Authors: David Park
The Poets' Wives
Alberta, above rubies
Contents
My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies.
I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.
Song of Solomon
Mr Blake comes so quietly I don’t hear him entering the room but when I look up he is sitting in his familiar place and his face is full of light. Even his black coat that in truth has seen better days seems burnished and sheened, no longer with wear but instead by something to which I can’t give a name. He calls me his sweet rose and his good angel and when he lifts his hands in customary animation I see for the first time in all the long years of our life together that his fingers have no stain or smudge of ink.
‘Do you no longer work?’ I ask, barely able to believe it might be so.
‘All my work is finished, Kate, and I am free and finally known. So everything I’ve put my hand to and everything done with your help now sits in blessed triumph.’
‘It’s more than could be hoped for,’ I tell him as I savour the sweetness of his words.
‘All the difficulties of the old life are fallen away. The man who was once a slave, bound in a mill amongst beasts and devils, has been set free from his fetters,’ he says as he wipes what could be a tear from his eye but which might only be a tremble of the light.
I want him to come to me, for the first time touch me with hands that have no trace of ink, but he stays in his seat and he’s looking at me as if he’s trying to remember something, his mind momentarily fogged, until with a shake of his head it’s free again.
‘But you, Kate, how is it with you?’ he asks and, although he doesn’t come to me, I see once more the love written bright on his face that he has always borne me and I tell him I am a little solitary but that I try to keep busy and fight despondency as best I can. From the street below there pipes up the voices of children playing and he goes to the window and holding his hand on the glass above his head, just the way he always does, surveys the scene below and says, ‘This too is Heaven.’
The light from the window seems to shine through him as he turns again to look at me, so at first I have to blink my eyes until he resumes his seat. When he moves away the sudden stream of sunlight is full of dust’s dance, the motes rising and falling like the notes of a silent song. His fingers have left no print on the glass.
‘It’s good your labours have ended, Will,’ I tell him, ‘because I don’t think these hands would allow me to be your helpmate, or colour as fine as they once did,’ and I hold up my hands stiffened with their rheumatism and which in my eyes at least have started to look like claws.
‘Kate, my Kate,’ he says as he comes to me at last and the coldness of his hands eases away some of the heated pain, ‘so many years you’ve laboured with me. Your faithfulness deserves its own rest.’
‘When will I come to you?’ I ask.
‘Soon, soon. Everything is almost ready.’
I nod but am impatient to see his words come true and whatever the reason for the delay its purpose eludes my understanding. He turns his head briefly again to the window as a street hawker’s cry rings out.
‘And how goes it with money?’ he asks, as he resumes his seat.
‘Making ends meet as best I can.’
I feel the sudden urge to tell him about the secret guinea I kept hidden all our marriage against the day it might be called upon but stop myself. Mr Blake is not always wise in the ways of the world or its money, so even now if he were to ask me for it I would have to deny him because the day when it’s needed may still yet come.
‘Listen, Kate, to what you must do. Take what’s left of my collection of old prints to Colnaghi and Co. and try to get the best price you can. Ask good money for the Dürer, the one above the engraving table. Demand to see the father not the son because the younger is a rogue who’ll cheat you and tell you the prints are of little value. As a man is, so he sees, and when he views these he’ll let profit blind him to their worth. And all that’s left – the paper, the tools, the press, every remnant of our toil – offer them to the local engravers, see what can be got for them. Try Richards first – of all of those assassins he is the most honest. Sell too whatever of the paintings you choose and try to find buyers for the store of books.’
‘I’d like to keep some brushes and a little of the paint,’ I tell him, ‘in the hope that my hands might allow me to fill some of my time profitably.’
‘Keep anything you wish. And I shall be close by, as close as you always were to me when I worked.’
I am pleased by this and ask him if he would like to drink or eat but he shakes his head and smiles and says he has no need of anything. There are so many questions I want to ask him but already I sense that time is short so one thing presses more than others for an answer.
‘Have you seen the child? Have you seen Eve?’ and my voice trembles as I ask.
‘I’ve seen her and she’s cared for and watched over.’
‘Praise God. And how much longer before I can see her?’
‘Only a short while. I promise that I shall come for you soon.’
‘I believe it,’ I tell him, ‘and it will be the happiest of all my days.’
Swallows dive and loop across the window. Swallows and children’s voices. Light suddenly stretching across the wooden floor polishes the nails. I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them he has gone, gone to walk once more with angels in the groves and to gather lilies in the sunlit gardens of Paradise.
I colour the prints keeping as close as I can to the original design and at the start I wonder how my hands that are smaller and finer than his struggle to be as delicate in their touch, but in time I take a silent pride in telling myself that our work is indistinguishable. I never fail to be struck by the beauty of the colours – the blues and greens, the violets, the pale oranges and pinks – and sometimes I think these are the shades of Heaven itself. And before long I am able to master the strangeness of such names as indigo, vermilion, cobalt and Frankfort black and be responsible for replenishing them and then there is no place where I’m happier than working at his side amidst the smell of nut oil and varnish, amidst the racks of needles and gravers, the sheets of paper and pumice stones used to polish the plates.
I colour such things as spring alive from the holiness of Mr Blake’s imagination that no other man could even think but to dream and sometimes I know his good angel watches over us when he tells me, ‘I am under the direction of messengers from Heaven, daily and nightly.’ And there are such times when I feel that I have left the earthly world behind and I mount on Jacob’s ladder to the very gates of Heaven and I see the angels ascending and descending and my eyes burn with the brightness of what his hand has made. And in his picture he has drawn the angels taking the hands of children and the sky below the burning sphere is deepest blue and star-spotted and as I look at him labour at the wooden press with the woollen cloths and ink-stained rags I say with Jacob, ‘Surely God is in this place.’
Now as my days wind surely to their welcome end it feels like I must somehow colour all these pages my memory continues to press and this is the work that is left to me although who commissions it or what will happen to it I do not know. I try to do it clear and clean, keep each stroke true to its edge, but the colours blur and run into each other so it is difficult to understand what was lived and what worked at his side, what memory is really mine and which shaped by his imagination. And coming from Battersea to lodge in Green Street, regardless that some would call the distance a trifle, for the young woman I was it seemed a journey into a different world, a slumbering country parish replaced by the noise and fury of the city where the streets were thronged with every class of person in God’s creation and not a minute that wasn’t filled with the rattle of carriages and post chaises, the scurry of hackney chairs or dustcarts. Smoke from thousands of chimneys, the ceaseless bark of dogs, the street-sellers’ cries and sometimes at night the curses of the mob or gangs of apprentices up to mischief. A Tower of Babel where it felt reigned only confusion and chaos. So strange it was that in those first few days I was too timid to venture far beyond the boundary of the street.