She had the sense to put herself in the hands of an instructress. The one she selected was Fanny Kelly ("the only woman to whom Charles Lamb had screwed up sufficient courage to propose marriage"), who conducted a school of acting. Being honest, as well as capable, Miss Kelly took the measure of the would-be Ophelia very promptly.
"You'll never make an actress," was her decision. "You've no talent for it."
But, if the applicant had no talent, the other saw that she had something else. This was a pair of shapely legs, which, as a ballet-dancer, could yet twinkle in front of the footlights.
This opinion being shared by its recipient, she lost no time in adopting it. As a preliminary, she went to Madrid. There, under expert tuition, she learned to rattle the castanets, and practised the bolero and the cachucha, as well as the classic arabesques and entrechats and the technique accompanying them. But she did not advance much beyond the simplest steps, for the time at her disposal was short, and the art of the ballerina is not to be acquired without years of unceasing study.
According to a French journalist, an "English Milord" made Lola's acquaintance in Madrid. This was Lord Malmesbury, "who was so dazzled by the purity of her Spanish accent that he adopted her as a compagnon de voyage, and shared with her the horrors of bad cooking and the joys of nights in Granada." This fact, however, if it be a fact, is not to be found in the volume of "memoirs" that he afterwards published.
Still, it seems that Lord Malmesbury did meet Lola. His own account of the incident is that, on returning to England from abroad, in the spring of the year 1843, he was asked by the Spanish Consul at Southampton to escort to London a young woman who had just landed there. He found her, he says, "a remarkably handsome person, who was in deep mourning and who appeared to be in great distress." While they were alone in the railway carriage, he improved the occasion and extracted from his travelling companion the story of her life.
"She informed me," he says, "in bad English that she was the widow of Don Diego Leon, who had lately been shot by the Carlists after he was taken prisoner, and that she was going to London to sell some Spanish property that she possessed, and give lessons in singing, as she was very poor."
Notwithstanding his diplomatic training, Lord Malmesbury swallowed this story, as well as much else with which it was embroidered. One thing led to another; and the acquaintance thus fortuitously begun in a railway carriage was continued in London. There he got up a concert for her benefit at his town house, where, in addition to singing Castilian ballads, his protégée sold veils and fans among the audience; and he also gave her an introduction to a theatrical manager, with results that neither of them had foreseen.