Guide Book

For Mary Blake, from her mother, Fanny Rawlins Blake, who swears an oath to God that the following account is true and complete.

FRB, November 1804, written on the merchantman Marguerite.

Fanny Blake Manuscript, Part 7

The Death of My Husband

Throughout the day, the rain intensified and the wind gained strength. As the storm worsened, my confidence grew, for who would expect a young wife, herself indisposed, to travel out in such weather to fetch a doctor, when her husband's symptoms were at first so unalarming?

I entered the kitchen and sprinkled a generous portion of powder, made from the ground leaves of the mildest of my hothouse plants, over the food, then seated myself with my husband at the dinner table. We consumed the meal together, sent the remains to the servants' hall, and parted for the afternoon. Within hours, the meal produced the desired symptoms: fever, biliousness and headache. I mustered the energy to climb to the servants' quarters beneath the eaves, and found the staff taken to their beds in various stages of distress.

I returned to my room, gathered my medical kit, and went in search of my husband, who lay moaning and feverish in his bed. I summoned his manservant, and ordered him to fetch a doctor, but the man looked so pale and weak that I told him I would go myself. At this, Mr. Blake roused himself, for even in his illness he could see that I was little better, and he did not wish to risk my health, and that of his third child, beginning to stir in my womb, for the sake of his own.

He begged me to leave him in peace and return to my room. I left him for an hour, and then returned, offering to blister him to relieve the symptoms. To this he consented, and I withdrew from my kit a jar of cantharides, sprinkling them liberally across his back. They soon had the desired effect, and great welts arose whereever the beetles had touched his skin. I popped the boils, sprinkled them carefully with a dusting of more potent powder, concocted from my most toxic exotic, and bade him to lie still. He was dead before I'd left the room.

Upon returning to my chamber, the effects of the milder poison to which I had subjected myself took full effect, and in an agony of feverish pain, the nascent life within me was extinguished and expelled. Those who were able among the staff rushed to my assistance, and it was many hours before another soul realized that Mr. Blake was dead.

On My Widowhood

Of the intervening years, you have some awareness, having grown from infancy to childhood to youth in my company. As you know, I sought no husband to replace the one I had destroyed. What comfort I had in life derived from my love of you, the small society of friends I cultivated in the neighborhood, and the affection of Mr. Heath. Though he traveled the country in the employ of other gentlemen who desired his services, he was never long from Stoney Grove.

As you matured, I began to detect more and more of your father in your countenance and in your spirit, and I despaired for the son I had lost. Though I never ceased to love you, I longed to be free of the burden of the man whose ghost haunted me in the paleness of your visage, the manner of your speech, and the thousand little habits that you were, no doubt, unaware that you shared with him. Moreover, though my better acquaintance with England greatly improved my esteem of it, I pined for the sunshine and beauty of my native land. I possessed the wealth to remove us both comfortably to Nevis, yet it was clear to me that by nature, you were ill-suited to life in the tropics. Having experienced the fate of a young woman, alone and without protection in the world, I could not subject you to the same or worse miseries in the hands of uncaring relations. And so in spite of my unhappiness, I remained mistress of Stoney Grove.

In the autumn of 1802, my friend William Heath departed this world. At the turn of the new year, the news of the death of my brother, George Rawlins, intruded upon my mourning. I had heard no word from him since the day of my marriage, and was greatly surprised to be notified of his passing. The letter came from his solicitor, informing me that my youngest brother James, whom I had never met, had inherited my father's estate. Shortly thereafter, the aforementioned James troubled himself to write to me, and the news that he shared pushed all thoughts of mourning from my mind.

In short, he revealed to me that these twenty years I had lived in the erroneous belief of a lie that my husband had so cruelly persuaded me to embrace as truth, and my brother George had, by his silence, allowed to continue. It seems that my son had not died in his infancy, but had been carried away to London in the company of my husband and a wetnurse, and there given over to the charge of George Rawlins. That blackard returned with him to Hundley Hall. Persuading the inmates of that estate that the child was the bastard son of someone towards whom he felt some charitable impulses, he reared him there as a servant until the boy was old enough to be shipped to the West Indies and indentured to a ship's master. The child arrived on Nevis in 1792, a year shy of his tenth birthday, and had not been heard of again. In reviewing his brother's correspondence, James had discovered this deception, as well as the unhappy circumstances of my marriage, and arrived at the conclusion that this child must be my son. The tone of his letter made clear that in this brother, I had found an ally, and though he had not until now had the courage to meet his sister, he was willing to make amends and help me to locate my missing child.

I immediately sent off a flurry of letters to the many acquaintances of my father's that remained on Nevis, begging them to share any intelligence they might have of an immigrant child by the name of Ned Blake. For months I waited in vain, as letter after letter was returned with variations of the same theme, "we have no news of such a child."

I despaired of ever finding him. I could not bear knowing that he was alive in the world, and did not know that he had a mother who loved him and would do all in her power to see the wrongs inflicted upon him set to right. Yet that knowledge was of more comfort than the alternative; that he had met a premature death, friendless and among strangers.

As I had no surety that the boy yet lived, I spoke not a word of his existence to you. The longer I waited and pondered my position, the more the resolve grew within me that I would not burden you with the rivalry and bitterness that bringing him to live at Stoney Grove would inevitably arouse. These feelings crystalised as I observed the attentions that Mr. Morcombe began to lavish upon you, and your evident pleasure at their receipt. At the time, he seemed like an honourable young man, and I trusted that he would make you a fine husband. But I would not test his affection for you by introducing a stranger into the household. If your brother lived, surely he had made a life for himself. And so I waited, and worried, and planned.

And then, a fortnight ago came the letter. A letter from him, in Ned's own hand, was delivered into my own. He was alive, on Nevis, and, having come of age, had settled in a small cottage on the island with a wife and a child on the way. This happy news I could not bear in silence, and in my gratitude and joy, I shared the outlines of the story with you.

I will close now, only pausing long enough to assure you that I hold no ill will towards you for the events that followed these revelations, and to thank you for your aid in my escape. I do not hope to see you again in this life, as I cannot now return to England, and I do not expect you to leave your homeland. However, be assured of my constant affection.

Your loving mother,

Fanny Rawlins Blake

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