A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  We walked for almost an hour, he guiding me over numerous rocks and logs in the path. Each time he took my hand, I felt something flow between us that quickened my heart and pulse. As we walked he told me the story that had come down to them from his maternal great-grandmother, Katherine Rawdon. She had lived through the American Revolution and recalled how her stepfather, Jonathan Gifford, had fallen in love with Caroline Kemble, the mistress of Kemble Manor, even though she was married to the wife of his best friend. The latter had remained loyal to the king and fled to British lines for protection. Caroline chose the American side.

  “The old lady made a romance out of it,” Jonathan said. “She had Gifford tricked into coming down here one night on the pretext that someone was breaking into the house, and Caroline Kemble, taking the initiative, telling him she loved him—and saw no point in waiting for a clergyman to prove it.”

  “Do you think it happened that way?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it for a long time.”

  “I don’t think it’s impossible. Women are not such passive creatures as you men like to think.”

  “My mother certainly was not passive. My father found that out a hundred times.”

  “A woman in a revolution—in a great upheaval—may decide love is more important than respectability.”

  He stopped to search out some landmarks on the moonswept moor. “We’d better turn around,” he said. “We’ll soon be halfway to Shrewsbury.”

  Our return journey was not so pleasant. Clouds began to scud before the moon, and the wind developed a cutting edge. “It will storm before morning,” he said.

  I was trembling violently with the cold by the time we reached the manor house. He flung logs on the dying fire and declared that the only remedy was some brandy from the wine cellar. “This belonged to the original Jonathan,” he said as he uncorked it. “He kept a tavern not far from here. That was a respectable business in those days. Before the Irish came over and gave it a bad name.”

  “What a pity that there’s this bad feeling between the Irish and the Americans. They’re natural allies, both with such good reasons to oppose the English.”

  “It’s the low types that came over in the late forties and fifties that gave you a bad name,” he said as he poured the liquor. “Of course we except Protestants like you. It’s the Catholics that we dislike. It’s hard to respect people who let priests and popes run their lives.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I spread my cloak before the fire and sat down, holding up the brandy to let the flames glow through it. “Let’s drink to ancient Ireland, before there were priests and politics to divide us.” I said.

  He sat down beside me and raised his glass before the fire in the same way. “To ancient Ireland,” he said.

  We drank off the strong liquor. Age had soothed its bite and deepened its strength. I felt fire run through my whole body.

  “The women of ancient Ireland were like your ancestor, Caroline,” I said. “They, too, sought out their men. The old books are full of stories of queens riding on white horses to invite great warriors into their beds.”

  “Did they find happiness?” Jonathan asked.

  “For a while. But Ireland had a way of withering it, alas. I’m thinking of the greatest of them, Dierdre. In the end she became Dierdre of the Sorrows, an image of her sad tormented country.”

  “Is that why you came to America?” he asked.

  “You yourself said it. There’s hope here. A future as open as that sea.”

  A wind that might have risen out of Ireland beat on the windows. The fire blazed, turning our faces and hands golden. Jonathan was on his elbow, staring into the flames as he must have done in a thousand camps in his four years of war. He looked up at me. “I begin to wish I could share that American future with you,” he said.

  “Let us at least share the happiness in this house.”

  I pressed my lips against his dry, aching mouth. With a sigh that was almost a groan, he gathered me into his arms. His kiss was harsh, almost angry, full of terrible need. Without another word he picked me up and mounted the stairs to his bedroom. There, with great shafts of moonlight on the floor and the sea wind beating on the windows, he made me—I hoped, I wished, I prayed—his American bride.

  His entering me was both a real and a mystical thing. I also entered him, almost crying out with the joy of a blind wish fulfilled. Wrapped within each other’s arms we journeyed into the darkness of our opposite selves, all things melting, male and female, age and youth, flesh and spirit, faith and doubt, ancient Ireland and new America. He was a tunnel down which I groped to a world of new hope and fresh promise. I was a bower in the field, a secret cavern in the mountain, where magical refreshment awaited the warrior.

  It was violent and brief, that first time, dominated by his need, tormented by the terrible historic voice that haunted him even as he possessed me. I felt the dryness, the harshness, of him—until the great pounding release that lifted me up on a flood of joy, on a river of fire. The youth, the life, that was locked within him cascaded into me, and I returned it to him through my lips, my fingertips, the nipples of my breasts, the throbbing rise of my belly, the pulse of my thighs. We were one being and my heart was ripped open, defenseless with a love that abandoned all caution, all rules of survival, that mocked danger and embraced the future. I really believed that we were entering a new country, that together we were finding the power to change a world. This indeed was happening, but it was a country of the heart, a world that existed outside time.

  I would not, I could not, think about this uneasy truth that night. Perhaps he did. It was harder for him to free himself from the grip of time, responsibility, reality. He wanted to take me to my room almost as soon as it was over, but I would not let him make it a furtive, guilty thing. I refused to leave him. “You’re mine as long as the moon is high,” I said. “We’re equals here, in the house of happiness. That is all I ask or expect.”

  I pressed my body against him and sealed those words with a long, deep kiss. We begn to make love again, slowly, tenderly, with less of need and more of sweet sensual caring, of seeking and finding and exchanging new pleasure in every touch and turn and caress, in every soft lingering kiss. This time I felt the slow gathering of his desire, I felt him possessing it, controlling it, using it to turn me from queen to servant to woman to queen again, into laughing sighing pleasure into May in December into the sunlit sea on the back of a great white horse springing from wave to wave toward the vast shining horizon.

  Yes! My love, my love, yes you are with me and I am with you there is no part of the sea or sky that we cannot reach—

  In the darkness—in the sweet trembling moonlit darkness—

  O my love, I am there with you again as I write this, so many long years after that night.

  At last the moonlight dwindled to a single patch on the ceiling and vanished. I left him with a final kiss and gathered the clothes that lay beside the bed and went naked back to my own room while the house shook in the rising wind. In our separate beds we watched the dawn bring a storm of cold gray rain. It was a kind of omen, a commentary on the summer world we were creating in the face of winter.

  At breakfast we met each other as ordinary mortals once more. We discussed train schedules and food supplies and decided to let Rawdon subscribe to New York newspapers to replace the Hamilton ones he read at Bowood. Behind our commonplace words we watched each other with eyes forever changed. I sensed he wondered what I expected from him now. That wary sadness was in charge of his spirit once more, but it had received a challenge from something deeper in him, the youth that early responsibility and a puritanical wife and hovering mother had denied him. He could never go back to that gloomy defeated self, as long as I was here to look him in the face.

  He asked me to ride to the station with him, ostensibly to arrange for the delivery of the New York papers. We left Rawdon unpacking his toy soldiers. Abner Littlepage, swathed
in oilskins, brought a closed carriage to the door. In its dark interior, with rain beating on the windows, Jonathan took my hand in an almost mournful way, as if we were going to a funeral.

  “What shall we do?” he said. “What shall we do now?”

  “I told you last night. I ask nothing, I expect nothing.”

  “Why? Why should you take all the risk and I—”

  “Women have been doing that since time began.”

  He laughed harshly. “When I married, there was a contract, two pages long, specifying who would get what.”

  “You could still have been happy, if you loved each other.”

  “I don’t believe in it. Not for me, anyway.”

  “Love.”

  “Yes. I should. I saw men die because they loved their country. But this kind of love—”

  “You think you don’t deserve it.”

  “Perhaps.”

  The carriage rocked and rumbled. The rain splattered against the sides. “Let me give you an Irish poem to recite,” I said.

  “Amo, amas

  I love a lass

  As cedar tall and slender

  Sweet cowslip’s face

  Is her nominative case

  And she’s of the feminine gender.”

  He laughed briefly, uncertainly. “I like that,” he said.

  A moment later he grew serious again. “We must trust each other,” he said. “I’m not by nature trusting.”

  “No, love each other. If we do that, all else will follow. For as long as we want it to follow.”

  He looked out at the long arms of the marsh grass, thrashing wildly in the rain and wind. “Here in your kingdom of the heart that’s possible. But up ahead, the real world begins.”

  I flung myself against him, pressing my face against his damp cloak. I breathed the battle smoke, the bitter residue of a thousand campfires that was in it. “I’ve had enough of the real world for a while. So have you. So has Rawdon.”

  He said nothing. But I felt his hand in my hair. Then he began to whisper:

  “Amo, amas

  I love a lass

  As cedar tall and slender…”

  In the distance, a railroad engine shrieked a warning. The storm beat maledictions on us, but we were safe within each other’s arms. All will be well, I vowed. All will be well.

  The Crooked Ways of Love

  So we began our reckless love, a compound of our needs and fears, his strength and my wildness, of blind wishes and blinder hopes. He came to us every weekend aboard the train, with its stubby shrieking steam engine, symbol of America’s energy and determination. I did not see, I could not see, the confusion into which I was leading us. If he saw it, he thought he had an answer to it. What sustained us, beyond the passionate pleasure we found in our midnights, was the change in Rawdon. Steadily, perceptibly, his antagonism to his father ebbed. We did not completely understand it. We thought it was a spiritual thing, an overflow of our own joy.

  There were other reasons. There was a deep vein of poetry in Rawdon’s nature, which ill suited the science and mathematics that his father was determined to make part of his mind. With me as his only tutor, he escaped science and plunged deep into poetry—not only the English poetry we read as part of his lessons, but Irish poetry. So much of our verse is speech between lovers—or haters—it was easy to play poetic games with him. One we played over and over again was Lad of the Curly Locks. As I tucked him into bed, I would rumple his dark hair and say:

  “Lad of the curly locks

  Who used to be once my darling,

  You passed the house last night

  And never bothered calling.

  Little enough ’twould harm you

  To comfort me and I crying,

  When a single kiss from you

  Would save me from dying.”

  Eyes aglow with the game, Rawdon would reply:

  “I shall not die because of you

  O woman, though you shame the swan.

  They were foolish men you killed.

  Do not think me a foolish man.”

  Then would come two or sometimes three good-night kisses, and he would close his eyes.

  Some of this was no doubt an overflowing of the love I felt for his father, but I loved the lad, too, with a mother’s delight in his good looks and his ready laugh and his passionate honesty. It was always the truth that he sought, in his endless perusal of the newspapers, in his pondering over the battles of the war, in his searching through books. I could see it derived from the literal, practical directness of his father’s mind, but Rawdon wanted more than facts. Young as he was, he sought truths of the heart, of the spirit, insofar as his young understanding could grasp them.

  “Do you think people should always tell the truth, Miss Stark?” he asked me one day.

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “Father says everybody, even the president, senators, businessmen, lies all the time. I saw it in a letter he wrote to my mother about when the war was going to end.”

  “It’s a shame, but it’s probably true.”

  “Do you ever lie?”

  “Sometimes. When you get older, it’s hard to tell the whole truth all the time.”

  “What do you lie about?”

  “Nothing important. Come now and read this book that your father brought down, Moby-Dick.”

  “I don’t like it. Who cares about hunting a whale?”

  “’Tis not the whale that Ahab seeks to destroy but the spirit of evil in the world. He sees it concentrated in this terrible creature. Your father says it’s a great book.”

  Rawdon shook his head. “Stupid.”

  I found the book hard going myself, but I was not able to blame it completely on the writer. Rawdon’s questions had awakened the secret fear that crept within my love for his father and grew stronger with every passing week. What would happen if my deception were discovered, if he found Elizabeth Stark was Bess Fitzmaurice, the Fenian girl? At first I consoled myself with the thought that it would simply be the end of the affair; though we would part with regret, it would be swift and clean, like the stroke of a sword. But as Jonathan’s spirit healed, as his nerves grew firm and strong, as his confidence in his manhood deepened, the part that pity and sympathy had played in my love began to diminish, and admiration, delight in his touch, his smile, his conversation, increased to the point where the thought of losing him became pure anguish. In my innermost heart I had opened myself to him, but I still wore deception on my face. I did not know what to do about it.

  Doubling the agony was the way he talked frankly to me about his mother, his wife, the family and its complex concerns. He saw his mother clearly enough. He resented the domineering part she had played in selecting his wife for him, though he never said so directly. He was freer in criticizing her pro-Southern politics, which he refused to share. But his mother had a grip on him in other ways, not the least of which was the large amount of stock she owned in the family railroad. Control of this immensely valuable property was now becoming a furious issue within the family. Many wanted to sell it to one or another of the tycoons who had emerged on Wall Street with hundreds of millions of capital at their disposal. The danger in not selling lay in their power to build a competing system, by corrupting the New Jersey legislature into giving them a right of way.

  Prudence was probably on the side of selling, but Jonathan Stapleton disliked the idea. “I don’t want to become a mere money man, no matter how much we’re paid. The railroad was our source of power, not because of what it was worth but because of the men who worked for it. We had spokesmen living in cities and towns around the whole state. Money can’t buy that.”

  “Would you not still have the cotton mills?” I asked.

  “Even if we expanded them, they’d still only be a single business in a single city.”

  I saw the forward thrust of his spirit, the readiness to mount the barricades, and rejoiced in it. The man who came down here in November did not, co
uld not, think this way. He had been exhausted in body and soul. Now, in bleak February, he was ignoring gray skies and ice floes on the bay; he was pulsing with life, vigor, command.

  We were on the beach, striding along at his usual pace.

  Rawdon was with us but scampering far ahead to investigate pieces of driftwood and dead fish and other flotsam of the winter sea.

  “I’m boring you with this business claptrap,” Jonathan said.

  “On the contrary,” I said. “I’m flattered that you take me into your confidence.”

  “I want a wife who shares not only her love with me but her mind.”

  “A wife?” I said, my voice dying away with disbelief.

  “Do you think I could let you go when we go back to Bowood? Do you think I could turn my back on happiness that way?”

  “I—I couldn’t preside at Bowood. I’d be an embarrassment to you. There would be scandalous rumors.”

  “We’ve had them before and survived. According to my great-grandmother Rawdon, Kemble Stapleton had a love affair with an Irish girl who turned out to be a British spy.”

  “How would young Rawdon react?”

  “I think he may love you more than I do,” he said.

  We walked in silence between mounds of snow and driftwood, my mind soaring above the wintry wreckage, then plummeting to earth like a stricken bird at the thought of my deception. Would now be the time to tell him? I suddenly remembered William Seward in his secret pleasure house in Washington, fixing me with his cold worldly eyes and saying, Who are you? A somewhat notorious Irish adventuress. My courage failed me.

  Jonathan broke our silence to reveal he had been practicing a kind of deception on me—not a malicious or intentional one. He had spoken what was in the forefront of his heart first. Now he began telling me why he had to qualify his bold declarations and delay fulfillment of his promise.

  “I hope, having told you this, you’ll let me choose the moment. It can’t be now, or even this spring. There are two reasons. One is my mother. She wouldn’t approve. You aren’t on the social level she considers so important for someone who becomes a Stapleton. Her health is failing rapidly. I flinch from bringing further unhappiness into her life—having brought so much.”