Franny Moyle by Constance: The Tragic, Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde Page A

‘sweet dreams’ on the nursery’s two infant occupants. In the sleepy atmosphere that Constance conjures, where the children slumber ‘with flushed faces and tossed golden hair on their downy pillows’, the little stork complains to the angel, ‘I am fastened here for ever; and though the sky is always blue, and the almond blossoms are always pink … I still long once more to see the dear home where I was born, and the wife who was given to me, and the little ones who came after I left, and whom I have never seen!’ 11
    The angel releases the painted stork with the aid of a magic pink feather plucked from her wings. With this empowering feather attached to its head, the stork is able to leave the fan in which it is imprisoned and fly to its homeland, on condition that it returns before the two sleeping children wake.
    Constance provides a highly visual, painterly and idealized description of the Japan to which the stork flies. There was plenty of reference material in her own home in Tite Street and other neighbouring Aesthetic homes that she could have drawn on. Not only had the Japanese fanatic Mortimer Menpes given Vyvyan some of his etchings of that country as a christening present, but his own nearby Chelsea home was an hommage to the East. Interestingly, the little girl in Constance’s story shares the same name as Menpes’ own child: Dorothy. If this was not enough inspiration, in August 1886 Otho had given Oscar a book on Japanese art, which Oscar described in his thank-you note as ‘by far the best book on Japanese Art that I know’, and one can imagine Constance studying this ardently before putting her own pen to paper.
    Constance describes vistas of ‘grey-tiled houses’ that ‘nestle in and out of the hill-side, each with its almond trees and its tiny rockery garden’, a ‘little stream with gold fish in it’ and ‘merry little girls clad in the richest rainbow hues, with eyes bright as stars, and smooth black hair dressed in butterfly fashion’.
    The painted stork flies from one artefact into another. In the Japanese workshop in which he himself was painted he finds anotherfan depicting ‘a mother-stork and all her little ones’, and this, he concludes, is his wife and family. For ‘many hours’ the stork talks to his family, and when the evening comes he realizes that he does not want now to return back to the ‘fog and the cold’ of England. However, a little Japanese girl who can conveniently see him and understands the magic of the moment begs him to return to England to the children there, and then bring them back to Japan with him so she might play with them.
    And so, because ‘the child looked at him so piteously and her smile was so winsome’, the stork cannot ‘bear to refuse her’. But when he re-enters the nursery in London, the magic spell is broken. The angel’s feather becomes dislodged from the stork’s head, his power to weave between real and imagined worlds is suddenly gone and the stork simply adopts his former place, back in the fan, finding himself once more flying across ‘the blue sky with pink almond blossoms round him’.
    Constance was delighted with the story and sent it to Otho. Typically for a woman who had a tendency to clumsiness, she managed to send her own copy of the book by mistake, one in which she had written an inscription, perhaps to Oscar or the boys. ‘I found that I’ve sent you my copy,’ she wrote to Otho. ‘Will you either send it back when you have read it, and I will send you the other, or if you like better, cut the inscription out and send it. Tell me what you think of the story.’ 12
    Constance’s first foray into fiction proved successful. The publicity her involvement in The Bairn’s Annual solicited was quickly recognized. ‘I have today got an offer for another story and if it appears I shall