Poets of Painswick

POETS OF PAINSWICK

by Kate Francia

Content warnings: Mention of parental loss

Monday, 1st of June

Dear Mama, 

I am sorry to tell you that Fanny is out hunting Poets again. It’s such a bore. She’ll be tiresome when she gets back, obv. sans Poets. No good telling her we don’t have the right sort of climate, or that she’d be sorry indeed if she caught one. She’ll persist in calling that bit of meadow above the duck pond “the moor,” lying in the grass pretending she’s just been thrown from her horse. Papa won’t let her take the plow horse, so she pretends hers has run off. 

Later: A bit of excitement. Fanny has contrived to twist her ankle out on “the moor.” It’s swollen to a frightful size. She’s mum on how she managed to walk home on it. (You mustn’t worry; she is perfectly well. Carrying on dreadfully, but you know how she is.)

Spoke to Papa after she retired, in re: something must be done. But as usual, No One Listens To Me. 

Missing you terribly. Yours affectionately,

Ada

•••

Wednesday, 3rd of June

Dear Mama,

Fanny is housebound with ankle, v. tiresome. She’s caught cold from falling in a muddy ditch, keeps looking out window, sighing mysteriously. I offered to read to her just to end the noise. Read first chapter of “Romance of the Forbidden Wood,” but she says my voice too mocking. 

I stole Fanny’s book on the way out, which was wicked of me. Read first half curled up behind the curtain in the window seat, up till Annabella’s kidnapping and encounter with ghost of Poet’s former lover. I don’t suppose you’ll mind my spoiling it for you. Annabella’s choices so far include: venturing off alone in strange castles, doing things explicitly warned not to do, falling in love with men who speak only in verse. Threw book across the room (narrowly missing cat) when Annabella gave impassioned speech to kidnappers about her love for Poet. Poet will not save her. Everyone knows Poets not to be trusted. 

Tried to explain this to Fanny, but apparently, I am Child, and lack Proper Womanly Feeling. 

Your Wicked Child,

Ada

•••

Thursday, 4th of June

Dear Mama,

Some developments. This morning I was minding my business in the parlour reading “Romance of the Forbidden Wood,” when a knock at the door sent everyone into a mad tizzy. Fanny running down the stairs with her cheeks pinched pink. “It’s him, it’s him!” etc.

She has actually caught one. God help us. That’s how she got home the other day. He’s on our chaise across from me at this moment. Pale, reedy, impeccably-cut suit. Wide soft mouth, red tongue between his sharp teeth. I am trying to concentrate on this letter, but he is looking at me with the strangest expression.

Later: Ugh. He is gone, for now. It is quite true what they say about Poets, the way they speak. I can only fear the rest of it may be true as well. He looked right at me, and said, as best I can recall:

Stars in her eyes, the fair-faced child,

Winking and wicked, worldly and wild—

“Oh, nevermind about Ada,” said Fanny. “Do a verse about me.” I am relieved she stopped him. I came over all queer when he was talking to me, like someone poured silver in my ear. His eyes on me, pinned. For some reason I cannot recall their colour. Yet I could not move until he looked away. 

He declaimed several more verses to Fanny, all dreadful. I would write them for you now he’s gone; but Fanny says the scratching of my pen is giving her headache, so I must stop for now. 

I wish you were here. I am quite sure you would have something to say about this. I should have known that with you gone she’d be in greater danger. Papa only laughed and said young ladies will be young ladies.

Your reluctant young lady,

Ada

•••

Sunday, 7th of June

Dear Mama,

I can hardly think at home with everything that’s happened. Papa and Fanny in competition to see who can shout the loudest. I have taken my writing things to the graveyard for a bit of peace.

Naturally, I tried to warn Papa. Young ladies who catch Poets always come to Bad End. I have read about this extensively: drowned, lost on moor, consumption, flung from cliff. Does Papa want to see Fanny laid out in flower-strewn coffin with hair unbound, buried with book of poems on chest? Wouldn’t he rather have grandchildren? 

He patted my head and told me I was a good girl. Next morning at breakfast, stuffed smile over his morning coffee: “Excellent news, girls! I have arranged a Suitable Marriage For Fanny!”

Oh Mama, what did he think was going to happen? 

I’m sure you can imagine. Fanny locked herself in room, screaming about how no one will let her have one thing, just one thing of her own. When I brought her tea, she laid her head on my shoulder and said: “Oh Ada, may you never know the ache of unrequited love.” Tried to remind her Poets not to be trusted, but she looked at me like I was utter fool and said that was the point. 

Poet came to call, of course. Papa, quite smug, stopped him at the door and told him he was too late, the young lady was now engaged. 

Poet said: “To die of love, was nothing e’er so sweet.” 

“Indeed,” said Papa. “Well, I wish you the best of luck.”

“A heart once caught will never more be free.”

“I’ll get your hat.”

Poet’s lips are redder since last time, his skin whiter. Papa thinks Poet is vanquished but— 

Later: Had to stop writing earlier as there was a strange rustling sound in the graveyard. Sun went behind a cloud, and I felt this awful chill in the tips of my fingers. Usually a place of solace and security for me. Must stop reading romances. 

But—to return to the matter at hand. I took Fanny some food after supper. Her appearance is worrying. She sat in her white nightdress looking out the window. Nightdress much more gossamer than I remember, with odd lace bits. 

Naturally I asked her where she got it. I know she never got lace like that in Painswick. It looked quite French.

“Honestly, Ada. To think about clothes at a time like this.” Fanny looked down at flimsy billowing sleeves with great indifference. 

“Can’t you be sensible, Fanny?”

“Sensible, sensible! Whenever people say ‘be sensible’ they only mean do whatever they think is best. ‘Be sensible, Fanny! Set a good example for your little sister!’ Well, it’s my choice, and I’ve made it. I caught the Poet fair and square. And everyone knows you can’t un-catch them once they’re caught. So try and stop me.” 

She turned her back to me and looked out the window again. I do not remember Fanny’s hair being so long. Hangs down her back now, almost to her knees, reddish glow in the firelight. Astonishing that a few days could create such an alteration. 

Can a Suitor rectify this situation? I wish you would advise. 

Your sensible daughter,

Ada

•••

Monday, 8th of June

Dear Mama,

Suitor came to call this morning. Fanny refused to come down. There was a row, etc., which naturally Papa won. Fanny and I sat for an hour in the parlor with Suitor, eating stale shortbread. He’s eminently Suitable: first in line to inherit nice piece of land, pleasant round face, enjoys hunting and card games. Really, really enjoys them. Never knew there were so many different varieties of whist. After he left, Fanny said: “I’d rather die.” 

“Oh, Fanny.”

"I shall cast myself from the turret like Annabella."

"Why on earth should you wish to be anything like Annabella?"

"At least she lived! Don't you ever long for something exciting to happen?"

"Kidnappings, ghosts, betrayals—hardly a happy life."

"Better than playing whist with that lump every night until I die."

That does sound tiresome, to be fair. 

Fanny has made herself scarce for the rest of the day, so house strangely peaceful, if darker than usual. We seem to be always in the shade these days. I have finished “Romance of the Forbidden Wood.” Annabella came to Bad End. Surprise, surprise. (I know I said I’d give up romances—I will, after this one.)

Will speak to servants re: excessive greenery growing up over the windows. Can barely see my paper to write, so for today, I am, etc. etc.

Your Ada

•••

Dear Mama,

We are in dire straits. Fanny missing since Monday. Took her chance while the rest of us were busy with Suitor. Knotted bedsheets out the window, rain pouring in. Suppose I should say it is Wednesday now. Papa finally taking threat seriously but in all the wrong ways. I am confined to my room. Papa thinks Fanny gone to London with Poet, but that is utter nonsense. However, when I said as much—

Later: After further storm of shouting from Papa, house is now quiet, as he has gone with Uncle to search for Fanny in London. Useless, as I tried to tell them. Fanny and Poet have certainly not gone to London. Not at all the climate for Poets. He’d never take her there. 

She might not even be with him. Everyone knows that once caught, Poet’s influence remains even if subjects are kept apart. It is terrible to think of her alone and God Knows Where. Oh, Mama! I should have recognized the signs, but in my defense she’s always like that, coughing and pale and saying things like “alas.” I cannot believe she has left me without a word. 

And what would I have done? Told her she was Utter Fool and Throwing Her Life Away? Yes, surely everyone dreams of running away with little sister in tow to tell you at every turn how ridiculous you are being. No wonder she has left me behind. Oh, where can she be? This unknowing is worse than anything. 

Weather has been gloomy and the house is dark and full of strange echoing sounds. I am so alone here. Sometimes when I speak it feels like a dream, one of those where I open my mouth but no sound comes out. Words die in my throat. 

I wish you would write back. Sometimes I feel you are the only one who can hear me at all. 

Your miserable daughter,

Ada

•••

Thursday, 11th of June

Dear Mama,

I hardly know what to think—Ugh!—Suitor, of all people, has just paid me a visit. Of course, he has heard the news about Fanny. At first, I thought he might want to help recover her, but: “Must say, not at all the sort he’d prefer in a wife, far too flighty for him, deeply regrets, etc.” 

Then, of all things, asks if my affections were yet engaged! Apparently, I am Sensible Sort, Quiet, Dutiful, etc. etc. Carried on at length. 

Of course I am Child and not yet Out, not for two years more at minimum, and also my sister is missing. Informed him of such when I could get a word in edgewise. He said he would wait. 

He has gone now, finally. I promised Papa would call on him when he returns. Yet his offer—his sweat-shiny face when he said he would wait—Ugh. I cannot explain. It all sits in my stomach like some twisty thing. Yet it is a suitable offer. I wanted Fanny to take it. A safe future, provided for, secure. And what is the alternative? Catch a Poet, live wildly and dangerously and briefly, come to Bad End? 

It seems there ought to be a third option. 

Your dutiful daughter,

Ada

•••

Friday, 12th of June

Dear Mama,

I have found Fanny, but things could not be much worse. 

I couldn’t bear to be inside, so I took the plow horse and rode to “the moor.” Found her sitting in the grass in a frothy tumble of white lace roughly the shape of a nightdress (quite sheer and Continental), her reddish-blond hair streaming down her back. Poet nowhere to be seen.

“Get up on the horse and I’ll take you home,” I said. 

“I shall never go home.”

“Don’t be tiresome, Fanny.”

“I am going to have a baby.”

(This caught me off guard. Given what I know of the mechanics of the thing, which admittedly is not much, but—she only went missing two days ago, you see.)

“How—how is that possible?”

“I wouldn’t expect a Child to understand.”

After some more of this nonsense, finally convinced her to get on the horse by pointing out that nine months is a long time to sit in the grass looking out over the duck pond, and anyway it will be January by then and quite uncomfortable. 

However, I had just gotten her hoisted up onto the horse and was climbing up myself when a sudden shout from the woods made the horse startle, and I was thrown to the ground. Horse immediately took off with Fanny. Picked myself up out of the mud, quite cross, and of course, there was Poet. 

I cannot explain how he is altered. As my sister has gone all frail and gossamer, he is like a white flame, his eyes like—ugh. I do not like to think of it. He reached out a hand and helped me up, and the spot where his hand touched my arm is all red, even though I was wearing sleeves and he never touched my skin. His mouth cracked open in a long thin smile and I couldn’t look away. 

“Though from my touch she runs for many a mile,

Yet do I see the promise in her secret smile.”

I ran, of course. Did not look back but heard his awful laughter behind me for a long, long while. 

Fanny and I are in the house now. Fanny asleep after being quite hysterical. Her skin is like tissue paper, dark purple under her eyes, deep cough in her chest. If she really is—you know—in the family way, she’ll hardly survive in this state. 

What can be done? There is Papa’s rifle on the wall in his study. But I don’t know how to fire it, and anyway, from everything I’ve read, dead Poets even more dangerous than live ones. 

Fanny opened her eyes and saw me writing. She asked if I was still writing to you. I told her that I was. “You always were a quaint little thing,” she said. I asked if she ever wrote to you. “I did, at first,” she said. “But what’s the use?”

Perhaps there is no use. But what else can I do? Without you it seems we have all been plunged into a very different sort of Story.  

Yours,

Ada

•••

Sunday, 14th of June

Dear Mama,

I won’t disguise the fact that things are dark in our house. Quite literally, as some strange crawling ivy plant has grown up all over our walls and windows the past few days so that all we can see out the windows is leaves. There are shadows everywhere. Over the fireplace, instead of the old family portrait of Papa as a boy with his dogs, there is now a painting of a strange castle on a cliff with waves dashing against it and a dark silhouette against the stormy sky. Fanny lies on the sofa staring at it all day long. None of the servants will own up to hanging it and when I demanded they take it down, they said it was stuck somehow. 

There must be a way to fight this. I have paged through every ridiculous romance in this house, but the Poets always win. There are a few in which they get killed in Duels and such, but their lovers always die shortly thereafter (heartache, poison, cliffs) so they can Be Together In Death and his Poetry Can Live Eternal, so that’s no good. Fanny may be the silliest sister in all of England, but she is mine, and she is all I have, and I’ll be Damned if I just let him have her. I will not sit in this house being Sensible and waiting for the end to come. I must do something.

P.S. I apologize for writing Damn. 

Later: I am here, now, at your grave. I wish you could see how the bluebells have grown. The sun has warmed your headstone; sitting with my back against it and my legs tucked up under my skirt, birdsong and bluebells, I can almost imagine everything will be alright.

But it won’t. From what I have read, I expect at any moment—

Later: He came, as I knew he would. I didn’t hear him or see him approach until he started speaking. I looked up at the sound of his voice and found him only a few steps away, looking down on me with the sun behind him like some terrible beacon. 

“The chase was long, the beauty caught at last,

The time for childish games was past.”

(Ugh.)

“Can’t you leave us alone?” I said. My voice came out thick and muffled, like forcing it through wool fabric. Held my notebook tight to my chest. He smiled his long tight smile, and I felt again that pinned feeling. He stepped closer, crushing the bluebells beneath his feet. 

“Her face was flushed, her blood pulsed thick and warm

Awaiting her love in her dead mother’s arms.”

He put his hand under my chin and forced it up. His touch on my face scalded like an iron pot in the fire. I dug my fingers into the cold earth above your grave and closed my eyes for just a moment. 

Then I opened them and said the only thing that came into my head: “Warm and arms don’t really rhyme.” 

He let go of my chin and stepped back with an odd expression. He put one hand over his heart and let his dark hair flop down over his forehead. 

“The time for childish games was past—”

“You already said that. A few lines before. You’re repeating yourself.”

His eyes snapped up. “The—the graveyard—full of graves—”

“The graveyard full of graves? All your stanzas have been insipid, to be honest, but now you’re just listing things. You’re the worst Poet I’ve ever heard.” I stood up and raised my chin. “I don’t know how you can even stand to listen to yourself. You couldn’t rhyme to save your life.”

“Warm and arms is a slant rhyme, you uneducated little—”

“Hah!” I laughed in his face. He stepped forward and towered over me. I pressed my free hand against the cold headstone of your grave and looked up without blinking. “You spoke out of verse,” I said. 

“I did not.”

“You just did it again.”

“Stop talking!”

“You can’t do it anymore, can you? How embarrassing for you.” 

Two spots of colour burned high in his cheeks. We stared at each other for what seemed like ages, but he looked away first. Even after he slunk out of the graveyard, I kept laughing—too afraid to stop—and my cheeks are still aching. If there are splotches on this page you must forgive them. It has been A Long And Tiresome Day. 

Your exhausted daughter,

Ada

•••

Wednesday, 17th of June

Dear Mama,

This morning Papa called me to his study. Surely to tell me I had been Right All Along and If Only We Had Listened To Ada, All This Misery Could Have Been Avoided!

Hah. No, naturally he was sitting in there with Suitor. Both of them looking Grave and Smug. I felt myself curl up inside. I have been sleeping for long hours these past few days, waking only to care for Fanny.

“I’ve spoken to your father,” said Suitor. He held out his hand. I saw it all before me: safe, sensible, secure. A lot of whist. 

“No, thank you,” I said. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Suitor. 

“I am not Out yet.”

“I have already given my consent,” said Papa. “It’s quite settled, Ada.”

“We’re perfectly suited,” said Suitor. 

“To be perfectly frank, I don’t think we are. I find your conversation Tiresome, your opinions Uninformed, and your manners Awkward.”

Papa stood up and his chair banged over. “Ada!”

“If you had only listened to me in the first place, Papa, none of this would have happened!”

Papa slammed his palm on his desk. Suitor’s mouth hung open. 

“Oh dear, Sir, you must try not to make that particular face,” I said. “It does make you look a bit like a caught fish.” 

I laughed then, and I cannot stop laughing thinking about it. Suitor blustered out, yelling at Papa that I was not at all what he had been promised, etc. etc. Papa furious, but there we are. 

Fanny’s health improving slowly. Quite difficult, it appears: shaking the Story someone has told about who you are and what you’re meant to be. 

Ivy still growing up horribly over our windows. This morning when I went to tear it down again—there, on the ridge of the hill. A dark, thin silhouette in a well-cut coat. Same Poet, or another? I suppose it hardly matters. Every Creature in England may come and try his luck. I shall be here, laughing at each in turn, pulling down the ivy every morning to let in the sun. 

Ever yours,

Ada