Poor Things

22. The Truth: My Longest Chapter

I knew of General Blessington long before Baxter read his name aloud from Wedderburn’s letter. In those days “Thunderbolt” Blessington was as popular with newspaper readers as Sir Garnet Wolseley and “Chinese” Gordon. Viscount Wolseley became commander-in-chief of the British armed forces. General Gordon, by getting the dervishes to dismember him, is venerated as an imperial martyr. My wife’s first husband has been less kindly treated. The Times of London and Manchester Guardian now ascribe his greatest actions to officers who were never named when the actions were first reported. The popular press follows their example. Why has the unhappy end of a brave warrior eclipsed a lifetime of patriotic effort? The best biography of him is still an entry in the 1883 edition of Who’s Who. He is not mentioned in later editions.

BLESSINGTON, Sir Aubrey la Pole, 13th Bart.; cr. 1623; V.C., G.C.B., G.C.M.G., J.P.; M.P. (L.) Manchester North since 1878; b. Simla, 1827; e.s. of General Q. Blessington, Governor of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Emilia e.d. of Bamforth de la Pole, Bart., Hogsnorton, Loamshire, and Ballyknockmeallup, Co. Cork; S. cousin 1861; m. Victoria Hattersley, d. of B. Hattersley, Manchester locomotive mnfctr. Educ.: Rugby, Heidelberg, Sandhurst. Commanded a native levy on the eastern frontier, Cape of Good Hope, 1849; expedition against the Swazanji, 1850–51 (severely wounded, mentioned in despatches, Brevet of Lieut. Colonel); volunteered for Crimea and served before Sebastopol 1854–56 (twice wounded and mentioned in despatches for repulse of five Russian sorties with very small detachment of the 4th Queen’s Own, Crimean War medal and three clasps, Order of Medjidie and Turkish War Medal); Brigade Major in charge of pursuing column in central India during the Mutiny 1857–58 (wounded, present at taking of the forts of Fumuckenugger, Bullubghur, storming of the Cashmere bastion and heights of Delhi, medal for India, bar for Delhi, Order of the Golden Fleece from Portuguese Crown for defence of Goa); Assistant Adjut. General, British Expeditionary Force to China, 1860 (wounded during the destruction of Yangtse shore batteries but present at the entry into Pekin and storming of the Summer Palace); Governor of Norfolk Island Penal Colony, 1862–64; Governor of Patagonia, 1865–68 (crushed the Tehuelches and Gennaken revolts without losing a man); Governor of Jamaica, 1869–72; Commander of Burmese Punitive Expeditionary Force, 1872–73; Lieut. General throughout suppression of first half-breed revolt N.W. Canada, 1874; Adjut. General, Ashanti War, 1875 (wounded, Victoria Cross); Commander-in-Chief of Militia in Canada, 1876 (injured by exploding bombard in tour of Quebec Province, thanked by Parliament with money grant of £25,000, 5th class Legion of Honour); Cons. candidate Loamshire Downs; Grand Warden of G.L. of Freemasons of England, 1877. Publications: While England Trembled, account of the government’s handling of the 1848 Chartist movement; Purging the Planet, a monodrama; Political Diseases, Imperial Cures, a lecture to the United Service Institute. Recreations: hunting, shooting, breeding thoroughbred stock, chairman of Manchester Humane Society Refuge for Waifs and Strays, personal supervision of experimental farm where slum orphans train for resettlement in the Colonies. Address: 49 Porchester Terrace, London. Clubs: Cavalry, United Service, Pratt’s, British Eugenics.

The day after Bella returned to us I read the above entry in Baxter’s library, first making sure nobody saw me. Weeks later I learned that Bella and Baxter had separately done the same. We were all too full of plans for Bella’s future to investigate or call up the past together — we hoped it would leave us in peace. Only Baxter had used the information to prepare for the past calling unexpectedly on us. As we hurried home from the church that cold Christmas morning only he was in a serious frame of mind. I had been infected by Bella’s eager curiosity and a crazy sense of the General’s importance. I had no fears that he would take her from me, but thought my love-life might be entering history as the love-lives of Rizzio and Bothwell had done — not enough for me to end disastrously, just enough to make me famous. Even a remark by Baxter did not cure me of that delusion. As we approached number eighteen we saw the General standing within the study window, glaring down on us. Bella shivered. Baxter said gently, “His left eye is glass — he always stares straight forward to make the right eye match it. No great general has been wounded as often as de la Pole Blessington.”

“O the poor lad!” said Bella, and waved encouragingly up at him. He gave no sign of seeing this, yet I suddenly feared pity might draw her toward him.

When we entered the study he continued staring out of the window with his back to the room. The old manufacturer was huddled in an arm-chair by the fire. He glanced at us briefly while Bella and I sat down together at the table, then went on gazing into the flames. The General’s lawyer and doctor sat primly on the sofa beside the detective. Seymour Grimes was the only visitor who looked comfortable: he held a glass of whisky filled from a decanter Mrs. Dinwiddie had left in easy reach. Baxter went straight to a bureau, unlocked it and brought out a sheaf of papers. He laid them on the table and asked no one in particular, “Does the General prefer to stand?”

“Sir Aubrey usually prefers to stand,” murmured the General’s doctor cautiously.

“Good,” said Baxter. He sat where he had a clear view of everyone and began talking at once.

“In a world as thickly peopled as ours nearly everyone must have several others who look and sound like them. Has anyone a better reason for thinking Bella Baxter is Victoria Blessington?”

“Yes,” said the old manufacturer. “A week ago I got a letter from a man called Wedderburn. He told me my Vicky was living here, with you. I contacted my son-in-law and was told he had received a similar letter a fortnight before, but had done nothing about it.”

“It was a madman’s letter!” said the General’s lawyer swiftly. “Wedderburn not only said Lady Blessington had been his mistress, he said she had been the mistress of Robert Burns, Bonnie Prince Charlie and a string of celebrities leading back to the garden of Eden. Are you surprised that the General ignored such an epistle?”

“Yes,” said the old man, scowling at the flames. “That letter was the only clue to my Vicky’s whereabouts in three whole years. We should have moved heaven and earth to find her when she first disappeared, but Dr. Prickett here said, ‘No need to call the police — I am sure it is a temporary derangement — a public scandal will only unhinge her further — if you love your daughter, give her time to return home of her own free will.’ Of course Prickett only says what Sir Aubrey wants him to say. I know that now, though I did not know it then. Days passed before Scotland Yard were told, and they handled the whole business very quietly because. . because. .” (he made a noise between a chuckle and a sob) “. . Blessington is the nation’s darling — an example to British youth — Lord Palmerston said so! The newspapers never printed the story and nothing was discovered. Or if it was, nobody told me. So as soon as I read Wedderburn’s letter I employed Grimes here. Tell them what you found out, Grimes.”

The detective nodded, sipped from his glass and spoke in the rapid lingo of a London native. He was an ordinary man of about thirty: so ordinary that I noticed nothing personal in him except his style of speech, which left out first-person pronouns.

“Was called to investigate Lady Blessntn’s dispearance seven days ago, three years after event. Lady vanished fromerome sudden being disturbed distressed distraught and in the famly way — eight months and a fortnight pregnant which often drives the fair sex round the twist poor things. Obtained photoportrait of lost lady, a goodun. Came to Glasgow pursuing information in letter from Duncan Wedderburn esquire and find said gentleman incarcerated in locked ward of Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum, positively no admittance. Lady B vanished from 49 Pochester Terrace 6 Febry 1880 so examined all police and Humane Society records of distraught or mindless female vagrants apprehended or otherwise detected in Glasgow after that date. Notice female of Lady B type seen diving from bridge into Clyde river on Febry 8 and fished out by Humane Society employee, one George Geddes. Showimphoto. ‘Thatser!’ sezee. ‘Where now?’ says I. ‘Corpus unclaimed,’ sezee, ‘so taken to University Medical College by police surgeon on Febry 15,’ sezee — wrongly. Godwin Baxter was police surgeon but College ledgers show Mr. Baxter delivered NO corpses there on Febry 15 or anytime after, because on Febry 16 College gets letter fromim saying he is resigning from police work in order to concentrate (sezee) onis private practice. Which he certainly did. By end of Febry coalman, milkman, grocer, butcher deliverin to 18 Park Circus know Mr. Baxter as a resident lady patient. Paralysed. By April she is walkin but childish. Three years later she sits here bloomin like a rose and fit to marry again. Good luck to you, Miss or Lady B!”

Seymour Grimes raised his glass to Bella and swallowed the contents.

“I like that man,” whispered Bella so intensely that I did not know if she understood him. Everyone else looked at Baxter.

“Your chain of reasoning has a missing link, Mr. Grimes,” he said. “You tell us that George Geddes (a popular and respected person in this city) says he recovered a dead body.²⁶ How can the corpse he retrieved sit with us here, when you say it lay for seven days in a mortuary?”

“Can’t say — not my department,” said the detective, shrugging his shoulders.

“I believe I can cast light on this dark business,” said the General’s doctor, “if Sir Aubrey allows me.”

The General gave no sign of having heard him.

“This is my home, Dr. Prickett,” said Baxter. “I not only allow, I request you to give your opinion.”

“Then I will, Mr. Baxter, though you will not like it. The London medical world is aware that since the start of this century the Glasgow surgeons have been putting electric currents through the nervous systems of dead bodies. It is on record that in the 1820s one of your sort animated the corpse of a hanged criminal, who sat up and spoke. Public scandal was only prevented by one of the demonstrators severing the subject’s jugular with a scalpel.²⁷ Your father was present at that demonstration. I have no doubt he passed on all he learned to you, who were his only assistant, apart from ignorant nurses. Sir Colin was notorious for knowing more than he shared with his colleagues.”

“God,” said Bella in a dull voice I had not heard from her before, “when we left the church today you said you were going to admit that you lied to me. I think I know now what the lie was. My pa and ma never died in an Argentine train crash. You invented that to hide something worse.”

“Yes,” said Baxter, and covered his face with his hands.

“So that poor old man really is my father? And that pole of a man who seems afraid to face me is my husband? And I ran away from him and drowned myself? O Candle please hold me tight.”

I am glad I did so because the General turned round.

He turned round and spoke in a crisp, thin, high-pitched voice which grew steadily louder.

“Stop shammin, Victoria. You remember perfectly well that Hattersley is your father, that I am your husband and that you ran away from home to escape from your wifely duties. This absurd story about drownins and morgues and loss of memory has been cooked up to hide the plain fact that for three years you have lived with a freak in order to glut your insane appetite for carnal intercourse, first with him, then with a lunatic libertine, and now with a low-bred ruffian. You are doin it now — here — before me eyes. UNHAND ME WIFE, SIR!”

He screamed the last words so loud I nearly obeyed him. One of his icy-blue eyes may have been glass but it matched the other so perfectly that I shuddered at the hatred I read in them. But I suddenly saw Baxter beside us, every inch as tall as the General and five times thicker, and unexpected support came from the old man who still gazed into the fire.

He said, “Do not talk about my Vicky like that, Sir Aubrey. You know whose carnal appetites drove her from home. If she is pretending to have forgotten then we should thank her. If she has truly forgotten it let us thank God.”

“I am ashamed of nothing in me treatment of me wife,” said the General sharply, but Bella gently untwined her body from mine and went to the old man.

She said, “You are trying to be kind so maybe you are my father. Let me hold your hand.”

He looked at her, twisting his mouth in a painful smile that reminded me of my mother’s smile, and let her take his right hand between both of hers. She closed her eyes and murmured, “You are strong. . fierce. . cunning. . but can never be kind, because you are afraid.”

“Not true!” cried the old man, snatching his hand away. “Strong, fierce and cunning, yes thank God, I am those. Those let me heave myself and your mother and you out of the stinking muck of Manchester, heave us all out by thrusting weaklings under it. I could not haul out your three little brothers — they died of cholera. But I fear nothing in the world except hunger, poverty and the sneers of folk with more money. Only a fool does not fear these, especially when he has suffered them. We all suffered from them until I squeezed your uncle out of his share in the workshop. He squealed like a gashed pig and tried to get his own back by joining Hudson — Hudson! The railway king! But I smashed him and Hudson too. Yes Vicky,” said the old man with a sudden roar of laughter; “your old father was the man who smashed King Hudson! But you are a woman and know nothing of business. Ten years later I had an Earl on my board of directors, was putting men into Parliament and employing half the skilled work-force of Manchester and Birmingham. Then one day you turned seventeen, Vicky, and I suddenly saw you were a beauty. I had been too busy to look at you before that or think of getting you groomed for the marriage market. So I dragged you straight to a Swiss convent where the daughters of millionaires are scraped clean and polished along with daughters of marquises and foreign princes. ‘Make a lady of her,’ I told the mother superior. ‘You will not find it easy. She is headstrong, like her ma once was — the sort of donkey who needs more kicks than carrots to drive her in the right direction. I do not care how long you take or how much it costs, but make her fit to marry the highest in the land.’ It took them seven years. Your ma was dead (feeble action of the liver) when you got home, and for your sake I was glad. Though a good wife for a poor man she was no use to a wealthy one. Her plain ways would have ruined your chances. Ee the nuns had turned you into a lovely thing — you spoke French like a real Mamselle, though your English still sounded Manchester. But the General did not mind — did you, Sir Aubrey?”

“No. Even her quaint dialect entertained me. She was the purest creature and prettiest thing I had ever met,” said the General broodingly. “She had the soul of an innocent child within the form of a Circassian houri — irresistible.”

“Did I love you?” said Bella staring at him. He nodded heavily.

“You adored him — worshipped him,” cried her father, “you had to love him! He was a national hero and cousin of the Earl of Harewood. Besides, you were twenty-four years old and he was the only man apart from me you had been allowed to meet. You were the happiest woman in the world on your wedding-day. I hired and decorated the entire Manchester Free Trade Hall for the reception and banquet, and the Cathedral choir sang the Hallelujah chorus.”

“You loved me, Victoria, and I loved you,” said the General hoarsely, “so we became husband and wife. I am here to remind you of that, and protect you. Gentlemen forgive me!”—and his right eye flickered disconcertingly toward Baxter and me—“forgive me for shoutin and insultin you. Perhaps you are honest men despite the circumstances, and me bad temper is notorious. For thirty years I served England (perhaps I should say Britain) by usin meself as harshly as the regiments I commanded and the savages I subdued. Not a muscle in me body is without its separate ache, especially when I sit down. I can only rest when perfectly prone. Will you allow me to rest for a moment?”

“Please do,” said Baxter.

Lawyer, doctor and detective sprang from the sofa. The doctor helped the General lie down flat on it.

“Let me put a cushion under your head,” said Bella, carrying one over and kneeling beside him.

“No, Victoria. I never use a pillow. Have you truly forgotten that?” said the General, closing his eyes.

“Yes. Truly.”

“You remember nothin at all about me?”

“Nothing certain,” said Bella uneasily, “yet something in your voice and appearance does seem familiar, as if I once dreamed it or heard it or glimpsed it in a play. Let me hold your hand. It might remind me.”

He wearily stretched out his hand but when her fingers touched it she gasped and pulled them back as if they had been scorched or stung.

“You are horrible!” she said, not accusingly, but astonished. “You said so on the day you fled from me,” he answered wearily, his eyes still shut, “and you were wrong. Apart from me military honours and social position I am a man like other men. You are still an unstable woman. Prickett should have operated on you after our honeymoon.”

“Operated? What for?”

“I cannot tell you. Gentlemen only discuss such things with their physicians.”

“Sir Aubrey,” said Baxter, “three people in this room are qualified medical men, and the only woman present is training to be a nurse. She has a right to know why you say she is an unstable woman with insane appetites who should have had a surgical operation after her honeymoon.”

“Before would have been better,” said the General without opening his eyes; “the Mahometans do it to their women soon after birth. It makes em the most docile wives in the world.”

“Hints are no use, Sir Aubrey. This morning in church your doctor whispered to me what he thinks — and you think — the name of your wife’s illness. If here and now he does not say it aloud it will be discussed in court before a Scottish jury.”

“Say it Prickett,” said the general wearily. “Bellow it. Deafen us with it.”

“Erotomania,” muttered his doctor.

“What is that?” asked Bell.

“It means the General thinks you loved him too much,” said Baxter.

“It means,” said Dr. Prickett hastily, “that you wished to sleep in his bedroom — share his bed — lie with him (I am forced to be blunt) every night of the week. Gentlemen!”—he turned from Bella and appealed to the rest of us—“gentlemen, the General is a kind man who would cut off his right arm rather than disappoint a woman! On the day before his wedding he asked me for an exact description — from the scientific, hygienic standpoint — of a married man’s duties. I told him what every doctor knows — that sexual intercourse enfeebles brain and body if over-indulged, but in rational doses does nothing but good. I told him he should allow his lady wife to lie with him half an hour a night during the honeymoon period, and once or twice a week afterwards, though all amorous dalliance should cease as soon as pregnancy was detected. Alas, Lady Blessington was so deranged even in her eighth month she wished to lie with Sir Aubrey all night long. She sobbed and wailed when not allowed to do so.”

Tears streamed down Bella’s cheeks. She said, “The poor thing needed cuddling.”

“You could never face the fact,” said the General through clenched teeth, “that the touch of a female body arouses DIABOLICAL LUSTS in potent sensual males — lusts we can hardly restrain. Cuddlin! The word is disgustin and unmanly. It soils your lips, Victoria.”

“I know everyone here is telling what they think is the truth,” said Bella, drying her eyes, “but it sounds daft. Sir Aubrey talks as if he was liable to tear women apart, but honestly, if he cut up rough with me I think I could break him over my knee like a stick.”

“Ha!” cried the General scornfully and his doctor began talking very fast, perhaps annoyed by Bella’s words and the equally sceptical glances Baxter and I had exchanged during his account of the case. His voice was almost as shrill as the General’s as he said, “No normal healthy woman — no good or sane woman wants or expects to enjoy sexual contact, except as a duty. Even pagan philosophers knew that men are energetic planters and good women are peaceful fields. In De Rerum Natura Lucretius tells us that only debauched females wriggle their hips.”

“That creed is both false to nature and false to most human experience,” said Baxter.

“To most human experience? Why certainly!” cried Prickett. “I speak of refined women — respectable women — not those of the vulgar mass.”

“This peculiar notion,” Baxter told Bella, “was first recorded by Athenian homosexuals who thought women only existed to produce men. It was then adopted by celibate Christian priests who thought sexual delight was the origin of every sin, and women were the source of it. I do not know why the idea is now popular in Britain. Maybe an increase in the size and number of boys’ boarding-schools has bred up a professional class who are strangers to female reality. But tell me this, Dr. Prickett. Did Lady Blessington agree to a clitoridectomy?”

“Not only did she agree to one — she begged for it with tears in her eyes. She loathed her hysterical rages, loathed her pathetic desire for contact with her husband, raged against her diseases as much as he did. She eagerly swallowed all the sedatives I administered, but at last I had to tell her they were worse than useless — that I could only cure her by cutting out the centre of her nervous excitement. She begged me to do it at once, and was bitterly sorry when I said we must wait until her child was born. Lady Blessington!” said Prickett, turning back to Bella again, “Lady Blessington, I am sorry you remember none of this. You used to consider me a good friend.”

Bella shook her head wordlessly from side to side. Baxter said, “So Lady Blessington did not flee from home because she feared your treatment?”

“Certainly not!” cried Prickett indignantly. “Lady Blessington used to say my visits were the pleasantest part of her week.”

“Then what was the reason for her flight?”

“She was mad,” said the General, “so needed no reason. If she is now sane she will come home with me. If she refuses she is still mad, and it is me duty as her husband to place her in an institution where she will be properly treated. I cannot leave her in a ménage which is turnin me maniac ex-wife into a nurse!”

“But she has not been your wife since she drowned herself,” said Baxter quickly. “The marriage contract says the marriage lasts until death do you part. The only independent witness to the identity of your wife and my ward is the Humane Society official who saw the suicide and retrieved the corpse. Dr. Prickett suggests I gave her a new life. If so I am as much the father and protector of the revived woman as Mr. Hattersley was of the earlier, and as entitled as he once was to present her in marriage to the husband of her choice. Mr. Harker, how does that logic strike you?”

“As piffle, Mr. Baxter: piffle and poppycock,” said the lawyer coolly. “I have no doubt Lady Blessington immersed herself in the Clyde, and no doubt the Humane Society official rescued her. He is paid to rescue people. He called you in to resuscitate her, and you plainly succeeded. You then bribed him to let you abduct her and bring her here where, pretending she was an invalid niece, you used drugs to render her childish, and thus enjoyed her physical charms and amorous weaknesses under the façade of being a good uncle and a kind physician. You even took your mistress on a world tour while playing that rôle! By the time you returned to Glasgow you had tired of her, so connived at her elopement with the unfortunate Duncan Wedderburn. Yesterday I visited poor Wedderburn’s mother, a terribly distressed lady. She told me her son had been bodily, mentally and financially destroyed by the woman he calls Bella Baxter. Were he not now in a locked ward of Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum he would be in jail for defrauding his clients of their funds. Your twice discarded mistress returned to you last month, so you quickly arranged to marry her to McCandless, your weak-minded parasite. If this story is put before a British jury they will believe it, because it is the truth. Look, Sir Aubrey! Look at him! The truth has hit him hard!”

With a groan like underground thunder Baxter had left the chair, pressed his hands to his stomach and bent over them, writhing epileptically. I was surprised he did not fall, but not by his distress. The solicitor had mixed facts and lies so cleverly that for a moment even I believed him. But Bella sprang to Baxter’s side, put an arm round his waist and soothed him upright again. This brought me to my senses. If the visitors had never before heard the cold fury of a thoroughly rational Scot, they heard it now.

“Mr. Baxter would be a stone statue if he felt no pain,” I told them. “You have used this wise, kind, self-sacrificing man’s hospitality to call him a freak and a liar. In the hearing of the patient whose life he saved you have accused him of viciously assaulting her. You know nothing of the terrible crack which rings her cranium — had he not tended her like a mother and educated her like a father it would have caused worse than total amnesia: she would be an imbecile. His tour with her was no amorous excursion, but the best way of reintroducing her to a world she had forgotten. He did not connive at her elopement with Wedderburn — he tried to dissuade her, begged me to dissuade her, and when we both failed he gave her means to return to us when she tired of the escapade. No roué discarding a mistress would have done that! You have also had the insolence to call me — his best friend! Archibald McCandless M.D. of Glasgow Royal Infirmary! — you have dared to call me a low-born ruffian and weak-minded parasite. No wonder that vagal nerve discharge has induced reverse peristalsis and that excess pancreatic juice has irritated the oesophagus causing severe heartburn! And you say his pain at such vilification is a sign of GUILT!!!??? Think black black shame of yourselves, gentlemen. You have almost persuaded me that you are not gentlemen at all.”

“Thank you, McCandless,” murmured Baxter.

He was sitting now in the arm-chair opposite Mr. Hattersley, Bella standing behind with her hands resting protectively on his shoulders. She watched him with an expression I later saw during our Italian honeymoon on the face of a Botticelli Madonna. Baxter now spoke to the lawyer as if nothing had happened.

“So you think the lady behind me is the same person as the General’s wife.”

“I know they are.”

“I will prove you wrong, and do so with testimonies from five independent witnesses, each a scientist of international fame. Lady Victoria Blessington was a hysteric; so childishly dependent on a husband who found her unbearable that her doctor’s visits were the happiest times of her week; so full of self-loathing that she gladly stupefied her mind with sedatives and yearned for her body to be surgically mutilated. Am I correct?”

“Yes, she gave the General hell,” grumbled old Mr. Hattersley, “but you might have mentioned that in her worst fits she still acted like a perfect lady.”

“She relieved her poor mind with sedatives,” said the doctor, “and wished to be surgically cured. Apart from that your portrait of the unhappy lady is all too true.”

“Yes, you know me wife well, Baxter,” sneered the General.

“I never met your wife, Sir Aubrey. The drowned woman who came to consciousness here is someone else. Tell the company, Dr. Prickett, who Charcot of Paris, Golgi of Pavia, Kraepelin of Würzburg, Breuer of Vienna and Korsakoff of Moscow are.”

“They are alienists — specialists in diseases of the mind and nerves. I regard Charcot as a charlatan, but of course on the continent even he is highly regarded.”

“On our world tour we visited them. Each examined the woman I call Bella Baxter and reported on her condition. These reports — signed and witnessed with English translations attached — lie on the table. Their terminology differs because they view the human mind from different standpoints, and Kraepelin and Korsakoff share Dr. Prickett’s view of Charcot. But all are unanimous about Bella Baxter — she is sane, strong and cheerful, with a vigorously independent attitude to life, even though amnesia (caused by injury to her skull and the loss of an unborn child) has left her with no memories preceding her arrival here. Apart from that her balance, sensory discrimination, recollective and intuitive and logical powers are exceptionally keen. Charcot daringly suggests the amnesia has enlarged her intelligence by making her relearn things when old enough to think about them, which people who depend on childhood training hardly ever do. They agree that she shows no signs of mania, hysteria, phobia, dementia, melancholia, neurasthenia, aphasia, catatonia, algolagnia, necrophilia, coprophilia, folie de grandeur, nostalgie de la boue, lycanthropy, fetishism, Narcissism, Onanism, irrational belligerence, unhealthy reticence and is not obsessively Sapphic. They say her only obsessive trait is linguistic. These reports are based on tests carried out in the winter of 1880–81, when she was learning to read and had an enthusiasm for synonyms, assonance and alliteration which sometimes verged on echolalia. Kraepelin said this was an instinctive compensation for her poverty of sensory reminiscence. Charcot said it might make her a poet; Breuer that the obsession would diminish as she gained more memories. It has done so. Her speech is no longer eccentric. Charcot said she was unusually free of the insane prejudices which characterize her compatriots, which of course was an expression of national prejudice, but his final words sum up the verdict of the rest: Bella Baxter’s most striking abnormality is her lack of it. Such a woman cannot be General Blessington’s former wife. Please examine these proofs, Dr. Prickett, or take them away and verify them at your leisure.”

“Don’t waste your time, Prickett,” said the General’s solicitor. “They are irrelevant. They are quibbles.”

“Explain, please,” said Baxter patiently.

“I will, very easily. Suppose that a sickly unpleasant fellow escapes from London after stealing my cash. Suppose that three years later the police arrest him in Glasgow, and are about to lock him up when a doctor cries, ‘Stop! I can prove this man is pleasanter and healthier since he stole your money, and has forgotten all about it.’ The police would think that a quibble. Lady Blessington’s erotomania made her a very miserable wife to the General, but neither he nor the laws of the land will allow her to commit bigamy and live happily ever after in a Scotch ménage à trois, simply because her happiness is sworn to by a horde of foreign brain doctors.”

A noise like a quietly cackling hen was heard — the General was amused. Baxter sighed.

Sighed and said, “Sir Aubrey. Mr. Hattersley. This woman is studying to do useful work in the kindly art of medicine. Why drag her backward into a marriage which made herself and her husband miserable? If McCandless is my parasite, Harker and Prickett and Grimes are yours. Nobody in this room wants a scandal. The only person outside it who knows the truth, or some of it, is a certified lunatic. All I have said has been to persuade you it is honourable and possible to let this woman freely choose whether she returns to England with you or stays in Scotland with us — honourable and possible.”

“Not possible,” said the General heavily. “The gossip about me wife’s disappearance has been increasin, not diminishin over the years. Half the London clubs think I got rid of me domestic problem like I got rid of the mutinous Indians and Ashanti. The damnable thing is, this time they disapprove. The Prince of Wales cut me dead last week and the cad owes me several thou. Since I left the battlefields and went into Parliament the papers have started forgettin I was once the nation’s darlin. A radical rag has started droppin hints, and unless I clap a libel writ on it the popular dailies will start callin me Bluebeard Blessington too. That arch-hypocrite Gladstone has suggested I clear me name by offerin a large reward for news of me wife’s whereabouts, dead or alive. Has everyone here forgotten that a Scotch parson will soon sit down to Christmas dinner and blab to his family and friends about a weddin service I interrupted? No, Victoria. If I find this Baxter has taught you to behave sensibly I will pay him well for his trouble, but you must return south, whether you remember me or not.”

“And think what you will have when you get home with him, Vicky!” cried old Mr. Hattersley growing very excited. “Sir Aubrey is three-quarters dead already and will not last more than another four years. That will give you time to squeeze at least one son out of him, then until the lad comes of age you can live how you like wherever you like: in the London town house or the estate in Loamshire or the other estate in Ireland! Think of those grand places, Vicky, all for you and me. Me! The grand-dad of a baronet! You owe me that, Vicky, because I gave you life. So be a sensible donkey. Honour and riches are the carrot heap ahead of you, a madhouse is the boot kicking you toward it. Yes, we can put you into an asylum for the insane! Who will care what a lot of foreign professors said two years ago when Dr. Prickett and an English specialist with a knighthood certify you are queer in the head? For you are queer Vicky, and the fact that you cannot remember your own dad proves it. Riches or a madhouse! Choose between em.”

“Or divorce Sir Aubrey,” said Baxter. “If he insists on taking a purely legal view of his marriage, so can you.”

We stared at him.

Even the General opened his eyes and watched for a moment as Baxter returned to his seat at the table and rearranged the papers so that a different set lay on top. He glanced at the upper page and said, “On the 16th of February 1880 Lady Blessington, then in an advanced state of pregnancy, was visited by another heavily pregnant woman, a former kitchen-maid in Porchester Terrace who said she was Sir Aubrey’s discarded mistress and begged for money. Sir Aubrey—”

“Take care sir!” barked the General but Baxter spoke louder: “Sir Aubrey broke in on them, flung the visitor into the street and locked his wife in a coal-cellar. Next morning Lady Blessington had disappeared.”

“Mr. Baxter,” said the solicitor swiftly, “you now pretend to know astonishing things about the past of a lady of whom, until this moment, you pretended to know nothing. If these allegations are not backed by eye-witnesses who will swear to their truth in a court of law — witnesses who will not collapse under the stress of skilful cross-examining — you will pay dearly for that slander.”

“My information comes from Sergeant Cuff,” said Baxter, “who you perhaps know of, Mr. Grimes?”

“Late of Scotland Yard?”

“Yes.”

“A good man. Asks big money but gets results. Likes sniffin around the skirts of the aristocracy. Yooimploydim?”

“I employed him last month to find all he could about Lady Blessington, after a letter from Wedderburn told me Bella Baxter was a reincarnation of Victoria Blessington. Cuff’s report here names many who will testify against the General in court, most of them servants who resigned or were dismissed from his service soon after Lady Blessington disappeared.”

“No connection,” said the General. “English servants are the worst in the world and none last more than two months with me. People say I dealt too savagely with the savage races, but the only man I can entirely trust is me Indian manservant. Odd thing, that.”

“Servants who testify against their former employers,” said the solicitor, “have very little credit in an English court of law.”

“These will be believed,” said Baxter. “Please, Mr. Harker, take this copy of the report back to your hotel and discuss it privately with the General. Go now, at once. Too many wounding things have been said here today. Tomorrow I will visit you in the St. Enoch’s Hotel and hear what you decide to do.”

“No God,” said Bella in a firm, gloomy voice, “my past has grown too interesting. I want all the details now.”

“Tell her, Baxter,” said the General, yawning. “Play your word game to the end. It will change nothing.”

Baxter sighed, shrugged and started summarizing the report while the solicitor, on a chair near the window, studied the copy he had been given. Baxter spoke straight to the General, however; not to Bella. Had he done so he would have been disturbed by the change the story made to her face and figure.

He said, “Dolly Perkins, a girl of sixteen, was your parlour-maid until the day before your wedding, Sir Aubrey, when you hired an apartment for her in a boarding-house near Seven Dials. You did not give your name to the landlady, Mrs. Gladys Moon, but she recognized you from your pictures in the Illustrated London News. She says you visited Miss Perkins regularly for two hours every Tuesday afternoon, and also on Friday afternoons when you paid the rent. This went on for four months, then one Friday while paying Mrs. Moon you told her, ‘This is the last time I’m doing this, you won’t see me again. Dolly Perkins is no use to anyone now. If you do not get rid of her she will give your house a bad name.’ Mrs. Moon spoke to Miss Perkins who admitted she was penniless and pregnant. So she was told to leave.”

“She was not pregnant by me,” said the General coldly, “because me revels with Dolly never involved impregnation. Nobody will believe that, of course, so the greedy bitch tried to blackmail me into givin her money to give birth to the bastard, sayin she would tell me wife I had sired it if I refused. So I told the slut to go to hell and left her without a shillin.”

“You queer sad old General,” said Bella mournfully, “did you honestly think your wife a maniac because she wanted warmed by you more than an hour a week, while you regularly hugged a young girl for four?”

“I never hugged Dolly Perkins,” said the General through tightly clenched teeth. “For God’s sake tell her about MEN, Prickett. She has learned nothin about em in this place.”

“I believe Sir Aubrey wiwiwishes me to say,” said his doctor faintly, “that the strong men who lead and defend the BuBuBritish people must cucultivate their strength by satisfying the animal part of their natures by rererevelling with sluts, while maintaining the pupupurity of the mumumarriage bed and sanctity of the home where their sons and daughters are engendered. And that is why pupupupoor pupoor pupoor—” (here the General’s doctor pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed his face) “—that is why poor Dolly had to be treated in that tutututerrible way.”

“No need to blub about it, Prickett,” murmured the General placidly. “You explained that very well. Now finish your story, Mr. Baxter, while rememberin I have done nothin I am ashamed of, indoors or out of it.”

Baxter finished the story.

“On the 16th of February 1880 Dolly Perkins entered 19 Porchester Terrace by the servants’ entrance. She was exhausted, ragged, penniless and hungry. The cook, Mrs. Blount, gave her a cup of tea, something to eat and a chair to rest in, then went on with her work. Shortly after she saw the chair was empty. Dolly Perkins had crept upstairs to the drawing-room, confronted Lady Blessington and told her story—”

“Mostly lies,” said the General.

“—and begged for help. Lady Blessington was about to give her money when Sir Aubrey entered, called in his footmen who thrust Dolly Perkins out into the street, and with the help of his manservant dragged his wife upstairs—”

“Carried her upstairs. She had fainted,” said the General.

“Then she soon recovered. You locked her in her bedroom but she flung up the window and started throwing things down to Dolly in the street outside: first a purse and jewellery then every small item of value in reach. By now, though it was a snowy day, a crowd of the poorer sort had gathered. I imagine—”

“What you imagine is not evidence,” said the solicitor without looking up from the copy of the report he was reading.

“—her violent actions before an appreciative audience must have filled Lady Blessington with a kind of ecstasy. No wonder. They were probably the first decisive things she had ever done. She now flung out dressing-table sets, shoes, hats, gloves, stockings, corsets, dresses, pillows, bedding, fire-irons, clocks, mirrors, crystal and Chinese vases which smashed of course—”

“And a small oil portrait by Ingres of me mother as a girl,” said the General drily. “A cab wheel ran over that one.”

“At first Sir Aubrey thought the uproar in the street was caused solely by Dolly Perkins and a mob of her plebeian friends. When at last he learned the truth and rushed into the bedroom Lady Blessington was flinging out chairs and light tables. She was dragged down to the basement by his footmen and manservant—”

“Carried!” said the General firmly. “She was in a delicate condition, even if she had turned into a ravin lunatic. The basement was the only part of the house with barred windows.”

“Yet you locked her in a windowless coal-cellar.”

“Yes. I suddenly realized every damned room down there except the coal-cellar had keys I did not know about, and I did not trust the servants. Victoria had always been too friendly with em and I feared they would help her escape. Which happened. It took me three hours to collect Prickett and another doctor who would certify her, and find an insane asylum which would accept a pregnant lunatic, and was prepared to send along a padded ambulance with three stout nurses to manage her transport. When I got back she had flown the coop.”

“Your former footman, Tim Blatchford, admits to smashing the cellar lock with a poker,” said the solicitor, consulting the last page of the report Baxter had given him. “Your former cook, Mrs. Blount, says ‘We all begged him to do it. The poor lady’s sobs and frantic cries for help was heard all over. We feared she had gone into labour, and her terrible confinement might cause the deaths of two.’ However, Lady Victoria emerged intact. Your former housekeeper, Mrs. Munnery, gave her clothing recovered from the street (it was cleaner than the coal-stained garments) and also the train fare to visit her father in Manchester.”

“Victoria is goin mad again,” said the General.

We looked at Bella and I heard old Mr. Hattersley moan in something like terror.

Her flesh had shrunk so close to the bones that her figure was now angular, but the horriblest change was in her face. The white sharp nose, hollow cheeks and sunken eye-sockets showed the skull all too clearly, yet within the sockets each black pupil had expanded to fill the whole eye, leaving just a tiny wee triangle of white in the corners. Her dark curling mass of hairs had also expanded, for the first inch of each one stood straight out from the head “like quills upon the fretful porcupine”. I did not doubt that before me stood the emaciated form of Lady Victoria Blessington, exactly as she had emerged from the coal-cellar. But her voice, though sad, was distinctly Bella’s.

“I feel how that poor thing felt,” she said, “but it will not madden me. So I visited you in Manchester, Dad. What did you do to me?”

“The wrong thing! The wrong thing, Vicky,” said the old man thumping the arms of the chair with his fists. “I should have kept you with me, sent for Sir Aubrey and thrashed out a better deal with him — a deal which would have benefited you as well as me. Instead I explained that a wife who abandons her husband is a truant in the eyes of man and God. I said you must fight the marital war on your own hearthstone or you would never win it. I told you to tell Sir Aubrey that if he lacked cash to bribe his cast-offs into holding their tongues he should send them to me — I know how to handle that sort of woman. All I said was true, Vicky, but I said it because I wanted you out of the house, out of my sight as soon as possible. I was afraid you would go into labour and I HATE women near me when they are whelping, hate the blood, screams and stinking mess they make, ugh, the thought of it makes me want to retch. So I took you back fast to the station and bought you a ticket for London. You were acting very calm and sensible, Vicky, and said I need not wait with you for the train, so I charged off in case you pupped on the platform. I was a coward, I admit, and I apologize. As soon as my back was turned you must have changed my first-class ticket to London for a third-class ticket to Glasgow. So here you are!”

“And here I stay,” said Bella calmly, and as she spoke the lines of her figure and face relaxed into their proper softness, her hair began to settle, her eyes recovered their usual depth, size, and golden-brown warmth. She said, “Thank you for giving me life, Father, though from what you say my mother had most trouble making me and you took none at all. Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having. Thank you, Sir Aubrey, for releasing me from my father, and thank you for driving me away from your house. Or perhaps I should thank Dolly Perkins for doing that. Without her it seems I would have gone on clinging to you. Thanks, Dr. Prickett, for trying to make life bearable for the poor silly creature I used to be. You cannot help being one still. Thank you, Mr. Grimes, for discovering and telling me how I had to travel through water to get my useless past washed off. Thank you for mending me, God, and giving me a home that is not a prison. I will continue living here. And Candle, how good to have a man I need not thank at all, who I cuddle and who cuddles me every night, is pleasant company in the mornings and evenings, and leaves me alone every day to get on with my work.”

She smiled and came to me, embraced and kissed me and I could not resist her; though I was sorry to show our affections so openly before her first husband. He was a Liberal M.P. as well as a great soldier.