2  

What Georgina should have done was to find Harry and ask him what he thought he was doing. Her silence was the expression of a catastrophic pride. In the next few days there would be events so grave as to change the rest of her life. Through choice and circumstance, she faced them alone. She realized one thing clearly enough: there was no one she could trust. In a drawer of the desk on which Gounod had composed—in so sacred a place as that—she found three letters from Eugène Menier, written from Paris the previous December, plotting with his brother to do her harm. (Was he the mystery man who had accosted Angele in the street, and had they together concocted the story she had told Georgina?) Whether she ever really understood that all the people she had met since moving to France were fleecing her is hard to determine, even from reflections written thirty years after the fact. In the short term, an old habit kicked in. Attended by a sympathetic Bell, she toured the house and made a detailed inventory of what had been stolen. She made no attempt to contact Harry or anyone else.

What had always been lacking in Georgina was any sense of her own history. The past did not linger for her. Whatever happened that was awful was at once erased and replaced by what was going to happen—better still, what she would like to have happen. It is the gambler’s mentality. Her brother Dal dissipated his entire inheritance in this way—and before him, the youthful Harry had done the same. Men did that: they ruined themselves on the turn of a wheel or the fall of cards. They gave up their wives and their children for sex, for the promise of something just beyond their reach, the dream of riches or the ideal woman. It was true her father had been different, plotting and planning, risking nothing. For Georgina to have run away with a penniless Hussar was offense enough with him. Had he lived to see her in bed with Angele at Argeuil, stroking a head from which lice fell, and spending days and even weeks unwashed, wiping up the children’s shit from the floors, his reaction would have gone beyond disgust, but he would have seen it as the inescapable outcome of her original defiance. For him, Georgina had fallen once and once only. She had disobeyed him.

This was also Louisa’s view. It was true she and Harry and Dal wanted Georgina committed because they were afraid of what might be disclosed. It makes no difference that many of their worst nightmares had already been realized. If Georgina was heading for an asylum, she had only herself to blame. She had been a bad daughter and a worse wife. She could not be saved now. She could only be silenced. Neither Harry nor Louisa made the slightest attempt to talk to her face-to-face, nor did they ask for a full account of what had been going on with the orphans and how the Meniers became involved. The hunter does not ask the rabbit in his sights what he feels about it.

Nor did it matter that Georgina herself made no effort to justify her actions. It was a very foolish thing not to have seen her husband at all for two years, and though she harangued her mother in hugely long letters about Harry’s awfulness, imagined and actual, Louisa’s advice was always the same. “In my opinion, you have only one path to follow though it may seem very disagreeable to you,” she wrote to her daughter. “The law obliges you to live with your husband and no matter what his wishes might be in regard to your orphanage, it’s your duty to comply.” Louisa had touched the heart of the matter as it was seen by the age. Georgina was to be excluded from the Victorian woman’s paradise of calm and measure and a quiet life not because she was special or exceptional. It was simpler than that. She had failed to show obedience to the wishes of a man.

Angele aside, she had no friends and confidants. There was no one to argue with her or plead with her. She lived without the healing properties of contradiction, upon which most relationships are founded. She most certainly did not consider herself mad, or likely to go mad, and there is something heroic in the way she sat and occupied the ruination of Tavistock House, pleased only that Menier was behind bars and looking forward to making her second appearance in court. Valerie de Lotz had vanished, and Mrs. Georgina Weldon was back in the saddle.