Armadale Read Online Free Page A

(alias Ingleby) to forge a letter. The pretext is that he does not have Lydia’s ‘wicked dexterity’ with the pen – but the real reason must be that forgery in 1832 is a capital offence, and Armadale-Ingleby is no fool. Reading between the lines, we assume that he sexually seduced the young maid. How else explain the curses heaped on her by the paternal Allan Armadale, as he lies dying. She is a more than leprous thing: ‘I saw the girl afterwards – and my blood curdled at the sight of her. If she is alive now, woe to the people who trust her! No creature more innately deceitful and more innately pitiless ever walked this earth’ (p. 34–5). (This, remind ourselves, is a twelve-year-old girl who did nothing more than imitate one adult’s handwriting at the instigation of another adult.)
    After the bloody consequence of her forgery, Lydia is bundled off to France. She is pensioned on condition that she never return to England. ‘Unpleasantness’ follows wherever she goes. A respectably married music teacher attempts suicide and goes mad. The still under-age Lydia has, apparently, seduced and ruined him. To protect the male sex, the young she-devil is confined to a religious establishment. Extreme in all things, she decides to take the veil. Better for the male sex had Lydia Gwilt been mewed up, as in earlier days. The nineteenth-century convent cannot reform or hold her, and Lydia Gwilt – now a dangerous woman – is loosed on the world to do her mischief. Already she has had an eventful enough life to fill several novels (some of them unpublishable in nineteenth-century England).
    Lydia has only her red hair, her beauty, her musical talent and herunscrupulosity with which to make her way. Ever resourceful, she becomes a pianist in a ‘low concert room in Brussels’ where she is taken up by a Baroness who needs a beautiful young woman as bait for her card-sharping business. Five years pass. In Naples, Lydia entraps one of the Baroness’s dupes, a rich young Englishman, into marriage. She returns to his home on the Yorkshire moors as a respectable lady, Mrs Waldron. But, corrupt to the core, she takes a Cuban lover – the magnificently disreputable Captain Manuel. Her cuckolded husband beats her with a horse whip; in return she poisons him. At this stage still inexpert in the murderer’s skills she is apprehended, convicted, and – after furious (and sentimentally wrong-headed) protest from the papers – pardoned by the Home Secretary (for Collins’s allusions to current events here, see Book the Fourth, Chapter XV, note 6). Spared the rope, Lydia is none the less obliged to serve two years in prison for theft. On her release, she makes an irregular ‘Scotch marriage’ with Manuel. But since he is already married, as she later discovers, the union is void. She blackmails her old employer, Mrs Armadale
née
Blanchard, and is in turn robbed and abandoned by the faithless Manuel. At this low point in her life she attempts a very public suicide, and in so doing sets off the series of deaths (but not her own) that lead to blue-eyed Allan Armadale inheriting Thorpe-Ambrose. The stage is set for the events of May to December 1851 which make up the body of the narrative.
    However carefully we read
Armadale
, there remain tantalizing gaps in Lydia’s history. Who
were
her parents? Did Collins keep this in reserve, and never get round to filling in the missing information? When – veiled, and with her distinctive red Paisley shawl flying – she threw herself from the first-class deck of the Thames steamer did she know that Arthur Blanchard, heir to Thorpe-Ambrose, was on board the vessel? Was it an attempt to lure him into a marriage trap, as she had other men? Or was she genuinely bent on self-destruction? At many points in the novel Lydia is baffling to the reader. She is also baffling to herself. Why, she wonders (as the reader