One morning in May, soon after breakfast, he visited unannounced and said we were to go shopping together. For what? I asked. For clothes, he replied, after which I must keep the next day free. We went to a store on Aldgate Street, where I was fitted out in a blue knickerbocker suit trimmed with gold, and a pair of high-legged boots. As I postured in this rakish costume, I felt a glorious sense of freedom and defiance, and Hans agreed I more resembled Hester Stanhope than the van Dyck duchess.
I could not guess what adventure was planned. I questioned Hans, but he gave me no clues. He told me to get a good night’s sleep, have only a light breakfast, and be ready at eight the following morning. “Are we to go to Ashkelon?” I asked. “Shall I shave my head? Will there be camels to carry my baggage?” He looked enigmatic and would not be persuaded to enlighten me.
I woke several times in the night wondering what awaited me. Perhaps Julian had talked to Hans about my hope to perform in a trapeze act. This might be the start of my theater career.
* * *
IN THE MORNING I put on this daring garb, coiled back my hair, and thought I looked like an androgyne. I again fancied I would have my hair cut into a bob like the suffragists, and felt mischievous delight at what Uncle Henry and Mrs. Arrowpoint might say.
Hans laughed when he saw me. His clothes were not dissimilar to mine. “Where are we going?” I asked, but he would not tell me.
We took a carriage to the rebuilt Alexandra Palace in north London. I had not been to that part of town before. We alighted in a field near the palace, and I was introduced to Captain Lucas, a military man with a bushy mustache and a loud voice. “Ah, my parachutists,” he boomed.
Parachutists. My excitement was intense. Was I to fly and outdo Julian on his trapeze and high wire? The captain stood by a huge basket, which ten men held anchored to the ground, and supervised the slow filling with gas of a vast golden balloon. “You are pioneers,” he said to Hans and me. He told us there had been ascents in hot-air balloons for the past hundred years and jumps using parachutes with rigid frames but that he had revolutionized parachute design. His inspirations, he said, were the flying squirrel and the dispersal of winged seeds, and he was working to perfect the design of a trapeze bar and sling. Twenty volunteers had so far jumped from his balloon, and the only injuries were a broken ankle and a grazed forehead. His eldest volunteer had been a postman aged seventy-two. I was the first woman.
“Is she adequate to it?” Captain Lucas asked Hans, as if I were not there. Hans told him I was stronger than himself: an archeress, a horsewoman, a swimmer. “This will be more thrilling than any of that,” the captain said. “This will be the most exciting event of your life.”
As if explaining an everyday affair, he said we were to rise two thousand feet in this odd contraption, then jump from it with parachutes that would waft us down to earth. First he showed me how to fall. “Never land standing up,” he said. “You’ll break your ankles and damage your knees and back.” The moment my feet brushed the ground I was to roll onto my back. I practiced. It was not difficult for I had learned to fall from a horse.
Captain Lucas showed me how to work the parachute, which hung from the balloon. Attached to it was a trapeze bar with cords and a sling of webbing about six inches wide. I was to step astride the sling, and as I jumped and held the bar above my head, the webbing would rise up between my legs and take my body weight. “You must keep a firm hold on the bar to balance yourself,” he said.
A crowd gathered to watch the spectacle. The golden balloon, as it filled with gas, swayed in the breeze and pulled at the ropes that tethered it. The tops of the limp parachutes were tied to the balloon’s netting with cocoa string, which, we were told, would snap under the weight of our falling bodies. The released parachutes would then stream and fill with air.
Hans and I were to be carried up with Captain Lucas and another instructor, a burly, much-tattooed man, in the huge basket suspended under the balloon. As the balloon went up, we were to sit on the basket’s rim, our legs dangling over the side, the webbing of the parachute between them, one hand holding the trapeze bar, the other holding the supporting ropes. When we were high enough in the sky, and at Captain Lucas’s command, we must jump forward from the basket. He said we would probably land a mile or so from where we took off, depending on the strength and direction of the wind. A pony and trap would pick us up and take us back to the palace. I was to jump first.
We perched on the edge of the basket. Captain Lucas gave the order for the men holding it to release their grip. Onlookers cheered and waved hats, hands, and parasols. There was no feeling of upward movement. It seemed as if we were still and unmoving while the earth and all those on it fell away. There was a strange silence. I saw the world as if I were a bird. It was as if my life was beginning. The landscape formed beneath me, a patchwork of fields and lanes; the crowd dispersed and became little figures who crawled away. I saw Lilliputian dolls’ houses and specks that were animals. Captain Lucas pointed to my destination, a small green square, which I supposed was a field.
We floated on, above the clouds and upward into heaven. The air was light and pure. Here was my escape from the earth, my happiness. Captain Lucas said we were over two thousand feet high and told me to be ready to jump. “Now!” he said, then “Go!” I gripped the trapeze bar with both hands and flung myself down, exhilarated, fearless, not knowing if the parachute was going to open. I heard the canopy of the parachute break from the balloon. There was a rush of air. I plummeted so fast and far my breath was knocked out of me. The sling tightened between my legs, I held the trapeze bar tightly with both hands, and it pulled at my arms, and then I saw the silken dome of the canopy of the parachute stretch over me, billowing in a gentle breeze.
I was suspended in clear, warm air high above the land. Above the symmetry of roads and farms, the shadows of trees on wooded hills, I felt such freedom. I was flying high. I laughed and shouted and thought how you would deplore it, how Mama would be alarmed, how Uncle would preach a sermon, and Grandcourt not rescue me no matter if I nearly died. My heart for this eternal moment was not pressed small. My unbounded future was everywhere and everything. The fixed receipt for my happiness was not determined by a husband’s permission or Society’s approval. I need not care about the wheel of fortune nor strive to win the golden arrow or the silver star. It did not matter that I could not be the best of women or make “my people” glad that I was born. I did not have to act like Rachel, sing like Jenny Lind, compose like Klesmer, or write like Mrs. Lewes. Humiliation and disappointment evaporated. I was above time or place, achievement or failure. I was in my element. Life and death seemed to blow with the wind. I looked down and saw the curve of the world, the patch of green that was my irrelevant destination. I did not want to hurry to reach it. I wanted to stay poised in the air, to float forever, to circle the globe, never to land, not because of fear of broken bones or dislocated shoulders, like poor Rex tumbling from Primrose, but so that this wonderment would never end. I had told Rex I wanted to go to the North Pole, ride steeplechase, dress like a man, and be queen of the East like Hester Stanhope. I should have told him I wanted to parachute jump from a hot-air balloon. I was not Lady of the Bow but Queen of the Skies. I was Gwendolen.
* * *
HOW LONG IT was before the earth drifted back to greet me, and houses and trees took on familiar proportions, I do not know. The elected field approached slowly, then with a rush. The grass rose, and as it touched my feet I circled onto my back; no broken bones, no pain. I undid the belt, stepped out of the sling, breathed the scent of grass, and saw the parachute lying beside me. I looked up, and there was Hans gliding down, and high above him in the sky the seemingly tiny balloon sailing on its way.
Hans and I laughed and hugged. He said he found floating down to earth strange and beautiful and that it made him understand abstraction and the severance of the new world from the old and that he would not paint in the same way again. I said I dared do anythi
ng now. People ran from the lanes to greet us. We were birds that had descended from the sky, from the realm of the rainbow and the sun. Wasn’t I scared? Did my mother know? Where was my husband? they asked. Hans and I were driven to the palace in the pony and trap, given hot tea and scones, and interviewed for the Graphic. “Are you beginning to see how wide and full of possibilities the world is?” Hans asked me, and I thanked him and agreed I was.
* * *
AND SO I moved on. I forgot I was a widow except in haunting dreams. I woke to relief that Grandcourt was forever gone. My unrequited love for you merged with new preoccupations. I wore the turquoise necklace as allegiance to a memory but not with a sense of hope.
The here and now were not much changed. What had changed was my acceptance of it. I still did not much care for the formal social round; my self-belief remained fragile, and so did my ability to trust the love of anyone but Mama. Hans partnered me at dances and dinner parties. I am not sure I would have been invited unaccompanied.
The Mallingers gave musical soirées and held dances at the Abbey; they now wanted suitors for their girls. Klesmer, when he saw me, invariably told me I was lovely. I felt by thus describing me he was telling me I was quite without interest, except as a valued painting to adorn a wall. Catherine was expecting their child: a little genius no doubt. Lord Brackenshaw was disappointed I now declined to hunt; he said he feared the modern generation was losing its vim and verve. Anna and my aunt and uncle stayed at Park Lane when in town to visit Rex. Anna was evidently in love with Hans, and I met this observation with unequivocal hope for them both. My aunt did not revise her opinion of me: I was a threat to the male of the species, a spoiled child, and probably a heretic. Uncle made no further mention of my marriage or his encouragement of it, and dropped his paternal manner toward me. Rex’s move into the Brackenshaw dynasty meant meat for breakfast for him and a pedigree companion for Primrose.
Often Hans accompanied me when I went home to see Mama. He was a loved guest. I have on the wall before me his sketch of the family grouped on the porch at Offendene as I arrive and Mama and my sisters greet me. It was how, on so many occasions, I remembered the scene. It was my delight to arrive like a meteor bearing gifts of hats, scarves, perfumes, and a hamper from Fortnum & Mason.
On that visit, Mama told me I looked radiant, and in truth so did she: her face less lined, her eyes bright, her clothes fashionable. She proudly showed me her wardrobe of new gowns. She told me Mr. Quallon, the banker, was her new adviser on financial matters. Offendene was smart, its management supervised by Rex: the hedges clipped, the stables extended. There was a full-time groom, a carriage for Mama to go visiting. Refitted windows made the house warmer; Jocasta and Miss Merry acquainted me with the new and gleaming kitchen. Rex’s generosity was an act of loving kindness; he wished for nothing in return but our well-being.
I doubt Mama could see me with a man without wondering if he might become another husband, but fortunately she was too reticent to ask questions about Hans. We all gathered around the dining-room table, and my sisters quizzed me about the life of balls and lovelorn swains they supposed I lived in London. I gave some account of Mrs. Lewes and her salons, the circus, opera, and latest hats and plumes in the shops, but I did not talk of Julian’s wondrous shift to Juliette, my ascent in a hot-air balloon and descent to earth in a parachute; these seemed like flights too far for Pennicote.
Mama’s delight was to see me happier. She confided her fear of my being lost, in grief and disappointment, to myself and her. With simulated nonchalance she asked whether you had written to me. I said you had not, but that from others I heard of your sunlit journey to the Wailing Place.
Clintock called at every opportunity and was so ardent in wooing Isabel he seemed scarcely now to notice me. His habit was to hold forth on tedious matters as if they were of supreme importance; how not to clean a hen coop was one. It was a mystery to me that Isabel tolerated an hour of his company, let alone the prospect of a lifetime of it, but I had learned that many life choices defy understanding.
Bertha came home for a visit, knowing I was there. I told her about Julian for, in knickerbockers and with short cropped hair, she now looked more of a man than did he. It was her view that all people should be free to follow their hearts. She enjoyed her work as a landscape gardener and spoke with unconscious frequency about Marjorie Millet, a stable girl at the Myre estate, with whom she rode, picnicked, and roamed the countryside.
When I left with Hans for London, Mama did not say good-bye with the same puzzled and disappointed countenance as when I was married to Grandcourt. As our carriage drove away, she and my sisters waved and waved from the porch, and I waved and my heart was wrenched, but more from a sense of the fragility of their lives and hopes, and the awareness of all things passing, than from remorse at leaving Offendene for the still unknown.
* * *
“YOU MUST MEET Barbara,” Mrs. Lewes said at my next attendance at her salon gathering. She gave her now familiar scrutiny of me, as if reading every detail of my appearance and thoughts.
Mrs. Bodichon was about fifty, tall but plumpish, unself-conscious, and with a proud, intelligent face, her hair still golden though sprinkled with gray, her skirt rather short. Hans told me she was a good watercolorist, a pioneer for women’s liberation, that Mrs. Lewes portrayed her in her novel Romola, and that she did not wear corsets because she viewed them as a symbol of male subjugation. How he acquired this last piece of information I do not know, but he liked such detail.
He was deep in talk with a tall, dark-haired young man whom I had not seen on previous Sunday gatherings and who, whenever I looked up, seemed to be looking at me. I rather wished I was in their company for I was curious about this stranger’s manner and their intense conversation.
“So you’re the intriguing Gwendolen,” Barbara Bodichon said to me. “Mary Anne has talked a great deal about you.” Apprehension as to what this talk might be must have shown on my face, for she added, “About your love for Daniel Deronda and your unfortunate marriage.”
Your love for Daniel Deronda. As I heard those words, though time had passed and I had made such moves forward to life without you, a stab of pain and loss went through me so keen that I reeled, and to steady myself held the back of a chair. I then met the gaze of the tall young man, and for a moment, because I was thinking of you, I thought his gaze came from you. It had the same intensity of interest as yours at the Kursaal in Homburg when you drew me into you, and the same effect on me of fear that my will had surrendered. I looked away.
Mrs. Bodichon asked how I liked London and said she admired my courage in braving the city alone. I protested I could not claim courage, with Hans as my escort and attentive friend, Sir Hugo Mallinger caring for me like a father, my more than comfortable quarters at Park Lane, and Mama and my horse and the countryside only a day’s drive away.
That was all to the good, Mrs. Bodichon said, now I was free and not trapped in the iniquity of a violent marriage. She pulled from her bag two pamphlets she had published, and handed them to me: A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women and Women and Work. I thanked her but doubted I would read either. I was more disposed to live iniquity than read about it. (I still have all Mrs. Bodichon’s pamphlets.)
She then gave me a little lecture on how wrong it was for men to hold the financial resources of the world and refuse to let women do decently paid work or have professional careers. To force women to marry for financial support was no better than legalized prostitution, she said. She spoke of a woman whose stolen purse was described in court as the property of her husband. “All professions ought be open to women,” she said. “They should be employed as doctors, preachers, members of Parliament, watchmakers; trained as clerks, cashiers, and accountants; allowed to read all literature, including Rabelais, Fielding, and Sterne; allowed to swim in municipal baths.”
I had read Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley and thought her right t
o call on men to alter their laws so women might have lives other than through marriage, but though I wanted to be free or at least not chained, happy or at least not sad, mine was not a campaigning disposition. I told Barbara Bodichon I could not have great theories. I could only feel as I did. She said for us all it was how we felt that mattered. I had my life to live, and, like all women she met, I needed that life to be unfettered. “I love the courage of women,” she said. “Had God existed, she would have been a woman.”
* * *
OVER THE MONTHS that followed I learned about Mrs. Bodichon’s eventful life. She came from a family of social reformers, Florence Nightingale was her niece, and William Smith, who worked to abolish slavery, was her grandfather, so it was perhaps in her nature to strive to make the world a better place.
I remembered dinner at the Abbey on that New Year’s Day and the conversation about cotton plantations. I only half listened for all I had wanted was to hear your voice. Mrs. Bodichon told me of a slave auction she observed in America, of a girl, advertised as “Amy, a good cook, a good washer,” who was holding her baby. A blackguard-looking man opened Amy’s mouth, examined her teeth, felt her all over, said she was expensive, and paid eight hundred dollars for her. Another girl, Polly, twice sold, had her three children taken from her, separated from each other, and sold. Polly said to Mrs. Bodichon, “Mum, we poor creatures have need to believe in God, for if God Almighty will not be good to us someday, why were we born?”
Mrs. Bodichon’s politician father, Benjamin Leigh Smith, never married her mother, a milliner like Julian’s mother, nor did she take his name. Barbara, eldest of the five children she bore him, was seven when her mother, aged twenty-three, died. She and her brothers and sisters were then raised by Mr. Leigh Smith. He taught them at home and supervised the building of a large carriage, like an omnibus and drawn by four horses, in which he, they, and the servants each year went on magnificent journeys to Italy, Ireland, or Scotland. They took sketching materials with them, and this gave Mrs. Bodichon her enthusiasm for painting out of doors.
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