The Honeymoon (11 page)

“It sounds most extraordinary.”

“Cara loves her little school. And you should see the allotments. They grow everything under the sun. And I bought the
Coventry Herald
, so now I can put forth all my grand ideas!” He laughed at himself. “You should write something for my newspaper,” he added.

“I’m not sure I could. I —”

“Of course you could. Write something about religion. Nobody knows more about the subject than you.”

She agreed to try. She labored for weeks reviewing three books on Christianity and finally produced the essay. He printed it immediately. Then he asked her to review another book, Gilbert à Becket’s
Comic History of England
, and she wrote a satirical piece called “Vice and Sausages.” There had been an article in the paper the previous week about unwholesome meat of dubious origin being sold to the citizens of Coventry. The person responsible for inspecting the meat was a man called John Vice.
“Every kind of animals, mice, rats, kittens, puppy dogs, up to a dead beast or body,”
she wrote,
“may all be made, by judicious seasonings, to taste like pork.”

“In addition to all else,” Charles told her, “you’re a wit.”

When her pieces were published in the
Herald
, she stared at the words printed on paper, her words, her ideas woven together and boldly put forward as if they made sense. And, strangely, they did make sense. Her name wasn’t on them, as was the custom, of course, but they were her ideas in print, the first time she’d seen that.

Meanwhile, gentle Cara taught health and the importance of kindness to animals at the Infants’ School, and
became her dearest friend. She came to love Cara and Cara loved her back. They alternated playing piano at musical evenings at Rosehill.

During that time, Cara insisted on painting her portrait. In it, Cara made her look pretty, with a girl-like delicacy. She colored her eyes a lovely blue, gave her hair gentle curls. Her complexion gleamed tenderly, with rosy touches on the cheeks. She wore a light-colored pinkish-purple dress with a delicate lace collar. Her arms were crossed in their typical attitude, hiding her body. The pose was impatient, as if she’d been compelled to sit still, which she had, to humor Cara.

“That doesn’t look a bit like me,” she told Cara.

“Are you implying I have no skill as a painter?” Cara said. “I’m rather aggrieved.”

Despite the picture’s lyricism, she had had to admit it did bear some resemblance. There was the faint suggestion of her large brow, her big, curved nose, her upper lip shorter than her lower lip, her strong chin.

“You’re just being kind,” she told Cara.

“Nonsense, it’s completely you.”

The French windows at Rosehill opened onto a broad terrace, and from there to a long, sloping lawn. The house was always filled with callers. On summer days, a bearskin rug was spread among the roots of the immense acacia tree, and some of the most interesting people she’d ever met gathered there. “Everyone who comes to Coventry with a queer mission, or who’s a little cracked, is sent to Rosehill,” Charles said, laughing.

Charles’s latest enthusiasm was phrenology, the belief that human character and faculties are indicated by the
dimensions and bumps of the skull. His prize guest was the leading phrenologist George Combe, a tiny, humpbacked man with a big head who wore black swallowtails. He was married to the wealthy daughter of the actress Mrs. Siddons. “We must have a cast made of this noble skull,” Charles declared, pointing at Marian’s head and making a tapping motion. “Perhaps it’ll reveal the source of her brilliance.”

“I’ll have no such thing,” she insisted. “I will never submit to having my head shaved so someone can make a plaster cast of it.”

But Charles buoyed her, he made her laugh with his silly enthusiasms.

Then, one spring day, like a gust of wind, the writer Harriet Martineau appeared, carrying a huge brass ear trumpet, for she was very deaf. Martineau was already famous. She suffered from chronic illness, but she was like an engine, incredibly prolific, the author of a nine-volume work,
Illustrations of Political Economy
, and an article opposing slavery for the
Westminster Review
, “The Martyr of the United States,” which had attracted enormous attention. Martineau was a true radical, in favor of Parliamentary rule over the monarchy and expanding the right to vote. She seemed never to let the fact that she was a woman stand in her way and had no hesitation writing about subjects such as politics that were usually the province of male writers. And she also wrote novels.

“You must meet our very brilliant friend, Miss Evans,” Charles Bray said.

Martineau cast the beam of her attention on Marian. “Really,” she said, holding her ear trumpet toward Marian
like an antenna. Marian was awed by her. This was the first woman writer she’d ever met. Martineau was in her forties, rapidly graying, and somewhat manly, even ugly, a robust figure who wore the plainest of clothes. In order for a woman to succeed in a man’s world, to have success as a writer, Marian thought, perhaps she couldn’t be pretty. Must she be sexless and deep-voiced like Martineau, and not care about her appearance? Perhaps Charles so readily accepted
her
, Marian, because she too was ugly, because he didn’t see her as a woman.

But she was a woman, with such a need for love, for tenderness, a longing to be held.

One day, the great American thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the founder of transcendentalism, on a lecture tour of England and Scotland, came calling.

Emerson was forty years old, tall, spare, hooked-nosed, but his voice was surprisingly gentle and sweet. When Charles introduced them, he told her he’d been reading Indian philosophy and it had had a great effect on him. He asked what the most important book she had read was, and she said Rousseau’s
Confessions
. “It was the same for me,” he told her. Later, when she and Charles were alone, he mentioned that Emerson had praised her. “ ‘Your friend has such a calm, serious soul,’ he said.”

Another visitor to Rosehill was Edward Noel, a cousin of Lord Byron’s. Noel was a short-haired man with a wide, warm smile. He owned an estate on a Greek island where he was instituting the latest agricultural reforms and trying to improve relations between peasants and landowners. He’d built stone houses for his laborers to replace their hovels. Noel also had a home in Devonshire, in Bishops
Teignton. His wife, Fanny, had consumption. He came to Rosehill alone with his three children or by himself. Marian noticed that he seemed especially close to Cara, and when the children arrived she always ran to greet them and made a fuss over them. She also noticed Cara and Noel were often alone in a corner of the drawing room in intense conversation, or strolling together in the garden.

When the weather grew warmer, the guests gathered under the huge acacia tree, talking and debating and laughing, and Hannah, the cook, a full-breasted girl with a complexion as soft and pink as a peach, prepared delicious picnics for them all of salmon and cold chicken and champagne.

At the center of it all was Charles, the sun around whom the entire household revolved.

One day, none other than Charles Hennell himself arrived. He was frail, melancholy-looking, with long, corkscrew curls, heavy-lidded, sensual eyes, rimless glasses, and cupid lips. Marian sat down beside him. “Your book’s been very important to me,” she told him. “Especially your conclusion that just because the Scriptures are myths doesn’t mean that they don’t have a beneficial influence.”

Hennell’s face lit up. “I’m very flattered,” he said. “I seldom meet anyone who’s even read the thing. I’m afraid it hasn’t sold very many copies, though a few of my coreligionists have taken me to task, saying it’s better to abandon Jesus altogether than to question the authority of the Bible.”

There was a swirl of young men around her now, young men unlike any she’d ever known, brilliant people, people who, like her, read different languages, and knew philosophy, mathematics, and science. They seemed fascinated
by her learning, so unusual for a woman, and by the way she fearlessly challenged them. She was conscious that she made her voice low and musical. She felt herself opening up to them in a slow, almost painful way, as if she were a bud whose petals were being inexorably forced apart by sunlight and warmth. What did it mean that these men loved to talk to her? Were they drawn to her as a woman? Or was she simply like another man to them?

Charles Hennell came again to Rosehill and joined them in their musical evenings, playing the viola while she and Cara alternated on the piano. She was moved by him, by his delicate looks, his sensual eyes and mouth, and by the courage it must have taken him, an ordinary man, not a scholar, to question the Bible, and still to reaffirm Christian belief. She tried to make herself pretty for him, to comb her hair neatly, though it always escaped her efforts to tame it. She put on a little coral necklace that she’d inherited from her mother. Perhaps he liked her? She couldn’t tell. He was always warm, and grateful to discuss his book. When they played music, his wan features flushed as he sawed away merrily on his viola.

Then, a young woman with astonishing long, red hair arrived at Rosehill. She entered the room filling it with her presence, a cynosure. Her name was Rufa Brabant.

Marian asked, politely, the natural question, “How did you come by your name, ‘Rufa’?”

“My real name’s Rebecca,” she said. “But my father was a friend of Coleridge and he gave me the nickname because of my hair,” she said, tossing her mane about her shoulders, perfectly aware, Marian thought, of her beauty. “I knew him when I was little. Actually, he used my name twice in
his poems. She laughed.
“From Rufa’s eye sly Cupid shot his dart,”
she recited.
“And left it sticking in Sangarado’s heart. / No quiet from that moment has he known, / And peaceful sleep has from his eyelids flown.”

This Rufa was not only stunning and had known Coleridge himself, but she was obviously learned too. “I’m translating Strauss’s
Das Leben Jesu
for Mr. Hennell,” she told Marian. David Friedrich Strauss was one of a group of German theologians who, like Charles Hennell, had begun questioning the historical truth of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus. “Mr. Hennell doesn’t read German but he’s heard about the book and asked me to do it.”

Marian could feel herself disliking this beautiful creature.

Later Cara told her, “My poor brother, Charles, is completely in love with Rufa, but her father’s forbidden the marriage. He’s a doctor and he insisted on giving him a physical examination and discovered he’s got weak lungs.”

Then, the next day, Charles Hennell himself drove up to the house. He walked right past Marian and went immediately to Rufa, took both her hands in his, and they went outside into the garden. Marian, watching them from the French window, saw them walking down the hill, their heads bent closely together.

Disappointment settled over her like a dull wave.

Meanwhile, Charles Bray told her enthusiastically, “You’ve got the temperament of genius. You’re the most delightful companion I’ve ever known.” She’d utter an idea and Charles would praise it as if it were the most brilliant thing in the world. He was writing a book about religion, he said, and he’d been reading Spinoza, about his ideas on the
nature of God. But he didn’t know enough Latin to translate it properly. “I have a little Latin,” she told him. “From church. Perhaps I could help you.” And she rendered some of Spinoza’s Latin phrases into readable English for him.

Sometimes they argued violently. Charles insisted that all religion was simply superstition.

“But you can’t say that!” she insisted, even though she herself had given up on organized religion. “People would just kill each other if it weren’t for religion.”

As they argued, Charles would look deep into her face and smile amusedly, infuriating her. But then the next day, they’d make up.

They talked constantly about the turmoil in the city below, the devastating effect on the workers of the constant fluctuation in ribbon prices. In the winter months, work was at a virtual standstill, families were cold and hungry, and parents couldn’t afford to send their children to school. Charles believed in the necessity of a fundamental change in the very nature of society.

But she’d seen what change could do when it came too quickly, that time, when she was thirteen and had ridden into Nuneaton that day with her father and seen the workingmen rioting over the Reform Act, and the Scots Greys riding through the crowd and bludgeoning them. She was still her father’s daughter, she realized; the conservative ways of the countryside had their hold on her. “Change can’t be too abrupt,” she said to Charles. “All those old rural virtues, people’s sense of obligation toward one another, the rhythms of the harvest and tenancy, those are ancient ties that bind people.”

“That’s called serfdom,” Charles said.

As they walked arm in arm, she could feel his elbow pressed against the side of her breast. He made no attempt to pull it away, and she didn’t move away either, because if she did, it would be an acknowledgment that his arm shouldn’t be there, and that she’d noticed it. And besides, she liked it there, his closeness to her.

One summer evening, as they sat apart in the darkness of the garden, Charles told her, “Cara and I have a special arrangement. We believe our marriage bond is so strong that nothing can break it. From the beginning, we’ve said that if we were drawn to other people, our love could withstand it.”

“Drawn to other people?” What did he mean? Did he mean sexually?

She could feel him, in the darkness, scrutinizing her for her reaction.

“You mean —” she said, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“We’re free to be intimate with other people.”

“That’s awful!” she said.

“Not at all. Cara’s developed an attachment to Edward Noel.”

She remembered Cara’s solicitousness toward Noel and his children. Noel’s wife, Fanny, was increasingly ill, and Cara had been going to Bishops Teignton for days at a time to help Noel nurse her.