Light, Descending Read online

  Copyright 2012 Octavia Randolph. This electronic version 2014

  Exemplar Editions

  ISBN 978-1-942044-00-0

  Bookcover design: DesignForBooks.com

  Cover art: Sun Setting Over a Lake, c 1840. Oil on canvas (detail). JMW Turner (1775-1851) Tate Gallery, London

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests beyond this, write to the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions” at [email protected]

  A version of the Whistler vs Ruskin court case chapter first appeared in Narrative Magazine, Spring 2010.

  This novel employs the 19th century British English spelling and usage common to the writings of John Ruskin.

  Light, Descending

  Octavia Randolph

  Also by Octavia Randolph

  The Circle of Ceridwen Saga

  The Circle of Ceridwen

  Ceridwen of Kilton

  The Claiming

  The Hall of Tyr

  Silver Hammer, Golden Cross

  The Tale of Melkorka: A Novella

  Ride: A Novella

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Book Group Discussion Guide

  Author’s Note

  The book (John Ruskin's Unto This Last) was impossible to lay aside, once I had begun it…I could not get any sleep that night. I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book. –– Mohandas Gandhi The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1929

  How mightily this dead man lives. –– Marcel Proust on hearing of Ruskin’s death, 1900

  In fact it becomes clearer to the world than ever that there is but one Ruskin in the world; an unguidable man, but with quantities of lightning in the interior of him, which are strange and probably dangerous to behold. –– Thomas Carlyle, 1874

  I think he is the finest writer living. –– George Eliot, 1856

  How things bind and blend themselves together!

  –– from the last published paragraph of John Ruskin, Praeterita III, 1889

  Chapter One

  The Lamp of Obedience

  London: 8 February 1832

  Even with the snow the boy knew his father would not be late, and he saw Mr. Telford’s carriage roll up to the door at Herne Hill just before four o’clock. His father came into the house, stamping the snow off, and called out hello to him. He passed a package to his son’s hands as the maid took his great coat and hat.

  “From Mr. Telford, John, with his compliments of the day,” his father said. John James Ruskin’s pride in his sole offspring was such that he concealed with difficulty his satisfaction in the distinction implied by the gift. He was a man who was beginning to know his own value, and felt this recognition from his gentleman business partner as a shared one.

  The package was heavy and squarish and wrapped round in stiff blue paper. “Please Papa, may I open it?” John asked.

  Mrs. Ruskin had just appeared from her parlour, wearing her everyday white lace cap over her grey hair. A gift from Mr. Telford! she thought. Everything concerning her son conjured in Margaret Ruskin that mixture of pleasure and dismay peculiar to her. She did not hold with presents being lavished on children. It was kind that he recognized her son’s special abilities, but to spoil him with gifts––! “No, John,” she answered, “you may not; it must wait until after supper.” She took the package from him and lay it on the hall table. “Good of Mr. Telford to remember you, John,” she reminded.

  “Yes, Mother.” His mother had always been “Mother” to John, but his father was “Papa”; he did not know why he called them thus, only that it seemed right. He paused a moment to look at Mr. Telford’s birthday gift, without touching the thick blue paper.

  Mr. Telford was the Telford of Telford Ruskin & Domecq, Wine Merchants, and John knew from visiting the offices and the conversation of his father that Mr. Telford had had the money to start the concern, his father did the selling, and Mr. Domecq produced the sherry.

  Mr. Telford liked John and gave him interesting things; John knew he had no boy of his own. Mr. Telford lent the Ruskins his own carriage for the family to use when he did not need it, and they had taken long summer trips to the Lakes in it, his father stopping at inns and the houses of rich men to sell them wines. John loved the Lakes and hills and wrote poems about them; two had been published. His parents paid him a penny for every twenty lines he wrote.

  Cook had made a pudding with plums and walnuts in it for the occasion, and after the table was cleared John James Ruskin took down two little stemmed sherry glasses from the crowded highboy and filled them half-full. He handed one glass to his son. It was Telford Ruskin & Domecq’s best stock. In the cellar sat a case of it, and with Ruskin senior’s continual application to his work, the prospect of many more such good things to come. He eyed his boy, standing there holding the thin stem a little tremulously. John James laboured in Trade in order to make his son a Gentleman, and his expectations were nothing short of stupendous. With young John’s brain, the boy would end a bishop, or Prime Minister. He would get him there, he and the boy’s mother; he to teach him application, and his mother to teach him to be good. He touched the rim of his glass to his son’s; his wife did not imbibe.

  From his twelfth birthday last year John had been allowed sherry, but he did not much like it. He took a small sip and tried to smile. He was wearing the watch and chain his father had given him in the morning, and he again thanked him for it.

  His mother brought him the gift from Mr. Telford, and he unfolded the blue paper.

  It was a book, a brown leather-bound copy of Samuel Rogers’ poem, Italy.

  “What pretty drawings!” said his mother. The book was of obvious value, a choice for a collector, and if John would be spoilt with such things, she could take comfort that they were worthy of him.

  “They are engravings, Mother,” John said, “and fine ones.” He had explained the difference to her several times in the past, and did so again in a patient voice. Each page of the book had a verse or two of Rogers’ poem headed by an illustration of a picturesque view of cypress trees, ruins, or cathedrals. John liked to draw, and every day he drew things––clouds, and flowers, and rocks––to understand them better. He looked more closely at the engravings. Some were signed ‘Stothard’ but many were signed ‘JWM Turner.’

  He looked at one by the Turner artist, a vignette of Lake Como. Boats were in the foreground, and jagged mountains in the background, and noble architecture to one side, all the things he liked. But what struck him was the way the sun was reflected in water, and how it lit the sky. He did not understand how Mr. Turner could so perfectly convey warm sunlight using only black and white lines. He would study the engravin
g and then draw it.

  After he said goodnight to his parents John went up the stairs with Italy in his hands.

  He passed the painting of himself as a baby in the stairwell. He was shown wearing a long white dress with a blue sash, and holding the blue lead to a spaniel he could not remember who was also in the painting. His parents had told him that he had asked the artist to put blue hills in the picture and Mr. Northcote had put them in behind him.

  The snow was still falling and the house was entirely quiet. He wished he could hear the muffled sound of his parents talking beneath him, or that one of them was musical and could play the piano so he might fall asleep to it. He wished the old house cat had not died; she used to nose her way into his room at night and nudge him. Most of all he wished his cousin George was still with them; George who was older and the only person who made him laugh. He had come to visit over Christmas but now was back in Croydon, readying to join his brother who was prospering in Australia. John feared he would never see him again; and indeed, in four months George would be drowned still within sight of England.

  John said his prayers, feelingly, with something approaching ardour, and got into bed. Despite the watch and chain and the sherry he felt almost like the three year old on the landing, except in the painting he looked ready to smile. He thought perhaps he had been happier then.

  He looked up at the shadows dancing on the ceiling from his candle, which he had not yet blown out.

  “I have nothing to love,” he said aloud.

  He thought he might start to blubber but he knew he was too old for that. To make himself stop he pushed himself up in his bed and pulled the Rogers Italy from his night table. He opened it to the Como scene and brought the candle closer.

  Chapter Two

  The Lamp of Memory: 1836-1843

  London: 1836

  The two young people had met first in Paris, but that was two years ago. Now John Ruskin was almost seventeen and Adèle-Clothilde Domecq was fifteen. Her sisters called her Clothilde, but at this second meeting John thought of her, and called her, Adèle. It rhymed with shell, spell, and knell and thus served his poetry, and Clothilde rhymed with nothing. Adèle had blonde hair and light eyes. She and three of her sisters had been staying at Herne Hill, and in four days the heart of young John had been reduced to a heap of ashes.

  She had been born in Cadiz, in the shadow of her father’s vast vineyards––Pedro Domecq was the elder Ruskin’s partner in the sherry-trade; the growing partner. But the Domecq daughters had been raised in France; the eldest was soon to marry a count. The four younger now gaily descended upon the Ruskin household and upended it. They had bouncing curls with ribbons at the root, from Adèle on down to the youngest, Caroline.

  Adèle’s frocks were from Paris, and her manners as well. She shrugged off her fur trimmed travelling cloak into John’s hands, and he tried not to goggle at her dress, short and with bewildering pantalettes. She turned to smile at him with small, brilliant teeth. She was like a heroine out of a novel or stepped down from a painting. Her face was oval, her nose upturned. Her complexion reminded John of fresh-poured cream. Her eyes glinted blue fire as she laughed, and they met his for one steady moment. He thought he might combust spontaneously.

  The girls’ French maid was with them, and that night his mother’s Scots maid Anne grumbled about the disdaining way the woman looked at the family’s accommodations. His sweetly quiet, brown-haired, newly-orphaned cousin Mary Richardson, who now lived with the Ruskins, suddenly seemed another, inferior species altogether. She faded into irrelevance around the Domecq sisters.

  “But we cannot eat such things!” Adèle would laugh at breakfast, her little sisters smiling too. The sideboard was laid with oatmeal, black pudding, and stewed fruit. They must have the bread, so, and the fruit fresh and a comfit, and oui, they were allowed coffee, very strong and with much sweet milk, merci.

  When John excused himself after breakfast to sit down to his daily Bible reading with his mother, Adèle followed them into the little side parlour to watch.

  “You are like––what––a child to her, a little child, who cannot read sa bible in private, for fear he will not do it himself,” she told him later. She was laughing; she was always laughing. Her English sounded sung to him.

  He invited her into his room to look at his minerals; she laughed and ran away. He realised too late he should have asked Adèle to bring her maid with her, and he looked around the house until he found the woman in her black bodice and frilled cap. She spoke no English, and his school-boy French failed him by degrees as she kept shrugging her shoulders and throwing up her hands at his stammering request.

  And when Sunday came, the girls needed to be taken to Mass.

  “I would be happy to accompany the Misses Domecq to Our Lady of Victories in the morning,” John offered at supper Saturday night.

  Margaret Ruskin rarely spoke on any topic until her husband had made his pronouncement. This time she did. Mrs. Ruskin gasped, and followed this with a blink of both eyes across the table at her son. She was training John up as a devout evangelical Christian, and suddenly here in her own well-ordered household the glittering head of Popery had reared itself, ready to snatch her boy to perdition. John watched his mother lower her knife and fork as if to remove them from danger. “You will accomp––you will accompany––these girls––to a Roman service?” she asked him.

  All the Domecq daughters were staring at him. Cousin Mary sat biting her lip, and lowered her head. His father cleared his throat and said he would send round to their Baptist minister’s young clerk to go; he and the Domecq maid, joined by their coachman, would afford suitable protection. Adèle listened with cocked head and smiled at John as she cut into her lamb-chop. He felt himself to be in her plate. He imagined the firm thrust of her knife and graceful lift of her fork as a fragment of his flesh touched her lips.

  If he could not escort her in public, he could yet woo her with words. He wrote a romance, Leoni: a Legend of Italy, and tried to read it to her.

  “It is a tragedy, of how I might have been, if I had been born a bandit,” he told her. She did not understand the term ‘bandit’, and when he attempted acting out the necessary behaviour for his hero’s Robin-Hood-like career she dissolved in peals of laughter at his pantomime.

  Labouring over his slight dictionary he composed, in French, a nine page declaration of devotion. He kissed the envelope and slid it under her bedroom door at midnight, and lay awake in a fever of expectation.

  Coming early down to breakfast he saw on his plate his letter transformed into a little paper boat, with one of the costly Covent Garden fraises the girls had demanded as cargo. He snatched it up before Adèle arrived, tossing her bouncing hair, laughing at him.

  Every attempt at conversation yielded disaster. Struggling to find subjects in common, John found himself lecturing his Spanish-born, French-raised, and Catholic-believing mistress of his heart about the flawed naval strategies that brought about the destruction of the Spanish Armada, then went on to Napoleon’s debacle at Waterloo, and found himself burbling his decided views on Transubstantiation. Adèle listened, hands in lap, smiling, and one agonizing afternoon ruffled his hair with her hand before she jumped up, laughing.

  He went out into the garden and wrote poems to her. He placed her in the Alpine mountains he loved, and saw how they now paled in his affections next to Adèle. It was then he began to weep.

  When the Domecq daughters left, John spent months in a haze. He could not write to Adèle, now back in Paris, without permission from his parents, and hers, and he was afraid to ask for it. Hoping to somehow gain her attention, he gave his poems to his father to read, who promptly had them published in the annual gift-book Friendship’s Offering. Heartened by his son’s increased versifying and insensate to the poignant juvenile yearnings expressed therein, John James Ruskin saw in his boy the makings of a great poet. John listlessly turned the pages of his own crisp copy,
unable to imagine the homely British production finding its way to a book-seller’s on the Champs-Elysees. He began attending lectures on literature at King’s College in the Strand; soon he would be going up to Oxford.

  Whether writing poetry to a hopeless love object or devising a colour wheel to measure the exact blue of the skies, for young Ruskin it was impossible to do, feel, or believe anything by halves. On any given morning he might awaken with almost manic physical and intellectual energies, and the next dawn be wholly and silently absorbed in reflection. He wrote torrents of poetry, hewed firmly to his study of Scripture (for Margaret Ruskin had repeatedly confided to him that at his birth she had solemnly dedicated him to the service of God), and kept up his collecting of minerals and botanical specimens. His natural passion for, and satisfaction in, writing and study was well noted by his parents, and the elder Ruskins, deeming these worthy occupations, unwittingly but irreclaimably blurred the distinction between Love and Labour by rewarding him monetarily for his creative output. Nothing escaped parental attention; all he did and said was worthy of praise, comment, and correction. The joys of discovery, of close observation, of musing, and drawing conclusions––however fanciful these latter might be while he was yet a child––were not left as random seeds for germination by the Ruskins; they must be potted up, nurtured, pinched and pruned to flourishment. The producing of work by the younger Ruskin became equated with the preferment of affection and approval by the elder two. One was loved through one’s work, and as the link between the two ossified in John’s mind, one loved through one’s work, as well. Holding his cyanascope to the heavens, rotating the circles of hand-coloured paper until one precisely matched the blue of the sky, he would then keep turning until he found one that recalled the eyes of Adèle.

  That autumn John occupied himself by re-cataloguing and arranging all his mineral specimens, and in the creation of rhyme-charts to aid his poetry. Then he read a review of three Turner paintings on view at the Royal Academy. The critic for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine decried both the artist’s moving the action of ‘Juliet and her Nurse’ from Verona to Venice, and the work’s execution as childish. For Turner’s painting of ‘Mercury and Argus’ the writer declared that the god referenced had no cause to put out the eyes of Argus; merely looking at the glare produced in the painting would have blinded him.