Authors: Matthew Plampin
The still-room maid adopts an air of mock surprise; of mock mystification. ‘You, sir? The great Mr Turner, up from London? One of the pair of prodigies who Mr Lascelles has employed to wander the grounds, to sketch the house – to be seen by all these visitors who stream through Harewood’s gates? Not to mention the worthy crowd that filled the Crown Hotel, where you was such an uproarious success?’
Will sees it; he feels acutely stupid for not seeing it sooner. He is cover. Part of the distraction staged to conceal the scheme. To have had two young painters residing at Harewood – and old associates to boot, in whom Beau Lascelles has an established patronal interest – is surely less likely to attract suspicion than if Tom had been here alone, should the events of this crucial week ever be scrutinised. Will can almost hear Beau’s explanation.
It was an artistical partnership of my designing. They were together for all of every day, out in the park, each inspiring the other. Raffaelo and Michelangelo. Claude and Poussin. Murillo and Velazquez.
He thinks of the ball, of how he was ordered onto the floor after Mary Ann’s foolhardy decision to dance with her latest lover. The transgression was diluted, forgotten; the company’s attention redirected. This is it, in essence. This is the task he’d been summoned to Harewood House to perform.
Mrs Lamb is smiling at him from the edge of the door frame – a broad, wry smile, bearing friendship and fondness and a plain trace of pity. She takes his hand again and kisses it, quite enveloping the knuckle, her mouth cool and oddly dry. This leaves Will yet more awkward. He wants to retreat into his room, he wants it with an aching intensity; then she bids him good night, telling him they’ll talk more in the morning, and is gone; and he’s sunk in darkness, somewhat at a loss.
Will sits on his bed. His earlier theory, hatched in this room not half an hour before, now seems contemptibly dim-witted. The Lascelles’ aim is rather higher than a husband. The entire drama is rewritten, with new roles for all. Beau and Frances are schemers of the lowest order, prepared to pimp their own sister for advancement. Mary Ann is a wanton harlot, wholly without compunction, who will apparently fuck any man placed in her vicinity. Bold, brave, rebellious Tom Girtin – who cannot know anything of what is truly going on – is but a dumb beast, a stud bull led by the ring Beau Lascelles has punched through his nose.
And Will Turner is a dupe. A hopeless ass, kept on hand to provide diversion. A jester gambolling in the background. His art, his ability – his
genius
, as many in London were calling it – is irrelevant to these newly minted aristocrats. They merely required a biddable being who they could warp to their purpose. His house portraits, keenly desired by patrons up and down the country, are here but an excuse.
It is wounding, this realisation, but the raw sting of anger that might have propelled him Tom-wards once again lay all this bare, to prise the lid off it, to tear it damn well is missing. In its place is simple exhaustion, setting in fast now that danger has departed. Besides, Tom will be accessible no longer. The west landing will be on alert for the remainder of the night; a guard would be posted, most probably, to ward against further disturbance.
Gnawing at him also, however, more insistently than his fatigue, is a need to absorb fully what happened in the baron’s chamber. At the forefront of his thoughts is a buckish triumph:
copulation
, and on Lord Harewood’s own bed! He can smell it still, beneath his clothes. The memory is almost too potent, too astounding to explore. Very little, of course, was actually visible on that dark four-poster. As he begins to summon a scene, to provide for the absences of memory, his mind reaches not for the monumental nudes of Italy, but those of a more carnal order; for the plump, disporting bodies of Mr Rowlandson, arched and splayed – of which he has a small, clandestine collection in the bottom of his print box, hidden beneath the Dutch seascapes. He fetches a light, using tallow for safety’s sake, pulls out a loose leaf and readies the porte-crayone. This one he will capture.
Mrs Lamb’s right thigh is dashed in, and her substantial, rounded hip, with the skirts hitched atop it; then the expanse of flank leading up to the daunting vastness of her bosom. Words come too, his own words, for the first time in weeks. He tries them as he works.
‘Drunk on the dark we lay ourselves, the moon’s pearl—’ He halts, frowning; he begins anew. ‘The moon, pleasure’s bubble, rises in dark wine …’
Her arm, the one she used to prop herself above him, is done in three lines only, and he’s back to the upper leg, the groin, the points of their connection; to the wide, rough-skinned knee he felt rubbing against his ribs; the stockinged calf flexing along his shin; the ankle that locked around his own.
She can’t have been eavesdropping.
The thought arrives unheralded and it quite spoils Will’s concentration, causing the sole of Mrs Lamb’s slipper to rove off on an unnatural course. He lifts the porte-crayone from the paper. They met in a state bedroom, in the east wing, perhaps the one area of the great house that was empty of people. The one place an eavesdropper
wouldn’t
be. It hadn’t seemed as if she was on her way elsewhere. She was by the bed when he entered, out of sight; and immediately swept him up, carried him along with her, through to their unlikely union on the baron’s counterpane. The still-room maid was supplying some distraction of her own. The design was to throw him completely; to sink him into his present, damp-palmed fervour; to prevent him from asking, from even considering, that most obvious of questions.
What was she doing in there.
*
Routine, observed unthinkingly, takes Will from the house and off into the park. He has slept, contrary to his expectation, four or five hours of dead slumber; washed himself and dressed in his standard outdoor garb; broken his fast at the kitchen counter. There’s a dullness about him, though, that he can’t shake, as if the tension of all this, endured for many hours now, has stretched him slack. The facts are too familiar; they are losing their bite, wearing smooth, no longer catching in his mind. He goes north-east, veering over the front lawn towards the woods. The spot where he made that first sketch is easily found. Sitting cross-legged upon the grass, he selects a sheet of Whatman and starts its replacement.
The result is cursory, finished in a half-hour, Will begrudging Beau Lascelles any effort – any application of the skill he so undervalues. He watches the sun melt a hole in a floe of gauzy cloud, and the shadows sharpen and darken across the house’s blank, black-windowed façade; and he feels a longing for work, for
real
work, of the sort he’d last known out at the castle.
The bells begin, the flat clangs cascading through the trees at Will’s back. Like all Londoners, he’s well used to this sound, at proximity and in volume. It is expected, also; he’s managed to ascertain that this morning belongs to Sunday, with its attendant observances. Worshippers assemble on the steps of the house. They are dressed smartly yet soberly, their conversation reserved, their gestures discreet; the occasional discharge of tobacco smoke is the only sign that this is the same band who crowed and cackled there the evening before, as they boarded their coaches for Harrogate.
Their numbers grow to two dozen or thereabouts; and are then more than doubled by the arrival of servants from both the house and garden, who join quietly at the rear, under the direction of Mr Noakes. They all proceed along the drive to the church path, which leads through the woods behind Will. The green parade, he’s heard it called, when Saturday’s revellers are summoned from their beds and pressed into Sunday’s reverence – marched forth to bend their aching heads in prayer. He has no intention of joining it. His plan is to use the ensuing emptiness of the house to get up to Tom, whether he be in his own chamber or Mary Ann’s. That radical quotation returns to him –
my own mind is my church
– and he’s murmuring it aloud when he spies the other painter, the man who had once bellowed it so daringly, close to the front of the procession. Freshly shaved and tidily attired, Tom is barely distinguishable from the gentlefolk who surround him. It’s a disturbing sight: Tom Girtin, committed and vocal atheist, going meekly to his pew – trailing, of course, behind the young woman he has unwittingly been enlisted to inseminate.
Will is up, the porte-crayone back in his pocket and the sketchbooks under his arm. His nerve is firm; he won’t permit it to falter. This isn’t what he prepared for, but the stakes are raised. They couldn’t reasonably be raised much higher. What fate lies in store for Tom once his task is complete? When a baby, ready to be presented to the world as the issue of the King’s son, is implanted within the younger daughter? His evidence could bring a swift end to the Lascelles’ ambitions, replacing promotion and advantage with derision and disgrace. It would be a great risk simply to let him go. Too great a risk.
No: the only hope for Tom, for them both, is
exposure
. This is what Will intends to suggest – what he has to propose right this minute as a matter of urgency. They have to hurry back to London and tell
everyone
. They have to state their case, as publicly as they are able. This will protect them. The Lascelles would be prevented from doing any harm as their guilt would be guessed at once. The support of all decent people would be won. They would be recognised – Tom’s amorous incontinence notwithstanding – as the innocent victims they are. It’s a hazardous route, and will bring on all manner of unwelcome changes, but no others remain. They cannot stand docile and acquiescent in the face of this misuse, awaiting a conclusion of the Lascelles’ choosing. They cannot do nothing.
The parade is approached at speed, Will thinking to slip straight through to Tom and ask him for a word. He’s knocked off track, however, by sight of the Douglas family: mother, father and an indeterminate number of offspring. Frances is talking to a girl in white lace, something to do with ducklings; and so tenderly, so plainly fascinated by what she is being told, that it makes the frosty imperiousness of her dinner-table conversation seem the behaviour of a different person altogether. Will is fairly sure, also, that this is the child who screamed at him in the darkened nursery. He slows down, changes course, but too late.
‘By Jove, Mr Turner! You impress me, young sir!’ John Douglas addresses Will directly for the first time. His tone is that of the gaming table, the gentleman’s club, with a brusque edge added. ‘I honestly wasn’t expecting to see you up and about so early. You were the
victor
, my friend, the clear victor in a rather crowded field. The drunkest of our drunk.’ He turns towards the staff; caps and bonnets lower to avoid his gaze. ‘Left a mess in the hall, too, I understand, for these poor souls to attend to. Remarkable, really. Your spirit. Your great appetite for life.’
Will can’t help protesting here. ‘Excuse me, but I weren’t – I was not—’
Douglas isn’t listening. Leaning down to match Will’s height, he points westward, across the front lawn. ‘Here’s a thing. Why don’t you take yourself off and sketch that tree over there? The big one, see it? Looks like a mushroom?’ A little push is administered by his grey-gloved hand. ‘Very brave, you coming out here like this. Very pious. But you need fresh air, I believe, more than you need a sermon.’
Will considers resistance, a retort, but his anger is tempered by doubt. Douglas is a party to the Lascelles’ scheme, obviously he is; this neat repulsion earns him an approving glance from his wife. How much have they deduced? Has Will revealed himself somehow? He stops on the gravel, letting the procession flow on around him. The churchgoers head up the path, disappearing among the trees. For a minute or two, he studies the sky again; the cloud lies now in high, diffuse lines, like chalk skimmed across coarse paper. Then he follows.
The church itself is uninteresting, a plain structure built from the same warm stone as the house, with clear glass in the pointed arches of its windows. It’s old, though, the porch robed in ivy, the gravestones blackened and lilting, and has been well placed in a fine grove of trees. The picturesque, in short, is present, and Will regrets momentarily that he didn’t discover it earlier, in place of the castle. He’d be far away from here, a serviceable sketch in the smaller book, ignorant of Tom’s situation and perfectly content.
But he cannot begin a new scene now. He
will not
. Instead, he strides from one end of the building to the other, and back again; then he starts a loose circuit, widening it gradually until he is out among the trees. The drone of an ecclesiastic can be heard within, leading the congregation into a hymn he doesn’t recognise. Churchgoing has never seemed to him like anything but time squandered. He’s heard other artists assert – usually after wine – that whatever they know of God is felt beneath the open sky; in a range of hills, with a storm coming on; above a rocky cove, looking out to sea. This all sounds about right to him. He has no wish to see churches burned or broken up, as some do – too much money to be made in painting them – but he doesn’t ever plan to waste his Sunday mornings on their cant and hot air.
The eventual opening of the doors catches Will unawares, roaming in a stand of pines. Tom is the first to emerge, hurrying off between the gravestones. He removes his borrowed hat, a shiny black number, and coughs into it six or seven times with ferocious, purgative energy. When he stops to spit, to wheeze in some air, Will nearly winces to see the tiredness on his face; to hear the labour in his breaths, clearly audible from twenty yards’ distance.
Beau is out the next moment, pursuing Tom perhaps, batting aside a strand of ivy and yawning hugely. He has his own burden of lassitude – a certain shadowing around the eye, a deeper note to his ruddy cheeks – but is bearing it with determined good humour. Approaching Tom, the heir to Harewood lays a hand between the painter’s shoulder blades, murmuring words of light-hearted enquiry. Tom rallies, as is his habit, drawing himself up and grinning, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief; offering some effortless reply that has Beau chortling into his burgundy stock.