While I held myself captive inside John’s house, I ate through the days like a woman starved, gobbling up all the things I was never allowed before. Dr. Carter explained to me, when he called to see how I was getting on, that laudanum often curbed feelings of hunger; but if my appetite was held in check before, now it had been given its full head. I was sublimely gluttonous, tasting bits of everything and enjoying second helpings of many. Cheese, in particular, was a novelty to me; long deemed too rich and binding for my already bound-up insides, it was now available to me in all its endless varieties. The blue-veined Stilton was my favorite, and I ate it with fruit at almost every meal.
I was very aware of my tongue as it tasted and my teeth as they bit. My jaw working to chew and my throat to swallow; and then my belly sighing its contentment. In the mornings, for the first time in all my life that I could remember, my body emptied itself easily without first requiring a purgative. My life’s rhythm had always been set to my body’s sluggishness, many days in which my food bound itself to my insides like Flanders glue, followed by mornings wracked with the cramps that always attended the use of a purgative, while it all came out in humiliatingly spectacular fashion. These mornings brought the fancies of traveling, in which I sometimes indulged, crashing down around my aching head—for, other symptoms notwithstanding, I could not imagine enduring such miserable hours anywhere except in my own home. But now, I had traveled—I was here— and my body had proved that it could function as cleverly as anyone else’s. The entire world was suddenly available, whenever I gathered courage enough to face it.
Outside the house, new leaves flexed like fingers on long, branching arms as the trees stretched after a winter of sleep. I wanted to pluck those leaves; to smell them and feel their tenderness between the pads of my fingers. I tapped out my impatience with my cowardice on the window frame instead. From my bedchamber, below which so much of the city sprawled like a rolled-out carpet, I watched the rest of London bloom with spring. John’s and his neighbors’ gardens, with their plum and apple trees espaliered against tall walls, went abruptly heavy with blossoms into which bees and butterflies eagerly dipped.
I closed my eyes and imagined Rosings Park, where little delicate shoots would be pushing up in the fields. Our head gardener, Mr. Saxon, would be starting his spring work: separating overlarge clumps of plants, pruning, making reality whatever improvements he and Mamma had dreamed up over the long frozen months. The woods would be noisy with life, all the creatures from Mr. Thomson’s “Spring” stepping into courtship rituals as solemn, and as ridiculous to an outsider’s eye, as our own. When I left, Rosings sent me off with cries like shoving palms; I tried now to imagine what it would say to me, hovering here as I was, unwilling to step back but afraid to step forward. Not yet, it might say. Wait just a little longer.
Or so I told myself.
All my life, I had been dormant as a winter tree, waiting for a spring that never came. But now it had come—it was all around me. I spent my years in detached observation of the wheeling seasons, but there was nothing detached about me now. Green and birdsong burst forth across London, and I watched, avid. Like the world outside, I was full, full of so much feeling I knew not what to do with it all. Like a child, I was all curiosity, every moment a discovery.
This fullness extended to my body, which, with the benefit of all the nourishment I’d been putting away in greedy gulps, changed subtly under my curious fingertips. My body was a mere thing before, inert and trapping me inside it; but now it was a wonder. I liked to imagine myself like one of the fat, bursting buds on the trees outside, but in truth, the changes were slower, gentler, all my hollows filling in, my angles rounding out.
More dramatic was how my body felt—that my body felt—a quickening of blood through my veins, like the rush of white rootlings underground; a tingling at the pads of my fingers, like a gathering summer storm. Under my shift, my breasts ached. Every sensation seemed exaggerated as a line of poetry; and as poignantly true.
I woke one morning to blood.
The evening before, a pain had sprouted, so deep in my belly it seemed unreachable. It began dull but grew into a fist that pulled and clenched and released; by the time I excused myself from dinner, I thought I might vomit. Spinner put me to bed, her face creased with worry, her fingers, calloused from needle pricks, testing the temperature of my skin.
“You’re cool, ma’am,” she said, though her brows drew together to see my hand pressed futilely against my abdomen. “But perhaps I should send for Dr. Carter?”
“No,” I said, miserable, closing my eyes. “I think—perhaps I ate too much.” I curled on my side and eventually fell asleep.
When I awoke to the thin light of dawn, I could not at first understand what had happened. I was lying in something wet, and for a dreadful moment I thought I had voided my bladder or my bowels in the night. I scrambled back, shifting aside the bedclothes, to find the white sheets stained bright as a butcher’s apron. The great, spreading stain was still wet, and as I shoved myself backward, away from it, I realized there was more coming, seeping from between my legs.
A bright rush of horror and then, suddenly, I understood. I’d had my first monthly bleeding when I was seventeen, and more, erratically, in the years since; but they were never predictable, not as Nurse and Miss Hall said they would be—though Dr. Grant assured my mother that such sparse and sporadic bleeding was to be expected in a delicate young woman—and never presaged by this burrowing ache. I was abruptly aware of my womb, of its existence somewhere in the deep mystery between my hip bones.
I rose up onto my knees on the bed. The insides of my thighs were streaked with blood; my chemise was ruined. I would be embarrassed, except that it felt not shameful, but joyful. This was a torrent; a glorious abundance that had been stored and waiting, and was now released. I felt borne along on it, like a leaf caught in a river.
I pressed my fingers over my eyes and, laughing, wept.
Spinner came in soon enough, took one look at my sheets and shift and the tackily drying blood, and sent for a bath. While we waited for the tub to be brought and filled, a housemaid came to bundle away my soiled linens, returning with salt and a basin of cold water. She blotted at the pinkish smear on the mattress, then sprinkled it over with salt, all the while pretending, in the manner of well-trained servants everywhere, that I was not the source of the troublesome stain.
The hot water eased away the deep-down ache even as Spinner scrubbed the blood from my skin. I stayed in the tub until it cooled, then let her clout and clothe me. The pinching pain began to return, however, and I curled over, fists pressed to my belly.
“What is it?” Spinner said, alarmed.
I said, “I don’t know—I have never suffered like this when I bled, before,” and a look of comprehension came over her face.
“It’s quite normal,” she said, then hesitated before adding, “I think perhaps—you did not suffer so because your drops kept you from suffering. Laudanum is . . . often prescribed for ladies during their turns. But I do not suppose you would want—”
“No,” I said, blade-sharp, and she nodded, looking relieved.