Vindication (5 page)

Mary listened also to her brother-in-law. At first, these sessions left her unsure what to do. She could pity Bishop his disturbed wife, but attempts to explore the crisis soon revealed an uncomprehending boor, one of those people at ease with money–he lent £20 to rescue the bankrupt Bloods ‘very properly without any parade'–but blocked off when it came to intimacy. At length Mary lost hope of getting through to a made-up mind: ‘it will ever press forward to what it wishes regardless of impediments and with a selfish eagerness believe what it desires practicable tho' the contrary is as clear as the noon day…My heart is almost broken with listening to B. while he
reasons
the case–I cannot insult him with advise–which he would never have wanted if he was capable of attending to it.' Instead of hearing his wife's needs, Bishop rationalised ‘fixed conclusions from general rules'. Mary's witness of her father's violence and the deterioration of her mother into an unloving and unlovable victim alerted her to other forms of unseen abuse in the situation of the apparent patient. Had Bishop been violent, had his abuse been visible, we can assume that Mary would have acted sooner. Her hesitations suggest a situation in which abuse was invisible–sexual roughness or the kind of covert tyranny that twists a wife's character. These are so close to contemporary notions of wifely compliance that words, again, did not exist–and silence still reigns a century later when novels like
Daniel Deronda
and
The Portrait of a Lady
open up the psychic torments of a tyrannical marriage. Protest, in such cases, could only take the forms of passivity, breakdown or, in the worst cases, what would appear as inexplicable derangement. When Mary came to nurse Bess she was sliding into derangement, and craving rescue. Bess managed to convey that her sole hope of sanity was to leave her husband.

Though Mr Bishop looked like a normal young man, Mary became increasing alarmed by an impregnable thickness. ‘Only a miracle can alter the minds of some people,' she saw. ‘To the end of the chapter will this misery last.' Her brother-in-law guarded his fortress against the damage in his vicinity. His friend John Skeys, a brother of Fanny's suitor, was convinced by Bishop's air of baffled innocence. Mary, who herself was ‘confused' at times by Bishop's version, could not blame Skeys: ‘For I that know and am fixed in my opinion cannot unwaveringly adhere to it.' She had no illusions as to whose version would be believed if Bess could neither get well nor stay with her husband. Socially, as well as legally, right was on his side.

As the frenzies gave way to more settled disturbance, Mary asked what she should do in urgent letters to Everina (still living in her brother's house and therefore best placed to plead their sister's case). ‘In this case,' Mary wrote, ‘something desperate must be determined on–do you think Edward [Ned] will receive her–do speak to him–or if you imagine I should have more influence on his mind I will contrive to see you…To be with Edward is not desirable but of the two evils she must chuse the least.'

That could have been a respectable solution: Bess could have appeared to be making a family visit, and would have been able to take her baby with her. For whatever reason, Ned failed to come up with an offer of temporary refuge. Any different refuge meant open defiance, and it would compound the defiance to take the baby who legally belonged to her father. Though Mary is usually pictured acting alone, in fact the three sisters faced the problem together. On the one hand, there was Bess deteriorating to the brink of madness, there was her sisters' fear of permanent damage, and daily evidence of her husband's intractability. On the other hand, there was the law of the land that bound wife to husband as property. The law allowed a husband to lock his wife at home for life.
Given the degree of mental illness, Mr Bishop might obtain a doctor's order to shut his wife in a lunatic asylum. The historian of marriage Lawrence Stone sets out this possibility: ‘One of the most terrible fates that could be inflicted on a wife by a husband was to be confined…in a private madhouse…where she might linger for months, or even years. The mere threat of such confinement, which was frequently used by angry husbands in the eighteenth century, was enough to strike terror. In eighteenth-century England, this fear hung over every wife…'

At twenty-four, Mary was under this pressure ‘to snatch Bess from extreme wretchedness'. The time had come to act, not talk. If Bishop got wind of it he would dismiss Mary and forbid her further contact with his wife. If they got away, he was likely to pursue them. The law allowed him to kidnap his wife against her will. Discreetly, Mary questioned a man called Wood, a friend of Bishop, about his responses: he was either a ‘lion, or a spannial' was the answer. News of the lion was disquieting, but did not deter Mary and Everina from planning their sister's escape.

Late in December Mary sent a message to Everina asking her to be secret and warning Ned not to ‘expostulate' on Bess's behalf in case Bishop scent the level resistance to him had reached. While Bishop took to bed with a passing fever, almost all his wife's clothes were smuggled out of the house with assistance from Everina and Ned's wife. Fanny was invited to stay for a few days in Bermondsey: as a guest going about her own affairs, she conveyed parcels to a brush-maker called Lear in the Strand; there, Everina would collect them. She found a place to store the bundles–not, presumably, Ned's house. Its location was not written down, for obvious reasons. Mary also had the forethought to have some ‘shirts' made–washable undergarments–since fresh things would be beyond their means once Bess was on her own. As the plan advanced Mary noted that Bess grew better ‘and of course more sad–'.

Their plan, set for mid-January 1784, was to switch coaches so as to throw Mr Bishop off their trail as they made for Hackney, a village to the north of London, beyond Hoxton–an area known to Mary from earlier days. In the eighteenth century Hackney was a centre for market gardening, with a nursery for ferns, camellias and roses. Coaches rolled along
the narrow curve of Church Street and stopped at the Mermaid, pre-eminent amongst the hostelries, and scene of political and parish meetings or the annual feasts of London tradesmen. The Mermaid itself was too public for runaways. Mary had chosen a lodging-house opposite, looking out on rural quiet at the back. In the dimness of swaying coaches as the sisters crossed the river and rumbled north, Bess's knuckles were in her mouth. Mary feared she would go into ‘one of her flights, for she bit her
wedding ring
to pieces'. She sighed over her baby, five months old, in a way that filled Mary with love and pity.

‘The poor brat it had got a little hold on my affections,' Mary granted, ‘some time or other I hope we shall get it.'

Leaving Bishop was less questionable than leaving the child behind. It's thought Mary never mentioned this episode to Godwin out of shame for her actions; more likely Godwin himself suppressed the facts in view of the illegality of the escape. Nor must we forget that when Godwin wrote his memoir, Elizabeth Bishop was still in her mid-thirties, needing as a teacher to preserve an impeccable reputation and therefore opposed to any memoir at all. As for the baby, we must remember, too, that according to law a wife who abandoned a marriage would have to relinquish her offspring. This tied most mothers to marriage, however disastrous. Another consideration was that when Mary and Bess left the Bishop house in January 1784, they had but £3 between them. Bess was not the only loving mother who convinced herself her child was better off with a wealthy father to provide for her.

Their hideaway was the house of a Mrs Dodd, who looked forbiddingly ‘wild' when she opened her door.

‘Heaven protect us,' Mary thought.

She introduced herself as Miss Johnson. Bess, less alert to danger, quietened down once the journey was over, while Mary's heart ‘beat time' with every carriage that rolled by, and a knock at the door threw her ‘into a fit'.

‘I hope B[ishop] will not discover us,' she wrote immediately in a shaky hand to Everina, ‘for I could sooner face a Lion.' Whenever the door opened she expected to feel his panting breath. ‘Ask Ned how we are to behave if he should find us out[,] for Bess is determined not to return[–]can
he force her–but I'll not suppose it–yet I can think of nothing else–She is sleepy and going to bed[;]my agitated mind will not permit me–Don't tell Charles or any creature–Oh!–let me entreat you to be careful–for Bess does not dread him now as much as I do–.'

Oddly, it was Bess who was composed. She wrote a ‘proper' letter to her husband, sent via Everina, their intermediary in matters great and small from the problem of clean linen to the question of whether Mr Bishop could be induced to agree to a separation.

In the meantime, they stayed in hiding. The day after the escape they lay about drained–nursing assorted aches, Mary joked, like languid ladies. She joked, too, that in her fear she had
almost
wished for a husband to protect her. At night, she was hot with a fever caught from Bishop; Bess too, though increasingly rational, was suffering from headaches which Mary put down to lack of exercise. They did not dare go out, but took heart from small mercies: their room was comfortable, and Mrs Dodd turned civil, reassured by lodgers with genteel aches and languor who directed letters to their attorney at a respectable address in Town.

The sisters continued to keep their heads down as the news spread. Mr Bishop reacted with angry ‘malice', according to Mary; had he been hurt or repentant, she could have felt for him, but as it was, he relieved her of compassion. Reports reached Mary that people blamed her as ‘the
shameful incendiary
in this shocking affair of a woman's leaving her bed-fellow–they “thought the strong affection of a sister
might
apologize for my conduct, but that the scheme was by no means a good one”–In short 'tis contrary to all the rules of conduct…for the benefit of new married Ladies.' One Mrs Brook let it be known that ‘with grief of heart' she gave up Mary's friendship.

They were not entirely bereft of sympathy. Good Mrs Clare came in the rain from Hoxton as soon as she heard, offered a loan and cautious advice–she was too responsible not to raise the question of reconciliation–and, returning home, sent the runaways a pie and some wine. Fanny entered into Bess's grief at leaving her child, and sent a note to John Skeys, through her brother George, begging Skeys to find out how the child did. Bishop was making the baby the centre of his outrage, and Mary had to concede
this point. He sent Bess no word of the child, and his answer, through Skeys, was cool and unsatisfactory, with no perception of his own part in his wife's breakdown. The message was that ‘poor', ill-done-by Bishop was puzzling his head as to how to effect a reconciliation, and hoped, if so, to make his wife happy.

Bess refused to return. Her voice sounds through Mary's reports with a force–frenzied, determined–of her own. Since Mary was blamed, then and since, for her ‘monstrous intervention', it's important to note that it's Bess who willed this end to her marriage, not Mary, who at times was unsure what to believe or do. Mary's part was to carry through her sister's decision, glad to see a Bess no longer in Bishop's power. For the look of ‘extreme wretchedness' hanging over her sister's face started to clear within days of leaving her husband. Her recovery vindicates this decision; so does the fact that Bess never regrets it–however vehemently she complains of everything else. The alternative would have been to compel her to bear with Bishop, a man so forceful, Mary remarked, that he would make even Ned ‘flinch'.

The next question was what two destitute young women were to do for their support. Their concerned doctor, Saunders, had given the sisters ten guineas to tide them over their crisis but could not undertake to support them further. Mr Blood invited them to live in his house, and this, of course, they could not accept.

A more appealing suggestion came from Fanny: she, Bess and Mary could live together and earn their living from painting and needlework. Mary seized on this plan with dreams of helping Fanny with her commissions. Such amateur enthusiasm stopped Fanny short: Mary had no conception of the professionalism required. Fanny explained this to Everina with a firmness that shows her to have been different from the weak figure who has come down to us. Fanny had her feet on the ground (apart from indulging Mary's tendency to hypochondria). Her letter documents the economic plight of young middle-class women who had self-respect and consideration for one another, but no money or means of support: