Beauty in Thorns

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Beauty in Thorns Page 32

by Kate Forsyth


  Georgie had been reading the writings of Lady Caroline Norton, who had some years earlier written an impassioned letter to Queen Victoria begging her to address what she called ‘the grotesque anomaly’ that married women in England were considered to have no legal existence of their own in a country ruled by a female sovereign. A woman’s property was her husband’s property. She could not make a will. She could not claim her own earnings. She could not leave her husband’s house without his permission. She could not sign a lease, or borrow money from a bank. She could not vote.

  A woman’s children were not her own. Legally, they belonged to the husband. If Georgie divorced Ned, she could lose all access to the children she adored. Once Georgie would have thought it impossible that Ned would ever do such a thing to her. Now she felt she did not know what he might do.

  She could throw him out. But the prospect of being a deserted wife was not a pleasant one. And Georgie was desperately worried about money. They were deep in debt now, and the financial manager of the Firm had warned them that any more scandal would ruin all of their prospects. Georgie had no means of supporting herself. She had not been trained for anything. If Ned left her, she would be left alone with two small children and no way to feed them. She remembered the beggar women she had seen as a child, barefoot and ragged on the streets of Birmingham, babies on their hips, cupped hands held out.

  It was the bleakest time of her life. She had never felt so lonely, or so afraid of the future.

  And Georgie longed for her husband with all her heart. She wanted to press herself against his tall slender form, her head nestled against his heart, his arms about her.

  In the end, she went home. What other choice did she have?

  You’re a heroine, Rosalind wrote to her.

  Georgie wrote back: Indeed my dear I am no heroine at all and I know where I come short as well as anyone else does – I have simply acted all along from very simple little reasons which God and my husband know better than anyone – I don’t know what God thinks of them.

  Dearest Rosalind, be hard on no-one in this matter and exalt no-one. May we all come through it at last. I know one thing and that there is love enough between Edward and me to last out a long life if it is given us …

  9

  Willow-wood

  Autumn 1869–Winter 1870

  Janey stood at the window, looking out at the street. Autumn leaves lay sodden on the cobblestones, occasionally rising and skirling as the wind rose. The rain had blown over, but mist drifted through the bare branches of the plane trees and obscured the iron railings.

  Behind her, Jenny and May were playing bears with Topsy on the carpet. On all fours, he growled and pretended to chase them, then rolled them over, tickling their tummies. The girls were screaming with laughter. The room was bright with lamplight, and behind the guard flames danced.

  In Highgate Cemetery, the gravediggers would be straining to lift the slab of marble from Lizzie’s grave. The ground would be wet. The men’s trousers muddied to their knees. Their breath smoking white. A small bonfire the only contrivance of colour. Smoke and mist together, smelling of autumn. Digging deep, earth rising high. The sudden clink as shovels hit the coffin. Squelch as someone jumps down into the grave. Heaving the coffin up. Mufflers over mouths. The awful job of levering up the lid. Gagging. Flame-light and shadows sorrowing at the bones and tatters within.

  Mr Howell would be standing by in his frockcoat and blood-red slash of ribbon, his top hat in his hand, his eyes lowered. He would be enjoying the drama of the moment. The doctor and the lawyer, standing back, disliking this task. Perhaps the lawyer would have his watch in his hand, thinking of his tea. He was there at the order of the cemetery, in case this exhumation was some elaborate trick to regain a secret will. The doctor would be uneasy, shifting from foot to foot, rubbing his gloved hands together. It was his job to disinfect the manuscript.

  Seven years it had been lying in Lizzie’s coffin, nestled between her cheek and her hair. Seven years of rotting away, food for maggots and worms.

  Janey did not know how Gabriel could do it.

  She was one of only six people who knew what was happening. His own mother did not know, even though the gravesite belonged to her. His brother and sisters did not know. His best friends did not know.

  Janey wished she did not know either.

  She thought of the poem he had written, the night that Charles Howell had first suggested digging up Lizzie’s coffin. Called ‘Willow-wood’, it was an interlinked sequence of four sonnets, and his first poem in almost seven years. Janey knew it off by heart. Phrases ran through her mind:

  O ye, all ye that walk in Willow-wood,

  That walk with hollow faces burning white;

  What fathom-depth of soul-struck widowhood,

  What long, what longer hours, one lifelong night …

  And her face fell back drowned, and was as grey

  as its grey eyes; and if it ever may

  meet mine again I know not …

  Janey shuddered.

  Gabriel should not disturb Lizzie’s grave.

  If her ghost had been unquiet for seven years already, how restless would she be now?

  Surely she would haunt Gabriel into his very grave?

  It was the longest, coldest winter Janey could ever remember.

  She felt ill all the time. Her back ached, and the muscles in her legs and feet would twitch and cramp constantly, making it hard to sleep. Food tasted strange to her, and often she felt nauseous. Her womanly cramps never seemed to ease, no matter the time of month, and she was always so tired. No-one could tell her what was wrong with her.

  Janey blamed London. Which meant she blamed her husband.

  She and Gabriel had not seen each other since Lizzie’s grave had been opened and the tattered book of poems recovered. There was too much gossip, too much speculation. Despite all Gabriel’s efforts to keep the exhumation secret, the news had leaked out.

  London was full of strange rumours. Lizzie’s body had not rotted away. Her face was still as perfect as the day she was buried. Her hair had kept growing long after death, so the coffin was overflowing with fiery golden coils. People said that her ghost was seen at Highgate Cemetery, drifting through the stone crosses and angels, her hair dragging behind her.

  In January, Janey went to see Gabriel, unable to bear it any longer.

  The Thames was grey and sludged with ice along the banks. Boys wrapped up to their eyes in mufflers poked about in the rubbish on the mudflats, looking for something to sell. A lone robin sat on a brittle branch, feathers ruffled up. The hems of Janey’s skirts were dirtied with smutty snow by the time she had walked from the curb of the street to Gabriel’s front door. She pulled her gloved hand out of her muff, and knocked on the door. After a long pause, she knocked again and then again.

  The door was opened slowly. Gabriel peered out. His eyes were deeply shadowed. He smiled when he saw her, though, and drew her inside, looking quickly up and down the street to make sure no-one was watching.

  ‘You have not written, asking me to sit for you,’ she said.

  ‘I cannot draw … or paint … my eyes … and look … my hands.’ He held them before her, and she saw they were trembling.

  ‘Oh, Gabriel. What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Who knows? Not I. The doctor says to stop drinking so much whisky, and to go to bed before midnight, and not to work. But you know I cannot do that.’

  ‘But if you cannot draw?’

  ‘I’ve been working on the poems.’

  She caught her breath. ‘So the manuscript? It was intact?’

  He did not answer her at first, leading her into the studio where at least it was warm. The room was dirtier and more crowded than ever, however, and Janey wished he would set her loose with a good stiff broom and her dusters. The edges of the canvases were furred with dust; she was sure it could not be good for him.

  Gabriel shovelled some more coal into the little pot-b
ellied stove, then drew her down to sit beside him, holding both her hands. His face was dark with tension. ‘It was just dreadful, Janey. The thing stank, though the doctor assured me it was not dangerous. But I could scarcely turn the pages without my stomach heaving. And no matter how much I washed, I could smell it for hours afterwards, on my hands and in my hair.’

  Janey’s stomach lurched in sympathy.

  ‘There were wormholes through the whole thing, destroying some of my best lines. And other pages had been stuck together and could not be eased apart. But I could see enough to reconstruct most of the poems, bit by bit.’

  When the grim task was done, he had burnt the original, unable to tolerate having it in the house. Janey could understand why.

  Gabriel hesitated. ‘Janey, I’d like to dedicate it to you … so many of the new poems were written for you.’

  She was aghast. ‘Oh, Gabriel, no. You can’t! Think of the scandal.’

  ‘I have,’ he said sombrely. ‘Oh Janey, I cannot tell you how much I wish things were different. If only I had married you when I first met you.’

  Janey found such words hard to bear. When she thought of her anguish when Gabriel had left her to go to Lizzie, and the long despair that had followed, it was hard to forgive him for the games he had played with her heart.

  Yet she had married Topsy. Gabriel had come to her, he had tried to stop her, but she had not trusted him not to hurt her again. And so now they were trapped in this unbearable triangle, each forged to the other.

  She laid her head on his chest, listening to the quick uneven tumult of his heart, his arms about her. There they stayed, not moving, not speaking, hardly breathing, till the room was dim about them. Then reluctantly Janey sat up, drawing herself out of his arms.

  ‘I need to get home,’ she said. ‘Look, darkness is falling already.’

  He rose too, putting out one hand to steady himself. He was haggard, his eyes red-rimmed. ‘Janey, will you forgive me if I don’t escort you home? I am so unwell …’

  She paused mid-step, torn between laughter and astonishment. Janey had always chafed against Gabriel’s insistence that she must always be accompanied, either by himself or her husband. When she thought how she had roamed the rookeries of Oxford at all hours as a child, begging for scraps, fighting for any tossed penny, it seemed ludicrous to be concerned about a staid cab drive along the gas-lit streets of Chelsea.

  Yet it was so unlike him. Gabriel was nothing if not chivalrous.

  She put out her hand and pressed his. ‘I’ll be fine. Look after yourself, Gabriel. Do as the doctor orders. I hope to see you soon.’

  ‘I’m worried about the poems,’ he confessed, walking her to the door. ‘So much of you is in them, Janey. What if someone guesses?’

  Janey could not comfort him. This was her fear too. She waited on the doorstep as he went out to hail her a cab, then went down the steps into the cold winter night, her hands huddled into her muff. She glanced back at him, trying to smile, then allowed the cab driver to hand her up into the carriage.

  She could not have explained what she felt. A kind of shadow on her soul, a sense that the ground was quaking under her feet.

  The next day Gabriel wrote to her, ‘The sight of you going down the dark steps to the cab all alone has plagued me ever since – you looked so lonely.’

  That was how Janey felt. She lived in a house buzzing with people – clients, customers, servants, carpenters, weavers, embroiders, her own sister, her own children, her own husband.

  Yet she was lonely.

  Gabriel wrote to her again a few days later, the letter as always being delivered clandestinely by Charles Howell.

  ‘Dear Janey, I expect this has come into my head because I feel so badly the want of speaking to you. No-one else seems alive to me now, and places that are empty of you are empty of all life. But more than all that for me, dear Janey, is the fact that you exist, that I can yet look forward to seeing you and speaking to you again … You are the noblest and dearest thing that the world has had to show me …’

  Janey wept and hid the letter carefully. She could not bear to burn it.

  In early February, another note came, begging her to come. The handwriting was sprawled and shaky, the words urgent.

  Janey had to go to him, but it was a risk. With Topsy working from home, he knew when she left and when she returned, and would never fail to ask where she was going. She could not lie and say she was going to see a friend. Topsy knew all her friends, and would quiz them about their meeting. So she made up some lie about matching embroidery silks, and took her sewing basket with her.

  Gabriel looked sicker than she had ever seen him look before. His olive skin was sallow, his eyes sunk into their sockets, and his hands trembled noticeably. He was also drunk, even though it was early in the afternoon.

  As soon as Janey stepped in over the threshold, he clutched at her. ‘Janey, I heard my daughter. She was here.’

  Chills ran over her.

  ‘What? But …’ She could not say it.

  His daughter had never drawn a breath.

  ‘I heard her, Janey. She was in the hallway, crying. I ran to the door and opened it, but nobody was there. I know it was my little girl, Janey. She would have been nine this year.’

  Janey knew Gabriel had a fixation with the number nine, just as his hero Dante Alighieri had. In his final painting of Lizzie as Beata Beatrix, Gabriel had shown the sundial casting its shadow over the number nine, to mark the time he had last seen his wife alive.

  She tried to reason with him. ‘Perhaps it was one of your wild beasts, Gabriel. The wombat, or one of the armadillos.’

  He shook his head, his eyes desolate. ‘No, Janey. It was my daughter. Crying for me.’ He began to weep. ‘It was her ghost, calling for me. Wanting me.’

  10

  Beauty Like Hers Is Genius

  Spring–Autumn 1870

  Ned was commissioned to paint a series of four female figures to represent the four seasons.

  He painted Georgie as Winter, draped in grey with a black hood and wimple like a nun, a book in one hand, the other held out above a small, smoky fire. Behind her a curtain, and beyond the bare branches of desolate winter trees.

  Ned painted Maria as Summer, lithe and beautiful, naked beneath her transparent gown, surrounded by roses and apples, forget-me-nots clustered below.

  Georgie found it hard to bear.

  In early 1870, he told Georgie he needed almond blossom. Armfuls of it. Georgie asked Rosalind Howard for help. Rather to her amazement she had discovered that Rosalind was an aristocrat, born into one noble family and married into another. Her husband, George, was the heir to the Earl of Carlisle, and they had a country estate that was the closest thing to a fairy-tale castle that Georgie had ever seen. Rosalind sent her a box of the fragile pink-and-white blossom, the first sign of spring.

  Ned painted as if in a fever, or a fit of madness. He painted Maria as Phyllis from Ovid’s tales of metamorphosis. Phyllis had been transformed into an almond tree by the gods after killing herself for love. When her faithless lover Demophoön came to find her, he embraced the tree in desperate sorrow, and the tree miraculously burst into bloom.

  In Edward’s painting, Phyllis herself was reborn, struggling free of the tree’s imprisoning wood, reaching for the fleeing figure of Demophoön. Her fiery red hair rippled across the almond blossoms, and her arms held the fleeing man as captive as the tree that still confined her body. On her face was a look of such longing. On his face, guilt and fear and horror. He was stark-naked, his bare legs entangled with the writhing green ribbons of the tree’s fluid sap.

  It was an extraordinary painting. The best thing Ned had ever done, and the most shocking. Georgie had never seen an unclothed man on a canvas before. Usually an artist concealed the sexual organs with draperies or leaves or a well-placed hand. Ned made no such attempt. His Demophoön was utterly naked and utterly vulnerable.

  In April, Ned sent it and ano
ther four paintings to the Old Water-colour Society summer exhibition. Maria Zambaco’s distinctive Grecian profile and huge, melancholy eyes were captured in every single one.

  A quote from Ovid was inscribed in the catalogue notes for Phyllis and Demophoön, which, when translated, said: ‘Tell me what I have done, except love unwisely.’

  It was the twisting of a knife in the wound for Georgie. She hated the thought of all London seeing her husband’s obsession with another woman.

  Two weeks after the exhibition’s opening, the President of the Old Watercolour Society wrote to Ned saying that they had received an anonymous letter complaining that Phyllis and Demophoön was lewd. They asked him to cover Demophoön’s genitalia with coloured chalk. Ned refused. He was then asked to remove the painting from the exhibition. Ned did so, then – when the exhibition was over – resigned from the society, swearing he would never show his work again.

  The scandal spread fast. Everyone was talking about Ned Jones and his voluptuous mistress and his lascivious paintings and his poor humiliated wife. Georgie took the children and fled London, going to stay near Marian Evans and George Lewes in Whitby.

  She did not know how she was going to survive the shame.

  The sun kept rising, the world kept spinning.

  Georgie returned home, determined to find a way to make a life for herself. She took up French lessons and joined a choir. She began to play the piano again, and taught her children their letters and numbers. She read as many books as she could find.

  Topsy dropped around to see her regularly, bringing her a bunch of bluebells or the latest novel. They talked of poetry and politics and their children, and never alluded to their spouses at all. He was such a square, solid lump of comfort.

  One day, Topsy shyly presented her with a sheaf of poems. His eyes would not meet hers, and his cheeks were flushed. ‘I wrote them for you, old chap,’ he said, and bolted.

 

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