Death of a Radical

by Rebecca Jenkins

  Given his previous line of work, Jarrett had trained himself to look for patterns and pieces that didn’t fit. Nothing jarred here. What were you expecting to find? he chided himself. Men with secrets don’t dangle them before strangers. He listened to the convivial voices about him. It was the rumor of ordinary men enjoying the company of their friends and neighbors; hardly the stuff of foreign agents and secret societies. He watched Duffin spinning his tales. His audience had grown.

  That’s why Duffin brought me here—to see them like this, at ease on their own ground. It was pleasing to think he was so trusted. Then it dawned on him. Duffin hoped he could protect these people. That thought made him uneasy. How in God’s name could he protect any one of them from the colonel’s fearful fancies?

  A familiar voice glanced out of the mix of voices. He leaned forward. The press of people parted a moment and he saw young Favian Adley sitting in profile to him with a notebook open on his knee. He was laughing at some joke being shared by his circle. He had never seen Grub so assured. It was a glimpse of the man he was to become. Jarrett sat back, caught out by an odd twinge of pride. So the boy had found friends already. He did not want to disturb his enjoyment.

  He was aware of movement by his right shoulder. Someone walked behind the high back of the settle toward the passage. As they brushed past, Jarrett’s nostrils caught a whiff of sandalwood. He leaned out, craning to see beyond his high-backed seat. He felt a blast of cold air on his face. The corridor was empty. He saw nothing but shadows.

  CHAPTER NINE

  His painting box stood on an old square table. Next to it, dominating everything, was the canvas on its easel. Charles had ordered him up a standard fifty by forty from London, ready-primed in a soft off-white. It gleamed at him, a vast reproachful blank.

  He lifted the lid of the mahogany chest feeling the familiar thrill of anticipation at the sight of its cork-stoppered glass bottles with their rainbow of dried pigments. There was a world of enchanting associations in that box: Venetian blue and Indian yellow, terra sienna and indigo; sepia from a cuttlefish and carmine from a thousand South American beetles. His colourman, Massoul, kept him well supplied from his factory on New Bond Street. The small bladders of prepared oils lay in the dividers at the back like the exotic fruit of some Asiatic tree. His paints were one of Raif Jarrett’s few extravagances.

  He might try the new chromate of lead. Massoul had recommended it—a pure bright yellow conjured up by the chemist Davy for Benjamin West. He squeezed out a dollop on to his palette, sealing up the leathery pouch with a tack. He scanned the room. It was well lit by northern light. The walls had been recently plastered and painted a pleasing yellow. A chaise-longue upholstered in an unfortunate shade of puce blocked one corner. In the middle of the floor a couple of chairs with curving backs and broad rush seats stood stranded, facing one another like guests come early for a party. He would have his sitter there with the light of the window falling obliquely on him. He placed one of the chairs and took a step back. Favian entered. He was wearing a dark coat and blue trousers, his cravat correctly tied, his hair smoothed down with water.

  “Where shall I be?” he asked.

  “Here, if you will.”

  Favian squirmed on the rush seat, his eyes on the threatening canvas. He turned this way and that trying for a comfortable pose.

  “And I should turn toward you … ?” He propped an elbow on the rail to support his head, folding the opposite arm across his chest to brace himself, his hand gripping the chair back. It was fortuitous but it made a good shape. “How long will this take, cousin?”

  “The masters prescribe three sittings in a northern light,” Jarrett murmured absently, adjusting the position of his model’s right leg.

  “But you will work faster than that, won’t you?” Favian asked anxiously. He had had no idea of sitting so long.

  “Gladly. I bore as easily as you.”

  In a draft of air Charles appeared in waistcoat and shirt sleeves with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other. He paused before the purple chaise-longue. Looping one foot about the nearest leg, he dragged it to an angle that satisfied him and collapsed full length upon it.

  “Have you any idea how many hours a canvas of this size will take?” Jarrett asked him in an exasperated tone.

  “Want me to find you a smaller one?” Charles responded genially, filling his glass.

  Jarrett sighed. He threw a clean piece of linen across one shoulder, dipped his long brush in a pool of brownish lake and began to cross the white surface with swift strokes, his eyes seeing in shapes and colors and shadows. The pale blob that was to be the head spoke.

  “Oh! I near forgot, cousin. I am to give you Mr. Strickland’s compliments. I ran into him while waiting for the coach in Leeds. Tall fellow; beak of a nose. You know him, I think? I was at school with his brother.” Jarrett grunted.

  “Strickland?” queried Charles.

  “Francis Strickland. Yorkshire family,” Jarrett responded. Charles frowned.

  “Say, isn’t he … ?” he began.

  “They have a place near Leeds,” Jarrett cut across him. “Yes, Tip, what is it?” The valet emerged from the doorway.

  “I am worried about Master Favian, Master Raif. There’s a dreadful draft from that window and you know how he’s poorly in his chest.” Tiplady pouted out his own chest like an aggressive fowl. He was a small man with a magnificent head that seemed too large for his body—the creation of a satirical God. “Mrs. Adley, she wrote to me herself, seeing as gentlemen can be careless. As I know as well as any, for did I not go all the way to Greta Bridge in a blessed trap on a freezing cold day to find nothing but Master Adley’s trunk left for collection?” The servant paused for breath. “I don’t complain for I never do,” he said with emphasis. “It was a good joke, no doubt, but didn’t I have the most dreadful fancies of what might have befallen? For you know he is weak in the chest,” he repeated reproachfully. Beyond him Favian was half out of his chair in outrage.

  Pressure built in Jarrett’s veins. The pleasure of painting lay in peaceful communion between himself and his subject. This was about as restful as setting up in a barnyard at feeding time. He waved his brush in the direction of the door.

  “Out!” he commanded. “Out! Or this will never be done!”

  A less established servant might have taken offense, but Tiplady cherished his martyrdom. He crossed the room at a measured pace, deliberately threw another log on the fire burning in the grate and returned in silence. His eyes fixed on his ungrateful master, he conveyed an age of suffering in his bow. He exited to the accompaniment of a sing-song commentary that faded with his retreat.

  “He’s not like you. He’s sensitive. He don’t go round nosing out corpses this way and that and doing other things a gentleman shouldn’t, not even in the provinces.”

  Charles flung a leg to dangle over the back of his chaise.

  “Poor fellow,” he remarked to his glass. “I know it is tiresome to be sickly, Grub, but old Tip does like to have someone to fuss over—especially now this one won’t let him,” he elaborated with a jerk of his head in their artist’s direction.

  “I’m not an invalid!” cried Favian.

  “Am I supposed to be here for my own amusement?” asked Jarrett plaintively.

  Favian resumed his position with an apologetic grimace.

  “How does that business go?” he asked in a conciliatory tone. “I heard about the fellow at the Bucket and Broom.”

  “It’s not my business,” Jarrett answered curtly. “It’s the colonel’s.” His brushstroke slipped and he caught the smear of paint with his cloth. He never could handle the man aright. It seemed that the very sight of him put Ison’s hackles up: “You are the Duke of Penrith’s agent, sir, and new to these parts. I have been magistrate here some years. Allow that my judgment is likely better than yours.”

  “Though had I had the lordling here with me it might have been a different affair,” he heard him
self add aloud. Charles looked over with a fleeting expression of brotherly sympathy.

  “Can’t think how you manage to be civil to that fellow. Every time I see him it’s all I can do to prevent myself yawning in his face. Do you know, the other day, it was coming down in torrents and I saw him order his coachman and linkboy to stay catching their deaths waiting for him while he went into Bedford’s?”

  “I fear the colonel lacks your radical sensibilities, Charles,” Jarrett murmured. The law resided with the magistrate. And he had no evidence. One couldn’t accuse a man with a piece of toffee and a window opened on a winter night merely because one didn’t take to him.

  “Who is this Colonel Ison?” Favian piped up in a fair imitation of a man who knew everyone that mattered.

  “Colonel Ison, Member of Parliament, His Majesty’s Justice and honorable commander of our militia!” Charles toasted with a satirical flourish of his glass.

  “A significant man these parts.” Jarrett jabbed a touch of paint along the jaw line of his sketch.

  “That brisk and martial air! I heard his service only lasted four months,” Charles remarked. “He went to Ireland at the time of the rebellion of ’90. It so alarmed him he retreated all the way to a half-pay post in the provinces. And this colonel, Grub, fears our peasantry are revolting. Or on the verge of it—though precisely why he should think so is not entirely clear.” He emptied his glass and poured himself another drink.

  Jarrett took a step back to contemplate his composition. The colonel’s comment about a great conspiracy nagged him. Nottingham stocking knitters and West Yorkshire croppers singing songs of General Ludd … Weavers gathering in corners, Duffin had said. The dead man Pritchard was a wool buyer. The fairs had to figure in it. Something had stirred the colonel up. What if he had an informant? Being, himself, at one time in the military branch of the trade, Jarrett had heard rumors of domestic agents at work at home.

  “I smell an informant,” he stated. Charles snorted, a derisive, dismissive sound.

  He had sketched in his outline. Now for the wash—and then the real work to come; building color and modeling shape in layer upon layer of paint. At one time he had run a whole network of informants back in Spain. His mind prodded the edges of the dark blank of what he did not know. The fairs brought an influx of strangers—a hunting ground perhaps? Imported, he said to himself as he thinned his paint with poppy oil. An outsider. But if he was right, imported as an agent of whom and to what end? His hand hesitated over the canvas.

  Capturing a likeness: to grasp a fleeting recognition of one being in the eyes and brain of another and fix it so others might see. Part of him relished the mapping, the planning, the exercise of wit required to overcome the small treacheries of this medium—the dirty oil, the unstable tint, the dripping brush—to reproduce in mechanical labor some semblance of what he glimpsed. But in sum—what folly! All that striving, to end, at best, with a taunting parody of your first conception: a caricature of life. He looked to his left. Charles stood at his shoulder. He was leaning his head back, examining the pallid likeness emerging from the canvas.

  “Look at our little Grub. He’s a man—well, a little man,” Charles commented. The impression stared back at them as if it knew more than they.

  “You do not take this seriously?”

  Favian’s voice recalled their attention. He was leaning forward, his whole body tense.

  Charles cast him an idle glance.

  “And what must I take seriously, young Grub?”

  “There are good men out there without work who fear they cannot feed their families. Don’t you see it?”

  “What rot!” Charles scoffed, reclining once more on his couch. “There’s none of that here.”

  “Honest working men have the right to defend the customs of their trade.” A carmine flush stained Grub’s cheekbones. “How can you not see that a man, a good man; a decent, hard-working man, who cannot earn enough to feed his family and fears for the future—how can you not see that such a man might grow desperate? These are unjust times—there is no justice.”

  Jarrett had never seen the boy so animated. He had broken his pose again. The composition was too bland. It lacked something—a vibrant splash of color to focus the eye. Blue. Something blue …

  “You are too dramatic,” said Charles. “Too much poetry, I dare say.” He glanced at Jarrett and waved a white hand. “The pose, the pose, Grub,” he chided.

  Favian resumed his position with a little huff of breath. A mischievous expression crossed Charles’s face as he lolled against the sofa back. “Who would imagine that our little scholar should turn out to be such a firebrand?” he pondered. Jarrett shot him a questioning look. Charles waved his glass in an airy gesture. “Thinking of what brought him here …”

  “That was an accident, a misunderstanding,” Favian protested.

  “A misunderstanding, Grub?” Charles lifted his brows in exaggerated surprise. “You assaulted the Warden’s lodgings with an incendiary device!”

  “I was making a poetic offering and by an unlucky chance the wind caught the balloon. I’ll admit I was drunk but what were the servants thinking of, leaving the window wide open in the middle of February?”

  “One might have thought the Warden wanted his guests to catch cold,” murmured Raif. “He should have secured his defenses.”

  “It was an inventive form of attack,” conceded Charles. Favian’s blush deepened.

  “I hope my poetry may inflame men’s hearts but it was never my intention to cause an actual conflagration,” he stated with dignity.

  “Ah! But consequences, my dear Grub! Your poetic flame consumed half a brocade curtain and the Warden’s second-best table cloth. You are lucky it was not his best linen—you might have been sent down.”

  “Peace, Charles. Let us accept that it was ill-fortune that turned Grub’s bark of poesy into a Congreve rocket.” Jarrett looked up and met the boy’s eyes. They glowed with such affection and trust, it was unnerving. The sensitive mouth curved in a playful expression.

  “Miss Lonsdale is a fine woman, isn’t she?” he piped up irrelevantly. “She’s not married, I understand? She seems a very intelligent woman and a warm nature too; interested in others. We spoke of you, cousin, the other day while we drank our tea.”

  “She is a fine woman,” Charles chimed in from his sofa, “though rather too much character for my taste. I swear I did my best to draw her off, Raif, but she had already spied your bird of paradise. Those plump partridges are like magnets to respectable women; they pretend to disapprove but they are as curious as cats. You’re sure to be condemned over the tea cups. Never mind. In their hearts the ladies love a rogue.”

  “Miss Lonsdale is no gossip,” Raif reproved him. He could see just the right blue in his mind’s eye—a cross between cornflower and Venetian.

  “Poor fool! As if it isn’t the nature of the sex to tell each other everything.”

  “We need some color. A handkerchief about the neck maybe—do you have one?”

  Favian blinked. His hand slipped inside the breast of his coat, white against the dark. He drew out a freshly laundered scarlet handkerchief and held it out tentatively.

  “Wrong color; I need blue, I think.”

  Favian looked down at the handkerchief in his hand a moment then folded it tenderly. He tucked it up one sleeve and resumed his pose, gazing studiously into the middle distance.

  If he used the view through the window beyond—substituted a summer sky for the winter one—that would give him the blue. Jarrett penciled a note on the margin of a paper lying on the table beside him and picked up his brush again.

  “So much about women baffles me,” Favian was saying, “even their very names. Well, Miss Lonsdale is Henrietta, I think. That’s simple enough. But Molly for instance, or Lally,” his tongue stuttered a little over the word. “I heard that name for the first time the other day and I can’t for the life of me think where it might come from.”

 
; Charles lifted himself up on one elbow to stare at him.

  “Adelaide, I should imagine,” Jarrett supplied, adding a murmured, “Down Charles!” My lord shut his mouth and lay back against the upholstered velvet.

  Favian broke his pose to stretch a little. He fiddled with his cuff and resumed his position.

  “What’s another word for yellow?” he asked. “I have been through corn and straw and sun. None will do.”

  “Piss,” offered Charles, gazing at the way his wine tilted in the bowl of his glass.

  Jarrett was contemplating the shadows behind Favian’s left ear.

  “Citrine, mustard, ochre,” he suggested.

  “I have a new composition in mind,” Favian confessed. “Not a classical form but a ballad. A poem for the people. I happened to meet a singer, cousin Raif, a local man, on my way here. You should hear them sing, here in Woolbridge. I have never heard such singing. It speaks to the heart with a directness …” His words failed him. He dropped his bracing arm to etch an expressive sweep with his hand.

  “Can you sing?” asked Charles.

  “I hum a little.”

  Jarrett made an impatient sound.

  “Sorry, cousin.” Favian resumed his pose. “I have set about a new work,” he went on, his eyes fixed dutifully forward, the rest of his face animated. “William Wordsworth speaks of his songs, but my desire is to write real songs—songs to rouse everyman’s heart. A ballad, you see. I am working on a ballad …”

  “A noble ambition,” Jarrett murmured absently, his mind still on the Bucket and Broom. The mystery visitors—they were likely to know something. A bearded man, smelling of sandalwood … He could hardly spend his time lurking in crowded places hoping to nose him out.