Strange Music (28 page)

‘Papa's conviction strengthens with time. I am terribly worried, Bro, that you might enter into a battle with him, the consequences of which would be beastly, would rip you both apart and rupture the family.'

He does not like to leave me, dear Bro, although I doubt he would be happier in London with Papa.

Lying flat on the blistered skin of my back, a war breaks out from within. Gilt-framed, Papa's smile no longer serves as an anodyne. I stare at the ceiling, my heart beating fast. I must tell Bro to ring for Crow but feel too tight-chested to move, to speak, too many tribulations bearing down on me.

Clouds of colour dance before my eyes, a vivid seascape, scarlet waves, mauve, acid green, strangely wonderful they seem, varying in shape and size. Strands of light ripple like waves upon the ceiling. The forms of mermaids rocked and bent by waves, a golden net of curls splays out across the sea. Blue-greens once dressed my room, just as they once dressed me – I had a girlhood penchant for wearing leafy greens. My green bower was the warmest room at the top of Hope End. It was carpeted and draped in emerald soft as the moss-cushions of the forest. Curtains trailed gracefully about my bed, opaque and willow green. Hangings of hills dotted with sheep like so many distant scudding clouds; secret valleys; stags in the deer-park. I remember every veined ivy leaf framing my open window through which a fragrance of honeysuckle and roses blew in. From here I gazed upon the gardens; woods stretching to meadows of wild flowers and the blue Malvern Hills where I rambled with the wild wanderings of youth.

A mermaid has swum past, her hair . . . I am tangled in a net of waving black curls. Is it easier to sink, or walk, or swim?

Before leaving for London Papa presented me with Shelley's most recent collection. Now that I have mastered the art of horizontal writing, I will, with pencil notes, inscribe each volume of Shelley's stacked amongst the note books I keep at my bedside. I am most particularly interested in
A Defence of Poetry
, and Shelley's speculations on physics and morality, and the translations of Plato's
Symposium
,
Ion
,
Menexenus
. But have found, even at a glance, that I take great exception to Shelley's ideas on religion, especially Christianity, and rather fear I won't be able to help myself from deleting all these passages I am flicking through and entering my own opinions. Shelley lacks an accurate command of Greek. Some of his translations are little more than nonsense. I am pausing only here and there on passages which strike me – the carelessness of this version is remarkable. That this is a posthumous volume edited by his wife, Mary, is no excuse. Though a great poet, Shelley cannot translate Plato, we have more than sufficient evidence. His understandings are insufficient to say the very least!

This morning Bro reads to me an article in
The Times
stating that the old franking system has finally been replaced by the penny post, and payment is to be made by the sender.

‘This means,' Bro explains, ‘that for the cost of one penny, you may write to your heart's desire without the worry of burdening any of your dear friends or family.'

‘It offers wonderful liberty,' I say.

Bro agrees that it is surely the most successful revolution of the day. ‘Right,' he says, ‘I shall go and brave the winds on the clifftops.'

Tucked in the cleavage of Torquay hills I lie ensnared by my long-possessed secret – to be swept off my feet by a dashing poet prince. Each day, when letters arrive on the silver server, I fear I pay highly in disappointment, for they bring no such news.

This morning I was surprised to see Hugh Stuart Boyd's seal upon a letter. That this elderly sightless man with whom I was blindly in love in my girlhood has not forgotten me altogether is a very pleasant notion indeed. Through the kindnesses of Nelly Bordman I recently heard Mr. Boyd was settled in Hampstead, though his exact whereabouts she did not divulge. And nor has
he
.

. . . Yes! Indeed! You DO treat me very shabbily – I agree with you in thinking so. To think that so many hills & woods shd. interpose between us. That I shd. be lying here, fast-bound by a spell, a sleeping Beauty in a forest, & that
you
who used to be such a doughty knight shd. not take the trouble of cutting through even a hazel tree with your good sword, to find out what had become of me! Now do tell me, the hazel tree being down at last, whether you mean to live at Hampstead, whether you have taken a house there & have carried your books there, & wear Hampstead grasshoppers in your bonnet (as they did at Athens) to prove yourself of the soil! . . .

I wish, more than anything, that I might be back in London for the Queen's wedding day, but the spitting of blood increases with these cold February winds. Dr. Scully's daily visits have merged this week into a stream of agony – he subjected me to a dynasty of blisters. Blister-torture, I call it. Blisters applied on the chest every three days for two to three hours. During visits Dr. Scully tells me all the scandals of the neighbourhood, from the local landed gentry cheating at baccarat, to a steam packet exploding recently in nearby waters (which explains why the post is rather erratic, I suppose), to the disgraceful behaviour of Lord-something-or-other while in wedlock. Such gossip gives me pleasure, and even
I
talk, but very little. My poetic voice is wasting to a whisper.

This past week my knees have ached – I am confined again to bed – except when lifted, baby-wise, to the sofa when they make the bed, but then I am inclined to faint from the exertion of movement.

We have not heard from Jamaica, which is a shame. Bro went out to the
Hopeful
, through such a foaming sea, that I shd. have been terrified if I had known anything about it before his safe return. Dr. Scully told me he tried to persuade him not to go – all in vain. We have tremendous seas & winds – & a chimney on the other side of the house, ‘nodding to its fall'. But nothing makes me fail to perceive the great advantages in point of shelter & warmth of this number 1. My room particularly is quite a nest of a room – there being nothing at all like it, according to Dr. Scully, in the whole of Torquay. During our short attack of frost, he used to stand before the fire every morning rapt in admiration, whilst Crow reported the state of the thermometer.

Can anything grow anywhere or anyway with this terrible wind? . . . I took two draughts of opium last night – but even the second failed to bring sleep. ‘It
is
a blessed thing!' – that sleep! – one of my worst sufferings being the want of it. Opium – opium – night after night! – and some nights, during east winds, even opium won't do, you see! . . .

. . . Now, my dearest Miss Mitford, write and tell me all about yourself and dear Dr. Mitford! It would revive me like an inward spring, to hear a great deal of good about you. Is it to be heard? God grant
that . . .

A windy day
again
. Seagulls, like strips of white cloth, are blown high over endless rolling grey sea. This week's physician forbids my escape from this room – should I say tomb? – how am I to be calm within when there is such turbulence without? How, with all these stresses and strains, Miss Mitford thinks I am to be a poet, I know not. I know I must keep on in this dreadful place yet fear I cannot, that some part inside me is cracking.

And how can I call Miss Mitford a dear friend when my correspondence is inconsistent? Nay, dreary?

. . . Papa has not come yet – but I am not as silly as Dr. Scully fancied, when he found me with tears running down my cheeks because of a ‘fortnight's absence', and sat down with a kind of despair at my bedside, with his ‘Well, Miss Barrett – there is no
reasoning
on such subjects!' I know very well that these ‘fortnights' are apt to grow.
That
was a fortnight before Christmas! Dearest Papa has so much occupation, and so many to care about and discipline in London, that it is very difficult for him to go two hundred miles from it – though Styx be ‘nine times round him' with promises . . .

This evening's melted jelly did not digest agreeably. Twice daily I take a glass of wine, one spoonful at a time. All I managed when the Hedleys visited last night was a few minute sips of beef tea.

Crow has ‘just come to remind ma'am there is a visit planned by the Hedleys for this evening'.

‘Jane will, I hope, bring her darling daughter, Ibbit, that we might have an angel once more in our midst.'

‘I trust she will, ma'am,' Crow replies.

I long to be that child; running and skipping, just as I did, in a little white muslin dress and frilled pantalettes.

When I reach out she escapes me, running too rapidly, leaping too high.

I was on the edge of collapse when Dr. Scully just now visited. It is with the greatest sufferance that I permit this treatment for I swear the blisters he applies serve only to distract me from the cough continually wracking my body. In Dr. Scully's company I am intensely nervous. Does he regard me well? I think not. Is that why he talks unrelentingly? The touch of his hands, the points of his fingertips prodding my wrist as he feels for my pulse are hard, cold. Fat black tentacles feed off my veins: these wriggling, bulging leeches suck from me the will to walk. Although the last draught of opium went some way to relieving the agony within my stomach, being so weak and frail, my hands tremble. This afternoon I cannot write. I cannot sleep and, I fear, never will.

I must ring for Crow. She shall bring another draught of opium. One more will not hurt.

Hope End surfaces. Dreams, like grains of sand are swept asunder, swallowed by raging salt water. Somewhere, thick with dust in the Wimpole Street attic, is the parchment on which Cousin Richard wrote for me tales of the ‘bad mad' runaways. I feel very nervous about it – far more than I did when my
Prometheus
crept out of the Greek, or I myself out of my shell in the first
Essay on Mind
– I struggle with the shape of verses and become thought-tied. Should I attempt to tell a slave's tale with my own breath I shall be in two panics: whether I can write it, and whether I shall want it published.

As my eyes close again I look upon the black slave woman, Quasheba. Would she have been considered a beauty in Africa? A beauty with black skin? Can black represent beauty?

I shall not turn my sight from all that was but look deeply upon the deserts we Barretts have created, and think what can be done.

Let tides of peace flow into my mind. Give to me the gift of reverie. The resourceful man uses imagination. To see, hear, taste, smell, touch. How powerful a tool is this! Quasheba is fighting. Fighting for liberty. Had she a lover, a black cane-cutter? In the sunny ground between the canes, said he, ‘I love you,' as he passed? When the shingle-roof rang sharp with the rains, heard she how he vowed it fast: while others shook, had he smiled in the hut, as he carved her a bowl of the cocoa-nut, through the roar of the hurricanes?

Mysteriously, I am beginning to experience an intense bond similar to sisterhood – a unity with the runaway's cause. I too have a longing for freedom. A longing to flee, soul-forward. I know not how or why Quasheba took flight, but if she was treated as one might presume Cousin Richard treated Negro women indentured for life . . . Such tales have long resounded in my ears; the rape of a young woman fresh from childhood. Strangely, feeling so strongly, deeply – I feel it in my bones, in my very soul, that the missionaries were not the root of the slave uprisings nor the fall of the apprenticeship system, as Sam claimed, and that extreme violence perpetrated by women, the terrible acts of which Cousin Richard spoke, such as Negro women killing their own children, must have meant something. Something sickening. Must have been due to evils within plantation life. I
do
have a mind to write on this. And to publish. How to go about such a task I must not forget. How to not sympathize but empathize. Imagination is like the act of remembering, without memory being in the consciousness – I have heard this before. I have been here before. I have lived this already.

I am black, I am black! And yet God made me they say: but if He did so, smiling back He must have cast His work away under the feet of his white creatures, with a look of scorn, that the dusky features might be trodden again to clay.