He will not have me. I am mad for him but he will not have me.
For almost two years I have visited the cemetery solely for the purpose of seeing him. And yet he will not take me.
I was careful at first — although I sought him out I did not want it to appear so. I always took the girls with me, then let them go off to play and pretended to be looking for them when really I was looking for him. I have paced up and down its paths, appearing to be fascinated by the merits of Roman versus plain crosses, or obelisks in Portland stone versus granite, or the names on graves chiselled into the stone versus fastened on with metal letters. I do not know what the workers there think of me, but they have grown used to my presence, and always nod respectfully.
I have learned a great deal about the cemetery that I did not know before. I know where they dump the extra soil displaced by coffins, and where the timber is kept for shoring up the deep graves, and the green rugs they place round freshly dug graves to look like grass. I know which grave-diggers sing as they work, and where they hide their bottles of spirits. I have seen the ledgers and the detailed maps, each plot numbered, used to record graves. I have grown used to the horses pulling stones about the place. I have come to know the cemetery as an industry rather than as a place of spiritual contemplation.
He runs it as if it were an immaculate passenger ship crossing the ocean. He can be hard and brutal if necessary with the staff — some of the men are very rough indeed. But I think he is fair, too, and he respects good work.
Above all, he is kind to me without making me feel a lesser person.
We talk about all sorts of things — about the world and how it works, and about God and how He works. He asks my opinions, and does not laugh at them, but considers them. He is how I had always hoped Richard would turn out to be. But I made the mistake of thinking my husband would change when we married; instead he became more entrenched.
John Jackson is not a handsome man. He is not a prosperous man, though he is not poor either. He is not from a good family. He does not attend supper parties or the theatre or openings to exhibitions. He is not an educated man, though he is learned; when he showed me Michael Faraday's grave in the Dissenters he was able to explain his experiments with magnetic fields far better than Richard or even my brother could have.
He is a truthful man, a religious man, a principled man, a moral man. It is those last qualities that have undone me.
I am not accustomed to being turned down. Not that I have offered myself as such before, but I enjoy flirting and expect a response, else I would not do it. But he does not flirt. When I tried to with him, early on, he said he does not like coquettes, that he only wants the truth, and I stopped. And so over several months — constantly interrupted by his cemetery duties — I told him what little there is to tell of my small life: of how much I miss my late parents and brother, of my dull despair, of my impossible search for a place by the fire that is neither too hot nor too cold. (Only a few things I have kept from him — my knowledge of how to avoid having a baby, my cold bed, the New Year's Eve Richard insists upon. He would be disgusted by the last. Myself, I am not disgusted so much as resigned.)
When, at last, in the autumn after a summer of what felt like a courtship, I told him in clear terms what I was prepared to do, he said no.
I stopped going to the cemetery for a time then, sending Jenny with the girls when they wanted to go. But I could not keep away. And so for this past year we have again seen each other, but not as often and without the heightened expectations. It is painful, but he has upheld his principles, and I have come to accept that they are more important than me.
So we meet, and he speaks kindly to me. Today he said to me that he has always wanted a sister and now he has one. I did not reply that I have already had a brother and don't want another.