Desert Queen (9 page)

T
hree seasons were all that a young lady was allotted to find a husband. Gertrude had used up her time. No one had asked her to marry him, nor was there someone she wished to wed. Not that she did not enjoy the company of young men; she did. But her sharp tongue sliced through their egos and her intellectual thirst quickly soaked up what drops of knowledge they shed. She refused to bow to them in her behavior: to be servile or silent or not argue, but rather agree with everything they said. She refused to change her personality to suit another’s. And if she did not meet their expectations, so be it. No tight-lipped male would be her lord and master.

Three years of the mating game had made her miserable, yet the prospect of a life alone seemed worse. At the end of an evening at the Russells’, she wrote despondently to Florence: “It is so flat and horrid without you. I hope you find your husband a consolation to you, you see I haven’t one to console me.” Fearful of living her life as a spinster, she ended her letter: “Mother dearest, three score years and ten is very long, isn’t it?”

Travel seemed the only solution; Persia the place she had always longed to see. At the age of twenty-three, having spent the winter months learning to speak the language, Gertrude waved goodbye to damp, cold England and left with her aunt Mary Lascelles for the East. Traveling on the Orient Express from Paris to Constantinople, and from there by boat to Persia, she arrived in Teheran on May 7, 1892, to visit Frank Lascelles, recently appointed the British envoy to Shah Nasiraddin. In her first letter home, she rejoiced: Persia was “Paradise.”

T
he legation grounds were like “the Garden of Eden,” Gertrude exclaimed to her parents. “You can’t think how lovely it all is—outside trees and trees and trees making a thick shade from our house to the garden walls, beneath them a froth of pink monthly roses, climbing masses of briers, yellow and white and scarlet, beds of dark red cabbage roses and hedges of great golden blooms. It’s like the Beast’s garden, a perfect nightmare of roses.” She stepped inside the rambling, pale stone house and walked through long hallways, where liveried servants bowed as she passed. Peeking around, she discovered capacious dining rooms, drawing rooms and billiard rooms, countless sitting rooms and bedrooms for family and guests, and everywhere she could smell the scent of roses and hear the songs of nightingales.

The month-long journey to Teheran earned a welcome from the entire Embassy: counselors, military attachés, telegraph coders, first, second and even third secretaries turned out to greet her, including one who seemed to catch her interest. “Mr. Cadogan, tall and red and very thin, agreeable, intelligent, a great tennis player, a great billiard player, an enthusiast about Bezique, devoted to riding though he can’t ride in the least I’m told, smart, clean, well-dressed, looking upon us as his special property to be looked after and amused. I like him,” she wrote at once to her family.

She met others too, in Teheran, whom she liked, particularly the German chargé d’affaires, Friedrich Rosen, and his wife, Nina. Mrs. Rosen, the daughter of friends of her stepmother’s, was intelligent and amusing; Dr. Rosen, a charming man and an Oriental scholar, who soon taught her about Persian culture and stirred her interest in the Arabs as well. The Rosens would become close friends, and when later they were assigned to Jersualem, she would make her first trip to that city, visiting them while she studied Arabic.

But one man in Teheran stood out from the rest. A week after she arrived, she wrote home again: “Mr. Cadogan is the real treasure; it certainly is unexpected and undeserved to have come all the way to Tehran and to find someone so delightful at the end. Florence [the Lascelleses’ daughter] and I like him immensely; he rides with us, he arranges plans for us, he brings his dogs to call on us … he shows us lovely things from the bazaars, he is always there when we want him and never when we don’t.” Not only was he charming but highly intelligent, well read in everything worthwhile in French, German and English.

Astride their horses, Mr. Cadogan led her into the desert, and she gasped at the power of its vastness and vacancy, the beauty of its jeweled oases. “Oh the desert round Tehran! miles and miles of it with nothing,
nothing
growing; ringed in with bleak bare mountains snow crowned and furrowed with the deep courses of torrents. I never knew what desert was till I came here; it is a very wonderful thing to see.…”

They went riding together, she always sidesaddle, to the Shah’s camp, and found a garden filled with wild animals and an
anderun
, a special palace for the royal ladies. When one of the gardeners opened the palace door, they stepped inside and found themselves “in the middle of the Arabian Nights.” Thin streams trickled across the tiled floors and reflections of the water danced in the tiny mirrored pieces of the roof, and all the way was roses, roses. “Here that which is me,” she wrote, “which womanlike is an empty jar that the passerby fills at pleasure, is filled with such wine as in England I had never heard of.”

She was roused by the sensuality of the East and seduced by the attentions of her suitor, handsome, ten years older than she, and worldly. He read her the mysterious lines of the Persian poets and slipped his arms around her. He took her to strange sights, like the whitewashed Tower of Silence, where the Zoroastrians threw their dead, leaving them for birds to devour, and he held her tightly when she shivered in fear. He showed her hawking and they watched together as the servants released quails into the sky and let loose the hawks to pounce on them. He brought her to a garden where they lay in the grass under trees, dangled their toes in a little stream, and kissed, then watched the lights changing on the snowy mountains. From his pocket he pulled out a tiny volume of Catullus and read aloud the lyric pieces of the Roman poet. “It was very delicious,” she wrote dreamily. A few days later they spent an afternoon in a garden tent, and in between their kisses they read the voluptuous quatrains of
The Rubáiyát
:

With me along the strip of herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown.
Where name of slave and sultan is forgot
,
And peace to Mahmud on his golden throne! …

A book of verses underneath the bough
,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
Oh, wilderness were paradise enow!

While a cholera epidemic raged through the country, killing thousands, she and Cadogan celebrated life. They recited the poems of Browning and Kipling and read the short stories of Henry James. They played tennis, they rode into the mountains, they took walks, and on one August afternoon, they strolled two miles down the River Lar to a place where Mr. Cadogan’s servant had spread a regal tea. Hungry and wet from a sudden shower, they hid under waterproof sheets and munched on bread and butter and raspberry jam. After tea they wandered along the stream, Cadogan fishing, she talking, until they walked home together. “It was the loveliest afternoon,” she purred.

By now they were speaking of their future, spending hours blissfully planning their life together: as a diplomat, he could be posted anywhere in the world; he had been to South America and did not like it, and they both hoped he would stay in the Middle East. It was easy to imagine herself like her aunt Mary, the charming, admired wife of an influential ambassador, with her Parisian wardrobe, traveling in luxury on steamer ships and sumptuous trains, meeting interesting people like prime ministers and kings, living in exotic places like Damascus and Baghdad. Her days were like dreams floating out of Oriental fables.

They had both composed letters to her parents, he to ask Hugh Bell’s permission to marry Gertrude, she to tell them of the news. After two weeks, when her parents did not respond, she wrote again, knowing for certain that her father would want to check her young man’s credentials. She guessed that the long wait did not augur well; her father was extremely particular about whom she could marry, and Mr. Cadogan did not really fit the bill. Hugh Bell expected a rich husband for his daughter, one who had a good income and good prospects for the future. Henry Cadogan was the eldest son of the Honorable Frederick Cadogan and the grandson of the third Earl Cadogan, but he had not inherited any family fortune. His salary as a junior diplomat was insufficient to support Gertrude, and to make matters worse, he was a gambler who had mounted up significant debts. He was well read and worldly, but as Hugh Bell learned when he contacted family and friends in Teheran, Cadogan was also arbitrary, strong willed, and intolerant of any interference with his wishes.

Even before her father’s reply arrived, Gertrude wrote to her mother that if Hugh refused to give his permission, the only thing Cadogan could do would be to stay in Persia and hope for a promotion. If he received an ambassadorship or something similarly remunerative, then the wait would have been worthwhile. “The consolation is that people really do get on in this profession and make enough to live on before so many years. But then,” she acknowledged, “the kind of life is rather expensive of course.”

At last in September her father’s letter came. With a quickened pulse, she opened the envelope, but her deepest fears turned out to be true. Hugh Bell refused to give his consent. He hoped that a separation would make Gertrude change her mind. She was heartbroken. She wrote to her stepmother for solace: “I care more than I can say and I’m not afraid of being poor or even of having to wait, though waiting is harder than I thought it would be at first. For one doesn’t realize at first how one will long for the constant companionship and the blessed security of being married, but now that I am going away I realise it wildly … our position is very difficult and we are very unhappy.”

In spite of their passion, they respected the social rules. They saw less of each other, feeling they no longer had the right to meet. Still she begged her mother to understand Henry Cadogan as she did. She could not bear that her parents think of him as anything less than “noble and gentle and good.” This was the loving side he had shown her. “Everything I think and write brings us back to things we have spoken of together, sentences of his that come flashing like sharp swords; you see for the last three months nothing I have done or thought has not had him in it, the essence of it all.”

She would choose to do it all over again, she assured them, despite the current pain and the awful separation that was coming. It was worth it all, she told them, “more than worth it. Some people live all their lives and never have this wonderful thing; at least I have known it and have seen life’s possibilities suddenly open in front of me—only one may cry just a little when one has to turn away and take up the old narrow life again.… Oh Mother, Mother,” she wailed.

O
n the boat journey home she wrote to her trustworthy friend Domnul Chirol, revealing her pain and confusion. “I think you know vaguely about my affairs—
vaguely
is all I know about them myself at present, but I fear they look very bad. It’s a threatening, stormy vagueness, not a hopeful one. Mr. Cadogan is very poor, his father I believe to be practically bankrupt and mine, though he is an angel and would do anything in the world for me, is absolutely unable to run another household besides his own, which is, it seems to me, what we are asking him to do.” She and her father had not yet had a chance to discuss the situation, but she hoped he would see Henry Cadogan’s father and arrive at some sort of decision. In the meanwhile, she and Cadogan were not allowed to consider themselves engaged and the possibility of their marriage remained in the distant future. “I write sensibly about it, don’t I, but I’m not sensible at all in my heart, only it’s all too desperate to cry over—there comes a moment in very evil days when they are too evil for anything but silence.”