Desert Queen (8 page)

She spent weeks with Valentine Chirol, a close friend of the Lascelleses who was also visiting them in Bucharest. Now a foreign correspondent for
The Times
, the thirty-seven-year-old Chirol, born in Paris to English parents, brought up Catholic and educated mainly in France, had graduated from the Sorbonne, trained in the Foreign Office and traveled (with no apparent assignment) for sixteen years throughout the Continent and the East. Highly intelligent and well informed, he spoke a dozen languages, made impressive contacts and provided information to Whitehall. No one called him a spy, but he served his government well. The portly five-foot-ten, red-haired, red-bearded Chirol, who loved good food and good wine, was nicknamed Domnul during his stay in Romania, and would become one of Gertrude’s closest friends.

For four months during the winter of 1889 Gertrude laughed, danced and flirted her way through Bucharest, and although no one asked for her hand in marriage, she was pleased by the attention she received. And almost always near her side was the blue-eyed Billy Lascelles, a good dancer but a bit too aloof for her liking. “He rarely confesses himself amused,” she complained in a letter home. “As for me I dance from the beginning of any ball to the end and I am genuinely amused all the time.” Nevertheless, the two were becoming close. As the winter snows melted, their friendship warmed. Then, at the end of April, with the well-traveled Domnul leading the way, they left Romania for a visit to Constantinople.

E
ast across the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor and west into the Balkan peninsula of Europe, the Ottoman Turks had advanced, expanding from a thirteenth-century Turkish state, with Constantinople at its head, into a sixteenth-century empire that stretched from the Euphrates in Iraq to the Danube in Austria. Under Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottomans controlled Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia and Turkey in the East and Hungary and the Balkans—Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Greece and Romania—in the West. For hundreds of years the Ottoman Empire had served as a stabilizing force, balancing the Russian power in the East with the British and French in the West. For Britain and France it provided protection against Arab attacks on Western traders conducting lucrative commerce: the British in the sheikhdoms of the Arabian Gulf and Mesopotamia, the French in Syria.

But by the nineteenth century, weakened by corruption, greed and too loose a management style, the Ottoman Empire had diminished and decayed. The loss of Egypt and Greece, along with a depleted economy, had forced the Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman Government was called) to rely more on the West. When the Russians marched toward Constantinople in 1878 in search of a warm-water port, the Turks, aided by Britain and France, were able to hold them off. But the Turks had fought a costly war. And when a surge of nationalism swept through the Balkans, the Turks lost Bulgaria and Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina. To the West the Ottoman Empire had become “the Sick Man of Europe”; its fate in the Balkans, the critical “Eastern Question.”

What worried the British most was that Russia would once again menace Constantinople, a threat England could not afford. Turkish protection was essential along the route to India, and an Ottoman defeat by the Russians could doom the jewel in the British crown. And thus the British held out a generous hand of financing to prop up the Turks.

B
ut the Eastern Question mattered little to Gertrude, at least for now. Her curiosity centered on Constantinople, the cosmopolitan city that straddled Europe and Asia; the splendid city on the Bosporus, ancient capital of Byzantium, seat of the Muslim Caliphate and symbol of Ottoman strength. In Bucharest, she had sampled a soupçon of Turkish flavoring; here, in Istanbul, she could savor an Oriental feast. A banquet of gorgeous colors and exotic shapes unfolded before her, “perfectly delicious” she wrote, as the low sun glittered on the water, bringing color back to the faded Turkish flags, “turning each white minaret in Stamboul into a dazzling marble pillar.” She watched the Sultan Caliph, putative leader of the Muslim forces that had swept through East and West, emerge in all his glory on a rare trip from his palace to his mosque. She eyed the spires of the Seraglio, a place at once luxurious and licentious, bringing to life Mozart’s opera
The Abduction from the Seraglio
; and she saw the flat dome of Saint Sophia, a miracle of Byzantium.

She and Billy took a
caïque
and rowed slowly up the waters of the Golden Horn; they climbed the snows of Mount Olympus and looked out on the dazzling Sea of Marmara; they mounted donkeys and bumped along the narrow passages of the bazaars. She loved seeing the people dressed in Turkish clothes, the men in turbans and loose-fitting pants, the women in silks, their faces covered with veils. She liked the closely latticed Turkish houses, the Turkish restaurants with strange foods, and she liked drinking Turkish coffee while Billy smoked a
narghile
, a water pipe. Swept up in the exotic romance of it all, by the end of the trip she and Billy were nearly engaged. The two set off for home, splendidly content, on the Orient Express. This was, observed her sister Elsa, “the last chapter of absolute happiness in Gertrude’s life. She was twenty, she was brilliant, she was charming, she had an attentive cavalier.… The future with all its possibilities lay before them.”

B
illy Lascelles fit all the requirements: son of a diplomat, grandson of a famous physician, rakish and rich, educated at Sandhurst and about to begin his military career, he was the ideal candidate for marriage. In London, where Gertrude stayed after they returned in the summer of 1889, he flattered her with his advances. They took afternoon tea together, dined together and sat together in the moonlit garden, talking and playing bezique, their favorite card game, till two in the morning. But Billy offered neither the mental stimulation nor the emotional exuberance she needed. He was too limited in his outlook and too blasé in his approach to life. She was used to the depth and daring, the intelligence and adventurousness of the Bell men. Even on her return to London from Constantinople, she had longed for her father’s company. “Dear, dearest Father,” she had written, “I do wish you were here. I half hoped you might be.
Do
come soon.” As for Billy, after a few months her interest strayed.

In July she turned twenty-one, a coming-of-age that tremored with meaning. She was now three years older than most young women who had entered British society; her introduction could no longer be postponed. She had smiled her way through Bucharest’s balls, but it was time for her official coming-out. A presentation at court and a formal party by her parents announced to the world that she had been transformed from an accomplished young girl into an eligible young woman. For the 1890 season, and for the two that would follow, Gertrude waltzed through the marriage market, from one ball to another, escorted by either Florence or an aunt. Pink-cheeked and fleshy-bosomed, she joined the line of other young women standing in front of their chaperones, waiting until young men asked them to dance. She smiled, she laughed, she looked deliciously indifferent, and she inspected the men even more carefully than they inspected her. For Gertrude, this was a difficult time. Few of the men were as brilliant as she. Few had attended Oxford or Cambridge. Few had traveled as far as the East. Few had her curiosity or her knowledge or her bluntness or her audacity. Few could match the standards set by her father and grandfather, and, most painful of all, few would desire her.

One of the few was Bertie Crackenthorpe. For at least a week he was in hot pursuit, inviting her to dine at his parents’ house and paying her unending attention, even to his father’s chagrin. “I do like him,” Gertrude wrote to Florence, assuring her that she had been well behaved. Bertie begged to see her, but Gertrude played coy, refusing to say she would be at home if he called, but crossing her fingers about the future. “We shall see how everything happens,” she said wistfully. Yet less than a week later, when she and Bertie were both invited to visit a friend, she hoped he would not go. Bertie already bored her.

In the autumn she returned to Red Barns, a damp retreat, cold and dull. Pretending to be happy, she was often admittedly “miserable,” with little to do. She tutored the younger Bell girls (Hugo was off at school), did social work with the wives of the colliery workers and read voraciously. At least her imagination could take flights of fancy. She lapped up biographies of Browning, Wordsworth and Mary Shelley, followed the explorations of Livingstone in Africa, recited Kipling’s poetry of the Empire and savored FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
:

Dreaming when dawn’s left hand was in the sky
I heard a voice within the tavern cry
,
“
Awake, my little ones, and fill the cup
“
Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry.
”

When spring arrived and unmarried women were once again in season, she returned to her family’s London flat. To fill the time, she took fencing lessons at MacPhersons’ gym, shopped at Harvey’s and on the Brompton Road and, to her mother’s horror, took the underground to see Mary Talbot doing welfare work in Whitechapel. Florence was “beside herself,” Elsa wrote later, that Gertrude had gone on such an “orgy of independence.” More to her mother’s liking, she went to art exhibits with the family maid and, similarly chaperoned, paid calls on friends: Caroline Grosvenor, an artist; Norman Grosvenor, her husband; and Flora Russell, daughter of Lord and Lady Arthur Russell. The Russells’ at-homes were the envy of London. Their Mayfair drawing room on Audley Square (where the windows were washed, extravagantly, once a week) attracted such well-known figures as Leslie Stephen and his daughters, Virginia and Vanessa; Mrs. Humphrey Ward; and Henry James, who sometimes brought along his friend, the controversial painter of “Madame X,” John Singer Sargent. But aside from an interesting conversation here and there, the days seemed to pass, she noted, “without much to show for them.”