by Alex Connor
The
Hogarth
Conspiracy
A NOVEL
ALEX CONNOR
SILVEROAK BOOKS is a trademark of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
© 2012 by Alex Connor
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN 978–1-4027–9018-8
Originally published in 2011 in Great Britain as Legacy of Blood.
First published by Sterling Publishing, Co., Inc., 2012
Cover design: Tal Goretsky
Cover image: David Garrick as Richard III by
William Hogarth; © The Bridgeman Art
Library/Getty Images
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… from all the deceits of the world, the flesh,
and the devil, spare us….
—THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
I have endeavoured to treat my subject as a dramatic writer;
my picture is my stage.
—WILLIAM HOGARTH ON HIS WORK
I remember the time when I have gone moping
into the city, with scarce a shilling in my pocket …
but as soon as I had received ten guineas … sallied
out again with all the confidence of a man with ten thousand
pounds….
—WILLIAM HOGARTH
Prologue
Under the whorehouses and the taverns lie London’s dead. Beneath cobbles and alleyways, within the hearing of the molly houses and the sodomisers, cheek by jowl with the shadow of St Paul’s, and within the summer stink of the Thames. Under flagstones and feet, under weather and sewage, lay the passageway I hurried towards. Shaken, I looked back many times to see if I was being followed—but there was only the creak of a dozen inn signs and the sound of a startled horse whinnying shrilly in Drury Lane.
Mischief made mumbles in the night, and my hands were sweating as I reached the entrance of the narrow alleyway. Expecting me, a guard, silent and surly, stood back to let me enter, handing me a rush light, and then moved into the street above. As the iron gate slammed to a close, I stared into the dank open womb of the chamber below. I could see shadows of two other men, distorted into ghouls, and placed my foot gingerly on the next step. God! My mouth was thick with panic, my pulse speeding up, blood yammering like a lunatic in my veins. Turning at a bend, I stumbled, and the buckle of my shoe struck the stone wall, gouging a white scar into the brickwork.
Hearing my approach, the men turned. One, a priest, a handkerchief held over his nose, a sprig of rosemary pinned to his vestments, regarded me with indifference. Obviously, he had been to an earlier funeral where the mourners would have handed out the nosegays—rosemary for remembrance. The other man, a doctor, stood in his brocade coat, blood stiffening his waistcoat; ladybird splashes on the gilded buttons. Corpulent, he made an awkward gesture towards the back of the room as I passed under an arch into a shadowed area beyond. For an instant I could see nothing, then raised the light I was holding and watched the shallow underground room shudder in the smoking flame.
I had known her living. Polly Gunnell, one of Mrs Needham’s whores, from the best brothel in London. Pretty and plump enough for the bankers, the businessmen, the theatregoers; fresh enough not to have to work out of a room in Drury Lane; sweet enough to avoid the streets. And quick and clever enough for royalty—or so she had bragged to me as she coiled a sliver of dark hair around her index finger and bit her bottom lip into a bud with her small teeth.
‘Sit for me,’ I had said a while ago, and I had drawn an engraving of her—Courtesan at Her Toilette—which had proved popular enough to earn me money, and Polly Gunnell fame. Encouraged, my imagination had found much room for Polly Gunnell, willing board and lodging for her knowing appeal. Inspired, I had constructed a morality tale, using her as the model, and called it The Harlot’s Progress.
But Polly Gunnell was no longer sleeping or breathing or biting her lip. She was lying on a stone table, next to a pile of beer barrels stacked up against the wall like a dunghill. Apart from her shoes, laced with two ivory ribbons, the heels sullied with London mud, she was naked. Slowly my gaze travelled upwards. Both thighs had been slashed from the knees to the groin, and around her vagina were numerous tiny mutilations, much blood bearing witness to the ferocity of the attack. Dry-mouthed, I attempted to swallow and tried to look away, but instead I looked at the rest of her body: Polly Gunnell’s nipples had been cut off, and a knife slash ran from her throat down to her pubic bone.
And within her corpse a terrible emptiness where once her womb, now torn out of her, had lain.
Unnerved, I turned to look at the others. The doctor was winding his fob watch, and the priest’s straight dark hair framed an expression of dissolute indifference. Nothing was said to me as I turned back to the body. Overhead, I could hear someone rolling barrels on the floor, a door slamming closed. My lamp spluttered as I turned back to the corpse. Polly Gunnell’s face—once pert with cleverness, soft with eroticism, a perfect countenance for longing—had been disfigured by a blatantly vicious criss-crossing of cuts, laced like the pastry topping of a pie. The muscles were exposed, the eyelids cut away, the nose severed. Blood, drying thick and dark, crusted the open wounds. Not an inch of Polly Gunnell’s pretty face remained. Not a millimetre of the countenance which had smiled out from the canvas and the printed page.
I had known Polly Gunnel’s face as well as I knew my own: had drawn it, painted it, engraved it. I had chosen her as the heroine of my morality tale, out to tender for the populace, plying her trade from the canvas and the metal plate, willingly whoring for me—the painter—William Hogarth. Whoring for me as she had done for the pimp and the procuress, clicking her fingers at the world as she swung her leg at the stupidity of men. She had laughed at the fate of the girl in the picture without ever realising it was her own future, a prophecy she could never deflect.
Turning away at last, I tasted the vomit in my throat and swallowed hard. The rush light I held momentarily illuminated a bunch of rags in a corner. Curious, I moved over and bent down, lifting a corner to reveal a dead newborn infant, its limbs white, its lips dark.
Shaken, my voice faltered. “Was this her child? Did they cut the baby from her whilst she was still alive?” I asked of the doctor and the priest, who were now moving towards the stone steps. Towards the street. “Sweet Christ, what did they do to her?”
The doctor shrugged.
I knew what he was thinking as he looked at me, a small, stocky man, standing in front of him. William Hogarth, satirist, vicious and sentimental by turns, and now obviously sickened and trying not to vomit.
“Look,” the doctor said curtly, “The priest’s a witness. I’m following orders, that’s all. I was told to fetch you here and to pay you for your trouble. You’re to see to this.” He jerked his head to where the monstrously mutilated body lay. “I don’t know why they killed the woman; I don’t want to know.”
“But I do,” I countered, persistently,“Who did this?”
“I’ve told you, I don’t know!” The doctor answered vehemently, straightening his wig, his fleshy hands shaking. “I was only ordered to bring you here.”
“By whom?”
The doctor shrugged again, feigning ignorance.
“I was sent a message; that was all.” Rattled, he reached into
his waistcoat pocket, feeling around urgently, then took a snort of tobacco. When he sneezed, he wiped the snot off his nose with the sleeve of his jacket. “When I got here, I was too late. I couldn’t do anything for either of them.”
I nodded. “Very well … I’ll see to it.”
“You made her famous.” The doctor assumed a mock sympathetic expression. “Everyone in London fell in love with Polly Gunnell, but no one would know her now. Just another dead hack.” Straightening up, he looked back at me. “Mind you don’t end up the same way, Master Hogarth.”
Sighing, he pulled on his hat and followed the priest up the steps into the alley beyond. I heard the dull iron thud of the gate echoing behind them as they left. I was now alone with the dead body of Polly Gunnell and her child. I took off my coat and laid it over her face, then touched the top of her head and felt the spring of hair under my fingers. I knew why she had been killed. Hadn’t my own safety been threatened when The Harlot’s Progress was published?
I had known at the time that the potency of the series would be given an added frisson if the public could identify some of the models in the paintings. How scandalous to depict Mrs. Needham, the infamous procuress, and how titillating to recognise Colonel Charteris, a rake so dissolute that England had nicknamed him the Rape-Master General. I flinched at the recollection. If only I had stopped there, but unable to resist another jibe, I had gone too far, satirised the wrong person. Depicted with Polly Gunnell a man as her lover. An important, familiar man, a man known to everyone in Europe—Frederick, Prince of Wales.
When the painting was viewed, I at once realised my mistake, but it was too late. Manhandled and threatened in my own home, I was ordered to alter the features of the courtesan’s lover. And so the man in the picture was emasculated by paint, turned from a hero into a vacant fool with a few deft brushstrokes.
But of course I could not vandalize my masterpiece. I had simply made a copy and hidden the original. The famous image still existed, the wicked satire hidden but not destroyed. I relied on the fact that a painter admired by King George II and feted across Europe had redoubtable allies. Polly Gunnell might have had no power to protect herself, but the fame of William Hogarth sheltered me.
But only so far.
Of course they would summon me to see to the body of Polly Gunnell and her dead child. What better way to send me a warning? Secure my silence? To make me realise that any threat to the throne would be ruthlessly obliterated. My arrogance had blinded me, but from that moment on fear would ensure my compliance.
I bent down again to the dead infant. Not wanting to leave its corpse for the rats to rip apart, I gently lifted it from the floor. I would lay it by its mother, have them buried together. But as I held the little body, I noticed a muted flutter and touched the child’s neck, where I felt the faint beating of a thready pulse.
“Jesus,” I exclaimed, panicking and looking round. “Holy God.”
I was almost insensible with fear. I had to get away—and I had to take the baby—a boy, as I now saw—with me. Now! Before anyone came back. Perhaps the doctor had already sent for the undertaker; perhaps even now he was walking down the alley. Maybe someone from the public house above would come down for more beer and find me—and the child.
Wrapping the rags around the infant, I hurried towards the steps with my bundle. Tentatively I stepped into the street. As I moved further into the alleyway, I looked around me, but the priest and the doctor were long gone. Overhead, a swollen white belly of moon followed my progress as I skittered through the ginnels and crossed Drury Lane. I kept the child pressed close as I passed drunks and road sweepers, lurking around the shortcuts I had known from childhood.
Unnerved and scared, I expected to be challenged, expected to be stopped. And then what fate would befall me? If they caught me, if they realised what I’d done, my life would be forfeit. They had thought that Polly Gunnell’s child was dead, but he was still alive: the bastard son of the Prince of Wales. The child who had survived against all the odds, whose existence was a threat to the most powerful figures in the land.
And I had that child. The child who desperate, ambitious, and ruthless men would seek to find and kill.
But only if they knew he had survived.
Only weeks earlier I had had an unexpected late-night visitor: Frederick, Prince of Wales, was ushered in by my startled servant. His manner was exceedingly courteous, almost as though I had been the royal and he the commoner.
“Master Hogarth,” he had begun. “I have something to ask of you, a favour, if you will, and, of course, your absolute confidence.”
I had immediately nodded agreement. Who refused the Prince of Wales?
“This concerns Polly Gunnell,” he continued, producing her name like a face card, sure to win the hand. “Dear Polly, your model, is carrying my child.”
There had always been royal bastards, but seldom had their fathers admitted parentage.
“I think you know of our liaison?”
“Polly has not referred to it directly.”
“But you guessed, of course—otherwise there would have been no painting.”
His Royal Highness had seemed to bear me no ill will, had even been—dare I think it?—amused by my audacity.
“I need to give you something,” he said, whereupon a substantial gold signet ring was dropped into my hand. It bore the inscription
To my secret child, from his father, Frederick, Prince of Wales.
Stunned, I gazed at him. “This is not wise, sir. This is proof that—” “As was the painting.” He held my look. “I ask you to watch over Polly. She has no family, and she trusts you, Master Hogarth. If the child is a boy, you understand what that could mean?”
I nodded mutely.
“Polly was under my protection, but yesterday she disappeared,” he said, then gripped my sleeve, imploring me—ME, William Hogarth—for help. “If she comes to you, assist her. Protect her. And keep this ring for the child. It is a testimony, proof of its lineage. Promise me, sir, you will do this?”
“I swear it.”
Satisfied, he had then nodded and left.
But I hadn’t kept my word, because she had not come to me, I had not seen Polly again. Until tonight, when what I saw was only her bloody corpse….
Afraid, I kept moving, increasing my speed, threading my way through the night crowds, passing a gin seller and ducking out of the way of a hackney coming quick from St James’s Street. I knew that at any moment someone could step out from an alley or a tavern doorway. Any man, every man. Some thug, some priest, some sergeant at arms, and ask, “What’s that, Master Hogarth? What’s that you’re carrying? What’s that, Master Hogarth?”
It’s flesh and blood. It’s breathing, it’s alive. It’s why Polly Gunnell is dead and my life is threatened. It’s the reason I’m running and have to keep running.
Out of breath, I paused momentarily and leaned against a wall, looking around me. I had to get home, get help. I had to get the child to safety. Although near exhaustion, I pushed myself on and then began to run again, dipping out of the beam of an idiot moon and the scrutiny of lighted doorways.
But no one saw me. No one saw William Hogarth that night. No one saw me panting as I finally made my way to my house. Scrabbling for my keys, the man known to have the wickedest brush in Europe unlocked the door and slammed it closed. Expecting at any moment for it to be breached, I slid the bolts and, shaking, clung to the infant in my arms.
The child was warming up against me. I could feel its heartbeat, feel the slow return of life—and I knew that the murderers must never know they had failed. All that must be reported back was that William Hogarth, painter and engraver, had organised and paid for the burial of his onetime model Polly Gunnell. And her dead bastard.
No one must know the child survived and certainly not know who its father was: such a revelation would bring only tragedy, the reverberations of which could undermine history.
Remembering the
hidden picture, I determined to hide the signet ring with it. For a fleeting moment I was shamed by my own conceit, considered destroying the damned work. What had been merely a satire, an ill-aimed joke, had found a target so dangerous and volatile it had already resulted in murder.
Only I had caused it. Only I could make amends.
It was the year of Our Lord 1732.
Part One
One
STUMBLING IN THE AISLE OF THE PRIVATE PLANE, SIR OLIVER PETERS grabbed the back of the nearest seat and righted himself. He wondered for a moment if his medication was making him unsteady as he concentrated on making his way along the narrow aisle to the restroom. Entering, he leaned against the sink gratefully, catching his breath.
Over the last few months he had hidden his illness so adeptly that no one—not even his wife, Sonia—knew about it. His weight loss he had attributed to his new gym membership, his shortened hours at the gallery to a lull in sales that nobody had anticipated. His tailor, in his confidence, had discreetly altered his clothes to conceal any telltale slackness, and a smaller shirt-collar size prevented the giveaway gape at the neck.
But in truth cancer had infiltrated Sir Oliver Peters’s plush life with all the viciousness of an arsonist setting fire to a child’s nursery. The disease had attacked suddenly, hijacking the confines of his good luck with squatter’s rights and aiming to take over each organ consecutively as it worked its way through the rotting majesty of his body.
Hearing a noise from beyond the door, Oliver stared into the mirror and winced. The noise was faint, but it was the unmistakable sound of sex, coming from the back of the plane and just audible through the restroom wall. There was female laughter too, then a man moaning. Oliver turned on the faucet to try to drown out the sound. He had never liked Bernie Freeland, finding his Australian camaraderie at odds with his own British reserve, and suspected that Freeland’s friendliness covered a brittle, unstable personality. Admired as a hedonist and a determined collector, Freeland had bludgeoned his way into the art world, using connections bought by his wealth. Bullish and affectionate at the same time, he had sucked the life out of lesser personalities and intimidated many dealers.