Winter of Despair

by Cora Harrison

  A half-finished picture stood on an easel. It was a landscape painting of Regent’s Park as seen from the veranda outside the drawing-room window of my mother’s house. The bushes, with their clusters of meticulously painted flowers, had been finished months ago, but the central figures had been barely sketched in with the faintest of pencil strokes and had not been touched since I had seen it last. I suppressed a sigh. My brother, as I had come to expect whenever I entered the room, was stretched on the sofa, gazing drearily at the ceiling above.

  I decided on shock tactics. ‘Charley, Edwin Milton-Hayes is dead,’ I said, purposely brutal, hoping that he would leap from the sofa and bombard me with questions.

  But he didn’t. He stayed as he was, stretched out, and his eyes did not move from the ceiling.

  ‘May gentle Jesus have mercy on his soul,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Never mind gentle Jesus, never mind his soul. It’s his body that we need to think about and that body is at Scotland Yard with some policemen looking at it.’ Again, I made my tone as brutal as I could. I had to shake him out from this daze.

  That shocked him, but in the wrong way. ‘We all need to think of our souls, Wilkie. They matter. The body is corrupt and will decay, but the soul will live forever,’ he said and then he placed his hands over his stomach and grimaced.

  ‘I have such a pain, Wilkie,’ he said and he whimpered like a small child.

  I looked at him with despair. If ever a man looked suspicious, well that man lay on the sofa in front of me. The story of the fight had gone around our little world. It had been so unlike Charley that a blow-by-blow account had been narrated in all the haunts of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and by their fellow artists. I had even heard a discussion of it within the precincts of the Inns of the Temple.

  So pain, or no pain, Charley had to be on his feet and joining the guests in the dining room within fifteen minutes. He had to eat some dinner, address a few words to his neighbours on either side of him and then he had to be in good shape and good form to endure the questioning of Inspector Field. There was only one thing for him. I left him abruptly and without a word went straight to my room, mixed a dose of magnesia and then laced it heavily with laudanum. I had a moment’s doubt as I carried the glass back to the painting room. Charley, I knew, did not like to take laudanum. He took it, of course. But then he suffered agonies of self-hate. It was all part of his fanatical religion. I had given him what I gave myself and, perhaps, that would be too much. Still, I dismissed that particular worry from my mind. He would be excited and stimulated by the company and I would make sure that he had plenty of brandy, would leave a bottle beside his place. Charley was fond of brandy and relied upon it.

  ‘Drink this, Charley,’ I said as I entered the room. ‘Down the hatch, old fellow.’

  He took it obediently. Charley was always an obedient boy. I waited beside him anxiously, waited as the minutes ticked by. Getting too late to change for dinner. Luckily everyone was used to my eccentricities and my oft-repeated desire that everyone should dine wearing a comfortable and colourful dressing gown. Charley, despite his agonies of depression, looked his usual neat and clean person. Some of the guests would, like Dickens, be wearing a dinner jacket and a black tie, but others, like young Walter Hamilton, would not bother,

  ‘Come on, old fellow,’ I said, as I heard the first gong sound, ‘come on then, Charley. You’ll be fine.’

  He was a little unsteady on his feet as I ushered him out of the room, but the haunted expression had gone from his eyes and his pale cheeks had a slight flush upon them. There was a buzz of conversation from the drawing room but I steered Charley past it and guided him down the next flight of stairs towards the ground-floor dining room. Only Sesina was in the room and she was putting finishing touches to the table. I cast a quick glance down the table. There he was, quite near to me, and with delightful little Molly French on the other side. I pushed him into a chair and then suddenly remembered that picture, Taken in Adultery. The red-headed young man and the slim young figure of a dark-haired girl. Still, it couldn’t be helped. My mother had arranged the cards and was liable to make a fuss if any of her arrangements were upset. And, after all, the inspector was not going to be present at the dinner. The important thing was to free Charley from that pall of depression, to make him relaxed and carefree.

  ‘Where’s the brandy?’ I asked Sesina.

  ‘Next to the canon, Mr Wilkie,’ she said. But without an additional word, she went to the top of the table, fetched the decanter and placed it beside Charley’s place name. ‘There’s another one in front of Mr Milton-Hayes,’ she said casually and with a wink in my direction. ‘They can pass it between them.’

  Milton-Hayes, I thought, was far beyond needing any brandy, so as soon as I had Charley settled in a chair and sipping his favourite drink, I went up to the top of the table and moved the brandy decanter from the dead man’s place and positioned it neatly between the canon and Lord Douglas. I had my own reasons to hope that his lordship would be a little drunk, a little incautious by the time that he met Inspector Field. Let him blurt out something, let him blurt it out before his noble father, the Earl of Ennis, could get hold of a team of lawyers who would prevent his son and heir from incriminating himself. That’s if the earl could still afford lawyers. I had heard that he was on the verge of bankruptcy.

  The first dinner guests, my mother on the arm of the canon, were at the door by the time Charley had finished his first drink. Dickens had managed to secure Molly for himself and was flirting loudly with her, probably much to the annoyance of her grey-bearded old husband who was saddled with the loquacious Mrs Hermione Gummidge. I went to meet them, smiling to myself at John French’s expression. He was a coward, though. Dickens was such a famous man that all a husband could do was to smile feebly and then look away as he watched his wife Molly giggle and pretend to hide her blushes. He glanced across the table, picked out his own name card and made his way towards his seat, deliberately averting his gaze and pretending to study a small oil painting of some fisher boys that hung on the wall behind him.

  ‘Wilkie, you haven’t changed your clothes!’ exclaimed my mother with mock fury.

  ‘Dear, oh dear,’ I said with a quick glance downwards. ‘Never mind, Mamma, I’ll just fly upstairs and slip on my best silk dressing gown – my new purple one.’

  Dickens, good fellow that he was, immediately backed me, wanting to go home for his own favourite dressing gown, or at least to send a cab to Tavistock House, and there was a chorus of voices, each trying to cap each other’s choice of dinner attire. My mother laughed, the canon smiled benignly, everyone took their places, nobody casting a second glance at the silent, taciturn figure of my young brother.

  But it only took a few moments for William Jordan to notice that the star painter of his art gallery was missing. While everyone speculated on possible reasons for that absence – my courageous mother, after joining in with a long and, I’m sure, fictitious account of an accident in Albany Street, called upon Sesina who enthusiastically corroborated her mistress’s account and added, I was sure, several fancy additions of her own – while all of this was going on, no one noticed my brother quietly sipping brandy and saying nothing at all.

  From time to time, during the spirited discussion, I peered around Mrs Hermione Gummidge’s bulk. Nothing unusual about Charley’s silence, but Molly, now that Dickens had deserted her in order to insert his novelist’s creativity into fabricating more and more reasons for the non-arrival of our dinner guest, was slipping several conspiratorial glances at Charley’s white face. I tried to send a warning glance at her while keeping up an animated conversation with my mother on the other side of the table. All against the rules of etiquette, of course, to talk across a table like that, but we are always informal in my mother’s house.

  And, puzzlingly enough, I could not get a word out of my right-hand neighbour. Very unlike Helen Jordan who was normally full of jokes and witticisms. She did
not look well at all, I thought. Her cheeks had been embellished with a touch of rouge, I felt sure; and it was not a success as the skin beneath the rouge was unusually white and her large dark eyes, fringed with those immensely long eyelashes, were filled with misery. There was something wrong, I thought, as the oysters were removed and replaced by the clear Mock Turtle soup … yes, there was an unusual air of constraint. Had there been some sort of a row between herself and her husband after we had left? Perhaps the news of the death of Milton-Hayes had come to the house after we left and then there had been accusations between them.

  My mother was an excellent hostess, knowing well how to blend an informal atmosphere with top class food, top class wine and she knew how to keep a free flow of conversation going as her guests savoured the meats and the fish and allowed the intoxicating fumes of the wine to mount to their brain and stimulate their wits. But tonight, this was not happening, not even when the turbot and the smelts were served accompanied by an excellent Chablis. Neighbour eyed neighbour with suspicion. That empty chair, at the top of the table, beside my mother, seemed to mesmerize the guests. No one spoke of it. Most tried to avert their gaze from it, but it stood there, like Shakespeare’s Banquo; a ghost at the feast, stood dumbly there, its silent presence a mute accusation. It was quite strange, I thought, that after that first burst of almost hysterical foolery that no one mentioned the missing guest again, or even expressed any curiosity about the pictures that he had promised to display for their opinion. Not even the canon, the purchaser of the works, said a word or asked a question about the pictures.

  I watched the clock, heard it tick loudly in a sudden silence as the croquette of chicken was removed by a saddle of mutton. The conversation was beginning to die out. Even Dickens now had his eye upon the clock and Molly, turning in despair from Charley who was still drinking steadily, cast a defiant glance across the table at her husband and then fixed her eyes upon her plate. William Hamilton tried to make conversation with Florence Gummidge while her mother, Hermione, at my side, gave an impatient sigh at seeing her darling daughter, whom she had hoped might make a splendid marriage, marooned, with an empty place on her right-hand side and an impecunious young man on her left.

  As the saddle of mutton was removed by a dish of pheasants, I looked from face to face, and eventually at the canon. There had been no sign of a canon’s robes in any one of the pictures that we had seen, so perhaps he was here purely in order to see whether this set of pictures would be appropriate for a church hall. Nevertheless, despite his stolid demeanour, his fingers were nervously shredding a bread roll.

  I cast a few uneasy glances over at Charley. He had refused the wine and continued to sip brandy. Nevertheless, it was a controlled process. He did not, as others might do, toss glass after glass into his mouth, just took the liquid, sip by sip. Nor did he become loud, or noisy, or give vent to uncontrolled fits of laughter. No, he sat quietly in his chair, ate a little, exchanged a few polite sentences with Mrs Hermione Gummidge, his neighbour on his right-hand side, but he seemed to be avoiding the glances of little Mrs Molly French, and that, I thought, showed a certain presence of mind. Perhaps, I thought, Charley would be all right when the inspector arrived. Brandy never seemed to make him noisy or incoherent. My brother, I told myself, was a gentle soul. Not someone who would ever slash a man’s throat in that brutal fashion.

  And then my eyes went from guest to guest, studying each face in turn. Not all, but most showed signs of tension. It could have been a scene from one of those crowded pictures painted by my godfather, David Wilkie. The Empty Chair, it might have been entitled and that chair, up at the top of the table, beside my dauntless mother, could almost be seen to cast a shadow over the invited guests; his invited guests. I had read the list that Charley had presented to my mother. Mrs and Mrs William Jordan, Mr and Mrs John French, Mrs Hermione Gummidge and her daughter Florence, Lord Douglas, Walter Hamilton and the canon, the proposed purchaser of the set. Not a person had declined the invitation. I wondered about them. I had little difficulty in matching most of them to the figures in the pictures that Dickens and I had uncovered in Milton-Hayes’ cloakroom, but there were a few puzzles.

  The doorbell rang just at the moment when Sesina and Dolly were arranging clean plates for the Curaçao soufflé and the marbled jelly and apricot cream. I saw how Dolly widened her eyes at Sesina with dismay. The soufflé would collapse if not served quickly. The guests glanced at each other uneasily, wondering, doubtless, whether the missing guest was arriving after all. My mother’s fingers tightened so much on the spoon that the candelabra in front of her illuminated the dead white of her knuckles.

  I got to my feet. ‘I’ll open the door, Sesina. You carry on.’ My late father would have died of shock to even hear of the man of the house opening a door, but my mother, brother and I led a bohemian existence and no one would be surprised. Eyes followed me, nevertheless, as I left the room. They had been expecting Edwin Milton-Hayes throughout the evening and now they were bracing themselves for his arrival.

  But, of course, it was not the artist; it was the police.

  Inspector Field had a minion with him, a young policeman carrying a bulging bag – more bulging than it had looked in the morning, I thought.

  ‘Come in, inspector,’ I said affably. ‘Everything is ready for you.’ It had been all arranged for Milton-Hayes, of course, but that didn’t matter now. I closed the door behind them and then led the way up the stairs and through into the drawing room.

  My mother was nothing but innovative. Her drawing room was magnificently unusual. The walls were painted black, but there was nothing gloomy about the room. These walls were just a background for my father’s magnificent landscape paintings which were framed in gold. There was gold everywhere. The ceiling was gold. The carpet was gold. The numerous sconces on the walls had the sheen of gold and the heavy black velvet curtains that framed the view of Regent’s Park were sewn with swirling garlands of golden leaves and stems. By day, the view of Regents’ Park was beautiful with graceful weeping trees and ponds and dominated the room, but, by night, the room was romantic and beautiful and the paintings were the focus of all eyes.

  Inspector Field gave a glance around, took out one of the pictures from his bag and held it awkwardly in his hands. It was one that I had seen this morning but had not looked closely at it. Now I examined it with interest. It had its name engraved on the same carved scroll as the others and obviously was part of the Milton-Hayes collection of paintings commissioned by the canon.

  ‘Root of All Evil,’ I read the title aloud. A gambling den, I guessed. Cards on the table. A woman with one long white hand to her heart and the other pushing a pile of gold coins across the table. The face, as with the other pictures, had been erased, covered with that familiar oval of white paint, but the hair was distinctive.

  The inspector was busy looking around him. ‘I thought you would have stands, or something,’ he complained. ‘Where am I to put these pictures? What had your brother arranged for Mr Milton-Hayes?’

  ‘Well, usually at these affairs, the artist takes his picture out and holds it in his arms, or props it up against the back of the chair.’ I wasn’t too sure, really. I took scant interest in these affairs and normally retired to the balcony to smoke a cigar, sip some brandy and contemplate the stars over Regent’s Park. Suit yourself, inspector, I thought. I have other things on my mind.

  ‘Brandy? Cigar? A piece of larks’ pie?’ I enquired airily.

  ‘No, no.’ He fumbled with his picture, walking around with it in his arms as though it were a baby.

  ‘There won’t be much room once everyone is in here,’ he grumbled.

  ‘We had a dance for over seventy people one night recently,’ I said coldly. The face of poor Charley, waltzing dreamily with Molly French in his arms, came before me and I wished even more fervently than before that I could have got him on to my friend Pigott’s yacht and transported him out of danger before he came under the inspector’
s eye. Too late for that, now, but at least I could do my best to shelter him tonight from Inspector Field’s suspicions and then remove him tomorrow. He was looking at me keenly, looking at me as though he were not sure that I was on the right side, after all. I remembered Dickens’ words and cursed myself. I needed to flatter this man, to appear to be lending him all possible help. I should be carefree, but at the same time keen, just like a fox hound on the trail of the enemy.

  And then the door opened and Dickens, himself, came in.

  ‘Let me help you, inspector.’ The words were quietly spoken, but in a moment he had sized up the situation and had taken all of the small chairs from around the room and lined them up against that splendid backdrop, the black curtain with its gold silk embroidery. One by one he carried over the pictures, placed each carefully in the centre of the chair, leaning its frame back against the back rungs of the chair. And then Dickens left the room and returned with the patched-up Winter of Despair, and set it upon another chair that had been placed well in front of the others in a place where one of the lamps threw a direct light upon it.

  ‘This, I think,’ he said in his most authoritative manner, ‘will be the key to the mystery.’

  Neither the inspector nor I, neither of us, asked him to support that piece of reasoning. Both of us were overwhelmed by his air of firm self-belief, by his air of authority. We felt, well I did, anyway, that this was a man who always knew the right thing to do, just as he always knew the correct note to strike when he turned out yet another new book or made a speech to a roomful of people.

  I watched my friend as he walked up and down, appraising the pictures, just as though he were a shopkeeper setting out his goods. He gave a grunt, took out the Forbidden Fruit, the picture of the very young girl being urged towards the church, and he placed it upon a chair just beneath one of my mother’s elaborate oil lamps, the flame burning brightly within the gold-engraved glass bowl. Now it was strikingly illuminated. And then, almost casually, he moved the picture Taken in Adultery towards a more obscure corner.