The Poets' Wives (5 page)

‘Can we afford another mouth to feed?’ I ask, unable in the light of his words to think of any other objection.

‘Yes we can. Joseph Johnson has ordered plates for a new book.’

So Lizzie comes to live with us, arriving at the house an hour later with her worldly possessions in a reed basket and which comprise little more than a few items of miserable clothing and a copy of the Bible that she says her mother gave her before she died. There is never any mention of a father. I greet her as I should and in truth feel shamed by the hardness of my heart that I showed earlier. We establish her as best we can in the back room even though her bed is no more at the start than some blankets on the floor with a cushion for her head but I try to make the room pretty by pinning up some of William’s pictures of holy scenes and she seems quiet but content, looking about her always as if everything is a great mystery.

In truth her care restores me a little and soon I take her out and buy cloth to make her some clothes as I do for Will and myself, but her eye instinctively falls on what is prettiest and I know she is disappointed by my choice of plainer and cheaper fare. I try also to teach her to read but she’s not a good pupil, her concentration soon wandering, and when I look to encourage her she asks, ‘What good will it do me?’ I seek to tell her that she could read the Bible her mother gave her as she surely hoped but she remains indifferent and I put off the teaching to some future date.

I get her to speak of her life, not out of idle curiosity but because I think it will help me to understand her better. So she tells me her father was a soldier who went off to a war somewhere she doesn’t remember and didn’t come back. The way she recounts it makes me unsure whether it’s the truth or something she’s made up. Her mother tried to keep the family together for as long as she could and then Lizzie’s two older sisters went into service and her mother had to do what Lizzie calls ‘work on the street’ to make things meet but she soon got pregnant and died in childbirth.

It’s a sorrowful tale and it makes me draw on as much of my kindness as I am able to find. At first as I instruct her on the ways of a home – all of which seem entirely foreign to her – we get on passably well although there are times when I have to sweep the floor after she’s finished and if I rebuke her gently she looks at me and then her green eyes that sometimes remind me of a cat’s will narrow and stare at me with an unblinking intensity. Once when we sit after work is done and I try to read to her from her own Bible she interrupts by asking, ‘Is it true that Mr Blake is given to fits of madness?’

‘Who told you this?’ I ask.

‘I don’t remember,’ she dissembles.

‘Who told you this, Lizzie?’

‘The butcher who sold me the mutton chops yesterday. He said, “I hear you’ve gone to live with that madman Blake.” ’

‘You must not listen to the foolish prattling of such people,’ I tell her, silently resolving that he shall enjoy no further of our business.

‘But why should he say it?’

‘Because Mr Blake is not like other men and when people see someone they don’t understand they are liable to make the mistake of calling it madness.’

Her green eyes are narrowed again, this time with suspicion, but instead of instructing her as I should to continue with her work, I find myself trying to persuade her of the truth of my words and so I say, ‘Have you ever seen any sign of this madness in Mr Blake?’

‘Some of his paintings are strange and not of any world I know,’ she says, hesitating at first then growing bolder. ‘And sometimes he talks to himself.’

‘Perhaps he talks with someone you cannot see. And some day the world will know him as the great artist that he is.’

‘His eyes?. . .’

‘What about his eyes, Lizzie?’

‘Sometimes they seem strange as if?. . .’ she hesitates again then looks at me to see if she herself has said something that is itself strange.

‘Mr Blake sees with the holiness of the imagination, sometimes sees worlds that are closed to others. You should not think it strange – it is a gift from Heaven.’

She goes to ask another question but I stop her and think up some work that must be done before the morning and she returns to it with little enthusiasm. As I watch her mope about I can’t help but think of her past, what she has seen and done, and it threatens to blot out the kindness I should show her and I am not as convinced as William that she has embraced a new life. Then the suspicion I see in her eyes is also present in me, coiling itself tightly about my thoughts. And despite her questions about William slowly she becomes comfortable in his company, until she likes nothing more than to watch him work, and soon it is clear that he finds some pleasure in her presence in the house.

In a new dress, despite its plainness and with her hair shaped out of its former wildness, she looks very different to the girl we met on the street but perhaps it is my unfair prejudice that makes me think a sense of her former life still lingers in her and she does not have all my trust. There is something about her, and not just in her green eyes, and at times she has the ability to slink quietly throughout the house so she overhears conversations about things that should be private between husband and wife. And there are times when she goes out and is away longer than expected but will say nothing of where she has been and when I put this to William he tells me that she is a servant but not a slave and her life is not ours to own.

Once when I return to the house I hear the sound of their laughter and when I go to the work room he is letting her colour one of the prints and I hear him praising her sureness of hand. I stand silently in the doorway until he realises I am there but when he calls me to look at her work my words are lukewarm. And since I lost our child, even though it is too soon for passion, he has not touched me in love and when I stare at myself in the mirror I think that what happened has taken something of the looks I once had. There are times when she tries to be my friend and taking the brush from my hand will comb my hair but once I catch her gaze on me in the mirror and her eyes are not filled with love. Then it frightens me that perhaps Will wants this girl to be our child, our Eve, to be part of our life for ever, and I cannot bear to think this might be so but I have no means to complain because he will tell me mercy has a human heart and whatever I say will sound as if I am lacking in grace.

He sometimes buys her little trinkets and ribbons that she plaits in her hair and gradually as she increases in his favour she takes less trouble to be in mine. She moves so quietly about the house that I am never sure where she is and slowly I start to believe that she is everywhere and nowhere so her silent steps carry her inside my head. Once I dream she comes into our room in the middle of the night and spies on us but even though I know it was a dream in the morning I look for traces of her presence. And I increasingly think she slips out of the house at night and do not know where she goes, then I start to wonder if she returns to her old haunts. But the one time I get up in the middle of the night and check her room she is there sleeping and I feel a weight of guilt for having doubted her.

She knows I watch her and sometimes under my gaze attempts to give the pretence of quiet industry but nothing she can do will convince me no matter how hard she tries and I become obsessed with finding her out so that once when she goes to the shops I follow her but don’t know what it is I hope to see. And apart from stopping too often for idle conversation or simpering and making eyes with the butcher’s boy there is nothing that is amiss and I return as if empty-handed. I try to talk to William of my unhappiness but he is working with full concentration and I don’t know what words I can find that might persuade him to let her go. And every time I hear their shared laughter it is a blow to my heart and when he says one evening before sleep, ‘It is a miracle that has been wrought in that girl,’ I simply make silence my reply. And once I think he says her name in his sleep but cannot be sure.

My own child is swept beyond my reach, and in her place has been left a changeling whose presence only serves to remind me every day of what I have lost. And then Will tells me that perhaps I should rest more because he thinks I am still far from my old self and that it would be best if Lizzie did her housework in the mornings and helped him in the afternoon. He believes she has a skill for it and when I look past him she is standing silently in the doorway and her lips are curled into a smile whose sharpness is meant to hurt me and succeeds in this its purpose. So I am pushed aside in my own house and for some days I take again to my bed and feel without the strength or desire to leave it. She plays the good nurse at first and brings me food but there is a smugness about her every movement and then once when I address her as Lizzie, she says, ‘I wish to be called Elizabeth. It is my proper name,’ and she turns on her heels with the tray and leaves me to the emptiness of the room.

One morning Will tells me that he must journey on business to Highgate and when he says that Lizzie will look after me I understand that it is only I who must call her Elizabeth. There is silence in the house when he is gone even though I strain to hear her footsteps and in time I rise and dress and try to make myself as quiet as she can. The sound of a passing cart and the driver’s sudden angry shout from the street below at some obstruction to his passage makes me jump and I realise that I am frightened in my own home. I go barefoot across the landing and stand listening at the half-closed door, hear a little break of gentle laughter and feel the pulse of my heart so loud it seems it must drum my presence. Then I open the door and find her at his desk with the drawer open and the hidden drawings spread on the table. She has at least the good grace to jump when she sees me but makes no effort to replace the drawings or close the still-open drawer.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask as I step into the room.

‘I was looking for something,’ she says and already her green eyes are fired with defiance.

‘You have no business here. You forget yourself, girl.’

‘My name is Elizabeth and I am not a girl,’ she answers and her voice is as cold as my face feels flushed with the heat of anger, tempered only by an uncertainty as to what it is I must now do.

‘Mr Blake will not be pleased to hear what you have done in his absence.’

‘Perhaps what might please Mr Blake would be if you were to do this for him,’ she says, holding up a page and pointing with no semblance of shame to one of the drawings. ‘But perhaps if you do not know how, I could teach you, or teach you this and this. Better to learn how to please a man than how to sweep a floor or do washing.’

It is beyond my power to suppress my anger any more and I slap her face because I do not have the words I need to force her into a recognition of her shame. She squeals and holds her cheek but thank God she is not much hurt and my hand shakes so much I have to press it into my side. I go to tell her I’m sorry until I see the hatred in her and instead tell her to go to her room but she stands up straight and stares me in the eye.

‘You lost his child and in so doing you lost his love,’ she whispers and then smiles once more.

I raise my hand to strike her again but she holds up her arm as she shouts, ‘Strike me again and I’ll be the good angel that brings him the child he so desires. Strike me ever again and I’ll work him to choose between your dried-up body and what he can enjoy with me. And you can’t be sure he won’t choose me, can you?’

And I am filled with fear and as my hand drops to my side I turn and hurry from the room, locking the door behind me, and I stay there until I hear her footsteps on the stairs and go to the window where I watch her walk into the street. But before she has gone more than a few steps she turns and waves up at me and I pull back, then as I sit on the bed I start to cry. I know I am no longer mistress in my own house, or perhaps in his heart, and in that moment it feels she is stronger and more cunning than I am and I know she despises what she thinks is my weakness. And she is right, if I do the wrong thing she will take my place in his affections and she grows daily out of childhood into womanhood and already I have seen how men look at her in the street and how she knows it without even having to turn her head and how she enjoys their inspection, sometimes choosing to reward it with a coy smile or a flounce of her body.

And I think again of his poem and know the terrible truth that the youthful harlot’s curse blights and plagues the marriage hearse. But I do not know what I must do to fix things, don’t know how to break her spell that holds him ever closer or end the power over me of her curse. She is still gone when he returns, his business successfully completed and a price agreed for ordered work. He asks me where she is but I tell him I do not know and I say nothing about what has happened.

‘You’re very quiet, Kate,’ he says. ‘Are you still weary?’

‘Just a little tired, but it will pass,’ I tell him.

‘We are fortunate to have Lizzie,’ he says as he stops to remove the shoes from his feet that are tired from walking. ‘She’s a good help to you.’

‘Yes, but I’m getting stronger and I think that soon I will be fully restored to health and then we would have no need of her help.’

‘But if we were to finish with her where would she go and then there is always the prospect that she might feel there is no other path open to her than to return to her old way of life? And she’s come so far along a better road.’

I give no reply but understand that I must wait my time and find a way of making him know the truth that will not reduce me in his eyes.