Desert Queen by Janet Wallach Read Free Book Online

her parents, noting that she had had no problem finishing her tests and even had time afterward for tennis and afternoon tea.
    Escorted by her cousin Horace, she attended a week of parties and dances to celebrate the end of exams. The highlight of the academic ceremonies was Encaenia, the last remnant of medieval practice, when all of the scholars marched in their colorful robes. Gertrude, who had started out at Oxford careless of her appearance, now had a passion for clothes. Long before the ceremonies, she had gone shopping for something to wear and, returning to Lady Margaret Hall, had burst into Janet Hogarth’s room: “I’ve got a hat, Janet, but a hat! Come see it.” At the Wednesday lunch, her straw hat, its brim drenched in roses, nearly hid her face. “Her outfits for commemoration week had been one of our great interests,” Janet Hogarth later recalled. “She certainly had the dress-sense.”
    Still whirling from the festivities, Gertrude now had to confront the orals, the most difficult part of the examinations. On the day of her oral exams, wearing a smart new dress and fashionable brown shoes, she sat calmly at the table, a picture of self-assurance. Like most parents, Florence and Hugh had come to Oxford for the event, and with them behind her, she coolly faced the battalion of male professors. First came the distinguished historian S. R. Gardiner, who started the viva voce with a question about Charles I. As her parents listened anxiously, Gertrude began her reply: “I am afraid I must differ from your estimate of Charles I.” Horrified, the famous don stopped his questioning and turned the baton over to the next man down the row. The interrogation continued on a quieter note until another professor asked her about a German town, noting it was on the left bank of the Rhine. But Gertrude had visited the village the year before. Without hesitation, she replied: “I am sorry, but it is on the right. I know, I have been there.” The room gasped.
    Despite her audacity, however, when the results came back, she learned she had received a First in Modern History, the first woman to do so. The announcement appeared in The Times , and along with accolades from her family, she received a flood of congratulatory letters from friends. Her triumph confirmed her predilection to say what was on her mind and declare what she knew was right. Florence called it “her entire honesty and independence of judgement.” Invigorating to some, tactless to others, her assertiveness would exhilarate many and intimidate many more. It opened doors that otherwise would have stayed shut, but it also earned her a reputation for arrogance.
    She was brash and immature, and in spite of her dazzling scholastic achievements, Gertrude had failed the most important test of all. Unlike her two friends from home, she had had no one ask for her hand in marriage. She was twenty years old, a snob, a bluestocking, a woman with an “attitude”; her haughtiness and self-importance hardly appealed to eligible young men, and those who dared to court her were soon dismissed. The few she had dated disappeared by the end of school. Mr. Raper’s name melted away with the winter ice, and Bob Cockerel was written off as very nice to talk to and dance with, “but that’s quite all.” As for her cousin Billy Lascelles, whose mother, Mary, was Florence’s sister, she found him amusing but abhorred his “offhand” way.
    The time had come to take matters in hand, Billy’s mother advised Florence. The Lascelleses were living in Bucharest, where Mary’s husband, Frank, was the British Minister to Romania. A winter season with foreign diplomats, it was agreed, might help Gertrude “get rid of her Oxfordy manner.”

C HAPTER T HREE
    An Ill-Fated Marriage

    A s Oxford had been a school for her mind, Romania would be a school for her manners. As Oxford had allowed her into the world of diplomas, Romania would allow her into the world of diplomacy. Or so