But by the nineteenth century, weakened by corruption, greed and too loose a management style, the Ottoman Empire had diminished and decayed. The loss of Egypt and Greece, along with a depleted economy, had forced the Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman Government was called) to rely more on the West. When the Russians marched toward Constantinople in 1878 in search of a warm-water port, the Turks, aided by Britain and France, were able to hold them off. But the Turks had fought a costly war. And when a surge of nationalism swept through the Balkans, the Turks lost Bulgaria and Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina. To the West the Ottoman Empire had become “the Sick Man of Europe”; its fate in the Balkans, the critical “Eastern Question.”
What worried the British most was that Russia would once again menace Constantinople, a threat England could not afford. Turkish protection was essential along the route to India, and an Ottoman defeat by the Russians could doom the jewel in the British crown. And thus the British held out a generous hand of financing to prop up the Turks.
But the Eastern Question mattered little to Gertrude, at least for now. Her curiosity centered on Constantinople, the cosmopolitan city that straddled Europe and Asia; the splendid city on the Bosporus, ancient capital of Byzantium, seat of the Muslim Caliphate and symbol of Ottoman strength. In Bucharest, she had sampled a soupçon of Turkish flavoring; here, in Istanbul, she could savor an Oriental feast. A banquet of gorgeous colors and exotic shapes unfolded before her, “perfectly delicious” she wrote, as the low sun glittered on the water, bringing color back to the faded Turkish flags, “turning each white minaret in Stamboul into a dazzling marble pillar.” She watched the Sultan Caliph, putative leader of the Muslim forces that had swept through East and West, emerge in all his glory on a rare trip from his palace to his mosque. She eyed the spires of the Seraglio, a place at once luxurious and licentious, bringing to life Mozart’s opera The Abduction from the Seraglio; and she saw the flat dome of Saint Sophia, a miracle of Byzantium.
She and Billy took a caïque and rowed slowly up the waters of the Golden Horn; they climbed the snows of Mount Olympus and looked out on the dazzling Sea of Marmara; they mounted donkeys and bumped along the narrow passages of the bazaars. She loved seeing the people dressed in Turkish clothes, the men in turbans and loose-fitting pants, the women in silks, their faces covered with veils. She liked the closely latticed Turkish houses, the Turkish restaurants with strange foods, and she liked drinking Turkish coffee while Billy smoked a narghile, a water pipe. Swept up in the exotic romance of it all, by the end of the trip she and Billy were nearly engaged. The two set off for home, splendidly content, on the Orient Express. This was, observed her sister Elsa, “the last chapter of absolute happiness in Gertrude’s life. She was twenty, she was brilliant, she was charming, she had an attentive cavalier.… The future with all its possibilities lay before them.”
Billy Lascelles fit all the requirements: son of a diplomat, grandson of a famous physician, rakish and rich, educated at Sandhurst and about to begin his military career, he was the ideal candidate for marriage. In London, where Gertrude stayed after they returned in the summer of 1889, he flattered her with his advances. They took afternoon tea together, dined together and sat together in the moonlit garden, talking and playing bezique, their favorite card game, till two in the morning. But Billy offered neither the mental stimulation nor the emotional exuberance she needed. He was too limited in his outlook and too blasé in his approach to life. She was used to the depth and daring, the intelligence and adventurousness of the Bell men. Even on her return to London from Constantinople, she had longed for her father’s company. “Dear, dearest Father,” she had written, “I do wish you were here. I half hoped you might be. Do come soon.” As for Billy, after a few months her interest strayed.
In July she turned twenty-one, a coming-of-age that tremored with meaning. She was now three years older than most young women who had entered British society; her introduction could no longer be postponed. She had smiled her way through Bucharest’s balls, but it was time for her official coming-out. A presentation at court and a formal party by her parents announced to the world that she had been transformed from an accomplished young girl into an eligible young woman. For the 1890 season, and for the two that would follow, Gertrude waltzed through the marriage market, from one ball to another, escorted by either Florence or an aunt. Pink-cheeked and fleshy-bosomed, she joined the line of other young women standing in front of their chaperones, waiting until young men asked them to dance. She smiled, she laughed, she looked deliciously indifferent, and she inspected the men even more carefully than they inspected her. For Gertrude, this was a difficult time. Few of the men were as brilliant as she. Few had attended Oxford or Cambridge. Few had traveled as far as the East. Few had her curiosity or her knowledge or her bluntness or her audacity. Few could match the standards set by her father and grandfather, and, most painful of all, few would desire her.
One of the few was Bertie Crackenthorpe. For at least a week he was in hot pursuit, inviting her to dine at his parents’ house and paying her unending attention, even to his father’s chagrin. “I do like him,” Gertrude wrote to Florence, assuring her that she had been well behaved. Bertie begged to see her, but Gertrude played coy, refusing to say she would be at home if he called, but crossing her fingers about the future. “We shall see how everything happens,” she said wistfully. Yet less than a week later, when she and Bertie were both invited to visit a friend, she hoped he would not go. Bertie already bored her.
In the autumn she returned to Red Barns, a damp retreat, cold and dull. Pretending to be happy, she was often admittedly “miserable,” with little to do. She tutored the younger Bell girls (Hugo was off at school), did social work with the wives of the colliery workers and read voraciously. At least her imagination could take flights of fancy. She lapped up biographies of Browning, Wordsworth and Mary Shelley, followed the explorations of Livingstone in Africa, recited Kipling’s poetry of the Empire and savored FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:
Dreaming when dawn’s left hand was in the sky
I heard a voice within the tavern cry,
“Awake, my little ones, and fill the cup
“Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry.”
When spring arrived and unmarried women were once again in season, she returned to her family’s London flat. To fill the time, she took fencing lessons at MacPhersons’ gym, shopped at Harvey’s and on the Brompton Road and, to her mother’s horror, took the underground to see Mary Talbot doing welfare work in Whitechapel. Florence was “beside herself,” Elsa wrote later, that Gertrude had gone on such an “orgy of independence.” More to her mother’s liking, she went to art exhibits with the family maid and, similarly chaperoned, paid calls on friends: Caroline Grosvenor, an artist; Norman Grosvenor, her husband; and Flora Russell, daughter of Lord and Lady Arthur Russell. The Russells’ at-homes were the envy of London. Their Mayfair drawing room on Audley Square (where the windows were washed, extravagantly, once a week) attracted such well-known figures as Leslie Stephen and his daughters, Virginia and Vanessa; Mrs. Humphrey Ward; and Henry James, who sometimes brought along his friend, the controversial painter of “Madame X,” John Singer Sargent. But aside from an interesting conversation here and there, the days seemed to pass, she noted, “without much to show for them.”
Three seasons were all that a young lady was allotted to find a husband. Gertrude had used up her time. No one had asked her to marry him, nor was there someone she wished to wed. Not that she did not enjoy the company of young men; she did. But her sharp tongue sliced through their egos and her intellectual thirst quickly soaked up what drops of knowledge they shed. She refused to bow to them in her behavior: to be servile or silent or not argue, but rather agree with everything they said. She refused to change her personality to suit another’s. And if she did not meet their expectations, so be it. No tight-lipped male would be her lord and master.
Thr
ee years of the mating game had made her miserable, yet the prospect of a life alone seemed worse. At the end of an evening at the Russells’, she wrote despondently to Florence: “It is so flat and horrid without you. I hope you find your husband a consolation to you, you see I haven’t one to console me.” Fearful of living her life as a spinster, she ended her letter: “Mother dearest, three score years and ten is very long, isn’t it?”
Travel seemed the only solution; Persia the place she had always longed to see. At the age of twenty-three, having spent the winter months learning to speak the language, Gertrude waved goodbye to damp, cold England and left with her aunt Mary Lascelles for the East. Traveling on the Orient Express from Paris to Constantinople, and from there by boat to Persia, she arrived in Teheran on May 7, 1892, to visit Frank Lascelles, recently appointed the British envoy to Shah Nasiraddin. In her first letter home, she rejoiced: Persia was “Paradise.”
The legation grounds were like “the Garden of Eden,” Gertrude exclaimed to her parents. “You can’t think how lovely it all is—outside trees and trees and trees making a thick shade from our house to the garden walls, beneath them a froth of pink monthly roses, climbing masses of briers, yellow and white and scarlet, beds of dark red cabbage roses and hedges of great golden blooms. It’s like the Beast’s garden, a perfect nightmare of roses.” She stepped inside the rambling, pale stone house and walked through long hallways, where liveried servants bowed as she passed. Peeking around, she discovered capacious dining rooms, drawing rooms and billiard rooms, countless sitting rooms and bedrooms for family and guests, and everywhere she could smell the scent of roses and hear the songs of nightingales.
The month-long journey to Teheran earned a welcome from the entire Embassy: counselors, military attachés, telegraph coders, first, second and even third secretaries turned out to greet her, including one who seemed to catch her interest. “Mr. Cadogan, tall and red and very thin, agreeable, intelligent, a great tennis player, a great billiard player, an enthusiast about Bezique, devoted to riding though he can’t ride in the least I’m told, smart, clean, well-dressed, looking upon us as his special property to be looked after and amused. I like him,” she wrote at once to her family.
She met others too, in Teheran, whom she liked, particularly the German chargé d’affaires, Friedrich Rosen, and his wife, Nina. Mrs. Rosen, the daughter of friends of her stepmother’s, was intelligent and amusing; Dr. Rosen, a charming man and an Oriental scholar, who soon taught her about Persian culture and stirred her interest in the Arabs as well. The Rosens would become close friends, and when later they were assigned to Jersualem, she would make her first trip to that city, visiting them while she studied Arabic.
But one man in Teheran stood out from the rest. A week after she arrived, she wrote home again: “Mr. Cadogan is the real treasure; it certainly is unexpected and undeserved to have come all the way to Tehran and to find someone so delightful at the end. Florence [the Lascelleses’ daughter] and I like him immensely; he rides with us, he arranges plans for us, he brings his dogs to call on us … he shows us lovely things from the bazaars, he is always there when we want him and never when we don’t.” Not only was he charming but highly intelligent, well read in everything worthwhile in French, German and English.
Astride their horses, Mr. Cadogan led her into the desert, and she gasped at the power of its vastness and vacancy, the beauty of its jeweled oases. “Oh the desert round Tehran! miles and miles of it with nothing, nothing growing; ringed in with bleak bare mountains snow crowned and furrowed with the deep courses of torrents. I never knew what desert was till I came here; it is a very wonderful thing to see.…”
They went riding together, she always sidesaddle, to the Shah’s camp, and found a garden filled with wild animals and an anderun, a special palace for the royal ladies. When one of the gardeners opened the palace door, they stepped inside and found themselves “in the middle of the Arabian Nights.” Thin streams trickled across the tiled floors and reflections of the water danced in the tiny mirrored pieces of the roof, and all the way was roses, roses. “Here that which is me,” she wrote, “which womanlike is an empty jar that the passerby fills at pleasure, is filled with such wine as in England I had never heard of.”
She was roused by the sensuality of the East and seduced by the attentions of her suitor, handsome, ten years older than she, and worldly. He read her the mysterious lines of the Persian poets and slipped his arms around her. He took her to strange sights, like the whitewashed Tower of Silence, where the Zoroastrians threw their dead, leaving them for birds to devour, and he held her tightly when she shivered in fear. He showed her hawking and they watched together as the servants released quails into the sky and let loose the hawks to pounce on them. He brought her to a garden where they lay in the grass under trees, dangled their toes in a little stream, and kissed, then watched the lights changing on the snowy mountains. From his pocket he pulled out a tiny volume of Catullus and read aloud the lyric pieces of the Roman poet. “It was very delicious,” she wrote dreamily. A few days later they spent an afternoon in a garden tent, and in between their kisses they read the voluptuous quatrains of The Rubáiyát:
With me along the strip of herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown.
Where name of slave and sultan is forgot,
And peace to Mahmud on his golden throne! …
A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
Oh, wilderness were paradise enow!
While a cholera epidemic raged through the country, killing thousands, she and Cadogan celebrated life. They recited the poems of Browning and Kipling and read the short stories of Henry James. They played tennis, they rode into the mountains, they took walks, and on one August afternoon, they strolled two miles down the River Lar to a place where Mr. Cadogan’s servant had spread a regal tea. Hungry and wet from a sudden shower, they hid under waterproof sheets and munched on bread and butter and raspberry jam. After tea they wandered along the stream, Cadogan fishing, she talking, until they walked home together. “It was the loveliest afternoon,” she purred.
By now they were speaking of their future, spending hours blissfully planning their life together: as a diplomat, he could be posted anywhere in the world; he had been to South America and did not like it, and they both hoped he would stay in the Middle East. It was easy to imagine herself like her aunt Mary, the charming, admired wife of an influential ambassador, with her Parisian wardrobe, traveling in luxury on steamer ships and sumptuous trains, meeting interesting people like prime ministers and kings, living in exotic places like Damascus and Baghdad. Her days were like dreams floating out of Oriental fables.
They had both composed letters to her parents, he to ask Hugh Bell’s permission to marry Gertrude, she to tell them of the news. After two weeks, when her parents did not respond, she wrote again, knowing for certain that her father would want to check her young man’s credentials. She guessed that the long wait did not augur well; her father was extremely particular about whom she could marry, and Mr. Cadogan did not really fit the bill. Hugh Bell expected a rich husband for his daughter, one who had a good income and good prospects for the future. Henry Cadogan was the eldest son of the Honorable Frederick Cadogan and the grandson of the third Earl Cadogan, but he had not inherited any family fortune. His salary as a junior diplomat was insufficient to support Gertrude, and to make matters worse, he was a gambler who had mounted up significant debts. He was well read and worldly, but as Hugh Bell learned when he contacted family and friends in Teheran, Cadogan was also arbitrary, strong willed, and intolerant of any interference with his wishes.
Even before her father’s reply arrived, Gertrude wrote to her mother that if Hugh refused to give his permission, the only thing Cadogan could do would be to stay in Persia and hope for a promotion. If he received an ambassadorship or something similarl
y remunerative, then the wait would have been worthwhile. “The consolation is that people really do get on in this profession and make enough to live on before so many years. But then,” she acknowledged, “the kind of life is rather expensive of course.”
At last in September her father’s letter came. With a quickened pulse, she opened the envelope, but her deepest fears turned out to be true. Hugh Bell refused to give his consent. He hoped that a separation would make Gertrude change her mind. She was heartbroken. She wrote to her stepmother for solace: “I care more than I can say and I’m not afraid of being poor or even of having to wait, though waiting is harder than I thought it would be at first. For one doesn’t realize at first how one will long for the constant companionship and the blessed security of being married, but now that I am going away I realise it wildly … our position is very difficult and we are very unhappy.”
In spite of their passion, they respected the social rules. They saw less of each other, feeling they no longer had the right to meet. Still she begged her mother to understand Henry Cadogan as she did. She could not bear that her parents think of him as anything less than “noble and gentle and good.” This was the loving side he had shown her. “Everything I think and write brings us back to things we have spoken of together, sentences of his that come flashing like sharp swords; you see for the last three months nothing I have done or thought has not had him in it, the essence of it all.”
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