Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Matthew Plampin 2018

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Matthew Plampin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover illustrations © Whistler Butterfly, c.1890 (pencil on paper), Whistler, James Abbot McNeil (1834-1903) / Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, USA / Gift of Charles Lang Freer / Bridgeman Images (Whistler’s signature); Shutterstock.com (peacock).

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008163648

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008163631

Version: 2018-12-28

Praise for Mrs Whistler

‘Mrs Whistler is a beguiling glimpse of a fascinating world … This novel is a delight’

The Times

‘A terrific novel … It springs off the page, bristling with life. A vivid and absorbing portrait of bohemian London and the love affair between Whistler and his long-suffering but spirited muse’

Deborah Moggach

‘Vividly engaging … a novel that conjures up the Victorian art world in rich colours’

Sunday Times

‘A delightful book’

Literary Review

‘A richly imagined historical novel, full of depth and vitality’

Sunday Times Culture

Dedication

For Sarah

Epigraph

‘Maud could tell the whole story, but she will not.’

Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell,

The Life of James McNeill Whistler (1908)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: The Falling Rocket

Part Two: Arrangement in Grey and Black

Part Three: The Gold Scab

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also by Matthew Plampin

About the Publisher

Part One

October 1876

Maud woke to the sound of a piano. The room around her was dark, its heavy shutters closed. Jimmy was standing to the left, framed by a doorway. She started to speak, to ask what was happening, and he darted forward, shimmering slightly as he passed. Angling her head, she watched as he went to the end of the bed, collected together his possessions and packed them into an old leather bag. When this was done, he whipped off his smock, revealing the suit beneath; and there was that glittering again, like golden fish scales. She realised it was tiny flecks of the Dutch metal he was applying downstairs.

‘Up,’ he said.

The piano was somewhere towards the bottom of the house. It was being played much too hard, attacked almost, the music tangled and all out of time. After a short struggle with the bedclothes – which were the best cotton, far finer than theirs – Maud managed to rise onto an elbow.

‘What in heaven—?’

‘Leyland has reappeared,’ Jimmy told her, cramming the smock into his bag. ‘And he is displeased. We must absent ourselves, my girl, tout de suite.’

Maud swung her legs over the side of the bed, her toes spreading on the bare floorboards. Her shift was damp with sweat. She smelt rather ripe, an oniony sharpness mingling with the curdled whiff of nausea. Despite the warmth, a shiver prickled up the back of her neck; the shadowy room, empty save for the bed, seemed to drift like a raft on a pond.

‘It’s after three,’ said Jimmy. ‘You’ve been asleep for nearly five hours.’ He stopped to study her. ‘How are you faring?’

‘Well,’ she lied. ‘Better.’

‘Come then,’ he said, adjusting the length of lavender ribbon that served him as a necktie. ‘Haste, Maudie. Let’s be off.’

Maud dressed as quickly as she could. Stockings, petticoat and corset. One of her everyday gowns, the colour of old brick with black lacquered buttons. The fabric felt odd against her skin, stiff and coarse, and her boots were tight, as if they’d shrunk a size while she slept. She gathered in her hair, winding it into a loose, greasy bun. Jimmy waited by the open door with the bag between his feet, wiping Dutch metal from his eyeglass with a handkerchief, wincing as the piano struck a particularly jarring note. Maud eased herself from the bed and went over to him, grinning a little as she looked at that mobile, actorly face; the white forelock resting amongst the oiled black curls; the small, sardonic line etched at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were a bright, sun-bleached blue. Wide at first, they dipped until very nearly closed, like a cat’s. He smiled back at her with affectionate impatience.

‘My hat,’ she said, picking a gold flake from his moustache. ‘Think it’s downstairs.’

Jimmy slotted the eyeglass into his breast pocket, scooped his bag from the floor and took her hand. Together they started through the house. Even now, moving at speed, her head muddled by sleep and sickness, and that terrible music grinding out in the background – Beethoven was it meant to be? – the pair of them seemed to sweep across the expanse of the landing; to descend the staircase, lent majesty by that grand marble curve; to proceed into the swank hallway below. It was borrowed, of course, wholly counterfeit, but it felt good nevertheless.

They swerved right, towards the dining room. This was Jimmy’s realm, where he’d spent much of the summer. He’d been brought in to finish off the original, rather dull decorative scheme – left incomplete, Maud understood, after its designer fell ill – and had decided instead to transform it into something truly astonishing. She hadn’t been in there for a day or two, which refreshed the effect – so much so that she slowed to a halt upon the paint-spattered floorboards, her hat momentarily forgotten. It was like entering a pavilion at a great international fair. The woodwork, the many yards of intricate spindle shelving, had been coated with gleaming gold. Much of the wainscot, cornice and ceiling was now gold also, and was being overlaid with a pattern of Prussian blue peacock feathers. And there, on the inside of the shutters, were the birds themselves. The central set had been closed, as if to show them off to a caller. A pair of peacocks perched at the top of the tall panels, their magnificent tails arranged beneath them in a cascade of fronds and scales and glistening discs. They were Japanese in character, ancient-looking and otherworldly. The low light in the dining room didn’t place them at the least disadvantage; the gilded wood positively blazed in the gloom, while the blues appeared a rich, fluid black.

That Maud was at Jimmy’s side, that she was helping him to do this – his finest achievement yet, sure to open up a whole new territory – made her so extraordinarily proud it brought tears to her eyes. There was bitterness in her too, though, just a hint; for already, before its completion, this splendid thing had become tainted. A week or so earlier, Jimmy had returned home to Chelsea in a state of fizzing agitation, talking of a development; of how the philistines were everywhere, absolutely everywhere, even lurking within those one had previously thought enlightened, with whom one had considered oneself friends. Eventually, after much shouting and cursing, the full story had been extracted. Frederick Richards Leyland, the house’s millionaire owner, had made an unannounced visit from his base of operations in Liverpool. His reaction to Jimmy’s efforts – undertaken without prior consultation, as a marvellous surprise, a gift to the entire Leyland family – had been, well, a touch disappointing.

‘He didn’t ask for it. That was his response. He didn’t ask for it and he didn’t want it. Not the gold, not the peacocks. Not even your flowers, Maudie.’

Under the original scheme, the dining-room walls had been covered with antique leather, brownish yellow in tone and patterned with spiralling ribbons of summer flowers. When Jimmy had taken over he’d decided that a number of these blooms had to be retouched, with their colours switched from red to blue – and that this task should be entrusted to Maud, in her occasional role as his pupil. It had been monotonous work in truth, with several hundred little flowers to be repainted exactly the same, but she’d done it with enormous care. Learning that it had merely added to the patron’s discontent hadn’t been pleasant.

‘It was like having a lead ingot tied around my neck,’ Jimmy had continued, ‘and being tipped into the goddamned river. Nine years, Maud. Nine years I have been cultivating that unappealing fellow. Much indeed has passed between us, oh yes, well beyond the scope of artistic patronage. And yet throughout all of this, throughout all of my attempts to school him in art, Leyland has understood, truly understood, not a single goddamned jot. All that discourse, all that forbearance, all that blasted time – squandered!’

The room, however, had to be finished. Of this Jimmy had been quite certain. He wanted London society to see precisely what this shipbroker from Liverpool had chosen to reject. Leyland had gone north again, to attend to his business, and so the slighted artist had embarked upon a last surge of industry. He’d moved to Kensington, living in the vacant, half-furnished house, enduring the scrutiny of an increasingly suspicious caretaker and applying himself entirely to his labour. Maud had come to see him that morning, with food and a couple of clean shirts. It had been her first visit, on account of this lingering weakness in her stomach. She’d hoped it was gone, more or less, but the jolting of the omnibus had left her so wracked with cramps that she’d been obliged to head directly upstairs, to the room Jimmy had been using, where she could rest without disturbance.

But now disturbance had found her out. The piano hit a crescendo, like a crate of bottles cast onto the ground, then, with barely a pause, lurched into another piece. Maud looked towards the hall, wondering how fast they could get away. ‘What happened between you two?’

Jimmy released her hand. He’d thought of a few things of his own that he wanted to take with him, and began a rapid survey of the tools and materials that lay about, picking out this and that, tucking brushes and knives and pencils into his jacket pockets. ‘A new friend had stopped by. The Marquess of Westminster.’

‘Oh, the marquess, was it?’

‘What can I say? His lordship wished to be shown the room. Word is going around, Maudie, of what has been done here. Everyone wishes to see it, from society and the press. And everyone who comes is quite awed.’ Jimmy looked up at the majestic, mystical birds arrayed across the shutters, a trace of reflected gold colouring the whiteness of his throat. ‘But then, honestly, how the devil could they be otherwise?’

Maud’s stomach groaned; she swallowed, her amusement fading. The smells in the dining room seemed especially pungent that afternoon, the cloying, heady odour of varnish mixing disagreeably with the metallic tang of the Dutch metal.

‘Our marquess, however, is not one merely to admire – no, my girl, he wanted it for himself. He’s taken to me, I think. Told me he liked Americans, and Southerners in particular. Something to do with mental independence. At any rate, he was soon talking of how he would have me let loose on a wing of Eaton Hall. He was ready to make terms, right there and then.’ Jimmy frowned; he gave his feathery white forelock a twist. ‘But then Leyland showed himself. Fresh from a railway carriage and ready to kill, in that dead-eyed way of his. The marquess’s compliments were thrown back in his face. The room, and by extension its creator, were maligned most viciously. And this nobleman, this fine person of taste and manners, was all but ejected from the premises.’ He snatched his cane – a length of bamboo, rather longer than was usual – from the corner in which it had been left and marched back to the door. ‘I really cannot stay here another moment. We must go, Maud. Now.’

Maud’s hat was hanging on the back of a wooden chair, beneath an empty stretch of patterned leather on the south wall. It was straw, tied around with black taffeta; as she put it on, an uneasy sensation tightening around her midriff, she spotted a tin basin on the seat of the chair, used for thinning pigment but presently empty. Best to be safe, she thought, and tucked it under her arm.

Jimmy was beckoning, reaching out for her hand, starting them towards the front door as if they were running for a steamer. It was too much. After only a half dozen steps the basin slipped free, crashing against the marble floor. The lopsided sonata belting up from below broke off abruptly. Jimmy hissed a curse; and leaving the basin where it had landed, they hurried out into the street.

Leyland caught them thirty yards from the house. Jimmy was trying to flag down a hansom, which was proving rather difficult; he’d acquired a reputation among the cabmen of Prince’s Gate for pennilessness, for partially paid fares and absent tips, and the first few that went by ignored his hails completely. Maud watched Leyland approach, pulling a little nervously on Jimmy’s sleeve, but he affected not to notice until the shipbroker was directly beside them.

‘Whistler,’ said Leyland, ‘you will finish the room.’

Jimmy stood back from the kerb. ‘But why on earth would you want that, mon cher,’ he said, squinting at the dreary sky, ‘when you consider it such a calamity? Surely it would be best to start anew, with an artist more suited to your preferences?’

‘You are too close to completion. I will see it done, and your price agreed.’

The shipbroker was a tall, straight sort of man, standing a good foot over Jimmy and Maud. A neat dark beard masked a narrow chin, while blank black eyes stared from beneath a broad forehead. He was wearing his standard, somewhat peculiar costume: a black suit and elaborately frilled shirt, with shiny, buckled shoes, like a music-hall undertaker. There was nothing music-hall about his manner, though – he was utterly cold, his voice without expression. Maud had actually met him on three previous occasions, for dinners at Lindsey Row, at which he’d been awkward, humourless, quite unable to blend with the artists, writers and actresses seated around him. They hadn’t conversed exactly, but they had spoken. Those black eyes had roamed over her, proprietorial and unashamed. Now he paid her no notice at all.

‘We are to make our terms here in the street, are we?’ Jimmy asked. He was using his performance voice, Maud noticed, which was rather more high-pitched than normal, with everything exaggerated – the American vowels yet longer and the Frenchified flourishes more pronounced. ‘Like men haggling over a horse?’

Leyland waited.

‘Two thousand guineas, then. There’s my price. That’s what I asked you for, if you recall.’

Maud turned away, smothering a laugh. He was joking, surely. The dining room was extremely fine, of course it was – but two thousand guineas? That was enough to buy the bloody house it stood in.

Jimmy was perfectly in earnest, however. ‘Four hundred apiece for the three peacock shutters,’ he said, ‘and a further eight hundred for the rest. Very fair, Leyland, by any yardstick.’

‘Do not test me, Whistler. I could have you barred from the house. I could have those peacocks of yours torn out and burned in the garden.’

There was condescension in the shipbroker now. He believed he had Jimmy outclassed, that this was a matter of bargaining, of forming a contract − his province. Regardless of what he thought of the room, the fellow’s pride plainly insisted on victory, and the imposition of his will; that his artist be put in his place and led, chastened, back to work. Maud hugged herself, feeling the first spot of rain land upon her cheek. She knew for a cast-iron fact that it would not be as simple as that.

‘You are right.’ Jimmy inclined his head graciously, as if accepting a fault. ‘You are quite right. My apologies. Bon Dieu, how appallingly rude of me. The decoration is an out-and-out disaster, after all, as you have ruled – as you have just declared so candidly to the Marquess of Westminster, and no doubt many others. The only honourable course, my dear Leyland, the only course open to me as a gentleman and a person of manners, is for us to take this sum of mine and split it between us. I will pay my thousand guineas, as my share in the dining room, and you will pay yours.’

A cab pulled up, a four-wheeler, the driver seeming to recognise Leyland. He leaned over to ask the destination; at close sight of the shipbroker he thought better of it.

‘You are not serious.’

‘I want justice.’ Jimmy cracked the end of his cane emphatically against the pavement. ‘We bear alike the humiliation of this affair, do we not? You for having entered into it so unknowingly; me for having disappointed so very publicly? It only seems right that we should therefore bear the expense in the same proportions. One thousand guineas apiece.’

The figure was uttered with a certain swagger, almost as if it was being attained rather than surrendered. Maud could sense Jimmy’s satisfaction; she could imagine him at the head of their dinner table, in fact, recounting the exchange to laughter and applause. Her head was beginning to spin. She wanted badly to sit down.

Leyland looked to his gaudy shoe buckles, digesting this proposal. ‘Should I consent,’ he said, ‘the sum would be my payment to you for the dining room, and a handsome payment indeed. There would be no question of it being half of anything.’

‘Naturellement,’ Jimmy replied, with an obliging nod. ‘But I must be allowed the time I need. This is paramount, Leyland. I won’t be hurried out or interrupted. I won’t have your blessed caretaker always looking over my shoulder.’

‘You will have the remainder of the year,’ Leyland told him. ‘I am leaving for Liverpool in the morning, and won’t be returning to London until December at the earliest. I expect industry, though, Whistler. Promptitude.’ He glanced Maud’s way at last, and she had a keen, uncomfortable notion of how she must appear: half their age, pale and unkempt, hair falling from beneath her straw hat. Not respectable in the least. ‘I cannot permit any more of this … coming and going. These visitors, whomsoever they may be.’

Jimmy opened the cab door, gave the driver their address and slung in his bag. ‘It will be finished soon enough. I have no desire at all to prolong this experience, Leyland, believe me.’ He reclaimed Maud’s hand. ‘I shall take Miss Franklin here home and see her settled, and then return early tomorrow.’

And just like that they were going, leaving the millionaire businessman standing on the pavement in the gathering rain. Leyland seemed to have been wrong-footed. He simply stood there, arms by his sides, as Jimmy closed the cab door behind them.

‘One thousand,’ he stated, by way of farewell. ‘That is the agreement.’

*

‘There you have it,’ Jimmy declared. ‘There you have the philistine, Maud, revealed in his full and most ignoble aspect.’ The insouciant act was beginning to slip; Maud could see the anger quivering in his jaw. ‘I have to say that the crudity of his methods has been surprising. That business with the Marquess of Westminster, that deliberate insolence, was done merely to tenderise me, don’t you see, ahead of our little negotiation. This is the manner of creature we are dealing with here. A cut-throat professional.’

The cab turned out of Prince’s Gate. Rain was falling steadily now; people were ducking into doorways and opening umbrellas.

‘You asked him for two thousand guineas,’ Maud murmured.

Saying the sum aloud amazed her all over again. She thought of the recent spate of dinners at Lindsey Row, dinners she’d been too sick to attend, held after Leyland’s first reaction to the peacocks – councils of war, Jimmy had called them, with Godwin and Eldon and the rest of them. Had this figure been agreed then? There had certainly been a lot of laughter.

Jimmy crossed his hands atop his cane. ‘Labour has been carried out, my girl. Payment has to follow. That’s how it goes.’

‘But – two thousand guineas, Jimmy?’

‘Nothing had been agreed. Do your work, my friend Frederick Leyland said, and then let me know what I owe you. That’s how it stood between us.’

Maud was annoyed, she realised, beneath her perplexity. She could see this for what it was. Provocation. Cheek. ‘So knowing that he didn’t care for what you’d done, you decided to ask him for a bloody fortune. What good did you imagine that would do?’

‘The villain has twenty times that a year,’ Jimmy countered. ‘Many hundred times it in the bank. Gained, I might add, through business practices of the utmost ruthlessness. And anyway, Maudie, you heard what just happened. I have scaled back my bill. Let a thousand guineas go. It’s quite the move, don’t you think? The rejection of the yoke. A lesson in the limits of a millionaire’s power.’

He ran on for a while, growing increasingly pleased with himself – conceding that the lost money was significant, undeniably, but would soon be made elsewhere, once word of the dining room’s beauty had spread among people of true taste. Maud honestly didn’t know what to make of it all. She was dog-tired, despite having slept through so much of the day. Once again, also, she was being assailed by unspeakable smells, of the kind that tended to linger in public carriages. Old cheese and filthy clothes. The foul stuff that gathered beneath your toenails. These odours seemed to reach into her, to coat the inside of her throat, to coil around her innards. She stared hard out of the window. They were still a good ten minutes from home – from the broken gate and the grimy front door; from the panelled hallway beyond, leading through to the back; from the small cobbled yard and the outhouse in its corner.

Jimmy had fished his tobacco pouch from his pocket, along with a couple of papers. He rolled them both a cigarette, passing hers over. Maud accepted it, knowing that she could no sooner smoke the damned thing than eat it whole. He put a match to his own and a new aroma filled that tiny, rocking box. Maud liked to smoke, always had, since she was ten years old. Now, though, the smell of it made her think of bitumen and burnt hair, of blood blackening on a butcher’s floor, of something poisonous and revolting. The cab slowed, approaching a corner. Her fingers closed around the door handle and she was out, clinging to a lamp post like it was a ship’s mast in a storm, swinging around and sliding down, coughing up a rope of treacly, yellow-green bile in the rough direction of the gutter.

It went on for a while, until her convulsions produced only a ghastly croaking sound. Jimmy was close by, perhaps two feet away. Oblivious to the rain, he was sitting on the high kerb, his leather bag beside him, finishing off his cigarette. Behind him was a parade of fine shops, their lamps alight. Traffic was rolling past, all hooves and horse legs and spinning spokes. Their cab was nowhere to be seen.

‘Could it have been an oyster?’ he mused. ‘Or that trout, maybe, that we had the Wednesday before last? River fish, Maudie, should never be trusted. One simply does not know what they’ve been swimming through. Why, if I were—’

‘There’s a child,’ Maud said.

She released the lamp post and leaned against it, trying to straighten her hat. Her gown was wet through across the shoulders; a cold drip weaved inside her corset, running down to the small of her back. It had been obvious. A sickness that can’t be shaken. Constant, deadening fatigue. The horrible intensity of smells. And the courses, the blasted courses, late now by more than a week. For nearly four years Maud had managed to avoid even the slightest scare. She knew when the lapse had occurred, though – she knew at once. It had been on the morning Jimmy had finished the shutters. She’d come over to Prince’s Gate, having not seen him for five straight days; and those peacocks, those extraordinary, mystical creatures, had been there to greet her, seeming to have blinked into existence at the snap of Jimmy’s gold-smeared fingers. He’d been up all night and was quite wild with exultation, proclaiming his deep delight that it was her – his Madame, his muse, his sacred partner – who’d been the first to stand before them. She was there, he’d said, in the peacocks – could she not see it? The raw elegance in those necks, in those trailing tails? It was hers.

They’d moved closer, arms entwining, talking excitedly of how pleased the Leylands would be when they took up residence there, and the great advancement it would surely bring. She’d glanced at him admiringly; he’d caught her eye and held it, in a kind of dare; and it had happened, right there on the floorboards, amid the pots and brushes and screwed-up bits of paper.

Jimmy was quiet for a minute. Then he flicked his cigarette end into a drain and began to speak about Charlie, his six-year-old son, who was lodged somewhere near Hyde Park in an arrangement that was satisfactory for everyone. This didn’t bring much reassurance, however, either to Maud or Jimmy himself. He stopped mid-sentence, pinching the bridge of his nose, thinking no doubt of the money – the thickening wad of bills on the hall dresser; the back rent due on their damp little house; the deal he’d just made with Leyland, and the different terms that might have been reached.

‘We’ll find an answer,’ he said at last. ‘We will.’

Maud drew in a shivering breath. She knew what was required of her. The babe would arrive, and the babe would go – to a foster family elsewhere in London most probably. Jimmy wouldn’t have children under his roof. He’d made that plain from the beginning: inimical to art, he’d said. And dear God, Maud didn’t want it either! She was a model, for goodness sake – training to be an artist herself, with Jimmy’s tutelage and encouragement. This could wreck it all. She pressed a palm against her forehead. How could she have been so careless? So bloody stupid?

‘Edie will help,’ she muttered. ‘She knows people, I think, back in Kentish Town.’

Saying her sister’s name prompted a series of sudden thoughts, each one weightier and more unwelcome than the last. Sooner or later, she was going to have to visit Edie and submit to a barrage of I-told-you-so’s. Her slender body, starved with such discipline, would swell up to a grotesque size. Jimmy would have to find another model, a girl who might well be better and end up replacing her for good. And she was going to have to give birth. Lord above. All that blood and pain and madness. She gulped, and gasped; and she leaned over sharply to be sick again.

October 1876

Swooping in through the door of the Knightsbridge telegraph office, Jim snatched up a form and a pencil from the counter and settled himself ill-temperedly in a corner. For a second or two he took in the hushed, assiduous atmosphere, the smell of ink and electrical wire, the tap-tapping of the machines. Then he inserted the eyeglass and began to write.

Have received your cheque at last.

He hesitated. This really didn’t do justice to the indignities of the weekend. Scratching together enough coin for basic sustenance had taxed his ingenuity – and he’d give much, much indeed, to forget the disdainful gratification on the landlord’s boiled-beef face as another two days’ grace had been begged of him.

Pounds I notice.

The pencil, gripped very fiercely, now popped out from between Jim’s fingertips, disappearing onto the floor. He bit back an exclamation. This was no good. Already he’d used nearly a third of the available space. A telegram might be immediate, but there was insufficient room for his anger to unfurl its wings. He needed to write an old-fashioned letter, signed with the Whistler butterfly – copied and numbered, as had become his habit in this particular correspondence. Publication, both the threat and the reality, was a weapon he was perfectly prepared to wield. Why the devil not? Let the vindictive philistine be hoist by his own petard. He had a supply of pens and paper at Prince’s Gate. The notion of composing a damning missive under its recipient’s own roof had a compelling audacity to it; so Jim tore the telegraph form in half, then quarters, then eighths, returned the eyeglass to his breast pocket and strode back onto the Brompton Road.

He quickly became aware that someone in the telegraph office had followed him out. This fellow had fallen in a few feet behind, but was now drawing level, leaning in to peer beneath the brim of Jim’s hat. He was tall, substantially built and clad in pale grey.

‘Jimmy,’ he said. ‘Jimmy Whistler, my dear chap.’

Jim didn’t slow down. He recognised this voice: the foreign accent, slight but distinct, married rather curiously to a very English turn of phrase. ‘The Owl,’ he said.

‘How—’ The man weaved around a street-sweeper filling a sack with dead leaves. ‘How are you keeping, Jimmy?’

Looking sideways, Jim saw a long, reddish-brown moustache, a bright enamelled tiepin, and that decoration on his lapel, the folded strip of scarlet ribbon, said to be an honour of some kind from his native land. He knew this man well, or had done: Owl, the resourceful Anglo-Portuguese, an unequalled repository of art knowledge, on familiar terms with everyone. They hadn’t spoken, however, in at least five years; Owl remained close to a number of people Jim no longer saw. Whether this was by drift or rift he could scarcely remember.

‘You still Rossetti’s man, Owl?’

‘That,’ answered Owl, assuming a regretful air, ‘is a complicated question. Gabriel is a blessedly complicated cove. I may as well tell you, however, that it is coming to an end. I fear he and I have done all that we can do. I know that you two have long ceased your intimacy, Jimmy, but I fear for his health. He barely sleeps these days. Why, only the other week Watts arrived at dawn to find him up a tree in his nightshirt. Out on the Walk, this was – practically dangling over the bloody river. He claimed to be counting off the stars. Luckily I was on hand as well. Ended up luring the poor devil down with a beaker of brandy.’

This was Owl, Jim recalled, to the absolute degree. Some men wrote, some painted, some founded factories, or drew up legislation, or commanded troops in battle. The Owl talked. He had a tale for every situation, an endless roll of gossip and indiscretion – things that he really shouldn’t be repeating but was anyway, with every detail vividly and enthusiastically imparted.

‘Frederick Leyland, they say, is half mad with worry,’ Owl went on. ‘Watts tells me that he makes a special point of coming round whenever he’s in town – to spend time, you know, and discuss how he will arrange Gabriel’s canvases in his new London pile. I’ve heard talk of commissions as well. For the future. Something large.’ He paused. ‘Are you still engaged on the decoration there? Is that what brings you to this neck of the woods?’

Jim came close to smiling here – not an especially subtle fellow, this Owl – but his amusement was hindered by unease. So Rossetti got Leyland’s respect. Rossetti got shows of concern and allowances made, and further work promised to him. And for what? Certainly nothing as glorious as that dining room. Not by a very long distance. Jim’s unease grew into resentment. It was quite preoccupying. His eyes glazed over; he clicked his thumbnail against one of the ridges in his bamboo cane. He had to force his mind back to Owl’s enquiry.

‘Barely,’ he replied. ‘Today might well see the last of it.’ After which, he thought, I shall be gone. I shall flee that blasted place like it was Bluebeard’s oubliette. ‘I’ve other things to be doing. My contribution to the Grosvenor Gallery, for instance.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Owl. ‘Sir Coutts Lindsay’s exhibition. I’d heard that he’d approached you.’ An eagerness had crept into him, of the sort that preceded the asking of a favour. ‘I’d like very much to see the room, Jimmy, if I may. Since we are so close to it. Just for a few minutes, as you apply the finishing touches. What d’you say? Can it be done?’

The two men had arrived at the corner of Prince’s Gate; ahead were the Botanical Gardens, the glass roof glittering through a screen of denuded branches. Jim considered the Owl – his languid, humorous eyes, his squarish forehead and rounded chin, the high shine of his expensive-looking top-boots. This was a cavalier, a dandy of the slickest stripe, but his keenness was disarming. That morning, the prospect of showing the peacocks to someone who might value them had a definite appeal. Jim nodded in the direction of Leyland’s house.

Although perhaps a foregone conclusion, Owl’s opinion of the dining room was expressed with his usual flair. ‘Transporting,’ he declared, after two reverential circuits. ‘A chamber utterly apart from the rest of the world, far beyond its troubles and interruptions. It is like – it is like being at the pinnacle of a lofty tower. Or in a gilded car slung beneath a balloon, floating a mile above London.’

How could Jim, propped against the sideboard, not grin at this? ‘Yes, well,’ he said, prodding at an empty varnish tin with his cane, ‘I’m afraid that the patron may disagree.’

‘Leyland? What else can you expect, though, from such a creature? The fellow is callousness made flesh. A shark, old man, of the Great White variety.’

‘Why Owl,’ Jim observed, ‘you appear to know the gentleman.’

‘It is impossible, my dear Jimmy, to work on Gabriel Rossetti’s behalf and avoid him. There’s a fascination between them. A kinship, if you like, despite the obvious differences.’ Owl turned back to the room. ‘We’ve done a deal or two of our own as well, over the years. That Rembrandt head, do you remember?’

Jim did. Rembrandt, in his view, had been a rather optimistic attribution.

‘You can take a cur,’ Owl continued, ‘from the alleys of Liverpool. You can give it an ocean-spanning armada of iron-clad vessels. You can wash its hide, and dress it in mountebank frills and silver shoe buckles. And it is still, under it all, a cur. You can see it in Leyland’s eyes, very clearly. The way he looks at you as if he’d gladly bite off your damned hand. Did you know that his mother ran a pie-shop, back in his home city? Down on the quay?’

Owl spoke incautiously, without so much as a glance out towards the hall, apparently indifferent to the fact that he was standing in Leyland’s house; that anybody could be listening in, as far as they knew, even the cur himself. It was a display, Jim realised this, staged for his benefit, but there could be no denying the nerve involved.

‘I’d heard,’ he said.

‘And yet you were caught out by his reaction to your room?’ Owl faced him again. ‘Forgive me, Jimmy, but this is no enlightened prince. This is Frederick Richards Leyland. The most hated man in Liverpool. This is the modern British businessman, in all his bone-headed viciousness.’

‘I have received a schooling, this past week,’ Jim admitted, ‘in business wisdom – as Leyland understands it.’

‘He has paid you what he owes, though, hasn’t he?’

And then, almost to Jim’s surprise, he was telling the Owl everything. He abandoned his remote, stoical stance – profoundly uncharacteristic as it was – and provided a full account of his travails, assuming the same confidence, the same disregard for discretion, as his companion, relishing every disclosure and the sympathy with which it was received. The climax, the peak of indignation, was reserved for the events of that same morning.

‘So I set aside my material needs – which are grave, I don’t mind saying – and hatch a deal that is wholly to his advantage. He tells me to name my price, Owl, so I do, and when this is deemed unacceptable I agree to take only half of the rightful sum – rewarding him, in essence, for his philistinism. He makes me wait for it, of course. Three rather trying days. Yet finally it arrives. Bon Dieu! The trumpets sound – the angels sing. I tear open the envelope.’

Owl was listening intently.

‘It was pounds. Pounds, Owl! We have moved from the guinea of tradition, of honour – with which he has always paid me in the past – to the base sovereign, the payment of tradesmen. My fee was shorn of its shillings, and left fifty quid lighter as a result. I swear I nearly threw the thing on the fire.’

There was some truth to this. At the breakfast table, Jim had waved the offending cheque aloft, holding forth about how it was a vulgar insult and warranted immediate destruction. After a minute, Maud had risen from her chair and come to his side, to offer consolation he’d thought; but instead she’d plucked the crumpled rectangle of paper from his grasp, smoothed it against her thigh and tucked it into her sleeve for safekeeping.

Owl understood, however, in a way that dear Maud simply could not. ‘It’s the best the brute can do,’ he said. ‘The one stone he has left to throw. I pity him, almost.’ He gestured towards the room. ‘This, though – this alone remains the fact. All else is mere anecdote. Our friend Leyland has earned himself much the same place in history as the dullard who paid Correggio in pennies.’

Jim liked this. ‘Indeed.’

‘So in sum,’ said Owl, producing a cigarette case and offering one to Jim, ‘your patron works you like a slave. Looks upon your works with no more feeling than a beast of the field. Pays you like a joiner, or a greengrocer, or the man who brings him those frilled shirts of his, and less than half the proper amount.’ He struck a match and held it out. ‘Jimmy old man, I’d say this room was half yours, half yours at least. To do with as you damn well please. Remove the shutters, these wondrous peacocks, and sell them elsewhere. Enhance the design, if you see fit.’

‘Enhance?’ Jim, sensing criticism, was suddenly alert. ‘What d’you mean?’

Owl lit his own cigarette, untroubled by the sharpness of Jim’s tone. ‘The shutters are magisterial,’ he said. ‘It’s the only word. Hiroshige has been eclipsed. And the patterns, these feather motifs – again, exceptional, beyond fault. This, however, this leather …’ He pointed to the panels that stretched behind the shelves and spanned the empty space above the sideboard and fireplace. ‘You’ve made an attempt, I see that. But it doesn’t go. The flowers look Dutch, for God’s sake.’

He was right. Jim knew it at once. There was a challenge here too, plain as day. You have been supine, Owl was saying. Supplicatory. Is this really how an artist should behave?

‘They are antique,’ Jim said. ‘Several hundred years old, I’m told.’

Owl shrugged. He puffed on his cigarette. ‘It doesn’t go.’

*

December 1876

The front door opened, admitting a current of wintry wind; it nosed through the papers scattered across the dining-room floor, lifting the large mural cartoon like the airing of a bedsheet. Jim scowled atop his stepladder. Young Walter Greaves, dispatched on an errand an hour or so earlier, had been instructed most firmly not to use the main entrance. He was shouting out something to this effect when Maud hushed him. She’d been sitting in a corner, wearing her coat, reading one of the art papers; but now she was up, already on her way outside, making for the French doors behind the central set of shutters. He glanced down at her. Several months had now passed, yet he could detect no outward sign of her condition. Her face retained its striking angularity; her figure was as lissom as ever. A small part of him continued to hope that it was a false alarm.

‘Jimmy,’ she said. ‘That isn’t Walt.’

Jim cocked his head to listen. From the hall came not the assistant’s hob-nailed thuds but the sigh of fine fabric, dragging in folds across the bare stone. Maud left, closing the shutters silently behind her. Jim climbed from the stepladder and crept to the doorway. Mrs Leyland and Florence, the middle daughter, were standing in the unlit hall, little more than dark shapes against the marble. Dressed for travel, they were looking around them in a faintly expectant fashion. A male servant came in and summoned the caretaker from his downstairs parlour. There was a brief exchange, then all eyes turned towards the dining room. Jim pulled back; he considered quickly how he should be found.

The room, thankfully, was brilliant. It had been enriched past hope or prediction by Jim’s greatest change: the painting of those awkward leather panels with a deep, obliterating shade of Prussian blue. This had been a mighty feat indeed, demanding every last ounce of his strength and his vision. His hands and forearms were still stained a little, having a greenish, cadaverous hue; numerous aches hampered the movement of his shoulders, his elbows, his wrists. But none of this mattered. His satisfaction with the result was difficult to overstate. In certain sections – and particularly now, under gaslight – the effect was so smooth and intense that it quite confounded the notion of surface, the gilded shelves seeming to float before a field of pure colour. The whole thing was transformative. Entering the dining room changed your mood, the very feel of your skin.

And then there was the mural. Emblazoned across the southern wall – upon which Leyland had once talked of hanging one of Jim’s own canvases – this was the feature with which he was most pleased of all. He chose a spot beneath it and darted over, arranging himself next to the sideboard.

The two fine Leyland ladies stood speechless, blinking as people do when brought forward suddenly into the light. They looked remarkably similar at first: the compact luxury of their clothes, the corseted uniformity of their figures, the handsome solemnity of their faces. Leyland, however, was in the daughter as well – those dark, baleful eyes, that regrettably broad forehead – and seemed even to taint her aesthetic responses; for as her mother’s initial shock was replaced by a kind of incredulous regard, her own expression grew rather more negative.

‘It is every bit as bad,’ she announced, ‘as it sounded in that wretched newspaper. Father will be furious. He will be furious.’

Commendably direct, Jim thought. He’d never seen this in Florence before: how old was she, eighteen? It was hard to keep track. Over the past five or six years he’d painted nearly every member of this family, starting with Ma and Pa and working down from there. Florence’s portrait was the least complete of his Leyland pantheon, now stacked out of sight in a corner of the studio. She’d been a difficult subject, querulous and impatient and impossible to impress; and although wholly at leisure she’d granted him only four sittings, of a couple of hours each. Not at all how Jim liked to work. Luckily Maud had been on hand to stand in her place, just as she had done for the mother and elder sister – wearing the three different gowns, occupying the three different poses, with her usual ease.

‘My only wish, Miss Leyland,’ he said calmly, ‘was to give yourself and your family the most beautiful room that has ever been.’

‘Did you obtain my father’s permission for this? For any of it?’

‘I cannot apologise for inspiration, Miss, and the paths down which—’

‘What of the leather? Did you pause, even, before turning it all blue?’

Flippancy here became irresistible. ‘I did wonder for a moment if it would take the paint,’ Jim answered. ‘But it did, as you can see. Admirably.’

Florence’s right hand tightened its grip upon her left. ‘Mr Whistler, that leather was salvaged from a ship wrecked with the Spanish Armada. It cost my father a great deal.’

‘And it did not harmonise with the rest. There is really nothing more I can tell you, Miss Leyland. The colours, the patterns – they could not be made to work.’

This didn’t satisfy Florence, not in the least, but she would argue no further. She informed her mother that she was going to look around upstairs, then strode back through the doorway, calling tartly for a lamp. Mrs Leyland, walking the length of the room, made no reply. Jim sensed that the day’s journey had taken its toll upon family concord.

‘My husband is in London,’ she said, once Florence was out of earshot, ‘and will be arriving soon. He left us at the station. Apparently there was a call he had to make.’

‘I see.’

‘We are not staying here. Frederick has booked a suite at the Alexandra.’

‘My dear Mrs Leyland,’ said Jim, ‘I should hope you aren’t. Why, most of the furniture is still in crates.’

‘He has had a piano assembled, though, I assume?’

‘Bien sûr. The poor instrument is beaten to its knees each time he crosses the threshold.’

Mrs Leyland’s laugh was a shade too loud. ‘As I believe we have observed before, Mr Whistler,’ she said, ‘he plays just as he goes about everything else.’

Unlike her daughter, Frances Leyland had sat willingly for her portrait. She’d given her time generously – had been reluctant to leave, in fact, even as the day grew dim. It hadn’t taken much to prompt an unburdening. Perched on the studio chaise longue, wearing the loose flesh-pink gown in which Jim was painting her, she’d told him of the indifference and sullen silences, the dozens of petty abuses and betrayals – of a marriage warping into something intolerable. Jim had listened with sympathy and close interest, undeniably flattered by this sudden intimacy – yet also savouring the clandestine thrill of access to another man’s most private affairs. Naturally, he’d promised to tell no one, pledging himself to a bond of secrecy. An alliance had thus been forged, and was further strengthened as Mrs Leyland’s portrait had advanced almost to completion. Leyland had been unconcerned by this friendship, seeming to trust Jim as much as he trusted anyone. He had no inkling, needless to say, of its confidential depths.

Smiling still, Mrs Leyland laid a gloved hand upon her collarbone and looked around again at the absorbing richness of the blue, at the yards of lustrous feather-patterning, at the resplendent birds. ‘It is not at all how I expected. It is like walking inside a jewel box. A Japanese cabinet.’

‘My intention precisely,’ said Jim. ‘A Japanese cabinet. I am so glad, Mrs Leyland, that you at least can appreciate what I have done. Although, who knows – perhaps dear Florence is mistaken. Perhaps your husband will as well.’

The lady laughed again, at the improbability of this Jim supposed. The sound was caustic, and also strangely helpless. He was considering whether to express regret at how things had gone, or provide his justification, or simply to laugh himself, when he noticed that she was taking her first proper look at the mural behind him.

The two new peacocks faced each other across the expanse of painted leather, the gilt in which they’d been depicted built up to a low relief. Their bodies were tense, their heads in hard profile; for despite their grace, and the sweeps of ornate plumage that framed them, these creatures were locked in confrontation.

Wonder had wiped everything else from Mrs Leyland’s features. ‘What is—?’

Jim stepped leftwards to improve her view. ‘It is entitled The Rich Peacock and the Poor Peacock.’

‘They are fighting.’

‘The rich peacock would fight, yes. Certainly he would. See the angle of his wing, how he points with it so haughtily – how he puffs up that great tail of his. How his beak opens to squawk his commands and the eye flashes a murderous red.’ Jim glanced up: the eye-bead, twisted that same morning from the band of one of Maud’s more flamboyant hats, was pleasingly ruby-like. ‘In contrast, the poor peacock meets this unwarranted aggression with firmness, but also with a noble resignation. With pride of a different type – a deserved pride. He steps back, Mrs Leyland. He will not fight.’ He paused again, regarding this bird’s as yet empty socket. ‘That eye will be green. The green of peace and reason. Once a suitable stone has been located.’

‘Are those – are those coins? Around the rich one’s feet – in its feathers?’

‘Shillings, madam,’ Jim stated. ‘They are shillings. Shorn, one might speculate, from guineas, leaving but neutered pounds behind. That the rich bird denies, in its meanness, despite the fact that they literally spill from it. That they are nothing to it.’

Mrs Leyland continued to stare at the painting, the reference lost on her. This was a detail her husband had omitted to share. Hardly surprising.

‘You may note that these shillings are rendered in silver, as are various other details.’ Jim pointed with his mahlstick. ‘See the throat of the rich bird, for instance, and the fronds that frill along it so very modishly. And the poor bird – upon his head there …’

Whereas the rich peacock sported a golden comb, the poor one had a single plume of whitish silver, jutting out like a unicorn’s horn – a forelock of Whistlerian prominence. What the image lacked in nuance, Jim felt, it compensated for in sheer poetic exquisiteness. Every time Leyland used the dining room, every time he threw a napkin over his frill and subjected a table of guests to his leaden conversation, he would see it. Everyone would see it. The mere fact of its existence made him want to seize hold of Mrs Leyland and waltz out into the hall.

‘Some may claim to detect meaning in this scene,’ Jim continued, ‘an allegory, one might say. On this I could not possibly—’

‘Mr Whistler.’ Mrs Leyland’s eyes were still fixed on the mural. The joke did not delight her – far from it. ‘Mr Whistler, do you realise what you have done?’

July 1877

The force of Maud’s anger caught her unawares. At first, lost for words, she went stamping from room to room, taking it out on the house – on Jimmy’s precise and oh-so-original decorations. She knocked pictures askew and kicked up rugs, she heaved wickerwork armchairs out of their places, she shoved down a Japanese screen. He followed behind, correcting what he could, making vague attempts at placation, as if even then the greater part of his mind was elsewhere. After a few minutes of this they reached the drawing room.

Maud turned abruptly to face him. ‘How could it have got so bad? Why d’you open the bloody door to them? Don’t you know anything?’

Jimmy didn’t answer. He’d lit a cigarette and was leaning back on his right foot, stroking his moustache thoughtfully, angling himself towards the two tall windows. This was a familiar ploy of his when he wished to stage a retreat. The artist is unexpectedly inspired, said the pose. Shhh! Don’t disturb!

Maud wasn’t having it, though, not today. There was a new piece of porcelain by the divan, a squat, blue-and-white vase, shaped like an oversized onion and patterned with oriental flowers. She went over to it and hooked a toe under one side. The thing was easily unseated, but rather heavier than she’d anticipated; too late she realised that it was half filled with water. It rolled away in a wobbling semicircle onto the rectangle of yellow matting laid in the middle of the room, disgorging its contents in irregular spurts. A white lily appeared, coasting off towards the skirting board, and then a pair of plump, back-flipping goldfish.

This got Jimmy’s attention at least. The artistic pose was dropped. Maud stood by, flushed with annoyance and the faintest touch of guilt, as he rushed across the room, righted the vase and attempted to save the fish. The cigarette fell from his lips and hissed out in the spillage; his eyeglass swung at the end of its cord, flashing in the dusty sunlight. He was not, in truth, very well suited to tasks such as this. The fish were sluggish enough but he could only catch hold of one of them; the other squirmed off beneath the divan, beyond his capacity for rescue.

‘You shouldn’t,’ Maud told him. ‘Keep them in a china bowl, I mean. Down in the dark. How would you like it?’

Jimmy shook water from his fingers. ‘Maudie,’ he said, ‘you’ve missed so much.’

Maud crossed her arms; she looked around for something else to upset. This hardly needed saying. Six weeks earlier, as she’d taken her leave, he’d been claiming that victory was imminent – the Grosvenor had opened to fanfares and he was poised to recover, in a single swoop, every last penny of their missing fortunes. And yet he’d greeted her today not with news of guineas, of sales and fresh commissions, but of bailiffs. The very word knotted her insides. Jimmy, though, had said it matter-of-factly. There was no secretiveness in him; no particular shame either. Two men, he’d reported, had called early yesterday morning, appointed by the Sheriff of Middlesex. He couldn’t recall who’d sent them; there were papers in the hall. Although perfectly polite, and better bred than one might imagine, they’d departed only after he’d produced ten pounds in cash, a broken pocket watch and some opal earrings that had belonged to Maud’s mother.

‘You said we’d be set right. You bloody promised it, Jimmy. You said we’d be able to talk things through. Don’t you remember? Move the child a bit closer. Find a woman in Battersea, or – or—’

The anger sputtered; Maud’s thoughts were straying in an unwelcome direction. The absence. The coldness in the crook of her arm. The sense of something very close at hand, something vitally and profoundly hers, that wasn’t being seen to. She’d been forewarned; she’d considered herself prepared. And it had beaten her to the floor. Five more days she’d remained at Edie’s after the foster mother had left – until her milk had ebbed almost to nothing, and the worst of the bleeding had seemed to be over. We’ll get you all cried out, Edie had said. Maud knew now, there in the drawing room at Lindsey Row, that five days hadn’t been nearly long enough. Jimmy would be sympathetic, of course he would. But only up to a point. They had an agreement – and with bailiffs at the door, any chance of amending it was gone.

‘We will be set right,’ Jimmy said, rising to his feet. ‘You’ll see, Maudie. I’ll buy you those earrings back.’

He misses it, Maud thought. He misses it by a bloody mile. Immediately her anger was restored to its full, scalding strength. She found that she was glaring at his hair, so carefully oiled and arranged; she saw herself grasping that single white lock and ripping it out at the root. The urge was resisted, just about. Instead she began telling him exactly what he was, drawing on a reserve of the ripest London slurs; and even after all the years he’d lived in the city, and the many battles they’d fought, a couple of these left him wrinkling his nose in bafflement.

The list ran on. Jimmy weathered it with the air of a man marking time, swivelling very slowly on his heel – then coming to a halt as he spied something outside. The drawing room was on the first floor, providing a broad view of the slow, brown Thames and the road that ran along its bank. Suddenly deaf to Maud’s invective, he went over to the right-hand window, dragged up the sash and leant out a few inches further than was safe, shouting a name with undisguised relief.

Maud fell into a glowering silence. She’d missed the name and could make out little of what was being said now, but this was clearly a friend. She edged sideways to peer out of the other window. All she saw was hats, a grey topper and a curious affair in rose felt, heading underneath the sill towards their front door. It was not one person but a pair – a couple. And Jimmy had invited them up. He ducked back in, strolled to a sideboard and began rolling another cigarette.

‘Stay there,’ he said lightly. ‘Don’t worry – they’re really not the sort to object. They’re rather keen to meet you, in fact.’

Any control Maud might have had was gone. She looked to the door, sorely tempted to ignore Jimmy and withdraw anyway. Fatigue was fast overwhelming her anger. Her bosom ached – Edie had laced the corset very forgivingly, yet still she seemed to strain against it – and further down, around the base of her belly, a sharper pain was stirring. She could go upstairs. Strip to her shift. Bury herself in their bed. But there were footfalls out on the landing – shapes blocking the line of light beneath the door. It was too late.

The callers made an assured entrance, striding in across the yellow matting. Maud’s initial impression was of height and handsomeness, and well-made, slightly unusual clothes. The gentleman trailed cigarette smoke; his companion wore a dark blue jacket that accentuated how very slender and pale she was.

‘The Harmony in Amber and Black,’ declared the gentleman. ‘The Arrangement in Brown. By Jove, Rosie, she is before us. Before us completely.’

They advanced towards Maud, regarding her with the close appreciation you might give a statue or a particularly interesting piece of furniture. Both were smiling. The drawing room felt dingier, smaller; Maud became aware of the rotten-egg smell of summer mud, oozing in through the open window.

‘I mean, it is uncanny,’ the gentleman continued, glancing over at Jimmy. He had a fine voice, warm and deep with the touch of an accent – Spanish, Maud thought. ‘Your portraits, dear fellow – they are more than likenesses. So much more. There’s a core to them, I’d say, a true artistic understanding. They get to the bottom of the matter. The essence.’

Maud looked at Jimmy. He could be prickly with praise; she’d heard him dismiss it, dismiss it with real violence, if he thought it misguided or insensible to his aims. That afternoon, however, he simply nodded in acknowledgement, then screwed in the eyeglass and smiled – the kind of wide, unguarded grin you’d only see in the company of those he genuinely liked. Two cigarettes had been rolled: he lit both, passing one to this new arrival. The Spanish gentleman sucked a last lungful from the butt already lodged between his fingers, flicked it deftly out through the window and accepted the next with a murmur of thanks.

‘Miss Corder,’ said Jimmy, ‘may I be so frightfully unnecessary as to introduce Miss Maud Franklin.’ He puffed on his cigarette, making a back-and-forth gesture. ‘Miss Franklin – Miss Rosa Corder.’

A hand was extended, in a glove the same pinkish colour as the felt hat. ‘Charmed, Miss Franklin, truly.’

Miss Corder’s voice was difficult to get the measure of. Respectable, if not quite quality; confident but also unassuming, somehow; wholly in earnest, yet tinted with laughter. Maud had been eyeing her cagily during Jimmy’s introduction, thinking that she might well be a model. A substitute. She certainly had the figure for it. Now, though, such fears could be disregarded. Maud had never met a model who spoke like this.

‘We know you, of course, from the Grosvenor,’ Miss Corder explained. ‘The pictures were so very beautiful. Do forgive us if we stare a little.’

Normally Maud would respond to a comment like this with self-effacement – perhaps something like, ‘Really I just stood there, that’s all’ – which would lead to discussion of her stamina, her patience and fortitude and so on, in the face of Jimmy’s famously gruelling requirements. That afternoon in the drawing room, however, she managed only a non-committal mumble. She was painfully conscious of their gaze upon her; of her swollen, ill-clad, exhausted body; of her complexion, drawn by stress and sorrow. She took Miss Corder’s offered hand. There was a strength in the long fingers that reminded her oddly of Jimmy’s.

‘I am glad you are back safely,’ Miss Corder added, more quietly. ‘I hope we will be friends.’

I’m glad you are back safely. Maud met her eye. She saw nothing there but good intentions – a slightly insistent kindliness. This strange pair obviously knew far more about things at Lindsey Row than Jimmy was supposed to have revealed to anyone. They’d been primed, Maud realised, and this amiable little scene arranged in advance. They knew what their arrival had interrupted. They were there specifically to deliver Jimmy from the trouble that was sure to attend upon her return, without their daughter, to news of bailiffs. This was another of his favourite stratagems – to seek refuge in company, drowning any difficulty in the bottomless pool of his acquaintance.

‘And this creature here, Maudie—’ Jimmy paused for effect, twisting the left point of his moustache, ‘is the splendid and most illustrious Owl.’

The Spanish gentleman made no comment on this peculiar introduction. He gave a shallow bow, smoke winding from his nostrils. ‘May I simply say, Miss Franklin, that in your presence one feels most clearly the intense and singular charge of inspiration. The Muse’s aura hangs heavy in the air. You are part of an exceptional group, Miss – an eternal being akin to Rembrandt’s Hendrickje, or Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, or the Bourbon princesses of our great god Velázquez.’

Maud laughed, she couldn’t help it – a hard, sceptical snort. This Owl was definitely one of Jimmy’s people. Beyond that, though, he wasn’t easy to classify. His manner was too smooth for a poet or a painter; his looming, leonine person too neat, too well tended for the stage. He lacked the careless superiority of a man of leisure, and a couple of unconventional details in his dress – the spare cut of his dove-grey suit, that red ribbon pinned to his lapel like some kind of military decoration – seemed to disqualify him from the law or most branches of business. There was the foreign aspect as well, the hint of elsewhere – could he be a diplomat? A journalist? Maud honestly couldn’t tell.

Plainly thinking he’d slipped the hook, and enjoying himself immensely, Jimmy sauntered to the door and called downstairs for John. Maud’s hackles rose anew. This low little trick mustn’t be allowed to pass unchallenged.

‘Do you reside here in Chelsea, then, Mr Owl?’ Saying the name felt ridiculous, childish; she gave it a mocking emphasis. ‘Or did you just happen to be passing by?’

‘Putney,’ Owl replied pleasantly. He drew a card from his waistcoat pocket and presented it to her. ‘We often come this way when travelling to Miss Corder’s lodgings in the city. Rosie likes to walk beside the river.’

The card lay face down in Maud’s palm. She turned it over and read: Charles Augustus Howell, Esq., Chaldon House, Putney. There it was. ‘Owl’ would be a common pronunciation of this surname in London. It was a very English handle, though, for a rather unEnglish person. No profession was given, she noticed, and no house number or street either; the suggestion was of a squire in his manor. She considered what he’d told her. Their guests were a gentleman and his mistress, with her installed at his convenience in an apartment closer to town – an arrangement almost disappointing in its ordinariness.

John appeared in the doorway. He noted Owl’s presence with wary recognition. The servant obviously hadn’t let this couple in or shown them up, as might have been assumed. The Owl at least had been to Lindsey Row before and knew his way around. Maud’s brow furrowed – hadn’t the front door been locked? Did he have a key?

‘Sherry,’ said Jimmy, ‘and the last of the buckwheat cakes. In the studio, if you please.’

‘No sherry left.’

‘A bottle of the Muscadet, then.’

John shook his head.

‘The Scharzhofberger? Surely we still have some of that?’

The servant hesitated; he gave a quick nod and made to turn away. Remembering the onion-shaped vase, Maud bent down and gripped it by the lip. A muscle in her midriff contracted; the pain was so astonishing that she nearly cried out. For a second or two, through a lens of tears, she watched the remaining goldfish wriggle weakly in an inch of cloudy water. Then she straightened up, wiped her eyes on her sleeve and held the vase towards the doorway.

‘Put this poor thing in another bowl, would you?’ she said, keeping her voice steady. ‘Something glass. And fetch a broom. There’s a dead one under the divan.’

John took it readily enough. He didn’t always heed Maud, but wouldn’t risk a fuss in front of his master. Owl, meanwhile, was studying the floor, the boards and the soaked patch of matting, tracing the pattern of splashes with the tip of his cigarette. He went to the divan, dropped to a crouch and reached into the shadows beneath – standing again a moment later with the missing fish in his hand. The tiny body was quite motionless and furred with dust. Expertly, Owl placed a fingertip against it, where the orange flank met the silvery underbelly. He gave it the gentlest of prods; the frond-like tail beat about, and for a second a fin was raised upwards like a miniature sail.

‘Bon Dieu, it lives!’ cried Jimmy, with a short, piercing laugh. ‘A Lazarus, what! A Lazarus among goldfish!’

Maud blinked. How long had it been since she’d spilled the fish? Four minutes, five? How could it possibly still be alive? As she craned her neck to see, Owl tossed the fish across the room, towards the vase – a light-hearted lob somewhat at odds with the eerie tenderness of the revival. His aim was true, though; it landed in the water with a hard hollow plop.

‘There, John,’ he said. ‘Never say that I have no gold for you.’

*

A display had been arranged in the studio, a dozen or so of the finest paintings currently in Jim’s hands, fixed onto easels or propped against the walls. There were his night-time views of the river, the Nocturnes, rendered in bands of luminous, misty blue; the Cremorne Gardens or somewhere like it, where half-formed figures drifted in golden fog; a couple of unclaimed, unfinished portraits; and Maud herself, Maud time and again, in an assortment of costumes and attitudes. Over the years Jimmy had painted her in the flowing tea-gowns of the artistic rich, peasant skirts and bodices, and bold modern garments that had fitted around her body like a sleeve.

Maud stayed close to the studio door. The muscle in her side still throbbed something awful. She rubbed at it, and was briefly taken aback by the amount of flesh her corset contained. She glanced at the Owl and his consort. They’d surely be making the comparison now, if they hadn’t already up in the drawing room. How could they not, with these paintings arrayed in front of them? They’d be lamenting the speed of Maud’s decline, and doubting her ability to recover; and wondering, perhaps, what Jimmy planned to do about it. Humiliation began to enfold her, but she clenched her teeth and forced it away. She wouldn’t be shamed by what had happened. She just wouldn’t. Inwardly, she dared these guests to make a remark. To raise an eyebrow. Anything.

Miss Corder had gone to the pictures, however, lost in veneration. She’d approached a full-length figure – Maud in white and black, her hands set on her hips, as modishly elegant as a Paris fashion plate. Owl, meanwhile, had taken up a position over by the French windows. After declaring Jimmy’s paintings beyond approbation, the great art of the age, he’d produced a pencil and a notebook and begun to write. It was a conspicuously businesslike response; he appeared to be compiling an inventory. Maud had been hoping that he might actually be a customer – that Jimmy had got the canvases out so that he could make his selection and furnish them with a few dozen much-needed guineas. She saw now that this couldn’t be the case. Customers did not make lists; if Mr Howell had dealings in the art trade, it was plainly on the selling side. His attendance at Lindsey Row was no accident, as she’d realised upstairs, but there was more to it than simply providing a distraction. Some form of arrangement was being set in place.

‘Is this all of them?’

‘Well, you know …’ Jimmy was in the middle of the room, smoking his cigarette. ‘There are a couple elsewhere in the house. Things being finished off. And there’s the Grosvenor, of course. Eight more canvases.’

Maud surveyed the studio again, and this time noticed a couple of absences. Most conspicuous was the portrait of Jimmy’s mother. He was especially attached to this picture – and somewhat more attentive to its well-being, she’d heard others imply, than he was to that of its model. Maud hadn’t seen it in the drawing room either, or the parlour, or any of the downstairs corridors. Jimmy had moved it well out of the way.

‘The Grosvenor paintings are yours?’

‘All the important ones. We still have an expectation of sales, a strong expectation. The exhibition has three weeks left to run. Stands to reason that the big buyers will wait until the end.’

Owl was nodding sagely. ‘That can be a pattern at shows of this kind.’

This sounded unlikely to Maud. She said nothing, though, as Jimmy was now talking with some candour about how tough things were becoming at Lindsey Row – the outstanding bills, the mounting legal threats, the bailiffs. It was a confession of sorts, a statement of failure, and his spirits dipped accordingly.

‘It’s difficult, old man,’ he concluded, ‘damned difficult. Each and every path seems to promise only fresh disaster.’

Maud felt the beginnings of pity. He was shaken. He needed her, in his way – his ally in penury. She hardened her heart, though, directing her eyes firmly towards the uneven herringbone floor. He deserved her anger. It shouldn’t be that easy.

Owl stepped in. ‘Well, there’s a great deal we can do here. These works of yours mayn’t have buyers, Jimmy, not yet, but they certainly have value. In abundance. The means are before us to generate nothing less than a fortune. From the paintings, and the copperplates as well.’ For all the ambitiousness of his words, his voice was level. Reasonable. ‘As for the bailiffs, what can I say? It shan’t happen a second time. I can promise you that. We shall build a barrier around you, my dear chap – a barrier of gold two miles high, and every one of these accursed philistines will be shut out for good.’

Maud’s doubt must have been showing, for Jimmy approached her, his composure regained, to offer some reassurance. ‘The Owl, Maudie,’ he said, ‘has worked deals that mystify the mind. That send the soul soaring.’

A cigarette was burning between his fingers. Maud plucked it out, deciding right then that she was ready to smoke again, and little caring what these guests might think about it. Jimmy’s tobacco was fine, smooth and strong; one puff set her fingertips tingling. She tilted back her head to exhale, holding his eye. ‘Like what?’

Jimmy turned to Owl. ‘Rossetti’s painting, the last one you handled,’ he asked. ‘That woman, you know, with those monstrous shoulders. How much did you get? It was all anyone talked of for weeks.’

‘A gentleman of my acquaintance,’ replied Owl, marvellously offhand, ‘paid us two thousand guineas.’

Maud coughed on the cigarette, soreness flaring along her side. That was the same sum Jimmy had asked for the entire Peacock Room, as everybody had taken to calling it. The sum he’d been denied. And this fellow was getting it for a single painting. Hope returned, despite her determined wariness; it was breaking through her like a lantern’s light. Everything could change. Their debts could be wiped clean away. Jimmy could be made wealthy. They could travel. Their trip to Italy, to Venice, so long postponed now that the idea had nearly lost all meaning, could be made at last. And dear God, they could talk of Ione. Of their daughter. Maud saw her ruddy hands, bunching the midwife’s shawl, and those glassy blue eyes; she felt the press of the child’s feet against her thigh. She couldn’t ever live with them. This Maud accepted. But if there was to be money, a second property could surely be rented nearby – in Chelsea even. A nurse could be employed. Or the foster family moved in. It had to be possible.

‘A fair figure,’ said Miss Corder, from across the studio. ‘Very fair. Why shouldn’t he pay that? What is he, a banker? A merchant? He should have paid more.’

‘And I could assuredly have got more,’ Owl told her, ‘had I been given another week. No question of it. But you know how damned impatient Gabriel can be.’ He removed his top hat, revealing a head of glossy auburn hair as oiled as Jimmy’s. ‘Where do things stand with the large picture over yonder? The Three Girls?’

This painting had been given only a secondary placing in Jimmy’s little display, out of the studio’s best light. It featured a simple, Japanese-style composition: three female nudes arranged around a potted cherry blossom, its pink flowers scattered against a backdrop of pale grey screens. One girl stood to the right, holding a parasol and clad in a robe so diaphanous it barely existed at all; another crouched beside the plant as if tending to it, her hair tied beneath a red and silver scarf; and there, at the painting’s left edge, was Maud Franklin, rather younger and slimmer and completely stark naked. In the altogether. This had been done right at the start, around the time of Maud’s eighteenth birthday, before anything particular had happened between Jimmy and her. She’d agreed readily enough. The art had required it, she’d reasoned; such was the bargain a model made with her modesty. Still, despite this firm self-instruction, she’d been a mite startled to discover that she wasn’t going to be alone in this picture, the two other nudes having already been laid in on an earlier occasion.

‘Three girls was the scheme agreed upon,’ had been Jimmy’s dry explanation. ‘Three different girls. At the patron’s specific request.’

Parts of it were sketchy, but Maud herself was pretty unmistakable – shown from the side, leaning gently towards the centre of the scene. It had been a hellish pose to hold, even by Jimmy’s standards. You couldn’t tell, though; the figure had a grace to it, and a sleekness, that now seemed frankly incredible. Yet her earlier discomfort did not return. As their guests looked at this painting, she felt only a sickly excitement at the sums that might be proposing themselves to Owl.

‘It’s Leyland’s,’ Jimmy replied. ‘As I suspect you are aware.’

‘And he still wants it?’

‘You know his views on receiving that which he has paid for. How very dogged he can be.’

‘But you don’t think simply to send it to him?’

‘My dear Owl, it is unfinished. Can you not see that? It certainly isn’t ready to be subjected to any form of general inspection. The same goes for the rest of Leyland’s works I still have here. All those blasted portraits, for instance.’

Owl looked about him. ‘And where might they be?’

Commissioned back when Jimmy had been counted among the family’s most intimate friends, the Leyland portraits had provided Maud with her ticket through his door. He usually kept the one of the wife out for show, being rather proud of it, she suspected; but today, along with the rest of them, it was nowhere to be seen.

‘Work upon all Leyland faces has halted, for the time being,’ Jimmy said, ‘and an alternative berth found for the canvases. Being as they are so big, you understand. There just isn’t room.’ He grew subtly mischievous, and gave a sigh of mock-regret. ‘The truth of it, mon vieux, is that having our British businessman in here, all long-limbed and morose – befrilled, you know, with sunken eye, lurking off in the shadows – was proving far too dire a distraction, so I bundled him into the cellar. The painted version, that is. Not the original.’

The Owl and Miss Corder laughed. Jimmy’s forgotten cigarette was almost burned out, the ember scorching Maud’s knuckles; she dropped it with a wince into a grubby saucer. When she’d left for Edie’s back in early May, the Leyland matter had been all but dead. The Peacock Room had been finished with at long last. But she knew their tone. Behind these jokes lay something new.

‘What’s happened?’

The studio door opened to admit John, bearing a tray with his standard air of mild irritability. Upon it was a plate of Jimmy’s American buckwheat cakes, a half-empty bottle of white wine and four smudged glasses. After setting the tray on the edge of the painting table, John stood back and looked to his master, expecting the usual complaint or additional instruction.

‘Jimmy,’ Maud said. ‘What’s happened? What’ve you done?’

Jimmy went to the wine bottle and picked it up. He sighed again, this time at her persistence. ‘Nothing, Maudie. I swear.’

*

Maud went upstairs barely a minute after the Owl and Miss Corder had taken their leave. She disrobed and dropped into bed, burrowing gratefully amid the cool sheets, and was filled with the sense, oddly welcome, of laying herself beneath the earth; of dragging the turf over her pounding head, never to rise again. For several days she stayed there, weighted down by exhaustion and a feeling she came slowly to recognise as loneliness. Her body and her mind had been refashioned to receive a child. To care for a child. And it was not there.

The moment of parting was played out a thousand times, the memories pored over and picked through in the hope that some new detail or sensation might be uncovered. Maud had been sitting in a scuffed, high-backed armchair, a mainstay of Edie’s parlour. Ione had been dozing in her lap; her own eyelids had started to flutter as well. She’d heard the front door, and lowered voices in the hall, but hadn’t thought anything of it. Edie had come in and bade her stand. Then she’d leaned forward, lifting away the child as if relieving Maud of an encumbrance.

‘Pass her here,’ she’d said.

‘It’s all right,’ Maud had replied, slightly perplexed, in a tone of good-humoured protest, ‘I can manage. Why, she’s light as a—’

Her sister had already been turning away, though, going back to the door, thinking it best just to get it done – to tear off the bandage with a sudden, unexpected stroke. It was only when the front door closed again, in fact, that Maud had fully appreciated what was taking place. She’d known that the foster mother was due, of course she had, but had assumed this would be after teatime. Later on. The next morning. She’d thought of pursuit. A few groggy, wandering steps had shown her that this was futile. So she went instead to the window, hoping to catch sight of them – to call out and have them stop for a proper farewell. The parlour was to the rear of Edie’s small terraced house. All that she’d been able to see was a bare yard. Ione was gone. Her awareness of this had seemed to gather at the top of her chest, pressing in on her until she’d been unable to breathe; until her collarbone had felt like it was about to crack in two. She’d made a sound, a kind of anguished yelp, and dropped back into the armchair. Alone.

With Maud’s grief came yet more anger – directed at herself, for her feebleness and her idiocy, but also pretty squarely at Jimmy. He kept his distance, sleeping on the studio chaise longue, no doubt thinking this considerate; and was preoccupied, as always, with his own business. Mrs Cossins, the cook at Lindsey Row, brought up her food and dealt rather grudgingly with her laundry. Once a day, twice at most, Jimmy would appear to ask how she was faring. His bed was huge and heavy, with a frame of dark lacquered wood; buried within it, she would glare out at him, refusing to speak. The words built up, acquiring a terrible pressure, as if they were soon going to explode from her and force a proper confrontation. How can you care so bloody little? she’d demand. How can you want things to be this way?

The feeling passed. Besides, she already knew full well what he would say. This was part of it, part of the risk they took. He was finding money, somehow, for the fostering – no mean feat. And he had welcomed her back into his household. It was wrong of her, really, to want anything more. The burden was hers. She understood that now. She had to become used to it; to cease to notice it, even. There in that dark bed, with a bead of blood drying stickily against her thigh, this seemed entirely beyond her.

Late one evening, Maud stirred to find Jimmy’s younger brother pulling a chair across the rug and settling himself at her side. William Whistler was a doctor of some renown, with a practice in Mayfair, a new wife named Nellie, and a smart house on Wimpole Street. He was a regular guest at Lindsey Row and familiar with the arrangements there, which he’d always appeared to accept without censure –although Maud had never been to the smart house or met the new wife. She sat up, self-conscious and a touch startled, unsure of what to say; then he began to ask a series of matter-of-fact questions about her well-being, and she saw that this was a house call, most probably undertaken at Jimmy’s request. Burlier and balder than his brother, with an accent less complicated by other influences, Willie was every inch the respectable professional – rather anonymous in a way, as easy to overlook as Jimmy was not. This was a screen, Maud had discovered, drawn before a life of real incident, of fearsome incident, in relation to which his present prosperity stood as a well-deserved reward. While Jimmy had been establishing himself in London, and making his first attempts to have a painting shown at the Royal Academy, Willie had been at war. He’d seen war at its most ferocious and bloody. There was a photograph of him, younger and leaner, in an embroidered officer’s coat, serving as a military surgeon in the army of General Lee. Jimmy’s pride in this could not be overstated. He remained an unrepentant champion of the Confederate cause – to such an extent in fact that Maud had learned to avoid the subject – and derived a fierce excitement from imagining what his brother had endured.

‘Boys, they were,’ he’d say, ‘mere boys, conscripted from farm and city alike. Brought into those hospital tents by the dozen, injured in ways one can barely conceive – shredded, Maudie, by the Union’s shot and shell. And expiring faster than they could be put in the ground.’

Willie himself never so much as hinted at any of this. You could scour his bland, plump face for as long as you liked and find no trace of it. But he had an authority about him, along with his reserve. Maud answered his questions promptly; she could hear a trace of meekness in her voice. He put a hand to her forehead and pressed two fingers gently against her neck to take her pulse. Then he thanked her, rose from his chair and retreated to the landing. Briefly, Maud caught sight of Jimmy, waiting just past the doorway. She heard Willie tell him that there was no cause whatsoever for alarm.

‘Could you leave her something?’ Jimmy asked. ‘For the restlessness – the moods?’

‘Not necessary. Miss Franklin is doing well, Jamie. As one might expect from one so young. She’ll soon be fully restored, I should think.’ Willie paused. ‘She would benefit from some diversion, though. Perhaps you might consider taking her down to Hastings.’

This was not an innocent suggestion. Jimmy and Willie’s elderly mother lived in Hastings, lodged in a cliff-top boarding house overlooking the sea. Willie had found the place, had handled the move and was footing the bill. He seldom saw Jimmy without mentioning how much the old woman longed to have him visit her; how the train was quick, three hours was all; how a trip there need only take a day, with some planning. Maud had met Mrs Whistler several times. She’d actually been residing at Lindsey Row when Maud had first come to stand for Jimmy, a domestic situation that now seemed unthinkable. It had surprised her that this singular gentleman, foreign in so many respects, could have family about him in London. Exiles, ain’t they, another model had told her. The losing side.

Mrs Whistler had left the city within a few months, at Willie’s urging – the smoke and endless fogs were bad for her health, he’d said – thus clearing the way for Maud to take up the role of Madame. Jimmy did venture down to see her a couple of times a year. Willie made it plain that he didn’t think this was nearly enough.

Maud lay motionless, listening closely, her feelings set at a degree of opposition. Such a journey would certainly be difficult. She found, though, that she wanted to see Jimmy’s mother again. She wanted him to take her. Apart from anything else, it would be interesting to find out what tale he’d spin. She’d be cast as a follower, she supposed, as well as a model; a chaste disciple, convalescing from some unnamed illness, brought along by her kindly mentor to benefit from the sea air.

Jimmy wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Now is not the time, doc. She’s damned tired. You’ve seen it for yourself.’

‘Mother likes her,’ Willie persisted. ‘She asks after her sometimes. She knows that she still features in your paintings. I’m sure you could tell her more or less anything you pleased.’

‘I cannot leave London at present, even for a day. Not with things the way they are – the Grosvenor and so forth.’

‘Jamie—’

‘We can do better, I believe. Wait here a moment.’

There was a shuffling of feet and a sigh from the doctor. The bedroom door began to open. Maud closed her eyes, pulling the sheets up to her chin, feigning sleep. She heard Jimmy’s boot creak on the loose floorboard by the bed; she smelled oil paint and tobacco. His fingertips touched the counterpane, just above her shoulder.

‘Maudie,’ he said, ‘I’ve had a thought.’

*

The Harmony in Amber and Black was a full-length female figure and breathtakingly slender: Maud’s figure as it had been around two years before, shaped by a corset that she hadn’t been able to wear since Christmas. The pose was simple, front facing with the arms at the sides. It had been made soon after she’d taken up residence at Lindsey Row, commissioned by Frederick Leyland as a portrait of his daughter Florence. The gown was close-fitting and modern, cut from a tawny chiffon that Jimmy had captured most skilfully, drawing out the tone with the sharp whiteness of the ruffed collar and cuffs, the black bow at the breast, and the neat black gloves, which melted, very nearly, into the hazy blackness of the background. Since she’d seen it last, however, a few months previously, the portrait had undergone a rather crucial alteration – for where the face of Florence Leyland had been was now that of Maud herself. This was why Owl had mentioned the Amber and Black upon meeting her the week before. She hadn’t realised exactly which painting he’d meant until a good while later. It hadn’t seemed terribly important – a mistake, most probably. Who, in all honesty, could keep track of Jimmy’s titles? He certainly couldn’t. Maud often thought that their principal purpose was to sow confusion.

And yet it hadn’t been a mistake. She hadn’t sat for this, or seen Jimmy at work on the canvas. It must have been done from an older drawing, or from memory – and recently, while she’d been away. He’d made the change especially for its exhibition in the Grosvenor Gallery.

‘Heavens, Miss Franklin,’ said Miss Corder, in the manner of someone intending to be overheard. ‘You are with your sisters.’

Maud thought of Edie, toiling in her husband Lionel Crossley’s book-keeping office; of her widow’s peak and ink-stained fingertips; of the tearful reluctance of their farewell. But Miss Corder meant the paintings, of course – The Harmony in Amber and Black and the other one. The Owl’s consort was about six yards away, across the Grosvenor’s west gallery. It was the largest room in the place, as big as a decent-sized dance hall, and fitted out with great extravagance. White marble statues stood against crimson damask; a long skylight was set into a barrelled ceiling of midnight blue, studded with golden stars. Even against such a background, however, Miss Corder made for an arresting sight. Her jacket was a bright silver-grey, impossibly tight, and trimmed with deepest green, while her hat had a brim nearly three feet wide, upon which lolled an enormous creamy orchid.

‘A hallowed moment,’ she continued. ‘Muse and masterpieces reunited. Such a rare privilege for us all.’

People were turning around. The Grosvenor held a wealthy-looking, vaguely artistic crowd, wandering and murmuring before the paintings that had been chosen for display. These were present in much lower numbers than was usual, arranged on the walls only one or two canvases high. The Whistler contribution had been hung over at the right end. The surrounding pictures, so dense with shapes and colours, and the luxury of the gallery itself, made Jimmy’s look strikingly empty: pure, in a way, both peaceful and mysterious. But after only a couple of minutes, it was already plain that they were receiving a rather different sort of attention to the rest. There were smirks, whispered remarks and snatches of suppressed laughter. Jimmy’s paintings were being mocked.

Maud started towards the velvet curtains that had been hung across the entrance. Miss Corder moved to intercept her, and they met awkwardly in a hot square of sunlight.

‘I’m leaving,’ Maud said, trying to step past. ‘Tell Jimmy I’ll be waiting at home.’

‘You are too modest. Why, without you, without your particular talents, these works simply would not exist. Your strength and grace has permitted—’

‘I know,’ Maud interrupted. ‘I know.’

This had been Jimmy’s proposal, in place of the seaside: a visit to the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery. Maud hadn’t been keen. Rising from the bed, preparing a bath and dressing in something appropriate for the Grosvenor’s Mayfair address had all seemed like a desperate chore. She was very aware also that the predicted change in their fortunes had failed to arrive. The undertaking was proving a disappointment, for Jimmy at least. He’d been insistent, however, so eventually Maud had agreed. She’d told herself that this was the life she had chosen; that if she was to be Whistler’s Madame, she had to keep abreast with Whistler’s affairs. Only after they’d left the house – her garments kept loose in certain areas and discreetly reinforced in others – had Jimmy revealed that he wouldn’t actually be going to the gallery. Miss Corder, who’d called the week before, was to accompany her instead. He had something important to attend to, he’d said, and would meet them later at the Café Royal, an old haunt of theirs. This disclosure had been carefully timed. A hansom had already pulled up; she’d been climbing inside. It had been too late to turn back.

Miss Corder had been standing ready at the Grosvenor’s entrance. She’d kissed Maud on the cheek and told her how extremely well she was looking, then paid for their tickets with a ten-shilling note. Maud had followed her up the broad marble staircase, trying to accept her fate and muster some enthusiasm. Now, though, she’d reached her limit. She was tired out and sore. She was cross with everything. She was heading off to bed.

Her companion stayed close, blocking her path. Miss Corder’s face was as unaccountable as the rest of her – really rather plain in a way, with its prominent nose and heavy, slightly protuberant lips; yet something was there, cleverness perhaps, or nerve, that lent it an odd appeal. A beauty, even. Her eyes, lilac in the sunlight, held a query; then they flitted away, back to the gallery, and her brow knitted with displeasure.

‘These people here don’t understand,’ she said, the volume of her voice unaltered. ‘They don’t look at the paintings for themselves. They have been drinking from a tainted source, you see, imbibing foolishness and conceited ignorance, and it has clouded their vision. Clouded it quite fatally.’

Those nearby were staring openly now, umbrage adding to their curiosity, as was surely Miss Corder’s intention. Four years with Jimmy had schooled Maud thoroughly in this variety of anger: the kind that insisted upon making a public display and clashing hard with that which had provoked it. Something here made her pause, however. Early the previous morning, the day after Willie’s visit, she’d been woken by the sound of Jimmy shouting, really shouting, down in the studio. He’d been alone, as far as she’d been able to tell. The words ‘impudence’ and ‘imposture’ had kept recurring. Sensing that an explanation might be at hand, she asked Miss Corder what she meant.

The lilac eyes widened. ‘You don’t know. Of course you don’t. He can’t bear to tell you of it, most probably. Your Jimmy has been maligned, Miss Franklin. Attacked in the crudest manner.’

She turned, moving her face out of the sun, and pointed a green-gloved finger at a nearby canvas. It was one of the larger Nocturnes, a couple of years old now – the Gold and Black, did he call it? – showing fireworks launching and falling over the river. A rack of livid white-orange hissed in the darkness, while banks of black smoke rolled off to the left and right, laid against the blue night like the silhouette of a mighty forest, and red-gold sparks drifted above in long, scattered trails. The handling was loose, even for Jimmy – the darks smeared on, blocked in; the lights barely more than raw dabs of colour.

‘A notice has been published,’ Miss Corder announced, ‘and much circulated, in the art press and beyond. A famous critic, keen for attention it would seem, has penned something far beneath him, beneath any right-thinking person – an assault, essentially, intended to blind his readers to this painting’s obvious virtues. Fortunately, Charles has been on hand to offer Jimmy advice. If he hadn’t, I scarcely dare to imagine what might—’

She stopped talking, distracted by a trio of young gentlemen, about their age – smart types, city fellows – who were grinning by her shoulder.

‘Custard,’ said one, indicating a falling rocket.

‘Gulls’ droppings,’ offered another.

‘Who was the critic?’ Maud asked.

‘Ruskin,’ said Miss Corder shortly. ‘And you can see right here what his authority has licensed. Stupidity Miss Franklin, has been allowed free rein.’

With that she swivelled another quarter-circuit and launched herself into battle, informing the young gentlemen that they were plainly insensible to art, hopeless cases indeed, embarrassing themselves further with every utterance; that they might as well take their tweed and their watch-chains and their primped whiskers and go back to their desks, in whatever godforsaken office they scratched out their existences.

Ruskin. Maud knew the name, of course; it had an association of stature, of the kind you might see spelt out on book spines in austere, golden letters, or heard being dropped into conversation as a display of knowledge. She hadn’t read any of it herself, but gaining the fellow’s ill opinion was surely a serious reversal. She wanted to ask what had been written, but Miss Corder was caught up entirely in her skirmish.

Thrown at first by her vehemence, the young gentlemen had rallied, rather pleased to have any form of attention from such a woman. They declared that the Nocturne was plainly the work of a drunkard, a staggering sot, and not very much work at that. Pictures of this type, one of them continued, might well appeal to ladies of a – they exchanged glances, starting to laugh – bohemian persuasion, but to the wider population they were nothing but a joke, an act of imposture, as Mr What’s-his-name had asserted.

Imposture, thought Maud. There it was.

Miss Corder listened, nodding as if some deep suspicion was being confirmed, the orchid bobbing atop her vast hat. Then she gestured contemptuously at the opposite side of the gallery, towards a spread of large paintings with a good deal more people gathered before them. All by the same hand, they had the look, from a distance, of stained glass.

‘That is more to your taste, I suppose – old Ned Jones?’ she demanded. ‘That is excellence, is it, all that laboriousness, all that misspent labour? Is that English art? Is that honestly what we deserve?’

Maud studied these paintings more closely. The colours had a delicate glow, as if the pictures were lit from behind; the forms were flawlessly arranged and drawn. She could see a row of beautiful angels bearing large crystal balls. Half a dozen women kneeling by a lake, gazing at their own reflections as if entranced. St George in his armour. Every one of them had virtually the same face – both the men and the women, and the ones who were neither men nor women. Their expressions held only the merest hints of thought or feeling. The effect was mildly unnerving. When considered next to the work of this Mr Jones, it could well be true that Jimmy’s pictures would not seem pure and peaceful, but crude. Lacking somehow. This notion came to Maud unbidden and it startled her with its disloyalty. She made to look back towards the Whistler display, for reassurance; and instead spotted attendants in livery, closing in on them from opposite sides, censorious glares on their faces.

Miss Corder was growing yet more impassioned and voluble about the various deficiencies she’d observed in the other artworks of the Grosvenor display. Maud was wondering whether she should interrupt, to point out the attendants perhaps, when her companion withdrew abruptly from this somewhat one-sided debate, casting not so much as a parting glance at her chortling adversaries.

‘Come Miss Franklin,’ she said, starting towards the curtained entrance, and the wide stairway beyond. ‘I believe we’re due at the Café Royal.’

*

Outside, the heat was starting to lift, a breeze snapping the shop awnings taut in their frames. Miss Corder walked along New Bond Street with a pronounced, leisurely sway, her hips swinging out a couple of inches with each footstep, unperturbed by either the clash in the gallery or the manner of their exit.

‘Ned Jones,’ she said. ‘Good God. Or Burne-Jones, as we must call him now. Charles knows the fellow. Used to know him. Even back then his style was said to be ponderous and overworked. All those hard lines, all that intricacy. And for such a wretchedly insipid result. But I suppose I should hope that the popularity of his pictures grows yet further. The blasted things would be easy indeed to replicate.’

Maud frowned a little, and began to ask what was meant by replicate, but Miss Corder was crossing a side street, moving around the back of a carriage, out of earshot. While Maud bent to gather up her hem, Miss Corder was just letting hers trail where it would, dragging through the summer dust. They were drawing stares – being unaccompanied and rather conspicuous – none too pleasant, some of them. The attention fell upon Miss Corder like sea spray on the prow of a gunboat.

‘I understand why you wished to leave so soon,’ she said, when Maud caught up. ‘To be honest, Miss Franklin, I can only stomach brief visits myself. The Grosvenor is a worthy venture, all things considered. It provides a place of exhibition to the occasional true talent, like your Jimmy. But I cannot help thinking it corrupt. They do it by invitation, you know, rather than merit. Amateurs, friends of Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife, shown alongside proper artists. It is a game, a game for the rich.’ Her lip twitched. ‘But works are shifting nonetheless. They are going for hundreds of pounds, if Charles is to be believed. I am beginning to think that I should have tried to get something of my own in there.’

There was a pause. Maud looked at a bolt of burnt-orange silk arranged in a draper’s window. ‘You’re an artist,’ she said.

‘More than that,’ replied Miss Corder, lifting her chin. ‘I am a professional, Miss Franklin. I make my living at it. But I am also a woman. And my father was a lighterman, down at Rotherhithe. And so I am kept always at the margins. Versatility is demanded of me, if I am to survive – a versatility that I’ll bet Mr Millais or Mr Leighton, or Lady Butler even, would struggle to summon.’ She stopped, checking the fervour that was returning to her voice. ‘But of course you know all this. You are an artist yourself. Charles says that Jimmy rates you highly – that he had you at work on the Peacock Room, in fact, repainting flowers. Before he brought the scheme to its final form.’

‘Before he covered them all up, you mean. Painted the whole thing blue.’

Maud was embarrassed, and faintly annoyed; Jimmy knew she didn’t like him telling people about her attempts at art – boasting about them, as he couldn’t help but do, despite having obliterated her painstaking labour at Prince’s Gate with barely a second’s hesitation. She’d protested about this, just once, trying to sound as if she was joking.

‘I had to Maudie,’ he’d answered simply. ‘It didn’t go.’

‘That was necessary,’ Miss Corder told her. ‘A sacrifice, you might say. Charles tells me that Jimmy regards you as a pupil as much as a model. That he’ll have your pictures selling before the decade is out.’

Maud felt herself colouring. She stared down at her boots. ‘I don’t know about that. I’ve barely begun.’

‘The best models,’ Miss Corder continued, ‘often have a painter in them as well. I have always thought this. It refines your sense of what’s needed. Of what it is to stand on the other side of the easel. And I must say that you are in the very best place. Jimmy Whistler is the finest teacher – the finest protector that you could ask for.’

It was rare indeed for Maud’s situation to be met with such approval. Edie, so careful in her respectability, didn’t even like to think of it. The other models she knew regarded it simply as a deft manoeuvre, a tidy bit of luck. How could she help feeling a flicker of affinity now with Miss Rosa Corder? Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to talk of art with a professional woman painter. Someone unmarried and young, and without social advantage. Someone who seemed interested in her, furthermore, and who could surely offer guidance when she felt able to work again. Questions began to occur also about Miss Corder and the way she lived. The pictures she’d painted, where they’d been shown and to whom they’d sold. Her own protector, the Owl.

Miss Corder was talking herself, though, expanding upon her admiration for Jimmy and of her sense of the war that had begun, between the forces of artistic righteousness and a broad, determined coalition of enemies. It was being fought on the walls of the Grosvenor Gallery apparently, and in numerous other places besides, with this Ruskin review being merely the latest offensive launched against them. Maud thought of that strange moment down in the studio – the suggestion that there was fresh trouble with the Leylands. It had slipped her mind until she’d stood before the Harmony in Amber and Black. They started down a lane and the wind picked up, overturning a metal pail and sending it rolling noisily across the pavement. Miss Corder paused; Maud saw her chance.

‘What of the Leylands? What’s going on there?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ Miss Corder replied, without much interest. ‘You mustn’t worry. A couple of accidental meetings between Jimmy and the wife, at the houses of mutual friends. The husband wasn’t best pleased. He still considers Jimmy and himself to be at odds, it seems.’

Not a word had passed between Jimmy and Frederick Leyland since the previous winter. The shipbroker had responded to his reworked dining room – to the Prussian blue walls, and the mural, with its spilled silver shillings and puffed-up, befrilled peacock – only with silence. They had been left to wonder, a very deliberate form of torture. The decorative scheme remained intact – that much they knew. But no more.

Maud had other questions, a long list of them; Miss Corder was back on the Grosvenor, though, and the dismal quality of so much of its display, a topic that sustained her without interruption until they reached Regent Street. It was packed solid, traffic inching and creaking around the dust-hazed Quadrant. Miss Corder weaved along the busy pavement, leading Maud beneath the red and white striped canopy that shivered above the entrance of the Café Royal. Jimmy’s preferred table was off to the side, next to one of the broad front windows, providing a commanding view of both the restaurant and the street. It was large, able to accommodate double their number, in case any notable passers-by were waved over to join them. Jimmy was at the head, listing things on his fingers; Owl sat to the right, nodding in understanding as he reached for his glass. The two women went in. A smart, portly waiter was there at once, asking their business in a heavy French accent.

‘We have come to meet our husbands,’ Miss Corder told him. ‘They are over there, by that window.’

‘Husbands,’ the waiter repeated. He took their hats, though, standing aside to admit them. Maud saw Miss Corder’s orchid smear pollen across his black silk waistcoat.

Both men rose at their approach. Jimmy’s eyeglass dropped out; Owl set down his drink. There were kisses and embraces. Miss Corder sat on the seat opposite the Owl, with her back to the window. Maud joined her gratefully, nearly groaning aloud in relief, kneading her aching knees beneath the table. She’d walked further that afternoon than she had in the previous month.

The Café Royal was decorated in the Parisian style, with tall mirrors in ornate, gilded frames, tabletops of veined marble and a black-and-white tiled floor. It was about a quarter full, perhaps slightly less; waiters roamed about the empty tables, polishing cutlery in the pre-supper lull. At that moment it seemed to Maud a haven of airy comfort and tranquillity. She smiled at Owl, at Miss Corder, and they smiled back at her; and there was a tiny flash of strangeness. The scene was that of four friends, four dear friends, settling in for a celebration. Yet she barely knew this pair. She’d met them only once before. Jimmy had mentioned that he and Owl had been on decent terms a few years previously, prior to her arrival at Lindsey Row, and had recently renewed their association. But this hardly justified all the confidences he appeared to be piling on the fellow.

The flash faded. A flute was placed in front of her and filled with sparkling wine. The day’s exertions had left her utterly parched. It was nothing short of beautiful, that glass: tall and delicate, frosted with moisture, the wine golden in the light of the declining sun. She picked it up, chimed the rim against Miss Corder’s, and Owl’s, and Jimmy’s, and drank deep – almost half the contents in one gulp.

‘And now, Maudie,’ said Jimmy, ‘you must tell, in precise detail, sparing me nothing,’ – here he screwed the eyeglass back in, and fixed the blue eye behind upon her with semi-comical intensity – ‘What. You. Thought.’

Maud had been furnishing Jimmy Whistler with opinions for a while now. For one who courted disfavour, who made out that he revelled in it, he could be acutely, damnably sensitive. Snide phrases penned in seconds by some newspaper critic were branded forever on his brain; there were a couple that Maud was pretty certain he would be reciting on his deathbed. Her actual views, therefore, were unimportant. She knew what he needed from her, and she supplied it without thinking.

‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘It was wonderful. The hall was yours, Jimmy. No contest.’

The moustache bristled with satisfaction. Miss Corder spoke up as well, poised and formidably eloquent, reporting on the crowds, the regrettable popularity of Mr Burne-Jones, and in particular on the reception of the firework painting – the Nocturne in Black and Gold.

‘The philistines were out in force,’ she said. ‘They were reciting Ruskin’s words before the picture. He has given licence to ignorant disdain. A refusal to look, or to see.’

Owl was shaking his head. ‘I tell you, Jimmy, the old goat’s been beyond the pale for a good while now. But this is a step further still. Ad hominem, as the lawyers say. Actionable.’

Jimmy was grave. ‘You aren’t the first to say this,’ he said.

‘What was in it?’ Maud asked, by now rather anxious. ‘What did he write that could be so bad?’

They shared a look; then three indulgent expressions were turned her way.

‘You deserve to know,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’d hoped I could spare you, but this may now be unavoidable. It was brief. Published in that peculiar private paper he puts out. But picked up since by everyone.’ He spoke slowly, assuming a terrifyingly steely smile. ‘The fellow wrote that my poor picture approached the aspect of wilful imposture.’

Maud gripped the stem of her flute. This was Ruskin’s own phrase, she could tell. The dreadful notice had plainly been memorised in its entirety.

‘He wrote that I was a coxcomb, Maudie. A coxcomb. That I was asking two hundred guineas to – how was it put? – fling a pot of paint in the public’s face. That the Black and Gold displayed only what he felt qualified to term cockney impudence.’

At this Maud let out an involuntary laugh, a flat, nervous whinny. ‘You’re no blessed cockney, Jimmy.’

Owl was grinning too. ‘It is absurd,’ he said. ‘Completely absurd. And actionable, as I say. In the course of my life, I have learned a thing or two about the law, and there is no doubt in my mind that you have been libelled. He attacks your person, my friend. Your character.’

‘The rogue denies me my fundamental right,’ Jimmy stated, ‘to call myself an artist. He says my work is not art. This is why no one buys. But what right do they have to pass judgement in this manner? These self-appointed critics, these ignoramuses, these blasted fools? What goddamned right do they have?’

‘None,’ said Miss Corder. ‘None at all.’

Owl nodded in sympathy. ‘You must go to court, Jimmy. I have said this to you several times now. The public chastisement of John Ruskin for the abuses of his pen is long overdue. And there must be compensation for the damage he has sought to inflict.’

‘That he has inflicted already,’ said Jimmy.

‘Compensation?’ Maud asked. ‘You mean – you mean money?’

The Owl turned to her in an attitude of apologetic explanation. ‘I know Ruskin, Miss Franklin. Better than any man alive, I should think. I was his – well, I suppose you might call it his private secretary, back before my association with Gabriel Rossetti. I undertook many missions on his behalf, and became familiar with every part of his affairs – some dark regions, Miss. And he has grown yet more strange since. The lunatic’s beard. The demented air that attends on his manners and his writings. It is said—’

‘Owl,’ Jimmy interrupted, dragging on his cigarette. ‘Not now.’

‘He must pay,’ said Owl, changing tack. ‘He can afford to, certainly. His father traded in wines, he traded very well, and left his only child rich indeed. The wretched fellow squats up north somewhere, among the Lakes, atop a veritable mountain of gold. It is your duty, old man, if you ask me, to have some clever lawyer relieve him of a portion of it.’

Jimmy seemed to see the sense in this. ‘We are down, I won’t deny it. To be completely honest, mon cher, we suffer still from the lack of Leyland’s thousand. That is the root of the trouble. Most of what he paid was already owed, you see – it’s long gone.’

Leyland. Maud sat up. ‘The Amber and Black,’ she said.

Again all three of them looked her way, curious and vaguely condescending. A connection had been forming in the back of her mind, since the walk over from New Bond Street. While visiting Lindsey Row in the years before the Peacock Room, Frederick Leyland would surely have seen the Amber and Black when it had Florence’s features. And then he would have seen it again in the Grosvenor Gallery.

‘I saw what you did to it. To Leyland’s daughter. You scraped off her face.’

They laughed hard at this, did Jimmy and the Owl, slapping their palms against the tabletop and stamping their boots upon the floor. It was more than Maud had expected, a lot more, and it knocked her off-course. She found herself smiling too, even as she tried to raise her voice over the uproar.

‘Something else has happened, hasn’t it, Jimmy? Why would you do that?’

‘You see the eye on this one, my dear Owl! A goddamned painter’s eye, it is! Nothing escapes it. Rien de tout!’

And somehow, before Maud could say anything else, she was under discussion as an artist for the second time in an hour. Jimmy trotted out a little legend of his own devising, in which the eighteen-year-old model Maud Franklin, soon after her arrival at Lindsey Row, had happened to discover an album of Japanese prints. The detailed studies of flowers within had inspired her to such a degree, he claimed, that she’d picked up the brush at once, and displayed an obvious gift for it. Owl said that he would very much like to see her latest drawings; as did Miss Corder, who declared that Maud simply must visit her studio on Southampton Row, within the week if it could be arranged. The attention and encouragement flattered Maud to the point of giddiness. Her skin flamed radish red, perspiration stippling her brow. Frederick Leyland and the Amber and Black quite left her mind.

‘I haven’t done anything for a while,’ she said, as her glass was refilled, ‘you know, on account of – of being away and …’

They told her that she must reapply herself at the first opportunity. That it was her responsibility to humankind. To leave such a talent unused, they said, was an unforgivable waste. She had to paint.

Maud nodded, and sipped, and promised that she would.

*

Dusk was shading the grand bend of the Quadrant by the time they decided to eat. As always, Jimmy insisted upon everyone having the same, with him ordering: Homard en Croute, a favourite of his. Maud would have eaten this gladly, but Miss Corder’s sylph-like form, snaking against the table beside her, served as a stern admonition. She had to recover her own figure as soon as possible, so she picked at the little pie, trying to look like she was making a start on it, breaking a hole in the buttery crust and prodding at what lay beneath.

Owl’s serving, in contrast, was gone in moments. Noticing Maud’s reluctance, he offered and then engineered a discreet swap of their dishes. It was a mystery, how he managed to eat such quantities while talking – for talk he most certainly did. Even Jimmy stayed quiet, or mostly quiet, to hear him. In that impressive voice of his, he began to tell them of a certain period of his youth – always brought to mind, he claimed, by the taste of lobster. He was Portuguese, as it turned out, not Spanish as Maud had assumed; or rather a half-Portuguese, the son of an English wool merchant and a noble lady of Oporto.

‘Their final child,’ he said. ‘No fewer than thirteen others preceded me. My father expired, in fact, not long after my birth.’ The cause was exhaustion.’

Left destitute, his widowed mother had moved out of the city with her six youngest to a village down the coast. There, some years later, the teenage Owl had supported them all by diving for treasure. The Barbosa, a mighty galleon from the time of King Alfonso VI, had been wrecked just offshore, the hull lying untouched in shallow waters. And so, an India rubber air tube clenched between his teeth, he’d set about groping through the seaweed-coated timbers – braving the snapping jaws of monstrous eels, the tentacles of octopi and heaven knows what else – returning to the surface only when his fishing net was filled with gold doubloons.

‘On occasion, in the Barbosa’s innermost crevices, I would encounter these gigantic lobsters. These turquoise leviathans, like creatures from dreams or the paintings of madmen. I see you laughing there, Jimmy Whistler, but you wouldn’t have laughed if you’d been in the water beside me. You’d have spat out your air tube and screamed like a horse.’

Jimmy was rolling a cigarette and smirking so hard he dislodged his eyeglass.

‘I swear the blasted things were two feet long,’ Owl continued. ‘The size of a small dog, and deuced lively with it. Spines like you wouldn’t believe. Claws the size of coconuts. I’d wrestle them up from the wreck, through the surf, to the beach where my mother and sisters would be waiting. Often we’d make a fire in the sand and roast the beast in its shell. Feast on it before the sunset. This,’ – he held up a forkful of pinkish flesh, the last of Maud’s pie – ‘can’t really compare.’

‘We should go,’ said Miss Corder. Her eyes were dark with love; she reached between the dishes for Owl’s hand. ‘You should take us – the three of us. We could find a house on a cliff-top, overlooking the ocean. The wild Atlantic. Think of it, Carlos. Think of what Jimmy could paint.’

The Owl – Carlos – agreed. ‘A fellow’s shilling goes far over there,’ he said. ‘Damned far. Why, we could take a castle. Live like royalty.’

Right then, with a newly refilled glass raised to her lips, this struck Maud as a truly brilliant idea. Why on earth shouldn’t they? Venice had been the plan, the promise, but elsewhere could surely be as good, especially in such enlivening company. The land of Carlos the Owl. She very much liked the sound of it. She glanced at Jimmy. Eyeglass reinserted, cigarette lit, he was studying the Portuguese with wry affection.

‘We’ll be expecting lobster every night, Owl, you know,’ he said. ‘You’d better bring along your bathing suit.’

They toasted their expedition, several times over and with much laughter. The last traces of formality fell away: Miss Corder and Miss Franklin were shown the door, with Rosa and Maud taking their place. Various far-fetched arrangements were made. Goals were set, both artistic and gastronomic. A warm camaraderie enfolded the table.

Shortly afterwards, as the dishes were removed, an unspoken communication passed between the men. They excused themselves and rose, disappearing into the rear of the restaurant.

‘Cigars, most probably,’ said Rosa, looking over her shoulder, out at the street.

Maud emptied her glass. She was feeling pretty damned tight, in truth, having drunk a good deal and eaten next to nothing. She fell to staring at Rosa’s hair. It was tied up in a plait, the coil as elaborate and perfect as a carving in a church. Until then it had simply seemed a yellowish shade of brown. Now, though, in the candlelight, Maud could see something much paler in it – a lustre that was almost metallic.

Abruptly, Rosa turned back to the table. Her eyelids lowered a fraction; she gave Maud a look of fond assessment. ‘You are brave,’ she said.

‘Beg pardon?’

‘To have done what you did. What was needed. All by yourself. And to be here again, at his side. It is very brave.’

Maud saw her meaning now, and her woozy happiness – all the pleasure she’d been taking in this place and this singular couple, so convivial and ambitious and full of spirit – went in an instant, vanishing as if it had never been, leaving her with the cold and simple fact that she was sitting there in a swell restaurant, pickling herself in sparkling wine like she hadn’t a care in the whole bloody world, while her child, her baby, was away several miles to the north in the care of a woman who could be anybody, who could be anything, who could be about to bake the infant alive in an oven and there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, that she could do about it. She put down her glass. She felt panic rising. It quivered inside her, urgent and hopeless. It bolted her to the spot.

‘You mean with my daughter,’ she said. ‘You mean with Ione.’

The smallest crack ran through Rosa’s self-possession. She’d plainly thought they would discuss Jimmy – the importance of loyalty or something. Not this. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘your daughter.’

‘I chose the name. Ione Edith Whistler. On my own. While I was – just after. I had to tell it to Jimmy. He hadn’t—’

Maud was going to say that he hadn’t asked what the name might be, that she’d given him three days to do it and he hadn’t, so she’d snapped and simply told him, shouted it at him in fact; but recounting this, trying to untangle it all for the first time, proved too much. She slumped forward onto the table, pressing her cheek hard against the marble. A slick of liquid – tears or wine, she couldn’t tell which – made her head slip an inch to the left.

‘I thought I could just leave her. I thought it wouldn’t matter. I—’

Rosa eased her back upright, wiped her face with the cuff of her silver-grey jacket, and proposed that they take some air – walk down to Piccadilly, perhaps. Maud was signalling her assent when the men came back into view on the other side of the room. They were speaking loudly in French to the head waiter, talking over each another with much gesticulation. Maud followed their approach with a prickle of resentment.

Jimmy noticed at once that something was wrong. ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘An excess of cheer?’

‘She’s tired,’ Rosa told him, ‘that’s all. A little weak still.’

Sliding his wiry frame onto the seat beside her, Jimmy plucked Maud’s hand from her lap and squeezed it between his. ‘Is everything well, Maudie?’ he asked, gently as you like. ‘What’s the difficulty here?’

Maud reclaimed her hand. ‘Nothing,’ she sniffed. ‘Honest.’

July 1877

Lord’s Cricket Ground, Jim swiftly decided, was a charmless spot on which to pass a fine summer’s afternoon. It was little more than a broad, dull lawn, a few streets away from Regent’s Park, hemmed in by depressing terraces and withered nursery gardens. There was something, perhaps, in the contrast between the luminescence of the sportsmen’s white costumes and the smooth green carpet upon which they played, but brief observation of the game itself – much milling about, punctuated by sudden thwacks and shouts, and frantic, inexplicable rearrangements – demonstrated to Jim that he would never understand or care for cricket, even if he lived to be a hundred years old.

He was there, of course, for a very particular reason, wholly unrelated to sport. By the day’s end he was determined that Whistler would be reinstated as the cher ami of the Leyland family. He would be the confidante of the wife, of the children, and of the husband too. Once again there would be dinner invitations, and visits to the opera, and trips up to Speke Hall, the Leyland country pile. And he would be allowed access to his Peacock Room, for the first time in half a year. He would be able to make a full and proper photographic record of what he’d done there, and expunge this corrosive suggestion of imposture once and for all.

The first encounter, nearly a month earlier, had genuinely been one of chance. Mrs Leyland had been seen across a drawing room, in a dress of powder blue, listening with the slightly pained attentiveness of a polite person enduring a tedious conversation; yet looking, it had to be said, tremendously well nonetheless. Indeed, the intelligence in her face, its beautiful tenderness, had made Jim’s breath catch very slightly in his throat. There had been a certain caution in him as they’d spoken. The saga of the Peacock Room was still much discussed in society. Many, he understood, were inclined to view him as a vulgar, self-promoting vandal, a foreigner with no understanding of honour or manners, who had traduced his patron’s trust; reacted with petulance to a generous fee; disregarded and then deliberately contradicted Leyland’s wishes, slathering valuable antique leather in bucket-loads of blue paint. And of course – perhaps most seriously of all for these blasted English – it was claimed that he’d made a gentleman’s home into an exhibition hall, with press nights, newspaper reviews and an unending procession of visitors. It had seemed entirely possible that Mrs Leyland might want nothing whatsoever to do with him.

But no. The connection forged during the painting of her portrait had survived. Her smile had been dry, faintly teasing; it held a memory of jokes, subtly shared, at the expense of those around them.

‘Should I strive for rapprochement, madam?’ he’d asked. ‘Is there hope?’

‘It will be hard,’ she’d replied, ‘most certainly. You know what Frederick is like. But there is always hope, Mr Whistler.’

A fortnight later they’d taken a drive in the Leyland carriage. It had been extremely pleasant, with much gossip and laughter, like old times almost – but only Mrs Leyland had been there. Jim had the sense that the rest of them might be avoiding him, or even unaware that the meeting was taking place. As he’d left, however, she’d mentioned this fixture at Lord’s: two Cambridge colleges, one of them her son Freddie’s, meeting during the summer recess to play for the relief of a pauper school in Maida Vale. The whole family would be present, she’d added. He’d understood her at once.

In the days afterwards, Jim had convinced himself that it was in fact a very natural progression towards the restoration of goodwill, somehow both rapid and agreeably unhurried; and when the envelope had arrived bearing the orderly, sloping hand of Frederick Leyland, his immediate thought had been that the wife had spoken with the husband. That she’d brought him round. That their rift was to be mended and the philistine tamed right there and then. That the value of the Peacock Room had been recognised even, and the Leyland commissions might conceivably resume.

The letter inside had been short, a dozen lines or so – headed with a ‘Sir’, finished off with a ‘yours truly’, both clear signals of war – and it had stopped Jim like a clock. The two of them, Leyland had written, were publicly known to be in a state of absolute and enduring opposition. In riding out with his wife, Jim had taken advantage of the weakness of a woman – yes, those really were his words – and had placed her in what he termed a false position before the world. Any further contact had been prohibited.

For a week Jim had stewed, occupied by Maud’s return from her confinement, and nagged by a most unwelcome sense of having been outmanoeuvred – of the Peacock Room being gone for good. Then, while out at the Café Royal the previous evening, he’d consulted with the Owl, whom he’d been keeping apprised of the situation. As usual, the Portuguese had been able to see in an instant that which eluded less nimble minds. His advice had been unequivocal.

‘Why, my dear chap, you must attend the cricket ground. Mrs Leyland is a tactician. One would have to be, with a husband like that. She has engineered a final opportunity for you to say your piece. The perfect opportunity, I might say. No, no, Jimmy – you must attend. You must go before him. It is the only way.’

So there Jim was, clad in white cotton duck and a straw boater, ready to patrol. His plan was to remain at a distance for a while, assessing the Leylands’ mood and selecting the optimum moment for his approach – perhaps just after Freddie had scored a wicket or whatever they were called. There would be a great cheer; he would stroll up, applauding with hands raised, calling out ‘bravo!’, and as one the family would turn towards him. Mrs Leyland would beam and beckon for him to approach. Her husband would be rather less pleased; Jim was confident that his wife would have worked on him a little, though, upbraiding him for that outrageous letter and laying out the situation in a manner so reasonable and objective that even the British businessman would heed it. He’d be flushed, furthermore, with his son’s sporting success – the son who’d always held Jim in such amity and regard. The fellow would have to give Jim a chance. A decent hearing, out there on wholly neutral ground. Yes, Owl was right. It really was ideal.

But a problem soon arose. This confounded game took up an unreasonable amount of room, two or three acres by Jim’s estimation, obliging the spectators – of whom there were a good number, a few hundred at least – to cluster thickly around the edges. It made the careful scouting he had in mind completely impossible. He was in amongst them from the start, these wealthy families and crowds of well-to-do youths, stuck beneath a shifting lily pond of parasols, unable to see more than a few yards in any direction. He might stumble across the Leylands entirely by accident – the timing of their reunion, and the climate of his reception, determined only by the whim of the gods.

Fortune, however, was on Jim’s side. Halfway around the cricket ground’s circumference, between caps and boaters and a variety of summer hats, he spotted the Leyland girls, perched atop a mustard yellow landau to get a better view of the proceedings. There was Florence, looking characteristically truculent; she would have seen the Amber and Black, he supposed, on the wall of the Grosvenor. Some appeasement would be required there – an explanation, somewhat disingenuous, of the artistic necessity of the change. Fanny, the eldest, was next to her, in a cream gown with a dark stripe. A woman of twenty now, she was out in society, being touted around for the purposes of marriage. And on the end, closest to him, was Elinor – Baby, they all called her – the youngest, but along with the others looking noticeably older to Jim’s eye – about fifteen, he guessed. She had been his most devoted companion of the three, always making him gifts of flowers and hopeless scraps of needlework, and he had applied himself to her portrait with special dedication. The child had been taken in blue, like Gainsborough’s boy, with a result almost equal to his painting of her mother.

The sisters had arranged themselves upon the open-topped carriage in a charmingly jejune attempt at elegance. Their attention was very much on the game and their elder brother’s performance in it – and rather pointedly not upon the gaggle of students who stood nearby, talking loudly and larking about, doing all they could to draw the young ladies’ notice. Jim smiled, recognising both roles; and then Baby – whose display was a touch less committed than that of Florence or Fanny – noticed him standing there. Her indifferent expression screwed up into an antagonistic little pout.

It was a spear, quite frankly, driven into Jim’s heart – yet another wound to an organ pretty much riddled with perforations already. He wanted to appeal to her somehow, to launch into an old jest perhaps, or recite a favourite rhyme. The girl was nudging her sisters, though, alerting them; and Florence was shuddering, yes, actually shuddering at the thought. Neither would so much as turn in his direction. Very well. So this would be difficult. It was foolish, really, to have thought otherwise. Jim carried on towards the landau, inserting the eyeglass. His cheery hail went unacknowledged.

Mrs Leyland was at the carriage’s near end, standing alone between its back wheels. Her fine, fashionable clothes – a light grey gown trimmed with delicate ruffles, tied behind with a bow of cerise satin – contrasted with her apprehensive bearing and the hard lines beneath her eyes. But she at least was pleased to see Jim, noticing his arrival with a sudden, unguarded smile. Relief, he thought.

‘Well, how about this,’ he declared, looking around him and wondering where Leyland was – watching at the front maybe, at the border of the pitch? Perhaps a well-timed approach was still feasible. ‘All these years in London, in England, and never once did I dare to imagine the, ah – the sheer glory of this game.’

‘I wasn’t sure you’d come,’ she said.

‘My dear Mrs Leyland, how on earth could I not?’ Jim glanced up at the girls; they continued to ignore him, to ignore them both, acting as if completely absorbed in the match. He lowered his voice. ‘Did you happen to hear that your husband wrote me the most astonishing letter, after our excursion the other day?’

Mrs Leyland maintained her smile; her eyes spoke of something else altogether. ‘He informed me of it,’ she said. ‘And took no little pleasure in the revelation.’

‘Such a heinous misunderstanding. I confess that it left me bewildered.’

‘I told him it was nothing,’ she said. ‘A ride in a carriage only. That it wasn’t defiance or deliberate rudeness or whatever else. But he wouldn’t heed me. He never does. He scarcely credits me with the mental capacity to walk down the stairs.’

‘He’s turned the children against me, I think.’

‘Of course he has, Mr Whistler. That is how it’s done. That is how you are cast out. Why, he’s managing to do the same to me, even as he leaves me with them all to go about his business. These pressing appointments that he has. He creeps off the instant we arrive in London, you know, then reappears back in Liverpool a week later as if this was a perfectly respectable way for a husband and father to behave.’

There was applause; Jim joined in, despite having no idea who he clapped or why. He could only think that Leyland was not there. The family had plainly come to Lord’s without him. Was this a last-minute alteration? It didn’t seem so. Mrs Leyland appeared to have invited him along knowing that her husband, the man with whom he needed so keenly to speak, would not be present.

The cricketers were walking off, heading into a low pavilion at the head of the ground. From conversations around them, Jim gathered that play had stopped for luncheon. The crowd broke apart, drifting in its different directions. Mrs Leyland opened a parasol and took his arm. She led him away from the landau at some speed, towards the long rectangle of paler grass in the centre of the pitch.

‘One of his women,’ she said, when they were a distance from her daughters, ‘came to our house. Can you believe it, Mr Whistler? To our house, up to the very door. With an – with an infant. His infant. After money, unsurprisingly.’

Mrs Leyland’s grip had become ferociously tight; Jim winced a little, both at the pressure of her fingers and the obvious extent of her distress. What, though, could he reasonably be expected to do? The thought occurred – ignoble, yes, but impossible to help – that if his strongest ally in this family was really in serious danger of exclusion herself, then the Peacock Room was truly lost.

‘You’ve known all along, haven’t you? His infidelities. The women he keeps around town.’

Jim gave a slight shrug, avoiding her gaze. He had a plain sense of escalation, of something growing far beyond him into regions that were really quite unknown, where wit and style and nerve would not even begin to address the problems at hand. He felt a desperate need for a cigarette.

‘Naturally you have. Dear God. I know the way you men talk to one another. The great licence you allow yourselves.’

She was right, worse luck: Leyland had shared a fair deal about his women, usually late at night at his club or in some restaurant or other. This talk hadn’t taken the form of confession or anything like that, or even of boastfulness. It had been closer to a dare – as if Leyland, aware of the familiarity that existed between the painter and his wife, had been challenging Jim to make an objection. Needless to say, Jim had not. They were men of the world, the pair of them, and this particular millionaire had seemed then to contain a deep vein of future commissions.

‘I am bound, my dear Mrs Leyland, by many ties. It is not my place to—’ Jim hesitated. ‘Know only that I value your friendship. More than I can tell you. If there is anything I can do, anything at all, to be of assistance, you must tell—’

He stopped again, as it occurred to him now that this could actually be why she’d encouraged his efforts to repair their connection. The marriage, ailing for years, was entering its final collapse. She needed an accessory. A berth, perhaps. A route out of the Leyland fortress that enclosed her so completely. The current of this whole episode, as he’d conceived it, had been him rejoining the family, via Frances Leyland – not her leaving it via him.

How did this reversal make Jim feel? Well, flattered certainly. Also consternated, as he had not the least idea how he would manage this, whatever it might turn out to be, in practical terms. It would add immeasurably to his own roster of trouble, in every conceivable area. And alarmed. Yes, most definitely alarmed. It was one thing to clash with a man in the field of art, where your own rectitude, your superiority in both taste and sophistication, could be taken for granted. But this, assisting in the end of his marriage – the removal, quite possibly, of his wife – was something else entirely. Suddenly he wondered whether Leyland already had suspicions. Whether this lay behind the extraordinary venom of that letter. The weakness of a woman. A false position before the world.

Jim’s offer was never finished. Reaching the centre of the ground – where three sticks were wedged into the turf, serving some obscure sporting function – they came to a halt and simply stood together in the sunshine, arms linked still, both struck mute by the enormity of what had been touched upon, and the panicked flailing of their thoughts. Jim looked back towards the landau. The Leyland girls had alighted from it and were talking with one of the cricketers – an especially tall fellow with a slope-shouldered, vaguely diffident stance and longish auburn curls spilling from beneath his cap. It was Freddie. Even at a distance, Jim could see clearly what was happening. The poor lad was being press-ganged into an unwelcome task. It wasn’t hard to guess what it might be. Soon afterwards, he started in their direction.

Mrs Leyland released Jim’s arm and began talking loudly about the garden at Prince’s Gate, and how much the new plantings were suffering in the heat, until Freddie arrived before them. Over the years, Jim had gone to some pains to cultivate a friendship with the younger Frederick Leyland, developing a tone both worldly and avuncular. The boy was every last inch his mother’s son – the same doe eyes, the same hint of vulnerability. Without a word to Jim, he trotted out some transparent nonsense about Baby having a headache, which apparently necessitated an immediate return to Kensington. He’d be all right, he added; one of the chaps would be sure to offer him a lift at the end of the match. Mrs Leyland met Jim’s eye very briefly and started to walk back. Jim made to follow – rubbing his forearm to restore the circulation – and found Freddie, sweet, loyal Freddie, deliberately blocking his path.

‘Now see here, Jimmy,’ he said. He paused to lick his lower lip; he crossed his arms and then uncrossed them again. ‘Jimmy, we can’t have this. We just can’t.’

Jim affected ignorance – blamelessness. ‘Have what, my dear fellow?’

‘Jimmy.’ Freddie sounded almost pleading now. ‘I can’t go against the governor. You must see that. Don’t force matters further. Please.’

‘I meant,’ said Jim, ‘to drop you a line about us going on a jaunt into town. I mentioned it to Godwin and he said – you’ll like this, I think – he said that—’

Freddie was shaking his head. ‘I can’t. Not now.’ He girded himself, like a man about to swallow something unpleasant. ‘Listen to me. You must not approach my mother again. In any fashion. And you must not write to her either. I – I really don’t think I can be any more clear about it than that.’

Jim looked into his pink face, so blessedly young; at the battle underway there, the reluctance and the resolution. ‘Surely not,’ he murmured. ‘Come now, Freddie. Surely not.’

The boy would say no more. He turned away and went after his mother – standing guard over her effectively, until she was in that landau with his sisters, the horses had been brought back up and they were departing the cricket ground. Despite all that had transpired – the pails of Prussian blue and the duelling peacocks, the roadside confrontations, the assorted barbs and slights – it was only now, as he watched the Leyland women being driven off into the dusty city, and Freddie cast one last look over at him before rejoining his fellows, that Jim fully understood the irreversible nature of this situation. He was shut out forever. An enemy.

Lindsey Row felt cool and dark after the sun-blasted cricket ground, and the sweltering box of the cab. Maud was suffering still from the dinner with Owl and Miss Corder. The aim had been to lift the girl out of the dumps in which she’d been mired since her return, and in this it had appeared to succeed – until her disintegration in the later stages, at any rate. Jim had all but carried her back to their bed; and the mumbled, accusatory questions she’d slung his way had indicated plainly enough that this particular difficulty was far from finished with.

Now her brown eyes followed him from a parlour armchair. ‘Where’ve you been?’

Jim sat opposite, dropping his boater to the floor. His clothes were stiff with dust and dried sweat. He had an overbearing sense of mental obstruction – of a great many things trying to fit through the same small aperture at the exact same instant.

‘Cricket,’ he said. ‘A match at Lord’s.’

‘You don’t care about cricket, Jimmy.’ Maud’s face was pale but attentive. She was a clever soul, his Madame. She knew that something was up.

‘There was a plan,’ Jim told her, ‘for the betterment of our position. But it came to naught. It may have been – well, it may have been something of a misstep.’

This wasn’t enough. ‘Rosa Corder,’ she said, ‘talks of conflict.’

‘Yes, well, conflict may be coming.’ Jim tried to rally. ‘But we’ll prevail, my girl. Things will improve. There are several other strategies under consideration. The Owl, you know, is a most resourceful and well-connected fellow.’

And then for some reason he began to tell her about lithography, and the Portuguese’s proposal that he make a series of lithographic Nocturnes – coloured prints of the river and its bridges, made ingeniously by sketching with crayon upon tablets of damp stone – which would surely amount to a stream of gold so steady and plentiful it might as well be coming in through a pipe. As he went on, he got a disconcerting sense of how he must appear to her. There will be a taxing period, certain friends had warned him, after a woman surrenders a child. It cannot be avoided. No matter what she has promised, no matter the arrangements that have been reached, no matter how unified and durable the two of you were before, there will be distress. Lingering distress. Resentment.

Maud rose while he was talking and went to leave the room. He reached for her as she passed but she was walking too quickly, brushing against his outstretched fingers.

‘Why will nobody,’ she said, ‘ever tell me what’s bloody happening?’

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