Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are?
THE SIXTEENTH DAY OF JULY, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND SIX AND TWENTY
Written by mine own hand, at the hour of Compline, in the chamber that was my father’s.
To none living do I address these words, save to God who readeth all things whether they be written or no, and to mine own soul, which hath need this evening of some examination it will not willingly submit to. What is set down herein is not for vanity of composition, nor to be read by any eye save mine and the Almighty’s, but only that I might compel myself, by the act of writing, to think more plainly than I am able to do in silence. In silence, my thoughts are like birds in a great wind: they wheel and dip and will not settle.
My confessor gave me a question today, in the garden where the rosemary grows thick along the south wall, and where the bees were making such an industry of themselves that one might almost forget the heaviness of the afternoon. He is a learned man, and a kind one, though his kindness doth not always spare me from the questions I would most like to avoid. He asked me, with that look of his that is partly innocent and partly something shrewder: whether do I believe that we are shaped more by our experiences, or by who, by the very nature of what we are, God made us to be?
He intended it, I think, as an examination of the soul’s formation in virtue. A question fit for a confessor to pose to a penitent. But I have carried it home through the long light of this July evening, and it hath grown heavier with every step, until now, sitting in my father’s chair at my father’s writing table with the candle burning low, it feeleth less like a question of virtue and more like a question of my entire life.
Let me try to answer it honestly, since I cannot answer it quickly.
I am told by those who attended my birth that I came into this world in the coldest fortnight of a cold January, under stars disposed, as my father’s astrologer hath long maintained, toward inwardness and patience and the long and cautious consideration of all things before the hand is laid upon any of them. The physician who tended me in earliest childhood declared me of melancholic constitution: the cold and dry humour dominant in my nature. He said I would be given to reflection and to careful judgment, but also, if the balance were not well governed, to a heaviness of spirit and a slowness in action that could, in time, become a kind of prison.
He hath not been wrong. He hath not been wrong these thirty years, which is a gift from God and a great inconvenience to me.
This nature is not mine by any merit or acquisition. It was set into me before I could speak, or choose, or refuse. It is as much my father’s gift to me as the estate itself, mayhap more so: the estate I might by neglect diminish, but the humour I was born to remaineth what it is regardless of what I do or leave undone. I am cold where warm women act. I am dry where moist women trust quickly and love quickly and recover quickly. I am slow where other women are swift; and the slowness is sometimes wisdom and sometimes only slowness, and the difficulty is that I am not always able to determine the difference until it is too late to matter.
This is who I am. I believe it was written into the very composition of my flesh before my first breath, that God’s hand was in the writing, and that there is no dishonour in it, though there is, certes, a great deal of inconvenience.
And yet.
My mother died when I was not yet five years of age. She died in the week after Christmas, of a fever that came upon her so swiftly that little could be done; and I remember of her almost nothing save the smell of the room where she lay, which was roses and something I now know to have been the medicinal herbs the physician brought, and the sound of the women weeping in the passage. I did not, at five years, fully comprehend what death was. I understood only that she was gone, and that gone meant something different from absent, and that no one would explain to me how different.
I learned early to hold lightly to things. Not by philosophy, but by necessity. Not by the considered wisdom of a grown understanding, but by the mute and wordless lesson that grief teacheth a very small child when there is no one to explain it to her properly.
Doth that experience shape my hesitation now? When I am slow to commit myself to any course, when I stand at the threshold of every decision like a woman who feareth the floor may give way beneath her foot: is this the melancholy humour in my blood, or is it the memory, written into mine every sinew, that the things one loves and relies upon may be taken without warning and without appeal?
I cannot separate the twain. I have tried this evening, and I cannot. They are wound together in me like threads in a cord, and to pull one free would be to undo the whole of it.
My father died in the first week of June, as God knoweth, and as I that am his daughter know in a fashion that is still more grief than knowledge. He had been failing these three years; his mind, which was once a fine and orderly instrument, became in the last months uncertain and shifting, like a candle in a draught; and I had been, in all but name, the keeper of this household long before he breathed his last. I learned to manage the accounts. I learned to speak with the steward and the notary and the men of law, to hold mine own counsel in the presence of neighbours who expected to advise me, and to nod and take note and then return to mine own chamber and think through what they had said with a deliberateness that I hope none of them suspected, for I do not think it would have put them at their ease.
Three winters spent at court, before my father’s illness grew too pressing to permit my absence, taught me much that was useful, and more that was grave in its instruction. I saw women who were bold consumed by their own boldness. I saw women who were silent rendered invisible by their silence. I returned knowing somewhat better what I ought not to do, though no more certain of what I ought to do than when I departed. The court is a school of a kind, though not one that granteth its scholars any surety of their learning. What it gave me was this: that this world doth not reward virtue as readily as the sermons would have it, and that a woman who standeth alone within it standeth ever upon uncertain ground, and had best plant her feet with care.
And yet I have stood. Through three years of my father’s decline, and through all the arrangements that followed his death, and through the grief that hath not yet finished making itself known to me. I stand. And in three days’ time, perhaps four, for I have not yet fixed the day, I am to sign papers that will make me, in the eyes of the law and of all this county, mistress of everything of which my father was master.
Mistress. God forgive me, that word sitteth strangely upon me still.
But I was answering a question. Or attempting to.
I incline to think, and I am well aware that I incline only and do not yet commit, which is, as I say, the oldest story of my soul, that the answer lieth not upon either side of the question my confessor set me, but in the uneasy middle where all the truest things seem to lodge themselves when they do not wish to be settled.
My nature gave me the mould. My experience hath been filling it ever since. But experience doth not cease when the mould is full: it presseth on, and the pressing altereth the very shape of what was already shaped. A woman born to melancholy and hardened by early loss and schooled by the court’s cold instruction is not what she would have been had those same humours moved through a life of ease and uncomplicated affection. The humour is the same; the woman is not.
The Psalmist saith that we are fearfully and wonderfully made: that the days appointed for us are written in God’s book before the first of them hath yet arrived. If this be so, and in my soul I believe it is so, then there is a self that God designed for me before mine eyes ever opened upon this fallen world; a self written by a hand more certain and more loving than any of the hands that have since written upon me. And that self, I suppose, is the foundation upon which all the rest is built.
But Job too was fearfully made, and his suffering did not leave him as it found him. He entered his affliction one kind of man and came out of it, diminished and enlarged at once, another. His nature endured throughout; but the long trial of his endurance changed what that nature expressed. It burned away what was not truly his, and left the remnant more purely itself than it had been before.
Mayhap this is what my confessor wished me to see: that the question he set me is not one with a single answer, but one that formeth the soul in the very act of its attempting to answer.
I am prudent. Of this I am sufficiently persuaded to say so without excessive qualification, which is, for me, no small thing: I am prudent. I do not spend what I do not possess. I do not speak where silence serveth better. I do not commit myself to any course until I have considered it from so many angles that the course itself is quite worn smooth from the handling. Whether this quality was given me by the cold governing of my humour, or won by the education of grief and watching, or by both means working together upon the same native matter, it is mine, and I intend to make use of it.
What I am less able to account for, what hath always walked at the heel of my prudence like its shadow, is the failing that groweth from the very same soil. I am slow. I am too sharply aware of the cost of every action, and the sight of those costs hath too often rooted me to the spot whilst the hour for acting passeth on without me. I have stood at more thresholds than I care to number, weighing and weighing, until the door before me either opened of its own accord or closed; and in either case the choice was made for me, which is not the same as mine having made it.
A mistress who maketh no choices is no mistress. She is only a woman sitting in a house that falleth quietly to pieces about her whilst she composeth admirably careful meditations on the wisdom of remaining still.
I will not be that woman.
God grant me the grace, for I dare not ask for certainty tonight when certainty is beyond my present reach, to set my hand to the papers when the day cometh, and to mean the signing, and to rise when it is done and walk forward into what is lawfully mine; bearing mine own name and mine own nature and mine own hard-bought experience with me, as a woman beareth a candle through a dark passage: not certain of what the light will find ahead, but carrying it nonetheless.
This is all I can promise myself this evening. It must, for now, be enough.
Written at the hour of Compline, on this sixteenth day of July, in the year of our Lord one thousand five hundred and six and twenty. God be my witness that what is set down herein is as honest as I am capable of making it, which is, I fear, not perfectly honest, but is the nearest thing to honest that a melancholic, over-careful woman of newly-inherited trouble can manage by candlelight.
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