Beauty in Thorns

by Kate Forsyth

  ‘If you’ll help me,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll carry you if I must. It’d be like carrying a little bird. I know you say you are feeling better, Lizzie, but indeed you are very thin. Are you eating properly?’

  She looked away from him. ‘Oh, yes. That is … I don’t much like the food my landlady serves up. It’s all pies and puddings and plum heavies. I feel I’m in danger of turning into a pudding myself.’

  ‘No fear of that,’ he answered, rather grimly.

  The hill was steep, and Lizzie was soon short of breath. Gabriel moderated his own eager stride to her feebler step, and helped her over the stile.

  A tunnel of hedgerows led to green meadows and a wide view of the shining sea. A kestrel rode the wind. Lizzie watched, marvelling at the bird’s swift effortless wheeling across the sky, its shadow flitting over her face as it crossed the sun.

  At last they reached the cliff’s edge. There was a natural seat made of a great slab of sandstone. Smiling, Gabriel perched beside her, leaning his hat against his knee. Lizzie’s heart made its presence known within her, like an over-wound clock.

  ‘I’ve heard of this place,’ Lizzie said, looking about her. ‘It’s called the Lovers’ Seat. There was a girl of good family, who fell in love with a sea-captain. Her parents would not countenance the match, and so they used to meet here in secret. Eventually they eloped, and were very happy together. So now they say anyone who becomes betrothed here will find happiness in love.’

  She felt, rather than saw, the stiffening of Gabriel’s body.

  They sat in awkward silence for a long moment. Then Lizzie stood. ‘Shall we go back?’

  ‘If you like.’ Gabriel’s voice was cool.

  They walked back through the meadows. Lizzie’s throat felt as if a choker had been fastened too tightly about it. When they reached her lodgings on High Street, she gave Gabriel her hand and said good night.

  ‘Do you not want to have some supper?’ he asked in surprise.

  She shook her head. ‘I’d like to rest now.’

  ‘So when will I see you?’

  ‘In the morning. Are we not going to see your friends? I will see you then. Good night.’

  His face softened. ‘Good night, my dear. Sleep well.’

  Alone in her own small room, Lizzie undressed and stood naked before the mirror, turning this way and that to observe herself. She could see the knobs of her spine, her sharp shoulder blades like tiny wings, the deep hollows beneath her collarbones, the protruding lines of her ribs. She looked down at her hands, translucent skin stretched over bones and tendons and veins. The feeling of constriction in her throat increased until she could hardly breathe. Lizzie hid herself in her voluminous nightgown. She drank down her usual nightly dose of laudanum, and climbed into bed. The mattress was hard and lumpy. She lay flat and straight, and put her hands on the hollow of her stomach.

  She thought of the kestrel, and its mastery of the wind.

  She thought of her brother, begging her not to forget him.

  She thought of dying, and leaving no trace of her presence in this world.

  Eventually she slept, a little.

  ‘She sits so still!’ Anna Mary exclaimed. ‘Really, she is the perfect model.’

  Lizzie let her lips curve a little. Her body was heavy and loose, her hands upturned on her lap. Her tongue still tasted the delicious sweetness of the laudanum.

  ‘How can you stay motionless for so long?’ Barbara demanded.

  ‘I just think,’ Lizzie said. ‘There is always so much to think about.’

  She looked out at the garden again. She and Gabriel and his friends were sitting on the terrace of an old farmhouse not far from Hastings. Built of red brick, the house had a steep red-tiled roof and tall chimneys. Behind the house was a quaint wooden barn with a tucked roof like a nun’s wimple. The only sounds were the distant lowing of a cow, and the twittering of birds.

  The house belonged to Barbara Leigh Smith. A young lady of twenty-seven, she wore a plain brown dress without a single flounce or knot of ribbon, cut short enough to show her sensible brown boots. She looked more like a farmer’s wife than an heiress. Yet Gabriel said she had more tin than she knew what to do with. Her grandfather had been the famous reformer and abolitionist William Smith, who had inherited a fortune made from the proceeds of sugar and spice plantations worked by slaves. He had spent his life campaigning fiercely for their freedom, and his granddaughter had inherited his revolutionary fervour as well as a good portion of his wealth.

  Her cause was for the liberation of women, and she was hard at work on a pamphlet that outlined, in plain language anyone could read, the stupidity of England’s laws regarding what they called the fairer sex.

  Barbara may have been rich and well connected – she was related closely to both the Nightingales and the Bonham-Carters – but she was nonetheless an outcast from polite society. She was illegitimate. Her father had refused to wed her mother, because he believed that marriage was a state akin to slavery. So although Barbara and her siblings had been brought up with every luxury money could buy, she would never have a coming-out ball, never be issued with vouchers to Almack’s, never enter the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, never tread in the divots at a polo match, and never, under any circumstances, be presented to the Queen.

  Barbara’s mother had been a milliner, and Lizzie was sure that was why Gabriel had chosen to introduce them. At first Lizzie had been cold and stand-offish, hurt that Gabriel should choose this way to rub her face in her lack of marriageability. But Barbara was simply too forthright and too kind-hearted to stand on ceremony with, and Lizzie had found herself thawing under the warmth of her interest.

  ‘She looks just like an angel,’ Anna Mary said. ‘And the colour of those irises against her hair. I wish I had time to paint her.’

  ‘You’ll have to come back,’ Barbara said to Gabriel. ‘We’ll paint all morning, have lunch, then go for a tramp in the afternoon.’

  ‘That’s hardly fair to Lizzie,’ Anna Mary exclaimed. ‘She’s an artist too, she’ll want some time for painting.’

  ‘I will sit for you if you will sit for me,’ Lizzie said. ‘You’d be a lovely study.’

  Anna Mary flushed, and looked down in pleasure. ‘Why, thank you.’

  Barbara snorted. ‘I notice no-one asks me to sit for them.’

  ‘But I’d love to draw you too,’ Lizzie said. ‘Your face is so strong, and yet so full of warmth and kindness. I think I’d like to draw you as a queen.’

  ‘I have often thought that,’ Anna Mary cried. ‘A queen from days of yore …’

  ‘In battle armour and a sword. I see it now,’ Gabriel said lazily. He was lying on the grass, his hands bent behind his head, the sketch he had done of Lizzie lying beside him. Lizzie wondered if Anna Mary and Barbara found it as disheartening as she did, watching him produce something so full of life, so quickly and easily.

  ‘Though I do not think I have the talent to do you justice,’ Lizzie said to Barbara. ‘I’m not good at heads.’

  ‘I am sure that’s not true,’ Barbara said. ‘Gabriel says that you have a natural genius, only wanting some tutoring to allow it to flower.’

  ‘He is just being kind. I have all the longing and none of the ability.’

  ‘All of us are afraid of that,’ Anna Mary said. ‘Us women, I mean. It is such a struggle for us, when every moment we spend drawing and painting is seen as a waste of time, and an indulgence of our vanities. And, of course, they will not let us take classes like the men.’

  ‘You’re better off without them,’ Gabriel said. ‘All the Academy does is stifle your creativity and try to make you draw slosh. Slosh, slosh, sloshetty-slosh.’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ Barbara objected in her forthright way. ‘You at least had the chance to learn from the masters. We have to fumble our own way forward, without anyone to help us or set us straight.’

  ‘That’s true of all of us artists,’ Gabriel objected.

>   The women all glanced at each other, silently acknowledging the obtuseness of men and the peculiar difficulty of being a woman in a world that thought they were little more than children.

  Both Barbara and Anna Mary had gone to art classes, however, even if it was not at the Royal Academy. They could afford canvases and paints and paintbrushes, and did not need to worry about how they were going to pay their rent.

  What a difference money makes, Lizzie thought. They think they struggle being women. They have no idea what it is to be both a woman and poor.

  ‘Well, it’s wonderful to leave the hustle and bustle of London, and have some peace for a while,’ Anna Mary said. ‘We plan to do nothing but draw and read and walk on the Downs, don’t we, Barbara?’

  ‘Yes, I’m determined to be the most selfish cove imaginable, and refuse to do a thing I don’t want to do. I have this grand landscape in my mind’s eye that I simply must work out.’

  Barbara turned to Lizzie. ‘So are you working on anything new?’

  ‘I’ve been working on a drawing of a scene from one of Robert Browning’s poems,’ Lizzie told her shyly.

  ‘Capital! Which one?’

  ‘“Pippa Passes”.’ Lizzie’s cheeks warmed. ‘I’m drawing the scene in which Pippa walks past the …’ She hesitated for a moment, then continued, ‘the women gossiping on the steps.’

  ‘Barb, she’s done a fine job of it, and I’m thinking it’ll be perfect for the next Folio.’ Gabriel turned back to Lizzie and said eagerly, ‘We’ve founded this club, to share ideas and drawings among us. The theme for the next round is “Desolation”. I’m doing this drawing of a young woman on the streets who is found by her old sweetheart, and Johnny Millais is doing something about a Roman soldier abandoning his English lover and Anna Mary is doing a sketch of a poor flower-girl, all cold and alone.’

  ‘To illustrate Job 30:19,’ Anna Mary said. ‘“He hath cast me into the mire and I am become like dust and ashes.”’

  ‘I’m doing a landscape of a windswept quarry by the sea,’ Barbara interrupted. ‘Really, much more desolate than all these fallen women.’

  ‘How can it be?’ Lizzie cried. ‘A lonely landscape is not a living thing. It’s only desolate when it reflects the misery in the heart of someone who looks upon it. What can be more desolating than to give yourself to someone you love utterly, and to be abandoned by them, left ruined and without hope?’

  Gabriel and the two women stared at her. Anna Mary leaned forward and gently touched Lizzie’s hand. ‘Well said, my dear. You are absolutely right. Barbara, I think it would be a wonderful thing to include Lizzie’s drawing in our folio.’

  ‘Excellent,’ she answered. ‘Send it to me when you can, Lizzie.’

  The maid brought out a tray of sandwiches. Gabriel loaded up a plate for Lizzie, saying, ‘You’ve hardly touched a thing, Gug. You need to eat and build up your strength. Tell her, Anna Mary.’

  ‘He’s right,’ she answered at once.

  Lizzie looked down at her plate in dismay. But with all three watching her, she could do nothing but smile and lift one of the sandwiches to her mouth and take a bite. The bread stuck to the roof of her mouth; the cucumber felt slimy and foul. She managed to swallow it down. Still they were all watching her. She forced down another mouthful, trying not to gag, then laid down the rest. ‘I don’t much like cucumber sandwiches,’ she said apologetically.

  ‘You need to eat meat,’ Barbara said, and passed her a sandwich thick with rare roast lamb. Lizzie valiantly chewed her way through it. After a while, conversation started up again and they stopped watching her so intently. Lizzie dropped bits of her sandwich under her chair, and hoped the ants would come and carry it all away.

  When Lizzie thought no-one was paying her any mind, she stood up and excused herself, going to find the outdoor privy. She found it a little hard to walk across the lawn; her legs felt rubbery. She did not need to force her fingers down her throat. The thought of that lump of half-raw meat rotting away in her stomach and the foul smell of the privy were enough to make her vomit straightaway. Her gullet burned with acid; her eyes stung with tears. It took her some time to compose herself, rinsing out her mouth with water again and again, and pressing damp fingers against her cheeks and eyes.

  When she walked back through the garden, it was to see Gabriel and Barbara sitting alone under the oak tree, their backs turned to her, their heads bent close together. Her heart knocked. She just knew they were talking about her. Lizzie crept across the lawn and stood in the shadow of the oak’s trunk, listening.

  ‘I would have thought you of all people would not be promoting the institute of marriage,’ Gabriel was saying. ‘You’re the one who wrote that women lose all rights once they are married, even that over her own body.’

  ‘Which is absolutely true,’ Barbara replied hotly. ‘But the alternative is no better. You think I don’t know? My father would not marry my mother because it went against all of his principles, and so my mother was thought a whore, to live with a man and bear him children out of wedlock.’

  ‘But …’ Gabriel began.

  Barbara cut him off. ‘You think him brave and noble, no doubt, but my mother suffered terribly from the shame, and so do I and all my brothers and sisters. You think I don’t care, because I’m rich and that gives me a measure of freedom most women do not have. But I do care, I care very much. Just remember … Miss Siddal is poor. She has no rolls of soft to cushion her against the censure of the world.’

  Gabriel said, a little shamefacedly, ‘I know. It’s just … my mother …’

  ‘You think your mother disapproves of her because she has worked as an artist’s model, which makes her easy game in the eyes of the world. Well, that is true, but the only way to make her respectable is to marry her. Your mother is a good Christian woman, I know. Surely she would forgive you for marrying a woman whom you have ruined in the eyes of the world? And just look at the poor girl! She’s wasting away. Clearly she’s not long for this world, any blind fool could see that. Marry her, look after her, give her what happiness you can.’

  Gabriel huffed out a deep sigh. ‘It’s just that I loathe and detest any kind of domesticity. The very thought of the parson’s mousetrap …’

  ‘Lizzie is not going to expect you to get a job in the City and hire a footman. She wants exactly what you want. To paint, to write, to be together without being cut by those she knows.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right. And I do love her.’

  ‘Then make her happy.’

  A tremulous smile curved Lizzie’s lips.

  Then she heard Anna Mary’s quick footsteps coming towards her down the path, and at once stepped out from behind the tree. She did not want to be caught eavesdropping. Gabriel stood up at the sight of her. ‘I might show Lizzie your woods. I’ve heard they’re very pretty.’

  ‘That would be lovely,’ Lizzie said demurely.

  They walked hand in hand through the meadows and into a copse of silver birches. A haze of blue lay over the ground, and Lizzie cried aloud. ‘Look! Bluebells. Aren’t they beautiful?’

  ‘I’ve never seen so many.’ Gabriel turned about, looking at the bluebells that stretched in all directions. Thunder muttered overhead, and then there was a faint patter of rain on the leaves. He caught Lizzie’s hand and they ran, laughing, to shelter.

  It began to rain hard. The wood was shadowed and dark.

  Gabriel put his arm about Lizzie and drew her close.

  ‘Gugs, I’m sorry if I’ve made you unhappy. You know I love you.’

  She searched his face with her eyes.

  ‘So I’m thinking … we could get married if you like?’

  ‘If you like? Are you mad? Of course I like!’ Lizzie threw her arms about him.

  ‘We need to wait for the mourning period to be over. For my father, you know. My mother wouldn’t want us to marry before then.’

  Lizzie looked at him in sudden anxiety, but he was kissing her and so she closed her
eyes and kissed him back.

  A year of mourning … she could wait that long …

  8

  Owt for Nowt

  Spring 1855

  Anxiously Lizzie looked at her reflection in the mirror. She was wraith-pale, hollow-cheeked.

  ‘Are you coming?’ Gabriel called. ‘We’ll be late. Not that I mind, particularly, but Mr Ruskin is a stickler for punctuality.’

  ‘I’m coming!’ She pinched her cheeks for some colour.

  Almost a year had passed since Gabriel had promised to marry her. In a matter of weeks, he could lay aside his black gloves.

  Yet he had not spoken again of marriage. Lizzie did not like to press him. It had been such a contented year, working side by side, helping each other. Gabriel had been struggling to develop his painting of a fallen woman found by her former sweetheart. Lizzie had worked on her drawings. Her best work had been a pair of lovers listening to gypsy women playing music, with a small angelic-looking child standing with one hand on the gate, as if about to swing it open. The man in the drawing looked like Gabriel and the woman looked like Lizzie, as they did in all of her work. She had no-one else to model for her.

  Her drawings were getting better. Lizzie could see that. Yet that gap between what she imagined and what she created was still so great, it seemed impossible that she could ever bridge it. Gabriel lavished her with praise, but she doubted his clear-sightedness. It seemed as if he saw her, and all she did, through a haze of golden light.

  Though perhaps Gabriel was right, and it was Lizzie who saw her own work through a self-distorting lens. For Gabriel had shown her drawings to John Ruskin a few weeks earlier. He had liked them. Indeed, he had bought a whole sheaf for thirty pounds, promising to have them splendidly mounted and bound together with gold. Lizzie had never earned so much money in her life. It was more than she had been paid in a single year as a milliner.

  Now she was going to meet John Ruskin and his parents, who were the ones who really held the purse strings. Mr Ruskin had sent a carriage for them. It was a black, glossy brougham, and driven by a straight-backed man in spotless livery. Lizzie was too anxious to relax back against the cushions. She had chosen her most demure grey gown to wear, and her cleanest gloves. Even Gabriel looked tidy, his black cravat tied in a most conventional knot. He put on a great pretence of being at ease, lying back against the cushions, but Lizzie could tell he was as tense as she was.