Improper Proposals (12 page)

Chapter Sixteen

I began to pack up my life, stuffing it into a series of wooden crates lined with straw, but before I’d had the chance to do much of anything, my morning sickness, so mild initially, bloomed into a debilitating case of all-day and all-night sickness. I could keep nothing down, not even the driest morsels of toast. Soon I was so ravenous I could have cheerfully eaten one of Moreton Cottage’s old oak floorboards, had I not been sure I would vomit it up straight away.

Somehow, over the course of not much more than a week, I had managed to pack up most of my belongings. All that remained was the kitchen, but the task of wrapping each plate and cup and glass with sheets of old newsprint was infinitely wearying, not least because the smell of the paper, ink-sharp and tannic, was profoundly nauseating. Already this morning I had retched up my breakfast—mere crumbs of dry toast and water—and my stomach had not yet settled enough to allow me to try again.

I would sit at the table for a moment and see if that helped. Perhaps I might try to wrap the dishes from here. I only had to reach—

The front door, which let straight into the kitchen, swung open with no warning, startling me so much I dropped the plate I was holding.

“What the fuck is
this?
”

Tom stood in the doorway, angrier than I’d ever seen him—far, far more upset than the day I’d been so late arriving in London—and he was brandishing a sheet of notepaper.

“‘
I
no longer wish to be your lover’
?” he barked, advancing upon me. “This is how you say farewell? This is how you end things? With a goddamn fucking
letter?
”

“Forgive me. I never meant to hurt you. I thought it would be easier—”

“Than what? Than trusting me enough to tell me the truth, face to face? I would never have done this to you, Caroline.
Never.
”

He sat in the chair next to mine, breathing heavily, and I tried not to look at him. I didn’t want to see how tired he was, how travel-worn and disheveled, how sad and despairing.

He stared at me, no doubt taking in the pallor of my skin and the lankness of my hair, left unwashed these many days. Understanding dawned, and with it came compassion, his anger melting away. “But you’re not well, not well at all. Whatever is the matter? I can help you. I can—”

I shook my head, mustered my last ounce of strength and looked him in the eye. “I’m not sick, Tom. I’m pregnant.”

To his credit, he didn’t look away. He was surprised, certainly, and more than a little taken aback by the news. But there was something else in his gaze, and it made me more wary than ever.

“Were you...oh, God, were you never going to tell me?” he asked, his voice catching. “Do you blame me? I thought the precautions we took would be enough, but evidently—”

“I was wrong to keep it from you. I see that now. But I didn’t want you to feel obliged to help me.”

“
Obliged?
What sort of man do you think me?”

“I think you the best of men. Likely the best man I’ve ever known. That’s why I couldn’t tell you. Why I wanted to protect you.”

“From the knowledge that I have fathered a child?”

“From your sense of honor. You would have insisted on marrying me, but you told me, when we first met, that you didn’t wish to marry.”

“Christ, Caroline. We’d only just met. And that was before I knew you. Before I—”

“Don’t say it,” I pleaded. “Please don’t say—”

“Before I fell in love with you.”

“Did you not mark my own feelings on the matter? I told you I was content as I was. I said I never wanted to marry again.”

“That was before you knew me,” he persisted. “Admit it.”

“Don’t do this to me. Please, Tom.”

“Do you think I would make a poor husband? I know I can’t hold a candle to John, but I would try to live up to his example. I swear I would.”

He would not stop until my heart was splintered through. “I’m sure you would make a perfect husband for...for a woman who truly loved you.”

“And you don’t? You make a poor liar, Caroline.”

Why would he not believe me? “I cannot love you. I
will
not.”

“You already do, my darling.” He smiled at me, his features aglow with tenderness and compassion. I was unworthy of such consideration.

“Not once have I ever said, not in word or deed—”

“Rubbish,” he insisted. “I see it in your every look, your every touch. Why will you not admit that you love me? It’s the truth. I know it is.”

“I cannot.”

“Why do you fear it so much? You know I will never hurt you.”

“John said that, too, when he courted me. And he hurt me worst of all.”

A terrible, oppressive silence fell between us. He didn’t understand. I had to make him understand.

“Not long after John and I were married, there was a fire at my parents’ house. Mother and Father both perished. I thought I would expire from the pain of losing them. I thought, then, that I would never suffer anything worse. I thought I had plumbed the depths of grief. And then I lost John.” I shut my eyes tight, wishing I could shield my heart from the agony that speared it through.

“I held him in my arms and watched the light fade from his eyes, felt his body grow cold. I longed for death, too, or at least oblivion. The pain I felt, then and now, was beyond enduring. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.”

Tom reached for me, offering the solace of his embrace, but I held up a hand to warn him away. “When they buried John, they buried my heart. I will not resurrect it, not even for you.”

“If I could bring him back to you, I would. I would do it in a heartbeat, Caroline, even though it would be the death of my hopes and dreams. But the thing is...I do know how you feel. Not because of Cecilia, though I will always mourn her loss. I know because I felt it yesterday when I opened this letter.” He glanced at the offending piece of paper, where he had tossed it on the table, and I knew he longed to destroy it. “In that moment, I felt as if you had pulled my beating heart from my chest and crushed it before my eyes. So I do have an idea of how you felt, my darling. I have a very good idea of it.”

“Why do you torment me so? Why won’t you let me be?” I whispered.

“Because I love you. As I know you love me.”

He had defeated me. “You know I do. God help me, but I do.”

“There, now,” he soothed. “The sky hasn’t fallen. The world hasn’t ended. We love one another, that’s all.”

“What now? What do you want from me?”

“Perhaps I ought to court you. Win your affections in a more conventional manner.”

“You did go about things in a rather backwards fashion,” I said, and the memory of it was so sweet I almost smiled.

“We both know you’d have been horrified if I’d appeared with flowers in one hand and a book of sonnets in the other.”

At that I dared to look him in the eye. I had hurt him, to my everlasting shame, but in his gaze I saw nothing but steady, unwavering affection and concern. I reached for his hand and held it tight.

“From the beginning, Caroline, I wanted you. But it scared the hell out of me. Not least because I’d never met a woman who could make me consider marriage, not in all the years since losing Cecilia. And there you were, standing in my office, mad as a hornet because I had kept you waiting, and I was smitten. Instantly plagued by visions of courtship and marriage and babies.”

“I had no notion you felt that way.”

“Thank God. Of course, your feelings were equally opaque. So I told myself I would find out, one way or another, how you felt. I began with the notion of the guide, not only because I thought you were a fine writer, but also because I wished to know you better.”

“So your second proposal...?”

“I was certain that if I could get through to you, find a way to burrow past your defenses, that I would have a chance. Hence my suggestion that we become lovers, without so much as a whisper of romance to leaven it.”

“Yet it worked,” I admitted.

“We will be happy, Caroline. I swear we will. And if we suffer, we suffer together. If I should die, you will not be alone. You will have our children, and my family, too. You will never be alone again.”

“I so wish I could believe. Simply believe, and leave the fear behind.”

“Then do it. Come with me, and leave all of it here, in this cottage.”

“I don’t know—”

“First come here. Let me hold you.”

I reached out, blindly, my eyes stinging with long-suppressed tears. He enfolded me in his arms, cocooning me in the sanctuary of his touch, and the wave of regret that swept over me in that instant was simply overpowering. How silly I had been. How silly and selfish and pig-headed.

I began to weep, great racking sobs that left me gasping and red-faced and sniveling like an ill-humored child. He ignored all that. Instead he led me to the door, took down my shawl and set it upon my shoulders.

“Come, now. We’ve a train to catch.”

“To London?”

“To London. I’ll hold you in my arms, all the way there, and the train will lull you to sleep. I think you’ll feel better after that.”

“Where shall we go when we arrive?”

“First to my parents, so they may meet my affianced wife. Then to St. Peter’s Eaton Square, to ask that the banns be called. And then, if you are not too tired, we’ll collect Grendel and drive out to Hampstead. Your newest niece is anxious to meet you.”

“What of my things? I need to pack a bag—”

“Leave everything. I’ll have new gowns made up for you straight away. We’ll buy anything else that you require.”

“It will only take a minute or two,” I protested.

“Leave it all. We’ll lock up the cottage and sort everything out once we’re married. Do you wish to let anyone know?”

“Mrs. Jones. She’ll mind it for me until we return.”

“Very well. To Mrs. Jones, and then to Didcot to catch the train.”

“How did you get here from the station?”

“I hired a carriage. A rather tumbledown thing, and the horse is nearly as ancient.”

He waited patiently as I found my reticule and locked the door, and only then did I think to ask a question that had been bothering me all this time.

“What of my guide? What did you think of the final chapter?” I asked, the weight of the past weeks finally slipping from my shoulders.

“It was perfect. There is one rather large problem, I’m afraid. It concerns the manuscript as a whole.”

This was appalling, truly appalling. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. In my opinion it’s perfect. But I had my solicitor read it over.”

“And?”

“And once he’d recovered from his fit of the vapors, he informed me that if I were to publish it, I would certainly be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act.”

“But after all that work—”

“All is not lost. I’m certain we will make excellent use of it in the years to come.”

Epilogue

In the House of Commons last week
,
the Member of Parliament for Southampton
,
Mr.
Russell Gurney
,
made so bold as to raise the subject of
The Married Woman’s Guide to Domestic Felicity and Contentment,
which has become all the rage despite its having been banned under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857.
Noting that he had
,
of course
,
not read the guide
,
but had heard on good authority of the utter depravity of its subject matter
,
Mr.
Gurney begged the question of how Her Majesty’s Government could allow such a scurrilous and morally bankrupt volume to be circulated with impunity.

Responding for the Government
,
Her Majesty’s Home Secretary Mr.
Henry Austin Bruce responded that he had little to offer by way of explanation for the book’s continued and growing popularity
,
but invited any and all members of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to read said guide at their earliest convenience and report back with their findings.

It was some time before the Speaker was able to restore order to the House of Commons.

The attendant controversy has quite naturally resulted in an unprecedented demand for the infamous guide
,
whose author is known only as Mrs.
C.R.
A
new shipment of copies
,
imported from the Netherlands
,
is expected to arrive in London any day.

—from the pages of
London Town
, October 1871

* * * * *

Author’s Note

Mrs.
Beeton’s Book of Household Management
, written by Isabella Beeton and published by her husband Samuel Orchard Beeton, was first published in 1861. It stretched to more than one thousand pages and featured advice on nearly every aspect of domestic life imaginable, including cookery, supervision of servants, legal matters, care of the sick, animal husbandry, and what appears to have been any other topic that caught Mrs. Beeton’s fancy. Little of the guide was original, and in fact entire passages were plagiarized from Eliza Acton’s
Modern Cookery for Private Families
and several other sources.

Despite its faults, the
Guide
made—and still makes—for compelling reading. In
At Home
, his history of domestic life, Bill Bryson declares that the guide’s “two unimpeachable virtues were its supreme confidence and its comprehensiveness. The Victorian era was an age of anxiety, and Mrs. Beeton’s plump tome promised to guide the worried homemaker through every one of life’s foamy shoals.”

Although Isabella Beeton herself died tragically young, her book remained a bestseller for decades. If you’d like to learn more about the
Guide
, you can find a reproduction of the entire 1861 edition at www.mrsbeeton.com. Even better is the engrossing biography of Isabella by Kathryn Hughes:
The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs.
Beeton
, which I recommend unreservedly to anyone with an interest in Victorian social history.

As far as Victorian guides to sexuality are concerned, much has been made of
Sex Tips for Wives
, published in 1894, its purported author the wife of a Methodist minister. I’ve read more than a few newspaper articles that cite
Sex Tips
as a “typical” example of repressed Victorian attitudes toward sexuality, often quoting “While sex is at best revolting and at worse rather painful, it has to be endured.”
Sex Tips
is now thought, however, to have been written pseudonymously for comic effect, and cannot be relied on as reliable evidence of nineteenth-century attitudes and practices.

Fortunately, historian Fern Riddell, author of the forthcoming
A
Victorian Guide to Sexuality
, has found examples of authentic Victorian guides to sexuality in the course of her archival research. One such guide, “The Art of Begetting Handsome Children,” dates to 1860 and is in the form of a very small pamphlet. Inside, it offers the suggestion that it may “be given at marriage instead of gloves.” It was in such underground publications that advice was more often disseminated in this period, in large part because of the restrictions of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The Act, which made no exceptions for artistic merit or the public good, allowed publications to be banned if any part of them were found to have the tendency “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences,” to quote the judge who first invoked the Act in a decision. Not until 1918, with Dr. Marie Stopes’s
Married Love
, did any book that frankly discussed sexuality become a bestseller—and even then, Dr. Stopes’s guide was banned for nearly a quarter century in a number of countries. It was left to the more forward-thinking publishers on the Continent to publish, and then sell to foreign buyers, those books that would have surely been banned from publication in Great Britain—Caroline and Tom’s guide, I like to imagine, among them.