The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  Neal was present at the hearing and was, of course, relieved that not too much had come out in open court. But the prisoner, of whom he had an opinion quite as low as Georgina’s, seemed to him a tricky cove, and when it came to trial, Menier would undoubtedly repeat his accusation of child murder, already heard by half a dozen people. As for Mrs. Weldon herself, he could not see how even the Treasury Solicitor could save her from an absolute passion to say more than the law required. Of Menier’s potential testimony she wrote:

  He forgets I kill little children, that Freddie’s death had preoccupied me; that I was a lunatic; that I was a forger; that I was looking to poison him; that I had him arrested from jealousy of Olive Nicholls and because he would not sleep with me; that I appeared stark naked in front of strangers; that I scandalised Paris; that the police chief made me leave; that I had a nervous breakdown if he slept with his wife; that I was demented, a maniac, and riddled with debts.

  If she spoke even half these whirling words aloud, Neal was right to be alarmed. The Treasury Solicitor was not an individual, but a government department. Whoever was briefed to appear for Mrs. Weldon would need a clear head and a certain degree of brutality if he was to hold her in check and keep back the most damaging of her self-incriminations. Chief of these was the fate of the orphan Freddie. The truth was that Freddie (the orphan whom Rosie Strube’s letter, quoted earlier, mentions as having “a very bad stomachach”) had died in Tavistock House at some time since 1875, after Harry left. No death certificate was ever issued, and although Georgina never fully confessed to burying him in the garden, that was almost certainly where he lay. He could have died of any of half a dozen causes, of which the least likely was brutal murder, and his burial under the mulberry tree could be put down to panic and ineptitude.

  Neal never asked her what had happened. His main purpose was trying to contain the story so that it did not come out in court. In this, coming from someone acting for the other party in possible divorce proceedings, he shows a rare compassion. Georgina describes him as “simple-minded,” but he seems to have been a kindly and intelligent man. Something really terrible had happened out in the garden one night, enough to have Georgina committed, if not for lunacy, then for a full criminal trial. If Neal chose to hunt down what happened to Freddie, finding witnesses and corroborating statements, Harry could certainly secure the divorce he wanted, but his wife might find herself behind bars. Georgina owed Harry’s solicitor more than she ever realized.

  All the same, Neal knew more than he was letting on. The vacillating Louisa Treherne had been brought to the moment of decision. She and her son Dal had at last expressed their complete agreement with Harry’s plan to bring in the doctors. To these three, it was more than ordinarily vexing that in only twelve or fourteen hours since her return, Georgina had succeeded in dragging the whole sorry mess out into the open. Harry understood his solicitor’s advice only too well: let this grubby Frenchman take what he wanted, so long as he cleared off, went back to France, and kept his mouth shut. The stupid man had not even done this properly: some of the goods stolen—jewels, watches, a christening mug—were Georgina’s private property and not for Harry to dispose of as he wished. In short, she was free to bring an action against Menier in her own name. Meanwhile, in his remand cell the prisoner had called for pen and paper and was preparing a lengthy rebuttal of the charges. He alerted his brother Eugène, who set off from Paris to help him, pausing only to heap abuse on Angele.

  In Argeuil, Marie and Victoria had packed up shop, and finding the plans to move the children to Gisors to be so much hot air (though Georgina had painted a glorious word picture of them traveling through the Fôret de Lyons like medieval troubadours), sent them by train to Paris. Angele was horrified.

  2

  What Georgina should have done was to find Harry and ask him what he thought he was doing. Her silence was the expression of a catastrophic pride. In the next few days there would be events so grave as to change the rest of her life. Through choice and circumstance, she faced them alone. She realized one thing clearly enough: there was no one she could trust. In a drawer of the desk on which Gounod had composed—in so sacred a place as that—she found three letters from Eugène Menier, written from Paris the previous December, plotting with his brother to do her harm. (Was he the mystery man who had accosted Angele in the street, and had they together concocted the story she had told Georgina?) Whether she ever really understood that all the people she had met since moving to France were fleecing her is hard to determine, even from reflections written thirty years after the fact. In the short term, an old habit kicked in. Attended by a sympathetic Bell, she toured the house and made a detailed inventory of what had been stolen. She made no attempt to contact Harry or anyone else.

  What had always been lacking in Georgina was any sense of her own history. The past did not linger for her. Whatever happened that was awful was at once erased and replaced by what was going to happen—better still, what she would like to have happen. It is the gambler’s mentality. Her brother Dal dissipated his entire inheritance in this way—and before him, the youthful Harry had done the same. Men did that: they ruined themselves on the turn of a wheel or the fall of cards. They gave up their wives and their children for sex, for the promise of something just beyond their reach, the dream of riches or the ideal woman. It was true her father had been different, plotting and planning, risking nothing. For Georgina to have run away with a penniless Hussar was offense enough with him. Had he lived to see her in bed with Angele at Argeuil, stroking a head from which lice fell, and spending days and even weeks unwashed, wiping up the children’s shit from the floors, his reaction would have gone beyond disgust, but he would have seen it as the inescapable outcome of her original defiance. For him, Georgina had fallen once and once only. She had disobeyed him.

  This was also Louisa’s view. It was true she and Harry and Dal wanted Georgina committed because they were afraid of what might be disclosed. It makes no difference that many of their worst nightmares had already been realized. If Georgina was heading for an asylum, she had only herself to blame. She had been a bad daughter and a worse wife. She could not be saved now. She could only be silenced. Neither Harry nor Louisa made the slightest attempt to talk to her face-to-face, nor did they ask for a full account of what had been going on with the orphans and how the Meniers became involved. The hunter does not ask the rabbit in his sights what he feels about it.

  Nor did it matter that Georgina herself made no effort to justify her actions. It was a very foolish thing not to have seen her husband at all for two years, and though she harangued her mother in hugely long letters about Harry’s awfulness, imagined and actual, Louisa’s advice was always the same. “In my opinion, you have only one path to follow though it may seem very disagreeable to you,” she wrote to her daughter. “The law obliges you to live with your husband and no matter what his wishes might be in regard to your orphanage, it’s your duty to comply.” Louisa had touched the heart of the matter as it was seen by the age. Georgina was to be excluded from the Victorian woman’s paradise of calm and measure and a quiet life not because she was special or exceptional. It was simpler than that. She had failed to show obedience to the wishes of a man.

  Angele aside, she had no friends and confidants. There was no one to argue with her or plead with her. She lived without the healing properties of contradiction, upon which most relationships are founded. She most certainly did not consider herself mad, or likely to go mad, and there is something heroic in the way she sat and occupied the ruination of Tavistock House, pleased only that Menier was behind bars and looking forward to making her second appearance in court. Valerie de Lotz had vanished, and Mrs. Georgina Weldon was back in the saddle.

  3

  One of the things that puzzled Victorians was that the greater the number of public asylums, the greater the number of lunatics. It was almost a commonplace that when a new asylum was built, on however grand a scale, it was within a y
ear or two insufficient for the needs of the community it served. It only gradually dawned on the general public that empires were being built by the medical officers in charge of asylums and that maybe many of those locked up had no real need to be there. Today this would seem to us to be obvious. But in the nineteenth century there was very little analysis of the categories of mental illness and no neurological basis by which it could be described. Disturbed patients were seldom treated by general practitioners in any methodical way, and individual psychiatry was practically unknown. Meanwhile, in any large community in Britain, up on the windswept hill somewhere out of town could be found that cross between a prison and a workhouse, the general asylum. It was true that the great and inglorious days of asylumdom were coming to an end and that the workings of the lunacy laws had yet again been widely investigated by a recent parliamentary select committee.

  The picture was a bleak one. Paupers, alcoholics, pedophiles, patricides like Richard Dadd, baby stealers, blasphemers, shoplifters, religious maniacs were all lumped together under one category. They were mentally deranged, but much more to the point, they had disturbed the moral order. Henry Maudsley, the most famous alienist of the day, whose sardonic and pugnacious critique of the system had already thrown the mad doctors into confusion, was at least sure about that: “The so called moral laws are laws of nature which [men] cannot break, any more than they can break physical laws, without avenging consequences . . . As surely as the raindrop is formed and falls in obedience to physical law, so surely do causality and law reign in the production of morality and immorality on earth.”

  According to Maudsley’s brutally materialist analysis of mental illness, Georgina was mad because her father was mad. In cases where inherited traits could not be established, there was a simple rule of thumb that all alienists applied: if the patient was likely to be a danger to himself or others, an asylum was indicated. Just as “in the body morbid elements cannot minister to healthy action, but, if not got rid of, give rise to disorder, or even death; so in the social fabric morbid varieties are themselves on the way of death, and if not sequestrated in the social system, or extruded from it, inevitably engender disorder incompatible with its stability.”

  The very term “alienist” for what would nowadays be called a psychiatrist reinforced this idea that mental illness was foreign to the common experience and had to be dealt with by methods other than those of general medicine. Maudsley was a savage critic of the system but believed as fervently as the most reactionary asylum keeper (but possibly with less Christian compassion) that lunatics were by definition inferior beings—“a new or abnormal kind which being incapable of rising in the scale of being, tends naturally to sink lower and lower.” This from the lecturer on insanity at St. Mary’s Hospital and Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at University College, London.

  The mad doctors called for Mrs. Georgina Weldon on Sunday, April 14, the day after Menier was remanded for a second time. The house was in a turmoil of spring cleaning, Georgina atop a library ladder wielding a feather duster, her servants at more basic tasks, when two gentlemen called Shell and Stewart sent in their names. She scolded Villiers, who had surely meant Messrs. Duff and Stewart, small-time music publishers of her acquaintance. (They had quite characteristically gone bankrupt, and she supposed it was this they had come to discuss.) Before she could completely descend her ladder and get out of her apron she was astonished to see ushered in two complete strangers.

  “Mrs. Weldon, you do not know us but we know you very well, we have often seen you. We are spiritualists. We have read your letters on The Education of Children in the Spiritualist newspaper and we are very desirous of placing some children with you.”

  She came down; tea was offered and accepted. While they talked, she took note of their appearance. Though they spoke like gentlemen, they were miserably unappealing specimens. One was an old man—“the very ideal of the lean and slippered Pantaloon.” His companion was about thirty, “all blinks, winks, and grins, and looked like a washed Christy Minstrel.” The discussion, which had begun with spiritualism, ranged over topics close to her heart, and she was soon prompted to disclose some of her own mystical experiences. As professed spiritualists, they asked a great many elementary questions, mostly to do with mediumistic powers. For example, how far did she believe in the physical manifestation of the departed spirit? Her answers were uncontroversial. She had never attended a séance in order to see the table fly to the ceiling or a ghostly face appear from behind the curtain. What she sought from spiritualism was a better opinion of herself. As to whether she thought her dear dog Dan Tucker had a soul, which was one of the questions these two then asked, the answer was self-evident. Such a loyal and faithful friend deserved an afterlife, as much as and more than many people. Was he in heaven, then? She supposed so. As to the rest, yes, she had received visions and heard voices—who hadn’t? Why, only a month or so ago she had been talking to Victor Hugo about these very things! Her visitors must surely concur that from the Other Side came insights and wisdom wholly beyond the grasp of mortal beings, as well as providing glimpses of a higher moral order. She really could not spare the time to discuss these things, though she commended to her visitors the interest in psychic phemonena shown by many distinguished men of their generation, including some doctors. But, they persisted, wasn’t much of spiritualism a fraud practiced on the credulous? She replied succinctly that she knew all about fraud.

  Georgina’s experience of spiritualism was much less dramatic than these two gentlemen wished to suggest. She liked the medium Towns best of all because he set her what seemed to be such entertaining riddles. A good example was his insistence that she would one day be threatened by a man with one eyebrow. This seemed such a bizarre possibility that she puzzled over it without success, until at last she realized Towns was trying to indicate Charlie Rawlings, the eldest of the bell-ringing brothers. (A friend of hers, Mrs. Adamson, quite disgusted by the bushy blackness of brows that met in the middle, had once insisted to Georgina that the pubescent Charlie shave a gap over the bridge of his nose, else she would never come to the house again.) At another sitting, Towns indicated danger from the friend of a man in uniform who died with a ball in his head. Nobody in her family or acquaintanceship could be made to fit the bill, until at last Menier, walking into the room on some other errand, mentioned offhandedly that a friend of his in the Garde Nationale had been shot in the head by a Prussian bullet. Spiritualism was always a roundabout way of telling her what she already knew.

  Mr. Bell watched the visitors leave. They walked through the ruined and overhung gardens in high spirits, laughing and joking.

  “Aren’t they hugging up to each other as if they had a fine prize?” he mused thoughtfully to Villiers, who was with him.

  The two men were in fact Dr. Winn and his son-in-law Forbes Winslow. Bell’s independent testimony that they were laughing as they left is especially interesting. Dr. Forbes Winslow had made a parlor trick out of a parlor trick by attending society séances in London and at the critical moment leaping up and exposing the medium. On one occasion he flung a pot of red ink into the face of a spectral visitor that was decorating the face of the medium when the lights went up. He was the son of a much better known—and very much more sympathetic—doctor specializing in the insane who had died four years earlier. Lyttleton Stewart Winslow inherited his father’s Hammersmith asylum in 1874 and changed his name by deed poll to ensure a continuity of brand image—in Georgina parlance, he had already been materially helped from the Other Side. He was ambitious, hardworking, and completely unscrupulous.

  The conversation Georgina had with him was never disclosed to her as a medical consultation, or anything like it. Indeed, no case history of Georgina’s symptoms was ever taken by a doctor of any kind. Armed with the knowledge that her father had died insane, Forbes Winslow had only to prove in her a hereditary disposition to madness. This would manifest itself by the exhibition of suitably irrational behavior.
It happened that an interest in spiritualism seemed to the unlikable Winslow just that. In the Mordaunt case, a telling piece of evidence had been that Lady Mordaunt sat down upon a gravel walk in the grounds of the Crystal Palace and pushed a fallen sprig of fir into the top of her boot. No person of quality in his or her right mind would do such a thing. Talking to angels—or being duped by mediums—was hardly less aberrant.

  That afternoon, just after lunch, Villiers announced Major General Sir Henry de Bathe. In the circumstances, this was a piece of brazen effrontery on de Bathe’s part, though of course he was there at Harry’s bidding. He was appropriately uneasy and only stayed ten minutes. He had come to welcome Georgina back to England and commiserate with her on the theft of her belongings by the blaggard Frenchman Menier. The unsuspecting Georgina pressed him to stay longer. This was a family friend and she had much to tell him. In fact, he could have no idea the troubles she had experienced. De Bathe waved all this away and made the pitch he had been sent to make. Concerning this theft business, did she not see that it would only increase her woes to drag some worthless wretch through the courts? She was at a loss to understand him. Why, de Bathe said, wasn’t it clear as day that a lady of quality could and should let the prosecution drop? It was beneath her to trifle with this man. Georgina was astonished. She had been robbed. Did a lady who had been robbed decline to prosecute—was this the advice of a veteran of Talavera? De Bathe fled shortly after.

  At half past eight in the evening, Bell admitted two men again claiming to be Shell and Stewart, alias Winn and Winslow. They were in fact yet two more doctors, the “short and tubby” Semple and “the dark, taciturn, evil looking” Rudderforth. They explained that they were associates of Shell and Stewart, with the same high purpose of placing children with the orphanage. Georgina gave them an hour of her time in the drawing room and once again allowed the conversation to turn more upon spiritualism than philanthropy. This meeting was more cordial than the first, and she rather fancied Semple had taken a shine to her. As a reward, she told him about the rabbit that had materialized at a séance with all the corporality and bodily functions of an actual rabbit before disappearing back across the earthly divide. Semple asked where this farewell had taken place, and Georgina freely told him: in the garden. One day the rabbit was there and the next, gone. The two men were greatly interested.