by Clara Barley
How has my life come to this? I am more alone than I have ever been. Had I swallowed my pride and faced my own fear of being single I would now be free to leave, perhaps court someone new. The irony of it makes me laugh at my own situation; I am a husband trapped in a loveless marriage. Is that not what I dreamed of, to be wed? And here we are, like all other couples, wondering how we ever tolerated each other. I take pleasure by myself, imagining we are back in the Moss House together, but it is harder to concentrate, the pleasure takes time to rise in me. I allow myself to think of Mariana instead but that does not always help. My body is in league with my mind, both full of torment and unable to quieten, unable to find release. Sometimes the pleasure does not come to me. I circle and push against myself, become rough with myself. She has broken me.
Yes, I care for her and would not wish her ill, but my love for her lies in the memories of courting, our time in the Moss House, our wedding, our first travels to Paris… but then the storm clouds gathered and we lost those we loved and were shunned by our friends, family and society itself. I thought I could cope with the loss of everyone else if I had her. I thought she alone would be enough to complete me and fill my days, but Aunt was right. One person alone is not enough. We need people. And now it is as if she is no longer with me, as though I am abandoned by her too. I know she cannot help it, but how can she be so selfish and cruel as to shut me out? She forces me to hide in my gatehouse and listen to the traffic pass by for fear I should see someone who will ask me, as always, how is Miss Walker, and I must smile and say very well thank you, when it is all a lie, she is not very well at all. Neither am I.
I hope and pray that she can find her way through this and come back to me. I bring over Doctor Belcome from York but he leaves with a shrug. No one can help her. I will give her until summer to improve. Otherwise I shall have to run away, for any more of this loneliness will be too much for me to bear.
Miss Walker
As soon as we wake, I dread the day. I must somehow function and have the maids see me. I am anxious about what letters will come, what the newspaper will say, if someone should call on us, if someone should burn down the Hall with us both inside.
She reassures me all the time and protects me from the world. I know she checks the letters, reads the paper before me, meets people elsewhere so they do not come to the Hall. She has not told me, but I know she takes a pistol with her when she ventures out. She takes the carriage with the groom if she must go into town and goes straight to the bank or a shop and retreats again. She is no longer involved in the estate, it is all done through her steward who calls in each day to update her and receive orders. She goes out for her walks, but very early or very late in the day when the tenants will be at rest. She never goes out after dark and never mentions the hotel or visits it, never talks of any more plans for the estate except for the immediate plans for Shibden Hall itself. She only speaks of her library, currently being added to the Hall in the form of a tall tower, where she will be on the top floor, looking out, hidden up a spiral staircase. A library big enough for all her books and a desk, but not big enough for the two of us. It is her library alone; I do not seem to be invited. It is not mine, but probably comes from my money. I do not mind; she is looking after me, why should she not be rewarded with her own library for her precious books and writing her diary?
I finally agree to another trip for fear of losing her. But I only agree to France.
I arrive in Paris in a daydream. I let her take me. I play no part in it but do not refuse to go. I can no longer protest.
Familiar Paris again; it is four years since we were here. We walk the same streets and visit the same places and it feels like déjà vu, only this time we are quieter, our words do not flow, we are slower, more subdued. I write to Elizabeth but no one else. She whisks us on to Brussels where I have not been before and for a short while its novelty encourages us to talk more and enlivens me, but my back begins to ache once more and ever more often she leaves me in the rooms as she goes out without me. I am waited on alone in the hotel and served teapot after teapot; I sit and try to read the same book over and over, but I cannot fall into it, cannot be immersed. I am numb in a foreign town with ill-tasting tea that grows lukewarm before I finish a single cup.
I decide to write again to Marian, begging her to forgive us and to come save me from loneliness at Shibden when we return, for I cannot do this again. I cannot just sit and wait for Anne and then ride in a carriage for hours at a time and then sit and wait again like I am just some maid, growing ever more detached from the world, ever more detached from Anne. I must set her free.
France and Belgium do not quench her thirst and when I flippantly suggest she climbs another mountain, we are off into the Pyrenees where the cold air gives me aches and pains all over and I can never get warm. She leaves me in the care of strangers as she sets off to climb to a summit without me and I wonder if she will make it back to me alive, and how I would have to manage without her if she fell, escort her broken corpse back all those miles home to empty Shibden. If she should fall, she will take me with her – for how can I live on without her?
Miss Lister
It is over ten years since I made my last ascent to this height. This time I am the first person ever to do so. I convinced some local guides to take me where no one had been before. Reluctantly, and no doubt bemused by this English woman, who they no doubt thought would fail, they were swayed by the money I offered them.
Here I stand, triumphant. I am free. It is just me, in my body, away from the world, above everyone else living on it. I am at the summit of Vignemale. I make the first ever ascent on the seventh day in August 1838. I am the first to claim it, conquer it. I am forty-seven years old, and my body is more aware of my age than my mind is; it aches and my feet are raw. I’m too old for this climbing nonsense but would not give this up for the world. It has taken days to get here after bad weather delayed my guides and me on two attempts, but we persevered and slept under the stars and climbed in the dark to get here. Should I die here, right now, I would be content.
When on top of the world, the mind travels to the overriding vision of one’s own existence, one’s own life. I think of how much I have achieved and loved and lost. The rest of my life stretches out before me, but it is in tedium.
I had forgotten that my family was not immortal; I’d pictured us together at Shibden forever, but in truth we only had a few years together, the five of us. Then Father and Aunt were lost, and now Marian is gone from us. We have few friends left to visit, no new acquaintances. Mariana seems a distant memory; so few letters pass between us now. Didn’t I tell her everything, once? I wish she were with me now.
I care for Ann, love her, but she no longer completes me. I am no longer whole. Was I ever?
Here I stand on the peak of a mountain no person has ever climbed before, and I am alive and happy, yes, but the experience will fade as soon as I take the first step back down. It will become just another memory, another experience recorded in my diary. I will publish this account. This could be a travel article. But pessimism creeps in and I wonder who would read it. Others have made ascents, after all; it is not new. Would they even believe a woman capable?
Perhaps I am no longer permitted to enjoy life. Perhaps I have already had my allocation of happiness, and now I am given just contentment, no more. As I look out over the clouds which are now beneath us, hiding the world from our sight, I have a memory of my aunt and I in Paris, laughing, and a wave of grief washes over me as I realise that I cannot tell her of this. She will never know. I trudge back down three thousand feet and every single step feels like I am walking closer to nothing.
When we are reunited, I hold her close to me, my little Ann. I do love her, but we are cast from the world and a distance now stands between us that feels insurmountable. Ascending the mountain seemed easier than conquering her again.
Miss Walker
Would it be easier to live a lie? To pretend otherwise? To find an old widower and beg him to take my hand? Or for each of us just to be alone? Yet in each other’s arms we hold each other as if we will never let go. As if we are the only two people in the world. Many days I wish we were. Who is there truly that cares for me but Anne?
I wonder ever more why she stays with me and does not cast me back to Crow Nest. When I voice this, she kneels before me and promises me she loves me and will be with me forever. She tells me over and over that I am her wife and that she will never leave me and will do anything for me, but I see how much this plays on her; my silence, my tears that I cannot help but let fall. She is trapped here with me and she paces back and forth, back and forth, and for all her protestations that she will wait for me, care for me, never cast me out and never leave me, I see her as a lion. Trapped. One day someone will leave the door open and her wildness, so supressed inside her over all these years with me, will overcome her, and she will start to run and keep running and never look back. Anne is the Lister lion we pass each day on the carved staircase. Anne is the six-foot stone lion that stares at anyone who arrives or leaves Shibden. Who am I to keep her caged?
Miss Lister
Just the two of us for Christmas Day.
All those years I begrudged the presence of my family and now I miss them terribly. Marian did at least pay us a brief visit, but it was like meeting a stranger. She has gone the way of Mrs Priestley, cold and aloof, as if she has closed her doors to us. I hold her closely as she leaves; can she not see that I am her sister still, who cares for her and loves her? Why does she care what we do alone, in private? It does not change who I am or what I feel. I’m glad Aunt and Father did not live to see how we sisters turned out. We never got on well but we did love each other. Aunt told me to look after Marian, but she is lost to me.
I decide to try for some pleasure with Ann. It has been too long. I am kind and gentle to her all day and sneak a few kisses to her cheek as I pass her by and she smiles, and by the time we are seated for supper I squeeze her hand and run my fingers across her cheek and gently loosen one of her curls. I play with her feet under the table, even as we are served food, and she giggles. For a moment I am transformed to our earlier days, but she pulls her feet back out of reach. I persist and continue to catch her eye as I ask her about her plans for the coming year and top up her wine.
At night I hold her close to me and start to kiss her passionately on the mouth and she accepts. Perhaps this is my Christmas present. She allows the kisses but does not push into me, but I continue. I run my hand up her nightdress on the outside of her leg and pull her hips towards me; again she allows me.
We start to clutch at each other and kiss messily, grabbing at each other’s mouths with lips and teeth and I think I have won her over. She allows me to remove her nightgown and I cast mine off and throw it high into the air with a flourish and she giggles again, that beautiful innocent ripple of noise I realise I have not heard for such a long time.
As our warm bodies and lips press together I finally feel free, content and, dare I say it, in love again. I pull back to look down into my lover’s eyes and, hoping to see the same reflected back at me, I see instead the opposite. I realise that Ann has everything a woman could ever desire to be happy, except the very power to enjoy it, and there is nothing I can ever do to change that.
And instead of compassion and understanding, I am repulsed by this. How can she not let me in? Let me love her? Tease me so?
I have given her all my love but it is not enough. We are separate now and the isolation of it crashes down on me and I feel myself turn angry. I take hold of both her wrists in my hand and continue to kiss her all over her body and squeeze firmly her breasts, her thighs, I allow my weight to bear down on her and her face hardens as she starts to squirm and pull her hands free. I push against her harder and pinch her and push my fingers into her, but she pushes me away and I let go as I see a flash of fear in her eyes as if I am a stranger. I sit back on my heels, the connection between us lost. She lies there looking up at me, angry. How could I be so cruel? I have allowed myself to be angry at her. I soften and smile and kiss her mouth again gently and turn her away from me and hold her carefully in my arms as I caress her soft back, shoulders and arms and she lets me. I try to fix her with my hands. I whisper that I love her, but she does not reply to me.
It is New Year’s Eve, 1838. Now it is I who cries, and Ann does not even turn to look at me.
Chapter Nineteen
1839: A departure from Shibden Hall
Miss Lister
Spring has come of a new year and the Hall’s first stage of alterations is complete except for the windows in my tower. However, it has all taken too long and there have been so many frustrating setbacks; it has all felt too much. My grand plans for more works will have to wait. If it takes this long to just build two new wings, then the full castle will take a lifetime. I shall settle with just this for now and am impatient that I will not be able to move my books into the tower before we leave again.
For we are leaving. It cannot wait any longer. Our journey to France was too short. I have waited and waited for her to recover, to come back into herself again and to no avail. I have waited and waited for them to finish the damn tower to no avail. I shall leave my steward to manage it. I am done. We are leaving for Russia. I need to go farther, somewhere uncharted by others from this country, somewhere I can write about and publish a book on. Somewhere far enough away that we cannot easily turn back.
Ann is still undecided as to whether to join me or stay behind. She talks of returning to her sister or at least to Crow Nest and having a succession of visitors there to keep her occupied, but she has done nothing to formally arrange either of these options, so it is just talk. In truth she does not want me to leave her; nor does she want to come with me. If only Marian were here to keep her company, then I could leave the two of them and have no pressures on how long I travel for or when I return. In my heart, do I really want to leave them here forever and never return? Or do I want to return when they have both found themselves husbands to whisk them away and out of my responsibility? How awful that my thoughts run to plans to be rid of them. I thought I could care forever, that our love would keep us strong, our bond of marriage, but the years sweep by and she is unchanged. We have not had intimate relations for nearly a year. She spends each night with me, but her body is no longer mine. We occasionally kiss but she stops me or cries or flies off about something I had done a week before that upset her and that I can do nothing about.
My lover has become my tormentor.
Miss Walker
Now Marian will decide our fate. We write to her and beg her to move back to Shibden, as it is her home too. We miss her. Anne loves her sister and we both want her here with us. We tell her that Anne wishes to go travelling and I am not well enough to go but she does not want to leave me alone. Anne believes Marian is more upset with her than with me, so may come if she believes it will only be me here.
Miss Lister
We tell her we will invite Ann’s sister Elizabeth to stay here too, with the children. It should be nice to have some children in the Hall, wouldn’t she like that? We tell Marian about the woodlands and the lake, which she must come and see in the warmth of summer. We beg her to claim her part of Shibden for herself. I enclose a sketch of the stone Lister lion and note on the back, ‘Some semblance of Father perhaps? Our Lister lion’.
I ask Marian in another letter from me alone, would she wish Ann from our lives? If she would befriend Ann again, then she never has to see me. I will sacrifice Ann to
her to make her happy, so neither of them must be alone. I beg her to agree that if she will not join us now, will she at least look after Ann should anything happen to me? Do not blame Ann for any of this, I tell her, it was all my doing.
We do not hear back for weeks.
I set a date to leave, with or without Ann, as the twentieth of June; to keep on waiting is insufferable. If I do not set off by summer, I shall have the worst of journeys through winter. The desire to leave burns inside me and I know she sees it, but I cannot help it. I seem to find no satisfaction in earthly pursuits and pleasures any more. Temporarily perhaps, but never to my core, as if everything stops at my skin. Travel presents itself as the only possible source for some enjoyment.
Miss Walker
She eventually writes back and agrees to visit! All is not lost, Marian will come. But she goes on to say that she will come for Christmas time. She believes as a family we should spend Christmas together, but she will come no sooner. There are no promises to move back in; it will just be a visit. Christmas is several months away, and Anne wants to leave in June. Marian will make us wait and she gives herself ample time to change her mind. Perhaps she says this just to stop our asking and intends to refuse us later. Anne fumes and shouts cruelly, what can she possibly have to fill the next seven months in her little life?
Some days I believe I can travel and look at the routes through Russia and beyond with Anne; I see myself there, with her, away from all the sadness here. But another day I will wake up with a fear in me that tells me I should not venture away from this place. If it were just to Europe again perhaps that would suit me, but she tells me she has finished with Europe and must go farther, especially for the travel book to be published; there are so many on European travels, she tells me, it must be somewhere new, that few have been to.
