The household became eerily quiet, like ‘a house in which somebody is still waiting burial’. His parents went into a state of hushed emergency, Margaret pathetically suggesting that her son join the minister’s youth classes, Thomas locked in his study, reading up Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion in order to rejoin the fray. ‘What am I to do?’ Stevenson wrote despairingly to his friend. ‘If all that I hold true and most desire to spread, is to be such death and worse than death, in the eyes of my father and mother, what the devil am I to do?’32
The fallout from Louis’s confession continued for months, his father’s anger and his mother’s distress erupting uncontrollably all through the spring and summer of 1873. Margaret wept at church, Thomas was full of dark threats and despairing glances, and condemned his son’s attempts at cheerfulness as ‘heartless levity’.33 When Bob went off to Antwerp to study art in the spring, Louis felt his misery at home even more sharply, and by the summer was almost prostrated by illness. This was one area where the youth could still count on a sympathetic response from his parents. They agreed that he should have a holiday, somewhere quiet in the countryside, with friendly, trustworthy people. Their choice was Cockfield Rectory in Suffolk, the home of Margaret’s niece Maud and her husband, Professor Churchill Babington.
Frances Sitwell was lying on a sofa near a window at her friend Maud Babington’s home when she saw a young man approach up the drive. He was wearing a straw hat and velvet jacket, carried a knapsack and looked hot, having just walked from Bury St Edmunds, a good eight miles away. ‘Here is your cousin,’ she remarked to Maud, who went out through the french window to meet him. The young man – very boyish, and with a strong Scottish accent – seemed shy to begin with, and jumped at the chance to go and visit the moat in the company of Mrs Sitwell’s ten-year-old son, Bertie. But by the end of the day, when he and she began to talk seriously to each other, ‘an instantaneous understanding’ sprang up between them,34 and strong mutual attraction. ‘Laughter, and tears, too, followed hard upon each other till late into the night,’ Mrs Sitwell wrote, ‘and his talk was like nothing I had ever heard before, though I knew some of our best talkers and writers.’35
Frances Sitwell was thirty-four when she met Stevenson, and had been married since the age of twenty to the Reverend Albert Sitwell, sometime private secretary to the Bishop of London and vicar of Minster, in Kent, since 1869. They had met in Ireland, where both grew up, and spent the earliest part of their marriage in India; Frances had also lived in Australia. The marriage was not a success, at least not from Mrs Sitwell’s point of view. No one seems to have had a good word to say for her husband, ‘a man of unfortunate temperament and uncongenial habits’, according to E.V. Lucas.36 The euphemism hints at cruelty and vice (was Sitwell an adulterer? a drinker?), but all we can be sure of is that by the time the couple moved to Minster with their two little boys, Frederick and Bertie, Frances was finding it necessary to spend long periods of time away from home visiting friends, of whom Maud Babington was the closest. Like Louis, she was an exile at Cockfield from an intolerable home life.
When Stevenson met her in the summer of 1873, Mrs Sitwell was mourning the death of her elder son only three months before, aged twelve. The tragedy seems to have catalysed her thoughts about a permanent separation from her husband, though she knew it would be difficult to effect one without Sitwell’s agreement. She and her surviving son were tied to ‘the Vicar’ indefinitely unless she could become financially independent, which meant finding a job, a very daunting prospect for a woman of her social standing at the time.
One thing she didn’t consider, and which speaks volumes about her character, was to throw herself into the arms of one or other of her many admirers. They were, on the whole, adorers rather than suitors, in whom she inspired devotion that verged on idolisation. ‘Divining intuition like hers was genius. Vitality like hers was genius,’ one of them wrote; another, ‘she was the soul of honour, discretion and sympathy’, ‘waiting for her smile is the most delightful of anticipations, and when it comes it is always dearer than you remembered, and irradiates all who are in her company with happiness’.37 Over the years she nurtured a string of needy young men, including Stevenson, Sidney Colvin, Cotter Morrison, Stephen Phillips and latterly Joseph Conrad, all of whom left ardent tributes to her virtues: a ‘good angel’, ‘a priceless counsellor’; a ‘deity’.38 But above and beyond the superlatives, a genuinely extraordinary character emerges: not a wit, a beauty or a coquette, but a woman of quiet, tender and very ardent feelings, who retained a childlike capacity for simple pleasures and the subtlest appreciation of sophisticated ones. Colvin remembers her clapping her hands for joy and ‘leaping in her chair’ at the anticipation of a gift or treat, and described her sympathy thus: ‘She cools and soothes your secret smart before ever you can name it; she divines and shares your hidden joy, or shames your fretfulness with loving laughter; she unravels the perplexities of your conscience, and finds out something better in you than you knew of; she fills you not only with generous resolutions but with power to persist in what you have resolved.’39 It was this paragon with whom Stevenson spent the month of August 1873. Sibylline, sensitive, brave, tender, distressed, bereaved, abused: he would have fallen in love with a tenth of her.
Mrs Sitwell, as we have seen, was delighted by the young Scot and within three days of his arrival at Cockfield had written to her friend Sidney Colvin to urge him to hurry if he wanted to meet ‘a brilliant and to my mind unmistakable young genius’40 who had ‘captivated the whole household’41 at Cockfield. Colvin had been a friend of hers (how good a friend I will discuss presently) since the late 1860s. They probably met through the Babingtons: Churchill Babington was made Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge during Colvin’s time there as an undergraduate. Mrs Sitwell intuited that Colvin and Stevenson would find each other interesting, but she also realised that Colvin, with his influential London literary connections, could be of use to her excitable new friend, who made no bones about the fact that the law was a bore and that he lived only for writing.
Sidney Colvin was only five years Stevenson’s senior, but had the air of a much older, more sedate person. Tall and thin, with papery dry skin, a rather ponderous manner and a speech impediment, he did not seem readily appealing. On graduating from Cambridge in 1867 he began a career as an art critic and literary commentator, writing for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Globe and the Fortnightly Review, three of the most prestigious periodicals of the day. In 1871 he became the Portfolio’s main art critic and had already published a short book; he was a member of the Savile Club (as was Fleeming Jenkin) and a friend of Burne-Jones and Rossetti (whose work he promoted avidly), and when Stevenson met him in 1873 he had just been appointed Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge. A young man so well-placed in the world might well have adopted a superior air with Maud Babington’s scruffy student cousin, but Colvin’s manner was always respectful, courteous and hesitant – he was a very English Englishman, and though not charming himself, highly appreciative of charm. It is hard to say who was more pleased when the train pulled in at Cockfield on 6 August, the ‘young genius’ from Edinburgh, excited to be meeting the sage of the Fortnightly Review, or Colvin himself:
If you want to realise the kind of effect [Stevenson] made, at least in the early years when I knew him best, imagine this attenuated but extraordinarily vivid and vital presence, with something about it that at first sight struck you as freakish, rare, fantastic, a touch of the elfin and unearthly, an Ariel. [ … ] he comprised within himself, and would