garrison classroom I turned to account in the mission. In the years that followed I became a good teacher and acquired a knowledge of the world at large, and of the Orient in particular, which has been vouchsafed to few women, along with a wide range of oriental languages.’
The smile returned to her face. ‘But I never forgot my Rupert,’ she said. ‘After a few years I returned to India. My poor mother had aged and grown more worn, but my wretched stepfather had changed not at all. He still believed that I would marry some uncouth private of his choice. I was now of an age to make my own decisions as to matrimony, and I did so. I married Rupert Eland, though he had changed his name to Fordeland.’
The smile broadened. ‘It is, I expect, difficult for men such as yourselves to imagine what marriage meant to me. The life of a junior officer’s wife is not a paradise, but it was so far from the squalor in which I had been raised that it might well have been. A junior officer’s wife still lives a life that is bound by service to the army and the Empire, but the differences were, for me, enormous. To occupy our own premises, to employ our own servants, to have space and time to pursue my artistic and intellectual interests, to be able to meet with other ladies who shared my interests, to share my life with a man whom I loved and admired, was as much as I could have desired.’
She became thoughtful again and sipped her tea. ‘Of course, we travelled, we followed where the Empire required Rupert. We travelled in the East, we were in Australia and we went to Singapore.
During that time I bore Rupert two children, a boy and a girl. Some might think that our life was hard, but I do not. I did not wish for more.’
She gazed past us, looking out of the window, and perhaps she saw those far-off days in the Orient.
‘It ended in a cruel misfortune,’ she continued. ‘Rupert had joined some brother officers on a tiger-hunting expedition. I was anxious that he return by nightfall, partly because I was aware that young officers in a hunting camp fall into ways of which I did not approve. I urged him to return at the end of the day and he promised to do so. He kept his promise, as I knew he would. Although he had lingered in camp after their hunt, he rode hard to reach home before sundown.’
She hesitated, as though to nerve herself for the recollection and recitation.
‘He had barely arrived home,’ she said, ‘when he collapsed. We put him to bed, but there was nothing to be done. He died from heatstroke.’
Holmes allowed the silence to stretch a while, but eventually I said quietly, ‘It must have been a calamity for you, Mrs Fordeland.’
‘It was,’ she said. ‘It was. Rupert had always been my future and had become the mainstay and centrepost of my life. At one blow I had lost my only love and the support of our little family. Rupert had not been one of those gilded young men who adopt the army as a gentlemanly occupation until they inherit family wealth. He had no prospect of family wealth, no independent income. He was a career soldier. I had no home to which I might retreat, neither in India nor in England.’
She set her jaw again. ‘It was up to me to ensure that my children and I survived. The only skill that I possessed was in teaching, so I set up a school for the children of officers.
It barely paid the way, but it kept my children and me from absolute penury. Nevertheless, I was always aware that our situation was precarious and that I must take steps to ensure a better future for my children. So it was that, when a friend in the consulate told me of the King of Mongkuria’s search for an English governess, I applied for and was accepted in the post.‘
She drew a long breath, as though an awkward task had been completed.
‘You have read my account of my years in Mongkuria, Dr Watson,’ she said. ‘I assure you that I did not alter that part of my story. King Chula has said that I ’made up from my imagination what was deficient in my memory‘, but that is not so; It is as true as my observation, my recollection and my pen could make it, so I shall not take up your time by reciting it all again. You may wonder why I have told you so much of my past, but it seems to me that you should understand fully how I came to be what I am and what I was when I visited Russia. It may assist you in understanding my reaction to what happened there.’
Sixteen
A Journey Through Russia
‘It had always been my intention to return to Mongkuria. Indeed, it had taken me no little time to persuade the King to grant me leave to come to England to visit my daughter. Unfortunately, while I was here, the King died suddenly. His son was only fifteen years old, so a regency ensued, and they did not invite me to return.’
She looked at both of us, who had sat silent through this recitation.
‘I will not bore you with details of what is, essentially, family history,’ she said. ‘My daughter’s marriage eventually ensured that we made our home across the Atlantic. However, I was not prepared to be simply an ageing pensioner of my wealthy son-in-law. My books had been received with no little success, and I established an income from writing and lecturing, largely, I may say, on the reduced status of women in all parts of the world. It was that which brought me to the attention of an American magazine editor and led to the offer to travel through Russia.’
Once more she paused and looked out of the window.
‘It seemed to be,’ she said, ‘a wonderful opportunity. So much is said and written about Russia by people who have never been there, and so much by people who have their own secret motives for what they say. I was being given the chance to travel the Tzar’s kingdom from end to end and to report on it as freely as I wished. It should have been the chance of a lifetime, and of course I saw it as such and jumped at it.’
She looked back to us, and continued, in what struck me as a reflective tone.
‘I was the first Western woman, if not the first Western journalist, to traverse the whole length of Russia. My articles were a resounding success in the States and in Canada. The company that
commissioned my trip was so pleased that they offered me an editor’s post. I turned them down. You may wonder at that, as you may wonder that I never wrote a book about my experiences in Russia, but I turned down the offer of employment and I never wrote a book about Russia, because there were things which I wished never to recall and things which I had promised never to say.’
She braced her shoulders and a brisker tone entered her voice.
‘Russia,’ she said, ‘was everything I thought it might be and many things which I had not imagined.
Have either of you been there?’
We both nodded.
‘Then, perhaps, you will not need me to tell you of the splendours which the great cities of Russia display. London, Paris, New York, Vienna, all have their fame for the richness and quality of their society and their entertainments, but Moscow and Saint Petersburg are close to their match. I saw performances, I attended receptions, which might have been in any of the world’s great cities. I did not actually meet the then Tzar and Tzarina, but more than once I was at receptions which they attended.
Of the social, artistic and intellectual life of the country I soon had no doubt, but that was not what I had gone to Russia to see.
‘I was there,’ she said, ‘to see as much of the real Russia as I might, for the great cities are no more representative of Russia than London is of all England or New York of all America. Nevertheless, it was in the cities that I began first to see the shadowed side of Russian society. In the manufactories which were already beginning to spread and expand in those days, I saw the way in which men, and women, were forced to toil and the hardships which they had to bear. I am not unworldly, gentlemen. I pride myself that I know more of the realities of life than many of my sex. I know that life in the West End of London is separated from life in the East End by a great social and economic gulf, and I know that this circumstance pertains, on a greater or lesser scale, in every city everywhere in the world.
‘But I was not there to see just their great cities. As we travelled eastwards, I saw more of their smaller cities, their country towns, their villages. Wherever I went I tried to see things as they really were, and not as officials might like me to see them. I was present at feasts and funerals and even a birth. More and more I became aware that poverty and fear are the lot of millions of workers in Russia. In the country, perhaps even more so than in the cities, they live lives which no Briton would stand. In the cities there are signs of unrest, but any association which is deemed to be involved in any kind of politics is put down harshly and its leaders sent to prison or banished to Siberia. In the country they dare not even try. They live in fear of the whim of their landowners, who have
