Authors: Matthew Plampin
This is reprisal, obviously: a blow struck back at Beau, who sighs loudly and waves for more wine. Will catches something else in Frances’s voice, though, as she details her complaints to Tom – flirtation, almost. She certainly sounds more entertained than she has so far that evening.
Will fares badly with criticism. He’s known for it – the muttered profanities, the black looks, the unexpected departures – and he’s squirming now, impatience nibbling at his innards. Tom, however, appears untroubled by Frances’s words. After the soup dishes have been removed, he offers a riposte, pontificating about the elevation to be found in Nature; the finer sentiments it can stir in the soul; the ways in which it can identify us with what he terms ‘our more permanent existences’.
‘Think, for instance, of when you stand alone before a range of hills – or see the clouds piled in the sky, towering up to Heaven, afire with sunlight. That is the sensation we seek. The Sublime mysteries of Creation, distilled into art.’
The entrée is served: rare beef, thinly sliced, rolled up and laid atop a lettuce leaf. Will has been listening to Tom’s deft paraphrasing of wiser men, his feelings somewhat mixed; but at the sight of food, hunger usurps all other considerations. He cuts off a large piece of the rolled beef, almost half the quantity on his plate, and works it into his mouth.
‘This can make us impulsive in our technique,’ Tom continues. ‘We admit it. We’re all in a rush at times, Will and I, and for that we can only apologise. But isn’t there hope in honest imperfection – in a striving that has yet to attain?’
Beau clearly judges his sister’s latest attack to have been thwarted. He growls in appreciation, banging the end of his knife against the table. ‘Quite right.’
Frances, if not actually impressed or convinced by Tom’s reply, has at least been drained of some of her venom. ‘And would you agree with that account, Mr Turner? Do you also seek to communicate the mysteries of Creation in your paintings?’
Will looks back at her in alarm. His mouthful was far too ambitious: there’s almost more than he can chew. He can’t speak, not with any decorum, but neither can he stay silent. Spitting the meat into a napkin is out of the question. Only one course is open to him. He grips his cutlery and swallows.
The beef’s passage is agonisingly slow. It seems to stretch Will’s throat to tearing point; to press hard against his collarbone; to halt at the top of his chest, blocking both blood and air. Tears edge from his eyes. He can feel the skin flaming from his temples to his neck, reaching the extremes of colouration. His vision dims and he wonders if he is to choke to death, right there at Lord Harewood’s dinner table, just because Tom Girtin has delayed him with his chatter and his misinformation, and prevented him from keeping to his schedule; and suddenly the beef is gone, worming into the lower chambers of his body, leaving him blinking and gasping atop his chair like a drunk hauled from a river.
‘I do,’ he whispers.
*
The party breaks up after dessert, too fatigued and fractious to contemplate any further entertainment. Mr and Mrs Douglas retire straight away. Beau remains a while longer, leading his painters through to the music room so that he can rattle on about some topic or other, but tiredness soon gets the better of him and he withdraws also. A minute later servants are drifting about, removing glasses and extinguishing candles.
Will rises from his chair and looks towards the hall, plotting a course back to the casket chamber that will give the still room the widest possible berth. Mrs Lamb doesn’t need to know that he’s been obliged to remain at Harewood. This has to be kept simple. He bids Tom good night.
‘Tomorrow morning.’ Tom stays seated, leaning back, his hands behind his head. ‘Tomorrow morning, Will, you and I will put all this nonsense aside and apply ourselves properly to the pursuit of art.’
‘Pretty speech you made back there.’
Tom grins; he lowers his voice. ‘She’s a nasty old trout, that one, but it don’t take too much to throw her off. As you saw.’ He sits forward. ‘We’ll talk to the gardeners. One of them will be able to advise us, I’m sure of it. It’ll be a good day.’
Will has already devised a new schedule. Out alone at dawn with books, bundle and umbrella, having left a note of gratitude for his patron; sketches of this castle, two separate views, done by noon; then off to find a carrier in the village. Tom’s determined camaraderie prompts a ripple of guilt, but he reminds himself that this is still, at heart, a contest. He must play to his strengths, just as Tom does. Besides, he’s certain that whatever sadness Tom might feel at discovering he has gone will last an hour at most, and that he’ll be forgiven immediately when next they meet in London; by which time Will’s Harewood drawings will be close to complete.
‘Could hardly be worse.’
At this Tom is up, taking Will’s arm, predicting great successes as they walk towards the hall. Once they are through the doorway, however, the two painters begin to pull apart. They stop, for a second equally surprised; then both see the reason. They are bound for different floors.
‘Of course,’ says Tom. ‘You’ll be wanting to call on the still-room maid. Inform her of your continued residence.’
Will ignores him. That odd note from their earlier conversation, forgotten in the dash for the waterfall, sounds again in his mind. ‘So there it is,’ he says.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘The
goose feather mattress
.’ Will’s nose twitches with anger. ‘You mentioned it out in the valley. I wondered how such a fine thing could fit in a basement room – a damn closet such as the one I’ve been shoved into – and here’s how. You’re upstairs with them. An
honoured guest
.’
A door opens in the shadows, off towards the saloon. Someone is listening.
Tom is shaking his head. ‘I’m up there, yes,’ he concedes, ‘but the room is small enough, you can be sure of that. For a valet, I think, or a ladies’ maid. Someone who has to be on hand night and day. They told me it was the only place left.’ He attempts a laugh. ‘If it’s the
mattress
that’s upsetting you, then I’ll drag it down to you now, this very minute, and sleep on the damn floor. Give the word, Will, and I’ll do it.’
None of this signifies, Will tells himself. It just proves what you knew already. He starts quickly across the hall, towards the door that leads to the central service staircase. It is all but dark; only the blackness of the mahogany against the grey walls enables him to find it. He hears Tom following him and imagines his remorseful pose – the embrace that would surely follow.
‘You stop there, Tom Girtin,’ he says, without looking around. ‘You leave me be.’
Will feels his way onto the staircase. Halfway down he stumbles, stubbing a toe through his flimsy evening shoes, triggering a flow of curses that continues until he is back in the casket chamber. He sits heavily on the bed, on the mean mattress stuffed with Lord knows what; then he turns to check the sketchbooks.
A parcel rests in the middle of his pillow. The paper is familiar, cheap and thin, wrapped around a half-dozen hard, tubular objects. At once Will realises what it is and who it is from. He lights a taper in the hall, coaxes a tallow stub to life and unties the string. The parcel contains beeswax candles, identical to those burning upstairs, forbidden on the service floor. He stares at them; the white sticks seem to glow against his breeches, to hold a trace of the radiance they will cast. This is his reward. Mrs Lamb knows he is still at Harewood.
Again, there is print on the inside of the paper – an illustration this time, set in a rectangle in the top half of the page, with two columns of dense text beneath. The candles clack together as Will sets them on the bed; on impulse, he picks one up and touches it to the tallow stub. It flares immediately, smothering the tallow, filling the casket chamber as a flame fills a lantern.
Will flattens out the sheet. It is headed
The British Slave Ship Zong Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying
. The drawing, although inexpert, is unsparing in its confrontation of this notorious incident. Negro bodies cover a ship’s deck, clad only in loincloths and irons. A number are being heaved up by sailors, by British tars, and tipped into the ocean. Most, despite the title, plainly live still. Some pray; some try feebly to resist and are lashed; all are surely doomed.
Will is dimly aware of this case. A decade or more old, it has long been employed by the Abolition movement as the ultimate symbol of the slave trade’s turpitude. As with the
Brookes
, his mind begins to roam around the image before him, to search out its possibilities – and again, there is a shock of revulsion at what he envisages. This time, however, he forces himself to persist. He dwells on the moments after the throw; what it would be to plunge into the limitless ocean, your limbs weighted and your body weakened by hunger and disease; the drag of the waves and the black chasm yawning beneath; the sun overhead, a drop of blinding fire, awful in its unconcern; and the despised prison ship, so cruelly transformed into your last chance for life, rolling off towards the horizon, forever beyond reach.
A voice passes in the distance. ‘It’s this, then it’s that, then it’s summat else. I swear, if he tells me once more, I’ll take that kettle and—’
Will looks up. His door is ajar. The blaze of the beeswax candle – this prohibited item, very probably lifted from a pantry or the steward’s room – would be visible some way along the corridor. He cups a hand around the flame and blows it out.
Harewood Castle is one for the books. Will knows it as soon as he clears the village. The ruin stands alone in a stretch of rough, sloping grassland, built into the valley’s side to shelter it from the worst of the weather. The two lower storeys have been hollowed out but are intact, more or less; much of the third, however, has been knocked away, with only two juts of stone remaining at the southern corners. It has the look of a huge, heavy armchair, placed on the edge of Wharfedale for the repose of a weary northern giant.
Drawing closer, Will notes the details – the pointed arches of the doorways, the arrow-slits and carved stonework, the climbing ivy – and his satisfaction grows. Here is a subject he can make use of. His notion is that prospective patrons, calling on him in the airy studio he’ll soon occupy, will be able to peruse an expanding library of sketchbooks, selecting the scenes they would have worked up into drawings. An ancient place like this fires the imagination in all the necessary ways and will have a strong chance of attracting custom.
Past the castle, furthermore, lies a fine Yorkshire prospect: a winding river, several miles of tranquil farmland and a horizon of gentle hills, coloured in the cool tones of a summer dawn. The sun is just beginning to rise, the orb itself hidden in luminescent vapour. Will studies the sky as he trudges along. Yellow lake, he reckons, washed very thin, with a smoky hint towards the top, up in the firmament proper; ultramarine would serve best, with possibly the smallest speck of madder brown.
The first composition is found to the east: the ruin, angled slightly, set off centre to allow for a decent sweep of the landscape beyond. Will settles on a mossy bank and unclasps the smaller of his sketchbooks. Although well stocked with abbeys, cathedrals and castles, this book still has perhaps twenty blank pages left. The sketch is made intently, without further thought, and it is finished before the sun has moved through a quarter of its course. Well pleased, Will collects his equipment and walks around the building, moving downhill in order to take it from the opposite diagonal.
This view is not so successful. The absence of a landscape behind makes the ruin seem too tall; it cannot be fitted properly on the page. Will continues working, but his concentration begins to ebb. He thinks of the stairs at Maiden Lane, the flight up to his painting room with the bulging wall, and a bruising altercation that once occurred there; a ballad about a knife-grinder, heard in a Cumbrian tavern the month before; the slave ship
Zong
, sails unfurled, a multitude of bodies floundering in her wake.
A twig strikes the page at a top corner, skittering into the crease. Will brushes it away and turns – and a man is rushing at him, leaping atop him, barging him over. Something flutters against his calf, light as a moth, and gives him a vicious bite. He struggles towards it, swearing; and this other person moves off, twists back, hopping across the grass.
Will claps at his stinging skin, perceiving several things together. His assailant, of course, is Tom Girtin; he has not been bitten but burned, the contents of Tom’s pipe bowl having dropped onto his leg and scorched a hole in his stocking; and Tom has the smaller sketchbook – is flicking through it with mounting amusement.
‘By God,’ he says, ‘you did stick rather closely to my own progress, didn’t you Will? Jedburgh. Kirkstall. St Cuthbert’s at Lindisfarne. Why, there’s hardly a ruin in here that I didn’t sketch myself last year.’ He nods at Harewood Castle. ‘Not this one, though. I had no idea that it even existed. Small beer, ain’t it, by comparison?’
Will gets up, wondering how Tom found him. Could Mr Cope have talked? He eyes the book, which the other painter is swinging about in a nonchalant manner, and is glad that he opted to stow the loose leaves in the larger one. He doesn’t move. The Academy schools, various menial office posts and rowdy nights in London taverns have seasoned him in horseplay. He has his own way of meeting it.
‘It’ll sell,’ he replies. ‘To Lascelles, and others too.’
This is deliberate provocation. Tom snorts; he bridles as if confronted by something disgusting. There’s a change in him today. That dash of languor has gone. In its place is an aggressive exuberance – the high spirits of one filled with a renewed sense of himself, of who and what he was. The cause of this is unclear.
‘A mound of old stones. A commonplace landscape. A horse, a sheep, perhaps a couple of peasants to add some life. Ain’t you growing so damnably
tired
of it?’