by Kate Morton
‘Who are you?’ she said beneath her breath. ‘And who were you to him?’
There was something more, something difficult to articulate. The woman in the photograph was illuminated: it was that face, of course, with its beautiful features and the enlivened expression, but it was the styling of the image, too. The long, unfussy hair, the romantic dress, loose and earthy, but also alluring where it caught her waist, where a sleeve had been pushed up her arm to reveal sunlit skin. Elodie could almost feel the warm breeze coming off the river to brush against the woman’s face, to lift her hair and heat the white cotton of her dress. And yet, that was her mind playing tricks, for there was no river in the picture. It was the freedom of the photograph she was responding to, its atmosphere. Now, that was the sort of dress Elodie would like to wear at her wedding—
Her wedding!
Elodie glanced at the clock and saw that it was already quarter past ten. She hadn’t even responded to Pippa’s message, but she was going to have to get moving if she expected to be at King’s Cross by eleven. Gathering her phone and notebook, her diary and sunglasses, Elodie loaded her bag. She surveyed the desktop for anything she might have forgotten and, on a whim, picked up the framed photograph, the woman in that wonderful dress. With a glance at where Margot was hunched over by the filing cabinet, she wrapped it in the tea towel and tucked it in her bag.
Making her way through the office door and up the stairs into the warm summer’s day, Elodie started texting her reply.
11 is fine, she typed; Leaving now – send me the address and I’ll see you soon.
CHAPTER FOUR
Pippa was working that day at a publishing house on New Wharf Road, putting together an installation in the foyer. When Elodie arrived at quarter past eleven, her friend was perched at the top of a very tall ladder in the centre of the contemporary white room. She’d been stringing long dresses and other antique items of clothing – skirts and bloomers and corsets – from the high ceiling and the effect was enchanting, as if a dance floor of ivory ghosts had swept in on the breeze. Words came to Elodie’s mind from one of her favourite Wilde poems:
We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot’s house …
We watched the ghostly dancers spin,
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind …
Pippa spotted Elodie and exclaimed around the wooden ruler clenched horizontal in her teeth.
Elodie waved back and held her breath while her friend leaned to fasten a petticoat strap to a thread of fishing line.
After an excruciating moment, Pippa made it back to the ground in one piece. ‘Won’t be long,’ she said to the man behind the desk as she shrugged on her backpack. ‘Just out for a coffee.’
As they pushed through the large glass door, Elodie fell into step beside her friend. Pippa was wearing dark wartime dungarees and the sort of puffed-up sneakers favoured by the teenage boys who gathered at the fish and chip shop on Friday evenings. The items were not individually notable, but somehow on Pippa their effect was magnified so that Elodie felt like a dreary little minnow in her jeans and ballet flats.
Pippa drew on her cigarette as they cut through a tall locked gate (to which she somehow had the code) and skirted the canal. ‘Thanks for coming early,’ she said on an exhalation. ‘I’m going to have to work through lunch to get it finished. The author’s coming in tonight to launch the book. Have I shown you? It’s gorgeous – an American who found out that the English aunt she’d known only as an ancient woman in a home had once been mistress to the king and had collected the most extraordinary wardrobe of dresses, all in mothballs in a storage unit in New Jersey. Can you imagine? The only thing my aunt left me was a nose I could steer a boat with.’ They crossed the street and made their way over the bridge towards a glass-faced restaurant adjacent to the Tube station.
Inside, a friendly waitress seated them at a round table in the back corner. ‘Macchiato?’ she said, to which Pippa replied, ‘Perfect. And a … ?’
‘Flat white, please,’ said Elodie.
Pippa wasted no time in pulling a bulging scrapbook from her bag, letting it fall open to reveal all manner of loose papers and samples. ‘Here’s what I’m thinking,’ she began, before launching into an enthusiastic description of sleeves and skirts, the pros and cons of peplums, the benefits of natural fabrics, switching from one illustration to another, barely pausing for breath, until the table was covered in magazine pages, fabric swatches and fashion sketches. Finally, she said, ‘So, what do you think?’
‘I love it. All of it.’
Pippa laughed. ‘I know it’s a bit of a muddle; I just have so many thoughts flying around. How about you – do you have any ideas?’
‘I have a veil.’
‘Ooh la la.’
‘Dad dug it out for me.’ Elodie handed over her phone with the photo she’d taken that morning.
‘Your mum’s? Lucky thing, it’s gorgeous. Designer, I’m sure.’
‘I think so. Not sure which one.’
‘Hardly matters, it’s beautiful. Now we just have to make sure the dress deserves it.’
‘I found a photograph of something I like.’
‘Come on then, give us a look.’
Elodie took the tea towel out of her bag and slid the silver frame from inside.
Pippa lifted a single amused brow. ‘Have to admit, I was expecting a torn page from Vogue.’
Elodie handed the frame across the table and waited, a flutter of unplaceable nerves at the pit of her stomach.
‘Wow, she’s beautiful.’
‘I found her at work. She’d spent the past fifty years in a leather bag at the bottom of a box under some curtains in a cabinet beneath the stairs.’
‘No wonder she looks so pleased to be out.’ Pippa brought the photograph closer. ‘The dress is divine. The whole thing is divine. It’s more of an art shot than a portrait, like something Julia Margaret Cameron might have taken.’ She looked up. ‘Does this have anything to do with the text you sent me this morning? Edward Radcliffe?’
‘I’m still trying to figure that out.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised. This photo is classic aestheticism. The engaging expression, the loose dress and fluid posture. Early to mid-1860s, if I had to guess.’
‘It reminded me of the Pre-Raphaelites.’
‘Related, definitely; and of course the artists of the time were all inspired by one another. They obsessed over things like nature and truth; colour, composition and the meaning of beauty. But where the Pre-Raphaelites strove for realism and detail, the painters and photographers of the Magenta Brotherhood were devoted to sensuality and motion.’
‘There’s something moving about the quality of light, don’t you think?’
‘The photographer would be thrilled to hear you say so. Light was of principal concern to them: they took their name from Goethe’s colour-wheel theories, the interplay of light and dark, the idea that there was a hidden colour in the spectrum, between red and violet, that closed the circle. You have to remember, it was right in the middle of a period when science and art were exploding in all directions. Photographers were able to use technology in ways they hadn’t before, to manipulate light and experiment with exposure times to create new effects.’ She paused while the waitress delivered their coffees. ‘Edward Radcliffe was very well regarded, but not as famous as some of the other members of the Magenta Brotherhood went on to become.’
‘Remind me?’
‘Thurston Holmes, Felix and Adele Bernard – they all met at the Royal Academy and bonded over their anti-Establishment ideas; tight-knit, but with all the lies, lust and split loyalties you’d expect in the cut-throat nineteenth-century art world. Radcliffe was prodigiously talented, but he died young.’ Pippa returned her attention to the photograph. ‘What makes you think he might have something to do with her?’
‘And Radcliffe was a friend of your main man?’
‘I’ve never come across the connection before,’ Elodie admitted. ‘That’s one of the strange things about it all.’ She took a sip of her flat white as she decided whether to continue. She was torn between two opposing urges: a desire to tell Pippa everything and draw on her best friend’s knowledge of art history; and an odd sensation that had come over her when she’d handed the photograph to Pippa, an almost jealous drive to keep the photo, the sketch, all for herself. It was an inexplicable and not particularly worthy impulse and so she made herself continue: ‘The photo wasn’t the only item inside the satchel. There was a sketchbook.’
‘What sort of sketchbook?’
‘Leather cover, about so big –’ she demonstrated with her hands – ‘page after page of pen and ink sketches, handwritten notes. I think it belonged to Edward Radcliffe.’
Pippa, who was never surprised by anything, drew breath. She caught herself quickly. ‘Was there anything in it you could use to date the work?’
‘I haven’t been all the way through, not carefully, but Stratton’s document holder was made in 1861. I’ve no way of knowing if they’re related, of course,’ she reminded Pippa, ‘beyond somehow having wound up in the same satchel over the course of a hundred and fifty years.’
‘What were the drawings like? What were they of?’
‘Figures, profiles, landscapes, a house. Why?’
‘There were rumours of an abandoned work. After Radcliffe’s fiancée’s death, he continued to paint, but not with the same spirit as before, and very different subjects, and then he drowned abroad. It was all very tragic. The idea of this “abandoned work”, something he was working on before her death, has taken on a sort of mythology in art history circles: people keep hoping and guessing and positing theories. Every so often an academic takes it seriously enough to write a paper, even though to this point there hasn’t been a lot of evidence to support the idea. It’s one of those whispers that’s so tantalising it refuses to die.’
‘You think the sketchbook might have something to do with it?’
‘Hard to say for sure without seeing it. I don’t suppose you’ve any more tea-towel surprises in that bag of yours?’
Elodie’s cheeks warmed. ‘I could never take the sketchbook out of the archive.’
‘Well, why don’t I drop in next week and have a look?’
Something tightened unpleasantly in Elodie’s stomach. ‘You’d better call first: Mr Pendleton’s on the warpath.’
Pippa flapped her hand, unperturbed. ‘Course.’ She leaned back in her chair. ‘In the meantime I’ll get started on your dress. I can already picture it: romantic, gorgeous. Very now –in an 1860s sort of way.’
‘I’ve never been particularly fashionable.’
‘Hey, nostalgia’s very much in vogue, you know.’
Pippa was being affectionate, but today it rankled. Elodie was a nostalgic person, but she hated the charge. The word was terribly maligned. People used it as a stand-in for sentimentality, when it wasn’t that at all. Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or to do things differently.
Of course, Pippa had only meant to make a light, humorous comment and had no idea as she gathered up her scrapbook that Elodie was thinking along such lines. Why was she so sensitive today? Ever since she’d looked inside the satchel, she’d been unsettled. She felt constantly distracted, as if there were something she was supposed to be doing that had slipped her mind. Last night she’d even had the dream again: she’d been at the house in the sketch, when suddenly it turned into a church and she realised that she was late for a wedding – her own – and she started to run, but her legs wouldn’t work properly – they kept collapsing as if they were made of string – and when she finally arrived, she found that it was no longer a wedding at all, she was too late, it was now a concert and her mother – still only thirty years old – was on stage playing her cello.
‘How are the rest of the wedding plans coming along?’
‘Fine. They’re fine.’ It had come out crisply, and Pippa noticed. The last thing Elodie wanted was to get mired in a deep-and-meaningful that might expose her malaise, so she added, airily, ‘Of course, if it’s details you’re after, you’d best speak with Penelope. I’m told it’s going to be beautiful.’
‘Just make sure she remembers to tell you where and when to show up.’
They smiled at one another, allies again, and then Pippa continued with blistering politeness: ‘And how is the fiancé?’
Pippa and Alastair had got off on the wrong foot, which wasn’t entirely surprising as Pippa had strong opinions and a sharp tongue and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Not that Alastair was a fool – Elodie winced at her own mental slip of the tongue – only that he and Pippa weren’t at all alike. Regretting her earlier sharpness, Elodie decided to wear some disloyalty to let her friend score a point. ‘He seems reassured that Mother is calling the shots.’
Pippa grinned. ‘And your dad?’
‘Oh, you know Dad. He’s happy if I’m happy.’
‘And are you?’
Elodie gave a firm look.
‘Okay, okay. You’re happy.’
‘He’s given me the recordings.’
‘He was okay with it, then?’
‘Seemed to be. He didn’t say much. I think he agrees with Penelope that it will be like having her there.’
‘Is that how you feel?’
Elodie didn’t want to be having this discussion. ‘We have to have some sort of music,’ she replied defensively. ‘It makes sense to keep it in the family.’
Pippa looked as if she were about to say something further, but Elodie got in first. ‘Did I ever tell you that my parents had a shotgun wedding? They were married in July and I was born in November.’
‘A little stowaway.’
‘You know how I feel about parties. Always looking for somewhere to hide.’
Pippa smiled. ‘You do realise you’re going to have to attend this one? That your guests will be expecting to see you.’
‘Speaking of my guests, do you think you could be a dear and send back your RSVP?’
‘What? In the post? With a stamp?’
‘Apparently it’s important. It’s a thing.’
‘Well, if it’s a thing …’
‘It is, and I’ve been reliably informed that my friends and family are bucking the system. Tip’s next on my list.’
‘Tip! How is he?’
‘I’m off to see him tomorrow. Don’t suppose you want to come?’
Pippa wrinkled her nose in disappointment. ‘I have a gallery event. Speaking of which …’ She signalled the waitress to bring the bill and pulled a ten-pound note from her wallet. While she was waiting, she indicated the framed photograph, lying beside Elodie’s empty coffee cup. ‘I’m going to need a copy so I can start thinking about your dress.’
Elodie was seized again by the odd, possessive urge. ‘I can’t lend it to you.’
‘’Course not. I’ll take a pic now with my phone.’ She lifted the frame, angling the picture to make sure her shadow didn’t fall across it.
Elodie sat on her hands, willing her friend to finish quickly, and then she rewrapped the photo in its cotton shroud.
‘You know what,’ said Pippa, inspecting the shot on her phone screen. ‘I’m going to run this by Caroline. She wrote her master’s on Julia Margaret Cameron and Adele Bernard. I bet she’ll be able to tell us something about the model, perhaps even who it was that took the photo.’
Caroline was Pippa’s mentor from art school, a filmmak
er and photographer, renowned for her ability to find moments of beauty where they were least expected. Her images were wild and alluring, with lots of lean trees and houses and wistful landscapes. She was sixty or so, with the lithe movements and energy of a much younger woman; she had no children of her own and seemed to look upon Pippa as a daughter of sorts. Elodie had met her a couple of times socially. She had striking silver hair, cut straight and thick across her shoulder blades, and was the sort of woman whose self-possession and authenticity made Elodie feel like a bad fit for her own skin.
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just …’ There was no way of explaining that the photo had been hers alone and now it wasn’t, without sounding petty and, frankly, a bit unhinged. ‘I just meant … there’s no need to bother Caroline. She’s so busy—’
‘Are you kidding? She’d love to see it.’
Elodie managed a weak smile and told herself that it would be helpful to have Caroline’s input. Unpleasant personal feelings aside, it was her job to learn as much as she could about the photograph and the sketchbook. And if a genuine tie to Radcliffe heralded any new information on James Stratton, it would be a very good thing for the archive team at Stratton, Cadwell & Co. New information on well-known Victorians did not surface often.
CHAPTER FIVE
Elodie walked the long way back, detouring down Lamb’s Conduit Street because it was pretty and the dove-grey chocolate box of the Persephone shopfront always managed to lift her spirits. She ducked inside – force of habit – and it was there, while she was leafing through the war diaries of Vere Hodgson, soaking up a 1930s swing-dance track, that her phone began to shrill.