Black Silk (15 page)

Submit and Henry were stuck, required to stay at least a few days as a matter of form. John Wharton was gleeful. In the four years they’d been married, he had had little enough opportunity to appreciate in the flesh the splendid, if slightly aged, husband he had found for his daughter. Now, up and on the mend, all he wanted to do was thump his elderly son-in-law on the back and take him hunting and fishing. He wanted to show Henry “his” Yorkshire—and no doubt show the marquess of Motmarche off to his neighbors. A marquess was not something very many of them had seen at close hand. Henry politely declined, using Wharton’s illness as an excuse; such activity would be too exhausting. Instead, Henry suggested that Submit give him a tour of what she liked best about Yorkshire—this would at least get them out of the house.

A tour for Submit, however, was a little difficult, since she hardly knew Yorkshire. For that matter, she hardly knew her father. He had paid and coached and pressured her into an upper-class frame of reference, in the end succeeding so completely as to make himself and his daughter incomprehensible to each other. Submit did remember one place in Yorkshire, however, one place in her childhood that she
knew and wanted to show Henry. She took him to her cove on the North Sea.

The cove was a peaceful place made up mostly of birds and water, rocks and sand. Nothing was expected of her there. When she was younger, home from school for a month at Christmas and a month in summer, Submit had survived her visits with her family by going, at every opportunity, to this private, sheltered bay.

It was surrounded by steep drops. As one came across the moor then looked over the cliff’s edge, it seemed impossible to get down to the inlet—until one found the worn old path that fishermen must have used in years gone by. The path wound down to sea level to a beach. Part of the beach was always above water, a rocky marooned dry patch. But the wider expanse was washed by high tide, only open by low. This meant swimming to the path at high tide. Or waiting. When Submit was younger, she had loved the idea of swimming to her secret place. But she was more cautious at twenty. The day she and Henry went, they timed it to low tide, late in the afternoon.

Submit was wearing the dress. Summer wool. It was so light, the weight and feel of feathers—the feathers from a white swan with peacock green trim. The air was crisp and mild with a bit of wind. The sea was frothy. The day was bright and blue, as if the sun lit the sky from beneath the water, an expansive glow. There was salt in the air. Submit could taste it, if she faced the wind, and feel it on her eyelashes.

She turned to Henry. “Do you like it?” she asked.

He said nothing, but she could tell by his eyes. They took in the sparkle of the place; the water’s vastness, the cove’s closure. It was impossible not to be impressed. The only land and water he had ever known were the banks that met the Thames or the river Cam. She felt she had given him
something; she had shown him the ocean. Smiling, she took their picnic basket from his hand.

A bottle of old port had been bestowed on them by one of the neighboring squires. Like fealty, Henry had observed wryly. In town, they had found some Stilton and walnuts and pears. They had packed these things together into a picnic meal, a kind of celebration that life continued, even for her father. As Submit spread their little banquet out over a flat dry area, she began to hum. The little cove was charged for her, with memory, excitement, anticipation, joy. She was glad to be here, glad to be able to share this with an astute and interesting man.

On her knees, as Submit pinned the final corner of their picnic cloth down with a rock, what could only be described as a sense of place compelled her to her feet. She kicked off her shoes and peeled off her stockings, then yanked up her skirts and untied her crinoline from about her waist. It collapsed into a twist of horsehair and wired hoops. Then she grabbed up her formless skirts in an armload and burst toward the water.

She screeched at the temperature. It was a painful, achy cold that instantly numbed. She shrieked and yelled this information back to Henry, enjoying doing so. Henry sat back at their picnic cloth, waving her on. She started to come toward him.

“No, go back.” He flapped his arms and laughed.

“But you,” she complained.

“For goodness’ sake, I’m not going anywhere. Go on.”

She did, holding the lovely skirts high. Then as a wave receded, she lost her balance and fell. She was taken out a foot or two, into a shallow pit of the rocky bottom. When she got up, the water was about her hips, floating her dress, weightless. The dress swam in the salt water, ruined, but Submit was nearly giddy. It seemed a perfect way to ruin it. On the
ebb, however, she stopped laughing. As the water receded, she was leaden. She couldn’t move in all the wet weight of drenched wool. She was stuck in her pit just feet from the shore.

“Oh, Henry. Help me,” she wailed.

“Take it off, you ninny. You can’t get out like that.” He seemed angry in a way she didn’t understand.

After a few minutes of fruitless struggle, she slipped the dress off and returned, under her own power, to the beach and Henry. In just her wet corsetry and pantaloons, she came up to the picnic cloth, dragging the dress in the rocks and sand. She laid the poor thing out to dry, then with Henry’s help wrapped the rock-warmed table linen about her shoulders. Her teeth chattered for a short time, but quickly she grew warm.

Henry would not speak through any of this. Not through the rubbing of her feet and her hands. Not through the pears and port. Finally, she did.

“It was
my
dress. And if I don’t mind—” She waited. “I can still put it back on for the trip to the house.”

But it wasn’t the dress or her modesty. Something else had been ruined in the fine day.

“Well, I’m sorry to have had such a good time.” She said it tartly as she began picking up.

“You’re young,” he answered. He stood.

She was uncertain whether his statement was an excuse, a simple fact, or an accusation. “I’m getting older.”

“You don’t like your father very much, do you?”

“No.”

“Mm,” he commented. “And me?”

“You’d make a bad father.”

“I’ve been very unfair to you, Submit—”

“Honestly, Henry. Please—”

“No. You can stay here if you wish.”

“Where?”

“In Yorkshire. You needn’t feel dutybound to stay with me any longer. This marriage was your father’s idea. I would still see to you most comfortably.”

“This is insulting.” As if she’d been pretending to be happy for four years. She turned away from him, reaching for the dress to pull it on.

But he caught her wrists and forced her to face him. Though sixty-three at the time, he was a strong man. He had gout in one leg and recurrent insomnia. He grew slightly breathless going up and down cliffs. But otherwise Henry was a man with good health to his credit. A disciplining parent could not have gripped her more firmly.

He seemed on the verge of saying something drastic, but then, in the quietest voice, he said, “You would be years younger without me. You have jumped directly from infancy to middle age. When I was twenty—”

He broke off and let go, turning to look out over the water.

Submit was just getting ready to draw on the dress again when he called over his shoulder, “Leave it.” He barked the directive at her, his vehemence so pronounced she was stopped in midmotion.

Then, in an uncharacteristic gesture, Henry wheeled halfway around, jerked the dress from her and rushed toward the ocean. He threw it in. Submit stood on the rocks and watched his energy, as if the dress were some grey, limp monster he was hurling into the sea.

“Miserable dress,” he explained as he came back. “You could have drowned.”

They climbed the path, Submit wearing the picnic cloth. (This would give her father something more to think about. He didn’t seem to know what to make of the obvious affection between them. It had never been particularly part of the plan.)

At the top of the cliffs, on the excuse that Henry had become winded, they sat to take in the view. From this vantage point, they could see the dress drifting below, a solitary billow floating out on the waves.

Graham had arrived home from Morrow Fields and had an early supper brought up to his rooms. The night was warmer than usual, almost balmy. The house was quiet. After dinner, he’d felt compelled somehow to dig out Rosalyn’s recent letters from his drawer. Presently, in bed, his dinner tray turned over to use as a desk, the ink on the paper still wet, he glanced over what he hoped was the final version of his own long, rather deceptive response to her correspondence. There were a dozen rejected versions on the floor—his written communication to her had become a masterwork of omission.

Putting his state of mind on paper to her was not easy from any standpoint. For one thing, even now, his concentration kept drifting off. Between frank, breezy remarks about the trial, the magazine episodes, and his unsatisfactory interview with the magazine’s publisher, his thoughts kept circling back to sunny meadows at Morrow Fields. Ultimately, he could write to Rosalyn of everything but what occupied his mind most. On the page before him, his trip outside the city today had become but a single sentence, a reference revised down to something vague enough to pass for truth without mentioning to Rosalyn what she would not want to hear.

Much he could not have explained anyway. Like trying to explain in a matter-of-fact tone the presence of a ghost: The
underbreath of Henry Channing-Downes had been evoked. The box on Graham’s dresser seemed almost to breathe in and out from its ugly, broken mouth. Henry’s keeping the box, not to mention his method of giving it to Graham, was an ambiguous gesture at best. At worst, much of Graham’s discomfort over the whole last few weeks felt as if Henry’s hand were in it somewhere. Graham distrusted his own unease. He couldn’t tell if he were jumping at shadows, at phantasms created from his own bad feelings for Henry; he couldn’t dismiss the unnerving sense that some of his suspicions had substance. The will, the wife, the box—and Henry’s motives—did not sum up so easily as he’d glibly pretended to Submit.

If Henry had only wanted to lecture him again over the pictures, there were more direct means available. Tate, for instance, would have conducted a private meeting in a more sober, reprobating tone than Submit had. Or a summons to a formal, well-populated reading of the will would have been a more public shock and humiliation. In either case, however, Graham would have been more likely, and more justified, to give way to victimized anger. Perhaps that was the point. Submit Channing-Downes checked his anger at Henry in ways that Graham could not identify or counter. He wondered to what degree Henry might have known or relied on this, for he surely had involved her with purpose.

This purpose divided itself into three possibilities. The first was the simplest. The wife was a predictable, reliable agent. Her reasonable, off-putting nature couched in femininity would—did—act on Graham in a disarming manner; it let his mind run, uncoagulated by the rage that so frequently saved him from trying to understand Henry Channing-Downes. She gave him the box, then left him to think.

Or, the second possibility, the wife herself might be the object of censure, adding another layer to make two con
current little games being run by a dead man. Graham rather preferred this more complicated theory: the two of them, the wife and the ward, each serving the dual function of witness and butt, each feeding the other their prescribed shocks and revelations. Certainly, unless she was a wonderful actress—a liar not only in word but also in facial expression and tone—the widow had not been forewarned about the box. Graham wondered what she could possibly have done to deserve this. It seemed so unlikely that this woman, this wife, could have come into a husband’s immortal bad graces. Still, the second was Graham’s favorite explanation. The idea of a mutual sentencing put him and Submit together. And there was, he knew, nothing like a common cell for breeding fellowship.

The last possibility he liked least and suspected most. The vulgar little box, besides being his own reproof, was the wife’s warning. Admittedly harsh (Henry was never one to spare anyone if it was for their “ultimate good”), it would also be unforgettable: Graham Wessit, the cousin who will surely offer condolences if nothing else—who in fact did offer an entire flat—is profane; have nothing to do with him. Henry had withheld introductions for a lifetime, then assured them at his death and on his own terms. He had presented Graham to Submit in a manner that immediately trumped any perceptions of kindness, good intention, or charm by a strong, visual show of baser dispositions. Exhibitionism. Crudeness. Stupidity. A fear of being ignored that eclipsed shame. Graham felt stripped naked in more than just the literal sense of the pictures. He felt he had been peeled back and exhibited down to his most fatuous, juvenile thought. “For his own good.” And for hers.

For his own good. This final, parting contact with Henry had that old familiar flavor—no mercy, no remorse. A corrective meted out with a benevolent smile. His guardian
had always had a singular taste and aptitude for bringing down a salutary hell onto the heads of those most dependent on his good will. That a young wife could escape this leaning or overlook it seemed impossible.

Graham remembered the most outstanding example of it in his own life. As he shifted in bed, his mind leaped to a single moment, a single emotion. Shock. It had flattened a magistrate’s sallow, soft face. It had silenced a courtroom. Graham felt again his own openmouthed chill as Henry’s voice uttered one single word at the end of the initial hearing for Graham’s part in the pictures.

“No,” Henry had said.

In disbelief, the magistrate had leaned forward. The lappets of his wig dangled as he repeated the question. “Do you wish to speak for your ward?”

“No.”

At eighteen, Graham had had to organize his own defense against charges of public indecency, moral corruption, and conspiracy to corrupt others. He was able to enlist the help of his tutor at St. John’s, his advisor, the sponsor of his boat club, and several classmates. But not a word, not a hand, not a shilling could be entreated from Henry. Henry, in fact, sat with opposing counsel, as if his own sensibilities were plaintiff to the case.

The arraignment was subdivided. Charges of passing illicit materials were answered in Cambridgeshire. In the Greater London courts, Graham and Elizabeth were held accountable for obscenity and for conspiracy to corrupt public morality. Once the civil courts were through with them, a special ecclesiastical court charged them with immoral acts against the laws of God and procreation. There were endless smaller charges, requiring more than half a dozen appearances before five different justices in the two jurisdictions. The opposing counsel, one Arnold Tate, was a
friend of Henry’s and was inclined to give the young peer and his friends something to remember, which he did: It was a full routing.

The official sentence was six months in an English prison, the Church of England claiming his first day of freedom for the pillory.

Graham could remember his own fright when he had heard the latter. A surprising clarity of detail came to him as he sat there staring at the papier-mâché box on his dresser.

He could hear the sound of bells again, a distant choir rehearsing somewhere, the faint, pure notes of young boys’ voices. The ecclesiastical judgment had taken place in the contradicting ambience of pre-Christmas. The church buildings and grounds were delicately laid with a fine, powdery snow, enveloped in a seasonal sense of well-being. Inside, in the closed courtroom, there was the comforting aura, the peculiarly English brand of cozy chill. Then he heard the word “pillory,” and Graham became preternaturally warm. He felt his knees melt, his stomach grow hot. He grasped the dock rail.

“No!” He looked about him for some confirmation that he was heard and understood. He looked into the faces of those who judged him and was alarmed by the blankness, the stone wonder that stared back at him. They had no idea of him as anything but a miscreant. He called out, “This is not right,” as a rising panic began to supersede pride or good judgment. He twisted his head toward Henry, toward Arnold Tate, the two of them sitting unofficially on back benches, like guests,
amicus curiae
to God’s justice. Graham pleaded toward them silently, then with words.

“Henry—They killed a man last year. They throw garbage and rocks—” Garbage and rocks unnerved him equally. He trembled on the hope of Henry’s saving him. Surely now…. The distant choir sang in a repetitive chorus, something in Latin. The discrepancy between those
serene little voices contrasted to the cacophony of complaint and anxiety in Graham’s mind: while, as he watched, Henry Channing-Downes neatly packed up his coat and scarves and the carriage blanket he had had over his legs. He excused his way past the knees of a balding, freckled-headed man. He pulled his coat collar up at his back. Other people followed him, obscuring him with their bobbing heads and murmuring feet. The doors opened onto an ordinary winter view—thick falling snow, an overcast monochrome. The room emptied into this, ghosts walking into a wall of snow. And that was that. Graham was left alone, except for the company of his new warders.

He was taken to Holidame, a provincial monastery-cum-prison near Epping. There he waited and fretted, ever mindful of the other impending punishment, which eventually came; no amount of plotting or worry could forestall it. On May 23, 1839, three days after he had turned nineteen, Graham was taken to Cornhill, where he was trammeled hand and foot to the posts that stood outside the Royal Exchange.

It was not as if Henry had raised his own hand against him. Graham was not, then or now, unmindful that his guardian had only let consequences catch up with him. But Henry reveled in every snag, every gnatty detail, every blow. Nothing was too much, nothing was enough. And nothing seemed to gratify Henry more than when, on the third day after bearing his charge home, just as it was looking as though Graham had made it through, he fell into a state of collapse. Scurvy was the name they gave his disease that summer, a half-truth, since this went hand in hand with the ascetic life of Holidame. But it took neither genius nor wisdom to know that this did not begin to explain the young man’s sickness.

Submit Channing-Downes might be able to imitate Henry’s sounds, his vowels and accents, but she could never
duplicate the satisfaction in his voice. To see a charmed child unacquainted with the long odds escape over the years disaster after disaster by no more than fickle good luck was to frustrate a reasoning moralist into near hysteria. When Fate finally changed her mind, nothing was too severe. Graham could forgive Henry some things, but he could not forgive Henry for wanting, needing, Graham’s own complete downfall as a kind of rightness that justified his own view of life.

Graham picked up his pen, then surprised himself by the sincerity with which he closed his letter to Rosalyn. “I look forward to seeing you,” he wrote, and it was true. He longed for her buoyant, cheerful company.

He signed the letter, then threw sand on the wet ink to blot it, like dirt into a grave; everything about his life in London felt dead. He packed a bag for his trip the next day thinking,
The final arrangements.
Nethamshire called like a paradise.

He was shaving the next morning when he heard the commotion downstairs.

“Now see here, we have been all the way to Netham looking for him, and they
told
us he was here. There is no use his hiding any longer.”

Graham came to the banister and looked down. “What is it?” Several men were on the wide spiral stairs. They were trying to make their way up through the housekeeper and footman.

“They say they have come to take you into custody, sir.”

Graham recognized a constable. For a moment he imagined that Henry’s widow had notified someone, that he was to answer for the pictures all over again. Then more reasonably, and more repellently, he thought of Tate and the girl.

“What is it?” he asked again. He addressed a large, purple-faced man below.

Not that man nor any of the others answered immediately. They only stared up, surprised to find that he was indeed here. Or perhaps they were a bit taken aback. In his right hand, fresh from his shave, Graham held an open razor. This and the altitude of a full floor of stairs seemed to give him an advantage. Slowly, he toweled the sides of his face, keeping his eyes fixed on them. “What do you want?” he reasserted.

They watched for several more seconds before they broke the silence of his house once again. They all talked at once, then a heavy man with a doughy face came forward. He was holding, alas, more papers. “We have a warrant.” He shook the document.

“May I see it?” Graham held out his hand.

The man hesitated. In the end, the housekeeper hurried it up the stairs. She looked fearful, as if the paper had her name on it, which, in the economic sense, of course, it did; no employer would mean no position.

They all waited while Graham glanced over it. Being intimately acquainted with the law’s veins and variegations of jurisdiction, he smiled. “I am afraid, gentlemen, that this is a Hampshire warrant.” Hampshire was one of the counties that his Netham property straddled. “It is not good in London.” It was also not initiated by the young girl’s attorney and not affiliated in any way with Arnold Tate. It was a general warrant having to do with a criminal inquiry. “What
is
this about?” Graham could afford a generous smile.

The men were puzzled; then they bumped into each other as they all tried to take the warrant back at once. One of them snatched it finally. They examined it noisily among themselves, exchanging recriminations. One man suggested, “Well, you may as well come.” With some malice, “We don’t really need one, no one would blame us—”

“What does this concern?”

“The woman—”

“What woman?”

“She’s dead.”

His heart stopped for a split second, the beginning of anguish. She had seemed so sturdy, immortal, in Morrow Fields.

“Arabella Stratford.”

The name didn’t register.

With a snide look, the man on the stairs explained, “The girl you bred twins on.”