Loved By Another Chapter Five

JULY 25th (November 10th)

The dressmaker was appalling in his treatment of me. Why a man is a dressmaker for a woman rather than a tailor is beyond me. He does not even measure us up, so it cannot be that. He is a very disturbing man. And my awful husband! He had already chosen the designs! It has become just how it was on the ship, the decisions bypassing me to defer to him. And he has taken the domestic accounts and reduced the amount of food automatically. He has become even more intolerable, an ogre of rituals and rules. He still has not visited me at night; he keeps to himself and leaves me to ponder his refusal to come to me. There are undercurrents, whispers of my youth and lack of pregnancy, whispers of barrenness.

Clover, in private, now mocks him with her soft Lilly-of-the-valley voice, unsilently. But now I am dependant on Clover for all of the information regarding everything. Oliver is determined to enclose me in a replica of society that was archaic even to the culture we left it with. I do not understand why we left if he just wants to create a society with the same problems, which had lead him to leave in the first place. I think he just feels insecure, as if to prove to others that he deserves respect. But this, still, gives him no right to take away all the freedom that I have gained through his neglect of me since we arrived. I am not happy here, not happy with him, but I was finally finding a niche within which I could survive, a boundary with which to define at least something of myself.

I am worried that he will take Clover from me. This, what I have now, has become less of a life than what I have ever had before him, it is less than life, it is barely existence. If he takes away Clover or the education program, I will be even less than nothing and no better than anything. Oliver talks as if he owns us all, but this journal is the only entity preventing him from tearing me apart. This journal means that he can never take what remains defiant within us.

When I cannot sleep, in the night when the daemons don’t come but haunt me deeply, Clover tells me these amazing stories. He can never take that away, those vivid memories that I keep. He cannot steal the lucid way she conveys worlds in her words, and the way she animates all things that she touches. I am afraid of transcribing them hear, as it would feel as if a betrayal of my heart. Oliver never has understood passion, like my passion for teaching the written word, or the passion from listening to the stories, the songs, music and dances of places that they allow me to feel. He could never see this as a style of enlightenment; never expand his repertoire of life. His world is enclosed by his mind, not by his eduction. I think that he has just been cruel from birth.

July 27th (December 20th)

He has begun to send me to functions every Saturday afternoon and this in addition to those society gatherings on Wednesday and Fridays. I am sure that they accept me as one of them; I have been acting in this play for my entire life, even though the script has changed. Clover now attends me everywhere that I am forced to attend. On Fridays at the end of each month, I attend a market, one of those previously mentioned by one of those insipid women. Here I collect many things to fill my time between Oliver enforced mealtimes. Instead of forcing himself upon me, he now forces me to eat with him, a reversal of our positions since we arrived. The only slaves in attendance at the markets are forced to wait outside the stalls, as to not contaminate the products for sale. I commented on this to Mrs Amy Cole, the host of the Friday social event, and she, quite blasé, stated that they would make everything soiled, unclean, and thus, must be kept at a safe distance. Interesting, as if they soiled everything, why does she have them carrying the products home? Or preparing her food? Or use them as a wet nurse for her children? Must all of these women be stupid? It is as if they cannot make basic correlations. It is both infuriating and disappointing.

I think that, although they are accepting me, they are becoming annoyed, and slightly suspicious of my comments and questions, but I was just devastated that Clover had to be left outside as if a contagious pet that I am enforced to endure. Each moment that I become more enclosed within this society, the more I notice the severe lack of value in any of it. Each breath I take, I exhale all of the repugnant inequalities that I still, unwittingly and unwillingly enforce. All I have attempted to achieve since we have been here has been gradually usurped by Oliver. Soon, all I will be is an errant butterfly trapped within a deathly glass chamber.

JULY 30th (December 30th)

The parties here are worse than back at home, because now I know better. I know who the party was created by and exactly who was actually taking the credit. Saturday’s party was the christening party of Sarah Kale Nesam and her husbands, Jonathon’s child, who is fourteen days old. I had not met Sarah Kale, as she has been in confinement since I started socialising; being that it has been a difficult pregnancy, and I was not an acquaintance of her to visit her personally. Her baby is fed by a slave wet nurse, whose child had recently died due to fever.

By the time I joined the party (Oliver decided on being fashionably late), Sarah Kale was passionately explaining the depravity of their slaves, their “ignorant” chanting and songs and their “primitive” worship of pagan devils posing as God. I felt like telling them that their belief systems are complex and beautiful, the structure amazing, the chanting and songs no different that the choirs we have. They sing of their devotion, we of his glory. Either way, this party of ignorance astounds me. No matter how much I prepare myself with this, it destroys me still.

If I could tell Sarah Kale that she is being hypocritical, if they are so dirty and evil, how can one allow them to feed one’s own child? I do not understand this behaviour. The whole five hours of this garden party, all of them complained. Not one of them saw the beauty of the last of the fall butterflies before winter. They missed the simple beauty of the blue light sky, and the powder-puff clouds, lazy hanging by the wire from hidden stars. They did not see the splendid platters of food, the angelic arrangement of colours and the way each piece was delicate and intricate, placed with delicate care, destroyed by their malicious natures. Their ugliness are pillars of Clack salt among gardens of ripe trees and rusty colours scattered as if painted with love.

AUGUST 2nd (FEBRUARY 8th)

It has been so long since we left home. I have not yet heard word form my family. I guess that this is half my responsibility. I should write to my mother, she must think that I am dead. Oliver is still keeping me confined from his sight as if in the final months of pregnancy. Although, this is impossible. All the sordid details my sisters used to fill me with had crept back from the cobwebish shadows of my mind, creeping quietly, disturbingly, persistently into my sleep, disillusioning my day and blocking the sum, only to brighten to the moon, no matter how heavy the curtains.

I am afraid that Oliver may hear my restlessness, and take me away to Atienne. This is a sanatorium. It is not called that, it is known as a Health retreat. This does not mistake the intent of this place, nor mistake the reason someone is sent there. I would die within the month if ensnared like a fly caught in a spider’s web. This is bad enough, this meagre existence of the pink and lilac walls, which once calmed and warmed me, now they shock my eyes and reverberates through my skull, causing me great pain. The food Clover brings to me no longer sustains me, and my ribs are slight in there angles under skin, and indicator of my rapid weight loss. I was not that big in the first place, but even the corsets are dimly aware that something is wrong.