The Lonely Lady of Dulwich Read online

  “You understand,” said Mr Hanson, “the separation will be immediate.”

  Zita said she quite understood. A further appointment was made for the signing of the deed, and the interview came to an end. Zita was determined to find a house as soon as possible. She found one the next day in Dulwich Village: a furnished cottage with a small garden, and in a fortnight’s time she had moved in. Robert Harmer had told her, through Mr Hanson, that he would send her all her personal effects, but she refused to keep any of the jewels or anything that he had given her, and she had few things of her own.

  She never saw Robert again. He died two years later during an epidemic of influenza. Before he died he had sold both his London house and his house at Wimbledon. He left Zita the same allowance she had received during his lifetime. He left a legacy to Amelia Legge, and Wallington went to the next of kin, a nephew who had settled in Canada, and who died five years later, leaving a son. This boy, Kenneth Harmer, became a cadet in the navy, and was a midshipman in 1914. He did well in the war and after. He used to go and see Zita when he was onleave, and she must have liked him, as she left him the small patrimony she had inherited from her mother, and the worksof Tennyson.

  Zita Harmer lived at Dulwich for the rest of her life, and died at the age of seventy, in 1920. She made her little garden beautiful, but she seldom saw anyone, and she never met Walter Price again. He settled down in America for good. The Legges used to visit her when they were in England. Legge died, an ambassador, a few years before the war: Amelia lived till the end of the war, but mostly abroad. She died the same year as Mrs Harmer.

  Zita was a beautiful old lady. Her hair was white and there were many tiny wrinkles on her lovely skin; but in her carriage, her movements, and her walk were the authority that only great beauty and the certainty of having possessed it confer, and her smile still lit up a whole room. People who would see her walking in Dulwich Village and Dulwich Park would wonder who she was, and what her story had been – that is to say, if she had had a story, which they thought unlikely.

  They called her the ‘Lonely Lady’.

  CHAPTER XIII

  I was at Dulwich when the effects of Mrs Harmer were being sold by auction in her cottage. The effects were mostly ordinary Victorian furniture, which was of no interest or importance, and went for little. There were a great many books, but with the exception of an odd collection of novels, they were mostly about gardening and technical at that. Mrs Harmer must have been a serious gardener.

  There were no pictures in the house except one or two early Victorian engravings by Landseer and Frith, which she had found there when she had taken the house. She had changed nothing in the furniture or the decoration, and had introduced no furniture of her own.

  There was an early Broadwood pianoforte, which made a wheezy tinkling noise like a spinet. I should have liked to buy that, had I known what to do with it. I went all over the little house before the sale, and visited the garden. It was a small garden, but it had been evidently planted and tended by a master hand and a loving mind.

  The sale took place towards the end of June, and the Madonna lilies were out; and the garden was curiously aromatic with verbena and sweet-scented geranium, cherry-pie and stocks, and sweet william and pinks. The cottage walls were smothered in roses. It was an unpretentious garden, and yet there was something special about it; something rare and intensely individual. This was odd, because in the house there was nothing that gave one the slightest indication of anything individual or personal. Inthe bedroom there was a cheap crucifix and a large coloured lithograph of the Holy Family.

  I bought two lots at the sale: a French book and an old-fashioned leather workbox or writing-desk – I don’t know which, for it contained reels of silk, tapestry needles, a crochet hook and a half-finished kettle-holder with ‘A Merry Christmas’ begun but not finished on it, as well as pens, pencils, an inkpot and a little notebook, and some sealing-wax and a seal.

  The French book was an old one, published in eighteen-eighty. It was tattered, but only half cut; it was a little bookof verse called Stances. On the title-page there was an inscription in violet ink: ‘à Madame Harmer, avec les plus respectueux hommages de Jean de Bosis, Paris, le 3 Mai, 1880’. One day I was looking at the writing-desk or workbox, and I took out the little notebook. I found it contained three entries in pencil. One was headed:

  ‘New Year’s Day, 1894.

  “So far, that my doom is, I love thee still.

  Let no man dream but that I love thee still.”

  Underneath this was written ‘Guinevere’.

  Further on in the book was another entry:

  ‘Good Friday, 1900.

  “Amor meus Crucifixus est.”

  There was a third entry, dated ‘May, 1920’. It must have been written just before she died. It was to this effect: ‘Kenneth came to tea’.

  ‘Secure for a full due.’

  I took out the small gold seal from the box, but I could not distinguish the image nor decipher the superscription. Out of curiosity, I took an impression. The image was that of a face enclosed in a heart, from which a flame arose, and the inscription was:

  Saignant et brûlant.

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  Synopses

  Titles published by House of Stratus

  ‘C’

  Baring’s homage to a decadent and carefree Edwardian age depicts a society as yet untainted by the traumas and complexities of twentieth-century living. With wit and subtlety a happy picture is drawn of family life, house parties in the country and a leisured existence clouded only by the rumblings of the Boer War. Against this spectacle Caryl Bramsley (the C of the title) is presented – a young man of terrific promise but scant achievement, whose tragic-comic tale offsets the privileged milieu.

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  Cat’s Cradle

  This sophisticated and intricate novel, based on true events, takes place in the late nineteenth century and begins with Henry Clifford, a man of taste and worldly philosophy, whose simple determination to do as he likes and live as he wishes is threatened when his daughter falls in love with an unsuitable man. With subtle twists and turns in a fascinating portrait of society, Maurice Baring conveys the moral that love is too strong to be overcome by mere mortals.

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  The Coat Without Seam

  The story of a miraculous relic, believed to be a piece of the seamless coat, worn by a soldier on Mount Golgotha after Jesus of Nazareth’s crucifixion. This captivates young Christopher Trevenen after his sister dies tragically and motivates the very core of his existence from then on, culminating in a profound and tragic realization.

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  Daphne Adeane

  Barrister Basil Wake and his arresting wife Hyacinth lead a well-appointed existence in the social whirl of London’s early 1900s. For eight years Hyacinth has conducted a most discreet affair with Parliamentarian Michael Choyce, who seems to fit into the Wakes’ lives so conveniently. But an invitation to attend a Private View and a startling portrait of the mysterious and beautiful Daphne Adeane signifies a change in this comfortable set-up.

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  Darby and Joan

  A series of romances, missed chances, and disasters befall the lives of Joan Brendon and Alexander Luttrell in a real life game of snakes and ladders, as each falls for others who enter their lives at seemingly unpropitious moments. Tragic misunderstandings, old flames turning up on wedding days, and bizarre coincidences are all the result of a missed letter! The Island of Malta features in this Victorian romance, which Baring based on a true story, providing insight into both the times and human strengths and weaknesses, before Darby and Joan end their days in happiness.

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  In The End Is My Beginning

  This historical novel tells the tragic story of Mary Queen of Scots, from her childhood until the beginning of her end, whose unwise marital and political actions provoked rebellion among Scottish nobles and forced her to flee to England, where she wa
s beheaded as a Roman Catholic threat to the throne. The clash of opinion over whether Mary was a martyr or a murderess is perfectly represented by four eye-witnesses (The Four Maries – her ladies-in-waiting) who narrate this captivating story with distinctive conclusions.

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  The Lonely Lady of Dulwich

  The novel portrays the life of a lonely, beautiful, yet over-protected Catholic girl and the several loves of her long life. A struggle develops between the demands of love and religious orthodoxy and matters of conscience are examined in significant detail. The story takes place against the background of upper-class English and French life at the turn of the twentieth century, and is written in a delightfully light and graceful style.

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  Overlooked

  Anthony Kay, a blind man, meets a gathering of people and quickly becomes involved in their lives. One of them is novelist James Rudd, who decides to study and write about the characters around him. The story he end up with is very different to the one Kay would have told …. Maurice Baring skillfully blends the objective and subjective, questioning the concept of sight in a portrait of characters whose lives are destined to be intertwined. As with crime incidents in the modern era, witnesses may see the same things, but their interpretation and recall can be very different.

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  The Puppet Show of Memory

  It was into the famous and powerful Baring family of merchant bankers that Maurice Baring was born in 1874, the seventh of eight children. A man of immense subtlety and style, Baring absorbed every drop of culture that his fortunate background showered upon him; in combination with his many natural talents and prolific writing this assured him a place in literary history.

  In this classic autobiography, spanning a remarkable period of history, Maurice Baring shares the details of an inspirational childhood in nineteenth-century England and a varied adulthood all over the world, collecting new friends and remarkable experiences. It has been said that Baring’s greatest talent was for discovering the best in people, that he had a genius for friendship, and in this superb book his erudition and perception are abundantly clear.

  ‘A classic autobiography’ – Dictionary of National Biography

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  Tinker’s Leave

  Reserved and unworldly, young Miles Consterdine and his epiphanic trip to Paris is Maurice Baring’s first bead on this thread of a story based on impressions received by the author in Russia and Manchuria during wartime. From here Baring allows us to peek through windows opening onto tragic and comic episodes in the lives of noteworthy people in remarkable circumstances.

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  www.houseofstratus.com