Beauty in Thorns

by Kate Forsyth

  He painted her as Proserpina again and again, and wrote a sonnet that ended:

  ‘Woe me for thee, unhappy Proserpine.’

  12

  Heartbroken

  Winter 1872

  Georgie could not believe that Maria Zambaco was gone.

  All sorts of rumours were whispered. Madame Zambaco had had a nervous breakdown and been put in an asylum. She was sick and thought likely to die. She had run off with another lover.

  Ned was so heartbroken, Georgie suspected the latter.

  He spent days locked in his bedroom, his arm over his eyes, the curtains drawn, the lights turned down. He did not touch his pencils or paintbrushes.

  Once again, Georgie had piles of bills to pay and no money to pay them with. She wrote polite letters to all who owed them money and even politer letters to all whom they owed. She wrote to Topsy too, begging him to excuse Ned for not delivering the work for which he had already been paid. Topsy would understand, she knew.

  Georgie had been afraid that her rejection of Topsy would harm a friendship that had grown very precious to her, but the opposite had proved true. They had grown even closer, and talked together of many things, as well as of love.

  ‘How can you bear it?’ she had asked him once, knowing Janey was down at Kelmscott Manor with Gabriel.

  ‘I am trying to keep the world from narrowing on me, and to look at things bigly and kindly,’ he had answered with a sad smile.

  Georgie had been trying to do the same, but it was hard.

  She went out into the cold damp afternoon to post the letters herself, not wanting to pay even the small coin a messenger boy would cost. The wind was full of wet black leaves that slapped her face. By the time she got home, her hair was bedraggled, the hem of her skirts were muddied, and one foot was wet because there was a hole in the sole of her boot. She unpinned her old bonnet and saw her face in the glimmer of the mirror. She looked thin and tired and beaten down, and her nose was red.

  Georgie dried herself, then went wearily to her husband’s studio. She had to see what paintings of Ned’s were close to finishing, so that she could try to sell them and raise some funds. Christmas was close, and Georgie wanted to be able to create something beautiful and magical for the children.

  She unlocked the door and stepped inside, her cold fingers fumbling to light the lamp. At last light flickered up, and she lifted the lamp high, beginning to look over the canvases that were stacked everywhere on the walls and trestles.

  The light fell upon a large canvas set up on a platform.

  A princess lying asleep on a bier, her maids slumped around her, roses and thorns bending close. Her dress was white and diaphanous, clinging to her long lithe limbs. Her hair was tossed half over her face, as if she had been writhing in her sleep. Her posture was sensuous, even provocative, the gossamer of her gown not concealing the jut of her breasts.

  The sleeping princess was, of course, Maria Zambaco.

  The lamp in Georgie’s hand shook. She put it down abruptly, and then slowly slid down to the ground herself. Holding her knees tightly, she hunched around the pain.

  Georgie’s most treasured memory was of the day she had first met Ned, and heard the story of Briar Rose for the first time, in Tennyson’s poem. She knew by heart the closing lines, and murmured them to herself, many times, with secret joy:

  And o’er the hills, and far away

  Beyond their utmost purple rim,

  Beyond the night across the day,

  Thro’ all the world she follow’d him.

  Almost as precious to her was the memory of the day when Ned had first drawn her, as the Sleeping Princess, and created out of her ordinary face something of such exquisite loveliness.

  In the darkest times, Georgie had held on to these two faint shining memories as something talismanic, proof that deep down Ned truly loved her.

  She pressed her hands into her face, shuddering with tears. For so long she had been strong, doing her best for the children, keeping up appearances to the world, waiting for the day Ned would remember her and return to her.

  Yet he had done nothing but flaunt his love for that woman to the world, immortalising her in paint as he had never tried to do for Georgie, the one who truly loved him, the one who had been faithful and staunch.

  She would never, ever forgive him.

  Part IV

  The Brightest of Bright Things

  1881–1890

  ‘Margaret came from school – the brightest of bright things is that damsel, half a head taller than her mother, and I sit and chuckle at the sight of her, and nudge my neighbour: also I praise her to her face that she may be used to flattery and be sick of it, and not astonished or touched when it is used by others – that is my way with her.’

  Extract from a letter from Sir Edward Burne-Jones to Charles Eliot Norton

  Quoted by Lady Georgiana Burne-Jones

  Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Volume II

  1

  Shadow of Death

  Spring-Summer 1881

  She had always been afraid of dying.

  Ever since she was a little girl, Margot had thought to herself: One day I won’t be here anymore. One day I’ll be gone forever. Snuffed out like a candle flame, nothing left but smoke.

  Is this what death felt like? Light ebbing away, her limbs slowly turning to stone?

  She could feel his eyes on her, intent on the curve of her lips, the fall of her lashes, the slope of her shoulder. She imagined his fingers, conjuring her face like magic on the paper.

  ‘Ned! Can’t you see the light has gone? It’s freezing in here.’ Margot’s mother came in with a whirl of cold wind.

  Margot opened her eyes. The room was filled with twilight, making everything strange and spooky. That wooden lay-figure could be a grinning skeleton, that drop cloth a wraith from the grave.

  ‘I wanted to get as much down as I could.’ Her father stood behind his easel, dressed in his paint-stained smock, his fingers smeared with colour.

  Mammy shut the door with a bang. ‘Margot must be so cold. And in that thin dress too! Do you want her to catch her death?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Papa sat by Margot, picking up her hand and rubbing it between his own. ‘You should have said something.’

  ‘You always say: sit still as a mouse and don’t move even a whisker.’

  ‘You could have given me just a little squeak, to let me know how cold and stiff you were.’

  ‘I’ve brought you some tea.’ Mammy thumped the tray on the table, and poured out some tea. Margot raised herself up on one elbow and took the cup, wrapping her fingers around it. Its warmth was very welcome.

  ‘Your father. He’d paint all night if he could. Why didn’t you light the lamp?’

  Papa replied mildly, ‘If I had realised how dark it was, I would’ve.’ He stood at the easel, frowning over the work he had done that day.

  Margot sat up, putting her teacup on the floor. ‘May I see, Papa?’ She jumped up and went to his side. Mammy came to stand with her, putting her arm about her. Together they gazed at the drawing.

  Margot asleep, her face turned on a soft violet-coloured pillow, her cheek faintly flushed. The delicate suggestion of petals behind her.

  ‘The sleeping princess?’ her mother asked.

  ‘You know I’ve wanted to do something big with the story for a while.’

  ‘And Margot is to be your princess this time.’ Her mother’s voice was flat.

  ‘Always.’

  Margot had been hardly listening. ‘Oh, Papa, couldn’t you have made me a little more …’ She made a sweeping gesture with one hand. It was the fashion just then for women to be voluptuous, and Margot feared she would be stick-thin forever.

  ‘She’s growing up so fast,’ Papa said, a melancholy note in his voice.

  ‘She is,’ Mammy said briskly. ‘But you can’t hold back time.’

  It was true Margot was growing up.

  In June, she had her fif
teenth birthday. Jenny and May Morris came over for afternoon tea. They played croquet in the garden, and giggled over the new Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience, inspired by Papa and Uncle Topsy and Uncle Gabriel. It starred long-haired artists in velvet coats, drifting about the stage and declaiming their poetry to rapturous damsels in loose dresses, just like Margot and her friends always had to wear.

  Two weeks later, Margot was up early. It was a bright summer day, but the air was already tainted with smog. She dressed quickly, for she was to travel down to Oxford with her father. The university was giving him an honorary degree. He had never graduated, having decided to throw it all in and become an artist. Pretending not to care, Papa said it was a good chance to go down and see Phil, who was in his first year there. Margot wore her new dress of white lawn and a rice-straw hat she had trimmed with tiny pink roses. It looked much better without all her hair hanging down and so she pinned it up, her heart beating fast at her temerity.

  ‘So it doesn’t get all blown about on the train,’ she told her father. ‘Don’t look so sad! I promise I’ll let it down again tomorrow, when it’s just us at home.’

  Papa sighed, and looked hunched and melancholy. Margot slowly put up her hands and unpinned her hair, letting it fall down her back again.

  Her father hated trains, and it was a sign of how much he wanted to go to Oxford that he had consented to travel in one. As they waited on the station, Papa fidgeted with his watch chain, and Margot knew he was wishing he were back in his painting smock, in the peace and silence of his studio.

  A long hooting, a gush of steam, then the train came snorting into the station like a one-eyed black dragon, billowing clouds of smoke and spitting fiery sparks. Margot held on to her bonnet. Tendrils of hair whipped about her face. Her father’s beard was blown sideways.

  ‘For every train they build, I shall paint another angel,’ her father declared.

  ‘The world can never have enough angels,’ Margot smiled.

  She did not like trains either. They were so strong, so dangerous. She hated tunnels the most. Darkness dropping like a sack. She could only sit, holding her breath and counting, till at last the train burst back out into sunshine.

  The graduation ceremony was at the Sheldonian Theatre, set in its own square and surrounded by immense stone busts of bearded men with strange staring eyes. Papa had to wear a scarlet gown with wide crimson sleeves that were, he said, just like a flamingo’s wings. He looked tall and gaunt and old amongst all the young well-fed graduates, his beard already turning silver. It touched Margot’s heart to see how uncomfortable he was.

  They managed to find Phil in the crowd. A slim youth with a sensitive face and floppy dark hair, he had the same luminous blue-grey eyes as Margot and their mother. He gave her a quick slap on the back in greeting, and endured his father’s gentle questioning about his poor grades with gritted teeth.

  ‘I do not much care whether you are at the top or the bottom of your class,’ Papa said, ‘as long as you find something that you love to do, and do it with all of your heart, and to the very best of your ability. That is all that matters.’

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ Phil replied dutifully, but rolled an agonised eye at Margot as soon as his father turned away. ‘I wish he wouldn’t jaw at me so,’ he whispered, as they went to find their places.

  ‘You know he means well,’ she whispered back. ‘And that he’s right!’

  ‘That makes it worse,’ Phil grumbled.

  The award ceremony dragged on. Phil yawned ostentatiously. Margot elbowed him to be quiet. It was hot, and she was uncomfortably aware of a prickling of moisture along her hairline. She coiled her hair up and stuck in a few pins, just to get the weight of it off the back of her neck. Papa did not need to know.

  Towards the end of the ceremony, a tall young man went to the lectern. He had curly fair hair, combed back from a high broad forehead, a straight nose, and a small moustache that he kept trying to make lie flat. His eyes were striking, being so pale a grey as to seem translucent.

  It seemed the young man had won a prize for his poetry, and was to read it out to the crowd. Phil groaned, and Margot elbowed him again.

  ‘Midway between the vintage and the spring, the apple-flower and apple-gathering …’ the poem began. Margot listened intently. She loved poetry, and the young man’s verse was full of marching rhythms and simple rhymes. ‘Yet still they fought, while through the ridge of spears, flashed in their eyes and sounded in their ears …’ he declaimed in a rolling Scottish brogue. ‘Death, and about their feet and through their breath, Death, and above their heads the shadow of death …’

  Margot must have made some small involuntary movement, because his eyes found hers. His voice faltered. For a moment, they stared at each other. Then he looked away, cleared his voice, and continued, ‘… While the swift continuous arrow flight, hailed on their armour and to left and right …’

  ‘Look how red you are,’ Phil whispered. He fanned her with his programme. ‘Is it the heat or Mr Mackail’s handsome countenance?’

  ‘What’s his name?’ she whispered back.

  ‘Jack Mackail. He’s the prize hog of the year. Won just about everything. They say he’s the most brilliant undergraduate in years. And he bowls like a demon.’

  Margot sat back, her eyes still fixed on Jack Mackail’s face. He looked her way again, and she was sure she saw colour creeping up his lean cheek. He lost his place, and had to look down at his pages. When he spoke again, his voice was not quite so sure of itself. ‘… What evil chance the coming days bring; what shape of terror; and the air grew chill …’

  When he had finished, Margot clapped enthusiastically. He looked at her again, smiled, then smoothed down his moustache self-consciously. Afterwards, he came and greeted Phil, and asked him how he was getting on.

  Phil stammered an eager response, then hastened to introduce Jack to his father. Margot waited quietly, listening as he and Papa talked books and art. To her relief, Jack liked Keats and Browning and Tennyson. Papa would never have forgiven him if he did not. Then Jack turned to Margot and put out his hand to shake. She put her hand in his. She could feel the warmth and strength of his fingers even through her gloves. Hot colour surged up her cheeks.

  ‘Do you like poetry too?’

  ‘I love it,’ she dared to answer. ‘Congratulations on winning the poetry prize.’

  ‘Did you like my poem?’ His gaze was intent on her face.

  ‘I did. It … it was very fine.’

  ‘It was unadulterated rot,’ he said. ‘When I think of who won the Newdigate in the past … John Ruskin … Edward Arnold … Oscar Wilde … well, I can’t believe they gave it to me.’

  ‘You deserved it. It was wonderful.’

  He smiled in gratitude. ‘I must go. But perhaps …’

  She waited, her heart beating uncomfortably hard.

  ‘Perhaps I shall see you again? Do you live in Oxford?’

  ‘No. In Fulham. London.’ In the back of beyond, she thought. No-one ever came to Fulham unless they had to.

  ‘Perhaps I might see you there,’ he said gravely, and at last released her hand. Margot tucked it inside her other, her palm tingling. He bowed and walked away, then turned and looked back at her.

  Margot could not help smiling. He smiled back, lifted one hand, then disappeared into the crowd.

  ‘He seems like a nice enough chap.’ Papa looked after him. ‘Said he’d like to come and see my studio.’

  Margot bit her lip to hide her smile.

  The summer passed slowly.

  Papa fretted over his painting. He wanted almond blossoms, and it was too late in the season to find them anywhere. ‘But you’ve painted them before,’ Mammy said. ‘Why can’t you go and look at your last painting of Phyllis and Demophoön?’

  Her voice was cold. Margot was surprised. Mammy was usually very patient when Papa began to fret. But then again, Margot remembered, there had been some scandal over that painting. It had a nude man i
n it, and the Old Water-Colour Society had refused to hang it. Papa had resigned, and never exhibited with them again. Indeed, he had exhibited nowhere for the next seven years. Perhaps Mammy was being so unsympathetic because she feared the same would happen again.

  ‘You know I cannot do that,’ Papa replied in a suppressed voice. ‘I need real almond blossoms.’

  ‘Then you must wait till next spring,’ Mammy said, closing the conversation.

  Papa was so unhappy he made himself ill. Mammy nursed him stoically, as she always did.

  Margot was restless in a way she did not understand. She wanted to walk for miles, or climb a mountain, or dance all night.

  One Sunday, Jack Mackail came for tea. As always, the house was full of visitors. Some came to see Papa’s studio, others came nervously clutching their portfolios in the hope of impressing him. He never refused anyone for fear, he said, of turning away an angel unawares. That day, the Dutch painter Mr Tadema and his wife, Laura, and two daughters were among the guests. Margot knew she was meant to entertain the daughters, but her shyness defeated her. She sat silently, her teacup balanced on her lap, sneaking peeks at Jack but unable to find a word to say to him.

  ‘Have you always wished to be an artist, Mr Jones?’ Mrs Tadema asked. A tall thin redhead, she was a painter of some note herself.

  Papa hated being asked such questions. ‘I did not know what an artist was. I can tell you I was always drawing. I had no mother – she died when I was just six days old – and my papa never stopped grieving for her. Without a sister or a brother, always alone, I was never unhappy because I was always drawing.’

  Mammy deftly turned the conversation back to the work of Mr and Mrs Tadema. Margot did not pay much attention until Mr Tadema said that he had recently been invited to go and see a mummy before it was ground down into paint.

  ‘A mummy?’ Margot asked. ‘A real live Egyptian mummy?’