Scold's Bridle

I am pregnant again, sickeningly and disgustingly pregnant. Barely six months after giving birth to one bastard, I am carrying another. Perhaps James's drunken rages will achieve some good purpose by bringing on a miscarriage. He weeps and rants in turn, screaming insults at me like a fishwife, intent, it seems, on trumpeting my "whorishness" to the entire building. And all for what? A brief, unlovely affair with Paul Marriott whose clumsy, apologetic gropings were almost past endurance. Then, why, Mathilda?

Because there are days when I could "drink hot blood, and do such bitter business as the day would quake to look on". Paul's priggishness annoyed me. He talked about "dear Jane" as if she mattered to him. Mostly I think about death-the baby's death, James's death, Gerald's death, Father's death. It is, after all, such a final solution. Father connives to keep me in London. He tells me Gerald has sworn to marry Grace if I return. The worst of it is, I believe him. Gerald is so very, very frightened of me now.

I paid a private detective to take photographs of James. And, my, my, what photographs they are! "The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't with such a riotous appetite." And in a public lavatory too. If the truth be told, I am rather looking forward to showing them to him. What I did was merely sinful. What James does is criminal. There'll be no more talk of divorce, that's for sure, and he'll go to Hong Kong without a murmur. He has no more desire than I to have his sexual activities made public.

Really, Mathilda, you must learn to use blackmail to better effect on Gerald and Father...