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The miscarriage was a shattering blow. In her memoirs almost the only good word she has to say about Harry in any of his guises is that he sat by her bed for weeks nursing her through illness and despair. The location was unpromising. On the road into Beaumaris there lay a short row of cottages, one of which was occupied by Harry’s mother, a redoubtable and, according to Georgina, coarse-grained widow who came originally from Eccleshall in Lancashire. The newly marrieds moved in as neighbors. They, who had so recently sat where Nero sat, now found themselves in four rooms and an outside privy, with no money, no prospects, and no friends. Watts’s portrait, which hung on the wall alongside Harry’s boyhood collection of stuffed birds, was a ghastly reminder of what had been.

Georgina lost the baby to what turned out to be an incurable gynecological defect. The enormity of this news—taken with the desolation of all her other prospects—might have brought a lesser woman to her knees. (It is the one subject on which she stayed silent in later life.) There were investigations done by doctors in London, cures attempted in the Rhine spas. The physicians she consulted saw a plump and comely young woman of twenty-three with a very ready presence, not at all the textbook wraith or hollow-eyed neurasthenic. Georgina was an otherwise healthy patient with unbounded energy and apparently unending reserves of courage and fortitude. They could not help her. It is quite clear that she desired children. Whatever had gone wrong with her own childhood she wanted to redress with children of her own. She persisted with the doctors long past the stage of a second or even a fourth opinion. In this, at least, the willfulness she had shown before her marriage came suddenly into focus. Being barren was something she simply could not allow to happen; and when it was proved beyond a doubt that she was, what was most valuable to her—her power over events—was taken away. Love in a cottage was all very well, but without the long perspective offered by children, where would her life with Harry lead?

Some of her new neighbors took pity on her. The kindly Lady Bulkely called, which she had never done for the elder Mrs. Weldon. All the same, the scale of her Beaumaris life was more like shipwreck than anything else. She responded with a new and unfamiliar determination to make the very best of things. She gardened furiously in a handkerchief plot overlooking the sea, kept a dog, made light of her circumstances, and absolutely insisted on her rank. She engaged two Welsh girls as maids at £8 a year and started the long climb back.

Without children, without the possibility of reconciliation to her own family, her single resource was not so much her talent, of which she had little that had been properly educated, but her energy. In the Beaumaris years it was this that made her famous. She astonished everyone who met her. Harry’s indolence, which had looked so well in uniform, soon enough seemed to her a mysterious force, a sort of disease even. She loved him dearly but found him completely without ambition. After a while he had himself elected to the Beaumaris Artillery Volunteers, where he found undemanding duties and congenial drinking companions among his fellow officers. Georgina organized a choir drawn from the ranks, augmented by child altos and with herself as principal soprano, and gave charity concerts. Harry thought her mad. His own plans were rudimentary in the extreme. He was waiting for his grandmother to die.