Mrs Whistler

by Matthew Plampin

  Crossing the studio at speed, Jim crouched down and pulled a canvas from beneath the piano, one of the larger ones – for it would have to be large. He bore it to an easel and quickly fixed it onto the stocks; then he wheeled around, looking for brushes and paints, barely resisting the urge to leap up into the air.

  ‘Owl, mon vieux,’ he shouted, ‘I believe, yes, I do actually believe that I have found the better way!’

  4 June 1879

  After the creditors’ meeting, Maud found Jimmy in the hotel courtyard, wandering amid the potted palms in a state of some agitation. She told him that she wasn’t coming back to the White House just yet, as she’d decided to visit the Grosvenor with Eldon, having only seen the exhibition once since it had opened the month before. A special point had been made of assembling a submission that year, despite their deepening difficulties; not least, Maud suspected, because it gave the exhibited works a safe berth, well away from the bankruptcy proceedings. There was also the matter of his name – the reputation that had to be kept up. Interest in his paintings, he’d been saying, had never been higher, with opinion split between acclaim and denunciation – the standard Whistlerian divide.

  Jimmy nodded a half dozen times in distracted approval. He didn’t think to question the timing. ‘Pay particular attention,’ he instructed, ‘to those before the portrait of Miss Corder. The mezzotint is underway, you know. Be sure to mention this to any who seem to like it.’

  Maud said that she would. She waited until he was in a hansom, heading back to Chelsea, and then started north. Before Eldon could query this, she informed him that they were not going to see the Arrangement in Brown and Black, as it was now entitled, but its model.

  No one answered the door. Number 93 seemed empty, just as it had when Maud called the previous summer, on the day of the Albemarle – the day that they’d learned of the second child. She took a breath. The walk from High Holborn had been only a couple of hundred yards, but the hot stink of the city had brought on a shade of fever, a deadening weakness in her back and legs. She’d pushed herself through it, though. This had to be done. Stepping away from the door, she looked along the dusty length of Southampton Row. Nearby, two carts were struggling to pass one another, with all the usual invective. Then she turned to Eldon.

  ‘Matt,’ she said, in preparation.

  Eldon looked back at her from beneath the brim of his faded topper. ‘Miss Franklin.’

  The chisel was slender yet heavy, tapering to a sharp, flat end. Maud had bought it on the way, at an ironmongers in Red Lion Yard. She held it out by the blade.

  Eldon saw her meaning. He didn’t much like it. ‘Miss Corder is Owl’s girl,’ he said. ‘And Owl is Jimmy’s man.’

  ‘This is for Jimmy.’ Maud planted the chisel’s handle in his palm and pointed towards the door. ‘Stick it right there. Same height as the knocker. I’ll keep watch.’

  Despite his reluctance, Eldon proved a capable housebreaker. He bent over, leaning in, applying his weight; there was a groan, a splintering crack, and the door swung open into a dark little vestibule. Maud checked the street; the carts were still there, wedged in tightly now, the drivers almost at blows. Nobody had noticed.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Wait here, Matt. Shout if anyone comes.’

  Number 93 was small and astonishingly cluttered. The narrow hallway was lined with boxes, cartons and bags. There were canvases wrapped in brown paper, crates bearing the stamps of foreign auction houses, a bronze statuette of a naked child riding a goat, two dozen coal black teacups – Chinese, Maud guessed – lined up along the top of a low bookcase. It was like being inside an overloaded drawer, with more objects than empty space. To the right, through a doorway, where one might expect a front room – chairs, a settee and so forth – was an artist’s studio, as disordered and crowded as the hall.

  Maud went in, walking cautiously to a tiny patch of bare floorboard in the centre of the room. The shutters were closed. There was a musty coolness, and the mingled smell of linseed oil, chalky dust and mice. The little light that seeped in from the hall fell on a small painting by the fireplace, up on an easel, one of half a dozen that Rosa appeared to be working on. It showed a baby in a crib, not much more than newborn: a round pink face against a patterned shawl. The style was loose, simple – French, Jimmy would call it – and the colours bright; the forms deliberately flattened, very slightly. Maud realised that she had never actually seen Rosa’s work before, beyond the odd sketch. It was bewildering, at this stage, to discover the true extent of her talent. She found that she was pleased, delighted even, the result of some residual loyalty; cross, also, that this had been kept from her, like a secret withheld; and upset, yes, very upset, for the infant pictured here made her think with an abrupt and overpowering clarity of her own children. The two daughters that she had now surrendered to others. Those familiar feelings arrived – the nag of panic, that aching, crippling grief – like a load dumped atop a flimsy table, beneath which it swayed and seemed ready to break apart.

  This was no good. Maud pressed her eyes into the crook of her right elbow, tears soaking into the grey poplin. They were well. They were in good health and being cared for. It was the only way. And they were well. Inaction and misery would not help them, nor would it help Jimmy and herself. She’d come here for a reason.

  Lowering her arm, Maud wiped her face on the cuff and sniffed loudly. She was turning away when she noticed the words in the bottom right corner of the canvas, painted as if sewn into the hem of the shawl. It was a name, the name of the baby: Rosalind Katharine Howell. Owl’s daughter, born to his wife Kitty a year or two before. The Portuguese had set his mistress to paint his child – the daughter that practically shared her name. Maud almost smiled. Now there was a neat bit of arrangement. No one could ever accuse the Owl of a lack of nerve.

  The room ran the whole length of the house, from front to rear, with a folding wooden screen dividing it in half. Maud forced one of its central panels back about eight inches or so, fighting against the rusted hinges, to reveal an area that was a bit less dark and marginally more tidy. It was dominated by a dressmaker’s dummy, upon which a gossamer thin gown, storm-cloud purple and very much Rosa’s in its design, was in the final stages of assembly. Squeezing through, Maud emerged beside a broad desk that had been pushed up against a wall. Across it, gathered into loose piles, were sketches in pencil, pen and ink and watercolour. They ranged from the barest beginnings to finished studies. Some were of clothes, gowns and hats mostly; others, to her puzzlement, she found that she nearly recognised. A number portrayed identical glassy-eyed maidens, playing lyres and reclining on knolls, looking distinctly as if they’d been drawn by Edward Burne-Jones. One sheet, pinned to a board as if recently worked on, held an expert watercolour of a heavy-featured woman brushing her hair. The style was markedly different, richer and more earthly; it seemed to be by another hand altogether. The initials DGR were entwined in a corner.

  Maud walked to the desk, standing by its chair; and on the far edge, beneath a jar of charcoal sticks, she saw a single sketch of Battersea Bridge, with the soft, clustered silhouette of Chelsea drifting mistily behind. She slid it from beneath the jar and picked it up. Along the bottom were several attempts to imitate the Whistler butterfly. She lowered it, looking around her in disbelief, almost reluctant to learn what else this part of the room might contain.

  Upon a smaller, simpler table beneath the window was a line of photographs. They showed the Leyland children: a three-quarter-length portrait of each one, and then all four of them together. The images were no more than a year old. Rosa was in the early stages of applying a coloured tint; beside the photographs were half a dozen brushes standing in a glass of cloudy water and a ceramic palette smeared with paint. Maud was frowning now, frowning hard, but she was composed, her mind making the necessary connections. She had a strong feeling that something was still missing. Then she turned again, towards the i
nterior wall, and there it was.

  The portrait was a head and shoulders view, roughly life-sized. It was unfinished, the brushwork raw in places, but already Frederick Leyland appeared dignified and darkly handsome. You’d take him for a statesman or a great composer, lofty thoughts seeming to glow within that wide forehead. It bore little resemblance, in terms of temperament at least, to the person Maud had seen at the creditors’ meeting only an hour earlier. Jimmy had tried to dissuade her from attending, saying that her health remained delicate; that the strain of it, the provocation, might prove too much. But she’d been determined. She’d wanted to hear every word, and to make notes too. As the White House underwent its painful disintegration and the shape of the future began to materialise, she’d resolved to stay on her damned toes. It’d be like the trial, she’d told him. She’d keep to the back, out of the way, and would leave if she felt herself ailing.

  There had been a crucial difference, however. Beforehand, in the hotel’s covered courtyard – after Jimmy had left, going on ahead to talk with his new lawyer, and before Eldon had appeared to escort her once more – she’d spied the great absence from the Court of Exchequer. The Owl, huge and pristine, had been cruising around the courtyard’s periphery, making not for Jimmy but a public lounge on the building’s eastern side. Maud had watched as he’d greeted someone within, rather more surreptitiously than usual, and had withdrawn with them to a nook away from the entrance. She’d shifted position, skirting a cluster of thin, cast-iron columns to lengthen her view into this lounge, and had seen something that at first had made no sense. No sense at all.

  Owl had been with Frederick Leyland. Even at a distance of twenty yards, standing half-silhouetted by a bright window behind, the association between them had been plain. Leyland’s attitude had been of slight complaint, and Owl’s of deference, as he made an effort to explain something, tapping one extended forefinger against the other. It had been a dense exchange – that of men with a purpose of some kind and little time in which to lay it out. After only a minute they’d broken apart, Leyland leaving the lounge and stalking back towards the hotel lobby. Owl had selected an armchair and lit a cigarette.

  Maud had met with Eldon soon afterwards and had gone into the meeting room on his arm. She’d made no notes. She’d heard Owl’s voice, and Leyland’s; and poor, fuming Jimmy, attempting a righteous reproof and being halted by his lawyer. She’d known then that she had to act. Answers were required.

  Out in the street, Eldon said her name, as a warning; then she heard him address someone else, rather more casually, and a woman reply. It was quick, far too quick. Rosa Corder was over beside the baby painting almost before she could turn from Leyland’s portrait. A stare ran between them, a line scored through the stale air. Each had caught the other red-handed: Maud in her trespass, her mistrust – Rosa in something rather deeper and darker. This is the moment, Maud thought. This is exactly it. But she stood absolutely still, incapable of movement or speech.

  Rosa, of course, was not. She was wearing a sort of tailored habit, the colour of ground coffee, with folds gathered around the neck. Her hair was up, pinned in a wave; the hat in her hand sported a huge, snow-white ostrich feather. Her talk was light at first, making no comment on Maud’s presence, or the fact that Eldon was posted on guard outside – asking forgiveness even, for her rapid entrance into her own home. She’d been taking her supper in an establishment across the road, she said, when the proprietor had told her that a couple were at her house and were going inside, which had put the fear of God into her as she’d thought that Maud might be her landlady, tired at last of the unpaid rent. Now she’d learned otherwise, she was acting as if she was pleased. As if she thought that Maud had called to rekindle their friendship.

  ‘At last,’ she declared, ‘at long last, you are in my studio!’ – and then she commenced a little bloody tour, describing how the sun’s rays moved through the room, which work was suited to which area, and so on.

  ‘I had to know,’ Maud interrupted, after a minute of this. ‘That’s why we broke in, Rosa. I had to know what you were up to.’

  Rosa swallowed; she shrugged, brushing the ostrich feather across her knee. ‘I can’t imagine what you think you have uncovered, Maud, but I—’

  ‘Mrs Leyland’s locket,’ said Maud. ‘The one she gave me. You mentioned it that day, back at Sharp’s Hotel. Don’t you remember? I hadn’t told anyone about it, not a soul. And yet you knew. I couldn’t work it out, not for the life of me.’

  ‘There isn’t—’

  ‘But now I see.’ Maud looked at the Leyland portrait. ‘The husband must have learned about the locket somehow, from the son I expect. He told this to Owl, who passed it on to you – and you were so busy pretending sympathy, pretending concern and friendship and the rest of it, that you forgot what you were and what you weren’t supposed to know.’ Maud’s anger was gathering pace. ‘The whole thing was to get you two in Leyland’s good graces, wasn’t it? Win you his patronage and much else besides, I’m sure. Your blasted Owl heard that Jimmy and Leyland were in difficulty over that dining room, and so he went at once to offer his services. To become Leyland’s spy. His agent.’

  Rosa was studying her hat, picking at the feather. ‘I don’t know how you can say these things,’ she murmured. ‘It wounds me to hear them.’

  ‘He’s been steering Jimmy wrong, hasn’t he, on purpose? The house. The bloody trial.’ Maud had a sudden, chilling vision of a conspiracy, its tendrils stretching in every direction; a trap, almost. ‘Did he know how that was going to turn out? Anderson Reeve said that the judge more or less told the jury what to decide. To award Jimmy that farthing. Was the damned judge one of Leyland’s too?’

  Rosa merely sighed, as if these questions were both irrational and faintly tiresome.

  ‘Your Owl has been encouraging every mistake, every bit of foolish bravado – and taking whatever he could for the pair of you along the way. The prints that summer. This copyright business. All that missing furniture.’ Maud realised that the sketch was still in her hand: the counterfeit Whistler, now a little crumpled. She held it up. ‘And forgery, for God’s sake. What were you going to do – try to sell it as an original?’ As she spoke it occurred to her that this would be a rather strange course, given the present state of Jimmy’s prices. She lowered the drawing and dropped it to the floor.

  ‘That was an experiment only,’ Rosa said. ‘It was never my intention to—’

  ‘And now bankruptcy. The grand finale of Leyland’s revenge. The crowning bloody masterpiece. Jimmy Whistler ruined once and for all. And Leyland himself on the committee, granted leave to rifle through what’s left of his possessions. I saw them, Rosa. Leyland and Owl – earlier, before the meeting. Planning it all out.’

  ‘This is delusion.’ A note of warning had entered Rosa’s voice. ‘I have accepted work from the man, yes. And Charles knows him. Of course he does. He knows everybody. We have to eat, Maud. We are still your friends.’

  Maud barely heard her. ‘I suppose that Jimmy is just your Owl’s latest mark. There was Ruskin, whose every secret he’s since spilled for the amusement of his companions. There was Gabriel Rossetti. We never did learn the reasons for that parting – although I see that you’re copying him as well. He’s a humbug, Rosa, a bloodsucking rogue.’ She faltered, her train of thought reaching an unwelcome juncture; the rage, so bright and enlivening, dimmed to grey dismay. ‘And you knew of it all. You went along with it. You talked to me of art. Of what we two might do together. You lied to me.’

  ‘Come now, you really mustn’t be so dramatic.’ Rosa tried to meet Maud’s eye. ‘You’ve suffered. I understand this, far better than you think. You have been gravely unwell. Given up another child – two in as many years. That is a dreadful burden, Maud. I fear it has left you confused. It would do that to anyone.’

  Lord Almighty, thought Maud, she’s bloody well trying to make me cry. To sob my way into her forgiving embrace. Twisting about, ignoring th
e twinge that cut beneath her hip, she planted the hardest kick she could upon the easel bearing the incomplete Leyland. It was dashed down, crashing against the wooden screen. The canvas came free, flipping away like a playing card and clattering behind the tailor’s dummy. A dog started to bark somewhere out at the back.

  ‘I knew that something was wrong. I knew it. I’m not quite the idiot you take me for. Your absences. Your promises and plans. The way Jimmy first brought you in, to calm me after Ione. But I did not suspect that you were making fools of me and Jimmy both.’

  At this, Rosa Corder’s patience finally expired. She set aside her ostrich feather hat. ‘I don’t think you’re an idiot, Maud, but dear God you are gullible. You drink down anything that’s put in front of you. Don’t you realise how Jimmy takes advantage of this? His wide-eyed girl from the lower orders?’

  ‘You don’t have a single clue about Jimmy and me. You don’t—’

  ‘If you aren’t careful you’ll end up in the same sad position as Jo Hiffernan. He’ll have you living at his convenience, as a nursemaid for his bastards. As a supplicant, begging for coin, made to look on as his career advances and another woman replaces you at his side.’