Coronach, page 24
“I don’t send you away. You do as you please— you always have.”
“We have a little time.... Darling, come to bed.”
He said, in a dry voice in which there was neither love nor pity, “It’s a little late in the day for that now,” and I never knew in what sense he meant it.
Their marriage was moribund. I did not precipitate its death throes, although I blame myself: I was the principal instrument.
In the spring of my ninth year there was an epidemic of measles; there were many deaths. My illness progressed normally for several days before complications ensued, and during one of Mordaunt’s vigils I heard the doctor’s whispered recommendation that my mother be sent for.
She had already left London; I knew nothing of this, only that she came. I still loved her then, and if she had not come forever she would at least remain a little while. It was all that mattered to me.
She stayed, and my tenth birthday passed: the London season commenced. And still she did not go.
She began arranging a place for herself, not only between us but in the very house. The paintings were cleaned, the walls rehung with French fabrics, new and graceful furniture appeared and familiar pieces were relegated to the attics. The only rooms she did not touch were Mordaunt’s library and the drawing room, which already bore the stamp of her relentlessly exquisite taste.
Mordaunt, whose resistance to change was as unyielding as mine, said nothing. Perhaps it seemed to him diplomatic, a silence in the interests of peace, or perhaps it did not matter to him what she did and at what cost, as long as she was with him.
I saw the selfishness of their passion for the first time in late September, and experienced its exclusion. They had been at cards in the drawing room: she paused, and was staring at her portrait.
She said, “Sixteen years,” and there was a silence. “Do I look old to you?”
He said, “You look like Catherine. How can Catherine be old?”
She gazed at her cards and did not speak.
They finished the game, and then he played for her. He seemed intent on his music, but it was Catherine of whom he was most aware, and it was Catherine to whom he gave its haunting beauty.
The moonlight grew stronger. He was playing familiar things from memory, a courante, a sarabande and variations by Handel, airs from the opera “Rodelinda”. Then he paused and flexed his wrist, where the powder and filth of Dettingen had been sutured into the wound, and the scars twisted like some obscene attempt at suicide. I knew by this that it was aching, and thought he would stop, but he began to play again, some little cadence of notes only she recognized. She said, “No, not that. Not tonight,” and he played no more of it.
Time passed. I was drifting, only half aware of their conversation, a murmur not intended for other ears, almost part of the rippling notes, one becoming the other.
Then the notes stopped and I was discovered.
They sent me to bed. I was not part of what was between them there, man and woman, and so I was shut out.
I lay in bed, dry-eyed with bitterness. He had not even kissed me good night. It seemed a final betrayal of me.
She conceived, of that autumnal flowering of desire. I wept when I was told, which prompted her to call me a jealous little bitch. Thereafter I hid my resentment, recognizing that I had been displaced.
Their happiness was brief: it seems impossible to me now that I had ever believed it would last. A letter was sent from London and the footman gave it to him by mistake: whatever its contents, the consequences were appalling. I had been out walking with my governess; when we came in we heard obscenities from the morning room. She was screaming at him, calling him a bloody Irish bastard, and then a door slammed, and perhaps because he had removed himself she too came out: she was sobbing dryly. I never saw him physically abuse her, although on that occasion it was evident by his face that she had exercised no such restraint.
Their son was born prematurely during the night. He lived perhaps an hour.
I woke before dawn: rain was falling. All the candles in the gallery were still burning.
Downstairs Mordaunt was crying, uncontrolled and uncomforted. I put my head on my knees and wept also, for his sake, sitting on the stairs, until Jane Neville found me and took me back to bed.
When I saw him in the rain-shadowed light of day, he was in the drawing room; he had not changed his clothing or shaved since the previous morning. I sat at the harpsichord and he began to teach me an obscure piece of renaissance music, My Lady Carey’s Dompe, which he played slowly, introspectively: he was patient and very composed, as if it were any other lesson. Sounds came and went: the arrival of a second surgeon; Jane, seeking me, and then leaving us undisturbed. The afternoon passed, rain beating on glass throughout the hours of a dark spring day, that music, never again played by me, a cadence of remembered anguish. Finally he rose and stood staring out at the rain, and said, “God seems so far away to me. I wonder how other men find him.”
Then he went once more to her, and left me alone.
They allowed me to see her in the evening; it was thought that she would not survive the night. Thackeray and his colleague were present, but they were obscured by the shadows. The scent of cut narcissi was overpowering: it did not mask the smell of a mattress soaked with blood and the effluxions of birth.
Thackeray led me to the bed. She opened her eyes and smiled at me.
“Come here, sweetheart.” The smells of blood and narcissi mingled hideously. “Have you been good, Meg?”
I said yes.
“What do you think? Achill says you shall go at last.” I did not understand. “To town. He says I may take you with me. You want to go, don’t you?”
I could not believe what I was hearing. I said something she thought was assent.
“I told him you would. I’ll take you to Vauxhall.” It seemed to have exhausted her. “Go away, darling. I want to rest. Kiss me, and we’ll talk tomorrow.”
I had lied to her; now like Judas I kissed her, knowing there would be no tomorrow. Death would release me from my promise, as it would release him.
And yet, impossibly, she did not die. She clung to his promise as though it alone had sustained her, and by early autumn we were in London. He did not accompany us.
I think of that first morning as The Harlot’s Progress. Her acquaintance, both male and female, sat conversing in her boudoir, tying her garters, holding her camisole, partaking of chocolate and scandal. She sat, half naked, before her mirror, drumming her fingers. “God’s blood, does he think he can keep me waiting while he dresses heads all over town?” And then to the room at large, “You see, dear friends, what happens when a woman goes home to whelp? All the town forgets her, and her damned friseur don’t come when he’s called.”
She returned her attention to the mirror and conversation resumed, blades and fops discussing politics, racing, their debts and the latest maidenheads they had had the pleasure of tearing, while the women, all witty little powdered faces under aureoles of unclean hair, talked of their lovers, admiringly, their husbands, disparagingly, and the latest modes from France. They did not notice me, until a saturnine man who had been sitting apart from the others looked up from a broadsheet and said, “Who the deuce is this?”
She said, not pleasantly, “My daughter.”
They were all staring now, and their eyes shrivelled my soul.
“The devil she is. Where did she spring from?”
“Mordaunt’s forehead, fully armed. And farouche, like him.” And, turning from the mirror, “Come in, you goose.” There was a ripple of amusement as they quizzed me, which I found intolerable. She said again, “Come in, damn you. Is this how you was taught to behave?”
He said, “Leave the chit alone, Kitty. She don’t know any of us. It’s no wonder she don’t want to come in.”
She rose, perfume and silk and powdered skin, and conveyed me to him. His eyes discomfited me: upon a blank innocence, the first vestige of sex was imprinted.
I curtsied to him, and he said, “She has pretty manners, Kitty. You can’t fault him on that account.”
“Oh, very pretty. A year or two more under that influence and she would outswear and outshoot us all.”
He continued his slow assessment of me.
“So. You are grey-eyed Athena, the maiden clad in armour.”
I responded with the childish pomposity Mordaunt had always found amusing.
“You do me too much honour, sir. My name is Margaret.”
“And mine is Harlesdon. Do you like town, my dear?”
I confided that I had seen nothing of it, and he laughed then, cruelly. It was the first of the humiliations of that year, until, listening acutely to the voices around me, I lost my northern accent.
He said, more meditatively, “I don’t think you’ll care for it. It’s very different from the country. How old are you?”
Scarlet with embarrassment, I mumbled my age. “You remind me of my daughter. She looks a little like you, or used to. I never see her now.”
Catherine was beckoning to me, and I glanced at him for leave to go, but he had already dismissed me. Her hairdresser had arrived: there were no introductions. He merely took a handful of my hair as if it belonged to some inanimate object and opined that it should be cut; she agreed, and instructed him to pierce my ears, and they discussed whether this wounding should take place immediately or be deferred until the following morning. My preference was not solicited, and no one heard my protest.
Harlesdon rose and announced that he was off to the ʼChange; she acknowledged it and he left her. He carried himself well but he limped badly, and the shoe could not disguise the deformity of his left foot.
She whispered, “Don’t stare at my lord. He don’t care to be reminded.”
Her hairdresser demanded her attention then, finding fault with every strand, attacking it with comb and scissors, tongs and pomade, and all the while telling her how to apply her cosmetics, removing her patches and affixing them to her breast and cheek with his saliva. When his ministrations were over she called to Regan to bring her a particular gown: the others left their chocolate and their lapdogs and their brittle, malicious gossip and told her it was out of fashion. She threw it on the floor and demanded another, until their approval was unanimous.
She was the most beautiful of women, more beautiful than any in the room, but they delighted in tormenting her, sheathing their barbs in polished wit and striking where they would most harm her. And yet they were so civilized, these people, so eminently civilized.
She saw me, and her eyes devoured me. Mine, too, would be this agony, this submission of body and spirit.
“God’s death, are you still here? Go and tell that plaguey slut to get out of bed and have you dressed in half an hour, and not in that damned moth-eaten habit!”
I fled.
We drove in Hyde Park around the fashionable Ring, and she promised me that I should have one of her horses and ride with her in Rotten Row; and in the evening she went to Almack’s. The pattern of our days and nights was set.
The ton gathered in her boudoir once or twice a week: men, titled and without titles, and women, actresses, duchesses, courtesans. Harlesdon was the constant. I did not want to like him, but he did not force his presence on me and he was kind in an unsentimental manner when we chanced to meet.
There were others for whom I could not say the same. Catherine courted strange and dangerous men, and I was careful not to be alone with them: roving hands and eyes and elegantly phrased innuendo, desiring to touch and be touched in return. They were beautiful and bored, like predatory birds, their dress exquisite, their manners fastidious, their morals nonexistent. That I was not yet twelve made no difference. I was female, and therefore meat.
When I had been clothed to her satisfaction she took me to her perfumer in Jermyn Street, her mantua maker in Oxford Street, Pickering the grocer at Number Three St. James’s Street, the goldsmith in Cranbourne Street. The city was a labyrinth, a cesspit of terrors, and yet its spell was a powerful one, as pervasive as the stench of rotting garbage, the bloated corpses of vermin and strays, the relentless cacophony of vendors’ cries and the screams of children and horses. Chairmen and coachmen cut through the crowds with a clear intention to do murder; the chairmen in particular were brutal and uncouth, many of them Irish, with their hatred of England written in their faces. If one escaped them there was peril from overhead, sewage flung into already teeming gutters and signboards low enough to decapitate the unwary. Danger was endemic. More than two hundred offenses were punishable by death, but the threat of execution proved no deterrent to those who had nothing left to lose. Crime became yearly more depraved, criminals more vicious, and, uncomfortably aware of the hunger and poverty in the streets, I did not wonder at it.
The Earl of Harlesdon was much in evidence. We observed the Guy Fawkes fireworks from a boat on the Thames, the slap of black water oily on the gunwale and the riding and masthead lights of the vessels in the port swimming above and below: I had never been in a boat or seen fireworks, and it seemed a great adventure. Three days later he took me to the Lord Mayor’s show, and we all went to Vauxhall, where we drank punch, heard music, walked beneath the coloured lanterns through pavilions and grottoes, and mingled with pimps and prostitutes and the bucks and ladies of the town. There were other visits also, to the Tower, to St. James’s, to Richmond.
I wrote nothing of him to Mordaunt, and little else of what distressed me, only of the frivolous things Catherine did to fill my time and her own, and he wrote curiously shallow and unaffectionate letters in return. They told me nothing of him, and the distance between us intensified until we might have been on opposite sides of the earth instead of three hundred miles apart. I had chosen London and I would have it, unadulterated by his influence: he had given me to it as completely as if he had committed me to the grave. So our silence grew, and but for Jane Neville I was more alone than I had ever been in my life.
Catherine’s only gesture toward him was to send him the portrait of me she had commissioned of Joshua Reynolds. It hangs at Evesham still, bearing the artist’s signature and hallmarks, the glowing treatment of light and fabric, the gauzy, romantic background, and for my immortality on canvas she paid Reynolds’ fee of five guineas. In it I see myself, a serious grey-eyed girl in a deep red gown, hair a cloud around a childish face, and that face, which should have had a child’s fresh colour, rendered as porcelain white as any lady’s of the ton. And, like the portrait of that young, grave man in regimentals which hangs in the gallery at Evesham, there is something significant in it, some desire we share to preserve nothing of the years that followed, for, like Mordaunt, I have never had another painted.
He despised that portrait, but he accepted it. It was all he had of me. Of him I had nothing.
On Christmas Day, a Saturday, we went with Harlesdon to Westminster Abbey. The King passed, but as I curtsied I received only a glimpse of a red frog’s face under a powdered wig, and a glittering entourage of obese Germanic courtiers: I saw nothing more.
The rare snow of London was falling as we came out. There was snow also on Monday night when the theatres reopened, and I was taken to Drury Lane to see “The Recruiting Officer”. Catherine was wearing a dark red satin gown, her breasts all but revealed and a necklace of rubies at her throat. Mordaunt had not sent them; she had not looked at his gift. The play was considered witty but I remember little of it, only the stench of pomade and sweat, the guttering foot candles, the heavily painted actresses, most of them looking like the whores they were, and a distressing incident when two officers of a royal Scottish regiment came in, and were pelted with fruit and shouts of “No Scots! No Scots!” until they were forced to leave. I watched them go with pity and confusion, for they were soldiers of the King, but the brute instinct of the mob allowed for no such nice discrimination. They were Scots, and the hatred of Scots endured in London: the grinning skulls of Jacobites executed on Tower Hill would remain spiked on Temple Bar for thirty years.
Catherine’s sister-in-law, Anne Lady Hatherleigh, was in London in January and called upon her one afternoon. My acquaintance with her was slight, as with all Catherine’s relations, but she paid me kind, unfounded compliments and I thought I could learn to like her well given the opportunity. Then Catherine told me I might go to my lesson, which meant she wanted to be rid of me.
The conversation continued sotto voce as women will exclude children, and consider them deaf or without intelligence.
They were speaking of Mordaunt.
Anne murmured something. Catherine said, “Did you not hear me, miss? Go to your lesson.”
I saw Anne Hatherleigh no more; she had returned to Westmorland, and what she had not said in my presence retreated to the back of my mind where it remained, becoming more disturbing as the winter passed.
In April Catherine took me to the races at Dachet, where the unspeakable cruelty of the jockeys to their horses and one another scored itself into a mind already numbed by violent impressions, and on a Monday morning in early May she completed her initiation by exposing me to London’s ultimate entertainment, a hanging at Tyburn’s triple tree.
Harlesdon was not in town for that episode; he had retired to his estate in Sussex. To do him credit, I think he would have prevented it.
I suffered nightmares afterwards, and Jane Neville wrote to Mordaunt, but it did not bring him to London, and if he censured Catherine for it I never knew. Neither he nor I mentioned it in the subsequent exchange of letters, and his communications to me became curt, almost perfunctory.
In September I lost what little innocence remained to me.
