Becoming Belle

by Nuala O'Connor

  “Why should you care what those people say or think, Belle? As a family, the Le Poer Trenches have been unkind to you.”

  “I suppose you’re right, Isidor,” she murmured.

  “Don’t addle yourself with how they think. You’re my friend and I mean to help you. That’s nobody’s concern but ours.”

  “We don’t live as other people live,” Belle said.

  “There! Quite right. We certainly do not.”

  She stared out the window again. Truly, how could William do this to her? Was their love not enough to fasten him to her side? She struggled to understand that he was actually gone, that he could forsake her so, with no care for how his actions would be perceived by the world. With none for his duty as husband.

  “William has simply left. I can hardly fathom it.”

  “It’s a strange business indeed. Dunlo will explain himself by and by.”

  Belle turned to Wertheimer. “William has not provided for me, Isidor. I earn, of course, but he has simply abandoned me.”

  “It’s as I thought. Come now, we will evacuate your Conduit Street room and get you comfortable. We shall go to my house in St. John’s Wood and you will stay there. I will keep a bedroom, but you will be mistress of the house.”

  “Why, Isidor, since when have you had a house in St. John’s Wood? Have I seen so little of you recently that I don’t even know where you live?”

  “I only lately took the house; I stay there occasionally. You were right, of course—Maidenhead is only suitable for rail buffs and old biddies. Fairleigh Lodge might’ve been in the Scottish Highlands it was so far from life.”

  He put out his hand to Belle and she rose. Yes, best to follow Isidor; he seemed to know what to do. Her head was disarrayed and the ache of William’s desertion bled through her. How could he do this? How inferior his family must think her to force him abroad and away from her. How tyrannized William must be to have obeyed the earl. Belle walked to Wertheimer. Arm in arm they left her husband’s rooms and descended in the lift to Burlington Street.

  AN APPARITION

  The Juma

  July 1889

  My darling Belle,

  I am here and I do not truly know why I am here, for my heart is in London with you. I am ill with remorse. I long to be with you and you only, I long to be away from this ghastly Mr. Robinson that Papa has entrusted me to. You are my world, Belle, you are all to me. I stand beside the ship’s forecastle each day, smoke cigarette after cigarette and look at the lurching sea. The churned-up water makes me skittish; I measure the tedious progress of the ship across the blue. The hours and days accumulate and I wonder what they will make of your love for me. I wonder if Wertheimer will claim you, somehow make you his own, despite our marriage, despite his penchant for the stronger sex. I worry that he will swoop on you and bend your mind and heart away from mine. Please don’t let it happen, my darling. Know that I think of you, and only you, all day and all night.

  I fear my own heart will stagnate, become a sorry stone. How am I to do without you by my side, Belle, always loving, always bright? What if you cannot forgive me for leaving? What if your love wanes and you no longer want to be my wife? These are the thoughts that torment me as I sail farther away from you. I picture my heart with its four pulsing chambers and wonder if each of them holds desires that contradict the others. Do one’s feelings walk from heart room to heart room—conflicting, unsettled, unknowable? Oh, how is a man to know how to do what is right? The heart, I think, is no better than an oubliette, a secret dungeon that shuns light. Or perhaps that is just my own. If you fail to understand me, rest assured you are not alone in your bewilderment. I don’t much understand myself.

  I’m furious with my father, at least know that. Confusion and obedience got me aboard this ship, but now I don’t understand why I acquiesced. I’m a married man. A man, damn it, and Father should not dictate to me anymore. When I think of your turmoil, my love, on finding me gone, shame slicks over my body like sweat.

  I might be on the ocean floor with the anemones for all I care about myself. But you! How ludicrous, Belle, that the distance between us should grow wider and that I don’t know what you’re doing at this very moment. Is it night or day in England now? Are you in slumber or awake? Oh, why did I leave you? Father bullied me and I let him. I wish I could stand up to him, but he’s so forceful it feels impossible. I wish for a clearer hold of my own destiny and the strength to steer it. I want you, Belle, I really do, so why did I not grab on to you and hold fast and damn Father to hell?

  In a clutch at comfort, I sit in my cabin and chant “The Sailor’s Farewell” and it’s your sweet voice I hear:

  “Sweet, oh! sweet, is that sensation

  Where two hearts in union meet:

  But the pain of separation,

  Mingles bitter with the sweet.”

  I never imagined the separation in the song would be ours. My mind is a bramble of concerns. When I’m not worrying about you, Belle, or the pile of debts I left behind, my mind turns over the fata morgana I witnessed last night. I was by the forecastle, smoking, when the horizon seemed to shift and distort into a cloudy mass. I squinted at the vision and, before my eyes, the clump—was it sea mist, the air?—transformed into the outline of a floating castle. As I watched, the shimmering shape gained turrets and windows. We were miles from land and as we stood and stared, Robinson and I, the apparition rose from the sea and hovered above the violet line of the horizon. The vision changed once more, turning gray and taking the form of a human head and, finally, to my mind, it took the shape of your own dear countenance! How I trembled, Belle. Did my bad conscience summon your face? Did you come to scold or forgive me?

  I asked the captain later about the vision. He said there are certain conditions of the atmosphere when the sun’s rays are able to form a picture in the air of objects below, like reflections one sees in glass or water. The sea warps the air and conjures phantoms that men firmly believe in, mirages. Somewhere between horizon and water things are sorcered to life. The captain said many a seaman has been driven frantic with desire or fear when he fancied he saw sea nymphs or fantastical leviathans of the deep. I said to him, “But I saw my wife’s face!” The man just shrugged and I got the feeling of sailors’ secrets being kept from me.

  I lay on my berth last night, jarred in every nerve. And, though rattled, I fell into a profound sleep. I woke fusty and shaken in the dawn, the cloudy silhouette of your lovely head floating in my mind like a revenant. I sit now writing to you, unfed and unnerved, wishing only for your darling voice in my ear, your hand in my own. I have the curl of your hair that you gave me, I lift it to my nose and smell it; I even poke at the hair gently with my tongue to see if I can taste anything of you on it.

  My only Belle, I always and forever love you, my darling, please know that. If only I could hold you now and explain, into your ear, why all this has happened. If I knew how to . . . It vexes me keenly that I have upset you and left you confounded. I do hope that you can forgive me and try to understand.

  Papa has promised to take care of you in my absence, but as England gets farther and farther away, I begin to doubt him. Please write to me, my love. I will send this letter from Hong Kong where you may find me at the Hong Kong Club on Queen’s Road. I will be there for a spell before sailing onward to the antipodes. Please tell me you haven’t forgotten your Dunlo, who is now and ever yours. I wish that instead of the gold heart I gave you on our wedding day that my heart lay against your breast at this moment and forevermore. Thank God we are married. Nobody can part us now.

  Your loving William

  A DOMICILE

  It’s not as if love can be parceled up and conveniently stored for when it’s needed,” Belle said. “Love is wild and wayward; it has its own way of catching hold of a person, doesn’t it? Love lands where it lands, without agency—much—from the lover. And certainly
not from the love object.” Pritchard fussed on his perch, cocked his head fully sideways and looked at Belle with his apple-pip eye. He opened his beak and sang in fluting trills. “I love William and he loves me; that’s not easily torn asunder by anyone or anything. Not the earl, not time, not distance.” Belle poked her finger into the canary’s cage. “You understand, don’t you, Pritchy?” The bird flitted and Belle took this for an emphatic yes. She wasn’t sure she understood any of it herself. William deserted her, his wife, because his father was a persecutor. Oh why could he not have stood up to the earl, refused to be tyrannized? Belle had managed to escape from her mother’s oppression, but perhaps William found it harder to run. But, there, he had run from her! Ah, but he would be back. In four months, when he turned twenty-one, he would be back.

  Belle’s thoughts rose, commingled and fell, a medley of hope for the future and fear of it. She shook her head to unrattle herself and wandered from the parlor into the smoking room. It was her favorite part of the house—Sixty-three Avenue Road—and it was there that Wertheimer always seemed most at home. His beloved pair of porcelain pugs bookended the mantelpiece, oak shelving held his favorite volumes and the wallpaper was a soothing olive color. His smoking cap and jacket, the former embroidered with autumn berries, the latter of navy brocade, lay across his chair back, waiting for him. She fingered the beautiful jacket and looked around; how grand it would be if this was her and William’s house, if these were their things.

  The smoking room held heat in a way Belle had never experienced—even when the coal was down to embers, the room was cozy and provided the warm embrace that she always craved. She had gifted Wertheimer a marble ashtray, for the cigars he so enjoyed, and it sat on the walnut table by his chair. Isidor didn’t smoke in the careless manner of other men—he sipped at each cigar as if tasting a new wine. He luxuriated over them and liked to watch the smoke leave his mouth in fancy coils. Belle liked the ceremony he made of smoking and she sometimes smoked a Navy Cut, to keep him company.

  Number sixty-three, nestled in St. John’s Wood, wasn’t as big as Wertheimer’s Maidenhead place, but its compactness suited Belle. As she was at the theater by night, she spent a large part of each day in her nightgown, strolling the rooms, stopping to examine Wertheimer’s eclectic belongings or staring out at the street and thinking of William and wondering at their situation, about all the things that conspired to cause it: the Clancartys, William’s malleability and, she had to admit, her own past.

  Belle peered out the window, seeking the man she had noticed who often lurked near the house. His favorite position was behind an oak directly across the road. Sometimes he jotted in a book; more often, he lingered and ogled like a person in a trance. He clearly thought he was being clandestine but, what with the burgundy suit he wore and his regular presence, he was hard to mistake.

  Once Wertheimer had run out to him, shouting at him to declare himself, but the man scurried off.

  “That fellow is Clancarty’s spy, I know it,” Wertheimer said, when he came back inside.

  “Would the earl go to such lengths, Isidor?”

  Wertheimer snorted. “He suspects us, no doubt, of untoward behavior. And old blood will go to any lengths to protect themselves, Belle. That man is following you—following us—and no good will come of it.”

  They did not see the man for a week after that, but he spooked Belle: he was a shadow, a ghost, and she felt that his shifty presence portended something bad for all of them. She looked over at the oak now, but the burgundy-suited man was not there; the street was barren and hushed. The vibrato of London’s heart seemed a long way off, though it wasn’t. Number sixty-three held a muted clamor to itself as if in anticipation of a great party. But there were no parties; Belle was mostly alone, apart from the servants. Wertheimer kept a bedroom but never stayed the night, even after accompanying Belle home from the theater. He changed his clothes in his room sometimes, but the bed remained unrumpled and Rosina, the maid-of-all-work, went in there to open shutters, refresh the flowers and, once a week, to dust.

  Belle had hours in which to think, to make a fine warp and weft of all that had happened, to wish for William’s return. He would come back to her, she was certain, but why did he have to stay away so long? She was forlorn in a way that hollowed her out; she realized that she had never truly felt proper loneliness before, the kind that makes a listless wreck of a person. It was a cruel separation indeed.

  Picking up a newspaper, Belle sat into Wertheimer’s chair and flicked her eyes over the stories; little could distract her from thoughts of William, from missing him, but she had to try. Her eyes alighted on a paragraph about a woman who had drunk ammonia and perished. Her husband, the piece said, had the musical first name “Summerscales.” She read that the woman’s mother had died and it “weighed on her spirits” so she took her own life.

  “Fool!” Belle said aloud. That ammonia-swigging twit had a husband present and willing, and she killed herself over a dead woman. And here was Belle, missing her husband with every ounce of her flesh, unable to see or hold him. “People know not how fortunate they are,” she murmured.

  A movement by the door startled her—it was Jacob Baltimore, the Negro page boy Wertheimer had hired. He had most of the duties of a footman, though he was utterly inexperienced, and he seemed to Belle to slink through the house like a stoat.

  “Enter, Jacob,” she said.

  “Ma’am,” he said, and placed the morning post on the chiffonier. He wore lavender gloves that were identical to Wertheimer’s and Belle wondered idly if he had taken them or if Isidor had gifted him the gloves. Isidor had mentioned something about Jacob and a coat that went missing, but Belle could not recall the details. Still, Isidor took the precaution of not allowing Jacob a set of keys.

  “Stay a moment.” Belle didn’t wish him to know she was lonely—he was a servant and a boy at that—but she longed for conversation. Anything to extricate herself from her own head.

  “Ma’am?” he said, and there was a touch of insolence about his steady gaze that seemed to say I know you. I know about you and your ways.

  Belle tolerated his contempt; she had no time for servants who cringed. Her preference was for audacious types—those maids and footmen who meant to better themselves and who did not hide it.

  “Hand me the letters,” she said, “I may need to make a reply.”

  Jacob gathered the envelopes and the brass letter opener, came across the room and held them out on a tray. Belle flicked through them and, finding nothing from William, dismissed the lot with a wave.

  Jacob stood a moment and his gaze traveled downward to where the gold heart nested in Belle’s cleavage. She put her fingers to the heart and trailed it back and over on its chain, pulling it up so that she then traced it across her open lips. Jacob’s liquid eyes lingered a few seconds too long before he stepped back, bowed slightly, then turned and fled the room. Belle sighed. He was a mere sprout, fifteen years old at most. She knew she mustn’t tease, but he had started it with that unchaste glim at her bosom. Oh, Lord, she needed to do something. It was all very well performing at the Empire every night, but her daytime moping achieved less than nothing. William had promised he would come back, his letters said so, but the waiting game was not one Belle liked to play. She missed William, the gorgeous physical presence of him, his arms, his voice; it hurt not to hold and kiss him. But lounging in sorrow was too dispiriting and her urge to tantalize Jacob, no matter how brief, left her feeling unclean. She would go out; she would summon Isidor and have him take her somewhere. He would help her recapture some vigor.

  FALL AND WINTER 1889

  AND SPRING 1890

  London

  AN OUTPOURING

  Hong Kong

  October 1889

  My darling Belle,

  I am sending you a bouquet of lines to soothe my sorry mind and to carry my most loving wishes across the seas
to you. The ache of not being with you is as fresh today as it ever was. Much as I don’t have the heart for joy, being so far from you, Hong Kong is, I must own, enchanting. If only you were here to see it, too. How you would enjoy the sight of pigtailed men in smocks and trousers of blue, some pulling carts ten times their size, hung with brooms, dusters, cups, baskets, dolls and every kind of bagatelle and bauble. I wish you were here to share in each strange sight I see. I shall purchase a trinket for you, my dear, something shiny and useless.

  The peasants stare at me, interested, I suppose, in my pale coloring and height. There’s novelty for me in being somewhere so alien, even if it reduces me to be removed from everything I know and love. But the heat is unmerciful and the smells, not being common, seem worse than the stink that rises off our own Devil’s Acre. I try to parse one odor from another but fail; the whole effect is heady, and sometimes nauseating, in the clammy heat. For all his efficiency, Papa didn’t suggest suitable attire. My wool drawers and waistcoats are stifling. It’s no wonder that some ex-patriates go native in their dress!

  Godley Robinson—he who accompanies me—is an irksome creature. He has only one tune: how noble my father is. He’s somewhat relentless, deifying Papa, then plucking tirades from the air about the lower orders as if he were some great gentleman. His hat is round as a countryman’s and squats on his head like an upturned bowl—he looks like a gamekeeper cut loose from the land. Where in Christendom did Papa find this man? It’s demeaning, Belle, to be escorted like a child. I am disgruntled. And I miss you with every ounce of me; you are constantly in my thoughts.

  I take long walks in an attempt to unmuddle my mind. I went to the shoreline today and stood before the steep granite hills, hoping to find a breeze to calm my humid body and settle my head. In Victoria Harbor, sampans crowd around; they tock against each other and the sound, blended with the lap of waves, is soothing. Women and children live on the boats; they sell fans and bananas with pressing hands. The women don’t remind me of you exactly, Belle, except that everything reminds me of you. You follow me like a spirit and I even fancied I heard you cry out on Star Street, to guide me to safety when a rickshaw threatened to flatten me. Am I going mad? First the phantasm above the sea and then your voice, clear as glass in my ear.