by Kate Forsyth
She thought of lying with him. They would be a strange couple. Her feet would stick out past his like her father’s did over the edge of his mattress. And he was so broad and square. He’d be heavy on her.
But the bed would be soft and the sheets would be crisp and clean like new snow. And he was a gentle man, for all his bearishness. He would be kind to her. And she’d be safe.
Janey cleared her throat. ‘Are ye sure? I ain’t yer kind.’ She imagined his mother’s outrage, the dismay of his brothers and sisters. What would all his friends think? She imagined a long table, set with a spotless white tablecloth, and shining glasses, and gleaming china plates, and rows and rows of silver knives and forks and spoons, and all the people at the table staring at her because she did not know what fork to use. She imagined their faces when she opened her mouth and spoke. She imagined the snickers hidden behind white gloves, the laughing mouths. Topsy would not notice. He did not care what people thought of him. It was because he was rich. He could do what he liked.
But Janey cared. She cared dreadfully.
‘You are my kind,’ Topsy said passionately. ‘Do you not love poetry and art and music and green growing things just as much as I do? Do you think it matters that you are poor? I have money enough for both of us. It’s the beautiful shining soul of you that I love, not who your father is or where you grew up.’
A lump in her throat.
He came and took her hands. ‘I’d do my best to make you happy, Janey …’
Tears and smiles together. ‘If ye’re really sure …’
‘I have never been so sure of anything.’
He kissed her hands, and then he kissed her mouth. She nestled into his arms, with her head on his shoulder, thinking, He’s such a kind man, such a good man. I’m sure I’ll come to love him in time.
7
Running Mad
Spring 1858
Struggling. Screaming. Arms held down. Someone on her thighs. So heavy. Head forced back. Fingers digging into jaw. Cannot scream. Tube thrust into nostril. No! No! Up her nose, down her throat.
Gagging.
‘Hold her still!’ he ordered.
Cracking of eggshells. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
Sound of whisking.
One arm free. Grabbed tube. Tried to yank it out. Arm wrenched back. Tube forced deeper. Throat bruised.
Funnel in tube. Glug glug glug. Disgusting.
At last the tube pulled out. Her arms and lower body released. Lizzie twisted away. Gagging.
‘If you vomit, we shall be forced to feed you again,’ the doctor said.
She swallowed it down. Bitter as wormwood.
‘Let her rest now. Feed her again in the morning. Six raw eggs in milk. Then the sulphur water therapy. I shall see her again tomorrow.’
The nurses nodded. Hard-faced bitches.
He went out, and the nurses packed away the feeding tube and funnel. One washed Lizzie’s face with icy-cold water and a rough flannel. Another smoothed out the rumpled sheets and blankets and tucked her in so tightly she could scarcely move a finger.
Their heels rapped loudly on the wooden floor as they marched out, in single file, proudly bearing their instruments of torture.
‘You may go in now,’ one said.
Lizzie shut her eyes. Her throat hurt.
She heard the tentative sound of Gabriel’s feet, and smelt the familiar scent of his eau de cologne as he leant over her. ‘Are you awake?’ he whispered.
Lizzie did not answer. She wondered how much he could hear from the other side of the door. Her screaming and thrashing? The awful glugging?
How could he let them do it to her?
After a while, she heard the faint sound of him sitting down. She stayed motionless, arms restricted by the tight bedclothes. She imagined all the raw egg and milk roiling in her stomach. Once again she gagged involuntarily. She forced herself to swallow.
Lizzie had tried to do without Gabriel, she really had. She had spent the summer with her cousins in Sheffield, going to chapel like a good girl, visiting ancient bedridden aunts, helping out with the darning. She had expected Gabriel to come and find her, begging her pardon and taking her home. Yet the months had slipped away.
She had some money. The rich American had bought her painting of Clerk Saunders for thirty-five guineas. She had a horrible suspicion he had only bought it to be kind, for the art critics in New York had singled out her painting for particular abuse. One had said it was ‘Pre-Raphaelitism run mad’.
Those words bothered her. Sometimes Lizzie was afraid that she was running mad. People looked at her strangely. Made excuses for her. ‘She’s delicate,’ her aunt Sarah would explain to visitors. Lizzie found it hard to manage with so many people worrying over her all the time. She asked if she could have a tray in her room. That made them think she was stuck up. But Lizzie could not bear to have people watch her eat. She fed most of it to the mice and the birds in the garden.
When the winter term began at the local School of Art, Lizzie began going to the women’s classes twice a week. ‘I am used to having Mr Rossetti as my teacher, of course,’ she had told the principal, a snub-nosed young man named Mr Mitchell. ‘But he has been commissioned to paint some murals in Oxford and so I thought I would come north for a while. Visit my kin. London was just so thin of company. Mr Ruskin, of course, has been busy about Mr Turner’s legacy, else I would have stayed to work with him.’
‘You know Mr Ruskin?’ The question had been asked with awe.
‘Oh, yes, indeed. Why, he has been so kind as to extend his patronage to me. Of course, now that my work is touring in America I no longer need it, but we have remained friends.’
‘Miss Siddal, it shall be an honour to have you frequent our humble school. May I ask, have you met Mr Millais?’
‘Frequently,’ she answered. ‘And Mr Holman Hunt too.’
‘Is he as … temperamental … as they say?’
‘Indeed, yes. We all call him the Maniac, you know.’
He had drawn his chair closer. ‘Tell me more, Miss Siddal!’
The other girls were jealous of Mr Mitchell’s attentions. They began to tease her, just like the other apprentice milliners used to do. They called her Carrots or Freckles or String-bean. And they made nasty comments about her clothes. Lizzie thought it was ridiculous to wear a crinoline while painting. One could scarcely reach the easel with all those hoops in the way. And she had no need of a corset to give her a waist measurement of only sixteen inches. Hers had been less than that for years.
In September, Mr Mitchell organised a trip to Manchester to see the Great Exhibition. Lizzie had dug out the clothes she had bought in Paris, and turned up in grand style. Mr Mitchell offered her his arm, and she swept on to the train in front of all those jealous cats.
In Manchester, though, a stranger accosted her as they strolled around the exhibition. He was a dapper young gentleman, with dark curls carefully combed through with sweet-scented macassar oil and a fluffy little moustache. Around his neck, he wore a flamboyant gilt cross hanging from a red ribbon.
‘I say, aren’t you Miss Siddal?’ he asked.
Lizzie turned warily. ‘Yes.’
‘I recognised you from Mr Millais’s Ophelia. And, of course, from so many of Mr Rossetti’s paintings. You are indeed his favourite model.’
Lizzie looked around quickly, to make sure no-one was listening. But of course, they all were, wide-eyed.
‘Charles Augustus Howell is my name. It’s a pleasure to meet you … though, of course, I feel as if I know you, seeing your face depicted on so many canvases.’
She felt sick and dizzy. A few of the girls were whispering and laughing. A few others looked down their noses at her. ‘Nothing but a common model,’ she thought someone whispered. Hot and cold flashes all over her body.
She managed a stiff bow and murmured something. Mr Howell did not take the hint, but stood chatting a while longer, asking her if Gabriel was painting her in a
nything new. He did not mention her own art, or that she had sold a painting for thirty-five whole guineas. His tone seemed patronising. She noticed that he had a markedly receding chin.
Lizzie excused herself and stumbled away, leaving him staring after her. She felt faint. The blasted corset was cutting off all the air to her lungs. There was nowhere she could hide. She had to endure the long journey back to Sheffield with everyone staring at her, whispering about her. Mr Mitchell did not offer her his arm, or indeed speak to her.
That night Lizzie crept down to the kitchen, and ate all the food she could find. She did so hurriedly, surreptitiously, afraid that every creak of the old house was someone sneaking down the stairs to find her. She had barely swallowed one mouthful before her hand was cramming something else in.
She ate till she was ill, and then she ate more.
The next day there were great scenes of consternation at the discovery of the empty pantry.
‘Maybe it was rats,’ her uncle said.
‘Mighty clean rats is all I’m going to say,’ Aunt Sarah said.
Nobody seemed to suspect Lizzie. Yet she felt as if every move, every mouthful, was scrutinised even more closely than before. She became more secretive. Eating on the sly, purging any chance she could.
Days narrowing, leaves orange as her hair. And still no sign of Gabriel.
Of course she suspected he was trifling with some other girl. When a letter came from Emma saying all the boys in Oxford seemed to have gone mad over some new Stunner, Lizzie knew she had been right. She wrote a dozen letters to him, the ink smeared with her tears, tore them up, wrote him another, tore it up too. She walked the damp cobbled streets for hours in a trance, searching for food to cram into her mouth. Sometimes she picked through garbage. She sickened herself.
One day she fainted, getting out of bed. Her aunt wrote to her parents. Lydia came, and took her back to Matlock Gorge. Lizzie wrote to Gabriel, begging him to come and rescue her. He came, but was stiff and stern with her. He told her she must do everything the doctors said, else he would leave again.
Lizzie did not want him to leave her. She wanted to be well enough to lie smiling in his arms, as he wound her long hair about his fingers and called her his love, his dove, his darling. But it was as if she had been turned into some kind of clockwork automaton, programmed to purge.
Lizzie lay utterly motionless, feeling her stomach gurgle and heave. Slowly the light faded. She heard Gabriel stoke up the fire, and then sit back down in the chair. He sighed. For a while, he seemed to read but then there was only silence.
Lizzie wondered if it was safe.
She opened her eyes. The room was dim, lit only by a shaded lamp on a table and the glow of the fire. Gabriel’s head was leaning back against the cushion. His long lashes rested on his cheek.
Lizzie began to ease herself out of the bed. She stood up. The world spun. She had to sit down and wait till the dizziness passed. Holding on to the furniture, she staggered over to the window. It was firmly shut against the dangerous night air. It took all her strength to open it. It creaked loudly, and she glanced over her shoulder. Gabriel did not move.
Bracing her bony hips against the windowsill, Lizzie leant outside. It was cold. Ivy grew up the wall, the glossy leaves fluttering in the wind.
It took only a moment for Lizzie to jam her fingers against the soft flesh at the back of her throat. She vomited so quickly it gushed over her hand. Most of it, though, fell down into the ivy below. She shook her hand clean and wiped her mouth.
‘What are you doing?’
Lizzie jumped violently. She spun around. Gabriel was on his feet, his eyes fixed on her, blackly dilated.
‘I … I felt so sick.’
‘I saw you …’ He made a thrusting gesture with his fingers towards his mouth.
A slow red burn of humiliation. ‘No … I …’
‘I saw you.’ There was accusation in his voice.
‘I had to get it out. It was making me sick.’
‘What? The food? No, the food is to make you well and strong again.’
Lizzie pressed both her hands against her aching stomach. She did not know how to explain herself.
‘So you were making yourself sick on purpose? All those times … you did it to yourself on purpose?’
‘No, no. It’s not like that.’ But she could see by the expression on his face that Gabriel did not believe her. She could see him remembering the dozens and dozens of times that he had held her, wiped her mouth and comforted her. His face hardened. He caught up his coat and pulled it on.
‘Gabriel, no … please …’
‘It’s over, Lizzie,’ he told her. ‘I can’t do this anymore. I could not bear to hurt you when you were so sick … I thought you were dying … but now I see that it was all some crazy kind of pretence.’
Lizzie caught hold of the table to stop herself from falling.
Gabriel’s look was contemptuous. ‘I will not be taken in by your tricks anymore.’
Lizzie tried to speak, but tears suspended her voice.
He went swiftly across the room, pausing as he opened the door. ‘Oh, and Lizzie, you know that girl you were so worried about? Well, it’s true. I’m in love with her. I’m going now to tell her.’
Gabriel slammed the door shut behind him.
8
Poison Or the Dagger
Summer 1858
Janey sat at the table, a book spread before her, her head bent in concentration.
‘Learn from this no’ …’
‘Not,’ Miss Leigh said, emphasising the ‘t’.
‘Not,’ Janey repeated. ‘Learn from this not to despise li’l things …’
‘Little,’ Miss Leigh said.
‘Little,’ Janey repeated. ‘Learn, also, not to be … dis … dis …. discouraged by great labours …’
‘You are doing so well. Keep going.’
‘The greatest labour becomes easy, if divided into parts. Ye … you do not … jump over a mountain; but … step by step takes you … to the other side.’
‘You, my sweet girl, are jumping mountains! Well done. Have you had enough? Shall we break for tea?’
‘No,’ Janey said carefully. ‘I would prefer to keep goin’ … going … please, Miss Leigh.’
‘Certainly, my dear. Read the next paragraph.’
‘Do not fear, therefore, to … attempt great things. Always remember that the whole o’ … of … that great …’ Janey pronounced the ‘t’ with intense concentration, ‘… buildin’ … building is only … one brick upon … another.’ On she went, slowly gaining in fluidity, till the whole page was read.
‘Oh well done, my dear! Let’s ring for tea, and I shall read to you for a while, shall I?’ Miss Leigh put out her hand and pulled the cord. A far distant tinkle could be heard.
Janey put down her schoolbook with a relieved sigh. Her neck was stiff, her shoulders tense, and her voice hoarse. There was so much to remember.
Rule 1: Avoid suppressing letters in pronunciation.
Rule 2: Avoid substituting the sound of one letter for another.
Rule 3: Avoid suppressing syllables in pronunciation, unless correct utterance requires it (how was a body meant to know?).
Rule 4: Avoid pronouncing ow like er (Miss Leigh had made a little rhyme for her to chant: ‘Yellow, fellow, hollow, swallow, sorrow, tomorrow, narrow, shallow, billow, pillow.’ After a while, it sounded like a love song, with all those oh, oh, ohs!)
Rule 5: Avoid the dropping of the ‘g’ sound.
Rule 6: Avoid an imperfect utterance of the sub-vocals and aspirates in a succession of similar sounds …
Janey still had not got the hang of that one.
Miss Leigh was very kind to her, though. They only did elocution twice a day, for half an hour at a time, and then she always rewarded Janey with something she loved to do. Playing the piano and singing rounds. Walking by the river and picking wildflowers. Reading more of The Heir of Redclyffe, which they
were both enjoying hugely. It did Janey good just to hear Miss Leigh reading aloud, her voice was so sweet and pure. Janey could practise the sounds of the words silently, inside her, and each day it got a little easier to say them right.
It had been five months since Topsy had hired this pretty little cottage on the banks of the River Thames, just on the outskirts of Godstow. It was a low white house, with a small garden crowded with roses, foxgloves and larkspur. It looked out over the calm green waters of the millstream.
The road led over a little humped stone bridge towards the Thames. Beyond were an arched bridge and the Trout Inn, and then a lock where boats could be raised and lowered through control of the water level. Topsy found that fascinating. Every time he came to visit, he and Janey would walk down and watch the locksman work the machinery. A footpath then led through the meadows towards Godstow Abbey, an old ruin on a little island where the river forked.
Usually Topsy would come to visit Janey and Miss Leigh by boat, paddling down the Thames from Oxford. Janey thought he found the whole idea of it wildly romantic.
He was the perfect suitor. He would sit in the sitting-room, a tiny cup and saucer perched on his knee, making polite conversation and blushing each time Janey spoke to him with her carefully enunciated vowels. ‘How do you do, Mr Morris? Is it not fine today, Mr Morris?’
Miss Leigh was a strict chaperone, but she allowed Topsy and Janey to walk alone together, as long as they never strayed from her sight. She walked behind them, leaning only slightly upon her stick, and pretended great interest in the play of light upon the river.
After that one kiss when Janey had said she would marry him, Topsy had barely touched her. A shy hand to help her over a damp spot. A low bow when he said goodbye. It was as if he wanted to pretend that she had always lived in Godstow with Miss Leigh, and that this was a conventional courtship. This was an easy pretence for Janey to make. She wished it were true.
Miss Leigh, her old parish school teacher, had been on the verge on being sent to the workhouse when Topsy had asked Janey if she knew anyone who could live with her awhile and teach her how to manage in polite society. He had rented them this cottage, hired them a skivvy, and opened accounts for them at all the best shops in Oxford. He had secured the services of a dancing master, a French teacher, a music teacher, and someone who could show her how to paint a competent watercolour. The teachers came and went all day, greased in the palm to be kind, and Janey – who had dreaded the lessons – found that she began to enjoy them. With Miss Leigh’s gentle encouragement, she learned how to walk with a book balanced on her head, how to curtsey in a country dance, when to remove one’s hat and when to leave it on (the rules did not seem to make much sense), and – to Janey’s great relief – what fork to use to eat oysters.
