Authors: Matthew Plampin
Will catches a glimmer of intent. ‘You’re going to take more.’
‘Mr Turner,’ replies Mrs Lamb, ‘I’m going to take every last thing that I can. You know what them bits of china sell for to the idiot gentlemen of London. And I’ll put the money to good use. It’ll go to aid those who seek to end this wickedness of theirs forever.’ She reaches for him now; her hand is on his thigh for perhaps three seconds before fastening around his forearm, just above the wrist. Her eyes, quite black, are open wide. ‘This is my chance, sir. They’ll be ridding themselves of me tomorrow. I must act.’
Her meaning is plain: she’s going thieving again, over in the grand house, and Will Turner is coming along to help. This is the deal she wants from him, and it’s not a choice. He’s being pressed into service like a man grabbed from the docks.
‘Madam—’
‘The house will be quiet. Early bed for everyone after the fuss last night – upstairs and down. We’ll move about like ghosts, Mr Turner. Spectres made from mist.’
Will thinks of the
Zong
– of the sketch he made of the woman now attached to his arm. ‘They found—’ He swallows. ‘They found one of them pamphlets. The ones you wrapped around my candles.’
‘What of it?’
‘They knew it’d come from you. Seemed to, anyhow. That we two are – that there’d been – that we’d—’ Will frowns; his cheeks and brow are bristling with violent heat. He abandons the sentence. ‘If one of us is caught, they’ll go after the other directly.’
Mrs Lamb is unimpressed. ‘Neither of us will be caught. I know this damn house better than anyone else alive. All I need is a second pair of arms. You’ll walk behind me. You’ll carry what I give you. That’s the whole of it.’
‘Madam,’ Will insists, ‘I ain’t no robber.’
Now she is impatient. ‘This is the only way you’re ever getting those books back, Mr Turner.’ Her grip grows firmer; her face is brought nearer. ‘And you feel the rightness of it. I
know
you do. I saw you with that print, with the
Brookes
, back in my still room. You’re of our party. I shouldn’t have to plead with you like this.’
Will’s heels dig into the floor, as if bracing for a tug-o-war; he twists his arm a fraction within Mrs Lamb’s grasp. Could this be true? The horror of those images is still imprinted upon him, that he can’t deny, but where an actual opinion should be – the granite conviction that must govern people of principle and impel them to act – there is only blankness. He’s a
landscape painter
, schooled by the Royal Academy. A man of dawn and dusk, of clouds and atmospheric effects; of the Sublime and the Picturesque Object. He has his path and it demands every last thing he’s got. What, really, does he know of all this? What does he
want
to know of it?
Mrs Lamb turns, leaving him facing the top of her mob-cap, the curls packed beneath the white cotton, always attempting to escape. She shuts her eyes and sighs, dispelling her irritation, collecting herself for a final amendment of manner; then she releases him, her fingers playing along his arm as they withdraw.
‘D’ye not think that we make a fine partnership, sir?’ she asks. ‘Why, last night we got past Mr Cope and the others without the least bit of trouble. We sported about them bedrooms like we owned the place.’ Her left boot inches forward, nestling against his right, underscoring her meaning. ‘It could surely be done again.’
Will colours anew, more savagely than ever. Squirming in the loose dirt, he steals a longing glance at her knees, and the open inch between them; at the way her buttocks softly overhang the stool.
A sly line appears at the side of Mrs Lamb’s mouth. ‘And there’s summat else you might care to know. It’s Mr Girtin who’s got your books.’
It’s a double blow, expertly timed; Will is left gaping, radish-faced, his objections obsolete. ‘Beg – beg pardon?’
‘A regular scene, there was, when Mr Lascelles arrived at the lake. Your friend Tom was sorely put out by your dismissal. Requested in the strongest terms that the books be placed in his care. Mr Lascelles weren’t best pleased, but he permitted it for the sake of harmony. To keep Mr Girtin applied to the task at hand, I suppose.’
Will sits up. Tom Girtin has the sketchbooks. He’ll be at leisure to look through them; to survey what Will has gathered; to examine the points of contact with his own northern tour the previous year, and the significant points of departure. And there’s the drawing of Tom’s, the infuriatingly brilliant drawing Will salvaged at Plumpton. Tom can’t discover that he has it. He just
can’t
. And that accursed sketch of Mrs Lamb, which Beau Lascelles waved at him with such glee. Why the
devil
did he make it? What in
damnation
was he thinking? Tom would consider it hilarious, and lay it open to the inspection of all artistic London. Academicians might hear of it. Conclusions might be reached about William Turner’s character – his ability to conduct himself in a manner befitting one of the king’s painters. The door to membership, the door to his future, might well become obstructed.
Dear God.
Will scrabbles against the greenhouse wall, clambering to his feet, accidentally kicking over a stack of plant pots. ‘Mrs Lamb,’ he begins – stopping to right his waistcoat, which has ridden a distance up his stomach. ‘Madam—’
Crossing her legs, the still-room maid places her elbow on her thigh and her chin on her palm, a pose of incongruous elegance. Her eyebrows rise in expectation.
‘What do we do?’
This woman is a saviour. Will is certain of it. Mrs Lamb will deliver him from the fix he’s in and set him back on his rightful course. Following her up through the park, he feels immensely grateful and slightly awestruck; and protected, shielded from harm, like Tobias on his journey with the Angel. Both of them are wearing black cloaks, which she brought with her when returning to the greenhouse. Will’s is at least three inches too long and reeks of horse, but out in the moonless night, pulling it on provided a distinct and exciting sensation of invisibility. The house is ahead, so dark and silent that it appears uninhabited. Exactly as she assured him it would be. The route to his books seems direct, secure and safe. He’ll be rescued from his present difficulty and freed from this place for good.
They enter at the kitchen corridor on the western side. Embers still smoulder in the range, dry-brushing doorframes and floor tiles a deep, tarnished red; but otherwise this end of the service floor is unlit and its passages empty. She takes them right, towards the still room. The lingering odour of dinner, of roast chicken and suet, gives way to the thick, sweet smells – fruity, spicy, waxy – that cling always to her clothes and hair. Reaching the threshold, she comes to a halt, her purpose suddenly suspended. Ten seconds go by. Will nearly nudges her, to prompt continuation, but thinks better of it.
This woman is a victim. It cannot be forgotten. The victim of something unspeakable. Will peers into the room, at the copper pans piled dully in the darkness, at the jars and bottles and trays – the instruments both of her enslavement and her revenge. Waiting in the greenhouse, watching the afternoon’s tones shift and dim, he wondered at some length about her experiences. Had she felt the slavers’ whips cut into her skin, or endured their abuses in closets and thickets? Had she seen others, relatives and friends, suffer the lurid horrors detailed by the Abolitionists – hung on hooks like butchered meat, dragged behind traps, lashed until dead? And the voyage to England, Christ alive; had it been on a slave ship, like the abominable
Brookes
? There’s much he would have her describe. He thinks these questions at her broad back, thinks them very hard, as if she might feel it somehow and turn to reply.
She doesn’t, of course. Will realises that this is a farewell. She stands in place for a half-minute more, contemplating it all; then she leans inside, scoops up two small sacks and quietly closes the door.
‘They’ve been moved to the gallery,’ she says, as they mount the western service staircase, ‘on account of Lord Harewood’s return.’
She’s talking about the china. Will stops climbing. ‘Are we to get all that first? Won’t it be heavy?’
Mrs Lamb looks back, her face in shadow. ‘Porcelain,’ she tells him, taking off her shoes and tucking them in her belt, ‘then books. Remove your boots, Mr Turner.’
With its sumptuous decorations muted by the night, the long reach of the gallery, could be that of an exhibition hall or large shop. Mrs Lamb passes Will one of the sacks and is off across the cool, smooth floor. Beau’s pieces are arranged in front of the west-facing windows, on a row of small tables. She moves through them like an authority, unhampered by the lack of light, making her selections and transferring them to her sack. Any caution regarding what she takes has obviously been dispensed with. She’s departing Harewood, never to return, and is grabbing the best loot she can.
This woman is a criminal, calculating and ruthless. She’s spied her opportunity and is using it to rob a nobleman of more money than country-house drawings would yield in a decade. And Will Turner is her accomplice. Staring about in panic, he sees his silhouette in the blue pane of an enormous looking glass: a runtish figure in an oversized highwayman’s cloak, boots in one hand and swag sack in the other, breaking into a grand house like the lowest blackguard of St Giles. He must have lost his mind entirely. Father would reel at the sight, that’s for sure. Mrs Lamb’s tale of distant sufferings, of girlhood ordeals, would mean precisely nothing to him. His response would be one of absolute incomprehension.
There
’
s causes, boy,
he’d say,
all sorts of very laudable causes, for which it’s worth doing all sorts of things. And then there is the law.
‘D’ye hear summat?’
Mrs Lamb has reached the far end of the gallery, her sack almost full. She’s staring back at Will. He realises that he’s standing quite rigid, glued in place, as a man might if he’d caught the sound of approaching footsteps. He shakes his head and hurries over to her, intending to ask how much more there is; how much longer they must remain so exposed. Before he can speak, however, she heaves up an object from the nearest table and turns about to present it to him.
The Endymion centrepiece. Its separate forms – the shepherd and the goddess, and the slab of rock upon which they so gracefully recline – are jumbled together in the gallery’s gloom, a tangle of glistening, rippling whiteness. The statuette looks large indeed in her arms, much larger than Will remembers. He doesn’t take it from her.
‘This they’ll miss,’ he says, ‘and soon.’
Mrs Lamb angles her head an inch to the left – a plain warning against nonsense. ‘I can sell it,’ she states, ‘for two hundred guineas. Put it in the sack.’
Will doesn’t move.
‘Put it in the sack,’ she repeats, more clearly and rather more coldly, ‘and we’ll go for your books. Mr Girtin’s room is straight above us. At the western corner.’ She adjusts her hold on the centrepiece. ‘No one will connect the two things, Mr Turner. They’ll come looking for
me
, and me alone. And they won’t have a single hope of success. You think I in’t prepared?’
Still Will does nothing, so Mrs Lamb pushes the statuette over in a way that forces him either to accept it or let it fall. It is weighty, even more than he expected, and a damn awkward shape; as he works it into the sack, trying to keep hold of his boots as he does so, the pointed parts of miniaturised anatomy press uncomfortably into his belly. His fright is impeding him now, dimming his awareness, gumming up his mouth with the foulest taste. He barely registers their exit from the gallery, passing beneath the empty gaze of John Hoppner’s Mary Ann; the scurry along the border of the dining room, back to the dingy confines of the western service staircase; the action of his legs as he climbs to the upper floor. Mrs Lamb sees it as they reach the landing and she’s on him at once, all tartness gone, drawing him under her cloak – reclaiming him as a lover might, her right breast flattening against his face.
‘Come, sir,’ she whispers, guiding him around a corner, ‘nearly there.’
Will moves the bulging sack from his midriff to his shoulder and attempts to peer out. ‘Which door is it?’
‘You’re doing so very well, Mr Turner. You’re proving a true friend.’
‘Which door?’
Mrs Lamb stops; she lifts her nose, as if sampling the air. ‘I’ll go. Won’t take a moment.’
Will has a different vision. He pictures himself striding across the bedchamber, wresting the books from Tom’s grasp and then conveying a few dark truths about the Lascelles before he leaves. He wriggles, testing her grip, and lets out a dissenting grunt.
‘Me and Tom need words.’
‘He’ll be over with her. Every hour’s important to them.’
‘Let me see.’
Her embrace hardens. ‘There in’t time. We can’t risk you two squabbling. Him deciding to alert the family.’
Will’s fear of this situation, of what he’s done and is doing still, switches to stubborn anger. He arches his back, pushing away from her, wobbling slightly as he breaks out onto the landing. She’s brought them before a pair of doors, set close together. He points.
‘This one?’
Mrs Lamb lowers her sack to the carpet, her face strong and serene in the low blue light. She’s not going to oppose him, but neither will she help; so Will advances on the door, reaching for the handle.
‘If I hear trouble,’ she says, ‘I’m damn well coming in.’
*
The room isn’t large. That it’s lit – a single beeswax candle over on the mantelpiece, close to guttered – gives Will pause, but he sees no one. A moderately sized four-poster is set against the opposite wall, its crimson curtains drawn; two tall windows look out into the empty night. It’s Tom’s, though. That cheap suit lies carelessly on a chair and those are his shoes on the rug, four feet apart, arranged as if kicked off. And there, under one of the windows, laid in the middle of a small desk, are the sketchbooks.
Will goes over to them. The clasps are fastened – the loose leaves present. It looks as if they haven’t even been opened. He’s frowning at this, mildly perplexed, when he notices the album beneath: dark blue board with a spine bound in black canvas, laced shut with a length of black ribbon. Tom prefers these to sketchbooks, liking to shuffle his sheets about, pass them around, lend them to people. Will deliberates for a second, then gently sets the Endymion centrepiece between his feet. He picks this album up, unties the ribbon and eases open the cover.