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She told me her son had been bodily, mentally and financially destroyed by the woman he calls Bella Baxter. Were he not now in a locked ward of Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum he would be in jail for defrauding his clients of their funds.
Yay!!! Duncan finally got those grippy socks! Good for him.
The solicitor had mixed facts and lies so cleverly that for a moment even I believed him.
“You have used this wise, kind, self-sacrificing man’s hospitality to call him a freak and a liar.
And you say his pain at such vilification is a sign of GUILT!!!??? Think black black shame of yourselves, gentlemen. You have almost persuaded me that you are not gentlemen at all.”
Finally! Our main character speaks up
“I will prove you wrong, and do so with testimonies from five independent witnesses, each a scientist of international fame.
they view the human mind from different standpoints, and Kraepelin and Korsakoff share Dr. Prickett’s view of Charcot. But all are unanimous about Bella Baxter—she is sane, strong and cheerful, with a vigorously independent attitude to life, even though amnesia
They agree that she shows no signs of mania, hysteria, phobia, dementia, melancholia, neurasthenia, aphasia, catatonia, algolagnia, necrophilia, coprophilia, folie de grandeur, nostalgie de la boue, lycanthropy, fetishism, Narcissism, Onanism, irrational belligerence, unhealthy reticence and is not obsessively Sapphic.
They say her only obsessive trait is linguistic.
Hard-working, thorough.
but his final words sum up the verdict of the rest: Bella Baxter’s most striking abnormality is her lack of it.
You owe me that, Vicky, because I gave you life.
That is not a valid reason--it's a threat. Any parent who says this to their child should NOT be a parent. What a pathetic excuse for a father.
“Or divorce Sir Aubrey,” said Baxter. “If he insists on taking a purely legal view of his marriage, so can you.” We stared at him.
“On the 16th of February 1880 Lady Blessington, then in an advanced state of pregnancy, was visited by another heavily pregnant woman, a former kitchen-maid in Porchester Terrace who said she was Sir Aubrey’s discarded mistress and begged for money.
HELL YES! EXPOSE THAT SON OF BITCH
“You queer sad old General,” said Bella mournfully, “did you honestly think your wife a maniac because she wanted warmed by you more than an hour a week, while you regularly hugged a young girl for four?”
Men!! Are!! Hypocrites!!
Her flesh had shrunk so close to the bones that her figure was now angular, but the horriblest change was in her face. The white sharp nose, hollow cheeks and sunken eye-sockets showed the skull all too clearly, yet within the sockets each black pupil had expanded to fill the whole eye, leaving just a tiny wee triangle of white in the corners. Her dark curling mass of hairs had also expanded, for the first inch of each one stood straight out from the head “like quills upon the fretful porcupine”. I did not doubt that before me stood the emaciated form of Lady Victoria Blessington, exactly as
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but I said it because I wanted you out of the house, out of my sight as soon as possible. I was afraid you would go into labour and I HATE women near me when they are whelping, hate the blood, screams and stinking mess they make, ugh, the thought of it makes me want to retch.
Men are so disappointing.
“And here I stay,” said Bella calmly, and as she spoke the lines of her figure and face relaxed into their proper softness, her hair began to settle, her eyes recovered their usual depth, size, and golden-brown warmth. She said, “Thank you for giving me life, Father, though from what you say my mother had most trouble making me and you took none at all. Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having. Thank you, Sir Aubrey, for releasing me from my father, and thank you for driving me away from your house. Or perhaps I should thank Dolly Perkins for doing that. Without her it
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GIRL BOSS
“They cannot win a divorce action against you, Sir Aubrey. Your alleged adultery with Dolly Perkins is irrelevant. A husband’s adultery is no ground for divorce unless it is unnatural—committed anally, incestuously, homosexually or with a beast.
What the--
think what kept him beside us was his bafflement at being neither victorious nor wholly defeated.
Suddenly she opened her eyes, looked at the General and said to him thoughtfully, “I remember you now, from the Dungeon Suite of the Hôtel de Notre-Dame, in Paris. You were the man in the mask—Monsieur Spankybot.”
OH MY GOD.
“That woman is no daughter of Blaydon Hattersley.” And then they were all gone. “Good,”
But two days later the papers announced that General Blessington had been found dead on the gun-room floor of his country house at Loamshire Downs. The revolver in his hand and angle of the bullet through his brain ruled out accident.
BYE BYE BITCH
READER, SHE MARRIED ME AND I HAVE LITTLE more to tell.
I believe our sons find their stolid father a welcome counterpoise to their brilliant, unconventional mother. I believe their mother finds me that too. She is the swelling sail, trim rigging and busy sunlit deck of our matrimonial yacht; I am the low hull with the invisible ballast and keel. This metaphor greatly contents me.
“Do not quarrel with the institution before you have seen through all its workings and understand them. Meanwhile use your free intelligence to plan better ways of doing things.”
It is weak of me to want company in my last minutes but . . . I am weak!”
“My will leaves all to Bella and you. Have children and teach them good behaviour and honest work by example. Never be violent with them, and never preach. Make sure Mrs. Dinwiddie and the other servants live comfortably here when they can no longer work, and be kind to my dogs. Finally—” (here he emptied the glass in one quick swallow) “—that is how wine tastes.”
I had not heard him laugh before. The sound started small and swelled up huge, so huge that I flattened my hands over my ears, though the throbs and twangs of his heart-beat swelled loud too until it and the laughter stopped in a sudden sharp snap. Complete silence. He swayed neither forward nor back, but sat perfectly rigid.
