Sweetest Ida,

 

I cannot endeavour to deceive you any longer. My health, as you well know, cannot abide climes such as this and I fear what these incessant chills will make of me. Further still, I fear what they will administer to you away from coal, cobbles and company as you are. Were it that circumstance different and locality not an issue. Be that as it may, I have taken - though it physically pains me to write this - to the burning of my sister’s letters for warmth. I could not bear to make cinders of your own. Wait; let me venture to justify such an act before you seek out the quill to pen a vehement reply: the gas-lights of London have long gone untouched, braziers ember not in the hearths of the gentile and, hyperborean temperatures such as these, have seen none fewer than fourteen of those enchained to vagabondage loose their last. It has become such that exiting one’s own tenement is tantamount to bequeathing their timbered furniture to the communal pyre. I see them now, pinpricks of man’s first discovery, dotting the city in their last moments; ignis fatuus focal points for the famined and rimed fiend.

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It is with great care and through a course of action inducted beneath bedclothes and at a great distance from windows, that I pen this to you - candles have become a bourgeois opulence and the stars from which lesser, purloining men flock. It is not a task for which I have steeled myself and I find the mere calligraphy of it an ache to heart and head. My soul remains in tatters. Do you recall last summer in Sandeman House? I expect it is the last and only time I smiled so much that my face became sore. Donia introduced us by the still, meditative lake in which we oft dove, and your countenance that day has yet to fade from memory. We walked the length and breadth of the grounds and my greatest torment was that singular moment when our hands unclasped as your mother called you to her side, to the idling carriage and thick-browed coachman on his perch, to the fells of Oxfordshire. Twilight fell too soon that day. Few occasions have we reconvened since, and yet, I am hard-pressed to express a time in which your beauty has not attended. It is another cold, is it not? The bitter hoarfrost of a diachrony spent apart. I must admit, in that particular regard, I am since warmed. Distance equates an objective mind and I find myself quite removed from the folly of love. The absence of my correspondence speaks to such, does it not?

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Yesterday, liberated fowls crooned at midday, their biological clocks thrown into disarray, and the first few flakes of finality fell; St Paul’s Cathedral wears the dusky cap even now - even the righteous heads have since bowed to the imminent terminus and the winds they bring. The clouds curtail all, and yet, in Sol’s occlusion and in the throes of prolonged illness, I have never felt so illuminated. You, who are now advancing in years, are not the same acacia-cheeked Ida Greene I met that morn; the strokes of clock have since etched their passage and your eyes lack their original Mother Nature lustre. Winter has arrived in our commitments and its moonglow is unfavourable. Tell me you too have not harboured such thoughts?

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The rotations no longer bear weight or substance; before a day would come and go and I would lay awake in anguish and restlessness, now I walk freely without you haunting my thoughts. We walk in the airy shadows of valhalla and oblivion, you and I; and I know which most welcomes me. I wish no longer to imprison you and your emotive leanings, we are both cut from different cloth and I cannot prop up an infantile devotion any longer; it is high time to extend your perceptions beyond such frames.

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We are like those will-o’-the-wisp city fires, we sprout up and burn with such fierce adoration: we can only ever last but the night. To think I would have bestowed unto you my mother’s ring and the matrimonial words seldom in this age spoken so justly. It would have been on the anniversary of that day on the lake at the precipice of the dock with your feet, as was your favoured custom, bare and skimming the surface. The sky would have been blue and ever so slightly marred by clouds - immaculate serenity is facade and a fool’s entry into love. I would have pulled it free from an innermost pocket and serenaded with Shelley. Economic woe saved us from such a blight, atmospheric woe the chance to reunite. Is it abominable of me to say that a minute part of me longs for the morning sans the fluttering of eyelids and the obstructions of contemporary living where awaits me the welcoming of pearly plumule? Little I have lived and yet long does it feel. Oh, how I wish we had never met.

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It is so very cold here. Do you suppose it would be warmer at the workhouses? Could I trade what little status I cling onto for suitable warmth? It matters not; the acheron ague comes calling. It is a biting sensation, a staccato stabbing of lassitude coursing up from shin to groin. Many a night has it kept me aloft and awake. Rurality such as yours kept it dammed, the unscored air a boon to faltering vitality. The city has only served to sever all.

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I have not left this room nor this bed, and I cannot even reach the lobby to see what you last sent. If I told you I loved you, would you still harken to believe me I wonder. For I wish you to understand that I do so love you, that I have loved you and that I shall love you longer still; you are the only needful thing in these eyes. Yet, it is time for me to imprison you no longer. The glacial epoch comes knocking and it can claim but a few.

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I have been a fool; too many candles have I let ooze their omega and I am seen. Hurried footfalls, I hear; haggard breaths and the beating of sticks on bannisters, I discern. My windowpanes frost in the November chill, leftover sweet wrappers that crinkle and crack. The last step of the staircase creaks and the doors of neighbours are thrown wide, hinges left shrieking. I shall not be able to prevent their taking of the perishables, I shall not be in the position to do much at all - I must admit I have not moved since the day you visited, I could not, heart-stricken as I was, and my legs no longer heed the mind’s call. Cover your eyes and read this not: below the knee they are blackened see, and the toes immovable, unattached, unfeeling. Hypothermia and the catafalque are my only wedded maidens now.

Forget the callous words, they are but the ramblings of a man at his last as white-fingers curl about him who would yet see you happy still. Do you really think my heart could ever stop beating for you? Espy it in babbling brooks and the robin’s tweet, in the cat’s purr and the morning dew.

 

Keep your fires burning so that I may find you,

Your Elijah