The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [96]
Gray’s passing is not the only sad news he shares. He tells Lily that Mr. Queckett at the College of Surgeons has also died. Carter then carefully, very carefully, drops a bombshell. “Misfortunes,” he writes, “have at length broken up my little household. She who was my wife has left India, in a sailing vessel, for England, and I am now quite alone.”
He doesn’t give Harriet’s name, as if it were too distasteful to include in so gentle a letter. As portrayed by Carter, she is continually the villain in the tale—a liar, a loose woman, a corrupter—someone I had pictured as being irresistibly sensual and impossible to please. Which is why “hearing” her voice elsewhere in the Carter Papers, starting with two letters from Harriet to H.V., comes as a surprise. On paper, she seems lady-like and agreeable, the very words Carter had used when he first met Harriet back in Khandalla.
“My dear Henry,” she writes in a short note sent the day before setting sail for London:
I am much obliged to you for giving me the Certificate of our Marriage, and I promise never to show it to any one, or to name such a document as being in my possession unless I am actually obliged to do so for self protection.
Yours,
Love,
H. Carter, Late: Bushell
Harriet writes again two days later, September 21, 1861. Now on board the boat with her two children, she bares her soul. “I have given you much pain and trouble, forgive me, I pray you…. I am sincerely sorry that I have managed so badly.”
Later in this letter, she unwittingly reveals an unexpected side to H.V. and to their relationship. “Your last words that you would ‘be with me in spirit’ are indeed a consolation. Never for a moment have [sic] any thing taken my thoughts from you, my preserver.” Harriet then speaks of what a comfort their daughter is to her. “I can feel that you are actually present with me in her.”
So what was the real story here? Someone wasn’t being entirely honest, whether H.V. or Harriet Carter, or perhaps both. How to uncover the truth?
Steve and I start where all the trouble began, with one word: widow. Sure enough, there it is on the couple’s marriage certificate, which we found tucked in a small file of Carter’s miscellaneous papers. Why had Harriet lied? What had been going through her mind?
Her lawyer, in a letter from May 1862, offers an explanation: Harriet had had “doubts” as to whether her divorce had been finalized, so, in order to “avoid debate,” she had sworn widowhood instead—simple as that. But why remarry if you are the least bit unsure you’re actually divorced? Something fishy was going on, and Steve and I followed the trail back to the tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, five thousand miles from Bombay. Here is where Harriet’s first husband divorced her on grounds of adultery, it turns out, presumably with the aforementioned Captain Robinson. Now, whether she had actually been unfaithful is unknown. But shame, not doubt, must have led her to lie on the marriage certificate. Far better to be known at the time as a widow than as an adulterous divorcée.
Just as this was beginning to sound like musty Victorian melodrama, out of the blue came a voice of reason: “I have already informed you that the first marriage was completely annulled and that the second marriage was valid—”
Actually, this was Steve, whispering into my ear as I typed on the laptop.
He had dug up a letter from Carter’s lawyer, Richard Spooner of Kent, England, who clarified, once and for all, the legal matters in the case of Carter v. Carter. His verdict? H.V. had no case against Harriet. At Carter’s request, Spooner had also asked Harriet personally if she would agree to a divorce.
Without any hesitation she said that she never was really attached to any person except you—that she loved you dearly—would do whatever you wished and never spend a Rupee