by Jessica Mann
‘Not all that high.’
‘And self supporting, and making your own decisions – if you’d been born when Artemis Bessemer was you’d have been a chattel so long as your father or husband was alive and destitute without them. You’d have had to go into some sort of service. I did myself, in a way, a century later. Now Artemis, you see, she’s merely an example. I’m using her life story as an epitome. It doesn’t matter whether she lived in a cottage or a castle. Here we have the raw material of history, this unique contemporary evidence . . .’ Margot waved her bandaged hand with undirected energy.
Her brother picked up the cardboard folder and said, ‘That’s right, old girl. Tamara can read this later and you can discuss it then.’
‘I shall give you the second half tomorrow. When I’ve made some corrections. It tells an extraordinary story, you’ll be astonished, Tamara. You, specially, I can’t wait to see your reactions. What I’ve got in hare . . .’ Margot stroked the second cardboard folder with creative pride.
‘Leave it now, Margot, get some rest,’ Jeremy Ellice said. Tamara followed him out of the room. Outside its enclosure of warm light and multi-coloured draperies, the house changed in character. ‘I live in one room,’ Jeremy had explained when Tamara arrived with her flowers and good wishes, and he had taken her down to the basement of a house that was otherwise entirely full of books.
The only external sign that this tall terraced house in Hampstead was a bookshop, was a tiny plaque beside the front door bell, on which were inscribed the just legible words, Jeremy Ellice, Reg. Office. Customers who wanted to call in person made appointments, but most of Jeremy’s business was done by mail. A box of newly printed catalogues was obstructing the entrance hall, and all the other passages were narrowed by heaps of books; volumes stacked on each step left six inches footway up the stairs. On coming in, Tamara had heard Margot’s faint voice calling, ‘Is that Tamara Hoyland? Do bring her down at once,’ and had not stopped. Now, ascending to the ground floor, Jeremy said, Would you like to look round?’ and Tamara eagerly agreed.
‘Nothing I like better than a really jumbled second hand bookshop. But are you sure you don’t mind?’
‘Of course not, the shop’s open for business.’ He flicked on a row of light switches, illuminating the book-lined stair well. ‘Take your time.’
Archaeological books were on the first floor, along with history, art history and natural history. Tamara prowled enviously along the rows of publications that cannot have seemed cheap when they were new and were now quite beyond the means of a working archaeologist like herself. The books she bought were more often those she did not really need and the second and attic floors contained a tempting range of them. What must have been the master bedroom was full of cookery books, gardening guides, and a vast selection of self-improvement manuals, from the advice on etiquette of the last century, to more modern self-expression. The back room, still with its nursery bars over the window, was lined and piled with fiction. Tamara leafed through forgotten volumes by long ignored writers, wondering whether their time had been well spent; yet she could imagine the unalloyed delight of holding a novel with her own name on the spine, and had an undefined, not entirely logical notion that producing one would, in some way, justify her existence. So far, when story telling had twitched at her mind, she had pushed the thought away. One could understand the purpose of archaeology. What good would the outpourings of her personal subconscious be either to readers, or to herself?
For the time being, Tamara read, borrowed and bought fiction, and here was a treasure house of it; she picked out a couple of early thrillers, a first edition of one of Rebecca West’s novels, a cookery book, a detective story by Glyn Daniel and one of C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series.
‘You chose the ones that have professional connections I see,’ Jeremy Ellice remarked. ‘An archaeologist, a civil servant, and a free woman.’
‘I get ideas from them.’
‘What ideas do you get from John Buchan? This one is a spy story I think.’
‘Various tips, here and there.’
‘I doubt whether one could use fiction as a recipe,’ Jem said, wrapping her up a copy of Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England. ‘Not like this one.’
‘That is for when I’m marooned on a desert island. It explains how to do everything from scratch.’
‘You look as though you would be resourceful enough without instruction. I still have to thank you for rescuing my sister. Where did you learn to cope as you did? Most girls would have fled screaming. And you look so fragile.’
‘I really didn’t do much.’
‘That isn’t what Margot told me. She said that you laid into the man like an Amazon.’
‘I suppose I lost my temper.’
‘That was either foolhardy or brave, then. But I can’t think how you managed to fight off a man Margot described as a thug. You’re a redoubtable girl.’
Somehow the bleak and shop-like ground floor had been transformed while Tamara was upstairs into a cosy room, like a cave turned into a home. Jem Ellice had aimed the spotlights to illuminate the rich leather covers of his most valuable wares, and had erected two wooden garden chairs, with brightly striped seats, on either side of the old fireplace, in which a gas fire hissed its blue flames. The mantelpiece carried a large black marble clock, with pillars supporting a triangular pediment. Miniature books were stacked between the pillars. Beside the hearth a mahogany table held heaps of literary publications, the London and New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, the Bookseller, Encounter, stacked beside various specialist journals of which Tamara had never heard.
‘It’s awfully nice here,’ Tamara said.
‘Sit down while I fetch some tea.’
‘I’ll get on with your sister’s manuscript. She’s sure to ask me what I think of it.’
Chapter Four
The wedding of the Prince of Horn and Lady Artemis Bessemer took place eight weeks before that of the Princess Royal and Prince Frederick William of Prussia. The two royalties had been chaperoned by a furiously bored Queen throughout a season of drawing room chats at Osborne and gentle walks at Balmoral. They were never alone together, but it was conventionally accepted that they were in mutual spontaneous love.
Artemis Bessemer was in Prince Joachim’s company twice; once when she refused to marry this stranger, again when she was united to him.
The Princess Royal took her leave of her home in the presence of a crowd shouting, ‘Be good to her or we’ll have her back.’ She and the Prince Consort clutched each other in tearful embraces before he left her in the cabin of the royal yacht.
The Earl of Bessemer said a curt goodbye to his daughter at the steps of the house in Belgrave Square before walking off to his club, relief marked in every line of his body. Artemis and Joachim von Horn set off, accompanied by their German attendants, in a procession of coaches. Artemis wrote to Clementine:
I am resolved to learn to respect my husband, and to make a life that I shall be able to share with you, dear sister, for I shall send for you, and for our dear Mrs Lambert, as soon as I may.
Mrs Lambert had written to Artemis that the Prince surely would be kind, though she might be surprised at some of his demands. ‘He will expect obedience,’ Mrs Lambert warned.
Unlike the Princess Royal, to whom tears came as easily as practised smiles, Artemis was determined not to cry. She reminded herself of French aristocrats going to the guillotine with gallantry, of Royalist heroines refusing to give their family secrets to Cromwell’s men. Artemis and Clementine had acted out many heroic roles. She promised, ‘He shall not see me tremble.’
Prince Joachim spoke little on the way to Gravesend. Once he touched her hand and said, ‘I shall make you happy. In Germany we expect love to follow marriage, not precede it.’
After all, there were many things to make a girl happy. The thirteenth Hereditary Prince of Horn and Reiss and Drachensfeld (to abbreviate his full tit
le) was among the richest men in Europe. He was the head of a famous, if now impotent, princely house, a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, a Baron of this, Lord of that – his description in the marriage contract had covered half a sheet of parchment. Artemis was to have jewels, money, furs, hunters, carriages, ladies-in-waiting. What lay ahead sounded dazzling in comparison with the schoolroom in Devonshire.
Artemis was the only one of the party not to suffer during the crossing from Gravesend to Antwerp. Joachim and all the servants were prostrated, and Artemis paced the deck alone. It was the last time she would be alone for a long time. Her ladies-in-waiting said, ‘The wives of princes are always accompanied. It is not done to be unattended.’
I am learning of many things that are not done, Artemis wrote. It was not done for husbands and wives to travel in the same carriage, even on a wedding journey. Artemis was attended by her two ladies, Frau von Brucke, the widow of a Baron, who frequently mentioned her husband’s rank, and Fräulein von Lansdorf, whose late father had been a general. Both treated Artemis with distant ceremony, and although they shared her travelling conveyances neither would sit down in her presence when they stopped at inns. It was not done. However, along with the deference to her husband’s rank, Artemis recognised their scorn for a wife who was not well enough born to share it. They curtseyed to her, but derisively, she thought.
The inns they stopped at were appalling. The servants hastened to lay the beds and tables with Joachim’s own linen and silver and to spread his own carpets on the rough board floors, but the heating was inadequate, the furniture primitive, and every night there were fleas and bed bugs. It was not done for Artemis to wear day clothes for dinner. She was obliged to put on the low cut dresses provided in her trousseau, revealing skin bumpy from insect bites. It was not done to wear a shawl.
Artemis had not known that married people were expected to share the same room, let alone the same bed. She was astonished when Joachim entered at one door and the maids simultaneously left by the other. Naturally she did not write of her experiences. It is from later veiled references after her child was born that one can deduce her reactions. She wrote then of the stupidity of hiding all information from the young, and of the shock it is to a girl to discover by experience things of which she could have been forewarned. For very few men is love what a young girl supposes it to be, she concluded.
Yet there can be no doubt that Joachim von Horn did love Artemis. Only a powerful emotion could have made him flout the rules of his caste by marrying out of it, and although money meant little to him, he had paid a lot for her. His definition of love, however, could hardly match Artemis’s. To a romantic girl of the eighteen fifties, love meant the meeting of two minds; to Joachim, of two bodies, and ungently at that. His name, like the Earl of Bessemer’s, appears on the list of a well-known brothel in London’s Soho, which specialised in providing young virgins, often bound or even chloroformed, for its clients. Many outwardly respectable men of the period were regular customers of such establishments; Joachim was not unusual. Artemis was unusual in that she was able to work out a logical explanation of what was happening. She had learnt something of physiology in her unconventional education, and she had seen what animals did, though it took her a while to draw the analogy. She reached a conclusion that, if neither complete nor correct, enabled her to understand that Joachim’s actions had not been the aberration of an abnormal man but the common behaviour of all men.
At the time, Artemis did not write of this, or of anything concerning her husband; only her later letters give some clues about these early days of her married life.
The journey was long and boring. The ladies-in-waiting talked about clothes and people. It was not done, or they were not able, to speak of public affairs, or of the countries through which they travelled, or even of the landscape. Conversation was of the Princess this, or the Countess that, and their marriages, ancestors and appearance. The ladies could or would not play the few games that Artemis had brought in her luggage, or even read. I am not fully persuaded that Frau von Brucke is able to read, she told Clementine.
Once Artemis mentioned Mrs Lambert. ‘She is a Prussian herself. It is she who taught me to speak German.’
‘The English accent is not attractive in our language. You must allow me to correct you,’ Fräulein von Lansdorf said. Artemis asked whether either lady might have known Mrs Lambert in Berlin.
‘We do not know those who are not of the nobility.’ That was definitely not done.
It was done to speak of the princely family with fawning expressions of esteem. Artemis would meet Prince Joachim’s mother, the Princess Bathildis, his brother, Prince Waldemar, whose wife, Princess Ulrike, was a lady of great rank whose alliance had done honour to both houses, and numerous aunts and cousins who lived with the family. All were described as gracious, condescending, kind, beautiful and noble.
Joachim himself spoke to Artemis only when they met at the dinner table – in monologue. ‘It is not done for ladies to express opinions on public affairs.’
This prince who had dared to marry a woman who could not be the mother of an heir, turned out, not surprisingly, to have reforming ideas about his own and his country’s future, some of which he explained to Artemis. He had been a student in 1848, a ‘year of terror’ throughout Europe, when thrones tottered, and those who remembered the French Revolution feared (or hoped) that the mobs would triumph again. Joachim had no wish to lose his throne, but he realised, more clearly perhaps than most German noblemen, how little power went with its pomp, and hoped to see some political realism introduced into the thinking of his class. Had his brethren known his thoughts they would have called him a dangerous radical. ‘But we shall see reforms,’ he assured his wife. ‘When Prince Fritz is King, he will dedicate Prussia to the welfare of the people – the whole German people. We shall see many changes during our lifetime. And one of them will be the freeing of such princes as myself from the chains that fetter their choice of a bride. You shall be the reigning princess, and our son will inherit my titles and fortune.’
At present, as her ladies repeatedly made clear to Artemis, Prince Waldemar stood to inherit everything. Waldemar and Ulrike had a son and a daughter. ‘She, of course, is eligible to marry the son of a king. Prince Joachim’s children however . . .’ Frau von Brucke had an habitual, sharp shrug with which she emphasised her denigratory remarks. She made it clear that she thought herself hard done by, having been reduced to waiting upon a lady who was not high-and-well-born, and on the day of their arrival at Horn itself she supervised the maids, as they dressed Artemis, with the expression of somebody who has been insulted.
The entourage consisted of numerous vehicles and outriders. For this last part of the journey Joachim sat beside Artemis in an open carriage. He wore uniform. Artemis had been put into a thin, low-cut dress, and her hair was coiled painfully around her head. She shivered with terror and cold as they crossed those last sandy miles of flat land. The Palace of Horn could be seen from far away. It was an immense white building, whose wings were spread across acres of land. Ranks of men in uniform or livery were lining the road, and stood in formation outside the Palace. At the foot of the curved staircase that led to the front door the Major Domo was waiting, and Joachim and Artemis followed him through the door, up the forty-five steps of the internal staircase, on each of which a footman stood, to the first floor, where rows of maids stood waiting to curtsey in unison at the Prince’s approach. The footmen wore blue coats covered with silver lace, with white gloves and gaiters. The maids wore short red dresses, with white fichus, aprons and stockings, and they had plaits of hair down their backs. The Major Domo was weighted down with gold braid.
Artemis noticed that the servants stared at her as though she were not a girl, but an example of some alien and unattractive species brought back from the Prince’s travels for his menagerie. Somewhere the word ‘Englishwoman’ was being whispered.
The Major Domo walked backwards before them a
s they processed through five large reception rooms, each furnished with the spindly gold furniture that had been fashionable in England half a century earlier. All the walls were riotously frescoed; the pillars, mantelpieces and floors were made of multi-coloured marble. At their approach, footmen opened each pair of doors with practised unison. Artemis was to learn that all the servants, male and female, took part in a military style drill every day.
Joachim’s family was assembled in the sixth salon. The Major Domo bawled out all his names and titles. Artemis, who had no right as a morganatic wife to her husband’s rank, was not announced by name.
The princely family was grouped around a porcelain stove; a young man, taller and more handsome than Joachim, in similar uniform, and, like Joachim, with his chest covered with medals and orders: Prince Waldemar; their mother, seated beside Princess Ulrike and three other ladies, all immensely tall and stout, their bosoms protruding like shelves before them; an aunt, a cousin. Artemis curtseyed several times, with no acknowledgement. Several ladies stood silently against the walls, but none was presented, and Baroness von Brucke and Fräulein Lansdorf moved to join them.
Joachim drew Artemis closer to his relations, and his mother held out two fingers, which Artemis brushed with her lips.
After a while, Princess Bathildis said, ‘She is very thin,’ and another lady said, ‘The English are always too thin.’
Artemis reported to Clementine that it was perhaps the most uncomfortable half hour she had yet experienced. None of the ladies addressed me. Perhaps they think I speak no German. They merely stared so that I did not know where to look. My husband and his brother left the room very soon, and it seemed an eternity before my new mamma crooked her finger at one of her ladies and said that I was to be shown to my apartments.