Authors: Matthew Plampin
Slowly, the glare fades and the sketch is revealed. There’s more to it than Will remembers – the broad thigh and the heavy breast, the black locks, the maid’s skirts gathered around her waist – easily enough, at any rate, to identify both the subject and the undertaking. Turning away, he stares up at the stable’s plain entablature; then down at the iron grate in the centre of the courtyard. He is broiling hot and hollowed out by humiliation. What can he say or do now? They have him. He’s been floored, roped like an animal ready for slaughter, and can only await the
coup-de-grace
.
Beau does not delay it. ‘You understand, therefore, that should you decide to
talk
, to circulate these foul stories of yours, they will be met in kind, and with evidence. The injury for you would be far more severe than anything you could hope to inflict upon us. It would mean your end.’ He leans in, adopting a quizzical expression. ‘
Do
you understand? Some manner of signal would be appreciated.’
Will nods.
The nobleman straightens up, apparently content; then, suddenly, he seems to tire of the interview – to remember his enervated condition, the party by the boating lake, the lure of seltzer-water and repose. The sketchbooks are handed back to Mr Cope. Will looks over, for a final sight of those volumes, the repository of so much labour and hope; but it is the valet himself that captures his attention. There is the smallest interruption to the line of the coat, and the straight back within; a slight angle between the shining shoes; an adjustment, barely present, to the colouring of the greyhound face. Mr Cope is discomforted. Dutiful as ever, he fastens the clasps on the sketchbooks and stows them under his arm. He acts as if unaware of Will’s gaze.
Beau steps to the side and extends a hand towards the stable doors: a curt instruction to depart. ‘Your terms are cancelled, Mr Turner. Away with you.’
*
Hidden behind an oak, Will remains unseen until Mrs Lamb is at the garden door. He approaches with a finger to his lips, though she has said nothing; makes a placatory gesture, though she shows no indication of alarm. Her wicker basket is over her arm, full it looks like, and covered with cheesecloth. She lets him come near, emerging from the woods where he’s been stewing now for three anxious, angry hours. Then she opens the door, checks quickly for gardeners and pulls him through.
They hasten past the vineyard and into the nearest greenhouse – the same one she was standing outside two days earlier, trimming pineapples. The ripe, still air closes around them. Leaves pack the long building like feathers in a pillow, almost obscuring the brick path laid down its middle and filtering the afternoon sunlight to create a yellowy, underwater ambience. She leads him to a small room at the rear, built against the wall. He watches her legs as she walks – the shape of her haunches, rolling within her charcoal dress.
This is it
, the body that was joined with his not a day ago; and despite everything that’s happened since, the hope blooms within him that they might shortly be joined again.
It soon dies. Mrs Lamb swings Will past her, into a corner. The room is crowded with terracotta pots; shelves hold planting tools, bundled canes and balls of twine. There is a mean table the size of a supper tray and a single three-legged stool. She advances, spreading like a blot; soon the only light is that which can fit around the margins of her form. He tries to take her in, to study her properly, but he cannot. They call it having knowledge, do the gallants of his acquaintance, back in Covent Garden –
I’ve had knowledge of that one
, and so forth. In this instance, however, the act has brought about no new insight or familiarity whatsoever. If anything, he feels more removed from her than before. Alongside this is a deep regard; and desire, still; and fear, quite a strong fear, for it’s plain now that she’s profoundly annoyed with him.
‘What d’ye say to them?’
It’s out. Of course it is. Will’s ejection would be the talk of the service floor. ‘Only what we know. What you told me.’
This is the answer Mrs Lamb was anticipating, but it displeases her nonetheless. She rails on for a while about how the Lascelles are certain to seek out the origins of the story; how she, with her enemies on the staff, will be the prime suspect; how there’s already a suggestion, derived from God knows where, that she was involved somehow in the young painter’s exit from Harewood.
‘It’ll see me discharged,’ she concludes. ‘They’ve been looking for a reason for longer than I can remember. It’ll be the first thing that new housekeeper does – before she even hangs up her hat, I shouldn’t wonder.’ She broods for a minute longer, following the weave of her basket handle with her fingers; then she shoots him a fierce look. ‘Why d’ye come out here, Mr Turner? Shouldn’t you be on your way back to London?’
‘They took my books,’ Will tells her. ‘All my work from this summer.’
The still-room maid is unsympathetic. ‘And what d’ye expect me to do about that?’
Will’s idea, elevated to certainty while he hid in the woods outside, is that the books would be stowed in a cupboard somewhere, or a pantry, that Mrs Lamb could be persuaded to raid. He sees now that this is pure delusion. They’d be upstairs, in Beau’s rooms most probably, well beyond the reach of a still-room maid. His heart sinks, his spine bowing; it’s as if the bottom has dropped out of him and he is spilled on the ground, spoiled for good. He mumbles something.
‘So that’s why you told,’ says Mrs Lamb. ‘You were trying to get back at them. To strike a little fear into our masters.’ Her tut has a glass-cracking sharpness. ‘Didn’t do you no good, though, did it? They know very well that nobody’ll heed a strange little puppy like you. There in’t any actual
proof
of their connivings. Just your word, a low-born artist hardly clear of boyhood, against that of a millionaire nobleman. A lord of the King’s party. Gossip, they’ll call it. Preposterous rumour from an unknown source. Lands on them like rain on a roof.’
All true. Will stares dazedly at the dirt floor. Beau Lascelles was right. In real terms, in terms of a case that could be made to the world, he has nothing. The books are gone.
The faintest touch of compassion passes over Mrs Lamb’s features. ‘I might’ve heard summat,’ she admits. ‘In the servants’ hall.’
Will can’t quite credit it, initially; then he wants to kneel, to clutch at her hands, to worship her like a saint in an old Italian altarpiece, brought before the Holy Virgin. ‘But what – where are – how can we—’
She stops him. ‘A deal, Mr Turner. I propose that we make a deal.’
The basket is set on the table, the cheesecloth folded back and an object carefully lifted out; she moves to one side to allow the light to reach it. Will sees a covered porcelain cup trimmed with gold. The decoration is oriental and rather dense: pagodas, butterflies, twisted trees and luscious flowers, wandering Chinese folk clad in robes of pink and blue, all arrayed across a dark ground. The saucer is thin as a lettuce leaf, and shaped like one too. The lid is crowned with a tiny gilded rose.
Madame de Pompadour’s chocolate cup.
Mrs Lamb seems to grow, the cup rising towards the greenhouse’s narrow beams; Will realises that he is flat against the wall – sliding down it to the floor. She is
proud
, openly so; she places the cup and its saucer on the table and sits upon the stool.
‘You’re the thief,’ he says.
She laughs. ‘Why sir, had you really not put that one together? What in heaven did you think I was doing up on the state floor, creeping around in the dark?’
Will doesn’t answer. Within the basket, he can see part of a small jug, teeming with painted parakeets; and what appears to be a sauceboat, its gold and blue handle curling like that of an antique lamp.
‘How much is there?’
‘Less than there should be.’ Mrs Lamb laughs again, more harshly. ‘A lot less than there should be.’
There’s a new quality to her, a righteousness not unlike that of Tom Girtin over in the saloon, when he talked of smashing Beau’s china with a hammer. Is this thieves’ logic, Will wonders – some convenient notion about the immorality of wealth, and the obligation of ordinary people to spread it about if they spot the chance?
‘You speak as if it was owed you.’
Mrs Lamb leans forward, linking her hands. She looks off into the greenhouse, at the tropical leaves swimming in sunlight; she grows both more calm and more incensed. ‘That’s because it
is
owed me. Me and many others.’ The stool creaks beneath her as she turns back – not to Will but the chocolate cup on the table, so absurdly ornate against the bare, bleached wood. ‘Where does it come from, d’ye reckon, this fortune of theirs? What is it that grants them this wondrous life, so far beyond the imaginings of the vast bulk of humanity? This in’t some ancient noble line, with country estates and tenant famers and suchlike. No, Mr Turner, the Lascelles harvest their gold from a different field altogether.’
Sitting motionless on the dirt floor, Will recalls Tom’s talk at Plumpton, of floggings and shackles; the terrible diagram of the
Brookes
and that scene from the deck of the
Zong
. He gazes at the still-room maid’s enlaced fingers – at the slightest tint of ochre that warms her skin, which he in his ignorance took for a sign of gypsy blood.
‘I’m a slave,’ Mrs Lamb says simply. The disclosure has a strange effect on her, a deadening effect, causing her fury to decline rapidly to weariness. ‘There it is, sir. I was born a slave. The legal property of the Lascelles family. And I’m their slave still, I suppose, in the eyes of the law.’
Will rubs his nose. His mind has acquired an almost animal emptiness, wholly beyond thought. Sweat wells above his brow and runs down the side of his cheek. He says nothing.
‘None of them knows,’ she adds. ‘It wouldn’t even enter their damn heads. Irish is what they’re content to think.’ She shrugs. ‘It is but an eighth share. Mestee, the plantation masters call us.’
The story is told matter-of-factly, without self-pity. Born on the Nightingale Grove estate in Jamaica, she was the issue of a clerk and a coloured domestic, put to work in the kitchens of the manor house. At the age of fourteen she witnessed a plantation visit by Daniel Lascelles, the first baron’s brother. For a week afterwards the estate hummed with talk of the family’s riches – and particularly the palace they had just built themselves back in England.
‘It fired summat in me, Mr Turner, and I ran away the first chance I got. A damn
palace
. I barely understood what I was doing, or what I was letting myself in for, but I knew where I was bound. I was coming to Yorkshire. I was coming to see this palace. I made it the business of my life.’
There was a punishing trek through the jungle; a month on the streets of Kingston, dodging the Lascelles’ slave-catchers; a stowaway’s voyage to Bristol; and then she was in England, seeking employment in guesthouses and hotels – in kitchens not so very different from the one she’d fled in Nightingale Grove. But she was free. When she moved on, nobody attempted to hunt her down. And this girl, light-skinned enough not to draw any special notice, had her skills.
‘I know sugar,’ says Mrs Lamb. She recoups her energy, and her pride along with it. Her chin lifts; she smoothes that stained apron. ‘I know it damn well. It won’t surprise you to learn that in Nightingale Grove there was a boundless supply. My mother taught me to make puddings and cakes. Flans and tarts and ices. And I was good at them all. The still room, though – that was where I shone. The more places I stayed, the clearer it became to me how I’d get inside their palace. I worked my way northwards, Mr Turner, from household to household. I climbed this country like it was a ladder.’
Will looks over at the chocolate cup. He tries to concentrate on something simple. ‘Why do all that?’ he asks. ‘Stage is sixpence. Why wait all this time?’
‘And break in, you mean? Force a window, grab what I can and run off?’ Mrs Lamb grimaces at her lap. ‘No, sir. I wanted to know what I was doing. What I was taking. I wanted to leave with as much of their wealth as I could damn well carry. Not so I could have it, you understand – but just so
they
could not.’ She pauses. ‘Then I saw my first
Brookes
.’
Of course. ‘You met with the Abolitionists.’
Mrs Lamb did more than this. She attended addresses by the movement’s great figures – and in Yorkshire, on the very doorstep of her target. Mr Clarkson giving a lecture in a Leeds tavern. Mr Wilberforce speaking before a huge public meeting in Harrogate. She saw the campaigners toiling in the streets and squares, and at the gates of the factories, quickly filling their petition sheets with the marks of ordinary working men. And she learned how their efforts were opposed by lords, princes and dukes, by King George himself; and how the war with France was being used as an excuse to let the notion founder, to silence its proponents and permit the evil to continue – to expand, even. What was needed, her Abolitionist friends told her, besides political will, was
funds
: ready cash so that literature could be printed and posted, notices placed in newspapers and speakers dispatched about the country. The matter had to be kept before the British people.
‘I knew then what I was to do. I’d use my skill with their slave sugar to gain entrance to their palace. And then I’d use my position to help halt that sugar’s flow.’ She smiles tightly. ‘A pleasing shape to it, wouldn’t you say?’
From here to Harewood, by Mrs Lamb’s account, was a series of straightforward steps. She took a cook’s post with a solicitor in Harrogate. Discovering the shops frequented by Mrs Linley, the housekeeper from Harewood, and the days on which she called at them, didn’t prove too difficult. An acquaintance was engineered, and presents made of Mrs Lamb’s most splendid preserves and chutneys. And when the still room fell empty – the maid having experienced a powerful, unexplained urge to return to her family in North Wales – Mrs Lamb was the obvious replacement.
‘It’s been nearly three years now. I’ve a bale of silver forks, hidden over in the village. Various jewels and gimcracks. A ring or two.’ She picks up the chocolate cup and its saucer and puts them back in the basket. ‘It’s almost too easy at times, especially since this current lot came into the house. They spend without thinking, and they barely damn well notice when it goes.’