Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [63]
As long as she keeps getting worse, Frances will stay.
Such thoughts, such weakness. Is it her body that's diseased or her mind? In the dark, Elizabeth cannot remember how to be good. How do they endure, those heroines of novels? A tear burns its way through her lashes.
Today she is weaker than yesterday, when she was weaker than the day before. She's eaten nothing to speak of for a fortnight. Sitting in the Abbey at noon, Elizabeth's eyes drift up the walls, across the floor. Every inch is inscribed; the place is crowded with names, packed tight like a gala ball for the dead.
She glides out of her stiff body, slips through the stained glass windows, soars up into the aromatic streets. She hovers round the Abbey, grips with one white smoky hand the stone ladder that the blunt-toed angels are climbing. She watches, she waits. How will it be?
She sees Frances roaming the streets, the ribbons of her bonnet hanging loose. Forgetful of her family, red-eyed for a year, heartsore for the rest of her life. Frances, transformed into a greedy girl on the doorstep of Heaven, knocking furiously, ready to make her demands.
Even within the dream, Elizabeth feels the implausibility of this. Suddenly she can see another Frances, a gray-haired Frances, revisiting Bath, only a little melancholy when she glances down South Parade to the stone bench where she used to sit with "poor Miss Pennington." And all around the visitor, the barrows and stalls and colliding sedan chairs, the essentials of Bath life going on just as ever, oblivious to the words etched on marble in the Abbey.
Elizabeth comes back to the present, to a warm hand wrapping itself around hers. This is what it comes down to: a firm grip that banishes past and future.
Feeling a tickle in her lungs she withdraws her fingers apologetically, searching for her handkerchief. No one turns a head; racking coughs are no novelty in Bath. But Elizabeth stares into her snowy handkerchief at the bold red flag death has planted there.
She folds it over and over till only white shows.
Not yet. Please. I did not mean, I did not know, I thought—
Impossible.
Down the aisle, her heels resounding. Scandalised whispers on every side. "What ill-breeding, to run off from church."
I am only twenty-five.
She bursts through the great double doors of the Abbey as if they were veils. Out in the watery sunshine, she takes a great breath. And another.
Frances is at her elbow.
Elizabeth presses her fingers against her friends hot mouth before she can say a word. "We have so little time," she whispers.
Tonight, Miss Pennington will dance.
Note
"How a Lady Dies " is about Elizabeth Pennington, born in 1732 or 1734, a wealthy vicar's daughter who wrote poetry, most of which has been lost. Her closest friend was the writer Frances Sheridan (1724–66). Sometime in the 1750s Elizabeth turned up on Frances's doorstep to say she could not live without her, as recorded in Alice Lefanu, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan (1824). I have drawn on a Utter by Frances in John Wat kins's Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1817), as well as her comedy A Journey to Bath (written in 1764).
On their return from Bath to London, Elizabeth died in Frances's arms.
A Short Story
Formed in her mother's belly, dark filigree: the watermark of the bones.
The birth was easy. She glided out easy as a minnow into the slipstream of life. The midwife crossed herself. The mother wept with gratitude for this Thumbelina, this daughter of her mind's eye, embodied on the bloody sheet. The father wept with dread