Becoming Lola

by Harriet Steel

  She put down the pen and flexed her fingers, cramped by the ferocity of her grasp. Perhaps she had deviated a little from the truth but it was permissible. She felt confident and powerful, ready to make her own future. And if she could do that, she could also remake her past.

  London society buzzed with speculation. Lola had her supporters amongst the press, but her most vociferous detractor, the editor of The Age was determined to discredit her.

  When she finished reading his latest piece, Lola stubbed out the cigarillo she was smoking on the page and narrowed her eyes. ‘It’s time we met,’ she muttered. She stood up and her hand brushed the Spanish dagger she still carried at her belt.

  When she swept unannounced into his office, the editor recognised her straight away. He sprang to his feet. ‘This is most unorthodox,’ he spluttered.

  ‘And your conduct has been most shameful.’

  ‘Be careful, madam. If you were a man, I would challenge you.’

  She gave a cool smile. ‘As I am a woman, I would be happy to accept.’

  He snorted. ‘You are wasting my time. Please leave.’

  ‘No, I will not. There are a great many things I wish to tell you.’

  He gritted his teeth. ‘Very well, I’ll spare you five minutes but not one second more.’

  He looked at the curious faces of his staff outside the open door. ‘Get back to work,’ he shouted.

  Lola perched on the side of his desk. She picked up the tinderbox that lay there, lit her cigarillo and exhaled a curl of blue smoke.

  ‘I can recommend these,’ she remarked. ‘I have them sent to me from Seville. May I offer you one?’

  The editor scowled. ‘Thank you, no. And don’t forget, madam, I said five minutes.’

  She laughed. ‘We Spaniards do not like to be hurried. Now tell me, sir, are you acquainted with my country?’

  ‘As it happens, madam, I’m not, but I don’t see what that has to do with the veracity of your position.’

  ‘Ah, but there you are wrong. You cannot judge me if you are not familiar with it. If you were, you would know Seville is full of people, people of importance, who would vouch for me if they were here.’

  ‘I have only your word for it.’

  ‘If you wish, I will provide you with letters.’

  She would write them herself if she had to. She saw the look of uncertainty on the editor’s face and felt her confidence rise. This man would not find it as easy as he might have thought to beat her. She still had plenty of arguments up her sleeve.

  When the clock struck three an hour later, she was still there, and when the hands passed four and five. Eventually, six o’clock approached and she stood up. The editor was slumped in his chair. He had said very little for the last hour.

  She gave him her most charming smile.

  ‘Thank you for your hospitality, sir. I must leave you now and dress for the evening. I hope I may assume that you will print a full apology in your newspaper?’

  He grunted. ‘Your capacity for argument outstrips even my own, madam. I will think about it.’

  She nodded. ‘Good. But please do not think for too long.’

  *

  Her belief she had triumphed over the editor of The Age buoyed Lola up for a while. But as days passed and she scanned the paper in vain for an apology, her exasperation grew. She marched to his office once more, but this time, he was ready and the door was shut in her face.

  She lobbied Benjamin Lumley with no more success. Her frustration increased as people started to cut her. Even though there were still men willing to foot her bills, their numbers dwindled rapidly.

  When gossip spreads, she thought glumly, doors close. She reviewed her prospects - she could take a lover, but the life of a kept woman was not always all it was reputed to be. Visited once a week perhaps, when her protector could sneak away from his wife, then for the rest of the time, left to languish in some little love nest, bored out of her wits. Even life with Thomas might have been less dreary than that.

  Then one evening at a party - one that she might formerly have declined in favour of something grander - she was touring the room on the arm of her host, a banker with European connections, when there was a stir by the entrance doors. A portly, middle-aged man, resplendent in a white dress uniform loaded with gold braid and ostentatious decorations had just arrived. A small entourage surrounded him.

  The host put his monocle to his eye. ‘Ah, here’s Prince Heinrich.’

  ‘A prince?’ Lola’s ears pricked up.

  ‘Indeed, Prince Heinrich the Seventy-Second of Reuss-Lobenstein-Ebersdorf. It borders Prussia.’

  Lola laughed. ‘What an absurd name.’

  ‘You mustn’t let him hear you say that. He may have more syllables to his name than lands, but he’s a god in his own country and he has a powerful sense of his own dignity, even if he is rather out of his depth in the big, bad world.’

  ‘You mean he is pompous?’

  Her host chuckled. ‘A good man for all that. Let us go and greet him. By the way, he speaks very little English, so unless you have a good command of German, I suggest you talk to him in French.’

  ‘I have heard much of your dancing,’ the prince said in his ponderous French after they had been introduced. ‘I look forward to seeing it for myself before I leave London.’

  ‘I fear that my engagements here are at an end, Your Majesty.’

  ‘A great pity.’

  She thought quickly. ‘But I have many invitations to perform my work in Europe. I plan to leave for Prussia soon.’

  ‘Then you must favour me with a visit at Schloss Ebersdorf.’

  Lola looked at him over her fan. ‘What a delightful idea.’

  By the time the carriages arrived to take the guests home, the prince was captivated. He even found himself offering to settle some of Lola’s more pressing debts, and they parted with mutual promises to renew their acquaintance in Reuss-Lobenstein-Ebersdorf.

  Chapter 15

  Lola sailed from Blackwall to Hamburg not long afterwards. Before she left England, she had not realised how much the weight of malicious gossip and newspaper attacks had oppressed her. She stood on deck as the ship crossed the North Sea, gazing at the rolling waves and feeling the wind in her hair. Reuss-Lobenstein-Ebersdorf: it sounded like a setting for a comic opera. It might be just what she needed. She was glad she had decided to go.

  In Hamburg, she wrote to her new friend, Prince Heinrich, telling him she would arrive shortly, and would travel as far as Leipzig by train. The court was thrown into a whirlwind of preparations for her arrival. The servants grumbled as they cleaned corners of the palace that had been home to spiders for decades and polished mountains of silver and crystal glass. Gardeners worked from dawn until dusk weeding and pruning borders to display the prince’s precious plants to their best advantage, and the courtiers dusted off their gala uniforms.

  Six of the prince’s finest horses were harnessed to the great state coach and dispatched to meet Lola at Leipzig. She clapped her hands when she saw the equipage and pointed to the trunks that the station porters dragged out to the courtyard.

  ‘Strap those to the roof of the coach,’ she ordered in French.

  Heinrich’s men looked at her blankly. She was about to tell them off when she realised that they probably didn’t speak French. With her natural ear for languages, in the last few weeks, she had already picked up some German, so she tried again with that. This time they understood her but their expressions were still perturbed.

  ‘We have brought a separate wagon for the luggage, my lady,’ one of the men said. He indicated a covered cart drawn by two mules.

  ‘No, I want it on the roof,’ she said, giving him a sharp tap on the arm with her fan.

  He shuffled his feet. It had taken hours of hard work to bring the state coach to its spotless condition, the trunks might scratch the gleaming paintwork, but on the other hand, the Serenissimus had given orders that his guest was to be treated w
ith great deference. Reluctantly, he motioned to the footmen to do as she said.

  ‘Everyone who is not needed to drive the coach must ride inside with me,’ Lola went on. ‘I cannot bear to have no one to talk with. Come along. I am a guest of your prince and must have my way.’

  As the coach swayed along the dusty roads, Lola smoked her cigarillos and, between puffs, practised her newly acquired German on Heinrich’s servants. They hardly spoke at all.

  ‘Have we much further to go?’ she asked after several hours of this one-sided conversation.

  ‘We have just crossed the border,’ the eldest man said.

  Lola pulled down the window and peered out at the dusty road. All she saw was dense woodland, broken up by a few fields and small farms. ‘What does the prince do here all day?’ she asked.

  ‘The Serenissimus hunts and visits his villages and farms.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes, my lady.’

  ‘How dull,’ she yawned.

  The man’s jaw dropped.

  She leant out of the window and banged on the crested door. ‘Stop,’ she shouted over the rattle of the wheels. The coachman hauled on the reins and the coach juddered to a halt. Lola jumped out and began to climb up onto the box. He watched her open-mouthed.

  ‘I’m bored,’ she declared. ‘Give me those.’ She pointed to the reins.

  The horses snorted and pawed the ground. An expression of horror came over the man’s face. ‘It is too dangerous,’ he said.

  Lola glowered, then, as suddenly as it had come, her irritable mood faded. She gave a brilliant smile. ‘Oh, if you insist, I suppose I can go the rest of the way inside.’

  A few hours later, the coach rumbled into the cobbled main square at Ebersdorf. A drum roll rang out and the guard of honour that had waited to greet Lola since early morning snapped to attention. She climbed down from the coach and marched along the line of blue and white uniforms, studying each man as if she were a general inspecting his troops. An aide hurried to fetch the prince and, in a few moments, with a broad smile on his florid face, Heinrich arrived to welcome her.

  *

  Ebersdorf was a modest town where, in the course of five centuries, the half-timbered houses had settled into a cock-eyed geometry of crooked gables and tipsy roofs. Heinrich’s palace had, however, replaced the medieval castle and it was in the classical style.

  That evening, the cream of society gathered there to meet Lola. In the gilded state apartments, huge vases of musk roses and lilies stood on every surface. Champagne flowed and the dining tables groaned with game from the forests, and peaches, melons, figs and pomegranates from the hothouses.

  After dinner, the court orchestra played waltzes and polkas so that the guests might dance. The music would not have passed muster at Her Majesty’s Theatre, but Lola was having far too much fun to notice. Chatting in the mixture of German and French at which she was becoming very adept, she impressed everyone with her candid charm and good manners.

  Soon, however, life at the small court began to pale. The gala welcome over, the prince returned to his usual occupations of hunting and inspecting his villages and farms. Lola loved to ride, but she disliked hunting and the allure of inspecting the tiny villages and farms, picturesque as they were, soon faded. It also irked her that the whole country seemed to treat the prince as if he were a god.

  ‘The dynasty of Reuss-Lobenstein-Ebersdorf must be a very ancient one,’ she observed as she rode with him early one morning. ‘Seventy-one Heinrichs alone before you.’

  ‘All my predecessors have been called Heinrich. Indeed, every male member of my family has the same name. My father was Heinrich the Fifty-First but twenty-one male children were born between us.’

  ‘Did no one have the wit to choose any other names? A few Wilhelms, Franzs or Josephs would have made a pleasant change.’

  The prince coloured. ‘It has always been arranged this way.’

  Lola shrugged. ‘I meant no offence.’

  She struck her horse’s flank with her riding crop. ‘Come on, I’ll race you back,’ she called over her shoulder as the animal broke into a gallop. The prince spurred his stallion to follow her, but to add to his indignation, she reached the stables first.

  Lola had developed a fondness for the prince’s St Bernard, Turk, which the big, shaggy dog returned wholeheartedly. That afternoon, he followed her into the palace gardens to walk in the sunshine.

  ‘Your master is a pompous old fool, Turk,’ she muttered scratching him behind the ears. His eyelids drooped with ecstasy and his pink tongue lolled from his jowls. ‘I’ve never known a man spend so much time on primping and preening as he does,’ she went on. ‘As for the way he likes to run his court, I can’t understand how everyone endures so much tedious ceremony and solemn conversation.’

  They passed a bed of pinks and she flicked at them with the switch she carried, decapitating a few. ‘I know,’ she chuckled. ‘I’ll make Heinrich a gift.’ Soon, she had picked every flower and, sitting on the sun-warmed grass with Turk at her side, she wove them into a garland.

  When she reached the royal stables, she found the prince’s stallion in his stall drowsing in the afternoon heat. He lifted his head as she approached and whinnied.

  ‘Good fellow,’ she murmured. She reached up on tiptoe and dropped the garland over his head, then stood back and surveyed the effect. ‘There, you look splendid.’

  A groom came round the corner of the stable and stopped short at the sight. His hand flew to his mouth, but Lola wagged her finger at him. ‘It’s a surprise for the prince. If you take it off before he sees it, I will be very angry.’

  The stallion still wore the wilting garland when Heinrich came early the next morning. He fumed as he rode out to the hunt. If he had known what a trial this woman would be, he would never have invited her.

  The hunt bagged a fine stag that morning and when Heinrich returned, he was in a happier frame of mind. He noticed the dead flowers scattered on the muck heap where one of the grooms had tossed them and remembered Lola. Perhaps he should do more to amuse her. He beckoned to his master of ceremonies.

  ‘You wish for something, Your Majesty?’ he asked, riding up on his bay gelding.

  ‘I have been thinking. We should organise an entertainment for our lovely visitor. What do you suggest?’

  The man thought for a moment. ‘An outing to your hunting lodge might amuse her. It is very beautiful there at this time of year and she has not seen it yet.’

  Heinrich smiled. The hunting lodge was one of his favourite spots. ‘Excellent idea,’ he beamed. ‘Make the arrangements at once.’

  *

  Dew still silvered the grass as the royal party rode out to the hunting lodge the following morning. Lola feared she might have gone too far with her joke the previous day. She tried to please Heinrich by showing great interest when he insisted on taking her round every nook and cranny of his beloved building, stopping at each stag’s or boar’s head on the walls to tell the story of the animal’s final hours.

  When he had finished, the party moved to a pretty glade nearby where they sat down at long tables covered with crisp, white cloths and tucked into a hearty meal of bread, honey, sausage, fresh eggs and ham, washed down with tankards of foaming wheat beer. As they ate, music drifted through the oaks and lindens surrounding them.

  ‘What is that?’ Lola asked.

  ‘I have ordered the band of the local foresters and miners to entertain us,’ Heinrich replied and, still playing, the band came into the clearing, the sunlight gleaming on their instruments.

  Lola smiled. ‘How charming they look.’

  The tune came to an end and Heinrich turned to his master of ceremonies. ‘Tell them to keep playing. They must wait for their beer and sausage.’

  After a hurried conference, the band struck up a new tune. This time, however, they did not know their parts so well and at each discord, Lola winced.

  The prince scowled. ‘The music does no
t please you?’

  Lola rolled her eyes as one of the trumpets wobbled and died away with a squeak. The prince’s ears reddened.

  Just then, a small procession of children, the boys in short leather trousers and white shirts with brightly embroidered braces, and the girls in colourful dresses and kerchiefs, marched into the glade and began to climb up into the trees.

  ‘What are they doing?’ she asked.

  ‘They are going to sing.’

  Lola sat with her fork halfway to her mouth and listened to the high-pitched voices labouring through a folksong. Suddenly she dropped the fork with a clatter and sprang up, clamping her hands over her ears.

  ‘I beg you, make them stop,’ she cried. ‘It is too horrible.’

  The prince jumped to his feet as well. ‘Stop the music,’ he roared. He seized Lola by the wrist. ‘Sit down, madam, you forget your manners.’

  Her eyes blazed and her hand went to the dagger that she still carried in her belt. A gasp of horror rose from the rest of the party and for a moment everyone held their breath.

  She blinked and let her hand drop. ‘Forgive me. I was alarmed.’

  The prince’s mouth was dry and his hand shook.

  ‘The concert is at an end,’ he barked.

  The band slunk away to find their beer and sausage and the chorus of children scrambled down from the trees. As he passed the royal party, one of the boys stared at Lola and pulled a face. In a flash, she reached for Turk who slept at her feet and tweaked the scruff of his neck.

  ‘Get him!’ she commanded, pointing at the boy.

  Turk lumbered to his feet and the boy broke into a run, but he had not gone ten yards before the dog caught up with him and knocked him to the ground. Heinrich was beside them in a moment. He grabbed Turk by the collar and hauled him off the shrieking boy who limped sobbing into the trees.