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Poor Mama! I do not think she has ever had bad intentions towards me, but, egged on by others, no one has done me more harm than her. There are instances where she has utterly failed in her duty towards me. She should have come to live with me at Tavistock after the mad doctors affair, as I begged her to do. Others were far too interested in keeping her with them for her to be able to respond to my appeal: I have been treated unworthily by you all. As for my exhibitions at police courts: give me the pleasure of citing a single instance where I have been wrong or out of order. I’m not asking you to furnish a list—it would not need more than one example. It should be possible to do that, surely, without you having to write or me to read a book . . . Of what great statesman does this letter make you think? None less than Gladstone. I sincerely hope that’s so.

Georgina wrote these words to her brother just before Christmas of 1880 as the conclusion to an enormously long letter in which all the old accusations of bad faith are gone over again and again. The truth was she by no means had Gladstone’s talent for marshaling an argument. What she had to say to Dal was more or less repeated in a pamphlet printed for her by Salsbury addressed to the new owners of Tavistock House. It was entitled An Urgent Appeal to the Israelite Men and Women, Patrons and Patronesses of a School for Jews. Nothing in the pamphlet was of the slightest practical value to them, nor did it have any interest to the public at large, unless it was to confirm their worst suspicions: she was becoming a one-note author, and exile in Gisors was making her worse.

It was a sad thing, but everything that was going to happen to her in life had already happened. She knew that. Nothing and no one new would ever come along as exciting as Gounod or as dangerous as the mad doctors incident. Gisors was fine, but it was the kind of calm retired folk are thrust into. Doing nothing when nothing is happening is no relaxation. She insisted on rising at six and, after a cold bath, made at least the pretense of washing the convent floors as a small act of religious obedience. She fed the chickens and tended the rabbits. She filled her day with small duties, went to bed early—and found she could not sleep. The same old tune was going round and round in her head. She wished to justify herself, but the means she chose—defamation of others and the most obscure projections of conspiracy (for example, that Sir Thomas Chambers, who had heard the Menier trial, was also M.P. for Marylebone, in which constituency many of her worst detractors also resided)—did her case nothing but harm. The good sisters needed her money and acted toward her with unfailing common sense but were completely unable to assuage her grief. The comic singer Arthur Blunt thought it worth his while to come to Gisors in hope of debauching her under the guise of cheering her up. He was sent packing.

Angele was even more restless. If this was to be the end—stalemate in the courts and a life eked out in Gisors watching the children grow up, take communion, and a year or so later marry some unwary farmhand—then where was the pleasure in that? It was not much different from the dreary life she had led in Clermont Ferrand and from which she had fled only to ruin herself. Her husband had vanished, vowing never to speak to her again (he was actually locked up in the Bicetre prison in Paris for an unrelated fraud, along with his equally scheming and devious brother Eugène). The nuns bored her, and she had heard the fine detail of the last two years of Georgina’s tribulations until she was ready to scream. Georgina might have the constitution of a horse, but she also had an elephant’s memory. Angele was far more easily downhearted than Georgina: failure made her ill. Seldom a week passed without the interment of some ancient old Gisorard, and the bells seemed to be tolling for her. Her youth, her looks, her years of promise, were as spent as Georgina’s, and what had she to look forward to in the future? Nothing but arguments. She was no more capable of settling down to the life of une bonne femme than her lover. There was no cottage with roses over the door, no puttering exile in some forsaken village or other, there or anywhere else in Europe.

To the dismay of the sisters, she persuaded Georgina to let her take five of the children out of the convent and move back to London. The means existed—Salsbury’s house at Brixton was at their disposal, and he was anxious to resume contact with his fellow utopian. In every other respect it was a crazy idea.

I should have been ashamed to confess to anyone that I was weak enough to take a house for her and five children when all that was managed so well at Gisors. I have a weird character. It’s true! When a matter of principle is at stake, I’m steel! Adamantine! Otherwise I have a deplorable feebleness of character. People have told me about her “if she isn’t happy, she sets about making life miserable for others. Fancy you needing to mess with such a woman!” They are telling the truth. My little friend Salsbury told me the same thing but . . . she didn’t want to let me go! There’s the truth of it and to get some peace and not have her on my back any longer, I pleaded the case so well that my friend did as I did. He gave in.

Angele left for England with the remaining five orphan girls in May 1881, leaving Georgina to celebrate her forty-fourth birthday alone in Gisors. Salsbury gave her the keys to the Brixton house and inquired anxiously after Georgina. Angele was curt and ungracious. She hired a maid and someone to teach the children, a young Frenchwoman named Eugénie Morand. Then, to Salsbury’s dismay, she left for Clermont Ferrand, on the pretext that her father was ill. Though she undoubtedly loved Georgina, she could not help abusing her simplicity. It was not Angele who was the darling of the Alpha restaurant, nor had anyone there ever heaped sympathy on her head for a disastrous marriage and the general cruelty of men. In the confusion of the last three years Bichette had been left in Paris—as it turned out, for good. Angele’s interest in her had evaporated. Nor did she act now out of love for any of the other children. Georgina was right about her motive: she brought the last of the orphans back to England as a demonstration of her power over her lover and left for Clermont Ferrand for the same reason.

It would have taken a novelist to unravel the exact relationship between these two women. There was no doubting they were intimate in a way that far exceeded that of mistress and servant, or a lady and her companion, although they generally preserved the outward forms of such arrangements. Whatever was or had been sexual in their behavior was never apparent, though it was obvious to people who knew them at all well that these were two women in thrall to each other. They squabbled, they sobbed bitter tears of reproach, they kissed and made up: in appearance, two short and dumpy women with volcanic tempers who dressed almost identically and had the same fine disregard for conventional morality. Like man and wife, they shared a secret history which they guarded with smiles and frowns, hand-holding and kisses, as well as dark moods and spectacular fits of sulking. It was not in Georgina to flaunt her deepest emotional desires any more than it was Angele’s way to reveal her own crippled dependency on money as the substitute for love. Georgina wanted fame; Angele craved for the sheer ordinariness of a bourgeois existence. Nevertheless they were—and were seen to be—a couple. They were together because they could not bear to be apart.

Harry was not above using the bond that existed between them. A few days after Angele left for England, Georgina received news that he was trying to get the divorce hearing heard in camera. “I’ll move heaven and earth to put a stop to that little game,” she wrote to her mother on May 28. When the letter was finally published, she glossed it with this note:

Mr. Weldon had made his solicitors and lawyers really believe I was given over to a vice of which one cannot speak—although not a matrimonial offence recognised by the law. The lawyers acted in good faith, as did the judge, but you must understand very clearly that Mr. Weldon, who knew the truth, well appreciated that he was able to play the role of a generous man who would rather suffer himself than reveal the true wickedness, the real mania of someone he loved so much . . .

On June 7 she came back to England, staying with Salsbury in Oxford Street. It was some small consolation that shortly after she arrived, she heard that Dal was bitten by a dog and laid up in bed for a fortnight. She may also have had trouble concealing her satisfaction at the news that Emily’s husband, Bill, had sent in his resignation to the duke of Newcastle and was planning to move south and buy a restaurant. “The fortunes of the Trehernes have never been at a lower ebb than this year,” Louisa wailed. She discussed waistlines with her daughter, who was trying to slim. Georgina had inherited the Dalrymple stomach, and Louisa advised her to conceal it artfully behind shawls, as she herself did. It was all trivial. The courts were on vacation, the weather was unpleasantly close and warm, the bank and some of her creditors were pressing—after only a few weeks Georgina retreated across the Channel once again.

In December, while Georgina was right in the middle of deciding how to avoid being represented as a vicious and heartless lesbian, the bomb that had been ticking since 1863 finally went off. She rushed home to England and wrote to her mother, straight from the ferry:

While I am very tired with my travels today, I must write to you, since I have been very shaken up to learn by the purest of chances that Mr. Weldon has a son (who it seems resembles him like two drops of water) who’s about thirteen years old, and with his mother is often to be found with Mr. Weldon on board a Houseboat at Maple-Durham! I am in a fury!!! She, it seems is wonderfully turned out—and she’s a dressmaker . . . Now we see the reason why he abandoned me at Muhlberg the winter of 1869–70. Remember how I was tormented on that rat’s behalf? I’ve got your letters. Have you got mine, expressing my love and anxiety on his behalf? Yours did their best to reassure me. It makes me furious, all the more because he knows how much I would have been happy to have a baby to raise. I told him that no matter what bastard he were to have, I would be happy to raise it.

It was a terrible confession to have made, wrenched out of her by real anguish.

No sooner had she sent this letter than she received one from Angele’s mother. Old M. Helluy had died in November, and Mme Helluy, who was far, far from the source of all these alarms and excursions, wrote a piteous and semiliterate letter asking for help. It was almost certainly dictated by Angele. As she always did, Georgina replied promptly. Her letter was courteous and kindly. She invited Mère Helluy to come and live under her roof in London, forgetting for the moment she did not have one.

In three days the deepest parts of her had been laid bare, both the hidden grief of being childless, a thing she never spoke about to others and which neither friends nor enemies took into account; and the streak of generosity and willingness that ran through all her actions. Mère Helluy had no more means of coming to London than she had of emigrating to Tahiti, and what she wanted was a bit of the money that Angele assured her was there for the taking; but that was not the point. Georgina believed without thinking about it that she could, and had the old lady come, would have tried to do her best for her. Not for very long, perhaps, and almost certainly without a happy outcome, but heartfelt.

It was Christmastime in Oxford Street, with brass bands playing at street corners and a distressing number of peddlers selling children’s toys. In a fit of despair Georgina went out and bought a hat for £25, of embroidered velvet with a plume of ostrich feathers. She justified the expense by explaining she must have something suitable for the divorce court proceedings that could not much longer be delayed. In her heart she was competing with the elegant and sophisticated Annie Lowe wrapping presents for her son, somewhere in that dream of domestic bliss from which fate and Harry Weldon had excluded her forever.