The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  I could not help noticing an echo of a previous passage in Knole’s history. During my researches into Inheritance, I was increasingly struck by a number of recurring themes: how Knole was built and then furnished on the profits of public office; how the family fortunes reflected those of the English aristocracy in general; how depression afflicted generation after generation of Sackvilles, prompting their gradual withdrawal and the withdrawal of their house from the world; how they tended to take Italian or Spanish dancers as mistresses. In the late eighteenth century, John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset, installed his mistress, the Italian ballet dancer, Giovanna Baccelli, at Knole, and commissioned the painter Thomas Gainsborough to produce a full-length portrait of her. He captured Baccelli mid-movement, in a moment of perfect equilibrium. You cannot help feeling that the work of these commercial artists in the mid-nineteenth century presents a rather cheaper, cut-price version of Pepita the dancer.

  Pepita returned regularly from northern Europe to visit her friends and family in Spain, and sometimes her mother and Manuel would follow her to Germany. Each year, Pepita appeared more prosperous than the year before. On one of her trips home in the early 1850s, she was staying at the Peninsulares in Madrid, one of the splendid hotels to which she had grown accustomed, and arranged to meet Manuel Guerrero y Casares, director of ballet at the Teatro Real. Although Manuel never thought much of her dancing, he did note the magnificence of her jewellery, in particular a heart-shaped gold pendant hanging from her neck with a large emerald in its centre and a surround of diamonds. A cousin of Catalina’s, who earned his living selling fruit off the back of a donkey, was struck by a very similar piece of jewellery when he had lunch with Pepita and her mother in Málaga, on their brief return to the city of her birth. ‘They seemed much better off – they were all dressed like gentle-people,’ he observed.

  By the mid-1850s, Pepita was at the height of her career, and a wealthy woman. When, a couple of years after their meeting in Madrid, she bumped into Manuel Guerrero again, this time in Vienna, she was dressed as splendidly as before, with the same superb jewellery, but this time she also had ‘a magnificent carriage with a splendid pair of horses, coachman and footman and everything of the first order’. He could not help noticing that, however polished and refined Pepita had become, there was still ‘something in the carriage of her body which stamped her as not being a lady of birth’. Manuel Guerrero saw her once more in 1858 in Copenhagen, where Pepita was performing her trademark El Ole at the Casino Theatre. She was staying at one of the most expensive hotels in the city, probably the Hotel d’Angleterre, ‘in great style and ostentatious luxury’. And yet again, he had something slightly sniffy to say about Pepita – perhaps due to some professional rivalry with his own wife, the Spanish dancer Petra Camara. When shown a portrait of Pepita he recalled that this was ‘exactly the posture in which she used to place herself though I do not consider it artistic’.

  By now Catalina and Manuel had settled in Granada, at No. 8 Calle de las Arandas. The lawyer who lived opposite remembered Pepita visiting, and their talking several times across the street from their respective balconies. Pepita was ‘beautiful and sympathetic and of pleasant conversation’. She was, he continued, ‘in the habit of going to and coming from foreign countries where she performed, gaining a lot of money, with which she supported her mother’s house, which always displayed excessive luxury . . . It was said that she had relations or an engagement with some foreign personage of importance, very rich and who gave her heaps of money.’

  In the summer of 1855, however, Catalina and Manuel were driven out of Granada by an outbreak of cholera, and escaped to the small town of Albolote, four miles away. Here they bought the Casa Blanca, a house in the main square, which they refurbished extensively. ‘It was handsomely furnished for people in that class of life,’ noted the local priest. They had a four-wheeled carriage with a cover over the top, and two carriage horses called Malagueño and Garbozo – all in all, a very ‘stylish turn out’. In addition, Manuel had a saddle horse, a dark chestnut named Esmeralda, and there was a horse for Pepita to ride when she visited, a piebald called La Preciosa. The garrulous Catalina would boast about her daughter, ‘The Star of Andalusia’, La Estrella de Andalusia, as she was known abroad, and describe the exalted company she kept in Germany, including veiled references to some Bavarian prince. Catalina told everyone that it was Pepita’s money that kept them in such style, a fact confirmed by her next-door neighbour who observed that Catalina and Manuel certainly did nothing themselves to earn a living – ‘all they did was to spend their daughter’s money’.

  Some of their new neighbours were snobbish about Manuel and Catalina. Goggle-eyed, and short and stout of stature, an ‘insignificant, common-looking chap’, Manuel swiftly became a figure of fun, ‘like a workman dressed as a gentleman’, wearing a gold chain and rings. He ‘seemed to be the sort of man who might have risen from the position of artisan and had suddenly become better off’, claimed the village priest; ‘Catalina looked very well when dressed, but when one entered into conversation with her – one plainly saw traces of an inferior origin.’ She and Manuel were said to quarrel frequently, ‘and she had been heard to tell him during these quarrels, that she would kick him out and send him back to his trade’.

  The couple gave themselves a great many airs and graces. For example, they would have their servants carry up to four luxurious armchairs from the Casa Blanca to church every Sunday – one for Catalina, one for Manuel, and one each for Pepita and Lola if they were there. These would then be placed prominently facing the High Altar, in front of the congregation. One villager overheard the priest telling Catalina that the ‘Church was not a Theatre and the chairs must be taken away’. ‘So far as I know,’ he continued, ‘they did not attend Mass again.’

  In the summer of 1856, Pepita came from Germany to stay with her mother at the Casa Blanca, accompanied by Manuel’s daughter Lola, a couple of servants, and two black dogs with long woolly coats called Prinnie and Charlie. The party alighted from the stagecoach at the point where the road to Albolote leaves the main road from Granada to Jaen, and was met by Pepita’s family in their carriage, who took them back to the house. A day or two later, Catalina held a party for Pepita at the Casa Blanca, to which she invited the local magistrate and the entire town council. A brass band from the neighbouring village of Atarfe was hired to serenade her, and there was dancing into the small hours, as chocolates, sweets and liqueurs were handed round. Pepita, who was wearing ‘a rose-coloured silk skirt with flounces, and very good jewellery’, greeted everyone and went out onto the balcony to salute the people in the square below. ‘It was a regular fete,’ recalled Micaela Gonzalez Molina, the wife of a local cattle-dealer and Catalina’s next-door neighbour.

  Pepita stayed for almost two months. Villagers remembered her many years later, strolling in the street, or chatting from the balcony of the house. She dazzled the local landowners’ sons with her striking looks. José Ramirez Galan was one of those who, as a teenager, serenaded Pepita soon after her arrival, and then became a regular visitor to Catalina’s evening receptions where there was music, dancing and light refreshments. ‘I remember Pepita teaching me to waltz – she wore slippers of gold-brocaded velvet. I thought I should have died of ecstasy – she was so charming and handsome . . . Her face and figure remain engraved upon my memory, notwithstanding the lapse of time.’ After Pepita had left Albolote, Catalina gave him a portrait of her daughter as a souvenir, which he kept in a drawer with his papers. Every now and then he would take it out to look at, for ‘she was worthy of being remembered’ – until, five years later, he got married, and his new wife made sure that it was tidied away for good. José’s older brother, Francisco Ramirez Galan, used to go to the evening parties at the Casa Blanca, too, and remembered Pepita as ‘very attractive, dangerously so. I was a young man at the time and she made a great impression on me.’ The other members of the family were less impressive, however:
‘Pepita appeared to be superior to the others; but the rest were inferior. Lopez used to dress up and show off on horseback . . . He was just the sort of man to get up on the box and take the reins.’

  As well as Pepita’s looks, it was her finery that was much remarked upon: the dresses, the silver salvers she had brought from abroad, and the jewellery that was remembered in great detail years later, not just the heart-shaped gold pendant, but also a brooch shaped like a lizard and ‘set with streaks of gold and emeralds alternately’, a gold brooch in the shape of a frog with blue stones, and ‘a great number of bracelets, including one shaped like a snake’.

  Pepita paid a second visit to Albolote in the summer of 1857, but there was far less stir this time and she only stayed three weeks. By now Catalina had bought a new house, the Caseria Buena Vista, sometimes known as La Caseria de los Pavos Reales (The House of the Peacocks), on the outskirts of Granada. There was a garden, a kitchen garden, an orchard, a meadow and some arable land, plus a couple of small vineyards, where Don Manuel would spend his time ‘giving directions to the men’ – when he was not ‘shooting rabbits, or any birds he could see’.

  Before they left Albolote, Catalina and Manuel stripped and gutted the Casa Blanca, removing many of its architectural features: the ornamental iron bars that framed the windows, the marble sinks, mantelpieces and fireplaces, windows, balconies, an iron gate, indeed anything else that might come in handy as they renovated Buena Vista. Pride of place went to a bronze statuette of Pepita dancing El Ole, which they placed in the basin of a fountain in the courtyard at Buena Vista. From then on, the house was often known as the Caseria de la Bailarina.

  Pepita visited Buena Vista in the spring of 1858 – the year emblazoned on a large new entrance gateway to the property. This time she was pregnant, and she stayed for six months or so. Occasionally she was spotted strolling in the vineyard, and at least one labourer recollected ‘with admiration’ her ‘large dark eyes [and] long arched eyebrows. She was a very handsome woman.’

  At around midday on 20 May, Pepita gave birth to a boy. When Pepita had trouble suckling the child, Catalina engaged a wet-nurse called Ana, who was herself the veteran of ten children (and two miscarriages). The baby, who eventually came to be known as Max, was baptised three days later in the parish church of San Ildefonso, as the legitimate son of Don Juan Antonio Gabriel de la Oliva and Dona Josefa Dominga Duran (although the couple had lived apart for more than six years). His names, in full, were Maximiliano Leon José Manuele Enrique Bernardino: the first was seen as confirmation by some that his real father was Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria, one of the godparents; the second was the Spanish equivalent of Lionel, another contender for paternity. The Duke, or Max in Bayern as he was often known, was a member of the Bavarian royal family, but a free spirit, nevertheless, with a passion for folk music, and in particular for playing the zither. In summer he could be seen hiking around the forests near his home at Possenhofen castle in peasant dress, but he was equally at home in the concert halls and theatres of Germany and Austria, which is where he probably met Pepita.

  After the christening, a crowd of people, mostly boys, followed Pepita’s carriage with its escort of two mounted Civil Guards, the mile or so from the church to the house. As they went, they picked up the silver coins thrown to them from a straw basket by the coachman, in a traditional gesture of largesse.

  Several months later, Pepita returned to Germany with Max and a nurse, to a house she had bought in Heidelberg. Lionel stayed with them in 1859, paying some of the household expenses and ‘an occasional wine bill or something of that sort’. That spring, Pepita’s aunt Micaela and her husband, who was going blind, came to Heidelberg for medical treatment, which Pepita paid for. They stayed in lodgings nearby, also at Pepita’s expense, and Micaela saw Pepita almost every day. On a couple of occasions she remembered meeting a foreign gentleman, who appeared to take particular notice of the child: ‘I heard from Pepita that he was a personage. He had all the appearance of being wealthy. He was rather tall, fair, good-looking and handsome, of a distinguished appearance . . . I think I heard that his house was somewhere in or about London . . . He appeared to be in the prime of life.’

  Lionel continued to visit Pepita as much as his official duties and her professional engagements would allow. He was now secretary at the legation in Turin, and in the summer of 1860 he took to renting villas for Pepita and Max for a few weeks at a time in northern Italy. The first of these was on the outskirts of Turin. A colleague from the legation, Dudley Saurin, would later recall accompanying Lionel on his walk from work at the end of the day to within a short distance of the villa, ‘and then I went to the right and he to the left’. For it was understood that Lionel would never introduce his mistress to his colleagues or take her out into ‘Society’, like other members of the legation. After Turin, there were villas in Como, Arona (on Lake Maggiore) and Genoa. While Pepita stayed in Italy that summer, under his ‘protection’, as Lionel described it, ‘the intercourse continued’.

  In 1861, Pepita returned to Germany, to a house she had bought in Hakenfelde on the outskirts of Berlin. Lionel stayed with her there for two months in the winter of 1861–2 – ‘the longest time I had ever stayed with her up to that time’ – and it was presumably then that Pepita’s second child, Victoria, was conceived. Catalina was staying there too for some of the time, and it was possibly from her, via her son Diego, that news filtered back to Oliva that Pepita had a child. Although Oliva never saw the son whose baptism certificate proclaimed he was his, he told people that everyone said the boy looked ‘very handsome, quite a jewel’ and just like him.

  Victoria was born at apartments Lionel had taken for Pepita at 4 Avenue de l’Impératrice (now Avenue Foch) in Paris on 23 September 1862. In contrast to Max’s papers, Victoria’s certificate of baptism described her as the daughter of Josephine Duran and of a ‘père inconnu’, ‘father unknown’. Lionel was there for the birth, as were Catalina and Manuel. But soon after, Lionel and Pepita appear to have separated. It was only when Lionel received a telegram in Turin two years later, saying that Pepita was very ill, that he hastened to Baden Baden, where she was with Max and Victoria. Pepita confessed that she had just had a miscarriage, and had been living with someone else, ‘but who he was’, claimed Lionel, ‘I never could find out’. Their reconciliation marked a turning-point in their relationship.

  Pepita’s career had, in any case, begun to peter out, and she gave up dancing. Their life together became more domestic. Whether Lionel’s lack of commitment had contributed to their separation or not, it was certainly the case that Pepita had been seeking a greater sense of legitimacy. Lionel later described how, after Victoria’s birth, Pepita begged him that if she had any other children by him, he would have them registered in his name. ‘I always resented this idea,’ he complained, ‘and objected as long as I could. Ultimately I was prevailed upon as will afterwards appear.’ As it happened, all Pepita’s children after Victoria were to be registered rather differently from her first two.

  Pepita made her last visit to Buena Vista probably in 1863. A lawyer, acting for the family in a dispute concerning a right of way through the property, particularly remembered her little boy being fond of some lozenges the lawyer was taking for a throat infection. Pepita told him that she was a dancer, ‘living under the protection of an English gentleman, to whom she was not married’. She had, however, ‘sufficient money to overcome the well-known scruples of the Granadinos on such subjects, and the best society in Granada went to her house’.

  In 1864, there was a sale at Buena Vista ‘of everything in the house’. Rafaela Moreno Pinel, who lived nearby, remembered how the sale was superintended by Catalina. ‘Now and then Manuel Lopez tried to intervene, but she turned him away saying “You don’t know how to manage these things.” She drove a hard bargain, but he was more indulgent.’ Rafaela bought a good many things: a glass toilet bottle engraved ‘Pepita de Oliva’; plated forks and spoons en
graved ‘C.O.’ for Catalina Ortega; and a dining table (although she had to wait till some time afterwards for one of its leaves to be delivered, since Catalina and Manuel carried on using it as a table top, supported on packing cases, until they actually left the house).

  It is possible that Oliva and Pepita continued to have a certain affection for each other – some people even said that tears would form in Pepita’s eyes whenever his name was mentioned. Lionel, too, acknowledged that she was ‘continually in communication’ with Oliva by letter, and ‘used to send him money to keep him quiet as she always dreaded his claiming some rights over her or the children’. Perhaps this explains Oliva’s arrival in Albolote in 1867 to take possession, as the legitimate husband of Pepita, of the Casa Blanca.

  That summer, Oliva was performing at the Teatro Isabel la Católica in Granada. Every morning, when rehearsals were over at about eleven, he would leave on horseback for Albolote and spend the day there supervising the workmen dismantling the house, before returning for the evening show at half past seven. He became a standing joke, as he regaled his fellow dancers with his sales of the day: a doorway, a window frame, ‘so many cartloads of bricks’, and so on. Over the course of a fortnight he salvaged lintels, tiles, wooden beams, fireplaces, and sold them on the spot until pretty much all that remained of the house were some of the external walls. Eventually, the town council gave Oliva notice not to pull anything more down, as the house adjoined a public place and was becoming dangerous. Under a power of attorney that he claimed had been given to him by Pepita, he then sold the Casa Blanca to the Gonzalez family next door. One of his colleagues later recalled being told by Oliva in 1867 that ‘he was getting some money from a house which belonged to his wife Pepita Oliva, the famous dancer . . . He said that there had been a son born, to which his name had been given, that he had intended taking judicial proceedings, and that in order to stop his mouth the family had given him something.’