Desert Queen (5 page)

N
early three weeks had gone by since her mother took to bed in the winter of 1871. At first, great excitement filled the house with the announcement of the arrival of a baby boy. But the bleak March skies of northern England darkened over Red Barns as the little girl waited in the nursery, eager to return to her mother’s loving arms, curious to see the infant, Maurice. Her brother’s cries were not the only strange new sounds in the house; hushed whispers blew like an evil wind outside her mother’s door. The frail Mary Bell was too ill to leave her bed, and the physician who attended arrived more often now; the clomp of the doctor’s steps came faster and heavier, but instead of improving, the patient was growing weaker. It was not long before pneumonia set in, and then, as quickly as they had come, the doctor’s footsteps disappeared. The little girl, watching anxiously for her mother’s return, saw her hopes snatched as suddenly as a raven seizes its prey.

Gertrude was not yet three when her family dressed her in black to mourn her mother’s death. Mary was buried in the fields at Rounton Grange, a new estate being built by Lowthian Bell, and for several years after, young Gertrude re-enacted the funeral. Each time a favorite cat or other animal died, she grieved with a heavy heart, and with much fanfare led an imposing procession to bury her pet in a cemetery in the garden.

In a photograph taken the year her mother died, the curly-haired child shows a furrowed brow that forms an arch over her troubled soul. Her haunted eyes peer restlessly for answers, and the distant expression, seen in every photograph of her from childhood to womanhood, foreshadows a life spent searching. But, as she leans her foot on a stool, defiantly looking as if she were about to jump on it or kick it over, her firm expression gives hint of her strong will and resolution.

Anger, betrayal, a sense of abandonment; these are the feelings that surge in a child who has lost a parent. But Gertrude was also fortunate to be enveloped by her father’s love. Few can deny the powerful affection of a three-year-old girl for her father; even more, he became her role model. He would be the person she most patterned herself after, the one whose stamp of approval she always sought. From him she gained enormous confidence and the attitude for overcoming obstacles.

Distraught over his wife’s death, Hugh was able to take solace in his daughter’s love and to share with her the pleasures of long walks and rock-climbing, riding horses, raising rabbits and cultivating flower gardens. For her birthday he gave Gertrude a watering can; she reported to him that wild roses bloomed abundantly in the garden. On another occasion she announced that she had gathered a nosegay, proudly noting that the roses had come from
her
garden. As an adolescent she sent him descriptions of a neighbor’s garden: bright scarlet dahlias, yellow-brown acacia, tall, thin chrysanthemums grew there, she wrote, but “I like the way we grow ours better.” Even as an adult living in Baghdad she shared with him the progress of her garden, wishing sometimes he would come and help. Flowers were but a small part of the powerful bond she nurtured with her father; all her life she rejoiced in his admiration and regarded him as an unending source of wisdom, understanding and love.

H
er brother, Maurice, became her closest playmate and perfect foil. Fearful of her sharp tongue and her reprimands, he followed her like an awkward puppy. When she led him to the top of a nine-foot wall and ordered him to jump, the little boy heeded and fell flat on his face, but she landed gracefully on her feet. Climbing treacherously to the roof of the greenhouse, Maurice went crashing through the glass, but Gertrude scampered safely across the panes. At the beach, when their nurse wasn’t looking, the children slipped from her side and Gertrude dashed with her brother from one cove to another or hid in the boats moored on the shore. In bad weather they played inside, pasting pictures in their scrapbooks, watching magic lantern slides, playing with their trains and dolls.

Until Gertrude was eight, the distraught widower Hugh, when not at work, spent most of his time at home. Despite the urging of his sisters, Hugh refused to think of marrying again. But on a vacation in Scotland in the summer of 1874 he was introduced to a friend of his sisters named Florence Olliffe. The twenty-four-year-old playwright had lived in France, where her father, a prominent physician and socialite, had created the seaside resort of Deauville. In Paris she had known diplomats and literary figures and counted among her family friends the writers Charles Dickens and Henry James. After her father’s death she and her mother had moved to England, where she impressed those she met with her sophisticated style; Hugh was struck by her elegant manners and her intense blue eyes. Florence noticed not only Hugh’s courtly ways, but when she saw him for the first time, standing at the end of a rose-covered path, she recognized how beautiful he was and how very sad.

For two years their relationship continued, and in the spring of 1876, when it turned more serious, Florence wrote a note to Gertrude. “My Dear Miss Olliffe,” Gertrude carefully penned in response, answering questions about her flowers and a pair of ominous ravens, “Thank you very much for your letter. The ravens are tamer and very nice. I think you will like the garden very much, the flowers are all coming out.” She signed the letter, “Your aff’ate Gertrude.”

That June in London, at the Harley Street home of Lady Stanley, a staging was held of an opera that Florence had written. The enlightened Lady Stanley, grandmother of Bertrand Russell and mother-in-law of Hugh’s sister, made the event a sparkling occasion. At the end of the evening, when Hugh escorted Florence back to her mother’s flat at 95 Sloane Street, he asked for her hand in marriage. “Lady Olliffe,” he announced, “I have brought your daughter home, and I have come to ask if I may take her away again.”

They were married two months later, on August 10, 1876, at a small church on Sloane Street. It seems so odd now, and even somewhat cruel, but the children were not included in the wedding. Instead, Gertrude sent a note: “My dear Miss Olliffe. I write this letter for you to have on your wedding day to send you and Papa our best love and many kisses. Thank you for the doll’s frock which fits beautifully … From your loving Gertrude.” For their honeymoon the couple went off to America, where Florence’s sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Frank Lascelles, were posted at the British Embassy in Washington, and the next time Gertrude wrote to Florence, thanking her for a locket, she addressed her with a new title: “My Dear Mother.”

Even before the wedding, Florence had tried to win the little girl’s heart, sending her clothes for her dolls and gifts for herself. Eager for the attention, Gertrude was troubled, nevertheless, by this new woman who took so much of her father’s time. While her parents were on their honeymoon, she wrote to them with some concern about their safety, told them she dreamed of dead ravens and wished that her parents were with her. By autumn, Florence and Hugh were back at Red Barns, and life returned to some of its old rhythm. A portrait done by Edward Poynter shows eight-year-old Gertrude seated on her father’s lap, his arm around her, their fingers entwined, their faces glowing with love and affection. In its essence, it was a picture that could have been drawn at almost any point in their lives.

When Hugh and his new wife went off to London the following April, Gertrude was almost in despair. “Dear dear Mamy,” she wrote to Florence, “I am very very sorry you cannot come home.… I send love to Papa and all. I am dear dear dear Mamy your loving Gertrude.” A short while later, she received news that her parents were returning: “Dear Mamy, I am so very very very very very very glad you are coming home.… Do get me a doll. I have got none.… Dear dear dear dear dear dear Mamy, you don’t know how glad I am you are coming home. From your very very very loving Gertrude.”

Eager for Florence’s love, the little girl struggled to please. Florence opened up an exciting world of books, theater, art and interesting people. As a child Gertrude liked nothing so much as to sit at her side, listening to her read from Lewis Carroll’s
Alice In Wonderland
or the tales of Ali Baba, Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin and his Magic Lamp from the
Arabian Nights.
As Gertrude grew older, she found much in Florence to admire: her talent as a writer, her efforts at social justice, her accomplishments as a hostess, her literary friends, her stylishness and fashion sense. Even more, she was grateful for the friendship and family life that Florence provided.

But her stepmother’s impatience with anything less than perfection prickled Gertrude like a spiky thorn. A photograph, taken when Gertrude was nine, reveals some of the tension between them. Florence, resplendent in a rich velvet dress trimmed with fur, is seated in front of a leaded glass window, her expression forbidding as she looks down at a large book in her hands. On one side stands Maurice, in his buttoned-up suit, on the other, Gertrude, in a plain wool dress, but as close as they are placed to her, the children seem miles away. There is no contact: no physical touching, no emotional bond. While little Maurice seems to be biting his lip to stop himself from crying, Gertrude looks soulful, her eyes off somewhere in the distance. If tears could fill the chasm between them, there would be enough to plug an ocean.

Gertrude’s willfulness had caused a string of nannies to quit their job. Florence, too, had little tolerance for Gertrude’s “highly spirited” ways. As soon as she began having her own children (there would be three in all: Elsa, Molly and Hugo), Gertrude, aged ten, was sent on long visits to her cousins (her favorite was Horace Marshall) or to her grandparents’ new house at Rounton Grange. More than once reports came back to Florence about Gertrude’s naughtiness, her dangerous climbs on steep rocks, the risky adventures that often scared the relatives.

Wherever Gertrude was, she escaped through her books. They were her magic carpet, but anything she read had to be approved by Florence. At the age of eleven she glided through John Richard Green’s long
History of the English People.
At fourteen, she asked her cousin Horace if he had read Browning’s new book of poetry. “I suppose not,” she answered with resignation. But, she boasted to him, in one week she had galloped through volumes of letters and biographies of Mozart, Macaulay and Mrs. Carlyle. At sixteen, she dashed through George Eliot’s
Silas Marner
, and then asked meekly, “What other book of hers may I read now?” Even at the age of twenty-three, after ordering a best-selling novel about the seduction of a maid, she wrote apologetically to Florence, telling her to return it: “Naturally I should have asked you about it before I read it.”

No matter how bright they were, girls of Gertrude’s class rarely were sent away to school; instead, they were tutored at home and, at the age of seventeen, were presented at court and introduced to society. Within three seasons of coming out, each was expected to find a husband. But Gertrude had shown an exceptional mind, too keen to be kept at home. Florence and Hugh, progressive thinkers both, took the radical step of sending her to a girls’ school in London. It would calm the energy level in the household and, at the same time, feed Gertrude’s hungry intellect. Queen’s College, a girls’ school on Harley Street, was started in 1848 as a series of Lectures for Ladies.

It was a total change from the protected world of Red Barns and Rounton Grange. For one thing, her classmates were all girls. For another, the rules were stricter in London than they had been at home. Intellectually, she had little concern. Her first-term grades marked her as an outstanding student: first in her class in English History; second in English Grammar, third in Geography, fourth in French and Ancient History. When a subject was too easy, she asked to be transferred to a more advanced class and welcomed the extra load of work. But eager as she was to learn, and as good a scholar as she was, the sixteen-year-old found the experience at Queen’s College lonely and painful. “I was horribly miserable yesterday,” she wrote after she returned for a new semester; “the first few days are the worst.” Torn from the comforts of home, she missed her male companions—her brother Maurice, her cousin Horace and her father—and disliked the company of other young women. She found them “uninteresting,” affected and not up to her speed. Nevertheless, the privileged young lady, whose grandfather had just been made a baronet, discovered that she did not always stand above the crowd: “It’s a very disagreeable process, finding out that one is no better than the common run of people. I’ve gone through rather a hard course of it since I came to College and I don’t like it at all.” She dreaded the “great flat stretch of weeks with nothing to look forward to,” and filled her days with extra school assignments. History was her favorite subject, and as she studied the English monarchy she began to comprehend Britain’s powerful role in the world.

City life did not please her; London was a quick flirtation, an evening of laughter followed by a lonely night of tears. For Gertrude, the countryside was constant love; it embraced her with arms full of roses and caressed her with blossoms and trees. “I wish I were at home,” she wrote wistfully in the fall. “There must be such a delicious autumn smell in the country, and then crackly yellow and red leaves, oh it makes me quite discontented to think of it.” Knowing how much she loved the outdoors, Florence made sure there were always fresh flowers in her room at school. When she slipped up once, Gertrude chided, “You didn’t send me any flowers this week! Did you forget?”