our engagement and marriage, our life at Cape Coast Castle, my unexpected death. You will also meet Brodie Cruickshank, another Scot, like George, in charge of the fort at Anamaboe, who became my great friend, and Mr. Thomas Birch Freeman, a Wesleyan missionary, Mrs. Bailey and several other characters of interest.
The story takes place between 1836 and late 1838, in London and at Cape Coast, just before the rains end and the Dry Season is about to begin.
It is curious how much of its romantic character a country owes to strangers, perhaps because they know least about it. I will try, at least, to give some sense of what that world on the coast was like.
It is worthwhile having an adventure, if only for the sake of talking about it afterwards.
“AND WILL THERE BE LIONS AND TIGERS?” I asked.
“If you want those you must go elsewhere,” he said, smiling at my ignorance. “But lovely birds, Letty, and palm trees, hibiscus flowers. The landscape is quite beautiful.”
“I was rather hoping for lions and tigers,” I said, but smiled up at him so that he would know I was only teasing, gave his arm a little squeeze.
I don’t think I have ever walked so much as I did in the days of our courtship: Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park Gardens, Regents Park, Russell Square. In my plan of Paradise, I always said, people will ride very little but walk not at all. In revenge they shall have the most comfortable chairs from morning to night. But George was better outside; drawing rooms and gossip did not interest him. He would have fled London for the hills of Scotland long before, except for me.
He smiled at babies in perambulators, at little boys sailing their boats; I did not want him to look at babies or little boys; it was important that he keep his mind on me, on what he had been working up to say.
“I’m feeling a little fatigued,” I said, spotting an empty bench. Just beyond, an old man was casting bread to the ducks.
We sat down. There was a not unpleasant silence between us.
“‘Cast thy bread upon the waters,’” I said, “‘for thou shall find it after many days.’ I’ve never been quite sure what that means.”
Still silence, but less comfortable. I wondered if I should suggest we continue our promenade. We made a pretty picture, Captain Maclean in his scarlet tunic and I in my new pelisse. I made a small movement, as if to rise, but he grabbed my hand.
“Letty,” he said, “I have no flowery way to say this. Will you marry me? Will you come back with me to the Coast?”
Victory. (Bugles and pennants, but only in my head.)
“Of course I will, George.” Then, “Shall we walk?”
Letty
I WAS THIRTY-FOUR when I first met George Maclean, and somewhat fearful and uncertain as to what my future was to be. Famous, yes, but solitary and I had recently noticed how some of my friends’ children called me “Aunt.” Soon those children would be having children and there would be another round of silver christening cups or porringers. Have you read Lamb’s essay about Poor Relations? Would I end up like that, an embarrassment, an elderly lady living in a pokey room at my brother’s house, his wife (I assumed he would marry now that his living was secure) treating me with condescension, his children (I assumed he would do the usual thing and have children) prompted to ask Auntie if she wanted the last tea cake or crumpet (Auntie declining even as her stomach rumbled). Or perhaps the Misses Lance would leave me their house when they slipped off their mortal coils, assuming old Mr. Lance, their brother, had already slipped his. I had a soft spot for old Mr. Lance. Whenever I was sent a gift of a brace of pheasants or a nice plump hare, he would remind us of what a crack shot he had been in his youth. The Lances did have nieces and nephews, so I probably could not really count on anything in that direction. If my brother didn’t want me, perhaps I would live out my declining years in a pokey cottage, seeing no one, alone with my books, my canary, and a cat, until, if a traveller knocked, he would be greeted only by a whisper behind a door.
I had always declared I would never marry, but that is the sort of thing women say, isn’t it, when they are no longer girls and still single. I didn’t so much want a husband as want the security of a husband, the status that comes from being married. He would have to be a gentleman, of course (the Landons may have come down a bit in the world but we were of an old and respected Hertfordshire lineage). It would also be useful if he had a good income, but even an adequate income would suffice. I had my own money — from my books — although I didn’t see a great deal of it; as soon as it came, a goodly portion went out, to my brother, for his Oxford education, and to my widowed mother. There was a sister, sickly from birth, and she lived with my mother until the poor child died at age thirteen. You will be shocked, but at the moment I can’t remember her name. An ordinary name, nothing like Letitia or Whittington, my brother. Elizabeth, yes, that was it. I was the eldest and felt it was my duty to help out, although there were days when I could have killed for a new frock. Everything I wore was always just slightly behind the latest fashion, even with the help of new ribbons or a gift-pair of new gloves. My admirers did often send me things, pheasants, for example, gloves, once an incredible rainbow-coloured silk shawl. When they sent letters without gifts I was always a little disappointed.
(“Dear Letitia, do you remember how we walked with our arms around one another when we were young?”) I suppose all famous people get letters like that, often from virtual strangers. “Dearest Letitia, I have woven you a special bookmark depicting a scene from Ethel Churchill,” some ghastly scrap that she probably spent hours stitching. Or even worse, “Dear L.E.L., or may I call you Miss Landon? I have taken the liberty of enclosing a small selection of my verse …”
They want a reply, those versifiers. “Dear Miss X, how kind you were to send me ‘A Sonnet Sequence on the Death of my Canary’…” They are hoping you will help them get published, of course, although they never come straight out and say so. I think I can safely state that never once, never once, did any of these unsolicited missives contain a spark of genius or even of good yeomanlike workmanship. The bookmarks had more craft than all these ballads or sonnet sequences or meditations in a graveyard. Can’t they tell? Ah well, we are told that love is blind and no doubt they love these things they write. If I am feeling kindly, then I do admire their courage, for it takes just as long to write a bad poem as a good one, perhaps longer, and even those of us who have been fortunate enough to have published and been praised, still tremble that next time, next time, we may be laughed at or even reviled. A horse at a mill has an easier life than an author.
And I knew my work would not be fashionable forever, for tastes in art change just as tastes in costume do. I remember going to Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks with dear Lady Blessington and she said to me, “One day your likeness will be on display,” and I replied, “Complete with my little attic room and my hoard of candle ends?” We laughed, but that night I had a terrible dream about my wax doppelgänger and a great fire in the waxworks. I saw my face melting, my dress on fire, my lips running down my chin and onto my bodice. All the others were melting, too, the kings and queens, the murderers and heroes and soon we all ran together. When the firemen arrived with their water, we had congealed into a great, many-coloured lump full of glass eyes. I woke up with the Misses Lance pounding on my door, asking if I was all right.
I had been reading Macbeth and I suppose I was thinking of “Out out, brief candle.” Who knows what ideas and images our sleeping selves can yoke together?
I have come a long way from talking about spinsterhood, but from my thirtieth year on, however gaily I presented myself to Society, my future as a single, aged woman was always there in the back of
