Beautiful Lies (59 page)

The article that led me to Maribel was written by Jad Adams and called ‘Gabriela Cunninghame Graham: Deception and Achievement in the 1890s’. It opened with a story that featured heavily in all the books and biographies of Robert Cunninghame Graham. In 1878, at the London registry office on the Strand, he had married a Chilean woman ten years his junior. His wife, Gabriela, was the daughter of a French landowner, Don Francisco José de la Balmondière, and a Spanish mother. Both had been killed in an accident when Gabriela was twelve years old. Gabriela had then been sent to Paris where an aunt enrolled her in a convent school. The Cunninghame Grahams liked to relate how they had met by chance on the Champs-Elysées, when Gabriela was startled and almost knocked off her feet by Robert’s wayward horse. It was, as Robert’s friend, A. F. Tschiffely, cooed in his biography of 1937, ‘a case of love at first sight’.

The story was very romantic. It was also, as Adams’s article revealed, a complete fiction, albeit one that had been successfully maintained long after its protagonists were dead and buried. Gabriela Cunninghame Graham died of dysentery in 1906, her husband thirty years later in 1936. It was not until 1985 that a previously undiscovered cache of family letters revealed the truth: Gabriela was not Chilean at all, nor was she called Gabriela. Her name was Carrie Horsfall and she had been born in 1860 in Masham, North Yorkshire. Her father was a surgeon. Carrie was his second daughter, and the second of thirteen children. In 1875, aged fifteen, she had run away from home and headed to London, determined to fulfil her dreams of becoming an actress. As for what had happened between then and her reappearance in 1878 as Robert’s wife, Adams could only speculate.

Immediately I was smitten. I tried to find out more about Gabriela but it seemed that, beyond what had been included in the article, there was little more to discover. The fleeting references in her husband’s biographies were unrevealing. I tracked down a handful of her published articles and poems. I also found a brief entry in
Study in Yellow
, a history of the influential literary journal
The Yellow Book
, that as well as recounting (again) the story of their romantic Parisian encounter, claimed that, during Robert’s trial for illegal assembly after the Bloody Sunday riots, Gabriela had issued ‘At Home’ cards to all their friends, giving their address as Bow Street Police Court. Everything else that seemed to be known about her was contained in Adams’s short article. Gabriela Cunninghame Graham was beautiful and charming (W. B. Yeats apparently referred to her as the ‘bright little American’), smoked prodigiously, and had a weakness for Parisian dressmakers. She was also enamoured of mysticism and the esoteric, and wrote a biography of Santa Teresa of Avila, published in 1894.

Only her mysticism prevented me from loving Gabriela Cunninghame Graham unreservedly. I could not help finding it peculiar, even improbable, that a woman who had once summoned the courage to run away from home to go on the stage would in later life succumb to what I considered to be mumbo-jumbo. I was certain from the outset that ‘my’ Gabriela was a sceptic, a woman with no time for visions and emanations and materialisations from beyond the grave. Almost immediately Maribel began to take shape in my mind.

The irony of imagining the life of a woman who imagined it for herself is not lost on me but
Beautiful Lies
, though based in truth, is fundamentally a work of fiction. Unhooking myself from the real Gabriela allowed my imagination to take flight. There is no evidence that there was ever, during Gabriela’s life, a serious risk of her secret being discovered, but I could not help thinking how differently her story would have ended if there had been. The 1880s witnessed the emergence of a brand-new kind of journalism, one that laid the foundations for our modern tabloid press and that would, by the end of the decade, bring down Charles Parnell, the widely revered founder and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party who, before scandal destroyed his career, had looked set to lead his country towards Home Rule (and from there perhaps, as some historians have argued, to all-Irish independence).

The pioneer of this New Journalism was the editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette
, William Thomas Stead. Stead, who took up his editorship in 1883, was the first newspaper editor who fully understood that the great power of the press lay in its role as a conduit between an eagerly opinionated public and a political class eager to appropriate popular issues for political gain. (He was also the first editor to introduce to English newspapers the American convention of the interview.) The son of a Congregationalist minister, Stead was a chapel-going Nonconformist and though he had little education and was described by George Bernard Shaw as ‘stupendously ignorant’, had a thunderous sense of right and wrong. Stead’s father had considered the theatre to be the Devil’s Chapel, and novels the Devil’s Bible. Under Stead’s leadership the
Pall Mall Gazette
soon provided a lurid alternative to both, whipping itself into sensationalist frenzies under the auspices of moral outrage and setting the tone for tabloid newspapers ever after. Stead’s most infamous stunt,
The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon
, exposed the seamy underbelly of London’s sex trade and forced Parliament to raise the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen. It also resulted in Stead, who had purchased a girl of twelve for £5 in order to show how easily it might be done, serving four months in prison for trafficking in child bondage.

Stead was also largely responsible for the downfall in sexual scandals not only of Charles Parnell but of Sir Charles Dilke, another Liberal politician. Both were supposedly on ‘his side’, but Stead showed no qualms about their destruction; his Puritan moral code allowed for no shades of grey. Later he worked to bring down the homosexual dramatist (and friend of Gabriela Cunninghame Grahame) Oscar Wilde. It was not a climate in which one was safe harbouring secrets. In his article Adams quotes a letter written by one of Carrie’s sisters after her death which underlined the fear of her family that the truth about Gabriela would be revealed. ‘I shall watch the papers,’ she wrote in 1906, ‘for I am certain in spite of all the story will come out . . . what I want to find out is what name he registered her death in – if other than Papa and Mama’s he can be charged with perjury.’ The scandal that would have resulted from such a discovery would not only have destroyed Robert’s political career, it would have meant social disgrace, not only for Gabriela and Robert but for both of their families. At a time when respectability was critical to a family’s social, financial and professional standing, such a loss of reputation might well have proved disastrous.

In my novel Maribel is not a writer, or not with any success. She is a photographer. Photography drew me in part because of its metaphorical significance, its ability to create illusions that seem real, and partly because the rapid development of photographic technology in the 1880s propelled the camera to the forefront of contemporary culture. While artists argued heatedly about whether photography could be considered a legitimate artistic form, the majority of Victorians regarded the camera as a scientific instrument, incapable of dissembling. As the pace of scientific discovery accelerated, psychology was also advancing with rapid strides, and hypnotic experiments were revealing previously unimagined complexities in human consciousness. There was, among many, a growing fascination with the occult. Spiritualist mediums promised communication with the spirits of the dead. Though some were sceptical, many took comfort from the idea that, in an increasingly secular world, it might be possible to prove the existence of God. In 1882 a group of scientifically-minded scholars, clergymen and public figures, among them a professor of physics from the Royal College of Science in Dublin, established the Society for Psychical Research, its stated objective to conduct organised scholarly research into human experiences that challenged conventional scientific models. One of their earliest experiments concerned the use of photographic images to capture the spirits of the dead, thereby proving beyond doubt the existence of the life everlasting.

It was some time before the Society abandoned its attempts and accepted the impossibility of proof. One might argue that it hardly mattered. Cynics and atheists dismissed the pictures as frauds; the faithful had no need of evidence. Perhaps our own stories are the same. During the writing of this novel I have come to question the nature of true stories, of history, of memory. Perhaps, like Maribel, we are all the composites of our own fantasies. Perhaps, in the end, it matters less what is true, but what we are determined to believe.

I
OWE A HUGE
debt to all the writers and scholars whose knowledge and wisdom have provided the foundations for this novel. I cannot possibly hope to do justice to them all here but I must extend special thanks to A. N. Wilson for his brilliant history,
The Victorians
, which is as entertaining as it is erudite. Jerry White’s
London in the Nineteenth Century
proved another indispensable resource, while contemporary memoirs and biographies provided wonderful first-person witness accounts of events in the book, among them
London Letters and Some Others
by George W. Smalley and
RDB’s Diary 1887–1914
by R. D. Blumenfeld, both memoirs of American journalists in London, and
Reminiscences and Reflexions of a Mid to Late Victorian
by the British Socialist philosopher Ernest Belfort Bax.
Annie Besant, An Autobiography
was also a source of fascinating contemporary detail.

A range of more specialised histories provided me with an understanding of the particular world occupied by Edward and Maribel Campbell Lowe. I was ably served by a number of political histories, notably
Socialists, Liberals and Labour
by Paul Thompson,
Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement, 1867–1974
by James Hinton, and the riveting
The World That Never Was
by Alex Butterworth. Two books in particular provided unparalleled access to the world of Victorian newspapers: Alan J. Lee’s
The Origins of the Popular Press in England 1855–1914
and Lucy Brown’s
Victorian News and Newspapers
. The website
attackingthedevil.co.uk
also proved a treasure trove of original contemporary sources pertaining to W. T. Stead and to the emergence of the New Journalism in the 1880s. The murky history of spirit photography was elucidated by two particularly helpful studies,
100 Years of Spirit Photography
by Tom Patterson and
Photographing the Invisible
by James Coates.

For information about Buffalo Bill and the London tour of his Wild West show I relied heavily on Alan Gallop’s terrific
Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West
with its wealth of contemporary photographs and press cuttings, and on ‘
Your Fathers, The Ghosts’: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Scotland
by Tom F. Cunningham. More general context was provided by such histories as Don Russell’s
The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill
, and Sarah Blackstone’s excellent
Buckskins, Bullets and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Black Elk Speaks
, as told through John G. Neihardt by Black Elk, offered a privileged glimpse into the Indian perspective on the period by one of the medicine men of the Oglala Sioux who travelled to England with Colonel Cody in 1887.

It was thanks to
Hostiles? The Lakota Ghost Dance and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
by Sam Maddra that I gained my first introduction to Robert Cunninghame Graham. His impassioned letters, written about the plight of the Indians to the
Daily Graphic
, led me to a number of books about the Scottish Socialist MP, most usefully
Don Roberto
by A. F. Tschiffley and
Cunninghame Graham; a critical biography
by Cedric Watts and Laurence Davies. Most importantly they steered me to the article that would prove to be the inspiration for this novel, Jad Adams’s ‘Gabriela Cunninghame Graham: Deception and Achievement in the 1890s’, published in 2007 in the journal
English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920
. I would like to extend my thanks to him, and to all the other historians upon whom I have depended so heavily during the writing of this novel.

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