Guilty Thing (34 page)

Dorothy, usually so loyal to Coleridge, begged Mrs Clarkson to ‘burn' this letter. But in such a mood she must also have confided in De Quincey, who was keeping his own laudanum habit quiet and could anyway see for himself the state of things in Allan Bank.

Unaffected by Coleridge's habits, Wordsworth was enjoying a burst of creativity. He had returned to ‘The Recluse', abandoned in 1806, and written an introduction to a collection of local views painted by the Reverend Joseph Wilkinson. The paintings were, Wordsworth said, intolerable, but his introduction was tremendous and later republished as Wordsworth's
Guide to the Lakes
. Here he laid out his philosophy of landscape, his views on rural architecture, and his famous hatred of larches.

Grasmere was emptied out in the summer of 1810. Dorothy visited friends in Lincolnshire, De Quincey went to stay with his mother and sisters in Westhay, and Wordsworth looked in on Sara in Wales, the thought of which filled Coleridge with misery. Sara had written to the Wordsworths but not to Coleridge and he found himself sloping back to his own family at Greta Hall. Mary was now, for the first time in her marriage, left alone in the house (as alone as you can be with five children under seven years old) and Wordsworth took the opportunity to correspond with her privately. Their letters – only discovered in 1977 – add another dimension to the domestic goings-on in the vale. Wordsworth and Mary had a secret: their marriage was not a workaday partnership for the raising of offspring, and nor was Mary simply her husband's helpmeet and housekeeper. De Quincey was wrong in seeing Wordsworth as incapable of romance; he and Mary shared what Wordsworth now celebrated as the ‘
lively gushing thought-employing
spirit-stirring passion of love', an ardour ‘very rare' in ‘married life. . . even among good people'. Wordsworth, who described himself as having an ‘almost insurmountable aversion from letter writing' revealed that he could ‘write on' to his wife ‘to the
end of time
'.

The woman he compared in his poetry to ‘a phantom', an ‘apparition', a ‘spirit', and a ‘dancing shape' was, we now know, seen by him as flesh and blood. Despite sharing every moment of every day, Wordsworth's desire for Mary had to be held at bay for fear of distressing Dorothy, who believed that her brother's marriage included her. Dorothy, wrote Wordsworth, would find their letters ‘obnoxious', and he instructed Mary to hide them away. But ‘fail not to write to me without reserve', he implored. ‘Never have I been able to receive such a letter from you, let me not be disappointed, but give me your heart that I may
kiss the words a thousand times!
' As for Mary, William's words – so new, so unexpected – had left her ‘
whole frame
. . . overpowered with Love & longing. Well was it for me that I was stretched upon my bed, for I think I could scarcely have stood upon my feet for excess of happiness and depth of affection.'

That October, Basil Montagu, a friend who was passing through the Lakes, invited Coleridge to return with him to London and consult a doctor. Coleridge, it was agreed, would stay with Montagu until he had recovered his health. So he left Greta Hall in Montagu's coach, but by the time they arrived in the capital the offer of hospitality had been withdrawn. Wordsworth, it seems, had warned Montagu that Coleridge was an ‘absolute nuisance' as a houseguest. A version – the Wordsworth version – of what happened was given to Catherine Clarkson by Dorothy:

William used many
arguments to persuade M[ontagu] that his purpose of keeping Coleridge comfortable could not be answered by their being in the same house together – but in vain. Montagu was resolved. ‘He would do all that could be done for him and have him at his house.' After this, William spoke out and told M[ontagu] the nature of C's habits (nothing in fact which everybody whose house he has been in for two days has not seen for themselves) and Montagu then perceived that it would be better for C to have lodgings near him. William intended giving C advice to the same effect; but he had no opportunity of talking with him when C passed through Grasmere on his way to London. Soon after they got to London Montagu wrote to William that on the road he had seen so much of C's habits that he was convinced he should be miserable under the same roof with him, and that he had repeated to C what William had said to him and that C had been very angry.

Coleridge's problem was houses. ‘Being in the same house together', ‘have him at his house', ‘everybody whose house he has been in for two days', ‘under the same roof'. Southey agreed: Coleridge's habits were ‘
so murderous of domestic comfort
that I am only surprised that Mrs C is not rejoiced at being rid of him. He besots himself with opium, or with spirits, till his eyes look like a Turk's who is half reduced to idiocy by the practice – he calls up the servants at all hours of the night to prepare food for him – he does in short all things at all times except the proper time – does nothing that he ought to do, and everything which he ought not.'

Reporting back to Coleridge what Wordsworth had told him in confidence was a peculiarly destructive act on Montagu's part, and Coleridge was destroyed by it. ‘O this is cruel! This is
base
!' he cried when Wordsworth's remarks reached him. In his notebooks he wrote: ‘W authorised M to tell me, he had no hope of me! – O God! What good reason for saying this,' and he repeated the dreadful words: ‘Sunday Night. No Hope of me! Absolute nuisance! God's mercy it is a dream.' Coleridge now found himself ‘
whirled about without a centre
 – as in a nightmair – no gravity – a vortex without a centre'. The catastrophe had ‘forced me to perceive – No one on earth has ever LOVED me.' It was as though, Coleridge said, he had been hit ‘with the
suddenness of a flash of lightning
'.

In this state, with the ‘
never-closing
. . . Wound of Wordsworth and his Family' still ‘festering', Coleridge began to prepare for another set of lectures, this time on Shakespeare and Milton, to be given at the Philosophical Society on Fetter Lane during the winter months.

By 1811 De Quincey had exhausted his inheritance. In April he asked if his brother might repay a £2 loan, as ‘my present income is so limited that every shilling is important to me'. In the late summer of that year, his mother and sisters made a much-postponed visit. Always well dressed, their ‘scarlet cloaks and silk pelisses', noted by Sara Hutchinson, gave the impression that their neighbour was still a wealthy man. The fashionable De Quincey women contrasted sharply with the threadbare Wordsworth women: in one of her recent letters to William, Mary had described being mistaken for a pauper as she carried her newborn son around Grasmere Vale. ‘I have become,' she said, ‘
like nobody in my looks and appearance
.'

For the next two months Grasmere became a version of Jane Austen's Netherfield: the De Quincey ladies drank tea with the Wordsworth ladies, the Wordsworth ladies drank tea with the De Quincey ladies, the Wordsworths and De Quinceys were invited to drink tea with the Clarksons, Wordsworth interrupted a letter because ‘
the Misses De Quincey have just called
, and I must walk with them to the Waterfall at Ghyllsode'. Mary De Quincey gave Wordsworth a gift of two birch trees; Wordsworth reciprocated with the roots of the fern
Osmunda regalis
, and Mrs Quincey brought along donations from Hannah More for the Sunday school being set up by Dorothy and Mary. The two households walked, picnicked, talked garden philosophy and read poetry; the visit was considered a great success by all. After they left, Mrs Quincey wondered if Mary Dawson might be tempted to leave her son's employ and cook for her.

Writing to her brother on 7 December, one month after they had returned to Westhay, Mary De Quincey reported that she had been ill and in her delirium found herself transported back to ‘
your sweet country
'. On one occasion she dreamed that she was at the tarn of Watendlath with De Quincey and Jane, where ‘we sat down by the warm stream, and ate the same mutton-bone which erst we gnawed on the descent into Borrowdale'. In another dream she ‘walked with Miss Wordsworth through Tilberthwaite on the beautiful winding road which charmed us so much'. She asked to be remembered to the Wordsworths, and for Thomas to tell Mr Wordsworth that the
Osmunda regalis
was planted. De Quincey's orchard, she said, had inspired them to make improvements in their garden at Westhay, and in imitation of the moss hut they were building their own ‘little rural hut of roots and moss and pieces of knotted trees, in a warm ever-green corner'.

Mrs Quincey, who had erected greenhouses when they were all the rage, was inevitably drawn to the rustic charm of Wordsworth's moss hut, which he had built with his own hands two years into his marriage. It was, Wordsworth informed his brothers, ‘a charming little Temple in the Orchard. . . with delightful views of the Church, Lake, Valley etc., etc.'. The simple structure, ‘circular' like a ‘wren's nest', built of branches ‘lined with moss. . . and coated on the inside with heath', was the perfect Romantic dwelling – in
Lyrical Ballads
, the huntsman Simon Lee lives in a similar ‘moss-grown hut'. It was here that Dorothy and William came to escape from the babies: ‘We are now sitting together in the moss-hut,' Dorothy wrote to Catherine Clarkson; ‘William goes on rapidly with “The Recluse”.' The moss hut became his study, and it was ‘from the moss hut at the top of my orchard' that he had written to Sir George Beaumont on 3 June 1806 to say that he had completed
The Prelude
: ‘the sun is sinking behind the hills in front of the entrance and his light falling upon the green moss of the side opposite me. A linnet is singing in the tree above. . . The green fields in the level area of the vale, and part of the lake, lie before me in quietness.'

But on 3 December, four days before his sister informed him that they were building a hut of their own, De Quincey had carried his woodman's axe up to the orchard and plunged it into the green mossy side of Wordsworth's charming little temple, slashing at its structure until it was nothing but a ruin. He then ‘razed the ash tree in the orchard and the hedge of holly, hackberry, and hazel that had screened the spot,' wrote Sara Hutchinson, ‘
and all for the sake
of the apple trees', which he over-pruned and left half-naked so ‘instead of its being a little wood, as it used to be, there is neither shade nor shelter'. ‘Dorothy is so hurt and angry,' Sara reported, ‘that she can never speak to him more: and truly it was a most unfeeling thing when he knew what store they set by that orchard.'

His defence would be that he was gardening. But to destroy the poet's hut, entrusted to his safe-keeping by Dorothy, was evidently an act of iconoclasm. De Quincey knew how Dorothy felt about her orchard; he knew the lines in ‘To a Butterfly', from
Poems, in Two Volumes
: