Читать книгу Mrs Whistler - Matthew Plampin - Страница 12

The force of Maud’s anger caught her unawares. At first, lost for words, she went stamping from room to room, taking it out on the house – on Jimmy’s precise and oh-so-original decorations. She knocked pictures askew and kicked up rugs, she heaved wickerwork armchairs out of their places, she shoved down a Japanese screen. He followed behind, correcting what he could, making vague attempts at placation, as if even then the greater part of his mind was elsewhere. After a few minutes of this they reached the drawing room.

Maud turned abruptly to face him. ‘How could it have got so bad? Why d’you open the bloody door to them? Don’t you know anything?’

Jimmy didn’t answer. He’d lit a cigarette and was leaning back on his right foot, stroking his moustache thoughtfully, angling himself towards the two tall windows. This was a familiar ploy of his when he wished to stage a retreat. The artist is unexpectedly inspired, said the pose. Shhh! Don’t disturb!

Maud wasn’t having it, though, not today. There was a new piece of porcelain by the divan, a squat, blue-and-white vase, shaped like an oversized onion and patterned with oriental flowers. She went over to it and hooked a toe under one side. The thing was easily unseated, but rather heavier than she’d anticipated; too late she realised that it was half filled with water. It rolled away in a wobbling semicircle onto the rectangle of yellow matting laid in the middle of the room, disgorging its contents in irregular spurts. A white lily appeared, coasting off towards the skirting board, and then a pair of plump, back-flipping goldfish.

This got Jimmy’s attention at least. The artistic pose was dropped. Maud stood by, flushed with annoyance and the faintest touch of guilt, as he rushed across the room, righted the vase and attempted to save the fish. The cigarette fell from his lips and hissed out in the spillage; his eyeglass swung at the end of its cord, flashing in the dusty sunlight. He was not, in truth, very well suited to tasks such as this. The fish were sluggish enough but he could only catch hold of one of them; the other squirmed off beneath the divan, beyond his capacity for rescue.

‘You shouldn’t,’ Maud told him. ‘Keep them in a china bowl, I mean. Down in the dark. How would you like it?’

Jimmy shook water from his fingers. ‘Maudie,’ he said, ‘you’ve missed so much.’

Maud crossed her arms; she looked around for something else to upset. This hardly needed saying. Six weeks earlier, as she’d taken her leave, he’d been claiming that victory was imminent – the Grosvenor had opened to fanfares and he was poised to recover, in a single swoop, every last penny of their missing fortunes. And yet he’d greeted her today not with news of guineas, of sales and fresh commissions, but of bailiffs. The very word knotted her insides. Jimmy, though, had said it matter-of-factly. There was no secretiveness in him; no particular shame either. Two men, he’d reported, had called early yesterday morning, appointed by the Sheriff of Middlesex. He couldn’t recall who’d sent them; there were papers in the hall. Although perfectly polite, and better bred than one might imagine, they’d departed only after he’d produced ten pounds in cash, a broken pocket watch and some opal earrings that had belonged to Maud’s mother.

‘You said we’d be set right. You bloody promised it, Jimmy. You said we’d be able to talk things through. Don’t you remember? Move the child a bit closer. Find a woman in Battersea, or – or—’

The anger sputtered; Maud’s thoughts were straying in an unwelcome direction. The absence. The coldness in the crook of her arm. The sense of something very close at hand, something vitally and profoundly hers, that wasn’t being seen to. She’d been forewarned; she’d considered herself prepared. And it had beaten her to the floor. Five more days she’d remained at Edie’s after the foster mother had left – until her milk had ebbed almost to nothing, and the worst of the bleeding had seemed to be over. We’ll get you all cried out, Edie had said. Maud knew now, there in the drawing room at Lindsey Row, that five days hadn’t been nearly long enough. Jimmy would be sympathetic, of course he would. But only up to a point. They had an agreement – and with bailiffs at the door, any chance of amending it was gone.

‘We will be set right,’ Jimmy said, rising to his feet. ‘You’ll see, Maudie. I’ll buy you those earrings back.’

He misses it, Maud thought. He misses it by a bloody mile. Immediately her anger was restored to its full, scalding strength. She found that she was glaring at his hair, so carefully oiled and arranged; she saw herself grasping that single white lock and ripping it out at the root. The urge was resisted, just about. Instead she began telling him exactly what he was, drawing on a reserve of the ripest London slurs; and even after all the years he’d lived in the city, and the many battles they’d fought, a couple of these left him wrinkling his nose in bafflement.

The list ran on. Jimmy weathered it with the air of a man marking time, swivelling very slowly on his heel – then coming to a halt as he spied something outside. The drawing room was on the first floor, providing a broad view of the slow, brown Thames and the road that ran along its bank. Suddenly deaf to Maud’s invective, he went over to the right-hand window, dragged up the sash and leant out a few inches further than was safe, shouting a name with undisguised relief.

Maud fell into a glowering silence. She’d missed the name and could make out little of what was being said now, but this was clearly a friend. She edged sideways to peer out of the other window. All she saw was hats, a grey topper and a curious affair in rose felt, heading underneath the sill towards their front door. It was not one person but a pair – a couple. And Jimmy had invited them up. He ducked back in, strolled to a sideboard and began rolling another cigarette.

‘Stay there,’ he said lightly. ‘Don’t worry – they’re really not the sort to object. They’re rather keen to meet you, in fact.’

Any control Maud might have had was gone. She looked to the door, sorely tempted to ignore Jimmy and withdraw anyway. Fatigue was fast overwhelming her anger. Her bosom ached – Edie had laced the corset very forgivingly, yet still she seemed to strain against it – and further down, around the base of her belly, a sharper pain was stirring. She could go upstairs. Strip to her shift. Bury herself in their bed. But there were footfalls out on the landing – shapes blocking the line of light beneath the door. It was too late.

The callers made an assured entrance, striding in across the yellow matting. Maud’s initial impression was of height and handsomeness, and well-made, slightly unusual clothes. The gentleman trailed cigarette smoke; his companion wore a dark blue jacket that accentuated how very slender and pale she was.

‘The Harmony in Amber and Black,’ declared the gentleman. ‘The Arrangement in Brown. By Jove, Rosie, she is before us. Before us completely.’

They advanced towards Maud, regarding her with the close appreciation you might give a statue or a particularly interesting piece of furniture. Both were smiling. The drawing room felt dingier, smaller; Maud became aware of the rotten-egg smell of summer mud, oozing in through the open window.

‘I mean, it is uncanny,’ the gentleman continued, glancing over at Jimmy. He had a fine voice, warm and deep with the touch of an accent – Spanish, Maud thought. ‘Your portraits, dear fellow – they are more than likenesses. So much more. There’s a core to them, I’d say, a true artistic understanding. They get to the bottom of the matter. The essence.’

Maud looked at Jimmy. He could be prickly with praise; she’d heard him dismiss it, dismiss it with real violence, if he thought it misguided or insensible to his aims. That afternoon, however, he simply nodded in acknowledgement, then screwed in the eyeglass and smiled – the kind of wide, unguarded grin you’d only see in the company of those he genuinely liked. Two cigarettes had been rolled: he lit both, passing one to this new arrival. The Spanish gentleman sucked a last lungful from the butt already lodged between his fingers, flicked it deftly out through the window and accepted the next with a murmur of thanks.

‘Miss Corder,’ said Jimmy, ‘may I be so frightfully unnecessary as to introduce Miss Maud Franklin.’ He puffed on his cigarette, making a back-and-forth gesture. ‘Miss Franklin – Miss Rosa Corder.’

A hand was extended, in a glove the same pinkish colour as the felt hat. ‘Charmed, Miss Franklin, truly.’

Miss Corder’s voice was difficult to get the measure of. Respectable, if not quite quality; confident but also unassuming, somehow; wholly in earnest, yet tinted with laughter. Maud had been eyeing her cagily during Jimmy’s introduction, thinking that she might well be a model. A substitute. She certainly had the figure for it. Now, though, such fears could be disregarded. Maud had never met a model who spoke like this.

‘We know you, of course, from the Grosvenor,’ Miss Corder explained. ‘The pictures were so very beautiful. Do forgive us if we stare a little.’

Normally Maud would respond to a comment like this with self-effacement – perhaps something like, ‘Really I just stood there, that’s all’ – which would lead to discussion of her stamina, her patience and fortitude and so on, in the face of Jimmy’s famously gruelling requirements. That afternoon in the drawing room, however, she managed only a non-committal mumble. She was painfully conscious of their gaze upon her; of her swollen, ill-clad, exhausted body; of her complexion, drawn by stress and sorrow. She took Miss Corder’s offered hand. There was a strength in the long fingers that reminded her oddly of Jimmy’s.

‘I am glad you are back safely,’ Miss Corder added, more quietly. ‘I hope we will be friends.’

I’m glad you are back safely. Maud met her eye. She saw nothing there but good intentions – a slightly insistent kindliness. This strange pair obviously knew far more about things at Lindsey Row than Jimmy was supposed to have revealed to anyone. They’d been primed, Maud realised, and this amiable little scene arranged in advance. They knew what their arrival had interrupted. They were there specifically to deliver Jimmy from the trouble that was sure to attend upon her return, without their daughter, to news of bailiffs. This was another of his favourite stratagems – to seek refuge in company, drowning any difficulty in the bottomless pool of his acquaintance.

‘And this creature here, Maudie—’ Jimmy paused for effect, twisting the left point of his moustache, ‘is the splendid and most illustrious Owl.’

The Spanish gentleman made no comment on this peculiar introduction. He gave a shallow bow, smoke winding from his nostrils. ‘May I simply say, Miss Franklin, that in your presence one feels most clearly the intense and singular charge of inspiration. The Muse’s aura hangs heavy in the air. You are part of an exceptional group, Miss – an eternal being akin to Rembrandt’s Hendrickje, or Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, or the Bourbon princesses of our great god Velázquez.’

Maud laughed, she couldn’t help it – a hard, sceptical snort. This Owl was definitely one of Jimmy’s people. Beyond that, though, he wasn’t easy to classify. His manner was too smooth for a poet or a painter; his looming, leonine person too neat, too well tended for the stage. He lacked the careless superiority of a man of leisure, and a couple of unconventional details in his dress – the spare cut of his dove-grey suit, that red ribbon pinned to his lapel like some kind of military decoration – seemed to disqualify him from the law or most branches of business. There was the foreign aspect as well, the hint of elsewhere – could he be a diplomat? A journalist? Maud honestly couldn’t tell.

Plainly thinking he’d slipped the hook, and enjoying himself immensely, Jimmy sauntered to the door and called downstairs for John. Maud’s hackles rose anew. This low little trick mustn’t be allowed to pass unchallenged.

‘Do you reside here in Chelsea, then, Mr Owl?’ Saying the name felt ridiculous, childish; she gave it a mocking emphasis. ‘Or did you just happen to be passing by?’

‘Putney,’ Owl replied pleasantly. He drew a card from his waistcoat pocket and presented it to her. ‘We often come this way when travelling to Miss Corder’s lodgings in the city. Rosie likes to walk beside the river.’

The card lay face down in Maud’s palm. She turned it over and read: Charles Augustus Howell, Esq., Chaldon House, Putney. There it was. ‘Owl’ would be a common pronunciation of this surname in London. It was a very English handle, though, for a rather unEnglish person. No profession was given, she noticed, and no house number or street either; the suggestion was of a squire in his manor. She considered what he’d told her. Their guests were a gentleman and his mistress, with her installed at his convenience in an apartment closer to town – an arrangement almost disappointing in its ordinariness.

John appeared in the doorway. He noted Owl’s presence with wary recognition. The servant obviously hadn’t let this couple in or shown them up, as might have been assumed. The Owl at least had been to Lindsey Row before and knew his way around. Maud’s brow furrowed – hadn’t the front door been locked? Did he have a key?

‘Sherry,’ said Jimmy, ‘and the last of the buckwheat cakes. In the studio, if you please.’

‘No sherry left.’

‘A bottle of the Muscadet, then.’

John shook his head.

‘The Scharzhofberger? Surely we still have some of that?’

The servant hesitated; he gave a quick nod and made to turn away. Remembering the onion-shaped vase, Maud bent down and gripped it by the lip. A muscle in her midriff contracted; the pain was so astonishing that she nearly cried out. For a second or two, through a lens of tears, she watched the remaining goldfish wriggle weakly in an inch of cloudy water. Then she straightened up, wiped her eyes on her sleeve and held the vase towards the doorway.

‘Put this poor thing in another bowl, would you?’ she said, keeping her voice steady. ‘Something glass. And fetch a broom. There’s a dead one under the divan.’

John took it readily enough. He didn’t always heed Maud, but wouldn’t risk a fuss in front of his master. Owl, meanwhile, was studying the floor, the boards and the soaked patch of matting, tracing the pattern of splashes with the tip of his cigarette. He went to the divan, dropped to a crouch and reached into the shadows beneath – standing again a moment later with the missing fish in his hand. The tiny body was quite motionless and furred with dust. Expertly, Owl placed a fingertip against it, where the orange flank met the silvery underbelly. He gave it the gentlest of prods; the frond-like tail beat about, and for a second a fin was raised upwards like a miniature sail.

‘Bon Dieu, it lives!’ cried Jimmy, with a short, piercing laugh. ‘A Lazarus, what! A Lazarus among goldfish!’

Maud blinked. How long had it been since she’d spilled the fish? Four minutes, five? How could it possibly still be alive? As she craned her neck to see, Owl tossed the fish across the room, towards the vase – a light-hearted lob somewhat at odds with the eerie tenderness of the revival. His aim was true, though; it landed in the water with a hard hollow plop.

‘There, John,’ he said. ‘Never say that I have no gold for you.’

*

A display had been arranged in the studio, a dozen or so of the finest paintings currently in Jim’s hands, fixed onto easels or propped against the walls. There were his night-time views of the river, the Nocturnes, rendered in bands of luminous, misty blue; the Cremorne Gardens or somewhere like it, where half-formed figures drifted in golden fog; a couple of unclaimed, unfinished portraits; and Maud herself, Maud time and again, in an assortment of costumes and attitudes. Over the years Jimmy had painted her in the flowing tea-gowns of the artistic rich, peasant skirts and bodices, and bold modern garments that had fitted around her body like a sleeve.

Maud stayed close to the studio door. The muscle in her side still throbbed something awful. She rubbed at it, and was briefly taken aback by the amount of flesh her corset contained. She glanced at the Owl and his consort. They’d surely be making the comparison now, if they hadn’t already up in the drawing room. How could they not, with these paintings arrayed in front of them? They’d be lamenting the speed of Maud’s decline, and doubting her ability to recover; and wondering, perhaps, what Jimmy planned to do about it. Humiliation began to enfold her, but she clenched her teeth and forced it away. She wouldn’t be shamed by what had happened. She just wouldn’t. Inwardly, she dared these guests to make a remark. To raise an eyebrow. Anything.

Miss Corder had gone to the pictures, however, lost in veneration. She’d approached a full-length figure – Maud in white and black, her hands set on her hips, as modishly elegant as a Paris fashion plate. Owl, meanwhile, had taken up a position over by the French windows. After declaring Jimmy’s paintings beyond approbation, the great art of the age, he’d produced a pencil and a notebook and begun to write. It was a conspicuously businesslike response; he appeared to be compiling an inventory. Maud had been hoping that he might actually be a customer – that Jimmy had got the canvases out so that he could make his selection and furnish them with a few dozen much-needed guineas. She saw now that this couldn’t be the case. Customers did not make lists; if Mr Howell had dealings in the art trade, it was plainly on the selling side. His attendance at Lindsey Row was no accident, as she’d realised upstairs, but there was more to it than simply providing a distraction. Some form of arrangement was being set in place.

‘Is this all of them?’

‘Well, you know …’ Jimmy was in the middle of the room, smoking his cigarette. ‘There are a couple elsewhere in the house. Things being finished off. And there’s the Grosvenor, of course. Eight more canvases.’

Maud surveyed the studio again, and this time noticed a couple of absences. Most conspicuous was the portrait of Jimmy’s mother. He was especially attached to this picture – and somewhat more attentive to its well-being, she’d heard others imply, than he was to that of its model. Maud hadn’t seen it in the drawing room either, or the parlour, or any of the downstairs corridors. Jimmy had moved it well out of the way.

‘The Grosvenor paintings are yours?’

‘All the important ones. We still have an expectation of sales, a strong expectation. The exhibition has three weeks left to run. Stands to reason that the big buyers will wait until the end.’

Owl was nodding sagely. ‘That can be a pattern at shows of this kind.’

This sounded unlikely to Maud. She said nothing, though, as Jimmy was now talking with some candour about how tough things were becoming at Lindsey Row – the outstanding bills, the mounting legal threats, the bailiffs. It was a confession of sorts, a statement of failure, and his spirits dipped accordingly.

‘It’s difficult, old man,’ he concluded, ‘damned difficult. Each and every path seems to promise only fresh disaster.’

Maud felt the beginnings of pity. He was shaken. He needed her, in his way – his ally in penury. She hardened her heart, though, directing her eyes firmly towards the uneven herringbone floor. He deserved her anger. It shouldn’t be that easy.

Owl stepped in. ‘Well, there’s a great deal we can do here. These works of yours mayn’t have buyers, Jimmy, not yet, but they certainly have value. In abundance. The means are before us to generate nothing less than a fortune. From the paintings, and the copperplates as well.’ For all the ambitiousness of his words, his voice was level. Reasonable. ‘As for the bailiffs, what can I say? It shan’t happen a second time. I can promise you that. We shall build a barrier around you, my dear chap – a barrier of gold two miles high, and every one of these accursed philistines will be shut out for good.’

Maud’s doubt must have been showing, for Jimmy approached her, his composure regained, to offer some reassurance. ‘The Owl, Maudie,’ he said, ‘has worked deals that mystify the mind. That send the soul soaring.’

A cigarette was burning between his fingers. Maud plucked it out, deciding right then that she was ready to smoke again, and little caring what these guests might think about it. Jimmy’s tobacco was fine, smooth and strong; one puff set her fingertips tingling. She tilted back her head to exhale, holding his eye. ‘Like what?’

Jimmy turned to Owl. ‘Rossetti’s painting, the last one you handled,’ he asked. ‘That woman, you know, with those monstrous shoulders. How much did you get? It was all anyone talked of for weeks.’

‘A gentleman of my acquaintance,’ replied Owl, marvellously offhand, ‘paid us two thousand guineas.’

Maud coughed on the cigarette, soreness flaring along her side. That was the same sum Jimmy had asked for the entire Peacock Room, as everybody had taken to calling it. The sum he’d been denied. And this fellow was getting it for a single painting. Hope returned, despite her determined wariness; it was breaking through her like a lantern’s light. Everything could change. Their debts could be wiped clean away. Jimmy could be made wealthy. They could travel. Their trip to Italy, to Venice, so long postponed now that the idea had nearly lost all meaning, could be made at last. And dear God, they could talk of Ione. Of their daughter. Maud saw her ruddy hands, bunching the midwife’s shawl, and those glassy blue eyes; she felt the press of the child’s feet against her thigh. She couldn’t ever live with them. This Maud accepted. But if there was to be money, a second property could surely be rented nearby – in Chelsea even. A nurse could be employed. Or the foster family moved in. It had to be possible.

‘A fair figure,’ said Miss Corder, from across the studio. ‘Very fair. Why shouldn’t he pay that? What is he, a banker? A merchant? He should have paid more.’

‘And I could assuredly have got more,’ Owl told her, ‘had I been given another week. No question of it. But you know how damned impatient Gabriel can be.’ He removed his top hat, revealing a head of glossy auburn hair as oiled as Jimmy’s. ‘Where do things stand with the large picture over yonder? The Three Girls?’

This painting had been given only a secondary placing in Jimmy’s little display, out of the studio’s best light. It featured a simple, Japanese-style composition: three female nudes arranged around a potted cherry blossom, its pink flowers scattered against a backdrop of pale grey screens. One girl stood to the right, holding a parasol and clad in a robe so diaphanous it barely existed at all; another crouched beside the plant as if tending to it, her hair tied beneath a red and silver scarf; and there, at the painting’s left edge, was Maud Franklin, rather younger and slimmer and completely stark naked. In the altogether. This had been done right at the start, around the time of Maud’s eighteenth birthday, before anything particular had happened between Jimmy and her. She’d agreed readily enough. The art had required it, she’d reasoned; such was the bargain a model made with her modesty. Still, despite this firm self-­instruction, she’d been a mite startled to discover that she wasn’t going to be alone in this picture, the two other nudes having already been laid in on an earlier occasion.

‘Three girls was the scheme agreed upon,’ had been Jimmy’s dry explanation. ‘Three different girls. At the patron’s specific request.’

Parts of it were sketchy, but Maud herself was pretty unmistakable – shown from the side, leaning gently towards the centre of the scene. It had been a hellish pose to hold, even by Jimmy’s standards. You couldn’t tell, though; the figure had a grace to it, and a sleekness, that now seemed frankly incredible. Yet her earlier discomfort did not return. As their guests looked at this painting, she felt only a sickly excitement at the sums that might be proposing themselves to Owl.

‘It’s Leyland’s,’ Jimmy replied. ‘As I suspect you are aware.’

‘And he still wants it?’

‘You know his views on receiving that which he has paid for. How very dogged he can be.’

‘But you don’t think simply to send it to him?’

‘My dear Owl, it is unfinished. Can you not see that? It certainly isn’t ready to be subjected to any form of general inspection. The same goes for the rest of Leyland’s works I still have here. All those blasted portraits, for instance.’

Owl looked about him. ‘And where might they be?’

Commissioned back when Jimmy had been counted among the family’s most intimate friends, the Leyland portraits had provided Maud with her ticket through his door. He usually kept the one of the wife out for show, being rather proud of it, she suspected; but today, along with the rest of them, it was nowhere to be seen.

‘Work upon all Leyland faces has halted, for the time being,’ Jimmy said, ‘and an alternative berth found for the canvases. Being as they are so big, you understand. There just isn’t room.’ He grew subtly mischievous, and gave a sigh of mock-regret. ‘The truth of it, mon vieux, is that having our British businessman in here, all long-limbed and morose – befrilled, you know, with sunken eye, lurking off in the shadows – was proving far too dire a distraction, so I bundled him into the cellar. The painted version, that is. Not the original.’

The Owl and Miss Corder laughed. Jimmy’s forgotten cigarette was almost burned out, the ember scorching Maud’s knuckles; she dropped it with a wince into a grubby saucer. When she’d left for Edie’s back in early May, the Leyland matter had been all but dead. The Peacock Room had been finished with at long last. But she knew their tone. Behind these jokes lay something new.

‘What’s happened?’

The studio door opened to admit John, bearing a tray with his standard air of mild irritability. Upon it was a plate of Jimmy’s American buckwheat cakes, a half-empty bottle of white wine and four smudged glasses. After setting the tray on the edge of the painting table, John stood back and looked to his master, expecting the usual complaint or additional instruction.

‘Jimmy,’ Maud said. ‘What’s happened? What’ve you done?’

Jimmy went to the wine bottle and picked it up. He sighed again, this time at her persistence. ‘Nothing, Maudie. I swear.’

*

Maud went upstairs barely a minute after the Owl and Miss Corder had taken their leave. She disrobed and dropped into bed, burrowing gratefully amid the cool sheets, and was filled with the sense, oddly welcome, of laying herself beneath the earth; of dragging the turf over her pounding head, never to rise again. For several days she stayed there, weighted down by exhaustion and a feeling she came slowly to recognise as loneliness. Her body and her mind had been refashioned to receive a child. To care for a child. And it was not there.

The moment of parting was played out a thousand times, the memories pored over and picked through in the hope that some new detail or sensation might be uncovered. Maud had been sitting in a scuffed, high-backed armchair, a mainstay of Edie’s parlour. Ione had been dozing in her lap; her own eyelids had started to flutter as well. She’d heard the front door, and lowered voices in the hall, but hadn’t thought anything of it. Edie had come in and bade her stand. Then she’d leaned forward, lifting away the child as if relieving Maud of an encumbrance.

‘Pass her here,’ she’d said.

‘It’s all right,’ Maud had replied, slightly perplexed, in a tone of good-humoured protest, ‘I can manage. Why, she’s light as a—’

Her sister had already been turning away, though, going back to the door, thinking it best just to get it done – to tear off the bandage with a sudden, unexpected stroke. It was only when the front door closed again, in fact, that Maud had fully appreciated what was taking place. She’d known that the foster mother was due, of course she had, but had assumed this would be after teatime. Later on. The next morning. She’d thought of pursuit. A few groggy, wandering steps had shown her that this was futile. So she went instead to the window, hoping to catch sight of them – to call out and have them stop for a proper farewell. The parlour was to the rear of Edie’s small terraced house. All that she’d been able to see was a bare yard. Ione was gone. Her awareness of this had seemed to gather at the top of her chest, pressing in on her until she’d been unable to breathe; until her collarbone had felt like it was about to crack in two. She’d made a sound, a kind of anguished yelp, and dropped back into the armchair. Alone.

With Maud’s grief came yet more anger – directed at herself, for her feebleness and her idiocy, but also pretty squarely at Jimmy. He kept his distance, sleeping on the studio chaise longue, no doubt thinking this considerate; and was preoccupied, as always, with his own business. Mrs Cossins, the cook at Lindsey Row, brought up her food and dealt rather grudgingly with her laundry. Once a day, twice at most, Jimmy would appear to ask how she was faring. His bed was huge and heavy, with a frame of dark lacquered wood; buried within it, she would glare out at him, refusing to speak. The words built up, acquiring a terrible pressure, as if they were soon going to explode from her and force a proper confrontation. How can you care so bloody little? she’d demand. How can you want things to be this way?

The feeling passed. Besides, she already knew full well what he would say. This was part of it, part of the risk they took. He was finding money, somehow, for the fostering – no mean feat. And he had welcomed her back into his household. It was wrong of her, really, to want anything more. The burden was hers. She understood that now. She had to become used to it; to cease to notice it, even. There in that dark bed, with a bead of blood drying stickily against her thigh, this seemed entirely beyond her.

Late one evening, Maud stirred to find Jimmy’s younger brother pulling a chair across the rug and settling himself at her side. William Whistler was a doctor of some renown, with a practice in Mayfair, a new wife named Nellie, and a smart house on Wimpole Street. He was a regular guest at Lindsey Row and familiar with the arrangements there, which he’d always appeared to accept without censure –although Maud had never been to the smart house or met the new wife. She sat up, self-conscious and a touch startled, unsure of what to say; then he began to ask a series of matter-of-fact questions about her well-being, and she saw that this was a house call, most probably undertaken at Jimmy’s request. Burlier and balder than his brother, with an accent less complicated by other influences, Willie was every inch the respectable professional – rather anonymous in a way, as easy to overlook as Jimmy was not. This was a screen, Maud had discovered, drawn before a life of real incident, of fearsome incident, in relation to which his present prosperity stood as a well-deserved reward. While Jimmy had been establishing himself in London, and making his first attempts to have a painting shown at the Royal Academy, Willie had been at war. He’d seen war at its most ferocious and bloody. There was a photograph of him, younger and leaner, in an embroidered officer’s coat, serving as a military surgeon in the army of General Lee. Jimmy’s pride in this could not be overstated. He remained an unrepentant champion of the Confederate cause – to such an extent in fact that Maud had learned to avoid the subject – and derived a fierce excitement from imagining what his brother had endured.

‘Boys, they were,’ he’d say, ‘mere boys, conscripted from farm and city alike. Brought into those hospital tents by the dozen, injured in ways one can barely conceive – shredded, Maudie, by the Union’s shot and shell. And expiring faster than they could be put in the ground.’

Willie himself never so much as hinted at any of this. You could scour his bland, plump face for as long as you liked and find no trace of it. But he had an authority about him, along with his reserve. Maud answered his questions promptly; she could hear a trace of meekness in her voice. He put a hand to her forehead and pressed two fingers gently against her neck to take her pulse. Then he thanked her, rose from his chair and retreated to the landing. Briefly, Maud caught sight of Jimmy, waiting just past the doorway. She heard Willie tell him that there was no cause whatsoever for alarm.

‘Could you leave her something?’ Jimmy asked. ‘For the restlessness – the moods?’

‘Not necessary. Miss Franklin is doing well, Jamie. As one might expect from one so young. She’ll soon be fully restored, I should think.’ Willie paused. ‘She would benefit from some diversion, though. Perhaps you might consider taking her down to Hastings.’

This was not an innocent suggestion. Jimmy and Willie’s elderly mother lived in Hastings, lodged in a cliff-top boarding house overlooking the sea. Willie had found the place, had handled the move and was footing the bill. He seldom saw Jimmy without mentioning how much the old woman longed to have him visit her; how the train was quick, three hours was all; how a trip there need only take a day, with some planning. Maud had met Mrs Whistler several times. She’d actually been residing at Lindsey Row when Maud had first come to stand for Jimmy, a domestic situation that now seemed unthinkable. It had surprised her that this singular gentleman, foreign in so many respects, could have family about him in London. Exiles, ain’t they, another model had told her. The losing side.

Mrs Whistler had left the city within a few months, at Willie’s urging – the smoke and endless fogs were bad for her health, he’d said – thus clearing the way for Maud to take up the role of Madame. Jimmy did venture down to see her a couple of times a year. Willie made it plain that he didn’t think this was nearly enough.

Maud lay motionless, listening closely, her feelings set at a degree of opposition. Such a journey would certainly be difficult. She found, though, that she wanted to see Jimmy’s mother again. She wanted him to take her. Apart from anything else, it would be interesting to find out what tale he’d spin. She’d be cast as a follower, she supposed, as well as a model; a chaste disciple, convalescing from some unnamed illness, brought along by her kindly mentor to benefit from the sea air.

Jimmy wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Now is not the time, doc. She’s damned tired. You’ve seen it for yourself.’

‘Mother likes her,’ Willie persisted. ‘She asks after her sometimes. She knows that she still features in your paintings. I’m sure you could tell her more or less anything you pleased.’

‘I cannot leave London at present, even for a day. Not with things the way they are – the Grosvenor and so forth.’

‘Jamie—’

‘We can do better, I believe. Wait here a moment.’

There was a shuffling of feet and a sigh from the doctor. The bedroom door began to open. Maud closed her eyes, pulling the sheets up to her chin, feigning sleep. She heard Jimmy’s boot creak on the loose floorboard by the bed; she smelled oil paint and tobacco. His fingertips touched the counterpane, just above her shoulder.

‘Maudie,’ he said, ‘I’ve had a thought.’

*

The Harmony in Amber and Black was a full-length female figure and breathtakingly slender: Maud’s figure as it had been around two years before, shaped by a corset that she hadn’t been able to wear since Christmas. The pose was simple, front facing with the arms at the sides. It had been made soon after she’d taken up residence at Lindsey Row, commissioned by Frederick Leyland as a portrait of his daughter Florence. The gown was close-fitting and modern, cut from a tawny chiffon that Jimmy had captured most skilfully, drawing out the tone with the sharp whiteness of the ruffed collar and cuffs, the black bow at the breast, and the neat black gloves, which melted, very nearly, into the hazy blackness of the background. Since she’d seen it last, however, a few months previously, the portrait had undergone a rather crucial alteration – for where the face of Florence Leyland had been was now that of Maud herself. This was why Owl had mentioned the Amber and Black upon meeting her the week before. She hadn’t realised exactly which painting he’d meant until a good while later. It hadn’t seemed terribly important – a mistake, most probably. Who, in all honesty, could keep track of Jimmy’s titles? He certainly couldn’t. Maud often thought that their principal purpose was to sow confusion.

And yet it hadn’t been a mistake. She hadn’t sat for this, or seen Jimmy at work on the canvas. It must have been done from an older drawing, or from memory – and recently, while she’d been away. He’d made the change especially for its exhibition in the Grosvenor Gallery.

‘Heavens, Miss Franklin,’ said Miss Corder, in the manner of someone intending to be overheard. ‘You are with your sisters.’

Maud thought of Edie, toiling in her husband Lionel Crossley’s book-keeping office; of her widow’s peak and ink-stained fingertips; of the tearful reluctance of their farewell. But Miss Corder meant the paintings, of course – The Harmony in Amber and Black and the other one. The Owl’s consort was about six yards away, across the Grosvenor’s west gallery. It was the largest room in the place, as big as a decent-sized dance hall, and fitted out with great extravagance. White marble statues stood against crimson damask; a long skylight was set into a barrelled ceiling of midnight blue, studded with golden stars. Even against such a background, however, Miss Corder made for an arresting sight. Her jacket was a bright silver-grey, impossibly tight, and trimmed with deepest green, while her hat had a brim nearly three feet wide, upon which lolled an enormous creamy orchid.

‘A hallowed moment,’ she continued. ‘Muse and masterpieces reunited. Such a rare privilege for us all.’

People were turning around. The Grosvenor held a wealthy-looking, vaguely artistic crowd, wandering and murmuring before the paintings that had been chosen for display. These were present in much lower numbers than was usual, arranged on the walls only one or two canvases high. The Whistler contribution had been hung over at the right end. The surrounding pictures, so dense with shapes and colours, and the luxury of the gallery itself, made Jimmy’s look strikingly empty: pure, in a way, both peaceful and mysterious. But after only a couple of minutes, it was already plain that they were receiving a rather different sort of attention to the rest. There were smirks, whispered remarks and snatches of suppressed laughter. Jimmy’s paintings were being mocked.

Maud started towards the velvet curtains that had been hung across the entrance. Miss Corder moved to intercept her, and they met awkwardly in a hot square of sunlight.

‘I’m leaving,’ Maud said, trying to step past. ‘Tell Jimmy I’ll be waiting at home.’

‘You are too modest. Why, without you, without your particular talents, these works simply would not exist. Your strength and grace has permitted—’

‘I know,’ Maud interrupted. ‘I know.’

This had been Jimmy’s proposal, in place of the seaside: a visit to the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery. Maud hadn’t been keen. Rising from the bed, preparing a bath and dressing in something appropriate for the Grosvenor’s Mayfair address had all seemed like a desperate chore. She was very aware also that the predicted change in their fortunes had failed to arrive. The undertaking was proving a disappointment, for Jimmy at least. He’d been insistent, however, so eventually Maud had agreed. She’d told herself that this was the life she had chosen; that if she was to be Whistler’s Madame, she had to keep abreast with Whistler’s affairs. Only after they’d left the house – her garments kept loose in certain areas and discreetly reinforced in others – had Jimmy revealed that he wouldn’t actually be going to the gallery. Miss Corder, who’d called the week before, was to accompany her instead. He had something important to attend to, he’d said, and would meet them later at the Café Royal, an old haunt of theirs. This disclosure had been carefully timed. A hansom had already pulled up; she’d been climbing inside. It had been too late to turn back.

Miss Corder had been standing ready at the Grosvenor’s entrance. She’d kissed Maud on the cheek and told her how extremely well she was looking, then paid for their tickets with a ten-shilling note. Maud had followed her up the broad marble staircase, trying to accept her fate and muster some enthusiasm. Now, though, she’d reached her limit. She was tired out and sore. She was cross with everything. She was heading off to bed.

Her companion stayed close, blocking her path. Miss Corder’s face was as unaccountable as the rest of her – really rather plain in a way, with its prominent nose and heavy, slightly protuberant lips; yet something was there, cleverness perhaps, or nerve, that lent it an odd appeal. A beauty, even. Her eyes, lilac in the sunlight, held a query; then they flitted away, back to the gallery, and her brow knitted with displeasure.

‘These people here don’t understand,’ she said, the volume of her voice unaltered. ‘They don’t look at the paintings for themselves. They have been drinking from a tainted source, you see, imbibing foolishness and conceited ignorance, and it has clouded their vision. Clouded it quite fatally.’

Those nearby were staring openly now, umbrage adding to their curiosity, as was surely Miss Corder’s intention. Four years with Jimmy had schooled Maud thoroughly in this variety of anger: the kind that insisted upon making a public display and clashing hard with that which had provoked it. Something here made her pause, however. Early the previous morning, the day after Willie’s visit, she’d been woken by the sound of Jimmy shouting, really shouting, down in the studio. He’d been alone, as far as she’d been able to tell. The words ‘impudence’ and ‘imposture’ had kept recurring. Sensing that an explanation might be at hand, she asked Miss Corder what she meant.

The lilac eyes widened. ‘You don’t know. Of course you don’t. He can’t bear to tell you of it, most probably. Your Jimmy has been maligned, Miss Franklin. Attacked in the crudest manner.’

She turned, moving her face out of the sun, and pointed a green-gloved finger at a nearby canvas. It was one of the larger Nocturnes, a couple of years old now – the Gold and Black, did he call it? – showing fireworks launching and falling over the river. A rack of livid white-orange hissed in the darkness, while banks of black smoke rolled off to the left and right, laid against the blue night like the silhouette of a mighty forest, and red-gold sparks drifted above in long, scattered trails. The handling was loose, even for Jimmy – the darks smeared on, blocked in; the lights barely more than raw dabs of colour.

‘A notice has been published,’ Miss Corder announced, ‘and much circulated, in the art press and beyond. A famous critic, keen for attention it would seem, has penned something far beneath him, beneath any right-thinking person – an assault, essentially, intended to blind his readers to this painting’s obvious virtues. Fortunately, Charles has been on hand to offer Jimmy advice. If he hadn’t, I scarcely dare to imagine what might—’

She stopped talking, distracted by a trio of young gentlemen, about their age – smart types, city fellows – who were grinning by her shoulder.

‘Custard,’ said one, indicating a falling rocket.

‘Gulls’ droppings,’ offered another.

‘Who was the critic?’ Maud asked.

‘Ruskin,’ said Miss Corder shortly. ‘And you can see right here what his authority has licensed. Stupidity Miss Franklin, has been allowed free rein.’

With that she swivelled another quarter-circuit and launched herself into battle, informing the young gentlemen that they were plainly insensible to art, hopeless cases indeed, embarrassing themselves further with every utterance; that they might as well take their tweed and their watch-chains and their primped whiskers and go back to their desks, in whatever godforsaken office they scratched out their existences.

Ruskin. Maud knew the name, of course; it had an association of stature, of the kind you might see spelt out on book spines in austere, golden letters, or heard being dropped into conversation as a display of knowledge. She hadn’t read any of it herself, but gaining the fellow’s ill opinion was surely a serious reversal. She wanted to ask what had been written, but Miss Corder was caught up entirely in her skirmish.

Thrown at first by her vehemence, the young gentlemen had rallied, rather pleased to have any form of attention from such a woman. They declared that the Nocturne was plainly the work of a drunkard, a staggering sot, and not very much work at that. Pictures of this type, one of them continued, might well appeal to ladies of a – they exchanged glances, starting to laugh – bohemian persuasion, but to the wider population they were nothing but a joke, an act of imposture, as Mr What’s-his-name had asserted.

Imposture, thought Maud. There it was.

Miss Corder listened, nodding as if some deep suspicion was being confirmed, the orchid bobbing atop her vast hat. Then she gestured contemptuously at the opposite side of the gallery, towards a spread of large paintings with a good deal more people gathered before them. All by the same hand, they had the look, from a distance, of stained glass.

‘That is more to your taste, I suppose – old Ned Jones?’ she demanded. ‘That is excellence, is it, all that laboriousness, all that misspent labour? Is that English art? Is that honestly what we deserve?’

Maud studied these paintings more closely. The colours had a delicate glow, as if the pictures were lit from behind; the forms were flawlessly arranged and drawn. She could see a row of beautiful angels bearing large crystal balls. Half a dozen women kneeling by a lake, gazing at their own reflections as if entranced. St George in his armour. Every one of them had virtually the same face – both the men and the women, and the ones who were neither men nor women. Their expressions held only the merest hints of thought or feeling. The effect was mildly unnerving. When considered next to the work of this Mr Jones, it could well be true that Jimmy’s pictures would not seem pure and peaceful, but crude. Lacking somehow. This notion came to Maud unbidden and it startled her with its disloyalty. She made to look back towards the Whistler display, for reassurance; and instead spotted attendants in livery, closing in on them from opposite sides, censorious glares on their faces.

Miss Corder was growing yet more impassioned and voluble about the various deficiencies she’d observed in the other artworks of the Grosvenor display. Maud was wondering whether she should interrupt, to point out the attendants perhaps, when her companion withdrew abruptly from this somewhat one-sided debate, casting not so much as a parting glance at her chortling adversaries.

‘Come Miss Franklin,’ she said, starting towards the curtained entrance, and the wide stairway beyond. ‘I believe we’re due at the Café Royal.’

*

Outside, the heat was starting to lift, a breeze snapping the shop awnings taut in their frames. Miss Corder walked along New Bond Street with a pronounced, leisurely sway, her hips swinging out a couple of inches with each footstep, unperturbed by either the clash in the gallery or the manner of their exit.

‘Ned Jones,’ she said. ‘Good God. Or Burne-Jones, as we must call him now. Charles knows the fellow. Used to know him. Even back then his style was said to be ponderous and overworked. All those hard lines, all that intricacy. And for such a wretchedly insipid result. But I suppose I should hope that the popularity of his pictures grows yet further. The blasted things would be easy indeed to replicate.’

Maud frowned a little, and began to ask what was meant by replicate, but Miss Corder was crossing a side street, moving around the back of a carriage, out of earshot. While Maud bent to gather up her hem, Miss Corder was just letting hers trail where it would, dragging through the summer dust. They were drawing stares – being unaccompanied and rather conspicuous – none too pleasant, some of them. The attention fell upon Miss Corder like sea spray on the prow of a gunboat.

‘I understand why you wished to leave so soon,’ she said, when Maud caught up. ‘To be honest, Miss Franklin, I can only stomach brief visits myself. The Grosvenor is a worthy venture, all things considered. It provides a place of exhibition to the occasional true talent, like your Jimmy. But I cannot help thinking it corrupt. They do it by invitation, you know, rather than merit. Amateurs, friends of Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife, shown alongside proper artists. It is a game, a game for the rich.’ Her lip twitched. ‘But works are shifting nonetheless. They are going for hundreds of pounds, if Charles is to be believed. I am beginning to think that I should have tried to get something of my own in there.’

There was a pause. Maud looked at a bolt of burnt-orange silk arranged in a draper’s window. ‘You’re an artist,’ she said.

‘More than that,’ replied Miss Corder, lifting her chin. ‘I am a professional, Miss Franklin. I make my living at it. But I am also a woman. And my father was a lighterman, down at Rotherhithe. And so I am kept always at the margins. Versatility is demanded of me, if I am to survive – a versatility that I’ll bet Mr Millais or Mr Leighton, or Lady Butler even, would struggle to summon.’ She stopped, checking the fervour that was returning to her voice. ‘But of course you know all this. You are an artist yourself. Charles says that Jimmy rates you highly – that he had you at work on the Peacock Room, in fact, repainting flowers. Before he brought the scheme to its final form.’

‘Before he covered them all up, you mean. Painted the whole thing blue.’

Maud was embarrassed, and faintly annoyed; Jimmy knew she didn’t like him telling people about her attempts at art – boasting about them, as he couldn’t help but do, despite having obliterated her painstaking labour at Prince’s Gate with barely a second’s hesitation. She’d protested about this, just once, trying to sound as if she was joking.

‘I had to Maudie,’ he’d answered simply. ‘It didn’t go.’

‘That was necessary,’ Miss Corder told her. ‘A sacrifice, you might say. Charles tells me that Jimmy regards you as a pupil as much as a model. That he’ll have your pictures selling before the decade is out.’

Maud felt herself colouring. She stared down at her boots. ‘I don’t know about that. I’ve barely begun.’

‘The best models,’ Miss Corder continued, ‘often have a painter in them as well. I have always thought this. It refines your sense of what’s needed. Of what it is to stand on the other side of the easel. And I must say that you are in the very best place. Jimmy Whistler is the finest teacher – the finest protector that you could ask for.’

It was rare indeed for Maud’s situation to be met with such approval. Edie, so careful in her respectability, didn’t even like to think of it. The other models she knew regarded it simply as a deft manoeuvre, a tidy bit of luck. How could she help feeling a flicker of affinity now with Miss Rosa Corder? Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to talk of art with a professional woman painter. Someone unmarried and young, and without social advantage. Someone who seemed interested in her, furthermore, and who could surely offer guidance when she felt able to work again. Questions began to occur also about Miss Corder and the way she lived. The pictures she’d painted, where they’d been shown and to whom they’d sold. Her own protector, the Owl.

Miss Corder was talking herself, though, expanding upon her admiration for Jimmy and of her sense of the war that had begun, between the forces of artistic righteousness and a broad, determined coalition of enemies. It was being fought on the walls of the Grosvenor Gallery apparently, and in numerous other places besides, with this Ruskin review being merely the latest offensive launched against them. Maud thought of that strange moment down in the studio – the suggestion that there was fresh trouble with the Leylands. It had slipped her mind until she’d stood before the Harmony in Amber and Black. They started down a lane and the wind picked up, overturning a metal pail and sending it rolling noisily across the pavement. Miss Corder paused; Maud saw her chance.

‘What of the Leylands? What’s going on there?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ Miss Corder replied, without much interest. ‘You mustn’t worry. A couple of accidental meetings between Jimmy and the wife, at the houses of mutual friends. The husband wasn’t best pleased. He still considers Jimmy and himself to be at odds, it seems.’

Not a word had passed between Jimmy and Frederick Leyland since the previous winter. The shipbroker had responded to his reworked dining room – to the Prussian blue walls, and the mural, with its spilled silver shillings and puffed-up, befrilled peacock – only with silence. They had been left to wonder, a very deliberate form of torture. The decorative scheme remained intact – that much they knew. But no more.

Maud had other questions, a long list of them; Miss Corder was back on the Grosvenor, though, and the dismal quality of so much of its display, a topic that sustained her without interruption until they reached Regent Street. It was packed solid, traffic inching and creaking around the dust-hazed Quadrant. Miss Corder weaved along the busy pavement, leading Maud beneath the red and white striped canopy that shivered above the entrance of the Café Royal. Jimmy’s preferred table was off to the side, next to one of the broad front windows, providing a commanding view of both the restaurant and the street. It was large, able to accommodate double their number, in case any notable passers-by were waved over to join them. Jimmy was at the head, listing things on his fingers; Owl sat to the right, nodding in understanding as he reached for his glass. The two women went in. A smart, portly waiter was there at once, asking their business in a heavy French accent.

‘We have come to meet our husbands,’ Miss Corder told him. ‘They are over there, by that window.’

‘Husbands,’ the waiter repeated. He took their hats, though, standing aside to admit them. Maud saw Miss Corder’s orchid smear pollen across his black silk waistcoat.

Both men rose at their approach. Jimmy’s eyeglass dropped out; Owl set down his drink. There were kisses and embraces. Miss Corder sat on the seat opposite the Owl, with her back to the window. Maud joined her gratefully, nearly groaning aloud in relief, kneading her aching knees beneath the table. She’d walked further that afternoon than she had in the previous month.

The Café Royal was decorated in the Parisian style, with tall mirrors in ornate, gilded frames, tabletops of veined marble and a black-and-white tiled floor. It was about a quarter full, perhaps slightly less; waiters roamed about the empty tables, polishing cutlery in the pre-supper lull. At that moment it seemed to Maud a haven of airy comfort and tranquillity. She smiled at Owl, at Miss Corder, and they smiled back at her; and there was a tiny flash of strangeness. The scene was that of four friends, four dear friends, settling in for a celebration. Yet she barely knew this pair. She’d met them only once before. Jimmy had mentioned that he and Owl had been on decent terms a few years previously, prior to her arrival at Lindsey Row, and had recently renewed their association. But this hardly justified all the confidences he appeared to be piling on the fellow.

The flash faded. A flute was placed in front of her and filled with sparkling wine. The day’s exertions had left her utterly parched. It was nothing short of beautiful, that glass: tall and delicate, frosted with moisture, the wine golden in the light of the declining sun. She picked it up, chimed the rim against Miss Corder’s, and Owl’s, and Jimmy’s, and drank deep – almost half the contents in one gulp.

‘And now, Maudie,’ said Jimmy, ‘you must tell, in precise detail, sparing me nothing,’ – here he screwed the eyeglass back in, and fixed the blue eye behind upon her with semi-comical intensity – ‘What. You. Thought.’

Maud had been furnishing Jimmy Whistler with opinions for a while now. For one who courted disfavour, who made out that he revelled in it, he could be acutely, damnably sensitive. Snide phrases penned in seconds by some newspaper critic were branded forever on his brain; there were a couple that Maud was pretty certain he would be reciting on his deathbed. Her actual views, therefore, were unimportant. She knew what he needed from her, and she supplied it without thinking.

‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘It was wonderful. The hall was yours, Jimmy. No contest.’

The moustache bristled with satisfaction. Miss Corder spoke up as well, poised and formidably eloquent, reporting on the crowds, the regrettable popularity of Mr Burne-Jones, and in particular on the reception of the firework painting – the Nocturne in Black and Gold.

‘The philistines were out in force,’ she said. ‘They were reciting Ruskin’s words before the picture. He has given licence to ignorant disdain. A refusal to look, or to see.’

Owl was shaking his head. ‘I tell you, Jimmy, the old goat’s been beyond the pale for a good while now. But this is a step further still. Ad hominem, as the lawyers say. Actionable.’

Jimmy was grave. ‘You aren’t the first to say this,’ he said.

‘What was in it?’ Maud asked, by now rather anxious. ‘What did he write that could be so bad?’

They shared a look; then three indulgent expressions were turned her way.

‘You deserve to know,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’d hoped I could spare you, but this may now be unavoidable. It was brief. Published in that peculiar private paper he puts out. But picked up since by everyone.’ He spoke slowly, assuming a terrifyingly steely smile. ‘The fellow wrote that my poor picture approached the aspect of wilful imposture.’

Maud gripped the stem of her flute. This was Ruskin’s own phrase, she could tell. The dreadful notice had plainly been memorised in its entirety.

‘He wrote that I was a coxcomb, Maudie. A coxcomb. That I was asking two hundred guineas to – how was it put? – fling a pot of paint in the public’s face. That the Black and Gold displayed only what he felt qualified to term cockney impudence.’

At this Maud let out an involuntary laugh, a flat, nervous whinny. ‘You’re no blessed cockney, Jimmy.’

Owl was grinning too. ‘It is absurd,’ he said. ‘Completely absurd. And actionable, as I say. In the course of my life, I have learned a thing or two about the law, and there is no doubt in my mind that you have been libelled. He attacks your person, my friend. Your character.’

‘The rogue denies me my fundamental right,’ Jimmy stated, ‘to call myself an artist. He says my work is not art. This is why no one buys. But what right do they have to pass judgement in this manner? These self-appointed critics, these ignoramuses, these blasted fools? What goddamned right do they have?’

‘None,’ said Miss Corder. ‘None at all.’

Owl nodded in sympathy. ‘You must go to court, Jimmy. I have said this to you several times now. The public chastisement of John Ruskin for the abuses of his pen is long overdue. And there must be compensation for the damage he has sought to inflict.’

‘That he has inflicted already,’ said Jimmy.

‘Compensation?’ Maud asked. ‘You mean – you mean money?’

The Owl turned to her in an attitude of apologetic explanation. ‘I know Ruskin, Miss Franklin. Better than any man alive, I should think. I was his – well, I suppose you might call it his private secretary, back before my association with Gabriel Rossetti. I undertook many missions on his behalf, and became familiar with every part of his affairs – some dark regions, Miss. And he has grown yet more strange since. The lunatic’s beard. The demented air that attends on his manners and his writings. It is said—’

‘Owl,’ Jimmy interrupted, dragging on his cigarette. ‘Not now.’

‘He must pay,’ said Owl, changing tack. ‘He can afford to, certainly. His father traded in wines, he traded very well, and left his only child rich indeed. The wretched fellow squats up north somewhere, among the Lakes, atop a veritable mountain of gold. It is your duty, old man, if you ask me, to have some clever lawyer relieve him of a portion of it.’

Jimmy seemed to see the sense in this. ‘We are down, I won’t deny it. To be completely honest, mon cher, we suffer still from the lack of Leyland’s thousand. That is the root of the trouble. Most of what he paid was already owed, you see – it’s long gone.’

Leyland. Maud sat up. ‘The Amber and Black,’ she said.

Again all three of them looked her way, curious and vaguely condescending. A connection had been forming in the back of her mind, since the walk over from New Bond Street. While visiting Lindsey Row in the years before the Peacock Room, Frederick Leyland would surely have seen the Amber and Black when it had Florence’s features. And then he would have seen it again in the Grosvenor Gallery.

‘I saw what you did to it. To Leyland’s daughter. You scraped off her face.’

They laughed hard at this, did Jimmy and the Owl, slapping their palms against the tabletop and stamping their boots upon the floor. It was more than Maud had expected, a lot more, and it knocked her off-course. She found herself smiling too, even as she tried to raise her voice over the uproar.

‘Something else has happened, hasn’t it, Jimmy? Why would you do that?’

‘You see the eye on this one, my dear Owl! A goddamned painter’s eye, it is! Nothing escapes it. Rien de tout!’

And somehow, before Maud could say anything else, she was under discussion as an artist for the second time in an hour. Jimmy trotted out a little legend of his own devising, in which the eighteen-year-old model Maud Franklin, soon after her arrival at Lindsey Row, had happened to discover an album of Japanese prints. The detailed studies of flowers within had inspired her to such a degree, he claimed, that she’d picked up the brush at once, and displayed an obvious gift for it. Owl said that he would very much like to see her latest drawings; as did Miss Corder, who declared that Maud simply must visit her studio on Southampton Row, within the week if it could be arranged. The attention and encouragement flattered Maud to the point of giddiness. Her skin flamed radish red, perspiration stippling her brow. Frederick Leyland and the Amber and Black quite left her mind.

‘I haven’t done anything for a while,’ she said, as her glass was refilled, ‘you know, on account of – of being away and …’

They told her that she must reapply herself at the first opportunity. That it was her responsibility to humankind. To leave such a talent unused, they said, was an unforgivable waste. She had to paint.

Maud nodded, and sipped, and promised that she would.

*

Dusk was shading the grand bend of the Quadrant by the time they decided to eat. As always, Jimmy insisted upon everyone having the same, with him ordering: Homard en Croute, a favourite of his. Maud would have eaten this gladly, but Miss Corder’s sylph-like form, snaking against the table beside her, served as a stern admonition. She had to recover her own figure as soon as possible, so she picked at the little pie, trying to look like she was making a start on it, breaking a hole in the buttery crust and prodding at what lay beneath.

Owl’s serving, in contrast, was gone in moments. Noticing Maud’s reluctance, he offered and then engineered a discreet swap of their dishes. It was a mystery, how he managed to eat such quantities while talking – for talk he most certainly did. Even Jimmy stayed quiet, or mostly quiet, to hear him. In that impressive voice of his, he began to tell them of a certain period of his youth – always brought to mind, he claimed, by the taste of lobster. He was Portuguese, as it turned out, not Spanish as Maud had assumed; or rather a half-Portuguese, the son of an English wool merchant and a noble lady of Oporto.

‘Their final child,’ he said. ‘No fewer than thirteen others preceded me. My father expired, in fact, not long after my birth.’ The cause was exhaustion.’

Left destitute, his widowed mother had moved out of the city with her six youngest to a village down the coast. There, some years later, the teenage Owl had supported them all by diving for treasure. The Barbosa, a mighty galleon from the time of King Alfonso VI, had been wrecked just offshore, the hull lying untouched in shallow waters. And so, an India rubber air tube clenched between his teeth, he’d set about groping through the seaweed-coated timbers – braving the snapping jaws of monstrous eels, the tentacles of octopi and heaven knows what else – returning to the surface only when his fishing net was filled with gold doubloons.

‘On occasion, in the Barbosa’s innermost crevices, I would encounter these gigantic lobsters. These turquoise leviathans, like creatures from dreams or the paintings of madmen. I see you laughing there, Jimmy Whistler, but you wouldn’t have laughed if you’d been in the water beside me. You’d have spat out your air tube and screamed like a horse.’

Jimmy was rolling a cigarette and smirking so hard he dislodged his eyeglass.

‘I swear the blasted things were two feet long,’ Owl continued. ‘The size of a small dog, and deuced lively with it. Spines like you wouldn’t believe. Claws the size of coconuts. I’d wrestle them up from the wreck, through the surf, to the beach where my mother and sisters would be waiting. Often we’d make a fire in the sand and roast the beast in its shell. Feast on it before the sunset. This,’ – he held up a forkful of pinkish flesh, the last of Maud’s pie – ‘can’t really compare.’

‘We should go,’ said Miss Corder. Her eyes were dark with love; she reached between the dishes for Owl’s hand. ‘You should take us – the three of us. We could find a house on a cliff-top, overlooking the ocean. The wild Atlantic. Think of it, Carlos. Think of what Jimmy could paint.’

The Owl – Carlos – agreed. ‘A fellow’s shilling goes far over there,’ he said. ‘Damned far. Why, we could take a castle. Live like royalty.’

Right then, with a newly refilled glass raised to her lips, this struck Maud as a truly brilliant idea. Why on earth shouldn’t they? Venice had been the plan, the promise, but elsewhere could surely be as good, especially in such enlivening company. The land of Carlos the Owl. She very much liked the sound of it. She glanced at Jimmy. Eyeglass reinserted, cigarette lit, he was studying the Portuguese with wry affection.

‘We’ll be expecting lobster every night, Owl, you know,’ he said. ‘You’d better bring along your bathing suit.’

They toasted their expedition, several times over and with much laughter. The last traces of formality fell away: Miss Corder and Miss Franklin were shown the door, with Rosa and Maud taking their place. Various far-fetched arrangements were made. Goals were set, both artistic and gastronomic. A warm camaraderie enfolded the table.

Shortly afterwards, as the dishes were removed, an unspoken communication passed between the men. They excused themselves and rose, disappearing into the rear of the restaurant.

‘Cigars, most probably,’ said Rosa, looking over her shoulder, out at the street.

Maud emptied her glass. She was feeling pretty damned tight, in truth, having drunk a good deal and eaten next to nothing. She fell to staring at Rosa’s hair. It was tied up in a plait, the coil as elaborate and perfect as a carving in a church. Until then it had simply seemed a yellowish shade of brown. Now, though, in the candlelight, Maud could see something much paler in it – a lustre that was almost metallic.

Abruptly, Rosa turned back to the table. Her eyelids lowered a fraction; she gave Maud a look of fond assessment. ‘You are brave,’ she said.

‘Beg pardon?’

‘To have done what you did. What was needed. All by yourself. And to be here again, at his side. It is very brave.’

Maud saw her meaning now, and her woozy happiness – all the pleasure she’d been taking in this place and this singular couple, so convivial and ambitious and full of spirit – went in an instant, vanishing as if it had never been, leaving her with the cold and simple fact that she was sitting there in a swell restaurant, pickling herself in sparkling wine like she hadn’t a care in the whole bloody world, while her child, her baby, was away several miles to the north in the care of a woman who could be anybody, who could be anything, who could be about to bake the infant alive in an oven and there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, that she could do about it. She put down her glass. She felt panic rising. It quivered inside her, urgent and hopeless. It bolted her to the spot.

‘You mean with my daughter,’ she said. ‘You mean with Ione.’

The smallest crack ran through Rosa’s self-possession. She’d plainly thought they would discuss Jimmy – the importance of loyalty or something. Not this. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘your daughter.’

‘I chose the name. Ione Edith Whistler. On my own. While I was – just after. I had to tell it to Jimmy. He hadn’t—’

Maud was going to say that he hadn’t asked what the name might be, that she’d given him three days to do it and he hadn’t, so she’d snapped and simply told him, shouted it at him in fact; but recounting this, trying to untangle it all for the first time, proved too much. She slumped forward onto the table, pressing her cheek hard against the marble. A slick of liquid – tears or wine, she couldn’t tell which – made her head slip an inch to the left.

‘I thought I could just leave her. I thought it wouldn’t matter. I—’

Rosa eased her back upright, wiped her face with the cuff of her silver-grey jacket, and proposed that they take some air – walk down to Piccadilly, perhaps. Maud was signalling her assent when the men came back into view on the other side of the room. They were speaking loudly in French to the head waiter, talking over each another with much gesticulation. Maud followed their approach with a prickle of resentment.

Jimmy noticed at once that something was wrong. ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘An excess of cheer?’

‘She’s tired,’ Rosa told him, ‘that’s all. A little weak still.’

Sliding his wiry frame onto the seat beside her, Jimmy plucked Maud’s hand from her lap and squeezed it between his. ‘Is everything well, Maudie?’ he asked, gently as you like. ‘What’s the difficulty here?’

Maud reclaimed her hand. ‘Nothing,’ she sniffed. ‘Honest.’