The Scarlet Sisters (43 page)

However, John Henry Wallace, former personal secretary to Sir Francis and Lady Cook, alleged that her remarks, which did not name him, were enough to identify him as the person she said had circulated stories of her murdering Sir Francis. Said to be bitterly upset at not being mentioned in the will, two years after Sir Francis died Wallace sued Tennessee for $50,000 for libel and slander.

Wallace testified in January 1903 that he had acted as Tennessee’s private detective and had trailed Sir Francis beginning in 1897, when Lady Cook “accused her husband of ‘carrying on’ with a certain lady.” Wallace said he followed him for four years until just before Sir Francis’s death at age eighty-four, being paid his regular salary by the very man he was spying on. He said he found nothing. Lady Cook’s counsel said her press statements did not refer to Wallace and charged that this was a blackmailing action, gambling on Lady Cook’s making “any sacrifice” rather than have the matter dragged into court. The jury thought otherwise and in March awarded Wallace £550.

Upon hearing the verdict, Tennie jumped up, “waving her arms and screaming.” When an usher took her arm to escort her from the court, she cried out, “Don’t pull me out. I’ll walk out. I am a sorrowful woman. I have done more for England and America than anybody else has done and my reputation is ruined.” As she left, she cried, “Cruel, cruel.” On June 13, Tennessee was granted a retrial. The Court of Appeals ruled in her favor, characterizing the Wallace suit as a blackmailing action.

This saga ended most strangely when a doctor was called to Wallace’s home to attend his sick wife the next month. He found her dead, having died from natural causes. Nearby was Wallace, bleeding from razor wounds to his throat. The doctor bound up his wounds and called the police, who charged him with attempting to commit suicide. While in the dock, he was seized with a fit. The case was adjourned, and Wallace was “remanded to the Kingston Workhouse.”

Following tradition, Sir Francis’s first-born son, Frederick, one year
older than Tennie, inherited a fabulous fortune—all the estates in Portugal and two-thirds of his father’s other property, including Doughty House. The second son, Wyndham, received the remaining third. Tennessee received £25,000 and the income for life from an investment of £50,000. Cook’s daughter received £25,000 and income from an investment of £100,000. His famous collection was left in trust for Frederick and his heirs, and kept in the Doughty Gallery. If Tennie was bothered by not receiving any of the art collection, she never said so publicly. Frederick was not the devotee of fine art that his father was. It was said by family that he “preferred his Madonnas in the flesh.”

Tennie, now in her late fifties, began a wandering life again, but this time as a very wealthy widow. She traveled the world in her crusade to aid women in whatever cause came to mind.

As for Victoria, the spirits could not have divined an eerier act of fate that left her, however lonely and unhappy, very wealthy. Because her father-in-law had died three days before her husband, she inherited the family home at Bredon’s Norton and its surroundings and property elsewhere in England, plus their house in Hyde Park Gate and most of its contents. She also became the largest shareholder in Martins Bank. Had Martin’s father outlived his son by even a few hours, she would have inherited only £100 from her father-in-law upon his death. His handsome bequest in his will for son John would not have passed to her.

After several months of mourning, Victoria, with Zula now her devoted caregiver, concentrated on publishing
The Humanitarian
until giving it up in 1901. In 1900, Victoria had begun her retreat from London, moving with Zula and Byron to her country home, Norton Park, in the village of Bredon’s Norton. It was not far from the place she had always hated to visit, Overbury. Despite her wealth, Victoria spoke mostly of her lonesomeness. “Wealth only shows the falsity of life.” People “flock to you for material things,” compared to “those way back who came to you because they understand the truth and your mission. What does one gain if they get the world and lose soul power?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Moving On

In 1901, Victoria turned sixty-three, and Tennie, fifty-six. Neither was in good health but Tennie kept up a world-jaunting life, staying in a residential hotel in Kensington while in London. She never complained about the loss of Monserrate or Doughty House, but neither did she mention ever seeing Sir Francis’s children.

Despite her deep mourning, Victoria had spent four busy years in London, not entertaining as lavishly as she and Martin had, but attending such gatherings as the Duchess of Westminster’s reception for Lord Salisbury. Yet Victoria was happiest in the company of thinkers, entertaining professors, and scientists who contributed to
The Humanitarian
.

She became more and more querulous and paranoid, threatening Martin’s family after having imagined that they contemplated suing her and demanding to know what had been done with her husband’s ashes. Her one friend in the family, nephew Robert, patiently informed her that he had buried them at sea as requested.

Victoria left London in 1901, escaping to an idyllic village 109 miles from London, in the rolling green fields at the edge of the Cotswolds. Her 1,200-acre estate outside Bredon’s Norton featured an enchanted walled garden near the front of her ivy-covered Tudor-style home. A wide, circular gravel drive led to the entrance. The center hall resembled a cozy hunting lodge, with a diamond-patterned floor of black slate and pale
gray stone, antlers looking down from thirteen-foot-high walls, dark wood paneling, and a huge fireplace. To the right, a large dining room sat across from Victoria’s study, with windows looking out to the Malvern Hills. On the inner entrance stained-glass door, Victoria had inlaid her favorite word,
KISMET
, on the bottom. Above bedroom doorways, she had inscribed the names of poets, such as Tennyson.

Zula Maude, now forty, had replaced Tennie, Colonel Blood, and then Martin as the devoted caretaker for an emotionally needy Victoria. Six years before, when Zula was thirty-four, she made the decision to be a submissive member of her mother’s entourage, forsaking the kind of freedom her mother had so seized in her youth. A family row back then had made the newspapers when Victoria tangled with her niece Ella (daughter of sister Meg) and Ella’s husband, Dr. Charles Stuart Welles, over Zula. Victoria had hired Welles as the American agent for
The Humanitarian
and to look after Zula, who ran the American publication. Under a three-year contract, the Welleses were living with Zula in a Manhattan residence leased by Victoria in her daughter’s name. In 1895, when Victoria heard that Zula had fallen in love, with a man Victoria presumed was after her daughter’s money, she furiously blamed Welles for not rigidly overseeing her daughter. Zula joined her mother’s suit against the Welleses to get sole possession of the house. In turn, Welles sued Victoria for back pay. Meg Miles, who had apparently remarried, as she was now called Margaret O’Halloran, unloaded on her sister Victoria, who had attacked
her
daughter Ella Welles, telling the whole story to the
New York Times
: “All this trouble arose over Zula Woodhull’s falling in love.” O’Halloran said her famous sister went on an eight-day siege to burn all that was “cursed” belonging to the Welleses, including seven trunks’ worth of dresses, children’s toys, and small furniture items. The rest of the furnishings she gave away. “There is no language that can describe the rascality of Victoria,” who has now tried to “clear out my daughter,” cried Meg.

From then on, Victoria extracted a promise from Zula never to marry; in exchange, she would inherit her mother’s vast wealth. So Zula Maud, thirty-four at the time, gave up her last chance to find a life of her own.
Victoria, the legendary free lover in her youth, emphasized a decorous life for Zula. The latter returned to England with her mother and, when Martin died in 1897, devoted her life to caring for Victoria as well as Byron. Zula’s attempts at individual expression, outside of her
Humanitarian
work, included writing a play, but were met with little success. She had none of her mother’s looks or complicated charisma.

Tennie had stayed out of the fight over Zula Maud and had continued a close friendship with the Welleses’ daughter, her grandniece Utica. When Utica’s father, the Dr. Welles with whom Victoria had fought, secured a high post in the U.S. embassy in London, Tennie arranged for grandniece Utica to be presented to Queen Victoria. In 1903, Utica married Thomas Beecham, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune and later famously known as Sir Thomas Beecham, the founder and conductor of the London Philharmonic. Utica was the first of his three wives. Beecham had numerous affairs, including a liaison with the infamous Lady Cunard, known as Emerald. Although separated for years, Utica, unlike her great aunts Victoria and Tennie, did not believe in divorce. Beecham finally divorced her in 1943. Throughout her life, Tennie, a.k.a. Lady Cook, played a motherly role to grandniece Utica, Lady Beecham. Contrasting Victoria to Tennie, sister Meg chastised Woodhull for not being more like Lady Cook, “who is honored and loved for her charitable work in London and Portugal.”

With Zula’s help, Victoria continued to publish
The Humanitarian
for four more years after her husband’s death, abandoning the nine-year venture at the end of 1901. She continued to travel often with Zula, but never lectured. Her last attempt, in America in 1893, was a failure. Her fiery oratory of the past had been dimmed by duller words spoken by a woman in her mid-fifties wearing glasses to read. Now, nine years later and passionate about motorcars, Victoria zoomed through London and the countryside in her 20 horsepower Mercedes Simplex; she and Zula Maud were reportedly the first women to drive through England to France and back again, in 1903. Sometimes she was driven by a chauffeur, who received numerous citations for driving, at Victoria’s insistence, above the 20 mph speed limit.

When she busied herself with local issues, Victoria was far from popular with Bredon’s Norton villagers, who were suspicious of her newfangled ideas and hostile to her imperious ways.

Victoria halted a charity that provided clothing and a ton of coal for every village family each winter, sacked servants, and refused to participate in “indiscriminate charity,” which fueled outrage. After she made village improvements that included the installation of streetlights, vandals systematically smashed the glass lanterns and ripped out equipment. A few years later, a chastened Victoria played Lady Bountiful, providing warm clothing for the needy at her Christmas parties and working with the local church to help families.

Victoria never stopped trying to sanitize her past. In 1893 an anonymous pamphlet appeared in London depicting her as having been a “gentle home-loving wife” before she embarked on a career. Later she hired a writer to create and send letters to the local papers that stretched the truth beyond belief: Victoria had been “all but elected” president of the United States, despite Grant’s landslide victory. In 1902 she told a magazine reporter that Buck was a “well known figure of the Ohio bar.”

Zula and Victoria tried a “back to the land” collective, encouraging local women to grow vegetables. It was not a success. Backward education committees refused to back their next move: a progressive school that would start with prekindergarten. In addition to basics, they would emphasize painting, music, carpentry, sewing, cooking, basket making, and physical education. They would also provide swings and seesaws, unheard of in rural schools. When the school board refused to participate, Victoria and Zula started the school with their own money. By 1908 it was attracting children from three miles away. However, the two-year experiment crashed in 1909 after a board of educators refused to give the school a “Certificate of Efficiency.” One editorial summed up a general feeling: pupils were going to mourn the loss of this “natural” education that “made the world a wonderful place” and a return to schools bound by rules and “copy-book maxims.” Still, parents were warned that they could be prosecuted if they did not remove their children from Victoria and
Zula’s school and return them to a school holding the required Certificate of Efficiency.

It is no wonder that Woodhull, despite her “Fairy Godmother” donations, remained aloof from this community and concentrated on her at-home salon, frequented by international and London visitors.

It may have surprised those who witnessed Woodhull as the prominent sister in the 1870s, but Tennie now took center stage, surpassing her older sister in carrying on their crusade for women’s rights. She spoke to queens, presidents, and would-be presidents. She lectured twice to crowds of seven thousand cheering, applauding fans at Royal Albert Hall.

In this new century, Tennie used her influence and celebrity as Lady Cook to garner headlines in her fight for women’s rights in England, France, Portugal, Italy, and the United States—wherever she was asked, and sometimes where she was not. At age fifty-nine, in January 1905, she looked the epitome of a Lady Cook, her short, curly silver hair crowned with a fussy, frilly hat tied in a bow at the chin. Just as she had entranced the British as an American novelty, she was now fascinating the press back in her homeland three decades later as a titled woman of note. Her views were now more staid than startling. Did she believe in communities raising children? “No indeed! Home is heaven where the father and mother work together in trust and sympathy. There is no holier word in our language” than
mother
, and the world needed “pure fathers” as much as the virtuous mother.

She was the press’s favorite dowager. At a New Year’s Eve party ushering in 1905, Tennie was the attraction in a luxurious, crowded room filled with the sound of soft dance music. Regal in sapphire velvet and ancient lace, “a woman of slight figure and with a face like an ivory miniature crowned with silvery hair,” Tennie was surrounded by admirers. To younger women, it seemed impossible that she had been jeered at and thrown out of hotels thirty-five years before. “She is seen everywhere—in exclusive drawing-rooms and at famous clubs. Everyone asks. ‘Who is the lovely white-haired lady?’ ”