They never feel love, but directly it’s born they throttle it and fling it under the sewer as poor girls do their unlawful children – they make up money marriages and are content – then the father goes to the House of Commons or the Counting House, the mother to her balls and visits – the children lurk upstairs with their governess, and when their turn comes are bought and sold, as respectable and heartless as their parents before them.
This was new and beyond the comprehension of a man like Morgan. Even more to the point, it was not a thing Georgina herself could understand. At the time she left Florence, an American girl her own age had come to Europe with the sole intention of being heard by Rossini. Genevieve Ward, young though she was, knew what she wanted and headed straight to Florence to get it. She had been told she had a good voice and was determined to make herself famous. Rossini was encouraging. He found her distinguished local teachers (one of whom was Uberti) and two years later she opened at La Scala. That kind of dedication was way beyond anything Georgina possessed, then or ever. She had the voice, but not the vision.
Morgan was in no great hurry to face up to London. He wished the journey home to be a way of applying a little finish to his daughter. They broke their return first by the shores of Lake Constance, where his younger brother George was living in style with an invalid wife, the Baronne de Hildprant. For a sixteen-year-old girl with hardly any understanding of the wider world this was interesting enough. At Schloss Hard Georgina found the kind of company she had been warned against at the Villa Capponi: indolent, not in the slightest way intellectual, gossipy – and amorous. True to his character, Morgan did not like his brother any more than he did his Florence enemies. On the other hand, his daughter could not be sheltered from the importunities of other people forever. The days at Schloss Hard turned into weeks, the weeks into months while he watched Georgina try out her new freedoms.
Her looks and personality were of great interest. In appearance she was judged to be perhaps a little too much on the short side, a little too full of figure to be the ideal of beauty. Her conversation was startingly direct and in one respect her aunt and uncle must have studied her with special doubt in their minds. She was already – and particularly among men of mature years – an accomplished sexual tease. Many of the scrapes she got into later in life came from this inability to treat men in a realistic way. She was arch in their company and sometimes irritatingly so. Weak men, or vain ones, might find her little-girl act provocative, but wiser heads found something missing in her, perhaps a commonsensical understanding of the limited choices life could afford, not just to her, but to anybody. She was not, in the way the French apply the word, a serious person. Even this early in her life it was easy to see that she had great energies, but many fewer talents than she supposed. She talked far too freely, scoffed and wheedled. She wrote on 21 June, at the end of a day of sunshine and persiflage: ‘I first experienced what Mama told me some time ago about young men making themselves agreeable to me.’
Young though she was, she had discovered the power sex could wield. This amorousness needed some explaining later on in life and she had a ready answer. She was scientifically amative: ‘I loved everyone who loved me and there were endless outcomes – lamentations, reproaches, tears on all sides. But there we are! I am a loving person. Phrenologists tell me that my bumps of love and friendship cover my entire head! One is not mistress of one’s temperament and of one’s skull, not at all.’
Even this early, her bumps dictated events in an unfortunate way. Among the party lounging and sketching, going out onto the lake in boats and exclaiming about the wonders of nature was a familiar family legend, the source of many an outrageous story. He was the fiery and voluble vicar of Llanelli, a man called Ebenezer Morris, whose living had been presented to him by Georgina’s grandfather. The Reverend Mr Morris was sixty-three and decidedly eccentric. His preaching was considered so entertaining that on one occasion the gallery of the church threatened to collapse from the press of people gathered to hear him. He was also a man of colossal and unforgiving temper, perfectly able to knock down a parishioner for some imagined insult. In his battles with neighbouring clergy, he composed scathingly brutal and quite scandalous letters and pamphlets. In Llanelli he was a notorious and much discussed figure.
As well as flirting with the young men who ran after her and deriding the enthusiasm her uncle held for romantic scenery, Georgina romanced the Reverend Mr Morris, whom she dubbed Canonicus. She was successful enough to have him embrace her a little too freely and kiss her without the innocence usually employed towards a child. Emboldened, he wrote her a love letter. One can think of half a dozen reasons why he might instantly regret what he had done. This was the first test of her capacity to behave more like a young lady than a hoyden. Could the situation be defused by tact and commonsense? Was this the kind of letter that anyone else would have torn in a hundred pieces or hidden in the trunk of a tree? Was it an occasion for the young to moralise the old and bring the reckless philanderer to the error of his ways, as happened in fiction?
She chose differently. She gave the letter to her mother. Louisa gave it to her husband. For all Morris’s long friendship with the family (which included being a lifelong drinking crony of his patron, Rees Goring Thomas) Morgan did not hesitate. The poor man was confronted with the evidence, humiliated, and shown the door. Georgina had done the right thing and learned a useful lesson: she might not be the cleverest girl in the world but she was certainly able to stir up passion in the opposite sex. Moreover, she had found a new way to make her father angry. Shortly after the incident, the Thomas family left Schloss Hard, still postponing London and heading towards Brussels.
In the winter of 1853 they took a house in the Rue de Luxembourg. Morgan bought a carriage with a form of armorial bearing painted on the doors. ‘We went about in our carriage, and all our ancient admirers, on foot, stared at us as if we were risen from the grave,’ Georgina commented. Her father had managed to secure a letter of introduction to the Ambassador: he was positioning himself for the campaign that lay ahead. If he had gone abroad like a loser, he intended to come back with a different story to tell.
Brussels, like Florence, sustained a large British colony, and for the same reason. It was cheap to live there and titled European families were ten a penny. A man might fill his mantelpiece with crested invitations and cartes de visite. Perhaps the very best people were in Paris, but there was enough going on in Brussels to replicate that older, frowstier form of society that was to Morgan’s taste. So, interspersed with the names of Dal’s fellow Etonians who came to stare and wonder, we find the Baron de Pfuel, Limmander de Nieuvehoven and – Louisa’s finest social acquisition – the Baronne de Goethals. There was war in the air and everyone was talking about Constantinople. Some of the insouciant young Englishmen Georgina saw lounging about at balls and parties she would never see again. One of her beaux was William Scarlett, whose uncle was to command the Heavy Brigade at Sebastopol.
Brussels was intended by her parents to be a kind of finishing school. They stayed a season and Georgina sang before an audience for the first time at the British Embassy. The recital – which may not have been more than one song – was well received. For the first time in her life it was exciting to be a Thomas. Though she was by her own description ‘wild’, she was also also ‘irresistible’. Her triumphs came entirely as a consequence of her own efforts – to her surprise people liked this turbulent and impulsive girl from Florence. Now that the family was out in the world a little more, her father’s peculiarities became more obvious. It was the first chance she had to compare him with other fathers and she began to form the opinion expressed so forcibly in the years ahead.
My father, who as a consequence of his proud and violent character had always been more or less mad at last became so, despite being gifted with rare and valuable qualities. His mother’s favourite, he had been spoiled as a child, and he reaped what all spoiled children reap. He inspired hate and terror in everybody. As for me, I never addressed a word to him in my life, and he only spoke to us to call us to table and to tell us we were damn fools. If my mother had only a little common sense or principle, she would not have endured such a hell, neither for herself nor for her children, and I blame her much more than my father for all that has happened.
There