4 
The true identity of those who had attacked the house was still unknown to Georgina. Late though it was, she sent her maid back out to ask any beat policeman the maid could find to patrol the grounds. Villiers was then to run to Hunter Street and ask for the appropriate senior officer to call in the morning. Then Georgina did what seemed to her most natural. She sat down and wrote to Mr. Gladstone. But Gladstone had more than enough on his own plate. The government was in a war crisis over Russia and Turkey once again. Gladstone’s London house was being stoned by his political opponents, and he and his wife hustled in the streets. It was a poor time for Georgina to call in favors she may have believed she was owed from him—favors that were in any case now ten years old. Nor would he have been particularly pleased to know that her other calls for help that night were addressed to the editors of the Spiritualist and Medium and Daybreak.
Her mind was seething, and as so often happened with her, she chose the wrong target to lash out at. It seemed to her that in some way or another, Menier was reaching out from his remand cell to do her harm. There had already been an indication of this. In the newspaper reports of the Bow Street remand proceedings against Menier, both the Standard and the Daily Telegraph had included this remark by his counsel, a Mr. Grain: “The sole fact of having established an Orphanage in a house owned by Charles Dickens without the sympathy or even the co-operation of her husband tended to prove that Mrs. Weldon suffered from hallucinations.” She was quite certain Grain had not said these words in open court. They were an interpolation by interested journalists. In short, there was a clique at work in some way controlled by the hideous Menier.
As soon as the post offices opened, she sent this pathetic telegram to de Bathe: “Come up at once. It is a matter of life and death.” De Bathe did not reply. During the morning an inspector arrived from Hunter Street, and she made a statement. She fired off a further volley of letters to anyone from the past who might help her, though their memory of her was likely to be exceedingly dusty. She chose the library as the fortress keep within the house and fortified it with a police rattle and two brass rose syringes, each containing three liters of water. Bell’s position in all this was highly ambiguous, for it was no job of his to fight for her freedom with a rose syringe. Neal came by at half past eleven and advised her once again that it would be “a great pity to stir up muddy waters.” It was a badly chosen phrase.
“Muddy waters! It isn’t muddy water that’s stained me! I don’t know what you’re talking about! Explain yourself!”
“Menier says that you owe him money, that you made contracts with him and that he has the most compromising letters from you.”
“Menier can tell as many foul lies as he wishes,” Georgina yelled in outrage. “It’s he that owes me plenty of money. I have not made a single contract with him and since I have never been able to stand the sight of the dirty beast it’s not very likely my letters have been compromising. That lot! They’re a gang of idiots.”
Neal was sent off with a flea in his ear, though before leaving, it is beyond belief that he did not speak to Mr. Bell and instruct the bailiff to open the door to the doctors when they next came back, and not to be such a damn fool.
Then, at two in the afternoon, a small miracle occurred: Mrs. Louisa Lowe sent in her card.
The elderly and garrulous Louisa Lowe had given damning evidence to the select committee hearings in 1877. She was one of the few educated women ever to have overturned asylum committal proceedings. Sent to Lawn House in Chiswick by her adulterous husband, she had escaped and, on the evidence of an independent medical examination, been judged perfectly sane. The case was an interesting one, not least because Lawn House was the property of Henry Maudsley, the archenemy of asylumdom. Even though he had not himself signed the committal order, he was sufficiently embarrassed by Mrs. Lowe’s revelations to divest himself of Lawn House, which he was in the process of doing when she pitched up on Georgina’s doorstep.
Mrs. Lowe was a woman somewhat in Georgina’s own mold. After her release, she at once founded the Lunacy Law Reform Society, which she ran from an address in Berners Street, a short way from the Sacred Music Warehouse. Her main target was the chief commissioner of lunacy, Lord Shaftesbury, though there she was pushing on an unlatched door. Lunacy law reform was in the air (though not likely to proceed from Mrs. Lowe’s understaffed and ad hoc offices, which opened only two afternoons a week. In this she was completely sister to Georgina. Louisa Lowe thought it was she and she alone versus the establishment, an idea that gave her preternatural strength of purpose).
How had she got wind of Georgina’s particular circumstances? It would seem that Georgina herself had not fully understood what was afoot until Neal’s arrival. He was not acting for her but for her husband, yet not even the most devious solicitor could avoid answering two very obvious questions: what was happening to her, and who were the people trying to force entry to the house? Had a sympathetic Neal secretly sabotaged his client’s wishes to see his wife sent to an asylum by summoning Mrs. Lowe? The two women had never met, and Georgina had never even heard of Mrs. Lowe and her good works. If no one—neither Neal nor just conceivably Bell—had a hand in it, her arrival was truly providential. The one woman in London who could delay proceedings at least long enough to give Georgina good advice had appeared in the nick of time. On coming to the house Mrs. Lowe had seen the landau drawn up in the square with Wallis-Jones and the nurses peering out. She understood at once they were there to take Georgina in the street if she left the house. Georgina might have spiritualism on the brain, but her visitor thought of nothing but asylums. Only a little while after they began to talk, an ashen-faced Bell put his head around the door.
“Them three of last night have pushed their way into the hall and declare they won’t leave. They want to see you. I told them you were out, but they said they’d wait until you came in.”
Bell had done his duty—“you are here for Mr. Weldon”—but clearly did not like it. While Louisa Lowe ran from the house to summon the police, Georgina retreated to the library, where she barricaded herself in with a wall of bound musical scores. Villiers, Tibby Jordan, and at least one of the Westmacotts, together with Bell, were left outside. Again, it seems certain that all these knew by now exactly who Wallis-Jones was, and his business, though he persisted in saying he was there for “something about an orphanage.”
Mrs. Lowe returned with the first two policemen she could find, who happened to have been patrolling the Euston Road. They were completely unprepared for the impasse they discovered—seven people milling about in front of the library door, from behind which the lady of the house was demanding to know what was happening.
Mrs. Lowe advised Georgina to come out and ask Wallis-Jones his business. This she did. The asylum keeper declined to answer. Then, Mrs. Lowe told the police, he should be taken up for trespass, at which point Wallis-Jones made a lunge for his patient, bellowing, “Take her, take her!” There was a scuffle and Georgina scrambled back behind her barricade, Louisa Lowe shouting to her, “Give them in charge: they are assaulting you!”
Georgina slammed the door, built up her wall of scores again (which assuredly included many by Novello’s), and, her ear to the woodwork, tried to piece together what was happening. With a howl of anguish, she heard the constables confess they were not from Hunter Street, home to so many Weldon dramas in the past, including searching for Gounod in the fog when “the old man” had plunged out on one of his suicide missions. These policemen were large and comforting, but they were strangers to the Weldon saga. They were from the Tottenham Court Road station. Georgina yelled at Villiers to run across Woburn Place and fetch men from Hunter Street. And then she heard the hubbub subside and a question-and-answer session begin with the usual and agonizing slow-wittedness of the police. Hunter Street arrived and there was more confusion, more repetition of the facts.
At last there was a knock at the library door, and Mrs. Lowe whispered the awful truth. Wallis-Jones was armed with an indisputably legal order to commit a lunatic at large, one Mrs. Georgina Weldon. She hesitated and then broke the news: the signature at the foot of the document was that of William Henry Weldon.
Georgina’s response was magnificent. She found pen and paper and composed a draft telegram. It was addressed to Harry at Albert Mansions in South Kensington: “Come at once. Some villains sent by that villain Menier have got into the house with a forged signature of yours.” She pushed the slip of paper under the door and watched it disappear. Mrs. Lowe read it in silence before showing it to the police. The two men from Hunter Street and their colleagues from Tottenham Court Road mulled it over with maddening slowness. For Georgina’s servants trying to peep over their shoulders, it was a heartbreaking moment. From their point of view, their mistress had at last been brought down. Below stairs, one might speak lightly of doolally-tap, one might marvel at the risks Georgina had taken and the thinness of the ice on which she had skated, but this was just too awful a way to end it all.
Wallis-Jones tried to talk the police around. He had his order to serve, it was all perfectly above board, they had all surely seen similar sad occasions. The lady was without question a lunatic at large. Rubbish, Mrs. Lowe said, pointing at the mute door to the library. How could it be held she was at large when she was in a treasured room of the family home? She was, presumably, where her husband desired her to be—at home, and quiet, and, though frightened, very obviously not deranged.
Maybe the telegram Georgina had pushed under the door made the police hesitate, or maybe they knew of the identity and reputation of the formidable Mrs. Lowe. Or maybe the two Hunter Street constables knew and liked Mrs. Weldon for her past instances of pluck and her invariably cheery greetings to them. This was the lady whose famous milk float had trundled past them on the beat, bearing the nippers off to the Langham Hotel, the singer whose house had twelve pianos. They declined to satisfy Wallis-Jones, and he was sent packing. The policemen from Tottenham Court Road left to resume their patrol of the Euston Road. Only then did Georgina emerge.
It had taken two days, but at last she understood the enormity of the situation. She could not bring herself to believe Harry would do such a thing. Mrs. Lowe was in no doubt, and kneeling on the carpet, stroking her hand, the faithful Villiers agreed, crooning, “It is! It is Mr. Weldon.”
Louisa Lowe proposed the immediate next step. Georgina should leave Tavistock House at once and outrun the committal order, which was only valid for seven days. If she was sane, she should fight. But if she stayed where she was, she would be taken up anyway, sane or not. Georgina looked beseechingly at Bell. “I’d go with the lady,” he murmured. The Hunter Street constables, who were still there, nodded. “Do go, ma’am,” one of them said.
She was handed a bonnet and a cloak and, still in her slippers, ran from the house, followed by “a puffing and panting” Mrs. Lowe. On the east side of the square was a hansom, attended by a young policeman. He offered to help them up. Louisa Lowe was momentarily suspicious, but the constable turned out to be on their side. “I have not taken the number of the cab,” he muttered helpfully, and the two women shouted to the cabbie to drive on. They clattered out of the square and were swallowed up in the afternoon traffic. It was not much of a headlong flight—Mrs. Lowe had lodgings in Keppel Street only a few hundred yards away.
Forbes Winslow’s daughter was married to the Punch contributor Arthur A’Beckett, and it amused him to pitch up outside the house in Tavistock Square late that night. A’Beckett stood in the dark shouting, “Mrs. Weldon is a dangerous lunatic! A thousand pounds to anyone who will help me take her tonight!” However, those that were left failed to see the joke.
A’Beckett had come into the square in the same sinister landau that he used to pay a bumptious visit to the Lunacy Law Reform offices the next day. He seems a particularly irritating young man. Women and madhouse keepers were funny in the same way women and gamekeepers might be, or women and stationmasters: the joke was about rules. These rules were an expression of the male world. Women, too, had their rules, chief of which was not to interfere in the world of men. But this haw-haw dundreary-whiskered kind of humor was pretty old-hat. Were it ever truly believed that Harry had offered a bounty of £1,000 on his wife’s head, the crudity of the thing would do him irreparable damage. There is little question that to lawyers like Neal, the whole business had been botched from beginning to end. De Bathe seems to have been the first to have realized this. He fled to Baden-Baden with his daughter Mary, under the pretext of visiting friends.
Georgina’s mother had, of course, stayed out of the way in Worksop, but when the news of the debacle reached her, she sent Emily’s husband, Bill, to go and look for Harry Weldon in London. Louisa Treherne was in a position very common to many women. Having left it to the menfolk to plan and execute a delicate business, she now realized she—even she—could have done it better herself. She wrote to Dal: “Poor Harry: he is, as you say, a confounded idiot, if only for having chosen his moment so badly. But I’m sure he has a good heart and without a doubt suffers terribly, above all from the vexation of having been the author of such disgusting fatheadedness.”
Georgina had no difficulty in evading Forbes Winslow’s servants until the order expired. After a day or so in Keppel Street, the good-natured Lowthers hid her in Fulham and then in a room in Whitechapel. How wholeheartedly was she being pursued? Her brother Dal, writing from Cox’s Hotel in Jermyn Street, let the cat out of the bag: Harry had given him full powers to parley with her. The moment she heard that, she knew Harry’s determination had begun to falter. Nobody with any sense would employ Dal as an intermediary. Joyously, she made mincemeat of her brother’s gloomy unctuousness. She told him she needed no moral lessons from a drunk and gambler, charges that stung because they were so close to the truth. “You, you’ve led a worldly and dissipated life: me, I’ve lived in a sober and unfashionable way.” Dal could never think quickly enough to rebut this sort of thing.
Georgina had been swift to get medical certificates of sound mind and good health from two doctors of her own, one of whom, Edmunds, gave what we might see as a modern opinion. “Eccentric? Certainly. But mad, no.” (He had been especially impressed by her account books, in which she meticulously recorded every expenditure.) She even wrote to Gisors and got the lay registrar, with whom she had shared such pleasant thoughts and so many illicit cigarettes, to write an open letter of support “pour servir à qui de droit.” It ended with this endorsement: “Her precipitate departure from L’Hôtel-Dieu has caused all the staff of this establishment, Administrators, the Bursar, nuns and pensioners of all ages universal regret.”
Louisa Lowe’s timely intervention had saved Georgina from spending what might have been the rest of her life in Brandenburg House. The rest she had done for herself. Mrs. Lowe was soon to find that the cause of lunacy law reform could not have two champions, and the women fell out in rather an acrimonious way. There was always much that was straightforwardly dislikable about Georgina. She was not always as honest or as generous as the situation demanded, and she could be ungrateful. These are common enough human characteristics. But though she had experienced a profound shock in the mad doctors’ episode, she had come out of it with the conviction, not that she was in need of help, but that she had somehow received an almighty blessing. Events had made her a Jeanne d’Arc. Her mind had latched onto the key point:
A wife has no recourse against her husband for an attempt on her liberty such as I’ve experienced. She cannot bring a complaint against him for conspiracy, defamation, imprisonment, assault and battery in a civil court. It’s not her rights that are safeguarded. The reputation of a woman is the thing of her husband: if it pleases the husband to ruin her, he is the master and she has no legal right to complain. Against any other man or woman, who has not sworn an oath before God to honour and protect her, she has her remedy. Against her husband, nothing of the kind.
Mrs. Lowe was also a wronged woman, of course, and the Lunacy Law Reform Society was set up expressly to help just one aspect of married women’s legal inequality. But to Georgina’s tastes, Mrs. Lowe’s methods were distressingly pedestrian. That was not what was wanted at all. Lunacy reform required a heroine. It required grand opera. By the time May was out, the direction the last part of Georgina’s life would take had been set. From now on, if men—Harry, Dal, “that boiled lobster Neal,” the revolting Menier, and anyone else that crossed her path—wanted a fight, they would get it.
Only a fortnight after Georgina’s flight with Mrs. Lowe, Harry wrote to Dal, indicating his capitulation:
My dear Treherne,
I asked you last night for time to reflect on the arrangements you have made with my wife, begging me out of consideration to yourself and above all giving way to the urgent supplications of your mother “to give my wife yet again one more chance”; and so stop measures I believe it to be my duty to undertake in order to protect my wife; and which I still believe should have been taken. For as long as matters go along as they should, I consent to abandoning my pursuit of her and things can continue as they have done formerly.
Georgina had won back the house and an allowance of £1,000 a year. The terms of surrender were probably dictated to Harry by Mr. Neal, who had pressed Dal to secure a signed agreement from Georgina to behave herself in future. The solicitor knew that this paper and its conditions as to her future conduct were almost worthless. The last paragraph of the letter contains an understandable note of chagrin coming from Harry direct: “Believe me, nobody will rejoice more than me to see these conditions fulfilled, but I beg you to believe that I have only adopted this way of going about things out of deference to the urgent desires of yourself and your mother.”
The conspirators had fallen out, and there was a flurry of correspondence in which Georgina’s mother in particular tried to bat away the accusation that she had pressed Harry to have her daughter committed. The truth was that she had done nothing to dissuade him, and had it all not been so horribly botched, she would have seen Georgina go into a private asylum without a qualm. Her protestations of horror at what had happened and her insistence that she was innocent of any complicity in it were mealymouthed. Harry now saw the perfidy of the Trehernes in full. He and he alone was going to have to carry the can for what had happened. This time he had lost the battle and the war. If he was not prepared to fight again on the same ground—and he wasn’t—then life for Harry Weldon in the future was going to be pure hell. He knew better than any of them what Georgina was capable of when it came to revenge.
It was not in his wife to let bygones be bygones, or to take time to digest what had happened. The Gounod clique was already conflated in her mind with the Menier clique. Now, thrown into the same geometrical stew, circles within circles, was the Weldon clique—Harry, her mother, and Dal. The three conspiracies interlocked. At the very time that Dr. Edmunds pronounced her mentally capable of managing her own affairs, she was agitating that the appointment of St. John Wontner to defend her interests in the Menier trial was somehow engineered by Forbes Winslow. In vain did Wontner point out that for thirty years or more his firm, along with Lewis and Lewis, had been the doyens of criminal law practice in London. He was there to help—indeed he had been appointed by the Treasury Solicitor expressly to make sure she came to no harm. Instead of being grateful, she was incredibly rude to the poor man. He lacked vision. His position was compromised. He completely failed to grasp the bones of the case.
She spelled it out to him, as to a child. Gounod was at the back of Menier, Harry at the back of Forbes Winslow. There was nothing that could not be ascribed to the fell designs of these three cliques. Who had threatened her with the St.-Lazare in Paris? Gounod. Who had done his bidding? Menier. How had Menier been encouraged and secretly funded? Harry. Who had egged Harry on with her allegations of hereditary madness? Her mother. Who was her mother’s creature in the attempt to get her committed? De Bathe. And why had Harry supported de Bathe in this scandalous way? Because he had at one time wanted to marry Mary de Bathe. On and on, random pieces of jigsaw jammed together to make a picture.
It was useless for Wontner to try to narrow the subject to a case of theft. Nor could he employ what normally worked in such cases—a man’s guiding hand to a beautiful lady. She swept that aside with contempt. They had tried to call her mad and she had defied them. Now would come revenge, now would come retribution of a biblical proportion. When she at last got hold of de Bathe on his return from Baden-Baden, she faced down him and his dizzy wife in their own drawing room. At first the general denied any participation in the plot, but at last she drew from him the miserable confession that he, too, had signed the committal order. She told him what she intended all her enemies to hear. “I said ‘General de Bathe, you will repent this.’ I turned to her and said ‘You will both repent this.’”
The first casualty in her campaign to vindicate herself was her family. Her mother was struck with terror by the bitterness Georgina exhibited on that subject:
A father and mother bring you into the world for their own
pleasure and not at all with the intention of rendering the least service to those who deserve it. They are obeying the laws of procreation. They owe their offspring nothing. In nature every animal chases away its young as soon as it can look after itself. The little ones only love their mother for what they can get out of her . . . In human nature, to the contrary, a child will love and cherish its parents or those who have brought it up only so long as it’s possible to retain the least illusion about them . . . but then, oh yes indeed, then, when its eyes are opened—goodbye! I don’t deny that happy families exist, but they are extremely rare. For all the rest, it’s hypocrisy, banalities, Panurgism and “what will people say?”
Menier was sent to trial at the Old Bailey in September. The case was heard by Sir Thomas Chambers, one of the first in which he sat as recorder, and it easily outdid the Gounod trial for absurdity, monumentally irrelevant testimony, and farce. Much did Georgina care: here was an opportunity to outline the conspiracies ranged against her, of which theft was but a tiny part. Try as he might, Wontner could not keep her to the point, and the judge professed himself astonished at the violence of her language. After a chaotic three days, the jury found for her, but the idea that Menier should spend five years of his life breaking stones did not appeal to them. To the guilty verdict they added a recommendation for mercy, clearly indicating that they thought Menier and Georgina were far better known to each other than had come out in open court. The innuendo was unmistakable.
The publicity surrounding the trial continued long after it was over. The London Figaro commissioned weekly installments of Georgina’s autobiography, which forced an embattled and disheartened Harry and an alarmed de Bathe to bring down a criminal prosecution for libel on the head of its editor and publisher. So much the better! Let it all come out! Forbes Winslow was sharply criticized in the pages of the British Medical Journal for his part in the affair; Frederick Flowers weighed in with a thoughtful legal opinion on the case. Now, wherever lunacy law reform meetings were organized, Georgina easily usurped Mrs. Lowe as the star attraction. Soon enough, she broke away with an initiative of her own:
Mrs. Weldon invites all persons—lovers of justice—to attend her AT HOMES. Evening dress is not de rigueur, and every class of person is WELCOME. Mrs. Weldon gives these Lectures on the principle that “a drop of water will wear away a stone.” Although her room can hold but 250 persons, still she hopes that her limited public may unite with her in doing all they can towards LUNACY LAW REFORM and the showing up of the practices of MAD DOCTORS.
Every Tuesday and Wednesday she gave these at-homes, at which she read from her own pamphlets and ended by singing from Gounod’s Biondina. Many lost and lonely people took up her invitation. She was a gifted raconteuse, and her towering indignation at the stupidity of the establishment was exactly what her audience wished to hear. Nobody of any consequence came, but those who were potential victims of the system—and those over whom the shadow of the law had already fallen—fell in love with her courage and ferocious energy. They had the additional thrill of listening to their heroine in the very house where she had bested the mad doctors and exposed them for what they were. There was no admission fee to these meetings, but at the end of the evening a collection was taken up. Those that gave had sat through a unique testimony brilliantly staged. They went away uplifted.
Publicity, as she had always said, brought fame. Publicity was like fire, dangerous and unbiddable. She could easily afford to ignore anonymous letters like this, which once may have caused her hurt: “My dear, fools are like poets, they are not made but born. I know, I was born so. And I recognise a full-blooded member of the family in you.”
The man who wrote this was a loser. He couldn’t, as she could, understand the crackling urgency of publicity, its flamelike fascination for the weak and the fearful. And in its wake came something much more valuable, a phoenix glory not given to everybody. Natural-born fool or not, she was famous now. In October, when she sang at a Promenade Concert at Covent Garden, the house rose to its feet in acclamation. The whole house, as one person. She stood onstage, heart pounding, eyes glittering in triumph, a little short woman who had made her own luck, listening to the cheers ring around the auditorium, bows clattering on the orchestral strings. Trying to take it all in, she realized with a wild leap of the heart that she was being pressed to an encore. In the past, Sullivan had conducted at the Promenades: when had that ever happened to him?