The Scarlet Sisters (40 page)

Over time, all was not bliss, however, as Tennie dealt with her hectoring mother, a sex scandal involving Sir Francis, and her own severe illnesses.

In an undated letter written in 1890, when Tennie was in her mid-forties, she pleaded with Victoria to come to Monserrate. “My dear husband is doing all in his power to make me happy, but he cannot help me from having turn of life. Now Victoria if I am your darling sister & you love me so much[,]
now
[she underlined] is your time to show it.” She was writing about her menopausal traumas and slightly chastised her older sister. “When you were passing through your time of life I was with you & came to you at every call no matter who I sacrificed. Now I am in a very weak and nervous condition. I have wiped out the last persecution in America & our fighting is finished. Now it is my life that I am fighting for. Monserrate is lovely, quiet and beautiful & indeed a Paradise, but I am in a terrible, nervous & melancholy state & I need someone with me that will sympathize and comfort me.” Sir Francis wrote a postscript: “Dear Victoria, I add a few lines to urge you and Mr. Martin to come. In her present distressed condition she really requires your sisterly sympathy and support, so do come… Wire soon and say you are coming. Yours sincerely, Frank Cook.” There is no indication whether Victoria came, but she at various times wrote impassioned and caring letters about Tennie’s health, which became worse after menopause.

From the beginning of Tennie’s marriage, mother Annie was up to her manipulative tricks. “Mother has written some awful letters to Sir F———,” Tennie wrote Victoria. Her mother took pains to tell Tennie in a rambling, wheedling letter that she must return to Doughty House to care for “your dear old mother,” now a widow. Since she still could not read or write, Annie dictated to a friend. Her paranoia seemed apparent when she noted that the letter was being written in secret, behind a locked
door. “I prefer Doughty house
much
before Monserrat” [an accepted spelling at that time]. At Doughty she could be happy “if I lived to be as old as old Methusala [
sic
]… I think you must have been as blind as a bat,” she remarked about Tennie’s first visit to Doughty House. “Otherwise you would have seen what a lovely place it was.” A dig at the possibility of Tennie’s becoming high hat followed. “It is too often the case that those that done [
sic
] the good will be forgot [
sic
] when the glory comes but I hope that will not be the case with my darling angel… Now would you not think it best for you to come home and take a little comfort with your mother before she dies?” She was now calling Sir Francis “your darling husband.” Annie would be around for four more years, until 1889. She got her way, dying at Doughty House.

In 1893, eight years after Tennie and Francis were married, a woman stepped out of the past to claim that Sir Francis had promised to marry her. She had been a housekeeper in Cook’s home while his first wife was alive. She testified in court that Victoria had paid £30 for letters from Sir Francis to her. Sir Francis admitted the liaison but that he had never promised to marry her. He paid nominal damages.

The next year, a small item was headlined:
A SOCIETY SCANDAL. A BARONET CHARGED WITH SEDUCTION
: “An action for breach of promise of marriage has been brought against Sir Francis Cook by a young woman named Miss Frances Susans. The plaintiff states that the defendant seduced her and afterwards induced her to assent to abortion. Sir Francis Cook, who is in his 77th year, is a wealthy merchant.” An exonerating article immediately followed, stating that the woman’s lawyer had quit the case and that a verdict was in favor of Sir Francis.” This clearly was a blackmail attempt, but Victoria scolded her sister on her husband’s “libertine” ways.

Victoria seemed torn between disliking Cook and wanting to remain close to Tennie. Her huge scrawl took up a whole page for just a few words: “My darling sister… I am impelled to write you and ask you if your heart is satisfied with the man that stands by your side as husband. Is he worthy of the precious charge in his keeping? I fear not when I think
what you have endured since he called you wife. My heart fails to believe you are content. The richness of that noble nature has never been satisfied with the scant appreciation his soul has given you.
Oh
, my sister, a hungry heart is not easily satisfied. You are going in company with a man who openly insults you and boasts of it and you are forced to bow your head and murmur not. Why? Because the one who should resent is a party to it. Write me a line.”

A more agreeable letter invited the couple to visit: “Darling sister, I have just shown Johnny your letter. He says when you come in tomorrow you must stop with us.” This had to have been after their mother had died in 1889. “We are all that is left in England. I have been sad unto death all day—you are
sad
as you can be. No we must have no more unnatural conduct.” The provocative phrase is not explained but may have referred to free love. “We have suffered enough.
God
knows we deserve some happiness my precious sister. We will settle all our difficulties and enemies. Now only be brave and get well.” A stab of fear for Tennie’s health followed: “You know it would kill me to lose you now.” Halfway down the page Martin wrote in his fine script, urging them both to come.

After Sir Francis’s death, Victoria wrote a frenetic memo in crayon, partly about her daughter, Zula, and also as an apology to her: “I want to free my soul of its agony. My sister became the wife of Cook who was an
old
libertine. She took on his
conditions
. I, trying to save her from going to pieces, allowed her to bring his conditions into our sweet home… My child, how I regret your ever coming in contact with one of what the worlds call family—you are not of their world… she [Zula] was forced to live in the congested atmosphere of Ignorance of the old world’s decrepitude which would not nor could not advance. The regret is why did I allow our lives to be affected by it. My daughter has never said one word of anger or a look that is not Love.”

This letter leaves more questions than answers. Does this mean that at his advanced age Cook was a philanderer? What did the phrase “unnatural conduct” mean? Free love? Or was Victoria just dramatizing or speculating? Tennie’s “taking on his conditions” sounds possibly like a venereal
disease, but there is no record for confirming this. Why did Victoria have to save Tennie from “going to pieces”? Both sisters wrote often to one another about their extreme nervousness, which could—emphasis only on “could”—have been a symptom of such disease.

It is clear that unspecified serious illnesses frequently plagued Tennie. In an undated letter, which had to have been written before 1897, Tennie frantically wrote, “If we are both going to die at once I want to leave a name & put ourselves right before the world & no time is to be lost. We must get decent photos, have truthful interviews in the paper & an elaborate & correct account of our great work & our success & our true worth.” She was as fixated on leaving a grand legacy as Victoria. “Our husbands might give us the money that they said they had left us, to spend now in putting us right before the world. I mean bis [
business
] I have suffered to [
sic
] much to die out & give my crown” to anyone who had not appreciated “us until to [
sic
] late.” Monserrate was the place “to work out our future destiny. It is Paradise, everything is lovely, fruits of all kind, abundance of flowers & everyone in love with me & the climate grand. I am improving fast & have a big appetite. My bowels move every day & I sleep well & my complexion is beautiful. I am sure we will both get well here if you come. Cable quickly.”

There is no record of whether Victoria visited.

Tennie’s illnesses point to an ebb and flow: she had considerable energy to travel and lecture at times, and then would collapse and become bedridden. In 1920, when she was seventy-five, she felt near death while enduring great pain. Her doctor “now decided that I have a bad fistula & that I must have it treated & seen to & as soon as my nerves will permit I must have an operation performed. He says I must be put under chloroform but I dread that. Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock I have got to have another little operation to enlarge the hole & keep the wound open… I am very feeble & I am thinking more of my health & meeting my god… in my state of health I prefer to be alone & keep very quiet.”

The site of the fistula, with an opening that needed to be drained of infection, was never mentioned. A fistula—an abnormal connection
between an organ, vessel, or intestine as the result of injury or surgery or from infection—can occur in several places in the body: between an artery and a vein; the skull and nasal sinus; the bowel and vagina; or in the stomach, lung, and bowels. It is impossible to know where Tennie’s was located. However, she knew about vaginal fistulas, and a decade before, at age sixty-five, she was still mesmerizing large audiences and, judging from the applause, hitting a nerve with scathing lectures about men “sowing their wild oats” only to give virgin brides pain, venereal diseases, and damaged children.

The specter of sexually transmitted diseases regarding the sisters has surfaced in biographies of Vanderbilt, Woodhull’s claims of her first husband’s constant whoring, and the scurrilous gossip of the unreliable Joseph Treat (“Tennie’s most painful illness… was a result of sexual disease”). One doctor treating Vanderbilt stated that his enlarged prostate “was likely the result of gonorrhea or ‘excessive venery’ ”—too much sex. Since gonorrhea was not seen as serious as syphilis at the time, Vanderbilt possibly could have infected Tennie, if they were lovers, with unforeseen results. Venereal disease can cause sterility, and Tennie had no children. It can also cause mental defects, such as those that afflicted Victoria’s son, Byron. Yet any such connection is pure conjecture.

Still, the subject must be addressed, as it concerns theories regarding the sisters and Vanderbilt. A biography of Vanderbilt by Edward Renehan Jr. splashed on its flap cover that “unreleased archives” showed Vanderbilt was in the throes of syphilitic dementia when he met the sisters. Renehan concluded that Vanderbilt’s relationship with them proved he was demented by the disease at the time. However, T. J. Stiles skewered Renehan’s unreliable claim as fraudulent in a subsequent Vanderbilt biography.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Love and Libel

At age forty-five, Victoria Claflin Woodhull Blood Martin was madly in love. Her interest in Martin may have begun out of a frantic need for redeeming respectability, but she actually found herself in a legalized marriage with a soul mate—something she had scoffed at being nigh impossible in her lectures and writing fifteen years before.

Their letters to one another are a study in contrast. Hers are filled with frenzied neediness and great outpourings of emotions, etched in large letters with jabbing underlines for emphasis and the
T
s crossed nearly through whole words. His are quieter, loving, but circumspect. Hers run on in haste without punctuation. His are dotted with commas and semicolons in all the right places.

Their physical intimacy was obvious: “I need your precious arms around me this moment,” she wrote. She called him her boy, and he signed “Your loving boy,” but John, three years younger, was her anchor. Without him she seemed adrift. “I am so lonely… darling husband my heart is very sad tonight.” And in another: “My darling husband—I am dreadfully nervous—I cannot endure being away from you—I got up at 4 this morning—I cannot get to sleep until I hear [your] precious lips murmur God bless my dear wife… you must love me very much & wire me the moment you get this.”

During their marriage Martin was away on short but frequent business
trips or speaking engagements, yet her letters sound as if their separations were forever. “I am lonely tonight—without thee my heart cries aloud for your kiss—sometimes I think I shall end it all before you return—this cold unsympathetic atmosphere has at last chilled me through [she was not talking about the weather]. Deceptions, low cunning trickery all going to make up what this world calls life.” Victoria “longed for the sympathy [from him] which I know lies stored up for
me
when all else fails.”

She ruminates about those who had done her wrong, and levels digs at Martin’s family. In 1897 Victoria was still writing caustically about his brother, Richard, who so disapproved of her: “I have just been listening to the story of
Richard
working to get a Baronetcy.
He
[twice underscored] will get it. Money buys all.” Her private neediness would have startled audiences who witnessed her independence onstage, yet a hint at Victoria’s success in capturing the devotion of successful men is revealed in her letters. The “feminine” rather than “feminist” side of dependence on men was beguiling and flattering, and threaded through her male relationships. Gen. Benjamin Butler eagerly prepared her appearance before Congress; Theodore Tilton played the gallant rescuer who introduced the little woman at her free lover speech; Stephen Pearl Andrews wrote her ringing words; and Colonel Blood constantly administered to her needs.

John responded to her pleas. “God bless you darling. You know that my heart is with you every minute.” In his letters, such as this one, written eleven years after their marriage, he attempted to reassure his “DARLING WIFE… I cannot bear to think that you are sad in our home while I am away.”

He also was needy. “Dearest little wife,” he wrote on September 1, 1887, “I was so sorry not to find any letter or message from you this morning.” In another he wrote, “Make me feel every minute that your heart is with me as much as mine is with yours.”

Victoria seemed to vacillate between attempting to seek his parents’ love and rejecting his pleas to visit them at Overbury. Martin was especially upset in 1896, thirteen years after their marriage, when she refused to come to Overbury while he visited his “gouty” father and his mother,
but Victoria continued to feel unwelcome. Several letters from Martin in May and June of 1896 reveal a continuing rift. In June he sadly noted, “Yesterday was my birthday. Nor did anyone, not even my little wife, send me greetings.”