34.  Harriet

 

1808

 

Harriet was a blessed child, conceived in an hour of extraordinary grace and born in another, for Pelham was home, his duties allowing it most exceptionally, and so heard her first cry.

         “God,” he breathed, gazing at her two minutes old, “she is so very — beautiful —!” — he could barely get it out, before he wept altogether.  She rivaled any child born on the Sabbath day, for sure, therefore, even though it chanced to be a Thursday, since she was so bonny.   She proved to be blithe, too, as blithe as her sister without her fierceness;  for after all, Harriet enjoyed the gift of being born to a mamma who was the happiest woman in the world, and a papa so very much in love with her mamma that he quite broke down with relief, to hear and then see her newly (and safely) come into the world, still half-wet from the passage, but a few moments after her appearance.  These were blessings Mavis had not known, in her earlier years, poor little Mavis, thus having had to fight with all her dauntless spirit for the joie-de-vie she claimed as her birthright in spite of everything.

 

*********************

December, 1808

At Sea

 

My most beloved wife — and now, thanks be to God!  Darling Mother of our Two children — how hard it is to take leave of you.

This time more than ever, I swear, I should be used to it by now, but it grows ever more painful, not less, to turn from you to my duty.

And more than ever because I was present at your travail, this time.  For which I thank God even as my hand shakes still at the thought of it.

I learn, I am humbled.  It is hard for a husband to imagine all his wife must endure.  We have laughed about its being like to a man building a boat in his drawing-room, never thinking how is he going to get it out to put to sea, but Sophie!  — truly it is not a laughing matter, is it.  As we walked together in the garden to hasten your earliest pangs and bring them on, your hand upon my arm, and the two of us stopping every few yards while another took hold of you — I can tell you this now — I was so filled with concern each time you leaned upon me, trying to catch your breath, that my stomach wished to rebel!  I almost lost my breakfast.  For sheer terror, Sophie, knowing all that must come before the day was out.

Well thank heavens now we have been blessed with the happiest of outcomes, I can tell you this.

My love what words are there to tell you of my feelings in beholding all you do, all you give?

When I waited downstairs, your cries filling the house, I wished instead I might only be going into battle.  There at least I know what to do with my self.  Oh do not think I wished not to be there — there is nowhere else on earth I should rather have been, except perhaps at your very side, although husbands are not welcome at such moments I know.  Only that I did not know how to bear it.

How do you? Bear it!?  How — do — you — Sophie?  Mary came to me now and then with news of your progress, that it must be a while yet.  Mavis sat with me a while but I could make no conversation and I think she could not bear to look at me, for each time she did so she looked away again and after a while excused herself.  God bless Mrs. Stroud, who kept me plied with coffee and tea, seeing I could stomach nothing else, and Stroud who was liberal in pouring the stimulants I did not ask him for, but one look at my white face told him were needed I suppose.

One day you will tell me of all you felt and underwent on the other side of that closed door.

I do not like to be shut out, Sophie, it half-kills me.

 

All I could do was hear your voice so unlike you and know it was I who had put you in this case.  All my old terrors for you rose up in my throat and almost choked me, as loud as you were, I could not speak at all.  Mary came to me again and told me it should not be long now and I could barely nod.  How much easier it is to stand upon my own quarterdeck and face a raking broadside where my feelings are engaged not at all, than to stand helpless by my own mantelpiece and hear the groans of my wife, I cannot tell you.

Before the end I did puke, I confess it.

 

And then — and then — oh my love — then — her first cry!  I thought at first yours, but my ears told me no, it had a different note, and then her voice rose and it was a full baby’s wail just as I recall from Pellie’s early days and I fell to my knees beside the grate.  And then Mary came to me once more and raised me up and told me to come and see you.

How can I tell you what the sight of your face did to me?  If I covered all this side of the page with your name alone, would that express it?  No;  hardly.  So drained as you were, so pale, so exhausted, your eyelids fluttering till you caught sight of me in the doorway and held out your hand.

And then Harriet.  Now I weep freely, here at my desk Sophie, I am not ashamed to tell you even, just as I did then.  Harriet.  The most beautiful sight I have ever beheld.  Our new-born child.  I am not a man to show his feelings but I could not help breaking-down then, for all the years I have believed tears to be a woman’s weakness.  Since first I allowed it in your arms, I find them ever more ready to come to me.  Let me not be ashamed of them.  Harriet — placed in my arms still wet from your body, the wrapping around her a little pink and bloody still — so new — so fresh — so sweet — and they gave her to me, to give to you — as I had once already — Sophie I want to write ‘my love’ to you but I find that to call you ‘my wife’ feels more sacred still.  This miracle, that in a moment of love we could make a life together.  I could not even hide my face as I wept, because she was in my arms.

Well I wished to stay by your side, but they hurried me away so soon after, when the pangs came on you again for the delivery of the afterbirth — yes my love, I do know these things, I had made poor Johnson tell me all the gruesome details all over again and not let him leave till I was fully acquainted with each thing that must be — and they did not allow me back till I had had several more glasses of brandy and recovered my self a little.  You were half-sleeping, I do not think you remember that I sat beside you all that while.  So exhausted from it all.  Mary tiptoed to bring me Harriet, washed clean now and wrapped freshly in a pretty shawl, as tired as her darling mother after such an ordeal.

My poor heart, bound by such chains now to these women so beloved I do not know what to do with myself when I even think upon it.  The perfection of her tiny face.  The little pink mark under her chin.  Delivered out of your body where I had planted her and now come into my arms.

Well it does not do for a captain to sob at his desk, who knows who might come seeking me for some thing or another and be shocked to find me tearstained and sniveling.  Let me compose my self.

There, that is better.  I have blown my nose and splashed water upon my face.  You do that, do you not?  I have seen you when you thought I was asleep, and you have risen from bed, when I am to leave you. You will never know the extent of all I learn from you, even to this.

 

Do you know, I believe if we lived at each others’ sides I should probably never tell you the half of this.  But here so far from you it pleases me more than any thing else to sit at my desk and draw up a fresh wide sheet of paper and tell you all that is in my heart.  It is the way I keep you beside me, near and close and alive in my thoughts.  And I know how deeply I delight in hearing your tales of all that you do and even more all that you think and feel, so I try to offer you no less.  At first – do you recall – how rusty a lover I felt – and as halting on paper!  How dearly I remember trying to express to you for the very first time all that you had become to me, as creaky and unused as I was to expressing anything of the kind.  How hard it was then to reach for the words, how I stumbled between my shock at our love-making and all else I felt, so impossible to tell. So stunned by all of it, so beside myself at the reawakening of my physical self.  My heart so full, so dumbfounded by you. And how you accepted my body’s speaking, instead, knowing what I meant by it.  I well remember writing “I love you” so bold for the first time.  Wondering how I could not have said it to you, any of the times I came into your arms, that blessed night!  I stared at the words upon the page for a long time after I had written them.  Wondering, now they lay before me so simple and so true, why it had taken me so long to dare to say them?  But since then thank God you have opened me up and let in the daylight my dear, I will have no secrets from you, we are entirely privy to each other which is the greatest gift of all.  I only hope dear Mavis will have as much with her Oliver, when finally they may belong to one another altogether.  One must build it, it does not come all at once.

So — here we are — husband and wife and parents of two beautiful children — and I thought you should like to get this little account, from the other side of the door!

You have never told me all that it is like, for you.  I think you fear I could not bear it.  Perhaps one day you will?  I ask it sincerely, Sophie, I would know all.

I hope to send letters with one of the frigates who is Portsmouth-bound tomorrow, so I shall take up the rest of my thoughts again upon a fresh beginning and close here so I may seal it in readiness for you.  Although there is as ever so much more to say.

You are my beloved and I thank god for you with each breath.  And for our son and now for our daughter too.  I must practice writing her name, Harriet, Harriet, Harriet — it comes more joyfully each time.  How shall I take leave of you, for now?  Always at the end of a letter, the same question.  Not wishing to do so.  Wanting to be both truthful and fresh, never stale, never penning the same-old endearments as if by rote.  I wish you to feel the full force of my love here, Sophie.  So —  as I did that morning, three days ago, then:  still thrilling from your blessed touch upon me, so generously, my wife who will not let me leave her side unsatisfied — your milk sweet in my mouth, your eyes sparkling and mine also.  Knowing myself more than ever most irrevocably and forever your own Edward.

 

 

********************

January, 1809

My darling Edward,

So you are a man who does not readily show his feelings, are you?  I am glad to hear it.  Heaven forbid you should be as transparent upon your quarterdeck as you make yourself to me, my love.  For which I thank God every day.

There cannot be a woman in the world as blessed as I, not now, not ever.  Ysolde?  Heloise?  Cleopatra?  Nicolette?  Cressida?  Penelope?  Helen?  No — they may have been famous for their great loves, but they none of them had you.

I am smiling as I write this, but I wept to receive your dear letter, with all that you thought and felt upon that blessed day.

 

You ask me, how is it for me, and tell me you can stand to hear it.  Can you?  Well, let us see if you can.  Here:  I shall withhold nothing, then, at your request.

 

It is terrifying.  There is no other sensation like it.  It has all the inevitability of a fit of coughing or a contraction of the bowels, that cannot be resisted, except that it is not single but continues for hour upon hour.  There is no escaping it.  It is like being upon a galloping horse that is running away with you.  And there will be no end to it until you have passed through the direst agony.  It must build and you are helpless before it.  You try to catch your breath in-between and at first you can and then you cannot.  You try not to scream and at first you can and then you cannot do that either.  The sound of your own voice terrifies you, so hoarse, so helpless.  You try freshly to contain it between gritted teeth and it comes out a growl like some animal.  You feel like an animal — indeed, in all truth, you are but an animal, with all the travail upon you God gave to Eve when He cast her out of Eden. 

You would faint but it is too sharp so you cannot escape it.  You think of all that is dear to you and fear to lose it.  You wonder how you survived the last time, now it is freshly come upon you again, knowing you had forgotten in between how very sharp it is, or else you never should have been able to face it again.  Your womb is a thing with its own life and it seems all set to kill you with its force.  It takes what it needs and leaves you nothing, no strength to bear it, but you must.  And still it goes on.  It has taken you but a minute to read this, as sick as you may feel now — think of it for hour upon hour. Are you terrified yet?  Are you exhausted yet?  Are you all done and beside yourself yet?  Do you have no more in you?  Well, then, you must go on;  I am sorry;  there is no help for it, and you are but half-way there.

Well I will spare you the next hours.  Or you would puke again, if you could truly know it.  And I do not want you to throw up all over your uniform, my letter in your hand, my love.  So we are come to the delivery.  Are you tired?  Well, this child will not see the world unless you expel it.  It will not come by itself.  You are all alone.  No-one can help you.  Your husband who so passionately put it there may be wringing his hands now but it is all yours to deal with.  The midwife or the doctor may lay their hands on you but all the work is yours.  And you know that you cannot fail in it.  There is no allowance for failure, here, the price is your life and the child’s.  And so you do what you must, not knowing how you may. It moves down the birth passage, every inch of its progress at the expense of all you have, and you are stretched to splitting, or so it feels.  How can it pass?  How can it not?  Will you survive it?  You do not know – you hope so – you scarcely can believe you will.  And the pangs are so forcible now that you are a child’s rag-dolly in the jaws of a bull-mastiff.  You think you cannot. 

But you do;  and then it is born all of a sudden and you are mother to this separate creature that is still bound to your womb and your soul with a twisting cord.  So quickly, the transition from travail to holding it.  A minute, in the end.  Although you felt as if your guts were being wound out of you upon a wheel a moment before, like the early Christian martyrs, they must follow the little body for sure as it is pulled from you.

But there it is.  And you have survived this hurricane and are safe to port.  Or so I imagine, would be the closest you could know of it.  Topsails shredded, tiller half-torn-away, crew half-dead and fainting.

 

And in your heart is such thanks to God for your survival and for the gift of it that you could faint from that alone.  You look at the new life, its eyes as big and round as its papa’s when he puts his mouth where its own now belongs.  And you ask yourself how you ever stood it;  promise yourself, it will be the last time you ask such a thing of yourself;  until it is over, has been so a week or two;  the baby so beautiful, your husband’s eyes so shining, and you cannot wait till he may come to you again, knowing full well that the next time he comes to your embrace you will pull him to you as if you had crossed the desert and the ocean both, just to hold him again and feel him spill into you.

 

Well Edward, do you still wish you had asked me?

 

I wonder if I should have told you now, for fear you will hold back from me next time we meet.  God forbid you should ever do so, Edward.  I am strong and each child we are blessed to have brings us a fresh fountain of grace and joy. I can stand it perfectly, I only give you these thoughts and fears in the moment so you will know how it is “on the other side of the door.”   My whole perspective when it is not actually upon me is quite different. I was born for this, it is the purest end my body was made for:  to hold you, my husband — to enfold you, to create new life, to nurture it, to deliver it up.  We are the vessels that bring forth the future.  And the future has a name:  Edward-Pellie — and now, Harriet.  Thanks be to God.

 

Harriet grows each day. She kicks and gurgles and blows bubbles and looks at me with your eyes which I cannot resist.  She smiles early, it is a true smile I am sure of it.  Pellie is very proud and tries so very hard to sit still long enough to hold her without fidgeting.  Three years is young but he says her name, Hay-et, Hay-et, Pellie wants to hold Hay-et.  Then when he has got her he does not know what to do with her.   You would laugh to see him.  He asks me often when she will be big enough to play.  Soon, darling, I tell him, in a little while.  He takes up the rattle and tickles her toes and she laughs at him.  Look, mama, Hay-et smiled at me!  I made Hay-et smile just for me, all by myself!  Yes, Pellie, so you did, I tell him, how fortunate she is to have you for a brother!  Then he glows just like you before he stamps off to get into mischief where I cannot see him.  Just like you.

 

Now I have put my hand to my mouth at that thought.  May god keep you safe my darling.  You once told me that was the first time you dared to believe that I cared for you, the day you came to me in the rain and I said so.  That your safety was a matter of such importance to me.  And if it was then, my darling, perhaps you can imagine how I feel upon the subject now. Come home to us when you may, Edward, I shall not mind how long it is so long as you do.

Let me close here and begin another letter tomorrow, this one is too heavy with feeling and travail!  I kiss you, sweetheart.  Barely able to wait until you shall come home once more to all of me, to claim all that I am to you, all that you are to me, I am so very blessed to be Your Wife.

 

********************

 

         Harriet grew to have her brother’s fortitude, but without his obstinacy (a legacy from her father she missed, then, but made up for it with a double dose of his great goodness).  She also shared a natural grace with her mother, but not quite as much of Sophie’s gentleness:  she was unafraid to say what she wanted, and in this, again, she resembled her father much.

And her smile was all her own, simpler and sweeter than any of theirs, for having known no pain in her little life whatsoever, not a whit:  her brother Pellie had one too, as carefree, but more mischievous — hers was nothing but sunlight.  She could twist Mr. Stroud round her little finger with it; and did, regularly.

 

         As for her father, he had doubted if there could be room in his heart for any more feeling, on top of all he bore for his wife and his stepdaughter and his little swaggering son;  but he found that there was, infinitely so;  and that it almost hurt him to contemplate it.  At sea, he found, he had to put it away into a secret compartment and not think of it too much, or else he would grow misty-eyed and tender and lose the bark and bite essential to the performance of his duty.  It touched him particularly, to think that the two occasions in his adult life upon which he had wept had been like bookends, once at her beginning, and again at her birth:  he thought of her not simply as Harriet, but as his Harriet.

 

He had finally persuaded Lord Nelson that the knight’s task for which His Lordship had plucked him up was now accomplished, and that the admiral should set him down again upon this new board to do what knights do best:  jump unexpectedly, now that there was no more fear of a whole fleet-action for a while, and make himself most useful and deadly by surprise, which it was harder to do with the entire fleet trailing behind him like a wedding-dress, God only knew!

         Some thought it a demotion, but when he got his Indy  back there was no happier man anywhere upon the oceans than Sir Edward.

         And so he did just that, then, moving swiftly and unpredictably according to the latest intelligence, which made it hard for letters to reach him:  and coming-home all unannounced, now and then, to throw the household into turmoil even as he lay at its still center with his face upon his wife’s breast and slept off the sharpest joy of his return.

 

         He loved all of his children, the one that was not his by blood no less since she had ‘found’ him;  but each one differently.  For Pellie he felt a swelling pride and (he must admit) ambition, for the lad to rise and do well in the Navy, or at least he hoped for it.  He chastised him firmly (but with his tongue only), when he was home, for his mischievous ways.  He wrote him many letters, as he grew older, hoping thus to influence him from day to day even while he must be absent — to school him in the ways of duty, and what was right, even as his mother taught their son the lessons of love he had learned so well himself at her hands. He often feared his counsel fell upon deaf ears, but he could not help giving it anyway.

 

         Mavis he stood back and admired, did his best to guide her as she weathered the storms of her growing-up, knowing as he did so that all too soon the nearest male hands in her life would not be his. Thankfully, his trust in the man whose hands they were to be was unshakeable; nor was he disappointed. 

 

***************

 

1812

 

Pelham stood upon the quarterdeck with his hands clasped behind his back and a look of satisfaction on his face.  They had steered a devilish tricky passage through some dangerous storms and shoals, and brought her through:  nor was it his ship he was thinking of.

Not yet facing Hastings, he addressed him, gruffly as was his wont on deck.  “Well now, Hastings — a pretty sight, hm?  Spithead?”

         Hastings had not normally thought the low headland and its grey Solent waters especially charming, but on this occasion he thought he knew what the Captain was driving-at, so he remained equally impassive, on the exterior at least, and played along.  Pelham did so enjoy his games of cat-and-mouse, and Hastings was not about to deprive him of this one.   “Indeed, sir.”

         “Let me see — what birthday did that daughter of mine just have?  Seventeen?  Dear me, how the years fly by!”  Pelham had adopted a breezy, conversational tone.

“Eighteen, sir,” Hastings said matter-of-factly, knowing full well that Edward knew as well as he did.

 

An expression of twinkling mirth appeared upon the captain’s profile then, still turned out to sea.  “Hm.  Hm!  Is she!”

“Yes, sir, last February.  You wrote to her, sir, I am sure you did.”

“Oh, I imagine I did.”  Pelham allowed the smile to spread from his eyes to his cheeks, although the corners of his mouth remained firmly turned-down.  “Expect you’ll be pleased to be home, then, Mr. Hastings — hm? Hm!”

The understatement caught Hastings off-guard even though he was expecting something of the kind, and he swallowed, felt the emotion flood his face.  As he did so he  noticed Pelham was blinking.  A good deal.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “I’m sure you’re right.”

 

Pelham turned to face him, then: and with it revealed the full force of his feelings.  “None better than you, sir — I always said that — hoped to God she wouldn’t ruin it —  thank heavens, she didn’t — nor you — can’t have been easy — by God, no! — but I think you’ll find she was worth the waiting-for, sir;  I do — and none better — none better, indeed — they don’t come any better than you, sir!”  - and he extended his hand to his soon-to-be son-in-law.  They shook, a very hard clasp indeed, and a long one:  no further words being necessary between them.

Off Spithead a drizzle started, as they dropped anchor.

 

Mavis was waiting on the shore.  They were expected:  and her little bring-’em-near glass had done its job once again – the Indy’s masts were instantly recognizable to the eyes of true devotion, and her ship’s boat pulling towards Portchester unmistakeable.  The tide was in and Hastings stepped right onto the sea-path.  He took her in his arms and kissed her, kissed her again and again and again, licitly now and for all the world to know.  At first, with the drizzle she had been standing in,  she felt damp and wraith-like in his arms — till he held her more closely still, breathing hard, and she likewise.  The warmth of her body came through the cold wet clothing then, her solidity, her passion; and he kissed her yet again.

 

Pelham waited a full minute to get out of the boat after Hastings, busying himself with his satchel of papers, although they were (naturally) in perfect order.

“Hm,” he murmured as he eventually stepped ashore, “Hm.  Still at it!  Good Lord.  Heaven help us!” — and cleared his throat loudly.

They looked at him, from each others’ arms.  “Well then, come along,” he barked — “—do you want to stand out here in the rain all day?  For I don’t!”

 

The men at the sweeps looked on with a very great deal of pleasure themselves  then, as their captain put his arm around his daughter’s other shoulder and the little group walked slowly homewards, the three of them together,  Sir Edward’s cloak flapping in the sea-breeze to reveal its crimson innards.

 

********************

 

His Harriet was four years old when he took her on his knee to see her sister make her vows.

 

         Harriet — his Harriet.  The child of his tears, and of his greatest joy.  Her light brown hair curled softly round her little face, and she ran to him first always, even when he had not been home in months.  He brought her shells, and bright silk shawls, and ivory balls carved within balls,  impossibly layered;   he saved her all manner of strange nuts, and lumps of amethyst bigger than his fist, and empty ostrich-eggs;  he brought her his heart, every time, and she clutched at it all and smiled.

 

         Sophie knew she had never had such a rival for his affections, not even Pellie;  and had rivalry been the issue she might have felt jealous. But she knew that it was she who had given Harriet to him — and he to her;   she felt the miraculousness of this, and knew with her wise heart that in loving Harriet as he did, he only loved her mother more.

 

         When he dropped to one knee in the hallway, but half way into the house after a months’-long absence, and began to help her pile up the wooden blocks again so that she could knock them down — without even a thought, for almost half-an-hour, of coming ‘fully home’ — and let her knock his hat off his head, into the bargain, his sacred hat, in peals of giggles — Sophie saw all the child meant to him, and her heart swelled:  and then she called Pellie in from the garden, where he was doubtless up to no good if she had taken her eye off him for all this time;  and then she prayed.  She could not have said why she did so:  only that these moments were too rare, too piercing, to be endured otherwise.

        

****************

         The money flowed, of course, and Sophie had few cares in the world now, except to wonder how Mavis was bearing the separation from her new husband.  He had promised that he would take her to sea with him, when he had his own command:   but so far no captaincy had come along, although God knows Pelham had put him forward often enough. 

 

         “I didn’t understand, before,”  Mavis said, staring at the wall, the first time Oliver had left her after their wedding and honeymoon.  “I am sorry, mama, for the times I wanted you, and you were busy with papa, and I was jealous — I didn’t know!”

         “But you do now, then,” said Sophie, “and for that I am very, very glad, my darling — I couldn’t want anything more for you, in your marriage, than to have — that.”

         “Oh, mama!” said Mavis, and burst into tears.  “He is so — so — dear — so — vulnerable — so— so — everything!”

         “I know,” said her mother.  “That is how men are, my sweet.”

 

         Mavis dried her tears.  “Mama,” she whispered, “did you — like it — at first?”

         “Well, darling,” said her mother, “my experience was quite different from yours!”

         “I thought I should die from wanting to be his wife,” said Mavis, “and then I was, and it was over so quickly, and — it did hurt! — and he was so upset, that it did —”

         “But you were happy,” said Sophie.

         “Oh, yes!” cried Mavis, “and more than ever, the more I found — how very much it meant to him, and that I — I liked it too… then…oh! Mama, by the time he had to leave, I — I — ”

          “Well, then,” said her mother.  “Be happier still, that you have never known it any other way than that, to give yourself joyfully.”

         “Papa is so wise, he knows us so well,” said Mavis then.  “My father was a loathsome man, wasn’t he?  How were you forced into it?  I wouldn’t, not for anything — anything in the world — I would kill myself, first!”

         “Well, love,” said Sophie, hurt, “there were circumstances — I had no income, no protector, no home — and I did not wish to kill myself then, although — I did, later.  But I had you, then, and so I could not.”

         Mavis saw how much her thoughtless judgements had wounded her mother, who had only ever done the very best that she could, in circumstances beyond anything Mavis had had to face.  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Let me think first and speak after, one day!”

         “Then you would not be you,” said Sophie, through her own tears.  “What do you mean about papa?”  she asked, when she had blown her nose.

“Why, in the letter that he wrote to us before our wedding, and he spoke of — oh, just such things, and more — he told us — how it is to be married, what we may expect, what we fear, that we should not be ashamed, what we receive when we give —— ”

 

Sophie looked at her sideways.  “What!?”

Mavis looked as surprised as she did.  “Did he not show it to you, Mama?  I thought he sought your confidence in all things!”

“He does, usually,” said Sophie, “but he must have wished to speak to you from his own heart, and not confuse it with anyone else’s thoughts.  How very lovely, that he did so!”

Mavis looked at her Mama, whose light was the subject of every line of her father’s letter, almost.  “He loves you so, Mama,”  she said softly.  “Wait — look — ”

“I should not — it was meant for you, surely — ” called Sophie after her.  But Mavis had fetched it already from the very top of her press where it met her eyes each morning before she dressed, and reminded her of the twin blessings of her father’s love and of her marriage.  She came into the room with it already unfolded, held it out to her mother.  

Sophie blinked freshly.  “If you’re sure you don’t mind —”

“I want you to read it, Mama.  You must.” 

 It moved her before she even began,   just to see with what care he had written.  His hand was especially neat and flowed across each page with a grace that spoke of deep joy and contentment in the writer:

Upon your Wedding Eve

My dear son Oliver, my dearest daughter Mavis – perhaps you will allow me to call you, for this one occasion, my dear children –

I had thought at first to speak with each of you in turn, in anticipation of your marriage – but I find that it is sometimes easier to open my heart fully in a letter, and also then you will have something lasting from me to look upon, not the memory of a conversation only – and again, at first then I thought of writing to each of you separately, but I find that I prefer to address you both together, now that you are embarking upon this journey together that is the dearest and closest any one may travel in this life. There is nothing I have to say to one of you that I do not wish for the other also to consider.

 

You must know first of all of the depth of my regard and love for you both.  I have had care of the two of you now in very different capacities these many years and my heart overflows to hand you into each others’ keeping.

I know well that you share a regard and an esteem for one another which must make this a sacred trust in each of your hearts, as I know well also how patiently you have both waited for this, its fulfillment in this present fullness of time. It has cost each of you much to do so, in your own way, and I acknowledge the  care you have had for each other and for all of us in that time so it should come to this honourable and most wished-for end.  As I know also that it has been very far from easy, as passionately as you both have felt for each other.  And do not think because I am your father that I am too old to know the force of such a passion.  Indeed, it is my greatest wish for you that it will bring you even a portion of the joy which the love your mother and I share has brought to me.  And trust me when I tell you I do fully know its strength and all you have had to withstand, my dears, to come here in honour.

Let me tell you only what I wish I had known when first I entered into the married state, then, since we must all find our own way, and yet I would counsel you a little even as I congratulate you with all my heart.

 

First and foremost my dearest children do not ever conceal or withhold anything one from the other.  You must know how I value the truth, we have each upon occasion had need to speak of it, and it will serve you now as no other tool may ever do in the tending and care and nurture of your marriage and all you hope to have and be together.  Use it wisely, use it well, use it often.  Which I might also say of your physical care of each other, if I might be so bold as to speak of that at all – again, perhaps something which is more easily done in a letter.  Do not withhold yourselves out of pride or hurt or for any reason one from the other.  Let there always be healing and solace and joy in your embrace and never obligation.  Speak kind words freely and harsh ones only after the hardest consideration, if ever.  Unkind ones, never.  Expect nothing and give everything and you will receive a gift that is beyond measure.  Look into your hearts each time and know why it is you come together, and do not stint to show your thanks each for the other.  There will be times of hurt and misunderstanding as well as separations, which are so very hard, and even dangers and difficulties.  Truth is your staff at all times here.  Do not ever part with angry words, but stay until the hurt is mended.  Do not ever, ever, ever take each other for granted.

 

Oliver, have a care for Mavis in all her womanhood and be careful with her when she is tender and fragile.  Mavis, you have a duty to tell Oliver when this is so and to make your state known to him, do not expect him to guess, he is a man and we do not do so well at that.  Mavis, know that a man does not always know how to say all that is in his heart and that he may often use his body to try to express it.  Read these unspoken words, never think they are less than all your husband’s heart at these times.  Oliver, know that what your wife needs from you in your person, in your care of her, in your duty to cherish her, will take much time and patience and love to learn.  Do not expect to know it all at once and allow yourselves much joy in the discovery of it.   Mavis, be patient with him while he fathoms all your ways.  Tears may be a gift, and there is no hurt we may not learn from.  There is a mystery at the heart of a man and a woman and a marriage that we may never presume to have uncovered fully.  All we can bring is our willingness, our humility, our care and love for one another. 

Mavis darling, you do not know as much as you think you do, in some ways, wise as you are in others.  Learn my dear and be willing to admit your mistakes.  Not to learn from them is the only true mistake.  Allow yourself to be guided by Oliver, who is fully a man and has been so these many years with a wider experience than you of the world.  He may be trusted with all that you are and I do not say this lightly.

 

There is a word in the marriage service which I have come to believe holds the key to all, and I myself learn the truth of it more fully with each year that passes in my own marriage.  It is ‘reverently’.  Have a reverence for each other and all else will follow.  Should you lose sight of it, nothing else will be right with you.  To find it, to feel it, remember God made you as you are and you must first accept all of it without fear or shame before you can make a gift of it to your spouse, to whom this all rightly belongs.  Which you are called upon to do in your vows.  Do this in holiness as a sacred trust and you can not then fail.  I spent half my life mistrusting my own nature before I met your mother.  I thought harshly of my self.  You are young and you have your lives ahead of you, and each other, so you will not make that mistake I hope.

  Do not be afraid to be your self.  Trust that it is enough, just as you are.  Let there be no shame between you my dearest children, not for any thing.  And so there will be nothing of which you may not speak — as you must.  Oh and I beg you, speak truly.  Never say what you do not mean or offer what you do not truly wish to give in fear of the other’s disappointment or disapproval.  Hurts have a way of growing from such harmless-seeming little deceptions.  Deception is the only betrayal.  Here I count self-deception also.  Instead, forgive as freely as you will need to be forgiven — and be assured that you will need it.  I know that I do.

I am sure you already know or suspect much of what I have told you, but some of it may unfold only over time, and perhaps you will look back years from now and think, ah that is what he meant –––––  and whether you know all of this or not, it pleases my heart to tell it to you, as dearly as I hold you both and so heartfelt are my wishes for your mutual happiness.  Mavis, Oliver, you have stayed a very difficult course and you deserve the prize you are to receive tomorrow.  Even though I expected no less, knowing you both as I do.

 

And so be true, be truthful, be joyful, be careful each of the other and know that you are both most dearly and tenderly and warmly and proudly beloved of your most affectionate father, Edward Pelham.

 

Mavis looked at her with shining eyes.  “It is the most beautiful thing anyone could ever have written,” she said, “ — is it not?”

For answer Sophie held it out, covering her face with her other hand, and wept freshly;  but not in pain, this time.  Mavis took the treasured sheets back, set it carefully upon the bureau, and then came to sit on the floor by her mother’s knee;  put her arms about Sophie’s waist;  rested her head upon her lap.  “I only pray to be so blessed, Mama,”  she whispered.

“As I do for you, my darling,”  replied her mother, unsteadily.

“Come, Mama, what a pair we are!  Dry your eyes, quickly  — I hear Harriet!”

 

         And indeed Harriet ran into the room then, with her dollie pressed against her breast.  It was her best dollie, that papa had sent her for her birthday, though heaven knows how he found a dollie to send her, out there at sea with only Mother Carey’s Chickens to keep him company — but papa could do anything!  Even send to London for a special dollie, when he was at sea.  (Had Emma Hamilton had anything to do with it?  Mavis suspected that she had.)  Its name was Edwina, for him, of course.  The jointed wooden arms and legs moved so cleverly, and the face was delicately carved and painted, with wide staring blue glass eyes.  Edwina had a bilberry velvet walking-dress, and a white rabbit-skin pelisse and muff.

 

         Mavis had had little time for dolls, but she knew how dearly Harriet loved this one.  She dropped to one knee, tall as she was, to greet her little sister.  “Shall I help you make those dresses for her?” she asked, “now that I have time again?”

         “And a hat,” said Harriet, “and shoes — leather ones — like the one that Pellie lost.”

         “No,” said Mavis staunchly, “they’ll be even better than those!”  She turned to her mother:  “Mama,” she said, “do you have an old kid glove —?”

 

        

*******************

        

And that was the happy time that Sophie remembered, afterwards:  all three of them sitting together and making, doing, so companionably — talking about Oliver, and papa, and telling stories — before Pellie’s ball was heard coming through the scullery-window;  although even that seemed happy, in memory.   After all, as Mary reminded her, his father had achieved the shattering of an entire orangery at a similar age, so Pellie must have a few panes of glass due him for free, yet.

 

******************

 September 10th, 1812

HilFold House, Porchester

Dear papa,

It is Sunday so I am riting you my leter.

I am in disgrase this week for braking the big windo in the droring room.  Last week it was the skullery.  My trebuchet works very wel. The marble had an ekselent trajectry but its parabola was to high and I had not shut the dor from the hal.  I shuld have don it outside but it was raning.  Next time I will bring it down a noch.  Wen mama gives it back.  Mister Strowd seys he better lay in a job lot of puty this tim.  In the meantime I am bilding a mangonel.

I am reding the book you sent me.  It is hard.  I like knights histry better than the Romins.  But you sent it so I am tryeing.

Je parle fransay avec ma tant.  Can you understand that?

Next time wen you are home I hop you will talck to mama about a sailbote for me.  I am eaght almost and that is old enufgh.  I promis I wont take Hariet out just my self.  I do very wel in the rowbote Mister strowd seys so.  I sculd it myself all the way past home to the Seagate.  But I coud go ferther with a sale.

I am to have a new sute of cloths becose I have grone.  Mama favers grene but I want blue like you.

Now it is tim to stop riting I have rote to you for harf an our. 

Your dutiful son Pelly.

****

DER PAPPA I MIS YOU.  MAMA HAS A BLISTR.  I DRORD A GOTE.  AND A JIRAF.  DID YOU EVER SE  A JIRAF PAPPA?  WIL YOU TAK ME TO SE  WON?  MAVIS MAD NUW SHOOS FOR EDWEENA.  WITH BUTINS EVIN.  HAV YOU STIL GOT MY EEGUL?  MAMA IS RESSTING.  I CAN RIT TOO YOU BY MI SELF.  O HELP  I HAV GOT INK ON MY DRES.  DONNT TEL  MAMA.  I WILL ASK MISIS STOWD.  PAPPA AR YOU WEL?  DID YOR COFF GO AWA?  AR YOU WARING YOR CLOK?  WOT HAV YOU GOT FOR ME PAPPA?  I LIK THE THINS YOU BRING BEST OF ALL.   MY SHELS AND ROKS. AND THE PECOK FETHA. AND THE SHIP PIN. AND THE NARWALL TUSCK.  AND THE CRAVING ON THE WOLRIS TOTH.  PAPPA  I LOVE YOU ALLWAYS CUM HOM SUN.  I SEND YOU MY LOVE AND MY DUTY FROM HARRIET

****

November 30th, 1812

Plymouth

My dear son,

I observe with no small amusement that among the few words you spelled correctly in your letter to me were the hardest:  namely, trebuchet, parabola, and – almost – trajectory.  I imagine it is because you have been reading about these with more enthusiasm than you have found to devote to your studies of ancient history, and doubtless they are closer to your heart.  It was most kind in you to spend fully half an hour out of your day packed with mischief to write to me and tell me of all your adventures and ambitions.  Are not Sundays devoted to quiet and good works?  Do you have any larger ambitions in the naval field than to sail a skiff, may I ask?  Yes it is quite true, one can indeed go much farther with a sail.  Further still, with several.  We ran off almost two hundred sea-miles yesterday between noon and noon.  You may well dream of such distances as you tack about the harbour.  I shall not permit you to have a boat until I am convinced that you can swim.  Then you may ask my permission and we shall see. 

My good friend Captain Timothy has agreed to carry your name on his books next year, and so we shall get you a good start in the navy without your having to neglect your studies.  Do not waste your time when you should be improving yourself, Pellie, there will be no opportunity to make up for it later and a captain who cannot write nor spell makes a pretty poor fellow.

You might wish to keep a record of the distances attained by your trebuchet at different elevations and with marbles of differing weights.  I think you will find the results to be most instructive.  I understand from mamma that you built it almost entirely by yourself, and I must tell you that even while breaking windows is a sorry thing, I had far rather you busied yourself with such valuable engineering than wasted time in fishing or larking about, birds-nesting or squirrel-hunting.  There is much to be learned from such application to science.  You will find this to be the very essence of gunnery and indeed of all artillery from that day to this, the science of projectiles.  Such a study and understanding will set you apart from those who come to the subject pitifully inexperienced and needing to learn all from scratch, even to earning you more rapid advancement.   I am pleased to hear of it.

 

On a more regrettable subject, Mamma also mentioned to me that you had taken her much aback with a piece of rudeness to Stroud, and sought to excuse it by saying that he was our servant.  Pellie, I am disappointed in you I must confess.  Much as it pains me to reprimand you by letter, this kind of high-handed arrogance is so thoroughly to be deplored that had I heard it with my own ears I should have upset your mamma further by wishing to take a switch to you — a thing I have never done.   Son, you must know that those who serve us can not answer for themselves when they are addressed with less than courtesy.  A gentleman will never treat any man or woman with anything less than perfect respect. Those in a subordinate position are due even more of your consideration by the very fact of their inability to speak to you with equal familiarity in return.  I hope this was but a moment of bad judgement, and that you are heartily sorry for it.  The man you insulted is worth ten of any snivelling seven-year-old child, whether my heir or no, and wears a hero’s badge to prove it.  He has given his limb in the service of his country and he has served me personally long and faithfully, both aboard ship and lately ashore.  I count him as one of my most trusted colleagues in the task before me of bringing-up my family and keeping the running of our home smooth during my long absences.  I hold him in very high esteem and hope that one day you will be the man he is.  He bears much responsibility and the thought that you should have insulted him galls me bitterly.  We owe him every courtesy.  If we do not value those who serve under us, my son, we are not worthy to be valued any more ourselves — indeed, far less even.  Never forget this.  You, in particular, if he is to be so cheerfully repairing the damage you have caused on top of all his other services to you!

When next you write to me, I hope to hear what amends you have considered making, and have made.  Learn from this.

 

Well, let us not end on such a sorry note.  Non, je ne parle pas fransay, not then, not now, as your tante will doubtless tell you.  She despaired of me!  I left my studies to put to sea at quite a young age, as you are aware, and French was not a subject I ever cared for, preferring ordinance and mathematics.

I am pleased to hear that you have grown.  When I next come home, we shall make a new mark upon the scullery-wall.  While I am flattered you should wish to emulate me in the sartorial line – that is to say, wear blue – I should prefer that you defer to your mamma’s wishes.  I well know that she is not an overbearing parent, and to submit to her authority now and again is no bad thing for you to learn to do with grace, Pellie.  It will stand you in good stead for the future.

Now mind her at all times then, and keep your conduct this side of that definition of wild which we discussed upon my last visit home — mind your manners, endeavour to remember you are learning to become a gentleman and an officer, and see that your will is purposely bent upon such improvements as are needed so that you shall always be, as you are, the pride of your affectionate Father.

****

November 30th, 1812

Plymouth

Harriet my sweeting,

Your letter made me so very happy.  I see your mamma’s loving heart in you and all your care for all of us and I am very very proud of my little maid for writing so well and so long all by herself.

Let me answer all your questions my darling.  No, I am sad to say I have lived this long and never yet seen a giraffe.  Although like you I have seen pictures.  What a sight they must be!  I HAVE  seen elephants, upon a few occasions – I beg your pardon little love, I must write simply so you can read it – I forgot my self – a few times.  How very big they are!  You scarce can think so bulky a thing can be alive.  They are grey and coarse with sparse hair sprouting from their tough hide and their ears are as big as your mamma’s parasol and they pick up things to eat with their trunk.  In India and Ceylon I have seen them working.  They push logs and carry men.  One day we shall get you a ride upon an elephant’s back.  And if a giraffe is to be seen we shall see that too. 

Save all your drawings for me, you know how I delight to see them.

Of course I have got your eagle, did I not tell you it should never leave my side?  It watches over my desk with its beady eye.  You made the beak and claws very well my love.  Mr. Hastings noted it at once and admired it, he said it was most life-like.

I am perfectly well and it is dear of you to ask.  I trust you are also.  When I think of you all at home and bend my thoughts to you there is no man in better case than I upon the seven seas.  My cough is quite gone. Yes, I wear my cloak when the weather calls for it, never fear.  What is this about mamma’s blister?  I hope it is all better now.  New shoes can be troublesome hurtful.  And I hope Mrs. Stroud was able to rescue you from the ink upon your frock.  But if you were in any trouble for getting it there, I pray you to tell mamma that you took it into your head to write to me even without help and she will forgive you at once, I am sure of it.

How kind of Mavis to make shoes for Edwina!  She has clever fingers, does she not.  Buttons, my goodness.  They must be no bigger than pease?

I am very pleased that you let mamma rest and did not bother her.  You are very considerate Harriet – that is to say kind of those you love.  You are growing to be a big girl who can do many things for herself, I can see!

What have I got for you?  A surprise!  I am pleased that you cherish the little gifts you have got from me.  I too thought the walrus-tooth especially fine, it was carved and decorated by one of my men as I told you and he has a very good eye for such things.  This is called SCRIMSHAW my darling, do you remember that tongue-twisting word we smiled over?  —  and it is a very ancient art that sailors do.

Yes I will come home soon my own little darling, as soon as ever I may, and you must know there is no greater treasure awaiting me there than your arms about my neck.  Give your mamma a warm and tender kiss and tell her I sent it through you, and then give her another just like it.  And one for your sister Mavis too, and finally for your dear aunt Mary, if that is not too much to ask of you!  I hope not.  I kiss you too and can not wait for yours.  Know that you are for ever the light and joy of every day to your loving Papa.

 

**********************

 

 

1813

 

It happened to be a Thursday.

Thursday’s child has far to go.

How far?

         Hastings waited for Pelham by the quayside, watching the slap and sparkle of the water on this sparkling late-March day.  He looked up with satisfaction at the row of French ships of all sizes lined up in the  harbour.  Three of the four had been taken by the Indomitable and her companion ships in the last few weeks.  They represented substantial prize money, and a boost to the morale of the men worth more than cash after months of stalemate and frustration.  They had finished a resoundingly successful cruise off the Spanish coast by taking a full-sized French man-o-war, a three-decker that outgunned the Indomitable and the smaller Ajax combined, but was unable to manoeuvre smartly enough to bring those guns to bear, while the British ships had kept after her like smaller birds mobbing a crow until she was crippled, dismasted, her captain decapitated and his crew, likewise, paralyzed. 

        

         Pelham’s handling of his beloved  Indomitable in the action had been nothing short of brilliant. Hastings had seen him decisive and cool under fire before, but in taking the Achille  Pelham had outdone himself: commanding the Indy’s movements himself, even to the details he customarily left to Mr. Cowles, he had brought her round again and again when a lesser sailor would have missed the moment and thus had to wear instead of changing tack smartly at the last possible second, or had too much or too little canvas spread to catch the fitful, freshening land breeze, or left himself too little sea-room and had to run before the wind away from the action to escape the rocky fangs of Punta Mondrago.   One day I hope to be half the captain he is, thought Hastings, as steel-blue swallows darted around him, some swooping even below the level of his feet to skim the water.

        

         He did not notice that the captain had rejoined him till he turned and saw Pelham standing behind him, hands clasped behind his back in his customary quarterdeck-stance, apparently ignoring his lieutenant.  He had not spoken.  A pair of swallows sliced right past his nose; and yet he did not move.  This was not a promising sign;  Pelham usually ignored his officers only when he was too angry to speak to them without betraying himself.  If there was anything Pelham could not abide – he had grown testier, more impatient with the years – it was to be kept waiting.  Hastings gulped, although not with the arrant fear he would have when he was Pelham’s most junior midshipman.  “Good Lord, sir, I’m sorry – have you been waiting there long, sir?” 

        

         Hastings braced himself for the reprimand – which did not come.  Instead Pelham turned a face of the most terrible blankness on him, and said, “I – I don’t think so.”   Five words, only – but vaguer than any Hastings had heard from his captain since he first came to serve under him, all those years ago. 

         Hastings was about to ask him if they should return to the ship, but was stopped by the way Pelham was holding himself.  On first impression he had been wrong about the captain’s pose, he saw now.  Normally it had the pent-up energy of a coiled spring, a tiger watching its prey.  Now there was nothing of the tiger about him;  he stood dull as an ox, blinking, staring out to sea with no expression.

        

         Christ!  Why did he not say anything?  Hastings held his breath. Oh, God, let it not be bad news — not from that family that now was his own, too —!  He held his breath in an agony of suspense at he waited to hear more.  What on earth could leave the captain looking as if he waited only to be felled by a merciful finishing blow?   

         “Captain Pelham — sir —— Edward — may I ask – what’s wrong, sir?” 

Pelham did not answer.  In his hand, Hastings saw,  was a folded letter.    

         “Sir – ?”

        

         Pelham continued staring out to sea.   His jaw trembled.  He looked at Hastings once, twice, as if he was going to speak, but could not;  looked back out to sea.  His face was a mask of suffering, the eyes narrow slits.

Hastings felt sick.

        

         I shall lift up my eyes unto the hills, he told himself, from whence cometh my help – but not for a sailor; the sea was the sailor’s comfort and joy, specially on a day like today where it stretched lapis and cerulean to a shimmering horizon. 

        

         But whatever had wounded Edward on this occasion would admit no refuge in the Mediterranean – or any other sea, he thought, not even the dark blue expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.  He had never seen his father-in-law so lifeless: the man stood like a gold-braided automaton beside Hastings, who waited for him to speak. The wait lasted what seemed like a very long time.  He thought he would vomit from the strain of it.  But if it had been Mavis, surely he would have said — wouldn’t he?  What, then?

Not Sophie, surely — wasn’t that her hand, upon the letter?

        

         At last Pelham spoke slowly, his words grating.  Hastings, used to his captain’s clipped precision, waited in a terrible suspense as these few fragments came, piecemeal and halting:  “See — for yourself — ” he said, holding out the poor letter, so slight as it was, for its dreadful task:  “It’s — it’s — Harriet.”

        

         The letter was not long:  Sophie could not bear to make it any longer, and Hastings could not bear to read it more than once.  Its contents were agony enough.  The child was dead, of a sudden — diphtheria — fully three months earlier.  She asked Pelham to come home, if he could be spared from his duty.

         Hastings winced;  dropped his head.  His heart broke, for all these people he loved so dearly.  He felt at a complete loss.  “I don’t know what to say, sir.  I – I am so sorry – ”

        

Pelham looked at him then, as if trying to understand his own words: “I – I – I never thought – it never occurred to me – always thought I should be the one –  hostage to fortune –   not Harriet!   Not my Harriet  ————”       

         “Sir —  ”   Hastings hesitated:  “Edward — ”

 

At the sound of his Christian name again, Pelham looked up.  His eyes were brimming:  he said nothing.  His throat worked.  Then he stared off.  He looked as if he were about to speak again, several times, and each time thought better of it. Whatever window into his soul had opened up in this moment of shared loss was shuttered again, locked fast and bolted, and wrapped in thorns.  Hastings might be his son-in-law;  but the captain was utterly alone, in this moment — and indefinitely, now.

 

Hastings flinched again.  Christ, what was there left to say?   To do?

Duty?

Duty.

That was always there, when nothing else was left. 

         “Shall we go back to the ship, sir?”

         “Might as well.” Pelham’s reply was so low that Hastings had to bend to catch it.

         “Yes, sir. I’ll call the boat around, sir.”

         “Thank — thank you, Oliver.”

        

         Pelham said not a word on the way back to his ship, except to direct the boat to the far side where he might climb aboard without the bo’sun’s whistle and a line of men saluting.  He shut himself in his cabin for a while, then reappeared and went about the frigate to inspect all the repairs and cleaning that had been effected since her arrival in port that morning. 

Hastings had already taken Mr. Wainwright aside with the news:  now it seemed, through that peculiar percolation by which news spreads throughout a ship, that the whole ship’s company knew.  They stared at the captain with grief in their eyes as he passed them, yet not meeting his gaze, any of them; knowing only that he had been dealt a terrible private blow, this very public man who could not escape their scrutiny, and wishing him the strength to bear it.  The bewildered expression on Pelham’s face as he walked around his ship reminded Hastings of a prizefighter who has been knocked-out, but refuses to accept the fact because he has not yet fallen down.

        

         His rounds complete, Edward returned once more to that pale-blue-panelled place of refuge and reflection; though how much it afforded him of either can only be imagined.  At least there, though, he was free of their mute and dogged sympathy – except that the ship seemed hushed; he knew they were quieter than usual, and wished for the hubbub they tried to spare him.

        

         Hastings’ heart ached.  He more than any of them knew all the captain’s family meant to him:  had witnessed through the years their joys and difficulties, sharing ever more closely in their fortunes as they drew him into the circle of their love.  No more the captain’s love than Sophie’s, he recognized now:  her guiding intelligence, that of the heart.  He had lived with them, slept with them, been cared-for at their hands:  was a son to them now in name as well as feeling.  And so his darling Mavis was bereft, also — he choked to think of her weeping, and he not there to hold her in this first great grief of her life.  And all this family he loved, shattered.

         Not Harriet!  She had been the dearest little girl:  he had hoped, one day, that he and Mavis might be so blessed ——   Harriet, he said, not knowing he did so:  Harriet.   Saw her crowing upon her papa’s shoulders, holding-on to his dark hair, her chin upon his head:  impossible to say whose eyes were more brightly lit.

 

         Hastings finished his watch, then found himself standing outside the door of Pelham’s cabin.  He had no idea at all what he was to say, but yet was unable to let his father-in-law and captain — and his friend — continue so, alone,  without whatever comfort he might try to bring him.  He feared it would be inadequate — knew it — but he must offer it nonetheless.      

         His first soft knock went unanswered.  He tried once more, less timidly, and was rewarded by the familiar “Come!” in a voice only a little wearier than he was used to hear.

        

Pelham was sitting at his desk.  A drawer of the escritoire was open.  Hastings recognized the stack of papers in it:  old casualty lists. Some would have been in his own handwriting, from actions over the last couple of years.  Sophie’s little Gibraltar sketchbook lay open on top of them, to a watercolour of a garden filled with flowers.  On the opposite page a crude pencil drawing of a cannon was flanked by piles of cannonballs stacked up in pyramids of four, and a signal-hoist; Hastings could not help reading it automatically, upside-down: m-a-v-i-s, of course. 

 

Then there were Mavis’s pictures, all of them, from her first shaky anchor to the detailed renderings of her papa’s ships, in a neat pile with a paperweight on top;  and a few of Pellie’s, of castles and swords, though he had less patience on paper than did his sisters and mother, preferring to act rather than to render.  Across the rest of the desk, spread all about, a treasure-trove of cruder paintings yet, by a childish hand that liked glowing colours and animals best of all.  H,  they bore in the corners:  Harriet.

 

He waited for the captain to acknowledge him.      

         Edward was quite preoccupied over a paper in his hand;  at last he sighed, and put it down on his desk most carefully before looking up.   It was another picture: a horse in a field, with a ship at sea behind it.  The horse was a warm brown and the ship yellow and black with pale yellow sails that ran into a blue sky.  All Harriet’s paintings ran:  she didn’t mind — in fact, she liked them that way, they looked softer, she said.  The horse only had three legs, apparently – but its flowing mane made up for the deficiency.

“What is it?” he said at last.  

“I — couldn’t stay away, sir,”  Hastings said, softly.

Pelham’s eyes closed for a moment.  Hastings held his breath.  Had he done wrong, in coming to him?  Succeeded only in inflicting further pain?        

         “Thank you, Oliver,”  said Pelham stiffly.   

         “I’m so very sorry, Edward.”

        

         Pelham sighed.  Hastings waited for him to speak, as he had done on the quay earlier.  He wondered after a while if the captain was still aware of his presence, but then Pelham started to murmur, half as if to himself,  blinking — “I never thought, man ––  I should have seen, the way they change every time — nothing stays the same — it was – just – the grace of her – that’s what I couldn’t get enough of – so like her mamma – it was like seeing a little Sophie growing up before my eyes,  she was so dear — enchanting — I don’t suppose you would understand – forgive me, Oliver, I – I am so much at a loss, I do not even know what I am saying.”        

         Oh God, he is so alone, at this moment,  thought Hastings, and there is nothing I can do about it:  nothing.       

         “Yes,” he said.

        

         From the corner of the cabin came a piercing, incongruously merry sound:  the liquid chirrups of a little canary in a round wicker cage, that the captain had discovered with inordinate delight on the smashed deck of one of the captured coast-traders and carried back on board, for what purpose Hastings could only guess — but an informed guess, knowing as he did that everything tender or sweet, beautiful or curious that came into Pelham’s hands found its way back to his Harriet, for her especial delight.  

 

Pelham flinched.  “For God’s sake, take that thing up on deck, Oliver, and let it go.”

         “Yes, sir.”

         “Thank you, Oliver – ”

         “Edward.”  Hastings felt useless.

         “That – that will be all, Oliver, if you please ——?”   Pelham made a choking sound; turned away, his shoulders rigid. 

        

         Of course:  he won’t weep while I am here, thought Hastings.  Would that he could!   Oh, Edward!        

         “Edward — sir,” he said again, picking up the cage – it weighed nothing in his hand – and closed the door silently behind him.  Fat lot of comfort that was to him. What do you say to a man who has lost his child?

        

         From the other side of the door he heard the sharp scrape of Pelham’s chair on the oak planking, and then a single strangled bellow, half choked-off: an animal sound, filled with rage and pain, like a wounded bull.  He held onto the door handle, but no further sound came after that – only silence, which seemed to him to be infinitely more painful. 

         The marine on duty stared down at the deck.

        

         Up top, the bird sat on the edge of its open door and looked from side to side. “Go on,” said Hastings –  “you silly thing, look, you’re free. Shoo!”  Its breast feathers ruffled in the wind – they were daffodil, streaked with gold.  It looked so fragile a thing to trust to air.  It shook itself once, briefly, and flew up into the rigging, where it was still perched on the mast singing when Hastings went below again.

        

**********************

        

         Pelham chose to dine alone. 

 

He called Oliver to his cabin and apologized, afterwards:  “I shouldn’t — be any company —”  he said.  “I know you would — sit with me, but — when I see you, I think — about being at home… ”  and then he buried his head in his hands, upon the desk, and his shoulders jerked in a dreadful silent way. 

Oliver stood by him, awkwardly:  what was he to do?  Should he leave him?  Dare he touch him?  How could he not offer that much comfort, at least? 

He moved close to him, put his hand upon Edward’s shoulder,  and squeezed it.  This small touch unmanned Edward altogether, then.  Piercing all his defences, it tore his throat open at last as if the sobs had been crowding there all along.

 

Never had Oliver heard such dreadful weeping — or ever wished to.  He put his own head in his other hand, almost unable to bear it.  Each gasp Edward took came out again in clots, a string, straining till he had no more breath in his lungs and beyond – and then another one, all over again.   “So – o – phie,” he said,  hoarsely:  “oh — my – So – phie — ! — ah! — ah! — ahhh!”  A minute later, more painfully still, it changed to “Ha – ri – e – e – e – et –!”

 

         Oliver wanted to hold him:  did not know how.  After these many years of Pelham’s kindness to him, he was all at sea now.  He let his hand rest where it was, hoping the simple warmth and weight of it would comfort.  He would have given all he had in the world (save for Mavis) to have been able to prevent this.  But he could only stand by.  This he did. 

After fully a minute Edward hid his face further in the crook of his elbow, sobbing still, his hands coming together now to grip the back of his own head, as if he were wrecked and this was a spar — or perhaps to prevent it from leaving his shoulders altogether in the violence of his grief.  Oliver put his other hand gently on top of them;  closed his fingers around those clenched fists. 

Edward cried more softly and bitterly, a little longer, his daughter’s name and that of God no more than whispers on his lips.  Then with all the strength he had, he pulled himself back together – Hastings saw the effort it cost him, in the iron-bound muscles and joints, the rigid shoulders.  No more sobs, after that:  Edward shook his head, shaking-off Hastings’ hand also, and wiped his streaming face with his palms and knuckles;  straightened;  stood, and went to his night-cabin to wash his face and hands; told Oliver he would see him on deck. 

 

He sent his compliments to the officers afterwards, begging them to report to his cabin briefly for their instructions to make sail.  The sounds of the ship getting under weigh seemed to rouse him:  he returned to the quarterdeck for their departure towards Malaga, seeing the Indy through the straits and beyond, before going below again. 

        

         The wind blew briskly and they ran before a following sea.  In the middle of the last watch of the night, Pelham finally went to bed.  He had sat in his cabin for hours, paced it for more;  briefly gone up on deck and stood in the fo’c’s’le looking out at the star-studded sky, and returned to his cabin holding onto the ship’s rail, as if the constellations had blinded him. 

At last, defeated, he had taken off his coat and lain down in his cot in his shirtsleeves – it was Sophie’s shirt; he had put it on especially, hoping to find a letter-packet from her in port, and wear it while reading all her news, and sweeter still, her longing that even now, after all these years, she did not fail to express.  Last time he had been home, he had made love to her so hurriedly once more before he left that he had not even taken off his clothes with her:  how sweet, how hasty, how happy they had been together in those stolen minutes right before his departure.  Now he doubted he would ever be able to do anything so carefree again.      

         He had seen men’s lives turn from one moment to the next, knowing it must happen to him one day – and now it had, from an unexpected quarter, stunning him.  The future stretched in front of him, without Harriet — it was empty, for all its promised solace of his profession and the knowledge that the Indomitable would continue to require all his care, leaving little time over to indulge himself in plumbing the depths of this new agony.  When would there be time for Sophie, for his family, for himself, if there had been not enough for Harriet, and he had lost her so easily? 

 

He stared at his hands:  how had she slipped through his fingers, when so lately he had held her newly born and looked into the sweet depths of her eyes?  He had been able to hold her on his one fore-arm, then, her fragile downy head in the palm of his hand, and rock her, so — and soon, so soon she had become his darling, the sunshine of the house, his little artist, his smiling miniature Sophie, and then — ?  And now — ?  How could time telescope so?  How could he not have foreseen this, felt it, prayed for it not to happen?  How had he come to take her little arms for granted about his neck, every time he should come home?

He had seen men disembowelled next to him, looking in disbelief at their own innards beside them, the splinter that tore them open having passed through as swiftly and implacably as Fate, as if they had been travelling all their lives unknowingly to meet it at that moment, on that deck, with that half-formed thought on their lips.      

          Now I know how they must have felt,  he thought:  the surprise of it, not to have seen it coming.  

         He fell asleep in the darkness before dawn.

 

         He had not known sexual release in a long time.  Often after he heard from Sophie, the night would be sweeter for her words still wreathing in his dreaming head, even at the cost of waking without her.  This time in port, he had gone for letters with a spring in his step, hoping —

        

         Sophie came to him, in the darkest watch, in a cruel teasing dream that left him gasping for her. As always he was helpless at the sight of her, unable to keep from sharp arousal in the joy and thrill of her undressing before him.  “I’m wet for you, Edward,” she said, and he thought she meant that sweet wanton tide of desire with which she would greet him; but when he reached for her she blurred like a watercolour; his seed left holes in her, and she ran at the edges in a pool and trickled through his fingers. 

         And as she did so Harriet sat at the dining-room table, painting like her mamma, looking up at him:  “Look, papa,” she smiled — but then her water spilled across her page, and it too dissolved before his eyes, the colours all washed away, the picture gone:  and she with them, her little yellow chair empty,  her name on it painted in Stroud’s uncertain hand a mockery, now.

         He sat bolt upright, setting his cot wildly aswing on its ropes, clutching at air.

 

         No Sophie — no Harriet — no-one and nothing but his cabin, his cot, his duty.

And there would be no Harriet, ever again.

But it was he who had not been there when they needed him, not the other way around.

Three months —!

 

How could he not have known?  How was it that he felt nothing, in all that time?  Not so much as a shiver —?

 

         And he felt ashamed, as he never had, for wanting his wife at such a time, even in his dreams.  Awake he was numb, but asleep his body had shrieked for her.  He sent his thoughts to her, helplessly, wondering where she was and how she had managed.  He should have been there.  He still could not believe that he would come home and not find Harriet there, running into his arms.  Surely that was the dream, to have lost her, and this would be a new day and all would be well?

        

         Hastings, a few inches below in the lieutenants’ berth, woke at the harsh cry; lay straining his ears in the semi-darkness.  A movement beside him betrayed his neighbour’s wakefulness:  Hastings knew he must have heard it too.  The next hammock swung – Simmons, a good-hearted lad, callow yet, only been sailing with Pelham a few months.   Now he turned to exchange a look with Hastings.  A streak of silver light fell across his fair, boyish face:  “D’you think – he won’t break, will he, Oliver?  Not under this?”

         “No; not a chance,” whispered  Hastings.  “I remember an action, once — we lost half the ship’s officers at one blow.  He went on without missing a beat.  No, he won’t break – not in his command.”  Just his heart,  he thought.

 

         Pelham lay awake and let the ship’s motion rock him.  Never before had he felt so far from comfort.  In the few dark days of believing he had lost the lieutenant that was like a son to him, he had thought, if he could just hold on until he could come to Sophie, there would be solace there.  And there had been.  She had never failed him:  never.  Not once.  How many husbands could say that?  And then the nightmare had lifted and joy reigned again.  But there was no second chance, here — and he could not imagine coming to her, seeking comfort, since she would be as broken as he was — probably more so — and have nothing left at all in her to give him;  nor he, her.  What could they ever give each other again?

         He had not been there, when his child’s eyes had fluttered closed for the last time.  He had not been there, to see her buried.   He had not been there, to uphold his wife.

         If he owed a duty to his family, then surely he had failed in it.

 

He had not even known.

 

********************

                 

         In the morning Pelham called his midshipmen to his cabin.  If they remarked upon his drawn and red-eyed look, they did not dare pass comment on it. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “I have decided that there is no use in expecting you to turn into lieutenants, like tadpoles into frogs, without the intervention of a miracle – or a sustained course in the trigonometry of navigation!  I fear I have neglected your education.  You will report to me sharp at six bells in the second watch every day, beginning tomorrow.”

        

         They waited for further instructions.

         “That is all,” snapped Pelham. “Good day, gentlemen. I shall see you passed lieutenants if it kills you.”

         “Which it very well may!” whispered young Purvis as he left the captain’s cabin. 

         “I heard that, sir!” Pelham roared.  “Up to the masthead – now, sir – at the double – yes, you, sir, damn your impudence – all the way, NOW, sir!”

        

         Purvis set off up the ratlines with white knuckles.  He had a particular horror of heights which eight months on board the Indy had failed to cure;  only Pelham’s furious face below him gave him the impetus to keep ascending until it should get smaller, and mercifully smaller still.  The men turned to watch him go up.  Several hands were draped over the yards aloft, ready to take a reef in the sails if the wind turned any fresher – Mr. Cowles had been eyeing it for the last half-hour.  He crawled up towards them, whimpering.

        

         The ship raced through the sapphire water like a thoroughbred horse. Purvis clung to the rope with every ounce of strength he possessed, leaving but little for the working of his legs. Three-fourths of the way up the first stretch, seeing the main-top overhang above him, he froze.

        

         Pelham and the other midshipmen jumped back as Purvis’s watery vomit splashed onto the deck.  He was hanging there paralyzed, unable to go up or down, or even to hold on very much longer.  The ship plunged her head into the dark troughs and shook it up again on each sparkling crest.  Purvis wailed, a high, keening sound.   

         Pelham threw off his coat and went up after the boy.  His feet were as sure as they had ever been; there was not an order to be given on board the Indomitable that Pelham was not capable of carrying-out.  He climbed swiftly and surely, only pausing half-way to jerk his head to one side so that the miserable boy’s next retching should spill onto his shoulder, not his upturned face.  He reached him in seconds, put his hand firmly into the waistband of the midshipman’s breeches, and grasped it tight so the boy should feel his grip.  “Shut up,” he said in answer to Purvis’s gibbering moan.  “I’ve got you!”

        

         “Can – can we – can we go down now, sir?”

         “Down?  Did I or did I not give you an order?”

         Purvis’s teeth chattered.

         “Have you reached the masthead, Mr. Purvis?”

         “No, sir,” wailed the wretched boy.

         “Then climb, sir.  I have you.  You will not fall; I am right behind you, and I shall keep a hold of you. But you shall climb, sir, or be court-martialled for disobeying an order.”

        

         Purvis slowly unwrapped his white fingers from around the rope, and reached a little higher. Pelham prompted him:  “Now your left foot – hm – now your right – don’t stop, boy – don’t look down, sir! – I said DO NOT look down! – now swing into the platform – yes, you may use the lubber’s hole, if you must – catch your breath – stand aside, boy, leave room for me – all right, now up you go again.  Yes, I have you.  Here is my hand in your belt.”

        

         Together they crawled the rest of the way.  Purvis moaned at each step, but Pelham stood firmly behind him until they reached the very pinnacle of the ship.  The men cheered and clapped, a ragged sound that came to them in that wuthering place on the wings of the wind.  Below them the three sails bellied taut – main-t’gallant, main-top-sail and main-sail one above the other – propelling the Indy forward at a dashing angle.  The ship was heeled over, so that directly below their feet and the ivory canvas was the sparkling sea. “Hold tight,” said Pelham.  “Got it?  All right – now you can look down.”

        

         “Ohmigod,” said Purvis.

         “Don’t tell me this is the first time you’ve been up here, Mr. Purvis?” shouted Pelham.

         “No, sir – but it’s different at sea, sir – I’ve only been up when we were at anchor!”

         “God help us, Mr. Purvis – how is His Majesty King George to sleep at nights, with the likes of you officering his god-damned navy?”  The wind snatched Pelham’s words from his lips.

         “What did you say, sir?”

         “Never mind. Now I am going to descend, sir – ”

         “What, sir?”

         “I’m going down, dammit, Purvis – don’t you dare to tread on my fingers, sir, as you follow me!”

         “No, sir.”

        

         They descended without incident.  Purvis shook from head to toe; but he had done it, and survived.  Pelham rubbed the boy’s vomit from his shoulder – “Fetch me a rag, there!  Thank you, Mr. Partridge – ”  and took back his coat.  “Anyone else like to see the view from the top of the ship?”       

         They shuffled, avoided his gaze, except for little Soames, who said excitedly, “May I, sir?”       

         “Off you go!” said Pelham, far more sternly than he felt.  “Show us how it’s done – look lively, lad!”    

         Soames was up and down in no time. “I saw land, sir, away under the starboard bow.  And two head of sail, sir, topsails-up, just coming above the horizon.”

         “Did you, by God!  My glass, Mr. Partridge – thank you, sir – what’s this?  Mr. Hastings, there!  Yes, you, sir!  Run up to the main-top, and tell me what you see.”

        

         “Aye, aye, sir!” Hastings ran to obey with something beside his usual eagerness.  What?   Admiration, he thought it must be, all mixed with the grief.  Whatever Pelham had had torn from himself, he was not so shattered that he could not find some vital part of him again, forty feet above the deck in a pitching sea, clutching a terrified boy he had ordered up there.  How else was he to survive this blow?

 

         But oh, Mavis — Sophie — Stroud — Pellie!   What masts were they to climb?  Hastings’ heart failed again to think of them all, awaiting this return.   

         “He’s right, sir – they’re coming into view now, sir. Looks like a couple of inshore craft, sir.”    

         “Two points to starboard, Mr. Wainwright!” roared Pelham.  “We’ll catch up with ’em in twenty minutes, I reckon – if this wind holds!”

        

         The night before, Pelham had wept at his touch.  Later, the deck between them, Hastings had heard Pelham first cry out and then a moment or two later racked by a single further chain of sobs so bitter and harsh once more that it had hurt Hastings freshly to hear them, knowing Pelham was alone with his grief this time, as he must be from now on, almost all the time.  Now he wiped a sudden blur of tears from his own eyes.   What could he do, for this man who had done so much for him?  — Listen?   Only if he would talk:  and he was a very private man, sharing his feelings but little.  Simply stand and sit beside him, then, and keep him company, if he would allow it.   And do his duty:  as Pelham was doing.  It was all he had left, Hastings saw plainly, for now.  Please God it would be enough.

        

         “What do you see, Hastings?”

         “Just a moment, sir – the wind’s making my eyes water – I’ve got them, sir.”

         “Very good,” said his captain, in something close to his old brusque tone (for it was all he had left to cling to, now – and clinging he was, with the very ends of his white bleeding fingers, to this – to his ship – to the routine, his profession, his other self). 

        

         Turning his face into the wind so that Pelham should not see these tears for him,  Hastings felt filled to bursting with a great love for the captain which he could never articulate:  for that essence of him that illuminated everything he did and said; his gruff kindness, the extraordinary professional zeal, the purity of him.   For the man who, broken, stood here on deck and was doing his duty by these wretched midshipmen.        

         In the last twenty-four hours he had feared his commander’s spirit would be lost, he admitted to himself;  that the Pelham remaining after so terrible a blow, the crushing of so many hopes for the future, would somehow be no more than the husk of the one before – he had seen it happen – he prayed it should not.  Let him one day emerge from this anguish not beaten but affirmed in every essential thing that he is —  God love him, thought Hastings.  Will I ever understand him — be half as strong as he is — do my duty half so well?                 

And so Oliver  thought he understood, up in the main-top, then:  and he thought last night that he had seen the first and deepest expression of Pelham’s grief, with this little incident on deck the beginnings of finding his way back.

 

**

If only it could have been as simple as that — if only.  There was nothing in Hastings’ young life (thank God!) that could have given him the eyes to know all that racked Edward, now — the pain beyond all imagining, just to start.  Beyond that lay the anguish for Sophie, a second agony to match the first — and close on its dreadful heels the remorse and helplessness he felt that he had not been there:  that he had had to learn of this only now, in this way, adding to the devastation of it all.   

This man that prowled the quarterdeck and climbed the mast was using them as crutches for his broken soul.   He gave a good appearance of being himself.  Only he knew that he could never be himself again, as he had been.  He knew this with a certainty equalling the certainty of his love, his duty, his mortality.   So far he had achieved the recovery of his public self, as he must — that much he owed to his men, finding at least this  puppet to inhabit even while his heart cracked within.   The mast, the midshipmen, the possibility of an action  — these were the spars to which he clung,  in this shipwreck of his life, knowing that if he loosed his grip on these he would drown for certain.

 

Of course, he did not lose his grip.  He had his duty to do, did he not?

 

Pelham stared out to sea, squinting at the horizon, impatient for the sight of the sails.  He hurt no less, but his duty lay out there in a flash of cream on the horizon.  Why did heartbreak make one’s guts grind and knot?  he wondered.  On the tide, straight to me?  Are you with me now, little one?   Do not leave me again, then, as long as I live – for I need you, Harriet, my little heart, my precious, my own.          

         She would have understood, he thought, that I went up after Purvis.  Still, he asked forgiveness of Sophie in his heart for doing anything, ever again, that did not show the ragged hole in his centre that had once held their Harriet.  It was the first of countless times he did so.

*********************

        

         Pelham knew the letter by heart; how could he not?  He only took it from his desk from time to time to smooth its creases and touch with fingertips that were not quite steady the words she had written him with so great an effort.  What had it cost her, to write them?  Oh, God —!  He did it whenever he felt he had not been mindful enough of her;  of their loss; of Harriet, his little Harriet.  The hand that had held the pen was careful, painfully so, the letters formed at the start with great deliberation as if each word had cost the writer much:  until they turned wilder and then broke down altogether.

        

         My darling Edward – the events of this week have come upon us with such terrible swiftness that I do not know what to write you, dearest love – but I know I must.  Edward, Harriet is gone — dead — lost to us for ever — no more ours, in this world.  Our own little Harriet, the child of our love, your heart and soul.  Oh God Edward I am so sorry — so sorry — that you must learn it this way — oh God!  What am I to do, without you?  Without her?  How are you taking this news, as you read this letter?  It is breaking my heart all over again to write it to you, Edward, I can only think how you are receiving it.

 

It was a fever, Edward, very sudden and I had no thought of losing her, until it turned overnight to dyphtheria and she could not breathe — the doctor tried to clear her throat, but it was no use — she died in my arms about five o’clock in the morning Edward, at the turn of the tide, I think her soul must have flown straight to you upon it —— oh Edward — Edward — Edward — 

Here there were great blotches in the letter,  and the stains of Sophie's tears:  he held them to his mouth, sometimes, even, tasting them; wept each time, wanting to mix their salt with his own.

         She most especially wanted you to have this picture of the horse with her papa’s ship out to sea, she was so proud of making it for you before she fell ill.  I was to send it to you, she wished it most particularly.  With my love to papa, she said, my love and my duty.  And she glowed when she said the word, knowing all it meant to you, that she could send you hers.  Her duty to you, Edward —!

It was quite swift, she suffered only a day and a night.

           Oh my love – help me!!  What a fool I am – sorry, my darling – how can you?  It is we must help you, now, since this loss will be fresh to you even as it is familiar to us, here, by now.  Oh come home, Edward, please — please — I have never asked this of you before, never, but I must see you —   I beg you — come home ————— !  We cannot bear this without you.  If your duty will permit it.

I will not put up a tablet for her grave, I thought you could at least choose that for her, my love ——  oh please come home — oh Edward, I am so sorry!

 

She had not signed it — as if she had needed to.

 

Three more copies came to him, the next month, aboard various vessels;  she had wanted to be sure he received one, at least.  Each time he hoped it would be fresh news, telling him how she did, at least — but they all bore the same date.  The first one seemed to be the original, though, for it was the wildest, imploring him to come home more often than the others;  and it had had the horse.

He thought of her, writing them out, so he should know.

 

Duty:  his duty.  He had not known the full cost of it, till now.  And then he had thought it was something he alone must do.

 

How could he have been so blind?

 

**********************

 

Mrs. Stroud answered the door.  Sophie heard a man’s voice, and someone being shown into the drawing-room at the front of the house.  She passed her hands over her hair automatically, tucking stray wisps where they belonged.  It was not that her appearance mattered — nothing mattered, not now — but that she ought to for Edward’s sake, if Lady Pelham were to receive a visitor.  She must not look like a distraught inmate of Bedlam.  Her natural grace and outward calm had sustained her through many a condolence call in the previous months;  here was another to be endured, apparently.

 

         She rose, was already in the hallway when Mrs. Stroud came for her.  “Captain Timothy, mum,” she said.

         Timothy.  But that was — Edward’s trusted man, the one who had brought her necklace all those years ago, and his love with it.  Her hand flew to it.  She looked up, saw him in the doorway twisting his hat in his hands.  He had gone quite bald since she had seen him last, though his face beneath was still fresh and cherubic, red-cheeked and shy-eyed.  “Captain Timothy — ” she said.

 

         “My lady,” he said, starting towards her.  “Lady Pelham, I — I am so very sorry — !”   His chin quivered.

         “Thank you,” she said, meeting his gaze for a moment as she came into the room and closed the door behind her.  She sat by the window and looked out into the street for a moment, then back to him.  He must be all of forty already, this ship’s-boy Edward had cared-for, been responsible for, tended, avenged.  What errand had Edward charged him with now?  For he was reaching into his pocket — still the sight of a captain's uniform moved her, hurt her freshly, since Edward was not in it — drew out a letter with Edward’s hand upon it.

         “He — he asked me to come to you, madam,” said Timothy, clearing his throat.

         She mastered her emotion.  “I knew it,” she said, “as soon as I saw you.”

         “I had orders to report to Portsmouth, my lady, and he came across in the ship’s boat to speak to me and give me this for you.”

         She took it.  “I — thank you — you will understand if I do not open it yet — ”    It was the first she had heard from Edward, since he should have received her news. Her heart squeezed and turned over in her chest.  So this was his response, to send this friend to her in person?  The best he could manage?

 

         Oh, Edward.  Her heart ached for him, then.

 

         Timothy had come up beside her, was kneeling at her feet.  “Of course, my lady.  He asked me most particularly, madam, because I should be seeing you myself — to bring it to you — and to bring you — all his love madam, his heart, he charged me to tell you.”  His spaniel-brown eyes pleaded with hers to see the man they both loved, who had sent him here, and to forgive him for not being that man himself but his messenger only;  and to forgive the one who sent him, instead of coming himself.  A silent beseeching. 

         “Yes,” she said.  “I — thank you, Captain Timothy.”

         “My lady, if he could have come to you, he would — please know that.”

         “Did he ask you to tell me that?”

         “No — I know it.  Madam, he sat in my cabin and — I have never seen a man so distraught, even though he — did not weep, or even speak very much.  We have — a history, he and I,  I — once turned to him, in a time of — of — the worst time of my life, my lady, and he — we understand one another — he did not need to tell me.  I — am honoured, that he should have asked me to come to you, madam —— ”

         “Yes,” she said, “that is — very kind of you, to think so highly of such a sorry errand.”

         “Never!  Not sorry!  My lady, I bring his love to you — as he most expressly charged me to do — the dearest errand of my life, my lady, you must believe it —— ”

         She looked into his eyes that brimmed-over.   Kept her own composure, for his sake, seeing how close he was to being unmanned altogether.  Such love as Edward inspired, everywhere.  And here he was, Edward’s emissary, his representative.  She felt sorry for him;  grateful.  “You are very kind,” she said.

         “Not at all, my lady,” he said, passing his sleeve up over his nose where it ran, and sniffing.  He gave up and pulled out a large snowy handkerchief;  blew his nose.

 

         “What is your ship, now?” she asked him. “It cannot be Euryalus  still!”

         “No, madam, I have command of Hector — er —  a second-rate, under Admiral Montague.”

         “And you had orders for Portsmouth.”

         “Yes, my lady, we put in this morning.”

         She had to ask.  “Where is he?”

         “On his way to Algiers, madam — he must be there by now.”

         “Do you know when he will come back to Portsmouth?”

         “He said as soon as he may, madam.  He meant it, I know it.  Nothing will keep him from you when his duty is discharged, my lady.”

 

         Sophie gestured with a tilt of her head to the chair across from hers on the other side of the fireplace.  The maid had laid a nice fire before going-out, and the room was bright and cosy even while it still felt calm and formal.  A portrait of Edward hung on the wall in his full-dress uniform;  it depicted him upon the deck of Victory  after Trafalgar, the creamy sail behind him laced with ragged shot-holes to represent the battle.  He had not wanted to sit for it, but Lord Nelson had insisted, since he was having his own painted at the same time by the same artist:  it was his gift, by way of thanking his flag-captain.  So Edward looked down upon them, stern-faced, grave, intent upon some faraway spot opposite, out the window perhaps — a gaze too wide for a room to contain it.  It was too imposing for the informal parlour where they sat as a family most often;  but here it looked splendid.  He had one hand upon the hilt of his sword, the other holding a furled chart.  She had never seen him standing thus, of course, in such an unlikely pose, but it looked impressive on canvas.  And there was no shortage of charts in his life, or shot-holes;  and the artist was gifted, had captured something essential about him, his spirit, his nobility, his courage.  There was warmth in the eagle’s face, unsmiling as it was:  in the eyes, the mouth.  An ensign hung in folds behind him.

         “Your knees must be hurting,” she said, “will you not sit down, Captain Timothy?”

         He rose awkwardly, drew the chair a little closer to hers before sitting in it.  His sword clattered as he sat.

         “Tell me how he is,” she said, “please.”

         Timothy closed his eyes, shook his head.

         “I can imagine,” she said, “but you have seen him, and — I want to hear it from you —— since you have come all this way, and he sent you — ”

         Timothy gave her a look so filled with pain and compassion she almost wished she had not asked.  It was as if this nice young man were skewered by what he brought.  “What can I say, madam?  He is beside himself.  I have never seen him so — it was all I could do to meet his eyes, but I did, of course, for the very great love I bear him, my lady, the love — and loyalty — and always shall.  He did not need to ask me to come to you, madam.  I had signalled him, ‘bound for Portsmouth ’, as soon as I saw it was his ship  — and so he came aboard, it was choppy but we stood-off while he did —  I had heard, that is why I signalled him, and so he did not have to tell me, or ask me — I believe he had already written this, my lady, in hopes of finding someone bound for home at the next port — for he came across right away, there was no time to have written it before he was stepping onto my deck.”

 

         Sophie tried to imagine it, the bo’suns’ pipes, the two captains facing one another.  Edward’s white face, grim, his throat working;  this young man receiving him, with such tender affection and grief for him.  Edward keeping his composure no matter what it cost him.  All he must have said, her husband, all he had not — the things he could not bring himself to, the things he could not say at all.  But he had sent him to her, with his love.  Expressly, explicitly.  The best he could do.

         “I see,” she said, sounding so like her husband that Timothy felt his heart jolt.  “And was he — well?  In himself?  Not in ill-health, sir?”

         “Not of the body, no, madam, he looked well and strong.  Pale, yes, naturally, and careworn, madam, I have never seen him so — so stern, but that — is to be expected — but he is bearing-up, my lady.  If that is what you mean.”

         “Yes,” she said, “that is what I meant.  Thank you.”  Her hand strayed to the pearls and diamond at her throat.  “You know, that time you came to me from him before,”  she said softly, “it was this you brought, in that little packet — I have not taken it off, from that day to this.”

         “I remember it well, my lady,”  he said. “I — had not had the honour of meeting you before, but he called me aboard his ship — we were both in port, at the time, of course I had Euryalus  then, and he had Indomitable  even then — he loved that ship, always has —— and he told me of you, madam.  I was so overjoyed for him.  All he said of you — a newly-married man, you may imagine, perhaps — his joy in speaking of you, telling me of his happiness, the blessing that you had become to him, your little daughter that found him — in all the years I had known him, madam, I had never seen him so —  aglow.  I shall never forget it.  It made me hope — wish — to find such a love, myself, one day.”

         “And have you?”

         Timothy flushed.  “Yes, my lady, I believe I have.  My Jenny — some might think her plain, but — she is my soul’s joy — we have three children together, three daughters, and she is with child once more, I have just learned, we hope for a son, but whatever God sends —— oh God, my lady, I should not have —— I beg your pardon —”

 

         “Yes you should,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes, “of course you should!  I rejoice for you, Captain Timothy, why on earth should I not!  I am so heartily glad for you, sir!”

         “You are very kind, madam,”  he said, swallowing.

         “Nonsense!”  she cried.  “You, one of my husband’s dear friends, of course I am pleased —!   I did know that you were married, I had heard it from Edward — but to see your face light up so when speaking of your family, sir, it brings me nothing but joy.”

         “I promised myself I should not marry,” said Timothy, “until I found a woman who would make me feel as he looked that day in Port Mahon, all ablaze with you.  He once told me not to marry in haste or for the wrong reasons, and I listened to him then:   he told me of the strains upon a marriage, when one is — so far from home, so often, so long —  ”  his eyes met hers here, in apology once more, but having started, he had the courage to continue:  “ — as I learned from him after, what should be the right reasons, the right choice, a love that might be so tested, and stand the strain.  He has ever been my mentor, madam — even in this.  I have learned much of what it is to be an officer, at his hands — and a man also.”

 

         Sophie tried to imagine Edward speaking of love, and marriage, and choosing a wife, to this lad as he was, to the young man he became:  wanting him to learn from his own bitter experience, wanting the best for him.  She had not known men spoke of these things to one another.  Edward must trust him, hold him in high regard, to talk on such private matters, she thought.  And care for him.  “And so you have found your Jenny,”  she said.  “Tell me about her.”

         Edward’s letter lay in her lap.  She had not forgotten it, was most acutely conscious of it, but Edward had sent his friend to her and she would not let him go with a perfunctory and graceless dismissal now that he had performed his sorry errand.  He was a dear young man, and she wanted to hear him speak a little longer before she must bid him goodbye and read Edward’s fresh words of grief.   She had waited for them these four months — had it been that long?  Yes, it had —— since the loss had befallen them, the shock — her numbness already was turning to something else ——  she was clawing her way out of this chasm of pain into which she had tumbled, was finding her way back even without Edward, if she could not have him, so that she would be able to greet him when he did return and extend her hand to his.  For she knew well that his own pit would be deeper and harder to escape:  how could it not be?

 

         So Jenny was the youngest of four daughters of a country parson, and was bookish and wore round spectacles that made her look like a dear little owl, and was very short and very sweet, and she loved her Captain Timothy and made him glow to speak of her.  Sophie wondered if he had ever told Jenny all that had happened to him.  Well, she would never know; one could hardly ask.  She hoped he had, so that a wife’s love and understanding could heal it fully, take away the last of the shame.   Did a man ever recover from such a thing?  She thought of Pellie, almost that age already, and her heart quailed.  But here was Timothy, a captain in His Majesty’s navy, hardly the walking wounded;  competent, warm, a splendid officer she was quite sure, seemingly fully recovered.  Although what lay in the depths of a man’s heart, even his wife might never know, unless he chose to tell her.

         She closed her eyes at this thought, sent her love to Edward freshly for the sake of the trust between them.

         “Well, my lady,” said Timothy, “ is there any more I can tell you of your husband?  I — I wish you could have seen and heard him for yourself, I swear to God — ”

         “So do I,” she said, “but you have been very kind, to come in his stead.  I am most grateful to you.”

         He rose, and so did she.  “My lady,” he said, taking her hand and bowing, then looking into her eyes, “while I cannot tell you it has been my pleasure, because of — the sad nature of this visit — you must believe me when I tell you it has been perhaps the greatest honour of my life, to be so charged by my friend. I — I hope I have discharged it as he would wish.”

         “Tell me one more time,” she said, suddenly needing to hear it, “tell me what he said —?”

         “To bring you his heart and his love, my lady — his love — he choked as he said it, he repeated it to be sure I heard him — his love, madam, to bring all his love to you, all of it —— ” 

         “Yes,” she said, hoarsely, “thank you.”

 

         She saw him to the door.  He kissed her hand, the one that did not hold Edward’s letter.  A few steps away down the street, he saluted her.  She waved to him.

 

         She went upstairs then, to the tall and lovely bed with its gold damask hangings and wide expanse for the two of them to hold one another upon and not worry about falling off the edge as they loved and played and slept and loved again — she had always felt very small in it, when she was alone, but it was their bed together, warmed by all the memories of their times of bliss and heat and need and the blessing of each other, and of whispered words of love, and of sleep, afterwards. 

         Sometimes they had let the children come into bed with them, and laughed and played of a morning before rising.  She heard their laughter, and Edward's.  Saw Harriet’s soft brown curls upon the pillow after she had climbed in there, asking if she might, coming to them in the middle of the night because papa was home, and she did not want to sleep alone;  and Edward asleep beside his darling daughter who lay between them, his hand upon her little shoulders as she slept.

         She broke the seal.

        

Sophie ——  Sophie ——

         There are no words — I am sorry — oh my love.  I can not believe it, but I have your letter and so I must.

            I am on my knees.

            Oh Sophie how are we to survive this loss?  I do not know, I can not see how.

            My little Harriet ———— our Harriet ——————

            I should be there with you now, but I am charged with conveying certain intelligence further and waiting upon the results of its arrival at its destination, these are my orders and I have no choice but to obey them.  To turn back now would be a dereliction of my duty.

 

            But I am here in flesh only, my heart and spirit are with you as always, broken though they are now, as close with you as they have ever been Sophie, no — closer —— I pray you to feel my presence beside you, know that I am there, for I am ———

            Sophie she was all my joy —  my love, I — can not say what she was — my love — my love —  my love —  my love —  my love —  my love —  my love — oh Sophie  Sophie  Sophie  Sophie  Sophie  Sophie  Sophie Sophie  Sophie I pray God will give you the strength and courage that have always resided in you even now to go on.  Yea though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death ———— 

         I am holding you.  Come — hold me?  You will, you are, I know it, you always have.

         It will be a little while till I can come to you.  I shall, as soon as I may.

         I will write to you until then, I promise.  Do not think there is one moment you are not foremost in my thoughts, not one.   Oh, God.  Sophie. We must comfort one another, now.

——Edward.

        

She lay on the bed and clutched the letter to her bosom, opening her dress to feel the paper against her skin, since his writing was upon it, all she could have of him for now.  She curled up into a ball and rocked — the motion calmed her.  She read it again, rubbed her face upon the poor lines of it, scratching her cheeks with the folds;  kissed it, shook with the thought of him writing it.  Edward, Edward.  Harriet, Harriet ———  Edward.

 

********************

 

He came home, at last, fully six months after their loss:  it was the soonest he could manage it.  He came inside, through the front door, and Mrs. Stroud was the first to see him.  She threw her apron over her head and ran back to the kitchen so he should not have to see her lose her grip on herself.  From his face it appeared he was close to that edge himself:  it was taut and white and bitterly lined, and his eyes were pools of devastation.

         Sophie came running to him then, and stopped before she got all the way into his half-open, empty arms:  they had always been wide before, and filled with joy.  They stood in the pretty sunlit hall, with its pattern of tiles in the floor that Harriet had liked to step around; and the rooms of their house opening off it, each one void of that little face, those dancing feet — and looked at one another.  Sophie’s hair was streaked with silver, now, suddenly:  he felt ashamed for even noticing it.  Her mouth trembled.

         Mavis stood in the drawing-room, beyond, her shape newly softened and rounded with child: not a surprise, but he hadn’t seen her, so.  She hung back, though. 

Mary, too, was standing just beyond, wringing her hands.  So here he was, and poor dear Sophie could weep in her husband’s arms at last, then,  she thought, his sister, loving both of them so much, knowing how long and bitterly Sophie had waited for this shattering moment now at hand, until he could at last come home to comfort and uphold her as he should.  There was a dreadful pity in her eyes – he noticed it, wondered which of them it was for — could it be for him? 

 

         Edward came into his wife’s arms, then, and laid his head on hers, and said nothing;  neither did she.  What was there to say?

         And then it was not she but he that wept, harshly and noisily, a terrible howling sound, and Sophie held him, for minutes on end, all in his captain’s uniform, his hat still in his hand behind her back, the gold braid, the anchored buttons, the severe black neck-cloth, all glorious and shaking and meaningless.

 

***************

 

It would be six months before he could bring himself to come to her as her husband again;  and another year before he did not sob, afterwards, bitterly, for a few seconds before he could stop himself, each time he did so.  To find the captain again had been easy compared with this — he sought the husband, found him shard by shard:  the lover had fled, or drowned, he knew not which.

 

Lux perpetua,  ‘eternal light’, he picked, for Harriet’s little memorial tablet, Popish though it might have sounded — but it was her essence, and his wish for her:  and a lamb — she would have liked that.  And her name, Harriet Sophia Helena Pelham, and her brief dates, that were almost all his joy.  She had been laid to rest in the nave of the small Norman church within the grounds of Portchester Castle, where worshippers had brought their faith at such times of testing and found the cool stone dogtooth arches framing it with a calm, round certainty for nigh-on seven hundred years.

Edward never came home but that he went there, first.

 

        

*********************

 

 

At Sea, April 21st 1813

 

My dearest — most beloved and treasured wife, my darling Sophie —

Here we are off Ushant and I do not know what words to write to you still, any more than I knew what to say when I was at home with you, or how to touch you or come to you or any thing I ever was wont to do so freely and easily and joyfully.

But I will try, and pray I shall make a better job of it than I did in your bed — I am sorry, Sophie, if I could have done any better — if it had been in me — please know that I would have, and the fault did not lie with you that I would not — could not — did not.

Such solace as we have ever found in each other, I long for it in my heart but my body grows faint to contemplate it — it seems to me a betrayal of all I feel and I can not bring myself to overcome it.  I pray that I shall, one day.  I owe that much to you and so much more.  Yes of course I saw your face upon the pillow and the fresh hurt in it I put there that you never thought to get from me.   You who have never refused me, ever.  And I am ashamed that I could not even speak to you of it then, except to tell you I could not, so leaving me to find these poor words on paper to explain myself to you now instead.  We have always shared so closely, my love, all that was in our hearts.  But at this moment I do not think I can bear to burden you with as much pain as I find there, since you bear so much more already, have borne it, alone too.  This is a night I must find my own way out of.  I pray you will be patient with me, Sophie.  It took me much of my life to find my way into your arms the first time.  Now my life is not as it was, it is broken all to pieces and I am lost again and must find my way back a second time.  It is dark, this time.  God give me the strength — if there is one to give any thing, and not a vain hope we cling to in credulity and weakness.  I do not know.

 

         Did they put up the tablet yet?  I hope it does not seem too simple.  I thought the white marble right, it will not weather being indoors as it would outside so the words will outlast us and our sorrow.  There will come a day when we too are at rest and her sweet name will still be there carved as crisply and firmly as the day it first appears on that wall, with all its other poor fellows we have so calmly read as we sang and prayed.  Can each one be a grief this dire?  Oh what a tide of loss, if that is so.  I did not think there could be so much pain in all the world.   Tell me if the lamb looks well, I could not bear for it to be stiff and unlifelike, it must represent her joy and innocence, I thought how she would have liked it, traced with her fingers the stony curls.  When I return — I have been thinking — let us talk about a window to honour the rejoicing she was to us, a better memorial, do you not think so?  I see light streaming through glass all coloured and fleeting as she was to us, the sun bright and then hidden.  I should like a window.  Would you mind?  Would it hurt you more?  How could any thing do that?

 

         The ship is — the ship.  I was going to write news of her but I find nothing of sufficient importance to trouble your eyes with it.  Winds have been ill, we have had to beat much of the way.  I find it occupies me and sleep comes easier when I am past exhaustion and spent utterly.   I do still make believe that my pillow is your breast, Sophie.  If I can think or feel any thing at all besides fatigue and despair.  Mostly I am numb.  I find I must pierce that to write to you at all.  It never was a struggle, till this.

Tell me Mavis continues in good health with the child-to-be.  Tell me how Pellie does and what Mr. Rodgerson is doing with him now in mathematics.  I should write to him and tell him how dear he is to me in spite of all my exhortations and admonitions and lectures.  I have been a captain too long, a father not enough.

Nor a husband.

It is a little comfort to me that you have Mary.  A dear soul, I did not see half of it as a boy, I took her presence for granted.  I can not find the way of writing much just now, not to start a fresh letter to my sister — will you be so kind as to give my love to her?  And my thanks.  She will understand, for what.

         Oh, Sophie.  Sophie.  Is there healing in your name?  If I cannot find it in your person?  Yes, my love.  In your company and your self and your lap, yes.  May I be your husband still even as I can not yet be your lover?  Hold me and tell me that I may.

 

How do you do, my love?  You looked pale still, though that is hardly to be wondered-at.  Still I am so used to the roses in your face, it was another shock to see them gone.  Not that you could stay the same any more than I could, I see that.  I hope time will restore them, my darling.  Write and tell me how you do, if you are well, how our own dearest Mavis fares. 

         Should I not have spoken of these painful things?  Tell me Sophie, I must find this new way of it.  What to do, what to say, what to write, what to feel — I am all at a loss.  My love.  How I wish I had let you hold me.

Hold me now, I pray you.  I am with you, Sophie.  I hold you in my heart and mind more than ever.  If there is still grace to be found here it must reside in you — it does. 

Accept these stumbling thoughts, sorry as they are, God knows — they are the best that can be attempted by your devoted husband E.

        

*****************

        

It seemed to Pelham that in losing Harriet, he had lost himself.  He felt but the husk of the man who had formerly inhabited his being.  He did his duty; came home in-between white-faced and sat at table and ate food he could not remember five minutes after it had passed his lips.   He put away the brandy in his cabin before he should give in to its promise of oblivion and thus render himself unworthy of his command.  He came ashore twice in that period and each time it was as if his body had returned to Portchester without his heart. After that first few minutes when he broke down altogether and howled out his grief in his wife’s arms, he did not dare begin to open that crack any further for fear he should do so again and again.  There seemed no bottom to this pain.  He ought to comfort Sophie, not leech comfort from her whom he had already betrayed.  So he was soft-spoken with her, and most attentive when they were together — she did not lack for a shawl for her knees, if the air should turn damp, nor a glass of wine poured at table, nor for his tender interest in her conversation.  He asked her about her correspondence with Miss Austen, and about the garden, and thanked her with over-bright eyes for the two new shirts she gave him to put in his sea-chest, before turning away and staring out of the window.

 

         At night all Sophie knew was that he lay awake beside her when she went to sleep, and in the morning when she woke he would be asleep on his side, back turned to her, so far gone at last that she could slip from bed and not disturb him, even:  a man so poleaxed by weariness that these few hours barely served to deliver him again to another day of consciousness.   In his sleep he permitted himself to be held.  She learned to curl around his back and lay her cheek between his shoulder-blades and he would give a deep shuddering sigh and their warmth would mingle slowly.

 

         The few times he sought release, alone in his cot at sea  in the longest watches of the night, it came to him with every feeling he had and the grief rose up again freshly and broke him all over again.  To spill was to cry helplessly, he found.  He did not dare bring this wretchedness to Sophie, to whom he should be giving, not taking-from, any more than he had already robbed her.  

 

         The second time he came home, after a repeat of just such a night like the first time, she unfastened her necklace that she never took off and laid it by in her jewel-box.  It was too sharp a reminder of all they had lost.  She had seen him looking at it, and looking away.  It seemed a reproach to him.

 

         At the breakfast-table he looked across at her;  she saw him close his eyes in pain when he noticed it missing.  He put his fork down in his barely-touched plate of fluffy scrambled eggs and golden button mushrooms and flaked kippers — his favourite — and laid his hand palm-out to take hers on the snowy damask table-cloth.  She put hers there and he gripped it tightly.  “I can’t —”  he said.

         “I know,” she said.

         “I — — ”

         “It’s all right, Edward,” she said.

        

*****************

        

He was harsh with Pellie, calling him “sir” for the first time (a small matter of a glib half-truth – or was it so small?)  The child went white-faced to his room.  Pelham did not know what to do, then.   Sophie watched but said nothing.

 

*****************

        

It was Mary who threw him a line when he thought himself beyond saving.  He was kneeling in the little chapel, in the nave where the cold slabs covered his earthly treasure.  He could not pray any more, but he went there anyway to be close to his own darling for an hour before setting back out to sea.  She let herself into the church quietly, closing the heavy old door with care so that he should not be disturbed, and sat in the back of the church waiting for him.  He knelt there till his knees could no longer take it, then rose with a groan, rubbing them, and sat in their pew beside the aisle and passed his hand over his face.

 

         “Edward,” she said, softly.

         He turned.  It was not the same face he gave his men, not fierce nor focused nor devoted with a passionate single-mindedness to his duty.  There was no duty here to sustain him.   His eyes were wild, his mouth a bitter line.  A pulse beat in his forehead.  She thought his head must ache with it (it did).  She had surprised him, and so he had not had time to put on the calm, stiff home face either.

 

         “Go to her,” said Mary.

         “I am — I have — ”

         “No,” said his sister softly, “you have brought your body home to us, but not your heart.”

         He gave a bitter sigh.  “I have no heart,” he said.  “Not any more.”

         “Do you think it’s here?” she asked, softly, looking at the marble slab with the beloved name and the resting lamb.

         “I don’t know,” he said, his voice no more than a whisper.  “I can’t find it.”

         “What are you afraid of?”  she asked, more softly still.

         “I have no right —” he said.

         “No right to what?”

         “To hurt her further.”

         “And what do you think will hurt her?”

         “Me — this — this — despair.”

         “So you keep it from her?”

         “I must,” he said helplessly, “it is so near to breaking me, Mary, I — ”

         “So she has lost a daughter and a husband both, then.”

 

         He stared at her.   The light shifted, slanting through the tall windows and fingering the creamy grey stone walls, the simple box-pews, the words and names.  “I am here,”  he said, “aren’t I?”

         “Are you?”

         “How can I ask her to bear it?”

 

         Mary looked at him steadily, lovingly.  “That you will not share it is breaking her heart all over again, Edward.”

         He stared back.  “ I — I see ———— ”

         “I knew you would,” she said, as gently as if he were three years old again and come to her scraped and bruised and trying so very hard not to cry.  “The love that the two of you have for each other, Edward, I know — I am sure — you must see that she needs your grief, if you are to go on.  You can’t do so without it, that’s for sure.”

 

         He had not been able to imagine making-love to Sophie.  He would wish for it and then see himself howling once more, helpless before the storm of it.  He had wanted to spare her that — her and himself, both.  But there would be no getting beyond it without first passing through it.  He looked at her in despair.  “I ought to uphold her,” he said, “not cry on her breast.”

         “If tears are what you have, then bring them,”  she answered, not letting his gaze fall.  “Bring whatever you have.  She needs you.  Just as you are.  Not this glass Edward who is afraid of shattering.  If you are all in pieces, then bring her the pieces, Edward.  If you hold them back, as you have been doing, she cannot heal and neither can you.”

 

         He put his hand to his mouth, breathed in harshly, closed his eyes:  saw how it would be.

He was to return in a couple of hours;  the ship’s boat would come for him half-way to high tide.

 

         “Will you — walk back to the house with me?”  he asked.

         “No,” she said.  “You go.”

         He stopped beside her, on his way to the back of the church and the door.  She pressed his hand.  “You can,” she murmured.

         He shook his head.  “It was good of you to come,” he said.  “Thank — thank you, Mary.”

         “Don’t thank me,” she said:  “go home.”

        

         It was just as he knew it must be.  Except that he thought it would break her to hold him as he wept, and instead she came alive in his arms.   The stiff and listless Sophie of the last months — a mirror to his own restraint — became once more his own most beautiful and beloved wife, as broken as he was, but no longer a stranger since he was not.  In the middle of the afternoon, a fire laid in the grate of their bedroom by Mrs. Stroud’s own loving hand so they might have privacy to say their goodbyes and now taking the chill from the room just as she had intended, he sobbed in her arms until he was spent;  and then pulled her dress open and put his mouth to her breast and sought first his own comfort and then, feeling her breathing quicken and her sweet nipple hardening under his hungry mouth, to please her while he still might on this earth, his precious wife.  She trembled, but she let him.  And then the trembling was for him, his kisses and tenderness, and she gasped and somehow he was graced with the flush in her cheeks he had missed so, and her cries, and he knew what she was giving him, the depths of courage she must fathom in order to allow him this gift of pleasing her.   It brought fresh tears to his eyes but they did not stop his intent.  He wanted to bring her there before he should go back to sea.  It would be a start, he thought, if he could meet her need for him thus.

 

         She came ablaze quickly under his touch — it had been so very long a time — she had thought perhaps never to know it again.  Helpless now, she cried-out and gasped his name — oh Edward, oh god, Edward, oh — oh — ohhh — and then began to sob as he unbuttoned himself with trembling fingers and clumsily, blindly, helplessly, came home into her again to find the same release.  She was crying as he did so and so was he.  All dressed in white, in his uniform, ready to leave — neck-cloth, shirtsleeves, weskit, britches, stockings, only his coat over the chair — he sought himself in her depths.  His movements were jerky, ungraceful, not rhythmic but each made singly, driving home as if with an effort between groans.  And so then his body took what it needed and so did his heart, and the two of them clung to one another as if they were drowning together.  The flayed look upon his face as he gave up his soul into her stayed before her eyes night and day afterwards.   And then he cried again, softly this time, unable to hold it in.  “I’m sorry — ” he gasped, “I shouldn’t — but I can’t help it ——”

         “Sssh,” she said, “yes, you should —  please, Edward, please — don’t keep this from me.”

 

         And so, being above all a loving and dutiful husband, he did not:  even though it cost him more tears, for months afterwards.

 

         (When he got up from the bed and straightened his clothing and passed rough fingers through his hair to straighten it into the semblance of a captain, his eyes met hers and did not falter.  “Please,” he said softly, “do one thing more for me — ?” 

 “Of course, Edward — what?” 

 “Put your necklace back on –– ?”    She did, of course, at once, rising from the bed and going to her drawer and turning to him to fasten the clasp for her.  His fingers trembled but he managed it.  Still holding her hair aside, he dropped a kiss on the nape of her neck.  “I love you,”  he said.

“I know,” she said. 

“More than ever,” he said, and his voice broke.      

 

“You are wearing your necklace again,” said Mary, after the ship’s boat had pulled away with Edward in it.

         “Yes,”  said Sophie.)

          

**************

 

         The tenor of his life had changed.  From summer it had turned to autumn, his life, and this frost had stricken all that was green in it.  He walked the lanes with Sophie and thought of the times they had picked blackberries together, a favourite activity of theirs, of his Harriet’s especially.  (The child used to skip ahead, sniffing her crimson-stained hands all the way home with cries of delight.)   It had been his task to reach the most impossible, the sweetest, the largest, the juiciest, getting himself sorely scratched for his efforts.  And then he would hold his harvest out triumphantly in the palm of his hand for all of them to eat;  and Harriet, when she took her share, would kiss his wounds all better, looking up at him with loving eyes.

         Sweet and sharp, hurt and giving and taking.  So this was to be his life from now on, then.

         He took it.

 

         There were fresh hurts:  he rode them out, comforting Oliver in his cabin when the news came of a little life started too soon and over so swiftly thereafter.  Although when Sophie’s letter came with the news that she was three months gone with child, he sat for a long time in stunned silence and bewilderment.  Then he took up his pen and wrote to their Lordships that he begged leave to be ashore at that time, if not in Portsmouth then on assignment in London, at the Admiralty, at least.  Later he said to Oliver, hoarsely, “— how can I?”  Oliver was wiser than to answer him, knowing the ways of grief now, but clasped his shoulder.   Pelham laid his hand over Oliver’s and squeezed it in silence, gratefully.

 

 

************************

 

At Sea,

April 1814

 

Sophie,

This must be my tenth attempt to write to you.

I received your letter this afternoon with the news of the child to be.

 

My hands shake and the deck is covered in wads of paper with a few wretched sentences on each one, none of them a fit response.  I do not know what is a fit response, so perhaps that is why none of them will do.  My heart fails at the thought of your being exposed to the danger and travail of another pregnancy. 

My own responsibility weighs heavily upon me.  I had sought solace with you, never thinking to add to your burdens further.  You say you are glad this is so.  I must be happy that you feel so — I am.  Your capacity to rise to any occasion never fails to astonish and humble me.  I know by rights I ought to sound more pleased.  We have been finding our way little by little out of the despair of our loss.  I must admit I was not ready for this.  I did not see it coming — how could I not?  I am not such a fool, am I, as not to know where babies come from?  But I never imagined, this late in our marriage, that —— well, why say more?  It is. 

If I were home tonight I think I should simply come to you and ask to be held, as tenderly and close as I wish to hold you, all night long.  In comfort, I mean, and for company and kindness and gentleness, not desire.  You must know your safety and wellbeing count above all, to me.  You are my centre and my soul holds fast to you.

Well doubtless this is not the response of unalloyed joy which you hoped for from me, had every right to hope for, to expect, even though you did say — knowing me as you do — that you thought it might be difficult news to read.  I am so transparent to you, then.  My heart is so full I cannot find words any more.  Please tell me you can pardon that, that you will be patient again with me while this news turns from shock to acceptance.  You live with these realities, you notice the changes in your self and wonder, and then wonder again, and then you feel more certain, and so it comes upon you a little at a time and you may anticipate, imagine, hope or dream.  (I hope you do not dread!)  Here there is no such subtle recognition:   I learn all at once, a fait accompli, your dear hand leading me down a turning in our path I did not expect and then, presto!  there is such a surprise at the end of it with no time to prepare, to anticipate, I am reeling from the suddenness, the force of finding-out all at once.

Hold me, Sophie.  We shall weather this too.  One day we will know it for the blessing it must be.  And I shall look back at the cramped hand writing this page, the frowning brow, and say, poor fellow, how hard he had to make all for himself when it would all come out so right and be so very well, in the end.  I do not doubt it.  My sense must convince my heart it is so. 

But what of you!  Sophie ——!!  My very darling wife ——  My love, you must engage the very best medical man that is to be had, and you must rest — rest — rest!!!! your precious self at every opportunity, pray do not do a thing that may be done by another.  This can not fail but to be a great strain upon you and you must not endanger your health with any insistence upon being “strong”  in some way as if you must prove your fitness!   To bear this child at all is to be stronger than I am, Sophie, do not doubt it, oh please cosset your self and be most careful with my darling wife whose being I cherish more than any thing ever.  Have comfortable gowns made, a dozen at least, and send for the best, most delicate creams and soaps for your tender skin and your dear feet and ankles and fingers and wrists when they swell, and do not stint on any thing you may need…  keep warm, do not hesitate to have a fire lit whatever the month, do not stay up late writing to me, or strain your eyes sewing, or upon any thing at all.  A queen, an empress, should do more than you to help herself these coming months, my beloved.  I am going to write as much to Mary and Mavis and Mrs. Stroud, as if they needed any such instructions from me but it will ease my mind, to do so, and so you shall not escape their care and love of you nor mine also, as they help me by tending to you.  Accept it I beg you, Sophie.  Or I shall not be able to sleep or rest at all, if I think you are strained and trying to do too much at this delicate time.

Oh can you see my face?  Bring me yours — let me kiss it — take you to my bosom and let us enfold one another as we have done so many times.  My love —  my love ———  my love.  Thank you for all you are to me.  And for this, too, then, since it is so.  More than ever therefore I must be and rejoice to be and am humbled to call my self your loving husband

Edward.

 

*********************

 

 

Hillfold House,

Portchester,

April, 1814

 

Edward my darling,

When will you understand that you need not apologize for being your self with me?

Your letter in answer to my news has made me cry.  Not for sadness but for the very thought of you struggling so and trying to find the right words to me.  Edward, there are no wrong ones.  Every single word you wrote is dearer to me than a whole bible. From your honest shock, to your fears, your wish that we might hold one another in this new turn our lives have taken, and then your so-tender and passionate care for me, that list of all I must do to safeguard your beloved wife and keep her well —— oh Edward, is there any woman in England who could be so fortunate in every aspect of her husband’s love?  No, there is not.

Darling, darling.  Yes we will look back one day and smile at ourselves.  I shall take your hand in mine and we shall walk quietly by the sea-shore and come home to watch our grandchildren play in the shade of the copper-beech tree, and all these alarms and anxieties will seem so very far gone.  Yet they are real now and I honour each one of them, because you feel it.  Only keep on being so sincere with me Edward, write me ever such heartfelt letters, do not ever tell me only what you wish me to hear, for that is nothing less than all that is in your heart.  And when you struggle for words, that is well too my love.  And then most of all, when you struggle, I shall indeed come to you with my arms open and we shall hold one another, yes even at this distance love, for I see your face — of course I do! — it is before my eyes at every moment, how could it be otherwise? — as mine is I know in your sight — and so we shall lie in our beds, so far, so close,  and know each that the other is holding out loving arms, to embrace, to enfold, to cuddle each other tenderly till all comfort that may be had is presently felt.  When ever you wish for me to hold you, Edward, know that I am doing so.

You must know I should have preferred to tell you my self, to spare you this shock so far from home, at sea, where you cannot just put your head on my shoulder and gather your self. But I can never forget that morning I came to you great with child at Gibraltar, and you not knowing or expecting any such thing!  Oh my poor love I shall never ever to my dying day forget the look of complete terror and anguish upon your stricken face!  — Did I mind?  No!  How could I?  I felt so for you!!! —  So, since we do not know how long you will be at sea this time, and how far along I shall be when you next return, I thought it best to tell you as soon as I was certain, my love, so that you would have all the time you might to become used to the idea.  I hope you will tell me this was the best course to choose — I am sure you will.

Have no fear that I shall over-exert my self.  I know that I am not as young as I was when first I became a mother, and I have too much sense to do anything other than take care of my self for you, for our children, for all our family.  As if Mary, Mavis and Mrs. Stroud would permit such a thing for a second, with or without your orders!  Oh love I see you at your desk, in your cabin, at sea, listening to the wind and feeling the angle of the ship as she is heeled over, wherever it is you are going, and a thousand and one things to occupy you, and amid all of that here you are writing to me, your heart aching I have no doubt, yet you imagine how it is I learn of a new child within me, and tell me I must have a fire if I am chilled, and new gowns, and think of my ankles…  Edward, Edward.  Such devotion.  How shall I ever deserve it?  And yet by this grace I daily give thanks for, even as I do not understand it, I may with breathless joy and profound humility call my self still and for ever, more blessed each day I do so, your own wife Sophie.

 

*******************

 

         They put into Spithead for revictualling for an afternoon, and he sent the boat for Sophie.  She came to his cabin wet with rain and they made love upon the window-seat.  She was thicker at the waist, but not yet big.  He shook, afterwards.  “I will have to find the way of it,”  he said, feeling dismasted, buffeted;  meaning all of it – their loss, the new life, his fears for her.

         “Yes,” she said, dropping a kiss on his forehead with its deepening lines.

         “I will try,” he said.

         “I know,” she replied.

        

*******************

        

He was  afraid, but kept his terror to himself:  fear of losing Sophie – fear that he had no fresh heart left in him to give to another child.  He tried to imagine a new little face, but could see only the one he had lost.  Then he was ashamed of himself, when Sophie’s risk and all she must find within herself were so much greater than any sacrifice of his –– and he the one to bring it all upon her, again.

 

         He went on, did his duty, wrote loving letters to his wife, his children, filled with his wishes for them, his pleasure in their achievements, his pride and satisfaction in all they did.  He begged Mary to tell him of any thing that might trouble Sophie in her self, in her health:  to keep him fully informed, to spare him no piece of news he should know.  She did so.  Thankfully, the pregnancy was awkward but uneventful, producing nothing worse than tiredness, shortness of breath and the tendency to swelling of the legs and feet.  Mary’s letters were reassuring, and his wife’s quietly happy.  (Sophie felt that a new blessing had been given them, hope gentle and sweet in her heart again.  Still, she held her sharpest joy inwardly, knowing that Edward could not perhaps share this view – not yet.)  Sometimes his letters did not mention Harriet’s name;  but between the lines she was everywhere, the silence when a song is done or the wind has died.

        

******************

 

         Sophie’s heart broke all over again, every time she came face-to-face with his guilt, his grief.  He came and went like a ghost, in between his times at sea.  “I wasn’t here —” he would say, staring off into emptiness, a world without Harriet in it. 

         “You were,” she said.  “Look, she made the painting for you — told me to send it — those were almost the last words she said, before —— ”  and she turned her face away, unable to finish her sentence.

 

         But he wasn’t there, not there,  not when he most needed to be, and she knew it:  so did he.

         “Forgive me,” he said.

 

         Duty.  His duty.

         He was not there.

 

         She had to write him a letter —!  — a letter — a letter!

         “Please,” he said.

         “Yes, Edward,” she said — it had been almost a year — and she looked into his eyes, and could not help but do so.

 

         Would he ever forgive himself?  Well, that was another matter.

 

*******************

 

1814

 

         So another child was born to them, that summer: their last.  Edward named her —  Ruth Celeste Sophia.

         Her papa was in London, when she was born two weeks early, and word was sent to him, at the Admiralty.  He rode all night to come home to them, stopping only to change horses;  could hardly stand when he got there.  The eternal Mrs. Stroud met him in the hallway.  “She’s upstairs, o’ course, sir,” she said as he stumbled past her.  He almost fell into the room.  He climbed onto the bed where Sophie lay, in all the mud of his journey, his boots even, and held her in his arms and shook for an hour until he slept, exhausted.  The next morning she showed him their new daughter.

 

         He had thought he would not be able to bear to look at her;  but he found that he could.  To his relief she did not look like Harriet,  but herself.  He could not have stood another Harriet.  This little one was smaller, and redder, and yet had more hair already, and a callus from sucking her thumb in the womb. 

 

         Pellie was almost nine, now — too big to sit upon his papa’s knee.  He sat beside him in a chair and talked nineteen to the dozen about everything in his life that his father ought to know about.  Stroud took one look at his captain and brought him a good-sized shot of schnapps,  although it was but ten o’clock in the morning. Pelham drank it all at once, with a swift grateful glance.  Stroud brought another.

         Mavis was — Mavis.  She had not changed, at all, in any way that mattered.  Such a pity, about the baby — Edward hoped for another to fill her arms, soon, when Oliver could not.

 

***************

        

Pelham fell asleep in the armchair that night, holding the little shawl-wrapped parcel that was Ruth against his chest.  It was the shabby armchair in their bedroom, the one from the parlour back in Gibraltar where he had first come to Sophie, and allowed himself the same luxury, all those years ago.  There must be something about that chair, thought Sophie, watching him by moonlight, the rise and fall of his breast, the absolute weariness in his face — and to think she had thought him weary, then!

 

         Oh, Edward.

         She thought of the time he had come to her after Pellie’s birth, and his trembling gratitude when she had brought him lovingly to his release, accepted the urgency in him that he could not help whenever she was near.

         Then. 

         It was different, now;  that unbounded spontaneity had been buried with their daughter, and would never be theirs again.  He had come back to her, thank God, but more deliberately now — giving himself to her, knowing that this balm was needed for both their aching hearts;  making tender love to her as if she were lent to him only, and he must take each chance to please her thoroughly, lest it be his last.

 At first she had found it difficult to respond as he so wished her to;  but his yearning for her to do so was so apparent that it became another gift she could give him, reaching into the brave depths of herself she did not know she had, allowing herself to take pleasure at his hands once more.  And so she had let herself surrender to the tidal surge of his mouth on her, making herself forget all else, until he brought her where he wanted her, and himself with her.  But the needing-to was less a thing of the body, now, and more a crying-out of the heart:  hold me —! 

 There was nowhere, here least of all, that the grief did not colour everything.  The physical love between them, always so fundamental, had become a fragile thing in need of nurture.  It was hurt, broken, as was every other essential part of them.  In their spiritual love for each other, they saw that and found their way back to it slowly, groping, like people newly blind.

 

         Well, it had brought them this far, to this new life they had made from the ruins of their shattered one, even though he had retreated from her again as she grew big with it.  She understood:  it was all so overwhelming to him, all over again, more so than ever.  His old life-force would have overcome that.  The present one was warier, less helpless — more guarded.  This pregnancy had set them back. 

So he had not yet come to her, nor seemed to want that this time, not physical release, nor need it:  only to hold her.  Not just this visit, since the birth, but even before that:  several weeks — months, even, it had been.  He had withdrawn from her under this new demand that he open himself anew to fresh hurt, give up his heart hostage one more time in spite of its still-open wound.  The thought of the child to come, that would once have been a joyful flame, was anguish to him now:  he could not bear it, held himself back – not that he meant to or wanted to, but that he must or be flayed once more. He would have come to her, if he could have:  that much she knew.  And the rest would come again, she was sure of it;  they had mended it before, time by time — they would recover it now.  Perhaps she would begin with soft, warm kisses upon him while he yet slept beside her, one early morning, slipping her love for him in under the healing cloak of unconsciousness to enfold his lonely, aching body before the armour came back to crush it with the opening of his still-hurt eyes.

 

         Yes, she would start there, one day before he left for London again — and perhaps he would forgive her, understanding why she had.  Her heart turned over, raced at the very thought.  Would there ever be a time he did not move her thus?  If so, it had not come yet, not even now.  They simply had to find their way to it, so far had they strayed from the known path in the dark forest of their loss.

         Before, it had been one of the sweetest things he did:  wake her softly in the middle of the night with his mouth to her breast, so that even as she came out of sleep she was gasping at his kisses, the playful tender suckling that began with his pleasure and redoubled in hers, thrilling them both.  It never failed to sweep them together into a spiralling dance of wanting and then satisfaction.   It was not something he took lightly; but on the few occasions he had repeated that first exquisitely tender discovery, it never failed to move her sharply.  He would most often do so the night before he was to leave her,  no matter how hotly they had loved before sleeping;  he would waken and reach for her for the bliss of one more time in each others’ arms, knowing what her response would be, counting on her delighted cries as she came to consciousness.  And she had found that even if she had retired to bed unhappy and in despair at the thought of his leaving, this would find  in her a deeper current with which always said ‘yes’ to him for her.   She prayed she would find his, thus.

 

And so, would he let her have so much of him, then, this time, before his duty took him?  — this handful of warm sweet pearls she craved from him, raining upon her milk-swollen breasts, beside the cold hard ones he had sent her to “make do”  so long ago, that swung from the gold chain she wore always?

Yes, he would:  because he loved her.

        

These thoughts, this hope, filled her eyes with tears as she looked upon him slumped back in the chair, the new baby cradled to his chest, both slumbering so innocently.  She wished she could keep all harm from them for ever through the sheer force of her love;  knew she could not.

But here he was, a thousandfold more beloved, now;  more — what were those mathematics, again?  Infinitely:  yes, indeed.  Edward,  asleep and vulnerable once again — as he had been, then — as he always was, with her.  And once more she dropped a kiss upon his brow:  but this time, so softly that it did not wake him.  He sighed, no more than that:  slept on, weary and brave and dutiful and loving and vulnerable as he was.

 

         Edward.

Edward.

Still a prayer upon her lips.

 

She was patient:  she could wait.

It would not do to hurry him, or he would only be hurt afresh in his failure, his inability to accept what she so longed to give him.

 

**************************

 

Edward liked to bring his wife her meals, in those quiet precious shared days while she recovered from the birth, and sit with her while she ate, up in their beautiful large bedroom with its pale-daffodil walls and rose-blue Persian carpet.  He would eat too, to keep her company.  

Mrs. Stroud would have liked to carry everything up to my lady herself, what with all the extra effort she had put into tempting her pale lips: omelettes wrapped around wild-mushrooms Mr. Stroud had been sent out in search of before dawn, and nourishing custards with nutmeg baked on top;  fragile melt-in-the-mouth pastry shells filled with minced veal and shallots (nothing so coarse as an onion for my lady at this delicate time);  pale-green leek-and-watercress soup with a spiral of fresh cream, and beef tea.  But she recognized the capting’s look, and put all on a tray for him:  turned it over to him for carrying-up, her own feelings mute but visible in the damask napkin folded just so, and the little nosegay of pansies off to the side.  (Stroud kept the faded ones nipped, so they would continue flowering late into the summer.)

 

The doctor had pronounced himself pleased with Sophie, after so late a pregnancy, it being a very good thing that she had her health in full, yet.  He had had other patients that had beaten her by ten years, alarming themselves and their husbands, both;  still, with this family’s particular history uppermost in his mind — for it was he that had worked and failed to save Harriet’s breath for her, that agonizing night —  he tended to Sophie more closely than he might otherwise have done for a woman so strong and fit.

The look on Pelham’s face as he turned his wife over to the doctor’s care would alone have given pause to any man thinking of making a perfunctory examination, or offering a careless opinion. “She is perfectly well, sir,” he said firmly, professionally — “yes indeed, my lady, you could not be making a better recovery.  The sea-air is so healthy, in these cases, and you have been taking plenty of nourishment, I see —!”

“Edward will not let me do otherwise,” she smiled, “he hovers over me and tells me stories to make me forget I am not hungry!”

“So you will do very well, my lady,” he finished, a hearty pronouncement and one he felt quite confident to make.

“Thank God,” said Pelham, closing his eyes briefly.

“Well, well —” waved the doctor, “I shall see myself out, sir — do not trouble yourself!”

Sir Edward had already turned to his wife:   remembered only from his most ingrained good manners to turn and nod his token thanks to the doctor.

 

*******************

 

Ruth, then.  A very quiet baby.  Sophie would tickle her toes, to wake her enough to nurse and grow strong.  Edward watched, as he still loved to do, although it turned his heart over, now.  He would get up, and tuck the lambs-wool shawl back round his wife’s shoulders where it had slipped down;  close the window, if a breeze should happen to steal in;  look with less blazing desire, now, but an even greater tenderness, at his wife’s rosy nipple escaping from the baby’s mouth.  Sometimes a glimpse of it would make him close his eyes for a moment as if in prayer.  In these few days he tried to make up to Sophie — and to himself — for not having been there when he should have been.  She understood, and made him welcome in that sanctuary of new-motherhood.

 

She wondered, at these times, if he would kneel by her lap and ask with shining eyes to put his own mouth there, as he had in those other miraculous and never-to-be-recaptured times with Pellie and Harriet.  It would be a start;  it had meant so much to them both, before, back when they lived in Eden.  But he did not:  he simply gazed.  Instead he told her that he loved her a dozen times a day, till she wondered if it could ever grow stale to her ears, from his repeating it:  but of course it could not, did not.  Neither, of course, did their conversation:  for they had still as much delight as ever in each others’ company:  more so, with Mavis and Hastings and Pellie and the house and garden to discuss, now.  They had been friends first, before ever he came to her as a lover:  they were friends still.

The next week, a day or two before he should return to the Admiralty — though please God by ship this time, not on horseback! — he asked her if she was well enough yet to leave her bed for a little and walk into the garden with him.  Of course, she said, braving Mrs. Stroud’s disapproving frown as she dressed carefully and submitted to being wrapped in not one, but two shawls.  She took the arm he extended her, and she leaned on it;  and so they made their way between the roses and the sweet-peas (oh, heavenly scent!) to the end of the garden.

“Should you like to go out along the shore-path?” he asked her, “just a little way?”

 

“Of course,” she answered, realizing at once his desire to see the sea again, and share it with her.  He had been taking long walks beside it while she rested, this week, and she knew the hankering he had to feel a deck under his feet once more, to sniff the breeze and eye the clouds. 

The gate in the rosy brick wall opened with a creak – no matter how much grease poor Stroud put on the hinges, which he did, a might, that salt air gained the upper hand on him and seized them up again (although he could, and did, keep the bugger painted).  Sophie had grown to love the sound of it:  it made her smile, and think of Stroud and his constant war against the sea, Canute-like;  and of the time Hastings had come out here after Mavis, the both of them so agitated, and returned hand-in-hand in a sacred, knowing, innocent glow — of how they had earned their happiness with truthfulness and patience, afterwards.

  And so they passed beyond their walled garden to the world outside.  Pelham put his hand protectively over hers as they made their way slowly down the pebbled path to the water’s edge.  A heron stood in the shallows, motionless.  Out beyond Rowner a gaff-rigged schooner with a dark-red sail tacked, made her way toward the harbour-mouth.  She watched him watch it.

 

They walked on a little, till her breathing caught slightly.  He noticed at once, turned to her with a frown of concern.  “Should you like to rest, my dear, before we return?” he asked her.

“Yes, Edward,” she said, “I should like that. Look, there is a hollow, by that gorse-bush — shall we sit there awhile?”

He took off his coat,  waving-off her protests, and she let him then;  spread it in the sheltered lee of the gorse and the tussocky sea-grass.  Very carefully, remembering her sore and tender state, he handed her down to sit there, gave her his wrists to grasp until she shifted and got as comfortable as she could.

 

“Is there still much bleeding?” he asked, concerned and wondering when the roses would bloom in her cheeks once more.

“No, not much,” she said, “less this time — because she was early, I think, and I had not grown so big— it was easier.”

“My love,” he croaked, then, sitting-down beside her in his shirt-sleeves.  She leaned her head against his still-powerful shoulder.  He put his arm about her and they looked out to sea together in silence for a while. It was not the awkward silence of two people who cannot think what to say, but the serene one of two who have no need to say anything.

 

“You’re my life,” he said at last.

She did not argue, knowing that despite the fact he must return to his duty, and the long absences still in store for them, and the passion he felt when upon his own quarterdeck, still nevertheless he had meant it with all his heart.

 

Did she dare say it?  Would he weep afresh?  Ten years they had been married:  a year and a half since they had lost the light of their lives.  She looked at the ever-deepening lines in his dear face, staring off beside her:  risked it, since there would be so few times together, so many when she would wish that she had done so while she had the chance and he next to her,  his arm encircling her.  “We are  blessed, Edward,” she whispered.

He buried his head in her lap, then.

 

************************

 

The next morning, before dawn, she moved so carefully in their big bed so as not to wake him before seeking him with her kisses.  She found him, of course, his body’s tide at the full, that hadn’t changed:  sleep was kind, that way – and so she came to him as she had on their wedding-night, and some special times in-between, not so often as to have lost their freshness or their power to move him to his marrow, his spine, he had said on one of them.  His groan came quickly, loud in the stillness.  She prayed it would not bring a rebuff with it – one he could not help, to hurt them both.

His hand found her head, gripped her hair, but did not pull it away from him. She kissed him more deeply now, while she still could, before he asked her what she was doing (as if it were not as clear as anything could be).

His breathing turned to gasps, and he said her name.  Was he going to weep?  It was hard to tell, without seeing his face.  Her breasts ached, filled with milk;  brushing his lean, hard body brought an answering hard tingle to them and she knew her milk would let-down, she could not help being moved by him.  It would be warm, though, streaming from her, so perhaps it would not distract his attention — and it didn’t (thank heavens).

He gasped, her kisses bringing him fully awake and fully aroused, now – she could feel his response deepening under the joyful wet sweep of her tongue.  Oh please, let him give her this. 

“Sophie —” he groaned,  “Sophie — oh, God — !”   She held her breath.  Could she bear a refusal from him, now?   “Oh,” he said,  brokenly, “ please — oh please, don’t — don’t —  don’t stop — don’t stop — don’t ever stop, ever ———  for Christ’s sake Sophie, oh — oh — ohhh —”

 

The need was there, as strong and sweet as ever:  and she had found it even in the forest of his despair and fear and hurt, that he now must give his heart afresh to this new daughter. 

His need. 

First he let her take it;  and then he gave it to her altogether.

 

**********************

 

While Sophie was resting that afternoon, before his return to London early the next morning, Edward sat with his sister Mary in the pretty drawing-room that held Sophie’s presence even when she was not in it.  So different from the cold,  formal rooms of their youth at Buckfastleigh;  so easy to be in, and open one’s heart — if a room could be an invitation.  Why not?  Sophie’s bedroom was, after all:  and so was Mrs. Stroud’s showplace, the dining-room.  Different hungers, different rooms.

He sat upon the sofa, stared out of the window.  Mary sewed, something lacy for the baby;  waited for him to speak.

 

“She told me –” he said, finally, “she told me we were blessed.”

His breathing grew unsteady.

“I — I suppose we are — ” he went on, between halting gasps and sighs.  “I can’t – can’t argue with her, she has the right of it, we have been —— but, oh—!”

 

Mary’s gaze lit on him, stayed there.  Calm, intelligent, caring.  She reached out, took his hand. 

He left it there;  put his head in his other hand, leaning his elbow on the arm of the sofa, holding on to her fingers tightly while he mastered himself.  And gave her what he never had given her when he was a boy and she had so wanted to give him  something – anything – anything at all,  her solitary little brother, and he had not let her then, because he did not know how, and neither did she, not then — what he gave her and took from her now:  the gift of comforting him.

 

***********************

Indomitable,

Out of London, Thames-side

August, 1814

My treasured wife,

So here I am once more at sea and the memory of your loving kiss still so sharp that it unmans me each time I think of it.  How is it that I come to you wishing to comfort you and yet it is you that reaches out to draw me into your healing embrace?  You humble me.

No sooner had I reached London than I received orders for the Baltic, so I write this in haste while I may still send it at Gravesend before we make open sea.

 

Tell me you are well my darling and that the baby thrives and that all is well at home.  I spent the last two weeks at your side in the sharpest and dearest mixture of bliss and trepidation it could be possible to feel. Yet it was my joy to wait upon you and I know you let me, even to small services you could well have done for yourself, so that I should have the pleasure and relief of performing them for you and thus of giving you some small thing in the face of all you give to me and to our children every day of our lives.  My love.  I have written to Pellie and to Mary and to Mavis and saved this last and dearest for you.  I give thanks for all that you are to me Sophie, I shall do with every breath I draw till the last and then only more so in the next life.

 

How you found the courage to come to me after my back has been turned to you so coldly I do not know.  I beg you to forgive me.  I think I could, I would have come to you as a lover had you not just given birth but I could not ask it of you to come to me.  And yet you did.  I have been so afraid, Sophie.  Not knowing if I am equal to all we have been given.   I feel so much and do not know what to do with all I feel.  It comes so naturally to you, to act upon what you feel.  Teach me?  You do, each day we love and are one anothers’.

 

And you took a small string from my bow, did you not.  Well I did not think to have taught you any thing, only learned from you, so it stirs me most deeply to think of what must have been in your mind as you looked upon me and dared to approach me.  I well recall the first time I  dared to approach you  in sleep.  Not meaning to demand anything, not intending to wake you even, only that I woke and there close by my face found your sweet naked breast, your bosom rising and falling softly with each sleeping breath, and such a prayer of thanks for you in my heart I could not help but brush it with my lips.  Yes that was in our carefree days.  I did not intend to do more than give you a sweet shudder in your dreams.  But you know how it is with me – I can not resist you – you sighed and your hand found my head and so I dared to be bolder yet. 

Oh lord how it stiffens me to write to you of it! — yes even now Sophie, you must know all my desire turns toward you, when I allow it to do so.  Your mew then brought me to such sharp need of you that we were shortly in one anothers’ arms again, you barely awake, oh it was one of the sweetest times I ever recall, you half-asleep and coming to consciousness under my ever-more-eager kisses, and drawing me to you drowsily at first and then in helpless fierce desire.  And now you have turned that lesson into a gift of your self to me.  One that for all my poor thorny defences I could not resist.  How well you know me Sophie.  How  shall I ever deserve you?

 

I must finish, good God there is so little time and I would not send you only these passionate thoughts when there is so much to touch on, my care of you and my wishes for the baby’s wellbeing and your full and quick recovery and how I should wish you to eat and grow strong and you must let Mavis fasten your slippers till you can bend without hurting your self and oh God Sophie a thousand and one things and all I have been able to manage is this scrawled thing of half-finished wishes and the most passionate recollections — will you pardon me?  I should have left more time — but if I had turned my pen to you first I should never have found it in me to write anything else, I am spent when I have opened my heart to you Sophie, I go all the way, I always have, with you, you are my be all and end all and I come to you first and last and in between.  And now I can not wait to see you and the roses once more in your cheeks and this new life rekindling your joy as you promise me it shall and I must believe you, and for us to be husband and wife together. 

My love, my love, my only true and sweet and dearest love, thanking you for all you are to me, all you bring to me, I am and shall remain for ever your own Edward.

 

 

**************************

 

He proved, of course, a tender and loving father to Ruth;  although it was still many years before he could utter the name “Harriet” without choking.

        

     ***********************

        

Ruth, as she grew, had dark hair, like Edward’s, and her eyes remained blue, although wide, like her sister’s had been.   But she was quieter and sweeter, and a little sadder, by nature:  although that was hardly surprising.

 

*********************

 

At Sea

October, 1814

My very dear son,

I hope and trust that you are of every service to your precious mamma at each moment.  You must know that I count on you to be the man when I cannot be there and to give her every consideration that I should.  Now that she must tend to your new sister she will have her hands very full and I know your assistance and care for her will be appreciated and needed.  You are a bigger brother now and have much to offer as Ruth grows under your example and protection.

Please tell me how you progress in your studies, whether you have yet mastered your Euclid and how your understanding of plane geometry fares.  Everything we do in navigation depends upon this understanding of triangles, it is the root and basis of all calculations and the lives of your men will depend upon your mastery of it.  I know you to be capable of great accuracy in your engineering, which pleases me greatly.  You have the makings of an excellent officer if you can but bind your will to your duty.  Self-discipline is all, there can be no other kind in the end.  Therefore I beg you to apply yourself most earnestly and diligently to the pursuit of it.

 

The last packet of letters your mamma sent did not include one from you.  I know your life must be filled with all manner of busy pursuits and lessons – I am counting on the lessons! – but still I should be most obliged if you would not neglect to tell me of your progress and what you have been doing and how our family do, at least once in a week.  You must know that I do not receive all the letters sent me, since it is difficult to convey a thing to a moving destination, and so I fear I must ask you to double your efforts in order to reach me with even half of your reports!  While we remain so far distant from each other, my son, this is all that I have of you and I would hold fast to it and to you thereby at all times.  Do not think for a moment that because I am not at your side that I do not expend a very great deal of thought and care upon you. 

You are older now and you have seen at first-hand how very precious we are to one another and how fragile is this thread which binds us to this life and to one another.  Do all you can to keep it strong and in good repair Pellie, we have nothing if we have not each other.  Could you but see the look of pleasure and pride upon my face as I read your thoughts, yes mis-spellings and all, you would not hesitate to send them regularly I know.  I ask you this not as a duty but as the gift of your filial feeling, just as I write to you not merely from obligation as your father but from the very deep love and pride which I feel for you. You are my stamp upon the future Pellie, as I am my father’s and so it has been throughout history, we have nothing to leave but our deeds and our children to take our place in the world.  I would not have you underestimate the importance of that.

 

Although you are but a boy and it would not be so clear to you as it is to me, and that is how it should be, boys may learn to shoulder more cares as they grow to men and to take an ever longer perspective.  Which is why I must tell you how it is from mine, since you cannot be expected to see it for yourself, yet.

Yet you must ask yourself as you grow to manhood what is the purpose of your life and your existence here.  There can be no honour in a life of vain self-service.  There is no greater end to my mind than to devote one’s efforts tirelessly and to the best of one’s ability to service and sacrifice, so as to leave the world improved from the way it was before.  This may be in a small sphere or a great one but service is the purpose and end of all, to my eyes.  You are blessed with extraordinary talents and intelligence, thank God, and it is my hope to see them used to the good of your country.

 

Never forget as you sit in church of a Sunday and see the light streaming through the window we placed there that it has been given to you to be and to remain living, not by right but as a privilege and a blessing, and that since it is but lent to you, you must be endeavour to be worthy of it.  In fact I should not want you to forget this lesson at any time.

How does your mamma?  I count on you to tell me, son, for she will not trouble me herself to mention if she has had the grippe or the earache.  Tell me all that goes on at home, I want your observations, it will do you good to report, you might consider it practice for keeping a log.  Oh Pellie, do I ask too much of you?  Exhort you too much, tell you too little how dear you are to me?  Forgive me if that is so.  I would be the best father I can to you and I regret that I must be absent by reason of my duty from your side during these critical years of your growing.  These letters are all we have to keep that connection close.  I wish to continue to know you as you grow and change, it pains me to come home and find you are not the lad I have been thinking you are but someone quite different whom I should have known, and did not.  Give me your self upon paper as I shall endeavour to do in return.

 

My own father was present to me every day and I little considered his gifts to me while he lived.  Although his manner was stern, if you think I am harsh then you should only have known your grandfather to know that it is hardly so.  Yet he thought much of me and dearly beneath it all, as I do you, only wishing to make me a better man for it.  I have been whipped at his hands upon more than one occasion, for willfulness, for pride, for disobedience, for lack of consideration, for temerity, for insolence even though I did not intend it.  All the other occasions were deserved I expect.  The last time was when I was yet older than you, the day I destroyed part of the house with the miscarriage of an experiment.  Yet he wished to teach me thereby what I owed to my self and to the world and I dare say he succeeded.  I hope so.  While I am not happy that my life takes me from you so much, I can feel pride in the service I have given to our country these past thirty-five years.

 

Well we have been making excellent way and are expected to make landfall in the island of Jamaica within a very short while.  It is a colourful place and would make Portchester seem very drab by comparison.  There are hills clothed in green year-round, and great plantations of sugar-cane and mills – there is another word but I cannot remember it – great stone buildings with steaming chimneys – for the production of rum thereby.  Parrots and bright flowers your mamma would love to paint, the sea impossibly blue and turquoise.  And yet in all this green beauty and colour there is a vileness at the heart of it.  The plantations are worked by slaves which I cannot help but think is an unchristian use of one’s fellow man.  Their servitude is brutal and they die like flies, as unmourned except for their value as beasts like an ox that has foundered.  I have had conversations with their owners which have turned my stomach, to be polite in return.

 I have had Negroes in my crew and I cannot subscribe to the belief that they are of second-rate intelligence and made to be subservient to us.  I made one master’s mate but a few years ago and he has proved the very best of men.  I foresee a great deal of trouble from the slave trade, one day, and it is my wish to see it ended.  You must not neglect to be aware of the history and politicks of the world around you, my son, for these are the forces which shape our lives and we are ignorant of them at our peril.  It would not hurt you to read the newspaper as often as you can, to try to understand all that is taking place beyond your immediate world.  And if there is any interesting news, you must know how much I would appreciate hearing of it from you.

 

It has grown late and this has grown long.  Too long to read at one sitting, I dare say.  Well it will do you no harm to look at it more than once.  It reflects I hope my very great care of you and wishes for your continued growth in stature, in learning and in all the attributes of manhood.  Know that I am now and shall always remain your most loving and proud Father.

 

 

 

35.   Landfall by Moonlight

 

1815

 

Mavis turned to Oliver, nuzzling his neck.  They had the spacious former guest-bedroom in the Portchester house now, since Aunt Mary had moved into the house-next-door and married dear one-armed Commodore Cruickshank.   There was little point in maintaining a separate establishment of her own when she and Sophie both missed their husbands most of the year, and enjoyed each others’ company — and besides, it was understood that as soon as Hastings was given his first permanent independent command, not the chance assignments that had fallen to him so far — a situation expected daily — she would pack her bags and fly to his side.  No need for a house, then, or any responsibilities:  this one was large enough to contain all.

It was the middle of the night, but as little as he was home, there could be no wasted time.  She knew he never could come into her arms without thinking of the baby they had lost, born too soon to live:  it had drawn a few, trembling breaths, a fragile pink moth caught in the lacy shawl, but the air was too sharp for its tiny lungs, its skin so much too thin, and Mavis had held it numbly, knowing it could not last the hour, herself held within the harbour of her mother’s arms, still in the birthing-bed, till it grew still and fluttered no more — poor little thing. 

         She had not cried:  what was the use in crying?   It had happened.

 

         Oliver seemed to think afterwards that if he took her, it would hurt her all over again, though she had tried to tell him it was the only comforting she wanted.  She had hoped for another baby, quickly, at first, but when none appeared she thought it just as well, really:  for when he got his ship, there would be no impediment to sailing with him, at least in the beginning.

         Every time was more precious to her still:  even more than that first kiss he gave her, in the shelter of the gorse-bush, the one that held all the promise of his feelings and his stated intention to wait for her.  And wait he had, patiently, loyally, kissing her one more time each year — she had thought she would die from it, sometimes, when his lips lifted from hers and she knew she must wait another year for the next — and seen the same in his eyes.  It was almost as if there were no separate times, but one long one only, stretching back to the moment in the cave when she had dared to brush his lips with hers, and thus claimed him.  Each time since then had only re-affirmed the rightness of their coming-together.

 

         His skin was smooth under the brush of her lips.  She rested her face between his shoulder-blades.  He had stripped off his nightshirt when he came to her earlier;  he had fallen asleep without it.  Sometimes she simply lay awake and stared at him.  God, but he was beautiful.  She still could not believe, after two years, that he was fully hers.  Nor that she could want him as much as she did.  When he entered her the first time, she had thought to know the extent of his manhood in that moment:  had not realized that he would bring also the little boy, both at one and the same time.  It still made her stomach lurch, to feel it, to think of it, even. 

         He had been so concerned not to shock her with the full force of his wanting — as if she had not felt it in every embrace they had shared since their engagement, when she was allowed to kiss him at last, freely, and did so, pressing up against him shamelessly till he gasped — what he tried to keep from her, blushing, more than ever:  what she could not wait to claim.

         He could not have shocked her if he had tried:  didn’t he know that?

         He was a virgin still, when he came to her.

 

         He had tried to be gentle with her:  he had trembled.  It was she that drew him, moving with the swift sharpness that was needed.  She did gasp with the piercing pain, then, but it was a reflex only:  for all his concern she only pulled him closer.  And then, so soon — she had scarcely caught her breath from the first burning stab of it — his eyes had widened and his voice cracked and he was all hers, at last:  entirely.

         And then he had told her he was sorry —!

         She tried to make him understand, but all he could do was tell her he didn’t want to hurt her, over and over, wiping the blood and seed from her thighs with his nightshirt, rubies and pearls, his hands still trembling.

         He had thought she was giving herself to him.  Then he finally saw he was also giving himself to her:  what she wanted, what she had always wanted.  After that he did not hold back, at all, since the more he gave, the longer – fiercer – hotter – more elemental he was with her, the brighter her eyes grew.

 

         It was so easy, to reawaken his wanting.  Her fingertips, her tongue, a few words could do it, even.  A look.  And then the fierce triumph, as he responded with all the heat that was in him:  all for her.  She could not get enough of him;  thought that if she could hold him thus every night for ever, it would still not be enough.  “Stop doing the running,”  he had said, back then.  So she learned not to give chase — to trust that she would be the prize he claimed all of his own accord.  She learned to make her invitations so subtle that he thought they were his.  

Moving against him in the bed was one of her favourites, pretending to be asleep, brushing his back with her front or vice-versa and sighing as if she were turning-over in her sleep.  He was  a bolt of silk.  There was a special tone to her sigh, a barely-voiced mmmh at the end of it, falling  — she had found it out once, quite by accident – that roused him instantly.  Her raw-silk lover crackled with the sudden electricity of need, would scramble into her arms then, breathless to discharge it.

         She made that sound, waited for his response.  In his sleep, his breathing quickened.  She sighed again, as if stirring beside him, not fully conscious but yearning, sweet.  Little sounds, that brought him quivering to wakefulness.  “ohhh…” he breathed:  “ohhh — oh, sweetheart… ”

 

         “Yes?” she whispered, as if he had woken her.

         “Oh God,” he murmured, “is it too soon — ? may I — ?”

         “Of course,” she answered, touching him, bringing him to fire and molten heat again, and herself with him.

         “You don’t mind — ?”  he asked.

         She put her mouth to his nipple, to shush him.  It worked:  he groaned, as she knew he would, under the flickering of her tongue.  She drew her fingers up the inside of his thigh, at the same time:  he shook.  It was so easy, to make him shake — she was almost ashamed of herself.

         She could have eaten him, so sweet as he was.  Sometimes she did — he would let her, in disbelief, holding his breath.  Not this time, though:  he was on top of her, seeking her, taking-up his wild roses with trembling hands, his breathing ragged, his sweet mouth open and then closing round the rosebud he was suddenly starving-for;  though not as starving as she.

         “Love,” he said, “love, love — love — my love — ” until his words turned to groans and she claimed him again altogether.

         She couldn’t see any wrong in it, this, if he needed to think it was his asking her that called-forth her ‘yes.’ 

         He always asked her.

         She always said ‘yes.’

 

         You might have thought he would have realized, one day — she expected him to — but he never did, it seemed.  So overwhelmed by his need, he could not imagine it had not started within his own body.

         All the better, then.

         And so now — and now — and now, and now, and ever more urgently now – now – now.

         Now.

 

         “Oh, God, I love you,” he said, brokenly.

         She kissed him.

         “Could it be wrong,” he whispered, “to want you so much?”

         “I don’t think so,” she whispered back.

 

         He slept.

         She watched him till dawn, heard the tide turn.

 

 

************************

 

 

Not so far away, Commodore Cruickshank watched his new wife sleep by moonlight.  It was but a couple of hours since she had gone from bride to wife, in his one-sided but firm embrace.

Some might not think her a beauty, though to his eyes she was a handsome woman – the masculine adjective fit her strong features better than ‘pretty’, that was for sure.  A good woman, a kind one;  and now, by some miracle, his wife.

His heart thudded painfully, to think it, even.

An extraordinary thing, considering he had never thought of marriage until he was fifty-odd, convinced nobody would want him.  Specially not after Trafalgar, when he was washed-up, only half the man he had been before.  Well, three-quarters, on a good day.

 

What a kind face that Miss Pelham had, he thought to himself, the day he had moved into the yellow cottage next to Hillfold-House.  Well, altogether a kind family, especially Lady Pelham — Edward, you old dog you,  he thought, you son-of-a-gun, back in those days we were aboard the old Prince-of-Wales and you were so stern, so high and mighty, so self-sufficient, so inaccessible — who would have thought you had it in you – ? eh – ?

 

And now, what was he to say, then?  Cruickshank, you old gimp, who would have thought you had it in you —?  Eh?

 

How had he dared to propose?  Was it after the dinners where they all read from Shakespeare, or the evenings where the ladies sang in turns at the piano, playing for each other, laughing and crying and laughing again by turns?

Was it the day she had dropped her basket in the street, and he had hurried to help her pick up all the ribbons and gewgaws and she had looked up at him and he realized she was flustered because he — he, one-armed and bearded as he was (it was so damned hard to shave) — he was kneeling beside her in the dust?  He had not thought her anything but plain, until he saw her colour, then.

He had stopped thinking of himself as a man, in that way.  Just part of the background.

Oh, lord.

 

How had he dared to think she might accept him?

Was it Lady Pelham’s kindness in inviting him, all those evenings and picnics?  Was it at the ball in Portsmouth, where Miss Pelham and he had stood watching the young folks dance the night away, the sweet young things so beautiful in their ballgowns, the young officers so dashing – as he was, once – and caught each other sighing, wishing they had those days over again, and not these lonely ones?

 

Well, whatever it was, he was damned glad he had written to Pelham to ask for his advice.

The reply had been characteristically curt:

Cruickshank — damned glad to hear from you.  By God!  What an idea.  Why not —?  If you can get her to have you — that’s the catch, of course.  But for what it’s worth, you have my blessing, sir.  Absolutely.  Shake my sister up a bit, eh?  Why not! Let me know how it comes off — ever yr servant &c., Pelham

 

He had wondered about that side of things.  What to expect.  Companionship, was what a woman her age was looking for,  in accepting a fellow.  Mustn’t rush her.

Not a clumsy old salt like him, especially.  It wasn’t even as if he would have known what he was doing – hadn’t been married before, didn’t know at all how to approach a woman, even.  Mustn’t frighten her.  Let their easy companionship deepen slowly, hope it would yet become more, accept it if it didn’t.  God, they were neither of them under fifty, after all.  Some would think that was too old for that kind of nonsense.

He hoped it would not be, one of these days.  At least to find out.

But she had told him, in accepting his offer, that it was because he was kind – that was what she said, and his heart had swelled, to hear it.  So he could hardly be anything less, now, could he?  Kind:  she was counting on it from him, then.  He would not disappoint her.  Lord knew, he was fortunate enough that she had said ‘yes’ at all.

Mustn’t shock her — absolutely not.  She would take a lot of gentling, this one, after so long an unbreached, unattempted state of maidenhood.

 

And then she had astounded him!  Barely a fortnight into it all – their being married – he thought he was taking his time, jollying her along, being so very patient and kind while this tall, shy maiden became adjusted to the very idea of having a husband on her arm, let alone in her bed, for he had not moved out of his own room, lord!  no, just set a pretty one up for her – all in good time, he thought – and then she had said to him, after dinner, as they walked along the shore that evening, her arm in  his, “Frederick,” – she had said, diffidently, “—did – did you wish me to be a wife to you, as well as a companion?  I was just wondering, since – since — ”

And he had almost stumbled, answered her honestly, “I didn’t think you’d be ready – why, my dear, I – I had hoped, in time, that – ”

“I thought perhaps you did not wish to, Frederick” she had said then, her fine strong  features deeply flushed, all of a sudden  –  “although if you had felt that way, I confess, I should have been disappointed —”

“You would ?” he said, dazed.

“If you do — do wish to —  why, this – would be a very good time, wouldn’t it?  now that we are – are married?”

 

She had Sophie to thank for that, of course.  She had gone to her after receiving Frederick's proposal and asked her honestly if she thought she was too old and narrow to be anyone’s wife.

Sophie took her hands.  “What do you want, Mary dear?” she asked.

“I – I should like it – very much indeed,” Mary had said, shyly.  “I – don’t want to be an old maid, Sophie. Not even here, as kind as you are to me — I want more than this — is that wrong, or foolish?”

“Not at all!” cried Sophie.  “Never!  Love is never wrong, or foolish, Mary — I know that much, with all my heart!  If you feel it, then you are not too old, or too narrow, or too anything!”  She smiled reassuringly, then.  “Now, we must have some very frank conversations, Mary dear, if you will let me prepare you a little – I think you will be happier, if you have some idea what to expect — a marriage is a complicated thing, my dear sister – not even just that  aspect of it,” she added, blushing, “though I imagine you might have the most questions, there —?  People seem not to speak of these things, ordinarily, as if it were all a great secret — and yet we do need to know, do we not?!”

 

“Tell me,” said Mary. “You always have seemed so happy together, in that way, you and Edward – there is a glow to you, and he – when he comes home to you, why, he – even now – ” and she stopped there, not wanting to hurt Sophie further.

“Yes,”  said Sophie, “even now, it is true...”  and she stared off for a few moments.  Thought of the last time Edward had come home to her, before Christmas, the baby already three months old, but it had been his first chance since the birth – and he had been able to say, “God! I want you — will you not come to bed?” just as in their old days;  and she had unbuttoned his uniform with trembling fingers, feeling like a bride again, and he had trembled, too, hardly able to wait.  And afterwards lain nestled at her breast, and shaken, till she said, “— you know I wish you would, Edward,” and he had crammed his mouth there, then, suckled her sweet milk till he shook no more, and filled them both, thus. 

This much quiet joy lay behind her stare, warmed it.  “Mary dear, do you know when Edward and I first found each other, neither of us had ever known happiness in bed before?”

 

“Good gracious!  I had no idea!   I thought – I knew, he had not, but you – the way he wrote of you, so glowingly, I felt sure —!”

“Well, we had not,”  said Sophie, “not at all – and it was because – there had been no understanding –  no generosity – no kindness – between myself and my – Mr. McKenzie – or between Catherine and Edward.  And so – there could be nothing else.  But when he came to me, we – we cared – wished each to please the other – and we were willing to tell the truth – to do so – and so – I think you may do very well yet, my dear, with your kind suitor, if you will have him.  These Naval types are very forthright, dear – those used to command, especially – you know where you stand with them – there are no games, they despise that kind of silly mannerly civilian conduct – which stands you in good stead, if you can but be as forthright in return.”

 

Mary thought of Commodore Cruickshank’s rosy mouth inside his salt-and-pepper whiskers, his capable hand picking up her ribbons, his eyes that were bright and intelligent and kind and blue and had come to rest on her face more and more often.  Of the officer he had been, used to responsibility and caring for things that were complicated and difficult, with zeal and energy.  Of the many things he seemed, besides all those, and kind also.  The way he still liked to wear a dark-blue coat and white trowsers, even if it was no longer a uniform, out of habit, out of pride – because no other colours seemed right to him, seemed all too gaudy (he had told her).  And of him, somehow – miraculously – wondering, feeling  the same about her.

“You must want him for who he is,” said Sophie, “that is the key to it all. He is a man.  That may seem obvious to you, but there are ways – things – needs – you should understand.  Before you say yes or no.  Are you willing for that?”

“Tell me,” said Mary again.

 

And so four months had passed, the winter blossomed into a spring more achingly green than any she could remember in her life before, when the sap had not had leave to run in her until this one.  And  Mrs. Frederick Cruickshank (née Pelham)  walked by the sea, a two-weeks’ bride, and asked her new husband, simply, if he would not come to her. 

And so he did:   shyly, in a long crisply-frilled nightshirt and a splendid long navy-blue sateen dressing-gown with dark red paisleys all over (he hoped it was elegant enough for her) — she had not seen him undressed, till now — and in his hand, a bunch of flowers he had picked from their garden in the evening dew while she undressed and prepared herself for him:  stocks that smelled so sweet and clovey, sweet peas, white roses, gillyflowers, Canterbury-bells, larkspur.

 

He stood in the doorway to her bedroom.  “Well my dear,”  he said, more shyly still, “will you give me a chance, then – to make you happy?”

“It would make me very happy if you would try, Frederick,” she replied, from the lavender-scented folds of her bed where she lay in her lace-trimmed batiste nightgown, a gift from Sophie (she had only ever worn plain thick serviceable cotton-flannel, before).  There also resided another gift, in the drawer of her night-stand, a little blue-glass jar of slippery-elm and rose-glycerine, made at Sophie’s suggestion by the all-capable Mrs. Stroud from her own receipt, being a woman of that age herself;  and a whispered suggestion where to apply it. (Mary had blushed deeply:  “thank you,” she said. “Ssshh,”  whispered Sophie – “it’s your secret!”)

   “And I should like – to make you happy too, dear,”  she whispered, thinking of her secret now and feeling so much more confident at what was to come,  as he came and sat on the bed — “ you might put those in the ewer, don’t you think?  For now?  They’re very beautiful, my dear.”

“What a capital idea,” he said, “I was wondering myself – and lord knows I don’t have a spare hand to keep holding them!”

“Hold me instead, then, Frederick,” she said, “if you would be so very kind… I think you have enough arms, for that, if I take you in both of mine?”

 

“Ohhh,” he said then,  blinking his blue eyes suddenly, “Mary — Mary!”

A little while later he said, “oh – oh, lord – I wasn’t sure you knew about this – ” and she whispered, “Sophie told me… what to expect – I wouldn’t have said yes to you, Frederick, if I’d thought I couldn’t have stood it – but oh, my dear – is that for me?”

“Oh yes,” he said.  “Yes, it is.”

 

“Oh my goodness,” she said, colouring deeply even down to her bosom under the delicate stuff of the nightgown – and thus looking lovelier to him by the minute.  “Sophie said it is a compliment, and – oh – Frederick!  What a very – sincere – compliment!  May I – may I touch?”

“I – would – like it very much if you did – ”  he said, unsteadily.  “Although lord knows what – might happen – ”

 

“Please, Frederick, ”  she said,  “– oh ! how hot you are – and fine, not rough — oh, goodness – she didn’t tell me – well, I suppose I had to find some things out for myself – Frederick, will you not make me your wife?”

“I think I’d better,”  he said,  “and not waste any time about it, either – ”

 

She had thought he would want to pull at the ribbons of her nightgown, and make free with her bosom too – Sophie had said he might – but he found himself too pressed for that;  “oh,” he said, “Mary !”

“Frederick —?  Oh – oh, my dear —!”

“Oh, lord, Mary!  There – there – there now – is this all right for you ?   There, my dear – easy, now —  oh! — handsomely, now – I beg your pardon, that’s naval talk, my dear, it means slowly – oh, lord – oh Mary! Mary!” 

 

Sophie had told her it would hurt – perhaps quite sharply, she had said.  Don’t worry, it won’t always,  she had smiled.  Just the first few times….  But it didn’t, as much as having gone without such human kindness and closeness for so very long — and having thought herself essential to nobody.  It didn’t hurt at all, compared with that.

 

“Oh Frederick,”  she said, quietly – “my dear, are you all right?”

“Oh god, yes,”  he said,  “god!  Yes!”

 

“It was that easy? ”  she said, in disbelief, looking at the new brilliance in his blue eyes and the sheer gratitude written all across his face – gratitude for her, for what she was, for what was within her gift, and knowing she had given it.  Beyond the shock of novelty, it had touched her extremely.

 “Was  that easy?”  he asked –  “I couldn’t tell – for you – thought I  might be – you know – you being a maid and all that – couldn’t help myself, my dear, you asked me and then I –”

“Ssshh, ”  she said, “Frederick,  I think I am going to enjoy being married a great deal more than I ever imagined!”

 

“Oh, lord,”  he said.  “Oh, Mary.  Oh, my dearest...”

And then she found out about the ribbon on her nightgown;  and how hard it is to undo little pearl buttons with one trembling hand;  and how simply one could say, “let me — ”  — and how his whiskers would feel when they were not kissing her mouth.

 

She had been afraid she wouldn’t be bosomy enough for him, not being built as generously as Sophie, but he seemed to like what he found.  Very much indeed.  Well, beggars couldn’t be choosers, she thought;  although her new husband was thinking far more admiring and grateful things than this. 

Somehow this new intimacy made her feel more shy than what had just passed between them, because that had been him gasping, with her feeling generous, calm and happy, not this breathless terrifying feeling as if she might whimper. Did she dare?  She almost wanted to cross her arms in front of her, tell him Frederick, that’s too much all at once – please –?   Sophie would tell me not to be so silly, she thought.  So she put her hands on his head and shoulders, instead, feeling him warm through the nightgown he wore. He was shaking;  Sophie had not told her about that, either.  “You’re shaking, Frederick,” she said, mildly.

“No more than you are,”  he said.  And they laughed until she pulled him to her breast again, not wanting him to stop.

Ever.

 

He wondered if he would ever tell her that he had been nigh-on a virgin too.  (If you didn’t count a couple of girls from his youth that teased but then didn’t give it up, laughed at you when you did because you couldn’t help it, being nineteen and a sailor and shy and desperate.)  And if so, when.

 

And now she was asleep beside him — miracle of miracles.  Fully his wife, he fully her husband.  Already he could not wait for next time — although he knew that he would, because he was a kind and patient man, and well used to waiting, wanting; to doing without.  She looked like a girl, so sweet, asleep, her long brown hair in a braid streaked with grey that was silver by moonlight.  He thought he would ask her if he might loosen it, next time.  He thought she might be persuaded to take her nightgown off, even, if Lady Pelham’s gentle coaching had been as thorough as it appeared.

God love that woman, was the last thing he thought before he fell asleep.  I don’t think she would have dared, without all that encouragement – or it would have been a damn sight more awkward — his Mary, so proud, so dignified, so vulnerable.  So dear, so kind — so desperate for him.

Almost as desperate as he was for her:  for a little human comfort.

That it was:   comfort.

He had not felt so comfortable and so breathless all at once in his life.

Oh, lord.

He felt himself to be a fortunate man, after all.

 

**********************

 

Out at sea, drawing down-channel now and ever nearer to Spithead and his wife, the orders for now-Captain Hastings (who was requested and required to take command of the sloop Brilliant)  in his desk, Pelham turned restlessly in his cot.  He thought of each of his family in turn, not passing over any of them, even the one that pierced him, and held them in his mind for a while, thought of all he wished for them, hoped and felt for them.  He often did this before coming home:  it made the transition easier, if they had been fully in his consciousness, deliberately, not just a sweet or tender passing thought but the subject of his focus. 

He was forty-nine years old, and he still felt like a younger brother with Mary, a fellow-schemer with the intrepid Mavis (who would certainly put to sea now, God love her! as she had always wished to do…) —— a reluctant authority-figure to Pellie, and a schoolboy with his wife.  All of those things, as well as captain and father.  Captain (and father, in a way) to his men, yes, always that:  not just the ones currently under his command but all the men, all through the years, whom he had led into battle and who had been his charge.  They would forever be his men;  it was a relationship that ran deeper than time.

Just as fatherhood did.  Harriet and Ruth would forever be his daughters.  The one, please God, all grown up one day, a husband of her own perhaps — God grant her as good a one as Hastings was! — and the other forever a laughing, brown-haired little girl with a welcome just for him, as he had a greeting just for her.

 

And, let it please God again ——  Sophie.

His Sophie — his friend, his bride, his lover, his most trusted confidante, his mistress — on occasion, even, a mother to him, more than Helena ever was — and never forgetting, of course, embracing all of these, his most faithful and faithfully beloved wife:  Sophie.

The grace of her, the name like a prayer upon his lips, more than ever with each time he said it.

Sophie, indeed.

 

Moonlight painted pale the beautiful curving oak beams that held the deck above his head, fitful between clouds and glancing off the surface of the sea.  His cot swayed with the motion of his ship, its lovely hangings catching the watery light that fingered the shape of a bird here, a fruit there, their colours all turned to grey-blue on a silver field. 

Dreaming of coming home to her and making landfall once more in her arms — coming all the way to the heart of her as she always welcomed him to do — Sophie — Sophie — he slept, then, till the sea-miles between them ran out from under him and he might once more come safe to harbour and  let go.