Posted on: 2011-06-26
You can see what they all think, by looking at their faces and the way their movements betray them. They think I'm ill-tempered and a nuisance. They're right of course; I am. I think they would be in my shoes. I try not to be irritable; but they all of them treat me the same.
'How is she today, Lady Catherine?'; 'She's not looking so well, today, Lady Catherine'; 'I hope Anne has been keeping well, Lady Catherine?'
When you are an invalid it is as though you have no personality to yourself, that somebody else must always be responsible for answering for you. It is as though a wrecked body also denotes an absent mind.
My body is weak and feeble. It has been since that Rheumatic Fever when I was a small child. I was about eight I think; though sometimes it feels as though I have been like this forever. If I work hard I can recall running in meadows, riding, and even climbing trees, an activity my mother deplored and my governess was powerless to prevent. Until that putrid sore throat that developed into a fever. Oh the PAIN! I felt as though my limbs were on the rack, the blankets were too heavy on my knees and I could not put the pressure on my elbows to sit up without crying for the agony of it.
I tried to get up of course, to deny the illness, as an active child will; but I was too weak. And I am told that my heart is so delicate that any great exertion could kill me.
Sometimes I wonder, is there an exertion I would be willing to undertake, knowing that I would die of it, just to enjoy the sensation ONCE of being human?
Perhaps to have a baby, knowing that though I give my life for it, I can give life to another?
Or to dance a wild dance at Almack's?
Not that anyone would wish to dance with me. The fever robbed me permanently of the bloom on my cheeks and set lines of pain on my forehead; and when my adult teeth came through after the fever, so many of them were found to be rotten they had to be drawn. Having half my teeth missing makes my face drop in beyond what is caused by the emaciation of a body that cannot be bothered to eat much. No, I am too ugly for any man to dance with, or get a baby on.
And I am too bitter now perhaps to want to offer love. I have learned my lessons too well from my mother to do anything but take; and to despise those who do not, cannot understand me. SHE does not understand me. She gives me everything I could ever want – except what she cannot give. Herself; and my health back.
And yet I do not want to die.
Not unless I could really find something worth dying for.
Even the clouded, pain-ridden half life I live, the existence I claw my way through has a sweetness of sorts.
Though perhaps when I am dead and leave this sad and sorry shell behind I will wish I had taken more risk earlier….. but nobody can know that….. I wish I knew.