by Karen Harper
James was gone a great deal, often with male friends at night, but he didn’t object if Lucy went to the theater with Nellie, who was living with Mother in their small house on Davies Street. Unlike Mr. Kennedy, James didn’t fuss over the baby but merely patted her on her head on his way out the door. But Lucy had learned to love the company of her daughter.
But she could not even abide James’s presence anymore, nor evidently could he stand hers. Today he’d been berating her for having a friend who was divorced, and she’d defied him to keep up that friendship, and they’d been arguing about that off and on. How dare he chase after other women and hold a simple friendship with her own sex against her. She almost wondered if he feared it would give her ideas—and it had.
“Ding damn, Lucy, a woman like that divorced friend is what others call ‘not quite nice,’ and you know it! An outcast, a social pariah!”
“I imagine she had a husband who deserted her as you have us.”
“Are you daft, woman? Defiant and disobedient, I know, but quite daft? I will not have my wife designing her own clothes, let alone that of others! And I know how you think—you’d like to sew fancy dresses for your betters, and where would that put us then? Outrageous! Besides, my finances may not stretch to cover the fees you pay for materials and dry goods and decorations in this modest little house now, but I’ve hardly deserted you!”
“Perhaps that would not be a fate worse than death, anyway.”
He raised his hand as if to slap her. They argued a great deal, but he’d never raised a hand to her. Lucy glared at him, standing her ground. She heard Nellie come partway down the stairs from seeing Esme.
“I love,” James muttered for her ears alone, “the pantomime theater, but I can’t even pantomime that I care for you anymore.”
“Anymore? Your so-called care for me hardly lasted until Esme was born, then you were emotionally—physically and morally—out the door. Which would not be such a bad idea now,” she said brazenly and reached for the brass doorknob.
He narrowed his eyes and heaved an exasperated sigh. The sharp smell of liquor on his breath nearly knocked her over. His shoulders slumped. She thought for one moment he would crush the top hat he held in his other hand. He shoved her hand away from the knob, yanked the door open, and went out into the night.
Lucy stood in the doorway, staring after him. In the twilight, some people were afoot, some in carriages or hansoms as the gas lantern lighter went by with his little ladder from post to post. She hoped those people had calm and happy lives. She heard Nellie come the rest of the way downstairs.
“I’m sorry, Lucy,” she said. “Best close the door. The night air is cold.”
“It feels cold in here, too, all the time, but worst when he’s here,” she said and closed the door and locked it. They went into the narrow parlor and sank onto the settee Lucy had brought from the other house since she well knew their funds were dwindling.
“Sometimes, Nellie,” she said, her voice small, “I don’t know how I got to this place—in my life, I mean. I want to do so much to create beautiful designs and bring them to life but can do so little. You wrote from Paris that the French knew the difference between love and romance. Well, I do too, and I have neither.”
“He is a driven man for some reason—difficult, but he may change. Perhaps if he had a son—”
“Not from me, though I fear he’s sowing wild oats with others. He’s besotted not only with liquor but with those so-called pantomime girls. I overheard him tell a friend about them the other day, how sweet and pliable they are, how lovely—”
Lucy’s voice broke, but she sniffed hard and went on. “I can’t abide him anymore, I just can’t. You are wise to turn down your admirers and callers at the door, however much it is expected of you to wed. I know you regret depending financially on Mother and Mr. Kennedy still, and I wish I had some funds to help with that. My whole life like this—Esme’s too? James called me daft. I’ll go mad—I think I am mad to keep sketching my designs, sewing my gowns. I need a friend who is out in society to wear one of my creations, to attract attention from others, and then—”
Nellie gasped. “You mean go into trade? But—but, even at our place in the great social wheel of things—Lucy, it just isn’t done! Not without absolute ruin. I have to agree with James on that.”
“I know. I know! Mother would be shocked too. The few and far between new friends I have might drop me, and see—you were shocked. Now if I were only a man . . .”
“I can’t believe you said that.”
“Well, if you, of all people, don’t understand, I am doomed.”
“Not that I don’t understand your longing. I just mean I can’t believe you said that, however much the bold and brave tomboy you used to be and then how you stood up to Mr. Kennedy and now to James. Honestly, Lucile Sutherland Wallace, I sometimes know what you mean. Not that I’d like to be a man, but that I’d like to be a woman and not have to act like one.”
Lucy seized Nellie’s hand and squeezed it. “Something good has to be coming soon,” Lucy vowed. “Something beyond sweet Esme and living in London at last. Something way beyond marriage, I swear it!”
Instead of sobbing and hugging, they shook each other’s hands like men.
“I might as well say it right out,” Lucy told her mother and Nellie as she entered the largest upstairs bedroom of her mother’s house on Davies Street.
David Kennedy had died, and they were in his bedroom where his things were being packed or stacked to be given away. Lucy had left five-year-old Esme home—if it was home anymore—with her nursemaid, Simpson. Now she wended her way into the clutter and chaos, which was nothing like the chaos in her heart. She had vowed to herself she would be strong through this and would not dissolve in tears—and not over Mr. Kennedy’s demise, but over the news she was about to give.
She took a deep breath, gripped her hands together, then gritted out, “James has run off with one of his pantomime girls. He has deserted me, and our marriage is over.”
Mother gasped and sank into the chair that had been Mr. Kennedy’s favorite. Nellie, looking angry but not surprised, said, “A pantomime girl! A perfect match for one of his level of morality and mental acuity. Except for you, the man has terrible taste, and he leaves a terrible taste in one’s mouth.”
Lucy yanked her coat off and threw it amid the piles of Mr. Kennedy’s earthly goods. His funeral had been last month, and now James Wallace was dead too—that is, as far as she was concerned. It meant social and financial ruin, but she was glad James was gone. Still, she grieved for Esme, however terrible a father he had been. She and Nellie had missed their own long-gone father for years.
“Dear me,” Mother said, waving her hand before her face to give herself air. She looked so pale in her black mourning widow weeds, while Lucy and Nellie had only kept to black bonnets and cloaks, and that for Mother’s sake. She looked as if she’d faint, so Lucy went to kneel beside her while Nellie sat on the nearby ottoman.
“I was right about him from the first,” Mother said between deep breaths. “A bad apple to say the least. You, my dear, and darling Esme are what matter now.” She reached out to hold Lucy’s hand with her free one.
“But are you all right?” Lucy asked. “You’re not going to get the vapors? I didn’t, and you mustn’t.”
“You, faint? Hardly. And of late I’ve discovered I’m made of sterner stuff too—I’ve had to be. But this will mean disgrace for you and Esme, when she’s old enough. It will hang about her like—like an albatross round her neck. It’s always the woman who takes the brunt and blame of all this. Mr. Kennedy is gone, and I thought at last we would come into our own, so to speak. But unspeakable—this.”
Damn men, Lucy thought. God forgive her for that, but “ding damn” them. Not only the cruel, departed Mr. Kennedy but cruel, departed James Stuart Wallace.
“I just want both of you to know I eventually will demand a divorce,” she told them.
&n
bsp; “But—but that would bring even more difficulties,” Mother insisted, “however much you want James completely out of your life. At least you must not rush to it straightaway.”
“Lucy,” Nellie put in, “think of it from this angle. You’d not escape him if you ever began to sell your designs. You’d have to be known as Mrs. James Wallace. Besides, we’ve seen it’s the men designers who have the prestige and power. And with James’s name on your designs, what if the blackguard demanded a fee, so—”
“I know. I know! But somehow I am going to find a way to be just Lucile Ltd. for my designs, I swear I am. I have to try to get someone interested, to hire an extra seamstress. Even with meager finances as they are—as they will be . . .”
Tears welled up at last, blinding her. She blinked them away, but they clumped her lashes and speckled her flushed cheeks. She forced a stiff smile. “You know,” she told them in a quiet voice, “Esme doesn’t even ask about him—where he’s gone, when he’s coming back. He’s been gone from her for a long time, I guess. Mother, I’m sorry. I rushed into the marriage. I see that now.”
“I know you did. I know you did, my dearest.”
“So,” Nellie put in, “best you not rush into a scandalous divorce and ruin any chance to build a career in design for proper women.”
“If things are too tight or too awful,” Mother said, “you and Esme can move in here with Nellie and me. There will be so much more room now, and I’ve been left some money.”
“If I do—and I don’t want to uproot Esme now,” Lucy told her, “I will help here, and when I begin to sell my designs, I—when I can get my life together again, as if it’s ever really been together—except with both of you and now Esme . . . I’ll—I’ll be right back.”
Avoiding stacks of books and piles of shoes and clothing, Lucy rushed from the room and down the hall to the water closet where she could curse and cry.
“Now, Lucy,” Nellie told her sister in a sotto voce tone as they left the Lyceum theater and hailed a hansom. “I’m not sure that you should have accepted that party invitation. I know you’ve been on your own for over six months, but you are not divorced.”
“So you’ve reminded me time and again. This is not the court of King Arthur or Louis of France, you know. Times are quite different now.”
“Sadly, not for women in limbo. Anyway, I’ve missed you while I’ve been away visiting again, and it was kind of you to introduce me to the play’s cast, but shouldn’t we get home to Mother and Esme? I’m sure your nursemaid Simpson will wait up too, but—really—to an actress’s house? These and other friends you’ve made while I’ve been gone and you and Esme have moved in with Mother sound so—well, Bohemian.”
“They are uplifting and supportive, so please don’t judge them,” Lucy said. “You liked the drama, and you will like my new friends.”
“Well, yes, Ellen Terry is a fine actress. But just because she and her set don’t give a straw if you’ve been deserted and are considering a formal divorce, that makes them friendly? I mean, Lucy, really, what about that couple over there, who waved at you, the strange man with long, golden hair, obviously dyed.”
“Oh, back in the line for hackneys? He’s terribly clever and quite a critic of the way things are. That’s Oscar Wilde and his wife.”
“Wild indeed. And Ellen Terry is downright indifferent to her personal appearance and dress once she’s off the stage. You admitted that, and I can see it. I thought you wanted to seek out socially fit persons to wear your designs and so promote them among their class.”
“Don’t lecture me, Nellie. And don’t sound like a snob. If you don’t want to accompany me, I will drop you at home.”
“No. No, I said I’d go and you should have someone with you. I’ve missed you while I’ve been away. I’ll behave, big sister.”
“Perhaps all this will be fodder for your precious diary, which you claim you will turn into a novel.”
Nellie kept her mouth shut after that. The book she was hoping to write, inspired by memories of the people and places she’d traveled, could probably use some eccentrics—not that everyone wasn’t that to some degree. But that Oscar Wilde person, however witty, was dressed in black velvet knee breeches and had a huge sunflower in his buttonhole. And Mrs. Wilde was in a family way, yet was flaunting her bulbous belly with a tight dress when everyone from Victoria’s court down was diligent to hide the shape of a baby, even if everyone knew how pregnant one was. How in the world could Lucy be associated with romantic, lovely fashions when she was friends with people who dressed like that? And Nellie had the distinct, uneasy feeling she hadn’t seen anything yet.
Unfortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Wilde fit right in at the party, Nellie thought after their arrival. The actress’s house was in an area called Barkston Gardens in Chelsea near the Thames. Young girls that Ellen Terry had gotten off the streets offered everyone wine and tiny shrimp sandwiches. When they—the guests, too—sat, it was on huge ottomans with no backs, forcing them to recline as if they were at a Roman party or in a harem.
For a while, Lucy played the piano. She’d always taken to that, had even entertained passengers years ago on their ship from Canada to England.
“I’m a woman with a past,” Nellie overheard their hostess say more than once in a brief lull. Nellie wondered if that’s why the actress and Lucy seemed to be getting on, as Lucy now draped folds of fabric over Ellen while others remarked and applauded and Lucy promised to sew her a dress.
At least one man who came in late and in a hurry knew how to dress. Oh, and he seemed to know Lucy and went right to her. He took her hands and kissed her on each cheek but then he did the same with their hostess. Nellie overheard Ellen introduce him to everyone as “Dr. Morell Mackenzie, our own famous, brilliant throat surgeon, and one knighted by the queen! Besides, he makes sure my theater throat stays healthy.”
Nellie gasped. The not only famous but infamous Dr. Mackenzie! Surely everyone had read in the newspapers and gazettes how he had been summoned to Germany to treat the cancerous throat of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, who was wed to Queen Victoria’s daughter. There was some sort of brouhaha between the German militant conservatives headed by someone named Otto von Bismarck, and the so-called enlightened, parliament party, which Frederick’s family was caught up in. But there had been a scandal involving the English doctor.
She racked her brain for the details. Though the German doctors had declared Prince Frederick was suffering from throat cancer and should have his larynx removed—which would have meant the loss of his voice and the impossibility of him becoming German emperor—the eminent Dr. Mackenzie had examined the prince and insisted it was not cancer and could be treated, thus preserving his right to the throne. But when Frederick ascended, he only lived and ruled for a short time.
The German doctors had accused Mackenzie of ignorance, even of long-distance murder, though Frederick had lived long enough to attend Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrating her sixty years on the throne and promoting continued German-English ties.
In answer to the German doctors’ slurs against Mackenzie—and his being chastised by the Royal College of Surgeons for writing a book in defense of his actions—the once glorified doctor had lately been vilified in England. But he was obviously welcome here among these people, despite a larger scandal than Lucy’s desertion by her husband.
Yet, Nellie wondered, was this famous man so familiar with Lucy only from his attending the same gatherings here at Ellen Terry’s? If he’d been here before, why had Ellen Terry introduced him to everyone? He did look like a fish out of water.
Talk about drama and theater, Nellie thought. This is like watching a play right here. In the cast of characters, Morell Mackenzie was dark haired and wiry, with a purposeful, serious air about himself. He stood very straight, almost stiffly. His conservative dark suit made him stand out too. He spoke to everyone, greeting them, including, eventually her, whom Lucy had seemed to point out to him.
Finally, Nellie managed to slip in one of her own. “So where and when did you meet Lucy?”
“She brought Esme to my office when the child was about one year old and had a hacking cough the little dear could not shake. Some soothing medicine and elixir drops solved that, and she was very grateful.”
“I see.” So he’d known Lucy for almost four years!
“And I see that charm and beauty and talent runs in the family. Lucile says you like to write.”
“Yes, someday perhaps for publication. Fiction, hardly the subject of your medical books.”
“I wrote three before this last catastrophe. Choose your subjects carefully then, I would warn, but believe in what you write and then go ahead, only be prepared for criticism and conflict.”
He heaved a sigh, and his shoulders seemed to slump before he straightened them. His features crumpled for a moment, and he sighed again. She yearned to ask him how well he really knew Lucy. And, though Nellie had been back from her travels this time barely three days, why hadn’t Lucy—his Lucile?—so much as mentioned him?
He took her hand and bowed over it, then worked his way back toward Lucy. Nellie watched them chat. Shift positions. Smile into each other’s eyes, then look away. They talked more, earnestly this time, almost whispering. About what? The doctor moved stiffly as he bent toward Lucy, as a flash of pain crossed his face. Lucy was actually blushing, which, even with her pale skin, she almost never did.
