A Crown of Shame, Volume I

A Crown of Shame, Volume I by Florence Marryat

Set on the fictional Caribbean island of San Diego during a season of fever, famine, and civil unrest, the story centers on Elizabeth Fellows, known as Liz, a selfless and capable woman of twenty-five who has spent her life assisting her father, Dr. Fellows, as a medical practitioner among the plantation's negro population. Motherless from birth, practical beyond her years, and possessed of a firm moral character, Liz is the quiet heart of the community, nursing the sick and tending to the suffering with unflinching devotion. Liz is secretly engaged to Henri de Courcelles, the handsome but morally unreliable French Creole overseer of the Beauregard plantation, owned by the wealthy Mr. Edward Courtney. Their engagement has never been publicly announced, and Henri's visits have grown infrequent. When Captain Hugh Norris, a merchant sailor who loves Liz honestly and openly, returns to San Diego and declares himself to her, she rebuffs him and defends Henri. Norris warns her that Henri is pursuing Maraquita Courtney, the planter's beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter. Liz rejects the accusation with indignation, and when Henri visits that same evening and swears by God that Maraquita means nothing to him, Liz chooses to believe him, silencing her own gathering doubts. The night deepens with further revelations. Dr. Fellows confesses to his daughter that the name they bear is not their own, and that he is a convicted forger who escaped transportation only through the mercy of Edward Courtney, his former schoolfellow and lifelong benefactor. The family has lived in dependency on Courtney's charity ever since. Shaken and humiliated, Liz nonetheless receives the confession with compassion and pledges that she owes Courtney her very life. Her father then extracts from her a solemn oath never to reveal anything she may see, hear, or suspect that night. She soon discovers why. Maraquita Courtney is found collapsed in the plantation, in apparent distress, and is brought to the bungalow. Dr. Fellows shuts Liz out and tends to Maraquita alone, then sends Liz on a midnight errand, five miles through the dark, to deliver a basket to an old negress herbalist named Mammy Lila on Shanty Hill. On the way, the basket moves, and Liz understands with horror that it contains a newborn infant. Maraquita's child has been delivered in secret. Liz leaves the baby with Mammy Lila and returns, bound by her oath to silence. In the days that follow, Maraquita is received home by her doting and largely oblivious parents, presented by the Doctor as having merely suffered a bout of fever. She shows no grief or guilt over the child. Her mother is already maneuvering her toward a brilliant marriage with Sir Russell Johnstone, the island's Governor. Maraquita secretly visits Henri by night and, though she still holds him to her through professed love, makes clear she has every intention of accepting the Governor's proposal if Henri can guarantee the child's removal from the island and permanent concealment. Mammy Lila dies suddenly of fever, and the infant is returned to Liz. Unable to part with it, she nurses it through the night with fierce tenderness, while in the darkness around her, Maraquita schemes and Henri plots. The following morning, the scheming yellow girl Rosa, whose own illegitimate baby recently died, discovers the infant in Liz's bed while fetching something for Henri. She tells Henri there is a baby in the bungalow and implies it is Liz's own. Henri, comprehending at once that this deception could shield Maraquita permanently, exploits the situation. He confronts Liz, demanding she name the child's mother, knowing full well she is bound by her oath to her father and cannot speak. When she refuses, he declares the engagement at an end, citing her silence as proof of guilt. Liz flies to wake her father to defend her name, and finds him dead in his bed. The illness that had been creeping over him has claimed him in the night. She weeps over his body, her oath now binding her more irrevocably than ever, for she holds the dead no less sacred than the living. Henri retreats, relieved that Maraquita's secret is safe and that the burden of it has been placed, through his own cowardice and moral failure, squarely upon the shoulders of the one woman who had loved him without reserve. Liz is left alone, her father dead, her lover gone, her good name blackened by plantation gossip, holding another woman's child and sealed in silence by a vow she will not break.

By Florence Marryat · First published 1876 · Genre: Victorian Novel, Drama, Social Commentary · 8 chapters · 39,155 words

First lines

It was the close of the hot season in San Diego, and the thunderous clouds that hung over the island rendered the atmosphere still more oppressive. Liz, the Doctor's daughter, stood at the open door of their leaf-thatched bungalow, gazing out into the starless night, and wondering when the rain would come, to relieve the intense heat and disseminate the sickness that was so rapidly thinning the population. The stillness was so unbroken that one might almost be said to feel it. Not a breath of air stirred the light feathery branches of the bamboo, not even the chirp of a solitary insect could be distinguished from their covert in the long grass, nor a note from the songsters that crowded the surrounding woods. The trailing creepers that hung like a gorgeous eastern canopy of crimson and purple and orange from the roof of the verandah, brushed their blossoms against her face, as she thrust it into the night, but they brought no sense of refreshment with them. Liz felt stifled for want of air, as she withdrew from the verandah, and re-entered the bungalow, with a deep-drawn sigh. But the sigh was for others. She was not a woman to make otherwise than lightly of her own pain or inconvenience. To witness suffering or distress, and be unable to relieve it, that was the great drawback of life to Elizabeth Fellows. She was not a girl, and the existence she led had tended to make her older than her age. She was five-and-twenty, and ever since she was a little child she had been motherless, and brought up to depend upon herself, and to minister to others rather than be ministered to.

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Victorian fiction · 19th-century literature · English novel · sensation novel · romance · domestic drama · social commentary · marriage · family secrets · scandal · class society · morality

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