The Honeymoon (14 page)

Miss Hughes interjected, “Go to Elizabeth, Robert. Leave this to me.”

Tight-lipped, she faced Marian in a fury. “You’ll leave tomorrow morning on the first train.”

Marian pushed past her, up the stairs to her room, and began throwing her clothes pell-mell into her trunk.

The next morning on the way to the station through the streets of Devizes, she wept. The coachman pretended not to notice. He had lied, lied! But why? Had she meant so little to him? The way he’d stood there as if made of stone, after all the love and praise he’d lavished on her. The betrayal was greater than any she’d ever known. He’d cared nothing for her.

She returned to Coventry, wounded. Hurt turned to anger at him, and contempt. He was a pathetic, selfish old fool. What had she done? Once again, need had overtaken her, smothered her judgment, all awareness. She hated herself for it, for giving in. Why wasn’t she stronger? Why didn’t she have a solid core that would enable her to survive without the love of a man?

Rufa Hennell, now married, announced that she couldn’t finish her translation of Strauss’s,
Das Leben Jesu
. She had already translated two volumes of it, but simply didn’t have time to devote to it anymore. The only person whose German was possibly good enough to finish it was Marian. Rufa apparently did not know of the scene between Marian and her father, Dr. Brabant. If Marian would undertake it, Rufa promised to help her. And besides, Joseph Parkes, a wealthy radical politician from Birmingham, had promised
to underwrite the costs of publication to the tune of three hundred pounds.

Yes, Marian said, she would do it. It would be her first book, though only a translation of somebody else’s work. But she’d earn a little money at it, twenty pounds out of the three hundred — very little indeed, but something. It could be the beginning of a way to earn a living.

The Brays offered her a place of her own to work, a room on the second floor of Rosehill, with a little mahogany desk where she could retreat when she wasn’t caring for her father at Bird Grove and running the household. “I will do everything to help you do it,” Charles said. “It’s a vitally important document, and only you have the learning to do it justice.”

And so she began. Like Henning, Strauss delved into the core of Christian belief, denying the divinity of Christ, saying that the supposed miracles of the Bible were merely tendentious fabrications by the early Christians, influenced by Jewish traditions, to show that Christ was the Messiah.

Snatching time from her household duties, she struggled over it. What was the proper translation of
materiell
? And
formell
? And the word
Abendmahl
? Was that simply “sacrament” or was it “
the
sacrament”? In addition to the German, Strauss quoted heavily in Latin and Greek. She had to try and teach herself Hebrew as well, to understand his arguments. But she took pride when she got it right, and the difficulty of it energized her. She realized she was good at translation. Perhaps she could somehow make a profession out of this, and it would be at the same time engaging and challenging.

Still, she found she could only translate about six pages a day, and the manuscript was 1,500 pages long.

At home, her father was aging and becoming more dependent on her. He’d never liked her going up to Rosehill, but it was part of their unspoken agreement that she could. Now he wanted her with him at all times. Dozing in his chair by the fire, his shawl wrapped around his shoulders, he’d wake up when she came into the room and realize that she hadn’t been there with him all along. “Where have you been?” he asked querulously. “What are you wasting your time on now?”

“I’m translating a book, Papa,” she said. “Remember, I told you? Don’t worry. I’m here now. I’m going to make your toddy and read to you.”

Every Sunday, she continued dutifully to take him to church, gripping the arm of the man who had once been strong as a tree and was now shrunken and bent.

But his need for her, his demands for her time, gave her intense happiness. He truly loved her. He made her read him his favorite passages of Walter Scott — the description of Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage and
The Two Drovers
— over and over again, just as she’d made him read
The Linnet’s Life
to her over and over again when she was a child.

As she continued on with the Strauss, her headaches grew more frequent. She became so immersed in it that she began to live within it. She no longer believed in Christ’s divinity. But he was still someone who had lived, a real figure to her, in his goodness and his sacrifice, and when she came to Strauss’s discussion of the Crucifixion and the soldiers piercing his flesh —
“the habitual custom was to nail once only the feet as well as the hands”
— she could feel the nails
piercing her own flesh, and in her mind, she could hear his cry,
“I thirst!,”
as vividly as if he were there with her. As the sponge was raised to his poor, parched lips, she tasted the vinegar on her own tongue. And then, his final words, “
It is finished!
”

After months of this, she collapsed in tears in front of Cara and Charles. “I just cannot do this anymore. Why did I take it on?”

“Of course you can do it,” Cara said, putting her arms around her. Charles agreed. “You must finish it. We’ll get Mr. Bury, the surgeon, to come in and see you.” Mr. Bury examined her and said her “subconjunctivial vessels” were congested. He applied leeches to her temples. After he left, she fell asleep. For a while she was relieved of the headaches, but they always came back.

Sometimes, when she was completely “Strauss sick,” she helped Cara in the Infants’ School, happy to be distracted by the little children. Or she’d climb the road to Rosehill to see Nelly, just to see her laugh when she bounced her, and hold her little hands while she took her first steps. The child seemed to know her and always smiled in recognition when she saw her. Would she ever have a child of her own? She was twenty-five. There was still time. But first she must have a husband. And there was no one.

Exhausted by Strauss, she found herself one day sketching out the first few lines of a story. She saw pictures in her mind of Griff and being with her father in the gig and she was back again in that lost world. There was a village, she wrote,
“sleeping on a hill, like a quiet old place as it was, in the late afternoon sunlight. Opposite it, below the hills, was the purplish blackness of woods, and the pale front of an Abbey, looking
out from among the oaks. A road wound under the shelter of the woods, of upswelling hills.”
As she wrote the words, she felt an intense joy in imagining the town — the word “upswelling,” so perfect, conveying the gentle-seeming softness of the hills, like a woman’s breast. And the woods, “purplish black.” They
were
that. Not many would use those blended colors to describe woods, the way the blackness was given warmth by the late afternoon sunlight, a special sweetness and mystery. She loved finding that color, imagining it, daring to describe it in not the usual language, but finding new words to make her impressions more real and live on the page.

How wonderful to be in the world of words, removed from Rosehill and all its complications, and most important, a world private to her alone, one that she owned and governed.

But the dream was interrupted. She rubbed her eyes and swung around in the chair to gaze out the window. Down below, on the lawn, she saw Charles and Cara sitting with a group of friends under the acacia. She was weary. And Strauss awaited her, pages and pages of it.

She bundled the pages of her “novel” together and put them aside.

At last the Strauss was finished, and in June it was published,
The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined
, by David Friedrich Strauss,
Translated from the fourth German Edition, in three volumes by Mr. John Chapman of 121, Newgate Street, London
. Marian’s name wasn’t on the title page, but that was the usual way. And she didn’t mind the anonymity in the least. The book had already caused an uproar in
Germany for challenging prevailing Christian authority, and it would no doubt have the same effect in England. She was happy to be shielded from the criticism. And she got her twenty pounds for the work. It was the first real money she’d ever made. She was now an author — of sorts. It had given her a taste of what could be.

Still, when she looked around her, she saw no way to earn a sufficient living as a writer, no future project she could undertake that would pay her anything. For now, her job was to care for her father.

When the book was published, Charles took her up to London to visit her publisher, John Chapman. Chapman had recently moved his business to the Strand. Catching sight of him for the first time, she was overcome by his looks. He was in his twenties, a bit younger than she, very tall, with an erect carriage and dark, curly hair, a peaked brow, finely arched eyebrows, and a cleft chin. His eyes were dark and full, keen and inscrutable and closely set. He bent down to take her hand. “I’m very honored,” he said, “to meet the translator of Strauss, the person who’s done more than anyone to present his important ideas to the English-speaking world.” This was her publisher, the man who had brought her words to light, and bound them between the hard covers of a book. And he was so fine-looking, overwhelming in his height. She was so intimidated she could barely answer him.

Later, Charles took her to visit the studio of the phrenologist James Deville, who was also nearby on the Strand. “I promise you,” Charles said, “a cast can be made without shaving your head.”

Deville’s studio was filled with shelf after shelf of white plaster casts of people’s heads. They were eerily still,
looking blindly out, and covered with lines and inscriptions. Charles watched enthusiastically while Deville made Marian recline on a special seat. He divided her head with strings and applied a light coating of almond oil to her eyebrows and hair. Then he brushed on the plaster, leaving holes at the nostrils so she could breathe. He inserted two quills into the nostrils, which made her sneeze at first. But the plaster soon dried and Deville removed it in pieces. It was unpleasant but bearable.

Charles undertook to analyze the results himself, and later he showed her what he had written.
“In her brain development the Intellect greatly predominates,”
he said.
“She was of the most affectionate disposition, always requiring someone to lean upon … She is not fitted to stand alone.”

She had thought phrenology was silly, but oh, how true those words were. “Not fitted to stand alone.”

Charles sent his report on to George Combe, who did his own analysis. Her head was so big, 22¼ inches around, that Combe wrote to Charles that at first he’d thought it was the head of a man.
“She has a very large brain,”
Combe wrote,
“the anterior lobe is remarkable for length, breadth & height … Love of approb
[
ation
]
and concentrativeness are large … She is extremely feminine & gentle; & the great strength of her intellect combined with this quality renders her very interesting.”