Hearing this, Elizabeth at once engaged a hired girl to help get everything shipshape. She asked her to come the following day, planning to use the Granville fund to pay her. Elizabeth had no compunction in asserting her domestic authority in this way, because her intention, having now returned home, was “to do my whole duty in the family, as mother and housekeeper.”16 However, she’d definitively not returned as a wife; after her husband’s behavior, she believed “the marriage contract is no more binding on me…than is the lamb bound to be the wolf’s wife, after the wolf has once torn his defenceless body to pieces.”17
Throughout that dinnertime, she and her friends discussed the course she should now follow. In the immediate future, Elizabeth had only one plan: she wanted to see her babies. So eventually the Blessings, Hasletts, and Elizabeth returned to the depot to collect her trunk. At the station, Elizabeth withdrew all her papers and pressed them into Sarah Haslett’s hands. Sarah was “the most efficient friend I knew of in Manteno”;18 Elizabeth trusted her to keep them safe. They’d be better off with her, Elizabeth knew, than under the same roof as her treacherous husband.
She shut the trunk, absent its treasures for the first time since their creation. It was almost like being without a part of herself. Mr. Blessing then heaved the trunk into his carriage and extended his hand down toward her. He and his team of horses were going to drive her to her door. He offered to come in with her—even to provide a permanent bodyguard if she wished—but Elizabeth declined. She didn’t want to get Theophilus’s back up any more than it already would be from her returning in the first place. Her hope now was that they could coexist. She would not trample on his rights, hoping he would respect hers also. They had both made this home and these beautiful children. Why could they not both enjoy them peaceably?
Elizabeth’s breath must have caught in her throat when she saw her home again for the first time in three years. Green shutters. A rather dilapidated garden. A dirty house, yes, but a house that was still hers.
Mr. Blessing lifted her trunk up onto the porch for her. Then he climbed back into his carriage, urging his horses on.
The sound of their hooves faded as Elizabeth faced the door.
Alone, she entered in.
CHAPTER 38
The front door opened easily. Elizabeth walked into the reception room, her eyes drinking in the dearly familiar furniture. There was her china closet, painted pea green by her own fair hands. Her settee, covered over with a black throw. Table, bureau, mirror, pictures… After years living in monastic plainness at the asylum, it was like returning to a palace.
Yet there were no princesses or princes she could see. She kept walking, through to the kitchen, the heart of the home, located at the back of the house.
The first person she saw was Theophilus. He sat in an easy chair beside the stove. The kitchen seemed to have become his study; stationery and papers were strewn about. Yet she had no eyes for her husband or even the mess. In his arms was baby Arthur.
Though surely, this was not the same child. Now nearly five, he was a baby no more. She had missed so much.
She went straight to him, ignoring Theophilus’s strained greeting; he did not get up. She pulled Arthur from his father’s arms, seemingly without resistance, and commenced caressing her child, marveling over this little boy who was her own, yet so much a stranger. As she fussed, the back door opened, and George and Libby came running in. She hugged and kissed them, then sat down with Arthur on her knee and the other two children before her.
“[You are] going to have a mother again,” she told them happily. “I [have] come to take care of [you] and hope we [shall] be very happy, and never be separated again.”1
She could barely believe she was back in her own kitchen, with her own children before her. In her imagination, though, it had never been quite like this. The children had been smaller, for a start. And Isaac had been present; in reality, her nineteen-year-old had moved out and was living in Chicago, as was Toffy at that time. Samuel was missing, too, though he did still live at home; he was almost sixteen.
It was perhaps Libby who’d changed the most. She was still the “perfect image”2 of her father, however; Elizabeth wrote, with a mother’s cutting honesty, that her daughter was “as good and gentle in temper as she is bad in looks.”3 Aged thirteen going on thirty, Libby protested at being called “little daughter”4 these days, indignantly pointing out that she was “in my fourteenth year.” Nevertheless, in Elizabeth’s eyes, she was still so young.