Beauty in Thorns

by Kate Forsyth

  It was such a relief to be away from the gloomy house at Hammersmith. Once so full and noisy. Now so empty and quiet.

  Bought to provide a haven for Jenny, the huge old house no longer fulfilled that function. Five years earlier, Jenny had been committed to an asylum, after going mad one day and trying to throw herself out a window. They had to tie Jenny to her bed, till the doctors came to take her away. It had felt like a death blow. Topsy had broken down afterwards and taken to his bed, and Janey felt he had never truly recovered from the shock of it.

  May, meanwhile, had fallen head-over-heels in love with a young playwright named George Bernard Shaw. They acted in dramatic theatricals together, marched in Socialist rallies, and fought over the suffragettes’ cause. May was fiercely independent. She had become head of the Firm’s embroidery department at only twenty-three, and believed passionately in the need for women to work and earn their own living.

  Mr Shaw had blown hot, then cold, then hot again, only to fall for an alluring actress and break off their affair. On the rebound, May had married a weak-chinned Socialist called Henry Halliday Sparling, who let her order him around as she pleased. Janey had been horrified. Her beautiful bright daughter, throwing herself away like that! She and Topsy had argued with May, to no avail. In the end Topsy had cut her off. May had proudly struggled to live on only a few pounds a week, refusing to admit she had made a dreadful mistake.

  Then, most shockingly, Mr Shaw moved in with May and Henry. It was meant to be temporary, while his lodgings were refurnished. But he stayed and stayed and did not leave. Soon the three of them were living in a far more open and scandalous ménage-à-trois than Topsy, Gabriel and Janey had ever shared.

  Unsurprisingly, it had ended in catastrophe. May had thrown her husband out, in the hope Mr Shaw would stay with her. Mr Shaw, however, tasting the first dazzle of success with his plays, had taken up with yet another actress.

  It had been one hard blow after another for May, and Janey hoped that a complete change of scene would be healing for them both.

  A few weeks of idleness in Sussex, and then they set sail for Egypt. Janey was more excited than she cared to admit. She had been fascinated by the land of the Pharaohs ever since seeing the Egyptian Gallery at the British Museum. She had always wished to travel the world, but apart from trips to Germany and Italy had been greatly confined to England by her husband’s work, the need to care for Jenny, and her own ill health.

  Egypt was as fascinating as she could have wished. Miles of wind-ruffled red sands. The enigmatic gaze of the broken-nosed Sphinx. The mysterious pyramids. Endless mazes of souks and alleyways. Fragments of ancient embroidery sewn before Christ had been born.

  Janey and May rode out into the desert, Janey’s horse being led by a tall man in sand-coloured robes. May joked that Mr Blunt should procure a camel for her, and wondered why it was that Janey had never learned to ride when she had grown up in a stable.

  ‘The horses weren’t ours to use,’ Janey explained, and – for the first time – shared a little of the truth of her childhood with her daughter.

  May was slowly coming back to life in the warmth of the Egyptian sun. She liked to watch the native jewellers at work in their tiny huts, and bought herself heavy, intricate jewellery which she then pulled apart and put back together in different patterns. She sketched an embroidery pattern that she called ‘An Eastern Garden’, inspired by the stylised drawings of birds and flowers they saw on vases and platters, and sewed an embroidered robe for herself inspired by traditional Arab robes called ‘djibbahs’. Janey was so glad to see her daughter working again. May was so like Topsy, she was only happy when she was doing something with her hands.

  On their last night in Egypt, Janey and May walked out into the old quarter of the city, quietly accompanied by one of Mr Blunt’s servants. The crooked narrow streets smelt of strange spices and the heavy fragrant smoke of tobacco saturated with molasses. Hawkers shouted their wares, singers beat their hands on their drums and wailed in high-pitched voices, veiled women in long black robes fingered bright-coloured silks, hawkish bearded men in white turbans dragged along overladen donkeys, and barefoot ragged children ran and played with shrieks of laughter. It was like they had wandered into a story from One Thousand and One Nights.

  Janey and her daughter found a high vantage point and watched the sun go down over the domes and minarets of the mosques. As the sky darkened, the eerie call of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer rose into the hot dusty air.

  ‘So, back to normal life now,’ Janey said with a sigh.

  May turned to her mother and burst out, ‘I don’t know what to do!’

  ‘About Henry?’ Janey asked, after a long moment.

  ‘I thought if I turned him out … if I ended our farce of a marriage …’

  Janey took a deep breath. ‘You thought Mr Shaw would …?’

  ‘Yes. But it seems he does not want me.’ May’s voice was bitter.

  ‘I always thought Mr Shaw was a dolt.’

  May turned to her, half-shocked, half-laughing. ‘But Mama! Everyone thinks he’s brilliant.’

  ‘Which is why he sleeps with the window open in the depths of winter, and refuses to eat meat, and wears those awful sanitary woollen suits.’

  May’s laughter broke free. ‘They are rather awful.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Janey smiled at May. ‘He is a dolt, though, darling girl. He had his chance to have you, and he threw it away.’

  ‘I can’t go back to Henry.’

  ‘You don’t need to. The laws have changed now. You have the right now to keep your own property, and earn your own income, and divorce a man if you don’t love him. You can start afresh if you’ve made a mistake.’

  May heaved a great sigh. ‘But … what will everyone say?’

  ‘Who cares?’ Janey said. ‘Not me.’

  May looked at her in astonishment, a smile quirking her finely cut lips.

  ‘We could go to Kelmscott Manor for a while,’ Janey said. ‘Till the scandal blows over. Jenny could come and stay. She’s always calmer at Kelmscott. We could read the Brontë sisters, and walk by the river, and sew, and tell each other stories …’

  ‘It sounds heavenly,’ May said, leaning on her mother’s shoulder.

  ‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ Janey said, and kissed the top of her head.

  3

  Awakening the World

  Summer 1898

  ‘I don’t mind how much I work, I’d like to kill myself with it,’ Ned told Georgie.

  ‘You will do so if you are not careful,’ she said, bringing a blanket to drape around his shoulders. ‘Come to bed, my dear. Avalon will still be here in the morning.’

  ‘But I might have lost the dream,’ he said. ‘I might wake up and it’ll be gone, and then the painting will be no good.’

  ‘You’re tired. You’ll paint better when you’ve had a rest.’

  ‘I really don’t want to rest. I’m afraid I will die before I have a chance to finish, and then what will happen to my poor painting?’

  ‘You’ll have plenty of time to finish the painting, my dear. There’s no need to worry.’ She took the brush out of his hand and stuck it in one of the many jars of turpentine that crowded the table and shelf.

  He let her lead him through the dark garden, the lantern swinging from her hand. It was a beautiful summer’s night, with faint stars above the apple trees, and the scent of flowers all around them. He pulled at her hand as they reached the terrace, and halted, looking up at the thin paring of the moon. His beard was white and his face lined, but his pale grey eyes were as full of light as when she had first met him, in her pinafore with her hair in plaits down her back.

  ‘I think the painting is too sad,’ he said. ‘King Arthur is not dead, he is just sleeping. Will you pick me armfuls of summer flowers, Georgie? I want to paint his garden full of flowers.’

  ‘That’s a lovely thought, Ned. I’ll pick you as many flowers as you like.’
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  She tried once again to lead him inside, but once again he resisted her pull.

  ‘You know, Georgie, there are only two types of women. Those who take the strength out of a man and those who put it back in.’ He kissed her brow. ‘You’re the kind that puts the strength back in, Georgie.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said simply. ‘Now will you come to bed?’

  Ned had been working on his immense painting of The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon with the same kind of obsessive intensity that he had brought to the painting of ‘The Legend of Briar Rose’. Georgie worried about him. He was sixty-three years old now, and buffeted by endless bouts of influenza. Sometimes she brought him his tea, and found him lying down, his hands draped over his chest. ‘It’s just the thumping of my heart,’ he told her.

  Georgie never knew if his heart pounded because he was ill, or because he was anxious. The two things were so closely entwined in her husband.

  Ned wanted to be nowhere in the world but in Avalon. When Georgie went to Rottingdean for a few days, he wrote her little notes every day, and named his address as ‘Avalon’ instead of ‘The Grange, Fulham’. Often he said to her, ‘No, I cannot go out tonight, I wish to go to Avalon tomorrow.’

  Georgie raided the garden for columbines and irises and forget-me-nots, and he took great pleasure in painting them in the foreground of King Arthur’s bier.

  The ninth of June was their thirty-eighth wedding anniversary. Georgie woke to find a little square of paper laid on the pillow next to her cheek. It was a page from his secret book of designs, in which he worked to wring secrets from the mysterious names of flowers.

  Drawn in the centre of the page was a circle, like a kind of magic mirror. Within the circle, thorns and wild roses entangled two figures. A knight in dark armour bent over the forget-me-not blue bed of a sleeping princess. The shield on his back looked like wings. He had lifted one of the sweet-faced maiden’s hands to his heart. His other hand tenderly stroked her hair, the same chestnut-brown as Georgie’s.

  In the corner of the page Ned had inscribed, in neat block letters, ‘Wake Dearest’.

  Eight days later, Ned called to Georgie in the middle of the night and she ran to him.

  ‘My heart,’ he croaked, clutching at his chest. ‘My heart.’

  She called for help, and sent urgent messages to Phil and Margot and the doctor, but they did not arrive in time.

  Ned died at the bluest hour of the night.

  What a kindness, she thought, to let him die alone in my arms.

  There was much to do. Ned was to have a memorial service in Westminster Abbey, the first artist to be so honoured. His remains were cremated and then buried in the church at Rottingdean, where Margot had been married.

  Georgie brought only a small wreath of heartsease to lay on his grave.

  ‘I am so very sorry,’ Janey said to Georgie.

  She answered simply, ‘We must pay for the wine we have drunk.’

  Georgie did not want to go back to London. She wanted to stay in Rottingdean, where she and Ned had been so happy. She could walk across to the grave, and bring him wildflowers, and think of him anytime she liked. London was so dirty and noisy now, and the Grange much too big for her now she was alone.

  ‘But what shall you do down there, all by yourself?’ Margot asked her anxiously.

  Georgie smiled and patted her hand. ‘Do not doubt that there is work for me as long as I am left on this earth,’ she answered.

  Packing up the Grange, she took care to save every letter Ned had ever written to her, every notebook in which he had scribbled down his thoughts and dreams. She asked all their friends to post her their memories, and any letters Ned might have written them. She set up a study for herself, and began the long and difficult task of resurrecting the past.

  All my dear Ned ever wanted to do was awaken the world with beauty, she thought to herself, looking at the last little painting of the Sleeping Princess that he had painted for her.

  That is what I must tell.

  Author’s Note

  When Edward Burne-Jones was painting his series of small water-colours inspired by the names of flowers, he wrote, ‘it is not enough to illustrate them – that is such poor work: I want to … wring their secret from them’.

  This is what I hoped to do with this novel about the women of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. I wanted to wring their secrets from them.

  I have been fascinated by the Pre-Raphaelites ever since I was a young university student. I was living out of home, and so poor I often had to choose between eating or paying for the bus fare home. I saw a poster of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting of Jane Morris as Proserpina in a newsagent’s window. I loved it so much I bought it. I was living in a student squat, with an old mattress on the floor and not much else. I stuck the poster up on my wall, so I would have something beautiful to look at every day.

  A few weeks later, I bought a biography of Rossetti at a second-hand book sale. It cost me $17, a huge amount for an impoverished student. I was so fascinated by the painting, however, I wanted to know more about it. That was the first time I read about the tangled lives of the Pre-Raphaelites. As time went on, I read everything I could find, bought more artworks, and even began to dress how I imagined a Pre-Raphaelite poetess would look.

  Years passed, and I became a university student again, undertaking a doctorate in fairy-tale studies. I wrote a chapter on William Morris and his ‘Rapunzel’ poem for my exegesis, which reignited my interest in the lives of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. I began to think about their work reimagining other beloved fairy-tales. A trail of crumbs led me to the story of Edward Burne-Jones’s lifelong obsession with ‘Sleeping Beauty’. I knew at once I had to write a novel about it. I began to explore and read and research and imagine. Two years later, I finished what proved to be the most fascinating and challenging book I have ever written.

  Along the way I read hundreds of books, biographies, journal articles, poems and letters – far too many to list here. I am most indebted to the work of Judith Flanders, Lucinda Hawksley, Jan Marsh, Fiona McCarthy and Wendy Parkins – and, of course, to The Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones by Lady Georgiana Burne-Jones.

  In regards to understanding Edward Burne-Jones’s paintings of Sleeping Beauty, I am grateful to the research of Kirsten Powell, ‘Burne-Jones and the Legend of the Briar Rose’, in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Volume 6, 1986; and ‘Smite this Sleeping World Awake: Edward Burne-Jones and The Legend of the Briar Rose’ by Andrea Wolk Rager in Victorian Studies, Spring 2009.

  Thanks also to my guide at Red House, Dharshan Thenuwara of Morris Inspirations Tours, who patiently answered so many questions for me; Rachel Barnes who took me on a private tour of Tate Britain’s Pre-Raphaelite art and stayed talking with me long after her time was up; Nick Powell, the Visitor Experience Manager at Highgate Cemetery who showed me Lizzie Siddal’s grave on a day just as gloomy and atmospheric as I could have wished for; and the knowledgeable and helpful staff at Kelmscott Manor and Buscot Park, who let me stay and gaze at ‘The Legend of Briar Rose’ as long as I liked.

  I am so grateful to the modern-day Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood of writers and bloggers who cheered me on and never tired of helping and supporting me – in particular, Stephanie Graham Pina, Kirsty Stonell Walker, Kimberly Eve, Essie Fox, Kris Waldherr, Joanne Harris, Terri Windling and – although she does not know it – Grace Nuth, whose blog The Beautiful Necessity was the first place I read about Edward Burne-Jones’s obsession with ‘Sleeping Beauty’.

  And a big shout-out to Colin Smith from Royal Tunbridge Wells, who thought up the title of the book when I cried out for help on Facebook.

  As always, thanks to my family and friends who let me rave on about the Pre-Raphaelites for hours and never let on if they were bored; to Susie Stratton for the world’s most expensive cup of tea in the Hotel Meurice in Paris, where Georgie and Ned stayed with John Ruskin; to my long-suffering husband who let me refurnish our house with W
illiam Morris cushions galore; and an especially heartfelt thanks to my brilliant and wise mother, Gilly Evans, who first bought me the Grimm Brothers’ fairy-tales.

  To Tara Wynne, Cheryl Pientka and Alice Lutyens, my wonderful agents, and Meredith Curnow, Patrick Mangan and the rest of the team at Vintage, thank you so much for having such faith in me and this book, and for all your insight and wisdom. You made the book so much better than I could ever have managed on my own!

  To my dear readers, thank you for reading my books – you have made all my dreams come true!

  If you would like to know more, you can download a Reading Group Guide at my website – www.kateforsyth.com.au.

  Finally, I thought I would share with you one of the eerie serendipitous discoveries I made while writing this novel.

  From the very beginning, I imagined Georgie Burne-Jones as the queen who wished for a child in the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ fairy-tale, and her daughter Margot as the princess who pricked her finger and fell asleep for a hundred years. What would the world be like, I wondered, when she awoke?

  So imagine my feelings when I discovered that Margot Burne-Jones was born on the 3rd of June 1866, exactly one hundred years before I was born …

  About the Author

  Kate Forsyth wrote her first novel at the age of seven, and has since sold more than a million copies around the world. Her books include Bitter Greens, a retelling of Rapunzel which won the 2015 American Library Association Award for Best Historical Fiction; The Wild Girl, the story of the forbidden romance behind the Grimm Brothers’ famous fairy tales, which was named the Most Memorable Love Story of 2013; and The Beast’s Garden, a retelling of ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’ set in the underground resistance to Hitler in Nazi Germany. Recently voted one of Australia’s Favourite 15 Novelists, Kate Forsyth has been called ‘one of the finest writers of this generation’. She has a BA in literature, a MA in creative writing and a doctorate in fairy tale studies, and is also an accredited master storyteller with the Australian Guild of Storytellers. Read more about her at www.kateforsyth.com.au.