Last Nocturne

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Mr Whistler is appalled,’ Grand told him.

  ‘Somebody’s been mucking about with one of his paintings,’ Batchelor explained.

  ‘No!’ Martin looked horrified. ‘At the Grosvenor? Unthinkable!’

  Whistler looked around the room and back at Martin. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘This is Alexander Martin, our assistant,’ Batchelor introduced them.

  ‘Charmed,’ Whistler growled, as if he’d just kicked the cat. ‘Who’s coming with me?’ He turned to Grand and Batchelor. ‘I’ve just come from the Grosvenor and now I’m going back with witnesses. Then we’ll pay a visit to that asshole Ruskin. It’s not a paint-pot I’ll be throwing in his face, believe me.’

  ‘Ah, I’m afraid there’s a problem there,’ Batchelor said. He looked at Grand. ‘In the first post this morning, Matthew. We’ve been banned from the Grosvenor.’ He held out the letter. ‘It’s from Saunders, written last night. You remember, he’s the flunky at the gallery but it’s counter-signed by the Lindsays, both of them.’

  Grand looked at it. ‘Sorry, Mr Whistler,’ he shrugged. ‘It looks like we’re persona non grata at the moment.’

  ‘What about you?’ Whistler rounded on Martin. ‘Can’t you come with me?’

  ‘What exactly has happened, Mr Whistler?’ the lad asked.

  Rather than have the artist fly into the realms of self-adulation again, Batchelor cut to the chase. ‘Someone’s altered Mr Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold.’

  ‘Altered?’ Martin frowned. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Changed, destroyed, ruined, despoiled. One flick of a brush would do irreparable damage,’ Whistler assured everybody.

  ‘I should like to see that,’ Martin said.

  ‘Would you, sir?’ Whistler stormed. ‘Why? To gloat?’

  ‘No. To see why someone would go to those lengths. I am intrigued, Mr Whistler.’

  ‘And you are as banned as we are, Gan,’ Grand reminded him.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Martin said. He ferreted in the third drawer from the bottom, second from the right, turning his back for a moment on the others. When he turned back, he was wearing a pair of spectacles with bottle-bottom lenses, a false moustache and an enormous pair of front teeth.

  ‘The False Face Case!’ Grand and Batchelor chorused.

  ‘Five years ago,’ Batchelor went on.

  ‘Six,’ Martin corrected him. ‘I found these exhibits in my tidying up,’ he said, wrestling with the teeth as best he could. ‘No doubt they were crucial evidence once, but they could come in handy now. If I just comb my hair so’ – he parted it in the middle – ‘and borrow a hat’ – Batchelor handed him his – ‘I don’t think my own mother would recognize me.’ He gave a twirl. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m game,’ Whistler said. And just about everybody had to work hard to resist the urge to shoot him.

  Lady Caroline Wentworth was dressing to go out. This meant that she kept Eleanor on the run, taking clothes out of the wardrobe, finding something wrong with them, putting them back in. Finally, her ensemble was complete, down to the smart hat and toning boots. It would never do, she told Eleanor, to have boots that matched. That would show a frivolous disposition and also a tendency to spend money like water. As an engaged person, she must start to develop a reputation for sober behaviour and also as someone who could manage a house frugally.

  Eleanor had known Lady Caroline since she had come to the London house as a tweeny. She was allowed to speak her mind more than some other servants. ‘But Mr Grand isn’t poor, though, Miss Caroline, surely? He always dresses so well and … he’s an American. They’re all rich, aren’t they?’

  Lady Caroline gave her Lillie Langtry laugh, down the scale, to avoid sounding shrill and common. ‘Of course he isn’t, Ellie,’ she said. ‘In fact, he is rather rich. He is one of the Grands of Boston, you know.’ She smiled at her reflection in the mirror and adjusted her hat a sixteenth of an inch.

  ‘Then why does he work at that detectiving?’ Eleanor asked. In her world, you worked if you had to, shirked if you didn’t.

  Lady Caroline sighed. ‘Because he likes it, Eleanor,’ she said. ‘He has promised to do less when we’re married and they have at least taken on some help. But I don’t know …’ She turned and grabbed the girl’s hand. ‘You have a young man, don’t you, Ellie?’

  Eleanor was in a bit of a cleft stick. Cook was very strict about followers, but Eleanor had red blood in her veins and didn’t want to be a maid all her life. She was doing well with the grocer’s boy. ‘Umm …’

  Her mistress smiled. ‘I know you do, Ellie,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen you with that lad who delivers the … things, you know, to the kitchen.’

  Eleanor smiled. It took more than toning boots to show a wife would be a good manager, but she liked Lady Caroline and she wouldn’t dream of saying so. ‘Yes, I suppose we have an understanding,’ she admitted.

  ‘Well, when you are’ – the woman lowered her eyes and blushed becomingly – ‘you know, well, you don’t want to be disturbed by people knocking on the door, do you?’

  Eleanor was shocked. She had no more done any ‘you know’ than she had flown to the moon. That was something for after marriage, if then. ‘I don’t know, madam,’ she said. ‘I think I can hear Cook.’ And she fled into the corridor where she could hide her burning cheeks.

  ‘So, Effie,’ Lady Caroline said to her hostess as she sipped her tea, ‘I’m afraid I quite shocked poor Eleanor.’

  ‘Well, dear,’ Effie Millais still retained her artist’s model looks and had never quite shaken off the slightly raffish reputation of being twice married, her first husband having been John Ruskin, that well-known pubic-hair-phobe, ‘you should know by now that the servant class is terribly correct about these things. Otherwise, we would be overrun by the offspring of every kitchen maid in the house. Poor dear John often says he can’t keep up with all our children, let alone if the servants started breeding.’

  Lady Caroline Wentworth was, of course, adept at gossip, and had gone to Effie Millais’s Morning with every intention of probing into her brief and – she had always been led to believe – singularly uneventful life with Ruskin. But now she was here, in the bright and crowded room, she was suddenly a little shy. She had originally hoped that by telling the story of Eleanor’s horror and the implication that she and Matthew Grand were at it like weasels whenever opportunity permitted, she would suddenly open the floodgates of Effie’s memory and she would Tell All. But it had all been so long ago and far away and Effie liked to live in the present.

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Caroline said. ‘I do hope she doesn’t give notice. She has never seemed to mind when …’

  ‘They don’t, dear,’ Effie said, comfortably. ‘It’s like thinking of one’s parents doing it. It simply isn’t done.’

  Lady Caroline Wentworth blenched just a little.

  ‘So, how is the lovely Matthew?’ the older woman continued. ‘Handsome, rich, my dear, you have yourself a catch, there. The American in him doesn’t really matter these days, so there’s no need to worry. Yorktown, they tell me, was a long time ago.’

  Caroline, who hadn’t been worrying until that moment, decided to move the conversation along. ‘We had a slight altercation last night about ghosts,’ she said.

  ‘My dear girl!’ another woman whom Caroline didn’t know had joined their little group, sitting herself cosily on the third low chair before the fire. ‘One must believe in ghosts, one really must. John’ – she turned to Effie Millais to explain – ‘that’s my John, of course, dear, not your lovely man … John, Teddy and Georgie had such an interesting conversation at dinner last night, on exactly that theme! Of course, after our dear little Mary died in Florence, we were heart-broken, but John’ – she turned again to Effie, who waved aside the explanation – ‘John knew she hadn’t gone, merely moved to another plane. So we often chat.’ All the while she was talking, her eyes were swivelling over her
hostess’s head, looking for someone more interesting to bore half to death. ‘Oh!’ she suddenly cried, interrupting herself. ‘Is that …? Why, yes, I do believe it is …’ And, to the best of her ability, she jumped up and sped away across the room.

  Caroline sat back, feeling as if she had been run over by a fleet of growlers. She looked mutely at Mrs Millais. ‘Who was that?’ she murmured eventually.

  Effie laughed. ‘That, my dear, was Mrs John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, to give her her full title. Elizabeth, to her friends, who are few. She is the worst name-dropper you could wish to meet. “Teddy” is Edward Burne-Jones, a lovely man who is actually friends with her husband. “Georgie”, I would imagine, is G.F. Watts to the art-loving public, because as I recall he was once Stanhope’s teacher. A funny chap, used to be married to Ellen Terry, you know, when the world was younger and so was she. Only lasted a year, but he painted some lovely things of her.’

  Lady Caroline felt she could add something. She hated to be the only one in the room who didn’t know what was going on. ‘Isn’t Choosing her?’

  Effie smiled as if her pet dog had done a trick. ‘That’s right, dear. It is rather unfortunate around the chin, don’t you think, but that’s Ellen for you. We all know each other, as you are aware, but somehow, poor Lizzie likes to think she knows everyone just that touch better. She is very active in the psychic community, though. But it would drive you mad to get into her clique, I think. Who else can I recommend?’ She scanned the crowd milling in her drawing room. ‘If I had known, I would have invited Fanny Cornforth. She has … in deference to your Eleanor, shall we say “kept house” … with Rossetti until recently, so of course she had to share her roof with Lizzie Siddal. Do you know that story?’

  Caroline shook her head, but said, ‘A little.’ She had only been a child, but remembered her mother being upset; women in the far-off sixties couldn’t afford to lose one of their number who was making such strides in a man’s world.

  ‘Well, she was a model – weren’t we all, dear? – but also an artist, poet … the usual mixture, dear. Anyway, she married Rossetti – he was a bit obsessed, if you want my opinion, but there, that’s just women’s gossip – but she died soon after. She was John’s Ophelia, you know.’

  ‘Ah.’ Caroline could now place the face.

  ‘I won’t say Rossetti has been a monk since then, hence Fanny, but he has made rather a cult of the perfect Lizzie. There was a rumour that she caught pneumonia when posing for Ophelia, but my John – listen to me, I sound like Mrs S! – is a proper painter, not like some I could mention, and he didn’t need her to be lying in water to paint her as Ophelia.’

  ‘I did hear that story,’ Caroline remembered.

  ‘Well, there you are. People are so silly. John has just painted the princes in the Tower, but he didn’t kill the models. Though it was a close thing – children just don’t know how to keep still for a minute! And, speaking as we were of Watts and models, there’s one of his over there. I can’t bring her name to mind at the moment, but she was in that thing of his, Ariadne, somewhere. Lounging, like all his women do. She wasn’t Ariadne, she was the handmaiden woman. I don’t know how she came to be invited, now I come to think … I must look at my guest list in my diary. It’s getting a bit unwieldy.’ She looked around. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘People who knew about ghosts.’

  ‘Yes. Not many people believe in ghosts, per se. They believe in spirits. But why do you want to know about ghosts? Chilly, shivery things, I always think. We try and keep our house full of light and laughter and I suggest you try to do the same, when you marry the lovely Matthew.’

  ‘We were at the Grosvenor yesterday, and I’m sure I …’

  Effie patted Lady Caroline’s knee and laughed. ‘The Grosvenor? Why didn’t you say so? Everyone knows the Grosvenor’s haunted.’

  ‘Twice in one day, Mr Whistler,’ the doorman touched his peaked cap. ‘We are honoured.’

  ‘You certainly are,’ the artist snapped. ‘This way, Mr …’ He’d already forgotten the alias that Gan Martin had dreamt up.

  The doorman peered closely at Whistler’s associate. He had seen odder-looking blokes, but not often and usually on canvases. He watched as the pair disappeared into the second gallery.

  Terence Saunders was already on edge that lunchtime. He had not seen Whistler the first time he had called, but Joe, the caretaker, had, and he had warned Saunders that the American looked a little put out. Saunders refrained from telling Joe that that was exactly what he’d like to do with Whistler. There was nothing worse than artists coming to admire their own work, if only because they inevitably disparaged everyone else’s, especially when that everyone in question at the time was in earshot. What had really got Saunders’s goat today was the unannounced arrival of approximately twenty-three girls under the watchful eye of Miss Easter of the Ladies’ Academy down the road. They usually visited, as Saunders knew, the more rarefied halls of the Royal Academy, with its Reubenses, Titians and Nice Subjects. The Grosvenor specialized in the works of the more avant-garde painters, the pre-Raphaelite tendency that outraged society on a weekly basis. There would be some awkward questions in biology this afternoon, if he was any judge.

  And here they all were, prim and proper in their starched apron-fronted uniforms, walking in pairs like a crocodile of snobbery, averting their gazes from certain canvases at the click of Miss Easter’s parasol on the floor. The whole idea of an art gallery, Terence Saunders knew, was that the great British public should not only gawp at great art but buy it too. Fat chance of that with Miss Easter’s gels.

  ‘Well?’ Whistler stood in front of his own creation. ‘Aren’t you appalled?’

  Martin crouched and peered closely at the lower frame. Checking that no one was looking, he lowered his less-than-sharp spectacles and noted the famous butterfly signature. Then he stood up. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘There are four more stars from the rocket than there were, more light on the river. That parapet has been altered. Oh, and this figure in the foreground – it’s gone.’

  Whistler secretly kicked himself. The figure in the foreground, an old man he’d seen wandering when he’d painted the thing, was one of the most obvious objects of the lower canvas. But it wasn’t there now, merely a vague silhouette, transparent, with the rocket’s light behind it.

  ‘Cleverly done,’ Martin murmured.

  ‘I have never denied that Ruskin is an adequate painter,’ Whistler said. ‘If he’d confine his work to his own canvases. Until now, I’d only taken umbrage over the man’s infantile critique. But this, this is a new low, even for him.’

  ‘There’s no proof it’s him, of course,’ Martin said.

  ‘Don’t talk such bollocks, er … Of course it’s him.’

  There was a shriek from behind them and Miss Easter had passed her parasol to her head girl in order to shield the ears of her youngest charge. Then she regained the parasol and proceeded to poke Whistler with it. ‘You,’ she screamed, ‘are an oaf and bounder of the worst water! This is an art gallery, sir, a place of beauty and finesse. It is not a place to use vile, base language in front of innocent young girls, no matter how much a canvas may offend you.’

  ‘Offend me?’ Whistler was almost speechless. ‘Do you know who I am, madam?’

  Martin cut in, anxious to diffuse the situation. ‘This is Mr James McNeill Whistler, madam,’ he said.

  Miss Easter looked the American up and down. ‘Never heard of him,’ she trilled. ‘And who are you? His keeper?’

  ‘Sebastian Melmoth,’ Martin announced. ‘Art critic to the Telegraph.’

  ‘Everyone is a critic, Mr Melmoth,’ she sneered.

  ‘Mr Whistler is …’ Martin started the sentence but never finished it.

  ‘… a blot on the escutcheon of a fine establishment. Come, gels, Sir Coutts and Lady Blanche shall hear of this!’ and she shepherded them away.

  ‘Sanctimonious old besom!’ Whistler snarled. ‘Right … um … Melmoth
. Ruskin it is. I’m not even going to the police over this matter. I want his kneecaps – pure and simple.’

  In the end, Gan Martin managed to talk James Whistler down from the deadly ledge onto which he had metaphorically climbed, and they went back to Grand and Batchelor’s offices in the Strand.

  ‘Why, though?’ Batchelor asked. ‘Not outright vandalism but careful alteration. What for, in God’s name?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Martin confessed. He had stashed his disguise back in the relevant drawer and was writing a cross-reference to it now it had been used in the Whistler case. He sipped a cup of Grand’s best coffee, which beat anything Maisie could rustle up by a country mile, being merely coffee and not a mix of any liquids on the stove. ‘But – and I don’t know if you noticed this, Mr Whistler, there were other anomalies. In “your” gallery, if I can call it that, there was a Rossetti – La Ghirlandata. It was his musical instrument period, usual plain girl with red hair. But the harp was wrong. Rossetti knows his strings. There weren’t enough of them in the version I saw today.’

  ‘Really?’ Whistler leaned forward. ‘How on earth do you know that?’

  Martin was horrified that the man even had to ask. ‘I know how many strings a Renaissance harp has, Mr Whistler,’ he said in affronted tones. ‘So does Rossetti. Whoever “doctored” La Ghirlandata doesn’t.’

  ‘That, and the fact that Gan here has a photographic memory, Mr Whistler,’ Batchelor said.

  ‘And in the first gallery,’ Martin went on, ‘I couldn’t help but notice Burne-Jones’s Pygmalion and Galatea – the new one, called The Hand Refrains, I believe.’ He winked at Whistler. ‘One of those naked-lady jobbies our friend the teacher would have steered her gels away from, no doubt.’

  ‘I can’t imagine why,’ Whistler growled. ‘I remember that one. The Aphrodite statue has no pudenda at all. Can’t really see what the other gods saw in her.’