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1893

Lovelace Cottage

Heartsease

February 1894

My darling Edward,

I trust this letter finds you well. I wish I could be by your side drawing all your discoveries, as I used to when we went on our country rambles, here in Sussex. I cannot imagine how you manage in such a hot climate, with only poor Mr Salter to help you. He doesn’t sound as though he is the best or most interesting of companions!

I long to see you, and hope that you will be back in Heartsease in the summer when our son – I am sure it is a son, he kicks so lustily! – will be born. Won’t it be lovely to have a baby in the summer, sitting out in our beautiful garden? I cannot wait to see him or you.

Hurry home to me soon, my love, we both grow impatient!

Your loving wife

Lily

Delhi

March 1894

Dearest Lily,

You are quite right, Mr Salter is a poor companion compared with you. He suffers badly in this heat, poor chap, constantly takes snuff and I suspect from the way his hand shakes in the morning he secretly drinks. He tries very hard, but his skills in drawing are nothing like yours, but I don’t have the heart to tell him so. Besides if I got rid of him, I’m not sure who would help me.

I hope to be finished with my expedition towards the end of the month, and am aiming to be back in Heartsease in June, just in time for the baby to be born.

The days cannot pass quickly enough till we meet again.

Your ever loving

Edward

Lovelace Cottage

Heartsease

May 1894

My dearest Edward,

I am sorry to write with sad news, but Lily’s baby arrived too soon. The doctor did all he could, but your son was born with the cord wrapped round his neck. He died soon after he was born. Lily is distraught and has not risen from her bed since. I cannot persuade her that her grief is too much and she should be more restrained. She is like a wild child when I try to calm her. The doctor has been and prescribed laudanum, but I fear for her wits if she carries on like this.

I hope you will be able to return soon, Lily needs you.

Your ever loving Mother

Delhi

May 1894

My dear Mother,

Thank you for you letter. I write to you with a heavy heart. I am sorry to be away once again, when Lily has need of me. I know you will look after her as I would. She is too fragile sometimes for this world, I fear, and bears her sorrows more keenly than others do. I am sure God will see fit to bless us with a child soon. I wish Lily could share this hope, but sadly she does not.

I hope to be home as soon as I can. Until then I remain,

Your ever loving son,

Edward

Lily Handford’s diary, June 1894

The summer blooms bright and strong out there in the garden. Edward’s garden. I hear the sounds of the birds and part of me wants to join the joyful song. But I cannot. I feel trapped here in this dark room, but the dark is like a warm shroud that comforts me. I cannot abide the windows being opened. I do not want to let the light in. There is precious little light in my life now. I cannot believe we will ever hold a baby that breathes and lives long enough to laugh.

At least this time I was able to hold my baby boy for a short time, even if he didn’t have the strength to suckle.

They say he died in sin. There was no time to baptize him. Father will not even allow him to be buried in the churchyard. My poor innocent little boy. How could he have sinned? How could God have let him die?

No, there is no light in my life, and none in my heart. Nor do I think there can ever be again.

Edward Handford came home to a very different wife. The household was cold and bare. There was no joy any more. The Lily he remembered only two short years ago, laughing with him by the willow tree, the Lily who had had so many hopes and plans for the future – that Lily had gone. In her place was a silent, pale ghost who barely moved from her bed. She stared blankly into space, her skin translucent against the pillow, her lips pale and bluish. Sometimes he feared she was dying; her hands were so cold; she lay so still.

Many an evening, he sat at his writing desk, recording his thoughts in his diary. Lily is not like other women, he wrote in November of 1894, she is more fragile than they are, less able to deal with the loss of her baby. Where other women accept it as God’s will, Lily rages against Him, in ways her parents both find blasphemous. Perhaps I should, but I cannot. Lily feels things more than others do. I cannot condemn her for it.

There were times when Edward had to stand up for Lily to his whole family – as the months wore on and still she seemed more and more enshrouded in her gloom, and less able to engage in the outside world, he even found himself quarrelling with his mother.

‘I will not hear of it,’ he said, when his mother suggested that he should have Lily committed because her behaviour was too extreme, too feverish, too hysterical. ‘Lily will stay here with me, and she will get better.’ Edward recalled with horror an aged aunt who had been locked in a sanatorium, and he had no desire for his beloved wife to be sent to one, however scattered her wits.

Later he wrote, Perhaps it is wrong of me to have had Mother live with us. She, who is so strong and steady, cannot understand the pressures the world brings to one such as Lily who flourishes in its light, but is bowed under by the dark. I know Lily will get better. She needs tender nurturing to take her through the winter of her pain. One day it will be spring, and she will smile again.

So Edward persevered that whole long dark winter, refusing her family’s demands to have Lily sent away, gently encouraging her day by day to re-enter the world once more. Until a day came, in the spring, when he was able to persuade her to join him in the garden to show her the agapanthus he’d planted in memory of Edward James, the son who had lived a mere six hours.

Lily cried in his arms then, and he rocked and cherished her and promised there would be other babies, and that he would never leave her again.