Inconvenient People (56 page)

Mrs Weldon had been partly attracted to Tavistock House by the Dickenses’ former schoolroom – a huge chamber that when converted into a performance space could accommodate an audience of ninety and a stage thirty feet deep. (It was here that Dickens used to write, direct and star in children’s spectaculars, such as
Fortunio and His Seven Gifted Servants
, and, for adults,
The Frozen Deep
, co-written by and
co-starring Wilkie Collins.) Now the Gounod Choir for adults would practise here, paying good money to be trained and conducted by the maestro himself; but the increasing filth and decrepitude of the house, the wild children and poorly behaved animals, plus all the gossip, took a toll on attendance levels. One of the choristers claimed that Charles Rawlings’s single thick eyebrow, running the entire width of his forehead, was perfectly disgusting and indicative of criminality. Mrs Weldon was angered by such unthinking, casual snobbishness. She was by now at the heart of social and political activism for all sorts of causes, including feminism, spiritualism, vegetarianism, anti-vivisectionism, anti-vaccinationism, land reform, the repeal of the blasphemy laws and support for the Rational Dress movement, whose aim was that no woman should have to wear more than 7lb of undergarments.

Regarding her musical enterprise, she urged intuition, amateurism and raw feeling as ways to break down the rigidity, hierarchy, conformity and closed-shop nature of the professional artistic circle. Mrs Weldon’s assault on the music world chimed perfectly with the low-level unrest that was unsettling many sectors of the nation in the 1870s. There was a great deal of crossover between spiritualists such as Mrs Weldon and Mrs Lowe and all manner of political protest, and the leading paranormal publications of the day reveal the bundling together of religious, social and political restlessness. The world had been revealed to the adherents of spiritualism as less solid than they had supposed – it was in fact a universe of gases, emanations and electrical impulse. For many, this new sense of fluidity brought about a social and political, as well as religious, reawakening. One of the two leading English journals of spiritualism was called
The Medium and Daybreak
, the latter word reflecting the idea of an emergent new era (as did ‘The Golden Dawn’ movement, formed in the late 1880s) – a turning-away from convention, constriction, the cash nexus, and gender and class segregation.

Mrs Weldon’s falling-out with the musical establishment would extend across two nations. When Charles Gounod stormed off back to his wife in Paris in June 1874, Mrs Weldon was distraught – she was not just hurt but left with a powerful sense of having been used, manipulated and then abandoned. Her pain quickly turned to anger. She sent the composer a bill for £9,791 13
s
9
d
for his keep, although
more than half of this she itemised as compensation for ‘the injury done by infamous calumnies, lies and libels’. She refused to return two of his scores that he had accidentally left behind, which drew fierce criticism from the French press, who believed that a great man had been held captive in London by a talentless
rosbif
adventuress.

But Mrs Weldon carried on without the famous Frenchman. Each Monday evening, the children were transported to Langham Hall in the West End in an ancient omnibus that she had bought second-hand and painted brown. Here, they would perform their Sociable Evenings, with Mrs Weldon singing her own composition, ‘Pussie’s Christmas’, the Rawlingses ringing their handbells and various children – some as young as two – singing solos or reciting verse.

Of all her alleged iniquities, it was the bus that mortified her family the most. Following Papa’s death, Mrs Weldon was back in contact with them, but when Mama and eldest brother Dalrymple found out about the clapped-out vehicle – with huge writing on the sides and rear, announcing ‘Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage’ and ‘Mrs Weldon’s Sociable Evenings. Langham Hall, 43 Great Portland Street. Every
Monday 8 p.m.’ – they became more sympathetic to Harry Weldon’s predicament. Letters about Mrs Weldon’s embarrassing behaviour began to be exchanged within her family. Dalrymple – ‘the essence of a conceited prig’, as she described him – wrote to his sister to implore her not to park or drive the bus anywhere near his London home.

The Duke of Bedford, ground landlord of Tavistock House, was no less perplexed and indignant when he learned that a self-navigating, self-steering hot-air balloon had been sitting for some time, inflated, at the front of the house, awaiting a patent and a commercial backer; to this eyesore was attached a sash bearing the legend
MRS WELDON
’
S ORPHANAGE
. The balloon had been the bastard brainchild of someone else Mrs Weldon had thoughtlessly, foolishly invited into her life – and the consequences were to be catastrophic for her.

She was in the habit of having the Rawlings brothers read out to her interesting snippets in the newspapers, and one day one of the brothers pointed out that a gentleman who had in the past come to see Monsieur Gounod with a libretto was now in the dock at Bow Street on a charge of child kidnap. She sent the Rawlingses off to the magistrates’ court to find out more, and ended by inviting the accused, Anacharsis Ménier, and his wife, Angèle, to come and live at Tavistock House. She did not find out for some time that Anacharsis was a con artist of some standing in his native France, and that Angèle had been a Parisian street prostitute whom he had pimped before marrying her. The child they would be found not guilty of seizing was Angèle’s niece, Bichette, who now joined Mrs Weldon’s rescued orphans; and Angèle turned out to be very handy with the ouija board.

Angèle and Mrs Weldon fell in love. When Angèle moved in, Georgina cut her own hair short, and both began to wear severely tailored, heavy black clothing; when writing to Angèle, Mrs Weldon adopted a masculine persona. All of which powerfully suggests that this was a physical relationship, though the only person to have worked his way through Mrs Weldon’s voluminous, but now lost, personal archive refused to accept that the friendship was ‘suspect’, to use his quaint term. Anacharsis Ménier later accused Mrs Weldon of having a sexual relationship with his wife; but he was a known
liar and blackmailer, and would also accuse her of poisoning three of the orphans and burying them beneath Charles Dickens’s mulberry tree (all that was down there were the bones of Dan Tucker, Tity and Jarbey). There is very little else in the surviving evidence that could approach the truth behind the rumours, apart from Georgina’s own complaint about ‘filthy allusions’ that ‘Madame Ménier lived with me
apart
from her husband’. What really matters is that the relationship between the women was deep and passionate – and it had placed in the hands of the unscrupulous Monsieur Ménier the wherewithal to blacken her name still further. Ménier would soon become the pivot of the plan to remove the inconvenient, expensive and mortifying Mrs Weldon from the sight of the world.

Things continued to fall apart in Tavistock House. There were twelve untuned pianos, plaster was falling from the walls and ceiling and the gardens were becoming overgrown. Pupils now pretty much consisted only of orphans, and the Langham Place Sociable Evenings were costing more to stage and publicise than the ticket sales brought in. One night, Mrs Weldon had to call the police to eject young Albert Rawlings when he became aggressive, and when a purse went missing, a spiritualist told her that the culprit was a boy with a single brow – Charlie Rawlings. Daddy Rawlings had been accosted by three men who had offered to pay him for any information he could glean about Mrs Weldon’s relationship with Charles Gounod; he had refused, but his sons were less honourable and began to sneak out tales to mysterious interrogators about the goings-on at Tavistock House.

Harry, meanwhile, was growing fidgety. His mother had died and had left him far less money than he had anticipated. So he now wanted to halve the annual allowance he paid to his wife and to sell the Tavistock House lease; but Georgina told him she would not agree to either request. To start divorce proceedings was expensive and potentially highly embarrassing as the existence of Harry’s mistress and son might come to light. Though naturally indolent, he was in fact now in employment: Mrs Weldon had used her social contacts to obtain for him the post of Windsor Herald at the College of Arms – a position that probably would not withstand the ignominy of a divorce.

Mrs Weldon began to think bigger instead of smaller. Could she perhaps relaunch her teaching career in Paris? Should she and Angèle take the noticeably gifted Sapho-Katie on a world tour to earn some much-needed capital? In the autumn of 1877, the two women packed up eleven of the most promising children and headed for the house of Angèle’s sister in Normandy, where the orphans were left while Angèle and Mrs Weldon travelled to Paris to whip up interest in their plans. They left a trusted couple called Mr and Mrs Lowther in charge of Tavistock House, and maids to care for the remaining children, but almost immediately the ruthless Monsieur Ménier kicked the Lowthers out and took over.

The trip to France was a disaster, and it is not easy to excuse Mrs Weldon the self-absorption, lack of organisation and poor sense of priorities she displayed. In Paris nobody was interested in her project. Then measles broke out in the Normandy village where the children were staying and several of them became seriously ill; fourteen-month-old Mireille died. Mrs Weldon was distressed but failed to
act quickly enough, though eventually she was able to find lodging and nursing care for the rest of the children with the nuns at the convent in the town of Gisors. At this point she received a letter from Harry announcing that he was in the process of selling the Tavistock House lease – so where did she want her belongings to be stored? On reading this news, Mrs Weldon fell to her knees and asked of heaven what she must do. A celestial voice instructed her, ‘Go home at once.’

Mrs Weldon arrived back at Tavistock House, unannounced, early in the morning of 4 April, as the maid was bringing the remaining children down to breakfast. The house was even more disordered than when she had left it six months earlier and she found boxes half packed with her personal possessions. More shockingly, finding the key in the lock of the library bureau, she sat down and read her way through letters which revealed that her mother, her brother, her husband and Ménier had been debating whether her eccentricity had tipped over into insanity and whether, if she were to be detained in an asylum, she might recover her wits. Mrs Weldon was horrified at the supine attitude of her mother, who had written to Harry:

In the bureau she also found a bundle of letters from poor mad infatuated Cadwalladwr Waddy, who had continued to write to her. These had been opened in her absence and carefully collated.

When Ménier and his heavily pregnant mistress Olive Nicholls got out of bed at noon and came downstairs, Mrs Weldon noticed that the Frenchman was wearing one of her watches. She recalled him that day as ‘fat as a pig, his blubber-like cheeks ashen pale, his dirty, greasy hair longer than ever’. She demanded to know why her belongings were being packed into trunks; Ménier replied that Harry
had told him that he was entitled to take goods to the value of £178 1
s
1
d
in payment of wages owed to him, and that he was simply packing up the items he liked best in the house. When Mrs Weldon accused him of theft, since the items belonged to her, not to Harry, Ménier replied that the law would not support her in this: as a married woman, anything that was hers was Harry’s, said Ménier. She had married before the passing of the 1870 and 1874 Married Women’s Property Acts, and so these items were in law deemed to be Mr Weldon’s, and not her own (although the laws did permit her to keep her own earnings). And if Mr Weldon would not sue, Ménier was confident Mrs Weldon would have no legal recourse to reclaim the objects.