The Wayward Muse (19 page)

They were Rossetti’s poems. Jane prayed that they were only copies.

When she visited him the next day, alarmed by the gesture of the poems and by his pallor and stumbling, she found him on the sofa where Lizzie had spent much of her pregnancy, holding one of her shawls and drinking Irish whiskey. Jane took one look at his slumped posture and bloodshot eyes and stopped the decanter. She carried it back to the sideboard and hid it inside, on a low shelf, behind a stack of dessert plates. She sat in a chair opposite him but could not now bring herself to touch him. Now he was a widower, and etiquette had to be observed.

“I had to do penance,” Rossetti said. The words seemed to flow from him, like blood from a stab wound. “At first I thought that Lizzie would not want me to destroy my life for her sake. Then I realized that of course she did. Why else did she…and anyway, I deserve to be punished. I don’t know how my punishment serves Lizzie, but it must. She must be able to see me from wherever she is. She must know what I’ve done.”

Jane put a hand on his arm to stop him, but he shook it off and went on.

“It was my only copy, you know. At the last minute I almost couldn’t do it, but I had told my brother I was going to and I knew what he would think if I didn’t. That’s Gabriel, he would say to himself. Full of noble thoughts that never translate into action. I wonder what other people must be saying about me now. Do you suppose they think I’m mad with grief? Do you suppose they think I’m a tragic figure?”

“Gabriel,” Jane said, “you can’t go on like this. You have to take care of yourself.”

“If they knew,” Rossetti said. “If they knew the truth about me, they would not think I was a tragic figure or that my gesture was fine. They would know, and you would know, that I’m a monster.”

“You’re not,” said Jane.

“I didn’t tell you all,” Rossetti said. “The other night, I didn’t tell you everything.”

“Is there something you want to tell me now?” Jane asked. Rossetti wanted to tell her about the argument. The thought of hearing the ugly words they must have hurled at each other was disturbing, but if it would help him to tell her…

“I kept secrets from Lizzie. I’ve kept secrets from you. I thought if you knew, you’d despise me.”

“I could never despise you,” said Jane, shivering involuntarily. He had been lying to her as well as to Lizzie?

“Lizzie left a note. I gave it to my brother. Did you see it?” asked Rossetti, getting up and walking to the sideboard. He knelt on the floor and rummaged inside until he found the decanter. He brought it with him to his chair and began to drink directly from it.

“Yes,” said Jane. “I saw it. She was never right after she lost the baby.” It was the received opinion of everyone they knew, even those who thought the laudanum poisoning was an accident. She wouldn’t have been taking laudanum at all if it weren’t for that.

“It wasn’t the baby,” moaned Rossetti. “I…I was seeing someone else.”

Jane felt as if she had been doused with cold water. “After the baby was lost?” she asked. Rossetti buried his head in his hands.

“Before?” she asked. Rossetti nodded, his face still hidden from her.

Jane felt a rush of anger. And yet, she reflected, she was not at all surprised. Of course it was something like that.

“The night she…we had an argument about it. She said it must stop or she would leave me. I taunted her, I dared her to leave. Then I went to see Fanny. I was with her all night. And Lizzie did leave me, didn’t she? She was true to her word.”

Fanny Cornforth, one of Rossetti’s models. Jane had met her several times: a buxom blonde who seemed dim-witted but good-natured. Entirely unworthy of Rossetti, Jane thought. And entirely unworthy of being the cause of Lizzie’s death.

“How could you do it to her?” asked Jane bitterly. “Did you love Lizzie at all?”

“I did once,” said Rossetti. “But we should never have gotten married. It was already too late by then. But of course I had to marry her. It was the only moral thing to do. Perhaps if the baby had lived, things would have turned out all right.”

“But you said yourself that you were seeing Fanny before the baby died. You think if it had lived, you would have stopped?”

“I’m a monster,” agreed Rossetti, burying his face in the silk cushions.

“I see now why you put your poems in the casket,” said Jane.

“Don’t reproach me, Jane, I can’t stand it!” Rossetti cried. “Don’t you think I’m torturing myself already? I can’t sleep at night, Lizzie’s face is always before me. The last thing she said to me was, ‘You’re not worthy of me.’ Of course she was right. I wasn’t worthy of her love and I’m not worthy of your friendship, but if you see fit to take it away, I just may go to join Lizzie. Please, Jane.” Now he looked up and Jane saw tears in his eyes. She relented.

“Do you love Fanny?” Jane doubted it was so, but stranger things had happened. After all, Morris had fallen in love with her, and she had not had much more to recommend her than Fanny.

“Fanny’s a wonderful girl,” Rossetti said. “But I won’t marry her, if that’s what you mean. She knows I won’t, and she doesn’t care. She’s very independent and she likes it that way. I never meant for Lizzie to find out about her, you know. I never meant to hurt her.”

“You hoped your lies would never become public,” said Jane severely.

“I swore to myself that when the affair with Fanny ended, there would be no others.”

“Which others? Annie Miller? Alexa Wilding?”

Rossetti groaned. “I’m so ashamed,” he said.

Jane struggled to compose herself. It wouldn’t do to scream, or to run at Rossetti and beat him with her fists. Her anger on behalf of her friend could not justify such behavior.

“Whatever you have done, Lizzie knew you loved her,” she said, although she was not sure if it was true. “Maybe she meant to scare you, but I don’t think she meant to…”

“Kill herself?” said Rossetti. “I think she knew exactly what she was doing. She knew what this would do to me.”

Jane made Rossetti some tea and managed to convince him to drink it and to eat some roast chicken and jelly. He would not go to bed; he said only children went to bed in the afternoon, but he promised not to drink any more that night. She couldn’t tell if he was saying it just to humor her, but she left feeling that she had improved things, if only slightly and temporarily.

On the train Jane sat unseeing as the dismal wintry landscape passed in a blur of frozen fields and trees drooping with ice. She did not know how to feel. She had thought it was Rossetti’s commitment to Lizzie that had kept him from her years ago, but apparently it was not.

It’s just my pride, she thought to herself. To have lost out to Fanny Cornforth, it does sting. But I would not have wanted to be what she is, little better than a harlot, living alone in rooms he’s paid for.

For the first time in years, she gave thanks that she had married someone as transparently honest as Morris. She could not imagine him going out at night to meet another woman. And yet, didn’t that make him dull and predictable? He had no passion left for her, but he hadn’t transferred it to someone else, he had just let that part of himself go dormant. Wasn’t it better that Rossetti was passionate, even if his feelings were misplaced?

That night at dinner Jane told Morris of her visit.

“He’s brooding,” Morris said. “It’s very bad for him. You shouldn’t encourage it.” The servant girl came in with a tureen of beef broth and they waited silently while she served it.

“He needs to unburden himself to someone,” Jane said when the girl had gone. “He feels responsible.”

“It’s not good for you either,” Morris said, stirring his soup complacently, seemingly unconcerned at the thought of Rossetti’s distress. “You’ll get overwrought yourself.”

“Well, why shouldn’t I?” said Jane. “My friend is dead, my other friend is calling himself a murderer and drinking himself to death; I think the situation warrants a little bit of upset.” Her voice was twisted with sarcasm.

Morris sighed. “It’s terrible,” he agreed. “Poor Lizzie. The girl was absolutely driven to do it.”

This made Jane even angrier. She put down her spoon, her appetite quite gone. “Gabriel is suffering deeply,” she said.

“And no doubt enjoying every minute of it. That business with the poems was the most self-pitying thing I’ve ever seen.”

“If I died I doubt you’d do the same,” said Jane.

“No, I wouldn’t,” said Morris, “because I’d have the knowledge that I’d treated you well in life to comfort me, and not a heart full of guilt.”

Rather than listen to Morris’s indictment of Rossetti, Jane muttered something about the squab and went to the kitchen. The cook was surprised when Jane took the bowl of cake batter from her hands and beat it until it frothed. When she returned to the dining room, Jane sweetly asked her husband about the stained glass program for All Saints Church in Selsley, and they did not speak of Rossetti and Lizzie again.

As she lay sleepless that night, though, listening to Morris grinding his teeth while thinking about Lizzie lying cold and motionless in the bed she and Rossetti had shared, Jane was filled with doubt. Had Lizzie been angry enough to kill herself to spite Rossetti? And ultimately, did it matter? She could turn her brain inside out searching for the truth, and at the end her friend would still be dead.

Stubbornly, the more everyone blamed Rossetti for what had happened to Lizzie, the more sympathetic Jane became. Though Jane agreed that he had behaved badly, she began to suspect that Lizzie had managed to win the argument. She had made sure that Rossetti would never be free of her, that he would always be haunted by guilt and regret. One was not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but at times Jane found herself very angry with Lizzie.

A month later, Jane gave birth to her second daughter, May. She was very busy, and though she wrote faithfully to Rossetti, she did not see him for quite some time.

M
ORRIS
, Marshall, Faulkner and Company won two gold medals at the International Exhibition in South Kensington in 1862. They sold a painted cabinet and received two major church commissions. It appeared that the business would soon be a success.

“I thought it would take five years at least to turn a profit,” marveled Morris to Jane. “But now I think two or three years at the most.” He picked Jenny up and whirled her around until they both tumbled to the floor of the nursery in a heap.

“That’s wonderful, William,” said Jane, trying to sound as encouraging as possible.

Chastened by the terrible outcome of Lizzie’s battle with Rossetti, Jane attempted to rededicate herself to her husband. Accordingly, she spent a week instructing the cook as to Morris’s favorite dishes. She made sure that a very good roast of beef or pork was on the table each night, along with a potato pudding or a vegetable pie. Unfortunately, at the moment that Jane decided to shower her husband with the affection she did not feel, he was having a difficult time at the loom he had built in the basement of Red Lion Square. Consumed by learning ancient weaving techniques, he hardly glanced at the food. He automatically shoved it into his mouth and then immediately retreated to his studio to read a sixteenth-century French treatise on weaving he had bought at an antiques store in London. After three days of special dishes that were ignored, Jane gave up.

Next she cleaned the house from top to bottom with her own hands and the help of the housemaid. They washed the windows and the floors. They scrubbed walls and ceilings; they washed all of the linens in the house. They polished all of the furniture, the silver, they washed all of the china. Everything smelled of lemon and sandalwood, but Morris did not notice.

Jane bought a piece of striped silk in peacock blue, made it up into an evening dress, and wore it to dinner with a new amethyst brooch affixed to her breast that brought out the blue in her eyes, but Morris scarcely glanced at her. He did not notice when she pinned her hair in a new way, or when she spritzed her neck with a new lilac eau de toilette. She had to admit that unless she could tell him how to increase the density of his weaving or help him perfect his half stitch, her husband was inaccessible.

In the brief moments he was in the house, Morris was happy to complain about aniline dyes or explain the difference between tapestry cartoons and other drawings, but she found it difficult to pay attention. Her mind kept wandering to the butcher’s bill and the tooth that Jenny was cutting; should she apply a cold compress to the gums, or give her a sugar cube wrapped in cheesecloth? He showed her eleven drawings of a pomegranate and wanted her to tell him which was the best, but she had trouble distinguishing between them. Why couldn’t he just appreciate a good roast, like other men?

One afternoon Morris came home unexpectedly early. Jane was sitting at the table with May in her lap, attempting unsuccessfully to get her to eat some mashed carrots. Most of it had ended up in May’s hair and on her dress. Beside her, Jenny was trying her best to handle her soup spoon, but could not keep it level. Chicken broth spilled on the tablecloth and on the floor. Jane did not have the energy to reprimand her. When the meal was done, all three of them would need baths, and fresh clothes. It wearied her to think of it. Morris stood in front of her waving a sheaf of papers.

“Look what I have!” he shouted. “The wallpaper prototypes have come!” He placed them next to her elbow and waited for her to look at them.

“I’m afraid I’ll get carrot on them,” Jane said. “Can I look at them after we’re done?”

“I suppose,” said Morris, disappointed. “Or I can turn the pages for you.” He sat down next to her and showed her each sample. “Do you like the color schemes?” he asked. He had asked her when he had made his first drawings, and she had responded positively. But that was a hundred compliments ago, and Jane’s energy was flagging.

“They’re lovely,” she said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster.

“Which do you like, Jenny?” asked Morris hopefully, holding them in front of his daughter.

“Blue,” she said, pointing with the hand that was holding the spoon. Jane flinched.

“Eat your soup,” she said.

“I fear that the blue is a little childish,” fretted Morris. “The yellow is more subtle.”

“Just because a child likes it doesn’t make it childish,” snapped Jane. “I like the blue. Does that make me childish?”

“What is the matter with you?” asked Morris. “Are you ill?”

Jane didn’t answer, she just kept spooning carrots onto May’s face. Morris moved to the end of the table and began to eat his lunch.

The bell rang and soon Georgie, heavily pregnant, lumbered in holding two-year-old Philip by the hand.

“Soup!” she said brightly, easing herself carefully into a chair and pulling her son onto the one next to her. “Is it chicken? Chicken is my favorite. And I see we’re having wild blueberries for dessert. How lovely.”

“Which do you like, Georgie?” Morris asked, standing up again with his sheets of wallpaper.

“Oh, I’m not qualified to speak about things artistic,” Georgie said, blushing.

“Nonsense,” said Morris. “You have two eyes.”

“Two nearsighted ones, you know. But if you insist.” She scrutinized the samples for several minutes before declaring the yellow her favorite.

“But I wish you had made one with a pale green ground,” she said. “I can’t wear it, but pale green is my favorite color.”

“The next one will be green,” promised Morris. “What is your favorite flower?”

“White star jasmine,” said Georgie. “Such delicate flowers, but with the scent of the gods, don’t you think, Jane?”

“I know it’s common, but I like roses,” said Jane. She wished that she and Morris could speak so cordially about color and flowers, the way he did with Georgie, and she knew it was at least partly her fault, but it seemed that everything that came out of her mouth now was terse and angry.

“Yes, you are very common,” said Morris, standing up. “I can’t stay, I have a meeting with the rector of a church in Scarborough to go over the installation schedule.” He bowed to Georgie. “Pale green jasmine. I won’t forget.”

He kissed Jenny on the forehead and patted May’s head. He said nothing to Jane as he left. Jane and Georgie listened to his footsteps on the flagstone floor as he walked down the hall. The heavy front door banged shut and he was gone.

Georgie took May from Jane and wiped her face and hands with a napkin. She rang for the nanny and asked her to take Philip and Jenny into the garden. Then she took Jane’s hand.

“He has never spoken to me that way before,” Jane said, almost to herself.

“He’s working very hard,” consoled Georgie. “He’s not himself.”

“I wonder if we have any laudanum in the house,” Jane joked bitterly. “That would show him.”

“Don’t say that!” gasped Georgie in horror. “Don’t even think it!”

“Let’s not talk of it,” said Jane. “When May has her nap, let’s have a picnic in the orchard.”

That evening Morris was remorseful.

“I should not have spoken to you that way,” he said. “Forgive me.”

Jane knew that she, too, should apologize for her snappishness, but she found she could not.

“I’m not feeling well,” she managed to say, by way of explanation. Morris was immediately solicitous.

“Is it a cold? Is it your head?”

“My back aches,” she said. Morris found a pillow to put behind her. He had the cook make a hot compress scented with lavender. He brought a blanket for her feet, and a cup of tea with lemon and two sugars. He offered to call the doctor; he offered to carry her to her bedroom. It made Jane sorry she had said anything.

Jane and Morris were eating a silent breakfast in the dining room. She was considering visiting Georgie and wondering whether a molded jelly would travel safely on the train when a telegram arrived from Burne-Jones. Morris scanned it quickly, then stood up so violently he knocked over his chair.

“What is it?” asked Jane in fright. Morris thrust the telegram at Jane.

Georgie scarlet fever,
it said.
House quarantined.

All at once Jane’s problems shrank to unimportance. All she could think was that Georgie might die.

“I must go to her,” she said, rising from the table. Morris held her wrist.

“You know you can’t,” he said. “That’s what a quarantine is. You can’t risk infecting yourself, or Jenny and May.”

Jane sat back down in her chair and put her head on the table.

The courier was waiting for the telegram’s reply. Morris began to pace the room as he tried to think of ways they could help. “Perhaps they need money. Perhaps I could send Dr. Briggs over there.”

It was agony, waiting to hear what would happen. Jane was sure that Georgie would die. She had never had real friends before she knew Lizzie and Georgie, and she had already lost one; of course she would lose the other now. She tried to pray, but it seemed hopeless. Morris did pray, every morning, on his hands and knees, despite the fact that he no longer believed in God. They went through their daily tasks in a fog.

Georgie was still dangerously ill when her son Christopher was born. Weakened by his mother’s illness, he lived only three weeks.

If I were Georgie, I would certainly give up now, thought Jane when she heard.

But Georgie lived. She was made of strong stuff and she had her boy Philip to raise. When it was finally safe for Jane to visit her, she brought small, thin-skinned russets and dark red grapes, and the last dahlias from her garden.

“These must have been so expensive,” said Georgie, scooping the seeds from a grape with a small spoon. “You should not have spent so much, not for me.” Her hands were so shaky Jane was worried none of the fruit would make it to her mouth. But Georgie would not let Jane help her.

“You need to eat good things to get strong again,” said Jane.

“I’m sorry to have worried you so much,” said Georgie. “But you see, I am well.”

Jane thought that Georgie, with her wasted frame and pinched, peaked face looked far from well, but she only smiled and said she planned to spoil her friend as much as she could. To herself she thought that she must bring pears, and filberts, and the very best dates from Persia.

“The doctor’s bills were much more than we could afford,” confessed Georgie. “And of course the funeral cost money. I don’t know what we shall do.”

“William will help,” said Jane. Georgie looked alarmed.

“You mustn’t tell him! Edward will be angry with me if he finds out I’ve told you. He is determined that we shouldn’t appeal to our friends. He is very stern on that point.”

“Can I do anything?” said Jane.

“Just sit with me,” said Georgie plaintively. “And tell me about the doings at Red House. It seems ages since I was there.”

“William has had rheumatic fever, you know,” said Jane.

“Yes, Ned told me, how selfish of me not to ask after him!”

“He is better,” said Jane. “But he is a terrible patient, always trying to go down to his office and refusing all attentions.” The truth was that with Morris ill, without Georgie and Ned, without Lizzie and Rossetti, Red House was rather dismal. But Jane comforted herself with the fact that it would not be long before her friend lived at Red House with her.

When a letter came for Morris from Burne-Jones, Jane thought nothing of it. The two men were in constant contact. So when she heard her husband crying behind the door of his study, she could not imagine what it could be. All she could think was that someone had died. Had Georgie taken a sudden turn?

The tears were still on his face when Morris came into the sitting room to tell her that the Burne-Joneses had sadly decided that they could not move to Red House after all. They could no longer afford to pay Morris what he needed to keep the place going.

“Perhaps in another year, when they’ve recovered, they will come,” said Jane, who was deeply disappointed but felt that Morris’s tears were excessive. It’s the fever, it makes him weepy, she thought to herself.

“You don’t understand, my dear,” said Morris. “We have to leave Red House.”

Jane fell into the window seat heavily, and Morris rushed to her to make sure she had not hurt herself. She brushed him away. She could not believe it. Red House was the first place, the only place, she’d ever lived that she truly loved.

“Is there no way?” she cried. She had not meant to blame him but Morris looked stricken.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “I miscalculated how long it would take the Firm to turn a profit. And, as you know, the copper mines have been steadily decreasing in productivity. Every year the income is less. Fairly soon we won’t receive any income at all, and by that time the Firm had better be on its feet.”

Jane reflected that, if anything, Morris loved the place more than she did, and that if there were a way to save it, he would have thought of it.

“Where will we go?” she asked bitterly. “Somewhere nearby? That cottage on Finch Street in the village?”