‘He would never do such a thing. You don’t have a single clue.’
‘Frances Leyland,’ Rosa stated next, as if the name was an argument in itself. ‘Your Jimmy would have left at once had she asked him to elope with her. He wouldn’t have given it – given you – a second thought. Did you really not see it?’
‘That was friendship only,’ Maud countered, about four fifths sure. ‘An alliance against that – that brute you’re so damned pleased to be painting for.’
‘Did you imagine also that he was actually in Paris last winter – when you were readying yourself for the birth?’ Rosa, standing there in her disordered studio, was quite calm; rather frightening in fact. ‘Dearest Maud, he never left Chelsea. He never left the White House. Those letters of yours, propped so nicely upon the hotel mantelpiece with their Parisian postmarks, were just another little falsehood. He forwarded them to an old friend of his over there, who obligingly sent them on to you. And you never for a moment suspected, did you?’
This time Maud could not frame a reply. She had noticed a certain vagueness in the letters. Jimmy’s observations on the French capital had tended to be brief, a line or two at most, and news of his friend Lucas next to non-existent – the main business of the correspondence being to revisit the Ruskin trial, and Art & Art Critics, and the wickedness of Frederick Leyland, in typically forthright terms. Just Jimmy, she’d thought. Just how he was.
Rosa softened. ‘I have deceived you,’ she said. ‘I admit it. But I cannot apologise for taking work from Frederick Leyland. I must make my living, Maud, however I can. Society barely tolerates a woman artist. You know this as well as I do. I have no wealthy family to carry me along, nor a list of Academicians willing to lend their influence, nor an artist husband to further my interests. I have Charles Howell.’
‘You two are bloody liars together.’
Rosa’s expression was almost pitying. ‘Yet so much of what I said to you was not deception, not at all. About our kinship, Maud. About how we two can help one another, and learn from one another. Those plans of ours can still come to pass.’
Maud shook her head. The pattern was simply too obvious now: an unsparing blow followed by a caress, by conciliation and endearments. You are a hopeless blockhead – yet we are alike, engaged in the same struggle. I have lied to you, exploited you – but we can still be the firmest of friends, allies in a lifelong fight. It suddenly became unbearable. She studied the mess for a moment, plotting a path out to the hall that gave Rosa the widest berth. Then she levelled a final glare at the woman before her, and was amazed, quite honestly, by how unruffled she was, how very certain of herself and her assertions.
‘Rosa,’ she said, stepping past, ‘just shut it, will you?’
Outside, Eldon had news. Owl – he was almost completely sure it had been Owl – had come along the street in a hansom, but upon seeing him standing there had instructed his driver to keep going, off into Bloomsbury. Maud veered south, towards the Strand, seeking only to put distance between herself and Number 93. She wasn’t moving anywhere near as swiftly as she would like.
‘Get us one,’ she said. ‘A hansom. Quickly.’ We will be well, she told herself. There is an answer to this. We will be well.
‘What’s happening, Miss Franklin? What happened in there?’
‘Quickly, Matt!’
*
It was early evening by the time Maud reached Chelsea. They’d had just tuppence between them, her and Eldon, which had meant no cab and a long walk, broken by stops on benches and low bits of wall so that she could recover her strength and wait for various little pains to subside. Next to nothing had been said; Eldon had seemed to understand where things stood, though, and carried on down the embankment with a tip of his hat. Maud approached the White House. She was desperately footsore, faint with headache and coated in dust, but she wasn’t finished yet.
In the hall were two men – put there, she thought, by the building society: a terrier-like fellow called Watson, and another, square-faced and younger with rather red eyes, whose name she couldn’t remember. They sat cross-legged on the floor, playing dice; as she entered they gathered up their coins and counters, rose to their feet and bade her a good afternoon. She returned their greeting, assuming an easy manner, assuring them with a wink that she had no cash concealed about her person. Watson gave a laugh; the red-eyed one grinned sheepishly.
‘He in the studio, Mr Watson?’
‘Where else, Miss? Hard at work on his pictures.’ Watson put on a voice, high and strained – a passable imitation of Jimmy’s drawl. ‘Making gold, don’t you know, Watson old chap. Making gold.’
The other one chuckled in a way that suggested he’d heard this before – that they both found Jimmy ridiculous. Here’s the difference, Maud thought: for all their civility and lack of censure, they would never think to mock a man before his wife.
‘Any sign of Mr Howell?’ she asked next, a touch more sharply.
The good humour ceased. Something about the Portuguese prohibited mirth. Mr Watson started to sit, readying his dice for another round. That fellow had been there earlier, he told her, but was gone now. Mr Whistler was alone.
Maud climbed the stairs, her forced smile fading, her heart feeling like a lump of cold mud. Honesty was needed. A straight account. This was where they had to begin. She would tell him about the locket, about Mrs Leyland’s warning, and then about everything else, right up to that afternoon in Rosa’s studio. The Owl would be knocked from his perch and chased away. They could confront this bankruptcy without any further confusion or falsehood. She’d collect together all the papers – take them to Edie perhaps, and Mr Crossley – and they’d progress from there.
After Southampton Row the studio seemed especially vast and empty. Jimmy was working in the soft evening light, so absorbed in a large canvas that he didn’t notice Maud’s arrival. Upon the table palette, in amongst the tubes and jars, was a four-pint paint pot, made from tin with a string handle. From the drips running down its side – from the smears on his hands and clothes, and the principal colour of the painting on which he toiled – she could tell that it was part of the stock of peacock blue left over from Prince’s Gate. As she walked forward, light shifted across the picture’s surface and there was a faint metallic flash. Jimmy was laying in coins with Dutch metal, weaving them once again into peacock plumage, the way he’d done in that mural of the fighting birds. The patterns used were the same, an act of deliberate reconstruction; but applied, she discovered, to a truly grotesque end.
Past Jimmy’s shoulder was a face, a frowning golden mask with a black, pointed beard: the day’s second portrait of Frederick Richards Leyland, and the precise opposite of the first. Full-length this time, the shipbroker sat hunched at a grand piano. He’d been transformed into a gruesome monster – a man crossed with a peacock, Maud supposed it was, made in part of money, the hands upon the keys being little more than a jumble of golden, coin-like feathers. The inevitable frill at his neck was mirrored by one sprouting atop his head, a peculiar, ugly comb; his long leg terminated in a peacock’s bony claw. Drawing nearer, she saw that this creature’s anger had a cause. At its neck was a barbed stinger, attached by a long whip of a tail to a Whistler butterfly hovering overhead, for which it looked around in vain.
This thing was a couple of hours’ work at most, painted crudely on unprepared canvas. But it had a charge to it, a blunt force, its joyful malevolence shot through with a dogged sense of triumph and a seam of the very darkest bitterness. Maud’s determination fled. It left her as if it had never been. How in heaven was she to tell Jimmy that his closest associate, his dearest friend, was in fact in league with his most hated enemy? That he had been all along, it seemed, for a matter of years now, undermining him on Leyland’s behalf, encouraging him to act against his own interests, and surely gaining some secret satisfaction in the results?
For they were demolished. That was now beyond doubt. Very soon they would be homeless, for pit
y’s sake. Maud began to grow fearful. How would the foster parents be paid? What would happen to their daughters? Bold action was called for. This she recognised. But they could not afford for Jimmy to be distracted any further than he was already. She had to think.
Jimmy turned around. The fretfulness of the Inns Court Hotel was quite gone. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, his moustache and eyeglass flecked with peacock blue paint. Seeing Maud, he smiled so broadly, with such unchecked glee, that despite everything she felt herself beginning to smile back.
‘And how was Miss Corder?’ he asked. ‘Was she not stately – gazing down with queenly disdain upon the rabble milling about her feet?’
Maud froze for a second; then she realised that he meant the portrait in the Grosvenor. ‘She was. Like a – a queen. It was a great success.’
No more was required, thankfully, as he wanted to move them on as quickly as possible to the canvas fastened to his easel. The title was the first thing he pointed out. It was written inside the book of sheet music propped open on the piano stand, with certain letters – an F, Maud noticed, and an L – festooned with little frills. The Gold Scab, it read, and beneath, Eruption in FRiLthy Lucre. The peacock feathers were next, and the coins tucked into the plumage; the bags of loot piled atop the piano; and then the stool – Bon Dieu, the stool! He almost hopped on the spot. It was the White House in miniature, with its double front and steeply pitched roof – the original design, prior to the involvement of the Board of Works. This hideous bird-like version of Frederick Leyland was literally perched atop it, his threadbare peacock tail fanning out over the façade.
Summoning the required response proved more of a challenge than usual. Before Maud could speak, however, Jimmy dashed past her, over to the far wall. There stood another two of these painted cartoons, each around half the size of The Gold Scab and rather less complete. One showed a pair of lobsters, bright red, cavorting in a black, treacly waterfall – making love, it looked like; the larger of the two had a frill at its neck, poking out between segments of the shell. The other depicted a great boat, wrecked upon an ochre hillside.
‘Noah’s Ark,’ Jimmy told her, ‘at the slopes of Mount Ararat.’
From a crack in the ark’s hull streamed a procession of pale faced, black-clad people, winding down the mountain into the foreground. Every one of them, both male and female, had the same bulging forehead, the same staring eyes, the same tapering black beard and frilled shirt: an unsettling multiplicity of Frederick Leylands. Disappointed by her blank-faced reaction, Jimmy set about talking her through it, something about how just as Noah had repopulated the earth, so Leyland – with his reckless scattering of his seed – was in the process of repopulating London. Instead of bringing the joke alive, though, this account rather confirmed its death. Jimmy raised an eyebrow and admitted that it was perhaps slightly obscure, which was why he’d decided to make The Gold Scab a good deal more direct in its attack.
A feverish feeling still clung to Maud, her head thick and throbbing, but irritation was now keeping her alert. Why on earth was he submitting to distractions and grudges when so much else remained to be done? ‘What are they for?’ she asked.
‘Why, Maudie,’ Jimmy replied, ‘they are to be left behind.’
‘At the White House? In here?’
‘Naturellement,’ he said, casually sly; then his excitement flared once more and he rushed out an elated explanation. ‘He’ll march up, won’t he, the instant he’s admitted, to start rooting through the canvases for what he imagines to be his. And this is what he’ll find. This is all he’ll find. There are plans in place. Everything but these fine pictures will be gone – stored in safety with the doctor, with the Owl. With our allies. And these three here will be wheeled out before the whole city. Carried downstairs for the sale. Put on display in the street. Written up in The World, the Athenaeum, the Art Journal – even The Times. Word will circulate throughout the country. Overseas, I should think. He’ll be exposed for what he is. A philistine who has driven out his wife. Disgraced himself with his greed and his faithless promiscuity.’
Maud swallowed. ‘Isn’t there a – Jimmy, isn’t there a danger to this?’
‘From Leyland, you mean?’ Jimmy laughed. ‘What would he do, precisely – ruin me?’
Maud couldn’t pretend to any expertise on the codes and manners of wealthy society, but she knew how it could be with secrets – how they often ended up blackening all who touched them. ‘Not from him. From everyone else.’
Jimmy was unconcerned. ‘My dearest girl, I assure you that I understand very well what is appropriate. This has such a beautiful poetry to it, don’t you see? And there will be much rejoicing at Leyland’s discomfort. Seldom has a man been so widely scorned and reviled. Why, only last week a lady was telling me—’ He was off now, slotted into his favourite groove, ready to run on indefinitely. But Maud had heard enough.
‘I know about Paris, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘I know what you did.’
This stopped him, at least. He took out his eyeglass with the slightest trace of nervousness. He expected a detonation, plainly, tongues of flame, the righteous wrecking of his studio. And maybe he deserved it. Maud remembered Rosa’s words on Southampton Row. He wouldn’t have given you a second thought. She felt a sudden need to test him. To ask for something.
‘We should go away.’
Jimmy stared; then he looked back to The Gold Scab, trying to disguise his relief. ‘Away to where?’
‘You said you’d take me abroad. Right back at the beginning, when I first came to you. Don’t you remember?’
‘Dearest Maud, I said a great many things.’
‘You said that you’d take me to Italy, Jimmy. To Venice.’
He was considering it now. ‘It might be a deft move,’ he reflected, ‘to absent myself from the country as the committee does its work. As the cartoons are discovered and my enemies rage. And Venice – it is true that I have long thought of passing a month there.’ He sighed. ‘The tin, though, my girl. The blessed tin.’
Maud found that she was ready for this; more than that, she had a solution, towards which Jimmy had only to be nudged. ‘What about the Fine Art Society? They’ve done all right with your plates, haven’t they?’
In truth, Mr Huish’s payments had become the one thing keeping them from complete destitution. The connection was made, thankfully; the two parts fitted together. Jimmy stood very still for a while, his eyes fixed upon Peacock Leyland’s scaly foot. Then he snapped his fingers.
‘Maudie,’ he announced, ‘I have had the most marvellous idea.’
*
October 1879
There was a whistle-blast outside, and an unintelligible shout further along the platform; a white curtain of steam was drawn across the window as the train began to pull slowly from the station. Maud thought that she was to have the compartment to herself, but at the last moment a man climbed in. He was a priest, a wiry, vigorous-looking sort of about sixty; in a cassock and cloak, no less, with one of those black, broad-brimmed hats. Once his valise was stowed, he took the seat opposite Maud and introduced himself in serviceable English. Her hair, he explained, had enabled him to guess her nationality, there being scarcely any redheads in France; and before you knew it they were chatting along quite happily, about Paris, as the train left the city behind, and the different journeys that lay ahead of them. She removed her gloves as unselfconsciously as she could, in order to display the ring. It was cheap and plain, barely silver at all – but there on the relevant finger, should anyone think to check. She told the priest that after a stay with a family friend on the rue de l’Arc de Triomphe, she was joining her artist husband in Venice, where he was etching views of the city for a special society in London. Saying these things to such a person felt good; it felt pleasingly legitimate, after all these years of God knows what.
Everything had gone rather well. They’d had some luck at last – although Jimmy had grown cross when she’d put it like t
his.
‘It is not luck!’ he’d cried. ‘By thunder, girl, it is my rightful goddamned due! Or about half my due, I should say – for they know what they’re doing, damn them. They’ve got themselves Whistler at a bargain price.’
The money had seemed generous enough to Maud. The directors of the Fine Art Society had voted to advance Jimmy one hundred and fifty pounds on a set of twelve copperplates, with an option to purchase for seven hundred upon on his return. She’d known him turn out a plate in two or three hours. If Venice was as beautiful as everyone said, he’d be done in a fortnight. A few paintings could also be made; there was talk of pastels. They’d return with one definite sale on the cards and a good chance of very many others. They would have means. They could begin anew.
‘He will want the views, then,’ the priest said. ‘It is a good field, oh yes, a very good field for painters. He will be wanting the sights.’ The old fellow began, counting on his fingers. ‘Le palais des Doges. La catedral de St Mark. Le Rialto.’
Maud nodded along, trying to remember as much as she could. ‘He’s been studying photographs,’ she replied. ‘He will certainly have ideas.’
They parted at Dijon, the priest’s destination. He blessed Maud before he went, crossing himself and so forth, which was sweet. Minutes later, though, wandering on the concourse with her carpet bag, the evening crowds streaming around her, she couldn’t say that she noticed any benefit. Perhaps such things simply didn’t work on the non-observant – or the actively sinful, which she supposed she must be. Perhaps they just slipped off like an ill-fitting shoe.
It was frightening, this journey, well beyond anything she’d undertaken before. She was absolutely alone, somewhere in the middle of a foreign country. There was no one she knew for hundreds of miles. Rosa came unbidden into her mind, urging courage, clear-headedness, self-reliance. Her brow furrowed. Looking around for a distraction, she spied a large, well-lit restaurant on the opposite side of the station.
Mrs Whistler Page 29
