by Kate Forsyth
For the next few weeks, Lizzie was confined to her bed, with mustard plasters applied to her chest and feet, and the doctor coming several times to take a basinful of blood from her veins. Her limbs felt heavy and, when she rose to use the chamber pot, her vision swarmed with tiny fizzles of light. It hurt to breathe.
She was still troubled by a racking cough, only eased by regular doses of Sydenham’s Laudanum Elixir. Luckily Mr Millais had agreed to cover her medical bills, though he had politely declined to pay the fifty pounds Lizzie’s father had demanded. Lizzie had been afraid that Mr Millais must be angry with her, but he wrote her a kind note thanking her for her work and assuring her that he had been able to finish his painting.
In May, the Royal Academy Exhibition opened. Lizzie insisted on rising and dressing, despite all her mother’s scolding. Her black dress was loose on her.
She limped along the cobblestones, her feet sore and tender. The wind cut through her thin coat, and made her breath wheeze in her chest. The sound frightened her. It was too much like the rattle in her brother’s lungs in the last weeks of his life.
Soon Lizzie was feeling so faint, she realised she would never manage to walk the three miles to the academy. Digging in her purse, she found a few pence and hailed an omnibus. It lurched over to the curb, and she caught hold of the leather strap and hauled herself inside. The omnibus jerked and jolted over every bump and pothole till Lizzie’s head ached, but at least she could rest her weary legs.
Lizzie paid her shilling, and slowly made her way into the exhibition. She looked all through the crowd but she could not see Gabriel anywhere. She asked an usher where she could find the Ophelia painting, and he smiled. ‘Ah yes. In the West Room. It’s been a dreadful crush, everyone wants to see it.’
Lizzie’s heart missed a beat.
‘Some people queue up for an hour to see it, then go back to the end of the line so they can see it again.’
Smiling, Lizzie joined the end of the long serpentine file. It moved so slowly, she had plenty of time to view all the other paintings covering the walls from floor to ceiling. When at last she reached Ophelia, her breath caught. It shone out of the multitude of gloomy paintings like a window on to a summer’s day. Yet it was a summer day overshadowed by the brazen light that comes just before a thunderstorm. Ophelia was caught at the very moment of surrender to her death, her hands relaxing, the centre of her gravity sinking into the shadowy depths. It was mesmerising. And heartbreaking.
‘Miss Sid!’
Lizzie spun on her heel at the sound of Gabriel’s voice. He was coming towards her, both hands held out, delight on his face. Her face lit up in response. He grasped her gloved hand. ‘It’s good to see you. I wondered if you would come to see yourself in all your glory.’
‘I wanted to see how it turned out.’
‘Magnificently, as you can see.’
‘It’s the heroine of the hour herself!’ Walter Deverell said. He and Gabriel had been lounging against the wall, laughing and teasing Johnny Millais as he did his best to respond to the adoration of the crowd.
‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’ Gabriel said. ‘Ophelia is a sensation!’
‘Not everyone likes it,’ Walter said. ‘Did you read the Times? I quote! “There must be something strangely perverse in the imagination which sources Ophelia in a weedy ditch, and robs the drowning struggle of that lovelorn maiden of all pathos and beauty.”’ He laughed.
‘Even Mr Ruskin is not wholly convinced,’ Gabriel said.
Lizzie looked at him in sudden swift anxiety.
‘He called Surrey “that rascally wire-fenced garden-rolled-nursery-maid’s paradise”,’ Walter told her gleefully. ‘He must really hate the place.’
‘Don’t mind us,’ Gabriel said. ‘We’re just teasing Johnny so his head doesn’t swell. Everyone thinks you’re a great beauty and a perfect Ophelia.’
Lizzie looked up at him in gratitude.
‘Johnny said you’ve been unwell, that you caught a bad cold after your dunking. Are you still fagged to death?’
She shook her head, so glad to see the concern in his eyes that she felt quite light-headed. ‘I am much better, thank you,’ she answered, smiling up at him.
Gabriel laid his hand on her arm, as if they were not standing in a crowded hall where everyone could see them. ‘Johnny should be ashamed of himself, making you ill on his behalf. I’m half minded to call him out!’
Lizzie smiled. ‘What, paintbrushes at dawn?’
‘He’d thrash me, the way I’m going. Look at him, the belle of the ball, and I haven’t a thing to show for all these past months of work. Maybe you’re the magic key. Maybe I should whisk you away, keep you all to myself, and see what masterpiece I come up with.’
She looked up at him, meeting his eyes boldly. ‘Maybe you should.’
It had been two years since Lizzie had met Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Even his name was unlike any other.
His friends called him Gabriel, as if he were angelic, but she had never known anyone so much of this earth. He loved to laugh, to talk, to eat, to make merry. He had dark wavy hair, worn long over a soft collar, and his eyes were deep set and ringed with shadows. His voice was low and deep and melodious, with a fascinating hint of a foreign accent.
He had been christened Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, but he had dropped the prosaic Charles and changed the order of his birth names to better effect. Lizzie understood why. Names were important. Gabriel had convinced her to change the spelling of her own last name, from Siddall to Siddal. He said it looked much more refined that way.
She had first seen Gabriel in the painted shape of a fool, singing, in Walter Deverell’s painting, Twelfth Night. The sight of him had stirred nothing in her. At that time, she had been indulging in a few foolish daydreams about Walter. But as soon as Lizzie met Gabriel, Walter and all the other young artists simply faded away.
‘Your hair,’ he had said, ‘is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. It is molten gold. I must paint you.’
Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before.
Lizzie had always been considered sadly plain. It was not just her red hair, though that was quite bad enough. It was everything. She was too thin and bony, and had too many freckles. But since Gabriel had declared her a ‘stunner’, his word for a woman of extraordinary beauty, suddenly everyone seemed to admire her.
And Gabriel seemed to have laid claim to her. If any of his friends wanted to paint Lizzie, Gabriel would turn up at their studios uninvited, his coat pocket bulging with pencils and battered old paintbrushes, and draw her too. Then he would offer to walk her home afterwards. Lizzie did not want him to see where she lived, but she strolled through Hyde Park with him, listening raptly as he told her about the great artists he and his friends considered Immortal, and quoted his poetry to her.
‘Her hair that lay along her back, was yellow as ripe corn,’ he declaimed, while boldly twisting one of her long red-gold tendrils about his fingers. ‘I must have known I was to meet you, Miss Sid. I immortalised you in verse before I even knew you!’
Lizzie was utterly enchanted.
When she was with Gabriel, she was able to imagine herself as he saw her. Luminous, intelligent, bold.
He understood what a risk she had taken agreeing to model at all, and understood at once that she had done so because of her love of Art.
‘I’ve never met a girl like you before,’ Gabriel said.
She laughed. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you either.’
He tried to kiss her a few times, and she had to turn her face away and hold him off with one hand. ‘I cannot help myself,’ he had said. ‘You should not look so delectable if you don’t want fellows to try and kiss you.’
Then his face had darkened. He had demanded to know if any of his friends had tried. Lizzie had thought Walter Deverell might have liked to, but he had never managed to screw up enough courage to try. She did not tell this to Gabriel, though. His mood could
change from humour to discontent or anger very quickly. Her denial pleased him.
‘One day,’ Gabriel said, ‘I’ll be a great artist, and sell my paintings for hundreds of guineas, and then we’ll run away to Italy and live in a castle on an island, and do nothing but paint and write poetry all day.’
‘I’d like to go to Italy,’ Lizzie replied primly, though her spirits soared.
Lizzie knew she should be guarding her heart as carefully as she guarded her virtue. It was such a strange experience, however, having someone else’s attention focused so intensely upon her face, her hair, her figure. She loved the way Gabriel’s fingers trembled when she unpinned her hair, how he laughed when she gave free rein to her observations on those she saw around her, and how he never thought she was a fool just because she was female. She had never felt such power.
Could it ever be?
Her father was an ironmonger.
His father had been an Italian poet and a revolutionary, fleeing the despotic rule of the King of Naples in a rowing boat.
Her mother had been born in Shoreditch.
His mother was the daughter of an Italian scholar and translator.
Her uncle owned a grocer’s shop in Barnsbury.
His uncle had been John Polidori, Lord Byron’s doctor and the author of the infamous story, ‘The Vampyre’.
Lizzie was just a shop-girl.
Gabriel was a poet and a painter, and the self-professed leader of a mysterious brotherhood of young men who had decided they were going to change the world with their art.
Surely it was not possible.
But did Gabriel and his friends not scorn the old rules? Did they not want to make the world anew? Surely, in the world that they imagined, anything was possible?
We live but once in this world, Lizzie thought. She had to try to live the life she wanted, even if she risked everything.
4
The Girl Who Unfastens the Door
Summer 1852
Lizzie sat with her eyes closed, a strand of her hair held between her lips, a distaff lying loosely in her other hand. She had sat in this exact pose, not moving a muscle, for what seemed like a very long time.
With her eyes shut, her other senses were heightened. She could hear the flurry of Gabriel’s pencil, the rustle of a mouse in the thatch. She could taste the tang of salt in her hair, and smell Gabriel’s distinct spicy odour.
On her tongue lingered the bitter aftertaste of the laudanum she had drunk before settling into her pose. She did not want her cough to bother her, disturbing her pose and breaking Gabriel’s rhythm.
Outside the bees hummed in the summer garden. This little thatched cottage on Highgate Hill seemed a thousand miles away from Southwark. Gabriel had needed somewhere to stay and work, and some friends of his had given him the use of the studio in their garden. It had one small panelled room downstairs, which Gabriel used as his living space, and a tiny bedroom in the gable above, reached by an outside stair. Ivy grew over the mullioned windows, giving the room a mysterious green cast. Gabriel had set Lizzie in the deep window-seat, so the light struck over her shoulder and touched one side of her face. Beside her, in the shadows, was set an old spinning-wheel.
Lizzie was dressed in a white chemise that laid bare her arms. Her hair hung loose down her back. She was posing as Delia, a woman in ancient Roman times who was waiting for her lover. Gabriel had read her the poem that had inspired his painting.
You too, Delia, don’t be shy at deceiving the guard.
Be daring: Venus herself assists the brave.
She favours the youth who tries out a new threshold,
or the girl who unfastens the door …
Lizzie knew she had broken every rule of propriety, coming here to this secluded cottage with a young man. The other artists’ studios had been busy places, with Johnny Millais’s mother within earshot, or Walter Deverell’s sister drawing at her own easel. Here she and Gabriel were all alone.
Tension taut as a copper wire between them.
At last Gabriel laid down his pencil and came towards her. Lizzie opened her eyes and looked up at him. His fingers lifted her hair and arranged it gently so it fell over her shoulder. ‘I am almost afraid of trying to paint you,’ he whispered. ‘How can I catch all this beauty?’
She smiled at him. He bent and kissed her. Lizzie ran her hand up his back, feeling the play of muscles under the silk of his waistcoat. Their kiss deepened. Gabriel’s hands began to explore her body through the thin cambric of her shift. She drew him closer. His breath caught, and he stepped away, running a hand through his hair. ‘I mustn’t,’ he said, his voice huskier than ever.
‘Don’t you want me?’ she challenged him.
He looked at her in surprise. ‘Of course I want you! But … well, you know I have no money … I cannot afford to marry … and I should not take advantage of you …’
She stood up and put her arms about his neck, pressing herself against him. ‘Aren’t we trying to disyoke our necks from custom?’
It was a line from a Tennyson poem he had been reading to her, about a princess who had sworn never to marry, so that she would not be the slave or toy of any man.
Lizzie knew it would make him laugh and catch him to her, kissing her again. After that, it was easy. They fumbled at each other’s clothes, sometimes laughing, sometimes sighing in surprise. Their bodies seemed to know what to do instinctively, each new discovery unlocking another secret. Afterwards, he rested his head in the curve of her shoulder, his breath rapid and uneven. Her fingers played with his hair.
‘Lizzie, darling,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for so long.’
She gave a soft murmur in response, kissing his bare shoulder, stroking his back.
When he lifted away from her, fastening his trousers, his fingers suddenly stilled. Sitting up, she saw a reddish stain on the white linen. She pulled the chemise down, tucking the stain out of sight.
‘So … you’ve never done it before either?’
When she shook her head, he looked troubled.
‘We’ve discovered it together.’ Her voice cracked with the intensity of her feelings. ‘Isn’t that the best way?’
Gabriel kissed her tenderly, then rose and – half-naked – found his pencil and sketchbook and began to draw her again. He filled page after page with her image, looking up only to ask her to move her chin a little to the left, or to bite her lip a little harder. Every now and again he rushed over to kiss her again.
Lizzie sat, her lips curved, her hands relaxed. She did not speak, or sigh, or shift her weight, or ask for a break. She did not want to break his intense concentration on her face, her lips, her eyelids. She wanted him to keep drawing her forever.
At last it was time to leave, and Lizzie put on her grey dress and bonnet. There was a moment’s difficulty when she realised that she must ask him to pay her for the afternoon’s sitting. She hesitated, not wanting him to think of her as some kind of harlot, wanting money in payment for her body. Gabriel had the same moment of realisation, and turned red. He laid out the usual fee, busying himself with his palette and easel while she tucked the money away in her purse.
Gabriel toyed with his paintbrush. ‘I think I am ready to start the water-colour now. Can you come early tomorrow? And stay late?’
Lizzie did not want him to think of her as too easy a conquest, so she answered a little coolly, ‘I might have things of my own to do.’
He looked up in sudden jealousy. ‘You aren’t going to see Walter, are you? I know he wants to paint you again.’
‘I might be.’
‘Don’t go, Lizzie. I need you here.’
Her heart melted. ‘All right. I’ll come then. But only if …’
‘Only if what?’ His voice was wary.
‘If you’ll teach me to paint.’
Light kindled in his eyes. ‘Gladly!’
The long summer weeks passed by, and each day Lizzie and Gabriel were easier in each other’s compan
y. When she was not modelling for him, they read side by side in the window seat, or talked eagerly of art and poetry. Gabriel gave her a sketchbook, and Lizzie drew pictures of girls in loose dresses, drawing, reading, day-dreaming, girls who looked just like her.
‘Do you think I should go to the Academy of Design? They have life-drawing classes there.’ Lizzie pressed her hands together hopefully. She felt she needed to ask him, for it would mean that she could not model for him as much, and Gabriel did not like it when she modelled for anyone else.
He looked up from his easel. ‘Oh, I don’t think so. Places like that do nothing but strangle your creative freedom. You’ll learn more puttering about here, with me to help you.’
Lizzie nodded, trying not to show her disappointment. She had so badly wanted to take lessons and learn properly, with other women who wanted to be artists. But she could not afford to do so without Gabriel’s help, now that she was no longer earning much through her modelling.
One problem was that Gabriel was not the most committed of teachers. If an idea for a poem struck him, he would wander off and start writing. Or he would go in search of a book, and Lizzie would find him standing and reading a quite different book half an hour later.
He also liked to show her by example. One day he seized her sketchbook and, with just a few swift strokes, transformed her stilted drawing into something full of life and drama. He then gave it back to her, grinning.
‘I can’t do it! It’s no use.’ Lizzie had thrown her sketchbook down.
‘Rubbish,’ he answered. ‘It takes a lifetime of practice to learn. You are a few years behind me, that’s all. The more you draw, the more your fingers will remember.’
So Lizzie drew until her fingers could scarcely be unlocked from around her pencil.