The Honeymoon (6 page)

That September, Marian entered the door of the Misses Franklin’s school on Warwick Row. There were pupils there from many other places too, from London, even a girl from India, and another one, a relative of one of the Franklins, from America. Miss Mary Franklin was a kindly, bustling sort who managed the school, while her younger sister, Miss Rebecca, was in charge of lessons. Miss Rebecca had spent a whole year in France, and she was very refined. She spoke in educated tones, carefully enunciating the beginnings and endings of all her words.

Marian excelled in her studies. Miss Davenport read her composition on “Affectation and Conceit” to the whole class as a model of its kind. In it, she’d condemned pretty women who
“study no graces of mind or intellect. Their whole thoughts are how they shall best maintain their empire over their surrounding inferiors, and the right fit of a dress or bonnet will occupy their minds for hours together.”
The first year she won the French prize, a copy of Pascal’s
Pensées
.

Miss Franklin let them read novels, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Sir Walter Scott, and G.P.R. James — some people thought that novels could lead young girls astray, but Miss Franklin was cosmopolitan. One day, Marian sat down and tried to write a novel of her own,
Edward Neville
, it was called, about the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. A mysterious stranger rides up to a castle on a black horse.
“The Rider
must have been about six and twenty he was tall and well proportioned and bore in his very handsome countenance the marks of a determined and haughty character.”
After six pages, she didn’t know how to go on.

She became the teachers’ favorite, and she basked in their praise and the glow of her achievement. Their praise was a form of love she’d never had, and she was ambitious for more, to be cherished by these women. She wanted to be the best at everything and she discovered in herself a hunger for everything they could teach her. Every new accumulation of knowledge set off a little burst of pleasure within her.

So good was she at the piano that Miss Rebecca asked her to play for guests in the parlor. One afternoon, she was making her way through “Für Elise” when she hit a wrong note. Nonetheless, the guests applauded. She managed to stand briefly and bow, and then she fled into the hallway weeping.

Miss Rebecca ran after her. “Marian, whatever is the matter?”

“I was so awful,” she cried.

“But no one heard that, Marian. You were excellent,” and Miss Rebecca hugged her and kissed the top of her head.

She wanted to be just like Miss Rebecca. Listening to her speak in her lofty tones, she became conscious of her “country” accent, the way she said “ayah” instead of “is not,” and “What sort of books am them?” instead of “What sort of books are those?”

If she couldn’t be beautiful, then at least she could make her voice beautiful. She began to imitate Miss Rebecca’s speech and to speak in low, melodic tones, and she noticed that people leaned forward to listen to her, and it made them pay attention to her words.

The Misses Franklin were Baptists. Like the Evangelists, theirs was a more intimate religion than the Church of England that she’d known since childhood. Faith was a question of the relationship between a person and God. Salvation was the result of faith, and sometimes believers declared their faith aloud in front of the congregation. The Baptists didn’t believe in christening babies, but only those people who’d declared their faith. They didn’t sprinkle water on them the way people usually did, but totally immersed them.

All the pupils at the Misses Franklin’s school attended the Cow Lane Chapel to hear the Misses Franklin’s father, Francis, preach about suffering and penance and the hope of salvation.

As she listened to his sermons, Marian felt herself becoming even more pious, like Miss Rebecca. She began to feel a closer communication with God; she became like a little minister herself. One day, she came upon two girls fighting in the Common Room, pulling each other’s hair. She grabbed them and forced them apart. “Stop that now,” she commanded. They ceased, intimidated by her, she knew, because she was so holy and she was Miss Rebecca’s favorite. “Come, let us clasp hands and pray,” she ordered, and they stood there sniveling as she joined their hands and they prayed.

If she’d never marry, she’d become a saint. She would live the life of the mind, the spiritual life. The activity of the mind, that was eternal, something that could never be taken away from you. She started wearing a Quaker cap which covered her untidy hair, and to dress plainly in a gray gingham dress — if she couldn’t be pretty, she would be plain then!

Meanwhile, Isaac had become a young buck, fond of dancing and ale and hunting. She disapproved of him, and he could sense it. When she came home from school and he saw her dingy new garb, he focused on her a moment and said, “Miss Holier Than Thou, is it now?”

Then, in December, when she was sixteen, it all ended. She was in mathematics class when Miss Rebecca appeared at the door and summoned her into the hallway. “You’re to pack your things,” she said. “Your papa’s come for you. Your mama’s ill and you’re needed at home.”

At Griff, she found her mother in bed again and suffering from great pain. She had cancer of the breast and it had spread to her bones.

As the weeks went by, the cancer filled her, her leg broke, she became paralyzed and couldn’t walk. Her father fashioned a little trolley on wheels and covered it with cushions and pulled her around the house on it.

But as her mother declined, her grief-stricken father could only stare helplessly at her, and Marian took over her care. Marian tried to soothe her. She stroked her brow and softly sang to her:
“There is a land like Eden fair, But more than Eden blest …”
Her suffering became so great that both Marian and her father prayed for the end to come to bring her relief.

In February, with darkness everywhere and the snow deep on the ground, her mother died, and when the earth thawed, she was buried in the courtyard at Chilvers Coton. Her father stood over the grave, tears streaming down his face. She had never seen him cry. “Papa, I will take care of you now,” she said, taking his hand, and he looked at her a moment, a faint smile coming through his tears.

The next spring, Chrissey married Edward Clarke. Edward was now a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and an apothecary, and he was setting up a practice in Meriden. Chrissey wore her best blue dress for the wedding, and a lace cap on her blond curls. Marian, her bridesmaid, wore the brown dress she always wore for church.

As Chrissey and Edward stood at the altar, Marian thought a light seemed to emanate from her sister. During the service, Edward bent over her tenderly and protectively, his eyes only on her, a smile of love and expectation on his face, as if she were the most delicate flower, the prize of his life.

No man would ever look at Marian that way. She was seventeen years old and no man would ever love her.

If she was not to marry, she must establish an independent self and do good works. So she started a clothing club in Nuneaton for unemployed ribbon weavers. And she dutifully attended church with her father.

Isaac had begun to court Sarah Rawlins, the daughter of Samuel Rawlins, a friend of their father’s, a rich leather merchant from Rotton Park in Edgbaston, whom he’d met when he was staying in Birmingham at the house of his tutor, Mr. Docker. Sarah was ten years older than Isaac, thirty-five, really too old to marry, tall and gawky with a big round nose and thin lips, and even touches of gray in her hair. Marian didn’t understand it.

She was mistress of the house now, in charge of everything. She supervised the meals and mended her father’s clothes. In the evenings, she played the piano to entertain him and read aloud to him from his Walter Scott novels. She loved to hear him laugh again when she read the parts about
the Baron of Bradwardine and the lawyer Clippurse and Sir Everard’s attempts to win the heart of Lady Emily.

To keep herself occupied mentally, she decided to make a chart of ecclesiastical history. She drew long columns on a piece of paper and in tiny, neat handwriting wrote down all the great events of the Christian Church.

“What’s that you’re doing there, gel?” her father asked.

“It’s my chart of the church. See, there are the names of the Roman emperors and their dates and what’s happening to the Jews at the time. And here’s the birth of Christ.”

“My Lord, did you see here what she’s doing, Isaac?” he said to her brother, who sat by the fireplace, his big shoulders bent over his gun, carefully cleaning and oiling it.

“Umm,” Isaac said, not bothering to look up. “Clever, ain’t she?” She heard the sarcasm in his voice, as if he were mocking her father’s words about her.

The next day when he went to Arbury Hall, her father boasted of his daughter’s piety to his employer, Mrs. Newdigate. Mrs. Newdigate was so impressed with her religiosity that she said that Marian could use the library at Arbury Hall for the research for her chart, and she was free to wander among the volumes as she pleased.

The first time Marian entered that big, dark room at Arbury Hall, it was as if she were in a holy place. There were stacks of volumes up to the ceiling, bound in red and green leather with gold stampings on the covers — all these treasures were hers now, nobody else ever came here.

Every afternoon, when her housework was finished, she rode over to Arbury Hall. In the quiet and privacy of the library, she read all five volumes of the Milners’
History of the Church of Christ
, and the Oxford tracts.

She came across a book called
An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity
, by a man called Charles Hennell. She’d never heard of him before. He was a junior clerk at a banking firm in London. The book had just been published. Hennell said that the Bible was full of inconsistencies. For instance, according to Matthew, Jesus entered Jerusalem on an ass and a colt. But Mark, Luke, and John mentioned only
one
animal, the colt. Moreover, Matthew said that during the Crucifixion they gave Jesus vinegar mixed with gall to drink. But Mark said it was wine
mingled with myrrh. “The discourses which allude to these miracles bear strong marks of fiction,”
Hennell wrote.

Hennell believed that Christ’s miracles as presented in the Gospels were but mythological events, like those of other ancient religions. Christianity should be freed from its dependence on these myths; it couldn’t rely on the uncertain events of two thousand years ago. Christ wasn’t divine. He didn’t perform miracles, and wasn’t resurrected from the dead. He was simply a great teacher and reformer. There was indeed a profound truth at the core of Christianity, Hennell wrote, a mystery that would eventually be revealed; until then religion should rest on the best impulses of human beings themselves, on their efforts to help their fellow men, on their love for one another, and on the beauty of nature itself.

Hennell’s words struck her with an almost physical force. All her life she’d been accustomed to listening to the stories of the Gospels as if they were the truth, engraved in stone. But Hennell was saying that these stories were but fables.

It set her into turmoil. She turned Hennell’s assertions over and over in her mind. The house of her old faith was collapsing around her. She didn’t know where to turn. As she sat beside her father in church and listened to the
Reverend Gwyther read from the Scriptures, she brooded on what Hennell said in a kind of anguish.

Yet her essential piety wasn’t shaken. If anything, she felt a deepening of it, a greater immediacy in her connection to God, as if there was nothing now between her and the ineffable spirit within her which was a reflection, an embodiment of Him — her need to love, her compassion for the poor and sick, her urge to comfort them. It was as if the rules and rituals of the church were but decorations, barriers between oneself and the mysterious and indescribable true spirit that lay within everyone.

She ventured further, read books on science, physics, mathematics, and chemistry. Her father let her buy as many books as she wanted at Short’s in Nuneaton, and for her twentieth birthday she bought a present for herself of Wordsworth’s poems. Opening those pages for the first time, she read:

For this man too, God existed, not in the myths of long ago, or in the doctrines of the church, but in everything around us; God was part of nature — He
was
nature.

How she loved the poet’s words, the music of them, their plasticity, rolling off the tongue. And as she read his work, she marveled at the infinite variety of the English language,
words in general, the rhythms of the English sentence, the sentences twisting and turning into themselves in a symphonic complexity. Words playing off one another, defining or evasive, their meaning sometimes clear, sometimes to be felt rather than discerned only through intellect. Words alone were abstractions, but when they were joined and linked, they could thrill and take possession of the soul. Words were the weapons and playthings of the mind.