There is another rustle, this one closer and crisper – not silk or satin but starched cotton. Bed sheets. Will turns. A child is stirring, rubbing at its eyes, mumbling a question. Had he, in his great anger, been speaking aloud? Or moving clumsily, forgetting the need for stealth? It hardly matters now. He steps towards the bed, extending his hands as if to capture a fugitive songbird.
‘No, no,’ he murmurs, desperately kind, ‘do not be afraid, I merely—’
The sound is absolute, pure and shrill, a drill-bit inserted into the ear and whirred around at phenomenal speed. It lasts for longer than one would have thought possible – fifteen seconds? twenty? – followed by shrieks for Nurse, for Mama, for Papa. The girl, for it is a girl, springs out of bed. She is perhaps four feet tall and clad in a white nightgown; she points at the intruder with a fearlessness rather at odds with her frantic squealing.
Abandoning placation, Will scrambles from the nursery and into the corridor that leads back to the eastern landing. The screams continue behind him, with other children joining in. Doors start to open; candlelight rushes over ceiling and walls; bare feet thud on carpets. He all but throws himself down the service staircase, hopping around its tight spiral two or three steps at a time, only to be halted abruptly by the mutter of Yorkshire voices below. Three footmen are gathered at the base of the stairs, on the service floor. Two bear trays, upon which is a cold collation of meats and cheeses; the third is shaking his head, claiming that there has been an error, that Mr Lascelles asked for cakes and sweetmeats instead. Will flattens himself against the wall, waiting for them to finish their dispute and go about their duties.
They do not. The moments squeeze by with excruciating slowness. Noises gather above, and the lambent aura of candles; and it seems certain that he’ll be caught there on the stairs, the obvious culprit, his motives for anyone to guess at. Thief? Kidnapper? Or something worse?
One chance remains. Near to the casket chamber is another narrow staircase, connecting the levels of Harewood’s east wing. Will has never troubled to investigate it, but there must be an opening among the state bedrooms – which, in Lord Harewood’s absence, are left standing empty. If he could reach them and locate this staircase, he’d be able to return to his berth unobserved.
Will steps onto the state floor and enters the grand room that holds the portrait of Lady Worsley. Although not in use, it’s hardly safe: immediately to the right is the saloon, glowing like a bawdy house behind its door. A committed band of revellers is still within, with Beau at its head. Will hears Purkiss bellow and spit, that fine gentleman having evidently been raised, Lazarus-like, for the purpose of further intoxication. As he weaves between the furniture he notices that they are in fact discussing him – enacting his mishap on the dance floor of the Crown with thumps, crashes and much raucous laughter. Will bites his tongue – literally bites it, his teeth sinking into the muscle to the point where they seem almost ready to meet. He carries on his way.
The left door opens onto virtual darkness. Clouds have obscured the moon, reducing everything to a two-tone scale: black, and that shade of grey that is closest to black. Outlines are rendered slightly imprecise, rough-edged, lent the burr of a dry-point engraving. One object, however, can clearly be distinguished: a four-poster bed of massive proportions, protruding majestically from a broad alcove in the inside wall like the prow of a royal barge. Will has only to cross the front of the room, he reckons, to reach the next eastward doorway – the next in a line of facing doorways that will run the length of the southern façade. He goes in.
Past the bed, something moves; a form rises, drawing itself upright.
‘Mr Turner,’ says Mrs Lamb. ‘Why sir, you caught me quite unawares.’
*
The witch will give me away again, Will thinks; she’ll stride around that bed, go through to the Worsley room and create a racket that will see me captured, beaten bloody and probably worse. She’s a shape only, both her features and her stance impossible to determine. Her voice is good-humoured, amiable even, but this could easily be deception.
When Mrs Lamb moves, however, it is in the direction Will himself has decided upon. She opens the east door and beckons for him to come over. She’s been eavesdropping, he assumes, and seems, with this gesture, to be making common cause with him. He doesn’t trust it, not one inch; this is the woman who delivered him to Mr Cope and brought his situation at Harewood to a new level of complexity. But her knowledge of this place wholly surpasses his. Playing along might aid his return to the service floor. Will approaches, his eyes growing accustomed to the gloom; and he sees that she’s grinning, a little breathless, as if upon a wild lark.
Beyond the door is an ante-chamber. A corridor runs off it, cutting across the house; at its far end, a figure with a candle waits by a window in the northern façade. Mrs Lamb takes him sideways, into the corner bedroom. She shuts the door behind them, setting it soundlessly in its frame. The room is of similar dimensions to the last, arranged around another looming four-poster, with its second door set in the north-facing wall. He turns, waiting for her to lead them on to the eastern staircase – and sees that she is in fact advancing towards him, readying to act, her silhouette giant against the surrounding greyness. Will makes fists, bracing himself for defence. He has been terribly naive. A damn simpleton. That murderous look, shot across the saloon the previous night. The slam of the door an instant afterwards. She means him violence.
The softness of her touch, when it comes, is scarcely less alarming. Disarmed, somewhat perplexed, Will is guided to the lordly bed, sat between the curtains and laid out upon the satiny counterpane. Her fingers close not around his neck but the top of his breeches, whipping them down to the knee-buckles, underthings and all; and then they are on him, waking him, working him in a manner both tender and brisk. He stares helplessly into the bed’s black canopy. All control of his thoughts and person is removed. Every sensation but one is shut from his brain.
Suddenly it stops. Will tries to lift his head. The still-room maid is rummaging beneath her skirts, making adjustments and hoisting them up, climbing nakedly atop him – and joining them, easing their bodies together just like that. He stays perfectly, rigidly still, legs straight and arms outstretched. Her smell rolls between them, sharp and warm and utterly confounding. She plants a hand on the mattress; the palm sinks in and his head slides after it, off to the side, coming to rest by the ball of her wrist. He can see almost nothing but has a vivid sense of her – of her weight and the arrangement of her limbs. The bottom of her thighs rest on the top of his, engulfing them, the flesh smooth and slightly sticky. Her apron, stiff with sugar, crackles against his chest. Her breath has a gooseberry bitterness; it gusts over his forehead, stirring his powder-caked hair. She begins to move.
It doesn’t last long. Will tenses hard, reeled in very tight; then emits a small, strangled bark as he is released. Mrs Lamb slows, coming to a halt in the space of five strokes. He pants awhile, suffused with a sweet, numbing calm, tiny sparks worming about at the margins of his sight. She looks down at him for a few seconds. He wonders if she can see any more of his face than he can of hers.
‘No shoes, Mr Turner,’ she says, as if nothing unusual has occurred. ‘No jacket neither. Honestly, sir, to what odd tribe do you belong?’
Is she disappointed? Will thinks she must be. He knows very well from tavern talk, from innumerable arguments overheard in the environs of Maiden Lane, that stamina is what’s prized in lovers – and that brevity most assuredly is not. Before any more can be determined, though, she’s off him, reassembling her garments, leaving him lying there, cold and damply exposed. When she touches him next it is to pull him from the grand bed, much as she pulled the breeches down his legs, and bundle him underneath it. He fits easily, sliding on the varnished floorboards. She squeezes in behind with rather more trouble, her head pushed close to his, a heavy breast nuzzling his forearm. Greasy, cinnamon-scented curls pile around his cheek.
‘Mad
am,’ says Will, fumbling with his disordered breeches, ‘what in the name of God—’
‘Someone in the corridor,’ whispers Mrs Lamb. ‘Heard your noise, I should think.’
Will freezes, leaving himself undone, too fearful to be embarrassed. Candlelight licks along the edge of the western door.
‘No cause for them to enter,’ she adds. ‘This is the baron’s own bedchamber, and he in’t at home.’
The light fades away; and the fact of what they’ve done, of where they are, snaps at Will like a dog bite to the buttocks. He starts, thinking to flee, knocking his pate on the bed’s underside. ‘But he’s coming back,’ he yelps. ‘The baron’s coming back!’
This isn’t news to Mrs Lamb. She presses him to her bosom, pinning them together for a second time, but for the purposes of restraint rather than desire. ‘Monday,’ she tells him. ‘Monday at the earliest. We’re safe enough, Mr Turner.’
Will struggles, but it’s no use. Her words do not reassure; he hasn’t the least idea when Monday might be. The past few days, in all their madness and muddle, have made him lose track completely. He finds, furthermore, that he’s annoyed by this woman, who runs so damnably hot and cold – baiting him with mysteries, pricking him with adversity – and now, apropos of nothing, smothering him in the most intimate friendship. She seems to be upending him merely for the fun of it.
‘Why the devil should I listen to you?’ he gasps. ‘Why are you so concerned for my wellbeing all of a damn sudden?’
The still-room maid watches the door. She speaks intently, seriously, her mouth an inch from his ear; he can feel her voice as well as hear it, reverberating in her breastbone. ‘You’re thinking of the night just passed, in the saloon. I was cross, Mr Turner, I admit it. I thought we understood each other, you and me. I thought there was sympathy. Then I hear that you’re going. Then staying. Then going once more. And then you’re sneaking through the house like a spy. To be frank, sir, I decided to draw you out. To see what you truly are.’ Her manner hardens. ‘And I wanted you to battle them. I wanted to show you the falseness of this gathering of theirs, this summer season they’ve crafted up here. Mr Lascelles has made you a part of it, after all. You should know its real nature.’
‘Its real nature,’ repeats Will flatly, from within her décolletage. This speech has only deepened his unease. There’s an expectation here that he’s done little to encourage; an assumption of allegiance, of comradeship, which he doesn’t recall having granted.
Mrs Lamb’s humour creeps back in; she loosens her hold, from a confining clasp to something like an embrace. ‘And the scales are falling, sir, in’t they? There’s much talk of you downstairs. You’ve had quite the day.’
‘Madam, I—’
‘Word is that Mr Ellis, that slippery slug, had to fetch you from the gallery earlier. Was it the portraits, perchance, that commanded your notice? The one of Miss Lascelles in particular?’
Will stays quiet.
‘It must be difficult for you,’ Mrs Lamb continues, ‘as an artistic gentleman, to understand why the baron’s own daughter was taken so unsparingly. With such brutal attention.’
‘Distortion,’ Will mumbles, his lower lip dragging very slightly against her skin. ‘Of a cruel sort.’
‘No, sir,’ she corrects him, ‘it was truth, no more and no less. The cruelty lay in making her sit, and having that fellow paint her so much as she was, so soon after the birth.’
The birth. Imparted casually, this is intended to stun: a choice morsel from the still-room maid’s store of Lascelles secrets. Once again, everything begins to shift, to pivot and realign, like the parts of a celestial model.
‘You’re saying … you’re honestly saying that Miss Lascelles is a mother.’
Mrs Lamb goes on to explain, in her steady, under-the-bed whisper, how the unlucky girl had returned from London early in the summer of 1796, with three trunk-loads of fashionable gowns, a case of new jewels and some gallant’s seed growing in her belly. He’d already exited the stage, an eminently unsuitable fellow whom Mr Cope (she believed) had been obliged to dissuade. As fortune would have it, her sister-in-law Henrietta was then at Harewood also, and with child as well – for the first time, before the twins. They entered their confinement together, up on the top floor of the house. Two expectant ladies climbed the stairs, yet only one baby was brought back down: a healthy boy who was accepted by Lord Harewood, by the world, as Edward Lascelles the third, his grandson and eventual heir. Of the other child there was no trace.
‘My guess would be a still birth,’ says Mrs Lamb, ‘and a switch. A solution to satisfy all parties. Anyhow, the portrait painter was on his way up from London before the babe was even baptised. To take the new mother, they said – meaning the son’s wife. And the gentleman certainly earned his money there. Every effort was made to mask Mrs Lascelles’ recent ordeals and picture the lady to her best advantage.’ She sighs; Will’s head moves with her chest. ‘It was her elder brother’s idea that he take one of Mary Ann too. As a punishment for her carelessness – for what she might have put them through, had those around her not managed things as they did. How she might have tarnished this new title of theirs. And it stays at Harewood as a badge of her shame. A warning, if you like, against further misbehaviour.’
Will is unconvinced. ‘Ain’t that an awful risk? Might someone not—’
The still-room maid pulls back, breaking their clinch. ‘Is it, though, Mr Turner? Who’d think to tie an unkind likeness of Mary Ann to her brother’s infant child? Did you, sir? Her condition was concealed. Nobody suspects, save a few Yorkshire servants. They hang the canvas poorly, as you saw – move it between the very worst spots in the house. And if it did ever receive any proper notice, who’d dare to make anything of it? Who among the fops and toadies that they invite out here would take the chance of insulting Lord Harewood?’
This interpretation feels rather determined to Will, like forcing a hat down upon a head that it doesn’t quite fit. He says nothing.
Mrs Lamb senses his scepticism; she seems to smile. ‘They’re right harsh with her, Mr Turner. Always have been. The youngest daughter, the late addition, and with a temper that does her no favours. A burden of worry to her parents and nowt but a nuisance to the rest of them.’ She peers out again, into the dark chamber. ‘Until this spring, that is.’
‘Beg pardon?’
Instead of supplying an explanation, Mrs Lamb releases Will completely and rolls onto her stomach. Light is gathering beneath the northern door. There are footsteps; two male voices, one sounding disturbingly like that of Mr Cope, engage in a brief discussion. The still-room maid crawls from beneath the bed. She listens hard and hisses an oath.
‘Appears I was mistaken. They’re searching for someone. Come, we should get downstairs.’
Will emerges, floundering in his haste, buttoning the slap of his breeches. ‘What … what happened in the spring, madam? What changed?’
Mrs Lamb doesn’t answer. Six strides take her back to the western door; she inches it open, alert for any sign of life in the corridor outside. The light is strong now. Will can see the impression on the counterpane, where they lay not five minutes before; and a curious crowding of objects across the bedroom’s buffets and side tables. It is china, he realises, Beau Lascelles’ haul of fine French porcelain, most probably being stored in here for safekeeping while the baron is absent. No individual pieces can be made out, just the odd spout or handle; and a tiny, naked arm, extended with graceful languor, which can only belong to the Endymion centrepiece.
The still-room maid isn’t going to wait. Will stumbles after her, fastening the last of his buttons. ‘Mary Ann’s much the same, ain’t she?’ He thinks of the castle, of the lovers squirming in the hearth. ‘Their punishment failed. She was just as careless this season as the last.’
Mrs Lamb almost laughs. ‘Oh no, Mr Turner. This time the whole thing was quite reversed.’ She steps into the doorway. ‘This time the poor sow was looking fo
r pregnancy.’
*
A hunt is in progress. Footmen are combing the state floor to ensure that no interloper is at large; that the upset up in the nursery was an accident, the mortified perpetrator now hiding in their quarters, too embarrassed to come forward; that no vagabond or burglar or professional child stealer lurks among the Chippendale, waiting for their opportunity.
Mrs Lamb leads Will across the corridor, heading diagonally down it, neatly evading a patrol. They arrive at a far smaller room, about the size of one of the four-posters, intended for a personal servant. It holds a mean bed and a modest wardrobe, and has a single window facing onto the eastern court, through which a weak, soapy light filters up from the service floor. She closes the door behind them with the same silent speed and tells him that this room will be checked last, as nothing of value is housed within – that they should be safe for a short while. He nods, glad of her assurance. It strikes him how very good she is at this.
They remain upright, ready for a prompt exit. Mrs Lamb comes near, taking Will’s hands in hers. A new awareness of what has just happened on the baron’s bed sounds through him, sudden and staggeringly loud, making everything reverberate at a strange new pitch. Her latest claim is forgotten. All intention, opinion and judgement are gone. He tries to catch his breath, but misses it slightly; he stands there like an imbecile, mute and idiotic, quite unable to meet her eye.
Mrs Lamb speaks fast and low, her lip twisting, taking her usual pleasure in the spinning out of privileged, provocative information. She starts with a question.
‘What do you know, Mr Turner, of Prince Ernest Augustus?’
Will & Tom Page 16
