Song of the Sea Maid (9 page)

Susan squints at me. ‘Are you not satisfied, miss?’ she asks with an ironic air.

‘It is perfection. But I am not. I do not require this finery. I was never vain of my face. Nor did I yearn to wear silk dresses.’

‘You cannot wear the asylum uniform any more. Now you must dress as a lady.’

‘But I have no need for it nor interest in it. I cannot wear these stays with such boning, as the quality do, or these ridiculous shoes. I will not be able to bend across the desk or reach up to shelves. And where will I place my fan when I am about to screw together equipment for our experiments? What good would this lace apron be when I spill preserving spirits down it?’

‘I know not. I only know Mr Woods will not have you shabby. He has a position to keep up. He likes his servants to go genteelly. And his ward likewise. He is a gentleman, after all.’

‘And I am a natural philosopher, Susan. And I have my work to do.’

‘You are a wilful stripling and will do as you’re bid under his roof. Now change your clothes.’

A loud knocking comes on the door.

‘Susan? Is the child there?’

‘Stephen?’ she calls. ‘What are you thinking coming up here? This is not your part of the house.’ She opens the door.

My tutor steps past her and beckons me hurriedly. ‘Porpoises!’

‘
What?
’ we both cry.

‘Porpoises, the sea mammals, spotted swimming up the River Thames. Come, Dawnay, quick! Throw on your cloak and hat. We may catch a glimpse of them if we run.’

So I am saved from tight stays by my persecutor’s husband. We race through the streets and down to the river. Mr Applebee asks around and hears of the animals seen just downstream. We rush along and then see a crowd of people pointing by the riverside. We push through and find a post by the water’s edge. We spot the porpoises breaking the water, their curving fins cutting through the choppy brown waves. Around and about them, the watermen are whooping and bashing the water’s surface with their oars.

‘Fie!’ yells my tutor. ‘Desist!’

‘Stop it!’ I join him. ‘You will kill them!’

We are met with a barrage of oaths. But the porpoises are oblivious. They are so nimble in their medium they twist away from the boats and leap from the water. The crowd gasps.

‘What a piece of work!’ says my tutor and we cannot help but dissolve into laughter as we watch them sport with the watermen and fly through the water with graceful celerity, upstream. We and others follow them for a time, but then it seems they tire and turn about, heading downstream away from London and, we hope, to the open sea.

‘Where do you think they are going?’ I ask.

‘To the Channel. They are not usually of fresh water. I have known of them in Scotland, Ireland too. But rare here, very rare. Peradventure they were lost.’

‘I hope they find their way.’

As I watch their lithe forms fleet away from us, an erstwhile feeling surfaces in the pit of my stomach – an old associate of mine I did not know I was still acquainted with, not now I have my home, my benefactor and my new life. It is the yearning for travel, for discovery, to follow those creatures of the sea, to leave this soiled city behind and see new places. Perhaps my early life on the streets, my years following in an institution, without an object to call my own – excepting my brother’s note – is it any wonder I have a nomadic soul? Yet so does the Applebees’ son, still away with the army, not seen for years, and he had a stable loving home and escaped it for the rough comforts of a red coat. Maybe it is born inside us, this yearning to be footsore, and in others resides the overwhelming need for a bolt-hole. But now that I have a home, I cannot take it for granted. I do not wish it gone, only to wait for me while I go on my adventures and then come back to it, like a patient wife. I wish to see the world yet not as those with riches do, the Grand Tour of young gentlemen who are ferried from antiquity to supper and back again. It is another kind of travel I want, to move through it incognito as those porpoises – be a part of it, invisible within it – not as a young lady with all the restraints that creates. Not even as a man; but as a creature, at one with nature, at one with the air and the sea. But there is no woman I have heard of who ever achieved that.

I settle in to my new abode and form an uneasy truce with Susan as regards my dress; she has found me stays without bones that they call jumps, usually worn by pregnant ladies and, now, female philosophers. And I will not wear the silly aprons, nor lappets that hang and get in the way or a bulky pad over my behind that impedes movement. I have one weakness only and that is for a blue-green lustring gown that I wear often, as its hue matches my mind’s image of the ocean I have never seen. I do make some effort to look smart and allow my new lady’s maid – Jane – to dress my hair neatly each day. She does coo and fuss about me, saying how my complexion is far too dark and not pale enough to be fashionable and how I must apply powder to whiten my face, which I steadfastly refuse. She also eulogises on how long and black my tresses are, and dark hair is favoured presently and if only I would allow her to dress it properly, in the new style – oh, what a fine head of hair it is! – and suchlike. But each day, I insist she pin it up beneath a neat cap, away from my face and away from experiments, and be done with it.

I spend much of my time that first summer in Mr Woods’s garden. He has a small plot at the back and hires a gardener, Mr Dawes, and an apprentice, Paul, to keep it tidy. Planted in the earth and in pots and boxes are a variety of trees, plants and flowers that can stand the coal-smoke of the city
,
including in one corner a Judas tree and in another a London plane tree – most commonly seen on the streets, yet here is one of our very own; with its peeling bark that renews itself every few years, it resists the damaging effects of the sooty air that would suffocate weaker specimens. Flowers that thrive despite the bad air here include a range of lovely roses, as well as lilac, holly
and honeysuckle
.
I quiz our gardener almost daily about the different species of plants, flowers, vegetables and fruits he grows in the ground, in the pond and the glasshouse. He tells me that at other times of the year he grows the bulbs of hyacinths, tulips
and
daffodils, as well as medicinal plants, such as mandrake and gentian. We discuss types of seeds, plant diseases and breeding. He is a gentle, kindly man and a good teacher, to myself and Paul; needless to say my childhood fears of apprenticeship fade when I see Mr Dawes’s patience with the boy.

I collect insects – butterflies, ladybirds, beetles, honey bees, dragonflies – and small animals: frogs, toads, mice and shrews. I kill one of each and preserve them, others I perform dissections upon and thus learn something of anatomy. Some I have kept in cages or jars for a short time, fed them a range of foods, medicines and liquors to see which thrived, which grew sickly, which died. I have removed the limbs of some small animals, used poultices of different herbs and chemicals on the wounds, to see which subjects succumb to infection and death, and which survive, or if any succeed in growing back a leg. Jane says I am awfully cruel, yet Mr Applebee and I know what we are about. It is science and science is a deity to me. There is no right or wrong when it comes to the truth; there is the fact and the fiction, the truth and the error, and little else matters. Certainly not a shrew’s comforts.

I am permitted the run of the house, yet mostly find myself in the curiosities room with my tutor, the kitchen with Susan, my bedroom with Jane, or in the garden with Mr Dawes. My benefactor still invites me into the withdrawing room for our chat, the same as we have done these past years, only it is nightly now, rather than weekly. He uses this time also to instruct me in the languages of Portuguese and Spanish, of which he has learned much in his dealings with these countries over the years. I use the Latin taught me by Mr Applebee to improve them. Mr Woods is often out carousing, despite his protestations more or less once each month that he will give up. He goes to the coffee shops for gossip and trade every morning, then to the dockyards to oversee his shipments, back for dinner each evening with me, and more often than not out for drinks with his business associates. When we talk I quiz him about his days on the sea, where he went and what he saw. He tells me his favourite thing was jaunting between the islands that lay near Spain and Portugal, where he tried all the classes of wine and other alcohol he could lay his hands on. His drunken exploits proved his fortune, as he became such an expert in them that he set up his own exporting business and outsold all his rivals. And often he strays into the subject – tiresome to me – of how his riches secured his entry into polite society and how fortunate he has been to take his place within some of the finest households in London.

‘Soon you must enter society, my dear,’ Mr Woods exhorts me. ‘Always shut up in that fusty old room. You are such a winsome thing. Soon you will attend balls, and evenings of entertainment and suchlike. I will introduce you to the quality ladies hereabout and one fortunate day you will meet a fine young gentleman, perhaps one of a bookish bent to suit your talents, and you will marry.’

‘But I have no interest in balls or evenings or drink or the ladies of Bloomsbury Square, or anywhere else for that matter, and certainly not marriage.’

‘But this is quite unnatural, for a young lady or indeed any young person. I must say, I do wonder these days what is to become of our youth, as the men seem to sink into effeminacy and the ladies advance to boldness. It is all quite against nature, and we will in some horrid future bemoan the fact that the sexes will become quite the same, their characteristic and delightful differences become confounded and lost.’

As Matron before him, Mr Woods seeks to engage me in matrimony with some as yet unknown bachelor. Yet neither understand I have no interest in such a union, as it would interfere and perhaps curtail permanently my ability to study and work. Nothing holds more value to me than that, and despite his kindness, my benefactor seems incapable of grasping this. I can see it frustrates him when I refuse to follow his advice, but the thought of submitting myself to marriage is akin to the pillory for me, and I will never do it willingly.

We engage in such squabbles from time to time, yet it upsets us both to cross swords over a topic upon which I fear we shall never agree. Thus, when I see the subject surface, I usually manage to steer our talks back to his travels, a more placid channel for us to navigate. I often ask him to expand on these islands he visited – what manner of flora and fauna inhabited them? Were they the same as those on the mainland, or how did they differ? And what kind of sea creatures did he see on his travels? I am becoming fascinated by the idea of situation. I spend the next years in this house devising a new theory of place. My experiments with my garden creatures and plants have led to me to think of our garden here as a tiny plot to us, yet a boundless realm of danger and opportunity for its miniature inhabitants. Its contents direct the lives of those who live in it or visit from other gardens or the streets, from the parks or the long river beyond. And it leads me to ponder the fate of islands, cut off from the mainland, and how their creatures manage their isolation so far from broader resources. How do they get there? How do they manage their abode? My life as a child from the street, to the institution, to this house has taught me that life thrives quite differently in different environments, given the right kind of food, drink and nurturing, or the wrong kind.

We hear news of Owen Applebee, that he is in North America, fighting the French alongside the Provincial American Forces. He writes to his parents that he has met members of the local American Indian tribes and mentions their bizarre dress and customs. But he is no man of science or even of poetry, and his words are frustratingly brief and give no detail of the extraordinary things he must be seeing. It is mostly filled with a written version of his usual verbal jollity and thick with references to his regiment – of Jack and Dick and Jim and their brave deeds and an officer who is a d—n fool
&c
. I recall I once wished to follow Owen all those years ago. But the army is no place for a natural philosopher – male or female; it is likely I possess the correct cool attitude towards life and death as a soldier needs, yet I feel I would be too distracted by my fascinations to pay much attention to fighting. And I have always been too interested in preserving life, rather than destroying it, as soldiers are required to do at times. Susan still prays for her son’s return and my tutor still rails at the folly of army life and his son’s absurd red coat. I do not care for his coat, only the liberty I believe he has and the sights he has seen on his travels – I am almost sick with envy at this aspect of his freedom.

In the year 1750, two curious events shake us up in London,
quite literally. We have two earthquakes. In the first, the house rumbles and shakes for some moments. Mr Applebee and I know it for what it is and feel satisfied that we have experienced an interesting phenomenon. The second is somewhat stronger and sets the dogs off howling across the city; some say they saw fish jumping clear from the Thames
.
There is a great to-do about it when some merchants of doom predict a third will come in another month’s time and finish us all off, due to God’s wrath at the debauchery of city life. Panic sweeps the residents and hundreds of coaches flee in days. Thousands race to Hyde Park and camp there. Mr Woods comes home from his coffee house all in a fluster predicting disaster. My tutor and I watch this display of superstitious terror with the bemused eye of the philosopher and instead write up our findings of the natural effects of the quakes. A third one does not materialise and many return shamefaced. At times such as these, it is said to be fortunate to have the comforts of religion. But I find the opposite: that science, or rather the knowledge it represents, gives the greater comfort, as it explains the world to us and banishes delusion and fear.