Ophelia's Muse (37 page)

CHAPTER 23

For what seemed like the thousandth time, Rossetti stood and stalked the perimeter of the studio. He sat back down in his chair, and then rose again and retraced his steps. He could hear Lizzie's screams from behind the bedroom door. The raw chords of suffering echoed through the studio, and his veins pulsed with the animal instincts of fear and flight.

Her labor had begun in the night, and the obstetrician, Dr. Hutchinson, had arrived with the nurse and set about preparing the room for the birth. Rossetti sent a note to Lydia, who came in the early hours of the morning to help.

Rossetti was not permitted to enter the bedroom, but the doctor appeared at the door periodically to answer his questions with a furrowed brow and one-syllable replies. Ford Madox Brown had tried, without success, to persuade Rossetti to go with him to a pub on the corner and wait there for the news. Ford had been through this before. He knew that there was nothing for the father to do but wait, and that this uselessness could be as hard to bear as the terrible cries. But Rossetti refused to leave. He felt that something wasn't right, and he was rooted to the spot by an awful conviction that he had nursed Lizzie back to health, only to now have her die in childbirth.

It was nearly nightfall again before Lizzie's cries, closer now to whimpers than screams, stopped abruptly. The sudden silence was jarring, and Rossetti snapped to attention in the chair where he was dozing. His eyes fixed on the closed door. He strained to hear a sound, any sound, but he couldn't hear anything. Finally the door opened and the doctor, his face lined with exhaustion, stepped into the studio. He looked at Rossetti with professional pity and sighed. “I'm sorry. The child is stillborn. It was a girl.”

Rossetti stared at him. He hadn't been thinking of the child, and the news came as its own shock. “And my wife? My wife, is she . . . ?”

“Mrs. Rossetti is resting. It's too early to say for sure, but I believe she will make a full recovery.”

Relief flooded through him, leaving him lightheaded. She was alive. “And the child? What happened?”

“It's impossible to say. It's not uncommon. There's no reason why Mrs. Rossetti shouldn't go on to give you healthy children.”

Rossetti nodded and went into the bedroom. He kneeled beside the bed. Lydia was sitting white-faced in a chair with a bundle of linens in her arms. He stared at her for a moment, then realized with a start what the bundle must be. He turned back to Lizzie, aghast. She was pale and clammy, but she was breathing, the soft rhythm of her breath visible in the rise and fall of the sheets that covered her. He took her hand. “My dove,” he whispered. “My little dove.”

She rolled her head to look at him, and the dull, unseeing gleam of her eyes sent a shiver down his spine. “Where is my baby?” Her voice was flat. “Where is my little daughter?”

“Oh, Lizzie.” He didn't know what to say. He looked to Lydia, who met his eyes with a troubled frown and mouthed the words, “She's been told.”

He turned back to Lizzie. “My love, you mustn't tire yourself, or wear yourself out with worry. After all, the most important thing is that you are well. I feel nothing but thankfulness that I haven't lost you as well.”

Lizzie continued to stare at him, either not hearing him or not understanding, he wasn't sure which. Then her eyes fluttered closed, and she seemed to pass into a peaceful sleep.

Rossetti stood up and left Lydia and the nurse to do their sad work. Back in the studio, he found that its familiar lines were already altered, slightly but indelibly, by the events of the night. They had lost the child, and his grief for the unknown life felt like a hard knot, whose contours and weight he would examine and learn by heart in the coming days. But for the moment, he could think of nothing but his relief that Lizzie had survived.

He stumbled over to the sofa and lay down. The studio was warm, but he was shivering from shock and exhaustion, and he pulled a throw over his shoulders. Tragedy, whose cold shadow had loomed over him all through the night, tapping his fingers on the windowpanes and breathing his dark fortune under the door, had somehow been averted. So why was it, he wondered, that he still felt its chill, as if the wind had only shifted for a moment, ushering in the false calm of the eye of the storm?

 

People came in, and then went out again. Rossetti was with her, and her sister, and others—the nurse perhaps? She was urged to drink, and to eat; to get dressed and to take the fresh air; to make some efforts at a sketch, or a little watercolor. Their words passed over her and passed through her. She heard them as if from a distance, and nodded vaguely, agreeably consenting to nothing.

If Lizzie had ever before paused to consider the nature of time, she would have thought of it only as constant and unremarkable: the tapping of her mother's knitting needles or the rising and setting of the sun outside the studio windows. Out in the street, men checked their pocket watches and the massive new bell in the Westminster clock tower kept the hour with startling accuracy, ordering and measuring the little lives that scurried below according to its steady rhythm.

It came as a surprise, therefore, to find that time was not so dependable as she had thought. Instead of an orderly march of seconds and minutes, time now seemed to proceed in fits and starts, stretching out and then warping, while whole hours and days disappeared into the ether. She was often surprised to notice the last dying rays of the sunset, when she would have, not a moment before, set the hour at no later than one o'clock.

In her moments of clarity, Lizzie repeated to herself what the doctor and Rossetti had told her: The baby had been born dead; there had been no question of saving her; it was not uncommon. She was buried in the cemetery, but there was no funeral service, since she hadn't been baptized. It was important for Lizzie to repeat these facts, because she often forgot them, and would wake from dozing thinking that she was still pregnant, or dreaming that she heard a child crying. Rossetti had seen to the burial alone, and Lizzie didn't know if he had named her, or if there was a stone to mark the grave. She couldn't ask him, couldn't form the words to make it real. There were things she knew he couldn't say, either: He never blamed her, never mentioned the laudanum, never said they would go on to have more children. She knew, somehow, that she would never have another baby. The stillbirth seemed both an omen and a punishment, and she would not tempt fate further. Marry in May and rue the day. She gave her daughter a name, which she kept secret and whispered to herself as she stared out of the window. This was her story. And then time would warp again and Lizzie would be back at the beginning, feeling as if for the first time the pain of each of these facts.

Rossetti, she noted with interest, appeared untouched by this new accounting of time. He mourned alongside her, and then, slowly and steadily, he returned to his old life. He rose each morning and painted, often at Ford's studio, so as not to disturb her. In the afternoons he returned home to work at his translations and verses, or to catch up with his correspondence. And then, as evening fell, he would sit with Lizzie, reading poetry to her and trying to draw her out, or else he went out to dine with friends, or to the theater. People came to visit: potential patrons and buyers, members of the Brotherhood, and the plump and beautiful models who sat for Rossetti's paintings and giggled at his whispered observations and compliments.

Rossetti tried to be patient. He watched Lizzie carefully, willing her to come to her senses. He gave her a little laudanum when her hands shook, and he pretended not to notice when she helped herself to more from the green bottle that rested always by her side. With a heavy heart, he packed the collection of tiny clothes that had accumulated over the past months into a chest under the bed, and pushed the cradle, delivered with such enthusiasm by Emma and Ford, to a corner of the studio. He covered it with a drop cloth, and tried to forget it.

 

Even if Lizzie could not feel its steady pulse, time did go on, and its progress was marked in strokes both large and small. Rossetti's reputation as both a poet and a painter was growing, and his painting of Fanny Cornforth,
Bocca Baciata,
had been particularly well received. The picture's frank sensuality and Fanny's beauty made it an object of desire to all who saw it. Gentlemen whose decency prevented them from inviting women like Fanny into their drawing rooms had no compunction about commissioning Rossetti to create images of her to hang above the mantelpiece. As Lizzie had once predicted, Rossetti couldn't paint fast enough to satisfy his admirers, and he felt at last that he was making a real start of things.

Each day the mail was full of invitations. He always extended these invitations to Lizzie, telling her how Emma Brown longed for her company, and how he missed having her on his arm. If she wouldn't come out, he said, then she should at least take up her work again. It was unfair, a crime against Art, to let her genius go to waste. But Lizzie was deaf to his entreaties. She claimed exhaustion or an upset stomach, or simply turned her head away from him and stared out of the window.

For the first time since his marriage, Rossetti chafed at his domestic duties. He hesitated to bring models home, and upset Lizzie, lest he lose time to nursing her when he should have been painting. When he was able to work in the studio, he could feel Lizzie's eyes following him, as focused and intent as a sailor watching for the first signs of shore. He sensed that he was her anchor, and he felt unbearably heavy: the anchor's chain running through his core, its weight rooting him to the studio, and to her.

He tried to draw her, to find inspiration in her as he once had. He painted a portrait of them as young lovers walking in a wood. But it was a gloomy scene, with the lovers meeting their own eerie doubles at twilight, a terrible portent of death. He drew her as Ophelia, spurned by a cruel and dismissive Hamlet. Each scene he imagined was darker than the last, but he found himself compelled to draw them, and later to hide them from her.

Frightened by the awful omens that he was creating with his own hands, he painted her as Regina Cordium, the Queen of Hearts. The painting showed her in a three-quarter profile, her thick hair falling simply over her bare shoulders, a bloodred strand of beads circling her neck and a pansy clasped in her fingers. The portrait was striking, but the girl in it was pale and listless. She was beautiful in an ethereal way, but hardly a symbol of desire, like Rossetti's lusty and inviting portraits of Annie Miller and Fanny Cornforth. Lizzie simply lacked the appetite for life that was so great in his other models that it seemed to burn through his canvases, threatening to devour those who looked too long.

Perhaps if Lizzie had regained a little of her health, she might have found some comfort in taking up her art again, and she and Rossetti would have worked side by side, in the artistic partnership that each had once imagined. Or perhaps, if the child had lived, the demands and pleasures of attending to that little, shared life might have inspired in Rossetti some of the domestic habits for which he had not yet acquired a taste. But Lizzie and the child remained ghosts of one sort or another, and Rossetti, chilled by their haunting presence, fled toward life.

 

“Oh, come on! Just one more dance!” Fanny cried, pulling Rossetti back toward the swirling mass of merrymakers who twirled across the dancing platform at Cremorne Gardens.

The dancers, in dinner jackets and silk gowns, glided and dipped around a pagoda that held the orchestra beneath its eaves. The walls of the pagoda glowed with thousands of emerald-cut crystals and mirrors, and cast a shimmering light over the dancers. Fanny's eyes glittered, and Rossetti followed her willingly onto the carousel of dancers.

“Just one more dance, and then I really must be off,” he murmured, taking her hand and pulling her close. Fanny smiled and shrugged, happy to have him there for the moment at least. They glided and turned across the platform, and when the orchestra started up a new tune with a quicker tempo, Rossetti stayed for a second dance. Everyone was drinking champagne, and the dance floor was a barely controlled chaos, with dancers changing partners and then finding each other again, laughing and smiling beneath the lights.

Rossetti and Fanny paused for a drink, and then returned to the fray. He knew that he was being reckless, that he ought to go home and see Lizzie before the evening was through, as he always did. But he couldn't bring himself to abandon the boisterous crowd for the lonely studio.

Fanny seemed to read his mind. “Don't worry. It's just a bit of fun.”

When the closing bell rang at five till midnight, Rossetti was still among the crush of people—young and old, of all stations of life and all shades of virtue—who let out a collective sigh at the ending of an amusing evening. Cremorne, with its colorful lights and lively cafés, offered up a feast to anyone hungry for beauty and life, and Rossetti didn't care if the colors, or the women, were sometimes too bold, or the fireworks too loud. He was drawn to its festivities as a cold man is drawn to a warm fire.

The bell rang once more and Rossetti led Fanny from the dance floor. Just as they reached the gate, he spotted a familiar profile in the crowd. It was John Ruskin, and Rossetti pushed forward to catch up with him.

“Hello!” Ruskin cried when he spotted Rossetti. “I thought that you might be here.”

“An easy guess. Is there any place more inviting on a warm evening?”

“No, I suppose not.” Ruskin glanced at Fanny and shook his head ever so slightly at Rossetti. Rossetti knew that Ruskin had never really approved of his dalliance with Fanny Cornforth. But Ruskin couldn't deny that Rossetti was painting great pictures of her, and he knew that Ruskin was willing to ignore his whims in women as long as the paintings were good.