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The new Mrs. Weldon returned to Florence with an adult’s view of what had been her childhood landscape. Harry was dismayed to find recent history being vigorously rewritten by his bride. The little girl who once bristled with virtue had become a confident gossip and name-dropper. She could assure people that Watts, who as a young man had painted Napoleon’s niece when she was newly married, had also painted her, to the acclaim of all London. She had met Thackeray, amused herself with Millais. Lord Clarendon and all the Villierses were special friends and Princess Mary such a lump. Tennyson was a rather earnest man with a complexion much ruined by tobacco. On the threat of war and revolution, of the political mood in England—on any matter whatsoever to do with politics—she was on less sure ground. Human society was for her always a matter of style and not content. It was hats and gardens, wallpapers, sheet music. She seemed not to understand that the world was being run by someone, or that there were wheels within wheels.

Georgina was, or would like to have been thought, “a fashionable.” A fashionable woman was described by the width of her crinoline, the depth of her neckline, the exact amount of false hair added to her coiffure. Only a fashionable would know what jewelry to select for a given occasion or how well or badly to play at cards. But the term extended beyond clothes and appearance and crossed the line between the sexes. Books, plays, towns, streets within those towns, drawing rooms, furniture, the naming of children and dogs, the livery of servants—the list continued. It was easy to see what would not do. For example, until the Crimea veterans started to come home, beards were thought very de trop among men, and only certain kinds of mustache would pass. But after the investiture Victoria gave her Crimean soldier heroes in Green Park, beards might be allowed. In the same way, Wellington had detested his officers wearing uniforms in public, but now (for a while at least) it was thought rather a good thing.

Fashionables might be treated satirically by their lessers, but the codes they established were very powerful. Georgina understood this world and all its nuances, without quite realizing that it interlocked with the world of real events. Though she came back to Florence a fashionable, it caused her no reflection that Italian unification was just about to knock a nail into the coffin of the English colony she wished to impress. In Florence itself the Grand Duke had abdicated, and the British Embassy, scene of so much revelry and intrigue in her childhood, had been withdrawn. Florence’s revolution had been peaceful, yet for the old Waterloo veterans still tottering the streets there was the unmistakable scent of gunpowder in the air. Garibaldi was in Naples. An era was ending.

Harry’s enjoyment of the honeymoon was tempered by some unpleasant surprises. For such a careless name-dropper, his wife was extremely exact in matters of household budgeting. The cost of a night in a coaching inn, the loose change left over from a wise—or careless—choice of wines: in such things she showed a decided taste for petty detail. He had married a list maker. It was a foreshadowing of what was to come. She made lists, she argued indignantly over bills, handled servants with superb contempt. It was a side of her he had not reckoned with. It was true she had a hundred ideas and inspirations and an absolute passion for improving the bones of a story. But the grand lady she liked to be in the daily concourse of carriages at the Cascine Gardens and the musical genius she felt to be her true destiny came down in bed to a rather erratic woman who tried to amuse him by imitating the sound of birds and animals. In the mornings, staying at this or that hotel, she would sing for him, at alarming volume, breaking off only to scold a maid or question the reckoning of last night’s supper. The Florence of galleries and palaces left them both unmoved. They were at their best in cafés and restaurants or as the guests of some gullible family, hoping for news of England.

Harry could play the part of a languid consort: it was the sort of thing he did well, and he was a clubbable, even on occasion a twinkly, personality. But he was much more realistic in temperament. Walking in the city and its gardens, listening to her chatter, it was better not to think too deeply of the comparison between Florence and whatever a little town in Anglesey had to offer. When they came home again to England—or as he had constantly to remind her, Wales—they would pay the full price for their folly.

For a few weeks, all was well. They went to Capri, where they met the minor Pre-Raphaelite John Brett, who sketched her portrait. Such flattering attentions were no more than the embers of the romantic fires she had lit so briefly among the Little Holland House set. Her flirting days, the gamble she made of her youth and beauty for such high stakes, all this was at an end. Marriage did not extinguish her beauty, but to marry meant to settle down. In the case of the new Weldons, without money and influence, it meant to disappear. Their host Brett was an instance of how obscurely the obscure might live. To be praised by Ruskin for a particular painting was a fine thing, but it was not the passport to wealth and riches. In a year or so, with the whole Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood shipwrecked (to some extent on the rock of marriage), Brett left Capri and took himself off to Putney, where he built himself a most amazing house and took up astronomical observation and was largely forgotten. Here on Capri, talking and lounging, life seemed so wonderful, so fabulous. Whether or not she had married Harry for love, she was clearly mad about him now. He was her Proomps, her Darling Boy, her Dear Old Man.

Brett was a few years older than them both and unmarried. He had been born into a soldier family and could recognize in Harry a lazy lustfulness, a sort of garrison town gift for making himself attractive to women. The husband, he observed, had little intelligent conversation and was perfectly ignorant of art and culture. His wife was beautiful but also distressingly empty-headed. The pencil sketch Brett did of Georgina shows her sleeping, a plump arm extended above her head, her chin full. Around her neck is a choker of coral. There is not a line on her face. The whole drawing suggests ripeness and indolence, a Mediterranean abandon. This is Georgina at the magic hour, the shutters open to a blissful silence as the sea begins to take up the tint of the sky. But the idyll could not last. Harry finally dinned it into her that they could not stay where they were. The sun, the sea, all the romance of Italy, had been no more than a cruel backdrop to what seemed like a hopeless future. For the second and last time in her life she climbed into a diligence and quit the Mediterranean.

Back in England, and on the road to her mother-in-law’s cottage in Beaumaris, she miscarried of a boy.