The Optickal Illusion

by Rachel Halliburton

  The verger’s eyes flicker.

  ‘I have many troubles in my life right now. You will forgive me if having a friend who I know to be sympathetic to France feels a little burdensome. More than a few people have told me that you have been looking for me. If you want some information that might help your cause, I am not your man.’

  He stares at him. Darton shakes his head and quickly goes to the door and opens it. Satisfied that no one is standing outside, he returns swiftly.

  ‘You should not be worried. My visit to France was not altogether what I expected,’ he replies in a low voice.

  ‘I take it you were not just singing.’

  ‘No indeed.’ The smile is almost indiscernible. ‘I was sent to meet an Irishman – a man called Wolfe Tone. A prominent and passionate Republican.’ He sits down again. ‘I thought the man was a genius – but he has a plan that is entirely reckless. He is conspiring with the French to send a fleet across the Channel, first to liberate Catholic Ireland, and then bring fear and terror to the English mainland. He has neither sufficient forces nor the organisation to do it. I predict it will be a disaster.’

  Provis clears his throat.

  ‘Your friend, the leader of the opposition, must be delighted with your conclusions.’

  ‘My friendship with Mr Fox has not been so warm since my return. We have not been able to see eye-to-eye on this matter in the slightest. I have sympathy with Mr Tone on the injustices he feels Ireland has suffered. But he believes the French are happy to serve him, when it is clear all he is doing is serving them.’ He sighs. ‘I have seen enough now to realise that England should not have its own Terror. As a result it is Mr Pitt who is currently most happy to receive me.’

  Provis stares for a moment with incredulity.

  ‘After all these years? Are my ears deceiving me?’

  Darton swallows.

  ‘They are not.’

  Provis recovers himself.

  ‘You were ever the pragmatist, Mr Darton. Does he pay better too?’

  ‘I suspected it might be in your character to condemn me, even if you agree with my position. Well hear me, Provis, I have seen far too many senseless deaths now to want to help someone who will only cause more. We have watched wave after wave of leaders in Revolutionary France turn on each other in hatred. Even now we cannot tell who will lead the country a year from hence, and what the consequences will be for the countries they have invaded. I know you are of the same mind. I hoped you might be happy to hear what I said.’

  His anger is making him breathe fast. He pauses for breath.

  ‘You believe this invasion of Ireland to be imminent?’ Provis asks quietly.

  ‘A message was brought to me in the middle of last night saying that it could happen within days.’

  ‘Does the King know?’

  ‘He has been apprised.’

  ‘Why do you seek me out on this?’

  ‘Having this change of heart has not been an easy matter. I wanted to seek the counsel of the most discreet individual I know. You have always challenged my political views in the past, but you are no one’s man, nor will you ever be.’

  ‘Maybe you give me too much credit.’

  ‘I think I know of what I speak.’

  Provis is about to reply when the door opens again at speed. This time it reveals Mrs Tullett. The two men catch each other’s eye in alarm.

  ‘How long have you been wai—’ Darton begins, but she has no time for his words.

  ‘Mr Provis, you must come right away! Oh God help us, you must come now.’

  ‘What has happened?’ he says.

  ‘Ann Jemima,’ she says. ‘She has fled.’

  She starts weeping loudly, and the Serjeant of the Vestry comes running.

  ‘What is the commotion? The King and Mr Pitt will be here any moment.’

  ‘My daughter…’ gasps Provis. Without speaking further he pushes past Mrs Tullett and Mr Roe, and leaves the chapel at a run.

  Ann Jemima stays till the condemned men and the woman appear in two separate carts. The men travel together, and the woman on her own. Two of the men are drunk – one shouts and leers at the crowd, though she cannot make out what he is saying. The second sways and lurches, while the two other men sit, grim and insensible.

  When the cart with the woman rolls past, Ann Jemima sees that she is small, neat and dressed in a white tunic. Her lips are pinched, her shoulders hunched, her eyes burn with quiet anguish. She does not look at the crowd. The louder the noise, the more she seems to retreat into herself.

  As she watches the carts progressing towards the scaffold, Ann Jemima realises that she cannot stay and watch the cleaving of soul from body, of life from flesh. She steps down from the wall and starts to fight her way out of the crowd – through the men shouting bawdily at the prisoners, and the children throwing food. The wall of bodies seems to go on forever – a maze of inhumanity, a labyrinth of cheap hate. Some people push back as she tries to pass, others shout angrily, others are insensible to any external force as they stare towards the prisoners being led out of the cart and up to make their confessions. Then, suddenly, Ann Jemima does not have to fight any more. There are still people around, and the noise continues to pursue her, but she feels as if she can breathe and move freely as she makes her way up towards Cheapside.

  Where am I fleeing to?

  The question patters across her mind with increasing urgency. No relatives left in the country, no world for her outside London. She thinks of crowded stagecoaches, of roads snaking in the darkness to villages with no names and faceless inhabitants. She tries to imagine herself as a governess teaching whey-faced children, or as a companion to a silhouette constrained by corsets and privilege.

  As she hurries on she stumbles into a flock of pigeons pecking at a hunk of mouldy bread. They sheer up into the air. For a moment, all she is aware of is wings and dust. As the shock agitates her mind, she is propelled back into a small dark room where the twenty-year-old painting master hired by her grandmother is showing her the first picture she has ever seen to depict a scientific experiment.

  It is this work that more than any other has made her want to paint. It’s a painting by a man called Joseph Wright of Derby, ‘the greatest artist to bring together science and art’. In her memory she can hear her painting-master’s words, the sound of a voice that once meant much to her. For a moment she can see his face, the thin elegant nose, the eyes furious with curiosity, the dark hair that one day she suddenly wanted to touch. The sense of impatience that animated his whole body when he was gripped by an idea. The laughter lines that transformed his face when she said something clever, the distracted air when she did not. Septimus Green. He could not see that when she went to his lessons, this skinny irreverent fourteen-year-old found a light there that was otherwise absent in her dark and tedious world. He had agreed to teach her simply in return for money to buy equipment for his scientific experiments. When he had seen how well she could draw, he had told her that one day she might become an excellent scientist’s assistant. Told her about Madame Lavoisier – wife to one of the greatest scientists in the world – about her skill in drawing scientific equipment and translating ideas that made their experiments among the most exciting in Europe.

  When Septimus shows her the picture by Joseph Wright, she feels as if she is inside and outside it at the same time – that she is the observer and the observed. She is watching a group huddled round a table – through the window a full moon can be glimpsed through the clouds, but it is candlelight that paints their faces and emotions. There are two young girls in the group – one of them cannot bear to look up at what is taking place, but there is one, about nine years of age, who stares with a mixture of curiosity and sorrow that breaks her heart. In all there are ten people in the room, one man deep in thought, one young boy operating some kind of device, one man comforting the older girl, and the others either looking on in fascination or engaged in conversation.

  In the
centre is a man who looks like a long-haired prophet, haunted by what he sees in the future. He is a scientist whose hand hovers over a large glass bulb – inside that bulb is a white bird, its chest resting on the bottom, just one wing held out, trapped and unable to fly. The device operated by the boy is slowly sucking the air out of the bulb. Normally the bird would be acting wildly, but the experiment is depriving it of enough air to do so, instead it is docile – and that docility is a prelude to death. The man in the centre is trying to sustain the right amount of air in the bulb to keep it between docility and extinction. But he does not know if his calculation is right, and some in the picture are not upset by this. If the bird’s life is sacrificed, then some level of knowledge will have been achieved, and that alone will have made the experiment worth it.

  And then she is in the picture. At first she is the girl looking up, she cannot stop looking, she wants to see all that is wrong and right. She craves knowledge about how air sustains life, and she is curious to see if this creature will live or die. She watches the bird, which was terrified and beating against the glass just moments earlier. She cannot understand why it is so still.

  When Septimus asks her if she likes the work, she wants to tell her him that when she is not allowed to draw and read what she wants, she too feels deprived of air. That when Hooke’s Micrographia was confiscated, and she was instructed to read a book for The Improvement of Young Persons instead, her desire was to smash a window. She wants to say that the precious hour with him each week is like the breath of life in a suffocating existence. But she does not say any of this. She thinks she might say it to him in a couple of years when she is older. But then a week after smallpox takes her grandmother away, he too is dead of the same cause.

  Where am I fleeing to?

  Her mind casts around wildly. There is another memory – it comes to her as a voice first, it is the voice of a girl the same age as she is, she can hear the friendliness in its rhythm, its easy lilt. They are talking easily in a large drawing room, she is confiding in her about what she has loved and what she has lost. This girl is the first ally she has known since coming to London, it is in her parents’ house that Ann Jemima stays before she arrives at St James’s Palace. She remembers helpless laughter and shared secrets, fleet-footed chatter and carefree afternoons. In this friendship she finds a kind of home, a sense of complicity that allows the wretched hours and days to speed away before she is united with Provis.

  But I cannot return.

  There are different emotions concerning other people in this house. She knows she is but a short distance from where it is now and her mind begins to weigh up the memories, frantically balancing her happier recollections against the swirl of confusion that followed. Her feet carry her on, up Cheapside, past the Bank of England, and up to Bishopsgate, till she reaches the alleyways that span out like arteries around the market. Above her patches of deepening blue sky are fringed by clouds gleaming gold in the sun. She thinks of Mrs Tullett talking about the houses for harlots in this area, about the women smuggled into the Palace for the pleasure of the Prince of Wales and other dignitaries at the Court. There are agencies for domestic work around here too, should she decide her only course is to become a scullery or laundry maid.

  Where am I fleeing to?

  For a moment her mind goes back to the condemned men and woman, the different expressions on their faces as they rattled past in their carts. She imagines each one, framed by an unforgiving sky, taking those last few steps towards nothingness. Their deaths seem both unbearably close, and yet a hundred miles away. As the chaotic thoughts loop and swirl around her head, Ann Jemima is suddenly aware of her own frail physicality, of the veins pulsing blood beneath her skin, of the lungs taking in air and turning it into life. For the people she has seen earlier that day, all of this is has stopped. She sees their heads placed in the nooses. A sob surges in her throat, as she thinks of them dropping towards the ground while the crowd shouts in ecstasy. For what seems an eternity, the bodies judder, till finally they stop moving.

  Next to this my problems are as nothing.

  The thoughts continue to loop and swirl, but her feet are taking her directly to the house in Spitalfields. And now she sees it. Her heart starts to beat faster. For some reason it is a shock to see it still standing there. She looks at the street name, recognises the blue door, sees once more the distinctive doorknocker in the shape of a man’s head wreathed with laurels.

  ‘I have no choice,’ she whispers to herself. Behind that door so many memories that she has banished for years. ‘It is my only chance for now.’ She takes a deep breath and approaches it unhappily. Gathers her cloak around her. When she raises the knocker and drops it for the first time, there is no answer. The blue painted wood seems to mock her. She raises the knocker higher so it hammers louder. She stands back and sees curtains moving, glimmers of lamplight.

  And then the door opens. The young woman behind the servant who opens it has high colour in her cheeks and dark hair. She wears an elegant long green dress, accompanied by cream gloves. She looks imperiously at Ann Jemima without seeming to recognise her. Then she takes a second glance and frowns in disbelief. ‘You!’ she exclaims. Ann Jemima is about to reply when footsteps approach her quickly from behind. A hand suddenly seizes her arm, forcing her to walk further down the street.

  She shrieks, and turns in outrage to find herself staring into Darton’s face.

  ‘Miss Provis,’ he says. ‘Your father is looking for you.’

  ‘How did you find me?’ she gasps, looking back. The woman has stepped out of the house to see what is happening, but when she observes Darton she quickly retreats and re-emerges with an older woman who looks shocked, before ushering her back inside again.

  ‘You had no right to find me,’ shouts Ann Jemima. ‘I knew what I had to do. Mr Provis is suffering because of everything I have done. The best thing was for me to be gone.’

  She looks wildly back to the house again, but the door is now closed though she can see a curtain moving on the first floor.

  He waits for a moment till she is calm again.

  ‘You must come back and hold West to account,’ he says. ‘You owe it to your father to do so.’

  ‘I will not come home. It is too great a risk,’ she hisses.

  ‘I have never seen your father so upset,’ he says, grasping her arm still more tightly.

  ‘I persuaded him to approach West. I have caused him nothing but trouble. I must be gone from his life, from everybody’s lives.’

  He relaxes his grip on her arm, and stands back.

  ‘You will cause him yet more by running away.’

  ‘I do not think you understand.’

  ‘What do I not understand?’

  She studies his face for a moment. Her own expression is filled with a mixture of defiance and terror, he has a sense that she is not sure what she is about to say or what effect it will have on him when she says it.

  ‘It is your duty to help Mr Provis take revenge.’

  He gestures solemnly behind her.

  It is at this point that she sees the waiting carriage, and Mr Provis waiting within it.

  * A dark paint used for the mixing of earthy colours.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Three artists and a bottle of gin

  ‘lake’

  ‘Lake, of which the true origin was for a long time unknown, is certainly a species of Wax, either found in its natural state upon flowers or trees, or wrought by a sort of Flying Ant, common in many provinces of the East Indies, as Pegu, Siam, Bengal, and Malabar. The cells of this Wax contain small bodies, more or less swelled, which in all probability, are the eggs of these Ants—they are of a fine Red, more or less deep. When bruised, they are reduced to a powder as beautiful as Cochineal. By putting these small bodies in water, they will swell in the same manner as Cochineal, will tint it of a colour equally beautiful, and in appearance will be almost the same. These small bodies are the colouring part of La
ke; for, if entirely divested, or in a small proportion, the colour-would be extremely faint.’

  constant de massoul,

  A Treatise on the Art of Painting and the Composition of Colours, 1797

  The first impressions of the day are like a rake scratching across Richard Westall’s brain. The artist has drunk two bottles of claret and half a bottle of brandy the night before, and he lies groaning for a while beneath his bedcovers. When he finally rises up from his bed he descends to his studio in his nightshirt and walks over to a standing cupboard from which he removes a large bottle. There is only a small amount of laudanum left in it, but it is enough to ease the pain in his head and allow him to consider what to do next. His eyes rove around the relics of his most recent month’s work: a huddle of half-completed canvases, two skeletal easels, and a vast pile of rags smeared with oil paint.

  Over the last year he has made £400 from his paintings – more than any other artist at the Academy. A mythical landscape alone has fetched him £105 at the Coxe, Burrell and Foster auction house, while a small study of a peasant boy has fetched him £84 at Christies. He enjoys the wealth and acclaim more than he admits, though he is increasingly sick to the soul at creating the kind of work that will sit prettily in patrons’ drawing rooms. He has a talent for Cupids and pale-skinned beauties that fills him with a mild self-loathing, and as long as it keeps him wealthy he suspects he will not have the courage to relinquish it.

  He picks up a bladder of yellow orpiment and punctures it. Briefly he catches the faint odour of arsenic – a garlicky smell, which he knows will become a stench if the orpiment is heated. He is about to squeeze the paint onto his palette when he hesitates and instead squirts it directly onto a landscape he has been working on. Half-formed recollections from the night before intrude on his mind. But he pushes them to one side, focusing on what is on the canvas before him. Without bothering to pick up a brush, he agitates the yellow orpiment with his fingers to create sunlight. The action becomes hypnotic, and he squirts more paint so that the golden pigment dazzles its way across the canvas. Yet when he stands back it does not look like sun. ‘In truth,’ he curses to himself with a wince of self-disgust, ‘it as if a horse has farted mustard.’ He seizes the canvas from its easel, staggering slightly with the unwieldiness of it before he casts it to the floor. Then he stamps his foot through it and throws the debris into a small room next to his studio.