Blanche Glover, spinster.
Maud shivered, as she always shivered, on reading this document. What had Christabel thought, when she read it? Where had Christabel been, and why had she gone, and where had Randolph Ash been, between July 1859 and the summer of 1860? There was no record, Roland said, of Ash not being at home. He had published nothing during 1860 and had written few letters-those there were, were dated from Bloomsbury, as usual. LaMotte scholars had never found any satisfactory explanation for Christabel's apparent absence at the time of Blanche's death, and had worked on the supposition of a quarrel between the two women. This quarrel now looked quite different, Maud thought, without becoming clearer. She took up the newspaper cutting.
On the night of June 26th, in driving wind and rain, another unfortunate young woman plunged to a terrible death in the swollen waters of the Thames. The body was not recovered until June 28th, cast up a little below Putney Bridge at low tide, upon a gravel bank. Foul play is not suspected. Several large round stones were carefully sewn into the pockets of the unfortunate creature's clothing, which was genteel but not opulent. The deceased has been identified as a Miss Blanche Glover. She lived alone, in a house once shared with the Poetess Miss Christabel LaMotte, whose whereabouts are not at present known, and have not been known for some time, according to the recently dismissed house-parlourmaid, Jane Summers. Police are seeking to find out Miss LaMotte's current place of residence. A message was left in Mount Ararat Road, sufficiently establishing the unfortunate Miss Glover's intention of doing away with herself.
The police had found Christabel for the inquest. Where? Steps sounded in a rush behind the partitions. A voice boomed. "Surprise, surprise." Maud, half risen from her chair, was enveloped in large warm arms, in musky perfume, in soft spreading breasts.
"Darling, darling Maud. I thought, where will she be, and told myself, she'll be at work, when is she ever anywhere else for God's sake, so I came right in and here you are, just as I pictured you. Are you surprised? Are you real surprised?"
"Leonora, put me down, I can't breathe. Of course I'm surprised. I sort of felt you coming, across the Atlantic, like a warm front-"
"What a figure of speech. I love the way you talk."
"But I didn't think you'd have swept in here. Not today, anyway. I'm so happy."
"Can you put me up for a night or two? Can I have a carrell in your archives? I always forget how pitifully tiny your space is here. It indicates a disrespect for Women's Studies, I guess, or is it just English university meanness? Can you read French, my darling? I've got things to show you."
Maud, who was always afraid of the arrival of Leonora, was then always extraordinarily pleased, at least at first, to see her. Her friend's expansive presence more than filled the small Resource Centre. Leonora was a majestically large woman, in all directions. She dressed up to her size, and was clothed in a full skirt and long shirt-like loose jacket, all covered with orange and gold sunbursts or flowers. She had an olive skin, with a polished sheen on it, an imposing nose, a full mouth, with a hint of Africa in the lips, and a mass of thick black, waving hair, worn shoulder-length and alive with natural oils-the sort of hair that would clump and gather in the hands, not fly apart. She wore several barbaric, but obviously costly, necklaces of amber lumps and varied egg-shapes. Round her head was a yellow silk bandeau, a half-tribute to the Indian bands of her hippy days at the end of the Sixties. She originated in Baton Rouge and claimed both Creole and native Indian ancestry. Her maiden name had been Champion, which she said was French Creole. Stern was the name of her first husband, Nathaniel Stern, who was an assistant professor at Princeton who had been a happily meticulous New Critic, and had totally failed to survive Leonora and the cut-throat ideological battles of structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction and feminism. His little book on harmony and discord in TheBostonians had come at just the wrong time. Leonora had joined in the feminist attack on its approval of James's anxiety about the "sentiment of sex" in Boston in i860, and had gone off with a hippy poet, Saul Drucker, to live in a commune in New Mexico. Nathaniel Stern, an anxious, white, pointed little man, whom Maud had met at a conference in Ottawa, had tried to placate the feminists by embarking on a biography of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Twenty years later he was still working on it, disapproved of by everyone, particularly the feminists. Leonora always referred to Nathaniel as the "poor sap" but had kept his name, as it appeared on the cover of her first major opus, No Place Like Home, a study of the imagery of home-making in nineteenth-century women's fiction, written before Leonora's militant middle and later Lacanian phases. Saul Drucker was the father of Leonora's son, Danny, now seventeen. He had, Leonora said, a curly ginger beard and a positive pelt of ginger fur all over his torso and right down below his belly button to his pubes. This was all Maud knew about the appearance of Saul Drucker, whose poetry was full of fuck and crap and shit and come, and who had apparently been big enough to beat up Leonora from time to time, which could not have been easy. His most famous poem, Millenarial Crawling, described a kind of resurrection of men and serpents in Death Valley, with debts to Blake, Whitman and Ezekiel, and, Leonora said, far too much bad acid. "Shouldn't it be 'millennial'?" Maud had enquired, and Leonora had said, "Not if it could be drawn out any longer, you do miss the point in a delightful way, you precise creature." She referred to Drucker as "meaty-man." She had left him for an Indian woman professor of anthropology, who had taught her yoga, vegetarianism, how to make multiple orgasms to the point of swooning, literally, and had filled her with sympathetic rage about suttee and the worship of the lingam. Saul Drucker now worked on a ranch in Montana-"he doesn't beat up horses," said Leonora-and had Danny with him. He had married again and his new wife was, Leonora said, devoted to Danny. After the professor there had been Marge, Brigitta, Pocahontas and Martina. "I love 'em dearly," Leonora would say, moving on, "but I'm paranoid about home-making, I can't bear the feeling of sinking into cushions and sticking there, the world's too full of other marvellous creatures…"
"What are you doing?" she said now to Maud.
"Reading Blanche Glover's suicide note."
"Why?"
"I do wonder where Christabel was, when she jumped."
"If you can read French, I might be able to help. I've got this letter, from Ariane Le Minier, in Nantes. I'll show you." She took up the note. "Poor old Blanche, what rage, what dignity, what a mess. Did any of the pictures ever turn up? They'd be fascinating. Documented lesbian feminist works."
"None have ever been found. I suppose Christabel may have kept them all. Or burned them up in distress, we simply don't know."
"Perhaps she took them all to that mock-castle with that nasty old man with the gun. I felt like stabbing him with the shears, the pig. They're probably mouldering in a glory-hole up there."
Maud did not feel like pursuing the idea of Sir George, though Leonora's idea was a good, indeed a probable, one. She said, "How do you imagine the paintings, Leonora? Do you think they were any good?"
"I dreadfully want them to have been. She had the dedication. She was sure they were good. I imagine them all pale and tense, don't you, voluptuous but pale, lovely willowy creatures with heaving breasts and great masses of pre-Raphaelite hair. But if they were really original, we aren't going to be able to imagine them, until we find them, in the nature of the case."