by J C Briggs
Dickens bade a bemused George Stanfield a hasty farewell, promising to come back soon to see his father. He strode away to meet Hob. Pray genteel Bob wasn’t taking afternoon tea. Dickens was in a hurry now.
Cipriani Lloyd told him about Jianna. Yes, she had modelled for him, four years ago, perhaps, but she had moved on. This part of the world was inconvenient for her — she’d used to come to his house in Gloucester Place. No, he didn’t know what had become of her. Beautiful girl, he said, quiet — remote somehow — ideal for the work he had been doing. Mourning figures, he’d done for St John’s Church and the Marylebone Church. Had Dickens seen them? Wanted to know who she was? Something for Household Words? Given the Pre-Raphaelites a pasting, hadn’t he, in June — sorry for that. Cipriani Lloyd liked them — Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin — now, that was worth seeing —
Dickens almost blushed. He had written a stinging denunciation of Millais’s painting: Christ in the House of His Parents — but the last thing he wanted was a disquisition on the merits or otherwise of the so-called brotherhood, but Cipriani Lloyd was a talker — a portly, curly-headed, smiling, immediately likeable, but garrulous man of thirty or so.
‘Colour, Mr Dickens, and precision of form — that’s the new —’
‘I don’t doubt I may be wrong, Mr Lloyd, but I can assure you I do not want to write about Jianna Rizzo. I just need to find her.’
‘Why, though?’
‘It’s a long story. I think she may have known a girl who is missing — the god-daughter of my wife’s personal maid. I said I would try to trace her.’
‘Then I am sorry, indeed, that I cannot help you. Artist, was she?’ he asked, pointing to the picture which Dickens had set down on a table.
‘Oh, no — this is — well, perhaps you will look at it for me. I don’t know the artist.’
Cipriani Lloyd uncovered the picture and stared at it. ‘Where did you come by this?’ He sounded puzzled and angry.
‘Do you know the artist?’
‘I am certain I do — it is by a man called Anthony Ferrars.’
Dickens stared back. ‘Not Ferrara?’
‘No — Mr Dickens are you quite well? You’ve turned quite pale. Will you not sit down and take some wine?’
Dickens sat. ‘A sudden faintness — I do beg your pardon.’ He took a gulp of the wine and steadied himself, ‘What can you tell me about Mr Ferrars?’
The smiling face frowned, ‘I should like to know why, Mr Dickens, and how you came by that painting.’
‘It is another long story — I will be frank with you. It involves more than one missing young woman. The police are involved, so I cannot tell you more, but I beg you to tell me about Mr Ferrars. The picture was found at an address in Clerkenwell where the young woman I was seeking was last seen — she was thought to be living with an artist who is connected to Jianna Rizzo.’
‘And you think this artist is Anthony Ferrars?’
‘Well, now that you have identified the picture.’
‘He did meet Jianna — he met her here back in 1845. I’d just moved here and Jianna was sitting for a last commission — it was a little statue of Philomel — grace and charm, the critics said … sorry, you don’t want to know about the critics, but she had that, Jianna, I mean and a look of remoteness about her as if her eyes were on another world. That’s why I used her for The Mourning Girl. But it was only a brief meeting — he asked me about her afterwards, said he’d like to paint her, but I didn’t know where she had gone.’
It fitted with what Jack Marchant had told them — she knew the man who called himself Antonio Polidori — but she had known him earlier as Ferrars. Why had she lied to Jack? He felt like a man caught in a net. He struggled to free himself. It was time to be a lot more blunt with Cipriani Lloyd.
‘Tell me about him, Mr Lloyd. Jianna Rizzo is missing, believed to be with a man who calls himself Antonio Polidori, and the young lady I was seeking is dead — found strangled in a reservoir in Clerkenwell.’
Cipriani Lloyd’s merry brown eyes blinked and his face now paled. ‘Polidori?’
‘Yes — I don’t know why, but I need to know about him.’
The sculptor poured more wine for both of them and drank his at one gulp. Then he poured another, filling Dickens’s glass, too. Dickens thought he would go mad as he watched him. For God’s sake, tell me.
‘Mr Dickens, I honestly don’t know where to start.’
‘I suggest you begin with Mr Ferrars — tell me how you know him and what you know of his history.’
Cipriani Lloyd ran his fingers through his curls — he looked like a good-natured cherub, except that his eyes were anxious. ‘Anthony Ferrars was brought up in Venice. His father was a banker — an agent of Coutts Bank — he made his money from the commission charged to English travellers and from foreigners who lived in Venice, either permanently or for a longish stay.’
Dickens nodded — he had used the same system when he was in Italy. You presented your letters of credit from your London bank — his was Coutts, too — and were charged for the issuing of the money.
‘His mother died young — that’s where Polidori comes in. Mr Ferrars knew Byron and Polidori. Polidori was some family connection, so Tony told me. He was proud of it. Anyway, Byron and Polidori were in Venice in 1816 —’
‘How old is Anthony Ferrars?’
‘Thirty-six. Same age as I am. His mother was a sleep-walker. Tony told me that Doctor Polidori was something of an expert in somnambulism — he’d written a paper on it and Mr Ferrars called him in to treat his wife. I don’t know what treatment he gave but it didn’t cure her. When Tony was eight she drowned — in the night. Someone had left open the door down to the water steps and she was found in the water. His father sent him to England to school when he was twelve and that’s where I met him. He didn’t fit in — neither did I, for that matter — too fat — no good at cricket or anything. Sipsy, they called me, and they thought Tony was mad as well as foreign. We were chums.
‘He was a sleepwalker, too. He’d go missing at night and sometimes he’d be found on the stairs. Sometimes he’d get as far as the lake. He could never remember anything about it. He’d go off into these trance-like states. He missed Italy — well, you would. The light, Mr Dickens, the sunlight — that’s why I went for six months. I was —’
Dickens interrupted, ‘Mr Ferrars?’
Cipriani grinned. He really was an engaging fellow. ‘Sorry, it’s a passion of mine. Well, he stuck it at school until he was sixteen, then he went back to Italy. The next I heard was that he went up to Oxford and hated that, and went back to Italy again. Then he turned to art — went to Henry Sass’s Drawing Academy. That would be about 1840. That’s how we met again. I thought he’d go to the Academy Schools afterwards — plenty did. Rossetti, for example — ’
‘Did he know him?’
‘Rossetti is much younger, but there is another connection. Doctor John Polidori was Rossetti’s uncle — died before he was born. Suicide, people said. Though, the verdict was “Visitation by the Hand of God” — quaint notion, don’t you think? Tony was quite struck with that.’
‘He didn’t attend the Academy Schools?’
‘He went back to Italy — always going back and forth. In one sense he couldn’t stick to anything — always flitting off, but then he’d take up an idea which would possess him for a while. At school, it was swimming. He was drawn to water — always in the lake or the river. And in his sleep, as I said. Because of his mother, I suppose. That’s what the alienists would say. And it was always Italy — Venice, of course, but he went everywhere, Rome, Parma, Bologna, Ferrara. And Byron — he said he remembered him though he was only a little child, I don’t know, but he became obsessed by the poems — he used to quote from one called ‘Sleep’. All about sleep being another world, or something like that. Same with Polidori, he was fascinated by the man — not just the vampire stuff. It was what Polidori had told Tony’s father about sle
ep. I may not have it right, but he had a theory that there are two minds — one working during sleep and one working during wakefulness, each unaware of the other. I suppose his mother’s death haunted Tony — he sought an explanation.’
‘Did he continue to sleepwalk?’
‘Sometimes. He came back in 1845 and stayed with me here for a few months. It happened then — he seemed troubled, but then took a house in William Street and I didn’t see much of him — we were both busy, and he could be —’ Cipriani looked at Dickens ruefully — ‘difficult at times. You never knew where you were with him — he could be charming and affectionate then cold and silent, but, well, school and all that. You remain loyal.’
You did, thought Dickens. The merry brown eyes were clouded with memory — two lonely boys thrown together in a place they hated, one a good-hearted, steadfast friend over all the years; the other — well, certainly troubled and unpredictable, and haunted, deeply disturbed, perhaps.
Cipriani continued, ‘He was painting, I do know that.’
‘Were there any women in his life — any love affairs?’
‘There was someone — in Italy, he said, a girl who died. That’s when he became possessed by the colour green. This green — that’s how I knew the painting was his. It became another obsession — finding the perfect green — this deep, rich green. Renaissance artists used Verdigris, the most vibrant green, and Malachite. You find it in Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Bronzini —’
And in a portrait in a castle at Ferrara, thought Dickens, but he just nodded.
‘Modern painters use Viridian and Emerald Green — highly poisonous, the latter. And, of course you can get your paints in tubes now, but Tony mixed his own pigments — it had to be perfect. His brush work is very distinctive. See —’ Dickens went to look and Cipriano handed him a magnifying glass — ‘he uses very small watercolour brushes to produce layer upon layer of colour on a white ground. It’s on a wooden panel — Tony preferred that — very smooth. Expensive, though. And I’ve a picture just like it. That’s why I was so surprised that you had it. I couldn’t have lost it — Tony left it here — like yours, it is not finished — the face, I mean. Tony never —’
‘When?’
‘A few weeks ago.’
‘You’ve seen him recently? Here?’
‘No, no — he moved away from William Street. I called, probably in 1846, but he wasn’t there. I assumed he’d gone back to Italy — it would be just like him. I didn’t hear anything of him until April 1850. He wrote to me — said he was back. He was looking for somewhere to live, he said. I was leaving for a six month tour of Italy so I wrote and offered him this house —’ he saw Dickens’s surprise — ‘I counted him as a friend — I had known him for so many years. In any case, I didn’t want to leave it empty. He said he didn’t need the servants — just a woman to come in and cook and take the laundry. I came back a few weeks ago and he was gone. Not a word, but that was characteristic, I’m afraid. Not a notion about where he is.’
‘What about family? Friends, the Rossettis — anyone?’
‘You could try them. Oh, there was a cousin or something — but that was years ago. Isabella — a widow, I think, older than Tony, but I’ve no idea where she lives.’
The mysterious Isabella, thought Dickens. Not that it helped at all. Was she a Ferrars before she married? That might help in tracking her down. ‘You don’t know her other name?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Dickens — I’m baffled by all this. The murdered girl you mentioned. Are you saying that Tony … I mean Jianna, is she in danger?’
‘I do not know, Mr Lloyd — I am saying only that he must be found.’
‘I see that and I am sorry I cannot be of more help.’
‘There is one more thing you can do. May I look at the other picture?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ll get it. You will see that it is just the same. It is Tony’s work — there is no doubt.’
It was exactly the same and on a wooden panel. Cipriani placed the pictures side by side. Dickens looked. Two portraits without a face — sinister, somehow, and haunting, as if the sitters had vanished, leaving a blank behind. And that distinctive red-gold hair. Cipriani gave Dickens the magnifying glass again. He knew what to look for now.
‘Look at the hair — that colour. You see it in so many Renaissance paintings, Mr Dickens, and the brushstrokes are so fine that you can see every hair.’
Dickens moved the magnifying glass from one picture to the other. The same artist had painted these. There was one difference.
‘This inscription,’ he said, ‘can you make it out?’
Cipriani took the glass and read the tiny words: The love where death has set his seal.
‘Byron,’ said Dickens.
Cipriani Lloyd looked at him, his cherub’s face as gaunt as if he had fallen from heaven.
40: A Pauper’s Grave
It was the case of Eliza Williams that had distracted Sam Jones. In 1849, Eliza Williams had cut her own throat, ‘beguiled,’ as the Police Gazette had reported, ‘by the arts of a policeman’. Jones had remembered the case — the policeman had vanished, his uniform abandoned at his lodgings — Police Constable Bentley Griss of K Division. Jones hadn’t known him, but it was the reference to the old case, the policeman and the suicide that had diverted him from his earlier search for cases in 1849.
Eliza Williams had been delivered of a bastard child and the beguiling constable had abandoned the ‘hitherto virtuous young female’ and she had killed herself.
And three wooden legs had also led him astray for beneath the long piece on Eliza Williams’s misfortune, there had been an account of a suicide in the Regent’s canal. The inquest on John Davis, an unemployed clockmaker, returned a verdict of ‘found drowned’. His two wooden legs had been left on the bank. More distracting still, had been the second inquest on the same day on a beggar ‘found drowned’ with his one wooden leg still attached. Jones had relished the thought of telling that story to Dickens and had then turned to the other accidents, suicides and unexplained deaths by water in the year 1849, none of which served his purpose.
Yet, since that occasion when he and Dickens had thought of that sequence of numbers: 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, Jones had brooded on the number 49. It was worth another look.
He had missed the few lines given to the drowning of an unknown female person in the Regent’s Canal where it flowed through St. John’s Wood — a young woman so disfigured that she had been unrecognisable. Now, in another newspaper, he found the inquest report which included the testimony of John Bate, a bargeman:
who was proceeding along Regent’s canal, and arriving at that part which flows by the gardens of the houses on the North Bank, nearing the tunnel under Grove End Road, his attention was attracted by a bundle floating in the water. Using his boat hook, he retrieved the bundle in which he found a shawl and a pair of nearly new women’s boots. He summoned a policeman. Inspector Day of D Division had attended
D Division, thought Jones, at Marylebone Lane Police Station. Perhaps that was why Inspector Maxwell of S Division had not mentioned the case. There were so many drownings. So many suicides of those driven into all the waters of London by poverty, debt, shame, loneliness — and murder, he thought. Fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, lovers shoved into the Thames, out of the way ponds, canals, wells even; or doing the shoving, either from the motives he had listed in his mind, or from hatred, cruelty, jealousy, revenge, or greed. He thought of those cases of mothers who had drowned their children so that they could collect the money from the burial club. Murder. And madness, he thought. Were they all mad or maddened by their circumstances to do that act from which there was no return — neither for the victim or themselves? He thought of Elizabeth’s story of Browning’s poem of the madman who had strangled his lover. Had this unknown girl been strangled? He turned back to the inquest report.
The drags were procured and the body got out and taken to the St Marylebone Workhouse. The surgeon
’s opinion was that the disfigurement of the face had been caused by its striking an old anchor which had been brought up by the drag. The injuries to the neck were consistent with the anchor chain having wrapped itself round the woman’s neck and torso. The body was much decomposed — it was the surgeon’s view that the young woman had been in the water for several weeks. Despite the description of her clothes: a black silk bonnet and brown merino dress and of her beautifully plaited golden hair, no one had come forward to identify her
“Beautifully plaited golden hair” — she had not known she was to die. She had gone to meet her lover by the canal, all unknowing. Or had she known? Watcher had talked of logic. Would a young woman dress herself up to die? Perhaps she would — pride, vanity? Did those things matter if you were planning your own death? He supposed they did — for a beautiful woman. To remind her false lover of what he had lost when he saw her lovely hair as he had known it in life.
This case didn’t make much difference. It might be a waste of time. That’s what he had said about Susan Harvest, and Elizabeth had put him right. Justice. This poor girl and Susan Harvest, buried by the parish in the cheapest of pauper coffins with a number scrawled on the lid. Just a number.
It would be a New Year soon — 1851 in a few weeks. Jemima Curd was murdered in 1850 — perhaps Violet Pout. Had the murderer had his fill? Would Jianna Rizzo live until 1851? Was there time to save her? Perhaps Dickens had found some discovery at Mr Stanfield’s.
Could there be some clue in that pauper’s grave in the St Marylebone Burial ground? Jones knew Inspector Elijah Day at Marylebone Lane. It would be worth making an enquiry. He would take Rogers. Mr Edward Tait had presided at the inquest. Jones knew him, too. He was the man he would have to see if he wanted an exhumation. If he wanted to know if Susan Harvest had been strangled.
41: A Most Dreadful Face