Laurie Sheck Read online

  Not those stairs of rushing water not the way they wouldn’t let me go down—

  Church Street, Nelson Square, 41 Hans Place, 1 Hans Place, 13 Arabella Road, so many new addresses. And Mary so often unwell as she lay in her bed those months after we came back, waiting for the baby to be born … and now this … I don’t know how to XXX and sometimes it seems even thinking’s a cruelty

  Dear Fanny,

  I’m in Lynmouth. They sent me away. I came here the week after Mary’s baby died. She’s sad all the time now. The baby was born too early. They never even gave it a name. Sometimes I just lie here and think: it had no name. Those twelve days she lived without a name and now when we remember her what are we to call her? Or do we say: “it”? “It” was born too early, “it” died. I turn each chilly idea over in my mind while nearby the sea moves like a higher mind that understands it’s incapable of knowing. Jessamine and Honeysuckle twining over my cottage window, but I’d rather see the London soot, anything angular and hard.

  Today, I don’t know why, I was thinking about how you always misspell afraid—you write “affraid.” Two f’s in it as if doubling its power in some way, and I’m sorry we didn’t take you with us when we left for France, you think Mary and Shelley despise you but they don’t. But there’s this look of fright in your eyes, something breaking in you bit by bit, but maybe I’m mistaken.

  You told me you didn’t think I’d ever be able to live alone. But I feel an almost violent tranquility. I distrust the surmises of our minds, Montaigne wrote. And here it’s as if all surmises have fallen away, I’m wonder and error and uncertainty and no one watches or criticizes or worries. As if I’m not even a Claire or Clary or Jane or Mary Jane anymore, but nameless or … Not hidden away but not seen either. Two ridges of mountains enclose the village. If I walk up the hill near Mr. Foote’s I can see the whole valley. When I read a book a voice comes close to me and knows me. I wonder if you feel this too?

  What are you reading? Are you feeling stronger? If you and Mary are both sad I don’t know how I’ll but you always seem sad. Remember what Ovid wrote?—”When eyes behold eyes in pain, they become painful themselves.”

  I think of your eyes.

  Your sister,

  Claire

  Claire wrote of ruins as a place I somehow know … so how could we just be kind to one another… each with our own jagged edges, our damage. Are icebergs ruins too? They carry inside themselves pebbles, boulders, dust. I never knew they concealed so much roughness, that beneath those gleaming surfaces such damaged, displaced dark lies hidden. (I think of the Chinese stick I found in Archangel.) Under whiteness and light, so many ruined worlds.

  Each time I see them, I remember her white sleeve, her hand leaving jagged letters that only even hint at who she is. But what of her face I never see? Her face. Her faces. Why do I make her plural like that? She signs her name so many different ways, as if there’s no one name to belong to. To have so many names, has that made her almost nameless? Is there something in her that feels, like me, unnamed?

  Fanny, I’ll write more later. There are silences in us which I fear will never be broken. Sometimes I think what I know of you is your small French watch, your red pocket handkerchief, your brown-berry necklace and your purse. Such things as you lay out on the table at night. I’m ignorant and worse.

  This milky midnight light. Icebergs drift through a white veil. Whiteness of her sleeve, of absence.

  When I lie down, pieces of Nansen’s index drift like icebergs in my mind: Books—longing for. Dogs—paralysis in legs. Journals—difficulty of writing. Moons—remarkable. Wind-clothes. Wounds. Wrist-sores.

  I distrust the surmises of our minds, Claire wrote to Fanny. More and more I trust within my mind almost nothing. In my dream Nansen’s paralyzed dog keeps trying to stand but its legs are useless twigs. I watch it though it hates being watched. It tries to hide itself, turns its face to the side. It wants somewhere private to die, but there’s nowhere private in the ice.

  When I wake I feel ashamed.

  Nansen felt he had no choice but to feed the weaker dogs to the strong.

  Why do I want to tell her these things? And of books that are longed for, journals that are hard to write.

  (And myself hidden. No mask to tear from my face.)

  I wait for her hand, then see the dog lift its eyes one last time, ice-locked and dying, thirteen months from solid land.

  When her hand returns it’s not writing. She’s holding, instead, a letter from Fanny, spreads it flat on a wooden surface in the sun.

  Dear Claire,

  Papa has given me this space of paper to fill & seal. He says you and Mary and Shelley have gone away to the Continent again. There are such silences in me even as I write you. Something lost inside me & I don’t know how to say it. Sometimes I’m not even affraid anymore as if I’m looking at myself from a great distance and so feel no need to be concerned. Everything over-with in a way. I try to speak plainly but understanding obscures and buries itself. I wonder if you feel this too, though you’re not like me, you’re bold, and I’m sure Mary and Shelley think me timid and a laughingstock, Mamma has told me so. The Creator shouldn’t destroy his Creature but he does this all the time—I shouldn’t dwell on such things and I do, but that doesn’t mean I’m foolish. I don’t know what I am … The other day Mr. Blood, brother of Fanny Blood, stopped by to see us. He gave me many particulars of the days of my mother’s youth before Godwin. He hadn’t been in London for 26 years. How can the world feel so desolate and deserted when it’s so full? For a few hours I felt as though my mother was with me, as she had been with Fanny Blood in Lisbon in those few days before Fanny died after childbirth. I felt such happiness, so strange to feel happy … I know you think Papa is cold, but he just seems that way as he worries about money. I can assure you he speaks of you with kindness and interest. Ever since Mt. Tamboro erupted it seems the whole world has grown cold. Dust everywhere blocking the sun. And such rainstorms and hail. They say the harvest will fail, that there’ll be food shortages, maybe even famine. I’m not sure where you are—in France? In Switzerland? You say you are too intolerant to enter into society but it seems to me you’re always going about, whereas I live in a solitude that… but I can’t explain myself, and I wonder if the famine will come and where you’ll be. Why does the mind grow ashamed of itself? I’m affraid you will dislike this letter, I’ve been rambling, but I write to you without disguise. Your Sister, Fanny

  If I could see Claire’s face I might know what she feels. But I see only her hands folding the letter. I don’t know where she is, what year it is, how much time has passed since she last wrote. It seems she’s not in Lisbourne anymore, has traveled.

  Nansen wanted his ship to get trapped by ice far out at sea, so when the ice drifted northward or even south it would be dragged to places no man had ever seen. I have no ship, this ice can’t carry me. Yet I feel I’ve reached the farthest pole. No faces anywhere. Only the mind’s isolate and perpetual movement—Ambiguity, silence, instability, exposure—

  Dear Fanny,

  It’s rained almost every day and there are violent storms. We stay indoors for many hours writing stories. Mary says she cant think of an idea for hers but that’s not true, I see her filling pages. I don’t know what kind of thoughts to send you. Montaigne wrote that he hoped to become ashamed of his mind, and you ask in your letter why does the mind grow ashamed of itself, but I don’t want to feel ashamed of my own mind. I want thinking to be free even if hunted by calamity, even if at times it makes of me a violent, desperate creature. Montaigne thought by withdrawing to live in complete solitude he could set his mind free. But his thinking couldn’t steady itself, it became like a runaway horse, that’s what he said. It presented him with thoughts “irregular and unmeaning.” “I put them on paper,” he wrote, “hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.” I wonder, did he really believe this?—or did he love his runaway horse more than anything. His books all runa
way horses, the fraught and unstable extremity of sight… Didn’t he love, in a way, thinking about Bertrand du Guesclin, who died at the siege of the castle of Randon, and how after, when his men had been defeated, they were forced to carry the citadel’s keys on the dead man’s body. Or of the uses of thumbs and why they are cut off. Or of Cannibals and Monsters, “this child just fourteen months old with a single head and double body, diverse limbs hanging and dangling.” “What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised therein … nothing whatsoever exists that is not in accordance with Nature.” If we could believe in the infinity of forms, Fanny, not pull back from the infinity of forms. I think he loved letting his mind travel into extremity, every harsh or mysterious territory, no matter what. If we could do this, Fanny … I don’t know when we’ll return from Switzerland, if ever. There is much to say I won’t put in a letter. Everything is different from what I expected. How are your eyes, are they better?

  Your Sister,

  Claire

  If it’s possible the mind can live unashamed of itself, and the “infinity of forms” be felt as a kind of goodness … If “nothing whatsoever exists that is not in accordance with Nature” … If all this is true, then how might I think differently of this body you gave me?

  When I try to think of this my skin goes cold. I see only ice, distrust the “surmises of my mind.” Thought isn’t comfort. Still, if everyone and everything is patchwork in some way, am I all that different? If the soul is error (but is there a soul?)… If, as Plato said, chance produces more beautifully than art, and the mind’s true movement is irregular, uncertain … then what’s beauty, what’s ugliness? Is there a clear line between the two?

  Even so, I can’t imagine heading back toward warmer land. And Claire will never look into my face, never know me.

  Every now and then flocks of murres, auks flying in a northerly direction, a line of black wings.

  As if in transcription.

  (But there’s so much tracelessness in me, in anyone.)

  For long stretches Claire keeps no diary. I dream the cold silence where the pages would have been.

  Architecture of oblivion, its drifts.

  My cold hands barely moving.

  In this cabin: rotting food crates half-buried in snow. Cans of peppermint drops and biscuits. Bunks scattered with torn clothes. Broken sledges, harnesses, frying pans, spoons.

  Such fragile traces.

  And always the question of who they were, what happened to them, did they suffer, did they die in the ice?

  So many ways the mind tries to climb itself, but can’t.

  Swansea Oct 9

  Clare,

  You’ll never read this—I’ll burn it shortly, the light going down over the bay, an inward silence widening. Sometimes in my mind I ask how cold, sometimes I see miles of wooden fence posts. Sometimes I sit and think of a machine I would call a Difference Engine that would solve many things, perform many complex computations. Always I relate my story very ill in any case. I try but can’t construct the outer. Something other is more present to me, in me, but I don’t know how to say it. Why do we try to know one another? I don’t mean to be coy. Only that we lived in the same house, ate the same breakfasts, walked the same walks, were mostly frank with one another, and still there’s something icy and impersonal in us and between us, between anyone. I thought I didn’t mind but something in me can’t get used to it. As if I were a monster fled to the woods and mocking voices were speaking from the trees. This is how you make laudanum: take a basketful of withered poppies, pick out the heads one by one, pierce them with a sewing needle then set them in a crock near the stove for the opium to sweat out. Mix the extract with sugar or alcohol to make it easier to drink. I think of inanimate matter, I think of descending shades of gray. I dream of someone—woman or man I cant tell—looking into my eyes and fleeing. But that’s not important. It’s this waking-time, all these gray or sunlit days. They’ll say I’m visiting my aunts … Families must present themselves “in the best possible light.”

  Your Sister,

  Fanny

  THE CAMBRIAN

  SWANSEA WALES, SATURDAY OCTOBER 12 1816

  AMELANCHOLY DISCOVERY was made in Swansea yesterday. A most respectable-looking female arrived at the Mackworth Arms inn on Wednesday night by the Cambrian coach from Bristol; she took tea and retired to rest, telling the chambermaid she was exceedingly fatigued, and would take care of the candle herself. Much agitation was created in the house by her non-appearance yesterday morning, and in forcing her chamber door, she was found a corpse, with the remains of a bottle of laudanum on the table, and a note, of which the following is a copy:

  I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has been only a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as

  The name appears to have been torn off and burnt, but her stockings are marked with the letter G. and on her stays the letters M.W. are visible. She was dressed in a blue-striped skirt with a white body, and a brown pelice, with a fur trimming of a lighter colour, lined with white silk, and a hat of the same. She had a small French gold watch, and appears to be about 23 years of age, with long brown hair, dark complexion, and had a reticule containing a red silk pocket handkerchief, a brown-berry necklace, and a small leather clasped purse, containing a 3s. and 5s. 6d. piece. She told a fellow-passenger that she came to Bath by the mail from London on Tuesday morning, from whence she proceeded to Bristol, and from thence to Swansea by the Cambrian coach, intending to go to Ireland—We hope the description we have given of this unhappy catastrophe will lead to the discovery of the wretched object who has thus prematurely closed her existence.

  Fanny,

  I keep thinking of how you ended your note with “forgetting that such a creature ever existed as”—and then no ellipses, no period, no other words, nothing, everything fallen away. That cliff of who you were (and yet I didn’t know you) overhanging only empty space. Nothing in the world more silent than your leaving it. Nothing in my brain more silent. (I know you’re no longer alive and still I write to you.) And when I see your words fallen away (the stark blankness beyond them) I know there’s an unsigned in me, something monstrously broken and unnamed. Though you said I was bold XXX you said I was XXX But why did you call yourself a creature? When you began your note you called yourself a being (I almost feel your breath on my cheek as I write this) but you ended it with creature, as if you felt you were no longer human, or … I don’t know, but it chills me. The blank space after “as” chills me … The newspaper account says you burned your name. But if you could have seen the runaway horse as beautiful, or, not beautiful maybe, but as something to be wanted … If you could have XXXX Sometimes Shelley uses such pretty words, I hate that prettiness: “the sweet season of summertide” or “and gentle odors led my steps astray,” “violet buds and bluebells,” “the pale stars of the morn.” But you died in a strange room, told them at the inn you were on your way to Ireland when you knew you never intended to get there, hadn’t even brought the money, so why should I like pretty words? I don’t think you liked them either. But then other times I see on scraps of paper or in notebooks other things he’s scribbled: “In hating such a hateless thing as me,” “You hate me [?were],” “The stream with a [leprous] scum,” “You were injured—& that means memory,” “a people starving on the untilled field,” “chains & chains & chains.” Those words more brutal and more true. Did you feel you were a hated hateless thing? I don’t know why I write unless it seems like speaking to you though I know this is foolish. No hour on the earth is safe. So much of what living is—Concealed—

  Your Sister,

  Claire

  Claire fo
lds the page from The Cambrian in fours, presses it tightly, slips it into a drawer.

  Fanny, I’m not well. My mind always keeps my body in a fever. Godwin wouldn’t let any of us go to your funeral or retrieve your body—your grave’s a pauper’s, anonymous. I’m going to have a child. By a man who, were I to float by his window drowned, all he would say would be “Ah, voilà.” If it’s a girl I think I’ll call her Alba—the a’s that begin and end it form a kind of gentle symmetry, a circle. (Then I think of that soft “a” in your name, that maybe something that soft grows too afraid.) But in my mind I feel something else, something like “slash this, slash that”—that this is what thinking is and there are so many sharp edges in me now, so many cuts and gashes overall. And I can’t anyhow