Extract: The Defiance of Frances Dickinson

1838, England: When eighteen-year-old heiress Frances Dickinson impulsively marries Lieutenant John Geils, she soon discovers there is much about her husband she did not know. A cruel and violent man, John keeps Frances in isolation on his family's estate in Scotland, while spending her fortune and preying upon their maids. A story of gaslighting, control and one woman's fight, The Defiance of Frances Dickinson reveals the truth behind one of the most sensational divorce trials of the nineteenth century. This is an edited extract from The Defiance of Frances Dickinson (Affirm Press) by Wendy Parkins – out now. Frances / Farley Hill Court, Berkshire / July 1845

A nightjar rattles. Unbaptised children turn into nightjars if they die, it is said.

My new daughter, pink and plump and not yet two weeks old, sleeps in the nursery upstairs. When I was a girl in that same nursery, curtains drawn against the lingering twilight, a nightjar’s strange churring would tell me I was not the only creature awake, impatient for dawn and for the freedom of park and wood once more.

The bird strikes up again, like a grating whirr within my own feverish head. All is quiet in the house. Earlier, I heard Mama’s door close and Hester’s soft tread pass quickly by. Mother retires early when John is here. No further sound will come from her room; she sleeps deeply after her black drops.

I turn over onto my back and stretch out each leg carefully, feeling that dark, sticky wetness between them. So much blood this past seven years! Worst of all, those glistening clots after a missed flow or two. At first, I had grieved those losses, like that time – in that other place – when I had lain on the floor of my chamber as a dragging ache took hold of me. By then I knew all too well what was happening yet I did not move, staying where John had pushed me down until Betty, my only ally, came to light my fire and found me. She stripped away the bloodied underthings past saving, bringing towels to staunch the flow and carrying away the terrible gobbets that made me shiver to behold, cold to my core.

The dark stain on the rug beneath me that day was so deep it had been a week or more before the rug could be restored to its place, the bare boards of my room a daily reproach. I cringed to think of the servants scrubbing and blotting, cursing me for their extra labours. Ever after, in the right light, I could still make out a shadow on the rug, the stain of failure, but also – tell no one – the trace of a life saved in the losing. Yes, a life saved, I truly came to believe. She who had left nothing but that shadow would never know what it was to walk that wretched house, to be bruised and betrayed there. She was free, unbound, just as her mother longed to be. Or perhaps he – an even more blessed release, if so. He would never be raised to be one of them.

* * *

Dr Bulley says Cecile must be my last, that the blood loss has been perilous and ought not to be risked again. There is damage, he says. He insists, too, that I consider a wet nurse, much to Mama’s disapproval. She had deferred weaning her only child for so long that it was considered almost vulgar in a lady of her station but you scarcely ever cried, everyone marvelled at that, she always says. I grew up robust and fearless, a little wild even. I never sickened – unless from too much indulgence in the kitchen, where Cook knew my taste for all things sweet – until I left this home and went north to that place.

Strangely, my girlish strength seemed to return to me here in the months before Cecile was born. I walked out most days, taking a familiar path to a glade where I could lie at my ease among sun-warmed bracken. Late one afternoon, watching golden strands of web waft in the warm air above me, the flesh on my belly suddenly tightened and I knew my time had come. I lumbered back to my feet and slowly retraced my steps; Cecile was pulled from me with the first streaks of the next day’s dawn.

* * *

When I looked out my windows this morning, having forced myself to get up and walk unsteadily about the room – I must get strong again, quickly! – I saw a row of bedsheets billowing in the breeze. It is Friday, I think, but there has been so much linen stripped from my bed that the maids have been firing up the laundry coppers almost daily. I hope they do not curse me here, too. God knows I am heartily sick of the mocking whiteness of freshly-laundered sheets that become clammy and soiled as soon as I lie in them, and of stale nightdresses, spotted rust-red below, with crusty yellowed patches across my breasts.

I seep, I leak, I cannot be contained. I am ebbing away like a foul tide, and yet John will not leave me alone, coming to my chamber last night after arriving from Scotland, still out of temper with my refusal to be brought to delivery in the house where those little never-babies dwell. A go by, I have heard such creatures called, as if merely passing shades that leave no mark, no pang, no scar.

He had cursed at the mess resulting from his efforts, but I squeezed my eyes shut and kept silent, straining to hear any night sounds from the feathered darkness beyond. After he had finished and gone, I had that dream again, waking with an acrid dryness souring my mouth and the sheet somehow twisted round my throat.

List! A step outside the door, too heavy to be Dinah, checking if I require a night draught or a change of linen. My heart thumps wildly, and, in response, I feel the throb of bruised flesh deep within, the hot sting of torn skin between my legs. I cannot suppress the sob that rises, even though I know that my weakness only inflames him. It is too much to bear. He will destroy me, of that I am certain.

And not me alone? Thoughts of my daughters flood my mind, like small apparitions spirited down from the floor above; the new babe and her three sisters, sleeping in their chamber beside the nursery. I see my own blue eyes staring back at me from their trusting faces and their presence is so strong I smell their young freshness like the first tart apples of the season. Oh, my poor girls, we must take flight!

The Defiance of Frances Dickinson is available in bookshops now.