A Mad, Wicked Folly

by Sharon Biggs Waller

  Sophie bobbed her head. “I’m ever so sorry, Miss Darling,” she whispered, and then dashed from the room.

  “This isn’t right!” I said, but my parents ignored me. “Freddy, please tell them.”

  But no one listened to me.

  “I cannot believe this.” Papa’s voice rose. “I cannot! How did I lose control over my entire household?”

  “Papa, please let me tell you,” I said, hoping that he’d listen, hoping that I could reach through his anger and convince him. “I’ve been accepted into the RCA. Let me tell you what I plan to do—”

  He rapped his fist against the mantelpiece. He shook the sketchbook at me. “This is over, do you hear me? You will forget these silly notions of yours!” And then, before I could blink, he cast my book into the fire.

  “No!” I fell to my knees at the hearth and reached into the fireplace.

  “Vicky, stop!” Freddy dropped beside me, grabbed my shoulders.

  I reached in to drag the sketchbook out, my fingers blistering as the flames licked round them. But I was too late. The book caught fire, and I could only watch as the flames engulfed the pages and the undraped drawing of Will turned to cinders. Rage began to bubble up inside of me then. It was like a spring that had lain quiet for a very long time, just waiting for the right pressure to give way and turn into a geyser. I stood up.

  “You don’t care about me, do you, Papa? You don’t know anything about me, who I am, or what I love!” I shouted at him. “I’m nothing to you. You only care about your business! You have never been a father to me and you’re never going to be!”

  My father covered the short distance to me in two long steps. He raised his hand and slapped me across the face so hard that my head snapped to one side.

  “George!” Mamma cried out.

  I pressed my hand to my cheek. My father had never raised a hand to me in the whole of my life. I didn’t know what was worse, the pain or the humiliation.

  Papa stared at his hand, stricken, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he had done. Then he turned on his heel and left the room. A moment later I heard the front door slam.

  Freddy came to me and pulled my hand away. I saw my reflection in the mirror over the fireplace, and there was a red hand-shaped mark on my face. I saw my mother in the mirror, too, her eyes wide with disbelief.

  Freddy began to pace the room, shoving his hands through his hair so many times that it stood up in a tangle. “What a terrible, terrible mess this is. My God,” he kept muttering over and over.

  I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t make any words come out.

  “What shall we do, Frederick?” Mamma asked, once again turning to a man for help. My mother couldn’t rely on herself, even in a crisis. In that moment, I think I hated Mamma for her weakness.

  Freddy stopped pacing. “She’ll come to my house. Let things settle for a bit.” Freddy pulled the bell sash. Emma came in, looking scared. “Can you please pack a valise for Miss Darling? Go with her, Vicky.”

  The pain in my heart was astonishing in its intensity. Just drawing breath took effort. My legs felt leaden, but somehow they carried me out of the room. I did not weep. The tears could not come. I wanted only to crawl into bed and sleep. And when we reached Freddy’s house, that was exactly what I did.

  Thirty-Seven

  Pimlico, Frederick Darling’s home,

  Sunday, fifteenth of August

  FOR THE FIRST time in my life I had no interest in art. I had no desire to draw; nothing inspired me; everything seemed wrong. I felt wrong. I didn’t know where I belonged anymore. Or who I was.

  When I was a little girl, I would draw and paint and dream. I would play all day in our garden and pretend I was a famous artist and my toy bears and dolls would come flocking to my studio to sit for their portraits. That creative spark had lived inside me all the time. But that spark blew out when Papa slapped me. I wasn’t sure I could rekindle it. I felt ridiculous, as though everything I had ever tried to do was laughable. Mamma was right. Who did I think I was?

  One day slipped into the next. Tension at Freddy’s house hung in the air like coal smoke. I knew Rose did not want me there. Whenever I came into a room, she found a reason to leave it. Freddy was kind to me, but I could see uncertainty in his eyes. Charlotte, with her sweet childish ways, was over the moon that I was staying in the house, and many a morning I woke to find her in my room, escaped from the nursery. One morning, for good measure, she had pushed baby George’s bassinet down the hall and parked him next to my bed. I took comfort in their presence.

  That night after Freddy brought me home to Pimlico, I’d begged him to intervene for Sophie, to write a letter for her himself if he had to. Without a character reference, Sophie would be unable to find a job even as a charwoman. The thought of her ruined because of me made me cry so hard I thought I’d never stop. Freddy promised he would help. I loved my brother dearly, but that night my love for him deepened. I didn’t know what I would have done without him.

  Freddy went straight back to Mayfair and waited with Mamma for Papa to return. Freddy told me later that Papa was full of remorse and dismayed that I had left before he could speak to me. He had locked himself in his study and refused to come out. At least Mamma had acquiesced to Freddy’s pleas and had given Sophie a character reference. Freddy saw Sophie before he came home. She told him that she’d stay with a WSPU friend until she’d found a new position.

  I knew I needed to go to the RCA and resign my acceptance but I found I couldn’t. I suppose I held on to some hope that Papa, in his remorse, would change his mind. He would yield, appear at Freddy’s house apologizing, and hand me a pot of money.

  But I was childish and fanciful in my hope, because I should have known that Papa could never forgive me. Despite his remorse for slapping me, in his eyes I had humiliated him, created a scandal that had far-reaching consequences. Sir Henry had wasted no time telling his side of the story at the Reform Club, and Freddy told me that Papa, ashamed, could no longer bring himself to attend. So I was not surprised when Papa didn’t come to see me. But I was surprised that Mamma didn’t either.

  A week later, I went to join Freddy and Rose in the sitting room. As I reached the door, I heard Rose say my name. I hung back in the shadows outside the door.

  “Why did you try to speak for Victoria, Frederick?” she was saying, irritation in her voice. “Whatever were you thinking? You should have known your father would react the way he did.” I could picture Rose’s face as she said this, eyes bright with righteousness. She always hated it when Freddy leapt to my defense.

  “Sweetheart, I had no idea she had been carrying on as she had,” Freddy replied. “All she told me was that she wanted to go to art college. Drawing that bloke was bad enough, but she was alone with him while he was unclothed!”

  “What a disgusting man!” Rose said. “To sit there naked and let a girl look at him? It’s not to be borne.”

  “It’s a jolly good thing Father doesn’t know his name, or he’d see to his ruin,” Freddy said.

  “She’s come out now, so she’s responsible for her own actions. Nothing your parents can do will save her.” Rose pointed this last bit out helpfully. “Not a wicked girl like that.”

  “She’s ruined. I know she is,” Freddy said sharply. “You don’t have to spell it.”

  Rose sighed. “What is she going to do with herself? She can’t stay here, Frederick. I won’t allow a black mark on our name to match the one she’s painted on your father’s. There is talk in my circle already. I went to June Arbuthnot’s today to play bridge, and all discussion in the room stopped when I came in. I was so embarrassed I came straight home.”

  “London is no place for her now.” I heard the shuffle of the fireguard and the sound of coals falling as Freddy poked the fire. “I don’t see her ever finding a husband. I fear this will follow her until the day she di
es.”

  Rose spoke, driving the knife in further. “Without a marriage, she’ll never have a life of her own. She’ll be as a child. A spinster’s life is a dreadful one.”

  There was a long moment of silence, and I thought about going in and pretending I hadn’t heard, but then Freddy spoke again.

  “She has to be sent away,” he said. “It’s what’s done in these circumstances. Father wants her gone permanently, but I’ve convinced him to keep her away for a year and then see where things lie. That will give a chance for the gossip to die down. And maybe she can come back and start anew. It grieves me to say it, but I think Great-Aunt Maude’s is the only place for her. At least she’ll be safe in Norfolk, and away from anything that will turn her head again.”

  Sent away. Like some unloved orphan in a Dickens novel. I was a problem that must be dealt with and then forgotten about. Would Papa ever think of me again? Would Mamma? Or would they excise every memory of me from the house and their minds?

  I wished with all my heart that Will were there beside me. I could see his eyes, kind, as he heard the conversation unfolding behind the door. I could feel his arm, heavy and warm around my shoulders, as he held me to him to comfort me.

  But then I remembered the hardness on his face as he backed away from me that day at the RCA.

  I had never felt so unloved and unwanted in my life. I swallowed and swallowed; I thought I’d choke on the tears that threatened to overcome me.

  “When will she go?” Rose sounded relieved. Of course she did.

  “I’m to take her home tomorrow night, and she’ll be in Norfolk by the weekend.”

  I pulled my shawl around my shoulders and leaned against the wall. All I could do was breathe in and out, in and out. This wasn’t happening to me, surely. This was someone else’s life. But then Freddy said something that saved me, that brought me out of the deep well of pain I had been lost in for the past seven days.

  “It’s extraordinary what she’s done, really,” he said. “She was accepted into the Royal College of Art! How did she do that? She had no money, no time on her own, no art supplies, nothing, yet she did it. When I bolted, I had money, your support, friends, and resources. She had, what? A lady’s maid to help her?”

  “She’s always been a tenacious girl,” Rose said.

  “But the thing is, such tenacity would be admired in a man. Father came round to my choice because he saw how determined I was, and that reminded him of his own start. Vicky tried the same thing, and everyone saw it as bad behavior.”

  “The world doesn’t work the same way for women.”

  “Well, maybe it ought to. I used to think it shouldn’t, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “It’s no good to wish the world were different, Frederick,” Rose said. “The truth is, there’s no place in the world for a girl like that.”

  I backed away from the door as quietly as I could and went back upstairs. I sat on my bed, closed my eyes. My hands were trembling and I gripped the edge of the mattress to calm them.

  I waited. I waited for the usual whispers to tell me I was preposterous. But they didn’t come. Instead, I heard new ones. There were Freddy’s: It’s extraordinary what she’s done. Such tenacity would be admired in a man. Rose’s: The world doesn’t work the same way for women. Lucy’s: How can you have what you want when you’re denied the same rights as male citizens? And then Will’s: When are you going to realize how talented you are? Most of all, I found the whisper of preposterous had been replaced with tenacious. And then I felt myself coming back, fighting through the sadness and pain and humiliation. That girl in Bertram’s picture was sparking to life.

  In the morning I woke up to find Charlotte lying next to me, escaped from the nursery once more. Her dark lashes lay against her cheeks; one hand was thrown up over her head.

  What would life be like for Charlotte when she was my age? Would tenacity be admired in a woman then as it was in a man? I imagined her at age eighteen, going out into the world with courage, living her life as she pleased.

  But how could she do so if there was no one to show her how? Charlotte needed someone to show her all the possibilities of life, someone who knew what bravery was.

  I may have had only one option in my father’s world, but there were plenty of options left in another.

  After breakfast, I wrote Freddy a note telling him I was going back home, gathered up my things, and slipped out of the house.

  I took the Underground to Dover Street Station and wandered about in Green Park until midmorning, when Papa would be at his place of business, and Mamma at her charity.

  The house was quiet when I came in. No one was about. I went upstairs to my bedroom to find that everything had been packed away in trunks, most likely waiting to be shipped to Aunt Maude’s.

  I searched through the trunks until I found the one that held my grandmother’s jewelry box. I could sell the jewelry, and that would keep me going for a bit. I had no reason to care now if Mamma noticed it missing. I unpacked one of the trunks to repack it with my tailor-mades and shirtwaists and a few hats. As I lifted out a stack of silk chemises on the bottom, I saw the leather cover of my sketchbook, the one I’d had in France. Packed neatly next to it were my Reeves & Sons charcoal set in its beech-wood box, the silver dip pen, the bottles of ink, the tin of conté crayons in portrait colors, the Derwent pencils, and the glass-paper sanding block. Everything my parents had taken from me, months ago.

  I took out the sketch pad and flicked through the pages, expecting to find the drawings torn out, but they were all there: the sketches of Lily, the one of a nude Bertram standing contrapposto, the one of the Black Maria with Will’s profile in the corner, marked by a scribble of pencil when Lucy had pushed me away. All the silly scraps of paper were in it too—the leaflets and notices and bits of paper that I had hoarded. And then I discovered, behind all this bumf, the drawing Mamma had done of me as a little girl. But it was no longer half drawn. Mamma had completed it.

  I understood now why my mother had turned her back on her own talents. It was scary enough in my world; it was utterly impossible in hers. But her packing my sketchbook and giving me her finished drawing meant as much to me as being accepted to the RCA.

  I tore a page out of my sketchbook and sat down to write.

  Dear Mamma,

  I’m not going to Norfolk to stay with Aunt Maude. I’m going to stay with a friend. I have to find my own way in the world. Don’t worry about me. I will be in touch soon.

  Thank you for packing my art things. I see that you finished the sketch of me. I will cherish it.

  Your loving daughter,

  Vicky

  I left the page on my dressing table and finished packing.

  I dragged my trunk down the staircase, thumping on each step. Mrs. Fitzhughes and Emma stood at the bottom of the stairs, watching me openmouthed.

  “Miss Darling?” Mrs. Fitzhughes said. “May I ask—”

  “Actually, if you can ask John to fetch a cab for me, I’d be most obliged,” I said, as the trunk dropped off the last step. I stood up and blew the hair out of my eyes. “If he could do that, I’ll be on my way.”

  Mrs. Fitzhughes blinked and blinked. “I . . .”

  “I’ll sort that for you, Miss Darling,” Emma said, and then hurried off. I thought I heard her giggle as she rounded the corner.

  “I’ll be off then, Mrs. Fitzhughes.” I dragged the trunk through the hall and outside.

  “Where are you going? What shall I tell your parents?”

  “Tell them . . .” I hesitated. “Tell them not to worry.”

  I directed the cab driver to the RCA in Kensington, and asked him to wait. I went inside, pausing in the anteroom to look at the art. Someday, someday I’ll be up there, I vowed.

  I went down the hall toward the clerk’s office, but on the way I saw Mr. Earnshaw, the
man who had given me advice on applying back in March, coming down the corridor. His face creased into a smile when he saw me.

  “Miss Darling!” he said. “It is so good to see you. My heartfelt congratulations to you. I heard you were accepted.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Earnshaw. But unfortunately I must resign my place.”

  Mr. Earnshaw looked taken aback. “I’m sorry to hear that, Miss Darling. I saw your work and I was most impressed. Most impressed. True, you have a lack of technique, but that can be learned. The panel agreed there is a strong sense of emotion in all of your subjects, in particular the figure study of the young man posing as David. That is very rare in a young artist and almost impossible to teach, because one must see the emotion in one’s subject and know how to portray it almost intuitively.”

  This was all astonishing for me to hear. It heartened me greatly but saddened me, too. Will would have been the first person to celebrate that with me. But I couldn’t tell him, not after what happened the last time I saw him.

  “May I ask why you’ve had such a sudden change of heart?”

  “It’s not my heart that has changed. It’s my circumstances. I can no longer afford the tuition. But I wish to try again next year, if I may. Now, please tell me what I can do to gain a scholarship. I’m sure I lost it because of my poor showing on the arithmetic section.”

  Mr. Earnshaw smiled. “No, not at all. The women who won the scholarships were no better on that part of the test than you were. But they are all more established in the art world. One has won a prize in an art show, and she’s had some work published. If you come back a mature artist with something like that in your portfolio next year, you’ll have an excellent chance.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I do. And whatever happens, I hope you will never stop creating art, Miss Darling, for you have immense talent.” He reached out his hand and I shook it.

  “I won’t, sir. I promise you that.”

  IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON by the time I arrived at Lucy’s flat in Clement’s Inn. I knocked on the door, and after a moment the door opened and Lucy stood there.