The Poets' Wives Read online

  Alberta, above rubies

  Contents

  Catherine

  1

  2

  Nadezhda

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Lydia

  1

  Author’s Note

  A Note on the Author

  Also available by David Park

  Catherine

  My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies.

  I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.

  Song of Solomon

  1

  Mr Blake comes so quietly I don’t hear him entering the room but when I look up he is sitting in his familiar place and his face is full of light. Even his black coat that in truth has seen better days seems burnished and sheened, no longer with wear but instead by something to which I can’t give a name. He calls me his sweet rose and his good angel and when he lifts his hands in customary animation I see for the first time in all the long years of our life together that his fingers have no stain or smudge of ink.

  ‘Do you no longer work?’ I ask, barely able to believe it might be so.

  ‘All my work is finished, Kate, and I am free and finally known. So everything I’ve put my hand to and everything done with your help now sits in blessed triumph.’

  ‘It’s more than could be hoped for,’ I tell him as I savour the sweetness of his words.

  ‘All the difficulties of the old life are fallen away. The man who was once a slave, bound in a mill amongst beasts and devils, has been set free from his fetters,’ he says as he wipes what could be a tear from his eye but which might only be a tremble of the light.

  I want him to come to me, for the first time touch me with hands that have no trace of ink, but he stays in his seat and he’s looking at me as if he’s trying to remember something, his mind momentarily fogged, until with a shake of his head it’s free again.

  ‘But you, Kate, how is it with you?’ he asks and, although he doesn’t come to me, I see once more the love written bright on his face that he has always borne me and I tell him I am a little solitary but that I try to keep busy and fight despondency as best I can. From the street below there pipes up the voices of children playing and he goes to the window and holding his hand on the glass above his head, just the way he always does, surveys the scene below and says, ‘This too is Heaven.’

  The light from the window seems to shine through him as he turns again to look at me, so at first I have to blink my eyes until he resumes his seat. When he moves away the sudden stream of sunlight is full of dust’s dance, the motes rising and falling like the notes of a silent song. His fingers have left no print on the glass.

  ‘It’s good your labours have ended, Will,’ I tell him, ‘because I don’t think these hands would allow me to be your helpmate, or colour as fine as they once did,’ and I hold up my hands stiffened with their rheumatism and which in my eyes at least have started to look like claws.

  ‘Kate, my Kate,’ he says as he comes to me at last and the coldness of his hands eases away some of the heated pain, ‘so many years you’ve laboured with me. Your faithfulness deserves its own rest.’

  ‘When will I come to you?’ I ask.

  ‘Soon, soon. Everything is almost ready.’

  I nod but am impatient to see his words come true and whatever the reason for the delay its purpose eludes my understanding. He turns his head briefly again to the window as a street hawker’s cry rings out.

  ‘And how goes it with money?’ he asks, as he resumes his seat.

  ‘Making ends meet as best I can.’

  I feel the sudden urge to tell him about the secret guinea I kept hidden all our marriage against the day it might be called upon but stop myself. Mr Blake is not always wise in the ways of the world or its money, so even now if he were to ask me for it I would have to deny him because the day when it’s needed may still yet come.

  ‘Listen, Kate, to what you must do. Take what’s left of my collection of old prints to Colnaghi and Co. and try to get the best price you can. Ask good money for the Dürer, the one above the engraving table. Demand to see the father not the son because the younger is a rogue who’ll cheat you and tell you the prints are of little value. As a man is, so he sees, and when he views these he’ll let profit blind him to their worth. And all that’s left – the paper, the tools, the press, every remnant of our toil – offer them to the local engravers, see what can be got for them. Try Richards first – of all of those assassins he is the most honest. Sell too whatever of the paintings you choose and try to find buyers for the store of books.’

  ‘I’d like to keep some brushes and a little of the paint,’ I tell him, ‘in the hope that my hands might allow me to fill some of my time profitably.’

  ‘Keep anything you wish. And I shall be close by, as close as you always were to me when I worked.’

  I am pleased by this and ask him if he would like to drink or eat but he shakes his head and smiles and says he has no need of anything. There are so many questions I want to ask him but already I sense that time is short so one thing presses more than others for an answer.

  ‘Have you seen the child? Have you seen Eve?’ and my voice trembles as I ask.

  ‘I’ve seen her and she’s cared for and watched over.’

  ‘Praise God. And how much longer before I can see her?’

  ‘Only a short while. I promise that I shall come for you soon.’

  ‘I believe it,’ I tell him, ‘and it will be the happiest of all my days.’

  Swallows dive and loop across the window. Swallows and children’s voices. Light suddenly stretching across the wooden floor polishes the nails. I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them he has gone, gone to walk once more with angels in the groves and to gather lilies in the sunlit gardens of Paradise.

  2

  I colour the prints keeping as close as I can to the original design and at the start I wonder how my hands that are smaller and finer than his struggle to be as delicate in their touch, but in time I take a silent pride in telling myself that our work is indistinguishable. I never fail to be struck by the beauty of the colours – the blues and greens, the violets, the pale oranges and pinks – and sometimes I think these are the shades of Heaven itself. And before long I am able to master the strangeness of such names as indigo, vermilion, cobalt and Frankfort black and be responsible for replenishing them and then there is no place where I’m happier than working at his side amidst the smell of nut oil and varnish, amidst the racks of needles and gravers, the sheets of paper and pumice stones used to polish the plates.

  I colour such things as spring alive from the holiness of Mr Blake’s imagination that no other man could even think but to dream and sometimes I know his good angel watches over us when he tells me, ‘I am under the direction of messengers from Heaven, daily and nightly.’ And there are such times when I feel that I have left the earthly world behind and I mount on Jacob’s ladder to the very gates of Heaven and I see the angels ascending and descending and my eyes burn with the brightness of what his hand has made. And in his picture he has drawn the angels taking the hands of children and the sky below the burning sphere is deepest blue and star-spotted and as I look at him labour at the wooden press with the woollen cloths and ink-stained rags I say with Jacob, ‘Surely God is in this place.’

  Now as my days wind surely to their welcome end it feels like I must somehow colour all these pages my memory continues to press and this is the work that is left to me although who commissions it or what will happen to it I do not know. I try to do it clear and clean
, keep each stroke true to its edge, but the colours blur and run into each other so it is difficult to understand what was lived and what worked at his side, what memory is really mine and which shaped by his imagination. And coming from Battersea to lodge in Green Street, regardless that some would call the distance a trifle, for the young woman I was it seemed a journey into a different world, a slumbering country parish replaced by the noise and fury of the city where the streets were thronged with every class of person in God’s creation and not a minute that wasn’t filled with the rattle of carriages and post chaises, the scurry of hackney chairs or dustcarts. Smoke from thousands of chimneys, the ceaseless bark of dogs, the street-sellers’ cries and sometimes at night the curses of the mob or gangs of apprentices up to mischief. A Tower of Babel where it felt reigned only confusion and chaos. So strange it was that in those first few days I was too timid to venture far beyond the boundary of the street.

  And what was more strange than this and which insists on being coloured in darkest hues? A scene that first looked like a representation of Hell itself where spirits and spectres clothed in vestments of black flowed out through its gates into the streets and filled them with their cries. The first day of May and Will tells me it’s a holiday given each year to the city’s chimney sweeps. A ragged army of young children, the oldest who look no older than seven or eight, the youngest nothing more than little smuts flown from some chimney, processing down the road like black sprites momentarily escaped the enslavement of their work, and they wave and clatter their brushes and tools in accompaniment to their shouts that break free from their skinny, soot-soiled necks to startle birds into flight. Stick-like limbs shiver under torn black rags. Feet are bare. Some are stooped or curved already in their spines. But the faces and hair of these they call ‘climbing boys’ and ‘lily-whites’ are whitened by splashes of meal and from their rags flutter little coloured ribbons or shreds of paper so some look like wind-blown scarecrows or tattered ghosts of themselves.

  I stand and stare and know I have never seen anything that looks so pitiful despite the laughter of the crowd and when I shudder William rests his hand on my shoulder and leads me away. In the days that follow he’s unnaturally quiet and then as sometimes he is wont to do I hear him leave our bed in the middle of the night, his footsteps leading into the work room, and I get up and follow, then sit beside him. He smiles his thanks but says nothing and I sit and watch him work, the night’s silence broken only by some drunken shout from far off and the fissle and whisper of the camel-hair brush painting the words and images upon the plate. As he leans over it lit by the lamp and with his magnifying glass in hand I am able to read the words he has written even though they are done backwards and see the child finally emerge before dawn, ‘a little black thing among the snow’, shouldering a bag of soot and making his way barefoot through winter streets. And as I read the words again he tells me they were given. I understand and when I look in his eyes by the break of day it is as if all the light has gone out of them and his face has a pallor that frightens me.

  ‘I am spent,’ he says as he slumps at the table and I stroke his hair but when I try to lead him back to bed he tells me it is light and air he needs so we dress and leave our lodgings, step into the city’s dawn. We see the river beginning to snake free from slumber, its slimed mud banks shiny with dew so they look frosted, and he takes me to stare at his sleeping childhood home in Broad Street and then we walk with the morning air cool against our faces. We pass the old almshouses, the brew houses and timber yards, see the homeless huddled in doorways and then a young girl shivering under a dirty shawl, who even at this hour is seeking to ply her unholy trade, calls out and William gives her some little money and tells her she must go home, if there is somewhere that bears this name. She looks at him with defiance as if he is a madman escaped from Bedlam and curses us but beneath the covering of rouge I see the face of a frightened child and I think of the engraving of Jacob’s ladder and wonder if some good angel might descend on wings of pity, take the wretched child by the hand and lead her to where her sins will be washed clean and she will be dressed in purer raiment.

  The city is slowly beginning to waken and we pass carts already heading to market heavy laden with goods and the drivers sit slumped over their reins as if barely awake, only jerking upright when a wheel hits a stone or the horse tries to stop and drink in one of the muddy puddles that strew the road. We return by the river where there are more of the poor sleeping, packed tight against each other in an attempt to defend themselves from the coldness of the night. Some have tried to find fortification with strong drink and empty bottles are scattered around, the glass flecked by the day’s strengthening light.

  In the days afterwards he begins his poem ‘London’ and everything that he has seen and felt makes itself known and I think he has never written anything so righteous or holy but the final lines are a lingering confusion to me:

  But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

  How the youthful Harlots curse

  Blasts the newborn Infants tear

  And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

  And it makes me fearful that somehow he thinks that because such a young woman exists in this world that all love is disfigured and defiled and I don’t want to think this but hesitate to ask him in case the answer is not what I hope to hear. So for days I carry her curses in my head, blasphemies made worse because they come from the mouth of little more than a child. Sometimes when they’re loudest they make my hand slip and because he has to tell me to be careful my heart is chastened and I make an excuse and leave off the work in pretence there is something pressing I must do about our home.

  This morning he promised that he would soon come back for me. When we were but newly in love and he had declared his intention to marry me it took him a whole year to make his words real. I hope he is not so tardy in this his final promise or as sometimes he is in the delivery of work that has been commissioned. The children’s voices have faded now with the day’s light. I think I must somehow be in Lambeth again so when I look out of the side window I catch a glimpse of the black mud-banked Thames through the gap in the houses, the water the colour of tin. I press my fingers to the glass where I think his have touched but mine leave puddled swirls that are slow to fade.

  A whole year in which to wonder if his declaration of love and vow to marry me were nothing more than the empty talk of this visitor to Battersea. Those months were a seemingly endless journey through a wilderness of loneliness and doubt.

  ‘He’ll not be back,’ my mother said. ‘You’ve let him slip through your hands. And his father has a hosier’s shop – you’ve thrown away a lifetime of nightcaps and stockings, not to speak of gloves and the suchlike.’

  At twenty years of age I had already become familiar with the promptings of a mother with too many mouths to feed who was always pushing me towards any suitor who only had to be able to stand upright to be considered a possibility. And it’s true that in hard times love’s requirements don’t ring so loud but with Will it was never about nightcaps and gloves but only love’s purest claim on my heart. Right from that first time I saw him – it can still make me blush like a girl to think of what I felt in those early days when I could hardly bear to be in the same room as him in case everything in my heart was visible on my face.

  A handsome man to me, if not to all the world, with what he may have lacked in stature made up for by the breadth of his shoulders, a strength of body and above all the possession of eyes that were full of the deepest life I had ever seen or have seen since. A man of dreams and visions who as a boy saw a tree full of angels and when he described it to me, the very words he used made it so real in my mind’s eye so I believed I could see and hear the bright rustle of their wings. I’d never seen or heard the like and sometimes just listening to the unbroken torrent of his words made me feel dizzy as if I’d played that childhood game where partners spin each other round.

  He had arrived with
what he thought was a broken heart having been rejected by the unworthy object of his desires and, as he unburdened himself that night when a storm rattled the windows and threatened to lift the cottage roof clean off, I simply spoke what I felt when I said, ‘I pity you from my heart.’

  ‘Do you pity me?’ was his question.

  ‘Yes I do, most sincerely.’

  ‘Then I love you for that.’

  So he loved me, without the need for a drawn-out courtship, and he swore that in a year he’d have gathered the funds to marry me properly and take me to be part of his life in the city. And in these present days it pleases me to remember that once I was his teacher, walking out in the country lanes and telling him the names of wild flowers – what pretty colours they cry out for now, each delicate to the eye – and the tools that the men used in the fields and he’d draw them right there and then, making as true a representation as I could ever have thought possible. When he told me he’d never been to school I was foolish enough for a little while to think him like me but I soon understood it could never be so because no man ever knew so many things as Mr Blake. And there were his letters. Every few weeks another one with little drawings in the margins and what was in every letter broke my heart so that sometimes I slipped away to the fields beyond the house and found amongst the grove a secret place where my tears went unseen and unheard.

  I keep them still and in the last few days have read each again and am sad that I was denied their comfort all those years ago. And what did he think when he never received a single one in reply? Perhaps his faithfulness after that silent year proved his love more than anything else could. I go to the table drawer and take out the yellowed ribbon-tied bundle and search one even though I know its words by heart and when I find it I read it aloud to the empty room that has been deserted by the day’s light and so have to take it close to the fire to let what last flames flicker there help my eyes: