Desert Queen by Janet Wallach Read Free Book Online Page A

it was hoped. With these goals, Gertrude was sent to Bucharest, and although at the Paris train station she bade farewell bravely to her father, she left with fear and trepidation. “I felt very sad at leaving you,” she wrote Hugh the next day, “and hoped you missed me a little.”
    Accompanied on the train by her cousin Billy, she arrived in Bucharest in time for Christmas and the winter season. Until now she had defined herself as a student, and if her agenda included parties, they were secondary to her work. But her role had changed; she was now available for marriage and her primary task was to find a mate. As Florence and Hugh Bell’s daughter, she was expected to make an excellent match. And if there wasn’t one here, at least she would learn how to conduct herself for the chase.
    The social season in Bucharest followed on the heels of New Year’s Eve: lavish dinners, concerts, theater, balls followed by suppers that lasted till sunrise, an endless round of parties in a city with little else to do. For three hundred years, until 1829, Romania had been a vassal state in the Ottoman Empire and, for half a century after that, a protectorate of Russia. Only in 1881, seven years before Gertrude’s arrival, did it receive its independence, and the young country had yet to exert its influence on the world. But its geographical position, next door to Russia and across the Black Sea from Turkey, made it an excellent listening post, while its resources of agriculture and oil gave it excellent potential as a friend. For the diplomat Frank Lascelles, Romania was a propitious assignment. From here he could develop strong contacts in both the East and the West.
    Invitations arrived nonstop at the British Embassy, and along with her uncle and aunt and Billy, Gertrude took part in a whirlwind of events. Mary Lascelles had proven to be far more relaxed than her sister, and under “Auntie Mary’s” wing, Gertrude gained a graceful air. Corseted in whalebone and steel, pushed and pulled into an elaborate decollete gown, she learned how to flirt with her ostrich fan, puff on her cigarette and dine on caviar and champagne, to refrain from biting her nails (a family habit) and from twirling her bangs around her finger, and to keep from blurting out everything that came into her mind. With all of this, her aunt hoped, she would change from a snobbish intellectual into a polished ingenue.
    But Gertrude continued to comment snidely on events. Of the guests at one dinner, she wrote home, Mr. Mawe was “very conceited,” and M. Demos, an elderly diplomat, was so tiny and bent “no country could possibly take the trouble to claim him.” Of the food at another dinner she wrote, “The fish we smelt the moment [it] left the kitchen, the meat was the consistency of cork.” And in the company of a group of diplomats she announced to a distinguished French statesman that he had no understanding at all of the German people. Her aunt was appalled, and Gertrude learned her lesson. When, a few weeks later, a British diplomat came to stay with the Lascelleses, she was “very discreet!”
    Bucharest gave Gertrude her first real taste of society, but more than that, it gave Gertrude her first real taste of the world. A world that went beyond British boundaries. At the palace, she met King Carol, a Hohenzollern by birth, and chatted lengthily with his mystic wife, Elizabeth, known as the poet Carmen Sylva. She was introduced to Count von Bülow, who would become the Chancellor of Germany, and to Count Goluchowski, who would become the Chancellor of Austria. She dined with European aristocrats and Asian envoys, and spent a day with the British diplomat Charles Hardinge (later the Viceroy of India), whose enormous knowledge about the East and the Ottoman Empire opened her eyes to problems she knew little about.
    She spent weeks with Valentine Chirol, a close friend of the Lascelleses who was also visiting them in Bucharest. Now a foreign