted with him. He listened to her and was willing to give advice when asked for it. She could, for example, discuss her eldest son Robert with him. Robert was now fourteen and on his mother’s return had left the Quaker school in Kendal to join the rest of his family, in the pleasant house she had rented in Glasgow. There he was to train to be a doctor like his father. He started on a medical course but couldn’t handle either the studying or the discipline, and to Mary’s consternation simply played truant and disappeared. He was absent a whole week and when his distraught mother found him he refused to go back to medical school. She had written to his father, asking what should be done, but letters took months each way, and James Stewart, meanwhile, was at hand. When advice did come from Livingstone it was no help to her – he was exasperated with Robert and inclined to wash his hands of him, condemning his ‘vagabond ways’ and failing to see how his own restive spirit had contributed to Robert’s waywardness.