Today (18 April) was supposed to mark the Edinburgh launch for Hope Never Knew Horizon before it had to be delayed by a fortnight, so in lieu of an event we thought we’d share an extract from the novel.
Hope Never Knew Horizon reimagines the origins of three objects of hope – the blue whale skeleton hanging in London’s Natural History Museum; Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’; and the G.F. Watts painting ‘Hope’ which hung in the White House during Barack Obama’s presidency – telling their stories from the perspective of someone marginalised from history. Through the distinctive voices of the maid, the model, the coxswain’s girlfriend and more, the worlds of poetry, art and science collide in a gorgeous, hopeful polyphony.
In this extract, the maid to the Dickinson family happens upon a letter revealing an intimate secret between the reclusive Miss Emily and her brother’s fiancé Susan Huntington.
EMILIE, EMILY, E (i)
Sure but Miss Emily thinks no one knows. She thinks she has something that’s a tidy secret, like a flower pressed neat between the pages of a book and that book sitting on a library shelf somewhere and so many books in that library that the pressed flower cannot be found. ’Cept I discovered that pressed flower, see, and now she is found out.
It was washday Monday in Amherst, same as every Monday, and she knew to pass her dresses and underclothes down to me and her sheets and pillowcases too, all done the night before or not washed till next Monday. Everyone in the house knew. I’d been up since early doors, creeping like shadows or mice. Even before the bread was to be baked in the oven, the water was on to boil in the copper and all the house but me asleep and the smell of Sunlight soap thickening the air, thick as three-day-old soup and catching in the back of my mouth so I was clearing my throat with every second breath.
Course I had my suspicions before then. Miss Emily was all lit up some days, see, and others she was dull as dark mornings or slamming the door to her room so hard I feared for the hinges; and I thought I had the reason for all that, a wee idea anyways, but what I found confirmed it.
She writes letters, don’t she now, everyone knows that. It’s her way of being in the world without venturing forth. Her fingers is always stained with ink and once the sleeve of her blouse was so blue on the cuff that it took for me to soak it in lye to lift it. And poems she writes – she keeps them in her desk drawer and a lock on that drawer so no one can see in, especially not her father. ‘A woman should keep her thoughts on more domestic concerns,’ is what he would say, each word given a certain emphasis with the wag of his finger. Mostly Miss Emily’s careful, but one day she was not and I saw the little books of poetry all stacked neat and numbered. Din’t mean much to me when I read one of her poems, but that’s no nevermind.
Letters and poetry, and books with small writing in the margins. And if there’s no paper by she writes on the corner of the bedsheet or sometimes on the wall, low down and behind a table or chair so it might not be seen. ’Cept I seen it. Just a word sometimes or a name, the one name over and over and over.
Well then now, this washday Monday morning and I was sorting through the clothes and the bedsheets. Some can take a hard boiling and some need the water not so hot. And the whites should not be mixed with the coloureds for clothes bleed as easy as pricked thumbs. I have an order to everything, an order arrived at with the years I’ve been doing the washing for the house. Sheets and pillowcases first and a great wooden dollie-stick to stir them in the maidening-tub; then the lighter coloured clothes, and last of all the darker dresses. I sorts them into three piles and that way I know how the day will unfold.
About six – and I always knows it’s six by the ringing of the church bells – I had the bread punched down for its second rise and the kitchen oven was fed with wood so it’d be hot for baking by seven, and the water in the copper was bubbling hard and so I could begin. I had a girl that helped me once but she was a thin slip of a thing and she complained about the work and how her arms ached with the turning of the dollie-stick and she was sticky with sweat from the heat in the wash-house and her hair came undone from the pins and fell across her face like the tails of mice or rats. Now I do it all myself.
Like I said before, sheets and pillowcases first and you’ve got to beat that dollie-stick till the breath in you is short and quick and the strings in your arms is tight as stretched wet rope and your back is pinching across the shoulders. Then everything plunged into a rinsing tub and the water in there is cold as though it’s been pulled fresh from the well and it
numbs the fingers and chills the bones.
I wrings the water from the sheets by twisting. Maybe one day soon the house will purchase one of those new ‘wringers’ and that’d make it all a bit easier, but I manage. And when the sheets are all shook and pegged out on the line and the air is blowing hard as punches and kicks, then I can turn to the blouses and dresses and the stockings and ladies’ undergarments.
So, I was going through the dresses see. Some of them is very pretty and no one is ever by in the washhouse so I sometimes holds them against me and I imagine what it is to be Miss Emily or the Mistress. That’s when I found it and it was good that I did for Miss Emily would have been all cat claws and spitting if it had been lost to the washing. I dipped my hand into one of Miss Emily’s dress pockets. To be sure there was no mischief in what I did, I was just fancying what it was to be a woman with time to write letters and poetry, or just to stand and stare at the birds singing in the trees for above an hour – I saw Miss Emily do that once, a whole idle hour. And she stood with her hands in the pockets of her dress and so I was wondering what that would be like.
Pinned in the pocket of Miss Emily’s dress was a letter, pinned so it never could be lost, though had it been put through the washing and beaten with the dollie-stick a hundred times till the water ran clean, there would not have been much of a letter left after that.
I unpinned it and took it out from Miss Emily’s dress pocket. It was not sealed or yet addressed but only folded and pinned and so I thought it nothing more than a poem she might have written or a recipe copied down from a book or a note on what she needed from the stationer’s – new paper or ink or pens. And where’s the harm in looking to see what she’d written if she’d written only that?
Only it was a wee letter and I know I should not have read it, should have folded it shut again and set the pin back in place and delivered it back to Miss Emily.
‘Dear and dearest’ is how it began and more than that, ‘Darling’ and other such endearments. On and on it went about how Miss Emily missed this person she was writing to, how the days when she din’t hear from them were long and every hour had in it a hundred hours and Miss Emily could not bear it, that time weighed so heavy. I do not have the letter to heart so I only remember and memory is ever imperfect so I only recall the sense of what was written. But one line I do have and Miss Emily wrote ‘I begin to hope for you’, by which I believe she meant that she hoped her love would be returned pound for pound.
It was a love letter. It was the loveliest love letter I ever saw and I was a little out of breath with the reading of it and I think maybe that was the intent. Breathless and light-headed I was so that I had to sit, there on the washroom floor. Oh, if only I was loved like that, I thought, and I pressed that thought and the letter to my heart.
After, I folded the letter and pinned it fast and set it where the hot air of the washroom could not reach and ruffle the page.
Later, when the bread was baked and set to cool and dresses danced on the drying line – and it is odd to me remembering that they danced that morning when they had not danced on any other washday Monday morning, or at least I had not ever thought of them as dancing before – and the house was up and about its business, I crept upstairs and quietly left the pinned letter on Miss Emily’s desk.
I felt something then, when I closed the door of Miss Emily’s room and the last that I saw of the letter was its place in the centre of her desk. I wasn’t sure at first but it was as though the words of the letter were somehow mine, that I had written them and now awaited an answer, longed for a word of reply and some return for the love I had written. And I understood in that moment all Miss Emily’s slammed shut doors and the stamped feet, and the sighing heard through open windows, or keyhole tears once. And the looking for the postboy each morning and asking and asking if he has yet been and if there was anything with her name on it.
I sighed and returned to the kitchen.
‘Open me carefully,’ Miss Emily’d written at the bottom of the page. And the letter was to Susan Huntington, ‘Dear and darling Susie,’ she’d wrote. And ‘open me carefully’ and not when anyone is by so that it is a secret just between Miss Emily and Miss Susan, ’cept now I know and my heart yearns and I look for the postboy now, as much as Miss Emily does, and I wonder where on earth he can be with his dillying and dallying, and I am a little cross when he does turn up and there is nothing for Miss Emily.
Join us at the upcoming Edinburgh launch event for Hope Never Knew Horizon.