Winter of Despair

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Why do you think that Milton-Hayes wanted to invite the canon to the dinner, Dick?’ I asked.

  He took my question seriously, looking straight ahead, frowning brows pulling his hat down close to those brilliant dark eyes. ‘I suppose that you could say that the canon was the buyer, the man who was going to have first pick from those rather arresting pictures,’ he said, but there was a hesitant note in his voice which invited me to disagree.

  ‘But the dinner, we now know, was not really an occasion to debate artistry, as Millais and Holman Hunt and even Ruskin had asked my mother to host. No,’ I said emphatically, ‘this dinner was the work of a devil. Milton-Hayes was showing his power over his poor victims. If they paid up, ahead of time, well he might have withdrawn the picture, but if they refused, they would have had a taste of what was to come when they witnessed friends and acquaintances speculating in whispers about the inspiration behind those diabolical pictures.’

  ‘I wonder whether some had paid up,’ said Dickens. He nodded amiably at the amazed and excited face of a bookseller who had come out of his shop to inspect his display of Bleak House and who was stunned to see the man himself glance at the shop window.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

  ‘Because you wouldn’t have expected him to carry all five pictures, six if you include Winter of Despair, into your mother’s drawing room.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ I said. I had never taken too much interest in Charley’s friends and their concerns. ‘I usually steal off and smoke a pipe,’ I admitted.

  Dickens gave me a censorious look. He would insist on believing that, as a man, I would have influence over my mother. I, however, knew, for many a year, that I had none and I had never wanted any. As long as she was happy and I was happy and poor Charley was as happy as his temperament and training at that Jesuit school would allow him to be – well, as long as all that came to pass, I would never have dreamed of having the slightest say in my mother’s dinner parties. After all, it was her house and her money. I endeavoured to be helpful, though. Dickens’ good opinion was very important to me.

  ‘I remember that we had a dinner to look at Holman Hunt’s picture The Awakening Conscience. I thought the girl didn’t look animated enough, didn’t look as if much was troubling her, to be honest, but everyone else disagreed with me, so I took myself down to the kitchen and had a second helping of Mrs Barnett’s apple charlotte pudding.’

  Dickens was satisfied with this. ‘I thought so,’ he said in his definite way. ‘Holman Hunt brings one picture and that probably would have been the norm. Milton-Hayes might have planned to bring just one or two. The threat might have been enough to make most of his victims pay up hastily and then Milton-Hayes might have brought something different to your mother’s dinner. If, for instance, your brother Charley had not managed to get hold of a slice of that money that your provident father left, then Milton-Hayes might have moved on to the husband of the lady. No man likes to be shown up in public as a cuckold and an old fool. Or else, perhaps he would have tried to milk Lord Douglas or his father. There must be money in that family and if his father, the Earl of Ennis, was unable to pay, why then a cousin or two might have been persuaded to cough up the necessary sum. Clever fellow, that Milton-Hayes, wasn’t he?’ added Dickens with a reflective expression on his face as though he were auditioning the artistic Milton-Hayes for a part in one of his novels.

  ‘Came from Essex, I think. Perhaps he’ll tell your mother.’ Inspector Field’s visit to my mother was still intriguing him; I could tell that.

  I myself was interested. It seemed undoubted that my mother had summoned the policeman. Probably sent Dolly with a message. Or was it Sesina? That might have been the answer to her little air of self-consequence. She might be pleased to be a messenger, might have made the most of her previous contact with Inspector Field. I hoped that there would be no more dramatic confessions on my mother’s part. The uneasy spectre of my father hovered around me. ‘Willie,’ I seemed to hear his solemn and reproachful voice in my ear using the old, childhood name which I had long swapped for my more adult second name, ‘Willie, I’ve left your mother and your brother in your care. What are you doing to safeguard them?’ The words rang through my mind incessantly. It was a relief when Dickens began speaking again, his decisive quick voice breaking up the ghostly echoes in my mind.

  ‘I was talking to Augustus Egg about Milton-Hayes, and he had a few interesting things to say.’

  I was immediately intrigued. Augustus Egg, for an artist, was a very sensible fellow and had a greater hold on reality than most of the Pre-Raphaelite brethren.

  ‘What did he think of him?’

  ‘Of Milton-Hayes? Didn’t care for him much, I had the impression, but that’s not the interesting bit. He said …’ Dickens paused with his eye on me before continuing. ‘He said that he thought the name was assumed. He remembered once that the man was writing a note. He was drinking in an inn with some of the others and he scribbled a note and gave a boy a few pennies to take it to his house. And,’ said Dickens with emphasis, ‘he put his name at the bottom of the page and then crossed it out, violently, according to Egg and then wrote “Milton-Hayes”. Now a man doesn’t make a mistake with his own name. Any other word in the English language can be misspelt by a man in his cups, but I venture to assert, though I don’t, as you know, like to be too dogmatic, but I’m sure that you will agree with me that one’s signature is almost a reflex action, as part of one’s self as it is to put one foot in front of another.’

  It would be for Dickens who once told me that he never wrote less than a dozen letters a day, but perhaps not quite so much for others. Still, every painting that the man did was signed by the ornate flourish of his double-barrelled name. Aloud I said, ‘I’m not surprised if it’s an assumed name. Did Augustus manage to see the first name before it was scribbled out?’

  ‘He thought it began with an R. I went around to see him last night and I tried to get some more out of him. The man is so indecisive.’ Dickens began to walk fast with a frown that lowered his eyebrows down over his eyes. He was fond of Augustus Egg, I knew, but if there was anything that Dickens could not abide, it was being indecisive. Often I found myself trapped into a hasty decision in order to avoid the charge. I felt rather sorry for poor old Egg, a man who liked to smoke peacefully until inspiration struck and then to work at a very leisurely pace. I controlled my thoughts though and turned an interested face towards Dickens.

  ‘I sat him down at the table, mended a few pens for him, took out a fresh slip of paper and said to him, “Now then, Egg, don’t think of anything except that day in the inn. You are watching a word being written at the end of a note. Milton-Hayes is holding the pen and the pen is travelling over the page. Now write that word, write it again and again until you are satisfied.”’ Dickens smiled grimly to himself.

  ‘And did it work?’ Myself, I would have given the man a dose of laudanum, but Dickens was a puritan and any mention of laudanum caused him to frown. He regarded the taking of opiates as a sign of weakness and so I avoided letting him know of my own usage. There was many a time that I resorted to them, however, in order to get a story moving and was often amazed how my pen seemed to scrawl across the paper almost as though under its own steam.

  ‘I said to him, “Keep going, Egg; keep going. Don’t stop to think, just keep writing until you think that you have it.” He filled half a page and then he sat back, well, you know Egg. He can never make up his mind about anything. He stared at the scrawls on the page as if he wasn’t sure how they got there. I didn’t rush him or anything. I just waited. I know how to deal with people like Egg and so I gave him lots of time. In the end, very quietly, I just told him to point to the one that looked the most like it. Unfortunately,’ said Dickens, neatly sidestepping a drunken man, ‘unfortunately, the one that he pointed to was the most incomprehensible of the lot. I could only be sure of the letter R and it was probably the letter A or else U after it. Egg, of course, G
od bless him, was very cheerful about it all and left all the guesswork in my hands. He thought that he had done his bit when he had ruined one of my pens, dropped some ink on my rug and used up a whole slip of expensive paper.’

  That acerbic note was unlike Dickens who was generally the most generous of men and was unsparing in pressing friends to partake of his hospitality. I took it as a measure of his friendship to me and his determination to solve this murder and to free my brother from his state of despair.

  ‘It’s useful, though, isn’t it?’ I said in his ear as we crossed St Mark’s Square. ‘He might have been named Raymond, or Ransley, or Raeburn, or even Russell,’ I ended, thinking back on what Piggott had said about Jack Russell dogs.

  ‘Or a million others,’ said Dickens. ‘Anyway, let’s see whether the canon knows any more. All we need is just a hint of a murky past. Just something that would give Inspector Field an excuse to shift the focus from your brother and move it onto someone else. He’s under pressure from his superiors at the moment, you know.’

  It was my first hint that Dickens had been talking with Inspector Field in private and I felt very grateful for his interest. He was an extremely busy man, writing every morning, writing to a deadline, month by the month, the next episode in Hard Times, his novel about the industrial north.

  The canon was pleased to see us. A newly promoted man, I sensed that he had not quite fitted himself into his new role. Perhaps my mother was right. The move from the docks on the east side of London to the leafy precincts of Regent’s Park had made him feel rather self-conscious and he wasn’t yet comfortable in his new role. He was effusive in his praise about my mother, in the role that she played in charitable works, in her interest in the church and in her support for new ideas and new methods. A woman, he said solemnly, who had a great love for God. He rapturously inhaled the scarlet flowers before laying them reverentially on the windowsill. I could have told him that the flowers of geraniums had no scent. I, also, could have told him that my mother’s religious instincts were purely a matter of boredom. She had worked hard at my father’s career, had been responsible for dealing with art galleries and arranging exhibitions and her suggestions of subjects to paint often turned out to be his most successful works. Since his death she had been at a loss. If Charley had the self-confidence to accept her help, she might have been the making of him, but he shunned her counsels, rejected her suggestions, exclaimed with horror at the idea of making use of her influence and seemed to glory in going contrary to her ideas. Poor fellow. His own worst enemy, I thought and wondered how this affair of the murdered artist was going to turn out and if we could ever find the real murderer and rescue my poor brother.

  Winter of Despair. I thought of Milton-Hayes and his picture and of his diabolical way of blackmailing those who had welcomed him into their fellowship. He had misused whatever gifts that he had, had employed them in blackmail, had enriched himself and had misused the art of picture making.

  However, this canon was friendly and perhaps as much a victim of a plausible tongue as some others. I smiled at him in a friendly fashion and accepted his tributes to my mother and then looked across at Dickens. He immediately took up the bat and carried on the conversation.

  ‘Yes, a remarkable lady, this mother of our friend, here; I’ve seldom admired a woman more than when she dealt so calmly with all of the sad events on the night of what should have been one of her pleasant little dinner parties,’ he said promptly. ‘A shocking business. Shocking to me and I hardly knew the man. And, of course, the report of Mr Milton-Hayes’ death must have been a great shock to you, also. I understand that you knew him well.’

  ‘Oh, no, not well.’ The canon seemed somewhat taken aback at that. ‘No, not well at all. Good heavens, no. I barely met him on a few occasions. But it was a relationship that I felt should be encouraged by me. I had hoped that good things would come of it: this alliance between the man of God and the man of Art. Our medieval church made great use of art in order to explain religion to the people and that was my connection with Mr Milton-Hayes; that was my sole contact with him. I commissioned him to paint some pictures for me. We are opening a new hall for the use of the laity and it seemed appropriate to decorate it with paintings which would be beautiful in themselves, but which would also open minds to think upon religious matter.’ The canon folded his arms across his plump stomach and smiled tentatively at us.

  ‘And so Milton-Hayes did his version of the seven deadly sins,’ I said.

  ‘An interesting idea. Was it yours or was it Mr Milton-Hayes’ concept?’ asked Dickens with one of his keen looks.

  The canon hesitated and I felt rather sorry for him. Those pictures, I was pretty sure, were not at all what a dignitary of the church would actually want on the walls of a room meant for the pious laity. Surely children would be admitted to these rooms and no one would want their innocent child speculating on the meaning of Den of Iniquity or Taken in Adultery and certainly not Forbidden Fruit, or any of the other pictures. I looked at the canon dubiously. It seemed impossible that a man such as this, hesitant, hide-bound within the constraints of conventional morality, would have really wanted pictures like these.

  ‘Well, the original inspiration was mine, but …’ He hesitated and looked at me for help.

  ‘But you had to leave the execution to the artist,’ I said, encouragingly. ‘I know that my brother and his friends talk a lot about this. They feel that an artist, unlike an artisan, cannot be tied down to a particular subject or particular way of working.’

  The canon smiled at me benignly and I thought I could read a touch of thankfulness in his face. ‘You’re quite right, Mr Collins. In fact, I felt a bit of a fool as I was trying to explain, but Mr Milton-Hayes seemed to brush aside what I said and kept on assuring me that he perfectly understood what I wanted and that I would be delighted at the result.’

  There was a short silence after he said that and then it was broken as Dickens, always courageous, said, ‘And were you? Were you delighted at the result?’

  The canon’s eyes fell before his and he chewed upon his rather full lips. And then he looked up and said, ‘De mortius …’ He left a silence and we both knew what he meant by this Latin tag – but neither of us felt like commentating. No, no one wanted to criticize the dead and yet it was the living who matter. I thought of trying to say something about that, but again it was Dickens who took the initiative.

  ‘And so you were deeply appalled at the use which Milton-Hayes made of your commission. And the choice of subjects, The Night Prowler, Taken in Adultery etc. It was the artist who chose the subjects.’

  ‘I tried to make some suggestions, brought along a few prayer books, an illustrated version of the “Sermon on the Mount” but, as I said, he didn’t want to be hampered.’ The canon wiped some sweat from his brow and I began to feel very sorry for him.

  ‘But the church was paying for these pictures, is that not so?’

  ‘That was so,’ said the canon. I could still see a sheen of sweat on his forehead and his eyes had a deeply troubled look. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, gentlemen, but the diocesan lawyer is due here at three and I see that it is past that hour now. Will you please give my most sincere thanks to your mother, Mr Collins?’ He shook hands energetically with us both and expressed himself overwhelmed to have had another opportunity to meet with the famous Mr Dickens, rang his bell for an attendant cleric, and then we found ourselves out on St Mark’s Square once more.

  ‘I wonder whether he will have to pay for those pictures,’ I said.

  ‘Not if the diocesan lawyer knows his job,’ said Dickens cynically. ‘That is what diocesan lawyers are for. Anyway, technically speaking they are unfinished, though I suppose any competent artist could supply the missing faces. Nice job for Charley, wouldn’t it be?’

  I shuddered at the idea. Charley was in a bad enough state. I began to feel uneasy about him again. Goodness knows what was happening while I was out of the house.

/>   ‘I’d better be getting back, Dick,’ I said. ‘My mother is very worried and I should be with her.’

  FIFTEEN

  Sesina was in the hall when Mr Wilkie came in. He had a way of running up the steps, rattling his umbrella against the area railings and he could always be heard in the kitchen if you were anywhere near to the window.

  ‘Better give that hall table a rub; the mistress was having a bit of a look at it this morning,’ she said blandly to Dolly. Not waiting for a reply, she seized the cloths and the tin of polish that she had left near to hand upon the dresser and went straight through the door and up the stairs to the hall.

  Mr Wilkie was just taking his key from the front door when she came into the hall. He didn’t look too worried, just thoughtful.

  ‘Just going upstairs to give your tables a bit of a polish, Mr Wilkie,’ said Sesina. ‘Do you want me to come back later?’

  He looked at her with a twinkle in his eye. Could read her easily. Knew that she wanted to be in on this affair. He gave her a wink and she bit her lips, though she knew that she was only half-concealing the smile.