The Poets' Wives (2 page)

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:

But that sweet village where my black-eyed maid

Closes her eyes to sleep beneath Night’s shade,

Whene’er I enter, more than mortal fire

Burns in my soul, and does my song inspire.

I think it was always my eyes he liked the best. I don’t know what colour to use for them and won’t look in the mirror in fear of seeing them dull and clouded with age. Some nights by candlelight or the fire’s final burn he’d lie and look into them as if he could see into another world. He’d say they were black as jet, as deep as far-off seas, or say some great fire burned there. And sometimes he’d take his fingertips and gently close them saying that if he didn’t they would consume him, set his very soul ablaze.

We got married in St Mary’s church by the river and I wore wild flowers in my hair and carried a posy of bluebells. But such dread I felt that it replaced all the things I was supposed and wanted to feel and then the moment came, not when I made my vows or received his, but when we stood before the parish certificate and unable to meet his gaze I signed my name with an X. So it was finally made known to him what I had hidden but no words were said and when I looked at him in shame nothing marked his face but love and he took my hand and as if with a fullness of pride led me through the church.

After all my fears and confusions it proved not such a great mystery after all. I took to it quick enough, as quickly as I took to so many things that were unknown to me in my previous life. We’d sit in Green Street where we first lodged and each evening after his work was done he’d teach me to read and write – Catherine was the first word I learned – and it pleased him that I mastered it so well. While he worked during the day I practised my letters when time was spare and read passages in the Bible he’d marked for me. It pleased him too when I’d read them aloud to him as he sat and rested after his toil. And best of all is when I read from the Song of Solomon, ‘Let my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits.’

Those are the first and best days of love when everything is new and nothing runs empty or needs replenishing. I am his all and everything is rich in its bounty and my skin wears the inky marks of his fingers again and again, whether by firelight or in the early morning’s first rays. And sometimes I fear he will grow tired of me or leave nothing for his work but he also gives me words that are wondrous and full of Heaven’s light and he tells me it is a holiness, sanctified and blessed. Once I tease him by asking if he has any strength left to do his work and he laughs and tells me, ‘Enjoyment and not abstinence is the food of intellect.’

‘Then, Mr Blake, I understand why you possess such an incomparable cleverness,’ I say and it pleases him so much he laughs again and it is a sound that is sweeter to me than any other. And then he tells me about a vision that he has had and the great work of poetry that he must write which will confound his enemies and make him known and, although I don’t fully grasp all that he intends, his passion blazes like an angry fire until it frightens me a little and I still him into a different passion by kissing his lips and when he says my name in his need his breath rushes warm against my cheek.

There is no shame in love – he makes me understand that – but there are drawings that never get shown and which in truth must be hidden from me. I find them by chance when looking for something else when he is out. And in these there are all manner of creatures engaged in everything that flesh can offer and things that I have never countenanced and in their monstrous strangeness they frighten me so that the hand which holds them trembles under the weight of their excess. Then I hear his footsteps on the stairs and I bundle them away but when he enters we both look as if we are surprised to see each other.

‘What’s wrong, Kate?’ he asks and I try to mask my confusion with a smile but he looks at me as if he knows what I have seen. ‘Are you well?’

‘I’m well enough, just resting my weary eyes.’

He seems satisfied and takes off his coat to begin his labour and I sit and watch him. He has told me often that he writes when commanded by angels but I think of the drawings and wonder what angel told him to draw these things. And then, but not for the first time, it frightens me that I grasp so little of what exists in him even though I have striven to know him and understand the visions that bring his work into the world.