Once Tom is out of sight, Will goes over to retrieve the drawing. As he thought, it is the Whatman page he gave Tom out by the castle, upon which he’d appeared to begin a colour study. There are a number of such studies in Will’s sketchbooks – supplements to the porte-crayone sketches, made quickly with a limited palette to record precise effects of light and atmosphere. This page, however, holds a considered work, an end in itself, despite the readiness with which Tom disposed of it. The view, perversely enough, is not of Harewood Castle, but the bridge they’d crossed on their way to the valley floor, a modest dry-stone structure, its arches mirrored in the water flowing beneath. Past it, to the right, is a sunny meadow, and a wood – and an indistinct female figure, clad in a pale riding habit, floating like raw cotton in the shadows of the treeline.
Tom’s style, like Will’s own, has its critics in the more conventional Academy circles. Too rough, they say. Uncouth, unprofessional, unfinished: a whole host of uns. There are blots on this drawing, it must be admitted, and a thumbprint, and the palette is constricted by the circumstances of its creation; but the grasp of light, of the effects of light as it falls upon and defines the world, is truly expert, and expressed with a simplicity and a purity that Will suspects his own productions cannot match.
Indeed, the drawing’s brilliance, its offhandedness, makes it painful to behold. All at once it causes Will to doubt his own ability and the direction he has given his labours, not to mention his future prospects – to picture himself as a failure, rejected by the Academy, forever poor and unnoticed. Tears sting his eyes; one slips out, darting across his cheek and jaw. It has happened before, this inopportune blubbing – normally in the houses of patrons, when encountering the canvases of Claude or one of the finer Dutchmen, and overwhelmed by his feelings of personal deficiency. Father has no patience with it.
What use is there in pitying yourself? the old man would ask. You’ve got to heed their virtues, boy, and add them to your own. How else will they be bettered?
Will recovers his determination. Tom is still occupied, talking to Stephen about pike; so he wipes his eyes, opens the larger sketchbook and places the drawing inside. Then, having fastened the clasps, he plucks his sodden boots from the ground and begins a squelching passage back to the horses.
*
The painters are seen soon after they clear the south-western end of the house. A murmur runs through the gathering in the flower garden, and costly hats turn; and Beau Lascelles is up, teetering atop a chair, hailing them enthusiastically over an immaculate hedgerow.
‘My Michelangelo, my Raffaelo! Join us, I insist!’
Tom halts his horse and dismounts, passing the reins to Stephen. Will sits rigid in his saddle, staring towards the stable block.
‘Come,’ says Tom quietly, moving to his side. ‘We must.’
The two painters stop behind the hedgerow to make their preparations. Will has been riding in his stockings, with the boots strung over his horse’s rump; now he bashes them together, knocking off as much mud as he can before working his feet reluctantly into their slimy confines. Tom, meanwhile, is pulling his jacket straight across his shoulders, brushing his waistcoat front, coughing against his hand – collecting himself, Will thinks, like an actor about to step from the wings. As they walk out between the flower beds, he becomes uncomfortably aware of the performance he too will have to deliver. The family and their guests must be convinced that all is perfectly ordinary. That his commission proceeds as normal, notwithstanding a couple of minor delays. That he hasn’t spent the past day striving to escape.
The party in the flower garden is close to its conclusion. The outer tables are being cleared discreetly; gentlemen and ladies are partaking of a final glass of cordial or champagne as the sun begins its decline. Beau, clad in a Prussian blue hunting coat and glossy black hat, works his way towards Will and Tom with impatience and no little pride, still eager to draw attention to the two young artists he has brought up from London – and plainly ignorant, as yet, of the full extent of their activities.
Tom returns Beau’s lively greeting, accepts a glass from a footman and resurrects some great joke from the night before. Will stays to the rear, scanning the company, hoping to locate Mary Ann and gauge whether she means to come over to greet them or maintain a sensible distance; and he realises that he’s filling the very role that he’d feared the Lascelles would assume was his. He is their lookout.
‘What’s this, then? A filthy little troll, come out from under his damned bridge?’
Mr Purkiss skulks nearby, beside a bed of white roses. He holds one of the choicest blooms in his hand, bending it out from the bush, and is carelessly tearing off the petals. His costume is smart enough, but has been loosed and unbuttoned in several places. A scowl is etched upon his pocked, puffy face.
‘Look at yourself, sir. Heaven preserve us. Have you been paddling in a sewer?’
‘A fall’s what it was. At Plumpton.’
Purkiss isn’t listening. ‘You’re a queer fish, ain’t you. A damned queer fish. I can see you in a hermit’s hovel, y’know, twenty years from now, buried beneath a hoard of bottled piss and cat bones. Scribbling on the walls like a damned lunatic.’
A lunatic. This can’t be chance. What has this gentleman learned? What might Tom have revealed while he swilled down Beau Lascelles’ liquor? Will looks off to the treetops, feeling his colour rise, with no clue of what to do or say; his clothes seem to shrink, tightening around his limbs and impeding his breaths.
Spotting his predicament, Tom starts to spin the tale of their meeting at Plumpton Rocks. It’s a fanciful account, disregarding truth to supply amusement, and it soon wins the attention of the company at large. The mulish Will Turner so set on a view, on his pursuit of natural beauty and picturesque effect, that he clambered atop a steep rock and lost his footing; the tumble, the splashing about, and Tom’s own comically inept efforts to rescue him; the supposed attempts of both to save Will’s sketchbooks ahead of Will’s life, such is their dedication to art. There is laughter and a general lightening of spirits, even Mr Purkiss growing a shade less loathsome; and Will notices Mary Ann, off among a group of young ladies on one of the garden’s upper tiers. Lord Harewood’s younger daughter wears a dove-grey bonnet and holds a painted parasol. She is watching her paramour closely, with an expression he can’t quite construe.
Will too watches Tom, so at ease with centre stage, his accent and demeanour having undergone their usual adaptation – and he decides that charm, be it that of Tom Girtin or anyone else, is but a fine polish applied to deceit. The fellow is betraying the Lascelles’ trust in a manner most intimate and profound, and he is making them love him as he does it. Will remembers his remarks on the house and grounds, on the French china, on Beau and Frances and the West Indian origins of the family’s astounding wealth; and he sees that this affair with Mary Ann, conducted so brazenly, with so little fear of the baron or his heir, is an act of defiance. An expression of his contempt.
Beau guffaws and lays an affectionate hand upon Tom’s shoulder. ‘These mishaps must be common enough, Mr Turner. An occupational hazard, one might venture, for the committed landscapist.’
‘No,’ replies Will. ‘They ain’t.’
Beau blinks, his broad beam narrowing a little. ‘Still, you are with us for yet another night, despite your best efforts to be gone. The fates are conspiring to keep you at Harewood. My artistical partnership has come to pass after all.’ He turns towards the house and says his valet’s name.
There is no sense of Mr Cope’s arrival, or of him having been absent before. He seems merely to have become visible. Master looks coolly at servant, and Will recalls the glimpse he caught of them the previous night, entwined like swans in that dark corner of the state floor. Such relations between men are known in London, as everything is; Mrs Wadsworth’s molly house, said to be popular with all ranks of society, stands only fifty yards from Father’s shop. Will finds the notion unfathomable. It may acco
unt for the valet’s ubiquity, though, and the singular position he has been allowed in the household.
‘Would it be possible, do you think, for Mr Turner to be included in this evening’s outing?’ Without waiting for Mr Cope’s reply – which is, in any case, a neat affirmative – Beau launches into an explanation, as much for the company as Will himself. ‘It is a late arrangement, you understand, agreed upon only yesterday. My dear sister Frances has an unshakeable preference for private balls, but I have assured her that a public assembly in a smart little town such as Harrogate shall furnish us with diversion both plentiful and refined – and variety, of course, that vital quality, which can so enliven an occasion. You, young sir, shall help me to demonstrate all this.’ Beau’s voice grows louder still, his eyes acquiring a sheen of cruelty. ‘Mr Turner, you shall join our party tonight. You shall dance at the Crown Hotel.’
The thought of this squat, grubby person parading about a ballroom, public or private, draws sniggers from Beau’s guests. Will looks over at Tom, who is wearing a glassy smile. It’s difficult to tell if he purposefully omitted to mention this expedition, in order to ensure compliance, or if it just slipped from his mind.
The ball is a punishment. This much is plain. Will’s behaviour – his stated desire to leave Harewood, and his repeated failure to do so – has affronted his patron. Now, thanks entirely to Tom, he has returned once again, and Beau Lascelles means to have some fun at his expense. The nobleman is coming closer now, his arms opening as if to enfold Will in an embrace, but at the last moment he pulls back with an exaggerated look of distaste.
‘A bathtub, Cope,’ he exclaims, waving a hand before his nose, to the further mirth of the company. ‘For the love of Christ, have someone bring Mr Turner a bathtub.’
*
The portrait is an odd one. That Will must admit. It took him a minute to find, the canvas having been skyed, in the parlance of Somerset House, as best Harewood can manage: hung above a door in a shadowy corner of the gallery, almost as if its owners wished it out of the way. The commission had been reported around London, as further evidence of the favour the Lascelles were showing Hoppner, but the work itself was withheld from the Academy Exhibition. Standing before it, Will can certainly see why.
Mary Ann is shown as fat, in short, markedly fatter than she is now. She is ungainly also, lumped on a seat like a sack of goods, her pose – left elbow at an angle, propping her up it seems, right hand lying in her lap – both listless and vaguely discomfited. The soft line of her neck, so admired by Will, is broken meanly by a pronounced double chin. An attempt has been made at modishness. Her hair is powdered and dressed; her cheeks blush with carmine; her gown of yellow-green silk is fashionably cut, with mid-length sleeves, a plunging neck and a bow tied beneath the breast. The voluminous skirts, however, suggest not the graceful weightlessness of antiquity, but a futile effort to disguise the extent of the sitter’s bulk. The actual brushwork is expert, the colouring utterly assured. Hoppner could have helped Mary Ann in a dozen different ways; he could surely have transformed her. Yet he has done nothing.
Will steps back, bemused. Why the devil would such a picture be taken? The first law of society portraiture – flatter your subject – has been contravened. The very opposite result attained. Will knows John Hoppner; he’s been careful, since he began exhibiting, to keep up a certain sociability between them. Tom Girtin might hold him in disdain, but the fellow is a senior Academician, a pupil of Sir Joshua at the peak of his ability and reputation. Hoppner would depart from his profession’s governing principle for one reason only: the specific instructions of his patron. Could Tom’s interpretation be correct? Was the portrait a spiteful trick, orchestrated by Beau?
The gallery extends over the whole west end of the house, a long chamber of splendorous emptiness. Will looks down it, ignoring the stucco, gilt and marble, his eyes picking out a second canvas hanging above the southern door. He strides over, through the warm, slanting bars of early evening sunlight that fall across the polished wooden floor. It’s a second portrait by Hoppner, another lady, of the same dimensions and even the same heavy golden frame as Mary Ann’s. They were plainly commissioned together. This one is more favourably positioned, however, and painted with a lighter palette; and as Will approaches he sees that it is a far more typical example of the portraitists’ art. The lady’s gown is an iridescent lavender. Its arrangement, the way it flows around her slender limbs, holds a clear echo of the Sistine Chapel. Her face is a perfect oval, the even features regarding the viewer with serene elegance. Will squints at the label, but it is too high up for him to read.
‘Mrs Henrietta Lascelles, by Mr Hoppner of London. Principal painter to the Prince of Wales.’
The servant, the corpulent under-butler Will had followed inside when he first arrived at Harewood, is standing in the doorway beneath the painting. Ellis is his name; appointed to dress Will for the ball, he has overseen a bath, the supply of fresh hair powder and a clean stock and shirt, the extensive brushing of the Vandyck-brown suit and the polishing of the evening shoes, which he has also somehow cured of their squeak. His supervision, in general, has been extremely close. Only a last-minute absence to resolve some confusion over wine glasses enabled his charge to slope away.
‘Indeed,’ Will mutters, a trifle embarrassed to have been thus discovered. ‘Most fine.’
‘She is the wife of Henry, Lord Harewood’s second son. They reside presently at Buckden, sir, in Huntingdonshire, with their two infant boys.’
Ellis’s voice has a pained, stilted quality to it. The servant obviously suspects an ulterior motive for Will’s presence on the state floor and intends to stress this by pretending the opposite: that it was driven solely by an overpowering curiosity for Harewood and its treasures. Accordingly, he embarks upon a great long list of facts about the gallery’s other ornaments and items of decoration, in which Will is obliged to feign interest.
‘What, though,’ he manages to ask, after the subjects of the hack paintings fitted into the ceiling have been exhaustively detailed, ‘of that other portrait down there? Above the other door?’
‘That is Miss Mary Ann Lascelles,’ comes the flat reply, ‘Lord Harewood’s youngest daughter.’
Will pauses. ‘Yet—’
The under-butler resumes his list, requesting that Will give his attention to the curtain pelmets, which, despite their luxurious appearance, are in fact made from wood, ingeniously carved and painted in the workshops of Mr Chippendale of London. Will obeys, noting the evasion, and is looking up at the ruby-red folds, marvelling at both the illusion and the pure aristocratic strangeness of the idea, when he sees movement through the tall windows behind. Past the flower garden, over the hedges, a procession is starting up from the stable block.
‘The carriages,’ pronounces Ellis. ‘Come, Mr Turner. Mr Lascelles will be expecting you in the hall.’
The chattering mounts as Will is ushered across the dining and music rooms, rising from a distant murmur to a muted roar; then the final door is opened and it engulfs him completely. He halts, quite oblivious to Ellis’s efforts to nudge him further forward. His mouth goes suddenly dry; a cool droplet of sweat breaks free of his armpit and races down the side of his ribcage. There are fifty of them at least, heavily scented and powdered, dressed to their best and in a state of high excitement. Beau is somewhere by the main doors, more audible than visible; but Mary Ann is nearby, only five yards to the left, surrounded by the same young ladies who were with her in the flower garden. They stand in a circle before a bronze Bacchante, daintily lifting the hems of their gowns to compare shoe-roses. Will recalls the portrait’s flabby, vacant visage; the actual woman is so much livelier, so much finer, that his teeth grind at the injustice of it.
A single, tentative step is taken; and the carriages cut fast along the northern façade, drawing up at the main entrance. This sight – the colours of the speeding conveyances, the discipline and co-ordination of the horses, the smart uniforms
of the coachmen – prompts an immediate shift towards the doors. Will is steered out into the twilight by the house servants. Casting about for further guidance, he spies a thin ribbon of white smoke, winding around one of the stone sphinxes that are set on either side of the steps.
Tom is leaning against the front of the sphinx’s plinth, his pipe in his mouth. Like Will, he has no formal hat and is again wearing his one acceptable suit of evening clothes, brushed clean but still rather too plain for the occasion. London sparrows, Tom and me, thinks Will with some gladness; then he notices the new silk waistcoat beneath Tom’s jacket, pristine white and of the highest quality, and the golden watch-chain that loops over it. His shoes seem different too, better made, and his stock as well. The suit, in actual fact, is the only constant component.
‘I knew it.’ Tom’s voice is huskily quiet and his breathing shallow, as if there is barely space for air to be drawn into his body. ‘I knew that you’d have to see the thing for yourself.’
Will grunts; he adjusts his cuffs. ‘Keeping watch on me now?’
Tom’s reply is lost in coughing, which he tries to smother in his sleeve. The evening is balmy – by Yorkshire standards, at least – yet he appears distinctly cold, his long arms crossed tightly.
‘Are you well, Tom?’
Tom takes a pull on his pipe; he looks away. ‘It’ll pass.’
Will turns to the flight of steps and the noisy cascade of revellers that is rolling slowly down them. ‘Did you know of this before, at the rocks? This … dance?’
Tom is unrepentant. ‘Beau wanted you to come. I wanted you to come. Is that so very strange?’
‘It was a lie, then. As good as.’
‘Christ in Heaven, Will, it’s one evening only. And it’s a dance. An entertainment.’ Tom spits something on the gravel. ‘Familiar with the idea, ain’t you?’
There is a great hoot of laughter from the steps as a young gentleman, giddy with Harewood champagne, stumbles midway and ends up sprawled upon the drive. Will is about to state that he sees no entertainment here, none at all; but Tom manages to pre-empt him.
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