The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  One of my mother’s prized possessions was a headshot silhouette of my profile that my teacher had done in the early 1950s when I was in elementary school. At the time I hated it, because my ponytail had gone slack and the teacher had cut out each loose tendril of hair in the silhouette paper. (She had asked each child to step into the light of a projector and to stay still – a feat we accomplished only after being told again and again not to move – while she drew each of our silhouettes onto a piece of construction paper. Later she cut the figure of each child’s head and shoulders out of the paper.) I was fascinated by the teacher’s dexterity. And my mother was over the moon! She marveled at the tendrils that embarrassed me, and at the fact that the teacher had even cut out the lines of my eyelashes.

  Now I, too, see the tendrils as moving. The fact that the teacher cared so much for details moves me, and the profile of myself from so many decades ago, so foreign to the profile I have now, moves me as well. In her collages Mrs. Delany pays particular attention to the tendrils of the vines, cutting the thin-thinner-thinnest lines out of the varied greens of her paper. It is as if she delved into the details of her happinesses, sadnesses, fears, frenzies, and daydreams. She cut into them. She snipped them out and touched them again and again as she positioned them and pasted them on black paper.

  They became her next life.

  Chapter Three.

  HOUND’S TONGUE

  Cynoglossum omphalodes, Hound’s Tongue [now known as Omphalodes verna], St. James’s Place, April 1, 1776 (illustration credit 2.2)

  Mrs. Delany perched at an oiled wooden table in her house on St. James’s Place in Mayfair, the one she had bought at the urging of the Duchess after the death of the Dean, on April 1, 1776 (April Fool’s Day even then). She was regarding a sample of Cynoglossum omphalodes, now known as Omphalodes verna. Its well-known common name is Creeping Forget-me-not; another charming label is Mary Blue-Eyes. (Mrs. D.’s own eyes were dove-colored, according to the Dean.) However, underneath her flower mosaick she wrote its sterner, tougher name, Hound’s Tongue. She proceeded to cut four bright white rings of anthers like the headbands that children might wear at weddings. Then she centered them into four of the eight tiny five-petaled blue flowers she had floated at the ends of the stems. Earlier she had glued these stems into a cluster of acuminate, spade-shaped leaves. And earlier than that she had cut out a small square of white paper and painted it black in readiness for the whole pasted assemblage.

  Hound’s Tongue was not a particularly exotic plant at all, botanist and Editorial Secretary of the Linnaean Society of London John Edmondson good-humoredly explained to me. It peeped out of the eighteenth-century English garden before the snow was gone, as it does still. Nicholas Culpeper, the seventeenth-century herbalist, said he cured rabies – “the biting of a mad dog” – with Hound’s Tongue.1

  Forget-me-not petals had their minor culinary uses, too; sometimes they were added (and still are) to batters for puddings. So Omphalodes, with its leaves that recall the tongues of small baying dogs and its flowers that sometimes flavor confections, was both sweet and curative at the same time. In placing its fragile stems and royal blue flowers above her rough and resolute leaves, Mrs. Delany created in the portrait a whiff of the plant’s ambiguity – and a little of the Granville family’s attitude toward child rearing, too.

  Mrs. Delany’s creamy-skinned, long-nosed, full-bosomed mother, Mary Westcombe, was the daughter of Sir Martin Westcombe, first Baronet Westcombe, the Consul of Cadiz, Spain (a center for trading in gold and silver between Europe and the Americas). In a portrait of Mary Westcombe by an anonymous painter2 we see a woman with a high forehead framed by brown curls – and a set-jawed, slantwise look that suggests she held the world suspect. With the portrait as the only visual clue to her personality, it’s easy enough to imagine her peachy bosom heaving in the arms of a young officer like Mary’s father, Colonel Bernard Granville. Yet from the held-back distrust of her posture it’s equally easy to sense an ambivalence about those arms.

  Whenever Mrs. Delany mentioned her father, she flushed with affection. The Colonel was the third son of Bernard Granville, Groom of the Bedchamber to Charles II. His two older brothers controlled the family fortune. The oldest, Sir Bevil Granville, Governor of Barbados, died in 1706, leaving the family’s wealth, as well as the obligation to help his siblings and their children, to the second oldest, the arty, opinionated Tory George Granville. George Granville became Lord Lansdowne, his name ringing with the derring-do of his ancestor who died at the Battle of Lansdowne. But, as the third son in his family, Mary’s father, Bernard, had to make his own way, never able to count on his older sibling for regular support. After Bernard retired from the King’s Army, he became Lieutenant Governor of Hull as well as Member of Parliament for Camelford and Fowey. There is no available portrait of him, and so we’re left to imagine him in his scarlet uniform, far from the birth chambers of his wife.

  She bore him four children in eight years, giving birth to her first son, Bernard, called Bunny, in 1699. Barely a year later, in 1700, came Mary. Her next was Bevil, born between 1702 and 1706. And after bringing her fourth and last child, Anne, into the world in 1707, she was exhausted. Her husband took her away to what was then the tony resort of Little Chelsea. He took another opportunity as well.

  He decided to better the social prospects for his oldest daughter, Mary, by sending her to live with his adored but stern and childless sister Lady Ann Stanley. (Colonel Granville had two sisters, Ann and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, the younger sister and a Maid of Honor to Queen Anne,3 never married and lived with their older brother Lord Lansdowne.) Ann had been a Maid of Honor to the previous Queen, Mary. She married Sir John Stanley of Grange Gorman, Ireland, who had been Secretary to the Lord Chamberlain to Queen Anne.4 Granville knew that his sister would manage his daughter’s education, teaching her how to take care of herself in the only way a girl of her class could do: by making an excellent marriage match.

  As the hand of the April Fool’s prankster reaches and inverts a world (or even as the hand of the old lady artist Mrs. Delany spun the black square of paper from side to side or upside down to fix her Hound’s Tongue in place), the Colonel reached into his eight-year-old’s routines and spun his daughter out from Mademoiselle Puelle’s, and out from her family house, to Whitehall, the former royal residence and seat of power, now at a fraction of its former glory after a fire in 1698 destroyed it, but still the location of Sir John and Lady Stanley’s apartments.

  Aunt Stanley would teach Mary everything about being a Lady in Waiting to the Queen. Mary would learn to dance in quadrilles, curtsy low, and walk backward in the sight lines to royalty. If she learned tact and restraint, she might, in a few years, secure a job as a royal companion, be paid a yearly stipend and given clothes, food, a place to live, not to mention proximity to gentlemen who might eventually marry her. After all, her swashbuckling great-great-great-grandfather, Sir Richard Granville, had died heroically for the orange-haired Queen Elizabeth I. The Granvilles had served the Crown, and Mary, by acquiring all the skills she needed, might also serve. She was eight years old, and Aunt Stanley, stiff as a posture board with her rules, was determined to train her niece as impeccably as a gardener espaliering a fruit tree. Mary was not going to run in her stocking feet or shout with excitement or laugh at nonsense. Nobody fooled with Aunt Stanley.

  Each of Mary’s years from the ages of eight to fourteen became a pointy-tipped hound’s tongue of admonishment from her aunt, who detected, Mrs. D. recalled at the age of forty, “an impetuosity in my temper, which made her judge it necessary to moderate it by mortifying my spirit, lest it should grow too lively and unruly for my reason.”5

  As Mary met her dancing master at Whitehall and learned to step precisely, as she learned to embroider meticulously (the term she would have used for embroidery is simply “work”), as she studied French to read and speak it faultlessly, as she worked at her spinet to play it sublimely, as she perfected her se
at on a horse, she was somehow managing to hoard her rowdiness and to compost it into fuel for later adult engagement with life. Her passage through her early years was a negotiation between her unruliness and society’s tamings. The huge task for the little girl – largely an unconscious task – was to conjure up the trick of retaining a degree of her wildness, what we might think of as her true self, while learning the endless shades of social distinction and internalizing the endless rules of comportment. “I own I often found it rebellious, and could ill bear the frequent checks I met with, which I too easily interpreted into indignities, and have not been able wholly to reconcile to any other character from that day to this.”6 She was an intrepid child, and though that audacity was not pressed out of her, it was transformed. Her aunt checked her, curbed her, restricted her, and within each limit that was set, Mary’s liveliness was distilled, then distilled again.

  Anchoring the lower right of Mrs. D.’s floral composition is real plant material – an honest-to-God Hound’s Tongue leaf, now brown and crackly, over two hundred and thirty years after she detached it from the plant and pasted it onto her black square. This is one of a number of the mosaicks that mix painting and cutting with dried plant parts, and though it’s one of the smaller ones, it’s also one of the more amazing because of the sheer tenacity of that actual leaf. Hanging on and not disintegrating, despite the odds, was one of Aunt Stanley’s qualities – and Mary Delany’s, too. It’s also one of the details that lifts the work into the realm of collage – not just paper on paper, but a work that employs other materials.

  You can think of the Hound’s Tongue leaf as a trompe l’œil trick or a ploy in a camouflage game. That a quite real leaf is pasted among the other leaves in the Hound’s Tongue creates a witty fillip of Mary’s impetuosity, long transformed from girlish impulsiveness into shrewd adult drollery. It reminds us that the origin of what she manufactured is nature itself. It is as wild as the child she once was. But the natural leaf is so cleverly disguised among the paper leaves that it seems tame. It appears as cultivated as she had to become to please her aunt. Even if you view this flower mosaick in the flesh, so to speak, you might not notice that the leaf in the lower right-hand corner is, well, mummified. It takes careful observation to get it, especially because the leaf above it is painted to look like the real one. This imitation leaf is one of the few completely painted elements in any of her works. In a way the simulation is like protective coloration for the actual one, in the way that a civilized self can conceal a secret, cherished barbarity.

  Hound’s Tongue, detail of plant matter (bottom leaf) and painted leaf (top) (illustration credit 3.1)

  Music Lesson:

  Then the little girl found a bright example of how a great talent had tamed the wild. George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) was twenty-five years old and had been touring as an organist when he was invited to Aunt and Uncle Stanley’s apartments at Whitehall in 1708. He had thick, dark, passionately quizzical eyebrows, black eyes, the hint of a double chin, and a hairline that gave him a grand forehead. He sat down to play for her uncle and aunt and eight-year-old Mary – at her own spinet, which had been sent with her to the Stanleys, perhaps along with her one- and two-piece gowns covered in the front by bibbed aprons and fastened in the back.

  Handel was writing Rinaldo, which would debut at the Queen’s Theatre the following year. His own childhood spinet, given to him by his aunt when he was seven years old, was in the attic of his house, and he climbed many stairs to play it. Coincidentally, the overture to Rinaldo ascends and descends like stairs. The opera, Handel’s first, was something very new – Italian-style, the whole thing sung, no speaking. As her spinet warmed under his curiously long, plump fingers and the plump base of his thumbs, Mary stood watching. There were seventeen years between them. He was not a contemporary, not a parent, not a boy her own age, but a young man like a very much older brother, or a dashing cousin. He became a lifelong friend, and she even drafted a libretto for him. (The work was never performed.)

  The minute Handel rose from the spinet and took his leave, Mary hoisted herself up on the seat and began to play, but the shadow of her uncle, Sir John Stanley, cast itself across the keys. His voice lowered toward her, and he asked “whether I thought I should ever play as well as Mr. Handel. ‘If I did not think I should,’ ” she stared at him and said, “I would burn my instrument!” In Mary’s memoir, she added this postscript: “Such was the innocent presumption of childish ignorance.”7

  In 1714, when Queen Anne died without a direct heir, Aunt and Uncle Stanley were fresh out of court cachet. The Granvilles gathered themselves up, as did all the other members of the aristocracy, and faced their options. The Jacobites favored returning the Stuarts to rule, even though that meant risking a Catholic on the throne. At least, the Protestant Granvilles reasoned, an English family would retain the monarchy. But in opting to be supporters of James the Pretender, they chose the wrong side. It was the Whigs who prevailed. Seeking a Protestant monarch at all costs, the Whigs followed a branch of royal bloodlines back to Germany and plucked the Elector of Hanover, who brought his wheaten eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair and his German manners and German language to the throne as George I.

  Bereft of influence, and rocked by the beat of all the changes that were to come, Aunt Stanley sent Mary home to her parents, to Poland Street in Little Chelsea. She would not become a Maid of Honor to a Queen after all.

  But Sir Bevil had saved King Charles, and wasn’t she to be at court, to curtsy straight down in a kind of plié, head inclined? Perhaps she would have helped manage the dress of the Queen, might have ordered manifold pairs of stockings for Her Majesty. Both her aunt and her father had nearly promised her. She had endured six years of discipline and learned to emulate a multitude of delicate shades of behavior as she grew out of her childhood frocks and childhood shoes and caps, and as she stood for the dressmakers to put her in the silks of a young woman with pubic hair who would have to learn to use a voideur when she excused herself to pee. The voideur, which looks like a gravy boat, was held by a female servant positioned behind a screen, and Mary would have had to learn to slip quietly behind such a screen, hike her skirts, and micturate right into it. She was fourteen years old, and she was prepared to stand around court assembly rooms for hours. But she was going home instead.

  “Nevertheless,” she wrote much later about her early years with her aunt, “the train of mortifications that I have met with since, convince me it was happy for me to have been early inured to disappointments and vexations.”8

  In Little Chelsea, Mary re-met her sister Anne. Anne had been an infant when Mary left the household, but now she was an ebullient eight-year-old, curious about this adolescent creature-sister who had appeared, all the way from Aunt Stanley and Sir John. They were to share a bed – and a daily schedule. They were to dress together and to eat together and to play music together. And Mary was to have a special gift from their father: her portrait was going to be painted. Day after day in the winter of 1715, she dressed and sat for the painter.

  One morning, she thought the hard rap on the door was her notice that it was time to get up early for another day of posing for her portrait. But it was two soldiers with guns in their hands barging toward their bedside like red exclamation points topped by gold epaulets.

  “ ‘Come, Misses,’ cried one of the men, ‘make haste and get up for you are going to Lord Townshend’s.’ ”9

  The little Jacobites.

  The girls heard their mother scream from the hallway, and from the hall her father’s voice rose above the mother’s howls.

  Tempestuously, Mary’s uncle Lord Lansdowne had teamed up with others of James’s supporters to overthrow the Whigs (and therefore George I) and put James the Pretender on the throne. But the plot had failed. Lord Lansdowne had been escorted to that dreary and magnificent clink, the Tower, soldiers loomed over Anne and Mary’s bed, and their mother was sobbing.

  The minute Mary’s father had lear
ned of his older brother’s involvement, he had feared that he, too, would be jailed, and planned a fast, secret getaway for himself and his family. Friends and servants were not to know. “He ordered two carriages to be at his door at six o’clock,” Mary wrote. “The man from whom the horses were hired, and who proved to be a spy, immediately, in hopes of a reward, gave information at the Secretary of State’s Office of these private orders, affirming that it was his belief the Colonel and his family were going secretly out of the kingdom.”10 Betrayed by the equivalent of an undercover cop at a car rental agency, the family was to be taken to Lord Townshend, the Secretary of State.

  Now Mary herself was screaming. “I cried violently,”11 she wrote later, summing up in three words the toppling volumes of terror of waking up to devil-red strangers at the end of her bed, witnessing her new breasts through her chemise. The soldiers would have smelled of cold, wet wool and sweat and ale. The sisters must have smelled like the sweet cheese of sleepy girlhood. Someone was trying the door. It was her mother’s maid, arguing with the soldiers that she must be admitted to dress Anne and Mary. At last they allowed her in.

  But as frightened as the more knowing Mary was, little Anne Granville was curious and imperious with the soldiers, and with the maid. She insisted on being properly dressed for this occasion, their abduction. “My little sister, then but nine years’ old,” Mary wrote, “had conceived no terror from this intrusion, but when the maid was going to put on her frock, called out, ‘No, no, I won’t wear my frock, I must have my bib and apron; I am going to Lord Townshend’s.’ ”