3  

In the winter of 1875 Georgina went to lick her wounds in Rome. The French Embassy had collected Gounod’s possessions, and the elaborate account she prepared and sent him disappeared into the maw of what she now conceived of as “the Gounod clique,” a set of silent but inveterate enemies centered in Paris. Harry was invited to accompany her to Italy but declined, giving as his excuse his duties with the College of Arms. He agreed to join her for Christmas but in December wrote that his mother was ill. Georgina had no way of knowing whether this was true or not, but she must have had some anxiety about his general state of mind, because before leaving London she arranged for the bell-ringing Rawlings children to keep an eye on him. Her spies duly reported no particular cause for concern. She was uneasy all the same. What was at risk was not her honor, but the house. She had lost practically everything she thought worthwhile when Gounod left, and all that remained—the orphanage, the remnants of her singing career, her inextinguishable sense of social position—depended upon having Tavistock House as a base of operations. For ten years she had wandered England singing for her supper and retreating only when it was necessary to the cottage in Beaumaris. In half that time the house in Bloomsbury had become the touchstone of her existence. It was the museum of her real self, every stone of it. Harry might scoff, and there were certainly things wrong with Tavistock, never a light and happy home, too ill proportioned to be the most desirable property. Nevertheless, it was generally accounted hers and not his. He paid. She created.

It was true that when in Rome her thoughts turned to other possibilities, such as a life of retreat in the Mediterranean where she could bring the children and live according to her other idea of herself, as a name written on an international register, the world as a Grand Hotel. One of the jokes she did understand was this: a man loses a sixpence in a dark alley and looks for it under a distant streetlamp, as offering more light. Plenty of the minor Italian aristocracy were cruising the Roman hotel lobbies in search of attractive but lonely Englishwomen to give this idea more than a theoretical base. Indeed, even while she spied on Harry, she was considering a proposition to live in Sicily with a shadowy but enthusiastically amorous count and forget her woes forever. There, it would rain blessings, the children would grow straight and strong, and she would spend her time traveling Europe with her voice. A stick to poke in Gounod’s eye.

Harry was unfortunately telling the truth about a sick mother. Hannah Weldon died suddenly in January 1876, leaving a will that revealed some disheartening facts. The other Mrs. Weldon’s thoughts and wishes strongly favored her sister’s family. The will had been drawn up in 1865 in the Wynnstay Arms Hotel, Wrexham, and some of its many legacies fell to “the eldest son/eldest daughter of my said son” at a time when it was almost certain she knew of Georgina’s inability to conceive. Were Harry to be childless, the legacies would revert, but not always to him. She is described in the will as still being “of Beaumaris in the County of Anglesea” and her bequests favor nephews and nieces who sprang, like her, from the North. Georgina, who had been married to Harry for five years when the will was made, was gifted £100 and none of the jewelry, plate, or pictures. What other wealth Hannah had to dispose of, which amounted to no more than £3,000, she tied up in a trust fund, and there are many provisions for the distribution of the profits of this among the Rawson family. Harry benefited, but by no means as generously as he had hoped. This was the testament of a cautious, modest, and unfashionable woman of average means, who had skewed her charitable wishes to her sister and her family.

It was a disappointing moment. Harry was bequeathed a few boxes of uninspired plate and china, books and pictures he did not particularly want, and—once the trust was divided among all the parties—next to no money. The reading of the will hardened his attitude toward Georgina and her plans. As she had begun to suspect, he was growing tired of Tavistock House. As an experiment in living in the grand style, it had proved disastrous. There were other options open to him. If he left Georgina or sold the lease and moved into smaller accommodation, what was lost? His post at the College of Arms afforded bachelor rooms, his club was as good as a home to him, and Annie Lowe waited patiently on the houseboat at Windsor.

It was true that in business and money matters he was no more experienced than Georgina, although only a few years later he was made treasurer of the College of Arms. The thing he had that she lacked so conspicuously was the ability to think things through. He may have seen, long before his wife, that Gounod’s defection had been more than an emotional blow. It really signaled the end of all her schemes and the snuffing out of her music career. It was all very well for Georgina to insist, as she did, that a true musical orphanage of the kind she envisaged must, absolutely must, have fifty children in it, but Harry could see what effect ten already had on his patience and goodwill. And it escaped no one that these ten had been left in the hands of servants while their patroness and music director took herself off to mend a broken heart in Rome. Without Gounod’s name and reputation to give some credibility to the ideas Georgina dreamed up, they were worthless. For as long as she was in the house, goading and urging, it was perhaps just possible for Harry to tolerate the children, the noise, the relentless self-advertising, and never ask where it was all leading. But when she was away, as now, the absurdity of what she wanted to do was apparent.

Georgina claims that she sensed all this and had offered to place all the orphans back where they had come from—whatever that meant—live quietly, and be the model wife of a Herald. In her version of life after Gounod, she says that Harry recognized the good she was doing, disliked her absenting herself from the house for such long periods, but wanted to give her every chance to succeed. She wrote to him from Rome suggesting a pure piece of Georginaism. Her family considered him a blackguard. But he was not all bad, and she had thought of a way out of their present unhappiness. He liked Freddie Warre, and Warre had a whole floor to let in his house. Harry could go there. In three years’ time the trust allowed for in his mother’s will would mature, and if in those three years she had not made a success of the orphanage, “the ugly moment would have passed” and they could be as they were. Meanwhile, she would not ask for more than £1,000 a year from him and, imperatively, the house. Harry replied that he didn’t give a fig what the Trehernes thought of him but that he was in agreement “and he did not say a word to make me suspect he did not think my plan admirably diplomatic.” Fortified by these remarks, she packed her bags, said good-bye to her crestfallen Sicilian count, and set off from Rome, not to come home, but to stay with her uncle and aunt at the Schloss Hard.

She had been away since November, and she did not return to London until the following July. The choir, the students, the plans for a national college, and all the rest of it vanished from her mind as surely as the winter snows. The orphans were not so easy to dispose of. The advertising cart gathered leaves in the garden, the sandwich men had given up their boards, but the children still had to be fed, cared for, dosed with medicine, and kept disciplined. That was not Harry’s job. But whose job was it? It seems incredible that she could abandon that responsibility and get away with it. However, though she did not know it, the long vacation she took from her rejection by Gounod was beginning to have repercussions wider than what to do about the children.

There were new players coming onto the scene, one of whom was Georgina’s mother. The timorous Louisa had shown no wish to meet her daughter after the marriage to Harry and its disastrous effect on Morgan Treherne. After her husband’s death she still kept her distance, salving her conscience by sending Georgina a small allowance every Christmas. The accompanying notes were vague and noncommittal. It was her duty as a woman to defer to a man, and that man was now Dal. Louisa learned with alarm that unforgivable Harry had begun to exchange letters with Dal in his role as head of the Trehernes. Their purpose was brutal and businesslike. Behind Georgina’s back, the most awkward question of all was being put: could her actions be described as those of a mad person? Or perhaps the question was differently nuanced. How would the Trehernes react to such an assertion, and would they stand in Harry’s way?

Georgina arrived in Switzerland in March, still firing off letters to Tavistock House and getting back answers signed by Harry—phrased, she thought, in rather more stylish terms than was customary with him. It at last occurred to her that he might not be writing them himself. When she got the chance to subpoena documents in the divorce action that eventually resulted, she found copies of these letters. They had been drafted for him by his lawyer. Moreover, she discovered that all the correspondence, including her suggestion that he move out as far as Freddie Warre’s, had been shown to her mother and the rest of her family

to make them believe I was a terrible woman and that “I had chucked him out of doors!” . . . One will appreciate that in spite of my (legal) flair, I could not have suspected something as Machiavellian as that, but I did imagine there might be a woman at the bottom of it, because he ended up by giving me the idea he had a grievance at this arrangement to live apart, and that he wished thereby to pay court to some woman that he wanted to seduce, given there is nothing that does seduce a woman more easily than the pity she feels for a man abandoned by his better half.

All these thoughts occurred to her in her walks beside Lake Constance, seven months after last seeing Harry, the house, and her orphans.

She did at last come home, not without a little Machiavellian plotting of her own. She wrote to a man she knew named Alfred Nodskou, who had been a dilatory and minor member of the Gounod Choir, a property developer who let furnished apartments. The idea was to enter London secretly, stay a few days with him, and spy out the land. The blind old man who was father of the Rawlings children was summoned to the Nodskou address and confirmed to Georgina that there was indeed a woman in the case. He was naturally unable to describe her. Nodskou, meanwhile, had contrived a scheme that she should buy a house he owned. He was very persuasive. It would be a fallback if things turned out badly. With her usual capacity to be duped by plausible men, she agreed, signing away £1,000 for a house worth maybe a third of that.

Early on Tuesday morning, July 4, she set off for Tavistock House, arriving a little after nine. She found Marian Westmacott and the children coming down to breakfast—“a little late, in my opinion, but there was my big difficulty—not the children, but the grownups on whom I was obliged to depend.” Harry was in the habit of rising late, and while she waited for him to show himself, she snooped around. She found the name she thought she was looking for—someone named Amy Oliver. She seemed the most likely candidate for Harry’s attentions. (It was not for another ten years that she realized she had been barking up the wrong tree.) She crept about on the ground floor, looking for more evidence. With a stroke of genius, she called for the housekeeping accounts. Someone, for some reason, had ordered twenty pounds of veal the previous Sunday, not one scrap of which remained by Tuesday. It was the kind of detail that was conclusive: Harry had been enjoying himself while she was away. It seemed to her unfair.

At half past twelve the unsuspecting Harry came down to breakfast and—as well he might be—“was visibly knocked sideways, but I leapt into his arms and embraced him with all my heart.” She found him uneasy and unresponsive. He refused to compliment her on her new costume, bought in Paris a few days before, and explained that he had to go out after breakfast and had engaged to dinner that evening three of his Garrick friends, Freddie Warre and the artists Sandys and Alfred Thompson. Georgina felt a migraine attack coming on. She went to bed and did not come down again that night. In the detailed account she gives of this fateful Tuesday, the children are not mentioned once. The one piece of remorse she felt was at the condition of her pugs Dan Tucker and Jarby. One was paralyzed, the other blind. She felt bad about being away from them so long.

Harry’s use of lawyers to draft his letters was the first step in divorce proceedings. He had to move extremely cautiously. He was fairly sure, after consultations with his solicitor, Neal, that under the terms they had agreed, if he left the house now, she could not subsequently sue him for divorce on the grounds of desertion. He was in fact quitting because he could not stand it anymore, but in law the arrangement was a separation and nothing else. There remained the matter of her adultery. This was a way of ridding himself of her altogether. The most recent of his suspicions concerning what was then called criminal conversation fell on the unfortunate George Werranrath, whom he believed to have slept with his wife in a Strand hotel room the previous year. But Werranrath had gone to America. The much more obvious candidate for any action of this sort was Gounod, but that made difficulties for Harry, since it could be easily proved that he was complicit in most of what went on between the Frenchman and his wife. There were other candidates, some going back six years, but here he risked alienating his new allies, the Trehernes. Mrs. Treherne did not wish to see her daughter in court on charges of adultery, or for anything else. Her concern was with Georgina’s sanity.

So much was made by Georgina of her mother’s treachery in what was to come that it bears examination here. Louisa was far from the action (if one counts a train journey of two hours or more), insulated from the world of real events by invalid retirement in her daughter Emily’s house near Worksop. The image one has of her is of someone sitting more than moving about. She found even the smallest problem too much to contemplate, and her capacity for giving family advice on any subject was compromised by the long shadow Morgan’s madness had cast over her life. It was all very well for her children to scold her now, but Louisa had gone along with things another wife and mother might have rebelled against much earlier. This she had not done for the sake of keeping up appearances, and despite her heroic self-abnegation, things had ended in the ugliest way possible. Thirty years of excusing Morgan to others had come to the point where he was unable to recognize her and was as mad as anyone could be. Nobody and nothing could palliate the simple truth: the M.P. for Coventry was insane in the way such things are represented in the most sensational books and plays. In the last years of his life he had gone to live far, far away, beyond the reach of anyone’s compassion. A second experience like that was more than she could contemplate.

As for Harry, when Georgina came back that Tuesday and shocked him so much, it is really the last time he is seen in the story with any clarity. Many another man would have jibbed at living with her under the terms she set, especially since their arrival in London. The enigma in Harry was his easygoingness, his laconic good nature. As he approached forty, he had endured—and often enjoyed—fifteen years of an extremely rackety marriage. In the conversations he was having nowadays with his brother-in-law, Dal must have struck him as the most colossal prig. Harry was no angel and not especially complex or sophisticated, but he knew Georgina as well as anyone else on earth. What was sad about her unexpected return was that his interest, his curiosity, and his compassion had come to an end. He had been her support, her chiding critic, a long-suffering friend to her genius. Now he had nothing more to give. The week after she returned he quit the house and went to live with Freddie Warre.