Desert Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t know how glad I am you are coming home. From your very very very loving Gertrude.”
    Eager for Florence’s love, the little girl struggled to please. Florence opened up an exciting world of books, theater, art and interesting people. As a child Gertrude liked nothing so much as to sit at her side, listening to her read from Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland or the tales of Ali Baba, Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin and his Magic Lamp from the Arabian Nights. As Gertrude grew older, she found much in Florence to admire: her talent as a writer, her efforts at social justice, her accomplishments as a hostess, her literary friends, her stylishness and fashion sense. Even more, she was grateful for the friendship and family life that Florence provided.
    But her stepmother’s impatience with anything less than perfection prickled Gertrude like a spiky thorn. A photograph, taken when Gertrude was nine, reveals some of the tension between them. Florence, resplendent in a rich velvet dress trimmed with fur, is seated in front of a leaded glass window, her expression forbidding as she looks down at a large book in her hands. On one side stands Maurice, in his buttoned-up suit, on the other, Gertrude, in a plain wool dress, but as close as they are placed to her, the children seem miles away. There is no contact: no physical touching, no emotional bond. While little Maurice seems to be biting his lip to stop himself from crying, Gertrude looks soulful, her eyes off somewhere in the distance. If tears could fill the chasm between them, there would be enough to plug an ocean.
    Gertrude’s willfulness had caused a string of nannies to quit their job. Florence, too, had little tolerance for Gertrude’s “highly spirited” ways. As soon as she began having her own children (there would be three in all: Elsa, Molly and Hugo), Gertrude, aged ten, was sent on long visits to her cousins (her favorite was Horace Marshall) or to her grandparents’ new house at Rounton Grange. More than once reports came back to Florence about Gertrude’s naughtiness, her dangerous climbs on steep rocks, the risky adventures that often scared the relatives.
    Wherever Gertrude was, she escaped through her books. They were her magic carpet, but anything she read had to be approved by Florence. At the age of eleven she glided through John Richard Green’s long History of the English People. At fourteen, she asked her cousin Horace if he had read Browning’s new book of poetry. “I suppose not,” she answered with resignation. But, she boasted to him, in one week she had galloped through volumes of letters and biographies of Mozart, Macaulay and Mrs. Carlyle. At sixteen, she dashed through George Eliot’s Silas Marner , and then asked meekly, “What other book of hers may I read now?” Even at the age of twenty-three, after ordering a best-selling novel about the seduction of a maid, she wrote apologetically to Florence, telling her to return it: “Naturally I should have asked you about it before I read it.”
    No matter how bright they were, girls of Gertrude’s class rarely were sent away to school; instead, they were tutored at home and, at the age of seventeen, were presented at court and introduced to society. Within three seasons of coming out, each was expected to find a husband. But Gertrude had shown an exceptional mind, too keen to be kept at home. Florence and Hugh, progressive thinkers both, took the radical step of sending her to a girls’ school in London. It would calm the energy level in the household and, at the same time, feed Gertrude’s hungry intellect. Queen’s College, a girls’ school on Harley Street, was started in 1848 as a series of Lectures for Ladies.
    It was a total change from the protected world of Red Barns and Rounton Grange. For one thing, her classmates were all girls. For another, the rules were stricter in London than they had been at home. Intellectually, she had little concern. Her first-term