No one knows what it was like, how very dark it was in 1815. The nights were enormous; you couldn’t believe they would ever end. After sunset, there was so little to do that, for amusement, I would linger outside by the stables, testing my bravery, but dusk had way of cowing me: the night grew and grew, and I shrank and shrank under it and soon would go in shivering.
Inside, I rarely dared waste a candle. It was by the light of the cold moon that I read all the books in the house. We had five; of these I remember two. One was the Bible, and one I did not understand but read again and again because it was the most mysterious: Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. Between thunderous turns of the pages, I could hear the house breathing and creaking, my old uncle snoring, the dogs smacking their tongues, and horses whinnying into the wind that blew in from the sea.
Then, my cousin. He came all the way from London, visiting his home only because it was close to the country house where a great poet would be reading. Taking me with him was the cost of his stay; his father, my uncle, insisted. “She’s a child,” my cousin protested. “She was born with the century,” said my uncle, dabbing at his drool. He was the only one I loved in all the world. My cousin’s gaze fell on me scornfully, as if assured of both my present unremarkability and the unremarkability of my future, but he did consent to my company.
The thump of the carriage across the quiet miles, the rustle of my cousin’s greatcoat, his glugging swallows when he drank something from a flask he did not offer me—I would have refused—and at last we arrived at a house where carriage after carriage pulled up to the columns and lanterns waved in the hands of coachmen.
To walk in! Like finding gems inside a stone: the rooms throbbed with motion and laughter that sent my head spinning, more people than I’d ever seen in one place, and candle upon candle that did not smell sour, as I’d thought all candles did. “Don’t stand so close,” my cousin said, when I was too near to his elbow, and so I wandered, undaunted because I did not know the cost of the beeswax or the tapestries, did not know a thing about fabrics, nor that I should not go right up to ladies and ask to feel their sleeves. I was not even jealous because I did not know enough to know that silk like theirs would never be mine. Two girls, about my age, though I at first thought them older, giddy with ringlets and the kindness one shows prospective converts, escorted me into a bedroom where they fussed with my dress, unbuttoning its topmost buttons and folding the collar under. “See? Décolletage.” I laughed at the word, and they laughed at my innocence.
And the music! Music, after no music for months, and that was only hymns in a church, and there hadn’t been a piano and a flute, just an organ with six pipes missing. I’d never heard a woman sing about love in a soprano that bubbled like whatever it was I was drinking out of a glass with a long stem. That we were there to hear a poet, I’d almost forgotten, for it had grown very late, all the candles burned down to nubbins. Then a man I had somehow missed freed himself from a circumference of admirers to take the stage. He held a book up, too high at first—it hid him—then lowered it enough to show his face. His face! It could have been sculpted from a block of moon-marble—except for the flush in the cheeks and the crest of dark curls prettier than mine. Whatever he read—“He walks in beauty”? something like that—mattered less than the curve of his lips and cleft in his chin and the mellifluous voice that rose from boots that went up past his knees and a rhythm that carried me forward from one rhyme to the next before I was ready. Thankfully—for my legs had grown unsteady—there was within reach a candelabra tall as a hat rack; I grabbed it to brace myself, and it rocked, just a little. Startled by a sharp pain, I yelped and looked down: droplets of hot wax from the drip-pans had spattered across the tender skin I’d newly bared. Everyone looked at me—my cousin glared—but that didn’t matter, because Byron was looking at me, too, with a bemusement that was nearly conspiratorial, and then, as welts rose on my provincial chest, he returned to the poem into which I had enjambed my own cry.
That I left with everyone else—that I didn’t claw onto the curtains and beg the night never to end—was a kind of arrogance. I must have thought there would be more such nights; there have been none. I feel like a natural born pilgrim who managed in her life only one pilgrimage to only one cathedral, and that, when I was a child. I tried to visit it again—but when I read the poet’s poems myself, they were less beautiful than they had been.
As was everything else. I found myself staring at the hair that grew from my uncle’s ears like black grass from sideways pots, and life went on and on. I became old, older than my uncle ever was; a centenarian, I’m told; I stopped keeping track of years some years ago. Though I have nothing to my name, no books of my own, I am not without souvenirs: I picked the scabs off my burns too early, making them bleed; they formed scars under my collarbones that my restless fingertips are still trying to read.
Amber Burke is a graduate of Yale and the Writing Seminars MFA program at Johns Hopkins University. She was an actress for ten years; now she teaches writing and leads the 200-hour yoga teacher training at UNM-Taos. Her work can be found in Okay Donkey, HAD, Wallstrait, swamp pink, The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Quarterly West, among other places. She has written more than 100 articles for Yoga International and Yoga Journal. Visit her website here.
The Disappointed Housewife 