Beauty in Thorns

by Kate Forsyth

  She smiled politely, offered her hand, spoke all that was expected of her in a colourless voice.

  To her chagrin, she barely came up to Madame Zambaco’s shoulder.

  ‘A pleasure to meet you, Mrs Jones.’ Her voice was sweet, melodious, with an exotic hint of a foreign accent. ‘Please, you must call me Maria. I have no desire to be known by my husband’s name. If I had my way, I’d be in court tomorrow and declaring before the judges my husband’s life-threatening cruelty. But they have no interest in that. Only adultery matters to them, and of that I have no proof, only endless suspicions.’

  Georgie felt herself moved to pity despite herself. Maria Zambaco’s voice was so full of pain and melancholy.

  ‘But … please, forgive me … I do not mean to burden you with my problems. What a bore I have become! Ned … may I call you Ned? I shall see you tomorrow.’ With a brilliant smile, and what Georgie considered a most familiar press of Ned’s hand between both of her own, Maria Zambaco moved gracefully away.

  Ned stared after her.

  Ned would not betray me, Georgie told herself. He loves me.

  Maria Zambaco came to the studio at least two times a week, so that Ned could make pencil studies of her face. He was planning to paint her as Psyche, the woman whose beauty made Venus jealous. Topsy had spent much of the last year composing an epic poem about Cupid and Psyche, and Ned planned to illustrate it.

  Sometimes, Georgie stood outside the studio door, straining her ears to listen to what was happening inside. She heard nothing but a soft murmur of voices, and the occasional laugh. Often, she heard nothing but silence.

  Miserable, she crept back down to the sitting room. To her sewing and her account book and her children. Ned seemed different. Restless, impatient, quick to find fault with her. She began to feature in his quickly-tossed-off caricatures as a short fat dumpling, her arms always filled with the baby.

  He finished the painting of Maria Zambaco, but said it was not good enough and began at once on another. In the second painting, Psyche lay asleep, her robe slipping from her shoulder and exposing one small, perfect breast. Georgie wondered if Maria had posed that way for Ned, shamelessly sliding the silk down her skin, her head flung back.

  Society women did not pose nude, she reassured herself. Madame Zambaco would have just posed for the face, and perhaps those beautiful white hands. Ned would have used a common model to paint the body. Though those sinuous lines and luminous white skin looked like Madame Zambaco.

  Then Maria began coming every day. Ned said he was giving her lessons.

  ‘Lessons in what?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘She wants to learn to paint,’ he answered curtly.

  Georgie remembered her own dreams of creating art. She thought of her early sketches and watercolours, her wood-carving tools, untouched now for years, her piano sitting mute and unused in a corner of the drawing room, her feeble attempts to write poetry. Her eyes burned, her throat constricted.

  ‘She has true talent,’ Ned said. ‘It’s a shame to let such a gift go to waste.’

  Does she not have children too? Georgie wanted to ask. Who darns their stockings? Who teaches them their letters? Who makes sure there is fresh bread for their tea?

  But she only turned away and mechanically tidied up Phil’s crayons and drawings. She knew the answer. With a fortune of eighty thousand pounds, Maria would not even have to button up her son’s boots for him.

  Six weeks after Margot’s first birthday, Georgie received word that their landlord had sold their house and they needed to move. Georgie’s heart leapt. If she could just persuade Ned to leave London. If they could move to the country, away from the Prinseps and their Pattledom, away from the pot houses and music halls, away from Maria Zambaco. A house with a garden, a house with a bright and airy studio so he did not need to go and paint in Val Prinsep’s all the time. Georgie began to try to persuade him.

  Ned flatly refused.

  Their arguments grew ever more bitter.

  In the end they compromised and moved to a new house in North End Lane, Fulham. It had plenty of room for a gallery to show off Ned’s paintings, and a garden still sweet with late-blooming roses and lavender. There was a big room with north-facing windows that Ned could paint in. It was only twenty minutes to Kensington in a hansom cab, but at least Ned could not walk over to Little Holland House whenever he wanted, and it was another half an hour or so to Gloucester Gardens, where Maria lived with her mother.

  Georgie could only hope it was far enough away.

  5

  Seizing Joy

  Winter–Spring 1868

  Janey had always hated London.

  She hated the spindly, soot-black trees. She hated the smoke and the fog and the sleet. She hated always feeling sick.

  Topsy had moved his family into a tall, thin house at 26 Queen Square. It had three steps up to the front door, and an iron railing that looked down to the grimy windows of the basements, exactly like all the other houses on either side. It had no garden. Only a yard with workshops that rang all day with the clang of iron and the whirr of the weavers’ looms and the scraping of the carpenter’s adze. The air was always tainted with smoke from the kiln.

  There was no peace to be had. Topsy was there all day, stamping about, shouting orders at the workmen. Their apartment above the shop had been turned into a display area, so that customers traipsed through all day to see the dining room hung with his sumptuous red Indian wallpaper, the blue-and-white scrolled foliage and fruit pattern he called Queen Anne, and the daisy design in the bedroom.

  Topsy was hard at work on the proofs for his new book of poetry, and left long curls of paper everywhere, scribbled all over with his quick impatient scrawl. His epic poem, ‘The Life and Death of Jason’, had been met with such applause Topsy was encouraged to proceed with the rest of his Earthly Paradise. The girls were always getting into trouble for drawing on his proofs, or cutting them up to make paper dolls, so Janey did her best to keep his work in order and out of the children’s way. It did not do much good. Topsy’s temper was shorter than ever, and the girls always underfoot, getting in his way.

  One afternoon May set about burying her favourite doll – named Lady Audley because of her golden hair – in a flowerpot in the courtyard. Amused, all the workmen stopped to watch her. Topsy saw them idling, and came out to shout at them to get back to work. When he saw the mess that May had made, he erupted into rage. It was like he was possessed. Janey could do nothing but shield the weeping little girl in her arms, and try not to shrink back as her husband shouted at them both.

  Afterwards, she tucked May up in bed and lay beside her. The nursery was hung with Topsy’s first-ever wallpaper design, called ‘Trellis’, inspired by the rose garden at Red House. Wild roses clambered on green thorny stems over wooden squares, with blue birds and damsel flies hovering in the midst. May did not like the birds. They stared at her, she said. Janey petted and soothed her till she was asleep, then lay staring at the repeating pattern till it seemed the birds moved and the insects whirred their wings.

  It was like a cage enclosing her.

  In early March, Ned and Georgie held a housewarming party at their new house, which was called The Grange. Ned had decorated his studio with orange trees in pots, and Georgie hung coloured paper lanterns along the terrace.

  Georgie showed Janey and Topsy about the house, then took them into the studio where most of the men had congregated, drinking wine and looking over Ned’s paintings. The Maniac was there, for the first time in years; and Algy Swinburne, and Bruno, and Roddy Stanhope, and William Bell Scott, as well as Ned and Topsy and Gabriel. Janey could not help but notice that a new model featured in many of Ned’s drawings and paintings, a young woman with a slender lithe figure and masses of dark-red hair. Everyone was exclaiming over the new boldness and sensuality of Ned’s style, and the beauty of his model, whom he had painted with her robe slipping from her shoulder, revealing one small breast.

  ‘S
he is a Stunner, no mistake,’ Roddy said, unable to tear his eyes from the canvas. ‘Did she really pose nude for you? You old dog.’

  Georgie turned and slipped away, her face downturned and unhappy. Janey hesitated, not knowing whether to follow her or to stay to greet the others. Gabriel decided for her. He had been scowling and looking saturnine, but his face lit up at the sight of her and he held out his hand. It seemed natural to walk over, and put her hand in his, and smile at him. Topsy scowled. Janey released her fingers from Gabriel’s, but did not move from his side.

  All the men crowded around Topsy, slapping him on his back, congratulating him on the success of his poetry, crowing over his reviews. He grinned, admitting that he was pleased with what he called ‘the puffs’. Janey and Gabriel stood quietly at the back of the crowd, not quite looking at each other.

  ‘Are you well, Janey?’ Gabriel asked in a low voice.

  Janey hesitated. She had not been well. Ever since moving to Queen Square, she had suffered headaches and sore throats and a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Her back ached all the time, and all the chores she had once done easily were now exhausting, as if she were seventy-eight instead of only twenty-eight. Janey blamed London in general, and the dust and smoke and noise of the workshops in particular, but she did not like to complain.

  ‘I’ll be glad when the winter is over,’ she said instead.

  Gabriel nodded. ‘It seems like spring will never come, doesn’t it?’

  He was standing where the light was most dim, but had one hand raised to shield his eyes from the light of the oil lamps.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, keeping her voice low.

  ‘I … I should not have come … but I feel so lonely sometimes. As if life is going on without me.’

  ‘I thought you had plenty of company,’ she answered, a faint edge to her voice.

  Colour rushed up under his olive skin. He put his hand on her wrist, clasping it warmly. ‘You, of all people, should not believe all the rumours you hear.’

  Janey met his eyes, a question in hers.

  He opened his mouth to say more, but Topsy bounced over, looking ruffled and bearish, his waistcoat straining at the buttons. Gabriel dropped his hand. Topsy put his arm around Janey. It was all she could do not to shake it off. She stood, stiff and stoical, as the two men talked about Topsy’s poems and Topsy’s new triumphs with the Firm and Topsy’s new wallpaper designs, selling like hot cakes. After a while, Gabriel excused himself and went out. Janey waited till Topsy was once again drawn into the general conversation of the other men, and then she slipped away too.

  She found Gabriel in the shadowy garden, sitting on a bench under a tree, smoking. Though the air was crisp and cold, the sky was bright with stars. The red glowing tip of his cigar was the only colour, like a winking firefly.

  He moved over, making room for her on the seat. Janey sat down beside him, burying her cold hands in the velvet of her mantle. She was very aware of the closeness of his body to hers. She wondered how to ask him what she wanted to know.

  ‘You think my housekeeper Fanny is my mistress,’ Gabriel said, after a long moment of tense expectant silence. ‘She was, I do not deny it.’ He looked down at the cigar in his hands, then gently tapped away the ash. When he sucked on the end, it illuminated his face for a moment, dark and frowning.

  ‘When you told me you were going to marry Topsy, I told you I was going to go to the Devil. Well, Fanny was that Devil.’ He glanced at her angrily. ‘Don’t look at me like that. What was I meant to do? You didn’t want me …’

  Janey looked away, her lips pressed together to stop them from trembling.

  After a while, Gabriel went on. ‘And then I married Lizzie. You think I didn’t really love her, but I did. I loved her with all my heart. It was just … she was so sick … all the time … and there was a kind of madness in it. I don’t know how to explain it. Perhaps it was the laudanum … perhaps she was just too finely wrought a creature to live in this world. I don’t know. What I do know is …’ His voice dropped till Janey had to lean forward to hear it. ‘I have a lot with which to reproach myself.’

  ‘You were unfaithful to her?’ Janey asked softly, afraid of breaking the spell of confidences that the starlit night seemed to be casting.

  He nodded, and smoked for a while in silence, the fiery tip flaring and fading, sweet-scented smoke billowing around them.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t,’ he burst out after a while. ‘If only I had stayed with her that night … if only I hadn’t gone to see Fan …’

  ‘You can’t blame yourself,’ Janey said. ‘It was an accident …’

  ‘I can and do blame myself,’ he answered sharply. ‘And now I am paying the price.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He smoked the cigar down to its last ember, then flicked the butt away into the undergrowth. The night seemed much colder and darker without its tiny fire.

  Janey shifted a little closer to Gabriel, repeating her question.

  He looked away from her. ‘I … it’s hard to say, Janey. Please don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ she said.

  ‘I … I’m having trouble … I cannot … I cannot make love anymore.’ His voice was tortured.

  Janey pressed her hand over her mouth. It was not what she had been expecting at all. ‘But … why? What’s wrong?’ she managed to say at last.

  He made a violent gesture with his hands. ‘I shouldn’t be talking like this to you. What am I thinking?’

  ‘Rubbish,’ she answered angrily. ‘I grew up in a stable yard. You know I’m not one of those gently reared young ladies who faints away at the sight of a piano leg. Tell me what’s wrong, Gabriel.’

  ‘I’m impotent,’ Gabriel told her bluntly, almost as if he wished to shock her. ‘One of my testicles is swollen up like a pig’s bladder.’

  Janey was shocked, but not for the reasons he thought. She took his hand and pressed it between her own. ‘Does it hurt?’ she asked fearfully.

  ‘Only when I make love,’ he admitted. ‘That’s why … you know.’

  That was why he thought he was being punished for his infidelity, Janey realised. ‘What does the doctor say?’ she asked.

  Gabriel shrugged. ‘He says it’s most probably a side effect of the mumps I had a few years ago.’

  ‘Can anything be done?’

  ‘It can be lanced … but the idea of a quack hacking away at my manly parts with a knife …’ He shuddered.

  ‘But wouldn’t it be worth the risk?’

  He looked at her sombrely. ‘Do you not think I should pay for what I did?’

  ‘No,’ Janey replied hotly. ‘Lizzie would never want you to torment yourself so. You know she wouldn’t.’

  ‘Then why does she haunt me?’ he demanded. ‘I see her in my dreams, staring at me with accusing eyes … I see her in her coffin, all her hair spread out about her like cloth of gold … and then she sits up and calls for me, and her eyes are weeping worms and beetles …’

  Janey stared at him in horror.

  ‘I cannot sleep … I wake up with such a start, my heart pounding a hundred miles an hour … I swear I feel her sometimes, touching me with her cold fingers. And she tries to reach me all the time, knocking on windows, rapping at the table … she does not rest quietly, Janey, I’m telling you!’

  All the hairs on Janey’s arms were standing up, and sweat had broken out in the small of her back. She remembered being a little girl, and hearing weeping in the night. Her father had told her it was the ghost of a young woman who had drowned herself in the old moat when her lover had been killed fighting for King Charles the First. Janey had often felt the ghost’s cold breath on the nape of her neck, and the brush of wet icy fingers along her face. She had always been afraid, creeping down the alleyway at night, in case the ghost should catch her.

  Gabriel kept on talking, words tumbling out incoherently. ‘I cannot paint anymore … there’s a mist over my eyes all
the time … like her ghost floats before me … and the light stabs my eyes … even candlelight … and the flames in gas-lamps … dancing and flickering … the world whirls about me … it’s how she must have felt before she died, Janey … sometimes my head feels as if it’s about to burst … I cannot sleep … I cannot go out … she wants me to join her, Janey … in darkness and death … she wants to make sure I love nobody else … and nothing else … I cannot paint … I cannot write …’

  Janey put her arms about him and rocked him as if he was a weeping child.

  ‘If only I could help her rest,’ he went on. ‘If only I could be free …’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she crooned.

  He wrenched himself out of her arms, staring into her face, grasping her hands so tightly he hurt her. ‘And I’m being left behind. Ned is painting works of such genius … such power … and Topsy … Topsy! He’s famous now for his poems … while mine … mine are buried with Lizzie!’

  ‘You are a great painter and a great poet,’ she told him. ‘Try not to lose faith. It takes time to recover from such a hard blow as Lizzie’s death dealt you. But it’s been six years now. You must forgive yourself and move on.’

  ‘How can I forgive myself when she haunts me so?’ he whispered. ‘If I could just know that she was able to rest …’

  Again they sat in silence. From the house came the sound of music and laughter, but here in the garden all was quiet. Gabriel was searching her face with eyes dark with misery.

  ‘Janey, are you happy?’ he asked. ‘In your marriage, I mean.’

  She shook her head. ‘It was a mistake. I should never have married him.’

  ‘Yet you did.’

  ‘Yes. And you married Lizzie.’

  ‘What a mess we made of things.’

  She felt an overwhelming sadness. If only …

  But then Janey thought of her daughters, laughing and playing hide-and-seek with her and bringing their dollies for her to kiss goodnight.