Beauty in Thorns

by Kate Forsyth

  ‘Where’s the baby?’ Judy shrieked.

  ‘I have had the saddest o’ misfortunes, my dear,’ Punch said sadly, in his funny high-pitched voice. ‘It’s just … the baby was so terrible cross, I throwed it out the window.’

  All the children laughed, except for the little boy on Ned’s knee who shrank away in terror. It was his birthday, and also his mother Margot’s birthday. Denis was very like her, Georgie thought, being delicately made with huge blue eyes and soft brown hair. He was a sensitive little chap too, prone to night terrors just like Margot had been. Georgie hoped that the Punch and Judy show would not inspire any nightmares that night.

  ‘Oh, no, the baby, the baby!’ Judy rushed about the tiny stage, weeping, then snatched up a cudgel and whacked Punch hard.

  Punch snatched the stick away and began to beat her around the head.

  ‘I’ll go to the constable, an’ have you locked up!’ Judy cried.

  ‘Go to the Devil. I don’t care where you go!’ As Judy rushed off stage, Punch began to dance about, singing raspily:

  As I was walking

  down the street

  a pretty girl I chanced to meet,

  hi ho hi ho hi ho!

  The audience began to sing along, and six-year-old Angela piped up in her sweet voice, looking up to her grandfather’s face every now and again to make sure he was singing too. After a moment, little Denis joined in and Ned took his hands and clapped them together, inside his own much larger ones.

  Just then a puppet dressed in the blue coat, white gloves and tall hat of a policeman crept on to the stage, a truncheon in his hand.

  ‘Watch out, Punch!’ Ned shouted. The children took up the cry. ‘Watch out! Behind you!’

  Punch whipped around and struck the policeman hard over the head with his slapstick. The policeman fell over.

  Ned guffawed so infectiously that the whole room erupted into uproarious laughter. Even little Denis laughed, clapping his small hands together joyously.

  The play went on in all its vital silliness, Punch gleefully beating down the lawyer, the hangman, and then the Devil in turn, and throwing the baby out the window whenever it made an unexpected appearance.

  Georgie watched quietly from a chair under the apple tree. Margot sat beside her, smiling as much at her children’s delight as at the puppet show itself. Angela in particular was beside herself with delight, dancing about and pretending to punch and whack the air.

  ‘Aren’t they enjoying it?’ Margot said. ‘It’s strange. Angela doesn’t seem frightened at all. I used to be terrified of Punch.’

  ‘I don’t much like it myself,’ Georgie confessed. ‘But your father loves it so much, I haven’t the heart to ban it.’

  ‘I suppose he never saw it as a child,’ Margot said.

  ‘No. But then I never did either. We were never permitted to see any kind of theatre, not even a puppet show. I first went to the theatre in Paris, with your father and Mr Ruskin, when Phil was only a little fellow. We went to the ballet, and I was so shocked!’

  Margot laughed. ‘The costumes or the closeness of the embrace?’

  ‘Both! I’d never seen the like.’ Georgie mimicked her own mother’s shocked tones at anything she thought unseemly.

  Margot smiled at her. ‘But you go to the theatre all the time now.’

  ‘Oh, yes. But not with your father. We have very different tastes. He loves comedy, while my taste runs more to tragedy.’

  ‘Yet you are always so cheerful and even-tempered, while Papa is the one who struggles with melancholy.’

  ‘I know. Your papa always says he cannot bear any story about heartbreak. He says such stories are only for the hard-hearted. And he, of course, is the softest-hearted of men.’

  Georgie sighed, thinking of her husband’s new infatuation with May Gaskell, the beautiful and desperately unhappy wife of a rich but aloof military man. Ned could never resist beauty and misfortune. And he loved the kind of intense romantic friendship that allowed him to pour out his heart to a sympathetic listener, and have them utterly charmed and bewitched by his whimsy. Georgie had known him far too long to be so bedazzled. In a week it would be their thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. Though Ned told everyone it was their one hundred and thirty-fourth anniversary, which made Georgie laugh.

  She did not mind Ned writing little love-notes, and meeting Mrs Gaskell for tea, and painting her daughter, and going to stay with her in the country. She knew there was no harm in it; indeed, it seemed to help both Ned and Mrs Gaskell, who had the same kind of wistful sadness about them. You should never want anyone to be everything to you, Georgie had realised. It placed too much of a strain on them. Far better to love and be loved for who you truly are, and turn to others when you needed more.

  It was the same with friendships. Ned had been greatly saddened by the rift that had opened between him and Topsy over his passionate zeal to change the world. Yet Ned had, in time, filled that rift with other close relationships. Including, most interestingly, Georgie’s nephew Rudyard Kipling, who had just published the most enchanting work for children called The Jungle Book. Georgie could not help a little pang at its success. Once upon a time she had dreamed of writing a book, and illustrating it herself, but such dreams had been put away long ago.

  There is only room for one genius in any family, she had told herself.

  Topsy was still very dear to Ned, of course. Indeed, Georgie thought their friendship had been strengthened and warmed by Ned’s eventual willingness to let his friend go. Topsy came to breakfast every Sunday morning, demanding vast quantities of tea and eggs and ham, and entertaining them all with his crazy outbursts of rage and enthusiasm, and his quite dreadful language. Georgie pretended to be greatly shocked by all the oaths that flew from his mouth, but in truth she wished that she could sometimes let herself go and stamp about, shouting, ‘Damn blast it all to bloody hell!’

  It must be very soothing.

  Topsy was just as radical as ever, despite having been arrested once for knocking off a policeman’s helmet at a court hearing. Yet in recent years, he seemed to have calmed down a little. He and Ned had spent many long hours together, working on a magnificent illustrated edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, with eighty-seven wood-cut illustrations. Ned said it was like a little cathedral, so beautifully and carefully was it made. He had given one of the first editions to Margaret for her birthday just that morning, wrapping it up in great quantities of brown paper into such a strange shape she could not possibly guess what it was.

  Georgie smiled to herself again. Her old fellow was still the funniest man she’d ever met.

  ‘Thankin’ you ever so much, my lady. It was a pleasure, it was, puttin’ on the show for your littlies.’ An obsequious cockney voice interrupted her thoughts, and she looked up. It was the puppeteer, holding his greasy hat in his hand, smiling at her hopefully. She had her purse ready with his payment, and counted out the coins carefully, with an extra tip in thanks for amusing Ned so well.

  The puppeteer’s voice slipped into the high, shrill tones of Punch. ‘That’s how you do it!’

  ‘However do you do his voice?’ Ned asked, coming up behind him.

  ‘Now that, sir, is a punchman’s secret. Can’t ever tell that, on pain o’ death,’ the old man answered, with an exaggerated wink. ‘Thank you again, my lady.’ He waved his hat and gathered up his barrow of puppets and striped tent, and wheeled them away, whistling.

  Georgie stared after him. She just could not get used to being called ‘my lady’.

  Who would ever have guessed that ordinary Ned Jones from Birmingham would end up being named a baronet?

  The baronetcy had been created for him by the Queen two years ago. Ned had then applied for a royal licence to change his name officially to Burne-Jones, which meant – rather comically – that his full name was now Sir Edward Coley Burne Burne-Jones. Not that anyone called him that, of course.

  Georgie felt uneasily that Topsy was disappointed
in Ned for accepting the title. It would have been such a good opportunity for him to make a public declaration of the hollowness of all such honours. But Ned was far too polite to do such a thing, and was actually secretly pleased. Their son Phil had been very publicly pleased, since he would inherit the title eventually. And it seemed so hard to make Phil happy these days, Ned thought it better to gracefully accept.

  It still gave Georgie a little start when letters arrived for her addressed to Lady Burne-Jones, however. She had been plain Mrs Jones for so long, she felt a little guilty opening the envelopes as if she was prying through someone else’s mail.

  A lot had changed in recent years. Motor carriages could be seen shoving their way through the crowded city streets, startling the horses with their high-pitched beeps. There was talk of founding a women’s suffrage union, and – much to Georgie’s surprise and pleasure – she had been elected a parish councillor in Rottingdean. ‘You should have seen her,’ Ned had crowed to Topsy. ‘She’s marching about and rousing the people – she’s like a flame, going through the whole village.’

  He was exaggerating, of course, but Georgie had high hopes of establishing a nursing service for the village, setting up a system to drain the cesspools and clean the streets, build new houses for the workers, and educate them so they could have some hopes of bettering themselves. If she had her way, every labourer in the village would be reading Topsy’s socialist newsletters. It was a struggle, there was no doubt about that, but Georgie relished the challenge.

  They lived in wonderful times, she thought. The world had changed so much already. What other changes would they see in the next fifty years, the next hundred?

  Margot brought her a slice of cake and a fresh cup of tea, then went to Jack’s side, winding her arm through his. He was talking in his serious way to a few of their neighbours about a new ballet said to be taking Europe by storm. It was inspired by Sleeping Beauty, just like Ned’s famous painting, and the score was written by a controversial composer called Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Jack smiled at Margot and pressed her arm a little closer, and she joined in the conversation eagerly.

  The children ran about the garden, screaming with delight as they chased each other with sticks. Ned came to sit next to Georgie. ‘I really do think Punch is the noblest play in the whole world. He’s such a fine character, so cheerful and good-natured, and such a poet. It’s such a shame he has such a shrew of a wife, and that the world keeps breaking in on him.’

  Georgie knew he was teasing her. In answer, she pointed to where Angela had just whacked Denis across the back with her stick. The little boy was crying, and his sister was defending herself loudly. ‘We was playing Punch, Mama. You can’t play Punch without whacking!’

  ‘And quite right too,’ Ned said, but got up to swoop on Denis, and hang him upside down, and march with him around the garden. Angela chased after them, demanding to be carried too. Soon the little boy was laughing hysterically, his face crimson, his lashes damp and spiky with tears.

  The next day Topsy came for breakfast as usual.

  ‘I say, old boy,’ Ned cried. ‘We had a Punch and Judy show here yesterday. You’d have loved it!’

  ‘Yes.’ Topsy wearily leant his tousled white head on his hand. ‘I do like Punch.’

  After he had gone, Ned came to Georgie, looking frightened. ‘Did you see Tops leaning on his hand? He never used to do that. I’m afraid, Georgie. He doesn’t look well.’

  She comforted him, but was worried too. Topsy was looking so thin and bent. And she knew that he had been forced to miss many of his Socialist meetings, his daughter May reading out his speeches for him.

  Topsy grew sicker as the year passed. A sea journey to Norway did little to help, and at the end of August they were all horrified to hear that he had tuberculosis of the lungs and did not have much longer to live. Ned wept in Georgie’s arms, and she had difficulty in hiding her own grief. It was like a fist punch to her diaphragm, making it almost impossible to breathe.

  On the first of September, Topsy wrote to Georgie in a shaky hand, ‘Come soon, I want sight of your dear face.’

  When she came into the hall of Kelmscott House, Janey met her, looking thin and haggard. Grey streaked her abundant black hair. ‘Oh, Janey, how is he?’ Georgie cried. Janey turned from her, and pressed her face into her arms against the wall. Her shoulders shook.

  Georgie patted her in wordless comfort, then went slowly down the corridor and into Topsy’s room. He lay in his bed, wheezing. He smiled when he saw her, though, and took her small hand in both of his huge, bear-like paws.

  They sat together in silence for a long time.

  Topsy died a month later, at eleven-fifteen in the morning, as gently as a babe falling asleep. Both Ned and Georgie were with him, as well as Janey and May and a few other dear friends. Ned fell to his knees by the bed and sobbed. ‘I am alone now. Quite, quite alone.’

  Georgie hugged him close. ‘I know, my dear. I know.’

  Topsy was buried in the churchyard in Kelmscott, on a wild and stormy day that lashed the mourners with rain and hail, as if Topsy’s spirit was in one last rage. His coffin was of a simple oak, covered with one of his ancient tapestries instead of a pall, and surrounded with all the flowers he most loved, the wild flowers of the meadow and hedgerow. It was carried to the church on a two-wheeled farm cart lined with moss and entwined with willow leaves and vines, with the roan mare that pulled the cart wearing blinkers made of leaves.

  ‘It’s so beautiful, it just breaks my heart,’ Ned said, leaning against the wall as if he had no pith left in his limbs to hold him upright. ‘It’s the funeral procession of an old pagan king … and once he is buried, there’ll be no more kings. The last of the great ones is gone.’

  2

  Starting Afresh

  Summer–Winter 1896

  Janey was unutterably lonely without him.

  The house was so quiet. No bellowing of rage, no gales of laughter. She could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall, the susurration of leaves in the garden. Lying on the sofa, her embroidery lying limp in her hands, Janey would have given anything to hear Topsy roaring her name.

  A discreet knock on the front door surprised her. Janey was expecting no visitors. Perhaps it was someone who did not know Topsy had died. According to his wishes, she had not hung the door knocker with crepe, or drawn the drapes, or even dressed in mourning. Topsy had hated what he called ‘that mumbo-jumbo’.

  The door opened and the parlour-maid bobbed her head. ‘A visitor for you, missus.’

  It was Mr Blunt. A handsome man in his late fifties, he had thick dark hair, a gingery beard and sardonic hazel eyes. He had been – for a while – her lover, but in recent years their ardour had cooled to an intermittent friendship. She did not want him here now, when her grief was so raw and her loneliness so heavy.

  Janey stumbled to her feet, one hand on the sofa arm to steady herself. He came straight to her, put his arms about her and kissed her.

  She drew herself away.

  ‘I came as soon as I heard the news, Mrs Morris. I am so very sorry. He was a great man. A genius!’

  She turned away, trying to compose herself. ‘After all this time, don’t you think you might call me Janey?’

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘Oh, no. I like to think of you as Mrs William Morris. “Famous for her husband, a poet, and most famous for her face; so let this picture of mine add to her fame”.’

  Gabriel had inscribed those words on the first portrait of her that he had painted so lovingly, so long ago. Sometimes Janey thought that Mr Blunt had only seduced her because she had been the lover of the two men he admired most in the world.

  Janey clasped her hands together. ‘Why are you here, Mr Blunt?’

  He smiled and took her hand, stroking her palm. ‘In my experience grief is a sharp spur to desire.’

  Janey drew her hand away. ‘What makes you think I am grieving? I am not unhappy … Topsy is at peace n
ow and no longer in pain.’ Her voice was cool.

  ‘Do you feel nothing at his death?’ he asked with avid curiosity.

  She could not look at him. ‘Well, of course it is a terrible thing. I have been with him for such a long time … since I first knew anything of the world. I was just eighteen when I married him.’

  And now I am fifty-seven, she thought. With grey in my hair and lines on my face. Fifty-seven and all alone.

  Tears sprang to her eyes. She moved across to the window, and looked out into the garden.

  ‘So you never loved your husband?’ Mr Blunt was avid with curiosity.

  ‘No,’ she lied.

  Once Mr Blunt had asked her – as they lay drowsily in each other’s arms – if she had ever given herself quite so completely to Gabriel. She had said ‘no’ to him then too.

  Janey did not want to reveal the deepest secrets of her heart to the world.

  Mr Blunt came to her side, taking her cold unresponsive hand once more. ‘Let me comfort you, Mrs Morris. You can tell me anything, you know that. You can unburden yourself to me. Let me look after you. Come and stay with me. My wife won’t mind.’

  Janey shook her head.

  ‘You could come to Egypt with me,’ he said. ‘Escape the London winter. See the Sphinx, climb the pyramids.’

  That caught her attention. ‘You mean it? Come to Egypt?’

  ‘If you like.’ Her sudden interest unnerved him, and he drew back a little.

  ‘Very well, I’ll come,’ she said. ‘But only if I can bring May.’

  So, three days after her husband’s funeral, Janey and her daughter went to stay with the man who had once been her lover.

  He lived in a lovely Jacobean manor house in Sussex. Peacocks strutted across velvet lawns, displaying their brilliant plumage, and gleaming horses with manes like silk looked out from spotless stables. As always the house was filled with aristocratic ladies in white bell dresses and impoverished poets in sack coats and floppy bow-ties. Janey was glad to walk in the gardens with May, and listen to music in the evenings in the grand drawing-room. Mr Blunt offered her a pansy once – a secret invitation to his bed – but Janey smiled and shook her head. Ruefully he wandered away and offered it to a bored-looking noblewoman with a wasp waist and leg-o’-mutton sleeves, who took it with a discreet smile and tucked it in her buttonhole.