Chalkdean. Ash-Wednesday February 21st 1798
My dear – my own dear wife,
The sincere assurance of my affection is the first and most important message I have to send you.
The letters shimmered, then swam. Ellin closed her eyes as relief swept over her like a tide. And when she opened them she saw the sun was shining. The world was whole again!
Around my feet beneath my desk (where poor Strap now lies disconsolate) a dozen crumpled pages witness the difficulty I have, have always had I must suppose, in recording the feelings of my heart; and although I have no reason to expect that this attempt will succeed better than the others, I am resolved to have done with procrastination. This time I force my quill to complete the piece, however ill-expressed – and as soon as it is sealed, I will bear it down myself to the young rogue who awaits it in the stable yard. It has been well said that time and tide will wait for no man, and in this case it is the literal truth.
My dear, I cannot endure to think of you in such distress so far beyond my comfort and protection. You must know that all my care is for your wellbeing – although I own your actions have wounded me most grievously. Ellin, why could you not have confided in me, your husband? Did you believe me so unfeeling that I would have forbidden you your concern for my brother’s safety – or denied him the warning you proposed?
But there; already I accuse you when I am myself at least as much to blame as you. Had I studied as earnestly to know your thoughts as I have to know my own, I believe that you would be here beside me now. Forgive me my omissions; and believe me when I tell you that neither distance nor circumstance have the slightest power to lessen my regard for you, my dearest wife I do love thee most truly. The tears stand in my eyes as I write it – I who was never the sentimentalist. I confess it openly.
My brother in his letter not only records fair hopes of your recovery, but undertakes to bring you safely home to me as soon as that may be. I have always known there to be more to Aaron than he chooses to reveal; and for all my faulty judgement, I know that I can trust him now to honour such a promise, at whatever risk to himself.
If our public papers are to be believed, the rumours of invasion may yet become reality. In which event, the sooner your crossing is made the better. Indeed, the vessel which brings you this is paid to offer you passage to Newhaven by return. Avail yourself of it, my dear, and with the utmost expedition. Or, if you do not yet feel strong enough to undertake the voyage, do everything I beg you to advance the time when you may do so.
Rest well, eat healthily and take good heart – and assure yourself each day, each minute of each day, of my love and affection.
Our little Lizzy asks for you most constantly. She misses you so much; and in your loss – our loss Ellin, yours and mine – only consider how much we have still to expect.
Come home safe and soon to us, my dearest love - to your daughter, to your abject Strap, and to the man who is and ever will be,
Your loving husband,
R.C.
So then he truly loved her after all; Rafe, who’d always been so careful to avoid endearments within her hearing – he loved her, forgave her, begged for her return!
‘Oh Rafe, dear Rafe, I love you too,’ she thought with a sudden rush of gratitude; ‘and if we sincerely love each other, then we can start afresh, I know we can!’
She’d make the crossing back to England with the first tide, and without Aaron’s escort; Ellin was determined. Considering what she’d sacrificed to prevent his earlier return, it would be the sheerest folly to put him at risk now. She wouldn’t countenance it – not for a single minute.
Yet in the end, all it had taken to persuade her was his assurance that the coast patrols between East-Bourne and Seaford were still undermanned beyond hope of effectiveness - and that he himself would sail for France as soon as he had seen her safe beneath his brother’s roof.
They put out of harbour just before high water; and if Aaron chose to stay on deck until after nightfall, he encouraged Ellin to believe it to be no more than a need for occupation that inspired him. In fact he knew the Channel to be alive with shipping. Word was that Citizen General Buonaparte had already assembled an armada of invasion craft in the ports of Dunkirk and Ostend – and since no one supposed the British to be ignorant of the danger, the risk of an encounter with an Admiralty sloop or cutter was a real one. Not that Aaron was afraid. No God with such a well known weakness for lost sheep, he thought, could possibly afford to let him fail. Not this time. Because this time he had virtue on his side.
In Aaron’s bold instinctive world, any woman was marked for exploitation by any man who had the spirit to exploit her. In Fécamp he had known at once that Ellin was his for the taking. However unwillingly she gave it, he’d seen the permission in her face that night amongst the bee skeps in the Chalkdean orchard. In Fécamp he’d only to withhold Rafe’s letter, to treat her with civility, to know that in the end she’d ride with him to the Horn Fair without resistance.
Instead the resistance had been his, and for the first time in his life he’d shown restraint. When the girl looked up at him from his own bed in Fécamp, he’d glimpsed something familiar in her tragic eyes – something that hurt him still – and instead of sparking life into them; instead of forcing into her eyes a reflection of his attraction, he’d looked away, demure as a whore at a christening! Then when he held the wine for her to drink, he’d forced himself to concentrate on the transfer of the fluid, the angle of the goblet, and to ignore the yielding softness of the lips he pressed against it.
‘A dog I may be, Sister Nelly,’ Aaron thought. ‘But never such a disloyal and ungrateful dog that I’d permit my brother’s wife to come to harm.’
Later, when she consented to walk beside him in his terraced gardens or out onto the quays, he’d shut his eyes to the provocations of her body in Marthe Lefèbre’s borrowed silks, transferring his fantasies instead to Marthe herself, and to their violent nightly essays in her verbena-scented bed.
Now he could take pride in doing what was right; with under the achievement that little burr of niggling pain that made it all so Christian and worthwhile! Instant virtue; automatic manhood. For once the demands of honour and affection coincided with the need in Aaron to demonstrate his own virility. In a few more hours he’d stand before his upright brother, and this time he’d look him squarely in the eye.
‘Your wife, Sir,’ he would say, with that sense of merit that he’d craved so long and now at last deserved. ‘You see, Ray, I have brought her home to you, just as I said I would.’ She was one gift from France, and from his brother, that Rafe could not in any wise refuse.
It was after midnight before Aaron judged the proximity of the Sussex coast and called for the lead to be cast. At five fathoms, peering through his Dolland glass, he could just make out the pale smudge of the cliffs across the water. The Channel flood had carried them some way to the east of their destination, on a level with the chalk pits of Holywell a good twelve miles from Newhaven. While they worked down shore Aaron had the gig hauled in and baled for landing; knowing there were spare mounts to be found at Bury Farm, and thinking it would be a pleasant irony to borrow from the Ashbys. Despite the harm that it had done her, his sister-in-law’s wild tale of old Sam plotting with the parson to see him caught and hanged was less alarming in his view than hers. By now, if he knew Sam, the farmer’s temper would have cooled; and in this chilly season there wasn’t a Bury man that Aaron knew who’d stick to any kind of sea-watch through the night. The Gap would be deserted. So would the Bury yards. He’d stake his life on both.
Rather than endure the tilting lamp again, Ellin crouched in darkness through the long hours of crossing, shivering with cold or fear – or both at once, she couldn’t tell. When they put into shore, the sharpness of the Sussex night refreshed her. Aaron carried her the few yards from the gig, before wading back for the halfankers he’d insisted on bringing with them for his brother; and then together they had climbed the slippery path up from the beach – where at another time, and in another life it seemed to Ellin, a naked youth had chased a foolish girl.
They found the ponies and the tack they needed where Aaron had predicted, and in the shortest time were on their way with Ellin mounted like a man, astride. Even at a foot pace the clatter of the ponies’ hooves seemed deafening; and at any moment she expected to be challenged. But the yards were empty. In the light of a moon like a silver coin, the limbs of the great beech tree by the dairy glittered with frost. Above the farm slates to the east, a faint violet flush gave warning of the coming day; and as they passed the dairy door, the magpie cat which Ellin had disturbed there once before, shot across their path and half way up the tree – round-eyed and fluffy-tailed; peering down at them with crazy feline humour. Aaron pulled in his nervous pony, then heeled it on without a further glance. But Ellin smiled back at the skittish creature; reminded somehow of herself in the way its wild ascent had ended in a clumsy backward slide.
Above the histrionic cat, a light shone through the frosty branches of the beech. Someone was up abroad already in the farmhouse – and yet, despite the danger that it represented, how welcoming that little yellow square of yellow light appeared to Ellin through the icy darkness. It called to mind the warmth and safety of her own home; so near to Chalkdean now, only a hill between them! So near to little Lizzy, asleep now in her cot – and to Rafe, her own dear husband. God bless him in his generosity!
And how could Ellin know that he was nearer still? Not across the hill. Not asleep in Chalkdean – but there behind the lighted window, even as she hurried past it.
Inside, the warmth and welcome of the lamplight was a good deal less in evidence. The room was cold, unventilated, and stank of chamber pots and perspiration. Its principle inhabitant lay exhausted in a welter of soiled sheeting, with the Sellington midwife asleep beside her in a chair. At the sound of a creaking stair-board the old woman stopped snoring to open an enquiring eye; and perceiving it to be the doctor in the doorway, snatched up a sodden rag to lean across the bed and mop the girl’s perspiring face.
Sam Ashby had taken his time in calling the physician to his daughter. ‘Justabout best thing for all, I reckon, if the nipper never saw the light of day,’ he confided to the midwife, Mrs Cheal, as much in the way of a hint as an observation. ‘Best thing for all, an’ blamed if I don’t think so.’
But after Ann had laboured for eight and thirty hours, asking for Mr Corbyn all the while, her father grudgingly agreed to send for him. Not to say that he approved of male finger-smiths, any more than Mrs Cheal did. Now he lingered self-consciously in the doorway to hear the doctor’s diagnosis.
‘Awkward as a cow in a cage, just like any man,’ Midwife Cheal observed to herself with all her usual scorn to anything in breeches within ten yards of an accouchement, while at the same time assuming an obliging air for the benefit of the college doctor.
‘’Er waters discharged yester afternoon. Proper ol’ flood an’ all, Sir,’ she advised him. ‘Bab’s there an’ in ’is proper place. But will ’e make that breach? No Sire, ’e won’t, an’ not by any manner!’
‘’E just don’t seem to want to come, Doctor.’ The girl spoke wearily from the disordered bed. Her hair was soaked with sweat despite the chill. Her eyes were large, dark-ringed with pain, intensely blue – and somehow she contrived a smile.
Rafe smiled back, impressed by her stoicism; and reaching for her pulse, he found it strong still..
‘Well then, let’s see if we can’t discover what it is that’s keeping him from his business,’ he said; speaking as grooms and stockmen speak, less for the words themselves than for their quietening effect.
‘’Tis only a mighty marvel to me that she’ve borne it thus far,’ the midwife confided loudly from behind his shoulder, unwilling to be excluded. ‘I’ve seen some first confinements in my time, Sir, believe you me. An’ there’s plenty I’ve attended who’d ’ave up and died, upon my word, sooner ’an suffer as this one ’as.’
For two straws, thought the rational and civilized Mr Corbyn, he’d have picked up the ignorant old witch and kicked her down the stairs. ‘Then you should certainly have sent for me earlier, should you not?’ he said without raising his eyes from the patient. ‘When will you people ever learn to apply for assistance when you need it?
‘I include you in this, Samuel Ashby,’ he added, ignoring the midwife’s scandalized objections to his examination of the girl without her coverings. ‘You should have appraised me of how things stood six hours ago at least – and you her father. I’faith man, I find myself astonished at your want of feeling.’
‘Astonished are ye? Dang me, I’m just about blazin’ astonished myself, I don’t mind tellin’ ye,’ the farmer roared, flustered by the turn events were taking into a fine defensive rage. ‘My eyes an’ limbs – a fine thing for a Corbyn to sermonize an Ashby on family feelin’s, I’d say! She’ll not swear it ’afore a magistrate, but the brat’s your brother’s work. Of that ye may be sure. One brother to plowter the strumpet’s furrow – an’ now the other to reap the bleddy ’arvest! There’s a middlin’ astonishment if ye like, Sir!’ And blowing like a grampus, Sam Ashby turned from the unnerving prospect of his daughter’s private anatomies wide to the world, to thunder off in search of a restorative draught of one kind or another.
In any normal circumstance, there was no aspect of the female constitution that could have put Rafe out of countenance as a practising physician. At the squalid lying-in hospital at Westminster, and more recently in the scattered habitations of the downland, he’d attended countless women in childbirth. Or with cystitis. Or with any number of feminine disorders - and at such times a proper and professional detachment had always come to him when it was needed. ‘Cases’ – that’s all that any of them were; the differences between them more limited than any of his female patients might suppose.
Yet here there was a difference. Perhaps because of Aaron and her father’s accusation? Or more likely from his own months of denial?
For whatever reason, when it came to his examination of the Ashby girl, Rafe found himself for once without his armour of detachment, at a sexual disadvantage. Ann’s own scant inhibitions had long since fallen by the wayside of events. She sprawled like someone in a Rowlandson cartoon with inelegantly parted thighs; and when of necessity Rafe reached between them to press aside the swollen labia, something base in him recalled a graffito he’d once seen painted on the door of a London brothel: Trade beef for mutton – feed the dumb glutton!… The glutton; the Moloch that swallowed men, and women too, along with all their civilised intentions; the female principle at the root of this poor girl’s distress, as he now viewed it – and of Ellin’s, and of all the malicious rumours linking her name to his brother’s.
Bad news flew apace. It seemed to Rafe that half the downland knew of his wife’s defection almost before he did himself; and naturally all credited her with the worst motives, despite the limitations of her condition. Her father had ranted like a man possessed and threatened from the pulpit to disown her. Her maid, Gubbin, had burst into noisy tears and proclaimed her mistress ruined; while old Gabel merely shook his head with the resignation of one who’d seen it all before.
‘Females, Mus Relph,’ he observed sadly. ‘Anybody who knows a bee from a bull’s foot ’ud tell ye. They generally always goes by their instincts, females – an’ wrong a score o’ times outter twenty.’
All presumed the worst; although only Aunt Drusilla had been tactless enough to show an active pleasure in the scandal. ‘Worthless! Have I not always said so?’ she demanded with more than a note of triumph in her voice. ‘But you wouldn’t have it, would you, Nephew? Oh no, you had to jump up and wed the girl as soon as she crooked a finger in your direction. But I knew, you see – your aunt was never taken in. I made sure she was a fortune-hunter the moment I first set eyes on her; and now she has the measure of your brother’s style of living, you can depend on it that you’ll not see her back in Chalkdean this side of Judgement Day!’
And although he’d retaliated with energy to defend his wife’s good name; assuring them all, as he daily assured himself, of Ellin’s virtue and Aaron’s ultimate loyalty to the family, Rafe’s own mind had seethed with mistrust and resentment. The village women smiled and bobbed at him as usual when he passed them in the lanes. But he well knew what it was they were whispering behind his back. Young Mistress Corbyn had left poor Doctor for his brother – slighted him, diminished his authority as a husband and a man – and however he might strive to rationalize her action, the bellowing, green-eyed spectres of jealousy and affronted pride pursued him still through all his inner thoughts. Even after the arrival of Aaron’s note with the tragic news of her miscarriage and the promise of Ellin’s safe return from France – even after all his own assurances of love and forgiveness – the women still whispered at the roadside; Drusilla remained as certain as ever of his wife’s intention to remain in exile, and Rafe himself as inwardly tormented.
But for all that he was a physician still, and for his time a good one; and in the moment that his fingers touched the cranium of Annie’s child, so far advanced it seemed to need but two or three contractions to bring it into the world, then Rafe recalled himself to duty. Gently introducing his hand a little further, he found the cause of the obstruction – a dystocia; a constricted ring of uterine muscles between the head and shoulders of the baby – and with the discovery, a clear determination of its solution.
‘The position’s good and I believe the child to be yet living,’ he was glad to tell the girl; conscious as he spoke of a ragged clatter of hooves below her window; a distraction he vaguely associated with Sam Ashby and the farm, and one he had no difficultly in dismissing at the onslaught of another violent spasm in his patient. ‘He won’t be long in coming now,’ he reassured her, ‘if you will allow me to take a little of your blood to help him on his way?’
At first he wasn’t sure she’d heard. As she squirmed onto her side in the grip of the contraction, Ann’s only reply had been a lusty bellow. But afterwards her blue eyes sought his again – and again, miraculously, she found the strength to smile. ‘Glory, Doctor; take as much as ye like,’ she panted. ‘’Tain’t ’elpin where ’tis, that’s eyeproof!’
As a rule, Rafe placed no great reliance on bloodletting and never used leeches, not even on children – an unusual attitude in a profession that for the main part considered the lancet and bleeding bowl indispensable to the cure of every ailment from asthma to apoplexy. But for a few patients of congested and plethoric habit, he’d found this most over-used of remedies to be of real advantage; also as it chanced in cases of uterine dystocia. Normally it was necessary to bleed such patients to the point of fainting, before their spasms were relaxed sufficiently to release the child.
Not so with Annie Ashby. Before Rafe had let eight ounces of her blood, the girl’s pains recommenced. He’d barely time to bind her arm before a series of strong contractions produced a crown of plastered, lardy hair; to be followed by the crumpled features of an angry living child.
It was a girl, puny of body but mighty of lung like all the Ashby’s; and as Rafe examined it – laughing at its waving fists, the outrage in its tiny purple face – he was reminded for a second time that morning of his brother.