Lister—

The red mist has cleared. I would apologise for the last words I sent except that I know you’ve read none of them.

I couldn’t write yesterday as I was in the strait-dress, my sleeves crossed in front and tied behind. But today I kept my voice very soft, and begged for the loop instead. (This is a merciful invention of Matron’s; the leather belt keeps my elbows by my sides so I can’t lash out, but can draw or write, at least, rather than having to sit stewing in my thoughts.)

Oh, what a spectacle I am. A crazed calf, roped. Like the Dane, I assure you I am but mad north-north-west. There are days like this when I find myself able to preserve an unruffled demeanour. Others, when I can’t help but burst out in what Matron calls my wild fits or paroxysms. (But why is it that when a respected man such as Duffin loses his temper and roars, no one accuses him of being deranged?) There are even occasional days when I wake up suffused with happiness, but Matron Clarkson frowns in concern and calls that mania.

Through all moods, I keep my secret somehow, Lister; I don’t breathe your name. I can’t bear to hear how the doctors would rewrite the story. How small they’d make it, or how sordid. Overattachment to a female friend, perhaps; an unhealthy state of dependency; the fantastical and indecent delusions of spinsterhood.

In the privacy of my skull, I remember every minute. How I caught love like a cold, at fourteen; or you did, and passed it to me; how it flared up between us. How we slept, rose, learned, played, ate, inseparable. I couldn’t tell my own pulse from yours. We spilled ourselves like ink.

So roll me in your arms, my love,

And blow the candle out. . .

If only I could merge my phantom lineaments with that young Eliza’s; warn her; ask her whether our schooldays shaped us once and for all, or only revealed our true underlying forms.

I only regret that I didn’t let you etch my name on the classroom window and immortalise me in hard glass, which might last longer than paper; I wish our love were recorded in the annals of the world. Though it does say for all to see, on that window, if only they’ve wit to read it—

With this

Diamond I cut

this glass with

this face I kissed

a lass

I wonder, the pupils who’ve spotted that, these last nine years, what do they make of it?

You and I bestowed ourselves on each other in a ceremony that, if it wasn’t valid, was no less earnestly meant.

O fare thee well, my little turtle dove,

And fare thee well for a while.

I thought we were sealed and one for ever. Was I gullible? Did you mean it then, even if you don’t now? What I give, I don’t, I can’t take back. Was yours a coward love? Did you tell me lies—or is love a story a lover tells in all sincerity, before time gives it the lie?

Fare thee well the love I bear thee,

Hopeless yet shall true remain,

Never one I loved before thee,

Ne’er thy like shall see again.

I’m an automaton that winds itself up to write the same message over and over. A botched, severed Child of the Earth. I bathe in the same river, and it’s never the same, and it never changes. Invisible hands spinning me around and around. Here I bake, here I brew, here I make my wedding cake, but I can’t break through.

Matron Clarkson coming for my pen now. Too soon—

Whenever I’m allowed to write, Lister, I mean to continue this same letter. That way I can tell myself I’m not being thwarted, quite, only delayed. I feel the rage bubbling up in me like a poisonous gas, but I breathe it out through my nostrils and try to smile.

No loop holding my arms to my ribs this morning; I’m trusted with the full use of my limbs. Dr. Mather comes in to take tea with me.

He speaks of the long gestation of disease in such a case as mine. “It disguises itself as mere moodiness or eccentricity, Miss Raine—grows under the surface for years till it bursts out.”

Does he believe it was there, hidden in me, when I was first under his care, as a girl, at the Manor? I don’t ask. I shudder at the notion that the year we spent in the Slope—all I felt, when my heart first opened like a bud—could have been nothing but an early symptom.

I try to read Dr. Mather’s jottings upside down; I make out lucid interval before he shuts the notebook. Lucid interval: is it in the Venerable Bede that life is compared to a small bird flying into a feasting hall that’s all ablaze with light and heat, then out the other end, back into the dark?

“But I don’t believe this is a mere interval.” My voice as low and ladylike as I can manage. “I’ve been perfectly calm for several days. What if I have recovered my senses?”

“A happy possibility, indeed.” He says it gently, gamely, almost as if he believes it. “Time will tell.”

“If I’m lucid for a whole week, will that convince you and Dr. Belcombe?”

“My dear lady, the disorder has its seasons, and we must not relax our vigilance too quickly. A physician of the name of Latham gave evidence to the House of Commons about two young patients; he’d discharged them both as of sound mind, whereupon one had hanged herself, and the other had thrown herself into the river.”

The story makes me flinch. “If I have a month of calm, then? Two months?”

Dr. Mather shifts in his chair. “A patient who hopes to earn her liberty by comporting herself sedately for a set period might manage it, but only by an immense and harmful effort of will.”

Oh, so he thinks me a cold-blooded plotter, waiting to be released to rampage shrieking along the ramparts of York?

He fiddles with his teaspoon. “I’m troubled that your tone suggests my co-proprietor and I are conspiring to keep you here. This is what we mind-doctors call a paranoea—a delusion that sees malice where there is none.”

I press my lips together hard. So the only way to show that my confinement is unnecessary is not to object to it? If I protest against my confinement, I only prove that I need to be confined?

But if it’s true what Dr. Mather says about the mad being capable of a sustained performance of sanity, then I wonder how many people going about their business out there in the world may only be keeping their wildest impulses in check by means of such an immense and harmful effort of will. Like actors pretending with all their might, trapped in a play on which the curtain never comes down. And if one of them does manage to keep on the mask of a sane woman for her whole life, can she not be said to be sane enough, more or less, for all intents and purposes?

In case he reads my silence as sullenness, I gesture to offer him more tea.

But he’s reaching for his cane, murmuring about having tired me.

“Not at all.” I find I can’t keep silent. “I’d lay money I’m at least as well as the general mass of humanity,” I say through my teeth. “So why may I not go. . .”

I trail off. Go where?

The apartments you and I might have rented, Lister, in the storied city of Florence. Our castles in the air, all blown away like tufts of cloud. My past lodgings: dear Myrtle Grove on the Choultry Plain, little rooms I took in Halifax, Bristol, York. To think that I managed to live on my own, with only a maid, for years on end. A grown woman with a wide acquaintance, who enjoyed most days and endured others; bore the slings and arrows about as well as anyone. How did I lose that knack?

“Miss Raine?”

I blink at Dr. Mather.

His tone is respectful: “Where would you propose to go? Do you know of any situation in which you could be placed more safely and comfortably than here at Clifton House?”

If only I did.

Is that what it comes down to, then—a matter of accommo-dation? If I had a home, people to take me in, would Dr. Mather let me out this very day? Is it my single, solitary state that keeps me prisoner here? If I only had a family asking, begging for my release, my return, swearing they’d bear with me through all weathers. If I had someone, anyone in this wide world to love me.

A soft horror creeps over me now at the thought that the good doctors will never let me out. My protectors, my captors. They’ll keep me here month after month with the best of intentions, year after year, for my own good, as my black hair starts to ashen; perhaps for the rest of my days.

Still calm, today.

I think back to the Manor, and those you and I knew. Since Miss Hargrave’s death last year—of an apoplexy, I heard, brought on by shock when one of her pupils eloped—Eliza Ann Tate is now ruling over the School in her aunt’s place. And of course our poor old dancing master, Mr. Tate, sank deeper and deeper into his melancholy, and came to his end in York Asylum. (Questions were asked in Parliament recently about the way the late Dr. Hunter treated his mad paupers, and how fast many of them died. I shake at the thought; I’m aware how much worse my conditions could be.)

As far as I know, Betty Foster and Nan Moorsom are still living at home. Including you and me, that’s four of the eight Middles who are old maids still, though marriage was the sole profession for which we were raised. Only two wives: sensible Mercy Smith, and Margaret Burn (now Mrs. Holmes), who’s somehow ended up in Naples, as if she stole our dream of Italy. Then there are the two of us who are gone already. Poor Fanny Peirson only made it to seventeen before her lungs gave out. Lovely Frances Selby married a vicar and was taken at twenty in her first childbed, just like the mother who bore her.

Why am I still alive?

At times, this past year, I’ve thanked Matron Clarkson and the doctors for preserving my life. But my future seems one long blank, an endless path through fog. I remember too much, yet can’t trust my memory. It distorts things, as if I’m looking through water.

Sometimes I even. . .

A crime and mortal sin to do it, a scandal to say it, a weakness even to think it. That seduced maid in the song you taught us, who hanged herself one morning in her garters. That nurse Meg: could she really have dropped little Fanny’s hand and let herself plummet off the cliff at Whitby?

Well, nobody will read this. So let me write down that I sometimes find myself wishing I’d had resolution enough to end it all before I ever came to this.

A knock at the front door, this morning. (I’m scribbling this down while it’s fresh in my mind, as proof, so I won’t have to wonder, when I wake in the night, whether I dreamed this extraordinary meeting.) Matron Clarkson asking if by any chance I feel able for a visitor.

“What visitor?”

“Miss Lister.”

At first I say nothing, in case it’s a cruel trick by the doctors to test whether I’ll fall into a frenzy.

Then heat rises up my neck, my cheeks. I long, absurdly, for a mirror, so I can see what I look like, what you’ll see, when you set eyes on me.

When I come into the small parlour, there you are, oddly all in black like a gentleman on his travels. The air of a doer, a darer, your own master. Turning about, inspecting the room—always loath to waste an idle second, always making mental notes for your diary. Mariana’s gold band still on your right hand, I notice.

“Raine! Miss Raine,” you correct yourself. Then, “Eliza, if I may?”

My throat’s stopped up. I’d prefer Raine.

“It’s a great relief to see you look so well.” Less certainly: “Are you well? You’ve put on some flesh. I’ve called on several—well, at least one previous occasion, but you weren’t receiving. And of course I’ve had regular reports of you from the good doctors. All in all”—eyes running from corner to corner like mice—“this place seems a very well-ordered. . .”

The advertisements call it a retreat.

“. . .house,” you finish.

From a distant room, a sudden wail. Your eyes narrow with panic.

I almost laugh. I find I can’t bear chitchat. (The one advantage of being a lunatic is release from the rules of decorum.) “Have you been abroad yet? Seen the world?”

A disconcerted chuckle. You shake your head. “I still have great plans.”

“You’ve not won distinction by your pen?”

“Not yet.”

“Where are you living?”

“At Shibden Hall,” you say. “Since poor Sam—”

It occurs to me that since you lost your last brother, this past year, your uncle must consider you next thing to a nephew. I’m curious: “Will you inherit?”

You don’t prevaricate; you nod.

I suppose at this point your uncle knows you better than to fear you’ll take a husband and leave the estate out of the family.

I ask, “Have you come to stay with your friends on Micklegate?” Meaning the Duffins; their names stick in my craw.

“No, as it happens—the Belcombes on Petergate,” you say. “Mariana’s been with me all spring and summer, and now we’re paying her family a visit.”

Pain like the kick of a horse, and I realise I’ve been foolish enough, in the flush of surprise, to imagine you’ve come to York expressly to see me. Was this stroll out to Clifton even your idea, or Dr. Belcombe’s suggestion? Less than a quarter of an hour’s walk; barely a leg-stretch to you. Is Mariana passing an hour shopping, or waiting for you in crumpled, aromatic sheets?

“Oh, my dear girl,” you murmur, with what I can only assume is compassion. “Still harping on that string—harking back?”

I could go for your throat, and blame it on a passing derangement.

But I only stare at you—your unbeautiful face, tight with guilt. I wish I could explain that time moves differently for those inside these walls; that all the days are confused and confounded; that the present is a waiting-room with only one window, facing back, offering a fixed view of the past, like the inerasable lines of a woodcut. I change the subject: “So you have your double prize.”

You don’t seem to follow.

“Shibden,” I spell out, “and a wife.”

Your face falls, and your voice drops to a husky whisper. “Not quite. Mariana’s to marry soon.”

I blink, startled. “A man, you mean?”

“A gentleman of fortune.” Your mouth like a knot in tree bark. “Needs must. It seems to us the only sensible solution. We’ll pay each other long visits.”

That little us; I’m almost touched that you don’t want me to know that you’ve lost the game. I can’t prevent myself from quoting in a sardonic tone what you said to me, in the carriage: “Who can live on love alone?”

You hear the echo, and wince. “But you, Raine, tell me, are you. . .” The tiny aspiration of happy. But instead of saying the word, you ask, very low, “Do they care for you well here?”

I could tell you that they feed me before I’m hungry; they wash me when they want me clean; they let me play my piano until one of the other patients complains; they only bind my elbows to my sides if I lash out. This is life in an institution. A soldier, a prisoner, a workhouse inmate, a nun, a patient, a pupil, a lunatic—must they not all necessarily obey, living at such close quarters like books on a shelf?

I say none of that, because I know now that you won’t, can’t, save me.

Your eyes brim. I’ve never seen you cry.

“Have you burned my letters?” Half hoping the answer will be no.

“Most of them, as soon as you asked it,” you say, nodding. Then add, “Not all.”

Oh, the sweet hurt of that.

You take your leave, assuring me you’ll call again, next time you’re in York.

A rainy day. This evening Matron Clarkson is letting me keep my pen as long as I like, as long as I’m quiet.

I look down on my whole course of life from an eagle’s height. It’s a sad story; if it happened to another girl, I’d weep for her.

Eighteen years—three-quarters of my twenty-four—since I was shipped away, India an ever-receding gauzy horizon behind me. School was my England and England was my school. From the start, my position was a peculiar one. I was studying the wrong books all along; I never quite learned the rules no matter how hard I studied them.

Eleven years since you first glimpsed me, at a mad-doctor’s party, of all places. Ten since we first spoke, in the refectory at the Manor. An orphan with the hungriest of hearts, how could I have resisted you? Nine years since the two of us first touched. Diamond and straw. Love is merely a madness, as Rosalind warns. Nine since we were parted at Walmgate Bar as I stepped down from the hack and it rolled away.

Like Ophelia, I was the more deceived, stupidly slow to grasp my gradual bereavement. We both held on, but I held harder, longer, more desperately. Six years since the pair of us, at eighteen, made our début, at York’s Assembly Rooms. (It wasn’t half such bliss as three years earlier, was it, when we’d sneaked in wearing borrowed disguises?) From then on I lived on dwindling rations of your company, your letters, your attention. Four years since I settled in lodgings in Halifax, to be near you and your family—but you stayed away on one pretext or another, mostly with your Isabella. Little by little over the years, I lost you, like coins dropping one by one through a hole in my pocket.

Was it my fault—was I too fretful and moody, seeing dangers everywhere, in fact inviting them in? Was I too greedy, did I cling too tightly, like a child who treasures a chick so fervently she crushes it? Or was the break between us your fault—did you cast me off callously, or merely let me slip through carelessness? Never one I loved before thee, Ne’er thy like shall see again.

Three years since we came of age, grown women of twenty-one. We were finally free to run off to Italy together. . .except that the dream had dissipated. Somehow I made myself accept that I was no longer (if I’d ever been) your wife. With painful effort, in the end, I convinced myself it was my duty to give you up to Isabella. . .whereupon you turned around and offered yourself to our friend Mariana instead. So the more fool me.

Perhaps it was simply our fate? A common one. Love kills time, time kills love.

At twenty-four, I fear my tale is told. I played at ducks and drakes until all my stones were gone. Little by little my nest was torn apart. I walked through the wrong door and went astray. Drop by drop, I’ve drunk the whole salt sea.

After you, Lister, what had I left? I came into my money, but that was not enough to set me free. I waited. This England, my only country now. Fatherless, motherless, no home but this.

The wonder is that it was only last year that I quite lost my mind. Love may be a kind of madness, but it was the losing of love that made that first hairline crack in me. Not that I accuse you, Lister. After all, breakage can be blamed on the brittleness of the china as much as the rough handling. Isabella must have been so much stronger than me, since she survived you casting her off.

The year you and I were fourteen, we invented love. Strange to think that it was the beginning of the breaking of me, and the making of you. We were a pair of originals, as long as we were a pair. Perhaps the difference is that you embraced your singularity, and I cringed at mine. I might have stepped more lightly without that burden; perhaps I could have made a better go of a more ordinary life.

I keep reading my bundle of old letters; I taste them as a doe browses, a berry here, a tender leaf there. On so many pages in indelible ink, proof that you once loved me. It only takes one kindling phrase to blow my dim embers into flames again. You called me your first and dearest love. I’ve never used such terms, because superlatives imply comparison, and for me there’s only ever been you. I must warn you, not your Mariana, nor any other woman, will ever attach herself to you as strongly. As scenes of youth are impressed on the senses for ever, so the shock of first love leaves a hot thumbprint that nothing can match.

I confess to being tormented by what-ifs. If only you hadn’t broken your leg, and we’d managed to stay together in our Slope. . .

Or if I’d insisted on leaving the Manor the day you did, stayed in the carriage at your side; cleaved to you and let nothing sever us. . .

If I hadn’t brooded and worried, in the long years of absence. . .

If you hadn’t flirted and lied. . .

If you’d been less giddy and I less jealous; if I’d been firmer and you tenderer.

Perhaps if we’d been allowed to stand up together in church and say before everyone, I do—

Hypotheticals, impossibilities. The dreams of youth rarely come to pass, I remind myself. We were not the first young lovers to fail at love in the end.

And I ask myself why the present tense is the only one that matters. Can’t the past be a sort of present too, if I plunge into memory and swim like a fish? Since every moment is fleeting, gone as soon as noted, so perhaps past, present, and future are all thin slices of reality, all flickering, all equally (in some sense) true. If Celia and her Rosalind, though two centuries old and made of nothing but words, will never be dead as long as there are readers to open the play and let the girls escape together into the forest, then could it be that our love can live on, too, in the blood-brown trail of ink, as long as there are eyes to decipher it?

So I keep writing. Making my mark, staining the paper. I stroke the hushed weave and wonder what white stockings, what old shifts, were sold off and torn small to form this page. Rags of frocks I might have worn myself, or smallclothes that once wrapped your lean thighs. Bengali calicos and muslins, the cotton that drinks in the Indian sun, the English linen from drizzle-grown flax—all fabrics marry in the vat, in the end. Stirred, pounded, battered, and bladed into pulp, laid in flat sheets and slowly magicked into this paper. And Indian ink, made of lampblack and water, what’s left after burning. Love has charred me. I lay my trace here and it smoulders on.

Your visit has done one thing, Lister—has proved that you haven’t forgotten. Only please, don’t remember me like this; call me to mind as I once was. Let me shine on, like a magic-lantern slide in your head. Rich and rare were the gems she wore. All I ask is for the memory of me to haunt you as you haunt me. Let our spirits touch and go on touching always, the way one page presses itself against the next.

E. R.

Sealed with my mark

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