Beauty in Thorns

by Kate Forsyth

  She had never been happier.

  ‘I draw better when I am hungry,’ Lizzie said, not looking away from her easel.

  ‘You’ve scarcely eaten a thing all day,’ Gabriel protested.

  She shrugged one shoulder. She could not explain to him how clear and pure her head felt when her stomach was hollow. It was as if the world clicked into sharper focus. Her body was all bone and sinew and nerve, like an artist’s body should be.

  ‘I could send out for a pie.’ Gabriel drew her back against him, sliding his hands down inside her bodice. She had abandoned her corsets, unable to bear the way they constricted her movements when she painted, and so had made herself a dress that was easy to fasten and unfasten. Gabriel thought she had done it for him.

  Lizzie pulled away. ‘I don’t know how you can eat those pies. How do you know what’s in them? Haven’t you heard those stories about a barber who kills his victims and cooks them up in a pie?’

  ‘That’s just a penny dreadful.’

  ‘Still, it could be cats or rats …’

  ‘Or bats. I get the idea. It needn’t be a pie …’

  ‘My mother will be angry with me if I miss dinner again. She likes the family to eat together.’ Lizzie looked out the window and realised how late it was. She jumped to her feet, shoving her paintbrush into a jar of turpentine. ‘Oh, Gabriel, why did you let me paint so long. I must fly!’ Hurriedly she unrolled the sleeves of her dress. ‘Will you tidy up for me? Where’s my coat?’

  ‘Are you sure I cannot walk you home?’

  Lizzie shook her head. ‘There’s no need. I’ll hail a cab.’

  Gabriel looked troubled. He pulled out his purse. ‘Let me give you some money for it.’

  She took it awkwardly, kissed Gabriel goodbye, and hurried down to the street. A hansom cab clopped past, the driver sitting up behind the cabin, shrouded in his greatcoat against the fine mizzle.

  Lizzie did not hail it. She began to walk, as swiftly as she could, with the weight of her skirts hampering her legs. Her basket banged against her hip. It was filled with her sewing, which she worked at quietly while Gabriel drew her. She had given up her job at the millinery shop, but earned what she could by sewing fancy work for a Southwark dressmaker she knew.

  She had to earn some money somehow. Gabriel did not like to think of her modelling for anyone else, and it was hard to ask him for money now that she shared his bed.

  She passed an apothecary. Lizzie’s steps faltered. She stood for a moment, hesitating, then hurried inside, paying two shillings for a small brown bottle of laudanum. She hid it in her pocket, then rushed back out on to the street. Only if I cough, she told herself. Or if I can’t sleep.

  It was a long walk. The domes and spires and chimneypots were black against a fiery sky. Puddles gleamed with uncertain light, restless beneath the pricking rain.

  The lamplighter was already making his slow way from gaslight to gaslight, his pole over his shoulder. As he lifted his wand high, Lizzie heard the hiss of the gas. Then a bright golden star bloomed, making the darkness thicken.

  At last, Lizzie saw the hulking shape of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, and knew she was almost home. She paused to catch her breath and smooth down her mud-fringed skirts. Her father was outside his shop, in his long canvas apron, fastening the shutters over the windows. Steel dust glittered in his hair. ‘Ye’re late,’ he said. ‘Get lost, did ye?’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. Mr Rossetti was that keen to finish a bit of work while the light was right.’

  ‘Did he pay you owt extra?’

  ‘Of course. A little. My omnibus took ever so long coming home. A horse fell on the hill, and the traffic was a nightmare.’ Her cheeks warmed, and she avoided her father’s eye.

  ‘Well, get yeself in. You know the night air ain’t good for ye.’

  ‘Yes, Pa.’

  Lizzie went through the shop, the tools and blades shining faintly in the light of her father’s lantern, which he had set on the cracked wooden counter. She could hear the clanging of tools from the workroom out the back, where her younger brothers were finishing up the day’s work.

  As she climbed the steps to their rooms, she felt tired and heavy-limbed. Her mother was stirring a pot that hung from a tripod above an open hearth. Lizzie’s stomach roiled at the smell.

  Mrs Siddal turned around, her red hair frizzing out from her head in the steam. ‘Where you been, Lizzie?’

  ‘Working. I got held up on the way home. A horse slipped and fell.’ Lizzie found it easier to lie to her mother than to her father.

  ‘You hungry? We’re just about to eat.’

  ‘I’ve eaten already. Mr Rossetti fed me.’

  ‘What did you eat?’

  ‘Mutton pie.’

  Her mother grunted. ‘Better fare than you get here, I suppose.’

  ‘No, that’s not it. He was sorry for keeping me so late, and wanted to make sure I had some supper.’

  ‘As long as you ate. Coming to the meeting?’

  Lizzie lifted her basket. ‘I’ve still got work to do.’

  Her mother looked displeased. ‘The state of your soul needs work too.’

  ‘I know, Ma. I’m sorry. But if I get it done quickly, then Mrs Tweedale will be pleased with me and give me more work.’

  Her mother took off her apron and hung it on a hook, and tidied her hair in an age-spotted mirror that hung from a beam. ‘There are some nice young men that come to the prayer meeting. Proper workers with proper wages. It’d do you no harm to come along and be nice to them every now and again.’

  ‘Yes, Ma. Maybe next week.’

  Her mother began to slice the boiled corned beef. It was red and rough, with a thick rim of yellowish fat. Just the smell of it made her feel sick. Lizzie went into the sitting-room and picked up her sewing. As soon as she heard everyone leave, she pulled out a sketchbook and a pencil, and began to draw. Her fingers felt stiff, though. After a while she tore the page out, scrunched it up and flung it on the fire. Flames leapt up hungrily, and then sunk away again into a dull glow.

  You’ve got to practise, practise, practise, Gabriel told her.

  All Lizzie did was practise, and yet her drawings remained rigid and lifeless. Perhaps she just did not have the talent. When Gabriel was only six, he had amazed the local milkman by his drawing of a rocking-horse. Lizzie was sure that no-one would be amazed by any rocking-horse she drew.

  Her hand slid into her pocket and touched her bottle of laudanum. A few drops won’t hurt, she told herself.

  In a daze, she drew until she heard her family’s boots on the stairs. Then she hid her sketchbook away, and pretended she had been sewing.

  The Siddal family went early to bed, to save lamp oil. Lizzie lay in her lumpy bed, listening to her sister’s breathing. Her whole body thrummed with tiredness, and every now and again one of her legs would twitch, startling her from a doze.

  There was a sick knot of anxiety in the pit of her stomach. Tomorrow was Saturday. Mrs Siddal would be expecting Lizzie’s pay packet. Lizzie had managed to save only a few coins. Gabriel was very relaxed about money. When he was short, he borrowed some from his brother or his friends. When he had a windfall, he spent it. He thought her very working-class, she knew, counting every penny.

  If only he would marry her! Then she would be free of her family, free of all these worries over money, free to do as she pleased.

  She crept out of bed and fumbled through the darkness to where her coat hung on its hook. As her fingers closed around the little bottle in its pocket, she felt a pang of fearful guilt. Laudanum was not cheap, she should be saving it for emergencies. But her head throbbed, her tongue and mouth were parched, and her stomach felt like a knotted tangle of string.

  Lizzie tipped the bottle and drank it down.

  One evening, Lizzie was nestled into Gabriel’s side, listening to him read Tennyson, when someone banged the front door open.

  ‘Gabriel!’ a man’s voice shouted. ‘Where are you? It�
��s devilish dark in here. Care to join me at the pub?’

  Gabriel pushed Lizzie aside and jumped to his feet. She scrambled up also, cheeks scorching. For a moment, the three of them stood there. No-one spoke, though the young man stared at her in curiosity. Lizzie realised that Gabriel had no intention of introducing her to his friend. Embarrassment turned to shame.

  One did not introduce one’s friends to one’s mistress.

  She picked up her skirts and fled.

  As Lizzie hurtled down the steep hill, tying the ribbons of her bonnet, tears flooded down her cheeks. She felt like such a fool. No wonder Gabriel never took her out to meet his friends. Lizzie had thought it was because he wanted to keep her all to himself. She had not minded, existing in a kind of happy dream where she had pretended that the little thatched cottage was their home, and Gabriel was her husband, and they were building a life of art and love together.

  It was all a sham.

  She could not stop the tears from falling. The wall of Highgate Cemetery loomed over her in the lingering summer dusk. She ducked into the shadow of its arched gateway, and pressed herself against cool stone, hiding her face in her hands.

  At last the storm of tears passed. Lizzie looked through the chained bars at the graveyard beyond. She could see dangling willow leaves, marble obelisks, stone angels.

  Lizzie knew she would return in the morning, with her sketchbook and her pencils, and pretend she did not mind.

  For she had come too far now to turn back.

  5

  The Winged Life

  Spring 1853

  One of her lover’s treasures was a handwritten manuscript of William Blake’s poems and pencil sketches, which Gabriel had bought for ten shillings from an attendant at the British Museum.

  He had, of course, borrowed the tin from his brother.

  Blake painted angels and demons and ghosts. Lizzie could understand why Gabriel was so fascinated by him. The same images haunted his paintings too. The poems, however, clanked with manacles and chains and locks, particularly in relation to marriage. One poem read: Why should I be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree? Love, Free Love, cannot be bound, to any tree that grows on ground …

  Lizzie realised Gabriel shared Blake’s view of love and marriage just as he shared his fascination with the ghoulish and ghastly. It was troubling to her. She had thought Gabriel’s objection to marriage was simply a wild young man’s reluctance to settle down too soon. She was beginning to realise that it went much deeper than that. Gabriel seemed to truly believe that love should be given freely, without any constraints of conventional morality. Another little poem of Blake’s said: He who binds to himself a joy, Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies, Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

  Lizzie was afraid that she had gambled away her virtue for nothing.

  One day, Gabriel came wandering into the studio, a note in his hand.

  ‘Bruno’s been caught in the parson’s mousetrap! I’m to stand witness for him and Emma next week.’

  Lizzie looked up from her easel. ‘What? You mean Bruno is to marry Emma!’

  She had known Emma as a girl; their mothers had been friends. Emma had given birth to Bruno’s daughter, Cathy, a few years earlier. It was Cathy who, with her lisping attempts to say Gabriel, had given him the babyish nickname Guggums that he and Lizzie now each called the other.

  Bruno kept Emma and little Cathy in a few rooms on the outskirts of London, visiting them three days every week, but keeping their presence in his life secret from all but a few very close friends.

  ‘I suppose he feels he must do the right thing,’ Gabriel replied. ‘There being a baby and all. And he seems happy enough. Just devilish short on tin, poor old chap. He’s only keeping a step or two ahead of the bum-bailiffs, and hasn’t any money for paint. That’s no way to live.’

  Lizzie took a deep calming breath. ‘But surely it makes better sense for them to live together, rather than Bruno paying for two establishments?’

  ‘He’ll get no work done at all with a wife and baby in the house.’

  ‘They can model for him. Make sure he doesn’t paint all night in the cold.’

  Gabriel looked uncomfortable. ‘Guggums … darling … you know I can’t afford to get married. I have even less tin than Bruno. My father’s going downhill awfully fast, and not earning a bean. My poor old mother and Christina are fagging over some kind of school in the country while poor old Maria is teaching Italian to idiots. And my brother William has taken some filthy job with Inland Revenue – when he has the soul of a poet! I’ve thought about getting a job too, honestly, I have. I went and applied for a job as a railway telegraphist, but I couldn’t do it, Lizzie.’

  Gabriel had come to kneel before her, holding both her hands in his. He kissed one, and then the other.

  ‘I know you understand that, dear heart. You wouldn’t want me to be a telegraph operator, would you?’

  Lizzie shook her head, unable to help a smile.

  ‘So you understand? It would be wrong of me to think of myself now, when my father is so ill and everyone in such a worry. It’s different for Bruno, he hasn’t any ageing parents or ailing sisters to worry about. He can marry when and whom he likes. It’s different for me. I owe my parents such a debt of gratitude, they’ve supported me for so long. I need to knuckle down and get a decent painting done, and start earning some tin myself. Then things will be different, I promise.’

  ‘All right,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Only … Gabriel, you do love me, don’t you? You do want to be with me?’

  He had turned her wrist so he could kiss the thin blue veins that pulsed beneath her white skin. One hand slid around her waist, drawing her closer. ‘I adore you. You are my own dearest Guggums.’ He drew her face down and kissed her.

  Lizzie lived in fear of her parents finding out. Every day drew the coil of deceit a little tighter. One day she trudged home wearily in the dusk, and came up the stairs to find her mother waiting for her. Lizzie’s stomach keeled over.

  Her mother stood up and silently held out her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry … I haven’t any coins … Mr … Mr Rossetti has not paid me yet.’

  ‘What? You’re out all day long, and come home without a penny to show for your troubles?’

  ‘Mr Rossetti is just a little strapped for cash at the moment. And you know he sometimes gives me painting lessons free of charge, in return for me modelling …’

  ‘And what use is that? It doesn’t put food on our table. I was against this modelling business from the start, you know I was, but you told me it would bring in extra coin for us all. You must tell this Mr Rizzetty of yours that you won’t be coming back, and then you’ll go to Mrs Tozer and beg her pardon and ask her for your old job back.’

  ‘I won’t! You don’t understand, Ma …’

  ‘I understand all too well,’ Mrs Siddal responded. ‘You fancy yourself in love with this rackety painter fellow, and hope you can bring him up to snuff. Well, men like him don’t marry girls like you, Lizzie, and you should know it. You need to find yourself a good solid down-to-earth man who’ll turn a blind eye to your past in return for a warm bed and lots of children.’

  ‘But that’s not what I want!’ Lizzie pleaded. ‘Ma, please … I have a real chance here to do something with my life …’

  ‘I won’t have it. It’s not respectable. Either he makes an honest woman of you and marries you, or you get a proper job and look about you for a man that will.’

  ‘He can’t marry me.’ The words burst out of her.

  ‘Why not?’

  Lizzie’s cheeks burned. ‘He’s poor … he can’t afford a wife …’

  ‘Then tell him to get a proper job so he can.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘Indeed I don’t.’

  ‘His art is everything to him.’ Lizzie stumbled to explain. ‘He has such big dreams …’ Her mother’s contemptuous snort goaded her on. ‘And h
is pa’s sick and cannot work anymore … and his ma is so burdened with grief and worry, he cannot bear to add to her trouble …’

  ‘And why would the news that he was about to marry be such a worry to her? I would have thought she’d be glad to see such a rattle-pate settling down.’

  Lizzie’s eyes fell. ‘His parents don’t approve of me …’

  ‘Well, I don’t approve of him. These artists are all loose fish.’

  ‘He’s not! Ma, please. He says he will marry me just as soon as he can.’

  ‘Well, until then, I forbid you to see him again. If he wants you, he can come with a ring in his hand.’

  Lizzie stood motionless, her pulse thudding. Then she shook her head. ‘No. I can’t leave him. I’d die without him.’

  She turned and went blindly towards the door.

  ‘Where are you going? I’m not finished with you!’ Her mother’s voice was shrill.

  ‘I’m finished with you.’

  ‘I tell you now, if you walk out that door, you won’t be welcome back here again!’

  ‘I’ve never been welcome here,’ Lizzie said, and put on her coat and bonnet and opened the front door. Her mother slammed it shut behind her.

  It was dark outside. Lizzie ran away down the road, shoulders hunched against the sharp wind. She remembered all the many small cruelties of her childhood. Forced to sit at the table for hours, staring down at the congealed mutton chops on her plate till her stomach was lurching, and still her mother would not let her leave till every last disgusting mouthful was choked down. Being made to sit alone in her freezing attic room to read or write or draw, because her mother thought such things a terrible waste of time. Never being good enough, no matter what she did. She remembered how her Sunday School teacher had once complimented her on how smart she was, and her mother had said, ‘Smart’s no use at all, shame she’s so plain. Looks are the only thing that’ll help a girl get on in this world.’

  Tears ran down her face. Lizzie blotted them away with the back of her gloved hand. She could not regret walking out, but she had no idea what she was to do now.