Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  He nodded silently. His old life had ended, and at times it had been a very pleasant one, couldn’t she see?

  They made a comfort stop at a stage hotel where the horses where changed. John handed her down from the coach and stayed outside as she made her way to find the conveniences. As Effie moved through the lobby she watched a young woman speak to a desk clerk. The woman held a little boy by the hand as he clung to her skirts with the other.

  I am a married woman, the newly-wed Mrs. Ruskin thought of a sudden, and this thrilled her. She almost spoke it aloud––I am now a married woman!––and could not keep the smile from rising to her lips. And one day, soon, she would be just like the woman before her, with a child clinging to her skirt, possessing the confidence and quiet satisfaction that nothing but marriage and children could bestow. When Effie returned to the coach she feared she was grinning idiotically. To her relief John did not comment, and she had no need to explain her inexplicable excitement. But seeing the mother and her son put her in mind again of family and home, and the wedding just celebrated.

  “Little Melville was as good as gold; he’s such a happy baby,” Effie added. Her newest sibling had indeed been quiet throughout the afternoon. “And so pretty.”

  She wasn’t sure John was quite attending, he was looking out the window.

  “Yes, if a blob of putty could be called ‘pretty,’” he answered.

  “Blob of putty? John, really my love––how could you––” she began, in laughing astonishment. “Melville is a beautiful child.”

  But babies were certainly ugly, he felt, thinking of the frog-like motion of their legs. “They’re all so undefined––one never knows what end one has gotten hold of,” he observed. “But I suppose Melville’s a fine fellow, for a baby,” he finished.

  They rolled on in darkness towards Blair Atholl. It had been after five when they had left Bowerswell and they would not reach the inn until almost ten. John had secured the Best Room; being the Highlands Effie knew it would be modest enough. A small laugh escaped her lips, and John looked at her.

  “Oh,” she answered, “I am just recalling Mr. Ruskin explain that he asked always for the second best room at any inn when he was upon his business travels, for fear of having the finest room denied to one of his customers should they arrive after him––for as he told us, how would it look for the sherry merchant to be sleeping better than the squire he sold his wares to? And I’m happy tonight we shall have the Best Room.”

  “Father could have the Best Room anytime he chose, he asks for the second merely out of seemliness to his clientele,” John answered. He could not imagine why this trifle had lodged in her memory, or why she had thought to mention it now, as if in ridicule.

  “Oh yes, my love, I understand, I do,” Effie said, aware that she appeared both ignorant of commercial decorum and to have made a jest of her new husband’s father.

  At the next stage the coach took on three more passengers, all men, and constrained by their presence the wedded pair barely spoke a word until they were discharged outside the door of the inn at Blair Atholl. They followed the innkeeper through the dimly lit and deserted reception room up a broad flight of stairs to their designated room. He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and quickly lit two lamps from the lantern he carried.

  “Now a bit of supper for you both,” he offered.

  John looked at her, and she shook her head. “Nothing thank you; we’ve had a tiring day,” he answered.

  “Some biscuits and wine, certainly?” the innkeep countered. “’Tis your wedding night.”

  Effie could see from John’s face that he had regretted mentioning this when he had written to secure the room.

  John paused a moment. “Beef tea, please.” It might serve to warm and steady him, and he had no appetite.

  He looked again at Effie, but again she shook her head. “No, nothing for me, thank you,” she said.

  Beef tea, she thought––is he as ill as all that? But the innkeeper was showing them the appointments of the room. There were two chests of drawers, a large mirror, and a small table with two chairs between windows whose draperies were drawn. Everything was new and singularly ugly, and the innkeeper was proud of all of it. “Bath room just across your hall; we’ve no other guests of a Monday so you have it alone.” They had their backs to the ornately carved bed as they bid the man goodnight. Effie could feel its presence behind her and was half afraid the man might say something about its size or comfort. She felt grateful that he ignored it, as they did.

  George and the innkeeper’s boy came bumping up the stair with the trunks, but at John’s direction did no more than open them both for ease of access before retreating themselves.

  The door closed behind him, and they stood looking at each other. This was the moment they had waited for over all these months. Effie had imagined the moment scores of times: John would open his arms and she would press herself to him.

  He did not open his arms. After a moment he smiled at her, and then turned to his trunk.

  What was she thinking––of course at any moment someone would come with the beef tea; he was thinking ahead and she was not.

  She was too modest to unpack before him, and John too did no more than pull open a few drawers, removing nothing from his trunk. She hung her cloak on the door peg, and sat down at the table. A young girl brought up the beef tea in a covered pipkin; she was pretty and reminded Effie of her eldest little sister Sophie. John came to the table and sat and took a tentative sip.

  She had never known him so silent and wished he would speak, say anything to help relieve her own anxiety and put her at ease. He smiled when he looked at her but made no move to embrace, or even approach, her. He was of course extremely devout, and she wondered if he was considering the sacred charge of the marriage act to come; but she longed for him to enact the passionate behaviour toward her which his letters had promised.

  He was sipping the broth very slowly; its aroma rose from the pipkin each time he levered open the lid.

  Seven or eight months ago John had had his spring and summer all planned out. He and his parents would be once again on their way to Switzerland, and after a few restorative weeks in the alpine foothills move on to France and its ancient cathedrals so he could continue writing about them. Instead he was in Scotland with a Scottish woman who was suddenly his bride. He had made his parents very unhappy in choosing her, although they had behaved handsomely in the end and given their consent. It was the first rupture he had had with them and one enormously painful to himself. The annual tour would now be a wedding trip, but revolutionists across Europe had stopped their going.

  Effie was speaking to him. “I shall go and––” what? “change,” “prepare herself”? She hardly knew how to put it. She stood and went to her trunk without finishing, found her new nightdress and matching slippers, and took them with her toilette bag to the door. She turned and smiled at him as she left the room.

  She stayed as long as she could in the bathroom, fearful of knocking on their bedroom door before he had finished his own preparations. What to do with her travelling dress, stockings, and shoes? She would feel foolish carrying them into the bedroom; she wanted John to see her in her lovely nightdress unimpeded by anything so pedestrian as the dress she had journeyed in. The bath was theirs alone, she would leave everything else within.

  I shan’t even see half of your wedding gown on the day we wed, he had written to her last month. I shall be thinking of what I am receiving in you––and perhaps I shall be hardly able to look at you at all...then in the evening––when I can look at you as long as I please––or at least until I dare not look any longer for fear I should die of joy...

  There was a small mirror over the basin in which she could see herself, if she stepped back, from almost the waist up. The nightdress, she thought, was singularly lovely, prettier even than her silk wedding gown, and at that moment the extra £9 to the seamstress would have seem
ed a trifle well worth it if the thought of this additional outlay not given her a pang of regret on her father’s behalf. But she shook this out of her head. The nightdress, of fine white linen, trimmed with Venetian lace, was cut so that it lay just upon the rim of her shoulders, framing the expanse of her white throat and bosom. She had never worn a garment which revealed so much of her flesh, and she was quite aware that beneath the slender drop of the fabric she was naked. Over this she slipped the matching wrapper, of a gossamer fineness. She loosened her hair, fearful to brush it, and pulled her little lace-bedecked slippers on her feet.

  She stood outside the door of their room and gently knocked. “Come in,” John answered. She stepped in and closed the door behind her. She felt radiantly happy and excited, and was almost trembling with fear as well. She had never looked as lovely as she did at this moment, and hoped the impress of her appearance would be sealed upon their minds and hearts.

  John stood by the table. He too had changed. He was clad in leather slippers, stockings, and a long wool dressing gown of dark pattern, tightly sashed, under which the hem of his cambric nightshirt could be seen. His throat was wrapped with his blue stock; he looked muffled.

  He gazed upon her. “You look charming,” he said.

  He was now alone with the young woman he had wed. He had written many things to Effie about this moment, and imagined many more than he had written to her, all of them as vague as they were passionate. The dangers the moment represented had dizzied him. In his fancy she had been a beautiful and seductive lure, and he utterly powerless against her, and this image had stirred his imagination. There was nothing dreadful enough to liken her to, he had written; and gorgós, dreadful, was the root of the bewitching and paralyzing Gorgon. Fear of Effie compounded her allure, and John had relished it. He had sent letters in which he had compared her to a snow field harbouring a deep cleft into which he might fall and not rise again, a cruel wrecker luring a ship to its destruction upon a rocky coast, or a forest thicket which would trap him with thorns. Imagining the hazards she embodied and writing them to her had so stimulated him that afterwards he had often taken recourse in pleasuring himself in shamed excitement. He wrote himself into flights of passion and could not help the action of his straying hands.

  Now that she was before him no definite path of action emerged. His thoughts began to swirl in his brain. The excitement had drained out of him, leaving only the peril of her nearness and its consequences. He was fearful they would never get to Switzerland’s mountains, which he felt he needed more than anything he could imagine; and he feared Effie would die in childbed as so many young wives did; and feared being left alone without her and with a baby as ugly as Melville; and feared the noise and confusion of a house full of children such as the Gray’s; and remembered being back at Christ Church and young Lord Ward who he scarcely knew inviting him into his rooms and gleefully pulling open a drawer and waving his hand at an array of pictures of naked women in obscene poses, all lewdly beckoning with grinning faces. He heard Ward’s laughter again, laughing him to scorn at his shock. Now here was Effie smiling at him, and waiting. He raised his arms and Effie ran to him and he embraced her.

  The layers of his own clothing made it impossible for her to receive any sensation of his person, even through the filmy gauziness of her nightdress, but she felt the palm of his hand upon the skin at the nape of her neck as he held her. He placed his hands on her wrapper and gently pulled it back. She moved her face so that he might kiss her, but he lay his head on her bare shoulder. She waited for him to speak, utter some endearment, call her his own. She felt his breath upon her bosom and trembled.

  He turned so that in lifting his head he shifted the nightdress where it rested upon her shoulder, and it slipped down below her elbow. As she dipped her shoulder to catch it the dress dropped from her narrow frame to past her hips. Nipples, waist, belly, the auburn triangle of hair between her legs, all was exposed.

  They both reached out and grabbed for her errant nightdress, and as they bent their heads struck. He stepped back and she reclaimed her gown and her modesty, holding the dress up with her hands. Her cheek flamed in a flush of mortification. She realised that at any other time it could have––should have––been almost funny, striking heads like that, but a moment that should have been precious had been spoilt. Her forehead hurt where they had struck, and he placed his hand on his own brow. John looked steadfastly at the floor, his hand at his head, and Effie felt close to tears that he did not come and take her in his arms again.

  John moved back and sat upon the edge of the bed, his face averted. He was profoundly embarrassed, and his sense of clumsiness was intensified by a feeling of being oppressed by Effie’s anticipation. A long moment passed, and then he said, “We are both tired, and I think it best we––refrain tonight.”

  She nodded, afraid to speak, and went to the side of the bed and slipped in. From the corner of her eye she saw John untie his dressing gown, and heard his leather slippers hit the floor. He lowered the extinguisher on the bedside table lamp. She felt him settle in beside her, then his weight shift as he turned to her. He lifted himself on one elbow, and after kissing her brow, bid her good night. He felt perhaps his cold was getting worse after all.

  In the morning they dressed privately. When she re-entered the bedroom John was sitting at the table taking his pulse, and at her question explained that his mother had daily taken the measure of his health in this manner, and he had promised he would continue the practice. They read the Bible aloud, and then had their breakfast in the inn’s public room. They spent their first married day visiting a waterfall, supping with a local family who fed them trout and potatoes, and returning after a long afternoon to dine at the inn. They had been perfectly cheerful with each other, really the best of friends; and had laughed and jested upon the little white ponies they had rented. The day had been fine, the air clear, and the gorges vibrantly green.

  Effie again dressed herself in her new nightdress, and again entered their bedroom in expectation. John was neither in bed nor standing, waiting for her entrance, but sitting at the table writing letters to his parents, a separate letter for each.

  She got into bed and sat up as he wrote, watching him bent over his letters and hearing the scratch of his pen across the narrow sheets of paper. She had finished her own letter to her parents, full of news of the cataract they had ridden to and assuring them they were as happy as could be; and while she had done that John had been busy in his notebook, sketching out ideas for his book on medieval architecture. Now that it was bed-time he was occupied writing to his mother.

  After a while she slipped out and retrieved the Balzac she had brought with her, but John did not lift his head from his task. Eventually she saw the small flare from his lamp as he melted a blot of sealing wax upon the envelopes. He rose and came to her side of the bed. She let Balzac fall upon her breast.

  He pulled a chair close and sat down, as if she were an invalid and he an attending physician.

  “Effie, my dearest, I know you’ll understand and see the wisdom of what I am about to tell you. The fact is that as I hope we’ll soon be starting for France, and then on to the Alps, I want you to be as fit as possible for the trip. I need you to be fit, as I have great need and desire––pressing desire––to make the most of every opportunity to measure and draw the buildings I hope to cover in my book.”

  She thought of her ability as a horse-woman, or of her scrambling with him up the gorge wall this morning to get a better view of the inside of the water-cave. “Few women are fitter than me,” she said, and smiled, “think of our walk today. If my boots were heavier in the sole––”

  He shook his head with a single but decided motion. “No, not what I mean. I don’t doubt your ability now, it’s your ability––or lack thereof––later.”

  “Later? When later? When we are in the Alpine foothills? Because of the high air, do you mean?”

  He sighed at her. �
�No. The altitude is quickly adjusted to, for a healthy person. It’s...in the event of your no longer being fit because...because you might be with child.”

  “Oh.” Her voice was very small.

  “I feel, feel quite strongly,” he went on, “that we must guard against this probability––perhaps inevitability––and refrain from relations before, and for the duration of, our travels in France and Switzerland.”

  Tears pooled in her eyes. She did not even know what these “relations” were, just that she had expected John to have kissed her and folded her in his arms, that he would tell her how he adored her, worshipped her––all the things his letters had contained, which had made her heart beat so quickly and had made her feel breathless. Now she was being rebuffed.

  Her own mother, having brought thirteen children into the world, was yet the soul of delicacy, and had never spoken to her about the actual relations between husband and wife, which she knew to be the closest in life. She knew a baby did not result from mere kissing, even though some of her Perth friends had told her of girls who had to wed after having been kissed. She knew, had somehow ascertained between novels and gossip that it was the sacramental act of marriage, an exchange of some sort, which took place in bed. She had bathed her little brothers and seen the differences in their bodies from her own, but just how the baby resulted was the mystery that was her husband’s to teach.

  And now her husband, John Ruskin, the celebrated young intellect, was telling her that whatever the mystery was, they––she––would not be initiated into it, for months. And he had never yet kissed her on her lips.

  He smiled at her, and placed his hand over her own. “Dear Effie, let’s save this experience for later, when the outcome will not threaten my work.”

  She returned his smile as well she could. Perhaps when they got to know each other better there would be the sense of rapture she had expected. She raised their hands and kissed the back of his.