Desert Queen

by Janet Wallach

  Her brother, Maurice, became her closest playmate and perfect foil. Fearful of her sharp tongue and her reprimands, he followed her like an awkward puppy. When she led him to the top of a nine-foot wall and ordered him to jump, the little boy heeded and fell flat on his face, but she landed gracefully on her feet. Climbing treacherously to the roof of the greenhouse, Maurice went crashing through the glass, but Gertrude scampered safely across the panes. At the beach, when their nurse wasn’t looking, the children slipped from her side and Gertrude dashed with her brother from one cove to another or hid in the boats moored on the shore. In bad weather they played inside, pasting pictures in their scrapbooks, watching magic lantern slides, playing with their trains and dolls.

  Until Gertrude was eight, the distraught widower Hugh, when not at work, spent most of his time at home. Despite the urging of his sisters, Hugh refused to think of marrying again. But on a vacation in Scotland in the summer of 1874 he was introduced to a friend of his sisters named Florence Olliffe. The twenty-four-year-old playwright had lived in France, where her father, a prominent physician and socialite, had created the seaside resort of Deauville. In Paris she had known diplomats and literary figures and counted among her family friends the writers Charles Dickens and Henry James. After her father’s death she and her mother had moved to England, where she impressed those she met with her sophisticated style; Hugh was struck by her elegant manners and her intense blue eyes. Florence noticed not only Hugh’s courtly ways, but when she saw him for the first time, standing at the end of a rose-covered path, she recognized how beautiful he was and how very sad.

  For two years their relationship continued, and in the spring of 1876, when it turned more serious, Florence wrote a note to Gertrude. “My Dear Miss Olliffe,” Gertrude carefully penned in response, answering questions about her flowers and a pair of ominous ravens, “Thank you very much for your letter. The ravens are tamer and very nice. I think you will like the garden very much, the flowers are all coming out.” She signed the letter, “Your aff’ate Gertrude.”

  That June in London, at the Harley Street home of Lady Stanley, a staging was held of an opera that Florence had written. The enlightened Lady Stanley, grandmother of Bertrand Russell and mother-in-law of Hugh’s sister, made the event a sparkling occasion. At the end of the evening, when Hugh escorted Florence back to her mother’s flat at 95 Sloane Street, he asked for her hand in marriage. “Lady Olliffe,” he announced, “I have brought your daughter home, and I have come to ask if I may take her away again.”

  They were married two months later, on August 10, 1876, at a small church on Sloane Street. It seems so odd now, and even somewhat cruel, but the children were not included in the wedding. Instead, Gertrude sent a note: “My dear Miss Olliffe. I write this letter for you to have on your wedding day to send you and Papa our best love and many kisses. Thank you for the doll’s frock which fits beautifully … From your loving Gertrude.” For their honeymoon the couple went off to America, where Florence’s sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Frank Lascelles, were posted at the British Embassy in Washington, and the next time Gertrude wrote to Florence, thanking her for a locket, she addressed her with a new title: “My Dear Mother.”

  Even before the wedding, Florence had tried to win the little girl’s heart, sending her clothes for her dolls and gifts for herself. Eager for the attention, Gertrude was troubled, nevertheless, by this new woman who took so much of her father’s time. While her parents were on their honeymoon, she wrote to them with some concern about their safety, told them she dreamed of dead ravens and wished that her parents were with her. By autumn, Florence and Hugh were back at Red Barns, and life returned to some of its old rhythm. A portrait done by Edward Poynter shows eight-year-old Gertrude seated on her father’s lap, his arm around her, their fingers entwined, their faces glowing with love and affection. In its essence, it was a picture that could have been drawn at almost any point in their lives.

  When Hugh and his new wife went off to London the following April, Gertrude was almost in despair. “Dear dear Mamy,” she wrote to Florence, “I am very very sorry you cannot come home.… I send love to Papa and all. I am dear dear dear Mamy your loving Gertrude.” A short while later, she received news that her parents were returning: “Dear Mamy, I am so very very very very very very glad you are coming home.… Do get me a doll. I have got none.… Dear dear dear dear dear dear Mamy, you don’t know how glad I am you are coming home. From your very very very loving Gertrude.”

  Eager for Florence’s love, the little girl struggled to please. Florence opened up an exciting world of books, theater, art and interesting people. As a child Gertrude liked nothing so much as to sit at her side, listening to her read from Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland or the tales of Ali Baba, Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin and his Magic Lamp from the Arabian Nights. As Gertrude grew older, she found much in Florence to admire: her talent as a writer, her efforts at social justice, her accomplishments as a hostess, her literary friends, her stylishness and fashion sense. Even more, she was grateful for the friendship and family life that Florence provided.

  But her stepmother’s impatience with anything less than perfection prickled Gertrude like a spiky thorn. A photograph, taken when Gertrude was nine, reveals some of the tension between them. Florence, resplendent in a rich velvet dress trimmed with fur, is seated in front of a leaded glass window, her expression forbidding as she looks down at a large book in her hands. On one side stands Maurice, in his buttoned-up suit, on the other, Gertrude, in a plain wool dress, but as close as they are placed to her, the children seem miles away. There is no contact: no physical touching, no emotional bond. While little Maurice seems to be biting his lip to stop himself from crying, Gertrude looks soulful, her eyes off somewhere in the distance. If tears could fill the chasm between them, there would be enough to plug an ocean.

  Gertrude’s willfulness had caused a string of nannies to quit their job. Florence, too, had little tolerance for Gertrude’s “highly spirited” ways. As soon as she began having her own children (there would be three in all: Elsa, Molly and Hugo), Gertrude, aged ten, was sent on long visits to her cousins (her favorite was Horace Marshall) or to her grandparents’ new house at Rounton Grange. More than once reports came back to Florence about Gertrude’s naughtiness, her dangerous climbs on steep rocks, the risky adventures that often scared the relatives.

  Wherever Gertrude was, she escaped through her books. They were her magic carpet, but anything she read had to be approved by Florence. At the age of eleven she glided through John Richard Green’s long History of the English People. At fourteen, she asked her cousin Horace if he had read Browning’s new book of poetry. “I suppose not,” she answered with resignation. But, she boasted to him, in one week she had galloped through volumes of letters and biographies of Mozart, Macaulay and Mrs. Carlyle. At sixteen, she dashed through George Eliot’s Silas Marner, and then asked meekly, “What other book of hers may I read now?” Even at the age of twenty-three, after ordering a best-selling novel about the seduction of a maid, she wrote apologetically to Florence, telling her to return it: “Naturally I should have asked you about it before I read it.”

  No matter how bright they were, girls of Gertrude’s class rarely were sent away to school; instead, they were tutored at home and, at the age of seventeen, were presented at court and introduced to society. Within three seasons of coming out, each was expected to find a husband. But Gertrude had shown an exceptional mind, too keen to be kept at home. Florence and Hugh, progressive thinkers both, took the radical step of sending her to a girls’ school in London. It would calm the energy level in the household and, at the same time, feed Gertrude’s hungry intellect. Queen’s College, a girls’ school on Harley Street, was started in 1848 as a series of Lectures for Ladies.

  It was a total change from the protected world of Red Barns and Rounton Grange. For one thing, her classmates were all girls. For another, the rules were stricter in London than they h
ad been at home. Intellectually, she had little concern. Her first-term grades marked her as an outstanding student: first in her class in English History; second in English Grammar, third in Geography, fourth in French and Ancient History. When a subject was too easy, she asked to be transferred to a more advanced class and welcomed the extra load of work. But eager as she was to learn, and as good a scholar as she was, the sixteen-year-old found the experience at Queen’s College lonely and painful. “I was horribly miserable yesterday,” she wrote after she returned for a new semester; “the first few days are the worst.” Torn from the comforts of home, she missed her male companions—her brother Maurice, her cousin Horace and her father—and disliked the company of other young women. She found them “uninteresting,” affected and not up to her speed. Nevertheless, the privileged young lady, whose grandfather had just been made a baronet, discovered that she did not always stand above the crowd: “It’s a very disagreeable process, finding out that one is no better than the common run of people. I’ve gone through rather a hard course of it since I came to College and I don’t like it at all.” She dreaded the “great flat stretch of weeks with nothing to look forward to,” and filled her days with extra school assignments. History was her favorite subject, and as she studied the English monarchy she began to comprehend Britain’s powerful role in the world.

  City life did not please her; London was a quick flirtation, an evening of laughter followed by a lonely night of tears. For Gertrude, the countryside was constant love; it embraced her with arms full of roses and caressed her with blossoms and trees. “I wish I were at home,” she wrote wistfully in the fall. “There must be such a delicious autumn smell in the country, and then crackly yellow and red leaves, oh it makes me quite discontented to think of it.” Knowing how much she loved the outdoors, Florence made sure there were always fresh flowers in her room at school. When she slipped up once, Gertrude chided, “You didn’t send me any flowers this week! Did you forget?”

  In the loneliness of her schooldays, she sought company through her letters. Her wooden pen with steel-tipped nib, a bottle of ink and paper became her constant companions. Throughout her life she would keep them by her side, and sometimes, when there was no one else, she used them to talk for hours to her family. Over the years, she wrote to her stepmother partly as duty, partly in friendship, partly as a journal of her experiences. Often her parents were apart and she wrote to them both. Her arm never tired; the words seemed to push the pen onto the paper without her body’s exerting any effort. She told everything there was to know; and later, when the British needed to know the terrain of the desert, she could tell them almost every grain of sand she had traversed, and when they asked about any man she had met, she could describe the birthmarks on his face and the warts on his character.

  In spite of the separation at school, Florence kept a firm watch, scrutinizing Gertrude’s manners and supervising her social life. Gertrude was required to ask permission before visiting anyone outside Florence’s circle, and like all young, unmarried women from proper families, she was not allowed on the street without a chaperone. She found the rules for her gender terribly frustrating. Even a visit to a museum required an escort: “I wish I could go to the National, but you see there is no one to take me. If I were a boy, I should go to that incomparable place every week, but being a girl to see lovely things is denied me!”

  At times she seemed perfectly willing to accept her mother’s control, and, indeed, all her life she acted with obedience toward her parents. She wished that Florence would come to London and visit and was delighted when Florence arranged for friends to invite her to tea. At their homes she met, among others, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the well-known novelist; Mrs. Green, widow of the historian; Anne Ritchie, the daughter of William Thackeray; Richmond Ritchie, her husband and an influential diplomat; Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano; Fanny Kemble, the actress and, later, Henry James and the poet Robert Browning.

  At other times, when Florence was very critical, Gertrude dipped her pen in anger. After receiving three excoriating pages, she wrote back to tell Florence they were “quite horrid,” and announced gleefully that she had avenged herself by promptly burning them. Her mother constantly reprimanded her for spelling errors and grammatical shortcuts, and after one particularly critical letter, Gertrude complained about Florence’s “priggish” style. “Would you have me say when talking of the sovereign, ‘The Queen of England, Scotland, Ireland, Empress of India, Defender of the Faith’?” the sixteen-year-old asked. “My life is not long enough to give everything its full title.” Another time she complained, “You’ve told me all those things so often that I know them by heart.… I don’t think it’s any use your telling me over again. Generally, I think I could write out your letters before I open them and come pretty close to the original withal!” How different were her comments to her father. “You don’t scold me nearly enough,” she told him, “but I’m much sorrier when you don’t scold me than when you do.”

  In her letters to Hugh, Gertrude solicited his help on freeing her from the dreaded piano lessons Florence insisted she have; she asked his advice on schoolwork, offered her views on history and sought her father’s opinions on free trade, Home Rule for the Irish, the fate of Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Liberal Party. She divided her writing between Florence’s interests in literature, fashion and the arts and Hugh’s interests in politics and world affairs. But slowly her own interests were developing in all of these areas. She wrote to Hugh that history might become her career (at least, although she did not say so, until she married), and in her last semester, at the suggestion of her teacher, she approached her father gingerly and asked permission to continue her studies at Oxford. If Hugh agreed to send her to university, it would be another radical step. Instead of a world of domesticity, she would be entering the realm of the elite and the powerful, a world ruled and peopled almost completely by men. “My only fear,” she wrote to her father, “is if I once go there you will never be able to get me away!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Man’s World

  Gray stone walls enclosed the University of Oxford, barriers warding off the prosaic and welcoming the privileged to its rarefied air. An assemblage of chosen people lived within, the intellectuals and the high-born, supporting one another’s sense of superiority, reinforcing each other’s sense of distinction. Gertrude’s acceptance bolstered her already strong self-esteem. As unhappy as she had been at Queen’s College, confined to a middling female world, she had proven herself an outstanding scholar. Now, in a far more appealing atmosphere, with the Bells’ drive and determination, she would rise to the highest levels.

  Since the twelfth century, clergymen, kings, prime ministers, diplomats, philosophers, scientists and academics had secluded themselves behind the Oxford walls to breathe the fresh air of thoughts and sample a feast of ideas. Each college hall, each cobbled path, echoed with the footsteps of powerful leaders and pioneer thinkers. Men like Roger Bacon argued in the thirteenth century for experimental methods of inquiry. In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas More defended the Catholic Church over the will of Henry VIII, and in the seventeenth century Oliver Cromwell, the country’s leader, served as Chancellor. There were scientists like Edmund Halley, who discovered a new comet, and, in the nineteenth century, Thomas Huxley, who brilliantly defended Darwin’s ideas of evolution. There were architects like Christopher Wren, who designed the Sheldonian Theatre and, later, artists like William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, whose stained glass windows lit up Christ Church Cathedral; poets like Matthew Arnold, who immortalized the school’s spires; philosophers like John Ruskin, whose books could be found on the shelves of the Radcliffe reading room. From the rule of the Plantagenets until the reign of Queen Victoria, the brightest young men, but only men, had entered Oxford; in exchange for the freedom to think, they cloistered themselves in austere surroundings, clothed themselves in simple robes, and undertook a life of celibacy. But the tone of Oxford chan
ged in 1874, when male students were allowed to marry. And it changed even more dramatically in 1879, when Miss Elizabeth Wordsworth, grandniece of the poet, became the first principal of Lady Margaret Hall, for young women. Only a few years later, in 1886, LMH would serve as home for Gertrude.

  As principal of the women’s school, Miss Wordsworth felt her first priority was to see that her students married. She was convinced that God intended woman to be “Adam’s helpmate,” and to fill that role properly, she insisted, a young woman must develop the “minor graces” of “neat handwriting,” “skillful needlework,” and “the ways of opening and shutting doors.” Her girls were allowed to sit in on lectures and to have their own tutors, but the pursuit of intellectual ideas was still considered questionable, not just for women but for the country. As the contemporary philosopher Herbert Spencer put it, thinking was dangerous for females; “the overtaxing of their brains,” he declared, would lead to “the deficiency of reproductive power.” When Gertrude arrived, the halls of New College Chapel still reverberated with the recent sermon of Dean John Burgon: “Inferior to us God made you, and inferior to the end of time you will remain.” But Gertrude Bell hardly felt inferior: at eighteen, she was already sure that she was the equal of any male, and if anyone doubted her word, she had her father to back her up.