B007M836FY EBOK (10 page)

Hydropathy, which was introduced to Scotland and England in the 1840s, was becoming a popular treatment for the vague, anxiety-related sicknesses of the mid-nineteenth century. Invalids had long ‘taken the waters’ at spas such as Bath and Buxton, but the new version of the water cure, invented in Silesia by Vincent Priessnitz in the 1830s, aspired to be more scientific and systematic. The theory was that immersion in hot and cold baths and showers could restore health to an unbalanced body. Edward Lane said that many of his patients were the victims of mania, whether an obsession with work (the ‘over-toil of the lawyer, the statesman or the mechanic’) or with drugs and alcohol (‘the suicidal indulgences of the man of fashion’). Charles Darwin sought help from Dr Lane because he was overwhelmed by anxiety about his ‘everlasting species-Book’, the work that would become
On the Origin of Species
; he suffered from terrible fits of flatulence, as well as nausea, headaches and outbreaks of eczema and boils. ‘I have seen many cases of violent indigestion,’ said Edward, ‘but I cannot recall any where the pain was so truly poignant as in his. When the worst attacks were on he seemed almost crushed with agony, the nervous system being severely shaken and the temporary depression resulting distressingly great.’

On Tuesday 4 July, a month after her parting from John Thom, Isabella visited Moor Park in the hope of seeing both him and Edward Lane. She caught a train from Reading to the village of Ash, a forty-five-minute journey, and from there a fly took her the last few miles to Moor Park. At 10.30 a.m. she alighted on a gravel drive in front of a wide white house, three storeys high. Above the front door was a plaque bearing the coat of arms of Sir William Temple, the celebrated diplomat and essayist who had lived there in the late-seventeenth century. Temple had bought the 450-acre estate in the 1680s, half a century after the house was built, seeking an escape ‘into the ease and freedom of a private scene, where a man may go his own way and his own pace’.

Isabella was greeted by Lady Drysdale, Mary Lane and some of their guests. The doctor was out, but she ran into Thom early in the morning. ‘The meeting was a very constrained one,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I coloured much, and the eyes of the party were keenly fixed on me. Mr Th— stood about without daring to speak much, and I became nearly silent.’

To the right of the terrace outside the dining room were a vinery, an orangery and a greenhouse, and next to those a walled garden, in which gooseberries, raspberries and blackcurrants ripened in the summer. To the left of the terrace a huge cedar spread its boughs over the grass, and a sundial marked the spot at which Sir William Temple’s heart, in a silver casket, had been interred after his death. Also beneath the lawn was a deep store room packed with ice that had been harvested in the winter from the canals and river; another icehouse was sunk into the hillside opposite the front door.

It was a warm, intermittently showery day. During a clear, fair spell in the late morning, Isabella walked in the garden with Atty, who was now about six, and a fellow guest, described in her diary as ‘Captain D’. Isabella was sharply aware of John Thom, who was strolling on the other side of a hedge with a ‘Mr B’ (possibly Robert Bell, a Moor Park patient who later gave Mr Thom a job). She exchanged a few words with the gentlemen, but got the impression that Thom was keeping his distance. ‘I rather wondered that he avoided me,’ wrote Isabella, ‘or rather did not seek me.’

Back in the house she changed for dinner, and took her place at the table at about half past one. She sat near two other guests, ‘Mrs O’ and ‘Mrs K’: ‘Mr T opposite, and never once spoke or looked at me.’

When they went back to the house, Isabella learnt that Edward had returned but had already had tea and gone out again. She took her tea with the other guests, and soon afterwards the doctor appeared outside the dining room. He ‘came bounding in through the open window to greet me’, wrote Isabella, ‘with more warmth than I even expected. Very warmly he shook hands; very cordially he sat down quite near me, and asked many questions as to my welfare.’ Now she could imagine Thom watching her admirer as well as her, witnessing her gay and easy intimacy with the handsome doctor. Again, she thrilled to the idea that her friendship with Edward Lane might inspire jealousy in others. ‘Mr Th— sat opposite,’ she wrote, ‘and seemed to be reading, but I know watched all that passed.’

Later, the guests gathered in the drawing room on the first floor. ‘Dr Lane was in the highest spirits; seated himself on the sofa I had chosen near the piano, and only left me to sing occasionally, and to speak a few words to his guests; but his eyes, his whole attention, his talk, was all mine … We spoke of love, of poetry, of his age, and I told him he had never looked better, though he declared he felt quite old; we spoke of music and his songs; he sang sweetly and with enjoyment both a French and a comic song, and several others, including one I asked for, “Oh, the heart is a free and fetterless thing”.’

The company continued to talk and sing into the night. After listening to the refrain of Eurydice in Gluck’s opera
Orphée
, Isabella asked Edward to read out Alexander Pope’s ‘Ode on St Cecilia’s Day’, ‘which he did the last thing, very sweetly, to my no small delight’. Both Gluck’s opera and Pope’s poem drew on the Greek myth in which Orpheus loses his beloved Eurydice because he cannot resist turning to look at her as they step out of the Underworld.

After the songs and readings, ‘and a few more jokes and compliments’, the party broke up for the night. ‘I know not that I ever more enjoyed an evening,’ wrote Isabella. ‘All headache was gone, all sense of sorrow; the old enchantment in that fascinating society was coming back upon me, and I felt that no one could compete in attraction with the handsome, graceful, lively, charming L.’

Mary – ‘his little wife’, ‘so sweet, so kind, so unsuspicious’ – took Isabella up the billowing staircase to her bedroom, and Edward soon followed: ‘and then they left me, but not to sleep; the bed was hard, and my spirits were far too much excited for sleep. I laid and turned till morning, and then it was late.’

Back at Ripon Lodge, Isabella rose at seven on Tuesday 11 July to find that it had rained overnight. She had been low since the visit to Moor Park the previous week, but on this morning, she said, she felt ‘rather less sad’. After breakfast Henry went to Caversham, where he had chosen a 25-acre hillside site on which to build a house. A ‘Miss S’ looked after the boys, while Isabella occupied herself with domestic chores. She told the butcher that he had made a mistake in his calculations, and once he had corrected the bill she paid him. At one o’clock she followed Henry to Caversham, where the house was already taking shape. The plot on which Henry was building commanded panoramic views to the south, an aspect that ensured ‘extreme healthfulness’, according to the estate agents’ particulars, but Isabella could muster no enthusiasm. ‘Much wearied and did not enjoy it,’ she wrote. ‘Sat and mused sadly in house. Back after 7. Unpacked and attended to affairs. Henry cross, both then and later.’

‘It was cool friendship now on his part,’ she wrote. ‘Had it ever been more? I thought not; and was thus again punished, as oft before, for over-adhesiveness, for love of approbation and excitability. When shall I be calm, cold, tranquil, praiseworthy? Never.’

The next month, Thom took a post as tutor to the fifteen-year-old Maharajah Duleep Singh, with whom he was to travel in Scotland. The Sikh prince was a ward of the East India Company, which had removed him from the Punjabi throne in 1849, and a favourite of Queen Victoria, to whom he had presented the Koh-i-Noor diamond in 1850.

Four days after receiving Thom’s letter, Isabella sat in the garden at Ripon Lodge with the latest number of the literary journal the
Athenaeum
, to which the family subscribed. The issue of Saturday 15 July carried an advertisement for Moor Park and pieces about Alexander Pope and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had published an account of her travels in England (she was ‘wholly the heroine of her own book’, said the reviewer).

‘Wrote out passages from
Athenaeum
,’ Isabella noted in her diary, ‘and read it at 1 in the garden, under that tree that I never see without thinking of my escapade with Mr Thom.’ The nature of the escapade went unexplained.

A month later, Isabella was still dwelling on Thom: he ‘clings to my heartstrings’, she wrote; ‘I cannot divest myself of his image.’

In the summer of 1854, Henry checked Isabella’s household accounts and discovered discrepancies that she would not explain. They argued – she resentful of his distrust and surveillance, he angered by her laxity and disobedience. Isabella did not admit that she had been spending money on John Thom. Though he had refused the £15 that she tried to press on him as a leaving gift, she had persuaded him to accept about £55 that year, in money and goods – this amounted to more than a twentieth of the family’s expenditure. Isabella believed that Henry had treated Thom shabbily, and she was making up for it. Given her contribution to the household finances, she probably felt entitled to dispense some of the money as she pleased.

That summer Henry also went after his younger brother Albert, demanding reimbursement of the £3,000 that he had repaid their father in 1852. Albert now lived in Westminster with Isabella’s sister Julia and their infant daughter, and he was investing in ambitious ventures, among them an expedition to Greenland to discover minerals and a project to build huge steamships to designs by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Albert refused to pay Henry, claiming that the debt was not his alone, and Henry sued him. When the case came to court in August, the jury found in Henry’s favour and Albert was ordered to pay his older brother £3,335.

Isabella said that Henry revelled in the financial misfortunes of others. ‘He hates all merit,’ she later wrote to Combe, ‘he envies all success. I have known him to go into a Bankruptcy court on
purpose
to feast his eyes upon the spectacle of some once-prosperous man in distress.’