You looked quizzical, disappointed, and as if you wanted to know more. Wanted perhaps to hear of the handsome prince, with the castle, carriages, and glinting sword of honor, who rescued me from suicide by drowning and helped me overcome the guilt of aiding my evil husband’s death. “Your life…?” you said, in a hesitant voice. I talked of an impending journey with untried friends, of kind Sir Hugo, Hans, the constant of Offendene, Mama’s contentment, the new windows in the house, and the same returning swallows in the barn.
You wanted to go beyond detail and delve into my heart. So I told you that, for the most part, I was at peace with myself, that out of evil good had come, and that I had learned to take things as they are, not as I wanted them to be or how I was led to believe they ought to be. I said I could be reflective at whatever came to me, good or bad, sun or shadow, the best things about myself and the worst. “You’ll be pleased to hear,” I said, “that I have almost but not quite lost any wish to gamble.”
You smiled but looked confused. Though I had gone no farther than to London, Paris, and Amsterdam, and you six thousand miles to the other side of the world, I had traveled in a way you could not understand. Your star was fixed. My journeys lay ahead.
Time and suffering had built a wall between us. You were now more entrenched in who you were, more sure of what was right and wrong, and I was less. I had seen how little it takes to drown. It was not that I learned to be more cautious, for to travel to unknown places with men to whom I was not attached was not cautious. It was more that I had learned not to suppose I could arrive at a destination.
You had taken your belief and its trappings with you from Wessex to Palestine: the Torah and the Tehillah, the Ten Commandments, the Day of Atonement, a day for rejoicing. I shunned any orthodoxy, Christian or Jewish, I had suffered confinement, and I would avoid it again: this you must be, that you must not be. I cared for the wide world and my brief and glancing view of it not defined by a man’s commands. I was a free spirit like your mother, though I lacked her strength and talent. I loved you from the moment I first saw you; I love you now. I would always be thrilled, shocked, and delighted to go into a room and see you there. It would always be as if I had found what I had lost and was looking for. But I could not have converted to your beliefs.
You noted I was wearing the turquoise chain. You said you thought of me often. You had not written to me because you were uncertain what to say. Sir Hugo often sent you my news. You were disappointed I would be unable to visit the Abbey while you were there. Mirah was at home in Jerusalem with your son, Daniel.
And then you said it had long been on your mind to give me a memento. Something other than the turquoise chain. You took from your coat your mother’s locket with her picture in it. I am wearing it now.
You and I, we were the life we did not live. The link between us remained untried, unbroken. Never together, never wholly apart. We were the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn, questioning desire locked in our eyes and hearts. I was important to you like the unreal mother you once glimpsed but never knew. You were important to me like the love and happiness I yearn for still. I have so often thought of you and seen and felt your gaze—in the music of Schubert, in the night sky. In the melancholy of evenings alone I penned these fragmented memories to you in violet ink, not with a wish for you to read them, only so as not to relinquish you.
* * *
I MADE MY journey, the first of many. I made—and make—my travels of discovery and adventure with womanly courage, a pleasure in what is new and strange, an awareness of freedom and good fortune, and as a bulwark against past or future pain. I left Paul and Antoine in the Seychelles Islands, not in anger or with disappointment, but from a desire again to be at Offendene, walk the familiar lanes of Pennicote, see the bluebells in the woodland, hear the wind in the birch trees, see Mama, who I feared had grown frail. I journeyed home with strangers.
Next year I plan to journey to Ashkelon with Violet Greene and two of her friends. I will try to visit you and your family. One day I am sure we will meet again. I would like to tell you of the journeys I have made, see your wise, kind eyes, feel the warmth of your hand in mine. I would like to tell you travel means most to me when it is in my mind. I would also like to tell you, but I will never dare, that you will always remain, though faded like an echo and locked away like a keepsake, my place of safety, my heaven on earth, the destination about which I will always wonder but can never reach.
Years Later
I consigned these pages to a drawer, time passed, memories faded. One afternoon my small daughter, Lucy, chanced on them and strewed them over the floor. As I gathered them up, before hiding them again I glanced at what I had written and was pained to be reminded of all I had endured.
I did not see Mrs. Lewes again after my return from Africa. She published the book about you in which I appeared. It was her last novel, and she gave it your name. I have not read it for I do not want harsh memories to surface, but I heard that she freely invented and omitted when it suited her so to do.
Her own story became more fantastic than either yours or mine. Mr. Lewes died of cancer not long after George Eliot’s new book came out, and she then married a family friend, twenty years her junior, whom hitherto she had referred to as her nephew. She was about sixty by then. Mr. Cross—I think that was his name—was a city financier with a red beard. I do not recall meeting him at her salon afternoons. Mrs. Bodichon told me he had until then lived with his mother, who died, which left him desolate. Her view was that all love is different, but apparently he had had no previous involvement with any woman other than his mother. I wondered if Mrs. Lewes married so as to gain approval from her brother Isaac, who deigned to break his censorious silence and congratulate her on the wedding. He cared about the fact of it, not whether it would bring her happiness. Then on the honeymoon in Venice Mr. Cross jumped from the hotel window into the Grand Canal and had to be rescued from drowning by gondoliers and sedated with chloral. It did not sound like a propitious beginning to married life.
I thought how being hauled, or not, from deep water figured large in the stories of your life, Mrs. Lewes’s, and my own. Mrs. Cross—I could not think of her as Mrs. Cross, though she liked to be referred to as such—within months of this marriage then died, I am not sure of what. A sore throat that turned into something else, I think.
* * *
I PONDERED THE news I had heard of some of the others who affected my life and wondered what of it was true.
So much and yet so little has happened and happens to me and within me. Time leaks away, but I am not bound to the old rules, I am free, and I have my flight. I cannot be summed up or shown to have arrived. I could not reach the destination of your heart, but I have other loves, all different; my daughter is chief among them. I do not see her father, who already has a wife.
Mama has become rather vague in manner and rheumy eyed, but her face lights with radiance at the sight of me. And my true friends are there for me through good times and bad. Rex predictably is happily married and a respected judge. He always remembers my birthday, always invites me to dances, functions, and to soirées that I have no wish to attend. Hans and my cousin Anna are married. She bestows the same devotion and adulation on her husband as she did on Rex. In their company I recapture the picnic days of childhood, riding in the meadows, swimming in the lake.
Bertha lives happily with Marjorie Millet not far from Offendene in a thatched cottage. They are now acclaimed landscape gardeners, much in demand. They have created their own paradisal garden and talk hotly of birds and bees and how rigorously one should prune roses.
Isabel—Mrs. Clintock—so far has five sons. Mama worries there will never be enough money, on a clergyman’s pay, to feed this tribe. Alice married a colonel and is proud of the aviary she has created on the grounds of their country house. Each time I visit, I with shame remember my slaughter of her caged bird. Fanny married a crofter; I forget how they met. They moved to Scotland, and she seld
om writes home.
As for the rest: I heard from Sir Hugo that the young Henleigh Grandcourt eschews mammon, cares nothing for his inheritance, plays the saxophone, has grown his brown curls long, and writes poetry. Sir Hugo also told me how Lush endured an alarming death: he stepped into quicksand near Lyme Regis, was not hauled from it until the following day, there had been a storm in the night, and his chill turned to bronchitis then pneumonia. He lasted a fortnight. I shrugged when I heard this news.
Julian returned to America and wrote to none of us. Hans saw news that he fell from the trapeze wire in front of a huge crowd in Kalamazoo, damaged his back, then took poison because he knew he would never perform his wonderful acts again.
And from Uncle I heard that Mrs. Gadsby inherited a pig farm near Bristol from an unknown, unwed relative. It turned out to be a gold mine, so Uncle said.
About the Author
DIANA SOUHAMI is the author of twelve critically acclaimed nonfiction and biography books, including Selkirk’s Island (winner of the Whitbread Biography Award), The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (winner of the Lambda Literary Award and short-listed for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography), and the bestselling Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter (winner of the Lambda Literary Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year). She lives in London. You can sign up for email updates here.
BY DIANA SOUHAMI
FICTION
Gwendolen
NONFICTION
Murder at Wrotham Hill
Edith Cavell: Nurse, Martyr, Heroine
Coconut Chaos: Pitcairn, Mutiny and a Seduction at Sea
Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks
Selkirk’s Island
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall
Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter
Greta and Cecil
Gertrude and Alice
Gluck: Her Biography
A Woman’s Place: The Changing Picture of Women in Britain
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
I
Grandcourt
II
Deronda
III
Gwendolen
Years Later
About the Author
By Diana Souhami
Copyright
GWENDOLEN. Copyright © 2015 by Diana Souhami. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover design by Lucy Kim
Cover images: Amazons of the Bow: A Sketch at an Archery Meeting (colored engraving), Lucien Davis (1860–1951)/Private Collection/© Look and Learn/Bernard Platman Antiquarian Collection/Bridgeman Images; first edition front cover of Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, courtesy of Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Souhami, Diana.
Gwendolen: a novel / Diana Souhami. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-62779-340-7 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-62779-341-4 (electronic book) 1. Social classes—England—Fiction. I. Eliot, George, 1819–1880. Daniel Deronda. II. Title.
PR6119.O6775G93 2015
823’.92—dc23
2014030247
First U.S. Edition: March 2015
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Gwendolen Page 24
