Authors: Matthew Plampin
‘Be sure to wait for me in the morning,’ he says. ‘We’ll have one good day out here together, Will Turner.’
*
The service floor is on high alert. Maids and footmen hurry along the corridors; orders and queries are shouted through the haze of tallow smoke. There is a crisis, Will soon learns – too many guests for the dining room. Nobody can agree whether this is due to faulty information from the family as to how many were invited, or late, unsanctioned additions, hidden in the larger carriages, but the talk is of relocating the dinner to the gallery. This would involve retrieving the banqueting table from a store-room, assembling it upstairs and then setting it for twenty-eight, all in a matter of minutes – an undertaking viewed with a mixture of panic and black resolve. Mr Noakes stands at a corner, up on a stool; clad in livery, the tie-wig in his hand, he dabs his shining pate with a handkerchief as he yells for the groom of chamber.
Will edges by unremarked. His goal is the kitchen, and the supper he hopes will be available within. He succeeds in reaching the doorway. Servants stream constantly in and out. Past them, he glimpses billowing steam clouds, a surface covered with gold-leafed plates, a spout of orange flame. There is a searing hiss, like fat sliding across a hot pan; someone, the chef presumably, curses loudly in French. Will moves on, further into the house. If he enters that kitchen now and asks to be fed he’ll be lucky not to have a spoon thrown at him. Better to sit in the servants’ hall until the weight of their duties has eased.
Suddenly the servants come to a stop, stepping against the walls, bowing their heads and dropping cramped curtseys. Beau walks through, unmindful of all, on his way to rejoin the festivities on the state floor; Tom Girtin is beside him, finishing a story. Will slips down a corridor, out of sight. He recognises this tale immediately. It’s one of Tom’s favourites.
When they were but fourteen years of age, the two of them had been due to join a sketching party to Hampton Court, under the stewardship of Tom’s erstwhile master, Edward Dayes. A boat was hired, and the company of young artists and apprentices gathered on the wharf at Blackfriars. Will voiced a desire to sit at the prow; Dayes had this privilege marked for himself. The resulting clash, between a renowned watercolour artist and a barber’s son from Maiden Lane, was terrible to behold, and resulted in Will remaining ashore, stalking back to Covent Garden as the boat and its mirthful cargo eased out onto the river.
‘The pattern of Will’s life was set that morning,’ Tom concludes. ‘Everything since has been mere reiteration.’
Beau laughs. ‘It is fair to say, then, that Mr Turner tends towards obstinacy?’
‘He’s a brother to me, honestly; but the most ill-tempered old donkey, denied his feed-bag and left out in the rain, is a picture of good humour by comparison.’
They mount the stairs and are gone. The servants return to work as if freed from a spell. Will takes a breath; he rubs the frown lines from his brow. His capacity for astonishment or umbrage at this situation is exhausted. Tom’s words, in truth, do not anger him particularly. Donkey, mule, ox – such epithets lost their sting long ago, and are now heard with something close to pride. Let them, he thinks. Let the Lascelles make Tom Girtin their pet. It’s hardly a secret that the fellow has no diligence, no discipline and a host of other defects. Let them wait month upon month for his drawings, long after Will’s are adorning their walls, winning widespread admiration. Let them—
‘A hand, Mr Turner, if you please?’
Mrs Lamb is at Will’s shoulder, standing close and smiling wide. She has a small sack clasped to her chest and another resting between her boots.
‘London brawn, sir, is what I need. Seems I’ve overreached myself – this here load is more than I can manage.’ She leans in yet closer, her mouth inches from Will’s ear, and lowers her voice conspiratorially. ‘I can promise you a fine reward.’
Will reaches for the sack on the ground. It holds only three slim silver trays – Mrs Lamb could surely have carried it without difficulty. This request for assistance is a ruse, but Will is content to play along. He has a question of his own for the still-room maid.
‘Lead on,’ he says.
She doesn’t move. ‘You’re friendly with him, in’t you – with this other artist, Mr Girtin. I saw you from my window, just now. Out on the lawn.’
‘We’ve known each other a good while.’
Mrs Lamb catches the distinction; her mouth narrows very slightly. ‘The gentleman’s arrival this afternoon was the talk of the house. He was at Harewood last summer as well, you understand. Among the very first guests the new family admitted. Couple of the housemaids grew quite besotted with him. Our dashing young painter.’
Will has no response to this. He adjusts his hold on the leather-bound sketchbooks.
Mrs Lamb is studying him with her black, unblinking eyes. ‘You weren’t told that your friend was coming here, were you, sir?’
‘Neither was he,’ says Will quickly. ‘Neither was Tom.’
The still-room maid brushes past, the stained cuff of her dress pressing against Will’s sleeve, then tearing away with a syrupy tackiness. ‘Goodness, Mr Turner, neither was anyone! You saw the confusion yesterday, when you showed up at our door. The family expect us to manage their little surprises, whatever they might be. Just look at the unholy bother down here this evening – twelve extra guests there are, and with no notice at all. A wonder we don’t rise up against ’em.’
Swinging about, Mrs Lamb advances imperturbably into the crowded junction of corridors before the kitchens. Will follows, trying to keep in her wake and out of everyone’s way. This is impossible: when a footman strides from the western stairwell, he has to skip sideways to avoid a collision. The servant is bearing a silver wine cooler, an ornate piece with lion’s feet at its base, filled almost to the brim with fresh vomit. Mr Purkiss is named as the culprit; wearily, as if this is but the latest in a line of similar misdemeanours.
‘Life in service, eh, lad?’ says Mrs Lamb to the footman. ‘Does it match your boyhood dreams?’
‘Enough now,’ calls Mr Noakes from his stool, over the laughter. ‘Sluice room with that, Mr Jenkins.’
The passage to the still room is quieter, a rich, jammy smell thickening the air. They go inside; moulds and pans, recently used, are piled upon the dormant stove, and perhaps two dozen tallow candles burn in a range of improvised holders. A stout table has been brought in and stood in the centre of the room. Across its middle, in their hundreds, are jellied sweetmeats. This is their source. Dusted lightly with sugar, they are arranged in rainbow bands – ruby red sea shells, like the one Will sampled; stars of jade with trailing tails; azure fishes beside coral-pink piglets.
‘My contribution,’ says Mrs Lamb, ‘to this most magical of nights. A new batch, Mr Turner, made especially. Pass over the trays, would you?’
They are alone, the door standing ajar behind them. Will sets down the sack. ‘Them candles you gave me,’ he says.
‘Oh aye. How d’ye find them? Any better?’
Will unclasps the larger sketchbook and takes the
Brookes
print from under the front cover. The moment is not nearly as dramatic as he envisaged. Mrs Lamb looks at the page for a second only. It leaves her totally unconcerned. She starts to stack dirty bowls and utensils at the table’s edge, clearing a space by the sweetmeats.
‘Mr Turner,’ she says, ‘you must pay no mind to that. It’s speakers in the markets, sir, over at Leeds and elsewhere. The scoundrels will stuff their pamphlets into a basket without so much as a by-your-leave. I use them for scrap.’ She heaves a chopping board to the floor. ‘I’m sorry, truly, if that one upset you.’
‘It didn’t
upset
me, madam,’ Will lies hotly. ‘It simply … it …’ He stops, wrong-footed. ‘It was chance, then? An accident?’
The still-room maid tosses a long knife into a dish, the bone handle clattering around the rim. ‘Heavens, Mr Turner, so mistrustful! Tell me, what else could it be? Why might I have done such a thing on purpose?’
Will’s gaze strays to the bowed hull of the
Brookes
. ‘That I don’t know.’
‘There’s the blessed family for a start, and the minions they have hereabouts. If Noakes or Cope found a body with summat like that they’d see them whipped like they was caught poaching rabbits. Why didn’t you rid yourself of it?’
Staring now, Will is thinking of the slave ship upon the open sea, and how it would move; the dreadful compression of humanity below deck as it rolled upon a wave; the hundreds of gallons of freezing saltwater that would pour in through the hatches. ‘I don’t know that either.’
Mrs Lamb comes around the table to retrieve her sack. She slides out the silver trays and lays them in a row, upon the knotted wood. ‘There’s more,’ she says, almost casually, ‘if you want them, that is. In that drawer.’
Will is snapped back to the still room. ‘What d’you mean?’
She shrugs. ‘Just seems that you’re holding on to that one very tightly, Mr Turner. Perhaps it speaks to you. To your Christian conscience.’
Will returns the
Brookes
to his sketchbook, refastens the clasps and looks towards the door. Is this why she wanted him in there? Why she snagged him in the corridor? He has an instinctive wariness of causes. Painters of any ambition take care to remain independent. He knows a couple of politically minded artists back in London and it’s proving a pronounced obstacle to their rise. ‘I don’t, madam. I assure you.’
The still-room maid shrugs again and begins to transfer the sweetmeats from table to tray, plucking up three or four of the miniature piglets at a time; and then she changes the subject so deftly and completely that it’s as if their discussion of the
Brookes
hadn’t occurred.
‘In’t it
strange
, though,’ she says, ‘that the family should be choosing to put on such a large entertainment as this one upstairs. Word down here is that Mr Lascelles and his sisters – one of his sisters, anyhow – should rightfully be hiding themselves away.’
Will, still a little flustered and contemplating his exit, wasn’t listening. ‘Beg pardon?’
‘And there’s the death.’ Mrs Lamb adjusts a couple of the piglets. ‘Some might say that it’s difficult to mourn an infant only a day old, already buried down in Huntingdonshire, and with a twin still living. But their brother Henry would be unimpressed, I reckon, and injured perhaps, to see all this jollity at Harewood barely two months later.’
This Will hears. Henry Lascelles is the second son, the politician. Will was unaware that he’d suffered such a loss. Small children die easily, though, and babies especially; it is not, in his experience, regarded as grounds for any prolonged seclusion. ‘What was the first thing? The sisters?’
Mrs Lamb, starting on the fishes, is happy to tell him. ‘They say that our Miss Lascelles found herself in a spot of trouble down in London. Quite compromised, she was. The poor dear had to be whisked off post-haste, back to Harewood.’
Just as Will deduced. He sees Mary Ann flouncing from the dining room upstairs, her footfalls rattling the glassware; Beau’s show of contrition once she was gone. ‘What happened?’
‘D’ye really not know, Mr Turner? D’ye not read the London papers?
The Intelligencer
and suchlike?’
Gutter rags were always heaped around Father’s shop, pored over by the clientele, every veiled reference and pseudonym debated at length. Will, concerned only with art reviews, never looks at them. ‘I confess that I don’t.’
The first silver tray is covered, loaded with confectionary. Mrs Lamb switches to the stars, continuing her revelations with steely levity. ‘You’ll be unaware, then, that Miss Lascelles’ mishaps are followed closely in their pages. All the available details. They find their way up here eventually. And those on the staff who wintered at Hanover Square saw plenty of it for themselves.’ She taps a clot of sugar from a star’s tail. ‘There was an affair, Mr Turner, and a wild one at that, and then there was a jilting. Our young miss was knocked off some gentleman’s boots like a lump of dung.’
‘Who was he?’
‘No one can discover. A mysterious nobleman so very rich that the prospect of the Lascelles’ millions leaves him unmoved, and with enough sway on Grub Street to keep his name the subject of guesswork only.’ Mrs Lamb straightens up for a few seconds, wiping a palm on her apron. ‘It’s a grand humiliation for her, to be sure. For the lot of them. Yet here they are inviting dozens to dine and drink in their home, and artists,
two
artists no less, to sketch in its grounds.’ She begins to fill the final tray. ‘It don’t fit.’
‘Perhaps they think it best to act as if unaffected.’
Again, her expression is doubtful; and then, noticing something behind him, it grows distinctly frosty. Will turns to find Mr Cope standing in the doorway. An uncomfortable pressure creeps up behind Will’s ears. It is impossible to say how much the valet might have heard. He curses himself for indulging in such careless gossip.
‘Mr Turner is a painter, Mrs Lamb,’ says Mr Cope, calm and unforgiving. ‘He is the guest of your master. He is not at Harewood for you to collar whenever you need an errand boy.’
The still-room maid’s smile is terrifying, a parody of graciousness. ‘Why, and a very good evening to you too, Mr Cope! The young gentleman has only been helping me for a minute. Besides which, might I point out that it is
dark?
What painting could he be doing now?’
Will’s eyes go back to the valet.
‘Mr Turner is here at the invitation of Lord Harewood’s son.’ Mr Cope speaks more slowly, as if for an idiot. ‘He has specific tasks assigned to him and little time in which to perform them. You are not to distract him with duties that belong properly to domestic servants. Do you follow?’
The false smile drops away. Mrs Lamb shifts back from the table and plants a fist against her hip. ‘It were common courtesy, that’s all. I had a heavy burden and Mr Turner was good enough to offer me assistance. Few of your precious
domestic servants
would do the same.’