IT WAS WRITTEN IN THE STARS
“You will cross the sea, you will find yourself in the same city with your Destiny, you will need all your courage, energy, intelligence to face the obstacles that will appear before you. Your life will be made of continuous moves, of changes and of adventures. One single soul in two bodies. Show this to the man who will be your husband.”
This is what the old gypsy woman who lived in the encampment near the Arundell country house at Stonymore Wood, in Essex, had said to Isabel. The fortune-teller, nomen omen, was called Burton. And, even though Isabel did not know it, Destiny was waiting for her in Boulogne sur Mer, the French seaside resort where young English girls from good families went to stay to learn the language and – last but not least – to try to snag, in accordance with their mothers’ intentions, a good suitor.
In September of 1850 Isabel, a beautiful tall girl, with blue eyes and long dark blond hair, with aristocratic manners and an independent air, was walking on the ramparts in the company of her cousin. Richard was there too, and given that the girls were unaccompanied, he felt authorized to stare at her with his penetrating and magnetic gaze. He had just returned from India and his charm and physical beauty were such as to attract all the girls he met. Unfortunately, he attracted much less the mothers of those girls, who saw in him a simple lieutenant of the Indian Army, with a low salary, a bad reputation brought back from India and a temper that made him appear insolent and rude. One of his characteristics, in fact, was the pleasure he took in scandalizing members of bourgeois society. Nothing exhilarated him more than observing the reactions of disdain of those who at that moment were listening to his sputtering speeches.
The second day, when he saw Isabel appear, Richard wrote in chalk on the wall: “May I speak with you?” and left the chalk on the parapet. “No – she wrote in response – mother would get angry.” It was during the third meeting, when they were introduced, that she learned the name of that handsome unknown knight. At that point the sense of destiny took hold of her, electrifying her. Their moment, however, had not yet come. Richard was courting Isabel’s cousin and she suffered from jealousy, so, when the Arundell family returned to London, she left without saying goodbye to him.
Left alone in Boulogne, Richard frequented a fencing club and returned with his mind to the project, already elaborated in India, of making a journey to Medina and to Mecca in disguise, a journey then carried out in 1853. The balance of his literary activity up to that moment was rather disheartening, his four books on India had not had great success. Not even the small book on the correct use of the bayonet had been taken into consideration, even though later, after the end of the Crimean War, people realized its usefulness. And regarding the Crimean War, Isabel, with more charitable intentions, had asked Florence Nightingale to be able to go there to act as a nurse, but her proposal had not been accepted as her age was considered too young. Then she, always full of resources, had created in London a volunteer association to aid the widows and orphans of war.
In June of 1856, while she was going to Ascot alone, someone opened the door of her carriage. It was the old gypsy who at Stonymore had predicted her future. “So, have you become Daisy Burton?” he asked her. “Would to heaven that I were!” Isabel replied. “Have patience, it is about to happen…” the gypsy woman affirmed.
Two months later, while she was walking with her sister in the Botanical Gardens, she almost ran into Richard while he was wandering around a large bush. He was in the company of his cousin, courted without success in Boulogne and now married to another. They shook hands and spoke of the four years that had passed. Isabel had in her hand a copy of Tancredi by Benjamin Disraeli, narrating the story of a young Englishman who went to the Middle East to familiarize himself with the philosophical mysteries of the Semitic world, a book that revealed her attraction to exotic places. Richard asked her if she would return to the park and she replied that she went there every day at 11 for a couple of hours. Punctual, he returned too, alone, and in the following two weeks he spoke to her of his project of a journey to discover the sources of the Nile. Then, on the last day, he asked her if she would be willing to renounce ‘civilization’ to follow him, perhaps to Damascus, if he had been given that consulate on his return from Africa. He did not want an immediate answer, but she had no hesitation and told him yes right away. She also confessed to him that she had always thought of him in the four years that had passed, that she had prayed for him and that she had read all his books. Finally, she showed him the gypsy Burton’s horoscope with the prediction of their future together. Richard, who had always been a bit superstitious, saw it as Before leaving for the African continent he gave her a poem he had written on Fame, seen as a woman who enjoined him to dare if he wanted to have the privilege of being taken into her arms. She reciprocated with a medallion with the effigy of the Virgin hanging on a gold chain. Very wisely, Richard pointed out to her that the precious metal could represent some risk where he was about to go, so she replaced it with a steel necklace. He never took it off for the rest of his days.
Richard hated farewells and he did not meet Isabel again before the departure. She, for her part, was always close to him on the journey with her letters. She also sent him a large envelope with newspaper clippings that spoke of the expedition of him and Speke, who reached Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, in the hands of the Manyema. He wrote very rarely, in the last twenty months he had not sent even a letter. Her mother, fierce enemy of Richard, gloated. She told her daughter that he must have now forgotten her or that perhaps he had been eaten by jackals. And she added that, in the improbable case in which he had returned with the intention of marrying her, she would not have given her consent to the marriage.
Isabel replied that, if she had had to renounce Richard, she would have entered a convent the next day and would never have married one of the suitors so dear to her mother. But inside she suffered and confided her sorrows to her diary. She wrote her resolution to learn to accept with trust the uncertainty of the situation without making her love depend on his actions, who was a man different from others. To distract herself a bit from that lacerating wait she left with her sister for a journey in Europe. When she returned she learned that Speke was returning to London and that Richard had instead remained in Zanzibar alone. Two days later, from the island of spices, a envelope arrived with a poem that Richard had written for her. It was a confirmation of what she had noted in her diary, namely that he was a man different from others and therefore not judgeable according to a common standard of evaluation. When, some time later, he too was arriving in London, Isabel realized she felt, as in the past, mixed happiness, fear, desire to see him united with the wish to escape. But when on May 22, while she was at friends’ house, she heard Richard’s voice at the door asking for her, she rushed to embrace him and they went out together. He stopped a taxi and told the driver to drive home to give them a way to talk. Richard had a skeletal appearance, yellow skin and his lip drawn back over his gums. The fever, the paralysis and the near blindness from which he had suffered during the journey in Africa had left their mark on his iron physique. Both decided to wait for the marriage and Richard went to spend some time in Paris. On his return, he continued to meet Isabel secretly until one fine day, without telling her anything, he left for the land of the Mormons.
Isabel said she had been created with an ardent heart and with the will to be the travel and adventure companion of a nomadic man. The sedentary life of the bourgeois lady was not for her and she did not want a marriage dictated by worldly ambitions or by interests in wealth. Moreover, her vivid imagination and strong interest in distant places made her prefer a piece of bread under a tent with the man of her dreams and the risks and unforeseen events of a wandering life rather than the security of an uneventful life. She was of the idea that an intelligent and free woman should not settle for a housewife role. She certainly would never have been such, even if she would have liked to have her mother’s approval of her marriage.
Taking advantage of Richard’s absence, Isabel had decided to make the most of the time that separated her from marriage by learning to manage manual work. She went to spend the summer on a farm and learned to cook, to clean the house, to raise chickens, to tend to horses, to milk cows… Returned to London, she asked a friend to teach her to fence.
When Richard returned, he told her that he would not wait other years, beyond the five already passed, for her answer. If she had further postponed the marriage because of her mother’s prejudices, he would have left never to return, because it would have meant that she did not have the strength of character necessary for the woman destined to be his wife. He would have gone to India and other countries and she would not have seen him again. Isabel, at that point, had no more hesitations and she told him yes.
SEVEN MONTHS OF HAPPINESS
On the morning of January 22, 1861 Richard was on the steps of the Bavarian Catholic Church on Warwick Street. He wore a hunting jacket and had a large cigar in his mouth. Isabel arrived shortly after with a light fawn-colored velvet dress. If she had changed her dress at friends’ house, she had told her parents that she was going to visit relatives in the countryside, she had not had the courage to tell them that she was going to get married. Only when they returned home from the ceremony did he write to his father-in-law, Hon. Henry Raymond Arundell, to tell him that he had abducted his daughter and to express to him his firm intention of not giving him, in the future, reasons to regret the step taken. Isabel, for her part, had matured some resolutions in her confrontations with Richard, among them those of making him acquire prestige, respectability and of trying to make him become a good Catholic. An arduous undertaking, given that he did not take into account at all the rules and social conventions and did not miss an occasion to mock every religion. She had also written in her diary a list of rules that a wife had to follow. “Hide from everyone his errors. Do not allow anyone to speak of him disrespectfully in front of you… Do not answer when he criticizes you and do not criticize him when he is the one who is wrong… Never ask him not to do a thing… Never bore him with religious argument speeches… Keep up with the times in a way that he does not get tired of you and do not grant him pauses because nothing tires him more than inactivity.”
The first seven months of marriage were, in Isabel’s words, of uninterrupted happiness. Years later she declared that those would have been enough to compensate for the difficulties that came later. Her role as wife was often difficult, he was at times cruel with words and with acts, he spent long periods far from home, but she, thanks to her own intelligence, to her strength of spirit and to her ability to adapt, overcame every obstacle.
She dedicated herself completely to her husband, she always lived in his shadow, she put her own desires in the background, she put her own talent at his disposal, renouncing being a writer, despite having the talent to be one, to take care of his works and act as his publicity agent. When she felt sad and dejected she took refuge in prayer and in meditation, her lifeline. Faith gave her strength, it intertwined with her identity and with her roots and it was something she would not have sacrificed for anything or for anyone.