The Honeymoon (23 page)

He came the next day and once more took her to the theater. And that evening, in the darkness of the house, everyone out or asleep, they crept up the stairs to her room, conscious of the treads squeaking, giggling like two naughty children. They didn’t have to speak about their intention. In the peace and darkness of her room on the third floor, it was their first time.

After they had finished, she quickly drew the sheet up to her chin to hide herself. But he reached over, lit the candle by the bed, and firmly pulled the sheet down again. He held the sheet back away from her body. “No,” she said, and tried to grab it from him.

“Yes,” he said. He moved the candle slowly up and down her naked flesh, studying her.

“It’s cold,” she protested.

But he continued silently contemplating her body, and she allowed it, wordless and frightened.

“Your body is so beautiful,” he said. Then he pulled the covers over both of them and wrapped her in his arms. “And I’ll never let you be cold again,” he told her, drawing her to him and rubbing her hands and feet to warm them.

He made love to her once more, and this time she wasn’t afraid. Her desire was at first baffling, unexpected in its intensity and freedom, for this was desire mingled for the first time in her life with reciprocated love, desire reflected in the love of another person. No need to question it, to wonder about it. It was far stronger than her capacity to stop herself.

On November 22, her thirty-third birthday, he came bearing red roses, out of season, seizing a kiss in the back office when they were alone. “You shouldn’t have,” she said. “They’re much too expensive!”

“It doesn’t matter. I need far more money than those cost. You deserve them.”

She put the roses on the windowsill of the dark room so she could look at them while she worked, at the deep, dusky red emerging from the winter gloom, a glamorous gift no man had ever offered her before, a gift of romance and honor.

When Chapman came in to consult with her, he asked, “Who’re those from?”

“A friend,” she said curtly.

He raised his eyebrows. But she didn’t offer more.

Christmas was approaching. A letter came saying that Chrissey’s husband, Edward Clarke, had died, bankrupt, leaving Chrissey with six children to feed.

She dropped her work immediately and took the next train to Meriden.

Isaac was there when she arrived, standing strong and bearded with his big, hooked Evans nose. Relishing his own success in the midst of the crisis, she thought.

Chrissey sat clutching her youngest child, Katie, only fourteen months old, while her other five children stood forlornly around her, brave young Edward, her oldest, and Robert and Emily and Christopher and Fanny. Chrissey’s youthful prettiness had vanished. She was only thirty-eight, but her teeth had fallen out from all her pregnancies, and her hair had turned gray. She was worn to the bone from Edward’s bankruptcy and the deaths of two of her children.

“I’m willing to let her live in the Attleborough house rent-free,” Isaac said. The house was a broken-down hovel on the estate, not big enough for seven people. Isaac continued in his inimitable way. “And Katie and Fanny can go to the Infant Orphan Asylum.”

From where she sat, holding dirty-faced little Katie to her breast, Chrissie shrieked “No!”

“They’ll get food and a bed,” he said impassively. He was always so sure of his rightness.

“Never!” Chrissey cried. She buried her face in the baby’s neck.

Marian interrupted. “Isaac, please. I’ll help Chrissey. I’ll change my situation and earn some money.”

She tried to make a Christmas for the children by filling a sock for each with an orange and some nuts. The day after Christmas, as she was gathering her things for the journey back to London, Isaac appeared again at the house. “Where’re you going?” he demanded.

“Back to London to try to earn some money to help Chrissey.”

“I’m the head of this family now,” he said angrily. “I am trying to ensure our sister’s survival, and now you’re leaving without telling me. In future, don’t ask me for anything.” He stormed out.

“What have I ever done to make him hate me so?” she asked Chrissey.

Chrissey shook her head. “Perhaps he’s jealous of your mind, your intelligence. You were always the clever one. Or perhaps it’s that he once loved you so,” she ventured, “and now you’re independent of him.”

When she got back to the cold, bleak streets of London, she arranged with the solicitor for their father’s estate, Mr. Holbeche, to have a portion of her allowance sent to Chrissey.

In her brief absence, the finances of the
Westminster
had slipped further into arrears. George Combe had agreed not to be paid for his article on phrenology and education in return for advertising for his books. But Chapman had inadvertently left the advertisement out of the issue and Combe was again threatening to pull his money out.

Charles Bray offered to give Chapman funds to pay Marian her wages, but she wouldn’t allow it. She wrote to Charles in Coventry thanking him:
“You are the
dearest, oldest, stupidest, tiresomest, delightfullest and never-to-be-forgotten-est of friends to me,”
she teased.

She was working so hard now that she developed an intense pain in her shoulder from the writing and editing. She could hardly hold her pen. George came daily now to see her. He’d find his way to the back office, and if no one was about, he’d lay his hand on her cheek. “Poor soul,” he said, “your worries are great, aren’t they?”

“But so are yours,” she said.

At night she let him into the house and he followed her upstairs to her room, and there he held her, kissed her, and warmed her with his body. Somewhere, Chapman and Susanna and Miss Tilley must know, she thought. Perhaps they were relieved that she had someone of her own now.

Once, at midnight, Chapman came in the front door just as George was arriving. Chapman looked askance at them, said “Good evening,” and went upstairs.

The next day in the back office, he told her, “You should watch yourself with Lewes. He’s a scoundrel.”

“Well, you should know,” she said, letting the anger out as she never had before. He daren’t say anything to that. He had no idea who George really was. He only cared that she had shifted her allegiance to someone else and might leave him stranded at his magazine.

Every night that George didn’t come was a void of loneliness, an unnatural state. There was now between them an attachment, profound and inevitable. He buoyed her with visits to the theater, tried to make her laugh when her spirits were down about Chrissey. His existence was woven into the fabric of her own, their separations unnecessary, a needless interruption in the inevitable continuity of their love.

Then, one February day, George arrived at 142 with his usual ebullience dampened. “Agnes is pregnant again,” he said flatly.

He could endure it no more. His friend, Frederick Ward, was in Brussels and said George could live rent-free at his house on Cork Street while he was gone.

And she could endure it no more at the Strand. By the following autumn she had found rooms for herself on Cambridge Street, nine pounds a month for rent and food. Somehow she’d find the money. The rooms were on the ground floor, noisy and drafty, but it was only fifteen minutes from Cork Street and she and George could go back and forth unobserved.

On the day she moved into her new home, Barbara Smith arrived, her golden hair streaming around her, her face flushed with the autumn air. “This is so sweet!” she cried with her usual enthusiasm. “You’ll be so happy here.”

“It’s a bit dark,” Marian said.

“We’ll fix that. I’ve brought some things to decorate with.” From her bag she took two watercolors she’d painted, already framed: a delightful little beach scene from Hastings where the Smiths had an estate, and blue and white irises. She tacked them up on the wall, then helped Marian unpack and rearrange the furniture. And together they made the place cozy.

George came too, without supervision, without interruption.

Still, she couldn’t escape the
Review
. Chapman brought manuscripts to Cambridge Street for her to work on.
Combe had written ninety-six pages on “Criminal Legislation and Prison Reform,” with once again phrenology being the answer to everything. He was demanding the article be published whole. She toiled over it and persuaded Combe to cut it down to thirty-six pages, without offending him.

In an effort to keep her at the magazine, Chapman offered her thirty pounds to do a new translation of Feuerbach’s
Essence of Christianity
. He’d put her name on it too, he said. Ludwig Feuerbach was another German critic of established religion, a philosopher and disciple of Hegel. Hegel had charted the evolutionary path by which humanity achieves a universal spirit, full freedom, absolute knowledge of itself. Feuerbach took Hegel one step further, arguing that Christianity itself would inevitably be superseded. God, Feuerbach said, was merely the outward projection of man’s own nature, his innate disposition to do good.

All winter, she and George worked together in their little nest. He was editing a book on Comte. He’d met Comte in Paris several years before and had become interested in his philosophy of positivism, his belief that all we can know is that which we can see and hear ourselves. Now he was collecting his various essays into one volume,
Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences
, in an effort to popularize the philosopher with English-speaking audiences, and she helped him correct his manuscript.

To give him time to do his own work, she read proofs for the
Leader
as well. She even wrote some of his “Vivian” columns for him — she’d learned to imitate his style perfectly.

In between she translated Feuerbach.
“Love is God himself,”
Feuerbach said,
“and apart from it, there is no God … not a visionary, imaginary love — no! a real love, a love which has
flesh and blood.”
It was just what she herself had come to believe. The essence of Christianity was not dogma, not the trappings of ritual, but human beings’ love for one another. Even when Chapman couldn’t pay her the full amount he’d promised, she kept on with the work.
“Marriage as the free bond of love, that alone is a religious marriage,”
Feuerbach had written. Furthermore, a marriage bond
“which is merely an external restriction, not the voluntary, contented self-restriction of love”
is neither a true marriage nor a moral one.

She began deliberately to pepper her letters with references to “Mr. Lewes,” so her friends would grow accustomed to his constant presence in her life. When Barbara came to tea, Marian confessed to her that she loved him. Barbara had been aware of her growing affection for him. Sometimes, when she arrived to visit, she found George ensconced with his book or even working on his manuscripts at the dining room table, and he would rise up and greet her in his usual cheery manner. Barbara had looked at Marian, her eyebrows raised in a question, but Marian had refused to explain.

Then, one day, when Barbara came, he wasn’t there. Marian made tea for her. “Where’s Mr. Lewes today?” she asked.