Archive of Our Own

The first letter took Mister Copperfield a little by surprise. He was now somewhat accustomed to receiving compliments from his readers, though they still flattered and, to a degree, bemused him. These accolades tended to be general in character, failing to specify what exactly those who had penned them had found ‘transporting in the highest degree!’ (beyond, perhaps, naming a particular tale as the judge that had sentenced them to the aforesaid transportation). He took the effusive praise (his work, apparently, reminded Mrs Schneebly of Devonshire of her dear dead great aunt Netty and all that was good in the wicked world, and was like unto a beautiful dream of heaven she’d wished never to end) with some embarrassment rather than credulously accepting it as a bona fide testament to ‘his genius, hitherto unparalleled in English literature’. (Good god, were they really forgetting Shakespeare, for a start?)

The less-hyperbolic document David Copperfield currently held in his hand begged his pardon in perhaps excessively complimentary terms. However, it then proceeded to inform him that its writer should never have encroached upon Mister Copperfield's privacy but for the small matter of a typo in the second paragraph of the cheap magazine edition of his train wreck story. It had a real title which David could hardly hold in his head for a minute together, even after he'd seen the thing in print—to him it was just ‘the train wreck story’, and its proper name an afterthought amounting to an imposition. The letter-writer begged to inform him of said error, that it might be corrected when Mister Copperfield collected the story up into a volume. David did indeed intend just such a project for the Christmas market, and so took the note with a gratitude which was especially profound given that the typo was rather embarrassing, accidentally suggesting something the delicate reader might find in-. The story, the letter continued, also contained a minor geographical inaccuracy which might distract people familiar with the area in question—the writer had passed that way once in a coach, and had since verified their suspicions with a man born and bred in the district. To round it off, the name of a character earlier introduced had been misspelled on the penultimate page. (David internally cursed the copy editor with himself—though occasional mischances of this nature were unavoidable in publication, and as it happened he'd seen that last and made a note of it already.) 

The writer hastened to assure Mister Copperfield that they did not look only to find fault, oh no, not on any account. The story as a whole was admittedly not their favourite of his—that honour was reserved for X, or Y, or perhaps Z (though they preferred to read that particular story in winter, its having a frost-and-fire sort of atmosphere that both invoked the chill and kept it out). Yet they liked the story, as they liked Mister Copperfield's work generally—and having been so specific in their complaint, they thought they ought to be equally specific in their praise to make up the difference. Thus motivated, his correspondent confessed to strongly admiring the neat little machinery of the plot. It was a delightful scheme, finely-wrought. Turn it this way to generate a bit more sympathy for the heroine and it’d quite fall apart, but Mister Copperfield knew better than to try it! One particular sentence had caught his dedicated reader’s imagination very vividly indeed. It happened to be one David had considered excising, thinking it lovely, but perhaps too much so—a gaudy fruit over-ripe almost to rotting on the vine, its pervasive scent liable to distract a person from the more subtle aromas emanating from the less showy specimens adjacent to it.

It touched David to discover that someone admired him at the very point where he was 'David Copperfield all over', as his Aunt would have it, himself even to a fault: a reader who relished his excess, his wild, expansive streak, the impulse in David to exceed good taste. His undisciplined heart. Something within David was forever silently asking the world 'How can I make you happy? How can I make you love me?', as it had done since he'd been driven from his mother and home in childhood, and even after he'd been reprieved from that abandonment. This was a letter that whispered back to it, underneath its words, 'you do, and I do: in being yourself, you are already sufficient to me.' Without being consciously aware, exactly, of why, David was struck indeed by the note.

“And of course,” David’s correspondent concluded, “the tale possesses the charm which I find in all your work, whether I would or no. I could not come to it in anger and not come away with a spirit pacified, almost against my very will!”

Rather charmingly for their own part, David's correspondent signed off with a teasing plea for some sign that this missive had not been a source of offence. “For I spoke only in the hope of aiding you, and I should be mortified beyond anything to have scolded someone I so greatly admire, whose work has given me such a deal of pleasure.”

David made annotations to the copy of the manuscript he’d set aside for the coming Christmas edition, then dipped the same pen in ink once more to thank his correspondent for—he checked—her aid.

My dear Miss Bathsheba Stack, he began, how grateful I am for your regards, having just presently received them! Though you could not have known it, they make for a timely intervention indeed. They were graciously given in some of the most craftsman-like terms in which I have ever had the pleasure of hearing a discussion of my efforts expressed. To have such praise in such a vein is to know its value, for—

He continued on for the length of the page, for David Copperfield never could write a short letter, unless it were the hastiest one-line post-dash. He let his tone encourage further confidences, for he was not so above vanity as to entirely dislike a discussion of himself, and indeed a person so immovable and unaffected by the opinions of their fellows would not be wholly human. It was quite true, after all: David rarely enjoyed an exegesis as well-delivered as this one had been, or so free of cant and full of insight in its place. David liked speaking of books in critical detail, with an eye to their making, and books' sometimes being his own could not entirely cure him of his taste for the business.

The lady's name struck within David some obscure chord of memory—but the recollection guttered out like a candle in a gust, and David thought no more on it save to ruminate that ‘Bathsheba’ was a musical name, possessed of a certain poetry, and to think its holder fortunate in her possession. Taken together, ‘Bathsheba Stack’ sounded somehow comfortable and familiar to him. David liked the pater of the first three syllables, and the way these clattering sounds were rounded off by the certain punctuation of the final coda, like a little life rounded with a sleep. He enjoyed the rhythm of that grand, queer, dramatic Christian (indeed, biblical!) name snapping against the wry prosaic undercut of its partner, like two nations with a fractious border. What was more, he’d liked his letter a good deal, and it had piqued his curiosity. He wished to hear that whisper once again. 

He was thus pleased to receive an answer to his reply from Miss Stack by the day’s end, which contained winking, comically baroque thanks for his reassurances and a meaty answer to a question he’d asked half-rhetorically. Oh, he liked this Miss Stack! He wanted a point in her response clarified, and so he followed her letter with another, hesitantly signing off with an invitation to a regular correspondence, if she so chose. True, he was a busy man growing every busier, but he hoped he should always have time to form new friendships. Besides, David was a little lonely at present, despite the broad and bustling circle of his acquaintance. Dora’s death had left the house quiet. There were no more barks from Jip; there were no more songs in the evening. David almost couldn’t stand the peace. He filled his hours with labour and thought increasingly of making a lengthy tour of the continent, in hopes that fresh scenery and the company of strangers might clear his troubled mind. Yet here was just such a diverting stranger, not a continent away but presenting herself to him, offering him the balm of pleasant and informed conversation. Even the people David dearly loved he found difficult to be around at present, weighed down as the ties between them were by memories and obligations. He craved their society and yet he shunned it. The company of crowds, taken in the large doses London afforded him, was worse still. Miss Bathsheba Stack, however, might be attended to at will, and at a distance, and there was no cruelty in their relation, no history between them and thus no hesitance in himself that David need police himself against.

David likewise hoped that there was no impropriety in exchanging perfectly decent letters with an intelligent woman simply on account of her sex and, perhaps, the fact that she was seemingly unwed ('Miss' Stack, not 'Missus'). Honi soit qui mal y pense!

Miss Stack was so kind as to assent to his offer of a sustained intercourse, and so David fell into the habit of writing to her every few days—perhaps more frequently than most such penfriends corresponded, but they were, it seemed, both voluble and speedy letter writers, with a great deal to discuss between them. David became so adjusted to this pattern that, without much consideration, he gave up thinking of a long continental adventure (which would have afforded him less opportunity for regular correspondence, and which he no longer felt he absolutely needed) and contented himself instead with a briefer tour of Scotland.

David conveyed the events of his travels to Bathsheba (as he now called her within his own mind, rather than her less intimate surname) as they occurred. He thought to use carbon paper retain an impression of these letters, which he subsequently edited into an account of that country which both pleased his Southern readers and expanded his influence in the North. David dedicated the resultant volume to Bathsheba, his ‘excellent friend’. Bathsheba congratulated him on the success of the enterprise, and said she suspected he could never have gotten such material out of the European prospect he’d outlined to her. His, she claimed, was a soul more responsive to the infinite vagaries of the country of his birth than the lure of the exotic. Indeed David had chosen to visit Scotland instead of Europe in part on the strength of Bathsheba's advice. She had reminded him that despite the nearness of that country and its deep, brotherly relationship to their own (if at times only brotherly in a 'Cain and Abel' sort of way, as she wryly put it), he owned he’d never so much as seen Caledonia. Ignorance of what ought to be one’s own business, she observed, was not in general a thing David loved. Did he not think he might improve his experience nearer to home, and cultivate a broader public while he was at it? The continent did not (yet) read him; the Scottish did. They might thus appreciate a portrait, if the thing were done with truth and sympathy. David’s exposure of lingering Jacobite wounds and the wealth disparities to be found in the Highlands, owing in part to a potato famine, cholera and unjust clearances, and resulting in the mass emigration of desperate and destitute people, certainly smacked of both qualities in her thinking, as well as outraging and offending just the people Mister Copperfield thought ought to be outraged and offended. Bathsheba added that to her mind, Mister Copperfield’s area of special genius was the business of chronicling Britain as he found it today. She suggested that he ought to further his talents where his inspiration lay, rather than ape after the dons who kept the Italy of the renaissance forever in their hearts—who after all, wrote no better than he did (a good deal worse, in most cases!), and who, on account of such preoccupations, could give nothing like Mister Copperfield’s account of British characters of all classes, of British struggles occurring even now.

Initially the tone of Bathsheba’s letters had been over-complimentary and unctuously polite, but as the two of them became better acquainted and more deeply intimate, she began to couple this sliding, sometimes sly and sometimes earnest civility with frankness and a vein of sharp, startling sarcasm that David at times struggled to fully apprehend. She kept him on his toes, like a taller dancing-partner whipping him through a waltz. They’d been discussing Scott, who David greatly admired, and Bathsheba had absolutely destroyed the novelist with a critique David had to admit the force and justice of. His opinion had been forever altered, and he’d laughed aloud reading her counterblasts to every one of his commendations. 

Oh you positive terror! Perhaps I oughtn’t, he wrote back to her, but do you know, I absolutely delight in how very wicked you are when defending a position you’ve taken up?

I know my audience, do I not? Bathsheba replied succinctly. She then skipped down to cover his next paragraph in hers, as was their usual order of business. At the bottom, below her signature, sat a post-script, unconnected to the above except by the agency of David's sound inference. But THANK YOU, for it is SUCH a pleasure to hear my modest talents commended. And by you, of any soul in the world! I do treasure it up, you know. 

David Copperfield’s heart often didn’t quite keep time. It was always either running ahead of his judicious helping of sense or lagging behind it. So he didn’t yet know why his pulse quickened at these remarks, as it did every time a letter from Bathsheba arrived for him. (For him—just him. She did not, she’d informed David, keep a great deal of company, either in the flesh or via their means.)

He asked her to call him Trotwood, as his dear sister Agnes, of whom he’d told her, did. He begged leave to call her Bathsheba; formality seemed somewhat ridiculous at this point. She readily granted the latter, but demurred on the first account. That, she argued, was his sister’s name for him, and while it was all very well of course, it wasn’t hers. Might she call him Copperfield, or David? Either, David agreed, readily ignoring the slight frisson her suggestion of his surname caused in him, though he couldn’t clearly remember the last person he’d been closely acquainted with who’d addressed him thus. 

Speaking of names as we are, Bathsheba wrote, have you never noticed we’re named for characters out of the same bible story, you and I? That’s a queer happenstance!

Why, so we are! David responded in good humour. (Though with shame I must admit that I had not.) I shouldn’t call the coincidence ‘queer’, for that sounds quite belittling to our poor connection—rather I shall take it as a sign that you and I are a pair predestined.

Bathsheba was a little cool to him in her next letter, and David thought he detected the hint of a sting buried in her response. He wondered if perhaps he’d overstepped the mark and been unseasonably warm. He felt as poignantly embarrassed as he did when he thought back on his days strutting before Dora’s residence attired in ridiculous style. (Albeit, he knew, with less cause—for did he not receive overly-warm letters every week from readers? He himself had never thought of these especially poorly on account of their undue assumptions of a personal knowledge of him alone.) Perhaps Bathsheba simply meant to discourage over-familiarity—she’d told him but little of her status and situation, and though David was burningly curious, he knew it would be discourteous of him to pry.  

He asked if she had ever given thought to writing fiction, and delicately encouraged her in the pursuit, if she’d any inclination for it. No one who wrote letters as she did need fear a lack of innate ability with words. Her speedy return letter pleased him no end: she had indeed considered it, and thus bolstered by ‘the kind sentiments of her dear friend, who ought to know his business’, give her but a day or two and she thought she might turn a thing she'd toyed with out solidly enough, as a first attempt. Mind, it’d be a thorough-going journeyman affair. He wasn’t to expect a masterpiece!

When the work arrived with him, it indeed bore several hallmarks of an early tale. David, with a broad experience of writers at various stages of their careers, could tell as much almost at a glance. But if it lacked the mastery of long experience and creaked a little, here and there, at the joints—here too stilted, there too apt to make every character express themselves just as Bathsheba herself did, and with a final act marred by too sour a note (not that David objected to tragedy or bitter reproof, but he maintained that this must be so delivered as to keep the narrative tone cohesive)—it was nevertheless evident that before him was proof of a talent that would, if cultivated, bear a rich harvest. David congratulated her, and hoped to hear more of her.

He suggested they meet to discuss the work, and out of a general desire to bring about an engagement which, to him, felt long overdue. Bathsheba demurred, saying that it was at present impossible—not simply on the days he’d proposed, but on any day at all. Piqued, David responded to her respectfully but a little coldly. He knew from the rapidity of her postal response that Bathsheba too dwelt in London, and not even in a very distant suburb thereof. He was too much a gentleman to chide a lady for her reticence in a personal matter such as this or to insist upon his point, valid as he thought it was, but he was also too quick in his feelings and open-hearted not to feel the slight keenly. She was much too important to him now to thus take lightly.  

With his notes Bathsheba revised these initial chapters, and she wrote more with both great rapidity and all the care that might have accompanied a slower process, growing more skilful with the practice. By the end David was left gushing over dispatches, all coolness forgotten, awaiting them eagerly and assuring her of this, even going so far as to request her permission to publish these instalments in his young magazine when she was satisfied with the work. 

Dearest, dearest Bathsheba, he wrote, what can I say of your latest triumph? Well, what I can say, I have endeavoured to in the notes you will find attached—thank you, once more, for being so kind as to send it to me. Would that you had given it to me in person!

He knew he ought to have resisted that barb, but the closer he felt to Bathsheba the more her refusals to so much as speak to him in the flesh seemed wildly irrational, unexplained as they were.

Sensing his displeasure (which chagrined David, because he’d suspected it better-concealed than it apparently had been), Bathsheba hastened to write him another letter, hard upon the heels of his own. She absolutely pleaded with him not to be angry with her, citing reasons for her concealment which it would be uncomfortable and painful to them both to discuss. She respected and valued him immensely and treasured his invitation, but while she devoutly wished for their meeting with a profundity she believed he could scarcely imagine, she knew there could be no happy outcome to such a consummation as things stood. She abased herself to such a degree that David was ashamed to have put her in a position that had made her feel obliged to offer such apologies, and sorry indeed for having so evidently hurt her.

My dearest Bathsheba, he rushed to reassure her, why should you ever think I would cease to speak to you over a difference such as this? It should take a great rift indeed opening up between us on some dire question of principle to accomplish that. I would grieve such an alteration heartily, and should work energetically to prevent it. Never fear to differ with me on small matters, I beg you! A healthy intercourse between us there may head off just such a calamity, and preserve us until the end of our lives in the companionship we presently enjoy, and which I, for my part, hold so very dear. I think your opinions are not so very opposed to mine there, at least! I am mortified to have caused you even a moment’s uneasiness, especially by behaving in so pushing and testing a fashion. Boorish as I am, I am perhaps (I hope!) equally repentant, and I remain your very own,

David Copperfield

To a degree David’s sense had now caught up with his heart, and each took advantage of their alignment to make some reckoning with the other in the context of this present discord. Bathsheba was one of David's dearest friends, he knew. He’d owned to himself that he was growing quite attached to her all this while. What he hadn’t realised until this disturbance arose was that he’d become not simply attached, but very possibly seriously so. He felt some guilt over the departed Dora, especially given that Bathsheba was so much her opposite in character that his present feelings seemed almost a rebuke to his poor child-wife. Yet even Dora had suggested that she’d felt a steadier partner might have been better attuned to him, and she would have wanted David to be happy, some judicious time after her loss. He was yet a young man, full of energy and affection, and Bathsheba had been his very guide through the darkness of his mourning: a personal and modern Beatrice, in her peculiar way. Who would have thought her observational black humour, the effort of creation they had shared and the sheer presence of such a ready mind so closely in conversation with his own would have been as good as any angel to him, and possibly of more use?

David said nothing of his feelings. They were new, and private, and he wanted to be very certain of them indeed before taking any step involving them. This was love as he had never known it: infatuation, yes, but not a mad, blind, thin, sharp passion. Not his wistful, pity-laced, aching fondness for Dora in marriage, either. Nor was it simply a practical affiliation and intimacy, though their connection offered him both in abundance. Their alliance was above all things a friendship, predicated on their opinions and their thoughts, which they shared with an honesty and breadth he’d not known to wish for before he had got it. David sometimes teased Bathsheba, saying she could cajole any information out of him—she was so very good at it! 

Bathsheba’s numbers sold very well indeed, and she confessed herself much relieved by that. For I feared I should be a burden on you and your young enterprise, and that you might press on with my numbers out of your fathomless stubbornness, or out of a fondness for me unequal to my merits. I know what they are, if you don’t. 

He laughed at her and sent along a contract for further work—she’d mocked his last, saying that she’d thought, by his own account of his career, that he’d known a little of the law? But she must have been mistaken, for were there not three distinct loopholes in this document (marked upon the copy she returned, enclosed) that would give any court (and thus David) the profoundest headache in regards to syndication rights?

He’d drawn it up himself, he’d have her know.

Yes, she’d said, she’d thought as much. And while it was a fair enough start, it was these little niceties, Copperfield, that would catch him out. For that was the whole nature of the law, was it not?

And how, he asked her, had she come to know the law's nature, red in tape and claw, better than he himself did?

Her reply was longer in coming than it usually was, and David wondered whether he’d once more encroached upon her privacy. But she answered him freely enough when she did deign to reply. She’d once worked for a legal man, in a lowly capacity. Well, David contested, so had he, though apparently with less good effect. She smartly replied that perhaps it was a matter of a wish to retain the information. David was vitally interested in almost any question going, but if he wasn’t interested, heaven help you. He’d never remember mathematics to save his life, she’d wager. David confessed that figures had indeed tormented him in school: he supposed he could force himself to learn them if given a practical object, but he never would make a natural navigator. Nor, Bathsheba suggested, a natural attorney, if any such there were, the breed being pretty unnatural in the main. She hoped he’d change the rest of his contracts just as she’d altered her own, the better to avoid confusion in future.

Everywhere David went, Bathsheba Stack began to be spoken of with admiration. His writer Aldersley said that she quite reminded him of his other writer, Miss Hale, and Miss Hale (who wrote under her maiden name to insulate her husband, a manufacturer in the North, from direct association with her work) wrote that Stack really was a gothicist in her way, was she not? Though too earthy to be connected to the poor late Brontë girls. The heaven-help-us sense and patience of Radcliffe or Austen, coupled with the mad, almost unseemly zest of the Monk. Hale asked if she might meet Miss Stack, her contemporary and companion in the odd and at times uneasy business of writing novels while female, when next she was able to travel into the city. Wryly David explained that this was likely to be impossible, as not even he had been granted that particular privilege, though she might certainly write to Miss Stack’s correspondence address (a non-residential one—Bathsheba, like many, must pick up her post, or have someone run and fetch it for her) to express the wish.

Of late David felt the absence of that particular mark of favour more keenly than ever. The more his respected friends and their shared public admired Bathsheba, the more his own feelings made themselves known to him. Stack sold well, and the magazine flourished, and David would have given a fair chunk of the income stream (provided payroll was duly protected, as Miss Hale would have hastened to add—bless her native decency, as much a reflex with her as an arm's jerking up when a hammer was applied to the elbow) to have congratulated her in person.

David Copperfield was fresh, but he was not naive. He was perfectly aware of how a person in Bathsheba’s position might well deceive him. He had, of course, wondered whether she’d represented herself to him truly before now, and considered the several reasons why she might wish to remain in retirement. But her letters were so personable, and so descriptive—he knew so much of her life, even having only been allowed into it at a remove. He was being asked for nothing beyond his company (having freely offered her the writing contract, which benefited them both), so what fraud could be in action? If she sought to extort money from him at some later date and cultivated their connection to such an end, she played a very long game indeed, and he thought the time invested could not possibly be equal to such a return. Bathsheba now had a professional literary existence external to David, and as she built up a body of work it seemed increasingly ludicrous to suspect her of misinformation as to her particulars. To what end? The truth was probably a good deal more prosaic. David suspected himself of cooking up a conspiracy to explain, or indeed explain away, the simplest thing in the world: a woman who shouldn't like to meet him. She had her privacy and her several attendant mysteries, and these saddened David, but he’d no right to her and he knew it. If her situation was in some sense dire, and if she needed help, surely she knew she could come to him for it, or request his reasonable aid? Thus it seemed she simply didn’t wish to.

Troubled by such reflections and made morose, as well as lingeringly, inextinguishably curious, David asked his fair correspondent if she might describe herself in general terms? He knew not even whether she was short or tall, or of Chinese extraction, or of Scottish. (And thus advocating her own interests in her advice! A most scandalous breach of faith, if true.)

Not fair, to begin with, unless you mean in point of complexion—I always was white as snow, but there my resemblance to your average fairy tale princess ends, I am afraid. I am just as English as you are, and I happen to know we are of an age, or near enough to it, for an article on you in the Illustrated London News only this week brought the year of your birth to my notice. I’ve auburn hair that has never yet met with favour anywhere and green eyes. I am tall, for a woman. To say a word as to my beauty would be to say too much. 

David outright said he expected her wit of running away with her, and joked that ‘tall for a woman’ often meant ‘still short enough to tuck neatly under a beau’s chin’. She replied that he did not know the rarified altitudes in which she traveled, and that if he ever required anything to be fetched down from a tall cupboard, he might call upon her in that capacity. She had seen his portrait of course, in the very paper she’d mentioned, but many other times besides. She knew him to be a slight man, of average height. Once, in fact, she’d even beheld him personally. He'd been addressing a large and crowded hall. 

I recall, Bathsheba observed, the stroke of her pen unusually heavy on the paper, that you had a rich shock of brunette hair that curled around your face, which was itself flushed in the hot room, and very animated. Looking at you it was difficult NOT to understand what you felt and thought about everything that passed (and to know that both currents ran deep with you). You wore a good suit, though shy of dandyism—which I expect you DO shy from, generally, though I also expect it’d suit you very well indeed, if you were to let yourself indulge in it. It shouldn't suit other men half so well, but you could pull it off better than than they do. You laugh nicely, if no one’s ever told you as much, and you have fine hands—though perhaps a tendency to grip the lectern too tightly with those poor instruments, in order to control a slight nervousness. Your knuckles were as white as mine! I wonder you should feel such a trepidation still, with all your gifts and such accomplishments as you have, but I must confess to liking you all the better for it, I really must. You’ve a voice suited almost to song, and eyes of extraordinary, piercing vivacity. You look something like a bust of a Roman senator come to life, but one can still see the softer promise, never entirely to be forgotten in you, of the fine boy you must have been—a promise slowly coming to fruition, and yet staying by you to lend you a certain feminine, sympathetic cast of expression, a vital quickness that appeals and charms. I remember I thought your wife a fortunate woman. Here ends my description of YOU, David, since you’ve such a zest for portraiture today. 

David adjusted his collar and felt embarrassed reading her perfectly appropriate letter, and that night committed the sin of Onan with a blush on the very boyish cheek Bathsheba had made note of.

You remind me, he later wrote, during a discussion of the nature of character, and whether one met with many very distinct people in life, a little of Rosa Dartle—a person you can have no knowledge of. Thus I must struggle to explain a comparison which rather eludes me, and do just what I resorted to such a metaphor to escape doing in the first place. Let us see if I can work it out here, spilling all my half-formed thoughts out before you and exposing myself to your just amusement at my predicament and ill-preparation. Well, then: Rosa was (and is still, I suspect, though I’ve no very recent proof of this) beautiful, except that she’d a temper, and when she was roused a faint scar on her upper lip would flare up demonically. Further Rosa was, or is, clever and contrary, interesting and intelligent, though she’d not enough kindness in her. If she was ever possessed of a goodly supply, it had eroded somewhat by the time she and I were introduced, and dwindled before my eyes just as one watches a candle do when one works through the night. She was, I am afraid, as vengeful as she was loving, and she loved a dear friend of mine (who proved very wicked, but who for my own part I never stopped caring for deeply, for all that) with a great and terrible bitterness. You may wonder why I seek to assign you such indifferent qualities, and I assure you that I don’t! It is more that some elements of her passionate nature, some expressions of her strong mind, are a little akin to your own. I fully believe you would have hated one another, but enjoyed the association nonetheless. My money would, as ever, be laid on you. (By the by, I think I have paid out in full to you after the confusion over the December instalment falling to the the new year's account, but say immediately if I am in any way in arrears, and I will hasten to correct any discrepancy.)

And pray, don’t think me unkind, but I must admit that at times you slightly remind me of an old enemy of mine. I almost dare not speak his name for fear of summoning the devil, with whom I imagine he is in deep, now that he has vanished from the lives of all of my acquaintance. He shared your keen insight into people's hypocrisies (which I do still wish you might temper with a little more understanding, Sheba, for I know your insight keener and more nuanced than the series of condemnations contained in your last letter, hilarious though they were, would indicate).

I apologise for speaking of a dear friend in the same breath as two such fascinating spectacles of villainy, but please be comforted by the thought that I find you no less interesting than the aforementioned specimens on account of your (relative) goodness. 

This remembrance was singular, because David didn’t even like to think the name of the man in question. There was something taboo about that particular subject, for him. David did not so much choose to avoid thinking of the man who had almost destroyed so many decent lives as his mind shut out any reference that might lead him thither automatically. Some instinct within David, perhaps one aimed at survival, warned him that the risks attendant on such contemplation were great indeed, and instinctively led him away from those paths. When the fiend was not before him, David repressed every inclination that his way tended. He felt a little guilty about this, as he suspected such avoidance had in part prevented him from making Micawber’s efforts to expose the villain. His old morbid fascination with the young man he’d grown up with was sealed away, more effectively than his lingering feelings for Steerforth, who, safely dead, might be regretted with a frankly romantic intensity that threatened at times to equal David’s regret for Dora. 

Both such sentiments were now, however, overshadowed by his brooding over Bathsheba, and at last David spoke, feeling as though he’d burst if he didn’t. Concealment had never been in his nature.

I must beg you alike not to mock me and for your pardon, he wrote, but, as I think you must know, I’ve grown so fond of you as to more than merit an expression to that effect. I suspect you refuse to meet because of what you've have said of your low circumstances, and perhaps what you have told me of your plain appearance. These terms are your own, and none of mine. I have formed no such judgments for my part, and should both indeed be true, you must know neither is anything to me. I respect your scruples, for they are born of your judgment, which you know I reverence more than words can express. But please, out of the kindness you so often indulge me with, tell me anything you can about why we must not meet? For regarding you as I do, it is a hard load, and I could bear it more easily, if you still insist I must, for knowing what I carried, and why, and whither—that is to say, if any longed-for event might come to pass that would enable our closer association.

Yours,

David Copperfield

David fretfully got on with the day’s business, all the while worried as to what she might say. 

What if I told you, Bathsheba answered after an anxious pause of two services, that next to me, your Rosa Dartle would seem the most flawless rose in England? Would you still wish to meet me?

Bathsheba

David responded:

I dash this off to catch the 5:30 return of post—inner London delights in twelve mail services a day, and each such hourly call is dear to me for your sweet sake. You are being a little playful, when I specifically asked you not to mock my declaration, but how can I do other than forgive you? Will you answer my questions, if you please?

It’s not to be, Bathsheba gave him instead, and I can’t say more than that, just now.

***

Frustrated, David turned to Agnes, who he’d faithfully promised to tell all his loves to as they came along. Frustration melted away as he read her some of the missives—he could not help himself from delivering them with style, and from sounding affectionate and proud of his beloved. For so, he admitted to himself now, she was. 

Agnes, seated, frowned as David paced and read. David stopped his recital in the middle of a particularly amusing passage to ask what troubled her. Hesitantly, brow knit, she shook her head. 

“I don’t know, Trot. I really cannot say! Yet does her manner of expressing herself not sound slightly... familiar? Somehow?”

David pressed Agnes' hand to his, kneeling down to speak to her. She looked at his hand, but her uncertain expression did not waver.

“How so, Agnes? In what respect?"

“I cannot say,” she admitted, “and that is the trouble of it! I might, I suppose, be imagining it, but unlike you and Miss Stack, who I agree to be as gifted a writer as you have suggested, if not entirely to my taste, I’m afraid I haven’t much imagination.”

“Nor are you usually prone to suspicion,” David observed, taking the slight to Bathsheba’s writing rather too much to heart but concealing his defensiveness, knowing he shouldn’t have done. “That makes your present worry more alarming, does it not?” 

“Oh no,” Agnes insisted, “David I won’t have you suspecting a woman you so admire because I’ve a worry I cannot justify even to myself! That would be very wrong! And very likely it is only my concern for you that makes me start at nothing—I should hate to give biased witness!” 

Agnes glanced over some business accounts Bathsheba had drawn up to assist David in the running of the magazine, had half a thought, and lost it before it flowered due to being too much in the habit of suppressing fancies. But the world is a fanciful place, full of fanciful people, and if she had entertained that thought then it might, like an old woman who is secretly a good fairy in disguise, have rewarded her handsomely in due course. Without ever knowing it, Agnes came within an inch of revealing an immense deception and, after he'd had time to curse and to mourn this latest setback, finally winning the man she’d quietly esteemed since boyhood. But an inch might as well be a thousand miles, if you’ve no strength to traverse it, and Agnes’ imagination (which might have been as strong as most peoples', had her father provided her with more of a childhood outside her life as his little housekeeper, or had she sought fancy's challenges and solaces for her own part) was a weak muscle, long gone soft with infrequent usage. 

“Do not the names involved strike you as curious?” Agnes asked.

“Oh, you mean the biblical coincidence!” David jumped on this chance to praise his slighted Bathsheba. “Yes, she mentioned that herself! A happy chance, isn't it?” 

Agnes thought she might point out that David hadn't found his encounter with someone who'd borne the other name in that story particularly serendipitous, but elected tact. David always seemed upset by any mention of Uriah. The merest suggestion of him worked David up to the point of calling the other man a cur almost before he’d done anything definite. Once more Agnes nearly grasped the nature of David's predicament, again Agnes almost had a suspicion—but it was too mad, and so it was forgotten before it had even formed. She ought to have considered that almost nothing was too mad for the people involved—that nothing was beyond either of them, neither any sublimity nor any piece of absurdity.

David drew her attention to a comment written in that same suggestive hand. “She’s so prudent, too—look at this thoughtful note on my accounts! I wouldn’t have thought to list the returns as she has done, but she’s precisely correct, I’ve been missing money we’re owed. Oh and she’s so diverting, Agnes, here, look at this, the part where she writes about trying to buy tripe—”

Agnes dutifully did as she was instructed, though she knew herself to be neither esteemed for humour in her own right nor honoured for her strong reception of others’ efforts. She was a serious woman; she had been serious since before she’d been a woman. Gravity was perhaps the abiding characteristic of her person, and she knew and accepted that. Trotwood loved this woman he’d never seen, for qualities Agnes had to admit she found more sensible than those he’d married poor, dear Dora for. Well, why not? Agnes supposed he’d never seen her either, for all they'd known one another since childhood, and that of the two of them, Bathsheba was the less invisible, the more full of colour.

Why shouldn’t David be happy with Bathsheba, whose absence Agnes could not explain to Trot, but whose love for him she felt (not without pain) in every line of her copious letters? He was happier now with even just the ghost of this woman than Agnes suspected she could ever make him, with all her steady work and careful affection. And why shouldn't she, for her own sake, look for someone she could make as happy? Pining was not wholesome, was not Christian. Adams, an old classmate of David’s, now an attorney, who had come to help her father after Uriah’s departure had left the practice in shambles, had for the past two years made himself very agreeable, and had lately offered some tenuous, delicate statements that had left Agnes with little uncertainty as to his regard for her. She thought they might get on well together, and that she might well, if she gave herself a chance to be courted by Adams, let her love of David fade into the pleasant, loyal, sisterly regard that David never failed to show a fraternal version of to her. Agnes could see herself coming to love Adams, and could see her style of love being met with care and devotion, could see what she had to offer completing Adams in a way she thought that perhaps it never could complete David, who had always wanted sharp winter nights and rolling, drunken summer days to go with his sleepy replete autumn afternoons and quickening, lively, snap-quick springs. 

She squeezed David’s hand in her own a final time and rose from the couch, a little sad and reconciled but yet also hopeful about the future in a new way, a way she had never hitherto been. She and Trot would never cease to love one another, she knew, and that love would never be the less for its not being romantic. She was David's rock: she was someone else’s wife. 

***

David began the letter frankly. I am as cross as I am ill. Entertain the invalid, if you would? I long for a story, and some of my favourites are by you. If you would tell me one about yourself, that is to say one of my favourite people, I should be double-blessed. It occurs to me that I know very little of your childhood—you may start there! Be not Bathsheba (though never be anything but your own dear self), but Scheherazade, and have the kindness to thus oblige your tyrannical emperor. 

If that is King David’s will, Bathsheba answered, then I am only to happy to serve! Though I’ll have you know, I shan’t dance naked at any banquets at your behest. For one it is immodest, and for another ridiculous given that I am decidedly not one of your lovely Persian queens or what have you. Finally it sounds as though it wouldn’t exactly serve, boring the assembled notables and quite chilling your poor correspondent. 

Where to begin? It’s such a question! Some of it, I know too well, wouldn’t interest you—we’ll omit those passages for now, despite your inevitable protests (‘oh everything you do is of interest to me!’). The other day you asked about my time working for that man of the law we’d spoken of once before, and it occurs to me now that I never did answer you! TERRIBLY rude of me, and I apologise a thousand times, I’m sure.

There is, I’m afraid, not much of a story, but what little there is I’ll tell you. For years I was in the service of an esteemed councillor who, while he was genteel among his own people and decent to me, was little more than a hypocritical drunken wretch. I learned more of the law than I was ever intended to in order to better conceal his mistakes (female secretaries are rare, but they do make them, you know!). Oh, he never did anything improper, that is to say I was never presumed upon as I know some women are. There I was lucky, if you can call the basest civility luck. I never could, myself. But I slaved at his household accounts, and then at the dog-ends of his business, and then at anything he didn't feel inclined to do himself (though you’ll grant it was never the station I’d been brought into the business to occupy). He did not generally feel inclined to much. I’ll admit that he was a tolerable, mediocre man who incensed me by thinking himself an excellent one, and most wise, and who convinced more sensible people of the same by having a good suit and acting the part. He would not have lasted a fortnight in my own neighbourhood.

My situation had, as you may imagine, few prospects. I have hitherto hesitated to reveal to you that I was formerly in service, because while you are broad-minded, I suspect you and I both know what station is to the world. You will perhaps be a little shocked to learn that, considering the grim outlook before me (that is to say, a full and thankless and unaltering life regarded as half a member of this household and indeed as half a person), I seriously set myself at my employer’s unfathomably bland scion and heir. It was always destined to be a tricky thing to bring off, but such was my scope then, and so far had my ambitions been curtailed. I might have overthrown a kingdom: I was stuck plotting the conquest of a patch of land, exactly like a feebler Fortinbras. (I do these just for you, you know, on account of your liking that Will fellow better than you like me, whatever you say about the matter and whatever compliments you pay (‘You are jealous even of him?’ Ridiculous David. There’s nothing you like that I’m not a little jealous of, you know, and your idols can’t expect to fare well! Really they can't!).) 

I hated the thought of it, and when the plan eventually fell apart, I was even, if you would believe it, a little relieved, by that at least.

Here ends the wicked tale of the conniving maid, a favourite among well-bred persons and the more discerning class of invalid.

Your Scheherazade and your

Bathsheba

More slowly than he would have liked (having dismissed the amanuensis he’d been working with on magazine articles to his supper—he never could use an amanuensis for fiction, or for private correspondence), David hand-wrote his reply. It did sound awful, and what a cad her old employer was! Was there no bright spot in her (how many?) years there?

A post later, Bathsheba gave him that she was glad to hear David call him as much, and felt she’d been waiting a long while for that particular vindication, having experienced so little sympathy during her term of employment. How many years? Too many. And as for bright spots, well. 

For a while the family had a relation living with them: an exquisitely pretty boy, nearly my own age. I felt terribly affected whenever I noticed him (and he couldn't be in sight without my noticing him to a shameful degree), for he really was an uncommonly sweet youth—one’s heart hurt to look at him. A lady shouldn’t say such things, but as I have admitted, I am no such creature. Moreover, he was kind to me, if a little pompous and something of an upstart—but then he was young, and I liked him, you know, a good deal, even in his cluelessness. I had known so little civility and interest, and here I was, receiving a goodly sum of the refined product from the most interesting person I’d ever yet met. I was half infatuated with him, half mad with resentment of him for crimes real and imagined. Oh, why do I say it when you, David, must know the mad passions of youth yourself?

I really was QUITE put out when he married an idiotic, offensively pretty, carelessly rich woman he’d seemed to know for little more than a minute—an hour at the outside! He’d an admirably ready, but oh, a very undisciplined heart. Yet even if he hadn't had it in him to love ME, he might at least have done better for himself! He might have known his worth. I'm afraid I took the insult poorly, and we parted on the worst of terms.

Well, David responded, feeling as though she’d reached into his mind and plucked out the very phrase, as well as a bit chagrined by Bathsheba’s unintentional reminder of his own perhaps hasty marriage (and not a little jealous of the boy Bathsheba couldn't help seeing, when she wouldn't see him), anyone who didn't see your worth and the value of your regard must be something of a fool. 

Oh, one forgives fools, if they do but reform a little, Bathsheba allowed, and I hope he is happier now. Though I never shall ENTIRELY forgive him—I hold grudges, you know! And don't say I oughtn't, for I know all your lectures by heart, and can anticipate the ones you've yet to read me. Now that you've been set up with a story, tell me everything about this illness—what are you doing for it? I know you won’t have seen a doctor, which you ought to, given that you are perfectly capable of affording it. Especially so, directly after the rents have come in—speaking of, how are advertisements shaping up for next month re my column space? Or are you too ill to do any speaking of that kind?

 ***

David’s magazine fared excessively well. In no small part thanks to you, my able partner, he told Bathsheba, who contributed material (she’d a dab hand for dry, back-handed commentary on events and observational humour) and, via correspondence, shared much of the organisational labour. David had begun this particular process of collaboration by grousing about the score of tasks preventing him from working, as he really wished and ought to, on his next instalment, and lamenting that perhaps the vital freshness of the idea that had come to him would be lost by the time he came to record it. Bathsheba’s return letter had been a short note, explaining what she’d done and that it was really quite to her own advantage, for didn’t she yearn to read the conclusion of the story more than anyone? These words had been accompanied by two of the letters David had spoken of the necessity of drafting, which he'd admitted to putting off. Bathsheba had said that she’d nothing better to do and might get on with the accounts, if he’d send along the necessary information. She’d been a little curt about the order his books were kept in, and eventually the management of these fell entirely under her responsibility. It was all carefully done—David looked them over regularly, liking to keep abreast of the whole functioning of his enterprise. David had at first paid her what he might another book keeper, but they’d then decided between them that she’d be better off with a percent-share of the magazine's profits cleared, calculated quarterly and laid out in monthly instalments—the same basis by which David paid himself. He frankly told friends and contributors that the woman was his right hand, and that she’d come to know the practical side of the business as well as he did or better. 

It amused David (and saddened him, a little) that readers often believed Bathsheba Stack and David Copperfield were married, but that Miss Stack retained her maiden designation for a nom de plume. These readers never could recall whether the magazine had exactly said this anywhere in particular, but the two of them did write the housekeeping column in concert, so surely? 

One morning, very early, David dashed off some ideas he’d brooded on since the previous night’s last post about how to make the traditionally lackluster summer sales figures rosier. For we’ve no less need of bread in June than in December, my authoress, he wrote. 

I always find you appealing in a mercenary mode, Bathsheba answered. Perhaps it is that I generally find you a pretty fair prospect. Or it might be the way such considerations run so against the grain: the contrast sets you off nicely. Maybe it’s your mind in action, which I admire in the way a keen judge of horseflesh might a good jumper, or a squire a handsome, shining-coated, bright-eyed bitch. 

It was obvious, undeniable flirtation. David set the letter down and thought a long while before answering.

Bathsheba anticipated him. Are you occupied, and if so, what with? (I own I may have gone a little far; if I have done, won't you forgive me and forget it?)

I’m not sure I can, David replied. Bathsheba, it’s not the advances I object to, so much as the fact that battle is never joined. You’ve rendered it impossible. I’m sorry to say explicitly a thing which you must know, but I find I cannot go on forever in this manner, never so much as writing the words. In short, as an old friend of mine would say, I must own that I love you. I must say that I have done so for a considerable term: that I would do it openly and honourably, in marriage, if you would permit me to do so. My mind has invented a thousand awful reasons why this might not be, and I fear many of them, more even for your sake than because they are the instruments of my present heartbreak. What must your life be, my Bathsheba? How terrible is your present condition? What are the circumstances of the woman most precious to me, and how can it be that I am ignorant of them? Yet, do I not know you, even in the darkness of my ignorance? What obstacles dare stand against us, when I find so little division between our hearts? 

Forbid me from speaking of this again if you feel nothing of the kind, and I beg you, stop reading if my declarations discomfort you—but let me here record for posterity that you are my constant companion, even in your absence, my provocation and my delight and even my comfort. 'In short', you are everything to me, and if I am much to you, then how much more my joy?

Yours, in this as in all things, 

David Copperfield

He sent the letter by the day’s last post and spent the night almost entirely sleeplessly, dropping off only with the help of a little brandy. When David awoke at 8:30, he discovered that a long, long letter from his mistress awaited him. He wielded the letter-opener like an executioner, and exhaled with the profoundest relief at the exquisitely promising first line.

My own, my all, my David (oh, at last! To call you so AT LAST!),

I must confess something that will no doubt sound very strange to you. I have loved you since even before we begun to correspond. You must not think me flighty or mad—I still have a few of my wits, and I intend to keep them. I read your work and knew you through it, I hungered to speak to you, and at last found occasion for doing so. You cannot know what joy that feeble pretext brought me! When you returned an answer to my second letter, which I’d worked so diligently to compose in the hope of not making myself seem ridiculous, when you suggested we might correspond, my heart palpitated, my hands shook, I broke out in a cold sweat, and I clutched the thing (a letter in your own hand, inviting our association!) to my breast in joy, raced about the room and threw myself upon my bed like a besotted youth, like such a fool as you can scarce imagine. I could not tell you so then, for despite not wanting you to think of it in such a light, I acknowledge it was madness—was ever a gentlemen in this humour wooed and won? But I think you might forgive me for it now, or pretty nearly.  My feelings for you have only matured and solidified as our intimacy has progressed (like a Christmas pudding left to cure, you might say—you've such a way with words, I never could equal it and have always admired it terribly).

A better woman would say she didn’t love you, that you weren’t bread and air to her—in fact, quite the reverse! She'd lie to you outright, but mind, she’d do it to ease your suffering, and to speed you towards a better wife who could give you all that I cannot. But I’m not she, and the thought of losing you makes me shake as I write—see the trembling of my hand? I love you selfishly, and you’ve a right to know it. 

Alas, some of what you allude to is true: I am prohibited from marrying you by other arrangements I dare not tell you of. I imagine you can guess the sort of thing I mean. I do not meet you because I know your noble heart and my own weak nature too well for that. You should try and set me at my liberty. I should be too weak to resist your urgings in person, as I always am weak where you are concerned, and your goodness and my weakness would together bring disaster down upon the both of us. Promise me you’ll never try to arrange such a thing.

Perhaps you might think of me as your wife—there is no harm at all in that, is there? Yes, that'd be very pleasant—pleasant is hardly the word for it, for I can think of little that would make me happier. Think that you have a wife who values you above anything, and that she is me, and that perhaps circumstance has parted you. And yet she loves you so that even if sense urged her to give you up (which it does not!), she couldn’t do it, not for anything, and relishes any little token of your feelings beyond the telling of it (certainly well beyond the bounds of decent and discreet satisfaction). The very fact of your being in the world fills her with rapture, and were you absent from it, her despair would be incalculable. (My mother mourned her husband, my father, up until her own death more than a decade later, with show and sincerity, which don’t often go together—that’s faith, or nothing is, and I don’t love you a whit less.) The separation pains your wife, but she endures it! And she’d do worse, for your sake.

Your Bathsheba— if you'll have her.

What can I say? David responded before noon. I am saddened and I am delighted. I feel everything, Sheba. I know full well that if anything else had occasioned such a tumult in me, it is you I would be rushing off to tell. 

If you are married already, I would gladly help to fund your living independently, with no obligations attendant on such an offer. Though (and forgive me for this) neither would I feel bound to abstain from taking up lodgings with you, if you left a living husband. For surely it is the law that is wrong, and not our regard for one another? I hold marriage as sacred, I think, as any man, but know only too well from a general experience of mankind all the perversions that state can undergo: the mismatched hearts, the mercenary unions, the cruelty and degradation and endurance it can demand of one. It is one thing to undergo privation hand in hand with a lover, and another for a hand that should be gentle to be turned upon one. Promise me you are not thus ill-used? I could not bear that. I could not bear that it should happen to you, and that I should fail you so terribly as that.

For my part, I promise not to seek you out, though it is hard—an act of fidelity on the order of your mother’s, if such a claim is no insult to the departed. 

I understand your situation may well be more complicated even than I understand it to be. There are a thousand onerous burdens of blood, for example. One such could bind you to care for a tyrannical old father who would not permit your union for anything. Another could have you waiting a score of years for a lost fiancé. You are, as much as it pains me to admit it, perhaps right in not telling me: I should only spend my days rescuing you in my mind, plotting stratagems, rolling stones up hills like Sisyphus and being crushed under them each time they came back after me. You are an intelligent woman, and I should not wish to be the boor who, on hearing of a problem, strides in over-confident, convinced their friend is a simpleton and that a momentary bestowal of their exalted intelligence upon the matter shall clear the thing up entirely. If you say the mountain cannot be moved, ascended or circumnavigated, I do trust that you have tried to do it. 

As to your proposition, my answer is lopsided, as I look on it with both an auspicious and a dropping eye. With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, as it were, in equal scale weighing delight and dole. It reminds me of all I cannot have, though that is base ingratitude. For I have no dearer friend than you, no more loved possession than the union you possess me of, and no better name than

Your husband,

David Copperfield

Bathsheba assured him of her safety in a letter dotted with tears. You ridiculous boy, she chid him, look what you've made me do! Oh, I’m so happy. Oh David, I’ve never been so happy in all my life. I’d no notion that I was even capable of it. She signed ‘your wife’ with a grand flourish, and David was a chagrined by how pleased and proud he was to be the author of so violent a joy in so sensible and gifted a person.

***

Now that things had come to a point, David felt a moral responsibility to inform his aunt of his state of affairs. This obligation made him rather nervous as his aunt was a violently sensible woman, not likely to look kindly on the fanciful turn his inclinations had taken. He prepared himself for a few jibes, and vowed to remain steady and reassuring in the face of this hard expression of her tender concern for him. He did love his aunt, and sought to make her proud, and the thought that he might disappoint her in his behaviour now troubled him gravely.

David visited her in the country, bringing with him many of Bathsheba’s letters. He set the whole course of events before his aunt.

“Blind Trot,” Betsey scoffed, “how are you to know this person is telling you anything like the truth about herself? She might be anyone! Anyone at all!” 

David explained his own misgivings on that score and the various proofs he’d used to quiet them, a series of convincing arguments delivered by a skilled and passionate orator. She grumbled, but settled as to the matter of Miss Stack’s professional profile and her steady hand in the running of the magazine. 

With a feeling of hesitation, David showed her Bathsheba’s explanation of her incapacity for marriage. Betsey frowned sternly over this, and David squirmed a little in his chair, like a much younger man, as she did so. 

“I suppose,” Betsey concluded, removing her small round reading glasses, “that she is indeed the victim of an unhappy marriage, or is otherwise prevented from seeking you out. Well,” she sighed, “that might be got out of, but who knows better than I the possible complications, and the pressures that can be brought to bear?" Her mouth took on a grim twist. "If I hadn’t had my independence in point of finance, I know I should never have escaped my own disgrace. And there can be more than money at stake. Suppose the girl’s particularly religious, or too sensible of a foolish mother’s final wishes? Ah,” she signed, tapping her glasses against her knee, “it happens, Trot! Often, it does happen. At least—not to speak ill of the dead—she seems to have retained more of her spirit than your poor down-trodden mother, crushed by such a bad situation as I suppose your Miss Stack’s must be. Bathsheba, I suppose I ought to call her. Well, David, I’m sorry for it—such things are very, very often not the fault of the ill-used woman in question, and she sounds energetic and sensible, just the sort of wife to suit you.”

Betsey made no mention of poor Dora, but David clasped her hand, and they passed over mingled regret and grief in silence. 

“I had thought your path might lie another way,” Betsey ventured, “but I see now that isn’t to be. If you and this woman of yours continue to help and provide for one another, it will be a truer and more sensible marriage than many I’ve known, and you’ll be made happy, as you ought to be.”

"You aren't angry with me then, Aunt?" David's bundled the letters carefully, avoiding her eyes. "You don't think I—"

"Angry? Angry, fiddlestick! Trotwood, have I ever considered Mister Dick out of his mind, simply because he chooses to express himself differently than others do? I have not done so! Why should I consider your marriage illegitimate, simply because it isn't a common one? A great many very regular marriages are highly irregular in the manner in which they're conducted. Yours may yet set us all right."

These tender speeches, and an accompanying familial embrace, were torn asunder by a forbidding and unexpected arrival—not that of Peggotty, who rushed in to tell of it, but of that which she announced. The dread menace was again visited upon them by heaven, or holiday-makers: donkeys.

*** 

David and Bathsheba had something of a honeymoon period, for all they hadn’t any direct contact. David might have assumed their intimacies would continue on in the companionable vein they had enjoyed for some time now, but the texture of their intercourse became finer, their disclosures more exact. Their passion heightened to such an extent that any terribly personal disclosure between them was itself a thing almost carnal. Bathsheba had a way of making even innocent disclosures sound obscenely insinuating, and with her own dear husband she didn't feel a great need to restrict herself to purely innocent disclosures. Even apart as they were, David found himself abruptly abandoning his desk to run up to his bedroom and, flushed, enjoy a private gratification, clutching his wife’s letter in his hand. It was in some ways his first love affair: never before had he been caught in the grip of such a mutual passion, in which both of parties were the beloved object and hung upon one another’s words. Feeling foolish after he had done it seemed churlish, conventional and stale in the face of a reviving joy that blasted cynicism. David liked himself and liked being himself, in such a state as this. He hoped he made Bathsheba equally content.

If only I had your portrait, Bathsheba enthused, a good miniature—a REAL likeness, mind, not a mockery like your awful book covers, which steal the roses from your cheeks and make you look like someone’s grandfather. (Someone's deceased grandfather, to be exact.) I know the difference! Oh darling, it'd be my dearest possession. Would you sit for one?

David demurred, but Bathsheba would have none of it. Don’t make me beg, she threatened. No, that’s never yet ended well for any husband!

Flattered and embarrassed, David did it for her. She enthused over the result, seeming unable to thank him enough. Why it's nearly as pretty as its original! Don’t fuss over the word, for you’re the pretty one between us, and if I’m content with it, so can you be.

I still can’t imagine what use you’ll find for it, David grumbled sulkily, for that little portrait painter had made such sport of him. More, perhaps, of his chagrin than the fairly common event of a client desiring to commission a miniature. He thought he might use her in something—a definite type. She’d probably feel more jolly about the prospect than revenged upon, which simultaneously consoled and annoyed David. 

Can’t you indeed? Bathsheba replied pertly. Why, I really am surprised at that. Especially given how sharp your mind is in other respects! Who doesn't like to look upon a picture of a handsome man? What loving wife doesn't like to look upon a portrait of her husband? What sailor's wife, parted from a dear husband, doesn't console herself as best she can in his absence? Sailors carve ivory into all sorts of trinkets for their sweethearts, don't they.

What an indelicate suggestion! Terribly immodest. David went straight up to his room to contemplate it more fully.

When Bathsheba sent him a plain gold ring, just the size of his finger (I remember your exquisite hands very well indeed, and required no reminder—plus a jeweller could resize it, I’m certain, if recollection has failed me!), David did cry a little, and kiss the thing in her stead (and felt the chill and the weight of it against his manhood when he attended to himself, and took a deep satisfaction in the sensation). 

I can’t exactly worship you with my body, as I’d wish, Bathsheba admitted, but perhaps with this ring, I can thee wed. All that I am and all that I possess are yours. I’m only sorry these don’t amount to much, and that owing to this, it took me these few days to find the sort of ring that’d suit you at the right price. Still, the posey came out well, didn’t it? 

It had done. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’, inscribed minutely on the inside of ring, and consequently worn against his flesh.

Tell me at least the dimensions of your own hand, David begged, and she provided him with a ring measurement. He dutifully transcribed this and bore the note to a jeweller.

“Thin,” the man commented, surveying this paper.

David shrugged. “It is the hand, sir, of a lady of about my own age. Do you think it a slender one? She’s tall, by her own admission—not a little creature, considered more generally.”

“I do, sir!” The plump little jeweller shook his head vigorously. “Yes, yes I do! Though well within my expectations of her sex. What sort of ring did you favour?” 

“The lady is pale,” David said, “and slender, as you say. She is auburn-haired, if it helps you to know it. She is much in the business of writing, and so enjoined me to seek out a plain, almost masculine affair that might neither interfere with her labour nor draw attention to itself.” He had been almost surprised that Bathsheba, with her sense of the dramatic (so well employed in fiction, and in the relation of her life’s daily events), had not wanted a grand, operatic affair to gesture with and make much of. He supposed her desire for concealment might be related to her circumstances—it did still pain him that he didn’t know them. She asked for something to fit her ring finger, but would she wear it there, or often do so? Did another sit there now? Did someone else enjoy the wife of his heart? Did she sit listless under the touch of a man she did not love, while she burned for him and he ached for her? The idea made David sad and almost sick, nearly violent in his thoughts.

Her complexion and hair ruled out silver, the jeweller decided. Oh, without a doubt they did! Mm. Yes, many women who married at this more sensible age did look to a ring that was as practical as it was lovely, rather than some gaudy bauble. What did sir think of these inlaid bands, the half-hoops? The jewel was set inside ‘em, to a degree, so it didn’t protrude and interfere with one’s business, if one worked with one’s hands.

David wondered whether, despite her fiscal cautions, Bathsheba might like a diamond. They were expensive, certainly, and something of a frippery, but he wished to give some testament to the strength of his feeling, and he could spare the sum, for this. He was still considering it when his eye was caught by another specimen: a ring consisting of two serpents twined together, their heads nestled against one another. He asked after the device.

“Ah, a motif dating back to antique Roman times!” The jeweller nodded with enthusiasm. “As you see, sir, they form a continuous link—a symbol of eternity, of everlasting love. Normally you find them set with diamonds, or rubies, or sapphires, but this one’s got emeralds, y’see.”

David did see. And the snakes seemed to see him—to stare back at him with a lively interest. He remembered to ask ‘how much?’ before he enthused ‘that is the very thing!’ Bathsheba would have been proud of him.

He kissed the ring and clutched it in his own hand through the night, and in the morning, with the envelope padded carefully so as to alert no one’s notice, he sent it to the postal box Bathsheba had asked him not to visit. 

Bathsheba was in raptures upon receiving it, and David felt wholesomely smug. 

You’re the very best of husbands to me, she cooed through the post, but then, I always knew you would be!

***

The reviews that greeted Bathsheba’s second novel often made mention of her uniquely feminine perspective. David wondered whether that was quite as prominent a feature of her work as these critics imagined or whether they simply saw womanly qualities in her output because they expected to find them there.

“It’s perfectly tactfully and modestly done,” David heard one woman telling another at Rules, “and under the lady’s control, but you can simply tell her characters have a strong, feminine inclination towards men. You don’t find that in male authors—her employer is perhaps an exception, but in the main, you simply do not see it.”

“Oh, I know just what you mean.” Her friend, who was possessed of large, bright eyes, bobbed her head like a crane in agreement. “It’s in her whole air—the reticence in her writing, the way she holds herself in patiently and then bursts out, unable to suppress her energies a moment longer. But it’s just as much in the way her characters look at men—that desiring gaze. One is sometimes worried that one enjoys that aspect of her oeuvre excessively, isn't one? You read so little fiction that is interested in depicting women’s—” she pursed her lips and dropped her voice, so that David struggled to make her out, “likings, you know, and their experiences of desires modesty forbids an open expression of.”

Even knowing he shouldn’t eavesdrop, David couldn’t help listening attentively to the whole of a conversation pertaining to his Bathsheba. They were discussing her latest, which featured a daughter and her mother, living alone. The daughter was in service and was keeping the family while her mother did what piecework she could.

“The close observation of her mother, of the woman’s moods,” the first woman remarked, “you know, that is what I seldom see in men’s novels. Stack’s work seems startlingly true for me, perhaps more so even than Hale's—so attentive to how persons think and act. I learn something of who I am in reading her, for she says so exactly things I’d never quite articulated about what it is be a woman. Though of course I can’t connect with her characters’ poverty—I haven’t her insight into it. Was she really born to that class, do you think? And how did she come into her present employment, if she was?”

“There’s where I think she goes awry,” the crane bobbed again, “in that business of working, and how she writes it. For the protagonist seems to know so much of the world, for a woman, and to have a great deal more latitude than is realistic!”

Unseen, David rolled his eyes. Middle class women usually assumed that all women had their experience, when poor women worked and moved in the world in just the way Bathsheba said, to his certain knowledge! If these ladies thought about the girls who worked for their dressmakers for but a moment, they couldn’t help understanding that. Bathsheba was simply a woman of a different class than any these two were familiar with.

David always wondered about the extent to which he should ask Sheba to translate for a presumed middle class audience—their actual readership was more diverse than that, and even if they had sold exclusively to people who also took the Times, should such an audience even require hand-holding in this manner? ('Should' being a different matter, of course, than 'did'.) Yet would her work be rendered more effective, would it reach more hearts and be more timeless if Bathsheba did stop to explain what was very normal to her? For his own part, despite his childhood experience of poverty David in many ways relied on Bathsheba on questions of class—he was deeply interested in her delicate observations of the behaviours and social expectations which arose from poverty and trusted her advice on these points in all his writing, which nearly always saw her before it ever met a press. 

He didn’t know how he’d write fiction without her: she was a part of his process now, as much an element of the cycle of his creation as first drafts.

***

Today’s letter was wide-ranging. David always enjoyed telling Bathsheba about his activities, and she was especially interested in his social endeavours: the details of the system he was researching, the people he’d met in the course of a project, what he thought should be done about a situation. He was currently making a thorough study of alcohol abuse among various classes so that he could write about the issue, and he outlined for Bathsheba the major strains of temperance thinking (and the indifferent ways they played out in practice) as much to gain clarity on the subject as to share what he'd learned in his conversations with advocates.

Everyone sees the evils of Drink, David commented. They are universally acknowledged, even by those who suffer from a compulsive, tragic craving for alcohol. Yet so few who would intervene for the good of the habitually drunk are equally willing to see and to speak out against the evils of over-work, inadequate pay and opportunity, Lenten entertainments and horrid education. An old acquaintance once described his charity school to me in the most unfavourable terms, and here at least he was honest, for I see what lasting disadvantages such evils breed, and how they might haunt a man all his life. Who, indeed, can live in England and miss them? The man who beats his wife in drink is to be abhorred as a villain, but many would rather tell him so, shake their heads and cluck than see this situation changed so as to make reprisals of his performance unlikely. In this the American temperance supporters, draconian as they are, make their greatest point: it is women and children who truly suffer when masters would give a man only enough to drown his sorrow rather than give him enough to slake his still deeper thirst for a life he need not seek to escape thus. Everyone would rather cure symptoms than causes, and alcohol is only a single road poverty makes use of. There are a thousand others besides. Gin is not the English libation: misery is our only draft. 

Coming back from these lean and hungry wool towns, I had occasion to stop off in Canterbury. Agnes sends you her compliments.

I must own I was not entirely pleased with our conversation, though of course I would only voice this to you. I came to her in the heat of my agitation from those visits to abject households, full of feeling and yet-unformed notions, needing to speak and craving an opportunity to work out my thoughts with a sympathetic individual. I never wish to criticise my excellent sister, who is far above any low reproach I might offer her, yet—occasionally, when I voice an idea to Agnes, she’ll simply frown at me and gently inform me that the thought is not prudent or kind. Often I do know that, and I should have reconciled myself in but a moment! She does this out of pure goodness, I know, but I can feel a little chastised, and thus unable to expand my thoughts. She won’t play with me, if that sounds anything other than infantile to you. I don’t mean it exactly in a childish way, and yet there is a trace of the child’s excitement, freshness and elasticity of thinking wrapped up in the word 'play' that well-suits my point. Without a bumpy stage-journey, I cannot arrive at any destination. And of course I never am allowed to be The Sensible One in any capacity where Agnes is concerned, though we are of an age and I believe that people who haven’t known me from boyhood occasionally do not think me a flighty fool in want of moral grounding!

She's forever telling me that such and such a business acquaintance I’ve expressed a complicated opinion of is probably all good. But no one is all good, and in fact I find that certain suspicions are prudent to entertain! Besides, I don’t require anyone to be! There is such a wealth of information and philosophy to be derived from the complex ways in which people are not rarified&pure—some of the best of people lies in their foibles, and I must admit to loving ridiculous people, grand people, terrifying people, grotesque people, people capable of extreme passion, good or ill, or heartbreaking kindness, or mad action, more than I find myself capable of feeling for people who are flawlessly pleasant, unobjectionable in their person and proceedings. And that 'madness' need not be the province of counts perishing in crumbling mountaintop castles or of youths contemplating the awesome and horrible prospect of god’s indifference to man, as per each and every utterly alone and uniquely brilliant&sensitive protagonist in a Romantic novel. I find a delightful madness in such people as we see all around us—their passions are no less grand (if anything, they are more deeply felt), they are simply played out with different (and I would contend more varied and interesting) materials! I think you, my sharp-eyed Bathsheba, taught me that this was true of me, that I have such a preference as I have here described. I rarely know myself, but why should I set myself to forming a better acquaintance with him when you do it for me with such style?

All this is terribly unfair to Agnes, and I’m already sorry for writing it. No sooner has the ink dried than I have regretted my haste and my temper. Yet how could I strike the words, for how should I conceal any thought from you, my wife? Please don't think I don't value Agnes and consider her infinitely wiser than myself. She seeks to be my better angel, and if I sometimes find the contrasts between us not to my taste, then that is my fault rather than hers. But you know she is a sister to me (I regret that you and she cannot be introduced!), and as between any siblings, there are these small frictions, competitions, vexations and differences of manner to be got over. Since Agnes is perfect, any deficits must all be on my own side. 

As to the illustrations, my decision is: you and I have this child together, and I aim for her to have every advantage in life. We can afford to give the magazine a better cover, and it ought to reap dividends. Let’s hire a better artist, even at double the cost. Seymour can’t do the detail work the proposed scheme entails so well as someone with a less commercial background. He is a sound advertising man: we require a painter of dreams. It’ll pay off, I am certain of it.

A final word: three distinct sentences in your last letter suggest that you believe I will or could ever abandon you (I return the letter with these underlined, but expect it back: my collection cannot be allowed to be incomplete!). My darling, if you weren’t you I’d consider that a positive insult to my honour. As it is, I wonder what past pains or worries lead you to suspect me of it, when I’ve given you no reason, never done anything of the kind in all my life?

Your husband,

David

***

I’ve done just a TERRIBLE thing, David Copperfield, and I do hope you’ll forgive me. I went to that public lecture you told me about Wednesday—the one you said had sold to capacity. Don't ask how I obtained a ticket, as I am certain it'd pain you to know (darling what is the point of trying to price to all classes when you know full well that second-hand dealers are what they are?). Somewhere in that heaving crowd, that desperate public that loved you so, was the thin shade of your wife, who adores you more than the whole room put together ever could.

How well you spoke! And yet don’t I know your eloquence? How passionately—perhaps I don’t know that quite as well as I’d wish, but oh, I see its other forms in you always. But as for how you looked: in rude health, my dear. Positively bouncing. If I lived with you I’d have you shave that stupid, affected beard, of course: it hides your pretty face from me, and is terribly uncomfortable for kissing, just for a start. Won't you do it for me, so your poor wife's imagination isn't thus interfered with?

As for the rest, I can’t complain. You were turned out just as your wife would wish. Those trousers are a little tight, are they not? Don’t get rid of them, the effect is pretty favourable. You’ve such energy, haven’t you? You practically leapt to that podium. I must admit I spent the whole time just looking at you and hearing the sound of your voice rather than the words (they’re good too, of course, but I have read them before, and in earlier drafts (don't think I didn't luxuriate in my smugness, for I shouldn't like you to delude yourself thus)). I didn’t consider the lecture fee a bit wasted (though you might have given your own wife a complementary ticket—hard, Copperfield! Very hard!). I bore your image away home with me, and it certainly warmed me through the unseasonably chill evening. Green is precisely your colour, and my ring looks perfect on you. Or rather you adorn it. 

Your wife, who is ever so satisfied with your performance

David really felt she ought to have warned him, somehow, of this particular letter’s contents. He was not a little affected by them. He told her as much.

Missus Copperfield, you are the cruelest she alive, to be so good at reducing me to this state, he pouted in prose. Not that I entirely mind. What I do mind is that I can’t learn to cherish each of your features in turn.

I play games with myself: if I don’t try over-much to imagine you, I feel my image of you is entirely complete—that I could not know you better if I had spent a lifetime seeing you. Yet if I attempt to consider the details, to think what precise image I should behold if you stood before me, you slip away from me like a ghost (which I am supposed to be able to see, given the hour of my birth—yet the hard thing is, for all that I never do see you). I catch myself out, thinking nonsense such as 'Bathsheba is too tall to easily fit in a little coach like this one I’m in now!' But then it occurs to me to wonder why exactly I suppose this, when I have no very good figure for your height to judge by. At times I have an almost strangely definite idea of your body, but when I interrogate the construction, none of the necessary underlying proofs are in place. And what I think hardly makes sense—a tall women is never so tall as my figuration of you, unless she is the most extraordinary phenomenon. I nearly imagine you looming over me, as though I were a boy again!

I have tried to piece together the little you’ve given me, of course. When you say you are bone-thin and bone-white, and jerky in your animations, I imagine you are slender and pale and quick, possibly a little bird-like. But I don’t know it, and my most private, secret imaginings of you are all guess and gesture and feeling.

Bathsheba took these musings in entirely the wrong spirit, and her response was poisonous. David winced at being, as he rarely was, on the receiving end of one of his wife’s vicious set-downs.

There, she began, you are deluding yourself. I haven't any feminine modesty, and thus I know what I look like and am unafraid to know it. I have never been prepossessing. I have never been so much as post-possessing. I haven't an ounce of that which allows others to glide easily through the world, and rather than disguise it with the best clothes I can afford, cosmetic enhancements and affecting to be better-born than I am, I would make everyone who would make me uncomfortable the same in turn. I would force them to look at me as I am, or worse! I have always put people on their guards, by virtue of my situation, my looks, my nature. Rather than cultivating a power of truly soothing them, putting them at their ease, I chose to cultivate my own natural powers, and to use others’ disquiet to my own advantage. 

If you like the idea of some bird-like girl, I suppose you’d better go and find one. 

What was it I told you, David wrote back, about suggesting that I might leave you? My wife? What kind of man abandons his wife, Bathsheba, and do you think me the sort? I believe you honest, and want nothing more nor anything less than you. I only suggest that I might see you differently than you do yourself: that your body might captivate and fascinate me as your spirit does, regardless of others’ opinions. Regardless even of your own! Sometimes I think you believe I only imagine that I love you. It’s hurtful, my own. It shows such a low opinion of me, and worse, a low opinion of yourself, which is more to me than my self ever could be. 

I could find a lightness in your limbs if they were lead, and a grace in your gestures were you an ogre. But more to the point, I believe you must have virtues of your own, or would to me: I have never known anyone without them, and I have an avaricious, Catholic taste for people. They delight me in their eccentricities, their particularities. You do not know me, if you think I would not be completely taken by some feature, especially with love to aid me. 

Let us leave it—I’m sorry to have displaced the mirth of our feast. The subject makes me heartsore, and I know it makes you no happier. The fact is, we are each frustrated by our inability to touch, and we take it out on one another for want of a wall like Pyramus and Thisbe's to tear down between us.

Let us talk of your latest, which needs edited in some way that will enable me to remove the last three pages. Too, too bleak, more in accord with the mood of your letter than the needs of the tale—not true to your initial vision or your more generous impulses, and I’ll never sell it in the Christmas edition, as well you know! I am all for an evocation of the miseries of human existence, but I’d prefer a point to it. You can do it better if do it you must, and again—perhaps experience these revelations in May, when no one will do violence to themselves by plunging into the icy Thames after they turn the final page...

***

Agnes’ wedding was like Agnes: a calm and lovely thing. Adams, Strong’s brilliant former head boy, who always looked to David as though he ought to have proved a clergyman rather than a lawyer, seemed a good match for Agnes—and David considered that high praise indeed. 

During a quiet moment when he was alone with his friend after the wedding breakfast David embraced her, brushing a tear from his own cheek. He spoke of his hopes for her, and she her pleasure in the day, her respect and affection for her chosen partner.

“Once,” she shook her head, smiling at herself, “I had half a fancy that you and I might do for one another, Trot. I thought I ought to tell you so now, for honesty’s sake. But I can truthfully say I am happy in my decision, and that I look on my partner with pride and contentment.”

The information surprised David, who let himself feel and consider it before speaking. “Agnes,” he said, “you occupy such an vital place in my life. Few people could ever be as much to me as you are, and I know no better person in the world—no one I more completely trust the goodness of. You have been friend, sister and guide to me, and had we spoken thus after my wife’s death, I must tell you, I think we might well have been more to one another. But is it wrong that you did not, when you are content in this? And when I think, if I consider it, that I would have made you unhappy, as I did Dora—yes, done what I would in good conscience never have wished to, by slighting your admirable qualities and seeking things of my wife which you, in all your excellence, indeed even on account of it, were not disposed to supply? I fear I should have made you so!”

The short, wistful laugh Agnes gave was the very sound of the last atom of her romantic attachment to him escaping into the air to mingle with the ether. The long and steady love left its traces in her. She would always feel a warm, sentimental and tender regard for David. It had changed and, she thought, improved her. It has sustained her when she’d wanted something to cherish, when she’d felt hounded and lonely and without prospects, without even the means of privately articulating her unease, her unfulfilled yearning. She felt herself finer for having loved David, better equipped for this present union and for her life. She never could quite tell David how she felt him wise: he took her rebukes more seriously than her compliments. Uriah, perhaps, had bred that habit in him, with his false fawning—Uriah, who’d seen how she wanted him and hated it, without ever seeming exactly jealous of her.

She thought of Bathsheba, who seemed to love David with all the violence with which Uriah had despised him. David would tell all this to his wife (Agnes accepted her as such, an agreed union of the spirit being to her a real and serious thing), as was appropriate, and Agnes felt reconciled to that—not violated by the disclosure, not shaken or exposed. Reconciled to her surrender, which looked likely to yield a lasting peace.

“Oh Trot,” she shook her head, “I think the problem is more that I would have made you unhappy, in the end. And that, I would never wish to do, either to you or as a fate for myself.” 

Arm in arm, they rejoined the company. 

***

Life, wonderfully, went on.

I’d repeat the praise that fell to you, David said of his lunch with a few eminent writers, teasing Bathsheba, but I understand my authoress despises flattery.

What, when it’s professional? Bathsheba shot back. I could do with a good deal of that. And I’m certain you could find ways to flatter me that I wouldn’t exactly take objection to.

David smiled at the missive. Let's make a game of it, then. I'll find flattery you love, how is that?

Bewitching, Bathsheba answered, and David shivered a little to be given such a compliment, called a name that had once delighted his mother from an evil tongue. Nevertheless, he did like it from Bathsheba.

*** 

Not quite a domestic hurricane, but certainly a substantial tropical storm, arose when David hired a new maid without consulting his wife. Bathsheba only learned of this development incidentally when David made some unfavourable but excuse-larded remarks about the girl having made a dog’s breakfast of a man’s.

It is of course difficult to be a good wife at a distance. Of course it is! But how can I hope to be anything of the kind if you will not possess me with all the necessary information, and allow me to do my part in taking care of you and arranging our household? Hm, Copperfield? Why, didn't it suit you to repose confidences in me, as you know I give you mine where I can, and regret where I I can't? I am sure I gave you every opportunity to do it! I suppose you've checked the girl’s references? Yet I find my confidence sadly disturbed on this point, for you must have taken her on a fortnight ago—you wouldn’t dare remark on her performance a second before that period had elapsed, and you had only Sue when you gave that dinner on the first, unless I have there too been deceived! Now, a fortnight ago you were running yourself ragged organising that benefit fund, so I am very regretfully forced to conclude that no, you did NOT check her references, at all! Did she even come with the recommendation of a friend? God d-----, David! I will not be trampled on, and have my rights and my prerogatives thus slighted! You really must give way!

David thought about taking a wounded, self-justifying tack. He contemplated the virtues of adopting as lofty and as cool a position as a mountaineer upon the snow-encrusted mountain Alps—he might be firmly insistent on his own rights! But he found he didn’t care much about them in the case, and there was something absolutely dear about his wife’s frustration in this instance, in her insistence on being given her due. He could understand it: she was a queen in exile, unable to manage her rightful estate and incensed by the very idea of its being mismanaged. Even before they'd married she'd insisted on knowing his arrangements when he'd had so much as a cold: it must gall her endlessly to have no pale, thin hand in the household. 

A thousand apologies, Mrs Copperfield. I ought to have let you help me to choose, or given the matter entirely over to your discretion. You are a part of the household, and more: you are its mistress. I’ll give you every particular of Sue’s performance if you wish, and you can write her a letter of dismissal if you see fit. Hire us a new girl from a staffing agency, or anything you like. Tell me what arrangements suit you, if these don’t! You know best in such matters, I'm certain, and I defer

Graciously,

Your chagrined, repentant husband   

Well! Bathsheba returned. That is a pretty fair response, I must say. But I am not mollified, Mister Copperfield! Don’t you think I am! You can’t work upon me so easy as that! I plan on being very cross with you for the whole of this afternoon—and yes, write out this ‘Sue’s’ particulars, but only at your leisure, for I do know you’ve real work to be getting on with. Is she pretty? For the first thing I’d have done is make sure she was competent as sin, and plainer even than I am. 

According to Abigail, when she came (plain, as promised, but a very good girl, who David came to think very highly of indeed), she ‘adn’t seen anybody but the lady at the agency. Mrs. Hardeskew had compiled her report when she'd come in to seek a position, and had kept it on file for her clients to review. 

“No one else witnessed this interview?” David stressed, because he really felt, somehow, that Bathsheba would have found a way to do precisely that—that she would have considered it important.

“No, sir!” Abigail frowned, her face screwing up like a pippin with her effort to think. “I’m very sorry, sir. Is it important?”

“No,” David sighed, entertaining vague suspicions about Mrs Hardeskew, and a little sad to have missed out on a lead Bathsheba herself had given him. 

“Your friend sent me, via the agency, a letter as to my duties,” Abigail said, bringing it out of her pocket and entirely neglecting to mention the thin, spare man who’d brought the document from Hardeskew's, who she’d fallen into such a conversation with (what a talent for drawing people out that one had!). “Have you anything to add to it, sir?”

“I’m sure Bathsheba’s instructions are fairly complete,” David said wryly, eyeing the densely-written, absolutely typical document. “But I’ll see if I’ve any amendments, thank you Abigail.”

***

A visit to the employment agency from whence Abigail had come did not yield much. David felt the conventional, vigilantly-proper, dull-eyed Mrs Hardeskew could not be his own spouse, and when he pressed about the arrangements she grew suspicious that he was some blackguard attempting to gain information about an estranged wife.

“You do not look up to much violence,” she sniffed at David Copperfield, all slender frame and large, sensitive eyes, all 6 foot flat of him in his boots, “but nonetheless, I am not in the habit of violating the trust of ladies by revealing—”

“Pray don’t,” David interrupted her. “I am very sorry to have mentioned anything of the kind, and to have given rise to any such awful suspicion, which I don't doubt is well-justified by your experience. It shows well in you and speaks highly of your discretion to be conscientious regarding such matters. I am mortified, madam, and I shall leave you in peace this instant.” David tipped his hat to the somewhat-appeased matron and left the premises, feeling deeply annoyed. He sulked out of the office and returned home, much oppressed by his failure. 

A fat, rambling missive, a clear sign of Bathsheba’s forgiveness, arrived at the day’s end. Bathsheba purred like a cat at having been able to choose, and was smug about Abigail’s obvious qualification for the role—her diligence and Bathsheba’s instruction as to David's preferences had together resulted in a cup of tea and a little ham, cheese and bread arriving unasked for at 6pm, as a tide-over before Master Copperfield’s later supper.

I saw you coming out of the agency, you wicked boy, Bathsheba wrote. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist that! To that end I waited nearby myself, and was richly rewarded with a visit from you. Don’t bother asking every shopkeeper in the premises about his clientele, dear, for I’d a veil on, and even ‘auburn hair’ would thus avail you not. My post box is an object of sacred mystery to you, but this was a new vector, and you simply couldn’t help yourself! You ought to have been a policeman, with your energy and your desire to illuminate anything murky.

It seems I can’t quite help myself either. Oh I HOPE you don't think me immodest, but though it cannot be, I LONG for the romantic consummations attendant on our regard for one another. You’ll forgive my telling you a little of that? I am feeling especially fond of you, with your having thus obliged me today. I will own that I at times imagine your attending to yourself, as I think gentlemen may sometimes do, in my absence. How strange and shocking, to think that you might do it with the very hands that likewise grip a pen to write me letters! My poor David, always this cold supper—and a lonely repast, too! It’d be nicer if I did it for you, wouldn’t it? I wonder, do you think of long, slender fingers and your ring glinting on them when you do it? Try once, for me. I’ve a firm grip, if it helps to know it, and my hands are unfortunately always too cold—but your body must be as warm as your nature, and I think you could warm them nicely. You and only you could do it. 

I love you. Oh, doubt the earth moves, but never doubt that! I love you so, David Copperfield. You are more loved than any husband on the earth, I think, if I may be a little proud.

David, made wretchedly hungry for such contact, responded quickly that he didn’t think her expressions at all beyond the bounds: rather they seemed to him quite in the spirit of fair play! Further, he ventured that if he didn’t fear upsetting her by lingering on what she said could never be, he’d be forever telling her of his desire to hold her, and to be held by her (in every sense). She hadn’t signed, which David thought prudent and followed her in—a letter might always be intercepted, and the content of this one was a little salacious. Besides, they knew one another’s hands well enough for recognition without these means by now.

Some of their letters now grew very frank on such points as these. David was reticent, but Bathsheba coaxed, telling him he was absolutely made for wooing in this vein, given his talents (not that he wasn’t likewise formed for offering a pretty complete physical satisfaction—far, far from it!). David said she really could get anything out of him, and she teased it was the other way around—she’d never once contemplated offering up this sort of thing in print before she’d become Mrs Copperfield! And you draw it out of me, you know—you are so very insinuating at times! 

David offered something demure and euphemistic about her white arms and thighs and neck, about kissing her through their rapture. Bathsheba devoured it and wrote back in a frantic, shaking hand, all encouragement and escalation. Your poor girl is absolutely dying for you, but she doesn’t mind a jot!

Bathsheba was wild with notions about chairs and stagecoaches and every form of love they might show one another. At one point, in a coy, guarded fashion, Bathsheba made insinuations of a nature that shocked and thrilled David. Oh but surely, having boarded away for school as you have done, you've had your little pashes for other boys before? It's common, I know! David admitted to knowing—something of those feelings, and to thinking them rather a normal part of one’s maturation. Though he knew some men to still be at it, and didn’t begrudge those that paid for the privilege any more than other frequenters of houses of vice. For he knew the practice could be pleasant. He’d heard.

Heard? Bathsheba asked, and he could almost hear a little laugh in the curve of her question mark. Some men even like to be sodomised by their wives on occasion, I have heard. For a sort of Sunday treat. It does make a change!

I’m sure you’d treat me very nicely, David replied, feeling feverish. And my wife might do anything with me that took her fancy.

David’s mind groaned with the strain of wilfully ignoring so much. He was too clever and saw the world in too narrative a fashion to fail to make connections between the facts offered to him. Not seeing such things, not letting himself conjecture and guess, was a tiring effort. Not thinking didn’t come naturally to him. At some level, David did register Bathsheba’s slips. He did recognise the description she’d given of herself. He did know that Bathsheba knew a few things about him that he’d never told her, that he didn’t see how she could have guessed. These lapses hadn’t even given him pause: he’d simply reconciled each instance within himself and given it no more attention—had, in fact, ripped his attention away from it, as though dwelling on any inconsistency were a betrayal of his wife. But the burden of his ignorance grew heavier with every hour and every letter, and soon it would prove too much for him.

 ***

Mostly, Bathsheba took business matters in stride. She wrote rapid responses to the magazine’s correspondence throughout the day, instructed printers independently and consulted with David on any editorial question.  But she was capable of an occasional blasting fit of temper, and of a great lashing-out in response to a difference of opinion or crisis. David guiltily tried to sneak something past her in the accounts that he thought necessary but knew she wouldn’t like. She caught him at it and gave him domestic hell. Her response contained no small-case letters whatever.

COPPERFIELD, IF YOU LOVE YOUR WIFE YOU'LL DO NOTHING LIKE YOU PROPOSE. THE RATE WE AGREED UPON IS OUR PRINTING BUDGET!!

She drafted an urgent notice to correct the galleys, and it arrived at the magazine offices in the nick of time. David looked over her proposed solution, agreed with the compromise and grudgingly set it in motion. For he knew he ought to have said, however much he'd wanted his way. Then something occurred to him. He clattered down the stairs (it was too late for her to still be in the street) an collared a match-seller who often loitered 'round the premises in hopes of catching passers-by.

“Boy, the letter I’m holding didn’t come by the regular post." His trembling hand held an unfranked envelope. "It must have been hand-delivered, not ten minutes ago. Who brought it? Was it a lady?”

A coin helped the boy remember that there weren’t no lady deliverin no letter, sir. Were a man, with a hat.

“Describe him,” David insisted, remembering his Shakespeare—such a disguise could well be employed to conceal feminine features. Or it might be a servant of hers—

“A tall’un,” the boy said. 

“Yes? Yes, and?” David insisted. 

The child shrugged. “I dunno, sir, I just say ‘e was tall! Spoke with a very posh voice when ‘e told me to ring the bell when he’d gone, so as they’d see the letter. ‘e called me a good lad and bought a match of me. An odd eye, sir. Penetrating. That’s about all I can say for ‘im!”

David let the boy go about his business and slumped on the stoop of his own offices, exhausted by the printing affair (which had been nearly as bad as he and Sheba's Great Chartism Row—she'd more sympathy for the movement than he had, owing to his fears that the first people to be thrown under the omnibus by violent social revolutions were those already lowest to the ground, and in numbers, too, and was currently enamoured of some manifesto or other she'd found in The Red Republican) and thoroughly dejected. Any messenger might be tall. Anyone could affect an accent other than their own, at least well enough to fool this inexperienced child. A hat could disguise one’s features well enough. God, was there to be no end to this? Not ever?

In that moment David both longed to know the truth and wouldn’t let himself even begin to.

He put it all away. This was no light day of labour, and he’d agreed to loving Bathsheba in her absence: to being a husband to her, just as she was. In just their present circumstances. He was happy, just as they were. All he could do was carry on, until the end of their days, pretty much as the was doing, unless she altered or the world did to accommodate her (supposing even that could help them). 

When David wrote his evening letter, he extensively covered the printing issue and apologised for having attempted to avoid apprising her of it.

I really ought to know be now that you are entitled to the full and absolute truth from me, he admitted, without equivocation or concealment. As to truth in other matters, forgive the impertinence, but I so want you tonight. God help me, I do. I thought you ought to know that I am thinking on you. That you might wish to know it.

You’d be quite correct, Bathsheba agreed in the morning. That, more even than the complete details of our accounts, is absolutely the sort of thing I wish to know all about.

***

The climb up the narrow, steep flight of stairs seemed to drain David’s will. By the time he reached the top of them he felt like crawling. Instead he paused, hand on the banister, and waited. The banister was crowned by an orb that had been was worn silk-smooth by time. Time, and the effects thereof: the lingering touch of the heavy hands, whose owners had slowly ascended these wretched, dimly-lit stairs in decades past. David tried not to think about whose hands had most recently polished it. According to the landlord, who also presided over the shabby shop below, the person David came to visit had lived here for years now. Had come here—David supposed it must have been before Dora’s death, by a little. Had come and never left. 

David walked softly (as though the building itself could be roused, and should be vicious if it were) through the bare-carpeted hall, lined with crackling, faded paper: brittle dead flowers, peeling away. Flakes of the stuff on a floor no one ever cleaned, undisturbed because David doubted the air in here had moved for half a century. The people here must live half entombed. David felt a curious pressure in his lungs that dust alone could never have accounted for, felt pity and anger well up in him and press against his heart, which creaked as though it'd break for the strain.

He opened the door with the spare key the landlord had been coerced into giving him, his wariness regarding his queer, formidable tenant giving way before a sum of money, coupled with his trepidation in the face of David’s righteous anger—banked, but visible and dangerous in him. David made a quick sortie at the room’s papers—enough to satisfy himself, though he didn’t find quite everything he was looking for. He sat down in a lean old chair, the stuffing of which had sagged in a defeated manner until the chair was almost a skeleton. A soldier disemboweled on the field, its swollen innards dangling immodestly. There, he waited. 

He had nothing to do for some hours but to wait. To observe the room before him while trying to avoid all other thought. The chamber was a cold one: the occupant, it seemed, did not customarily spend much on coal. There were but few specimens of the breed in the scoop, and only a meagre whisp of ash lay in the grate. The occupant also apparently made do with the scantiest necessaries in the way of furniture; a few old prints from books wafered against the wall, and one from a series of Great Living Men that David found he could scarcely stand to look upon. There were some half-dozen rickety shelves, containing documents. And there, David noticed with a start, asleep on the narrow bed, was the cat he'd sent, which had earned him such a fulsome expression of thanks and joy. He swallowed to see it, suddenly fighting back tears. Was it cold, in here? No, it was a thick-furred specimen of the breed, as its mother had been, and looked to be in perfect health, positively larded with cat's meat. David stood, walked to it and stroked its head. It looked up at him, blinking sleepy eyes at the master it hadn't seen since kittenhood, then settled back down, feeling safe in his familiar presence. "Still lazy, Tybalt," he murmured reprovingly. David withdrew his hand slowly and returned to the chair.

He saw no articles of clothing anywhere, nor any kind of food. Upon another shelf in an open cupboard sat a plate or two, a cup and so forth, all dry and empty. There were two saucers, presumably for Tybalt's use, upon the floor. One was empty, the other had a little water in it. Everything about the premises had the air of being in a legal neighbourhood and of being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. There were a great many ink bottles encamped upon on the room’s worn desk, miniature black-clad mourners at a graveside. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes there, too—possibly purchased in the shop below, which had a great many such outside its door, in close association with a label reading “Law Books, all at 9d” in law-hand. Inside said shop there were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging up. In the room David occupied, however, there was but one solitary blue bag, and that was perfectly and horribly familiar to him.

At last his head lifted at hearing a familiar tread on the stairs. David closed his eyes in pain. Another confirmation—but then he’d known, had he not? He needed no additional proofs. The several the room had already afforded him themselves comprised an embarrassment of riches. He'd known and he'd known and he'd known.

He opened his eyes again in time to watch a man walk in with a letter in hand. A bright-polished ring glinted on his finger. He was sedately dressed, save for his ring and a white neckerchief, head-to-toe in decent black. Everything about him was black and white, excepting the splash of angry colour that was natural to him, and which accorded perfectly with his nature. The newcomer was so absorbed in opening his letter and starting in on it then and there that he stiffened with shock when David quietly spoke to him. 

“How,” David said, alerting the man to his presence, “did you expect this to end, Uriah?”

Uriah Heep's head jerked up and he blinked, looking, for once in his life, so very stupid. David relished it cruelly. He watched the widening and narrowing of Uriah’s eyes, which flashed green as the eyes of the snakes on the ring on his finger, as the other man realised that David had directed him on a fool’s errand across town simply to procure time for this invasion. David had claimed he'd wanted a piece on canals that Aldersley had promised him and then been too busy to deliver—‘Bathsheba’ had volunteered herself. But what did Bathsheba, bred as Southerly as David, know of canals, for all her good will? She’d have had to go as far as Mile End to speak to a lock keeper, or the more fashionable Little Venice, or perhaps the Docklands. Nowhere she could have done her research would have been convenient to her apartments, or easily accessible by means of public transportation. 

Uriah’s mind, David thought wryly, was in no fog whatever, however startled he had been by David's appearance: he'd already apprehended the whole matter. David could not say as much for himself. Even now he could not quite fathom the depths of his own credulity. Had he ever truly been unaware of all this, in some private part of himself, which kept its secrets even from his waking mind? David knew people’s particular voices as well, he thought, as any man alive. He was particularly attentive to such matters—yet Uriah’s disguise had long lapsed, and he’d capitalised words for emphasis exactly where the stress would have fallen if he’d spoken them. The same went for his exclamation marks, his turns of phrase. David had always known the cadence in which Bathsheba’s letters ought to be read, when that was a thing most often governed by experience of the compositor’s diction. Every instance of uncanny knowledge David had blithely attributed to their ‘extraordinary bond’ came back now to mock him bitterly. As for Bathsheba’s being taken for a woman by all and sundry, by people who hadn't David's reasons to have known better, there had ever been something a little feminine in Uriah’s position and in his manner, perhaps an affinity born of his solitary upbringing in his mother’s company. Uriah waited, suffered, resented, hated, felt and lived as many women did: David found the success of Uriah's deception on this point less extraordinary than he might have done.

Driven by a suspicion as to Bathsheba’s real identity that he could not articulate within himself, but which had grown as overpowering as Psyche's compulsion to look upon Cupid, David had done what had always been within his reach: he’d waited unseen at the post box where Bathsheba or her intermediary collected her messages. Once, then twice, a child had checked this to no avail. Frustrated by the lack of message the man himself had then arrived, as though he felt his minion might have gotten it wrong—as though there might have been a missive for him, lying undetected against the floor of the box. Looking irate to have been disappointed, Uriah had huffed off. David had slipped home, where he found and read Bathsheba’s increasingly frustrated questions as to where he’d been all day with a sick feeling. He'd then outright lied to her for the first time, excusing himself plausibly. He'd spoken of his towering frustration with Aldersley’s undelivered feature on canals, and his active wife had rushed to his aid. He was not to worry! She’d see to everything.

David had written effusive thanks, knowing Uriah would go out the next day and thus resign the field to him. David's actual feelings, as he'd sought out the child messenger and made her his guide, had been far less magnanimous. 

He’d thought of doing several things. He might, via letters, push ‘Bathsheba’ to a confession, harrowing Uriah to it, all innocence. He might suggest the subject in a way that wouldn’t set off Uriah's suspicions beyond arousing those of a guilty conscience (if indeed Uriah had such an organ). “Oh, I was reminded today by some vile piece of business I saw in the papers of an old enemy haven’t seen fit to mention to you 'ere now. It's quite a funny story, and pathetic, so could be of minor interest. I'll tell you all about this scoundrel.” David suspected he could truly grind it in. Uriah might agree the man sounded a wretch and attempt to change the subject, or might expose himself in a rearguard effort. ‘Perhaps you were too cruel to him, dearest! Look at this evidence, and this! Perhaps his fondest wish was to be your friend, and you wouldn't honestly entertain the idea?’ Here or on another subject, he could catch Uriah out in knowing too much: “what insight, Sheba! Sometimes I feel as though you've known me since childhood.”

David might take it out in meanness to his ‘wife’, torturing Uriah to regain his own dignity, either prising them apart by increments or with a grand break. He might maintain their communication only that he might use it as a means of discovering what benefit, exactly, Uriah derived from hurting and humiliating him in this manner. 

He could confront Uriah in person to try and determine the man’s motives, and whether this business was truly about anything other than deceiving and ruining David. In the flesh, David could watch Uriah's familiar reactions for clues. He could drink in Uriah's hurt, if any were on offer. “I’ve been so upset by all this that I believe I'll need to get married swiftly—after all, I haven’t got a wife, have I? And I'll need someone to fill this void which I must admit you have created. Someone to confide in, to take over the aspects of my life I foolishly handed over to you, to provide me the comfort associated with marriage that you never did—it has of course been quite, quite frustrating, and I'll be glad to take it out on someone! Perhaps I’ll find an especially pretty one! Yes, that’s just what I need after the dance you’ve led me.”

Or he might insist on the consummation he felt owed. Force the point. If half of what he’d said was true, then David thought Uriah might like it too. They could fuck, could they not? Not make love, no, but they could do something to one another as wild and black as David's mood. And all the while David might be over-fond, a grotesque parody of a bridegroom. That was one way of playing it—for in a sense, this revelation freed them up, didn’t it? David would quite literally have died before slapping a woman in bed for having lied to him, but he’d hit Uriah clear across the face before, and at the present moment he felt no regret whatever about that awful youthful indiscretion: only an intense urge to commit the sin again.

Yet David knew, even in the height of his anger, that it wouldn’t go anything like that if he tried for it. He knew he’d cry, trying to fuck Uriah viciously. There he'd be, sobbing his I hate-yous, rasping that he was so angry with Uriah, and did Uriah know that, did he even care? He’d never once offered David anything honestly. Not in all their years.

In the end, David had opted for a cold conversation, unmediated by letters. This was the plan David thought he could best bear to carry out, as well as the means of redress that did the best justice to the both of them. When the flood-tide of his anger ebbed and practical consideration returned to Copperfield in any degree, he felt himself a compromised nation. Yes, Bathsheba was a spy, but the fact of the matter was he’d no idea how to get on without her. He ought to stop thinking of Bathsheba as 'her', or as a person at all, but he found it incredibly difficult. The fact remained that she knew the state of the accounts better than he did (and David had checked them exhaustively in the wake of this revelation, not sleeping for the whole of the night: they really were in good order). So many of his decisions went via her. She did so much of the magazine’s administration, and took, to her smug delight, a very real role in the running of his household. In hindsight he ought to have called Bathsheba out when she had volunteered to handle the magazine’s incorporation papers and corporate accounts. It wasn’t very likely, was it? Not even given her (now darkly hilarious) mocked-up origin story. David suspected that Uriah simply couldn’t have handled watching him do the thing inadequately.

Rather than answer the question put to him, Uriah glanced at the detritus scattered about the room. His papers had been neat when he’d left—David hadn’t bothered to put them back that way. The floor was now littered with mess. David watched him watching it. 

“I wanted to see what you’d done with the miniature,” David explained, standing, stepping forward and gesturing around the room. “It isn’t here. Did you perhaps sell it? Or is there a blackmail scheme in the works? Possibly you gave it to a tramp you’re in league with, and she’ll claim it’s a love token, and that I’m the father of her bouncing baby boy. There’s my reputation and career in question, even if I quiet the artist and convince people that as a public figure, it is possible someone could have taken my likeness from the papers and my appearances.”

Uriah flinched, saying nothing about the miniature’s location.

“‘ow did I expect this to end?” Uriah repeated slowly, after tiptoeing through the wreckage and leaning with his back against the desk chair David had lately occupied, crossing his arms over his chest and stroking his chin with his hand. “I didn’t, exactly,” he admitted.

“Ah,” David said icily, leaning against the wall and making the very posture of his body a challenging riposte to Uriah. “So, then! I was never to marry, or to move on. I'd continue receiving letters from 'one who'd readily 'ave been my wife, were circumstances different than they are!'” here he mocked Uriah’s accent cruelly, “until my dying day, and all the while I was to live something of a half-life.”

“Yes,” Uriah said, almost in a hiss. “I never said I wasn't selfish, Copperfield. You even found it pretty, in ‘er. You can’t deny that, can you?” 

“No,” David shook his head slowly. “No, I will give you that you did not say anything of the kind. You've managed at once to be terribly honest and hideously dishonest—a complex feat, but hardly your first of that nature. I'd commend you, but I think I've given you enough encouragement over these past years. You never think you’re going to get caught for these things, do you?”

“I meant,” Uriah clarified, “that I did not exactly expect it to get to this point—leastways not when I began. As for getting caught, well. In a way I’m surprised to ‘ave lasted as long as I did. There was ‘ubris in the case, I will admit! Moreover, though, I didn’t quite care. It was worth it, all I did was worth it, an’ I ‘adn’t anything to lose.”

“But you did then!” David insisted. “And you do now! You are, at present, a highly-regarded writer. You make a decent sum—I know you do, I pay it! Yet here you are in an abominable garret room off the Courts of Chancery—”

“It ain’t as bad as all that.”

“Uriah, it is. And worse. And why? Did you spend the last years lost in a fantasy, paying no great attention to these surroundings because in your own mind, you hardly dwelt here? Or is it you’re old situation regarding my money, or rather my aunt's, which you didn’t much spend to your own advantage when you stole and held the whole of it? Are you a budding miser? Or for all your scheming, do you truly not care about this sort of thing?”

“Oh well, I’m extremely honoured by your deigning to visit such an umble abode, I’m sure!” Uriah said with a mocking suavity, assuming his most irritating front. “Mine is a retired situation, as you see. Oh yes, I am limited as to situation. I don’t mind confessing to you (in strict confidence) that I sometimes find it difficult to keep up a genteel appearance. I have felt the cold here. But it matters very little! Pray excuse the introduction of such mean topics. I am sorry I cannot offer chocolate!”

“Could you even give me coffee?” David raised an eyebrow, refusing to let Uriah see that he was taken aback by Uriah's pleasant viciousness, which he'd not had to negotiate so directly with for years. “Do you know? You could give me information about my supplies to the ounce, but I think you’ve no real idea whether you’ve anything of the kind. You'd give me hell for living like this. Would 'Bathsheba' allow anything like it?”

Uriah swallowed at the first awful mention of his other self by name. A blush burned on his cheeks and his mouth worked its way towards an answer. David just kept on.

“What are you even doing here—no no, pray, don't tell me, I expect I can figure it out. I’m not quite the idiot you’ve made of me. When you moved to the city after Canterbury proved inclement and without further opportunity, you took what spare law work you could lay hands on. Then the writing took over, and you made a better living at that, so you left off your earlier employments. Yet you didn't bother to move from the location that had initially made professional sense in the way of getting what odd jobs were going and finding out relevant information. It didn’t occur to you, or if it did, you simply didn’t care enough to see any such plan through. For you’re an ‘umble man still, are you not?" David snorted. "Lord, the number of times you must have had to rewrite a letter for your having used that phrase boggles the mind.”

“‘ow did you finally figure it out, then?” Uriah spat. “‘ow'd you come to know, at last?”

“You described,” David said, flint entering his voice in response to the implied mockery, “a walk you’d been obliged to take to a certain manufacturer’s shop a little too well, I'm afraid. You are in the habit of telling me when you intend to miss several returns of the post, lest I worry, and of claiming the same privilege. You were guarded, but you evoked the bridge over the Thames nearest St Paul’s vividly enough that I could easily recognise it. You mentioned the burnt caramel smell of the roasting nuts—those particular sugared-nut vendors only show up three places in London that I am aware of, and this was the only one you could have meant. I was feeling particularly low, and I recklessly thought—she’ll go there again, today. I’ll spend the afternoon there, it’s busy and I shan’t be seen. And so I watched the crowd for passing figures matching my wife’s description. I saw you walk that way, and over and above the shock of unpleasant recognition, I knew. My heart stopped, as though my soul’s mate had died in that instant. Perhaps I shouldn’t make myself so vulnerable as to tell you that, but I think perhaps it might wound you too, and horribly, you’ve made me want that. You bring out the very lowest impulses in me, and always have done. I confirmed my suspicion, which is too indefinite a word for my grieving certainty, by standing sentry over your box. I withheld myself via correspondence so as to catch you out—easier, I thought, than stealthily following the girl to you while you were hard by, and with less risk of losing or alarming her, or discovery.”

“Quick as ever,” Uriah muttered, as though to himself.

David laughed bitterly. “How can you bring yourself to say it, when I have been so monumentally stupid? Look at what you've done to me--does it please you?”

"No!" Uriah insisted.

"Do you dare lie to me now?" David shouted. "Did you ever feel a moment's shame for all the worry and sorrow you brought me?"

"It could hardly be helped," Uriah said, his voice shrill with what David was shocked to see looked like true, wracking guilt. "It's not as if I wanted it this way! And didn't I also bring you plenty of comfort? You said as much! Didn't I work myself 'ard for you, an' give you my all, willingly? Gladly?"

"Comfort your betrayal rips away from me! Every piece of help you ever gave me must now be interrogated, every responsibility you assumed now reassigned, my whole life reshaped around your absence! Is that vengeance enough for whatever it is you think I've done to you? Are you at last satisfied?"

Uriah looked paler even than usual. Looked absolutely ill, in his distress. He swallowed hard. Did it again. “Oh, but—but you won’t leave off writing to me! No! You can’t, can you? Because I'm so necessary to you, I made certain I was. How could you replace me, even as stubborn as you are? No, you'll have to keep me, you'll find you must do it, when you're a little calmer! We can pretend everything is as it was! Or, or if you can't forgive me, why then we might—”

“Forgive you?” David asked. “Who should I forgive, my wife? It seems I haven’t got one. You’ve made a widower of me once more.”

Uriah’s face twisted in rage, and David thought that he’d like so much to kiss him. To smash their mouths together and see if Uriah would clutch his shoulders and drop limp against him, kissing him again and again, murmuring ‘David, oh David, my own—’ Then he could shove Uriah to the ground and for once feel the adult between them, tall and righteous rather than undermined and undone by the older man. David could sneer at Uriah, spit on him, depart to stitch up his wounds in private and emerge with a wiser, more disciplined heart. David wanted to do it out of lust, and he wanted to do it out of spite, and he wanted to do it because he was piercingly sad—because he wanted above all to love his partner, and a stupid part of him didn’t understand how that could just stop, how it could be stolen away. Death hadn’t stopped him loving Steerforth or Dora, why should this betrayal end his adoration for Bathsheba? And his heart cried that his beloved lived, after so much else had been taken from him, and that he need not lose her too!

“Of course," Uriah laughed awfully. "How did I ever convince myself you wouldn't lop me off like a leg that's gone gangrenous? The things a man'll let himself believe, when he's desperate! Oh you’ll move on and forget our time together then, I’m sure,” Uriah said, his voice shaking with anger and his whole body contorted with passion. “As you forgot it upon leaving Canterbury! You never once mentioned my name to your wife! You would make only the most oblique inferences to me, if you'd even condescend so far as that! Your hand across my face was less of an insult, Copperfield. Yes, I suppose you’ve proved pretty capable of escaping any cage I, or even good sense and your own advantage, might form for you. But you can’t take these years from me,” Uriah crowed. “They’ll remain the prime and pride of all my life, whatever you do! Go on, murder me now if you like—you can’t unmake having loved me! Go on then," he kicked hard at the papers on the floor, "steal back your letters if you dare. It don’t amount to much, for I know ‘em all without prompting! Here,” he seized one from the ground seemingly by instinct, and David had no idea how he recognised it so easily, “throw this one on the fire, if you like!" Uriah waved it at David, still half bent and looking at him with a mad, rictus grin. "It’s the first one where you said you loved me." He straightened and advanced on David. His voice warbled and cracked horribly, like the paint on the wall of a burning house. "In ashes I’ll still remember it, so I’m afraid it won’t do you any good! I’ve had you,” Uriah hissed, almost in tears, shivering with his feeling and pushing the paper in David’s face, “an’ I’ll always have you with me, however many years pass between moment this an’ our deaths.”

“What do you want of me?” David shouted at Uriah, bewildered and upset almost to tears himself. The cat slept through their row and David wanted to collapse on Uriah's bed with it, to miss all the racking awfulness of the confrontation he'd craved and brought about himself. “For once in our lives, honestly tell me what you want! And don’t rely on a thousand tricks to position and prime and deceive me—simply say it, for the love of god, Uriah! What did you hope to accomplish with all this?”

“‘n what good will it do to say the words?” Uriah asked, drooping into sullen misery now, falling back with the alteration in his emotions. “I could lower myself to beg, and to be ‘umble in my heart even, which I’d do for no one else, and what for?” He laughed, a little hysterically, shoving his hand through his hair, which he’d let grow long about his face. “Suppose I’ll have to get another bird.” He gestured with his ringed hand at an empty cage by the window. “That was company, for awhile. One died, ‘n I got another. Before I ever wrote to you I used to tell myself, as a little joke, 'why, I'll free this poor creature when David cares one whit for me. For my own heart shall be light enough to fly then, and inside myself I'll sing my own songs, and what need ‘ll I have then of any bird!' 

‘But you know,’ I’d say to my companion, ‘I doubt I'll ever have cause to release you. Isn't it cruel of your marvelous David Copperfield to cage us both thus? You’re a stupid thing, bird, though pretty enough—he's pretty but sharp, an' oh, he knows better than to do a thing like that. To care for a man like me.’ Now, you might wonder what birds want with the freedom of a world full of cats, with scant food and cold winters. I never used to see what they were about, when I was a boy! In fact I came to understand it when I knew you better. Why, one might well wonder why I prefer this cage,” Uriah gestured, his hand taking in the room, London, all of England, “to the freedom of the world, which I am better prepared to navigate than a little finch, being more of a buzzard sort of person myself. But the truth is I'm as stupid as the bird, really I am! Certain wants are fundamental to our natures, even if they haven't any business being. No, you can't outstrip nature, can you!” Uriah shook his head. “Try as you might!”

David stared at him, helpless and bewildered. His silence seemed to incense Uriah, and David recalled that it had also done so when he'd last seen the man. When Uriah had hissed that he'd hated David, that he'd always hated him, that he'd pay a fortune to be truly told David only didn't speak because he couldn't, for someone had cut out his tongue.

Uriah’s expression turned vicious, quite probably in consequence. “I won’t say I’m beaten,” he muttered in a dangerous tone. “Why, if I’ve lost everything, then so be it, Copperfield: you’ll hear precisely what I want." He faced David like an impresario, welcoming him to the show. "Firstly, I want to keep running our business and our ‘ome—I love managing you. I wish I directed plays, so that I could sit you in a chair and tell you to tilt your head up just so and watch you all day long. But ‘aving ‘alf your business in ‘and? Oh, that is better yet!” He rubbed his hands together. 

“It’s a tidy operation in and of itself, but it is dear to me for being yours! Ours! You called it our child, once. Well it’s the only one we’re like ever to ‘ave, but I always wanted such a thing with you. No one else would ever do for me! I want to see if that charming lap-position you mentioned, where you kiss me during, works ‘alf so well for gentlemen. I think you’d be better suited to the lady's place there, your being a touch smaller. I’d like to tell you I love you,” he said it in furious tones, “while I fuck you ‘till you cry—it’d be easy enough to do. You must be so pent up from all the years, all the letters. I had you positively panting for me, I know I did. To think you agreed to let your little wife sodomise you, you wanton!" Uriah leered at him. "I’d have you read one of those letters aloud with your lovely voice while I sucked you off. One of yours, mind, for it’d embarrass you more, and you look so sweet and boyish when you’re put out in that fashion. Mind, it might make me a little vicious to have you at last, though, because it'd remind me I wasn’t your first. An’ I ought to have been, Copperfield, for didn’t I love you just the same when you were a boy? You’ve never given me my due, an’ I ‘ad to resort to such lengths—” He shook his head theatrically, playing at his distress even now. It reminded David of how cavalier Uriah had been about his own father's death when they'd first met, how lofty and how grand. David thought that perhaps Uriah found it easier to dissemble a little than to express himself directly, to speak eviscerating truths. That performance might be the only road to honesty he knew well enough to take. 

“Oh!” an idea occurred to Uriah, and he writhed with enthusiasm at the thought. “An’ I want, whenever I feel poorly, for you to make me tea, an’ call me your poor dear wife, and put that warm little hand of yours on my face and tut over my unhappy lot. I want you to bring me toast and to listen to me whine and to say I’m very brave for enduring it staunchly, when we both know I’m making a right fool of myself. And all your lush declarations!” Uriah draped a long-fingered hand over his heart—he seemed to favour the one with the ring, in all his gesticulation. “To hear them from your mouth, with the right name given 'em! Oh, David," he breathed, "is there anything in the world I don’t want?”

David goggled, and Uriah sneered (but his eyes were so dejected, under the fierce expression he'd assumed). “To much for you, Copperfield?”

A long moment passed. “Fine,” David said with decision. “Fine. Whichever you like.”

“Pardon?” It was Uriah’s turn to look drastically taken aback.

David gave a long exhalation. “Once I’ve calmed down and forgiven you—yes. All right. It will be a few weeks, perhaps even a couple of months. And even then, at least at first, the thing it won’t be done in entirely the spirit of innocent joy in which I had imagined our union." David said it with wry exasperation. "I'm sorry for it. I must work to overcome how humiliated and how angry you've made me. No one else I’ve loved has ever done anything of this nature to me, you know. Even Steerforth’s betrayal seems, for my own part, but little, compared to yours." David shook his head. "But I do understand that after that period—yes. We can do all of that. Indeed we must.”

Uriah paced, then sat down on his bed, propping his elbows on his knees, interlacing the fingers of his hands and resting his chin on these.

“You’re going to forgive me?” Uriah asked, not believing it. His voice was flat, without any inclination of hope or promise.

David rolled his eyes. “You’re my Bathsheba, and I've made certain solemn promises. Or rather," David waved his hand, "my Bathsheba was always you. People don’t separate from their wives at the first major struggle. Whatever I might have thought in my first flush of rage," David snorted at himself. "Honestly, Uriah. You and I are married—that was your idea.”

“Well you said you’d loved an illusion just now!” Uriah spat back immediately, seemingly unable to help himself, nursing the words like a wound. “You said I wasn’t your wife!”

David laughed at that, short but gentle, as he himself was. “An 'illusion' that obliterated me last week over my attempt to do some of the legal work myself. ‘Oh dear David,'" that same David pronounced in falsetto, "'didn't you say you had training in this? Because it’s in such a muddle, you see, so I am confused!' Far too substantial a phantom for my tastes. Not my idea of the thing at all. And for all your talk of humility, your pride couldn’t allow an illusion to stand for one moment. You corrected every inaccuracy. Heaven forbid I think you a beautiful woman!”

Tentatively, seemingly almost against his will, Uriah grinned at that. He still wouldn’t look David quite in the eye, but David saw the expression, angled as Uriah was towards the clean but grim-viewed window, and felt gently encouraged by it.

“I take marriage very seriously,” David continued. “Perhaps I only thought I did the first time—now I find I am far more resolved on the subject. It's no kind of game to me. I wouldn't have said what I said to you and gone along with the shared dream of our marriage if it hadn't been absolutely real to me. And I think,” he eyed Uriah’s ring, “that you take it seriously, too, and that that is how you think of yourself now. If I got married again you'd boil alive and think me a bigamist, and frantically wonder if you could rightly sue.”

David caught Uriah’s eye, watched Uriah consider suggesting a legal argument to that effect and decide against it at this time, and laughed again. Copperfield shook his head and sighed. 

“I know you too well to truly despise you for this, now. I understand you too deeply. I am forced by that knowledge to understand your reasons. If someone told me, 'your Bathsheba has done something unforgivable' and explained the vague outlines of the conflict in another form, I'd respond, ‘well she's far from secure in just these ways, and loves me to distraction, and never can trust that I'll do as she wants if she doesn’t go further than she ought to.’ You dare do all that may become a man, and you don't have much use for the rest of the line."

"You won’t hold it against me and lord it over me forever?" Uriah nigh whispered, and in the sound David heard that Uriah would come to him even if he said he would, and heard also Uriah's guilt, buried and hidden even from himself, that he might go on in this. "For I knew all the while I hurt the man I'd least like to, and that if anyone else had so practiced upon 'im, I—" He did not, perhaps could not, finish.

"No, dearest," David said firmly, watching Uriah shudder under the word. "You did use me. Knowingly, you did. You used my own weaknesses against me, my childish desire to see a woman freed from a bad marriage, as my own mother wasn’t, and the people you knew I’d speak to—you used Betsey’s dislike of men, and Agnes’ solid pragmatism and her refusal to assign blame where she was not certain it was due. All our best impulses, well known to you, you expertly turned against us and made our weaknesses. But can I hate your desperation? I always saw it in you. You told me of it yourself. How can I ask you to tell me you're sorry for the practice of deception rather than for its effects on me, when you only did as your nature and your love compelled you to?”

“You’re ever so much better than me, ain’t you?” Uriah said wryly, exhaling. “I really don’t think I could forgive someone for making me love them. Even with all the intervening years, I still haven’t truly forgiven you. Not fully, anyway! And you didn’t even set out to do it deliberately!”

“I’ll give you cause to,” David promised, thinking that he could want Uriah in his own person—that he had, in a way, for a long while. That the body he’d half known as Bathsheba’s had always been this body, with its height and its strength and its supple, twisting, twining quality. “And I like being in love," David admitted. "Perhaps a little too much, even. It's your nature to love deeply, and to resent it. Well, it's mine to love deeply and to love being in love.”

Uriah looked at him properly at last, and David felt want twist in his chest. Uriah whetted his lips, a question in his eyes, and David shook his head.

“No, I won’t so much as kiss you tonight. Not when I’m angry. And I am still very angry, you know. By rights I couldn't do that to us." Uriah's expression showed willing, but David insisted. "If I wouldn’t think it right to treat you that way as a woman, then it’s shameful to do it just because you’re a man. It’s no way to start. Besides, we’re both exhausted by this, even if we can’t feel it yet.”

“No,” Uriah agreed, eyeing David with sadness and depletion and undisguised want. “But as soon as you can, David. For I’ve waited longer even than you have, you know.”

Not knowing how to part, David simply clasped Uriah’s hand. To think he’d feared it as a boy! He understood now that half that fear had been a want he couldn’t yet grasp, that had frightened and disgusted him by virtue of its then-inexplicable sensual component. Poor Uriah, perspiring every time the idol of his young and underfed heart came near, unable to disguise it. David felt a stab of fondness for that awkward figure. Foolish boy.

“We’ll talk about that,” David said cryptically. Parting from Uriah gave David a strange mixture of difficulty and relief: this had been so much to deal with. “Bathsheba Stack,” he said at the door with a laugh. “You certainly aren’t subtle.”

“Ah, but you didn’t get it though, did you?” Uriah raised a thin eyebrow.

“Only because I’m not subtle either,” David said with the door open. “And by the by, start thinking about living arrangements. We’re certainly not staying here.” David departed without a backward glance. At home he enjoyed a long, unaccustomed nap, because whatever else Uriah Heep did (commit fraud and write novels and train himself to be a lawyer out of nothing and love him, just as he’d said, more than any husband in the world was loved), he could wear David out like none other.

***

Days without contact drove the both of them a little mad, and a fortnight without even a single letter almost to outright insanity. They weren’t used to it: the whole structure of their days, their lives and their thoughts revolved around one another. They were more intertwined than most conventional married couples. 

At last David sent a letter directly to Uriah’s address. Have you given any thought to where we might live?

Uriah returned a dossier and, at the top, a thorough explanation of the benefits each property afforded and his own preferences. Nor were the drawbacks forgotten. Uriah had gone to see each, if David would care to do the same. He thought they’d better buy rather than lease—more economical, in the long term, and it was one fewer interloper to discover them. As to concealment, Uriah had quite a good idea he’d tell David about in person. These premises here were nearish the theatre, and could easily accommodate apartments above and the whole of the magazine offices in the lower floors. All the saved money from Uriah’s unspent wages and royalties could just about cover a down payment—they might call it a sort of apology. Though it hardly mattered, as it all came from the same source (their joint efforts) and went to the same place (their joint ends). If David thought it a little weak as far as apologies went, he nonetheless appreciated the thought, and felt this was about as close as Uriah could honestly come to regret on the point of his illicit practices, as opposed to whether they'd made David wretched in the execution.

David visited the place himself, signed papers with the solicitor (For they will have to be in my name, you know—make out a private rider that clarifies your share? Oh, and we’ll adapt my will—dredge up two discreet witnesses for that, if you could. Some harmless, good-intentioned, peaceable couple that will harbour no sinister suspicions about what is really quite a common document, who we need never encounter again.), and wrote Uriah to ask whether he wanted any hand in David’s removal arrangements (for I don’t see much work ahead of you on your end, and I presume our last discussion did not so far alter your personality as to make you disinterested in having the run of the house—for Christmas I ought to give you a chatelaine).

Now, should you believe me if I said I found the idea just a pinch erotic? Uriah asked.

Yes, David answered.

Thus it was that David again saw Uriah: in company, whilst a great many hired men were orchestrating the transfer of all his belongings, and carrying a shaking and angry wicker basket full of poor Tybalt, which he handed off to Abigail to situate. David blushed, coughed to clear it, and gave Uriah only a covert nod. 

“This is our confidential man of business, Mr Heep,” he told the foreman, having received instructions to say something along these lines, if he liked the notion, and trying it to see whether he could come over casual. “My wife, alas, is too much an invalid to attend to the arrangements herself as she would wish, but Mrs Copperfield has instructed and deputised Mr Heep in everything—trust him as myself. Uriah?” He clapped Heep’s shoulder in a familiar fashion, and Uriah, no less affected and yet no less an actor than David, started himself before covering it. 

“Poor Miss Bathsheba!” Heep heaved a vigorous sigh. “No, she ain’t a well woman, sir, more’s the pity! Now what are they doing with that trunk? Those books go in the library, as is marked right on 'em, plain as day and then some—only the cookery books our girl uses go through there.” Oh what a good girl Abigail was—Uriah had selected her, in part, for her capacity to mind her own business. He paid her over the odds, and he thought they’d keep together a very long while. 

Frequently, as he had when he’d only just met David and he’d thought he never would get over the novelty of just looking on him, he was so beautiful, Uriah caught himself watching Copperfield while one or the other of them rattled off instructions. The light from the long, low garret windows (which were particularly difficult to see into from any other building, not to mention the street) didn’t half flatter Copperfield. But then, didn't everything? 

In some ways David hadn’t been so honest as Uriah felt he had been in his own letters. I suppose I am an average looking man, David had tried before Uriah had rolled his eyes and put the man out of his misery by revealing that he knew perfectly well what David looked like. I was certainly an awkward-looking child, David had continued bold-faced, and adolescent! (When exactly had that been, Uriah wanted to know?) Thus I imagine I understand something of the struggles, the anxieties a woman may feel regarding her appearance— At that point, Uriah had informed the then-still-with-him second bird that David was full of s--- and this letter wouldn’t be the worse for the bird making use of it in the fashion he was accustomed to do with newspaper (Uriah never would, but it had tempted him!). And then there were the several claims that David was wretched at this or that thing which Uriah positively knew him to be proficient in! These too had tested him. He’d loved for David to tell him stories of his youth in Canterbury. Uriah had been fishing of course, but he’d also found the combination of familiarity and novelty in them delightful. He shook himself out of his reverie when Abigail, who David had carefully spoken to about everything, approached his elbow and said the dishes were safely installed, and asked him what wanted doing.

“Linens, I think,” he said calmly, eyeing David. “He’ll be tired, after all this. Tea and the cold supper laid out, and you can go to bed yourself, when we’re through. Take that cat with you this evening, if you will.” They had a bell for her, but actually Abigail was to live in her own suite on the floor below. More private that way, as he’d told Copperfield.  

At last the men finished. The foreman offered Mr Copperfield ‘compliments to your lovely wife, sir,’ as he departed.

Uriah sighed after the shut door with great drama. “Will no one believe I ain’t lovely?” 

David laughed at that, unfastening his braces and slumping, drained, onto the chesterfield. Uriah thought what an exceptionally handsome picture he looked. For a moment there, he had considered hiring a woman of Bathsheba’s description to meet David, to allay his suspicions and to make him happy. But then David was bound to subsequently see the actress in something else, that was just Uriah’s luck. And Uriah had known he could never brief a stranger with sufficient thoroughness. What suspicion and thus pain it might engender would be more trouble than the thing was worth. Besides, at best it'd be David desperately clutching someone else's hands for half an hour, carrying her image away with him, and Uriah couldn’t stand the notion. 

“Admit it,” Uriah said lightly enough, “really you hoped your Sheba was, despite everything she said to the contrary, a gorgeous woman in an unhappy marriage who’d wind up being rescued by her usband's death. Or that she’d run away to you, an' ruin herself for the love of you.”

“Life,” David said, his eyes closed. “Is not a novel. It does not often correspond to melodrama plots. It’s generally far more ridiculous. And did you not suggest I'd ruined you as it was? That's more than enough satisfaction on that front for me.”

“Still,” Uriah said, coming to stand behind David, tentatively taking David's tense shoulders in his bony hands and rolling them, watching David shiver with a lump in his own throat, guilt compelling him to say things he knew he oughtn't, as he often couldn't help doing where Copperfield was concerned, “I'll never make you as pleased as that would have done. You would have been so relieved to explain it all to your aunt, and the army of your acquaintance—to have Agnes welcome me as another sister. I’ve taken that from you, an’ I know it. You might have been happy after a normal fashion, instead of skulking around with a male lover in secret. For secrecy comes natural to me, while you abhor it.”

“Do I?” David considered, leaning back into Uriah’s hands in a way that made Uriah ache with tenderness. “I’m not so certain, Uriah. Perhaps I’ll adore having a private life that’s totally my own, separate from the world and its expectation. We won’t tell many friends the full truth of our association, but I’ll put you in a pumpkin shell, and keep you very well indeed.”

“I put you in one,” Uriah reminded him with delicious smugness. “Seeing as it’s my money.”

“You like that, don’t you?” David asked, turning his head to kiss Uriah’s knuckle and making him shiver. “Mm. So you do. Now tell me honestly. All this—was there anything of vengeance in it? From one angle the thing looks quite the grand entrapment, and if you’d set out apurpose to embarrass or injure me, you couldn’t have gotten in a better position to do it. You committed a massive act of fraud once to spite me—I don’t know exactly what’s beyond you, only that I’ve yet to encounter any such thing.”

“There was no little love in that other one, either,” Uriah reminded him. How queer it was, that they'd never yet directly discussed the grandest plot of Uriah's life, and the great tangle of resentment that thus lay between them. It could change nothing now that the two of them had settled with one another, yet still Uriah approached the topic with apprehension, with the traces of his old admixture of feeling. “And I can’t say there wasn’t. Yes, there must have been a little revenge in this too—a desire to humble you, to make you suffer love as I did. Even ‘a little’ undersells the thing, I know. You hurt me terribly, a hundred times, and what did my heart care that you didn’t quite intend it? And it wasn't all old wrongs, best forgotten. Though it meant nothing to you, you never so much as wrote my name—”

“I never mentioned you,” David interrupted him, “because I found any mention of you vexatious and painful, an embarrassing reminder of my own failure to deal with you as a man. You so affected me, years after I’d last seen you, that Agnes knew not to so much as allude to you, despite it being as much her affair, and her knowing all of it. I have ever felt boyish and weak where you were concerned. You confused and fascinated and repelled me. I always knew there was something in us that was alike, even when the thought made me terribly uncomfortable. I believe I always knew I wanted you, even when I didn’t let myself know that I knew it. And so that is what I did when you were Bathsheba: I protected myself from any suspicion that might threaten our union. I blindly refused to see you in her, so that I could keep you.”

His tone was patient but pleading, for David needed Uriah to see it—needed his partner to feel that David was with him for love rather than out of obligation, and that it wasn't Bathsheba, divorced from Uriah, that inspired that feeling in him. Something occurred to David, and he winced. 

“I suppose it must have annoyed you that I always implied I’d be doing the having and the taking in the marital bed, due to some mistaken assumptions about your gender.”

“Not at all!” Uriah insisted, trailing his fingers over David’s neck and brushing David’s cheek with his knuckles, feeling an electric thrill at this consummation. He bent his long torso to murmur into David’s ear. “Why, I’ll admit that when you were a youth I thought of nothing but sodomising you. Not just 'when I set myself to considering carnal satisfaction', mind. I couldn’t get through ten minutes of work without the notion occurring to me, with all the freshness and charm of a wholly new scheme. It really is distracting, when a person is trying to get on in the world, to have the loveliest fifteen year old boy one could imagine coming into the house too quick, skidding on the rug, dropping his school books all over the entryway and having to bend over to pick them up. I didn’t think straight for the rest of the day when it occurred, I can tell you. I tacked the rug down to preserve my very sanity! However now that you’re a man, curiously I find my thoughts largely tend in the opposite direction. You’ve grown up so ‘handsome, 'aven't you? My slingshot-wielding prince transformed into a wise ‘n warlike king, as t'were. Though,” he kissed David’s neck, slowly and deliberately, tracing lines thereupon, “I’m sure I could be brought back around, if you fancied.”

“I missed you, these past weeks,” David said in lieu of a direct rejoinder as he mulled this over, leaning into Uriah. “It’s a hard labour, staying angry with you. It hurts to do it, and I don’t like myself much for it.”

Uriah thought about sniping that the period of separation had been David’s own wretched idea, so he had only himself to thank for it, and that it hadn’t done him any great favours either. But he did feel the sting of self-recrimination, and he didn’t want to push it, besides. He was older now. He knew better than to vex his partner unnecessarily, just out of petulant, self-willed feeling. Or at least most of the time he did. If David had forgiven him, he was lucky. If he’d needed a fortnight without communication and another with only business-related letters between them to do it, that was little enough, compared to the awful deprivation Uriah might easily have endured. “I’ll try not to put you to it too off’n.”

“Largely you don’t,” David admitted. “We manage better than many couples of my acquaintance. I expect living together will present us with some fresh vexations, as well as with many joys—but it’s such a relief, isn’t it?" He squeezed Uriah's hand in his own. "At least it is to me, when I had resigned myself to a solitary domestic life, and only the higher, less earthly part of marriage.”

“It is,” Uriah enthused, coming to sit next to David and clutching both his hands, “oh it is! An’ one I never looked for, that I’d given up anything but dreams of.”

Uriah watched David as David chaffed his cold hands in his own, warming them nicely. A little red crept into David’s cheek, and Uriah exhaled, watching it. To know David wanted him—to see it for himself! He almost wanted to thank him, yet knew not how to do the thing properly, without the false fawning David despised. He wanted to learn to do it a'right, from his heart with no dissembling, for David.

“The first time,” David murmured, looking up at Uriah through his lashes, “let me take you as your husband. It’s what I’ve longed for, these past years, and I suspect I need it now. Would you allow me that? I will be gentle,” David promised.

Uriah gave a breathless laugh. “Course you will. Don’t I know it? Mind, it’ll be such work getting you to be otherwise, when I feel like it. Thought I like the idea enough that I don’t much hold that against you. I’m hard at it, when I’m pursuing an object, and I usually see a thing done.”  Uriah unfolded himself and led David by the hand to the bedroom, to the bed Abigail had made for them.

“Lie down, my love,” David said with soft firmness, just as if Uriah were a sensible but somewhat anxious woman he was taking to bed for the first time, who had been chattering just to obscure the fact of her nervousness. Uriah sat, but didn’t lie.

“There will be time enough,” David said as he unbuttoned his shirt, “to discuss what else you might like me to do. Don’t get ahead of yourself, when you’re yet a new-made bride.” 

Uriah swallowed hard and took off his own jacket, but David tsked and bent to pull his cravat off, slow and steady. He unbuttoned Uriah’s shirt and pulled off the long undershirt beneath it. 

“I ain't exactly inexperienced,” Uriah muttered nigh sulkily, but with a catch in his breath at David's attentions.

David snorted. “Trade, dearest? A few encounters in seedy pubs where you played the conversation right—a back-alley job?" He tossed his head, his tone lofty and assured. "None of that’s a husband, and none of it is making love. Do take your bridal night in earnest, for my sake and your own.”

“I do,” Uriah said as David eased off the last of his garments, trembling under David's ministrations already. “Oh but I do. David—”

“I feel you do,” David assured Uriah, kissing him, cupping Uriah's face with his palms. David felt the steady thrumming thrill of his own power over the man before him. It answered the old inequalities between them, and it soothed David's lingering sense of betrayal and resignation. Impossible to seriously resent Uriah, when the man shook beneath his fingers as if overpowered and terrified by the strength of his regard for David. Impossible to hold onto fear, slighted feelings, shame and one-upmanship when David could touch how he was loved, could hold it in his own hands. Uriah made a desperate noise and tried to turn their kiss into something hard and fervent, but David gently broke from him. “Pace yourself,” he murmured. Uriah looked mutinous, but David shook his head, for Uriah had to learn that he had nothing to prove. “I have no intention of going anywhere, and you will be good for me. You owe me that, and you shall like it very well. Let me show you the difference between what you have done and what we're about, though I hold that it isn’t the precise act or the skill involved in it that separates love from rutting, so much as the intent. Lie down, dear.” David stoked Uriah's chest and gave him a little push.

Uriah followed, looking furious and frightened and infinitely longing. Like what he was: a man who'd waited the better part of his life to be thus touched, by these hands.

“If I call you Bathsheba in this,” David said as he caressed Uriah’s limbs (making Uriah struggle against the very lightness of his strokes, and grip the sheets so as not to buck, or to try and take control of the situation), “it isn’t because I think you anything other than you are, or that I love the idea of her through you. It is, to me, just another name for you: an endearment between us. Is that agreeable to you?” David asked.

Uriah, calming under the touch and now only quaking under it, growing softer and more receptive, could only nod.

David prepared him and Uriah, looking wretched and in a black mood with himself, made little hitched cries against the sensation. 

“Shh,” David soothed, wondering why Uriah should dislike what was most captivating in him, this weakness towards himself that made David's breath catch and his heart ache in his chest like a thing bruised and swollen. “Why fight it, Uriah? You needn’t be embarrassed. I cherish your response to me, it’s nothing to be ashamed of! Keep looking at me like that," he whispered, "it drives me mad.”

“I love you.” Uriah said it fast, as though the expression had broken out of him. David held Uriah's gaze for a tense moment, steady, absorbing the wildness of Uriah's eyes. Oh, David thought stupidly, oh but it's always there when he looks on me, and all this while I never saw it. 

“I think you’re ready,” David said with an air of critical judgment. “Lift your hips,” he added, shoving pillows judiciously under Uriah's bony posterior. “There.” With care and a soft, soothing noise to quiet the harsh one Uriah made into the hand he was biting against the pleasure, David slid himself in, gasping when he’d managed it. He swallowed hard, then bent to kiss Uriah (an arrangement that involved Uriah leaning up to accommodate him, on account of his greater height). 

“And I you,” David whispered to him, trying a gentle thrust. Uriah clutched at David's shoulders as though he did so with the specific aim of leaving marks. David choked on breath, arousal and wonder. “You’re mine now, aren’t you?” He continued, just as soon as he could. Uriah gave a desperate nod and David repeated the action of his hips. “My adoring wife,” David said, falling into a rhythm. Uriah gasped at the word as though he wanted to scream. “Does my wife like that?” David asked softly, pushing harder.

Uriah gave a frantic jerk of his head, and David shook his in response. “No, darling, I’ll hear it. And call me your—”

“‘usband,” Uriah managed, his eyes rolling back in his head as David took hold of his cock, “my ‘usband oh god David, fuck, fuck, take me, your wife loves it, an’ I always have been yours, since I, since the day we—fuck, fuck!”

David had decided his wife was ready to take things at a brisker pace and acted in accordance with his conclusion. Uriah made a sound that resembled no human word in any known language.

“You’re a very good girl,” David said with a small smile through his hard breaths, “if a bit of a wanton.”

“Copperfield!” Uriah protested strongly.

“Mrs Copperfield?” David asked sweetly in reply. “God you’re tight for me, aren’t you Ury?”

Uriah cursed and whined and thrashed and begged at that, but nothing, not all his clever words nor all his pleading 'for pity an' for mercy', persuaded David he ought to go at anything other than the firm, gentle rhythm that suited him. “It just goes to show you that trade has nothing on good, regular usage, doesn't it? You’ll come for me like this, won’t you, Uriah?" Uriah gasped, and David smiled, hard and victorious. "And you'll let me break you to it, I think. Why we must do it often, to keep you pliant and in good form. I'll want my wife quite regularly, and she'll need seen to in just that fashion.”

"You're drunk with power over me," Uriah complained bitterly through his choked-out cries. "I knew you'd be a tyrant, if ever you got the opportunity! I knew you'd lord it over me!"

"It's ever so good," David admitted. "Don't tell me you mind, darling?"

“I’ll die,” Uriah moaned, “‘n god I want it, please, I’ll die, oh David!”

With a jagged whimper and a writhing shake of his whole body, Uriah came easily in David’s hand. He made broken noises as David finished, rocking himself softly into Uriah, mindful of his tenderness. 

David gathered his partner in his arms afterwards, proud of the shaking he'd engendered in the other body, his own heart singing with triumph and possession and the intoxication of forgiveness. Uriah looked half-way to sobbing.

"I can't hardly believe it," Uriah said, and David knew he referred to their present felicitous entwinement, to David's having forgiven him, to the whole course of the last years. Uriah's voice was thick with a fervent, religious gratitude David dared not comment upon, but which struck his heart even as that first letter of Bathsheba's had. He felt he saw and knew and cherished Uriah, even as Uriah had him—that Uriah, in his several faults and excellencies, was sufficient to David just as he was, and so very worthy of his love.

“We've a lifetime to come to terms with your incredulity," David said with kind lightness, caressing the bony ridge of Uriah's hot cheek with his thumb. "Did you really cry when I first said I loved you, you manipulative thing? All over your letter?”

“Yes,” Uriah whispered into his shoulder, not looking at him.

David laughed, running a palm along Uriah’s thin back, now fever-hot with evidence of passion, and kissed his cheek—he couldn’t quite reach his forehead, in his present position. Uriah was conductive. David had never known that about his perpetual coldness, before now. He stored up and returned what heat he was given, reflecting the world he moved through back at it, and his body and his personality, in this as in so many things, were like one another.

To Uriah’s surprise, it wasn’t long before David sported further evidence of connubial interest (though Uriah supposed it was far from unusual, in a Honeymoon period). They were still lying together when Uriah felt this proof of David's regard against his thigh. David idly took Uriah’s hand in his and sucked his ring finger, down to the snakes. The image made Uriah faint. David released his captive with a wet sound of suction that only enhanced the effect.

“Get on your front,” David whispered into Uriah's ear, only remembering to add an ‘if you please’ when Uriah had already sprung into that position and tentatively spreading his legs. He groaned with satisfaction when David slid back within him, a little surprised when David went much harder this time but relishing it, sliding up on his knees to accommodate his husband. David fucked him harder and quickly still, with a firm grip on Uriah's hips, their bodies smacking together pleasingly. David caressed and then lightly pulled the hair Uriah had grown out and Uriah choked, hard again himself. When David pulled out of him, dripping and satisfied (Uriah really did think he could die of this sort of thing), David pushed Uriah onto his back.

“I’ll take care of you,” David promised with a kiss. He then shoved Uriah down with a hand at his chest, sliding down his body and taking Uriah’s cock easily with a boy’s-school trick of encompassing it entirely. (He had hitherto been a little coy, with his wife and the postal service both, about his extra-sodomitical experiences in that regard.) This left Uriah to paw David’s shoulders, to stroke David's soft, loose curls with his ringed hand and offer endless compliments on David’s exquisite beauty and high skill and thank god that David had shaved his beard, which he must have done at Uriah's urging, for just such an eventuality as this, which thought made Uriah (pleasingly long in coming, after having done it once, and thus luxuriating in his lengthy stay at his majesty’s pleasure) spend hard, because did it not say that David had longed to fuck him, and planned for it? Did that not bode better than anything? Was not the future brighter than it had any right to be? 

Uriah kissed the taste of himself off David’s lips after, telling his husband that he cherished him, that he’d fuck him senseless in the morning. Uriah insisted that David was a genius in this and in everything, that he was masterful indeed as far as husbands went, and that his wife loved him beyond anything.

***

Even David Copperfield’s close associates were a little in the dark about his domestic arrangements. David had always been amiable and free in his speech, so this new discretion did take them aback, though it was generally supposed that he’d taken up apartments with his Bathsheba at last. Traddles, always cleverer than people gave him credit for, guessed something more about the nature of the situation than anyone else did. The individual in question did not occur to him, but he suspected the involvement of a man. He kept it to himself and didn't pry, and invited David (who always came alone) around for supper just as usual. He was sure David was a moral man, and that what David Copperfield did could not be cruel or wrong. David continued to live in the world in an upright manner, and to have an open mind and generous opinions, and that satisfied Tommy Traddles amply. 

Helped along by her familiarity with both parties, Agnes knew all and yet knew nothing, even as David himself had once known Bathsheba’s identity. If told, she would have been surprised, and yet—not greatly so. Betsey Trotwood, who was very wise in a great many respects, missed the thing entirely. She supposed Bathsheba an upright woman, perhaps a little proud, who dreaded to meet her de-facto husband’s family and friends for fear of being scorned, shaming herself, and what was worse—bringing shame on David. That was a hard position to be in, to be sure, and if such was her stance, then Betsey could but respect it. Now, had someone laid a few of the vital particulars before Betsey Trotwood, or even simply asked her to contemplate more deeply the nature of Uriah’s crime against their family and what motives had driven them, Betsey might have put it all together very neatly. But David never mentioned the affair, and she considered it a trouble passed. When David visited Peggotty and herself, he satisfactorily reported himself ‘very happy indeed, ma’mn’. Well! It was enough for her. 

David’s other friends understood him to be married to Miss Stack, as was (a penname she retained), and that there was some hush there, perhaps owing to the wife’s grave ill-health and invalidity. (Some thought this had held up the union for a while, with her on the brink of destruction, and perhaps reluctant to give herself and burden David in such a condition.) David did, however, come in for any confidential ‘husband’s talk’ going on account of this status.

“My wife,” Aldersley grumbled over a pint, “seems to find me a vexation—whenever you have me work long hours, I’d swear she’s glad of it! What about you, does yours put up with it all right?”

“She is very engaged in the business herself, you know,” David said, taking a meditative sip, “so she doesn’t much begrudge me Press Nights. And as to fondness, I think my wife would kill for me, easily. The real trouble would lie in getting her not to do it.”

“Ah, Heep!”Aldersley said as that man returned from the bar with a refreshed beverage and another for his master (who Heep sometimes half-mockingly referred to by that title). “The very man I am supposed to speak to—now, what were your mistresses’ directives concerning widows and orphans?” 

“That they should be consigned to workhouses, wasn’t it?” Heep said dryly. “Unless you are yet again attempting to take up more than your allotted space on the page. Column inches are money, Mister Aldersley, and begging your pardon sir, you never do say anything so brilliant that it cannot stand to be curtailed by a word or so to prevent this drain on our state’s resources, as it were. You do say something brilliant that'll only suffer for curtailment in the forthcoming issue,” he nodded at David, “but nevertheless you must cut it to length—much more and we’ll push ourselves out of the binding bracket.”

“There are two more pages in that category at the printers’!” David protested.

“They are reserves,” Uriah said sweetly, “for emergencies, Master Copperfield. For such exigencies as we cannot foresee! My mistress is very keen on avoiding such problems as are not emergencies, so as to preserve such a window. My mistress is very strong on preparation. As you know, sir!” 

Everyone who worked for the magazine felt that they did indeed know the mysterious, never-seen Bathsheba Stack-Copperfield pretty well, not simply through her writing but also through her practical instructions and Mister Copperfield’s remarks. It was widely agreed that she was hard-working and level-headed. Though all understood that the union might damage David’s reputation if it were broadly publicised, the consensus was that though she was occasionally a little hard, Miss Stack was an ideal partner for Mister Copperfield, who was, if anything, too soft. At any crisis David ran upstairs to their apartment, or consulted her man, Heep. Miss Bathsheba also made her will known via that odd, red-headed agent. 

“For in her ill ‘ealth,” Uriah signed feelingly, “the poor creature can only support looking on a very few faces!” Something in the glint of his eye seemed to dare them all to counter ‘and yours is one?’

Heep came and went between the floors at the bidding of his mistress. He was forever about the office, deeply involved in all the Copperfields’ affairs. Heep was swift of response, always ready with a comment that Miss Bathsheba wanted a matter handled in such and such a way.

Younger members of staff were sometimes disposed to grumble about what they thought of the way Miss Bathsheba wanted a thing, and Mister Copperfield too, for that matter. Such a comment would more often than not result in Uriah Heep’s materializing right behind one. 

“Have a care!” he said over-brightly on one such occasion, making Andrews, the young copy-setter who’d said it, jump half out of a skin and continuing blithely. “For I’ve never known the woman to miss or to forget a slight. She don't take kindly to upstarts. And why should she?”

“You’re an impudent rascal, Heep!” the put-out boy said in his own defence. “You speak dismissively of her, I've heard you do it!”

“Mister Heep,” Uriah corrected him sweetly. “Esquire, if you would. For I am, you know! Oh, Stack and I know precisely what we think of one another. That's just frankness! But I'm useful to her, an' to her Copperfield, so she keeps me around. You are rather less useful, Andrews. Remember it.” Uriah found the log-book he’d come for and practically swung out of the room, using the door knob to do it like some form of performing monkey. 

“She's supposed to be some kind of invalid!” Andrews whined to his companion, another young boy in just such a condition in the business as his own. He was very afraid of Mister Heep, but felt the need to make exactly two parting remarks to acquit himself of any such charge, both to his friend and within himself.

“A very active invalid!” his friend snorted. “She gets everywhere, like a foul smell—I swear she’s a witch who uses Heep as a familiar, and sees everything he does. I don’t think Mister Copperfield has a thought he don’t tell her, and then she gets at things I’d swear neither the Chief nor his pet skeleton could have heard a whisper of. How, I couldn't venture to say!”

“Witchcraft,” Andrews agreed. “She’s up there doing witchcraft.”

“Is she very pretty?” a daughter of their printer, who greatly admired Mister Copperfield, asked Mister Heep wistfully. She flushed at her own boldness in asking. “Mister Copperfield being so handsome, and all.”

Mister Heep just snorted. "She's no lovelier than I am, and if Copperfield’s told you otherwise, he’s a liar.” 

When Mister Heep left the girl to rejoin David upstairs, taking them two at a time and locking the door after he’d come in with an unintentional flourish natural to him, David observed Uriah over the reading glasses he wore now when correcting proofs. 

“How went your usual round of getting into everything?” David asked from his desk, amused. He didn’t think Uriah really even minded pretending to be a servant. It was, if anything, his special skill set. 

“About as well as ever,” Uriah replied cheerfully, dropping onto the Chesterfield and making best use of the space, his long limbs sprawling out over the whole of it. “The printer’s girl likes you something fierce, by the by. An’ I didn’t even scratch her eyes out for it. You really have reformed me! Next you’ll ‘ave me saying aiches ‘n all.”

“You weren’t jealous?” David asked standing and crossing to him, a little incredulous. “I’d profess to you that I have no special interest in the printer’s girl, and indeed even an indistinct memory of her name, but I never thought such confessions carried weight with you!”

“Oh but they do!” Uriah said, shaking his head, reaching out and dragging David on top of him, settling David against his own body comfortably. “I cherish an’ trust them, of course!”

“Since when?” David asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Don’t be mean,” Urian said, giving the tip of David’s nose a quick kiss. “What ‘ave I to be jealous of, mm? You’re too moral for adultery, and everyone knows you’re a married man, Copperfield. Ain’t I your wife?”

“You are that,” David agreed, kissing him properly. “And I suppose you’re going to ask me to prove it, now.”

Uriah sighed. “You know me too well!” He gave David a languid smile and stretched. “If you please.”

“I’ll go and fetch the necessaries,” David said, standing up. “I’ll have you over the couch, I think.” He left, and returned with unguent to find Uriah finishing with his clothing. “Do you remember that time you inveigled your way into sleeping on mine," he jerked his head at the couch, "when I was—what, seventeen?”

“Eighteen,” Uriah corrected. “An’ vividly. I’d worked so hard to get there, securing a dinner invitation from those vile people an’ all! It’d been ages since I’d seen you last, and I was in a state of determined desperation.”

“And to think that I repaid your best-laid plans by dreaming of nothing but impaling you with a red-hot poker all night long. I fantasised about it awfully. Looking back, it is a little poignant.”

“What are you and I but proof dreams do come true?” Uriah said with a vast, self-parodying enthusiasm that made David laugh, flinging himself over the couch and his wife.