The Life and Love of William Elford Leach

My Freudian Stream of Consciousness

Looking back on the course of events that led William and I to each other, I am amazed at how easy it was to love him. He was a bit strange, I suppose. Very dedicated to his work. He was gone for long periods of time with Doctor Cranch, studying foreign creatures, I suppose. I had begged him to take me with him on numerous occasions.

"Now, Caroline, there is no place finer for a woman than our metropolitan Europe. Other lands are perilous and foreign. I couldn't bear to put you at risk like that.”

I would plead with him, telling him just how unhappy I was in Wales. I told him I would rather die in the wild than live another day just like the thousands before. I told him how bored I was of everything in Wales. There was nothing for me there, except when he was there, then I had a reason to be in Wales. He fed me greater knowledge than the frivolous pageants and coatillions of the academy. I learned more from loving William Elford Leach than any education could possibly teach, especially as a woman. I was nobody in Wales, just another schoolgirl or rich woman. But with William, I felt like I was something altogether rare and exciting.

Don't get me wrong, I've always known and understood my beauty. I know what I can do to a man with a single glance, a short look, a knowing smile. I've used it to my advantage, and it's also caused me great suffering. Though I knew I always looked beautiful, I could never seem to feel like the person I saw in the mirror. I always felt--different, somehow. Like maybe I'm less of a person than those around me, or maybe I'm just masquerading as something rare and precious.

But with William, I always felt like the world was just barely out of my reach. As if by merely standing on my tiptoes and reaching just a little further, I could grab it, spinning on its axis, and make it irrevocably mine. I would share that world with William. I would make it into something greater than what it is. I would try to fix it, fix everything.

God knows that's what William was doing. For me and for everything else that walked or talked or breathed or reproduced.

He was gone so often, reaching on his tiptoes for the world in far-off lands that I'd never see with my own eyes. I always missed him so while he was away. I thought of him often, longing for his embrace, remembering him.

My God, how I would always miss him so hard that my body physically ached.

But absence makes the heart grow fonder. It was in those long intervals of lovesick melancholy, in my heart's ebb and flow, that I fell in love with William Elford Leah. Every time he walked in the door, unannounced, of course, excitement coursed through my veins white and hot and I had never felt so much joy. Whenever he wrote, which was not often because his travels were so remote, I was especially fond of his signature. The way it looped and curled and seemed to sprawl like black ocean waves on the thick sand-colored paper. His penmanship was so excellent. He was always so excited about his new discoveries and his extended research, describing everything in great detail. I absorbed all the information and excitement, and sometimes a part of me wished that he'd never return home, that he'd always send me is research from such exotic places that I probably should never see or know about. I was far too selfish to believe that wholeheartedly, though. A part of me also wanted him entirely to myself.

He sometimes sent a few photographs. Cranch was even older, and his full white head of hair was missing from the crown of his head, a little fleshy hole in an abyss of white. But William--my William--looked as dashing as ever. He never seemed to age in all the years and new addresses and adventures farther and farther from home.

My dear William never seemed to change. He was as vivacious and jovial as the day he was born, always smiling until the very end.

My God, what I wouldn't give to see that wonderful smile all over again, just once to burn it into the backs of my eyelids, so I'd see him even in the deepest recesses of sleep. That smile awoken parts of me--deep down--from a deep and lightless slumber. It set every nerve on fire and mended all the broken places where I longed for nothing but his touch and his love. Nothing would ever be quite as beautiful and enlightening as his smile. Dear God, I could spend the whole day just staring at his smile. Not speaking, not kissing, just looking at his wonderful teeth and cheeks and the crinkles by his eyes and those wonderful half-moon dimples and--oh, how I ache to live forever with that smile on my mind. I ached to be lost in the crevices of his joyful face forever.

I thought, then, sitting with Jane, that maybe I ought to have brought some of those photos from his travels. There were only a handful of them, nothing worth fussing over, yet they felt somehow more alive now that he was gone. I still don't know if I believed he was really gone. A part of me knew he would never truly die, just diminish in the memory of others, growing larger and larger, his name soon washing out the names of all the great minds who built the foundation of his fantasies and his hopes and dreams.

But, alas, death came to him all the same.

After we finished our champagne, Jane led me to the bedroom where my dear William lay dead. I caressed his face, where that smile once entranced me, and wept to myself. His eyes were shut. I wanted to see them, the comforting brown and the clear milky white and the sobering deep black. I remember the peace they had always held, and I missed them with every fiber of my being. Those rosy lips that I would never get enough of hung open slightly, as if he were still excitedly telling me about his wild adventures even in death. His hands were cold and wrinkly. I did not want to hold them anymore. I remember the feel of his hand on mine, how his hands were comfortably rough and real and impossibly warm against my fingertips. His sandy hair was unchanged. Beautiful and golden and soft and shiny and impossibly beautiful. He didn't look frail and defeated in that deathbed. He didn't look as my father had looked, with eyes sunken and strength lost to the deepening cataract of The End.

No.

William--my William--looked alive still. Like maybe he was just out on another long adventure and would soon come back home to me and he would hug me and tell me he loved me and we'd settle down in London and have a family--how I wish he had married me long ago when he had the chance. He was always so busy--Tasmania to Norway to Brazil to Morocco, constantly going from one place to the next in the name of science.

Of course I had supported him. Of course I loved his work as well as him. Of course I would wait a hundred years to marry him if he wished.

I just wanted to be married to him before death reared its ugly head. The things we want in life don't come to us at our every whim, though. No, we could not be married. There were complications in our lives, and our family--oh, dear God, our family.

I shudder to think of what will become of that now.