I was not always small and sickly.
When she was in a remembering mood, my nurse sometimes liked to tell me my own story. It began with the moment she beheld me for the first time, still wet from my mother’s womb.
The infant was robust at birth, she said, as if my origin was just another fairy story. Fat and dimpled as could be, with hair sticking up from her head like soft dark feathers. Her mother, pleased her work was done, did not even mind, as so many other women must, that it had all been to bring a girl into the world, for Lady Catherine was wise enough to wed Sir Lewis de Bourgh, whose estate could pass as easily to a daughter as to a son. She praised her new daughter’s nose, the unlikely slope of which already gave her the look of Lady Catherine’s own noble relations, and declared that she should be named Anne, after her own elder sister. Baby Anne’s father and his steward drank a toast of finest brandy to her health.
I could imagine them together, firelight making the brandy glow in Papa’s crystal glasses. I could even imagine Nurse, looking down at my infant face with her own broad face full of curiosity and good humor. Mamma was harder to picture; she so rarely lay abed that it was difficult to think of her tucked up among the cushions after the exertion of birth.
But soon enough, Nurse went on, Anne’s health declined. She turned peevish and miserable, and nothing, neither her mother’s arms nor her nurse’s milky breasts, could calm her. The parish doctor was called for; he said the babe suffered from an excess of wind, and prescribed a bittersweet tincture of laudanum to help her sleep.
And sleep I did. I slept so long and deeply, Nurse said, that when she woke in the early hours of the morning, it was to find her own shift wet with leaked milk. She put me, still sleeping, to her hard, swollen breasts, gratitude for the rest the medicine afforded us both warring with worry when I suckled only a little, and so lethargically that the excess milk had to be expressed by hand into the washbasin.
When I woke at last, I turned fractious again almost at once, wailing loudly enough to be heard far beyond the nursery. The entire household went tense and afraid, the babe’s cries powerful and unstoppable as sea waves in a storm. Her poor parents were frantic, and helpless as any parents whose child is clearly in pain. But the good doctor was called back, and he brought with him more drops, which worked their magic again directly.
Though Nurse tried to wean me from my medicine once or twice, I always wailed again so loudly—Like a pig brought to slaughter— and turned consumptive, hot and chilled by turns, my chest rattling. She learned to dose me—my magic drops, she called them, smiling—at intervals, which alleviated my discomfort and kept me sweetly sleeping much of the time. And though the soft rolls at my ankles and wrists melted away like snow in spring, Dr. Grant, with a shake of his graying head, said it seemed I would likely always be delicate, and Mamma gave thanks, loudly and often, for the wonder of modern medicine.
Memories of my early life begin slow and dreamy as any of my nurse’s stories. They meander like dust motes in the shafts of sunlight that came in through the nursery window. I was not supposed to dance, myself, but I could pretend, in the hours I spent watching those flecks twirl and collide, that I was one of them, a member of the set.
Some of my memories are surprisingly clear—I could describe the exact pattern of fruits and leaves in the intricate molding on our drawing room ceiling, or beat out with my fingertips the cascading rhythm of the garden fountain. Scents come back to me with overwhelming clarity—my musty nursery, of course, but also the headiness of the garden in full summer bloom, and the bright scent of Cook’s pea soup, one of the few dishes to regularly tempt my appetite. It tasted of spring even when she served it in winter from boiled dried peas, accented with the faint tang of onion and the salty musk of anchovies.
People had their own peculiar smells; or rather, their fingers did, fingers that were forever testing the heat of my cheeks and brow. Mamma’s, laden with rings, smelled of lily of the valley, a delicate scent at odds with the robustness of her form and character. My father’s fingers, when he patted my shoulder in his usual distracted manner, smelled thickly of snuff. Over the years, as I needed her less and less, Nurse’s gown and apron began to smell of smoke and grease from the kitchen, but her fingers forever smelled of the medicine she dispensed to me twice daily, bitterness just masked by cloying treacle.
For my own good, the boundaries of my world lay at the far-flung edges of my father’s vast estate, but Nurse widened them, just slightly, with the fantastical tales she told as I drowsed in the grips of my drops. Stories of men the length of my thumbnail; of sleeps that lasted centuries. My medicine turned me stone-heavy, a breathing statue, eyelids drawing down despite all my best efforts and thoughts drifting like milkweed fluff. In this way, I was like one of the people in the stories, for what could be more fantastical than a girl made of stone?
When the weather was fine, and the sun not too strong, Nurse sometimes took me out to the garden, where, if it was too early for my first dose, I practiced reading from the Book of Common Prayer, my tongue stumbling over sentences no more comprehensible than the whispering of the wind through the trees, and far less interesting.
If it was later, I remained so still and recumbent that all manner of creatures came to me: bees roaming from the garden hives, who perhaps mistook my gowns with their block-printed patterns of leaves and flowers for an extension of the garden beds; beetles who scuttled up my wrist on feet so light I could not feel them; grasshoppers, some striped brown as winter leaves, others so bright a green that they blended completely into the summer grasses. These startled me a little from my stupor when they bounded from ground, to bench-back, to my knee, and down again. They were so energetic that, loose-jawed and loose-limbed, I could only marvel at them. The voices of all the grown persons in my life buzzed inside my head like the whirring of insect wings, reminding me gently that I was not meant for such darting quickness.
I am happy to say that those voices were slowly replaced by others—friends, phantoms, and, eventually, even myself—who, not-so-gently, disagreed.