A Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates

  So abash’d was Octavia by this well-delivered speech, and so intimidated by her sister’s cool green gaze, that she fairly shrank away, with many profuse apologies; and allowed her impatient sister to pass.

  Poor Octavia! It was a measure of her loneliness, within her own family, and the somewhat disordered state of her sensibilities, that, in those weeks preceding the wedding, she succumbed to many a lachrymal outburst, and would dearly have loved to be but a carefree child again, sharing her bedchamber with pretty little Malvinia. “How you have deserted me, my heartless sister!” Octavia murmured, seeing again the winsome image of her younger sister, and the bright-glittering mischief of her periwinkle eyes. “But I shall have my revenge upon you—I daresay—for I shall be a married woman within a fortnight, while you—piteous creature—are but a fallen woman, scorned by all decent persons, and bent upon the pathway to perdition!”—this ejaculation so little pleasing the unhappy girl, she surrendered to a fresh spasm of weeping, and hid away in her bedchamber, behind a locked door, to be summoned out only by the repeated demands and protestations of Mrs. Zinn: for Madame Blanchet and her young French seamstress had arrived, and the day’s fittings must begin.

  Miss Octavia Zinn’s emotional vagaries, in those confused days before she became Mrs. Lucius Rumford, will afford perhaps a morbid interest, to those harboring a curiosity concerning such extreme states of mind; but cannot have a general interest, nor, I am confident in asserting, would Octavia herself have granted them any value, after she had become initiated into the honorable obligations of wifehood. That she alternated between ecstatic flights of fancy, and moments of unmitigated dread; that she hurried about the house humming and singing beneath her breath, like a very young child anticipating Christmas, and then stopped short, and began to tremble, and weep, as if knowing that something hideous lay ahead; that she dwelt o’ermuch upon the grave, communing, in her heart, with her belovèd Grandmother Kidde­master (whose spirit, the impressionable young lady halfway believed, dwelt in the enormous rosewood wardrobe with its happy abundance of drawers), or that, in impetuous reaction against such thoughts, she betook herself for long unauthorized walks in the wild forest above the gorge (so startling Mr. Zinn, Samantha, and Nahum, upon one embarrassing occasion, that the inventors believed they had seen a veritable ghost in the woods nearby!—a stumbling aimless figure in a light-colored gown, with a white cap upon its head that quite obscured its face); that she was continually dropping stitches in her knitting, or pricking her fingers with her needle, whereupon her fine Irish linen became dotted with blood—all this is hardly to Octavia’s credit, yet has some small historical veracity, and suggests a surprising parallel, inaccurate in other respects, with Constance Philippa, in the weeks and days preceding her wedding. Indeed, so unbalanced did Octavia’s judgment become, and so beclouded by spurious sentiment, that she found herself yearning for the companionship of her lost older sister, whose abstergent wit, and scorn for such frivolities as dress fittings, she believed would be most refreshing. But how dismaying, how unspeakable, Constance Philippa’s crime!—to have broken the sacred bonds of matrimony upon her very wedding night, and to have brought such disgrace upon her family: for which she might never be forgiven, save perhaps in the other world. (And Octavia even found herself thinking, with a wistful melancholy, that she should not have minded, even, seeking solace from Deirdre: she might have crept into her bed, and the two of them might have shivered and hugged and wept, and Octavia could then speak of her own sudden terror of being orphaned—of all the imaginable fates, the most cruel.)

  Cousin Rowena might have been expected to be of some aid, but her spirits were somewhat depressed, as a consequence of an apparent recurrence of the pregnant state, following close upon a grievous miscarriage, and several months’ difficult convalescence: and so, apart from pressing into Octavia’s hand Dr. Mudrick’s invaluable book, she behaved rather evasively, and offered advice of an agreeably sunny, but rather general, nature, stating that Octavia, as a young bride, must remember at all times that the marriage bond is sacred, and the issue springing from it blessèd, and that Jesus Christ would never be far from Octavia’s side, should she require His guidance. (She went on to say, with a queer gratified vehemence, that Delphine Martineau, who had once held her head so high, had truly backed herself into a tight corner, having married a “genuine” brute of a husband, who drank, gambled, and, it was rumored, consorted with females of a certain classification.)

  On the very eve of her wedding day, Octavia found it difficult to sleep, and quite exhausted herself, with a feverish scribbling in her diary, of a most unnatural—and, indeed, uncharacteristic—nature. I am visited by such thoughts! the wayward young lady wrote, I scarce know how to gauge them: a sudden hideous image of a skinned rabbit on the hearth, the poor thing freckled with blood; Grandmother Kidde­master in her casket; a confus’d memory of the son of that Irish coachman of Grandfather’s—I shall not sully the page with his name—for ’tis of little moment—as a young boy of perhaps twelve or thirteen, in the company of rough boys like himself—workers’ sons, it may be—frolicking some distance downriver—bathing and splashing one another—and our little drawing and sketching class, led by the French governess Grandfather had secured for us for a brief spell, taken all unawares—and most affrighted—and—and I forget— And, indeed, the o’erwrought girl did seem to have forgotten, not only what sight had so astonished her and her sisters, on the riverbank so many years before, but why, in fact, she was attempting to record it.

  So she ripped the offending page out of her diary, and, bethinking herself of the entire project, that of recording her intimate thoughts over a period of some years, decided emphatically that the entire diary must be destroyed, before the morn: and spent an hour or more feeding the pages into her fireplace, that no evidence of Octavia Theodora Zinn should be preserved, when she took her rightful place as Mrs. Lucius Rumford.

  FORTY-SIX

  It will come as no great surprise, to the mature reader, that our distraught heroine’s apprehension regarding the wedding ritual, and the matrimonial bed, and Mr. Rumford himself, proved to be totally unfounded.

  Indeed, upon the sunlit morn of her first day as Mrs. Rumford, the deeply gratified Octavia spent upward of an hour upon her knees, in the privacy of her dressing room, giving fulsome thanks to Our Heavenly Father, and to His belovèd Son, that she was at last a wife, and had been brought forever under the protection of a loving husband.

  Octavia so lingered in the tearful bliss of prayer, and in fussing over a small wound on her right shoulder, which she had not wished her maid to see (for, negligible tho’ the wound was, and emitting hardly a thimbleful of blood, it did present an angry, reddened, alarming appearance), that, upon descending at last to the breakfast room, as the hour chimed seven, she found Mr. Rumford already gone: and had to content herself with eating alone. It may have been the unfamiliarity of the room, with its high ceiling, and featureless walls, and somewhat grimy wainscoting; it may have been the curt manner of the elderly maid, whose oft-reiterated Missus had a singularly hissing sound; it may have been that Octavia dearly missed her bridegroom’s presence, at so momentous an occasion as her first breakfast in Rumford Hall: in any case she had little appetite, forcing herself to swallow but two or three mouthfuls of coffee, and a mere half-piece of cold buttered toast.

  Her heart beat in a flurry, and she closed again her moist eyes: summoning forth Mr. Rumsford’s cherished countenance, and the dry, acerb odor of his muttonchop whiskers and hair, and the several words of affection and esteem he had uttered, the previous night, in the midst of his strange, protracted exertions. She hoped she had proven worthy of the sanctity of the marriage bed, of which her elders had spoken so emphatically, and yet so evasively; she dared to hope that blessèd issue would one day spring—she knew not altogether how—from that unitary act, into which Mr. Rumford had initiated her.

  (As a consequence of her assiduous application of the cautionary
words of Dr. Mudrick, to her own situation, Octavia had completely triumphed over a gross inclination to “succumb to unseemly or ill-timed emotion,” and had, through a generally voluntary stratagem of her own discovery, succeeded in overcoming a childish propensity for both tears and fright. This was accomplished thusly: upon the very onset of Mr. Rumford’s most vigorous, and, as it were, corporeal attentions to her body, Octavia had stuffed a considerable quantity of her lace-trimmed pillowcase into her mouth, to stifle her surprised screams; and, when that expedient proved but a stopgap, she had turned her head sharply, in order to gnaw at her own tender shoulder—not drawing a sufficient quantity of blood, fortunately, to attract Mr. Rumford’s notice, or to deflect from the energetic procreative travail, to which that worthy gentleman had applied himself.)

  The bride’s most treasured reward being, upon the cessation of Mr. Rumford’s prolonged wheezing and plunging and pumping, a scarce-audible, but unmistakable, blessing: “. . . wife.”

  RUMFORD HALL WAS as distinctively an historical dwelling place as Kidde­master Hall, tho’ lacking grandeur and ostentation; and somewhat overcast, it may be, by an appearance of crabbèd gloom, emanating from the steep turreted roofs upon which mold, or dull-hued moss, grew in some profusion; and the tall narrow windows, many of them shuttered against the chill; and the flinty dark granite of which the building was constructed, which bespoke stolidity rather than grace, and sombre dignity rather than charm. The mansion house was composed of three storeys, with cellar and attic, and enjoyed no extraordinary vista, having been built not atop a hill, like Kidde­master Hall, but rather in a sort of sunken glade, in which the ground was forever somewhat spongy underfoot, and, in springtime, badly puddled. About the main property a fifteen-foot brick wall had been constructed, with a narrow porter’s gate, and a generous quantity of iron bars and spikes—not o’erly sharp, Octavia was quick to note, rusted with the years, and doubtless quite dull.

  “Rumford Hall!” the young bride murmured under her breath, when, her bridegroom beside her, she had been driven through the main gate, still in her pretty wedding finery, with her filmy veil upon her head. “And I—mistress!”

  Mr. Rumford being a gentleman of few words, and those judiciously chosen, with no flair for meretricious display, or drawing-room gallantry, he expended little time in introducing the new Mrs. Rumford to the senior members of the housekeeping staff, all the while stroking and fumbling at his sandy-hued beard (not in nervousness, I should hasten to report: for Mr. Rumford was of a settled, grave disposition), and told her, in a voice she might have wished were lowered, that she would not find her duties o’ertaxing, but they were demanding, and required a very early rising, and constant surveillance, and extreme discipline; for, servants being of a naturally lazy disposition (and a number here were Irish), they were most perspicacious in regard to any laxity, let alone slovenliness, either of a corporeal or a spiritual nature, in the mistress of the household. “And yet,” Mr. Rumford said, his pale lips shifting in the semblance of a husbandly smile, whilst his pebble-colored gaze retained its necessary dignity, “and yet, my dear Mrs. Rumford, I do not doubt you: I do not doubt that you will fulfill your duties more than satisfactorily.”

  At which kindly words, the young woman did not trust herself to reply, but, with tear-brimming eyes, modestly bowed her head.

  WHERE, DURING THE romantic days of their courtship, Mr. Lucius Rumford had been to Octavia a scarce-grasped phenomenon, most readily approached in its elements (a top hat of gray silk and cotton correctly laid upon a table, or upon the carpet, with a pair of dark gloves correctly laid across the rim; a calling card of precisely the correct weight and quality of paper, the engraving having been done by Rilker & Sons of Philadelphia, in the typeface employed by all the best families; a pair of muttonchop whiskers in which sand-colored hues, and white, and silver, were unevenly blended, and which gave to his hoary face an almost youthful dash; and a distinctive odor, as of dry leaves, or ash), he was now, as her lawfully wedded husband, and the master of Rumford Hall, an altogether different experience: no less formidable, perhaps, and certainly no less impersonal, but a great deal more immediate, upon the necessity of their retiring to their bedchamber each night.

  “My dear Mrs. Rumford,” Mr. Rumford said, in a not unkindly voice, rising from his chair beside the fireplace (in which, to save fuel, a modest fire of somewhat damp oak logs burnt), “I believe it is, is it not?—time to retire.”

  Whereupon Octavia let fall her knitting, as if startl’d, and said, with alacrity: “Yes, Mr. Rumford, I am certain it is.”

  And the required servants were rung, and the married couple ascended the staircase, to their bedchamber on the second floor of the old house, and each retired to a dressing room, attended by a servant, and performed the necessary ablutions, and was helped to dress for the night: each step of which Octavia followed without question, tho’ it did puzzle her, at first, but only at first (Octavia being not of a restive or skeptical mind), that, after she had bathed, she was required to put back on not only her chemise, and her petticoats, but her stiff whalebone corset as well—tho’ she was allowed to leave off, for the night, her wide-rimmed crinoline, for which she was meekly grateful; and, of course, her wire-and-horsehair bustle, which was out of the question, under such nocturnal circumstances.

  It is a radically different nighttime attire, from what I wore in my childish maidenhood, Octavia bethought herself, dressing in haste, but so, I must remember, is my elevated station in life now radically different, from all that preceded it.

  Ofttimes Mr. Rumford allowed Octavia to know, by way of her lady’s maid, that the master wished her to wear “her prettiest morning cap” too, or “her prettiest bonnet”: which quite ruled out the possibility, for poor Octavia, of undoing her heavy hair, and extracting the “rats” and other false pieces, which so vexed her during the day, and were quite horrific at night. But she could comprehend the gentleman’s distaste at being forced to glimpse a bare head, and gave some inward thanks, for her own part, that, whenever, in the privacy of their bedchamber, she chanced to catch sight of her husband, his nightcap was firmly ensconced on his narrow head, and not a single offending hair protruded.

  Mr. Rumford had evidently a weakness, as well, for every variety of attractive trim—silk ribbons, and bows, and ruching, and fringing, and feathers, and beads, and tinsel, and sequins, and crocheting, and lace, and embroidery, and even gold brocade—some of which, taken from a massive cherrywood wardrobe in one corner of the bedchamber, must have belonged to Mr. Rumford’s deceased wife. (Or wives: for Octavia had not been informed, and did not like to inquire, whether Mr. Rumford was a widower twice over, or but once; similarly, she was not altogether certain of the precise number of his children, and of their specific ages.)

  “And here, ma’am, from the master’s own hand,” the maid might whisper, looping about Octavia’s neck a feather boa of the softest swansdown, or entwining in her plump bodice a chain of sateen rosebuds: the which our Octavia accepted without question, and even with some nervous relief, for it would greatly embarrass her to feel exposed, in her physical self, even in the bridal bed: for the puritanical sternness of Mr. Rumford’s Calvinist faith would brook no carelessness in such matters.

  Upon many a night, then, and particularly during the first several months of their marriage, before Octavia’s initial pregnancy became too evident, the young Mrs. Rumford was led by her lady’s maid to the enormous fourposter bed, with the sombre silken canopy, and the high, hard horsehair mattress, to await her bridegroom, attired in a most remarkable, but certainly fetching, costume, of a sort that, in her virginal ignorance, she had not guessed married women wore: this costume consisting, for the most part (tho’ naturally it varied from night to night, according to Mr. Rumford’s instruction), of cotton chemise, and calico “cover,” and whalebone corset (laced as tightly, alas! as its strings would bear), and yet another lightsome cover, and a half-dozen or more petticoats of silk, or satin, or
cotton, or muslin, or poplin, all flounces and frills and puffs and draped folds, over which was arranged, by the harried mistress and her silent maid, as many as fifty or sixty or even seventy yards of trimming: in order to prevent, one must infer, Mr. Rumford’s nocturnal gaze from encountering any unnecessary exposure of female flesh, which would surely have been repugnant to him, despite Our Heavenly Father’s blessing of the bridal bed, and His emphatic imperative that Adam and Eve, and all their progeny, increase and multiply, that the earth may be inhabited, and Christianized.

  The bride being carefully arranged on her side of the bed, some distance from the tasseled cord by which the servants were summoned, the maid noiselessly extinguished all but a single candle, and left the room; and, within a minute, bearing his own candle aloft, the bridegroom made his entrance from out his dressing room, in what might have been his slippers, or even his stocking feet, judging by the hushed quiet with which he approached the bed. The degree of darkness in the bedchamber varied considerably from night to night, as Octavia gathered, without, it cannot be too firmly stressed, making any deliberate effort to recall, or compare, or analyze, or assess, one marital night in terms of another, or any marital night in terms of a virginal night, from days long past: the precise degree of darkness being, in any case, problematic, since Octavia was not invariably in a position to know, Mr. Rumford either pointedly requesting, or wordlessly allowing her to know his request, that she acquiesce to a hood, of some lightsome and altogether agreeable material (muslin, it may have been, or the finest silk: but never wool, linen, or satin, which would have interfered gravely with her breathing, and become uncomfortably warm), the which accoutrement was generally drawn over her head, hair and head covering and all, with no haste, and certainly no roughness or impatience of manner, on the part of the master. Thus blinded, the young woman could not, with confidence, determine whether Mr. Rumford extinguished both candles, or one, or none: or whether, his mood quite naturally varying from night to night, he varied too the degree of illumination, and might even, unbeknownst to Mrs. Rumford, light an additional candle or two, or even the kerosene lamp, for his own purposes. (So scrupulously devoid of all unseemly curiosity was Mr. Rumford’s new wife, that, upon the morn, oft finding herself alone in her bedchamber—Mr. Rumford having earlier departed, in order to lead favored menservants in prayer, and the daily Bible reading—she rang at once for her maid, and did not allow her frivolous gaze to wander about, to determine whether any curio of the previous night was in evidence, or even whether the wick in the kerosene lamp was more greatly scorch’d, than she could recall. For the lessons she had eagerly learned from out Miss Edwina Kidde­master’s many handbooks of wisdom, coupled with her dear mother’s diplomatic hints along these lines, and, it scarcely needs to be said, her own intrinsic delicacy and feminine reticence of soul, cautioned her against any foolish expenditure of attention, in matters not of her concern, and which might provoke, in her belovèd husband, any acrimonious rejoinder, or—tho’ it rarely came to this, as I am obliged to record—any exaggeration of manly force, during the unitary act, which might result in severe and punitive pain, in the nether regions, or elsewhere, in Mrs. Rumford. But I do make haste to explain, to the fair-minded reader, that the alarm and terror of the bridal night, and, indeed, the excruciating pain our childlike virgin endured, all the while most considerably grinding her teeth against her milk-soft shoulder, was but rarely repeated—and then, only, one infers, with the greatest reluctance on Mr. Rumford’s part, rather out of a sense of castigatory discipline, than any animal passion, pleasure, or corporeal lust! It cannot be a human member, not even a masculine, virile object of reproduction, the affrighted virgin thought wildly, in her agony, upon the occasion of her bridegroom’s laborious consummation of their love, that first night: it must be, ah! I know not, dear God! of wood, or stone, or hardened wax, or some unnameable substance!—these very words, near-sinful in what they suggest of rebelliousness, and indelicacy of character, being banished forever from the bride’s thoughts, upon the dawn, and the resuming of the pure and unpolluted daylight world, in which she was again Mrs. Rumford, the new mistress of Rumford Hall.)