She turned to him, brows lowered, her pretty face clouded. “Would you not die for me?”
“Yes!” he cried. “I’d die a thousand times!”
“Don’t be silly,” she said curtly. “You can only die once.”
His face became crestfallen. He didn’t like to think she thought of him as being silly. He never did.
“His one true love died in the storm,” she continued, “and the ancient king killed himself with his own dagger rather than live another hour without her.” Her eyes had drifted to that secret place that only she knew. He had always tried so much to join her but could never quite see what wonders she beheld.
“Well I will love you even after I’m dead,” he declared.
She plucked a daisy from the grass beneath the cross and held it to his cheek. “This is a holy place and has been for thousands of years.” He was filled with awe, the immensity of all those aeons pressing down on the place. “You know you cannot lie.”
He felt the fervour of his nine year old love, or what he thought to be love, rise through him like a scorching fire. “May I be stuck down dead if I lie!” he said.
She gasped, pulling away her hand and staring up at the cross. “Don’t say that! Not here! A thunderbolt may shoot down and burn you to a crisp!”
He was not afraid, as the king with a dagger at his heart hadn’t been afraid. “We shall be together for ever!” he said.
But she receded, back into the blackness of the deep ocean, till her faint shining orb of a face turned into an oblong patch of blue light. He awoke, or experienced what passed for wakefulness. The same oblong patch hung on the wall opposite, but now it was faint moonlight shining in through the window. He raised his head, which throbbed mercilessly, staring helplessly at the jug of water on the table, but sank down weakly to his pillow. The sounds of people outside bounced inside his head like the echoes inside a huge cave. He groaned as he felt his mind being consumed by the fever again.
The bedroom door opened, the noise amplified by his illness to the sound of a thunderclap. A figure loomed over him, the face in shadow, and he could smell the mustiness of coal dust. He wondered whether it was real or a figment of his twisted imagination. Then a hand beneath his head, lifting and supporting him; warm but sweet water being fed from a cup held to his burning lips.
“Jowan? Jowan Connoch? I thought it was you.” A man’s voice, close to his ear. “You are the image of your father. I thought for a moment I was seeing a ghost. Fair took the wind from my sails.”
The young man coughed on the water and the cup was removed. A cloth was dabbed on his chin and neck where the water had dribbled and pooled. “Who…?” he said feebly, but could manage no more.
Hours passed that might have been mere minutes, populated with nightmares that left only a sense of dread in the memory. He briefly saw the sunlight striking the wall where once he’d seen the patch of moonlight, and in the space of a blink it was night again. In between all this he thought he saw the man, or felt his presence. Sometimes there was a cold cloth laid on his forehead. More water at his lips. Words that made no sense.
Then, like a storm that passes as quickly as it had begun, the fever passed and he awoke to the sounds of sparrows chirruping loudly on his windowsill, the clatter of horses’ hooves on the cobbles under his window and the usual urgent babbling of humankind. Sat silently on a chair at the foot of his bed was the man, watching him. His eyes were is shadow; his forehead was heavily creased and ingrained with dirt, looking as if they had almost been drawn upon his skin with ink. The young man could smell coal dust again. He’d seen many such men who worked the steamers, feeding the great boilers below the waterline, their faces and hands as marked by their trade as much as coalminers. He tried to raise his head from the pillow but the action caused it to spin alarmingly.
“You’re not quite over it yet, young Jowan,” said the man. “You need to rest a while.”
He recognised instantly a fellow Cornishman. A man of the cove. He squinted at the bright light. “Thank you,” he said.
The man rose. “I shall have to go now,” he said. “Goodbye, young Jowan and remember that I am truly sorry for my part in things.” He left the room.
The young man heard the heavy tread of boots on the bare boards outside his door. “Wait!” he called. But there was no reply. Once the sounds of the footsteps had died away he was unsure whether all along he had been fooled by another product of his fever. He allowed himself a few minutes to recover then swung his legs over the side of the bed, gripping the iron headboard as he tested whether his weakened legs could carry the weight of his body. He staggered over to the door, then, holding the banister, eased himself down the stairs. He was met at their foot by the landlady.
“Where did he go? The man?” he asked. “He was taking care of me…”
“Gone,” she said.
“Where?”
She scowled. “How am I to know? People come and go all the time and it’s none of my business to know where from or where to.” She held out a small canvas bag tied with twine at its neck. “He left this for you.”
Puzzled, Jowan Connoch took the bag from the woman. “Did he say who he was?”
She shook her head. “He never gave his name, but he said to tell you that he’d gone some way to making recompense. Paid me extra to keep you here and look after you if you didn’t recover before his ship left port.”
“Recompense? Did he say what for?”
Again she shook her head. “He told me to tell you he knew your father. He was there on the night he died, in – where was it? – Porthgarrow? He said the bag held answers for you.”
He sat on the stairs, the canvas bag clutched in his hands, what little colour that remained in his cheeks draining altogether.
“Nothing of value,” she said, realising she’d given away the fact that she’d already rifled through the bag’s contents. “I would assume,” she added, “given that you and he were strangers.” She left him to untie the string around the neck of the bag.
He reached inside and removed a folded letter and an old key.
* * * *
The Cottage
The thickly wooded escarpments pressed ever more on either side of the crude road, looking curiously ominous in the dreary light; at their base were huddled a small number of mean cottages. Denning sat upright, glancing up at the dark palisade of trees. At length the road broadened out to form a narrow street framed on either side by more aged cottages wearing heavy canopies of miserable black thatch, or glistening with wet slate tiles. The horse’s hooves began to ring as they came into contact with smooth, rounded cobbles. Stretching down the hill Porthgarrow began proper, more cottages seemingly strewn thoughtlessly about, pressed tightly together and creeping, one above the other, up the precipitous hillsides, in some instances apparently clinging to little more than a toehold on the rocks, every inch of space taken advantage of. A jumble of lanes and alleys scored through them like crusty old veins.
As he might have expected, there was little correlation between what he’d been told to expect and actuality. It appeared such a dirty, dreary little place. It was good that he was immune to Wilkinson’s infectious zeal. It hadn’t always been so.
Denning once likened Wilkinson to a child seeing the stars splashed across a vast universe for the first time. He had always been given to frequent bursts of enthusiasm, bouncing from one beautiful idea to another like sunlight does off a crystal chandelier, his voracious mind forever on the move, searching, as if he needed a continual supply of new stimulations. Though Denning had long grown wary, even tired of him, he could not deny that he’d appeared like a breath of sweet scented air when first blown into his dusty young existence. He exuded life and he’d never met anyone quite like him.
They’d met in Paris, six years ago, both enrolled as hopeful and eager young men at the studio of Charles-Marc-Gabriel-Gleyre, a man whose sudden but fleeting fame was lodged in the 1860s when Denning and Wilkinson were
still boys. Denning had no choice in the matter as to which studio he attended; he was in no position to contest his mother’s arrangements. She’d had the artist recommended by a respected old dame who’d once spent considerable time in Paris and had been entranced by both his ‘pretty pictures’ and his impeccably charming manners towards the fairer sex. It was an opportunity to learn more than colouring a canvas, she told her son.
For a number of months they worked at his studio to copy live models and boast, as the young so often do, of their superiority to their tutor and his old fashioned beliefs.
“The landscape is but a backdrop!” Wilkinson lamented in disbelief tinged with anger following a morning of criticism of them all by their tutor. “Can you believe it? He said it is unimportant! What an old fool! What fools we are for even gracing his studio with our presence!” And so it went.
Once their confidence grew, they broke free and rented and shared their own studio, though studio was being overly generous with the term. It was small, dark, damp and crowded, and situated above a part-time brothel off the Rue St Denis, “One of the better kind,” noted Wilkinson with some authority. The place was run by the enterprising Madame Charpentier, who dabbled in buying works of art, or taking them in part exchange for services rendered. Paris was a city bulging with artists struggling to make a name, painting many, selling few.
She once showed them a wall in her drawing room filled with paintings. “My wall of desperation, vanity and lust,” she called it. “I bought these six for a paltry sum,” she said, her arm gesturing grandly, “from the exhibition at Hotel Drouot last year. They may be monkeys with palettes,” she said, quoting the critic Wolff in the Figaro, “but see, with the rest of them they do a fine job of covering the cracks in my wall at a cost far less than quoted for fixing it. I do not always understand what it is they paint, but if I do not get a return on my investment from all these young pups then at least I have put them to good use!”
She was always accompanied by a silent, frail-looking young man of around twenty years called Frederick. “My plaything,” she would refer to him, even in his presence, and she would stroke his hair as if he were a dog. Frederick would often sit and watch Wilkinson and Denning at work, wistfully maintaining he would like to be able to paint but had not an ounce of skill, and repaid his time with them with stolen bottles of cognac or joints of pork from Madame Charpentier’s kitchen.
He might even call them heady days, Denning mused with a fondness that surprised him. He and Wilkinson were opposites in so many ways, not least emotionally. He staid and lacking in ambition and direction, Wilkinson a bull charging from one receptive cow to another. Their creative union had not been without its moments of artistic chest beating, angry words and flying paints and canvases; one moment they might be stormily divided by the value of Dutch painting then united over a bottle of wine by their admiration of Degas.
Back then the font of Wilkinson’s vast and infectious emotional and physical energy came from the inspiration he found in the seedy bars, cafes and brothels of the city. He obsessively followed the tramps and homeless drunkards, pursued them tirelessly and committed their world-weary state to canvas, one boozy face after the other, till their tiny space was overrun with scores of drying canvases. Denning wondered at one point whether opium lay at the heart of Wilkinson’s continued, if not escalating, mania, or perhaps he had taken a little too many absinthes in his quest to relate to his subjects. In attempting to get into their heads perhaps he’d almost stepped out of his.
Then, quite unexpectedly, at least to Denning, a not too happy Madame Charpentier, who had been more than accommodating to the two young men, gave them immediate notice on their makeshift studio and they were forced to leave. It was obvious from her anger that Wilkinson was behind Madame Charpentier’s change of heart, but neither broached the subject, Denning too polite and Wilkinson already forgetting the incident as soon as they were out on the streets with their trunks. As it happened both did not unduly care, for they had begun to grow tired of the place. It also coincided with the ateliers closing down for summer and Wilkinson said they ought to head for the northern coast where it was cooler. Paris had become too stifling, he moaned, looking back at Madame Charpentier’s establishment with something akin to loathing. Denning caught sight of Frederick’s sad white face hovering at the window, till Madame Charpentier commanded him go away with a peremptory flick of her hand.
Their mood quickly restored, they travelled to Pont Aven in Brittany, a small, picturesque market town that sat close to a tidal estuary and by the river Aven, where water mills almost outnumbered the fifteen or so houses. It was already awash with young artists from all over the world, drawn there as much by the cheapness of the place as by its beauty. Wilkinson and Denning rented rooms at the Hotel des Voyageurs run by the extremely popular and buxom Madame Julia Guillou.
Here they fell in with a group of young men studying at the Academie Julian in Paris, ardent followers of the artist Basten-Lepage, who advocated painting from nature, out in the open – plein air painting. Drawn into using these methods, their world became fresh again, this new direction giving them impetus and a desire both felt they had lost in Paris. They socialised most evenings, drank and ate too much, and spent hours arguing the merits and shortcomings of each others chosen artistic ideologies.
But Denning was too much a realist; Wilkinson called him a cynic. Yes, it was a pretty setting. Yes, it was inexpensive. But pretty soon Pont Aven began to fall out of favour with him. The locals, he felt, were dirty, uncouth, drunkards, and some of the scruffy little urchins that ran around attached themselves to you like leeches that you could not shake off. Then there was the difficulty of taking a canvas outside to paint the workers in their traditional costume, toiling in the fields or on the water under admittedly beautiful skies, which stretched his patience gossamer thin. The shadows moved, the light changed, the wind knocked his canvas or blew dirt into the oils. He wished he had but an ounce of Wilkinson’s unbounded energy, but he was soon flagging, both physically and in spirit.
Then that awful, unsettling incident with the street girl happened that changed everything.
It affected him in a way he couldn’t have guessed. Eventually he made his excuses to Wilkinson and left France for England. He hadn’t seen Wilkinson since. Not till he arrived unexpectedly at his London studio.
At first he was glad. As if all the good times they’d shared preceded him and enveloped Denning. He shook his hand warmly, welcomed him in, offered him a drink. But even then old memories settled on him like a piece of dark material and no sooner had Wilkinson taken off his coat than he wished him gone, from his studio, from his life forever.
“Don’t you see?” Wilkinson’s animated voice almost raised an octave in excitement. “You are not choosing what you paint, it chooses you.”
Denning put a finger to his ear. “Must I feel that bitter poison again?”
“The poison is right there,” he returned, jabbing a finger to the portrait taking shape on the canvas. “That is what’s killing you, slowly, by degrees, and one day you will be totally lost.”
“I am not the one who is lost, Terrance. You are the one still searching. I’m sufficiently happy where I am. I have no need to go wandering to some godforsaken backwater to find something I patently have no need of.” Thoughts of Brittany were still fresh in his mind.
“You call this happiness?” He strode over to the large window of Denning’s studio, looked out tiredly onto the busy street below. The sunlight streamed in and framed Wilkinson’s head in a shimmering halo. A faint summer breeze lifted the curtains and he could smell the dust of the road. He looked older, wearier, than his years. “Yes, you rent a fine house, stock a fine cellar and probably have a fine servant or two...”
Denning joined him at the window. “All true. Your exact point being?”
“Are you to be simply a sum of all these facile parts, no more than that?” He tapped Denning’s chest. “There is m
ore in there than those trifles. There is the wild, beating heart of an artist, dancing at the cage of your chest and desperate to be freed again!”
“I am quite satisfied with my lot,” he defended, but he knew inside he was telling a lie.
“The Cornish are so like the Bretons. Their culture, their landscape, so uncannily similar. That’s the magnet that draws the artists to Cornwall. But Porthgarrow is unique. Its way of life is like no other in all the fishing villages of Cornwall, its isolation being its saviour. But it cannot remain so. The world is shrinking. Soon we will all be the same, and worlds like this an echo in the distant past. But for a time it would be ours, and ours alone. So what do you think?” cried Wilkinson animatedly. “You and I, the fathers of the future of art!”
In spite of everything, Denning still envied Wilkinson his passion. He felt he had very little passion for anything, that all-consuming fire, that surety of focus, or that if it did strike he felt he didn’t have the energy to sustain it. Wilkinson had been very perceptive. It was the artist in him. He could see that everything in Denning’s life, his art included, was but a dull means to a dull end. He desired to experience, just once, what it must be like to give over one’s being completely to the single-minded pursuit of a burning, life-force-sapping objective.
But not with Wilkinson.
“I say let me sleep on it.” Denning turned away from the window, towards the bottle on the table. He paused at the woman’s portrait. She wasn’t as pretty as he would like to believe. She wasn’t as pretty as she thought she was. But she was a comfort.
“Bah! You will sleep yourself to death!” groaned Wilkinson.
But he was here all the same, in Porthgarrow. As if caught in a whirlpool of inevitability that pulled him in no matter how he struggled against it.
The smell caused him to wrinkle his unaccustomed nose, and he would have pulled out a handkerchief to stifle the odour but for the fact he might cause offence. The road was covered liberally in mud and horse manure, some of the dirt obviously washed down from the hillsides into the stone channels, yet he wasn’t sure if some of it was human excrement. But overriding all was the pungent smell of fish, fresh and rotted, which seemed to coat everything like a rancid varnish. The rain had dampened down the smell, but if it were so disagreeable on a wet day, what was it like in the heat of the sun?
The House of the Wicked (a psychological thriller combining mystery, murder, crime and suspense) Page 3