Beauty in Thorns

by Kate Forsyth

  Lizzie refused to eat. She could not even think of food without remembering that terrible night, when she had gorged and purged till her throat was stripped raw. It had been a kind of madness. She could not let it happen again.

  ‘She hasn’t eaten in two weeks,’ Emma told Bruno. ‘If this goes on, she’ll die.’

  At last, in desperation, Emma wrote to Lizzie’s family. Lydia came in a hansom cab. Doctors were called. Murmured conversations over Lizzie’s head. She did not listen. It took all her energy just to breathe. She was lifted and carried out to a carriage. It rattled and jounced for miles, hurting Lizzie with every jerk. Lydia told her they were going to a spa in Matlock Gorge. Lizzie didn’t care.

  It took them several days to reach the spa. The journey exhausted any reserves of strength Lizzie had left. Lydia wept and wrung her hands, sure that Lizzie was going to die.

  The carriage began to descend a steep road. It seemed they were descending as deep as hell. Yet the deeper they went, the colder it grew. Lydia had to get out and walk behind the carriage, to ease the burden for the horses. No-one tried to make Lizzie walk. It was like she was dead already. The carriage her coffin.

  At last she was settled into a room. They wrapped her in eiderdowns and stoked up the fire. Lydia helped her sit up against her pillows and brought her some paper. Lizzie wrote to Gabriel, telling him she never wanted to see him again.

  Then she wrote to John Ruskin, thanking him for his kindness and refusing his allowance.

  She would never paint again.

  ‘Anyone would think I was trying to make you eat broken glass,’ the nurse complained. She went away and brought the doctor, a bearded man with a gold watch-chain stretched across an ample belly. He took Lizzie’s wrist in his hand, and pinched her skin. The white mark of his fingers did not fade.

  ‘You are malnourished,’ he told her. ‘It happens sometimes in young women who overstrain their nervous energy. You must have complete bed rest, with no stimulation. No letters, no visitors, no novel reading. A few drops of laudanum morning and night, to check your hysterical tendencies, and abundant feeding …’

  But Lizzie did not want to eat. She wanted to need nothing. Not love, not art, not food. The doctor frowned and said something in a low voice to the nurse. She returned a few minutes later with a brown wooden box. The doctor opened it and showed Lizzie the contents. A rubber hose. A gigantic syringe.

  ‘This is a feeding tube,’ he told her. ‘If you do not eat, we put the tube up your nose and down the back of the throat so you cannot spit it out. And then we pump gruel into you. It is not pleasant.’

  So, unwillingly, Lizzie swallowed down the beef tea and claret jelly and milk custards they insisted on serving her six times a day. All her little tricks – hiding food under her fork, dropping it under the table, spitting it out into her napkin – were of no avail. The hard-faced nurse recorded every mouthful. The more she resisted, the more they made her eat.

  Each day she grew a little stronger.

  By the time the gorse was turning the dales golden, the doctor thought she might be permitted to read her letters. She was given a pile, most of them in Gabriel’s distinctive hand. After a long moment she opened the first.

  She could hear his voice in her head as she read. He begged her pardon, and asked after her health. He was sorry, he wrote. He had never meant to upset her so. After a while, the letters became less contrite and more like himself, filled with tidbits of news and details of his work.

  The last letter was only thin. Gabriel told her excitedly that Bruno had organised an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art and wanted to include some of her paintings. Gabriel thought she should show the self-portrait she had done in oils, plus the best of her drawings and watercolours. You must let me hang Clerk Saunders too, he wrote. Ruskin agrees it is the best of your work and hopes we can sell it for you.

  Lizzie stared down at the letter. Her paintings were going to be exhibited. Strangers would see them. Her heart was beating very fast and her palms were damp. She did not know if she was excited or frightened. The two feelings were often akin for her.

  Lizzie got out her suitcase and began to pack.

  The doctor was not pleased. He thought she should stay another month at least. But Lizzie was adamant. She must attend her first ever exhibition.

  It felt strange to be back in London. The brown smear on the horizon. The choke of coal smoke. The clatter of carriage wheels on cobblestones. Crowds of people hurrying about their business, faces shuttered. The feeling of being invisible.

  The gallery was opened for a private viewing the evening before the official opening. Lizzie could not eat a bite all day. Her body thrummed with nerves. Tonight she would see Gabriel for the first time in almost three months. Lizzie did not know what to expect. Would he be cold and remote? Or would he be sorry?

  As Lizzie walked in, a little murmur arose from the crowd. She held her head high, one hand holding up the loose folds of her gown. She saw that her face and form were everywhere, in Gabriel’s drawings and paintings. As brightly coloured and crowded as stained glass windows, they glowed from the walls.

  Here and there were hung her own small canvases. Lizzie thought they compared favourably with some of the other artists’ work. Her brushwork was much looser and freer, but her use of colour was good and she had managed to catch something of the emotion of each scene. Her main fault was the stiffness of her human figures. If only she had been able to take life drawing lessons at the Royal Academy! How else was she supposed to learn?

  Then Lizzie saw Gabriel. He turned, and looked at her. His eyes lit up, and he held out one hand.

  Lizzie walked over, and put her hand in his.

  ‘Let’s celebrate!’ Gabriel cried, a bottle of champagne in his hands.

  Lizzie’s heart quickened with hope. She gazed at him, her hands pressed together at her breast.

  ‘The exhibition is going to New York!’

  Lizzie was conscious first of a stab of disappointment. She had thought Gabriel had meant at last to marry her. But then the words penetrated her brain, and she felt a new surge of excitement.

  ‘Really? I cannot believe it! My paintings too?’

  ‘One of them. Clerk Saunders.’ Gabriel grinned at her excitement. ‘It’s a Yankee friend of Ruskin’s. His name is Charles Eliot Norton, and he’s from Massachusetts.’ He pronounced the word in an exaggerated Yankee drawl. ‘He came to the exhibition and liked what he saw, and made a selection to take back with him.’

  ‘My painting is going to America.’ Lizzie marvelled at the very idea.

  ‘Let’s drink to rich Americans!’ Gabriel popped the cork out the window, then poured out two frothing glasses. Lizzie clinked her glass with his and drank deeply.

  ‘Norton has commissioned me to do a watercolour for him, of any subject I like,’ Gabriel said nonchalantly. ‘He’s paid me fifty guineas for it.’

  ‘Fifty guineas! Oh, Gabriel, we’re rich.’

  ‘He wrote an essay for The Atlantic Monthly in which he said my paintings were among the best the age had produced.’ Gabriel poured more champagne. ‘And Coventry Patmore has sent me his review of the exhibition. He said my contributions were the main interest of the whole exhibition.’

  ‘Did … did he mention me?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Gabriel tossed Lizzie the article, then came and stood behind her, kissing the back of her neck. He unpinned her hair and let it unfurl down her back, then began to unbutton her dress. Lizzie ignored him, all her attention on the article. Gabriel, Bruno, Johnny Millais, William Holman Hunt and Arthur Hughes were all mentioned in the opening lines. Her name did not appear. She scanned the rest of the article quickly. Finally she found her name, in the very last paragraph. She read it with breathless eagerness that turned quickly to horror.

  ‘Look what he said! “Her drawings display an admiring adoption of all the most startling peculiarities of Mr. Rossetti’s style.” Startling peculiarities!’

  ‘Oh that
’s just his pompous way,’ Gabriel said. ‘Don’t let it worry you.’

  Lizzie twisted away. ‘He said Clerk Saunders did not please him! Oh what if the American man reads the article? He might change his mind about taking it to New York.’

  ‘He won’t change his mind.’ Gabriel smiled at her reassuringly.

  She paid him no heed. ‘No-one will want to buy my paintings after this! He said my self-portrait was a promising attempt. Attempt!’

  Gabriel grabbed the paper from her. ‘It’s not that bad, Lizzie. Look, he said a very promising attempt. And he said the other paintings deserve more notice than he has time to give them.’

  ‘He had time to give you five paragraphs,’ she said.

  ‘Well, yes, but …’ Gabriel’s voice trailed away as he saw the look on Lizzie’s face.

  ‘All of London will read it. They’ll all think I’m a bumbling amateur who had the gall to think I could paint. I’ll never get another exhibition … I’ll never be able to sell a thing …’

  As she spoke, Lizzie paced back and forth ever more wildly. Suddenly she paused, her gaze caught by Gabriel’s trunk that had been brought up from the lumber-room. It was half-packed with clothes and books. ‘Are you going somewhere?’ she asked in a very different tone of voice.

  ‘Well, yes, actually.’ Gabriel’s gaze slid away from her. ‘Some of the fellows have got up a scheme to paint some murals on the walls of the Oxford Union’s debating hall.’

  ‘Oxford? You’re going to Oxford?’

  ‘Just for a while, Lizzie.’

  ‘How long?’

  He twisted his glass back and forth between his long, paint-stained fingers. ‘I guess it’ll be two or three months.’

  She did not speak. Her silence agitated him.

  ‘You know I get seedy if I stay in London over the summer. The smell from the river … I thought you’d be away yourself. You seemed to like that last place all right. You could go there again. I’ve got that money Norton gave me …’

  ‘I thought we were going to use that money to get married,’ Lizzie said. ‘You said we would.’

  ‘And we shall. When I get back from Oxford.’

  Lizzie moved towards the door like a sleepwalker, picking up her bonnet as she went. Her hair still fell loose over her shoulders.

  ‘Where are you going?’ His voice was sharp.

  ‘To pack,’ she said. ‘If I’m to go back to Matlock Gorge, I’d better get ready.’

  2

  A Rare Beauty

  Autumn 1857

  Janey crossed the King’s Head yard, carefully carrying a jug brimming over with ale. She did not want to spill a drop. Her mother knew exactly how much liquid her jug carried.

  It was mid-afternoon, and the blue sky was softened with spindrifts of high clouds. The leaves of the trees were golden. The streets were full of laughing students in long black gowns, returned to Oxford for the Michaelmas term. It would not be long, Janey knew, before the laughter and high jinks turned to white-faced anxiety as exams loomed. But for now, the students were full of exuberance. Janey would have to keep well out of their way if she did not want the ale spilled.

  ‘Look at that girl!’ a young man’s voice cried. ‘Have you ever seen such hair?’

  Janey ducked her head lower. Many people commented on her hair. It was dark and heavy. Impossible to comb smooth. She tensed, expecting another unkind comment about her height or her raggedness.

  The young man surprised her, however. ‘What a stunner! We have to show her to Gabriel. He would adore her. What a Beatrice she would make!’

  Janey glanced up. A shabby young man with fair floppy hair and pale eyes was leaning over the balcony rail. He was with two other young men, all with tankards in their hands. They seemed too old to be students.

  They cheered and raised their tankards to her. Embarrassed, Janey hurried away. Her mother would be wanting her ale.

  Janey carried the jug down Holywell Street towards St Helen’s Passage, the alley where she had been born. Locals called it Hell’s Passage. Narrow and dark, it led to a small cobblestoned yard with a cesspit in the corner, protected only by a cracked wooden cover. A gutter in the centre of the alley oozed foul-smelling slime. The smell was so awful it was hard to walk past without gagging. Small shacks made of old bricks and packing cases had been built against the walls. Clothes-lines hung with ragged shirts hid the sky. An old woman sat on a doorstep, smacking her gums, her twisted hands fumbling at a piece of leather she was attempting to cut into shoe soles. A dirty child with a swollen stomach and bare feet stood wailing nearby. His mother shouted at him to shut up.

  Janey stopped outside one of the shacks, and pushed open the makeshift door with her hand. The only light came from a single rushlight stuck in a cracked saucer. Her mother lay on a pallet, covered by a filthy blanket. She wore nothing but her chemise and a pair of old stays, stained to the colour of tea. The tiny room stank.

  ‘Where ye been?’ Annie slurred. ‘I been waitin’ and waitin’.’ She sat up and groped for her tin cup. ‘Fill me up, there’s a good girl.’

  Janey bent and poured the ale. Her mother’s hand shook so badly, the liquid sloshed on to the bed. Annie smacked Janey hard across the ear. ‘Mutton-head! Look what ye did.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Janey whispered. She filled the cup to the brim, then set the jug down on the floor beside the pallet. ‘Are ye hungry? I brought ye some bread.’

  ‘I might have a peck at it later.’ Annie slurped at the ale.

  Janey put the dark heel of bread, wrapped in a cloth, on the floor next to the jug. She picked up some clothes and hung them over a line made with a length of old twine.

  ‘Stop with yer fussing, ye know I can’t stand it. Got any stub?’

  ‘Nay,’ Janey answered. ‘Ye know I don’t get paid afore Sat’day.’

  Her mother reared up, seizing her arm. ‘If I find ye’re lyin’ to me, ye’ll meet wi’ it, that I swear.’ Roughly she searched Janey’s pockets, then put one hand inside her bodice, to make sure she had not tucked any money inside her stays.

  Janey pushed her hand away. ‘Told ye.’

  ‘Any more cheek fro’ ye, an’ ye’ll get the back o’ me hand.’

  ‘I need t’get back to work.’ Janey stoked up the fire, then picked up the empty jug to take back to the inn.

  As she passed through the pub’s yard, she saw her father harnessing a carthorse to the brewer’s cart. A hullocking man, his black hair was curly as a ram’s fleece. He had a way with horses, and people whispered it was the gypsy blood in him. Janey did not know if it was true. She did not look like an English girl, though, with her wild, black hair and long nose.

  ‘Hi, Da.’

  ‘Hi, Janey.’ He hesitated then said, ‘How’s yer ma?’

  ‘Same as ever.’

  He looked down at his boots, then slipped his hand into his pocket and drew out a two bob bit. ‘Here ye are, Janey. I know it’s yer birthday this week. Get yerself summat nice.’

  She accepted the coin in surprised pleasure.

  ‘Got a tip from a rich young cove,’ he explained.

  He went back to work. Janey went into the pub, fingering the coin in her pocket. A two bob bit wasn’t enough to buy a book, which is what Janey really wanted. She had not been able to read much since she had left the local parish school, five years earlier, at the age of twelve. She had loved the afternoons sitting sewing with the other girls, one invisible stitch after another, while her teacher Mrs Leigh had read to them aloud. The little classroom so small and snug, the kettle singing on the hob, and the stories unfurling themselves in the quiet. Janey had loved those stories so much, Miss Leigh had let her stay back after class, and read on herself, as much as she was able. Janey would have given all she owned to never have to leave that room, that moment.

  But of course she had to.

  It was no use longing for a book of her own. Her mother would just tear out the pages to light the fire. Janey could have bought he
rself a new collar for her dress. But it’d be hard to keep it nice in that hovel. She could buy herself a cake. A couple of bites, though, and it’d be gone.

  As she went about her work that afternoon, scrubbing floors and black-leading the fireplaces at the pub, Janey’s mind kept returning to the bright little coin in her pocket. She could not take it home, else her mother would find it and take it. She had to spend it today.

  She stood up and dusted off her apron. Her eye was caught by the jar of spills on the fireplace. Furtively she sorted through the narrow twists of paper, hoping to find a poem or a story that she could smuggle out.

  She found a playbill for a show that was to play that night at a temporary theatre set up at the old gymnasium on Oriel Street. Tickets were a shilling a head. Janey crumpled the playbill in her hand. She had never been to the theatre, though she had watched Punch and Judy shows and other performances in the street during the St Giles Fair. She had often wondered what it would be like.

  As soon as her shift at the pub was done, Janey hurried to Oriel Street, where she purchased two tickets to that evening show. Her heart was thumping hard with dread and excitement. She hid the tickets in her bodice, and went to find her sister, who worked for a laundress on Merton Street.

  ‘But what’ll we wear?’ Bessie demanded, as soon as she heard the news.

  ‘We’ll have t’wear our Sundays,’ Janey answered.

  ‘But they’re so old an’ shabby.’

  ‘It’s all we got.’

  Both girls had only two dresses. Their everyday frocks were grey and much-mended. Their Sunday dresses were kept for best. Janey’s was made of faded blue wool, with a wide plaid trim at the hem and cuff. She had trouble finding dresses to fit because she was so tall. Bessie’s was brown cotton calico printed with tiny white flowers. Both dresses were cut very simply, without flounces or frills.

  Janey lied to her mother and said she had found the tickets lying in the street. Her mother was not happy. She complained the whole time the girls washed in the bucket and drew on their dresses.