Like a Woman Scorned

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My family and I are back from our beach trip, although still adjusting to the demands of normal life.  In the past few days I've been writing up posts for the November blog party, answering questions, and sending out emails, all of which leaves disgustingly little brain power for the task of writing a post for the present.  Hence the belated nature of this one.

However, I was very pleased to fall in once again with Rosamund's Character Letters meme, which I have not done since July - horrors!  This month's edition comes from the pen of Regina of Tempus Regina and has very little to do with the actual plot, which is nice in that it gives nothing of importance away.  Besides, it's nice practice for the upcoming NaNoWriMo.

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,

nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

- william congreve

Mr. John Ingram—

Although we parted yesterday on, I think, no uncertain terms, I thought it best I commit myself in ink and on paper, that there be no misunderstanding. If I have made myself clear already, I ask your patience. I will be finished in a moment; bear with me to the end, and then you may burn this if you wish.

Do not call me a liar when I say I am sorry we should have come to this. I was happy these last two months; you know I was; my face is too hard to lie. On every other point you would have found me pliant, eager to bow to any wish you could have invented. How could I have done else? Gratitude alone (such a harsh word between us!) would have made me dumb. But you asked this, and you find me rigid.

 I cannot, I will not, give Kay up. I am all the world to him, and before you came he was all the world to me. He is but a child, Ingram, a poor, weak-minded child who will never be a man. You call him a burden. Oh! You can have no conception what a burden he is. You say that marrying you I will have riches, enough to send him away, to make believe I have no brother, to be free of all those obligations. But if you think I could so easily cast him off, then these two months have taught you nothing of me. Oaths and obligations are never so lightly fulfilled. Kay belongs with me. You take us both or you take neither, and last night you chose the latter.

 But comfort yourself, Ingram: in attempting to rid yourself of one nuisance you have unwittingly rid yourself of two. There is no reason now to speak with your parents. No risks to run, no shame to endure, no money and no position to lose. What an easy error you have made; only think if you had made the other instead, and found yourself saddled with a servant to wife and a fool for a brother-in-law! Reckon it to Providence, if you will, that you escaped so narrowly from such a trial.

I remain your servant,

Regina K. Winters

Postscript: I deliver this by a shop boy’s hand, lest you have the horror of crossing my path again. You will not see me again at the mill, nor, I hope, anywhere else. If we do have the misfortune of seeing one another, I will keep to the far side of the street as befits my station.

A First Impression

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In May I participated in a little meme that Rosamund Gregory of Shoes of Paper, Stockings of Buttermilk put together: Character Letters. My character for that round was Tip, writing a letter from the Mediterranean to his home in Pennsylvania.  The subject of this letter is still Tip, in a way, but the writer is Josiah Darkwood; he gets sadly little press around here, and I thought I should remedy that.

Note: Rosamund does not appear to have a July edition of Character Letters up, but as long as you link back to her, I'm sure she wouldn't mind participants.  Who doesn't like participants?

On to Darkwood.  Writing and reading are his two favorite pastimes, and as he does them  frequently, he is quite competent at both.  His penmanship is exceptional: bold, smooth, and flowing, as his thoughts come so quickly that he must keep his quill moving to stay a-pace.  He never draws on the edges of his letters, and his writing, unlike Tip's, is surprisingly un-blotted.

23 June, 1803
The Seagull's Nest, Boston

My dear Amy,

I wrote to you just yesterday, but while I realize that writing again so soon is little short of pitiful, I hope you will pardon me.  Is it so terrible, darling, that I want to talk with you as much as possible before we sail?  It may be a year before I see you again, and there is no knowing when I will hear from you next.  Write often, I beg, if it is not too much a burden for you.

Tomorrow Bent and I will have been here at the Seagull’s Nest three weeks.  There is but little progress on the Argus, and I don’t expect we will sail before next month is up.  I have not yet seen Lt. Decatur, although I hear he is in town, and until today, Bent and I alone of the brig’s officers had arrived in Boston.  I confess, I find it better that way; I am not, as you so well know, cut out for the communal lifestyle of the sea.

But I fear my reprieve has ended: we have had an addition to our number, a new midshipman on his first voyage—out of Pennsylvania, I think he is.  His name is Brighton, Tip Brighton, though I hope that is not his Christian name; Bent introduced him as such, however, and I smiled a little at the sound of it.  I hoped then that he did not notice; I rather hope now that he did.  At any rate, I will try to sketch an image of him for you (at the time he joined us I was more interested in my book, so my depiction may be somewhat lacking).  He is a little older than Bent, a fair few years younger than I: perhaps sixteen, or eighteen.  He struck me as being all limbs and sheer lankiness, rather like a colt that has yet to get all its legs beneath it.  His expression when Bent first introduced us was almost sullen, not quite sour, but perhaps if that were otherwise, he would not be exactly unpleasant.  You will forgive me, but my opinion of him at this particular moment is somewhat curdled.

To say where and when it started is not difficult, but how—of that, I still find myself uncertain.  It was all a flash, really.  If Brighton had not been there—but it is no good to say that, for he was, and perhaps it was just as well in the longer run of things.  But I am unclear.  I promise I shall do better.

You remember, my dear, what I have told you of Bent; and you know, too, how rash he can be.  This evening was worse than usual.  Mr. Lattimore, who runs the inn with a heavy hand, pushed Bent for his pay; he has been pushing, but until now it has been relatively subtle and I had thought him content to let Bent pay in installments, as he usually does.  It is certainly the best he can offer, and far more, I think, than Mr. L. deserves.  But it seems Lattimore thinks otherwise, and tonight he pushed too far.  (I should very much have liked, Amy dear, to put my own fist in the man’s ugly face…!)  But I fear Bent pulled a pistol on him instead.

I know Bent, and I know he meant nothing by it; he threw away his fire in a moment.  But it was a stupid, wrong, bull-headed thing for him to do!  I admit that.  And yet I cannot see, at this moment, that it was any less stupid, wrong, and bull-headed for Brighton to step up (as though he were no stranger at all) and start a fist-fight with Bent.  Of course as soon as he did the whole inn was in an uproar, and there was no chance to separate the two and smash their heads together as I would have liked.  So you see, Amy, why my opinion of Brighton is curdled.

This has been our first evening together.  What will it be like when we sail?  Perhaps, however, I am too hasty and Brighton will yet redeem himself.  I have already said that he is but a young, awkward fellow; I would hazard a guess that his upbringing has been none too good.  Now that I have vented my emotions I will try to be more lenient.

—But I pray God to give me patience, for I fail to see how I will ever manage to keep Brighton and Bent off each other’s throats after this!  It will, I think, be a very long trip indeed.

Yours ever,

Jo

The Essence of Bravery

Over at her blog A Wanderer in the Shadowed Land, Rosamund Gregory has started up a meme of her own: character letters.  It is an exercise designed to get the writer into the head of the character (it's dark in here!) by writing them in first person, and as such, it makes a splendid complement to the Beautiful People series.  To put it in Rosamund's words:

"There are a great many awesome "programs" of a sort for blogging writers--such as Beautiful People and Snippets of a Story--but I've noticed that most of them are in the third person. This is not wrong, of course, but it's very good to be able to get inside one's characters' minds in order to understand them. Even if you're writing in third person, you learn new things about your friends that you would never have known otherwise."

She has posted all the guidelines and those lovely things here and the very first edition, with the link-up and such, is here.  I'm afraid my entry does not follow the prompts very well, but hopefully no one will mind.  This letter is from Tip to his mother back home.  He writes on plain paper in a rather cramped, painstaking hand; put a quill in his hand and he seizes up (as if he wasn't awkward enough before), and so he tends to write out each word as though his life depends on its neatness.  He has no artistic talent and doesn't "doodle," but the edges of the page are severely blotted from his tendency to hold the quill sideways when he stops to think.  Also, he signs with his Christian name.

28 November, 1803 
Syracuse, Sicily 

Dear Mother,

This is no good. I must have begun the letter three times now, and I cannot seem to write beyond the first line. I was never much good at letter-writing, you know. Being so far from home seems not to have changed that.

Your letter reached me today, and only three months late, at that. There was a packet ship, the Lizzie Blue, waiting for us here in Syracuse when we dropped anchor; I’ll send my reply back with her, though God alone knows when she will make port again. Strange to think that with all my effort to write this, it may never reach you at all. If it does not, and if you never read this line, I hope you will know I tried.

I hardly know what to say to you, Mother. I know you must be thinking nearly five months have passed and in that time I have never once written, and for that I have no excuse but the one you already know, that things were very difficult when I left. Looking back I can see that it was difficult for you, too, and that I made life hard for you and Father both, but at the time I could not bring myself to write, and now my words have rusted—if I ever had them to begin with. Everything I think of to tell you how sorry I am, to tell you how I wish Molly were still with you, sounds callous even to myself. But I am sorry, and I do wish it. I know how much you loved her.

We have had our own death this past month, while we were at Gibraltar. I won’t upset you by telling you about it, only say that it was sudden and hit me harder than it ought. For I only knew him less than six months—less than half a year, Mother!—and yet it hurt as badly as your letter. Does that make sense to you? It makes very little to me.

Mother, I am finding out that I am not brave. I had never thought much about it before, but now it stares me in the face every day. Not that the idea of war or even the nearer thought of coming against a Tripolitan frightens me more than it does the next man; no, but it is living that is so hard. So often in the morning I wake up and feel ill with the thought of the day—and yet it gives me, too, a sort of hard satisfaction in the rising. Perhaps that is the greatest lesson the sea and the Navy will ever teach me.

Even my rusty words are spent now. So I will tell you only that I love you, and ask that you give my love to Father and tell him that I will try—that I am trying—to make him proud. I know I am not Harriet and will never make up for her, but I hope, all the same, that you will be proud of me.

Your rebellious son is not very rebellious tonight, Mother. He is simply tired.

With love,

Edward.