Re: Edward
Ah, well, I perhaps wouldn’t get too attached to that impression of me, I fear it about to take a sudden dip.
I’m sorry for you both. Thank you for sharing it with me. I shall hope most fervently that you are never removed from this place. What if he arrived here? I am answering my own question by asserting that one cannot simply sit and wait for something that may never happen, but take destiny into their own hands. Is that about the size of it?
Now your story was in fact quite an endearing one, if not rather a tale of woe. I’m afraid my own admission is less pleasing.
My marriage to Bertha was at the arrangement of our parents, and we first met the day we were to wed. It is not uncommon, and I do not think it will be so strange to your sensibilities either. I knew she was not well before even a week was up, and I was advised to simply institutionalise her in Jamaica (for that is where we were married) and return to Europe and mention it to no one. (The arrangement, it transpires, was more for the security of some plantations between our families, and nothing to do with our own happiness or otherwise).
I am delaying. My point is simply that she was never a wife to me, but simply someone I felt responsible for because no one else was going to do anything to help her. But I was never anything other than a strange man to her, she would never remember for long. So, my point is that I was not faithful to her. There was not anything promised, it was always quite clear that I had no intention of marrying. At least it had always been that way.
I met someone else. I tried not to love her, but it was impossible. I tried to push her away, but I know I always confused her so with seeetness one day and coldness the next. I tried to make her think I was sweet on someone else. Oh, she was a good Christian girl who would never have become all tied up with me if she had known the truth, that my wife lived still. I tried to excuse myself with the knowledge that insanity is a legal grounds to end the marriage, but at the same time if I ended the marriage, she would be at the mercy of her brother. Indeed, I invited him to come and see his sister and I know not what was said, but she violently attacked him and... not really the point, but I could see that he was not up to the job. If I went through the law, it would be no good.
I made the girl promises I could not keep. At any point I could have stopped and told her the truth but I was so very selfish, I knew that as soon as she heard of my wife she would be gone and it felt like if she left I would never recover myself, I would bleed inwardly, I would just lie down and die in the street. It is not an excuse, it is just how it felt. I convinced myself that it didn’t count as being married, that we had never consummated the marriage, was the Jamaica marriage really binding in England? (Yes, is the answer, by the way.) Too selfish, too afraid of the truth, I let her get all the way to altar before she found out I could not marry her. And even then it was my brother-in-law who stopped it, not me.
I told her all thereafter, and while she said that she pitied me, forgave me, loved me still even, she of course could not stay. I begged with her, but she had far too much self-respect to live in sin with another woman’s husband. So she left, I know not where she went. She took no money and very few possessions. I can only hope someone was kind and helped her along her way.