“What can you do, if it is?” I realized Liam was asking.
“Do? If it’s Addison’s? Nothing. I can advise her to avoid stress, which tends to make it worse. Advise her about diet. Malnutrition can kill her eventually with untreated Addison’s.” I contemplated this, my sense of gloom deepening.
AT HOME, WE HAD A SIMPLE DINNER AND WENT TO SLEEP EARLY, worn out by the day, clasping hands in the upper hallway before we went to our separate rooms.
I woke to realize I was not alone in my bed. Perhaps I had caught the smell of him in my dreams, or felt the warmth of him near me; I opened my eyes in the darkness without surprise, only delight and a thrill of danger. We embraced wordlessly and set to work on the problem of how to make love with the least noise possible.
My sheets, I remember thinking at one point later, alone again and at a contented midpoint between sleep and waking. I will have semen on my sheets. Will I be undone by that? Washing is backbreaking work, between the water hauling, the soaking, the boiling in a large kettle, the mangling, the ironing; there was no plausible way of doing it myself. The best was to be so rich in linen that the job was necessary only every few months, and in fact we’d done no laundry since moving to Ivy Cottage, though we’d have to soon. I’d been planning to bring in a laundress and detach Mrs. Smith’s sister, Sarah, from her usual duties to help—but suddenly sending the laundry out, to Alton say, where it could be more anonymous, seemed a better idea. I need to ask someone about this, I thought, and then I was asleep.
CHAPTER 16
JUNE
Chawton
IT PROBABLY WAS A KIDNEY STONE. AFTER TWO AND A HALF DAYS of agony, Jane felt better, recovering her appetite and insisting on getting up. Within a week, she was back to normal.
Except, I couldn’t help noticing, normal was worse. Her liver was still swollen, her skin odd colors, sometimes bronzed, sometimes grayish. Her joints pained her, she admitted, and she continued to lose weight. As that cold, wet spring turned to cold, wet summer, she declined; it was not linear, but it was inexorable. There were days she did not leave her bed at all; at first this was unusual, and then it wasn’t.
At times, though, she was almost her old self, taking an outing to the garden—she no longer went farther than that—or going to the parlor to sit at her little table and write. She was lucid and cheerful. She talked of what she would do when she recovered.
Did the others realize what I did? Martha, perhaps; I saw it in her face sometimes when she thought no one was observing her.
But she was busy running the household, taking over the jobs Jane could no longer manage and those Cassandra had no time for; we did not talk privately. Mrs. Austen continued to be consumed with her gardening, her preserving, and her own ailments, seeming unconcerned with those of Jane. Biographers have puzzled over the relationship of Mrs. Austen and her second daughter; seeing it up close did not make it any less of a riddle. They were never openly hostile, yet they spoke as little as possible, like two people trapped together who have agreed to ignore each other.
Cassandra could hardly pretend things were fine with Jane, yet she betrayed no further emotion, at least not to me. She, like her sister, talked about the future as if it were waiting for them both, planning a trip to Cheltenham, for the waters, in the fall.
She spent the bad nights sitting up with Jane, and by June there had begun to be more bad ones than good. In the daytime, I insisted that she rest, and often spent the day with Jane myself, sometimes joined by Liam, whom all the ladies had grown more comfortable having around. After that night he sang for them, something like what I had predicted in jest happened. Mrs. Austen was even more relentless about recounting her ailments; Martha often made him a particular cake with rose-hip jam after he had praised it once; Jane made him sing; and even Cassandra seemed softened. It was as if they had finally decided what to do about him: count him as an additional brother or son, one who did not have to be deferred to but could be ordered about, sent on small errands, good-naturedly quizzed. Perhaps it helped that there was a dearth of actual brothers and sons around just then: Edward had gone back to Kent, and Henry was at Oxford. Captain Frank Austen, though in Alton, was often busy with household projects at his new home, and James, though not far away in Steventon, seldom visited and brought little cheer when he did.
I HAD AN EXTRA MOTIVE IN MY BEDSIDE VIGILS: THE LETTERS AND “The Watsons.” I remained persuaded that the bedroom was the likeliest place for them, but searching it was something I’d not dared so far. Despite all the time I spent there, I was never alone, and Jane did not sleep so much as doze fitfully. Those kidney-stone days, when she was doped with opium, would have been ideal, as I realized only later; at the time, her letters were the last things I was thinking of.
Then one day in early June, Jane, who had stayed in bed that morning, complained her joints were paining her more than usual: could she have some laudanum? It worried me she’d asked—laudanum is highly addictive—but I also realized this was my chance. That the doctor in me and the spy were in conflict worried me too, a sense of disquiet I tried to ignore as I gave her a dose from the little bottle, along with an admonition about the dangers of becoming too fond of it.
“You give your opinions so decidedly on medical topics, Mary,” she said with a teasing smile. “As much the physician as your brother. Are you sure you did not attend lectures along with him in Edinburgh?”
“I made him tell me everything he learned. I would read his books.”
“Remarkable.” As her expression relaxed, became dreamier, I had the sense of her ferocious intellect, under the influence of the narcotic, no longer contracted on one point but diffuse, spreading and stretching, finding unexpected connections between things.
“One day perhaps it will not be,” I suggested. “Men and women will be free to pursue the same fields of activity. Perhaps it is only lack of education holding us back, as Mary Wollstonecraft suggested.”
“Do you mean to say the writings of that person penetrated to the Indies?”
“I had heard the name, but I was not able to find her works until I got to London.” I paused. “Do you agree with her? I do not ask about her own scandalous life, but her ideas. What do you think of them?”