Will & Tom

by Matthew Plampin

  ‘What d’ye say to them?’

  It’s out. Of course it is. Will’s ejection would be the talk of the service floor. ‘Only what we know. What you told me.’

  This is the answer Mrs Lamb was anticipating, but it displeases her nonetheless. She rails on for a while about how the Lascelles are certain to seek out the origins of the story; how she, with her enemies on the staff, will be the prime suspect; how there’s already a suggestion, derived from God knows where, that she was involved somehow in the young painter’s exit from Harewood.

  ‘It’ll see me discharged,’ she concludes. ‘They’ve been looking for a reason for longer than I can remember. It’ll be the first thing that new housekeeper does – before she even hangs up her hat, I shouldn’t wonder.’ She broods for a minute longer, following the weave of her basket handle with her fingers; then she shoots him a fierce look. ‘Why d’ye come out here, Mr Turner? Shouldn’t you be on your way back to London?’

  ‘They took my books,’ Will tells her. ‘All my work from this summer.’

  The still-room maid is unsympathetic. ‘And what d’ye expect me to do about that?’

  Will’s idea, elevated to certainty while he hid in the woods outside, is that the books would be stowed in a cupboard somewhere, or a pantry, that Mrs Lamb could be persuaded to raid. He sees now that this is pure delusion. They’d be upstairs, in Beau’s rooms most probably, well beyond the reach of a still-room maid. His heart sinks, his spine bowing; it’s as if the bottom has dropped out of him and he is spilled on the ground, spoiled for good. He mumbles something.

  ‘So that’s why you told,’ says Mrs Lamb. ‘You were trying to get back at them. To strike a little fear into our masters.’ Her tut has a glass-cracking sharpness. ‘Didn’t do you no good, though, did it? They know very well that nobody’ll heed a strange little puppy like you. There in’t any actual proof of their connivings. Just your word, a low-born artist hardly clear of boyhood, against that of a millionaire nobleman. A lord of the King’s party. Gossip, they’ll call it. Preposterous rumour from an unknown source. Lands on them like rain on a roof.’

  All true. Will stares dazedly at the dirt floor. Beau Lascelles was right. In real terms, in terms of a case that could be made to the world, he has nothing. The books are gone.

  The faintest touch of compassion passes over Mrs Lamb’s features. ‘I might’ve heard summat,’ she admits. ‘In the servants’ hall.’

  Will can’t quite credit it, initially; then he wants to kneel, to clutch at her hands, to worship her like a saint in an old Italian altarpiece, brought before the Holy Virgin. ‘But what – where are – how can we—’

  She stops him. ‘A deal, Mr Turner. I propose that we make a deal.’

  The basket is set on the table, the cheesecloth folded back and an object carefully lifted out; she moves to one side to allow the light to reach it. Will sees a covered porcelain cup trimmed with gold. The decoration is oriental and rather dense: pagodas, butterflies, twisted trees and luscious flowers, wandering Chinese folk clad in robes of pink and blue, all arrayed across a dark ground. The saucer is thin as a lettuce leaf, and shaped like one too. The lid is crowned with a tiny gilded rose.

  Madame de Pompadour’s chocolate cup.

  Mrs Lamb seems to grow, the cup rising towards the greenhouse’s narrow beams; Will realises that he is flat against the wall – sliding down it to the floor. She is proud, openly so; she places the cup and its saucer on the table and sits upon the stool.

  ‘You’re the thief,’ he says.

  She laughs. ‘Why sir, had you really not put that one together? What in heaven did you think I was doing up on the state floor, creeping around in the dark?’

  Will doesn’t answer. Within the basket, he can see part of a small jug, teeming with painted parakeets; and what appears to be a sauceboat, its gold and blue handle curling like that of an antique lamp.

  ‘How much is there?’

  ‘Less than there should be.’ Mrs Lamb laughs again, more harshly. ‘A lot less than there should be.’

  There’s a new quality to her, a righteousness not unlike that of Tom Girtin over in the saloon, when he talked of smashing Beau’s china with a hammer. Is this thieves’ logic, Will wonders – some convenient notion about the immorality of wealth, and the obligation of ordinary people to spread it about if they spot the chance?

  ‘You speak as if it was owed you.’

  Mrs Lamb leans forward, linking her hands. She looks off into the greenhouse, at the tropical leaves swimming in sunlight; she grows both more calm and more incensed. ‘That’s because it is owed me. Me and many others.’ The stool creaks beneath her as she turns back – not to Will but the chocolate cup on the table, so absurdly ornate against the bare, bleached wood. ‘Where does it come from, d’ye reckon, this fortune of theirs? What is it that grants them this wondrous life, so far beyond the imaginings of the vast bulk of humanity? This in’t some ancient noble line, with country estates and tenant famers and suchlike. No, Mr Turner, the Lascelles harvest their gold from a different field altogether.’

  Sitting motionless on the dirt floor, Will recalls Tom’s talk at Plumpton, of floggings and shackles; the terrible diagram of the Brookes and that scene from the deck of the Zong. He gazes at the still-room maid’s enlaced fingers – at the slightest tint of ochre that warms her skin, which he in his ignorance took for a sign of gypsy blood.

  ‘I’m a slave,’ Mrs Lamb says simply. The disclosure has a strange effect on her, a deadening effect, causing her fury to decline rapidly to weariness. ‘There it is, sir. I was born a slave. The legal property of the Lascelles family. And I’m their slave still, I suppose, in the eyes of the law.’

  Will rubs his nose. His mind has acquired an almost animal emptiness, wholly beyond thought. Sweat wells above his brow and runs down the side of his cheek. He says nothing.

  ‘None of them knows,’ she adds. ‘It wouldn’t even enter their damn heads. Irish is what they’re content to think.’ She shrugs. ‘It is but an eighth share. Mestee, the plantation masters call us.’

  The story is told matter-of-factly, without self-pity. Born on the Nightingale Grove estate in Jamaica, she was the issue of a clerk and a coloured domestic, put to work in the kitchens of the manor house. At the age of fourteen she witnessed a plantation visit by Daniel Lascelles, the first baron’s brother. For a week afterwards the estate hummed with talk of the family’s riches – and particularly the palace they had just built themselves back in England.

  ‘It fired summat in me, Mr Turner, and I ran away the first chance I got. A damn palace. I barely understood what I was doing, or what I was letting myself in for, but I knew where I was bound. I was coming to Yorkshire. I was coming to see this palace. I made it the business of my life.’

  There was a punishing trek through the jungle; a month on the streets of Kingston, dodging the Lascelles’ slave-catchers; a stowaway’s voyage to Bristol; and then she was in England, seeking employment in guesthouses and hotels – in kitchens not so very different from the one she’d fled in Nightingale Grove. But she was free. When she moved on, nobody attempted to hunt her down. And this girl, light-skinned enough not to draw any special notice, had her skills.

  ‘I know sugar,’ says Mrs Lamb. She recoups her energy, and her pride along with it. Her chin lifts; she smoothes that stained apron. ‘I know it damn well. It won’t surprise you to learn that in Nightingale Grove there was a boundless supply. My mother taught me to make puddings and cakes. Flans and tarts and ices. And I was good at them all. The still room, though – that was where I shone. The more places I stayed, the clearer it became to me how I’d get inside their palace. I worked my way northwards, Mr Turner, from household to household. I climbed this country like it was a ladder.’

  Will looks over at the chocolate cup. He tries to concentrate on something simple. ‘Why do all that?’ he asks. ‘Stage is sixpence. Why wait all this time?’

  ‘And break in, you mean? Force a window,
grab what I can and run off?’ Mrs Lamb grimaces at her lap. ‘No, sir. I wanted to know what I was doing. What I was taking. I wanted to leave with as much of their wealth as I could damn well carry. Not so I could have it, you understand – but just so they could not.’ She pauses. ‘Then I saw my first Brookes.’

  Of course. ‘You met with the Abolitionists.’

  Mrs Lamb did more than this. She attended addresses by the movement’s great figures – and in Yorkshire, on the very doorstep of her target. Mr Clarkson giving a lecture in a Leeds tavern. Mr Wilberforce speaking before a huge public meeting in Harrogate. She saw the campaigners toiling in the streets and squares, and at the gates of the factories, quickly filling their petition sheets with the marks of ordinary working men. And she learned how their efforts were opposed by lords, princes and dukes, by King George himself; and how the war with France was being used as an excuse to let the notion founder, to silence its proponents and permit the evil to continue – to expand, even. What was needed, her Abolitionist friends told her, besides political will, was funds: ready cash so that literature could be printed and posted, notices placed in newspapers and speakers dispatched about the country. The matter had to be kept before the British people.

  ‘I knew then what I was to do. I’d use my skill with their slave sugar to gain entrance to their palace. And then I’d use my position to help halt that sugar’s flow.’ She smiles tightly. ‘A pleasing shape to it, wouldn’t you say?’

  From here to Harewood, by Mrs Lamb’s account, was a series of straightforward steps. She took a cook’s post with a solicitor in Harrogate. Discovering the shops frequented by Mrs Linley, the housekeeper from Harewood, and the days on which she called at them, didn’t prove too difficult. An acquaintance was engineered, and presents made of Mrs Lamb’s most splendid preserves and chutneys. And when the still room fell empty – the maid having experienced a powerful, unexplained urge to return to her family in North Wales – Mrs Lamb was the obvious replacement.

  ‘It’s been nearly three years now. I’ve a bale of silver forks, hidden over in the village. Various jewels and gimcracks. A ring or two.’ She picks up the chocolate cup and its saucer and puts them back in the basket. ‘It’s almost too easy at times, especially since this current lot came into the house. They spend without thinking, and they barely damn well notice when it goes.’

  Will catches a glimmer of intent. ‘You’re going to take more.’

  ‘Mr Turner,’ replies Mrs Lamb, ‘I’m going to take every last thing that I can. You know what them bits of china sell for to the idiot gentlemen of London. And I’ll put the money to good use. It’ll go to aid those who seek to end this wickedness of theirs forever.’ She reaches for him now; her hand is on his thigh for perhaps three seconds before fastening around his forearm, just above the wrist. Her eyes, quite black, are open wide. ‘This is my chance, sir. They’ll be ridding themselves of me tomorrow. I must act.’

  Her meaning is plain: she’s going thieving again, over in the grand house, and Will Turner is coming along to help. This is the deal she wants from him, and it’s not a choice. He’s being pressed into service like a man grabbed from the docks.

  ‘Madam—’

  ‘The house will be quiet. Early bed for everyone after the fuss last night – upstairs and down. We’ll move about like ghosts, Mr Turner. Spectres made from mist.’

  Will thinks of the Zong – of the sketch he made of the woman now attached to his arm. ‘They found—’ He swallows. ‘They found one of them pamphlets. The ones you wrapped around my candles.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘They knew it’d come from you. Seemed to, anyhow. That we two are – that there’d been – that we’d—’ Will frowns; his cheeks and brow are bristling with violent heat. He abandons the sentence. ‘If one of us is caught, they’ll go after the other directly.’

  Mrs Lamb is unimpressed. ‘Neither of us will be caught. I know this damn house better than anyone else alive. All I need is a second pair of arms. You’ll walk behind me. You’ll carry what I give you. That’s the whole of it.’

  ‘Madam,’ Will insists, ‘I ain’t no robber.’

  Now she is impatient. ‘This is the only way you’re ever getting those books back, Mr Turner.’ Her grip grows firmer; her face is brought nearer. ‘And you feel the rightness of it. I know you do. I saw you with that print, with the Brookes, back in my still room. You’re of our party. I shouldn’t have to plead with you like this.’

  Will’s heels dig into the floor, as if bracing for a tug-o-war; he twists his arm a fraction within Mrs Lamb’s grasp. Could this be true? The horror of those images is still imprinted upon him, that he can’t deny, but where an actual opinion should be – the granite conviction that must govern people of principle and impel them to act – there is only blankness. He’s a landscape painter, schooled by the Royal Academy. A man of dawn and dusk, of clouds and atmospheric effects; of the Sublime and the Picturesque Object. He has his path and it demands every last thing he’s got. What, really, does he know of all this? What does he want to know of it?

  Mrs Lamb turns, leaving him facing the top of her mob-cap, the curls packed beneath the white cotton, always attempting to escape. She shuts her eyes and sighs, dispelling her irritation, collecting herself for a final amendment of manner; then she releases him, her fingers playing along his arm as they withdraw.

  ‘D’ye not think that we make a fine partnership, sir?’ she asks. ‘Why, last night we got past Mr Cope and the others without the least bit of trouble. We sported about them bedrooms like we owned the place.’ Her left boot inches forward, nestling against his right, underscoring her meaning. ‘It could surely be done again.’

  Will colours anew, more savagely than ever. Squirming in the loose dirt, he steals a longing glance at her knees, and the open inch between them; at the way her buttocks softly overhang the stool.

  A sly line appears at the side of Mrs Lamb’s mouth. ‘And there’s summat else you might care to know. It’s Mr Girtin who’s got your books.’

  It’s a double blow, expertly timed; Will is left gaping, radish-faced, his objections obsolete. ‘Beg – beg pardon?’

  ‘A regular scene, there was, when Mr Lascelles arrived at the lake. Your friend Tom was sorely put out by your dismissal. Requested in the strongest terms that the books be placed in his care. Mr Lascelles weren’t best pleased, but he permitted it for the sake of harmony. To keep Mr Girtin applied to the task at hand, I suppose.’

  Will sits up. Tom Girtin has the sketchbooks. He’ll be at leisure to look through them; to survey what Will has gathered; to examine the points of contact with his own northern tour the previous year, and the significant points of departure. And there’s the drawing of Tom’s, the infuriatingly brilliant drawing Will salvaged at Plumpton. Tom can’t discover that he has it. He just can’t. And that accursed sketch of Mrs Lamb, which Beau Lascelles waved at him with such glee. Why the devil did he make it? What in damnation was he thinking? Tom would consider it hilarious, and lay it open to the inspection of all artistic London. Academicians might hear of it. Conclusions might be reached about William Turner’s character – his ability to conduct himself in a manner befitting one of the king’s painters. The door to membership, the door to his future, might well become obstructed.

  Dear God.

  Will scrabbles against the greenhouse wall, clambering to his feet, accidentally kicking over a stack of plant pots. ‘Mrs Lamb,’ he begins – stopping to right his waistcoat, which has ridden a distance up his stomach. ‘Madam—’

  Crossing her legs, the still-room maid places her elbow on her thigh and her chin on her palm, a pose of incongruous elegance. Her eyebrows rise in expectation.

  ‘What do we do?’

  Monday

  This woman is a saviour. Will is certain of it. Mrs Lamb will deliver him from the fix he’s in and set him back on his rightful course. Following her up through the park, he feels immensely grateful and slightly awestruck;
and protected, shielded from harm, like Tobias on his journey with the Angel. Both of them are wearing black cloaks, which she brought with her when returning to the greenhouse. Will’s is at least three inches too long and reeks of horse, but out in the moonless night, pulling it on provided a distinct and exciting sensation of invisibility. The house is ahead, so dark and silent that it appears uninhabited. Exactly as she assured him it would be. The route to his books seems direct, secure and safe. He’ll be rescued from his present difficulty and freed from this place for good.

  They enter at the kitchen corridor on the western side. Embers still smoulder in the range, dry-brushing doorframes and floor tiles a deep, tarnished red; but otherwise this end of the service floor is unlit and its passages empty. She takes them right, towards the still room. The lingering odour of dinner, of roast chicken and suet, gives way to the thick, sweet smells – fruity, spicy, waxy – that cling always to her clothes and hair. Reaching the threshold, she comes to a halt, her purpose suddenly suspended. Ten seconds go by. Will nearly nudges her, to prompt continuation, but thinks better of it.

  This woman is a victim. It cannot be forgotten. The victim of something unspeakable. Will peers into the room, at the copper pans piled dully in the darkness, at the jars and bottles and trays – the instruments both of her enslavement and her revenge. Waiting in the greenhouse, watching the afternoon’s tones shift and dim, he wondered at some length about her experiences. Had she felt the slavers’ whips cut into her skin, or endured their abuses in closets and thickets? Had she seen others, relatives and friends, suffer the lurid horrors detailed by the Abolitionists – hung on hooks like butchered meat, dragged behind traps, lashed until dead? And the voyage to England, Christ alive; had it been on a slave ship, like the abominable Brookes? There’s much he would have her describe. He thinks these questions at her broad back, thinks them very hard, as if she might feel it somehow and turn to reply.