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Revenge, say the Italians, is a dish best eaten cold. Before the act that gave her power to plead her own case in civil actions, Georgina’s appearances in court had been as witness or defendant. She was well known within the legal profession for being a wrecker, with only the sketchiest understanding of how trials were conducted, an ignorant woman with an overinflated idea of herself. She was good for fees. Those who had dealings with her and went on later to deride her in their clubs had overlooked one thing. She might know nothing of the law, but she most certainly had a histrionic ability that if it were ever trained would be a formidable weapon. All she needed was the knowledge with which to back it up.

A few months after she first read the Married Woman’s Property Act, she met a man after her own heart, an elderly solicitor named William Chaffers. Some time earlier, Mr. Chaffers had been aggrieved to notice that a titled gentleman had secured tickets to the royal enclosure at Ascot for a lady of loose morals. This would not do, and he wrote to the Lord Chamberlain to say so. The lady proved to be the wife of the knight in question—a fact Chaffers may well have known. He was prosecuted for attempted blackmail. However, on the morning that the wife was to be called to give evidence about the respectability of her origins, she fled the country and the case collapsed. Chaffers’s victory was short-lived: though innocent as charged, he was struck off for his impudence and had since eked out a miserable and understandably embittered existence. This was exactly the sort of boon companion Georgina needed. Chaffers taught her the language of law and how to prepare a plea.

In September writs were served on Neal, Winslow, Rudderforth, Rivière, the editors of the Daily Chronicle and the London Figaro, Semple, de Bathe, and finally Harry. “Now I must look out the other ruffians,” she commented grimly.

The writs had been issued from premises in Red Lion Court at the head of Fleet Street, more or less opposite the Inner Temple, where Morgan had sauntered in the days of his youth. They struck their recipients dumb with amazement. Harry had been served in the Garrick, his solicitor Neal at the office. When they conferred, it was clear she proposed to mount an all-out attack on the mad doctors episode, with the incident on the stairs at Covent Garden as a side dish. The provisions of the 1882 act gave her the powers, and no other woman in England had acted so swiftly upon them. To call it alarming was an understatement. Neither Harry nor any of the others gave a damn for her plaint against Rivière, though Neal was at a loss to see what possible action she could bring there: she had been found guilty of criminal libel and gone to jail for it. The events surrounding the four doctors, Harry, and de Bathe were a different matter. While the affair was now five years old and though the public had a short memory, the notoriety surrounding Mrs. Weldon’s “escape” had not gone unnoticed by learned judges. The doctors involved were quite horrified at the thought of being dragged through the courts. Winslow in particular had most to lose.

These first writs were served by a willing if timid clerk named Lever, but there soon appeared someone much more to Georgina’s tastes, the drunken, argumentative, and—as it was to prove—unstoppable Captain William Harcourt. Nothing about him was as it seemed. He was not born Harcourt, but Johnston. He never was captain. Gazetted ensign in 1853 just in time to be sent to the Crimea, he found himself before Sebastopol. Quite as weary of the siege as his generals, he exchanged uniforms with a dead Russian and simply walked into the town, where he had “a jolly good time.” He marched out of one gate with Menshikov’s army as the French and British arrived through another. His later career included a total of twelve years of hard labor and any amount of tall stories. Georgina describes him presenting himself for employment: “a poor thin miserable creature, smelling fearfully strong of beer, stale onions and tobacco, with a suspicion of kipper and bloater.” He was taken on at once.

In the little firm she set up in Red Lion Court, the elderly and high-minded Chaffers deviled away in one corner, Georgina rehearsed her legal phraseology at an ink-spattered desk, and Captain Harcourt lounged at the door, ready to dart away at a moment’s notice to serve another writ. She found the life entrancing. Chaffers was only there as consultant, for in all the suits she brought forward, she intended to be the plaintiff in person acting in forma pauperis, words she was beginning to relish. F. C. Phillips wrote a biographical sketch of her as she was in these Red Lion days:

In the first room was a grille, behind which, when not serving writs and other processes at his own personal risk, used to sit Mrs. Weldon’s secretary, Mr. Harcourt. Mrs. Weldon herself used to transact business in the outer room amid a chaos of ink bottles, stumps of pens, papers and memoranda, legal and otherwise. The inner room was her sanctum, and here she made tea and received her visitors.

Phillips was impressed by her and made note of her short hair, vivacious features, and “eyes strangely brilliant and piercing.” He was conscious of her reputation as an escaped lunatic, a thing he scoffed as quite impossible to believe. All the same:

That she was strangely unlike most other women was evident at once. Her manner no doubt was feminine; one could understand in a moment the power she claimed to exercise over children and animals; but with all this there was a strange masculine thread in her character. She behaved like a woman, but she thought and expressed herself as a man, and would and could beyond question make herself extremely disagreeable if she chose to do so . . .

By the end of her first year she had, with Captain Harcourt’s energetic assistance, served notice of her first twenty-five actions, which are worth tabulating. They read:

Weldon v. Weldon

Weldon v. de Bathe

Weldon v. Neal (two cases)

Weldon v. Lloyd

Weldon v. Bates

Weldon v. Semple

Weldon v. Rudderforth

Weldon v. Johnson (Figaro)

Weldon v. Winn

Weldon v. Misu

Weldon v. Misu (second case)

Weldon v. Maddock

Weldon v. Jaffray (Birmingham Music Festival)

Weldon v. Sylvester

Weldon v. Moncrieff

Weldon v. Winslow

Weldon v. Winslow (second case)

Weldon v. Weldon (second case)

Weldon v. Gounod

Weldon v. Lloyd (second case)

Weldon v. Rivière (second case)

Weldon v. Budd and Brodie

Weldon v. Stevens

Weldon v. Wontner

In all but three of these cases she represented herself. Social Salvation, the Herald of Health, the True Cross, and all the other little publications for which she had written, all the esoteric knowledge she had been offered from cranks and do-gooders, even the unfailing accuracy of predictions from the Other Side she had received, could now go hang. This wasn’t litigation; it was war. It was blitzkrieg.