Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell

as well as all the capital. Hugh maintained an expensive household of wife and five children in what was still a fairly modest house, Red Barns, and had one son at Eton and another soon to start. Lowthian lived in his five-storey country mansion, Rounton Grange, and maintained his London house at 10 Belgrave Terrace, largely for his own use. The iron industry, in company with other staple industries, had recently undergone a downturn, and profits had begun to fall. Late in 1889 Gertrude had been an interested eavesdropper on a conversation between two men on a train, discussing whether ironmasters were “making a roaring fortune”: she had remarked to Florence, “They thought they must be, poor deluded wretches; I didn’t undeceive them!” Now, in July 1892, her hopes dashed, a broken-hearted Gertrude wrote a most touching letter to Chirol:
    Mr. Cadogan is very poor, his father I believe to be practically a bankrupt, and mine, though he is an angel and would do anything in the world for me, is absolutely unable to run another household besides his own, which is, it seems to me, what we are asking him to do . . . I hope he will now see Mr. Cadogan in London and arrive at least at some conclusion. Meantime, Henry Cadogan and I are not allowed to consider ourselves engaged and I’m afraid the chances of our eventual marriage are very far away somewhere in the future. I write sensibly about it, don’t I, but I’m not sensible at all in my heart, only it’s all too desperate to cry over—there comes a moment in very evil days when they are too evil for anything but silence . . . it’seasier to appear happy if no one knows you have any reason to be anything else. And I care so much . . . I’m forgetting how to be brave, which I always thought I was.
    There was nothing for Henry to do but stay on in Persia for a year or two, and try to work his way into a more remunerative post. A lesser soul than Gertrude might have rebelled against her father’s decision, but she wrote a letter to Florence that is remarkable for its sense of honour, and even in its extraordinary sympathy for her parents:
    Our position is very difficult, and we are very unhappy. We have not seen much of each other . . . since my father’s letter we don’t feel that we have any right to meet. The thing I can bear least is that you or Papa should ever think anything of him which is not noble and gentle and good. That is all of him I have ever known.
    It’s very horrid of me to write like this, it will only make you sorry quite uselessly and needlessly. You must not think for a moment that if I could choose I would not have it all over again, impatience and pain and the going which is yet to come. It is worth it all . . . Some people live all their lives and never have this wonderful thing . . . only one may cry just a little when one has to turn away and take up the old narrow life again—Oh Mother, Mother.
    There could be no doubt that Gertrude was in love. And Henry may well have truly loved her in return. Perhaps they would have been happy together; he would have given up his gambling and she would have learnt to subject herself to the rigours of his modest career, following him from post to post. But they were not to have the chance. The painful goodbyes were somehow endured, and she returned to Sloane Street, where a loving Florence was waiting to comfort her. A day or two later, Hugh arrived from the north, to fold his beloved daughter in his arms and talk her through her tears.
    Subdued for once in her life, Gertrude wrote few letters in the following months. Her feelings were deep, and she was slow to recover. Nonetheless, the spring found her in France, writing home of a romantic garden in Nîmes whose beauty reminded her of a certain garden in Persia, where she had once been so happy:
    Took a carriage and drove to the garden where lies the Temple of Nymphs. The frogs croaked and the little