Chapter Text
--- PROLOGUE ---
Diary of Mrs Margaret Bell
Aboard the RMS Lucasta — En Route to Buenos Aires
November 28th, 1849
The air grows warmer by the day. The sea is a vast, ridiculous blue, as if God Himself knocked over an inkwell and let it bleed into the water.
Adam has been reading Pope aloud to me during the afternoons. I prefer Wordsworth, but he says it lacks rigor. He is, as ever, intellectually precise, even in sickness. He corrects my Latin with gentle amusement.
Our journey began, as things with Adam do, with a wry suggestion. “I’ve a theory about the curative properties of dry South American air. Shall we go test it?”
At first I thought it another of his schemes, floated with more wit than expectation. But he was serious, or rather, serious in the way that Adam is: determined beneath his irony.
“We’ll have adventures, my girl,” he said. “It will be gloriously inappropriate.”
I agreed. The idea had a wildness to it, but also because I could not have let him go alone.
He coughs less in this air, or perhaps the salt winds carry the sound away. He insists he feels stronger, though his hands tremble when he holds his tea. The doctor said the dry warmth of Argentina will ease his breathing, but we know we are not sailing toward recovery, but toward farewell.
He has encouraged me to keep this journal. “You may as well write it down, my dear. You always notice more than you ought to.”
He will sometimes say things like that.
Buenos Aires
December 14th, 1849
We have arrived.
The city is unlike anything I expected. Its streets bustle with carriages rattling over cobblestones, gauchos striding past in deep red ponchos, women clad in skirts of starling brightness, markets heaped with fruits more colourful than anything I have seen. Everywhere, there is red: in vests, hatbands, doors, windows, lanterns.
The faces astonish me most—swarthy Spaniards, night-skinned Africans, flaxen-haired Frenchmen, dark-eyed Indians, and florid Englishmen. What strange accident of history has brought such different people to this distant corner of the world?
The Spanish tongue is quick, light and musical. And the heat! It wraps around me so thickly I cannot quite breathe.
We have taken a residence in Recoleta, on a wide, well-paved street lined with trees. The house is low and whitewashed and built around a courtyard that glows with bougainvillea and clusters of purple grapes. There is a fountain in the center, chipped and green with age, that gurgles contentedly through the day. I find it soothing.
The architecture is peculiar. There are no passages or halls connecting the rooms. To move from the front salon to the kitchen, or to reach one's chamber, one must pass through all intervening rooms. One lives in full view here.
But the most charming is the flat roof—azotea, our cook tells me. In the evening when the rooms below turned stifling, we ascended to catch the river breeze. Adam sat in his chair while I walked the perimeter, watching our terrace stretch and slope into the river.
I unpacked our books first.
December 16th, 1849
Adam is in good spirits. We took a carriage to the Plaza de la Victoria. The ombú trees fascinate him, such strange, swollen trunks supporting canopies that seemed to float above the ground.
There was a procession of horsemen, men in crimson jackets with gleaming knives and spurs and women with shawls thrown over their heads, laughing gaily, their fans mischievous.
The women are striking here, their eyes lively even beneath their veil.
December 22nd, 1849
We attended service at the Anglican chapel. It is sparse and rather gloomy, with English roses awkwardly blooming in pots. There were other English families in attendance: the Lowells, the Petherbridges, the Gowlands, and a solemn young man with ink-stained fingers who turned out to be a junior diplomat. The sermon was grim, but the choir was enthusiastic.
I find that Adam, when he forgets himself, will often hum along. He caught me watching him and gave me a soft smile.
Later, we walked through the market in San Telmo. He bought me a silver comb from an old man who claimed it once belonged to the daughter of a Spanish nobleman, before the revolution. We suspect it was made last month, but I accepted it with a curtsy and a smile. Adam seemed pleased.
December 26th, 1849
Yesterday we attended a Christmas party at the Petherbridges, English sugar investors. They had done their best: palm fronds in place of holly, oranges piled high in bowls, and plum pudding lighted with brandy. There was even a punch bowl. Adam sipped once and grimaced.
Men smoked freely, even in the presence of ladies—a local custom adopted without protest. I sat with the wives and listened to them speak of letters and packages from home that arrive late but intact.
I slipped into the garden while the guests sang “Holly and the Ivy.”
When we returned, he kissed my forehead and said, “A very tolerable evening, wouldn’t you say?”
January 4th, 1850
It rained today but not like the rain in England. It was sudden and biblical. The sky darkened in an instant, thunder cracked and lightning flashed. I waited under the awning of a bookstall, soaked and laughing, breathless with the wild joy of it.
Adam looked up from his chair when I came in. Must you always run toward the storm, he asked, his voice sharp, cold, unexpectedly precise, like a pin through flesh.
I opened Wordsworth. “Byron would be more suited for such meteorological drama,” he offered.
I think we quarreled.
January 6th, 1850
We were invited to another gathering, this time hosted by the Lowells. There was music, alternatingly mournful and festive, and long discussions about railway investments and Rosas’ tightening control of the provinces. I half-listened, but Adam thrives in these rooms.
He introduced me to a young English botanist. “My wife,” he gestured and then looked at me as if it had surprised him.
January 20th, 1850
His decline has begun.
He sits on the azotea and reads, though he turns fewer pages than before and complains when he has to get up. He dictates letters now instead of writing them.
Today he had me reply to his solicitor about his properties and tenants in Milton-Northern. I asked what he wished me to say. He only shrugged and said: “You know my mind on these matters. Say what you think is reasonable.”
He’s been giving me more of it—quietly and without much ceremony. That is his way, but he watches me closely when I write.
February 1st, 1850
He no longer joins me on my walks. Instead, I bring the city back to him. I tell him stories: the milk-boys racing each other on horses, the laundrywomen spreading linen across the green sward near the Alameda, the street urchin who tried to sell me a pair of wild ducks.
He listens with his eyes closed and calls me Scheherazade.
I have taken to sketching the buildings, the columns and arches, the flat rooftops, the cathedral dome, the shuttered windows.
February 20th, 1850
I walk further now, beyond the English streets, into parts of the city where the carriages give way to ox-drawn carts, where people don’t slow their speech for the Inglesa.
The contrasts here are brutal. Elegant houses stand next to miserable mud-huts, gardens of impossible lushness spill over walls, while just beyond, there is a carcass of a dead horse.
Sometimes I’m afraid. But one finds unexpected beauty too. I bought peaches and the old woman who sold it smiled at me with such warmth, her weathered hands wrapped the fruits in a cloth with such tenderness. I bought more than I needed.
I saw Mrs Lowell upon my return. She was getting into her carriage, pulling on her gloves. She looked startled to see me, my skirts dusted with the street, my hands full of fruit. I smiled and kept walking.
Adam sleeps most of the day.
He murmured in his sleep last night: “Forgive me.” When I asked what for, he blinked at me and said, “For not being better. For not giving you your own life sooner.”
March 5th, 1850
He coughed blood.
Dr Molina comes daily now, though there is little he can do. Adam has taken to quoting Ovid in sleep, and sometimes addresses me as if I were his college tutor. Then, lucid again, he apologises.
I cannot cry in front of him. He has always admired composure.
March 15th, 1850
Adam does not rise now. He likes looking at the courtyard in the mornings when the sun is low. He watches the light creep up the wall and says it reminds him of Oxford.
Yesterday, he asked me what I would do after.
I told him I hadn’t thought of it.
He said, “Then start. Start now. Perhaps your second life has already begun.”
March 21st, 1850
He died at the edge of morning, with the windows open and birds singing like mad things in the trees. I was holding his hand. He didn’t speak, not in the final moments. Just looked at me, and I knew that whatever I had been to him—daughter, wife, pupil—I had been enough.
March 30th, 1850
The stone is plain. His name, his years, and one line from Horace that he had chosen: Non omnis moriar.
In the mornings, I sit with my tea and try to remember what I wanted to do before. I’m not yet sure what I will do next.
But for the first time, I think the question belongs to me.