My father was a North American born of black Irish stock, a man of strong mind, high spirit, and personal intrepidity, and it was all three of those noble qualities that removed him from his family on more than one occasion. But from the moment of that midnight quarrel, my life’s course took its first shattering turn, for Papa had devised an eccentric scheme as wild and romantic as it was perilous to hazard—and it would take him away from us forever.
In my romantic girlish mind my thoughts of him would fluctuate as if riding astride a pendulum. In one instant he was the American seafarer, off on another exotic venture to a faraway and savage land; but in the next moment Papa was the British merchant who would desert the family he adored when, surely, closer to hand there were equally prosperous projects to be explored. Caught between worshipping him and being cross with him for leaving all of us to fend as we might in his absence, I was as quick to defend him as I was to condemn. He broke my heart as often as he mended it.
After many dreams of success and many conflicts betwixt prudence and ambition, when I was but seven years old Papa departed for Labrador to establish a whale fishery amongst the Esquimaux Indians there, believing he could civilize them and teach them the necessary skills that would eventually make British America’s whaling industry topple that of Greenland’s, its greatest rival. It turned out to be a double farewell, for my elder brother, John, was sent off to Italy at the same time, apprenticed to a mercantile house in Leghorn.
My parents corresponded as frequently as practicable. At first, their letters were full of fondness, even ardor, for each other, as well as Mother’s fears for Papa’s health and safety, and his repeated tender assurances that all was well and that he missed his adoring family dreadfully. He would return to England even wealthier, as triumphant for himself as for the economy of king and country, and every day would be a holiday under the Darby roof. But gradually, the tone of his letters began to change. Warm affection was supplanted by a civil cordiality, as if he now wrote from duty rather than desire. My mother felt the change, and her affliction was infinite.
“Why did I not conquer my fears?” she lamented to me, as she pressed my auburn curls to her bosom. “Why did I let my own timidity divide me from the very man to whom I pledged myself, body and soul, and consigned my fortunes?”
At length, a total silence of several months awoke my mother’s mind to the sorrows of neglect, the torture of compunction. “Has he forsaken us for my trepidation?” she would worry aloud.
And then, one horrible day, the penny dropped.
Two
The Mistress and the Mentor
1766…age eight
“I have heard something from Lord Chatham,” Mother wrote to my father, “which has been the cause of the greatest consternation; I beg of you to break the truth to me.”
Lord Chatham, the elder Pitt, had been one of my father’s sponsors, financing, along with others, a portion of Papa’s commercial exploration in Labrador. His lordship would never have been indiscreet enough to speak of another’s affairs, but one unguarded remark with regard to her husband’s domestic arrangements put my mother into a dizzying panic.
At long last, a letter arrived from Labrador. There was a woman named Elenor, an attachment whose resisting nerves could brave the stormy ocean, and who had consented to remain two years with him in the frozen wilds of North America.
This intelligence nearly annihilated my mother. “When had she appeared?” Mother demanded to know. “How long have you been deceiving me that our home was a happy one, one to which you truly yearned to return? When did your letters first ring with falsehoods?”
Her sad and desperate remonstrances were met with no reply. Mother resigned herself to grief, and I felt powerless to comfort her. Though I was then at an age to feel her anguish and to participate in her sorrows, I lacked the skill to soothe her, try as I did. I often wept myself to see her weep. I was confused, my allegiances torn. My young brain was unequipped to comprehend how my brave and noble father, in whose eyes and face I so clearly saw myself, could commit so grievous a transgression against such a tender and loving creature as my mother. Not only did Papa appear to assign the blame for their too-sudden estrangement to my mother’s dread of seafaring, but my mother accepted that burden as well, drowning herself in tearful mea culpas.
I have never owned the ability to sit idly by when I perceived an injustice. “He deceived you, Mama. How can you not hate him, if only for a while?” I asked her. I wanted her to stand her ground and fight for her rights to his love. If she resigned herself—however miserably—to his loss, then she also forfeited my marker, along with those of my younger brothers, William and George! Her maddening acquiescence to what she considered her own culpability in the alienation of Father’s affections made me wish to turn warrior and take up the cudgels on her behalf! “Wouldn’t it be splendid, then, if you could summon a champion to represent your true and just cause?” But Mother did not immerse herself in medieval romances and gothic fantasies as I did—stories where the fair damsel gains a defender and is never troubled for longer than it takes to increase the element of suspense.
Her mind was not
