The Poets' Wives Page 4

  In a new dress, despite its plainness and with her hair shaped out of its former wildness, she looks very different to the girl we met on the street but perhaps it is my unfair prejudice that makes me think a sense of her former life still lingers in her and she does not have all my trust. There is something about her, and not just in her green eyes, and at times she has the ability to slink quietly throughout the house so she overhears conversations about things that should be private between husband and wife. And there are times when she goes out and is away longer than expected but will say nothing of where she has been and when I put this to William he tells me that she is a servant but not a slave and her life is not ours to own.

  Once when I return to the house I hear the sound of their laughter and when I go to the work room he is letting her colour one of the prints and I hear him praising her sureness of hand. I stand silently in the doorway until he realises I am there but when he calls me to look at her work my words are lukewarm. And since I lost our child, even though it is too soon for passion, he has not touched me in love and when I stare at myself in the mirror I think that what happened has taken something of the looks I once had. There are times when she tries to be my friend and taking the brush from my hand will comb my hair but once I catch her gaze on me in the mirror and her eyes are not filled with love. Then it frightens me that perhaps Will wants this girl to be our child, our Eve, to be part of our life for ever, and I cannot bear to think this might be so but I have no means to complain because he will tell me mercy has a human heart and whatever I say will sound as if I am lacking in grace.

  He sometimes buys her little trinkets and ribbons that she plaits in her hair and gradually as she increases in his favour she takes less trouble to be in mine. She moves so quietly about the house that I am never sure where she is and slowly I start to believe that she is everywhere and nowhere so her silent steps carry her inside my head. Once I dream she comes into our room in the middle of the night and spies on us but even though I know it was a dream in the morning I look for traces of her presence. And I increasingly think she slips out of the house at night and do not know where she goes, then I start to wonder if she returns to her old haunts. But the one time I get up in the middle of the night and check her room she is there sleeping and I feel a weight of guilt for having doubted her.

  She knows I watch her and sometimes under my gaze attempts to give the pretence of quiet industry but nothing she can do will convince me no matter how hard she tries and I become obsessed with finding her out so that once when she goes to the shops I follow her but don’t know what it is I hope to see. And apart from stopping too often for idle conversation or simpering and making eyes with the butcher’s boy there is nothing that is amiss and I return as if empty-handed. I try to talk to William of my unhappiness but he is working with full concentration and I don’t know what words I can find that might persuade him to let her go. And every time I hear their shared laughter it is a blow to my heart and when he says one evening before sleep, ‘It is a miracle that has been wrought in that girl,’ I simply make silence my reply. And once I think he says her name in his sleep but cannot be sure.

  My own child is swept beyond my reach, and in her place has been left a changeling whose presence only serves to remind me every day of what I have lost. And then Will tells me that perhaps I should rest more because he thinks I am still far from my old self and that it would be best if Lizzie did her housework in the mornings and helped him in the afternoon. He believes she has a skill for it and when I look past him she is standing silently in the doorway and her lips are curled into a smile whose sharpness is meant to hurt me and succeeds in this its purpose. So I am pushed aside in my own house and for some days I take again to my bed and feel without the strength or desire to leave it. She plays the good nurse at first and brings me food but there is a smugness about her every movement and then once when I address her as Lizzie, she says, ‘I wish to be called Elizabeth. It is my proper name,’ and she turns on her heels with the tray and leaves me to the emptiness of the room.

  One morning Will tells me that he must journey on business to Highgate and when he says that Lizzie will look after me I understand that it is only I who must call her Elizabeth. There is silence in the house when he is gone even though I strain to hear her footsteps and in time I rise and dress and try to make myself as quiet as she can. The sound of a passing cart and the driver’s sudden angry shout from the street below at some obstruction to his passage makes me jump and I realise that I am frightened in my own home. I go barefoot across the landing and stand listening at the half-closed door, hear a little break of gentle laughter and feel the pulse of my heart so loud it seems it must drum my presence. Then I open the door and find her at his desk with the drawer open and the hidden drawings spread on the table. She has at least the good grace to jump when she sees me but makes no effort to replace the drawings or close the still-open drawer.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask as I step into the room.

  ‘I was looking for something,’ she says and already her green eyes are fired with defiance.

  ‘You have no business here. You forget yourself, girl.’

  ‘My name is Elizabeth and I am not a girl,’ she answers and her voice is as cold as my face feels flushed with the heat of anger, tempered only by an uncertainty as to what it is I must now do.

  ‘Mr Blake will not be pleased to hear what you have done in his absence.’

  ‘Perhaps what might please Mr Blake would be if you were to do this for him,’ she says, holding up a page and pointing with no semblance of shame to one of the drawings. ‘But perhaps if you do not know how, I could teach you, or teach you this and this. Better to learn how to please a man than how to sweep a floor or do washing.’

  It is beyond my power to suppress my anger any more and I slap her face because I do not have the words I need to force her into a recognition of her shame. She squeals and holds her cheek but thank God she is not much hurt and my hand shakes so much I have to press it into my side. I go to tell her I’m sorry until I see the hatred in her and instead tell her to go to her room but she stands up straight and stares me in the eye.

  ‘You lost his child and in so doing you lost his love,’ she whispers and then smiles once more.

  I raise my hand to strike her again but she holds up her arm as she shouts, ‘Strike me again and I’ll be the good angel that brings him the child he so desires. Strike me ever again and I’ll work him to choose between your dried-up body and what he can enjoy with me. And you can’t be sure he won’t choose me, can you?’

  And I am filled with fear and as my hand drops to my side I turn and hurry from the room, locking the door behind me, and I stay there until I hear her footsteps on the stairs and go to the window where I watch her walk into the street. But before she has gone more than a few steps she turns and waves up at me and I pull back, then as I sit on the bed I start to cry. I know I am no longer mistress in my own house, or perhaps in his heart, and in that moment it feels she is stronger and more cunning than I am and I know she despises what she thinks is my weakness. And she is right, if I do the wrong thing she will take my place in his affections and she grows daily out of childhood into womanhood and already I have seen how men look at her in the street and how she knows it without even having to turn her head and how she enjoys their inspection, sometimes choosing to reward it with a coy smile or a flounce of her body.

  And I think again of his poem and know the terrible truth that the youthful harlot’s curse blights and plagues the marriage hearse. But I do not know what I must do to fix things, don’t know how to break her spell that holds him ever closer or end the power over me of her curse. She is still gone when he returns, his business successfully completed and a price agreed for ordered work. He asks me where she is but I tell him I do not know and I say nothing about what has happened.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Kate,’ he says. ‘Are you still weary?’

  ‘Just a little
tired, but it will pass,’ I tell him.

  ‘We are fortunate to have Lizzie,’ he says as he stops to remove the shoes from his feet that are tired from walking. ‘She’s a good help to you.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m getting stronger and I think that soon I will be fully restored to health and then we would have no need of her help.’

  ‘But if we were to finish with her where would she go and then there is always the prospect that she might feel there is no other path open to her than to return to her old way of life? And she’s come so far along a better road.’

  I give no reply but understand that I must wait my time and find a way of making him know the truth that will not reduce me in his eyes.

  ‘Let’s continue with her for the time to come at least and the house is brighter with her in it,’ he adds as he tries to squeeze away the pain in his toes.

  So the house is brighter for her presence and in his head she has become part of his painted world of innocence. I tell myself that I need all my patience and I must bide my time and wait until opportunity presents itself but as the day slips into night my spirits sink into a lifeless despair and the bed we sleep in seems suddenly bigger and filled with a greater space between us than I have ever known. And I am afflicted by dreams where once more I no longer have the ability to read and when they exchange letters every day their content is hidden from me. It is wakening one night from such a dream that I hear the door of her room open and close and on impulse I rise and put on as few clothes that are needed to render me respectable and then I follow her into the street. The moon is fat and pocked of face and the night feels strange, transformed into something I do not recognise, and there is a throb of life that matches nothing I know from the day but feels almost as if it is a living creature pressing against the bars of its cage.

  I stay as close as I dare when she crosses New Road and enters Apollo Gardens where a series of tents and makeshift dwellings offer every type of licentious entertainment that the fallen man might desire. In the light of day it seems a sorry enough place where the rickety shelters look as if they might be dispatched by the first angry storm but at night with their smoking oil lights that throw giant silhouettes against canvas walls and with both the wail of fiddles and human voices it takes on the appearance of Hell itself. Suddenly I am approached by a man who lurches drunkenly towards me and asks me what he must pay for his pleasure and only his unsureness of foot allows me to evade his clutches. The pathways are mucky from earlier rain and in the deeper puddles there is a sheen of moonlight and I am frightened and think of turning back but a greater need drives me on. Two soldiers in uniform stand in the doorway of a tent with tankards in their hands and drink a raucous curse on Bonaparte. I hear their foul jeers as I pass them and then I see her enter the largest tent and she seems able to move through the paths unseen and undisturbed like a shadow.

  I start to fear that I am following her into some world from where I shall never return and in every corner of the tent I see faces that look as if they would cut your throat for the meagre contents of your purse. A pile of empty oyster shells glitter like watching eyes. And with every second that passes I feel as if I have entered one of Will’s depictions of Hell and the sulphurous darkness smoulders like the very worst of nightmares. And whether real or imaginary it feels as if the colours of this world are painted deepest purple and black then streaked with a violent crimson. I pull a shawl over my head as if this might offer protection and go to the side of the tent where a badly sewn slash allows me to glimpse inside without being seen and she is sitting at an upturned barrel that serves as a table and which is surrounded by a group of men and women who have obviously taken a great deal of strong drink and whose very laughter sounds obscene. Then she is curled in one of the men’s laps and garlanding his neck with her arms until he nuzzles his face into her partly uncovered breasts. And I shudder uncontrollably for a second as I imagine that the man who is invited to take such liberties will slowly lift his head and I shall see Will’s face. There is a sickness in my stomach and then I watch the man lead her through a narrow doorway at the back of the tent and into the night. I think of following but know it serves no further purpose and so hugging the shadows as much as possible I make my way back home.

  When I enter the house Will is standing with a candle and there is apprehension and agitation in his face. He stares at the mud on my shoes and the prints they have left on the floor.

  ‘Where in the name of pity have you been, Catherine? And where is Lizzie?’

  ‘Where is Lizzie? On her back plying the trade that is most familiar to her and at which she is best. Plying it at this very moment.’

  ‘That can’t be true,’ he says, the insistence in his voice telling me that I have lied to him. ‘Why do you say these evil things?’

  ‘Because it’s as true as I am standing here – I have seen it with my own eyes. And you would have seen it too if you hadn’t allowed your eyes to be blinded.’

  ‘It’s false!’ he shouts as I have heard him shout about so many other things.

  He starts to look past me towards the door and I can tell that even now he is weighing my words for their truth and the continuing doubt in his eyes stirs my anger like never before so when he says, ‘I must go and bring her home,’ and starts towards the door I lose all control and hear myself shout, ‘Go to your little chicken whore and I’ll not be here when you return! Bring her again into this house and I shall be gone for ever. I mean it, William.’

  He hesitates, his gaze torn between me and the door behind, then says, ‘What will become of her?’

  ‘I have no answer for that but I know that if you bring her back into this house what exists between us will be destroyed for ever, so now you have to leave off thinking about her and think about us if you have any care about our life together.’

  ‘But what if she comes to harm?’

  ‘She has made her choice and there’s nothing more that you can do for her. What we tried to give her was never enough for her. I knew that from the start and if her plans had been allowed to take root she would have taken my place in your bed.’

  ‘How can that be true, Kate?’ he says, shaking his head in denial.

  ‘Look at me, Will, look at me now and tell me that you never felt the impulse.’

  He turns his head away and so we both have our answer. The house suddenly gives one of those inexplicable groans where everything seems to shift a little as if burdened with too much weight but I feel no mercy for him even though I see the anguish in his face.

  ‘It’s a poor prophet, William, that can’t see his own future, that lets his will be bent to that of one so unworthy.’

  He stands like a child and the candle flutters a little from the door’s draught so his face is shadowed and flecked.

  ‘What must I do?’ he asks, looking at me for the first time with the spark of love in his eyes.

  ‘Lock the door, Will. That’s what you must do. Lock it and don’t open it no matter how loud the knocking. In the morning she can collect her things. Now come to bed and hold me tightly so that all my doubts fade away and everything is mended and made new.’

  He does what I ask and when the hammering starts he tries to press it out of his senses by burrowing his head into my empty womb and after a while the knocking is replaced by curses that seem to flap about our heads like bats until eventually silence settles and there is only the steady beating of our hearts.

  I do not know what happens to her – in the morning he tells her she must go while I stay in our room and it is only years later that he tells me he tried to find a place for her in Lambeth’s Asylum for Girls where such as her are trained for domestic service or to work in some of the new manufactories that need labour. I do not think it is a place where she would take kindly to the discipline and in my mind at least, and although I never say it, I consider it more likely that she joins with others such as her at Charing Cross. And that is a place I never venture for fear of encountering her
.

  But even then things are not fully mended between us at first and I cannot so easily forgive him for all that has happened so our bed is cold even when I am mended and although he is solicitous and kind he gives his passion to his work and during this time I do not help him so often and he does not choose to show me what he has done except one morning when I am slow to rise there is a poem on the table and I know he has left it for me to see:

  My Pretty Rose Tree

  A flower was offerd to me:

  Such a flower as May never bore.

  But I said I’ve a Pretty Rose-tree,

  And I passed the sweet flower o’er.

  Then I went to my Pretty Rose-tree:

  To tend her by day and by night.

  But my Rose turned away with jealousy:

  And her thorns were my only delight.

  I take it and read it again and then I go to the window and look out where the river glides between houses. At first I am angry because I should not have had to turn away with jealousy and what thorns prick him now count as nothing to the pain inflicted on me. There are fishing smacks and cargo boats crowding the river that every day grows busier with the city’s business. I wonder what distant sea it flows to. I have never seen the sea. Then I set the poem back exactly where I found it and go about the business of the day.

  All our long future days together are filled with his visions and wondrous revelations and surely this is a portend to some miraculous event. I ask Mr Blake in a whisper if he thinks it is a sign that we are in the final days but he doesn’t reply and stands as if mesmerised as all around us people are halted motionless, their upturned faces struck by a sense of wonder. And it is as if one of his pictures has been made real and engraved on the night sky and the very colours are like the ones he favours and for a moment I wonder if it is possible that the Divinity of his imagination has rendered this real. Or perhaps it is God’s punishment on a people who have turned their faces away as they do from all those who are prophets. The city’s dogs are barking and whimpering and those children still at play in the street are frozen into stillness and some are crying with fear.