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By Root 410 0

It was over, she knew. It was already over. The failure was outside of her body. It was already there, in the green and sunlit day. And it had always been there. In every thought she’d had about him, or just behind it, was the emptiness, the hollow-ness, the knowledge that she was wrong, that it wasn’t true, that it wouldn’t happen. The realisation came as a great liberation. Weeks and months of prayer and hope suddenly evacuated from her. She could say anything and her words would just be air, unavailing as a fragrance. She might as well tell the truth. Sweating and faint, she was nevertheless calm. The world was thin around her, bright and threadbare, and she spoke out loud what she actually thought.

‘Mr Tennyson,’ she began.

‘Yes?’

‘For a long time now I have wished to say something, to know something.’

‘Is that so?’

‘It is. You see, I have developed a great admiration for you.Well, it’s more than that. I’m enamoured, might be a good word. And I was hoping that this admiration might be mutual, that you might perhaps consider me as a possible wife, a plausible wife.’ She laughed at the phrase.

‘I see.’

‘Yes. Absurd, isn’t it? I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s very unconventional, but then I thought you aren’t conventional. Also, I have a fever.’

‘I see.’

They stood there together with the people moving around them. Tennyson said nothing for a long time. He exuded his familiar, thick silence, then said, ‘I’m very honoured, of course . . .’

‘Of course,’ Hannah laughed.

‘But . . .’

‘Please don’t feel you have to finish that sentence. I’ve been most tiresome. If you would excuse me. I’m very sorry.’

Hannah smiled and turned and hurried into the house to be sick.

Annabella found her when eventually she returned to the garden. ‘Well?’

‘No, not well.’

‘Frankly, I think you’ll live to be relieved. I mean to say, are all poets so dirty? Did you see his ears?’

‘I wasn’t especially looking at his ears.’

‘A lucky escape. You can think of it thus.’

‘Oh, I will. Who wants to be married to such ears?’

Annabella’s disrespect was typical and did not at that moment upset Hannah, although later it would remain in her thoughts. Annabella’s beauty fronted for her; behind it she was disloyal, satirical, and nobody knew. ‘Nymph or dryad?’ She tried to mimic his Lincolnshire accent. ‘Nymph or dryad?’

Posthumous to hope, Hannah felt quite empty apart from the seethe of her sickness sensations. The one effort she still had to expend was to make sure she was always where Tennyson was not. And soon the day would be over. Days ended, like everything else. She chatted as best as she could with other guests and allowed her damp hand to be kissed when her father introduced her to the brightly dressed Thomas Rawnsley, who made machines or something else and lots of money. It was only later, when she was alone in her bed, that she cried and cried.

‘Pssst!’

Eliza looked up from her household accounts.‘How may I help you?’

‘Shh!’ Matthew pressed a finger to his lips, then beckoned with a curling finger to follow him through the doorway.

Eliza blew on the inked page and went after him, found him loitering half-way round the corner of the vestibule.When he saw her, he moved on. She laughed, bustled after.

‘Where are you leading me?’ she called.

He crouched out of sight. When she rounded the corner, he stood up, pirouetted, and beckoned her on.

‘Fool.’ She followed him, laughing as he danced away.

The house was empty, with all the wedding guests gone. He led her all around it until she was panting, then finally stopped by his study door. ‘If you would care to follow me.’ He smiled. His whiskers looked mischievous.

‘Gladly,’ she breathed.

He opened the door for her and in she went. She saw immediately what he’d been leading her towards.

‘What is it?’

‘Aha,’ he said. ‘What is it indeed?’

Eliza looked at the box on the floor. ‘I thought it was one of the wedding gifts when it arrived.’

‘In which case you were wrong. Isn’t it beautiful?’

It stood on his desk, a brass machine with three curving feet, a stem, a barrel with