Vox Meditantis

List your top 5 grocery store items.

Saturday, 19th December, 1835

You find me in what was once the orangery – though the glass is mostly gone now, and the cold gets in through every crack. I suppose you think it queer that I should stand here, amongst the broken pots and frost-blackened vines, when there are fires lit in the East wing and Cook laying tea. But I’ve always been drawn to ruins, you see. Perhaps because I am one myself – or shall be, when the lawyers have quite finished with Father’s will.

Do not mistake me. I am the heir. The estate passes to me, such as it is, with all its debts and damp and the roof that wants mending in three places. The aunts said I should marry straightaway, before the creditors got wind of it, but I told them I’d sooner take the veil – which made them clutch their prayer-books and whisper about my soul. My soul! As though it were a thing one could misplace, like a shawl.

I confess I am not much given to chapel-going, though I say my prayers of an evening when I remember. God knows I need His mercy more than most. The vicar says I have too light a manner for a woman in mourning, but grief makes me restless, not solemn. Father would have understood. He was a rogue himself in his youth – ran up debts in London, kept a racing-stable, drank claret like it was small beer. By the time I knew him he was respectable, of course, or trying to be. But I saw the old spark in his eye when he told the stories. That’s my inheritance, truly: not the land, but the wildness.

The vessel I keep returning to – there, you see it on that shelf, the cracked majolica urn – held oranges once, brought up from the hothouse. We’d have them at Christmas, a great luxury, sticky and bright. I remember peeling one on this very spot when I was nine or ten, the juice running down my wrists, Father laughing because I’d got it all over my frock. The smell of it, sharp and foreign, like something from the East Indies. I keep the urn here though it’s empty now and chipped besides. Foolish, I know. But I cannot bear to throw away what held sweetness once.

Nostalgia is my weakness, you see. I live too much in what was. The aunts say it is unwholesome, that I ought to look forward, make plans, think of duty. But when I try to imagine the future – myself as mistress here, giving orders, balancing accounts, receiving the tenants – it feels like a coat cut for someone else. The past fits better. I can slip into it like an old gown and feel at home.

If you were to ask me – and here’s a curious fancy – if you were to ask me to name the five things I should wish from the grocer’s shop, the things that would make this cold ruin feel like a house again, I should tell you: First, tea. Good black tea, not the dusty stuff we’ve been making do with since Father’s illness. Second, loaf sugar, the kind that comes wrapped in blue paper, because life is bitter enough without taking it unsweetened. Third, wax candles – proper ones, not tallow, which stinks and smokes and reminds me we are poor now. Fourth, a cone of treacle, dark and sticky, because it makes even the plainest bread taste of something. And fifth – ah, fifth would be a bottle of port, the sort Father used to keep in the cellar, that we drank on Christmas Eve before Midnight Service, when the world felt full of promise.

You see what I mean about living in the past? Even my provisions are memories.

The aunts would say I ought to list flour and salt and oatmeal, sensible things for a sensible woman. But I was never sensible. Father used to say I had quicksilver in my veins instead of blood, always moving, always restless, never content to sit still and do tambour-work like my cousins. He did not mean it as criticism. I think he saw himself in me, the part of him that hated respectability, that wanted to run wild.

I ought to pray more, I suppose. Beg forgiveness for my levity, my improper thoughts, my disobedience. The aunts say a woman’s duty is submission – to God, to her elders, to the circumstances Heaven has appointed. But I cannot believe God made me as I am only to crush it out of me. Surely there is room in His creation for the restless ones, the wild ones, the ones who will not fit the mould? The Scripture says we are earthen vessels, fashioned by the Potter’s hand. Well, I am a cracked pot, then. But I hold water still, after a fashion.

Sometimes, standing here in the ruin of what was, I wonder if I am being punished. If God is teaching me humility through loss, breaking my pride as these walls are broken. The vicar would say yes, that affliction is meant to purify the soul, burn away the dross. But I cannot find it in myself to be grateful for the lesson. I am stubborn. I cling to what is gone. I will not let the past be past.

This orangery was built by my grandfather, in the year of Waterloo. He was flush with prize-money then, and full of schemes. He planted lemon-trees and fig-trees, tender things that needed coddling through the winter. Most of them died. The hardy survived – like me, I suppose. Still standing, though the glass is broken and the cold gets in.

I shall have to sell some of the land, the lawyers say. Pay the debts. Make economies. Perhaps the orangery will be pulled down for the stone. It is of no use now, except to me, and I am not consulted. Heirs are not the same as masters, I am learning. I inherit the burden but not the freedom.

Yet here I stand, in the gathering dusk of a December afternoon, talking to you as though you were friend and confessor both. Unburdening myself to the empty air. Father used to say confession was good for the soul, though he never darkened a church-door if he could help it. I think he meant something different – that speaking one’s truth aloud, even to silence, was a kind of prayer. A way of bearing witness to one’s own life.

So witness this: I am a woman of twenty-four, unmarried, in possession of a crumbling estate and a cracked majolica urn. I am imprudent, wilful, given to dwelling on what is gone. I speak too freely. I do not weep as I ought. I stand in ruins because they feel more honest than the drawing-room, where we pretend that nothing is wrong, that we are still what we were.

But I shall survive this, as I have survived everything else. I am my father’s daughter. I bend but do not break. And I will not be made respectable, no matter how the aunts may try.

The light is fading now. I must go in before they send a servant to fetch me. But I shall return here, again and again, to this broken place. It is the only spot where I feel entirely myself – rogue, heir, and ruin all at once.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.