Gwendolen

by Diana Souhami

  In that bleak outpost she aroused no comment. In church she was viewed as a widow, tenant of a house owned by a Mr. Grandcourt, a name not known in the district. Grandcourt visited her, stayed, and left as he chose, while appearing in Society as the most eligible of bachelors. She and their children were entirely dependent on him. He provided two ponies, dogs, toys, a wagonette, good clothes, but would make no commitment except through a will. She had no contract, no binding agreement, no sense of belonging anywhere.

  Listening to Sir Hugo, I felt dread lest my future too be infected by such isolation. I was alarmed to hear that Colonel Glasher, like Grandcourt, was violent and punishing. I wondered if both Lydia Glasher and I at root were victims who sought out pain and punishment, or doomed alike for seeking to build happiness on another’s pain. Perhaps I, like her, would find no place I might safely call home, no true address. You traveled to find your roots, Sir Hugo was assured of his, but she and I could not plant on shifting sand. I recalled her words at Cardell Chase and the venom of her second letter.

  When Mr. Grandcourt first knew me, I too was young. Since then my life has been broken up and embittered. It is not fair that he should be happy and I miserable and my boy thrust out of sight for another … The man you have married has a withered heart. His best young love was mine; you could not take that from me when you took the rest.

  Perhaps with Grandcourt’s death and money her life would be less broken up and embittered. She could speak of “best young love.” “The rest” for me meant loathing and ice-cold diamonds. She must have had more strength than I to withstand his treatment of her. That afternoon when she stood with their children on Rotten Row and he rode past without acknowledging her or them … Why did she subject herself to such humiliation? Why did she want to marry such a man? Compelled to more time with him, I would have murdered with that steel blade, lost my reason, drowned myself in the Thames without your rescue. I could not tell Sir Hugo of my self-loathing or confide my disturbed dreams and memories, but I confessed to my relief at having borne no children to remind me of Grandcourt, and to my wish to forgive myself for my impulsiveness and Lydia Glasher for her bitter desire for revenge.

  Sir Hugo learned that Lydia Glasher intended to keep the repellent Lush as her factotum; employment that absolved him from the effort of providing for himself, allowed him limpetlike to adhere to her in the same way as he clung to Grandcourt for fifteen years, have his own rooms in all and any of her houses, feel superior to any servant, be impervious to insult, intervene over scheming arrangements of her heart, and carry out all poisonous errands.

  I was shielded by Sir Hugo from further dealings with him. Did he think, I asked, Lush more resembled a toad crouched in a damp dark corner, or a parasitic wasp that feeds on its host? A cross between the two, Sir Hugo said.

  Lush tried to turn him against me. He told him I married Grandcourt in haste to avoid the humiliation of work as a governess and penury for my family. He said he warned Grandcourt that if he married me he would have to provide for Mama and my sisters and would repent of it within a year. He admitted he would have found Catherine Arrowpoint acceptable as a wife for his master because of her inheritance.

  “Put Lush, Grandcourt, and Mrs. Glasher from your mind,” Sir Hugo told me. “You need never see any of them again.” His advice was welcome, though not easy to follow.

  * * *

  MY STAY AT the Abbey was a time of enlightenment and transition. I recalled the New Year’s Eve there, so soon after my marriage, when you and I looked out at the moon and I asked what I could do, should do, to bear the guilt I felt and the punishment to which I could see no end, and you said, “Look on other lives besides your own. See what their troubles are and how they are borne.”

  With the kindness and counsel of Sir Hugo and Hans, I more clearly saw your troubles and the tribulations and struggle of those who shaped my destiny. I dared hope my actions were no worse than those of the other players and less heinous than Grandcourt’s and his henchman, Lush. Better too than those of my uncle, who was so forceful in thinking himself right.

  That New Year’s Eve you also exhorted me to “try to care for something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for what is best in thought and action.” I like to think that with the encouragement of Sir Hugo and Hans, I was freed from the worst thoughts that had warped me. But I had learned too much of what I could not do and did not care for. I do not know if my desires had ever been small and selfish. I had not found much gratification. I had hoped for love and ambition to guide me.

  * * *

  IN MID-AUTUMN HANS accompanied me home to Offendene. As our carriage neared the lane that led to the house, I felt excitement and delight. Mama, Alice, and Fanny gathered on the porch to greet us. Mama was so happy to see me well, at ease with myself, and in the company of a young and cheerful friend. The house looked small and shabby after the grandeur of Topping Abbey, but entering it I felt reunited with a loving friend. I again was proud to have restored the house to Mama and my sisters so that they need not sew for sixpences or go cap in hand to anyone.

  Bertha, to Mama’s pride and concern, was now living away from home. Hans took her room, and I went back to the little bed beside Mama’s. Bertha was emphatic that for herself she would consider neither marriage nor a governess’s post. She said that having observed Mama’s marriage then mine, she would sooner be a strumpet. She was working at Upton Manor, twenty miles away, as a gardener. Mama praised her talent for botanical drawing. I was surprised. I had always thought Bertha slow and unimaginative, and I had derided her artistic efforts, but she had so impressed the owners of the Manor, Sir Roland Myre and his wife, Anne, with her horticultural knowledge, they hired her to help maintain their arboretum and commissioned her to illustrate a calendar with a different tree for each month of the year.

  Mama adored Hans but I think was relieved not to have to view him as my suitor. If a button was loose on his shirt she sewed it, if his boots were scuffed she saw they were polished, if he sneezed—as he did much of the time because of the flowers, the grass, the horse, the dog—she tended him with balsam and menthol. He made her laugh, and that was a joy to hear. She plied him with cake, hot chocolate, and sweets. He called her Mrs. D and said she was his country mother. It amused me to see how Mama would have loved a son like Hans, boyish and mischievous, a bit wayward but vulnerable and good-natured too. Most of all I think she adored him because he watched out for me in his concerned yet carefree way.

  At ease with my sisters, Hans teased and flirted just a little, amused them, gave them sketches he did of them. A spirit of joy and ease imbued the house. Together we walked the lanes and picked crab apples in the woods. I was glad to be reunited with Criterion and to ride fast each day. Alice had cared for him all summer and was rueful to be consigned to Twilight, the slower horse.

  One fine warm day Rex and Anna joined us—my sisters, Hans, and me—for a long walk and then a picnic near Cardell Chase. I was apprehensive about Rex’s state of mind, and Anna, I suspected, would be subdued and watchful. But the countryside was pure and lovely, Mama had seen to it we had a pie, cheese, sourdough bread, and apples, we spread ourselves under a beech tree, and our joy was light and without care or undercurrent.

  Rex made no mention of my troubles. I was glad again to see his honest, intelligent face and hear his respectful voice. I had heard Lord Brackenshaw’s eldest daughter, Beatrix, was smitten by him, but I did not know if he was flattered at her interest. He asked what my plans were if I went to London, and I said I did not know, that I hoped to find a creative path but was unsure what that might be. He said whatever I put my mind to he was sure I would excel at and that I enhanced any gathering. Hans reiterated the important thing was for me to enjoy myself. Neither of them made any mention of you.

  Anna was enamored of Hans. She transferred her devotion from Rex to him and fussed that his fair skin might burn in the sun or that he might have chosen the
lesser piece of pie. At ease with her attention, he teased and complimented her. It occurred to me that she would love the man she married with the same wholeheartedness and ease as Mirah Lapidoth loved you, whereas I could never be unequivocal or entirely straightforward.

  * * *

  THE DAYS AND weeks passed. I thought often of Sir Hugo’s words The absence of unhappiness is a freedom and a privilege. I was no longer unhappy, incessantly watched, or answerable to the command of a savage keeper. Safe again at Offendene, with Mama and my sisters provided for, not lavishly but adequately, with Sir Hugo as my protector and Hans as my friend, I rejoiced in my freedom. And though a weight of guilt and wrongdoing burdened me, and I could not quite see how I might meaningfully occupy the days, I dared to admit that the greater conflict would have been had Grandcourt lived. He was mourned by no one.

  But I could not go back to who I was before my marriage or to the life I had lived. I did not want to appear in Wancester Society as the ill-treated widow; nor could I again be Mama’s spoiled darling, sharing her bed, her coiling my hair. When suffering so with Grandcourt, I thought the old routines were all I wanted: Mama and the house, reading by the fire, dinner parties, charades, and picnics, the archery contest, the hunt, galloping over the downs. But I could not settle into such a life again, and I refused the social invitations with which Mama tried to tempt me.

  My fears had gone, of the dark, of the vast night sky, the face in the wainscot, the serpent in the diamonds. I could think of death without particular dread. But Offendene, though loved by me, was not a place where I now could stay. The ghosts of the past confined me. If I was to become an adult, if I was to become Gwendolen Harleth, I must move away from Mama and Pennicote.

  * * *

  SOON AFTER HANS returned to London, I followed him there. Mama agreed to my going. I believe she would have agreed to any move I wanted and thought might bring me a chance of happiness. Hans promised to chaperone me and that his family would care for me. Sir Hugo assured her of my safety and well-being in his Park Lane house, with his servants to look after me, and he, Lady Mallinger, and their daughters frequently in town, and I assured Mama of my frequent visits home. I said she would see so much of me she would grow bored, that I needed her company more than she needed mine, and that she and my sisters must stay with me at Park Lane when in town.

  In Sir Hugo’s town house I was accorded a bedroom in pale green and cream, and an elegant sitting room with writing desk, chaise, and view over Hyde Park. As the maid closed the door I felt calm and safe, but I yearned for you to call, see me in these surroundings—free and determined to be myself—be pleased for me, and give me encouragement. The wish passed, and I realized, with strange sorrow, that I thought about you with less pain, and only with effort could I conjure you in my mind, your still and thoughtful presence, your eyes that seemed to take me in, and although I still revered you, the day might come when you ceased to be the person to whom in my heart and soul I addressed my every wish.

  I was sad that despite you saying you would write to me and remain close, you did not because you could not: not as a married man. Sir Hugo and Hans always read to me their letters from you, but what could I care about this place called Palestine and your other life and adventures from which I was so excluded?

  * * *

  LONDON SEEMED FULL of secrets, promise, and destinations. From my windows I looked out at trees and lawns, people strolling, talking, hurrying, smart carriages, buskers, lamplighters. I thought of my sister Bertha and my surprise that she should find a singular talent and the strength to pursue it. I hoped there might be a similar fate for me.

  Hans promised to escort me to the theater and circus and on boat trips along the Thames; to introduce me to his clients, friends, and fellow artists. He encouraged me to wear simpler clothes and to coil my hair more freely. I wondered about getting it cut short like some of the suffragists. Hans said he would cut it for me with his mother’s kitchen shears and that when he had finished I need never again fear the amorous intentions of any man.

  One of the first visits I made with Hans, in late autumn, was to Mrs. Lewes and her husband. We were invited to one of her Sunday salon afternoons. “She wants to know more about you and your feelings for Dan,” Hans said. “She misses her conversations with him.”

  I had first seen her at the Abbey at Sir Hugo’s New Year’s Eve party, when you and she were talking about the Jews, then a few times more at Park Lane, at the Mallinger gatherings. Hans told me it was you who inspired her to study Jewish history, and you who introduced her to Mirah Lapidoth, who then sang Hebrew songs at her musical soirées.

  I had thought little more of her for she seemed ugly and erudite, but now, widowed and uncertain of my social status, I was trepidatious at the prospect of meeting. I feared that, like Klesmer, she would confront me with her genius and my middlingness, and I had had sufficient of that mix.

  Hans said she had her own muddles, just like the rest of us. “She’s not really Mrs. Lewes, even though she insists on being addressed that way. She always corrects anyone who speaks of her as Miss Evans, but that’s who she is. She can’t marry him because he already has a wife, Agnes, whom he can’t divorce.”

  Mr. Lewes had been Agnes’s tutor. He married her when she was nineteen. She was blond, beautiful and clever, translated books from French and Spanish, believed in free love, and had eight children. “Lewes was the father of the first four,” Hans said, “and Thornton Leigh Hunt, editor of the Daily Telegraph, fathered the others.” Leigh Hunt also had another ten children with his legitimate wife and on two occasions was the father of a child by her, then one by Agnes, born within weeks of each other. He had wanted to be an artist but paint made his skin fester and itch, so he turned to journalism. Hans sympathized, because he himself was allergic to many things, though fortunately not to paint.

  Apparently, Lewes was at ease with this unconventional marital arrangement and cared more for the first of the babies fathered by Hunt, but born to Agnes, than for any of his own children, with whom he was rather distant. He put his name as father on the birth certificate, though the child was “very brown with unmistakable Hunt eyes.”

  Hans was unclear when Mary Anne Evans and George Lewes became lovers but thought it was early in the 1850s. Before she would agree to live with Lewes, she wrote to Agnes for assurance their marriage was over in all but name. Agnes replied she would be delighted for Mary Anne to marry her husband, but as he had condoned her own adultery they could not be divorced. So Miss Evans lived in a loving and committed relationship that she could not grace with legal status. Her eldest brother, Isaac, whom as a child she adored and revered, would not speak to her because of it and only communicated about unavoidable family matters through solicitors.

  I thought of Grandcourt and Mrs. Glasher when they had become lovers, their “best young love,” and Colonel Glasher had refused to divorce his wife. Mary Anne Evans avoided social ostracism by calling herself Mrs. Lewes. She was wiser than the law.

  Apart from such tiresome practical obstacles, the Leweses and Leigh Hunts were civilized and supportive of each other. There was no vengeance or malice: no lying in wait at Cardell Chase, no wedding day letters about withered hearts, no menacing appearances on Rotten Row. Mrs. Lewes wrote her successful novels under the name George Eliot, so I, like many of her readers, had supposed the author to be a man. George was Mr. Lewes’s Christian name, and Eliot, she said, was “a good mouth-filling easily pronounced word.” Writing earned her wealth as well as fame and financed Mr. Lewes, his wife, and their offspring, whom she viewed as her stepchildren. The children called their mother “Mama” and the second Mrs. Lewes “Mother.”

  My eyes were being opened to London life, and I resolved to choose my time to explain such complexities to Mama. But hearing of such temerity gave me an inkling of how I might perhaps for myself, by some act of daring or rebellion, achieve liberation from the fixed receipt of a woman’s happiness. I might yet, like Hester
Stanhope, dress like a Bedouin and travel with a caravan of camels across the desert.

  I doubted I could be a writer, like Mrs. Lewes or Mrs. Arrowpoint. I could not conjure unborn people in my mind or bring myself to care about the truth or otherwise of Tasso’s madness, or whether his seventeenth-century Italian love life was one thing or another. I cared about my own love life, and yours, and Hans’s and Rex’s and Sir Hugo’s and Mama’s and Bertha’s.

  Mrs. Arrowpoint of course did not shine outside of Wancester, whereas George Eliot was admired worldwide. Queen Victoria had twice read Adam Bede and was so taken by it she commissioned the artist Edward Corbould to paint two watercolors from scenes in it: one of Dinah preaching, the other of Hetty making butter. Hans said these pictures hung in Buckingham Palace, though he had not seen them. He admired Corbould’s technical skill but considered his subject matter stiff and traditional.

  Hans and I went in Sir Hugo’s carriage to the Priory, the Leweses’ house by the Regent’s Canal. I told him I would like to arrive a little late to give other guests time to gather. I did not want to be conspicuous. I wore pale green and white, a simple pearl necklace, and of course the turquoise chain.

  The house, secluded and pretty, was set far back from the street. Late roses still bloomed in the front garden. The rooms, spacious with large windows that reached almost to the ceilings, had been arranged and furnished by the architect Owen Jones, who designed the interior of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. All had bespoke wallpapers and carpets and were filled with paintings, engravings, sculptures, and exotic fabrics. The Leweses each had a book-lined study. They shared a music room.

  I was discomfited when on arrival Mr. Lewes took me into his study, ostensibly to show me a portrait of “Polly,” as he called Miss Evans—to add to the confusion about names—which hung over the fireplace. I recoiled at the way he took my arm and looked at me. He asked Hans for his view of the portrait, and I knew by Hans’s circumlocutory reply he thought it of little merit. Mr. Lewes wanted to commission him to do another, of Polly reading in their garden with her dogs beside her.