The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon Page 5

  When Georgina was told of her father’s great scheme, it probably left her in two minds. On the one hand, the plan was so outrageous, so impossible, that it filled her with the same almighty ambition as his and nourished in her that old sense of being born to greatness. For her the Florence years had hardly been distinguished, but now that did not matter, or not as much as it might to a lesser soul. Her destiny beckoned: life in a country seat, with a fine town house, a rich man who loved her, and a circle of jealous and admiring friends. This was the fulfillment of all her wildest daydreams; novels were based on plots like this. The other possibility was that her father had set the bar so high exactly to deny her any kind of a marriage at all. In some somber fashion it was his method of possessing her. In this way of looking at it she was his and would never be another’s.

  In 1852 Morgan and his family left Florence. In the informal history of the expatriate community, as recorded in memoirs and reminiscences, it is as though he had never been there. You did not have to be a poet or a peer to get something from Florence; nor did you have to be a roué. But the policeman of society left no record. One of the sidelights cast on the city in those days was the vigorous efforts made by the more pious English to import Protestant Bibles to Tuscany, a campaign that might seem close to Morgan’s heart. In 1851 Captain Wilson, who was hardly in the mold of an evangelical bigot, went to visit an Italian friend imprisoned by the Austrians for the possession of a smuggled Bible. “In the afternoon I paid a visit to Guicciardini in the Bargello. It really makes one’s blood boil to think that even the abuse of justice should enable any Government, however despotic, to incarcerate a man merely for reading a bible and making free use of his conscience.”

  This is a recognizably Early Victorian tone. Wilson was a gentleman, who believed like many of his kind—like Morgan Thomas himself—that an English gentleman was the greatest masterpiece ever created by man. But beneath the languid airs and graces, which the Hussar officer certainly had in full, there had to be some fire, some subterranean force. A man must have his demons. Morgan makes a poor comparison with the gallant and penniless Wilson. He had his demons, but there was something empty at the heart of him. A weaker man, or perhaps a poorer one, might have used the Tuscan years to seek preferment at home in England. A more intellectually curious one might have embraced the city for its own sake, or at any rate looked about him. From all that rich stew of society, the only thing Morgan Thomas took away with him from Florence was his butler, the secretive and sardonic Antonio.

  Going Home

  1

  The road is dusty, the coach unbearably stuffy. The landscape has very soon palled. One valley is much like another, one ridge reveals the next. She is sweating in her stays, her waist nipped in painful imitation of adult fashion, her legs in stockings, her feet crammed into dirty white silk shoes. Not a button is to be loosened from her bodice, not a hem raised of her skirts. Clothes, like the empty conversation, the conventional diet, are to be endured. She belongs to the kind of family in which all the children are considered as miniature and largely ungrateful adults for whom the future has already been mapped out. Her brothers will never work, in the sense that engineers or doctors work. They will probably become soldiers. Though it might be privately comical to imagine these lumpy and unimaginative boys as standing in the breach at some future clash of arms, it is not so funny at all to consider her own position. Though she is hardly more than a child, her future has been even more ruthlessly dictated. What she sees in the mirror is what she is. She is a commodity. What she wants can have nothing in it that doesn’t correspond to what her parents want. Even before she has truly entered the world—as expressed by the mystery of other people—she is preparing to leave it.

  Time moves as slowly and maddeningly as the coach in which she sits, but even so, in five or six years’ time, what little freedom of action she possesses now will have disappeared. Part of her commodity value is obedience to a man. It was her father, and all too soon it will be her husband. The sweat thickens in her hair and gathers behind her knees. The road unravels. At the end of it (the child’s fantasy) might be a prince, a castle, and rolling acres. The person not likely to be waiting is a poet or a dreamer, or anyone who lives in a garret. Though there is much in the world—as, for example, the young Austrian officer who leans in through the carriage window to inspect the passports, or the distinguished-looking German scholar on his way to Rome, or any of a hundred interesting examples met along the way—most of the observable world is nothing more than idle scenery. About England, where she is going, she knows next to nothing: she knows the names of shops but not the names of cities. Victoria, whose star she felt she was to follow, has turned out to be distressingly family-minded and moralistic, besotted with her prim little husband. As for her own talents, her father speaks at least as good Italian as she, her voice is untrained, her reading patchy and inconsequential. She is already a little on the dumpy side. And she is sweating.

  2

  It happened that Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens were traveling to Florence at exactly the same time the Thomases set off in the opposite direction, and a letter by Collins to a friend has left us a snapshot picture of travel by diligence along those dangerous roads of northern Italy. He explains how strings were tied to the trunks and luggage riding on the roof and each passenger sat with the loose end in his hand. The intention—no matter that the coach was in motion—was to prevent theft. “It was like sitting in a shower bath and waiting to pull the string—or rather, like fishing in the sea, when one waits to feel a bite by the tug of the line round one’s finger.”

  The tedium of the journey, the bad inns and low cunning of the peasants met along the way, the occasional interrogations by unpleasantly brusque Austrian patrols, all conspired to produce in Morgan the conviction that he was at last leaving the shadows and coming back into the light. Let others take what they could from Italy: he was free of it. He was not as rich as he would like, and he was no longer young. However, Louisa’s inheritance was clear of entail at last: he could throw out the agricultural laborers who were now in disgraceful occupation of Gate House and set about making himself a landed proprietor. That had a ring to it. He had enough money to send both his sons to Eton; and sprawling next to Louisa as the coach rattled along, its canvas window coverings clattering, sat the petulant girl on which the last and he hoped best phase of his life depended. Somewhere, perhaps even on this very road, returning home to some noble house in a carriage emblazoned with arms, was the man to marry Georgina and, by so doing, elevate the whole family.

  The diarist Charles Cavendish Greville had summed it up in 1843: “This year is distinguished by many marriages in the great world, the last, and the one exciting the greatest sensation being that of March to my niece. A wonderful elevation for a girl without beauty, talents, accomplishments or charm of any kind, an enormous prize to draw in the lottery of life. All the mothers in London consider it a robbery as each loses her chance of such a prize.”

  Morgan understood well enough that his stake in this market was slender. But he also knew, or thought he knew, that nobody got what he wanted by chance. There was a campaign to be fought. That was how it had been in his own day, and that was how he imagined it to be now. His firsthand knowledge of English society was nearly fifteen years out of date, yet he supposed that what went in the days of his youth, went on still. It had better, for he knew of nothing else.

  He was to be proved wrong. Even leaving aside his wife’s eccentric taste in clothes—her high color and preference for red shawls led Georgina once to describe her mother as looking like a macaw—there was something fusty and old-fashioned about the whole family. Though they were English to the people they met along the way, there was an ignorance in them that surprised their fellow countrymen. A significant example of this was found whenever Louisa mentioned her daughter’s wonderfully clear soprano voice. Anyone who asked out of courtesy to whom they had sent her in Florence for lessons—to Signo
r Giulio Uberti perhaps?—was met with a studied silence. She had received no lessons. The same was true of the art and literature of the day. Morgan knew that his bête noire Watts was back in England but not that he was recently engaged on enormous historical and allegorical paintings in which his social conscience wrestled with the ills of society. (They were sometimes called muffin paintings, after Thackeray’s satirization of a “George Rumbold” painting in which Rumbold—his name for Watts—had painted such a huge canvas that a mere muffin had a diameter of two feet three inches.) Meanwhile, what was this absurd thing called the March of Intellect—whence to where? The Great Exhibition had been and gone—what had been the attraction of looking at a lot of farm machinery and the like, displayed in a building made of glass by a man who was gardener to the Duke of Devonshire?

  For Georgina, going home was the adventure of her young life. She was about to rejoin what was the greatest nation on earth at its most prosperous. Everyone knew that Britain was best. Even her father believed that. Surreptitious study of fashion plates showed her that a ball gown was now worn off both shoulders and that hair was curled only at the back to fall lightly on the neck. In calling on others, it was de rigueur to wear a long fringed shawl over a demure dress, the whole set off by a beaded reticule, dangled, it would seem, by the middle fingers of the left hand. There was much to ponder here, but the imaginative leap was to picture the man who would capture her.

  The year that Morgan left England, Thackeray wrote the potboiling FitzBoodle Papers. Its story begins farcically with the remark by his hero “I have always been considered the third-best whist player in Europe . . .” FitzBoodle, we discover, is the second son to a title stretching back to Henry II; his absurd opinions and brief adventures first entertained the readers of Frazer’s Magazine. To the modern taste the empty vanities of FitzBoodle and his redoubtable stepmother, Lady Flintskinner, are too easy a target. In the early Thackeray there is cleverness, but also a faintly studied quality. FitzBoodle and the other works like it were slight, not because they were too cruel, but because they were too cautious. There were plenty of readers ready to discover in Thackeray a kind of social anxiety, an insecurity. They saw, or thought they saw, in his own phrase, the flunky that hid behind the gentleman. But, unlike Morgan Thomas, Thackeray grew up with the new age and learned from it. His vision deepened and darkened. In a letter written when his eldest daughter was in the same situation as Georgina, young and beautiful and eligible, he strikes a much more somber note. Speaking of a society to which he was now himself an adornment, he wrote:

  They never feel love, but directly it’s born they throttle it and fling it under the sewer as poor girls do their unlawful children—they make up money marriages and are content—then the father goes to the House of Commons or the Counting House, the mother to her balls and visits—the children lurk upstairs with their governess, and when their turn comes are bought and sold, as respectable and heartless as their parents before them.

  This was new and beyond the comprehension of a man like Morgan. Even more to the point, it was not a thing Georgina herself could understand. At the time she left Florence, an American girl her own age had come to Europe with the sole intention of being heard by Rossini. Genevieve Ward, young though she was, knew what she wanted and headed straight to Florence to get it. She had been told she had a good voice and was determined to make herself famous. Rossini was encouraging. He found her distinguished local teachers (one of whom was Uberti), and two years later she opened at La Scala. That kind of dedication was way beyond anything Georgina possessed, then or ever. She had the voice, but not the vision.

  3

  Morgan was in no great hurry to face up to London. He wished the journey home to be a way of applying a little finish to his daughter. They broke their return first by the shores of Lake Constance, where his younger brother, George, was living in style with an invalid wife, the Baronne de Hildprant. For a sixteen-year-old girl with hardly any understanding of the wider world, this was interesting enough. At Schloss Hard Georgina found the kind of company she had been warned against at the Villa Capponi: indolent, not in the slightest way intellectual, gossipy—and amorous. True to his character, Morgan did not like his brother any more than he did his Florence enemies. On the other hand, his daughter could not be sheltered from the importunities of other people forever. The days at Schloss Hard turned into weeks, the weeks into months, while he watched Georgina try out her new freedoms.

  Her looks and personality were of great interest. In appearance she was judged to be perhaps a little too much on the short side, a little too full of figure, to be the ideal of beauty. Her conversation was startlingly direct, and in one respect her aunt and uncle must have studied her with special doubt in their minds. She was already—and particularly among men of mature years—an accomplished sexual tease. Many of the scrapes she got into later in life came from this inability to treat men in a realistic way. She was arch in their company and sometimes irritatingly so. Weak men, or vain ones, might find her little-girl act provocative, but wiser heads found something missing in her, perhaps a commonsensical understanding of the limited choices life could afford, not just to her but to anybody. She was not, in the way the French apply the word, a serious person. Even this early in her life it was easy to see that she had great energies, but many fewer talents than she supposed. She talked far too freely, scoffed and wheedled. She wrote on June 21, at the end of a day of sunshine and persiflage: “I first experienced what Mama told me some time ago about young men making themselves agreeable to me.”

  Young though she was, she had discovered the power sex could wield. This amorousness needed some explaining later on in life, and she had a ready answer. She was scientifically amative: “I loved everyone who loved me and there were endless outcomes—lamentations, reproaches, tears on all sides. But there we are! I am a loving person. Phrenologists tell me that my bumps of love and friendship cover my entire head! One is not mistress of one’s temperament and of one’s skull, not at all.”

  Even this early, her bumps dictated events in an unfortunate way. Among the party lounging and sketching, going out onto the lake in boats and exclaiming about the wonders of nature, was a familiar family legend, the source of many an outrageous story. He was the fiery and voluble vicar of Llanelli, a man named Ebenezer Morris, whose living had been presented to him by Georgina’s grandfather. The Reverend Mr. Morris was sixty-three and decidedly eccentric. His preaching was considered so entertaining that on one occasion the gallery of the church threatened to collapse from the press of people gathered to hear him. He was also a man of colossal and unforgiving temper, perfectly able to knock down a parishioner for some imagined insult. In his battles with neighboring clergy, he composed scathingly brutal and quite scandalous letters and pamphlets. In Llanelli he was a notorious and much-discussed figure.

  As well as flirting with the young men who ran after her and deriding the enthusiasm her uncle held for romantic scenery, Georgina romanced the Reverend Mr. Morris, whom she dubbed Cannonicus. She was successful enough to have him embrace her a little too freely and kiss her without the innocence usually employed toward a child. Emboldened, he wrote her a love letter. One can think of half a dozen reasons why he might instantly regret what he had done. This was the first test of her capacity to behave more like a young lady than a hoyden. Could the situation be defused by tact and common sense? Was this the kind of letter that anyone else would have torn in a hundred pieces or hidden in the trunk of a tree? Was it an occasion for the young to moralize the old and bring the reckless philanderer to the error of his ways, as happened in fiction?

  She chose differently. She gave the letter to her mother. Louisa gave it to her husband. For all Morris’s long friendship with the family (which included being a lifelong drinking crony of his patron, Rees Goring Thomas) Morgan did not hesitate. The poor man was confronted with the evidence, humiliated, and shown the door. Georgina had done the right thing and learned a useful le
sson: she might not be the cleverest girl in the world, but she was certainly able to stir up passion in the opposite sex. Moreover, she had found a new way to make her father angry. Shortly after the incident, the Thomas family left Schloss Hard, still postponing London and heading toward Brussels.

  4

  In the winter of 1853 the Thomases took a house in the rue de Luxembourg. Morgan bought a carriage with a form of armorial bearing painted on the doors. “We went about in our carriage, and all our ancient admirers, on foot, stared at us as if we were risen from the grave,” Georgina commented. Her father had managed to secure a letter of introduction to the ambassador: he was positioning himself for the campaign that lay ahead. If he had gone abroad like a loser, he intended to come back with a different story to tell.