‘You see I have consumption,’ she said. ‘I will not live long. But I am glad I saw you again before I died.’
‘Eliza! Oh, Eliza!’ I cried, burying my face in her hair. ‘But I must get you out of here,’ I said, recalled to the present, and the noisome place in which I had found her. Lifting her into my arms I stood up, preparing to carry her out, when she spoke.
‘My debts — ’
‘I will pay them. I will get the money somehow, no matter how heavy they are.’
‘No, James, it is no good,’ she said gently. ‘You must put me down. I cannot go with you, even if you pay my debts. I am not on my own. I have a daughter.’
A daughter. The words stopped me at once. A daughter. A child who should have been mine.
She turned her head and I followed the direction of her gaze, seeing a small child sleeping on a dirty pallet. She was about three years old, with Eliza’s features and fair hair.
‘Take care of her for me when I am gone,’ she said.
‘I will take care of both of you,’ I promised her. I put her down nevertheless. ‘Wait here a moment, there is someone I want to fetch. Dawkins, do you remember him?’
She smiled as she recalled the past.
‘Yes.’
‘He has fallen on hard times. I promised him I would try and find him a position, and it seems that I have just found him one. I will hire him to be your manservant. I will fetch him at once and he can help me take you to my lodgings, you and your daughter both. You will be safe there until I can secure something better for you.’
‘You are very good to me,’ she said.
‘I love you, Eliza,’ I said.
‘Still?’ she asked, searching my eyes.
‘Yes, still.’
She gave a sigh of contentment.
‘I should have been stronger,’ she said. ‘I should have held out against them, for I have loved only you.’
I set her down gently and went to fetch Dawkins. He was astonished when I told him that he had been in the same sponging-house as Eliza, for he thought he should have recognized her, but when he saw her so changed, he understood. I took Eliza in my arms and Dawkins carried the little girl, together with Eliza’s few belongings, and having paid her debts, I hired a hackney cab and took her back to my rooms.
She was exhausted by the time we arrived, and I left her sleeping. Dawkins stayed with her whilst I engaged a nurse to take care of her as well as a maid to look after her. Then I returned to my rooms.
She was still sleeping. I sat and watched her, tracing in the lines of her ravaged face the lines of the Eliza I had known. They were one and the same, and having reconciled the past with the present, I took her hand and held it as she slept.
Monday 30 June
I have decided to let Eliza stay in my rooms as she is too ill to be moved, and I have rented a fresh set of rooms for myself. I sat beside her all day and all night, and her suffering cut me to the heart. But for her sake I did not show it. I let her talk, pouring out all her griefs: her cruel treatment at my brother’s hands as he exposed her time after time to humiliating meetings with his mistresses; her feelings of hopelessness; her gratitude to her first seducer for a kind word; her flight from my brother’s house; her despair when her seducer left her because she had a child; her gratitude, again, for a kind word from another man, and her life with him; her destitution when again she was abandoned; her desperation; her selling of her jewellery, then her fine clothing, then last of all her allowance; and her descent still further when she had nothing left to sell.
‘And then you found me,’ she said.
‘I should never have gone away,’ I said, my heart wrung as I looked at her. ‘I thought it would make it easier for you, for both of us, but my absence left you friendless. Had I been in England, this could never have happened.’
‘Let us not dwell on the past, unless it be happy, and much of it was. All of it was, until we were separated. Do you remember the morning on the lake?’
‘How could I forget?’
‘I think of it often. I always have. Whenever life was too painful to bear I would go there in my dreams, and be with you again. You recited poetry,’ she said, smiling. ‘I liked to remember it, when I was cringing from the curses of other men. It warmed me to remember that once I had been loved, and loved by such a man as you.’
‘You are loved still, Eliza,’ I said, my voice breaking.
‘I know.’
She lifted her hand to my face, but before she could touch me, she was seized with a violent fit of coughing. I held her until it passed and she lay back, exhausted.
‘I think I will sleep now,’ she said.
She passed into slumber, and I was grateful for it. She was beyond pain in sleep, and a smile touched her lips, showing me her dreams were happy.
Wednesday 23 July
Eliza’s daughter and I are coming to know each other. The little girl, named Eliza after her mama, is intelligent and, now that she is clean, very pretty. She loves her mama, and it brings me great joy to see them together. Eliza is never happier than when her daughter is beside her, unless it is when I recite poetry to her, for we are both transported back to a sunlit world where sorrow never entered, and where we thought we would live for ever.
Thursday 14 August
Eliza was very weak today. I took her hand as she lay in bed and said:
‘If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, “This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.” ’
‘Alas, I am not so beautiful now,’ she said.
‘You are to me.’
She closed her eyes, a smile upon her lips, and I was glad to have brought her some pleasure, for I could tell that she was sinking fast. I sat back so that my tears would not fall on her face and I thanked God for every precious moment she was spared to me.
Friday 15 August
Eliza is dead. She died in my arms.
Oh God! Eliza.
Saturday 16 August
The funeral was a quiet affair. Leyton, good friend that he is, stood by me as I buried her.
‘Come back with me,’ he said, when it was over. ‘You should not be on your own at such a time.’
I thanked him from the bottom of my heart, but said, ‘I must get back. I have her daughter to think of now. Poor child! She has suffered a terrible loss.’
‘You both have.’
‘Then we will comfort each other.’
‘And what will you do then?’
‘I would like to keep her with me always, but I have to return to the army, for without my pay I cannot live. I mean to find a good school for her so that she can be happy.’
‘I will ask Caroline if she knows of anywhere that might suit,’ he said.
I thanked him and then we parted, he to go back to his wife and family, and I to go back to Eliza’s daughter.
Monday 8 September
Leyton has been as good as his word, and with Caroline’s help, I have found a school to take little Eliza. It is run by honest and loving people, and I am persuaded that she will be happy there.
I have recommended Dawkins to Caroline’s brother, and now I must return to the Indies and rise as far as I can in my profession, for a colonel’s salary will enable me to look after myself and my charge far better than a captain’s pay.
1792
Thursday 14 June
As I came off duty this morning, Green sauntered up to me and said, ‘Come with me if you want some sport.’
‘What is going on?’ I asked.
‘Wait and see.’
I followed him along the dusty road, with the sun hot on my back and the scent of musk in my nostrils, until we came to a turning. He led me along a little-used path until we came to a place far away from the camp. The noise hit us first, a whispering like the sea far off, and then growing louder as we drew nearer unti
l we could distinguish cries and then words.
‘Three pounds on Cattering.’
‘Five pounds on the bullock!’
We entered a crowd of men who were busy placing bets, with money changing hands at a great rate. The objects of their betting were standing at one end of a dirt track. Cattering was harnessing himself to a heavily laden cart, whilst next to him was a bullock similarly harnessed. The carts and their loads were the same, and Green said to me, ‘Who’s your money on, Brandon?’
I looked at the bullock and then Cattering. The bullock was stronger, I had no doubt, but I had never met a more determined man than Cattering and I knew his will to win would be stronger than the bullock’s.
‘My money’s on Cattering,’ I said, placing my bet.
Green wavered, but then said, ‘The cart is too heavy for a man, even a man like Cattering. He will never move it.’
He placed his bet on the bullock.
There was some more fevered betting and then the race was on. The bullock made a good start, pulling the cart away whilst Cattering strained to start his cart moving. His muscles flexed and his sinews strained. Great veins stood out in his neck. And then the cart began to move, slowly at first, but picking up speed as he leant forward, driving his legs into the ground and pushing himself forward by main strength and sheer force of will.
He began to gain on the bullock, which had stopped to munch a blade of grass. Its driver drove it forward, but the bullock seemed to take a delight in dallying.
Cattering pulled ahead, cheered on by his friends. He had almost reached the finish line when the bullock suddenly decided it would like to move and it put on a turn of speed that drove the men into a frenzy of cheering and cat-calls.
Bullock and man were neck and neck. Cattering stuck out his head, pushed with his legs, heaved with his shoulders and surged across the finish line, leaving the bullock to take second place.
‘Well done, man!’
The words echoed from dozens of lips as Cattering’s friends — of whom, at that moment, he had a great many — clapped him on the back. Cattering could not reply, for he was done in. Sweat ran freely down his back and face, and he drew in his breath in deep, heaving gasps. But by and by he began to recover, and by the time Green and I left, he was being carried aloft and hailed as a Titan.
‘I was going to put in an order for two more bullocks to pull the guns, but I think I will use Cattering instead!’ I said.
Green laughed.
‘He would cost you too much. Bullocks can find their own grazing. Cattering needs solid meat.’
We walked back to our quarters, and when we arrived, I found a letter waiting for me. Green bid me adieu and I went inside, taking my letter with me. It was from Eliza. I opened it with pleasure, and saw at once that her writing was maturing, for the rounded babyish characters had given way to the more stylish hand of a young lady of twelve years old.
She told me all her news, that she was happy at school, that she and her friend Susan had been singled out by the dancing master as examples for the other girls to follow, and that her sampler had been judged the neatest in the class.
She enclosed a self-portrait for me, done in water colours. It is the wrong way round, she explained, as I took it from a looking-glass, but it is otherwise very like.
I hoped not, for the eyes were of different sizes and the mouth was distinctly crooked, but I treasured it none the less. It showed her with dark hair, which, if the colouring was to be believed, meant that she had lost her babyish fair hair and was now unlike her mother, perhaps resembling her father. I could not understand his abandoning her, for a more cheerful and charming girl it would be hard to imagine; romantic, too, like her mother, for she had discovered Shakespeare’s sonnets, and told me that I must read them, for she was sure that I would like them.
I folded her letter and put it with her others, a treasured pile in my desk, then turned my attention back to my work.
It has been my solace this last nine years, and climbing the ranks to colonel has given my thoughts a positive direction, but I find lately that I am dissatisfied with it and wanting something more. But what more can there be for a man who is above thirty, and whose heart is in the grave?
Monday 9 July
I looked over the new troops this morning and was pleased to see that they looked strong and likely to survive, for the climate kills off so many men I sometimes wonder there are any left to fight.
I opened my letters when I came off duty, and I had a jolt when I saw that one of them was addressed in Catherine’s handwriting. I opened her letter with some misgiving, and I discovered that Harry had been killed. He had been riding home — drunk, I supposed, though she did not say so — and he had taken a fall from his horse.
I looked at the date on the letter. It had taken four months to reach me. Harry would be long buried, and without a son to succeed him, the Delaford estate was mine.
I sat staring in front of me, not seeing my soldier’s quarters but seeing the green fields of Delaford, with the river running through them, and the walled gardens and the dovecots and the tall windows reflecting the sunlight. I thought of the drawing room and the sound of Eliza’s harp, and the ballroom and Eliza’s hand in mine, and the dining room and Eliza laughing at me across the table.
I thought of my father turning me out and forbidding me the house, and Harry lolling on the sofa, saying he neither knew nor cared what had become of Eliza, and my desolation on my last visit. And I wondered, Can I go back there, or will my memories haunt me?
I folded the letter and said nothing of it to anyone, not even to Green, for I wanted to be sure of my feelings before I shared them. If I claimed my inheritance I could leave the army and offer a home to Eliza. I could give her the life of which her mother had been deprived, and in time I could see her marry a good and honourable man, someone who would love her and would not care about the circumstances of her birth.
I thought of my Eliza, and how happy she would have been to think of her daughter at Delaford. I remembered her saying to me, in the rose garden, how much she loved the house, and I knew then that I would go home.
Tuesday 10 July
I spoke to my commanding officer, telling him that I would be leaving the army. He expressed his surprise and dismay, but, on learning that I had come into property, he congratulated me and wished me well for the future.
My fellow soldiers rejoiced at my good fortune. Only Green was downcast, but once I had invited him to stay with me the next time he was home on leave, he became more cheerful and sincerely wished me well.
And so I am to leave the Indies, which have been my home for more than a decade, and return to England. I do not know whether I am happy or apprehensive, but, whatever my feelings, I am now irrevocably set upon that path, and a few more months will find me at home.
Wednesday 5 December
This morning I visited Eliza’s grave, something I have never dared to do since the terrible day I buried her. I told her of my good fortune and I promised her that I would make her daughter happy. The wind sighed, and I thought that she had heard me.
Thursday 6 December
I dined with Leyton. He is now the proud father of four children, and he was delighted to learn of my inheritance.
‘This is splendid news, Brandon,’ he said, as we sat over our port. ‘It is about time you settled down.’
‘I can afford to, now.’
‘Have you been back to Delaford yet?’
‘No. I have some business to attend to in London first — ’
‘Buying a carriage, I hope.’
I smiled. ‘Yes, I mean to set myself up well. And then I want to visit Eliza.’
It was a relief to talk about her, for he is one of the few people who knows of her heritage. To the world at large she is my ward, although I am aware some people impute a closer connection, believing her to be my child, but to Leyton she is Eliza’s daughter.
‘It will do her good to have a set
tled home. Will you take her to live with you? ’
‘Not yet. She likes her teachers, and she has made many friends at school. I mean to have her with me in the holidays, but I am persuaded she will be happier in familiar surroundings with familiar people for the time being.’
‘You must buy her a pony.’
‘I intend to, and to teach her to ride.’
‘And a pianoforte. Abigail has one with a sweet tone. You must come to dinner tomorrow, and I will encourage her to play for you.’
‘I am relieved you have two daughters, Leyton, for at least I have someone to ask about Eliza’s welfare. Otherwise I would be lost.’
‘We are all lost!’ he said. ‘Women are incomprehensible creatures, even at so tender an age, and having two daughters has not made them any more comprehensible to me. They can be inconsolable over a ribbon that is the wrong shade of blue, but let some real tragedy befall them and they bear it like a man, indeed far better than many men I have known. But I will do my best to help.’
Wednesday 12 December
I visited Eliza at school today. She was lively and cheerful, telling me all about her studies, her masters and her friends. I told her I had inherited a house, and that I had left the army. She was excited to learn that she would be able to visit me in the holidays, and I have promised her that she can invite a friend to stay.
1793
Thursday 10 January
I was apprehensive about coming back to Delaford, but my fears were misplaced, for Delaford as my estate is very different from a Delaford ruled over by my father or brother. I have found a good manager and appointed a new housekeeper and together we are setting about restoring Delaford to its rightful condition. The house is already looking brighter, for with a new staff of maids to help her, Mrs Trent has seen to its cleaning. The main rooms are now well polished, with not a trace of dust to be found anywhere. They need new decorations, however, and I thought how Eliza would have loved to choose them!