B007M836FY EBOK (31 page)

In the late 1860s, Henry moved back to Edinburgh with his new wife, and took over a yard in Glasgow on the River Clyde, which was replacing the Thames as the centre of iron shipbuilding. In 1869 he patented a design to improve the operation of dredgers, boats that used a revolving ladder of buckets to heave mud and silt off the riverbed.

Isabella left Reigate in the late 1860s and moved into a rented house on the village green in Frant, Kent. Henry’s sister Helena was living a few miles away, having moved with her family from Brighton to Tunbridge Wells. Despite all the disclosures of the diary and the court, Helena and her children seemed to think more highly of Isabella than of Henry. In April, one of Helena’s daughters wrote in the family journal that she had received a letter from Isabella: ‘a splendid letter writer!’ she reported, ‘and whatever her faults may be [she] is a good mother to her sons. I cannot but feel much interested for her.’ Helena invited Isabella to call on them. On 4 April, Helena’s son Ernest wrote in the family journal: ‘Mrs Robinson (Stanley’s Mother) came at Mother’s invitation to see us on Saturday and stayed to tea, having walked in from Frant a distance of about three and a half miles. I went down to the Station with her in the evening.’ On a return visit to her house in Frant, Ernest met Alfred, who had now qualified as a marine engineer.

Henry moved back down to England, and by 1876 was living in Norwood, Surrey. ‘He has become quite an old broken down man,’ reported a niece. ‘He has almost lost his memory.’ Henry’s business, too, was faltering – ‘the firm is not making a penny just now’ – and in 1877, Tom Waters broke with his uncle: ‘He could not stand his idiotic interferences any longer.’ The second Mrs Robinson, to whom Henry’s sister Helena referred as ‘poor little “Marie”,’ bore her husband three sons.

Isabella, restless as ever and perhaps pursued by her reputation, moved from Frant to St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, and then to a house called Fairlight in Bromley, Kent.

Each of the famous fictional adulteresses of the nineteenth century – Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Zola’s Thérèse Raquin – died at her own hand, her sins having engulfed her in grief and shame. Isabella too was killed by her own hand, though in less sensational circumstances. At her house in Bromley on 20 September 1887 she discovered an infected abscess on one of her thumbs. Three days later she died of septicemia, with Otway at her side. On the death certificate, he gave her age as seventy, and her marital status as widow. That December, Henry died in Dublin aged eighty.

‘Reader,’ she wrote, ‘you see my inmost soul. You must despise and hate me. Do you also pause to pity? No; for when you read these pages all will be over with one who was “too flexible for virtue; too virtuous to make a proud, successful villain”.’ Isabella was quoting loosely from Hannah More’s play
The Fatal Falsehood
(1779), in which a young Italian count – a ‘compound of strange, contradicting parts’ – falls desperately in love with a woman promised to his best friend.

When Edward Lane first read the diary, this entry in particular drew his anger and scorn: ‘The address to the Reader!’ he wrote to Combe. ‘
Who is
the Reader? Was this precious journal, then, intended for publication, or if not quite so bad as that, was it meant for an heirloom for her family? On either supposition, I say there is clear madness here – and if there were not another passage in the whole farrago to warrant that view, to my mind this one alone wd be sufficient.’

Yet Isabella’s address to an imagined reader might, on the contrary, point to the clearest explanation of all for why she kept her diary. Part of her, at least, wanted to be heard. She harboured a hope that somebody considering her words after her death would hesitate before damning her; that her story might one day be met with compassion, even love. In the absence of a spiritual afterlife, we were the only future she had.

‘Good night,’ she ended, with a desolate blessing: ‘May you be more happy!’

A big thank you to my agent, David Miller, as ever; to his colleagues at Rogers, Coleridge & White, including Stephen Edwards, Alex Goodwin and Laurence Laluyaux; and to Julia Kreitman of The Agency in London and Melanie Jackson in New York. My thanks to Richard Rose for his excellent suggestions and advice. Thank you to everyone at Bloomsbury in London for making the publication process such a pleasure, among them Geraldine Beare, Richard Charkin, Jude Drake, Sarah-Jane Forder, Alexa von Hirschberg, Nick Humphrey, Kate Johnson, David Mann, Paul Nash, Anya Rosenberg, Alice Shortland, Anna Simpson and – particularly – my editor, Alexandra Pringle, whose guidance has been invaluable. Many thanks also to the other publishers who have supported this project: George Gibson and the rest of Bloomsbury in New York, Ann-Catherine Geuder in Berlin, Dominique Bourgois in Paris, Ludmila Kuznetsova in Moscow, Andrea Canobbio in Turin, Sofia Ribeiro in Lisbon and Henk ter Borg in Amsterdam.