‘I was thinking about death,’ Brian murmured. ‘Well, perhaps graves would be more accurate.’
‘Ah. Graves generally, or one in particular?’ I said with the forbearing smile of someone preparing to understand.
‘The ones in Whatley churchyard,’ he said quietly, ignoring my tone.
‘Robert and Caroline?’ I asked.
‘Not exactly. The one I had just scraped with my credit card and realised it wasn’t them when the torch ran out. The bit I cleared said John, and the rest of it was covered in lichen except the far end which said died something or other, the month and the day 1920, aged eight years. It seemed irrelevant at the time.’
‘You mean – the little boy in the picture?’
‘It sounds far-fetched, but it wasn’t only that. It was the identical grave next door. I shone my torch on to it and saw one word legible through the mould, and it has come back to me – it was Burke. Of course, it didn’t mean a thing then.’
We were both silent for a time.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked. Brian nodded.
‘We’ll have to go back.’
The next day Jennifer Beauchamp rang to tell us that she had found Katrina’s baptism certificate and would send a copy to us. We mentioned the grave in Whatley churchyard, and told her we intended to go back there. She suggested that we combine the trip to Nunney with a visit to her father, who was a little better and keen to meet us after a long conversation with her. She had shown him the prints of Robert’s paintings we had left with her but warned us that he appeared to know nothing at all about them. We rang John Beauchamp and a date was set for the end of the following week.
When the baptism certificate arrived it showed that Katrina was born on 20 February 1904 at Talara, Peru, to Henry and Rose Burke. However, she was baptised Katrina Marian on 15 May 1904 in the ‘City and Port of Valparaiso, Chile, South America, in the British Episcopal Church at this place’. So, less than two months after the birth, the family seem to have left Talara and moved to, or arrived in, the port of Valparaiso. The ‘trade or profession’ of the father (Henry) was shown as ‘gentleman’, and the sponsors were Edmund Parry-Okeden, Millicent Parry-Okeden, Hermione Parry-Okeden and Edith Baggs.
For Henry to be back in England in time to start an entirely new career in January 1905, he probably needed to have left Peru by mid-1904. The description of Henry as a gentleman was probably a euphemism to disguise his unemployment after the collapse of the oil company at Talara. The presence of the contingent of Parry-Okedens was a surprise. Presumably they must have gone out to Peru to see that no harm came to Rose during the birth in such a dangerous and primitive place. We guessed that the visit to Valparaiso was a temporary stop on the boat trip taking them back to England; being a large port, it was probably the first place they came to with an Anglican church.
We tried a new line of enquiry by searching the lists of the shipping companies to see if there was any record of the family returning to Britain from South America in the middle months of 1904. We entered the name Henry Ulick Burke, and were stunned by the response. First, we found recorded journeys for Henry and his second wife Elsie in every year between 1933 and the outbreak of war in 1939. There were also earlier records of trips for Imperial Tobacco with the British India Steam Navigation Company, encompassing Tangier, Madras, Port Said and Colombo.
In among the cruises and pleasure trips, however, were one or two critical records of very different voyages, which either endorsed Henry’s account of his early life or provided information that illuminated events in a stark new light. It was uncanny to stumble across a list for the SS Oregon, part of the Dominion Line, sailing between Portland, Oregon, and Liverpool in 1894. After listing its first-, second- and saloon-class passengers, it records a group of 25 horses in steerage, below the water line, being overseen by a group of eleven roughnecks, defined as farm labourers, led by a twenty-year-old lad: Henry Burke (Cattleman). Somehow, that description, ‘cattleman’, in conjunction with the image of the stifling, ill-lit bowels of the ship, gives a grimy sense of the menial nature of Henry’s work that the word ‘cowboy’ might completely disguise. He travelled again two years later from New York to Liverpool on the Luciana, in marginally better conditions.
However, it was his voyage from New York on the SS Teutonic, a ship of the White Star Line, that took us completely by surprise. It arrived in Liverpool on 19 May 1904. His age and other details leave no doubt that this is Henry, especially as his obituaries specified Liverpool as his disembarkation point from Peru. Since Katrina was christened in Chile just four days earlier, it is clear that he was not with his wife for this important family event. This strongly suggests that, under the strain of childbirth and the collapse of the oil company, the relationship between Henry and Rose had broken down and he had returned alone, rather than face the ignominy of travelling back with his traumatised wife. So it was Rose who tactfully gave the profession of her baby’s father as ‘gentleman’, rather than ‘none’, which might have been more honest at that uncertain moment. Anxiety to have the child baptised, apart from religious orthodoxy, would have been related to the complexities of authenticating the legitimacy of children born in remote areas of the world where no infrastructure for issuing birth certificates was in place.
Had Henry’s life continued down the disastrous path it had followed in the first eighteen months of his marriage to Rose, the Parry-Okedens would have had the option of quietly absorbing Katrina into their world at Turnworth House, and providing a good home for her, safe in the knowledge that the documentary evidence defined her absent father as a man of private means. They must have felt that their infatuated daughter had been tricked into marriage by a ruthless fortune hunter, with his fantastic tales of rodeos and Buffalo Bill, gold bullion and oil wells which, within a few months, had proved to be completely worthless.
When Henry landed at Liverpool on 19 May 1904, he was an unemployed, penniless oil worker, from an impoverished family. What can have been in his mind at that bleak moment of defeat as he stood by the rails of the SS Teutonic? Who had he been able to turn to, as the unforgettable challenge, ‘If there is any good in you, you will make good,’ rang in his head only to be answered by the mocking voice of Ulick Ralph, the brilliant barrister, from beyond the grave, ‘I rest my case, the boy’s a fool’? Could it have been the one couple who, with their aristocratic connections and upper-class lifestyle centred on their ancient manor house at Benthall, had the ability to reassure the Parry-Okedens and broker a reconciliation between Rose and Henry? The people who, the following year, uprooted themselves from their beautiful home in Shropshire, and bought the freehold of a village house in Nunney, near both Henry and the Parry-Okedens – the house which, eighteen years later, they left outright to Henry, including all its contents and all their personal belongings?
By an odd chance, Henry’s later career seemed to cast a tantalizing flicker of light on a discovery we had made earlier in our investigations into Robert’s work as an artist. We had stumbled on a copy of a skilful but conventional drawing of a house, signed and dated 1889 (fig. 117). The title was recorded as ‘The Limes at Witts-bridge’. Initially, our attempts to identify the setting proved fruitless, until we discovered that the title was incorrect and should have read The Limes at Willsbridge (fig. 106). This proved to be a village on the outskirts of Bristol that was later absorbed into the city suburbs. The house was demolished in 1960, but had been identified by name in documents and is recognisable from old photographs as the subject of Robert’s drawing. It was a late eighteenth-century building that formed a subsidiary part of a substantial property known as Willsbridge Castle, and was built by a former owner of the castle for his unmarried sister. By the time Robert made his drawing, the castle was owned by William Sommerville, a prosperous paper manufacturer who owned two factories employing over five hundred men, the principal one in the adjacent village of Bitton. The Sommerville family owned several important local houses, including Bitton Hill House and Bitton Grange. Willsbridge and Bitton were barely six miles from Ashton Gate, the hub of the W. D. & H. O. Wills tobacco empire. The Sommervilles were influential figures at the heart of the industrial community of south Bristol and William Sommerville was a prominent member of the Bristol Chamber of Commerce under the Chairmanship of Sir William Wills.
Fig. 117. Robert Bateman, The Limes at Willsbridge, 1889, pen and ink, private collection.
As chairman of the Wills Company, Sir William dominated local life and was reputedly the second-richest man in England. A prominent JP, he sat as MP for South Bristol between 1894 and 1900, and in 1905 was raised to the peerage as Lord Winterstoke. His greatest achievement was to weld the leading tobacco companies together to form Imperial Tobacco, in order to defend themselves against an attempt by James Buchanan Duke, head of the American Tobacco Company, to gain control of the entire British market after he had bought Ogden’s, a major British supplier, in 1901. Eventually, both sides acknowledged the damage being inflicted on their industry by their frenetic rivalry, and a truce was called through the formation of an international conglomerate called British American Tobacco (BAT). Ogden’s was absorbed back into the British arm of the operation with its managing director, Percy Ogden, put in overall charge of the core manufacturing base at the Wills factories at Ashton Gate. Percy Ogden held this pivotal post until 1908, when he was replaced by Henry Ulick Burke, who continued to hold it uninterruptedly until he retired in 1933.
Did Henry owe this crucial opportunity, which underpinned his meteoric promotion and successful later life, to a longstanding relationship between William Sommerville and Robert Bateman? Had the Bristol businessman helped an old friend by using his influence with his neighbour Sir William Wills to secure a good position in the BAT empire for an able young man in 1904?
Henry’s return from the New World seemed to mark as decisive a turning point in Robert and Caroline’s lives as it had in his. Intriguingly, Robert Bateman had inscribed the rock near his lifelong property, Biddulph Old Hall, and his childhood home, Biddulph Grange, with the enigmatic legend, ‘Remember this Day 11th June 1904’ (see fig. 46), exactly three weeks after Henry’s arrival in Liverpool. One of the articles in the Bristol Records Office had described a particular aspect of Henry’s return from Peru in 1904 which was blamed on a knee injury that required surgery:
He had some trouble with his knee, and had an operation without anaesthetic. It was not successful, and he decided to come home and have another operation. Again it was performed without anaesthetic, but it was successful.
Since we know that Henry was penniless at this point, one wonders who met him and financed his second operation. If it was Robert and Caroline, it would explain their presence at Biddulph on 11 June 1904, which was much nearer Liverpool than their home at Benthall Hall, in Shropshire. Biddulph would have provided a quiet place where they could look after him while he convalesced, away from inquisitive servants and neighbours in Benthall. It would have offered the necessary seclusion to consider what was to be done to rebuild from the disasters that had engulfed Henry’s marriage and financial affairs. The fact that by January the following year Henry had a new job in Bristol, and Robert and Caroline had moved to Somerset and bought the house they were to leave to him suggests that the date 11 June 1904 might have been the fateful moment when they felt compelled to tell him the truth of their relationship to him, in order to justify the new role they were proposing to assume in his life.
If this was so, it would have been the definitive moment of self-revelation that transformed Robert and Caroline’s entire lives. Their son, lost to them at birth, and lost again in America, had been miraculously returned to them. He had been cruelly maltreated by the people in whose care they had placed him but, by a wonderful stroke of good fortune, he had been given back to them at the very moment when he needed them most. They could not deny the compulsion of their parental instincts to claim him as their own and rescue him from destitution.
The day of that unburdening of their souls would indeed be a day they would always remember. Robert had perhaps felt the need to record it, in rock, in the grounds of his childhood home. To access its site he had cut steps into the face of the rock, not only so that his sixty-five-year-old wife could go up to the sacred place, but also so that a handsome young man of thirty, who was recovering from a knee operation, could be there with them, for the first time, as their acknowledged son. Judging by the way Robert and Caroline begin almost immediately to set in motion the process of reorientating their entire lives to centre on Henry, Rose and their family, it is difficult to believe that the ‘riddle on the rock’ and Henry’s return from Peru are not related.
This strange symmetry was on our minds when we arrived at John and Joyce Beauchamp’s home in Marlborough. We were still anxious to meet one of Henry’s two surviving grandsons, and Katrina’s only child, but we no longer approached the meeting with any expectation of stumbling upon a cache of lost Bateman paintings, nor even an explanation of how they were disposed of. It had become clear that neither of Henry’s children had conveyed any information about the fate of the paintings, or about Robert and Caroline, to their sons.
Despite his eighty years, John Beauchamp had the distinctive tall, lean figure and refined features that we had seen in so many photographs of Henry. He spoke quietly with a gentle, considered intensity that gave what he said an air of precision and seriousness. After a few enquiries about our journey, he suddenly said,
‘As you can see, there is nothing here from my family. Particularly my mother’s side. Almost nothing, I’m afraid.’
We asked him about Henry.
After a moment’s pause, he said,
‘As a child I found him a bit frightening, actually. My first memory of him is sitting on his knee at the wheel of his big car – I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember it seemed huge to me at the time – and being told to drive it round the lanes near our house. That was rather typical of him. It should have been fun, but his manner was too distant and detached. It felt like an exam. You felt he was annoyed if he had to intervene and turn the steering wheel.’
‘What about all his adventures in America,’ I asked. ‘Surely they must have been very exciting when you were a boy.’
‘Yes,’ John replied, quietly, with an air of uncertainty that suggested he had some reservations. ‘I did get quite enthusiastic about Buffalo Bill – Bill Cody. I visited his grave years later when I was grown up. My grandfather had two silver or nickel-plated pistols that Cody gave him; he let me hold them, I remember. And we went to his old house in Bristol, where there was a blue plaque saying that Cody had stayed there when he was visiting Grandad. That’s been demolished now, I think.’
I asked about the saddle, bridle and quirt that he had won in Wyoming – had Henry passed them on, or the silver pistols?
John shook his head.
‘Those are the sort of things I imagined he might have given to you or your cousin,’ I said.
‘No, I’ve no idea what happened to any of it. Of course, my mother and Henry hardly saw each other later. She loathed Elsie, his second wife.’
As we talked, the poignant story of John’s childhood and adolescence gradually emerged, which had curious echoes of Henry’s lonely early years. In 1927 his mother Katrina had married John Louis Beauchamp, the eldest son of a wealthy coal owner, with an extensive landholding based on Norton Hall, a historic house outside Midsomer Norton they had acquired in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Beauchamps were a wealthy and influential family in the south Bristol area. John Louis’s grandfather had built over five hundred model houses for his employees, as well as a large Methodist church at Norton Down. According to John, his parents’ marriage did not really work from the beginning; he was an only child, and felt lonely and unwanted. He recalled them openly indulging in affairs with other people, to whom he was sometimes introduced. He was frequently sent for holidays with his Auntie Vi, at her house near Shepton Mallett, which had a memorable plum orchard.
John asked Joyce to fetch an old photograph album from the loft. The photographs in the album, predominantly from the interwar years, conveyed a vivid sense of life among a group of good-looking, wealthy young people, which largely consisted of parties, country house visits and foreign travel. John Louis and Katrina Beauchamp were relentlessly stylish and modern, posing in their bags and one-piece bathing costumes, or smoking and sipping cocktails beside their open-topped cars. They were invariably surrounded by glamorous chums, intermittently identified by John as ‘a flame’ of my father’s, or a man who was always around as he was ‘besotted with my mother’. The atmosphere of hedonistic pleasure, underpinned by wealth and social exclusivity, was palpable.
It was easy to understand how utterly alien to them Robert’s pictures would have been, steeped in a world of historical association and romantic love. The Beauchamps were in the process of discarding both the restrictive morality of Christian monogamy and the fusty Victorian veneration of the past. That would explain Katrina’s disdain for the images themselves, and her lack of enthusiasm for keeping them, but not quite the suppression of all knowledge of them and their creator years later.
Was it possible that this was motivated by a less chic instinct, a determination to maintain her social cachet by avoiding any reference to the slightly irregular relationship between her father and his uncle and aunt, which had the potential to raise questions about his (and by implication her own and her son’s) legitimacy? In other words, was Katrina aware of a skeleton in the family cupboard, which could undermine the perception of the grand Burke/Lee-Warner/Parry-Okeden background which had made her eligible to take her place among the Beauchamps of Norton Hall?
One thing had become clear by the time we came to say goodbye to the Beauchamps that day. Katrina had avoided mentioning any connection between herself and Robert and Caroline to her son, either in his childhood or later in life. John acknowledged that he had heard the name Robert Bateman, but from whom and in what context he could not recall.
‘The truth is I never ever remember my mother saying anything at all to me about him or the pictures you left with Jennifer. In fact, even now I find it hard to believe that my mother had ever seen any of them in her life.’
As we left Marlborough for Whatley churchyard, Brian and I were only too aware of the power of events from the distant past to resonate and disturb the equilibrium of ordinary lives being lived countless years later, in utterly different conditions. At one level we felt an instinct to stop meddling and let the past keep its secrets. At the same time, we could not overcome the urge to combat what seemed to be an injustice to the reputation of Robert Bateman, which appeared to have been propagated as much by his closest family as by the wider world of art critics and gallery curators. In fact, his relations seemed to have played a key role in frustrating the attempts of influential figures, such as Julian Hartnoll and Amanda Kavanagh, to champion his cause and bring about an informed reassessment of his place in the history of the later Pre-Raphaelite movement. We were beginning to wonder if we had got things out of proportion. Had we attached too much significance to the inheritance of the house and personal possessions, and so overstated the intricate family relationship between the Batemans and the Burkes?
When we reached Whatley, we registered for the first time that the two matched graves were alongside Robert and Caroline’s. We crouched down and there, on the kerb, just as Brian had remembered, was the name ‘John’, then a long section obscured by lichen and, beyond that, just visible, the number ‘20’ and then ‘Aged 8 Years’. We had brought a proper scraper this time, and within minutes we had cleared both kerbs. Although they revealed only what Brian had suspected, we were shocked by the strength of our reaction. John Burke, the adored eight-year-old son of Rose, had been buried not only immediately beside her, but at the very feet of Robert and Caroline’s memorial. We were gripped by an uncomfortable sensation of having blundered on to a scene of intensely private love and loss. The graves were grouped together, as near to each other as the sad process of burial would permit (fig. 116). Rose’s exact replication of John’s grave was an eloquent expression of her longing to be reunited with him.
Just as Robert and Caroline’s shared grave showed their longing to be united for all time, and the identical graves of John and Rose, set beside each other, demonstrated a mother’s yearning to be reunited with her child, so the closeness of the whole group spoke eloquently of their loving relationship as a family. More specifically, it illuminated Rose’s will to identify herself, and her child, with the older couple. By 1920, Robert and Caroline were nearly eighty years old, and in failing health. We can only assume the plot in Whatley churchyard had been reserved for them. It must have been Rose’s decision to bring John’s body from Bristol, where she was living at the time, and have him buried immediately at the foot of their allocated site, so that he would be near them. Since Robert and Caroline were still alive, this constituted a conscious recognition of the relationship between them. Devastated by John’s death, Rose chose the churchyard near the house of her husband’s uncle and aunt rather than a grave near to her home in Bristol or the family chapel at Turnworth House.
However, if she was aware of a much closer link between her son and the Batemans, the choice for his grave would have been quite natural. Was Rose symbolically entrusting her little boy to the care of his loving grandparents? Furthermore, if Rose did understand the true relationship between Henry and Robert and Caroline, had she herself acquired the one person she had been longing for, all her life – a devoted, loving mother? Did Caroline come to fill the role of the idealised Rose of her imagination? When, two years later, Robert and Caroline joined John in the churchyard, was this place the focus of three relationships that had transformed her empty life, and filled it with the love she had always craved? The little cluster of graves we were looking down at told their story silently, but with heart-breaking clarity.
The graves made up an L-shape with an empty plot, above Rose’s and beside Robert and Caroline’s, which had remained unused throughout the succeeding ninety years. We could not suppress the conviction that this patch of earth had been reserved long ago, by Robert and Caroline, for Henry Ulick Burke to be reunited with his wife, his child, and the parents who had longed all their lives to encompass him within the radiance of their love.
That was the story the graves told – the same story that the wills told, and the house told, and the lost paintings told, and retold; the story that Henry, Katrina and Ulick Richard set out to suppress. We now knew that the dry words on Robert and Caroline’s headstone had been put there by them, and reflected their priorities. They had chosen to forget everything except Robert’s status as a JP and Caroline’s exalted Howard connections. But they could not forget the true story, because it was woven into the fabric of all their lives. They had all stood, huddled together in this churchyard, in 1920, when John’s little coffin was lowered into its grave. They must have known why it had been brought from their home in Bristol, where he died. They were here again, in the very same spot, two years later, when Robert and Caroline were interred near the child, and again, nine years later, when their wife and mother was placed with them.
In 1933, Henry set out to destroy the route map to this place, and with it the painful narrative of his life. He wanted to be just Henry Ulick Burke, successful businessman, secure in his first-class cabin. No baggage, no traceable past, no shameful memories. For their own reasons, Katrina and Ulick Richard had been equally keen to bury what they knew of the scandalous connection with the Batemans. They had acquiesced in the sale of Nunney Delamere and the disposal of all its contents, especially the paintings, and never referred to them, even to their children.
But Robert and Caroline’s deep love for Henry and their grandchildren could not be suppressed. Their compulsion to nurture them and endow them with all their most precious possessions had eventually undermined their descendants’ attempts to disown them. It was the sheer power of the love story between Robert and Caroline that had ultimately revealed the truth that lay behind years of attempted evasion and subterfuge. Henry, Rose, baby John, Richard and Katrina, and all their children and grandchildren lay at the very heart of that story, and were created by the passionate intensity of it.
We felt that the relentless series of anomalies that made up the pattern of Henry Burke’s extraordinary life, and the repeated evidence of Robert and Caroline’s determination to benefit and bond with him and his family, was only explicable if they, and not Ulick Ralph and Katherine Burke, were his parents. It was a bold assertion to make, in the face of the fact that every written document defined Henry as their nephew, including their own wills. It was this that made us send for Katherine’s will. When we saw it, it threw a direct light on her reaction to Robert and Caroline’s funeral. It was dated 21 August 1922, ten days after Robert’s death, strongly suggesting that it was drawn up in direct response to Robert and Caroline’s wills, which makes a comparison between the documents especially revealing. The contrast is absolutely clear. Whereas Robert and Caroline identify Henry as the senior executor of their entire estate, Katherine begins, ‘I appoint my daughter, Hope Katherine Burke, my Sole Executrix.’ Henry dominates the whole of Robert and Caroline’s wills, receiving all the really significant bequests. In Katherine’s will, although she defines him as her son, he is mentioned only once in a single sentence as part of a series of small individual bequests:
I give and bequeath the following specific bequests, that is to say: To my daughter Sybil Matilda, six silver dessert spoons, six silver dessert forks and six silver teaspoons. To my son Henry Ulick Burke – all my family portraits and jewellery set with diamonds. I give and bequeath to my said daughter Hope Katherine Burke all the rest of my silver and plated goods, pictures, prints, jewellery, furniture and other personal and household effects.
Hope is overwhelmingly the main beneficiary of the will, being given the majority, some £3,000, from a trust fund set up at the time of Katherine’s marriage, and sharing any residue beyond that figure equally with her sister Sybil. Mabel Emma receives a small annuity.
The most significant feature of Katherine’s will, however, is not the small bequest she allocates to Henry, although this would have been distinctly unconventional in a family with a single son and three daughters in 1922. It is the way she organised the business arrangements of her will. These were so irregular that it is hard to believe they were not deliberately intended to undermine Henry’s role as head of the family. Henry was six years older than Hope and was a man of business with a responsible management role in a major company. In the early 1920s, to appoint his unmarried sister as sole executrix was so contrary that it must have constituted an intentional rejection of him.
How did Katherine justify this decision? Why wasn’t she proud of her son? Why didn’t she acknowledge his achievement as a businessman, and use his experience, to administer her affairs after her death, as her brother Robert had just done? Here we come to the heart of the mysterious inconsistency between these two documents, drawn up just over a fortnight apart. Robert’s will, though identifying Henry Burke throughout as ‘My Nephew’, treats him exactly as one would expect a parent to treat his only son. Katherine’s, though defining Henry as ‘My Son’, treats him as one might any ordinary relation. She does not invest him with any authority to dispose of her affairs or belongings, and leaves him just a few individual items, principally some portraits. If these were Burke family portraits, it might constitute some recognition of his role as heir to the family name. And we thought portraits had a far greater chance of surviving for their family associations, as Rose Parry-Okeden’s had, than for their artistic quality. Katherine had not died until 1933, so her will would have been activated in the very year Henry was selling Nunney Delamere, getting remarried and beginning his nomadic life in ships and hotels. In those circumstances, we thought it likely that he would have passed the portraits straight on to his only son, Richard Ulick, as Burke family heirlooms. We contacted Richard’s son, Jeremy, to ask if he had the portraits but he had never heard of them and had absolutely no recollection of his father or mother ever mentioning them, although he felt sure they would have valued them very highly.
The alternative was that by ‘my family portraits’ Katherine meant her own family. By the time she made this will in 1922, both her parents and all her brothers had died. If she had a collection of Bateman portraits, leaving them to Henry would have been treating him as the custodian of the Bateman, rather that the Burke, family heirlooms. The only explanation for all these inconsistencies seemed to be that, behind all the subterfuge, an act of expediency had been conceived and carried through, a lifetime earlier, on the far side of the world. At the time, it had appeared simple and easy to manage, but it had slowly grown and asserted its right to be acknowledged, until it had insinuated itself into the entire fabric of the relationships of all those who took part in it.
If we were to reveal the true forgotten world of Robert Bateman we needed to revisit the beginning of his devoted relationship with Caroline. We had to see if we could pick up a faint echo of the startling revelations about their emotional involvement with Henry Burke, in the tumultuous early years of their love affair. If we did, what could it tell us about Robert’s life and work?
