Sophie and the Sibyl (31 page)

‘It’s a message for the gentleman, Madam the Countess.’ She bobbed in the doorway. ‘The boy said it was urgent, but didn’t need an answer.’

‘Oh.’ Sophie looked up, stretching out her hand for the letter. ‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know, ma’am. But it’s from Mrs. Lewes at the Priory.’

Sophie snatched the letter from the maid, flung Lucian upon the hearthrug and tore it open, ripping the Sibyl’s careful steady writing in the process. Her face changed as she read, as startled and affronted as Our Lady herself, accosted by the angelic messenger. Sophie, far from mastering the lurking anger that bubbled within her, now burned with a pure, white rage.

My dearest Max,

Were I strong enough to attend the ceremony at the Museum this afternoon, nothing would prevent me from congratulating you in person. To think that you have discovered our beloved Lucian who means so much to us both! My delight in seeing you after all these years would make my presence at this particular celebration a temptation indeed, but I am most unwell with an infected tooth. Mr. Lewes will be there to applaud you on behalf of us both. However, I trust that you will call at the Priory before you return to Berlin. My satisfaction in learning that you have at last found your vocation, and have indeed become the famous scholar and adventurer I always longed to honour and admire is indeed a high reward. You have fulfilled all my hopes and expectations.

My dearest Max, if you but knew how deeply I wish to efface any misunderstanding that might still divide us. You have shown nothing but reverence and esteem towards me and I treasure our friendship. My affection for you remains unchanged.

Kindest Regards

Marian Evans Lewes

What was it that unleashed Sophie’s colossal rage? The fact that she was ignored? Unmentioned? Her discovery of the statue in the basilica unacknowledged? Her passions and ambitions written out of the official recorded history, yet distorted in the Sibyl’s grandiose prose, and held up to be jeered at and belittled by the fashionable world? Should she sit by, powerless, while this antique dame wrote intimate little letters to her husband? Well, whatever it was that exploded in Sophie’s heart, a fierce sense that she had been wronged urged her to don her boots, thunder into the hall, bellow in French for her straw hat and long coat, hurtle out of the main doors, clutching the fatal letter with its innocent address printed on the crest, and bound away down the quiet road in the direction of Regent’s Park Canal.

‘Sophie? Sophie!’ called her impotent hostess.

But Countess Sophie von Hahn would not, could not, now be stopped.

The house stood well back from the road: two storeys, high windows and the roses, bristling with fresh shoots, arched before the main doors. The pointed white gables gleamed above her. Sophie paused at the gateway, intent as the Avenging Angel, and looked down at the address in her gloved hand, which she now unfolded like the seventh seal. The Priory – yes, this is the place. She swung on the doorbell and heard it pealing through the house. A tiny maid, with curious, knowing eyes looked up at her, clearly expecting a different face. Sophie instantly stepped inside, and to the maid’s obvious alarm, closed the outside door behind her.

‘I am very sorry, madam, but Mrs. Lewes is indisposed and can see no one. Mr. Lewes has gone to a ceremony at the British Museum. I’m very sorry, but –’

Sophie cut her short and practically pushed her into a Chinese jar that served as an umbrella stand.

‘I’m perfectly aware that Mr. Lewes is out. Tell your mistress that her German publisher, Maximilian Reinhardt August Duncker, needs to speak to her on urgent business.’

A foreign whisper in Sophie’s accent startled the maid who lost confidence in her role as Cerberus, the guardian of the gateway. Unscrupulous and forearmed, Sophie handed over Max’s visiting card. Shaking her head doubtfully the little maid sped off up the staircase, indicating that Sophie should wait in the morning room. Green wallpaper, comfortable chairs, occasional tables, hand-painted botanical studies, elegantly framed, Sophie waited for thirty seconds, and then set off after the maid, catching up with her on the second landing.

‘But, madam –’

‘Go on. Announce me. Say that I’ve brought an important message from Max. She will see me. She’s expecting a reply.’

With uncanny prescience Sophie knew that her husband’s name would prise the Sibyl out from beneath her afflictions, and raise her cage of prophecy from the Delphic abyss. The maid knocked and entered the great drawing room. Sophie stepped inside the door and paused, assessing the battlefield. Theatrical drapes, pulled back a little, revealed the full extent of the room. A slender, bowed figure in a white lace cap with a poultice tied round her face sat bent double on the sofa, apparently mending a rug. The famous pendulous jaw remained quite concealed, but the nose, spotted red and purple, projected forth. The great head, apparently too weighty to lift, rose tentatively in acknowledgement of the unwelcome intrusion. The maid scuttled up to the Great Lady, pressed the card into her hand, muttered an unintelligible apology and fled, closing the drawing-room doors behind her. Sophie, lurking by the curtains, heard only one word – ‘Max!’

And that name had a magical effect upon the shrunken, morbid shape. The Sibyl straightened, turned, and attempted to rise, her shawl slipping back upon the cushions. All the blinds, pulled half-down, created shadows across the carpets. In the murky dark the two women peered at one another, in appalled surprise.

‘
You
are Mrs. Lewes?’ Sophie strode forward. She intended her opening salvo to be fierce, rational and unanswerable, but her voice boomed like a cannon in the still, fetid air, her tone scornful and incredulous. Was this pale shade really the great sage to whom all Europe bent the knee? And there was no dancing ape-man to shield and protect the famous writer now. She faced one of her most ardent readers, whose rage, unchained, shattered the silence.

‘I would not wait downstairs only to be told to go away again. I’ve waited long enough for an answer to my letter. That letter I wrote to you over four years ago, the letter you never answered. And I am returning this incautious message you sent to my husband expressing your undying affection. So you at least have been fully answered. You did not have the decency to return my letter to me. Nor did you answer it. You gave it to my husband to make trouble between us.’

She flung down the crumpled note at the Sibyl’s feet. Two white lines appeared on either side of the writer’s purple nose. She was wearing spectacles. Had Sophie, now standing before her, back to the light, taken the trouble to observe her antagonist closely, she would surely have seen a frail old lady, ravaged by toothache. But the young Countess, hat straight as a cardinal’s, a shimmering demon incarnate, busy exorcising her anger in a manner never envisaged by the philosopher Lucian, had no intention of pausing, even to draw breath.

‘I am Sophie, Countess von Hahn, and you have written me into the opening chapters of your new book – a thing you had no right to do. I accuse you of stealing one moment of my life and of distorting the facts. You are not just. And you are not honest. I once admired your books and now you have disappointed me.’

The Sibyl sank back upon the sofa, as if bludgeoned into the cushions. This accusation proved too preposterous to comprehend. Who on earth had allowed one furious, articulate reader to blaze through her quiet drawing room with her voice raised? And who was this young woman after all? What possible connection did she have to Max? The Sibyl’s toothache created a mist in her brain. This room served as her audience chamber, her throne room, the sacred space where her disciples bowed down before her, paid homage to her genius, waited quietly to be granted a moment beside her, a little breath of comfort and guidance from the elderly deity. And where was her mountebank? Her ardent keeper, her defender against unhinged enthusiasms? Her deepest fears rose to the surface, and stuttered out from her swollen jaw.

‘You have judged me,’ she whispered, ‘you scorn me for who I am, for how I have lived. You presume to know how I have suffered.’

The Sibyl answered another tribunal, where she had been judged in absentia, not the one before her. The present confrontation collided at a crossroads. But Sophie stood her ground. She had not stormed the Priory to discuss the Sibyl’s situation or the writer’s feelings, but to give vent to her own. Her savage cry could be heard all down the stairs, where the servants, gathered at the foot, gazed upwards, transfixed with curiosity and alarm.

‘No, you’re wrong. I don’t judge you for what you’ve done or who you are. And frankly, I don’t care what you’ve suffered. Why should I care whether you are, or are not, legally married to Mr. Lewes? Plenty of people live like that in Germany. I wouldn’t be so small-minded. I wasn’t brought up to think about other people in such an ungenerous way. But you, you are not generous. If I had been you and had your choices before me, I would not have written your books in the way that you have done. I would not have told women to be satisfied with self-sacrifice, convention and subservience. I would not have lived one life and believed in another.’

And with that Sophie turned on her heel, flung open the drawing-room doors, and then slammed them behind her. The thud of her boots on the descending stairs vibrated back through the great house. The servants scattered. The Sibyl sat rigid in the half-light, clutching Max’s card, her scorned and loving letter fluttered at her feet, her eyes dimmed.

One way and another the Furies had crossed her threshold.

END OF CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

recounts a Terrible Succession of Melancholy Events.

One thing still puzzles me about this extraordinary encounter. The Sibyl, supposedly a fountain of transparent confidences, confessing all to her devoted little man, never told Lewes anything about this stormy interview. When he returned that evening, jubilant, and full of amusing tales, eager to describe the ceremony and the pompous Director of Antiquities, he found her, collapsed upon the sofa, in a state of great distress. But even as he comforted her and called for warm milk, he never suspected that more lay behind the tearful wails than the prospect of a bad night and aggravated toothache. Poor Polly, that tooth will have to come out. I can’t bear to see your pale, drawn face. Why, your cheek feels quite hot. Let me send for some ice, then at least we can cool that reddened swelling. Come, lean on me. There, there, you should be in bed. Oh, but you missed some fine performances. Our boy Max recited Lucian in Greek!

Sophie, however, had been observed leaving the Priory. Ah, yes, the watchful spy lurking near the canal counted the minutes of her visit, and then set off, close behind the brilliant Countess, matching her stride and studying her clothes. Behold Edith Simcox, whose passion for the Sibyl was so overwhelming that she was reduced to skulking in hedgerows, hoping to gather up scraps of information from the servants or a glimpse of her idol in the windows. Edith delivered fresh flowers that very morning, and several loving messages to aid the Sibyl’s progress with her toothache. But she, the faithful lover and disciple, was not admitted to The Presence. So who was this straight, slender girl, unchaperoned, got up in expensive, fashionable dress and a startling straw hat, who strode straight into the sanctuary, without even bothering to scrape her boots?

Edith Simcox polished her spectacles, and quickened her pace. Sophie, still volcanic with rage, would not have noticed cannon to the right of her, or cannon to the left of her, and certainly never noticed the concentrated surveillance of a nondescript thirty-two-year-old woman in a camel jacket and a felt hat haring down the path behind her. But Edith Simcox, now transformed into the passionate huntress, a pack of hounds baying in her heart, convinced herself that she had captured a younger rival in her sights.

Who was Edith Jemima Simcox? She was, quite literally, a shirt-maker, who founded a women’s shirtmaking cooperative with her friend Mary Hamilton. She was a businesswoman, a writer, and a social reformer. And from 1876 until 1900 she kept a Journal, a personal, secret Journal, not intended for publication, which she called
Autobiography of a Shirtmaker
. And therein, with unselfconscious, excessive, unhinged emotion, in a style that still seems complex, intricate and embarrassing, she recorded her passion for another woman, a woman twenty-five years older than herself, a woman who was the most famous writer of her day, Marian Evans Lewes.

Simcox first met the Sibyl in 1872, when the idealistic shirtmaker was busy preparing a review of
Middlemarch
, and for the next seven years she haunted the house and traced every move the writer chanced to make. She frequented the drawing room, whenever she could get in, the gardens and the nearby streets whenever she couldn’t. She wrote love letters, then tore them up, sent little notes filled with declarations, embroidered treasures, armfuls of forget-me-nots; this unchecked, immoderate obsession transformed her into a suppliant whose behaviour made her utterly ridiculous. The Sibyl received all homage gracefully, but made it clear that the depth and extent of Edith’s affection would never be returned or reciprocated. Did the great lady find herself moved by Edith’s tendency to fling herself upon the rug and kiss her darling’s feet? The beloved moved her slippers out of reach, flattered, but irritated. Edith went on loving; she too could not be stopped.