I tell her that I will leave the house, visit the bookshop, and pick out a present for her.
And it is good to get out into the fresh air—or what passes for fresh in London. The day, however, isn’t bad or too cold. The bookshop is only a short walk.
And I marvel at how much freer, how much fuller, howmuch happier I feel walking the streets than I was a few months ago. Then I felt shackled, heavy, desperate, agonized. Annabelle is the reason, of course, that I feel so differently now.
As I walk, I imagine a future in which Annabelle and me and our child form a family. I see how the child might have Annabelle’s spirit, the one that makes her so indomitable, and my literary sensibilities. I would not ever have to wonder where I belong, because I would always know that I belonged with my wife and child.
The thought of that future fills me with such sweet longing that it scares me. It seems too much to be allowed in this life. Is anyone ever allowed to be that happy?
As if in answer to my question, as I pass a newsstand an image catches my eye. It is of a couple, a man and a woman, and I am not sure why I pause. Neither figure truly looks like me or Annabelle. The woman is very coarsely drawn, her limbs distended in cruel lines, reminiscent of Rowlandson’s countless older women, and the man is thin, narrow-shouldered, and knock-kneed.
But somehow, despite these distortions, I know instinctively.
The caricaturist has done his job.
I study the broadside. The woman, her blouse open, leers at the thin, clumsy looking young man as she pours wine down his throat.
The caption reads:seduction a la de Lacey.
“One shilling,” the man behind the stall says. “It’s a funny one, ain’t it, sir?”
I stare at the image.
Isthiswhat people really think about me and Annabelle?
Surely not. Itcannot be.
While the caricaturist attempted to mock Annabelle’s looks, anyone who saw her in the flesh would be able to see her beauty. The artists cannot really think that such a woman, of only thirty years of age, is such an object of disgust that she must get a man drunk to bed her.
But the lines along which they drew her aren’t new—I have seen many caricatures in a similar fashion with older men and younger women, the joke usually being that the women are only bedding the men for coin.
No. No one really thinks that this depiction of my wife is true.
Or at least not anyone who has ever seen Annabelle or known her.
No, I realize with shock.
I understand for the first time. And it shames me that it has taken this long. I never comprehended before why there was such a discrepancy between the woman I saw in the papers and the one I met at Trescott. When we married, I didn’t really understand why they would lampoon her for it.
Now, suddenly, I do.
It is a way of punishing Annabelle. Just as her father did. They want to punish her for her disobedience. For being a woman who refuses to heed the rules laid down for her, who wants power and obtains it, who dares to tempt men and make them feel desire, and yet who is only ruled by her own.
I not only fail to see the humor in the illustration.
I am ashamed.
Because I believed similar drawings before I knew her. I thought that if they spoke of her this way, then they must have a reason. If they said such things, they must have the truth on their side.
She must be lascivious.
She must be wicked.
Why would they say it otherwise?
Now, I understand why.
Because Annabelle merely being herself is a defiance of our society and all the men in it. Because there is an irresolvable tension between who she is and how our society demands people like her behave.
