Becoming Belle

by Nuala O'Connor

  “Lost his way, poor boy, lost his way, poor boy,

  He cried and made a fuss, lost his train and lost his bus,

  And lost his way, poor boy, lost his way, poor boy,

  He wept some more, made a fuss, lost his train and lost his case . . .”

  The entire theater erupted and Belle laughed as loudly as any of the pit boys who were now standing, tossing cheeky hand kisses to her. Once her sister had finished, Belle bowed once more and slipped from her box to go backstage so that she and Flo might travel to the Café Royal together.

  * * *

  —

  Throughout the day crowds had waited for them, and the Café Royal was no different. When the two sisters entered the foyer of the hotel, they were greeted by a throng. They shook hands with several people and Belle accepted their congratulations. She recognized a newsman from the Pall Mall Gazette. He stepped forward with the usual impertinence of his profession and, without even offering a greeting, began to question her.

  “What verdict did you anticipate, Lady Dunlo?”

  Belle turned and looked him straight in the face. “Why, the verdict that was given, naturally. I knew I was innocent of the awful charge that had been trumped up against me.”

  He scribbled down her answer and continued. “Do you intend to continue your theater engagements, Lady Dunlo?”

  “I’ve had no time to consider the matter, sir. I’m not really sure.” It would, of course, depend on William, and his relations with his family, but she was not about to divulge that to a newsman.

  “What is your opinion of the judge”—the man checked his notebook— “Sir James Hannen?”

  “Well, of course I find him a dear man.” The crowd who had jostled closer to hear what Belle was saying, laughed. “Oh, but I really mean that about him, I feel it keenly,” she said, looking around at their faces. “His lordship is a dear and fair man.”

  “And were you satisfied with the advocacy of your learned counsel, Lady Dunlo?”

  “Why, yes. I was delighted with Mr. Lockwood.” Belle smiled. “And Mr. Wertheimer’s man, Mr. Gill, well, he has been a brick, truly. They have done us proud.”

  “And your opinion of the counsel on the other side?”

  “Mr. Russell did his utmost, his dead level best, in a very bad case. I feel a little sorry for the man.” Belle slid her arm through Flo’s. “Now, you will excuse us, ladies and gentlemen. The court case has given us an appetite and we’re ready for our supper.”

  The crowd parted and further compliments were given:

  “Brava, ladies.”

  “Congratulations, Miss Bilton!”

  The sisters launched forward arm in arm toward the gilt and crimson of the café. Perhaps, Belle, thought, William will be within; her gut lurched. Since they had left the court she had hoped that every corner she turned might reveal him. He would come forward to stand before her and they would embrace. She would want to admonish him, but she would hug and forgive him—of course she would, if only he would show himself. Belle sighed and Flo gathered closer to her side. As they neared the café door, Wertheimer walked through it and stood before them; he offered a broad smile. A fresh carnation was pinned in his lapel.

  “Victorious red,” Flo murmured.

  “Isidor,” Belle said.

  “Belle.”

  He beamed and held out his hand, which she pumped gratefully. They stood and looked at each other, their hands still clasped.

  “Oh, lord,” said Flo, “are we going to stand out here for the night? My stomach is doing a tarantella; I will capsize if I don’t eat soon.”

  “Shall we?” Wertheimer said, offering an arm to each lady.

  “We most certainly shall,” Belle said.

  The two sisters flanked Wertheimer and the trio entered the precious, promising sanctum of the Café Royal.

  A RECONCILIATION

  When William arrived at Avenue Road, the day after the petition was dismissed, Belle’s first words to him were, “How can I trust you, William?”

  “Please find it in your heart to, Belle,” he said. “I beg you to have faith in me, my darling.”

  Rosina had let William in, for Jacob had disappeared after his day in court. Wertheimer waited for him to turn up and resume his duties as page boy, but Belle knew they had seen the last of Master Baltimore. Belle tried to reprimand Rosina with a glare when she announced William, but the girl refused to look at her.

  Belle agitated her skirts now and stood before her husband. “Have faith in you? But, William, you’re someone who does not do what you say you will do. I don’t like that kind of person. That kind of man.”

  It was strange to have him in Avenue Road, his tall frame filling the smoking room. His hair was wet from the rain and when he came closer, she could see that his coat was quite soaked, as if he had walked the two and a half miles from Burlington Street. All the way from Mayfair in a torrent, to speak to her. Well, well. Maybe she could forgive yesterday’s blasting silence. Forgive all of it. He moved even nearer and put both hands on her waist.

  “You must have confidence in me, my darling,” William said. “I’m much changed.”

  “If you are, William, why did you not come to me yesterday? Would that not have been the courtly thing to do? The proper action? A way to manifestly show these great changes that have come over you?”

  She pulled his hands from her waist and walked to the window. Belle surveyed the street; wind and rain were making a rackety day of it and, she found, it matched her turmoil.

  “My love,” William said, “please listen to me. It was all a frightful mistake: the petition, everything. I was much addled while abroad, my thoughts so very disordered. Remember I was ill. Godley Robinson wore me down, on my father’s instruction. I was utterly befuddled. I’m in no such state now. My mind is as clear as can be, as is my heart.”

  Pritchard flitted mightily in his cage—was he pleased or upset by William’s voice? Belle couldn’t decide.

  “Belle, won’t you try to understand? Won’t you accept that I am deeply sorry? You must hear me, Belle. I cannot apologize enough. For the case and everything about it.”

  “It’s hard for me to know what to think about it all. When you continue to act in odd ways, how am I to believe your remorse or discern changes in you?”

  “Mama said yesterday she sees nothing but difference in me this past year.” His look was mournful.

  “You saw your mother?”

  “Yes. She came to tell me that my father is determined to dispossess me of whatever he can. He has begun to sell off his assets in Ireland. Mama says he is selling Garbally’s furniture and paintings at Christie’s.”

  “I see. And does Lady Adeliza mean to help you?”

  “I believe so. She was much saddened by the trial, by my father’s actions.”

  Rosina brought tea though Belle had not requested it. They drank in silence and ate Little Cupids, Belle wondering if the girl had purposely served those particular cakes.

  “The weather is unsettled,” she said.

  “Yes, it has been changeable of late.”

  William’s look was mesmeric when she spoke, as if Belle were inventing language as it fell from her tongue. He asked after Flo, Seymour and Wertheimer, and Belle gave brief reports. But their eyes traveled over each other’s faces and bodies, and they sucked at every word the other said, thirsty for a trickle of feeling to match their own. Is he as churned up as I am? Belle wondered. She wanted nothing more than to drop at his feet and clasp her arms around his waist. Did he want that, too? He had come looking for forgiveness—did he want everything that might accompany that?

  “William, do you mean for us to go on?”

  “Go on?”

  “As husband and wife, William. Are we to be united now?”

  William pushed the tea table to one
side and fell to his knees on the rug. He took her hands and jostled them with his own.

  “Of course, Belle, of course. That’s why I’m here. I love you with every idiot inch of my head and my heart, with all of me. I want to be with you more than I want any other thing. I want to show you that I can do this right.”

  Belle whimpered and leaped into his lap. They kissed and it was the most natural thing, to feel William’s tongue hot and swollen in her mouth. Tears slipped from her eyes and mingled with their spit; they laughed and cried. Within minutes they were buried under the coverlets in Belle’s bedroom overlooking Norfolk Road, attempting to swallow each other whole, while they hatched plans for their combined future.

  SUMMER 1891

  London and Galway

  A DEATH

  Ten months after reuniting with Belle, having not seen his family at all, William was summoned by Lady Adeliza to his father’s bedside in London. Belle knew better than to ask to accompany him. That he failed to arrive before the earl expired troubled William greatly. He had traveled to Berkeley Square from Plymouth where Belle was performing.

  “His body was still warm,” he said to Belle, when he got back to her later that May evening, as if trying to fathom how that could be. He missed his father’s death rattle by mere moments. “I took his hand in mine and the heat had not yet left it. The skin was soft, his fingers pliable in my own fingers. My sister, Katherine, said I was lucky not to have witnessed the end; she said it was ‘not smooth.’ When I questioned her for more, she fell silent. Whatever her opinion, I should have liked to look Papa in the eye one last time.”

  Belle took him in her arms. “If you could allow yourself to weep, it might peel back some of the pain of the past months.”

  “I wish I could but no tears will come.” William sighed. “I wish I had made things equitable between Papa and me, I would like to have been able to do that. To assuage my guilt, I suppose.”

  “Now, now, my love,” Belle crooned. “What do you have to be guilty about? Your papa chose his own path with regard to you.”

  He lifted his head from her shoulder. “Mama reports that he does not want to be buried in Ireland, in the family vault at Saint John’s. I confessed my surprise. Now, why should he not want to be interred there, Belle? He loved Garbally, and Ballinasloe, as I love it.”

  She looked at William and wondered at his naïveté. “It may be because he was afraid I may end up in the tomb beside him, my love. Your papa did not want his earthly remains cheek by jowl for eternity with a peasant countess.”

  William sighed and pulled at the black tie Belle had knotted for him that morning.

  “I hope I did not hasten his death with my outburst in court. With everything afterward. My neglect.”

  “Your father was gravely ill, my love. He attended court against the will of his doctor, remember?”

  “Yes, you’re right.” He stayed his hands. “And I needed to say what I said that day. For my own sake.”

  “You did, my darling. He saw, then, that you had become a man.”

  William sighed. “I wonder if the men of our generation can ever call ourselves men? Papa and his ilk were a different breed to us; they grew up quicker. Their fathers were perhaps stricter and would not countenance bad behavior. Papa had to put up with mine.” William tugged at his tie, loosening it. “Mama said that he wished for an unostentatious burial. He shall have it in London, I suppose.”

  “He could surely have had that in Ballinasloe, too?”

  “Indeed.” William slipped the tie from his neck and worked his finger behind his collar. “Though perhaps not if he wanted a very quiet burial. My grandfather’s funeral there was rather a grand affair. His coffin stood on a catafalque in the picture gallery at Garbally; I was brought to pay my respects, but I was young and too loudly I asked Mama if Grandpapa meant to sleep all day. I was bustled outside to the procession beyond the portico. Two hundred children stood there waiting for the coffin. The boys wore armbands of crepe, the girls black rosettes; the tenants had bands and veils of black on their hats. They looked festive and I wanted very much to march with the boys, as I saw it. But I was stuffed into a carriage for the solemn trot to Saint John’s. The town felt eerie that day—no shop or business was open, the shutters were closed on the houses. It was as if my dead grandpapa had cast a sullen spell. I did not like it. As the carriage made its way up Church Hill, the tenants formed a cordon right and left. I waved to the gamekeeper, a man I liked because of his even temper; he was always patient with me. When Mama saw me wave, she slapped my hand and I entered Saint John’s with tears dripping down my cheeks. All the old ladies condoled with Mama and Papa, and cried even more at the sight of my wretched face.”

  Belle helped her husband out of his jacket. “Your papa loved you, William.”

  “Did he, Belle? We both know that he was disappointed with me. Always. We never fitted properly together, he and I.”

  “His pride was damaged, for sure, when you went behind his back to marry me, but he loved you well.”

  “You know it was said once that Papa had all of Grandpapa’s prejudice and none of his ability. I wonder, Belle, how can you be so kind about my father when he treated you so ill?”

  “He didn’t know me, William. It’s true he didn’t care to remedy that, but it’s easy to feel animosity toward a person who’s not real to you, whose eyes you never look into. If he’d taken the time to get to know me a little, perhaps he would have found things to like about me.”

  “Maybe your greatest fault was aligning yourself to me. It was me he disliked.”

  Belle took him in her arms. “Parents are odd creatures, William. They don’t always behave in rational or generous ways. Perhaps they even act selfishly in order to preserve themselves. But I do believe your papa was on your side. Despite everything.”

  A BEGINNING

  As they approached Dublin’s Broadstone railway station, William told Belle that the bridge their coach was crossing had been an aqueduct until recently.

  “It used to carry the Royal Canal,” he said.

  Belle nodded in appreciative interest, for she knew William was proud of Ireland and she wished him to know that she was willing to be great hearted about the place.

  “The railway station is a fine-looking place, to be sure,” she said.

  “Neo-Egyptian in style,” William said, as if he were architect and builder, both. “The Midland Great Western Railway Company is run by visionary men.”

  He sighed and took Belle’s gloved hand in his own and she could sense a settling down in him, a belonging to it all that had begun on the sea crossing on The Lady Martin. But, no, it had started before that, when Lady Adeliza informed William that he was not to be disinherited entirely. It was then that William had grown, before Belle’s gaze, into the man she knew he could be. On the crossing he grew larger, more Irish, more resolved. When they had approached Waterford, William’s itch to disembark ran through him like electricity. He dragged Belle to the ship’s rail—despite the fog that made the deck slippery—so that she should enjoy the first glimpse of his homeland as soon as he did.

  The steamy curtain meant, of course, that the land was obscured. The mist was not the brown, smoke-choked fog of London; rather it was a scarfy vapor that seemed to amplify the sound of The Lady Martin breaking through the water. Gulls keened like the bereaved, the nearer the ship got to the coast. The boat and birds together made some cacophony, but Belle saw that William reveled in it. Her stomach surged with the movement of The Lady Martin, but she didn’t let the sickness overwhelm her. When the yellow gleam of the Hook Lighthouse shone through the mist, accompanied by the long, lonely burr of the horn, William almost keeled over with excitement. To Belle, he was once again the boy who had been lost during the machinations of the trial and all that happened after it: their reunion, his ostracizing by his father. William giggled; he grinned; he j
igged with the anticipation of finding his feet once more on Irish soil. For herself, Belle was quietened by the sea and its over and back between the two islands, ferrying its freight of fish and men, reinventing itself with every sandy shift. To what new life did it carry her? She had left the stage once Lady Adeliza secured her and William’s future. It was a wrench, but Belle had known the day would come. And she would dance at parties and balls, and everyone loved to hear a song well sung, did they not?

  Now seated on the train in Dublin, waiting for it to lurch forward to Ballinasloe, Belle began to settle, too. William sat opposite her in their compartment, readying their accoutrements for travel: his Irish Times, Belle’s Women’s Penny Paper, and a bag of lemon drops to ease queasiness. He laid these things on the seat beside him and sat back, a man in charge of himself and his life.

  Belle ran her hands over her mourning silks; they made a pleasing rustle when she smoothed the skirts. In style it was a restrained gown, but the jet buttons and Limerick lace trim lifted it, Belle felt, from the ordinary to the rather grand. William had ordered the silk crepe de chine from a mill in Lyons. He had it fashioned into gowns by his mother’s favorite London seamstress and it pleased Belle that he went to such pains. She also wore a black enamel brooch with a gold repoussé border, containing who knew whose hair; it had been an early gift from Wertheimer when she had admired it in his Maidenhead home. Belle was glad to be the finest in attire; Lady Adeliza, she knew, had worn Parramatta silk and Lady Katherine, her sister-in-law, just bombazine. William himself looked august in black gloves and cravat, and a new suit from Henry Poole & Co.