Will & Tom (15 page)

Tom gives up on the umbrella. ‘It’s gone,’ he says. ‘Another thing that I owe you.’ He walks to Will’s side. ‘I see what you’re doing, you know. What your aim is in this.’

‘You do?’

Tom sits close, indifferent to Will’s soggy clothes. ‘You’re trying to help me. That’s why you’ve stayed. You’re behaving as a true friend should. And I reward you with harsh words.’ He pauses, grimacing with self-reproof. ‘A plunge in the damn waters. The loss of your work, for God’s sake.’

Will says nothing.

‘You could’ve given me up. Others would have, immediately, in hope of favour from the Lascelles. And yet you’ve kept our secret. Heavens, Will, I don’t believe the thought of betrayal has even entered your mind. For that you have my thanks, and my love.’

Tom stands again and takes a piece of quality paper, folded in two, from his tail-pocket. On it is a watercolour drawing, done on a half-scale with perhaps five grades in the tone. He turns this sheet in his hands, altering his hold; then he wheels about and casts it towards the pool with an almost contemptuous flourish. The drawing’s rough ‘V’ shape causes it to twist skyward, spiralling off to one side, landing instead in a knot of waterside ferns. Will is about to exclaim, to ask why on earth he would do such a thing, when he sees it: Tom is seeking atonement by destroying the one piece of art he’s produced since his arrival from London. He faces Will and makes a frank appeal.

‘I ask that you return to Harewood with me, for tonight at least. They’ll think it odd if you leave without explaining yourself, or claiming your bundle. We could have your clothes laundered. Drink some more of Beau’s brandy. Talk of art, and of London. And I swear to you that I won’t be discovered. I swear it, Will. On the lives of my mother and brother.’

Quite the reversal, thinks Will, for a man who was commanding me away not two minutes earlier. Such turnarounds are common in Tom, though, and his request is not unexpected. It’s already plain to Will that he’ll have to go back. Even if he could bring himself to trust Tom with this insane liaison – which he emphatically
cannot
– and continue the northern tour without his usual provisions, he’s now one sketch short. The commission can’t be fulfilled with what he has. That close view has to be retaken. So, rather numbly, he nods.

Tom interprets this as a further demonstration of loyalty and friendship. Grinning, offering again his sincerest thanks, he leans in to grip Will’s shoulder; then he strides around the outcrops to hail Stephen across the lake.

Once Tom is out of sight, Will goes over to retrieve the drawing. As he thought, it is the Whatman page he gave Tom out by the castle, upon which he’d appeared to begin a colour study. There are a number of such studies in Will’s sketchbooks – supplements to the porte-crayone sketches, made quickly with a limited palette to record precise effects of light and atmosphere. This page, however, holds a considered work, an end in itself, despite the readiness with which Tom disposed of it. The view, perversely enough, is not of Harewood Castle, but the bridge they’d crossed on their way to the valley floor, a modest dry-stone structure, its arches mirrored in the water flowing beneath. Past it, to the right, is a sunny meadow, and a wood – and an indistinct female figure, clad in a pale riding habit, floating like raw cotton in the shadows of the treeline.

Tom’s style, like Will’s own, has its critics in the more conventional Academy circles. Too rough, they say. Uncouth, unprofessional, unfinished: a whole host of
uns
. There are blots on this drawing, it must be admitted, and a thumbprint, and the palette is constricted by the circumstances of its creation; but the
grasp of light
, of the effects of light as it falls upon and defines the world, is truly expert, and expressed with a simplicity and a purity that Will suspects his own productions cannot match.

Indeed, the drawing’s brilliance, its
offhandedness
, makes it painful to behold. All at once it causes Will to doubt his own ability and the direction he has given his labours, not to mention his future prospects – to picture himself as a failure, rejected by the Academy, forever poor and unnoticed. Tears sting his eyes; one slips out, darting across his cheek and jaw. It has happened before, this inopportune blubbing – normally in the houses of patrons, when encountering the canvases of Claude or one of the finer Dutchmen, and overwhelmed by his feelings of personal deficiency. Father has no patience with it.

What use is there in pitying yourself?
the old man would ask.
You
’
ve got to heed their virtues, boy, and add them to your own. How else will they be bettered?

Will recovers his determination. Tom is still occupied, talking to Stephen about pike; so he wipes his eyes, opens the larger sketchbook and places the drawing inside. Then, having fastened the clasps, he plucks his sodden boots from the ground and begins a squelching passage back to the horses.

*

The painters are seen soon after they clear the south-western end of the house. A murmur runs through the gathering in the flower garden, and costly hats turn; and Beau Lascelles is up, teetering atop a chair, hailing them enthusiastically over an immaculate hedgerow.

‘My Michelangelo, my Raffaelo! Join us, I insist!’

Tom halts his horse and dismounts, passing the reins to Stephen. Will sits rigid in his saddle, staring towards the stable block.

‘Come,’ says Tom quietly, moving to his side. ‘We must.’

The two painters stop behind the hedgerow to make their preparations. Will has been riding in his stockings, with the boots strung over his horse’s rump; now he bashes them together, knocking off as much mud as he can before working his feet reluctantly into their slimy confines. Tom, meanwhile, is pulling his jacket straight across his shoulders, brushing his waistcoat front, coughing against his hand – collecting himself, Will thinks, like an actor about to step from the wings. As they walk out between the flower beds, he becomes uncomfortably aware of the performance he too will have to deliver. The family and their guests must be convinced that all is perfectly ordinary. That his commission proceeds as normal, notwithstanding a couple of minor delays. That he hasn’t spent the past day striving to escape.

The party in the flower garden is close to its conclusion. The outer tables are being cleared discreetly; gentlemen and ladies are partaking of a final glass of cordial or champagne as the sun begins its decline. Beau, clad in a Prussian blue hunting coat and glossy black hat, works his way towards Will and Tom with impatience and no little pride, still eager to draw attention to the two young artists he has brought up from London – and plainly ignorant, as yet, of the full extent of their activities.

Tom returns Beau’s lively greeting, accepts a glass from a footman and resurrects some great joke from the night before. Will stays to the rear, scanning the company, hoping to locate Mary Ann and gauge whether she means to come over to greet them or maintain a sensible distance; and he realises that he’s filling the very role that he’d feared the Lascelles would assume was his. He is their lookout.

‘What’s this, then? A filthy little troll, come out from under his damned bridge?’

Mr Purkiss skulks nearby, beside a bed of white roses. He holds one of the choicest blooms in his hand, bending it out from the bush, and is carelessly tearing off the petals. His costume is smart enough, but has been loosed and unbuttoned in several places. A scowl is etched upon his pocked, puffy face.

‘Look at yourself, sir. Heaven preserve us. Have you been paddling in a sewer?’

‘A fall’s what it was. At Plumpton.’

Purkiss isn’t listening. ‘You’re a queer fish, ain’t you. A damned queer fish. I can see you in a hermit’s hovel, y’know, twenty years from now, buried beneath a hoard of bottled piss and cat bones. Scribbling on the walls like a damned lunatic.’

A lunatic
. This can’t be chance. What has this gentleman learned? What might Tom have revealed while he swilled down Beau Lascelles’ liquor? Will looks off to the treetops, feeling his colour rise, with no clue of what to do or say; his clothes seem to shrink, tightening around his limbs and impeding his breaths.

Spotting his predicament, Tom starts to spin the tale of their meeting at Plumpton Rocks. It’s a fanciful account, disregarding truth to supply amusement, and it soon wins the attention of the company at large. The mulish Will Turner so set on a view, on his pursuit of natural beauty and picturesque effect, that he clambered atop a steep rock and lost his footing; the tumble, the splashing about, and Tom’s own comically inept efforts to rescue him; the supposed attempts of both to save Will’s sketchbooks ahead of Will’s life, such is their dedication to art. There is laughter and a general lightening of spirits, even Mr Purkiss growing a shade less loathsome; and Will notices Mary Ann, off among a group of young ladies on one of the garden’s upper tiers. Lord Harewood’s younger daughter wears a dove-grey bonnet and holds a painted parasol. She is watching her paramour closely, with an expression he can’t quite construe.

Will too watches Tom, so at ease with centre stage, his accent and demeanour having undergone their usual adaptation – and he decides that charm, be it that of Tom Girtin or anyone else, is but a fine polish applied to deceit. The fellow is betraying the Lascelles’ trust in a manner most intimate and profound, and he is making them love him as he does it. Will remembers his remarks on the house and grounds, on the French china, on Beau and Frances and the West Indian origins of the family’s astounding wealth; and he sees that this affair with Mary Ann, conducted so brazenly, with so little fear of the baron or his heir, is an act of defiance. An expression of his contempt.

Beau guffaws and lays an affectionate hand upon Tom’s shoulder. ‘These mishaps must be common enough, Mr Turner. An occupational hazard, one might venture, for the committed landscapist.’

‘No,’ replies Will. ‘They ain’t.’

Beau blinks, his broad beam narrowing a little. ‘Still, you are with us for yet another night, despite your best efforts to be gone. The fates are conspiring to keep you at Harewood. My artistical partnership has come to pass after all.’ He turns towards the house and says his valet’s name.

There is no sense of Mr Cope’s arrival, or of him having been absent before. He seems merely to have become visible. Master looks coolly at servant, and Will recalls the glimpse he caught of them the previous night, entwined like swans in that dark corner of the state floor. Such relations between men are known in London, as everything is; Mrs Wadsworth’s molly house, said to be popular with all ranks of society, stands only fifty yards from Father’s shop. Will finds the notion unfathomable. It may account for the valet’s ubiquity, though, and the singular position he has been allowed in the household.

‘Would it be possible, do you think, for Mr Turner to be included in this evening’s outing?’ Without waiting for Mr Cope’s reply – which is, in any case, a neat affirmative – Beau launches into an explanation, as much for the company as Will himself. ‘It is a late arrangement, you understand, agreed upon only yesterday. My dear sister Frances has an unshakeable preference for
private balls
, but I have assured her that a public assembly in a smart little town such as Harrogate shall furnish us with diversion both plentiful and refined – and
variety
, of course, that vital quality, which can so enliven an occasion. You, young sir, shall help me to demonstrate all this.’ Beau’s voice grows louder still, his eyes acquiring a sheen of cruelty. ‘Mr Turner, you shall join our party tonight. You shall dance at the Crown Hotel.’

The thought of this squat, grubby person parading about a ballroom, public or private, draws sniggers from Beau’s guests. Will looks over at Tom, who is wearing a glassy smile. It’s difficult to tell if he purposefully omitted to mention this expedition, in order to ensure compliance, or if it just slipped from his mind.

The ball is a punishment. This much is plain. Will’s behaviour – his stated desire to leave Harewood, and his repeated failure to do so – has affronted his patron. Now, thanks entirely to Tom, he has returned once again, and Beau Lascelles means to have some fun at his expense. The nobleman is coming closer now, his arms opening as if to enfold Will in an embrace, but at the last moment he pulls back with an exaggerated look of distaste.

‘A bathtub, Cope,’ he exclaims, waving a hand before his nose, to the further mirth of the company. ‘For the love of Christ, have someone bring Mr Turner a bathtub.’

*

The portrait is an odd one. That Will must admit. It took him a minute to find, the canvas having been skyed, in the parlance of Somerset House, as best Harewood can manage: hung above a door in a shadowy corner of the gallery, almost as if its owners wished it out of the way. The commission had been reported around London, as further evidence of the favour the Lascelles were showing Hoppner, but the work itself was withheld from the Academy Exhibition. Standing before it, Will can certainly see why.

Mary Ann is shown as
fat
, in short, markedly fatter than she is now. She is ungainly also, lumped on a seat like a sack of goods, her pose – left elbow at an angle, propping her up it seems, right hand lying in her lap – both listless and vaguely discomfited. The soft line of her neck, so admired by Will, is broken meanly by a pronounced double chin. An attempt has been made at modishness. Her hair is powdered and dressed; her cheeks blush with carmine; her gown of yellow-green silk is fashionably cut, with mid-length sleeves, a plunging neck and a bow tied beneath the breast. The voluminous skirts, however, suggest not the graceful weightlessness of antiquity, but a futile effort to disguise the extent of the sitter’s bulk. The actual brushwork is expert, the colouring utterly assured. Hoppner could have helped Mary Ann in a dozen different ways; he could surely have transformed her. Yet he has done nothing.

Will steps back, bemused. Why the devil would such a picture be taken? The first law of society portraiture – flatter your subject – has been contravened. The very opposite result attained. Will knows John Hoppner; he’s been careful, since he began exhibiting, to keep up a certain sociability between them. Tom Girtin might hold him in disdain, but the fellow is a senior Academician, a pupil of Sir Joshua at the peak of his ability and reputation. Hoppner would depart from his profession’s governing principle for one reason only: the specific instructions of his patron. Could Tom’s interpretation be correct? Was the portrait a spiteful trick, orchestrated by Beau?