Will & Tom (4 page)

The company – Mary Ann excepted – attempts to be impressed by Douglas’s tale. An awkwardness persists, however; and before ten more minutes have passed, Frances gathers in her silken shawl and rises from her chair, giving the ladies their cue to depart. Her sister is away immediately, rushing around the table in a wide circle and off through a door at the back of the room. The two other women follow at a more leisurely pace, arms linked, sharing a whispered joke that Will suspects is at Mary Ann’s expense. Frances is equally unhurried, but she sweeps rather than strolls – stopping by a sideboard to murmur an order to the ever-present Mr Cope. He bends down to offer his ear, then nods once in obedient understanding.

The door closes behind her, to a collective release of breath. Costly jackets are removed, wrapped into balls and hurled aside; waistcoats are unbuttoned; sweat-sodden shirt-tails are wrenched free from breeches. Servants bring in crystal brandy decanters, large tumblers and trays of sweetmeats, folding back the tablecloth to set them upon the polished wood beneath. Intrigued, Will leans forward to scrutinise the jewel-bright confections – selecting one that is a rich raspberry red and moulded in the shape of a conical sea shell. He gives the point a cautious nibble; the soft, jellied flesh dissolves instantly, flooding his mouth with a taste of summer fruit so succulent and intense that he nearly blurts out an oath.

Beau wishes to clear the air. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says, ‘please tell me that you are far too wise to pay any mind to that saucy talk concerning my younger sister.’ He props a foot on the empty chair to his left. ‘None of what we said was of any consequence. God knows, Mary Ann has had a miserable time of it lately. I’m sure you’ll have heard the rumours – the scurrilous stories that swirl about London. It was not gallant of us to wave it before her up here as well.’

The others indicate that they understand Beau and Mr Purkiss spoke only in jest – Douglas adding that his wife was damnably prone to over-reaction where her sister was concerned. Will, for all his theorising, has heard none of these rumours about Mary Ann. Keen to learn more, he wonders how best to assure his host of his discretion.

Mr Purkiss is watching him, his pocked face heavy with contempt. ‘An appropriate moment for you to withdraw, Mr Turnbull, wouldn’t you say?’

Will looks to Beau. He is swilling brandy around in a tumbler; he makes no objection, not even to the error regarding Will’s name. A silence settles upon the dining room. These fine gentlemen will say nothing else while the painter is present. He is being dismissed.

There is a second or two’s numbness while Will fully apprehends what is happening – and then a jolt of furious, dizzying energy. Lips pursed hard, he clambers from his chair like a man dismounting a difficult horse. The plum waistcoat has gone awry and one of his stockings is coming loose from his breeches. He doesn’t attempt to adjust them. Drawing himself up, he announces that he will retire for the evening – adding, a little more pointedly than is politic, that he has
much work to do
. A cursory bow and he is off across the carpet, accelerating shoe-squeaks marking his progress to the door.

The music room beyond is far darker, lit by only a triple-stemmed candelabrum placed atop a pianoforte. Will slows, feeling a gummy sensation in his right palm: the remainder of the shell-shaped sweetmeat, carried with him from the table, is starting to liquefy against his skin. All appetite gone, he looks about distractedly for somewhere to dispose of it.

His mind teems with unpleasant questions. Was he asked here specifically to be mistreated? It’s beginning to feel deliberate. Has he perhaps offended Beau in some way, or connected himself inadvertently to an enemy of the Lascelles? Is this all, in short, a
trick?
Have they dragged him out to Harewood in order to avenge a slight received during the season, in a London drawing room or pleasure garden? Will has grown up listening to the
ton
talk in Father’s shop, gossiping unguardedly while they were shaved. He knows very well how they delight in their cruel games and obscure vendettas – in wreaking precisely this kind of humiliation. The only rational course for him is to leave, at first light if not that same evening. He makes for the hall door.

‘Mr Turner.’ It is Mr Cope, back at the entrance to the dining room. ‘One moment, if you please.’

Beau saunters through. He glances at his valet with mild resentment, like a man forcibly parted from his brandy and the company of his friends; but, nearing Will, he plasters on a rueful smile.

‘My apologies for Purkiss, Mr Turner. The fellow is brusque as a baboon, really he is. And I am sorry, also, if I have appeared inattentive – not the case, I assure you. It has been a trying day for everyone at Harewood. Relocation, on the scale that we must perform it, is so very taxing. The clothes alone, great Jupiter …’ He sighs, weaving drunkenly into a window alcove. ‘I have been busy these past months, furthermore, in the auction rooms – specimens of finest porcelain, you understand, cast in the workshops of poor King Louis and several of his departed courtiers. Nothing that would be of interest to
you
, I daresay, but it must all be unpacked under close supervision. The servants simply cannot be relied upon to—’

Will has had enough. ‘I want my terms, Mr Lascelles. Your letter let me believe that it was drawings you were after, drawings of your house. So I want my terms, sir. What views you’d have me do, and the money involved.’

Beau is blinking, amazed, as if he is entirely unused to being addressed in such a direct fashion. It is an act, deliberately unconvincing. ‘Well, of course, Mr Turner. I suppose we have not … I mean to say, I am aware that we—’

Mr Cope intervenes. ‘Mr Lascelles desires four views of the house, two close and two distant – you may select the orientation – and two other subjects of your choice, taken from the estate. For these six drawings, delivered in a complete condition to Lord Harewood’s residence on Hanover Square, he will pay you sixty guineas.’

Will pauses, then nods; it’s a solid contract, half the winter’s work right there, not to mention the valuable additions he might make to his sketchbooks in the valley and woods around the house. But things still don’t seem right. He’s being dispensed with. This is not the manner in which commissions should be made – laid out by a businesslike valet whilst his lord sways in the background.

Now, though, Beau is walking towards him with disconcerting purpose. ‘There are your
terms
, my solemn young sir,’ he proclaims. ‘I trust that they are to your satisfaction.’

He seizes Will’s hand, as if to seal their agreement with a shake – but instead turns it in both of his, examining it closely. Will stiffens, acutely aware of the sweetmeat still stuck to his palm. Beau makes no comment, brushing the ruby-red stub onto the carpet; then he isolates the thumb and holds it up for his valet’s inspection. Will is dragged to Beau’s side – pressed against the damp, voluminous shirt and the slippery flab beneath.

‘See here, Jim, look at that
nail!
A proper talon it is! Why, the damn thing must be half an inch long. The
scraper
, I believe they call it. Distinguishes the true watercolour man, the true artist, from the mere dabbler.’

Released abruptly, Will stumbles and almost falls to the floor. He regains his balance to find the two men contemplating him. Mr Cope is inscrutable, a towering silhouette in the bright dining room doorway; while Beau stands beside him in a boozy contrapposto, one hand on his hip, that oversized, florid face split by a sardonic grin.

‘Did I not say that our Mr Turner was the genuine article?.

*

Two days at most, thinks Will, hopping from the bottom step back onto the service floor. Two days to sketch this pile, and some bridge or lake in the vicinity, and I’ll be gone. The fat villain can rot out here with his fine French china and troublesome sister and idiot idler friends – and that unaccountable valet, that
Jim
, stuck barnacle-like to his master’s bloated hull. Their crude efforts to intimidate him, to humble him, won’t be successful. He vows it.

A
cockney project
indeed! The
genuine article
! Will suddenly wants to break something, to kick in that door panel, to rip the buttons from his new brown jacket and send them skittering down the corridor. But instead he stops; swallows hard; loosens his stock. He has been undervalued before. He has known every sort of maddening condescension.
It is nothing to him
. All that matters is work, and finally he has his terms. So, two days of diligent sketching – and then away again into the hills and woods of England, never to return. It’s not late. The studies could be started that same evening. Will is confident that he can recall enough of the house to lay in the beginnings of a close north-eastern view. He needs candles, though; he searched his bedchamber earlier and found none. The still room, Mr Cope said. Will corrects his waistcoat and stocking and sets off.

Few servants are about. Will reaches the middle of the floor, the bare vaults beneath the main hall, before he encounters anyone – a boy in an apron propped against a pillar, polishing his way through a sprawling herd of boots. This boy’s directions take him past a dining room, where footmen and maids sit at separate tables, eating quietly in close rows. Mr Noakes stands beside the plain fireplace, still in his tie-wig and livery, detailing the day’s lapses with stern, priestly disappointment. Will hurries by.

The still room is on the building’s western side, off to the right at the end of a passage, the door wedged open at the bottom with a split log. Beyond is something between a well-stocked laboratory and a back-alley curiosity shop. Sturdy shelves hold a great archive of jars, bottles and drums; bushels of dried herbs, earthenware dishes and copper jelly-moulds hang across every remaining inch of wall. It is stiflingly hot, the single high window firmly shuttered. The smells are many, mingled and layered; vinegar, cloves, baked fruit, lavender, some kind of roasted meat. A low stove supplies the only light, washing the room’s brown shadows with red and ochre, and adding a lambent edge to glass and tin. Will thinks of the Dutch paintings he has seen, at the houses of his London patrons – the cluttered huts and stables of Rembrandt or David Teniers. He walks in.

Mrs Lamb stands past the window, at a workbench invisible from the doorway. She has her back to Will, angling herself to catch the firelight, but has noticed his entrance. This, he sees, is her domain. It seems obvious now; the basket of purple berries, the interest in the gardener, the knowledge of the house’s fruit stocks. She is Harewood’s still-room maid. Her mob-cap is off and her hair unfastened, the tangled curls a vital, absolute black.

‘You’re down early, Mr Turner,’ she says, turning slightly, showing a cheekbone and a curving eyelash. ‘Supper was cleared but fifteen minutes ago. Did you not care to converse with Mr Lascelles and his friends?’

‘I’ve work to do, madam. I need rest.’

‘Such dedication.’ Will can feel the spread of her smile; she’s guessed the truth. ‘Few men would walk so willingly from Mr Lascelles’ table. He’s on familiar terms with royalty, you know. Frequently mistaken for the Prince of Wales.’

‘It was mentioned.’

Mrs Lamb faces Will now and he is struck anew by the
fullness
of her, her height and bearing, the span of her hips – a sheer womanly presence that dwarfs and bewilders him. She’s grinding peppercorns in a pestle and mortar, twisting her wrist with slow strength.

‘They’re ambitious,’ she says, ‘this new branch of the family. Baron in’t sufficient. Less than two years since they inherited and they already see themselves at the big palace, dining with King George. Half a dozen more mansions like this one affixed to their name.’

Will looks at the stove, at the pans bubbling gently atop it, and is unable to stop the thought of patronage entering his mind.
Do good work
, whispers Father’s voice,
and this family will surely use you again
. ‘Well,’ he says; then nothing.

‘Candles, is it?’ Mrs Lamb asks, putting down the pestle and mortar. She opens a drawer and reaches inside. ‘These was dipped only last week. Should burn decent enough.’

The candles are tallow, tapered and dirty grey. Shaped from animal fat, they smoke copiously and are prone to sputtering – and their light is poor, barely adequate for reading, let alone making a sketch. Will thinks of the candles that shone so brightly in the dining room upstairs: finest beeswax, white as milk and a clear foot long, superior even to those that he has Father buy back in Covent Garden.

‘Ain’t there nothing else?’ He hears the curtness in his voice, the flat twang of London streets; immediately abashed, he wants to apologise, to revise his query, but can’t locate the words.

Mrs Lamb, wrapping a dozen of the candles in a thin sheet of paper, appears unperturbed. ‘There’s no beeswax below stairs, sir,’ she informs him, ‘if that’s your meaning. The cost, see. Our good steward has them locked away in his office.’

Will’s incredulity overtakes his embarrassment. ‘But Lord Harewood is one of the richest men in England.’

‘Oh, Mr Turner.’ Mrs Lamb walks over and presses the packet into his hands, holding them just an inch before her bosom. ‘Don’t you know the nobility at all?’

‘But—’

‘These are a special recipe of my own. They may surprise you.’ She is near, disconcertingly so; she smells of orange peel and fresh pepper. Her expression is dryly sympathetic.
You are strange
, it seems to say,
but I like you nonetheless
.

Will tucks the packet under his arm and bids her goodnight. His smile is faint; remarkable enough, though, after the day’s myriad confusions and annoyances. It lasts almost the whole way back to the building’s eastern side – when he lights one of the candles at a wall-bracket and knows at once that Mrs Lamb’s creations are no better than any he’s encountered before. The nimbus hardly seems to cover the length of his arm as he bears it to his chamber. He sets the candle in a saucer upon his chair, sooty smoke streaming from the flame like steam from a kettle. If three or four of the wretched things were grouped together, he thinks, there might just be enough light to work by. He starts to unwrap the rest of Mrs Lamb’s packet – and sees that something is printed on the inside of the paper, a diagram of some sort. He shakes out the candles and unfolds it.