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  Harold departed for the Ottoman Empire and, in the spring, Vita went to Italy – ‘that beautiful land, the home of all loveliness’101 – with Rosamund. ‘People say, after their fashion, “And did you have a good time in Italy?”’ she wrote afterwards to a friend, ‘and I say “Oh yes”, but they don’t know all that it conveys to me: the olives, and the sun, and the view, and the cross of light over Piazza del Duomo, and the little dirty [illegible] streets, and the fun of Perugia and Urbino and paddling in the sea.’102 Not to mention, presumably, Rosamund. Vita’s memories of Italy that year sparkled with the joy that was so notably lacking from her descriptions of Harold’s proposal. When Harold first left for Constantinople, Vita had taken to her bed. ‘I don’t remember ever having been so unhappy. Only today I have begun to understand that I do not love him … I was in bed all day and have had time to think.’103 It was an inauspicious beginning.

  Victoria, currently enjoying Vita’s confidence, ruled out an engagement proper for eighteen months. She forbad the ‘lovers’ to correspond on any but the most formal terms. In the event, albeit unwittingly, Victoria’s proscriptions proved just what they needed and jolted their thoughts into focus. Implicit in the letters they exchanged in the interval before Harold’s return in the autumn was an understanding that, at some point, they must decide whether or not to be married, and an acknowledgement that the decision lay chiefly with Vita. Vita advocated delay but took some care not to put off Harold entirely. ‘Some day there will be no more away,’ she wrote on 23 July. Prophetically she added, ‘You mustn’t make fusses about the people I speak to more than once because I will always tell you about it, and we can laugh at them together.’104 As a picture of future dealings, it contained significant inaccuracies.

  On her return from Italy, with Harold still abroad, Vita began redecorating her bedroom at Knole. She described its new appearance as ‘so decadent’ in a letter she wrote him on 29 May; it had previously been ‘mock-Italian’ in blue and gold and, before that, ‘lovely with buff walls, with a frieze of big cornucopias with red and purple fruit (pomegranates and grapes) and the rest of the room red and purple … with a purple drugget, and a sofa with red and purple velvet cushions’.105 ‘From stern trecento it has become pure Pelléas et Mélissande … I ought to have pale mauve volumes of Verlaine by my bed.’106 It smelled of Madonna lilies and the incense she had brought back with her. The previous month, her bedroom at Hill Street had also been redecorated. ‘My room is being papered black and gold with black furniture and gold stuff on the chairs. It will be very early Victorian, and rather macabre, and very eccentric, and people won’t like it but I shall. Do you think it sounds hideous?’107 Vita explained that such rearrangements happened every six weeks. They were for her own benefit and, like her literary self-projections, were a form of role play; their very theatricality was part of their point. She transformed her private spaces into stage sets. Harold responded by describing her as ‘the distant princess of my exile’.108

  In an article written for Vogue in 1924, ‘Fashions in Decoration’, Vita explained that the desire to make one’s surroundings pleasing and colourful partly arose in response to the weather: ‘if under our grey skies we feel the need of a brighter relief it is for no one to refuse it to us’.109 In fact, in the years before her marriage, Vita’s was an inclination of its time. The First World War had yet to challenge the serene existence of Britain’s upper classes. A leisurely cavalcade of stately Saturday-to-Mondays remained the stuff of aristocratic life, balanced by London parties, as Vita remembered, of ‘long dinner-tables covered with splendid fruit and orchids and gold plate, and people whose names I can find in the Daily Mail sitting all around’.110 In that sumptuous world of privilege, houses played a key part. They provided the safe and cosseting backdrop for the life that Vita would expose in The Edwardians as shallow and amoral. They embodied wealth and prestige and a hostess’s particular talents and style. In Vita’s case, her relationship with Knole made her feelings about houses particularly acute. Visiting Ragley Hall in Warwickshire as a fifteen-year-old, the child of Knole observed, ‘There are some fine things in the house but dreadfully arranged; it seems very comfortable and homely, but far from smart!’111 Houses reflected their owners. In The Edwardians, Vita described in the banqueting hall at Chevron, ‘two Bacchanalian little vines, dwarfed but bearing bunches of grapes of natural size, [that] stood in gold wine-coolers on either side of the door’, just as, in Victoria’s day, they did at Knole, Vita’s model for Chevron.112 The extravagance of gold plate drummed into service as planters symbolised Knole’s grandeur, symbolised too Victoria’s talent for excess and by extension, something of the joyous exuberance of her whole manner of life. The grand luxe of the Edwardian era was hedonistic: it was also a species of escapism. That Vita so often redecorated her rooms at Knole and in London says much about her fragile sense of identity and her desire to escape. Repeatedly in her arrangements she attempted to capture a memory or a mood: those memories were most often of visits to Italy, her favourite escape. Glimpsed against the backdrop of her decoration and redecoration, her uncertainty about her engagement to Harold makes sense. She is experimenting with different ‘Vitas’. It is unclear how Harold will be assimilated within these varied rooms, just as it is unclear which Vita will suit him best.

  Addressing the ‘Italian’ Vita of the blue-and-gold bedroom, Harold had sent her his first present soon after his departure. It was a sixteenth-century wooden figure of St Barbara, which he had bought the previous year in Spain. Vita’s response was one of delight, though she assumed the figure was ‘really only a little boy, unless he is John the Baptist’.113 She commended its ‘gloriously flat nose’. St Barbara would turn out to be an apt presiding deity for Vita; the figure accompanied the couple from home to home for the remainder of their lives. A well-born early Christian martyr distinguished by her beauty, Barbara had preferred to remain isolated and immolated in the tower in which her father confined her rather than marry the husband of his choice and risk compromising her beliefs (in Barbara’s case, her Christian faith). A refusal to compromise and, over time, a growing desire for solitude within a tower that was at first metaphorical and at Sissinghurst a reality, became cornerstones of Vita’s life.

  Victoria’s insistence that Harold and Vita’s correspondence contain neither endearments nor intimations of affection resulted in a kind of phoney war. Neither knew exactly where they stood. Their letters suggest, not for the first or the last time in Vita’s life, that they were frequently at cross purposes. ‘I like things stripped down to truth,/ Un-prettied, unromanticised,’ Vita would write in one of many unpublished poems.114 It is not an assertion that rings true of her letters to Harold during their protracted engagement. Vita hedged her bets; Harold’s letters indicate that he considered their marriage an inevitability. ‘I will wait and wait and wait for you – and be patient unendingly – and unendingly will I resolve not to bother you … or to be morbid,’ Harold pleaded.115 So easily did Vita take control. She gave with one hand and took with the other; in many ways shy and insecure, she was capable only of mastery. ‘As we have always known, we are quite ludicrously suitable,’ she wrote in July 1912, her words like the balm of summer breezes to Harold.116 Reassured and confident, he gave himself up to a brief but all-consuming infatuation with Pierre de Lacretelle, a ‘slender, dark, vivacious and highly intelligent’ Frenchman based in nearby Therapia.117 Invigorated by Lacretelle, Harold wrote begging her to marry him in the autumn. She read his letter within hours of receiving her first proposal from Lord Lascelles. To both men she responded evasively. Her behaviour remained consistent with that selfishness which, seated on a trunk in the moonlight at Hatfield, had encouraged her to accept Harold while doubtful of her own feelings: Vita’s need to retain as many options as possible for as long as possible had deep roots. It arose from the certainty of dispossession that in turn arose from her inability to inherit Knole.

  At Knole in late September, Harold kis
sed Vita in the garden. He kissed her again in the Venetian Ambassador’s Room, with its enormous bed and faded tapestries of green and gold and pink. Confronted by what she interpreted as physical evidence of Harold’s feelings, and undoubtedly swayed by his choice of setting, Vita responded instinctively. ‘I love him,’ she repeated over and over in her diary; it was a kind of empiricism. But love could not be wholly straightforward. ‘I so much want to see R[osamund] again,’ she added.118 In December, with Harold back in Constantinople, Vita again returned to Italy, taking Rosamund with her. There she wrote what became her first published poem. She dedicated ‘The Dancing Elf’ to Rosamund, ‘sweet Spirit of the night … for ever young, for ever fair’. It appeared, labelled ‘To R.G.’, in The English Review weeks before Vita and Harold’s wedding.

  Five months after Harold’s autumn visit, Vita doused his confidence with ice. ‘You know if I leave my beautiful Knole which I adore, and my B.M. [Victoria] whom I adore, and my Ghirlandaio room which I adore, and my books and my garden and my freedom which I adore – it is all for you, whom I don’t care two straws about. Now I dare you to deny a word of all that.’119 Such epistolary swaggering was partly a tease, Vita in the guise of Sackville cavalier appropriating what she took to be the language of male discourse. Almost two thousand miles away, Harold could not be certain. His uncertainty increased in May. After visiting Spain and Italy, Vita wrote proposing they call off their engagement. Her words, Harold replied, ‘[knocked] the sun out of my days and [made] even the clock tick differently’.120 Hastily Vita retracted. While she was abroad, Rosamund had become engaged to a thirty-eight-year-old naval officer, whom she met at Dartmouth. Suddenly alone, Vita panicked. ‘I cannot let him out of my life. I shall marry him,’ she wrote on 11 June.121 She told Harold she wanted him back ‘frightfully’. She apologised ‘in sack-cloth and ashes’. She insisted he would be better off with a Rosamund: ‘very gentle and dependent and clinging’. And having talked herself round and round in circles, she asked winsomely: ‘Tu me pardonnes?’122 Harold’s answer was a foregone conclusion. He understood fully, he explained, that Vita’s feelings did not correspond to ‘that absolute abandonment of self which I feel’.123 For both of them, it was evidently enough. In March, walking in Hyde Park, Violet Keppel had again told Vita she loved her. Then in May, while she and Mrs Keppel were staying at Knole, Violet had appeared in Vita’s bedroom in the middle of the night, ‘grop[ing] my way down miles of passages, past the staterooms, through the long gallery, with its perennial smell of mothball’.124 She had successfully extracted from Vita a promise that the latter was not in love with Harold.

  That summer, Victoria faced the Scotts’ lawsuit. Along with Rosamund, Harold was among those who accompanied Vita and her parents to the trial. ‘The many who prophesied an engagement to take place between the Hon. Victoria Sackville-West and Mr Harold Nicolson as an outcome of the latter’s assiduous attention during the lately settled Sackville–Scott lawsuit have the satisfaction of having prophesied correctly,’ asserted one newspaper in the aftermath of Victoria’s victory. The engagement was announced on 4 August and widely reported: with two salacious court cases behind them, the Sackvilles were decidedly newsworthy. The Daily Sketch linked Vita’s engagement to Victoria’s huge windfall: ‘Eight days’ wonder to end in wedding bells!’ ran its headline. Victoria’s courtroom victory enabled her to take care of the financial side of Vita’s marriage to Harold. It was what Seery himself would have wished: two days before his death, he had agreed to provide Vita with enough money to overcome Harold’s ‘supreme ineligibility’.

  Their wedding was set for two o’clock in the afternoon of Wednesday 1 October in the Chapel at Knole. Before then Lord Lascelles, Rosamund and Violet wrote to congratulate Vita. Lascelles’ letter was dignified, gentlemanly, friendly; Rosamund’s despondent; Violet’s withering in its scornfulness. Distraught, lonely and pathetic, Rosamund cried ‘all night and every night’, her tears fully audible to Vita in the next-door bedroom; ‘cold as ice’, Vita offered neither sympathy nor comfort.125 Nor did she share the news with Violet. In her autobiography written forty years on, Violet wrote: ‘Six months later she married without letting me know.’ Her mistake had been to trust in Vita’s confession, wrested from her on that moonlight night in May. She had failed to take into account Vita’s invariable need in her relationships to appear to play the part required of her, to say what her listener wanted to hear regardless of the state of her emotions or the likely complications. ‘As long as she did not tell me herself, I attached small importance to [rumours of her engagement]. I was stunned by what I took to be a piece of perfidy I did not deserve.’126 Violet’s revenge, when she exacted it, would be devastating in its impact on Vita and Harold’s marriage. Predictably she did not attend the wedding. Instead Mrs Keppel gave Vita an amethyst and diamond ring in Violet’s name. Other presents came from Rosamund, who steeled herself to act as Vita’s principal bridesmaid, Lord Lascelles and Orazio Pucci in Florence. Victoria began compiling a scrapbook. She included photographs of the newly engaged couple at Knole. In one image, they sit in deckchairs outside the Colonnade Room. Harold gazes at his hands and Vita looks wistful. In the gulf between them stands an empty chair. It may be a coincidence.

  Throughout the eight-week-long official engagement, newspapers continued to mine the slender pickings offered them. ‘Kidlet is a poetess,’ noted one; another described Vita as ‘a young girl of versatile tastes [who] lately has had some verses published in the “English Review”’.127 Overwhelmingly reporters fell back on the romance of the union. ‘A Love Match’ was one headline; more explosively another proclaimed, ‘She Sacrifices a Fortune to Marry the Man She Loves’. Their reports scarcely varied. Had they uncovered the identity of the ‘R.G.’ of ‘The Dancing Elf’ – ‘Thou crosst the room on tiptoe to my bed,/ One finger on thy lip’ – they would have found a less commonplace story. Instead descriptions of the bride’s ‘matchless English home’ eventually gave way to well-intentioned gloating over the sumptuous wedding presents. These included historic jewels, a small bronze sculpture from Rodin, whom Vita had met in Paris earlier in the year and again within weeks of the wedding, a signed photograph of Ellen Terry and copies of the seventeenth-century candle sconces in the Colonnade Room which, at Victoria’s suggestion, were the Knole estate staff’s offering. At Chaumet in Paris, Victoria bought her daughter ‘a string of emeralds and diamonds’. She added it to the necklace costing £2,000 that she had already bought on impulse from a jeweller in Bond Street. (She also took Harold shopping for an engagement ring for Vita: together, she reported in her diary, they looked at ‘over 100 emerald and d[iamond] rings’ before choosing ‘a lovely one’ for £185.128) In the first flush of her hard-won riches, Victoria was extravagant in her generosity.

  Victoria commissioned Vita’s wedding dress from William Wallace Terry, of Court dressmakers Reville & Rossiter. It was a striking and, at fifty guineas, costly ensemble. Described in the illustrated press as ‘The Golden Wedding Dress’, it featured a skirt of gold silk brocade of what was fancifully termed ‘Persian’ inspiration; The Lady’s Pictorial likened the colour to ‘the tassel of Indian corn, the silk shimmering bright like the silk on the cocoon’.129 With it, Vita wore the Irish lace veil which had formed part of Victoria’s Court dress for the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896. ‘In lace and old gold,’ one reporter commented predictably, Vita presented a ‘spectacle for a painter’. Surviving photographs show an unsmiling Vita overwhelmed by clouds of veil. Her lengthy train was managed by Rosamund Grosvenor and Vita’s other grown-up bridesmaid, Harold’s sister Gwen; at Victoria’s request the former was removed from the photograph of Vita afterwards released to the press.130 Vita also had three junior attendants, including Viscount Moore, son of the Earl and Countess of Drogheda; all were dressed in costumes copied from Hoppner’s late-eighteenth-century portrait of the children of the 3rd Duke of Dorset, which hung outside Knole’s Music Room.

  On a day of brigh
t autumn sunshine, the effect of this consciously picturesque ensemble in the tiny fifteenth-century chapel was ethereal and lovely, ‘a radiant vision of white and gold’, hothouse lilies in pots along the altar, dust motes mobile against the Gothic tapestries, the congregation of only twenty-six shoe-horned around the choir under the gaze of the Bishop of Rochester. Outside, the bulk of the guests, including four duchesses, awaited the reception. Vita had decorated the Chapel herself. She noted that it was ‘decked out like a theatre by me’.131 Her wedding day provided a fitting climax to her youthful role play. Afterwards, inevitably, all reports granted the starring role to Vita, whom they invariably labelled ‘Kidlet’. Like the Sackvilles, the newspapermen discounted Harold and his family. It was as it would remain. On the previous evening, Victoria had taken to her bed. She remained there throughout the service and the celebrations. It was probably a relief. In her absence, most prominent among the other women in the Chapel was Olive Rubens, who sang an anthem from Gounod’s Redemption: ‘From Thy love as a Father,/ O Lord, teach us to gather/ That life will conquer Death.’ She wore chestnut-red velvet trimmed with skunk, an appropriately extravagant costume for Lionel’s mistress.

  For months Vita had hardly written at all. Her energies were consumed in carefully constructing a house of cards in her letters to Harold, and by emotions which were volatile and unsettled. On and off during the course of 1912, she had worked at her latest historical drama, Jarl Haddan, a four-act play set incongruously in ninth-century Norway. Then in August, happy at last alone at Knole with Harold and an emollient Victoria, she began to write poetry again. The title of one of those poems is 1913 – ‘MCMXIII’. It captures her mood of the moment; it suggests what Harold represented to her then: ‘“Oh, why so grave?” he cried to me,/ “Laugh, stern lips, laugh at last!/ Let wisdom come when wisdom may./ The sand is running fast.”’