Wild Talent (17 page)

I confess, Jeanne, though I am not often at a loss for words, I could think of no adequate response!

Hélas
! What impulse draws me into this vulgar world of charlatans and pseudo-mages, these
mystif-icateurs
in their carnival finery, who prey on the deluded and hallucinated? And I think of you, Jeanne, possessed of genuine powers, but hidden away in Clerkenwell and wasting your talents in the service of a third-rate medium. Whatever would they make of you in Paris?

How I wish you could be here with me, my sensible Jeanne, to persuade me away from bad company and frivolous entertainments.

Alexandra

May 30

I feel a little stronger today, and thanks to Millie's ointment, the rash on my hands is fading. But Madame Rulenska will not excuse me from tonight's séance, for a spiritualist group is coming to see us perform.

May 31

It is difficult to write of what happened last night, as I scarcely understand it myself. Madame began with her usual repertoire of tricks — the raps and floating instruments and so forth — and moved on to the reading of secret messages, which went as well as usual. Then, as I was putting the envelopes into their basket, my feeling of lightheadedness returned, and I felt quite unsteady on my feet. But now it was time to dim the lamps, and call on Mlle Violette and Running Wolf.

Sudddenly, in that close, hot, incense-filled room, the world began to spin around me. I remember that I staggered, and grasped the back of a chair for balance. Figures appeared, cavorting round me in a mad quadrille. There was Mlle Violette, dancing headless and bloody in her wide silk skirts, and Running Wolf, a tomahawk in one hand and in the other, a dripping scalp. There were other faces, spirit faces, twisted with anguish, pallid and swollen and disfigured, fearful to look upon.

I must have cried out, for vaguely at a distance I heard a stirring and murmuring, a sound of bewilderment and concern.

And there was George, just as he had looked that day in the byre, blood dripping from his shoulder, his eyes filled with a dark and terrible intent. But I was not the one that he turned to with a look of murder — it was Tom who stood beside me, defenseless and unawares. It was Tom who was to suffer at George's hand, and I who must find a way to save him. We were in some other place, not Clerkenwell, the three of us suspended in that terrifying moment. My heart raced, nausea rose in my throat, pain lanced through my skull. My hands burned as though they were aflame, and I lifted them into the wind that gusted through the room. Things toppled and smashed. All around me I could hear the thud of falling objects, startled shrieks, the sound of splintering wood.

And then I was back in the ordinary world. Wide-eyed with astonishment and alarm, the spiritualist ladies were fleeing in disarray. Madame Rulenska, white-faced and furious, robbed for once of speech, stood staring: first at me and then at the circle of wreckage that lay around me like the aftermath of a storm.

“Well, that's a right mess you've made of things, in't it?” Her voice was loud and strident, all genteel pretensions fallen away. “You're a fat lot of use to me, my girl, if you're going to pull a trick like that!”

“I'm sorry . . . ” I started to say.

“My dear, you've no call to be sorry.” Mr. Dodds had come to stand in the doorway, teacup in hand, surveying the scene. “The fault is not yours, it is entirely Madame Rulenska's.”

“Not her fault?” shrilled Madame Rulenska. “With the room in a shambles, and my customers run off in hysterics?”

“My dear lady, can't you see that you've made this poor child ill?”

“What, I've made her ill? What have I to do with it? If this how she means to behave, I've a good mind to put her out in the street.”

Mr. Dodds' voice was quiet, but all at once it had a dangerous edge. “Like your last assistant, Madame?”

“Who, you mean Daisy? That went home to the country to care for her mother?”

“Ah, but it was not the mother that was sick, was it? It was poor little Daisy, whose hands were all red and raw from dipping them in benzine, and who fainted dead away from the fumes.”

“Bollocks!” said Madame Rulenska. “Benzine's harmless enough, it's naught but cleaning solvent —I 've used it often enough myself.”

“But twice a day, six days of the week?” asked Mr. Dodds.

“I think not. Nor, I think, are you sensitive to the fumes, as Miss Guthrie clearly is. You may recall I warned you about Daisy. If you keep on like this, you'll have Miss Guthrie's death on your hands as like as not.”

“And if you keep on interfering, I'll have the pair of you out on the street!”

Dear Mr. Dodds! I know that he is truly concerned for me, and is not afraid of Madame Rulenska's wrath. But Madame R. is as stubborn and self-centred as Madame Blavatsky ever was. She made no reply, just gave us both a venomous look and stalked out of the room, shouting for Milly to come and help set things to right.

CHAPTER THIRTY

June 9

T
hough I watch for the post twice a day there still has been no word from Tom. Surely by now he has had time enough to reply to my letter. Perhaps he is ill? I cannot believe that he has had a change of heart. But I have had another letter from Alexandra, which disturbs me almost as much as does Tom's silence.

Chère
Jeanne, I have been to visit my family in Brussels, and while I was there I paid my respects to my father's old comrade M. Elisée Reclus, who has retired to a pleasant house at Ixelles. In his old age he is as radical as ever, and continues to produce impassioned manifestos inciting the working classes to revolt. There in his pleasant suburban garden, or by his fireside late at night, political exiles, poets and free thinkers of all kinds grow drunk on cheap red wine and revolutionary fervour. And Paris, too, is delirious with change, with the promise of revolution. You can smell it on the air, like a whiff of gunpowder.

Everywhere in the cafés are nihilists, anarchists, Marxists. Nothing is sacred, all things are possible. The artists too, and the poets, are caught up in the ferment, outraging the bourgeoisie and overturning stale conventions.

So do not be surprised, Jeanne, if I tell you that I have been visiting certain (almost respectable!) nihilist and anarchist salons. All my life I have been in a state of rebellion; and I have wasted too much time in the company of M. Péladan and his kind, with their absurd romantic fantasies.

    Alexandra

June 15

My father always said that we must find our true purpose in life. His was a love of learning, and helping others to learn. No one at Lansdowne Road, least of all HPB herself, doubted for one moment that they had discovered their purpose. Mr. Dodds has his history of Clerkenwell, which he swears will occupy him for the rest of his days. Even Madame Rulenska has her questionable ambitions. And Alexandra — her purpose in life will be something grand and glorious, though I think she has not discovered it yet.

And as for me? I thought once, a long time ago, that I knew what I wanted out of life. I would scarcely recognize her now, that bookish child who dreamed of literary fame and her name in gilt. When I became a bondager, those high-flown ambitions shrank down to a simple need to be warm and dry, to have gloves for my hands and stout boots for my feet, to endure the winter and see the summer come again. At day's end I had a weeded field, a pile of mended sacks, the cattle fed; at summer's end the harvest safely gathered in. Purpose enough, I think, for most ordinary folk.

Alexandra writes of charlatans and mystifiers who prey on the deluded, but does she understand that is what I too have become? This life with Madame Rulenska is surely not what my father hoped for me, nor what I hoped for myself.

June 20

Mr. Archibald Keightley has written, enclosing notes from Mr. Bertram and Countess Constance with news of Lansdowne Road. He tells me that Madame Blavatsky is indeed much recovered, and the other day, persuaded by Mrs. Besant, she actually left the house, to attend the grand opening of a working women's restaurant. The Countess reports that for the restaurant opening the likes of Lady Colin Campbell, the Baroness de Pallandt and Mrs. Oscar Wilde were out in force, and HPB was in her glory. Oscar Wilde himself dropped by, and they traded barbs and witticisms in lively debate. And now, to the bemusement of the good Dr. Mennell, HPB is planning a summer holiday in France.

Reading Mr. Bertram's gossipy note, I realize how much I miss the lively, eccentric, world of Lansdowne Road. Mr. Willie Wilde, the journalist, has fallen on hard times, because (says Mr. Bertram, disapprovingly) he has wasted too much time in sporting clubs. Mr. Oscar Wilde is working on a novel which will undoubtedly cause a scandal. And there is more:

“Mr. Yeats has introduced his friend Miss Maud Gonne, an Irish lady with whom he is clearly in love. Miss Gonne is tall and very beautiful, has strong opinions and is said to be a revolutionary. We find her quite intimidating. She tells us that she has had occult experiences in which she takes leave of her body, gazing down at it from ceiling height. (HBP suspects her of using too much hashish.) One day Miss Gonne asked HPB if it was possible to be a Theosophist and also involved in politics. HPB advised her that she should do as she liked, and anyone who objected was a flapdoodle. Miss Gonne seemed pleased with this advice.”

But from Tom, not a word. How foolish I was, to imagine for one moment that his intentions were serious, to think that our brief acquaintanceship could ever be more than that. Yet twice a day I listen for the post with a thumping pulse, tightness in my throat, and when there is no letter for me, it fair breaks my heart. I think of that long-ago night when we three bondagers, Edith and Nellie and I, gazed into the glass to see who we would marry; and for me there was only darkness.

June 24

Another week begins with another sad procession of heartbroken mothers and grieving widows, along with the usual assortment of curious onlookers. Every séance increases both Madame Rulenska's savings account, and my mood of melancholy. She refuses to let me give up the trick with the benzine, though now she allows me to work with a cloth over my face, and Mr. Dodds went to the chemist's and found me some india rubber gloves. But my illness has given way to malaise and boredom — what Alexandra would call
ennui et tristesse
. When Alexandra finds herself in such a state, her first instinct is to travel somewhere else. As she once admitted, she is quite fond of running away, not because she must, but simply because she can.

“What would they make of you in Paris?” Alexandra has asked. And “How I wish you could be here to persuade me from bad company.” (To judge from her last letter, that company may be worse — and perhaps more dangerous — than she admits.)

If Madame Blavatsky, with her failing body and poor swollen limbs, can journey abroad . . . I s it possible? Could I simply run away? Again?

Chère
Jeanne,
But of course it is possible! You must give your notice at once. What better time to see Paris, than in this summer of the Great Exhibition! We can be
touristes
together. I will show you my beloved Musée Guimet, and we will admire M. Eiffel's tower, which Madame Blavatsky so abhorred. We will “lean on the Pont de la Cité in front of Notre Dame and dream, with heart and hair to the wind.” (That is my poor attempt at translating M. Paul Verlaine, a strange and disturbing and wonderful poet I have discovered of late.)

I believe that
les Jourdans
may shortly have a room to let, and if not, you are most welcome to share mine. Also, until you find work you are not to concern yourself with money, for I am about to come into an inheritance, and expect to be embarrassingly rich.

Write soon,
chérie
, and tell me when you expect to arrive.

A.

July 5

I have confided my plans to Mr. Dodds, who said, “My dear girl, you are an employee, not a bondservant. Madame Rulenska may rant and rave, but she can hardly keep you here. And Paris? Well, I need not tell you that it is a perilous city for a young woman on her own. But you are a sensible young person, and so I am led to believe is your Parisian friend, Mademoiselle David. And as for the journey, what you want are a stout pair of boots and an up-to-date Baedeker's.”

So on Mr. Dodds' advice I have purchased a copy of Baedeker's
Paris and Environs with Routes from London
to Paris,
and have taken my boots to the cobbler to have them resoled.

July 7

I have given my notice. Madame Rulenska is not well pleased.

“What, are you daft? Leaving a good position in a respectable house? Scarpering off on your own, without so much as a by-your-leave, to some wicked foreign place?”

She hovered over me, like a great black bird about to swoop. “You have no notion when you're well off, my girl. Don't I feed you and house you, and pay you good wages? Be bloody grateful I don't do materializations, like Mrs. Fisher down the street.”

That thought made me shudder, for I've heard of the horrid trick Mrs. Fisher and some other mediums use to produce their ghosts and spirits: spewing forth lengths of white gauze from their stomachs and throats — or worse still, from other parts of their bodies. If Madame Rulenska imagined there was good money to be made, she would surely add it to her own repertoire.

Under that implacable black stare, I nearly lost my resolve. But I thought, Alexandra would not put up with this; and neither shall I. And so I turned and went straight upstairs to organize my belongings, leaving Madame Rulenska to shout at my retreating back.

PARIS

. . . to embark on perilous travels and vast
undertakings . . . search for new perfumes,
bigger flowers, unknown pleasures.

—Gustave Flaubert

. . . in this street, in the heart of this magical
town . . .