4  

In the winter of 1853 the Thomases took a house in the rue de Luxembourg. Morgan bought a carriage with a form of armorial bearing painted on the doors. “We went about in our carriage, and all our ancient admirers, on foot, stared at us as if we were risen from the grave,” Georgina commented. Her father had managed to secure a letter of introduction to the ambassador: he was positioning himself for the campaign that lay ahead. If he had gone abroad like a loser, he intended to come back with a different story to tell.

Brussels, like Florence, sustained a large British colony, and for the same reason. It was cheap to live there, and titled European families were ten a penny. A man might fill his mantelpiece with crested invitations and cartes de visite. Perhaps the very best people were in Paris, but there was enough going on in Brussels to replicate that older, frowstier form of society that was to Morgan’s taste. So, interspersed with the names of son Dal’s fellow Etonians who came to stare and wonder, we find the Baron de Pfuel, Limmander de Nieuvehoven, and—Louisa’s finest social acquisition—the Baronne de Goethals. There was war in the air and everyone was talking about Constantinople. Some of the insouciant young Englishmen Georgina saw lounging about at balls and parties she would never see again. One of her beaux was William Scarlett, whose uncle was to command the Heavy Brigade at Sebastopol.

Brussels was intended by her parents to be a kind of finishing school. They stayed a season, and Georgina sang before an audience for the first time at the British Embassy. The recital—which may not have been more than one song—was well received. For the first time in her life it was exciting to be a Thomas. Though she was by her own description “wild,” she was also “irresistible.” Her triumphs came entirely as a consequence of her own efforts—to her surprise people liked this turbulent and impulsive girl from Florence. Now that the family was out in the world a little more, her father’s peculiarities became more obvious. It was the first chance she had to compare him with other fathers, and she began to form the opinion expressed so forcibly in the years ahead:

My father, who as a consequence of his proud and violent character had always been more or less mad at last became so, despite being gifted with rare and valuable qualities. His mother’s favourite, he had been spoiled as a child, and he reaped what all spoiled children reap. He inspired hate and terror in everybody. As for me, I never addressed a word to him in my life, and he only spoke to us to call us to table and to tell us we were damn fools. If my mother had only a little common sense or principle, she would not have endured such a hell, neither for herself nor for her children, and I blame her much more than my father for all that has happened.

There is a characteristic element of exaggeration in this. At the time, darting about Brussels, discovering clothes, learning to waltz, and reaping compliments wherever she went, life had taken an unexpected twist. It was fun. Evidently, some young women made their effect by hiding shyly behind their mothers’ skirts. That was not Georgina’s way. She was bold, careless even. A lifelong habit of bathing in cold water had been set in Florence. Now, much farther north and in the depths of winter, she bounced from the bath pink and eager, hungry for breakfast and the chance to meet new people and shine in their company. Wherever she went she demonstrated a similar animal exuberance. She was happy.

While retaining the lease on the house in the rue de Luxembourg, Morgan finally took his family back to England in 1854. Dal was at Eton, but the other children had never seen England and only Georgina had been born there. It was exciting to be home, but it was also daunting. The country was more interested in cholera and the imminence of war than the arrival of the Thomas family. Georgina’s flirtatious experiments followed her across the Channel: no sooner had they set foot in England than Morgan intercepted a love letter to his daughter from a mysterious G.V.—presumably by stealing it or reading it surreptitiously. His reaction was illuminating. He summoned the butler, Antonio, and had him take it to the bemused local police. Meanwhile, Gate House in Mayfield was prepared for the family as its permanent seat, and Georgina’s first scattered impressions of her native country were gathered while driving about Brighton and East Sussex to be introduced to the local gentry. She was not impressed. That vague sense of superiority so lavishly rekindled in Brussels was not to be squandered on mutton-eating squires and their sullen children.

At first, England disappointed Georgina. Life at the Villa Capponi had been dull, but wonderful things had happened to her since. Though her father watched her like a hawk, she had already received two declarations of love and turned any number of heads. Neither of her sisters was of an age to be seen in a romantic light: she was the center of attention in whatever drawing room she found herself. She confirmed the earlier suspicion that she was far more forward and direct than her English contemporaries. In an age that placed so much importance on the niceties of address, how to behave with self-effacing quiet was something it was already too late for her to learn. Her father had been right about one thing: once you described yourself as of good family, the number of friends and acquaintances you might make in life was small indeed, at any rate in the Sussex hinterland. However, farming had never been so prosperous in living memory, and Morgan and his family had come back to a golden decade for corn prices. The best of the country gentlemen had “no enemies but time and gout,” as one admiring foreign observer put it. That did not necessarily make them entrancing company.

If Sussex was dull, London was a different matter. Though Morgan might find as much to deprecate there as anything he had found in Florence, his opinion counted for nothing. The London he came home to had almost doubled in size from the one he had left. Its sophistication and complexity were quite beyond him. There was more “dash” to affairs than he remembered and a great deal more irreverence. Whole new classes had sprung up and with them manners that were beneath Morgan’s dignity to interest himself in. He was safe for as long as he stayed in the West End and kept himself away from anything approaching talent. The truth was that Morgan could not and never would find a niche in society. His time had passed.

For Georgina London was a city bathed in dangerous adventure. Rotten Row, of which she had heard much as a child, had been recently widened to accommodate the Sunday carriage rides of the rich and titled. She duly made her baptismal appearance there, stared at in what she considered an insolent way by any number of young men on horseback. She found them all distressingly tall. It was no use attempting a conversational finesse by comparing the scene disfavorably to the Cascine Gardens—this was the real thing. The carriage row in Hyde Park was a showcase of the aristocracy. The Prince Consort rode out there. As the elegant carriages ambled their way back and forth along the mile-and-a-half route around the edge of Hyde Park, on fine days—just out of sight but not out of earshot—as many as twelve thousand bathers swam in the Serpentine. The scale of London and the juxtaposition of its classes were beyond anything she had ever seen. Like her father, she discovered much that she must learn. The greatest part of it was where and how to fit in. To be fashionable was to know far more—perhaps to discount far more—than the elementary education she had received in Florence.

In 1855 Georgina went back to Brussels with her mother for Carnival, and on February 17 attended a ball at the Baronne de Goethals’. It was the scene of one of the great moments in her life. Among the company was a Portuguese baron named Pedro de Moncorvo. He was twenty-seven years old, the son of a former ambassador to the Court of St. James. Georgina was dressed in the costume of a Parisian grisette, and the evening passed in a delirium of romantic enchantment. Here, with all the force of a novel, was the perfect situation—a beautiful girl heated by the dance, pursued by a dark and handsome stranger. Writing fifty years later, Georgina claimed to have loved him with all her heart, and when she was sixty-six, she went all the way to Bemfica to visit his grave. Moncorvo was probably the first man to see her for what she was and not attempt to change her. They met no more than ten times, during which he alternately scolded and cajoled her. For the first but not the last time in her life she was, so to speak, living to the tune and lyrics of the best kind of song. Four days after her eighteenth birthday, her father intervened, and she was banished from Brussels and sent into exile at Boulogne.

On June 18, wracked by love, playing the piano with tragic abandon, she opened the door of her lodgings to find Moncorvo on the doorstep. Unchaperoned, they walked on the cliffs overlooking the town.

He asked me if I had deceived myself in allowing that perhaps I loved him. I answered “If I loved you, what would be the use?” “Forgive me,” he said. “If you loved me we could be married in that church” and he pointed to the church of Boulogne. I made no reply, his lips almost touched my cheek. I drew back gently. He did not kiss me. He departed that same afternoon—and I have never seen him since.

It is a perfect vignette. As she grew older, she realized he may have loved her with a seriousness her youth and ignorance did not allow for on the day. For the rest of her life she wondered what might have happened if she had done as he asked and married him against the wishes of her parents. And though a year later he married a Portuguese comtessa, he continued to write her affectionate letters, enough for her to make that long sea journey when he died. What makes the story so poignant, in light of what was to come, is that the girl on the cliffs was still the girl from Florence, the wayward boy in the body of a woman, the original and untempered Georgina Thomas. She lost him out of inexperience.

It is sad to see her later embroider the story, explaining that she could not marry him because of a devotion to a higher thing, her art. She was an eighteen-year-old girl who had for the first time in her life been faced with a real decision, touching real feelings. Moncorvo was asking a lot of her—he was very much older, he was poor, and he was Catholic. But the truth was that—too early in her life for her to understand and profit from the experience—a man was prepared to take her exactly as she was. In this brief and shimmering image of them on the cliffs, we are watching a man who has seen something of the world and a girl who has not. Moncorvo was not saying “take me back to England so that I can sponge off your father.” He was inviting her to come with him to Portugal.

When he pointed with a sweep of his arm to “the church of Boulogne,” the gesture also took in the villa where Dickens and Wilkie Collins stayed with their families, and the place where Thackeray and his daughters had rested in the past. Perfectly visible was the massive embarkation camp from which the French Imperial Army had set sail to the Crimea. Even while they spoke, many of those who had marched down to the quays garlanded with flowers were being blown to pieces at the Malakhov Redoubt.

Georgina knew nothing of such things. Moncorvo was the first to lay bare her ignorance of the real world. She may have had practical misgivings, and certainly the peculiar urgency and danger of his visit must have weighed with her. Watching the hazy sea, trying not to look into his eyes, she learned from Moncorvo that afternoon what love was, rather than what a well-arranged English marriage could confer. She chose the wrong option.