The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  After they left, a cold wind of doubt began to blow. She had found it exhilarating to speak about the orphanage, even in the last minute to midnight of its existence, but two inquiries after it in a single day were either heaven-sent or sinister. A huge reaction set in.

  “Oh Tibby,” she cried to her maid, “I feel dreadful. Something awful has come over me. What can these men be? They are Menier’s men. All is prepared. They want to get me away from here.”

  Twenty minutes later she heard the large piece of masonry that held together the ruined gates of Tavistock Square being moved, and a landau was driven through. The timing would seem to indicate that all four doctors had met out in the dark in order to have a pavement consultation, for the landau was from Forbes Winslow’s asylum and the three occupants of it were a keeper named Wallis-Jones and two female nurses. There was to be no more shilly-shallying or deception. Nice Mr. Semple agreed with his colleagues and did not need reminding that the referrals he had made to Forbes Winslow in the past had always been profitable. If he had the fleeting sensation they were behaving like burglars, it was something he must put from his mind. They were doctors and Mrs. Weldon was unwell. Now they had come to fetch her.

  Inside the house all lights had been hastily extinguished, and after an agonizing pause there came a hammering on the door. With Georgina and Tibby clinging to each other in terror, the phlegmatic Bell went to parley with the unknown parties gathered in the courtyard. Standing in pitch-dark, the door on the chain, Bell refused to allow Winslow’s servants into the house. It is evident from this he had been kept in ignorance of his employer’s intentions toward his wife, and this in turn suggests that only the threat posed by the upcoming trial had forced Harry into such urgent comings and goings.

  Though Wallis-Jones did not identify himself, Bell could read the situation as well as anyone. More than a few times, in his capacity as a bailiff, it had been he who had stood out in the cold trying to gain access to a property. Now, with some gallantry, he held his ground. Mrs. Weldon was abed and could not be roused. He refused a bribe to open the door. It was a sorry piece of work, this, and the honest and bighearted Mr. Bell had begun to take a dislike to the voices blustering on the other side of the woodwork. Their way was not Bell’s way, oh no. But there was something said that certainly made him think, if the significance of it did not immediately strike Georgina.

  “You are here for Mr. Weldon,” Wallis-Jones explained with heavy emphasis, not once but twice. Bell was being told which side his bread was buttered on. It may be that he put two and two together at this point, and if he did, the stubborn defense he made of the front door does him even greater credit.

  After a while, Georgina heard the landau pull away, and Villiers, who was returning to the house from her night off, saw it pass her, driven by a coachman with a cockade in his hat. Unseen, but surely somewhere close by in the shadows, was her former master in a huddle with the four doctors. It was nearly midnight.

  4

  The true identity of those who had attacked the house was still unknown to Georgina. Late though it was, she sent her maid back out to ask any beat policeman the maid could find to patrol the grounds. Villiers was then to run to Hunter Street and ask for the appropriate senior officer to call in the morning. Then Georgina did what seemed to her most natural. She sat down and wrote to Mr. Gladstone. But Gladstone had more than enough on his own plate. The government was in a war crisis over Russia and Turkey once again. Gladstone’s London house was being stoned by his political opponents, and he and his wife hustled in the streets. It was a poor time for Georgina to call in favors she may have believed she was owed from him—favors that were in any case now ten years old. Nor would he have been particularly pleased to know that her other calls for help that night were addressed to the editors of the Spiritualist and Medium and Daybreak.

  Her mind was seething, and as so often happened with her, she chose the wrong target to lash out at. It seemed to her that in some way or another, Menier was reaching out from his remand cell to do her harm. There had already been an indication of this. In the newspaper reports of the Bow Street remand proceedings against Menier, both the Standard and the Daily Telegraph had included this remark by his counsel, a Mr. Grain: “The sole fact of having established an Orphanage in a house owned by Charles Dickens without the sympathy or even the co-operation of her husband tended to prove that Mrs. Weldon suffered from hallucinations.” She was quite certain Grain had not said these words in open court. They were an interpolation by interested journalists. In short, there was a clique at work in some way controlled by the hideous Menier.

  As soon as the post offices opened, she sent this pathetic telegram to de Bathe: “Come up at once. It is a matter of life and death.” De Bathe did not reply. During the morning an inspector arrived from Hunter Street, and she made a statement. She fired off a further volley of letters to anyone from the past who might help her, though their memory of her was likely to be exceedingly dusty. She chose the library as the fortress keep within the house and fortified it with a police rattle and two brass rose syringes, each containing three liters of water. Bell’s position in all this was highly ambiguous, for it was no job of his to fight for her freedom with a rose syringe. Neal came by at half past eleven and advised her once again that it would be “a great pity to stir up muddy waters.” It was a badly chosen phrase.

  “Muddy waters! It isn’t muddy water that’s stained me! I don’t know what you’re talking about! Explain yourself!”

  “Menier says that you owe him money, that you made contracts with him and that he has the most compromising letters from you.”

  “Menier can tell as many foul lies as he wishes,” Georgina yelled in outrage. “It’s he that owes me plenty of money. I have not made a single contract with him and since I have never been able to stand the sight of the dirty beast it’s not very likely my letters have been compromising. That lot! They’re a gang of idiots.”

  Neal was sent off with a flea in his ear, though before leaving, it is beyond belief that he did not speak to Mr. Bell and instruct the bailiff to open the door to the doctors when they next came back, and not to be such a damn fool.

  Then, at two in the afternoon, a small miracle occurred: Mrs. Louisa Lowe sent in her card.

  The elderly and garrulous Louisa Lowe had given damning evidence to the select committee hearings in 1877. She was one of the few educated women ever to have overturned asylum committal proceedings. Sent to Lawn House in Chiswick by her adulterous husband, she had escaped and, on the evidence of an independent medical examination, been judged perfectly sane. The case was an interesting one, not least because Lawn House was the property of Henry Maudsley, the archenemy of asylumdom. Even though he had not himself signed the committal order, he was sufficiently embarrassed by Mrs. Lowe’s revelations to divest himself of Lawn House, which he was in the process of doing when she pitched up on Georgina’s doorstep.

  Mrs. Lowe was a woman somewhat in Georgina’s own mold. After her release, she at once founded the Lunacy Law Reform Society, which she ran from an address in Berners Street, a short way from the Sacred Music Warehouse. Her main target was the chief commissioner of lunacy, Lord Shaftesbury, though there she was pushing on an unlatched door. Lunacy law reform was in the air (though not likely to proceed from Mrs. Lowe’s understaffed and ad hoc offices, which opened only two afternoons a week. In this she was completely sister to Georgina. Louisa Lowe thought it was she and she alone versus the establishment, an idea that gave her preternatural strength of purpose).

  How had she got wind of Georgina’s particular circumstances? It would seem that Georgina herself had not fully understood what was afoot until Neal’s arrival. He was not acting for her but for her husband, yet not even the most devious solicitor could avoid answering two very obvious questions: what was happening to her, and who were the people trying to force entry to the house? Had a sympathetic Neal secretly sabotaged his client’s wishes to see his wife sent to
an asylum by summoning Mrs. Lowe? The two women had never met, and Georgina had never even heard of Mrs. Lowe and her good works. If no one—neither Neal nor just conceivably Bell—had a hand in it, her arrival was truly providential. The one woman in London who could delay proceedings at least long enough to give Georgina good advice had appeared in the nick of time. On coming to the house Mrs. Lowe had seen the landau drawn up in the square with Wallis-Jones and the nurses peering out. She understood at once they were there to take Georgina in the street if she left the house. Georgina might have spiritualism on the brain, but her visitor thought of nothing but asylums. Only a little while after they began to talk, an ashen-faced Bell put his head around the door.

  “Them three of last night have pushed their way into the hall and declare they won’t leave. They want to see you. I told them you were out, but they said they’d wait until you came in.”

  Bell had done his duty—“you are here for Mr. Weldon”—but clearly did not like it. While Louisa Lowe ran from the house to summon the police, Georgina retreated to the library, where she barricaded herself in with a wall of bound musical scores. Villiers, Tibby Jordan, and at least one of the Westmacotts, together with Bell, were left outside. Again, it seems certain that all these knew by now exactly who Wallis-Jones was, and his business, though he persisted in saying he was there for “something about an orphanage.”

  Mrs. Lowe returned with the first two policemen she could find, who happened to have been patrolling the Euston Road. They were completely unprepared for the impasse they discovered—seven people milling about in front of the library door, from behind which the lady of the house was demanding to know what was happening.

  Mrs. Lowe advised Georgina to come out and ask Wallis-Jones his business. This she did. The asylum keeper declined to answer. Then, Mrs. Lowe told the police, he should be taken up for trespass, at which point Wallis-Jones made a lunge for his patient, bellowing, “Take her, take her!” There was a scuffle and Georgina scrambled back behind her barricade, Louisa Lowe shouting to her, “Give them in charge: they are assaulting you!”

  Georgina slammed the door, built up her wall of scores again (which assuredly included many by Novello’s), and, her ear to the woodwork, tried to piece together what was happening. With a howl of anguish, she heard the constables confess they were not from Hunter Street, home to so many Weldon dramas in the past, including searching for Gounod in the fog when “the old man” had plunged out on one of his suicide missions. These policemen were large and comforting, but they were strangers to the Weldon saga. They were from the Tottenham Court Road station. Georgina yelled at Villiers to run across Woburn Place and fetch men from Hunter Street. And then she heard the hubbub subside and a question-and-answer session begin with the usual and agonizing slow-wittedness of the police. Hunter Street arrived and there was more confusion, more repetition of the facts.

  At last there was a knock at the library door, and Mrs. Lowe whispered the awful truth. Wallis-Jones was armed with an indisputably legal order to commit a lunatic at large, one Mrs. Georgina Weldon. She hesitated and then broke the news: the signature at the foot of the document was that of William Henry Weldon.

  Georgina’s response was magnificent. She found pen and paper and composed a draft telegram. It was addressed to Harry at Albert Mansions in South Kensington: “Come at once. Some villains sent by that villain Menier have got into the house with a forged signature of yours.” She pushed the slip of paper under the door and watched it disappear. Mrs. Lowe read it in silence before showing it to the police. The two men from Hunter Street and their colleagues from Tottenham Court Road mulled it over with maddening slowness. For Georgina’s servants trying to peep over their shoulders, it was a heartbreaking moment. From their point of view, their mistress had at last been brought down. Below stairs, one might speak lightly of doolally-tap, one might marvel at the risks Georgina had taken and the thinness of the ice on which she had skated, but this was just too awful a way to end it all.

  Wallis-Jones tried to talk the police around. He had his order to serve, it was all perfectly above board, they had all surely seen similar sad occasions. The lady was without question a lunatic at large. Rubbish, Mrs. Lowe said, pointing at the mute door to the library. How could it be held she was at large when she was in a treasured room of the family home? She was, presumably, where her husband desired her to be—at home, and quiet, and, though frightened, very obviously not deranged.

  Maybe the telegram Georgina had pushed under the door made the police hesitate, or maybe they knew of the identity and reputation of the formidable Mrs. Lowe. Or maybe the two Hunter Street constables knew and liked Mrs. Weldon for her past instances of pluck and her invariably cheery greetings to them. This was the lady whose famous milk float had trundled past them on the beat, bearing the nippers off to the Langham Hotel, the singer whose house had twelve pianos. They declined to satisfy Wallis-Jones, and he was sent packing. The policemen from Tottenham Court Road left to resume their patrol of the Euston Road. Only then did Georgina emerge.

  It had taken two days, but at last she understood the enormity of the situation. She could not bring herself to believe Harry would do such a thing. Mrs. Lowe was in no doubt, and kneeling on the carpet, stroking her hand, the faithful Villiers agreed, crooning, “It is! It is Mr. Weldon.”

  Louisa Lowe proposed the immediate next step. Georgina should leave Tavistock House at once and outrun the committal order, which was only valid for seven days. If she was sane, she should fight. But if she stayed where she was, she would be taken up anyway, sane or not. Georgina looked beseechingly at Bell. “I’d go with the lady,” he murmured. The Hunter Street constables, who were still there, nodded. “Do go, ma’am,” one of them said.

  She was handed a bonnet and a cloak and, still in her slippers, ran from the house, followed by “a puffing and panting” Mrs. Lowe. On the east side of the square was a hansom, attended by a young policeman. He offered to help them up. Louisa Lowe was momentarily suspicious, but the constable turned out to be on their side. “I have not taken the number of the cab,” he muttered helpfully, and the two women shouted to the cabbie to drive on. They clattered out of the square and were swallowed up in the afternoon traffic. It was not much of a headlong flight—Mrs. Lowe had lodgings in Keppel Street only a few hundred yards away.

  Forbes Winslow’s daughter was married to the Punch contributor Arthur A’Beckett, and it amused him to pitch up outside the house in Tavistock Square late that night. A’Beckett stood in the dark shouting, “Mrs. Weldon is a dangerous lunatic! A thousand pounds to anyone who will help me take her tonight!” However, those that were left failed to see the joke.

  A’Beckett had come into the square in the same sinister landau that he used to pay a bumptious visit to the Lunacy Law Reform offices the next day. He seems a particularly irritating young man. Women and madhouse keepers were funny in the same way women and gamekeepers might be, or women and stationmasters: the joke was about rules. These rules were an expression of the male world. Women, too, had their rules, chief of which was not to interfere in the world of men. But this haw-haw dundreary-whiskered kind of humor was pretty old-hat. Were it ever truly believed that Harry had offered a bounty of £1,000 on his wife’s head, the crudity of the thing would do him irreparable damage. There is little question that to lawyers like Neal, the whole business had been botched from beginning to end. De Bathe seems to have been the first to have realized this. He fled to Baden-Baden with his daughter Mary, under the pretext of visiting friends.

  Georgina’s mother had, of course, stayed out of the way in Worksop, but when the news of the debacle reached her, she sent Emily’s husband, Bill, to go and look for Harry Weldon in London. Louisa Treherne was in a position very common to many women. Having left it to the menfolk to plan and execute a delicate business, she now realized she—even she—could have done it better herself. She wrote to Dal: “Poor Harry: he is, as you say, a confounded idiot, if only for having chosen
his moment so badly. But I’m sure he has a good heart and without a doubt suffers terribly, above all from the vexation of having been the author of such disgusting fatheadedness.”

  Georgina had no difficulty in evading Forbes Winslow’s servants until the order expired. After a day or so in Keppel Street, the good-natured Lowthers hid her in Fulham and then in a room in Whitechapel. How wholeheartedly was she being pursued? Her brother Dal, writing from Cox’s Hotel in Jermyn Street, let the cat out of the bag: Harry had given him full powers to parley with her. The moment she heard that, she knew Harry’s determination had begun to falter. Nobody with any sense would employ Dal as an intermediary. Joyously, she made mincemeat of her brother’s gloomy unctuousness. She told him she needed no moral lessons from a drunk and gambler, charges that stung because they were so close to the truth. “You, you’ve led a worldly and dissipated life: me, I’ve lived in a sober and unfashionable way.” Dal could never think quickly enough to rebut this sort of thing.

  Georgina had been swift to get medical certificates of sound mind and good health from two doctors of her own, one of whom, Edmunds, gave what we might see as a modern opinion. “Eccentric? Certainly. But mad, no.” (He had been especially impressed by her account books, in which she meticulously recorded every expenditure.) She even wrote to Gisors and got the lay registrar, with whom she had shared such pleasant thoughts and so many illicit cigarettes, to write an open letter of support “pour servir à qui de droit.” It ended with this endorsement: “Her precipitate departure from L’Hôtel-Dieu has caused all the staff of this establishment, Administrators, the Bursar, nuns and pensioners of all ages universal regret.”